To the memory of Dr. Olfert Dapper, who saw a
wild unicorn in the Maine woods in 1673,
and for Robert Nathan, who has seen
one or two in Los Angeles
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery. Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus. She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight. She had killed dragons with it, and healed a king whose poisoned wound would not close, and knocked down ripe chestnuts for bear cubs.
Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves—for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides. They mate very rarely, and no place is more enchanted than one where a unicorn has been born. The last time she had seen another unicorn the young virgins who still came seeking her now and then had called to her in a different tongue; but then, she had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.
One day it happened that two men with long bows rode through her forest, hunting for deer. The unicorn followed them, moving so warily that not even the horses knew she was near. The sight of men filled her with an old, slow, strange mixture of tenderness and terror. She never let one see her if she could help it, but she liked to watch them ride by and hear them talking.
“I mislike the feel of this forest,” the elder of the two hunters grumbled. “Creatures that live in a unicorn’s wood learn a little magic of their own in time, mainly concerned with disappearing. We’ll find no game here.”
“Unicorns are long gone,” the second man said. “If, indeed, they ever were. This is a forest like any other.”
“Then why do the leaves never fall here, or the snow? I tell you, there is one unicorn left in the world—good luck to the lonely old thing, I say—and as long as it lives in this forest, there won’t be a hunter takes so much as a titmouse home at his saddle. Ride on, ride on, you’ll see. I know their ways, unicorns.”
“From books,” answered the other. “Only from books and tales and songs. Not in the reign of three kings has there been even a whisper of a unicorn seen in this country or any other. You know no more about unicorns than I do, for I’ve read the same books and heard the same stories, and I’ve never seen one either.”
The first hunter was silent for a time, and the second whistled sourly to himself. Then the first said, “My great-grandmother saw a unicorn once. She used to tell me about it when I was little.”
“Oh, indeed? And did she capture it with a golden bridle?”
“No. She didn’t have one. You don’t have to have a golden bridle to catch a unicorn; that part’s the fairy tale. You need only to be pure of heart.”
“Yes, yes.” The younger man chuckled. “Did she ride her unicorn, then? Bareback, under the trees, like a nymph in the early days of the world?”
“My great-grandmother was afraid of large animals,” said the first hunter. “She didn’t ride it, but she sat very still, and the unicorn put its head in her lap and fell asleep. My great-grandmother never moved till it woke.”
“What did it look like? Pliny describes the unicorn as being very ferocious, similar in the rest of its body to a horse, with the head of a deer, the feet of an elephant, the tail of a bear; a deep, bellowing voice, and a single black horn, two cubits in length. And the Chinese—“
“My great-grandmother said only that the unicorn had a good smell. She never could abide the smell of any beast, even a cat or a cow, let alone a wild thing. But she loved the smell of the unicorn. She began to cry once, telling me about it. Of course, she was a very old woman then, and cried at anything that reminded her of her youth.”
“Let’s turn around and hunt somewhere else,” the second hunter said abruptly. The unicorn stepped softly into a thicket as they turned their horses, and took up the trail only when they were well ahead of her once more. The men rode in silence until they were nearing the edge of the forest, when the second hunter asked quietly, “Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things.”
“Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?”
“No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns. And it seems to me now that I have heard stories—but I was sleepy with wine, or I was thinking of something else. Well, no matter. There’s light enough yet to hunt, if we hurry. Come!”
They broke out of the woods, kicked their horses to a gallop, and dashed away. But before they were out of sight, the first hunter looked back over his shoulder and called, just as though he could see the unicorn standing in shadow, “Stay where you are, poor beast. This is no world for you. Stay in your forest, and keep your trees green and your friends long-lived. Pay no mind to young girls, for they never become anything more than silly old women. And good luck to you.”
The unicorn stood still at the edge of the forest and said aloud, “I am the only unicorn there is.” They were the first words she had spoken, even to herself, in more than a hundred years.
That can’t be, she thought. She had never minded being alone, never seeing another unicorn, because she had always known that there were others like her in the world, and a unicorn needs no more than that for company. “But I would know if all the others were gone. I’d be gone too. Nothing can happen to them that does not happen to me.”
Her own voice frightened her and made her want to be running. She moved along the dark paths of her forest, swift and shining, passing through sudden clearings unbearably brilliant with grass or soft with shadow, aware of everything around her, from the weeds that brushed her ankles to insect-quick flickers of blue and silver as the wind lifted the leaves. “Oh, I could never leave this, I never could, not if I really were the only unicorn in the world. I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?”
But when she stopped running at last and stood still, listening to crows and a quarrel of squirrels over her head, she wondered, But suppose they are riding together, somewhere far away? What if they are hiding and waiting for me?
From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms. “I will not go. Because men have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean they have all vanished. Even if it were true, I would not go. I live here.”
But at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, “Yes, but now.” She hurried through her forest, trying to look at nothing and smell nothing, trying not to feel her earth under her cloven hoofs. The animals who move in the dark, the owls and the foxes and the deer, raised their heads as she passed by, but she would not look at them. I must go quickly, she thought, and come back as soon as I can. Maybe I won’t have to go very far. But whether I find the others or not, I will come back very soon, as soon as I can.
Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how long. She almost turned back then; but instead she took a deep breath of the woods air that still drifted to her, and held it in her mouth like a flower, as long as she could.
The long road hurried to nowhere and had no end. It ran through villages and small towns, flat country and mountains, stony barrens and meadows springing out of stones, but it belonged to none of these, and it never rested anywhere. It rushed the unicorn along, tugging at her feet like the tide, fretting at her, never letting her be quiet and listen to the air, as she was used to do. Her eyes were always full of dust, and her mane was stiff and heavy with dirt.
Time had always passed her by in her forest, but now it was she who passed through time as she traveled. The colors of the trees changed, and the animals along the way grew heavy coats and lost them again; the clouds crept or hurried before the changing winds, and were pink and gold in the sun or livid with storm. Wherever she went, she searched for her people, but she found no trace of them, and in all the tongues she heard spoken along the road there was not even a word for them any more.
Early one morning, about to turn off the road to sleep, she saw a man hoeing in his garden. Knowing that she should hide, she stood still instead and watched him work, until he straightened and saw her. He was fat, and his cheeks jumped with every step he took. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, you’re beautiful.”
When he tugged off his belt, made a loop in it, and moved clumsily toward her, the unicorn was more pleased than frightened. The man knew what she was, and what he himself was for: to hoe turnips and pursue something that shone and could run faster than he could. She sidestepped his first lunge as lightly as though the wind of it had blown her out of his reach. “I have been hunted with bells and banners in my time,” she told him. “Men knew that the only way to hunt me was to make the chase so wondrous that I would come near to see it. And even so I was never once captured.”
“My foot must have slipped,” said the man. “Steady now, you pretty thing.”
“I’ve never really understood,” the unicorn mused as the man picked himself up, “what you dream of doing with me, once you’ve caught me.” The man leaped again, and she slipped away from him like rain. “I don’t think you know yourselves,” she said.
“Ah, steady, steady, easy now.” The man’s sweating face was striped with dirt, and he could hardly get his breath. “Pretty,” he gasped. “You pretty little mare.”
“_Mare?_” The unicorn trumpeted the word so shrilly that the man stopped pursuing her and clapped his hands to his ears. “Mare?” she demanded. “I, a horse? Is that what you take me for? Is that what you see?”
“Good horse,” the fat man panted. He leaned on the fence and wiped his face. “Curry you up, clean you off, you’ll be the prettiest old mare anywhere.” He reached out with the belt again. “Take you to the fair,” he said. “Come on, horse.”
“A horse,” the unicorn said. “That’s what you were trying to capture. A white mare with her mane full of burrs.” As the man approached her, she hooked her horn through the belt, jerked it out of his grasp, and hurled it across the road into a patch of daisies. “A horse, am I?” she snorted. “A horse, indeed!”
For a moment the man was very close to her, and her great eyes stared into his own, which were small and tired and amazed. Then she turned and fled up the road, running so swiftly that those who saw her exclaimed, “Now there’s a horse! There’s a real horse!” One old man said quietly to his wife, “That’s an Ayrab horse. I was on a ship with an Ayrab horse once.”
From that time the unicorn avoided towns, even at night, unless there was no way at all to go around them. Even so, there were a few men who gave chase, but always to a wandering white mare; never in the gay and reverent manner proper to the pursuit of a unicorn. They came with ropes and nets and baits of sugar lumps, and they whistled and called her Bess and Nellie. Sometimes she would slow down enough to let their horses catch her scent, and then watch as the beasts reared and wheeled and ran away with their terrified riders. The horses always knew her.
“How can it be?” she wondered. “I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else—what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?”
Sometimes she thought, “If men no longer know what they are looking at, there may well be unicorns in the world yet, unknown and glad of it.” But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone. Yet she went on along the hard road, although each day she wished a little more that she had never left her forest.
Then one afternoon the butterfly wobbled out of a breeze and lit on the tip of her horn. He was velvet all over, dark and dusty, with golden spots on his wings, and he was as thin as a flower petal. Dancing along her horn, he saluted her with his curling feelers. “I am a roving gambler. How do you do?”
The unicorn laughed for the first time in her travels. “Butterfly, what are you doing out on such a windy day?” she asked him. “You’ll take cold and die long before your time.”
“Death takes what man would keep,” said the butterfly, “and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief.” He glimmered like a scrap of owl-light on her horn.
“Do you know what I am, butterfly?” the unicorn asked hopefully, and he replied, “Excellent well, you’re a fishmonger. You’re my everything, you are my sunshine, you are old and gray and full of sleep, you’re my pickle-face, consumptive Mary Jane.” He paused, fluttering his wings against the wind, and added conversationally, “Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.”
“Say my name, then,” the unicorn begged him. “If you know my name, tell it to me.”
“Rumpelstiltskin,” the butterfly answered happily. “Gotcha! You don’t get no medal.” He jigged and twinkled on her horn, singing, “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home, where once he could not go. Buckle down, Winsocki, go and catch a falling star. Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover, so I should be called kill-devil all the parish over.” His eyes were gleaming scarlet in the glow of the unicorn’s horn.
She sighed and plodded on, both amused and disappointed. It serves you right, she told herself. You know better than to expect a butterfly to know your name. All they know are songs and poetry, and anything else they hear. They mean well, but they can’t keep things straight. And why should they? They die so soon.
The butterfly swaggered before her eyes, singing, “One, two, three o’lairy,” as he whirled; chanting, “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, look down that lonesome road. For, oh, what damned minutes tells he o’er who dotes, yet doubts. Hasten, Mirth, and bring with thee a host of furious fancies whereof I am commander, which will be on sale for three days only at bargain summer prices. I love you, I love you, oh, the horror, the horror, and aroint thee, witch, aroint thee, indeed and truly you’ve chosen a bad place to be lame in, willow, willow, willow.” His voice tinkled in the unicorn’s head like silver money falling.
He traveled with her for the rest of the waning day, but when the sun went down and the sky was full of rosy fish, he flew off her horn and hovered in the air before her. “I must take the A train,” he said politely. Against the clouds she could see that his velvet wings were ribbed with delicate black veins.
“Farewell,” she said. “I hope you hear many more songs”—which was the best way she could think of to say good-by to a butterfly. But instead of leaving her, he fluttered above her head, looking suddenly less dashing and a little nervous in the blue evening air. “Fly away,” she urged him. “It’s too cold for you to be out.” But the butterfly still dallied, humming to himself.
“They ride that horse you call the Macedonai,” he intoned absent-mindedly; and then, very clearly, “Unicorn. Old French, unicorne. Latin, unicornis. Literally, one-horned: unus, one, and cornu, a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn. Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold and the mate of the Nancy brig. Has anybody here seen Kelly?” He strutted joyously in the air, and the first fireflies blinked around him in wonder and grave doubt.
The unicorn was so startled and so happy to hear her name spoken at last that she overlooked the remark about the horse. “Oh, you do know me!” she cried, and the breath of her delight blew the butterfly twenty feet away. When he came scrambling back to her, she pleaded, “Butterfly, if you really know who I am, tell me if you have ever seen anyone like me, tell me which way I must go to find them. Where have they gone?”
“Butterfly, butterfly, where shall I hide?” he sang in the fading light. “The sweet and bitter fool will presently appear. Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again.” He rested on the unicorn’s horn once more, and she could feel him trembling.
“Please,” she said. “All I want to know is that there are other unicorns somewhere in the world. Butterfly, tell me that there are still others like me, and I will believe you and go home to my forest. I have been away so long, and I said that I would come back soon.”
“Over the mountains of the moon,” the butterfly began, “down the Valley of the Shadow, ride, boldly ride.” Then he stopped suddenly and said in a strange voice, “No, no, listen, don’t listen to me, listen. You can find your people if you are brave. They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints. Let nothing you dismay, but don’t be half-safe.” His wings brushed against the unicorn’s skin.
“The Red Bull?” she asked. “What is the Red Bull?”
The butterfly started to sing. “Follow me down. Follow me down. Follow me down. Follow me down.” But then he shook his head wildly and recited, “His firstling bull has majesty, and his horns are the horns of a wild ox. With them he shall push the peoples, all of them, to the ends of the earth. Listen, listen, listen quickly.”
“I am listening,” the unicorn cried. “Where are my people, and what is the Red Bull?”
But the butterfly swooped close to her ear, laughing. “I have nightmares about crawling around on the ground,” he sang. “The little dogs, Tray, Blanche, Sue, they bark at me, the little snakes, they hiss at me, the beggars are coming to town. Then at last come the clams.”
For a moment more he danced in the dusk before her; then he shivered away into the violet shadows by the roadside, chanting defiantly, “It’s you or me, moth! Hand to hand to hand to hand to hand . . .” The last the unicorn saw of him was a tiny skittering between the trees, and her eyes might have deceived her, for the night was full of wings now.
At least he did recognize me, she thought sadly. That means something. But she answered herself, No, that means nothing at all, except that somebody once made up a song about unicorns, or a poem. But the Red Bull. What could he have meant by that? Another song, I suppose.
She walked on slowly, and the night drew close about her. The sky was low and almost pure black, save for one spot of yellowing silver where the moon paced behind the thick clouds. The unicorn sang softly to herself, a song she had heard a young girl singing in her forest long ago.
“Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe,
Sooner than I will live with you.
Fish will come walking out of the sea,
Sooner than you will come back to me.”
She did not understand the words, but the song made her think longingly of her home. It seemed to her that she had heard autumn beginning to shake the beech trees the very moment that she stepped out into the road.
At last she lay down in the cold grass and fell asleep. Unicorns are the wariest of all wild things, but they sleep soundly when they sleep. All the same, if she had not been dreaming of home, she would surely have roused at the sound of wheels and jingling coming closer through the night, even though the wheels were muffled in rags and the little bells wrapped in wool. But she was very far away, farther than the soft bells could go, and she did not wake.
There were nine wagons, each draped in black, each drawn by a lean black horse, and each baring barred sides like teeth when the wind blew through the black hangings. The lead wagon was driven by a squat old woman, and it bore signs on its shrouded sides that said in big letters: MOMMY FORTUNA’S MIDNIGHT CARNIVAL. And below, in smaller print: Creatures of night, brought to light.
When the first wagon drew even with the place where the unicorn lay asleep, the old woman suddenly pulled her black horse to a stop. All the other wagons stopped too and waited silently as the old woman swung herself to the ground with an ugly grace. Gliding close to the unicorn, she peered down at her for a long time, and then said, “Well. Well, bless my old husk of a heart. And here I thought I’d seen the last of them.” Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
“If he knew,” she said and she showed pebbly teeth as she smiled. “But I don’t think I’ll tell him.” She looked back at the black wagons and snapped her fingers twice. The drivers of the second and third wagons got down and came toward her. One was short and dark and stony, like herself; the other was a tall, thin man with an air of resolute bewilderment. He wore an old black cloak, and his eyes were green.
“What do you see?” the old woman asked the short man. “Rukh, what do you see lying there?”
“Dead horse,” he answered. “No, not dead. Give it to the manticore, or the dragon.” His chuckle sounded like matches striking.
“You’re a fool,” Mommy Fortuna said to him. Then, to the other, “What about you, wizard, seer, thaumaturge? What do you see with your sorcerer’s sight?” She joined with the man Rukh in a ratchety roar of laughter, but it ended when she saw that the tall man was still staring at the unicorn. “Answer me, you juggler!” she snarled, but the tall man did not turn his head. The old woman turned it for him, reaching out a crablike hand to yank his chin around. His eyes fell before her yellow stare.
“A horse,” he muttered. “A white mare.”
