Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  With a sigh that was like the loss of blood, and yet also like the loss of poison, Sephaina bowed her head. She would not step aside. She would say nothing. If it must be she would be hurt and she would die. But not in negation, not from fear of other things, not out of slavish acquiescence and blindness. She saw within herself, as if in a dawn pool, the reflection of all her years. It had been impossible to think of her life drastically changed, continuing elsewhere, not because she was ill-equipped to live it in such a way, but because her whole life had been a building towards this end. Her death, the last stitch in the tapestry, upon which all other stitches rested. She could not break the thread. Harmony was her familiar. Harmony she recognised, and must yield to.

  She remembered the lamps burning out in the meadows. She thought of the burning lamp of faith, contained in herself. Sephaina shuddered. She had thought of bones. But her resolution did not slip away.

  When the gentle rap came on the door, the early sunshine had overbrimmed the window and lay across Sephaina’s body. When her attendants entered, she saw their faces in this silken light. Anguish and pleasure were mixed in each face, and a calm, saddened hope.

  She was not afraid of them. She could not hate them. She was their hope, and her death was what had saddened them. Their hands touched her with love, as if she were very precious. She would not cry out at them. She touched them as carefully as they touched her.

  There was a stillness in her, like death already. Yet it was warm.

  So they took her through the meadows where the people kneeled, and along a narrow road, and through a valley, and came to the wood. They entered the wood, entered its hot, green essence where the sunlight dripped down and the shadows spun like spiders. There were no bones in the grass, and neither any flowers.

  They brought her a crystal cup with a dark drink in it, but she put the cup aside. She had already begun to cry, but softly, almost unobtrusively. Her maidens kissed her hands, the priests blessed her. The older women took her away, and drew off her garments, concealing her with their bodies. No one explained to her what they did. Sephaina did not question or protest. Her tears fell noiselessly down onto her own skin.

  She lay on the ground between the margins of her black hair. The women put the bracelets of the shackles, which were light and delicate and did not chafe her, on her wrists and ankles. With great decorum, circumspectly, they arranged her limbs, until she was a white cross on the grass. Men pegged the ends of the shackles into the ground, some distance from her, their faces averted so they should not shame her by looking at her nakedness.

  Then, every one of them left her.

  Through the scent of her own tears, Sephaina could smell the fermentations of the wood, like the perfumes with which they had dressed her. She heard the faintest whispering, also, that might have been the wings of insects, or the leaves brushing one another as they grew. Above, the green roof was burnished by the sun. Rays of sun leaned like spears all about her. Like a fence of gilded posts. It was peaceful. These instants seemed timeless, and might go on for ever, and while they did so, she was secure. Then she heard something step through the grass towards her, and the sound was scarcely discernible, not remotely human.

  The unicorn leaned over her like a tower.

  It was dark against the flaring leaves above, its whiteness curbed. It seemed the largest single entity in the world. The horn on its head was like another shaft of sun.

  Sephaina clenched her whole body, but she could not shut her eyes, she could not look away from the unicorn. When it touched her, she would die, in terrible agony, and beyond the agony an unknown whirlpool gaped.

  There was a pause. She gazed at the mask of death, and felt a stasis, an unconscionable waiting. And then the birdlike soaring sense of rightness, in fact of perfection, came to her again, even in her fear. Her entire body quickened, seemed elevated. She knew pain could not hurt her, and she smiled, in welcome. The unicorn seemed to read her mind. He swung his gigantic head and the blazing spike of the horn ran down.

  There was a rending. Feeling nothing at all, she was confused. Then the rending came again, and twice more, and the ropes of grass which had bound her wrists and ankles lay dismembered. The unicorn stepped across her body, laving it with shadow. The curtain of the trees drew back and the unicorn re-entered the deep of the wood. There was a flash of whiteness, the curtain fell and the unicorn was gone.

  Out of the green space, women came and clothed her, and lifted her. A priest came and took her hands. They were ghosts, but the ghostly priest talked to her.

