Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

'Brother Ali, my poor brother in freedom, Ali, what a state you're in!'

Well, as you know, dear Mah-Lo, at the best of times I cut a sorry

figure, but the privations of our journey had taken their toll too. I had, for most of the time since we had arrived in that benighted isle, suffered from an almost continuous flux – initially of fecal matter, latterly of blood and black water. The failure to retain fluids had caused a terrible thirst which, of course, I attempted to assuage at any wells we passed and the cleaner-looking rivulets. I had also taken to eating melting snow and ice until the thaw removed their passing solace. No doubt, I looked even more cadaverous than usual.

The cause? Well, of course, the absence of sanitation in London, I suppose, produced a constant presence of pestilential air, coupled with our hosts' readiness to eat and serve meat that had been left to hang for several days, even weeks, before eating it.

Prior Peter asked a few pertinent and succinct questions then rang a small handbell. One of the brethren appeared almost immediately and received from him a short list of herbs, some to be picked fresh from the garden we had crossed in the first quadrangle, others to be found pressed and dried in the friary's herbarium, yet others reduced to tinctures or essences from the apothecary. 'However, we shall resort to essences only in extremis,' he giggled, 'for such is the advice of one of the greatest of our alumni.'

Weak though I was, I was able to cap his little joke. 'You will, I hope, shave all the ingredients with the sharpest of razors.'

And thus began one of the longest, most rewarding conversations I have ever had, stretching as it did over several months, broken only by sleep and my new friend's administrative duties. These included putting on a show of appropriate devotion at the appropriate times, since disguised emissaries of the Bishop of Winchester, in whose diocese Oxenford is situated, often slipped into monasteries and friaries checking that the daily offices were said or sung in a proper and seemly manner and that no heresies were heard, spoken or taught.

Uma tired quickly of this, both the offices and our conversation, and soon went temporarily out of our lives, practising what we merely preached to one another, and no doubt having an even better time of it for, as Peter was wont to say, quoting Aristotle, 'It is not gnosis but praxis is the fruit.' Or, knowledge is nothing without action.

However, on this first occasion gnosis went hand in hand with praxis, and within half an hour or so my new friend had prepared, largely with his own hands, an infusion, whose main flavours were peppermint and aniseed, not unpalatable. 'This,' he said, 'will work in two ways. Immediate relief will come in the form of a deep warm sleep, induced by the presence of tincture of opium dissolved in distilled alcohol according to an Arab receipt. We call it laudanum. The opium has the opportune double function of inducing not only the rest you need but a temporary cessation of the peristalsis of the lower bowel. Then there is peppermint oil and oil of aniseed, which, although not as quick acting, will ensure that the cure is prolonged after the effects of the opium have worn off. The mixture was invented by a doctor of medicine here at Oxenford named Collis Browne. Now, look, I cannot send you back to the dormitory, which is cold and uncomfortable. Drink up first, then you must have my couch…'

I protested, of course, but willy-nilly he, with Uma's encouragement, led me into a tiny cubicle behind the big fireplace, on the other side of its chimney-piece. Being thus heated it was already comfortably warm. They laid me on Prior Peter's bed, which, though narrow, was mattressed with swan's down, he said, and fragrant with dry lavender.

There followed an interlude as blissful as any I have experienced for first they divested me of my clothes and then, bathed in warm air as I was, they cleansed my tired, soiled body with sponges soaked in perfumed water. It produced a warm glow over my body, which penetrated to my aching bones. Meanwhile, the laudanum had a similar effect on my soul for behind my closed eyes I entered a world hung with crimson drapes and furnished with gilded chairs, a sort of womb-like place where I fancied myself an unborn babe, about to be born into a future of unlimited powers.,.

Ali's voice jaded. A deep breath, a sigh, a little bubble of saliva in the corner of his mouth and he was asleep. I tiptoed away.

I returned three days later, business had kept me away, to find Uma again at the table, sharing a jug of k'hawah with Ali. I tasted it, found it too bitter without sugar, too sweet with. Once we were settled Uma took up her shuttle and began once more to weave her scarlet thread into the fabric of Ali's tale – a magic carpet which had already transported me to the ends of the earth.

I see Ali, who seems very poorly, his face ever greyer, the sinews in his neck like the thinner branches of holly trees, comfortably established in Prior Peter's cot, with a good fire to warm him. and I decide to move on.

It is less than a week since I embraced Eddie March, and already I miss him: his palms squeezing my buttocks, his fingertips stroking my perineum, his breath hot in the crook of my neck and the thrust of his prick inside me but, of course, I have no idea as to where he might have gone. Without much thought I leave the island of Osney, with its priory and rows of pollarded willows, and head up lanes and byways through the fields and woods in a roughly southerly direction. But presently I sit on a milestone marking the road to Swindon and give the matter some consideration.

Eddie is on the run from the King and Queen who are his enemies. The King and Queen are in the middle of Ingerlond in a town called Coventry. Therefore that is the last place he will be. Until he's caught.

But… They, the King and Queen, will have ordered their people to search for him, hunt him out and, if or when they catch him, they will take him to Coventry. At all events news of him, if he is seen and recognised, as he was in London by the legless beggar, will be drawn towards that city like iron filings to a lodestone. Thus, by a pleasing paradox, the one place where I may discover his whereabouts is the one place he would rather not be… Having worked this through. I get up from my milestone and head back to Osney and Oxenford, skirt them and continue heading north, sleeping that night in a sheltered ditch.

In the morning I fall in briefly with a pompous young man leading his mule up a hill from which we can still see the spires and towers of the city behind us dreaming in the dawn sunlight. He carries a pouch embroidered with a shield bearing gold lions running across a red ground in two of its comers and silver floral shapes on a blue ground in the others, and as we near the crest of the hill the following conversation takes place.

'Pray tell me, sir,' I ask, 'are we on the road for Coventry?'

'Why, yes, indeed." he replies. 'It lies some fifty miles north at the end of this very road. I am on my way there myself," he continues, 'being an equerry of Their Majesties, returning from delivering letters to the notables of the city,' and he gestures back over his shoulder.

We are close to the crest of the hill.

'Reverend Brother,' he says, then looks more sharply at me, frowns and looks away, 'you are welcome to ride pillion behind me when the road is flat or downhill. But up the slopes we must walk for my beast is tired after making such good speed with the letters I delivered.'

'I think not.' I say. 'I shall only delay you when I say the Daily Office.'

For that is what monks, friars and so forth are supposed to do,.it least six times a day, the Daily Office being prayers and verse directed at the Christian God.