Two Women and Some Books
Love cares not for grand estate
For lords and ladies tall and great
The pauper with an empty plate
May even so adore his mate
Love cares not for dresses silk
Nor yet for skin as white as milk
As even those of beggars’ ilk
May find that love their ‘betters’ bilks
Love is cool when in the sun
Yet warms the soul when day is done
A demon child that gets its fun
By making fools of everyone
The Working Title crew bring you the exclusive opportunity to enjoy more wisdom from the mysteriously enigmatic Madam Pendulica… You can listen to this on YouTube.
This sign sheepishly admits to being peopled by lovers of light opera and Europop.
Favourite tune: Fernando by Abba
Slow and stately, this sign is fond of Germanic opera of the sort that takes most of a day to listen to.
Favourite tune: Welch’ wunderbar Erwarten from Das Liebesverbot
Any kind of a duet will suit Gemini. The soppier and more romantic the better.
Favourite tune: Save Your Love by Renee and Renato
In spite of the characteristic sideways scuttle of this most crepuscular of signs they are drawn to the musical excitement of the female marching band.
Favourite tune: Congratulations – played on the xylophone
Lions are creatures that deeply value their sleep therefore any lullaby will do.
Favourite tune: O mio babbino caro
The primness of the Virgo psyche is perfectly matched by the innocence of nineteen fifties popular music.
Favourite tune: Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen By The Sea, by Max Bygraves
Weighing up the relative merits of styles of music has been a Libran preoccupation for many years culminating in a passion for Amazonian nose flute terpsichory.
Favourite tune: Anything nasal
The Scorpio affinity with fast motorcycles, black leather and bad boy sex means that nothing but rock will do.
Favourite tune: Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf
The Sagittarian equineness predisposes them to the enjoyment of intensely rhythmic music. Notably that of Germanic extraction.
Favourite tune: A Walk in the Black Forest by Horst Jankowski
Capricorn is the rock and roll sign, and the zodiacal goat can be pacified in almost any situation by the application of Elvis Presley.
Favourite tune: Jailhouse Rock by the above gentleman
Aquarians like smooth flowing watering music.
Favourite tune: Orinoco Flow by Enya
Pisceans have surprisingly catholic musical tastes. They will listen to anything as long as it is loud and immersive.
Favourite tune: Brown Sugar by The Rolling Stones
Madame Pendulica predicts she will return…
They called it ‘choice’, but in truth she had none. She could refuse to marry a wealthy parvenu and see her family face ruin. Or she could do her duty.
Her father knew her well and expressed neither surprise nor gratitude when she assented to the marriage.
What nobody expected was how fiercely loyal she was to her merchant-born husband.
It was many months before he asked her why. She pressed his hand.
“At first, loyalty was the only coin with which I could repay your kindness.”
“And now?”
She blushed like a rose and he kissed her strongly….
©️jj 2019
From The Cracksman Code by Jane Jago
Once breakfast had reached the toast and jam stage, Anna smiled at Bill.
“I think you should tell Sam all about your family. So he can get them straight in his head before he meets them.”
“Yes. I should. If I don’t he may be so surprised by the twins that he runs away. I wouldn’t like that. I’ll start with Daddy. He is Uncle Rod’s twin brother, but he isn’t nearly so big. Grandma Cracksman says he is the runt of the litter. I think that’s rude, but Daddy laughs. He says he may not have the family brawn, but he did get all the brains. Is that right Anna?”
“It is, except that the smallness is relative. Jim’s a chunky six five as opposed to a rangy whatever Rod is.”
“Six nine. But we’re interrupting Bill.”
“Mummy next. She’s beautiful. Blonde and cuddly, and with the biggest blue eyes in the world. She sings when she’s happy and hearing her sing makes us happy too.”
Rod patted his head.
“She’s a belter and no mistake. But she’s a big girl with it, and there’s nobody can cuss a blue streak like Patsy Cracksman.”
Bill laughed.
“You are right. She does swear beautifully. My brother Jaimie is next oldest. He’s fourteen. I like him a lot, because he is patient and explains things when I don’t understand. He is very clever with computers. Just like Daddy. Then comes the twins. They are twelve-and-bit, and they are very difficult to explain. Sometimes I like them and other times I don’t. They are quite rough and quick-tempered, and they only really like each other and Mummy. Their proper names are Matthias and Cyrano, but mostly people call them Matt and Cy, or Twins. Except for Anna who calls them Dickhead and Shitface.”
