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The latin chant 'Laudamus Te' a prayer for conscientious yet cheerful acceptance of the joys and challenges of life, is said to have been used as the central anthem in the eve-of-battle ceremonies performed by the legendary order of knights errant known as the Brotherhood of the Snake.
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This solemn rite would culminate in a toast to the memory of Saint George the Martyr, their unfortunate founder and sage whose sad fate it was to be devoured by the very dragon he had
set out to slay.
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| Larvam
bellam malum gerit:
virgines pulchras caveamus. Artem laborem esse ne liceat: formam veram ne reliquamus. Utrum fiat tibe gaudium aut dolor, iterum talos iace. Deus optimum fecit: item faciamus. Amor est opes felicitatis: custodite. Melancholia est hiatus angustus: transvolemus. Unda spumans dum vita est, sepulchri oblite, nata bene. Scientia admissarius ferus est: ad cursum dometur. Temporis punctum sopus sit: sagittam tuam mitte. Error niger est ipsa mors: nunc transfigatur. |
Hid by a mask
is evil's snare:
of damsels fair let us beware. And let not art such labour make, that living beauty we forsake. Life offers joy along with pain, so take the dice and throw again. Let not on God our censure be: he did his best and so should we. Enriched we are if in our hoard is naught but love as treasure stored. Let's fly from melancholy's keep and cross his rampart by one leap. Undaunted by the yawning grave, may life be ridden like a wave. Joyful as a savage horse, may skill be broken for the course. Accept the moment for thy mark, and see how in that narrow dark Hides deaths vain shadow there betwixt and by thine arrow is transfixed. |
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Ram hugged her long arms around her knees and shifted in the dry, pastel earth of the West Mesa above the tiny town of Alameda, one of the many pale adobe collections along the Great River. Once great, she amended, for indeed the poor Rio Grande was hardly more than a wide patch of river bed winding through the silver and the fuscia of the invading salt cedars.
Wonderful thickets these made for the bees, and more wonderful honey, but they stole what precious little water still ran down the Grande which hadn't already been stolen into the great cement clear ditches of the various Conservancy Districts. And even now, a warrior for the latter stalked the water’s second bed, a “ditch rider,” in the vernacular of the area. The man on the horse who removed your homemade wooden dams so you couldn't back up the water and flood your fields first.Ram laughed softly. She knew at least one such culvert captain who turned a pretty profit selling the dams back to their makers. What a people these were. What a varied and amazing lot, all of them. Nearly noon, there would be many a Mamasita flapping the wheat cakes, the tortillas, between browned, skilled hands, or chopping the fire plants, both hands filled with cleavers they kept sharper than Ram usually dressed her own sword's blade.
Give me an army, Ram thought, of such as these plump, doe-eyed, mothers of the earth, armed with only their cleavers and their great wooden spoons, and their tempers, hotter than the red pepper garlands which graced their doorways. With such an army I would still be King.
Quicker than reason she found a point in the right pastern of the ditch rider's sorrel gelding. It buckled ever so slightly and the rider pitched over the pony's head, kerplunk into the ditch.
She could not hear the broad, Tex Mex commentary--she was nearly a half-mile away--but it did not matter. What had she to do with his ilk in any case?
When he was from Order...
and she, from Chaos.
She felt the sun roll away from her face as an all-too-familiar internal chill eclipsed the blinding brightness of the desert day and her even brighter mood. Ram was not surprised. It returned so often now, she might soon begin to count the days by its presence...
And how soon...the hours themselves?
Such a book of hours as no sacred monk had ever penned or illuminated. Such a set of offices as they probably recited in the Seventh Ring of Hell.
She laughed again, considering such a profane book and the illustrations therein.
But she was soon enough preoccupied by the babe and the reason she had come out from the town, so far from the house of her gracious hosts. The MacLeods, as the line had come to be called in these latter centuries since Connor, bore a streak of--what?-- madness, insanity, hyperesthesia? Whatever they chose to call it, some of the Danaan Mothers who had borne the half-caste babes, the Immortals, of this strain had gone stark, raving mad their entire gestations.
Not that normal pregnancies, human or Danaan, were noted for sobriety and wit, Ram reminded herself. Well, on with it, she took the tiny package from a pocket in the jeans jacket she’d borrowed from Alexa. Just another treatment, she lied to herself, something to keep us alive and safe.
Steady on, little one. A wave of terror washed over her back where the three extinct volcano cones suddenly attained the height of Heaven’s Altar. Do not be afraid, Sean. I am here. You are safe. I am holding you. Feel the sun? Feel how warm and bright it is? She untucked her T shirt and lifted it up, leaning back on her elbows, the package still tightly grasped in her right fist. Maybe today she could talk the wee one out of its terrors and save herself some...
Not to be, she sighed. Ah, well. Sitting back up and pulling her shirt down, Ram set to the task at hand. The tiny glass stopper that capped the vial of acid felt soapy and slippery in her fingers as it melted the oil there. Damn! She had no intention of incapacitating herself. Wiping her hands on the jacket and mentally apologizing to her host, she unrolled the denim and drew the sleeve over her hand, using it to protect her fingers. She wriggled her left arm out of its sleeve and laid it down, elbow to wrist, on the pale brown earth.
She let one more wave of mindlessness take and then release her and then she leaned over and poured the acid, slowly, deliberately, along the full length of her inner forearm.
Out of a shallow arollo, trotted three feral dogs. Abandoned by owners over the years, they had formed themselves into a straggly pack by dint of an inborn imperative of survival. They had smelled something like dying, wonderful wafts of old egg smell, something to roll in, if not to eat.
The thing was not yet dead, though surely it would soon be, it made such an awful howling and wail. They knew this in the way all desert things know that death is life, that knowing all the faces of death is the most important knowledge there is.
But they were mistaken. Slinking and dodging closer to the wounded bitch they smelled the second sign beneath the burn and the blood and the high spicy notes of agony and rage. This one was with pups. A grave mistake. No power greater than the wounded mother.
Ram stopped whimpering and struggled up.
No greater danger. They yelped and ran, tails between their bony, mangy legs.
Because they sensed beneath the death stench, a stronger aura which had warned them away...
Life...................
Life offers joy along with pain, so take the dice and throw again.
Joe Dawson, recently deposed Northwest Territories Watchers' Chief, sat before the stone fire- place and warmed his stiff joints, his bone weary body, in the warm blaze that popped and crackled happily in the hearth. Crane was watching the store in his absence, the Watcher portion, anyway. Joe had put Mick on to run the bar while Joe sojourned here in the northwest wilderness, the Holy Ground of Duncan MacLeod's cabin on the isle.In other times, other circumstances, Joe might have thoroughly enjoyed the chance for a vacation. God knew he needed one. The entire preceding year had been so awful, he was beginning to share Duncan's horrid notion that they had, one and all, descended to the Seventh Ring of Dante's Inferno. Infernal it was, unbearable, both the good and the bad, though there had been little enough of the former. Hellish it was, an incendiary progression of one crisis after the next, until even the strongest of them had snapped like the tinder in the fire before him.
Late summer, the coming morn was chilling the air and setting Joe's posture into the mode which south of this spot, nearer the prairies, folks called "all stove up." Dawson eased himself off the couch and tried to loosen the knots in his frame, stretching his aching arms, shifting the harness of his prosthetic limbs, rubbing the ribs on his left flank where Duncan had thrown him into the wall. That had signaled it was time for Adam to take over the Watch.
Thank the Dear Lord for Adam, Joe thought. Without the ever youthful old man, the Oldest Immortal--Methos, or as the Watchers knew him, Adam Piersen, research dweeb--Duncan would be dead by now, or Joe, or Amanda, or....
