Theatrical Muse 338 and 340
Just smoking through the show,
checking out the cast.
Surfing through the sites,
Thinking of the past…
Singing to myself,
Thinking about fame.
Like Will Shakespeare sang,
Just what’s in a name?
I’ve had a hundred names and at least a thousand nicknames; I ain’t even sure of the difference between the two. Naming me is like naming a cat. I come when it suits me (unless they use an invocation and then choice ain’t a factor.) I don’t even know what they were thinking with some of those nicknames. Sometimes it must have gone by opposites, like calling a bald man “Curly” but maybe some of them wanted to bait me into telling them my real name. They wouldn’t be able to hear all the notes in it if I did, but it’s still not a risk I’d take.
One of the latest was outright comic - but I do use a lot of energy when I’m working and sugar helps. Honey gives a real fast blast. Maybe they noticed that.
,
Most of the nicknames go by so fast that I don’t keep track, but I remember some…
Once upon a time there were stories that started with “once upon a time”. I think the nickname I had for a while then began when one of the war-chiefs added to his harem. No, it was later than that and it wasn’t a duke. It was a landholder, a baron, and they didn’t have harems at the time. They had other customs.
That baron was a fool in most ways. He ran through his inheritance, took a wife and ran through most of hers and then, after a few hard years, his first wife died. That left him with a daughter who’d learned her mother’s gentle manners - but to look at her you’d never have known she had “aristocratic blood” at all. She was the staff for his great house.
(Some things don’t change. In most times and most countries you can tell who the aristocrats are, even if they’re in rags. Aristo women rarely have scars and they never have calluses; most peasants have both. With aristos both sexes tend to be taller and more muscular than the peasants - it’s the difference between being reared on meat and being reared on potatoes or rice.)
From what I heard at the Gig, the Baron looked at his fortune and realized that if he wanted to eat next year he was going to have to sell land, unless he could put something else on the market. He looked at his daughter and realized that he’d wasted what might have been a good investment - so he took himself off to town to find himself a rich wife. He attracted one Lady Grizolda, a widow with two young daughters who was reputed to have a fortune even larger than the one he claimed to have himself.
(From her song her ladyship was usually no fool herself, but she had her weaknesses. Her first husband was a smith and they’d been happy enough until he was killed by a panicking stallion, her second was a wealthy wine merchant who’d seemed decent until she was expecting his child and he’d started threatening to send her own daughter away. He’d left her everything before he died of the stomach gripes and she’d married a Lord for his title. When he turned out to be a spendthrift she’d reached for the arsenic too late and he left his grieving widow an empty purse.)
Grizolda must have taken one look at her starveling step-daughter and seen the sleek, prosperous-looking man she’d married in a whole new light, but she knew an asset when she saw one. She had contacts in court and knew of a rich old prince who had … interests that were offending his king and who needed to marry fast. Ashleen was still of marriageable age; she had indisputably aristocratic blood and manners fit for a queen - and there were other things that were likely to appeal to him.
They had her portrait painted - not idealized, just as she was - too thin, with hands and knees scarred from the scrubbing. That cost too much, so they did the rest by greasing her foot, filling a tray with damp salt and telling her to rest her foot in it until it dried. The salt crystals set solid, and they sent the little cast of her foot with the portrait to prove that she was almost as small as the peasant child she resembled. Prince Lorenzo made an offer for her as soon as he saw it and the Baron and his wife looked at the bride-price and rejoiced.
It was Grizolda’s oldest daughter who called the vengeance demon. (All she understood of it was that her scraggy older stepsister was getting married first - to a very rich prince. She wished Ashleen gone.)
Calling a Vengeance demon is always a mistake, but how big an error it is depends on who you get. Hallie always had a soft spot for the ones ill-treated by their families - she also knew where to get my talisman.
Stories get changed over the centuries, but I guess you know the rest. The Fairy Godmother arranged for Ashleen to go to the ball; she got a beautiful dress, danced with Prince Charming, left at midnight and ended up getting married and becoming a queen. The details may have got shuffled around, but that’s the gist of it.
(I heard that Prince Lorenzo looked everywhere for the girl who fitted his little crystal foot-cast and never found her, and that bad things happened to the rest of the family, but the Gig was over and we’d split the scene before all that.)
Heh! Wait a minute. I don’t think her name translated as Ashleen in your language. It was Ashella or Embereen, maybe Cinderella - something like that.
Muse; "Sweet" the Singing Demon.
Fandom, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Words; Name 172, For Sale, 828