Date: Sun, 14 May 1995 22:36:48 -0700 Reply-To: Noah Johnson Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Noah Johnson Subject: Quis Custodiet 1/1 (Long) QUIS CUSTODIET By Noah Johnson Oregon Territory, 1846 To the Indians, he was Sundown. The white men called him Jack. He got along well enough with both groups. He was a half-breed Indian, but they were common enough in that day and age. There was nothing about him that would make anyone look twice, and he had a polite, disarming, and forgettable manner. That was why the Watchers had recruited him. He'd been living with his father's tribe, a group of Cherokee that had more or less settled in what would later become Washington state. There was a man among the tribe, a medicine man named Iron Horse. The very oldest man in the village could remember when he was new at the job, but to everyone else, he was like the mountains and the sky; he had always been there. Sundown was the man in the tribe charged with trading with the whites, because of his own white blood. On one of his journeys into the territorial outpost, he noticed a man eyeing him strangely. Sundown had only come to talk with the beaver hunters and see what was being offered in exchange for pelts, but this man, a white man who wore spectacles and a bowler hat, kept following him. Finally the man came right up to Sundown and offered to buy him a drink and tell him a story. The drink was good, and the man, whose name turned out to be Edmund Chance, was friendly, but the story was incredible. "Jack," asked Chance, "You know that medicine man in your tribe? Iron Horse? About how old would you say he is?" Jack had shrugged. "I don't know. He's been medicine man since I can remember." "He doesn't ever seem to get any older, does he?" "Now that you mention it, no. What are you getting at, Mr. Chance?" "According to what I've been able to find out, your Mr. Iron Horse is roundabout one hundred and twenty years old." said Chance with a bit of a smile, before draining his drink. Jack just laughed. "Aw, you must have some kind of mistake, sir. I know Iron Horse, and he's not near that old." The man in the spectacles held up an admonitory finger. "Not quite, my friend. He doesn't _look_ one hundred and twenty. He doesn't look a day over forty. He hasn't aged for eighty years, give or take a few." "How can a man live so long and not age?" Jack asked, confused. "I know he has some strong medicine, but I don't think he could make himself..." "...Immortal? No, Mr. Sundown, he did not make himself Immortal. He was born that way. A few times in a generation, someone is. They live, and then they die, and then they rise up again, this time to live forever. Iron Horse is one of these men, though I don't know how much he knows about it himself. Bartender, another gin for my friend." "You're insane, Mr. Chance." said Sundown, a little afraid of this polite, matter-of-fact man who talked about living forever. "No, Jack, I'm as sane as you. What I tell you is only God's honest truth." Chance held up his left wrist. There was a blue tattoo with a curious emblem on it. "For thousands of years, the Watchers have existed. Since there have been Immortals, we have been there. Hiding in the shadows, keeping one careful eye on those rare, fantastic few who cannot die." "I've never heard of you." Jack said guardedly. "Nobody has. We are as much a secret as the Immortals themselves. Our mission is the truth. In England in the Dark Ages, they called them Druids, or faeries. During the Inquisition, they were branded as witches. A hundred civilizations have known their subtle presence, and every name for them is different. Even your own people must have their legends of people who live without dying, or rise from a fatal wound unharmed." Sundown nodded slowly. The legends did exist. "Every tale told about them cloaks the truth in another layer of myth, or exaggeration, or religious nonsense. The purpose of the Watchers is to make certain that no matter what, the truth about these incredible beings survives." Chance finished dramatically. Sundown waited a moment before speaking. Then, "You say no one knows about you. Then why are you telling me all of these tales?" "We want you to be one of us, Jack. We want you to watch Iron Horse. We know almost nothing about him, but you, you're a member of his tribe. You can learn everything about him. You can record his life's story forever." Chance's eyes grew bright as he spoke. Jack was silent for some time. "All right." he decided finally. It was late the next day before he started the return journey to his village, his head still ringing with new ideas, and filled with words like "Quickening" and "the Game." Absently, Sundown rubbed at the tattoo on his wrist. It was still sore, but he liked it. It made him part of something immense, and eternal, and secret. For the rest of his life, he was marked as a Watcher. He entered his village tentatively, half-afraid that those in it would denounce him as a spy. He shook his head, trying to clear that image out of it. He was not a spy. A spy came to betray. He came to record. The chief, Thunderhead, came out to greet him, asking what had kept him so long. Sundown answered that he had been making new friends. He began the next day, asking the oldest man in the village if he remembered when Iron Horse had first become their medicine man. "I remember, Sundown, I remember." Burning