Kings of Albion

Chapter Twenty-Four

I returned three days later, business had kept me away, to find Uma again at the table, sharing a jug of k'hawah with Ali. I tasted it, found it too bitter without sugar, too sweet with. Once we were settled Uma took up her shuttle and began once more to weave her scarlet thread into the fabric of Ali's tale – a magic carpet which had already transported me to the ends of the earth.

I see Ali, who seems very poorly, his face ever greyer, the sinews in his neck like the thinner branches of holly trees, comfortably established in Prior Peter's cot, with a good fire to warm him. and I decide to move on.

It is less than a week since I embraced Eddie March, and already I miss him: his palms squeezing my buttocks, his fingertips stroking my perineum, his breath hot in the crook of my neck and the thrust of his prick inside me but, of course, I have no idea as to where he might have gone. Without much thought I leave the island of Osney, with its priory and rows of pollarded willows, and head up lanes and byways through the fields and woods in a roughly southerly direction. But presently I sit on a milestone marking the road to Swindon and give the matter some consideration.

Eddie is on the run from the King and Queen who are his enemies. The King and Queen are in the middle of Ingerlond in a town called Coventry. Therefore that is the last place he will be. Until he's caught.

But… They, the King and Queen, will have ordered their people to search for him, hunt him out and, if or when they catch him, they will take him to Coventry. At all events news of him, if he is seen and recognised, as he was in London by the legless beggar, will be drawn towards that city like iron filings to a lodestone. Thus, by a pleasing paradox, the one place where I may discover his whereabouts is the one place he would rather not be… Having worked this through. I get up from my milestone and head back to Osney and Oxenford, skirt them and continue heading north, sleeping that night in a sheltered ditch.

In the morning I fall in briefly with a pompous young man leading his mule up a hill from which we can still see the spires and towers of the city behind us dreaming in the dawn sunlight. He carries a pouch embroidered with a shield bearing gold lions running across a red ground in two of its comers and silver floral shapes on a blue ground in the others, and as we near the crest of the hill the following conversation takes place.

'Pray tell me, sir,' I ask, 'are we on the road for Coventry?'

'Why, yes, indeed." he replies. 'It lies some fifty miles north at the end of this very road. I am on my way there myself," he continues, 'being an equerry of Their Majesties, returning from delivering letters to the notables of the city,' and he gestures back over his shoulder.

We are close to the crest of the hill.

'Reverend Brother,' he says, then looks more sharply at me, frowns and looks away, 'you are welcome to ride pillion behind me when the road is flat or downhill. But up the slopes we must walk for my beast is tired after making such good speed with the letters I delivered.'

'I think not.' I say. 'I shall only delay you when I say the Daily Office.'

For that is what monks, friars and so forth are supposed to do,.it least six times a day, the Daily Office being prayers and verse directed at the Christian God.

He shrugs, this lean and spotty youth, whose breath smells of bacon and onion and the clove he has chewed to hide them or perhaps to ease the toothache he must have from his bad teeth. Since we are now at the top of the hill, he mounts his mule and sets it into a trot. I continue behind him and am thus well placed to see what happens next.

At the bottom of the hill, a small group of men in dark cloaks and large floppily brimmed hats, sidle out from behind a ruined sheepcote. Their leader has a small firearm placed across his shoulder. His mate touches the end that protrudes behind with a smouldering fuse and, pop!, they blow my young equerry's head off. He remains seated for a moment with blood pumping from his neck and then his trunk slips sideways and he tumbles out of the saddle. I wait long enough to see that their interest lies in the pouch, embroidered now with blood as well as silks and precious thread, before leaping the ditch and hiding in a thorny thicket.

The day lengthens, the shadows shorten and the traffic on the road increases. Most travellers are accompanied by armed men. It is, after all, the link between the city in which the King and his court reside, and the one where the wisest men of his realm, known as dunces, carry out their business. Yet, as I have seen, one fraught with danger – hence the fact that all but a few, like my unfortunate acquaintance, travel with bodyguards, sometimes in quite considerable numbers. I reflect on the presence of footpads, murderers and the like hidden in the coverts near the highway, and decide to move off a mile or so to the west and pick my way to Coventry by lanes and byways, even if it means taking four days to get there instead of two or three.

It is a bright day with a gusty wind, and grey clouds roll intermittently across the sky. There are occasional splatters of rain, but it is never bad enough to obscure the position of the sun, and I am able without difficulty to maintain my northerly direction. Occasionally, too, from the top of a hill I can see the main road winding up hill and down dale over to my right, and the chain of villages it threads. With my senses alive and alert to all around me, not out of fear but because I feel they should be for every second of our pilgrimage across this planet, I begin to appreciate, as I could not when distracted by the company of Enoch and Ali, the tiny beauties of this country'. With none of the splendours of Vijayanagara, for which I still hanker; none of the awesome crags, the deep forests, the rich plantations and the cities scrubbed and jewelled, the white-sanded shores and emerald seas, my eyes, ears and nose seek out smaller glories.

These include yellow flowers, extended like the grubs of small butterflies, hanging from thin leafless branches. When they catch the wind they dance and tiny puffs of gold powder float from them. In clumps at the roots of these trees or bushes, for they are not big at all. I spy small white stars, not pendulant like the flowers we saw when the snow melted. Then there are elegant trees with drooping black twigs in their crowns whose trunks art-covered with a silvery-grey bark which peels off like fringed paper when I pull it. These often have quite large leathery fungi growing on them shaped like the swollen ears of baby elephants. A brilliant green moss, whose foliage is made up of tiny emerald stars, whose points touch each other to form a fine lacework covers rounded banks where the earth is moist. When I look closely I see that many plants and trees have tiny swollen buds, but none yet show any sign of bursting into leaf. There are birds jewelled with blue and yellow, and one with a red chest and jet-like beak, needle sharp, but all very small. They do not sing but chirp and mew plaintively as they scavenge for particles of food.

All in all I get a sense of life not burgeoning, far from it, but struggling against the cold, the ice and snow, which still linger in patches of shade. It seems it will be a long, hard battle and when a flash of white draws my eye and makes me stoop. I find the fragile skull of what I take to be a rodent from its two sharp incisors: clearly Parvati must wait awhile yet – Kali still rules in these hushed woods.

Towards dusk a winding descent through woodland, with a little brook chattering along beside me, takes me into a wide but meandering valley where the trees have been cleared and a rough sort of cultivation has taken place. In front of me, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, is a village much like those we passed on the way to Oxenford: twenty or thirty hovels, each with a tiny garden and a fruit tree, cluster round a handful of larger buildings – a church with a squat tower and a large barn. But even now and at that distance I am aware that something is going on: I can hear a primitive raucous music emanating from a selection of untuned drums and wailing pipes, punctuated by high screams – whether of pain or pleasure it is impossible to say.

Then, just as I approach the settlement and the sun is dipping behind the hills to the south-west, a crowd of people stream out of the big bam, the music becomes louder, and I can see that amongst them the musicians have come as well, and all are dancing, or at least flinging themselves about in a bizarre way around a large-pile of brushwood, holly branches, ivy, broom, brown gorse and prunings. I am now in a small orchard of lichened apple trees, which, in common with most trees I have seen, look dead or nearly so. Since there is a certain wildness in the antics of the people in front of me, which makes me nervous, I hoist myself up into the lower boughs of one, hoping thereby not to be discovered at least until I am satisfied I will be welcomed with friendliness.

A burning brand is poked into the foot of the pile of wood and branches and, despite the soft drizzle that is now falling, the flames take hold and are soon snaking up into the heart of the heap; there is a crackle and snapping as it takes hold, and a plume of white smoke sewn with gold and ruby sparks climbs into the cloud-filled, darkening sky. The next thing that happens is that a life-size human doll, made of straw and dressed in old clothes, is brought out and two men, holding its shoulders and feet, swing it high up on to the tire, which thus becomes a make-believe pyre.

A cry, a shout rises up, and the women who, I can see it now by the light of the fire, are wearing masks or hoods made of coloured cloth with eye-holes, seize burning brands and, still dancing roughly in time to the cacophonous beat of the music, come madly out into the orchard, banging the trunks of the trees with their brands and shouting curses or imprecations such as 'Bear apples, fuck you, Goddamn you. I want pears from you.' Once their brands have broken up, some hoist up their ragged skirts and. holding the lower branches in their hands, grip the trunks with their thighs and knees and rub their private parts against the bark.

Needless to say, in the midst of all this, I am discovered. A tall young woman with red hair flowing from below her hood throws back her head in an ecstasy real or simulated and finds my foot six inches above her forehead. She freezes, then screams: this time there is no doubting the fear and anger

All those nearest her catch her tone and, still carrying their brands, approach. The effect spreads outwards and soon the whole gathering, maybe forty or more, men, women and children, are gathered around my apple tree, looking up at me. There is no mistaking their hostility, and by now I have enough Inglysshe to glean from the men, who have pushed to the front, a sense of its cause.

"E doos be a fuckin' friar or a monk, no doubt o' that.' 'Arr. But why be 'e 'ere?'

"E be a spy for the Bishop, no doubt o' that neither.' 'Well, what's to be done wi' im?'

'Cut 'is fucking throat, I say, an' bury 'im in the midden.' 'If 'e get out of 'ere alive, then fucking Bishop'll send 'is men to burn our fucking village an' we be well fucked.' And so on.

'Well, first thing, zummun 'ad better get 'im out o' that there tree.'

Rough hands reach up to me, fasten on my ankles and pull. 'All right, all right,' I cry, 'I'm coming.'

And because I'm a touch frightened I forget to deepen my voice.

"E only be a young un from the sound of it.'

Once on the ground the nearest gets hold of my cowl and pulls it back while two more pinion my elbows to my sides.

'Here's a thing, then. Zumman get a light on 'im, let us see 'im proper.'

They have much to admire and find strange. First there is my head, once shaven but now with an all-over pelt of hennaed black, about half an inch long and no tonsure, then my full but tended eyebrows, also grown back, my straight nose, full lips and rounded chin. My eyes like deep mountain pools. My skin the colour of copper exposed to the air just as it begins to brown and lose its golden look. One of the women seizes my hand and turns it beneath the flickering light. 'This be no man's hand,' she says. 'This be a woman's and a lady's at that.'

'An' this be no friar's mantle,' another says, 'wrong colour and cut, and the material too fine.'

'She got boobies too,' one of the two holding me from behind calls out, after having a quick squeeze with her free hand.

At that, the one holding my hand, who was the first to see me, lets go and pulls up the hem of my gown, all the way, as far as the belt will allow.

'Yers,' she says, 'that's no friar nor monk. That's a hen.' Gerroff,' says I, and, looking over her shoulder and seeing curious children as well as men gathering round, one of whom lowers a torch to illuminate my lower half, she does indeed pull down the skirt of my robe. 'Zorree,' she whispers, almost in my ear, and I note a certain female companionship..I sense that I have one quality at least that has provoked a touch of sympathy. I feel better for it.

Chapter Twenty-Five

It is now clear to me that what I have been walking through during the day is the corridor linking winter to spring, the first stirrings of the new season having been beneath my feet and around me in the sights and sounds of the woods. These people, too, were well aware that a threshold had been reached and that the deities that control such things might well need a ritual shove to get us all across. Deities? Not the Christian godling and his mother and his father in heaven but the goddesses and gods who are worshipped here and everywhere, but in many parts are now hidden away like-toys we are supposed to have grown out of. Except for these people, and many more across the world, it's not a whipping you get if you're discovered, but the rack, the thumbscrews and a burning. Hence their fear of me when they took me for a friar.

Back home, girls go out into the fields, make heaps of flowers and place on them images of Parvati and Shiva. In play they perform a marriage ceremony between the goddess and the god: it is all done as a childish ritual, a game, but still carries, like the ancient odour one smells when opening a long-closed chest, the survival of something far more powerful from the times when the gods walked among us, something which resembles what I am now caught up in, in darkest Ingerlond.

Meanwhile, a debate continues amongst these villagers as to what should be done with me. The older men are all for cutting my throat, though one or two of the younger ones suggest that they should 'give me one' first. However, the women are generally against this for, as an older lady points out, if I am a religious then I must be a Clare, by which she means. I later learn, a member of the sister order of the Franciscans. It seems they are the only females who venture away from their convents, and when they do it is to bring succour and charity to the poor and ill. However, if I am not a Clare, then what am I? It would be foolish to harm me before discovering what the consequences may be.

By now we are all in the large barn, which has an earth floor, piles of dry grass or hay round the sides and heaps of grain. As the elders continue to argue, the rest are clearly preparing for a feast. The musicians, for want of a better word, have gathered at the far end opposite the big double doors, their drums, pipes and stringed instruments around them. There are a few tootles on the pipes and a bagpipe sets up a drone; one of the men rattles a box, filled, I imagine, with dried peas, another begins to beat a primitive drum, a skin pulled tight over a clay pot, with the palms of his hands, and so on. Some trestle tables are set up and a big barrel with a leaky bung is hefted up by six strong men and placed on one. Smoke, laden with the odour of burning meat, drifts in from an adjoining lean-to stable.

I am still held by the arms in a corner furthest from tin-door and behind the band. The women are close around me and some of the men looking curiously over their shoulders, when at last the one who first found me, whom the others call Erica, cries, 'Only Greasy Joan will know, she's the one, she'll know.'

'You're right,' cries another.

'But who will dare to wake her up?' a third asks. 'She'll give them cramps and stitches for a fortnight.'

'She ought to be here. She never misses a Bride's Day. she never misses the Bridget Feast.'

'But nor 'as she ever slept without food or drink for a month either.'

'Go on, get her up. An' if it kills her, well, good riddance, she's lived long enough, that's for sure."

And three or four melt away into the smoke that's now swirling more thickly than ever. It smells green, as if they're trying to cook on fresh-cut wood rather than charcoal.

Presently they're hack with a very old woman half carried, half supported between them. Because the old crones, the wise old women of Vijayanagara are usually so, I had expected her to be thin, scrawny, a bundle of bones, but this old lady, although, so they say, she has fasted a month, is fat with lolloping breasts beneath her gown, a belly like a barrel, huge thighs, and ankles swollen like puddings packed in the stomachs of sheep. She is also bald and toothless, so only her cheeks look thin. She's grumbling and cursing through her gums, uttering obscenities worse than any I have yet heard, even here in Ingerlond.

They plant her in front of me and she gazes at me from eyes that look left and right at the same time, up and down, and one is misty blue, the other pale green. She has a wart on one cheek with four black hairs growing out of it, and big dewlaps, like a great white-water buffalo's, which quiver and shake when she speaks or moves her head. In an ambience already rich with foetid odours, her own stale exhalations, the smells of flesh tired and unwashed, old piss and shit, make a cloud around her.

'Come on, Greasy, tell us who she is,' they call. 'Is she a witch? Takes one to know one…' and so forth.

She peers at me, shifts to one side then the other, reaches out a podgy hand, looks more like a long-teated cow's udder than a hand, and touches my wrist. Then she cackles, a hard, rattly sound, and hisses too, like an angry goose, showering us all with spittle and revealing teeth small, yellow and broken. At last the fit leaves her, and she almost shrinks in front of me, seems to sink a little.

'Yer fools, y' know, yer all bloody fools. Can't y' see her skin, how dark it is, can't y' see her beauty, the glow about her? That I should live, live to see this day, this night. Well. I'm blest after all. At the end of me life I'm blest.'

'Oh, come on, Granny Greasy, don't mess about, tell us who she is,' they cry.

'Well, then, I will. This here is none less than Mary Gypsy, Mary of Egypt, Marry Gyp hersel'! Miriam Marina. She'll dance for you, if you ask her nicely, and if she don't like you she'll blast your wombs with warts and fill your cunts with teeth.' Then her voice drops and she speaks to me alone. 'Forgive me. Lady, it's your sister loves me now, your sister and my mother, old Hecate, but truly I loved you once."

And with that she turns and, tottering like a rotten tree in a storm, she stumps and stumbles her way from us, out through the smoke to whatever bed she's been wakened from.

By Hecate I understand her to mean Kali.

They look at me with wonder.

'Are you really Marry Gyp?' they ask. 'Will you dance for us? Please dance for us.'

I look out beyond them, this small group of women, to where the rest are jigging and stamping to the beat of the drums and the twisting music of the raucous pipes. Every now and then they wave their arms above their heads and holler. 'Hey-ho, silver moonshine,' thus invoking the Queen of Heaven. Over by the tables beer is being drunk from the barrel, most of it direct from the bung, the young men catching the stream, which looks like nothing less than a stream of pee, catching it in their mouths the way a dog will catch milk squirted from a cow's teat. Others are eating slabs of pig-meat wedged into lumps of grey rye bread. Clearly no one's going to watch me dance with any serious attention. I'll look a fool gyrating in a corner while the others stumble about the place locked in their own worlds of booze, food, their own revelry.

'Later,' I promise.

And 'later' comes in an hour or so, but meanwhile I've persuaded my friend Erica to take me to her hut where I make my preparations. Inside there's a small fire of white charcoal, and a baby hangs in a basket from the roof. There's no man about, so either she's a widow or she's been caught out by some other woman's husband. She has no jewellery except for some copper bracelets, which she dips in sour beer to give them a gold-like shine. I prefer copper anyway, it's Parvati's metal, and I have my small bag of pearls hidden away… I'm not saying where – no, it's not rude, just that it's good to keep a few secrets, you know?

We scout about and, taking a big risk, she gets us into the church. They only see a priest once a month, but he's left some vestments in a chest. Erica uses flint, stone and a tinder-box to light some candles, and while she goes through the chest I take one and have a look around. There's a damp smell about the place, cold stone sweating the body fluids of the dead. There's Jesus, all taut muscles and corpse pallor skin, stretched on his cross, silly bugger, and his mother too in a side-chapel, holding the baby, a gold-leaf halo round her head. But where's the mother in all her glory? Should be the babe looking at her with adoration, not the other way round.

I return to the vestry and pull my robe over my head. Erica gives a little gasp. I take her hand, rough from washing clothes and field-work, and make her stroke the flat part of my chest above my breasts, then my breasts, my shoulder, my back and my buttocks, and she sighs with wonder at their smooth, gleaming darkness in the candle-light. Then, out of an amice nicely embroidered, with strings and all, we improvise the little skirt or apron temple-dancers wear.

Normally I would matt my hair with ghee and pile it up in a jewelled crown, but now, of course, it is still growing out of its shorn state and is far too short, so we rip up a white and gold chasuble too, and heap that up like a turban. I paint my face with charcoal mixed with butter, shaping my eyes like almonds, thickening my eyebrows and eyelashes, and use red clay and butter for my lips. Finally I draw spiral and dot patterns round my nipples, which I also paint with red.

Thus decked out, in tawdry imitation of the figure I would have been at home, when I would have worn a girdle, necklace, diadem, anklets, ear, toe and finger rings, all made of gold and set with precious stones, I look grand enough, numinous even, for Erica to fall on her knees, clasp my thighs and bury her head in the amice.

'You really are the Marry Gyp.' she moans, 'you really are.'

I put my tiny finger-cymbals on my third fingers and thumbs, bend my elbows in front of me, crook my little fingers, and let her hear the silvery chime.

