Red Unicorn

by Tanith Lee

  And the unicorn turned and galloped away, weightless as red smoke.

  But Tanakil ran after it. All the stone-set of her face was torn like the cabbages, torn to rags of terror and loss. Her eyes were like blind windows with a raging fire behind them.

  She ran after the unicorn.

  And Tanaquil, almost as blind, as mad, ran after her.

  Leaving the Sulkana Liliam standing like a small white statue, all alone in the darkness.

  XV

  But in the heart of the forest, it was darker still.

  Tanaquil ran. The trees glanced by like black poles against a reddish, low afterglow, or paler against night sky, night leaves.

  Ahead, the princess, a sound of snapping twigs, stumbles, and small animals leaping aside.

  Far, far ahead, the unicorn, unseen, noiseless.

  A phrase droned in Tanaquil's mind, something said once by her mother, "He led her a dance."

  She had been puzzled. What did it mean? It meant this.

  And then Princess Tanakil, with a shriek, tumbled right over something. She fell with a sound like small bells and crushed paper bags.

  There was another clearing. Overhead the dark sky with its choruses of singing silver stars. The Rose not yet high enough to be spotted.

  The princess lay sprawled over a small fallen tree trunk. Some aggressive-looking rabbits, which had been feeding, lurked in the clover.

  Between two of the farthest trees, the red unicorn stood quite still.

  It was now, by night, the red of a dying fire. Brighter than by day, yet more sombre too. The horn, as it turned its head, flicked the starlight in a way Tanaquil remembered.

  She needed to be visible. She was.

  Tanaquil helped Tanakil to her feet.

  "Let go. Thank you. Who are you? Oh, it's—"

  "Oh it's me. Sorry."

  "Sorceress. Is that beast yours?"

  "No. Unicorns don't belong to anyone. But I think, however, both of us have something to do with it."

  "Don't speak in riddles," snarled Tanakil. She fumbled at her waist, "I'll banish you with a spell, you demon."

  "I'm not a demon. And I think you've done enough magic-making for one day. Don't you?"

  Tanakil stared at her. Her face was uncreasing. She looked hurt and miserable. "What do you mean?"

  "Your sister. Lili-Liliam. The poisoned flask."

  "It was a cup of tea."

  "It was poison. You almost admitted it to her. You almost let her drink it."

  "I should have done. I should. She's a bitch."

  "No she isn't. She's not as clever or sensitive as you are. Jharn loves you, after all, not her. Isn't that bad enough for her? Do you really need to kill her too?"

  Tanakil began to cry. They were the bitter heavy sobs of one who has not allowed herself to cry very much. Of one who has tried to stop thinking of what she wants, except maybe for five or ten minutes every day.

  Tanaquil went over to the princess. With the oddest feeling, she put her arms about her.

  "It's all right to cry. Go on. Poor old Tantal."

  She held Tanakil close and Tanakil wept into Tanaquil's almost identical unicorn-red hair.

  Across the clearing, the unicorn, silent, immobile, seemed to watch.

  "The best thing is, you didn't do it. You stopped her drinking it. I mean—damn Liliam. You were the one who would have had to live with killing her."

  "She'll know now. She'll have them behead me."

  "No, she won't. She's too slow to realize what you did. All she saw anyway was the unicorn. And then you chased after it. And she was too grown-up and proud to do that."

  "The unicorn is here to stab me," said Tanakil stubbornly, straightening up and wiping her eyes on her sleeves. "I'm ready."

  "I don't . . . think so. Anyway. It's my unicorn too."

  "You said—"

  "You and I," said Tanaquil. She took a breath and said firmly, "We're the same, you know. You're me, I'm you."

  "You're an apparition, a demon."

  "Hush," said Tanaquil gently.

  Across the glade, the unicorn was approaching now, picking its fragile, starlit way, and as it passed, the grasses seemed to catch soft fire, but the rabbits fed peacefully beneath its hoofs, and it stepped delicately over them.

  "Quill," said Tanakil, using the name Tanaquil had offered before, "what does it want?"

  "I don't know. I expect it'll show us."

  Tanakil said, in a rush, "I should have been Sulkana. I'm one year older than Lili. But my mother ran away from Tandor, our horrible father. And she ran away from me. Lili's mother stayed until she died."

