(courtesy Angry Robot Books)
If you are history buff, you will be used to the fact that in recounting events from the near or distant past facts should take precedence over almost anything else, which is right and just and precisely what good history telling should do (this comes with the caveat that subjectivity can be hard to divorce from historical objectivity and is always in play in even the most balanced of accounts).
Having said that, what sometimes feel lacking when you’re reading the history of any epoch, no matter how fascinating the facts on the ground may be, is what sort of people the main figures in any historical period were like; that’s not a criticism of historical accounts, simply an acknowledgement that even when we have personal entries from the people concerned, it’s next-to-near impossible to know the real people in play.
Personal accounts are, after all, really just highly polished personal PR, with those penning them all too aware that history will use their words to advance and explain who they were as a person.
Still, imprecise though the act of assigning personality to historical fact may be, there’s something immensely fascinating about any writer, especially as one as talented as Stephen Aryan (The Coward, The Warrior), tackling a period of history and bringing alive the many players who shaped and propelled it.
In his new novel, The Judas Blossom, which forms the first entry in his The Nightingale and the Falcon series, Aryan dives deep into the vibrantly arresting characters at the heart of the Mongol Empire’s invasion of Persia in the 1260s.
Hulagu heard the crowd long before he saw them in the feast hall. Almost fifty men were drinking, talking, shouting and laughing with one another, standing in groups or sitting on benches scattered around the room. All of the visitors were honoured. All of them brave warriors, military leaders, or men of learning. Hulagu was related to many via blood or marriage, and the rest were significant for their accomplishments. Together they would decide who would be the next Great Khan and Emperor of the Mongol Empire.
It was, like so many period of conquest and subjugation but particularly so in the case of the Mongols who were not known for taking any prisoners and often raised cities to the ground, killing all the inhabitants in their pursuit of land, power and influence, a bloody and terrible period in which centuries-old societal structures were rent asunder and political certainties tossed to the wind in a wholesale ending of the established order.
In his telling of the great tumultuous change of this violently transformative period, which saw the Mongol Empire get as far as the eastern borders of Europe, Aryan focuses on one of the rulers of the khanates which made up the Empire, Hulagu Khan, a man who presided over the Ilkhanate that bestrode much of what we now refer to as the Middle East.
At the time The Judas Blossom opens, Hulagu, ruling from the northern Persian city of Tabriz, is working hard both to cement Mongol rule of a bruised and bloodied Persia, which resents its fall from imperial grace and its new status as a subjugated land, and to push the boundaries of empire still further into Syria, and the Holy Lands which, naturally enough, are resisting the Khan’s quest to rule over all the known world in league with his brothers and cousins.
(courtesy official author site)
His is a thankless role in many respects, with little time to enjoy the fruits of victory thanks to ongoing campaigns of war, ongoing infighting over who should be the Great Khan or supreme ruler of the Mongol Empire, and political maneuvering both within and without his court.
He is joined in this utterly immersive and richly-told story by a number of key dissident figures, chief among them Kavion, a onetime Persian general who accepts a role working in Hulagu’s military hierarchy with the aim of enacting revenge from within, and Princess Kokochin who is the last of her tribe (all murdered by the Mongols) and ostensibly the khan’s newest wife, but who increasingly finds herself chafing under the suffocating restrictions of what should feel like good fortune but which feels more like an existential curse.
Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, is Hulagu’s son Temujin who goes from timid progeny of a great warrior who is failing to make his mark as a ruler-to-be to some who taps into mystical powers so great, there’s a real chance he could play a pivotal role in where the Mongol Empire goes next and the form it takes.
There are countless more smaller plays involved too, all of which added a rich humanity to The Judas Blossom and to the historical period it covers which comes ever more fulsomely alive the more we read about what motivates these people and why it is they act as they do against the backdrop of one of the great upheavals in human history.
Letting the khan die would have changed little, but that didn’t stop him feeling guilty, especially after seeing so many friends die during the invasion. After an hour of tossing and turning, Kaivon realised he’d made the right decision. Saving Hulagu would also stand him in good stead for the future. He needed to to earn the khan’s trust, and those closest to him, if he was to be given any real power and responsibility.
What makes The Judas Blossom such a fantastically arresting read is how it serves up the history of the Mongol Empire, much of its factually based, in such a real and living fashion.
Any idea that history could be boring is banished completely and absolutely as this skillfully wrought recounting of the period takes into the hearts and minds, with vivacity and tangible empathy, of people who are no longer names in an historical recount but rather characters whose motivations and drivers feel very accessible and knowable.
Aryan doesn’t try to paint any particular group in any kind of light, preferring to let the actions of people speak for themselves, and they do in stark and volubly entrancing tones, and at the end, it’s the innate humanity of every character, for good or ill, that really brings the story alive.
Overall, The Judas Blossom is a towering piece of involving and affecting, and at times, near-magical historical writing that reminds us that while history may feel remote at times, it is the work of living, breathing, flesh-and-blood and engrossingly fascinating people who are as fallible as the rest of us and who, in their admittedly imagined humanity, make mistakes, experience triumphs, all while being driven by the need to make their mark on history for a host of reasons which, by book’s end, they are most assuredly on their way to doing in ways that will reshape history even more than it already has been.