Two Women and Some Books
Writing made easy – if you don’t mind the bumps!
The wit, wisdom, joy and frustration of a writer’s life summed up in limericks…
You’ll have freedom to travel they said
But I’d much rather stay in my bed
An airline hostess
Has far too much stress
So I’ll just be an author instead
The tale of a bold knight, a valiant steed, an innocent maiden and a cunning dragon…
The maiden wasted little time in considering her options. “Although I’m firmly of the opinion you lot are hallucinations brought on by fear on the off chance you aren’t, I’d suggest the young man comes down here and does something aside from waving his sword around.”
Salazar swallowed his surprise and kicked Barney firmly. “You’d better turn around, sir knight. Your fair lady awaits. And it doesn’t sound to me like she is accustomed to waiting.”
Barney turned and looked ruefully down at the girl. “I’m really sorry about this, Princess .”
Aurora offered him a sunny smile, which awoke a dimple in her left cheek.
Judging it politic to leave the humans to their own devices, the big horse turned his back while Cicero made an enclosure of his wings. Finding the sounds of sliding cloth and murmured comment a bit distracting, he turned his attention to Cicero who was looking pinched, and uncomfortable, and disapproving.
“I don’t know what I imagined,” he said thinly, “but that young female person just giggled.”
“Sir Barnabas has a bit of an effect on females. We’re only here because The Queen’s Majesty has designs on his virtue. He’s not interested – because even if she wasn’t married she’s scarcely a catch. So we bravely ran away.”
“You ran from a female?”
“No. We ran from her mad bastard of a husband. He’s about eight feet tall, built like a wyvern, and completely mental. He’s never lost a tournament, or a duel, or a battle in his life. And he is said to have killed ten dragons.”
Cicero winced. “Oh. Right. One of them. I’ve read about that sort of a king.”
They were quiet for a few moments, then Cicero spoke pettishly.
“Do you think those two will be much longer about their business? This is beyond embarrassing.”
Salazar was casting about in his head for something anodyne to say when the giggles and murmurs were interrupted by a sharp cry. He opened his mouth to say something about the job mostly being done when the ground beneath his hooves began to tremble. He looked to the north, where the lush meadowland gave way to scrubby moorland.
“Oh no. By the hairs on my granddam’s fetlocks please let my eyes be deceiving me.”
But they weren’t. It looked as if Nemesis, in the shape of a mad half-giant and his equally deranged horse, was galloping towards them bellowing imprecations.
“Is that?” even Cicero sounded impressed.
“Yup. That’s his mad-jesty.” Salazar raised his voice. “Hopefully you two have done the needful, because it’s time we weren’t here.”
Barney stood up and his companion straightened her skirts before standing beside him. Cicero dropped his wing and they both stared open-mouthed at the nightmarish vision that was The King’s Royal Majesty in a killing rage.
“Avaunt ye foul fiend,” he bellowed and the spittle flew from his lips. “Prepare to meet thy doom.” His barbed lance rested on his right boot and he swung a battle axe of about a man height negligently in his other hand.
“I thought my brother was a mad bastard,” the Princess murmured. “What happens now?”
“Now, hopefully, we get the hell out of here.”
“Grasp my foreleg,” Cicero commanded.
Barney and the Princess did what they were told, and the dragon took a firm grip of Salazar’s bridle. He sent a gout of flame towards the approaching madman before touching his snout to the rock and muttering a word in dragonish.
Came a flash of something beyond lightning, the western sky turned as black as tar, and the Dragon Rock split from top to base falling in two halves on the cold grass. The king’s gigantic horse stopped galloping, and his mighty hooves cut deep channels in the moorland peat. His royal rider had all he could do to keep his seat in the face of this sudden cessation of movement even though he dropped his weapons, and groped for the reins. By the time he had collected his wits and his shredded dignity the dragon and its companions were nowhere to be seen.
“Come out and face me you lily-livered lizard. Ye can’t hide forever,” he bawled as he rode around the ruins of the only true Dragon Rock in his kingdom. “Coward,” he roared into the darkening sky. “Cowardly son of a cowardly father.”
