Aramais

Dinner at Nineveh's Royal Palace: Scarab took a long, deep breath, "Indeed, my lord. You shall see the star of Assur on your journey, and know it by name," he struggled. "You'll receive the answer to all from a deceased King, and bury him." The king cleared his throat, wondering if Scarab had drank too much. Looking down at his lap, Shalmaneser questioned the logic of Scarab's last statement. "If the dead could rise, would I not certainly be walking among them by now?" Scarab didn't reply, and the king was quickly losing patience. "I have freed a million wicked souls from their wretched flesh and none have returned to complain," he yelled. About this book: The king of Assyria in 847 BC may indeed have killed a million men. If you asked his northern neighbor, though, they might've begged to differ. Certainly, it wasn't a million subjects of Aramu, the king of the recently confederated Nairi tribes rivaling Assyria's status as the Mid-East's lone superpower. Aramu would've viewed such banter as a serious provocation. And, in this story, he responds measure for measure to the Assyrian king's boasts, sparking a war at the most spiritually inconvenient of times. What has this to do with the title character, Aramais? Crowns come in many forms. And for Aramais, a late bronze-age mercenary in Aramu's service, it is certainly a heavy one. Where did he get it? Where does anyone get something so...well made? It was always there, waiting for the opportune moment to reveal itself. Based on historical circumstances in the Levant at the dawn of the Iron Age, this novel tells the story of the competing beliefs and destinies of interconnected people and the royal families and armed forces of the Mid-East's two most powerful countries. Orbiting the insidiously seductive plot are tales of wisdom, drug abuse, rape, euthanasia, adultery, murder, paranoia, cannibalism, survival, and atheism.