Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  In the huts and the tiny passages between them we counted fifteen skeletons or cadavers, including eight who were young: babies, small children, older children. Skeletons? Not quite. Although the beasts of the forest had eaten out the hearts, lungs and livers, and the birds had attacked their eyes and smaller parts, the summer heat had dried what was left and patches of skin still clung to their heads, and hair too. Some had been decapitated but most had been stabbed with spears or slashed and hacked with swords or axes.

  There was no sign to suggest that any had been other than naked. Four still held in their hands single roses, dried and withered now, no doubt cut before they were attacked or perhaps when they knew they were about to be attacked, to be offered to their assailants. These had been plucked from the gardens, overgrown now, of course, we found on the far side of the settlement.

  The larger hut in the middle seemed to be a blank, a circular wall with no door or windows. We walked round it. Brother Peter mumbled and sighed, and stumbled on the dressed stones that lay in his way. Tears streamed down Anish's plump cheeks. Prince Harihara looked angry to the core of his being, his lips tight, his fists clenched, his complexion white, his eyes burning. I paused to consider how I felt. Well. I have seen such things too often since I was left for dead at the top of a well Stuffed with the bodies of my parents and siblings. I felt numb. And my knees and knuckles hurt.

  One thing I felt sure of. I knew the signs. When men kill tor power, prestige, or out of greed or hunger, even for revenge or to punish, you feel there is an imperative there that is natural, even rational, that has come from something deep in our natures. It means something. Even for the victims. They know why they have died. But the cruellest, stupidest, meanest and most horrible murders, murders preceded by rape, living dismemberment, come from a hatred that has only one root and that innately meaningless and trivial, unnatural and irrational. Religion. These people, like my own people, had chosen the wrong god.

  Why should this be? If you live a life that is mean and ignoble, impoverished and filled with crippling labour that enriches others not yourself, as long as there are masters and men. your only hope is to be rewarded in heaven. And if your neighbour's heaven is not your heaven, his god is not your god, then one ot you must be wrong. And what is even worse is if he believes, as these people had, that there is no god at all… That is unthinkable, unacceptable. In his head lies the possibility that it might be you who has been deceived, so crush his head with all the venom…

  'Ali, I know you're not feeling well, but could you give us a hand with this?'

  The Prince – even then courteous, certain as ever of getting his way. 'This' was a large flat stone, somewhere between the shape of a square and an egg, one foot thick at the edges but nearly three-feet thick in the centre and six feet high. It seemed likely it served as a door but its base had sunk into the turf and it took the four of us an hour to shift it.

  'Does it have to be moved?' I grumbled, after the first twenty minutes of useless heaving and pushing.

  'My brother is not out here so he may be inside.'

  He was right.

  The stone shifted at last. The hut breathed out – a musty, dry smell, faintly aromatic. The cold light flooded in, joined the sunbeam that was already there, thanks to the hole in the roof, a patch of almost lemon-yellow light on the curving, undressed stone. Four sparrows flew out, also through the hole in the roof, and a tabby cat, a queen, snarled and spat before launching herself up from the lap she had been sitting in.

  There were seven of them, sitting in a circle, ankles crossed, hands, palms upturned, in front of them. None of them wore clothes though all, three women and four men, were dressed: in tiaras and necklaces, arm bangles and wrist bangles, girdles and anklets, made from twisted lead and copper, now tarnished with time, but still set with crystals, felspars, yellow, white, red or green. Some were opalescent like moonstones, others, like sun-stone, spangled. Each had a simple handleless tin cup in front of their feet. Presently Peter picked one up. There was a smear of dried-up purply black residue, a paste, in the bottom. He sniffed at it.

  'A concoction of extracted and concentrated belladonna, aconite and hemlock,' he said. "The dehydrating effect and spasmed muscles could account for the fact that they have remained upright in depositions they adopted before drinking it. Though they would have had to resist the onset of considerable if brief pain to remain as they are.'

