Troy: Shield of Thunder

The story

Assumes you have read Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow; the opening situation reveals some of how it ends.

Shield of Thunder picks up some time after Lord of the Silver Bow and assumes you know how that book ended. Helikaon now rules Dardania and has made a marriage for his kingdom's sake, though he still loves Andromache. He begins the book slowly recovering from an assassin's blade. Andromache, still promised to Hektor, learns things about both Priam and Hektor that she has to keep to herself.

The title belongs to her. She carries a birthmark which, according to a prophecy Priam takes seriously, marks her as the Shield of Thunder, the woman who will bear a child whose city will never fall. It is one reason Priam wants the marriage so badly.

Much of the book belongs to new characters. Kalliades, who carries a famous sword, and his friend Banokles are Mykene soldiers who have fallen foul of Agamemnon and are running for their lives. On the road they rescue a young woman calling herself Piria, a runaway priestess nursing a terrible secret, and the three of them end up in the company of Odysseus. He, like every king of consequence, is sailing for Troy, where Priam is holding games to celebrate Hektor's wedding.

Gemmell uses the gathering to put every alliance on stage at once: envoys, wavering allies, old friendships under strain, and Odysseus trying to keep Ithaka out of a war that is not his. Agamemnon, with Achilles among his allies, is ready to use any pretext. By the last third of the book the fighting has begun, and the campaign that follows is Gemmell's own, built on long planning and hidden treachery rather than on Homer's sequence of events. Readers of the Iliad will meet familiar names in unfamiliar places, and some famous figures matter far less than they expect.

Reading notes

Middle books of trilogies often mark time. This one mostly avoids it by bringing in Kalliades and Banokles, whose soldier's-eye view and friendship give the novel much of its warmth and humour. For many readers of the whole trilogy they become its heart. Helikaon is less central, partly because he spends the early chapters convalescing, and the book is stronger for spreading its weight across a wider cast.

The historical imagination is the draw. Gemmell treats the war as a contest for trade and power in which Helen is a minor figure, and he has thought hard about how a Bronze Age alliance might actually move against a walled city. Against that, some attitudes, especially around sexuality and women's freedom to choose, are conspicuously modern, and the romance between Helikaon and Andromache spends a lot of time in longing.

This was the last novel Gemmell saw through to completion. It was published in September 2006, a few weeks after his death, and many readers rank it, with Lord of the Silver Bow, among his most accomplished work: the large cast is handled with a patience his early books lack. Read it straight after Lord of the Silver Bow.