The Path

by Rebecca Neason

  Karma was something the nomads spoke of a great deal, and they could not understand either MacLeod’s ignorance or indifference. His ignorance they set about to rectify, teaching him as they would a child about samsara and its cycles of birth, death, and rebirth, and about the Great Mandala, the Wheel of Time. They used simple words, laughing with him—and helping him to laugh—as he endeavored to master their language, which differed from the Chinese he had learned on his travels a century ago.

  But not even their merry temperaments could completely penetrate MacLeod’s indifference. It filled him like a dark void, a hole in his soul too many years in the making. After almost two hundred years of life, he was weary. He was tired of the Game. It felt as if his existence was only about death anymore—killing to survive.

  So he wandered, as he had wandered here, looking for that word or smile or touch, that one moment that might bring his heart back to life. For the last two years he had been through China, renewing old acquaintances, perhaps looking for the man he had been when he had visited the “mysterious East” a century before.

  He had seen Kiem Sun again, only to find that the last hundred years had sadly changed his Immortal friend. Fearful of the Game, Kiem Sun lived on Holy Ground, obsessed with perfecting an ancient formula of herbs that would create an invincible warrior. He thought it would protect him when the time of the Gathering finally arrived, but in his search for the preservation of his life he had ceased to truly live.

  Kiem Sun had sent him to May-Ling Shen—delicate as a flower, deadly as an Immortal warrior had to be—and for a time he had found comfort in her arms. But the restlessness had come, as it had come to him here on the Tibetan plateau, and he had needed to be on his way again. He left May-Ling with a kiss and a smile, both of them hoping to meet again, and both of them knowing there could be no permanence for Immortals. Death might await on the blade of the next sword.

  “You will leave with the sunrise, you say?” Zhi-yu’s wife, Ruoyin asked, her voice bringing MacLeod’s thoughts back to the present. She handed him a steaming bowl of spiced yak milk, one of the staples of the nomad’s diet.

  Duncan nodded. “That’s right,” he said.

  Ruoyin gave him a patient smile that seemed to say how foolish she thought he was to be leaving at all. Then she went to sit beside her daughter, a new mother who was nursing her infant son.

  Duncan wrapped his fingers around the bowl, enjoying the heat. He had almost said, “as soon as it is warm enough,” but he was not certain that time ever came at these altitudes.

  That was all relative, he supposed. Back home in Scotland, no one would believe anyone could live at these heights, let alone flourish. Yet these mountain nomads did just that. They lived happily, raising their families and their herds of yak at altitudes of 14,000–17,000 feet.

  Here on the Tibetan plateau, the daytime temperatures rose barely above freezing and at night were cold enough to almost stop a man’s blood in his veins. This was the “Land of Snows,” the “Rooftop of the World.”

  It was a harsh life, but one lived among breathtaking beauty, where rainbows could appear in a cloudless sky and be reflected back again by the deep crystal of mountain lakes. And the mountains themselves, snowcapped and shining like a jewel-encrusted crown of the earth. Duncan had seen other mountains—the Alps, the Pyrenees—but nowhere had he seen anything like the mountains of Tibet.

  In spite of the hardships, the Tibetan nomads were a merry people. They lived communally, relying on their herds for almost all of their needs. They housed themselves in huge tents woven from the animals’ thick hair, fed themselves with its milk and meat, and burned its dung for fuel.

  The tent in which MacLeod was sitting was one of great comfort by the nomads’ standards. The largest in the camp, it was over twenty feet square. The thick yak hair from which it had been woven kept out most of the wind and the night chill. The small, portable brazier in the corner, which had replaced the ancient practice of a central fire pit, heated the air to a moderate temperature, and the double layer of rugs, hand-knotted and also made from dyed yak hair, both insulated and added beauty.

  Over in the corner one of the tribal grandmothers was spinning her small prayer wheel and chanting softly to herself. Nearby, two other women were talking and laughing while they combed and spun from the ever-present basket of yak hair at their side. Ruoyin still sat next to her daughter and grandson, crooning a lullaby to the now sleeping infant.

