JL: Yusef of The Dark

Fiction

Trove of The Murderess

Yusef of The Dark

Or, Trove of The Murderess: A Swords & Sorcery Novel

SEP/22/24

Author’s Proof

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A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

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Dust Cover

Some men are destined to be great, to travel that lonely, fortune-paved road. Other men are doomed to hate, to tread that treacherous, fury-lit way. Both brands of hero have for company only foes and fiends. So came Yusef of the Dusk, out of the fiend-haunted east, consort of the Lady Night Sky, slave of the weird sword at his right thigh. Out of Indica, in the year 1204 of our Murdered Lord, driven to seek the Trove of the Murderess of Ultima Discord, one Hate-forged heathen sought to avenge the man he might have been.

Dedication

For Jake, who fought the fiends at that unseen gate.

Inspiration

An intolerable dream, which drove me awake at 2:23 this morning, before the truck began licking the oiled road beyond this garden window, in the basement of the home where I am a guest. Afflicted by an eye seizure brought on annotating an obscure memoir, hoping that sleep would restore the right eye so that the works of Tacitus, might be annotated, this writer had fallen asleep listening to an audio of Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander.

Out of this haze the Old Stoic, Arrian, called me into his study. The small room was of unpainted sheet-rock framed in red oak, carved in the likeness of a serpent, a great serpent, seeking its tail. The corner coping on the four corners were of eagles, looking up and away. As I examined the frame in the likeness of the great slithering worm, looking for the tail and hoping it was not too near the yawning fangs of it’s owner’s mouth, Arrian, his clean shaven face, held in stern regard over his purple smoking jacket, admonished me, “Are you stupid?” pointing to a man at his desk, facing us both as we stood across from him.

The seated man was dressed in a white shirt and black tie and was reviewing the Penguin Classic edition of Tacitus, The Agricola and The Germania. He looked something like the deceased actor Tom Laughlin [of the Billy Jack, movie], with a short graying black beard. This figure pointed to my notes in the right margins, and corrected Arrian, “No, he is not stupid, strange, yes. He has sufficiently grasped the salient points, even those I intentionally obscured.”

The man I understood to be Tacitus, then looked up at me, “But you waist your time. Send a dream back to us and to look ahead.”

“But what do you mean,” I mumbled, like an elementary student witless and befuddled.

I then woke in a kind of sleep paralysis, on my left side, extending my right hand to keep the looters from coming through the grocery store door. I had let the next to the last cashier out and a mob had gathered outside, demanding access to the hoarded food on the shelves. I tried in my half sleep to hold them back, to pull the door closed, then they pushed me back down into sleep. Every time I woke to their sneakered feet pressing their imprints into my white shirt, my black tie caught in my key ring as I tried to lock the glass, metal-framed door. clamoring over my prone form, I broke into a sweat and passed out.

Finally I woke with control of my right arm free and reached for my flip phone, at 2:23. The right eye felt like it was alive and angry, burning its way out of the socket it ached within. Up I stood, the right side of my head burning, turned on the harsh light, and took a pill. Back to sleep I went, on my back.

They looked down at me, clean jawed Arrian and bristle-chinned Tacitus, wearing the same white button shirt and black tie I now recall having worn as I tried to hold the mob at bay. They spoke about me as if were not conscious.

Arrian said, “We should send a wise man into the gathering night.”

Tacitus responded with a look of agreement but a twist of the mouth, “Into the night yes—but a wise man won’t get so far as we’d like, it is the imprudent soul who makes the best arrow loosed from an inquiring bow.”

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I had such a hard time returning to sleep, with every closing of the eyes bringing the image of the improbably dressed ancient Roman squinting at me in harsh reproach. Sleep claimed me at about the time Dawn’s first soft light crept through the garden window above me, here in my basement bed. More grocery store nightmares crowded in petty dream as I, in my white shirt and tie, sought some door that actually opened. Frustrated I dragged my soul awake and made the bed, creasing it just like it had awaited me when made by the woman that owns my host of old and away. I heard them both, injured and half-repaired, limping on the 100 year old floor boards above.

Coming upstairs without this laptop, afraid that more screen time might bring back the eye seizures, I picked up one of my Nordic host’s favorite books. Reading The Wanderer’s Havamal, by Jackson Crawford, or Words of the High One or Words of the One-Eyed, 2019, Hackett, 177 pages, soothed the addled mind some. Crawford’s discussion of the Codex Regis, “copied around AD 1270 from an exemplar written between AD 1200 and1240,” had the date of its composition in sync with the career of my fictional character Yusef, who survived the 1201-2 famine in Egypt and journeyed briefly to India before gaining the perspective required to return to the world of his ill-fated nativity—The West.