  But Prince Harihara did not hear him. He was on his knees in front of one of the figures, with his face in his hands, rocking soundlessly to and fro. Although the skin of all these dead had withered and browned with time, this one was perceptibly darker than the rest. And although the faces of all shared the same rictus of death and the same effects of mummification by poison, heat, cold and dryness, the Prince could no doubt detect in the mask in front of him the physiognomy of his younger brother. Besides, as we had been warned to expect, his legs had been removed at the knee joints.

  In the centre of this ghastly circle there had been placed the one object of monetary value to be found in the whole settlement: a gold bowl, very thin, embossed with a crude oak-leaf pattern. When we had left and had found it possible to talk of what we had seen, Anish offered the supposition that this was the Holy Grail, believed by many Christians to be hidden in these islands. But Peter said no. It was much older that Christianity, he said. Similar objects had been found in long barrows all over the country.

  Anyway, this one had held water, now dried up, and two flowers, a lotus, or water-lily, and a rose. But they were withered too, dried up and dead. We rolled the stone back, leaving Jehani where he had chosen to be, then led the Prince away. He did not speak for forty-eight hours, but when he did he seemed himself again, though his mouth retained a melancholy downward twist at the corners for as long as I knew him.

  Our mission now done, we headed south. Peter was anxious to return to Osney, the rest of us to London and a ship to take us east, back to the Orient. We had not gone far before we met up with a troop of men led by a knight who was marching on the command of his liege lord to Shrewsbury where the King was gathering an army. The King? Henry? No, Edward, son of the Duke of York, Edward the Fourth.

  On the way Prince Harihara catechised Brother Peter about what we had seen, about what had happened to his brother and why.

  Although he expected or at any rate hoped to be back in Vijayanagara as quickly as any letter, he wrote it all down for his cousin. In fact we were delayed further, as you shall hear, and the letter reached its destination a month ahead of us. Here it is.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Dear Cousin I have sad news to report. We found the body of Jehani, my brother and your cousin, in a bidden settlement. He had been dead for at least two years, possibly three, and was entombed with six of his friends. His place of rest was decent enough and reflected the life he had been leading and the beliefs he held so we felt it appropriate to leave him, undisturbed, where he was, simply sealing up the tomb again behind us.

  Although nothing can be certain we have, with the aid of a wise man who knows about such things, pieced together a picture of Jehani's last months or even years.

  It seems likely that apart from his death, and the earlier mutilation he had suffered, he had been happy and this must be our consolation, though it cannot wipe out the guilt I feel that it was my stupid jealousy that sent him on his travels in the first place. However, I must believe that the happiness he found here was at least as deep and ennobling as that I made him forsake in Vijayanagara.

  He was in the company of a small group belonging to a sect called the Brothers of the Free Spirit. This sect exists in secret cells across the west, some of which have managed to find places in the wilderness where they can live undisturbed according to their beliefs and without interference from the authorities – for a time at least.

  Ali tells me that the Assassins, whose founding father was Hassan Ibn Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, and the Thuggees, too, share some o
f their characteristics, the difference being that the Assassins and Thuggees both pay an excessive and obsessive attention to the experience of death. The Brothers, however, see it as part of the natural order and as such to be welcomed when its arrival is timely.

  I shall now summarise the main tenets of their faith, if that is the right word, expressed through praxis rather than dogma.

  They hold all in common; there is no private property. Women are the equal of men. Where the climate is suitable or the time of year conducive, they go naked of clothes but not of personal ornament. They practise singing, dancing, story-telling and poetry, and they play on musical instruments. They eat simply and eschew animal flesh except at times of the year they hold holy. They use hallucinatory plants such as various mushrooms, hashish and other substances. They believe in a god, or a goddess, but it is the god or goddess within them they seek to discover, not an alien entity. They eschew all violence, even in self-defence. They do not tell others what to do and they do not expect others to tell them what to do. They condemn no activity or behaviour that brings pleasure and does not harm others. To avoid conflict, division into parties, power struggles and the like, they limit their numbers in any one group to twenty or so people. Out of these, seven or so of the older members form a council who take decisions for the whole group.

