Gate of Horn, Book of Silk

by Michael Andre-Driussi

  Zoology: the bush dog is a canid of Central and South America. Also called “vinegar dog.”

  C

  calendar “even the lengths of our years are different” among the towns of Blue and the different cities of the Long Sun Whorl (V, chap. 10, 245). See DUSRA AGAST.

  Caldé’s Palace the residence of Viron’s leader. Olivine lives here as a “ghost.” Silkhorn enters with her (VII, chap. 10, 219), takes a bath, and accepts a change of clothes. Silkhorn sees again the room where Horn and Nettle had slept, and performs private sacrifice with Olivine (VII, chap. 12). Later that night, he returns again to retrieve the knobbed stick he had left behind (VII, chap. 12, 258).

  When Hound, Pig, and Silkhorn visit Bison and Mint for lunch, the menu includes squab salad (VII, chap. 14, 284), salmon and capers (284), shirred oysters (289), roast pork (290), and pickled pilchards (303).

  Calf one of Horn’s brothers (V, chap. 3, 74), “a shopkeeper of New Viron” (VII, list). Calf, Tongue, and Tallow wanted help from Horn in past years (VII, chap. 2, 40). Calf puts up Hoof, Hide, and Vadsig when they come with Silkhorn to New Viron (VII, chap. 13, 260).

  Anatomy: the fleshy, muscular back part of the lower leg.

  Zoology: the young of cattle.

  Cantoro “a merchant of Blanko” (VI, list), he gave an ingot of gold to the war effort (VI, chap. 14, 221).

  Onomastics: Italian surname.

  Capsicum “Marrow’s mistress and executor” (VII, list; VII, chap. 13, 267). She has a slave girl (269). Capsicum was Marrow’s mistress on the Long Sun Whorl and followed him and his wife down in the first wave (VII, chap. 13, 270). The name or names of her offspring by Marrow are unknown, but Weasel is her ten-year-old grandson.

  Capsicum suspects Gyrfalcon had Marrow killed (VII, chap. 13, 272), presumably by poison. She thinks Silkhorn is Silk (274), and the note she gets from Calf seems to have confirmed this (272–73).

  In the inhumi attack on the wedding of Vadsig and Hide, she uses the opportunity to stab Gyrfalcon and is shot dead by one of his bodyguards (VII, chap. 20, 401).

  Botany: genus of peppers native to the Americas (chili pepper, sweet pepper, bell pepper).

  carabao draft animal of Gaon (V, chap. 15, 367).

  Zoology: a domesticated water buffalo of Southeast Asia, found in the Philippines, Guam, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

  Caracal a young man of New Viron who told Starling about the gang that raped and murdered Lily (“The Night Chough”).

  Zoology: a medium-sized cat in Western Asia and Africa. Closely related to the serval.

  Case of the servant girl claimed as daughter the three gray-bearded men from Skany ask the Rajan of Gaon to resolve this case for them: their town’s founder wishes to marry a girl he had formerly employed as a servant. The girl is willing, but a poor woman has come forward to claim the bride-price, saying that she is the girl’s mother. The girl denies this, saying that her father was left behind in the Long Sun Whorl and her mother perished on the lander. The immediate issue is that the girl, as orphan, would receive her own bride-price (V, chap. 6, 147–48). To resolve it, the Rajan feels he must interview both the bride and the alleged mother, at least, to determine to what degree the adoption was real (155). He also suspects that the groom is one of the three gray-bearded men (148).

  In the first mention of the case, it reminds Silkhorn of Seawrack (148). Hers is a case where an orphan girl was adopted and modified by an alien sea monster/god, who then presents this Siren as a bride to Horn, adorned with gold after the first attempt left the Siren maimed. In this light, Seawrack’s gold is her dowry.

  A volume later, Fava tells her tale of “The Washed Child,” in which a child is saved from his murderous mother and adopted by a group, only to disappear later. Commenting upon the story, Incanto says, “It interested me. The bit about the trial particularly. It reminded me of a similar case I once heard of, in which a certain woman claimed that a servant girl was her daughter, although the girl herself denied it” (VI, chap. 2, 43).

  And yet, we do not know how the Rajan solved the case. We know he went to Skany and stayed most of the summer, and thus the case itself acted as just the sort of “Siren song” to lure him away. We know he returned to Gaon. The case was important enough that he refers to it. Despite this, it remains an enigma.

