Ravenheart

The story

Eight hundred years have passed since Connavar and Bane, and the Rigante are a conquered people. The Varlish hold the land, and the terms of conquest are written into ordinary life. A Rigante may not carry a sword or own a gun, may not ride a horse taller than fourteen and a half hands, and is kept apart from Varlish society at public gatherings; even the tartan a clansman wears is regulated. The history taught in the lowlands is the conquerors' version, and only in the northern mountains do some clans still live free.

Kaelin Ring is a Rigante boy growing up under this rule. His father, Lanovar, was betrayed by the Moidart, the enigmatic Varlish lord who governs the region from Eldacre. Kaelin lives with his aunt, Maev, and he is watched over by Jaim Grymauch, a one-eyed giant of a highlander who drinks, brawls and steals cattle with great enthusiasm, and who promised Lanovar that he would look after the boy. The clans love Jaim because he is everything the old Rigante were, and even some of his Varlish enemies regard him with a grudging respect.

The story turns on a crime. A young Varlish woman is murdered, and Kaelin and Jaim, helped by the Wyrd of Wishing Tree Wood, the last woman who still follows the old ways, go after the killer. What Kaelin does when they find him forces Maev to send him north to the Black Mountain. Around them Gemmell builds a wider cast: Alterith Shaddler, a Varlish schoolmaster who becomes one of the book's more surprising figures, and Gaise Macon, the Moidart's son, who can see the injustice on which his father's rule rests. The question underneath is how long a people can be made to accept the unacceptable, and what finally makes them stop.

Reading notes

Ravenheart is where the Rigante series changes key. Swords and spears give way to muskets, cannon and rifles, and the setting moves from something like Roman Britain towards something that will remind British readers of the Scottish Highlands after the Jacobite risings, when clansmen were disarmed and even tartan was policed. The parallel is never spelled out, and it does not need to be.

The novel also carries a personal weight. Gemmell's stepfather, Bill Woodford, was the model for Druss. Speaking at the World Fantasy Convention in October 2000, Gemmell said that Bill had died that April, that in Ravenheart he had given Bill centre stage, and that Jaim Grymauch was his homage to him and to fathers like him. The result is plain on the page. Jaim is the heart of the book, a disreputable man with a protective streak as wide as he is, and much of its warmth comes from him.

Opinion on the novel is split. Several reviewers rank it the best of the four; Publishers Weekly, reviewing the American edition, felt it was more interested in setting up the next book than in telling a balanced story of its own. Both views have something to them. The book reaches a real climax, but a number of threads, Gaise Macon's above all, are plainly left open for Stormrider.

Because eight centuries separate it from Midnight Falcon, Ravenheart works as a starting point, both for the second pair and for Gemmell in general. The earlier books add depth to the legends the characters tell, not information you need.