by Donna Lettow
Shafts of lightning exploded from Avram’s body, shattering the windows of the pilothouse, scarring the deck and the sides of the barge with their intensity before snaring MacLeod in their web. Power shot through him unrestrained, and the moan became a scream as cosmic fire sparked his nerves, his cells, his very atoms.
Through the pain, through the loneliness and the despair that held him prisoner, he reached into the maelstrom within his essence and grasped the memories churning there, desperate for identity. Lightning pierced the physical form once called MacLeod, sending it writhing to the deck of the barge, but he was Avram, son of Mordecai the Pharisee, and he was marrying the most beautiful woman in Judea. He lifted Deborah’s veil and looked into her chestnut eyes, and they were the lifeless eyes of Debra Campbell and he was Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod and his world was coming to an end at the base of a cliff in the Highlands of Scotland. Tongues of fire shot from the bilge pipes quenched with a hiss in the waters of the Seine and he was assailed by the smell of burning wood and burning flesh and he was Avram the schoolteacher fighting on alone in the village that had died around him as the Cossack’s horse rode him down and he rode and he rode on the heels of that butcher, Kern, who’d destroyed his family, and he vowed someday MacLeod of the Lakota would have his revenge.
He roared, a wild howl filled with anguish and sorrow, and he reached for heaven as if he could almost touch it, first one hand, then both. Almost, but not quite.
Suddenly, the lightning ceased, the fog blowing past the barge on a gentle breeze as if nothing to disturb the fabric of space and time had just occurred, and he was once again MacLeod, Duncan MacLeod, born in Glenfinnan in the Highlands of Scotland in 1592, and he was the victor.
But there was no joy in this victory. MacLeod collapsed back onto the deck, a puppet with no strings, exhausted. And he wept.
* * *
Minutes, hours, days later, he felt the approach of another Immortal. Barely lifting his head, he reached out for his sword. Then he looked up to see Methos mounting the gangplank. “You,” MacLeod said.
“I came to watch the fireworks.” Methos picked his way carefully across the shattered glass and blasted decking. “I hear it’s Palestinian Independence Day.” With the tails of his grungy raincoat, he wiped off a spot on the deck and sat down beside MacLeod.
MacLeod sat up, looking at his katana as if it was a stranger to him. “I didn’t do it for the Palestinians.”
“I know,” Methos said with more compassion. “Still, I suppose it had to be done.”
Now that the deed was done, MacLeod was firm. “He couldn’t keep on killing innocent mortals.”
“True,” Methos said, examining a shard of glass he’d picked up near his feet. “Much better to let the mortals go on killing each other.”
MacLeod looked at him oddly. “What do you mean by that?”
“Me?” Methos shrugged, tossing the glass fragment into the river. “I dunno. Sometimes I just like to hear myself talk.”
MacLeod stood, putting away his sword. “I’ve got to go.” Methos nodded sagely. MacLeod walked to the gangplank and off onto the Quai. Methos looked around the wreckage of the barge.
“Guess I’ll just tidy up a bit.”
It was dawn when he knocked on Maral’s door at the Jordanian Embassy and he was surprised when she opened it almost immediately. Her eyes were red and shadowed. She hadn’t slept.
“Duncan!” She thought that she’d never see him again, that by coming so close to whatever secret he was forced to conceal, she had lost him forever. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into her room.
The door closed, he pressed her back against it and kissed her, a soul-searching kiss, as if he never wanted to let her go. A kiss so full of hunger, so full of need, she could tell something had happened. Something had changed him almost imperceptibly, had left him with this deep aching loneliness.
“Duncan … it’s all right.” She stroked his head, brushed back his hair, trying to comfort him. “Let me help.”
“Just hold me,” he whispered. “Please …” There was nothing he could tell her.
