Rampant

by Diana Peterfreund

  Tears fell freely down Mrs. Bo’s face, and she shook her head. He moved on to Mika. “Tell me, light of my life. I shall ruin him. Tell me.”

  “I swear, Ba ba, I swear…” Mika began.

  “Don’t you see, Ba ba?” Grace said. “She’s not hurt. She’s just not yours.” The words echoed around the stone enclosure, and the girl once more circled until she faced her father. “I’m your daughter, Ba ba. I am.”

  Mr. Bo just looked at his wife and blinked.

  “Phil,” Neil warned, and my cousin sprang into action. She herded the rest of the hunters out of the rotunda, keeping tight hold of Bonegrinder’s bandana collar.

  Dorcas shook her head as we were hustled away. “I don’t get it. What was wrong with that girl?”

  “Have you ever seen that before?” Ursula asked Cory. We had retreated to Rosamund and Zelda’s room, a spot that had quickly become the social center of the dormitory floor. Zelda lay sprawled on her bed, flipping through a magazine thick with glossy photos of bony models. Rosamund was painting her nails. Phil was brushing Bonegrinder, and Cory was looking green around the gills.

  “Not that particular issue, no,” Cory said. “I’ve seen a few who failed the trial by zhi, which was awkward in the extreme. But in most cases, it’s a self-selecting process. If the girl understands the danger Bonegrinder poses, she will admit if she’s ineligible, no matter what the consequences might be at home. We’ve even fudged the facts for the parents if the girl comes to us privately.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Phil said, “is why you don’t just give every girl being tested the ring Neil wears. That way, if she doesn’t pass on her own merit, at least she isn’t hurt.”

  “Then what would Uncle Neil do for protection?” Cory asked.

  “What does Neil need to be there for?” Phil said. “Make a hunter administer the trials.”

  “But now that we’re all here,” Cory said, “we hunters will be preoccupied with training.”

  Phil shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems barbaric, the way we do it now. In the old days, I bet they used to let the girls who failed the test be killed by the zhi.”

  I shuddered.

  “They used to do all kinds of horrific things in the past,” said Melissende. “One of my ancestors was a donna of the Cloisters, and every year she tested the girls by piercing their chests with the tip of an alicorn. If they healed, they could stay.”

  Gross.

  “And if they didn’t, they were dead anyway,” Cory said. “Immunity to the poison is contingent on virginity.”

  “There are many bad ways to die,” said Rosamund. “A vestal virgin who was guilty of breaking her vows was buried alive.”

  Yeah, but suffocation was supposed to be like going to sleep. Alicorn poisoning was gruesome. Then again, at least it was quick.

  Dorcas looked up from where she was biting her nails. “Were the vestal virgins unicorn hunters, too?”

  “Wirklich?” Rosamund exclaimed. “Then they would have something more to do than tend a hearth all day. I always think that job is too easy.”

  “There’s some evidence for it,” Cory said. “Especially since the cult of the goddess Diana was based outside Rome—in Aricia—in ancient times.”

  Phil leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Who were the vestal virgins again?”

  Cory looked over, smirked, and broke into lecture mode. “Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth. The vestal virgins were her priestesses. Their job was to make sure that the sacred fire in her temple in the Roman Forum never went out. According to legend, as long as it was lit, Rome would not fall.”

  “Got it. Thanks,” Phil said brightly. “So what—”

  But Cory wasn’t finished. “They also were in charge of various and sundry items that were sacred to the Roman people. They performed certain rites, presided over the court system, and had rights and privileges that no other Roman woman possessed.”

  “Interesting,” Phil said, in a tone that meant enough.

  “Like what?” Ursula asked.

  “They could own property, for one.” Cory began counting off on her fingers.

  “So not just chattel,” Phil whispered.

  “And they could be carried around the streets on a litter. And if they met a condemned prisoner on his way to execution, he was pardoned.”

  Zelda flipped a page in her magazine. “What does any of that have to do with unicorn hunting? So far, they’re just other virgins. Like Catholic nuns. Isn’t that what the Order of the Lioness pretended to be?”

