Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

Yes, indeed. By the middle of the year, when the villagers are partying beside their midsummer bonfires, when the hay is cut and the wheat beginning to yellow and the rye is five feet tall and, when the breezes breathe across it, shot with blue like watered silk, and behind every hedge and in even- woodland clearing boys have their hands on young girls' breasts or under their bums, and the girls wind their thighs around the young boys' hips and cling to their necks with arms like the boughs of beech trees or poplars and the swallows and white-rumped martins swoop along the rain puddles skimming the water-skin for drink and gnats' eggs, I grow tired of my Virgin's garb, the adulation of the mostly old and feeble that goes with it, and the awed respect of the men I meet. And, anyway, I am bursting out of it as my body returns to its usual shape. It's time to seek a new persona. And maybe Eddie March as well.

I have been of two minds about where to head. Some days I have been pulled to the south by a longing for Eddie, on others I have headed north and west knowing that in that direction lay the place where Prince Harihara's lost brother might be found and to find him might well mean reunion with Ali and the rest. Anyway, I am somewhere towards the north-west of the country, not fir I think from the borderlands between Ingerlond and Gwalia, of which more later, when, in a fertile undulating plain of forest and farmland laced with small rivers, with a castle in the distance on a low hill called Malpas, I spy a young knight pricking down the winding track on the back of a very big orange-coloured gelding. And, to be frank, I feel a sudden urge to have this lad as a surrogate for Eddie. I also have at the back of my mind the thought that if I can get him to get his kit off and maybe take a nap, I might get myself a new disguise.

He's moving slowly, his horse barely ambling, and from the slight rise I am on I can see that shortly he will pass by a mill-pond with a grassy sward starred with daisies on its bank. The mill itself is a ruin, surrounded by willows and rushes and yellow flowers they call flags growing out of the mud around it. Such is the lawlessness of these times many such places set apart from villages, towns or castles have been plundered by wandering bands of robbers, the inmates killed, their gold stolen and often their dwellings fired. Certainly a melancholy that should have served as a warning hangs over the scene, in spite of the healthy-looking sedge and the singing birds.

Moving swiftly, despite flowering brambles and thickets of dogwood, I get to the sward ahead of him and quickly divest myself of my Virgin's robes, crown and all, so that when he comes on to the grass, there I am, sitting beneath a willow, entirely as nature made me, with my knees pulled up and my arms hooked round them, apparently watching the emerald and sapphire dragonflies cruising and copulating over the lotus pads, whose flowers are just on the point of bursting from their glans-shaped cases.

'Oh, shit,' he says, then, 'Holy Mary Mother of God.'

Come on, I think. You cannot be serious. But no, he is not, the statement was an oath not a guess as to my identity. He swung a leg over his pommel and dropped to the ground.

'You're going to disappear, aren't you?' he said. 'Or turn into a wicked old crone? They always do. In the stories.'

Now I can see him I feel a touch disappointed. He's no more than fourteen, and rather plump, with blond almost white hair and a haze of yellow on his upper lip.

'Who?' I ask, still sitting, looking up at him over my shoulder.

'The naked ladies knights come across when they're out questing.'

'Are you a knight? Are you questing?'

'Not a knight. Chaps don't get to be knights until they've done some deed of derring-do. That's in the stories. In real life it's more a case of having forty quid a year and being called to be in Parliament.'

His voice still flukes up every now and then – not a promising sign.

A moment passes. I straighten my knees, lean back on my elbows, let him see my tits. 'I'm not going to disappear. I'm not going to change into anything. I'm not even going to bite. Not hard anyway.' And I shake my hair, now growing back and glossy black again. 'Do you think you could move your horse off a bit? It's attracting a rather nasty son of fly.'

He looks at me. looks at his horse, whose tail is slashing the air behind him and whose withers shudder spasmodically to shift the brutes and, 'Come on, Dobs,' he says, and leads him away to the other side of the lawn where he loops the reins around an alder branch. As he conies back he's already unlacing his jerkin. I stand and give him a hand. Also a full view of what I have on offer.

'This really is real, isn't it?'

'You bet." And I fumble the buckle of his belt, which is heavy with his scabbarded sword.

'I'm John Coombe of Annesbury,' he says. What's your name?' 'You can call me Uma.'

Well, it still is quite small, long, thin, pointed, yet somehow fresh and unused, which is nice, standing up and pinging, and, of course, he's all over me before he's properly in. but at his age he's no shrinking violet and we get where I want to go second time round, and third too. Then I suggest we have a swim in the mill-pond because it's a hot sultry day and by now we are both very sweaty and smeared with misdirected semen. I stay near the edge, squelching the mud between my toes, and give myself a bit of a wash, then I tell him I bet he can't swim to the other side, having it in mind that while he's taking me up on this I can filch his clothes and his horse.

Now. what happens next is something I do not have in mind. I have no idea how treacherous these mill-ponds can be. You see, he can't swim, which I have not properly understood, he's just been wading about pretending to, and being the very young man he is, this is not something he is going to admit. So he wades off towards the other side. A shout, a cry, a gasp, a podgy white arm flailing amongst the lotuses which, even while we've been there, have opened their sixteen petals to welcome the light of their lord the sun into their fragrant hearts, and he's gone.

Sorry.

Still. I had just taken him to heaven and back, introduced him to the goddess within, in a way he would never have managed with the local girls, and, since he was a gentleman, probably saved him from being hacked up by some grown man with an axe. Lots of" people get a far worse deal out of life.

His clothes are not at all a bad fit, and his buttercup-coloured horse is quite happy to take me on board. Together, horse and I, we set off towards Malpas Castle. We have not gone far when, rounding a bend, we come upon what looks like a robbery.

Clearly this is to he a day of chance meetings. Well, every day is, is it not? But meetings of some significance are rarer. What is happening is this. Within a group of four or live people a thin, pale man with a straggly black moustache and a black felt hat with a large brim is pulling his way through a large-leather sack with a drawstring, sorting the contents into two heaps – what he wants to keep and what he does not want to keep. On the keep side is a fair amount of good-quality jewellery and clothes made from expensive stuffs, such as velvet, fine cotton and silk, while on the other side go toiletries, wool, leather, gaberdine and so forth. He is watched by a pale, tired-looking woman, basically handsome but now in a real cow of a rage, dressed in crimson velvet riding gear with gold embroidery, and very fine soft-leather boots. Her blonde hair is pulled up but coming adrift from beneath a velvet cap with a feather. As I come on to the scene she has a riding crop with which she is attempting to slash the pale thin man. but a fat man, his companion, is contriving to hold her back. The final character in the scene is a small boy of about seven years old who is screaming his head off. I know them all.