Kings of Albion

by Julian Rathbone

  first arrived, on the Yorkists' left, coining out of the wood that lay-in the oxbow of Cock Beck.

  The first thing Edward did was commit his reserve to shore up his left. Much to his chagrin they were driven off and pursued up the beck in a southerly direction by the Queen's reserve cavalry, neither group being seen again. Many thought Edward was now lost but he so encouraged his men, fought with them so bravely, and was so skilful at bringing in fresh troops under their lords at points where they were needed, that his line held.

  Moreover, at this point he behaved like a true general – the young Alexander could not have done better. He knew that the fundamental thing was to keep his line straight. Any bulge or indentation would cause a weakness. The powers on his left were dropping back to face Somerset on their flank so somehow he must bring up his right to straighten the line. The Queen's army was already weakest on that side, because of the slope and the threat of the cannon – if he could only push them back another fifty yards, his line would hold.

  He was on Genet again, all that 'not mounting until he was in York' was flannel, of course, and he knew it was important enough to make sure it was got right. In short he came galloping over to us in person, reined in with a spatter of snow and mud that splattered Ali in his good eye, and looked down at me.

  'Hurry-Hurry,' he cried, 'now's your chance to do a chap a favour and pay me back for all the kindnesses I've shown you.' he hurried on, perhaps forestalling any crude calculation we might want to make. 'Be a good chap and get those crossbows out and let my men have a crack at those bastards over there.'

  I did not like to admit that I had already paid the sergeant to keep the crossbows cased. These were not crude things to be used in a battle, they were elegant, crafted, works of art made to grace the formality and style of a properly organised hunt, but Eddie muttered something about guts for garters and having our balls off, and anyway the men who had been carrying them were readier to obey their putative king than the darky cove who kept getting in the way.

  It took ten minutes or more to get them uncased, the right bolts assigned to the right engines, and all pointing in the right direction during which the Queen's power in front of us, perhaps heartened by the success on the further flank, or guessing at last that the cannons were not firing today, were pushing harder than before.

  There was a problem: the line of Yorkists, some five hundred of them, between the crossbows and the enemy. Eddie got in amongst them, got some to lie down, others to run for it before he himself, still riding Genet, got out of the way. By now I had got into the spirit of the thing: I stood at the end of the line of crossbows, my previous collection of bird-shooters and crocodile killers, drew my scimitar, held it above my head, and at a nod from Eddie brought it down.

  Some bows clicked, some clanged. Some bolts whistled, some screamed. A lord leading the enemy took a tiny bolt right through the slitted visor and in the eye. The largest bolt, fired from the monster that had to be mounted on a man's back, took two Yorkists from behind and skewered them to the two Lancastrians in front of them. After that they fired at will until the enemy broke, scattered and scampered down the hill.

  Ali looked up from the Prime's manuscript. 'But not,' he said, 'before one of them had managed to trip Eddie, and threaten his life with a broadsword. Tlw distance was not great and I was by his side in no time with my little stiletto fumbled out from under my furs, cape and loincloth. Trained by the followers of The Old Man of the Mountains I knew exactly what to do with it, even without the aid of hashish, and I fiddled the point between his third and fourth ribs. Eddie rewarded me later with a farmstead in Thorney Hill in Hampshire, but since it was reputed to be on poor soil and with few inhabitants I never bothered even to visit it.'

  And screwing up his good eye he went back to what he had been reading.

  Thus, by these events on both wings, the whole battle was skewed from an east-west line to one that ran from north-east to south-west with the ridge and the road in Yorkist hands. When, a little later. Norfolk's men arrived along the road from the south they found themselves on the Queen's army's flank and cut off their retreat to Tadcaster and York by the road. The only way to go when they broke was into the Renshaw Wood and the ravine and these created a terrible bottle-neck.

  The river was no longer a brook but a torrent, fast-flowing and filling the floor of the ravine, as the snow of two days, which never settled properly but ran off as soon as it hit the grass, poured into it.

  Trapped in the trees, thickets and water and soon by those who tripped and fell and could not get up again, men were slaughtered in their thousands, many falling at the hands of their own people who slew them from behind in their desperation to get clear. The water ran red with blood and indeed the mightier river Wharfe, into which the Cock Beck emptied, ran with blood all through the next day.

  The sum of all those fighting that day was reckoned at ninety thousand. All in all twenty-eight thousand men were butchered and maybe half as many again were wounded and died later. We were told it was the biggest battle ever fought in Ingerlond, never as many killed. And I doubt if these numbers will ever be equalled on Inglysshe soil.

  And for what? For religion, to impose one set of beliefs on another – the most common cause for such killing fields? No. So one nation could conquer and take over the land of another – the second most common cause? No. For booty, loot, gold, slaves, to take back to one's homeland? No. But simply so that one man could be king rather than another, to rule in the same way and under the same laws. For two men to fight for such a prize is not a wonder, but that they should be capable of getting a nation into arms, father against son, brother against brother, for so feeble a reason, is indeed a wonder. Whatever else can explain this phenomenon one factor must be present. These Inglysshe, or at any rate a great many of them, enjoy fighting. It's as simple as that.

  Silence spread around us. Then there was a sudden flurry down by the pool. All's cat had caught a small frog. Hobbling and swinging about after her, Ali shouted and swore at her, hit out at her with his stick until she dropped it and leapt into the cardamom tree, snarling and spitting back at him. The frog now sat frozen with terror on a coping stone below. Ali picked it up, held it gently in the palm of his hand. Struggling to get his breath back he said:

  'She looks all right…"

  And he took it hack to the edge of the pool. It leapt, plop, hack into the water. Ali lifted his cat down and soon they were friends again, she purring in his lap.

  'Is that the end of the story?' I asked.

