The Legend of Broken (109 page)

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“‘
Alchemy!
 … metals to gold … tiny men like vegetables …’”
Heldo-Bah speaks of the ancient alchemical “arts,” as they were known by both their practitioners and their detractors: for even the most enlightened of its practitioners did not treat alchemy as a
pure
science. Like so many areas of learning during the Dark and Middle Ages (and not unlike certain fields of science today), alchemy became more famous—or infamous—for the more extreme and even nonsensical of its practices than it did for its very real, but less dramatic, contributions to science, medicine, and philosophy (and through philosophy, as Carl Jung later explained, to a kind of proto-psychiatry and psychology). Heldo-Bah names two of these more extreme activities, the attempt to turn base metals into gold (the most famous, of course, of alchemical efforts), as well as the peculiar desire of some practitioners to create a miniature human called a “homunculus,” basically by nurturing sperm (in which, it was thought,
all
of the elements that eventually became a human being resided) in some place other than a woman’s womb. Many but not all alchemists saw the womb as nothing more than a nutrient-rich, protected sack, one that could be imitated, preferably in the Earth, thereby removing what post-tribal medieval thinkers often called the “pernicious influence of the feminine” from the life produced.

What is worth noting about alchemy, for the purposes of understanding the importance of the Broken Manuscript, is that many alchemical undertakings became very valid advances in fields ranging from metallurgy to chemistry to common household applications such as cosmetics, dyes, glasswork, and ceramics. But its most important achievements were those centering on military chemistry: alchemists would eventually discover gunpowder, as well as that most mysterious and elusive weapon of all military history, Greek fire (about which the Broken Manuscript will soon have a great deal to say); and the effort to refine base metals—the pursuit behind the famous “lead into gold” legend—led to the creation of ever-stronger and more sophisticated forms of steel out of “base” iron ore and carbon. —C.C.

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“‘… quietly stream away …’”
Caliphestros seems to be intentionally playing on the unnatural fear of and prejudice against most cats, great and small, that has haunted European and Asian history since Roman times. And the especially irrational reaction to big cats (whether tigers in India, lions in Africa, or even leopards in South America) malevolently turning into “man-eaters” displays this ignorance and fear at its clearest and worst: after all, wolves and other dogs have been hunting men down since the dawn of time without being invested with the particularly and peculiarly evil intentions that are given so readily to “man-eating” cats. The result, however, is that great cats have been hunted to the point of, or into, extinction everywhere in the world, yet at the same time have become the object of fascination and ownership for such people as wish to prove that they can either master or (seemingly more benignly, but in fact just as destructively) “tame” these wildest of wild animals: today, for instance, there are more tigers owned by private individuals in the United States (and usually kept in abominably cruel circumstances) than in all the jungles of the world.

Anyone interested in exploring an organization and center that does invaluable good in the cause of offering such animals rescue and homes, while simultaneously educating Americans and anyone else concerned with (or merely inquisitive about) this problem should contact Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Florida; their website can be found at www.bigcatrescue.org. —C.C.

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“… Davon dog-owl”
Keera’s initial skepticism is justified: nearly all large, “hooting” owls are capable of making “dog-like” sounds (John James Audubon called the American Barred Owl “the barking owl”), whereas very few can do what it is claimed the bird mentioned here has and will, making the European cousin of the barred owl an unlikely suspect. In all probability, the mysterious bird in question is the Eurasian Eagle Owl, and probably the same “Nerthus” we have already encountered, explaining why Caliphestros would be evasive on the subject, at this point: his trust of the foragers is not yet complete. —C.C.

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Heldenspele
Gibbon writes, “Here we encounter a phrase, the meaning of which can only be half-interpreted with any certainty. Clearly, we have the word that has survived to the modern German,
Helden,
or ‘hero’; but as to
spele,
we can but posit educated guesses. Does it have some Gothic or other Barbarian root? Or should we take it as an early form of the German
Spiel,
or ‘play,’ or
spielen,
‘to play’? All we can say with certainty is that Veloc intended to compose some sort of heroic, spoken tale.” Once again, Gibbon has been stymied by the limited scholarship into Gothic of his day: if he’d had the advantages we now do, he would certainly have identified
spele
as the Broken dialect’s synthesis of
Spiel
and
spill,
the latter the Gothic term for ‘tale,’ especially in the sense of ‘heroic tale,’ or
thundspill
. —C.C.

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“‘… the ash tree of the Frankesh thunder god …’”
Perhaps the most enduring legend to emerge from St. Boniface’s time among the Germanic barbarians was his famous cutting down of a tree supposedly favored by Thor, the Nordic-Germanic god of thunder, after calling for Thor to stop him by striking him dead, if the god truly could. After Boniface dealt the tree a few blows, this legend goes, a great wind rose up and uprooted it, blowing the thing over, at which the local tribesmen converted to Christianity and built a chapel on the spot where the tree had stood.

But Heldo-Bah, repeating a mistake that many before him had made, and would continue to do in ages to come, confuses the type of tree, in his telling: it was Thor’s Oak that supposedly fell to Boniface’s divine wind, whereas Heldo-Bah is doubtless substituting the Ash of Life in Norse-Germanic mythology,
Yggdrasill,
the roots and branches of which supposedly encompassed all of the nine worlds in that religion’s mythological system. —C.C.

