by Tanith Lee
‘Yes,’ she said. The men behind the priest murmured then.
Sephaina lowered her eyes and saw the unicorn imprinted on the floor. It was different from the entity in the tapestry. It glowed, and its horn had a light within it like that of burning phosphorous. In some strange way, she remembered the unicorn. To be told of it was no amazement to her. That it might dwell in the world, that it might come to her indeed, did not seem incredible. But, for the first time also, something twisted inside her, a feeling very old, though new to her: it was fear.
They showed her the gown she was to wear. It was the palest green, sewn with flora of blue thread. They showed her the oils and perfumes they would use for her skin and hair, and these were scented like a forest and the most delicious plants that might be discovered there.
Sephaina walked through the house, gazing at everything in it. She had a feeling of loss, as if she could never come back there. No one had told her if she would. Something had prevented her asking.
As the sun began to set, something odd happened in the meadows beyond the house. There began to be fire-flies, dozens of them, scores of them, and then hundreds upon hundreds. They were not, of course, fire-flies, but the flames of torches and of lamps. The meadows, from the far distance to the edge of the moat, were dark with people, and on fire with lights. Bizarre shifting patterns, like those in a weird mosaic, formed and fell apart. Sephaina watched the lights, knowing why people gathered about the house. She had never known her power before, though she had, at some oblique station of her heart and mind, accepted her rarity long ago. To see the demonstration of her power, her influence, her emblematic worth, stunned her.
She brooded on it, pausing for long minutes, transfixed at one after another of the high windows. She wondered if they saw her, the ones who waited in the meadows. She imagined that perhaps they did, although not with their eyes.
Eventually her women persuaded her to the bedchamber where she had always slept. They washed and braided her hair with herbs, ready for the morning. When she lay down, they drew the covers over her. One read her a passage from a beautiful book which told of enchanting and lustrous things, towers built upon water, boats sailing the air, lovers who loved and lost and refound each other at the brink of violet seas where birds spoke in human voices. Then, her ladies and her maidens kissed Sephaina, and they went away to the antechamber beyond her door. Here, two of them would sleep each night, in case she should want something and call out. This had not happened since she was a little child.
Sephaina lay in the familiar bed, and watched the bedroom in the mild irradiation of a single low lamp. She remembered nights of her childhood, and how the shadows fell at different seasons, or when the moon was full, and how the room would be when the sun rose again. Her window was sheltered, however, by the ascension of the wall, from the vantage of the meadows, and so from the lights of those who stood about the house. And she wondered all at once if this room, whose window, unlike all the other upper windows of the house, was shielded from the meadows, was always given to the chosen maiden for just this reason: to allow her peace on this one night of her life, the eve of her sixteenth birthday.
The words of the priest came and went in her head all this time, behind every one of her other thoughts.
She had only seen depictions of woods, she had never seen a real one. The wood in the tapestry had been very dense, very darkly green, with slender tree-trunks stitched on it, and with blossoms thick on the grass, and yet there had seemed no way to go through the wood. And the unicorn. How would it be to wait for it to come to her, how would it be to know she herself was the magic thing which drew the magic thing towards her? It was curious. It was as if all this had happened to her before, yet in some other distorted way…
Sephaina closed her eyes, and was startled that two tears ran from under her lids.
But she had been trained by serenity to sleep easily and deeply, and already her mind moved forward from the shore, slipping into the smooth currents of unconsciousness. A dream rose from the threshold, and greeted her. She beheld a drinking cup of crystal and a long and fluted stem. The drink in the cup was very dark. She stared, and saw the wood and the unicorn inside the drink, inside the cup. Then she swam by the dream into the depths of sleep.
Sephaina woke to a huge silence that was uncanny. It was an actual presence in the room filling and congesting it. It might have been that her own heart had stopped beating. Or it might have been the heart of time which had stopped, every clock in the house, or the world, stilled. Yet she breathed, was capable of movement; her heart sounded. These things she discovered by cautiously testing them.
At length she sat up, the ultimate test, and so she saw that a shape crouched in the embrasure of her sheltered window, between the room and the starry night.
Fear has many forms. Sephaina’s fear burned low as the low-burning of the lamp, yet, like the lamp, pervaded the chamber. Fear was also so novel to her that it seemed quite alien. She could barely control it. The twisting she had felt within herself when they had told her of her destiny, the ebbing and swelling flow of unease and isolation that had mounted as she watched those hundreds of lights swarm upon the meadows, now gained a quiet and terrible dominion over her.
She could not have cried out, even if she thought to do so, and somehow the ambience of her fear prevented her from thinking of it. She was alone, on the whole earth, with the shape, whatever it should be, which had manifested between light and night.
Then the shape altered, melted upward. It slid from the embrasure, and began to come towards her, gliding, taking no steps. The lamp did not in any way describe it, except that, with no warning, its eyes flashed, cat-like and appalling. And in the very same second, dry summer lightning also flashed. It shattered the window and the room together. By means of this freak illumination, she saw the outline of the invading demon. It had now assumed, or perhaps had consistently possessed, the structure of a man, rather tall, physically agile and long-haired.
