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…
Write one for children they said
And I jumped in right over my head
But the youth of today
Wears your patience away
And right now I wish I was dead
They set off, not following the road, but heading uphill onto the high common land where sheep and goats roamed, and the air was filled with the sweet scent of yellow gorse.
For Julia, the ride was enchantment. She had her arms around the man she loved and her cheek resting on his back, and all the while they passed through the greenest and, she thought, the loveliest landscape she had ever seen. The only bar to complete enjoyment was the increasing rigidity in Dai’s shoulders as they neared his family home.
They came down from the hillside onto an obviously well-travelled road, and not many minutes later Dai stopped the vehicle beside a wide white-painted gate. He screwed around to look at her.
“This is it,” he said somewhat grimly.
“Smile, love,” she admonished. “You don’t want to upset your mother.”
His face softened as he looked at her, then he got off the vehicle and opened one leaf of the gate.
It was a long approach to the house and Julia was surprised to be passing through vineyards where the harvest was in full swing.
“I never made the connection,” she said in a voice of awe. “I knew your family were wine merchants with a vintner’s in Viriconium. I should have thought that maybe you have your own wines.”
“We don’t sell wine. It’s brandy. Distilled on the property.”
“Oh my. Why didn’t I know that?”
He managed an eloquent shrug as the all-terrain drew to a silent halt in front of a long, low stone-built house. Somebody must have been watching out, because the door opened and a little group of people hurried out to greet them.
First came a middle-aged woman with a coronet of jet-black braids and a pair of piercing blue eyes. She could only be Dai’s mother, Olwen, and everybody else hung back to allow her to greet her only child. He leapt off the vehicle and grasped his mother in a boisterous hug, lifting her quite off the ground and burying his face in her neck. She hugged him back for a long moment before putting her hands on either side of his face and kissing his cheeks.
“Put me down and introduce your wife,” she scolded but Julia could see the tears of joy that sparkled unshed in her eyes.
Dai obligingly set Olwen on her feet and turned to lift a laughing Julia from the all-terrain.
“I’m sure I should be able to get myself off this thing, I just couldn’t figure out how.”
“Your legs aren’t long enough.”
He kissed her lovingly before taking her hand and leading her to where his family waited.
“This is my wife, Julia,” he said with simple pride. Then he ticked off names on his fingers. “My mother, Olwen. Brother, Hywel. My sister-in-law Enya. And these are my nephews Merfyn, Angwyn, Brychan and….” he looked at the babe in Enya’s arms questioningly.
His brother grinned. “Oh. Him. That’s Dai.”
Dai strode over and smote his brother on the shoulder.
“You never did?”
“We did,” it was Enya who spoke. She looked at Julia. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Julia walked over and looked at the baby’s fair face. She blinked away a tear.
“No. I think it’s lovely. And I may not be able… We may never be….” she stopped and Dai came to stand behind her with his hands on her shoulders.
Enya smiled a sweet smile.
“Would you like to hold him?”
Julia nodded mutely and Enya put the baby in her arms.
From Dying for a Poppy by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook
A darkling drabble offers a shiver of horror in a hundred words…
The smell brought women to their front doors and prudent wives closed their windows.
“What be that?”
The oldest among them pointed to the mouldering stones of the castle that stood high above them, and the plume of oily black smoke that hung around it.
“They’m burning a body.”
“Question is, who. Is it the old one? Or have he won again?”
The youngest wife sighed. “I don’t suppose us’ll ever know. But that knight was mighty fine.”
“Aye. But so was the old one when he first come here.”
The women shivered and went indoors away from the darkness.
What happens when the hunter becomes the hunted…
After a pause, as though to be sure Grim had nothing to add, Jecks said: “Right.” Then he looked questioningly at the politician almost as if asking her permission to say something more. She gave a thin, slightly patronising, smile that included all three of them and spoke herself.
“I am sure I don’t need to remind you of the requirement placed upon you, in your employment, for the highest degree of confidentiality.”
She was definitely not CSF then.
“You know that is a given,” Jecks told her, his tone colder than before.
“Yes. Of course.” The woman was realising belatedly that she had just insulted them all.
Badly.