Lake smiled toothlessly. "It was the night of the worst thunderstorm these old eyes have ever seen. I couldn't have been more than a tiny boy at the time, but I recall it clearly. The lightning tore across the sky every time you looked up, and in the distance we could see that the forest had caught fire. I saw treetops burst into flame, and then the rain would extinguish them. To this day there is a split pine not far from here that was split on that night. "I was outside watching the storm. My mother was crying at me to stay inside, not be killed, but when has death ever been real to the young? I, and the others who were out of doors at the time, saw an amazing thing. A bolt of lightning came down almost inside the village, striking an oak, which exploded in a flash of light and sound. It seemed as though Iron Horse walked from the center of that explosion, medicine satchel hanging from his shoulder, war club in one hand, tobacco pipe in the other, as he has always been. He stepped into the village, and it seems that he was a member of the tribe in that instant. No one ever questioned his right to be here, or his position as medicine man. "Since that night, he's been here. I suppose it must be his medicine that keeps him young while men like me just get older and older. But what makes you ask, Sundown?" Sundown smiled the smile that said he could be trusted, since he was no one of any great importance. "Oh, I was just wondering about him. You know the funny ideas young men get sometimes." Later, he struck up a friendship with Iron Horse, pumping him carefully for information. The medicine man made no secret of his age, and seemed glad to talk to Sundown about his life. He was reserved, but not secretive. He had no knowledge of the Game, or at least didn't seem to care. He knew about other Immortals, and several of them passed through the village, drawn by tales of an ageless medicine man. Iron Horse had no desire to fight any of them, and most went away without making any trouble. One of them, a trader named MacLeod, stayed with the tribe for a few weeks. Sundown recognized him from the Watchers' files. He was Scottish, even older than Iron Horse. On his next trip into town, Sundown met with a Watcher named Horst Albrecht, assigned to MacLeod. "Damn it, if he'd only settle somewhere, I could have fifty men watching him, but he keeps wandering across the countryside. One trader working the same routes as him is a coincidence, but more than that would look suspicious. The man's running me ragged." Horst complained, in the room over the bar that served as the Watchers' local headquarters. "Hell, Albrecht, I'll keep an eye on him for as long as he's in the village, if you want." Sundown thought nothing of taking such a familiar tone with a white man. He was, after all, a fellow Watcher. "Can you do that for me, Jack? It'd look a little funny if I was to show up in the same village as him, staying for the same period of time." "No trouble at all. Just lately, he's been talking for hour after hour with Iron Horse, day in and day out." "What do they talk about?" a young Watcher wanted to know. "Damned if I know. I can't get close enough to hear without looking suspicious. I'll see if I can get Iron Horse to talk about it later on." "Do that." said Chance, recently promoted to local head. "One of the most important questions about Iron Horse is how he interacts with other Immortals, since he apparently either doesn't know or doesn't care about the Game." Jack nodded. "He definitely at least knows about it by now. I've caught a few of the phrases from talks he's had with other Immortals, and last week he dropped 'there can be only one' into a conversation with the chief." "But he doesn't carry a sword, an axe maybe?" Albrecht asked. "Just his war club." "Hell, he's not going to take many heads with that." the young Watcher observed. "Maybe he plans to hit them with it, and take their heads when they're down." suggested Chance. "Nothing in the rules against it, I guess." Jack shrugged. "Still, kind of a chancy way to do it." "He's _your_ assignment." Chance said. "Do you think that's how he'd pull it off?" "I really can't say. As far as I can find out, he's never taken a Quickening in a hundred and twenty years." There was a moment of surprised silence. "I'll be damned. He's either real lucky or real stupid." Albrecht finally said. "I'd say real amiable." Jack replied. "There've been a few who've dropped by the village to come for his head, but he always talks them out of it, I think. Anyway, they always leave without killing him." "I will be damned." said Chance in amazement. "Jack, you've got to ask him how he does that. How _does_ one Immortal talk another out of taking his head?" "I'll try and weasel it out of him as soon as I get back to the village." Jack promised. "You do that. Offhand, I don't know of another Immortal who's never fought a duel in that long." The next morning, Sundown walked back to the village, arriving midafternoon. When he was several hundred yards away, he knew something was wrong. If the gunshots hadn't given it away, the screams would have. He broke into a run. He arrived at the edge of the village to a scene out of a nightmare. They'd all known about the new cavalry general in the territory, and most of them had known that he disliked Indians, but nobody had seriously expected him to order a massacre. Blue-uniformed