Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  Others taken with him, including two young lads, go first and one lad breaks free. The soldiers hack him to pieces, as if he is a steer in the shambles.

  Owen turns to the headsman and says, 'I trust you will not handle me so roughly. You have an axe and a block.'

  Then they tear off the collar of his red velvet doublet and placing his head on the block he says, 'This head was wont to lie in more than one queen's lap.'

  Later, when they have gone. I take up his head and place it on the top step of the market cross and with three ladies of the town I gather up a hundred candles from the church and we place them on the steps around him. I wipe the blood from his face and kiss his cold lips. The air sparkles with frost, and the candles burn all night. As the late dawn streaks the sky with red I feel the presence of another behind me as I sit on the bottom step. The candles, now burnt low, gutter with the first breeze of morning and the smell of beeswax soured by heat drifts about us.

  I look up and round and see a tall figure in full armour, blue steel enriched with gold inlay. Behind him two squires carry two shields. On one are blazoned silver flowers on lapis, quartered with golden lions on a field of blood. On the other there are three gold-leaf suns, freshly laid on gesso and burnished to a brightness that catches the light. I have heard the story of the battle at Mortimer's Cross. I have heard how three suns appeared in the sky above the man who would be king and both armies took it as a sign that Cod was on his side.

  He lifts his visor. It's Eddie. Eddie March. Edward Plantagenet, King of England, Duke of York. Behind him, the great black stallion I once saved from a whipping strikes sparks from the cobbles and neighs like a trumpet.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  She sighed deeply, dabbed her eyes with a scrap of muslin.

  'I'll go for a little walk, if you don't mind. The rain has almost stopped. Ali will tell you what, in the meantime, he had been up to…'

  The day after the battle of Wakefield we found that, in the general business around us, we were ignored. Prince Harihara remained determined to push on towards Macclesfield Forest, which now lay some fifty miles south-west but, of course, with the destruction of York's army we no longer had the protection a prudent traveller would want in those lawless roads. The Queen herself was heading back to the north-east to recruit more help and troops from the Scottish Queen, while her main army celebrated its victory and showed no immediate will to move south or north. Nevertheless, the Prince felt we should never be so near our goal again and instructed me to find a guide who would take us those last sixteen or seventeen leagues.

  Brother Peter found a small Franciscan friary not far from the cathedral. Its prior directed us to the home of a cobbler, whose sympathy with the Brothers of the Free Spirit went beyond even that of the friars. Setting aside his lasts, needles, leathers, hammers and other tools of his trade, this worthy man cheerfully agreed to take us on. He declared himself especially happy to, for his trade was scarce worth carrying on at that time of year with the short days and the expense of good candles. No doubt the sight of the Prince's gold played its part too. But what gave the enterprise point and us great encouragement was that, on seeing our complexions, he asserted that he had heard some time ago that a man with just such a skin had been living with the brothers in Macclesfield Forest and was an object of some curiosity amongst the simpler people who lived thereabout. How long ago?

  Oh, three or four years ago, maybe more.

  This shoe-mender's name was Edwin. Although by nature cheery he lived alone, had sober habits, was industrious and frugal. His father, a travelling mason, had worked on the rebuilding of the cathedral (still, twenty years later, in progress), married, then almost immediately died after falling from the clerestory, which they were modernising, when a piece of wooden scaffold broke. His mother's brother was a cobbler and to him Edwin was apprenticed when still a boy. He had never married, being much attached to his widowed mother, but studied alone and mastered the art of reading. He had read the gospels in a Wycliffite translation that was copied and passed underground, as it were, amongst the weavers of Wakefield, who were among his clients.

  Here, and not for the first or last time, I felt a sudden sense of comradeship, of companionship. I mentioned this to Brother Peter.

  'I call such people.' he said, 'the Johnson family."

  'Why?'

  'It's a common, anonymous name, yet it suggests a sort of toughness, an independence, with a decent ordinariness too. Not all of them are Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, but many are. They pay no respect to authority, whether secular or religious, but quietly, keeping themselves to themselves, go their own way.'