She cleared her throat and went on: “But this is a matter that has a lot of highly delicate political ramifications. You may recall the trial last year of Kahina Sarava? Her exaggeration of the effectiveness of an algorithm suite she had developed led to a large amount of public money and private investment being funnelled into her corporation, Sarava Intellectual Properties. You may also recall the nature and purpose of the algorithm was withheld from the public trial in the interests of security.”
Cista Tyran had a strange expression on her face, as though something inexplicable had just made sense to her.
“Kahina Sarava? She was —”
“That’s not important right now,” Jecks said quickly, speaking across her. “Please listen, comments can be made later.”
But Grim had seen the urgent warning in Jecks’ eyes and noted the slight frown on Cista Tyran’s face as she subsided back into her chair. His own expression, he was careful to make sure, maintained its usual deadpan. The other woman raised one hand a small amount, in a gesture chastising Jecks.
“But this may be relevant, I would like to hear what Var Tyran has to say?”
Cista Tyran did not even wait for permission from Jecks.
“I was just going to say that Kahina Sarava was the CEO of Sarava Int. and that was where Avilon Revid worked before he murdered his family and joined The Legacy. She was effectively his patron as much as his employer.”
Grim would have been willing to lay money that was not at all what Cista Tyran had been about to say, but the utter conviction of the way she said it now was enough to leave the other woman with nothing to do but nod and go on.
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.
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…
If everyone learned from mistakes
Didn’t wait for disastrous earthquakes
Wrote with similar care
They give to their hair
Our books would be yummy as cakes
Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…
***** ***** *****
A darkling drabble offers a shiver of horror in a hundred words…
It was quiet in the forest. Too quiet. The small things made no noise, and the busy brown birds hushed their chatter. The old woman sniffed the air. A smell of man sweat made her wrinkle her nostrils even as she climbed into the arms of a tall tree. The witch hunters dragged their prey into the clearing, laughing coarsely. She was young and might have been comely once; now she was just a smear on the forest floor. A smear whose blood awoke the hungry ones. The hunters screamed, but their prey died with a smile on her lips.
The tale of a bold knight, a valiant steed, an innocent maiden and a cunning dragon…
After they had strapped a sword belt around him and hung a plain sword on one side and a lethally sharp dagger on the other, the dressers approached Barney with a helmet that looked very much like an upturned coal scuttle. He took it out of their hands and regarded it with some disfavour.
“Hammer,” he muttered and somebody put a large ball-peen hammer in his outstretched hand. He gave the helmet an experimental bash. Nothing happened. Barney smiled inwardly as an anvil in the corner of the tent caught his eye. He strode over and shouldered the black-visaged and scowling smith to one side.
“Watch and learn my friend.”
With six mighty blows of the hammer, Barney enlarged the eye slot and the breathing hole while producing an over-eye lump pretty well guaranteed to deflect blows away from the vulnerable facial area. He pushed out his lip as he studied his handiwork: it wasn’t pretty but at least he’d be able to see. And breathe. The smith actually smiled.
“Nice bashing, Sir Barnabas,” he said in an undervoice.
“Where in the name of my sainted dam did you learn that?” Salazar was incredulous.
Barney just grinned and strode back to where his ‘dressers’ stood with their mouths open.
“Keep walking. Go outside and stand by the mounting block. You’re carrying half a ton of steel and you’ll never get on my back without it.”
Barney kept walking and Salazar wasn’t far behind him. After an undignified scramble during which Barney swore and Salazar sniggered the brave knight was ready for his helmet and lance. With the helmet on his head, Barney could only see straight in front. It was a deeply unsettling feeling. Then somebody handed him about three metres of tapered wooden pole with a metal point at the sharp end.
“Rest it in the stirrup beside your right foot.”
That helped while Barney found the balancing point.
“Keep it upright until I say. Then just hold the thing steady. I’ll do the manoeuvring.”
Barney grunted and concentrated on finding his balance in the saddle. He had a while, as they joined a line of mounted idiots in search of glory. Salazar was unimpressed.
“Nothing here to bother us.”
When it was their turn, Barney could feel a change in the balance of the great warhorse as Salazar set himself for a charge. Somewhere in the background he could hear the crowd baying for blood and the voice of a herald bawling introductions. Then Salazar bunched his muscles. He set out at a rolling gallop and Barney gripped hard with his knees.
