(urth) Sev's common lineage

[Roy C. Lackey]

Mark Millman quoted and wrote:
>> He is tall compared to most people
>> but at least a head shorter than
>> every single exultant he meets. In
>> other words, he is of armiger height . . .
>
>I have yet to see any evidence that armigers are, on average or as a
>whole group, taller than optimates.  Can anyone provide documentation,
>or is this an idea that has become enshrined in the common
>understanding without actually having any support in the text?

The latter, I'm afraid. As you say:

[snip]
>  I think that the only systematic difference in height between
>classes for which evidence exists is that between exultants and
>everybody else, [snip]

The armigers are a social class, and that class is not defined by
crossbreeding between exultants and ordinary humans. When such crossbreeding
does occur, the offspring are automatically excluded from the exultant class
but do not, by default, become an armiger. Such offspring often produce
people of greater than average height, such as the fat guy outside Agilus'
cell who was taller than Severian, referred to as "surely the illegitimate
son of some exultant". (SHADOW, XXX) IIRC, Gurloes also makes reference to
some tall person as being an exultant's bastard. I can prove your point with
a quote from Agia to Sev.

"To confess the truth, I wanted them to go on thinking you might be an
armiger. Armigers go about in fancy dress so much because they're always
going to fetes and tournaments, and you have the face. That's why I thought
so myself when I first saw you. And you see, if you were, then I was someone
that somebody like that, an armiger and probably the bastard of an exultant,
might care for." (ibid., XIX)

If you will pardon my tendency to read what the text actually says, rather
than what I might like it to say, it seems perfectly obvious to me that Agia
found it necessary to distinguish between armiger dandies and exultant
bastards. In context, when she first saw him outside the rag shop wearing
his torturer's cloak, she thought he was an armiger in costume. His height
was just the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

FWIW, Valeria was an armiger, but I don't believe she was unusually tall.
Neither did Sev note that Lomer or Nicarete, also armigers, were
particularly tall.

-Roy