Black Unicorn (Dragonflight)

by Tanith Lee

  "Who sent you to fetch me?" said Tanaquil. A demon was at the beck and call of anyone powerful enough to summon it. Disquieting visions of Vush and the artisans hiring a sorcerer went through her mind.

  But Epbal Enrax said, "Lady other Red of Hair. Yonder. "

  There was something standing on the sea.

  Tanaquil had taken it for a figment of the weather, a cloud, a water spout. Now she got up slowly and started to walk toward the violent edges of the water. The peeve rose to follow, decided against it, and began to burrow into the sand.

  The thing on the sea wavered like a flame. It had a flamy red top. The ocean had come further in, and now the thing drifted inland too. It stopped about ten feet from the shore, and from Tanaquil. It hardened, took shape. After half a minute, Jaive the sorceress stood on the water. Her hair blew madly, like a scarlet blizzard in miniature. She was wrapped in a theatrical black mantle sewn with silver and jasper locusts. Her face was fierce. She was silent.

  "Mother," said Tanaquil.

  Jaive spoke. "Yes, that's right, I'm your mother."

  After this unsensible exchange, they braved the storm and stared at each other.

  Finally Tanaquil said, stiffly, "So you decided to search me out after all. I thought you wouldn't bother. I mean, after you left me in the desert and so on."

  Jaive frowned. Her eyes flashed. "Stupid child! If you knew the difficulties I've had."

  "Poor you."

  "The unicorn—if I had realized—the magic, the mystery—I thought it was some toy of yours, made up out of bits of clever crystal, bone, wheels and cogs, your usual paraphernalia."

  "I don't make things, I repair them," said Tanaquil. Jaive flapped her hands dismissively. The sea ruffled and spat at her feet. "And must you stand on the water?"

  "Am I?" Jaive looked about. "This isn't myself. It's a projection of my image. I can't manage anything more. My sorcery is in disarray. Had I known—would I, a practiced mistress of the magical arts, have flung my power at a real unicorn? The damage to my ability was very great. Only now have I begun to recover my skills."

  "I see," said Tanaquil. "You mean you didn't search for me sooner because you couldn't. It wasn't merely uninterest or pique?"

  "How dare you doubt your mother?"

  "It's easy."

  Jaive's face wrinkled up, and a flickering went all over her. Tanaquil was not sure if this was due to faulty magic, rage, or something else.

  "I say nothing," shouted Jaive, "of your coming to this city. I say nothing about the palace in which I located you."

  "Zorander's palace," said Tanaquil. Jaive's image pleated, twirled. "I'm sorry. If you'd trusted me . . . I know, I mean I know—"

  "That man is your father," shouted Jaive. In the pleats and twirls, all of her seemed now to flame. "I renounced him."

  "Yes, mother."

  Jaive stopped shouting, and the pleats and twirls gradually smoothed out.

  "I can overlook your behavior," said Jaive, "because I comprehend that it was the unicorn that brought you here, and the unicorn that needs and demands your service."

  Tanaquil's mixture of feelings spun off and left only one question. "Why? What does it want? Mother, do you really know?"

  Jaive smiled. It was not like any smile Tanaquil had ever seen before on her mother's face. She is beautiful, the awful woman.

  "I thought all along you were his daughter," said Jaive. "Obsessed with things, mechanical gadgets. But you're mine. Tanaquil, you're a sorceress."

  "Here we go," said Tanaquil, impatient. "Of course I'm not."

  "Your sorcery," went on Jaive relentlessly, "lies in your ability to mend. You can mend anything at all. And once mended by you, it never breaks again. Since you were a little child, I've seen you do this, and it never came to me that it wasn't some cold artisan's knack, but a true magic."

  "Mother!"

  Jaive held up her imperious hand. "Think, and tell me honestly. When you repair a thing—a clock, a bow, a doll—what do you do?"

  "I—look at it. And then I pick up the proper tools—and I—"

  "How do you find the fault? How do you know which tool will correct it? Who, Tanaquil, taught you?"

  "No one. I can just do it, mother."