Mommy Fortuna looked at him for a long time. “You’re a fool too, magician,” she snickered at last, “but a worse fool than Rukh, and a more dangerous one. He lies only out of greed, but you lie out of fear. Or could it be kindness?” The man said nothing, and Mommy Fortuna laughed by herself.
“All right,” she said. “It’s a white mare. I want her for the Carnival. The ninth cage is empty.”
“I’ll need rope,” Rukh said. He was about to turn away, but the old woman stopped him.
“The only rope that could hold her,” she told him, “would be the cord with which the old gods bound the Fenris-wolf. That one was made of fishes’ breath, bird spittle, a woman’s beard, the miaowing of a cat, the sinews of a bear, and one thing more. I remember—mountain roots. Having none of these elements, nor dwarfs to weave them for us, we’ll have to do the best we can with iron bars. I’ll put a sleep on her, thus,” and Mommy Fortuna’s hands knitted the night air while she grumbled a few unpleasant words in her throat. There was a smell of lightning about the unicorn when the old woman had finished her spell.
“Now cage her,” she said to the two men. “She’ll sleep till sunrise, whatever racket you make—unless, in your accustomed stupidity, you touch her with your hands. Take the ninth cage to pieces and build it around her, but beware! The hand that so much as brushes her mane turns instantly to the donkey’s hoof it deserves to be.” Again she gazed mockingly at the tall, thin man. “Your little tricks would be even harder for you than they already are, wizard,” she said, wheezing. “Get to work. These’s not much dark left.”
When she was well out of earshot, sliding back into the shadow of her wagon as though she had just come out to mark the hour, the man named Rukh spat and said curiously, “Now I wonder what’s worrying the old squid. What would it matter if we touched the beast?”
The magician answered him in a voice almost too soft to be heard. “The touch of a human hand would wake her out of the deepest sleep the devil himself could lay on her. And Mommy Fortuna’s no devil.”
“She’d like us to think so,” the dark man sneered. “Donkey hoofs! Gahhh!” But he thrust his hands deep into his pockets. “Why would the spell be broken? It’s just an old white mare.”
But the magician was walking away toward the last of the black wagons. “Hurry,” he called over his shoulder. “It will be day soon.”
It took them the rest of the night to pull down the ninth cage, bars and floor and roof and then to put it back together around the sleeping unicorn. Rukh was tugging at the door to make sure that it was securely locked, when the gray trees in the east boiled over and the unicorn opened her eyes. The two men slipped hurriedly away, but the tall magician looked back in time to see the unicorn rise to her feet and stare at the iron bars, her low head swaying like the head of an old white horse.
The nine black wagons of the Midnight Carnival seemed smaller by daylight and not menacing at all, but flimsy and fragile as dead leaves. Their draperies were gone, and they were now adorned with sad black banners cut from blankets, and stubby black ribbons that twitched in the breeze. They were arranged strangely in a scrubby field: a pentacle of cages enclosing a triangle, and Mommy Fortuna’s wagon lumping in the center. This cage alone retained its black veil, concealing whatever it contained. Mommy Fortuna was nowhere to be seen.
The man named Rukh was leading a straggling crowd of country folk slowly from one cage to the next, commenting somberly on the beasts within. “This here’s the manticore. Man’s head, lion’s body, tail of a scorpion. Captured at midnight, eating werewolves to sweeten its breath. Creatures of night, brought to light. Here’s the dragon. Breathes fire now and then—usually at people who poke it, little boy. Its inside is an inferno, but its skin is so cold it burns. The dragon speaks seventeen languages badly, and is subject to gout. The satyr. Ladies keep back. A real troublemaker. Captured under curious circumstances revealed to gentlemen only, for a token fee after the show. Creatures of night.” Standing by the unicorn’s cage, which was one of the inner three, the tall magician watched the procession proceeding around the pentacle. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said to the unicorn. “The old woman warned me to stay away from you.” He chuckled pleasantly. “She has mocked me from the day I joined her, but I have made her nervous all that time.”
The unicorn hardly heard him. She turned and turned in her prison, her body shrinking from the touch of the iron bars all around her. No creature of man’s night loves cold iron, and while the unicorn could endure its presence, the murderous smell of it seemed to turn her bones to sand and her blood to rain. The bars of her cage must have had some sort of spell on them, for they never stopped whispering evilly to one another in clawed, pattering voices. The heavy lock giggled and whined like a mad monkey.
“Tell me what you see,” said the magician, as Mommy Fortuna had said it to him. “Look at your fellow legends and tell me what you see.”
Rukh’s iron voice came clanging through the wan afternoon. “Gatekeeper of the underworld. Three heads and a healthy coat of vipers, as you can see. Last seen aboveground in the time of Hercules, who dragged him up under one arm. But we lured him to light again with promises of a better life. Cerberus. Look at those six cheated red eyes. You may look into them again one day. This way to the Midgard Serpent. This way.”
The unicorn stared through the bars at the animal in the cage. Her eyes were wide with disbelief. “It’s only a dog,” she whispered. “It’s a hungry, unhappy dog with only one head and hardly any coat at all, the poor thing. How could they ever take it for Cerberus? Are they all blind?”
“Look again,” the magician said.
“And the satyr,” the unicorn continued. “The satyr is an ape, an old ape with a twisted foot. The dragon is a crocodile, much more likely to breathe fish than fire. And the great manticore is a lion—a perfectly good lion, but no more monstrous than the others. I don’t understand.”
“It’s got the whole world in its coils,” Rukh was droning. And once more the magician said, “Look again.”
Then, as though her eyes were getting used to darkness, the unicorn began to perceive a second figure in each cage. They loomed hugely over the captives of the Midnight Carnival, and yet they were joined to them: stormy dreams sprung from a grain of truth. So there was a manticore—famine-eyed, slobber-mouthed, roaring, curving his deadly tail over his back until the poison spine lolled and nodded just above his ear—and there was a lion too, tiny and absurd by comparison. Yet they were the same creature. The unicorn stamped in wonder.
It was so in all the other cages. The shadow-dragon opened his mouth and hissed harmless fire to make the gapers gasp and cringe, while Hell’s snake-furred watchdog howled triple dooms and devastations down on his betrayers, and the satyr limped leering to the bars and beckoned young girls to impossible delights, right there in public. As for the crocodile, the ape, and the sad dog, they faded steadily before the marvelous phantoms until they were only shadows themselves, even to the unicorn’s undeceived eyes. “This is a strange sorcery,” she said softly. “There’s more meaning than magic to this.”
The magician laughed with pleasure and great relief. “Well said, well said indeed. I knew the old horror wouldn’t dazzle you with her twopenny spells.” His voice grew hard and secret. “She’s made her third mistake now,” he said, “and that’s at least two too many for a tired old trickster like herself. The time draws near.”
“The time draws near,” Rukh was telling the crowd, as though he had overheard the magician. “Ragnarok. On that day, when the gods fall, the Serpent of the Midgard will spit a storm of venom at great Thor himself, till he tumbles over like a poisoned fly. And so he waits for Judgment Day, and dreams about the part he’ll play. It may be so—I couldn’t say. Creatures of night, brought to light.”
The cage was filled with snake. There was no head to it, and no tail—nothing but a wave of tarnished darkness rolling from one end of the cage to the other, leaving no room for anything but its own thunderous breathing. Only the unicorn saw, coiled in a corner, a baleful boa; brooding, perhaps, over its own Judgment on the Midnight Carnival. But it was tiny and dim as the ghost of a worm in the Serpent’s shadow.
A wondering gawk stuck up his hand and demanded of Rukh, “If this big snake do be coiled around the world, as you say, how come you to be having a piece of it in your wagon? And if it can shatter the sea just by stretching of itself, what’s to keep it from crawling off wearing your whole show like a necklace?” There were murmurs of agreement, and some of the murmurers began to back warily away.
“I’m glad you asked me that, friend,” Rukh said with a scowl. “It just so happens that the Midgard Serpent exists in like another space from ours, another dimension. Normally, therefore, he’s invisible, but dragged into our world—as Thor hooked him once—he shows clear as lightning, which also visits us from somewhere else, where it might look quite different. And naturally he might turn nasty if he knew that a bit of his tummy slack was on view daily and Sundays in Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival. But he don’t know. He’s got other things to think about than what becomes of his belly button, and we take our chances—as do you all—on his continued tranquillity.” He rolled and stretched the last word like dough, and his hearers laughed carefully.
“Spells of seeming,” the unicorn said. “She cannot make things.”
“Nor truly change them,” added the magician. “Her shabby skill lies in disguise. And even that knack would be beyond her, if it weren’t for the eagerness of those gulls, those marks, to believe whatever comes easiest. She can’t turn cream into butter, but she can give a lion the semblance of a manticore to eyes that want to see a manticore there—eyes that would take a real manticore for a lion, a dragon for a lizard, and the Midgard Serpent for an earthquake. And a unicorn for a white mare.”
The unicorn halted in her slow, desperate round of the cage, realizing for the first time that the magician understood her speech. He smiled, and she saw that his face was frighteningly young for a grown man—untraveled by time, unvisited by grief or wisdom. “I know you,” he said.
The bars whispered wickedly between them. Rukh was leading the crowd to the inner cages now. The unicorn asked the tall man, “Who are you?”
“I am called Schmendrick the Magician,” he answered. “You won’t have heard of me.”
The unicorn came very near to explaining that it was hardly for her to have heard of one wizard or another, but something sad and valiant in his voice kept her from it. The magician said, “I entertain the sightseers as they gather for the show. Miniature magic, sleight of hand—flowers to flags and flags to fish, all accompanied by persuasive patter and a suggestion that I could work more ominous wonders if I chose. It’s not much of a job, but I’ve had worse, and I’ll have better one day. This is not the end.”
But the sound of his voice made the unicorn feel as though she were trapped forever, and once more she began pacing her cage, moving to keep her heart from bursting with the terror of being closed in. Rukh was standing before a cage that contained nothing but a small brown spider weaving a modest web across the bars. “Arachne of Lydia,” he told the crowd. “Guaranteed the greatest weaver in the world—her fate’s the proof of it. She had the bad luck to defeat the goddess Athena in a weaving contest. Athena was a sore loser, and Arachne is now a spider, creating only for Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival, by special arrangement. Warp of snow and woof of flame, and never any two the same. Arachne.”
Strung on the loom of iron bars, the web was very simple and almost colorless, except for an occasional rainbow shiver when the spider scuttled out on it to put a thread right. But it drew the onlookers’ eyes—and the unicorn’s eyes as well—back and forth and steadily deeper, until they seemed to be looking down into great rifts in the world, black fissures that widened remorselessly and yet would not fall into pieces as long as Arachne’s web held the world together. The unicorn shook herself free with a sigh, and saw the real web again. It was very simple, and almost colorless.
“It isn’t like the others,” she said.
“No,” Schmendrick agreed grudgingly. “But there’s no credit due to Mommy Fortuna for that. You see, the spider believes. She sees those cat’s-cradles herself and thinks them her own work. Belief makes all the difference to magic like Mommy Fortuna’s. Why, if that troop of witlings withdrew their wonder, there’d be nothing left of all her witchery but the sound of a spider weeping. And no one would hear it.”
The unicorn did not want to look into the web again. She glanced at the cage closest to her own, and suddenly felt the breath in her body turning to cold iron. There sat on an oaken perch a creature with the body of a great bronze bird and a hag’s face, clenched and deadly as the talons with which she gripped the wood. She had the shaggy round ears of a bear; but down her scaly shoulders, mingling with the bright knives of her plumage, there fell hair the color of moonlight, thick and youthful around the hating human face. She glittered, but to look at her was to feel the light going out of the sky. Catching sight of the unicorn, she made a queer sound like a hiss and a chuckle together.
The unicorn said quietly, “This one is real. This is the harpy Celaeno.”
Schmendrick’s face had gone the color of oatmeal. “The old woman caught her by chance,” he whispered, “asleep, as she took you. But it was an ill fortune, and they both know it. Mommy Fortuna’s craft is just sure enough to hold the monster, but its mere presence is wearing all her spells so thin that in a little time she won’t have power enough left to fry an egg. She should never have done it, never meddled with a real harpy, a real unicorn. The truth melts her magic, always, but she cannot keep from trying to make it serve her. But this time—“
“Sister of the rainbow, believe it or not,” they heard Rukh braying to the awed onlookers. “Her name means ‘the Dark One,’ the one whose wings blacken the sky before a storm. She and her two sweet sisters nearly starved the king Phineus to death by snatching and befouling his food before he could eat it. But the sons of the North Wind made them quit that, didn’t they, my beauty?” The harpy made no sound, and Rukh grinned like a cage himself.
“She put up a fiercer fight than all the others put together,” he went on. “It was like trying to bind all hell with a hair, but Mommy Fortuna’s powers are great enough even for that. Creatures of night, brought to light. Polly want a cracker?” Few in the crowd laughed. The harpy’s talons tightened on her perch until the wood cried out.
“You’ll need to be free when she frees herself,” the magician said. “She mustn’t catch you caged.”
“I dare not touch the iron,” the unicorn replied. “My horn could open the lock, but I cannot reach it. I cannot get out.” She was trembling with horror of the harpy, but her voice was quite calm.
Schmendrick the Magician drew himself up several inches taller than the unicorn would have thought possible. “Fear nothing,” he began grandly. “For all my air of mystery, I have a feeling heart.” But he was interrupted by the approach of Rukh and his followers, grown quieter than the grubby gang who had giggled at the manticore. The magician fled, calling back softly, “Don’t be afraid, Schmendrick is with you. Do nothing till you hear from me!” His voice drifted to the unicorn, so faint and lonely that she was not sure whether she actually heard it or only felt it brush against her.
It was growing dark. The crowd stood in front of her cage, peering in at her with a strange shyness. Rukh said, “The unicorn,” and stepped aside.
She heard hearts bounce, tears brewing, and breath going backward, but nobody said a word. By the sorrow and loss and sweetness in their faces she knew that they recognized her, and she accepted their hunger as her homage. She thought of the hunter’s great-grandmother, and wondered what it must be like to grow old, and to cry.
“Most shows,” said Rukh after a time, “would end here, for what could they possibly present after a genuine unicorn? But Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival holds one more mystery yet—a demon more destructive than the dragon, more monstrous than the manticore, more hideous than the harpy, and certainly more universal than the unicorn.” He waved his hand toward the last wagon and the black hangings began to wriggle open, though there was no one pulling them. “Behold her!” Rukh cried. “Behold the last, the Very End! Behold Elli!”
Inside the cage, it was darker than the evening, and cold stirred behind the bars like a live thing. Something moved in the cold, and the unicorn saw Elli—an old, bony, ragged woman who crouched in the cage rocking and warming herself before a fire that was not there. She looked so frail that the weight of the darkness should have crushed her, and so helpless and alone that the watchers should have rushed forward in pity to free her. Instead, they began to back silently away, for all the world as though Elli were stalking them. But she was not even looking at them. She sat in the dark and creaked a song to herself in a voice that sounded like a saw going through a tree, and like a tree getting ready to fall.
“What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain—
What is gone is gone.”
“She doesn’t look like much, does she?” Rukh asked. “But no hero can stand before her, no god can wrestle her down, no magic can keep her out—or in, for she’s no prisoner of ours. Even while we exhibit her here, she is walking among you, touching and taking. For Elli is Old Age.”
The cold of the cage reached out to the unicorn, and whereever it touched her she grew lame and feeble. She felt herself withering, loosening, felt her beauty leaving her with her breath. Ugliness swung from her mane, dragged down her head, stripped her tail, gaunted her body, ate up her coat, and ravaged her mind with remembrance of what she had once been. Somewhere nearby, the harpy made her low, eager sound, but the unicorn would gladly have huddled in the shadow of her bronze wings to hide from this last demon. Elli’s song sawed away at her heart.
“What is sea-born dies on land,
Soft is trod upon.
What is given burns the hand—
What is gone is gone.”
The show was over. The crowd was stealing away, no one alone but in couples and fews and severals, strangers holding strangers’ hands, looking back often to see if Elli were following. Rukh called plaintively, “Won’t the gentlemen wait to hear the story about the satyr?” and sent a sour yowl of laughter chasing their slow flight. “Creatures of night, brought to light!” They struggled through the stiffening air, past the unicorn’s cage, and on away, with Rukh’s laughter yapping them home, and Elli still singing.
This is illusion, the unicorn told herself. This is illusion—and somehow raised a head heavy with death to stare deep into the dark of the last cage and see, not Old Age, but Mommy Fortuna herself, stretching and snickering and clambering to the ground with her old eerie ease. And the unicorn knew then that she had not become mortal and ugly at all, but she did not feel beautiful again. Perhaps that was illusion too, she thought wearily.