  The men in the tent were clustered around MacLeod. They had accepted his decision to leave with the same good humor they had shown on his arrival, and now their conversation had turned to other matters, such as where next to move the herd. As they talked, the men’s hands worked ceaselessly, almost mindlessly, with the bowls and pestles in their laps. They were grinding natag, a powdery snuff made of cardamom, cloves, tobacco, and the fine ash of burned juniper.

  This grinding went on every evening; Duncan had quickly realized the slow, methodical action was more of a habit than the snuff itself. He had tried the natag once, out of good manners, when he had first come to live among the nomads. That once had been enough. But he enjoyed sitting among the men, watching the almost hypnotic movement of the pestle in the bowl and smelling the pungent aroma of the crushed spices.

  As he sat there, hearing their voices without really listening, it was like being transported back in time, back two hundred years to the Highlands of Scotland when his people had lived much this same way. Had the world really changed so much, he thought, or was it just him? Somewhere in the last two centuries, the wonder in him had died.

  With that thought, restlessness again gripped him. He stood abruptly and headed toward the thick hide-flap that served the tent as a door.

  “There is a Yeti-wind blowing, Duncan MacLeod,” the tribal leader called after him. “The Demon of the Snows will be prowling tonight. Do not go beyond the smoke of our fires.”

  “I will be careful, Zhi-yu,” Duncan assured him, not quite smiling at the old man’s words.

  In this, too, the Tibetans reminded Duncan of his own people. He could almost hear his mother’s voice telling him not to go out when the “goblin moon” was high. Goblins, witches, wood sprites, fairies—his childhood had been filled with stories of these creatures stealing human babies from their cradles and human souls from the unwary. The Christian Church had never quite banished the fears of ancient lore.

  Tibet, too, had its horde of demons the people feared. Some were creatures of spirit and fire; others walked the world in physical form, but were demons, nonetheless. The most terrifying of these was the Yeti. It was said to be eight feet tall, with long white fur and with teeth and claws powerful enough to rend man or beast. The nomads burned branches of a special bush to keep the demon at bay. This was “Yeti-wood,” their only fuel besides dried yak dung, and at night they did not go beyond the boundaries of their camp’s comforting blanket of smoke.

  In two hundred years of life and all of his travels, the only demons Duncan had seen were the human kind—and usually they had a sword in their hand.

  The night air did little to refresh MacLeod as he walked through the nomads’ camp. There was not much to see at this late hour. The large black tents were but deeper shadows rising on the darkened landscape. Prayer flags hung everywhere, squares of brightly colored cloth on which prayers had been printed, and during the day they fluttered gaily in the sun. But now they hung still, silent, and dark. The only light came from the sliver of the waning moon and from the stars, which here on the high Tibetan plateau looked almost near enough to reach out and grab by the handful.

  MacLeod pulled his long fur-lined coat more closely around himself and felt the comforting presence of his katana. Even here he would not go unarmed, though out of respect for the beliefs of his hosts he tried to make his weapon as unobtrusive as possible.

  He walked to a nearby boulder and sat, waiting for the silence of the night to enter and calm him again. But it was not really silent; as
he sat there, Duncan could hear the voices of nomads, laughing and talking in their extended families. This was the sweet and gentle sound of communal life. It was a life Duncan knew he could never be a part of, even if he stayed. He could never live and grow old among people he loved. That knowledge kept him moving and fed the restlessness he had lived with for so very long. That—and the Game.

  Even here he knew it would eventually find him. It always did. And with the Game came death. Mortals had their wars, their causes and laws; Immortals had their swords and the end was the same. More death. Always death.

  Duncan drew in a deep, cleansing breath and let it out again slowly. The cold of the night air was beginning to penetrate even through his thick coat. One more deep breath, then he started back toward the tent. He would stay here tonight and be on his way in the morning—to Lhasa to attend this ceremony that meant so much to his Tibetan friends, a final thank-you for their kindness. After that, Duncan gave a mental shrug. Who knows? he thought. Does it really matter?

