Kings of Albion Read online

  Kings of Albion

  Julian Rathbone

  'There are moments in this novel when one could be watching an episode of Blackadder. Frivolity abounds… Hut beneath the gags,.I serious historical novel is lurking. Julian Rathbone has had the excellent idea of viewing the Wars of the Roses from the perspective of some visitors from India. Their reactions to what they see. ranging from disgust to bemusement, shed unexpected light on fifteenth-century England' Sally Cousins, Sunday Telegraph

  'Set in 1460, this hugely enjoyable romp is narrated by Mah-Lo from Mandalay – a wink at Joseph Conrad and the sort of sly joke with which the book abounds. The heart of darkness is not Africa, however, but England in the grip of the Wars of the Roses. The novel tells of a group of men who travel from Goa to trace a kinsman. Rathbone vividly describes the "Inglysshe, the least civilised and most barbaric people on earth", and brings to life the sounds, sights and, above all. smells of fifteenth-century England' Sunday Times

  'Rathbone's novel is excellent, both as a fictional adventure story and as a detailed and enlightening description of an ancient land' The Times

  Kirkus Reviews

  No doubt hoping to extend the extravagant sweep-of-history-on-the-road theme of his previous novel (The Last English King, 1999), but falling short, Rathbone shifts to the Wars of the Roses, and a group of travelers from India who arrive just in time to be in the thick of the intrigue. In 1459, the disfigured but widely traveled Arab trader Ali, already pushing 60, agrees to deliver a packet from a mysterious, soon-dead stranger he meets in an English inn to the royal family of Vijayanagara in southern India. Ali's success earns him a return to the cold and rain of Albion, but this time with a prince of the family and his retinue in tow. The mission now: to track down the prince's brother, long estranged and believed to be practicing a secret, forbidden religion somewhere in the north. As they head west, Ali discovers that the monk in their party is actually a sensuous young woman he met briefly before leaving India. Later, Uma seduces him in a Cairo bathhouse, and adds a teenaged English nobleman to her list of conquests as they prepare to cross the English Channel. The boy, Eddie, is one of those plotting to overthrow the king of England; finding a hostile reception when Ali and company make it to London, he is forced to flee. Ali and the others get caught up in the civil war as well, with the prince shut up in the Tower of London and Ali and Uma leaving town without him. When Ali falls ill and stops in a monastery to recuperate, Uma keeps going, looking for Eddie, but she's thrown in prison, too, just as the two sides begin their series of bloody battles. Eventually, she finds her hot-blooded boy, and the prince finds his brother-but these reunions aren't what they've been expecting.The rambling seems more travelogue than novel, including, as it does, everything from theology to weather reports, and the notion of strangers in a strange land never quite catches fire.

  Julian Rathbone

  Kings of Albion

  2000

  For Alayne, Arthur and Nina

  Author's Note

  Kings of Albion is a work of fiction that purports to be set in the fifteenth century. Readers bothered by anachronisms and inaccuracies are asked first of all to consider whether or not these may have been intentional. If they are still bothered then I must ask them to accept that the whole thing could have happened in an alternative solar system on the other side of the universe. Nevertheless, I did read around a bit.

  Once the conceit of placing a small group of oriental characters in darkest England had occurred to me I had to decide where they might have come from. Originally I thought Burma. Seeking information about medieval Burma I got in touch with Richard Blurton of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum and told him my problem. 'Not Burma,' he said, 'Vijayanagara.'

  Where?

  In common, I imagine, with most people who will read this book, I had no idea where he was talking about. He told me, and directed me to the available sources. The Empire of Vijayanagara was the result of the unification of the states of southern India which took place in the late thirteenth century and survived as a unity until 1565. When it was finally conquered by a coalition of Bahmani sultans it was completely obliterated in an uncharacteristically thorough way: the libraries were destroyed, the massive buildings and cities stripped of almost all their ornaments bothsculpted and painted; the surviving population and its civilisation degraded to the status of peasant serfs. For centuries almost the only sources of knowledge about what had been lost were the chronicles and records of sixteenth-century Portuguese traders and explorers, particularly those who penetrated the empire after their annexation of Goa. It is only in the last few decades that archaeologists have begun to work on the huge sites and piece together a new conception of what this lost civilisation must have been like.

