by Tanith Lee
At some juncture, he was offered payment. This was after he had followed the hunt back into the town. He had walked a quarter of a mile behind them, then a mile, two miles. He had not seen what had happened as they entered the town, but when he came there the streets were empty. It had begun to rain, gently at first, but with increasing violence. If blood had trickled into the streets from the unicorn’s wounds, it had been washed away. The people, too.
If any had watched the hunt’s return, they would have seen an animal, slung between staves, its feet obscurely roped, its head hanging down. It had looked dead, dead and bloody and of a surpassing, horrid ordinariness.
But the slung carcass of the unicorn was not dead.
Lauro himself had not looked at it.
Somehow, however, he had followed them all, and come in the end to the three-towered house, and at the door men had been waiting and taken him in.
The Lord sat in a carved chair and drank wine. He was rain-wet, and his clothing steamed. The hall was full of such steam, and the yard full of the steaming, snarling hounds, who had tasted blood and been given no portion of a slain beast to devour.
The Lord stared at Lauro. The Lord was gross and ruddy.
‘Well. You will wish to be paid. I have gained a rare animal. I may henceforward collect such oddities. It might amuse me to do so. What price do you ask for your information?’ And when Lauro said nothing, staring back with his cold inhuman eyes, the Lord said: ‘It was worth something, and you know it. I had heard rumours, from my boyhood. Many heard these tales. But it took you, stranger and vagabond, to suss the creature out for me.’
‘For you,’ Lauro said.
‘For me. What price then?’
Lauro said, ‘Where do you mean to keep it?’
‘Penned. On grass, under trees. A pavilion. Something pretty. The ladies shall tame it. In three months it will eat from my hand, like a lapdog.’
Lauro looked right through the Lord and his hall, and saw a pavilion on grass, and the unicorn gambolling. It occurred to him, with an uncanny frightening certainty, that since the unicorn had only been a legend before, he himself, by his desire and his desperation, had somehow conjured it. Conjured, witnessed, and betrayed.
‘By the Christ,’ said the Lord, growing furious all at once, ‘name your price, you insolent devil.’
The thoughts and the words combined. Lauro smiled.
‘Thirty pieces of silver,’ he said.
With a curse or two, and a clinking of coins like curses, they paid him. Afterwards, he went outside, and around the wall of the Lord’s house, from sight. He sat down by the wall, in the rain. He could think of nothing, yet the image of the unicorn remained. After a time, deep within himself, he felt the mysterious formless stirring which tortured him, as always, unable to find its expression. He understood that this occasion was no different. But he was now like a dumb man in enormous pain who could not cry out.
At some point he slept under the blanket of the rain.
When he woke, there were warm and fluttering lights in certain high windows of the house. He wondered where the unicorn was, in some stable or outhouse, perhaps, and he wondered if it would die, but it did not seem to him it had lived. He slept again, and on the second awakening the lights in the house were out. He got to his feet and rain fell from him like water from a bucket. He began to move around the wall, searching for something, at first not comprehending his search. Eventually, he became conscious that he was seeking a secretive way back in, a way to reach the unicorn. But he did not know why he did so, or what use it might be. He did not even know where the unicorn had been imprisoned.
He came to a part of the wall which seemed, even in the wet darkness, to be different. He could not tell what it was. But then the notion began to grow that it was different in some mode of the spirit, because it was connected to his purpose. Almost immediately he found a thin wooden door. He rapped on the door, and received no answer. There were rotted timbers in the door, that sagged when his knuckles met them.
For maybe an hour he worked at the rotten wood, and when some of it gave way, he worked on the rusty bar within. Ivy clung to the bar and insects skittered away from his probing, wrenching hands. The joints of his shoulders jarred in their sockets and sweat ran down his back and across his breast, turning icy cold when it touched the heavy rain in his clothes.
When the door opened he no longer thought it would, and had been working on it from mere momentum, as if hypnotised.
