(urth) Short Sun Notes: Mucor

[Andrew Mason]

A happy Feast of Saint Katharine to you all.

I recently finished reading _Short Sun_, and as I went along I found
myself encountering a lot of puzzles, and also possibly seeing some
solutions to existing puzzles, so I thought it would be useful to post
some comments here. I plan to do so intermittently in coming weeks. As
is my wont, I think that quite a lot is reasonably clear, and it’s
possible to grasp the broad outline of the story without solving all
the mysteries, but an amazing amount is not clear – about Neighbours,
about inhumi, about gods, about trees, about the Rajan’s identity
(it’s obvious who two of him are, but, given what he says about the
pen-case, who is the third?) and so on.

I think I _may_ have spotted Silk’s father. (Not Typhon. And I don’t
just mean Tussah.)

Anyhow: a while ago we were discussing the Mucor/Pike/Oreb scene in
_Long Sun_, and I raised the question whether Mucor may have the power
to summon ghosts (as Silk later suggests) and whether she may be able
to communicate to others her power of out-of-body travel.

As to the first: I think she has. In RTTW, at Blood’s mansion, Pig
meets Mucor, but then enters Hyacinth’s suite and apparently meets
Hyacinth – he smells her perfume and she kisses him. It seems quite
likely that the beautiful woman whom Pig met earlier when exploring
the mansion was also Hyacinth; the Rajan doesn’t realise this at the
time, because he only knows the story of the mansion being haunted by
an ugly woman, i.e. Mucor; but Pig insists the woman was beautiful,
and it’s not clear why he would think of Mucor as such. So I think
it’s likely Mucor has summoned the ghost of Hyacinth, as she earlier
did the ghost of Pike.

As to the second; this is less clear. One possible indication is that
it’s said Remora sent the ‘crazy’ woman away because she was driving
other people crazy. But the main evidence has to do with Mora and Fava
and their power of possession. It seems quite likely that Mucor is
the source of this. It’s the same kind of possession she does, and not
at all like the standard inhumi form of astral travel. When the Rajan
meets them possessing Vadsig, he initially thinks that the possessor
is Mucor, but when he says it can’t be, because ‘Mucor would be alone,
I think’, Vadsig giggles – suggesting that Mucor is around somewhere
and the possessors do know her. Earlier, Hide has a dream involving
two little girls (Mora and Fava) and a wooden doll (which, on the
basis of something the Rajan works out later, would seem to be Mucor).
Finally on reaching Mucor’s island, the Rajan says to his companions
‘you’re wrong when you say that Mucor does not know you. She knows all
of you almost as well as she knows me’, which suggests she has been,
in some form, with the party on their travels. (Though how Mucor
contacted Mora in the first place remains a mystery.)