  Casco “a jealous suitor, long ago” (VI, list). Appearing in Salica’s story “From the Grave.”

  Onomastics: a Spanish/Portugese surname from “helmet, shell.”

  Italian: helmet.

  Chaku “a mercenary from Gaon” (VI, list), subsequently employed by the Duko of Soldo (VI, chap. 11, 179). He is drawn to Green when Incanto warps there from the snowy pass (VI, chap. 13, 193). He and Teras perish in the sewer fight, yet later wake in the snow on Blue with the rest (VI, chap. 15, 224–25). He cannot speak or understand what is said to him after this, yet he still seems to serve Inclito (225).

  Hindi: knife; lancet.

  Chandi “a concubine” (V, list), she cannot be much over fifteen (V, chap. 9, 222). She is crying with homesickness, so the Rajan asks her to tell her real name and the town she came from. She tells him she was born on the Long Sun Whorl (where she had lived in a much bigger house and everyone had deferred to her family) but came to Blue as an infant (V, chap. 9, 222). Later, the Rajan sees that Chandi’s cheek has been scratched, presumably in a fight with Pehla (V, chap. 12, 304). Chandi means “silver” (V, chap. 16, 381). She came to wait on the Rajan after he had frightened Moti (V, chap. 12, 288).

  Myth: (Hindi) the fierce goddess.

  Onomastics: silver.

  Commentary: the details about her “real name” and the town she came from strongly suggest that Gaon is at the center of some sort of informal confederation. That is to say, the concubines are not exclusively from Gaon, so that Chota/Evensong is less an exception and more the rule.

  chem reproduction additional details of chem reproduction arise:

  “A chemical woman like Maytera Marble carries within her half the plans necessary to build a new chem, and a chemical man like Hammerstone, the other half . . . It was how they began to build Olivine” (VI, chap. 10, 159). Eyes are made by the males (VII, chap. 4, 81).

  Chenille “the woman who accompanied Auk to Green” (V, list). While sailing, Horn reads The Book of the Long Sun about Chenille “who had drawn his [Silk’s] picture in colored chalks as soon as he was gone [in Limna]” (V, chap. 2, 50). In his subsequent conversation with Marble, Horn says that even on Green, Chenille might be a better person than she was in Old Viron (V, chap. 4, 100).

  Silkhorn later finds her as a slave in the basement of Sinew’s house in Qarya (VI, chap. 24, 372; VI, chap. 25, 377). Along with Auk she had been an inhuman, a human slave of the inhumi. Unable to have children, they adopted five orphans as their own. After Silkhorn warped his mercenaries to Green and wiped out the City of the Inhumi, it seems that the surviving inhumi forced their inhumans to undertake desperate assaults against the human colonies in order to replenish their cattle stocks. Auk and Chenille fought so fiercely because their adopted children were being held hostage by the inhumi, and having failed to capture Qarya, they know their children have been drained to death (377). (See entry in LS Half.)

  Botany: chenille copperleaf is a houseplant with drooping red flowers.

  Choora “a long, straight, single-edged knife favored by the Rajan” (V, list; chap. 12, 285). An Afghan knife.

  Chota “a nickname given Evensong by her fellow concubines” (V, list). “The name (it is ‘small’) fits her” (V, chap. 12, 288). For a list of his concubines, see RAJAN OF GAON.

  Hindi: small, younger.

  Chrasmologic Writings “the sacred book revered in Viron” (VI, list). A few quotes are given in the course of the text. (See entry in LS Half.)

  • “A simple way would be to admit that myth is neither irresponsible fantasy, nor the object of weighty psychology, nor any other such thing. It is wholly other, and requires to be looked at with open ey
es” (VII, chap. 16, 324). This passage comes from most of the last part of “Epilogue, Part I” (328) in Hamlet’s Mill (1977) by de Santillana and von Dechend. This is particularly electrifying since a few deep readers of Wolfe had long suspected an influence of this book upon Severian’s Narrative.

  • “There, where a fountain’s gurgling waters play, they rush to land, and end in feast the day: they feed; then quaff; and now (their hunger fled) sigh for their friends and mourn the dead; nor cease their tears till each in slumber shares a sweet forgetfulness of human cares. Now far the night advances her gloomy reign, and setting stars roll down the azure plain: At the voice of Pas wild whirlwinds rise, and clouds and double darkness veil the skies” (VII, chap. 12, 241) is based on a passage in Book XII of Alexander Pope’s 1828 translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Pope’s version has the following slight differences:

  • Then where a fountain’s . . .

