Votan and Other Novels

Book 0: FANTASY MASTERWORKS

by John James

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In the second century AD, a Greek nobleman is travelling and living abroad in Germany while carrying on an affair with a military man's wife. When discovered, he takes an emergency business trip to save his life and packs amongst his belongings certain items that lead the people he encounters to think him a Norse God, a fortuitous point of view which he does little to dispel. Forced to keep up the pretence of being a god while staying one step ahead of his lover's jealous husband, Photinus must juggle the severity of his situation with the enjoyment of being a god. Published here with its sequel, NOT FOR ALL THE GOLD IN IRELAND and companion volume MEN WENT TO CATTREATH, VOTAN is one of the highpoints of modern fantasy.

Release date: May 28, 2015

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 753

Sample

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 GaimanNew York

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.

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.

That’s how we got Ursa. She was a Thuringian who had been carried off by a party of scavenging Marcomen, a big hearty lass, blonde and blue eyed. Don’t you believe it when they tell you all Germans have yellow hair. A lot of them have, enough to impress you, but most of them are more mousy. As for red hair, that Tacitus talks about, that’s rare too, except among the Picts. Fair skin, though, mostly, and nobody quite as black-haired or black-eyed as we see here in the south.

When we got Ursa, she was none too worried about what had happened. Being hauled off to Vindabonum and sold for rough work in the kitchen was, for her, an entry into the great world. She didn’t stay in the kitchen long. I was nineteen at the time, and very much at a loss, and there wasn’t anything much she could do about it, even if she had objected. In fact, she seemed really pleased at my picking her up, and somehow the other Germans in the household always treated her as something special. And that’s how I learned German.

Once I began to get fluent in German, Vindabonum, too, began to wake up. Hardly any of the locals spoke Greek. A lot of them could be understood in a rather horrid kind of Latin, but mostly it was German or nothing. Once I could get along in German it was different. It was another world, their world. It was a world of small shops and taverns, open markets and bustling people. Savages at bottom, of course, like their cousins across the Danube, noisy and uncontrollable.

I was nineteen, I told you, and there wasn’t much of what you might call entertainment. There was a kind of theatre where they had regimental sports twice a year, second-rate gladiators and beasts nobody would risk on a more sophisticated audience. There was a tale locally about a party of actors who had come with some Sophocles, but nobody turned up, and they were last seen walking back to Aquileia, having sold all their costumes to pay their debts, and lucky nobody sold them too.

So the only things to watch were the religious ceremonies, not that there were very many of them either. There were the usual official shrines and the troops had a Mithraeum, but that was private, of course. No use trying to see that unless you’re willing to take on more obligations than anyone would in their right minds. I wonder how long it takes to get the bull’s blood out of your hair. The Jews were just as private; there were two kinds, the orthodox ones, and the ones who eat anything and worship an ass’s head.

There was more fun where the Germans lived, outside the walls, in nasty little slums along the river and the roads. They weren’t anything like as bad as the German villages I’ve seen since, but they shocked me then. They were alive, though, with their little clusters of square thatched houses, and their cooking fires outside and naked children in the dust. If it rained, of course, it was a different matter, and when it snowed it turned quite nasty, especially inside with everyone huddled around the open fires, or braziers if your house doubled as a tavern. But most of the summer and autumn we could sit on the benches outside those taverns, drinking the local brews of barley or rye or plum, and looking at the way these people lived, not lived, camped really, not living in any settled way, squatting under the ramparts.

What did they live on? Well some of them had bits of land out on the edge of the woods, and a lot lived by heavy labour, hauling barges up the Danube or building in the barracks. A lot of them were craftsmen, heavy workers like smiths or potters. It’s always a sign of civilisation when you find men doing the potting. The men who worked the wagons up from Aquileia, with all that lovely red Samian, couldn’t afford to buy it and they used the local rather gritty ware.

Most of these people had relations across the river on the Marcfield, as they called it, or even farther north. On feast days we would go to one of the riverside taverns, Rudi’s usually, and watch them coming across on the ferry. There were peasants in their best clothes come to see the great city, and a very great city that filthy Vindabonum must have seemed to them. They only saw the native quarter, of course; we never let them within the gates.

There were mothers and fathers up to see their recruit sons in the cavalry barracks, because by that time nobody was very choosy who you recruited for an auxiliary regiment, and they brought in pies and sausages. Sweethearts too, sometimes, but not many of those, because half of the recruits were running from some girl they’d got into trouble, and the other half were eager to see if it felt any different to get a southern girl into the same state.

