Druss

Druss is the axeman at the centre of the Drenai books, and the figure most readers mean when they talk about Gemmell. Legend meets him in his sixties, slower than he was but still formidable, when he decides to ride to Dros Delnoch rather than sit out his old age; a prophecy about his death hangs over the whole novel. The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend goes back to the young woodsman whose wife is carried off by slavers days after their wedding, and who takes up his grandfather's axe, Snaga, to find her. The Legend of Deathwalker puts him in Gothir and on the Nadir steppes with his friend Sieben, and White Wolf sends a greying Druss on the road with Skilgannon. He is blunt and quick to anger, and he holds to an old-fashioned code of honour while having no patience at all with his own legend. In The Swords of Night and Day, set a thousand years later, he returns both as a spirit and through Harad, a Reborn grown from his remains. Gemmell said the character was modelled on his stepfather, Bill.

Appears in

1. 1Legend (1984)In Gemmell's first novel, an ageing axeman and a reluctant soldier help hold a six-walled fortress against a Nadir army half a million strong.
2. 2The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend (1993)Druss as a young woodsman, following the slavers who took his wife Rowena across the sea and into a war in Ventria.
3. 3The Legend of Deathwalker (1996)Druss rides into Nadir lands after jewels that might save a dying friend, and ends up defending a Nadir shrine against a Gothir army.
4. 4White Wolf (2003)Skilgannon the Damned leaves his monastery with his swords and a quest to raise the dead, and finds Druss the Legend on the same road.
5. 5The Swords of Night and Day (2004)A thousand years after his death, Skilgannon is grown again from his bones and wakes in a Drenai world ruled by a sorceress called the Eternal.