The Protagonist

Yusef of the Dusk, so named for his affinity for sundown escapades, escapes, and offenses, is, in many ways, a fool, yet is vested with an uncanny instinctive sense wedded to an almost childish code of honor.

Reading Odin’s travel advice bluntly recommended, Yusef, one of my few unslain protagonists, as the hero suggested by Tacitus in my harrowed literary dream.

Yusef is cagey about his origins, is thought to be from Northern Spain, was orphaned, served as a servant boy and bodyguard to a Hebrew Alchemist of Navarre, who was slain by Berbers in Morocco. A strongly built man of just over medium height, Yusef speaks Arabic fluently, with a harsh Frankish accent, speaks broken Farsi and a muddled Norman French in the manner of a child of ten, has variously claimed to be, been suspected of, and has denied being, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. He hates Turks and Berbers with a passion, despises Arabs and Hindus, envies and distrusts Christians, is too fond of fair women—his lust exceeding his judgment—and trusts only horses, sail cloth and steel.

Yusef has a maddening desire for the Dark-Eyed Lady in the Night Sky, an ethereal nymph who beckons him where she wills, also known as Madam Night. He has also been seduced by a strange, Steely-Eyed woman of ominous aspect who drives him to her will with both threats and promises. Doomed to wander, and to only find rest as a guest, Yusef harbors a simmering-bold hatred for The World, an affliction he is sure may only be cured by Death—whose drear door he eagerly races for.

Thematic Verse Lines Adapted below as chapter headings, which inspired the structure of this novel, are from Jackson Crawford’s The Wanderer’s Havamal, which the reader is encouraged to acquire for reflection.

Yusef has previous appeared as a supporting protagonist to Ab Al Latiff, chronicler of the 1201 Egyptian Famine in the omnibus fiction The Jericho Bone. He was the lone protagonist in the sequel Yusef of the Dusk. A reader has suggested he appear in two more novels, Yusef of the Dark: Trove of the Murderess, and Yusef of the Dawn: Fate’s Angry Pawn, as yet to be framed.

As this yarn is a myopic, from his manic and un-reflective perspective, a word on Yusef’s appearance will be entertained. At 5’ 10 and 170 pounds, Yusef is a better rider, climber and jumper than runner. He walks easily, with a prowling swagger, described by one Turkic foe as if “a leopard suffered from hips displaced by riding too broad a horse,” with a crooked menace, not fast but sure. He swims well enough to avoid drowning—swimming being the only time he prays to the uncaring powers. His hair is thick, wavy and an ochre black, streaked with a lighter red. Although he appears to be 30 years, his moderate long point of beard is a silvery white. His square forehead is scared from a saber cut, looming over two narrow eyes, one steely gray, the other iron brown. His neck is thick, shoulders, arms and hips wide; but his chest sunken rather than deep, feet, lower legs and waist too small for him to be a true strongman. Yusef adores good clothes and over dresses, in part, to hide his shirt of mail which comes to mid thigh and elbow. He jokes that his chest and guts are sunken compared to his great depth of shoulder and arm from the long habit, since age 13, when his Alchemist Master was slain, of dodging Berber blades and Turkish arrows. He prefers shirts and pants of silk, boots with knee high uppers of black leather soled in ox horn, a loose knee length buff jacket of emerald green, belted with a broad red sash, and a steel cap coifed with brass scales and wrapped in an oiled scarf of linen, stained black. His hands and forearms are most at home in black leather gauntlets sewn with goose-greased iron scales. Yusef is obsessed with his gear, artifacts which have replaced the only two friends he has ever known, both taken from him, one by Death, the other by Fate.

I have not plotted Yusef’s journey, other than to recognize the sway of Madam Night, the wiles of Slut Steel, and to people the world’s unfriendly reaches with worthy foes and wily whores.

-James LaFond, 2:30 PM, Tuesday, August 8, 2024

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Contents

The Episodes of Yusef’s Pursuit of Madam Night

-1. Before You Enter

-2. To Try His Luck

-3. He Needs A Fire

-4. From A Friendly Host

-5. A Man Needs Wisdom

-6. A Wise Man

-7. The Watchful Guest

-8. In Someone Else’s Heart