For a brief second there was a tear in the storm clouds that were rolling in from the west and a blunt saurian face smirked at him before blowing a single blue flame in his direction.
The dragon disappeared again, and as the king’s beard burned merrily a disembodied voice spoke from the sky.
“Game over.”
There will be a new serial for you to enjoy next Sunday!
There is no greater writing gift
Than giving those who sigh a lift
No better use of word or craft
Than beating sorrow with a laugh
There’s no better plot nor ploy
Than that our work will bring you joy
I have no literary aspiration
Save to bring smiles by my creation
Holly dragged a couple of very heavy bags out of the back of the Land Rover and hauled them into the kitchen. She went back for a second load, and as she was passing the staircase Alan’s voice floated down.
“Did you get it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Bring it here and let me see it before you wrap it up.”
“As soon as I’ve finished hauling groceries.”
There was the sound of movement overhead and for one delirious moment Holly actually thought he was coming down to help. But then she heard a door slam. Her slender shoulders drooped, and she soldiered on alone.
Some half an hour later, she trudged up the stairs holding a small box in her left hand. Walking into Alan’s office she placed it carefully on the desk in front of him. He looked up from his computer screen.
“At last. Knowing how much I want to see this, I’d have thought you could have brought it to me before now.”
“I could. But then the groceries wouldn’t have been put away before the twins get home from school.”
He opened his mouth to make a scathing retort, but his wife was already on her way out of the room. Instead, he opened the box and looked gloatingly at the heavy gold bangle in its layers of tissue paper. It had cost a great deal of money and meant he wouldn’t be buying his wife or his twin sons Christmas presents this year, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the image of his daughter with the bangle clasped around one slender wrist. She was going to love it.
Downstairs Holly got on with preparing the evening meal, presenting the world with her usual face of calm good sense. Inside, however, she was far from being serene and happy. Not for the first time in the ten years of her marriage, she wondered what maggot had entered Alan’s brain. How could a man who was constantly bewailing his own poverty possibly justify spending four thousand pounds on a bracelet? She allowed herself one small kitten-like snarl, before popping a huge shepherd’s pie in the oven. She was just putting the kettle on when the back door slammed.
“Paddy, Sean, shoes,” she shouted. “And before anyone considers arguing, I have fresh doughnuts.”
There was the sound of masculine laughter, and a couple of minutes later the kitchen door opened and two huge young men all but fell in. They surrounded her and subjected her to a certain amount or good natured rumpling, before sitting down at the scarred wooden table.
“You are,” Sean said, “very possibly the nicest stepmother in the world.”
“She is,” his twin concurred. “Which begs the question of how the miserable miser upstairs ever persuaded her to marry him.”
“Behave, you pair,” Holly couldn’t help laughing, as she put a huge mug of very strong tea in front of each and a plate of doughnuts between them.
While they were eating, Holly looked at their broad, good natured features and did her own wondering. She wondered exactly how two such self-centred people as Alan and Corinne, came to have produced a matched pair of nice sons. Paddy grinned at her.
“Stop frowning Stepmama, you’ll put wrinkles in your pretty forehead.”
She smiled at him, and he shoved a whole doughnut in his mouth.
“He’s been practicing,” Sean explained with simple pride. “That’s school over until January. So what now?”
“Tomorrow. Nothing. Unless you’d like to go shooting.”
“We would,” the boys chorused. “How did you swing that?”
“I have my methods.”
“And after tomorrow? What are you softening us up for?” Sean was the quicker on the uptake of the duo, although Paddy was the leader.
“Sunday your mother arrives.”The boys groaned. “And what else?”
“Christmas Eve, Anna and Christabel will be here. Staying until the day after Boxing Day.”
“Oh won’t that be fun. The two ex-wives at each other’s throats except for when they join forces to have a go at you. Plus the most spoilt young woman on the planet, Daddy’s darling Christabel, expecting to be waited on hand and foot.” Paddy looked at Holly. “I dunno how you stick it. And don’t say it’s for love of our despicable father, because you aren’t that stupid.”
“I stick it because I promised myself I’d be here for you two until you were old enough to leave home. When that happens…”
The boys looked at her with round eyes before getting up from the table and enveloping her in a group hug.
