At seven fifteen, Sam parked his scruffy Audi in the pub car park. He sat for a moment, wondering about the next few days, then got out of the car and hefted his small bag from the boot. Striding into the beer garden, he made himself slow his pace as he headed for the little camping field, where the woman he had spent all of the last week, and most of the last year, thinking about would be waiting for him. His feet made no noise on the grass as he rounded the hedge. He saw the familiar campervan, with the black dog sitting inside the door, and then his eyes turned to the woman who sat at her ease on a comfortable chair with a glass of wine on the table at her elbow. She wore a simple white dress and her long brown legs were stretched out in front of her. He walked softly towards her and she turned and smiled.
“Hello Sam.”
“Hello yourself.”
She stood to greet him, and he bent his head to kiss her laughing mouth.
“You look gorgeous.”
“Smooth talker. You look pretty good yourself.”
hen for a moment there seemed to be nothing to say. Bonnie rescued them by jumping out of the camper and greeting Sam enthusiastically. The small interruption allowed the humans to collect themselves.
“Oh Sam,” Anna laughed helplessly. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
“And maybe it was. We just have to give ourselves some time. And you do look gorgeous.”
“I tried. Somehow it didn’t seem right not to make an effort.”
“That’s nice. Makes me feel like you think I’m worth an effort.”
“That remains to be seen. For now, how about a glass of wine while the food heats up?”
“Please.”
Anna jumped into the camper and passed out a glass and a bottle.
“Sit. I’m just putting the lasagne in the oven.”
Sam poured himself a glass of wine, then sipped carefully as he sat in one of the two chairs.
“Hey. The wine is excellent, and I’ve always liked these chairs.”
Anna laughed and came out of the camper carrying a small tray. Sam jumped up and took it from her hands. She laughed again.
“Just something to keep us going while supper cooks.”
“Antipasto. How sophisticated.”
Anna sat beside him and reached for her own glass of wine. She nibbled an olive and smiled at Sam.
“Eat. Or I’ll snaffle the lot.”
He grinned, and they both reached for the olives. He grasped her hand and turning it palm up bit gently into the soft flesh at the base of her thumb. She felt a hitch in her breath, then caught her bottom lip between her teeth.
“I didn’t say eat me.”
“But you were right there, and I couldn’t resist a nibble.”
“Shut up and have an olive.”
After that, the conversation got easier and by the time their supper was ready they were almost as relaxed with each other as they had been on their previous dates. They moved inside for the lasagne, and Anna put together a simple green salad to go with the pasta and the warm garlic bread. They sat opposite each other at the small table eating and talking. Sam cleaned his plate with the last of the garlic bread, then grinned wryly.
“It’s a good job you ate the garlic bread too, otherwise a snog would have been right out of the question.”
She leaned over the table and kissed him softly.
“You taste all right to me.”
Before she had the chance to move away Sam put a hand behind her head. He nibbled her lower lip before kissing her deeply.
“You taste more than all right. But I guess we should deal with the dishes before we start fooling around. I’ll wash.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I do. You cooked. And it was delicious.”
They cleared up, working side by side in complete amity. When the little galley was spick and span, Sam smiled at Anna.
“Does Bonnie need to go out now?”
“She’d like to.”
“Shall we then?”
They walked hand in hand down to the little stream. Bonnie had a noisy drink, then came and looked up at the two humans with a quizzical expression on her dark face. Sam stroked her ears before taking Anna by the shoulders and bending to her mouth. This time the kiss was hot and urgent and left Anna’s knees close to buckling. She wrapped her arms around him and clung on tight. He laughed delightedly. “Like that do you?”
“Mm, but my legs are going to collapse if you carry on doing it.”
He swooped her up into his arms and strode back to the open door of the camper. Bonnie frisked around them enjoying this new game. Sam put Anna down just outside the door, and kissed her thoroughly.
“You sure you want this?”
“Oh yeah.” She fisted her hands in his hair and pulled his head down for another kiss. Somehow, they made it inside, where things rapidly turned a bit frantic.

