A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [192]
“You have my thanks, my lady,” Carra said. “For honoring me this way.”
“Well, you’re most welcome, and truly, I thought we’d best take our merriment while we can.” Labanna’s dark eyes turned haunted. “The omens are poor, and the news worse.”
Carra nodded, moving instinctively a little closer to her. Out in the center of the great hall, the music pounded on, and the dancers moved gravely, circling round and round. In her grim mood it seemed that they were weaving an immense and ancient spell rather than celebrating an event as common as a wedding. Yet, even over the music, when Carra turned toward the window she heard or thought she heard the harsh cry of a hawk, as if some huge bird drifted overhead on the rising night wind.
Author’s Note
Many readers and reviewers have assumed that the Deverry books take place in some sort of alternate Britain or that the people of Deverry came originally from Britain. In fact, they emigrated from northern Gaul, as a couple of obscure clues in the text tell the compulsively careful reader who also knows an awful lot about. Celtic history. Since only a few people fall into that rather strange category, myself being one of them, allow me to explain further. For one thing, the great heroes often mentioned, Vercingetorix and Vindex, are real, historical Gauls. For another, those “vergobretes” who became in Deverry “gwerbrets” are mentioned in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars as magistrates among the Gauls, though, he says, the Britons have no such kind of leader, relying instead upon “kings.” The Gaulish king, it seems, was more what we’d term a “warleader,” the “cadvridoc” of Deverry, than the ruler of an organized state. Even in Britain, however, the Celts elected their kings more often than they accepted them by inheritance, a pan-Celtic political tradition that lies behind the instability of the Deverry kingship.
The language of Deverry also derives from that of Gaul, but Gaulish was not, as far as scholars can tell, very much different from the Old British that evolved into the language we know today as Cymraeg or Welsh. Thus the Deverrian language looks and sounds much like Welsh, but anyone who knows this modern language will see immediately that it differs in a great many respects. Now, not a lot of Gaulish survives. The Gauls had never been big on writing things down, and when the “cursed Rhwmanes” conquered the place and imposed Latin as the official language, the native speech and oral literature died out. Fortunately a good many personal and place names survive among the remnants—the very thing a fantasy author needs!
As for the Deverrian forms of these names, remember that not only do all languages change over time, but each family of languages changes according to its own rules. In our own family, Indo-European, which includes among others the Germanic, Persian, Hindi, and Slavic groups as well as the Celtic languages, these changes have been studied and codified by linguists. For instance, any “g” sound caught between two vowels tends to first soften, then drop away; “-nt” or “-nd” at the end of a syllable changes to a simple “n,” the old Indo-European sound “wh” or digamma either hardens or disappears, and so on and so forth.
What I’ve done, then, is taken old Gaulish names and subjected them to these rules of change to produce the Deverrian names you find in the books. Consider the ancient word isarnos, iron, which has become in Deverrian yraen. Although the spelling seems similar to our word, we actually pronounce iron eye-urn, in defiance of the order of its consonants, a pronunciation similar to the Welsh haearn. Both are different from the Deverrian ee-rain, the nickname of one of my characters in this volume. As well, I’ve cribbed a few of my favorite names from Welsh history, for instance Rhodry (spelled Rhodri in Welsh orthography). That some of the others have ended up sounding like actual Welsh names goes to show just how much alike Old British and Gaulish were. Most Deverrian names, though, such