The Legend of Broken (105 page)

As to the specific books mentioned in this list, most speak for themselves; although perhaps the most interesting feature of the collection is the inclusion of the
Strategikon,
a Byzantine military manual concerning, in the main, cavalry tactics (heavy cavalry being the mainstay of the Byzantine army) but also dealing with other important issues, such as discipline in an army and how best to achieve it (as well as what punishments to mete out for infractions), and what would today be called “military anthropological” studies of the peoples that made up the main enemies of the Eastern Roman Empire (although the emperor Maurice, the compiler and main author of the work, ambitiously spoke of the Roman Empire as unified under his rule). The
Strategikon,
like the work of China’s Sun Tzu, is a work of a startlingly enduring nature, with impressive implications for modern military organization and conduct, both on the battlefield and off; but Maurice has enjoyed none of Sun Tzu’s modern vogue, a new edition of the
Strategikon
having only recently appeared, after a long absence from bookstores in the West. This new enthusiasm likely has to do with the important comments Maurice and the other writers who contributed passages to the work made concerning styles of warfare between large states and non-state enemies, what we would today call counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Certainly, by applying the precepts included in the book to the intellectual wasteland that was Western European military doctrine and practice during his own lifetime, the old man could indeed have presented himself in any court as a near “sorcerer” of war—a fact that would have brought him renown and wealth, while placing his services in high demand, thus explaining why he was so consistently welcomed in courts throughout the region, and was also allowed, during his sojourns in such places, to pursue medical experiments—notably dissection—that, while once common in cities such as Alexandria, had become ghoulish anathema to Christian and Muslim nobilities and leaders.

As to the remainder of the authors cited, only one statement by the narrator may seem questionable, because of its seeming political incorrectness: the claim that Procopius and Evagrius had determined that most if not all outbreaks of the bubonic plague—
Yersinia pestis
and its related disorders—originated in “Ethiopia.” Historical research, however, has proved the theory that the disease most often known simply as “the Death” originated in that region: the rats who carried the fleas that were and remain the initial spreaders of the contagion (which has never entirely disappeared, a vaccine against it never having been developed) apparently boarded Nile trading ships, and reproduced wildly, as did their fleas, in the granaries of Egypt, whence they took ship for all the major ports of Europe. Further genetic research on the subject remains to be done (see the masterful volume edited by Lester K. Little,
The Plague and the End of Antiquity
), but it seems altogether likely that, whether politically correct or not, the Justinian Plague of the old man’s era (the outbreak having occurred sporadically during the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, taking its name from the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who was struck down by it, but survived) did indeed follow this geographical contagion pattern. —C.C.

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“pains”
Gibbon validates this account of the old man’s experiments with soldiers, as well as his self-diagnosis, by remarking that “such pains are a thing which almost anyone who has known a soldier, sailor, or ordinary citizen who has lost a limb to war, mishap, or disease can confirm, and in which many scholars who were also medical professionals or simply possessed medically inclined minds took an interest. [René] Descartes [1596–1650] himself took welcome time away from his syllogistic aphorisms to investigate the subject, although praise for its initial identification rightly belongs to an earlier Frenchman, the surgeon and anatomist Ambroise Paré [1510–1590], royal physician to no less than four French kings, who described patients who had undergone amputation feeling continued pain, not at the sight of the severing, but
in the missing limb itself.
He noted, as well (further agreeing with our as-yet anonymous friend in the Manuscript), that this pain could be heightened with the onset of certain atmospheric conditions—what we have come to know as rapid changes in barometric pressure—as well as by the aggravation of the general state of agitation in which the patient lived: the root of this last assertion being that drugs which had sedative but no analgesic effects proved to be of use in reducing the distress. Many other, lesser lights have studied the phenomenon, but we are no closer to understanding it than was the former court physician of Broken.” Today, the psychogenic distress experienced by amputees—which was given its popular name of “phantom pain” by the American physician and surgeon Silas W. Mitchell, who, working in the 1860s, was provided with no end of subjects for study by the American Civil War—is better understood; but the entire subspecialty of neurology that deals with such problems as severed nerves, neural entrapment in scar tissue, etc., remains one of the most challenging fields in medicine, as the persistent distress caused by the cutting of nerves (which can be a result of surgical malpractice or even surgical routine, as much as or more than by amputation or accident) endures as a principal cause of chronic pain syndromes. —C.C.

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“… 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.

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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. Recognizing both
Brocken
’s continued suitability as a site for a television tower and, even more importantly, the mountain’s larger strategic significance (in the wrong hands,
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, popularly considered the primary path of entry for such an invasion by Western military leaders), the East Germans and their Soviet “protectors” in 1961 declared
Brocken
a top secret security zone. 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 für 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.

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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.

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“… 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 indeed 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.

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“… 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.

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“… 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.