How could they have come to this pass? Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod, stalwart son of the Scottish Highlands, an oak of a man, the Immortal with the most impeccable reputation of all the warriors in the combat called "The Gathering," was this very moment in "four points" in the next room, a dissipated hulk, sublimely divided in equal portions of fury and futility.
Dawson had no tears left for his friend. In the months following Richard Ryan's death he had wept for them all, for the raw real terror that something even more important had been destroyed between them all: their trust and friendship, and other even less tangible blessings they had all but taken for granted, things like certainty and hope.
And their small, close group of Mortals and Immortals was shattered irreparably. In its ashes the surviving members were so wounded and weary with it all, they each of them bore the stigmata of the walking dead. Hollow-eyed, dazed, distracted they muddled through what was left, trying to reassemble some meaning, some pathway towards, or just expectation for, the future, waiting helplessly for that future to be revealed to them, afraid in very profound and unexpected ways.
They had each of them, Amanda and Adam, Lucille and Anne, and Joe himself taken their Champion too much for granted, both as to his goodness, of which they tended to make gentle fun, and as to his essential place in their lives--what they'd written off as a Clan Chieftan thing. Now that he was so utterly sundered, they'd had more than enough time to contemplate how much he was a part of them...
How dearly he was loved by them, albeit each in their own way.
They had also taken his great strength and skill, if not for granted, at least with the faith of the blind. Only Adam had truly seen the black and brooding potentials beneath MacLeod's unbending code of ethics. Joe and the rest had seen the Dark Quickening as an aberration and not integral to Duncan's character. Well, Richie had known Duncan as a terror. Richard who feared nothing now, or ever again. Before Ryan's death, only Adam knew enough to be truly afraid of Duncan MacLeod. Now they all were. It was very different viewing this Scottish juggernaut from the opposite side of the battlefield.
Adam was the first to suggest they kill Duncan, not honorably on the challenge ground, but anyway and anyhow they could manage. Adam, who probably loved Duncan better than the rest, though he would never admit this. Adam, who could have taken Duncan's head in the moment after Richie's death, when the Highlander had offered up his katana and his life to Methos, the Oldest Immortal. Adam had been disgusted at the offer, had simply walked away. How often had he regretted that decision, Joe wondered. How much more would they all learn regret should this go on any longer?
Joe stirred the fire, grunted as he leaned down to add another log, and then slumped back down on the couch and stared at the fireplace, wrestling with the thoughts that would not let him sleep. He still could not form a clear understanding of how the tragedy with Ryan had occurred. They were in Paris. He was there to visit Watcher HQ Central, ship his brother-in-law's body back to the States for his niece, check out the clubs, kick back on Duncan's barge. Should have been a wonderful break in what had been a hectic year, but some obsession with the coming Millennium had taken MacLeod to the far side of sanity where he was beset with the ghosts of the other Immortals he had killed. Duncan had even ripped open Horton's sarcophagus at the airport, convinced he was still alive and stalking him.
Duncan was so convincing, Richie had been drawn into the delusion, had showed up, as he often did, at the wrong place and the wrong time, had literally walked into his own beheading, as Duncan battled an army of ghosts, not realizing one of the ghosts was his student and friend.
MacLeod was devastated, as were they all. The fact that Richie's remains had disappeared left the wound open but not with the hope that they would be seeing him in this life again, only with the certainty that they would not be able to lay him to rest, either in the ground, or in their hearts.
Joe had returned with Adam and Duncan to Seacouver, lost, haunted pilgrims returned to home and hearth, where home and hearth would never be again. There was no harbor on all the whole wide sea to cease their drifting grief.
Duncan seemed to recover first, but Joe shook his head and burrowed into his beard to worry his chin, they should have seen that as the worst sign. I should have seen, he thought. I should not have wanted so desperately for things to be as they were, when they weren't. When they never would be again. Duncan had gone on--well, there was no other word for it--a killing spree which made the Knacker serial killings pale, in sheer numbers, if not atrocity.
As Joe understood it, as Duncan had drunkenly explained one frightening eve, the Gathering was at hand and it was time he, the Highlander, stopped pretending that he had any business other than to kill as many Immortals as he could. He reasoned that though he did not mean to kill Richie, still he would have had to eventually given the rules of the game, just as he would have to kill Amanda and even Adam, or be killed by them. That was the reason for which he was bred and born. That was the only true purpose of his life.
And all the rest, friends, lovers, chivalric codes, right, wrong...
All the rest was a silly, self-indulgent denial of his birthright.
Duncan MacLeod was to kill, or be killed, and there was no other Truth.
Joe still felt his veins go frosty just thinking about the night Duncan's madness had manifested itself in the disturbing tones of absolute reason. Sometimes, even now, Joe wondered if his Immortal friend had indeed lost his heart, his very soul. They certainly made no appearance that night as Duncan tossed back his third shot, hands still bloody from his latest kill, still trembling from the Quickening.
But most of the time, Joe Dawson knew better. Even if Duncan did not know it, the real Truth of the matter was that the Highlander was searching, not for another Immortal to kill, but for the one other Immortal on the earth skillful and strong enough to kill him, that Duncan sought his own death and he'd just not found his equal yet.
Nor was he likely to.
And that was why Joe and Adam had drugged and kidnapped the strapping Scot and bundled him up to his cabin on Holy Ground.
They would either turn him around...
...or they would give him the death for which he sought so diligently.
It looked like the latter option was going to be their only option, and it was a perfect measure of Joe's extreme desperation that he sent a message off to the Lord of Chaos herself, an email to a private server in New Mexico.
All it said was, "Au secours!"
Patrick Woodruff Ram leaned against the patio's archway and let her grey green eyes drink in the sites of Alexa's desert garden from the pinon nuts drying on the adobe steps to the garlands of herbs hanging in the eaves of the rough wood trellis. The hummingbird feeder with its pink sugar water sparkled like a screeing crystal. The Russian olives silvery leaves shimmered in the light afternoon breeze and mottled the light mystically upon the mother and her babe seated at the small fountain in the garden's center."Back from your walk so soon?" Alexa readjusted her shirt and draped the baby over her left shoulder rubbing his back softly. It was such a simple motion, but done with a quiet grace and assurance which left Ram envious. Alexa might have been some undiscovered desert Madonna painting in a wealthy padron's private gallery of all things spiritual.
And for a moment, Ram was hesitant to enter the garden. It seemed for all the world like holy ground. "Yes," she answered from her place at the arch. "I seem to have ruined your jacket, though. I will buy you another," she added, her low tones vague as the bleached stones of the garden in the high afternoon light.
"I know," Alexa smiled. "I remember how hard it was to concentrate on anything outside myself."
Ram stared.
"Well, come here," Alexa cradled the baby in her elbow and he grazed sleepily towards the rest of his late lunch. "I swear I won't bite you." She laughed gently as her son woke and she reminded him not to bite.
Ram wandered over and sat down beside her, trailing her hand in the water of the fountain's pool.
Seeing that Ram was not going to speak, Alexa continued carefully, "I do seem to remember that everything got brighter, sharper, that while I could hardly think straight, I felt everything more com- pletely, more..." she struggled with a way to explain, "just more real. Even with the pain, everything was--well, exquisite."
Ram put her fingers to her mouth and tasted the slightly brackish water. "What are you talking about, Alexa?"
"I was thinking how our situations have been reversed," Alexa said more simply. She rearranged the light blanket over the baby's face to keep the sun off his fair skin. He was sound asleep. She rebuttoned her shirt and placed the baby in Ram's waiting arms.
