by Caleb Carr
than logic might lead one to suspect Counterintuitive as it may seem, doctors have discovered that gentle massaging of the parts of the body affected by an amputation does indeed afford many patients some mitigation of pain; and, as we will see, the particular way in which the old man’s companion “massaged” the stumps of his legs was quite unique, and generally successful. —C.C.
“Stasi” A shortened version of Anastasiya. The full and pointed meaning of that longer name is explained in the text, as well as in the following note; but there is an additional and fascinating coincidence (or is it mere coincidence?) concerning this particular nickname in connection with the modern uses of the mountain Brocken that causes one to wonder if the narrator did indeed possess genuine gifts of foresight and prophecy:
As has already been noted several times, Brocken was, prior to the twentieth century, popularly considered the most sinister mountain in Germany and perhaps all Europe, the meeting ground not only for human witches and warlocks, but for the supernatural demons and other unholy creatures with whom those humans cavorted, as well. It is perhaps fitting, then, that after the assumption of national power by Adolf Hitler in 1933, the mountain found particular use to the propaganda machine of his Nazi party—as the site of the world’s first long-range television broadcasting tower. It was Brocken’s tower that broadcast the 1936 Summer Olympic Games to a very large (by the standards of that day) area of northern Germany: the first time the Olympics had appeared on television anywhere. A weather station and hotel had also been constructed; but Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, preferred radio to television as a tool for indoctrinating the German people (and when one considers the physical peculiarities, not only of Goebbels, but of nearly all the Nazi leaders, one can understand why); all activity on Brocken, along with broadcasting from the television tower, was therefore suspended during World War II. The mountain was bombed by the Western allies at the very end of the European war (April 1945). Although the hotel and the weather station were destroyed, the television tower miraculously survived; and when American troops occupied the mountain, they rebuilt the weather station and used the television tower for their own propaganda purposes. But when Brocken fell into the Soviet zone of occupation in 1947, the Americans disabled both the tower and the station before relinquishing control of the mountain.
During the early decades of the Cold War, Brocken comprised a “security zone” for the Communist government of East Germany: it was the site of an enormously ambitious fortification project, one that recalled the achievements of the “Mad King” Oxmontrot some thirteen hundred years earlier. Both Brocken’s continued suitability as a site for a television tower and, even more importantly, the mountain’s larger strategic significance were recognized: in the hands of the Western powers, Brocken could have proved a strong threat to the advance of East German and Soviet troops into West Germany along the route that eventually leads through the Fulda Gap to the southwest, the most obvious path of entry for such an invasion. The East Germans and their Soviet “protectors” therefore declared Brocken a top secret security zone in 1961. Large numbers of troops began using the area just as the army of Broken had once done, as a location in which to train for what seemed an inevitable war. The summit of the mountain was once again turned into a fortress, this time for the use of the East German and Soviet militaries; and construction soon mushroomed into one of the most ambitious Cold War building projects ever undertaken:
The military installation was enclosed by a massive concrete wall, built of 2,318 sections, each of which weighed two and a half tons, and the whole of which was of a scale almost equal to the natural stone walls of Broken. Within the new walls, the mountaintop became the site of a major Communist listening post, from which were monitored any and all broadcasts in West Germany, private and public, military and civilian—an operation that was controlled by the Soviet KGB and the East German Ministerium f Staatsicherheit (the “Ministry for State Security”), or secret police, whose popular name was the Stasi.
German reunification occurred before the long-expected invasion of Western Europe through the Fulda Gap by the forces of Eastern communism, and the massive concrete walls atop Brocken were dismantled along with the more famous wall in Berlin; the television tower now broadcasts one of the television stations run by the democratic government of the unified Germany. Tourism has come to the mountain, its former secret status having made it a haven for rare species of flora and fauna, and it was included in the Harz National Park in 1990; but memories of the Stasi remain burned into the memory of the people of East Germany—hardly what the old man had in mind when he named his savior and companion. —C.C.
Anastasiya Gibbon provides no explanation of this name, and little need be added to that in the text, except to say that the name was and remains ubiquitous among Baltic, Nordic, and Slavic peoples, in many slightly varied versions, and that it long ago entered English as Anastasia. Other than that, the narrator’s interpretation of its meaning is quite accurate; although we may pause in wonder at how many times it has been the name of females destined for remarkable feats of survival, in fact, legend, or both. The most obvious of these cases, of course, is the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, famous in legend as the sole child of that country’s last tsar and tsarina, Nicholas II and Alexandra, to have (purportedly) survived the family’s savage massacre in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural district, in 1917: even if this “survival” is wholly apocryphal, it only underscores the resurrectionary associations of the name. —C.C.
