Young Woman In Mythological Guise, by Sandro Botticelli
I’ve put up a deleted scene from The Maker’s Mask, in which Ligeia Boccamera negotiates an alliance with Mukhtar Prime. Some bits of this got cut out and used in the conversations between Ligeia and Karely in The Hawkwood War. It got cut for several reasons – it wasn’t really helping move the plot along, I wanted to keep the reader in suspense as to what Ligeia was up to, and it spoiled the impact of the Hawkwoods’ motives if Ligeia and the Mukhtars were after exactly the same thing – but it’s a fine example of Ligeia being Ligeia and I thought you might like to meet Mukhtar Prime, so here it is.
My media player just cued up Shriekback’s Nemesis, which seems kind of appropriate for this excerpt.
We are not monsters – we’re moral people
And yet we have the strength to do this
This is the splendour of our achievement
Call in the airstrike with a poisoned kiss
Ligeia would approve, I think. And then it started playing You Are A Pirate from the LazyTown soundtrack, which was substantially less appropriate, unless, I suppose, you want to imagine Mukhtar Prime being played by Geoffrey Rush.
I was in The Wallace Collection yesterday, and found Ligeia posing as Eleanor of Toledo.
Somehow that surprises me not at all.