The Sunday yard sale was all but over. Fortunately, the old copper whisky still was still there. That and a big ugly plant.

While Stevie was dickering with the seller she idly stroked the plant’s glabrous leaves.

“Tell you what,” seller said eagerly. “I’ll accept your offer. If you take that ugly fucking plant too.”

Stevie was real happy. 

“Y’all can have that plant in the kitchen.”

Monday, Stevie come home from work in an ugly mood. But as he grabbed her throat something odd happened. 

Ain’t too many better ways to find out you got a man eating plant.

©️jj 2019

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 would like to listen as you read, or instead of reading you can on YouTube.

I

Anno Diocletiani MDCCLXXVII Maius

“Notebook entry. Confirm date, Post Ides, Maius. Time, night watch, at two twenty three, and location Augusta Arena, Londinium, Britannia Maxima. Looks like the report of a murder was not wrong. He seems pretty deceased to me.”
Under the brilliant lights of the pitch, which turned night into day, the body would have looked gruesome anyway. It had no face. But laid out as it was on a white sheet, the injuries seemed to stand out more. There was no blood but…
Dai wished he had not put quite so much garum on the chips he had been eating less than an hour ago. Even after more than eight years in the job he still found he had little stomach for the messier end of it. At least the hands seemed to still be intact, which made part of the process a lot easier. He pressed the touchscreen of his identipad against one finger and then entered the other necessary details. DNA and fingerprint checks both came up. Which was unusual as most murder victims were unregistered on either database. But when he saw the image he knew why this one was different.
This had once been Treno Bellicus ‘Big Belly’: one of the leading lights of the Caledonian Game team here in Londinium for the Games. That had to be more than ironic.
Dai, like every schoolkid in Britannia, knew that an arena had stood here since before the Divine Diocletian had rebuilt the Empire under his heavy hand, spreading his brand of Romanisation as far as his arms would reach and at the same time snatching back the privilege of being a full citizen from all born outside Italia. Back then, the arena had staged the kind of barbaric and bloody spectacles ex-patriot Romans expected. And now? In all honesty, Dai could not say it was too much different. It might include a ball as a sop to those who wanted to call it sport, but the brutality remained the same. The Games in all their unrelenting savagery. Those who couldn’t be there in person to taste the dust and smell the blood could freely watch the spectacle on the screens on every street corner and in every public building. Bread and Circuses.

The prize that lured the finest athletes of the provinces to risk life and limb was otherwise unattainable Roman Citizenship, and this poor bastard had been a star player. A broad-featured face looked out of the screen on Dai’s wristphone, wearing a manufactured snarl; behind him was a virtual backdrop with sports drink logos and other product placements. Well, those sponsors had just lost one of their money-spinning assets.
Reluctantly, he returned his attention to the body and bent over it to peer at the visible injuries as he made his initial informal observations. It was as much talking himself through coping with the gruesome scene as anything of real value.
“Victim ID biometrics confirmed. Body is supine. Been dead the last four hours. He looks like he has been laid out all ready for anointing and Charon’s obol. But placed on a white cloth that I’m willing to bet half my next salary is going to be a bed sheet. Body was bled out, through the throat – ugly gash there – and cleaned up before being put here. The other half of my pay is going on the certainty there will be nothing on the body we can use to ID the killer. Other injuries I can see -”
One of the disadvantages of being a plainclothes investigator was it seemed to lead to less respect from civilians, especially from Roman civilians.
“Llewellyn?” the voice was coolly condescending.
Even though he had told his decanus to keep everyone away, Dai was grateful for the excuse to straighten up and stop looking at the corpse.
The woman who stood there was in her thirties, with classic Roman features; she wore her fashionably short stola over close-fitting leggings and boots. For someone who must have been dragged out of bed in the small hours, she looked very well turned out and made Dai wish he could cover the small stain on his tunic where he had dropped a chip when the call to attend this crime came through. Her name badge declared her to be ‘Annia Belonia Flavia’ and said she was Curatrix Prima. No doubt in charge of this arena. She was frowning at him and he realised he must be staring.
“That is indeed who I am, domina.”
Behind her back he could see Bryn, his decanus, looking guilty. So he should, but Dai had the feeling this woman was not the kind to be easily put off.
“Do you you know how this happened?” she demanded, as if it was Dai’s fault the body had been left in the middle of her pitch.
“Investigations are already underway,” he told her smoothly. “We have identified the victim and my people are questioning everyone who might have seen anything here.”
He had tried to put himself between her and the body, but she sidestepped and looked. Her hands went up to her face and the skin behind them looked almost as pale as the corpse, leaching into a light hint of green. To her credit, she recovered without vomiting, but she stepped back and took a breath before restoring the gravitas expected of a Roman matron.

