Castle of Days (1992) SSC

by Gene Wolfe

  CHAPTER XXIX

  SIMAR A woman’s dress consisting of two long strips of linen or cotton that cover the wearer from neck to ankle but leave an opening at each side from ankle to arm.

  PORTREEVE An official charged with keeping order in a town (not, as is sometimes stated, necessarily a seaport; the port in portreeve refers to the city gate). Here the civilian official who assists the chiliarch by keeping order among the civilians present in the military compound, and in conducting the trials of civilian offenders arrested by his troops. Roughly, a bailiff having wide powers.

  TANG The part of sword or knife blade that is concealed by the hilt.

  JURUPARI The devil of the Uape tribe.

  CHAPTER XXX

  SUCCUBUS A lustful female demon; also, succuba. Some authorities hold that the same demon assumes male (incubus) or female form to suit the preference of its intended. James Blish, who had, I think, studied such matters as deeply as a modern man can, held that the semen collected by the succubus was recycled (as it were) by the incubus form, which thus “fathered” children. On the other hand, the author of Les Farfadets (Paris, 1821) holds Lilith to be the Princess of Succubae, which would appear to imply a permanent separation of the sexes.

  PARACOITA The female partner in sexual intercourse. (The male partner is the paracoitus.)

  GENICON An imagined sexual partner.

  SCOPOLAGNA A woman whose appearance others find stimulating in the extreme.

  POPPET A toy. A puppet. Poetically, a loved one, particularly when the loved one is physically smaller than the lover.

  WATCH-AND-WATCH Every other watch. The speaker was on duty every second watch, and took out his doll when he was off duty.

  LEMANS Kept women. (The radical meaning of leman is chosen person. In the past, the word man meant person or human being; the word for a male was wer or were. In fact, woman was originally wifman, “wifeperson,” the suffix being required because female animals were considered the wives of their mates.) CANGUES Wooden collars having holes for the neck and hands. The victim—Severian would say “the client”—is unable to eat or drink, and has various other difficulties too obvious to require comment.

  ABACINATIONS Blindings performed by heating a metal basin and holding it to the victims’ eyes.

  DEFENSTRATIONS Executions performed by casting the victims from high windows. (The word is a favorite of Robert Bloch’s.) ESTRAPADE Strappado. A torture in which a rope (or chain) is tied to some part of the victim’s body (most often the wrists) and the victim is dropped from a height, falling until stopped by the rope.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  QUILLIONS The arms of a simple cross guard.

  SUMPTER An animal (less often, a person) used to carry supplies.

  CELESTINE A delicate blue, the color of heaven.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  ANCHORITE Holy hermit.

  POPUL VUH What is written on leaves.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  ENNUI Boredom.

  VULPINE Foxy.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  SPECIE Coins. (Literally, kind. Originally, to promise to repay in specie was to promise to repay in hard money a loan made in hard money. From that, a promise to pay wages, etc., in specie came to mean a promise to pay in actual coin, instead of in clothes, food, and so forth, as was then often done.)

  CHAPTER XXXV

  BURGINOT A type of open helmet having a rounded, longitudinal crest. Also, burginet.

  VERTHANDI The middle sister among the Norns, who represents the Present. She is also called Verdande. Another planet of the old sun’s system.

  ALZABO An animal that assumes the personality of the prey it has devoured; it cries at doors with the voice of a dead child, then attacks the grieving parent who opens the door. This Arab legend is based upon the hyena.

  SUPERCARGO A clerk put aboard a vessel by a shipper to attend to his shipment.

  CHANDLER One who sells marine supplies, a ship-chandler. (The original meaning, which is still in occasional use, is one who makes and sells candles.) STUNS’LS Studding sails. Sails extended from the sides of a square sail, as by lashing additional spars to the yard.

  BOSQUETS Pleasant thickets.

  PELISSES Long fur cloaks; similar cloaks of cloth trimmed with fur.

  CANTLE The back-rest of a saddle.

  DEESES Icons representing the Heavenly Court.

  TERATORNIS A bird similar to a condor, but larger; it is now extinct.

