by Tanith Lee
And so, for one reason or another, as the unicorn moved towards him, Lauro broke from his trance and moved forward one step in answer.
At which the unicorn, perhaps seeing him for the first time, stopped.
At which Lauro took another step.
At which the unicorn became the single blink of a white lid on the night, and was gone.
Nothing natural could have moved so very fast. It had not even seemed to turn, but just to wink out like a flame. Nevertheless, Lauro knew it had gone back into the wood, which must be its habitation. A vague succession of stories came to him which explained how a unicorn’s wood might be beset by perils, by phantoms, by disasters. These did not stop him. He ran at the wood and straight into it.
It was like falling off the edge of the night into a black pit. The pit was barred over by raucous branches which slashed his face and slammed across his body, full of earth which gave way under his feet and the tall columns of the trees which met his body with their own. He fell many times, and once he was almost blinded when an antler of branches stabbed into his face. But presently he glimpsed a white gleam ahead of him, and knew it for the unicorn, and he shouted with fury and joy. And then he fell a long way down, as it seemed into the black soul of the wood, and lying there on the black soul’s floor where there were decayed leaves like old parchment, and some tiny flowers that shone in the darkness, he dazedly saw the white light coming back to him. This time for sure the unicorn might savage him. He thought of this with awe but not terror. The touch that would unlock the genius within himself could not kill. Whatever wound there was, he would be healed of it. The fall had stunned him, and he was conscious that the neck of the lutelin was snapped off from the body.
Then the unicorn came between the trees, and it was only the moon.
Lauro knew despair then, and a sort of anger he had never felt before. He lay watching the moon, its light making his face into a bone in the black cavity of the wood.
When the day came, he was able to climb out of the cavity, which had not seemed possible before, although conceivably it had been possible. He put the broken lutelin into his pack, and walked out of the trees. By day, the wood had a different appearance. It was very green, but the green of undisturbed deep water. On all sides the trees, though struck by sunlight, seemed impenetrable.
It was silent. No birds, no winds moved in the unicorn wood.
A while before noon, Lauro entered the town on the rock.
It was like many other towns, and he scarcely looked about him. Others looked at him, and he felt their eyes on him. This was because he was a stranger, but also because he was himself and there was that quality to him of the fire, or the moving light, a quality in fact curiously like that he had noted in the unicorn.
And today, besides, his obsessive intensity was very great. It was like a wave banked up behind his eyes. And when he sat on the steps of the stone church, under the high doors and their carvings of martyrs and demons, his face was like these stone faces, with the reddish autumnal hair falling leadenly round it. His hands were stiffly clasped, without even the lutelin now to lend them life.
After a while, a woman came to him and offered him bread from a basket, and he would not take it, and later another offered him fish and he refused this too. Then a priest came out, and offered him holy comfort, and Lauro laughed, high, and pitched as if he sang. There were others, all eager in their timid solicitous ways to aid him, for they sensed his pain, and they came to him and the cold fire of his pain, like moths to the candle. He refused them all. They could not help him. They knew it and they went away. Even the child who tugged on his sleeve, looking up into his eyes and their black centres, even the child, at whom he briefly smiled, ran away.
The day gathered in the town until it was the colour of strawberries, and the rays of the sunset fell through the church windows from within and out upon the steps, and upon the face of Lauro. He could not play or sing what he had known, could only speak it, and had not been able to.
He had been there seven hours when the Lord of the town came riding to Mass in the church, a thing he did not generally do. The strawberry sky was behind him and behind the eight dark horses and the dark forms of the men who rode on them. The horses were not remotely like the unicorn. Even if they had been given crystalline horns that flamed in the sunset, they would not have been like. Someone had told the Lord of the stranger with the lank red hair and the frozen face and hands. They had reported him as a seer or a poet, one who has witnessed some portentous thing; and so he had.
The Lord reined in his horse at the foot of the stair.
He looked at the stranger with his Lord’s proud and self-blind eyes, and suddenly the stranger looked back at him with eyes that had seen far too much.
‘You,’ the Lord said. ‘Why are you sitting there? What do you want?’
Lauro said, ‘There is a unicorn in your wood.’
‘A unicorn,’ said the Lord. ‘Who reckons so?’
‘I do.’
‘You may be mistaken. You may be drunk or mad. Or a liar. You. What are you?’
‘I forget,’ said Lauro. ‘I forget who I am. I forgot in the moment I saw the unicorn.’
The Lord smiled. He glanced about. His men smiled to demonstrate they were of one mind with him. The townspeople smiled, or else lowered their eyes.
‘Perhaps,’ said the Lord, ‘I do not believe in unicorns. A fable for children. Describe what you saw. Probably it was a wild horse.’
Lauro got to his feet, slowly. His eyes were now wise and looked quite devilish. This was because he did not know any more what to do. He turned and walked, without another word, up the steps and in at the church doors.
