The Legend of Broken

by Caleb Carr

  Lenzinnet Gibbon notes, “A typically German compounding of the rank of ‘linnet’ with what, it would seem, was the Broken dialectal term for the modern German Lanze, or ‘lance.’ Hence, the term has a distinctly Romani, or Latin, influence, analogous to the ‘first spear’ [or, pilus prior] rank of the Roman infantry, but transplanted to the cavalry, where it anticipated the later European terms ‘first lance’ and ‘lancer.’ ”

  ball-headed spurs An interesting detail that may reveal something of the people of Broken’s earliest history and attitude toward animal life during their pagan era. Spurs had been in use at least since the Roman Empire, yet the Romans almost exclusively used a “prick” or “spike” spur, a simple, straight piece of iron tapered to a sharp point, and meant to inspire their mounts to obedience and speed, like most spurs, through pain. The ball-headed (or, in the parlance of modern dressage, the “Waterford”) spur, however, has persisted among various riding cultures as something of a counterargument to the belief that horses will respond only to discomfort, for the small, spherical piece of metal used causes little pain and no bloodletting, and has sometimes been called an instrument of cooperation rather than of absolute command. One can find advocates even today of both types of spurs—a fact that indicates that the ball-headed model is at least as effective as the elaborate forms of pricking and cutting spurs that have been developed since the Romans, particularly in the American West, Latin America—and, of course, nowhere more so than in that homeland of animal extermination and abuse, Texas. —C.C.

  cavalry sword By the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the various styles or “models” of the classic gladius, the Roman short sword (which had been “borrowed” from Rome’s Spanish Celtic enemies), the shape and image of which are closely identified in the popular consciousness with the Roman legions to this day, had been largely replaced by a somewhat longer blade of lesser width (or, in some cases, simply greater tapering), the spatha, which fell somewhere between the gladius and the various, classically medieval blades, most notably those Viking models referred to in the Broken Manuscript as “raiding” swords; especially popular among horsemen, this is likely the version of the “Broken short-sword” that Arnem and his mounted troops carried. —C.C.

  The scouts shrug There truly are moments in the Manuscript when any reader will find his or her own credulity at the choice of words strained past belief; and the use of the word “shrug” is certainly among them. However, research reveals that “the raising and contracting of the shoulders to express uncertainty or indifference” (in the nearly identical language of several prominent dictionaries) has been going on since at least the fourteenth century, when Middle English gave us the shrugge. Why note such examples? Because they continue to demonstrate, first, the surprisingly direct and “modern” sound of so many texts from the early Middle (or Dark, or Barbarian) Ages, and, second, the extent to which the florid language that we so often associate with those epochs was the invention of later authors who were anxious to propagate a mythic chivalric code that had supposedly existed since ancient times, and had been passed down directly to modern European nobility. —C.C.

  “an easy gallop” A moment of validation for the Manuscript, and for its translator: some may wonder why Niksar does not order the men to ride at a canter, which is actually defined as an easy gallop; but the word did not come into use until the mid- to late eighteenth century. —C.C.