Ram was always delighted to hold Alexa's son. She would never hold her own. This and many other things she had explained to Alexa the day she arrived, looking for safe harbor. Alexa and her new husband were only too happy to oblige. David Kuehl had been worried about all the time Alexa would be alone while he was off driving his rig. Ram seemed a godsend, someone to help with the new baby and keep Alexa company.
Ram rocked little Davie and tried to focus on what Alexa was saying, all the while ignoring the stabbing prickly sensation in her breasts, and fantasizing that she held instead her own son sleeping in her arms. "Our situations?"
Alexa had given up on the conversation and was now on her knees weeding the flower bed across from the fountain. "Yes, Ram. I was thinking you are..."
"Oh," Ram connected, "You mean that I am the one dying now and you are..."
Alexa planted her foot in front of her and wheeled around, suddenly standing up.
Ram could only see her shadow blocking the sun, but she felt the apprehension in her posture. "I should have told you sooner, Alexa. I am sorry," she added.
"I am--" Alexa prompted.
"Immortal," Ram replied. "Sort of," she amended.
"How sort of, Ram?"
"Well, you will recover from almost all injuries, including the ravages of time itself. You will live a very long time, Alexa."
"And my children?" Alexa laid her hands on her belly where the latest addition to the Kuehl household lay.
Ram shook her head and turned her gaze to the ground. "I am sorry, Alexa."
Alexa ripped the sleeping infant from Ram's arms, "What have you done to me?"
"I--you asked me, begged me to save--it's not something that can be meted out by degree, Alexa. What did you want?"
"I will see my children grow old and die," her voice was so sad the baby woke crying. "And David. Oh, God! How will I ever explain this? What have you done?"
Ram folded her arms in front of her, slightly above where her waist used to be. "What was the last thing you wished for?"
Alexa thought a moment and then her rage evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared. She smiled and replied, "I wished it was possible to have my children and still be with Adam."
Ram smiled also. "You just couldn't do both in one lifetime, Alexa."
"Oh, I just didn't understand..." Alexa sat down beside Ram unfolded her arms and hugged her with the baby between them.
"You've got Ma-ya-el!" David entered the garden doing a bad imitation of the AOL email wav. "Well, am I interrupting, or is a menage a preggers in the offing?"
Ram really liked David. If things did not work out with Mac and Adam, she had arranged for David and Alexa to be Sean's foster family. "Who?"
"You, Auntie Ram," David kissed his wife, hugged her very odd friend, and scooped up his son.
"No, David. Who is it from?" but of course, she knew. Only one person in the world that wasn't in this garden now knew where she was. Ram just wanted to know what David knew.
"Don't know, signed DML space X space ISLE," David replied going nose-to-nose with the baby. "Weird message, though."
"How?"
"Just two words," David lifted up the baby and blew on his belly. Little Davie's baby giggles made them all laugh.
"David?" Ram asked, "What two words?"
"Something French, oh succor, something like that..."
Ram rose from the fountain, "Au secours?"
"What is it, Ram?" Alexa reached up and grabbed Ram's arm.
Ram hissed and jerked her arm away, mumbled something about falling down, scraping her forearm... Then she was halfway cross the garden, making tactical plans, reviewing plane schedules to Seacouver, wondering what on earth could have happened...
"Ram!" Alexa called after her.
"There's a savings account in your name at that bank on the corner, across from the MacDonald's, in that shopping center west of here. I'll call you sometime next week. And if..."
"Ram, what does the message mean? What is happening?" Alexa started after her.
Ram turned around and faced them. Her eyes were bright with excitement and purpose. In one moment by this message she had transformed from patient waiting to the incandescence of regal destiny. She will leave now, Alexa thought, and I will never see her again.
"Oh, I am not sure exactly what has transpired, but somewhere there is a damsel in distress, in need of a noble Knight to the rescue. 'Au secours,' is the cry, in French, of such a maiden," Ram laughed thinking again how dear Joe was to her, even if not the other way round. She hoped the distress was not his. "In any case," Ram finished, "I am needed."
Let not on God our censure be: He did his best and so should we.
Enriched we are if in our hoard, is naught but love as treasure stored.
Adam Piersen set the ancient journal aside and glanced over at his patient, spread-eagled in four- point leather restraints on the hand-hewn oversize pine bed. Duncan was still sleeping. Good. Adam went about setting up for the next round. He opened the intricate Samsonite case with the double locks and its many divided compartments...a modern day country doctor's black bag....if the country were the far side of the rainbow.
Choosing several of the vials and a half-dozen hypodermic sets, he dabbed the tops with an alcohol pad and began loading the syringes with a mixture of meds.
So it was that Duncan MacLeod, prisoner in his own cabin, woke to see Adam flicking his finger against the side of a syringe, knocking the bubble loose, and squirting the excess into the air.
"What now?" Duncan mumbled.
Adam turned, "Oh, good morning, Duncan."
Duncan bucked against the restraints. The bed shook and Adam stepped back, setting the syringe with the other hypos, lined up and labeled, on the bedside table. "How are you feeling?" Adam stared out the window, settling his thoughts, ordering his wits.
MacLeod's nostrils flared and the deep brown eyes flashed as their gaze twitched restlessly round the room. One-by-one, he tested the leathers of the restraints, gauging which was the weakest. "Cleaner," he replied and turned his tactical attentions towards the man at the window, Death, the Horseman of the Apocalypse. Methos did not look well. His long back had bowed a bit, the angular shoulders drooped. Duncan could not remember the particulars of the last time he'd been out of restraints, but he had the distinct impression he'd done them both, the Eldest Immortal and the Meddlesome Watcher, a good bit of damage. They couldn't either of them keep this up much longer.
He would find a way around this stupid scheme of theirs. After all, they were staying up round the clock and he was sleeping like a baby, thanks to Methos' pharmacopoeia. They couldn't outlast him, Duncan thought. Soon, now they would have to decide whether they would kill him or let him go.
If he didn't get loose and kill them both first.
"Your choice, Duncan," Adam kept his gaze out the window trying to find something inside himself to rise up with the sun of this new morning. "The restraints or the drugs." He heard the clinical disconnection of his own voice as if it were a stranger's.
Duncan had all he could stand of the old man's twisted sense of loyalty, or whatever. One more time he tried to get Adam to see the abject foolishness of their efforts to "deprogram" him. "Adam," his throat was so stiff with frustration, he could hardly lift it above an ominous growl. "Adam, I don't get it. You, more than anyone else, should understand this. Aren't you always after me about stupid and useless notions like chivalry and ethics. Aren't you in fact the least ethical person I know?"
Adam turned his head and looked down, "Not anymore," he said almost too quietly to hear.
"We are Immortals," Duncan continued. "Can you have forgotten what that means?"
"That we outlive the people we know and love," Adam answered. "That we are subject to a rigid set of rules. That we tie the past into the present merely by virtue of..."
Duncan rose up to the limits of his bonds, "We kill each other until there are no more of us left to kill!" He spat this at Adam with the full force of his furious ire. "Everything else is meaningless!"
"Why didn't you kill me that night beneath the bridge in Paris?" Adam sat carefully on the edge of the bed and placed his long fingers on the center of Duncan's chest over the wool shirt done in the plaid of his adopted clan. He meant to remind the Highlander of his former self, the guardian, the gentle friend. He meant to walk him back to the sunny glen and out of this dark and dire dimension of Gaelic black humours.
"Because I was a fool!"