Part 2 will be here next week or if you can’t wait to read on you can snag the full novella here.

It was high summer and everyone was helping with what looked like being a bumper harvest. The men stripped off their shirts, though Dai needed profuse applications of sunscreen. 

He was glad enough to finish for the day, but as he sat in the cool of the stable he frowned to himself. He had been aware of a certain amount of unwanted female interest in his naked torso.

Somehow it felt cheapening.

His grumpy reverie was interrupted by a feminine giggle. His wife, Julia, grinned at him.

“Cheer up lovely boy, at least you are pretty enough so they look.”

©️jj 2019

My waggon’s on a bumpy road
The wrong side of the track
The sun’s too hot, the rain’s too cold
But there’s no turning back
Sometimes it’s axle deep in mud
Or buried in a hole
Tears of effort stained with blood
Come chipping at my soul
But if I find a meadow wide
Or river dappled cool
Or someone walking at my side
Why then I feel a fool
And even when the pathway forks
And hurt on trouble piles
I find that I can do my work
With courage and a smile

©jj 2019

The Working Title Blog is bringing you Dying to be Roman as our new Sunday Serial from tomorrow. Dying to be Friends explores a bit about Dai and Julia’s lives before they first meet in Dying to be Roman…

The boot would have caught him in the head. Dai rolled away as it swung in and he took it on the shoulder instead. But the rest of the pack were about to catch up and after the last experience of that, he knew he had two choices, surrender at once or hold on, count the moments and pray. The decision was taken from him as the whistle blew across the field.  Which was just as well because he could not have taken much more punishment.
A hand reached down, attached to a brawny arm.
“Well done, you’re not bad at this are you?”
The mud smothered ball was clutched close into his body and Dai, still winded and bruised from the last assault, took the hand, grateful for anything that might help him back on his feet. A moment later he was reeling back on the ground, shoulder probably half-dislocated as his erstwhile helper was holding the ball aloft and making an earsplitting hooting noise.
Dai lay still, closed his eyes and let the world revolve around him for a few moments. The jubilant cheers and back-thumping slowly faded. It was not the first humiliation he had endured since he had started his career in the Vigiles and he was willing to bet it would not be the last. But at least it would be the last he had to endure on this training course.
This ‘team building’ event was meant to be a treat for the final day. A reward for all the hard brainwork they had been required to put in to qualify for the rank of Investigator. Random draw assigned the teams and they had spent the morning training. Dai had contemplated feigning gut cramps to escape the afternoon match and now he wished he had.
He became aware it was starting to rain. Britannia in the early spring tended to wet and the ground they had been playing on was already part mudslide. The drops were heavy and he decided he was not hurting quite so much any more and probably ought to get up.
“Spado!” He recognised the voice of his team captain and opened his eyes, pushing himself to his feet one knee at a time. A far cry from the players you saw on the sports channels. They would take all kinds of a kicking and just roll to their feet and jog off.
“You must be the most stupid cunnus I ever played in a team with. Giving the ball away to the other side – and that after the whistle.”
“The game was over and I thought -”
“You thought you’d fall for the oldest trick in the book? The rules are merda, Llewellyn – just like what you keep inside your skull. This is harpastum. The Game. They had the ball when the ref got his first view of it after the whistle.”
The anger and disgust on the other man’s face was so intense Dai found himself sinking into a defensive stance. He had no idea how to play harpastum, the messy brawls for glory had never appealed to him, he’d avoided it like the plague during his school years opting for other sports, running and swimming being the ones he favoured most, but he knew how to fight when he had to, that had always been on the sports syllabus in his life. The other man seemed not to notice, he had already turned away and was jogging back towards the building.
Wiping at a splotch of mud which was sliding over his eye, Dai realised he was only spreading more mud as his hand was coated too. In fact, there was not much of him that was not. He squelched back across the pitch, the rain picking up as he did so, and by the time he stepped into the changing rooms, the mud was cascading in rivulets on the floor behind him. He pushed open the door and the conversation dropped as the entire nineteen man team glowered at him.
