Legend by David Gemmell
Man, what a great book. I'm not sure why I never read it before. Maybe when I heard about it I turned up my nose at it being 80s heroic fantasy. Shame on me, if so. It is maybe a little dated, but not much. The world-building is slight, but for the most part it's a very focused setting, so the far details don't matter much. I expected the main hero to be the drive, of course, the legend, but it seemed like nearly every character had a gut-wrenching heroic moment. Gemmell achieves a lot in a relatively short book. Plenty of poignant lines about being a man and doing the right thing, etc. Teenage me would have called it his favorite book perhaps, adult me still likes it an awful lot.