Black Unicorn (Dragonflight)

by Tanith Lee

  The skeleton sparkled. It looked almost friendly. And then, by some shift of the sunset light, it altered, and a vague terror touched Tanaquil, like nothing she had felt before. Her mother did not believe in religion or priests, but Tanaquil wondered if she should make some offering to God. For only the God could know what this thing had been.

  The light melted; the sun had set. In the deep blue sky the stars began to arrive, and the cold of night breathed at the window.

  "You'll be warm here," said Tanaquil to the peeve. It snored in its lair.

  Tanaquil climbed on her work table and began to put bronze hooks into the beam above—

  The door was knocked. The voice of Bird, one of the girls who still sometimes absentmindedly cleaned the chambers of the fortress, came through its timbers. "Lady Tanaquil?" Tanaquil did not think she had heard Bird's voice for two months, had not met her anywhere. And now she was not glad to hear or see Bird.

  "Just a minute!"

  Tanaquil ran to the bed, swept off the topmost quilt, and flung it over the skeleton. Then she opened the door. Bird bowed, as the kitchen people, who saw Tanaquil most days, never did.

  "Your lady mother sent me to fetch you."

  "What does she want?"

  "She's got a demon sitting in her circle of wax. I screamed when I saw it."

  "She's always having demons in her circle. Why does she want me?"

  "She just said fetch you at once."

  "It's not convenient—" Tanaquil checked. If she did not go to her mother, Jaive might come sweeping down to find her. A visit from Jaive was rare, but then, so was a summons. "All right," said Tanaquil, and she came out, shutting the door. Bird had not seemed to notice the quilt, nor even the snow of stuffing from the pillow and smears of meat fat.

  They went up the stone stairs. A wooden fruit detached itself from the banister and bounced away; neither girl reacted. The open landings were chilly, and outside braziers burned along the wall walks and the soldiers were singing sea chanties.

  "Do you seek Jaive?" asked the jade head on the Sorcerium door.

  "Oh, who else?"

  "Your name and rank?"

  But the door found itself being opened from within in mid-question, and looked insulted.

  Bird gave a tweet and darted back down the stairs.

  Jaive's chamber of magic was shrouded at the walls by a curious veiledness, like mist in a forest. The center of the room was clear, and there in the wax circle, lit by the burning tapers, sat a demon with two heads, elephant ears and frog eyes, a huge stomach, and no legs, for it stopped at the pelvis—or perhaps the rest of it was in some other dimension under the floor.

  Jaive stood imperiously by. She observed her daughter, shook back her scarlet maze of hair, and said, "What have you been up to, Tanaquil?"

  "Nothing," said Tanaquil. "How do you mean?" she added, more casually.

  "Epbal Enrax says to me that weird elements have entered my fortress."

  Epbal Enrax was the demon. It was called up about once a month. Tanaquil nodded politely. "How are you, Epbal Enrax?" The demon breathed out a mauve puff, which was a sign of contentment. "I don't see why," said Tanaquil, "you should think any weird elements here have anything to do with me."

  "Epbal Enrax," said Jaive, "speak!"

  Epbal Enrax spoke. The chamber shook, and pestles and parchments plummeted from cabinets—its voice was not loud, only reverberant.

  "Below," said Epbal Enrax, "close by."

  "Which is you, Tanaquil."

  "It's also half your soldiers, the maids—"

  "Continue, Epbal Enrax."

  "Red of hair sets fingers to a spark of fire."

  Tanaquil shivered. Luckily the demon brought extra coldness—some of the taper flames had frozen—she had an excuse. She looked at her mother scathingly, and said, "He means you, mother. Red hair and sparks and all that. There's some stray spell of yours loose on a landing again. He's trying to catch you out. You told me demons are always prone to do that."

  Jaive frowned, and turned to the demon.

  "Here's my daughter. What of her?"

  Epbal Enrax said: "Rebellion."

  Tanaquil had an uneasy feeling it was now assisting her deception. Demons would always cause mischief if they could. But she took the cue.

  "Yes," she said, "it's that row we had, mother. About my leaving here. And you won't let me."

  Jaive lost her powerful look. She was exasperated.

  "Do you think I want to hear this nonsense now?"

  "You fetched me here."

