F&SF BK OF UNICORN VOL1.indb

by Gordon Van Gelder

  “My dear Marius,” he now soothed, “no one understands better than I your disappointment. But surely, for the man of indomitable will, such frustrations only serve to redouble the determination to succeed. Had Stanley given up before Victoria Falls . . .” He let the sentence trail off meaningfully, mildly sickened by the ingenuousness of his appeal, but equally convinced of its effectiveness.

  “Yes, yes, I suppose you’re quite right,” Wallaby murmured, sitting imperceptibly straighter. “It doesn’t do to get discouraged too quickly on these things.” He sipped distastefully from his wineglass. “Years ago in Mombasa I ran into a dicey old Dutchman who swore he’d seen a white rhino in the Gambezi. He’d been tracking it off and on for years whenever he could steer a safari into the area, and everyone thought he was crackers, of course, but one day he walked right into Starrs’, threw the skin on the bar, and ordered drinks for the house. Showed us all, he did. Never forgot it.” Wallaby scowled darkly. “Which is probably why I’m here with you today instead of enjoying a bottle of decent hock in Athens.”

  The innkeeper moved deferentially to their table and placed a worn copper platter before Sir Marius. “This looks a bit better,” the Englishman grunted as he dubiously surveyed an array of media dolma and moussaka, a local dish of beef cunningly cooked with aubergines, mushrooms, and tomatoes, and smothered in a simmering soufflé of feta cheese. The elderly Greek smiled encouragingly and placed another bottle of Retsina on the table.

  “You enjoy, Kyrios, you enjoy.” Panayotis beamed proudly. “I know how to cook for English. I work in Athens three years. That’s where I learn your language, also French and a little Turkish.” The innkeeper had regaled them earlier with his travels, for as the only local man to venture forth as far as fabled Athens and the sea, he was a minor celebrity, and served as mayor of the cluster of rude stone-and-wattle cottages comprising the hamlet of Theodoriana. “You will find the best food in the Pindus mountains right here, here with Panayotis, milord.”

  “I don’t question that,” Sir Marius grunted, tentatively slipping a fork into a mussel entwined with grape leaves, “only whether it’s a recommendation.” But after one bite, he smiled abruptly, like ice melting, and nodded approval to the innkeeper, who half giggled with relief and obsequiously bobbed his grizzled head in an awkward half bow. Why do the peasants always fawn on the hulking, ill-mannered boor, Deverish reflected bitterly, when it’s so obvious I’m the sole gentleman in our party? He gulped his Retsina convulsively, and lit another cheroot, gratefully dragging the harsh smoke into his lungs.

  After the meal was over and cloyingly sweet honey-and-nut pastries had been washed down with Turkish coffee and ouzo, Wallaby belched contentedly and plucked a cigar from a battered lizard-skin case.

  “Doubtless have indigestion later on, but at least I feel halfway human for the time being,” he grumbled. Panayotis diffidently presented a bill, and Wallaby, without examining it, tossed a jumble of fifty-drachma notes onto the table.

  “Take our rooms from that and keep the change.”

  The innkeeper’s eyes fixed hotly on the bills for a long moment before he scrabbled them up with trembling hands, his mumbled words of gratitude cut short by Wallaby’s roar for a bottle of Metaxa. Deverish choked back the bile in his throat. Of course the old fool could afford to throw away his money—he’d never had to sweat for it. He cursed for the thousandth time the perverse law of nature ordaining that cretins like Wallaby be blessed with wealth, while the rare man of genius must grovel in muck for the offal of everyday existence, lyric words and vaulting imagery strangled stillborn. Deverish stared at Wallaby guzzling brandy like a bloated pig greedily snuffling for truffles, and his hand involuntarily strayed to the sheaf of poems in his jacket pocket. It would not be long now. His eyes slivered as he smiled suddenly, exultantly, and when he spoke he no longer had to struggle to keep the hatred from his voice.

  “Don’t you think you overpaid the chap a bit, old boy?”

  Wallaby looked up from his brandy and scowled.