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“‘… Vat of Turds!’”
As Gibbon points out, “Yet again, we encounter evidence of just how much of a link the Broken dialect must have been between various older, even ancient, Germanic dialects and modern German—for the homonym discussed here remains very similar today, the German
Bohnen
meaning fecal ‘droppings’ (and also ‘beans’), while
Fass,
although the letters themselves appear as parts of many other words, on its own does indeed connote a ‘vat.’ Yet this ribald connotation has not survived in any other of the many accounts and legends concerning the life of St. Boniface [
A.D.
672–754] and his long career of converting the Germanic peoples to Christianity, possibly because, after being renamed ‘Boniface’ by Pope Gregory II in
A.D.
719, the man in question often continued to travel under the name ‘Winfred’—although apparently not in Broken.”

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“‘… what became of him, if he did.’”
St. Boniface did, indeed, enjoy great success in converting the Germanic tribes to Christianity, and he attempted to carry that success over to the raiding tribes of more northerly regions; however, his luck ran out during the latter endeavor. Although still alive, in all probability, when the events in the Broken Manuscript took place, he was eventually killed by pagan raiders, in
A.D.
754, and if we accept Gibbon’s contention that
Varisian
was the Broken dialectal term for “Frisian,” then Heldo-Bah’s skepticism here is justified, as it was Frisians who did the missionary in. —C.C.

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“‘… the river
Nilus
 …’”
Again, Caliphestros uses the Latin term for a place or thing (in this case, the Nile river), and both the narrator and Gibbon’s translator leave it in that form, forcing us to wonder why; but, as the reference in that tongue seems important (and the meaning is fairly obvious), I, too, have left it alone. —C.C.

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“‘… the rats that infest those same grain ships …’”
Caliphestros once more mentions a notion that is tantalizingly close to being the truth: the Black Death did indeed travel the grain routes from the upper Nile to the ports of Egypt, and from there to Europe—carried by the rats who bore the fleas that were responsible for spreading the infection. He saw the connection as metaphorical; yet if he’d had the time and the instruments, it is more than likely so perceptive a scientist would have found that the connection was actually causative. —C.C.

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“‘… bedding her own brother?’”
Gibbon writes, “No one familiar with Norse and Germanic mythology will be surprised by this remark, for the tales of their gods, like those of nearly all pantheons in the known world, contain important instances of the incestuous coupling (knowingly and otherwise) of brother and sister. And in those Northern tales, specifically, is contained one of the most famous among such myths, that of the hero who, in Germany, was known as
Siegmund,
and his sister,
Sieglinde
.” Unfortunately, Gibbon lived just over half a century before the appearance of perhaps the most famous reinterpretation and retelling of this myth: that contained in Richard Wagner’s
Die Walküre,
second of the four installments in his monumental
Der Ring des Nibelungen
cycle. The opening installment of the work,
Das Rheingold,
would be sprung upon an unsuspecting public in 1869; and, when completed, the Ring cycle would quickly become one of the most successful works of operatic literature, albeit an endlessly controversial one. —C.C.

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Alandra,
here and
passim
Gibbon writes, “The reference here would seem to be to the siege of Troy,
Alandra
being, apparently, the Broken variation on the name Helen. Whether it would have been possible that the rulers and people of Broken would have had knowledge of the Trojan War, based on a translation into their own dialect of (in all probability) a Latin text of Homer’s
Iliad,
is far more difficult to prove, names often traveling where their context does not. Certainly, it is possible that Caliphestros himself created such a translation, although this Alandra was already a child of some seven or eight years by the time he arrived in Broken, leaving out the possibility that he had suggested the name in the first place. In addition, one can easily anticipate the difficulties that would have accompanied propagating such stirring foreign legends in as closed and self-admiring a society as Broken’s, thus making it far more probable that Caliphestros did not translate the work, and that the name made its way into the kingdom with some earlier emissary—quite probably, that greatest admirer of Hellenic and Roman culture upon the stone mountain, Oxmontrot himself.”

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“‘… 
Kreikisch … Graeci
 …’”
The first open statement—ignored, at this point, by Gibbon, of the Broken dialect’s term (often derogatory) for “Greek” is accompanied by the second word, the Latin term for the same people. Caliphestros himself explains the reasons for the different uses—perhaps the reason Gibbon ignores them. —C.C.

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“… can actually
taste
scent …”
This is an extraordinary statement for Caliphestros to make, and it seems obvious that it was rooted in his anatomical, which is to say his dissecting, work earlier in his life: certainly, no one among either the Bane or the Tall could have been aware, based on their levels of scientific advancement and their terror of the Davon panthers, of such a relatively arcane aspect of the feline sensory system, which is found throughout the feline tree, from housecats to their great relatives. The reference is also further evidence of how frustratingly close scientists came, during the eras before and during the rise of Christianity and Islam, to a truly modern understanding of anatomy and medicine, even veterinary medicine: for cats do, indeed, have unique sensory organs inside their mouths, but they do not “taste” scent with them. Rather, they
smell
with their mouths, adding considerably to their ability to detect scent, often from amazing distances. —C.C.

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“roseberry”
Almost certainly a precursor of “raspberry.” The thickness and slightly thorny aspect of the bushes suggest as much, while raspberries are indeed a branch of the wild rose family. —C.C.