  PANDOURS Soldiers of unusual size and strength. They were originally recruited from private guards, gamekeepers, and the like.

  And there you have it. In the appendix to The Shadow of the Torturer, I said: “I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so.” I hope that in this essay the truth of that statement has been established.

  In writing science fiction about unknown planets, the author is usually compelled to invent wonders and to name them. It occurred to me when I began The Book of the New Sun that Urth has already wonders enough—if only it has inherited the wonders of Earth. Or if (as may be) Earth’s wonders have descended to it from Urth.

  Now, a disclaimer. I am not a philologist. The odd bits of wordlore in this essay are those I have gleaned while working on The Book of the New Sun. It is more than possible that I am incorrect on some points. And it is certain that much more could be said about all these words—an entire book could be written on almost any word in the English language.

  For that matter, even philologists and lexicographers make mistakes. Dictionaries are written by human beings, after all. That business about portreeves being associated with seaports will be found in several good dictionaries, put there by lexicographers who have forgotten that porta once meant a gate or door. (A seaport is a gate to the sea; an airport, a gate to the air; spaceports, when we get them, will be gates to space.) The best dictionary I have found is The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I also recommend a small book called The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, Mispronounced Words; it is preposterously cheap, if you can turn up a copy for sale. A good desk dictionary, such as the American Heritage, is always of value. So is a good Latin-English dictionary.

  Be warned that anybody can call a dictionary Webster’s—there’s no copyright on that name. The real McCoy (he was a boxer, did you ever wonder?) is Merriam-Webster’s unabridged, but the current (third) edition has fallen among flakes; you can get better value for your money by buying the Random House. An unabridged dictionary, by the way, is not one that contains all the words of the English tongue. No dictionary does, and I’d be willing to bet none ever will. Unabridged merely designates a dictionary that has been composed from scratch, not cut down from a bigger one owned by the same publisher.

  If this essay has interested you in the origin of words, remember that a derivation isn’t necessarily correct just because somebody, myself included, has gotten it into print. When Dr. Johnson wrote the first dictionary, he included the guess that curmudgeon came from the French coeur méchant—“wicked heart”—and credited it to “an unknown correspondent.” Later a Dr. Ash ripped Johnson off, deriving curmudgeon from coeur, “unknown,” mechant, “correspondent.” (My own guess is that it’s from cur muggins, which would be pretty good 18th century slang for snarling fool. But that’s only a guess.) Be careful of good stories; they’re often false. No matter how many times you read about it, no king ever knighted a loin of beef. Sir meant of high rank and importance. (It is directly derived from sire, and closely related to the French sieur—“lord.”) The sirloin is the best loin, and that’s all.

  Frequently the correct explanation is the obvious one. The king’s Beefeaters never served him sirloin from a buffet. They were elite troops who got good rations, and some other soldiers didn’t like it. Similarly, the word nightmare is about a thousand years old, but when a Viking used it he meant just about what you would have guessed he meant an hour afte
r you stepped out of the timewarp—a bad dream about an unmanageable horse. Yes, Vikings did ride horses sometimes. That was the problem: they did it sometimes, but not often enough to get really good at it.

  I hope you get good at this. If you’re interested in sf, you should find this interesting too. When you want to know where you’re going, it helps a lot to know where you’ve been and how fast you’ve traveled. And it’s all written in words.

  Onomastics, the Study of Names

  In the essay just before this one I talked only a little about the proper names used in The Book of the New Sun. I discussed the name of Urth and one other planet, I believe, and tried to explain why the Matachin Tower is called the Matachin Tower. In this piece I’d like to go into names a bit more deeply, beginning with the rule of naming I used: Everything is just what it says it is.

