Sojan the Swordsman Read online

  I also wrote my Dancers at the End of Time stories and novels under the influence of Edwardian humourists and absurdists like Jerome or Firbank. Together with more conventional generic books like The Ice Schooner or The Black Corridor, most of that work was done in the 1960s and 70s when I wrote the Eternal Champion supernatural adventure novels which helped support my own and others’ experiments via NEW WORLDS, allowing me also to keep a family while writing books in which action and fantastic invention were paramount. Though I did them quickly, I didn’t write them cynically. I have always believed, somewhat puritanically, in giving the audience good value for money. I enjoyed writing them, tried to avoid repetition, and through each new one was able to develop a few more ideas. They also continued to teach me how to express myself through image and metaphor. My Everyman became the Eternal Champion, his dreams and ambitions represented by the multiverse. He could be an ordinary person struggling with familiar problems in a contemporary setting or he could be a swordsman fighting monsters on a far-away world.

  Long before I wrote Gloriana (in four parts reflecting the seasons) I had learned to think in images and symbols through reading John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton and others, understanding early on that the visual could be the most important part of a book and was often in itself a story as, for instance, a famous personality could also, through everything associated with their name, function as narrative. I wanted to find ways of carrying as many stories as possible in one. From the cinema I also learned how to use images as connecting themes. Images, colours, music, and even popular magazine headlines can all add coherence to an apparently random story, underpinning it and giving the reader a sense of internal logic and a satisfactory resolution, dispensing with certain familiar literary conventions.

  When the story required it, I also began writing neo-realist fiction exploring the interface of character and environment, especially the city, especially London. In some books I condensed, manipulated and randomised time to achieve what I wanted, but in others the sense of ‘real time’ as we all generally perceive it was more suitable and could best be achieved by traditional nineteenth-century means. For the Pyat books I first looked back to the great German classic, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and other early picaresques. I then examined the roots of a certain kind of moral fiction from Defoe through Thackeray and Meredith then to modern times where the picaresque (or rogue tale) can take the form of a road movie, for instance. While it’s probably fair to say that Pyat and Byzantium Endures precipitated the end of my second marriage (echoed to a degree in The Brothel in Rosenstrasse), the late 70s and the 80s were exhilarating times for me, with Mother London being perhaps my own favourite novel of that period. I wanted to write something celebratory.

  By the 90s I was again attempting to unite several kinds of fiction in one novel with my Second Ether trilogy. With Mandelbrot, Chaos Theory and String Theory I felt, as I said at the time, as if I were being offered a chart of my own brain. That chart made it easier for me to develop the notion of the multiverse as representing both the internal and the external, as a metaphor and as a means of structuring and rationalising an outrageously inventive and quasi-realistic narrative. The worlds of the multiverse move up and down scales or ‘planes’ explained in terms of mass, allowing entire universes to exist in the ‘same’ space. The result of developing this idea was the War Amongst the Angels sequence which added absurdist elements also functioning as a kind of mythology and folklore for a world beginning to understand itself in terms of new metaphysics and theoretical physics. As the cosmos becomes denser and almost infinite before our eyes, with black holes and dark matter affecting our own reality, we can explore them and observe them as our ancestors explored our planet and observed the heavens.

  At the end of the 90s I’d returned to realism, sometimes with a dash of fantasy, with King of the City and the stories collected in London Bone. I also wrote a new Elric/Eternal Champion sequence, beginning with Daughter of Dreams, which brought the fantasy worlds of Hawkmoon, Bastable and Co. in line with my realistic and autobiographical stories, another attempt to unify all my fiction, and also offer a way in which disparate genres could be reunited, through notions developed from the multiverse and the Eternal Champion, as one giant novel. At the time I was finishing the Pyat sequence which attempted to look at the roots of the Nazi Holocaust in our European, Middle Eastern and American cultures and to ground my strange survival guilt while at the same time examining my own cultural roots in the light of an enduring anti-Semitism.

  By the 2000s I was exploring various conventional ways of story-telling in the last parts of The Metatemporal Detective and through other homages, comics, parodies and games. I also looked back at my earliest influences. I had reached retirement age and felt like a rest. I wrote a ‘prequel’ to the Elric series as a graphic novel with Walter Simonson, The Making of a Sorcerer, and did a little online editing with FANTASTIC METROPOLIS.

  By 2010 I had written a novel featuring Doctor Who, The Coming of the Terraphiles, with a nod to P.G. Wodehouse (a boyhood favourite), continued to write short stories and novellas and to work on the beginning of a new sequence combining pure fantasy and straight autobiography called The Whispering Swarm while still writing more Cornelius stories trying to unite all the various genres and sub-genres into which contemporary fiction has fallen.