When the world reclaimed them, they lay entwined and Sam smiled down into Anna’s face.
“Well, well, well. You are a pleasant surprise.”
“How so, kind sir?”
“A tiger under the snow. A body like a goddess. Simultaneous. I never had that before. You?”
“Umm. No. But I haven’t had a lot of lovers to compare.”
“Could one be rude enough to ask how many is not a lot?”
“One.”
Her voice was very small.
He hugged her tightly.
“Don’t sound ashamed. Choosy isn’t a failing.”
“Not so much choosy as nobody else wanted me.”
He was genuinely puzzled.
“Why would you even think something like that?”
For a moment Anna studied Sam’s tattooed chest. Saying nothing. Then she lifted her face and met his eyes.
“Because it’s true. You wouldn’t have noticed me a year ago. I’d stopped hiding when I met you.”
“Hiding?”
“Protective colouring. I was a plain, gawky teenager, and then there was a lot of shit at home to deal with, and in the end I had a job where anonymity was almost essential. So I developed strategies to prevent people noticing me. Ill-fitting clothes, unflattering hairstyle, never saying boo to a goose, never looking people in the eye. And so on.”
“So what changed?”
“Too much to explain. I realised that my life was a crock of shit. And I bought the camper so me and Bonnie could have some fun.”
Then she couldn’t talk any more and hid her face against his chest again. He stroked her hair, then she felt his fingers removing the comb that had by some miracle kept it in a knot at the nape of her neck. He combed the waves out gently before kissing her temple.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you embarrassed and sad. I really do have feelings for you. Apart from the best sex of my life, you are beautiful and funny, and I’m very lucky just to be here.”
“Don’t be sorry. I have to learn to talk about it.”
“Not if you don’t want to…”
“I do. But I think I can only manage it in bits.”
“Fair enough. I’m not pushing you.”
He rolled her over and ran those knowing fingers up and down her spine before massaging her shoulders and spanning her narrow waist with his hands. He found a thin, white scar just above her right hip.
“Is this one of the things it’s hard to talk about?”
“Yes. I was fourteen. My mother threw a knife at me. I lost a lot of blood and some internal bits and bobs.”
“Oh baby. I’m sorry. Why?”
“Dementia and alcohol abuse.”
“Shoot. You did have something to cope with. However, you came through it strong and lovely.”
“Thank you.”
She rolled onto her back and used a fingertip to trace the tattoo that wandered across his chest.
“Tell me some more about Smaug.”
“A little rebellion, but you know that. I knew I was going to be a responsible surgeon for the rest of my life, and I wanted something that was for Sam the rebel. It fucking hurt. And my wife hated him.”
“Oh? How odd. I think he’s sexy.”
“Do you now?”
“I do indeed.”
“You wanna demonstrate?”
“Maybe.”
She walked her fingers down the dragon’s back and followed its tail down.
“Careful woman,” he growled softly, “dragons can be dangerous.”
“I’ll take my chances. Just lay back and take it like a man.”
He rolled onto his back and put his hands above his head.
“Be gentle with me.”
“No chance.”

From The Cracksman Code by Jane Jago

When you’re old you’re invisible and people don’t care
They don’t seem to see you, it’s like you’re not there
As though adding just one more year to your life
You’ve gone past a horizon.

When you’re old your opinions are all patronised
Your given that smile that ne’re touches the eyes
As though by default you’re no longer considered
An intelligent human.

When you’re old younger folk underestimate you
They don’t understand what you know how to do
As though they believe that you have no idea
Of how the world works.

