The King's Name Read online

  Jo Walton writes science fiction and fantasy novels and reads a lot and eats great food. It worries her slightly that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up. She comes from Wales, but lives in Montreal.

  Also by Jo Walton

  Among Others

  The King’s Peace

  The Prize in the Game

  The King’s Name

  Jo Walton

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the US by Tor,

  a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, 2001

  First published in the UK by Corsair,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © Jo Walton, 2001

  The right of Jo Walton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-746-6 (ebook)

  Cover design: Nik Keevil, keevildesign.co.uk

  Here’s the rest of it, Gangrader. I hope it’s what you wanted.

  This volume is especially for the participants of the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition, both for specific help and for just being there, a community where it’s normal to want to talk about writing.

  Thanks once again to Graydon and Emmet and Hrolfr for reading chapters as they were written, Julie Pascal for suggesting the title of this volume, Michael Grant for all the semicolons, Mary Lace for having such appropriate reactions, David Goldfarb, Mary Kuhner and Janet Kegg for helpful readings, Sketty Library for getting me books, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden for doing all the difficult stuff.

  INTRODUCTION

  I greet the appearance of this second volume of the translation of the Sulien Texts with the same pleasure with which I greeted the publication of the first. (The King’s Peace, Tor Books, New Caravroc, 2753.) It was past time for a translation of the work into modern Yalnic, more than a hundred years after the discovery of the text and the publication of the first Vincan edition. This is not an unapproachable work; indeed it is an exciting and readable one. The delay in translation is for reasons of political controversy which we would all do well to put behind us in these more liberal times.

  This, like the first volume, consists of merely the text, with no scholarly annotations. Serious students seeking such will be able to read the Vincan and would be better to purchase my The Complete Sulien Text (2733, rev. 2748, Thurriman University Press, New Caryavroc). I am honored, however, to say a few words about the work, for those unscholarly readers who read this vernacular edition for pleasure but for whom the bare text is not enough.

  The book, whoever wrote it and for whatever purpose, is set against the troubled and all-but-undocumented history of the thirteenth century. It deals with a period that we know better from myth and legend than from sober historical accounts. The Vincan legions had departed the island of Tir Tanagiri forty years before the opening events of the book. The time between had been one of chaos, invasion, and civil war, as the island became once more a collection of petty kingdoms and as the barbarous Jarns crossed the sea to raid, invade, and settle. King Urdo, as every Tanagan schoolchild knows, united the island and brought peace.

  In the first volume published in this edition were the first two “books” of a document which claims to be the memoirs of Sulien ap Gwien, one of the legendary armigers of King Urdo. This second volume contains the third, longest, and last “book.” The first “book,” The King’s Peace, begins with the assertion that the writer is Sulien ap Gwien, Lord of Derwen, writing at ninety-three years of age for the purpose of setting records straight.

  At the time of writing, she says, the Jarnish invaders from overseas were at peace with the Tanagan and Vincan inhabitants of Tir Tanagiri, and she wishes to give an account of how they came to be one people. The book documents Sulien’s career, beginning with her brother’s murder and her rape by the young Jarnish raider Ulf Gunnarsson, the nephew of Sweyn, king of Jarnholme. She was then dedicated against her will to the Jarnish god Gangrader, and left to die of exposure, which she escaped by her own efforts. Unknowingly pregnant by Ulf, she entered into the service of the High King Urdo ap Avren. The baby was born and named, shockingly, Darien Suliensson in Jarnish fashion. Many people believed this child to be the son of Urdo, because of a night Sulien and Urdo spent in the same room in Caer Gloran. He was fostered in the monastery of Thansethan, whereupon Sulien returned to one of Urdo’s cavalry regiments, or “alae,” and became leader of a pennon of twenty-four riders. After an invasion of the island by Sweyn and a disastrous battle at Caer Lind, in Tevin, she became praefecto, or general in command, of the ala. Meanwhile she earned the enmity of and later killed Morwen, witch, queen of Demedia, and sister of Urdo. There followed six years of war, culminating in a great victory for the High King’s forces at Foreth Hill. At this victory Urdo did not accept a truce from the defeated Jarnish kings, but forced them into making an alliance and recognizing him as High King, with all the island henceforward to live under law.

  The second “book” contained in the first volume, The King’s Law, covers the first seven years of Urdo’s Peace. On the first afternoon of the Peace, Ulf Gunnarsson received a trial for rape, before Urdo and Ohtar, a Jarnish king. He admitted his fault and offered to make reparation, then refused to defend himself in a judicial combat. Sulien decided to let him live, and he entered her ala.

  The victory at Foreth was shortly followed by an invasion of three large groups of Isarnagans, the barbarous people who lived in the western island of Tir Isarnagiri. Sulien successfully persuaded one contingent of Isarnagans, led by Lew ap Ross and his wife, Emer ap Allel, the sister of Urdo’s queen, to become vassals and settle in an empty part of her brother Morien’s realm of Derwen. During the negotiations Sulien discovered that Emer was secretly involved in an adulterous relationship with Conal ap Amagien, all the more shocking because Conal had killed Emer’s mother. The other two contingents of Isarnagan invaders were eventually defeated militarily. One, led by Black Darag and Atha ap Gren, retreated back to Tir Isarnagiri. The other was treacherously slaughtered by Urdo’s Malmish praefecto, Marchel ap Thurrig, after they had surrendered. Marchel was exiled to her father’s homeland of Narlahena for her crime: but for Thurrig’s long and faithful service she would have been executed for it.

