The Last Rules
Verin Haley
[email protected]
http://www.geocities.com/lunalarea
Rated: PG-13
Summary: The differences between male and female.
Disclaimer: Not mine; I make no money from this.
Warning: incest references.
This story is unbeta'd. It kidnapped me driving home last night,
and I spent twenty minutes or so scrawling it into a notebook on the side
of the road. I'm not sure who the speaker is, or even if there is a
specific speaker. An old f'immie -- Ceirdwyn, perhaps. As always,
any critique is welcome.
The Last Rules
Immortals are an odd breed of human, similar to mortals but of necessity
different. What most people -- mortal and male Immortal alike -- never
stop to consider is that female Immortals are as different from men as mortals
are from us. We are often lumped together, but the fundamental truth
is we differ radically. We have different lives and different experiences.
Even different rules.
The first rule, the most important, the one that frames all others, is
that in the end, there can be only one. At some point, we must all
fight, and all but one must die. As we still live, we will live and
die by our rules.
The second rule, the one that qualifies the first, is that all fights
must be fought one person against one person. There is one winner,
one Quickening; remember this: there can be only one, because it is something
that we -- all of us -- can never forget. But not on holy ground, and
that is the third rule. Holy ground is sacrosanct. We do not fight;
we do not kill.
The last two rules are ours alone: you must not tell them; you must not
keep them. These are the women's rules.
There are fewer of us. We are physically weaker than men, and we
are trained less often to fight. We have a high mortality rate, especially
in our first century. Which is why, for all our hatred and occasional
vendettas, there is a solidarity among female Immortals. We know.
It is a grand mystery where Immortals "come from." Who are we born
to? Sometimes I want to shake every person who has ever asked that
in front of me and demand of him, "What do you think, fool? Where all
men come from." But they would not believe, and we would not want
them to.
Immortals are a long-lived race. Our birthrate is very low in the
first place. We simply should not need to replenish our numbers that
quickly. In addition to that, conception is almost nonexistent as
the female immune system attacks sperm as soon as it enters the body. It
is hard to get pregnant and harder still to stay pregnant, since Immortal
fetuses abort more often that not. Part of that is natural, I think,
but most of it is because if a mother takes a Quickening, the baby dies.
No second chances. While this is only a risk in the first five
months of the three year gestation period, it happens far more often than
not. There have even been a few rare instances where Immortal women
have accidentally taken Quickenings later in the pregnancies. Fortunately,
such abortions are almost unheard of, since they tend to kill the mother
with the child half the time. No surprise, really, because at that
point, the women is no longer Immortal.
Oh, the loss of Immortality does not last forever. The Quickening
simply turns inward, focusing on the child. In that time, the mother
ages. She can be killed. No few are, in childbirth. (Which
greatly decimates the already lower number of female Immortals.) But
while a woman is pregnant, she is "safe", at least from Immortals. She
no longer has the telling signs of her Immortality: no warning, no healing,
no immunity to death.
Most of us hate it. We are vulnerable to life far more so than we
ever are to a man's sword. Life is fickle. There are diseases;
accidents. We are not used to living with mortality. So many
of us die during that time that most Immortal women will do anything to avoid
it. Some refuse to willingly sleep with Immortal men; some bet on
our immune systems. (Mortal men, at least, are safe. Mortal
and Immortal, our two species are sterile together.) Honestly, what
woman would want to be pregnant? Not once she passes her first century
or her first pregnancy. The idea sounds appealing to most of us, at
first. For the most part, with few exceptions, we were raised to be
wives and mothers. We want children, but not once we learn the
consequences. There are always consequences.
Men have a vested interest in believing all Immortals are sterile. Who
would want to live with the knowledge that you must one day fight and kill
your child? (How many women have gone mad from that knowledge?) More,
why should they believe us? Women are "weak"; we will say and do anything
to avoid being killed. Even "lie" about being pregnant.
Still, most men would choose to know, I think. Women, however, have
a far stronger interest in keeping it a secret. Who among us wants
to be turned into a child farm for men who think they need children so badly?
Or men who would conceive a child only to kill it for its Quickening?
To be bred and bred and bred until we die of old age or birth? Who
among us can afford to keep and care for a child when, after birth, our Immortality
and the hunters return. We cannot even risk keeping our children,
knowing we must fight them and knowing they may get us killed.
Granted, some of us try to raise them, and some of us stay close, like
Cassandra stayed near her sons, but for most of us, the pain and the risk
is just too great. It is better not to know whether the man raping
you with a sword at your throat is your son.
So we endure it -- endure the loss, the pain, and the secrecy -- because
that is what we do. It's what we are good at. We live,
we survive, we mourn. What else can we do? Except pass the knowledge
-- woman to woman, teacher to student -- annd weep, because we may bend and
break the first two rules, but the last three are sacrosanct. Above
all else -- above woman, daughter, lover, teacher, student, and survivor --
we are Immortal, and there can be only one.
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