(urth) Seawrack's Arm

b sharp bsharporflat at hotmail.com
Mon Mar 16 21:01:33 PDT 2009


The other initial mystery about Seawrack is how she came to have
one arm. My first thought (again hearkening back to BotNS themes) 
is that she was produced asexually, a bud grown from The Mother and in need
of haste, she was released prematurely before her last arm was formed.
 
Later she does say she remembers having a real mother before The Mother. But
I think we are meant to believe krait when he asserts that Seawrack is a 
perpetual liar. I tend to think she is lying when she says things that make
her seem more human (as she was instructed to do) and telling the truth when
she reveals siren-ish things. 
 
When Horn re-finds her sitting on a rock after a long separation
he seems to report she was reverting and seems more coiled around
the rock than sitting.  In a conversation soon after that we might get a moment
of truth from her when she says that drowned dead bodies are for eating
(that could be the real motivation for being a siren, they are predators..).
 
James Wynn suggests she could have been built from the corpse of the pirate-
woman Horn killed earlier. That's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of...
but I get the impression she had been a siren for a while..long enough to have
developed the sense that dead sailors are for eating and needing retraining to
not eat raw fish.
 
I am suspicious of that pirate ship. It is all black, and Horn thinks the people
on it are mostly women. Perhaps they are all women? I keep thinking of BotNS and
how Abaia is twice suggested as having a physical presence above the water in the
shape of a ship. And there are the Corn Maidens and the undines associated with him.
 
A short while after Horn shot one of the pirate-women and she fell into the sea,
he awakes to find blood all over the deck. He has a vague fantasy about the woman
he shot swimming and following their boat and jumping aboard but he dismisses that
as an impossibility. But it wouldn't be impossible for a siren/mermaid. Perhaps it
was his shot that took her not-so-necessary arm off? And I wonder if the black ship
wasn't an above-water creation of The Mother for carrying her offspring.
 
-bsharp
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