  The names of human beings in The Book of the New Sun are just human names. (I can think of only one exception—Loyal to the Group of Seventeen, the Ascian who appears in The Citadel of the Autarch.) Severian, Vodalus, and Agilus are all ordinary, if now uncommon, names for men. If you would like to call your baby daughter Valeria, Thecla, or Dorcas, rest assured that she will be receiving a genuine name, borne in the past by any number of human females and no doubt borne by some in the present too. For that matter, Dorcas isn’t really all that uncommon today. There is a woman named Dorcas in Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; and in the movie “The Great Muppet Caper,” Dorcas is the wife of Nevil, played by John Cleese. Jonas is an alternate form of Jonah. If Jonah had moved to Rome instead of lighting out for Tarshish, he would have been called Jonas.

  The monsters are named for monsters. The original Erebus was the son of Chaos; he was the god of darkness and the husband of Nox, the goddess of night. (And thus the stepfather, if you like, of our Princess Noctua.) Furthermore, Mount Erebus is in Antarctica, the seat of our Erebus’s dark and chilly power.

  If Erebus is a cold monster, his partner Abaia is his opposite. The original Abaia was a giant eel inhabiting the waters of the South Pacific. Never one to overlook the obvious, I’ve supplied our Abaia with giant undines for concubines.

  These gross beauties are also called water-women, and both undines and water-women (in so far as they can be distinguished) have dubious reputations. Undines are the elemental spirits of water, the word undine being derived from unda, wave. Like all elemental spirits, they partake of the character of their element, so undines are beautiful, restless, and suffocating. Another, less noticed, property of water is that it renders living beings effectively weightless, or nearly so. It has been frequently pointed out by various writers that human beings cannot be scaled up indefinitely; weight increases as the cube of body height, the load-bearing capacity of bones only as the square. Make your giant big enough (they say) and his legs will break when he tries to stand. It’s all quite true, but it’s true only as long as the giant stays on land. Put him—or her—into the water, and he or she can be as large as you like. In the same way, the weightlessness of space (physicists say microgravity) permits giants as big as those in dreams. Note that the water-woman who accosts Severian at the ford speaks of swimming between the stars. But we have come much too far from the business of names.

  Like the undines, Baldanders is a giant who is still growing. I took his name from Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings. It isn’t one of Borges’s best books, but that has never stopped me from stealing from it disgracefully. (Anyway, second-rate Borges is still very good.) In his article on Baldanders, Borges credits the name to one Hans Sachs (1494-1576) of Nuremberg, then states, “Some ninety years after Sachs’s death, Baldanders makes a new appearance in the last book of the picaresque-fantastic novel by Grimmelshausen, The Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1699).” Were Sachs and Grimmelshausen real? Is there actually such a book as The Adventuresome Simplicissimus? I have no idea. Borges is capable of making up much better books and authors than anyone can find in libraries; for examples, read “The Approach to Al Mu’tasim” and “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” both of which are to be found in his Ficciones. (If you do not get a copy of that book, if you fail to read those stories, you will never be sure that I am not making up Borges, a literary effort worthy of the Nobel Prize.)

  Baldanders’s gadfly, physician, and slave, Dr. Talos, takes his name from a bronze (or brass, which authority do you read?) man built by Vulcan (Hephaestus) under Mt. Etna. This Talos (or Talus) was put on the island of Crete, where he served as a watchman, running around the island three times a day. His blood was liquid fire, and he was “killed” by the Argonaut Poeas, whose arrow struck the stopper and permitted the liquid fire to run out into the sand. Nowadays anyone who has enough money can buy a guard robot a great deal like Talos. It will patrol the area ceaselessly, challenge intruders in a deep voice, grab them with its mechanical hands, and squirt tear gas or Mace in their eyes. (Such robots are currently used to patrol diamond mines in South Africa, by the way.) If someone with a lot of money bought one of these robots and took it to the Greece of about 1000 B.C., we might now have a legend a great deal like that of Talos, whose fiery blood so strongly suggests the acid in a battery. Another interesting point is that when Talos caught someone, he killed him by grasping him and jumping into a fire. The grasping part is precisely what the robots do, and tear gas burns the eyes. However that may be, Talos’s inexhaustible energy and fiery nature seemed appropriate for our Dr. Talos.

