Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (2 page)

Language

The major difficulty an author faces in writing historical fiction is that of language, because language is constantly evolving and we have no real knowledge of how people spoke and sounded, in any language, hundreds of years ago. I have chosen to write in standard English, but even that is a relatively new development, since the language was only "standardized" in the nineteenth century. Until that time, there was no orthographically correct way to spell anything.

Most of the characters in my stories would have spoken in the ancient Celtic, Germanic and Gallic tongues, while the better educated, Romanized characters, like Bishop Germanus and his associates, and even Clothar as a student at the Bishop's School, would most probably have conversed in Latin. When people of mixed tongues met and mingled, they would have spoken the lingua franca of their time, although the real lingua franca—literally the language of the Franks—had not yet come into common use. But throughout history, whenever people of diverse tongues and races have come together to trade, human ingenuity has quickly developed basic, fundamental languages to fit their needs. In Africa, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that language was Swahili. In Oriental Asia, it was Pidgin. We do not know the name of whatever trading language was dominant in fifth-century Europe, but I have chosen to call it the Coastal Tongue, because the coast was the interface point for most traders.

Many terms and expressions used in this story, however, have no modern equivalent, and others sound modem and up-to-date when in fact they are genuinely ancient. I have addressed a few of these in the notes that follow here. Modern readers are sometimes surprised, for example, to find the title Duke being used in the ancient world, but the word originally sprang from the Roman army, where a man who had distinguished himself by demonstrating spectacular heroism and leadership could earn himself the title of
dux,
which is the Latin word for a leader, a man who is foremost among his companions, and out of that title came the English title of Duke.

In much the same way, people in North America today tend to feel proprietorial about nouns like
corn
and
bannock,
not realizing that
corn
has always been the generic Old World term for any kind of grain and that bannock—the simplest form of unleavened bread—is common to every primitive society, no matter what they call it. The Celtic clans of Scotland and Ireland have always called it bannock, and it was their use of the name that the aboriginal peoples of America adopted. The plant Americans call com, on the other hand, is known as maize in Europe, where it is a coarse, mealy grain fed to cattle. American sweet corn came to be known in Europe only during and after the Second World War.

Another problematic word for us is
mile.
A modern mile is 1,760 yards, or approximately 1,500 meters, whereas the Latin word
mille
meant a thousand, and a Roman mile was one thousand paces long. Bearing in mind that the average Old World Roman was less than five foot six inches tall, their marching pace would have been short, probably in the range of twenty-six to twenty-nine inches, making their mile shorter than a modern kilometer.

And then there are the
latifundiae.
Few people today have any concept of how highly organized, and even industrialized, the Roman Empire was sixteen and seventeen hundred years ago. The Romans had a thriving stock market and a highly refined and regulated real-estate industry, and the food production and distribution system they constructed to feed their citizenry, founded upon a system of enormous ranches and collective farms called latifundiae, was extremely sophisticated even by today's standards. These private enterprises, run by corporations and funded and owned by investors, produced grain, cattle, wines, fruits and vegetables and other commodities in vast amounts for shipment to markets throughout the Empire.

The Latin word
magister,
which gives us our modern words
magistrate
and
magisterial,
was in common use in the Roman army in the fifth century. It appears to have had two levels of meaning, and I have used it in both senses throughout this book. The first of these was the literal use, where a student or pupil would refer to his teacher or mentor as Magister (Master), with all appropriate deference. The second usage, however, resembled the way we today use the term
Boss,
denoting a superior whose title entails the accordance of a degree of respect but falls far short of the subservience suggested by the use of the word
Master.

Similarly, the word
ecclesia
gives us our modern word
ecclesiastical,
but the original meaning of the word was a church, particularly a permanent church, built of stone.

Citrus wood is well documented as being the most precious wood in the Ancient World, but we have no idea what it was like. No trace of it survives. It is one of the earliest known instances of a precious commodity being exploited to extinction.

And finally, a word about horse troopers. Roman cavalry units were traditionally organized into
turmae
(squadrons) and
alae
(battalions). There were thirty to forty men in a
turma
(the singular form of turmae), and the strength of the alae ranged anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four turmae, which meant that a cavalry battalion could number between 480 and 960 men. The
contus,
a substantial, two-handed cavalry spear, was the weapon of many heavy cavalry turmae, and those troops were known, in turn, as contus cavalry.

PROLOGUE

I saw the bird lying in a pool of sunlight as soon as I came into the room. It was in the far corner over by the fireplace I built when I first came here a score and more years ago. I recognized its still form and felt immediate regret as I realized why its familiar song had been missing from my bedchamber that morning. The brightness of the pool of light in which it lay told me what had happened: the bird had flown in through the window and then, blinded in the sudden darkness of the room, had dashed itself against a wall and died.