The Lord of the town was unused to men with devil’s eyes who turned and walked wordlessly away from him. The Lord gestured two of his men from their mounts.
‘Go after him. Tell him to come back.’
‘If he will not obey, my Lord?’
The Lord frowned, visualising a scuffle in the precincts of the church, damaging to his reputation. He dismounted suddenly. The Lord himself, with his two men at his back, strode up the steps into the church after the stranger.
Lauro was standing at the church’s remotest end, in shadow before the darkened window. His hands hung at his sides and his head was bowed. The Lord gripped him by the shoulder, and Lauro wheeled round with a vicious oath. Lauro had been in the other, second world, aeons away, where the unicorn was. His eyes flared up and dazzled, luminous as a cat’s, and the Lord hastily gave ground.
‘Swear to me, on God’s altar,’ said the Lord.
‘Swear to what?’
‘The unicorn.’
‘A hallucination,’ said Lauro. ‘I am a liar. Or drunk. Or mad.’
‘Swear to me,’ said the Lord.
Lauro grinned, with his long mouth closed, a narrow sickle.
‘What will you do if you believe me?’
‘There were stories before,’ said the Lord, ‘when I was a boy. Years ago. I dreamed then I should hunt such a beast, and capture it, and possess it.’
Lauro put back his head and laughed. When he laughed, he looked like a wolf. Laughing, the wolf went to the altar and placed his hand on it.
‘I swear by God and the angels of God and the Will and Works of God, that there is a unicorn in your wood. And God knows too, you will never take, capture, or possess a unicorn.’
The Lord said:
‘Come to my stone house with me. Eat and drink. Tomorrow you shall ride with us and see.’
So Lauro lay that night in the Lord’s stone house with its three dog-toothed towers. Sometimes before he had lain in the houses of lords. His envy and his ambition were not exacerbated by anything of theirs.
Preparations for the hunting of the unicorn had begun almost at once. It occurred to Lauro that the Lord wished to credit the unicorn’s existence, that on some very personal level the reality of the legend was highly important to him. But Lauro cared nothing for the
desires and dreams of the Lord. The hunt was less convincing to Lauro than the memory of the unicorn itself which had now become ghostly. He believed in the unicorn rather less than the Lord believed, and yet he knew he had beheld it, knew that it waited for him in the wood. If it was possible to come at the unicorn by means of dogs and horses and snares, then he would accompany the hunt. But he did not believe in this, either, as he had said. It had come to be that what he believed credible was useless to him, and that what he did not believe could happen at all he believed would happen — since it had already happened once, and because it was essential to him. Actually, the hunt was as his song-making had been, a needful but flawed expression, inadequate but unavoidable. So he lay in the house, but did not sleep.
In the morning, the Lord’s underlings brought Lauro down again into the hall. People hastened about there with a lot of noise, and food was piled high on platters and wine stood by, just as on the night before. The dogs were out in the yard, a sea of brown and white that came and went in tides past the open door.
Presently a girl was conducted in at the door. She was fair-skinned, and this skin had been dressed in a long green gown. Her hair and her eyes were both dark as the wood, and Lauro, looking at her as she curtsied for the Lord, knew her purpose. She knew it too. She was very solemn, and her eyes were strangely impenetrable, as if the lids were invisibly closed not over, but behind them.
The Lord came to Lauro eventually.
‘I have only to give the word, now. Are you ready?’
‘Are you?’ asked Lauro.
‘You show me no respect,’ said the Lord peevishly. ‘I do not trust you.’
‘Did I say you should trust me?’
‘You have nervous hands,’ said the Lord. ‘I would think you were a musician, but you have no instrument with you. Walk with the grooms, in front of me. I want you in sight.’
Lauro shrugged. He was not really aware he did so.
They went out into the courtyard, and the dogs began to bark. Overhead the sky was clear, and all around the air was sweet. The girl in green was put on a horse, which she rode with both her legs on one side, in the manner of a lady. Because it was the custom of the legends and stories, she had been set at the head of the hunt, and the dogs, which were leashed, tumbled after the tasselled hoofs of her horse. Lauro walked with the grooms, behind the dogs and before the horses. The hunt-master, and the Lord and his men, each with their swords and knives, came clanking on. There were three bowmen, and two boys to sound the horns. The hunt-master himself carried a long blade in an ornate scabbard, but he was frowning, angry or unnerved.
The townspeople stood watching in the streets, and they scarcely made a sound, though some of them indicated Lauro to others who had not seen him previously.
As the hunt left the town and began to pick a way down the rock, with the dogs whining impatiently and the green-clad virgin riding side-saddle before them all, everything became, for Lauro, measured as a planned and stately dance. The falling verdure of the trees that flooded round the track as they descended, meshed with the sun and confused his eyes, so he partly closed them, and the noises of the dogs and the metal noises of the men made his ears sing, so he ceased mostly to listen.