companion It is worth noting, here, the true meaning of the word “companion” in the Manuscript (and indeed the English language), especially as it relates to the old man and his great cat. Because of one of the many misapprehensions popularized by Dan Brown’s engaging yet nonetheless terribly misleading The Da Vinci Code—this one claiming that the word “companion,” from before the time of Christ to well after it, could imply “wife” (as Brown claims was the true meaning of Biblical and Gnostic gospel references to Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s “companion”)—one might be tempted to assume that some sort of bestiality was occurring inside the great panther’s cave. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, and a list of experts too long to list here, such a connotation only applied retrospectively: in other words, a man’s or woman’s “companion” (say, in the phrase “companion in life”) could indeed be their legal spouse—but only if they were established as being in such a relationship. It did not mean, in other words, that companion was always an alternate word for “legal spouse,” if the couple in question had not already been legally joined. This point needs to be stressed because Stasi is so often referred to as “the old man’s companion,” and because her very intimate—but, of course, platonic—relationship with the old man was used by the rulers of Broken (and even, at first, the Bane) as further evidence that he was actually a sorcerer. —C.C.
traces of those markings Although he could not have known it, the narrator is describing both the metallurgical formula and the color associated with the gold amalgam that would gain great popularity, in the 1920s and thereafter, as “white gold.” —C.C.
the long, dipping spine Gibbon, again, dismisses the panther’s dimensions, since fossil evidence that such massive creatures existed so comparatively recently in Europe was either unknown or seriously misunderstood during his era. Regardless of whether this particular specimen was a representative of what is today known as the European jaguar or the European cave lion (the latter being somewhat older and larger), we cannot help but be struck once more by her amazing—and yet, for her species, apparently unremarkable—size: with a nine-foot body (excluding the tail, meaning nine feet from nose to rump) that stood roughly half that at its spine, this is an animal more than capable of all the remarkable feats attributed to her in the Manuscript. The “white” fur was not, if we are to judge by the color of both the eyes and the dark “eyeliner” around them, an indication that she was either an albino or a separate
species or, indeed, truly white; rather, it is a color that still appears, occasionally, in lions and other great cats around the world, which is very nearly white. (The faint, light markings also confirm the presence of pigmentation.) We also can see, with the revelation that the “warrior queen” was in fact a great cat, why the old man’s medicines and poultices would have been so helpful to her: his treatments appear to have been grounded in opiates, willow bark (the “natural aspirin”), and naturally occurring antiseptics, none of which are or would have been toxic to cats, as so many other, seemingly milder, drugs are. Acetaminophen, for example (most popularly known by its major brand name, Tylenol), is generally considered an extremely benign drug, among humans—but it is fatal to cats, even in very small doses.
against his nose and face It will not need stating or restating, to those who live with and/or work with cats, large and small, that this delicate touch is their most intimate indication of affection, and of the granting of their trust—rarely gained (particularly in areas like northern Europe, the nations of which, especially France, have a long history of believing cats the familiars of witches and creatures of Satan). —C.C.
the Northeastern Sea Gibbon writes, “Having reliably determined that the ‘Seksent Straits’ to which the narrator refers is our own Channel, we may infer that this ‘Northeastern Sea’ is that which lies in the direction indicated, relative to the position of the mountain Brocken—in other words, the Baltic Sea. Yet, even if this is so, we can draw few conclusions from the fact, little as yet being known of the tribes who inhabited the Baltic coast during this period.” We are, as already noted, at no such disadvantage today, however, and this interpretation only reinforces the notion that the old man came from the trading peoples who had been pushed to the Baltic coast by larger and more warlike tribes, such as the Huns. —C.C.
should stir disbelief Gibbon writes, “While we may indeed, as the narrator suspects, scoff at the further idea of a crippled and bleeding old man being taken in and cared for by so carnivorous a beast as a panther, anecdotal Natural History is too full of tales of humans thus cared for by various animal species (for what reasons, we may never know) to permit our immediate dismissal of this part of the tale.” Indeed, the fact that the panther had very recently lost her cubs in the most traumatic manner possible actually reinforces the Manuscript’s account, according to the results of recent experiments on animal brains ranging from our relatives, the apes, down to the tiny wasp and bee: it has been discovered that the brains of every species of animal life contain that core region—the amygdala—that both feels and preserves emotional trauma. Thus, as Gibbon suspected, we have no good reason to reject the narrator’s account at face value; rather, we have sound cause to accept it. A recent and excellent illustration of this is the case of the “lion man” of modern Africa, George Adamson (foster parent, along with his wife, Joy, of Elsa the lioness, in Born Free), who lived among and was protected by lions until his tragic death at the hands of poachers. Indeed, the story of Caliphestros and Stasi has many elements that closely resemble the tale of Adamson and his lions, too many for us to be able to dismiss the former as mythological. —C.C.
Part Two
legitimate legislature Gibbon refers to the French Revolution’s second phase, during which the National Assembly that had sworn the famous “Tennis Court Oath” became, in response to the persistent refusal of the royal, aristocratic, and clerical sectors of the ruling class to evolve with anything like real alacrity, the National Constituent Assembly, which issued the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” and revealed as its noble purpose the official abolition of feudalism and the formulation of a French constitution. Unfortunately, the makeup of this Assembly also saw the emergence of wily leftist members who sought to prostitute the Revolution to their own ends—chief among them such characters as HonorMirabeau, a particular target of Gibbon’s ire in other letters, and the chief “manipulator” of whom he speaks here, as well as far more radical revolutionaries (Gibbon’s “basest scoundrels”), the most extreme of whom, of course, was the man whose name would all too soon become synonymous with the “Reign of Terror,” Maximilien Robespierre. —C.C.
