Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook is a whodunit set in a modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules. If you missed previous episodes you can start reading from the beginning. You can listen to this on YouTube.

IV

Julia was rapidly getting annoyed. There was something big and bad going on, she knew it in her gut but she couldn’t pin it down. As she had feared, talking to the lion keeper’s wife had proved a waste of time although it wrung her loins with pity. Somebody somewhere had to know something. But whom? She kicked the wall of the office she had been allotted and swore sulphurously. Edbert looked up from the dagger he was polishing the nicks out of.
“Why don’t you go have a word with the lovely Lydia?” he rumbled. “I heard a rumour that she’s thick with the wives of both the dead Romans and with the Arena boss.”
Julia gave him a grim look, knowing full well that asking him about the source of his rumour would get her nowhere. Praetorian barrack-room gossip was her guess. Stamping her feet into her boots and striding out of the room, she crossed the courtyard and was admitted to the Tribune’s lodgings without comment. A moment later she was at the door of Lady Lydia’s rooms. She tapped and a homely female face appeared.
“You after her ladyship?”
Julia nodded.
“She ain’t here.”
Julia was nonplussed and the woman sighed.
“If you was to ask me, she don’t intend coming back.”
Julia stiffened.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I just found out that she took her jewel box.”
“Come with me,” Julia snapped.
She stomped off along the corridor, not bothering to check whether or not the woman followed her. Hurrying as fast as she dared without causing too much remark, she was soon knocking on the door of the Tribune’s suite of offices. The secretarius came to the door.
“I need to see the Tribune,” Julia demanded.
The man frowned, but she heard Decimus speak sharply.
“Who is it, man?”
“Domina Julia,” the man mumbled.
“Let her in then, and bugger off.”
The secretarius glared at Julia, but he opened the door wide and shuffled through it and passed her.
“Come in, girl. Come in.” Decimus bellowed.
Julia went into the room followed by Lady Lydia’s servant. The Tribune stood in front of an open window with his big hands clasped grasped behind his neck. She stopped quietly and waited for him to speak.
“I hate all the admin and paperwork that goes with this job and I hate that little pederast of a keyboard-fiddler. Hate him and his computer equally.” He did not trouble to modulate his volume and the secretarius would still have been in earshot. Then he dropped his voice and turned to her with a smile. “I was about to contact you with some new information anyway. But what brings you here, little sister?”
Julia shuffled her feet and he stopped smiling.
“So. It’s not a social call?”
“No. It’s about the Lady Lydia.”
“What about her?” He sounded long-suffering rather than surprised.
“I went to talk to her and she seems to have gone missing.”
That summoned a frown to his face.
“Missing? What do you mean missing? And why did you want to speak to her?”
“Missing as in not in the house, and her woman here says she has taken her jewellery box. And I wanted to talk to her because one of her close friends is dead, and two have been recently widowed.”
Decimus glowered at her from beneath his thick, black brows then hit a bell on his desk with one hard fist. A guard came scuttling in.
“Will you please find out if Domina Lydia is in the house?”
“Sir.”
The guard left at a gallop, and the Tribune turned his fulminating gaze on the serving woman who shook her head and returned it stoically.
“You might have known she was up to something,” the woman said, her tone inappropriately accusing. “She has been too quiet. Except for that Titillicus and he was in the nature of a diversion.”
Decimus showed his teeth.
“Shut up Boudicca. If you can’t be anything but right you can just shut up.”
The woman actually smiled at him. There’s a story here, Julia thought, but she was too exercised with the puzzle in hand to add another set of questions to her list. However, Decimus obviously felt the need to explain.
“Boudicca here is a Briton by birth, but she was sold to Lydia’s futatrix of a mother when she was a little girl, just before enslaving anyone was outlawed. Of course every decent person promptly freed their existing slaves, if they had not already done so, but as it was not a legal requirement, the old cunnus didn’t. So Boudicca came with my lady wife as a body slave. I freed her. Annoyed the merda out of Lydia, but you know how I feel about slavery and those who keep trying to get it reinstated.”
“I do.”
It was not the whole story, Julia thought, she got the impression she was being told the details as much to distract as to inform. But right then there seemed no more to say on the topic and she was not about to enquire, so the three people in the room stood in silence for a moment.

Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook

Above,
On wings,
A flight achieved

Beyond
The reach
Of human scope,

Clouded
Skies embrace
The solitary spirit.

Dreams
That lift
The humbled mind

Endure,
And ride
The silent wind

Forever,
Through clouds
Imbued with gentle grey.

