Florippas, daughter of Ladan, widow of Meirion

Chamber maid

Played by: Jolanta

Name:Florippas, daughter of Ladan, widow of Meirion
Age: 20
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 140

Background:
Idran is a busy city, full of commerce and trade, learning and spirituality. Not all roads lead to it, but that is only because the storms of the desert that camps at its back door discourage such tributary public works. The city and the desert have a symbiotic relationship nevertheless. The sultanate knows it cannot control the nomads who roam the sands, but it can control the water holes that give sustenance to their livestock. For the nomads, they have no desire to conquer a city - looking down upon the grounded peasants and nobles alike. But the city has its uses. It is far easier to perfect materials when the seasons do not control one's movements. In addition, though the nomads would be loathe admitting it, yurts and tents require special skills to construct and refined material to maintain - skills and products now only possessed by merchants within the city. The city gains an added benefit to this relationship: the nomads are a ready army, one that has a definite interest in preserving the status quo. So while it cannot tax this migratory people, it can count upon their aid.

Idran has become well-known not only for its wealth, mostly through trade, but also for its tolerance. Long has it been the breeding ground for new sects and unorthodox thinkers. The followers of the One God have found a home here, as have the priests who seek to reclothe that god.

Within this vibrant polis live a man, his wife and their two children. The man's name is Ladan, and he is a felter. He manages a steady business, though not an overly lucrative one. The money and trades he makes permit him to house his family in relative comfort, with their own pigs, sheep and donkey. He is incredibly focused, desiring to save enough money to buy his own camel - a symbol of high status within the society. Once such a status is earned, he hopes to attract a suitable wife for his son and a husband for his daughter.

The wife, Marit, is a sickly woman. Multiple pregnancies have left her weak and easily fatigued. Only two of her six children have made it past the age of five. While Ladan works in the felting yard, Marit minds the house and oversees the children's education. Though Ladan has little time for questions of faith, his wife has become a devout adherent to the religion of the One God. She follows a sect that advocates the idea that all faithful must be taught to read: words, nature, and people. Without the ability to read, one cannot gain the knowledge of how to find the house of God. The cruellest act, therefore, is preventing a child from learning how to read.

The boy is Fierabras, and intensely active. He helps his father with the felting. He has an imagination that won't let him, or his mother, rest. Innately irreverent, he questions everything his mother tries to teach him and heckles the lecturer in the meeting house. In jest and exasperation, Marit refers to him as her "little burden."

But this story is not about Ladan, or Marit, or Fierabras. It is about the little girl who grew-up in Idran only to run away with a knight to a foreign land where legends are born.

The girl's first memory is of her naming ceremony. With bated breath the family had counted down the days until its youngest member could be embraced by her father and teased by her brother. Until the ceremony occurred, only the mother could touch her or speak to her. At last, the day of the girl's fifth birthday dawned. Magnificent caravans were arriving and thoroughfares were paved with flower petals. To the child, as to all children, the celebration could only be for her - and perhaps it will one day be said that it was a sign that on this day foreign emissaries and alien tongues glutted the streets. But such claims are the doings of myth while the girl lived in a world full of nothing more extraordinary than coincidence. For today another young maid turned five and, as the people said, no longer breathed emptiness. The sultan Balan had a daughter, and with joy he held her up to his people and named her Florippas, the flower of his life.

Word of the name spread fast, back to the house where Ladan, Marit and Fierabras gathered around their own pride. As Marit picked her up, the child nervous in this room of ecstatic solemnity, she intoned: "Husband, mother presents daughter."

A paternal smile split wide the black beard. "Wife, father knows her; father embraces her," and here he took the child in his arms and held her close. "Father names daughter: Florippas."

But ceremonies cannot stop death. At age fifteen, Fierabras, well thought to be beyond the reach of child illnesses, succumbed to a fitful fever. His death came at a bad time. Ladan had finally accumulated enough wealth to purchase a camel. However, he did not have the wherewithal to keep it in the city, and so had to pay for one of the nomads to care for it for him. The cost of doing so meant that Ladan had to let go two of his hired hands. With the death of Fierabras, he hadn't enough workers.

And so it was that six years after she first felt her father's embrace, Florippas embraced what was to be her dowry. Still young, her duties were limited, and her time split between mother and father, but she knew her place. In the mornings, she churned the butter and prepared the midday meal. In the afternoon, she wet the wool and beat the fibres. In the evening, she learned to read. And at night, she lay awake thinking of her brother and listening to the dying jubilation of the market square.

When Florippas was sixteen, her mother lay bedridden with her ninth pregnancy. The lying-in was uncommonly long, and the midwife's frown daily grew deeper. Florippas tended to her mother and ran the household. Ladan had little choice but to hire on new hands, though he had not yet recovered from the cost of status. He would never entertain the thought of selling his camels (the one he had had given birth). When Marit at least entered labour, her pains were mercifully short. The babe was born cold and red. The bleeding did not stop, and Marit closed her eyes for the last time two hours later.

The house was now Florippas' responsibility. The hands Ladan had hoped to keep temporary stayed past the first month, then past the third. To stay alive - for what is life without one's position? - Ladan remarried. He courted and won a well-off widow attracted to the business - for she had two young sons in need of an inheritance.

In the family for eleven years, Florippas suddenly found herself marginalized. The boys could do four times the work she could in the felting yard and the house was the wife's by right and inclination.