  “Right, but all the vestal virgins’ responsibilities were associated with purification,” Cory said. “They performed ceremonies that supposedly kept the granaries free from poison, and for the festival of Lupercal, they made these special cakes that supposedly induced fertility and health in anyone who ate them.”

  “The Remedy,” I said softly. “They were the hunters in charge of the Remedy.”

  Cory nodded. “Exactly. The priestesses of Diana in the temple in the Arician countryside south of Rome were the hunters. But the priestesses of Vesta, here in the city’s center…”

  “Were the healers,” I finished. So ancient Rome divided up the hunter responsibilities between those who killed the unicorns and those who healed the people. I liked that idea. It must not have been combined until the medieval period, when priestesses of pagan gods gave way to Catholic nuns.

  Dorcas piped up again. “My father always said our gifts are a heritage from Alexander the Great.”

  “The lineage of Alexander the Great determines who gets hunter powers,” Phil said, clearly happy she knew something about it. “If you’re his descendant and a female and a virgin…”

  “Very stupid,” Rosamund said. “He was not a woman or a virgin!”

  “Had to be a virgin at some point,” Melissende grumbled. Phil laughed.

  “But do you know why that is?” Cory asked Phil. “Do you even know why we’re here in the first place?”

  “I’m sure you do,” Phil said, and seemed very interested in a knot of hair under Bonegrinder’s chin. She tugged, and the animal nipped at her fingers with razor-sharp little teeth.

  Cory did indeed know. “In 356 B.C.,” she began, as if narrating the prologue from an epic blockbuster, “on a hot summer night, a fire broke out in the Temple of Diana at Ephesus—in modern-day Turkey—one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.”

  Zelda stopped flipping pages. Rosamund paused, her polish brush hovering over her thumbnail.

  “They say it was set by a man named Herostratus, who wanted to be remembered for some action of his.”

  “Arson?” Phil twirled her finger in the air. “Whoop-de-do.”

  I shrugged. Clearly, it worked. Now I knew his name.

  “The temple was the home of many priestesses of Diana. In one of her incarnations, she was the Mistress of the Animals and held sway over all the creatures of the forest, the mountains, and the desert. Like her, many of her priestesses were virgin hunters charged with tracking and culling the beasts of the land.” Cory paused. “The most fearsome of which was the unicorn.”

  Bonegrinder started licking her own belly.

  “On the night of the fire, these priestesses were trapped within the temple and burned alive.”

  A chill passed through my body.

  “The goddess was not present to save her priestesses, because, in her incarnation as the goddess of childbirth, she was in Macedonia, watching over the wife of King Philip as she gave birth to his son, Alexander. So the story goes that in memory of the priestesses she lost, the goddess Diana bestowed upon Alexander the Great and his female descendants the powers of the virgin huntress.” Cory smiled beatifically, and everyone was silent.

  I snorted. “Are you serious? That’s the explanation?”

  Cory looked offended. “Of course.”

  “That’s idiotic,” I said. “First of all, we don’t have any special hunting powers for bears or boar or mallard
ducks. Just unicorns. Diana must have been a little stingy, huh?”

  “It was unicorns because they are the most deadly of all the animals!” Cory argued.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s another thing. Why does Alexander get to be the only guy with special unicorn powers, and after that it’s just the female descendants?”

  “Because it was Alexander’s birth that prevented her from stopping the fire.”

  “So all of a sudden the goddess Diana, who isn’t exactly man friendly, decides to sacrifice all of her priestesses, her entire virgin huntress entourage, for the sake of one baby boy who is more interested in conquering cities and doing stuff that virgins certainly aren’t doing—otherwise we descendants wouldn’t be here in the first place—than doing the whole virgin hunting thing?”

  Rosamund looked thoughtful. “Even more, Alexander the Great didn’t hunt unicorns. He tamed them. His warhorse Bucephalus, the one he tamed as a child, he was a karkadann, yes?”

  Melissende nodded. “In my family, they say that Alexander’s military power was due to Bucephalus. That he planned his strategy with the unicorn, carried on conversations with it. That’s why he couldn’t conquer anymore after Bucephalus was gone.”

