Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet (41 page)

  
The canvas bore an image sufficiently complete to be discernible.  The image
was of a little-known man: the sharp lines of his worn, tormented features
prominent in the brush and knife-strokes of the paint, and his eyes, bottomlessly
bleak and black.  And at the man’s breast, clutched in an embrace as though she
were bound to his soul, was a little girl.

  
She stopped and took a deep breath before taking the palette in one hand and a
palette knife and a fine brush in the other.  She took the knife and cut into
the globules of paint, mixed in the turpentine and linseed oil in faint doses
and, with a still and timid hand, began to apply the dark crimson in fine
lacerations. 

  
She wielded her brush like an apothecary of the soul, tending to her own
wounds.  Cathartic twinges shot through with each aching stroke.  Her heart
numbed as the tip of the brush parched, then she would lower her hand, take
another deep, shaking breath, dab the brush onto the palette and again,
eliciting from the man’s features all the anguish of a soul wrung dry, stroke
by slow stroke; each streak of crimson more painful than the last, until her
mouth began to quiver. 

  
A lone tear broke in the corner of her eye and streamed down. 

  
She took the knife and cut the paint in short slashes under the deep, vexed
orbitals of his hung head.  Her pain seemed to increase with his beauty, and
his beauty increased with her pain.  But she would shed all the blood of her
soul to do him justice.  Hours passed into the night.   The tears streamed
constantly and fell on the cloth beneath her, but she never wiped them lest she
break her focus.  She painted through the pain, through the beautiful
commiseration with her subject: the hero whose sacrifice she could never truly
grasp, except through her art.  The brush trembled painfully as she raised her
hand from the palette and brought the tip to the canvas for the final touches. 

  
When the last stroke broke from the canvas, the brush slipped from her
fingertips.

  
The door opened.

  
“Naomi.”

  
A low voice from behind startled her.  Her beloved was standing in the
doorway.  She saw his reflection in the glazing. 

  
“Yes.” She quietly wiped away her tears and did not turn.  “What is it?”

  
“Someone here to see you.”

  
He stepped aside, drawing the door wide open. 

  
Step
–
tap
–
step
–
step – tap. 

  
She lifted her head with a start and turned. 

  
“…Hello, child.”

  
A figure in black stood in the doorway.

  
They stared silently at one another. 

  
The door slowly shut and her beloved’s footsteps faded down the hall. 

  
The silence endured.

  
“It has been too long I know,” said the old hermit.

  
She smiled, and her smile winced to an immediate contortion of sorrow.  

  
The old hermit took a painful step forward, looking as though he were about to
stumble.  He had walked so far.  He stopped and panted and seemed to laugh.  “Yes
… too long,” he repeated.

  
She came forward and put her arms around her third father just as the tears broke,
and he laid a frail hand upon her back and held her.  “You have done so well,”
he whispered fondly.  “I know that he would have been proud of you.”

  
It took a while for her tears to stop. 

  
When they did, he loosed his embrace and regarded her solemnly. 

  
“You’re the keeper of his legacy, now.”

  
“I know,” she sighed, wiping away her tears.

  
“His story must live on lest we all forget.”

  
The old hermit’s eyes dilated as they looked fascinatedly past her.

  
He brought the cane forward and walked up to the canvas.

  
“That is him.” he said.

  
“Yes,” she replied, coming up beside him.

  
“Thirty years…”  The old hermit gaped. “Your memory is superb.”

  
Silence.

  
“I wish he could have been here to see it,” she said. “To see everything:  My
family … my daughter … the new world.”

  
“Oh, I think he saw it all long ago,” the old hermit nodded.  “He would not
have let you go for anything less.  I think he had greater faith in you than we
will ever know.”

  
“What do you suppose happened to him?”

  
“Whatever Providence willed,” the hermit replied.  “That, we will never know. 
Every trace of him was erased long ago.  Your memory is all that remains now.”

  
“Do you think that he remembered in the end?”

  
“He fulfilled what he had to.  He had no need to remember.  But…” A reminiscent
smile curled up the old hermit’s mouth.  “Somehow, I think destiny had done him
justice before the end…”

  
The chronometer read 0300. 

  
He had not slept.  It had become progressively more difficult to sleep over the
last 11 months and 13 days.  In the background, a broadcast muttered something
about the very first “
Martial Assimilation
,” hailed all over the
pro-militarist media as a “
milestone in martial history
.”  Ironic,
considering there was no such thing. 