There were pedlars with leather and carved wood, and cheap silver ornaments beaten out of silver coins, and men with Amber, and there were Holy Men. We usually had a line of legionaries across the quay, picking out at random perhaps one traveller in five or six and making him turn out his bundle for concealed weapons. The people didn’t seem to mind this, and we never saw anybody caught with anything, although often enough the odd pie or apple changed hands. It made the job worth while, and was one of the reasons why duty on the river was popular even after ten years of peace. But nobody ever filched a piece of Amber, it wouldn’t have been worth it, too much scandal. And nobody ever searched a Holy Man.

You’ve probably read about the German’s religion in authors like Tacitus. But none of these men ever went across the frontier. None of them ever spoke to more than one or two Germans, and those were Latin-speaking civilised ones, and being properly brought up and full of Homer, they tried to make some sense out of what they heard. The fact of the matter is that there’s no sense in it at all. No two Germans will agree on who their Gods are. Mostly they have two. One is called Tiwaz, and he is a fine-weather Wind God, and the other is called Wude, and he is a bad-weather Sky God, and you hear him riding overhead with all his dogs howling in any storm. In the north, they also have a kind of Vulcan, a Smith God, who must be very comforting in the winters they have there. And there are a lot of minor Gods for streams and trees and suchlike, but nobody agrees about them at all.

They haven’t any real temples; they make offerings at rocks and trees where there has been an epiphany of a God. And they haven’t any priests, only these Holy Men. Being a Holy Man might happen to anyone. It starts with an epiphany of the God, a waking one like being struck by lightning, or in a dream. And the God lays a charge on you, and out you are driven to fulfil it. These Holy Men, of course, happen in a lot of lands where the people aren’t really settled on the soil or haven’t enough to eat. The Jews had them, and some of them wrote down the charges the God put on them. I’ve seen the Celtic ones, and they are very given to being holier than anyone else, and talk a lot about it. India is full of them. In Germany they are rare.

There are some Holy Men who eat no flesh, and some who live on nothing but fresh blood. There are some who may not touch women, and some who are, conveniently, driven by the God to sow their seed where they can. There are some who wash and some who don’t wash. The one I am going to talk about didn’t wash.

We were sitting outside Rudi’s Tavern one day, the last fine day of autumn. There was Aristarchos, prefect of a cavalry cohort, and Meno, from the Legion Headquarters, who was drowned in the Danube the following year. There was a lawyer called Polycleites, who didn’t tell anyone why he had come up there on the edge of nowhere, though my father knew. We were, in fact, a little Greek club, all speaking Greek, and we were drinking beer and eating hot sausage; sometimes I think I lived on hot sausage in those days.

This Holy Man was worth looking at. He was well over six feet, and he had matted greasy yellow hair down to his waist. He had clothes on, and not all of them bother: a leather breech clout, and a scarlet cloak down to the hips in the German fashion, and that was new and clean.

He walked past the troops as if he didn’t see them and they were glad to let him alone; some of these gentry have uncertain tempers. He came to the top of the bank, and he very carefully turned till he was looking straight into the eye of the sun. Then he put up his bare arm, and plucked something large and shining out of the empty air. That’s not too difficult if you’ve been trained to it, as I have. It was too far off to see what. Then, whatever it was, he threw it straight at the sun. We followed its course in the air. Whether it was the wind or some God that held it I do not know, but I swear it changed its course, and it fell, quite gently, on to our table. It didn’t even spill anyone’s beer. We looked at it. It didn’t roll. It was a great piece of Amber, twice the size of your two clenched fists. A king’s ransom.

‘Generous, isn’t he?’ said Aristarchos. ‘Oh, no, he’s coming for it. You can smell him from here.’

You could too. Over he came, and he sat down at the table, pushing in between the two soldiers and opposite me. I felt a bit of a devil, so as he sat down I made a few of the right passes and vanished the Amber, on to my lap under the table.

‘Careful,’ said Aristarchos. ‘You’ll be turned into a toad in another minute.’

However, the Holy Man didn’t seem surprised. He just sat. There was no harm in being polite.

‘Beer, Holy Sir,’ I offered.

‘Tiwaz has laid it on me. I drink no strong drink.’ He had a strong northern accent. One of the tavern servants brought a jug of water, and filled him a beaker.

He’d drawn it half an hour before out of the river. Never drink water unless you’ve seen it drawn; usually then you don’t want to any more. The Holy Man must have had a stomach made of pottery; the water was darker than the beer.

He looked at the knives on the table. He leaned across and picked up Polycleites’s knife. Polycleites opened his mouth and the other three of us all kicked him under the table. The Holy Man said, in German, ‘Iron, iron, iron,’ three times, just like that. He spun the knife on the table. When it stopped, the handle pointed to him, the point to me. He did the same thing with Aristarchos’s knife, then with Meno’s. Each time, the point of the knife looked straight at me. Last, he took my knife. He spun it. This time, the point came to him, the hilt to me. He drank again.