  "When I was ten," said Jaive, "I summoned a small sprite out of a kettle. They said: 'How did you do it, who taught you?' I said, 'No one. I just can.'"

  "Mother—"

  "Enough time's been wasted," said Jaive. "The unicorn came to you because it scented your magic and how it would serve. It came as a bone, a broken skeleton, and you mended it, and made it go. It was my own thoughtless blow that fully revived it—a miraculous accident. Or did the unicorn also use me? I'd rejoice to think so. Nothing can destroy a unicorn, Tanaquil, and only despair can kill it. Once it did despair—yet even then its bones remained, and the life in them. Now it waits. For your help."

  "My help. What can I do?"

  Jaive smiled again. Warmer than her fiery hair, her smile.

  "Do you think unicorns can ever really have lived on this earth? No, their country is the perfect world. The world for which this one was a model that failed. For some reason the unicorn strayed, or was enticed, out of a breach in the wall of its world. And then the gate was closed behind it. It couldn't return. It lived here and it pined. It died the only death it could, sleeping in the desert. Until you found it."

  "Actually, a peeve found it."

  "The peeve has given itself to you, as your familiar."

  Exasperated, believing, Tanaquil said again, "Yes, mother."

  "Doubtless," said Jaive, "the one who worked the crime against the unicorn, bringing it from its perfect home, shutting the door on it, was the first ruler of the city. To correct the balance, his descendant must set it free. And you, Tanaquil, are the Prince's daughter." Jaive bridled. Anger and pain went over her face, and she crushed them away while Tanaquil watched. Jaive said, "Accomplish your task."

  "I think you mean that the archway in the rock is the gate to the other world—that it's broken, so nothing can go back through it. But I can repair the gate. Yes?"

  "Yes, Tanaquil."

  "But, mother, there's just air and rock—it isn't bronze and iron. There aren't any pins or cogs or springs or hinges—"

  "There are. Only a sorceress of your particular powers could find them."

  "Oh, Mother—"

  "Don't dare contradict me. I was terrified of the unicorn. I. But you have never been. And now, look and see." Jaive pointed along the beach. Another new expression was on her face. No longer terror, certainly. It was awe, it was youth and laughing delight. "Look and see and don't make it wait any longer!"

  The unicorn was on the beach below the rock. Its blackness shamed the shadows, its horn brought back the light. The rain had ended and the sea was growing still.

  Torn ribbons . . .

  Did you feel that? . . . It was strange . . . Just for a moment—something . . .

  This time Tanaquil did not shriek, or run. She was alone. The murky milk of the foam swilled through beneath the arch, and she walked up to her ankles in water. The storm was over, but the day was dying quickly in thick cloud. In an hour it would be night.

  She had looked back once, and the flame of Jaive was still there on the darkling sea. It raised its arm and waved to her, as once or twice when she was a child the form of Jaive had waved to her from the high windows of the fortress. But the projected image was faltering, and like the daylight, going out. Epbal Enrax had already vanished. The peeve had hidden in the sand. Tanaquil did not know what she felt or thought of what had happened. Lizra and Zorander and Gasb also had faded. It was the Gate that counted. The unicorn.

  The unicorn had drawn away as she approached. Not shy, but precautionary, as if testing her again. She remembered how it had chased the artisans, the moment when it reared upwards on the platform. The unicorn could kill her far more efficiently than Gasb. But it had poised, away up the line of the cliffs, as she entered in und
er the arch.

  Tanaquil moved forward one slow step at a time. The sense of the abyss below the sand was strong. She picked her path, searching after the indescribable sensation that had assailed her, like falling asleep for three heartbeats or five . . . For that had been when she had passed across the gate, a gate that led now to nowhere because it was broken.

  Going so alertly, so slowly, she touched the rim of its weirdness and jumped back at once. There. Unmistakable.

  But—what now?

  There was nothing to see, save the dim rocks going up from the water, and, the other side of the arch, sand and gathering darkness.

  Torn ribbons. She had felt them fluttering round her as she and Lizra ran, going through, coming back.

