An engaging study of the absurd where humorous overtones mask a deeply subversive, perverse undercurrent. An 11-year-old village idiot (‘savant fou’), cursed from birth to remember everything except his own name, creates chaos, outrage and regime change in Eudaemon (Aden) in 534CE when he, Andromeda and Scheherazade, goddesses of the hunt and fables join a mysterious stranger, Hermes, son of Zeus, messenger of the gods, in his epic search for his long lost true love, Lesbia.
FREE on Kindle UnLimited & on Kindle April 5-8
Teaser.. .My patience paid off at night when the most recent wife of the sultan hidden by her niqab stepped on deck for some air after the dhow cleared the port of Eudaemon.
“Mistress Adara,” I hissed from the shadows of some deck cargo. She looked around, so anyone observing her would think she was looking out to sea.
“How do you know my name? My voyage is secret.” she hissed back.
“I recognized your foot.”
“You’re mad.”
“Yes, mistress,” I mumbled, beside myself with excitement. “Yours is the most beautiful and desirable ankle in all the harem.”
She gasped, shocked. “How do you know that? Who are you?” Urgency and a note of panic creeping into her voice.
“Show yourself. Or I’ll have you thrown to the sharks.” Her hand moved to the jeweled dagger she had on her belt.
I inched forward behind the bales just enough so only she could see my face in the moonlight. I was so excited to see her again, like the impossible had come true.
“It’s me,” I managed to gargle, before my neurons shorted and rationality went downhill fast.
She gasped. “My God! The Greek’s babbling idiot. What are you doing here?”
I mumbled some polyglot in ‘tongues’ even I didn’t understand.
“Not that. Imbecile. Stop talking your Greek and Roman rubbish.”
Peering more closely at me, she stopped abruptly and pulled her niqab off her head to see me more clearly. “But you’re not. . . What devilry is this, idiot? You’re not a girl.”
“No, mistress,” I said, hanging my head, shamed by the serial deception she had been victim of in the immediate past.
“But when you came to the palace. . .to read for the sultan . . . and came into the harem all those times. My God! I can’t believe this.. . . You were a girl.”
“Everything was false, mistress. A ruse of my saintly wise master. He trained me in the art of makeup and disguise. And whenever I went out in the street. And to the palace it was always as a girl. To protect me from roving slavers and that predatory pedophile husband of yours. If he realized I was a boy he would’ve enslaved me as a babbling freak to amuse his degenerate guests.”
She breathed heavily, shocked and burdened by this.
“How did you get on board? Everybody’s looking for you.”
“Why mistress? All I did was burn the scrolls as my master bade me.” This was not entirely true. He told me to burn them. But as they were clearly much sought after, and therefore of great value, I hid them away with the gold he gave me. And set alight to the house instead to cover my deception.
“And half the town with it.”
“An administrative oversight.”
“You’re insane. And all the body parts found in the countryside and washed up on the beaches? What about them?”
“Evil lackeys who deserved no better end for all the misery they caused the living.”
“They were the sultan’s men sent to find you.”
“You’re better away from that place, mistress. The sultan was planning a diabolical Roman orgy to seal his new alliance with the Emir of Karne. The most vile and unnatural acts have been scripted from the scrolls. Women from his own harem will play starring roles. To remain there would be suicide by another name”
