Dark Prince

The story

Assumes you have read Lion of Macedon; the set-up gives away how it ends.

Dark Prince follows directly from Lion of Macedon, and its premise depends on how that book ends. The Chaos spirit chose Philip's son Alexander as its human host. Parmenion's fight against it ended in only a partial victory: the boy's soul was not destroyed, but it merged with the darkness instead. Now the prince carries both natures inside him. Philip still rules Macedon, with Parmenion as his chief general and strategist, and the general has taken on the task of helping the boy win a struggle nobody else can see.

There is another Greece, reached through sorcery, where the creatures of legend still live and the Chaos spirit already rules through a demon king. Its people keep a prophecy of a golden child who will restore the land's fading magic, and the demon king believes that eating that child's heart will make him immortal. He has decided that Alexander is the child, and he draws the boy into his world. Parmenion has to go after him, and his guide is the seeress Derae, the woman he loved and lost long ago.

The rescue is only part of the book, which goes on to follow Alexander into kingship and the invasion of Persia. The historical campaign runs alongside the war inside him: at times he is wise and generous, at others as savage as the thing he carries. Aristotle is here too, as a man who works magic with the Sipstrassi stones. The mood is darker than the first book's, and the magic sits much closer to the surface. For Parmenion, older now and wearier, the question is what loyalty means when the boy he has fought to save may become the danger he was meant to stop.

Reading notes

Dark Prince is looser and stranger than Lion of Macedon. Where the first book is mostly history with a seam of magic running through it, this one spends long stretches in a mythic other world, and one reviewer noted with some surprise that Alexander ends up fighting alongside centaurs. Readers who liked the Spartan realism of the first volume may find the change abrupt. Readers who came for Gemmell's fantasy will find more of it here.

The best idea in the book is the explanation it offers for the historical Alexander, remembered both as a brilliant, generous leader and as a man capable of sudden savagery. Gemmell turns that contradiction into possession, and it gives the Persian chapters a tension that plain historical fiction could not. Parmenion remains the centre of gravity, and the book is as much about his loyalty and weariness as about the prince.

It is also where the pair's link to the Stones of Power becomes clear, through Aristotle and his stones, though nothing here requires you to have read the Sipstrassi novels. Taken together, the two books are entertaining rather than profound: one reviewer judged them decent, fairly light reading next to more literary treatments of the same period. Read Lion of Macedon first; this is a direct sequel and makes little sense without it.