Adam tried again, "Why did I not kill you after you took Sean Burns' head?" If he could not incite his friendship, then maybe his overweening guilt. But he knew better than to invoke Richard Ryan's ghost. The wound ran still too deep.
"Because you are a coward!"
"And why would I fear killing you, when I have taken more lives than you have known."
"Long past, old man. Your swordsmanship sucks and you never practice. With me dead, who would do your fighting for you? Who would there be to hide behind?"
Adam tucked his chin down and swallowed his anger. Somewhere in this despicable bit of warmeat was his friend, he reminded himself. "I managed perfectly well before we met."
"You call hiding in the Watchers doing well?"
Adam could no longer bear his proximity. He rose and walked aimlessly across the small room, tripping on the Navajo rug at the foot of the bed. Wide Ruins, a particularly beautiful and valuable piece. He couldn't believe it wasn't hanging on the wall instead of under foot like this...
Duncan's foot snaked out to the limits of his bonds and hooked Adam savagely midgut, doubling him over coughing and gagging.
Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod was not finished yet. He waited just long enough for Adam's breathing to steady and then he loosed the second salvo. "You think you admire me," he began, "you think you feel friendship toward me...you may even think you love me."
Adam looked up at the Highlander from his position bent over, his hands on his knees. The hazel eyes widened and his eyebrows lifted in a questioning arc. He stood up straight and grimaced. Taking a deep breath he replied, "I do love you, Duncan MacLeod."
A cheap smile crawled across Duncan's full lips. "And I don't suppose it was Dawson who dragged me in the shower, then? I kin nay recall what happened exactly, but I kin imagine..."
Snap. Adam's control evaporated. "Oh, shut up, you sorry excuse for a Scot's man's distaff!" He wheeled around and headed for the bedroom door, pressing his mouth shut, arguing with his rage that Duncan was ill, that he didn't mean...
Adam's rage won out. He paused at the door to deliver, first his counter, and then his very strong answering offense. "Speaking of drugs and taking advantages, Ram is on her way here."
He then spoke the words that no child of Man ever hears without an essential shiver of the soul.
"And Mother wants to talk to you..."
Let's fly from melancholy's keep and cross his rampart in one leap. Undaunted by the yawning grave, may life be ridden like a wave. .
Ram hit Seacouver like a desert wind, all heat and grit and scattering. She broke into the dojo, called Dr. Lindsey and Sweet Lucille and then tied up Mac's phone line for the rest of the afternoon with a diligent search through the Watchers' Network and Database, notwithstanding their very expensive new security software. While she browsed and considered and judged, catching up with the five, no six, months she'd been in blissful ignorance at the Kuehls' Keep, she also began to implant her influence at certain critical points of the system. She had done so once before and it might come in handy to let them know, once again, she had them by the bytes if the need should arise.And she did it because she could, because the game of it delighted her as if she were a child. Ram was in such a high state of humor, she hardly stumbled when Richard Ryan's death came flashing forth on the laptop's screen. She liked Richie. He would make interesting company.
Thrice through the events before and after the tragedy and Ram began to wonder about the Millennium prophecy...the Child of the Dark and the Child of the Light.
And thus Sprach...the big Z.
She was entirely surprised to find herself offended. But I am the End of the World, God Damn It! She was surely damned to have carried that weight down the endless corridors of darkest Time and lose the title at the last.
Then she laughed aloud, alone in Duncan's airy loft. Such a greedy little puppy, I....to be the death of one race and to think I'd want another such devastation on my conscience.
If I had one.
When Ram was finished ravishing the Watchers' System she laid the laptop to rest on the couch, disconnected the modem and the phone immediately rang. "Hello, Dr. Lindsey."
Two hours later, she was still on the phone to Anne, Mary alternately cooing and howling in the background, trying for her mother's attention from the stupid little machine in her ear. Across the loft, the lift door opened and in walked Lucille carrying a large suitcase. Ram indicated the couch, pointed at the phone and made a "small" sign with her thumb and forefinger.
Lucille set the case down, headed for the kitchen island, and began making tea, all the while listening to Ram's side of the conversation and making mental lists and notes as was her custom. "I brought what you asked for," she said as Ram punched off the power on the cellular. "You didn't give me much to go on. I hope it's right." The strain in her voice brought Ram across the room to her side.
"Is something wrong, Luz?" Ram started to reach for the voluptuous red head and then thought better of it. "What?"
Sweet Lucille busied herself with the tea, saying nothing at all, looking neither right nor left. The unaccustomed stiffness took Ram by surprise in a woman whose every move had always been liquid or molten, but she held her tongue until the tea things were laid out on the low table before the couch.
Yet another new couch, Ram now noticed. She'd been hell on Duncan's furniture. Moving the laptop, she sat down at the very opposite end of the sofa from Lucille, sensing even this distance was still too close.
It seemed Lucille began to say something as she set her cup down but Ram's waiting gaze turned her back. She indicated the suitcase, "See if those things will do, Ram."
Ram knelt on the floor and tipped the case over flat flipping the catches and lifting the lid. "Excellent!" she was clearly delighted. "Oh, Luz! Just too perfect!"
The top layer was an enormous fur, the color of a fox--and of Luz's hair, Ram thought. Beneath was a deep green cloak of soft velvet. Beneath that, leathers in soft doeskin, belts and braces. Ram picked the lot of them up and held them to her face luxuriating in the smell and the textures. At the bottom of the suitcase their was a pair of dark, thigh high boots, sturdy in the soles, soft in the lasts.
"I'm afraid they're a bit large," Lucille said quietly. "I thought you would be showing more by now."
Ram didn't hear her. She'd draped the cloak round her shoulders and pulled over the fur atop that and gone waltzing through the loft like a child playing at Superman with one of his mother's towels. From nowhere, there came a deep-throated whirring and buzz, a sudden glint of strobing light appeared magically it seemed in her right hand. Lucille watched her soar up on Duncan's wide bed twirling a very large sword in both her hands like a baton...
....or a buzz saw.
And the look on Ram's face was at once horrible and magnificent.
God help them that go against this demon, Lucille thought. As I must do now, she reminded herself, now while she may kill me for my betrayal...Now, before the last of my courage fails.
Lucille rolled up the beige silk of her left sleeve and held her hand up palm forward towards the war wright on the counterpane. "Ram," she called out, setting her long limbs, steadying for the worst.
The progressive climb of the sword's pitch lowered and stilled. Ram pulled the fur over her head and let the cloak drop to the bed as she stepped off. She looked at the new Watcher's tattoo on Luz' wrist and did not seem to react at all. "You can go now if you want, Lucille. I put the money in your purse. I can see this is making you uncomfortable...and..." the softest sigh escaped her. "I can see now I won't, can't, be of any comfort to you."
"I am sorry, Ram," Lucille was near weeping she was so sorry.
It was Ram's turn to be uncomfortable. "Jesus, Luz! What do you want me to say. It's not my business what you do. I can't be deluding myself that we were ever lovers, when you made it so perfectly clear from the first to the last that it was only a business arrangement. Neither can I claim the delusion that Joe and I were ever anything at all, even friends."
Sweet Lucille had practiced over and over how she would tell Ram about Joe after she told her about becoming a Watcher. "How did you guess?"
"It doesn't matter. You are forgiven...if that's any help," Ram said earnestly.
Lucille was undone by how easy Ram had made this. Ram was right. She was no comfort at all. Sweet Lucille, she of the wondrous ways and the will of pure steel, collapsed sobbing to the dusty floor of MacLeod's loft apartment on Cambie Street.
