Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

Well, here we arc in Calais, in the castle or keep, and things are a little better than they were before. And often knee-deep. This Duke of Somerset stole our saddle horses – he called it requisitioning – leaving us only the pack animals, which in effect he confiscated as well but then, on Ali's insistence, agreed to sell them back to us. So, although we had to walk we were able at least to take with us the few precious commodities we still had left for trade and barter.

The rain continued to fall, blowing across the bleak plain like curtains of icy grey silk which yet, perhaps on account of the fineness ot the drops, seemed to penetrate our clothes or at any rate seek out the gaps between them and our skin. Our feet squelched in the yellowish-white clay, which contrived to be both sticky and greasy at the same time – that is, it stuck like overcooked unwashed rice to our footwear, yet when impacted presented a surface on which one slid and tumbled. Some of the small rivers we crossed had precarious plank bridges, just wide enough to take a narrow agricultural cart, but three of the lesser ones had no bridges and we had to wade through them, dragging our reluctant asses and mules behind us.

The fields were ploughed but not yet harrowed and water lay in runnels like strips of polished lead in the furrows. When, or if, the land dries out, the soil will be broken up and planted with seed which, in eight months' time, will carry grain, which they call rye and which they will grind for the flour to make the bread that is the staple diet of the ordinary people. We have already had our fill of it. It is heavy, grey, stodgy, sour stuff, which has caused most of us to be severely constipated. However, here in Calais the nobility eat a white bread made from wheat, which is almost palatable.

The leafless trees looked dead though some we were told, those planted in regular lines, were fruit trees and would bear fruit when summer, the warm season, comes. They keep these fruits in the roofs of their barns, wrapped in straw. We have eaten some. They are called apples. The skin is dry wrinkled and coarse, the white flesh squashy yet dry too. They are a pale brown but, we are told, when fresh they were a yellowish green and so delicious that they call them golden. According to Ali, the apples grown in Ingerlond are better.

There is meat available – beef, which of course we will not touch, pork, which Ali refuses, mutton and domestic fowls – though little is eaten by the common people. Almost all the animals and poultry they rear are taken into the city and sold so they can pay rent and taxes to the landowners, who are Ingerlonder gentry. They either boil it in pots or broil it over open fires. In neither case do they try to improve the flavour apart from smearing it with salt before cooking. It is thus either tasteless or disgusting. They drink milk, but straight from the cow without allowing it to mature or ferment so it is bland, ale, which is a sour strong liquor made from grain that has been allowed to germinate and rot, and wine, also very tart so it seems to take the skin off the inside of one's mouth. They do not drink water, which they say carries disease. Consequently the Ingerlonders are drunk by the end of every meal, including breakfast.

Although it was only twenty miles, this last stage of our journey took two days – partly on account of the shortness of the days but mainly because of the state of the road. We spent the night in a fortified tavern with a courtyard in the middle, stabling on three sides of the ground floor, a communal room on the other, and dormitories above. There was nothing in the way of hygiene. Travellers, male and female, were expected to piss and shit on the edges of a great pile of steaming muck in the middle of the courtyard – a mountain of human ordure and the sweepings from the stables. There were no washing facilities. Apart from those provided by the incessant rain.

This inn marked the border between the land controlled by Warwick, which we were entering, and that of Somerset, which we were leaving. We had been accompanied by a small troop of Somerset's soldiers who stayed at the inn, relieving their comrades who returned on the next day to Guisnes. At the inn there were soldiers in the service of Warwick. We expected them to fight, but though they were well armed they saw no reason to do so, which was the first mark of good sense I have seen amongst these people. They carried swords, bows and arrows, and wore rimmed helmets over chain-mail cowls, and jerkins. They did not carry shields, as these, they said, would interfere with their handling of the bows. Shields, they said, were for the gentry. I allowed them to see the keen interest I felt in their bows and they were kind enough to demonstrate them.

They are fearsome weapons. Each bow is a simple branch, shaped and seasoned, nearly six feet long. The arrows are a yard long and tipped with a slim but barbed steel point. Each soldier normally carries ten or a dozen at a time. They can shoot further than almost any crossbow and pierce armour up to half an inch thick at a hundred yards. But, in contrast to crossbows, they have one enormous disadvantage: they require huge strength on the part of the bowman to be of any real use. Most men in Ingerlond apparently begin training with a smaller version at an early age, and are required by their lords to keep up the practice into late manhood. The result is that you can tell an Ingerlonder, not one of the gentry but the ordinary countryfolk, by the swollen, overmuscled nature of his shoulders and arms, especially the right one, which pulls the feather flight of the arrow right back to his ear.

Although these two troops of bowmen were serving opposed masters they expressed no enmity or even dislike for each other through most of the evening, but ate and drank together in perfect amity. Until, that is, they got into a game of dice whereat a quarrel broke out with one man accusing another of cheating. By now, of course, all were drunk. The quarrel became a fight, but not with real weaponry, just fists, table-legs, chairs and so forth. The public rooms were wrecked, many heads were bloodied, and two or three were rendered unconscious. Then suddenly all fell back into friendliness again for no apparent reason, and they continued drinking ale together until all had fallen into a stupor as if nothing untoward had happened at all.

We woke to an almost cloudless dawn and a piercing cold wind that blew out of the eye of the rising sun. For a moment it was all almost beautiful: the sky above sapphire, then, in the east, rose-pink like the tips of lotus petals or wild roses; the ground, the broken furrows, the trees and their branches and twigs were all covered in a dust like diamonds that glittered in the sun. Almost for a moment I believed the verses my brother Jehani had copied out, describing a jewelled city. This dust was a little like snow but finer and is called frost. It is made from the tiny particles of moisture in the air that freeze then fall and collect on everything they land on.

In spite of the cold the brightness seemed to cheer everyone, not just us, but the soldiers, the bowmen, the other travellers and the servants in the inn. All bustled about slapping their sides to keep warm, shouting and even singing at each other, though some quietened down a little when a small girl, not more than three years old, was found in a corner of a barn where she had gone in the night to piss and had frozen to death once away from the animals and her parents, who had been drank.

We breakfasted off the foul bread and milk warm from the udder, though the bowmen pushed slabs of ground-up but barely cooked beef between pieces of bread and drank ale, and we were on the road again within an hour of the sun being fully above the horizon. At first it seemed easier than the day before because, with the frost, all the moisture in the soil hail frozen so one no longer had to wade and paddle through mud. However, it was all churned up into clods as hard as rocks and unless one kept one's eye firmly on where one was putting one's feet one might twist an ankle in an ugly fall. And then, of course, where there had been large pools or puddles there was now sheeted ice, cloudy like watered milk, and more slippery even than the most highly polished marble or basalt, even when wet.