[What Came Before]

If nothing else, Anissi proves half-Norsirai children are OK if they're girls.

[What Came Before]

Boys are potential threats right?

Girls though are property.  And blonds are rare in their part of the world.  Why burn up some valuable property when you could sell a girl to another tribe for some pretty great horses.   Or salt.

Also, just an unreliable narrator and Cnaiur doesn't remember it right or know the truth, he only knows the story he's told himself.  If the scylvendi women broke custom in how they treated his mother's blond haired offspring then that breaking of custom would have a corresponding shattering effect on Cnaiur, leaving him with a more erratic impression of the event.  Perhaps he tells himself it was a boy, because a wife giving birth to a slave's male child would be an offense worth killing the child.  Perhaps he tells himself it was a girl because girls are girls, thus it's obviously okay to kill the child.  Perhaps it was neither gender, but a 'thing' like the ones Esmenet and the others bore, and Cnaiur can't process that, so he variably calls it girl or boy because it is more convenient to give it a familiar label and dismiss the thought than the inconvenient thought of recalling his mother giving birth to a monster--particularly when the man who impregnated her had also been filling Cnaiur with his semen as well.  All the worse if he gets some jealous 'pleasure' at the thought of his mother's death because her death means that one of Moenghus' other lovers is gone, leaving him all to Cnaiur.  By repressing/redirecting and labeling the event Cnaiur can channel the thoughts away from a direction that will remind him of his sexual relations with Moenghus.

[What Came Before]

Perhaps it was neither gender, but a 'thing' like the ones Esmenet and the others bore, and Cnaiur can't process that, so he variably calls it girl or boy because it is more convenient to give it a familiar label

This makes sense. The Scylvendi don't seem to have a word, a cultural concept, of 'homosexual', so it's logical they wouldn't have one for 'intersex' either. Just as Cnaiur can only grasp his sexuality in terms of dominating other men ("most violent of all men", "breaker of horses and men") and 'proving' his normality by taking Serwe ("my proof! my prize!"), so he can only use the terms and concepts his culture has provided him with to describe his half-sibling. It cannot be anything other than either 'boy' or 'girl', just as Cnaiur himself cannot be anything other than 'man' and sex cannot be anything other than a 'violent' 'breaking'.

[What Came Before]

So I was kinda right in the other post where I thought they killed the baby - I just thought it was a girl that was killed.

Possibly the Scylvendi are used to taking slave wives back from their pilgrimages. Thus a girl baby taken in isn't so anathama to their culture.

The thing is, I'd bet it's a mistake, but it's also, IMO, so damn easy to rationalise after the fact that it may as well be taken as canon.

But although that's fun to do, the real deal is to ask the guy.

Actually, sounds like a fine excuse for fan fiction!? The blonde Scylvendi! (or do I remember wrong and they don't all have black hair?)

then threw the baby into the fire cuz it kept changing gender.

Win! lol!

Looked it up on my kindle

Now that's the power of PDF! I almost want to pirate the books I own in dead tree format, so I can do searches!

[What Came Before]

If nothing else, Anissi proves half-Norsirai children are OK if they're girls.

Lol, weren't you the one rocking my boat on Cnaiur loving his half-sister... some nonsense about birth dates, decades removed from each other ?

+1 on girls = property, lockesnow... But Cnaiur's Mom owns property... Gah! Property owning property. What had Earwa come to?

Big +1 on own Birthing Abominations and introspective indigestion .

[What Came Before]

Lol, weren't you the one rocking my boat on Cnaiur loving his half-sister... some nonsense about birth dates, decades removed from each other ?

The dates (assuming the EG is accurate) indicate that Anissi is not the daughter of Moenghus by Cnaiur's mother. She's still half-Norsirai, though, according to tDtCB (actually, I'm going by her PoN wiki entry, since I've lent my copy of tDtCB to my brother). So the Utemot don't seem to have an automatic "kill all half-blooded children" policy.

+1 on girls = property, lockesnow... But Cnaiur's Mom owns property... Gah! Property owning property. What had Earwa come to?

