Jaycee Woods

One of the pivotal characters in my draft novel Boudica and The Butcher is Mata. She is an assassin unexpectedly trapped in Pilgerruh by The Butcher’s siege of the city.

Cleaver, the city’s rebel leader, had her captured. He blackmailed/hired her to kill The Butcher.

Stuck for a name I adapted from Mata Hari. Later I may give her an appropriate last name like Maut; thus Mata Maut, so that would make her mother of death in Hindi. Alternatively, Mata Abhav; I was going for Mother of Nothing but abhav is more like deficiency related to healthy living. I see Mata as representing the opposite of Boudica’s pregnant mentor Olga, so I just need to play with the right word to express that to myself; if my character Olga is the mother of life, Mata is the mother of?

In order to infiltrate The Butcher’s camp, she allowed herself to be captured by one of his raiders into the city. As a captive, she was made a camp slave assigned to constructing the siege wall around the city. It is a brutal service that makes her eager to kill The Butcher for her own reasons.

While she does severely injure The Butcher, he survives. However, she is executed.

By the point of the assassination attempt, both The Butcher and Mata are sympathetic characters put into deadly conflict against each other by the war. I have yet to draft that part of the novel. If I am successful, their conflict should demonstrate that the ideas that caused the war are the villain of the novel; further, that a battle of ideas should not be allowed to degenerate into violence.

Copilot created a sample image of Mata for me.