  "What were you doing?" asked Jaive, with a last quiver of suspicion.

  "What do I ever do? Mending something, fiddling about. I'm bored. It's infuriating. I want to leave and—"

  "Be quiet!" stormed Jaive. She turned on the demon again and cast a bolt of light at him. The demon sizzled and began to whine. "You also be quiet! I'm surrounded by fools. If it's excitement you want, Tanaquil, we shall have a dinner in the hall. Yes, a feast, a party. You may wear one of your best dresses."

  "That will be fun," said Tanaquil.

  "Now go away. As for you—"

  Tanaquil shut the door quickly, hearing the demon's cries and apologies all the way down the first flight of steps.

  The fortress was in near-blackness now, an occasional lamp left alight over the staircases and at the turnings of corridors, stars in windows, and brazier flicker.

  Tanaquil opened her door and hesitated.

  Through the darkness and through the cover of the quilt, a faint soft glow floated upward from the floor. The starry bones shone like the stars. Fingers to the spark of fire—had the demon really meant herself and what she did? What did she do? What sorcery beyond her grasp might she be unleashing?

  She went into her room and stood shut in the night of it.

  "Peeve," she called softly, "what are we up to?"

  No answer. Tanaquil said, "There's to be a dinner. I'll get you a gorgeous meat bone—" and saw that the shutter had been nudged wide at the window. In the feathers on the floor were the marks of fat-sticky paws. The peeve was gone. Drawn by darkness, it had returned to the hollow hill in the desert.

  Tanaquil felt a pang of anxiety. She was responsible for the peeve. They shared this adventure. No, that was silly. Who could control a peeve?

  She lit her lamp and the glow of the skeleton faded.

  "I'll just get on," she said aloud.

  She thought of the sand giving way in the hollow hill and the peeve disappearing. Grimly, she got up on her work table and started once more to arrange the hooks.

  How slowly the night passed.

  Had she ever had a sleepless night before? Tanaquil could not remember one. Dissatisfaction and boredom had made her sleep. Now she was not bored at all, but alert, eager, very worried.

  She had done all she could with the tools at her disposal. Tomorrow she would seek the blacksmith, who was one of the soldiers, hoping he was not too drunk to get the forge going. To her specifications he should be able to create for her those parts she needed to repair the beast of bone. A wild idea had come to her, too. Cogs and wheels, hinges and tiny shafts of bronze and copper might be incorporated into the skeleton, its legs, neck and spine. Perhaps it would be possible to make it move, to trot and leap, paw the ground, shake its head and twitch its slender tail. If she was canny, the blacksmith would only think she was at work on another, more complex, clock.

  When she had done all she could, the night had swum out into the black hours of early morning. The moon had come and gone. The snow had fallen and frozen. Still shivering, Tanaquil had set a fire on her hearth and lit it.

  She left the shutters ajar. Sometimes they creaked and she looked up—but the peeve was not there.

  In the morning she would go and look, along the roofs, in the hill. Hopeless to try now; the cold would be impassable. She could not even find her wool jacket or cloak.

  Finally, in the dull firelight, she put another quilt over the skeleton to hide its
mysterious glow, doused her lamp, and went to bed.

  She lay and looked at the normal glow of the fire on the ceiling.

  Then she was out in the desert, hurrying over the rimy snow towards the fortress, and from above she heard the shouts of the soldiers, and they fired their crossbows at her but missed. Tanaquil half woke then, and heard the soldiers in reality clattering about and calling. But that was not so novel. They were always seeing things that did not exist and shooting at them. She picked up a dim cry: "It's only ghost-light on the snow, you idiot!"

  Then she was asleep, and standing on the hollow hill like a bridge. On the western horizon the moon, which had sunk, was rising again. She watched it, and then she opened her eyes.

  Some more time had passed. The fire was out. The room should have been in darkness, but it was filled with light. The moon had come in at the window.

  And then Tanaquil saw the peeve standing on the foot of her bed. It was almost the scene of the previous night, except that she had left the way open for it. Except that now it held in its mouth a thing too large to have been carried with ease, long, and whorled like a great shell from the ocean, spiralled to a point thinner than a needle. And it shone, this thing, it flamed, turning the whole room, the peeve, Tanaquil, the air itself, to silver.

