Strategos - Rise of the Golden Heart by Gordon Doherty

After leaving Apion in a very, very dark place at the end of Strategos: Born in the Borderlands, I often wondered not where I would take him next, but where I would find him when I returned to the story to write this second volume. The cliff-hanger ending to the first volume was a tempting place to pick up again, but I quickly realised that Apion's story demanded something different.

 

Indeed, having read David Gemmell's classic 'Midnight Falcon', I marvelled at how the author had effortlessly stepped several years ahead from where the previous volume, 'Sword in the Storm', left off. Much had happened in the intervening years. Richly painted and seemingly iron-willed characters had been demoted to mere background figures. The world had changed. But had the author made that choice, or had Connovar and Bane chosen for him?

 

I knew that Apion had to be closer to the tumultuous event around which the trilogy pivots: Manzikert. When, on the first day of my research into this period, I saw the announcement that Michael Attaleiates' History - an eyewitness account of Manzikert and the campaigns of the preceding years - had been translated into English, I sensed the hand of fate on my shoulder. I devoured Attaleiates' History in days, reading of the rise of an emperor who many thought could restore Byzantium to greatness, and of his perilous campaigns into Seljuk Syria. So it was, then, that Apion's destiny was to become entwined in this brutal and treacherous period . . . "

More about the book: http://www.gordondoherty.co.uk/writeblog/strategosriseofthegoldenheart

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Future Fans of Gordon's books, or those interested in the history of the Britons, the Rigante, The Macedonians or the Trojans might also be interested in these posts on this blog: 

Legionary and Strategos: Viper of the North

Legionary - Viper of the North by Gordon Doherty

Rome was eternal and her legions invincible. Then the world changed.

The Huns rode from the east, spilling from the windswept steppes and into Eastern Europe. The tribes that first felt their wrath were ill-prepared for their mastery of mounted warfare, and found that they had two choices; to submit to the Hunnic yoke, or to run for their lives. The mighty Goths, a raft of Germanic tribes that had warred amongst one another and with Rome for hundreds of years, were the last of these tribes between the Huns’ advance and the Eastern Roman Empire. But when the Huns arrived, the Goths were forged together in the fires of adversity and they made their choice – they ran from the Huns and flooded across the Danube and into the empire. Hundreds of thousands of them. Warriors, elderly, children.

The Goths arrived in the province of Moesia Inferior, panicked but respecting the tentative truce that had been brokered with the empire.  They were initially kept in a vast refugee camp on the southern banks of the Danube. Despite this fragile peace, the border legions were threadbare and ill-equipped to police such an incursion.

It was this that sparked my imagination.  Such a huge number of people – proud and noble – terrified, angry and lost in a foreign land. And the Romans, so few, doubtless anxious at the Goths’ arrival and fearful that the Huns would surely follow. This seething cauldron of emotion and strife was always balanced on a knife-edge. Then, I had the killer thought – the thought that inspired the tale of ‘Legionary: Viper of the North’:

What if one dark individual had engineered all of this, and now readied to tip that balance?

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