In the hall things are much quieter now. Only a block-flute from amongst the pipes is playing, and the drummer is using his fingers on the skin instead of beating it with his palms. Five couples sway to his beat, locked in close embrace, the rest are strewn about the earthen floor or giggling in the piles of hay, mostly in couples. There is less smoke and the big barrel on its table is leaking a slow dribble, which an old man, prostrate beneath it on his back, attempts to catch in his mouth. Needless to say, a silence spreads out from where I am until the whole hall is as quiet as a desultory snore here and there will allow, and all open eyes are upon me.

I give the cymbals a ping or two, and head tilted both forwards and to the side, swing one knee up and out before bringing the sole of my foot down with a tiny stamp. Then the other side, the other foot. My arms swing, my fingers straighten and curl. Ping, ping, and the drummer, who is wide-chested, has arms like elephant trunks and a black mat of hair across his chest, picks up on my rhythm with his fingers and his friend with the flute, tall and thin with yellow hair, ventures a little run. And round my feet the incense Erica has brought from the church softens the bite of woodsmoke and sour beer.

Presently, in the Teluga tongue, I sing.

Oh, Goddess Minakshi

whose lovely body has a deep blue sheen

with long eyes shaped like a carp

Goddess who provides release from the fetters of life

who resides in the forest of kadaniba trees

esteemed one

who conquered Shiva

grant me bliss.

And later, the drummer adds his ditty:

Such a one did I meet, good sir, such an angelic face who like a sprite, like a queen, did appear in her gait, in her grace…

Prancing and swaying, I swing down the hall and the clouds of incense part around my thighs, my brown feet raise the dust. Copper and pearls flash and glow in the embers of a fire and the stir of my passing makes the flames on the tapers shudder. My naked breasts promise more than pomegranates, my buttocks are peaches.

Eyes turned up at me gleam and flash and no one moves except to sigh in pleasurable pain. I cannot dance for ever, and already they know they'll not see my like again.

Flute and drum are getting to know me. Messages flash between us. The first flutters like breath in a baby's throat, the second quickens in a lovelorn pulse. I turn on a toe, pummel the floor with my feet, fling my arms in windmills of desire about my head, and without taking their eyes from me every he and she there reaches for his or her other. The sweat glistens on my shoulders, runs between my breasts, my thighs, and the wind I've raised begins to gust about the corners of the room, the sacking over the entrances fills like sails, and the gale, a warm wind with rain on it, rushes in, gathers me in its arms and blows out the lights.

There is plenty of the long night left. In the dark Alan, the drummer, is the first to find me, but he's a noisy brute and his groans and shouts soon lead David and his flute to the comer we're in. The hay is deep and soft and still smells fresh, even of the summer flowers that mingled with the grass when it was mown. They're nice, they take the edge off my hunger, but Eddie they are not. Better, or as good, when they at last fall silent, or almost silent apart from thunderous snores from Alan and sighs and whistles from David, Erica finds me, takes my hand, and leads me to her bower where her boy-child swings from the roof in his cradle and charcoal still glows in the centre of the floor. She sponges me down with rags soaked in warm water, gives me cold spring water, cheese and bread. She makes me lie in her cot with her and rocks me to sleep in her arms with her lips in the crook of my neck, her breasts that leak a little milk against mine, and her strong legs crooked on my waist and lying across my thigh.

Before dawn, but not before cockcrow, she sets me on my way towards Banbury but I'm hardly more than a hundred yards out of the village when running feet make me turn and Alan falls in beside me without a word, his clay drum on his back and a cloak over his leather jerkin and apron.

Ten yards, and it happens again, through the mist and over the sparkling frost comes David – cloaked, too, and no doubt with his flute about him. He gives Alan a look that lacks friendliness and falls in on the other side, also without a word.

This will not do. Both seek to own me and that I will not have. I whisper a prayer to Parvati and in ten minutes or so it is answered. We are climbing a hill now and once we're over the crest the village will be gone, and nothing will induce them to return. As subtly as I can I reduce the length of my steps. I even pant a little and put my hand on a branch as if I need to rest. And then, at last, they come. First a little girl in a woollen dress, her hair all loose, but she is overtaken by a boy who scampers past her and reaches us first.

"Uncle Alan," he cries, 'Grandpa Bert has broke the chain on his harrow and none of us will get our fields broken up for sowing if you don't come now."

Then the little girl is at my side. 'Uncle David, if you don't come now. Uncle Alan will never get his forge up to heat "cause the bellows has a hole in it."

I look at them both, first Alan then David.

'So. You are the village smith. And you are the bellows mender. A long goodbye to both of you.'

And humming a little hymn to the goddess I pass on my way over the crest of the hill and down the other sale.

Chapter Twenty-Six

In Banbury marketplace there is a fair for carnival. An ox is being roasted whole, which, of course, disgusts me, but there is plenty to please the senses too: apples on sticks, dipped in honey and roasted, cubed pork or lamb sizzling on skewers over gridirons, pastry cakes filled with raisins, a local treat, hot spiced wine, nick-nacks and gew-gaws known as fairings are all for sale. And there are sideshows too: jugglers, fire-eaters, tightrope walkers. There are contests of strength, and contests which involve rolling big wooden balls down a long plank to knock over nine club-shaped skittles. And, above all, there is a carnival procession led by a girl of lovely beauty riding on a white horse. She has pale white skin and long yellow hair, and she is wearing a green dress. She has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes and she is followed by a band with the usual pipes, bagpipes and drums. Do the people of Banbury know who she really is, this Carnival Queen? Maybe, but they'll only whisper it.

Best of all. well, best after Her Ladyship, there's a shadow puppet theatre, best because it reminds me of home where such entertainments are common. There's a two-wheeled cart with a very old horse still between the shafts, munching in a nosebag. The tail-gate has been dropped and there's a white cotton or silk screen stretched in a frame just behind it. Then there's a gap in the planks of the door and up through it. from underneath, and hidden by drapes that brush the cobbles, the puppeteers thrust the two-dimensional dolls and manipulate their limbs and heads in front of a tented bank of oil-lamps and candles. None of it works too well at midday when I arrive, but later as the sky fills with purple clouds and the sun falls behind the big new church and a few flakes of snow drift across the marketplace, it looks better, a little cave of light and pleasure.

There is a notice painted in red and yellow lettering on a semi-circle of wood above the screen: Geoff Reeve and Family, Shadow Puppets for your Edification and Education, as seen by the Crowned Heads of Europe.

They are enacting a miracle performed by the Mother of God on the pilgrims' road to Santiago. My initial fascination wears off and I wander through the crowd, sampling some honeyed barley-cakes, which I filch. I hear a cheer from the crowd round the shadow puppets and wander back.

There's another notice up now as well as the first: it reads 'The Last Inglysshe King'. This looks more interesting. I take my place in the crowd next to a peasant who is eating roasted barley, puffed up by a brazier's heat.

A warrior, clearly the hero because he is taller than all the other characters, swears an oath of fealty to a duke. The crowd boos. He has been tricked into it, they shout. An old king with a crown and a beard dies in his bed. The Warrior Hero takes his crown and the crowd cheers. The Warrior Hero fights a battle against two men in winged helmets and defeats them. The crowd cheers again. Ships rock and sway across the screen. The Duke gets out of one. The crowd boos. A second battle takes place. It lasts a long time. Then an arrow hits the Warrior Hero in the eye and the Duke wades in with his sword, kills him and takes his crown. The crowd boo again, but more soberly. Some turn away and I see that one or two look sad indeed.

The show ends with a comedy. It involves an old man with a young wife who climbs a pear tree where she is fucked by a young man. There's more to this than meets the eye. The old man is winter, the pear tree is the tree of love, of the goddess, the young man is spring and the wife is the earth, a good choice for a festival on the cusp of winter and spring. Considering the whole show has been no more than a matter of shadows on a screen it has been well done, and fulfilled the promise of instruction combined with pleasure.

I am about to leave when I hear an irritated sigh from behind me and a smallish man, with thinning grey hair, spectacles and a pleasing, open face, pushes between us, holding a collecting box in one hand and a walking-stick with a crook for a handle in the other. 'Pennies for the puppets,' he says, and my peasant with the inflated barley grain pushes off fast. I put a penny in the box. I picked it, and four more like it, from his purse during the show.

'Generous,' says the new arrival. 'A farthing would have been ample.'

'You asked for a penny.'

'A manner of speaking.' he takes me by the elbow and looks over his shoulder. 'I take it from the way you speak and the darkness of your skin that you are a stranger to these parts, possibly even from some further shore?'

I nod my concurrence.

By now the crowd is drifting away from us. Geoff Reeve, for that is clearly who he is, casts a jaundiced eye over the receding backs.

'I won't get any more out of this lot. Perhaps you'd care for a jar with me?' He ponders a moment. 'At the White Horse, perhaps?'

He shakes his collecting box and I follow him towards his cart and stage. From behind he has a faintly ecclesiastical look: a bald patch at the back of his head suggests the tonsure, his roped robe a monk's habit. Perhaps he was once in minor orders: certainly his erudition and manner are, I have discovered, rare in Ingerlond outside the Church.

'Jenny?' he calls. 'Chap here, awfully nice fellow, but a Johnny foreigner, so I'm taking him over to the White Horse for a pint. Join us if you've a mind to.'

A handsome woman, younger than him and with blonde hair, who is loading small cushions that had been put out for children in front of the screen into the back of the cart, turns and smiles at me.

'How very nice to meet you,' she says. 'I'll be with you directly.'

Geoff Reeve shakes some coins out of his collecting box, retains a couple of pennies, and gives the rest to Jenny; then he takes my elbow again and we walk over the cobbled square, past the cross to a tavern called the White Horse, on the side opposite the Fine Lady.

He is known in the tavern. 'Master Reeve, what can I get you?' A cheery girl has singled him out, and is ready to serve him ahead of customers who have been trying to get her attention.

'Two pints of mulled winter ale, Bess, in pewter, if you please, and a couple of dozen oysters from the barrel that arrived today. Get Peter to bring it to the fire for us.' And he pushes me in front of him towards the big fireplace with its large inglenook, a bench and a three-legged table. 'At least we'll be warm here. The cold really gets to me, especially in the hip.' And pulling up his robe to reveal his knees he spreads them towards the fire and his hands above them. His spectacles flash with the flames.

'Where are you from, then?' he asks.

There seems no reason to lie. 'From Bharatavarsha,' I say, giving the Sanskrit name, 'which you generally call India, I believe.'

'Really? Now refresh my memory. Which side of Africa is that?'

'The further side.'

'Ah. And what brings you to this end of the world?'

Not an easy question to answer. To say that I am seeking wisdom when I have left the land that is the fount of all wisdom would invite ridicule from this clearly cultivated gentleman. Fortunately we are interrupted by the arrival of our comestibles.

The oysters are excellent, already opened for us so all we have to do is toss them into our mouths from their glowing nacreous shells, which are thinner and more round than the ones we pick up from the Malabar coast, and more delicately flavoured. The ale-is dark, rich, fruity in flavour, and, perhaps because it is served hot, very quick in its intoxicating action. A small wild apple bobs against the rim.

'Your show,' I comment, 'was about the Normans. The people who rule you.'

His glasses flash at me, seriously, knowingly. 'Bastards! No, not really. It's about Harold. Good bloke, but unlucky.'

'The arrow in the eye?'

'Of course… he loses. And William becomes king and the Normans lake over. Bastards,' he repeats.

'Are they really so different, the Normans and the rest?'

He leans towards me and puts his hand on my knee. 'Yes,' he says. 'They've never fitted in, in spite of marrying Danes and Saxons, which they were bound to do since they brought few women of their own with them. Their kings married into the Prankish Angevins, who call themselves Planta-Genet after the branch of broom their founder wore in his helmet…'

The name stirs up sand from the bottom of my mind, the way a shrimp at the bottom of a rock-pool does, but I couldn't place it. Geoff went on, '… and it's only in the last sixty years after nearly four hundred, that they've even bothered to learn Inglysshe. They're not properly English at all, stiff-necked, proud, formal, obsessed with form, order and rank.'

I remembered how, at Calais, Warwick and the rest had treated Wydville with contempt because he was no Norman. Geoff went on: 'They are clannish, and they love sports but the more warlike the better. Those who do not have the inclination or the physique go into the Church and are made bishops. But while their relations with each other may be easy they remain arrogant to outsiders.'

'What about their women?" I ask.

'Obsessed with their men. They serve them like slaves, marry-as they are told to, bear children as regularly as cows calve, and are even more concerned than the men with status and the trappings of status.'

'So what are the real Inglysshe like?'

'There are two sorts, those who collaborated and those who did not. Those who did are servile and obedient, content to do anything for a quiet life so long as they are not starving. You see, the Normans had a problem. They had to recruit clerks, officials, sheriffs, constables, customs officers and the like to run the country. And provided they behaved the Normans were happy to let the Saxons do this work.'

He sighs, continues, 'These people, these collaborators, developed a finicky sense of neatness, correctness, to please their masters. They accept the Normans as their lords by right and tradition, and will do anything to please them, showing forelock-tugging deference at all times and aping Norman manners. Usually it was the Saxons who collaborated. The Danes are more independent. But both races shared a way of life, before lead-coloured tankard to his lips, gives it a shake. I look round and see the boy who brought us our drink and oysters at my shoulder and I order two more pints. This time I pay for them.

When he's ready to go on it is in a tone more speculative than before, as if he were thinking through what he had to say for the first time.

'In the old days both Saxons and Danes governed themselves through village moots or meetings. Even the King was governed by the biggest moot of all, the Witangemot. Ami although most of these privileges were taken away or driven underground the spirit that lay behind them survived.'

'And imbues the second strand in the Inglysshe?' I guess.

'Yes, indeed. Under our outer robes of conformity we are fiercely independent, and respect each other's individuality. We can work hard when it suits us, but we'd rather drink, dance, and muck about. And there'd be a lot more of that than there is if our Harold had won that damned battle…' And he sways a little on the bench, wipes a tear from the corner of his eye. 'Merry Ingerlond,' he says. 'That's what we lost.'

'Geoff. Geoff? Come on, now.' I look up and see his wife Jenny smiling down at us.

'Hello, my dear.' Geoff sits up with a start, suddenly recovered. 'Just telling this young feller about the Inglysshe and so forth. He's from India. Fascinating place. Perhaps we could knock up a shadow-play based on his experiences… Call it, let me see, Far Flung Places?? Sit down, dear, have a bite and a drink, see what you think.'

And he gives me a big wink, which I am sure she sees, for she, too, gives me a secret little moue before squeezing in next to him.

Coventry. Again I keep to the countryside to avoid the dangers of the road, and it takes me a day and a half to get there. I must confess, too, that I had a bad night sleeping in the stabling of that Banbury tavern. I had to share the straw, pretending to be a man amongst several others in the way of ostlers and grooms. I had drunk a gallon of ale by the time the Reeves departed, which had to be disposed of and it was not easy to maintain the pretence while pissing next to a man similarly engaged. And then the oysters. Never eat shellfish unless you can see the sea is a good rule, and always open them yourself It only needs one bad one, and one bad one there must have been. No doubt the heat of the fire and the numbness induced by the ale disguised its presence…

The result is that I came upon the city at around midday when I might have been there the evening before. The first thing one sees, and that from a considerable distance, is the spire of its cathedral, which soars to a needlepoint out of the smoke and murk that fill the air above the city roofs. Next, and quite clearly seen, since the town is built on a low eminence above the fields and commons around it, is a vast shanty-town outside the city walls. Since London has proved hostile to the royal faction, the King, or rather his Queen, has made this city, in the very centre of the island, her capital and principal seat of government, calling Parliament to meet here, and bringing in the whole apparatus by which the nation is ruled.

In its train this has brought many thousands of hangers-on, mostly people who have no visible means of support, as out-of-work artisans, entertainers, tinkers, gypsies, prostitutes, unfrocked clerics, unattached professional soldiers, horse-dealers and then the people who would supply this crowd with victuals and drink, especially the strong drink the Inglysshe love so much. Now, in a town the size of London such a crowd can be accommodated, and even employment found for many, but what was a relatively small place of perhaps no more than five thousand souls is swamped, law and order and all the other services break down, and the whole place is enclosed by a human jungle, like a well-formed egg-yolk within a sloppy white.

First, on the outskirts of this shanty-town, there are enormous, steaming middens with heaps of refuse as well as ordure, both animal and human, and up and down these miniature alps old women and children clamber and slither looking for food, such as cabbage stalks, stale loaves, fish-heads, even egg-shells with a trace of egg-meat still in them, and the last of the meat too, pigs' feet and ears, cows' tails and goats' heads – I say the last for we are now into Lent, forty days when no meat will be eaten.

Then come the hovels, crowded about with no discernible streets or lanes, except for the main thoroughfares from each of the cardinal points of the compass, which lead to the gates in the city walls, and which, willy-nilly, every visitor must follow. Here, countless beggars use every art and wile to keep body and soul together. Women, holding screaming babies they have hired from baby-dealers, tug at my sleeve with grubby palms outstretched; there are young men in the prime of life with serviceable limbs tied up to look like amputated stumps, which they claim have been lost in the service of the King or even in the French wan, others have sores painted on their faces and some mimic blindness.

Moving nearer the walls one finds quacks and swindlers selling talismans, pilgrims' medals, amulets and the like guaranteed to give protection against every manner of ill, and street-trading apothecaries offering green dragon's blood, the stones from the heads of poisonous toads, the shrivelled stomachs of sharks, false limbs carved from wood, glass eyes. Others hawk the shrivelled hands and feel of babies said to be the relics of saints, and there is one who claims to have the piss of a witch in a glass vial, which, he says, poured a drop at a time on the nape of a woman's neck will, by its giving off a vapour and a foul stench, reveal her to be a faithless whore.

All seem to do a good trade but he who does best is a tall lean man with straight yellow hair to his shoulders who sells pardons, signed and sealed by the Pope in Rome. He claims these scraps of parchment will get a man or woman time off from Purgatory, a place apparently sinful souls must go to, to be purged before progressing to the paradise these superstitious people believe in.

All this, of course, produces a fearful clamour of cries, shouting, screams and singing out, which is like the scraping of slate on slate to my ears, assaulting them just as badly as my vision, sense of smell and touch are lacerated by this wretched throng around me.

Presently the South date rises above the thatched and tented roofs, flanked by twin towers and with a lowered portcullis. Fixed to its lintel is the usual ghastly array of skulls and half-eaten heads of those who have displeased the authorities. For a moment I pause, nonplussed, since, yes, it is shut and has a detail of maybe ten soldiers armed with swords and crossbows in front of it. But I hardly have time to consider how I should get in when a trumpet sounds, and from behind I hear the thunderous clatter of iron-shod hoofs on cobbles, the rumble of wheels, the crack of whips and jangle of harness and weaponry.