Author’s Notes
Working on Zealot, I’ve come to appreciate how very different writing fiction for the printed page is from writing for the TV screen. So many more words are needed! You can’t just map out the dialogue and rely on an actor to provide the character’s description, expression, and reactions. When writing a book, you don’t have the luxury of an Adrian Paul or Peter Wingfield calling the writers to say, “You don’t need to put in that line—I can say it in a look,” and they do, beautifully. On the other hand, you don’t have the producer calling to say “Masada? Have you gone totally insane? Where am I supposed to double Masada in Paris?”
One luxury that you have when putting a book together, unlike a television show, is what you’re reading right now—the author’s notes. Many’s the time the writers of “Highlander” would have loved to put a banner across the bottom of the screen that said something like, “Well, it was supposed to be Waterloo, but it snowed the day of filming.” So, having been given this precious opportunity. here are a few notes.
On May 16, 1943, SS Major General Jürgen Stroop reported to his superiors that “The Warsaw Ghetto is no more.” The 50,000 Jews who had remained in the Ghetto after the mass deportations of nearly 500,000 to the death camps, and the roughly 1,000 young Jewish rebels who had risen up in arms against the Nazi war machine to try and protect them, were gone—captured and sent to Treblinka, shot where they stood, or consumed by the fires the Nazis set to ravage the Ghetto. Of the actual heroes and villains involved in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, I’ve put my words in the mouths of only a few—Ghetto commander Mordechai Anielewicz and his companion Mira, Jurek, Issachar Schmuel the gangster king, General Stroop.
Little is known about the last hours of Masada, except what is reported in Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish Wars. Josephus, a one-time Jewish rebel turned Roman collaborator, purported he got his facts from two women who survived Masada by hiding in a cistern. Recent archaeological evidence does support much of what Josephus wrote, including the pottery shards inscribed with the commanders’ names which were used to draw lots. The shards confirm the presence of Eleazar ben Yair the legendary commander of Masada, who I’ve borrowed for this book.
A note about Jewish naming conventions. According to Rabbi Morrison David Bial, the practice of naming children only after deceased relatives was originally an Ashkenazic tradition (Jews from Central Europe), not biblical or talmudic in origin, and so wouldn’t have been adhered to at the time of Masada.
Of the many books and references I consulted, three really stand out: Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Israel Gutman; The Struggle for Peace: Israelis and Palestinians edited by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and Mary Evelyn Hocking; and Masada, by Yigael Yadin, the archaeologist who uncovered the rock’s mysteries in the 1960s.
Thanks to “St. Catherine’s fifth grade”—Jennifer, Darla & Dr. Amy—for the beta testing.
Thanks to Sara Schwager, who brought the Hebrew in line with the pronunciation used in the 1940s.
Thank’s also to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for refusing to let memories die away like the smoke from the camps. And to the writings of Elie Wiesel, who brought Avram Mordecai into sharp focus for me when he wrote of having to remember, even if “condemned to live as long as God himself.”
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.…
But not when it comes to new HighlanderTM novels! Watch in May 1998 for a new novel by Rebecca Neason, author of Highlander: The Path.
The Immortal known as Darius began life as a leader of the Goths. His army swept out of the Urals, sacked Rome, then headed to Paris—where Darius’s life was changed forever by his encounter with a holy man whose Quickening he took. As a result, Darius became a priest and forswore the Immortals’ game. This is the story of his centuries-long friendship with Duncan MacLeod, in which the tw
o face danger and treachery, in the name of Immortal brotherhood.…
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE...
He is immortal. A Scottish warrior born four hundred years ago. He is not alone. For centuries he has fought others like himself. He can die only if a foe takes his head, capturing his life-force in an event known as the Quickening. But his battles are eternal...for in the end, there can be only one. He is Duncan MacLeod. The Highlander.
NEVER AGAIN
The Hebrew warrior Avram Mordecai has defended his people since the Roman siege of Masada, through 2000 years of Diaspora, ghettos, pogroms, and the Holocaust. And MacLeod has fought beside him, saving Jews from the Nazis in World War II. Now the Highlander is protecting a beautiful Palestinian diplomat at peace talks that the Zealot has vowed to disrupt by any means-including murder...