by Anthony Appleyard http://www.buckrogers.demon.co.uk

I am Ensign Stephen Peterson of the USS Enterprise. I was glad to be going to Earth on leave at last after so many incidents in far places. During my time under Captain Picard I saw much happen. I remember when the Klingons were the great enemy, until on the bridge I saw instruments jump off scale at the violent subspace shockwave when their main power source on the moon Praxis in their home star system exploded: a mishap all too likely in a society where position in control of dangerous power sources was too often decided by betleH and dagger and not by careful responsible decision by superiors. I saw their chancellor Gorkon's peace offers to the Federation, unwilling but forced, for after that they could not confront us and hold their empire down both at once, and rebellion could have flared far and wide and then spread to the Ferengi Union creating a huge power vacuum with unknown results, and revenge by subject peoples no longer subject, and undesirables getting armed interstellar travel technology in the confusion, and refugees, and old quarrels revived, and all the messy apparatus of violent political upset and collapse.

It was often so even before Man had space travel; in the 19th century Greeks rebelling against the Ottoman Turkish tyranny slaughtered twenty thousand Turks in the sack of Tripolitsa, the Turks' administrative centre in Greece. I have seen where a planetary people called the Akhtumin, with no other way out of typical viciously disadvantageous business agreements with Ferengi, resorted to the gun, and what happened to the Ferengi rulers there. A construction gang who we came across there turned out to be eight important Ferengi financiers captured and forced to serve as space-workmen, despite the bad way Ferengi sense organs of balance react to weightlessness, and that ultimate disgrace to Ferengi, their huge sexually sensitive ears cut off to fit into small spacesuit helmets. Some accuse that Ferengi are fond of business and dislike manual work because their ears make it hard to design any necessary industrial or flying protective headgear for them. Then Ferenginar looked like sending a reprisal and enforcement fleet there, so the Akhtumin appealed to the Federation, which ended up picking up the pieces and accused of stealing Ferengi territory.

This with variations would happen hundreds of times if the big breakup happened, and we might not be able to pick up so many pieces at once. People who over-romanticize the past have compared the Federation to the Roman Empire as a law-bringer, a comparison I dislike, for I know of Roman cruelties and vices and corruptions. But the Federation is like the Roman Empire in one way - the time it takes men and ships to get across it, and the Federation suddenly asked to keep peace among a welter of revenge against former rulers and old local quarrels returned at the far edges of its neighbouring big powers' territories would be in much the same position as the Roman Empire suddenly asked to keep peace in Burma or Lapland - it would plain simply be too far to send men.

Thus I went over in my mind as the stars seen from the ship gradually settled back towards the Earth sky star patterns of my childhood. By then Picard was captain of the Enterprise. If I could change one thing in history, it might be to prevent the old Hurk alien takeover of Qo'noS soon after Kahless came to power, for it was in rebelling against the Hurk that the Klingons got from the Hurk space travel and all their technology above the mediaeval level. Old Klingon records and family legends speak of remote probings and lost occupations far outside their Empire's current border. Often they pushed out, and often an Emperor died or was deposed and many garrisons were pulled back to fight over the throne, slowing the spread enough for spacefaring nations around to combine and hold them back somewhat, so they did not spread as far as Earth before Earth got warp technology and could fight back effectively. Just where had they been in the past? Those old tales are often very unclear as to coordinates. A promising mineral and fuel rich planet called qanDIS qanDar puqloD yuQ, far away in what is now Federation space, spoken of in the DuraS family's old records, is only one of many such; their modern members regret the loss and blame, probably falsely, a side-branch of Worf's ancestry for starting the internecine feud that caused the pullback that lost them that and other remote possessions when on Earth it was the early 9th century AD. The planet was not described much, but from what I heard of it stuck in my mind for some reason.

Finally they stopped having Emperors to try to stop these repeated setbacks, and the voDleH quS'a' or quS quv'a' in veng wa'DIch stayed empty, until recently a venturesome laboratory got hold of one of the most sacred relics on Qo'noS, a dagger with dried blood from Kahless on it, and grew a clone from an intact DNA set that they salvaged from the blood. Many called the result qeylISqoq, `not the real thing', a child of great sacrilege, who had never fought Molor or had to hide for his life in the wilderness round the QI'IStaq (= Kri'stak) volcano; but others hoped that he would unite his people.

But the Klingons are in space and must be accepted. With no Klingon space power, some other empire would likeliest have spread over the area instead, and matters would be much as they are. And we and Klingons had to fight side by side only 7.8 light years from Earth at the faint red star Wolf 359 (in Leo as seen from Earth) against the Borg incursion, even as Romans and Goths had to fight side by side at Chalons-sur-Marne in France to stop the Huns. But Wolf 359 proved to be no Chalons-sur-Marne, and nearly all the Federation and Klingon ships were lost, and the Borg were orbiting Earth before they were stopped, how is irrelevant here; but if that loss of imperial ships lets a new local rebellion succeed and spread, that is to come.

But I was coming back to Earth, away from Klingons and Romulans, away from alienness, away from shadows of alien takeovers that have happened or if things had been otherwise might have happened, back home. The first article in the first in-flight magazine that I picked up was about languages on various alien worlds, including on Qo'noS the dominant language Tlhingan Hol, and the still widespread southern language Klingonaase, and other holdout languages in remote areas: for so yet another printer's man gave the words capitals however often reminded not to. I turned to the next article quickly as the ship sped on through emptiness where Klingons in force had thankfully never flown.

I thought about how the first contact with Klingons had gone wrong. We knew of them from the Vulcans, who contacted us after Zefram Cochrane made Earth's first warp spaceship out of a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile as told in detail elsewhere. We knew then little about the Klingon mentality. Our only common language was Vulcan, which the Klingons involved knew badly and had a hard contempt for. They inevitably misunderstood something, treated it as a deadly insult, and the meeting turned to shooting. That one of the Earth ship captains' second-in-command was named Carless did not help much, apparently misusing a sacred name; that may seem distinct enough from qeylIS, but many of the Klingons there were Klingonaase speakers and knew the name as ka`elis or similar. Such pronunciation hazards as calling a Klingon official a qagh, instead of qaH (= "Sir"), are proverbial; but the same is known from Earth: many a Chinese official has been called `Pig' instead of `Sir' by foreigners saying the Chinese word "zhu" in the wrong tone.

The ship went into Earth orbit, and we beamed down. Some of us regretted the old type of return home, the relatives waiting at the spaceport, and the ground or air journey home. But for me the ship's transporter room dissipated and I found myself in England on a neighbour's front lawn in the small North Yorkshire market town of Cailsdack. It is the sort of place that people tend to hear of only at general election time as a routine screen flash "Lab [=Labour Party] hold Cailsdack" and briefly wonder where the place is; but I was born and raised there, within sound of its monthly cattle market. To the west as the start of the Pennines rose the high blunt cone of Holtwy Hood with a microwave mast on it, and north of it the longer bulk of Corricksdack Fell. I knew the area well: the big church which had belonged to an abbey until King Henry VIII intervened, and in it the monuments including the ornate tomb of Sir Roger de Caylesdac, who fought at Poitiers and captured four French knights and came home laden with ransom, much of which he used strengthening his castle and enlarging the abbey including building the present Gothic church joined to the west end of the abbey's small Saxon church which he kept as a ladychapel. Church records said that the old church had been built by a local lord named Kimping, who the village of Kimpingshall was named after.

Midges bothered me. I swore at their bites, for escorting diplomatic missions to Qo'noS I had learned to ignore its native ghIlab ghew midges which for all their annoying sharp buzzing never bit people. As familiar birds sang around me at last, I wondered about the local placenames. Some of them indeed told of takeover by crews of ships from afar - by sea from Scandinavia, such as Askby and Ormscale and Birkwith. A large excavator passing labelled `Kaill's of Cailsdack' helped not at all to explain where any local placenames had come from; nor did the local saying `When Holtwy wears his hood, the chance of rain is good.'. South the church spire showed if I looked down the road. In the church's chancel are seats for a man from each parish in the area when they used to hold meetings there, and over the seats the parish names are carved in compressed Gothic font: Askby, Nembing Underwood, Nembing Ferrers, Longton, and so on. Above Hodpuddock's name is carved as a typical casual mediaeval ornament a toad (`puddock') sitting in a builder's hod; but that is unlikely to be the true origin of the name.

"But the sky's clear today," I thought thankfully, for I planned to tour the local villages later, "DaHjaj HotlhwI' HuD vIleghlaHchu', 'ej yIQbe' Hemey ...", and suddenly realized that I was thinking in Klingon, a language that I had had quite enough of in recent months. What had I called the familiar heather and bracken covered bulk of Holtwy Hood? HotlhwI' HuD, Scanner Hill. That it had indeed been in the 1939 to 1945 war, when there had been an anti-aircraft radar station on its top, built on the foundations of an old windmill. And before that, what? `Holt' is ordinary Anglo-Saxon for a patch of woodland. But a manorial roll written in 1343 mentions a right to graze sheep "super colle qui nominatur hotlewihud". But yet, it seemed to fit in with other odd-loking English hill names such as Mow Cop and Cleeve Cloud and Buttington Tump. I shook aside such purposeless speculations and went indoors.

Thankfully my parents were in, and still lived there. I found later that one of my crewmates, coming with me and beaming down to Pontefract in Yorkshire, found his parents' house sold, his father gone leaving no forwarding address, his mother divorced and remarried gone to an address which they had by then moved on from, and his neighbours and relatives sorry but none had a spare bed even for a few days, and none ever having thought to send him a message `care of Starfleet' to tell him what had happened or an address to stay when on leave. He told all concerned in rather ripe naval language what he thought of them and radioed to be beamed up again and forgot thought of leave longer than one day.

But my parents let me in, and I was glad to rest. My mother was not mentally in tune with the idea of beaming in, and wondered why on my way into town I had not noticed the scaffolding round Cailsdack Abbey where passage of many years and delayed-action coalmining subsidence had at last forced a big repair job including taking down parts of it and reassembling it.

Dinner was a long time coming. After a while I looked in the kitchen and found that, as before, she was attempting a far too long and formal affair for my tastes when I had other things to do. I apologised, referred her to our previous discussions on the point, sorted out a reasonable meat and two veg and afters from the tangle of half-prepared allsorts, quickly ate it, and went to town to hire some sort of adequate personal transport; I chose a motorcycle.

That done, I went to the church. Archaeologists accompanying the builders had dug down. The early 16th-century ladychapel indeed stood on the cut-down walls of Kimping's Anglo-Saxon church, but that in turn stood over something older of an unfamiliar style. They were evacuating what had been the family vault of the de Caylesdac noble family until they died out in the male line in 1704. One of the coffins was of Sir Roger's first son Sir John de Caylesdac who his father Roger left at home to run the estate (as he did not trust agents not to embezzle) and to keep one member of the male line safe.

Sir John disliked being left out of the French war. What action he saw in reality is unknown, but a traditional dragon-slaying ballad centres on him. I had read it in school. Its author would not have stood beside Shakespeare as a master poet, but when literature was rare the mediocre seemed good. There are many such tales in the northeast of England, varied by such creatures as a monstrous man-eating invertebrate worm at Lambton in Northumberland. The Cailsdack dragon ballad says (with the spelling normalized) that the creature came from the northwest in a night of storm and denned in the pools and swamps of Cawmere and ravaged the area around "till nought in th' land was left of good / that you could see from Holtwy Hood". The people fled and it had to change dens to follow its prey: "At Minnerhubbing next it struck, / 'twas there of times the least of luck. / He followed west its gory track / far in the hills to Kimmerdack. / The caves there are so deep and fell / some say they are a gate of hell / and in them writings strange in form / wrote by some goblins foul deform / of those who dug those caves of old / (but where they went to, none has told).", and went on to say how he went underground after it and slew it.

Tales of strange writings were no novelty, for I have seen the Minnerhubbing runic Viking gravestone. That also goes into the supernatural tales that the area used to be full of; as decoded somewhat from the fanciful allusions that Viking poets were fond of, it says in Old Norse that the seawolves were resisted effectively when they tried to attack the abbey at `Keilsdakr' and lost many men there and in a battle `und minihura hofði' (= `beneath Minner Head Fell'), for "[the local] women had lain with trolls and brought forth children as hard as giants".

I rode north, out of town, into the flat black peat land of Cawmere, for centuries a shallow lake and dangerous sinking bogs until in the 19th century George Stephenson the railway builder's victory over the huge dreaded morass of Chat Moss between Manchester and Liverpool showed that such bogs were not unconquerable, and encouraged men to attack Cawmere. Nowadays the land is safe to walk on, and straight roads divide it into big fertile fields. Beside one I heard children arguing about something they had caught in a ditch.

"It isn't an eel. It isn't a snake. It's all wrong for an ordinary worm.".

"It's a `kwagg', like in that magazine I read. Someone must have let it go here, same reason as there's mink from America about in England." said one.

"No. It's a caw-worm. My gramps lives here, and he heard from his gramps that they've always been here. Cawmere used to be full of them till they drained it. He said that people used to eat them when the food ran short.".

"Yekkh!!"

"Let it go!!! I don't want it.".

I looked at it. On some other worlds, I would have known what it was, but it could not have been that here. I rode on. The new village of Newton-in-Cawmere beside the road is the centre of a new parish; one of the spare seats at the east end of the row in the Abbey had been allocated to it and given a new carved name in 1852. The spare seat opposite it in the Abbey was allocated to Ashton-on-Cailsmoor, a new parish set up in 1843 as the old grazing common called Cailsmoor gradually shrank to nothing under successive encroachments by farmers and gentry.

I rode on, to the two Nembings under the dark mass of Tarnham Wood. Between them a Lord Nembing still lived in Tarnham Grange near the wood edge. I rode back to Cailsdack along the edge of the hills through Kimbeltsham and Eppowsham to Corricksdack, all built in the local limestone and with big inbye paddocks to hold sheep driven in off the nearby moors, and turned east along `the new road' past the two roadside farms of Newhurst and Nemptingdack which I knew well as a small boy on a bicycle in the summers. It was so traditionally English, and a thankful break from alienness and strange worlds. `The new road' was built around 1840 by the then Lord Nembing to bypass Hudpuddock village, whose people had a bad reputation for harassing through traffic to try to get money off it. It was not much as bypasses go, two cart tracks widened and joined by nearly two and a half miles of new road across fields, but the local people did not like change and treated it as the great wrong of the age. The next stage was a determined local campaign to block the road off and return its area to farming; it ended in a trial where two local farmers were fined so heavily that they had to quit, and the new man in Nemptingdack very nearly changed the strange-looking name to `Elmtrees', but local opinion prevented it. I rode on.

Something strange seemed to hang around the names on the signposts. The persistent `-dack' on local placenames was agreed by the local branch of the Place Name Society to be a variant of `dock', a Viking word for a `recess or corner', now restricted to harbours and law courts, but in old times used more generally. Plenty of local placenames told of those fierce settlers from northeast over the sea. Another possibility was a Celtic noun ending in '-t' or '-d' plus the Celtic suffix '-(i)akon' = "belonging to" (= Welsh '-(i)og').

A right turn sign pointed to Dudgeford; I remembered a controversy in a newspaper when I was 11 about a thick layer of concrete-like stuff which a farmer there ran into when he dug a hole for a new sewage tank in one of his fields. His not to reason why; his only to hire a compressor and a pneumatic drill and break the stuff up and shift it aside; but someone heard of it, and wondered what it was going there - and sent some for analysis and radiocarbon dating. I left the place and got back to Cailsdack in time for tea. Next day I would go west into the hills.

After tea I went to the Abbey. The workmen were still there. Part of the north nave aisle was badly subsided and had to be taken down. As they did this, I saw them find a sealed hollow containing bundles of old documents, probably hidden there from Henry VIII's commissioners and never recovered. I caught a few glimpses of them, and wondered: what was there before the Normans and along with the Saxons? Vikings. Some native Celtic holdout areas such as Elmet and Loidis. And what else?? That would be revealed soon enough. Mention of Celtic reminded me of a sermon in a collection of them that a priest in the Abbey had made in 1748:-

"... When you count something, do not count in cipher like nasty furtive spies `yin, do, tree, pethera, pimp' as some shepherds do, in distorted Welsh although we are far from Wales, to evade tax by not letting their natural appointed lords know how many their flocks are, but rightly and honestly count in the King's English to `render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's', and let your dealings with your lords on earth be open and honest and a model for your dealings with your Lord in Heaven.". I already knew of this survival of Celtic numbers for over a thousand years of English speech; the well-known nursery `hickory dickory dock' is one form of the `8, 9, 10' of the series. So far unremarkable. But the sermon continued, as I remembered it:-

"And do not count `woe, choe, wedge, loss, vaw', as some do round here for the same reason, or woe and loss will wedge themselves into you when you are judged before God and Christ. Next time any of you count sheep, it will be `one, two, three, four, five' in your proper language, the King's English, openly before God and men, and shame all furtiveness and concealment, for you may hide your increase from men, but God sees all ...". This part said something too startling to accept, so I did not accept it. In the years and light years since I had read it, my memory of it must have got mixed with later matter and the endless distances between here and Qo'noS. I would have to go back to the Abbey library when it was open and re-read that sermon to get my memory of it right.

Next day I rode west, along the old road, into the hills, where Sir John had ridden long ago. In Minnerhubbing under the heathery height of Minner Head Fell the sheep were down for shearing and a sea-like surf of bleating was everywhere. In the 19th century men hoped to dig iron and copper there, and found little, although the geology had promised plenty. Here many more of the farm names were of a strange-looking sort. I reached Tilwiddock, and finally Kimmerdack, villages of grey limestone houses and a church on the hillside a little clear of river flood level. The caves, or whatever they were, had been sealed for safety. South of the road were the ruins of Kimmerdack coalmine, started in 1834 and soon abandoned, for the miners kept running into old workings and clearly someone before them had worked the area out - who and when? Not even the oldest known records spoke of previous mining there, except in ignorable old tales of goblins and the like.

In the morning I went to the Abbey library. The book of sermons was still where it had been when I was teenage. So much had happened `out there', and in here things were still as they had been. The sermon was still there. And, there clearly in 18th-century printing, was the strange counting number set that had no business being known by anyone on Earth at the time.

Outside, work continued. Mediaeval roof beams were being pried apart, and treated with insecticide while they were out. Stacks of numbered wall stones accumulated. The ground would have to be strengthened with much injected concrete before it could carry a heavy stone church again. Much of the outside carved work was too badly corroded by 20th-century acid rain and centuries of roosting birds' droppings and could only be cut back to flat surfaces and replaced by new carved stuck-on panels. But the excitement came from the ladychapel. The rubble fill of the wall contained bits of carved work from Kimping's Saxon church which had stood there. A workman looked at one big piece of it and swore in astonishment. I looked at it with him. It was a wall slab of local limestone, with an inscription on. I well knew its alphabet and topic, but neither had any business whatsoever being where they were.

I asked about the document find. They let me look at them. The first few that I saw were routine Church matter in Latin, missals and annals and the like, mostly mediaeval but some Anglo-Saxon, but the next made me jump again. It was a lawsuit over land. Descendants of native landowners were reasserting claims after a foreign ruling class had left. It was prefaced clearly in Latin "Aliqui litigantum non bene sapiunt linguam anglicam, scripsi igitur eorum ipsa verba in lingua sua ut non possit dici error fieri in translatione." ("Some of the litigants do not well know the English language, so I have written their own words in their language so that it cannot be said that error arose in translation"). The rest was an attempt by an Anglo-Saxon scribe to use his own language's spelling system to write a language that it was not intended for. It was very different from the modern standard transcription, but it was clear which language it was, and I could understand it. It looked totally wrong, shockingly wrong, but it was there in undoubted iron-and-tannin ink in Anglo-Saxon handwriting written with a quill pen on ancient sheep parchment. Something which I thought I had left far away and knew would not happen here, had happened here long ago. I now knew why the strange counting numbers in the sermon and the strange alphabet on the Saxon slab were there. A cold feeling of ancient alienness seemed to blow across the familiar Yorkshire countryside. Thus it read:

"æscleah dach ducgford tlilwihpudac 7 puchmeihe ponglubog 7 gacgbecg wulfræd net sof. wulfgar wulfræd puclodfoh heggmo puchmeifetl sucpu fafdacg cgatl wulfpu eadpu puclod, a sawceucpuwipu puclod gachbe eadpue ecg puchmeifetl suc cyneræd cenræd puclod wulfræd puclod heggdih wulfgar cgatl wulfmær ducgfordngan. ecg mumei rap cgatl targbetlech bidtlingan cynepengesheallngan.".

Thus it means: "It is known that Wulfræd certainly had Ashley and the lands which are now named Dudgeford and Tilwiddock. Wulfpu' son of Eadpu' says that his father `got due to death' [= inherited] those lands from Wulfgar son of Wulfræd, but Wulfmær of Dudgeford says that Eadpu' was `not a son of people married to each other' and that Cyneræd son of Cenræd son of Wulfræd got those lands when Wulfgar died. And TarghbetleH the Half-klingon of Kimpingshall says the same.".

"It looks like he hadn't properly sorted out what to do with the glottal stop, and he let that thing like a 7 that the Anglo-Saxons used as an and-sign slip in. Since he had to use `h' for the glottal stop sometimes to prevent ambiguities, he had to go back to the Northumbrian habit of using `ch' for H. It's quite clear who ruled here for a time before the Vikings and the Normans, where men have been thankful that such beings haven't come, the alien and mixed-language personal and place names, and the evidence that the area had been under alien rule long enough for some natives to forget their own language and learn that of their rulers (as before that they had forgotten their native Celtic language and learned Anglo-Saxon). I knew there was something strange about the area. The question is: what the %$#& were they doing here?! juS yo' qIj."

"Erh?"

"`The Black Fleet is passing'." I explained. "That's what some people on Qo'noS say when there is a general ominous feeling. The Black Fleet is their Fleet of the Dead. And as I came in, I saw some children catch what looked quite a lot like a Klingon qagh in a ditch in Cawmere. OK, someone may have brought some in recently and one escaped. But why do some people say they've always been there?, and why does that Anglo-Saxon record call the lake Cagmere? This area is notorious for giving placename researchers a difficult time.".

"`Key-lake'? We don't really want qagh going wild in the rivers and lakes: they'd eat everything, even worse than when mink got in that time.".

"Perhaps. And mixed-language personal names. I know that Anglo-Saxon personal names center on warriors and weapons and predatory animals, but including pu' and peng, like that local leader called Cynepeng? His hall was at Kimpingshall, whence the place's name.".

"In the Abbey's old records I once found an old standing order telling people `nolite scribere in scriptura picadica neque in scriptura runica.'. People began to think that runes were black magic symbols; and I used to think that the other sort of writing mentioned was something to do with Picardy in Belgium: now I know it wasn't.".

"There's also this old stone with a pIqaD inscription on.: 'orate pro' 'anIma pu'wulv pu'beorneS Sunu vevor HIne 'a'no'm, but I can't make sense of most of it."

"The first three words are church Latin and the rest's Anglo-Saxon: `Pray for the soul of Pu'wulf son of Pu'beorn, a fever took him away.' Anglo-Saxon in pIqaD, what next?".

"Likely it was the only sort of writing that many of the natives had learned, from the sky-aliens. In those times next to nobody outside the Church could read and write. And a parchment page of it here. For example, this bit of it says: 'ond tlhone SwI'nve'Dunggh 'In 'eovorwealD tlhe tlha' 'ellormen Ha'tatlh targh ngem.".

"And the swine-pasturage in Eoforweald, that means Wild Boar Forest, which the strange men call targh ngem.".

"Targ Wood. A targ's a dangerous wild and domestic Klingon animal like a pig. It could be Tarnham Wood. And the name Nembing might be ngem bIng, that's `the area under the wood'.".

"This document's in the ordinary alphabet, it looks like Anglo-Saxon. What's it say?" I asked.

"It looks like the natives had a hard time and a bad clash of cultures. It's a chronicle. I'll read some bits of it out. dccxxxiv: Her Tlinganas þrowodon þone haligan preost Earnræd lange ond hearde mid kiggpecge for þæt he anom utan of Godes cyrice æt Wulfmæreslea micelne 7 unwlitigne idolum hira gedwolgodes Ceglises ofsleandes Molor the hie settedon þærinne for abominationem desolationis stantem ubi non debet swa hæðnas settedon gelicnesse gedwolgodes in Godes templum in Iudea lande...:. [Year] 734: Here Tlinganas, I suppose that's Klingons, long and hard tortured the holy priest Earnræd with a -kiggpecg-?".

"qIghpej. Agonizer.".

"`- because he took out of God's holy church at Wulfmæresleah, that's Woolmersley, it means Wolfproud's Meadow, a big and unbeautiful and unholy likeness of Ceglis, I suppose that's Kahless, slaying Molor that they had set in there as an abomination of desolation standing where it ought not to be as heathen set up a likeness of a false god in God's temple in Judea. The scribe was clearly in an emotional state and at one point he broke into Latin quoted from the Bible. I'll skip to near the end. `Her God Eallmihtig asendede þa Tlinganas 7 mid him hira searwas 7 hira gelicnesse hira gedwolgodes Ceglises 7 hira deofolsearwige kiggpecgas 7 oinakhas 7 laddon eall in hira ducgum,7 afleogon in rodore 7 hie ne habbaþ eft gecumen, 7 þus God worhte his miltse on Eorþe. Ne æfterra man seah Tlingan oððe ducg on manna eorþe oððe on Eorþes rodore. Þus God worhte his dom. Ond wearþ for nahte þæt manige habbaþ geworden cræftige ceamwigas oððe ducgmenn oððe oðre rodorsearumenn, æfter þæt hie aeodon.7 hie gecoron Cynepeng Eadpenges sunu swa hira hlaford ond laccuf.: Here God Almighty sent the Klingons away and with them their devices and their likenesses of their false god Kahless and their devils'-device kiggpecgas' - agonizers, you said - `and -oinakhas-'.".