  Are Typhon and Piaton one monster? Their names say they are not. Piaton has a human name. Typhon bears the name of a classical giant who breathed fire and was one of the chief enemies of the gods. The typhoon has blown his name into the modern world. Some commentaries make him the son of Zeus and Niobe (well, that’s what Niobe said), and the wicked brother of the Egyptian Osiris, whom he murdered. (Real Egyptians call this wicked brother Set or Seth; real, honest-to-gosh, no kidding Egyptians called him Sutekh. He had white skin and red hair, both of which they were prejudiced against.) Other commentaries—and in mythology, there are always others—say he was conceived by Hera without male assistance. (My own bet is that she just wanted to forget that guy.) He is often confused with Typhoeus, son of Gaea and Tartarus, who had wings and the body of a snake. When two boys look so much alike, you’re bound to get them mixed up.

  Speaking of Gaea reminds me of her son Nod (in Dr. Talos’s play), although I spelled her name Gea, which is easier. Nod is one of the Nephilim, the giants who inhabited prehistoric Canaan. One (plausible, I think) tradition says that they supplied wives to Adam’s sons. The Bible says they originated when “the sons of God” mated with human women. It does not say who “the sons of God” were. They have been explained as both fallen and unfallen angels, and as elemental beings and so forth. I would suggest a more simple explanation—that they were man-like beings whose behavior suggested that they were yet without sin: that is to say, who did not wear clothing or speak as the ancient Semites understood speech. If they were hominids, the notion that they raped, and perhaps stole, women is not absurd; and if one assumes that the traditions of Genesis are truly old, there are plenty of candidates for the position—Gigantopithecus blacki, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Paranthropus robustus and so on. The fact is that one need not delve deep into theology or biblical studies to account for the biblical giants. Legends of big, powerful, hairy, rude giants are remarkably widespread. They are widespread because big, hairy, rude giants were remarkably widespread well into the Pliocene.

  Gabriel will be immediately recognized as the Judeo-Christian (Moslem too, I believe) archangel. His name means the power of God.

  Meschia and Meschiane are the Persian Adam and Eve; they are also known as Mashya and Mashyoi. Jahi is an evil and deceitful druj—a female demon. In Persian myth, she is specifically charged with menstruation, and therefore both with the suffering and the impurity of women. (Don’t ask me why men think a menstruating woman impure. They just do, or at least a lot of them do. Men are funny.)
This may be the best chance I get to point out that the entire play is acted by five persons: Severian, Dorcas, Baldanders, Dr. Talos, and Jolenta. Meschia and Meschiane are Severian and Dorcas, of course. Severian also plays the second soldier, the prophet, the generalissimo, and the familiar. Dorcas is the Contessa’s maid and the second demon. Baldanders is the giant Nod and the statue. Dr. Talos is Gabriel, the Autarch, the first soldier, and the inquisitor. Jolenta is Jahi, the Contessa, and the first demon. I have tried to allow enough time between changes of character to permit the actor to change his costume and makeup. (The playing of several parts by a single actor, often with changes in sex, is of course an ancient theatrical tradition; everyone knows that boys played all the women’s parts in the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and some have even suggested that the same boy portrayed both Cordelia and the fool in Lear. What is less widely known is that English morals forced Shakespeare to reverse the practice of the Italian models he studied, in which young women—luscious in doublet and hose—appeared “disguised” as men.)

  The Hierodules Ossipago, Barbatus, and Famulimus have taken the names of minor Roman gods. The original Ossipago was calcium and Vitamin D; he nurtured the children’s bones and kept them from breaking. My Ossipago I visualized as a robot disguised as a human, and caring for small children has always seemed to me to be a good job for a robot. I seem to have lost my notes on Barbatus and Famulimus, but it would seem safe to say that the former oversaw the sprouting of a boy’s beard while the latter looked after his reputation.

  Thinking it a good omen to give the last man the name of the first, I have called him Ash, translating the Teutonic Ask. Ask’s wife was Embla (Vine). Odin, Hoenir, and Lodur are said to have created this couple from a dead tree and its equally dead parasite, so their very existence indicates the hope of rebirth.