“I enjoyed that,” Mommy Fortuna said to Rukh. “I always do. I guess I’m just stagestruck at heart.”
“You better check on that damn harpy,” Rukh said. “I could feel her working loose this time. It was like I was a rope holding her, and she was untying me.” He shuddered and lowered his voice. “Get rid of her,” he said hoarsely. “Before she scatters us across the sky like bloody clouds. She thinks about it all the time. I can feel her thinking about it.”
“Fool, be still!” The witch’s own voice was fierce with fear. “I can turn her into wind if she escapes, or into snow, or into seven notes of music. But I choose to keep her. No other witch in the world holds a harpy captive, and none ever will. I would keep her if I could do it only by feeding her a piece of your liver every day.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Rukh said. He sidled away from her. “What if she only wanted your liver?” he demanded. “What would you do then?”
“Feed her yours anyway,” Mommy Fortuna said. “She wouldn’t know the difference. Harpies aren’t bright.”
Alone in the moonlight, the old woman glided from cage to cage, rattling locks and prodding her enchantments as a housewife squeezes melons in the market. When she came to the harpy’s cage the monster made a sound as shrill as a spear, and spread the horrid glory of its wings. For a moment it seemed to the unicorn that the bars of the cage began to wriggle and run like rain; but Mommy Fortuna crackled her twiggy fingers and the bars were iron again, and the harpy sank down on its perch, waiting.
“Not yet,” the witch said. “Not yet.” They stared at each other with the same eyes. Mommy Fortuna said, “You’re mine. If you kill me, you’re mine.” The harpy did not move, but a cloud put out the moon.
“Not yet,” Mommy Fortuna said, and she turned toward the unicorn’s cage. “Well,” she said in her sweet, smoky voice. “I had you frightened for a little while, didn’t I?” She laughed with a sound like snakes hurrying through mud, and strolled closer.
“Whatever your friend the magician may say,” she went on, “I must have some small art after all. To trick a unicorn into believing herself old and foul—that takes a certain skill, I’d say. And is it a twopenny spell that holds the Dark One prisoner? No other till I—“
The unicorn replied, “Do not boast, old woman. Your death sits in that cage and hears you.”
“Yes,” Mommy Fortuna said calmly. “But at least I know where it is. You were out on the road hunting for your own death.” She laughed again. “And I know where that one is, too. But I spared you the finding of it, and you should be grateful for that.”
Forgetting where she was, the unicorn pressed forward against the bars. They hurt her, but she did not draw back. “The Red Bull,” she said. “Where can I find the Red Bull?”
Mommy Fortuna stepped very close to the cage. “The Red Bull of King Haggard,” she muttered. “So you know of the BulL” She showed two of her teeth. “Well, he’ll not have you,” she said. “You belong to me.”
The unicorn shook her head. “You know better,” she answered gently. “Free the harpy, while there is time, and set me free as well. Keep your poor shadows, if you will, but let us go.”
The witch’s stagnant eyes blazed up so savagely bright that a ragged company of luna moths, off to a night’s revel, fluttered straight into them and sizzled into snowy ashes. “I’d quit show business first,” she snarled. “Trudging through eternity, hauling my homemade horrors—do you think that was my dream when I was young and evil? Do you think I chose this meager magic, sprung of stupidity, because I never knew the true witchery? I play tricks with dogs and monkeys because I cannot touch the grass, but I know the difference. And now you ask me to give up the sight of you, the presence of your power. I told Rukh I’d feed his liver to the harpy if I had to, and so I would. And to keep you I’d take your friend Schmendrick, and I’d—“ She raged herself to gibberish, and at last to silence.
“Speaking of livers,” the unicorn said. “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”
A few grains of sand rustled down Mommy Fortuna’s cheek as she stared at the unicorn. All witches weep like that. She turned and walked swiftly toward her wagon, but suddenly she turned again and grinned her rubbly grin. “But I tricked you twice, anyway,” she said. “Did you really think that those gogglers knew you for yourself without any help from me? No, I had to give you an aspect they could understand, and a horn they could see. These days, it takes a cheap carnival witch to make folk recognize a real unicorn. You’d do much better to stay with me and be false, for in this whole world only the Red Bull will know you when he sees you.” She disappeared into her wagon, and the harpy let the moon come out again.
Schmendrick came back a little before dawn, slipping between the cages as silently as water. Only the harpy made a sound as he went by. “I couldn’t get away any sooner,” he told the unicorn. “She’s set Rukh to watching me, and he hardly ever sleeps. But I asked him a riddle, and it always takes him all night to solve riddles. Next time, I’ll tell him a joke and keep him busy for a week.”
The unicorn was gray and still. “There is magic on me,” she said. “Why did you not tell me?”
“I thought you knew,” the magician answered gently. “After all, didn’t you wonder how it could be that they recognized you?” Then he smiled, which made him look a little older. “No, of course not. You never would wonder about that.”
“There has never been a spell on me before,” the unicorn said. She shivered long and deep. “There has never been a world in which I was not known.”
“I know exactly how you feel,” Schmendrick said eagerly. The unicorn looked at him out of dark, endless eyes, and he smiled nervously and looked at his hands. “It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is,” he said. “There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still I have read, or heard it sung, that unicorns when time was young, could tell the difference ‘twixt the two—the false shining and the true, the lips’ laugh and the heart’s rue.” His quiet voice lifted as the sky grew lighter, and for a moment the unicorn could not hear the bars whining, or the soft ringing of the harpy’s wings.
“I think you are my friend,” she said. “Will you help me?”
“If not you, no one,” the magician answered. “You are my last chance.”
One by one, the sad beasts of the Midnight Carnival came whimpering, sneezing, and shuddering awake. One had been dreaming of rocks and bugs and tender leaves; another of bounding through high, hot grass; a third of mud and blood. And one had dreamed of a hand scratching the lonely place behind its ears. Only the harpy had not slept, and now she sat staring into the sun without blinking. Schmendrick said, “If she frees herself first, we are lost.”
They heard Rukh’s voice nearby—that voice always sounded nearby—calling, “Schmendrick! Hey, Schmendrick, I got it! It’s a coffeepot, right?” The magician began to move slowly away. “Tonight,” he murmured to the unicorn. “Trust me till dawn.” And was gone with a flap and a scramble, seeming as before to leave part of himself behind. Rukh loped by the cage a moment later, all deadly economy. Hidden in her black wagon, Mommy Fortuna grumbled Elli’s song to herself.
“Here is there, and high is low;
All may be undone.
What is true, no two men know—
What is gone is gone.”
Soon a new catch of spectators began to come sauntering up to see the show. Rukh called them in, crying, “Creatures of night!” like an iron parrot, and Schmendrick stood on a box and did tricks. The unicorn watched him with great interest and a growing uncertainty, not of his heart but of his craft. He made an entire sow out of a sow’s ear; turned a sermon into a stone, a glass of water into a handful of water, a five of spades into a twelve of spades, and a rabbit into a goldfish that drowned. Each time he conjured up confusion, he glanced quickly at the unicorn with eyes that said, “Oh, but you know what I really did.” Once he changed a dead rose into a seed. The unicorn liked that, even though it did turn out to be a radish seed.
The show began again. Once more Rukh led the crowd from one of Mommy Fortuna’s poor fables to another. The dragon blazed, Cerberus howled for Hell to come and help him, and the satyr tempted women until they wept. They squinted and pointed at the manticore’s yellow tusks and swollen sting; grew still at the thought of the Midgard Serpent; and wondered at Arachne’s new web, which was like a fisherman’s net with the dripping moon in it. Each of them took it for a real web, but only the spider believed that it held the real moon.
This time, Rukh did not tell the story of King Phineus and the Argonauts; indeed, he hurried his sightseers past the harpy’s cage as quickly as he could, gabbling only her name and the meaning of it. The harpy smiled. Nobody saw her smile except the unicorn, and she wished that she had chanced to be looking somewhere else at the time.
When they stood in front of her cage, gazing silently in at her, the unicorn thought bitterly, Their eyes are so sad. How much sadder would they be, I wonder, if the spell that disguises me dissolved and they were left staring at a common white mare? The witch is right—not one would know me. But then a soft voice, rather like the voice of Schmendrick the Magician, said inside her, But their eyes are so sad.
And when Rukh shrieked, “Behold the Very End!” and the black hangings slithered back to reveal Elli, mumbling in the cold and the darkness, the unicorn felt the same helpless fear of growing old that set the crowd to flight, even though she knew that it was only Mommy Fortuna in the cage. She thought, The witch knows more than she knows she knows.
Night came quickly, perhaps because the harpy hurried it on. The sun sank into dirty clouds like a stone into the sea, and with about as much chance of rising again, and there was no moon, or any stars. Mommy Fortuna made her gliding rounds of the cages. The harpy did not move when she drew near, and that made the old woman stand and stare at her for a long while.
“Not yet,” she muttered at last, “not yet,” but her voice was weary and doubtful. She peered briefly at the unicorn, her eyes a stir of yellow in the greasy gloom. “Well, one day more,” she said in a cackling sigh, and turned away again.
There was no sound in the Carnival after she was gone. All the beasts were asleep, save the spider, who wove, and the harpy, who waited. Yet the night creaked tighter and tighter, until the unicorn expected it to split wide open, ripping a seam down the sky, to reveal -- More bars, she thought. Where is the magician?
At last he came hurrying through the silence, spinning and dancing like a cat in the cold, stumbling over shadows. When he reached the unicorn’s cage, he made a joyful bow to her and said proudly, “Schmendrick is with you.” In the cage nearest to hers, the unicorn heard the edged shivering of bronze.
“I think we have very little time,” she said. “Can you truly set me free?”
The tall man smiled, and even his pale, solemn fingers grew merry. “I told you that the witch has made three great mistakes. Your capture was the last, and the taking of the harpy the second, because you are both real, and Mommy Fortuna can no more make you hers than she can make the winter a day longer. But to take me for a mountebank like herself—that was her first and fatal folly. For I too am real. I am Schmendrick the Magician, the last of the red-hot swamis, and I am older than I look.”
“Where is the other?” the unicorn asked.
Schmendrick was pushing back his sleeves. “Don’t worry about Rukh. I asked him another riddle, one that has no answer. He may never move again.”
He spoke three angled words and snapped his fingers. The cage disappeared. The unicorn found herself standing in a grove of trees—orange and lemon, pear and pomegranate, almond and acacia—with soft spring earth under her feet, and the sky growing over her. Her heart turned light as smoke, and she gathered up the strength of her body for a great bound into the sweet night. But she let the leap drift out of her, untaken, for she knew, although she could not see them, that the bars were still there. She was too old not to know.
“I’m sorry,” Schmendrick said, somewhere in the dark. “I would have liked it to be that spell that freed you.”
Now he sang something cold and low, and the strange trees blew away like dandelion down. “This is a surer spell,” he said. “The bars are now as brittle as old cheese, which I crumble and scatter, so.” Then he gasped and snatched his hands away. Each long finger was dripping blood.
“I must have gotten the accent wrong,” he said hoarsely. He hid his hands in his cloak and tried to make his voice light. “It comes and goes.”
A scratching of flinty phrases this time, and Schmendrick’s bloody hands flickering across the sky. Something gray and grinning, something like a bear, but bigger than a bear, something that chuckled muddily, came limping from somewhere, eager to crack the cage like a nut and pick out bits of the unicorn’s flesh with its claws. Schmendrick ordered it back into the night, but it wouldn’t go.
The unicorn backed into a corner and lowered her head; but the harpy stirred softly in her cage, ringing, and the gray shape turned what must have been its head and saw her. It made a foggy, globbering sound of terror, and was gone.
The magician cursed and shivered. He said, “I called him up one other time, long ago. I couldn’t handle him then either. Now we owe our lives to the harpy, and she may yet come to call for them before the sun rises.” He stood silent, twisting his wounded fingers, waiting for the unicorn to speak. “I’ll try once more,” he said finally. “Shall I try once more?”
The unicorn thought that she could still see the night boiling where the gray thing had been. “Yes,” she said.
Schmendrick took a deep breath, spat three times, and spoke words that sounded like bells ringing under the sea. He scattered a handful of powder over the spittle, and smiled triumphantly as it puffed up in a single silent flash of green. When the light had faded, he said three more words. They were like the noise bees might make buzzing on the moon.
The cage began to grow smaller. The unicorn could not see the bars moving, but each time Schmendrick said, “Ah, no!” she had less room in which to stand. Already she could not turn around. The bars were drawing in, pitiless as the tide or the morning, and they would shear through her until they surrounded her heart, which they would keep a prisoner forever. She had not cried out when the creature Schmendrick had summoned came, grinning, toward her, but now she made a sound. It was small and despairing, but not yet yielding.
Schmendrick stopped the bars, though she never knew how. If he spoke any magic, she had not heard it; but the cage stopped shrinking a breath before the bars touched her body. She could feel them all the same, each one like a little cold wind, miaowing with hunger. But they could not reach her.
The magician’s arms fell to his sides. “I dare no more,” he said heavily. “The next time, I might not be able . . .” His voice trailed miserably away, and his eyes were as defeated as his hands. “The witch made no mistake in me,” he said.
“Try again,” the unicorn said. “You are my friend. Try again.”
But Schmendrick, smiling bitterly, was fumbling through his pockets in search of something that clicked and clinked. “I knew it would come to this,” he muttered. “I dreamed it differently, but I knew.” He brought out a ring from which dangled several rusty keys. “You deserve the services of a great wizard,” he said to the unicorn, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket. Unicorns know nought of need, or shame, or doubt, or debt—but mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get. And Rukh can only concentrate on one thing at a time.”
The unicorn was suddenly aware that every animal in the Midnight Carnival was awake, making no sound, but watching her. In the next cage, the harpy began to stamp slowly from one foot to the other. “Hurry,” the unicorn said. “Hurry.”
Schmendrick was already fitting a key into the snickering lock. At his first attempt, which failed, the lock fell silent, but when he tried another key it cried out loudly, “Ho-ho, some magician! Some magician!” It had Mommy Fortuna’s voice.
“Ah, turn blue,” the magician mumbled, but the unicorn could feel him blushing. He twisted the key, and the lock snapped open with one last grunt of contempt. Schmendrick swung the cage door wide and said softly, “Step down, lady. You are free.”
The unicorn stepped lightly to the ground, and Schmendrick the Magician drew back in sudden wonder. “Oh,” he whispered. “It was different when there were bars between us. You looked smaller, and not as—oh. Oh my.”
She was home in her forest, which was black and wet and ruined because she had been gone so long. Someone was calling to her from a long way off but she was home, warming the trees and waking the grass.
Then she heard Rukh’s voice, like a boat bottom gritting on pebbles. “Okay, Schmendrick, I give up. Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The unicorn moved away into deepest shadow, and Rukh saw only the magician and the empty, dwindled cage. His hand jumped to his pocket and came away again. “Why, you thin thief,” he said, grinning iron. “She’ll string you on barbed wire to make a necklace for the harpy.” He turned then and headed straight for Mommy Fortuna’s wagon.
“Run,” the magician said. He made a frantic, foolish, flying leap and landed on Rukh’s back, hugging the dark man dumb and blind with his long arms. They fell together, and Schmendrick scrambled up first, his knees nailing Rukh’s shoulders to the earth. “Barbed wire,” he gasped. “You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I’ll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I’ll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I’ll turn you into a bad poet with dreams. I’ll set all your toenails growing inward. You mess with me.”
Rukh shook his head and sat up, hurling Schmendrick ten feet away. “What are you talking about?” He chuckled. “You can’t turn cream into butter.” The magician was getting to his feet, but Rukh pushed him back down and sat on him. “I never did like you,” he said pleasantly. “You give yourself airs, and you’re not very strong.” Heavy as night, his hands closed on the magician’s throat.
The unicorn did not see. She was out at the farthest cage, where the manticore growled and whimpered and lay flat. She touched the point of her horn to the lock, and was gone to the dragon’s cage without looking back. One after another, she set them all free—the satyr, Cerberus, the Midgard Serpent. Their enchantments vanished as they felt their freedom, and they leaped and lumbered and slithered away into the night, once more a lion, an ape, a snake, a crocodile, a joyous dog. None of them thanked the unicorn, and she did not watch them go.
Only the spider paid no mind when the unicorn called softly to her through the open door. Arachne was busy with a web which looked to her as though the Milky Way had begun to fall like snow. The unicorn whispered, “Weaver, freedom is better, freedom is better,” but the spider fled unhearing up and down her iron loom. She never stopped for a moment, even when the unicorn cried, “It’s really very attractive, Arachne, but it’s not art.” The new web drifted down the bars like snow.
