The Legend of Broken Read online

  The Legend of Broken is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Caleb Carr

  Map copyright © 2012 by Simon M. Sullivan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-8129-9408-7

  www.atrandom.com

  246897531

  Jacket design: Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  Jacket images: © Minden Pictures/Masterfile (jungle and waterfall); © Getty Images (leaves); © Douglas Pearson/Getty Images (fortress); Angel Graphics/Art Etc. (feline figure); iStockphoto (ferns)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introductory Note

  Map

  Part One: The Moon Speaks of Death

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  Interlude: A Forest Idyll

  I: The Old Man and the Warrior Queen

  II: Within and Without the Cave

  III: Their Separate Torments, Their Consolation Together

  IV: The Specter of Salvation

  Part Two: The Riddle of Water, Fire, and Stone

  I: Water

  II: Fire

  III: Stone

  Part Three: The Riddle Put to Power

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  3:{xi:}: The “Battle” for Broken

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  Some years ago, while doing research at one of our major universities on the personal papers of Edward Gibbon—author of the multivolume classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776 to 1789—I came across a large manuscript in the collection, contained in an unmarked box. On further investigation, I discovered that the work was not entered in either the university’s card catalogue or its computerized list of holdings. Intrigued, I began to read the document, and soon realized that it was a narrative concerning the fate of a legendary kingdom said to have ruled over a portion of northern Germany from the fifth to the eighth centuries. The tale had never been published, during Gibbon’s lifetime or since; I only knew of the thing because I’d run across references to it in several unpublished letters that Gibbon had written to his countryman and colleague, the great Edmund Burke. Burke’s own masterpiece, Reflections on the Revolution in France, had appeared just as did the last volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; and, as a token of his esteem for what he had immediately recognized to be a seminal achievement on his friend’s part, Gibbon had attempted to present Burke with a copy of his latest discovery.

  But Burke had subsequently returned the gift, and sent Gibbon a cordial yet sternly phrased warning against any attempt to publicize it.

  At the time, I didn’t quite know what to make of the manuscript: although detailed in its descriptions, its provenance could not be immediately proved, and any tale that made such remarkable claims about a largely unknown and unknowable chapter of history (for northern Germany during most of the Dark Ages remains one of the notable blank spots in the record of European civilization) required at least that much. I knew from Gibbon’s letters that the original document had been translated into English by a linguistic and historical scholar of impressive talents; but I also knew that this character had nonetheless chosen to remain as assiduously anonymous as had the manuscript’s original first-person narrator. Exploring his personal history would therefore be of no further aid in terms of verification. Certainly, the English vocabulary and idioms that he employed throughout the translation were consistent with the late eighteenth century, containing no anachronisms of the kind that would have quickly betrayed a fabrication or hoax produced during a subsequent era; yet something more was required.

  Recently, that something more has begun to surface, in the form of documents dating back to the last days of Hitler’s Germany. These documents (which are only now in the process of fully emerging) apparently reveal that not only Hitler himself, but some of his most trusted advisors, as well, were aware of both the Broken Manuscript and the historical evidence that supported it: so aware, in fact, that they became determined to eradicate all trace of any written or archaeological evidence of the kingdom of Broken’s existence from the record of German history.

  Taken together with Gibbon’s statements, these facts are sound enough to demonstrate that the manuscript is quite probably factual; and I have therefore decided to present this, the tale of the kingdom of Broken, embellished with Gibbon’s and Burke’s original correspondence on the subject, as well the former’s footnotes to the text, to which I have added my own explanatory notes. (Throughout the text, the accompanying notes are indicated by a series of hyperlinks. These notes are offered simply for clarification; the reader should not think that reading them is necessary to understanding or, hopefully, enjoying the book itself; they can be read as one proceeds, reviewed after each chapter or when one has finished, or ignored altogether.)

  As to the elements central to the manuscript’s actual story, I can only say this: there developed, particularly after first the Elizabethan and then the Victorian eras, a feeling that tales set in the Dark or Middle Ages must necessarily have a certain formality and fussiness, not only of style, but of subject. Yet, especially in the case of early medieval Germany, nothing could be further from the truth. The legends that emerged from that time and place were driven by both language and plots that we would today recognize as very similar to works of more recent eras: indeed, examples such as the Broken Manuscript could be considered almost modern. Certainly, by relying on such themes as obsessive kings, diminutive peoples of the forest, buried scrolls, and, ultimately, a vanished civilization (elements that would, obviously, become staples of certain schools of literature in our own time), as well as by relating these elements in the informal manner that it does, the manuscript contributes to a trend that Bernd Lutz, in his masterful essay on early medieval German literature, called “a monument to vernacular dialect.”

  —CALEB CARR

  Cherry Plain, N.Y.

