Jaycee Woods

Recently, I was formatting Chapter 9 “The Mentor” of my draft Boudica and The Butcher. It is still rough af, so it captures only the bones of the story. I really liked a bit that framed the objective of Boudica’s heroine’s journey as well as teasing Cyrus’ role behind the scenes as Boudica’s “fairy godmother,” working through Olga to save his best friend’s soul (Gideon Sheridan, aka The Butcher).

The scene is a dialogue between Boudica and Olga. The Butcher had rented Olga to teach Boudica her responsibilities as an officer’s slave. Both Boudica and Olga had been conscripted rebel soldiers; when captured each had chosen slavery over death while all their male rebel comrades had been executed. Not a fetish, but a dramatization of Boko Haram’s policy (kill the males and enslave the females) inserted into an anti-war story about a future Second American Civil War. In a way, Olga is simply a slightly older version of Boudica; Olga had been a slave longer and was also pregnant with Cyrus’ child.

Side note: Later in the story it is disclosed that the book Boudica selected in the below clip was Eli Goldratt’s The Goal, a dramatization of throughput accounting principles for industrial production reform. Gideon Sheridan had been a business management professor, so I opted for a business book instead of Sophocles’ “Antigone” despite Boudica’s given name when she was a rebel soldier being Antigone.

** A clip of the dialogue **

“Yes mistress…thank you for that lesson,” Boudica said seeming pleased with Olga’s emphasis on natural beauty as Boudica had no experience with the art of illusion practiced with cosmetics.

“Do you know how to read?” Olga asked.

Boudica stood firm and answer proudly, “Yes mistress…when I was a child before the war, I learned.”

Olga instructed, “In your free time, read books so that you might be more interesting in conversation with your master. Do not go for the pre-war trash that passed for popular literature, instead read classics as your master studied those before the war. Listen to him attentively if he explains these books to you as you will be connecting to who he was before the war and all the killing. Such will remind him that there will be living to do again after the war.”

Boudica nodded seeming interested in the books that she found on her master’s shelf. “I shall.” She browsed the books before picking one that her master must have read before the war.

Olga said, “My Cyrus knew your master before the war; they were professors together at James Wilson College. Before he became The Butcher as the rebels call him, your master was a happy, generous, and friendly man. The killing of this war has changed him. He says that he became who his men need him to be for this war but come peace I don’t know how he could recover to build a new life. Maybe he isn’t capable of being a man of peace any longer.”

Boudica nodded, feeling a little sad. “I can’t imagine my master as other than a soldier.”