There is not time or room to get out of the way. What we have is a squad of mounted soldiers, armoured in open helmets, which leave their laces exposed, chain-mail, breastplates, jointed steel casing on their limbs, big swords at their sides, shields attached to their harness, and holding heavy spears. There are perhaps a score, and all riding big horses that sweat beneath their loads but keep up a slow, steady trot, and what makes them take up so much room, so the crowd must press back against the walls of the shanties, some of which cave in bringing down the roofs on the people within, is a big monster of a cannon drawn by a team of mules. A tube made of lengths of cast iron, fused together and bound with brass hoops, followed by a cart filled with stone balls and then another loaded with barrels of gunpowder. It is not as big or grand as the carriage Jagannath is pulled on when he makes his trip from temple to temple in Puri in Orissa, but the effect is similar. However, whereas the pilgrims who are crushed to death beneath Jagannath, which is an avatar for Vishnu, have freely chosen this form of self-immolation, here in Coventry the poor souls who are crushed beneath this monster have not elected this way to die but go screaming to their deaths.

Nevertheless this Juggernaut has timed its arrival precisely at the right moment to get me into the city. Imagine a giant log in a storm-swollen stream – as it passes on its way so it will suck in behind it the turbulent water and all the tumbling flotsam that rules on it. The guards do their best to close in and shut off the flow as the pointed black teeth of the portcullis grind slowly down above us, yet as many as thirty get through, and I am amongst them.

A moment's hesitation then, like the others with me, I choose a side alley and rush off clown it between high gabled houses that block out the sunlight and the sky. After a minute or two I slow, stop and look around. The winding dark place I am in is chill, as if the sun never reaches the cobbles and flags beneath my feet, there are few people about, and there is a dank, deep, near perfect silence, quite different from the bedlam I have left. Looking behind me I see no sign of pursuit, yet I feel I am a trespasser, that I have reached a place where those in charge would prefer me not to be. I take a winding course through a warren of similar narrow streets to get away from the gate with its guards. Presently I glimpse the slim spire soaring like a steel poniard into the grey sky, with a flash of gold from the cross or weathercock at its summit, and I bend my steps towards it.

Less than an hour later I am in prison.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Uma sighed, Her eyes unfocused. Then she shook herself smiled at me with a tenderness that was inspired not by me but by her memories, and gathered together the small items she always carried with her.

When she had gone Ali took up his tale – and thus it was for the next few days: turn and turn about they told me their stories to the point where, almost at the end, they merged again into one.

My convalescence was slow, Ali resumed, my body weakened, so Peter Marcus said, not only by the flux, not only by the privations endured over the months of travel compounded by forced reliance on unaccustomed food and drink, but also, of course, by a constitution compromised in early childhood by the terrible blow administered by the Sunnite's scimitar. Since I prided myself that, for nearly sixty years, perhaps more. I had maintained through constant privation and travel a lean, wiry fitness in spite of my disadvantaged frame, I took leave to doubt this – indeed, I almost suspected that some of the potions Prior Peter gave me were designed to make me feel weaker and more wearied than I was. The fact was, as he often repeated, he rarely had the chance to meet and converse with someone who had seen as much as I, who had experienced so much, and studied both from books and at the feet of some of the wisest men who have lived during our times.

We spent six weeks together, right the way through the period of Lent, never leaving the friary and its gardens, but talking and reading together whenever his duties, which he carried out as I have said with some diligence but not out of devotion, allowed.

'You see, my dear Ali, my situation here places me in an awesome position as the successor and inheritor of the three greatest Inglysshemen who have ever lived and who between them, one after the other, created a tradition of thought, and action, too, which will, I believe, be hailed in time as the greatest gift our nation has bestowed on mankind.'

I knew enough to be sure that the Inglysshemen he referred to were Roger Bacon, William of Occam (to whose apophthegm, Occam's razor, concerning entities or essences we had jokingly alluded when Peter was preparing the potion that cured me) and John Wyclifle. I was quite conversant with their teaching and knew of their connections with Oxenford and the Franciscans. All three had made Oxenford their home and their principal place of study, and had been protected from persecution by the university.

It was Brother Peter's aim and ambition to collect, collate and draw together the teaching and praxis of these three men and out of the consensus, the accord and harmony between them, build a unified philosophy of life that would be the foundation stone on which mankind could move towards a millennial perfection. It was a matter of great pride to me, first, that he acknowledged how much of their knowledge represented in turn a growth from the great philosophers of my own Arab nation, particularly Ibn Rushd, known to the Christians as Averroes, and second, that he valued my own insights into and experiences arising from the hermetic teachings of Hassan Ibn Sabbah. Whether he knew I was an initiate because Uma had told him so before she departed, or whether he deduced it from the presence of the thin steel dagger they found in my loincloth when they bathed me, whose scabbard or sheath is marked in Arab calligraphy with the central tenet of our denial of faith. I did not ask.

The snowdrops, which was the apt name Peter gave the tiny white bell-like flowers we had seen in the hills, gave way to daffodils, which we call jonquils, celandines, anemones, love-in-idleness, with, beneath the russet brick walls, gillyflowers, forget-me-nots and even some tulipans. The bulbs of the last named had been a gift from the Ottoman Sufi Grand Imam of the dervishes' mosque in Iconium, who had enjoyed philosophical discourse with some of Peter's brethren. My the middle of March the gut problems I had had, a particularly vicious and persistent form of dysentery, had responded to Peter's potions and we spent much of another warm spell in the gardens, sitting in simple double seats made from dressed planks. The backs of these commemorated in carved lettering the wise men who had meditated so fruitfully in the past in this same garden, amongst them the three who were the subjects of most of our conversation,

All was tidy and orderly here; even the paths were gravelled with small round stones like peas, and behind us on the walls, following the custom of the Arab gardeners in Spain, the espaliered apples, pears, and even a vine began to push out tiny buds. The air was fragrant with the smell of the daffodils and their narcissistic cousins.

Our conversations followed patterns and routes dictated by the logic or fancy of our thoughts, which pursued concepts and conclusions rather than the chronological track dictated by the three lives, the three bodies of work, which we picked at and attempted to unravel. Our aim was to weave all into an intricate but self-sufficient garment of thought that might clothe the bewildered minds and souls of men against the cold winds that blow out of the darkness that surrounds our existence. But, for the sake of clarity and brevity, dear Mah-Lo, I shall now take them in order.

First came Roger Bacon, who flourished some two hundred years ago. Nothing in the world of learning comes from nothing, and Roger based his thought on that of the great Arab thinkers, going back not only to Avicenna and Averroes but to Abu Yusuf Ya' Qu Ibn Ishaq al-Kindl and Albumazar. From the former of these last two he learnt much about optics and was thus able to invent, or at any rate vastly improve, spectacles, without which we would all, as scholars, be as helpless as blind mice, and from the latter mathematics and the faith in mathematics that decrees they are as reliable a source of truth as revealed scripture.

Hut even more important than spectacles were the principles on which Friar Bacon based his study of optics, which were mathematics, of course, but also observation and experimentation.

You ask what I mean by experimentation [and I have to say that at this point Ali became more animated than I had yet seen him, at any rate when his philosophical fit was upon him]. You observe a phenomenon – say, the way sunlight may be focused through a lens to a fine point on a surface set in a plane perpendicular to the sun's position in the sky. and you discover that the distance between the lens and the surface on which the point of light appears at its smallest and brightest varies according to the thickness of the lens. From these phenomena you produce a mathematical, algebraic formula that allows you to predict what thickness of lens will require a certain distance between it and the surface for it to achieve perfect focus, or knowing the thickness of the lens, you will predict the distance. Now. You test the validity of your algebraically expressed formula by using it repeatedly to predict thickness of lens when you know focal length and vice versa. Algebra? A mathematical methodology discovered by Muhommad ben Musa al-Khwarizmi. When an experiment, which can be repeated, or controlled observation of phenomena, thus support the mathematically-based hypothesis one can be sure that a truth has been arrived at. Knowledge or scientia has been acquired.

Friar Bacon believed that knowledge so attained was the only knowledge worth more than a groat (a small sum of money, dear Mah-Lo, in Ingerlond a skilled manual labourer's daily wage) but, of course, he could not declare this publicly. Why not? Because to do so would be to deny the certain truth of God's laws and will as bequeathed to us in Holy Writ and interpreted by Mother Church. These are jealous gods and would have burnt him alive if he had spoken against them.

He did indeed go as tar as he dared in naming tour causes of ignorance: one. the example of frail and unsuited authority; two, the influence of custom; three, the opinion of the unlearned crowd; and four, concealment of one's ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom. When you think about it, Peter asserted, three of these four come pretty close to describing the processes by which both Scripture and the Church arrive at what they would have us believe…

Somewhere at about this point I asked Brother Peter what he thought of the myth of the Brazen Head that Bacon was reputed to have made and which he bade speak forth prophecies, but which produced only the banality of 'Time was. Time is. Time's past' before exploding into atoms, the atoms Democritus took to be the building blocks of matter. My new friend's voice dropped, he glanced about him to be sure no one was near enough to hear what he said, and then he murmured, 'Gunpowder. Gunpowder used as such to fire a gun, to project a cannon-ball. He was the first to do it, and he did it using a huge church bell, made of brass, with a huge bell mouth, and with those very words inscribed around its lip.'

'But why whisper? There is no secret about gunpowder now. It is used in battle and in sieges from Bristol to Bombay.'

Brother Peter kept his voice low. 'Why do you think his brass cannon blew up?'

I thought for a moment. 'Because Friar Bacon's gunpowder was better than he thought it would be?"

'Precisely. Through experiment and mathematics he arrived at the receipt, correct to the last scruple, that produces a powder more powerful and certain in its effect than any other.'

My heart quickened. At last it seemed I might be on the point of achieving one of the aims that made up the purposes of our expedition across the world to this barbarous island, namely to seek out the latest in military technology.

'Do you have the receipt here in Oxenford?'

'Here in Osney. But… coded. Of course.'

'Why coded?''

'His superiors in the order were not unsympathetic to his enquiring mind; for much of his life he was allowed to speculate and experiment without interference. The condition imposed, though, was that the records of his work should be hidden from the gaze of those who might lack the discipline to treat them with the care and respect they deserve. In other words to prevent their exploitation for personal gain or power, or to subvert the teachings of the Holy Church. So. Code.'

'But you know the key?'

Peter touched the side of his nose with his index finger. 'Trust me.' he said. 'Roger had no inclination to hide his light under a bushel. His code demands little of the cryptologist's art to unravel. He left a thread-end protruding: one good pull and it all falls apart.'

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A penitential Lent I am having of it, and no mistake, most of it spent in this tiny cell, no more than five by three feet across, four feet high, with a vault rising to a foot beyond that. There is a grating of wrought iron for a door, which leads on to a passageway lined with numerous other cells like mine. The walls are rough, undressed stone held together with slapped-on mortar, of which more in a moment. When it rains a sheen, almost a curtain of water, tainted only with the musty stoniness it picks up on the way, runs down them, forms a pool, and trickles away under the bars and into the corridor. There is a heap of straw on the floor, which is changed weekly.

I am of course alone. There was a family of mice, but I have eaten them. This was silly. If I had let the pregnant females come to term, there would have been more. Perhaps I could have husbanded them, and continued for longer to supplement a diet of rye crusts, a handful of which are thrust under the grating on most evenings. The straw, too, has seeds of grain in it. occasionally a whole ear.

The mortar. It was mixed, I would guess, with too much sand, and is further weakened by the presence of flint shards. I managed on the second day to liberate one of these, about an inch long and with a sharp point, and I have been using it and its successors to grind, pick and poke through the mortar. Today, four weeks later, or thereabouts, I achieved daylight, the first I have seen for nearly five weeks, through a hole, a passageway with a slight angle in it, just big enough to take my hand and forearm, up to my shoulder, right through to the outside. Impossible to exaggerate the lift this has given to my spirits: the first two joints of my index finger are in the sun!

I imagine what this must be like from the outside: the blank wall at the back of an annexe to the Guild Hall; a sudden trickle of sandy mortar from a point where three corners of stone do not quite meet as they should, a small brown finger poking through and waggling. At what height is this happening? A foot above the floor of the alley? Six feet up? Even higher? Will it be seen? What will happen if it is? I twist and pull and extricate my arm. Knowing these people, I should not be surprised to have my finger bashed with a stone, slashed with a knife, or even bitten off. Instead I put my eye to the hole and, in spite of the bend in my tunnel. I can sense that sunlight. And then, with my ears against it, I can hear a distant bell, the clatter of hoofs on cobbles and, nearer, a hoarse voice, a woman's, insisting that the cabbages she has for sale are spring cabbages, new season, freshly pulled, buy them here.

So. After all, this cell may be a womb rather than a tomb and the naked child within may yet contrive a birth canal. Why not? In the darkness, virtually complete even after my eyes became adjusted to it, I have yet been able to work out the extent of the patch of mortar I have been working at and it is at least as big as the circumference of my head – and, as every magician knows, if your head will go through the rest will follow… if you know how. I scrabble about, find the latest of my flint tools, and set about enlarging what I have begun. It is, of course, dull work, scrape, scrape, twist, twist, and then dragging out the dust and grit I have loosened with my lacerated fingertips. Occasionally they bleed, and now I can see the blood. Previously I could only taste it. But it is not work that requires mental concentration and my mind can wander freely.

Or it can, even here and in this situation, do what I like best and dwell, with reverence and relish, on every sensation that racks my body: the ache in my thighs, the cold in the soles of my feet, the stiffness across my shoulders, even the dry, sharp, coarse unpleasantness of hard sand, cement and crumbs of flint beneath my fingers. And hunger. Like a cancer gnawing my entrails. It is only through the senses that we know we are alive, only through the senses that we can make the best of being alive.

However, right now, I muse on the stupidity that brought me to this tomb-womb.

I wandered into an open space. One side was filled with a tall church, perhaps the most elegant I have seen on my travels. Smaller than St Paul's, not as noble as Notre-Dame of Paris, it soars perpendicularly with high bridges of flying stone shaped like the bones in the breast of a bird, which balance in equilibrium the forces with which the weight of the roof pushes the walls outwards, walls pierced with windows so it seems there is no wall, but pillars and glass only. It carries the eye and the people who built it would say the soul too, to the tower and then the steeple amd so to the heaven where these people believe their three gods, which they will insist with absurd lack of sense is one god, and his mother loo, all dwell.

The big doors at the west end were open and people were wandering in and out, so out of curiosity I joined them. Inside tall thin pillars climbed to galleries stacked on each other, the stones mostly a pale soft grey but some black marble, pillars which branched out into a grand foliation in the root, like huge tan-shaped leaves, veined with ridges of stone. There are such giant leaves in the forests above our Coromandel coast, but I have never seen anything like them in Ingerlond or Francia. And the wonder of these is that, considering how high they are, they are painted in glowing colour, blues, reds and gold for the most part rather than the greens of the leaves they echo. They are almost as grand as the paintings, tiles, inlays and enamels that adorn our own temples.

The walls of glass beneath and between are all coloured too. some in patterns, others in pictures depicting the lives of their godmen and Sadhus; but the most glorious windows, the most wonderful, are big round rose windows set high in the end walls where the predominant colour is blue, an awe-inspiring deep, resonant blue, and the subject matter the life and glory of Mary who, no matter what these Christians think, is surely an avatar for Parvati, or, as she is sometimes called, Uma, and for whom I am named is her servant.

But for the most part it is not Parvati but Kali who rules, even if she is never seen, for Death is everywhere: in the man torn and bleeding, nailed to his cross, in the depiction of martyrdoms, or at least in the way the sadhus clutch like badges the implements by which they were tortured to death – Catherine with her wheel, Lawrence with his roasting rack, and hundreds more. And finally Kali stalks the arcades and ambulatories below, for here are the tombs of bishops and nobles, with statues of their corpses laid on top, some in armour, some in the vestments of their office. And on one at least is depicted, also in stone, a gruesome skeleton over which the worms still crawl.

So, in one place, we have the ecstasy of godmen and the misery of death, and nowhere in between any love or acknowledgement of the glory that can accompany us on our pilgrimage from darkness through light and back to darkness. What sort of religion is this that carries the mind to a heaven of blue, yet dwells with cadavers?

I have my answer. By these means, splendour and horrid fear combined, the churchmen and princes keep their hold on the souls of the masses who toil for them – for these cathedrals assail the senses with promises of ecstasies always just beyond your reach but ultimately attainable in death, while they terrify with fear of death and everlasting torment. Not only are there colour and light, but there is treasure too, in crosses and croziers, images and vestments. Incense in clouds is released from swung thurifers of polished silver, and music from flutes, fifes, oboes, trumpets, trombones and drums as well as sung. Even that produced by sets of pipes through which air is pumped with a bellows breathes when small slabs of ivory-covered wood are pressed, fills the spaces, colouring them with varied sound… All this magnificence, appealing to every sense save only that most important one of touch, may induce a euphoria as pronounced as that which comes from over-indulgence in bhang, and fools one into thinking that if one is not in heaven then heaven, when it is achieved, will be much like this.

Heaven is thus the bribe the churchmen and princes promise to their hordes of slaves in return for keeping to the calling God has given them and not seeking or striving to climb above their station or escape the misery they are born to. The bribe – and the threat too: for this benign and forgiving god will also leave the souls of those who rebel against his word to rot in endless torment throughout eternity. That, too, is depicted here and there in the lower levels of this edifice.

And there lies the difference between that religion and ours, exemplified by the difference between our temples and theirs, for while theirs soar and carry one upwards to a perfect heaven and by implication spurn what is terrestrial as corrupt, or dwell on terrors, ours, however tall and magnificent they may be, do not attempt to deny their weight, but sit on the earth and glorify it.

Musing thus I made my circuit of this building, which is dedicated to a demi-god called Michael, a warrior angel who, they say, cast into hell the devil, here depicted as a dragon or serpent with Michael's spear in his throat, and finally came back out into the square.

Opposite me now was another building, almost as grand as the first, with a facade of decorated stone, statues in niches, painted and leafed with gold like those in the church, with many rooms and antechambers off it, and with the prisons and torture chambers I now know too well behind and under it. It is dedicated, in name at least, to the same St Mary, or Parvati, but in fact was built for commerce and trade. It is the new Guild Hall, but right now does not serve the purpose for which it was so recently built: it has been occupied for a year or more by King Henry and Queen Margaret, their court and courtiers and all the senior functionaries of government.

And as I step out of the church and into the square, which has a few market stalls in it and above which jackdaws soar and cackle as they dispute the ledges on which they want to build their nests, there is a brief blast of trumpets and a squad of soldiers comes out of the main doors of the Guild Hall, down the steps and marches into the square to join those already there to make a wall between the people and… the cannon in whose wake I came through the city gate.

Following the soldiers comes a small crowd, including the King and Queen, and the seven-year-old boy-child, who is certainly the Queen's but is probably not, I now remember Eddie March telling me, the King's. They pause at the top of the wide flight of steps looking down into the square, facing the cathedral, then descend to look at that awesome tube on wheels in front of which the plumed mules still steam and stamp.

