The Fourth Gwenevere

by John James, Caitlín Matthews, John Matthews

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

With a new Gwenevere manuscript recently found, bestseller John James returns with this witty, serpentine novel, which weaves the Arthurian legends into the wider fabric of the struggle for Europe.

Release date: May 7, 2015

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Finding The Fourth Gwenevere

The Dark-Age World of John James

The novels of John James have a deserved and fervent following. Few writers have so successfully re-envisioned the period of history known as ‘the Dark Ages’ (now called by historians ‘the early middle ages’) with such clarity. James’ ability to plunge wholeheartedly into the myths that thread the Roman and Dark Age period for his material, as well as his sharp wit and undeviating irony, give his work a crisp definition and energy that has inspired the writing of many.

John James was born 30 November 1923 in Aberavon, Wales. After studying philosophy at St David’s University, Lampeter, he took an MA in psychology at Selwyn College, Cambridge, becoming a psychologist at the Ministry of Defence. His work included the selection and training of aircrews at RAF Brampton.

He published eight novels, four of which were set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the rest in the Roman and Dark-Age eras.

Votan (1966) reveals the travels of the Greek merchant Photinus among the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe, where his exploits cause him to become recognised as Odin.

Not For All the Gold in Ireland (1968) sees the return of Photinus the Greek, who this time travels into Britain and Ireland where he encounters Cú Cuchulainn and the Red Branch Warriors of Ulster.

Men Went to Cattræth (1969) is set in the late fifth century, during the youth of Arthur, and is based upon the earliest British epic poem, Y Gododdin by Aneirin. This extraordinary novel is narrated by Aneirin himself.

In the Bridge of Sand (1976) Juvenal, the satirist, leads Roman troops to conquer Ireland over a magical bridge of sand with the help of Vergilius, the poet Virgil.

His first-person narratives are racily told, salted with wit and irony, capturing the laconic mode of North European understatement as well as the rhetoric of bards and druids. The figures of the wandering Shipman and the poet as carpenter of song and story recur throughout his work, revealing James’ well-balanced alter egos.

James was a master of the oblique. He takes much for granted in his readers and makes no concessions to explain or gloss his material. One could say that reading a John James novel is a lot like reading an ancient text. When it was written it needed no glossing; now it does. So deeply is James embedded in the material that he writes as if from the period in which it is set.

For this reason we have provided brief notes, maps and glossaries. To make clear what James explicitly did not would be to denigrate his unique style, so we have refrained from adding anything to the text, except where it was required to make sense or when we felt James would have done so himself.

It can fairly be said that no other writer (with the possible exceptions of Peter Vansittart and Rosemary Sutcliff) has ever penetrated as deeply into the mind and heart – the very bones and sinews – of the Dark Ages. James quite literally works from within that world, as if he actually lived there – as, in a certain sense, he did.

We met John James through a mutual interest in the Matter of Britain, as the study of the Arthurian legends are known, at a performance of The Birth of Merlin, a play attributed to Willian Rowley and said to contain a few lines by Shakespeare, at the Theatre Clwyd in Wales. Here, as we sat on the grass drinking beer and discussing the Dark Ages, Arthurian literature and Celtic Magic, John revealed to us that he had another novel, nearly completed, called The Fourth Gwenevere. We were full of anticipation, but the years rolled on and when John died on 2 October 1993, the book had not appeared.

Fast-forward some nineteen years. We were discussing the merits of John James with our friend Penny Billington, who was as enthusiastic as we were about his work. When the subject of the unfinished novel came up, Penny got really excited and wanted to know what had happened to the manuscript. Unfortunately, we had lost touch with John’s widow, and later learned that she had died. We had no way of knowing if he had a family, or if the remains of his work had survived.

But Penny was not to be put off. She set out on a personal quest, hunting though the Internet for any mention of John James’ family. Eventually, she found a photograph of John’s gravestone, and she called the cemetery to find out if members of his family were maintaining it. They were. From here she tracked down John’s children and wrote to them. Did they know about the fate of the manuscript? After a few exchanges, John’s children climbed up to the loft where several boxes of their father’s effects were stored, and unearthed a collection of dusty 5¼-inch floppy disks – the kind that had been in use twenty years earlier. They were labelled The Fourth Gwenevere.

