Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

I thought about what he had been through and what was to come.

'Anish-bey,' I said, giving him the Arab title since I am an Arab and we were in Arab country, 'I don't think we have passed the boundary. We are close to it, but I would say we are still in a country that may properly be called civilised."

'With public executions? Impaling? To say nothing of this hunting business.'

'Believe me. You have not seen anything yet.'

That evening over supper, taken outside the pavilion with silver lamps hanging from its arches and in the trees, the song of crickets and a great orange moon above the minarets beyond, pretending to eat sand-grouse and gazelle meat (the rotten carcasses had been buried and what we had were chicken and goat from the market), the three of us discussed which route we should take to Ingerlond. I favoured running along the coast to Sebta, crossing the straits to the great rock called Jebel Tariq and making our way to Kaniatta-al-Yahud which, I argued, would prolong our stay in civilisation longer than any other route. Of course, I had in mind that that way I would be able to see Haree, though I kept that consideration to myself. However, Anish had done some homework on his own through an Indian merchant from Bombay he had hunted out, and had discovered that all commerce between the centres of civilisation and the western barbarians was done through the city-states of Venice and Genoa, that although there was always the danger of piracy the Venetians voyaged in convoys; moreover they used galleys with oars as well as sails, which precluded the delays that might attend calm weather or adverse winds. Consequently, I was commissioned next day to leave for Iskenderia, find a ship-broker and charter a galley to take us to Venice. My familiarity with the port stood me in good stead and I had no difficulty in finding what we needed.

It was then that Uma took me to one side and asked me if I would teach her the Inglysshe language. I proceeded to do so, whenever the opportunity arose, and found her an apt pupil -more so than the Prince and Anish, who occasionally joined us and made a class of these lessons.

Our induction into barbarity remained gradual. Venice, of course, looks to the east and has borrowed much of our glory in its own architecture, along with the treasures it has plundered from us. St Mark's not only looks like a mosque with a minaret, many of its stones were taken from Arab and Ottoman lands. The city-republic boasts painters of remarkable skill some of whom, had they not been fixated either on the infancy of their god and his mother or his ugly death, equalled – so Prince Harihara asserted – those of Vijayanagara. They seemed, too, to have a fair appreciation of the joys of what it is like to be truly human that we found only rarely the further we journeyed west and north.

While we were there I went in search of the alchemist who had discovered such a signal way of making an infusion out of k'hawah beans. He was still alive, though in straitened circumstances, and delighted to find we had brought two heavy sacks with us. We took a sample along to a Jew who traded in money from a house on the Giudecca. He sampled the drink and lent a considerable sum to my alchemist, who was able thereby to set up a k'hawah house once more in the Piazza di San Marco. The money we raised defrayed all the expenses of our expedition's stay in that watery city. This Jew, Shillem by name, had an interesting history: he had been forced to convert following a nit-picking judgement made against him by the supreme court of the city. However, he had got over this and had been back in business as a banker for a decade or more. I have to say he treated us fairly.

In miles we were now well over half-way to our destination but not in time; in fact, it took us as long again as we hail already taken, and more, to find our way to Calais. The adventures and difficulties we went through are not germane to the main thread of my story so I will cut short the telling of them.

Having hired mules and asses in Mestre. We followed the valley of the river Po across the north of Italy through Vicenza, Verona and Milano to Torino.

There was much to admire in all these places but they were spoiled by the continuous state of warfare between them and even between rival parties within them. Often these fatal feuds were between families of merchants who, instead of competing in the marketplace by improving the quality of their goods or selling cheaper, resorted to swords, daggers and poison. The situation was particularly bad in Verona, which we passed through as quickly as we could after losing one of our cooks in a brawl between two gangs of unruly youths belonging to rival families. These youths even resorted to despoiling each other's tombs, but that's another story.

It was now late summer, and quite hot so the change of climate did not much bother us until we began to climb the mountains north-west of Torino. Mere, at the top of a pass called Mont Cenis, which offered us majestic views of peaks near and distant the like of which I have only seen in the high Pamirs, we caught sight of distant snow. No one would believe it was other than outcrops of white marble and branded me a liar when I tried to tell them it was crystallised water.

'Like purified sugar or salt?' Anish exclaimed mockingly.

'Like purified salt in appearance,' I replied, 'but very cold.'

Prince Harihara, however, supported me. He had heard of it but had never realised it existed in such vast quantities.

We were to see a lot more before we were through.

My companions felt the cold in the mountains and were glad to descend again into the wide valley of yet another great river, this nine the Rhone, where we found the peasants occupied with the harvest of grapes from which they made a fermented alcoholic drink that has a similar effect to bhang or rice wine, but leaves you sick and with a headache. Taken in excess over a long period, it produces fatal internal bleeding and even madness. So much were the people of the area addicted to it that they grew vines in preference to wheat, hemp and other wholesome crops.

It was now that my inexperienced companions began to experience the phenomenon that over the next year and a half was to disturb them almost more than any other: the change of the seasons. In Vijayanagara there are two, warm and wet. and hot and dry, and they follow a pattern so predictable that you can tell to the day in advance when the rains will begin and at what time of day it will rain and for how long. My friends soon discovered that a day might begin warm and bright, but end cold and wet, and that as the months rolled by the leaves fell off most of the trees, that almost all growth failed so the people had to subsist on what they had stored in barns which, by the following spring, was usually rotten. We saw people dying of hunger – a sight to which I was no stranger, but which Prince Harihara and Anish declared was obscene, an offence against nature and the gods, which indeed it is.

While I have a speculative mentality Anish likes to categorise, label, evaluate. Once, as we passed across a high plain where the crop of wheat had been burnt before harvesting rather than the stubble afterwards, where we saw the unburied corpses of women and children who had been raped and impaled, where we passed an open grave-pit filled with the blackened corpses of those who had died of plague, he said, 'Ali, you know if you said our Vijayanagaran commonwealth was the First World, and the Arab states we passed through the Second, then this surely is the Third and worst, a world where the evil hounds of famine, sword and pestilence range at will behind the god of war.'

We made slow progress up the Rhone and then the Saone,.moss those burnt and ravaged uplands then down the Seine to Paris, passing through lands owned or ruled by the King of the franks and the Duke of Burgundy, who were rivals for supremacy in the area, and many other fiefdoms, principalities and duchies, seeing many skirmishes on our way. We also saw much repression and persecution of the peasantry, and of anyone who raised a voice against the abuses or irrationality of the Church; this resulted in frequent burnings and worse in public places. As foreigners who were clearly not Christians and, since our skins were dark instead of pale, cold and bloodless, possibly not fully human, we were in constant danger of being arrested and condemned as heretics, spies or aliens. However, these people believed above all in money and wealth, although they were loath to admit it, and we were always able to buy safe-conducts and even armed protection from the nobles whose land we rode across from the store of gold and jewels we had brought with us.