Unicorn Tracks

by Julia Ember

  “Unicornalis Kardunn,” Kara explained. She picked up a sketch of two animals. The drawing lacked the practiced refinery I’d seen in many of the ladies’ sketchbooks, but I could make out the equine form of a unicorn and a smaller, two-horned beast that I couldn’t distinguish. “That’s their official name. We have this theory that the abada might also be a subspecies of unicorn, so we’ve classified them as a family.”

  My brain skipped over most of what she said, focusing in on a single word: unicorns. I almost sighed out loud. Of course Tumelo would assign me to this group, knowing that the unicorns were one of the hardest animals to track in Nazwimbe. What a bastard. The creatures lived a solitary existence, deep in the wooded brush, with prints indistinguishable from those of a common horse. They made no noise, moving with a feline grace, their whinnies a whisper on the air.

  “How many days are you here with us in Nazwimbe?” I asked, moving Tumelo’s box of cigars from his chair so I could sit in it. “Unicorns are difficult to track. We may have to go out several days just to see one.”

  “Mr. Nzeogwu assured us this area hosted one of the largest populations,” Kara said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye with obvious suspicion.

  “We’re here for three weeks. Plenty of time! We understand they are elusive, part of their mystique that makes them so intriguing to us,” Mr. Harving cut in quickly, taking a long drink from his glass of cider.

  Great. Tumelo had all but guaranteed them I would find unicorns for them to study, even though he knew how difficult they were to find. He had been too happy to offer me four days off. I should have suspected something. Curses in two languages flashed through my mind. I’d known him for years. I should have realized that his generosity wouldn’t come cheap.

  “When can we be ready to go out?” Kara asked, wringing her pale hands. She began to repack the maps into long wooden tubes.

  “I’ll go prepare the horses,” I said, taking a deep breath. I was so tired that heaving myself out of the chair seemed like an adventure in itself.

  As Kara packed up the documents, one of the long carrier boxes knocked into the tray, spilling cold cider into my lap. I leapt to my feet with a yelp, the liquid soaking my trousers to the skin.

  “I’m so sorry!” Kara was at my side in seconds, trying to mop up the mess with a white sweat towel, but only succeeding in pushing the stain deeper into the fabric. Her cheeks went pink with embarrassment, and she bit her lip.

  I sighed; those were my last clean pair.

  I moved away from her, trying not to grimace at the feeling of the wet fabric against my thighs. Schooling my face into a reluctant smile, I said, “It’s fine. I’ll change. Meet me at the stable block.”

  IN TWO hours of scouring the red earth for tracks, I’d managed to locate a lone, undersized bull elephant. I searched the riverbanks for hogfish and crocodiles, the tree lines for leopards and mngwas and prodded the bushes as we rode along with the end of my rifle, hoping to draw out the malaxas and jackals. For once, even the phoenixes stayed hidden. As we turned back to take the path home, I felt sticky with defeat, sweat, and tree sap.

  The Harvings praised the beauty and diversity of the flowers, the tremendousness of our vast, open spaces. Both were good riders, and rather than ignore me and chat to each other, they actively scanned the horizon with their binoculars. Their cheerfulness annoyed me. I almost wished they had spent the afternoon whining or trying to throw things at the elephant while it cooled itself in the mud, grasping leaves from above with its dexterous trunk. Then I could have resented them, instead of my own failure.

  We rounded a corner in the path, passing alongside the riverbank. The water was high from the spring rains, brown with silt. A twitch in the bushes across the water drew my attention, and I squinted toward it.

  “Look, look!” Kara said, standing in her stirrups and pointing. “A crocodile, there’s a crocodile on the bank!”

  I followed the line of her finger to a moss-covered log, bobbing in the current along the shore. I snorted. “That’s a log, Miss Harving.”

  Kara flushed, twisting the dials on her binoculars. “No… it’s moving….”

  I reached over and plucked the instrument from her grasp, adjusting it myself. When I passed the binoculars back to her, and she peered through the focused lens, her blush deepened. If it was possible, the redness of her cheeks made her eyes even brighter.

  “I just got these,” she muttered.

