The Legend of Broken (98 page)

†
 
“‘Blast it’”
Etymologically speaking, the persistent use of various oaths based on the word “blast” is interesting—and again, adds plausibility to the Manuscript—as it is one of the few words to originate in Old High German that has survived intact, but into
English
(by way of Old English), rather than into modern German: thus it becomes, in a sense, one of the “ghost words” of a dead language. This may seem implausible, if one assumes that the expression is somehow associated, as it usually is today, with explosives; but in fact, “blast” is another example of a phrase that might seem an anachronism, on first look, but which dates back to the early Middle Ages, where “blasts” of wind or man-made air (as in horn-blowing) occurred long before Europeans had divined the secret of how to blow each other up with gunpowder. —C.C.

†
 
“‘… your accursed city was built …’”
Gibbon writes, “We ought not think that the Bane are speaking, here, in any but literal terms. As our great British explorers—most recently the late and much lamented Captain James Cook—have discovered, the exile of tribal members who have proved unable to contribute to the advancement of a given society, onto some neighboring island, or into some wilderness or other in a remote location, is a practice found the world over—as are societies formed by those same exiles. The fact that, in this case, the exiles appear to have taken on a distinctive physical feature—reduced height—ought not surprise us, either: we have only to look to advances in, say, the breeding of livestock within England itself to understand the physical ramifications, positive as well as negative, of the careful selection of mating partners. If the citizens of Broken deliberately bred their progeny to grow tall, strong, and handsome, it only stands to reason that those exiled from the city would produce a significantly smaller—and less attractive—race.” Thus did one of the great historians of his own or any era instinctively anticipate a major scientific principle. —C.C.

†
 
“‘… our unfortunate new recruit.’”
Gibbon’s claims about the cultural mimicry of the people of Broken continue to be borne out in small ways: use of the word “recruit,” rather than simply “warrior” (or some one of the many similar terms used by barbarian tribes in Europe at the time), further calls to mind a society in which military service had been highly systematized and regimented along Roman, rather than early feudal, lines—a theory confirmed by the fact that such service was not, evidently, compulsory, even for the lower classes. —C.C.

‡
 
“‘Hak’”
It is impossible, of course, to determine if the original translator of the Manuscript has left this exclamation intact, or if he has approximated some similar sound from the original dialect of Broken; but its close resemblance to the still-common German
Ach
is noteworthy. —C.C.

†
 
“… built for the healthy.”
If the policy of “culling” weak members of those tribes that eventually made up the kingdom of Broken seems to contemporary sensibilities so drastic as to be mythical, we should remember that, even in Gibbon’s time (as he makes clear in an earlier note) there was awareness of societies great and small that had employed—that still employed—similar policies; although he fails to mention how often his own Britain did the same, to rid itself of those citizens who lacked financial sense or scruples (debtors and thieves, as well as other petty criminals, all of whom were sent to America, Australia, and other distant colonies).

Nor should we be smug about Gibbon’s deliberate blindness on this score: such practices have no more vanished from the twenty-first century world than they had from the eighteenth. Various tribes that are “indigenous” (a word that almost daily loses meaning, in a world increasingly marked by transient populations) to South America and Africa allow parents to have only the number of children that the tribe generally can support, killing off surplus numbers. The ancient Roman practice of weeding out physically deformed children by exposing them at birth to the tender mercies of mountainside wildernesses, meanwhile, is currently echoed both in the Chinese practice of selling or simply drowning unwanted female children—a “traditional custom” that occurs with regrettable frequency—as well as in the license that so many Muslim societies give to individual men and entire families to disfigure, murder and anathematize women who are perceived as having disgraced themselves and their families, often by “allowing” themselves to be raped. —C.C.

‡
 
“the Celestial Way”
The appearance of the word “celestial” in the name of Broken’s main thoroughfare—assuming, again, that it is a literal translation, and not a whimsical choice of the translator—underlines the diversity of cultural influences on the city’s society as far back as its founding, “celestial” being a word that is far more commonly found in descriptions of Eastern palaces and potentates than in those of Western. —C.C.

†
 
“The
Denep-stahla
”
Gibbon writes, “These more serious rituals of mutilation contain one common element: the use of
stahla
after the hyphen, which may indicate that they are derived from the sacred instruments used to inflict the punishments,
stahl
being a modern German word for ‘steel,’ particularly as pertaining to ‘blades.’ The origins of the first parts of the phrases, on the other hand, are matters for sheer speculation: more they seem to have been adaptations of terms peculiar to the original cult of Kafra, and to have therefore been brought into Broken with that god and that faith. We do not know where, precisely, this religion originated, as I have said; but the physical manifestations of these strange words are made fully, indeed hideously, clear by the narrator’s descriptions of the rituals, and suggest an Eastern, even an Oriental, morality.” [
Note:
Gibbon is being, as was sometimes his tendency, openly prejudicial, here—it was, after all, the
Western
Romans who perpetuated such ancient and “progressive” punishments as crucifixion and being mauled to death in arenas by wild animals. —C.C.]