Anna coloured.
“To my eternal shame. I called them it once when they were about seven and I was at my wits’ end. Since when they have tormented me by refusing to answer to anything else.”
Rod grinned.
“I call them ‘you pair of fuckers’, so I got no moral high ground there. They are just like me and Jim were at that age. Intolerable. Inseparable. They will be easier to handle, and easier to prise apart, when sex rears its ugly head.”
Bill looked from Anna to Rod, then shook his head wisely.
“If grown ups can’t deal with them, it’s no wonder me and Charlie mostly avoid them. Charlie is my little brother. He’s only five, but he’s very, very smart. He learns things so fast it frightens some of his teachers. But he is kindhearted and helps the others in his class when they don’t understand their work. His class teacher told Daddy that he was already better at teaching than anybody else in our school. But the head teacher don’t like it that he is so smart. He don’t care, though. The only reason he don’t tell her to feck off is that he promised Daddy he wouldn’t. Then there’s Gandalf and Eller, who are Mummy’s dogs, Daddy’s dog Benni, the cat who is just called Cat, and Jamie’s parrot Cap’n Flint. That’s all of us.”
Bill sat back in his chair, with the air of one who has done a good job. Rod clapped his hands softly.
“A masterful dissertation, young Cracksman. Now. Are we all finished. I’ll get the bill…”
The cobbled street shone in the light of the electric sun and all the little houses were perfect replications of a small town in the old world. We took turns peeping through the hole in the ‘sky’ at the tiny perfection under its glass dome.
We looked longingly, but it was too expensive a toy.
Mama took us to the market, where we bought juicy fruits that we ate on the way home.
We forgot about the diorama. Except for Kitty, who went every day to stare.
Then she didn’t come home.
Sometimes we see her playing on the cobbles.
Artwork by Cindy Tomamichel
You can listen to this on YouTube.
The small round tent with it’s stippled canvas sat under the spread of an oak tree on the edge of the showground. All around rural folk talked rural patter about lambing and brewing, the price of rape by the acre and the eroding of environmental subsidies.
I didn’t feel as though I could bear another hail-fellow-well-met conversation with another farmer, which would begin with a friendly smile and end with a polite one, painted on just as they beat a rapid retreat back to the beer tent or the show ring.
the conversations followed an unavoidable and inevitable pattern.
“So what you going to do with those acres up on Claw Moor now you’ve bought them? Farm sheep?”
“Farm wind.”
A moment of confusion which would change to a quickly hidden hostility.
“The Moor is a beauty spot you know.”
“So is the world.”
A puzzled frown.
“I don’t see -“
“No. Very few do. I quite understand.”
Then the choice between rancour and retreat. Retreat winning most often, to my relief.
So the fortune teller’s tent seemed to me as much a place of temporary respite from all that as a possible entertainment for a few minutes. Besides, I could do with the promise of a tall, dark stranger – especially one who didn’t run away as soon as I started talking about my farm.
Inside it was cool and dim, the scent of verdigris and myrrh gentling the air. The fortune teller was young, not the wise old woman I had expected. She said nothing, nodding regally to the chair opposite her and then lifting a crystal ball from the table between us and holding it in her hands. Silence spread into the sounds outside and absorbed them as my gaze became fixed on the young woman’s dark eyes.
Was it vision or speech? I will never now know, but for a moment reality was banished to the sidelines and something happened. I saw a barren earth devoured by her children, embraced beneath the sleeping flood of rising oceans and the moon riding the skies as sole witness to the coming of a time that did not know humanity.
Then I was standing under the oak tree in the shade that cast me apart from the sun soaked showground, the jollity of ice cream vans and warm real ale, listening to the announcer telling us the winner of the Waggiest Tail contest…
Gareth was bathing. For the first time since he won his spurs he had a chance to be really clean and he revelled in the coolness of the lake.
The eyes that watched him from the reeds were interested in the lean muscular length of the young man, and in his mop of yellow hair.
She swam to his side and lifted her head out of the clear, brown water.