E.M. Swift-Hook

From Haruspex: A Walking Shadow part of the Fortune’s Fools series by E.M. Swift-Hook. You can listen to this on YouTube.

The first time he had seen it, from above, Stin thought the far-spreading sprawl of low rise, square, flat-roofed buildings looked like someone upturned a truckload of children’s play blocks. Or not. The shapes were too uneven. Maybe more like a skip full of builders’ rubble, emptied out in the middle of nowhere.
The buildings were all shades of ochre, the newer ones more brown or orange, the older ones yellowed and greying. Some close pressed along narrow streets. Others, more segregated in their own patch of land with courtyards and walls. The double dome of the tiny spaceport bubbled up, incongruous, in the midst of it all and anywhere else in the galaxy there would be ninety million health and safety regulators screaming that the residential buildings were too close. Here, though, there was no one with sufficient authority to object – even if anyone had actually cared. From the domes, a street ran to the main square and then continued pretty much straight on until it came to the only other building of real substance. Dominating the mud-brick built housing and offering a kind of low-tech counterpart to the spaceport domes, the stone-built citadel stood as a testament to local architecture, with its odd half-cylinder tower and its own microcosm of courtyards and housing gathered around the curtain wall.
This was the city of Keran. The planetary capital of Temsevar which was surely the most grimly benighted world in known space. It stood – or more sort of slumped – in a vast plain which stretched, dizzyingly, as far as his eyes could see in every direction, bleak and empty with nothing taller than knee-high bushes and an odd grey-green grass which grew all over.
Someone told Stin that before the spaceport, the settlement had just been a trading post centred on the citadel. Back then, it had only a scant handful of permanent residents and a high turnover of the weird tattoo covered nomads, whose tribes ranged the plains around, moving all the time to avoid their livestock over-grazing the sparse foliage. In some ways, he reflected, nothing much had changed – only the city had grown and now the nomads came from beyond the sky and were much fewer in number.
During the short summer the locals told him Keran was a dust bowl and throughout the long winter, it was a frozen hell. For Stin, it was all alien. A place of exile. First impressions always count and he had been left here in the winter. Adjectives that sprang to mind when he thought how he would describe it to people when – if – he got home again were: bleak, desolate, barren and bitter – like finding himself stranded in a gigantic cold-storage compartment. The memory of standing in the vacant dock looking at the empty space that had been occupied by the ship he arrived in earlier that same day, was still vivid. And that of the voice behind him full of friendly sympathy.
“She left without you? Well, no worries, it happens here. You’re not the first and I’m sure you won’t be the last. You’ll get off in a year or two, just might have to earn yourself a bit to pay the passage.”
He turned to see the speaker, a short man with a round face and a balding fuzz of dark hair.
“I don’t know why she…”
The round face broke up into a gnomish smile.
“You’d not be standing here if you did, would you? Anyway, I’m Agernilio Tavi, but everyone calls me Gernie. I’m the one-man band who keeps the port here running.”
“Stin. Stinian Sabas. I’m the dumb fool who just got dumped by his girlfriend. Now I guess I’m stranded.”
“You and me both, only I’ve stuck it out here the last two and a half decades. Oh man, your face. Don’t look so worried – I chose to stay.”
Gernie, he discovered, was the unofficial deity of the spaceport. He ran the place as his own private business venture and that made him the most important person in the whole of Keran. He was the gatekeeper. The one who controlled access to the rest of the galaxy, the one who could arrange for cargos to be shipped in or out.
Everything offworld was prized here – as long as it wasn’t high-tech dependent. The most highly sought after offworld items were weaponry and medical supplies. These would be purchased or exchanged for whatever local trade could offer – exotic food and drink, art and artefacts, some semi-precious stones and metals. Most of what was traded out didn’t come from Keran or even from the same continent. Most trade came – and went – on the backs of the local beasts of burden. These ponies were ugly beasts, with short, stubby ears, broad backs and thick coats, but had peculiar looking split-hooved feet which could spread and grip on soft ground or ice. They would carry trade goods in pack trains, along the single broad road which stretched to the seaport of Vinbrith, just out of sight over the horizon.
Stin went to Vinbrith the once. It had a pretty sounding name and looked totally picturesque from a distance, the cute cottage-like dwellings clinging to the cliffs above the harbour, the little ships bobbing on the tide and the huge wooden wheels turning slowly. It was perhaps only when you saw the wheels, used to lift the cargos on wooden platforms up the sheer cliff face, were treadmills with three ranks of six men chained in together, that the illusion began to fall away. That and the stench. Pretty as a picture from afar, but close to Vinbrith was worse than Keran – and that was saying something. But from there, wooden-built sailing ships carried goods of all sorts to and from the other continent of the planet, which, Stin had been told, was ruled by someone they called ‘The Overlord’ and held the vast majority of the planet’s population and most all of its resources.
Gernie found him the work. There were a lot of things that needed doing which the locals lacked the technical skill to achieve. It wasn’t good pay, but at least it would earn him passage offworld – eventually.  Stin was roped in to help keep the port functional and to spell Gernie manning the archaic transceiver which was set up with the one solitary comms satellite in orbit above the planet.
The system was so primitive that it couldn’t even access regular link-based FTL transmissions. That meant that the only real contact the planet ever got with the rest of the galaxy came via the few ships that visited Temsevar each year. But those incoming ships had to communicate through the satellite as the spaceport couldn’t talk directly to them, it was too far behind modern link technology to do so.
It was when he learned that particular fact that Stin finally realised this place wasn’t just at the back of beyond like most Periphery worlds, it was actually a good few kiloparsecs behind the back of beyond.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Gooseberries, round and pink and hairy
Eaten by queens and constabulary 
Cooked in pies and crumble bakes
Made into both jam and cakes
Enjoyed at lunchtime and for tea
By those of high and low degree
Gooseberries, beloved of pilgrims and nomads
And those who like sucking on pink bristly gonads 