cavalry officers swarmed throughout the village, some on horseback, some on foot, all of them slaughtering the tribe left and right. Sundown forgot his well-trained survival instincts and ran into the middle of it. Bullets flew past him with sharp snapping sounds. The knack for invisibility he'd always had seemed to be working, as officers rushed past him without even a glance. Sundown saw that more than one of them had tears running down his face. Later, Jack would wonder why he hadn't gone looking for his mother, or his sister, but for Iron Horse. He found him at the edge of the village, locked in combat with a man in a lieutenant's uniform. The cavalry man was wielding the standard-issue saber against Iron Horse's war club. Almost before Sundown could take in the scene, the lieutenant struck off the medicine man's head. There was a moment of what seemed to Sundown to be total stillness, despite the fact that behind him in the main village the unequal battle raged on. A ghost slipped out of Iron Horse's body and into the lieutenant's, and then everything exploded in lightning. Jack was thrown back by the force of it, and blacked out. When he awoke, his village was dead. Everyone he had known since childhood. His mother. His friends. Burning Lake. Thunderhead. Iron Horse. Jack was numb. He wandered around, looking at the dead bodies, the burnt houses, the total lack of anything alive. He found one living human, an infant, a little girl crying for her mother. Absently, he picked her up and wandered on. He ended up by Iron Horse's mutilated body, still lying where it had fallen, the war club on the ground where it had slipped from his hand, next to the peace pipe that had fallen out of his medicine bag. Jack picked the pipe up, and looked from it to the corpse of his Immortal several times. That was when he finally started to cry. Oregon, 1870 Danny's Bar was the local place to get hammered, watch pretty girls sing, and lose a few bucks at poker or blackjack. It didn't have swinging batwing doors, but it did have a janitor named Jack who co-owned the place, and it did have a set of rooms upstairs holding a very interesting library and a telegraph system. Currently getting hammered therein was Okie Wilcox. It wasn't his real name, but he'd been going by it for a hundred years now, and it was one of two names he was filed under. He'd come to the New World in 1518 and showed no signs of leaving. He was Greek by extraction, but as a person, he was as American as they came. He'd fought at Bunker Hill for the colonies, and been decorated by Washington. He'd been a member of Congress once, and a colonel twice. It was generally agreed that he was a hell of a guy. He was a gunslinger at the moment, and a good one. Firearms had always been the American weapon, much as the shillelagh was to Ireland and the knife was to Mexico. Okie had been a crack shot for three hundred years, with increasingly accurate guns. He was also damned handy with the longsword he packed inside his duster. Jack kept an eye on him while he swept out the bar, and of an evening would often sit on the roof across from Okie's hotel with a good book and a pair of opera glasses. "Mike," Okie was currently opining to the bartender while Jack swept sawdust off the floor nearby, "blended whiskey ain't fit for washing a horse in. Give me single-malt or give me death." _Drinks only single-malt._ noted Jack. _Strong opinions on the subject._ He went behind the bar to get a dustpan, slipping one of Okie's shot glasses into his pocket as he did so. He wasn't allowed to interfere with Immortals, but there were no rules against an occasional keepsake. Suddenly Okie's head snapped up with an expression Jack had seen a hundred times before on other Immortals' faces. He was sensing another of his kind. He glanced towards the door a moment before it swung open and gave entrance to a blond boy not more than four feet tall. Twelve years old, at the outside. The boy ran over to Okie. "Mister, you gotta help me. I'm in trouble." "Hang on there, kid, what's going on here?" Okie said, befuddled by both single-malt and being confronted with this tiny, cherubic Immortal. "Hey kid, no children allowed! This is a drinkin' bar!" the bartender said, leaning over the bar to glare at the boy. "Hang on, Mike, you heard the boy. He's in some kind of trouble." Okie said, waving a hand at the bartender. "I'll be in trouble if the Temperance League finds out I'm lettin' kids in here!" wailed Mike. "They'll have my b..." he trailed off as he realized there was a minor present and finished lamely, "...well, I'll really get it from them." "I guess this boy..." "Kenny." supplied the kid. "...Kenny and I better talk in private anyhow." Okie said, getting up and leaving a dollar on the bar. "C'mon, Kenny, I'll get you some lunch, if you're up for it." "Thanks a lot, mister." said the kid with a smile full of innocence. Jack had vanished upstairs the moment Kenny mentioned his name. He rifled hurriedly through the files and stacks of chronicles in the upstairs office, promising himself yet again that he was going to get the place better organized the minute he got the time. The boy's name rang a bell, something he'd found in one of the chronicles he liked to peruse, getting an idea of overall Immortal history. "Aha!" he shouted, turning up a file with a photograph sticking out of it. The photo was of the boy Jack had