  Vijayanagara was just what I wanted: a civilisation very probably more civilised than Europe in the fifteenth century', and one about which still comparatively little is known so I could allow my imagination to roam freely. No doubt true students of Vijayanagara will condemn the results on every possible ground and I apologise to Richard Blurton lor dragging him into this farrago. Nevertheless I owe him a real debt of gratitude.

  I also made copious use of Indian Art by Vidya, published by Phaidon.

  I first discovered the Brothers of the Free Spirit in Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus, published by Picador, and followed them up in Norman Conn's 77ie Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millennariaus and Mystical Anarchists in the Middle Ages published by Mercury, both classics which were a joy to have to read. I first read of Hassan Ibn Sabbah in the works of William S. Burroughs (whose Family ofjohnsons I've also borrowed), though the Assassins figured in many schoolboy romances I read when I was a boy, while, not much later, Eric Linklater's Mr liyculla was my first introduction to Thuggee.

  Among other borrowings there are short but more or less direct quotations from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and an adapted paragraph trom Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough. The peroration of Brother Peter's sermon is taken from Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse at a point where he himself quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche and Sean O'Casey. And finally Ali ben Quatar Mayeen and Prince Harihara Kurteishi each owe just a little to Alan Quatermain and Sir Henry Curtis in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines…

  As will always be the case with a writer who is tolerably well read and arguably elderly there may be other borrowings I am not aware of.

  No doubt my fifteenth-century England is as out of kilter as my Vijayanagara. I made no use of primary sources. I did, however, read all the popular histories of the period that are in print or could be found in public libraries, and the social histories too. In the end I kept Alison Weir's Lancaster and York – The Wars of the Roses (Pimlico) beside me as the most lucid and in many ways most detailed blow-by-blow account I had found, and I should like to acknowledge my debt to that title. The modern versions of medieval verse which appear are by Brian Stone and are taken from Medieval English Verse, published by Penguin Classics.

  However, my main source, for all aspects of Kings of Albion, the one to which I always turned first and where I usually found as much as I wanted, was the njn Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which I inherited from my father: it sits in its case a yard to my right and in all the time I have spent on this book I doubt if half an hour has passed when I have not pulled out one or other of its volumes.

  JR

  December, 1999

  PART I

  Chapter One

  Ali ben Quatar Mayeen ('Call me Ismail, if you must, but I prefer Ali') was a retired trader – or, rather, a rep for a trader, a sort of latter-day Sinbad. Never made a fortune out of it. not until that last trip he took so long telling me about, and
even that was not a real, serious fortune. It was enough, though, to see his son Haroun – Ali called him Haree through medical school in Misr-al-Kahira, which Christians call Cairo, keep a rainproof roof over his head, and buy all the bhang he needed until the day he died. And I mean needed. After two winters in Ultima, or almost Ultima, Thule, Ali's joints played up like hell, especially his knees and knuckles, and especially when it rained, and bhang is the only thing that eases that sort of pain when you're seventy years old. Seventy? That's a guess. Ali himself was capable of putting his age at anything between sixty and seventy-five.

  Rain? Yes, for a couple of months a year it rains very seriously in Mangalore, rain, Ali would say, as he'd never experienced it before, not even in Manchester, and even though it's warm rain it got into his joints, made his knuckles swell, and they hurt as if a skilled torturer were sliding red-hot needles into the cartilage between the bones. Knees too. But it doesn't last long, and the bhang helps. In fact, look at it this way, for two months a year he-was as high as one of those dragon kites you Chinese fly during your festivities and, yes, the pain was still there but as if it belonged to someone else. And, apart from the rainy season, the Malabar coast of India, in the empire of Vijayanagara, seemed to Ali like paradise on earth.

