Chapter Eight
Duncan rose early the next day. Sleep had been hard to come by, so an early exit from bed was easily accomplished. Leaving his hair down and his shirt off, he drank a little orange juice before heading quietly down to the dojo.
Once there, he did some light stretching and warming up, preparing his mind and body for the real exercise he was there to do. Throughout this warm-up time, his mind was carefully blank, busy with white noise, concentrating only on the feeling, the motion, the proper use of each muscle group.
Satisfied that he was ready, he lifted the katana and began his kata.
The forms were more than automatic; they were a part of him, a part of who he was and how he was. They not only required no thought to perform, they actually made clearer thought possible, which was why he so often turned to them when he was deeply troubled. Usually he would find better focus doing kata without the sword, but today he felt the need to swing the steel as he thought.
Moving, stepping, flexing silently in the deserted dojo – the kata took on a life all their own, liberating his mind from his body, and the journey began.
Well, it tried to begin. Every journey begins with a single step, but not when both feet are glued to the floor. The matters he was there to deal with seemed mired in mud, difficult to lift to the surface. There were obstacles in the way, impediments to the consideration he needed so desperately to do. Doubly frustrating was the knowledge that he had certainly planted those obstacles himself.
Becoming aware that his motions had grown tenser and less controlled, Duncan concentrated on relaxing his muscles and slowing his breathing. When he felt the forms taking over again, he returned to the problem with a different approach.
He should begin by identifying what he was feeling. Allowing his mind to bathe in the slow, steady river of physical movement, he waited for the first emotion to swim toward his consciousness. It came fast and hard and with little warning, and he spent some more energy slowing the slashing of the sword and relaxing his grip on the hilt, never halting the smooth rhythm of the kata.
Anger, then, would seem to be the dominant emotion. Little point in questioning himself about the object of that anger.
The overt thought of Methos triggered another spate of agitation, which he controlled this time with less effort. Hell, yes, he was angry with the old immortal. His sense of betrayal was almost overwhelming. Technically, he knew that Methos had never lied to him about this part of his past, but it was difficult to justify leaving something of this magnitude unspoken.
True, it was not the way of the world's oldest immortal to spontaneously share information about his past. But the Highlander couldn't accept that his "friend" had been harboring a secret so horrendous and never even given clues, to perhaps prepare Duncan for the day when he was ready to share this part of his past. This led naturally to the possibility that Methos had planned never to confide this particular secret; certainly he would not have done so now, were his back not against the wall. It was hard to accept that Methos wouldn't have trusted him with this knowledge, in the face of the bond that the two of them shared. Or that Duncan had thought they shared.
This last thought brought another rush of anger and, forcing himself to remain disciplined and focused physically, he was able to identify the source: If he had been so misled by Methos as to be completely unaware of the old man's true capacity for violence and mayhem, how could Duncan know what elements of their friendship were real and what parts were simply vapor, convenient fictional constructs that Methos had erected to crowd the landscape of his character and avoid exposure? Perhaps their very friendship was a cover, a façade of respectability behind which to hide an unspeakable period in his life.
The one undeniable truth of the situation was that he had made a friend, a friend who'd become important to him, and that friend had now turned out have once been a monster.
He winced, not at the line of thought but because he had nicked his arm. Astonished, he stared at the cut – more than a nick, after all – and watched blood ooze out and trickle along his arm and to the floor. When had an errant blade last injured him during kata?
Grabbing a white towel from a shelf, he mopped up the blood from the floor, his sword, and his now-healed arm, then resumed his kata. Soon his thoughts returned to his previous perception of Methos as a non-violent, even rather harmless friend. How could Duncan trust his own judgment about anyone now, when it had been proven so egregiously unreliable?
The whisper of the katana as it glided through the early morning darkness in the dojo belied its lethal potential should anything more substantial wander into its path.
Yes, Duncan acknowledged, it was perhaps the discovery of his own faulty appraisal of Methos that cut him most deeply. To survive as an immortal who strives to stay out of the Game, one must learn to assess other immortals – their desires, their needs, their ambitions and true intentions – thoroughly and accurately. While Duncan had never claimed to know exactly what made Methos tick, he had until now been pretty sure that power, cruelty, and killing were things he not only didn't crave, but actively shunned.
To learn now that the man had been a part of the most vicious and reviled instruments of death and destruction the ancient world had ever known was to learn that Duncan's ability to judge people was considerably less dependable than he had believed it to be.
Smoothly, he continued his sinuous, almost hypnotic exercises, severing imaginary ties with his ever-fluid sword.
Pictures filled his mind now, imagined versions of the slaughtering of innocent villagers and families, furnished with some details by Cassandra's impassioned account of the Horsemen raiding her desert camp. But these pictures were soon displaced by his own real memories of the Texas homesteaders butchered by the man he had then known as Melvin Koren. He well remembered the savagery displayed by "Koren" and his gang of run-of-the-mill hoodlums. It wasn't much of a stretch to mentally amplify the carnage by a factor of four.
Imagining Methos in the company of such people had at first been painful, something he recoiled from. Now it activated within him a depth of rage he hadn't realized he possessed. Methos had been one of the four, just like Kronos. Duncan no longer had trouble seeing the charming, boyish face of his "friend" and placing it within the massacre scene he imagined from Cassandra's description – only now, the ready, sly, always ironic grin was lent a sinister glow by the grisly context.
Duncan's katana sliced again and again into the growing morning light, whispering of wrongs to be righted and pain avenged.
His exercise was nearly complete. Soon, Methos would be here to discuss the details of the contest.