Then the wind began. The spiderweb blew across the unicorn’s eyes and disappeared. The harpy had begun to beat her wings, calling her power in, as a crouching wave draws sand and water roaring down the beach. A bloodshot moon burst out of the clouds, and the unicorn saw her—swollen gold, her streaming hair kindling, the cold, slow wings shaking the cage. The harpy was laughing.
In the shadow of the unicorn’s cage, Rukh and Schmendrick were on their knees. The magician was clutching the heavy ring of keys, and Rukh was rubbing his head and blinking. Their faces were blind with terror as they stared at the rising harpy, and they leaned together in the wind. It blew them against one another, and their bones rang.
The unicorn began to walk toward the harpy’s cage. Schmendrick the Magician, tiny and pale, kept opening and closing his mouth at her, and she knew what he was shrieking, though she could not hear him. “She will kill you, she will kill you! Run, you fool, while she’s still a prisoner! She will kill you if you set her free!” But the unicorn walked on, following the light of her horn, until she stood before Celaeno, the Dark One.
For an instant the icy wings hung silent in the air, like clouds, and the harpy’s old yellow eyes sank into the unicorn’s heart and drew her close. “I will kill you if you set me free,” the eyes said. “Set me free.”
The unicorn lowered her head until her horn touched the lock of the harpy’s cage. The door did not swing open, and the iron bars did not thaw into starlight. But the harpy lifted her wings, and the four sides of the cage fell slowly away and down, like the petals of some great flower waking at night. And out of the wreckage the harpy bloomed, terrible and free, screaming, her hair swinging like a sword. The moon withered and fled.
The unicorn heard herself cry out, not in terror but in wonder, “Oh, you are like me!” She reared joyously to meet the harpy’s stoop, and her horn leaped up into the wicked wind. The harpy struck once, missed, and swung away, her wings clanging and her breath warm and stinking. She burned overhead, and the unicorn saw herself reflected on the harpy’s bronze breast and felt the monster shining from her own body. So they circled one another like a double star, and under the shrunken sky there was nothing real but the two of them. The harpy laughed with delight, and her eyes turned the color of honey. The unicorn knew that she was going to strike again.
The harpy folded her wings and fell like a star—not at the unicorn, but beyond her, passing so close that a single feather drew blood from the unicorn’s shoulder; bright claws reaching for the heart of Mommy Fortuna, who was stretching out her own sharp hands as though to welcome the harpy home. “Not alone!” the witch howled triumphantly at both of them. “You never could have freed yourselves alone! I held you!” Then the harpy reached her, and she broke like a dead stick and fell. The harpy crouched on her body, hiding it from sight, and the bronze wings turned red.
The unicorn turned away. Close by, she heard a child’s voice telling her that she must run, she must run. It was the magician. His eyes were huge and empty, and his face—always too young—was collapsing into childhood as the unicorn looked at him. “No,” she said. “Come with me.”
The harpy made a thick, happy sound that melted the magician’s knees. But the unicorn said again, “Come with me,” and together they walked away from the Midnight Carnival. The moon was gone, but to the magician’s eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness. He followed her, never once looking back, even when he heard the desperate scrambling and skidding of heavy feet, the boom of bronze wings, and Rukh’s interrupted scream.
“He ran,” the unicorn said. “You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.” Her voice was gentle, and without pity. “Never run,” she said. “Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks, but walk slowly and she may not follow. Walk very slowly, magician.”
So they fled across the night together, step by step, the tall man in black and the horned white beast. The magician crept as close to the unicorn’s light as he dared, for beyond it moved hungry shadows, the shadows of the sounds that the harpy made as she destroyed the little there was to destroy of the Midnight Carnival. But another sound followed them long after these had faded, followed them into morning on a strange road—the tiny, dry sound of a spider weeping.
Like a newborn child, the magician wept for a long time before he could speak. “The poor old woman,” he whispered at last. The unicorn said nothing, and Schmendrick raised his head and stared at her in a strange way. A gray morning rain was beginning to fall, and she shone through it like a dolphin. “No,” she said, answering his eyes. “I can never regret.”
He was silent, crouched by the road in the rain, drawing his soaked cloak close around his body until he looked like a broken black umbrella. The unicorn waited, feeling the days of her life falling around her with the rain. “I can sorrow,” she offered gently, “but it’s not the same thing.”
When Schmendrick looked at her again he had managed to pull his face together, but it was still struggling to escape from him. “Where will you go now?” he asked. “Where were you going when she took you?”
“I was looking for my people,” the unicorn said. “Have you seen them, magician? They are wild and sea-white, like me.”
Schmendrick shook his head gravely. “I have never seen anyone like you, not while I was awake. There were supposed to be a few unicorns left when I was a boy, but I knew only one man who had ever seen one. They are surely gone, lady, all but you. When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be.”
“No,” she said, “for others have seen them.” It gladdened her to hear that there had still been unicorns as recently as the magician’s childhood. She said, “A butterfly told me of the Red Bull, and the witch spoke of King Haggard. So I am going wherever they are to learn whatever they know. Can you tell me where Haggard is king?”
The magician’s face almost got away, but he caught it and began to smile very slowly, as though his mouth had turned to iron. He bent it into the proper shape in time, but it was an iron smile. “I can tell you a poem,” he said.
“Where all the hills are lean as knives,
And nothing grows, not leaves nor lives;
Where hearts are sour as boiled beer—
Haggard is the ruler here.”
“I will know when I get there, then,” she said, thinking that he was mocking her. “Do you know any poems about the Red Bull?”
“There are none,” Schmendrick answered. He rose to his feet, pale and smiling. “About King Haggard I know only what I have heard,” he said. “He is an old man, stingy as late November, who rules over a barren country by the sea. Some say that the land was green and soft once, before Haggard came, but he touched it and it withered. There is a saying among farmers, when they look on a field lost to fire or locusts or the wind: ‘As blighted as Haggard’s heart.’ They say also that there are no lights in his castle, and no fires, and that he sends his men out to steal chickens, and bedsheets, and pies from windowsills. The story has it that the last time King Haggard laughed—“
The unicorn stamped her foot. Schmendrick said, “As for the Red Bull, I know less than I have heard, for I have heard too many tales and each argues with another. The Bull is real, the Bull is a ghost, the Bull is Haggard himself when the sun goes down. The Bull was in the land before Haggard, or it came with him, or it came to him. It protects him from raids and revolutions, and saves him the expense of arming his men. It keeps him a prisoner in his own castle. It is the devil, to whom Haggard has sold his soul. It is the thing he sold his soul to possess. The Bull belongs to Haggard. Haggard belongs to the Bull.”
The unicorn felt a shiver of sureness spreading though her, widening from the center, like a ripple. In her mind the butterfly piped again, “They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints.” She saw white forms blowing away in a bellowing wind, and yellow horns shaking. “I will go there,” she said. “Magician, I owe you a boon, for you set me free. What would you have of me before I leave you?”
Schmendrick’s long eyes were glinting like leaves in the sun. “Take me with you.”
She moved away, cool and dancing, and she did not answer. The magician said, “I might be useful. I know the way into Haggard’s country, and the languages of the lands between here and there.” The unicorn seemed very near to vanishing into the sticky mist, and Schmendrick hurried on. “Besides, no wanderer was ever the worse for a wizard’s company, even a unicorn. Remember the tale of the great wizard Nikos. Once, in the woods, he beheld a unicorn sleeping with his head in the lap of a giggling virgin, while three hunters advanced with drawn bows to slay him for his horn. Nikos had only a moment to act. With a word and a wave, he changed the unicorn into a handsome young man, who woke, and seeing the astonished bowmen gaping there, charged upon them and killed them all. His sword was of a twisted, tapering design, and he trampled the bodies when the men were dead.”
“And the girl?” the unicorn asked. “Did he kill the girl too?”
“No, he married her. He said she was only an aimless child, angry at her family, and that all she really needed was a good man. Which he was, then and always, for even Nikos could never give him back his first form. He died old and respected—of a surfeit of violets, some say—he never could get enough violets. There were no children.”
The story lodged itself somewhere in the unicorn’s breath. “The magician did him no service, but great ill,” she said softly. “How terrible it would be if all my people had been turned human by well-meaning wizards—exiled, trapped in burning houses. I would sooner find that the Red Bull had killed them all.”
“Where you are going now,” Schmendrick answered, “few will mean you anything but evil, and a friendly heart—however foolish—may be as welcome as water one day. Take me with you, for laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.”
The rain faded as he spoke, the sky began to clear, and the wet grass glowed like the inside of a seashell. The unicorn looked away, searching through a fog of kings for one king, and through a snowy glitter of castles and palaces for one built on the shoulders of a bull. “No one has ever traveled with me,” she said, “but then no one ever caged me before, or took me for a white mare, or disguised me as myself. Many things seem determined to happen to me for the first time, and your company will surely not be the strangest of them, nor the last. So you may come with me if you like, though I wish you had asked me for some other reward.”
Schmendrick smiled sadly. “I thought about it.” He looked at his fingers, and the unicorn saw the halfmoon marks where the bars had bitten him. “But you could never have granted my true wish.”
There it is, the unicorn thought, feeling the first spidery touch of sorrow on the inside of her skin. That is how it will be to travel with a mortal, all the time. “No,” she replied. “I cannot turn you into something you are not, no more than the witch could. I cannot turn you into a true magician.”
“I didn’t think so,” Schmendrick said. “It’s all right. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worrying about it,” the unicorn said.
A blue jay swooped low over them on that first day of their journey, said, “Well, I’ll be a squab under glass,” and flapped straight home to tell his wife about it. She was sitting on the nest, singing to their children in a dreary drone.
“Spiders and sowbugs and beetles and crickets,
Slugs from the roses and ticks from the thickets,
Grasshoppers, snails, and a quail’s egg or two—
All to be regurgitated for you.
Lullaby, lullaby, swindles and schemes,
Flying’s not near as much fun as it seems.”
“Saw a unicorn today,” the blue jay said as he lit.
“You didn’t see any supper, I notice,” his wife replied coldly. “I hate a man who talks with his mouth empty.”
“Baby, a unicorn!” The jay abandoned his casual air and hopped up and down on the branch. “I haven’t seen one of those since the time—“
“You’ve never seen one,” she said. “This is me, remember? I know what you’ve seen in your life, and what you haven’t.”
The jay paid no attention. “There was a strange-looking party in black with her,” he rattled. “They were going over Cat Mountain. I wonder if they were heading for Haggard’s country.” He cocked his head to the artistic angle that had first won his wife. “What a vision for old Haggard’s breakfast,” he marveled. “A unicorn coming to call, bold as you please, rat-tat-tat on his dismal door. I’d give anything to see—“
“I suppose the two of you didn’t spend the whole day watching unicorns,” his wife interrupted with a click of her beak. “At least, I understand that she used to be considered quite imaginative in matters of spare time.” She advanced on him, her neck feathers ruffling.
“Honey, I haven’t even seen her—“ the blue jay began, and his wife knew that he hadn’t, and wouldn’t dare, but she batted him one anyway. She was one woman who knew what to do with a slight moral edge.
The unicorn and the magician walked through the spring, over soft Cat Mountain and down into a violet valley where apple trees grew. Beyond the valley were low hills, as fat and docile as sheep, lowering their heads to sniff at the unicorn in wonder as she moved among them. After these came the slower heights of summer, and the baked plains where the air hung shiny as candy. Together she and Schmendrick forded rivers, scrambled up and down brambly banks and bluffs, and wandered in woods that reminded the unicorn of her home, though they could never resemble it, having known time. So has my forest, now, she thought, but she told herself that it did not matter, that all would be as before when she returned.
At night, while Schmendrick slept the sleep of a hungry, footsore magician, the unicorn crouched awake waiting to see the vast form of the Red Bull come charging out of the moon. At times she caught what she was sure was his smell—a dark, sly reek easing through the night, reaching out to find her. Then she would spring to her feet with a cold cry of readiness, only to find two or three deer gazing at her from a respectful distance. Deer love and envy unicorns. Once, a buck in his second summer, prodded forward by his giggling friends, came quite close to her and mumbled without meeting her eyes, “You are very beautiful. You are just as beautiful as our mothers said.”
The unicorn looked silently back at him, knowing that he expected no answer from her. The other deer snickered and whispered, “Go on, go on.” Then the buck raised his head and cried out swiftly and joyously, “But I know someone more beautiful than you!” He wheeled and dashed away in the moonlight, and his friends followed him. The unicorn lay down again.
Now and then in their journey they came to a village, and there Schmendrick would introduce himself as a wandering wizard, offering, as he cried in the streets, “to sing for my supper, to bother you just a little bit, to trouble your sleep ever so slightly, and pass on.” Few were the towns where he was not invited to stable his beautiful white mare and stay the night, and before the children went to bed he would perform in the market square by lantern light. He never actually attempted any greater magic than making dolls talk and turning soap into sweets, and even this trifling sorcery sometimes slipped from his hands. But the children liked him, and their parents were kindly with supper, and the summer evenings were lithe and soft. Ages after, the unicorn still remembered the strange, chocolate stable smell, and Schmendrick’s shadow dancing on walls and doors and chimneys in the leaping light.
In the mornings they went on their way, Schmendrick’s pockets full of bread and cheese and oranges, and the unicorn pacing beside him: sea white in the sun, sea green in the dark of the trees. His tricks were forgotten before he was out of sight, but his white mare troubled the nights of many a villager, and there were women who woke weeping from dreams of her.
One evening, they stopped in a plump, comfortable town where even the beggars had double chins and the mice waddled. Schmendrick was immediately asked to dinner with the Mayor and several of the rounder Councilmen; and the unicorn, unrecognized as always, was turned loose in a pasture where the grass grew sweet as milk. Dinner was served out of doors, at a table in the square, for the night was warm and the Mayor was pleased to show off his guest. It was an excellent dinner.
During the meal Schmendrick told stories of his life as an errant enchanter, filling it with kings and dragons and noble ladies. He was not lying, merely organizing events more sensibly, and so his tales had a taste of truth even to the canny Councilmen. Not only they, but all manner of folk passing in the street leaned forward to understand the nature of the spell that opened all locks, if properly applied. And there was not a one but lost a breath at sight of the marks on the magician’s fingers. “Souvenir of my encounter with a harpy,” Schmendrick explained calmly. “They bite.”
“And were you never afraid?” a young girl wondered softly. The Mayor made a shooing noise at her, but Schmendrick lit a cigar and smiled at her through the smoke. “Fear and hunger have kept me young,” he replied. He looked around the circle of dozing, rumbling Councilmen and winked widely at the girl.
The Mayor was not offended. “It’s true,” he sighed, caressing his dinner with linked fingers. “We do lead a good life here, or if we don’t, I don’t know anything about it. I sometimes think that a little fear, a little hunger, might be good for us—sharpen our souls, so to speak. That’s why we always welcome strangers with tales to tell and songs to sing. They broaden our outlook . . . set us to looking inward . . .” He yawned and stretched himself, gurgling.
One of the Councilmen suddenly remarked, “My word, look at the pasture!” Heavy heads turned on nodding necks, and all saw the village’s cows and sheep and horses clustered at the far end of the field, staring at the magician’s white mare, who was placidly cropping the cool grass. No animal made a noise. Even the pigs and geese were as silent as ghosts. A crow called once, far away, and his cry drifted through the sunset like a single cinder.
“Remarkable,” the Mayor murmured. “Most remarkable.”
“Yes, isn’t she?” the magician agreed. “If I were to tell you some of the offers I’ve had for her—“
“The interesting thing,” said the Councilman who had spoken first, “is that they don’t seem to be afraid of her. They have an air of awe, as though they were doing her some sort of reverence.”
“They see what you have forgotten how to see.” Schmendrick had drunk his share of red wine, and the young girl was staring at him with eyes both sweeter and shallower than the unicorn’s eyes. He thumped his glass on the table and told the smiling Mayor, “She is a rarer creature than you dare to dream. She is a myth, a memory, a wiIl-o’-the-wish. Wail-o’-the-wisp. If you remembered, if you hungered—“
His voice was lost in a gust of hoofbeats and the clamor of children. A dozen horsemen, dressed in autumn rags, came galloping into the square, howling and laughing, scattering the townsfolk like marbles. They formed a line and clattered around the square, knocking over whatever came in their way and shrieking incomprehensible brags and challenges to no one in particular. One rider rose up in his saddle, bent his bow, and shot the weathercock off the church spire; another snatched up Schmendrick’s hat, jammed it on his own head, and rode on roaring. Some swung screaming children to their saddlebows, and others contented themselves with wineskins and sandwiches. Their eyes gleamed madly in their shaggy faces, and their laughter was like drums.