Inside the door was an obscure stone-arched walk. Lauro went into it, and through it, and came out in an old yard framed by the tall blank walls of the house. Another door, this one unbarred, led into a little garden. Beyond the garden, still inside the precinct of the house, was a patch of muddy ground. Distantly a tower loomed up, before the tower several cumulous-like trees rose in a bank of shadow. A lamp burned, showing two men asleep under an awning, an empty wine-skin between them. These things were like messages inscribed on the stones, the earth, the dark. In the very centre of the dark, far beyond the scope of the lamp, against the trees, was a dim low smoulder, like a dying fire, except it was white. It was the unicorn.
A fading ember, a candle guttering. The flame of the unicorn dying down, put out by rain and blood.
Lauro went forward, past the drunken sleepers, out of the light. He padded across the grass, and came under the rustling, dripping trees. The rain eased as he did so, and then stopped. He saw the unicorn clearly.
It was seated, with its forelegs tucked under it, like a lamb or a foal. The fringe of its mane was sombre with water. Its head was lowered, the horn pointing directly before it. And the horn was dull. It looked unburnished, ugly, natural, like a huge nail-paring. He could not see its eyes. Though they were open, they were glazed; they had paled to match the darkening of its flesh until the two things were one.
There was no protection for the unicorn from the elements, but then, it had lived in the wild wood. What held it penned was a fence of gilded posts, no more. They were not even high enough that it could not have jumped over them. What truly held it was the collar of iron at its neck, and the chain that ran from the collar to an iron stake in the ground.
Something glittered in the mud, more brilliantly than the unicorn now glittered. As Lauro came nearer, he saw there were small gems and coins lying all about the unicorn. A ruby winked like a drop of wine. Some man had thrown a jewelled dagger, some woman a wristlet of pearls.
Bemused, Lauro stood about five paces from the gilded fence. There had been no emotion in him he could identify, until now. But now an emotion came. It was disgust, mingled with hatred.
He approached two more paces, and hated the unicorn.
He hated it because it had failed him. It had proved attainable, and vulnerable. It had let itself be dirtied. It was inadequate, as he was.
Its wounds, of course, marred it. There would always be scars, now, from the teeth of the dogs, the arrow, the knives. But its fading was not due to these alone.
He had reached the fence. He waited, in an appalled foreknowing, for the beast to turn to him, to plead with him by means of its lustreless eyes. If it did so, he might kill it. For he knew, at last, it too was mortal, and could die. It had never existed in a second world of perfection at all. His mistake.
It lay like a sick dog and did not look at him, while the night murmured with the aftermath of the rain. Some minutes elapsed before Lauro leaned in across the gilded posts and stretched down to take the rich man’s dagger from the mud.
An hour later, when his limbs were numb from standing rigidly in one place so long, and his spine ached and his head and his very brain ached, and the moon appeared over the trees and the unicorn had not looked at him, Lauro threw the dagger at the unicorn.
As he did so a cry burst from him. There were no words in it. Then the dagger struck the unicorn in the neck, or rather, it struck against the area where the chain had been locked to the collar.
Something happened. Somet
hing snapped inside the case of the lock. The lock mouthed open, and the chains snaked away and lay coiled on the mud among the scattered jewels. The collar spun from the neck of the unicorn as if propelled.
Lauro took a step backward. Then many more steps.
What had freed the unicorn seemed to be an act of magic, perpetrated through him, and through what had been intended as an act of malicious harm. A theory that the force and angle of the blow might simply have sprung the crude mechanism of the lock did not temper Lauro’s reaction. As he stepped back, he examined the fence of posts, expecting it to dissolve or collapse. This did not happen.
Nor did the unicorn respond to its freedom for some moments. It seemed almost to consider, to debate within itself. Then, when the response came, it was complete. It sprang up, deftly, and the night seemed to slough from its body like a skin.
Set loose from this skin, as from the chain, the unicorn began to glow. It altered. Its eyes filled as if from a ewer and were charged again with depth and nameless colour. The wounds glared, changed also like peculiar eyes, shot with incandescence — its new skin, or the skin beneath, was white again.