  "Parents can be awful pests," said Tanaquil.

  The unicorn was only a foot or so from them.

  Slowly it turned. Its side was now towards them.

  "What . . . what is it?" whispered Tanakil.

  "I think . . . but it wouldn't—"

  "Here, me," cried a voice, raucous and breathless. Then another similar voice, "Me! Me! Here!"

  The princess and Tanaquil spun round.

  The peeve came thumping into the glade, as if fired from a bow, the dyed-green veepe, a lettuce leaf still caught in its jaws, darting after.

  The outraged rabbits spat and fled.

  "Me!" "Me!"

  "All right, it's you two. Now be quiet," said Tanaquil.

  "Go unicorn," said the peeve. "Rides."

  Tanaquil glanced at the unicorn again. It stood, patient, timeless. It was smaller than the black unicorn had been, yet strong. It would be easy, to swing up on its back.

  But you could not ride a unicorn.

  She thought of the Perfect World. There they had not even ridden their horses.

  And yet, was this the gesture of its friendship? It would take them somewhere. And it would carry them, the way you might carry a tired child.

  Tanaquil went to the unicorn, and put her hand, stilly, on its neck. It felt of warm satin, it smelled of grass, and night. It was solid. It waited.

  "Is it a fact we get up on your back?"

  After all, why else had she thought of it? Why else had the peeve thought of it?

  "Come on, Tantal," she said to Tanakil.

  "What?"

  "This." Tanaquil, used to the problems of horses and camels, propelled herself up with no trouble. "Sit behind me."

  "On a unicorn? That would be unlawful."

  "Trust me."

  "Trust you!"

  "Who else," said Tanaquil, "can you trust?"

  She saw the starlight gleam in the round eyes of peeve and veepe, watching and panting. Then Tanakil had jumbled up untidily behind her, cursing, slipping. The unicorn kept steady as a rock.

  "Are you on?"

  "Yes—ah! Now I am."

  And now what?

  Tanaquil was not really prepared. Tanakil was certainly not prepared.

  The unicorn jumped. It jumped straight off the ground into the air. And hung there. Then it sprang round the glade, its feet galloping over nothing, its head towards the sky.

  Tanakil gave a muffled squall.

  "It's all right. We have to trust it."

  "Trust you, trust it—"

  The unicorn swam on for another swift circuit; it was flying, but without wings.

  Fifteen feet below, peeve and veepe stared up.

  And then something quite idiotic, quite beautiful. From the back of the peeve two pale brown feathery wings sprouted. He too lifted up into a flight. Hardly graceful, but lively, he bowled around the glade, paws pummelling, making gratified spuff-spuffs.

  At this the unicorn rose upward, ten feet, twenty, directly towards the sky above the glade.

  Tanakil uttered her best curse yet.

  "Hold tight. Yes, you are, aren't you," choked Tanaquil as Tanakil almost strangled her with one clutching arm and squeezed her breathless round the middle with the other.

  The peeve came whizzing by, reversed, and capered round them. "Nice! Nice!"

  Perhaps they could
all have flown up this high anyway. Did the peeve even need wings?

  The unicorn hung over the treetops now. The peeve, diverted, rooted in a nest with his snout, and a large bird popped up and pecked him.

  On the ground, the veepe looked with yearning eyes. Tanaquil could hear it whining, poor thing.

  The peeve batted the irritated bird into its nest, and shot back towards the ground. Just above the veepe, the peeve lashed out with his tail.

  With no sensible thought left in her mind at all, Tanaquil saw two black wings sprout in turn from the veepe's dyed body. It too plunged up into the air.

  But the unicorn was cantering, wingless, into the highest black cup of the night.

  She clung to it, and Tanakil clung mercilessly to her, and behind came the two daft flying, and decidedly paddling, forms of the veepe and the peeve, their four eyes brighter than the stars. While the lettuce leaf fluttered in the veepe's jaws like a flag.

  XVI

  They went so high, they caught up with the last of the sunset. It reappeared below them all along the hem of the world.

  But the scarlet sunset had made the shape of a red unicorn, with a star for an eye. And the clustered stars of the Rose made up its horn, the final coil and curl ending in the dark upper sky.