  “ ‘fire wounds’ ” Gibbon writes, “The modern German term for ‘gangrene,’ Wundbrand, must have closely, if not precisely, matched the Broken dialectal term, Wundbrend, meaning, as it does, ‘wound of fire’ or ‘fire wound.’ This burning sensation, which nearly always originates in the extremities, is one of the first, but hardly the most horrifying, of the symptoms of gangrene. And, as Visimar himself notes, his initial term for the illness, Ignis Sacer [‘Holy Fire’], was indeed the popular Latin term for the terrible malady that, into our own age, features gangraena [gangrene] as one of its principal (and fatal) properties, but is not ‘true’ or ‘pure’ gangrene. The Holy Fire, I am told, is still imperfectly understood; but we can say with confidence that it was the same malady that eventually took on the rather more colorful title of ‘St. Anthony’s Fire’ (St. Anthony, as you know, being the patron of the victims of pestilence).” St. Anthony [ca. A.D. 251–356] was an Egyptian Coptic Christian, and the patron of an extraordinarily large range of diseases, infectious and otherwise, having spent much of his life working among their victims. Prominent among these illnesses was the “disease” which Visimar here describes, which was indeed and actually not gangrene proper, but a form of poisoning, ergot poisoning (or “ergotism”), which results in gangrene, but is not identical with the form of gangrene that Arnem associates with battlefield wounds; the first is caused by alkaloid agents, and is accompanied, as well, by other, often outlandish symptoms (hallucinations, convulsions, loss of feeling, rotting flesh, and miscarriages, the last so often that ergot was often deliberately employed as an abortifacient), while the latter is the “simpler” result of festering wounds. Not a few experts think that many mass outbreaks of delusional madness throughout history and the world have been the result of the first malady, ergotism: the deranged behavior surrounding the seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, witch trials are a celebrated, but by no means the only or strongest, candidate (for an even more widespread, calamitous, and recent possible outbreak, see John G. Fuller’s classic in the field, The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire, which describes the near-self-destruction of a small French town in 1951—possibly due to ergot, possibly to mercury poisoning). Ergotism was also destructive and globally widespread enough to be one of the few such diseases to receive particular mention in the medical texts of nearly all ancient and medieval societies—Eastern, Middle Eastern, and Western.

  An important point that must be reemphasized: Both the narrator and Visimar have by now suggested that two diseases are at work, in the kingdom of Broken; yet we will see that they were often lumped together—by average people ignorant of even the limited medical facts available to them at the time, as well as by Kafran healers and physicians little better informed—under the heading “a plague” or “a pestilence.” This was not an uncommon occurrence; indeed, it is not unheard of, in our own time. The desire of doctors to explain a constellation of symptoms by finding one malady that covers them all has long been entrenched in medical minds; and is often as responsible as blatant ignorance for incorrect treatments. —C.C.

  Wildfehngen Gibbon writes, “Although many, if not all, military commanders of high rank engage in some similar practice, German commanders especially have ever employed idiosyncratic terms of affection, when speaking of and to their rank-and-file soldiers: terms which, when translated literally, simply lose much of their weight and meaning. These range from the relatively simple meine Jungen and meine Kinder [‘my boys,’ ‘my children’] to the host of more esoteric names of which this Wildfehng (or the plural, Wildfehngen) seems to be an ancestor (for we find a very similar word still in modern German, in the form of Wildfang, which may imply anything from a madcap male ‘wild child’ to a female ‘tom-boy,’ that is, a particularly boyish and boisterous young girl). English commanders, like all others, share such terms of affection for many of their troops, but it is really in the ancient warrior culture of Germany that we find the practice at its most elaborate, profound, and sometimes paradoxical: for however ‘wild’ such troops may have been or may be, they were, have been, and are expected to obey strict codes of honorable conduct, the breaking of which can bring punishments that make even the justly notorious extremes to which our own British naval officers often go when dealing with disciplinary infractions seem rather mild in comparison.”

  Gerolf Gledgesa The name is the sort of mix that we can now identify as fairly common: Gerolf is clearly Germanic (implying a combination of the often-used roots “wolf” and “spear”), while names or terms close to Gledgesa are found only in Anglo-Saxon, sugg
esting the possibility of this character’s having come from Saxon Britain. The surname connotes “fiery terror,” and the justification for it becomes clear, as his personal history is recounted; but its ultimate irony will only grow apparent later. —C.C.

  Ernakh Significantly, Gibbon makes only a few references to the Huns—doubtless among the principal peoples identified by the rulers and soldiers of Broken as “eastern marauders”—in his six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and, in this particular case, he evidently did not know (or did not think it worth noting) that Ernakh was originally the name of the third son of that greatest of all Huns, Attila. Whether the nurse/housemaid Nuen had this fact in mind when she named her own offspring, or whether Ernakh was merely a traditional and perhaps common Hunnish name, we do not know. —C.C.