Wildly excited, Penny called us and together we persuaded the family to pack up the disks and take them – by hand – to a company in Cornwall that specialised in retrieving material from these outdated methods of storage. A few weeks later we received a collection of Word-friendly files – and found that what appeared to be more than two-thirds of the book were there.

But the chapters were not numbered, and at first glance there seemed neither rhyme nor reason to their intended sequence.

Determined not to be defeated, we settled down to studying the chapters, reading them over and over until, gradually, they began to make sense. We found that, as well as the main chapters, there were short interludes, written in a different voice to the main narrative. We realised that these were meant to fit between each chapter – but there were not enough of them.

The jigsaw of John James’ final work took several months to sort out, but not only did we find ourselves reading one of his finest works, but also one that brought a surprisingly fresh eye to the well-trodden roads of the Arthurian Legends.

In the end we had a sequence that we both felt was what John had intended, and that in fact we had almost an entire manuscript. But we realised that there were some gaps, and with great trepidation, over the next few weeks, we set about filling in those gaps. In fact only a handful of the interludes needed writing, and as both of us had spent years reading and re-reading John’s work, we felt we could do justice to the work as a whole.

Finally, we had a complete manuscript, which John’s family approved. We prepared a glossary of unfamiliar or Welsh terms and places, as well as a map of the areas where the story takes place. There is also a cast list of characters (compiled by John himself).

Having gone as far as we could with the manuscript, we decided to get in touch with Neil Gaiman, whose championing of John James’ earlier work is well known. On hearing that there was a lost final book, he became as excited as we were, and offered to help in any way that he could to promote it and to help find a publisher.

After a couple of publishers turned down the book, Jo Fletcher accepted it and the result is before you now. We hope that John would like what we have done with his last story, which is as close to his intention as we can make it, and that all his many fans will think so too. All of those fans, as well as the ones we hope will discover him for the first time, owe a huge debt, as do we, to Penny Billington, as well as to John’s children, for sticking with the project, and to Neil for his inspired words and encouragement.

The Fourth Gwenevere may seem a strange title to anyone not familiar with the Arthurian legends, but the Welsh Triads write of Arthur having three previous wives, all called Gwenevere. In this book, the name is merely a title, and the fourth lady of that name becomes the dynastic cement between the British and the Saxons after the Battle of Badon, a marriage that will result, everyone hopes, in the birth of a ruler acceptable to both British and Saxon sides. The outrageousness of John James’ suggestion of a Saxon wife for Arthur will certainly set the pigeons flying!

Readers will want to know where in John James’ Classical and Dark Ages novels The Fourth Gwenevere comes. While there is no immediate relation between the published novels and this book, it stands chronologically after Men Went to Catraeth by some thirty-forty years, and it shares many common references with that book. Readers will be pleased to discover that Morvran, the narrator of The Fourth Gwenevere, is himself a descendant of Votan – Photinus – the hero of Votan and Not For All the Gold in Ireland. As James prophesied in Votan, ‘Every one of these nations that is changed will be led by the sons of Votan … and they will spread over the whole earth.’

The book is narrated by Morvran map Tegid, who is mentioned in the ancient Trioedd Ynys Prydein (Triads of Britain) as one of the three survivors of the Battle of Camlann. It is a case of the good, the bad and the ugly, for Morvran as the ugliest, Sandde Angel-Face as the most beautiful, and the saintly Cynwyl all escape unslain, we are told. John’s Morvran is a seasoned campaigner, the King of Gwent, one who once ruled in Lindsey until the Heathen forces overran his realm and killed his kindred. Despite his limp and his ugliness, both tokens of that conflict, Morvran has more intelligence than the rest of the British kings put together and it is he who uncovers the truth behind the fall of Arthur, and he who is left to sort out the consequences of a secret plot so byzantine that only the Emperor of Byzantium himself could have set it in motion.