  With enormous care, as if not to snap a spider's web, Tanaquil pushed her arms forward into empty air.

  And something brushed her, like a ghost.

  She did not like it. She pulled back her arms.

  She thought: Jaive is still a sorceress before she's my mother. She put the unicorn first. She thought: I can help a unicorn.

  Tanaquil slid her arms back into the invisible something that stretched between the rocks. The brushing came, and she reached in turn and took hold of it.

  Her fingers tingled, but not uncomfortably. The elements inside the air were not like anything she had ever touched or handled.

  That doesn't matter. She tried to think what happened when she looked into the workings of a lock, a music box, the caravan's cartwheel, the dismembered snake in the bazaar. Then she gave it up. Still holding on to the first unnamable strangeness, she groped after another along the net of the air. She closed her eyes, and behind her lids she saw a shape like a silver rod, and she swung it deftly over and hung it from a golden ring.

  Her hands moved with trance-like symmetry. Objects, or illusions, floated toward her, and she plucked them and gave them to each other .

  She did not need any implements—only her hands. Perhaps her thoughts.

  Not like a clock or engine. Here everything drifted, like leaves on a pool.

  She seemed to see their shapes, yet did not believe she saw what actually was there—and yet what was there was certainly as bizarre as her pictures of rods and slender pins, rings and discs and coils and curves, like letters of an unknown alphabet.

  Probably I'm doing it wrong.

  She opened her eyes and saw no change in anything, except the darkness came hurriedly now.

  The unicorn glowed black against the rock a hundred feet away. The fans of the sea were pale with a choked moonrise.

  She shut her eyes and saw again the drifting gold and silver chaos of the Gate like a half-made necklace.

  Suddenly she knew what she did. It was not wrong. It was unlike all things, yet it was right. She seized a meandering star and pressed it home—

  She had half wondered if she would know, dealing in such strangeness, when the work was finished. Complete, would the Gate seem mended—or would it only have formed some other fantastic pattern, which might be played with and rearranged for ever.

  It was like waking from sleep, gently and totally, without disorientation.

  She stepped away and lowered her arms, eyes still closed.

  The Gate was whole. It was like a galaxy—like jewelry—like—like nothing on earth. But its entirety was obvious. It was a smashed window where every pane of glass was back in place. There was no doubt.

  Then Tanaquil opened her eyes, and after all, she saw the Gate. Saw it as now it appeared, visibly, in her world.

  You could no longer look through the arch. A dark, glowing membrane filled it, that might have been water standing on end, and in the stuff of it were spangles, electrically coming and going.

  Tanaquil was not afraid of it, but she was prudent. She moved back a few more steps. And frowned.

  What was it? Something, even now—not incomplete, yet missing.

  She turned round and walked out of the arch.

  The sea had drawn off again, as the tide of night came in. As she moved out on the sand beyond the rock she heard the huge midnight bell from the palace in the city borne on silence, thin as a thread.

  She remembered Lizra, Zorander. She remembered Jaive. But in front of her was the unicorn. It had walked down almost to the arch. It was all darkness. The horn did not blaze; even the pale cloudy moon was brighter.

  "I've done what I can," said Tanaquil. "Only there's some other thing—I don't know what."

  The unicorn paced by her, to the entrance. It gazed in at the sequined shadow. She saw its eyes blink, once, garnet red. Then it lowered its head to the ground, opened its mouth—she caught the glint of the strong silver teeth she recollected from its skull. But two other items glimmered on the wet sand.

  Tanaquil went across, keeping her respectful distance from the beast, although it had once dragged her by the hair, to see what had been dropped.

  "Did you kill him for these?"

  The unicorn lifted its head again. It gave to her one oblique sideways look. She had never confronted such a face. Not human, not animal, not demonic. Unique.

  Then it dipped the horn and pointed it down, at the base of the cliff. The horn hovered, and swung up. It pointed now toward the clifftop twenty feet above Tanaquil's head. After a second, the unicorn sprang off up the sand. It returned to its place of waiting. It waited there.

