“I can’t do this very much longer,” he said slowly. “It isn’t this horrible place and it isn’t having to be listening for him all the time—I’m getting rather good at that—it’s the wretched cheapjack flummery he has me perform for him, hours on end—all night last night. I wouldn’t mind if he asked for the real magic, or even for simple conjuring, but it’s always the rings and the goldfish, the cards and the scarves and the string, exactly as it was in the Midnight Carnival. I can’t do it. Not much more.”
“But that was what he wanted you for,” Molly protested. “If he wanted real magic, he’d have kept the old magician, that Mabruk.” Schmendrick raised his head and gave her a look that was almost amused. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “Besides it’s only for a little while, until we find the way to the Red Bull that the cat told me about.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper as she spoke this last, and both of them glanced quickly over at Prince Lír; but he was sitting on a stool in the corner, evidently writing another poem. “Gazelle,” he murmured, tapping his pen against his lips. “Demoiselle, citadel, asphodel, philomel, parallel…” He chose farewell, and scribbled rapidly.
“We will never find the way,” Schmendrick said very quietly. “Even if the cat told the truth, which I doubt, Haggard will make sure we never have time to investigate the skull and the clock. Why do you suppose he piles more work on you every day, if not to keep you from prowling and prying in the great hall? Why do you think he keeps me entertaining him with my carnival tricks?—why do you think he took me as his wizard in the first place? Molly, he knows, I’m sure of it! He knows what she is, though he doesn’t quite believe it yet—but when he does, he’ll know what to do. He knows. I see it in his face sometimes.”
“The lift of longing, and the crash of loss,” Prince Lír said. “The bitterness of tumpty-umpty-oss. Cross, boss, moss. Damn.”
Schmendrick leaned across the table. “We can’t stay here and wait for him to strike. The only hope we have is to escape at night—by sea, perhaps, if I can lay hold of a boat somewhere. The men-at-arms will look the other way, and the gate—”
“But the others!” she cried softly. “How can we leave, when she has come so far to find the other unicorns, and we know they are here?” Yet one small, tender, treacherous part of her was suddenly eager to be convinced of the quest’s failure, and she knew it, and was angry at Schmendrick. “Well, but what about your magic?” she asked, “what about your own little search? Are you going to give that up too? Will she die in human shape, and you live forever? You might as well let the Bull have her then.”
The magician sank back, his face gone as pale and crumpled as a washerwoman’s fingers. “It doesn’t really matter, one way or the other,” he said, almost to himself. “She’s no unicorn now, but a mortal woman—someone for that lout to sigh over and write poems about. Maybe Haggard won’t find her out after all. She’ll be his daughter, and he’ll never know. That’s funny.” He put his soup aside untasted and leaned his head into his hands. “I couldn’t change her back into a unicorn if we did find the others,” he said. “There’s no magic in me.”
“Schmendrick—” she began; but at that moment he jumped to his feet and rushed out of the scullery, though she had not heard the king summon him. Prince Lír never looked up, but went on drumming meters and sampling rhymes. Molly hung a kettle over the fire for the sentries’ tea.
“I’ve got it all but the final couplet,” Lír said presently. “Do you want to hear it now, or would you rather wait?”
“Whichever you like,” she said, so he read it then, but she never heard a word of it. Fortunately, the men-at-arms came in before he had finished reading, and he was too shy to ask her opinion in their presence. By the time they left he was working on something else, and it was very late when he bade her good night. Molly was sitting at the table, holding her motley cat.
The new poem was meant to be a sestina, and Prince Lír’s head was jangling happily as he juggled the end words on his way up the stairs to his chamber. I will leave the first one at her door, he thought, and save the others until tomorrow. He was debating his original decision against signing his work, and playing with such pen names as “The Knight of the Shadows,” and “Le Chevalier Mal-Aimé,” when he turned a corner and met the Lady Amalthea. She was coming down quickly in the dark, and when she saw him she made a strange, bleating sound and stood still, three steps above him.
She wore a robe that one of the king’s men had stolen for her in Hagsgate. Her hair was down, and her feet were bare, and the sight of her on the stair sent such sorrow licking along Prince Lír’s bones that he dropped his poems and his pretenses together and actually turned to run. But he was a hero in all ways, and he turned bravely back to face her, saying in a calm and courtly manner, “Give you good evening, my lady.”
The Lady Amalthea stared at him through the gloom, putting out a hand, but drawing it back before she touched him. “Who are you?” she whispered. “Are you Rukh?”
“I’m Lír,” he answered, suddenly frightened. “Don’t you know me?” But she backed away, and it seemed to the prince that her steps were as flowing as an animal’s, and that she even lowered her head in the way of a goat or a deer. He said, “I’m Lír.”
