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.

An 11-year-old idiot (savant fou), cursed from birth to remember everything except his own name, creates chaos, consternation and regime change in Eudaemon (Aden) in 534CE when he, Andromeda and Scheherazade, goddesses of the hunt and fables, join Hermes (known here as Demetrius), messenger of the gods, in his epic search for his long lost true love, Lesbia. Finding on their chaotic journey the scrolls containing the true Epectesy of St. Gregory of Nyssa, revealing something so shocking and socially explosive it was hidden for centuries: the key to the eternal cerebral orgasm.

And the emancipation of women.

Expect the unexpected.

"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. To disembowel himself on my very doorstep in front of my wife and children, unless I come and perform a marriage service immediately, witnessed by notaries.”

Talia discreetly pressed gold coins into his hand.

“Buy your wife a nice new dress and some jewelry.”

“A dress!” he cried, choking on the words. “Mistress, if I buy her a dress. If I even suggest she buy a dress, she’ll throw me out of the house again, 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.”

The rabbi 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 and Demetrius understood what he said. . . . And I remember none of what he said now.”

The rabbi touched her hand.

“It’s better you remember nothing. You’ve been there. You’ve done it. 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, 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.”