Rewiew request for an ancient world adventure like no other

[Holden]

My Year With The Gods

Free download on Kindle Unlimited or email for a pdf file

Your review will be most welcome. Expect the unexpected.

“My Year With the Gods” is an intense character-driven study of the absurd where humorous overtones mask a deeply subversive, perverse undercurrent in this ancient world adventure story like no other.

It’s 534CE: after Rome fell, before Islam, in the multi-cultural trading port of Eudaemon (Aden).

An 11-year old idiot boy (savant fou) has been orphaned twice. First when his parents died. Then the old Greek scholar who took him in and educated him died. Leaving him to fend for himself with a very challenging legacy: a collection of pornography from across the ancient world which even a pope would envy, and the degenerate sultan desperately wants translated. And the original, ‘secret’ unabridged Epectesy of St. Gregory of Nyssa. The soul’s moving into the oneness of God - the socially explosive key to the eternal cerebral orgasm. Handed down from Gregory’s scribe for generations until it ended up with Aristophanes, who being without issue left it in the care of an idiot gypsy boy who remembers everything except his own name.

This book is the first part of the idiot boy’s ‘diary’, about the extraordinary adventure he has with ‘the gods’, following Demetrius (Hermes), Andromeda and Scheherazade in search of Lesbia. And how they are responsible for igniting regime change in Eudaemon in their bid to free her.

“Mistress Talia,” Rabbi Ezra called, stepping forward as they crossed the crowded room. He was on the wrong side of thirty five and enjoyed his wife’s cooking far too much.
“Rabbi Ezra,” Talia said, seizing his hand. “Thank you so much for coming at such short notice.”
“What else can I do, mistress? I ask you. When a madman comes banging on my door in the night, threatening to kill himself right there and then, demanding to get married.”
Talia pressed gold coins into his hand.
“Buy your wife a nice dress.”
“A dress!” he cried, choking on the words. “Mistress, if I even suggest she buy a dress, she’ll throw me out of the house, just like she did this morning when I wake up to find the whole town has gone mad. All the women have cut off their hair, and are wearing white seamen’s clothes and going to the palace.”
He leant closer to her. There was garlic on his breath.
“There must be something in the water. When she returned from the palace she looked at me with lust in her eyes like I never saw since the first year we were married.”
Talia laughed and touched his arm conspiratorially.
“She’s experienced the Epectesy of St. Gregory.”
Rabbi Ezra stared at her as if Abraham had just walked into the room.
“Then it’s true?” he said. “Aristophanes’ fool spoke to you in Greek?”
“Yes. But we were in the hands of the gods. We were somewhere else. . . And only women understood what he said. . . . And I remember none of it now.”
The rabbi touched her hand.
“It’s better you remember nothing. Trust me. It’s better this way,” he said reassuringly, but the pain on his face told of his torment.
“If I warned him once, I warned him fifty times. “Aristophanes, my friend,” I said when we would drink tea together and argue about the Torah. And I’m ashamed to say, Mistress Talia,” he said, breathing in earnestly. “That the old Greek knew more about the Talmud, the Torah and the Holy Scriptures than I ever will. And the idiot boy can recite them all from memory. He could step into my shoes this very minute and I would be out of a job, but still left with a wife and children who expect food on the table.”
“Yes, yes, Rabbi Ezra, I understand all that. But what did you warn your old friend about?”
“I tell the Greek as he’s nearing death’s door, the idiot boy is touched by God, you know this, my friend. But there’s a limit to what even his young genius mind can handle.”
The rabbi looked at her glumly.
“He didn’t listen to me. And here’s the result.”
“What? Short hair and naked breasts.”
“No, mistress. Even the stained whites I can live with,” he said, with dread in his voice. “The idiot boy has revealed the true Epectesy of St. Gregory of Nyssa.”
“Is there a false one?”
“No, my gracious hostess. There’s one anybody can read if they care to look for it. Which even Jewish scholars have studied. And the one only Aristophanes had. The original, full and unabridged version of the epectesy, mistress. The Singleness of Being. Of the soul moving into the oneness of God. As Gregory dictated to his personal scribe all those years ago. A revelation which transcends all faiths. ”
“The key to the eternal cerebral orgasm,” Talia said quietly.
“Correct. But at the time publishing it would be so inflammatory and dangerous to the continued functioning of ‘normal’ society, the scribe persuaded his master to only release a heavily edited version, lest they both be burned alive by the ruler of Cappadocia.”
“They weren’t?”
“No. And as my friend told me with almost his dying breath, the original was hidden away by the scribe, and passed down from father to son, scholars all, until it ended up here with Aristophanes. Who being without issue, could only leave it in the care of an idiot gypsy boy who remembers everything except his own name.”
The rabbi waved at her open shirt.
“The result of that is in my face,” he said. “And the town’s full of women who won’t take ‘No’ for an answer.”

