========================================================================= Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 07:09:11 -0500 Reply-To: Sandra1012@AOL.COM Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Sandra McDonald Subject: Lay Down Your Sword 4/8 Amanda crossed the courtyard. She no longer felt the breeze, or the sunlight, or the impending sense of the weather changing. She wasn't even sure those were her own legs, carrying her across the mud. The world ended and began with the blue eyes of Richie Ryan. "Richie," she said again, because all other words had left her. Beside him, Gregor gazed anxiously at the younger Immortal's face, not even breathing. "I'm sorry," Jason said clearly. "I don't know who that is." He spun away and left them standing in the mud. "But - " Amanda started, and moved as if to follow him. Gregor stopped her with a firm grasp on her arm. Connor caught up to them both, and watched Jason go into the shop without a look backwards. "I don't understand," Amanda said. "Actually," Connor said, "that went better than I expected." Inside the carpentry shop, Jason took out a bin and the pieces of plank that he'd already measured to build Brother Hans' bench. His hands were trembling, but he ignored them. He took out some sandpaper and began smoothing down the wood. Someone's silhouette fell across the doorway. He didn't even look up. "I'd like to be alone," he said simply. The silhouette, whether it was Connor or Gregor, went away. Jason's knees began to give way and his head swam. He couldn't have said if the weakness came from his fasting or from the woman's words outside, but he reached blindly for a stool and sat before he fell. He put his head down between his knees and took ragged breaths. He felt very cold, and very vulnerable, and very alone. The dots before his eyes vanished. He lifted his head and waited for the queasiness in his stomach to abate. Richie. The same name that the men had used when they came to see him. One had been slight and mild and mature, with eyes that spoke of eternity. The other had been taller, younger and stronger, a handsome man with a very faint accent and a face that seemed strangely familiar. Richie Ryan, they'd called him. Jason had never heard of him before in his entire life. Although, truth be told, it was just recently that he'd begun to realize he had no entire life. Nothing that dated previous to living at this monastery, specifically. Although in the mirror he guessed he was maybe nineteen or twenty years old, no childhood memories came to his mind no matter how hard he concentrated. He must have had a mother and father, maybe sisters and brothers, but they refused to show themselves. He must have grown up somewhere, but no images of homes came to him. He'd thought about asking Gregor or Connor, but then he would catch them staring at him with an odd intensity that warned him that maybe he didn't want to know the answers. Jason tried standing. He did well. He went to his bench and looked down at the wood for Hans' bench. For a moment he was staring instead at a workbench full of metal shapes and power tools, in a workshop filled with sunlight and glass, and the presence of a woman at his shoulder sent the hairs on the back of his neck standing straight up. "Richie," she said. He turned but he was alone, in a monastery carpentry shop, and Tessa was gone. Tessa. A name. His mother? Jason clung to the sense of her being with him, but couldn't envision her face or shape. The only sense that lingered was the aura of someone who loved him. Jason squeezed his eyes shut. They were wet, for some reason. He picked up the sandpaper and started rubbing. When his fingers started bleeding he stopped, and realized he'd lost track of what he was doing. Who was Richie Ryan? He went to the doorway of the shop. Brother Gustaf had taken Dom Stephan's place at the woodpile, and the sound of his ax splitting wood cracked like thunder. The woman Amanda had gone. Gregor and Connor were nowhere to be seen. Jason was as alone as he'd asked to be, and the solitude crashed down on him like an tidal wave. Everything at Gethsemani, he'd noted, swung between a balance of solidarity and solitude. The solidarity of men come to journey on unique paths in a community forged of common vision. The solitude of silence and a daily routine of choirs and prayers that drove him personally crazy with boredom. Except for his occasional and disturbing visitors, Jason found life at the monastery excruciatingly dull. In that dullness he'd been forced to turn inward, into contemplation of the world and God, but he'd always resisted examination of his own mind. He didn't know if he could bear to remember what his mind so desperately wanted to keep hidden from him. But they were there, the memories, held back behind a dam that was leaking dangerously around the edges. A dam threatening to crash inwards with what he knew would be tragic results. Terrified, Jason fled to the chapel. He knelt on the stone floor and clasped his hands together and prayed like he'd never prayed before. Not for memory. Not for solace. For strength, because he desperately needed some about now. A hand on his shoulder startled him from grayness. "Are you all right?" Minette asked, her young face framed with concern. "Jason?" He stared at her. Of all the people in the monastery, she was the one who so obviously loved him. She'd proven it to him, night after night, giving and loving and touching but never pushing him, never taking anything he didn't offer. But in the same frightening way that he could sometimes see into other people's minds, Jason knew that Minette represented some terrible danger. "Dom Stephan," he gasped. "I need Dom Stephan." Minette fled to fetch the abbot. When he came in a few minutes later, he knelt on the floor beside Jason and took his icy hands into his warm ones. Dom Stephan knew a personal crisis when he saw one. Sometimes brothers suffered collapses that