The Legend of Broken (101 page)

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“‘… the Varisians with their longboats …’”
Gibbon writes, “Once again, we must consider the words
Frankesh
and
Varisian
to be, like
Torganian,
mere phonetic approximations: the first for ‘Franks,’ or more precisely, the ‘Frankish,’ tribes who, as I have said, may already have driven the
Torganians
(‘Thuringians’) from the region south of Broken. Varisian, meanwhile, is clearly another such approximation, this one for ‘Frisian,’ a northern tribe notorious for their sea and river raiding.”

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“‘… our enemies.”
It is important to understand that this discussion of torture, while it may seem anachronistic, is anything but, if one understands the history of warfare in any sort of detail. The torture of enemy combatants and noncombatants, and the question of whether any useful information gleaned by such methods outweighs the risk to the soldiers and people of the torturing side, is hardly unique to our own era: it is, in fact, at least as old as the Roman Empire, where it was debated in much the same fashion as it is today. The arguments have resurfaced regularly throughout Western history ever since; and we should therefore not be surprised to find it cropping up in these pages. Indeed, Gibbon himself is so familiar with it, apparently, that he does not even deem it worthy of mention. —C.C.

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the
Lenthess-steyn
Gibbon writes: “I must repeat, would that we had sufficient knowledge of the Broken dialect to comprehend the meaning of every phrase, particularly some of the most obscure yet revealing. One such is this place where the healers among the Bane, who appear to have been skilled in the use of herbs and the extracts of forest plants, did their noble and comforting work, and also, apparently, achieved advances in the knowledge of anatomy that religious superstition prevented in more ‘advanced’ societies and tribes—Galen himself [the father of Roman and, many believe, Western medicine] would have envied their freedom, in this regard!” Gibbon’s frustration over the lack of a precise translation perhaps prevented him from reasoning out the strange but appropriate meaning of the title of these caves. The phrase
Lenthess-steyn
can be pieced together from Gothic, Old High German, and Middle German (the usual mixture of the Broken dialect in its later phases): it seems to translate as “the Soft Stones,” implying caves in which the aged, the ill, or the wounded either recovered or had their journey to the Lunar afterlife eased, or “softened.” —C.C.

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“… effective in battle …”
Before proceeding with any detailed discussion of the armor, helmets, and swords employed by the Bane and the army of Broken, one scholarly fact (best argued by Ewart Oakeshott in his
Dark Age Warrior
) must be reiterated, particularly regarding this region of northern Europe during the period under consideration:
there are no definitive sources on the subject of just what “Dark Age warriors” employed for armor and helmets (and precious little concerning their manufacture and use of swords), and we must therefore judge largely by what we read in individual accounts—of which the Broken Manuscript is one of the most elaborate.
Hence, we can infer, in this instance, that the presence of scale armor among the Bane is further evidence that Oxmontrot likely fought for the Roman armies of the eastern empire, as well as the western, since such “scale mail” was preferred by the formidable Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) armies. However, while the armorers of Broken appear to have been able to reproduce effective examples of this alternative to chain mail (an alternative that offered greater protection but limited range of motion), the Bane were apparently less able to do so. They likely had some quality examples (captured or stolen from Broken soldiers), but, as the narrator says, their craftsmen simply could not yet work in such detail, largely because of the quality of their iron—which, although about to improve, limited them to merely a few such suits, probably used more often for show than for combat.—C.C.

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“… the iron itself.”
Again, the Bane were not, at this point, able to produce steel of a high enough grade to make the manufacture of truly quality blades and helmets possible, although they would soon gain the capacity to do so. This subject will be discussed in greater detail later in the story itself, but it does not spoil that story—and, more important, it is necessary—to note here that their swords were either of low-carbon steel, or steel laminated onto simple iron cores, as was common in barbarian Europe. Their helmets, meanwhile, were based very generally on those of the Broken army, which appear to have been within the family of Germanic adaptations of Roman helmets (and known collectively, as has already been discussed, as the
Spangenhelm
design) which included roughly conical or rounded helmets onto which were riveted or welded segments to cover the nose, cheeks, and sometimes the lower neck. The hinges in such designs were almost universally leather, save in the case of the highest-ranking soldiers, who could afford metal hinges. Without the latter two features, the Bane would have been left with something closer to the Norman helmet, a simple one-piece, conical design with a fixed nose guard as an organic extension, not a component: a sound enough protection, if the steel was of sufficient grade, which the Bane’s was not—a condition that was, again, about to be altered. —C.C.

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Ashkatar
Here is a name that appears to have vanished completely, along with the society that gave it birth; and the best estimates of those experts consulted is that
Ashkatar
was an approximation, in the Broken dialect, of some altered or corrupted form of
Augustus,
the earlier name of Octavian Caesar, the famed architect of the Roman Empire during the bridging of the
B.C.
and
A.D.
eras. If so, this would indicate that Ashkatar’s ancestors had once been people of importance, perhaps quite close to Oxmontrot, for it would have been the Mad King and his fellow mercenaries who would have heard the story of Augustus during their years of campaigning for Rome. —C.C.