  He had a couple of wives, sisters, not yet m their twenties, he reckoned, who cooked the native food to perfection, saw that the servants kept the place clean, bathed him, fed him, put him outside on the patio where the fountain played and the lotus and the roses bloomed, and encouraged a couple of friends, traders like him, to come in and swap yarns about old times and old adventures. If he was feeling particularly well, and it was not too hot, he'd potter down to the port, drink some lemonade in one of the Arab-owned establishments, and watch the big dhows with their huge triangular sails coming in over the harbour bar from all four imagined comers of the rounded world. There was an Arab girl down there too, who sang like an angel while she played on a guitarra, nostalgic songs about Granada where she was born. It was there, of course, that I first made his acquaintance.

  Wben dusk came, his wives took him back to bed and put him between them so his old bones seemed almost to suck the warmth and life from their soft bodies and he slept, so he told me, like a new-born babe.

  Not bad, eh?

  Who am I? What is my history? Didn't they tell you? I'm sorry. My name is Mah-Lo, I was bom in Mandalay, moved down to Rangoon when I was a nipper, went to sea on a Malay Arab's boat as ship's boy.., but this is Ali's story not mine. Suffice it to say, when I'd learnt all there was to know about sailing from the archipelagos to Port Suez in the west and back, I called myself an Arab and a Muslim and got myself made master of a trading dhow owned by a Malay sultan. Trade took me up to Nanking on the Yangtze. There the local governor and mandarin told me I could sell information as well as copra and he sent me up here to Cambaluk. Which some call Peking. Back to Ali.

  It's not a problem being an Arab and nominally a Muslim in Mangalore. It's a port and therefore cosmopolitan: they've had Christians there almost since there were Christians, going back to a guy called Thomas Didymus who actually knew Jesus and made some converts; Jews who didn't know Jesus and stayed Jews; and of course the Indians themselves come in ill sizes and shapes – pale Aryans and Hindus, copper-coloured Dravidians, like Ali's wives, and dark-skinned Tamils. Most of the seamen are Arab and now they're getting Europeans, who come through the Mediterranean, down the Red Sea and across the Arab Ocean. But, of course, they have to transfer to Arab boats for the last leg. I know the Portuguese reckon some day they'll bypass the Arab Ocean by sailing right round Africa and use their own ships for the whole trip… I'm wandering. Old men do. Something you'll have to get used to. And, of course, there are Chinese. Like yourselves.

  Being a Muslim isn't, as I say, a problem, although Vijayanagara has been at war with them for a hundred years, that is with the Bahmani sultans. A couple of hundred miles north, up beyond Gove, Goa the Portuguese call it, you get into their territory. The war is territorial, not ethnic or religious. None of that stupid jihad stuff. Indeed, many commanders and some regiments in His Imperial Majesty's army are Muslim mercenaries. Ali was more likely to get into trouble for being a merchant than for being an Arab. Merchants are noted for being spies, double spies, and for taking remuneration from two opposing sides. There is some justification in this for what trader will deny that the summit of his ambition is to buy and sell in the same market? Trust me. I'm a merchant. I know.

  Ali and his fortune. As aresult of the adventures I am going to recount, he acquired land, good farmland in the spice-growing foothills of the Western Ghats, with a couple of villages to go with it. He sent what he could to his son Haree and enjoyed the rest.

  Once we had started our routine I used to arrive in his enclosed garden three or four times a week. A regular thousand and one afternoons it felt like, though of course it was nothing like as many as that – I doubt if Scheherezade's were either. He said he did it because he enjoyed talking about his life, because lie would retain thereby a sort of life beyond the grave. According to Ali. this life is it. There is no life after death, neither as the proverbial fly or bug as certain high-caste Hindus. Brahmins they call themselves, would have us believe, nor in a Muslim paradise feasting off ambrosia and nectar, waited upon by houris, entertained by damsels with dulcimers. That, Ali already had.

