Black Unicorn (Dragonflight)

by Tanith Lee

  Also, she tried not to think of the unicorn.

  The unicorn was something so bizarre that it could only happen once. If that. Perhaps it had assisted her in the desert, or perhaps she had only made that up. Maybe the bush had caught alight in the cold cave naturally. Maybe she had only crawled by herself towards the well.

  It seemed to her now that it was possible she and the peeve had not found anything under the rock hill. That nothing had gone wrong at Jaive's feast except that Tanaquil herself had flung open a door and run away.

  One morning she actually said to the peeve, "Do you recall the starry bone you found?"

  "Bone?" said the peeve gladly, "where?"

  And a merchant going by, fanning himself, glared at the peeve and made the sign against evil spirits.

  It was the nineteenth day of Tanaquil's journey with the caravan, and a wonderful sunset inflamed the sky, glowing vermilion and amber, with clouds in the west like furled magenta wings. The general opinion was that they would reach the city the following evening. Everyone was pleased, and the servants had all day given Tanaquil tales of the city that were plainly quite absurd. The city's prince was supposed, for example, to have a palace of white marble fifteen stories high. Tanaquil nodded politely.

  In the afternoon they had passed a great obelisk with a brass arrow at its top pointing west. The prayer on the obelisk read: We give thanks to God, who brings us to Sea City.

  The desert changed. Low rocky cliffs drew up out of the dunes, and then the cliffs had dry brown shrubs on them, and here and there a warped, wild tree. As the light blushed, they came into round hills with stands of green cedar. Flocks were pastured, and little villages lay in every direction, one after another, with their fires and lamps burning up like bits of the red sky.

  The leader came down from his cage and mounted a mule. He rode at the head of the caravan, with Gork walking beside him. "We'll spend the night at Horn Spring," said the leader in a ritualistic, syrupy voice.

  Tanaquil felt something like a twitch of a curtain inside her mind.

  She turned to one of the servants, Foot.

  "Why is it called Horn Spring?"

  "A sacred legend of the city," said Foot.

  "An ignorant villager like me," said Tanaquil, "hasn't heard of it."

  "No," sneered Foot. He decided to be nice to her. "They say a prince from the city came there. It was a very sandy year, and he was parched with thirst. He asked the God for water, and a beast with a horn ran up out of the desert and cleft a rock with this horn, and out burst the water."

  "How convenient," said Tanaquil. The hair had risen on her scalp.

  "Watch it, your funny animal's in the soap again," said Foot.

  The sky was wine-red, fading. The caravan wound up a dusty trail and they were on a bare dark hill. Above, the top of the hill ended in a big rock, like a chimney. Under the rock was a grove of trees and another well with a stone curb, which was not spectacular. The leader got off his mule and, going to the well, thanked God for the caravan's safe arrival.

  The camp was made below the grove, and water drawn from the well. Foot advised Tanaquil to drink some, as it was very health-giving and said to grant wishes. Tanaquil, though, did not go to look at the well; it was dark now, and growing cold, the thin snow whipping out on a buffeting wind that rose soon after the sun set.

  Tanaquil sat near one of the fires and ate her rations, sharing them with the peeve. "What shall we do in Sea City?" she said to it, then hastily, "Don't say anything, here's Gork."

  "Nasty," said the peeve.

  "That animal really does have an odd bark," said Gork. The peeve snarled and went under a cart with a salted biscuit. "What will you do in the city?" Gork asked Tanaquil with unknowing repetition.

  "Oh, this and that."

  Gork studied his pocket watch, tapped his boots and whistled. Next he said quietly, "Are you courting?"

  Tanaquil was amazed. Should she be flattered or laugh? Very seriously she replied, "I'm afraid I am. My brothers betrothed me to someone in the city."

  "Those brothers don't seem to look after you properly," said Gork.

  "But they're my menfolk, so I have to do as they say."

  "Yes, quite right."

  The peeve bit down on the biscuit with a cracking noise, and Gork straightened and whistled up at the snow. Without another word he went off. Presumably, thought Tanaquil, he had seen the value of a lady love who could mend his cart wheels and his watch.

