From The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester by George Ormerod. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, 1819:

“[Sir Hugh de Dutton, b. about 1175] also had the magistracy, or rule and authority, over all the letchers and whores of all Cheshire, granted unto him and his heirs, by John constable of Cheshire and baron of Halton, as freely as the said John held the same of the earl of Chester, saving the right of the said John to him and his heirs; which are the very words of the deed, only rendered by me in English. Lib. C. fol. 154, h. So that he holds it, as it were, under the baron of Halton, who reserves his own right by a special reservation.

“This privilege over such loose persons was granted first under Roger Lacy, constable of Cheshire, under Richard the First, by Randle, surnamed Blundevill, earl of Chester, in memory of his good service done to the earl in raising the siege of the Welsh-men, who had beset the earl in his castle of Rothelent in Flintshire; for the constable having got a promiscuous rabble of such like persons together, and marching towards the said castle, the Welsh, supposing a great army to be coming, raised their siege and fled. So saith the ancient roll of the barons of Halton. Lib. C. fol. 85, b. Monasticon Anglicanum, 2 pars, pag. 187. This roll saith, that rabble consisted of players, fidlers, and shoe-makers. The deed here toucheth letchers and whores. The privilege and custom used at this day by the heirs of Dutton, is over the minstrelsie and common fidlers, none being suffered to play in this county without the licence of the lord of Dutton, who keeps a court at Chester yearly, on Midsomer-day, for the same, where all the licenced minstrels of Cheshire do appear, and renew their licences; so that the custom seems to have been altered to the fidlers, as necessary attendants on revellers in bawdy-houses and taverns.

“And it is to be observed, that those minstrels which are licensed by the heirs of Dutton of Dutton, within the county-palatine of Chester, or the county of the city of Chester, according to their ancient custom, are exempted out of the statute of rogues, 39 Eliz. cap. 4.”

One of the pleasures of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series is running across the small songs that Breq, the main character, collects. One particularly graceful lullaby that threads its way through the story is It All Goes Around:

My mother said it all goes around
The ship goes around the station,
It all goes around.

My mother said it all goes around
The station goes around the moon,
It all goes around.

My mother said it all goes around
The moon goes around the planet,
It all goes around.

My mother said it all goes around
The planet goes around the sun
It all goes around.

It’s clear in the story that the song is a ferocious earworm. Which is why the tune for it that Foz Meadows composed is so perfect. It fits the lyrics beautifully, and sticks in your head. It certainly stuck in the head of Tumblr user @comedrinkwithme, who demonstrated that it’s a really good round.

Pastiches? Why, yes there are.

The soft clink of container against flask and the quiet slosh of liquid woke me quickly and completely. No ancillary, and no crewmember trying to perform an ancillary’s role, would make so much noise brewing and pouring tea.

Ship, why is there a stranger in my cabin? I asked silently, keeping my eyes closed and my breathing even. No doubt the stranger had noted my involuntary physiological changes on waking, but perhaps she would think it was simply a sleep phase transition. If she wasn’t an ancillary, if she had never stood like a piece of furniture, all but invisible, while citizens and ancillaries breathed and slept and woke around her, she might not know the thousand subtle differences between consciousness and unconsciousness.

The stranger convinced me that no harm was intended, replied Ship. I believe the tea is supposed to be the signal for you to wake up.

I opened my eyes. The stranger was at the foot of my bed, watching me with her head tilted to one side. She wore a simple outfit of black and gold, with a single large ornament on the left side of her chest and three small matching pins on her collar. In her ungloved hands she held a strange glass container of tea. The container was too tall to be considered a bowl. If it had not had a handle and been clearly intended for drinking from, I would have called it a vase. The fragrance of the tea inside was unfamiliar too, like Heart of the Valley with citrus peel added.

“Greetings, Fleet Captain,” she said as I sat up. “My previous captain was also fond of tea in the morning, and I’ve taken the liberty of making you some the way that he liked it.”

I took the vaselike vessel from her and sipped it. It was delicious. “And what did your previous captain call it?”

