Seawrack's Arm

b sharp · 17 Mar 2009, 04:01 · from 2009-March.txt.gz

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From: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:01:33 -0400
Subject: (urth) Seawrack's Arm
Message-ID: <COL109-W562AF8768ACF4493F68EE2D7980 at phx.gbl>

The other initial mystery about Seawrack is how she came to have
one arm. My first thought (again hearkening back to BotNS themes) 
is that she was produced asexually, a bud grown from The Mother and in need
of haste, she was released prematurely before her last arm was formed.

Later she does say she remembers having a real mother before The Mother. But
I think we are meant to believe krait when he asserts that Seawrack is a 
perpetual liar. I tend to think she is lying when she says things that make
her seem more human (as she was instructed to do) and telling the truth when
she reveals siren-ish things. 

When Horn re-finds her sitting on a rock after a long separation
he seems to report she was reverting and seems more coiled around
the rock than sitting.  In a conversation soon after that we might get a moment
of truth from her when she says that drowned dead bodies are for eating
(that could be the real motivation for being a siren, they are predators..).

James Wynn suggests she could have been built from the corpse of the pirate-
woman Horn killed earlier. That's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of...
but I get the impression she had been a siren for a while..long enough to have
developed the sense that dead sailors are for eating and needing retraining to
not eat raw fish.

I am suspicious of that pirate ship. It is all black, and Horn thinks the people
on it are mostly women. Perhaps they are all women? I keep thinking of BotNS and
how Abaia is twice suggested as having a physical presence above the water in the
shape of a ship. And there are the Corn Maidens and the undines associated with him.

A short while after Horn shot one of the pirate-women and she fell into the sea,
he awakes to find blood all over the deck. He has a vague fantasy about the woman
he shot swimming and following their boat and jumping aboard but he dismisses that
as an impossibility. But it wouldn't be impossible for a siren/mermaid. Perhaps it
was his shot that took her not-so-necessary arm off? And I wonder if the black ship
wasn't an above-water creation of The Mother for carrying her offspring.

-bsharp
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