It was a blackbird, a tiny, glossy creature whose only other color was its brilliant orange beak. As I bent over it and peered at the forlorn way one of its wings lay spread on the stone floor, the thought came to me that nothing about this little being gave any hint of the miraculous power and volume of pure song contained within its fragile frame. When this bird sang, men could hear it from miles away on quiet summer evenings. Its voice, its song and its magical power transcended and confounded the physical smallness of the singer.

I crouched cautiously, aware of the brittleness of my aging knees, and picked the dead bird up, cradling it in my hand and folding its already stiffening wings, noting the way the tiny head lolled on its broken neck. So small it was, and yet such a great loss to me in my early-morning awakenings and to everyone else whom its song reached. A blackbird—a
merle,
to the local Franks—a voice of purity and immense beauty, silenced forever. And then merely thinking of its Frankish name, another, heavier wave of grief swept over me without warning; connections and associations swarmed in my mind, and my eyes were all at once awash with tears. I drew myself erect and inhaled a great, deep breath to steady myself, reaching out to lean on the stone breast of the fireplace, and then I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and looked about me at this bare room that holds so many memories and uncompleted tasks.

We have no need of open indoor fires here in the warmth of southern Gaul, but when I first came to these parts many years ago, my mind was filled with memories of long, pleasant nights spent in another land far to the northwest, sprawled in comfortable chairs before a roaring fire set into a stone-built chimneyed hearth, and so I indulged myself and built such a hearth here, in my new home. Once I had built it, of course, reality asserted itself, and to my wife's gentle amusement the fire was seldom lit. But I would often sit for hours in front of the silent hearth in the long autumn evenings, gazing into the dried logs and dreaming of things gone, and as time passed the habit endured while the memory of warm firelight faded. Since my wife died, I have been the sole user of this room, and I have lit the fire four times, purely for the pleasure of gazing into the heart of flames and interpreting the pictures I imagined I saw there. Today would have been the fifth occasion, had I not found the bird.

Moments after I had picked the small corpse up, I found myself outside, scraping a shallow hole with my heel in the grass beneath the window, then kneeling to use my dagger to deepen the hole into a grave. I buried the blackbird there, refusing to ask myself why I should be doing such a thing, and then I returned directly here and dragged this heavy table to the window, after which I sat down to write for the first time in years. And here I am, writing about a dead songbird and the memories it brought back to me.

Ten years ago, a full year after the death of my beloved wife, and prompted by an urging I could not deny, I made the saddest journey of my life, although at the start of it I thought nothing could surpass the sadness I had known throughout my later years. I laid aside my rich clothing and dressed myself as an ordinary, undistinguished man, then made my way, in a strong, tight boat that belonged to an old and honored friend, across the narrow seas to Britain.

I did not go alone. That would have been extreme folly for a man of my age, even although I refuse to consider myself
old.
Besides, those who love and care for me had quickly decided, upon hearing what I had in mind, that I must be mad to think to risk my life upon the seas and journey to a land notorious for its savage people and their alien ways. They thought at first to prevent me somehow from going at all, but then, seeing I was determined to go despite them, they insisted that I travel with an escort. So I selected the youngest of my three sons, Clovis, and nine of his closest friends and companions to accompany me. These were all young warriors, still unwed and approaching their prime, and armed with the finest weapons our armorers could make—long-bladed swords and axes of the finest tempered iron—so that no one could have denied that they were the best protection I could have. And thus accompanied, I set out for Britain with the tolerance, if not the unstinted blessings, of my advisers.

My youthful escorts called themselves knights, claiming adherence to the order established decades ago in Britain when I was their age, and I had long since become tolerantly inured to the images their fancies conjured in me. I no longer made any attempt to dissuade them from their error, for they paid my protestations no attention when I did, considering me an old and querulous man, worthy of honour and respect, perhaps, but a relic nonetheless of a generation whose time had passed, and hence no longer quite aware of the potency and immediacy of modern events, customs and times. Despite my silence, however, and notwithstanding their own insistence upon believing otherwise, they were not knights. All their enthusiasm and all their dedication to the ideals they cherished was mere self-delusion, because they had never knelt before the King to undergo the Ceremony. And so I had come to tolerate both their delusions and their deference to me, aware that they sought no more than to honour me and my long-dead friends in their insistence upon cleaving to the form and rituals of what we had once called knightly conduct.