The round Mayor stood fast until he caught the eye of the raiders’ leader. Then he raised one eyebrow; the man snapped his fingers, and immediately the horses were still and the ragged men as silent as the village animals before the unicorn. They put the children gently on the ground, and gave back most of the wineskins.
“Jack Jingly, if you please,” the Mayor said calmly.
The leader of the horsemen dismounted and walked slowly toward the table where the Councilmen and their guest had dined. He was a huge man, nearly seven feet tall, and at every step he rang and jangled because of the rings and bells and bracelets that were sewn to his patched jerkin. “Evenin’, Yer Honor,” he said in a gruff chuckle.
“Let’s get the business over with,” the Mayor told him. “I don’t see why you can’t come riding in quietly, like civilized people.”
“Ah, the boys don’t mean no harm, Yer Honor,” the giant grumbled good-naturedly. “Cooped up in the greenwood all day, they needs a little relaxing, a little catharsis, like. Well, well, to it, eh?” With a sigh, he took a wizened bag of coins from his waist and placed it in the Mayor’s open hand. “There you be, Yer Honor,” said Jack Jingly. “It ben’t much, but we can’t spare no more than that.”
The Mayor poured the coins into his palm and pushed at them with a fat finger, grunting. “It certainly isn’t much,” he complained. “It isn’t even as much as last month’s take, and that was shriveled enough. You’re a woeful lot of freebooters, you are.”
“It’s hard times,” Jack Jingly answered sullenly. “We ben’t to blame if travelers have no more gold than we. You can’t squeeze blood out of turnip, you know.”
“I can,” the Mayor said. He scowled savagely and shook his fist at the giant outlaw. “And if you’re holding out on me,” he shouted, “if you’re feathering your own pockets at my expense, I’ll squeeze you, my friend, I’ll squeeze you to pulp and peel and let the wind take you. Be off now, and tell it to your tattered captain. Away, villains!”
As Jack Jingly turned away, muttering, Schmendrick cleared his throat and said hesitantly, “I’ll have my hat, if you don’t mind.”
The giant stared at him out of bloodshot buffalo eyes, saying nothing. “My hat,” Schmendrick requested in a firmer voice. “One of your men took my hat, and it would be wise for him to return it.”
“Wise, is it?” grunted Jack Jingly at last. “And who be you, pray, that knows what wisdom is?”
The wine was still leaping in Schmendrick’s own eyes. “I am Schmendrick the Magician, and I make a bad enemy,” he declared. “I am older than I look, and less amiable. My hat.”
Jack Jingly regarded him a few moments longer; then he walked back to his horse, stepped over it, and sat down in the saddle. He rode forward until he was hardly a beard’s thickness from the waiting Schmendrick. “Na, then,” he boomed, “if you be a magician, do summat tricksy. Turn ma nose green, fill ma saddlebags with snow, disappear ma beard. Show me some magic, or show me your heels.” He pulled a rusty dagger from his belt and dangled it by the point, whistling maliciously.
“The magician is my guest,” the Mayor warned, but Schmendrick said solemnly, “Very well. On your head be it.” Making sure with the edge of his eye that the young girl was watching him, he pointed at the scarecrow crew grinning behind their leader and said something that rhymed. Instantly, his black hat snatched itself from the fingers of the man who held it and floated slowly through the darkening air, silent as an owl. Two women fainted, and the Mayor sat down. The outlaws cried out in children’s voices.
Down the length of the square sailed the black hat, as far as a horse trough where it dipped low and scooped itself full of water. Then, almost invisible in the shadows, it came drifting back, apparently aiming straight for the unwashed head of Jack Jingly. He covered himself with his hands, muttering, “Na, na, call it off,” and even his own men snickered in anticipation. Schmendrick smiled triumphantly and snapped his fingers to hasten the hat.
But as it neared the outlaw leader the hat’s flight began to curve, gradually at first, and then much more sharply as it bent toward the Councilmen’s table. The Mayor had just time to lunge to his feet before the hat settled itself comfortably on his head. Schmendrick ducked in time, but a couple of the closer Councilmen were slightly splattered.
In the roar of laughter—varyingly voluntary—that went up, Jack Jingly leaned from his horse and swept up Schmendrick the Magician, who was trying to dry the spluttering Mayor with the tablecloth. “I misdoubt ye’ll be asked for encores,” the giant bellowed in his ear. “You’d best come with us.” He threw Schmendrick face down across his saddlebow and galloped away, followed by his shabby cohorts. Their snorts and belches and guffaws lingered in the square long after the sound of hooves had died away.
Men came running to ask the Mayor if they should pursue to rescue the magician, but he shook his wet head, saying, “I hardly think it will be necessary. If our guest is the man he claims to be, he should be able to take care of himself quite well. And if he isn’t—why then, an imposter taking advantage of our hospitality has no claim on us for assistance. No, no, never mind about him.”
Creeks were running down his jowls to join the brooks of his neck and the river of his shirt front, but he turned his placid gaze toward the pasture where the magician’s white mare glimmered in the darkness. She was trotting back and forth before the fence, making no sound. The Mayor said softly, “I think it might be well to take good care of our departed friend’s mount, since he evidently prized her so highly.” He sent two men to the pasture with instructions to rope the mare and put her in the strongest stall of his own stable.
But the men had not yet reached the pasture gate when the white mare jumped the fence and was gone into the night like a falling star. The two men stood where they were for a time, not heeding the Mayor’s commands to come back; and neither ever said, even to the other, why he stared after the magician’s mare so long. But now and then after that, they laughed with wonder in the middle of very serious events, and so came to be considered frivolous sorts.
All that Schmendrick remembered later of his wild ride with the outlaws was the wind, the saddle’s edge, and the laughter of the jingling giant. He was too busy brooding over the ending of his hat trick to notice much else. Too much english, he suggested to himself. Overcompensation. But he shook his head, which was difficult in his position. The magic knows what it wants to do, he thought, bouncing as the horse dashed across a creek. But I never know what it knows. Not at the right time, anyway. I’d write it a letter, if I knew where it lived.
Brush and branches raked his face, and owls hooted in his ears. The horses had slowed to a trot, then to a walk. A high, trembling voice called out, “Halt and give the password!”
“Damme, here we go,” Jack Jingly muttered. He scratched his head with a sound like sawing, raised his voice, and answered, “A short life and a merry one, here in the sweet greenwood; jolly comrades united, to victory plighted—“
“Liberty,” the thin voice corrected. “To liberty plighted. The l sound makes all the difference.”
“Thank ‘ee. To liberty plighted. Comrades united—na, na, I said that. A short life and a merry one, jolly comrades—na, that’s not it.” Jack Jingly scratched his head again and groaned. “To liberty plighted—gi’me a little help, will ye?”
“All for one and one for all,” the voice said obligingly. “Can you get the rest yourself?”
“All for one and one for all—I haven’t!” the giant shouted. “All for one and one for all, united we stand, divided we fall.” He kicked his horse and started on again.
An arrow squealed out of the dark, sliced a wedge from his ear, nicked the horse of the man riding behind him, and skittered away like a bat. The outlaws scattered to the safety of the trees, and Jack Jingly yelled with rage, “Damn your eyes, I gave the password ten times over! Let me only get my hands on ‘ee—“
“We changed the password while you were gone, Jack,” came the voice of the sentry. “It was too hard to remember.”
“Ah, you changed the password, did ye?” Jack Jingly dabbed at his bleeding ear with a fold of Schmendrick’s cloak. “And how was I to know that, ye brainless, tripeless, liverless get?”
“Don’t get mad, Jack,” the sentry answered soothingly. “You see, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t know the new password, because it’s so simple. You just call like a giraffe. The captain thought of it himself.”
“Call like a giraffe.” The giant swore till even the horses fidgeted with embarrassment. “Ye ninny, a giraffe makes no sound at all. The captain might as well have us call like a fish or a butterfly.”
“I know. That way, nobody can forget the password, even you. Isn’t the captain clever?”
“There’s no limit to the man,” Jack Jingly said wonderingly. “But see here, what’s to keep a ranger or one of the king’s men from calling like a giraffe when ye hail him?”
“Aha,” the sentry chuckled. “That’s where the cleverness of it is. You have to give the call three times. Two long and one short.”
Jack Jingly sat silent on his horse, rubbing his ear. “Two long and one short,” he sighed presently. “Awell, ‘tis no more foolish than the time he’d have no password at all, and shot any who answered the challenge. Two long and one short, right.” He rode on through the trees, and his men trailed after him.
Voices murmured somewhere ahead, sullen as robbed bees. As they drew nearer Schmendrick thought he could make out a woman’s tone among them. Then his cheek felt firelight, and he looked up. They had halted in a small clearing where another ten or twelve men sat around a campfire, fretting and grumbling. The air smelled of burned beans.
A freckled, red-haired man, dressed in somewhat richer rags than the rest, strode forward to greet them. “Well, Jack,” he cried. “Who is’t you bring us, comrade or captive?” Over his shoulder he called to someone, “Add some more water to the soup, love; there’s company.”
“I don’t know what he is maself,” Jack Jingly rumbled. He began to tell the story of the Mayor and the hat, but he had hardly reached the roaring descent upon the town when he was interrupted by a thin thorn of a woman who came pushing through the ring of men to shrill, “I’ll not have it, Cully, the soup’s no thicker than sweat as it is!” She had a pale, bony face with fierce, tawny eyes, and hair the color of dead grass.
“And who’s this long lout?” she asked, inspecting Schmendrick as though he were something she had found sticking to the sole of her shoe. “He’s no townsman. I don’t like the look of him. Slit his wizard.”
She had meant to say either “weazand” or “gizzard,” and had said both, but the coincidence trailed down Schmendrick’s spine like wet seaweed. He slid off Jack Jingly’s horse and stood before the outlaw captain. “I am Schmendrick the Magician,” he announced, swirling his cloak with both hands until it billowed feebly. “And are you truly the famous Captain Cully of the greenwood, boldest of the bold and freest of the free?”
A few of the outlaws snickered, and the woman groaned. “I knew it,” she declared. “Gut him, Cully, from gills to guilt, before he does you the way the last one did.” But the captain bowed proudly, showing an eddy of baldness on his crown, and answered, “That am I. He who hunts me for my head shall find a fearful foe, but he who seeks me as a friend may find me friend enow. How do you come here, sir?”
“On my stomach,” said Schmendrick, “and unintentionally, but in friendship nonetheless. Though your leman doubts it,” he added nodding at the thin woman. She spat on the ground.
Captain Cully grinned and laid his arm warily along the woman’s sharp shoulders. “Ah, that’s only Molly Grue’s way,” he explained. “She guards me better than I do myself. I am generous and easy; to the point of extravagance, perhaps—an open hand to all fugitives from tyranny, that’s my motto. It is only natural that Molly should become suspicious, pinched, dour, prematurely old, even a touch tyrannical. The bright balloon needs the knot at one end, eh, Molly? But she’s a good heart, a good heart.” The woman shrugged herself away from him, but the captain did not turn his head. “You are welcome here, sir sorcerer,” he told Schmendrick. “Come to the fire and tell us your tale. How do they speak of me in your country? What have you heard of dashing Captain Cully and his band of freemen? Have a taco.”
Schmendrick accepted the place by the fire, graciously declined the gelid morsel, and replied, “I have heard that you are the friend of the helpless and the enemy of the mighty, and that you and your merry men lead a joyous life in the forest, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. I know the tale of how you and Jack Jingly cracked one another’s crowns with quarterstaves and became blood brothers thereby; and how you saved your Molly from marriage to the rich old man her father had chosen for her.” In fact, Schmendrick had never heard of Captain Cully before that very evening, but he had a good grounding in Anglo-Saxon folklore and knew the type. “And of course,” he hazarded, “there was a certain wicked king—“
“Haggard, rot and ruin him!” Cully cried. “Aye, there’s not one here but’s been done wrong by old King Haggard—driven from his rightful land, robbed of his rank and rents, skinned out of his patrimony. They live only for revenge—mark you, magician—and one day Haggard will pay such a reckoning—“
A score of shaggy shadows hissed assent, but Molly Grue’s laughter fell like hail, rattling and stinging. “Mayhap he will,” she mocked, “but it won’t be to such chattering cravens he’ll pay it. His castle rots and totters more each day, and his men are too old to stand up in armor, but he’ll rule forever, for all Captain Cully dares.”
Schmendrick raised an eyebrow, and Cully flushed radish-red. “You must understand,” he mumbled. “King Haggard has this Bull—“
“Ah, the Red Bull, the Red Bull!” Molly hooted. “I tell you what, Cully, after all these years in the wood with you I’ve come to think the Bull’s nought but the pet name you give your cowardice. If I hear that fable once more, I’ll go and down old Haggard myself, and know you for a—“
“Enough!” Cully roared. “Not before strangers!” He tugged at his sword and Molly opened her arms to it, still laughing. Around the fire, greasy hands twiddled dagger hilts and longbows seemed to string themselves, but Schmendrick spoke up then, seeking to salvage Cully’s sinking vanity. He hated family scenes.
“They sing a ballad of you in my country,” he began. “I forget just how it goes—“
Captain Cully spun like a cat ambushing its own tail. “Which one?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” Schmendrick answered, taken aback. “Are there more than one?”
“Aye, indeed!” Cully cried, glowing and growing, as though pregnant with his pride. “Willie Gentle! Willie Gentle! Where is the lad?”
A lank-haired youth with a lute and pimples shambled up. “Sing one of my exploits for the gentleman,” Captain Cully ordered him. “Sing the one about how you joined my band. I’ve not heard it since Tuesday last.”
The minstrel sighed, struck a chord, and began to sing in a wobbly countertenor:
“Oh, it was Captain Cully came riding home
From slaying of the king’s gay deer,
When whom should he spy but a pale young man,
Game drooping o’er the lea?
“’What news, what news, my pretty young man?
What ails ye, that ye sigh so deep?
Is it for the loss of your lady fair?
Or are ye but scabbit in your greep?’
“’I am nae scabbit, whatever that means,
And my greep is as well as a greep may be,
But I do sigh for my lady fair
Whom my three brothers ha’ riven from me.’
“’I am Captain Cully of the sweet greenwood,
And the men at my call are fierce and free.
If I do rescue your lady fair,
What service will ye render me?’
“’If ye do rescue my lady fair,
I will break your nose, ye silly auld gowk.
But she wore an emerald at her throat,
Which my three brothers also took.’
“Then the captain has gone to the three bold thieves,
And he’s made his sword baith to shiver and sing.
‘Ye may keep the lass, but I’ll hae the stane,
For it’s fit for the crown of a royal king.’”
“Now comes the best part,” Cully whispered to Schmendrick. He was bouncing eagerly on his toes, hugging himself.
“Then it’s three cloaks off, and it’s three swords out,
And it’s three swords whistling like the tea.
‘By the faith of my body,’ says Captain Cully,
‘Now ye shall have neither the stane nor she.’
“And he’s driven them up, and he’s driven them down,
And he’s driven them to and fro like sheep—“
“Like sheep,” Cully breathed. He rocked and hummed and parried three swords with his forearm for the remaining seventeen stanzas of the song, rapturously oblivious to Molly’s mockery and the restlessness of his men. The ballad ended at last, and Schmendrick applauded loudly and earnestly, complimenting Willie Gentle on his right-hand technique.
“I call it Alan-a-Dale picking,” the minstrel answered.
He would have expounded further, but Cully interrupted him, saying, “Good, Willie, good boy, now play the others.” He beamed at what Schmendrick hoped was an expression of pleased surprise. “I said that there were several songs about me. There are thirty-one, to be exact, though none are in the Child collection just at present—“ His eyes widened suddenly, and he grasped the magician’s shoulders. “You wouldn’t be Mr. Child himself, now would you?” he demanded. “He often goes seeking ballads, so I’ve heard, disguised as a plain man—“
Schmendrick shook his head. “No, I’m very sorry, really.”
The captain sighed and released him. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured. “One always hopes, of course, even now—to be collected, to be verified, annotated, to have variant versions, even to have one’s authenticity doubted . . . well, well, never mind. Sing the other songs, Willie lad. You’ll need the practice one day, when you’re field-recorded.”
The outlaws grumbled and scuffed, kicking at stones. A hoarse voice bawled from a safe shadow, “Na, Willie, sing us a true song. Sing us one about Robin Hood.”
“Who said that?” Cully’s loosened sword clacked in its sheath as he turned from side to side. His face suddenly seemed as pale and weary as a used lemon drop.
