Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) Read online

  Praise for John James:

  ‘a first-rate historical novelist’ Oxford Times

  Votan

  ‘The narrative is terse, the colours vivid, the events barbarously splendid … an imagination as rich as it is vivid’ The Times

  ‘… excitement, mythology, the splendour and barbarity of the Dark Ages, and vividly imagined adventures’ Northern Echo

  Not for All the Gold in Ireland

  ‘A thoroughly enjoyable novel, full of exuberance and colourful fantasy’ Manchester Evening News

  ‘Crackles with atmosphere and splendidly imaginative writing’ Guardian Journal

  MEN WENT TO CATTRAETH

  ‘A novel of stark imaginative fire’ The Observer

  ‘Rich and fascinating and intense’ Western Mail

  VOTAN AND OTHER NOVELS

  JOHN JAMES

  VOTAN

  NOT FOR ALL THE GOLD IN IRELAND

  MEN WENT TO CATTRAETH

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were — and remain — landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Praise for John James

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Introduction by Neil Gaiman

  Votan

  Title Page

  Contents

  Vindabonum

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Germany

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Asgard

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Lands Beyond Asgard

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Pictland

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Waste

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  The Amber War

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Not For All the Gold in Ireland

  Title Page

  Contents

  Gaul

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Londinium

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  The Mere

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Ireland

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Men Went to Cattraeth

  Title Page

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Website

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction by Neil Gaiman

  The hardest part of being a writer, particularly being someone who writes fiction for a living, is that it makes it harder to reread a book you loved. The more you know about the mechanics of fiction, the craft of writing, the way a story is put together, the way words work in sequence to create effects, the harder it is to go back to books that changed you when you were younger. You can see the joins, the rough edges, the clumsy sentences, the paper-thin people. The more you know, the harder it is to appreciate the things that once gave you joy.

  But sometimes it’s nothing like that at all. Sometimes you return to a book and find that it’s better than you remembered, better than you had hoped: all the things that you had loved were still there, but that it’s even more packed with things that you appreciate. It’s deeper, cleaner, wiser. The book got better because you know more, have experienced more, encountered more. And when you meet one of those books, it’s a cause, as they used to say on the back of the book jackets, for celebration.


  So. Let’s talk about Votan.

  I’m really late in getting this introduction in, mostly because I’ve been trying to work out how to introduce Votan without giving it all away. One does not want to explain the jokes, nor does one feel the need to assign homework before one gives someone a book to read. But it will not hurt if you are familiar with your Norse myths. They will make Votan a deeper book, a game of mirrors and reflections and twice-told tales. It might be a good thing to read the Mabinogion, and the Irish Taín. They will make you smile wider and shake your head in wonder when you read Not For All The Gold In Ireland.

  So. First of all, you should feel free to skip this introduction and go and read the book. You are holding a beautiful book here, written by a remarkable writer: it contains three novels. Two novels about a Greek Trader called Photinus, who is at least the equal of, and, dare I say it, a finer rogue and tale-spinner than George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman; and a darker retelling, or recreation, of a Welsh epic poem.

  I read them as a young man – they were republished as fantasy novels in the early eighties, having been published in the sixties as historical novels. They are not fantasy novels, nor are they strictly historical novels: instead they are novels set in historical periods which people who read fantasy might also appreciate. The Photinus novels (there are only two, with a third novel implied but, alas, never written) are based on mythic and magical stories. (Men Went to Cattraeth is bleaker, and based on an old Welsh poem, the Y Goddodin.)

  Photinus’s mind and his point of view, his voice if you will, is not ours. It is this voice that lingers longest for me. His attitudes and his world are those of the past. Occasionally he commits atrocities. He does not have a twenty-first century head. Many characters in historical novels are us, with our point of view, wearing fancy dress. Votan’s dress is rarely fancy. The conceit that all protagonists in historical novels should share our values, our prejudices and our desires is a fine one (I’ve used it myself), and it is much more difficult and much more of an adventure to create characters who are not us, do not believe what we believe, but see things in a way that is alien to us and to our time.

  My own novel American Gods has a sequence where the hero, Shadow, spends nine nights on the tree, like Odin, a sacrifice to himself: I did not dare to reread Votan in the years running up to writing American Gods, then once my book was written, it was the first thing I read for pleasure, like a chocolate I had put away as a boy until the perfect time. I was nervous, and should not have been. Instead I discovered a whole world inside a book I already knew. (And yes, I am sure that Shadow’s tree-hanging owed a huge debt to Votan’s.)

  So. Here are the things I will tell you, that might make reading this book more pleasant for you.

  Votan is the story of a man called Photinus – a young man, a Greek trader, a magician, heartless and in it for profit – who seeks amber, and finds wealth and companionship and also finds himself Odin Allfather, the Norse god. The sagas and the tales and the poems that tell us about the Aesir, about Odin and Thor (Donar is Donner is Thunder) all reconfigure here, as if seen through a dark mirror: bleak tales they are, and dark.