Wondering if this would only make things worse, Ram knelt beside her and gathered her to her heart and the troublesome swollen shelf which the babe was making of her chest. She stroked Luz' sunrisen locks with the tenderness which her motherhood and her mortality had gifted her of late, all the while humming the lullaby her baby would never hear.
Lucille stilled, rocking in the arms of the very strange mother of Adam Piersen. "I felt as if all the while I was buying your shroud. That's why the colors are so bright. I couldn't bear them to be somber. What do you want them for?"
"Dear, Luz," Ram brushed Lucille's forehead with her lips and then settled her forehead against Lucille's temple. "You have brought me the caparisons of my final battle. It is the most holy thing one friend may do for another and God Himself has blessed me with such a one as you to bring me these."
"They are glorious," Ram cupped Lucille's chin in her palm and tilted her head up so their eyes met.
"I shall be glorious in them."
. Joyful as a savage horse, may skill be broken for the course.
Joe's right lid lifted slowly. The slightly smoky air reminded him immediately how much he had abused his eyes of late. The air might have been sandpaper. He closed his eyes and cast his blind question out in the general, ever-changing direction of the Oldest Immortal. "You okay?"
The animal sound which emanated as reply was clearly in the negative. Joe moaned and levered himself up to semi-sitting, squinting his sore eyes part way open. "Well? What are we going to do?"
Adam emerged from his profound dissatisfaction and went over to help Joe the rest of the way up. He reached deep in a back pocket and handed over a small plastic bottle of eye drops. "Here." Then he sat on the floor by the couch and circled his knees with his arms, staring at the fire, letting go of the last of his hope.
Joe blinked the drops across his eyes. "What now?"
Adam turned around to stare at the Watcher. The echo had no meaning. It was only coincidence, but it affected him at some level, humanized Duncan for a moment, making the rest of this more difficult. "I am out of ideas, Joe," he began. "We have been at this almost two weeks. And..."
"I think he's some better," Joe handed the drops back. "He's stopped shouting and fighting."
Adam smiled sadly as only one who has seen fifty centuries could do. They'd waited a week longer than he'd intended purely by the force of Joe's optimism, but even this was failing. "He is a warrior, Joe. He is waiting, gathering his strength. You know that both our lives are in danger, not just mine. We are letting our hearts rule our heads and that is always a treacherous course."
Joe's first reaction was a momentary hopelessness, then his anger buoyed him up. "You would say that! But how often has Mac saved your butt, Buddy, because his heart ruled his head?"
Adam turned back towards the fire and loosened his grip on his knees, his whole long frame slumping back against Joe's false legs. "I can't talk him out of this because there is no arguing his logic. How can you fight the truth?"
"Truth?" Joe leaned forward and rested his hand on Adam's shoulder. "What truth? He's mad as a mayfly at high noon!"
"No," Adam breathed out noisily through his considerable nose. "He hasn't said anything that isn't absolutely true, Joe. We're not going to change his mind about this."
"He's killing Immortals without regard to sex, age, character..."
"Like he is supposed to...as he was born to, Joe."
"He's paranoid..."
"Well, the other Immortals are looking to take his very valuable, and increasingly vexsome, head and the Watchers were crawling around, stalking him unmercifully preparatory to our kidnapping him..."
"He went after Cassandra..."
Adam did a very slow take as he looked back over his shoulder at the Seacouver bartender, "You say it like that was a bad thing."
Joe could not help smiling. He could only excuse his heartless reaction on the fact the witch had managed to get away and was still among the living, shaken, but intact.
"And I suppose you're going to tell me it was tragic he killed Kenny."
"No," Joe admitted. The end of that demon child had been too long in coming. "Why can't we take him back to the cave like before?"
Adam rubbed his face with his hands. "Right, and what would we do if he got away from us at the airport...run him over with a plane?"
Joe shuddered recalling the debacle getting Duncan up here. He'd actually run him over with his car.
"The only thing wrong with Duncan is he's not on our side any more. He hasn't said or thought or done anything that is outside the bounds of his heritage."
"Bull shit!" Joe's Bourbon Street fog made the the epithet sound like high holy malediction. "And excuse me all over if this is too personal, Buddy, but you can't say all that crap about your lusting after him has any basis in fact. That certainly is not the truth."
Adam stretched and got up to start the coffee. "You are right," he said.
Joe was glad to see the tiniest crack in Adam's grim resolution.
"I excuse you all over," Adam finished.
Ram turned off the headlights and parked the rental car next to Dawson's in the road side garage portion of Mac's boat shed. She removed the suitcase and set it on the trunk lid. Sorting through the various leather strips, she picked one a foot wide by six feet long and two narrow strips an inch by four feet. Walking to the water's edge, Ram knelt down and set the leather in salt sea bath of the inlet which sheltered Duncan's holy isle, just visible by the cabin's firelight across the sea lake of the broad bay.Back to the car, she retrieved a larger, longer case and began to unpack her armor. In other times, she would have a squire to do these menial tasks, but she was grateful for the occupation of her hands and mind. The ritual of readying for the last battle steadied and comforted her somehow, while it fed into the processes by which she would prevail this night.
Larvam bellam malum gerit, she began the Laudamus in her mind...
Fair or no, Duncan of the Clan Leod, ye'd do well to 'ware.
Duncan MacLeod came awake slowly. His tongue was thick and dry in his mouth and boasted an
acid, chemical flavor, from an earlier round of Methos’ magic medicine show. He supposed they
meant well, the Watcher and the Eldest Immortal, but it grated that they were poisoning, not only
his own flesh, but also this place. The cabin on the isle, the ancient holy grounds, had long been his
one unvarying point of sanctuary and peace in an unforgiving world, his own personal haven.They had profaned this blissful shelter, had sullied the pine bright air. To have his one safe place
turned into a prison was almost more than the Highlander could bear. As the days turned into weeks
and a fortnight had passed, Duncan’s divers irritations with his two friends found focus in the single
thought that they had destroyed the blessing of this place for him, that whatever happened, he would
not be returning to this spot. Their bothersome meddling had ruined it for him.He did not understand their concern. Well, he couldn’t really expect Dawson to understand the
imperatives of Immortality, but Adam’s continued thick headedness confounded the Scot. Here he
was finally agreeing with all of Old Adam’s tenets of pragmatism and the old man was beside himself.
What the hell did they want with him? What did they want him to do if it wasn’t what he was doingnow, what he was born to do? He was a soldier in the Greater War, the Gathering. Perhaps he had confused himself with the lesser questions of comradeship and clan and such, over the four centuriesof his life, but he had never actually lost sight of his place and his purpose.Duncan suspected they had discovered his plan to challenge Connor next. Well, what did they
think? Sooner or later, this would happen. Duncan had merely cast aside all the pretense. In the
Gathering there were no clans, no friends, no lovers...There was only the Challenge, the Battle, the Quickening.
...and in the end, The Prize.
Duncan had begun to feel that just having the dreadful, heartless slaughter come to an end would be more than prize enough. He would bring that end with the force of his own hands, his own will...or he would himself be ended. In either case, it would be over. Finally over.
And that had become Duncan’s only interest, only purpose.
He should take Adam, Methos, next. Quick, clean. But he would have to end the old bartender’s
life first. Adam’s Quickening would surely leave him weak and vulnerable for days. Duncan could
hardly imagine what it would be like to take on the five millennia of Methos’ longevity. The Watcher,
Joe Dawson, would surely try to kill Duncan while he lay helpless under the sway of the Eldest
Immortal’s death.Duncan wanted very much to take Adam’s head, to be done with agonizing over how dreadful it
would feel to end the life of such a close friend. The torment of waiting for this inevitability was worse
than grieving after the fact. Richie had shown him this. His dying had torn the scales from Duncan’s
blind eyes, had shown him the truth.And in the light of this terrible Truth, Duncan had been faced with two actions: to run from the
revelation, or to pursue it. His was not a temperament to retreat.“Mac?”