“I did,” said Molly Grue, who hadn’t. “The men are bored with ballads of your bravery, captain darling. Even if you did write them all yourself.”
Cully winced and stole a side glance at Schmendrick. “They can still be folk songs, can’t they, Mr. Child?” he asked in a low, worried voice. “After all—“
“I’m not Mr. Child,” Schmendrick said. “Really I’m not.”
“I mean, you can’t leave epic events to the people. They get everything wrong.”
An aging rogue in tattered velvet now slunk forward. “Captain, if we’re to have folk songs, and I suppose we must, then we feel they ought to be true songs about real outlaws, not this lying life we live. No offense, captain, but we’re really not very merry, when all’s said—“
“I’m merry twenty-four hours a day, Dick Fancy,” Cully said coldly. “That is a fact.”
“And we don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor,” Dick Fancy hurried on. “We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back—most of them—and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day. We don’t rob the fat, greedy Mayor on the highway; we pay him tribute every month to leave us alone. We never carry off proud bishops and keep them prisoner in the wood, feasting and entertaining them, because Molly hasn’t any good dishes, and besides, we just wouldn’t be very stimulating company for a bishop. When we go to the fair in disguise, we never win at the archery or at singlestick. We do get some nice compliments on our disguises, but no more than that.”
“I sent a tapestry to the judging once,” Molly remembered. “It came in fourth. Fifth. A knight at vigil—everyone was doing vigils that year.” Suddenly she was scrubbing her eyes with horny knuckles. “Damn you, Cully.”
“What, what?” he yelled in exasperation. “Is it my fault you didn’t keep up with your weaving? Once you had your man, you let all your accomplishments go. You don’t sew or sing any more, you haven’t illuminated a manuscript in years—and what happened to that viola da gamba I got you?” He turned to Schmendrick. “We might as well be married, the way she’s gone to seed.” The magician nodded fractionally, and looked away.
“And as for righting wrongs and fighting for civil liberties, that sort of thing,” Dick Fancy said, “it wouldn’t be so bad—I mean, I’m not the crusader type myself, some are and some aren’t—but then we have to sing those songs about wearing Lincoln green and aiding the oppressed. We don’t, Cully, we turn them in for the reward, and those songs are just embarrassing, that’s all, and there’s the truth of it.”
Captain Cully folded his arms, ignoring the outlaws’ snarls of agreement. “Sing the songs, Willie.”
“I’ll not.” The minstrel would not raise a hand to touch his lute. “And you never fought my brothers for any stone, Cully! You wrote them a letter, which you didn’t sign—“
Cully drew back his arm, and blades blinked among the men as though someone had blown on a heap of coals. At this point Schmendrick stepped forward again, smiling urgently. “If I may offer an alternative,” he suggested, “why not let your guest earn his night’s lodging by amusing you? I can neither sing nor play, but I have my own accomplishments, and you may not have seen their like.”
Jack Jingly agreed immediately, saying, “Aye, Cully, a magician! ‘Twould be a rare treat for the lads.” Molly Grue grumbled some savage generalization about wizards as a class, but the men shouted with quick delight, throwing one another into the air. The only real reluctance was shown by Captain Cully himself, who protested sadly, “Yes, but the songs. Mr. Child must hear the songs.”
“And so I will,” Schmendrick assured him. “Later.” Cully brightened then and cried to his men to give way and make room. They sprawled and squatted in the shadows, watching with sprung grins as Schmendrick began to run through the old flummeries with which he had entertained the country folk at the Midnight Carnival. It was paltry magic, but he thought it diverting enough for such a crew as Cully’s.
But he had judged them too easily. They applauded his rings and scarves, his ears full of goldfish and aces, with a proper politeness but without wonder. Offering no true magic, he drew no magic back from them; and when a spell failed—as when, promising to turn a duck into a duke for them to rob, he produced a handful of duke cherries—he was clapped just as kindly and vacantly as though he had succeeded. They were a perfect audience.
Cully smiled impatiently, and Jack Jingly dozed, but it startled the magician to see the disappointment in Molly Grue’s restless eyes. Sudden anger made him laugh. He dropped seven spinning balls that had been glowing brighter and brighter as he juggled them (on a good evening, he could make them catch fire), let go all his hated skills, and closed his eyes. “Do as you will,” he whispered to the magic. “Do as you will.”
It sighed through him, beginning somewhere secret—in his shoulderblade, perhaps, or in the marrow of his shinbone. His heart filled and tautened like a sail, and something moved more surely in his body than he ever had. It spoke with his voice, commanding. Weak with power, he sank to his knees and waited to be Schmendrick again.
I wonder what I did. I did something.
He opened his eyes. Most of the outlaws were chuckling and tapping their temples, glad of the chance to mock him. Captain Cully had risen, anxious to pronounce that part of the entertainment ended. Then Molly Grue cried out in a soft, shaking voice, and all turned to see what she saw. A man came walking into the clearing.
He was dressed in green, but for a brown jerkin and a slanting brown cap with a woodcock’s feather in it. He was very tall, too tall for a living man: the great bow slung over his shoulder looked as long as Jack Jingly, and his arrows would have made spears or staves for Captain Cully. Taking no notice at all of the still, shabby forms by the fire, he strode through the light and vanished, with no sound of breath or footfall.
After him came others, one at a time or two together, some conversing, many laughing, but none making any sound. All carried longbows and all wore green, save one who came clad in scarlet to his shoes, and another gowned in a friar’s brown habit, his feet in sandals and his enormous belly contained by a rope belt. One played a lute and sang silently as he walked.
“Alan-a-Dale.” It was raw Willie Gentle. “_Look_ at those changes.” His voice was as naked as a baby bird.
Effortlessly proud, graceful as giraffes (even the tallest among them, a kind-eyed Blunderbore), the bowmen moved across the clearing. Last, hand in hand, came a man and a woman. Their faces were as beautiful as though they had never known fear. The woman’s heavy hair shone with a secret, like a cloud that hides the moon.
“Oh,” said Molly Grue. “Marian.”
“Robin Hood is a myth,” Captain Cully said nervously, “a classic example of the heroic folk-figure synthesized out of need. John Henry is another. Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl. Not that it isn’t a remarkable trick, of course.”
It was the seedy dandy Dick Fancy who moved first. All the figures but the last two had passed into the darkness when he rushed after them, calling hoarsely, “Robin, Robin, Mr. Hood sir, wait for me!” Neither the man nor the woman turned, but every man of Cully’s band—saving only Jack Jingly and the captain himself—ran to the clearing’s edge, tripping and trampling one another, kicking the fire so that the clearing churned with shadows. “Robin!” they shouted; and “Marian, Scarlet, Little John—come back! Come back!” Schmendrick began to laugh, tenderly and helplessly.
Over their voices, Gaptain Cully screamed, “Fools, fools and children! It was a lie, like all magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!” But the outlaws, wild with loss, went crashing into the woods after the shining archers, stumbling over logs, falling through thorn bushes, wailing hungrily as they ran.
Only Molly Grue stopped and looked back. Her face was burning white.
“Nay, Cully, you have it backward,” she called to him. “There’s no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!” Then she ran on, crying, “Wait, wait!” like the others, leaving Captain Cully and Jack Jingly to stand in the trampled firelight and listen to the magician’s laughter.
Schmendrick hardly noticed when they sprang on him and seized his arms; nor did he flinch when Cully pricked his ribs with a dagger, hissing, “That was a dangerous diversion, Mr. Child, and rude as well. You could have said you didn’t want to hear the songs.” The dagger twitched deeper.
Far away, he heard Jack Jingly growl, “He’s na Child, Cully, nor is he any journeyman wizard, neither. I know him now. He’s Haggard’s son, the prince Lír, as foul as his father and doubtless handy with the black arts. Hold your hand, captain—he’s no good to us dead.”
Cully’s voice drooped. “Are you sure, Jack? He seemed such a pleasant fellow.”
“Pleasant fool, ye mean. Aye, Lír has that air, I’ve heard tell. He plays the gormless innocent, but he’s the devil for deception. The way he gave out to be this Child cove, just to get you off your guard.”
“I wasn’t off my guard, Jack,” Cully protested. “Not for a moment. I may have seemed to be, but I’m very deceptive myself.”
“And the way he called up Robin Hood to fill the lads with longing and turn them against you. Ah, but he gave himself away that time, and now he’ll bide with us though his father send the Red Bull to free him.” Cully caught his breath at that, but the giant snatched up the unresisting magician for the second time that night and bore him to a great tree, where he bound him with his face to the trunk and his arms stretched around it. Schmendrick giggled gently all through the operation, and made matters easier by hugging the tree as fondly as a new bride.
“There,” Jack Jingly said at last. “Do ye guard him the night, Cully, whiles I sleep, and in the morning it’s me to old Haggard to see what his boy’s worth to him. Happen we’ll all be gentlemen of leisure in a month’s time.”
“What of the men?” Cully asked worriedly. “Will they come back, do you think?”
The giant yawned and turned away. “They’ll be back by morning, sad and sneezing, and ye’ll have to be easy with them for a bit. They’ll be back, for they’m not the sort to trade something for nothing, and no more am I. Robin Hood might have stayed for us if we were. Good night to ye, captain.”
There was no sound when he was gone but crickets, and Schmendrick’s soft chuckling to the tree. The fire faded, and Cully turned in circles, sighing as each ember went out. Finally he sat down on a stump and addressed the captive magician.
“Haggard’s son you may be,” he mused, “and not the collector Child, as you claim. But whoever you are, you know very well that Robin Hood is the fable and I am the reality. No ballads will accumulate around my name unless I write them myself; no children will read of my adventures in their schoolbooks and play at being me after school. And when the professors prowl through the old tales, and scholars sift the old songs to learn if Robin Hood ever truly lived, they will never, never find my name, not till they crack the world for the grain of its heart. But you know, and therefore I am going to sing you the songs of Captain Cully. He was a good, gay rascal who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. In their gratitude, the people made up these simple verses about him.”
Whereupon he sang them all, including the one that Willie Gentle had sung for Schmendrick. He paused often to comment on the varying rhythm patterns, the assonantal rhymes, and the modal melodies.
Captain Cully fell asleep thirteen stanzas into the nineteenth song, and Schmendrick—who had stopped laughing somewhat sooner—promptly set about trying to free himself. He strained against his bonds with all his strength, but they held fast. Jack Jingly had wrapped him in enough rope to rig a small schooner, and tied knots the size of skulls.
“Gently, gently,” he counseled himself. “No man with the power to summon Robin Hood—indeed, to create him—can be bound for long. A word, a wish, and this tree must be an acorn on a branch again, this rope be green in a marsh.” But he knew before he called on it that whatever had visited him for a moment was gone again, leaving only an ache where it had been. He felt like an abandoned chrysalis.
“Do as you will,” he said softly. Captain Cully roused at his voice, and sang the fourteenth stanza.
“’There are fifty swords without the house, and
fifty more within,
And I do fear me, captain, they are like to do
us in.’
‘Ha’ done, ha’ done,’ says Captain Cully, ‘and
never fear again,
For they may be a hundred swords, but we are
seven men.’”
“I hope you get slaughtered,” the magician told him, but Cully was asleep again. Schmendrick attempted a few simple spells for escaping, but he could not use his hands, and he had no more heart for tricks. What happened instead was that the tree fell in love with him and began to murmur fondly of the joy to be found in the eternal embrace of a red oak. “Always, always,” it sighed, “faithfulness beyond any man’s deserving. I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree’s love.”
“I’m engaged,” Schmendrick excused himself. “To a western larch. Since childhood. Marriage by contract, no choice in the matter. Hopeless. Our story is never to be.”
A gust of fury shook the oak, as though a storm were coming to it alone. “Galls and fireblight on her!” it whispered savagely. “Damned softwood, cursed conifer, deceitful evergreen, she’ll never have you! We will perish together, and all trees shall treasure our tragedy!”
Along his length Schmendrick could feel the tree heaving like a heart, and he feared that it might actually split in two with rage. The ropes were growing steadily tighter around him, and the night was beginning to turn red and yellow. He tried to explain to the oak that love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal, and then he tried to yell for Captain Cully; but he could only make a small, creaking sound, like a tree. “She means well,” he thought, and gave himself up for loved.
Then the ropes went slack as he lunged against them, and he fell to the ground on his back, wriggling for air. The unicorn stood over him, dark as blood in his darkened vision. She touched him with her horn.
When he could rise she turned away, and the magician followed her, wary of the oak, though it was once again as still as any tree that had never loved. The sky was still black, but it was a watery darkness through which Schmendrick could see the violet dawn swimming. Hard silver clouds were melting as the sky grew warm; shadows dulled, sounds lost their shape, and shapes had not yet decided what they were going to be that day. Even the wind wondered about itself.
“Did you see me?” he asked the unicorn. “Were you watching, did you see what I made?”
“Yes,” she answered. “It was true magic.”
The loss came back, cold and bitter as a sword. “It’s gone now,” he said. “I had it—it had me—but it’s gone now. I couldn’t hold it.” The unicorn floated on before him, silent as a feather.
Close by, a familiar voice said, “Leaving us so early, magician? The men will be sorry they missed you.” He turned and saw Molly Grue leaning against a tree. Dress and ditty hair tattered alike, bare feet bleeding and beslimed, she gave him a bat’s grin. “Surprise,” she said. “It’s Maid Marian.”
Then she saw the unicorn. She neither moved nor spoke, but her tawny eyes were suddenly big with tears. For a long moment she did not move; then each fist seized a handful of her hem, and she warped her knees into a kind of trembling crouch. Her ankles were crossed and her eyes were lowered, but for all that it took Schmendrick another moment to realize that Molly Grue was curtsying.
He burst out laughing, and Molly sprang up, red from hairline to throat-hollow. “Where have you been?” she cried. “Damn you, where have you been?” She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.
When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. “You don’t talk like that,” he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. “Don’t you know how to behave, woman? You don’t curtsy, either.”
But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. “_Where have you been?_” Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn’s old dark eyes that looked down.
“I am here now,” she said at last.
Molly laughed with her lips flat. “And what good is it to me that you’re here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?” With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. “I wish you had never come, why do you come now?” The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.
The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, “She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world.”
“She would be.” Molly sniffed. “It would be the last unicorn in the world that came to Molly Grue.” She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn’s cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, “It’s all right. I forgive you.”
“Unicorns are not to be forgiven.” The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. “Unicorns are for beginnings,” he said, “for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls.”
Molly was stroking the unicorn’s throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. “You don’t know much about unicorns,” she said.
The sky was jade-gray now, and the trees that had been drawn on the dark a moment ago were real trees again, hissing in the dawn wind. Schmendrick said coldly, looking at the unicorn, “We must go.”
Molly agreed promptly. “Aye, before the men stumble on us and slit your throat for cheating them, the poor lads.” She looked over her shoulder. “I had some things I wanted to take, but they don’t matter now. I’m ready.”
Schmendrick barred her way again as he stepped forward. “You can’t come with us. We are on a quest.” His voice and eyes were as stern as he could make them, but he could feel his nose being bewildered. He had never been able to discipline his nose.
Molly’s own face closed like a castle against him, trundling out the guns and slings and caldrons of boiling lead. “And who are you to say ‘_we_’?”
“I’m her guide,” the magician said importantly. The unicorn made a soft, wondering sound, like a cat calling her kittens. Molly laughed aloud, and made it back.
“You don’t know much about unicorns,” she repeated. “She’s letting you travel with her, though I can’t think why, but she has no need of you. She doesn’t need me either, heaven knows, but she’ll take me too. Ask her.” The unicorn made the soft sound again, and the castle of Molly’s face lowered the drawbridge and threw wide even its deepest keep. “Ask her,” she said.
Schmendrick knew the unicorn’s answer by the sinking in his heart. He meant to be wise, but then his envy and emptiness hurt him, and he heard himself cry out sadly, “Never! I forbid it—I, Schmendrick the Magician!” His voice darkened, and even his nose grew menacing. “Be wary of wousing a wizard’s wrath! Rousing. If I chose to turn you into a frog—“
“I should laugh myself sick,” said Molly Grue pleasantly. “You’re handy with fairy tales, but you can’t turn cream into butter.” Her eyes gleamed with a sudden mean understanding. “Have sense, man,” she said. “What were you going to do with the last unicorn in the world—keep her in a cage?”
The magician turned away to keep Molly from seeing his face. He did not look directly at the unicorn, but stole small sights of her as stealthily as though he could be made to put them back. White and secret, morning-horned, she regarded him with piercing gentleness, but he could not touch her. He said to the thin woman, “You don’t even know where we are bound.”
