Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

rings entrusted with emeralds and rubies, anklets and so forth. An invisible miasma of perfume hung about her and shifted in tone when she moved.

'Mah-Lo. effendi, I should like you to meet the lady lima. Uma, this is Mah-Lo. I have told you about him.'

My bow expressed, I hope, some of the reverence and wonder I felt. The goddess in front of me placed her palms together in front of her creamy bosom, which her bolero, cut low, scarcely hid at all, and gently inclined her head above her pointed fingertips. The eyes that looked up at me were watchful, calculating and seductive.

I sat beside her with my hands on my knees. She picked up my right hand and placed it on the table between us, keeping it covered with hers, and murmured that it was a pleasure to meet me, or some such greeting.

Uma, you know, has figured in my history,' Ali continued. 'As a vision, a promise, a sort of consummation – you recall how we bathed together in the Caliph's palace in Misr-al-Kahira – and, of course, disguised as a Buddhist monk. She is also the aunt of my two wives.' He took a date from the silver bowl that stood by the lemonade jug, popped it in his mouth, discreetly removed the stone in his palm, chewed, swallowed and went on. 'Sow, there are parts of our story which she can tell better than I since she was present at important times and I was not. In any case what happened to her and the things she caused to happen have their own intrinsic interest. So she has very kindly agreed to share some of her afternoons with us…"

He passed his good hand over the empty socket of his missing eye and sighed. 'Uma. You may as well start,' he murmured.

Uma withdrew her hand from mine, sat upright. 'Very well,' she said. She took a sip of lemonade and closed her eyes. For a moment the garden seemed still, almost as if with her it held its breath, though I suppose I fancied this. No doubt the fountain continued to play and the birds sang.

Then she began.

Sea-wrack and spume, sail-crack and whistle, heaving brown water swinging like a mother's soothing hand against the rough, seaweed-festooned stones of the pier. The blow of the wind round my midriff as. head down, I clutch my outer cloak about me – they must not see my rounded breasts, my steepled nipples. Well, that's what they feel like in this wind.

There's quite a gang of us, a caterpillar almost for legs and cohesion, inching along a bent stick towards the tightly moored vessel, held snug against hempen bolsters by hawsers as thick as my arm, in spite of the lash and whip-slash of wind.

Looking back above their heads I see the spires and towers of Calais, the tumbled roofs of thatch and slate, the smoke shredded down the alleyways of air between the chimneys, and the rainclouds bustling across the sky above them. Prince Harihara Kaya Kurteishi, a purple velvet cap trimmed with gold braid pulled over his glossy black locks and tied with a red silk scarf below his chin to hold it on, his plump dark lace screwed up against the wind which I know he hates, black sable tins as glossy furs his hair, and soft leather boots also fur-trimmed; Chamberlain Anish. eyes red-rimmed, moving with exaggerated care lest he slip on the sea-slimed cobbles, his elbow held by Ali ben Quatar Mayeen here the Lady Uma offered a warm smile to our host. who's in a muddle trying to keep his turban on, hold his stick and support Anish all at the same time, and with one hand not as functional as it should be, yet he finds time to peer around him with his one good eye, ever curious, ever seeking out the strange, the new. Then our fakir, with wild hedgehog hair, muttering arcane spells and mantras into his pointed beard or scolding the ten-year-old lad who carries his box of tricks for him. Last, or rather not last because our baggage train follows him, Eddie March, clanking and jingling with his accoutrements and leading by a bridle trimmed with scalloped purple hessian his high-stepping stallion with its balls like giant plums. This Ingerlonder is the only one of our party I've yet to fuck with, but I shall, I shall, and each of the rest thinks he's the only one who knows my breasts, my buttocks and my crimson quim.

Then there's the mules, only twelve left now, so much of the goods we brought with us have been spent, and six out of our original ten muleteers. Anish sent the dhobi-wallahs, the cooks and all but two of the secretaries home with our soldiers. He said they were too expensive to keep.

I turn away and look now across the sweep of the harbour, the forest of masts in front of warehouses, and quays stacked with bales of wool and casks of wine. I breathe in and the sharp air stings my questing nostrils: it's laden with smells, of tar and rope and timber, of fish and vinegar, of sea and all the smells of sea, the rotten sweetness of old fish offal, and salt and seaweed, rats' breath and urine, bleached wood and the bones of drowned sailors, and the cleansing ozone, which seems to carry the tang of semen freshly milked.

And then the farmyard smell, mingled with all the spices and perfumes of India, as the mules clop by and one dumps yellow turds at my feet. They won't be coming on the ship, we'll have to hire or buy another lot in Dover, but the sacks and bags are all to be humped on board.

I love departures, arrivals too and today we shall have both, the latter either in Dover where the burghers favour the men of York, or in the bosom of the deep.

Although this is the shortest by far of our sea trips the boat is the largest, a great big three-masted tub, fat within hooped staves, like a barrel on its side. There are several of these freighters in the harbour, carvels they are called, built to carry wool out of Ingerlond, and coal and pig-lead, firewood, ironware and cheap tin trays, then back they come with furs and silks, German armour, French and German wine, and all the precious things merchants like Ali have always traded from east to west, but mainly, the Ingerlonders being as they are. wine.

Because the hull bellies out, the gangway from the quay is eight feet long and quite wide, with roped sides and rungs nailed across the planks to stop us from slipping. First the muleteers unload the mules and carry our baggage below, stowing it in the hold, but now it is the turn of March's stallion, which is called Genet. Genet will not cross the gangway. A sweat breaks out on his shoulders, enough to froth in the wind. He arches his neck and rolls his eyes so you can see the whites. He neighs, almost bellows, like a trumpet, rears up then lashes out with his hoofs, whose clattering metal shoes strike-sparks from the granite flags. He gives off a hot, ferric smell, like a thunderbolt. It takes two of the muleteers to hold him and even then he contrives to bite one on the shoulder so blood streams down his back.

Eddie March strides forward, his face black with rage, and taking a long whip from the chief muleteer, which he holds so the long thong is looped up against the shaft, he beats the animal about the face and neck until he backs away, head down and cowed, but as soon as they lead him forward towards the gangplank, he rears up again and almost breaks loose. I can see March will beat him again, and since he is a noble animal this distresses me. I move forward. 'Let me,' I say, 'let me.'

'Get back, boy. He'll chew you and spit you out.' Spoken in that lazy drawl these Ingerlonder nobles use when they want to make you feel small, or assert their superiority.

'I think not.'

And I take the bridle, close up to Genet's cheek, and standing on tiptoe begin to murmur then croon in his flattened ear, which presently he pricks. With my free hand I stroke and soothe his quivering flank. His close-cropped hair is as smooth as silk one-way, rough as shark's skin the other. I can feel the dampness of his sweat, smell the fodder on his breath and peer into his flared scarlet nostrils. I sense his power, first shimmering across the surface of his skin, then, as he recognises my kindness, receding like a tide into his innermost organs. His eyes narrow a little, no longer flashing white, and become pools of deepest amber and jet again beneath fringed curtains of eyelashes I might die for. With my free hand I find in a pocket beneath my cloak three sugared almonds I had forgotten I had, and I let his hot, wet lips scoop them from my open palm, and now, it's fair to say, he's mine for ever.