Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

Not bad, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'At the beginning?'

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

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

'How did you escape?' I asked him.

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

'Just now you said you were eight.'

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

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

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

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

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