Clothed with the Sun, page 1
Then the dragon stood before the woman
Book Two of the Omega Trilogy
Ω
J.B. SIMMONS
Copyright © 2015 by J.B. Simmons
All rights reserved.
This is fiction, not prophecy.
Names, characters, and incidents in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental.
www.jbsimmons.com
jbsimmons.light@gmail.com
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Cover by Kerry Ellis
www.kerry-ellis.com
ISBN: 978-1502923981
My name is Elijah Goldsmith. This is my story, and it’s the honest-to-god truth. I’m glad you’re back to hear more. My dreams still haunt me, but I’ve seen signs of hope. At least I ended up beside Naomi, in the middle of a desert. What matters is what we choose to do next. I’ve made some good choices, and some bad ones. You might as well hear all of it before you pick sides.
I STOOD IN a narrow valley, facing a small stone cottage. Its roof was thatched, and smoke drifted from its lonely chimney. No other buildings were in sight. No other sign of man. Steep hills rose around me, spotted with dark rock and covered with grasses blowing in the wind. The breeze carried ocean salt. There were a hundred shades of green. This place felt lush and wet and thin—close to the heavens.
“She’s in there.” The voice behind me was powerful. It almost knocked me to my knees.
“Who?” I asked, my voice quivering like a bowstring.
“Your promised one.” It was the voice of a man I knew, but I could not look at him.
“Naomi?”
“You have more than one?” The man sounded amused. “I underestimated you.”
“Why are you here?”
“She has my child.”
The answer sent a shiver down my spine. “Your child?”
“Come, see for yourself.” The man walked past me, toward the cottage. His body was tall and regal. The grasses swept around him at the knees.
I rushed after him. I felt the dense meadow grabbing my legs, holding me back. I struggled to keep up. Just as I reached the cottage, he opened the plain wooden door and stepped inside.
“No!” he shouted.
I stepped through the door, breathing heavily. The cottage had a small, simple room with stone walls. A fire was burning bright in the hearth, and another man sat facing the fire. I couldn’t see his face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
The man in the chair didn’t budge, but the tall man spun to me and grabbed my throat. It was Don Cristo. I should have known. His face twisted in rage as he lifted me off the ground.
I fought for breath, but none came.
“You,” Don growled. “You know where she is.”
But I didn’t know. I tried to shake my head.
He squeezed harder. “Why did you lead me here?”
I tried to think, but I felt consciousness fading. The man watching the fire seemed oblivious. My eyes closed, with Don’s angry face seared in my vision.
“Eli, Eli.” Someone else was speaking to me. It was a familiar voice, in a French accent. “Sun’s rising soon.”
I cracked open my eyes. Jacques’s scruffy face was in mine. His breath smelled as musty as a tomb.
“It’s still dark,” I mumbled.
“Never let the sun get ahead of you.” He pulled me to my feet. His grip on my shoulder was gentle, but his hands were strong, like leathery, callused clamps.
I tried to rub the sleep and the dream out of my eyes. Dreams and reality kept blurring in the desert.
“A little rest, a little folding of the hands, and you’ll be destroyed, boy.” Jacques’s whisper echoed in my ears.
I looked around the tent, half expecting to see something different in the first light of morning. But it was the same. Two piles of sleeping blankets, with Naomi curled up under one on the far side of the tent. She was breathing deeply—serene and pregnant.
The tent’s canvas matched the light brown sand at my feet. Just days ago my feet had been paler than the sand. Now they were darker, at least between the straps of my sandals. Jacques had given me the sandals. I chose to believe it was a loan rather than a gift, because that way I could pretend I’d be leaving this desolate place soon. Doubtful.
“Quit staring at your feet.” Jacques was waiting by the tent’s open flap of a door.
I followed him outside and pulled my brown cloak closer. The desert heat would come only with the rising sun. We reached the well, and Jacques handed a wooden bucket to me. It was heavy and tied to a rope that felt like sandpaper in my hands.
“Draw,” Jacques said.
The first morning, after Jacques had pulled me out of sleep, he’d shown me how to draw the water. It was simple, but not easy—and definitely not the kind of thing you did growing up in New York City. After a few slips and bruises, I’d figured it out.
I was determined to make this morning’s drawing my smoothest yet. I held the bucket over the deep hole in the ground, while my other hand gripped the rope firmly. As I stepped back, I looped the rope around the closest of the oasis’s three palm trees. I heard the distant splash of the bucket hitting water. I waited a moment, then began to pull the bucket up.
The rope was taut with the bucket’s weight, but the makeshift anchor eased the effort. Hand over hand, I raised it steadily. How long before my hands would be as callused as Jacques’? When the bucket came into view above the well’s ancient stone rim, I tied off the rope around the palm. I walked to the bucket, swung it over to the stone rim and untied it. I grabbed the bucket’s handle with both hands and waddled it over to the trough. I poured it in, put the bucket down, and looked to Jacques. Maybe I expected his praise, or at least satisfaction.
He looked at me with his ever-amused, ever-tanned face. He had only faint wrinkles at his eyes, but the strands of bright white in his hair and stubble had to mean he was at least forty.
