Highlander - Donna Lettow [117]
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