There is not much of a crowd below the steps, just the soldiers who came with the cannon, and no one challenges me as I slip through an arcade of black timbers, sheltering a frontage of shops, to reach the end of the steps which I climb to a point from which I can see and even hear the monarchs…

Whoops! Oh, yes, yes, yes! A piece of mortar has cracked away in the roof of my tunnel, and with a little manoeuvring and twisting I am able to get it free. It's as big as a coconut and, best of all, the stone above it now shifts a little, like a loose tooth in a giant's mouth. If only I had something bigger than these flakes of flint to use as a lever…

Where was I? On the steps of the Guild Hall gawping at the royal party, which is now below and somewhat to the side of where I am standing. The Queen, Margaret, is one of those people at whom, in a crowd, one cannot help looking. Of middling height for a woman, so shorter than most of the grandees and magnates around her, she yet exudes a charisma, a glow. She is thirty years old and in her prime of beauty, physique, intelligence. She stands straight, with her head, supported by a long ivory neck, tilted back a little, which gives prominence to a well-shaped chin. Her nose has a fineness, too, that softens the slight aquiline curve beneath the bridge. Her eyes are small, softly lidded, but piercing and blue, forever alert and seeking to hold and abash the eyes of those who would speak with her. Her fair hair is pulled up and under the velvet cap of a jewelled gold crown. Her purple gown is simple, though pearled and edged with gold, her slippers are cloth of gold too. Her hands are long, with long fingers, rarely still, and with many rings.

The contrast with her husband could not be more marked. He is only ten years older than her but looks twice that. Tall, thin, he wears a brown velvet cap, a brown worsted jerkin, grubby with spilled food, has haunted eyes, red-rimmed and moist, a shambling gait. His thin mouth is a brighter red than one would expect, but not, I think, painted. His only jewellery or sign of rank is a heavy gold chain in which S-shapes alternate with squares in which dull garnets are set and from which hangs a decorated cross with pearls set between the arms.

He is as different from the lords around him as he is from his wife. They all vie with each other like peacocks in slashed and scalloped doublets, jewellery and so forth, or more military accoutrements such as half-suits of armour inlaid with gold, jewelled daggers. These are the men we have heard the Yorkists rail against, the favourites of the Queen, who have ransacked the coffers of the realm for coin and taken the King's lands on whose rents the government of the realm depends.

'It's a fine piece,' the Queen calls out, 'my lord Beaumont has brought us.' Her voice is her least attractive feature, being shrill and often petulant. 'Onghrrree, come here and admire this very fine piece.'

Her accent is clearly French for all she has been England's queen for nearly fifteen years. 'Onghrrree' was the closest she chose to get to 'Henry'.

'But what can we do with it?' she went on. 'It is too big and cumbersome, is it not, to take to battle?'

She turned then to a lean, dark man whom I hail barely noticed, but now recognised to be a chamberlain of the Duke of Somerset's we had seen in the fortress of Guisnes, outside Calais.

'Mountfort, you know the place, would not my lord Somerset be able to knock a hole in the walls of Calais and get himself in with such a piece?'

'Yes, indeed, ma'am. If one could put it in his hands…'

But the King was now stammering and clearly wished to speak. For all they did so with a bad grace, in the way the young humour the elderly or even a precocious child, the small throng fell silent.

'Would not,' he managed at last, 'the French take advantage of such a hole or breach and follow my lord Somerset through it?'

Some of the lords nodded wisely at this, but the Queen was having none of it.

'Onghrrree, you're such a child in such matters. Run along and catch up on your reading, why don't you? Chaucer's translation of Boethius it is just now, is it not? "The Consolations of Philosophy"? So rewarding. I'm sure.'

And, following a sign from her fluttering fingertips, a couple of stewards took the shambling man by the elbows and led him away. One of these was tall and pale and wore a black hat, the other was fat, short and greasy. I got to know them later – the tall one was John Clegger, the fat one Will Bent.

Meanwhile, the Queen, much like a child with a new toy, took her son's hand and trotted down the steps to the cannon. One of her lords picked up the boy and sat him astride the barrel, while the Queen fell into earnest conversation with another, no doubt discussing the deployment of this new weapon. The cold breeze smoothed her fine dress against her breasts so the nipples showed, and the lord, caressing the gun with one hand, grew red about the neck. At this point I felt a presence at my shoulder, followed by a heavy hand.

It is loose, really loose, my giant's tooth, give me another ten minutes and I think I'll be able to get it out.

There's someone at my shoulder. Mountfort. Bastard.

'I've seen you before somewhere, haven't I? Weren't you with those Oriental chappies who came to Guisnes?'

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A week or so after our talk about Roger Bacon – we were perhaps into April by then, for I remember it was raining sweetly, gently, but enough to keep us indoors – our conversation moved on to the second of Brother Peter's great Inglysshemen. In his upper room with his cased books around us and comfortable chairs to sit in, he began with an apologetic-attack on Avicenna whose version of Aristotle was based on the neo-Platonist Porphyry's interpretation of the Stagyrite. Following William of Occam, and referring to his writings and occasionally to Aristotle's Organon, he demonstrated how Aristotle's speculations regarding entities, essences or Universals had been corrupted by the neo-Platonists. For the latter, essences existed in the mind of God, and were presented corporeally, materially, on earth, in a corrupted, degraded way. Thus the idea of 'cat', for instance, and here my friend fondled the tabby beauty called Winnie, who often slept and purred on his lap, existed in the mind of God as a perfection of cats before cats were created, and no cat that had ever existed was a perfect cat, since corporeality always falls short of the perfection of the idea.

'But this,' he went on, fondling Winnie's throat and forehead, which was marked with a W, 'is to deny what is so markedly the most important feature of Winnie, her haecceity, the fact that she is individual, uniquely herself, unlike every other cat who has ever lived. And she has her own perfection – whether or not she is perfect cat is not for me to say, but certainly she is perfect Winnie.'

'Oh, come,' I replied, 'all cats have many features in common. Quite apart from their appearance and their anatomy, they follow patterns of behaviour which are identical. All wash in the same-way. All eat and drink alike. They all use the same techniques when hunting. I could go on and on, but you know what I mean. You cannot deny there exists an idea we can call 'catness' which includes all these qualities.'

A silence lengthened between us. Then: 'You have never been owned by a cat, have you?'

There was a coolness in his voice that irritated me almost as much as the stupid way in which he had framed the question. I was, perhaps, at that time more than usually easily annoyed – as convalescents often are.

'No,' I replied. 'I like them, be sure of that, but they do not travel well, and I have never remained in the same place for more than six months since I was eight years old. Apart from when I was in the Mountain where I learnt what wisdom I have.'

'Then allow me to speak with more certainty of being right concerning the nature of cats.'

'There you are,' I cried, and leant forward to tap his knee, at which Winnie leapt down to the floor and went to mew at the door. 'You speak of the nature of cats. By that you surely mean the essence, the idea that informs them all.'

'No. I simply mean the characteristics we light upon to distinguish them from other animals of a similar size and familiarity. But what I am asking you to consider is this. It is in the nature of cats to be different from each other. Believe me. And not through the corruption of matter by the fall of man or any other such cant but because that is the way cats are.'

It was clear that if a falling-out was to be avoided, we should remove the conversation to a higher plane.

'And you would apply this to everything, every phenomenon in the perceivable world?'

'I, Aristotle, and William of Occam, yes, we agree.'

A sunbeam pierced the rainclouds and fell briefly on the table-between us.

'Even to two motes of dust?'

'Observe,' said Brother Peter, 'no two motes of dust occupy the same space at the same time. In that at the very least they are different. And I believe if we could grind lenses sufficiently fine and line them up to study even the most PIKpo of particles we would find differences between them – PiKpo is the Greek word for very small.'

'I know very well what PiKpo means. What I am trying to say is we use words to define types. The word "cat" is meaningful. Do not such words indicate ideas, essences?'

'Types, yes. Essences, no. Though I would prefer to use the words "species" for "types" and "universals" for "essences".'

'I am still confused. You are simply swapping terms, but you prove nothing.'

'That is because you give too great a power to words. Words arc tools. Useful, but in themselves they do not contain truth. It is useful to say that beer is beer, by which we indicate a certain species of drink. It is useful because I can say, 'Would you like some beer?' and you will know thereby the sort of experience you are being offered. But this is not to say that there is an essence of beer, a perfect beer in the mind of God. Indeed not. Looked at another way, the word implies quite the opposite, for it allows us to say that this beer is different from that beer, this beer is better than that beer. Do you like this beer?'

We both drank. I allowed myself beer at the priory because Peter said it was weak and because the water was river water, there being no well on the islet.

'Yes,' I said. 'And it is different. You are right.'

'That is because this beer is made with hops of a particular species. Some of our Hussite brothers from Pils in Bohemia sent us a sack. But we must return now to William of Occam. Let me sum up what he had to say about words. There are terms of first intention, which is what we call words that are the names of individual things and which, in Inglysshe anyway, we qualify with an article: the cat at the door. This cat at that door. There is a cat at the door. And there are words used as terms of second intention, as universals, genera, or species. Cats like fish. Cats wash behind their ears when there-is rain about. A universal is thus a sign of many things, in this case the many things that make up a cat. Universals do not exist. The only existence they have is as qualities of individual cats.' 'Hum,' said I.

'Words used thus are merely tools,' he repeated, 'which we resort to for convenience' sake: they do not describe something that has a reality of its own. Only individual things have that reality. That is what Aristotle, properly understood, thought. That is what Occam meant when he said: "Essentia non sunt multiplicandai praeter necessitatem." A sharp dictum that slices through a lot of cant. Essences, universals should not be multiplied except out of necessity, and ultimately the only Necessary Universal is God, the Prime Mover. And.' here he lowered his voice for what he was about to utter was a burning matter, 'and he, or it, goes back a long, long way. Maybe all it was was a bang, a big bang like the bang of the Brazen Head, but with the motto "Time is. Time will be. Time might just as well go on for ever".'

He had gone beyond me now, as sometimes he did when a sort of divine afflatus, an ability to prophesy, fell on him. I tried to bring him back to earth. 'Is it not the case that your Friar Bacon was kept mute in the cells of the Franciscan order in Paris for many years, that Occam was imprisoned as a heretic, that even John Wycliffe might have been burnt but escaped?'

'But. my dear Ali… one moment while I let Winnie out. See? Like many cats once disturbed she will not resume her former comfort, but not all cats reach with their front paws to rattle the latch to signify they want to go out. There. They were… gunpowder. They threatened to blow apart the whole structure of our society. They undermined the very foundations on which the authority of Church and king can be said to stand for they privileged, as inevitable consequences of their thought, individual observation, individual judgement; they revealed ways to the truth that did not depend on the authority of Mother Church nor the divine right of kings, but on knowledge obtained by practical everyday experience, as it was said those doctors of antiquity who relied on experience and observation did. the ones known as empirici. What gives a pope or emperor the right to rule? Why, if you take away frail and unsuited authority, custom, the opinion of the unlearned crowd, the display of apparent wisdom, if you take away the idea that a pope or king embodies, albeit corporeally and with earthly corruption, the essence or entity of priesthood and royalty as conceived in the mind of God, you are left with two things, two justifications for investing certain individuals and institutions with authority over the rest of us.' 'And they are?'

'The power to unleash force, death, torture and deprivation on those who would gainsay you.'

'That I understand. But brute force is scarcely justification.' 'Quite so. Nor, really, is the other.' 'And that is?'

'The willing consent of the ruled.'

'But,' said I, 'that does seem a justification. Better, anyway, than brute force.'

Brother Peter again became animated.

'It depends,' he said, and the words tumbled out like nuts from a sack, 'how that willing consent is obtained. If lies are fed to the people for generation after generation and never questioned, they become part of the unconsidered background to their mental lives, never truly looked at or examined, hardly even thought of, but controlling everything in the foreground of their thoughts. By these means, as powerful, as all-pervading but as unnoticed as those that cause an object released in air to drop, is the consent of the people contrived and maintained. And anything that threatens to undermine this invisible wall of belief, the way gunpowder can blow down a castle wall, must be treated as anathema, a burning matter.' He sighed, looked around, then up and out of the cloudy glazing of the window. 'It's stopped raining. Wycliffe, the last of our three, was feeling towards all this. But that is enough for now. Let us walk through our garden, admire the raindrops on the cherry-blossom, then perhaps feed our fish.'

As we walked between the low cropped hedges, and breathed in the fragrances released by rain and a sun suddenly warm, I attempted a summary.

'Without this…' I searched for a word and made one up

'… introjection of belief, on what grounds would a person offer his consent to be ruled?'

'He, or she, would use observation and analysis as nearly mathematical as may be, to work out who or what system would best suit his own interests and those of his fellow men. By fellow men I mean the men and women he works with. Clearly the people he works for are a different class of person altogether and will think in a dialectically opposed way. He and his fellows would employ a hedonistic calculus. And he would eschew any pre-given ideas about the commonwealth of men said to be based on the essences that exist in God's head.'

I savoured the subtle sharpness of a needle of rosemary, pinched between my teeth. 'Just now you brought in John Wycliffe, the last of your three Inglysshe Franciscans. There must be more to be said about him.'

But Brother Peter had had enough. Scattering some breadcrumbs on the surface of the first of his ponds (the fish recognised his shadow as it fell on the water and came to the poolside before he threw them), he said, 'You may not have noticed, dear Ali, that we are now approaching the end of Lent. Yesterday was the day of the Crucifixion of Jesus, which we call Good Friday, three days of tasting that last through till the first meal after Holy Communion tomorrow when we celebrate his apparent return from the grave. At that celebration I shall give a talk based on the teachings of Father John Wycliffe, which, if you'll forgive me, I shall now set about preparing. You will be very welcome in our church tomorrow at eleven in the morning.'

Chapter Thirty

I'll get the fucker out if it's the last thing I do. If I don't then trying to may well be the last thing I do. I've torn a nail and it's bleeding. Hurts like snake-bite too.

Oh dear, oh me, they piled up so much against me at my trial. Trial is hardly the word but it is what they called it. Many wise judges heard the case, even the King and the Queen, whose shrill voice I got to know well. First, I had disobeyed my lord of Somerset by taking a boat from Calais to Ingerlond. Next my skin is what they call black so I am a pagan heathen and possibly not a person at all but a monkey. It seems that, unlike us, they feel no kinship or respect for monkeys. Next it was known from Lord Scales in London that I had consorted concupiscently with my lord of March. They must have meant Eddie – lust for whom I admit was the reason I had come to Coventry, but lord? I didn't know he was a lord.

At this, some of my judges realised that I might not be a boy. None of us is perfect, I pleaded. And I am indeed a woman. None had doubted that Eddie might go in for buggery with boys, but best to be sure. Just for the record. They soon made sure I was female, by the usual method. I was therefore a witch, as well as everything else.

The Queen especially now went berserk with fury. She screamed at me, circled me in that cellar that had been made to store wine – it stank of it as if a couple of barrels bad burst there – and came at me with long scarlet nails, which she dragged down my cheeks. 'You bewitched young Eddie,' she screamed. 'No Inglysshe nor Frankysshe man, either and Eddie is both, could look on your dusky skin without revulsion. Confess you consort with the Devil, who has given you charms to ensnare young men.'

Yet above all I was a Yorkist and possibly privy to that faction's plans. It was known Warwick was in Ireland with York. Was he planning to return to Calais? What were York's intentions? And where was March? And so on and so forth. They applied various means to extract from me what they thought I knew, mostly involving hot irons, pincers, and some stretching, especially of the spaces between my legs, but since I could not tell them what I did not know they soon gave up. The John Clegger and Will Bent I named earlier as the Queen's stewards took their turn in all this, though most of the examination was carried out by the city's executioner, a foul man, a blacksmith by trade, with a deep scar down his right cheek, and always the hot smell of burning metal about him. He and his apprentices did unspeakable things to me. Unspeakable? So why speak of them.

All that remained was to decide how I should die. They could not decide. The Bishop wanted me burnt for a witch, the Lord Chief Justice wavered between beheaded as a traitor, or hanged and drawn. And that's how matters stand. Executed I must be. Only the means remain to be decided.

Ouch! Fuck, shit and bugger it all. It came out, but dropped on my toe. Not so much a giant's tooth as a cannon-ball or anyway, a melon. But, you know, I really think I might be out by nightfall. My rock has brought down a shower of rubble inside the wall, it all seems loose and all I have to do is scoop it out. But minding where it falls.

Standing in the moonlight, in a litter of cabbage leaves, I find I am bothered by my nakedness. Not because it is cold – it is no colder in the alley than it was in my cell. Nor do I feel shame at being naked as these Christians are said to. But because I am a mess. My body is slimed with my own excrement and that of the slugs I have shared my tiny tomb with. It is also scabbed and ill-looking, though a month has passed since it was seriously abused. Worst of all, it is now thin. Well, I might not have got out so easily had I been rounded, glossy and full, though not what you would call fat, in short a worthy temple for the goddess within me. But all the same I do not like to think I might be seen so scrawny and poorly looking. So I head for where I know I shall find clothes.

But first, on the corner of the alley where it feeds back into the square, there is a pump, a public supply of water. I crank the lever a few times and get a great gobbet of water followed by a steadier rhythmic flow, and I contrive to get most of me beneath it while still cranking with my right hand. Then I take turn about and do the other side. Finally I sluice the sheets of water off each arm in turn, my thighs and hips, my stomach, or rather the hollow where my stomach once was, and my shrivelled breasts. The water flashes silver in the moonlight. It is very, very cold, but that makes it feel all the more cleansing. Then walking briskly and trying to control the convulsive shuddering that has seized me, I make it down the arcades by the shops and into the church.

Yes, there are people about. A very large number, filling the wide central nave, many kneeling, some standing, some praying with their eyes shut passing the foolish beads they use to pray with through their fingers, almost all with bowed heads, and those who keep their heads upright have their eyes fixed forward on the high altar beyond the choir, where all is a blaze of light from a thousand candles, some very big indeed. Clouds of incense fill the air, choirs chant that wretched rising and falling wail, bells chime, the chains on thurifers clank, jewelled vestments flash back the lights, and, happy Easter, no one has eyes for the naked wench who strides down one of the side naves, past the chancel and choir and so to the ambulatory and, at its apex, the lady chapel. I suppose if anyone does see me they put me down to hallucination produced in a dirty mind by the devil.

Here, behind the rood-screen, all is almost dark, and certainly deserted. I climb on the small altar and reaching up take her ladyship in my arms and, with a muttered apology, I hoick her down to the floor. She has a gold crown with a sunburst behind it which is not gold at all but leafed wood. She is a wooden doll, quite well carved and painted where her face and hands are visible to her worshippers, but left rough and unfinished where the cloth of her robes covers her. Her face and hands are polished oak, a little darkened with age, and not far off the colour of my own complexion. Her robes are a woollen blue mantle with a hood, a long black dress, and an underskirt of white linen trimmed with lace, which turns out not to be a skirt at all but merely an apron. I prop her against a pillar and climb into these clothes. They are not a bad fit, though I think I would have more than filled them had I not been starved for so long.

I tuck my wet hair up under the hood. The shudders recede. I almost feel warm. And, of course, hungry too. Well, I have learnt enough of the rites of this strange cult to know what lies in the little walled box behind its glowing oil lamp, and I make a very brief and inadequate snack of the dried while biscuit and the small silver cup of wine I find there. It's not a lot, but certainly I feel better for it. Time to go. I pause. Then, why not? I turn back, pick up the gold crown and place it on my head, over the hood, and then the jewellery – her rings, her ear-rings, and so forth.

Still clutching the bunched-up apron in my hand, I head for the transept doors that will take me back to the square and, in one of the darkest comers of all, find myself faced with none other than old Scar-face himself, my evil-minded torturer, of whom my last memory before I fainted was of him bringing himself off with one hand while poking a stick up my cunt with the other. A stick with thorns, a pruning from a rose perhaps.