  Many miles to the south, on the other side of the massive Himalayas, the kingdom of Nepal was a land of ancient splendors and ancient sorrows. It was a land of warrior-Kings and fierce, bloodthirsty gods, where a man’s fate was decided before his birth by the caste into which he was born.

  But three hundred years was enough to overcome any stigma of birth, if one was determined and ruthless enough. Nasiradeen Satish was both. No one but himself remembered his origins, the filth and squalor of his earliest years, the pain and soul-numbing poverty of being the only child of outcasts, untouchables.

  His parents had died of hunger and disease when he was only eight years old, and he had watched their maggot-ridden corpses decompose because no one cared enough to bury them, and he was too small to do the work himself. Even at that age, something in him had been fierce enough to stand against fate. He vowed that he would not die forgotten and alone. He would find a way out of the caste into which he had been born.

  Now, Nasiradeen Satish stood at the pinnacle of power. Over the centuries, from the time of his first death at age twenty-nine, he had fought and clawed and killed relentlessly to get here. He had “died” countless times; with each reawakening, he had renamed himself into a higher caste, gathering the strength and skill, the training and knowledge, and the wealth to back up his claims. He paid homage to the gods only when their will coincided with his own and otherwise ignored them, as he ignored or overrode the will of any who stood in his way.

  Nasiradeen was not the king—he was something far, far better. Nasiradeen was the leader of the Gurkhas, the royal army of Nepal. Ten thousand men vowed to fight and die at his command. Only the King had greater power, at least in name, and to Nasiradeen’s most elite troops, the five hundred men he had picked and trained himself, even the word of the King was not enough to alter their allegiance.

  He would soon use those troops to gain a kingdom.

  Tonight he stood alone on the rooftop of his grand home, a dark silhouette against the star-filled sky. At nearly six and a half feet, he would have been tall among any people, and among his own he was a giant. The turban on his head, like the clothes that covered his muscular body, was of the finest silk, with a large ruby burning at the cross-hatch of the wrappings. Other jewels sparkled on his restless hands, and a large brooch of diamond and sapphire pinned the cloak he wore against the cold. Boots of leather and lamb’s wool encased his feet like clouds of warmth.

  Below him, the whitewashed walls of his many rooms were hung with silk brocades and tapestries. Slaves waited to serve him on gold-washed plates and with jewel-encrusted goblets. Concubines were ready to give themselves for his pleasure. He had only to make a gesture, mention a desire, and it would be fulfilled.

  But his mind was on none of these things. In truth, they bored him. Tonight, standing in the cool, crisp air under the light of the waning moon, he faced north toward the mountains and beyond. Toward Tibet.

  His plan was already in place, and his spy, his instrument of betrayal, already living among the people in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The information he had already sent—maps of the city and of the roads, reports on population, water and food supplies—had helped Nasiradeen firm his plans.

  There would be more reports coming, as Nasiradeen readied his troops, and there was one, in particular, for which he was waiting. He must know when the Dalai Lama was again in Lhasa; no conquest of the country could be complete without the Dalai Lama’s death.

  That was the true purpose his spy served; information, yes, and to open the gates when the army arrived—but above all, to kill the Dalai Lama. It would not be long before together they would strike.

  Before the rains come again, Nasiradeen promised the night, the darkness, himself, Tibet will be mine.

  Chapter Four

  The entire tribe turned out to wave Duncan on his way as he prepared to ride off in the morning sunlight. They had provisioned him well, including a bundle of Yeti-wood to burn in his evening fires and a small tent in which to sleep, all loaded onto one of their sturdy mountain ponies. Zhi-yu himself gave Duncan directions on which trails to follow in order to reach Lhasa. Then the tribal leader enfolded him in a bearlike embrace.

  “Our farewells are only temporary, Duncan MacLeod,” he said, stepping back and smiling his merry smile. “We will meet again, if not in this life, then the next, when the Great Wheel spins.”

