Echoes of the Great Song

The story

The Avatars were a near-immortal people who ruled an empire through the power of crystals. Then the world turned over. Tidal waves drowned their homeland, a new ice age began, and their old capital now lies under the ice. A few hundred survived. From a handful of cities they still govern the Vagars, the human peoples around them, but their crystals are fading. Their weapons, like their long lives, depend on that power, and the crystals can be recharged with human life drawn from Vagars. Among the Vagars a secret rebellion is growing.

Now two moons appear in the sky, and the Almecs arrive. They are ruled by the Crystal Queen, they command the same kind of power as the Avatars, and they use it with even less restraint. Their message to the Avatar council is simple: submit and live, or fight and die.

Gemmell follows the war through several people. Talaban is an Avatar warrior marked by a private loss, and one of the few of his race who sees the tribespeople as people. Touchstone, an Anajo tribesman who travels with him, is searching for the wife he lost. Viruk, Talaban's cousin, is a brilliant killer with an unhinged streak and a gardener's patience. Anu, the Holy One, has been building something for a long time and says little about why. Rael, the Questor General, leads the Avatars and has to decide what they can afford to give up. And Sofarita, a peasant girl, is drawn into events that later peoples will turn into legend.

The Avatars' choice is between an old order that is failing and allies they have spent centuries treating as lesser, and the Almecs do not leave them long to decide.

Reading notes

Echoes of the Great Song is Gemmell's Atlantis novel in all but name, built around a crystal-powered civilisation and the catastrophe that ended it. Each chapter opens with a fragment of the legends later peoples told about these events, and the gap between those fragments and what the reader has just seen is one of the book's quieter pleasures.

It is also more openly political than most of his work. The Avatars have kept themselves alive at their subjects' expense, and when a crueller empire arrives with the same powers, they are made to see themselves in it. Talaban's slow recognition of what his people have been is the moral spine of the story, and the arguments between Avatars and Vagars are not tidied away for the sake of the battles.

Its admirers rate it among his best books, and more than one reviewer has called it his masterpiece. The cast is wide and the plot has many strands, so it is slower to get going than the Drenai novels. It stands entirely alone and is a good introduction to Gemmell at his most thoughtful.