  Throughout my career critics have announced that I’m ‘abandoning’ fantasy and concentrating on literary fiction. The truth is, however, that all my life, since I became a professional writer and editor at the age of 16, I’ve written in whatever mode suits a story best and where necessary created a new form if an old one didn’t work for me. Certain ideas are best carried on a Jerry Cornelius story, others work better as realism and others as fantasy or science fiction. Some work best as a combination. I’m sure I’ll write whatever I like and will continue to experiment with all the ways there are of telling stories and carrying as many themes as possible. Whether I write about a widow coping with loneliness in her cottage or a massive, universe-size sentient spaceship searching for her children, I’ll no doubt die trying to tell them all. I hope you’ll find at least some of them to your taste.

  One thing a reader can be sure of about these new editions is that they would not have been possible without the tremendous and indispensable help of my old friend and bibliographer John Davey. John has ensured that these Gollancz editions are definitive. I am indebted to John for many things, including his work at Moorcock’s Miscellany, my website, but his work on this edition has been outstanding. As well as being an accomplished novelist in his own right John is an astonishingly good editor who has worked with Gollancz and myself to point out every error and flaw in all previous editions, some of them not corrected since their first publication, and has enabled me to correct or revise them. I couldn’t have completed this project without him. Together, I think, Gollancz, John Davey and myself have produced what will be the best editions possible and I am very grateful to him, to Malcolm Edwards, Darren Nash and Marcus Gipps for all the considerable hard work they have done to make this edition what it is.

  Michael Moorcock

  Author’s Note:

  Sojan the Swordsman was the first fantasy character I created, around 1954 or ’55 when I was fourteen or fifteen. He appeared in the first issue of my Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine Burroughsania, which I sold at school for a penny. Later, when I was asked by the editor of the juvenile story paper Tarzan Adventures for something in the manner of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fantasy stories, I remembered Sojan. These are the stories as originally conceived, warts and all, roughly as they appeared as serials in the magazine from 1957. They would all be illustrated by my good friend Jim Cawthorn, who would work with me all my writing life until he died in December 2008. Jim’s illustrations are taken both from the magazine and the reprinted but unrestored stories commissioned by Savoy Books in 1977. This book is dedicated to Jim Cawthorn, who remained a mentor and an inspiration.r />
  Michael Moorcock

  With special thanks to Graeme Talboys for his incredible feat, worthy of Sojan himself, in restoring this text to electronic form; and also for John Davey, as always an outstanding editor and astonishing friend, who resurrected the texts from their original appearances together with Jim Cawthorn’s illustrations.

  Parts of this book originally appeared in Burroughsania (1954), Tarzan Adventures 1957/’58, and Sojan 1977, publishers Britton and Butterworth, who were the first to discover the stories, reprint a version of them and commission fresh illustrations from Jim Cawthorn.

  Introduction

  THERE is a story told across the many inhabited worlds of the universe about the fate of brave men and women where the pursuit of money and power is prized less than the pursuit of honour and self-respect.

  They die noble deaths and are destined to be reborn over and over again on distant planets, often taking the place of another heroic person who has died in action… This is a form of reincarnation, the universe’s way of ensuring that some kind of balance is struck between those who are motivated by greed and those who work for the general good.

  One such fighter was Sir John de Courcy, of an ancient line going back to the days of the Conquest on his father’s side and to a race of Irish warrior-statesmen on the other. The de Courcy family had served their country as soldiers since before Agincourt. They had given their blood, lives and treasure in selfless defence of all that was best in British history. Until the First World War they had commanded cavalry but now served in tank regiments. The current holder of the family title had commanded light, fast-moving vehicles in the North African desert against the cunning of Rommel, the infamous Desert Fox and later served with Montgomery in the European campaigns which had gradually pushed the Nazis back to Berlin. Now, once again side by side with his American allies, he was fighting in Korea against an enemy quite as single-minded as Hitler’s forces and quite as ready to crush individuals in the name of a ‘greater cause’, though this time they did not call themselves National Socialists but Communists.

  The conflict had been going on interminably for many months, with the North Koreans and their Chinese allies neither giving nor expecting quarter, just as the Anglo-American forces remained implacably determined to win. On more than one occasion Sir John had been able to strike deep into the enemy’s territory and return with his entire squadron intact but, as the war continued and the fighting grew fiercer and fiercer, things grew increasingly desperate.

  The conflict had taken de Courcy and his squadron into a part of the battlefield seeded with land mines, an area of narrow gullies and low mountains, full of ruined buildings, torn-up barbed wire, filthy mud and burned-out war machines. It had come on to rain and the mud had become so deep it was increasingly difficult to steer the Centurion tanks. Fearing for the safety of his crews and their machines, Sir John had decided that it was time to return to home base and broke radio silence to give a coded message to that effect. The driving rain had increased. What was worse, the mines were everywhere and his charts did not allow him to pinpoint their likely positions.

  The narrow canyon in which they found themselves was a natural trap. In spite of all intelligence reports, including those from the air, Sir John’s tanks found themselves under attack from a large number of enemy war machines and infantry armed with anti-tank weapons.

  Bombed from the air and bombarded from the ground the British tanks fought valiantly to extricate themselves from their position. Eventually, however, they ran out of ammunition and were reduced to just three Centurions as night came down. Sir John ordered his remaining vehicles to leave the field and return to base but they had lost radio contact with their headquarters and for the most part with each other and the last message he received from the nearest tank was that it was on fire and that the crew was having to abandon their machine. He ordered his own tank to go to the aid of the crew, his searchlights moving back and forth over the vast, desolate plain as they cautiously sought the stranded soldiers without wanting to pick them out for the enemy.

