Wolf in Shadow

FOREWORD

Of the many characters I have created over the years, few have captured the imagination of readers as powerfully as Jon Shannow, the Jerusalem Man.

Alan Fisher, the award winning author of Terioki Crossing, and a fan of the film Casablanca, has a phrase that sums up characters like Shannow. 'They walk out of Rick's Bar, fully formed and real. The author doesn't have to work on them at all. There is no conscious act of creation. One moment they don't exist — the next they stand before you, complete and ready.'

I remember the moment Shannow walked out of Rick's Bar.

It was at the end of a miserable, wet day in Bournemouth at the start of autumn in 1986. I was the group managing editor of a series of newspapers stretching from Brighton to Portsmouth on the south coast. The previous week I had a call from my father to tell me that my mother was in hospital and that surgeons feared she had terminal cancer. They were right. A year before she had suffered the amputation of her right leg, and fought back to make a dramatic entrance at a Christmas Dance. This time there would be no fightback.

I had visited her in London, and then driven to Bournemouth for a business meeting, concluding it at around ten that night. I was Staying in a small hotel of remarkable unfriendliness. The kind of place — as Jack Dee once said — where the Gideons leave a rope! I hadn't eaten since the previous evening and I called the night porter. He said the kitchen staff had gone home, but there was a plate of olives someone had left at the bar. Nursing the olives and a very large glass of Armagnac I returned to my room and opened the Olympia portable typewriter.

I was at the time preparing a Drenai novel, featuring the Nadir Warlord Ulric, which my publishers had commissioned. According to the contract the book was to be called Wolf in Shadow and was, loosely, a prequel to Legend. I had completed around sixty pages. They weren't good, but I was powering on as best as I could.

Sitting by the window, looking out over Bournemouth's glistening streets, I tried to push the events of the week from my mind. My mother was dying, I was waiting to be fired, and staff, who had joined my team in good faith, were facing redundancy. After the fifth large Armagnac I decided to continue work on the book. I knew I was drunk, and I also knew that the chances of writing anything worthwhile were pretty negligible. But forcing my mind into a fantasy world seemed infinitely more appealing than concentrating on the reality at hand.

The scene I was set to continue had a Nadir scout riding across the steppes. The intention was to follow him to the top of a hill and have him gaze down on the awesome army camped on the plain below.

I focused on the typewriter keys and typed the following sentences….

The rider paused at the crest of a wooded hill, and gazed down at the wide, rolling empty lands beneath him. There was no sign of Jerusalem…

The walls of the mind came crashing in as I typed the word Jerusalem, thoughts, fears and regrets spilling over one another, fighting for space. There followed a bad hour, which even Armagnac could not ease.

But after midnight I returned to the page and stared down at it. It called out to me. Who is he, I thought? What is he looking for, this Jerusalem Man?

And suddenly he was there. Tall and gaunt, seeking a city that had ceased to exist three hundred years before. A lonely, tortured man on a quest with no ending, riding through a world of savagery and barbarism.

The story flowed in an instant, and I wrote until after the dawn.

Through all the despair that followed in those next painful months I found a sanctuary in the company of Jon Shannow. Through his eyes I could see the world clearly, and understand how important it is to be strong in the broken places.

As a result Shannow will always be one of my favourite characters.

For a while back there he was the best friend I'd ever had.

David A. Gemmell

Hastings, 1995