Highlander - Donna Lettow [40]
Avram, breathing hard, glared at the Roman with hate in his eyes, but did not speak.
“What is your name?” Constantine asked again, less gently. Damn these Jews! They all knew Latin well enough, the dogs, but they would not dignify it with a response. “Tell me your name!” he demanded.
Avram’s only response was to spit in the Roman’s face.
Constantine grabbed the Jew viciously by the length of his hair. Marcus Constantine tolerated such insubordination from no man! He drew a fist back to strike—then hesitated. Angrily, he pushed the youth away from him and took a step back. This was a student, he reminded himself, not an interrogation. He would need a different tactic.
He knew no Aramaic, rarely bothered to learn the native languages of the subjugated peoples because they were so quickly supplanted by Latin. But the young Jew refused to respond to Latin. A compromise: “Athanatos, “ he said in Greek. “You are Immortal, you cannot die.” The Jewish scholars all seemed to know some Greek, and the robes of the dead old man on the floor proclaimed him a scholar. With luck, his boy was one as well. “We are alike, you and I. We are Immortal. I am Marcus Constantine, and I’ve come to help you.”
Avram sat back on his heels, stunned, no longer struggling against his bonds. “I cannot die?” he repeated, wary. “Never?”
There were terms and conditions they would get into later, but for the moment that would suffice. “Never,” Constantine confirmed. “You’ve seen so yourself.” He cut Avram’s bonds with the iron knife, and Avram scrambled away from him, moving to the woman’s by.
Avram pulled the veil from Deborah’s head and gazed longingly at her lifeless face. “Never?” he asked again, his voice filled with anguish.
“Accept the gift, Jew. We are blessed by the gods. We will live forever—Immortal.”
“Blessed? I’m cursed, don’t you see? Cursed by God.” He clutched Deborah’s body tightly to his own. “God in Heaven, what have I done to you to deserve this?” He rocked her cold body back and forth, back and forth, tears welling in his eyes. “Deborah!” he bellowed in a voice he hoped would crack Heaven. “Deborah!”
Paris: The Present
“I don’t think Avram ever got over Deborah. How he’d lost her. How he’d betrayed her. And how he’d betrayed his God. Over and over, I heard about how he’d betrayed God by not dying. I remember thinking at the time what a demanding God that young man had. But now I know it’s Avram who’s the demanding one.” Constantine paused a moment, then continued. “I took Avram and we left Judaea not long after. I’ve never been back. And I’ve never been able to get the images of Masada out of my head.”
“I don’t know how anyone could,” MacLeod concurred.
Constantine picked up the sword box and led the way out of the Temple room. “But that’s not actually what you were asking about, was it? You wanted to know about Israel now, not Israel then.”
MacLeod followed him back through the exhibit. “Don’t you have to understand one to understand the other?”
“If more people realized that, Duncan, maybe we wouldn’t still be debating the future of Palestine two thousand years later.”
A flock of wayward children came running down the aisle, screaming and laughing. MacLeod dodged out of their way and they swirled around Constantine like an ocean wave engulfing a rock. Behind them, a harried teacher’s aide called out, “Stop! It’s time to leave.” But the children paid her no mind as they pushed past Constantine toward the next exhibit.
“FREEZE!”
And the voice that had commanded a hundred generations of fighting men to his will reverberated through the marble hall like the voice of God. The children froze in their tracks, silenced by the general’s order.
With a grateful look, the teacher’s aide gathered her charges. “Come, the bus is waiting,” she told them, and they followed her toward the exit in a quiet and orderly fashion.
Constantine shrugged