  Then the peeve dropped its burden gently on the bed, and the vast light diminished, until it resembled only the starlight of the beast of bones. And so Tanaquil saw properly that what the peeve had brought her, from the sand under the hill, was a horn. And never having seen such a horn, she knew it, as would anyone who ever lived in the world.

  "Oh, peeve," said Tanaquil. "By the God. It's a unicorn."

  3

  When Tanaquil opened her eyes five days later, the first thing she saw was not the painting of Jaive. Instinctively, Tanaquil had turned in her sleep, and lay facing her work table. And there above, hanging in space, spangling the sunshine from the window, was the finished skeleton of the unicorn.

  It was eerie and beautiful, less like bones than some fey musical instrument. The replacement discs and tubes of burnished copper did not spoil it; they were only sunny patches of warmth against the crystal, and the hoof was a dot of fire. The skull of the unicorn was like a pale rainbow, and the horn, which by daylight seemed only a giant shell made of pearl, had been attached to the forehead with pins of bronze; a coronet.

  The unicorn stirred faintly in an early morning breeze. The chains that held it from the beam were a bright rain. It was a sort of exquisite mobile.

  In the joints of it were the thin shining levers and the wheels Tanaquil had fastened there at midnight.

  Under the skeleton, on the table, sat the peeve.

  The soldiers had remarked on the peeve, which had followed Tanaquil on each excursion to the blacksmith's forge. They thought the peeve was a pet. They admired its loyalty as it sat staring at the smithing work. Tanaquil knew the peeve was only interested in the parts for the unicorn. As she labored over it in her room, the peeve had watched her from its lair under the bed, sometimes coming out to paddle across her tools and upset them. It rarely spoke. Yesterday the herders had come to the fort, and large cuts of meat were now being prepared for Jaive's dinner. Tanaquil had brought the peeve several samples, which it had dragged under the bed to eat; a nasty, smelly arrangement that Tanaquil tried to overlook.

  "Hallo, peeve," said Tanaquil now, letting it know she could see. The peeve ignored her. It slowly raised one paw, and before she could protest, it tapped the lowest bone of the left hind leg.

  A sweet chiming note came from the leg, and echoed away through the skeleton.

  Tanaquil sat up. The peeve jumped off the table backwards and shot under the bed.

  "You see," said Tanaquil sternly, leaning down to confront the peeve's astonished pointed face, "I told you not to touch."

  She got out of the bed and went to the suspended skeleton. Light as dust, she flicked at the bones of the forelegs, and other chimes winged over the room. She ran her fingers along the cage of ribs, and there was a rill like silver beads falling down a stair of marble.

  She had not been able, last midnight, to bring herself to try if the unicorn would move. She was half afraid it might, and that movement would dislodge some bit of it, which would then come down and break. But also, she was just afraid.

  The chimes of the bones filled her with awe. She stepped away. And going to the bed she sat there and only gazed at the skeleton, while the peeve put its head out and gazed too, saucer-eyed.

  Bird knocked on the door, bowed, and held out a wave of olive-green silk.

  Tanaquil's "best" dresses never went sorcerously missing, for her mother stored them in a closet of her own apartment. Tanaquil accepted the dress, a unity of floor-length, wide, rustling skirt, boned bodice, high neck, and complicated sleeves. It had a sky-blue embroidery of lyres and lilies all over it.

  Bird spied past Tanaquil unavoidably.

  "Ooh, what's that?"

  "What exactly?"

  "That dangly glittery thing."

  "Just something I found somewhere. It's been there ages."

  Bird looked doubtful, but she only said, "Your lady mother says I'm to attend you to the feast."

  Tanaquil frowned. As she had feared, her mother was set on making the dinner excessive and full of fussy rituals. "I'm to wear my gray velvet gown," said Bird.

  "Oh, good," said Tanaquil.

  "The gong will be struck just after sunset. Then we're to go down."

  Bird was obviously looking forward to the dinner. Perhaps everyone was, except Tanaquil, who felt annoyed and almost embarrassed, for Jaive had suggested the dinner to Tanaquil as the cook had suggested she bake a cake.

  When Bird had been persuaded to go, Tanaquil shut her door and tossed the splendid dress onto her bed, where the peeve came to investigate it.