  Such were the people Jehani lived amongst. My informant tells me that he may have lost his lower legs as a result of torture by crushing before he was taken in by these people. He may have been tortured because he was already identified as a Brother of the Free Spirit, or simply because he was a stranger with skin darker than those around him,

  There is much we shall never know about him for certain, we can only guess.

  He lived, in some comfort, with all a rational man could wish for, in a small settlement hidden in a forest, in a part of a forest where ordinary people were afraid to go since it had been the site, some fifty years earlier, of a meteoric impact. The Ingerlonders believe such occurrences come from the Devil, who, in their cosmology, is the spirit of evil. However, hidden away though they were, it seems likely that the authorities became aware of their existence and most of the group were murdered by soldiers, probably sent by the Bishop, the spiritual authority in the area. The elders however, including Jehani, were able to seal, or have themselves sealed, within their largest building where they took their own lives by means of herbal poisons.

  These are the facts as well as we know them. Much more could be said, but little that is worth saying and nothing that will bring him back. We are now on our way home.

  Your affectionate and obedient, but grieving cousin,

  Prince Harihara

  PART V

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  We arrived at Shrewsbury at the end of January to find that the new Duke of York, or King, as he preferred to be known, had left the day before, heading south to Hereford where, we gathered, he aimed to consolidate all the various divisions of his army, raised as it had been in the counties of the west as well as in the borders or Marches between Ingerlond and Wales. Prom Hereford he planned to move to the support of Warwick in London who now awaited the onslaught of the Queen following the battle of Wakefield.

  But we were still five miles short of Hereford when we met his army heading north after all. Apparently, a few miles to the north and west this new king's scurriers, or spies, had discovered a large power of Welshmen who, it was thought, were heading for a crossroads at a hamlet called Mortimer's Cross where they would go east and south towards a point north of London where they would be a more than useful addition to the Queen's army. Since these scurriers were certain that York's army was double the numbers of that led by Owen and Jasper Tudor, it seemed sense-to move forward and deal with them before they could add their numbers to the Queen's.

  On the afternoon which was the eve of Candlemas, the day, as Uma has already told us, when Christians bless all the candles they will use in their churches during the next twelve months, the army drew up on the river Lugg and waited for the new duke to make his dispositions. A mile or so away the vanguard of the Welsh could be seen moving tentatively towards us through the murky gloom.

  It was at this point that the Duke, riding past us with an escort of knights and squires, with his standard, the royal arms, carried behind him. His visor up, turned his face towards us so we recognised him and he recognised us.

  He was only eighteen years old. Irrationally we had expected him to be older. As indeed he might have been. His father, Richard of York, was fifty when he died at Wakefield.

  It was Eddie. Our Eddie. Eddie March. Eddie, Earl of March.

  'Good Lord,' he cried, reining in with a slight clatter of armour. 'It's the Oriental chappie. Prince Hurry-hurry. How are you, my dear fellow? And Ali too. My goodness, your quick thinking got me out of a scrape, what? Nearly a year ago, as I'm alive. Is the witch with you? That wonderful girl. What was her name? Uma. Of course. How could I forget? I say, I'm a touch busy right now, things to deal with and so forth, but Gervase here will look after you and bring you to my tent for a bite to eat and a glass or two when I'm through. What do you say? fine. good. Dashed glad to see you again. À bientôt, then, what?'

  Gervase was a squire of about fifteen years old, who did as he was told.

  Eddie had changed. The deaths of his father and younger brother had aged him. You don't believe in death, not even when you've seen it and dished it out, until the first person close to you goes. Then you believe. And in his case the manner in which they had gone was a source of pain and hate: they had been betrayed by Trollope and others into lighting a battle they should never have fought. Then the insult to the dead, the abuse of their bodies. Older he certainly was. and bitter with a deadly, cunning bitterness, a thirst for revenge that quite overcrowed the jolly, whoring japer we hail known in Calais and East Cheap.