  
As the pixie-faced anchor on the holoscreen nattered on, his focus shifted from
the naked reflection in the glazing to the full view of the inner sky city from
the top of the high-rise.  The full moon was high and large and shone like a
spotlight through the translucent wall.  He stared directly into the light
savoring the scent which rose from his body breath by slow breath.  Jasmine…

  
A ruffling noise came from behind.  He looked over his shoulder, at the jasmine
woman with the ebony skin and emerald eyes and the long woven locks of hair
like bullwhips, and the thick scars on her back that looked like they had been
torn by blade-ended flails.  She sat bare-breasted on the bedside, back turned.
 As she got dressed, he recalled the flows and motions of the previous three
hours with curious reflection.  There was something very different about this
martial woman he could not quite place.  Each climax had heightened his fascination
with her, and increased
her
aversion to
him
.  And that Jasmine
smell…

  
“What is your name?”

  
The emerald eyes looked up and studied him. 

  
“Does it matter?” she laughed softly.  

  
“I would like to know.”

  
She looked askance.  “Why?” she asked.

  
He didn’t answer.

  
The jasmine woman smirked and looked away. 

  
He watched her get dressed, trying to fathom what it was about her that had so
roused his fascination. 

  
As she got ready to leave, he blurted; “My name is Cassius…”

  
“Sure it is.” She stood up, took out a black canister, rolled the tablet into
her hand and knocked it back and swallowed and exhaled.  “That was good.  Maybe
too good,” she said screwing the cap on the canister and tucking it into her
coat.  She ogled him sternly. 

  
“Don’t look for me … if you know what’s good for you.”

  
She fastened her coat around her and left without more ado, and he followed her
with his stare right until the moment the door closed, and then waited for the
sound of the footfalls to fade down the corridor.  When she was gone, the
holoscreen turned off.  He put on some clothes, lifted the bedding off the
floor and laid it on the mattress in a bundle.  He looked back up at the moon
with a tired groan and examined the fraying gauze around his arms. 

  
The light over the dispenser shaft was green.  He took out the day’s provisions
and set them in the refrigerator, sat down, took out a cigarette, lit, inhaled,
bowed his head into his hand and rubbed his red-rimmed eyes, blowing out the
smoke in slow-flowing wisps that thickened in the fingers of light.  When he
looked up, a twinkle of something caught his eye on the floor at the foot of
the bed: something small and iridescent, just under the lip of the loose
bedding.

  
He squinted through blurred vision.

  
He took another drag of his cigarette and waited with queer hesitation. 

  
Eventually, he laid the cigarette down on the ashtray and rose from his seat,
his eyes fixed with intensity on the twinkle in the bedding.  Leaving a trail
of smoke in the shafts of moonlight, he sauntered over to the bed and looked
down at the floor. 

  
He cleared the bedding away with the tip of his foot and picked up the little
luminescent trinket.  A pendant hung by a thin silver chain in his fist and
swung hypnotically before his eyes.  He turned to the door on reflex, but the
jasmine was long gone, and the golden pendant settled in the palm of his hand,
still lukewarm with the heat of her flesh, and the feel of it ignited a
frightening clairvoyance. 

  
His fingers glided almost on instinct over the depression on the back of the
pendant.  He squeezed his fingers gently together. 

  
The locket clicked open. 

  
A small, folded piece of paper was pressed in the small space. 

  
Gently, he took it out. 

  
Carefully, he unfolded it. 

  
Slowly, he brought it up to the light. 

  
His fingers went limp and the pendant slipped from them and fell.

  
The image of the little girl revealed in moonlight reached through his gaping
eyes and seized his mind with a single purpose.  He lapsed into a trance which
held him frozen for a long while before he turned his mesmerised eyes up at the
moon. 

  
The image slipped from his fingers.  He put a coat over his bare chest and
ambled robotically up to the door. 

  
As the capsule descended to the streets, he fixed his gaze northward to the
valley hidden in the gloom of night.  He marched till dawn broke, and then
through morning and noon and dusk until night fell again, over the teeming
streets of the inner metropolis, brushing past thick crowds of machine men and
over long, mirage-layered, traffic-ridden roads, through rugged brush and
woodland his legs bore.

  
When he stopped a full day later, he was at the edge of the valley, looking
back at the point where he had started, never to return.  The moons became suns
and the suns became moons again as he waited and waited, eyes turned up to the
heavens.  He waited.  Until his flesh fused with bone, he waited.  And with
each inch he crawled toward death, the prophecy became clearer – visions of the
future disclosed in the past – a vision of Sodom and the entire martial world
crumbling in a hail of purging fire.  And he remembered.  He remembered the
promise.  He remembered who he was waiting for.  He remembered who he was – a
name that would be remembered forevermore in annals of the new world.

--   END   --