Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

2000

Kings of Albion is a work of fiction that purports to be set in the fifteenth century. Readers bothered by anachronisms and inaccuracies are asked first of all to consider whether or not these may have been intentional. If they are still bothered then I must ask them to accept that the whole thing could have happened in an alternative solar system on the other side of the universe. Nevertheless, I did read around a bit.

Once the conceit of placing a small group of oriental characters in darkest England had occurred to me I had to decide where they might have come from. Originally I thought Burma. Seeking information about medieval Burma I got in touch with Richard Blurton of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum and told him my problem. 'Not Burma,' he said, 'Vijayanagara.'

Where?

In common, I imagine, with most people who will read this book, I had no idea where he was talking about. He told me, and directed me to the available sources. The Empire of Vijayanagara was the result of the unification of the states of southern India which took place in the late thirteenth century and survived as a unity until 1565. When it was finally conquered by a coalition of Bahmani sultans it was completely obliterated in an uncharacteristically thorough way: the libraries were destroyed, the massive buildings and cities stripped of almost all their ornaments bothsculpted and painted; the surviving population and its civilisation degraded to the status of peasant serfs. For centuries almost the only sources of knowledge about what had been lost were the chronicles and records of sixteenth-century Portuguese traders and explorers, particularly those who penetrated the empire after their annexation of Goa. It is only in the last few decades that archaeologists have begun to work on the huge sites and piece together a new conception of what this lost civilisation must have been like.

Vijayanagara was just what I wanted: a civilisation very probably more civilised than Europe in the fifteenth century', and one about which still comparatively little is known so I could allow my imagination to roam freely. No doubt true students of Vijayanagara will condemn the results on every possible ground and I apologise to Richard Blurton lor dragging him into this farrago. Nevertheless I owe him a real debt of gratitude.

I also made copious use of Indian Art by Vidya, published by Phaidon.

I first discovered the Brothers of the Free Spirit in Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus, published by Picador, and followed them up in Norman Conn's 77ie Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millennariaus and Mystical Anarchists in the Middle Ages published by Mercury, both classics which were a joy to have to read. I first read of Hassan Ibn Sabbah in the works of William S. Burroughs (whose Family ofjohnsons I've also borrowed), though the Assassins figured in many schoolboy romances I read when I was a boy, while, not much later, Eric Linklater's Mr liyculla was my first introduction to Thuggee.

Among other borrowings there are short but more or less direct quotations from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and an adapted paragraph trom Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough. The peroration of Brother Peter's sermon is taken from Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse at a point where he himself quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche and Sean O'Casey. And finally Ali ben Quatar Mayeen and Prince Harihara Kurteishi each owe just a little to Alan Quatermain and Sir Henry Curtis in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines…

As will always be the case with a writer who is tolerably well read and arguably elderly there may be other borrowings I am not aware of.

No doubt my fifteenth-century England is as out of kilter as my Vijayanagara. I made no use of primary sources. I did, however, read all the popular histories of the period that are in print or could be found in public libraries, and the social histories too. In the end I kept Alison Weir's Lancaster and York – The Wars of the Roses (Pimlico) beside me as the most lucid and in many ways most detailed blow-by-blow account I had found, and I should like to acknowledge my debt to that title. The modern versions of medieval verse which appear are by Brian Stone and are taken from Medieval English Verse, published by Penguin Classics.

However, my main source, for all aspects of Kings of Albion, the one to which I always turned first and where I usually found as much as I wanted, was the njn Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which I inherited from my father: it sits in its case a yard to my right and in all the time I have spent on this book I doubt if half an hour has passed when I have not pulled out one or other of its volumes.

JR

December, 1999

Ali ben Quatar Mayeen ('Call me Ismail, if you must, but I prefer Ali') was a retired trader – or, rather, a rep for a trader, a sort of latter-day Sinbad. Never made a fortune out of it. not until that last trip he took so long telling me about, and even that was not a real, serious fortune. It was enough, though, to see his son Haroun – Ali called him Haree through medical school in Misr-al-Kahira, which Christians call Cairo, keep a rainproof roof over his head, and buy all the bhang he needed until the day he died. And I mean needed. After two winters in Ultima, or almost Ultima, Thule, Ali's joints played up like hell, especially his knees and knuckles, and especially when it rained, and bhang is the only thing that eases that sort of pain when you're seventy years old. Seventy? That's a guess. Ali himself was capable of putting his age at anything between sixty and seventy-five.

Rain? Yes, for a couple of months a year it rains very seriously in Mangalore, rain, Ali would say, as he'd never experienced it before, not even in Manchester, and even though it's warm rain it got into his joints, made his knuckles swell, and they hurt as if a skilled torturer were sliding red-hot needles into the cartilage between the bones. Knees too. But it doesn't last long, and the bhang helps. In fact, look at it this way, for two months a year he-was as high as one of those dragon kites you Chinese fly during your festivities and, yes, the pain was still there but as if it belonged to someone else. And, apart from the rainy season, the Malabar coast of India, in the empire of Vijayanagara, seemed to Ali like paradise on earth.

He had a couple of wives, sisters, not yet m their twenties, he reckoned, who cooked the native food to perfection, saw that the servants kept the place clean, bathed him, fed him, put him outside on the patio where the fountain played and the lotus and the roses bloomed, and encouraged a couple of friends, traders like him, to come in and swap yarns about old times and old adventures. If he was feeling particularly well, and it was not too hot, he'd potter down to the port, drink some lemonade in one of the Arab-owned establishments, and watch the big dhows with their huge triangular sails coming in over the harbour bar from all four imagined comers of the rounded world. There was an Arab girl down there too, who sang like an angel while she played on a guitarra, nostalgic songs about Granada where she was born. It was there, of course, that I first made his acquaintance.

Wben dusk came, his wives took him back to bed and put him between them so his old bones seemed almost to suck the warmth and life from their soft bodies and he slept, so he told me, like a new-born babe.