  It was fun, he said, to live again the ecstasies and agonies of a long lite from the safety of a wicker chair, well padded with cushions, in the shade of a fragrant cardamom tree, drinking lemonade, nibbling a bhang cake as a digestif, and letting his lunch, the main dish of which might have been mutton braised in butter with coconut, turmeric, coriander, cumin and ginger, go down. The rest of the household were taking their afternoon naps; even the enamelled fish in the pool hardly shifted.

  'I don't take a nap in the afternoon,' he told me, the first time I took my place beside him. 'Sleep does not come easily when you're old. My girls won't come to bed with me while it's still hot – that's what they say, anyway – too sweaty and I tend to fart a lot after a meal. Actually they're probably copulating with their current lovers… If they're not, they should be. At their age I would have been. Where shall I begin?'

  'At the beginning?'

  Ali ben Quatar Mayeen was born in a small village in the hills near Damascus. When he was eight years old and had just been inducted into the first circle of the mysteries of the Islamic sect his tribe belonged to, a form of Shiism, known as the Ismailites, the local caliph, a Sunnite, took it into his head to have the lot exterminated. In a trice it seemed Ali was robbed of a happy if frugal childhood by circumstances that would be almost too horrific to contemplate now, had I not seen them repeated countless times since, right across the known world, in almost every place I have been to. Only Vijayanagara itself proved free of such horrors. Everywhere one goes it is the same. In the name of God men dismember each other, torture, use ever more vile and yet cunning ways of inflicting pain and death. In a way Ali's family and their friends had been lucky – they were raped and beaten, yes, and cut literally into pieces, but all quite quickly. Nothing compared to the sufferings the Christians inflict on each other when one sect gets the members of another within its power.

  On the day that changed his life, that day on which he was born again, he saw his father, his mother, his step-mothers, his brothers and sisters and half-brothers and half-sisters decapitated in front of his eyes, having first been mutilated in unspeakable ways. Well, he would have, had it not been the case that while all this was going on he kept his eyes closed,

  'How did you escape?' I asked him.

  'I was only six years old and I ran and hid.'

  'Just now you said you were eight.'

  'I said eight? Just now? You're quite wrong. Six. I should know. Naturally I fled to the safest place I knew… my grandmother's skirts. I would hardly have done that if I had been as old as eight…'

  Well, he's by no means the first unrel
iable narrator I've listened to.

  According to Ali, a Sunni warrior decapitated her neatly with a horizontal swipe ol his razor-edged scimitar and as she fell, or rather collapsed, fountaining blood from the stump that had been her neck a moment before, into the cloud or cushion of her apparel that billowed out around her as she sank to the floor with her head in her lap, he aimed a second cut at Ali who now stood revealed behind her. He would have been cut diagonally in half had he not swayed back at precisely the right moment. Instead of taking the edge, the blade of the scimitar, he was merely scratched with the point. Scratched? The cut was an inch deep running from the outer corner of his right eye, taking off his right nostril, passing across his mouth leaving him with a peculiarly nasty hare-lip, crossing the right collar-bone, which it broke, the breast-bone, which it nicked, finally slicing four of his left ribs and laying open the flesh to the left of his belly. Quite a scratch.

  He continued his backward fall and passed out. Now it appears that the trauma caused by this wound was so severe that he went into a catatonic trance, much like those assumed on purpose by Hindu godmen, so that all his bodily functions slowed almost to a complete halt, but did not cease. And because his heart was beating, but possibly as little as once a minute, there was no force in the bleeding after the initial rush of blood, and what did leak out clotted before he bled to death or, indeed, before he had lost more than a couple of jugsful.

  It was winter and cold at nights, the village was in the mountains. and his trance continued unbroken until the following morning. The murderers, no doubt wishing to render the village and land uninhabitable for ever, sowed the fields with salt and, having first stripped the bodies, dragged them all, Ali's family and neighbours, to the wells and tipped them in. hoping thereby to poison them. The wells, that is.