  The unicorn on which they rode veered smartly. It rushed now like a wind, straight for the Rose.

  Tanakil went "Oh-oh." She burrowed into Tanaquil's back.

  Tanaquil held fast to the mane and neck of the magical beast. She had relaxed, for surely, after all, this was a dream. She would be shaken off and fall and wake with a bump, in bed. But where would the bed be? Domba's house? The magnolia tree? Or the guest room in Jaive's fortress?

  The glow of the stars of the Rose was growing brighter and more bright. In a few minutes it seemed as bright as a clear bluish-rosy dawn.

  Transparent bubble clouds went by beneath, like pretty paperweights that were weightless.

  "Tantal—if I'm not dreaming you, or if you're not dreaming me—you must look! It's first class."

  Tanakil stirred.

  "We're so high now, we're flying into the stars."

  "No, that's impossible," said Tanaquil.

  But it was not impossible.

  Tanaquil knew, from her mother's early lessons, that all stars were suns, huge balls of flame and gas, millions of miles from any world. But here, in this curious place, it seemed the stars of the Rose at least were like the stars she had imagined as a little girl.

  And now the unicorn sailed among them.

  Far more than could be counted from below, they hung, trembling slowly, sparkling and spangling, some as great as the palace of Hoam-Harm, some even larger, some the same size as Tanaquil herself. And there were others, small as apples, as cherries, but all revolving, burning bright. Their glassy silveryness was washed with pale sapphire and jade, with specks of flame and soft dazzles of lightning. They were like giant opals, like diamonds. And yet, they were stars, stars as stars should be, with no reason to them, no science, no logical, down-to-earth answer.

  They rang and sang too, faintly. On their own. And when the tail of the unicorn brushed the little ones, they gave off little notes and chimes, and sometimes even a sound like a child's laughter.

  "It's amazing."

  "Yes. It is."

  Behind them, the peeve and the veepe came flapping through, now and then pausing to roll over in the air and strike a star with a paw. Tanaquil was glad to see this seemed to cause no damage.

  Of course, the stars were tough as steel, perhaps indestructible. They were stars, for heaven's sake.

  In the center of the Rose cluster, or perhaps it was not the center, but it seemed to be, there was a plain like a smoky mirror, stretching, horizontally, through the jewelry of lights.

  Nothing was on this plain, which had bevelled edges like a mirror, until the unicorn sank down, and landed there.

  A moment after they touched down, a tinsel gush started from above. A waterfall of stars, or the embers of stars, was falling to the plain.

  It seemed time to dismount. They did so, and stood under this heavenly downpour.

  "Where have we come to, Quill?"

  "I don't know, Tantal. But it looks all right."

  "And why?"

  Tanaquil drew her eyes from all the hypnotizing loveliness and stared hard at the only recognizable things. Peeve and veepe were playing noisily in the star shower. Tanakil stood with her half-green dress. She no longer looked cruel, or wretched. Her face had been washed clean.

  "I think," said Tanaquil, measuring out her words, "we had to come away from the world. Leave the world behind. And then be face to face."

  "We're doubles."

  "We're the same."

  "So then?" said Tanakil.

  The crystalline shower seemed glittering in Tanaquil's mind. Her mind, like the face of her other self, was being rinsed clear. Crystal clear.

  "Listen. It's so simple. Sit down."

  They sat close, legs crossed, leaning towards each other, while the veepe and the peeve rolled over and over in sprays of unearthly gems.

  "Honj—I mean Jharn—loves you," said Tanaquil. "You love him. That's really all you both care about. So blast the rest of it. Let Lili be Sulkana. Let her throw you both out. Tell him to leave her, and you go with him. What does the rest matter?"

  "No, that's too simple."

  "Why shouldn't it be simple?"

  "But she," said Tanakil in a rough little voice, "what about Lili?"

  "Look, if he doesn't love her, he'll feel bad, and he'll probably make her feel bad. He's no use to her. He wants to be with you. She's so honorable, she'll have to agree. And oh, Tantal, don't you see? If he leaves her, then she's free to love someone else. And she does, Tantal, though none of you know it. She loves Fnim."

  "But he's too old!"