“I’d give a great deal,” Sean said, “to know what the old bastard has done that’s gotten you rattled enough to admit that.”
Holly waved her hands distractedly. “I shouldn’t have said it. And I don’t want you two to be thinking about it…”
“Okay. We won’t.”
From Team Holly by Jane Jago
They stand, these sentinels of human pride, that ask
Silent questions, shouting out from the past in stone
Where once walked feet brought here by many urgent tasks
Now stand we, gaping.
The mighty raised each edifice that all might see
The depth of dominion they could summon forth
A legacy of tears, of wars from sea to sea,
Or maybe wisdom.
Could they guess the lessons their history would teach,
Each one who strutted proud and strong upon life’s stage?
When their sun shone and these proud buildings were upraised,
Did they sleep nights?
Listen to Granny because Granny always knows best!
I’m not against electric cars per se – although there is an argument to be had about where the electricity to power them comes from, and another about battery technology. However, the basic premise is a good one. And I’m all for anything that can help the planet.
But. And it’s a big fat hairy…
I have a shedload of personal reasons for hating the reality of the bloody things in the here and now.
How am I disappointed, shall I count the ways?
First of all, you can’t hear the bastards coming, and in the country lanes where Gyp and me walk every day you need to be able to hear what’s hurtling around the bend towards you in time to throw yourself in the hedge and mutter a quick prayer to the god with responsibility for the safety of grumpy old women. You can’t do that with Jemima and her middle-class planet saver, and she’s so busy talking bollocks to little Serpentine and Acne that she doesn’t even notice the pedestrians she has left skittled in her wake.
Make electric cars have noise generators, and make it a legal requirement to use them!
Point the second is charging stations. For more than sixty years I have shopped in a nearby small town. But I can do so no more, because half of the only car park to which it is physically possible to carry my shopping has been given over to charging stations for an expected tsunami of electric cars. Right now, of course, the only electric vehicles in evidence are a 1970s milk float, two invalid scooters, and a golf cart redolent of urine in which the Mothers Union ferries the bewildered elderly to and from its business.
All of which means, we have half a usable car park and seventeen crouching machines – most of which aren’t even commissioned.
Ergo me and my like can’t park. Which means me and Gyp hie the Micra to a German hypermarket on the outskirts of the nearest large conurbation.
And that’s the current net effect of electric cars and it will be so until somebody gets hold of the roll out and does something sensible.
Until then local businesses lose out and the pedestrian population remains at risk from eejits in silent killing machines.
But on the upside me and Gyp are saving a shitload of money, or we would be if the booze wasn’t so tempting.
Writing made easy – if you don’t mind the bumps!
The wit, wisdom, joy and frustration of a writer’s life summed up in limericks…
We all know the feeling of change
When things in our head turn out strange
It’s the imagination
That leads to creation
Not a muse, on a horse, on the range
The most photographed woman of her generation looked at him politely, and offered a practised smile. It was frustrating, but he chose not to show that, instead he searched for another way to to shake her out of her self-possession.
“Does it not worry you?” he asked in his deep, hypnotic voice. “Are you never a little afraid?”
“Afraid of what?”
“That the old superstition is true, and every time you are photographed you lose a little of your soul.”
She regarded him limpidly.
“Perhaps. Perhaps I have been photographed so often that I am just a graceful shell.”
He looked into the serene depths of her remarkable amber eyes and allowed his frustration to boil over.
“Well maybe I should photograph you like that,” he snapped with sudden viciousness. “As an empty vessel remarkable only for the elegance of its window dressing.”
She made no reply, so he stared again into the depths of his imaging device – looking for something to distinguish his pictures from the thousands of others that flooded the Internet and colonised every glossy magazine on the planet. As he concentrated it seemed to him that those famous eyes grew even wider, and clearer, and that they slowly filled the viewfinder as bit by bit they dragged his soul into the abyss that lurked in their depths.
He screamed just once, and the woman smiled the secret smile he had been looking for…
Sometimes Janice struggled with being a children’s author.