I: Water
cuirass Another encounter with a word that, while it has a modern story (cuirass being a fifteenth-century French term), also puts us back in the largely unknowable realm of the armor employed by Dark Age warriors. We are left to wonder just what concept it was that the translator felt comfortable denoting with the immediately recognizable “cuirass”: it might have been anything from the Greco-Roman bronze pieces that covered the front and back of the torso (although we have no other indication that either Broken soldiers or the Bane still employed bronze weapons in the field), to the steel and leather cuirasses of the Chinese and then the Persians. Again, we must rely on the text, and on the original translation, to supply details. —C.C.
quadrates Gibbon writes that this formation is “easily identified, by those with even a basic knowledge of Latin, as growing out of that language’s quadratum, or ‘square’; and we can safely assume that these ‘squares,’ whether composed of the smaller fausten (‘fists,’ fauste being the singular, ‘fist’) or the larger khotors, were rooted, not in imitation of the closely ordered, distinctive checkerboard pattern of the Roman quincunx, but out of the imperatives of the traditional, even ancient, German military doctrine of expecting attack from all sides. Apparently, Oxmontrot at this moment saw, for the first and perhaps only time, something in the Roman military model that he (rightly) did not believe suited his Germanic legions, and that he believed he could improve upon; and in organizing Broken’s marching and defensive order-of-battle formations, he altered the Roman pattern to a prototype of what would come to be identified as both a modern German and an Anglo-Saxon way of war—for in modern times, it would remain both a characteristically Prussian/German, and then British, trademark: the famed square.”
the chaos of conflict The effect of madmen on troops in the field is a recurring tradition in various traditional cultures, and so the Talons would have been far from alone in their belief that somehow a madman or madwoman could divine present and future order in what was (and very often remains, to the average soldier) the incomprehensible context, purpose, and results of battle. The first Muslims, the Vikings, and certain American Indian tribes were only a few examples of early peoples who sought the counsel of such characters at such moments (ascribing to it varying levels of importance); and it cannot be denied that the results were often remarkably productive. —C.C.
seksents As explained earlier, this appears to have been the Broken dialectal word for “peasant,” an interesting fact, in that it has a clear phonetic (and likely etymological) relationship to “Saxons,” a tribe who may well have first entered Broken, not as fierce, proud conquerors, but as peasants, in many if not most cases “indentured” peasants, who thus occupied the lowest rung on the ladder of Broken’s fairly unique social hierarchy. —C.C.
thatch-roofed … forges and smiths Gibbon writes, “We have become so accustomed, in our own age, to tales of thatched roofs put to the torch, or set alight by some ordinary household mishap, that we forget that there ever was an era when thatch was viewed as progress. But, at the time of the events described in this narrative [the late seventh and early eighth centuries], thatch was only beginning to appear in northern Europe, and was an expensive technique that was also far more advanced, pleasant, and efficient than were the mud, sod, and mere tree-limb roofs that set the dubious standard for most of the era’s dwellings.” As for the “forges and smiths,” while, as always, it is impossible to say with anything like certainty, the description of the bustling town called “Esleben” in the Manuscript, along with its approximate position on the map, create at least the possibility that it might have been some early forerunner of the town of Hettstedt, which became famous for just such a variety of commercial activities, from the agricultural to the proto-industrial. —C.C.
“Akillu
s!” Gibbon writes, “Here is further proof of how great the influence of classical Greek and Roman culture was on Broken, having made its way in, again, through the experience of the ‘Mad King’ Oxmontrot and his comrades, who served in the Roman legions as foreign auxiliary troops (which, by the later imperial period, comprised the bulk of the ‘Roman’ army). Although the epithet ‘Greek’ or, in the Broken dialect, Kreikisch was, as seen elsewhere, employed as a thinly veiled insult, there nonetheless appears to have been ample knowledge of and respect for ancient Greece’s heroes. We may infer this, not only from the fact that various counterparts to such names (in this case, ‘Achilles’) made their way into both Gothic and the various ancient and modern Germanic dialects, but by the already-demonstrated and crucial fact that the Roman—and, thereby, at least some of the Greek—military systems were studied and emulated in Broken, and even improved upon.” Today, there remain Germanic and Nordic counterparts to the name Achilles in various countries, although they are used infrequently, in keeping with the very un-martial societal values and national narratives that such societies have at least tried to project in the “postmodern” age. —C.C.
“lad” Gibbon writes, “My translator did inform me that the Broken grammatical form for ‘children’ was remarkably close to the modern German kinder; however, while it has always been something of a tradition for German commanders to refer to their men as such, the same effect is not achieved in English, ‘children’ sounding far more condescending than any military officer would wish to. He therefore chose ‘lad’ or ‘lads’ when he encountered the word, which seems fitting.”