“Tea. Earl Grey.” She closed her lips, as though there was another word in that sequence, one she did not intend to say.

This is a spoiler thread for Ancillary Mercy.

This splendid piece of late-medieval woodcarving by Tilman Riemenschneider shows the Fourteen Holy Helpers, also known as the Viersehn Heilegen or the Auxiliary Saints. As we’ve remarked here before, they’re more or less the Avengers of the Late Middle Ages. The game is to figure out who’s who.

To see a much larger version of the sculpture group, go here. (It’s part of this blogpost.)

Playing Spot the Saint with a Holy Helpers group is always a challenge. You’ve got your normal kind of problems: bishop saints tend to all look alike, people living far inland were confused by that object Saint Erasmus travels with, and one Saint Cyriacus is always being mistaken for another.

With the Fourteen Holy Helpers, there’s also the question of who was in the team lineup for that issue. A fairly standard lineup would be Acacius/Agathius, Barbara, Blaise, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, Cyriacus, Denis/Dionysius, Erasmus/Elmo, Eustace, George, Giles/Egidius/Aegidius, Margaret of Antioch, Pantaleon/Panteleimon, and Vitus.

However, saints in the normal lineup could be swapped for others. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints lists the potential replacements as SS. Anthony Abbot (Anthony the Anchorite), Leonard of Noblac, Nicholas of Myra, Sebastian, and Roch or Rocco. To these, Wikipedia adds SS. Apollonia, Dorothea of Caesarea, Oswald the King, Pope Sixtus II, and Wolfgang of Regensburg.

On top of that, Riemenschneider’s sculpture group only has thirteen saints in it. So: who’s who, and how can you tell? Any idea who’s missing, or where in the group they’re missing from? What else do we know about the missing figure?

Have fun, split hairs, drag in interesting data you’ve run across. The usual.

Please refrain from posting the complete answer in clear as the first comment in the thread. In fact, please refrain from posting any answers in clear until the fluorosphere’s chewed on things for a while. You can get the same murmurs of astonishment out of the rest of us by posting answers in ROT-13. The point at which this ceases to be necessary I leave to your own good judgement.

Arthur Chu interviewed medievalist and journalist David Perry on TechCrunch:

Perry: [W]hen I hear people talk about Nordic fantasy as white supremacist, I like talking about the diverse ways the Vikings interacted with people around the world. They often intermarried local populations, they very quickly adopted local religions when it was useful. The Viking experience in Russia is really not the story they want to tell. You can try to make it that way, but the story in Russia is really state-building, collaboration with Slavic peoples, connections to the Eastern Mediterranean, both the Islamic and the Greek Orthodox world — and quite a diverse Islamic world at that. The story to me is that the greatest Nordic civilization is this wonderful Kievan polyglot, polyethnic society.

That’s not the story that the racists want to tell and they’re not gonna listen, but people asking “Is this true? Is their way the only way to do it?”, you can really work with that.

You can also tell the story of medieval democracy in Iceland, for instance, with a very non-authoritarian, collaborative element — where violence still played a very prominent role. I try to complicate this vision of Vikings as all about dominance and conquest.

Chu: It seems that we’re drawn to idealized versions of medieval times one way or another — some forms of fantasy that depict those times as a romantic ideal, a “simpler time” filled with pageantry and honor, and then Game of Thrones subversions that focus on rape and mutilation and horrible suffering, but rarely anything in between.

Perry: These are all things that tell us a lot more about ourselves than about the Middle Ages. Not that rape and torture didn’t happen in the Middle Ages, it certainly did, and not that it wasn’t responded to in ways that are different than ways we would respond to it today.

But, you know, we pick and choose, the creators pick and choose, they want to show something that will be disturbing or controversial or will be a political tool and they try to say history supports us in this. And then they throw in dragons and zombies and then they say that’s unrealistic but that’s okay, that’s just storytelling.

That comes back to what I try to say — it’s okay to draw from history, but history does not wholeheartedly support any one of these fictional depictions. These come from creators making choices. And the choices they make have consequences.

I joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1989†. The parish where I was baptized was known at the time for two things: the starkness and modernity of its architecture and the dramatic dysfunction* of its community leadership. It was home to me in many ways, and I am grateful to this day for the gifts I received there. I realize now that I like the clear openness of my current church partly because it reminds me of that first home. But I also was and remain damaged by some of the things that happened there. It’s a place that’s much easier for me to contemplate after moving away, when I no longer have to choose whether or not to go back.

This is familiar‡ territory for many people here.

So a few days ago, I stumbled on a Twitter/Tumblr discussion of a particularly “ugly” chapel. It was the usual easy internet snark, with cutesy nicknames, uncharitable assumptions without evidence, concern trolling and hand-wringing, contempt and judgment. And the picture at the top of the Tumblr post was my baptismal church.

I was irritated. I answered some of the posts, got some apologies, maybe made a few people think a little. But under that simple irritation was a much more complex net of emotions, one I’m still tangled up in.

On the one hand, all of the criticism was superficial stuff: the easy and unkind things that people write when they forget the humanity of the rest of the web. But even that was hard to answer as I remembered the deeper flaws, the ones the critics didn’t know about. It was all too tempting to move from defense to defensiveness, to proclaim or pretend that all had been well in that cool and airy chapel. To tell myself those outsiders hadn’t proven themselves wise or nuanced enough to deal with the whole story. To cover up. To lie.

And in this case, some of those temptations are true. Some of those impulses were right. Outsiders are rarely able to understand the context, the complexity, of dysfunction; casual internet outsiders doubly so. The events I remember are long ago, and the culture and people have changed several times since then. Walking away and staying away was the right decision. I don’t need to try to undo it now.

There are members of our community here who have taken that path, the simple one of cut ties, silence, unanswered calls, unopened letters. And they witness that simple does not mean easy. It’s a hard path, because so few of these situations are free of good things or the hope of good things to come. It takes courage and firmness to stay away, to remain uninvolved.

Meanwhile, there are others who have gone the other way, who have left the Gordian knot uncut and figured out how to drive the cart despite it, who maintain relationships with the family that hurt them. That takes another kind of courage, a different form of firmness.

Today is the 21st of September, Dysfunctional Families Day, the seventh we’ve observed here on Making Light. I admire and honor you, the people in this community, for the work that you have done to help yourselves and each other along your chosen, necessary paths. I value beyond measure the truths that you have told here. And I love you, the way one loves the family one looks upon with an unshadowed heart.

† for reasons that are off-topic here
* NB: everyone involved was an adult. No crimes were committed. This isn’t the dysfunction you’re thinking of.
‡ pun very much intended

This is part of the sequence of Dysfunctional Families discussions. We have a few special rules, specific to the needs and nature of the conversations we have here.

1. If you want to participate but don’t want your posts linked to your contributions to the rest of Making Light, feel free to choose a pseudonym. But please keep it consistent within these threads, because people do care. You can create a separate (view all by) history for your pseudonym by changing your email address. And if you blow it and cross identities, give me a shout and I’ll come along and tidy it up.
2. On a related note, please respect the people’s choice to use a pseudonym, unless they make it clear that they are willing to let the identities bleed over in people’s minds.
3. If you’re not from a dysfunctional background, be aware that your realities and base expectations are not the default in this conversation. In particular, please don’t do the “they’re the only family you have” thing. Black is white, up is down, and your addressee’s mother may very well be their nemesis.
4. Be even more careful, charitable, and gentle than you would elsewhere on Making Light. Try to avoid “helpiness”/”hlepiness” (those comments which look helpful, but don’t take account of the addressee’s situation and agency). Apologize readily and sincerely if you tread on toes, even unintentionally. This kind of conversation only works because people have their defenses down.
5. Never underestimate the value of a good witness. If you want to be supportive but don’t have anything specific to say, people do value knowing that they are heard.