  ‘It is always done in this way,’ said the priest to Sephaina, under the sun-broken trees. ‘There is a warning given. For each, it will be unique; the demon within arises. It may take any form, that of some secret misgiving, perhaps, or some awful memory. It speaks the words of death and nightmare. Many of our daughters cannot endure the thought of what lies before them. They are shown the bones, bedded deep in the wood. The bones, you must understand, do not exist, but seem most real, as you recall. Those young women who cannot bear their fate fly to the meadows or the lands beyond, or else fall to their knees before us, begging us to release them. This too is always done, they are sent away, and thereafter without true happiness and without sanctity we must live, until the next sacrifice is due. For almost fifty years, Sephaina, the sacrifice has failed. For she must accept her death, and go consenting, to set the balance right. But to consent is all. Then death is not needful. You live, and we are holy, because of you.’

  Sephaina said, like one waking from a dream, ‘What now, then?’

  And he told her now she would live in honour and luxury in the house, among the women she had always known, who had tended her. And that when the next chosen came to them, a little child, she too would help to care for it and rear it to its purpose, as she had been cared for and as she had been reared.

  They carried her back to the slate-blue house, singing, with garlands, wine and laughter. The people in the meadows also sang, and gave her gifts. For today at least she remained wholly special.

  But after today…

  Seeing the house she had not expected to see again, the flowers, the lilies on the polished moat, Sephaina knew disillusion in her rescue as she had known a wild elation in her fear. The shining building of her years had collapsed. She had met death, who had turned aside. Her sunset went unrequired, though like the sun her glory faded. She was to be an attendant. She was to wait upon another. She was no longer the chosen one. Another would be that.

  After the vision and the vision’s ending, how drained and commonplace and far away the world seemed. A collection of plants and stones and random flesh, now only paintings in another book.

  It was true, they had not killed her, but she might still die. Of boredom.

  Three: The Unicorn

  And in the third life, Lasephun was the unicorn.

  In the beginning there had been only something white, white and gleaming as the centre of a flame. It moved like marsh gas, a disembodied, cool fire, or a breath of opaline wind. It entranced things to pursue it, may-flies, doves, fawns, but it did not consume them. Nor were they able to pass through it. Sometimes it rested, at others it ran. Its speed seemed dependent upon nothing, not even itself. Its repose was similar. It neither fed nor expelled any waste matter. It was not embryonic. It did not take on the forms of other things. At night, faintly, it emanated a pale, unimaginable glow. It was like the soul of a star, fallen in the wood.

  One day, this luminous uncreature drifted from the wood, and skimmed over the surface of a pool. The pool faithfully reflected it for several moments, and then ceased to reflect it. The pool began to show instead another reflection, of something which had once been there, drunk from the pool, and spirited itself away.

  This thing in the mirror of the pool touched its long slim horn to the wafting formless whiteness. When the white thing reached the other edge of the pool, it let down slender legs into the grass. A canine beautiful head emerged, an arch
ing body. The starry spike broke from its forehead.

  It had no particular memory, the unicorn. It did not know, therefore, it had been dead and had then existed as a spirit or a fable, or if now it was reborn. The pool had refashioned it in a partially earthly shape, as the eyes of a man would have done. Water, and human eyes, possessed this sorcerous ability.

  The unicorn touched the earth with its feet.

  The earth knew the feet of a live thing.

  The trees, the air, knew it.

  The recognition of presences about it solidified the presence of the unicorn. The unicorn was now solid, and externally actual. Inside itself, however, it remained phantasmal and fantastic.

  The nature of the unicorn was like a prism, composed of almost countless facets. Each thought was a new dimension. The intensity of Lasephun, the obsessiveness, was demonstrated by the unicorn’s adherence to each of these facets as it explored within itself.