just seen downstairs and an Immortal named DaSilva. The information in the file turned Jack pale. DaSilva had posed for the photograph the previous year, shortly before being killed. By Kenny. The boy's _modus operandi_, according to what Jack read, was to find an Immortal likely to take in a helpless young student, claim that his teacher had been killed, and beg for help and tutelage. After worming his way into his "teacher's" confidence, Kenny would kill them. He was almost seven hundred, older than most of the people he killed. "Good God almighty." muttered Jack. "What's going on, papa?" came a voice from behind him. Jack turned. It was his adopted daughter, Jenny. He'd found her in the wreckage of his burned village when Iron Horse had died, and taken her as his own. He'd offered her the chance to become a Watcher, but she'd turned it down repeatedly over the years. Still, she was considered somewhere between a mascot and a charter member of the local group. Over the years, she'd grown up into quite an attractive young lady, round-faced, with high cheekbones and jet-black hair. "Okie is in serious trouble." Jack said. "Now who's after him?" "A ten-year-old kid who's really seven hundred." "Papa, even I know how good Okie is. I doubt anyone with a ten-year-old body could really offer much of a threat." Jenny didn't care all that much about Immortals, but found them interesting enough to follow. "His body is ten, but his mind is older than this nation, girl. Never underestimate any Immortal." he admonished her, shaking the file. "What's he going to do, sneak up behind him?" Jenny asked. Jack nodded. "Exactly." Over the next week, Kenny became Okie's latest cause. Okie laughed with the boy, and played games with him, and taught him more than a few tricks with the boy's sword that Kenny claimed had been given to him by his first teacher. Okie was of the opinion that it was "a cute little blade." Jack was of the opinion that it was five hundred years old, and had enough blood on it already. "Now, look here, Kenny." Okie said, during one of their tutoring sessions on a nearby ranch. "You take the blade in what's called a reverse grip, like this, with the blade comin' out the bottom of your fist, and bring it down across your body like this." He made a fast diagonal stroke from his shoulder to his knee. "That'll take a man's head if he's kneeling, but only if you got your weight behind it." Jack was in an oak tree five hundred yards away, with a telescope. Lipreading was one of his multiple skills. Kenny repeated the move, sloppily. "Naw, you're swingin' with your arm." Okie said. "Now, see, when I do it, see how I rotate my whole body? The strength comes from your hips up, and into the sword." _Goddamnit, Okie, the boy is older than you are. In a fair fight, you'd take him in a second. Even if he were full-grown, you're much better than he is. But he's not going to *give* you a fair fight._ Kenny repeated the move again, without his theatrical clumsiness this time. He said something Jack didn't catch. The boy wasn't facing him. Okie laughed and nodded. "Well, yes, boy, you got to get the man on his knees first, but there's ways to do that." Okie paused. "'Course, you could always just hit him in the ol' family jewel pouch." He laughed some more. Jack put down his telescope and began to get out of the tree. He'd watched a lot of Immortals in his time, but Okie was the first one since Iron Horse that he'd really liked. The man was so _alive_. He took Immortality, not as a curse, but as what it was, eternal life. Rather than squander it, he simply ran out and lived it. He enjoyed every second as though it were his last, despite the fact that he could well have an eternity of them. He was the only one Jack had ever seen who never seemed to get maudlin or depressed about Immortality. Jack realized he was really going to miss the big, brash gunfighter. He wanted desperately to warn him, tell Okie about the boy's evil nature, point out the mad fires that sometimes burned in his innocent blue eyes. He couldn't. It was against all the rules. He wouldn't. The next afternoon, Okie was killed. It was in the alley behind the bar. Jack was on the roof. Kenny came knocking on the back door of Danny's, asking to see Okie. He was still banned from actually entering, of course, so Okie had to come out. The gunfighter was completely sloshed. Kenny saw this, and began talking in a fast, high-pitched voice about an Immortal he swore was after him. Okie had a hard time following, in his state. He got confused. Kenny pointed toward the end of the alley, still jabbering about an evil Immortal. Okie wandered toward the mouth of the alley with one hand inside his duster, his back to Kenny. Kenny's small, sharp blade was suddenly in his hand. He lunged forward, piercing Okie's spine. Okie gasped, half-collapsing. He attempted to struggle to his feet, managing to get onto his hands and knees. He turned his head to look up, and the last thing he saw was Kenny, sword in a reverse grip, slashing cross-body with his whole weight. Jack, on the roof, didn't make a sound. It wasn't easy. "It worked just you said it would, you big, stupid bastard." came Kenny's incongrously childlike voice, choked with evil glee. Jack saw the explosions of lightning, and for a moment amid the lights, he could swear he saw Kenny's face _twist_, becoming for a moment a mask of ancient evil. The