“Here we go, little knight. Couch lance. Now.”
Barney dropped the weapon to lie horizontal pointing over Salazar’s neck to where he could just discern another mounted knight charging along the lists towards them. The point of his lance bit into something unyieldingly metallic with a fearful screeching crash, and the jolt all but unseated him. All but. He twisted the unwieldy weapon, instinctively knowing he needed to free it from his opponent or be dragged to the ground. He fought the lance free, and Salazar slowed to a walk.
“Don’t look now, but he’s down.”
“I can’t look. Unless you could unscrew my head.”
And that was pretty much how it went all day, with Barney and Salazar growing in confidence and trust, until the shadows were lengthening and they’d unhorsed everyone else at least once. Barney was getting bored and his arm was aching when a discordant fanfare of brassy trumpets broke into his reverie.
“Oh bugger.”
“What is it?”
“The King’s Majesty has just ridden up to the lists.”
Even from the perspective of a former chucker-outer this rather changed the game.
“Wouldn’t be a good idea to unseat His Majesty, would it?”
“No. Look. How much do you trust me?”
Barney laid a mailed hand on the proudly arched neck.
“Pretty much all the way.”
“Okay. This is dangerous but it’s our only option. Other than letting his kingship unseat you. And I don’t feel like doing that.”
“What do I need to do?”
“Couch your lance. Sit still. And pray.”
“I can do all of them.”
Barney sat astride his tall companion, and while the windy herald introduced the King’s Majesty with as many flowery adjectives as he could think of, it came to the newly-created ‘knight’ that the warhorse beneath him must be weary. After all, the big stallion had been carrying a big man dressed in a steel suit all day. This required some thought. But just as the green shoots of a plan began to unfurl their leaves the herald finally shut his mouth. Came yet another rather off-key fanfare and Salazar broke into a rolling gallop.
This adventure of Barney and Salazar will continue next week…
Barren and lifeless and white
The glacier creaks and it groans
Beneath us, the hot path of flight
Awakens the dead creatures’ bones
As we turn to make just one last pass
Of our search in the cold deathly light
Something chillingly taps on the glass
A creature of tremor and fright
The fingers are icy, and crack
As the rime in their crevices breaks
With fingernails horny and black
That pick at the ship till she shakes
As we pull it away from the ice
The hand drips and melts and corrodes
If the power in the ship won’t suffice
We too will be perished and cold
But we’re free and we head for the sky
Where it’s clean and the atmosphere clear
That will teach us to not overfly
Hell. At this time of the year
The hard men of the barrios and their cold-eyed womenfolk called it a freak show, but that didn’t prevent them from putting their money into the animator’s cold bluish hands.
He and his dancers performed in a dark, smoke-filled bodega down one of the meanest alleys in the city. Even now, when the show had earned him sufficient to buy a theatre in the entertainment quarter, it suited his purposes to stay right where he was—with his ballerinas stored in an old tea chest in the corner of a store room, cheek by jowl with bottles of bootleg whisky and bathtub gin.
The jumbled heap of bones and desiccated papillae lay silent and unregarded until it was time.
When the drinking den was full of sweating, slobbering humanity, he lifted his gold and ivory baton and called his servants to the dance.
The dancers assembled themselves, while the orchestra tuned its unfamiliar instruments and the fluting voices of a thousand captive songbird souls sang counterpoint to the breathless musicality. The animator drew his cloak about him like the feathers of a bony bird and ascended the rostrum—as he spread his arms the music came together and his creatures danced.
Such was the mesmeric quality of the music and the bird-bone ballerinas that even the drunken stevedores from the docks would stop their brawling and stand quiet until the unearthly music stopped.
Strangest of all, nobody could ever remember precisely what dances the bone ballerinas performed, any more than they could whistle the tunes that turned the smoke-filled air they breathed cold and pitiless, and painful on the lungs.
And still they came, filling the club with their sweat and stench, even as they filled the coffers of the animator and his business partner with gold.
As word spread it became the fashion among the scions of wealth and privilege to brave the foetid alleys of the barrio and see with their own eyes now the bare bones took life from the musics of darkness.
