Unicorn Tracks

by Julia Ember

  He bent down and placed the stone in what looked like a hole in the ground. I twisted the dials on my binoculars, zooming in, and squinted. The hole was part of a long channel, narrow—a foot wide at most—that seemed to feed back into the lake. When we had investigated before, I’d been so transfixed by the sight of the horns that I hadn’t noticed the canal. A definite failure for a tracker. The leader stepped back and accepted a flask from one of his followers. The stone pulsed, then glowed white, casting an eerie light over the baobab tree. I felt the ground tremor.

  For a moment, Kara and I sat with bated breath. I half expected a wild stampede of unicorns to materialize on the horizon beyond the lake. Instead we listened to the bored snorts of the horses below, the clash of horns as two abada stallions sparred off, and the ever-present, soft melody of the phoenixes.

  Then Kara grabbed my arm. A charge of energy traveled from my wrist up to my heart as I turned to follow where she was looking. A lone stallion cantered across the field, whiter than summer clouds. His body heaved with muscle; thick feathers fanned his black hooves. Neck arched proudly, he carried a regal horn, twisted to the top with silver. The riders dismounted and reached for their lassos.

  When he reached the baobab tree, the unicorn looked around in confusion. The trance of the moonstone seemed to break with the humans closing in on him. He sniffed the horns around him, squealing and pawing the ground in distress. Three of the riders threw their ropes, catching him around the neck. As he struggled to back away, the others advanced. Men taunted the stallion with their whips, making him kick and try to rear. When his feet lifted, they threw more ropes, circling the nooses around his powerful feet. As a group, they wrestled the unicorn to the ground, throwing themselves on top of him the moment his knees touched the grass.

  Even with the weight of six on his back and men all around holding ropes anchoring him to the ground, the stallion kept fighting. His eyes rolled back in his head, his legs thrashed, and I could hear his screams from the cliff. I’d never heard a unicorn make a sound before, and hearing it now sent a chill through my entire body. His screams were different than a horse, higher in pitch, with a vibrating tremor that made him sound almost like a singer at the crescendo of a magnificent performance.

  The leader of the group advanced on the now subdued unicorn, holding what looked like a handsaw. The stallion tried frantically to spear the man with his horn, but three of the followers held the animal’s head in place. Still he tried, snorting and staring his captor in the eye, silver-tipped horn poised like a sword toward the leader’s heart.

  Kill him, I found myself praying. Fight them. Kill him, and it’ll all be over.

  The saw began to tremble in the man’s hand as he swiped it again and again across the base of the stallion’s horn. Fragments the size of fingernail clippings covered the earth like snow. Beside me, I felt Kara start to shake. Her whole frame quivered with silent sobs. The horn fell to the ground, and all at once the stallion quit struggling. The men climbed off him and loosened their hold on the ropes that bound him.

  The group’s leader reached for one of the ropes around the unicorn’s neck. He turned and the stallion followed him, as meek as an old broodmare. His eyes seemed to blink back a heavy sadness, the only echo of his proud battle song.

  THEY CAPTURED another before they rode away: a filly, small and with delicate-looking legs and bones. The men underestimated her, and I almost cheered when she drove her horn into the thigh of one of her would-be captors. When they finally wrestled her to the ground, her success cost her. The injured man’s friends whipped her mercilessly until her white coat ran with dark blood.

  When their dust trail cleared on the horizon, Kara pulled her knees up to her chest. Her eyes and cheeks were puffy with tears. She struggled to speak, but her voice choked and clogged. “I’ve never seen anything so awful. I’ve been dreaming about seeing the unicorns for years. When that stallion appeared, he was everything I’d ever imagined and more… beyond beautiful. And what they did to him… what they made him….”

  I nodded, wrapping my arm around her shaking back.

  “I want to know what they do with them,” she said, wiping her eyes and peering up at me. “I have to know.”

  “I don’t think we want to know.”

  She lifted her head from my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “No, I have to know. Not knowing is the worst for me. I’ll imagine everything possible. We have to find out. Please.”

  The way her blue eyes widened would be my undoing.

  I knew those men were dangerous. They carried guns and whips and braved the unicorn’s sharp horn to get what they wanted. If they could wrestle down a 1300-pound unicorn stallion, a beast made of solid muscle, what could they do to us? Plus, I’d never seen a stone like that before. It seemed to harness energy from the lake. But, against all logic and sense of self-preservation, I found my mouth forming the words: “It’s only noon now. We still have the night and the morning tomorrow before anyone will expect them back… if they’ve not gone more than a few miles, I could track them.”

