Ghost King

The story

Britain is sliding out of Roman order and into its Dark Ages. King Aurelius is killed in a hunting ambush arranged by Eldared, king of the Brigantes, and the realm comes apart. Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Brigante tribesmen gather to divide what is left, and behind them stand stranger powers: a Witch Queen and the Lord of the Undead. The Sword of Power, Cunobelin's blade, which confers the right to rule, has vanished beyond the Circle of Mist.

The heir is Aurelius's son Thuro, a boy who has been sickly since birth and whom nobody would choose to lead an army. A few of his father's men survive the ambush, among them Victorinus and Gwalchmai, and set about raising a force in his name. They get help from unexpected quarters, including Prasamaccus, a lame Brigante huntsman who saves Victorinus's life and turns out to be one of the most likeable people in the book.

Thuro himself falls into the keeping of Culain, an old mountain warrior who is remembered in legend as the Lord of the Lance, and who alone knows the Witch Queen's secret. Culain sets about turning the boy into a fighter. He is not the only person in the story whose past runs a long way back: the enchanter Maedhlyn talks as though he had a hand in events as distant as Troy. The relationship between Thuro, Culain and a young woman named Laitha gives the novel its emotional centre, and readers who know the Arthurian stories will recognise which old triangle it echoes.

The task is laid out early. Thuro has to survive, grow strong enough to lead, recover the sword and go into the Mist to find a ghostly army. The main action covers only about a month, though the histories behind it reach back thousands of years, and the Sipstrassi stones of the Jon Shannow books are part of the magic behind it. Gemmell's boldest change to the legend is in whom the boy grows up to be: Uther Pendragon, not Arthur.

Reading notes

Ghost King was Gemmell's fifth novel and the start of his Arthurian pair, published by Century in 1988. It sits inside the Stones of Power sequence because its magic comes from the same Atlantean stones as the Shannow books, but it reads perfectly well on its own and asks no knowledge of Wolf in Shadow. Gemmell's approach to the legend is practical rather than reverent: the matter of Britain becomes a story of a weak boy, a hard teacher and a country falling apart, with the familiar names arriving at angles.

The coming-of-age story is the heart of it, and Gemmell handles the training and the growing self-respect well. The minor characters are strong; Prasamaccus in particular is a favourite with readers. The book moves quickly and wastes little. Its weaknesses come from the same speed. Thuro's change from boy to man happens so abruptly that some readers find it confusing, and the motives of its immortal villains are hard to follow. Reviewers who came to it from the Drenai novels have tended to find it lighter on character and narrative weight than his best work.

It suits readers who like their Arthurian material with more mud and swordplay than courtly love, and anyone who enjoys the story of an unpromising youth hardened by an older mentor, a pattern Gemmell repeats in Last Sword of Power. It is a reasonable first Gemmell, short and self-contained, though the story continues in Last Sword of Power.