Kings of Albion Page 3

  The next two years saw me inexorably drawn eastward as if my soul were a sliver of magnetised steel, mounted on a pin and dragged by a lodestone. No doubt this was in part a response to the trader in me for commerce recognises that a promise given has the strength of a contract, but also there was a more spiritual bond which my Franciscan had evoked. The Brothers of the Free Spirit, whose innermost councils have renounced God as well as the Devil, have their Islamic equivalent to which I belong. Having studied at the feet of the successors of the Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan lbn Sabbah, I count myself an adept, and it is my duty to do all I can for all who share our disbeliefs, whether they come from Muslim, Christian, or Hindu beginnings.

  At this point Ali must have noticed the shift in my expression for he paused with the eyebrow above his good eye raised like an inverted black crescent moon. I took the plunge. 'You are, then,' I stated, somewhat uneasily, 'an Assassin.'

  He cracked a walnut between the thumb and forefinger of his good hand and used the digits of the other to pick over the white flesh he had exposed.

  'You may say so, so long as you do not attribute to me the practices the vulgar ascribe to us. As you know, I take hashish a great deal, and the word assassin derives from the word hashish. And occasionally I have had good cause to bestow on mortals the supreme ecstasy of death. But I don't make a habit of it.'

  This was a relief, and I allowed him to return to his narrative.

  My first visit to the Malabar coast arose out of business I had in southern Arabia, at the south end of the Red Sea, in a small port called Mokha, where I was trading silver ingots for woven camel-hair carpets with certain Bedu chieftains. Once we had concluded the deal they sealed it with a beverage I had not come across before, which they called k'hawah. It is an infusion made from the ground-up pits or bean-like stones of a small cherry-like fruit of a low bush, which is grown on the sea-facing slopes of the mountains that border the Red Sea. I was impressed by its beneficial effects: it enlivens the spirit without intoxication, removes headaches, and stimulates mental activity. Moreover, taken with sugar crystallised from the sap of the cane that grows on the plain below the hills, it is remarkably palatable.

  So impressed was I with this concoction that I immediately bought half a dozen sacks of these beans and took them to Venice, where I sold them at a very considerable profit. The enterprise was aided by the cunning of a Venetian alchemist I knew who had invented a way of improving the infusion by expressing steam through the grounds of the k'hawah inside a sealed retort. This improved its potency and flavour. He sold the resulting drink in tiny cups for enormous prices in the Piazza di San Marco.

  Thinking I was now about to make a proper fortune at last I returned to Mokha only to find that during my absence the local imams had declared k'hawah to be an intoxicating liquor and therefore proscribed by the Kor'an and it underwent a brief spell of prohibition.

  I do not easily give up and enquiring amongst fellow traders learnt that the nearest habitat they knew of that resembled that of the south-west-facing slopes of the Yemeni mountains was that of the Western (ihats lying behind the Malabar coast of southern India, particularly that part served by the port of Mangalore. I bought four dozen potted k'hawah bushes for almost nothing since they were now of no commercial value and booked a passage for them and myself on a dhow bound for Mangalore and its palm-green shore. Once there, I arranged for a landowner who grew cinnamon, cardamom and ginger on his estates in the mountains to set aside a quarter of an acre of his poorer, higher land where the earth did indeed resemble that of the south Yemeni hills. My forty-eight bushes were taken from their pots and planted there. He was happy to gain rent however small from this unlikely patch with a promise of a share of the profits if any accrued.

  Since any profit that there was to be made from this venture would be.it least a couple of years or so in the future I returned to Arabia, but not before I had ascertained what commodity the Vijayanagarans were most in need of and would pay for most handsomely.

  Horses.

  The Vijayanagarans' only mounted arm at the time was a regiment of elephant, which, in the well-ordered and virtually harmless form of warfare practised between Hindus, performed a merely formal function. When a phalanx of elephants advanced on infantry it was understood that the infantry would retreat.

