(urth) Wall of Nessus

[Mr Thalassocrat]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 5:17 AM, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

> Despite my recent musings about when and why the Wall of Nessus may have
> been built, upon further reflection I think I can establish from the text
> that it antedates both the autarchy and Typhon.
>
> Jonas came from an earlier time period and knew far more than Severian
> about
> the past. Sev questioned him, when they were in Saltus, about the strange,
> man-like creatures they had seen when they passed through the Wall. He
> asked: "When we were going through the Wall, you said the things we saw in
> there were soldiers, and you implied they had been stationed there to
> resist
> Abaia and the others." (CLAW, chap. VIII)
>
> Sev wanted to know if the man-apes he saw in the mine were also hybrids
> like
> those in the Wall and why the autarchs had not used human soldiers. There
> follows some debate about that, but it is not germane to my point. Jonas
> said: "The old autarchs, who were not autarchs or called so, did use human
> soldiers. But the warriors they had created by humanizing animals, and
> perhaps, in secret by bestializing men, were more loyal. They had to be,
> since the populace - who hated their rulers - hated these inhuman servitors
> more still. Thus the servitors could be made to endure things that human
> soldiers would not. That may have been why they were used in the Wall. Or
> there may be some other explanation entirely."
>
> Regardless of why hybrids were used in the Wall rather than humans, the
> point is that rulers (plural), before the autarchy, stationed defenders in
> the Wall. Typhon was the last ruler before the first autarch, Ymar, and
> those two were contemporaries. So, if Jonas is to be believed, the Wall was
> there before Typhon. That section of text also strongly suggests that the
> purpose of the Wall was to resist the mountain-sized monsters in the
> oceans.
>
>
But isn't that contradicted a little later in the same scene? IIRC, Sev
points out the walls aren't going to be much use against creatures the size
of Abaia, and Jonas agrees, indicating that the walls are actually for
defense against Abaia et al's human followers.



> That latter detail may be somewhat at odds with Cyriaca's story, and after
> Typhon was revived on the mountain he speaks as if the monsters in the
> oceans were news to him ("There are powers in the seas now who would rule."
> [SWORD, chap. XXVI] ), but that's the way it goes.
>
That "... in the seas *now* ..." is an annoying little itch. Of course, in
UOTNS and the susbequent cycle volumes, Abaia etc infest the seas in
Typhon's day.
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