Two Women and Some Books
Advice on growing old disgracefully from an elderly delinquent with many years of expertise in the art – plus free optional snark…
Come on gran, Carpe Diem they said
But the pillow is soft to my head
I have doughnuts and milk
And my jammies are silk
So, f**k it, I’m staying in bed
The call of the wind on the darkest night
The whisper of summer breeze
The sound of a skein of geese in flight
The movement of leaves on a tree
The dance of a barefoot child at play
The tears of the sorrowful and strong
The piper greeting the close of day
Are all notes in my lady’s song
Where hands on strings make music bright
Where nightingales serenade the light
Where unseen orchestras play
Where dancing demons skitter by
Where eagles dip their wings and fly
Where the goddess has feet of clay
The whisper of breath across my cheek
The touch of a sound like a bell
Is my lady strong or is she weak
Is this heaven or is it hell
I no longer know and I no longer care
As the song in the winter wind ruffles my hair
And I follow my lady so bright and so fair
And the sound of her singing strips my soul bare
The call of the wind on the darkest night
The whisper of breeze in July
Her song is why I stand and fight
The reason I live or I die
A sci-fi story of love, betrayal and Space Pirates!
Two years after she had graduated, almost to the day, Pan was companion of honour to Jennay as she and her wife were married in one of the special chambers of the administrative building set aside for such ceremonies. They had chosen a blue-themed ambiance and classic wedding music. It was a beautiful event and afterwards, the two families mingled at an open-air meal with live music and dancing.
Pan mingled a little but was not interested in dancing. So she sat chatting with Grim about his upcoming exams when a link text dropped into her inbox. For a moment she didn’t believe it. Then she did and her heart seemed to swell physically behind her ribs.
I’ve missed you so much. Sorry for not keeping in touch but work has been crazy. Can we get together soon? xxx
“You alright, Pan?” She glanced up to see Grim was staring at her with a worried expression. “You’ve gone very pale. Do you want me to get you some water?”
For Grim to show that degree of concern she must be looking ill.
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s just…”
Then it all came out.
Grim was a good listener and always less judgemental than either of their sisters. Or if he was he kept it to himself behind that expressionless face. When she finished, the sounds of the festivities all around seemed to come from another planet.
“You going to meet him then?”
That was the question. It wouldn’t be hard. She had subsidised flights from working for Rota and nearly two cycles of untaken vacation due. Her heart had no doubts at all what the answer should be, but her head was calling for caution. Tolin had let their relationship all but die. Did she really want to open herself up to that kind of hurt again?
“You think I should?”
Grim said nothing for a moment and was clearly weighing things up from the lofty heights of a fifteen-year-old’s wisdom.
“I think you’ll regret it if you don’t,” he told her.
She found herself nodding agreement.
They met on Thuringen. A place called Starcity which had a bad reputation for it’s lax approach to organised crime. Pan didn’t see anything that struck her as particularly criminal as she headed through the spaceport. But then she had come in on a Rota freighter and her route out of the port was through an area controlled by their tight security.
Once outside, after the substantive grandeur of Central, she was underwhelmed by the squat, mid-rise blocks that dominated the skyline here.
She summoned an auto-cab and took a short flight to the bar she had logged on her link. A place called Voltz, which the augmented details told her was a popular hangout for freetraders, mercenaries and bounty hunters. Not surprisingly, this was close to the freight end of the spaceport, not far from cheap-rent docking bays.
He was sitting in an alcove and she nearly missed him. If he hadn’t been on her augmented track she would have walked past. As it was even when he stood up she was thinking there had to be a mistake. He looked thin instead of muscular, his face was haggard, part of one ear was missing and there was heavy scar tissue over his cheek and jaw on that side.
A moment later his arms were around her holding her close and she could feel a slight tremor in his grip.
“I’ve missed you so very much, Pan. I was frightened you wouldn’t come. I don’t deserve you, I really don’t.”
She pushed him gently away, holding him at arm’s length and taking in the changes, wondering if she looked just as different to him.
“What’s happened? Are you ill?” She lifted one hand to touch his mangled ear then couldn’t quite bring herself to touch it. “What…?”
He captured her hand and used it to tug her towards the table. As he turned she caught his uninjured profile and a smile, so familiar it hurt. She took a seat beside him and he pushed a drink across the table.
