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They say that there are no child Immortals. They say that those who die young die soon. They say that children are too weak for the Game, too weak to live.
Part of this is true.
No one knows when the Game began. All any Immortal knows is that it is. It began with the beginning of time, perhaps when humans were few and immortals fewer and all of them lived in the same place. Maybe the Game reflects the truth, a true future and a true Gathering and a true winner, all neatly wrapped up at the end like a particularly gruesome fairy tale. Or perhaps it is just a reflection of the fact that men who cannot die have nothing better to do than to kill each other.
New Immortals were, and perhaps still are, mostly warriors. No one knows how many pre-Immortals live and die their perfectly ordinary human lives without ever realizing that a sword stroke or a gunshot to the heart could have them live forever. Immortality doesn’t come about after death from sickness or old age. It has to be violent, either accidental or on purpose. So naturally Immortals are mostly warriors. Men will fight because it is what they know and women will fight because they refused to be killed but children…
Children do not fall in battle. Men fight wars, and some women do too, and many more are prepared to defend their homes if it comes to it. But children do not fall in battle. They die of foolishness and carelessness, their own and their parents’, and the die of the simple unpredictable harshness of the natural world, and sometimes, after the defense of their fathers has failed, and so has the desperate last stand of their mothers, they fall to slaughter.
Perhaps that in itself accounts for the difference. Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it all leads back to the fact that the grown-ups had Methos, the Horsemen, gods and monsters, but the children had Mara.
Mara was born somewhere she can’t point to on a map at a time she’s lost track of. She died falling down a dried up well on her ninth birthday, and when her parents hauled her out they were shocked and afraid but mostly just incredibly happy that she was alive, so perhaps all the important things have their start in them.
She lived in peace for a long time, she never grew up, but she did the work of children, she was a daughter to her parents and an older sister to all the children, and she learned and grew in her heart if not her body. She watched her parents grow old and the children grow up, and their children, and she became a sort of wise woman whom people came to for advice and counsel. Her people were nomads who did not go near cities nor often meet strangers, and so she did not know what she was, only that she lived, and she did not demand answers. But in time, all good things must come to an end.
A man came, and his sword flashed in the desert sun. His quarrel was with her and only her, and so she ran, out into the dry wilderness where she had guided her people for years and years. She knew this land like her own heartbeat, and so she ran over difficult ways where the sun beat down and the ground was treacherous and there was no safe water to be found, and he died before she did. But she went farther than she had ever been before, and lost him from her people, so that neither of them could find them again. Then she trudged on and on, alone and without defense, and she died too many times to count, until at last she came to a city.
Cities then were just beginning, but they were like cities in many times and many places, full of strangeness and bustling anonymity and street children.
She found it easy enough to lose herself there, living in the nooks and crannies that parentless children find for themselves. She lived as street children live, by begging and petty theft when the opportunity arose, and running, always running. And as she was old and clever and her heart was kind, she soon gathered other children around her, and taught them what she could, and protected them as she was able, and shared with them what she had. And it became known in that city that if you are ever in trouble or in need of help, go first to Mara.
But a city is a place of many people, and where there are many people there are many immortals also. And further, immortals are travelers by nature and necessity, and whether they are running from their fellows or seeking them out, most in the end find their way to cities.
So it was not long before hunters came seeking a weak head. But Mara was quick, and she was clever, and she knew the streets as only street children do, and she knew how to use her smallness take her places grown-ups could not fit and disappear. So she ran and she ran and she ran.
But eventually she was known to the immortals of that city, a bounty that was difficult but not dangerous, and she could not run forever. So she left that city and came to another, and the pattern repeated. She kept her head down and her feet swift, and did what she had to to survive while she did what she could to be kind.
She had lived for hundreds of years like this when she first met another child immortal. She might have met others before, but she had made it her habit to run at the first hint of a buzz. But his had felt brand-new-young as though freshly dead, and so she risked investigating.
He was almost six then, and he is dead now, but he lived to be over a thousand, and that is more than enough for anyone.
They say that there are no child Immortals, that those who die young die soon. They say that children are too weak for the Game and too weak to live.
Part of this is true.
Most children are not like Mara, with parents who love and teach them as long as they live, isolated enough that they need not meet another immortal until they are old and canny themselves. Most children, left to their own without help or guidance, soon die for good.
And so, Mara, who had learned to survive, had learned to hide and never forgotten to care, sought out child immortals. It was hard in those days, when travel was slow and hard, and news went nowhere. Mara simply searched and hoped for the best. She took risks, running towards immortals instead of away, but she knew how to fight in a pinch now, despite her small size and strength and lack of sword, she knew how to get away, and no one can fight what they cannot see, and she was best at not being seen. Perhaps fate was with her, because everywhere she went she found children.
Those she found she taught and guided. She shared all she knew and she was always learning. She taught them how to run and how to hide and how to survive on their own. But most of all she taught them to look out for each other, and each of those children found more children and taught them as they had been taught.
Grown-ups play the Game. They fight for honor or self-preservation or power or simply the fun of it. But children have no time for games. They keep their heads down and their feet quick and they stand hand in hand to help each other. Because this is what they must do to survive, because this is how they were taught.