  “A talking unicorn?” Cory said skeptically. “I think that’s a tad unrealistic.”

  I let out a bark of laughter. That was the unrealistic part? “This whole story is nothing more than a myth! Who were the hunters before the birth of Alexander? Just those priestesses? Are you saying no one had any defense against unicorns outside this one Turkish temple—no one in the Far East or in Western Europe—because they didn’t worship the goddess Diana?”

  Cory crossed her arms. “Okay, Astrid. What’s your oh-so-rational explanation?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I think the whole thing is nonsense, frankly.”

  “How can you say that after everything you’ve seen?” Cory asked. “After what we all just witnessed with the Bos? One a descendant of Alexander, one not. And look what happened.”

  “Just because I don’t know doesn’t mean there isn’t a good explanation,” I said.

  “You work on that,” Cory said, “and I’ll use the explanation we’ve got.”

  Phil looked back and forth between us. “Come on, girls. Don’t tell me we’re going to have to separate you two. Sock one of you in the Temple of Vesta and the other in…Where was the Roman Diana place again?”

  “The Temple of Diana in Aricia,” Cory said. “But it doesn’t work anyway, because I’m a Leandrus, and she’s a Llewelyn, and the Llewelyns are supposed to be the best hunters—”

  I groaned. “Oh for the love of—”

  Bonegrinder jerked almost out of Phil’s grasp. In the hall, we heard voices, and I stopped talking.

  “You aren’t leaving already?” It was Grace Bo.

  “I’m afraid we must,” said her father. “It’s a long trip home.”

  “But, Ba ba—”

  “Do not shame our family.” Footsteps in the hall. A door closed.

  Bonegrinder pulled to her feet and Phil led her out of the room. She crossed the hall to the door marked MELISSEND AND GRACE and knelt on the floor.

  Cory glared at me. “Explain that.”

  Now that we had gathered a good group of hunters, Neil wisely decided it would be best if we were actually trained to, you know, hunt. He and Marten brought in an archery and bowhunting expert from the countryside to teach us the basics. His name was Lino, and they found him after a news story on the rise of wild animal attacks profiled him as one of the top game hunters in the country who, despite his prowess, had been unable even to hit one of the strange animals who were depleting livestock in his area.

  The poor guy was despairing of our abilities before we’d finished setting up the targets in the courtyard. Lino watched us struggle to anchor the legs of the target in the ground, shaking his head and casting worried glances back at Neil, who sat with Marten Jaeger on the edge of the wall separating the aisles from the courtyard. At the far end of the courtyard, Phil was fastening Bonegrinder’s chain to a metal ring set in the stone walls. The presence of the three men agitated the beast more than a little. She’d been drooling all morning.

  The overcast sky had been threatening rain for the past hour, and I secretly wished the barometer would drop a bit more. Perhaps a storm would send us all inside. Then again, Cory hadn’t spoken to me since our argument about Alexander the Great, so maybe being trapped in our shared room was a fate worse than archery.

  Last night at dinner—which Grace Bo had not attended—Cory had taken one look at our table, which featured a full-throttle Phil regaling Neil and the other hunters with a story about last semester’s state volleyball competition, and remembered some very important research she’d had to do in Neil’s office. I almost wanted to join her. Post–Mad Goat Incident, I knew exactly what it was like to feel left out.

  Yet I remained where I was at Phil’s side.

  Lino had unpacked half a dozen bows of different sizes and shapes, some featuring gears and levers and struts that made the contraptions look more like camouflage-pattern torture devices than the graceful—if gruesome—ancient bows on the wall downstairs.

  “Who is the first?” Lino asked. “We must test your draw.” He pointed at Dorcas and held out a bow that looked like a picture frame made of carbon alloy with metal strings. She took the weapon gingerly in her hand and began to ape his positions and movements.

  But she couldn’t draw the string back at all. He fiddled and adjusted, encouraging her all the way, until she managed to pull it about halfway back. After that, it seemed to be a bit easier, but she could hardly hold it for more than a second before setting the whole thing down and shaking out her arms.