Beyond the veil of the neuroleptics, Duncan was aware of being jostled and poked and pushed up
to sitting. More importantly, he suddenly registered, his hands were unbound.“Duncan, don’t even...” the second voice seemed to read his mind and Duncan felt a cold thin edge come to rest lightly beneath his jaw.
Duncan opened his eyes as they retied his hands, but the room would not come into focus. A cold
washcloth swiped his eyes and jaw and he jerked his head away, managing only to bash back againstthe thick pine headboard. All the time--some two decades ago--he had worked with axe and adze tofurnish this place, never did he foresee it put to such disgusting use. This fine piece had shelteredhimself and his love, had shepherded his many dreams. His teacher Conner had slept here once.He had never made it to be a pillory, God Damn It! But so they had made it, so they had cursed and muddied and turned all the holy joy of this place into curséd ware, dim misery.
Then the food was at his lips and he lunged out to bite the hand that feeds. There was a suddencry and curse and the damnable shade withdrew, porridge-spattered no doubt, by the smell. Well, let them be burned on their twisted ministrations. Duncan had no mercy for them, no more than they for him. The battle was set and their feeble posturings of compromise, their pleas for reconsideration, fell like the knell of the blackest bell upon the ears of the deaf and the dead.
So he was thoroughly surprised and dismayed when another blurred wyte approached the stocks his broad bed had become and kissed him lightly on the forehead. He might have bashed the man with his very thick Scot skull, but the boldness of the gesture had stunned him.
“We are sorry, I am sorry, to have put you through this, Duncan. It has booted us naught, has ifanything, driven you farther away down the path your circumstances and your grief have chosen for you. This night when the moon is up full, I will take you to the crest of the isle, in the ring of pines, and send you to your rest. You have fought long and well, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. It is time to lay down your sword and sleep. Forgive me, friend.”
Duncan blinked as the hot tears dropped on his face, and he called out Methos' name, but theghost was already gone and the room was empty.
Ram finished setting the fire within a circle of stones in the clearing across from the boat shed. The night was just beginning and a glowing remnant of the sunset still clung to the west beyond the outlet of the broad bay. She finished ordering the raiment and the armor and weaponry, slipped her clothes and went for a bracing baptism in the salt sea lake. Cold beyond believing, it took her breath at first in noisy, shuddering gasps, but her remarkable physiology soon rose to the occasion. When she emerged from her bathing Ram was newborn and bright. God Bless the power of the Living Water, she thought the benediction, Bless Yoann and Yeosh for revealing its power.Sitting on a rock at the bay’s edge, she retrieved the narrow strips and wound them in tight perfect spirals over her palms, round her wrists, and down her forearms to her elbows. Ram, continually flexed and twisted to mold them to the various movements she would use, while still keeping them tight enough to serve as bracers and liners beneath the true armour pieces that shielded her arms, the backs of her hands, and her fingers. When she finished with these, she pull up the wide leather band, wrung out most of the water, and bound it tightly around her chest. This was more than a little uncomfortable, but she knew the pressure would soon make her sore new architecture numb and considerably more flat, rendering it less of a disadvantage in the coming battle.
She could only be grateful that she was behind schedule lactating with this pregnancy. Small favors, she mused as the pressure and prickles dimmed down. She moved back to the car trunk serving as her armoury table, and began to don Lucille’s wondrous outfit. As she pulled the second boot on and laced it tight around her thigh, Ram began to feel the power of the garment, not its gaudiness and flare, though surely there was that, but more the sweet sadness, the tenderness with which it had been procured...the woman’s love for her could be felt piece-by-piece. It wound her like swaddling and warmed her like love’s own light.
Like a true and noble Knight, she would wear her lady’s favor.
Ram was loathe to wake the babe within her, but there was no alternative. She was without the power of her former station, without even the power of the half-castes that the Watchers called "Immortals."
"All right, little one," she began softly, touching the babe with a gentleness she had only managed once before in all her long life--the time of her motherhood of the man now called "Adam."
"It is time, Sean," she crooned to the sleeping child. "Call your father, Sean. Bring him to us."
“I can’t believe you told him!” Joe Dawson, former Chief Watcher, and now solo bailer, scooped up another can of chill, stinking salt water from the ankle-deep pool in the bottom of the boat and heaved it towards Adam who was seated in the prow rowing for all his long arms were worth.Adam shook off the water and spit the noxious stuff back at Joe. “Of course I told him!”
Joe bent back to bailing wondering all the while what this amount of saline would do to his very
expensive prostheses. He didn’t fancy going through the lengthy business of getting them refitted.“Why?” he shouted above the creak of the oar rests and the slap of the lake against the hull.Adam grunted unintelligibly. He was keeping a sculling pace in a wreck of a craft that hadn’t even been in the water for over a year and wasn’t meant for racing even in its finest condition. All the fittings were thick with rust or frayed with splinters. A more unworthy vessel had never graced the bay. “...honorable...t...do,” Adam repeated.
“The only honorable thing to do?” Joe asked. Surely he had not heard right.
Adam nodded, never missing a lick on the oars. Dawson was impressed at the old man’s strength. What he had always taken to be slender shoulders because of Adam’s constant droopyposturing were now fully pumped against the obstinate oars. His deltoids were the size of a football ormaybe those larger ones they used for rugby. Adam always claimed he was stronger than he looked, but before now, Dawson hadn’t really believed him.
“Why?” Joe asked again.
Adam was a portrait of exasperation. The Elder Immortal looked down at the building swamp in the bottom of the boat and back at Joe.
Joe returned to bailing. His hands could hardly stay round the can they were getting so numb with the cold and the far shore, the boat house, and the car were still half the lake away. He stopped worrying about refittings and started worrying about drowning. If they made it at all it would literally be on the strong back of the Eldest Immortal, straining to its full measure, his breathing forced and loud as the screech that the truckers called “Jake braking.”
Joe returned to bailing with a vengeance. After all they’d been through, he was damned if he would end up a bloat-floating carcass of some northwest park service report.
It had been almost sundown when they took the continued quiet in the cabin bedroom as something more ominous than just exhaustion on Mac’s part. Adam went to check and the look on his face when he returned said all that it needed to. Mac had escaped them.
As fast as they could gather warm clothes, weapons, lights, and sundries, they were down to thesmall dock where they found the outboard sunk in four feet of water. Adam reported it would take them two, maybe three days to haul it out on shore and dry the engine and fix the hole in the hull. Duncan had thought enough of them not to leave them stranded, just delayed.
Duncan had probably walked the lake bed back towards the mainland. Enough of a kind gesture to make them both too sad to speak. That and the fact he hadn’t killed them on his way off to freedom.
Then Adam remembered the old rowboat that the Highlander had never gotten around to refitting, beached high on the hill behind the cabin. The tall Immortal had hauled the unpromising craft down to the lake and set it in. It had proceeded to fill with water while Adam salvaged the oars and life vests and the oar brackets...or whatever they were called, Dawson couldn’t remember. Joe was only wondering when Adam would see the uselessness of all this when the Eldest Immortal jumped in the boat and steadied it for Dawson to board.
“You can’t be serious, Buddy,” Joe said.
“Oh, it’s better than it looks,” Adam replied staring out across the water, trying to get a fix on the errant Scot.