  Meanwhile a Feast of Peace was held in Caer Tanaga for all the kings of the lands that made up Tir Tanagiri, Jarnish and Tanagan alike. Not all the kings were happy about this, but an uneasy peace held. A few years later there was an attempt by one of these petty kings, Cinon of Nene, on the life of Sulien’s son Darien, still fostered at Thansethan. The attempt was foiled by the intervention of the great boar, Turth, one of the powers of the land. Sulien believed this attempt to have been instigated by Morthu, the son of Morwen, who hated her for killing his mother. Urdo refused to act against Morthu without proof. Two years later, Urdo’s queen, Elenn, miscarried of a son. She suspected this of being Morthu’s doing, but he pas
sed the examination of the priest Teilo, who should have been able to detect a lie. Urdo and Elenn and all their court then made pilgrimage to Thansethan to pray for a son. This visit, and this volume, concluded with two terrible duels—the first between Sulien, as the queen’s champion, and Conal ap Amagien for the honor of Elenn, whom Conal had jokingly insulted. The second was between Ulf Gunnarsson and Sulien’s brother Morien, after Morthu revealed to Morien that Ulf was the killer of their brother. Ulf won his duel, and the news was brought to Sulien as she preserved the queen’s honor without killing Conal, that her brother was dead and she must leave the ala and return home to become Lord of Derwen.

  The present volume takes up the story five years later.

  I have here recounted the events of the first volume as if they were indeed the words of Sulien herself, and of definite historicity. Unfortunately, we can by no means be sure that this is the case.

  The manuscript we have fills the last seven volumes of the compilation known as The White Book of Scatha. The history of the White Book would itself fill volumes, but suffice to say that the White Book as we have it came to the island of Scatha sometime in the twenty-first century, and has certainly not been tampered with since that time. It languished, neglected until the first three volumes, consisting of Tanagan prose and poetry, were published with an acclaimed translation by Lady Gladis Hanver in 2564. There was then pressure to publish the rest of the book, and though additional volumes appeared, the “Sulien Text” remained invisible. The middle volumes of the White Book consist largely of uninteresting Vincan poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it was generally believed that there was no more of interest in the work. The publication of Professor Malaki Kahn’s Vincan edition of The King’s Peace: An Extract From the White Book in 2658 came as a complete surprise to everyone.

  What was not surprising was that Kahn chose to publish his edition in Vincan. The text, which contradicts almost all known facts about King Urdo and many about the Early Insular Church, could not at that time have been published in Yalnic. Even in Vincan it was immediately denounced by many as a forgery. Professor Kahn’s application to excavate at Derwen was greeted with derision, and it is true that it would require the destruction of large parts of what is now an attractive twenty-first-century port to discover the thirteenth-century home (and possibly the original manuscript) the author of the “Sulien Text” describes.

  From stylistic and scribal evidence in the White Book itself it appears that the “Sulien Text” was copied in the mid-twentieth century, probably either at Thansethan or at Thanmarchel, and at the request of the Haver family of Scatha, who commissioned the White Book. The scribal note states that it is a copy of an earlier copy which was certainly made at Thansethan, very probably for the Great King Alward. This would be the sixteenth-century Alward of Munew who reunited the whole of Tanager under his leadership while holding off the Norlander invasion. He was a great scholar and may well have been interested in the life of Urdo. There is no intrinsic reason to disbelieve that the White Book scribe told the truth as he knew it. (See Jeyver, The Scribes of the White Book, 2723.)

  It is to Alward’s sixteenth-century scribe that we owe the chapter division of the work as we have it, the commonly used title (“I found in the library of Thansethan a work on the King’s Peace” the scribal note begins) and also the quotations which are used to head each chapter. Some of these quotations have been described as “of more value than the text itself.” (Prof. bint Kerigan, “The Poetic Fragments of Anirin ap Erbin From the So-called Sulien Text.”) These fragments have been attested by many scholars as undoubtedly genuine. Some of them are very well known while others are not found elsewhere. They, at least, unmistakably date from the age of Urdo, or not long after.

  Those who claim that the text is a modern forgery, especially those who attacked Prof. Kahn’s religious or other motives, are no less than delusional. The manuscript exists and has been extensively studied in modern conditions. While there would have been many reasons one could imagine for someone to forge an account of Urdo’s life—especially one as different from the accepted version and as pro-pagan as Sulien’s account—there would have been little purpose in doing it without circulating it and stirring up difficulty. “If someone went to the trouble of forging this book, why did they then not go to the further trouble of disseminating it?” asked Dr. Enid Godwinsson. (In “The Sulien Text: Whose Agenda?” in Journal of Vincan Studies, Spring 2749.)