“You learn fast,” Jacques said. “Still, your hands shake. They must grow stronger. Now let’s get the herd.” Part of me smiled inside. That was as close to praise as he’d come.
He led me to the other side of the tents, where the camel herd was corralled each night. The area was tucked within the banks of hills around our dried riverbed, but the camels still had to be bound. Jacques had taught me how to fetter their front legs. All it took was a short cord of cloth Jacques called an aqal. We’d bend each camel’s front right leg at the knee, then tie the aqal around the bend. That kept the camel from going anywhere far. It seemed cruel, making a creature spend the night with only three legs for standing. Jacques had said only, “this is done,” when I’d pressed him. He said things like that a lot.
This morning, as we reached the camels, the sun was just cresting on the cloudless horizon. I hadn’t seen a cloud since we’d arrived here. The brownish red hillsides around us became stripes of amber and garnet. It made the harsh terrain seem alive.
“Mierde,” Jacques muttered. “Grabuge.” He was holding one of the fettering aqal ropes. It had been chewed through.
“He’s gone?” I asked.
“Oui. Pack up. We ride out and find him. Only an idiot tries to escape here.” He eyed me accusingly. “The desert is death to anything alone.”
THE RUNAWAY CAMEL had left tracks. We’d been following them all morning with no sign of life outside our little caravan of four. Jacques and I were riding camelback over the plains of ragged scrubland, with two extra camels tied behind us. “Never trust one camel when you can have two,” he’d said.
We reached the top of a low hill and again saw emptiness sprawled out before us. “Are you sure he went this way?” I asked.
Jacques pointed at the line of tracks in the sand. He looked at me like I was clueless.
“Yeah, I see the tracks,” I said. “But how do you know they’re Grabuge’s?”
“You see other camels?” He gestured to the empty expanse as far as our eyes could see.
I shook my head. “How far could he have gone? Is it really worth all this for one camel?”
“Every camel in my herd is priceless. I have a duty to protect them.” His eyes never wavered from the horizon.
“Is that supposed to be a parable?”
“It’s no parable, boy. It’s a camel.”
As if that settled things, Jacques fell into quiet and rode ahead. My camel followed without any nudging from me. I gripped the reins and thought back to my dream. I’d had it two straight nights. Did that mean it would come to be, like my dream of Rome? It should have been less terrifying. There was no dragon—just rugged hills, a cottage, and a couple of men. But one of those men was Don, which made my stomach roil. He’d thought I’d known where Naomi would be, but in the dream I’d had no idea. That made me feel sick, too. The more I tried to untangle the dream’s meaning, the more unanswered questions I had.
As another hour passed, the desert’s temperature rose. I felt like the proverbial frog in a pot being brought to boil. After a while, I started unwinding the scarf from around my face. I’d rather get a face full of sand and sun than suffocate in this heat.
“Leave it on,” Jacques said.
“Why?”
“I said leave it on.”
I wound the cloth back around, to cover my head and my face again.
“Good.” He drew his camel closer to mine and pulled a canteen from a saddlebag. He opened it and held it over my head.
He dumped the water on me and let out a muffled laugh. “The wet cloth cools. Breathe deep, boy. You’re still very soft, but these lands harden even you.”
“Whatever, man.” I was shaking my head, but the water did feel good. “All I need is to get back to my home.”
“Your home is soft,” he said. “The world is soft, makes soft men. The desert makes real men.” He formed a fist and flexed his bare arm. The tanned muscles looked as steady as the rocks scattered at our feet. “We trust in our bodies and in the Lord, not in precepts and governments.” He tapped his temple. “Five years since I used mine. My mind is free now, just as yours can be if you keep your precept shut off.”
“You have a precept?”
“Oui, disconnected. It was once essential.”
“Essential to what?”
Jacques smiled. “Any other questions?”
“Lots of them.” Every other time I’d tried to ask about his past, he’d given me some chore to do. Now we were stuck tracking a camel in the middle of nowhere, so I fired away. “What did you do before you came here? How did you get into this religious order?”
He stared ahead, as if he hadn’t even heard me.
“You don’t seem like the order’s type,” I said. “Neither does Camille. Did you bring her here? And why the Moroccan desert? Were you running from something?”
“The water has gone to your head,” he mused. “Was it curiosity that made you a seer?”
His question made me think of my Mom. She always used to say I was curious. “Nothing made me a seer. That’s just a label your order made up.”
“Did we make up the dragon that you saw in Rome? The dragon that attacked your plane and made you crash here? The dragon that killed Bart?”
I shuddered at the memory. No, the order had not made that up, and my dreams had grown only more vivid in this wasteland. “You haven’t answered any of my questions,” I said.
“You find my camel, and maybe I’ll answer one.”
“Fine.” I scanned the desert around us. No camels. The tracks disappeared over the crest of the next hill in front of us. “Grabuge!” I shouted, as if calling for a lost dog.
“Shhh! Quiet boy. Are you trying to scare him away?”
“No one can hear us out here. He’ll come if he hears my voice.” I looked out over the empty desert. “Grabuge!”
