The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend

The story

Long before Dros Delnoch, Druss is a young man in a mountain village in the Drenai lands, awkward among his neighbours and quick to anger, and newly married to Rowena, the one person who can calm him. He is in the woods felling trees when slavers attack the village. They kill many of the villagers, leave his father dying and carry off the young women, Rowena among them. With his last words his father tells Druss to take the family's battle-axe, Snaga, which once belonged to his grandfather Bardan, and go after her.

The pursuit is a long one. Druss joins forces with Shadak, a hunter with his own score to settle against the same slavers, and together they catch up with the raiders' camp. Rowena is not there. From the band's leader, Harib Ka, they learn that she has unusual mystical gifts, which makes her valuable, and that the swordsman Collan has taken her on to the port of Mashrapur. On the way he meets Sieben, a poet with a weakness for other men's wives, who becomes his closest friend and, in time, the man whose poems turn Druss's deeds into legend. An attempt to reach Rowena on the Mashrapur docks goes badly wrong, and she is shipped away to Ventria.

To follow her, Druss signs on with Bodasen, a Ventrian officer recruiting fighters for the young emperor Gorben, who is struggling to hold his throne against the neighbouring Naashanites. What follows is a hard education in someone else's war, and Druss comes out of it famous. Sieben, meanwhile, becomes convinced that something in the axe is feeding his friend's appetite for battle. Rowena's own story runs alongside Druss's, and it does not stand still while she waits to be found.

Reading notes

This is less a novel than a linked sequence: three novellas written for the book, followed by a shorter piece, Druss the Legend, which first appeared in the 1991 omnibus Drenai Tales and jumps forward to Druss in middle age. The joins show: each section has its own antagonist and climax, and the pace is episodic rather than building. What holds it together is the search for Rowena and the slowly growing question of what the axe is doing to the man who carries it.

Its best quality is that it takes the marriage seriously. Rowena is not a prize waiting at the end of a quest; her side of the story is given real weight, and Gemmell is interested in what the long separation does to both of them. The book also accounts for much that Legend takes for granted, from the axe to the reputation, and the friendship between Druss and Sieben is one of the warmest things in the series. Readers who meet the old Druss first in Legend will get more from it, because so much of it prepares the man on the wall, but anyone who prefers to follow a life in order can start here without being lost.