The humour and understatement of the novel juxtaposes the accustomed and sometimes isolationist ways of the British with the barbaric but determined incursions of the Heathen invaders; this theme is drawn out further when Britons meet Continentals on Morvran’s quest into Gaul, where the British encounter foreign foodstuffs and very different modes of discourse. The fact that James, in his dramatis personae, lists Agaric, Count of Toulouse, and his sister Amanita, will give you some brief glimpse into his Dark-Age world which also sports fairies, ancestors and mythic beings who are as real as the other characters in this book. The conclusion of the novel is a fictional re-depiction of the tenth-century Welsh poem, Armes Prydein (The Prophecy of Britain) from the Book of Taliesin, in which the hopes of the British for the future envision a united, rather than a warring people, who will sweep the Anglo-Saxons from the land.

Reality is sometimes stranger than myth, as this book shows. John James rests in the Strata Florida Abbey cemetery in Ceredigion, Wales, itself a place of mythic moment. At the Reformation, goes the legend, monks fled into Wales with one of Glastonbury’s most famous relics and settled at Strata Florida Abbey until the relic, the wooden bowl known as the Nanteos Cup, one of many Grail claimants, passed into the keeping of the Powell family. What John James would have made of that legend is anyone’s guess, but we can be sure that his would have been a very down-to-earth exposition, with its own well-reasoned and intricately woven poesis.

Poesis is at the centre of myth, for it is nothing less than the act of transforming and continuing the world. As Diotima points out in Plato’s Symposium, every bringing forth has its own innate beauty. As you read the last chapter of The Fourth Gwenevere, do not forget to add the name of John James to the list of the saints, gods and heroes. In the words of the Armes Prydein:

In wood, in plain, on hill,

A candle in the dark will go with them.

Caitlín & John MatthewsOxford, August 2013

The men stood in the rain, under the edge of the wood. They looked down across the bare hillside to the little stream. On the far crest was another wood, perhaps a furrow’s length away. They watched that. They looked into the face of the west wind that brought the rain, beating across to them as level as spears.

The men were silent. They stood in their blue cloaks, weather-washed and faded. Their long yellow plaits, uncut, hung down over their shoulders in front. Coloured rags were twisted into their plaits, and feathers, and small bones of birds, of animals, of men. Round their legs, beneath the knee, over their puttees, were bound the tails of oxen. Their faces under their beards were marked with scars, wide but not deep, made in childhood, rubbed with charcoal, that told their kindred.

Under their cloaks, their hands were on the hilts of their swords. For carrying the swords they were born, had lived until now. The men were the swords. They were nothing if they were not sword-bearers. They would live till the swords fell from their hands, in the dark rushing of their blood or in the palsy of age: though this last they feared, and were determined, each severally, not to see. The swords were more real than men, lasted longer, were harder to make, to find, to keep. And without the swords, the men were worthless.

The swords lived. Each was a being in itself, known by its powers, by its features, by the jewels in its hilt, by the bronze furniture of its limewood scabbard, by the healing powers of the stones bound above its hilt with charms and runes and the gift of blood, by the peculiar knotting of its own peace strings. Each was known by its name, which would be remembered when the men who for a short time had borne it were dead and rotted and forgotten: ‘Jawbreaker’, ‘Skullcrusher’, ‘Bonegrinder’, ‘Crowfeaster’, ‘Widowmaker’, ‘Seascourer’, ‘Landwaster’.

Then there were the men on the opposite hill. They did not come, they were simply there. One moment they had not been, the next it was as if they had been there for ever, since the birth of time, as if the wood had never had any existence except as their shelter. They sat, slight men on great horses, huddled into their cloaks against the snow that would come from the east when the wind turned against them. But now it was the friendly west wind, the wind from the Island of the Blessed, from the place of the dead. Yet even now, as they settled their ironbound helmets more closely on their close-cropped hair, they were glad of the goose grease on their shaven chins, and the comfort of their long moustaches. Under their vermilion cloaks, some bright and new, others old and faded to russet with the weather, over the mail that let the world know they were the Iron Men, their hands were closed on the hilts of their swords.