  Taking the reins of the pack pony in one hand, Duncan mounted his horse and rode away. As the sound of the nomads’ voices faded in the distance, so did Duncan’s smile. He thought of Zhi-yu’s parting words, and they brought him no comfort. Did reincarnation exist, as the Tibetans believed, governed by the spinning Wheel of Time? Did lives that touched once keep finding each other again and again? Duncan had no answers, but he knew that there were many people, mortal and Immortal alike, he had no desire to see again in any life.

  Perhaps for Immortals there was no returning. All spins of the Wheel gathered into one that could last through the millennia.

  What about an afterlife? he asked himself. He had believed in one once, and there were people—parents and friends, teachers, past loves—whom he would like to think of as happy somewhere, eternally beyond the touch of pain or sorrow. He would like to believe he would see them again.

  The silence in his heart was the only answer he needed. It seemed that all such simple and comforting beliefs had died with his mortality.

  * * *

  Duncan rode throughout the day in a solitude more profound than he had ever known. The eternal silence of the mountains. It was different than being alone in the hills of his homeland. There the wildlife rustled and twittered and the trees, gorses, and heather were in constant motion from the winds. It was different, too, from the solitude of the ocean, where whales and dolphins danced among the waves and the waters below teemed with life, where seabirds would light upon the sails to rest from their travels and the ship’s creaks and groans were overlaid by the voices of crew and passengers.

  Here, on the mountain road of Tibet, it was as if those things belonged to another world, a world of grosser needs and appetites. The only relief to his solitude was the sight of an occasional bird soaring high overhead, or even more rare, of a building off in the distance. Constructed on tall stone outcroppings and rising upward like part of the mountains that surrounded them. MacLeod was unsure whether they looked dreadful or wonderful in their isolation.

  The silence in which he traveled soon became filled with memories, and his own thoughts turned deafening. By the time to make evening camp, it felt as if his mind would surely burst from the cacophony of voices and the swirling kaleidoscope of faces from the past two hundred years.

  He found a sheltered spot that would protect himself and the horses from the worst of the night air. He needed to be busy; he did not want to think or to remember. Not yet. He set up his small tent and made a fire, smiling with the thought of Zhi-yu as he set a few pieces of Yeti-wood on the flames. Then he fed
the horses and melted snow for their water.

  His own dinner was no more elaborate—dried yak meat and strong, smoky tea. Duncan missed the fruits and vegetables of Europe. The thought brought a strong wave of memories of home. It was late May, and he knew that in Scotland the days were lengthening and turning warm and the nights were sweet with the fragrance of blooming heather.

  “It still feels like bloody winter here,” he muttered to himself, putting some more fuel on the fire and pulling his coat more tightly around his body. But in spite of the climate, MacLeod knew he did not want to be in Scotland.

  With thoughts of home, the floodgates of memories opened and refused to be shut again. If he could not stop the memories, he could at least control them, he thought grimly, fixing with determination on the happier times of his life. He saw again the faces of his mother and father, of the clan in which he had been raised—of Debra Campbell, the girl he had loved and once hoped to marry. It was all so long ago, and they were all dead now. He had seen so much death.

  It was true he had been raised to be a warrior, in the Highland clan where fighting was as much a part of life as eating, sleeping, or making love. He’d had a sword in his hand almost from the time he could walk, the wooden ones of childhood soon enough replaced by blades of forged steel. Highland weapons were not weapons of grace or style, but of power, and Duncan MacLeod’s strong arms had quickly learned to wield them well.

  Like the other Highland clans, the MacLeods were a proud people, fierce in their independence. They fought each other in duels of honor; they fought other clans out of blood-feuds or for the lands and possessions needed to survive; and sometimes, if the cause was great enough, the clans put aside their differences and fought against the common foe—the English.

  Though the Scots, as a people, fought most fiercely to keep their dreams alive, Duncan had no such illusions. In truth, he had few illusions anymore. He tried to fight only when he must and to choose his battles carefully, but too few other Immortals lived by the same code. When they came, he had to take their heads to survive. He was nearing his two hundredth birthday, and it felt as if killing and death were all his life held anymore.