“Do you think it matters to me?” Molly asked. She made the cat sound once more.
Schmendrick said, “We are journeying to King Haggard’s country, to find the Red Bull.”
Molly’s skin was frightened for a moment, whatever her bones believed or her heart knew; but then the unicorn breathed softly into her cupped hand, and Molly smiled as she closed her fingers on the warmth.
“Well, you’re going the wrong way,” she said.
The sun was rising as she led them back the way they had come, past Cully, still slumped asleep on his stump, across the clearing, and away. The men were returning: dead branches cracked close at hand, and brush broke with a splashing sound. Once they had to crouch among thorns while two of Cully’s weary rogues limped by, wondering bitterly whether the vision of Robin Hood had been real or not.
“I smelled them,” the first man was saying. “Eyes are easy to deceive, and cheats by nature, but surely no shadow has a smell?”
“The eyes are perjurors, right enough,” grunted the second man, who seemed to be wearing a swamp. “But do you truly trust the testimony of your ears, of your nose, of the root of your tongue? Not I, my friend. The universe lies to our senses, and they lie to us, and how can we ourselves be anything but liars? For myself, I trust neither message nor messenger; neither what I am told, nor what I see. There may be truth somewhere, but it never gets down to me.”
“Ah,” said the first man with a black grin. “But you came running with the rest of us to go with Robin Hood, and you hunted for him all night, crying and calling like the rest of us. Why not save yourself the trouble, if you know better?”
“Well, you never know,” the other answered thickly, spitting mud. “I could be wrong.”
There were a prince and a princess sitting by a stream in a wooded valley. Their seven servants had set up a scarlet canopy beneath a tree, and the royal young couple ate a box lunch to the accompaniment of lutes and theorbos. They hardly spoke a word to one another until they had finished the meal, and then the princess sighed and said, “Well, I suppose I’d best get the silly business over with.” The prince began to read a magazine.
“You might at least—“ said the princess, but the prince kept on reading. The princess made a sign to two of the servants, who began to play an older music on their lutes. Then she took a few steps on the grass, held up a bridle bright as butter, and called, “Here, unicorn, here! Here, my pretty, here to me! Comecomecomecomecome!”
The prince snickered. “It’s not chickens you’re calling, you know,” he remarked without looking up. “Why don’t you sing something, instead of clucking like that?”
“Well, I’m doing the best I can,” the princess cried. “I’ve never called one of these things before.” But after a little silence, she began to sing.
“I am a king’s daughter,
And if I cared to care,
The moon that has no mistress
Would flutter in my hair.
No one dares to cherish
What I choose to crave.
Never have I hungered,
That I did not have.
“I am a king’s daughter,
And I grow old within
The prison of my person,
The shackles of my skin.
And I would run away
And beg from door to door,
Just to see your shadow
Once, and never more.”
So she sang, and sang again, and then she called, “Nice unicorn, pretty, pretty, pretty,” for a little longer, and then she said angrily, “Well, I’ve done as much as I’ll do. I’m going home.”
The prince yawned and folded his magazine. “You satisfied custom well enough,” he told her, “and no one expected more than that. It was just a formality. Now we can be married.”
“Yes,” the princess said, “now we can be married.” The servants began to pack everything away again, while the two with the lutes played joyous wedding music. The princess’s voice was a little sad and defiant as she said, “If there really were such things as unicorns, one would have come to me. I called as sweetly as anyone could, and I had the golden bridle. And of course I am pure and untouched.”
“For all of me, you are,” the prince answered indifferently. “As I say, you satisfy custom. You don’t satisfy my father, but then neither do I. That would take a unicorn.” He was tall, and his face was as soft and pleasant as a marshmallow.
When they and their retinue were gone, the unicorn came out of the wood, followed by Molly and the magician, and took up her journey again. A long time later, wandering in another country where there were no streams and nothing green, Molly asked her why she had not gone to the princess’s song. Schmendrick drew near to listen to the answer, though he stayed on his side of the unicorn. He never walked on Molly’s side.
The unicorn said, “That king’s daughter would never have run away to see my shadow. If I had shown myself, and she had known me, she would have been more frightened than if she had seen a dragon, for no one makes promises to a dragon. I remember that once it never mattered to me whether or not princesses meant what they sang. I went to them all and laid my head in their laps, and a few of them rode on my back, though most were afraid. But I have no time for them now, princesses or kitchenmaids. I have no time.”
Molly said something strange then, for a woman who never slept a night through without waking many times to see if the unicorn was still there, and whose dreams were all of golden bridles and gentle young thieves. “It’s the princesses who have no time,” she said. “The sky spins and drags everything along with it, princesses and magicians and poor Cully and all, but you stand still. You never see anything just once. I wish you could be a princess for a little while, or a flower, or a duck. Something that can’t wait.”
She sang a verse of a doleful, limping song, halting after each line as she tried to recall the next.
“Who has choices need not choose.
We must, who have none.
We can love but what we lose—
What is gone is gone.”
Schmendrick peered over the unicorn’s back into Molly’s territory. “Where did you hear that song?” he demanded. It was the first he had spoken to her since the dawn when she joined the journey. Molly shook her head.
“I don’t remember. I’ve known it a long time.”
The land had grown leaner day by day as they traveled on, and the faces of the folk they met had grown bitter with the brown grass; but to the unicorn’s eyes Molly was becoming a softer country, full of pools and caves, where old flowers came burning out of the ground. Under the dirt and indifference, she appeared only thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old—no older than Schmendrick, surely, despite the magician’s birthdayless face. Her rough hair bloomed, her skin quickened, and her voice was nearly as gentle to all things as it was when she spoke to the unicorn. The eyes would never be joyous, any more than they could ever turn green or blue, but they too had wakened in the earth. She walked eagerly into King Haggard’s realm on bare, blistered feet, and she sang often.
And far away on the other side of the unicorn, Schmendrick the Magician stalked in silence. His black cloak was sprouting holes, coming undone, and so was he. The rain that renewed Molly did not fall on him, and he seemed ever more parched and deserted, like the land itself. The unicorn could not heal him. A touch of her horn could have brought him back from death, but over despair she had no power, nor over magic that had come and gone.
So they journeyed together, following the fleeing darkness into a wind that tasted like nails. The rind of the country cracked, and the flesh of it peeled back into gullies and ravines or shriveled into scabby hills. The sky was so high and pale that it disappeared during the day, and the unicorn sometimes thought that the three of them must look as blind and helpless as slugs in the sunlight, with their log or their dank rock tumbled away. But she was a unicorn still, with a unicorn’s way of growing more beautiful in evil times and places. Even the breath of the toads that grumbled in the ditches and dead trees stopped when they saw her.
Toads would have been more hospitable than the sullen folk of Haggard’s country. Their villages lay bald as bones between knifelike hills where nothing grew, and they themselves had hearts unmistakably as sour as boiled beer. Their children stoned strangers into town, and their dogs chased them out again. Several of the dogs never returned, for Schmendrick had developed a quick hand and a taste for mongrel. This infuriated the townsmen as no mere theft would have done. They gave nothing away, and they knew that their enemies were those who did.
The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache: swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself. Often then, between the rush of one breath and the reach of another, it came to her that Schmendrick and Molly were long dead, and King Haggard as well, and the Red Bull met and mastered—so long ago that the grandchildren of the stars that had seen it all happen were withering now, turning to coal—and that she was still the only unicorn left in the world.
Then, one owl-less autumn evening, they rounded a ridge and saw the castle. It crept into the sky from the far side of a long, deep valley—thin and twisted, bristling with thorny turrets, dark and jagged as a giant’s grin. Molly laughed outright, but the unicorn shivered, for to her the crooked towers seemed to be groping toward her through the dusk. Beyond the castle, the sea glimmered like iron.
“Haggard’s fortress,” Schmendrick murmured, shaking his head in wonderment. “Haggard’s dire keep. A witch built it for him, they say, but he wouldn’t pay her for her work, so she put a curse on the castle. She swore that one day it would sink into the sea with Haggard, when his greed caused the sea to overflow. Then she gave a fearful shriek, the way they do, and vanished in a sulphurous puff. Haggard moved in right away. He said no tyrant’s castle was complete without a curse.”
“I don’t blame him for not paying her,” Molly Gme said scornfully. “I could jump on that place myself and scatter it like a pile of leaves. Anyway, I hope the witch has something interesting to do while she waits for that curse to come home. The sea is greater than anyone’s greed.”
Bony birds struggled across the sky, screeling, “_Help_me, _help_me, _help_me!” and small black shapes bobbled at the lightless windows of King Haggard’s castle. A wet, slow smell found the unicorn. “Where is the Bull?” she asked. “Where does Haggard keep the Bull?”
“No one keeps the Red Bull,” the magician replied quietly. “I have heard that he roams at night and lies up by day in a great cavern beneath the castle. We’ll know soon enough, but that’s not our problem now. The nearer danger lies there.” He pointed down into the valley, where a few lights had begun to shiver.
“That is Hagsgate,” he said.
Molly made no answer, but she touched the unicorn with a hand as cold as a cloud. She often put her hands on the unicorn when she was sad, or tired, or afraid.
“This is King Haggard’s town,” Schmendrick said, “the first one he took when he came over the sea, the one that has lain longest under his hand. It has a wicked name, though none I ever met could say exactly why. No one goes into Hagsgate, and nothing comes out of it but tales to make children behave—monsters, werebeasts, witch covens, demons in broad daylight, and the like. But there is something evil in Hagsgate, I think. Mommy Fortuna would never go there, and once she said that even Haggard was not safe while Hagsgate stood. There is something there.”
He peered closely at Molly as he spoke, for it was his one bitter pleasure these days to see her frightened in spite of the white presence of the unicorn. But she answered him quite calmly, with her hands at her sides. “I have heard Hagsgate called ‘_the town that no man knows_.’ Maybe its secret was waiting for a woman to find it out—a woman and a unicorn. But what’s to be done with you?”
Schmendrick smiled then. “I’m no man,” he said. “I’m a magician with no magic, and that’s no one at all.”
The foxfire lights of Hagsgate grew brighter as the unicorn watched them, but not even a flint flared in King Haggard’s castle. It was too dark to see men moving on the walls, but across the valley she could hear the soft boom of armor and the clatter of pikes on stone. Sentinels had met, and marched away again. The smell of the Red Bull sported all around the unicorn as she started down the thin, brambly path that led to Hagsgate.
The town of Hagsgate was shaped like a footprint: long toes splaying from a broad paw and ending in the dark claws of a digger. And indeed, where the other towns of King Haggard’s realm seemed to scratch like sparrows at the mean land, Hagsgate was well and deeply dug in. Its streets were smoothly paved, its gardens glowed, and its proud houses might have grown up out of the earth, like trees. Lights shone in every window, and the three travelers could hear voices, and dogs barking, and dishes being scrubbed until they squeaked. They halted by a high hedge, wondering.
“Do you suppose we took a wrong turn somewhere, and this isn’t Hagsgate at all?” Molly whispered. She brushed foolishly at her hopeless rags and tatters. “I knew I should have brought my good dress.” She sighed.
Schmendrick rubbed the back of his neck wearily. “It’s Hagsgate,” he answered her. “It must be Hagsgate, and yet there’s no smell of sorcery, no air of black magic. But why the legends, then, why the fables and fairy tales? Very confusing, especially when you’ve had half a turnip for dinner.”
The unicorn said nothing. Beyond the town, darker than the dark, King Haggard’s castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts, and beyond the castle the sea slid. The scent of the Red Bull moved in the night, cold among the town smells of cooking and living. Schmendrick said, “The good people must all be indoors, counting their blessings. I’ll hail them.”
He stepped forward and threw back his cloak, but he had not yet opened his mouth when a hard voice said out of the air, “Save your breath, stranger, while you have it.” Four men sprang from behind the hedge. Two of them set their swords at Schmendrick’s throat, while another guarded Molly with a pair of pistols. The fourth approached the unicorn to seize her mane; but she reared up, shining fiercely, and he jumped away.
“Your name!” the man who had first spoken demanded of Schmendrick. He was middle-aged or more, as were they all, dressed in fine, dull clothing.
“Gick,” said the magician, because of the swords.
“Gick,” mused the man with the pistols. “An alien name.”
“Naturally,” the first man said. “All names are alien in Hagsgate. Well, Mr. Gick,” he went on, lowering his sword slightly to the point where Schmendrick’s collarbones converged, “if you and Mrs. Gick would kindly tell us what brings you skulking here—“
Schmendrick found his voice at that. “I hardly know the woman!” he roared. “My name is Schmendrick, Schmendrick the Magician, and I am hungry and tired and unpleasant. Put those things away, or you’ll each have a scorpion by the wrong end.”
The four men looked at one another. “A magician,” said the first man. “The very thing.”
Two of the others nodded, but the man who had tried to capture the unicorn grumbled, “Anyone can say he’s a magician these days. The old standards are gone, the old values have been abandoned. Besides, a real magician has a beard.”
“Well, if he isn’t a magician,” the first man said lightly, “he’ll wish he were, soon enough.” He sheathed his sword and bowed to Schmendrick and Molly. “I am Drinn,” he said, “and it is possibly a pleasure to welcome you to Hagsgate. You spoke of being hungry, I believe. That’s easily remedied—and then perhaps you will do us a good turn in your professional capacity. Come with me.”
Grown suddenly gracious and apologetic, he led them toward a lighted inn, while the three other men followed close behind. More townsfolk came running up now, streaming eagerly from their houses with their own dinners half-eaten and their tea left steaming; so that by the time Schmendrick and Molly were seated, there were nearly a hundred people wedged together on the inn’s long benches, jamming into the doorway and falling through the windows. The unicorn, unnoticed, paced slowly after: a white mare with strange eyes.
The man named Drinn sat at the same table with Schmendrick and Molly, chattering as they ate, and filling their glasses with a furry black wine. Molly Grue drank very little. She sat quietly looking at the faces around her and noting that none seemed any younger than Drinn’s face, though a few were much older. There was a way in which all the Hagsgate faces were very much alike, but she could not find it.
“And now,” Drinn said when the meal was over, “now you must permit me to explain why we greeted you so uncivilly.”
“Pish, no need.” Schmendrick chuckled. The wine had made him chuckly and easy, and had brightened his green eyes to gold. “What I want to know is the reason for the rumors that have Hagsgate full of ghouls and werewolves. Most absurd thing I ever heard of.”
Drinn smiled. He was a knotty man with a turtle’s hard, empty jaws. “It’s the same thing,” he said. “Listen. The town of Hagsgate is under a curse.”
The room was suddenly very still, and in the beery light the faces of the townsfolk looked as tight and pale as cheese. Schmendrick laughed again. “A blessing, you mean. In this bony kingdom of old Haggard’s, you are like another land altogether—a spring, an oasis. I agree with you that there’s enchantment here, but I drink to it.”
Drinn stopped him as he raised his glass. “Not that toast, my friend. Will you drink to a woe fifty years old? It is that long since our sorrow fell, when King Haggard built his castle by the sea.”
“When the witch built it, I think.” Schmendrick wagged a finger at him. “Credit where it’s due, after all.”
“Ah, you know that story,” Drinn said. “Then you must also know that Haggard refused to pay the witch when her task was completed.”
The magician nodded. “Aye, and she cursed him for his greed—cursed the castle, rather. But what had that to do with Hagsgate? The town had done the witch no wrong.”
“No,” Drinn replied. “But neither had it done her any good. She could not unmake the castle—or would not, for she fancied herself an artistic sort and boasted that her work was years ahead of its time. Anyway, she came to the elders of Hagsgate and demanded that they force Haggard to pay what was due her. ‘Look at me and see yourselves,’ she rasped. ‘That’s the true test of a town, or of a king. A lord who cheats an ugly old witch will cheat his own folk by and by. Stop him while you can, before you grow used to him.’” Drinn sipped his wine and thoughtfully filled Schmendrick’s glass once more.
“Haggard paid her no money,” he went on, “and Hagsgate, alas, paid her no heed. She was treated politely and referred to the proper authorities, whereupon she flew into a fury and screamed that in our eagerness to make no enemies at all, we had now made two.” He paused, covering his eyes with lids so thin that Molly was sure he could see through them, like a bird. With his eyes closed, he said, “It was then that she cursed Haggard’s castle, and cursed our town as well. Thus his greed brought ruin upon us all.”
In the sighing silence, Molly Grue’s voice came down like a hammer on a horseshoe, as though she were again berating poor Captain Cully. “Haggard’s less at fault than you yourselves,” she mocked the folk of Hagsgate, “for he was only one thief, and you were many. You earned your trouble by your own avarice, not your king’s.”
