Conn Iggulden’s Wars of the Roses series is entrancing.
The man writes like none other.
His prose is so good I wonder whether I can truly make it justice with my mere broken words.
His historical fiction is amazing. I say this with my hand across my heart, and in the name of the holiest of holy, after having devoured the likes of Vintila Corbul, Maurice Druon, Umberto Ecco, Irving Stone, Karl May, Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, Alexander Kent aka Douglas Reeman, and many many others.
Yet, somehow Conn Iggulden manages to somehow send the reader back in time to the precise moment when the Crown of England fell from the weak hands of Henry VI of Lancaster into the strong palms of Edward IV of York.
It is true that people were cruel back then. Very close to the brutish condition decried by Hobbes some 250 years later. But they lived very close to their own souls and respected the human condition. A man was judged by how fast he avenged the blood of his ancestors. A woman was also judged by how loyal she proved to her family.
Point is that people were very true to their own nature. They dared ponder beauty in art, faith, nature, while also making sure to live and die and also kill those who sought to harm them.
The same people who killed their enemies after a vicious battle waged in the name of the Lord, and who refused to forgive their foes, denying them Pax, by sending them directly into the next realm, the very same men who committed murder and mayhem, they also built those cathedrals, palaces, castles, and libraries, that adorn Europe, every which way one turns.
They killed their fellow man with a devotion worthy of a better cause, for sure. But they also left behind those edifices that explain the nature of their devotion, contrition, and atonement.
One can see how they knew themselves to be miserable sinners, and how hard they tried to find a way back into the Lord’s good graces, by building a better future.
That was then.
As for now, in our day and age, one may say Man has become civilized. After all, where are the swords, falchions, pikes, halberds, bodkin arrows, poleaxes, daggers, and animus? Since they’re all gone or resting forgotten collecting dust and spiderwebs on the walls of some museums, those days must long be gone, eh. And one would be wrong. Miserably wrong.
Today, millions of people are killed each year without anyone pointing out the obvious scale of destruction. Millions of unfulfilled destinies are thrown to the four winds each year, and nobody cares. Not really.
And what’s worse, the killers walk among us, with a clean a conscience as possible given the amoral nature of the human condition. People die left, right and centre, and the killers are worshipped, elected, confirmed, validated, and they do not even attempt to atone for their crimes.
Not only that. They leave nothing behind. Just a monumental wake of destruction that will only be forgotten or outdone by their successors.
As time passes, the only thing that changes is the size of the crimes against humanity, we all accept, tolerate, encourage, and fail to acknowledge.
We think our ancestors to be monsters because they had blood on their hands. Yet they knew it and carried their crimes in their souls, as sins. They knew they messed up. And they showed us their acts of contrition. Those kings and queens bloody well knew the wages of sin is death, yet that did not stop them from wishing to beautify their monstruous legacy.
So that something better than the decay and rot of myriad corpses laying the foundation of their pestilent empires, might endure past their day and age of blood and iron.
What acts of contrition, if any, are being made today by the current crop of mass murderers we call leaders?!
The Price of Beauty is eternal damnation moderated by good works. Not excused, mind you, but tempered by acts of contrition.
If one must kill, which is an eternal sin that guarantees a sentence of perpetuity in Hell, if one must kill, the least one can do is build something that says:
I am sorry for being a murderer. I wish to be absolved by society for I know God may not!
Götterdämmerung 