  “Donner Niksar” Gibbon writes, “We will discover soon enough just what this noble yet unfortunate young son of Broken’s achievements were; what should concern us, for the moment, is the form that the spelling of his Christian name takes. One finds, in the few bits of Germanic documentation that survive in their various dialects as well as in the many Norse sagas, nearly every spelling possible of every aspect of the name and life of Thor, son of Odin, god of thunder, and paragon of youthful Germanic-Norse virtues, who spent nearly all his time aiding other gods, demi-gods, and humans with his great strength, command of thunder, and magic hammer, Mjolnir. The important element, however, for our purposes, is that his name in Old High German appears to have been spelt Donar, which would have been pronounced ‘Donner’—the same form we find here in Donner Niksar. The variations of the names are all of little importance, of course, as they are mere variations on the dialectal terms for ‘thunder,’ although it is interesting to note that the modern German word for that phenomenon, donner, has hewed so closely to at least one ancient version: Broken’s. Thus, there is the strong suggestion not only that the myths of the supposedly ‘Norse’ gods were likely those of the entire Northern European region, but that they may well have originated with those Germanic tribes who inhabited the area we today consider Germany, calling at least some of the aspects of the Norse domination of civilization in that region into question.” Without realizing it, of course, Gibbon is anticipating the notion advanced most forcefully in our own time by Michael Kulikowski, and discussed at length earlier in these notes: that the myths of the Gothic migrations and the Norse invasion and cultural domination of northern Germany may have been largely just that: myths. —C.C.

  “the Krebkellen” Gibbon writes, “The practice itself is explained in the text; we pause only to reassert the fact that Oxmontrot, its creator, considered not even the most fundamental Roman tactics to be above improvement. The practice of the Krebkellen, which we may confidently translate as ‘crab colony,’ certainly takes its inspiration from the Roman testudo, or ‘tortoise,’ the tactic, which had long proved successful, of having Roman soldiers form a sort of shell by interlocking their great convex shields, or scuta, to their fore, back, sides, as well as over their heads. But again, this tactic, while ingenious, could also be clumsy, designed as it was to mirror the essentially steady, deliberate movement permitted by the formation of the quincunx—that is, a primarily frontward-and-rearward motion—to say nothing of the continued relegation of the role of cavalry as essentially support troops for those infantry formations. The contrast with Broken’s Krebkellen, on the other hand, can indeed be likened to the difference between a tortoise and a crab—or, to complete the terminological explanation, a ‘colony of crabs,’ in which such creatures are known to live and defend themselves. While both species use their external shells for protection, as both infantries used their shields for interlocking protection, the Broken troops sacrificed some strength of defense for speed, maneuverability, and, hence, offensive potential, the last especially embodied in the cavalry units, which acted as the faster-moving ‘legs and claws.’ ”

  “worthy of our claws” Gibbon lets this part of the discussion go without remark, perhaps because it’s unclear whether Akillus is talking about the “claws” of the Krebkellen, or is referring to the pride that every man in the Talons took in the raptor’s claws that adorned his cloak. It makes very little difference to the ensuing action. —C.C.

  “this aptly named fellow” Taankret An obvious source for what would become the famous chivalric name of Tancred, the word itself is combined of elements implying “thinking” or “thought” and “counsel”—and is, indeed, suited to its man, as so many names in the Manuscript seem to be. —C.C.

  Fleckmester Gibbon writes, “Here is a name that, given all the guidelines we have established for the Broken dialect, is not at all difficult to understand: ‘fleck’ is an ancestor of the modern German pfeilmacher, counterpart of our own ‘fletcher,’ or arrow-maker, while mester is plainly some Old German variation of meister, or ‘master.’ ”

  longbow As is perhaps apparent, this use of the word “longbow” simply implies a greater length than the bows used by the Bane—it is not, apparently, an anticipation of the later English invention that would famously carry the day at battles such as Agincourt. —C.C.

