The Legend of Broken (102 page)

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“… elected officials …”
It is worth underscoring the point that the Bane’s process of electing various governmental officials, including their chief, was in keeping with the “barbarian”—or at least the Germanic—norm of the Dark Ages. Indeed, Western democracy owes as much (or more) to the codes of these societies than it does to those of ancient Greece and Rome. The Bane’s granting of an at least occasionally preemptive right of fiat to the High Priestess of the Moon does reveal, however, as the narrator suggests, a paradoxical, simultaneous, and deep tie between the exiles’ government and that of the city out of which they had been cast. —C.C.

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“… raft of parchment documents …”
Although both the people of Broken and the Bane could make parchment from the organs and hides of calves, goats, and sheep, “the Tall” were considered the more advanced of the two peoples, in this context, mainly because they preserved the technique of manufacturing parchment scrolls: long sheets of parchment wound around two rods, or batons, with “pages” being “turned” by unwinding one rod and winding the other. The Bane, for their part, relied on loosely bound sheets of parchment, the irony being that, today, the image of the scroll has become emblematic of the archaic: indeed, it is virtually synonymous with ancient and early medieval cultures, while the bound sheets of parchment that the Bane employed were of course the earliest forms of modern books, and were symbols, therefore, of progress.

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“… four-year-old Effi …”
The names of Keera’s children, like those of Sixt Arnem’s, offer important clues as to the cultural drift of each society, Bane and Broken.
Effi
is a form of the modern German
Elfriede, Baza
is an Old High German variation of the Slavic
Boris,
while
Herwin
is related to the modern
Erwin,
which is itself a variation of
Hermann,
still a common enough name in contemporary Germany, despite its original meaning: “friend of the army.” In short, the Bane, for all their imagined “inferiority,” may have been more closely linked to the modern German people than were the subjects of Broken. —C.C.

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ackars
Ackar
is believed to be the Old High German word for “acre,” and the amount of land it represented was reasonably close to that which we continue to assign to the term today. Some premodern definitions of an “acre” can vary a little, since the word literally refers to the amount of ground an ox can plough in a day, and certain unscrupulous, land-hungry authorities used teams of two oxen to get an increased measurement. Then, too, not all ground is equally easy to plough; but despite these and other considerations, the differences between the several legitimate versions tend to be small, and come out somewhere near the modern number of 43,560 square feet. —C.C.

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Alandra
Another Broken dialectal rendering, this time of the modern German
Alexandra,
which is derived from the older
Alessandra.
Like its male counterpart,
Alexander,
the name means “protector”—a fact that, in the case of this particular woman, will prove accurate in one sense, but far more ironic in another. —C.C.

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sukkar
The Arabic term for sugar, Arab traders having introduced granulated sugar made from Indian cane into the West only in the early eighth century: very shortly before the events recounted in the Broken Manuscript took place. Gibbon may have let this usage go without comment simply because he found its meaning obvious. —C.C.

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“phrenetic”
There are cases in which an archaic spelling for a word that we might think anachronistic goes a long way toward demonstrating how very old some seemingly “modern” concepts are, and I have therefore left them in their original form; “phrenetic” is one such example. —C.C.

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the newts
The color and general appearance of these creatures, together with their living in northern Germany, mark them as almost certainly being Great Crested Newts (
Triturus cristatus
), whose range once included almost all of Europe, and who have been reduced in number in modern times only by the loss of their habitat due to human development, to the point that they are now a threatened species. Newts are not, as Isadora seems to indicate, precisely the same animals as salamanders: but both do make up the two classes of the family
Salimandridae,
and it is therefore likely that no distinction was drawn between them in the ancient world, or during the Dark Ages. In addition, while the differing feeding, mating, breathing, and breeding habits and techniques of the seventy-odd members of this family are impossible to completely detail here, both newts and especially salamanders did, indeed, possess certain very important mystical and spiritual properties, in certain religions and folklores of those eras: they were fire spirits, or “elementals,” just as undines (or, variously,
ondines
) were water spirits, gnomes Earth spirits, and sylphs spirits of the air. Elementals were thought to be actually composed of their basic element, and the human who could control such a creature could, at least temporarily, control that element. —C.C.

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Emalrec
Though it passes unmentioned by Gibbon, this name contains a mild irony: if we account for the vowel shift of Old High German, it becomes the fairly common
Amalrec,
a variation of
Emmerich,
both of which connote “powerful worker”—hardly accurate, in this case, and perhaps an intentional comment upon the state of affairs in the Fifth District, and in Broken’s society generally.
Berthe,
meanwhile, is obviously an archaic form of
Bertha,
drawn from the root
beraht,
meaning “bright” or “famous”: also an irony. —C.C.

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“sackcloth,” “smock,”
and
“rough material”
Gibbon continues to pay little attention to the questions of how, and to what extent (a considerable one), judgments concerning wealth and station were drawn from elementary statements about clothing, particularly among women, in Broken as elsewhere in “barbarian” Europe. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that we find still more proof, here, that a woman’s clothing and therefore station in life were signaled by, in descending order, material(s) used, the quality of needlework, and color (expensive dyes obviously being available only to people of means). “Fashion,” as we understand the word today, scarcely existed, even in one of the most advanced societies of the time. In the case of the unfortunate Berthe, for example, the flat statement that she wears “a simple piece of sackcloth … poorly stitched” (sackcloth being a material that, since the time of the ancient Hebrews, had been used by penitents and mourners, who wished to deliberately torment themselves) seems intended to fix her station, in our minds. And indeed it can, if we are aware that sackcloth was no more than the burlap-like substance used, as the name indicates, for making sacks to hold grains, cotton, root vegetables, and similar items; it cannot, in short, have been a comfortable garment, even if “well stitched,” especially not for a woman who was pregnant, and even less for one who had no “smock,” which, again, during this period referred to a simple robe, usually cotton, that women wore as an undergarment,
if
they could afford it. —C.C.