“Your favourite. Well, it always was. I’m sorry if it’s not what you’d want now but the service here is old school. You have to walk to the bar. So I got it in ready for you.”
Pan glanced at the drink. A Colotu spritzer, a recreational she hadn’t touched since her student days. With a shock, she realised she had changed as well these last two years. It was a lot to take on board.
She shook her head slowly. “Just tell me what’s happened to you. Was there an accident? If you need money to get your face fixed properly, I can help.”
She could too. She had been saving the last two years.
“You’d do that?” Tolin laughed briefly. Recapturing her hand, he took it to his lips then placed the palm against the ruined flesh of his face. “No. I truly don’t deserve you. I was thinking you’d take one look and walk out on me. That’s why I didn’t keep in touch. I couldn’t bear even the thought…”
Whatever he had been through had taken the sparkle from his eyes. Without really knowing why, Pan leaned in and kissed him. For a few moments the world around them didn’t matter and when she sat back, Pan found her head and her heart had made peace.
“I wish you had come to me before,” she told him. “I’m not so shallow that you being injured is going to make me stop caring. Tell me what happened and we’ll sort things.”
Roguing Thieves is a Fortune’s Fools story by E.M. Swift-Hook. There will be more Roguing Thieves next week…
They called her Nanny Bee, although as far as anyone knew she had never been a wife or a mother, let alone a grandmother. But she was popularly believed to be a witch – so Nanny it was. She lived in a pink-walled thatched cottage that crouched between the village green and the vicarage. The Reverend Alphonso Scoggins (a person of peculiarly mixed heritage and a fondness for large dinners) joked that between him and Nanny they could see the villagers from birth to burial.
Nanny’s garden was the most verdant and productive little patch you could ever imagine, and she could be found pottering in its walled prettiness from dawn to dusk almost every day. People came to visit and were given advice, or medicine, or other potions in tiny bottles or scraps of paper – but they always had the sneaking suspicion they were getting in the way of the gardening.
But there again, digging is second nature to gnomes.
The village well was running dry. Never in living memory – and some of the villagers enjoyed lengthy lifetimes – had the well ever been anything but brimful of sweet cold water.
What had happened?
A problem at the spring?
A band of hefty young men armed with shovels went to see. They returned puce-faced and angry. The precious water was being diverted to fill a lake her ladyship thought would look pretty in front of the Big House.
The vicar had a word, but returned empty-clawed and apoplectic.
He talked to Nanny. “Stupid woman doesn’t see how a village with no water is any of her problem. And himself is away at parliament until the middle of next month at least.”
“Oh well. What can be diverted can be undiverted.”
“Except she has men with guns guarding the valley.”
Nanny laughed and tapped her finger to the side of her nose.
Once she was alone she removed her boots snd socks and went to stand with her bare feet in the soil. She communed…
An hour later water started flowing into the well again.
“Thanks moles. The village owes you.”
She was answered by a deep laugh from somewhere underground.
Con Trevithick stood on the cliff path with the pack containing all he had left in the world leaning against his left leg. He stared across the water to where Plymouth squatted like a carbuncle against the clean morning sky. It was an hour past dawn, and he had been waiting, standing stock still and silent, since just before the sun rose. To be honest, he was beginning to think himself on a fool’s errand but he couldn’t quite bring himself to turn his back and begin the long trudge home to Lamorna on his own.
He had never felt quite so alone in his life, especially when he cast his mind back to the heady days before the parliamentarians took over the city. He found it painful to remember a time when it didn’t matter who your father was so long as you kept your nose clean and worked hard. And even more painful to recall the feel of a certain small hand in his as they danced around the Maypole in Stonehouse. Of course, that was back in the days when her father smiled on their courtship. Con stood alone in the early sunlight and tears pricked his eyes as he thought about their betrothal – how he had saved to buy her a little silver ring, and how she had shed tears of joy over that small gift.
But those happy days were long gone. In March, when the city fathers declared for parliament, Cornishmen were driven from the city by bands of marauding dockers. Con had been lucky to escape with a whole skin, leaving before the marauders reached his lodgings with his girl’s father’s words ringing in his ears.
“Go and be damned to you. And you can forget my girl. She weds Peter Sailmaker on her next birthday.”
