Details of Barrayar I have forgotten

[beatrice_otter]

Do we know what Padma's Da's name was?  We can presume his father's name was Ivan, as Ivan would have been named after him.  Do we know what Aral's older brother's name was, or Aral's middle name?

What are the Vorbarra colors?  Are they red-and blue like the colors of the imperium, so that Barrayaran soldiers in parade dress are in fact wearing Vorbarra livery?  Would there then be a difference between livery and a military uniform?  I'm pretty sure we only see Gregor wearing nice suits and military uniforms, we don't see him ever wear his House uniform.  Of course military uniform usually trumps House uniform, but it doesn't always seem to.

Comments

[aella_irene]

And Aral's sister doesn't even get the conversation. She just gets a grave.

(My issues with LMB's complete failure to turn any of the dead and unnamed women into anything more than fricking cardboard let me show you them.)

(My urge to write the fic where Miles completely screws up an Auditorial investigation, because the beginnings-- the very beginnings-- were during the Cetagandan war, and Aral's elder siblings were involved at the tail end of the very beginning, and he knows so little about his aunt and uncle, and takes Count Piotr's war stories as utter truth, I will suppress it.)

[philomytha]

Aral's sister isn't even in the story half the time--it's just Aral watching his mother and brother get killed, and no mention that his sister was even there. I suppose you could try to paper this over by constructing a theory that she died of something else, before the massacre, but it doesn't help much.

And I see no need to suppress the urge to write that fic! I'd read it...

[beatrice_otter]

(My urge to write the fic where Miles completely screws up an Auditorial investigation, because the beginnings-- the very beginnings-- were during the Cetagandan war, and Aral's elder siblings were involved at the tail end of the very beginning, and he knows so little about his aunt and uncle, and takes Count Piotr's war stories as utter truth, I will suppress it.)

No, actually, please write that! (I didn't even remember that he had a sister, that's how short shrift she gets.)

[aella_irene]

Mark sees her grave, in the scene where he's walking through the graveyard. It's all we have.

[lannamichaels]

And it doesn't seem like Aral's First Wife even *has* a marked grave, since Mark doesn't see it. (Does *Mark* know Aral was married previously?)

[beatrice_otter]

I dunno whether Mark knows, but under the circumstances I highly doubt she's buried in the Vorkosigan family plot. I will bet you quite a lot that given how short a time she had been a Vorkosigan and the mysterious circumstances surrounding her death, that her own family and Piotr decided to quietly bury her with her Vorrutyer family. (I doubt Aral was in any condition to be making such decisions.) If Piotr was embarrassed enough over the whole thing to possibly kill her, I doubt he wanted to keep her or any reminders of her after her death. And if I had a daughter/sister/cousin/whatever who I suspected had been murdered by her husband or her father-in-law (even if I thought they might have been justified, as might have been the case) I would not have wanted her buried in their family plot.

[philomytha]

Yes, I'd expect that her body was returned to the Vorrutyers.

Mark probably knows about her, as part of his exhaustive study of the Vorkosigans. Galen seems to have been pretty obsessed with Aral. I wonder whether he thinks Aral killed her.

[lannamichaels]

It's probably not surprising that I have Thoughts on what happened to her body. (I have been trying to write Petya Introduces Guy To His Mother for how long now?) I don't think she went back to the Vorrutyers for a few reasons, the first being Hello Patriarchy. There are several possible murderers involved here, and Aral's concerns aside, I don't think Piotr should be more suspicious than Count Vorrutyer is. Her behavior wasn't looking good for the Vorrutyers either, and Piotr and Count Vorrutyer weren't just in-laws, they were first cousins. The Vorrutyers were mainstays of the conservatives, Piotr definitely was, so they were close relatives, probably good friends and war allies (they married their children off less than a decade after a civil war; they were probably on the same side), and they'd made an arranged marriage for their children. All very happy and peaceful, and then Pierre Vorrutyer's daughter starts being Sexual Freedom, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Aral's a possible murderer, so is Ges, but I think Piotr and Count Vorrutyer have equal weight when it comes to possibly being the murderer.

Also, considering the Maien: it's the close relatives. The brother. It being the father isn't too far off. It might even be the fathers *duty*, the way they see it: the mother kills the muties, the fathers kill the dishonorable women. And so the patriarchy is maintained.

And now we come to Lady Vorrutyer Vorkosigan. Even if it was suicide, no one is going to be eager to claim her as their relative. Both sides are equally as guilty of the cover-up, but who has to have her in their family graveyard? They can't put her somewhere else, that would be just making the scandal bigger. So, which one, Vorkosigan or Vorrutyer? They weren't divorced. They weren't seperated. She was married to Aral. Olivia is in the Vorkosigan family graveyard, even though she was murdered for being a Vorbarra. It seems that wives are buried with their husbands. If they were divorced, there would be a much better case for the Vorrutyers having to take her, but I think they were probably playing not-it and Piotr lost and had to bury her as Aral's wife, which she was, instead of as Count Vorrutyer's unmarried-or-divorced daughter.

Even Ges, her brother, thinks of her as Aral's wife. The patriarchy is enjoying itself when it comes to destroying this woman completely.

[lannamichaels]

Considering the Vorrutyers, I wouldn't be shocked if Piotr said "hey, she was a Vorrutyer, you get her" and Count Vorrutyer said "hello no, she married a Vorkosigan" and Piotr was overruled.

I dunno. The whole bridal bed imagry in the epilogue to Cryoburn fills me with rage. HE HAD TWO WIVES. And, yes, there are two sides, he could be buried between them, THAT'S NOT WHAT IT SAYS. It's just, her erasure *pisses me off*. Of all of them, that one bothers me the most. Yeah, she was probably honor-killed, no one cares, and even the narrative insults her.

[zdenka]

The non-mentioning of Aral's first wife in that scene really bothered me too.

I would wonder if Cordelia would even want to be buried on Barrayar, except that she made a promise to Bothari.

[lannamichaels]

You should write it!

And, well, my rage at the treatment of the Dead Women, I have already showed. ;)