Yet Florippas refused to remain idle. For years she had listened to the clamour of the market, but seen it only a handful of times. That could change. And so she approached her father one day as he inspected the quality of a new shipment of wool. Without a word she settled herself at his feet, recalling how it had been years before when he first began to instruct her. Silent eyes gazed steadily upon the fast-aging man until he set aside the wool and took notice of her.

"Father, am I still your flower?"

"Daughter, you are the blossom of my life."

"Then let me spread my petals."

And so it was decided. Each day, Florippas draped lengths of felt over her shoulders, bound felt at her waist, pinned swatches to her skirt, and shielded her head from the sun's blaze with a veil of the lightest felt. Each piece represented the best dye jobs, the strongest weights and finest textures. She enticed the travellers and it was not long before Ladan was getting offers for both his wares and his daughter.

For her part, Florippas gloried in her time spent roaming the market stalls and walking amidst the caravan camps. She met many men from strange lands and saw instruments that stood to her as marvels. When her feet grew weary or her voice hoarse, she would stop for a time at the feet of a balladeer. From them, she grew to know and love the stories of noble warriors and gentle ladies, crafty seneschals and vile peasants.

So there should be little surprise when one day, a warrior from a far land caught her eye and held her heart. His name was Meirion, and had come been sent as an escort for a learned man who desired to see the wonders of the world. Unfortunately, the man's constitution did not agree with all the wonders he saw, leave Meirion bereft of charge, far from home, and quite lost. The nomads in the desert had found him and taken pity upon him. They gave him yogurt and fruit and brought him to the city.

He found her enchanting, and to her he was a song given life. Clothed in her dazzling array of felt, he believed her rich, and for herself she believed him noble. Neither was inclined to enlighten the other. Dreams are hard enough to have when asleep, let alone find when awake. Only one concession was made, and that gladly, if not whole-heartedly. Florippas agreed to embrace the Druidic faith and abandon the One God. To a child raised to read, such a thought seemed not anathema, but merely another chapter to attend, and then pass on when once the last page had been reached.

Ladan made little objection over the marriage and his wife even less. The betrothed booked passage on a ship bound for Abertawe, Meirion's homeland. Once on shore, they were wed.

The marriage was a short one and civil. Florippas soon discovered that the life of a warrior was not always comprised of glorious deeds and moral fortitude. Meirion found that a foreign wife looked pretty at first, but once back among the fair-skinned, curly haired women of home her exoticness lost out to her strangeness. There were difficulties of language and arguments over culture and breeding. Nevertheless, they were kind to each other, even if disappointment prevented much else.

It was a marriage that neither had to endure long. After less than a year, Meirion was slain in an argument with a neighbour. They were not keen on having a former practitioner of the One God living so close and, to his credit, Meirion defended the honour of his wife - valiantly, if futilely.

With Meirion gone, Florippas faced initial scorn and the threats of worse. She sought protection from the royal house, pleading to permit her to work as a simple chamber maid. Her request was granted when once they learned both of her skills with wool and her protruding belly.

It is now two years on. The religious unrest has risen ever more, but for now Florippas' place has assured her safety - so long as she is careful where and when she ventures beyond the grounds. Used to a life of partial seclusion, Florippas finds the self-imposed confinement comforting. She gave birth to a child, a fine baby boy whom she has named Math - for he is her treasure.

Personality Profile:
Florippas is not overly mournful for her lost home. She has come to love Abertawe as if it were her own. An embracer of cultures and novelty, she no longer gawks at the people or animals she encounters.

Forthright by nature, she is dutiful by breeding. This combination means she does what is called for, but when her tasks become onerous or burdensome beyond the norm, she does not hesitate to speak her will.

She is friendly, and always ready to listen to a story or song, or to tell one of her own. She disapproves of too much gadding about, being mature and sensible in all things. Her life has taught her above all to value and honour family and never to make rash decisions - particularly with money. As such, she is something of a hoarder, and any treasure she has she attempts to secret away.

Of all the things she fears, it is the thought of being alone that terrifies her most.

Physical Profile: Her build, though initially light like her mothers, has through years of work become more solid than waif-ish. She has long dusky brown hair (think a medium brown that can look somewhere between light brown and red when hit by the light), straight. Her skin is pale, with a slight sheen to it under the eyes. Her nose is a little large, with a bulbous curve at the tip that prevents her face from gaining beauty. Her eyes are chestnut brown, narrower than those of the natives of Abertawe and slightly slanted. When she laughs, they become like slits in her face, hiding her eyes from view. Her lips are a pale pink, the top one thinner than the bottom. She stands at five feet, six inches and weighs one hundred forty pounds. Her hips still bear the marks of childbirth, though her small breasts have returned to their natural size. Her hands are callous from years of work, and bear several burn scars from where the scalding water caressed her as she wet the wool for felting. Build: light, but muscular arms and hands
Race: Idranian (equivalent of Armeno-Greek)
Skin: pale
Hair: dusky brown
Eyes: chestnut brown
Outstanding Features: callous hands that have old burn scars

Skills and Abilities:
Although she does not have the physical prowess to do it all, she knows much about felting - the types of wool, the way to wet it, pound it, roll it, dry it, dye it, cut it and inspect it.

She can cook and clean, sew and weave, and butcher small animals (suckling pigs, lambs).

She knows how to ride a camel, though her skills in riding a horse are severely limited.

Special Notes:
I should specify that although Florippas can read, she cannot write. She receives occasional correspondence from her father (one letter every six months). In return, she hires a clerk to write a few lines for her so she can make a reply.