Dai shook his head and walked past them, heading for the welcome warmth of the shower room. He might have lost the game, but of the five points they had made, two had been his and owed more to his running skill than anything else. The other three had been scored by their team captain, but then that was a man who had been in the under 20s finals at Augusta Treverorum six years ago as he had proudly boasted when putting himself forward for the role. They also seemed to have overlooked the fact that Dai had been the one clutching the ball and defending it with his body when the whistle went. Which, he had been told, was the way to ensure victory in this game. No one had bothered mentioning anything about after the whistle.
They were all gone when he emerged from the shower room, much to Dai’s relief. He had already seen the first purple marks revealed as the mud was washed away and he had a feeling that the following day he was going to be stiff and sore. Fortunately, the following day he would be heading home to attend his half-brother’s wedding and have a week in the fond bosom of his family before starting work as a junior Vigiles investigator for the submagistratus in his hometown of Viriconium.
He was towelling his hair dry and was wondering if he could afford a massage in the baths next door, when the door was flung open by one of the women who had been leading the training course.
“Llew –” She choked off halfway through his name, her mouth open and her eyes wide. Then a light flush of colour brushed her cheeks.
Dai dropped the towel from his shoulders to wrap it around his waist. Well what did she expect bursting into the men’s changing rooms? Romans who did not respect the privacy of non-citizens could expect to get an eyeful of six-pack and extras.
“Apologies, domina,” he said, reaching for his tunic.
“Eh – yes. Well, you were not answering your wristphone so I had to come and find you in person.”
“We were told to keep them turned off or silent.”
“Yes. So you were. So here I am.” She gave a little smile.
Under the cover of his tunic, he undid the towel and finished dressing, aware of her eyes on him and more than a little resentful of the fact she felt free to stare all she wanted. He realised then that he would be glad to be home, away from the coldly Roman Londinium and back in a place where the majority of people he met treated him like a human being.
“What was it you wanted, domina?” he asked, trying to keep the bite from his tone.
“The Prefect wishes to see you immediately.”
The Prefect? He was the man in charge of operations for the Vigiles. A fair few steps down from the Caesar of Gallia maybe, but about as close to that as Dai had ever got. He opened his mouth to ask why and she made a dismissive gesture “That means now, Llewellyn – and after, how would you like to be my guest at this evening’s graduation dinner? We can skip the boring speeches and head back to my place.” She smiled again as she finished speaking and Dai decided she was not at all bad looking for a Roman and very well preserved for her age, which had to be at least ten years over his own twenty-four years. For a moment he was tempted, very tempted. “It’s a sub-aquila apartment,” she said, no doubt hoping to sway him with the promise of the Citizen only levels of luxury which that implied. Instead, it had the opposite effect and Dai found himself shaking his head and tasting a bitter flavour in his mouth.
“You honour me too much, domina,” he said, coldly. It was very obvious she was not used to being refused because her anger was instant.
“The Prefect’s office – now, Llewellyn.”
Then she went, slamming the door behind her.

You can keep reading Dying to be Friends by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, just pick it up for FREE until 10 July. Dying to be Roman begins tomorrow here on the Working Title Blog!

When she was a girl she had been vain about her smooth, white hands. After she married, she was proud of the tenderness of those hands as they cared for her babies. Once her children were grown she prided herself on the things her busy hands created – from baking and preserving to sewing and weaving. 

Now she was an old woman her hands were twisted and knotted, although they still cooked and cleaned and cared.

She frowned at the papery skin.

Her husband caught the direction of her glance.

“I like your hands,” he smiled, “they show you have lived.”

©️jj 2019

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?

E.M. Swift-Hook

Sometimes you trip over a book by chance and thus it was for me with this one.
Mumsie had been redecorating her retiring room and stacked her broken-spined monstrosities of literature in the hall. Since she was not entirely sober, these leaning towers had shed volumes across the parquet and I missed my footing on one that had fallen open.
Nursing a twisted ankle and a bruised derriere I retrieved the offending tome with every intention of feeding it to the flames in retribution. But the cover caught my eye, and instead, I rescued it from being re-interred within the maternal parent’s bookshelf and started reading.