  • feasts the day . . .

  • they quaff . . .

  • friends devour’d . . .

  • Nor cease the tears . . .

  • night advanc’d her . . .

  • setting stars roll’d . . .

  • When, at the voice of Jove . . .

  • “Though trodden beneath the shepherd’s heel, The wild hyacinth blooms on the ground” (VII, chap. 20, 408) comes from a fragment of a poem by Sappho, famed poetess of Lesbos: “As on the hills the shepherds trample the hyacinth under foot, and the flower darkens on the ground.”

  Cijfer “Captain Wijzer’s wife” (VII, list; VII, chap. 5, 103). She is the one housing the comatose Jahlee in Dorp (104). She visits Silkhorn to show the letter and explain that Jahlee walks and talks at night (107).

  Dutch: digit (number or finger/toe), or statistic.

  Cilinia “Typhon’s eldest daughter” (VII, list). She is thus the girl whose computer version is Scylla of the Long Sun Whorl. She had “pledged herself in secret to one of the sea gods of . . . what would in time become our Red Sun Whorl” (VII, chap. 17, 360). Which is to say that the girl was a follower of Scylla the Great of Urth.

  Cilinia was buried in the necropolis of Nessus (VII, chap. 17, 369). Hoof sees her spirit as “a skinny girl with an angry face and straight black hair” (VII, chap. 19, 392). Seeing the bones in her casket, her spirit says, “I died young. It can’t have been long after I was scanned for the Whorl” (VII, chap. 19, 392).

  History: St. Cilinia (d. 458), the mother of St. Principius and St. Remigius, died at Laon, France.

  City of Inhumi where the lander from Pajarocu takes Horn, Sinew, and the others; where the lander from the Long Sun Whorl had delivered Auk, Chenille, and the others. Early on in Horn’s imprisonment, a Neighbor helps him escape from the underground jail in order to clear the sewer (VI, chap. 1, 20).

  The city, built by the Neighbors, is described as “a grove of disintegrating towers like a noble face rotting in the grave” (VI, chap. 21, 312), and the “towers of the Neighbor lords” (314). Its buildings, while ruinous, are still standing because the inhumi maintained Neighbor-slaves on Green long after the Neighbors had vanished from Blue.

  When Silkhorn warps to Green from Blue with the mercenaries, they arrive in the same cell he knew before. Auk sees him as Silk and urges him to escape (VI, chap. 13, 193). Silkhorn eventually gets the mercenaries to follow him, and they fight against the city, intending to kill all the inhumi through brutal tower-to-tower fighting (VI, chap. 16, 236–38). While apparently successful, this has unforeseen consequences: see CHENILLE.

  Colbacco a man who brought new men to Blanko up from the south, from villages like Cugino’s (VI, chap. 16, 244).

  Italian: a busby military cap or a fur hat.

  colorcat see GRABBER.

  Comus “a minor god, Pas’s jester” (VI, list; VI, chap. 19, 284).

  Myth: (Greek) god of festivity, son and cup-bearer of Bacchus.

  conjunction the term used for the period of closest approach between planets Blue and Green. This comes every six Blue years. (For orbital details, see SHORT SUN.)

  This use is at some variance with astronomy, wherein “conjunction” occurs whenever two planets in the sky appear close to each other. The point where planets are literally closest is called “closest approach.”

  corn while Horn’s main goal is to bring Patera Silk to New Viron, he also has a quest for corn (also known as “maize”). It seems that the corn planted by the original colonists was very abundant, but subsequent generations have fallen off, such that the colony requires new corn seed in order to survive.

  When Silkhorn wakes up on the Long Sun Whorl, he manages to fulfill this secondary goal very quickly through the cooperation of the unnamed CORN SEED MAN. This character gives him two types of corn seed, one black and the other red-and-white, and tells him the secret of maintaining high yields, which is basically through first-generation hybrids.

  Cross ’em, and you’ll get good seed. Plant it to grind and feed the stock. Don’t plant the next, though. You got to go back to these old kinds and cross again. . . . You plant them in the same hill so they’ll cross. You don’t feed that or grind it either. Plant it. Corn’ll be yellow or white. Not never red nor black. . . . Thing is, every year you got to grow some black and some red-and-white off by themselves. Got to keep ’em apart and don’t let no other corn near ’em. Do like that, and you can grow more seed next year for the year after (VII, chap. 2, 37).