He looked at me. His blue eyes bored into my black. After a while he looked away. He looked at my hair. At that time, it was still possible that I might follow my father in the Temple, and my hair and beard had been uncut since birth. My hair was long as his, black and clean against his dirty yellow.

He asked, ‘What is your name, Roman?’

I didn’t feel like arguing about Romans and Greeks, they all looked alike to him, anyway. I said,

‘I am Photinus.’

‘Photan, Votan, Woden, Odin,’ he repeated, trying out all the variants which the Germans used. Germans can’t learn to speak Greek, their tongues are too short, and they had great difficulty with the initial Ph of my name, turning it sometimes into a digamma, sometimes into a double u and sometimes a single u, sometimes dropping it altogether.

‘And what is your name, Holy Sir?’

‘I have no name.’

‘How do men call you, then?’

‘I have no name. Men call me Joy.’

He stood up. He had the Amber in his hand. I had not seen or felt him take it back. It worried me. I stood up with him. I did not want to, I just felt I would. Always, in the north, whatever I did, even when I must have been obeying the command of a God, I felt I was doing what I wished.

He went back to the quay. He stood where he had stood before, this time most carefully placing his back to the sun, so that his shadow fell straight before him. Again he flung the Amber straight up into the air, straight above his head, and the sun caught it and it shone so that we could all mark it and see it curve down into the waters of the Danube. There were a dozen legionaries who spent the next week, all day and every day, diving for it, but they never found it.

There were a lot of people watching, mostly German. Joy turned away from the river. I had been expecting him to go back across the ferry, but no, he walked away, across the German quarter. I followed him. I had to. We came to a place by the Carnuntum road where there was an oak tree in an open space.

When he stopped there were about thirty or forty Germans with us. Two had spades. Without a word they began to dig. They dug a grave, seven feet long and two feet wide. When it was about four feet deep, others came and spread a layer of brushwood and twigs in the bottom. There was a great heap of brushwood too that they left by the graveside.

Joy turned to me and said in quite beautiful Greek, with no trace of an accent:

‘I go to my Hesperides. I go to renew my youth.’

Another German came forward with a long rope. Joy tied a noose in it and placed it round his own neck. It struck me that there was something wrong. Joy’s vows were to Tiwaz. But hanging was how you sacrificed to Wude, the Wind God; you hanged the victim from a branch, wind about him, wind beneath him, the wind squeezed from his body.

Joy climbed into the tree. He sat astride a branch about ten feet up. He looked about him, and then threw me the end of the rope.

‘Hold!’ he said.

I passed the end of the rope around my body and braced myself. I felt the jerk as he jumped. The strain lasted a moment. Then a knife flashed and someone cut the rope. I turned to see. A dozen Germans held Joy’s rigid body. The face was swollen, the tongue protruded.

I touched him. Born in Apollo’s house, I knew where to touch him. In the temple, in the throat, there was the pulse of a day-old chick.

They laid him in the grave. Over him they heaped more brushwood. They covered all with a few inches of earth. We all went away.

Each day I went back at noon to the oak tree. The grave was untouched, the earth drying on the brushwood. On the ninth day the grave was open. In it was a layer of ash and charred twigs. There was no body alive or dead, burnt or unburnt. Where Joy was I did not know.

None of my friends ever mentioned again that struggle in the tavern. None of the Germans under the tree, many of them men I knew, ever mentioned it again. Otho never spoke of it at all. But he knew.

There was just one other thing wrong with Vindabonum. Or right, depending on your point of view. There were an awful lot of men, gentlemen, that is, and not many ladies. There were plenty for the legionaries and the Germans, I mean, but not so many that you could really associate with. There were a few local gentry, if you had a low standard for gentrydom, and some of the auxiliary and legionary officers were married, but too many of these had picked up their wives in the fish-market when they were in the ranks. So the really attractive ones were rare, and those honey pots drew a lot of wasps.

The effect of this was not altogether what you might imagine. There wasn’t really anything for either men or women to do a great deal of the time. Nothing for the women, except to run small houses with cheap slaves. Very little for officers in third-rate regiments on garrison duty. A few, like Aristarchos, would go out to find something to do, and they didn’t stay long, even if they lived. But even that kind of garrison life entails a fair amount of detached duty at isolated posts and all kinds of chances to get out into the country. This didn’t mean that the ladies were more accessible. It only meant that the ladies made all the running.

There were a fair var