If RSB is serious about the Scylvendi being based in some ways on the real-world Scythians and Sarmatians, then women owning property would make sense. Part of what made the Greeks and Romans view the Scythian and Sarmatian tribes as weird and alien was their treatment of women as (at least in some ways) equal to men. Gave rise to the Amazon myths, among other things.

[What Came Before]

Anissi could be Moenghus' granddaughter, but I think Kellhus might have seen that stamped in her face.

and even if Moenghus' granddaughter were only 1/4 Norsirai, if the Norsirai or Dunyanic traits are dominant then a 1/4 would look like a half.  Her children, if they were blond, would probably be called half Norsirai as well.

[What Came Before]

Perhaps, I might have added the [jokes][/jokes] tag to both those, Duskweaver . I thought I was being obvious previously in suggesting that it was telling of Scylvendi culture, as you highlighted, that they burnt the boy and kept the girl.

+1 lockesnow on Mendellian traits - if I recall correctly. And I think that's also the consensus Duskweaver and I came to last time about Kellhus reading Anissi's heritage in her face. Plus Anissi would betray or we'd think she would betray half-Dunyain characteristics.

[What Came Before]

Perhaps, I might have added the [jokes][/jokes] tag to both those, Duskweaver .

No, I got that. It's just that the ex-teacher in me often has a pathological need to clarify things, even when it's not strictly necessary. People tell me it's a form of arrogance, but what the hell do they know?

[What Came Before]

So long as you doth not protest my pathological need to respond in kind ... actually, probably all too human, in my case.

[What Came Before]

When maithenet is killed his last words to esmenet are, "tell my brother that..." and he's dead.  That conversation is yet an extension of this one caused by kelmomas.
And before I forget, the daughter its safe. Where? And did esmi only tell kel about the passageways but not her youngest daughter?

[What Came Before]

Theliopa is the elder daughter (if that is who you are referring to). I think Esmenet dotes on Kelmomas far more than Theliopa, who she does note feel she can relate to like she can Kelmomas (even though that feeling is merely conditioned). Kelmomas will have the advantage of the passageways where the others will not. Where Theliopa is, though, I cannot say.

Maithanet's last line troubles me. Why, as a writer of Bakkers style, include it at all? We had just been clued in to how misguided the half-Dunyain Maithanet had been this whole time, so perhaps this final line with it's gravitas is, even though lacking plot information, an indication that Maithanet had figured it all out at the last second, and it is up to the reader to pick up on that and finish his thought using the available information! Though, this is coming from someone who believes that Bakker is trying to condition the reader as much or more than the Dunyain condition the Dramatis personæ, so, take it as you will

[What Came Before]

Theliopa is a critical resource... she's Esmenet's copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to Earwa. Anyone would be foolish to simply dispose of her.

Also, it's clear that Maithanet, thinking Esmenet finally cracked, was doing what he could to safeguard the Empire (including making sure the children are safe, during and after the Custodian's Revolt) - until he realizes about Kelmomas, when Inrilatas makes note in the conversation of this thread title. By then Maithanet realizes all the gears, already, in motion, by Kellhus and by Kelmomas and Esmenet is just a cog/goal. More importantly, that Kellhus, likely doesn't care about the details of the New Empire's fall or that he's factored the fall/near-fall into his plans - seeing farther than his flerwed half-relations.

Maithanet's last line troubles me. Why, as a writer of Bakkers style, include it at all? We had just been clued in to how misguided the half-Dunyain Maithanet had been this whole time, so perhaps this final line with it's gravitas is, even though lacking plot information, an indication that Maithanet had figured it all out at the last second, and it is up to the reader to pick up on that and finish his thought using the available information! Though, this is coming from someone who believes that Bakker is trying to condition the reader as much or more than the Dunyain condition the Dramatis personæ, so, take it as you will

So tropy as to practically beg subversion ?

[What Came Before]

So tropy as to practically beg subversion ?

It has no hope of subverting the cliched "melodramatic dying words" trope, but I have hope that Maitha will offer us more revelations yet 

[What Came Before]

I can think of some meager twests rather than whatever he was going to say being really, truly important... No-Revelation at All? Flerwed Probability? Maithanet is speaking to someone else there - a) because Kellhus was watching b) insert entity here?