Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

'The power to unleash force, death, torture and deprivation on those who would gainsay you.'

'That I understand. But brute force is scarcely justification.' 'Quite so. Nor, really, is the other.' 'And that is?'

'The willing consent of the ruled.'

'But,' said I, 'that does seem a justification. Better, anyway, than brute force.'

Brother Peter again became animated.

'It depends,' he said, and the words tumbled out like nuts from a sack, 'how that willing consent is obtained. If lies are fed to the people for generation after generation and never questioned, they become part of the unconsidered background to their mental lives, never truly looked at or examined, hardly even thought of, but controlling everything in the foreground of their thoughts. By these means, as powerful, as all-pervading but as unnoticed as those that cause an object released in air to drop, is the consent of the people contrived and maintained. And anything that threatens to undermine this invisible wall of belief, the way gunpowder can blow down a castle wall, must be treated as anathema, a burning matter.' He sighed, looked around, then up and out of the cloudy glazing of the window. 'It's stopped raining. Wycliffe, the last of our three, was feeling towards all this. But that is enough for now. Let us walk through our garden, admire the raindrops on the cherry-blossom, then perhaps feed our fish.'

As we walked between the low cropped hedges, and breathed in the fragrances released by rain and a sun suddenly warm, I attempted a summary.

'Without this…' I searched for a word and made one up

'… introjection of belief, on what grounds would a person offer his consent to be ruled?'

'He, or she, would use observation and analysis as nearly mathematical as may be, to work out who or what system would best suit his own interests and those of his fellow men. By fellow men I mean the men and women he works with. Clearly the people he works for are a different class of person altogether and will think in a dialectically opposed way. He and his fellows would employ a hedonistic calculus. And he would eschew any pre-given ideas about the commonwealth of men said to be based on the essences that exist in God's head.'

I savoured the subtle sharpness of a needle of rosemary, pinched between my teeth. 'Just now you brought in John Wycliffe, the last of your three Inglysshe Franciscans. There must be more to be said about him.'

But Brother Peter had had enough. Scattering some breadcrumbs on the surface of the first of his ponds (the fish recognised his shadow as it fell on the water and came to the poolside before he threw them), he said, 'You may not have noticed, dear Ali, that we are now approaching the end of Lent. Yesterday was the day of the Crucifixion of Jesus, which we call Good Friday, three days of tasting that last through till the first meal after Holy Communion tomorrow when we celebrate his apparent return from the grave. At that celebration I shall give a talk based on the teachings of Father John Wycliffe, which, if you'll forgive me, I shall now set about preparing. You will be very welcome in our church tomorrow at eleven in the morning.'

I'll get the fucker out if it's the last thing I do. If I don't then trying to may well be the last thing I do. I've torn a nail and it's bleeding. Hurts like snake-bite too.

Oh dear, oh me, they piled up so much against me at my trial. Trial is hardly the word but it is what they called it. Many wise judges heard the case, even the King and the Queen, whose shrill voice I got to know well. First, I had disobeyed my lord of Somerset by taking a boat from Calais to Ingerlond. Next my skin is what they call black so I am a pagan heathen and possibly not a person at all but a monkey. It seems that, unlike us, they feel no kinship or respect for monkeys. Next it was known from Lord Scales in London that I had consorted concupiscently with my lord of March. They must have meant Eddie – lust for whom I admit was the reason I had come to Coventry, but lord? I didn't know he was a lord.

At this, some of my judges realised that I might not be a boy. None of us is perfect, I pleaded. And I am indeed a woman. None had doubted that Eddie might go in for buggery with boys, but best to be sure. Just for the record. They soon made sure I was female, by the usual method. I was therefore a witch, as well as everything else.

The Queen especially now went berserk with fury. She screamed at me, circled me in that cellar that had been made to store wine – it stank of it as if a couple of barrels bad burst there – and came at me with long scarlet nails, which she dragged down my cheeks. 'You bewitched young Eddie,' she screamed. 'No Inglysshe nor Frankysshe man, either and Eddie is both, could look on your dusky skin without revulsion. Confess you consort with the Devil, who has given you charms to ensnare young men.'

Yet above all I was a Yorkist and possibly privy to that faction's plans. It was known Warwick was in Ireland with York. Was he planning to return to Calais? What were York's intentions? And where was March? And so on and so forth. They applied various means to extract from me what they thought I knew, mostly involving hot irons, pincers, and some stretching, especially of the spaces between my legs, but since I could not tell them what I did not know they soon gave up. The John Clegger and Will Bent I named earlier as the Queen's stewards took their turn in all this, though most of the examination was carried out by the city's executioner, a foul man, a blacksmith by trade, with a deep scar down his right cheek, and always the hot smell of burning metal about him. He and his apprentices did unspeakable things to me. Unspeakable? So why speak of them.

All that remained was to decide how I should die. They could not decide. The Bishop wanted me burnt for a witch, the Lord Chief Justice wavered between beheaded as a traitor, or hanged and drawn. And that's how matters stand. Executed I must be. Only the means remain to be decided.

Ouch! Fuck, shit and bugger it all. It came out, but dropped on my toe. Not so much a giant's tooth as a cannon-ball or anyway, a melon. But, you know, I really think I might be out by nightfall. My rock has brought down a shower of rubble inside the wall, it all seems loose and all I have to do is scoop it out. But minding where it falls.

Standing in the moonlight, in a litter of cabbage leaves, I find I am bothered by my nakedness. Not because it is cold – it is no colder in the alley than it was in my cell. Nor do I feel shame at being naked as these Christians are said to. But because I am a mess. My body is slimed with my own excrement and that of the slugs I have shared my tiny tomb with. It is also scabbed and ill-looking, though a month has passed since it was seriously abused. Worst of all, it is now thin. Well, I might not have got out so easily had I been rounded, glossy and full, though not what you would call fat, in short a worthy temple for the goddess within me. But all the same I do not like to think I might be seen so scrawny and poorly looking. So I head for where I know I shall find clothes.

But first, on the corner of the alley where it feeds back into the square, there is a pump, a public supply of water. I crank the lever a few times and get a great gobbet of water followed by a steadier rhythmic flow, and I contrive to get most of me beneath it while still cranking with my right hand. Then I take turn about and do the other side. Finally I sluice the sheets of water off each arm in turn, my thighs and hips, my stomach, or rather the hollow where my stomach once was, and my shrivelled breasts. The water flashes silver in the moonlight. It is very, very cold, but that makes it feel all the more cleansing. Then walking briskly and trying to control the convulsive shuddering that has seized me, I make it down the arcades by the shops and into the church.