Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

And our fingers, his short for the width of his big hands but strong with square ends, mine long and thin – what secret joys they find where thighs and torsos meet! His thumb runs down the crease and curves to cup the mound of bone, they part the wiry hair and probe the puckered lips; my thumb and forefinger ring the root of his prick while the other three roll his balls in their wrinkled sack. We play on each other as if on musical instruments smoothing the mucus between the pads on our fingers, teasing the tissue until his strengthens like timber and mine swells like a grape.

And now breath is taken by beauty, beauty of doing not seeing, of tasting and smelling and softly caressing. The longing now is nostalgia for a past that never yet happened, and I pull myself close to him, releasing his sex so I can hold his head and force my tongue and kisses on his neck and mouth, while he rolls us round and with one hand beneath me, in the small of my back, feeling out the cleft between my buttocks and with the other feeding his hungry pillar into me sends tides of hot joy up from my…

Well. Ali. You and I did it a couple of times, so you know what I'm on about, and you won't mind if I tell you that this Welsh chieftain knew what he was doing, was the best.

Summer drifts into autumn. Here the Welsh hills, which were a dull russet, slowly become lilac-coloured and then purple, spread with tiny bell-like flowers, so many millions of them it's like a

purple blanket and springy and soft so that with care, avoiding the bigger branches that hug the ground, one can lie on it and lose oneself in the sweet but light fragrance of it, gazing up into a blue like aquamarine and watch where eagles soar with necks collared in gold. And beneath these low bushes yet another bush hides from the snows and wind that howl across here in winter, blowing line powdery drifts, but now rich with small black berries, black that is until Owen names them: then you see how they're really blue, a deepest indigo.

These hills are cleft and riven with valleys so narrow near the crests you don't really see them until the hillside suddenly fills away beneath your feet to brown rock and water clear as crystal but brown, too, from the gravel beneath or grey and flat where the water has rounded boulders through the millennia, bubbling and gurgling from pool to pool. Deep in these declivities the air is still and the sun hot. With our ponies grazing on the ridge above us (they'll move and maybe neigh if anyone approaches), we can strip off our woollen cloaks and trousers and, on cropped thyme-scented grass beside the stream, make love again, and yet again, or just lie in each other's arms, backs against a sun-warmed lichened rock and watch the brown fish browse the moss beneath the surface.

At such times Owen feeds my head with tales of ancient Wales such as those of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, and Branwen, daughter of Llyr and I tell him the tale of Rama and Sita. Then he sings the love-songs and laments of Dafydd ap Gwilym and Dafydd Nanmor, who, he says, is a living bard and may one day come himself to Dinbych to sing to us. And I teach him the lore of Parvati, the mother of us all, and Kali too with her necklace of skulls, whose avatars I sometimes am, and he calls her Rhiannon, who is both virgin mother and mare-headed eater of human flesh.

The frosts come, and then, as I hinted, the snow and gales sweep in out of the grey sea we sometimes glimpse from the higher hills. Wolves howl amongst the sheep-pens and one day early in December we ride out with great grey hounds, long-limbed so the snow is no problem for them, with massive necks as strong, I say, as Owen's. We take no wolves but drive them deeper and deeper and higher and higher into the mountains, seeing them always streaking ahead of us, loping and lolloping up almost vertical

steeps, then silhouetted against the darkening sky, three of them, to howl their praise at the moon and defiance at us below, freezing in a shepherd's hut beside a black tarn. But there's wood stored there, and candles too, and the five of us, for Owen has brought three huntsmen with him, dine off biscuit and salt-dried mutton, before sleeping beneath the fleece of a bear.

Christmas conies, which Owen and his clan or tribe celebrate with some solemnity.

Mah-Lo, you will have understood how in those climes far to the north of us and even of your own country, the steady decline of the sun towards the winter solstice is a matter of some significance. All people who live in those climes hope and trust that sooner or later it will be halted and when it is, when by fine calculation, based on careful observation of the sun in relation to tall stones set in circles like giant teeth on hill-tops for this very purpose, they can assert with certainty that the sun has risen at a point a little to the left of where it rose the day before and sets a little to the right, they declare that the goddess has conceived and borne a son, which they call Adonis or Adonai".

On that day, out of the hills and woods came priests called druids, not Christian. Their leader bears mistletoe, and they enact certain rituals using drums made from oak, which simulate thunder. The leader carries the ancient sword shaped like a sickle and made of gold with which he cut the mistletoe and with which he now guards it.

He personates in flesh and blood the great god of the sky who has come down in the lightning flash to dwell among men in the mistletoe, the thunder-besom, that grows on the sacred oaks in the deepest valleys of Gwalia, by the side of black and fathomless tarns. The goddess whom he serves and marries is no other than the Queen of Heaven… for she, too, loves the solitude of the woods and the lonely hills, and sailing overhead on clear nights in the likeness of the silver moon, looks down with pleasure on her own fair image reflected on the calm, the burnished surface of the lake, Diana's mirror.

Here, in this country-, we call them Shiva and Devi or Parvati. Thus with due solemnity, and joy, too, the marriage of the gods is celebrated and the birth of the sun, the new year, and the hope of lambs born, barley and rye in the sheltered valleys and fleshy salmon flashing silver up the rivers and streams.

Hut that year, before the twelve days are done, news comes that fills me with foreboding, though Owen says it is good, of the Queen's great victory at Wakefield and the death of York and his son Rutland.

'A nest of vipers has been rooted out,' my lover cries in his deep voice, like an organ. 'Maybe we can now live in peace.'

But as winter deepens, the couriers who gallop up to his gates carry reports and commands as bad as winter itself and most especially bad are those carried by his son.

One day, when we are riding down a long winding valley, under the rowan trees, which still bear the odd berry, not all have been stripped by the birds Owen calls redwings, he comes. No snow now – as always happens on this island it lasted a week and then melted away – but frost again and the ice crackling in the puddles beneath the ponies' hoofs. A couple of red. fork-tailed kites circle in the updraught from a shepherd's croft, wondering if a quick drop on a dead sheep nearby is worth the risk from a mountain cat that's crouched under a boulder with an overhang nearby. And I'm riding in front. Owen is the only man I've ever met who'll let me do that), when I see a couple of men breaking away from the castle wall a mile away, and coming at a steady gallop up the track towards us. Both in half-armour, the one behind carrying a standard – presumably that of the one in front.

I rein in, let Owen come alongside. His broad forehead furrows and he pushes that black lock back. Of course it falls forward again.

'Shit,' he says.

And he lets out a quick sigh, his shoulders sink, and his hands, holding the reins, drop on to the pommel. I sense some life has Leaked out of him and I feel ineffably sad. This man is old enough to be my grandfather, just; he is, well, an old man. As old men do he finds the bad moments, when they come, more and more difficult to cope with.