  “Nerthus” Gibbon ignores the name, perhaps because scholarship in Germanic and Norse mythology had not yet reached the point that the Germanic goddess of fertility could be identified precisely; this would be a very strange omission, however, for it is one of the goddesses that Tacitus actually names, using this same spelling, in his Germania (pub. ca. A.D. 98), placing her firmly in the original pantheon of ancient Germanic, rather than Norse, deities, and supporting the theory that a very great deal of what we still think of as “Norse” culture and mythology was actually taken from Germanic traditions. Indeed, one senses that Gibbon is reluctant to give so much credit to the Germanic tribes (perhaps because of their repeated thrashings of the “indomitable” Roman legions), but, being even more hesitant to go up against a scholar of Tacitus’s standing, he simply passes the name over, as he does so many uncomfortable subjects.

  The sole question that remains, then, is just what extraordinary creature we are discussing; and from the behavior, the extraordinary size and strength, and the markings, we can definitely say that we are dealing with the Eurasian Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo), a bird of immense size and power, as great or greater than its formidable cousin, the Great Grey Owl of North America (Strix nebulosa). The differences are mainly of appearance, the Grey Owl having an ovular or circular face and no “ear tufts,” the feathery “horns” that actually are no more than cosmetic, having nothing to do with hearing. The Eurasian owl is more like the North American Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) in appearance, but the size of the Eurasian Eagle Owl is much greater. Needless to say, these creatures caused enormous fear among humans, in part because of the fact that, like all owls, their weight was and is amazingly light in comparison to their power: it is always remarkable to come upon a recently deceased owl of any type and feel its extraordinary lightness, in this regard—a lack of weight designed to assist their silence and agility in flight and the hunt. And the Eurasian owl could take not only such normal prey as rabbits and other small mammals, but deer fawns: it was therefore believed, quite logically and rightly, that they might do the same to important domestic livestock such as lambs, kid goats, and even newborn calves and foals (always a real danger), to say nothing of human infants and toddlers. —C.C.

  skutem shields Gibbon writes, “Having so closely aped so many of the most crucial Roman military customs, it is not altogether surprising that we here find the soldiers of Broken almost directly transposing the Latin word for shield, scutum, into their own tongue.” It is also true, however, that by the time Oxmontrot served as a foreign Roman auxiliary, the classic Roman scutum had changed in size and shape, becoming more ovular and slightly smaller; so it is possible we do not, in fact, know precisely what Broken shields resembled, just as we do not know the precise details of so much of their culture. —C.C.

  dance his deadly round At this point in th
e general history of northern Europe, as well as many other parts of the continent, “dance,” as a form of recreation, still consisted almost solely of “dances in the round,” that is, the joining of hands and then unchoreographed movement to one direction, then the other, etc., rather than of the courtly steps and masques with which we associate the later and higher Middle Ages. The only other forms of dance commonly referred to were quite sinister, in both origin and meaning: there were the “dances” that were associated with severe illness, generally nervous—such as St. Vitus’s Dance, a name given to various forms of chorea—and there was (as is mentioned here) the “Dance of Death,” or “Danse Macabre,” which involved that entity leading the wicked or the sickly to a generally unhappy end in the hereafter, either through trickery or sheer power. The Dance of Death could often involve witchcraft, which was blamed for many disorders, especially after the rise of the monotheistic faiths: again, medicine was poorly served by the predominance of those faiths, except in the cases of those who took their piety with a grain of salt, and refused to let it interfere with reason. Even these last were largely preservative movements; that is, they kept existent knowledge that had been gleaned centuries ago from vanishing, rather than advancing or building on it: progress that would not begin again, after brought to a virtual standstill in the fourth and fifth centuries, until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries—a full thousand years or more that could obviously have been used to great advantage. —C.C.