  Suddenly, Mr. Harving’s horse let out a squeal and bolted. Tail held high, the horse put its head down and ran, long strides eating up the ground. My mare reared on her hind legs and fought to free her head from my iron grip. Even Kara’s mount, a swaybacked, elderly gelding, pawed at the ground and grunted nervously.

  As soon as Elikia’s feet were on the path again, I saw what had set them off. An enormous griffin paced toward us, beak snapping open and shut. The animal’s yellow, catlike eyes had narrowed into slits. Sunlight glinted off her silver feathers, making her appear covered by chain mail. Her tail twitched and her hind legs bunched beneath her body as she stalked us.

  I looked to Kara, expecting her to be shaking with terror or crying. In my time as a guide, I’d seen my share of sobbing tourists. Instead, her rifle was cocked, and she stared at the creature down the barrel.

  “Hold, don’t shoot it. Not yet,” I said, looking the griffin in the eye. One of the first things I’d been taught by Tumelo when I started guiding tours was that prey run. Alpha predators always stood their ground. To a griffin or a lion, humans who ran were no different than the impala and buffalo they hunted. Standing to fight could earn the hunters’ respect.

  The griffin made a warbling sound deep in her throat, like a disgruntled farm goose. She looked away from us, gazing into the brush behind her. The bushes rattled, and a flurry of tiny griffin babies swamped their mother’s legs, winding in and out of her feathers and playing with the tuft at the end of her catlike tail.

  Kara chuckled and put her gun up. We started laughing, and I felt the tension in my body gradually flood out. The griffin fluffed her gray feathers and lay down, the babies burrowing into her and tucking themselves under her protective belly. Tiny beaks and feathered heads popped out from under her bosom, peering up at us. Two of the bolder infants wobbled toward us, imitating their mother by clacking their beaks. The mother stretched out her paw and tucked the wanderers back underneath her.

  “Aww, look at them! They’re kind of cute,” Kara said, patting her horse’s neck. “In a monstrous kind of way.”

  “Where did you learn to use a gun?” I asked. When she’d requested a gun at the camp, I’d been shocked. And kind of suspected she’d asked just for show. Instead, her unwavering grip had demonstrated experience. The barrel had made a perfect line to the space between the griffin’s eyes.

  She shrugged and brushed her sweaty hair back out of her face. “My father thought I should practice before we came here. I set my old dolls and stuffed toys up in the hedgerows and practiced shooting them.”

  I imagined a row of smiling child’s toys with bullet holes between their eyes. The morbidness of it made me chuckle.

  Shaking the image out of my mind, I looked down the path. There was no sign of Mr. Harving or his horse. “We should probably look for him. I don’t see him down the track. His horse didn’t look like it would stop anytime soon. I’ll find him a different mount tomorrow.”

  Kara laughed. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s a great rider. Probably enjoying the chance to have a good gallop after so many weeks in wagons and on ships.”

  Although I’d ridden her a few times myself, Mr. Harving’s horse was pretty new. She probably had never seen a griffin before, definitely not one poised for hunting. I would have to tell Tumelo about her behavior. The mare’s inclination to bolt made her unsuitable for us. Our horses had to spook in place, as running only made them more likely to get attacked.

  Lucky for me, the horse left deep, muddy hoofprints in the red pa
th. We followed them at a trot until we found the horse grazing beside the path in a field, with no sign of her rider.

  Kara sucked in a breath beside me. “He’s lost. God, I can’t believe this. Lost on our first day. Do you think something attacked him?”

  I didn’t want to say that it depended on how badly he’d fallen. Some of the animals in Nazwimbe could literally smell blood for miles. Falling off your horse with those things nearby never ended well.

  “I’m sure he’s all right, Miss Harving. He’s probably back along the path somewhere, in a hedge or something. I was focusing on the trail and probably didn’t spot him.”

  I steered alongside Mr. Harving’s mare to grab her reins. Kara kicked her gelding back and forth down a small stretch of the path, calling her father’s name, getting louder each time she yelled. I glanced about the field itself. Long blue grass whistled in the light breeze, the stalks swaying. The mare had trampled a flat square in the middle of the field, but I couldn’t see a rider’s impression. A blue mush of grass dripped from her bit. I scanned the edges of the field, looking around the tree roots for any sign of Mr. Harving.