If a few wealthy young men awoke to find their purses unaccountably absent, who was to care. The city watch had enough to do without venturing into places where an officer of the law was likely to wind up with his throat cut in a ditch.
But still they came, intrigued by the promise of something new and uncaring about how such novelty might have been achieved.
The wealthy and important city fathers were accompanied by hard-nosed, heavy-handed bodyguards—and by and large they were safe, unless they got too close to the women who sold their bodies and their diseases with little discrimination.
So matters stood on the night when the Count Himself descended from his high place to see with his own eyes. His councillors begged him to command a performance in the safety of his own palace, but he laughed in their faces.
“This is a thing of the barrios,” he said, “and cannot be experienced anywhere but the place of its birth.”
Knowing themselves beaten, the old men quieted, although the Count’s security detail was armed to the teeth and every one walked with the casual menace of a seasoned killer.
Deeming the entertainment too elemental for the eyes and ears of his lady wife, the Count brought with him the most beautiful and expensive puta the city had to offer. She was exquisite, gowned in silk and velvet, and with her proud, pale face covered by a mask of the finest lace.
They walked the mean street side by side, but she did not seek the support of his arm, and neither did she waste energy peering into the darkness of doorways and alleyways. He laughed and she looked up at him.
“Señor?”
“It is a surprise to find one so beautiful so unafraid.”
“There is little here to fear. I have always found the greed of the sons and daughters of wealth and privilege more problematic than those who do what they must to survive.”
He nodded, but made no comment.
Inside the stuffy bodega she seemed as much at ease as if she was attending a banquet high on the city hills where the air would be scented with almond blossom and citrus trees, not human effluvia and fear. The Count’s bodyguard cleared space for them and she sat down at the cracked and stained table careless of her silken clothing.
Such magnificent disregard of danger and discomfort called to some wildness in her escort and he bent his handsome head to place his lips on the white skin of her wrist where the veins showed blue in the fitful light.
He opened his mouth to say who knew what, but his voice was frozen in his throat by the first sounds of what he was later to call not music.
Before anyone’s ears had chance to become accustomed to the strange cacophony a tall, cadaverous figure, wearing a frock coat and top hat jumped onto a small table and raised its arms.
It was not possible to say from where the ballerinas came, but they filled the stage with their jarringly compelling dance.
When the Count managed to drag his gaze away from the birds, or beasts, or whatever they may once have been, it was to find his companion staring fixedly at her own hands. As he watched her he saw a tear fall from beneath her mask.
“Do you not wish to see this dance?”
“No. I do not. The dancers are too naked.”
He was nonplused for a moment. How could a woman who earned her not inconsiderable fee by being mostly naked be so affected by dancing bones? But he wasn’t without empathy and he quickly understood that it wasn’t prudery, but pity, that brought tears to his fair companion’s eyes.
“You feel sorry for them?”
“I do maestre. Are they not animated nightly and made to dance, without even the covering of flesh to protect their modesty? Of course I feel sorry for them. If you listen beneath the music you can even hear their cries.”
Beauty lifted her head and looked at the stage where half a hundred frail butterflies adorned the wings of the prima ballerina who danced as if her life story was in the steps she took. The bone dancer turned her head to one side and for a moment something glowed in the empty eye socket of her skull.
Beauty said something that the Count didn’t catch and the dancers began to whirl widdershins. Faster and faster they spun and the wild music grew wilder in its efforts to keep pace. But it was to no avail and the sound of a hundred instruments screaming in their death throes brought almost every human in the room to their knees.
As the music faltered and failed, the scrawny figure of the animator screamed. Just once. Before he began melting into his dark robes. The wind, which came from every direction blew through the dancing bones before picking up the desiccated animator and sucking him upwards through the roof to who knew where.
On stage, the bones fell into untidy heaps and as they touched the floor they became no more than dust.
For a brief moment the prima ballerina stood alone, still gowned in butterflies but with the animator’s top hat added to the ensemble.
She bowed, with an irony not lost on The Count, before falling to dust among her sisters.
As the wind blew the last dust away a voice like the rustling of dead leaves filled the room.
“Liberado por piedad,” it whispered.
Then it was gone.
This story was inspired by the image created by Paul Biddle