  He meditated for a moment, then went on. 'A Johnson minds his own business, but he will help you when help is needed. He doesn't stand by while someone is drowning, or trapped under a fallen tree or piece of masonry. The Johnsons know good and evil are in conflict and the outcome is uncertain. But the conflict is not eternal since one or the other must win the final victory. The question is: Which side are you on?'

  The last stage of our pilgrimage was wretched, crossing a low range of hills known as the Pennines. Being the first weeks of the year the weather was cold and wet, the days short, the nights interminably long. Wet and cold, we came down the western slopes of those hills into rain driving out of the west and into a small town called Manchester. I can remember hardly anything of the place except that whatever it is makes joints swell and ache when rain comes took hold there. As I shivered in the corner of a tavern where we stopped for the night Brother Peter and Edwin argued with each other over whether the best footie players came from the west or the east side of the Pennines. For two intelligent men, one very learned, it seemed a stupid dispute to get into, but I was too miserable to care.

  We were now less than a day's walk from Macclesfield Forest, and Prince Harihara was agitated at the prospect of arriving there, alternately pacing about the public room with excitement lighting his eyes, or sitting in the comer, morose and anxious over what the morrow would bring. Anish, having made sure that we had dry bedding and had eaten and drunk enough, sat beside me. 'Tomorrow,' he said, 'we should be through. Mission accomplished. Whatever happens, we should be able to turn south at last and head for home. How long will it take us, Ali? Tell me, not as long as it took us to get here.'

  He stretched out his still podgy hands to the fire, turned and beamed at me. 'I can't wait to get back,' he added. 'Still, we've seen a lot. I wouldn't have missed it for worlds. And all arising from that bundle of parchment you brought with you from Calais to Vijayanagara.'

  That stirred my interest. 'Do you have it about you?' I asked.

  'It's upstairs in our room. I'll get it.'

  He was back in a moment, undoing the red leather strings, folding out the creaky parchment.

  As John the apostel hit syy with sight

  I syye that cyty of gret renoun

  Jerusalem so nwe and ryally dyght

  As hit was lyght fro the heven adoun

  The birgh was al of brende golde bright

  As glemande glas buniist broun

  With gentyl gemmes anunder pyght

  Wyth banteles twelve of tiche tenoun

  Uch tabclment was a serlypcs ston…

  Ali must have noted the puzzlement on my face

  .

  For you, Mah-Lo, let me put it into a tongue you can understand,' he said

  .

  As John to each of these jewels gave name

  I reckon each stone from his narration.

  Jasper was the name of the first gem

  I saw adorning the base foundation;

  It glimmered green on the lowest tier.

  On the second step, sapphire was seen,

  Then chalcedony, stainless and clear,

  On the third step showed with pallid sheen,

  The fourth was emerald with hue of green;

  The sardonyx was the fifth stone

  And the sixth was ruby, as it was seen
/>
  In the apocalyse, by the Apostle John…

  Ali's eyes grew misty. 'I am remembering,' he said, 'the first time I read these words. In the courtyard, was it? Or the hall, in Vijayanagara. With the Prince. What a lot we saw and did following that day.' He sighed. 'In Manchester, opening out the pages, I said much the same to Anish after I had read the third verse.'

  And John yet counted the chrysolite,

  The seventh stone on the tiered plinth.

  The eighth was beryl, clear and white.

  And topaz inlaid with twin hues ninth;

  The tenth, chysoprase, firmly fixed,

  And gentle jacinth the eleventh stone.

  The purple and indigo amethyst

  Cure of all woes, made the twelfth zone…

  'You know, Anish,' I remarked, when I had read these verses,

  in that Mancunian inn, with the- rain splashing outside, and a howl of cold wind in the chimney, ‘I can't believe that a heavenly city, like the one described here, lies twelve miles away.'