  “He’s here, he’s over here! Mnemba, quick!” Kara shouted from the edge of the forest, twenty meters farther back up the track. “He’s not moving.”

  She dismounted, wrapping her horse’s reins around her fist, then knelt down in the tall foliage. I could make out a tuft of her flaming hair shining like a beacon as I cantered toward her, dragging her father’s reluctant horse behind me.

  I swung off Elikia and crouched beside her. Kara had peeled her father’s trouser leg up, revealing his swollen calf. A boil had formed along the man’s curved muscle, red and swelling with a white center. I swallowed hard. “Help me flip him over. I need to see the other side of the injury.”

  “What if it’s broken? Won’t we risk moving the bone?” She laid her hand protectively across her father’s chest.

  “It’s not broken. I think it’s a sting, but I need to see it more clearly.”

  “A sting? A sting from what?” Her voice rose. “Is it poisonous? Oh no….”

  Without thinking, I laid my hand over hers and squeezed it. Immediately, I tried to justify my alarming overfamiliarity with a client to myself. It was a maternal gesture, right? Comforting? Out here, she and her father were my responsibilities. My safari-children. Her hand was as soft as the inside of a flower petal and the milky color of unicorn ivory.

  If she thought I had overstepped a boundary, she didn’t show it. Maybe friends did that kind of thing in Echalend. Kara squeezed my hand back without looking at me. “If you’re sure.”

  We turned him on his stomach, and I inspected the back of his calf. In the middle of the boil’s white center was a black stinger, the length and width of my middle finger. I closed my eyes, worst suspicion confirmed. I slid my fingers to the man’s neck as subtly as I could. I didn’t want Kara to see me checking if her father was dead. His pulse beat strongly, and I relaxed. Bracing his leg with one hand, I pulled the barbed stinger out with the other. Chunks of white pus dripped from the stinger like goat’s cheese.

  I stood up and went to my saddlebags. Feeling around the bag’s crumb-filled bottom, I found the small knife I always carried. I sat back down next to Mr. Harving. “You might want to look away for this. It’s pretty gross.”

  Kara shook her head, her hair coming free from its tie and falling around her shoulders. I hadn’t noticed how thick it was back in the office. She rubbed her father’s back and watched my every move.

  I slid the blade into the boil, making an incision the length of my thumbnail. A trail of yellow-green poison spurted out, the smell strong enough to make Kara gag. I braced myself and then squeezed the remainder of the toxin out through the opening. Pus and blood spilled down his leg in a waterfall of red and yellow. I imagined Bi Trembla’s face, watching me conduct this field surgery without alcohol to clean the wound or a needle to seal it. Her mouth would be gaping with partially formed curses, her hands balled into fists at her hips. But if we left it, the poison would spread throughout his body. Even Bi Trembla would have to concede to that.

  We waited, hardly breathing ourselves, while his shallow breath became deeper and more regular, and he slipped into a more peaceful sleep. The sleep didn’t worry me. If a person survived a manticore sting, sleeping after the stinger was removed helped them recover. Still, Mr. Harving could be ill for up to a week. Manticore stings were known to cause fever, chills, vomiting, and sometimes hallucinations. The sooner we got him back to camp, and into Bi Trembla’s regimented care, the better.

  Elikia wouldn’t run if we met anything else on the trail, so I decided to load him onto her and ride his mare back. I brought the reluctant horse right over to Mr. Harving and gestured to Kara. “I’ll need your help to load him. I can’t lift him alone. He won’t wake until tomorrow at the earliest, and we need to get him back to camp.”

  If she had been any of my other tourists, I might have ridden back at hell speed to bring Tumelo. Somehow I couldn’t imagine a Mrs. Dyer-type lifting her husband onto a horse, emergency or not. But Kara was different—I’d just seen her stare down a griffin, and she hadn’t fainted at the sight or smell of her father’s injury. When I told her what had to be done, her mouth set in a firm line and she nodded. Together we bent down and lifted her father’s snoring deadweight off the ground.

