What's So Great About Ushas?

Matthew King · 11 Jun 2008, 16:39 · from 2008-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: automatthew at gmail.com (Matthew King)
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:39:43 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
In-Reply-To: <000a01c8cb80$c7da8b20$ebd24a0c at rclackey.stic.net>
References: <000a01c8cb80$c7da8b20$ebd24a0c at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <cdbc18280806110939w2a95e8eeg48609960011c2587 at mail.gmail.com>

> I don't believe there is any mention at all of Typhon's children in the Urth
> Cycle, and the only black bean story I recall is the one told by Jonas at
> the very end of SHADOW, which makes no mention of the sun. Anyway,
> "grave of the sun" sounds like that sun is already dead. Where is the quote
> found?

Jonas's story, minus the interruption:
---
In the old times, the lords of this world feared no one but their own
people, and to defend themselves against them built a great fortress
on a hilltop to the north of the city. It was not called Nessus then,
for the river was unpoisoned. Many of the people were angry at the
building of that citadel, holding it to be their right to slay their
lords without hindrance if they so desired. But others went out in the
ships that ply between the stars, returning with treasure and
knowledge. In time there returned a woman who had gained nothing among
them but a handful of black beans.

She displayed the beans to the lords of men, and told them that unless
she were obeyed she would cast them into the sea and so put an end to
the world. They had her seized and torn to bits, for they were a
hundred times more complete in their domination than our Autarch.
---

I had interpreted the beans as the genesis of the sea monsters Abaia,
et al.  It is interesting that Jonas claims this to be the almost the
only story he knows.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net