©️jj 2019

Welcome to the Hotseat of Truth, a device in which your protagonist is trapped. The only way to escape is to answer five searching questions completely honestly or the Hotseat will consume them to ashes! 

Today’s victim is Aaspa the eponymous heroine of Aaspa’s Eyes by Jane Jago

What do you regard as the most important principle everyone should uphold?

I can’t narrow it down to just one so I will give you a short essay. I believe in the three freedoms. Freedom from want. Freedom of thought. Freedom to love as you will. 
In addition, I believe adults to be responsible for the safety and happiness of the young. 
And, of course, I  believe it is fundamentally wrong to judge people on their appearance.

What is your relationship with humanity?

As you are, presumably, human yourself you may not care for my thoughts about your species. I am sure that the best among you are to be admired and respected, but all the humans I have met have been the dregs of a power and money-hungry society wherein it is each for himself. A human was responsible for my mother’s untimely death, deeming her own arrogant bigheadedness of more value than the life of one she spoke of as a ‘mere animal’, so maybe that has coloured my view of humans unfairly. 
Whatever the truth of it, I cordially despise humans and have as little to do with them as possible. I don’t mind killing them though. 
*Aaspa grins showing her fearsome fangs.*
I guess I have to make an exception for you.

How important to you is the idea of second chances and showing mercy?

Of course I believe in second chances. Everyone deserves a chance to learn from their mistakes and to right any wrongs they may have been responsible for. 
What I’m not so keen on is third and fourth chances. If someone is given the chance to turn their life around, but they spurn that chance in favour of wrongdoing then they do so at their own peril. I am a big giver of second chances, but less lenient with those who keep on making the same mistakes.
Mercy is a different concept altogether, and my idea of this virtue may differ from yours. But I will explain. To me. Mercy is the giving of friendship and understanding to the friendless and the misunderstood. It is the offering of food to the hungry and shelter to the homeless. Mercy can indeed involve not taking advantage of a vanquished foe, but equally killing a creature that is beyond help can also be mercy in its purest form.

What do you fear the most?

For myself I fear little – except perhaps the moving staircase to the place of the angels (that just about makes me piss myself, even though I know it to be a silly fear).
The real hard fear, however, and the one that wakes me in the night in a cold sweat is that someone might decide to harm my imps. 

What one thing in life would you never agree to give up?

That’s an easy one Aascko, my mate, my life, the other half of my soul and the air that I breathe.

You can read more about Aaspa in Aaspa’s Eyes by Jane Jago

They came before dawn, silent as wraiths and deadly as rattlesnakes. 

By the time the men were aware of danger they were having their throats cut by soundless assassins.

The raiders herded women and children into the grassy bailey, where the systematic butchery began. Old women and male children first. Then young female children and plain women.

In the end there was naught left but prime bloodstock and the leader signed for the slaughter to cease.

“Slaves for sale.” His smile was like the cut of a whip.

Morgana spat in his face. 

He had them all killed for that.

©jane jago

A flash fiction by Jane Jago. You can listen to this on YouTube.