Previous posts (note that comments are closed on them to keep the conversation in one place):

• Have a Dysfunctional Families Day
• Dysfunctional Families Day: Inversion Experience
• Dysfunctional Families Day: No Expectations
• Dysfunctional Families Day: Tangled Emotions
• Dysfunctional Families: You Must Be This Unhappy To Ride
• Dysfunctional Families: Circled Strangers
• Dysfunctional Families: Fish Hooks
• Dysfunctional Families: Everybody lined up for the parade?
• Dysfunctional Families: Sitting and Rising
• Dysfunctional Families: Surviving and Thriving
• Dysfunctional Families: Shooting and Shouting
• Dysfunctional Families: Hope
• Dysfunctional Families: Forgiveness
• Dysfunctional Families: Books on Tape
• Dysfunctional Families: Toolbox
• Dysfunctional Families, the Role-Playing Game
• Dysfunctional Families: Witnessing
• Dysfunctional Families: Boundaries

Larry Smith has sold SF and fantasy books at more conventions than some of us have had hot meals. At nearly every con I attend, Larry and his wife and bookselling partner Sally Kobee have the largest all-new book installation in the dealer’s room, offering just about every single title released in the previous few months, including plenty of material from publishers not part of the Big Five. They’re part of the infrastructure of our community. I once (only partly jokingly) defined traditional SF fandom as that set of people who (1) subscribe to Locus, (2) read somebody else’s copy of Locus, or (3) will tell you at some length just how thoroughly they don’t care about Locus. You could as easily define us as “that set of people who buy a new hardcover from Larry Smith at least once a year.”

As widely reported, on 8 Sep 2015, Larry was driving his van full of books home from DragonCon, when he was involved in a freeway accident that rolled the van. His passenger was unscathed, but Larry is reportedly pretty banged up. He was released from the hospital yesterday but it’ll be a while before he’s completely healed, and meanwhile insurance is covering only part of what it will cost to replace the all-important van, to say nothing of the many damaged and destroyed books. There’s a GoFundMe for Larry and Sally that aims to raise $10,000; it’s about halfway there. We’re going to donate to it and we hope some of you do too. Truly great booksellers are never in plentiful supply.

On sale today in hardcover and e-book. Excerpt here. Author website here. Bookstore appearances (with tacos!) here.

(Making Light posts about the previous books: California Bones and Pacific Fire.)

My flap copy:

Daniel’s adopted son Sam is lost. Made from the magical essence of the tyrannical Hierarch of Southern California whom Daniel overthrew and killed, Sam has been consumed by the great Pacific firedrake secretly assembled by Daniel’s half-brother Paul.

Unknown to Daniel, however, Sam is still alive and aware, magically trapped inside the dragon as it rampages around Los Angeles, periodically torching a neighborhood or two.

Daniel has a plan to rescue Sam. It will involve the rarest of substances, axis mundi, made from the bones of the great dragon at the center of the Earth. To obtain it, Daniel must go to the kingdom of Northern California and boldly pose as his half-brother, returned to claim his place in the competition to be appointed Lord High Osteomancer of the North.

Only when the Northern Hierarch, in her throne room at Golden Gate Park, raises her scepter to confirm Daniel in his position will he have an opportunity to steal the axis mundi—under the gaze of the Hierarch herself.

And that’s just the first obstacle.

Some notice:

“It’s got subterranean halls with pillars of bones, a magic sword, magical duels and some of the coolest bone magic ever, but that’s all interwoven with the taste of an LA burrito, the concrete waterways of Los Angeles, and the neon glow of the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier. Van Eekhout has written a 21st century alchemy.”
—Maureen F. McHugh on California Bones

“Half crime caper, half heroic quest, Greg van Eekhout’s Pacific Fire pulls the reader into an inventive, compelling, fully-textured urban fantasy world, mixing SoCal culture with magic so ingenious and convincing you can practically smell it, and feel it crunch between your teeth. A real treasure, not to be missed.”
—Kurt Busiek on Pacific Fire

“Captivating…The author’s fantastic ear for dialog is often well employed in snark, especially between Daniel and his friend and fellow thief Moth. While the series could end here, it would be a shame to create such an intriguing world and not visit again.”
—Library Journal on Dragon Coast