When you’re old you no longer have vigour and youth
You are weaker and slower, and that’s just the truth
But you are who you ever were and still inside
You’re a powerhouse.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Internet assholes

As a woman of a certain age, I had kind of hoped that I’d seen humankind at its worst. But then along came the internet.
Home of mildly amusing memes, pictures of pets, jolly banter. And vicious bastards.
I’m not going to call them trolls. That trivialises the damage they do. They are unprincipled assholes, probably with very small penises, most of whom hide behind assumed names and pretend faces to drip their evil on the world.
In my youth if you disagreed with someone you mostly sorted it out in the pub – possibly with fisticuffs.
Or, if you were a middle-class twat, you wrote to the Times.
Today, though, you can sit behind a keyboard and fire salvos of ill-informed downright nastiness at anybody who it takes your fancy to abuse.
I’ve had a few attempting to get under my skin. They really don’t like it when I just ignore them. Life is too short to engage with any asshole who combines extreme political views, with misogyny and a side order of complete f*g stupidity.
However, I’m not fragile, and I don’t give a shit. But.
When I read some the uninformed opinions of some utter wanktard who calls himself something like ‘Mister Macho’ or ‘The Moral Major’, or ‘The Voice of the People’, I find myself offended.
I don’t know whether the media personality they are all slagging off was suicidal or not.
But what I do know is it ain’t up to me to decide.
I don’t know which of two warring ‘celebrities’ is right.
But I do know it ain’t up to me to decide.
And it’s not up to the court of the internet neither.
All I have to say is if you want to drip vitriol at least do it in your own name, with your own face and accept that someone might want to punch your head…

It doesn’t matter what you think – this is Granny’s opinion and it’s not up for discussion!

Hammar was, at seventy-three, the youngest man practicing his craft. It was technology, he would explain. No one wanted the old hand-made wares anymore except a few craft shops.

When one day some local teen broke in and stole all his tools, Hammar was set to retire. The police found the teenager and the tools, and made her apologise. They said she’d been trying to use the tools on her own.

Hammar looked at the lass and sighed. She was not the best apprentice in the world, but she wanted to learn and the craft would not now die out.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Maryam sat with her back against the bole of an ancient olive tree and felt the warmth of the earth as a benison. She had stood, dry eyed, at the place of the skull until she was sure her husband was truly dead and then walked away. Walked until she could put one foot in front of the other no longer. She was very tired now.
Her swollen ankles throbbed, and the stranger in her belly moved so that a small hand or foot could briefly be seen pressing the loose linen of her robe. She felt a tear run down her face and wiped it away with her dusty fingers.
“Oh my love,” she said bitterly, “what of your promise now? Did you not vow to be mine for all our days?”
She thought she heard mocking laughter inside her head and recalled the smell of freshly worked wood in his father’s workshop on the day he told his parents he was going to marry her. His father had had smiled and nodded, but the woman who birthed him stared Maryam in the eyes.
“You won’t keep him, he’s not for the likes of you.”
And bitter Mary had been right. He was gone.
Gone, and if Maryam didn’t miss her guess they would be looking for her now. Her and her unborn child. The priests wouldn’t allow them to live to bear witness.
She touched her belly tenderly.
“I’m sorry little one. I’m sorry.”
Looking down the track she had followed from the place of crucifixion, she saw a cloud of dust in the bottom of the valley and knew the temple guard had found her trail. She shuddered with the understanding of the fate they had in store for her, and wondered if there was a way to kill herself before they found her and dragged her by back to the city by the hair.
But she had no way to end her agony.
Knowing herself beaten, Maryam looked towards the glory of the western sky in an attempt to store the beauty of the sunset to buttress her soul against what was to come. For a moment, she almost forgot her fear and sorrow in the splendour of the dying sun. Before the last streaks of orange dropped below the horizon she noticed a dark shape flying towards where she sat. It seemed unusual to her, being too big for any bird she had ever heard of and she stared as it came closer. Maryam caught her breath.
It was a great winged lizard and it flew purposefully towards her,
cupping its wings to land neatly on the grass before her. It dipped its head politely.
“Do I have the honour of addressing Maryam wife to Yesua of Nazareth?”
Maryam heaved herself to her feet and bowed.
“I am Maryam.”
The creature smiled reassuringly.
“My name is S’a’thur and I am a dragon. I am sent to offer you sanctuary.”
“Dragon? Sanctuary?”
S’a’thur gestured with his snout towards the column of dust now labouring up the slope towards the olive grove where Maryam rested.
She sighed. “They won’t let us live, will they?”
“No lady. They will rip the child from your womb and kill you both.”
“And you offer an alternative.”
“We do.”
“Why?”
“Because it amuses us to save the wife and unborn child of a man who was not supposed to have a wife, leave alone a daughter.”
Maryam looked measuringly at the creature then shrugged.
“It could not be worse than the Sanhedrin.”
The dragon bent a knee and the heavily pregnant woman clambered awkwardly into the space between his iridescent wings.
As they took off, the fittest of the temple guardsmen breasted the rise to see only the light reflecting on dragon wings. The man fell to his knees.
“An angel,” he said reverently. “I see an angel.”
Maryam laughed sardonically as her draconic transport turned on a wingtip and headed west.