“It couldn’t be worse than it looks,” Joe commented. “You realize I am not Immortal and I don’t
swim.”Adam had looked up from fixing the oar things...what were they called?...and he somehow had
shamed Dawson into boarding. Joe wasn’t sure exactly how he had managed it, but he had. There was that certain subtle way in Adam that was pure Ram, irresistible as the force of gravity....sinking us down to the semi-deep of this wretched ice lake, Dawson thought and he bailed even
faster. “Where is Ram?” he yelled above the boat noise and the wind and the spray.“She...cannot....Holy Ground,” was all he could make out of Adam’s gasping reply. Dear Lord,
Joe thought, he’s tiring. We’re not going to make it! “Adam!”The Immortal looked up. His hazel eyes were dull and distant. The stupid scow was getting the best of him. Joe pushed forward off the aft bench and grabbed the oars. “You can’t keep this up!” he yelled.
Adam shook his head.
“Let me row,” Joe yelled again. “You bail.”
Adam stared at Joe as if he were speaking Swahili, one of the very few languages he did not know.
“Help me get my legs braced,” Joe shouted, taking the oars, as Adam relinquished his seat.
Dawson spit on his palms and got a good grip on the oars. Adam straddled his ankles and sat down on them. With one last look behind him to get his aim, Joe set his eyes toward the distant cabin and settled into what he thought of as his PT mode, the mind place where he’d learned to go during the grueling rehab sessions after he’d returned from the war. Never in his wildest imaginings had he thought all those hours on the rowing machine were ever going to come in this handy.
He tested the oars through three strokes, hit his rhythm and never looked back again.
The night was deepening, the moon rising, when the pathetic wreck of a boat hit the dock.
Joe kept right on rowing steady and sure. Except for the bank and the dock frame and the sudden slap across his face, he might have rowed them all the way back to Seacouver.
Duncan MacLeod climbed up the bank and shivered in the night air. He’d lost his bearings coming across the bay and ended up a half mile west of the dock and Dawson’s car. Damn! He ran his broad hands roughly through his tangled, dank hair, and then climbed up to the roadway to head eastward towards the car parked at his boat shed.A short way down the road he felt the buzz of another Immortal. Someone was waiting for him at the boat shed. Perhaps the man had been waiting for him to leave Holy Ground unarmed. It had happened once before, three years earlier...Richie had showed up with his katana...
Armed or no, Duncan thought, this man’s head is mine if I have to take it with my bare hands. He climbed into the dense underbrush and circled around to approach the spot from a more advantageous position, picking up a sizable branch--more the dimensions of a log--on the way.
He broke quietly into the clearing south of the boat shed. The man sitting at the fire did not even
look up as he approached.“Good evening, Duncan of the Clan Leod,” Ram said in a more than friendly fashion. “Please, sit
down, have some coffee, and thaw out a bit.” She indicated an adjacent log with her metal-clad hand,
miniature armour with tiny hinged pieces over the knuckles.Duncan chose instead to sit across the fire from her, taking the offered cup and the pot with him. After a few tentative sips--it might have been poisoned, after all--he drank down the cup and poured another. It was wonderful, just enough Beam to do it justice and no poison at all.
“I am sorry I did not think to bring you a dry set of clothes, Brother. But I did bring you a weapon.” She handed him an enormous claymore, hilt first, over the top of the flames. “I hope it is suitable.”
Duncan set down his mug and took the sword, testing its heft, sighting down the trough, setting it upended on his palm to gauge its balance. It was a superb piece, several centuries old, but newly honed and dressed. “It will do,” he said flatly. “What are you up to, Ram?”
She did not answer, just sat staring into the fire, sipping her coffee. The silence made him look at
her. Duncan was surprised. Ram appeared to be decked out like a Pictish nightmare, all leathers and
furs. Otherwise, she seemed as always, lean and angular and forbidding. Oh, my God, he thought, she’s done something to the baby!“No, Duncan,” she lifted her head slowly and pinned him in the sparkling reflection of the fire in
her eyes. “Your son is well.”Then Duncan’s battered heart beat against his throat. In all that had happened, he had forgotten
there would be one more Immortal, one Last Immortal, for him to kill......his own son.
“You should not live so long to harm a single hair upon this child’s head,” Ram said quietly her eyes never leaving his. “Nor my other son’s either,” she added.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because after this night, Brother, you will be dead,” neither her tone nor her expression changed from the pleasant, though intense, attention she had set upon him.
“You are not part of The Gathering, Ram,” Duncan was not interested in this bitch. He wondered how he could have managed to make himself get her with child. “So that is what you are decked out for.”
Ram’s lids descended slowly and he could almost feel the heat of her anger over the flames. When she opened her eyes again he could read nothing at all in the mirrors of their surfaces. In the next moment a large towel sailed over the fire and hit him full in the face.
“Why don’t you dry off and I will hand over a bit of my advantage to you. It will not help, of course, but it is the least I can do, given our vow as Shield Brothers.”
“And what, “ Duncan wiped his face and began drying his hair, “advantage could you possibly have?” Could this harridan actually be challenging him?
The smallest smile lit Ram’s face as she rose to show him the answer to his question. “You have
made some very disparaging remarks about my sword--‘hand anvil,’ was one such I believe. In any case, consider yourself honored to be the first non-Danaan to have this old anvil explained to you. It is a most closely guarded secret, you understand.” The heavy weapon appeared in her right hand, the so-called sword with the thick edge on one side, the fine edge on the other, and the fluted trough down the tongue.Duncan had lifted this sword or one very like. It was heavier than the big claymore she had givenhim. Adam had first discovered these swords at the sites of previous challenges, left by the Danaans that had stood witnessing the slaughter and been scared off by one thing or another before they couldretrieve their weapons. The swords had no balance, being terribly lop-sided, and they were almost too heavy to lift, let alone wield. He could only see them being used as an axe, after the victim had been incapacitated by some other method.
She thought she was safe. She thought he would not kill his own son. She did not know he would rather kill his son now than later. She did not know he would just as soon kill her now, one single blow against the Danaan harpies in the death of their former king.“Your secret is safe with me,” he commented sardonically, combing his hair back with his handsand replacing the leather tie.
“There is no fear for that, Brother. The dead are most discrete.” With that she tossed the sword up in front of her, about eye-height and caught it off true, setting it spinning in her hands like the blades of a fan, or a helicopter...
Duncan put his hands reflexively up to his ears. The grooved blade caught the rush of air and
created a roaring ring of incredible volume.“Open your eyes, Brother, or you’ll be wasting all this valuable instruction.”
Duncan found he had squinted his eyes shut against the obnoxious strobing effect of the firelight
upon the spinning blade. He opened his eyes and watched her stop the blade by throwing one shielded forearm into the path of the spinning steel. It bounced and she canted the blade into a dive that buried it deeply in the ground by her right foot. He winced when the blade hit her, knowing that the blow must be painful even padded and armoured as her forearms were.Ram seemed unaffected. She showed him how the blade could fly wide arcs and small, how it could be reversed instantly, how it could be made to rise and to dive...
Duncan followed it all, seeing the things she did not mean to show: how she had to take her stance outside the protection of her double-handed grasp, the lag between tossing and turning the blade, the inertia that planted her immobile in the center of some of the maneuvers, how absolutely vulnerable she would be if she missed on one of those impressive dives and had to take time hauling the blade back out of the dirt, seeing how it tended to bury itself so deeply.
She had to work with the lift of the foil-shape in the blade. It was obviously a precision of placements and angles. And if her wrists should tire...
Duncan nodded at her when she was done, “You’ll be wanting to rest now, Ram.”
“Oh, not at all, Brother,” Ram grinned. “I am just warmed up. Ready when you are, except...”