back windows of the building exploded. Jack ignored them, watching Kenny's face. They could be replaced. After all, it wasn't the first time. Washington Territory, 1880 Jack hadn't been called Sundown for thirty-four years, making him fifty-six. His heart was giving him hell lately. He didn't do a lot of field work anymore, leaving that to the younger generation. He was considered one of the grand old men of the Watchers, despite the fact that his apparent age came mostly before its time. His daughter had left to attend school in the east years before, and he'd only seen her on visits since. He was sitting in his office, rereading the Iron Horse chronicle again, when it all went at once. Back then, a stroke was still called apoplexy, but by any name, it's nothing to wish on a man in late middle age. He woke up blind, and immediately began getting used to the feel of the bed they'd put him in. He knew he'd never get out of it. The Watchers came, and talked with him, and expressed their deepest sorrow, and wished him all the best in the next world. A lot of them expressed their firm confidence that he was going to heaven, despite being technically a heathen. Jack gave a number of orders pertaining to the disposition of both his estate and his duties as a Watcher. He kept calling for Jenny, not wanting to die without talking with her one last time. Everyone said that they'd cabled her, but received no reply. Jack had almost resigned himself to dying without ever talking to his daughter again, when one day he heard a familiar voice ordering everyone out of the room, and would have cried out in joy if he could have. "Hello, Jenny." he croaked. "Hello, papa." she replied. It was very quiet in the room with everybody gone. "I'm glad you came." "I didn't get any of the cables they sent me. I was on my way here already." "I'm happy you were coming to visit, Jenny." "It wasn't just a visit, papa. I came to tell you something." "Are you getting married?" Jack asked, smiling as best he could. She laughed a young laugh. "No, not yet, papa. I..." there was a pause. Jack wished he could see what her face looked like in that moment. He heard her take a breath and start over. "Papa, do you remember who my mother was?" "No, I told you that when you were just a child. I never knew exactly whose baby you were." Jack was finding it more and more difficult to speak. "I'm an Immortal, papa." The room was totally silent for a moment. "Jenny? Did you just say that you're an Immortal?" "Yes. It just happened. I fell out of a window back in Boston." "Are you certain?" "I... I felt myself die, papa. When I woke up, I wondered if I could be an Immortal, so I cut myself with a knife, just a little." she took a deep breath for strength. "It healed right up, papa. I really am. I didn't know what to do. I decided to come to you and tell you. Then I got here and heard you were... dying..." Jack spent a moment gathering strength, as his brain dragged itself back out of the comforting fog it had been gradually sinking into. "Jenny, have you got a pen and paper?" "Why?" "Just get it." Jack heard a rustling for a moment. "All right, papa." "Write down what I say. Duncan MacLeod, living with the Lakota Sioux, maybe a hundred or so miles to the north. Mei Ling Shen, in Canton, China. Conner MacLeod, in New York. Arthur O'Hill was last seen in Spain, under the name Gerald O'Riley. He should still be there. Rebecca Horne is living in Calais, France. Ask for a tall, blond woman of independent means. Any of these will take you in, and train you. They're among the best there are." "Papa, this is against the rules..." "Jenny, you're my only daughter. You're young, and strong, and beautiful, and you're going to live forever. Nobody's going to take your head if I can help it. Now, Conner MacLeod is a bit of a long shot, but he's a good-hearted man. Rebecca is known to be soft-hearted when it comes to young Immortals in need of training, but Mei Ling is better than she is. O'Hill is a bit of a vagabond, so be prepared for travel if you go to him, but he's a damned fine swordsman." "Papa, you're not allowed to do this." "The devil with the rules. I'm going to be dead very shortly, and I can't summon up the energy to give a good damn about the rules." He paused, racking his brain for some other advice he could give that might help. "One other thing. If you ever see an extremely large, black-haired Immortal with a scar across his throat and another by his right eye, run as fast as you can. Don't challenge him, don't..." Jack's voice ran out, and he spent a moment gasping for breath. "I won't, papa." "Jenny, promise me you'll find one of those people I named and get them to train you. Promise." "I promise." "Good. Good." "I won't tell them about the Watchers." "Good girl. You're going to be a good Immortal, Jenny, I can feel it. You're going to go places and see things and live..." he couldn't speak any more. He didn't need to. She knew all the important things. The next day, early in the morning, Jack died. That afternoon, Jenny was on a train to San Francisco, where a boat would be leaving for China before too long. She didn't speak Chinese, but she would have time to learn. In the back of her train car, a man with a curious seal hanging from his watch chain sat behind a newspaper. He was only pretending to read it. =========================================================================