Mystery of Agia

Ryan Dunn · 20 Jan 2011, 21:33 · from 2011-January.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: ryan at liftingfaces.com (Ryan Dunn)
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:33:21 -0500
Subject: (urth) Mystery of Agia
In-Reply-To: <758650.8590.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <758650.8590.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <1D636C62-2D4D-47E8-90B4-327840AFB2B9 at liftingfaces.com>

On Jan 20, 2011, at 3:46 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:

> As far as Agia goes, Sev sees her naked with her brother, even though she is like the only woman in the book Sev does not actually have intercourse with, right?  Yeah, don't the Pelerines strip and search her?  She's a woman.

Yes, she has breasts, and hips, this is true. She also has an abnormally deep, unmistakable timbre in her voice.

She also has chestnut hair which likes to fleck to gold under the seemingly omnipresent sunlight that hits her features. Damn you, aureoles.

Some other stuff that bugs me about the twins...

. .

IN AGILUS'S CELL:

"I pushed her away - not into a chair this time but against the wall. Her head struck the stone, and though it must have been padded by her abundant hair, the sound was as sharp as the tap of a mason's hammer. All the strength seemed to leave her knees; she slid down until she was sitting on the straw. I would never have guessed that Agia was capable of weeping, but she wept.

(I've expressed my issue with the specificity of this passage before, how Severian goes to the trouble to set up her volume of hair against the sound of her skull hitting the wall, and how she goes slack, quiet, then weeps... does not black out.)

"Agilus asked, 'What did she do?' There was no emotion beyond curiosity in the question."

(An awkward reaction, and makes me think he is disconnected from genuine human emotion the same way Talos was.)

[...]

"Agia rose, brushing the straw from her knees and rounded thighs. As though she realized only now that she was naked, she picked up the blue- green brocade gown I remembered so well and clasped it to her."

(What is up with these two being so aloof? More than once we catch them remembering to act human after the fact.)

. .

AT AGILUS'S EXECUTION:

"From far away came a scream, Agia's voice as unmistakable as a face seen by lightning. Something in its timbre made me feel she had not been watching at all, but had known nevertheless when her twin died."

(That voice again, its timbre, its unmistakability.)

. .

...ryan

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