  “You’re bad enough as a guide, Deverish, don’t start doubling as my accountant. In any case, the draft from Athens gives me enough to buy and sell this whole pigsty of a town—not that I’d want it, God knows.” He slurped noisily from his glass and wiped his moist forehead with a tattered red bandana. “And another thing, Deverish, once and for all stop calling me ‘old boy,’ and trotting out your whole insufferably tatty Oxbridge act. I don’t give a damn about a man’s birth, and I’ve always held Debrett’s the least reliable stud-book of the lot, but the pose bores me to tears and will only get you laughed at back in London.” His eyes suddenly softened. “I don’t mean that harshly, Deverish. Just be yourself, that’s all. You’ll get along better that way.”

  Deverish stood up abruptly, his sallow cheeks flaming. Wallaby’s insult he could have almost savored, on account so to speak, but the gratuitous fillip of condescension was intolerable. His fists tightened into balls and he spun on his heels to hide his face from Wallaby’s eyes.

  “I’ll speak to the innkeeper now and see if he knows anything,” Deverish said tautly, his words barely above a whisper.

  “All right, all right, we’ve gone this far, go ahead.” Wallaby belched, and took a long pull from his glass. “Though I’m beginning to think that photograph of yours was some kind of forgery, or perhaps just a shot of an ibex or aurochs. You probably wouldn’t know the difference anyway.”

  With a surge of secret satisfaction, Deverish composed himself. He, after all, was the master of this situation. There had never been any photograph, merely the maudlin mumblings of an old Greek in a Salonika bar drunkenly bemoaning his native Karanakis, where unicorns still lived and flitted through the forest glades. Deverish had been amused at first, but the old man’s words held the germ of an idea. He had met Sir Marius Wallaby for the first time the day before at the Travellers Club, where he had eloquently requested the wealthy baronet’s backing to publish a volume of his verse, only to be summarily rebuffed and packed off like a beggar with a fiver stuffed in his pocket as a token of Wallaby’s largess—which, to make it worse, he was forced by dint of circumstances to accept. But Deverish knew of Wallaby’s reputation as a hunter; the old man had stalked everything from elephants in Africa to cougars in Peru, and photo stories of his expeditions appeared regularly in the lurid illustrated press. If the opportunity to bag the greatest game of all—the last surviving unicorn—presented itself, could the old fool resist the temptation? Wallaby’s childlike credulity needed little priming from Deverish, and the baronet accepted the tale eagerly, immediately moving to outfit an expedition. Now, three weeks later, the two of them were alone in one of the most desolate areas of Greece, two hundred miles from the nearest police station, in a mountainous countryside where accidents were bound to occur, particularly to someone fat, clumsy, and slow of foot—someone, above all, with the equivalent of two thousand English pounds in Greek drachmas stuffed in his pockets.

  Breaking off his reverie, Deverish strode to the kitchen and peremptorily ordered the innkeeper to their table. Panayotis followed, but not, Deverish noted irritably, with the alacrity he displayed in response to even the rudest of Wallaby’s summonses. Once seated, the old Greek gratefully accepted a glass of Metaxa and listened closely as Deverish explained their quest in fluent Greek, frowning thoughtfully before finally replying in tortured English—Wallaby didn’t know a word of any foreign language not featured on menus—that he had never heard of such an animal.

  “But, milord,” Panayotis continued haltingly, addressing only Wallaby as was his custom, “there is an old man, a priest, who lives in the woods. He stayed many years in a monastery on Mount Athos and is now what you would call hermetos, for he exists only on nuts and berries, and will kill no living thing for food. There are some who say he is mad”—Panayotis crossed himself surreptitiously at the blasphemy—“but I see much truth in his eyes. He lives in a cave at the foot of Karajides mountain, but once in a while
he comes here, and I give him bread and wine.” He took another sip of Metaxa. “This priest knows the woods and mountains like none of us, who are all farmers and seldom wander far from our fields. I have seen him in the forest once or twice, and the animals follow him, even the deer, and are not afraid. He feeds them, and sometimes he talks to them.” Panayotis looked momentarily embarrassed, fearful the Englishman would despise his credulity. “Of course, milord, for all I know he is not even a real priest; the priest at Calabaris in the valley comes here once a month to preach since we have no church of our own, and he says he knows nothing of this hermetos. But I think he is a holy man.”

  Wallaby gestured impatiently with one pudgy hand.

  “I don’t care if he’s a saint or a highwayman. If he knows the woods and mountains of this territory, I want to speak to him. We’ve been going around in circles for three weeks because your damned peasants have eyes for nothing beyond their bloody turnip plots. Can you bring him to us?”

  The innkeeper’s brow furrowed doubtfully.