Dune by Frank Herbert

A family with names that seemed to me highly inappropriate for science fiction (Paul, Jessica, Duncan and Wellington – the last reminding me of a certain furry, litter-picking character), move to a desert planet which is full of worms.
This family seem to be very unpopular and almost all of them get killed off by another family, who have much more genre appropriate names (Glossu, Vladimir and Feyd-Rautha).
Paul survives and goes on to become the hero of the book. He gets to wear a wetsuit which works in reverse, take drugs and ride one of the worms. Oh, there are also some very strange women who go around torturing children and speaking in enigmatic phrases such as ‘fear is the little death’ and other meaningless nonsense.
The best thing about this book is its length. It is fat enough to be perfect for wedging the door of my writing sanctuary closed.
2 stars for such excellent utility!

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

The cat joined Garth for lunch every day, and he began to notice how thin she was and how dull her coat.

It came to him that she was feeding kittens and he felt a little worried that nobody would feed her on his day off.

He spoke to the master smith, who shrugged massively.

“We can always use cats in the smithy. Speak to Karina.”

Garth spoke to the smith’s comely daughter and between them they fed the little cat.  

By the time she brought them her kittens, Garth and Karina had thoughts of a brood of their own… 

©️jj 2019

She turned to go in, but he stopped her with a long arm. ‘I need a favour.’
‘Oh yeah? Like what?’
‘Will you come to Seattle with me? It’s Angus and Maggie’s fortieth wedding anniversary day after tomorrow. They heard I was in the States. Big family bash.’
‘Sure. Why not?’
‘Oh. A hundred and one reasons. Not least the third degree about why we are brat-less.’
Mike laughed. ‘That’s OK. Just tell them you have no balls. They won’t believe it, but it’ll shut them up.’
He looked at her narrowly for a minute then grinned. ‘That’ he said with some surprise ‘is the closest we’ve come to making a joke about my little problem.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘The joke is good. It’s maybe bad it has taken so long. Now I’d better book us some flights, and then we can sort out two big wardrobes.’
‘And your mother’s clothes.’

After twenty-four hours of frantic sorting, Mike was only too glad to collapse into her seat for the six-hour flight to Seattle.
‘Remind me never to ride to your assistance again.’
Leo sniggered and pulled her into a friendly half-hug. ‘You just shut up and go to sleep.’

They touched down at 6am local time and soon cleared immigration. Having only carry-on luggage, they bypassed the carousels and were about to enter the arrivals area when Leo balked like a jibbing horse. He was striding ahead of Mike, with both their bags in one hand, when he stopped dead. She all but walked into his back, and was about to give him what for when she felt the tension in his long body.
‘Just move behind this pillar’ he spoke without turning his head.
She obeyed, curious as to what had disturbed him.
‘We, or rather you, seem to be awaited’ his voice was taut. ‘And this is a problem because?’
‘Because I don’t recognise any of the three big blokes who are holding a placard reading ‘Michaela Johnson’.
‘Yeah. OK. That’s just plain wrong. What’d we do?’
‘Call Angus.’
‘Leo, it’s six o’clock in the morning.’
‘So?’
She gave in and sat on the floor while he made a brief call.
‘We need to move back from the doorway. Airport security won’t bother us. Then we wait for Angus himself. We don’t go with anyone else. He’ll be about a half hour.’
They pulled back from the doorway and a security guard moved towards them, then he stopped and put a hand to his earpiece before sheering off to harass a group of holidaymakers who looked as if they may have imbibed a little too freely on their flight. Moving even further away from the door, Mike sat on the floor and she and Leo composed themselves to wait. For what seemed to be ages, nothing happened, and the three hard men stayed put carefully watching arrivals. Just as Mike was about to nod off some even larger men surrounded the trio and marched them off. She got up and snuggled under Leo’s arm, in time to see a bulky figure marching across the concourse towards them. Angus Johnson clapped his half brother on the shoulder and enveloped Mike in a bear hug.
‘Fine welcome to Seattle that was’ he rumbled in his gravelly tones. ‘We know that lot. I’m sure they will be only too delighted to tell us who sent them. We’ll ask them very nicely.’ He smiled a smile of surprising charm. ‘Shall we go home? Maggie’s cooking breakfast.’

From Shall we gather at the river? by Jane Jago