Con had found work on a farm in St Germans while he waited out the spring and summer. He was a hard worker, and skilled, and he was made aware that he could wed the farmer’s comely daughter and stay on the farm in comfort for the rest of his days, but he would not marry without love. He just waited out his allotted time and kept his head down. Yesterday he had packed his belongings and shaken the kindly farmer’s big hand.
He headed north-east as he had a thing to do before he turned his face to his father’s house and the boats bobbing on the tide in Lamorna Cove. And that was why he was standing on the clifftop watching the city over the border with a mixture of hope and fear in his heart.
It was September and he was here to keep a promise.
It was September, and there was a taste of frost in the morning air. It was September and tomorrow his love was to be the bride of another man. It was September, and Con was waiting to see if other folk kept their promises.
As he watched the water’s edge and the tiny pathway that climbed to where he stood, he began to realise how futile were his hopes. It was past time. His dream was dead.
He picked up his pack and tried to ignore the tears clogging his throat.
He had just set his foot on the path when he caught the sound of something running through the bracken. He turned his head in time to see a small black and tan dog break cover and hurtle towards him. He dropped his pack and bent in time to receive a frantically wagging body in his arms. Finding himself unable to speak he clutched the terrier to his chest and stared in the direction from which it had come.
He didn’t have long to wait. First his keen ears caught the sound of footsteps, and then she was there, coming out of the dark shade with her skirts kilted up to her knees and a bundle under one arm. She smiled and he felt tears of joy run down his cheeks.
“Con,” she said joyfully, “you came, I thought you may not”.
He put the little dog down and took the half dozen steps he needed to gather her to his heart.
“I came, and I was beginning to fear you had not.”
“I missed the landing and had to beach the boat on the undershore. It took me a while.”
He smiled down into her eyes and looked at the bundle she had dropped on the grass at his feet.
“Does that mean you have left your father’s house?”
“It does. Although he won’t know until supper time. By then we shall be long gone.”
Con kissed her just once and she responded by touching a hand to his face.
“Shall we go home then love?” his voice reverberated with joy.
She put her hand in his and nodded. Turning her back on Plymouth she raised her face to the Cornish sky.
“Aye. Home it is.”
And they set their feet on the path together, with their little dog dancing around them on the springy turf.
The Dog Days are the high days of summer and a perfect time to celebrate our canine companions in verse and prose.
We wanted a puppy. But Maw said no. Said we wasn’t responsible enough. Said we neglected the animals we had got, so no puppy.
We sulked a bit, but then Elmer said Maw had a point. So we knuckled down and helped her about the place, learning to care for the cow and the sheep, and the yard dogs, and the horses.
We was so busy we near to forgot about the puppy. But Maw never forgets nothing.
We come in from the yard one time and there’s a box by the fire. Maw smiles as the puppy jumps out…
In a modern-day Britain where the Roman Empire never left, Dai and Julia solve murder mysteries, whilst still having to manage family, friendship and domestic crises…
“Sheep.”
Dai pointed to the tussock pocked hillside that veered up sharply from the bottom of the valley. These sheep were a hardy local breed with grey-white fleeces and small curling horns. They moved with agility over the rocky slope, their flock spread out into groups, pairs and singletons.
It was early morning and the report of a new theft had them driving through the wild country that formed the hinterland between Viriconium and the coast.
“The first question I have,” Bryn said, his own gaze firmly on the narrow road ahead as it wound along beside a stream at the bottom of the valley, “is how do you take sheep from a hillside like that? I mean it’s not like they are in a field and you can just wave your arms at them and back up a trailer to the gate. You couldn’t bring something big enough to carry all those along a road like this anyway.”
They were heading out to the small crofting farm which had been the victim of the last sheep rustling incident, in the hope of gaining some insight into who might have known where the flock was when it was stolen.
“Dogs,” Dai said, wondering if he was right. “Or maybe people on quads?”
“At night?” Bryn sounded doubtful. “And over this terrain?” He gestured with one hand to the high-lifting hills on either side.
“Drones, then maybe? Though no one seems to have seen any around that shouldn’t be there, I did the checks. It does make you wonder.”
