(urth) Baldanders
mournings glory
mourningsglory at hotmail.com
Thu May 18 12:39:25 PDT 2006
>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
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