In the master bedroom, a woman shut the door between herself and the scores of well-meaning friends and relations who filled the house with their hustle and bustle. She sat down in front of her mirror and began making herself ready to face the hardest day of her life. She worked carefully, taking each step of the ritual slowly, and attempting to brace herself with the simple fact of its familiarity. It was a routine in which each item on her dressing table had its allotted place, and was to be used at its allotted time.

She noticed dispassionately how sorrow and lack of sleep had wreaked havoc with her face, and dabbled random snatches of grey into her cap of mouse-brown hair. Even the softly flattering antique mirror she had inherited from her mother’s grandmother couldn’t make her seem anything but old, and sad, and somehow diminished on this particular morning. ‘You look a proper hag’ she said to her reflection, before gently putting her hairbrush in its accustomed place. She picked up her rings from the little glass bowl beside her, where they always lived when she wasn’t wearing them. After sliding them onto her fingers, she closed her eyes while she threaded gold hoops into the holes in her earlobes.

Feeling the warm weight of two hands on her shoulders, she opened her eyes and managed a half smile for the man who stood behind her.
‘You all right?’
‘No. But I will be.’
‘Good girl.’
She looked down at the rings on her left hand for a moment before saying what was at the very front of her mind.
‘It occurs to me that if I believed in the resurrection and the light, and the possibility of eternal life in the hands of a loving God, today might be a comfort to me…’
‘It might indeed. But as you don’t, not even a little bit, it will be just one more thing to be endured.’
Being so completely understood was like balm to her shredded nerve endings and she put the hand she had been so carefully studying on top of the big square one on her left shoulder.
‘Oh I do love you’ she said with almost childlike simplicity ‘I just don’t tell you enough.’
‘That’s all right’ he replied, in the deep imperturbable voice that had been her lodestone for more than forty years ‘I know. I’ve always known.’
She allowed herself the luxury of leaning back and resting her head against the solid wall of his chest. Closing her eyes she let the tears run unchecked down her cheeks.
‘Don’t cry, love.’
‘Am not. Much.’
Then she felt him bend and rest his cheek against her hair. They stayed like that for a long time, each drawing courage from the other as they had done so many times before. When he finally lifted his head, their eyes met in the silvery depths of the mirror.
‘I just wish…’

But she was never to hear what he wished as there came a tap on the door and her sister’s worried face peeped around the panels.
‘Are you ready? It’s just that the cars are here.’
She stood up and squared her shoulders. ‘Yes. Coming now.’

So she left that place of sanctuary, and went downstairs. Down to where people wore black clothes and sombre faces, and where the hearse bearing her husband’s coffin waited in the street.

© Jane Jago 2017

The life of an elderly delinquent in limericks – with free optional snark…

I am old I have noticed this fact 
There’s no need to approach it with tact
I don’t bother that you
Will have noticed it too
But stop smirking or you will get smacked

© jane jago

A flash fiction by E.M. Swift-Hook. You can listen to this on YouTube.

There was an endless, hacking, dry cough coming through the paper-thin walls, which combined with the aching squeal of protest in the springs of the bed as I tried to find an almost comfortable position to lie in, made sleep seem a grimly distant prospect. At least, I thought, I would get no unwelcome visitors here. The mildew-scented air, battled with a slightly sour odour of fabric left too long undried that was perfuming my pillowcases. It reminded me of the smell of the dirty-linen basket at home.

Home.

I had no home now, I had forfeited that in exchange for a promise of happiness.

Thoughts and emotions welled up anew, like bubbles rising in a boiling pot, and the more I tried to let them go, the faster they seemed to simmer. So I gave up the battle and opened my eyes, the sickly yellow glow of the flickering, streetlight outside the window revealing where the wallpaper had pinched-up and peeled off, revealing the card with a picture of a single rose. It had been my talisman for weeks and my promised ticket to freedom – five magic words: ‘Trust me, I love you’.

My trust in that love had brought me here – this place that was supposed to have been a sanctuary but offered only cold comfort.

E.M. Swift-Hook

His weight on her was such that she could barely breathe. She moved a little restlessly, feeling wetness spreading across her back. Oh well, she thought, at least he’d had fun then – but she wished he’d shift his backside. 

He didn’t, so she made a determined effort to extract herself from the stifling prison of his sheer bulk. Finally free, she scrabbled for the lamp. Turning up the wick she saw a sea of colour. The wetness that soaked the bed was bright scarlet and had seeped from around the axe buried between his shoulder blades.

She started to scream…

©jane jago