  'Not quite,' Uma murmured. 'You see I too was there at the end. What happened was that that younger brother of Eddie's. Richard, bribed an ostler and got a pony which he rode to the battlefield. I followed him. It was dusk when I found him. He was going through the wood searching out the Queen's men who still lived inside their boxes of iron. When he found one who did he fiddled the point of his poniard through the man's Visor, searching for an eye and when he found it he rammed it home. This is a boy of eight, you know? A boy who will be king until Owen Tudor's grandson kicks him out.'

  'There was a coronation too, before we left,' Ali added. 'In the middle of June. Gross business. Very barbaric. Long ceremony in Westminster Abbey with wailing monks and braying brass, endless business with anointing oil, a big jewelled crown, sceptres, globes, what all. And afterwards absurdly huge feasts with barrels of wine and beer, lewd dancing, wild extravagance in clothes and jewellery, much of it sold by us, and mass executions carried out in public. In the middle of all this Eddie made our Prince a knight, for his help with the crossbows. A Knight of the Garter, big deal. You had to buckle a strip of velvet just below the knee and wear a star made out of cheap little diamonds. It's meant to be the highest order he could receive, but the Prince now keeps the doings in a box with a few other oddments he picked up in Ingerlond, as souvenirs. After that we came home.'

  It was time to go. Ali was tired. The sun was already beginning its swift fall into the Arabian
Sea. Uma was anxious to get her children to bed. But I knew I would not be back and I wanted the last ends of the story tidied up.

  'You got back safely?'

  'Clearly.'

  'And with the military expertise the Prince had gone for?'

  'Oh yes. I suppose so. It didn't interest me greatly. But Bardolph Earwicca is now the Emperor's Master of Ordnance, and we also brought back four other youngsters, a knight, a couple of men-at-arms, and an archer, who professed themselves at a loose end now the wars were over and were anxious to travel. They have settled in well and are retraining the army.' 'Anish?'

  'He's all right. Still Prince Harihara's chamberlain as far as I know.' Tliere was a silence for a moment or two, which I broke. 'And you, Ali. What did you bring back? Apart from a pension which seems adequate.'

  'A more certain conviction than ever, maybe, that the Old Man of the Mountain had it right: Nothing is true. Everything is possible. Nothing matters. No. That's not all.'

  He stood and turned away, but he could not disguise the slight break in his voice.

  'From the best friend I ever had I learnt a better way of looking at things: that it is no sad truth that this should be our home. Were it but to give us simple shelter, simple clothing, simple food, adding the lotus and the rose, the apple and the cherry, it would be a fit home for mortal or immortal man.'

  Later that evening I went down to the quay just as the sun was making its swift descent into the ocean. I would be leaving Mangalore and the Malabar coast in the morning aboard a Chinese trading junk on which I had booked a passage, taking my Dravidian wife with me. We would be heading south, round Sri Lanka and back to civilisation. But at that moment, looking west, the offing was barred by a blank bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – it seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

  Postscript

  A year later Mah-Lo presented himself and his account of Ali ben Quatar Mayeen's adventures to the court of the Ming Emperor Cheng-Hwa in his capital Cambaluc. In his preamble he said that while the Vijayanagaran empire's army had recently undergone a radical transformation the reforms were all made with defence rather than expansion in mind. The defences of fortresses had been improved to withstand sieges supported by gunpowder; they had their own way of making gunpowder which was better than anyone's apart from the Chinese; they were training heavy infantry to withstand cavalry. It was Mah-Lo's opinion that with these improvements they would be able to withstand Muslim invasions for the foreseeable future but they presented no threat to Chinese expansion or trade.

  Looking further afield, to the other side of the world, it was his conclusion that none of the European kingdoms need be considered an immediate danger to the Chinese apart possibly from the Portuguese. And even the Portuguese, it seemed, were more interested in building up a maritime trading empire based on enclaves of merchants rather than military domination.

  However, in the long term, he had no doubt that eventually the Inglysshe could become a problem. If Ali was right in his depiction of this island race, once their internal disputes were settled Mah-Lo feared they could well become a problem for the whole world.

  Their history, particularly the Norman Conquest and its aftermath,

  had developed a set of contradictory characteristics which gave

  them an edge over all the other peoples he had encountered in

  all his wanderings.

  'They are,' he told us, 'a nation of individuals who yet can combine and behave with ferocious bravery under leaders they respect; they are skilful and ruthless traders with few natural assets of their own to exploit; they are foolhardy sea-farers; they are inordinately arrogant; they are ruthless, unforgiving, cruel enemies. Unfettered by morals or a common religion they take an empirical, pragmatic view of life, adapting their beliefs to circumstances, though always favouring an approach which leaves each individual the captain of his own soul.

  'Ali once heard an Ingerlonder say: "I do not tell others how to live and I do not expect others to tell me."'

  Mah-Lo continued: 'They enjoy and even live for camaraderie, the company of their fellows, physical prowess, hedonistic if simple enjoyment shared with others, strong drink and rough, speedily concluded sex. They have an incredible capacity to suffer pain for a short term, and will face death willingly. But they will not put up with pain or toil as a life-choice. They hate boredom.

  'They will cheerfully accept individuals of other creeds and races as individuals, especially if they take a personal liking to them, while continuing to despise all foreigners in general.

  'They are mad,' Mah-Lo concluded. 'One day they will conquer the world.'

  There was a moment's silence, then the Grand Chamberlain made a dismissive gesture with his long-nailed lingers. "But not China,' he said. 'No,' Mah-Lo agreed. 'Probably not China."

  Julian Rathbone

  Julian Rathbone is the author of many books, including the hugely acclaimed The Last English King and the Booker-shortlisted Joseph. He lives in Dorset.

  ***

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