  The sultans, however, took warfare more seriously; elephants do not like horses and, when faced with a cavalry charge, run amok trampling the infantry behind them and often unseating their mahouts. Indeed, so serious had the situation become, the sultans would surely have overrun the Vijayanagaran empire decades before I got there, had they ever been able to agree amongst themselves. However, they tended to fight each other with yet more vehemence than they fought their neighbours. Meanwhile the Vijayanagarans were beginning to build up a horse cavalry of their own, retaining elephants for ceremonial parades only. But the process was still in its infancy, and at that time, for a prime, partially broken, three-year-old stallion, strong enough to carry a man in armour or service a mare, they would pay its weight in coriander seed or dried ginger.

  And in Moskova or Stadholmen they pay for those spices, weight for weight, in silver or amber.

  For what – the tenth time in my life? I thought my fortune was made. However, I did not have the wherewithal to buy horses in any great numbers and had to borrow heavily from the Yemeni Jews in Aden. Nevertheless I got together a string of eighteen horses including six brood mares in foal and, heedless of the warnings of diose who know best, put them on a ship for Mangalore. Even the ship's captain, who was also in debt and in a hurry to make money, told me to wait a few weeks, but I would have none of it. We were duly caught in the north-east monsoon and shipwrecked on one of the Laccadive coral islands where we remained for five weeks, eating horseflesh, before we were picked up by pearl fishers and taken on to Mangalore.

  I was now penniless and return to the Yemen was not an option – the Jews there would have had me impaled as a warning to reneging borrowers and indeed it seemed the only asset I had left was the black packet my Brother of the Free Spirit had given me two years earlier and a handful of gold coin I had managed to keep about my person. I called at the godown of the agent of a Cairo-based trailer I had done business with in the past, though not in Mangalore. However, his chief clerk here had heard of me and was able to advise me that Prince Harihara Raya Kurteishi was part of the Emperor's household with a senior position in the military establishment and, of course, resided in the City of Victory itself. In the course of the next few days a large caravan was due to leave Mangalore, headed by the governor, or ttayak, and I should be able to buy myself a place in it.

  A day or so later I joined the caravan, which was indeed substantial, and set off for the hinterland beyond the Ghats. At the front went priests and monks, some wearing jewelled vestments, others in simpler robes the colour of burnt earth, blowing their gilded trumpets, striking their gongs and chiming their finger cymbals, scenting the air around them with frankincense, and bearing on a shoulder-high litter a bronze but gilded and polychrome statue of the dancing, tour-armed Shiva, ringed as usual with fire, draped with silk and decorated with jewels and garlands. Behind him came the governor, who was returning to the City of Victory for the great festival of Mahanavami, which marks the end of the monsoon season, the same monsoon that had shipwrecked me and my horses.

  He rode on the first of six elephants, caparisoned in velvet with gold bullion tassels and edgings. Next came a score of mounted soldiers carrying burnished spears and shields inlaid with gold, silver, copper and mother-of-pearl, all of which flashed sunlight back through the moist haze. They were there for show – war-parties from the sultanates do not come so far south and none of the civil population has any cause to threaten the lives of their rulers. In this happy land even mountain brigandage is unheard of.

  Behind this ceremonial bodyguard came twenty or so donkeys on one of the first of which I rode, the rest being used to carry the impedimenta
we might require on the way. Westerners despise people who ride donkeys, reserving the animal for purposes of draught, even though their principal goddess rode one on her way from Palestine to Egypt and later her son, the Prophet Jesus, also used one to enter Jerusalem in triumph. I had no such reservations, especially as by then I had reached an age where riding was always preferable to walking. Behind the donkeys came mules and a camel train carrying goods from all over the known world which, once the monsoon was over, had begun again to arrive in Mangalore.

  Forgive me for dwelling a little on this journey. I have been constrained at times to make a mendicant's living out of telling tales of travel on street corners or in places where men eat and take their leisure, and old habits die hard.

