Highlander - Donna Lettow [36]
“Beta testing. If we can survive St. Catherine’s fifth grade, we can survive anything. We’ve had a minor disaster in here, but nothing that a rigorous application of glue couldn’t fix.” Constantine reached into the open case and pulled out a small figurine. He turned toward MacLeod, holding the figurine up against his own face. “Not a very good likeness, don’t you think?”
“That’s you?”
“Unfortunately. Not that I told that to the model makers, of course.” He gestured expansively over the architectural model in front of him. “Behold Jerusalem’s Second Temple, King Herod’s greatest masterpiece.” The Temple Mount was encircled by a wall of massive stones—an engineering marvel, the wall in some places twenty times higher than the figurines representing people—and paved in stone. The Temple itself was of gleaming marble highlighted in gold. Against the splendid backdrop of the Temple, the figurines of the Roman conquerors were painted a ghostly gray. “And behold Rome’s finest,” he continued, placing the figure he called his own discreetly behind and to the left of the commanders. “Fools, every last one of them.”
Constantine tapped a finger against a wall labeled Court of the Gentiles and seemed pleased when nothing moved. “That should hold it.” He picked up one end of the glass lid, and MacLeod helped him lower it into place on top of the case. “It’s amazing what havoc the average ten-year-old can wreak.”
“This,” MacLeod indicated the Temple model, “isn’t from memory, is it?”
Constantine laughed. “Oh, no, no, no. Based on the most sound archaeological evidence available. Archaeologists have very set ideas about what these sites looked like and where everything was. Far be it from me to rock their boat with the unprovable truth. If the great minds of archaeology want to insist that some hole in the ground is a swimming pool, then it’s a swimming pool. Let them have their fun.”
After the Temple was safely back behind glass, MacLeod handed Constantine his box. “Paul Karros’s sword, per request.”
Setting the box on the top of the Temple’s display case, Constantine opened it and withdrew the short sword, admiring the way it caught the light as he sliced it through the air in a short combination pass. “Oh, that is nice.” His face lit with the pleasure of a fine blade in his hands and he felt a sense of power tingle through his body. God, how he missed it sometimes, locked away among his books and papers. He lunged and slashed, and the sword danced in the light.
“Marcus, the children,” MacLeod warned quietly as a couple of St. Catherine’s finest dashed past the doorway.
Constantine put the sword back in the box with obvious regret. “I’ll indulge some other time. Come, we’ll put it in its case, so I won’t be tempted.”
MacLeod looked at the delicate Temple model once again, remembering his visits to Jerusalem. The first had been nearly 250 years before, in those dark, tortured years after the Scottish failure at Culloden. He’d fled Scotland like a banshee, trying to escape the ghosts of his people and the demons in his own mind. For a time he’d thought perhaps the answers would lie in the Holy Land. Instead he’d found a land in many ways like his beloved Scotland, occupied by invader after invader, downtrodden, her holy places in neglect and decay. Even then, only a fragment of the Western wall remained of what was once Herod’s magnificent temple. It was hard for him to envision this splendid edifice atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock—the center of the world, to Islam—had already stood for a thousand years when MacLeod saw it for the first time. “Marcus, you’ve been around…”
“That, my dear man, is an understatement.”
“You know what I mean. What’s your take on Israel?” Constantine laughed. “Much more favorable since the invention of air-conditioning, I’ll tell you.” He saw MacLeod’s earnest look and took the question a little more seriously. “Two hard lessons learned from four of the worst years of my life. First, always remember