  And then the sound began.

  She took it for some purer note of the night wind, at first. It seemed everywhere around, ebbing and flowing.

  She thought, idly, still accustomed to the supernatural things of Jaive's fort, Perhaps there are demons on the wind.

  "Aaeeh! Look! Look! "

  A pot dropped and smashed. To the eerie sweetness of the wind's tone was added the din of panic. Three servants, who had been descending from the well, had stuck in their tracks, letting fall water jars and wailing, pointing away above the grove of trees.

  The whole camp was suddenly in confusion. Men drew knives and cudgels. The merchants emerged from their awnings with whinnying cries, and one sank to his knees, reminding God he wanted protection. The camels, too, were stamping at their pickets, roaring and snorting, while the mules brayed maddeningly.

  "A fiend! a monster!"

  "Kill it!"

  "Run!"

  Tanaquil stared over the hill, up along the chimney of rock. She got to her feet as if raised by cords.

  Atop the chimney was a blackness on the night blacker than the night. It seemed to have no form, yet there was a flicker over it like foamy fire. And out of it burned two crimson stars beneath a sword of light.

  Slowly it turned, this sword, to east and west, south and north, catching on its spiralled ribs, its pitiless point, the blasting of the wind. And the wind played the sword, the wind made music. The sword of the horn sang, and now the camp, even the vocal camels and raucous mules, fell silent.

  "You exist," said Tanaquil. And before she knew what she did—again—she held her hands out into the air, as if to touch that creature on the rock some fifty feet above her.

  But with a splash of whiteness, of black, the unicorn had turned and bounded off into space. The music ended. And over the wind, Tanaquil heard the voice of the praying merchant.

  "Just look at her, the witch. Can't be trusted. She calls up demons."

  Tanaquil left the sky. All the men had moved up around her. They stood on the hill glaring at her. The knives and sticks made a forest, and for a moment she could see nothing else.

  Then the fat leader pushed through. He observed her distastefully.

  "I took you in, girl. I let you keep that animal, which my good patron Pudit said was bewitched. Don't trouble with her, I said. She means no harm."

  "I don't," said Tanaquil.

  "Then why did you conjure a demon on the rock?"

  Tanaquil recalled her raised arms, and how it must have seemed.

  "I didn't conjure it. And it wasn't a demon—" She almost blurted that she knew a demon when she saw one, and just stopped herself in time. "Don't you know what it was? It was a unicorn—"

  The leader gave a sour laugh. "No such thing."

  She thought: He'll believe in something supernatural and evil, but not in the glamour of a unicorn.

  The merchant Pudit had approached. He said, "There's only one method with a witch. She must be stoned."

  "Sounds reasonable to me," agreed the leader. Then he was yodelling, leaping up and down, and kicking in the air his left leg, which had a brown fur trouser.

  Men rushed to his assistance. The peeve, detaching its teeth with an annoyed growl, sprang instead at the merchant Pudit. It bit him several times, while Pudit's servants, trying to strike the peeve with their bludgeons, thwacked the merchant on the arms and chest.

  Tanaquil was not sure if the peeve had meant to create a diversion so she might escape. If so, it failed, for Foot and on
e of the others had grabbed her by the arms.

  After a few more moments of incredible noise and flurry, the peeve in any case let go and fled. It dashed between legs and flailing sticks and vanished down the hill faster than a falling boulder.

  "Bitten to the bone," announced the leader. "The animal's her familiar."

  Tanaquil noticed there were plenty of stones on the hill, and some of the men had begun to pick them up.

  She watched, stunned.

  Then she saw Gork thrusting through the crowd, coming over and standing before his bitten leader, clicking and clinking and with the goad going clock-clock-clock on his boot.

  "It's no good killing her," said Gork. "That'll be bad luck."

  "Rubbish," said the bitten leader. But the men with the stones had hesitated.

  "Now don't you remember last year?" asked Gork.

  There was a long pause. Whatever had happened last year was obviously being remembered in detail.

  "That was," said the leader, cuddling his leg, "a different thing altogether."