  “Ten kilos only,” Lino said sadly.

  Jaeger and Neil exchanged looks.

  As Lino repeated the process with the next hunter, I joined Cory and a few of the other girls by the table of weaponry. Along with a variety of bows, he’d laid out hunting knives of all shapes and sizes, as well as arrowheads barbed with movable bits of metal and wood and fiberglass arrows, fletched with different kinds of feathers or even tiny, paper-thin flecks of plastic. At one end of the table, nestled within protective foam cases as if made of fine china, lay several guns.

  “What I don’t understand,” Melissende was saying, flipping an unlit cigarette around and around in her fingers, “is why we’re wasting time with bows and arrows. This isn’t ancient Rome. Can’t we just shoot unicorns with sniper rifles?”

  “No,” Cory said. “They can’t be killed by bullets.”

  Oh, here she went again. I’d personally gouged out a unicorn’s eye with my thumb. They weren’t made of titanium.

  “Why not?” Melissende asked. She lit the cigarette, and Lino stiffened, marched over, whipped it out of her mouth, and stamped it out in the grass.

  “You will stop that. The animal can smell it. And all of you, no more perfume, okay?”

  We nodded, our eyes on the giant bow in his hands.

  “We are very far from even using arrows, today,” Lino said. “You all must do many exercises to improve your arms.” He marched Ilesha off to test her draw.

  The other hunters started playing with the various articles of camouflage and scent masks the instructor had brought along. Not that they’d be much use, considering how unicorns were drawn to us, no matter what we wore.

  Cory began playing with one of the guns, picking it up and screwing things on and off. “You really want to know why not?” she asked Melissende, who shrugged and moved on.

  “I’m more interested in why we can’t use crossbows. They’re cooler than either guns or longbows.”

  “It’s all the same reason,” Cory went on, but Melissende had lost all interest. “It’s because the bolt’s too short.” Melissende took out another cigarette and turned away. “I’ll show you!” Cory said in a rush.

  “What do you know about guns?” I asked Cory, terrified tha
t any second the thing would explode.

  “A bit,” she said. “More rifles than handguns, though. My grandfather used to hunt quail and pheasant and other fowl on our estate. He took me out to shoot skeet with him when I was young.”

  “So you have some hunting experience, then.”

  She shrugged and collapsed the base of the handgun. It made a strange, echoing click.

  “Though birds aren’t exactly unicorns,” I added, as she pulled a lever on the barrel.

  She looked at me, gun pointed down at the ground. “I’ve killed more unicorns than you.” Then she lifted the gun and aimed it at Bonegrinder. I heard a pop, and the zhi staggered against the column.

  Phil screamed.

  Bonegrinder dropped to one knee, wheezing, as blood poured from her body in twin streams.

  10

  WHEREIN ASTRID SHOOTS AND SCORES

  PHIL RUSHED ACROSS THe courtyard toward the unicorn.

  Lino had Cory’s gun in one hand, and Cory’s arms pinned behind her back with the other. He was shouting at her in Italian.

  “Astrid!” Phil called to me. “Help me! She’s bleeding!”

  I ran over to my cousin and the animal. Blood gushed from opposite sides of Bonegrinder’s torso. Phil placed her hands over the wounds, and blood spurted from between her fingers, dark and so hot it practically burned.

  “Help me, oh, God, help me,” she begged. Bonegrinder calmly lifted her head and licked Phil’s face. Blood began to pool around the zhi’s white fur. So much blood. I pictured collapsed lungs, organs shredded within her body. The little unicorn didn’t have a chance.

  From a distance, I heard Neil yelling at Cory.

  “A towel!” I cried. “Someone get us a towel!”

  A shadow fell across us. “She will be fine.” I looked up. Marten Jaeger stood over us, making sure his shiny leather shoes were well away from the creeping pool of blood. “Take your hands away—you will see.”

  “Don’t,” I said to Phil. “Keep the pressure on.”

  But Phil lifted her soaked, red hands and peered down at one wound through blood-matted fur. “It’s closed up.”