Two Women and Some Books
To stab with the sword of a heartless word
To render impotent by making absurd
To drip with the acid of literary scorn
To make enemies rue that they were ever born
To take one’s revenge in innumerable ways
To make villains of heroes in bitter small plays
Those are the weapons at our fingers’ end
Have a care when you pi** off a writer, my friend
She sat alone in absolute blackness, just as she had always done. From far away she could hear the music of Carnival, under her cold little feet she could feel the rhythm of the drums, and her nose twitched as the smells of torches, and burnt sugar, and heated humanity, penetrated the narrow blackness of her cell.
She wondered what it might be like to be outside, but that wasn’t what Carnival held for her.
She was the sacrifice. The bastard seed whose mother had not survived her birth. They had, they said, taken her in out of the kindness of their hearts. Tonight she was to repay their care.
They would blindfold her and carry her through the streets to the temple, where the High Priest would put out her eyes. They had offered her poppy juice, but even though she was deathly afraid she had her pride.
Heavy footsteps in the corridor warned her that the time had come and she stood and faced the wall with. A voice outside the door bade her make ready and she closed her eyes. From behind her eyelids she became aware of the yellowness of lamplight, and she tried to keep that warmth in her head, even when hands came around her face and tied the blindfold tightly.
They hustled her out of her own space and took her in a direction she had not been before. Her nose caught the sense of water and something sweet before she was roughly pushed into a room with a cool smooth floor. Soft arms caught her before she fell and female voices cooed soothingly.
“Come lady.”
They bathed her and perfumed her, rubbed oils and unguents into her skin, and combed out her long hair. All the time they were careful to remind her to keep her eyes closed, but at least their hands were gentle. When she was polished to their satisfaction they dressed her in smooth soft draperies and covered her face with a mask. The final touches were soft boots and a fur-lined cloak to beat the cold of the longest night. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt really warm, and the unaccustomed luxury of it almost undid her carefully cultivated serenity.
The fluttering women led her to a door she was sure was not the one by which she had entered the bathhouse.
It must have opened immediately, because she sensed space in front of her. Hands reached out to grasp her forearms, but they touched her with more respect than she was used to. This frightened her. It was, she thought, as if they were giving her dignity just in time to snatch it from her. For a moment she wished she had taken the poppy juice, but then her spine stiffened. She would endure.
They shepherded her down a long flight of shallow steps. The group halted at the bottom and two large hands spanned her waist, lifting her onto she knew not what. She was gently pressed into a seat. Then hands that felt almost apologetic fastened jingling chains to her wrists and ankles. They moved away and she understood where she was. She was outside. There was sky above her head. As she tried to process the irrational fear she felt, whatever she was sitting on rose into the air and began to move. Once her stomach settled, she understood, she was about to be carried at shoulder height out into the mayhem of Carnival.
The smell of street food reminded her that she hadn’t been fed for some days. Then music stabbed her ears like a tidal wave of sound. She wanted to laugh, to cry, to dance. But all she could do was sit in a swaying litter knowing that the crowds stared and pointed even though she was blind. The eunuchs bore her onward, and she thought ‘I’m alone here, why not open my eyes’. She peeped through her lashes to discover the gauzy mask actually allowed her to see. To see bright lanterns, multicoloured sparkling lights in the sky, and the upturned faces of many many people. For somebody whose only glimpses of life had been taken at the risk of severest punishment, Carnival should have been terrifying. But it wasn’t, it was exhilarating and the sights and the sounds and the smells sang in her blood. For a while she even forgot her impending doom in the sheer thrill of the night.
Then it happened. There must have been something spilled on the street, because the left-hand bank of bearers all lost their footing together. The palanquin tilted at a crazy angle before falling into a foetid ditch with its helpless passenger still chained to the seat.
The next thing she knew was voices.
“Why didn’t she jump clear?”
She felt hands at her wrists.
“She couldn’t. The bastards chained her to the litter.”
“Why’d they do that? The sacrifice is willing ain’t she?”
She found her voice, although it sounded strange in her own ears. “Of course I’m willing. Willing to have my eyes ripped out. And whatever else they decide to do with me. Just like I was willing to be kept in a windowless cell all my life.”
She didn’t expect to be believed, but something in her voice must have told them she spoke truth because she heard the sound of splintering wood and she was thrown across a brawny shoulder. Then they were off and running, wriggling through the crowds with the ease of long practice. Out through the city gates they sprinted, long before the temple guard managed to fight its way to the crippled palanquin.
They brought her to the old woman who runs the menagerie that follows Carnival from city to city – who nodded just once.