I recognise him, he recognises me. 'By Our Lady…' he begins, and 'Yes, indeed,' I reply. For all I have been weakened old skills remain and I have surprise on my side. Furthermore the old fool drops to his knees, crossing himself as he does so. Quickly I wind the lacy apron round his neck once and still holding both ends of the scarf I have made of it, brace the sole of my right foot on his forehead, and… Snap!

Unwrapping the scarf and murmuring a Thuggee prayer to Kali, I run out into the square. There I stop, and look around. My breath returns to normal, my heartbeat steadies, the glow that took fire in my womb and spread to my furthest extremities when I straightened my knee begins to fade, and I look about me with a curse on my lips for all that this wretched city has done to me.

'Burn,' I say. 'Burn.'

And I know one day it will.

Chapter Thirty-One

Interlude

Brother Peter Marcus preaches in the church of St Francis, Osneyy, on Easter Morning, 1460

'Everywhere on your road preach and say, "The kingdom of God is at hand". Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out devils, freely have you received, Freely give. Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor start", for the workman is worthy of his hire." The seventh to tenth verses of the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.

'Dear children of God, my sermon this Easter morning will be a very simple one. All I aim to do is remind you of the teachings of Father John Wycliffe, the kernel of his thought at any rate, and suggest how his teaching points down paths we should try to follow.

'First, at the centre of his thought was poverty. In this he followed in the footsteps of Francis, our founder, who heard the words of the Gospel I have just read to you at the moment of his conversion. From this came the certainty that righteousness has nothing to do with power or dominion or possessions or property. To own something is to take it from someone else. He who has a penny more has caused another to have a penny less. Nor does true righteousness confer power or the right to power, dominion or the right to dominion. John believed that dominion and power were the prerogatives of the civil authority, and not of the Church or churchmen. But even this he saw was a standby, a provisional thing, until all men and women, all people, should live together in harmony, all equal, and come together as the Israelites did in every jubilee year and hand back to all, to the people as a whole, all personal property.

'Next, Father John believed that the central thing in every man's life was the immediate dependence of the individual Christian upon Cod, a relation which needs no mediation of any priest, and to which the very sacraments of the Church are not essentially necessary. Indeed, he went so far as to assert that round the sacraments, which are but signs and symbols, a dreadful and harmful habit of superstition has grown up, later hardened by the closed minds of the so-called fathers of the Church into dogma and doctrine. And by these means, by making the sacraments the prerogative of the priesthood, to grant or withhold as their fallen natures dictated, power and dominion over the gates of heaven and hell were seized by the Church, Thus no one can go to heaven unless they have received the body and blood of Christ and only the anointed priest has the power to magic the bread and wine into the body and blood. Brethren, I tell you, following the teaching of our Father John, this doctrine of transubstantiation is a blasphemous folly, a deceit which despoils the people and leads them to commit idolatry. If sacrament there must be, then let it be the sacrament of sharing the good things of life, the bread and wine, in good fellowship, as we have just done in our Easter Communion, and remembering as we do so the teachings of Jesus and his example, as he bade us.

'Brethren, these doctrines of the sacraments as laid down by Rome, Avignon or wherever the Pope is these days, deny the true Church that is in all of us and especially when two or three are gathered together in His Name. That is the Church our Lord left us with, the Church John lived and breathed for. The true Church consists solely of the community of the righteous, and its only authority is the teaching of our Lord as left to us in the New Testament. The supreme authority, the only authority, is Holy Scripture and particularly the actual words of our Lord as recorded in the Gospels. Which is why John Wycliffe devoted so much of his life to translating and disseminating the Gospels in our own tongue. It is for these and like reasons that after his death his hones were dug up and burnt for a heretic, as if this mean, malicious act could in any way diminish the power of his thought.

John's wisdom was not a homely stuff woven together on the loom of mere common sense, though there is much of that in it. It was far more, drawing together the threads left by his two great predecessors. Roger Macon and William of Occam. The first found truth in what he could see, feel, touch, hear, smell and measure. The second showed how the teaching of the fathers and the schoolmen has dragged us away from experience to speculation, from the particular to the general, from fact to essence. John began to see how all this provided the foundations for the tyrannies that spoil us all. It behoves us to continue down the road these three have shown us.

'It is my belief – no, my certainty, grounded in experience as well as logic, that we can use their teaching as stepping-stones, as stairs to a height from which, looking back whence we have come, we shall see exposed the gigantic fallacy on which our philosophy and morality were built – namely the transformation of facts into essences, of historical into metaphysical conditions. The weakness and despondency of man, the inequality of power and wealth, injustice and suffering are attributed by the Church and its thinkers to some transcendental crime and guilt. Rebellion, disobedience against God, became the original sin that tainted us all. and the striving for gratification which is life was stained with the sin of concupiscence.

'This departure into metaphysical realms culminated in the deification of time: because everything in the empirical world is passing, man in his very essence becomes a finite being, and death is in the very essence of life. Madness preached, "All things pass away, therefore all things deserve to pass away! And this is justice itself, this law of Time, that it must devour its children."

'And again this madness pronounced as doctrine that only the higher values are eternal, and therefore real: faith and a love which does not ask and does not desire became the goals to which we should all aspire. And why? By these means the Church seeks to pacify, justify, compensate the underprivileged of the earth, and to protect those who made and left them underprivileged. These doctrines have enveloped the masters and the slaves, the rulers and the ruled, in an upsurge of repression which has caused the increasing degeneration of the life instincts and the decline of man.

'Traditional forms of reason, as exemplified in the real thought of Aristotle, the peripatetics and the empiricists of ancient times, are rejected, and experience of being-as-end-in-itself- as joy, lust (I use the Teutonic word, which combines desire with joy), and enjoyment were thrown out with them. To return to the path we have been led from, to descend on the other side of the mountain not into the Valley of the Shadow of Death but into the land of milk and honey, to come to ourselves in a world which is truly our own, we must struggle against the dominion of time, against the tyranny of becoming over being. As long as there is the uncomprehended and unconquered flux of time – senseless loss, the painful 'it was' that will never come again – being will continue to contain the seed of destruction that perverts good to evil and vice versa. Man comes to himself only when transcendence has been conquered, when eternity has become present in the here and now.

'Before I came here to speak to you I took a turn about our garden. The cherry tree is in blossom, our cherry tree, the only cherry tree in the whole of creation to be just as it is at this very moment. Next to it the lilac tree our brothers in Anatolia sent us is in bud, just about to open buds already white at the tips, and in its branches a bullfinch sang, its black cap burnished so blackness shone almost like the sun and its red breast glowed like fire. No other bullfinch in the world but this one graced this morning a lilac tree like ours.

'Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not neither do they spin. At this time of Easter, of blossom on the cherry tree, of the scarlet and black bullfinch in the lilac tree, of birth and resurrection, let us remember that if all things pass, all things return; what goes round comes round; eternally turns the wheel of Being. All things die, all things blossom again, eternal is the year of Being. All things break, all things are joined anew; eternally the house of Being builds itself anew. All things part, all things welcome each other again.

'Eternity, long since the ultimate consolation of an alienated existence, was made into an instrument of oppression by its relegation to a transcendental world – unreal reward for real suffering. Now, here, at Easter, eternity is reclaimed for the fair earth – as the eternal return of its children, of the water-lily and the rose, of the lover and the beloved… The earth has all too long been a madhouse. We must reverse the sense of guilt; we must learn anew to associate guilt not with the affirmation but the denial of life, not with rebellion but with the acceptance of the repressive ideal.

'It is no sad truth, but rather.I grand and glorious one that this earth should be our home. Were it but to give us simple shelter, simple clothing, simple food it would be enough. Add the water-lily and the rose, the apple and the pear, it is a fit home for mortal or immortal Man. Woman. Persons,'

'What did you think of that, Ali?' 'Uplifting, though a touch confused.'

'It's not easy to turn back the tide of a thousand years in a few pithy paragraphs.'

'I can do it in one sentence." 'You can?'

'As the Old Man in the Mountain said, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."'

'That is the black side of my discourse, the far side of the moon.'

'If you say so.'

Brother Peter paused by the pond and looked at me, his pale-blue eyes suddenly sad, his posture briefly tired, perhaps from the strain of giving his sermon, perhaps because he had decided our separation was inevitable.

'There is a small college of people,' he said, 'who have taken these thoughts towards a dark conclusion. They live in the north but to avoid persecution move about.'

'The Brothers of the Free Spirit?'

'I believe that's what they call themselves."

'Just where are they?"

'Try Macclesfield Forest.'

But before I left I prevailed upon him to seek out the coded details of Roger Bacon's last experiments with gunpowder, and thereby. I think, did more to save the empire of Vijayanagara from imminent destruction than any of the rest of us.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Having found all this talk of Occam and Wycliffc deeply confusing,

not to say boring and irrelevant, but with my mind concentrated

again by Ali's last statement regarding gunpowder, I attempted

to bring him back to what was germane.

'But what,' I asked him, after a short silence had grown between us,

of the Prince and Anish during this time? Were they still locked away

in the Tower?'

'I'm glad you asked. For, like you, I am now tired of my own voice. And, anyway, we have reached a point in our story where it is not out of place to return to the Prince's correspondence with the Emperor.'

And he pushed a small pile of papers across the table. While I read, he slept.

Dear Cousin

We are still incarcerated, after several months, well, weeks anyway, in this monumental prison and, of course, I still have no way of knowing whether or not you have received my letters and, if you have, what steps you are able to take to arrange our release. I suppose, even though we have languished here for so long, it is unreasonable to expect an answer from you in less than twice the time it took for us to get here, so I must continue to be patient.

Materially speaking things have not been as bad here as they might have been. Anish and I were given three small rooms to share in the central block or keep of this castle, which is known as the Tower of London, though it is in fact many towers linked by walls, or, like the central block in which we are living, free-standing. Everything is made of stone – either blocks of pale grey limestone or flint cores bonded with mortar – and roofed in lead or slate. The floors also are slate or limestone. There is almost no decoration apart from occasional tapestry hangings and only one of our rooms has a fireplace. Yet in spite of the primitive nature of our surroundings we are pestered to show gratitude for the comforts we have – and indeed, I have to say, our guardians fare no better than we do.

The chief of these is Lord Scales, an old and irascible nobleman, who is governor of the Tower for the King. Occasionally he invites us to dine with him when he rails against the Duke of York and his affinity, and against the merchants of the City who, he claims, plot to starve him out by refusing the passage of food and other necessaries into the Tower. Occasionally he demands money from us for our keep, or a jewel, and either he is unaware of the true value of things or he is modest in his demands, for a pearl no bigger than a pigeon's egg keeps him happy for a fortnight or more.

He has kept us up with the news too. The Duke of York is in Hibemia or Erin, an island to the west of Ingerlond, and smaller, but not much smaller, claimed as a domain of the King of Ingerlond, though his power extends only down the east coast and not far inland, the rest of the island or Ireland being occupied by savages. It is believed that Warwick has joined York there, in a port called Waterford on the southeast coast, where it is feared they are planning a joint invasion, York across the sea from Ireland and Warwick from Calais.

In Calais the same stalemate as before persists. The Duke of Somerset is tied down by Warwick's army, and Warwick's men by Somerset. Neither can embark without exposing himself to attack from the other; neither is strong enough to risk an open battle.

Of Eddie March, who is the cause of all our present woes (really it was a mistake on my part to hire him as a guide and protector, Ali was right about that, as about so much else), we have heard nothing certain. Either he is in Waterford with Warwick or he has made his way back to Calais. More important, the whereabouts of Ali and his companion, the Buddhist monk, remain a mystery and, perforce, Anish and I, Anish anyway, have been at some pains to mitigate the effects of his disappearance by learning Inglysshe. Oh, yes. That fakir who attached himself to us has disappeared too.

So, dear cousin, the time has passed slowly but not without some benefits for our country and people, which I hope we shall one day be able to bring back to you. In spite of cold wet weather for most of the time Anish and I have been able to make, piecemeal to avoid suspicion that we are spies, a thorough examination of these fortifications, and particularly of their efficacy or lack of it against gunpowder and ball. To these ends we have had several conversations with the Under Master Sergeant of Ordnance. Bardolph Earwicca.

The actual Master of Ordnance is, of course, a Norman of noble blood and therefore a fool, a young man called Guy Fitzosbern with no chin and a voice like a horse's, or should I say donkey? Certainly a donkey when he laughs, eeee-aw-aw-aw-aw. He knows nothing about his job except how to draw his salary.

Sergeant Bardolph, however, is a master gunner. Thick-set like most Saxons, his ruddy complexion is further enhanced by carbuncles and boils, which glow like so many red-hot cannon-balls. Like many Saxons he puts the word 'fucking' into his speech wherever he possibly can, for no purpose at all that we can understand. The word refers to the act of' love-making, particularly those actions that lead to conception, and their use of it seems to imply they hold love-making in contempt.

I began by asking Bardolph if he did not think the walls of the Tower, especially the outer ones, somewhat thin, lacking in substance. They would surely soon be breached by well-directed cannon-fire, I suggested. Would it not have been sensible, as mastery of the techniques involved in the use of gunpowder developed, to have strengthened them, thickened them?

'Waste of fucking time, squire,' he said, having first sucked in his protuberant lips and then expelled the air thus taken in, with a noise like a fart. Meanwhile, I asked myself, did he mean waste of time that could be better spent in love-making? It soon became clear that he meant nothing of the sort, in fact he meant… nothing.

'You see, squire,' he went on, 'there ain't no fucking wall yet been built can withstand the force of powder, no matter how fucking thick it is.'

'How about thirty feet thick and made of solid rock?'

'That ain't a fucking wall. That's a fucking mountain. But even so, given time and loadsa powder, it'd go, it'd fucking go.'

'So how, dear friend,' I asked, or rather Anish did on my behalf, 'can a town or castle be protected against cannon-fire?'

'Simple, really, innit?'

By now we were standing between two towers on a battlement, scarcely wide enough to allow two armed men to pass each other.

'Come wiv me.'

And he took us into a big round room, occupying the whole area of the nearest tower, about thirty feet across. Much of it was filled with a cannon twelve feet long and the accoutrements that went with it, videlicet a ramrod with an end like a giant mop, an open barrel of water, another of gunpowder, and about twenty spheres of stone laboriously ground to an almost perfect roundness, each about two feet or more in diameter. There was also a shelf on which was placed a Hint, a stone and a tinder-box together with a wick that had been soaked in solution of saltpetre and left to dry.

'All present and correct,' Sergeant Earwicca shouted, 'and ready to blow the balls off of anyone who dares a misdemeanour directed against His Majesty's person or property."

I marvelled he had put so many words together without a 'fucking'.

'The art you see of protecting these 'ere walls against a gun, is be sure we have a gun here, and six more to be precise, bigger'n any they can fucking bring against us.'

'I see,' I said. 'If I have it right, the aim is to cannon-ball the opposing cannon into silence before they can knock down your walls, and you are certain of being able to do this because this cannon is bigger than any that can normally be brought against you, and, because it is placed at a height, it has greater range.'

The cannon in question, as I have already said, was uncommonly big, an iron tube hooped with brass at every foot or so of its length. It was mounted on a solid oak chassis, which in turn was laid on what I took to be a giant wheel laid in an horizontal plane. So, within the limits of the embrasure from which its snout protruded, the angle at which it tired Could be altered both from side to side and up and down.

'For gen'leinen you got some fucking brains,' our friend remarked, and tapped the side of his huge fruit-like nose with his forefinger – a gesture I took to signify appreciation of our intelligence.

So there you have it, honoured cousin: the way to make sure our fortifications are not knocked down by the Bahmani artillery is to make sure we are defended by guns bigger and better than any they might bring against us. I imagine we could have worked that out for ourselves without traipsing across half the world. However, there might be something to be learnt about the casting of large cannon, and that is something Anish and I will endeavour to look into. And maybe, too, there are ways of refining the exact constituents of gunpowder to gain optimum efficacy.

I remain, dear cousin,

Your devoted servant,

Prince Harihara

Chapter Thirty-Three

Dear Cousin Five months we have been here, and we are now approaching the end of the six month of the year 1460, Christian reckoning. Without the advice of our sadhus I can't work out what that makes it according to our more complicated lunar reckonings, but it's about a year since we sailed from Gové, Anish says two months more than a year, so I'm sure you'll get a rough idea.

Effectively we remain prisoners. Though in tolerable comfort, there is no question of our being allowed out into the city which we can see from the walls, or indeed of trying to find our way home. Although not formally charged we are tainted with Yorkism, with collaborating with traitors and giving them succour, and Scales, when the drink takes him badly, making him bellicose and hostile, reminds us that he can get the paperwork done at what he calls the drop of a hat and our heads off quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

'Here’ is, of course, this gloomy fortress-palace-prison called the Tower of London, though I have to say that, with the arrival of what they call summer, it is less gloomy than it was. Summer? A brief period when the sun shines rather more than it did, and the temperature is such that we need to ask to have the fire lit in our rooms only towards dusk, which I have to say now comes late in the day, the night being only about six hours long. You would think that with this amount of daylight it would be even hotter than our country, but no. The sun remains perversely low in the sky, even at noon, and the days are only rarely as warm as the coldest in Vijayanagara. Moreover, the weather remains wholly unpredictable: a week of cold rain may still occur, followed by a few days of warm sunshine though with a sharp breeze from the east. Then come cloudy, sultry days, even warmer, culminating in a thunderstorm, heavy rain, almost as heavy as our monsoon at times, and sometimes, even now, the raindrops are frozen into what they call hail. Then back to blustery winds with frequent showers.

Nevertheless, the gardens here, which are quite extensive within the walls, are now pleasant for much of the time, with many tall rose bushes, lilies, peonies (though they arc now over) and many flowering herbs, particularly thyme, rosemary (also now over, it flowered earlier than the rest), and sage, dried sacks of which you will remember traders have brought us from time to time from the Himalayan foothills. Incidentally, they charge far too much for them.

The fish-ponds, too, have lotus in them, would you believe it? which they call water-lily, smaller than ours but just now coming into bloom with flowers very similar, eight or sixteen petals in a mandala. Here they are a rarity apparently and are merely admired for their beauty and not at all for their spiritual significance. The sight of them tilled me with a sudden longing to be back home.

What else? Fork-tailed birds, exactly like the swallows that haunt our temples from the end of the monsoons through to the hot season, arrived here a month or so ago and built tiny cement-like nests up under the eaves of all the towers and battlements, hundreds of them, and have laid eggs and arc-rearing chicks. You know it has long been a puzzle amongst those of us who bother to think about such things as to where our swallows go to breed: well, here, I think we have the answer. For reasons best known to themselves, and to Devi-Parvad who rules all things living, they fly north.

That is not the received opinion in Ingerlond. Quizzing one of the gardeners on the subject, an old man with a red face, long white hair and with the knotted swollen finger joints that afflict most of the elderly in Ingerlond, he spluttered through broken teeth, 'Why, bless you, zurr, come Michaelmas they doos dive into the mud round ponds and sleeps out the winter in a state of intoxified slumber, waking only when they feels the regenerative power of the sun on their backs.'