  Tanaquil bent down and took up the two cream-white whorled fossils the unicorn had dropped from its mouth: the Festival cloak pins of the Prince. Which it must have ripped from the sharkskin. And long ago, had they been ripped from this cliffside? These then, the last components of the Gate.

  Tanaquil knelt where the horn of the unicorn had first pointed. Old, wet, porous, no longer the proper shape, a wound showed in the cliff that might once have held a circling whorled shell.

  "What do I have?" Tanaquil searched herself, Lizra's silk dress lent for the procession. It had no pockets or pouches for a knife, its pendant topazes unsuitable, its goldwork too soft. Finally she rent the bodice and forced out one of the corset bones—as she had hoped, it was made of bronze. With this she began to scrape at the rotted rock, using now and then a handful of the rougher sand for a file.

  "One day I shall tell someone about this, and they won't believe me. "

  She had managed to get the fossil back again into its setting in the rock base. The fit was not marvelously secure, but it was the best she could do. She had studied the Gate. The liquid shadow had not altered. Spangles came and went.

  Tanaquil sighed. She stared up the stony limb of the cliff, toward its arched top like a bridge. It had been plain, the gesture of the unicorn. If one fossil was to be set here, the other had its origin aloft.

  So, in her awkward dress and useless palace shoes, Tanaquil started to climb the rock.

  She was glad the wind and storm had finished, for the rock was slippery and difficult, much harder to ascend than the hills beyond her mother's fort.

  As she climbed, she thought of the unicorn dying there beneath the arch in the desert that so exactly resembled the arch of the Gate. Perhaps the likeness had soothed it, or made worse its pain, trapped in the alien world. Maybe it had scented, with its supernatural nostrils, the old sea that once had covered the desert. Or maybe, wilder yet more reasonable than anything else, everything had been preordained—that the unicorn would lie down for death under the hill, and she come to be born half a mile from its grave, a descendant of the city princes, its savior.

  "I hope I am. After all this, I'd better be, for heaven's sake."

  Her skirt in shreds, her feet cut and hands grazed, she reached the summit of the cliff.

  She thought of the shell she had seen in the rock, in the desert, held firm in the stone. Would the situation of this fossil be the same?

  No. It would lie to the left of the arch, near the opening, diagonally across from the fossil below. How do I know? Don't bother.

  Tanaquil crawled to see. She discovered beds of seaweed root
ed obstreperously in the rock. With cries of outrage she pulled them up. And found the old wound of the fossil, obvious, exact, incredibly needing nothing.

  She pressed the shell into it. It fitted immediately.

  She was not prepared—

  For the cliff shook. It shivered. And out of it, from the arch below, there came a wave of furling, curling light, and a sound like one note of a song, a song of stone and water, sand and night, and conceivably the stars.

  Tanaquil clung onto the cliff. She expected it to collapse, to be thrown off, but the shivering calmed and ceased, the light below melted to a faint clear shine. She looked then away at the unicorn. She supposed it would dart suddenly towards the cliff and under and in, and away. But the unicorn did not move.

  "What is it? Go on!" Tanaquil called. "Before anything else happens—anyone comes—or isn't it right?"

  Yes, yes. It was right. The Gate was there, was there. And yet the unicorn lingered, still as a creature of the stone.

  Tanaquil hoisted herself over the bridge, and began to let herself down the cliff again. She was urgent now, and not careful enough. She lost her grip once, twice, and eventually fell thirteen feet into a featherbed of sand.

  The unicorn was digging her out. She swam through the smother and emerged, spitting like a cat. It was not the unicorn.

  "Pnff," said the peeve. "Bad."

  "Yes, thank you. Very bad." She pulled herself upright and scattered sand grains from hair and ears. The peeve ticklingly licked her cuts, so she lugged it away. "Why is it standing there? The Gate is—" And she saw the Gate as now it was. Open. Waiting. In the spangled dark, an oval of light. It was the light of the sun of another dimension. Warm and pure, both brighter and softer than any light she had seen in the world. In her world. And through the light it was possible to glimpse—no, it was impossible. Only a kind of dream was there, like a mirage, color and beauty, radiance and vague sweet sound.