Life as a keeper of big cats may be hard, but every morning she looks at the sunrise and is thankful for her eyes.
Benjo was an alley cat who lived in Devil’s Lane
He was the biggest alley cat and quite a frigging pain
The children loved to pet him when they came home from school
But Benjo was just letting them, ‘cos Benjo was no fool.
Benjo was the father of every kitten in the ‘hood
It’s not so much that he was bad, it’s more he was too good
At rooting in the rubbish and hunting out each rat
So all night long there was a din, none slept as he got fat.
And when the people rose each morn with bags below their eyes
They’d see Benjo relaxing having won his nightly prize
And though the grown-ups muttered than the damn cat had to go
The children wouldn’t hear of it for all so loved Benjo.
So no one dared remove the dreaded Benjo from his lair
He’d claws as sharp as scimitars if an adult did appear
And though he made a misery of every sleepless night
Benjo was the biggest cat and never lost a fight.
Until one night the neighbourhood was plunged into such quiet
That all who woke, for once refreshed, the mystery enquired
For Devil’s Lane was catless and no one for sure could say
Where Benjo had vanished to upon that fateful day.
Benjo was an alley cat who lived in Devil’s Lane
Until he left the rats behind and ne’re went there again
Now he is a purry cat on pillows stuffed with foam
For Benjo was a clever cat who found himself a home.
Admirable advice from Madame Pendulica’s mystic moggy!
So today she (that’s Madame Pendulica to you or Dotty Doris to me) was doing this thing where she grabs a handful of polished stones (she calls them crystals) and throws them on a black cloth divided up into the houses of the zodiac and then proceeds to give her client a ‘reading’ based on which of the stones land where (“You have jasper in your first house and that is bringing optimism in your immediate future.”)Please note that he’s not the one to be optimistic, Dotty Doris is – she’s making a wad from this consultation.
Anyway, I digress, she was doing this reading for a client who was trying to decide whether or not to accept a proposal of marriage. We’d been through the background already:
“She’s perfect in every way and we are madly in love. But should I marry her?”
Madame purred in her throat (I swear she takes lessons from me).
“You are wise to seek my guidance and I shall consult the stars through their union with the earth by the power of the crystals.”
Translation; “I can see we have a gullible one here who’ll pay for at least three sessions and keep me in prosecco and the cat in tuna for a week.”
He nodded and looked grave.
“You see I know the economic and legal commitment of marriage is a serious undertaking and if I am besotted I am not going to be able to think things through clearly. So please, tell me, should I marry her?”
Oh ye gods and little fishes, what a complete asshole!
I’d had enough so put my paw in and told him that if I was his girlfriend I’d be telling him to take a hike. If he’s the sort who can’t even know his own heart and mind over whether he should marry then he’s better left on the shelf with that open packet of dried kibble that’s sat there the last six months since I refused to eat it anymore.
Unfortunately, the mad bat went on to convince him that his answer was obscured by the moon being occluded by onyx and his having obsidian falling in Scorpio so he should come back the next week to get clarification.
I really do have to admire her.
And I thought of him almost fondly when I ate my tuna that evening.
Ailuros the Mystic’s Mog predicts she will be offering more advice sometime in the future!
Big Brenda was asleep in the afternoon sun, when she felt a polite tap on the sole of her boot. Opening her eyes, she saw the honeysuckle fairy accompanied by a whole cloud of beez.
“What’s the trouble Honeysuckle?”
“It’s that Chiggers ma’am. Keeps trying to steal hunny.”
Brenda rubbed a hand over the stubble on her chin, making a dry scraping sound.
“All right. Tell the beez I’ll have a word.”
Picking up her knobkerrie she strode over to the greenhouse.
“People what don’t want me to come down there and break their toy, better leave the beez alone.”
…for a moment the silence was blissful. Then the screaming started…
Writing team Leo and Mike Johnson have their day disturbed when a body turns up near their house.
The girls thanked the WPC, then the oldest girl spoke up again.
‘You really want to know about the thing floating in the river don’t you?’
‘They do’ Leo said steadily ‘but they aren’t allowed to ask you any questions without a responsible adult present.’
‘Ain’t you lot responsible?’ a petite brunette grinned.
‘In this case responsible has a quite specific meaning. It’s either a parent or a social worker. Somebody who will be looking out for your welfare.’
‘Oh. Right. But we could tell you anyway. Without questions.’ ‘You could.’