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the names of Arnem’s children
The collection goes seemingly unnoticed by Gibbon, in all likelihood because they only offered him more frustration. Even today, one remains obscure:
Dalin,
which may or may not be some dialectal interpretation of the Gothic term for “share,” and may have been given to the boy at his mother’s urging precisely because of the child’s remarkable physical (and, apparently, behavioral) resemblance to his father, even at birth. We can be more sure, however, that the remaining names reflect either a general trend toward modern Germanic names in the kingdom of Broken, or a conscious effort by Sixt to emphasize his own heritage over Isadora’s apparently Gothic background (the Gothic tribes were, of course, “Germanic” in the broad barbarian and early medieval sense of the word, whereas “modern Germanic names” refers to those appellations belonging quite distinctly to the languages and dialects that would one day meld to form modern German.):
Anje
is a variation of
Anna, Dagobert
a fairly common medieval combination of the terms for “good” and “gleaming” (and the name of one of the great Merovingian Frankish kings, just before the period during which the Manuscript’s tale is almost certainly set, and possibly, therefore, borrowed by the worldly Arnem from those same Franks), while
Gelie
is a derivative of
Angelika.
The remaining name,
Golo,
seems to be some kind of variation on or nickname for “Gottfried.” It is still in use—as, indeed, are many of these names, in some form or another—but
Dalin
remains a riddle without a definite solution. —C.C.

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“… two large, crow-like birds.”
of Isadora’s clasp, Gibbon writes, “Without doubt, we are faced, here, with a representation of Odin, patriarch (or ‘All-father’) of the Norse gods, who traded one of his eyes for wisdom, and was attended by two ravens, one representing Thought, the other Memory. What is of particular interest is the fact that, while we now think of this mythology as quaint, it was quite vibrant, during the period that Broken existed, and was such a threat to the Kafran faith (as it was to monotheism generally) that those who worshipped the Norse gods were declared to be, not wayward primitives, but doomed heretics, in Broken—just as they were by the early Christian church.” Once again, Gibbon reveals his fascination with other-than-Christian faiths, although worship of the Norse gods can hardly have been considered a “cult” or “mystery” religion—whereas (ironically) the Kafran faith does indeed fit the mold of either a cult or one of what are known as the “mystery faiths”. —C.C.

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Nuen
The name of the Arnem children’s nurse and, later, governess is ignored by Gibbon, probably because
Nuen
would have been a thorny problem for him to solve, scholarly works on Eastern history and culture being relatively few, in his time, and many if not most of those relying on the work of ancient historians. Presuming
Nuen
to be an ancestor of the modern
Nuan
—which, in Chinese, is intended to connote warmth and geniality—may seem a logical conclusion, save that the connection between the Huns (almost certainly the people from whom this woman emerged) and the Chinese has long since been effectively dismissed; and even the Huns’ relation to the
Xiongnu
(or, in the older form, the
Hsiung-nu
), a tribe of nomads that occupied northern and northeastern Asia (an area that included much of Manchuria, Mongolia, and the Chinese province of Xinjiang) and may have given rise to some of the similarly restless peoples that sprang out of those regions, is a relationship that, while once considered likely, has recently come to be deeply questioned and in some cases dismissed. Thus the Chinese background of the name is unlikely, but we have few theories to take its place; and so we are forced, like Gibbon, to simply accept the name—although with greater, if therefore more frustrating, awareness of just why we must. —C.C.

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breck
Further evidence, if any is needed, that Isadora’s ancestors were indeed Goths who interbred, over time, with other, “newer” Germanic tribes: the word that we know as “brook” winds its way back through most of the related languages of the region—German, Dutch, Middle English and Old English—until its earliest ancestor is found in the Gothic
brukjan.
The diminishment of the Gothic influence, added to the Old High German vowel shift and the few peculiarities of the Broken dialect that we can speak of with confidence, more than explain the specific form encountered here. —C.C.

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Gisa
The name of Isadora’s guardian and teacher, the woman who raised her following the robbery and murder of her parents, is another tantalizing clue to the pattern of religious and social evolution in both Broken and northern Germany generally: although identified as an Old High German name,
Gisa
’s precise meaning has been lost. We can, however, fairly safely assume both that it was a shortened form of the Germanic
Gisela,
which connotes both “hostage” and “tribute,” and that it was therefore probably not her original name. Thus, given her activities, was this woman of Nordic extraction perhaps sold into servitude in Broken after being taken as a slave by some unknown armed force or band? And, if she was indeed a “hostage,” was she a person of some importance in her northern homeland? Many such hostages during this era (as today, in parts of the developing world) were never redeemed—a fact that would explain both her bitterness and her indoctrination of Isadora into what was, in Broken, considered a heretical cult, but which was already an established religion in the region, and perhaps a major one; certainly, it was one that would undergo an enormous revival when it was reasserted by the Nordic tribes, many of which blended it with various interpretations and narrative chapters of Christianity. —C.C.

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“… his saddle’s iron stirrups …”
A detail that goes unnoticed by Gibbon reveals itself, in the modern era of military history (and military technological history, especially), as being of enormous importance: Broken’s mounted troops were using metal stirrups. The Romans had no such advantage, accounting for why their cavalry units were not the most feared parts of their armies: it was the bracing offered by stirrups that created the stability necessary for men on charging horses to drive spear and lance points into massed infantry, as well as the control needed for mounted archers to fire without gripping the horse’s reins. (There were Asian steppe and American Indian tribes whose warriors could perform this action by way of using their thighs alone to control their mounts, but such were highly exceptional troops, at this time, and relatively rare). Without the stability and control made possible by iron and steel stirrups, horsemen were relatively easily knocked to the ground; whereas, possessed of this seemingly simple advantage, they were very hard to dislodge from their mounts. Two questions concerning Broken’s cavalry, however, remain: If they were indeed using stirrups, why were their mounted units not larger, more heavily armed, or trained in the performance of massed shock tactics that the innovation allowed? Furthermore, from whom did they borrow the all-important advance in mounted technology, which would literally change the face and fate of Europe? Whatever the case, by failing, on the one hand, to increase the size of units that had been given drastically increased shock power, and, on the other, to arm them with the full range of weapons that heavy cavalry mounted with metal stirrups could employ, and by electing instead to maintain their imitation of the Roman model despite possessing a tremendous advantage, the Broken army committed an error of enormous magnitude. —C.C.