  Tanaquil was dissatisfied. She had found she did not want to go near her work table under the beautiful bones.

  "This evening," she said to the peeve, "before the stupid feast, I'll see if I can't get it to move."

  Then she turned her back on the unicorn skeleton and went to sit in the window. But it seemed to throw a far reflection on the desert, which glittered.

  An hour before sunset, Bird came back to tong Tanaquil's hair into corkscrew curls. Something had happened to the tongs on the way. They wriggled and heaved and eventually got out of Bird's hands and strode on their two legs into a corner. The peeve hissed and spat at them from its nest in Tanaquil's dress.

  "You shouldn't have let your pet get fur on your gown," said Bird.

  They threw water on the fire they had meant to use for the tongs, and hoisted the peeve off the dress—"No, nice," it cried, clawing out lengths of embroidery—Bird dressed Tanaquil and exclaimed over her glory.

  "I can't breath for these bones," said Tanaquil.

  Everything was bones. The tight bodice, the peeve's stinky snacks under her bed, the glimmer of the skeleton from the beam—at which, now, Bird did not even glance.

  The peeve sulked on the pillows.

  "Go and put on your velvet," Tanaquil told Bird. "I'll meet you by the gong at sunset."

  When Bird had gone again, Tanaquil knotted up the skirt of her gown and climbed on the work table. "Now." Taking up one of the fine tools she kept for the insides of clocks, Tanaquil inserted it carefully into a small bronze screw. Next, using the handle of the tool, she hit the wheel in the foreleg of the beast. The wheel spun, became a blur. A hinge shifted, a shaft narrowed as a pin slid backward—

  "So you won't do it," said Tanaquil to the unicorn, boldly. "You're meant to paw the ground—the air, if you like. Why won't you?" She tried the same procedure on the right forelimb. The wheel spun, the joints of bronze moved, but nothing happened. "Have I miscalculated the weight?" Less nervously, now that she was disappointed and puzzled, Tanaquil tried to wake the tapering tail, the brilliant head. There was no response.

  Gradually the immobile unicorn of bone began t
o change to ruby. The sun was setting in the window.

  "If you won't, you won't."

  Tanaquil got off the table. She knew a shameful relief, and at the same moment she was drained, as if she had walked for miles under the midday sun.

  The unicorn swayed like a fire.

  "I'll have to go down."

  "Down," said the peeve. It burrowed under a quilt.

  Tanaquil left the room and closed the door. Her hands were full of pins and needles. Then she heard the gong booming below, early, and gritting her teeth, descended to Jaive's dinner.

  Jaive rose to her feet in an explosion of sequins. "We salute the savory junket!"

  Everyone else clambered up. "The savory junket!"

  They all sat down again.

  And the two old stewards, a pair of many called from retirement in attics and cellars of the fort for such meals, hobbled round the hall with their silver basins. On every enamel plate they dolloped out the junket, which was sallow, and wobbled.

  Despite the three lit fireplaces, racks of torches in demon-shaped sconces, and the rose silk curtains along the walls, Jaive's hall was always draughty. A solitary banquet table stood isolated in the midst of it, facing an enormous round window of emerald and red glass. Outside on this window, new patterns of frost had already formed, ferns and fossil-like things. Beyond it lay the darkening, freezing desert, its rough sand a mere five feet below the glass—but the glass was sorcerous and only another sorcery could breach it. From the carved beams, however, hung ordinary cobwebs. There were holes in the curtains, and in the damask table-cloth. The rats had parties in the hall when Jaive did not.

  The painted doors at the south end of the room groaned open for the fourth time.

  Jaive rose.

  "We salute the soup!"

  Everyone else got up. "The soup!"

  Everyone sat down.

  Jaive sat at the table's center, in a tall ebony chair inlaid with sorcerous symbols of obscure meaning. Her guests had taken their usual positions. Tanaquil was on her mother's right hand; Bird was just behind her, with the other attending maids, Yeefa and Prune. On Jaive's left sat the captain of the soldiers in his dress suit of gilded mail and some battle honors that were possibly real. Down the rest of the table, left and right, were placed the captain's second-in-command and seven elderly retainers of the fortress, including Tanaquil's former nurse. Everyone had on their best, in some instances smelling of mothballs.