Lightly, and with no preliminary, it leapt the posts of the pen. And then once more, it halted.
Lauro was closer now to the unicorn, or the fantasy which was the unicorn, than he had ever been. He was not afraid, and no longer was he consumed with hatred and disgust or disappointment in it. These also had been sloughed. The unicorn was renascent, beautifully and totally. The wet mane was like silver. The horn of its head was translucent and the night showed through it faintly, and there seemed to be stars trapped within the horn.
Lauro waited, like a lover who is willing to permit an old love to resume its mislaid power upon him. He waited for his belief in the miracle of the unicorn to come back. And slowly and irresistibly it did come back, flowing in, touching him as before, so he felt the certainty of it in his bones, sounding them like a chord.
The unicorn began to move again. Its head was slightly tilted sideways. It looked at Lauro with one eye which had grown denser than the night.
He had believed in it, betrayed it, freed it. This time, he knew, the unicorn must acknowledge him. Lauro’s awareness was unarguable. It was a fact for him. Perhaps it was his sureness itself which would cause the unicorn to do so.
The unicorn hesitated yet again. Lauro gripped the air and the darkness in each of his hands. He tried to memorise the image of the unicorn. Soon, it would be gone. Only the unlocking it would give to him, only this would remain. Twinned, bonded, they would have freed each other of their separate chains. That must last a lifetime. It would.
Then the unicorn moved. It raced towards the little garden and the walk beyond, unerringly seeking the environs outside the house. And, for a frantic instant, he thought it would avoid him. But as it passed Lauro, it turned its head once more. The silken, star-containing spike of the horn drove forward and to one side, laying Lauro’s breast open, cloth and flesh and tissue peeled away, the beating heart itself revealed, and ceasing to beat.
As the ultimate inaudible leaf-sounds of the unicorn’s feet died in his ears, Lauro, lying on a bed of blood and hair and mud and rain, understood at last the rhythms and the means of his expression. The feeling like pain, like a death wound, swelled inside him, carrying him upward, and he was able, finally, to give it utterance. His lips parted to speak the glowing exactitude of the words which came. His lips stayed open, and when the rain began again, it fell into his mouth.
Two: Of Death
But in the second life, Lasephun was a young girl.
She was small in stature and slim. The pale skin was now in her almost white. Her hair was long and very dark, falling to her waist in black, shining streamers. The character of the being Lasephun’s obsessiveness, in this, the second life, was muted and quiescent, although still in evidence in particular ways. But this life, a girl of sixteen who was called Sephaina, had been cared for in a unique manner, grown almost like a cherished plant. She had not yet had occasion to seek within herself, and so to be astonished, or to become dissatisfied.
Where Sephaina had been born she did not know, neither her parentage. These things did not matter to her. They had no relevance. Sephaina’s awareness had begun in a slate-blue house, moated by brown water. Lillaceous willows let down their nets into the moat, and birds flew by the narrow windows with which the walls were pierced. Such pictures were set like stained glass into each of her days. The calm of the house, certain architectures, certain lights and shades incorporated in its geography, these were the balm in which the years of Sephaina floated. Her companions were several, and choice. The women who firstly cared for and then waited on her, were kind and elegant. The girl children who played with her grew up into beautiful maidens. Nothing ugly came in her way, and nothing more distressful than the death of a bird or a small animal from the meadows beyond the high walls of the house.
Within, the house was a puzzle of rooms bound by winding stairs and carven doors. From its tallest turrets the meadows, pale golden with summer and pale blue with flowers, might be seen stretching away to a sort of interesting nothingness, which was the edge of vision. Sephaina had seldom entered the meadows, then only to picnic beneath a tree, her girl companions spread about her, birdsong and the notes of mandolettes mingling. For Sephaina, the world was no more than these things. She had never been sick, or truly sad. The only melancholy she had known had been slight, and bitter-sweet. She was surrounded by love and devotion, and it was in the nature of this life to accept these gifts, and dulcetly reflect them. To be valued was as integral to her days as her curious adopted state. For she understood that others did not live as she did, while never questioning how she lived. From her first awareness, a sense of her own purpose, though unexplained, had been communicated to her.