“Except what, Ram?”
“Well, I would not want you to die an idiot, Brother. What would I tell poor Sean? That his father was a cretinous bit of warmeat?”
“Ram!” If she thought the mention of his son would undo him, then she was the idiot.
“I just meant for this to be in the nature of a test. Simple questions. Simple answers. When you
get an answer wrong...”The glare of the Highlander’s dark eyes fixed upon her in absolute rage as he rose with the
claymore in hand.“Then you get a bad mark,” Ram finished.
Methos, also known as Adam Piersen, Ph.D., Watcher Research drone, felt thoroughly ashamed with himself to have put the former NW Territories Watcher Chief in such grave danger. Or at least he would feel such shame just as soon as he had caught his breath enough to think straight and his legsunbent from kneeling in the cold brine of the leaking boat.“Adam,” Joe jostled his shoulder. “Something’s going on across the road. Sparks and steel- on-steel. A Challenge, I think.”
Adam groaned as he struggled up to standing. Damnation! The buzz hit him full force as his head cleared. MacLeod! He couldn’t get a good sense of the other one...powerful, but...
Young! God help them! He was fighting a child, and a PreImmie at that!
“Come on! We have to stop this!”
“We can’t interfere, Buddy,” Joe reminded him.
Which Adam took to be ironic in the extreme, given Dawson’s predisposition to interfere in most
things Immortal. Together they managed the rest of the way up to the road and across to the clearing
where, by the moon’s full light, they spied Ram’s version of Danaan “school,” and Duncan’s collection of very bad marks.Oh, Dear Lord, Dawson’s mouth slacked open. Duncan stood poised with more than a yard of steel blade in his hand, a claymore by the looks of it, though not in the style of the MacLeod blade from Glennfinnan. Its guards slanted downward and away from the hilt. At the opposite side of the clearing Ram stood dressed in orange furs and green velvet and pale, light brown leather with darker boots. Her face was bright in the fire’s glow. Her eyes reflected red from the hyperdilated pupils, but everything else about her seemed quite at ease, as if she were watching Duncan fight someone else and not her.
Duncan was blooded, a dozen wounds from shoulder to thigh, none of them serious. Adam could
not divine how the heavy blade, now at rest in Ram’s right hand, could have done such delicate, if
grotesque, work upon the Highlander. Something akin to doing petit pointe with a jack hammer. The
Elder Immortal understood now that he had sensed the child Ram carried and not a PreImmie, though it surely was that, and very powerful by the aura emanating from Ram’s side of the clearing.“Catch your breath, Brother,” Ram called out encouragingly. “I will give you a moment to rethink your last answer.”
MacLeod sneered and drew up tall, his sword still at the ready above his left shoulder. “Get any
closer to me, you serpent spawn, and I’ll cut your tongue out and shove it up your...”“I do not think that was either the question or the answer, Brother,” Ram strolled almost casually toward the fire at the center of the clearing, closer to Duncan, but with the fire between them. “Let me see,” she grinned, or showed her teeth, it was unclear which exactly. “The question on the table: Are you a good man, or just o-bee-dee-ent?” The way she said this last made it seem to be a profanity.
“I was born to kill or be killed until there is only one,” Duncan intoned with an ardent and prideful air that was at once daunting and pathetic.
Adam and Joe both sighed. They’d been down this road with the Highlander many times in the past two weeks. And they’d tried everything they could think of to show him how wrong he was.
Ram came straight through the fire, blowing the flames down to the ground with the sudden wind of her whirling blade. She “flew” it up above her right shoulder, skimmed it under Duncan’s quick parry, reversed its direction left to right, throwing it to her left hand, where she guided it into his right thigh, bouncing it back away from him with her right metal forearm guard. The blade could have transected Duncan’s leg but for the fact that she had “pulled” the slice, had met the blade with her own arm before it could bite too deeply.
“Wrong,” she said, slipping back ten strides, nimble as a wraith.
Well, they hadn’t tried anything like that. Dawson's shock prevented any sensible response to the scene before him. He saw Mac’s legs buckle him to the ground. It was all so unreal. Ram was playing out some grotesque torture here. She’d been at it for some time by the look of the brawny Scot’s many woundings. How could she be so cruel? Why did she not just end it?
Adam’s breath whistled through his teeth. He watched his friend go down and felt a distinctive urge to go to him, to help him. This was so unfair. Ram wasn’t fighting him. She was shaming him. This was a death unworthy of Duncan’s mostly honorable life. He had all but forgotten his own plans to kill Duncan.
Duncan was dimly aware of Adam somewhere beyond the light of the fire at the edge of the challenge ground. He hurt in so many places he could not count them. “You cheated!” he spit outthe accusation.
“Neither a question, nor an answer, Brother. If you mean did I fail to show you how the sword changes weight and how it may be wielded in one hand, as well as in two, or that my legs are armoured as well as my arms, then I stand accused. But we are still left with the two questions, neither of which you seem able to ken. I will ask you them both and, depending on your answers, I shall be done with this--one way or the other.”
Duncan heard the words, the unchanging tenor of her damnable, soft throat. He wouldn’t have
believed a woman, half his weight, and pregnant, and mortal, could best him, but so she had done, or so she would do if she would just stop jabbering and get on with it. The slashes in his arms and shoulders had finally weakened them to the point where he could not lift the heavy claymore again. His legs were jelly and the last gash had severed the lateral hamstring. He could not even stand.“Who judges you, Duncan?”
Duncan heard her repeat the question that had begun this challenge. “Why don’t you just tell me the answers?” he growled.
The sword rang behind him and buried itself halfway through his chest. He tasted blood in his mouth and his own sword dropped from his hand as he folded his arms over the rent.
“Wrong answer, Brother,” Ram leaned close and whispered in his left ear. “I believe the lesson is
finished.”Duncan heard the terrible sword begin to ring, the pitch driving higher and higher behind him. He bowed his head and stilled his attempts at breathing. If she did not make haste, he would be dead before the blade ever struck. He began to tremble as his body started into shock with the loss of blood from the chest wound. Damn you, Ram, do it now!
He felt the leather hair tie fall open on his shoulders and he heard Dawson cry out, “No!”
Then there was a bruising sting at the back of his neck.
...and then, there was nothing.
Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod found himself walking through a dense fog. He could feel the road, cobbled, beneath his soles, but he could not see his feet. The light filtered flat and unnatural through the thick ground cloud casting its own shadows and obscuring his. The day was neither hot nor cold, but the air was thick and still like the dead calm before an electric storm hits.Duncan could not remember coming to this place but it seemed he had been walking this cobbled way for some time now, perhaps an entire day. Still, he felt no weariness anywhere in his entire large frame. He lifted his hand to his face but something, someone, stopped him.
“That is probably not the best idea,” the silky voice warned. “In this realm you would be wise to look outside yourself to begin with.”
Duncan turned to see Ram clad in what looked to be one of his T-shirts by the size of it. Her legs were bare, as were her feet and arms. “Hello, Brother. How goes it with you?”
“Where?” Duncan searched the fog, except for Ram, he could see nothing but the swirling, roiling clouds.
“You are dead, Brother.”
This made Duncan laugh and it was a while before he could speak again. “Why would you say that?”
“Here,” as she spoke, a large stone appeared by the trail. “Have a seat. There is much we need to discuss.”
Duncan sat down beside her on the stone. “Why did you say I was dead?” he asked again.
“Because I killed you, Brother. It was time. Nothing else would do.”
This was one of Ram’s intricate schemes, Duncan reasoned. He would just have to wait until she
