Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

'Here’ is, of course, this gloomy fortress-palace-prison called the Tower of London, though I have to say that, with the arrival of what they call summer, it is less gloomy than it was. Summer? A brief period when the sun shines rather more than it did, and the temperature is such that we need to ask to have the fire lit in our rooms only towards dusk, which I have to say now comes late in the day, the night being only about six hours long. You would think that with this amount of daylight it would be even hotter than our country, but no. The sun remains perversely low in the sky, even at noon, and the days are only rarely as warm as the coldest in Vijayanagara. Moreover, the weather remains wholly unpredictable: a week of cold rain may still occur, followed by a few days of warm sunshine though with a sharp breeze from the east. Then come cloudy, sultry days, even warmer, culminating in a thunderstorm, heavy rain, almost as heavy as our monsoon at times, and sometimes, even now, the raindrops are frozen into what they call hail. Then back to blustery winds with frequent showers.

Nevertheless, the gardens here, which are quite extensive within the walls, are now pleasant for much of the time, with many tall rose bushes, lilies, peonies (though they arc now over) and many flowering herbs, particularly thyme, rosemary (also now over, it flowered earlier than the rest), and sage, dried sacks of which you will remember traders have brought us from time to time from the Himalayan foothills. Incidentally, they charge far too much for them.

The fish-ponds, too, have lotus in them, would you believe it? which they call water-lily, smaller than ours but just now coming into bloom with flowers very similar, eight or sixteen petals in a mandala. Here they are a rarity apparently and are merely admired for their beauty and not at all for their spiritual significance. The sight of them tilled me with a sudden longing to be back home.

What else? Fork-tailed birds, exactly like the swallows that haunt our temples from the end of the monsoons through to the hot season, arrived here a month or so ago and built tiny cement-like nests up under the eaves of all the towers and battlements, hundreds of them, and have laid eggs and arc-rearing chicks. You know it has long been a puzzle amongst those of us who bother to think about such things as to where our swallows go to breed: well, here, I think we have the answer. For reasons best known to themselves, and to Devi-Parvad who rules all things living, they fly north.

That is not the received opinion in Ingerlond. Quizzing one of the gardeners on the subject, an old man with a red face, long white hair and with the knotted swollen finger joints that afflict most of the elderly in Ingerlond, he spluttered through broken teeth, 'Why, bless you, zurr, come Michaelmas they doos dive into the mud round ponds and sleeps out the winter in a state of intoxified slumber, waking only when they feels the regenerative power of the sun on their backs.'

There are also ravens here in the Tower, again similar to those that dwell in the cliffs and crags of our highest mountains. These are almost tame and the guards of the Tower rear the chicks, which were hatched not long after we were incarcerated, feeding them scraps of liver and other offal. There is a superstition that as long as the raven flourish in the Tower, for so long will Albion (which is another name for Ingerlond) likewise flourish.

Well, cousin, I am boring you with these snippets of natural history, but Anish and I have been so bored ourselves for most of the time that we have found ourselves pursuing such trivia. On now to weightier matters.

Our gaoler here. Lord Scales, who prefers to call himself our host, came to us this morning, in the very garden I have been talking about. He's an old man too, bearded like a leopard, also with a red face (Anish says the preponderance of red faces amongst the elderly here is the result of drinking alcohol in excess since childhood), a bluff manner and filthy temper. He caught up with us just as we were contemplating the movement of a long-legged fly across the surface of the pond. Anish was musing on this phenomenon, attempting to find in it an example of the ephemerality of even great events in the flow of time. The significance he found arose from the fact that the fly left no footprints on the surface.

'Here's a thing, then,' rasped Lord Scales. 'Here's a damned thing. Your Yorkist cronies from Calais landed at Sandwich late the day before yesterday, and they're already at Canterbury. That arsehole Bourchier, the Archbish, is backing them, they've already doubled their numbers up to twenty thousand, and they'll be knocking on our door in a day or two.'

'What's their purpose?' I asked.

'They say to restore good government to the kingdom. They say they honour the King who they say is the rightful king. But these folk never say what they mean.'

'And what do they mean?'

'They mean to kick the King out. and put Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York – who, believe me, is an arrogant bastard – on the throne instead. But I'll stop them, see if I don't.'

'But if they have twenty thousand…'

He knew very well that I am well aware that he has only a couple of hundred garrisoned in the Tower.

'I've got me cannon, haven't I? You've seen them. I'll blast 'em to bits, soon as they set foot in the city.'

Anish piped up. 'Who leads them?" he asked.

'Richard Neville – son of a bitch who calls himself Earl of Warwick because he married old Warwick's daughter – Salisbury, who is his father. Lord Fauconberg his uncle, who also got his title between the sheets, and Eddie March. Crooks. A gang. Gangsters.'

'Not York himself, then?'

'No. Got more sense. He'll hang on in Ireland until he sees how it all turns out. Well, it'll turn out badly for them all. Mark my words.'

Arid he stumped away, huffing and puffing up the steep stairs no doubt to inspect his guns and make sure our friend Bardolph Earwicca had them in working order.

'Could turn out all right for us,' said Anish, 'if March, Warwick and the rest remember who we are. And Alderman Dawtrey bothers to tell them where we are.'

'Anyway,' said I, 'at least we'll see how well these pieces he's got up there work.'

At this moment the long-legged fly came too close to a water-lily or lotus pad on which a small frog sat. A flick of its tongue and the fly was gone. 'Tell me, Anish,' I asked, 'just what part does that frog play in your miniature cosmology? Shiva the Destroyer?'

'Too grand." he replied. 'Let's just settle for Tataka, the man-eating demoness.'

Honoured cousin, things are definitely moving here, changing, so I shall not after all commit this letter to the Arab trader I had in mind who has now sailed, hoping to raise Tyre in the Levant in a month or so, but keep it by me and make entries as events unfold. I'll find means to send it on when the situation has clarified. Five days have passed since I put my pen aside, and we are now at the beginning of the month they call July, after Julius Caesar who apparently invented this calendar they use at much the same time as he was building this fortress we are in.

Ooof! Perhaps I should have waited. Lord Scales is having a wonderful time shooting off his pieces. The gunners load and lay them, he rushes up to each emplacement in turn, touches his saltpetre wick to the charge, watches the touch-hole fizz, then bang! off the thing goes, and he rushes on to the next, back out of the tower, down the steps on to the battlement, along it, which is quite dangerous since he could fall off into the yard, up the stairs to the next tower, bang! and on again. He has six pieces pointing out over the city, three to the north towards the part they call Smithfield and three to the west shooting across the low rise they call Tower Hill and into Billingsgate. For all the height these pieces are set at, and their size, he does not seem able to inflict damage at more than five hundred paces, which is a matter of considerable distress and grief to him as it leaves the bridge just, and only just, beyond his range. And it is over the bridge that Warwick's army is now passing, having been welcomed by the Lord Mayor and aldermen, including, I suppose. Alderman Dawtrey.