  At last Sir John caught sight of the guttering wreckage of the tank and nearby a few men sheltering in a shallow foxhole, their uniforms badly singed and one of them, the driver, evidently wounded. He ordered all lights and radio to be extinguished and, while the enemy sought them out, left the relative security of his Centurion to try to help the stranded crew to safety. Reaching their foxhole, he ordered them to board his own tank, helping the wounded man through the mud and filth of the battlefield. He had almost reached his vehicle when a squadron of MiG jets flew low overhead and from ground level enemy searchlights flooded the field with light, making him and the wounded man an easy target.

  “Come on, man,” murmured Sir John to the driver, “not much further to go!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the driver gritted, “but I’m all in! Nothing left, sir. Better go on without me, sir. I’ll just have to let the blighters capture me.”

  “Nonsense, man!” No de Courcy had ever abandoned one of his men and Sir John was determined to get the driver back to his own tank which had already turned, with its companion, and was waiting to pick them up. The problem was that his tank was overcrowded and moving very slowly through the rain-swept darkness. He and the soldier he had rescued were forced to climb onto the turret and hope for the best as they rumbled very slowly back towards base.

  Suddenly the ground became a thousand columns of spurting mud as the MiGs opened fire with rockets and machine guns. By some miracle nothing hit them and it seemed they would soon reach the relative safety of a low overhang, half a mile from where they were likely to pick up some covering fire from nearby American allies.

  Then, suddenly, just as they seemed to reach relative safety, Sir John’s tank hit a mine which sent it swerving to one side, rocking and lurching, knocking him clear of the turret, its wheels screaming as it reared into the muddy air, covering him with filth. He made a grab for the tank’s gun and missed it, and then he was rolling down towards the ground as a searchlight beam caught him in its glare, picking him out so that a low-flying MiG could get him in its sights and aim a stream of tracers at him. His body was on fire. He gritted his teeth against the pain and he was suddenly blind.

  Then the waves of agony faded slowly. He had the impression of sailing upwards, away from the battlefield, away from the filth and the horror, up, up into the dark velvet of the sky, through the white blaze of stars which merged one by one into a mingling of a thousand colours and he was sinking down again to a brilliant softness which embraced him like the body of a lover…

  Even as these sensations took him to themselves his mind became vague until he had almost forgotten his own name and had ceased to wonder at the strangeness of the smells and sights around him. What was his name? Sir John? Sar Jan? No! Now he remembered — it was So-jan. Sojan. The pain was fading. He wished he could remember where he had been. What was the nature of the conflict? Where was he now? Where were his men? What had he been doing? He screwed his eyes against the light which no longer flashed, no longer hurt him. He clambered slowly to his feet, wiping sweat from his face with his free hand. In his other hand there was an object both familiar and unfamiliar. He recognised it at last.

  A long, slender piece of slightly curved metal with a complicated guard around his hand.

  It was a sword.

  A sword such as his ancestors had borne into battle for over a thousand years! A sabre? No, a vilthor.

  With a shrug, Sojan sheathed his sword and caught hold of the trailing rein of his mount which, happily, the men who had attacked him had not harmed. He was safe and so was his riding myat. It came back to him now. He was heading for a city to offer his services to its warlord. He had been attacked by a group of thieves who had given a reasonable account of themselves before he had killed them. Now he drew the beast to him and swung up into the saddle…

  Chapter One

  Sojan the Swordsman

  A MYAT TROTTED
peacefully across the broad, seemingly never-ending plain which made up the landscape as far as it was possible to see. No sound issued from the cloven hoofs, muffled by the mosslike substance which clothed the ground in a mantle of vivid colour — purple, green and yellow, with a trace of crimson or violet here and there. Nothing else grew upon that plain. It was a wilderness, barren and empty — the greatest desert on the planet of Zylor.

  A wandering warrior sat astride the myat’s broad back. At his steed’s side hung a shield, a virtually unknown accoutrement on Zylor, but the clan to which the rider belonged had perfected it as a valuable asset. The man’s name was Sojan and the beast upon which he rode was a big, sturdy animal. From both sides of its huge, tapering head grew long, sharp horns, curving outward. More like a reptile than a mammal, the myat’s head resembled a snake’s. Its tail was thick and it, too, tapered.

  Sojan was dressed in a bright blue jerkin reaching to his knees. His legs were bare. Tough boots of myat hide were upon his feet, reaching to about two inches from his knees. Over the jerkin was a leather harness of simple design. Two straps crossed his shoulders, coming to his waist. Attached to a broad belt were his weapons — a sword, a long, sharp dirk, and a holster containing his big, round-butted air-pistol. As he rode he recharged the pistol and fitted the ammunition into its chamber. The myat needed no guidance and its reins hung on its neck as Sojan saw to his weapon.