  Anish frowned, peered at the Teluga script, which appeared below the Inglysshe verses. 'There's no suggestion,' he said, 'that the place described here is in Ingerlond.'

  I was nonplussed. 'Why are we here, then?' I asked at last.

  Anish was puzzled. 'To find Jehani and bring him home.'

  'And?'

  'And to learn as much as we can about military matters from the most warlike people on earth so we may defend ourselves against the Bahmani sultans.'

  I took a turn about that gloomy low-ceilinged room, partly hoping to ease the pain in my knees, partly to give myself time to think. I tripped over the stretched-out ankles of a drunk as I did so.

  'Mind where yer at, yer silly bogger,' he growled.

  Returned to where I had started, I stared down at Anish, who had now sat himself in a settle with the package on his knees.

  'But not to discover the heavenly city made manifest on earth?' I asked.

  'Why should citizens of Vijayanagara want to seek a heavenly city?'

  He had a good point there, I conceded to myself, if not to him. Man comes to himself only when transcendence has been conquered – when eternity has become present in the here and now. Those had been Peter's words in his Easter sermon. At that moment he was dozing in the inglenook.

  'So why did Jehani write out these English verses if not to point us in the direction of a city where we can shovel up precious stones by the sackful?'

  Anish frowned, possibly put out by the slightly belligerent, not to say sarcastic, tone I was adopting. Perhaps the beer, of which I'd had a pint or three (I'm afraid by then I was quite addicted to the stuff), was talking. The landlord's own. Boddington, his name was. It was on the sign outside. Anish glanced down again at the part written in Teluga, the language of the Dravidian princes and their entourages, a closed book to me.

  'He says he came upon them in a rather beautiful poem written by a man whose daughter died. She appeared to him in a dream and showed him this city, which the poem describes. It made Jehani feel homesick, made him long for Vijayanagara again.'

  Brother Peter stirred, leant across him. 'The poet was a knight,' he said, 'but also a Brother of the free Spirit, or at least a Lollard, and these verses are an adaptation of Wycliffe's translation of the last book of the Bible.'

  Anish went on with some reproof in his voice. 'I don't see why any sane man would want to shovel precious stones into a sack."

  'No?' said I.

  'No. Precious stones should adorn dancers. Men and women. Even buildings and statues. As they do in Vijayanagara.'

  'You forget. I am not a native of that city. I'm a traveller, And sometimes, for travellers, it is convenient to have precious stones in sacks.'

  He had the grace to acknowledge then that we could not have come so far. had warm clothes to wear and the wherewithal to buy food and drink, and a more or less dry bed for almost every night, had we not, at my suggestion, brought a large number of jewels with us. In sacks.

  At this point Prince Harihara, who had been watching us from a draughty corner near the door, his face in shadows, his dark eyes gleaming, called out: 'That's enough, Anish. And you, too, Ali. We'll discover all we need to know soon enough."

  And he asked Boddington for a candle to light our way to bed.

  So. No heavenly city. No jewels beyond the dreams of avarice littering the streets. What did we find? First, a river called the Mersey, across which we took a ferry, then a forest, with a glade in its centre. At the ferry Edwin left us. It was dangerous, said the ferryman, for a poor man with no education to be found anywhere near where the Brothers of the Free Spirit had lived. Had lived? Gerald, the ferryman, looked grim but would not respond to our questions.

  Forests, to be satisfactory, require management. So said a forester who appeared on the other side of the river and agreed to take us further. He was a big man, one of the biggest I have seen, with a red curly beard and a merry eye.

  Old and rotting trees need to be taken out; rides created, which will also, in dry summers, act as fire-breaks; thickets allowed to grow for deer to shelter in and the roe deer especially, who are secretive, to have their young – some birds, too, prefer thickets to trees for their nests. Streams should be banked or encouraged, where the lie of the land suggests it, to form ponds and stocked with fish. Macclesfield Forest, like so much of the rest of Ingerlond, had been neglected for twenty years or more, due to the wars, both foreign and civil. Rides and paths were overgrown, brambles and briars had filled them, and the fallen trees had been left to rot. But in the heart of winter none of this was too much of a problem – the briars were reduced to coils of thorny stems, the grass was withered and the leaves dropped from the saplings as well as the giants so one could see one's way clear and, from the occasional rises, across extensive views. All this was explained by the forester as he led us to the centre.