  "Well I, for one," said Gork loudly, "won't travel with a caravan under a witch's dying curse. Nor my men. Eh, boys?"

  There was a cluttering of dropped stones.

  "All right," said the leader sullenly.

  "We'll drive her out," said Gork. "Let her go and talk to demons in the hills." He was rewarded by hearty amalgamated assent. Gork said to Foot and the other man, "I wouldn't touch her if I were you. Who knows what the slut might do next." Then he came over and put his face near hers. Gork winked. He cried: "Be off, you filthy witch." And gave her a weightless shove.

  Tanaquil nodded. She turned and ran down the hill, and the men moved back from her, a few shouting names. A thrown missile burst near her heel, but it was only a clod of earth.

  As she ran she thought of the useful small knife and the tinder-box she had bartered away from Foot, in exchange for the torn silk of her dinner dress. She thought Gork had probably saved her life. And that the unicorn, which had saved her in the desert, had somehow played a trick on her tonight, stirring up from the peaceful dark danger and uncertainty.

  Tanaquil sheltered that night in a cave of the hills, with as much space as she could manage put between her and the caravan. Bushes shielded the cave mouth, and the fire she lit. Sometimes she would stab the fire with a branch and describe aloud the leader, Pudit, Foot and certain others, in vivid terms. To her muttering and firelight the peeve was guided in the early hours of the morning. It had killed a small rodent, and this she apologetically roasted for them. The peeve seemed indifferent to its own loyalty.

  They fell asleep, and were woken by sunrise.

  When she walked out of the cave, Tanaquil saw that the hills slipped gently down westward to a great plain. Lit by the rising sun, a golden crescent glittered on the plain's farthest edge, and in the curve of it the sky had swum in on the land.

  "It's the city," Tanaquil told the peeve. The peeve groomed itself, not sparing a glance. "And beyond, there's the sea."

  She was very impressed. She had a second of wanting to jump up and down and shout, but she controlled it.

  Very likely it would take some days to cross the plain, but Tanaquil was reassured by the landscape as she descended into it. The sand had given way to thin grass, in places to tracts of wild red and purple flowers. Palms and acacias grew, and later there were orchards of palm and fig, olive trees and lemon trees, behind low walls. Villages lay along the plain like stepping stones to the city. Tanaquil entered one boldly, and asked for fruit. They took her for a boy with very long hair, gave her the fruit, and were astonished at the "tame" peeve.

  Tanaquil and the peeve walked all day, and Tanaquil had words with her ill-fitting cast-off boots. At sunset the wind rose eagerly. Men appeared in the orchards to cover the younger trees against the cold. Since there was another village in front of her, Tanaquil went into it and inquired of a woman on the street if she might have shelter for the night. "I can mend things," Tanaquil added, enticingly.

  The woman gave her use of the barn, and presently the village music box was brought her in pieces. Tanaquil sat on the straw, bootless, working on the box, while the peeve chased real and imaginary mice, and the thinnest snow painted in the rims of the village. When she was finished, they gave her a supper of peppery porridge and olives, and took the music box away. She heard it playing from house to house until midnight.

  In the night, night passed down the street.

  Waking, Tanaquil saw under the barn door four black stems with flags of lighted ocean. She heard the shell of the horn scrape along the door. She felt the terror of it, the magic, and the impossibility that it should be there or that she should go to it.

  "What do you want?"

  But the unicorn only moved through the village like the wind, silent, without music.

  Just before dawn, four or five women were staring at pink glass hoof-pocks in the rime by the well.

  "What's this?" they said.

  "Oh, whatever can it be?" agreed Tanaquil.

  The peeve laid seven slain mice, subject to the laws of the cruel, badly made world, at the feet of their hostess.

  So Tanaquil, daughter of Jaive the sorceress, finally reached the city she had been vaguely hearing of for nearly sixteen years.

  She felt so elated that day at having got there, it was almost as if she had invented and built the city herself.

  First of all, coming out of some trees, Tanaquil found one of the stone obelisks. This marked the start of a paved road. It was quite a narrow road, however, and empty; looking to either side over the plain, Tanaquil could see in the distance evidence of much dust and traffic obviously going along wider roadways to the city.

