# Taste of Honey *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 11 Oct 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### m.driussi *11 Oct 1998, 04:05* "As URTH makes clear, the Old Autarch's function, both in the story and in the world, is to prepare the way for Severian. His career and his trial mark the road the New Sun must follow. So Appian is a fittingly evocative name for him. `Appian' is close to the Latin `apia' (bee), an apt name for a servant under the honey steward . . ." (from "The Death of Catherine the Weal and Other Stories," written in 1992 for Clute's book and still unpublished). Sigh. Here's a taste of honey that's far from sweet; one of the last remaining granules of thunder from an essay that must have bred whole herds of dust bunnies by now, covering hearth and heath from Hibernia to the white cliffs of Dover. Feeley's 1991 essay, which included some stuff about the honey and the bees, failed to make the Appian link (or so I thought and still believe)--hence the aformentioned granule, an erg, a spark that dreamed of being a bolt. But that's a common enough experience, I'm sure everybody knows it--you work hard on something, send it off and wait. Years go by. Nothing happens--the thing is lost under a rock in a deep cave in the middle of a black forest at the bottom of the ocean. It moulders among the boulders. When things are published, at the very least there's a sense of closure. True, the thing might not be read by many (and in that sense it is almost equivalent to being under a rock, etc.), but it is done, completed, a matter of record, for better or worse. Ah well. ---