There are also ravens here in the Tower, again similar to those that dwell in the cliffs and crags of our highest mountains. These are almost tame and the guards of the Tower rear the chicks, which were hatched not long after we were incarcerated, feeding them scraps of liver and other offal. There is a superstition that as long as the raven flourish in the Tower, for so long will Albion (which is another name for Ingerlond) likewise flourish.

Well, cousin, I am boring you with these snippets of natural history, but Anish and I have been so bored ourselves for most of the time that we have found ourselves pursuing such trivia. On now to weightier matters.

Our gaoler here. Lord Scales, who prefers to call himself our host, came to us this morning, in the very garden I have been talking about. He's an old man too, bearded like a leopard, also with a red face (Anish says the preponderance of red faces amongst the elderly here is the result of drinking alcohol in excess since childhood), a bluff manner and filthy temper. He caught up with us just as we were contemplating the movement of a long-legged fly across the surface of the pond. Anish was musing on this phenomenon, attempting to find in it an example of the ephemerality of even great events in the flow of time. The significance he found arose from the fact that the fly left no footprints on the surface.

'Here's a thing, then,' rasped Lord Scales. 'Here's a damned thing. Your Yorkist cronies from Calais landed at Sandwich late the day before yesterday, and they're already at Canterbury. That arsehole Bourchier, the Archbish, is backing them, they've already doubled their numbers up to twenty thousand, and they'll be knocking on our door in a day or two.'

'What's their purpose?' I asked.

'They say to restore good government to the kingdom. They say they honour the King who they say is the rightful king. But these folk never say what they mean.'

'And what do they mean?'

'They mean to kick the King out. and put Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York – who, believe me, is an arrogant bastard – on the throne instead. But I'll stop them, see if I don't.'

'But if they have twenty thousand…'

He knew very well that I am well aware that he has only a couple of hundred garrisoned in the Tower.

'I've got me cannon, haven't I? You've seen them. I'll blast 'em to bits, soon as they set foot in the city.'

Anish piped up. 'Who leads them?" he asked.

'Richard Neville – son of a bitch who calls himself Earl of Warwick because he married old Warwick's daughter – Salisbury, who is his father. Lord Fauconberg his uncle, who also got his title between the sheets, and Eddie March. Crooks. A gang. Gangsters.'

'Not York himself, then?'

'No. Got more sense. He'll hang on in Ireland until he sees how it all turns out. Well, it'll turn out badly for them all. Mark my words.'

Arid he stumped away, huffing and puffing up the steep stairs no doubt to inspect his guns and make sure our friend Bardolph Earwicca had them in working order.

'Could turn out all right for us,' said Anish, 'if March, Warwick and the rest remember who we are. And Alderman Dawtrey bothers to tell them where we are.'

'Anyway,' said I, 'at least we'll see how well these pieces he's got up there work.'

At this moment the long-legged fly came too close to a water-lily or lotus pad on which a small frog sat. A flick of its tongue and the fly was gone. 'Tell me, Anish,' I asked, 'just what part does that frog play in your miniature cosmology? Shiva the Destroyer?'

'Too grand." he replied. 'Let's just settle for Tataka, the man-eating demoness.'

Honoured cousin, things are definitely moving here, changing, so I shall not after all commit this letter to the Arab trader I had in mind who has now sailed, hoping to raise Tyre in the Levant in a month or so, but keep it by me and make entries as events unfold. I'll find means to send it on when the situation has clarified. Five days have passed since I put my pen aside, and we are now at the beginning of the month they call July, after Julius Caesar who apparently invented this calendar they use at much the same time as he was building this fortress we are in.

Ooof! Perhaps I should have waited. Lord Scales is having a wonderful time shooting off his pieces. The gunners load and lay them, he rushes up to each emplacement in turn, touches his saltpetre wick to the charge, watches the touch-hole fizz, then bang! off the thing goes, and he rushes on to the next, back out of the tower, down the steps on to the battlement, along it, which is quite dangerous since he could fall off into the yard, up the stairs to the next tower, bang! and on again. He has six pieces pointing out over the city, three to the north towards the part they call Smithfield and three to the west shooting across the low rise they call Tower Hill and into Billingsgate. For all the height these pieces are set at, and their size, he does not seem able to inflict damage at more than five hundred paces, which is a matter of considerable distress and grief to him as it leaves the bridge just, and only just, beyond his range. And it is over the bridge that Warwick's army is now passing, having been welcomed by the Lord Mayor and aldermen, including, I suppose. Alderman Dawtrey.

Warwick and the Yorkists are much favoured by the City merchants for several reasons. The King, or most say the Queen in the King's name, has taxed them heavily and has also accepted huge sums from the Hanse merchants, in exchange for privileges they have not had before. The

Yorkists promise to turn all this round once they have the mad King in their power and meanwhile Warwick's ships, under flags of convenience rather than those of the Calais Pale, have taken Hanse ships on the high seas. So not only have the London merchants welcomed his army, they have even given him fourteen thousand gold coins, an enormous sum, with which to pay and feed his soldiers.

Naturally as a result, like bees to a hive, men flock to join his army. One of Lord Scales's staff has been stationed on the highest tower and has attempted to count how many have crossed the bridge. He makes it as many as forty thousand, a very considerable army indeed, though how many will remain, once they have been fed and paid and the prospect of long marches and actual fighting conies closer, remains to he seen.

Meanwhile, the bombardment of the nearer streets continues for a couple of hours each day. After that there has to be a pause while more stone balls are brought up to the pieces, and barrels of powder. At one point we heard a brief altercation between Sergeant Earwicca and Lord Scales, which went some way towards explaining the failure of the cannon to throw their projectiles as far as the bridge.

'The fucking powder, yer honour, was mixed up in Epping where the charcoal comes from.'

'I know that, you fool, but where was the powder mixed?'

'And brought in barrels down the river Lee.'

'You blithering idiot, they don't mix powder in the village of Finsbury…'

And so on, the point being that after two hours laying and firing the guns both men were deaf.

Eventually they came to an understanding of each other. The three ingredients of the powder were mixed in Epping Forest and put into barrels there. Now the constituents weigh differently and the shaking and jolting of the transports, followed by a year or more just standing, had separated them so the charcoal powder, being the lightest, was at the top, then the sulphur and finally the saltpetre.

Not completely separated, you understand, but enough to compromise the powder's performance.

Meanwhile, the roofs of the nearest houses are being shattered, and the upper rooms ruined. There have apparently been some deaths and mutilations, and a deputation came to the gates of the Tower to ask Lord Scales to desist. He went out on to the drawbridge to meet them and abused them roundly, saying, 'You scurvy miscreants, I'll blow the whole bloody city apart as long as you harbour a single Yorkist soldier among you. Now get the fuck out of it before I blast you to hell!' and his bowmen let loose a flight of arrows at their backs as they ran for it.

But one man who had had the sense to bring a buckler along with him, which quickly looked like the back of a porcupine with the arrows sticking out of it, yelled back, 'I'll fucking get you. Lord Scales, when you get out of here. One of your fucking cannon killed my daughter!' and so forth, before, walking backwards, he rejoined his friends at a safe distance, up on Tower Hill, just outside the main gate, where traitors are sometimes executed.

Our social life has been much improved by these new circumstances. A handful of lords, supporters of the Queen, who were in London, have, with their households, taken refuge with us. I won't bore you with their names, but they're an uncivilised lot. The women go about with low-cut bodices revealing their breasts almost to their nipples, and with gowns cut away in front so you can see their stockinged legs as high as the knee. All, men and women alike, wear copious amounts of jewellery, but a lot of it I have to say is fake or cheap, as garnets for rubies, feldspar for amethyst and topaz, and gold much alloyed with copper. The general effect reminds us more of temple dancers and actors at home than of princes or ministers.

Anish and I derive much amusement from watching them and conversing with them (we are both now quite at home with the Inglysshe tongue). The women talk of nothing but the expense to which their husbands and fathers have been put to provide their clothes and ornaments, the men of their prowess in the hunt, the strength of their horses, the fleetness of their hounds, and their achievements in jousting – of which more later, if I have time.

Every morning Scales sends out spies, who return every evening with news of what the Yorkists are up to in the town. They have a great asset in an Italian priest called Coppini, sent by the Pope to bring the opposing sides to a peaceful settlement, but who preaches to the citizens in favour of York. The Pope apparently expects to gain from the Yorkists various rights disputed between the Crown and the Church, and urges the King to accede to the Yorkist demands. Meanwhile, all the Yorkist lords made a great public show in the churchyard of St Paul's of swearing fealty and loyalty to the mad King, insisting that their sole aim is to restore good government to the country.

It is now the sixth day of July and the Yorkists have been on Inglysshe soil for a fortnight. The King has made no move against them out of Coventry and people say he fears an invasion in the north by York himself and durst not move. So yesterday they began their move against him instead and ten thousand men under Lord Fauconberg marched north. Today Warwick and March left with a further twenty thousand or more, leaving Warwick's father, Lord Salisbury, here with two thousand men to contain us in the Tower and hold the city.

We were to have a joust in the gardens here today, for the younger men were getting bored and restless. When that happens they fight amongst themselves like puppies while serving-girls, even some of the ladies, go about in constant fear of rape. The lists were set up and the young nobles got into their amazingly complicated heavy armour. This is a crazy sport. They mount horses and charge at each other with heavy spears and try to dislodge each other from the saddle. It looks terrifying, and there's no doubt that inside their steel shells, like crocodiles or giant turtles, those who (all are badly shaken though apparently few are hurt seriously. But it began to rain heavily in the morning, the grass lawns were turned to quagmire, and the whole thing was cancelled.

Here I must finish as Anish tells me he has heard of a carvel due to sail on the tide to the Levant, and he believes he can bribe a kitchen boy who goes down to the markets every morning to take our letters with him. I've rambled on somewhat but. believe me. I hold at the front of my mind, at all times, the plight of Prince Jehani and the hope that one-day we may yet come up with him. And both Anish and I do our best to forget that our heads remain on our necks solely at the whim of an irascible old drunk.

Your obedient and affectionate cousin.

Prince Harihara

Chapter Thirty-Four

' Rain, Mah-Lo, even warm rain like this, still fills my body with

aches and cramps, and my soul with a blank numbness.’ It was indeed raining, the steady warm rain we know will come every evening in June, following a distant rumbling and tumbling of thunder over the Ghats behind us. Because of it we had moved from the shade of the cardamom tree, but only as far as the shelter of a small free-standing kiosk in the middle of his courtyard. It had a tiled roof and upswung caves that caught the water and made it run to the comers where it fell into channels cut into the granite flags. The rain itself splashed into the little pond, and thudded on the leaves of the ornamental shrubs. Like us, the birds that haunted Ali's garden huddled along the ledges beneath the eaves, eyed it all balefully and waited for it to stop. His grey Burmese, very sleek, prowled up and down the edge of the verandah like a caged black-phase leopard, or panther, clearly longing to make a dash for it to a sheltered patch of soil where it could do its business but desperately loath to get wet.

Ali went on, 'Look, Mah-Lo, how my finger joints are swollen. My knees appear no different from normal, I grant you, but believe me, they burn inside with terrible pains, and up here in the hollow of my thigh, it is like a sword-thrust. If it was not for the hashish you brought me yesterday I would be dead or mad…"

And he thrust a ball of the oily resin, as big as the egg of a quail, which he had been rolling between his palms, the warped left one on lop of the sound right, on to the charcoal glowing in the howl of his nargileh before sucking on the mouthpiece as if his life depended on it. As well it might, for all I knew. His sanity anyway. The rich sweet vegetable smoke, cooled by the rosewater through which it had been bubbled, billowed around us. Breathing it in passively, I settled back to enjoy the mild euphoria it provoked, which somehow went well, as far as I was concerned, with the cosy drumming of the rain, the damp warmth, the early darkness of the cloud-filled sky, and presently the steady drone of my companion's old voice.

That last letter of the Prince's has taken us on three months or so. We must retrace our steps in the sands of time, back to Easter, and the day after Peter gave his sermon, the day I set forth again on my short walk through Middle Ingerlond.

It started to rain even before I hail got to the wicket gate and by the time I was through it it was pouring. I damn near turned back. I did turn back. And what did I see but my friend now of several months not waving me goodbye from the dry safety of the door-keeper's lodge, but stumbling down the gravel towards me. He took me by the elbow and steered me straight on along the way I was about to go, up on to the main road that passed by the walls of Oxcnford leaving them on the further side of the brown, swirling, pockmarked water. In his left hand he held a large soft leather bag with handles.

'Forgive me, Ali.' he cried, 'it was boorish of me to send you off like that. Let me come some of the way with you.'

We splashed on through puddles and over ruts, and presently the rain eased a little, the sun warmed our backs, which steamed gently, and a rainbow appeared over to the right, blessing the bleak prison-like dwellings of scholars and clerics with a brief promise of something better. I have to say I felt happy to be on the road: it was three months since I had set foot outside the Osney priory and, pleasant and welcoming though it had been, I was ready to see new faces and new places. As you know, dear Mah-Lo, my wandering life has, until now, but rarely allowed me to spend more than a month or so in one place, and I still get restless, even now when rest is all I need, rest for these aching bones. Which, let me say, are feeling a lot better now. This is good blow you brought me, much better than the local stuff.

'Genuine Moon-disc from the Mountains of the Moon,' I said. 'There was a boat came in yesterday from the Gulf ‘

'The real thing, then.'

And his eyes went dreamy – possibly he has remembering the years he had spent in his youth amongst the Assassins of the Hindu Kush, at the feet of the fakirs who followed Hassan Ibn Sabbah and took bhang for inspiration. Then he took a deep puff, shook his head, grinned lopsidedly, and went on.

Presently we came to a parting of the ways, a crossroads in fact. One path led to a bridge and back to the city, another straight on to the north towards, the signs said, Banbury and Coventry, while the one to the right indicated Burford.

'The Burford road,' said Peter, setting down the leather bag he was carrying, 'for the north west. Burford is an interesting place.'

I fully expected him to leave me now, having set me on the right road, but again he took my elbow, picked up the bag and went with me, looking up at me with almost childish mischief in his eyes.

'We are, you know, a preaching order, a mendicant order, and I have dallied too long in the comfort of the cloister. I feel ready to get out now, preach a bit, see a few new faces, pass on some of the fruits of a winter spent in contemplation and hard study. And watching you go, knowing I'd miss you, I thought, if then, why not now? And look…' he loosened the drawstring on the bag, which was black '… I've brought with me what I could lay my hands on in the moment I had of Roger's writings.'

He pulled up four small books of parchment, bound in leathered boards. He gave the pages a flick. The writing was minuscule.

'All in code,' he added, 'but I've cracked it.'

What followed was not what I intended. We spent far too long walking and talking, many weeks, in fact, in pleasant companionship, with a little hardship but not much. Though I tried to urge-on him that my objective was a conventicle of the Brothers of the Free Spirit, which he himself had told me might be near a place called Macclesfield or Manchester. Brother Peter was in no hurry to be anywhere in particular. And, after all, Prince Jehani was Prince Harihara's brother not mine, and for as long as I believed Harihara to be in prison, there was little point in me trying to find Jehani.

We begged for food (neither of us had with us more than our staff and the clothes we stood up in) and always we got more than we needed. Occasionally Peter gave sermons on street corners, at market crosses, in churchyards or out in the countryside away from the reach of authority or law. His congregations rarely numbered more than a score or so, but equally he was never forced to resort to the expediencies of his mentor, the founder of his order, and preach to the birds. We slept in barns, lazar houses, and occasionally the beds of widows.

The countryside greened up, the ditches filled with flowers, and I soon forgot that the trees had been leafless. Apple trees blossomed, then pears, the meadows filled with small flowers called buttercups, which sheeted them with yellow, and the woods rang with birdsong, especially that of the two-noted cuckoo that lays its eggs in other birds' nests. In the gifts people brought us, soft sour cheeses and cream figured often, eggs, too, and fresh young roots and cresses. The duck eggs were especially good.

For the most part Peter preached a message that was not as brave or far-reaching as that he had been inspired with at Easter, but spoke straightforwardly of the blessings of poverty, sharing, owning things communally. He attacked the priesthood and the Normans for stealing from the working people and he condemned superstition, greed, luxurious living, indolence, warfare and so on, and he used, from memory, the Bible in Inglysshe as a text, the translation of John Wycliffe. He always eyed his listeners with a cunning eye, and tempered his message to those who were there: thus if he saw a constable or a reeve he praised the King and the secular law, if there was a poor priest he praised his poverty but if there was a rich one around, a canon or even an abbot, he came quickly to a conclusion and we moved on.

More interesting were the long talks we had as we covered the ground from one village to the next.

'Let us agree between ourselves,' he said, quite early on, and even though we were alone, walking through an oak forest whose boughs were laced with brilliant yellowish fresh green, which he-had pointed out was not leaves but green flowers, he looked over his shoulder and into the holly thickets, to check there was no one in hearing, 'that God is a meaningless concept. We have no need of him…' 'Or her?'

'Indeed, of her either…' and here he rocked with laughter. 'What a wag you are, Ali. but quite right too. Why shouldn't we call God a woman? Since we're agreed she probably does not exist at all she might just as well be female!'

'You were saying we have no need of her…'

'Save perhaps as First Mover. Something must have kicked the whole thing going, but once started then cause and effect takeover, and she could push off to whatever other universes she has an interest in. Granted that, it becomes fascinating, does it not, to speculate on how cause and effect might have put together a chain of Being that resulted in so many diffuse and different species as we see around us? And perhaps to guess what amongst them were the first originals from which the rest came.'

'Speculation is free and harmless.' I said, but also looked around warily, 'though it may lead to the rack and the stake. So. Speculate."

'I was rather hoping you would.' 'Why me?'

'Since you have so reduced all human learning to the two postulates of your sect's founder, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted", you have sloughed off far more of the baggage of learning with which civilisation has loaded us than I have, and you can thus prance about more freely than I. I mean metaphorically,' he added, glancing at my withered hand and scrawny shanks.

'All right." I agreed, 'here goes.' But I remained mute for some minutes as we rambled on through acorns and beechmast beneath a canopy of layered green until, inspired by his brief absence behind a holly bush where he performed a natural function, I began.

'The first life…' Then I corrected myself. "The first animal life must have begun with the simplest, most basic form, from which all the others developed.'

'And that is?'

'A sack. No. A tube! A tube that maintains itself by sucking in food at one end, absorbing what it needs, and expelling what it does not need at the other. When you think about it, all animal life, including men and women, are at bottom just that. The rest is added to make the basic tube work better. So I'd guess the very first animals were just that and nothing else.'

'So how did they change? Become so varied and different. And so many different types. Species. What,' he added, 'in terms of cause and effect, of action and reaction makes a new thing? What is the origin of species?'

I gave that a little thought. 'Look,' I said eventually, 'I have travelled a great deal, I have seen animals like wild dogs and rodents thriving in deserts; in Muscovy I have seen an elephant, frozen inside a block of ice, with long, long hair, while in Vijayanagara they have almost no hair at all. I have seen monkeys that climb trees and monkeys like the ones on the rock of Jebel Tariq that live in caves and run about on the ground and have a different stance and use their legs in a different way from that employed by the tree-dwellers. And so on. The world is different from outplace to another. There are mountains and plains, valleys and peaks, hot places and cold, wet and dry, rocky deserts and luxuriant forests. And in each place the differences between the animals help them to suit the place where they live.'