  “That I do not think, milord. He visits here only when he desires, and you could wait weeks before he come again.” He brightened perceptibly. “But I could lead you to his cave—it is not a long walk.”

  Wallaby heaved agonizedly out of his chair and began waddling towards the stairs, the bottle of Metaxa dangling loosely from one hand.

  “All right, we’ll leave at seven in the morning. Wake me at six, prepare a warm bath, and for breakfast fry me six eggs, coffee, some toasted bread, and a side of bacon.” He cut off the innkeeper’s protest. “Then kill the pig, I’ll pay you for it. Seven o’clock.” He nodded curtly to Deverish and hauled his bulk laboriously up the stairs. Deverish sat hunched over his brandy for at least another hour, and the innkeeper was puzzled by the Englishman’s sporadic bouts of smirking laughter. Yes indeed, he thought, savoring the words, do kill the pig. And you will pay for it, dear Marius, you will surely pay for it.

  Deverish awoke after a restless night on a hard pallet-like bed and shaved painfully in cold water brought him in a chipped porcelain basin by the innkeeper’s eldest son, a handsome boy in his late teens with tousled, coal-black hair, smooth olive skin, and the classic features of a young Homeric prince. He eyed the youth appraisingly for a moment, and then dismissed the thought. Later, back in Athens or elsewhere on the Continent, but not here, not now. He could afford no taint of suspicion, much less scandal—the stakes were too high.

  Downstairs, Wallaby crouched over a three-week-old copy of the Times he had purchased in Ioannina, the last stage of their journey maintaining vestigial contact with the outside world. He had already polished off his breakfast, and looked up irritably as Deverish took his place at the table and accepted a steaming mug of harsh black tea from the innkeeper.

  “Can’t you ever be on time, man? I said we’d depart at seven, and seven it is, whether you’ve eaten or not. Hurry up with that breakfast!” Panayotis, who had been hovering over Wallaby’s shoulder, resignedly padded out to the kitchen, no trace of resentment on his face, and Wallaby immersed himself in the paper for a few more moments before hurling it to the table with a muted imprecation.

  “Must know the damned thing by heart now,” he growled. “I can recite King George’s movements from morning to night, and throw in a verbatim report of the Kaiser’s speech at Potsdam.” He looked accusingly at Deverish. “If I’d known we’d be running about half of Greece on this mad chase of yours, I’d have taken some serious reading matter along.”

  Deverish’s lip curled imperceptibly. Wallaby’s idea of serious literature was the latest issue of the Strand, and the peregrinations of Conan Doyle’s absurd fictional fabrication—or, on a more refined level, the muddled bleats of eunuchs such as George Manville Fenn, Dick Donovan, and W. Clark Russell. For hours on the coach from Athens, Wallaby had rattled on with indefatigable enthusiasm over the latest literary excretions of these favored pygmies—all the while oblivious to the presence at his side of one who could burn his words into the ages if only freed from the material shackles binding lesser men and allowed to breathe, to move, to create. Once, at the very outset of the trip, when his plan had not as yet fully crystallized, Deverish granted Wallaby a second chance to become his patron and read the fool several of his best poems. Wallaby had listened abstractedly, finally nodding judiciously and patting Deverish on the shoulder. “Nice stuff, I’m sure, but I prefer poets who make themselves clear, like Kipling or Housman. All this agonizing over life and death is a bit deep for me. But keep at it, old boy, by all means keep at it.” Wallaby had returned with evident relief to his copy of Nature, and neither of them referred to the subject again.

  Under Wallaby’s impatient eye, Deverish wolfed an indifferent breakfast of lumpy porridge and cold slabs of greasy bacon and then departed with the innkeeper for the hermit’s cave. As the small party left the village and passed through the open fields of the valley, Deverish’s spirits failed to lighten, although it was a cool, antiseptic morning, with a clean summer breeze rippling the air and scudding ragged tufts of cloud across a sky of the washed metallic blue found only in the Mediterranean. Deverish wanted Wallaby alone, high in the mountains, not on a hiking trip through the forest in quest of some half-crazed recluse, but he had waited this long, and could afford to wait a few hours or a few days longer.