called for more professional expertise than the order could provide, and had to be taken to the mental hospital in New Lucerne. Something about the look in Jason's eyes, the imploding grief, sent Dom Stephan's heart clubbing in his chest. "What is it?" he asked, trying to sound reassuring. "What is it, Jason?" "Why does God do it?" Jason demanded. "Why does he let it hurt?" "He hurts with you. He's here for you, if you let him be." Jason struggled away. He retreated, nearly tipping himself over the stalls. "He wasn't there!" he yelled at the abbot. He didn't know why he was yelling. His emotions and body and mind seemed beyond his rational control, flooding through with anger and grief that cut like dozens of swords into his flesh. "He didn't come!" Dom Stephan stood in alarm. "Jason, you must calm down." Jason pointed a shaking finger. "I was there, and you weren't. God wasn't. What they did to her - " Her who? Memories of a dark haired woman with eyes full of laughter, a woman he'd shared his bed and heart with, a woman he'd watch be dismembered as he screamed - Jason whirled, the sense of Connor and Gregor crashing in on him as they appeared in the doorway. Truths kept flooding into his mind, visions, memories, the woman, the name, the chaos. He backed instinctively away from the two Immortals who meant to help him, but could only inflict more and more harm. He tried to talk, but the words caught in his throat. Gregor said grimly to Connor, "I thought this might happen." "Jason," Connor said, taking a cautious step forward, "it's all right. We want to help." But he wasn't Jason. Didn't they know that? Couldn't they see? Jason had never been, and could never be again. He sucked in a ragged breath and shook his head as Connor tried to get closer. "It hurts too much," he whimpered. "Make it stop." "What hurts?" Connor asked. How could he explain to them the equivalent of a Quickening ripping open his mind, again and again? How is it that he even remembered what a Quickening was? The dark-haired woman's energy and light had taken him as their tormentors watched, ripped him into a thousand shreds of sorrow - Somewhere a bell rang. He whirled to face the pulpit, where a shaft of sudden sunlight cut through the narrow windows to illuminate the cross. But he wasn't in the monastery anymore, and what he saw came completely from inside. He saw Felicia Martins' face, and Tessa Noel's face, and Duncan MacLeod's face, and Darius' face. He saw the skylines of Paris and Seacouver and London and Rome, slicing into him like knives. He saw Angie, Sargeant Powell, Kristin Gilles, Kamir, Benny Carbassa, Joe Dawson, Anne Lindsey, Hugh Fitzcairn, Maurice. He spun out on racetrack into a tragic motorbike accident and fiery death, took bullets into his chest meant for Joe, beheaded Mako. He pulled Mark Roszka, Tessa's killer, from a vengeful death. He lopped off the heads of dozens of enemies. He lay with Felicia, her hand soft against his chest. He stood on the deck of barge in the middle of the Seine, on a beautiful spring day, and Amanda was smiling at him and calling him Richard. And the last thing he thought before the world blacked away was that he didn't want to be Richard Ryan. *** The temperature dropped twenty degrees in three hours, the sky sent down torrents of rain flecked with hail, visibility went down to a dozen feet. They hadn't gone back to their hotel room for fear of discovery, and weren't wearing proper hiking boots or clothes for a three thousand foot hike up the Alps. Cold and storms wouldn't kill them. But it made the journey a whole lot harder. MacLeod felt the mud start to slip out beneath his shoes. He groped for a hold on the sheer rockface beside the path, and then Holland's hand grabbed him and steady him. Stupid. She could have just as easily been sent tumbling down the slope with him, and then where would they be? But he bit down on his reproach, and swallowed past the lump of fear in his throat. He'd come so close to losing her. A few seconds later and he would have found Ris taking her Quickening. As it was, only a vague and persistent nagging doubt had persuaded him to follow Holland without her knowledge or awareness to the transit station. He had no reason to fear they'd been discovered by the SIDI, but he'd followed her just the same. For a few seconds he'd lost her in the maze of alleys, even though he could hear the clash of her steel and Ris' blade. As he turned frantically, trying to trace the sound, he'd caught sight of motion in the shadows and focused for the briefest second on the woman who stood there, dressed in white, her blond hair framing a face whose loveliness he'd never forgotten. Tessa. In the shadows, watching him. Then he'd blinked, or the sun had shifted, or the awareness of Holland's need had intruded, and there was nothing in the shadows but the shadows themselves. He raced towards them because in that direction lay Holland, and he'd been barely in time to keep Ris from severing her head. He should have killed Ris forever, damn the rules. On the mountain, Duncan MacLeod was sure that he should have killed Ris. But now was too late. Ris would have revived and gone on his merry way, slaughtering other Immortals with the same casual indolence. He'd nearly beaten Connor a few months ago. Holland had never stood a chance. She turned him now in the rain, her hair plastered to her head, her body fighting off shivers. "We're lost!" she told him over the wind and freezing rain. "Just keep going up," MacLeod told her. He grasped her for a tight embrace for a few seconds, trying to transfer his body heat to her. Immortals might not die from hypothermia, but they could be slowed by it. They might not die from frostbite, but they could suffer from it. "You know, MacLeod," she said awhile later, as the rain blinded them to the path ahead, "a girl really gets around the world with you." They stopped periodically for rest and to wait for the storm to lessen. The rest