Midnight Falcon

The story

Assumes you have read Sword in the Storm.

Bane is Connavar's son, born outside his marriage and never acknowledged; his mother is Arian, the girl Connavar loved as a boy. He has his father's unmistakable eyes, one brown and one green, so everyone in the Rigante lands knows exactly whose child he is, and the knowledge does him no good at all. He grows up an outsider, feared for his temper and his fists, while the king he so plainly resembles keeps him at a distance. The resentment between them runs through the whole book.

Bane leaves the Rigante and crosses the sea with Banouin, the son of the healer Vorna, and for a time he finds acceptance and a life worth having on the far side. It is taken from him suddenly. The young woman he has come to love is killed by gladiators of Stone, and the man responsible is Voltan, the most celebrated fighter in the empire. Bane survives, barely, and sets out to reach Voltan by the only route open to a foreigner with a sword: the arena.

So the son of Stone's most dangerous enemy becomes a gladiator in the imperial capital, the first of the Keltoi to fight there. Rage, an ageing champion, takes him in hand, the promoter Persis Albitane sees money in him, and the crowds learn his name. Voltan, by now, is more than a famous swordsman: he leads the empire's Stone Knights. Around the arena, meanwhile, the empire is preparing to march on the Rigante once more. As Bane gets closer to Voltan his certainty begins to slip, and his private vendetta and his people's survival start to pull in different directions. The book's real question is which of them he will choose, and what he will finally make of the father he left behind.

Reading notes

Midnight Falcon is often named by Gemmell readers as the best of the Rigante books, and Bane is the reason. He is a stronger lead than his father: bitter and self-pitying at the start, but with a warmth the story slowly lets out, and his gradual turn away from simple revenge is handled with real patience. The novel is about vengeance and what it costs, and about whether a son can stop defining himself against a father he hates.

The arena chapters are fast and physical, and Rage, the old gladiator who trains Bane, is one of the book's best creations. Gemmell's love of westerns shows here more than anywhere in the series, and the nods to John Wayne films are hard to miss. One reviewer's complaint is fair: in a Celtic-flavoured world, two major characters called Bane and Rage sound more like a comic book than a saga, and the names take some getting used to.

Read Sword in the Storm first. Midnight Falcon tells a complete story, but its emotional weight depends on knowing who Connavar is and what he did to become king, and much of the pleasure lies in seeing Connavar from the outside, through the eyes of the son he would not claim.