The girls looked at each other speculatively; the one who seemed to be the de facto leader of the group nodded sharply. ‘You need to understand that we haven’t been having a very nice time, not the least of which has been no proper washing. Anyway, we decided to take some shampoo into the river and see if we could wash our hair. Environmentally unsound, but we really were stinky. So we’d all washed and were swimming around naked, feeling much better. Of course, Molloy appeared at the side of the pool and started berating us as sinners etcetera, etcetera. I wanted to smack her one, but the others persuaded me to just swim away. We all swam to the dam, where we knew the silly bitch wouldn’t come, being unable to swim. She started crying and carrying on, and we did some diving to really piss her off. Then Mags got her foot caught in something. It could’ve been serious but we noticed she wasn’t coming up fast enough and two of us grabbed her. We were towing her back to the beach because she was coughing and spluttering a bit. That was when Molloy started screaming hysterically. To start with we didn’t take a lot of notice, being more concerned with Mags. When we all got onto the beach, the silly bitch was still pointing and screaming, so we looked. And there was something floating. Something bloated and dead. Mags was very sick. And after that there was just a lot of screaming happening. Until Mr Leo turned up and smacked Molloy’s face. Which was very satisfying.’
The WPC who had been busily scribbling grinned.
‘I don’t think I need to write the last bit down.’
One of the girls who hadn’t yet spoken piped up. ‘Was that dead thing a person?’
‘Probably. Unless the local sheep have taken to wearing denim.’
‘Just don’t think about it’ Mike was bracing. ‘It’s none of your never mind. You consider what you are going to say to your father so he takes you away from that bloody school.’
She had just finished speaking when a perfunctory tap on the door heralded the entrance of a bulky mannish-looking woman with an incipient moustache. Mike raised an eyebrow.
‘Yes?’ she kept her voice neutral with an effort.
‘Come along girls. Time to leave.’
The oldest WPC looked up. ‘No. You can go, but the children stay until their parents come for them. That’s the rules.’
The woman tried to stare the WPC down, but had no success.
‘Very well’ she said’ on your head be it. I will leave them in the hands of the ungodly.’
Mike opened her mouth, but Ro reappeared and forestalled her. She grasped the interloper by her collar.
‘You. Out.’
She forcibly ejected the woman from the kitchen and frogmarched her to the back gate. A grinning policeman opened that gate and Ro all but threw her out. She returned to the house smiling somewhat grimly. ‘Bitch’ she said before striding off waving a duster.
From Shall we gather at the river? a hard hitting murder mystery thriller by Jane Jago which is available for 0.99.
It isn’t as if we can know
The future and where things will go
To always be stellar
Take sunscreen and umbrella
And then you can go with the flow
“We’re investigating a murder then?”
“You’d think.” Dai made no attempt to keep the wry note from his voice. “But we got the budget for this from Antiquities. Our masters value the stolen document, ‘an artefact of Roman significance’, more than the life of the courier — but then she was only a Briton.”
His mood was not improved when they went to interview the owner of the stolen document, a Roman Citizen and an official who also owned the chump half of Valentia in northern Britain. Claudius Albus Balbus. Balbus refused a polite invitation to come to the vigiles headquarters, so they tracked him down to his plush hotel.
It was a shimmering construction built beside the skyliner ascent, convenient to transport access for visiting Romans. Dai noted the stylized eagle, wings spread, hovering over the door ‘SPQR’ clutched in its ceramic talons. He was not surprised this building was sub aquila — Roman only. He was also not surprised when he and Bryn had to show their ID before being allowed past by the discreet security guard in the portico. He was surprised, however, when Bryn nudged him in the ribs and nodded at the retreating back of a man who had just walked out of the building.
“Atty Brickenden. Thug for hire. How could scum like him even get let into this place?”
“Maybe he was providing drugs for one of the visitors.” Dai suggested.
“True. Or fixing them up with a girl.”
Asking after Balbus, once inside, Dai was told the magistratus could be found in the atrium. Dai led the way until he was brought to a halt at the door of the open courtyard. An elegant woman, wearing a stylish stola, daringly cut and in this season’s colours, stood occupying the entrance.
“Oh, there you are. At last.” She lifted a languid hand imperiously and pointed to her feet. “Crinitia needs to visit the little girl’s room.”
Dai’s gaze followed her pointing finger down to what appeared to be a perfect sphere of fluff, from which emerged a leash that was looped over her arm. By the time he had registered that ‘Crinitia’ had to be some variety of canine, the woman was pressing the end of the lead into his hand and, as he opened his mouth to explain, she walked away.
Behind him, Bryn was suffering an inexplicable fit of coughing and wore an unrepentant grin when Dai spun round.
“I don’t know how you do it. Your Celtic charm wins the ladies every time, Bard.”