  It is not that James demythologises the stories, strips off all the beauty and the magic. It is more that he gives us reflection. As their best, these books are like holding a conversation with somebody from two thousand years ago. Occasionally, James can be too knowing or too wry (it is worth observing how many of Photinus’s observations are common sense and utterly wrong – where amber comes from, for example, or the commercial possibilities of coal) but these moments are swept away into the next glorious story.

  And the more you know, the more there is to find. I do not want to give away anything that James hid so well in his text, but here, I shall give you a couple of early ones for free: Loki is of the Aser, but not of them, trading on their behalf from his base in Outgard, not Asgard. In one of the most famous stories, we visit, with Thor, Utgard, where the giants live, and meet the crafty trickster who is also King of the Giants, Utgardloki. (Loki is half giant, half Aesir.) In the Norse sagas, Fenrir (from old norse, meaning fen dweller) is a monstrous wolf, the offspring of Loki, who bites off the hand of Tyr: here, our own Tyr tells the story of his own encounter with Fenris.

  The stories of the Norse Gods are dark stories, and they do not end well: there is always Ragnarok waiting, the end of all things, the destruction of Asgard and the Aesir and all they hold dear. While Photinus/Votan become a god, he is doing it as a servant of another god, in this case an aspect of Apollo, who desires chaos, and who is laying, in his own way, the steps that will brng about the end of the world, in fire. We meet the gods in this book, in a way that reminds me of Gene Wolfe’s Latro tales.

  Remember, when reading these books, Google is your friend. Wikipedia is your friend. If you are curious, look it up. Were there really Celts in Galatea – modern Turkey – that the British would have recognised as cousins, speaking a similar tongue? (Why yes, there were. Wikipedia tells me that three Gaulish tribes travelled south east, the “Trocmi, Tolistobogii and Tectosages. They were eventually defeated by the Seleucid king Antiochus I, in a battle where the Seleucid war elephants shocked the Celts.”) Were there really vomitoria, where Romans went to vomit? (No, there weren’t. It’s a common misconception. A vomitorium was actually kind of hallway. But this is a rare slip.)

  Not For All The Gold In Ireland brings us an older Photinus. I’m not sure that he’s wiser, but he’s softer, less monstrous. And he’s funnier (both books are funny, although the humour of Votan is gallows humour). He’s off to get back a document, and on the way he’s going to wander a long way into a number of stories. He’ll become Manawyden, son of Llyr, the hero of several branches of the great Welsh prose work known as the Mabinogion (as are many of the people we will meet on the way – Pryderi, for example, and Rhiannon. Taliesin turns up too, centuries before we would expect the legendary Taliesin (but it is a title, we learn, not a name, handed down from bard to bard)).

  And there’s a strange and glorious achievement here: for the people are human, yes. But they are also mythical, larger than life. Not always in the way that we expect culture heroes and gods to be, but in a new way: they are avatars of gods, avatars of heroes: are these the Odin and the Loki and the Thor of legend, or do they echo them? Do the gods and heroes have a separate existence from Photinus and his crew, and are our protagonist and his friends being pushed through tales that will need to exist?

  As the tale goes on, we meet other heroes (is Photinus a hero? He is the hero of his own story) and when we encounter Setanta, the given name of the Irish hero known as Cú Chulainn, we can predict that we will slip, as we do, from the Mabinogion into the Taín. And Not For All The Gold In Ireland concludes itself in a manner that is both a valid conclusion to the book we have been reading and is also a cliffhanger, and perhaps also a set up for another book, one in which, I suspect, Photinus would have found himself Quetzalcoatl of the Azteks and Kukulkan of the Mayans.

  That book was never written. John James did not return to Photinus: he wrote other novels, fine and powerful, and different. These are books that have been brought back into print by people who love them, and would not let them be forgotten. If you are willing to walk and ride with Photinus, who was called Votan and Manannan and many other names, and who only wanted to increase his family’s wealth, and to bed the willing wives of absent officers, then he will repay you, not with amber, or mammoth ivory, or Irish gold, but with stories, which are the finest gift of all.

  Neil Gaiman

  New York

  VOTAN

  JOHN JAMES

  www.sfgateway.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Vindabonum

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Germany

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Ch
apter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Asgard

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Lands Beyond Asgard

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Pictland

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Waste

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  The Amber War

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Vindabonum

  1

  Well, if you really want to know how it was I came to be chained to an oak tree, half-way up in the middle of nowhere, with wolves trying to eat me out of it, I’ll tell you. Of course, it’s not nearly as interesting as what happened afterwards, but you can piece that together yourself if you go down to any of the taverns around the Praetorian barracks and listen to what the soldiers sing. If you can understand German, of course. They sing things like:

  High the Allfather

  Hung in the hornbeam;

  Nine days and no drinking,

  Nine nights and no nurture …

  or:

  Alfege the Earl, Odin-born,

  Great in guile, wise in war …

  I often go down there and listen. It never crosses their minds that it was only me all the time. Half the songs are about me; the other half I made up myself, anyway.