© jane jago

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.

©janejago

Dai pulled the man out of the computer chair. Njord might be big-boned but he clearly was not one to keep himself much in shape.
“The domina is asking you a polite question, Torkel. I am not quite so polite. I want to know how a virus that affects your security surveillance on two separate occasions could have got onto your system without you knowing about it.”
The blond man’s face had turned red as Dai’s grip tightened.
“I don’t know,” he gasped. “I told you. I didn’t even know it was a virus the first time. Even your people didn’t find that. I only found it after the second outage.”
Dai decided that as he was getting some degree of cooperation he could be generous and let go. Njord dropped back onto his chair again.
“So how could it happen?”
The blond man started pulling up information in streams that meant very little to Dai, but he could see Julia scanning it rapidly, her expression focused.
“Here,” Njord said and pushed a finger at a line of random numerals.
Dai tried to look as though he had some idea what it meant, but it was Julia who asked:
“So where is that? Have you a plan of the arena—a schematic to show where that is geographically?”
Dai saw the refusal form on the blond man’s lips.
“Torkel,” he cautioned, “I don’t need to remind you to be polite to the domina, do I?”
The blue eyes glared at him with hatred, but Njord pulled up a 3D schemata for the complex and stabbed his finger at a small flashing pixel on the lowest below-ground level. 
“It’s there,” he said.
“What’s there?”
“Absolutely nothing. It’s a blank wall.”
“So someone uploaded this whilst standing in that corridor.” Dai pointed to two clearly marked cameras even he could identify as such. “If we have the recordings from these for that time we—”
“You misunderstand,” Njord said. “If I am right and this is the signal that did it, then it was not uploaded from somewhere beside the wall—it was uploaded from somewhere inside the wall.”

The tunnel was an old one, dating back to the days they had fed people to the lions in the arena for denying the godhood of the divine Diocletian. When that had ceased to be a crime during the Enlightenment, the menagerie had become a place for keeping all the exotic animals a lanista might desire to put on interesting displays. But the animal fights had finally been outlawed throughout the Empire, along with slavery and discrimination on grounds of race or gender, a few years before Dai had been born. At which point the menagerie became a place to take your children to see the animals. The only deliberate deaths you could expect to witness in the arena nowadays were the public executions of traitors and murderers.
There was a popular joke that made much of the fact it was easier to get yourself accused of treason than murder. Even if you killed someone in front of witnesses you could get away with your life. But the slightest hint you might be involved in any anti-Roman activities and you would be arrested, tried and executed within the week. That was the usual job of the men Decimus had allocated to work with Julia and Dai, uncovering and arresting potential anti-Roman agitators, and Dai found it gave him an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades every time he turned his back on them.
But it was their technology and their brawn which first found and then broke into the tunnel behind the wall and tracked along it in one direction to a manhole cover on the edge of the arena’s playing field and in the other to the menagerie.
At the menagerie end, it finished in a solid metal door. Whilst the Praetorians sent out for the appropriate equipment to break through. Dai and Julia left them to it and headed to the menagerie overground.

From Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook a whodunit set in a modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules. You can listen to this on YouTube.

Paddy Dog was never disobedient, on the contrary he was the epitome of good behaviour. He would come when called, sit on command, lie down and wait patiently outside the local shop for his owner.

And he hated water.

So when Paddy Dog jumped in the river, his owner was surprised, especially when Paddy Dog was pulling at something in the water and wouldn’t leave it even when called.

His owner, disgruntled, eventually went to see and found Paddy Dog trying to rescue a kitten which had fallen in the reeds.

Paddy Dog now has a friend called Tabby Cat.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Paris, 29 November 1642 (Gregorian Calendar)

In a splendid chamber of the Palais du Cardinal, which was one of the most splendid mansions in all of Paris, a man sat lost in deep reverie, his head resting on his hands as he leaned over a gilt and inlaid table, covered with documents. Behind him, a vast fireplace was alive with leaping flames. Thick logs blazed and crackled on brass-ended firedogs, their flickering brilliance combined with that of the wax lights set in the twin grand candelabra which illuminated the room.It occurred to him that if anyone had been there to see, and he thanked God they were not, they might have mistaken his cloak with its rich colour and golden thread for a gorgeous red simar, robes of office due to a cardinal. They might have thought that against all possible hope and expectation the owner of the Palais had risen to sit at this table and work.
But he had no time for such fancies. He creased his brow in anxious reflection as he bent over the list of names, grateful for the solitude of the suite of rooms he was in, relieved by the continued silence from the chamber beyond and aware, painfully aware, of the measured tread of the guards outside on the landing. They were there to ensure the safety of the master of the house. That thought made him shake his head. They could not any longer ensure the safety of a man who barely lingered now on the threshold of death, reluctant to release the agony of life for the promise of eternal bliss because he felt his work was not yet done.
And neither was his own work, the man in the red cloak knew. He had come to this room to find the document he needed, breaking into the private cabinet of L’Éminence Rouge, and now he had found it, a list of names. So it was merely a matter of choosing a name—choosing the right name. It was not a long list but from it he had to choose the name of a man with few connections in Paris, a man who had no friends in powerful places who might step in to defend him. He needed it to be one of the men on the list in his hand, because they were the only ones who could have had the right access—apart from himself, of course.
All the names were French and one or two he recognised, men he would very much enjoy seeing accused, humiliated, convicted, broken by torture and removed from life on the gallows. But he also knew they would have friends, family and possible patronage. It was not a risk he could afford to take.
Then he saw that there was one name on the list which did not belong to a Frenchman. A name he knew belonged to someone of no significance—someone who no one would stand up for, and no one would miss.
Smiling to himself, he replaced the list exactly where he had found it and left the room quickly before his presence there was noticed.

From The Physician’s Remedy, Book Four of The ‘Lord’s Legacy’ Sextet by E.M. Swift-Hook

Items of feminine apparel were going missing from washing lines. The summer sun and breeze was encouraging the washing of bed linens, winter clothing – and underwear.
But the underwear couldn’t always be found when the washing was picked in to be ironed.
Somebody somewhere was in possession of many pairs of linen bloomers, but nobody knew who.
The village constable investigated to no avail so he did what everyone did when something was above their pay grade – he went to see Nanny. The two of them sat in her fragrant garden, she was puffing on her pipe and he had a leather tankard of ale in one large pink hand.
“Us’v laid in wait, but when us does the he never comes. Un seems to know…”
“Then I suspect they does know.”
The constable scratched his head. “I don’t get it, missis.”
She patted his meaty arm. “Never mind. You just leave it with me.”
He finished his beer, belched quietly and left.
At sundown Nanny had a conversation with a friendly magpie before making her way into the forest.
She sat on a fallen tree.
“I’m waiting.”
Nothing happened for a while, but then a procession of strange little people came into sight.
Fauns wearing linen coifs and with white linen bloomers covering their hairily goatish lower limbs.
Nanny sighed. It was going to be a long night.

©janejago