(urth) Mucor and Oreb in the manse

[Roy C. Lackey]

James Wynn quoted and wrote:
> > If you want to say that Mucor's "seen you with no clothes on" meant only
> > that she had seen Silk when he was undressed but not totally naked,
fine.
> > Then you can dismiss the the black-clad imp Silk imagined while he was
> > sleeping after getting back from Blood's villa and go straight to the
next
> > time Silk slept, which was the night of Oreb, Mucor and Pike, and chalk
the
> > black-clad imp up as just part of a crazy dream. It was just as hot that
> > night and he had undressed for bed. This is known because he stopped to
put
> > his trousers on before he went downstairs to look for Oreb (LAKE, ch. 1,
> > 32).
>
> As I said before, the above isn't even YOUR favorite theory of when
> Mucor saw Silk naked. So--for you--it doesn't really tie Mucor to the
> night in question. To your reading, it means that Mucor should always be
> thought of as possibly there at any time, so why not then as well? Okay.
> That's tenuous, but defensible.
>
> But if Wolfe had Mucor, Oreb, and Pike's ghost appear to Silk on the
> same night (like Dickensian ghosts of Christmas) --two at the same
> time--and each having little or nothing to do with each other, it would
> be the greatest red herring Wolfe has ever laid on his readers to my
> memory.

But the fact remains that Pike's ghost wasn't seen at the same time or place
as Oreb and Mucor. Pike's ghost came minutes later, on the landing, and
neither Oreb nor Mucor were with him.

As Silk told Mamelta, Pike was dead. Neither Oreb nor Mucor were dead on the
night in question in the manse. The sounds of floorboards and Pike's bed
creaking and a closing door are the sorts of things associated with ghosts.

Why would Silkhorn, astrally traveling in time, bother to do those things?
It was Pike's bed in Pike's room, not Silk's. Silk had no personal emotional
ties to Pike's bedroom, but Pike's ghost might.

Pike's hat ties Silk to Hy at Blood's villa, where she had a shrine to
Kypris. Silk didn't like thinking about what uses the hat might be put to by
a whore and her clients, and the goddess was in her that night at the villa.
Kypris may also have been in Rose at the time of her dalliance with young
Pike, which resulted in Blood. The dropped hat and old man's smile may have
been his way of saying that he understood Silk's attraction to Hy because
much the same thing had happened to him decades ago.

-Roy