  Its life became and was self-exploration. It had no other function. It lived within, and where the external world brushed it — the scents of the wood, the play of light and shade, day and night, the occasional wish to drink from the pool, it explored these sensations within itself and its reaction to them. It had no gender, no creative or procreative urge. It was timeless, knowing neither birth nor death. It was refined like the purest distillation, and it was totally self-absorbed. So it lived and was happy, learning itself, finding always new aspects of itself and its relation to the objects around it. It was seldom seen, and never disturbed. Possibly a hundred years went by.

  One dawn, the unicorn came from the wood as the sun was coming from the horizon. The world was all one contemplative and idyllic pinkness. Pink seemed in that instant the shade of all things lovely, ethereal and divine. As the unicorn lowered its head towards the spangling water of the pool, it sensed, for the first time it could ever remember, an expression of life nearby.

  Startled, the unicorn raised its head, and water-beads glissanded from its brow as if the horn wept tears of fire.

  The startlement might have resembled that of a deer alarmed at its drinking, but was not of this order. Never before had it encountered a corresponding life signal from anything about it. It had never known that such a note was capable of being sounded.

  After a moment, confused and fascinated, the unicorn moved away from the pool, and glanced around itself.

  Above the valley, a ruined town rotted graciously on a rock. Some way off in another direction, a slate-blue house sank in a dry moat: this was not visible from the pool. Beyond the pool another way lay the wood, while in the valley there were several trees. Beneath one of these a young girl lay asleep. Presently the unicorn came on her and paused.

  Her long dark hair ribboned about her, her skin was white as cream, save where the freckling of leaf-shadows patterned it. A pannier lay beside her; she had been gathering roots and plants perhaps for use in some simple witchcraft.

  The unicorn recognised her at some basic inexplicable level, and a fresh facet leapt into being in the prism of its awareness. Decades and decades before, the unicorn had been human and a girl rather like this one. Yet there was more. The girl asleep under the tree was very young, and she was a virgin.

  The magic of virginity — for magic it was — was quite straightforward. Its sorcerous value was that of energy stored, and was accordingly at its most powerful not in the celibate, but in the celibate who had never yet relinquished celibacy, and better still in one who had not even known himself. This, as it happened, the girl had not. Her life, just as the unicorn’s had been lived inwardly, had been lived outwardly. Her meditation and her senses turning always outwards, she had not yet found herself, knew herself neither in the spirit, nor in the body. In this manner she was strangely asexual, as the unicorn was. While her extreme youth lent her also, briefly, an air of the ethereal. Her birth was close enough she had overlooked it, her death far enough away she had not considered it. Life and death and sex were, for this time, beyond the periphery of her sphere — yet only just. However, for this short season, the sounding note of her existence had paralleled the unicorn’s own.

  Aside from the sounding note, and despite recognition, the unicorn did not see the girl as what she was, but only as another external object, like a stone or a flower.

  After it had observed her for some time, the unicorn pawed the turf a little. The gesture was reflexive, physical, a mere exercise of the muscles which now must be used. It looked nevertheless ferocious and dangerous, and it wakened the girl, who sat up, bewildered and staring, her hand to her mouth in fear.

  It seemed she had heard old stories of what a unicorn was. She did not appear to be in doubt, only in amazement and fright. Then these emotions visibly faded.

  When she spoke aloud, the unicorn, having no longer any knowledge of the human vernacular, did not understand her. Nor did it seek to understand. It sensed exultation in her voice. It sensed itself the cause of this exultation — and not the cause. What in fact she had said amounted to the words: ‘You are my sign from God. Now I know the one I love will come also to love me.’ For in fact the very innocence of her meditation had already, through itself, brought itself to an end. She loved.

  The unicorn had forgotten almost altogether the aspirations and the inner processes of men and women. It looked, with its shadowy, gleaming eyes, that were like burned yet burning violets. It watched as the girl obeised herself before the unicorn which had become her omen of love. As she did so, the unicorn felt itself harden once more inside the shell of its physical existence. So all things may be fixed by the regard of others.

