Knights of Dark Renown

The story

The Knights of the Gabala were the pride of the Nine Duchies, nine knights in silver armour sworn to protect the realm. Six years before the story opens, eight of them rode through a gateway into another world to fight a great evil, and none came back. The ninth, Manannan, felt a fear he could not master and stayed behind. He has been known as the Coward Knight ever since, and nobody knows what the others found on the far side of the gate.

Without them the kingdom has turned sour. The king is said to be enchanted, his soul dead. A new order, the Red Knights, rides in his name, and anyone with foreign blood is now blamed for the realm's troubles, the nomad peoples above all. Lawlessness spreads, and people who once looked to the silver knights for protection now have to hide from the red ones.

Resistance begins almost by accident. Llaw Gyffes, who escaped from a duke's dungeon, finds that rumour has made him the leader of a rebel army in the Forest of the Ocean, when all he actually has is a scatter of outlaws and frightened families. To protect them, Nuada argues for a new company of knights, recruited from whoever is there: thieves and killers, a cripple, a poet. The old armourer of the order, Ruad Ro-fhessa, takes on a gifted boy named Lug. And Manannan comes to accept that the only cure for his shame is to ride through the gate himself and find out what happened to the others.

The two stories run side by side. One stays in the forest as the king's army closes in. The other goes beyond the gate, into a place that owes more to horror than to romance.

Reading notes

Knights of Dark Renown is an early Gemmell standalone, and it borrows its names from Irish and Welsh myth: Lug, Nuada, Manannan, Llaw Gyffes, and Ruad Ro-fhessa, one of the titles of the Dagda. Gemmell uses them as colour rather than retelling the myths, and the story is recognisably his, about people with bad histories taking on an oath they are not qualified for and finding out what it costs.

Reviewers tend to praise the pace and the passages beyond the gate, which have a real streak of horror. The usual complaint is size. There are a lot of main characters on similar roads toward redemption, and at around four hundred pages the book cannot give them all enough room. Several readers also feel that the final chapters arrive too quickly after a careful build-up.

It was published as a standalone and reads as one. The chronology on the Gemmell Awards website, drawn up by fans who say they talked it through with Gemmell, puts it at the very start of the Drenai timeline, long before Waylander, but nothing in the novel depends on the Drenai books, and it makes a good first Gemmell.