'Ah. I see where you're going.' Peter could hardly contain his excitement. 'The first simple tubes would have to change as soon as their surroundings changed, as soon as the food they sucked in and shitted out was different… But how did these changes happen? What was the machinery? Why did they not simply die?'

We trudged on, in a melancholy mood now, fearing perhaps that we might, after all, have to return to that bearded old monster working like a potter for seven days and breathing life into the clay creatures he had created.

Presently, on that day, the heat began to bother us, Peter anyway, who was less used to it than I. We had come into a small glade where a storm had uprooted one of the forest giants and left a space open to the sky on which short green grass already grew. We sat with our backs to the trunk of the fallen hero and looked up into the beechen green above us.

A hundred tiny worms were visible, though they, too, were green, suspended on threads of gossamer from the leaves, and through them flitted a pair of the small red-breasted birds with sharp black beaks. They caught the little worms, which were yet more than a mouthful for them, and carried them away. In the short space that we watched each must have taken at least ten.

'What are they doing with them?' I asked. 'They cannot be eating them all themselves.'

And then I laughed, for one of these robins let go and limed my friend's bald pate.

'Bugger,' he said, and groping around beneath the tree-trunk found a dock-leaf with which he cleaned himself up, leaving a green smear where he could not see it. 'So, up there we have simple tubes that chew up leaves or blossom and pass tiny green droppings, and larger, more complicated ones that fly about, eat the smaller ones, and shit what they do not need having transformed the detritus into a black and white mess. Incidentally, their appetite is apparently ravenous because they are feeding the chicks nested in that hole where the tree has shed a branch. Is there a lesson to be learnt here? basically they are the same, tubular shit-makers, but in accidents so different. Why?'

'The simple ones have only to chew leaves, and when a leaf is nearly gone they spin a thread to get to the next. But the birds need to fly if they are to catch the worms, so they have grown wings and so forth to carry them from worm to worm. At some time in the past they, too, were worms, no doubt, but perhaps their food supply became inadequate, so they changed.'

'So. What you are saying is that we are all, all the animals there are and fishes and birds, just tubular shit-makers who…' he searched for the word '… adopted to changing circumstances so they could continue their main function of shit-production?"

'And staying alive… at least long enough to reproduce their kind.'

'The whole process took more than seven days.' 'I'd say so.'

'So. Those worms, and you and I. each adapted to his surroundings, are simply destined to feed, shit and, once we have reproduced, die.'

'Yes,' I asserted. And I felt a strange excitement well up in me, as might afflict a man who stood silent upon a mountain-top and surveyed a whole new ocean of knowledge, shrouded as yet in impenetrable mist.

'A destiny that lacks the dignity of being made in God's own image.'

'What's dignity got to do with it?'

Peter stood up, gave me a hand, and we set off again, both of us ruminating like a couple of cows.

'If,' I brought forth after a time, 'there were no robins, then the worms would eat all the leaves and there would be no more trees. If there were no more trees there would be no more worms, and soon no possibility even of robins… There is a sort of balance here, an equipoise.'

'Ah, but if there were no worms then I grant you there would be no robins. But there would still be trees. Lots of them.'

Chapter Thirty-Five

After a week or so of gentle walking, sometimes in widening t-\ circles (at one point we reached the eastern bank of the river called Severn, but then turned back as we were now in what Peter called the Welsh Marches, and the Welsh on the other side spoke a language as barbarous as their behaviour), much talking and some preaching we came at last to Burford, which was a place of some interest. But first the approaches signalled a change. We had moved from the river plain into an undulating country, the hills not high but frequent and occasionally steep. Many brooks and rivulets ran through them. There was much forest, but also, especially in the valleys, water-meadows where huge mushroom-coloured kine lay and endlessly chewed on lush grass and king-cups. In the uplands it became more and more the case that commons and what had once been ploughed were enclosed in wicker fences and harboured sheep. The villages we passed through, and occasionally stayed in. were prosperous, many of the buildings, even those of the poorest, of a pleasant warm grey stone. When it wasn't raining women sat in the doorways spinning wool from distaffs on to spindles, gossiping in the sunshine, while indoors or in lean-to sheds their menfolk wove the yarn into cloth on primitive looms. At any rate they looked primitive compared to the ones the Arab nation uses, whether for cotton and silk in Moorish Spain or tine wools in Asia. Many of these people spoke not Inglysshe but a tongue Peter said

was Flemish, from the Lowlands across the Channel. They had the art of weaving and spinning better than the Angles and Saxons, and had been encouraged to settle in Ingerlond.

'With sheep and cattle in the fields, what do these people do for bread, which is the staple of life?' I asked.

'They buy the raw wool from the lords and landowners, who enclosed the land and brought in these people-'

'Wait,' I interrupted. 'What of the peasants who lived here first? The Angles and Saxons?'

'Three things,' he replied, as we toiled up a hill steeper than most on a track hedged with a thorny shrub with bright green leaves sprouting; pinched off between thumb and forefinger they made a delightful savoury salad, which we nibbled at as we walked along. Hawthorn, it was called. 'First, the plague carried off most of them a hundred years ago. This left the lords with a problem – too much land, not enough labourers. Wages rose. Second, those who survived married into the families of the Flemish people, each happily absorbed into the other. Third, those who were dispossessed by enclosure, and would not marry to become spinners and weavers, took to lawlessness and the forests, which they call the Green Wood. There they live off the lords' venison, rabbits, hares and so forth, or hire themselves out to the lords as soldiers in these wars. I'm surprised we have not met any. In many ways they practise what I preach.'

But I was more interested in how the spinners and weavers worked.

'They buy the wool,' Peter replied, 'then spin and weave it. They take it to market where they sell it to merchants. There is a difference, a surplus, between what they pay for it and what they sell it for, and with this difference they buy the necessaries of life, including flour from other parts.'

But by now we had breasted the crest of the hill and were able to look down into a wide lush valley where there nestled a small town or large village. My curiosity about the wool trade was forgotten for a time.

'Burford,' said Peter.

On the way down we passed a small pit in the hillside from which two men were cutting a bluish-grey caked but powdery clay and loading it into a cart.

"Fuller's earth,' said Peter. 'With abundant running water one ol the necessaries for a flourishing wool trade. The others are good pasture for sheep, and skilled craftsmen. The fuller's earth is used for cleaning the grease and fats out of the wool, which help keep the sheep waterproof and well.'

'They certainly need it.' I supplied, for it had come on to rain again. 'Why do they cultivate giant thistles? Surely they are no use to anyone except donkeys.'

Just below the fuller's earth pit there was a small plot filled with the tall spiky plants, as yet only in bud.

'They are not thistles but teasels. Once they have flowered they form hard, brittle seed-cases with bent almost barbed bristles. The weavers use these to tease up the nap on their cloth, which they then shear off leaving a fine almost silky finish, which is much valued by the richer sort.'

'It seems there is a conspiracy between man and…'

'And… God?'

'Nature. To make this a region in which cloth manufacture can flourish.'

'Not forgetting history, the past. Remember the plague.'

Burford was indeed a prosperous place, and newly so. A main street of commodious new houses, timber-framed and brick, leads down from the Oxenford road, which we crossed to a small river on whose bank stood a curious church. Curious, because though three hundred years old it was undergoing substantial refurbishment and rebuilding. A new and graceful steeple had already been erected on top of the massive square tower, while the nave and aisles were being laboriously raised to new galleries with new piers supporting the new roof. Yet most of the lower structure, the side-chapels and so forth, remained unaltered.

I put these anomalies to Peter. 'Surely,' I said, 'it would have made more sense to start afresh. That way they would have-produced a building in a uniform style, harmonious and properly proportioned, instead of this mish-mash. I suspect, too, it would have been cheaper.'

In answer he took me by the elbow, always his practice when something conspiratorial, confidential or requiring persuasion was in the air. and led me into the nave. He pointed up to a niche crowning one of the older arches. There was a statuette, a crude and primitive representation of a woman riding a horse. He then conducted me round the capitals of the older side piers and pointed at equally crude representations of the act of procreation and so forth. Finally in the churchyard he construed what we had seen.

'This,' he said, 'is a temple, not a church. It is a temple not to God hut to the goddess, the white lady who throughout these parts rode on a white horse, naked but for her golden hair and garlands of flowers, at the midsummer solstice. There are signs of her and of the cult that still worships her, all over the place if you know where to look. At Banbury she has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. In Coventry she is Godgifu. The rulers of the Church may try to hide all this by building over it, but they dare not wipe it out.'

'So why,' I asked, 'is this temple, disguised as a church, dedicated to a man. the prophet John the Baptist. I mean, why not to Mary, the mother of the prophet Jesus, whom your people call God and whose mother must therefore be a goddess?'

He looked at me with solemn but expressionless eyes. 'You probably do not know this,' he said, 'but the day on which St John is remembered, and his death especially, is the twenty-fifth of June, the summer solstice. But you will be aware that he was beheaded as the result of the dancing of a beautiful naked woman, was indeed a sacrifice to her. In a few weeks' time you will believe me when the solstice conies and we see the bonfires that will be lit throughout the land."

He preached that evening and, as usual, carefully pitched his sermon to the small group who had turned out by the bridge across the river. Most were buxom, pink-cheeked women, done out in some finery for the occasion, though not ostentatious like the nobility but rather neat and clean in whites, greys, browns and blacks, all with starched caps sometimes tilted up like sails above their not inconsiderable gold necklaces and brooches.

He spoke of the virtues of hard work, of prosperity as a sign not only of hard work but of godly living, not only of godly living but of God having chosen them to be his handmaids. He went on to say how a person was not saved and numbered amongst the elect by good works, or by the sacraments, which were but toys for the simple-minded, but – and this is what 'elect' means – by being chosen. And how does one know one is chosen? First, by an inner certainty that it is so, and second, by the outer signs, the prosperity brought about by good works and hard-won skills. In all this he used as support and example the words, in Inglysshe, of St Paul, also from the Wycliffe Bible. This Paul seemed something of a philosopher in the way he teased at the problem of faith, the chosen, and the efficacy or irrelevance of good works.

This they all loved. The women smirked and smoothed down their aprons, the men puffed out their chests, cleared their throats, ahem!, and nodded meaningfully at their companions.

'What need have we of priests and Latin,' cried Peter, coming to his peroration, 'when we have the Holy Scriptures set forth for us in plain good Inglysshe to guide us? What need of churches when two or three gathered together in His Name have been promised that He will be with them? What need of confession and absolution when we have our own consciences to guide us?'

Finally he produced a story that he said he took from the Gospel of St Matthew, chapter twenty-five, in Wycliffe's version, the story of the talents, and how the master praised the men who made best use of these weighty pieces of gold he had left them with and condemned the man who merely buried his and gave it back.

One weaver, a tall, thin old man, dressed in some splendour in velvet and with a gold chain round his neck, was especially pleased with this and invited us to take supper in his home and bed there too. So prosperous was he that he even had a spare room. His establishment put me in mind of Alderman Roger Dawtrey's in London, though it was not on the same scale. Still, he and his large fair wife, who had a big bony nose and huge breasts, together with his three daughters and his two sons-in-law, gave us excellent entertainment and a royal meal.

Later, as the maidservant of the household climbed the stair ahead of us with a beeswax candle to light us to bed, I asked Peter, 'And what of our lady? Our white lady on her white horse?'

And he replied, 'Oh, I love her madly, but would she get us to a table laden with roast goose, plum duff and cream? She dwells with the shepherds and the few ploughmen left, in the Green Wood, and with the gypsies.'

That night, as Peter lay snoring on the other side of the big bolster that lay between us I got to thinking. These people are prosperous. They make money. But they are frugal with it. They live well, but without ostentatious display or wild extravagance. Yet they are not misers. What do they do with their talents, their surplus gold?

A nobleman whose peasants have produced a surplus of food sells it for cash to artisans and merchants who do not have land. With this spare cash he indulges in conspicuous display, for that is what he values above all else, his self-esteem and the esteem of others. He will buy labour and materials to build ever larger castles and palaces, finer clothes, furniture, gargantuan* feasts, and, if, as so often happens, he is threatened by another nobleman, or he himself covets another nobleman's land, he will buy those most expensive items of all, arms, armour and men, and go to war.

And what will a peasant do who earns, either by hire or by selling his produce, more gold than he needs? Why, he will frugally save it up, bury it beneath the floors of his hut or hovel, against a day when the harvest will fail or his master turns him off his land.

But these weavers and spinners? And likewise merchants and artisans? Well, as a trader for others I have seen it with my own eyes, and I was seeing it again here in Burford. They buy another loom, more distaffs and spindles, and more wool. But they have no time of their own to operate them, so they buy the time of others. But just as they made more money from their own spinning and weaving than they needed, so they will sell their cloth for more than the cost of the extra looms and spinning tools and the time they had to buy, all added together, for there would be no point in doing it if they didn't. And that results in even more gold than they need. What to do with it? Why, the same again. Until one man would own hundreds, maybe thousands of looms, buy time from thousands of workers… and so on, and so on?

* Allow me one footnote as a warning to would-be pedants. OK, Rabelais came a hundred years later, but Gargantua and Pantagmel were popular names for giants throughout the middle ages – Enc Brit, 1911. J. R,

There'd be an end of it, of course. There would soon be more cloth in the land, in the world, than people needed, and once even-man had three coats, one for best, one for daily use, and one in case, there'd be an end of it. But would there? Would not the enterprising man not now look around for other things to make and sell?

My mind began to swim, I felt mentally dizzy, as I tried to formulate examples in my head of how it might work, inventing figures, multiplying them, forgetting the number I'd first thought of. Soon I began to sweat and moan at the enormity of it all. Peter woke up and, grumbling, prodded me into telling him what was bothering me.

When I had done so, with examples and figures, he finally said, 'Ali, with your tale of tubes that suck in sustenance and push out shit you fathomed the distant past. Now, with your man going to market with twenty yards of linen, you have unravelled the future. So go to sleep.'

'Wool,' I said. 'Cloth. Twenty yards of cloth not linen.'

'Funny,' he said, 'I could have sworn you said linen.'

The next day we set off in a north-westerly direction with serious intent to get towards Macclesfield, or Manchester, but still keeping to the byways and smaller places. The next night, I recall, we were given shelter in a barn in a bed of what was left of last year's hay. I remember it because when we stopped on the outskirts and looked around us there was a moment of evening stillness. Then a blackbird opened its throat and sang from the top of a willow tree, and round him, through the evening mist, we could hear all the birds, for miles around, singing their hearts out. The place was called Adle's Trap.

By now the bushes whose leaves had provided such tasty salads, and which served often in that area to make hedges, had burst into profuse bloom, which arched down over us, thousands of small white flowers in clusters so they looked like spray tumbling over the crest of a wave, the green surf that thunders against our coast here in Malabar. I know the comparison sounds far-fetched, but it was further justified by the fact that the ditches below these hedges were now filled with even tinier clusters of white flowers growing up in plate-shaped circles so it looked like the swirling of the wave before.

The first flowers, the ones on the bushes, had a heady fragrance, slightly sweet but somehow animal as well. Mah-Lo, I don't think I shall embarrass you by telling you what it smelt like. But for a man, and for some women, too, I daresay, it's the most exciting odour in the world. No wonder these flowers that bloom in the month of May are called may, which is one of the names Parvati or Uma has in those parts.

All of which led me to think with some nostalgia, indeed a little longing, for all I was even then a quite old old man, of our Uma, and to wonder where she might be and how she was faring.

Next day we passed through one of many towns in Ingerlond called Stratford. Peter said it was famed in those parts for the quality of the gloves it produced, which brought it some prosperity but nothing on the scale of that of the weavers and spinners in the hills we had left behind us. We crossed a river called Avon – there are as many Avons as there are Stratfords – and admired the swans that were building a big nest downstream in the rushes, which grew beneath a slanting willow in the churchyard. Then we pressed on a further hour or so up the Coventry road to a hamlet called Snitterfield.

Here a peasant called Shagsper took us in, showing some faith in Peter's robe for he needed help and guidance of the sort he felt a Franciscan might provide. The midwife hail gone into Stratford for the day and his wife was in labour and bleeding. Two or three women of the village, of the sort who make a profession of mourning and laying-out had already gathered at Shagsper's door anticipating the worst – or, from their point of view for they were like crows gathering about a corpse, the best.

Peter immediately made several infusions in which both fresh young raspberry leaves, willow-bark, valerian and rosemary figured, and, between her groans and screams, persuaded Mistress Shagsper to take them. Then he got his patient off her bed and on to the birthing stool, which her husband had been loath to do without the presence of the midwife. Presently she brought forth a thin-boned and wrinkled little boy. Peter hastily christened him John, thus ensuring that if he died he'd go straight to heaven.

However, the baby fed well from his mother's breasts, and the blue colour of his skin receded, became a healthier pink, and presently, hilled by his mother's singing, he went to sleep. 'Never harm, nor spell, nor charm, Come our lovely baby nigh,' she sang, probably making it up on the spot. 'Lulla, lulla lullaby.' Not the most moving or penetrating of lyrics, but it served.

As we left Snitterfield we passed two villagers trimming a hawthorn hedge where its branches had grown over the track enough to be a nuisance to passers-by. One was hacking at it with a small axe; the other trimmed it with a pruning knife.

'Oi rough-hews 'em,' said the first, as we passed.

'An' oi shapes their ends,' the second concluded.

'What philosophers these men are,' cried Peter.

'Whatever do you mean?'

'The irresistible forces of nature, as witnessed in the causes and effects that create species, rough-hew our destinies. And accumulated wealth employed reproductively shapes our ends. History in a mouthful.'

Chapter Thirty-Six

he roads were filling up now. Every day we saw men in armour, often on horseback, heading towards Coventry, and three times a cannon-train: mules pulling these cumbersome weapons along roads too narrow for them or too rutted, or which crossed fords too deep. Since we knew that the King and court were in Coventry it was not difficult to guess what was happening. He, or, if he was as mad as people said, his affinity and connections, especially the Queen, were preparing for the arrival of the Yorkists, both those with the Duke himself, expected any day from Ireland, and those from Calais led by his cousin, the Earl of Warwick. I recalled that one of these was Eddie March and how Uma had bedded him with so much pleasure to both that they had nearly been caught by Lord Scales. Only my quick intervention with his horse had saved him. It seemed not impossible that if she was still alive she might have sought to join him again and, indeed, perhaps Prince Harihara and Anish might do the same since they had employed March as their guide in Ingerlond. With this in mind I was not entirely loath to postpone our trip into the north-west to search out the Brothers of the Free Spirit – at least, until I had news of my friends' and employer's whereabouts and fortunes. Moving towards the area where the King's army was collecting seemed as good a plan as any since, no doubt, the Yorkists would do the same if they wanted a battle.

There was lots of fresh food now, much of it the same or like the foods we Arabs eat, such as beans and later peas and many green-leafed salads but lacking the interest our spices and herbs give them, apart from mint and parsley. Indeed, the whole-countryside would have been a sort of paradise if it were not for the crazy weather.