  NOVEMBER 3, 1790

  Lausanne

  Are there reasons to count the central elements of the tale credible?

  There are. First, the location of the small but evidently powerful realm of Broken can easily be calculated: The narrator’s mention of it as lying outside the northeastern borders of the western Roman empire place it somewhere in Germania, while his descriptions of the dramatic countryside call to mind not only the fertile fields of the Saale and Elbe River valleys, but, even more pointedly, the dense, timeless forests of Thuringia and Saxony, in particular the Harz mountain range—the highest point of which is a summit called Brocken (the “c” was evidently dropped in the Bro
ken dialect, with the result that the word was pronounced much as it would have been, and is, in Old and Modern English). This mountain has ever been infamous as the supposed seat of unholy forces and unnatural rites, and its physical attributes conform closely to the mountain atop which the city of Broken is said to have stood (particularly its summit of stone, which bears some resemblance to the Gallic stronghold of Alesia, although it was far superior from a military perspective).

  As to the customs and culture of the people of Broken, they were certainly more developed than anything that can be found in central Europe between the fifth and eighth centuries A.D., the period during which the greater part of the kingdom’s history seems to have transpired. But this difference can, I believe, be accounted for by the unidentified narrator’s assertion that the kingdom’s founding ruler, one Oxmontrot, and several of his tribesmen once fought as barbarian auxiliaries for both the Western and Eastern regions of the Roman empire. Evidently this chieftain possessed not only a brutal sword arm, but a potent intellect, as well, which absorbed and made use of many of the most beautiful, noble, and administratively effective Roman traditions.

  Unfortunately, he also legitimized the beliefs of his less perspicacious companions, who had been drawn into several of the most extreme Roman cults of sensuality and materialism that had been organized around such deities as Elagabalus [var. Heliogabalus] and Astarte, and who wished to form a similar new faith of their own. This longing took the form of a similarly secret and degenerate cult, one that was permitted by Oxmontrot to become the new faith of the kingdom of Broken, for reasons that will become clear. The faith was organized around what had, until then, been a minor deity in Rome’s eastern provinces, one called Kafra; and his dominance would lead to the second most important development in the early years of Broken, the creation of the race of exiles known as the Bane.

  —EDWARD GIBBON to EDMUND BURKE

  My pitted skull sees once more, and my bleached jaws crack to tell the secrets of Broken …

  AND SO THESE WORDS have at last risen from the ground in which I will inter them, defying Fate as my homeland of Broken never can. The city’s great granite walls will remain shattered, until they again become the shapeless raw stone from which they were fashioned. Do not pretend, scholars unborn, that you know of my kingdom; it is as windblown and forgotten as my own bones. My purpose now is to tell how this tragedy came to pass.

  Do you wonder at my saying “tragedy”? How can I say anything else, when I know full well that historians of your day will be unable to state with conviction whether Broken ever existed at all, despite its magnificent accomplishments? When I know that its enemies, as well as some of its most loyal citizens—to say nothing of Nature itself—shall work as hard as they evidently have done to dismantle the great city’s magnificent form? And that I, from whose mind that magnificence sprang, still deem the destruction just …

  Above all, consider this, before going on: You are embarked on a journey in which every cruelty, every unnatural urge, and every savagery known to men plays a part; yet there is compassion here, too, and also courage, although it is one of the peculiarities of the tale that each of these qualities appears when it is least expected. And so: let strength of heart guide you through each period of confusion to the next point of hope, keeping despair from your soul and allowing you to learn from this history in a manner that my descendants—that I—never could.

  Yes, I became utterly lost … Do I remain so? My own family whispers that I am mad, just as they did when I first spoke of recording these events with the sole purpose of burying the finished text deep in the Earth. Yet if I am mad, it is because of these visions of Broken’s fate: visions that began unbidden long ago and have never departed, regardless of how desperately I have begged more than one Deity for peace, and no matter what intoxicating potions I have consumed. They weight me down, body and spirit, like a stone-filled sack about the neck, dragging me under the surface of my Moonlit lake, down to those depths that teem with so many other bodies …

  I see all of them, even those that I never truthfully saw in life. They ought to have faded: it has been more than the span of most men’s lives since I returned from the wars to the south and the apparitions began, and it has been half again as long since I came back from my voyage to the monks across the Seksent Straits, who revealed to me the meaning of my visions, that I might record all that I know to be true, against the day when someone, when you, would stumble upon my work, and determine if the mind that had created it yet deserves to be called mad.