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“plague”
If this seems a leap to a conclusion on Isadora’s part, we should remember that the bubonic plague was constantly on the minds of people throughout Europe, Asia, and especially northern Africa (where most outbreaks began) during this period. Its principal symptoms were widely known, and its details known enough for someone like Berthe to realize that if her husband’s sores had not developed into
buboes,
the near-black sores that gave the Death its name, the disease was likely not
the
plague. On the other hand, many other people were not capable of such discrimination, leaving open the possibility that Berthe’s ability was only a product of her association with Isadora, a gifted healer. —C.C.

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“rose fever”
Variations on this term can be found in more than a few ancient and medieval manuscripts, as can the many other names given to what was almost certainly
typhoid fever;
but it is important to note that “rose fever” could denote several other mortal fevers and sicknesses that shared crucial symptoms. The most common of these was
typhus,
and the general inability to tell the difference between the two during ancient and medieval times—evident in the similarity of and relationship between names—was a problem especially pertinent to and within the Broken Manuscript, as shall be seen. Even Gibbon, given the extent of medical knowledge in his eighteenth century, was in no position to make such distinctions (indeed, it was only in the nineteenth century that typhoid fever and typhus were definitely identified as two different illnesses); and at the time during which the events in the Manuscript were taking place, the lines between pestilences were far more blurred, so that the term “rose fever” likely included several other candidates, as well. Today, we can be more discriminating, and try to accurately distinguish between what were certainly (as we shall soon see) two illnesses that struck at the kingdom of Broken and the lands around it at the same time, but that were labeled “plague” by the stricken peoples; and the most important differentiating factor, in terms of understanding the events that the rest of the Manuscript chronicles, lies in the methods of transmission of these illnesses: direct physical contact with the afflicted, breathing of the same air or drinking of the same water, and finally (as we shall soon see) eating the same diet, a practice that brings into the picture yet another widespread disease with certain similar (actually, more horrific, but, ironically, less virulent) symptoms, a further confusion that would make the situation even harder to analyze.
Note:
To say more of this last method of transmission at this juncture, however, would be to spoil the suspense that the narrator is working hard to construct, at this as at other points: it is enough that we note, here, that two diseases were actually at work in Broken, and that none of them was actually “the plague” or “the Death,” phrases generally reserved for the Black Death, or bubonic plague.

Finally, it also should be noted that this phenomenon of two diseases being identified as one was not at all unusual, during this historical era; in fact, it is in many ways typical, especially of how little medicine had been allowed to advance by the various monotheistic faiths (for whom dissection of the bodies of those killed by the afflictions was a sin), in the four or five hundred years since Galen. —C.C.

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Bohemer
and
Jerej
Both Slavic, and probably Slovak (given the geography), names, of which Gibbon comments, “We know the Slavs to have followed earlier invader tribes into central Europe by the beginning of the sixth century, and we must concern ourselves here with one of the principal groupings of this race, the Bulgars, whom we know to have undergone, by the late seventh century, a fractious division into two or more ‘empires’ of ‘great khans’—neither of which ‘empire,’ we should note, was as powerful or even as large as Broken. One of the chief factions thus produced moved east to the familiar ground of the Volga, while the other pushed on to establish itself upon the lower Danube; and from this forcefully acquired territory, the second group immediately commenced raiding the settlements, not only of the Byzantine [or Eastern Roman] empire to the south, but of other barbarian tribes in other directions. It therefore seems entirely credible that, by the moment of Broken’s crisis two centuries later, superfluous, criminal, or merely adventurous members of this empire—which had by then become firmly entrenched—might have struck out on their own, to find their fortunes in such famously wealthy kingdoms as Broken. Or, they may have been prisoners of war—or perhaps they even entered Broken, like Heldo-Bah, under the rather sinisterly ingenious policy of indentured servitude that allowed flesh-dealers to cheat Broken’s laws concerning slavery.” The two names, like the two servants, have rather contradictory natures, each being Broken dialectal versions of Slovak names, in the first case for “god of peace,” the second, “worker of the earth.” —C.C.

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bulger
Gibbon writes, “While we have no specific justification for believing as much, it seems plain, given the information gleaned thus far, that this adjective is connected to a name: ‘Bulgar,’ which remains the shortened form of ‘Bulgarian.’ But there is a matter of interest here that makes the word, perhaps, more than just another Broken adaptation of another people’s name: when the narrator refers to the
Frankesh
(‘Frankish’) or to the
Varisian
(‘Frisian’) tribes, the first letter of each name appears in the upper case, as a measure of respect, one not accorded to such tribes as the
seksents
(Saxons), a name which, as we have seen, the subjects of Broken likely equated with ‘peasants.’ Apparently their attitude toward
bulgers
was similar; indeed, it is possible that this little piece of the Broken dialect contributed to one of the modern German terms for ‘vulgar,’
vulgär,
as much as did the commonly-cited Latin
vulgaris.
” [It should be noted, here, that Gibbon is indulging his sometimes wild taste for speculation. —C.C.]