For these men were the swords, they were nothing more than sword-bearers, for carrying the swords they had been born, had lived till now, and bearing the swords they would die, in the rushing of their own hot blood, for none of them could hope to die of old age. The swords were more real than the men who carried them, lasting longer, harder to find and to tame and to handle than even the great horses. And without the swords, without the horses, the men were worthless.

The swords lived. Each was a being in itself, with its man’s face at each end of its cross hilts, the head of a sea beast in its pommel and ground deep into its blade. Each had its own name, given with incense and holy oil, that would live when the names of the men who bore it were long forgotten: ‘Frost in the Morning’, ‘Dawn before Harvest’, ‘Mist Rises Early’, ‘Bees in the Summer Meadow’, ‘Butter in a Lordly Dish’, and greatest of all, ‘Hard is my Judgement’, eight times quenched.

Now the men were here on both sides. They waited for noon. Grey cloud covered all the sky, yet they knew it was not yet noon. In the grass the spiders’ webs still carried the dew. After a long silence and a stillness like the last frost, they knew that the webs were dry and it was indeed noon, that the years were accomplished and the Treaty fulfilled.

From the western hillside, four men came down the slope. One limped. They carried no swords, nor did they wear helmets, although they were belted as great lords. They were gay in new crimson tunics of southland wool, which shone beneath the worn russet of their cloaks, hanging knee length over their wide trousers of dark blue. It was by such splendour that they were known as heralds on this the day of fulfilment. They came down to the stream that lay between the two hosts, a mere rill that a little maid might step across. They bent forward and each laid his burden on the further bank.

The men on foot stood in the shelter of the eastern wood and counted what was brought. This was the price always paid: three bags of salt and three bags of meal, three jars of wine and three bags of iron nails. These four things, the elements that rule the world of affairs and of war, were laid down to be taken. Then as an extra, five men in working dress came down the slope and laid down a gift for the poor, the carcases of five boars, gutted and scalded hairless, each castrated before slaughter and each lacking the right thigh, the hero’s portion.

The woman came out from the eastern wood. She walked smoothly and easily into the open ground, and waited there a moment, plain for all to see in her cloak striped in yellow and blue from collar to hem, her hair coiled about her head. Her eyes were no more blue than her dress, no more blue than the blue of the cornflower or the flax blossoms: her hair was no less yellow than the spun flax or the sea sand in the summer. The four men in new scarlet tunics saw her, through their violet eyes under the brown curls. They turned their backs on her and faced the west.

Now she walked down the slope without a backwards glance. All had been said that would be said. She scattered the webs in the grass, and woke the moles under it. She walked into the face of the west wind that brought with it the scent of the grave flowers and the murmur of ghosts, the west wind into whose teeth no living man would sail. She walked forward towards the line of the Iron Men, on their great horses, towards the line of painted shields, of undrawn swords.

She came at last barefooted on the grass to the little stream that clattered the pebbles before her. She looked down at the price paid for her, at the salt and the meal, at the wine and the iron: and at the extra, the meat. Then she slipped the cloak from her shoulders and, naked, entered the stream. She did not stretch out to step across it, she did not stoop to it, she did not wash her hands or face in it, she stepped into the stream as if it were not there. The water swirled about her ankles, and the pebbles bruised her soles, the ripples washed away the webs. She made two steps and came out on the other side. The messengers waited, their backs to her, and they held out between them a cloak of new crimson wool.

For this was the Treaty, that she herself should come as her own dowry, that she should bring neither clothes nor jewels nor gold nor silver. She brought nothing with her save her own body and her own mind and the skills she had sealed in them. The woman stood there all golden in the grey light: she turned her back towards the west and looked a long time towards the east. She drew the crimson cloak to her shoulders and wrapped it about her body.