“The old woman,” said the Lady Amalthea. “The moon went out. Ah!” She shivered once, and then her eyes recognized him. But all her body was still wild and watchful and she came no nearer to him.
“You were dreaming, my lady,” he said, finding knightly speech again. “I would that I might know your dream.”
“I have dreamed it before,” she answered slowly. “I was in a cage, and there were others—beasts in cages, and an old woman. But I will not trouble you, my lord prince. I have dreamed it many times before.”
She would have left him then, but he spoke to her in a voice that only heroes have, as many animals develop a certain call when they become mothers. “A dream that returns so often is like to be a messenger, come to warn you of the future or to remind you of things untimely forgotten. Say more of this, if you will, and I will try to riddle it for you.”
Thereupon she halted, looking at him with her head a little turned, still with the air of some slim, furred creature peering out of a thicket. But her eyes held a human look of loss, as though she had missed something she needed, or suddenly realized that she had never had it. If he had even blinked, she would have been gone; but he did not blink, and he held her, as he had learned to hold griffins and chimeras motionless with his steady gaze. Her bare feet wounded him deeper than any tusk or riving talon ever had, but he was a true hero.
The Lady Amalthea said, “In the dream there are black, barred wagons, and beasts that are and are not, and a winged being that clangs like metal in the moonlight. The tall man has green eyes and bloody hands.”
“The tall man must be your uncle, the magician,” Prince Lír mused. “That part’s clear enough, anyway, and the bloody hands don’t surprise me. I never cared much for his looks, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Is that all the dream?”
“I cannot tell you all of it,” she said. “It is never finished.” Fear came back to her eyes like a great stone falling into a pool: all was clouded and swirling, and quick shadows were rushing everywhere. She said, “I am running away from a good place where I was safe, and the night is burning around me. But it is day too, and I am walking under beech trees in the warm, sour rain, and there are butterflies, and a honey sound, and dappled roads, and towns like fishbones, and the flying thing is killing the old woman. I am running and running into the freezing fire, however I turn, and my legs are the legs of a beast—”
“Lady,” Prince Lír broke in, “my lady, by your leave, no more.” Her dream was darkening into shape between them, and suddenly he did not want to know what it meant. “No more,” he said.
“But I must go on,” said the Lady Amalthea, “for it is never finished. Even when
I wake, I cannot tell what is real, and what I am dreaming as I move and speak and eat my dinner. I remember what cannot have happened, and forget something that is happening to me now. People look at me as though I should know them, and I do know them in the dream, and always the fire draws nearer, though I am awake—”
“No more,” he said desperately. “A witch built this castle, and to speak of nightmares here often makes them come true.” It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying—generally you killed something—but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling.
“I would court you with more grace,” he said, “if I knew how. My dragons and my feats of arms weary you, but they are all I have to offer. I haven’t been a hero for very long, and before I was a hero I was nothing at all, nothing but my father’s dull, soft son. Perhaps I am only dull in a new way now, but I am here, and it is wrong of you to let me go to waste. I wish you wanted something of me. It wouldn’t have to be a valiant deed—just useful.”
Then the Lady Amalthea smiled at him for the first time since she had come to stay in King Haggard’s castle. It was a small smile, like the new moon, a slender bend of brightness on the edge of the unseen, but Prince Lír leaned toward it to be warm. He would have cupped his hands around her smile and breathed it brighter, if he had dared.
“Sing to me,” she said. “That would be valiant, to raise your voice in this dark, lonely place, and it will be useful as well. Sing to me, sing loudly—drown out my dreams, keep me from remembering whatever wants me to remember it. Sing to me, my lord prince, if it please you. It may not seem a hero’s task, but I would be glad of it.”
So Prince Lír sang out lustily, there on the cold stairway, and many damp, unseen creatures went flopping and scurrying for cover before the daylight gaiety of his voice. He sang the first words that came to him, and they were these:
When I was a young man, and very well thought of,
I couldn’t ask aught that the ladies denied.
I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,
And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied.
But I said to myself, “Ah, they none of them know
The secret I shelter and savor and save.
I wait for the one who will see through my seeming,
And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave.”
The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens;
The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.
I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled,
And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned.
But I said to myself, “Ah, they none of them see
There’s part of me pure as the whisk of a wave.
My lady is late, but she’ll find I’ve been faithful,
And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave.”
At last came a lady both knowing and tender,
Saying, “You’re not at all what they take you to be.”
I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking,
And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea.
And I say to myself, when there’s time for a word,
As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved,
“Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger,
And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.”
The Lady Amalthea laughed when he was done, and that sound seemed to set the old, old darkness of the castle hissing back from them both. “That was useful,” she said. “Thank you, my lord.”