Something hit my side like a truck, knocking me off the camel’s back. Next thing I knew, I was flat on my back, gasping for air. Jacques was on top of me, gripping my throat in his fist. His eyes were flat, grey and firm.
“Quiet,” he whispered. “You hear me?”
I tried to nod and he let go. My mouth burned as I gulped down the hot air. The sky was an enormous blue mass pressing down on me, squeezing me between the earth and the heavens. I just laid there on the sand for a while, defeated. I slowly rose to my feet.
“Next time, you listen, yes?” Jacques gazed at me coolly.
I nodded, keeping my face blank despite a flicker of fear. His grip had felt like Don’s in my dream. I stood no chance against this guy, and it was just the two of us out here. I should have known better by now. This man was no joke. He was a rock. What had he been in the past?
His eyes shifted to the right, looking past me at something. A grin spread across his face. “Grabuge,” he said with the affection of a father greeting a son. “You wily boy.”
I turned to look, just in time to catch a giant, wet lick from the camel’s tongue. “Ack!” I hopped back, but Grabuge nuzzled his head into my chest. A new camel was at his side.
“He likes you, boy.” Jacques ran his hand over the new camel’s face. “And he brought a friend. Your lucky day. You found two camels, so maybe I answer two questions. We return now, yes?”
I nodded and brushed the sand off my back. Better not to mention that my shouting had worked. I mounted Grabuge as Jacques tied the new camel to our caravan. We’d gone from four to six. Jacques took the lead again as we headed back the way we came, the sun high overhead.
WE RODE A long way in silence. Between the hot sun and the swaying camel, I found it hard to keep a straight line of thought. My mind wandered to Naomi. Right now she’d be helping Camille with chores around the camp. I could envision her slender hands molding oats into honey cakes. Her face would be focused. Everything she did seemed elegant, even out here in the wilderness, even with a baby growing inside her.
She insisted she was a virgin, and that some kind of miracle or technology had done this. I believed her, though it was little comfort. My thoughts drifted back to the dragon and to last night’s dream. Was Don really the father? How was that possible? With a single touch? I had learned better than to doubt my dreams, but I couldn’t imagine how I’d lead Don to a remote place like that cottage. I puzzled over the man who’d been in the chair, watching the fire. Why hadn’t he turned when Don shouted?
After a while, Jacques interrupted my inner rambling. “Earlier you ask if I bring Camille here?”
“Yes, and who were you before coming here?”
“You ask many questions,” he said. “I pick two. This is how it works.”
“Okay, so did you bring her here?”
“Camille is magnificent woman, yes?” The French-lover look in Jacques’s eyes made me squirm.
“Sure.”
“Her beauty belongs in palaces, not deserts.” Jacques sighed, gazing ahead as if drifting into the past. “That is where I met her. Six years ago, in Versailles. It was a banquet of my country’s most powerful and famous. In this gathering where everyone has privilege, Camille was like a diamond in a pile of quartz. She’d worn a white dress clinging to her every curve. On first sight, I knew my life could continue only with her. I needed to feel her thin waist in my hands, to pull her chest close to mine, and to drink deeply from her mouth.” Jacques trailed off, still looking ahead.
This was getting awkward, but I had to admit it was intriguing. I’d never heard Jacques say so much at once, and he sounded nothing like the others in Naomi’s order. “So what happened?”
He smiled. “Oui, it happened. We married within the week. We moved here within the year.”
He made it sound like his life’s greatest accomplishment. “That was fast,” I said. “How did you convince her to marry you? And why did you come here?”
Jacques winked at me. “A man who knows his calling and pursues it—well, God gives to that man. My hair had no white in it then. My position and presence were,” he shrugged, “difficult to resist. I will never forget Camille’s face when I declared my intentions to her, that she would be mine that night and forever. She was amused, enticed, and vulnerable. You see, Camille was known in France. She was a model and a film star. No man could claim a woman like her. No man but me, for God had prepared me. And Camille was ready. She was addicted—to fame, to wealth, to drugs. Her life was unmoored. Her soul cried out for help, to be tied to a fixed pillar.” He looked at me with an intense gaze. “I became the pillar.”
I felt blood rushing to my cheeks at the not-so-subtle implication of his metaphor. “So you and she, you know… it all sounds a little too hot for people like you.”
“People like me? You mean a leader of the Order of John? A God-fearing man?” He paused. “Well, my God created passion. You know my God, you are Jewish, yes?”
I nodded. Better to keep him talking than to test what he meant by “knowing God.” I knew enough now to believe there was a God, but he wasn’t gaining any favor with me after letting the dragon loose.
“You know the stories of the Torah?” Jacques asked.
“Some of them,” I said, but not like I did with V’s help. Every memory seemed fainter without her in my mind. I wondered if I’d ever get to reconnect my precept.
“The God of our patriarchs had a simple view,” Jacques explained. “Ever heard this, from your Torah and my Bible: And Isaac brought Rebekah into his mother Sarah’s tent, and he took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. Just so, but in Paris rather than a tent, Camille became my wife.” He turned to me expectantly.