†
 
“… narrowed to sharp points.”
Here we find more evidence to support the contention that Broken’s first king, Oxmontrot, served as a foreign auxiliary in the Roman army: the style of military fortification and housing in Broken’s Fourth District is almost identical to those outposts and forts that Roman armies of occupation constructed, particularly in central and northern Europe, where tall, stout pine and fir logs were to be had in abundance. —C.C.

†
 
“… the emblem of his rank and office”
Again, the emulation of the Roman military by the soldiers of Broken is striking, even down to such small details as the baton of rank and authority that was carried by senior Roman officers—as well as the leaders of several other outstanding armies, most if not all of them imperial. In more modern times, it was bestowed on German field marshals during the Nazi era: indeed, as Gibbon occasionally notes, it almost seems that the society of Broken may have been something of a “missing link”—culturally, governmentally, and militarily—between Rome and those states of the modern West (especially but not solely Germany) that have had imperial pretensions and ambitions. —C.C.

†
 
“… beyond the Meloderna, …”
If we accept Gibbon’s contention that “Meloderna” was the name used in Broken for the modern Saale River, then the “river valley beyond the Meloderna” where this battle, presumably against the Huns, took place may have been the Mulde, although it seems far more likely that it was the Elbe. The latter represents the more significant barrier, in military terms (it was along the Elbe, of course, that American and Russian forces met to complete their fatal division of Germany during the Second World War), and is only some seventy-five to a hundred miles from the mountain
Brocken
—certainly within just a few days’ riding and even marching range of an army as organized and powerful as was Broken’s. —C.C.

†
 
“detachment”
Here is an example of the translator, while not necessarily taking a greater liberty, at least using a much more modern word (which had come into use among military forces only at the end of the seventeenth century) to stand in for whatever the original Broken phrase was. The most common modern German word for a military detachment,
verband
(pl.
verbände
) might suggest to some that the translator would have done better service had he translated whatever the Broken dialectal word was into English as “band”; but that is a far more vague term, militarily, than “detachment”; and, as we have already noted, we cannot rely on modern German, when speculating on the Broken dialect, to be anything save a partial descendant of what remains a lost language. —C.C.

†
 
Kastelgerde
This is the plural (as we shall soon see) of
Kastelgerd,
a word that Gibbon chooses to ignore, almost certainly because, again, experts of his day did not have the tools to interpret it; nor, indeed, can we say with any certainty that experts of our own time do. But, because of the great advances made during the last century in understanding both Old High German and Gothic, we can at least make a much more educated guess than could Gibbon:
Kastel
(a noun here, using the upper case, as most German nouns did then, and all do, today) is almost certainly a slight variation on the common German
Kastell,
a secondary and less frequently used term for “castle” (the more common being
Schloss
), while
gerd
is almost certainly a Broken variation on the Gothic
gards,
incorporating the vowel shift borrowed from Old High German, meaning “houses” as in important clan households. The purpose of the entire term is evidently to convey that these structures are “castles” as in palaces and family seats, not necessarily fortresses, although they seem to have had more of that utilitarian purpose early in the kingdom’s history. —C.C.

†
 
“… service as a
skutaar
 …”
Gibbon writes, “The appearance of the word
skutaar
is another example of the bridge that Broken’s society formed between imperial Rome and Europe in the Barbarian Age: the word itself is doubtless derived from the Latin
scutarius,
or ‘shield-bearer,’ which is also the source of our own words ‘esquire’ and ‘squire,’ as well as several similar terms we find in other European tongues—the French
esquier,
for example.”

†
 
“… the panther enters …”
The legendary “European panther” is far more than a myth. In fact, there are two likely candidates for the “panthers” referred to in the Manuscript, both of which originated in the Pleistocene era and were, until recently, thought to have become extinct anywhere from eight thousand to two thousand years ago. The first example, commonly known as the “European jaguar,” is of interest because of its known preference for forests (although this preference has been challenged by recent research) and its solitary habits—as well as the fact that fossil evidence indicates that the last of its kind lived in Italy and Germany as little as two thousand years ago, and possibly far more recently. In fact, there have been unproved but insistent claims of sightings of the European jaguar up to, and even in, the present era. The second candidate, the “European (or Eurasian) cave lion,” is the great cat depicted in Europe’s famous Ice Age cave paintings, as well as ivory carvings and clay sculptures. Clearly, it played a vital role in the religions of those peoples, and one can easily understand why: It originated earlier than the European jaguar, and was a more massive animal. Males could reach a length of twelve feet and a weight of six to seven hundred pounds (females were about two thirds the size of males). They had the physical appearance to match the description of “Davon panthers” in the Manuscript: golden fur, short leonine manes, and tiger banding of varying hues. They could easily bring down the largest hoofed animals, including and especially horses, and therefore represented a significant problem for cavalry operating within Europe’s most ancient and thickest virgin forests, of which the Thuringian certainly was one, and in parts remains so.

Perhaps the most intriguing clue regarding both of these animals is their classification: like modern lions and tigers, and unlike the smaller wild cats that existed in Europe, they belong to the
Panthera
genus (the European jaguar is the
Panthera gombaszoegensis,
the cave lion the
Panthera leo spelaea
), making the Manuscript’s consistent reference to them as “panthers” not at all far-fetched. —C.C.