  First, once we had left the bustle and mess of Mangalore (ports, even in the best arranged of places, are always messy, are they not?) there was a narrow plain some thirty or so miles wide, of wetlands, of lagoons filled with wading birds and fishing boats, rafts and floating villages with, where the land rose a few feet, plantations of coconut palms and plantains. The road, a causeway, threaded its way often across a carpet of lotus whose flowers the women and girls of the villages, Tamils, wove into garlands, which they either wore or offered in homage to the god who went before us. Often they sang and danced, and the twanging of their stringed instruments and the wailing of their flutes signalled our arrival or faded into the mists behind us.

  As we left the lagoons we crossed land that was still wet but drained, where water levels could be controlled, and here were the paddy-fields of rice, a bluish green at that time of year and like a haze of fur across the greenish blue of the water. The earth beneath the hoofs and feet of our animals became firmer, so they clipped and clopped instead of squelching, and lifted us above the palms, watery lotus plains and rice paddies. We camped for the first night on the outskirts of a village set in fields of coriander, which almost overcame us with the sweet, fruity, spicy fragrance of its flowers and seeds and the more acrid odour of leaves crushed by the passing feet of peasants.

  More pungent yet and pepper)' were the plantations of cardamom trees on the higher slopes above the village, which we passed through on the following morning, leaving the coastal plain behind us under a nacreous blanket of mist. It came to my mind that somewhere nearby was the tiny plantation of k'hSwah bushes I had caused to be planted, but I was given no opportunity to leave the caravan and seek out the plot I had leased.

  As well as cardamoms there were groves of cinnamon and hedges of peppercorn vines and, near the copious streams that tumbled out of the Ghats, reed-beds of ginger whose bulbous rhizomes were hung along the cane walls of the dwelling-places to dry. Amongst these spice plantations there were also groves of citrus trees, whose fruits hung amongst their star-like flowers, golden lamps in a green night, including the sweeter varieties recently imported from China.

  We camped that second night in the foothills of the Ghats and near the entrance to a soaring but narrow gorge through which tumbled one of the many rivers that fed the lagoons we had passed through and would continue to do so, months even after the monsoons had passed. Already the air was cooler, partly on account of the height we had climbed but also because of the continuous and conflicting breezes that funnelled through the gorge or eddied over the rounded foothills. Much of the area remained virgin forest stalked by jaguars, hunted over by eagles and forming not only wonderful groves filled with flowers and honey but shelter, too, for many animals, tiny deer, pigs and even wild elephant.

  But I suspect you would prefer me not to describe every stage of that journey. Suffice it to say the next day the climb through the winding gorge became more and more terrifying, the track narrower, the precipitous drops from it to the cataracts below steeper and deeper until we reached a point when looking down we could see the backs of soaring eagles and vultures. Then, at last, the sky opened out again and we found ourselves not at the top of a pass with a descent equally horrendous in front of us, but rather in an upland of broken countryside, riven with valleys that opened out into undulating plains albeit crags still soared above them. This vast and varied landscape now tilted towards the east, for the large rivers of the area ran in that direction towards the Eastern Ghats, through which they tumble along the Coromandel coast.

  This broken plain, scarred and scored by rivers, was by tar the most fertile land I have ever seen, for the areas the rivers could not reach were served by a network of artificial canals and waterways, carved from the virgin rock or built of cunningly interlocked blocks of stone. Every crop flourished in that rich soil, that warm atmosphere, and so plenteous was the supply of food that the lords of that land were able to maintain tracts of untouched forest as hunting reserves without diminishing the welfare of the ordinary people.

  After a day or two during which our path meandered with a river we came to its confluence with a larger waterway, one of the two great rivers of that empire, the great Tungabhadra, and the next day the most wonderful sight I had ever seen presented itself to my eyes as we wound with the river round a vast crag and saw beneath us the City of Victory.

