Highlander - Donna Lettow [70]
MacLeod Looked around for his shirt. “What about Rivka?” He found it in a heap behind the munitions crate. He shook it out and slipped it on.
“She’ll get over it. Or she won’t. She’s just a kid. Kids’ dreams get shattered all the time, and they survive it. She will, too.”
But sometimes dreams are all you have to get you through, MacLeod thought. But he knew Avram was right, they had more urgent things to worry about than the hurt feelings of a twelve-year-old. In less than two hours, the army of the devil would be massing outside the gates.
He and Avram passed the intervening time in relative silence, each preparing for the coming struggle in his own way. Back in the Highlands, the warrior MacLeods would prepare for battle with glad hearts, with boisterous songs and loud war cries, with the clanging of steel to bolster their courage and throw fear into the hearts of their enemies. A glorious sight it would be, the clans arrayed for battle, confident in their bravery, sure in their victory, raising a ruckus that could wake the dead. But here, so far from the green fields of Scotland, victory was far from sure. And it was a very long time since the prospect of war had gladdened MacLeod’s heart.
May-Ling Shen, who had helped open the door to the Eastern philosophies to him, had taught him another way to prepare—the kata. Visualizing the opponent, practicing defense and attack over and over first in the mind, then again on the practice floor, calmed and readied the spirit for battle. But that required an adversary whose method of attack could be known, whose moves could be predicted, and who would fight honorably. The evil facing them was none of those.
In the end, after physically checking his weapons a dozen times, making sure they were cleaned and armed, ensuring that their makeshift incendiary devices were free of cracks and leaks, and then making sure again, he resorted to a battle-preparedness technique centuries older than himself—vigil. He sat in silence under the stars, unmoving under the nearly full moon that ushered in the Passover, and opened his heart and his mind … to God, to the universe, to whatever source whence enlightenment might come. But none came.
After checking and double-checking the detonator and wires that led to the store of explosives buried beneath the Gesia Street gate, Avram prepared himself in a similar fashion. But where MacLeod had been able to empty his mind, Avram’s was full of thoughts and images he couldn’t erase. The light fading from his beloved Deborah’s eyes as she accepted death at his hands over enslavement to a Roman master on another Passover eve. The defiance in the face of his teacher and friend Rabbi Isaac as he offered his mortal life to the sword of the Crusaders storming the archbishop’s palace in Mainz, a place that should have been sanctuary for all. And the children torn from their mothers’ arms in the streets of Warsaw, the mothers sent to certain death in the ovens of Treblinka, their squalling children to God only knew where.
His nostrils filled with the smoldering ruin that was once the tiny Russian shtetl of Onyetka, and he choked from the memory. He could hear the agonized screams of those consumed by flames as the Great Temple fell around them, their escape blocked by the mighty Roman legion. Slowly, he began to take hold of the memories, to focus. Painstakingly, he folded them together in his mind, building a foundation. And on that foundation of anger and hate and pain, Avram carefully centered himself. When he finished, he was ready to face the enemy. He was more than ready.
MacLeod spotted the shadows at a couple of minutes past four. A truck passing outside near the Wall, stopping every fifty yards or so to discharge