Still she stood there, while from the east four men came down the slope. They wore new shirts, bright with the white of bleached flax, and by that they were known as heralds. They had laid aside their swords, but they carried their saxes, knives a cubit long, one edge honed sharp, ‘the Cheek Opener’, the other blunt and rounded, ‘the Wrist Cracker’.

They tossed aside the carcases and voided on them that no man might eat of the meat. They slit open the bags of meal and scattered it, so that the birds might live till there was man-flesh for them again. They smashed the jars of wine, that the worms might feed well, for in peace or war they were the corpse-eaters. They opened the bags of salt and poured it into the stream, that the boundary might be bitter. Only the iron would they accept, for that would make spears.

On the far western side, the four messengers walked up the slope, the new crimson cloak bright among their worn russet. They came to the line of the Iron Men. A horse was brought, and if the woman were frightened of this strange beast, she did not show it, but let herself be helped to mount. With the messengers, she rode towards the west and was lost.

The men to the east watched the line of the Iron Men fade from the slope. They did not turn to ride away, there was no swift movement. One moment they were there, in russet against the trees, in the red and yellow and sap-green and sea-colour and violet of their shields: then they were not there, the splendid paints of Empery melting into nothing as they had so often done in war. Now there was no reason to stay. The sword-bearers walked into the wood, and were seen no more.

Only the spiders rejoiced, and the moles were again hidden.

The woman stood in the bows. She could see the blue hills of the Badon country. To the right were the blue shades of the Apple Land, and to the left the blue haze over the Lead Mountains. Between then lay the Marsh, and even from deck level she could see beyond it the white summit of the Glass Island, Ynys Witrin. The sky was flecked with white clouds hard against the blue, driven before the west wind, hurrying into the sun and the dry lands, where the wheat the colour of her hair would be yielding to the sickle.

She felt the wind on her, but she loosed the scarlet cloak, the robe of Empery. Her gown of yellow silk was the gift of the Bezant Emperor, brought to her and delivered with flowery speeches, first in the Latin she understood and then, more haltingly, in the common language of the people of the wide lands which had been hers at birth, by Theodore the foreign trader. The lace at the edges and the hems and in the girdle against her skin was also of silk, but of her own working. The wind blew the fine fabric hard against her body. She thrust her hands, as the sailors did, into her belt, a band of linen from the Irish sewn with plates, a palm square, of thin gold. Each plate showed a different picture, punched out with a needle point: the landing of Brutus and the Trojans in the Isle of the Mighty which now bore his name, the destruction of the Irish on the banks of the Archan, the treachery of the Heathen on the Night of the Long Knives, the stand of the Three Hundred in the Wood of Cattraeth, the rise of the House of Uther.

In such a ship, she knew, her ancestors had come to the Island, and had reached Vortigern’s table where they had showed their strength and their hardness of mind. She stood as they had said her grandmother had stood, in the windy bows, looking ever forward to the long white cloud that always hovers over the land. But ahead now lay not the limitless waves of the story, but only the green lands of the Summer Country.

Then the long ships had come to an empty shore, to a land cleared of its people by the White Death. But around this ship were a host of leather boats to welcome it, like a swarm of so many huge gnats, paddled by as many as twenty men a side, their spear points gleaming where they were stowed upright in their buckets so as not to puncture the sides. The dragon standard of the Great Duke flew from the nearest boat, just ahead. And from the shaft of his pike there dangled also her golden net. There he sat, as a king might sit, ready to leap ashore and claim the land, if it were empty land or the enemy’s land, as his. But this was not a king, could never be a king, although he might father kings if the peoples were to call his sons to be kings. If he could father any son. He never had fathered one yet, not even left a peasant girl with an unwelcome relic of his dukedom. And the woman here knew that he never would. Long before she was born, when the Great Race was new to the Island, and this man still a child in the north, Bladulf had gathered together his wives and his witchmen and his doctors and his gods, and they had tied the knot on the leader of the Iron Men, and there would be no king from that line. And she had learned other skills: she could make nets.