  But before she could try to touch it — it had some dim memory, perhaps a race-memory of its kind, of such touchings — the unicorn drew away and vanished in the wood.

  Then from the wood’s edge, its eyes piercing through the foliage which was like curious jewellery, the unicorn continued to watch. Rising and picking up her pannier, with a strange half-weeping sigh, yet smiling, the girl moved away across the valley. She began to climb towards the ruined town, and the unicorn watched.

  A village leaned against the walls of the town. The unicorn saw the girl enter the village. It saw her step into a little hovel with a roof of golden thatch. She sat down at a spinning wheel. The wheel spun. The girl whispered dreamily. Magic as well as thread was unfolded from the primitive machine. By now the unicorn felt as much as it saw. It had ceased to view with its eyes alone. Some aspect of itself, still fluid and supernatural, had followed the girl and now hung against a wall. It was reminiscent of a cobweb, pale and luminous, unobserved.

  Dusk seemed to enter the room suddenly, like smoke. A moment after, the girl raised her head and her face lost all its faint colour. A shadow, intensely blue in the evening light, fell across the room, the spinning wheel. It was the shadow of a young man. Even in the gathering darkness, the colour of his hair was apparent. It was auburn, as the hair of Lauro had been. The phantasmal cobweb that lay against the wall, the perception of the being which had become a unicorn, clung again itself. It had now recognised, without recognition, the two lives which it had formerly been. The purpose of this representation, its earthly male and female states, filled it with strange longings, a sort of nostalgia for mortality it did not comprehend.

  The young man spoke. Then the young girl.

  The cobweb essence of the creature which had become a unicorn listened. It began, at last, by some uncanny osmosis of thought — telepathy, perhaps — to distinguish the gist of the conversation.

  ‘I have thought of you all day,’ the young man said. ‘I do not know why.’

  ‘You are uncivil to say this. Am I not worth recalling?’ And the wheel spun, as if it, not she, were hurt, excited and unsure.

  ‘I think you are a witch, and put a spell on me.’ But he laughed. His laugh was Lauro’s. In this way the unicorn had laughed, long, long ago.

  ‘So I might. So I meant to.’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘To test my skill. A
nother man would have done as well. You are nothing to me.’

  ‘If I am nothing to you, why do you sit and gaze at me in church?’

  ‘Who told you that I did?’

  ‘Your own face, which is red as a rose.’

  ‘It is my anger,’ she said.

  But he went close to her and sat beside her, following the wheel with Lauro’s eyes, as she followed it with Sephaina’s.

  The light faded, and at last he said: ‘Shall I light the lamp for you?’

  ‘You are too kind. Yes, light the lamp, before you go to your own house.’

  ‘May I not stay, then, in your house?’

  ‘If you stay,’ she said above the flying wheel, ‘the village will remark it. I have neither father nor mother, nor any kin. If you stay, you must wed me, they will all say. And the priest will demand it.’

  ‘The priest already knows I am here. I took care that he should.’

  Then the wheel was left to itself and whirled itself to a standstill.

  The cobweb clinging to the wall beheld itself embrace itself, the two it had been as one. But the anguish and the urgency of love it did not pause to examine, for some noiseless clamour drove it abruptly away.

  As the lovers twined in the hovel, therefore, the unicorn walked delicately to the pool in the valley. It touched the tip of its unbelievable horn to the reflection there. Its calm eyes were two purple globes, shining, and its whiteness was like summer rain.

  A human would have been thinking: Ah, I must consider this. I must know this. But the unicorn only considered, only knew. It returned to the black wood, wrapping itself in the blackness, fold on fold, until it was utterly invisible, even to itself.

  The brief mortal kindling it had witnessed — or possibly imagined that it witnessed — held its awareness as its own life and the manifestations of life had formerly held it, and nourished it. It turned about within itself the images of the perfectly commonplace coupling, the commonplace wishes and desires which had heralded it. It turned them about like rare gems to catch the light of the rising moon.