  Thus the hybrid seed is a transitory breed. It is enhanced but ephemeral.

  This seems especially relevant because Silkhorn himself is a hybrid of Silk and Horn. He is enhanced, ephemeral, and ultimately transitory.

  By association with the corn-quest, Silk seems to be a type of “corn king.” There is even a hint of this in the common term “cornsilk.” The hybrid nature of Silkhorn makes this metaphor much more concrete.

  Corn, Maytera Maytera Marble, trying to remember the last time she slept, says, “We don’t ever wake up unless something wakes us. Did you know? And nothing did until Maytera Corn came in. Then I jumped up and fixed breakfast, but it was almost noon, and I never slept after that” (VII, chap. 15, 312).

  Botany: an important food grain, also known as maize.

  Commentary: the action of Marble being awakened by Corn is later repeated with her daughter Olivine being awakened by Silkhorn, further reinforcing the linkage between “corn” and Silk.

  corn seed man the unnamed character who gives Silkhorn the seeds, referred to as “the husband” (VII, chap. 2, 31). His cousin is Firefly, which might be a hint that his name is in the insect group. In preparing to go into the dark outside he lights a tin lantern from the lamp (35), which might identify him or his wife as Palm. After giving the seed, the man tells Silkhorn that he knew Silk, that he got his slug gun from Silk, presumably back in the days of the revolution, so he is probably around Horn’s age of 35 rather than Silk’s age of 43. But then the man becomes belligerent, telling him to fight or leave, even striking at Silkhorn when his back is turned. Silkhorn knocks him out with his own club-like stick, then goes away.

  Commentary: the insect-related names of The Book of the Long Sun are few. Neither Spider the spy catcher nor Patera Feeler (as a stretch) seem to fit in this case, but Locust, a boy at Silk’s palaestra, seems highly significant.

  corn seed wife the unnamed wife of the corn seed man, referred to as “the woman” (VII, chap. 2, 31). She washes Silkhorn’s fresh arm-wounds with boiled water, and then bandages them with strips of clean rag. She had gone to meet the sick woman (Hyacinth) living at the manse nearby but was brusquely turned away at the door. She begins preparing bacon and coffee while the men go out to get corn seed. Her name might be Palm.

  Corpo the assembly of Blanko (VI, chap. 1, 28).

  Italian: body: in this case, the legislative body.

  Cowslip “one of Horn’s sisters” (VII, list). Oxlip is another.

  Botany: Primula veris, wild flower and member of the Primrose family.

  Cricket “a boy, Cows
lip’s son” (VII, list). One of Horn’s nephews, he guards Seanettle with Babbie (VII, chap. 17, 338).

  Zoology: an insect that chirps.

  crocodile creature of Blue, with eight legs (VII, chap. 1, 15). Named by Gaonese. See also ELEPHANT.

  crustacean man thing during the storm that comes after Horn meets Seawrack, a strange creature comes onboard the ship (V, chap. 6, 161). Babbie rushes it and it catches him like a lapdog, about to throw the hus overboard until Seawrack tells it not to (162). After this encounter, it leaves.

  Horn speculates it is a Neighbor who had been granted immortality by the Mother, but then, having exhausted physical pleasures, threw himself into the sea, thus becoming a sort of sea titan. Seawrack knows it but does not like to speak of it.

  We know from the case of Seawrack that the Mother can bestow powers like underwater breathing and Siren song. Immortality would seem to be a different category, but Horn’s speculation (even if untrue) broadens the possibilities.

  Myth: (Greek) in Metamorphoses (book XIII), Ovid describes the meeting on an empty beach between a pre-monstrous Scylla and Glaucus, a sea god. Glaucus saw her, naked and gorgeous, and fell in love. She fled from his advances until she was trapped. He then told her he had been born human, and as a sailor he found a weird patch of undersea grass that, when he ate of it, transformed him. She rejected him still.

  In another encounter recorded by other authors, Glaucus appeared to the Argonauts during a sea storm and assisted them. (Glaucus pointed out to me by James Wynn.)

  These three details (love at first sight on the beach; a strange sea plant field; a meeting in a storm) seem relevant to Horn’s story.