Chapter 1

2017 Washington D.C.
She’d kept the précis to read in bed, last on her ‘to do’ list for the day, her interest slightly piqued as the one-page was also accompanied by a Kindle tablet.
Beside her the president slept soundly, the incessant daily crises of office far from his mind.
She couldn’t remember when she last read a book. Or even had time to think about reading a book.
In her world Rupert Murdoch’s maxim of “If it’s worth saying it can be said in a page.” had been condensed to one paragraph. Two hour meetings were held in ten minutes.
She read the paragraph.
Then the page.
A sudden sense of foreboding swept over her. Before reading this report she thought she’d been there. Done it. Many times. Knew about all the plots, rackets and schemes. Where the bodies were buried. Now she wasn’t so sure anymore.
Her antennae for impending disaster were second to none. But nothing she’d experienced in the past decades behind the levers of power prepared her for the known unknowns suggested in this NSA case file from an obscure, but clearly gifted analyst.
Instinctively she knew the outlook of unmentioned unknown unknowns was the view from the anteroom of hell.
That the report even reached the chief-of-staff a miracle.
To arrive on her bedside table a practical joke which deserved the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
She picked up the Kindle, turned it on and began reading.

She was a fast study. Two hours later she left the president snoring peacefully beside her and slipped out of bed. Grabbed her dressing gown and walked down the hall to the office.
Sat behind the expansive oak desk. It was somewhat larger than she preferred, but it came with the job. It stayed, the person behind it changed. It was where the buck stopped.
She reached for the console of the secure encrypted telephone. And hit the top speed-dial button.
The call was answered in ten seconds.
“Vladimir,” she said. “What do you know about the Epectesy of St. Gregory of Nyssa?”
There was a moment’s silence on the other end.
“What do you know about Holden Braithwaite?” came the reply.
It was her turn to pause.
“Nothing.”
“Neither do we.”
“How’s that possible?”
“You tell me,” he said.
“We need to talk.”
“The walls have ears.”
“I’ve no time to meet, for at least three weeks. And even then a lot of people will be seriously pissed off. You know that.”
“Yes. . .” There was another pause. “I’m sending someone over. After you talk to him, you’ll know what I do. And time will become meaningless.”
“He’ll still need to move heaven and earth.”
There was a laugh on the end of the line.
“That’s his stock in trade. Do you have the Kremlin Special Reserve vodka I gave you last time you were in town?”
“In the bottom drawer. Why?”
“Have a shot. Then in about fifteen seconds go and see what’s on your front lawn. You’ll understand why you should’ve had two. I’m waiting for your call.”
He hung up.
She opened the bottom drawer, took his advice and had a shot from the bottle which was almost full.
Swallowing it was punishment from the cold. She didn’t like punishment.
When she went and looked out the armored window she realized Vladimir was right. She should’ve had two.
There was a 17-hands high Arabian warhorse in the moonlight on the front lawn. But no alarms sounded.
She turned around as a man walked out of the presidential washroom.
Still the alarms were silent
But she was not afraid. She’d read the book and now expected anything.
He smiled.
He was tall. His face suntanned. His hair, golden curls, tumbled down over broad suntanned bare shoulders. His eyes inescapable cyan blue.
He was like no one she had ever seen before or even imagined. He was from age long gone. Few heroic Roman charioteers from Circus Maximus cruised Pennsylvania Avenue. Although there were surely many wannabes in the hardcore gay bar around the corner downtown.
Yet it was as if she already knew him intimately. And where he was from.
“Demetrius,” she said, snapping her fingers as she walked back behind the Resolute desk. “I expected you sooner.”
“Madam President, the horse which speaks Greek and flies is fast. But not that fast.”
“He won’t make a mess on the lawn, will he? That would be a dead giveaway,” she said.
The messenger of the gods laughed. “Don’t worry. If he forgets where he is, it’s totally organic and instantly recycled. Besides this meeting doesn’t exist.”
She laughed. “You’re my kind of man.” She gazed into his fathomless eyes. And smiled. “Tell me everything I don’t want to know in ten minutes. What’s the idiot gypsy boy done now?”
“He left his diary behind.”

Ancient scrolls had been discovered where an unthinkable social revolution started all those years ago, in the godforsaken hellhole presently known as Aden.
Such was the perceived power over society of the key to the eternal cerebral orgasm that some very sick dangerous people were prepared to go to any length to find and destroy the scrolls mentioned in the diary, and anything and anyone that stood in their way.

It would be their last mistake. As they didn’t understand who they were really dealing with.

This book is the beginning of the revolution.

If you don't have Kindle Unlimited please email me rayxt AT hotmail.com for a pdf copy. Your review will be most welcome on Goodreads and Kindle