Agia

Agia has always struck me as being rather too well educated to be from the stratum of society Severian finds her in when he meets her. She seems to know quite a bit about the Conciliator and the Botanic Gardens. Her little speach about the Conciliator at the beginning of V. 1, Ch. 19 (p. 118, Orb ed.) has always seemed a bit odd to me, coming from her. But, then again, I don't believe we ever find out much about her past.

Or: I've never seen Agia as being generally educated. Rather, she seems to have picked up a lot of odd historical facts, or factoids. Her offhand reference to the Conciliator living "say, thirty thousand years ago" (in Shadow, Chapter 19) is unusually precise for a Commonwealth citizen. And the odd phrasing "thousand years" instead of "chiliads" or "millenia" suggests to me that she heard it from someone who is not a Commonwealth citizen. Perhaps someone who was alive that long ago? I see one obvious suspect.

(Wild speculation: could Hethor have been the (unseen) soldier who betrays the chiliarch freed by Severian?)

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