Her series of Hippity-Hop and Bunnykin sold out to pre-schoolers’ parents as perfect for precious, developing young minds.
There was much excitement when she published the retelling of a favourite fairy tale.
Until the reading parents got to …they all lived happily ever after. The story continued:
..except they didn’t as no one lives forever. In fact, they all died. Some quite terribly of various agonising diseases and some in horrific accidents.
What the parents, and Janice, hadn’t expected was the delight with which most youngsters took to this dose of reality.
The Dragon and Leek was a small but substantial wayside cupona on a narrow, but well-travelled, road skirting through the foothills of the mountains. It seemed to lack any kind of village and stood, half-hidden by the forest in its deep valley. Here the road tracked the path of a brook which locals considered worthy of being considered a river. Used to the Tamesis, Dai was not convinced.
It was mid-morning as the vigiles piled out of the all-wheeler in the car park which doubled as a stableyard and were met by the worried landlord. Blaen Aderyn was a man who looked past the age of retirement and leaned on a stick to walk, but had a fierce briskness which defied anyone to consider him too old for his role.
Introductions made, Dai sent Bryn and his team with one of the staff to begin the usual investigation preliminaries and let himself be coaxed into the warmth of the lounge area, by Aderyn. A few locals, presumably from the hill farms around, were gathered at one end watching a game of harpastum on a big screen. Now and then the image broke up or the screen blanked, but the small audience didn’t seem to mind. Aderyn found them seats well away from the sports fans. The two of them were served with mugs of honey sweetened mulled wine that Dai only agreed to when assured it was mostly just spices and water – and on the promise a tray would be provided for Bryn’s team as they worked.
“This is a terrible shock to us all, I don’t know how it could be. They were fine when they arrived early evening, ate quietly – the men here and the lady upstairs in her room. It is not anything we have had happen here before and I can’t imagine how it could be. This is so very, deeply disturbing.”
Dai nodded along sympathetically and brought the topic to the point.
“So they came in last night, rooms were pre-booked in the name of,” he checked the entry in the book – handwritten. “Deliciae Parnassa Devotius?”
The man nodded. “Yes. She came all cloaked and hooded. Could barely see her face beneath the fur.” “And her escort were Roman – are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be. They spoke like it and they both wore one of those.” He gestured to the broad silver ring of citizenship on Dai’s index finger. “They ate their food and went up to their room soon after.”
“Did they say or do anything you recall whilst they ate?”
Aderyn frowned and shook his head.
“Not aside what you might expect – the weather, having to travel at Saturnalia – that kind of thing.”
“Anything about their employer?”
“Not a word as I heard. I can ask the staff of course, or you can.”
“Did they talk to anyone else? Any other guests?” “Well, it being Saturnalia and all they were the only guests. Most of our trade comes from those who have business at one of the medical or care facilities on Ynis Mon. Romans don’t like to stay there overnight and we make a good stop-over before they run back to Londinium. But trade has not been so good lately, what with the latest economic downturn and -”
Dai cut across him.
“Did they talk to any locals?”
The old man shook his head again, a worried frown on his face.
“Not that I know. You lot are going to pin it on me though, aren’t you? Just like the last Submagistratus did over the contraband they they found in the cellar of The Fox and Radish. You don’t care who gets the blame long as someone can be tried for it. They took Geddy Haps and had her executed for it within the week. And she was as innocent as they come.” His voice was rising in pitch as he spoke and some heads turned from the game towards them.
“Won’t happen,” Dai said in the brief space when Aderyn paused to draw breath. “The man you speak of is himself disgraced and dead. There will be no miscarriage of justice on my watch. You have my word.”
“The word of a Roman?”
“The word of a Llewellyn – and a citizen.”
The old man reacted to his name, which was not so surprising. The family was very well known throughout Cornovii and beyond.
“A Llewellyn you say? And a citizen? How can that have happened?”
“When this is all dealt with I will happily come back, sit by your welcoming hearth and buy us a jug of your finest ale to share as I tell you the tale of it. But for now I need your honesty – so we can find who did this and what has happened.”
From Dying as a Druid, a Dai and Julia Mystery by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.