  The narrow road, which would have taken a light cart and mule, ambled through groves of lemon trees and lilacs, and in one place there was a stone basin with water and an iron cup connected to it by a chain. The chain settled for Tanaquil an idea that had been bothering her.

  "Peeve, do you mind if I put you on a leash?"

  The peeve had found a lemon and was trying to eat it. She peeled the lemon for it and, while it investigated the pith, Tanaquil tied 'round its neck the long sash that had secured her headcloth. The leash was rather clumsy, but it would serve for now, and might prevent comment from the city people.

  The peeve spat out the lemon and clawed at its neck.

  "No, no. I'm sorry, but you must put up with it."

  "Off," said the peeve, "off! Off!"

  "No. Please. Just till we get—wherever we're going."

  "Wurr," said the peeve.

  It rolled about and became entangled with the leash. Tanaquil patiently disentangled it before it strangled. "Half an hour?"

  The peeve sulked as they walked along the road. Every so often it would sit down, and Tanaquil would find herself hauling it over the paving on its bottom. The peeve swore. It had learnt some of the soldiers' oaths.

  "Or you can stay outside."

  The city was surrounded by houses that had grown up under the wall. There were gardens with cypresses and banks of flowers, blue and white, yellow and mauve and red. The houses had roofs of dragon-colored tiles. The wall stood over them, and it had, as reported, tiled pictures on it of chariots drawn by racing horses, of lions, trees of fruit, and so on. The narrow road ended at a narrow gate, where two soldiers stood to perfect attention, like dolls.

  Out of the city came an enormous noise. There seemed to be every sound on earth taking place at once. Tanaquil heard wheels rumbling, engines that toiled, buckets that rattled, and water that swilled; she detected cattle lowing and dogs barking, while trumpets crowed, doors slammed, birds flew, men and women quarrelled and laughed and sang. She was taken aback. Well, what did you expect?

  The peeve was gazing at the city's noises in disbelief, attempting to snuff out all its smells, including that of the sea.

  "Lots of bones and meat and biscuits here," said Tanaquil.

  She sauntered toward the gateway
, and all at once the two soldiers came alive.

  They clashed over the entrance to the city their crossed spears.

  "Halt."

  Tanaquil halted. What now?

  "State your business in Sea City."

  "I'm visiting my aunt."

  "You will produce her letter inviting you."

  "I don't have it."

  "Without such a letter or other confirmation, you can't enter the city."

  "My aunt will be furious," said Tanaquil.

  The soldiers did not seem distressed by this news. They said nothing, their faces were blank, and the spears remained locked.

  "What are the grounds for entering?" said Tanaquil.

  "An invitation in writing from a citizen. A summons by the Prince or other dignitary. The bringing of merchandise into the city. The desire to practice a legitimate business there. One word of warning," added the soldier. "Don't say you mend things. We hear that feeble excuse about twice a day."

  "I see. I didn't understand." It seemed to her she had never made a plan so swiftly. "I'm an entertainer. I do magic tricks."

  "This may be allowable. The bazaar supports entertainers. But you'll have to give proof."

  "You mean you want to watch me perform? That's rather awkward. You see, I was robbed in the desert. They took everything——my donkey, my bag of tricks—"

  "How can you carry on your business in the city then?"

  "I do have one thing left," said Tanaquil. "You see this peeve? Just an ordinary desert creature. But by a clever illusion, I can make it appear to talk."

  The soldiers turned their mask-like faces on her.

  Tanaquil abruptly tugged the peeve's lead.

  The peeve kicked. It parted its jaws. "Rrr!" it went.

  Tanaquil coughed. "Sorry. Dust in my throat. Try again— "

  She toed the peeve quite mildly in the side.

  It spat. "Bad," said the peeve. "Won't. Don't like it. Go desert." And spinning in the sash it managed a short dash and pulled Tanaquil over. As she and the peeve tumbled on the hard paving, she heard the soldiers split their masks, giving off guffaws.

  "That's a riot," one choked. "Can you do it again?"