They reached the main farm buildings after a bumpy journey over a potholed mud and gravel track that led up from the road. Two skinny herding dogs with lolling tongues and high lifted tails followed the woman who owned the croft out of the door of the small cottage, built from local stone. She stayed by the house as Dai and Bryn parked up and got out, the dogs now sitting beside her. For a moment Dai was reminded of Canis and Lupo sitting beside Julia. These dogs had an owner not much taller than Julia was, but maybe a decade older. She stood, back held stiffly straight and chin lifted with an almost defensive pride, brown eyes fierce, her dark blonde hair half hidden under a woolly hat.
Bryn gave her a friendly nod as she looked between them. “You’ll be Hyla Edris, I’m SI Bryn Cartivel. We’re here…”
“About last night?” The woman’s voice sounded taut.
“That’s right. I was hoping you could help me understand a few things about what happened and then we might be able to get your sheep back more easily.”
Hyla Edris shook her head, and Dai was sure he could see an extra brightness of moisture in her eyes.
“No. You won’t be bringing my girls home. They’ll all be dead by now. But the fools that took them have no idea what they did.”
“What they..?”
“My girls weren’t bred for eating They were all bred for their wool. Five different rare breeds I had in my flock, from three different provinces. They were worth a lot, lot more than just meat on the hoof.”
“You’ll have insurance for them?”
“Oh, for sure, there is a man due out tomorrow to talk to me about it. Seems there was some problem with my paperwork. But that won’t bring my girls back, will it? And even though the money will help, my business is ruined.”
“You can get more sheep,” Dai said. “Surely even rare ones?”
The woman shook her head as if he was missing the point. Then she gestured towards a recently re-roofed outbuilding. “My business is spinning and weaving. I keep the sheep because I can’t buy in the wool I need. It’s not so simple as you think. But then you lot from Viriconium, you know next to nothing of what life is like for us here in the hill farms. We’re not all inbred yokels chasing round a few sheep, there’s some of us with a bit more going on.”
Dai spread his hands in a gesture of apology. “I promise we will do our best to bring those who took your sheep to justice.”
Which was when she saw the silver band of Citizenship on his finger and her face changed. A quickly hidden mix of fear and anger.
“Roman justice. Killing people for entertainment. That’s not going to help me… dominus.” She made the honorific sound more like an insult.
Bryn cleared his throat.
“I need to ask you a few questions about what happened. Where were the sheep last night?”
The woman drew a tight breath as if to get herself back under control.
“I had them in the low field because I was supposed to have them microchipped today.”
“So it would have been relatively straightforward for someone to steal them? No need to go all over the hills for them?”
“Very.”
“Who would have known they were in that particular field?” Dai asked and almost winced at the ferocity of the look the question earned him.
“Most everyone in the area.”
“Local gossip is that good?”
This time there was more of contempt than anger in her face. She put a hand into the pocket of the long coat she was wearing and pulled out a much-folded sheet of paper which she thrust into Dai’s hand. He opened it out noting the Demetae and Cornovii administrative area official logo at the top. It was a notice of compulsory microchipping of all sheep in the district. It included a list of names and dates for all the farms in the locality.
Dai passed the letter to Bryn who read it quickly.
“At least one other farm on this list has had their flock stolen,” he said.
“Now isn’t that just the coincidence.” Hyla Edris sounded bitter.
From ‘Dying to be Fleeced’ one of the bonus short stories in The Second Dai and Julia Omnibus by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago
Advice on growing old disgracefully from an elderly delinquent with many years of expertise in the art – plus free optional snark…
You are old. Let me give you a tip
Your body’s too saggy to strip
It shouldn’t be you
Showing off your tattoo
At the head of a mass skinny dip
Summer is ‘icumen in’
So quickly go do you
Down the pub to down the beer
And drink a pint or two
Love that brew!
You now chase the beer with rum
And after hours too
Get it as they call last orders
Got to love that brew!
More beer, more beer,
Get in a pint or two,
Ne’er cease to drink that brew!
A sci-fi story of love, betrayal and Space Pirates!
Home hadn’t changed even after five years away.
The twins were so much taller than she expected, for all they had kept in touch through links. They had been eight when she left, real children, and now they were teens. Back then it had sometimes been hard to spot the difference, despite their being different genders. But now they looked nothing like each other. Halkoms’s voice had broken and he had shot skywards in height whereas Magenta was beginning to get a very feminine shape. Pan’s other sister, Kiona, two years older than the twins, was having mid-teen angst and mood-swings. It was like coming home to well-loved strangers who she would have to get to know all over again.