  "She wants someone to replace her father. To give her the father she never had. Not awful cold demanding Zorander—I mean Tandor—but a kind, happy, carefree, funny father. Someone who can make her laugh. Make her tell jokes. Can make her into a woman, not a piece of chilly stone. And someone who needs her too, to calm him down. And you, my girl," said Tanaquil fiercely, "need someone to stop you breaking things and blowing things up."

  Tanakil shook her head. Nodded her head.

  A peculiar shiver went over her dress. The green half vanished. The stain was gone. While under the waterfall of stars, the veepe was black and had stardust, not lettuce in its mouth.

  "If it's so easy, shouldn't we go back and do it? If so, how do we go back on our own?"

  "The unicorn," said Tanaquil. She turned and gazed about for it. The unicorn was not there. "Wait. I think I see. I think—Tantal, the unicorn—it's a part of you, of me. It's . . . do you know this expression, the Heart's Desire?"

  "I know the expression," said Tanakil, "but how do we get down from here?"

  Tanaquil got up.

  "You and I, again. Sorceress. And so this, it's like everything else. It's actually embarrassingly simple."

  When Tanaquil, holding firmly to Tanakil's hand, jumped off the edge of the glass plain, Tanakil screeched. But the stars only chimed, and then they were floating serenely down through the showers of the stars, through the jewelry work of the Rose, with the peeve and the veepe paddling after them, obedient for once. Only the piece of lettuce must have been dropped somewhere in the sky. Would it too become enchanted?

  "It's silly," nagged Tanakil. "Everything can't be as straightforward as this—"

  "Perhaps it is. Perhaps everything always is. Even the terrible things. Even the heartbreaking things. Perhaps the answer is there and it's so simple we never see it."

  They flowed down through the clouds, which had a smell of rain and lightning. Their hair streamed cool. They laughed.

  The sky was darkening, then the sky was black and the stars far off.

  Veepe and peeve, like two badly-designed birds, wrestled in thin air, dropped half a mile, were seen belo
w, scurrying and fluttering over the tops of the forest.

  "Go to him at once," said Tanaquil. "To Jharn. And to Lili."

  "There'll be a three-hour-long row."

  "Better than a lifelong absolute foulness."

  Beyond the forest, lights were dimly to be seen.

  "There's Sweetish. And there's Tweetish, and Tablonkish. And there, I think that could even be the town of Kohm Pleetish."

  Tanaquil sighed, and tilting her head, looked back at the Rose. A tiny green brilliant had appeared. No doubt she had just not seen it before. Either that, or the dropped lettuce leaf had turned into a star.

  On the forest floor, while woken birds fussed and bustled in the branches above, Tanaquil and Tanakil shyly, bossily, shook hands.

  The peeve and the veepe washed each other, then had a quick fight for old time's sake.

  "Good luck, Tantal."

  "Good luck, Quill."

  They began to hear calls, and to see the flash of torches through the trees.

  "A search party for me," said Tanakil. "Useless fools—"

  "You don't need to be angry now. Go straight to him."

  "Yes. To him." Tanakil smiled, which suited her.

  As the princess walked away through the aisles of the night wood, sometimes throwing a stick for her veepe, (which still had wings) Tanaquil felt, as if for the first, the rhythm of her own pulses.

  What Tanakil must do, she, Tanaquil, must do also.

  Even so, she watched until, some while after her double had disappeared, there came glad shouts of finding, and a trumpet call.

  "Now for their three-hour row," said Tanaquil. "But we, we go home." The peeve looked at her expectantly. "Am I right?" she asked him. "That's simple, too?"

  "In," said the peeve. "Out."

  "I thought so."

  Tanaquil bent and picked him up. He was as warm as toast, as known as her own self. Honj was still a stranger. To love was not to know. That had still to be learned. It might take all the years of her life. How wonderful.

  "Hold tight." The peeve, still obedient, stuck every single tooth and claw into her clothes and arms. "Ouch!" Here we go. Up and out!"

  It was like surfacing from a deep and swirling river. All things, cold and hot, molten and impassable, running, spilled the other way. They pushed, like two needles, through a thick black cloth, through and through, and shoved their heads, their bodies, minds and hearts and souls, out into a dark, and to a golden light.