Seawrack's Arm

Stuart Hamm · 17 Mar 2009, 06:40 · from 2009-March.txt.gz

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From: hammstu at sbcglobal.net (Stuart Hamm)
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:40:36 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Seawrack's Arm
In-Reply-To: <COL109-W562AF8768ACF4493F68EE2D7980 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <111252.20372.qm at web81402.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Again, I'm re-re-reading and really trying to get a grip on this series...(I know,right??)
?
I'll try to find the passage manana but I believe it's made clear that Babbie?took off her arm?the first time she tried to get on the boat....
?
?
I'm buying part of her one arm thing being a visual nod?to Venus de Milo...a bit of humor form GW??

???? Mobile ? (415) 786-3624
???? Skype?? stuart.hamm
myspace.com/stuhamm
? ??? stuarthamm.net

--- On Mon, 3/16/09, b sharp <bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:

From: b sharp <bsharporflat at hotmail.com>
Subject: (urth) Seawrack's Arm
To: urth at urth.net
Date: Monday, March 16, 2009, 9:01 PM

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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