Short Sun Notes: Mucor

A happy Feast of Saint Katharine to you all. I recently finished reading Short Sun, and as I went along I found myself encountering a lot of puzzles, and also possibly seeing some solutions to existing puzzles, so I thought it would be useful to post some comments here. I plan to do so intermittently in coming weeks. As is my wont, I think that quite a lot is reasonably clear, and it’s possible to grasp the broad outline of the story without solving all the mysteries, but an amazing amount is not clear — about Neighbours, about inhumi, about gods, about trees, about the Rajan’s identity (it’s obvious who two of him are, but, given what he says about the pen-case, who is the third?) and so on. I think I may have spotted Silk’s father. (Not Typhon. And I don’t just mean Tussah.) Anyhow: a while ago we were discussing the Mucor/Pike/Oreb scene in Long Sun, and I raised the question whether Mucor may have the power to summon ghosts (as Silk later suggests) and whether she may be able to communicate to others her power of out-of-body travel. As to the first: I think she has. In RTTW, at Blood’s mansion, Pig meets Mucor, but then enters Hyacinth’s suite and apparently meets Hyacinth — he smells her perfume and she kisses him. It seems quite likely that the beautiful woman whom Pig met earlier when exploring the mansion was also Hyacinth; the Rajan doesn’t realise this at the time, because he only knows the story of the mansion being haunted by an ugly woman, i.e. Mucor; but Pig insists the woman was beautiful, and it’s not clear why he would think of Mucor as such. So I think it’s likely Mucor has summoned the ghost of Hyacinth, as she earlier did the ghost of Pike. As to the second; this is less clear. One possible indication is that it’s said Remora sent the “crazy” woman away because she was driving other people crazy. But the main evidence has to do with Mora and Fava and their power of possession. It seems quite likely that Mucor is the source of this. It’s the same kind of possession she does, and not at all like the standard inhumi form of astral travel. When the Rajan meets them possessing Vadsig, he initially thinks that the possessor is Mucor, but when he says it can’t be, because “Mucor would be alone, I think”, Vadsig giggles — suggesting that Mucor is around somewhere and the possessors do know her. Earlier, Hide has a dream involving two little girls (Mora and Fava) and a wooden doll (which, on the basis of something the Rajan works out later, would seem to be Mucor). Finally on reaching Mucor’s island, the Rajan says to his companions “you’re wrong when you say that Mucor does not know you. She knows all of you almost as well as she knows me”, which suggests she has been, in some form, with the party on their travels. (Though how Mucor contacted Mora in the first place remains a mystery.)

Also, in regards to the below, one of the girls is equated with hyacinth in the dream. Together they certainly reach back to talk to hy, with much the same mechanism that inhuma and our narrator dream travel. The question is, ghost of hy or hy temporarily pulled forward from a point when she was alive? Sent from my iPhone

Andrew Mason wrote (25-11-2012 23:17):

C'mon, ya can't say that and then leave us hangin, dyin to tear yer hypothessus to bits.

Very true. That's in a later dream of the Rajan's, I think, but the two are clearly connected. I find it hard to see how Mora can be Hyacinth - when she turns into Hyacinth, Fava turns into a doll with Chenilles' knife through her, i.e., I take it, Mucor (who was possessing Orpine when Chenille stabbed her) - and in both cases it doesn't seem to make sense to see them as the same person. But the people who appear in this dream - Mora, Fava, Scylla and (implicitly) Mucor - are the same people who appear in Hide's dream, and are genuinely present with the travellers; so that does seem to be evidence that Hyacinth is there as well - perhaps Mucor is still drawing her spirit.

Any special reason to think it's the latter? I think ghosts can certainly exist in this world - that would seem to follow from the combination of out-of-body travel, such as Mucor does, and a genuine afterlife, as revealed by Silk's vision on the Aureate Path. But if Mucor is indeed reaching back in time to a point when Hyacinth was alive, then she might have done the same with Pike.