She turned. Forty feet astern, Theodore the Greek held his right hand to the steering oar. With scarcely the strength of a finger he controlled this mass of oak and elm and fir, held in rein the power of the flaxen sail drawing with the weight of a hundred bulls. This was a ship fit for a king-burying. And it was his, under his hands. He was a new man, of a kind she had not met before, with black hair and black eyes that both sparkled when he smiled, a man with skin the colour of kid-leather, who spoke to her in Latin with a strange new accent. He smelled of sweetness and of strength at the same time, like the scent of honey in a wolf’s mouth.

The woman turned again to look forward, at the ring of boats, at the green hills, now so near. The bosun was there, at his mooring station, his bone whistle around his neck on a thong of walrus hide, his boat-hook ready to fend off, to grapple, to take the depth of the water, to feel the hardness of the rock, the softness of the silt. He looked her straight in the eye, in a way she had not found among the Iron Men in court or in camp or in bed. He murmured,

‘Not long now, Lady. Not long now.’

He spoke in her own language, the common tongue, but in a strange dialect, evenly accented, the gutturals lost, the ‘rrrs’ pushed back into the throat. She looked close at him for the first time. The hair under the dirt and oil was as fair as hers, the eyes though blue were ice blue, not the violet of the Iron Men. His face was marked on the left cheek with four tiny triangles, cut lightly into a boy’s skin as manhood taking, and then rubbed with charcoal. That, with the blue shirt, and the two light throwing axes in his belt, told her all.

‘Not long now,’ he repeated in that strange accent which told her who he was and where he came from, with no other word spoken. And then the forefoot struck sand, shaking her against him. The ship was grounded in the ebbing tide, would be there till the flood. The leather boats near a furlong ahead were motionless on the beach, and the tall men from Mona, in their shirts of yellow and green, were wading out with her chair upon their shoulders. So the woman left the ship and came into the Summer Country.

‘Oh, to have her for mine, naked under my hands, in my bed between me and the wall.’

Not wishing to see any disturbance start, there at dinner, I only answered him, ‘Strict metre requires one to say, naked as a walrus’ tooth. Ask any bard.’

That was what Theodore, son of Ariston the Greek, the Shipman, said in the Hall, in my Hall at Caerwent, under the torches at the end of summer feast. Gwion Lhygadgath, who was Porter to the Kingdom as well as my Huntsman at Court, had cried from the door to all the five corners of the world, that the knife was in the meat and the wine was in the cup, and if there were anyone who was pre-eminent in any art or craft or skill, let him come forward. But we hoped that too many of them would not come, because wine that year was scarce, and the new wine just brought out of the ship was not yet settled from the voyage. This night it was not only Theodore the bringer of wine who had sat down to dine in my Hall, in the Hall of Morvran, the ugliest of the Three Ugly Kings of Britain, an admitted bard, King of Gwent and Prefect of Caerwent, ruler of all men from Ross to Avan. As indeed I still am. I bear the great sword, Bees in the Summer Meadow. This night, Arthur, Great Duke of Peace and War, bearer of the sword Caliburn, Hard is my Judgement, had sat down to dine too.

This was to be the last time in that year that the Great Duke graced us with his presence. I had fed him, and his Great Duchess, and their household, and their grooms, and their craftsmen, and her spinners of flax and stuffers of lace cushions, and their horses and their dogs and their mules’ widows’ brothers-in-law, for thirty days of which ten were his due from the King of Gwent and twenty from the Prefect of Caerwent, the greatest port and the richest city of all the Island, now that London, the flower of cities, was so set about with the Heathen that its glory was almost gone. The Great Duke always came at this time of year to claim graciously what was his due and to eat our harvest before it was out of the fields, almost. But what I had, I gave freely.

Mind you, the Great Duke was willing to share with us what he had of his own production. He and his household had been hunting the day before in the woods beyond Usk, and they had killed (besides three wolves and a pole cat which even my own household would not eat unless under a vow to mortify the fat) two bear. . .