It seemed to her he addressed her. In the dreadful silence, she replied.
He said: ‘Would you see me?’
She replied: ‘No.’
At that he laughed. She was sure enough of the laugh. He sung it to her, and it was very cruel. Just then the tinderish lightning ignited again in through the window, and he seemed to catch flame from it, absorbing, vampire-like, colours and equilibrium. She knew him instantly, the demon. His hair was red as rust, his eyes were bleak, and his face like a bone. Across his breast a flap of cloth hung loose and ragged. Under this rent was an incoherent darkness that evaded or tricked her gaze.
She knew him. The knowledge was a facet of her fear.
At last she said: ‘What must I do to be rid of you?’
‘Nothing, yet. I shall step from your window, in the same way I stepped up here. You will come with me.’
Sephaina visualised the drop from the window to the moat below.
‘You mean to kill me.’
‘No. Why not put your trust in me? You are willing to trust all others — your servants, your friends, the priest. The unicorn.’
Sephaina stared. She began to pray, and fell quiet.
The demon only said, ‘Give me your hand.’
At which Sephaina, without knowing why, gave him her hand.
Immediately she was weightless. The covers of the bed drifted away from her. Linked to the demon, she too now glided across the room, her feet half the height of her own body from the ground. Seeing which, she would have let go of him, but her hand would not leave go.
‘Why fear this?’ he inquired of her, almost with irritation. ‘There are other things you should fear.’
And even as he spoke, he passed through the window and out onto the broad cool highway of the night sky, and she was taken with him.
The roofs of the house lay below, uncertainly gleaming, like tarnished pearl. The moat had become a circle of mist. The meadows were a great fire which had burned down to embers, for only here an
d there were the lamps still lit, and these looked very small to one who moved through the air, as if they no longer had any significance for her.
How was it possible to travel in this way? It occurred to Sephaina that maybe she had left her body behind. Yet her form was opaque, though weightless as a feather. The demon, too, appeared physical rather than astral, and as they clove the dark air, sometimes strands of his hair would blow across her face, stinging her cheeks: both things had substance and were real.
The arc of the sky, like a glorious cathedral ceiling, benighted, swung and dipped above them.
The land below sheered away, amalgamated and no longer discernible. Sephaina, who all her days, as he said, had been able to trust — and so was in the habit of trusting — commenced trusting her devilish guide somewhat. She was not afraid of being suspended in space. In her limited experience so many things were miraculous. Anything different was a wonder. A wonder, therefore, eventually seemed merely different. And besides, she knew him. Of course, one life ago she had been him, or she had been what he appeared to be. She became relaxed, and it made her impatient that she could not tell what the landscape was that unfolded below them. She wanted to see it; she had seen so little, save in books.
Then the flowing abstract knit together. Sephaina saw they hovered like two birds above an ebony cloud, which as they sank lower grew gilded veins and smoky fissures. A waterfall of leaves brushed her face. They had come to a wood.
Inside the upper levels of the trees they moved with a darting precision, like that of fish. There was an opening, a glade like a bubble, and the demon drew her into it. They rested on invisible nothingness.
‘Look down,’ he said to her. ‘Look about. What do you see now?’
Sephaina looked into the slightly luminous black heart of the glade. Enormous sallow flowers dimly shone back into her eyes.
At last he said, ‘Did you never see bones, before?’
‘Yes — the bones of a bird — once.’
‘These are the bones of other things,’ he said.
They dipped again, and the grass-heads met their feet. She stood a few inches above the carpet of the glade, and she recalled irresistibly the tapestry of the unicorn, where the ground was strewn by blossoms. Here, bones lay thick as snow.
He led her. They spun over the glade. She was glad she need not walk on the bones. So she looked into the sockets of skulls and of pelvises. The demon drew a thigh-bone from the grass. He examined it and threw it aside with the contempt of some great inner pain. The form of this long bone, as it fell, reminded Sephaina of the spike on the unicorn’s forehead.
They came into a second glade, adjacent to the first. Here too there were bones, but fewer of them. In a third glade, the bones were scarce and mostly concealed among the tree-roots, or in the tangle of the undergrowth. Some of the bones were smudged with moss.
‘And who do you suppose left their skeletons here?’
‘Are the… ’ she whispered, ‘are these the bones of unicorns?’
‘These are the bones of countless young girls that unicorns have killed.’
Although she did not want to, Sephaina raised her head and looked into his eyes. His eyes were unkind and clever, and exceedingly honest.
She did not question him. Presently he said, ‘In reparation for the ancient hunting, for capture and for death. A sacrifice. The maiden is perfect and her life is also without blemish. No disease. No sorrow. They have told you, you will wait, and the unicorn will come to lay its head in your lap. That is true enough.’
He continued to speak to her, and after a moment Sephaina screamed.
He was a demon. He told her lies. Yet behind her lay the snow of glistening bones. The bones of the young girls who had been pegged out, naked and spread-eagled, awaiting the supernatural beast from the wood. Which, scenting them, did indeed come, and did indeed lay its head in the lap of each — breaching her virginity and impaling her womb upon the blade of its monstrous horn.
