Book about a man who crashes on a planet and saves the princess with a magical weapon

Question

Many years ago I bought a very cheap sci-fi/fantasy book. What I remember:

• I think the cover was kind of red.
• A guy/pilot crashed with his spaceship on an unknown planet - in a forest.
• He is hurt, someone saves him. He wakes up in a nice place/palace - meets the princess.
• I think she tells him there is a prophecy about a man coming and saving their people.
• He has to fight (in a labyrinth?) to get a magical weapon - the weapon speaks/whispers to him - I recall it was a sword/spear.
• Then he goes on to save the "native" people of the planet - I can remember their skin color is blue.
• Again it sounds like a popular movie, but the natives have some special animals they ride into battle.
• The hero has black hair/very dark hair and I think a beard.
• I am sure that on the cover you can see this man.

Answer 1

This reminds me of The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, one of Lawrence Watt-Evans first novels, if not the first. The titular cyborg is a warrior who fights on long after the war has ended, because no one still alive can decommission him. In the first chapter, he lands/crashes on a planet where his ship has detected "gravitational anomalies" -- which turn out to be sorcerers, flying by magic. He's injured in landing, and rescued and magically healed -- and then the real adventure begins.

Excerpt from the first chapter:

He lay back on the acceleration couch and wondered idly whether he had been officially decommissioned, and whether anybody left alive had the authority to decommission him. He had no idea, and there was no way he could find out. He had been under total communications silence when the D-series destroyed Old Earth's military -- and probably its civilization as well -- and since then, of course, there had been no signal at all from his home base on Mars. There could be little doubt that his superiors were all long dead; if the war hadn't killed them, the passage of time would have. The fourteen years of subjective time he had spent in space worked out to about three hundred years of outside time, and he doubted very much that anyone on Old Earth had been making breakthroughs in geriatrics after the war was lost.