  But there will be time enough for all such deliberations, while there is precious little, now, to explain what you must know about my kingdom before our journey can begin. Yet the monks under whom I studied warned against plain recitation; and so—imagine this:

  We tumble together out of the eternal heavens, where all ages are as one and we may meet as fellow travelers, toward the more constrainèd Earth, which is, at the moment of our approach, in an era earlier than your own, yet later than mine. Passing through the mists that envelop a range of mountains more impressive than lofty, more deadly than majestic, we soon come to the highest branches of a perilous expanse of forest. The variety of trees seems nearly impossible, and the whole forms a thick green roof over the wilderness below; a roof that we, in our magical flight, shall penetrate with dreamlike ease, eventually settling on a thick lower limb of one obliging oak. From our perch we are afforded an excellent view of the woodland floor, lush and seemingly gentle; but its wide carpets of moss frequently conceal deadly bogs, and its stands of enormous ferns and thick brambles are capable of cutting and poisoning the toughest human flesh. Even beauty, here, is deadly: for many of the delicate flowers that emerge from the mosses or cling to the trees and rocks offer fragrant elixirs fatal to the greedy. Yet those same extracts, in the hands of the less rapacious, can be made to cure sickness, and ease pain.

  Yet what of man, in this place? It was once believed that humans could not survive, here; for we have entered Davon Wood, the great forest that the people of Old Broken said was made by all the gods to imprison the worst of demons, in order that they might know the loneliness and suffering that they inflicted upon those creatures that they tormented. The Wood has always provided an impenetrable southern and western frontier for Broken, one whose dangers have been plain even to the wild marauders that first appeared out of the morning sun generations ago, and that yet ravage neighboring domains. Only a few of these invaders have even attempted to traverse the Wood’s unmeasured expanse, and of that small number even fewer have reemerged, scarred and crazed, to declare the undertaking not only impossible but damned. The citizens of Broken were once content to view the Wood from the safety of the banks of the thundering river called the Cat’s Paw, which provides a perilous break between the wilderness and the richness of Broken’s best farming dales to the north and the east. Yes, once my people were content, with this limitation as with so many; but that was before—

  Lo! They arrive ere I can speak their name—look quickly. There—and there! The blur of fur and hide, the glint of furtive eyes, the whole fluid: between, under, and over tree trunks and limbs, around and through nettle bushes and vine tangles. What are they? Look again; try to determine for yourself. Swift? Impossibly swift—they find pathways through the Wood that other animals cannot see, still less negotiate, and they navigate those courses with an agility that makes even the tree rodents stare in envy—

  They begin to slow; and perhaps you note that the “hides” of these quick beings are in reality animal skins stitched into garments. Yet not even in Davon Wood do beasts go clothed. Could they perhaps be those cursed demons about which the people of Old Broken told such fearful tales? Certainly, these small ones are damned, in their own way, but as to their being demons—examine their faces more closely. Beneath the soil and sweat, do you not take note of human skin? And so …

  Men.

  Neither forest beasts, nor dwarves, nor elves. And not human chi
ldren, either. Watch a moment more: you must realize that, while these travelers are unusually small for fully grown humans, they are not too small. It is something else that disturbs you. Certainly, it is not their agile, even entertaining, movements, for these are as marvelous as any troop of tumblers; no, it is something more obscure that leads to the conviction that they are somehow—wrong …

  Forgive me if I say that your judgment is not complete. They are not “wrong” of themselves, these little humans. The wrong you sense is the result of the grievous manner in which they have been wronged.

  But wronged by whom? In one sense, by myself, in that I gave life to my descendants; but far more by the new “god” of my people, Kafra, and more still by those people themselves, who despise this small race more than any vermin. Do I confuse you? Good! In this mood, you will raise your eyes up to the heavens and appeal for relief; but you will encounter, instead, only more marvelous sights. First, the sacred Moon, deity of Old Broken, although discarded within my lifetime for that newer and more obliging god; then, lit by the Moon’s sacred radiance, a great range of mountains miles to the south of the peaks that we passed on our journey here, a range known in Broken simply as the Tombs. Further north and east, the shimmering band that you see cutting across the enviable farmlands that are shielded by the mountains (lands that are the kingdom’s chief source of wealth) is the Meloderna River, the teat at which those rich fields suckle, and the kinder sister of the rocky Cat’s Paw.

  And in the center of this noble landscape, protected as some royal child by Nature’s powerful guards, stands the lone mountain that is the kingdom’s heart. As torturously forested on its lower slopes as is Davon Wood, yet as barren and deadly as the Tombs above (if more temperate), this is Broken, a summit so frightening that, legend has it, the single great river that burst out of the surrounding mountains at the beginning of time split into many at the mere sight of it. Great and imposing as the mountain is, the greatest sight we shall witness is atop it: the walled wonder—bejeweled, from this distance, by flickering torches—that is both the proverbial heart and the sinful loins of the kingdom. Miraculously carved out of the solid, nearly seamless stone that is the stuff of the mountain’s summit, the city was once the favorite of the Moon, but incurred that Sacred Body’s wrath when it embraced the false god Kafra: