(urth) Baldanders

[mournings glory]

>From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com>

>I had the impression that the undines were women
>once who'd gone through a process like-but-unlike
>what Baldanders is doing to himself: like, in its main
>physical effects; unlike, because they allowed it to
>be done to them in service to another, while Baldanders
>is doing it to himself in service _of_ himself.

Nicely put, and as I've speculated recently 
(http://listserver.dreamhost.com/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2006-April/001892.html), 
I believe a case can be made that the undines are actually serving the 
Hierodules rather than the Megatherians.

Further evidence can be adduced in the visit of Famulimus, Ossipago and 
Barbatus to Baldander's castle.

Says Famulimus to Severian at one point, "You know the water women, I 
believe." But how do the three Hierodules know this? Have they been 
monitoring Sev all along since his inital encounter with Juturna and the 
nenuphars? Were they present, if remotely, via long-range reconnaissance, at 
Cephissus? Or have they just read the reports, so to speak?

Also, when the Hierodule saucer is about to flit off from the castle, notice 
how Severian describes one of its crewmembers: "and then, just as I was 
wondering if the crew did not ever peer down to see us, *the mermen,* the 
strange, uncouth beings who for a time walked the bottom below their hull, 
one of them indeed came down, head foremost like a squirrel, wreathed in 
orange light and clinging to the hull with hands and feet, though it was wet 
as any stone in a river..."

em