Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

'She looks all right…"

And he took it hack to the edge of the pool. It leapt, plop, hack into the water. Ali lifted his cat down and soon they were friends again, she purring in his lap.

'Is that the end of the story?' I asked.

'Not quite,' Uma murmured. 'You see I too was there at the end. What happened was that that younger brother of Eddie's. Richard, bribed an ostler and got a pony which he rode to the battlefield. I followed him. It was dusk when I found him. He was going through the wood searching out the Queen's men who still lived inside their boxes of iron. When he found one who did he fiddled the point of his poniard through the man's Visor, searching for an eye and when he found it he rammed it home. This is a boy of eight, you know? A boy who will be king until Owen Tudor's grandson kicks him out.'

'There was a coronation too, before we left,' Ali added. 'In the middle of June. Gross business. Very barbaric. Long ceremony in Westminster Abbey with wailing monks and braying brass, endless business with anointing oil, a big jewelled crown, sceptres, globes, what all. And afterwards absurdly huge feasts with barrels of wine and beer, lewd dancing, wild extravagance in clothes and jewellery, much of it sold by us, and mass executions carried out in public. In the middle of all this Eddie made our Prince a knight, for his help with the crossbows. A Knight of the Garter, big deal. You had to buckle a strip of velvet just below the knee and wear a star made out of cheap little diamonds. It's meant to be the highest order he could receive, but the Prince now keeps the doings in a box with a few other oddments he picked up in Ingerlond, as souvenirs. After that we came home.'

It was time to go. Ali was tired. The sun was already beginning its swift fall into the Arabian Sea. Uma was anxious to get her children to bed. But I knew I would not be back and I wanted the last ends of the story tidied up.

'You got back safely?'

'Clearly.'

'And with the military expertise the Prince had gone for?'

'Oh yes. I suppose so. It didn't interest me greatly. But Bardolph Earwicca is now the Emperor's Master of Ordnance, and we also brought back four other youngsters, a knight, a couple of men-at-arms, and an archer, who professed themselves at a loose end now the wars were over and were anxious to travel. They have settled in well and are retraining the army.' 'Anish?'

'He's all right. Still Prince Harihara's chamberlain as far as I know.' Tliere was a silence for a moment or two, which I broke. 'And you, Ali. What did you bring back? Apart from a pension which seems adequate.'

'A more certain conviction than ever, maybe, that the Old Man of the Mountain had it right: Nothing is true. Everything is possible. Nothing matters. No. That's not all.'

He stood and turned away, but he could not disguise the slight break in his voice.

'From the best friend I ever had I learnt a better way of looking at things: that it is no sad truth that this should be our home. Were it but to give us simple shelter, simple clothing, simple food, adding the lotus and the rose, the apple and the cherry, it would be a fit home for mortal or immortal man.'

Later that evening I went down to the quay just as the sun was making its swift descent into the ocean. I would be leaving Mangalore and the Malabar coast in the morning aboard a Chinese trading junk on which I had booked a passage, taking my Dravidian wife with me. We would be heading south, round Sri Lanka and back to civilisation. But at that moment, looking west, the offing was barred by a blank bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – it seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

A year later Mah-Lo presented himself and his account of Ali ben Quatar Mayeen's adventures to the court of the Ming Emperor Cheng-Hwa in his capital Cambaluc. In his preamble he said that while the Vijayanagaran empire's army had recently undergone a radical transformation the reforms were all made with defence rather than expansion in mind. The defences of fortresses had been improved to withstand sieges supported by gunpowder; they had their own way of making gunpowder which was better than anyone's apart from the Chinese; they were training heavy infantry to withstand cavalry. It was Mah-Lo's opinion that with these improvements they would be able to withstand Muslim invasions for the foreseeable future but they presented no threat to Chinese expansion or trade.

Looking further afield, to the other side of the world, it was his conclusion that none of the European kingdoms need be considered an immediate danger to the Chinese apart possibly from the Portuguese. And even the Portuguese, it seemed, were more interested in building up a maritime trading empire based on enclaves of merchants rather than military domination.

However, in the long term, he had no doubt that eventually the Inglysshe could become a problem. If Ali was right in his depiction of this island race, once their internal disputes were settled Mah-Lo feared they could well become a problem for the whole world.

Their history, particularly the Norman Conquest and its aftermath,

had developed a set of contradictory characteristics which gave

them an edge over all the other peoples he had encountered in

all his wanderings.

'They are,' he told us, 'a nation of individuals who yet can combine and behave with ferocious bravery under leaders they respect; they are skilful and ruthless traders with few natural assets of their own to exploit; they are foolhardy sea-farers; they are inordinately arrogant; they are ruthless, unforgiving, cruel enemies. Unfettered by morals or a common religion they take an empirical, pragmatic view of life, adapting their beliefs to circumstances, though always favouring an approach which leaves each individual the captain of his own soul.

'Ali once heard an Ingerlonder say: "I do not tell others how to live and I do not expect others to tell me."'

Mah-Lo continued: 'They enjoy and even live for camaraderie, the company of their fellows, physical prowess, hedonistic if simple enjoyment shared with others, strong drink and rough, speedily concluded sex. They have an incredible capacity to suffer pain for a short term, and will face death willingly. But they will not put up with pain or toil as a life-choice. They hate boredom.

'They will cheerfully accept individuals of other creeds and races as individuals, especially if they take a personal liking to them, while continuing to despise all foreigners in general.

'They are mad,' Mah-Lo concluded. 'One day they will conquer the world.'

There was a moment's silence, then the Grand Chamberlain made a dismissive gesture with his long-nailed lingers. "But not China,' he said. 'No,' Mah-Lo agreed. 'Probably not China."

Julian Rathbone is the author of many books, including the hugely acclaimed The Last English King and the Booker-shortlisted Joseph. He lives in Dorset.