Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

My stay in Calais was longer than I had expected. First I had to recover from the Influence of the Stars, or Influenza, as the Venetians call it; then, when I came to trade my Muscovite sables I found that they had been ravaged by moths. It took me some time before I was able to find what I took to be a more than averagely stupid Ingerlonder whom I could persuade that these holes were the fashion in Moskova and conveyed a greater value upon the furs. In truth he had the last word. The bales of worsted he gave me in return were similarly damaged: 'Broderie anglaise, my old china,' he said, and slapped me on the back.

All in all it was getting on for a month later before I was able to set off on my travels again, and, though I had no intention at all of going to the southern extremity of the Indian peninsula, I had almost inadvertently slipped that oiled black packet into one of the deeper recesses of my baggage.

My destination was Bruges, ami to get to the eastern postern I had to pass through the central square. A burning was about to begin. I do not like to witness such barbarities but the press was such that I had to wait until it was over. It was, need I say it, my quasi-Franciscan Iriar who was tied to the stake, high above the crowd, high enough for me to be able to see that his thumbs (his hands were bound in front of him) had been crushed and his body broken on the wheel. He was, however, still alive and aware enough of what was going on to spit on the crucifix that a Dominican was waving under his nose, conjuring him to repent as he did so. There was a plaque attached to his neck by a noose so it rested on his chest and it bore the words: 'Self-confessed but Unrepentant Brother of the Free Spirit'.

The flames caught, the smoke rose, and as they did it was my impression that somehow his mysterious eyes, still gleaming with intelligence and possibly knowledge, found mine and for a moment I felt he was communicating to me both a sense of collusion and trust. Then his eyeballs rolled upwards and his whole body seemed to relax as he breathed in the smoke that was billowing about his head. I recognised the symptoms of ecstasy, that most sublime ecstasy of all, the ecstasy of a death embraced, of union with the god within.

The smell of burning flesh remained in my nostrils for a week.

For the next three days Mangaiore was the scene of a prolonged festival in which the goddess, in her role as Queen of the Sea, was wooed and bedded by Vishnu to the accompaniment of dancing, music, fireworks and the rest. On the fourth day I returned to Ali's large bungalow and rejoined him in his garden where he resumed his tale as if there had been no interruption at all.

The next two years saw me inexorably drawn eastward as if my soul were a sliver of magnetised steel, mounted on a pin and dragged by a lodestone. No doubt this was in part a response to the trader in me for commerce recognises that a promise given has the strength of a contract, but also there was a more spiritual bond which my Franciscan had evoked. The Brothers of the Free Spirit, whose innermost councils have renounced God as well as the Devil, have their Islamic equivalent to which I belong. Having studied at the feet of the successors of the Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan lbn Sabbah, I count myself an adept, and it is my duty to do all I can for all who share our disbeliefs, whether they come from Muslim, Christian, or Hindu beginnings.

At this point Ali must have noticed the shift in my expression for he paused with the eyebrow above his good eye raised like an inverted black crescent moon. I took the plunge. 'You are, then,' I stated, somewhat uneasily, 'an Assassin.'

He cracked a walnut between the thumb and forefinger of his good hand and used the digits of the other to pick over the white flesh he had exposed.

'You may say so, so long as you do not attribute to me the practices the vulgar ascribe to us. As you know, I take hashish a great deal, and the word assassin derives from the word hashish. And occasionally I have had good cause to bestow on mortals the supreme ecstasy of death. But I don't make a habit of it.'

This was a relief, and I allowed him to return to his narrative.

My first visit to the Malabar coast arose out of business I had in southern Arabia, at the south end of the Red Sea, in a small port called Mokha, where I was trading silver ingots for woven camel-hair carpets with certain Bedu chieftains. Once we had concluded the deal they sealed it with a beverage I had not come across before, which they called k'hawah. It is an infusion made from the ground-up pits or bean-like stones of a small cherry-like fruit of a low bush, which is grown on the sea-facing slopes of the mountains that border the Red Sea. I was impressed by its beneficial effects: it enlivens the spirit without intoxication, removes headaches, and stimulates mental activity. Moreover, taken with sugar crystallised from the sap of the cane that grows on the plain below the hills, it is remarkably palatable.

So impressed was I with this concoction that I immediately bought half a dozen sacks of these beans and took them to Venice, where I sold them at a very considerable profit. The enterprise was aided by the cunning of a Venetian alchemist I knew who had invented a way of improving the infusion by expressing steam through the grounds of the k'hawah inside a sealed retort. This improved its potency and flavour. He sold the resulting drink in tiny cups for enormous prices in the Piazza di San Marco.

Thinking I was now about to make a proper fortune at last I returned to Mokha only to find that during my absence the local imams had declared k'hawah to be an intoxicating liquor and therefore proscribed by the Kor'an and it underwent a brief spell of prohibition.

I do not easily give up and enquiring amongst fellow traders learnt that the nearest habitat they knew of that resembled that of the south-west-facing slopes of the Yemeni mountains was that of the Western (ihats lying behind the Malabar coast of southern India, particularly that part served by the port of Mangalore. I bought four dozen potted k'hawah bushes for almost nothing since they were now of no commercial value and booked a passage for them and myself on a dhow bound for Mangalore and its palm-green shore. Once there, I arranged for a landowner who grew cinnamon, cardamom and ginger on his estates in the mountains to set aside a quarter of an acre of his poorer, higher land where the earth did indeed resemble that of the south Yemeni hills. My forty-eight bushes were taken from their pots and planted there. He was happy to gain rent however small from this unlikely patch with a promise of a share of the profits if any accrued.

Since any profit that there was to be made from this venture would be.it least a couple of years or so in the future I returned to Arabia, but not before I had ascertained what commodity the Vijayanagarans were most in need of and would pay for most handsomely.

Horses.

The Vijayanagarans' only mounted arm at the time was a regiment of elephant, which, in the well-ordered and virtually harmless form of warfare practised between Hindus, performed a merely formal function. When a phalanx of elephants advanced on infantry it was understood that the infantry would retreat.

The sultans, however, took warfare more seriously; elephants do not like horses and, when faced with a cavalry charge, run amok trampling the infantry behind them and often unseating their mahouts. Indeed, so serious had the situation become, the sultans would surely have overrun the Vijayanagaran empire decades before I got there, had they ever been able to agree amongst themselves. However, they tended to fight each other with yet more vehemence than they fought their neighbours. Meanwhile the Vijayanagarans were beginning to build up a horse cavalry of their own, retaining elephants for ceremonial parades only. But the process was still in its infancy, and at that time, for a prime, partially broken, three-year-old stallion, strong enough to carry a man in armour or service a mare, they would pay its weight in coriander seed or dried ginger.