  THE MKUU scattered ash in a circle around Mr. Harving’s sickbed. Tumelo had insisted on calling a local spiritual leader, to give our guests an “authentic cultural experience” even though neither of us practiced the ancient beliefs. Nor did anyone I knew. Bi Trembla rolled her eyes as she changed the dirty dressing on Mr. Harving’s injured leg. But Kara watched the Mkuu with fascination as he placed a phoenix feather under her father’s pillow and traced a square in putrid amarok musk between his eyes.

  When the healer completed his ritual, Bi Trembla pointed toward the door. “My patient needs his rest and some real medical attention. Why must you bring in these wretched displays, Tumelo?”

  Tumelo shrugged, grinning at her. “Maybe I think they work.”

  Bi Trembla’s eyebrows rose so high they almost touched her hairline.

  “Or maybe I just like a good performance every now again. And these guys are cheaper than bringing in actors.”

  I covered my mouth so Bi Trembla wouldn’t see my smile. Her scowl grew more pronounced, and she shooed all of us out, shutting the flap behind us.

  Since Bi Trembla had taken over the hut assigned to the Harvings as a hospital, we’d had to set Kara up in another. Luckily, with the Harvings as our only current guests, we had more available. But none were as luxurious as the one her father had paid for. So we tried to make the new one as comfortable as possible, lining the floors with our best rugs and buying new furs from the village at exorbitant prices. The local tanners smelled desperation and charged Tumelo double. Still, we had a standard to maintain. We couldn’t let her travel back to Echalend and tell her circle of friends our hospitality was lacking or that the hut where she’d stayed wasn’t like the one promised to her father. There were too many up and coming safari camps in Nazwimbe. If our reputation wasn’t perfect, Tumelo’s business would fail.

  Kara followed us out of the hut, smiling for the first time since we’d returned to camp two days before. Her father’s color had returned, and he’d taken a little clear broth. The two of us would go back out into the wild today.

  I went to get the horses ready, sending Kara to the kitchens for a morning cup of tea and some hot porridge. Tumelo jogged up behind me, gasping for breath.

  “I have a plan,” he panted, bracing his hands on his knees.

  I sighed. Things never went well when Tumelo had a plan.

  “In case you can’t find a unicorn. Since it’s only his daughter going out with you for the next week, I can put a horn on Ketz and leave her in a field for you to find. That way if you don’t find one when Mr. Harving is better, his daughter will st
ill say she saw one. Then they can’t go home and say I’m a liar.”

  I groaned. Ketz was an elderly gray mare, arthritic and boney with knobby knees and growths on her ankles. Unicorns had rounded, strong bodies. Kara would never believe she was a unicorn no matter how well Tumelo decorated the horn. “That’s not going to work, Tumelo. She’s not stupid. She helps her father with his research. And Ketz looks nothing like a unicorn.”

  “She’s white-ish,” Tumelo defended.

  “And that’s where the similarities end.”

  “Eh, Mnemba. They’re foreigners. They’ve never seen a real one. They just know they look like horses, yeah?” Tumelo ran a hand through his hair, and a faint blush rose to his cheeks.

  We entered the barn. Ketz was not tied to her post.

  My eyes narrowed. “You’ve done it already, haven’t you? Where did you leave her?”

  “I used a real unicorn horn!” Tumelo protested. “I gave it to the kitchen boy to tie on. That girl will never know the difference! And I didn’t leave the horse. The boy is out watching to make sure she doesn’t get eaten.”

  “And who is going to make sure the boy doesn’t get eaten?”

  “I gave him a gun. Bi Trembla said he’s reliable.”

  “You gave a ten-year-old child a rifle?”

  “He’s just small. I think he’s twelve or thirteen.”

  I shook my head, sighing. For all his wily business sense and salesmanship, sometimes the stupid things Tumelo did made my head hurt.

  “Where did you even find a unicorn horn?” I asked as I threw a saddle over the back of the black gelding I’d chosen for Kara to ride. When he puffed out his stomach to stop me tightening his girth, I slapped his belly. Unicorns almost never lost their horns. The spirals were even denser than the tusks of an elephant, and unicorns were peaceful creatures that did not use the horns to fight each other.