Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

Should he have offered thanks to Allah that he was left to last and was thus at the top of the heap? Perhaps. But, then, it was in the name of Allah that all this had been done.

He came to when the sun reached his exposed posterior and warmed it. Caked with blood, not all of it his own, and racked with pain – most of it actually a deep-rooted stiffness – he struggled down off the pile of corpses at the top of the well, took a brief look round. Apart from the flies that gathered with the sun, and the rats, he was now the only living creature there. The sheep and goats had been taken, and the dogs as ruthlessly dispatched as their masters. He ran. Pausing only to wrap himself in some sacking he found still hanging from the arms of a scarecrow, and plucking a bean-pole from a villager's allotment for a staff, Ali ran.

Not too far or too fast at first, but once his wound was healed he ran a long way. Perhaps he has been running ever since, or at any rate until he fetched up in Mangalore. He slept occasionally, but in those first years not much, and anyway he continued to run even in his dreams. He ran to Baghdad, then Tabriz, and finally Kabul. From then on, for the most part, he walked, rode or sailed.

He assumed the role of beggar, found his way on to the Golden Road to Samarkand, joined a passing caravan in which the ostlers, camel-men, bearers and so forth had kept in mind the injunctions of the Prophet regarding a Believer's responsibilities to the poor more clearly than their masters had, and begged his way with them right up the Silk Road as far as Karakoum and the Roof of the World. He did the trip again and again, and discovered a certain skill at bargaining, at detecting the ruses of cheating vendors and, when the caravan was ready to return for the fifth time with animals laden with silk, lapis-lazuli and gold, he had become the trusted employee of one of the merchants, a Parsee whose leanings were also towards Shiism, and who looked on him favourably.

It would be wrong to say that thereafter he prospered, hut at least he survived. For ten years or so he worked for the Parsee as a general amanuensis, dogsbody, factotum. He learnt to read and write, to add and subtract, to keep accounts. Later, as the Parsee aged and became increasingly attached to his godown and counting-house, he employed Ali as his agent, his traveller. He discovered a gift for languages born of the earlier necessity to beg from and live with people who had no cause to learn his own. He also found time in which to study the inner secret teachings of the deeper Shia and took a year or two away from trading to dwell with wise men in a community who live among the mountains that lie to the north of the Hindu Kush.

He returned to the service of his Parsee, who eventually reached the sort of age Ali is now. Ali expected to be made his partner with a loan to enable him to continue trading in the I'arsee's name. However, the Parsee preferred a more complete retirement and, urged on by his daughters who wanted to make good marriages into the gentry of the land, liquidated his assets, dug up his gold reserves, and bought plantations of pistachio and apricot trees, thus raising his status to that of landowner. Ali continued to act as his salesman abroad and did tolerably well, selling his ex-master's Sun-dried tiunza apricots and green nuts, but basically he was now a freelance, without the capital to set up as a proper merchant.

His son Haree? The disfigurement Ali had suffered at the hands of the Sunni fanatic taken with the fact that he was never a rich man virtually precluded the possibility of marriage or indeed any sexualrelationship other than the transitory sort that can be bought. He was not a pretty sight, and as he aged he became less pretty. His left side slowly collapsed, and his left arm, possibly because a vital nerve had been severed, withered, though he was left with the use of the thumb, index and middle lingers. His face was like an apple that has begun to rot: fine on one side but dark brown and spongily shapeless on the other, and at almost all times when he was in any sort of public situation he covered it with the edge or hem of his scarecrow cape, leaving only the left side and left eye visible.

However, not long after his Parsee withdrew from trading, Ali was doing business on his own behalf with an Egyptian cotton-grower whose crop had failed as a result of an attack of weevils, leaving him substantially in debt to Ali. Now, there is an endemic disease amongst those who live along the banks of the Nile and the canals that irrigate the surrounding flatlands that causes blindness, and this cotton-grower had a daughter who was blind but in other ways attractive and apparently healthy. Ali married her, having first bestowed on her impoverished father all the worldly wealth he then had about him. They settled in Iskenderia where he set up as an agent in the port. Haroun, Haree, was the only fruit of that union since the cotton-grower's daughter died of puerperal fever shortly after he was born. Ali put him in the care of his dead mother's cousin and set off again on his travels but he has paid for his keep ever since. He never really got to know Haree properly, passing as he did through the area once every two years or so, but he now has the satisfaction of knowing that Haree will learn an honourable profession and hopefully make a reasonable living with less trouble than his father has had.

Enough. I am wandering. A tedious recital of a thousand and one adventures on the road was not Ali's purpose, but rather an account of the one big adventure that came at the end. And that is what you want to hear now. It far surpasses all the others in length and interest, in horror, tragedy, passion and even, occasionally, in the happiness n brought. And hopefully you will take from it the insights you desire into other nations and empires, insights for which you have paid.

It all began, as it ended, in Ingerlond, but that part of Ingerlond which is tin the mainland of Europe, namely Calais, a small enclave whose importance lies in its role as the gateway to the island – indeed, almost all the trade with the island is now conducted through this port. I have heard it said that Ingerlond is the arsehole of Christendom and Calais is the arsehole of Ingerlond. Ali didn't find anything to quarrel with in that.

The main exports through Calais are wool and woollen cloth. Indeed there is very little else the Inglysshe, or Anglish as they are sometimes called after one of the savage tribes that settled there, produce in surplus that anyone could conceivably wish to buy, except possibly tin and lead. Calais is the only town where foreigners are allowed to buy Ingerlonder wool, which makes its export easy to tax, and is therefore known in the jargon of their traders as the Staple. The quality is high, though not as good as that of Kashmere, and much in demand in climates too cold for cotton or silk. The Inglysshe have the art of spinning their wool to a fineness which almost equals silk and of dyeing it too, and of weaving it in artful ways. This fine wool is called worsted, and it was in the hopes of picking up some hales of the stuff in exchange for some sable furs Ali had brought from iMuscovy that he was in Calais.

He was staying in a tavern or lodging-house in the quarter that lies between the harbour and the main cloth market, and Suffering, as almost everyone does in those climes, from what seemed to be an everlasting cold – his nose leaked like the bladder of an incontinent octogenarian, his chest churned and rattled as if it were a bucket filled with unset mortar, and he-had gone early to bed. It was a big bed and. following the custom of those uncivilised regions, he had been constrained the night before to share it with two mariconic tinkers who buggered each other off and on, and a squire, his lady and two children on their way to join the Duke of Burgundy's court. The two infants whined and whimpered until their mother prevailed on Ali to expose his face to them. She told them that he was the devil and would carry them off to hell if they didn't shut up. They did.