The chosen sacrifice, brought to death by those she loved. Judas’ kiss. The crucificial nailing. A reversal of the image of Christ and of the unicorn. Animal for god, the female for the male. The lore of the wood. Of death.
Her hand was still moulded to the hand of the demon. When she cried out, she felt the cry pass into him.
‘You think you do not credit what I say. But what I say is the truth, as the unicorn is also truth.’
‘No,’ Sephaina said.
So he made her go back, back through the glades, and he made her see, again and again, the bones of dead women. Again and again he murmured to her of how it had been, how it was. Tomorrow she, like the rest, would lie on the floor of the wood, and next year, on her seventeenth birthday, she too would be bones.
At last he drew her away, back up into the night, where the stars hung, brooding on their longevity. She saw the stars, and the world below. They meant nothing to her. This fresh miracle, the miracle of betrayal and horror, she had also accepted, or so it seemed.
‘Now you believe,’ he said to her, ‘I will tell you how you may evade your destiny. Would you like to hear?’
‘Is there a way?’ she asked.
‘More than one. I can set you down in the meadows beyond the house. There any able man, ignorant of who you are, can deprive you of your virginity. Without this ceremonial enticement, the unicorn will not seek you out. Or I can carry you to some far-off country where no one will think to search for you.’
‘But you are a demon.’ she said. ‘And this is a dream. Wherever you took me, I should wake in the house.’
‘Should you? Then do only this: approach those who come for you tomorrow. Reveal your knowledge and your reluctance. They will not press you, for the sacrifice must go willingly. You will, of course, be cast from the house, and will become an exile. No one, any more, will care for you, and few will offer you love. But you will avoid the agony and death of the sacrifice.’
Sephaina gazed at the stars, which lived for ever, or very nearly.
She beheld the land below, so distant it did not seem she need ever return to it.
‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘Tell me what I must do.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘my part is played out. I will tell you nothing more.’
Sephaina shivered. Her hand in his was changing into ice.
‘Then let me go. Let me go back and wake.’
‘This is no dream,’ he said. He smiled. His mouth was a crescent, his eyes were colder than her hand.
Then the night was emptied away. Winds and stars and darkness and the earth, all emptied at a vast and improbable speed, through her eyes and in through her window.
The last thing she was aware of was the separation of their icy fingers, his dead, hers merely frozen.
She did not sleep after that, but rather she ceased temporarily to exist. When once more she grew to a consciousness of her surroundings, the dream remained vivid and actual, as if it lay in shards about the room. She had only to take up these shards, examine them, bring them together. She did so, trembling. She lived again each minute of her flight and her time in the wood of bones. Very little was missing. And she knew it was not a dream, as in the dream she had known it was not.
When this had been accomplished, Sephaina lay like a stone, and gradually the window, where stars had framed the demon, began to pale and greyly glow.
Soon the sun would rise, and they would come for her. They would bathe her and anoint her and dress her in the green gown embroidered with blue and heavenly flowers. They would take her among the trees of the wood. They would strip her and chain her and death would come, white as the moon, with starlight caught even by day inside its killing horn.
Sephaina lay, and she considered how the demon had offered her freedom from this death, and how she had not allowed him to help her, and she wondered if he would have helped her.
To lie with a man — she could not have done that. She had been nurtured in a certain way, and was quite innocent. Never having
thought of the sexual union between man and woman, as if knowing she must die a virgin, such an act was now like a myth, and useless to her. But to be carried to safety in some other place, far from the house, the moat, the meadows. How would she live there? And lastly, if she herself were to deny her fate to her attendants, to the priests — crying out when they came to her that she had learned they meant to give her to death — if she did that, pleaded for her survival, won it… How should she fare on the raw face of the world, untutored, unguided? She who had always been cherished and trained to find her cherishing natural, therefore necessary.
Yet to live, to evade pain and horror, and whatever abyss or ascent, hellish, supernal, stood beyond mortality. Surely to escape this was worth all exile, despair and loneliness.
Then she thought in bewilderment of those she loved, and how they had always intended to destroy her. The very shock of it made her, somehow, certain that it was so. Such a thing as this could not have been invented.
But neither had their love been false.
With puzzled wonder, she considered this final absurdity. Love her they did. Simple instinct reaffirmed her belief in their sincerity, just as the same instinct had believed the warning of the demon.
As the warmth of dawn started to powder the greyness, she rose and stood at her window. She watched the birds begin to fly upwards, and the light begin to hang the heads of the willows beyond the wall with thin chains of greenish gold.
When the sun lifted, the sky flushed, blushed with joy. Sephaina felt her own heart lift, despite herself. She felt herself to resemble the sky. She had been cultivated to openness and beauty, and she knew a sudden extraordinary happiness. It dazzled her. She sought for reasons. It had come to her, she was an atom of the whole creative, created landscape, of the air, of the sun. Her course, too, had been fixed: to rise and to go down. For this lovely and poignant day she had been bred. Because of her value on this day, she had been loved. She was the sacrifice by means of which earth and heaven might touch. The hands of the clock might not terminate their progress. The shadow on the sundial could not hide itself. Some things must be.