came fitfully, and the storm raged without any consideration whatsoever. The changing world climate which had sent massive hurricanes and typhoons across the planet worked its influence everywhere, MacLeod knew. The storm could last for days, and they'd be stuck right in the middle of it. Or it could end and clear into sunny blue skies within minutes, which would have made him very happy. For every step forward, wind and mud drove them back two. For every foothold gained, another washed away and nearly plummeted one or both of them into the sharp ravines below. Finally MacLeod pulled her into the half-shelter of an outcropping. Darkness was falling fast with the end of the day, and he had no idea how close they were to the top. Holland huddled against him, and clumsily rubbed his bare hands between hers. MacLeod could barely feel them. Water poured down on their heads but the rock cut down the whipping wind, and for that MacLeod was glad. He clenched Holland tightly against him. "If it doesn't clear," he said, "we'll have to go back down." "How?" she asked. "We can't see a thing." "It's easy," he said, with a confidence he didn't feel. "Just drop and die. Drop and die. We'll get down eventually." But he didn't like the plan. He didn't like the thought they could be separated by ravines or chasms, or the very nasty idea of accidental decapitation by a particularly sharp boulder. Holland buried her head in his shoulder. Then she twisted up and kissed him. "Thanks again," she said. "For saving my life." "All part of the service," he said wearily. The vision of Ris standing over her had burned its way like acid into his brain. "Will you marry me?" "What did you say?" MacLeod caught his breath. He hadn't meant to say the words. He didn't know why they'd picked this moment to slip out, after nearly fifty years of living together. "I said," he repeated cautiously, "will you marry me?" Holland laughed. "In the middle of a storm, on the side of a mountain, with who knows what ahead of us, a killer probably behind us, and you decide to propose?" "Does that mean 'no'?" he asked. She kissed him on the mouth. Hard. Her tongue met his. After several minutes, she broke away. "It means, ask me at the top," she said, and he imagined she was grinning. MacLeod had some choice words to say about that, but the sense of another Immortal approaching cut the sound off in his throat. It was pitch black outside, and he couldn't see anything. But he could feel someone. Vis, probably, following them. "Stay here," he whispered. "Duncan, how can you fight if you can't see?" she demanded. "If I can't see, he can't see," MacLeod said, disengaging himself from her and the rocks. He was lying and he knew it. Vis might be equipped with night vision goggles. He might have a robot aid. He might even have an old-fashioned flashlight. MacLeod stood in the wind and rain and darkness, his sword ready to slice out on instinct, if need be. "Who's there?" he called. The storm answered, with more water, more rain, and hail that felt like whirling glass. The wind howled like a banshee. MacLeod stood poised at the center of all the natural power of the world - battered and soaked by it, but part of it, part of the world taking a Quickening of its own. Far away, too faint to be real, he thought he heard a scream that arched across the roof of the world. "I'm Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod!" he shouted to the elements. "Who are you?" Abruptly a voice spoke at his shoulder. "Some clan, different vintage," Connor said. "Really, Duncan, there's no need to shout." *** The bells of Vespers woke him. He was lying in bed in his own room, under thick and warming coverlet. The sky had turned to furious rain. In a short time it would be dusk. Gregor was praying at the foot of the bed, although there really was no need for that. "How do you feel?" Gregor asked. "Fine," he answered, although he didn't really know how he felt. They'd taken his shoes but left his clothes on, and he bent to remedy the situation. Gregor asked, "Where are you going?" "I have to leave," he said. He felt empty and tired, but knew his duty. Something was calling to him, and although he couldn't be sure if it came from outside his head or inside his chest, it was a true summons all the same. Gregor moved to stop him from leaving the room. "Jason, you can't." So it wasn't obvious. He took Gregor's hand in his own, and squeezed it reassuringly. "I have to. Trust me, Gregor Powers. I can't be free if you keep me imprisoned here." Gregor's eyes filled with tears. Maybe he sensed the truth from the use of his full name, or from the look in the younger Immortal's eyes. Whatever it was, he crossed himself and stood aside. He went downstairs. The brothers were still at choir. Their voices, rising in Latin, felt like gentle caresses against his chest. He'd never learned Latin, although Darius had once tried to instruct him the basics. He'd been too impatient to learn. He'd been young, in France, in love with everything new and exciting, and Tessa and Duncan were teaching him about the world through their love for it and for each other. The world he was now prepared to abandon. Out of the building, out through the courtyard, out past the gate he went. The wind and rain immediately ripped into his clothing, but he didn't feel it. The summons was the only thing that mattered, and if the time ever came for discomfort it would come later, after he'd reckoned with the memories that seemed too vibrant and too large and too painful to ever be kept in the confines of one mind. Richie Ryan, who'd once been Jason Sanger, went out into the storm to make his decision. end of part four ****************************************************************************** Evil Boss: "Maybe, when this is all done with, they'll even name a continent after you." Julia Heller: "Yeah. They can call it Hell." - Earth 2 Earth 2 convention April 19-21, New Mexico! But I'd rather go to SydniCon