Dai returned the grin, but with an edge of irritation behind it. He held out the lead.
“Looks like you get to take Fluffy here for a mingo and merda, Decanus Cartivel.”
Bryn’s smile faded suddenly. “You don’t seriously mean— ”
“Oh but I do.”
From Dying to Alter History by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, one of the fourteen alternate history short stories in Tales From Alternate Earths 3 from Inklings Press.
Glossary
Please note these are not always accurate translations, they are how these terms are used in Dai and Julia’s world.
Decanus – sargeant.
Magistratus – senior official with legal jurisdiction over an area.
Merda – shit
Mingo – piss
Portico – entrance hall
SPQR (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus) -The Senate and People of Rome.
Stola – female formal wear.
Sub aquila – literally ‘under the eagle’. An eagle above the entrance of any building means it is Citizen access only – aside for those who might work there of course.
Valentia – we would call it Northern England.
Vigiles – Police. In Dai and Julia’s world the police are a sub-branch of the military.
When the loud banging and creative swearing started to emanate from the hole in the ground under the greenhouse, Brenda went for a visit with Granny.
“They find somebody to read their book to them?”
“No. They’m following the pictures.”
“What. Like the biggers and flat pack furniture?”
“Very like.”
Brenda winced. “I’ll just have everybody move to a safe distance then.”
“I would. Them three isn’t likely to get hurt, they’m too stupid. But one of the flower fairies could cop for a big problem.”
Brenda nodded.
The fairytale people shifted themselves away from the veggible garden and waited…
What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted…
Even for someone who’d seen more bad things than most in a long career with the Coalition Security Forces, the images being projected onto the wall of the briefing room were hard to look at.
Really hard.
At first glance, he found it difficult to tell if the images showed something that had indeed once been human. Plastered up on a screen and close to twice normal size, it looked more like something drawn from the hyper-imagination of a special effects creator working on some VR linkcast nasty. In case any gory detail of the torture inflicted was missed by the viewer, the images showed it all from several angles, and zoom shots homed in on each specific injury in horrid magnification.
It was butchery.
“Just in case there is any doubt about the kind of people we are dealing with here, this is just one example of their work.” The voice of the briefing officer was unemotional. “This man was once one Foss Fingal. Almost all the injuries you can see were inflicted before death.”
The narrator paused as two male faces appeared, one on each side of the original image. One showed a man smiling and at ease with himself and the world; the other, a man who wore a taut expression, watchful, expecting some kind of attack.
Durban Chola and Jazatar Baldrik.
“These, then, are the two people responsible,” the briefing continued. “One ordered it done and the other carried it out. Let’s be very clear from the outset, these are not pleasant individuals — even by ‘City standards.” The understatement hung in the darkened room like a bad smell.
So this really was something serious.
Even before the presentation began it had been pretty obvious this was going to be big. Instead of the briefing taking place in the usual way by link conferencing, he had been ordered to report to Coalition Security Force Headquarters in Central. And he’d been given the kind of thorough security check-in normally reserved for visitors, not for the fully-cleared, ID carrying operative that he was. Then there was the fact that he had been shown into a room buried deep in the heart of the HQ complex. A briefing room with no external windows and quietly dominated by the subtle hum of full-on surveillance damping with all external link access shut-off. Just in case anyone there was inclined to make an illicit private recording of the proceedings.
Another giveaway that this was anything but a regular briefing, not that he had still been in any doubt at all by that stage, was the identity of the man who greeted him: Garn Jecks. Calculating it out, Jecks would be the boss of his section head’s boss’s boss. In fact, Jecks was the ultimate boss. He was the man in charge of the entire Coalition Security Force and hovering close to deity as far as most regular serving CSF officers were concerned.
“Dugsdall. Right. Good that you are here. Take a seat.”
There was only one empty seat in the area of the room where Jecks gestured, so he sat on it and glanced around briefly to see if he knew anyone else. The woman on the chair beside him looked the lean, mean and hungry kind – the only doubt being exactly where that hunger was focused. She was presently focused on whatever personal screens held her attention, but he had a strong feeling they were not going to be ones about her favourite esport celebrities.
Whatever it was she was looking at must have been pretty attention-grabbing though, as her top teeth were visible, pressing hard into her bottom lip as she concentrated. Then she moved her arm and he saw the slight bulk of a wrist slot analysis device, no doubt the source of her screens. It also answered all his questions: she was on a power climb – a woman literally wired to her work. Which made her exactly the kind of person he would choose to swim a shark-filled river in full spate to avoid.
From Iconoclast: Mistrust and Treason a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy for a limited period.
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