Highlander - Donna Lettow [10]
“We of all people know that power doesn’t guarantee Immortality, Duncan.” MacLeod nodded in agreement. “Which is, in fact, part of the point of my new exhibition.”
“I thought you must have an agenda, Marcus. It’s not like you to glorify Rome like this.”
“Ah, no, no, my friend, just the opposite. Consider this exhibition as a tribute to the assimilated. A memorial to the societies that were lost to history when the Romans came through like a giant steamroller, flattened their native cultures, carried off their best and brightest, and turned everyone into second-class Romans.” Constantine stopped at one display in the center of the next section of walkway. As far as MacLeod could tell, it was a waist-high circular railing about six feet in diameter that enclosed nothing but floor. Constantine fit his key into a control box under the railing and turned it. “Watch,” he said.
Suddenly, a round column of light appeared in the center of the enclosure, filling the space from floor to ceiling. MacLeod watched, waiting for something more to happen. After a moment, he prompted, “And … ?”
“Patience,” Constantine counseled, looking more than a little like a wizard conjuring a spirit as he gestured at the light. “It takes a moment for it to warm up.”
MacLeod saw a word begin to spiral down the column of light. Etruscan. “Hologram?” he asked, and Constantine nodded. Then there were more words. Samnite, Umbrian, Carthaginian, Sardinian. Faster. MacLeod realized he was watching a roll call of the assimilated. The technology fascinated him. Corsican, Corinthian, Syrian, Numidian, Celtiberian, Cimbri, Teuton, Egyptian. Like in a whirlwind, the names of vanquished peoples spun down from the ceiling, sucked into the floor. Samaritan, Dacian, Thracian, Illyrian, Macedonian, Epirote, Parthian, Helvetii. Faster and faster the vortex spun, the names descending fast and furious—Caledonian Maeatae Arverni Senones Nervii Galatian—so fast MacLeod could no longer read every one, could only pick out random cultures before they disappeared without a trace. Insubrian, Gaesatae, Boii, Iberian, Belgae, Suebi, Iceni, Parisii.
Finally the last name was consumed by the floor and all that remained was the column of light. Constantine turned off his new toy. MacLeod shook his head in wonder, and asked, “Whatever happened to the days when museums were places with dusty relics in big oak cases?”
“Just keeping up with the times, Duncan—we have to compete with EuroDisney now.” He gestured for MacLeod to follow him into the next room of the carefully orchestrated exhibition. “We still keep a couple of cases around, for purists like yourself.” A Plexiglas case taller than MacLeod filled the center of the cubicle, accessible from all sides. On a nearly transparent pedestal, parallel to the floor, rested an Egyptian sarcophagus. Above it, apparently hovering as if by magic, several smaller artifacts were suspended by fishing line. The arrangement seemed a little off, a large space left empty on the right side of the display, but MacLeod’s attention was drawn to the sarcophagus.
“Marcus, that’s Nefertiri’s.” MacLeod remembered the day he’d freed the handmaiden of Cleopatra from her two-thousand-year imprisonment in that sarcophagus. He also remembered the day he’d been forced to kill her.
“I guess you might call it a little selfish, wanting to get a curator’s exclusive, but I called in a few favors from some of our kind. I wanted to bring a few pieces to the public that had never been on exhibit before. Pieces like this drinking horn from my old friend Bato the Illyrian”—he pointed out a translucent vessel carved from alabaster—“some rare pieces that could exemplify the beauty and sophistication of one of the cultures we destroyed or that in some way would symbolize the brutality we were capable of.”
MacLeod had raised an eyebrow at Constantine’s “we.” Since