Of course, Jennay was still the same. A strong, capable, woman, only a few years older than Pan herself, who had taken in and adopted her stepsister’s orphans without a word of protest, setting her own life on hold to make theirs flourish. Although Jennay was a fully trained paramedic, it was not the sort of work that easily fitted in around childcare, so money had always been tight.
“I told you that you would fly if you took up that scholarship,” she said, hugging Pan once the first rush of excited greetings from all three siblings had been navigated. She picked up one of Pan’s travel bags. “Come on, let’s get you settled in. I’m afraid you’ll have to share a room with me. Mabs moved in with Ki and Grim is in the cabin room the twins used to share. We left the top bunk and built a desk under it for him.”
“Grim?”
Jennay laughed. “I know, right? Everyone calls Halkom that nowadays, it’s that stonefaced look of his. Now, here we are. You can have the bed by the window. There’s storage under it as well.” Then she was left alone to unpack and settle.
It was good to be home.
Sitting on the bed and looking out of the window, Pan wondered if she should uproot them all. Trade this house with a garden where they could grow fresh food, clean air and the views of the magnificent countryside, for an apartment in a city, thirty floors up with synth-meals and virtual scenery through ambianced windows.
She didn’t have to.
She could settle here on Mulligan’s Reach, get a job in the spaceport doing whatever they would pay her for. She wouldn’t have to uproot the family and the best bit was that there were a fair few freetraders based here. She was sure Tolin could find a bay in the spaceport. She wanted to ask him, but he wasn’t available on link. Not surprising as he would be spending a lot of time in FTL space, planet and systems hopping, where link technology had yet to find a way to connect.
The decision was taken from her the next day anyway.
She was up early to help hustle the others out to school and was just finishing up clearing away from breakfast when Jennay made her sit down at the old kitchen table. Her face looked as stony as Grim’s.
“Look, I didn’t want to spoil your homecoming yesterday, and I’ve been keeping it from the kids, but you need to see this.”
‘This’ was a mail from the landholding wing of the city administration. Their landlord. It gave them notice that the land was being sold for redevelopment and they would need to move out within the next three cycles.
Pan met Jennay’s troubled gaze, saw the haunting fear and felt the weight of responsibility settle more heavily on her own shoulders. It struck her that Jennay must have been about her own age when taking on four children. Well, now it was her turn to step up and put family ahead of her personal life. Pushing away her dreams of setting up home with Tolin, she mustered a smile and reached over the table to squeeze Jennay’s hand.
“Well, the good news is it doesn’t matter. I’ve got a position with Rota doing mech tech repair and upgrading work on their merchant fleet. We’re moving to Central.”
So with a brave smile held in place on her face like a mask and a heavy heart, Pan signed over her life to Rota for the foreseeable future. She didn’t even have the compensation of an interesting job. The work she was being paid at Central rates to do was well below her level of qualification. It was also made clear to her that the chances of progression were limited. Rota just liked to have an overqualified staff to impress their clients. With so many people such as herself, desperate to gain access to Central, they could pick and choose from the brightest and best in the rest of the Coalition. Worse still, as a new citizen of Central, she was expected to work through her first year without taking any vacation unless on compassionate grounds. Unfortunately, that didn’t include maintaining a long-distance romance.
The link chats with Tolin trailed off as the year went on. He kept saying he’d try to come and visit, but they both knew that was never going to happen. Getting a visa for Central was beyond the means of a struggling freetrader just starting up. Then one day he just didn’t reply to her link and that was that.
If her own happiness had been stymied by the move, at least she had the compensation of seeing the others bloom. Kiona and the twins took to life in Central as if born to it and were thriving. They were storming their grades in education and making new friends. Even Jennay was blossoming after her time-out raising them all. She had gone back to work as a paramedic and begun dating a colleague. There was even serious talk of marriage.
It made it hard for Pan to share her own unhappiness with anyone. She lost her brave smile somewhere along the way and began to settle into the idea of life as it was. After all, she could hardly complain. She had a well-paid job and a home in Central. Most of the galaxy would look at her with unadulterated envy.
Roguing Thieves is a Fortune’s Fools story by E.M. Swift-Hook. There will be more Roguing Thieves next week…
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