“I don’t know why I sang that one,” Prince Lír said awkwardly. “One of my father’s men used to sing it to me. I don’t really believe it. I think that love is stronger than habits or circumstances. I think it is possible to keep yourself for someone for a long time, and still remember why you were waiting when she comes at last.” The Lady Amalthea smiled again, but she did not answer, and the prince took a single step closer to her.
Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, “I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.”
Before she could speak, if she meant to, they heard footsteps below them on the winding stair, and King Haggard’s veiled voice saying, “I heard him singing. What business had he to be singing?”
Then Schmendrick, the royal wizard, his own voice meek and hurried. “Sire, it was but some heroic lay, some chanson de geste, such as he often sings when he rides out to glory, or rides home to renown. Be assured, Your Majesty—”
“He never sings here,” the king said. “He sings continuously on his fool’s wanderings, I am sure, because that is what heroes do. But he was singing here, and not of battle and gallantry either, but of love. Where is she? I knew he was singing of love before I ever heard him, for the very stones shuddered as they do when the Bull moves in the earth. Where is she?”
The prince and the Lady Amalthea looked at each other in the darkness, and in that moment they were side by side, though neither moved. With this came fear of the king, for whatever had been born between them, it might be something he wanted. A landing above them gave onto a corridor; they turned and ran together, though they could not see beyond their breaths. Her feet were as silent as the promise she had given him, but his own heavy boots rang exactly like boots on the stone floor. King Haggard made no pursuit, but his voice rustled down the hallway after them, whispering under the magician’s words, “Mice, my lord, beyond a doubt. Fortunately, I am possessed of a singular spell—”
“Let them run,” the king said. “It suits me well that they should run.”
When they stopped running, wherever they stopped, they looked at each other again.
So the winter whined and crept along, not toward any spring, but toward the brief, devouring summer of King Haggard’s country. Life in the castle went on in the silence that fills a place where no one hopes for anything. Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw. And in the evenings, before she went to bed, she usually read over Prince Lír’s new poems to the Lady Amalthea, and praised them, and corrected the spelling.
Schmendrick fooled and juggled and flimflammed as the king bade him, hating it, and knowing that Haggard knew he hated it and took his pleasure thereby. He never again suggested to Molly that they escape from the castle before Haggard made sure of the truth of the Lady Amalthea; but he no longer sought to discover the secret way down to the Red Bull, even when he was allowed time to himself. He seemed to have surrendered, not to the king but to some far older, crueler enemy that had caught up with him at last, this winter in this place.
The Lady Amalthea grew as much more beautiful every day as that day was grimmer and gloomier than the one before. The old men-at-arms, coming down drenched and shivering from walking their posts in the rain, or in from stealing things for the king, opened as quietly as flowers when they met her on the stairs or in the hallways. She would smile at them, and speak gently; but when she had passed by, the castle always seemed darker than ever, and the wind outside would rattle the thick sky like a sheet on a clothesline. For her beauty was human and doomed, and there was no comfort in it for old men. They could only draw their dripping cloaks tighter and limp on down to the small fire in the scullery.
But the Lady Amalthea and Prince Lír walked and spoke and sang together as blithely as though King Haggard’s castle had become a green wood, wild and shadowy with spring. They climbed the crooked towers like hills, picnicked in stone meadows under a stone
sky, and splashed up and down stairways that had softened and quickened into streams. He told her everything he knew, and what he thought about all of it, and happily invented a life and opinions for her, which she helped him do by listening. Nor was she deceiving him, for she truly remembered nothing before the castle and him. She began and ended with Prince Lír—except for the dreams, and they soon faded, as he had said they would.
They seldom heard the hunting roar of the Red Bull at night any more, but when the hungering sound came to her ears, then she would be frightened, and the walls and the winter would grow up around them again, as though their spring were all of her making, her joy’s gift to the prince. He would have held her at such times, but he had long known her dread of being touched.
One afternoon the Lady Amalthea stood on the highest tower of the castle, watching for Prince Lír’s return from an expedition against a brother-in-law of the ogre he had slain; for he still went out on occasional errantries, as he had told Molly he might. The sky was piled up over the valley of Hagsgate, the color of dirty soap, but it was not raining. Far below, the sea slid out toward the smoky horizon in hard bands of silver and green and kelpy brown. The ugly birds were restless: they flew out often, two and three together, circled swiftly over the water, and then returned to strut on the sand, chortling and cocking their heads at King Haggard’s castle on the cliff. “Saidso, saidso!” The tide was low, and near to turning.
The Lady Amalthea began to sing, and her voice balanced and hovered in the cold air like another sort of bird.
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—
She did not remember having heard the song before, but the words pinched and plucked at her like children, trying to drag her back to some place that they wanted to see again. She moved her shoulders to get away from them.
The Last Unicorn Page 15