Gareth’s dagger flew to his hand, and the nymph laughed.
The young knight dropped his weapon and dived beneath the water where his hands became tangled in her greenish hair.
Matilda Whitethroat was brought to bed with the landowner’s child on a brisk autumn morning. Lord Edric summoned the parish priest to Matilda’s bedchamber and legitimised the babe as soon as the women had washed off the sweat of childbirth.
Then he rode off to the wars.
Matilda moved herself and her infant back to her father’s house. And watched.
When Edric rode home he brought a wealthy young wife with him.
Within an hour, Matilda had left the town.
Twenty years later, Eudric was bested in the tourney by a handsome young man.
“Ill-met father.” Tors Edricssen snarled.
From A Walking Shadow, the final book in Haruspex Trilogy of Fortune’s Fools by E.M. Swift-Hook. You can listen to this on YouTube.
When the ship finally opened up, Stin stood waiting with Panvia, who still held her tea and was sipping at it. He helped her to kick the blocks to the ramp in an ultra low-tech parody of the way a spaceship dock would normally autosecure.
The first person out seemed more as though he was expecting to meet an armed assault than a middle-aged maintenance technician sipping a cup of tea. He held an energy snub in one hand and looked more than willing to use it. He wore a slightly garish, military cut outfit and his black hair pulled back into a short ponytail, separating on one side around the slight lump of a skull implanted port.
Panvia completely ignored the weaponry and lifted her mug.
“If you want a cuppa, I’ve something warm and spiced on the brew. It’ll help get your innards used to the local micro-flora and fauna. Tastes pretty good too.”
The black haired man didn’t reply, he finished his visual check of the environment and apparently satisfied that there wasn’t a secret ambush waiting in the shadows, moved aside.
“Tea sounds good to me.” The reply came from a second man who emerged from the ship. This one was dressed like he was attending a debut event in Central, but with a shaggy mane of golden blond curly hair tempering the effect. “And your tea always tastes good, Pan.”
Panvia’s normally dour expression lightened to something that nearly approached a smile.
“You look like you could do with it, too. You been living on all that alien muck too long.”
Any reply the blond man might have made was cut short by a shout of unmitigated delight from the entrance to the dock.
“Durban,” Gernie called and strode over to the ship with a huge grin on his round face.” You know until I saw you just now I was only half-convinced it really was you. When you sailed out of here with that cargo I was thinking that was it. That you’d use it to set yourself up – somewhere nice in the Middle Worlds, maybe the ‘City. Or possibly, knowing you, even Central way. Why the hell would you want to come back here, man?”
He finished the speech as he reached the blond man and threw his arms around him in a close embrace which was returned with mutual back slapping. The man with the ponytail moved sharply, clearly worried and only relaxed when Gernie released his victim and stepped back, still smiling. “They still talk about you in Micha’s from when you were first here that winter we met. How long ago was that now?”
“Too many years, maybe even too many decades,” the blond man said, his own smile as warm as Gernie’s. Then he looked directly at Stin. “This a new member of your ground crew?”
Gernie followed his look, turning to see.
“Oh, that’s one of our waifs and strays. Stinian. His girlfriend dumped him and jumped out. He helps out to earn his passage one day.”
“Harmless?”
“Mostly, for sure. Aren’t you Stin?” Now what was he supposed to say to that?
“I guess,” he agreed.
Gernie had already turned away again, his back to Stin.
“This your latest boyfriend?” he was asking, nodding at the man with the black hair and the scalp port. The blond man, Durban, laughed.
“Jaz is a friend – a very good friend.”
The other man, Jaz, seemed unconcerned by Gernie’s assumption. He seemed to still be expecting some kind of trouble. Or maybe that was just his normal way of being.
Archie just looked at her. His eyes were a peculiarly liquid brown and she could rarely resist their beseeching depths.
But this time she was determined.
“No Archie,” she said firmly, “I’m not listening to him. Araminta saw him with a whore on either arm. Why would she lie to me?”
Archie’s gaze grew even more fixed and she found herself squirming under his regard.
She stamped her foot.
“No Archie. Just no.”
An hour later she picked up the phone and called Paul. Once she heard his voice Araminta’s spite was forgotten.
Archie trotted off with his tail wagging.
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