  It is a city larger, more beautiful, more harmonious in architecture and in the lives of the hundred thousand who live there, than anywhere else in the world. Byzantium and Rome may have monuments to equal those of the City of Victory, but none to surpass them, and by no means so numerous, and both have suffered the ravages of age and numerous conquests while those of Vijayanagara are at the most only a century old: indeed, building even now continues apace in the suburbs and on the summits of the surrounding crags. Cambaluk alone has ornamentation and open spaces as fine – but forbidden, of course, to ordinary mortals.

  Religions the world over have tempted us away from the proper purpose of our lives, the pursuit of happiness on earth, by promising an afterlife in a heavenly city unachievable on earth. Let their prophets and priests look on the City of Victory and admit their error.

  Chapter Four

  'My dear Ali, clearly you have not been advised of the new laws.' 'What new laws are those, Mah-Lo?'

  'Since the most recent incursions of the Bahmani sultans there has been an interdiction on all aliens and foreigners from leaving the coastal ports. Trade with the interior can now be conducted only through approved intermediaries.'

  I did not know that.What a terrible shame for you. You are not bored by an account of our capital city? Well, then, I shall proceed.'

  My dear Xlah-Lo, you must have been there yourself. Why am I wasting your time with an account of what you already know well?'

  The City of Victory occupies a natural basin through which the river flows and which is surrounded by wild crags in a crescent that protect it from attack from all quarters of the compass, save the east. These crags are linked with massive walls of wedge-shaped masonry and the gates are so placed in this indomitable combination of natural and man-made defences that caravans, or approaching hostile armies, have to make sharp turns beneath angled battlements from which missiles and boiling pitch can be hurled and tipped. These gateways also serve as customs posts where tribute and taxes, which are a major source of the wealth and splendour inside, arc-collected: the City of Victory is not merely a consumer, using its own vast wealth deriving from spices, diamonds and gold to buy in luxuries of all sorts, but is also an entrepot where traders from east and west can meet without having to cross the deserts, mountains and war-lords' domains north of the Himalayas. At least, such was the case when I first made the trip.

  It was at the great west-facing gate that the governor of Mangalore and his entourage and guard left us. The rest of us, especially those clearly not citizens of the empire, were subjected to the usual questions, form-filling, payment of entry taxes and the like, which are everywhere the scourge of anyone whose livelihood has depended on trade. I had to state my business, how I had come to bring to Prince Harihara Raya Kurteishi a package addressed to him, that I intended to seek him out in the next day or two and give it to him.
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br />   I have to say that at Vijayanagara (for the name serves both the empire and the city) these formalities were conducted with more politeness and genuine condescension than I have experienced anywhere else, the officials courteous and punctilious and, being no less prosperous than any of their fellows in that earthly paradise, quite immune to bribery. Indeed, they showed a humanity I had never previously experienced from such functionaries, to the extent that when I had to let my cloak drop, their attitude to my scarred and mutilated face and body was not of fear or derision as is usually the case, but solicitude and polite curiosity as to how I had been so horribly disfigured. Moreover, they recommended to me a hostel attached to a temple when- I would be well received and not charged at all, apart from what I might feel able to give freely, as charity. Admitted at last through that great gate, I began my descent, following their directions, through the Sacred Zone, to the small temple they hail indicated.

  The great river itself divides the city into two main sectors, which are built on the steep hills above it leaving a wide plain between. This is filled with fields, especially of cotton, orchards, plantations, parks and gardens, terraced on the higher levels and all irrigated with abundant water, channelled into canals that feed tanks ami reservoirs. The loftier of these supply large, ornate fountains, set on decorated belvederes, from which the citizens gaze across the valley to the broken mountain ranges, often clad in mist, a hundred miles away.

  This Sacred Zone was filled with temples dedicated to the pantheon of what I soon learnt I should not call the Hindu religion, of which the most magnificent were dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu and the goddess Fampa, who is identified with the river. I cannot do justice to this vast complex of temples with their endless ornamentation, decoration and colour. There was also much fantastic statuary, particularly at gateways or at the bottom of the many flights of stairs. These were representations of tigers and elephants, done to the life so you almost felt nervous of walking where a massive foot might tread on you, or a large cat might sink its claws into your back.