Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

Such were the people Jehani lived amongst. My informant tells me that he may have lost his lower legs as a result of torture by crushing before he was taken in by these people. He may have been tortured because he was already identified as a Brother of the Free Spirit, or simply because he was a stranger with skin darker than those around him,

There is much we shall never know about him for certain, we can only guess.

He lived, in some comfort, with all a rational man could wish for, in a small settlement hidden in a forest, in a part of a forest where ordinary people were afraid to go since it had been the site, some fifty years earlier, of a meteoric impact. The Ingerlonders believe such occurrences come from the Devil, who, in their cosmology, is the spirit of evil. However, hidden away though they were, it seems likely that the authorities became aware of their existence and most of the group were murdered by soldiers, probably sent by the Bishop, the spiritual authority in the area. The elders however, including Jehani, were able to seal, or have themselves sealed, within their largest building where they took their own lives by means of herbal poisons.

These are the facts as well as we know them. Much more could be said, but little that is worth saying and nothing that will bring him back. We are now on our way home.

Your affectionate and obedient, but grieving cousin,

Prince Harihara

We arrived at Shrewsbury at the end of January to find that the new Duke of York, or King, as he preferred to be known, had left the day before, heading south to Hereford where, we gathered, he aimed to consolidate all the various divisions of his army, raised as it had been in the counties of the west as well as in the borders or Marches between Ingerlond and Wales. Prom Hereford he planned to move to the support of Warwick in London who now awaited the onslaught of the Queen following the battle of Wakefield.

But we were still five miles short of Hereford when we met his army heading north after all. Apparently, a few miles to the north and west this new king's scurriers, or spies, had discovered a large power of Welshmen who, it was thought, were heading for a crossroads at a hamlet called Mortimer's Cross where they would go east and south towards a point north of London where they would be a more than useful addition to the Queen's army. Since these scurriers were certain that York's army was double the numbers of that led by Owen and Jasper Tudor, it seemed sense-to move forward and deal with them before they could add their numbers to the Queen's.

On the afternoon which was the eve of Candlemas, the day, as Uma has already told us, when Christians bless all the candles they will use in their churches during the next twelve months, the army drew up on the river Lugg and waited for the new duke to make his dispositions. A mile or so away the vanguard of the Welsh could be seen moving tentatively towards us through the murky gloom.

It was at this point that the Duke, riding past us with an escort of knights and squires, with his standard, the royal arms, carried behind him. His visor up, turned his face towards us so we recognised him and he recognised us.

He was only eighteen years old. Irrationally we had expected him to be older. As indeed he might have been. His father, Richard of York, was fifty when he died at Wakefield.

It was Eddie. Our Eddie. Eddie March. Eddie, Earl of March.

'Good Lord,' he cried, reining in with a slight clatter of armour. 'It's the Oriental chappie. Prince Hurry-hurry. How are you, my dear fellow? And Ali too. My goodness, your quick thinking got me out of a scrape, what? Nearly a year ago, as I'm alive. Is the witch with you? That wonderful girl. What was her name? Uma. Of course. How could I forget? I say, I'm a touch busy right now, things to deal with and so forth, but Gervase here will look after you and bring you to my tent for a bite to eat and a glass or two when I'm through. What do you say? fine. good. Dashed glad to see you again. À bientôt, then, what?'

Gervase was a squire of about fifteen years old, who did as he was told.

Eddie had changed. The deaths of his father and younger brother had aged him. You don't believe in death, not even when you've seen it and dished it out, until the first person close to you goes. Then you believe. And in his case the manner in which they had gone was a source of pain and hate: they had been betrayed by Trollope and others into lighting a battle they should never have fought. Then the insult to the dead, the abuse of their bodies. Older he certainly was. and bitter with a deadly, cunning bitterness, a thirst for revenge that quite overcrowed the jolly, whoring japer we hail known in Calais and East Cheap.

And now, just a month after his father's death, he had his own army and the first chance to satisfy the thirst for revenge that burned like acid bile within him. Yet there was fear too.

At dusk we stood outside his tent and looked down over what would, in the morning, be the field of battle.

There was a bridge, the river Lugg, and Wigg Marsh, across the Worcester road. A local man. Sir Roger Croft of Croft Castle, stood beside us and pointed east. The crossroads were below us just south of the hamlet, two furlongs north of the bridge.

'My lord…'

'Sire."

'Indeed, yes, Your Majesty. The marsh. The road crosses it. If they break that way

'Yes. We'll put the archers on that side, on the far side of the marsh. And the main body over the bridge, on the other side.'

'Your Majesty, if you do that, you cut off or make a bottle-neck of our retreat, should we need it.'

'There will be no retreat. And it's best if they know that.'

There were no cannon. At Candlemastide the roads were too deep in mud or snow to move them, the very air, even when it didn't rain, too moist for gunpowder.

They were in place by nightfall, and as the darkness closed in we could see the torches of the Welsh winding through Mortimer's Cross then spreading out. We could hear the jingle and clang of their armour, the neigh of their horses.

But with darkness came doubts. Eddie had twice the number of men, twice at least. But that was at dusk. How many at dawn? So many lords and knights, with their affinities, in his army: Lord Audley, Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord FitzWalter, Sir So-and-so of This, Baron That of So-and-so. And all, just like Trollope, had sworn their oath to Henry, if not when he ascended the throne then at some time after. How many, like Trollope, would return to that allegiance when the sun rose and the skylarks left their watery nests?

Once back in his tent all this weighed heavily and Eddie said, 'We need a sign. An irrefutable sign that we will win because God is on our side. Only that way can we be sure that chaps will realise that their oath to Henry was falsely sworn and that I am rightfully king."

He turned to our prince. 'Hurry-hurry,' he said, 'you Oriental chaps have a reputation for magic and so forth. Could you conjure something up for us? An eclipse, perhaps. Put the sun out and say the sun is Henry?'

And that, dear Mah-Lo, is as far as I shall go tonight with the spinning of my yam. It's a good place to stop is it not?Just on the eve of a battle whose outcome is in the balance. Scheherezade could not have done better.

I've had occasion, once or twice, said Ali when, the next day, he took up the tale again, to mention the fakir who attached himself to us right from the start. He came and went like a shadow, a not very familiar familiar. Tall, dark, a Mussulman god-man, he was, I sometimes thought, my other self, my similar, my brother, the ghost of the man I might have been had I not been mutilated as a child in the way you see before you. Indeed, at times I was none too sure in just what dimension he existed, for it seemed to me that none saw him or were aware of his presence but I. He was often there, a flicker in the comer of my eye who was gone when I turned; a presence between the sun and a wall that faded with the light whose rays it interrupted.