Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

'Speculation is free and harmless.' I said, but also looked around warily, 'though it may lead to the rack and the stake. So. Speculate."

'I was rather hoping you would.' 'Why me?'

'Since you have so reduced all human learning to the two postulates of your sect's founder, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted", you have sloughed off far more of the baggage of learning with which civilisation has loaded us than I have, and you can thus prance about more freely than I. I mean metaphorically,' he added, glancing at my withered hand and scrawny shanks.

'All right." I agreed, 'here goes.' But I remained mute for some minutes as we rambled on through acorns and beechmast beneath a canopy of layered green until, inspired by his brief absence behind a holly bush where he performed a natural function, I began.

'The first life…' Then I corrected myself. "The first animal life must have begun with the simplest, most basic form, from which all the others developed.'

'And that is?'

'A sack. No. A tube! A tube that maintains itself by sucking in food at one end, absorbing what it needs, and expelling what it does not need at the other. When you think about it, all animal life, including men and women, are at bottom just that. The rest is added to make the basic tube work better. So I'd guess the very first animals were just that and nothing else.'

'So how did they change? Become so varied and different. And so many different types. Species. What,' he added, 'in terms of cause and effect, of action and reaction makes a new thing? What is the origin of species?'

I gave that a little thought. 'Look,' I said eventually, 'I have travelled a great deal, I have seen animals like wild dogs and rodents thriving in deserts; in Muscovy I have seen an elephant, frozen inside a block of ice, with long, long hair, while in Vijayanagara they have almost no hair at all. I have seen monkeys that climb trees and monkeys like the ones on the rock of Jebel Tariq that live in caves and run about on the ground and have a different stance and use their legs in a different way from that employed by the tree-dwellers. And so on. The world is different from outplace to another. There are mountains and plains, valleys and peaks, hot places and cold, wet and dry, rocky deserts and luxuriant forests. And in each place the differences between the animals help them to suit the place where they live.'

'Ah. I see where you're going.' Peter could hardly contain his excitement. 'The first simple tubes would have to change as soon as their surroundings changed, as soon as the food they sucked in and shitted out was different… But how did these changes happen? What was the machinery? Why did they not simply die?'

We trudged on, in a melancholy mood now, fearing perhaps that we might, after all, have to return to that bearded old monster working like a potter for seven days and breathing life into the clay creatures he had created.

Presently, on that day, the heat began to bother us, Peter anyway, who was less used to it than I. We had come into a small glade where a storm had uprooted one of the forest giants and left a space open to the sky on which short green grass already grew. We sat with our backs to the trunk of the fallen hero and looked up into the beechen green above us.

A hundred tiny worms were visible, though they, too, were green, suspended on threads of gossamer from the leaves, and through them flitted a pair of the small red-breasted birds with sharp black beaks. They caught the little worms, which were yet more than a mouthful for them, and carried them away. In the short space that we watched each must have taken at least ten.

'What are they doing with them?' I asked. 'They cannot be eating them all themselves.'

And then I laughed, for one of these robins let go and limed my friend's bald pate.

'Bugger,' he said, and groping around beneath the tree-trunk found a dock-leaf with which he cleaned himself up, leaving a green smear where he could not see it. 'So, up there we have simple tubes that chew up leaves or blossom and pass tiny green droppings, and larger, more complicated ones that fly about, eat the smaller ones, and shit what they do not need having transformed the detritus into a black and white mess. Incidentally, their appetite is apparently ravenous because they are feeding the chicks nested in that hole where the tree has shed a branch. Is there a lesson to be learnt here? basically they are the same, tubular shit-makers, but in accidents so different. Why?'

'The simple ones have only to chew leaves, and when a leaf is nearly gone they spin a thread to get to the next. But the birds need to fly if they are to catch the worms, so they have grown wings and so forth to carry them from worm to worm. At some time in the past they, too, were worms, no doubt, but perhaps their food supply became inadequate, so they changed.'

'So. What you are saying is that we are all, all the animals there are and fishes and birds, just tubular shit-makers who…' he searched for the word '… adopted to changing circumstances so they could continue their main function of shit-production?"

'And staying alive… at least long enough to reproduce their kind.'

'The whole process took more than seven days.' 'I'd say so.'

'So. Those worms, and you and I. each adapted to his surroundings, are simply destined to feed, shit and, once we have reproduced, die.'

'Yes,' I asserted. And I felt a strange excitement well up in me, as might afflict a man who stood silent upon a mountain-top and surveyed a whole new ocean of knowledge, shrouded as yet in impenetrable mist.

'A destiny that lacks the dignity of being made in God's own image.'

'What's dignity got to do with it?'

Peter stood up, gave me a hand, and we set off again, both of us ruminating like a couple of cows.

'If,' I brought forth after a time, 'there were no robins, then the worms would eat all the leaves and there would be no more trees. If there were no more trees there would be no more worms, and soon no possibility even of robins… There is a sort of balance here, an equipoise.'

'Ah, but if there were no worms then I grant you there would be no robins. But there would still be trees. Lots of them.'

After a week or so of gentle walking, sometimes in widening t-\ circles (at one point we reached the eastern bank of the river called Severn, but then turned back as we were now in what Peter called the Welsh Marches, and the Welsh on the other side spoke a language as barbarous as their behaviour), much talking and some preaching we came at last to Burford, which was a place of some interest. But first the approaches signalled a change. We had moved from the river plain into an undulating country, the hills not high but frequent and occasionally steep. Many brooks and rivulets ran through them. There was much forest, but also, especially in the valleys, water-meadows where huge mushroom-coloured kine lay and endlessly chewed on lush grass and king-cups. In the uplands it became more and more the case that commons and what had once been ploughed were enclosed in wicker fences and harboured sheep. The villages we passed through, and occasionally stayed in. were prosperous, many of the buildings, even those of the poorest, of a pleasant warm grey stone. When it wasn't raining women sat in the doorways spinning wool from distaffs on to spindles, gossiping in the sunshine, while indoors or in lean-to sheds their menfolk wove the yarn into cloth on primitive looms. At any rate they looked primitive compared to the ones the Arab nation uses, whether for cotton and silk in Moorish Spain or tine wools in Asia. Many of these people spoke not Inglysshe but a tongue Peter said

was Flemish, from the Lowlands across the Channel. They had the art of weaving and spinning better than the Angles and Saxons, and had been encouraged to settle in Ingerlond.