Drinn opened his eyes and gave her an angry look. “_We_ earned nothing,” he protested. “It was our parents and grandparents whom the witch asked for help, and I’ll grant you that they were as much to blame as Haggard, in their way. We would have handled the matter quite differently.” And every middle-aged face in the room scowled at every older face.
One of the old men spoke up in a voice that wheezed and miaowed. “You would have done just as we did. There were crops to harvest and stock to tend, as there still is. There was Haggard to live with, as there still is. We know very well how you would have behaved. You are our children.”
Drinn glowered him down, and other men began to shout spitefully, but the magician quieted them all by asking, “What was the curse? Could it have anything to do with the Red Bull?”
The name rang coldly, even in the bright room, and Molly felt suddenly lonely. On an impulse, she added her own question, though it had nothing to do with the conversation. “Have any of you ever seen a unicorn?”
It was then that she learned two things: the difference between silence and utter silence; and that she had been quite right to ask that question. The Hagsgate faces tried not to move, but they did move. Drinn said carefully, “We never see the Bull, and we never speak of him. Nothing that concerns him can be any business of ours. As for unicorns, there are none. There never were.” He poured the black wine again. “I will tell you the words of the curse,” he said. He folded his hands before him, and began to chant.
“You whom Haggard holds in thrall,
Share his feast and share his fall.
You shall see your fortune flower
Till the torrent takes the tower.
Yet none but one of Hagsgate town
May bring the castle swirling down.”
A few others joined in as he recited the old malediction. Their voices were sad and far, as though they were not in the room at all but were tumbling in the wind high over the inn’s chimney, helpless as dead leaves.
What is it about their faces? Molly wondered. I almost know. The magician sat silently by her, rolling his wine glass in his long hands.
“When those words were first spoken,” Drinn said, “Haggard had not been long in the country, and all of it was still soft and blooming—all but the town of Hagsgate. Hagsgate was then as this land has become: a scrabbly, bare place where men put great stones on the roofs of their huts to keep them from blowing away.” He grinned bitterly at the older men. “Crops to harvest, stock to tend! You grew cabbages and rutabagas and a few pale potatoes, and in all of Hagsgate there was but one weary cow. Strangers thought the town accursed, having offended some vindictive witch or other.”
Molly felt the unicorn go by in the street, then turn and come back, restless as the torches on the walls, that bowed and wriggled. She wanted to run out to her, but instead she asked quietly, “And afterward, when that had come true?”
Drinn answered, “From that moment, we have known nothing but bounty. Our grim earth has grown so kind that gardens and orchards spring up by themselves—we need neither to plant nor to tend them. Our flocks multiply; our craftsmen become more clever in their sleep; the air we breathe and the water we drink keep us from ever knowing illness. All sorrow parts to go around us—and this has come about while the rest of the realm, once so green, has shriveled to cinders under Haggard’s hand. For fifty years, none hut he and we have prospered. It is as though all others had been cursed.”
“’Share his feast and share his fall,’” Schmendrick murmured. “I see, I see.” He gulped another glass of the black wine, and laughed. “But old King Haggard still rules, and will until the sea overflows. You don’t know what a real curse is. Let me tell you my troubles.” Easy tears suddenly glittered in his eyes. “To begin with, my mother never liked me. She pretended, but I knew—“
Drinn interrupted him, and just then Molly realized what was strange about the folk of Hagsgate. Every one of them was well and warmly dressed, but the faces that peered out of their fine clothes were the faces of poor people, cold as ghosts and too hungry to eat. Drinn said, “’Yet none but one of Hagsgate town may bring the castle swirling down.’ How can we delight in our good fortune when we know that it must end, and that one of us will end it? Every day makes us richer, and brings us one day nearer to our doom. Magician, for fifty years we have lived leanly, avoided attachments, untied all habits, readying ourselves for the sea. We have taken not a moment’s joy in our wealth—or in anything else—for joy is just one more thing to lose. Pity Hagsgate, strangers, for in all the wretched world there can be no town more unhappy.”
“Lost, lost, lost,” the townsfolk whimpered. “Misery, misery we.” Molly Grue stared wordlessly at them, but Schmendrick said respectfully, “That’s a good curse, that’s a professional job. I always say, whatever you’re having done, go to an expert. It pays in the long run.”
Drinn frowned, and Molly nudged Schmendrick. The magician blinked. “Oh. Well, what is it you wish of me? I must warn you that I am not a very skillful sorcerer, but I will be glad to lift this curse from you, if I can.”
“I had not taken you for any more than you are,” Drinn answered, “but such as you are, you should do as well as any. I think we will leave the curse the way it is. If it were lifted we might not become poor again, but we would no longer grow steadily richer, and that would be just as bad. No, our real task is to keep Haggard’s tower from falling, and since the hero who will destroy it can only come from Hagsgate, this should not be impossible. For one thing, we allow no strangers to settle here. We keep them away, by force if we must, but more often by guile. Those dark tales of Hagsgate that you spoke of—we invented them ourselves, and spread them as widely as we could to make certain that we would have few visitors.” He smiled proudly with his hollow jaws.
Schmendrick propped his chin on his knuckles and regarded Drinn with a sagging smile. “What about your own children?” he asked. “How can you keep one of them from growing up to fulfill the curse?” He looked around the inn, sleepily studying every wrinkled face that looked back at him. “Gome to think of it,” he said slowly, “are there no young people in this town? How early do you send children to bed in Hagsgate?”
No one answered him. Molly could hear blood creaking in ears and eyes, and skin twitching like water plucked by the wind. Then Drinn said, “We have no children. We have had none since the day that the curse was laid upon us.” He coughed into his fist and added, “It seemed the most obvious way of foiling the witch.”
Schmendrick threw back his head and laughed without making a sound, laughed to make the torches dance. Molly realized that the magician was quite drunk. Drinn’s mouth disappeared, and his eyes hardened into cracked porcelain. “I see no humor in our plight,” he said softly. “None at all.”
“None,” Schmendrick gurgled, bowing over the table and spilling his wine. “None, pardon me, none, none at all.” Under the angry gaze of two hundred eyes, he managed to recover himself and reply seriously to Drinn. “Then it would seem to me that you have no worries. None that would worry you, anyway.” A small whee of laughter sneaked out between his lips, like steam from a teakettle.
“So it would seem.” Drinn leaned forward and touched Schmendrick’s wrist with two fingers. “But I have not told you all the truth. Twenty-one years ago, a child was born in Hagsgate. Whose child it was, we never knew. I found it myself, as I was crossing the marketplace one winter’s night. It was lying on a butcher’s block, not crying, although there was snow, but warm and chuckling under a comforter of stray cats. They were all purring together, and the sound was heavy with knowledge. I stood by the strange cradle for a long time, pondering while the snow fell and the cats purred prophecy.”
He stopped, and Molly Grue said eagerly, “You took the child home with you, of course, and raised it as your own.” Drinn laid his hands palm up on the table.
“I chased the cats away,” he said, “and went home alone.” Molly’s face turned the color of mist. Drinn shrugged slightly. “I know the birth of a hero when I see it,” he said. “Omens and portents, snakes in the nursery. Had it not been for the cats, I might have chanced the child, but they made it so obvious, so mythological. What was I to do—knowingly harbor Hagsgate’s doom?” His lip twitched, as though a hook had set in it. “As it happens, I erred, but it was on the side of tenderness. When I returned at sunrise, the baby had vanished.”
Schmendrick was drawing pictures with his finger in a puddle of wine, and might have heard nothing at all. Drinn went on. “Naturally, no one ever admitted to leaving the child in the marketplace, and though we searched every house from cellar to dovecote, we never found it again. I might have concluded that wolves had taken the brat, or even that I had dreamed the whole encounter, cats and all—but for the fact that on the very next day a herald of King Haggard’s came riding into town, ordering us to rejoice. After thirty years of waiting, the king had a son at last.” He looked away from the look on Molly’s face. “Our foundling, incidentally, was a boy.”
Schmendrick licked the tip of his finger and looked up. “Lír,” he said thoughtfully. “Prince Lír. But was there no other way to account for his appearance?”
“Not likely,” Drinn snorted. “Any woman that would marry Haggard, even Haggard would refuse. He gave out the tale that the boy was a nephew, whom he graciously adopted on the death of his parents. But Haggard has no relatives, no family. There are those who say that he was born of an overcast, as Venus was born out of the sea. No one would give King Haggard a child to raise.”
The magician calmly held out his glass, and filled it himself when Drinn refused. “Well, he got one somewhere, and good for him. But how could he have come by your little cat-baby?”
Drinn said, “He walks in Hagsgate at night, not often, but now and then. Many of us have seen him—tall Haggard, gray as driftwood, prowling alone under an iron moon, picking up dropped coins, broken dishes, spoons, stones, handkerchiefs, rings, stepped-on apples; anything, everything, no reason to it. It was Haggard who took the child. I am as certain of it as I am certain that Prince Lír is the one who will topple the tower and sink Haggard and Hagsgate together.”
“I hope he is,” Molly broke in. “I hope Prince Lír is that baby you left to die, and I hope he drowns your town, and I hope the fish nibble you bare as corncobs—“
Schmendrick kicked her ankle as hard as he could, for the listeners were beginning to hiss like embers, and a few were rising to their feet. He asked again, “What is it you wish of me?”
“You are on your way to Haggard’s castle, I believe.” Schmendrick nodded. “Ah,” Drinn said. “Now, a clever magician would find it simple to become friendly with Prince Lír, who is reputed to be a young man of eagerness and curiosity. A clever magician might be acquainted with all manner of odd potions and powders, poppets and philters, herbs and banes and unguents. A clever magician—mind you, I said ‘clever,’ no more—a clever magician might be able, under the proper circumstances . . .” He let the rest drift away unspoken, but no less said.
“For a meal?” Schmendrick stood up, knocking his chair over. He leaned on the table with both hands, breathing harshly. “Is that the going rate these days? Dinner and wine the price of a poisoned prince? You’ll have to do better than that, friend Drinn. I wouldn’t do in a chimneysweep for such a fee.”
Molly Grue gripped his arm, crying, “What are you saying?” The magician shook her hand away, but at the same time he lowered one eyelid in a slow wink. Drinn leaned back in his chair, smiling. “I never haggle with a professional,” he said. “Twenty-five pieces of gold.”
They haggled for half an hour, Schmendrick demanding a hundred gold pieces, and Drinn refusing to offer more than forty. At last they settled at seventy, half to be paid then and half upon Schmendrick’s successful return. Drinn counted out the money on the spot from a leather pouch at his belt. “You’ll spend the night in Hagsgate, of course,” he said. “I would be pleased to put you up myself.”
But the magician shook his head. “I think not. We will go on to the castle, since we’re so near it now. The sooner there, the sooner back, eh?” And he grinned a crafty and conspiratorial grin.
“Haggard’s castle is always dangerous,” Drinn warned. “But it is never more dangerous than at night.”
“They say that about Hagsgate too,” Schmendrick replied. “You mustn’t believe everything you hear, Drinn.” He walked to the door of the inn, and Molly followed him. There he turned and beamed at the folk of Hagsgate, hunched in their finery. “I would like to leave you with this last thought,” he told them. “The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart. Good night.”
Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars. There was no moon. Schmendrick stepped out boldly, chuckling to himself and jingling his gold coins. Without looking at Molly, he said, “Suckers. To assume so lightly that all magicians dabble in death. Now if they had wanted me to lift the curse—ah, I might have done that for no more than the meal. I might have done it for a single glass of wine.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Molly said savagely. “They deserve their fate, they deserve worse. To leave a child out in the snow—“
“Well, if they hadn’t, he couldn’t have grown up to be a prince. Haven’t you ever been in a fairy tale before?” The magician’s voice was kind and drunken, and his eyes were as bright as his new money. “The hero has to make a prophecy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him—though in another kind of story, it’s more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he’s not a real hero. It’s a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”
The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark. Molly said, “If Lír is the hero, what is she?”
“That’s different. Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I—we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.” Schmendrick yawned and hiccupped and shivered all at once. “We’d better hurry,” he said. “Perhaps we should have stayed the night, but old Drinn makes me nervous. I’m sure I deceived him completely, but all the same.”
It seemed to Molly, dreaming and waking as she walked, that Hagsgate was stretching itself like a paw to hold the three of them back, curling around them and batting them gently back and forth, so that they trod in their own tracks over and over. In a hundred years they reached the last house and the end of the town; in another fifty years they had blundered through the damp fields, the vineyards, and the crouching orchards. Molly dreamed that sheep leered at them from treetops, and that cold cows stepped on their feet and shoved them off the withering path. But the light of the unicorn sailed on ahead, and Molly followed it, awake or asleep.
King Haggard’s castle was stalking in the sky, a blind black bird that fished the valley by night. Molly could hear the breathing of its wings. Then the unicorn’s breath stirred in her hair, and she heard Schmendrick asking, “How many men?”
“Three men,” the unicorn said. “They have been behind us since we left Hagsgate, but now they are coming swiftly. Listen.”
Steps too soft for their quickness; voices too muffled to mean any good. The magician rubbed his eyes. “Perhaps Drinn has started to feel guilty about underpaying his poisoner,” he murmured. “Perhaps his conscience is keeping him awake. Anything is possible. Perhaps I have feathers.” He took Molly by the arm and pulled her down into a hard hollow by the side of the road. The unicorn lay nearby, still as moonlight.
Daggers gleaming like fishtrails on a dark sea. A voice, suddenly loud and angry. “I tell you, we’ve lost them. We passed them a mile back, where I heard that rustling. I’m damned if I’ll run any farther.”
“Be still!” a second voice whispered fiercely. “Do you want them to escape and betray us? You’re afraid of the magician, but you’d do better to be afraid of the Red Bull. If Haggard finds out about our half of the curse, he’ll send the Bull to trample us all into crumbs.”
The first man answered in a softer tone. “It isn’t that I’m afraid. A magician without a beard is no magician at all. But we’re wasting our time. They left the road and cut across country as soon as they knew we were following. We could chase along here all night and never come up with them.”
Another voice, wearier than the first two. “We have chased them all night. Look over there. Dawn is coming.”
Molly found that she had wriggled halfway under Schmendrick’s black cloak and buried her face in a clump of spiny dead grass. She dared not raise her head, but she opened her eyes and saw that the air was growing strangely light. The second man said, “You’re a fool. It’s a good two hours to morning, and besides, we’re heading west.”
“In that case,” the third voice replied, “I’m going home.”
Footsteps started briskly back up the road. The first man called, “Wait, don’t go! Wait, I’ll go with you!” To the second man, he muttered hastily, “I’m not going home, I just want to retrace our trail a little way. I still think I heard them, and I’ve dropped my tinderbox somewhere . . .” Molly could hear him edging off as he spoke.
“Damn you for cowards!” the second man swore. “Wait a moment then, will you wait till I try what Drinn told me?” The retreating footsteps hesitated, and he chanted loudly: “’Warmer than summer, more filling than food, sweeter than woman and dearer than blood—‘”
“Hurry,” the third voice said. “Hurry. Look at the sky. What is this nonsense?”
Even the second man’s voice was growing nervous. “It isn’t nonsense. Drinn treats his money so well that it cannot bear to be parted from him. Most touching relationship you ever saw. This is the way he calls to it.” He went on rapidly, quavering a little. “’Stronger than water and kinder than dove, Say the name of the one you love.’”
“Drinn,” rang the gold coins in Schmendrick’s purse, “drinndrinndrinndrinn.” Then everything happened.
The ragged black cloak whipped against Molly’s cheek as Schmendrick rolled to his knees, groping desperately for the purse. It buzzed like a rattlesnake in his hand. He hurled it far into the brush, but the three men were running at them together, daggers as red as though they had already struck. Beyond King Haggard’s castle, a burning brightness was rising, breaking into the night like a great shoulder. The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.
With an old, gay, terrible cry of ruin, the unicorn reared out of her hiding place. Her hoofs came slashing down like a rain of razors, her mane raged, and on her forehead she wore a plume of lightning. The three assassins dropped their daggers and hid their faces, and even Molly Grue and Schmendrick cowered before her. But the unicorn saw none of them. Mad, dancing, sea-white, she belled her challenge again.
And the brightness answered her with a bellow like the sound of ice breaking up in the spring. Drinn’s men fled, stumbling and shrieking.
Haggard’s castle was on fire, tossing wildly in a sudden cold wind. Molly said aloud, “But it has to be the sea, it’s supposed to be.” She thought that she could see a window, as far away as it was, and a gray face. Then the Red Bull came.