Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

First, on the outskirts of this shanty-town, there are enormous, steaming middens with heaps of refuse as well as ordure, both animal and human, and up and down these miniature alps old women and children clamber and slither looking for food, such as cabbage stalks, stale loaves, fish-heads, even egg-shells with a trace of egg-meat still in them, and the last of the meat too, pigs' feet and ears, cows' tails and goats' heads – I say the last for we are now into Lent, forty days when no meat will be eaten.

Then come the hovels, crowded about with no discernible streets or lanes, except for the main thoroughfares from each of the cardinal points of the compass, which lead to the gates in the city walls, and which, willy-nilly, every visitor must follow. Here, countless beggars use every art and wile to keep body and soul together. Women, holding screaming babies they have hired from baby-dealers, tug at my sleeve with grubby palms outstretched; there are young men in the prime of life with serviceable limbs tied up to look like amputated stumps, which they claim have been lost in the service of the King or even in the French wan, others have sores painted on their faces and some mimic blindness.

Moving nearer the walls one finds quacks and swindlers selling talismans, pilgrims' medals, amulets and the like guaranteed to give protection against every manner of ill, and street-trading apothecaries offering green dragon's blood, the stones from the heads of poisonous toads, the shrivelled stomachs of sharks, false limbs carved from wood, glass eyes. Others hawk the shrivelled hands and feel of babies said to be the relics of saints, and there is one who claims to have the piss of a witch in a glass vial, which, he says, poured a drop at a time on the nape of a woman's neck will, by its giving off a vapour and a foul stench, reveal her to be a faithless whore.

All seem to do a good trade but he who does best is a tall lean man with straight yellow hair to his shoulders who sells pardons, signed and sealed by the Pope in Rome. He claims these scraps of parchment will get a man or woman time off from Purgatory, a place apparently sinful souls must go to, to be purged before progressing to the paradise these superstitious people believe in.

All this, of course, produces a fearful clamour of cries, shouting, screams and singing out, which is like the scraping of slate on slate to my ears, assaulting them just as badly as my vision, sense of smell and touch are lacerated by this wretched throng around me.

Presently the South date rises above the thatched and tented roofs, flanked by twin towers and with a lowered portcullis. Fixed to its lintel is the usual ghastly array of skulls and half-eaten heads of those who have displeased the authorities. For a moment I pause, nonplussed, since, yes, it is shut and has a detail of maybe ten soldiers armed with swords and crossbows in front of it. But I hardly have time to consider how I should get in when a trumpet sounds, and from behind I hear the thunderous clatter of iron-shod hoofs on cobbles, the rumble of wheels, the crack of whips and jangle of harness and weaponry.

There is not time or room to get out of the way. What we have is a squad of mounted soldiers, armoured in open helmets, which leave their laces exposed, chain-mail, breastplates, jointed steel casing on their limbs, big swords at their sides, shields attached to their harness, and holding heavy spears. There are perhaps a score, and all riding big horses that sweat beneath their loads but keep up a slow, steady trot, and what makes them take up so much room, so the crowd must press back against the walls of the shanties, some of which cave in bringing down the roofs on the people within, is a big monster of a cannon drawn by a team of mules. A tube made of lengths of cast iron, fused together and bound with brass hoops, followed by a cart filled with stone balls and then another loaded with barrels of gunpowder. It is not as big or grand as the carriage Jagannath is pulled on when he makes his trip from temple to temple in Puri in Orissa, but the effect is similar. However, whereas the pilgrims who are crushed to death beneath Jagannath, which is an avatar for Vishnu, have freely chosen this form of self-immolation, here in Coventry the poor souls who are crushed beneath this monster have not elected this way to die but go screaming to their deaths.

Nevertheless this Juggernaut has timed its arrival precisely at the right moment to get me into the city. Imagine a giant log in a storm-swollen stream – as it passes on its way so it will suck in behind it the turbulent water and all the tumbling flotsam that rules on it. The guards do their best to close in and shut off the flow as the pointed black teeth of the portcullis grind slowly down above us, yet as many as thirty get through, and I am amongst them.

A moment's hesitation then, like the others with me, I choose a side alley and rush off clown it between high gabled houses that block out the sunlight and the sky. After a minute or two I slow, stop and look around. The winding dark place I am in is chill, as if the sun never reaches the cobbles and flags beneath my feet, there are few people about, and there is a dank, deep, near perfect silence, quite different from the bedlam I have left. Looking behind me I see no sign of pursuit, yet I feel I am a trespasser, that I have reached a place where those in charge would prefer me not to be. I take a winding course through a warren of similar narrow streets to get away from the gate with its guards. Presently I glimpse the slim spire soaring like a steel poniard into the grey sky, with a flash of gold from the cross or weathercock at its summit, and I bend my steps towards it.

Less than an hour later I am in prison.

Uma sighed, Her eyes unfocused. Then she shook herself smiled at me with a tenderness that was inspired not by me but by her memories, and gathered together the small items she always carried with her.

When she had gone Ali took up his tale – and thus it was for the next few days: turn and turn about they told me their stories to the point where, almost at the end, they merged again into one.

My convalescence was slow, Ali resumed, my body weakened, so Peter Marcus said, not only by the flux, not only by the privations endured over the months of travel compounded by forced reliance on unaccustomed food and drink, but also, of course, by a constitution compromised in early childhood by the terrible blow administered by the Sunnite's scimitar. Since I prided myself that, for nearly sixty years, perhaps more. I had maintained through constant privation and travel a lean, wiry fitness in spite of my disadvantaged frame, I took leave to doubt this – indeed, I almost suspected that some of the potions Prior Peter gave me were designed to make me feel weaker and more wearied than I was. The fact was, as he often repeated, he rarely had the chance to meet and converse with someone who had seen as much as I, who had experienced so much, and studied both from books and at the feet of some of the wisest men who have lived during our times.

We spent six weeks together, right the way through the period of Lent, never leaving the friary and its gardens, but talking and reading together whenever his duties, which he carried out as I have said with some diligence but not out of devotion, allowed.

'You see, my dear Ali, my situation here places me in an awesome position as the successor and inheritor of the three greatest Inglysshemen who have ever lived and who between them, one after the other, created a tradition of thought, and action, too, which will, I believe, be hailed in time as the greatest gift our nation has bestowed on mankind.'

I knew enough to be sure that the Inglysshemen he referred to were Roger Bacon, William of Occam (to whose apophthegm, Occam's razor, concerning entities or essences we had jokingly alluded when Peter was preparing the potion that cured me) and John Wyclifle. I was quite conversant with their teaching and knew of their connections with Oxenford and the Franciscans. All three had made Oxenford their home and their principal place of study, and had been protected from persecution by the university.