Not, however, until the day preceding her sixteenth birthday was her destiny announced, and placed before her like a newly opened flower.
Shortly after noon, as Sephaina sat quietly with two of her women, a priest entered the room, and a group of men with them. Sephaina had, of course, seen and conversed with men, but never with so many at once. She was not shy with them, but she guessed instantly, and faultlessly, that something of great import was about to happen.
The priest addressed her without preamble.
‘Tomorrow you will be sixteen years of age, and on that day your fate, which has always been with you, governing your existence — although unknown — will be fulfilled.’
Then he extended his holy ring to her, and Sephaina kissed it.
The men nodded. None of them spoke.
The priest said to her: ‘Follow then, and learn what your fate is.’
So she rose, and the priest went from the room, up a winding stairway and into one of the turrets. Sephaina followed him, with her women, and the men walked after, the heavy brocade of their garments making a syrupy, sweeping noise on the steps.
If Sephaina had entered this turret before, she was uncertain. If she had ever come there, then the turret had since been much changed. There was a long and exotic tapestry worked in a multitude of colours, which covered every wall. A candlebranch burned in the middle of the floor, flickering somewhat, so the figures in the tapestry seemed to quiver and to breathe.
The subject of the tapestry was a great hunt, which pursued a white beast with a single horn through the glades of a wood, until a girl was found in its way, seated on the grass, and the beast lay down and put its head in her lap. At which the hunt drew close and with dogs and bows at first, and thereafter with knives and spears, appeared to kill the creature. It bled from many wounds but the blood did not reach the grass, which was starred instead by rainbow blossoms.
Sephaina looked at these scenes of cruelty, deceit and death, and she wept a moment, as at any of the few deaths she had seen. But her tears ended almost immediately. She was perturbed, and turned to the priest for his answer. He gave it.
The creature in the tapest
ry was a unicorn. A thing part fabulous and partly earthbound. It was not necessary that one either believe or disbelieve in it. There had been an era when the unicorn had been hunted, had been slain or captured, cut and roped, demeaned, used to increase some lord’s vainglory or pride of acquisition, or bloodlust. But the death of the unicorn was, in fact, largely inconsequential. It was conceivable only a single beast had ever been killed, or that none had been killed. Or that all the unicorns then extant in the world at that time had died — only a dream left behind them capable of seeming life, or that they had been reprocreated by mystical means from some eerie quickening between foam and shore, cirrus and mountain-top. Neither did truth or falsehood rate very highly in this case. The core of the story of the unicorn, its humiliation, in some ways paralleled the history of the Christ and might be said to represent it. And now, as the debasement of Christ had been raised to worship, so the unicorn, ghost or truth or simply dream, was propitiated and adored. The clue to existence was the protean ability of man to alter things. To balance the ignominy of the unicorn’s death, whether false or actual, the ritual of the hunt had transformed into a festival of love.
They would advance into the trees of the wood, not with horses, dogs and weapons, but now on foot, unarmed, with flowers and fruit and wine. And to lead the procession there must be a maiden, who would charm by the magic force of her virginity, not in order to betray, but in order that they might do homage. And if it should come to her, laying its long head, horned as if with polished salt, in her lap, then the offerings could be made to it. Or if not, still the beauty of the tradition had been honoured, and the spirit of the unicorn with it.
‘And you,’ the priest said to Sephaina as she stood between him and the circling tapestry, ‘you have been reared in perfect harmony and happiness to be that maiden who will lead the procession into the wood. Your years have been kept lovely in order that you be wholly lovely for him, the white one, so he will wish to come to you and give his blessing to what we do, and his forgiveness of what has been done. Every sixteen years, this is the custom. You are very special. You were chosen. Do you understand?’