  And now, just a month after his father's death, he had his own army and the first chance to satisfy the thirst for revenge that burned like acid bile within him. Yet there was fear too.

  At dusk we stood outside his tent and looked down over what would, in the morning, be the field of battle.

  There was a bridge, the river Lugg, and Wigg Marsh, across the Worcester road. A local man. Sir Roger Croft of Croft Castle, stood beside us and pointed east. The crossroads were below us just south of the hamlet, two furlongs north of the bridge.

  'My lord…'

  'Sire."

  'Indeed, yes, Your Majesty. The marsh. The road crosses it. If they break that way

  'Yes. We'll put the archers on that side, on the far side of the marsh. And the main body over the bridge, on the other side.'

  'Your Majesty, if you do that, you cut off or make a bottle-neck of our retreat, should we need it.'

  'There will be no retreat. And it's best if they know that.'

  There were no cannon. At Candlemastide the roads were too deep in mud or snow to move them, the very air, even when it didn't rain, too moist for gunpowder.

  They were in place by nightfall, and as the darkness closed in we could see the torches of the Welsh winding through Mortimer's Cross then spreading out. We could hear the jingle and clang of their armour, the neigh of their horses.

  But with darkness came doubts. Eddie had twice the number of men, twice at least. But that was at dusk. How many at dawn? So many lords and knights, with their affinities, in his army: Lord Audley, Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord FitzWalter, Sir So-and-so of This, Baron That of So-and-so. And all, just like Trollope, had sworn their oath to Henry, if not when he ascended the throne then at some time after. How many, like Trollope, would return to that allegiance when the sun rose and the skylarks left their watery nests?

  Once back in his tent all this weighed heavily and Eddie said, 'We need a sign. An irrefutable sign that we will win because God is on our side. Only that way can we be sure that chaps will realise that their oath to Henry was falsely sworn and that I am rightfully king."

  He turned to our princ
e. 'Hurry-hurry,' he said, 'you Oriental chaps have a reputation for magic and so forth. Could you conjure something up for us? An eclipse, perhaps. Put the sun out and say the sun is Henry?'

  And that, dear Mah-Lo, is as far as I shall go tonight with the spinning of my yam. It's a good place to stop is it not?Just on the eve of a battle whose outcome is in the balance. Scheherezade could not have done better.

  I've had occasion, once or twice, said Ali when, the next day, he took up the tale again, to mention the fakir who attached himself to us right from the start. He came and went like a shadow, a not very familiar familiar. Tall, dark, a Mussulman god-man, he was, I sometimes thought, my other self, my similar, my brother, the ghost of the man I might have been had I not been mutilated as a child in the way you see before you. Indeed, at times I was none too sure in just what dimension he existed, for it seemed to me that none saw him or were aware of his presence but I. He was often there, a flicker in the comer of my eye who was gone when I turned; a presence between the sun and a wall that faded with the light whose rays it interrupted.

  It's a trick fakirs perfect, often by the simplest of means. Appear in a locked room? Simple. Hide there before the room is locked. Manifest in a crowd? Easier still. Arrive in disguise and when there is a distraction, throw it off. They have garments that look coarse and poor through cunning weaving and painting but made of silk so fine they can be crushed and balled away.

  They can swallow almost anything so their bodies provide hiding-places that walk with them; they can get their fists up their rectums and leave there a king's globe, cross and all.

  They also know substances with strange qualities, unlikely powers, that cam turn metals into ashes; they can make a rope stand on end with no apparent means of support and encourage a small boy to climb it. Lying on the ground they make six people each put a finger under them and, lo, they rise into the air and none of the six feels the weight. They work with mirrors. And… they understand how the track of light can be concentrated and bent by passing it through cunningly shaped lumps of glass.