  This is not to say that the text is indeed the work of the shadowy Sulien ap Gwien. Very little is known about her except for what appears in this book, and that little is often directly contradictory to her own text. Without wishing to enter into religious controversies, it should be noted (see Camling, “Irony in ‘The Glory of Morthu,’ ” Urdossian Quarterly, Autumn 2685) that the Vincan word “pius” which is almost universally applied to Sulien in the later chronicles and poetry dealing with Urdo, meant at that date “faithful,” and not, as it means now and is generally translated, “pious.”

  In the five hundred years between Sulien’s time and Alward’s the work may have been written by anyone. Yet, who would have chosen to do it? Indeed, who would have had the skill or the time to do so? Without need of Godwinsson’s whimsical conclusion that the forger died on or before completion of the manuscript, it is worth considering her point about the sheer time such a forgery must have taken: we are not talking a few pages but a weighty work that covers two volumes of modern print. It must have taken years. The text is written in an almost classical Vincan, the sure sign of someone very well educated. Few outside the monasteries in those centuries would have had that skill. Few inside the monasteries would have had the desire.

  One of the most controversial points in the text is, of course, the treatment of religion. The monks of the Insular Church were remarkable in their kind treatment of manuscripts from other traditions, but they did not go out of their way to forge works that would bring discredit on themselves. Sulien’s general view of the Church as being suited to idiots, her portraits of St. Gerthmol as a fool, St. Dewin as a manipulator and, worst of all, St. Marchel as a short-tempered bigot, indicate an agenda of someone who disliked the Church. Only in her treatment of St. Arvlid and St. Teilo do we see anything approaching the hagiographic work typical of the period, and even there they are engagingly human saints, as Brother Ivor of Thanmarchel points out about Arvlid (Sulien and the Early Insular Church, 2722), “This picture of the blessed martyr helping out in childbirth and making honey is not the one the church gives us, but it is one the church should be very slow to reject.” Indeed the Church has been quick to claim the picture of life at Thansethan as “Sulien” shows it, while rejecting other parts of this “eyewitness” account out of hand.

  There are many parts of the text which show an intimate familiarity with the thirteenth century in which it is purported to be set. Sulien always calls the islands Tir Tanagiri and Tir Isarnagiri, though these “Tir” prefixes had ceased to be in use by the time of Gwyn Dariensson’s Code of Laws, and the island was already the familiar Tanager by the time of Alward. Yet she calls the islanders “Tanagans” and “Isarnagans” and not “Tirtanagans” as we find in the Vincan period, for example in Decius Manicius. This is precisely as we would expect for the transition period. In many other ways—for example the description of the training of the alae and the growth of villages—she has been vindicated by archaeology. Martinsson’s (Proof of Forgery of the Sulien Text, 2731) denunciation of the name of the otherwise unknown “Masarn” because the word “masarn,” “a maple tree,” was not in use until the discovery of maples in the Trans-Iarla lands in the twenty-second century, must be dismissed. The book cannot have been tampered with since it came to Scatha and the possession of the Hanver family a hundred years before the discovery of the New World. The name Masarn must have some other origin. Hartley’s (“A Possible Southern Connection” in Journal of Vincan Studies, Summer 2745) fanciful coupling with the common
Sifacian name “Massinissa” must regrettably be dismissed, as, unless he had come, like Elhanen the Great, on an elephant across all the Vincan lands, how could a Sifacian have been in Tanager at that time?

  Yet to place against these historical accuracies we have typical miracle tales of the period. What are we to make of a work which, on the one hand contains a detailed description of a stable block that has been excavated precisely as described, and on the other repeats miracle stories like the three days’ night and the magical water on Foreth? Brother Ivor’s comment that “She cannot even decide consistently which set of Heathen Gods she worships” (Ivor, op. cit.) is unfair, but certainly the personal appearance of gods in the text takes it out of the realm of history into that of fable.

  We must regretfully dismiss the idea that this may be the famous “boke” on which Galfrid of Thanmarchel claimed to have based his famous “The King and the Kingdom.” For one thing, Galfrid states clearly that his “boke” was written “in the ancient Tanagan language,” whereas the Sulien text is in Vincan and certainly has not been re-translated back into Vincan. There is also Kunnarsson’s (The Sulien Text: A Reconsideration, University of Stellanova Press, 2751) very well-considered point, “If the author of the Sulien text was attempting to give us the history behind the myth, they made a mistake and gave us the wrong half, explaining the things that nobody believed anyway and leaving out the plausible parts of the story most beloved by the poets.” I believe, with Prof. Kunnarsson, that these omissions are evidence for the genuine, or at least very early, nature of the text.

  The burden of proof that the work was not written by Sulien ap Gwien under the circumstances she states in the text, lies with those who would suggest otherwise. Until we have permission to fulfill the late Prof. Kahn’s dream and excavate at Derwen, unless and until we discover the lead casket she says she wished to place in the walls (and which her great-nephew says he had done to her desire), then we will have no proof either way.