"'oynaQ. Electric shock prod. I suppose the `-as' is an Anglo-Saxon plural ending.".

"`- And loaded all into their -ducg-s-'".

"Duj. Spaceship. I reckon that why they left was that their emperor died and they had to go home to fight over the succession. That often happens with them.".

"`... and flew away into the sky, and they have not again come back, and thus God worked his mercy on earth. Not afterwards was a spaceship or a Klingon seen on the earth of men or in earth's sky. Thus God worked his judgement. And it came for nothing, that many had been skilled -ceamwig-s-'".

"chamwi'. Technician. Back to ox-drawn subsistence farming and all that space-base-type skill they'd learned was no use any more.".

"`... or spaceship-men or other sky-device-men, after they went away. And the people chose Cynepeng son of Eadpeng', yet more of those startling mixed-language names: `kingly torpedo' and `fortunate torpedo', `as their lord and -laccuf-'".

"la'quv. Supreme commander. Many of them needed time to de-alien-ify their speech habits.".

"`7 æreste he ond manige foron to Ceglisdace þe ærra hatte Duwernig 7 tobrucon þone deofoligan hearg Ceglises þe þa Tlinganas getimbrodon ond in his stede hie getimbrodon þær cyricean to Gode ond Criste. And first he and many with him went to Ceglisdac', that'll be Cailsdack.".

"qeylIS Daq. Kahless's place. Now we know at last what that name came from.".

" ... which earlier was named Duwernig."

" Looks like an old Celtic name, Duboverniacum, that's 'the place of black alders'.".

"`And broke down the devilish heathen temple of Kahless that the Klingons had built there, and on its site they built a church to God and Christ.' ... And this later bit: it looks like some people backslid afterwards: '7 ic Cynepeng eode to Cynewulfeshyrste to nimanne hafocas 7 þær in huse ic fand siex menn 7 hira cynne 7 hie forsocon God ond Crist 7 macodon niwe gelicnesse Ceglises ofsleandes Molor 7 gebiddon hit þæt eft cumen to Eorþe þa rodorsearwas 7 ic þorfte weorcan hearde eftcierran hie to Gode ond Criste.': `And I Cynepeng went to Kinnelshurst to take hawks', I suppose for falconry, ‘and there in a house I found six men and their families who forsook God and Christ and made a new image of Kahless slaying Molor and were praying to it that the sky-devices should come back to Earth, and I had to work hard to turn them back to God and Christ..' ... so the South Pacific in 1945 was not the first time that religious leaders have had trouble with cargo cults."

"And things likely slowly settled back to normal. Industry came back at last, this time home-grown. Iron ore miners came again to the base of Minner Head Fell, and in 1834 coalminers again to Kimmerdack, but both soon left, for both places had been worked out long ago. But a thousand years before, the iron ore of mInnIHor HuD and the coal of qInemar Daq went a long way to keeping the alien occupation running. The names mean `Ox Hill' and `Cynemær's Place'.".

"This bit looks like someone had trouble getting alienisms out of the local population's speech. It's a bit like the Appendix Probi, that's a Roman list of right and wrong spellings that some Roman wrote for Latin. Lets look at it: ‘Ond þa rihte word to sprecanne fore Gode ond mannum sind: secgan oððe sprecan ne cgatlian,': And the correct words to speak before God and men are: ‘to say' or ‘to speak' not ‘to jattle'..."

"Yes," I said, "That looks like it's no new thing. In Starfleet there's been trouble and arguments about crew who have learned Klingon casually mixing it with English, and orders telling it to stop; and people saying "jattling" for "speaking" was one of them. Some people do all sorts of things to sound new and picturesque."

He continued: "lufian ne bangian (love, not bang), sceotan ne bahhian (shoot, not baH), sweord ne etl (sword, not ‘etlh), helm ne mif (helmet, not mIv), bar ne targ (boar, not targh), min lufling ne bangoi (my love, not bangoy), an twa þrie feower fyf ne wa cea wecg los fag (one two three four five, not wa' cha' wej loS vagh), and so on."