But what I remember most, and it would have pleased the Hindus of these parts, were the fields held in common by all the local community, often by riverbanks, where the grass grew thick and lush with hundreds of smaller herbs and (lowers amongst it, and cows munched their way through it. Most families had a cow, and each village had common land all could share. The cows were not as big as ours, had smaller horns and dewlaps, but huge udders; throughout this Middle Ingerlond, cream and butter, cheese and milk were abundant.

What our Hindus would not have liked – and Prince Harihara and Anish must have been disgusted by- if they had come across it – was the eager, even greedy way these people feasted off beef. The bullocks were separated from the heifers and mostly killed and eaten before they were two years old, often roasted over huge fires at fairs and festivals. It didn't bother me, and once I had the taste for this Inglysshe beef I sought it out whenever I smelt the rich odour of burning flesh drifting across a meadow filled with stalls, pedlars and the common folk. On account of the abundance of green, fresh grass, and water too, these animals never had to walk more than fifty or a hundred paces in a day, so their meat was tender and rich with fat.

The one thing they did not grow in Ingerlond was hemp, which grieved me. I would not touch their stronger beers or mead, an alcoholic drink made from honey. Although I now counted the Prophet's interdiction useless superstition, the avoidance of strong drink was so deeply ingrained I could not even smell it without a slight feeling of nausea. But bhang or hashish I would have given my soul for, supposing I have one and anyone wants it.

The fairs were an excuse for rural sports, which were often both absurd and dangerous. Men shot arrows at bird carcasses whirled round on the ends of ropes in simulation of flight or at distant targets made up to look like the heads of Saracens. Although it was many decades since anyone had been on a crusade, which is what the Christians call a jihad, they were still remembered. Oddly enough, no one hit on my dark visage as a sign that I might be one. Or perhaps they weren't bothered whether I was or not. By and large the Inglysshe are tolerant and easy-going – the old Inglysshe, that is, not the Normans – so long as their bellies and tankards are full. The men also sat on greasy poles set across brooks and tried to knock each other off with bags filled with sand; they ran races wearing armour; they split wood with giant axes; they wrestled in a variety of styles. Often we saw broken limbs, bloodied noses, and bruised faces worn with pride by winners and losers alike.

All these were one man against the rest to find the best, but we also came across, and particularly on Midsummer Night's Eve, a contest between all the men of one village against those of another. The object was to get an inflated bladder into the centre or some other agreed point in the opposing village. Simple. Indeed, very simple, for there were no rules except against the carrying of actual weapons. Teams seemed to divide themselves into those who relied on brute force and those who expected to win through cunning. The first, having obtained the bladder or ball, simply bunched around the man carrying it and in a solid block attempted to push their way through all opposition to their goal. The second used decoys and fast running to jinx their way through, often drawing most of the opposition after a runner carrying a similar but not genuine bladder, while the real bladder was carried or kicked by byways and round the back. Because of the nature of the bladder it was possible to kick it over quite long distances, up to a hundred paces, to get it over the heads of opponents to men of one's own side. Kicked, it travelled further and straighter than when thrown. Men who had this kicking skill were especially valued and honoured by their team-mates.

My companion had a strange liking for this sport. When we watched it he would quickly identify himself with one of the participating villages, buy or borrow the favours their supporters wore, such as ribbons in special colours or scarves, then run about cheering their successes and groaning or even using uncouth language when they failed, and shouting catchphrases and snatches, lie explained that before taking orders in his early twenties but while still a student at Oxenford, he had been an adept and turned out for the student hall where he lodged.

At the end of the day the losing village played host to both communities and round a giant bonfire plied each other with beer, or cider made from apples nine or ten months earlier and now unbearably tart on the tongue, no sweetness left, which they nevertheless consumed copiously since it made them drunk even more quickly than their beer. Meanwhile they danced, they danced to bagpipe, flute and drum, strange maze-like dances, or dances in which they banged sticks together. Many had bells attached by ribbons to their bodies. And suddenly, through this cacophony, prancing, grotesque capering, I heard and saw something quite different, the whirling sword dances of the Moors in Granada, and the circling arms and stamped feet of the Moorish women. This may have been illusion, though I later learnt that it was believed these dances were first brought to Ingerlond by John of Gaunt, great-grandfather of the present King, who had fought campaigns in Spain.

Towards midnight all who were still on their feet jumped through the flames, those who were not on their feet but awake copulated with the girls, but many just snored through a senseless stupor until dawn.

As I have said. Brother Peter was much taken with the bladder-game, which he called 'footie', and a fortnight or so later suddenly revealed what may have been his purpose all along in taking us south and east instead of north and west: there was annually held, round about the tenth day of July, a particularly watchable contest between two villages on the banks of the river Nene a mile south of a town called Northampton. These were Sandyford and Hardingstone, which was a further mile or so to the south. We arrived on the site late on the evening of the ninth, wet through after two days of continual rain, and almost immediately ran into a picket of armed men on horses guarding the ford.

'Ah,' said Peter, 'these will be constables placed here to ensure that no members of either team will break the prescribed bounds of the contest by crossing the river and thereby stealing a march on the others.'

'Maybe,' I said, looking down into the swirling, rushing water, 'but believe me, no one is going to cross here without a boat.'

For fordable though it may have been on an ordinary day, on this day, on account of the rain, it looked deep and fast-flowing,

We walked on through the gathering dusk and presently came to the road to the south, the highway. Between the river and the undulating plain it crossed a low rise.

'This will be a capital vantage-point from which to follow the course of tomorrow's contest,' Peter exclaimed with glee, and we followed it to the top.

A gang of twenty or so men, in half-armour and supervised by another horseman, was dragging a large cannon up the hill from the river to join four more that were already deployed across the crest. They protected the approach to the town, whose towers and spires loomed through the murk a mile or so behind us and on the other side of the river.

'No doubt,' Peter continued, 'these men belong to the Sandyford team and are here to defend the extremity of their territory.'

He seemed not to have noticed the cannon, or chose to ignore them. It was then that I noticed something abnormal about his appearance.

'Peter,' I said, 'do you realise you are wearing your spectacles? Normally you only have them on when you are reading.'

A moment later, while Peter was still fumbling with his lenses and peering about him with ever-increasing signs of surprise, the supervising horseman accused us of being Yorkist spies and ordered his men to tie us to a gnarled and lichened apple tree that grew on the top of the rise.

'You can jolly well stay there,' this unpleasant youth added, in the accents I had learnt to associate with the Norman tribe, 'until we've seen your beastly friends awff. Then we'll take you deown to the teown and find out what colour your insides are.'

On top of everything else it rained all night.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I woke, yes, woke, although I was tied upright, facing outwards, my wrists to Peter's wrists, my ankles to his, with the trunk of the tree between us. A bough of tiny immature apples bumped my forehead, a patch of piss was running down my inside leg, and the sound of a skylark shrilled in my ears. We were both intolerably stiff, aching in every joint and muscle, but as we stirred the sun rose over the plain to the east and a few moments of warm sunshine eased the pain.

Around us and below, the gunners were also stirring, lighting fires and cooking a breakfast in which, from the smell of it, bacon and black pudding played a considerable part, smells both of us found disgusting for a time though soon even in my Muslim soul and Peter's Franciscan one they wakened hunger. Presently a sergeant-gunner, a barrel of a man with long yellow hair, a huge moustache of the same colour and a week's growth of beard, dressed in brown studded leather, a mail skirt, a breastplate and rimless helmet took pity on us and made one of his crew give us some bread, which, of course, he had to hold for us.

From his side of the tree, Peter asked me what I could see of what was happening.

Since I was facing east and south I had to screw up my eyes against the sun, still low in the sky beneath a bank of black cloud. 'Well,' I said, 'the slope is uneven but gentle, and loses itself in a plain that is yet not completely flat. There is common land, pasturage, a couple of villages, one of which I suppose is Hardingstone, with fields about them. Beyond them is the forest. The road winds down the slope, between the villages, and loses itself amongst the trees.' 'Is there much in the way of activity?'

'Quite a lot. A hundred yards away the men are trying to adjust the position of the cannon under the direction of the bastard lordling who put us here. But they are having a lot of difficulty since during the night they have sunk almost to the axles of their small wheels in the clay. Our young friend is growing very bad-tempered about it.'

‘I can hear him.'

'No doubt you can hear, too, a monotonous hammering noise, wood on wood. This is because many more men, armed and armoured, are coming into the scene and are hammering stakes into the ground with sharpened points angled upwards, digging a ditch and throwing up a rampart, stretching three hundred paces or more on either side of the road, in a line at right-angles to it. That's about it. No. I'm wrong. Suddenly they are all excited and I can see why. Coming out of the forest and heading up the gap between the villages is a long column of soldiers carrying lances on their shoulders, and here and there in the column groups of fifty or more men in heavy armour on big horses

'How far away?'

'A mile or so.'

'And you can see them in that much detail?' 'My one eye is better than your two.'

A moment of silence from my friend, possibly a touch of chagrin. I sought to mitigate any offence I might have given. 'And what can you see on your side?'

'Not a lot. A large camp of soldiers. Tents. The King's standard. No sign of footballers, though, But it's early yet.'

The morning wore on. More and more men came up from the river and formed up behind the stakes, many of them archers with those vicious longbows. There were horses, too, clad in plate armour and carrying armoured men. Whenever they got into a declivity or a marshy patch – there was one such over to my left where a stream meandered through fields to join the Nene, which was out of my view – the combined weight was too much and the horses sank to their knees, whinnied and neighed in distress and panic and threatened to unseat those of the knights who had not already dismounted. But most were foot-soldiers, also in full armour and carrying billhooks with axe- or mattock-like blades, and heavy swords at their sides.

About mid-morning we heard trumpet calls and drum-beats and, Here we go. I thought, but, no. it was for a parley that they sounded. Out of the more distant ranks now serried in front of the forest to the south came twenty or so horsemen with a herald's trumpet in front, carrying big banners covered with the complicated devices all Europeans carry into battle as means of identification. Though how an ordinary soldier is meant to distinguish each from the other, to know friend from foe in the heat of battle, without a dictionary of heraldic devices as part of his battle-kit, defeats me. Probably defeats him too.

Our popinjay, now mounted since the ground on the rise was firmer than below, shaded his eyes and spoke to a couple of similarly mounted and armoured young men who had come up to join him. 'Oh, Christ, it's the Godgang,' he exclaimed.

'Godgang, Justin? What's a fellow meant to make of that?'

'Bishops, dear Maurice. There's old Bourchier there, Archbish of Canterbury, can't mistake his white beard. Cousin of York's, ain't he?'

'Brother-in-law, son of. And that's Salisbury with him." the third chipped in.

'You're talking through your arse-hole, old chap. Salisbury's even longer in the tooth than the Archbish.'

'God, Maurice, what a wanker you are. It's the Bishop of Salisbury not the Earl. And that swarthy character with him must be Coppini. Pope's legate. Wop. Eyetie.'

'Question is, what are they up to?'

'I reckon they'll try to get to the King and say it's not him they're after but the Queen and all her people, and if he'll come quietly there won't be a battle.'

'Well, it might work. The old fool can't stand fighting. Nasty men bashing each other with axes. Gives him a headache.'

'Old Staffers won't let them through, though, will he?'

'Not a chance. With this hill in our favour and the cannon, we can't lose. Staffers is spoiling for a battle. Get them out of the way and we can get down to London and sort out poor old Scalesy. He's been locked up in the Tower since Christmas.'

'I say. though, those chaps do seem to have an awful lot of chaps with them. Must be getting on for twice our lot.'

'Don't worry, Maurice. We've got the cannon, right?'

'Sure, you're right. No need to worry then. I'd better be getting back to the headman.'

And the one called Maurice trotted off with a great jangling and clanging of armour, leaving our man and Justin behind.

'Who's Morrers with, then? And why is he wearing that black stick thing on his helmet?'

'Lord Grey of Ruthin. Local chap. Joined the King because he reckoned he'd get help in a land dispute with his neighbour. Don't trust them an inch. If Warwick offers him a better deal he'll change sides.'

'Still. We do have the cannon.'

'Oh, yes. We have the cannon.'

It began to rain again.

It was all over by four o'clock. Peter and I had a good view of it and what we couldn't see we pieced together later.

First, the bishops rode back at about one o'clock, and since there was no reaction we supposed rightly that they had failed in their mission. Then Peter started hollering and shouting, 'Kick it, you stupid bastard, pass, pass the ball. Oh, he's lost it, the silly fucker…' and a lot more of the same and I could feel his hands tugging at mine so he wrenched my back into the trunk of the apple tree then gave my shins a jolt as he tried to mime kicking with his feet. I truly thought the battle had started, that the Yorkists had somehow got behind the King's lines and were rampaging along the river bank behind us, but, no, it was the footballers. I have to tell you, Mah-Lo, many Inglysshemen, and some of their women too, take these games very seriously indeed.

Then: 'Oh, no, the bastards, what are they doing?'

'You tell me.'

'The King's rearguard are seeing them off They've – I do not believe it – they've taken their ball from them… They're all going home! They can't believe it's all over… But it is, for now.'

And he went on shouting and swearing about it so I wasn't able to tell him what was happening in front.

First there was another blast of trumpet calls, then the Yorkists below began to move forward. The man called Justin and our popinjay trotted off through the rain, which was now coming down like rods or the lances of the advancing army. I could see them moving about the cannon, and even how they were blowing on the fuse, trying to get a spark going, and indeed there was a puff of smoke and a glimmer of a flame, but instead of a bang a sound like nothing so much as a loud fart. The ball almost rolled out of the muzzle, trundled a few yards down the slope before it stopped and sank into the mud a clear hundred yards in front of the Yorkists. They gave a great cheer and quickened their movement up the slope as fast as the mud and rain would let them. Which was not very fast.

Going uphill, through the mud, the horses could not make it, not with the weight of their own armour as well as their riders'. The knights dismounted, or slid off their high-pommelled saddles, and waded up the hill with their men. They were a strange sight, like giant mechanical dolls such as I've seen at Byzantium. On their helmets they had huge crests in the forms of animals' and monsters' heads, trees, eagles with spread wings, castles, ships, even, giving them two or three feet more in height over the rest. If they stumbled and fell it took four men to get them up again, yet few were hurt. A well-placed arrow might find the chain-mail in their crotches, or a joint in their armour, but otherwise their plate, rounded and pointed, never presenting a flat face, turned the missiles.

And, of course, when they finally got amongst the ranks of the enemy, if they ever did, they were ruthless executioners of everything that came their way, smashing all the common soldiers in their slighter armour, with huge blows from maces, axes, or broadswords four feet long, which inflicted terrible wounds, crushing skulls, slicing through shoulders into ribcages, causing blood to fountain up everywhere and severing arms thrown up in supplication.

Below me, the fight was even since the cannon were useless in the rain: the Yorkists had more men, but the King's side had that hill, which on account of the thick, greasy mud was even more of an advantage than ever.

It was a different story, however, on the eastern side of the field where the marsh and brook were. Here, the advance was held up by the waterlogged ground; here, too, the lords and knights had to get off their horses, which could carry them no longer, and wade with their men towards the rampart and the stakes. As they came they faced salvo after salvo of arrows from those wicked longbows and men began to fall. And right in the middle and at the front, with arrows bouncing off his shield, waving a huge sword and shouting at his men to follow him was an awesome figure of a man. Somehow I knew who he was, even at that distance. Something in the way he held himself, something about the way he flourished that sword made me certain I had seen him before: Eddie March? Maybe.

The cannons had failed but the longbows, the clinging mud and the rain were doing their work. It looked for a few minutes as if the Yorkists were not going to make it to the ramparts and certainly not over them, not for as long as the bowmen had arrows to shoot, but then it all went wrong for Stafford, Duke of Buckingham and the King.

The line between the bowmen dicing March and the cannon just below me was held by a thousand or more wearing that black stick badge. Lord Grey of Ruthin's men. Hardly any arrows had been fired from this sector and as the first Yorkists, led by a lord in full armour, tramping and clanking up the hill, reached the rampart. Lord Grey's men leant over it and helped him across!

Well, that was that. Grey's men turned themselves round, save those who continued to help the Yorkists, who were soon flooding through the gap and tanning out to the left and the right on our side of the fortifications. The King's men realised they were beaten and ran for it round the ridge and back to the Nene.

Now it was Peter's turn to tell me what was happening.

'Oh, the poor buggers,' he exclaimed. 'They can't get across the ford – the river's too full and fast and the bridge is too narrow. They're cutting them up like – like – so many bushels of rye in July. Ugh! Blood everywhere. The river's running with blood. It's a shambles. I can see the Duke. Stafford. Duke of Buckingham. He's trying to rally them, make them turn and fight. Oh, no. He's down. Oh, the poor sod. His standard's down too. There's about six men hacking at him. He doesn't stand a chance. Oh, that's it. They've got his head off, stuck it on a lance. Jesus, there goes the King. Ducking and weaving like a chased fox, heading for the bridge. There's men of his letting him through. He'll get away. Yes, he will. Oh, no, he won't. He's run up against an archer. Drawing his bow at him. Ooops, that's it, the Yorkists have got him, they're taking him back to his tent… Well, at least they haven't cut his head off. Yet.'

At this moment a Yorkist knight came puffing up on to the crown of the hill and, seeing us and our predicament, assumed we must be enemies of the King and therefore friends of York, so cut us free.

He stood beside us as we rubbed our chafed wrists and ankles and, indeed, supported me for a minute or so, since my knees were buckling under me. We told him we hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours save a crust of bread, so he scouted about a bit and came back with bread and cheese and a canister of milk. Nice lad, for all that the surcoat over his breastplate was splashed with blood, not his own.

Now there was a sudden stillness over all the field for in the entrance of his tent stood King Henry, lean and gangly, pale, his head shaking and his fingers twining in and out in front of him as, no doubt, he considered, as best his fevered mind would allow, how to behave. Should he fall on his knees and beg for his life?

But no. It was the Yorkists who knelt, and such was the silence that even at that distance one felt one could hear the creak and clang of their jointed armour.

'Odd behaviour for the winners,' I muttered.

First they unbolted their visors and lifted off their plumed and absurdly crested helmets so when they now stood I could clearly discern the one I knew: Eddie March, yes, it was he, his light brown hair darkened with sweat, his face still red from the heat inside the helmet and the effort of fighting while shut inside a hundredweight or so of metal. The heraldic devices on his shield were similar to the ones on the King's banner: gold lions on red, quartered with silver lily flowers on blue. I wondered if there was some magic in this, or calculated insult, but forgot to ask about it until the reason for it became obvious.

On this occasion, before I could give the matter any thought, Warwick, dark, big, handsome, a man in his prime in contrast to Eddie, who was not yet eighteen, having made the obeisance due to the man who was still king, the Lord's Anointed, as they said, threw back his head and bellowed like a bull: 'So Where's the fucking Queen, then? And the bastard they call the Prince of Wales?'

At this point Ali, whose speech had been getting slower and slower, yawned and fell silent.

The rain had begun to ease as dusk gathered; the Burmese returned from the bushes and leapt into his lap. He tickled her under the chin.

I heard a doorlatch click and looked across the pool and into the verandah. His two wives, veiled in muslin but as lovely with rounded breasts and slim waists as their aunt, were coming towards us.

'Come back tomorrow, dear Mah-Lo,' said Ali, 'and we'll hear what had been happening to Uma.'