Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) (2 page)

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

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:

or:

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.

I thought that would make you sit up. It isn’t every man you meet who can remember being worshipped as a God – and who still is. And it isn’t every day you meet someone who has fathered half a dozen Royal Houses. I haven’t spent all my time in the counting house, you know. As a matter of fact, looking back, I seem to have spent most of it in bed. That’s where I learnt my German, in bed, with Ursa, in Vindabonum.

I was young, then. We went up to Vindabonum, my father and I, during the reign of his late Sainted Majesty. It was not altogether
by our own volition. We were priests of Apollo in the Old City. Not Apollo the Sun only, or Apollo the Music-maker at all, but Apollo the Healer, who is a very specialised God indeed and not to be found in very many shrines. There was a great deal to do there in those days. People came to be healed from quite a distance, sprains and bruises and such like, mostly. My father was very good with these.

‘Yes, yes, Photinus,’ he would say, ‘it’s all very well to do these spectacular cures, trepannings and amputations and visitations of boils and sores. But how often do you get a chance to see them? Not often enough to get any practice in, let alone make any money. No, it’s these little jobs that are the doctor’s bread and oil. They come in every day by the score. They’ve got to come in, you see. You can follow the plough with boils or even if you’re raving mad – you can govern a province like that, you know – but not with a swollen ankle that you can’t put to the ground. You’ve got your choice: come in to the doctor and pay, or lie up for a fortnight, and you can’t afford to do that. In you have to go, half a day in the ox cart, see the doctor, pay up your half piece of silver or your pair of chickens, and zut! he jerks it back into place for you. The next day, back you are behind the plough or pitching sheaves into the wagon, and you know that the next winter you won’t starve. Time’s everything in sowing and harvest; do it when you have to or never do it at all.’

Not that we were too worried about the pairs of chickens. Some of the hill farms had been in the family since the Persians, and a lot of the other charters weren’t much later. And there was some confusion, very often, about what was Temple property and what was family. So long as we lived in Vindabonum, the silver came up regularly. From the farm rents, from the olive presses, from the shipping line, from all the agencies we had. Not a bad organisation really. It all came through keeping out of politics.

But it was politics sent us up to Vindabonum. Keeping out of politics is always a bit of a risk. It isn’t so much supporting the wrong man as not supporting the right one, and there had been a bit of trouble about not joining up with the right people.

Now doubtless in the days of their late Sainted Majesties
Nero or Galba we might have all been killed where we sat, but by my young days we’d run out of violence. Besides we had a lot of influence in odd places, and it was enough for someone to suggest, quite firmly, that it might be better if we went and lived elsewhere for a time. Not necessarily Vindabonum. They offered us a choice of several places, all quite horrible, like that place south of Leptis Magna, on the edge of the desert, and York. I never did get to York.

Anyway, they were all on frontiers, and we happened to have an agent in Vindabonum, a man called Otho who did a lot of buying of furs and timber and wax across the Danube, and selling cloth and wine and pottery and oil. That’s a good trade; you sell the oil and wine
in
the pots, saves carriage. So we went there, up with all our furniture and plate in the wagons from Aquileia, we weren’t going to be uncomfortable, and our own servants. We had a dreadful time with them, and in the end we had to send them back and stock up in the local slave market.