Wall of Nessus

Roy C. Lackey · 14 Jun 2010, 07:13 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:13:21 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wall of Nessus
References: <000901cb080c$a24bd6a0$3dd14a0c@rclackey><AANLkTimNF_7phiZuvwCMYZObOBCVpmbPVbROd7kc1Hq4 at mail.gmail.com><006601cb0879$4ddd39c0$59cc4a0c@rclackey>
	<AANLkTilLT4407kUNfZU4wY0V73RjJAk-UllkDYkyuiHT at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <00b101cb0b91$16331100$bacf4a0c@rclackey>

Andrew wrote:
> Just on a different tack, I think it's easy to miss what Jonas' actually
> meant to explain in his interrupted story at the gate. I think it was
> clearly offered in answer to Sev's question to Talos about why the
> half-beast guards in the wall, not about the existence of the wall itself.
>
> Jonas starts on his story, explaining that the citadel was built in the
> olden days by the rulers of Urth to protect themselves against the
populace.
> Some people then left Urth to go amongst the stars, eventually returning.
> One woman came back with magic seeds, defied the rulers and on being
> condemned by them, cast the seeds the sea. The chaos at the gate prevents
> Jonas from finishing. (I think I've remembered all of that correctly.)

In his story, he doesn't actually say that she cast the beans into the sea,
just that she threatened to and was seized and torn to bits. But I suppose
we are to assume the beans were indeed cast. The rulers were said to fear
none but their own people, so they built the Citadel on a hill north of the
city, which was then not called Nessus. There is no mention of the curtain
wall around the Citadel at that time.

Okay so far. The Citadel was built to defend against the people. But that
doesn't explain the Wall. In Severian's time, most of the Commonwealth's
population seems to live *inside* the area circumscribed by the Wall.
Uncounted millions, anyway, so clearly the Wall was not intended to keep the
people away from the rulers in the Citadel at the center of the circular
walled city. It was intended to keep something *out* of the city.

> So how would have Jonas' story ended? Presumably the casting of the seeds
> leads to the presence of Abaia et al. How does *that* in turn lead to the
> man-beasts? My guess goes like this: Abaia et al suborned some of the
> populace; the rulers could trust nobody; they created the man-beasts as
> creatures with hard-wired loyalty not susceptible to the lure of Abaia
etc.

If that is the case, the Wall was built to defend against a threat from the
sea that didn't exist before the beans were cast, regardless of the nature
of the soldiers stationed within it. The improbable scale of the Wall
strikes me as all out of proportion to a threat the old rulers didn't take
seriously and that Typhon didn't seem concerned with. Since Typhon was the
last monarch, and the villagers and others Sev met in Typhon's era called
the city Nessus, he must have ruled many thousands of years after the Wall
was built and the city had grown so far up the river that the Citadel was no
longer north of it.

At one point in URTH Sev, going on about the size of the mirrored sails on
The Ship, said that the Wall was "a few leagues in height and a few thousand
long" (p-103). Bah! That's a Big Dumb Object.

-Roy

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