Apart from the girl, it was like any other hunt, for meat or sport. He knew, when they reached the wood — day-green and opaque — they would not find the unicorn. The wood was like a curtain or a tapestry. It was possible to thrust through to its other side, but not to discover any substance in it.
They entered the vale under the town. They rode through the vale, between the solitary trees with their caps of sunlight, and over the long rivers of their shadows. The pool appeared, a shallow rent in the fabric of the land, with the sky apparently beneath and showing through it. At this sky-pool, the unicorn had drunk, or performed its ritual of drinking. Behind lay the wood like a low cloud balanced against the earth and the horizon. He remembered the wood and the pool as if he had lived in this spot since childhood, he who had always been wandering. But then, these also had become figments of the second perfect world which, in some esoteric way, he had indeed always known.
The girl cast one glance behind her before she rode among the trees. As she lowered her eyes, they met Lauro’s; then she turned away again.
The hunt trotted into the wood about twenty paces, and then stopped still, while the hunt-master ordered his men ahead to search for droppings and other indications of the presence of a large beast. Lauro moved aside and leaned on a tree, and smiled coldly at the ground. A unicorn could not be taken in such a fashion. His mind seemed to drift out into the wood, searching and searching itself for some permissible, ethereal trace, like an echo, of the unicorn, but the greenness was a labyrinth where his mind soon lost itself. He sensed the girl had moved ahead alone. He closed his eyes, and all of them were gone.
Then — he did not see or sense it, he knew it — then the unicorn came, as if from nothingness, and stepped across the turf, ignoring the hunt, the dogs, the girl, looking at him. And Lauro felt the shadow of the unicorn wash over him, like a faint breeze.
Lauro opened his eyes. There was nothing there, where he was gazing. But something was happening to the Lord’s men, a susurration not of noise but of silence. There was a great heat in the wood.
The girl had indeed moved forward alone, and she had dismounted or been lifted down. She stood between two trees, and the unicorn stood beyond her. It was like a statue, immobile. It did not look real.
There was nothing to be done. The creature did not move. If the men should move, the unicorn would run. So much was obvious. But the hunt-master, used to his craft, to the unsupernatural deer and starting, panic-swift hares, signalled to one of the boys who carried a hunting horn, and the boy, his eyes bursting, blew the horn — since he had always done so — and the men by the hounds slipped their leashes, again from habit.
The pack flung itself forward and the surge of it hit the girl as she stood there before the unicorn. She was tossed sideways, and would have gone down, but one of the grooms snatched her up and away out of the foam of dogs.
Everyone seemed taken by surprise at his own actions. The unicorn, for an instant, seemed surprised, too. But Lauro laughed again, as he had in the church. He was dubiously glad the hunt had come to defile the unicorn’s sanctity and purity and solitude. Glad for the yelping and shouting, and the blundering of hoofs. Yet he did not suppose any true defilement was likely.
But the unicorn ran, and the dogs belled and swirled after it. Men and horses rushed by.
There was a long aisle between the trees, tenuously barricaded at intervals by screens and sheer sloping walls of blinding sunlight. Down this aisle the unicorn ran. And suddenly Lauro realised he could see the unicorn running, that it was perceptible to him. Before, the speed and articulation of the unicorn had been quite invisible.
As he noticed this, with a kind of slow searing shock, one of the bowmen let fly an arrow.
The unicorn was so white, so luminescent even by day that it seemed the shaft was drawn after it by magic, magnetised to the shining skin.
Lauro saw, or thought he saw, the arrow penetrate the right flank of the unicorn. It seemed to stumble. It was like a star clumsily reeling in its smooth and faultless flight. Lauro could not now believe what he saw. The unicorn had become a deer, a white stag, nothing more. Lauro was running, with the rest. So he beheld the foremost handful of dogs catch up to and leap on their prey.
The unicorn fell. It was very sudden, and the dogs gushed over it. He saw teeth meeting in the sorcerous skin. And then, something more terrible. The unicorn, like almost anything at bay and pulled down, began to fight. First one dog was spitted, screaming and lathering on the slender tower of the impossible horn, and then another. Each, as it was impaled, was thrown away, its entrails loose as ribbons. And the fabulous horn was red.
A man raced forward shouting, laughing or appearing to laugh. He thrust the tip of his short knife into the unicorn’s side. Anot
her was driving a blade in the arching throat. The blood of the unicorn just like that of the dogs, was only red.
Lauro dropped to his knees, and the hunt went by him and covered the sight of the fallen unicorn which was only a white stag. It had not made a single sound.
Someone dashing by, kicked Lauro. He felt the blow from a distance of many miles. No blow, no pain, no warmth could come at the cold thing inside him.
The horns were winded, and the hunt-master swore in a business-like way. They had hunted the unicorn, wounded it, bound it. It was taken. The whole event had been very quick.
Lauro continued to kneel, as if he prayed, on the trampled turf.