  It rained, but not as heavily as it had in Manchester the day before. More a gentle mist, a healing rain, the forester called it. Not only tall, he was well-built too, dressed in green, with a longbow, and a horn on his belt. Brother Peter teasingly called him Robin Hood, and had his head bitten off for his pains. The gear was pretty standard for a forester was the message we got. From the pommel of his saddle there swung a large axe, its blade sheathed in leather. It didn't seem unreasonable for a forester to carry an axe but Peter muttered something on the lines that if he wasn't Robin Hood then he must be the Green Giant, whose head was struck off with his own axe by Sir Gawain at the court of King Arthur.

  At this point the forester reined in and pointed down from the low escarpment we had arrived on across a wide valley, an almost perfectly circular bowl, about a mile across. And even in winter it was evident that here things grew with a floridness, a burgeoning, a freshness and greenness different from the rest of the forest.

  'Some call it the Garden of Eden," he said, 'others the Garden of Earthly Delights. But most follow the Church and Bishop and call it the Devil's Bowl. Fifty years ago, or thereabouts, a ball of fire dropped out of heaven. The earth shook. A fire raged through this part of the old forest for a week. And when the smoke cleared and the fire died down, there was this great hollow in the land like an upturned palm. All the people were terrified of it, and no one would go into it. Within a year or so, though, it began to green up again, first just mosses and heath, but then the trees came back and, of course, because the people were afraid of the area, all species that are hunted came into it and bred undisturbed, perhaps as they really did in paradise. There are deer, of course, and hares, wild boar, pheasants and partridge, orioles and magpies, and in the river that runs through it otters, beavers, trout, crayfish and, in early summer, salmon. And all are bigger and more handsome than any you will see elsewhere. And also a wider variety of plants – not just the forest ones but apple, pear and cherry, too, currants, raspberries and strawberries all took hold before the big forest trees like the oak, the ash, the beech could cover all with life-deny
ing shade. And flowers, of course: aconites which you may find in bloom already on the forest floor, do not eat them they are poisonous, then celandines, wind-anemones, primroses, snowdrops, and violets, daffodils, Solomon's seal, borages, worts of all sorts, wild garlic and many, many more. It's a shame you cannot see it in May or June…' He pulled up and looked around at us. 'You will find the Brothers' dwellings as near to the centre as you can get.'

  'And the Brothers?' cried Prince Harihara, his face pale with foreboding.

  But the green man had already turned his horse's head and was making his way back down the outer slope of what we now realised was a rim, very like that of a shallow bowl. As he went, a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and a shower of raindrops as clear as stainless shards of chalcedony fell about his shoulders. Then he was gone.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  A bare half-mile down a track that had been wide and over-arched with beech, but was now encroached upon by holly and butcher's broom, took us to the centre. On the way red squirrels chattered from the boughs and dropped nut-casings on our heads. A red fox trotted by. We crossed a stream that ran between banks of red clay and a robin redbreast sang on a willow twig above it. I recalled aloud that red is the colour of death, but pushed the thought away when none of my companions found an answer.

  When we arrived in it there was no doubting we were there. First a hedge or ring of holly, much of it heavy still with red berries, twenty yards or so across, enclosed a wide swathe of grass, a lawn cropped by deer and rabbits to less than an inch but even in January thick and lush. This in turn made a ring round a low fence of wicker hurdles many of which, untended, had fallen or been pushed down. Inside this circle there was a tiny village of about ten stone huts roofed with turf, though again most had been tumbled by malice or time. In the very middle a round hut stood, bigger than the rest, and apart from a hole or two in the roof where the turf hail fallen through, more or less intact.