  A short journey it might be to the innkeeper, but for Deverish the trek appeared interminable, burdened as he was with both their hunting rifles and a rucksack containing rations and extra cartridges. For all his bulk Wallaby pressed on relentlessly through the fields and into the thick woods of hawthorn and birch lapping at the foot of the more lightly forested mountain slopes, his plump cheeks redder than usual from exertion, intermittently whistling bawdy tunes and pausing only for an occasional swift swig of brandy from his capacious silver flask. Deverish was consistently astounded and repelled by the man’s insatiable appetite for liquor, and by the fact that it never exacted a toll the following morning, whereas his own four brandies of the night before had bequeathed him an aching head and churning stomach, tinged with the bleak edge of nervous despair always attendant to his hangovers. Wallaby, predictably enough, was in the best of spirits and insisted on regaling Deverish with his hunting exploits.

  “Only thing I’ve never killed is a fox,” he said as the old Greek led them through a copse of silver birch and into a small sun-swept clearing at the foot of a rugged, barren hillside. “No sport there, the poor terrified beast doesn’t have a chance, run to ground by a pack of bloody baying hounds and a hundred horsemen. A coward’s pastime, if you ask me—I always give my game a sporting chance.” He pulled out his flask again and took a quick, slobbering gulp, wiping his mouth with the back of one scarlet hand. “Whatever else they say about that fellow Wilde, he had the fox hunter’s number: ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.’ Eh?” Wallaby burst into a sudden peal of laughter and slapped one meaty thigh, as if the words had been his own spontaneous observation. Deverish merely grimaced—there was something blasphemous at the words of Wilde dribbling from the flaccid lips of this great oaf—and joined the old Greek, who had halted in the middle of the clearing.

  “The holy man lives here,” Panayotis whispered reverently, as Wallaby lumbered to his side, “in that cave there, milord.” He pointed to a black gash in the pitted face of the hill. “I will go on ahead and see if he will talk with you.” Panayotis dropped his pack to the ground and extracted two bottles of wine and a sack stuffed with flat bread, dates, feta cheese, and pungent black Calamaris olives—it had been decided that a bit of discreet bribery might lubricate the priest’s tongue—and entered the cave.

  Wallaby and Deverish stood together without speaking in the clearing for several moments after the innkeeper left them. Deverish was restless and nervous, and the insistent glare of sunlight pained his eyes. He was suddenly conscious of the intensity of birdsong in the surrounding trees, and as he looked closely he saw hundreds of different birds array
ed in the branches, their voices beating out to serenade the men in the clearing. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been a pleasant scene, but now the noise was too orchestral, too insistent, and Deverish found it vaguely disturbing, if not actively tinged with menace. There were too many birds for such a small clearing, and he had a tingling sensation of their awareness, as if their tiny eyes were all fixed on his, the jarring cacophony of birdsong directed at him alone. He jerked around to face the cave, sweat springing out on his brow, just as Panayotis emerged and waved them to enter.

  Deverish followed Wallaby and the innkeeper into a dank warren littered with scraps of food and fouled linen. The air was so noxious Deverish almost choked, and abruptly he experienced a wild impulse to flee back into the sunlit glade. But then he saw the man huddled in one corner, and his artist’s fascination with the grotesque dispelled all fear. The hermit was tall, at least six feet four, and incredibly filthy, his bony frame draped in the tattered remnants of a soutane, a huge, hand-carved wooden crucifix dangling from his neck. His hands and feet were polished black with a solid patina of filth, and greasy, tangled dark locks fell below his shoulders. The hermit’s beard was a living thing, a coiled snake dangling to his waist, encrusted with grime and particles of food, but his teeth, when he smiled to greet them, were startlingly white, and his eyes were the clear light blue of the bleached sky outside. The man should have been repellent, but even to Deverish he was strangely impressive. He did not rise but remained crouched in the corner, extending both hands in a mute gesture of welcome. Deverish wondered if they were expected to sit on the filthy floor of the cave, but Wallaby merely squatted on his haunches before the old man and motioned Deverish to explain their mission, while Panayotis hovered edgily by the entrance, occasionally casting awestruck glances at the hermit. Deverish, remaining on his feet, quickly told the priest that he and Wallaby had heard reports of a unicorn surviving in these remote hills, and wished to verify them. The old man was silent for a long moment, his eyes cast down and pensive, before he looked directly up at Deverish and spoke softly. Deverish couldn’t follow him at first, but finally he realized the old man was speaking classical Greek, the words pure and clean as a mountain stream.