Sword in the Storm

The story

Connavar is born on a night of storm, and within days his father is dead in battle. He grows up in the Rigante settlement of Three Streams, raised by his mother, Meria, and by Ruathain, his father's closest friend, who marries her and becomes the steady centre of the boy's life. It is a world of cattle and clan feuds, druids and earth magic, and it lives alongside the Seidh, an old and unpredictable race who haunt the woods and take a close interest in the boy. When the Morrigu, their goddess of death and mischief, asks Conn what he wants most, he answers glory. She promises that he will have it. The rest of the novel tests what her promise is worth.

The first test comes early. As a boy he takes on a bear to protect a lame friend, and it nearly kills him; only the village witch, Vorna, keeps him alive, at real cost to herself. The story of it makes him famous before he is grown. Banouin, a foreign merchant settled among the Rigante, knows the empire of Stone from the inside and teaches Conn how its armies think. That lesson matters, because Stone is working its way through the Keltoi tribes on the mainland, and sooner or later its generals will look across the water at the Isles.

Later chapters take Connavar south into lands the empire is conquering, where he sees its methods at first hand, and home again to a different kind of life. He marries, he is drawn into feuds with neighbouring tribes, and he finds in himself a fury that frightens the people who follow him. Along the way he earns the name Demonblade, and the book has shown clearly what his rise has cost those around him. Gemmell gives as much room to weddings, cattle raids and village quarrels as to battle, and the Rigante come across as a community rather than a backdrop.

Reading notes

Sword in the Storm opened a new world for Gemmell after well over a decade of Drenai and Sipstrassi books, and he clearly enjoyed the change. The Rigante echo the Iron Age Britons, with the Brigantes audible in the name, and the empire of Stone is Rome in all but name: drilled legions and a talent for turning neighbours against each other. The Seidh and the Morrigu come from Irish myth, and Gemmell uses them well, as powers that give generously and collect later.

The book's great strength is its sense of place. Village life gets real time on the page, the account of Conn's boyhood is among the warmest writing Gemmell did, and the battles, when they come, are handled with his usual pace. The weaknesses are real too. The tone is serious, with little of the humour that lightens the Drenai books, Connavar himself can be a hard man to warm to, and one reviewer found the secondary characters sketched rather than drawn.

It is a sensible first Gemmell, and the obvious way into the Rigante. It completes its own story of Connavar's rise while leaving the larger contest with Stone for Midnight Falcon. Readers who only want the later, musket-era pair can start with Ravenheart instead, which stands on its own.