  Kara sprang up. “Tell me how I can help.”

  “It’s not safe,” I warned, climbing slowly to my feet. My knees ached from crouching so low for so long. “Bi Trembla will hang me from my feet and skin me alive if she ever finds out I agreed to this.”

  I didn’t say that Tumelo would fire me, even though I was sure he would. Cousins or not, there was only so far I could push. This would cross the line. I had avoided my village for so long that the camp had become my home. I closed my eyes to clear a wash of nostalgia. At least if he sent me home, I’d be out of reach of Bi Trembla’s wrath.

  “I won’t say a word,” she whispered. “My father can’t know either. He’s progressive, but he would keep me chained to his side until I marry if he learned I went chasing after a poaching gang.”

  I spat into my palm and offered it to her. When Kara wrinkled her nose in revulsion, I chuckled. “That’s how we seal a deal in Nazwimbe.”

  She rolled her eyes but spat into her own hand and shook mine.

  I dismantled the tents while Kara grouped the horses together, tightened their girths, and offered the mules some water from her canteen. It wasn’t ideal, tracking a group while dragging three pack animals behind us, but there was no way we could bring them back to the camp without raising Bi Trembla’s suspicion. When I went tracking for practice, deep out in the wild, I liked to go with just my horse, another person, a gun, and enough water to survive. I could find shelter beneath a tree, or sleep under the stars, gather berries, and hunt rabbits. Traveling light made it hard for someone—or something—else to follow your trail, while you followed them.

  We mounted up and carefully steered our horses down the ridge to the base of the baobab tree. I could see the area where the two unicorns had fought for their freedom. A jagged circle of frantically trampled grass and the heavy impressions their knees made on the soft earth remained. Kara dismounted again and went to retrieve the stallion’s horn. She ran her hands along the silver ridges and then tucked it into one of our supply packs.

  “I can’t see which one belonged to the filly,” she said, putting her foot into her gelding’s stirrup and swinging back on. “There are so many smaller ones. I almost feel like we should bury them. The horns, I mean. It’s like the unicorns’ spirits just died the minute those men cut off the horns.”

  “In Nazwimbe, we burn the dead. We could try to burn the stallion’s horn when we make camp tonight. Wherever that may be.”

  A broad smile appeared on Kara’s face, but her eyes remained downcast. “I’d like that. And I think it’s right, to do it the Nazwimbe way. He was from your country, born and bred.”

  I’d never tried to burn ivory before. I didn’t even know if it was flammable, but for her, I would try. I would build the biggest brushfire ever seen on the savanna if it made what she had just seen a little easier to deal with. I pointed to the line of trampled grass leading away from us. �
��At least those men won’t be hard to track. I don’t even have to dismount to look for hoofprints. That many riders will leave a clear trail leading right to them.”

  She nodded. “Easy.”

  I shrugged, hoping I wasn’t overselling my abilities. “Unless they split up. Then we’ll have to choose which trail to follow and pray we’re right.”

  IN A sense we got lucky. The riders stayed together, but we kept riding into the early dusk with no sign of their destination. Our horses started to tire, and the mules refused to trot on, leaning their weight against the leads that tied them to Elikia’s saddle. The mare pulled to a stop, looking over her shoulder at the live anchors dragging her back.

  With the sun going down, we needed to find a place to stop and make a fire. Most of Nazwimbe’s hunters prowled the open plains in the haze of dusk and cover of the night. The riders had moved through the plains, along flat ground. I didn’t want to lose the trail, but I also wanted to avoid making our camp out in the open. As we rode under the cover of a lone baobab tree, I reached up and cut a branch down with my knife, sharpening it into a stake to drive into the trail.

  I chose a spot for us atop an old cheetah’s den, a rocky outcrop with a dugout burrow beneath, and built our fire at the center. I fed it brush and heather, making it smoke so it would frighten the animals around us out of the underbrush. A smoky fire would also keep the insects that loved Kara’s blood at bay. Kara gave the horses water, took their tack off, and hobbled them so they couldn’t run away while we slept. True to my promise to Bi Trembla, I didn’t intend to sleep, but I didn’t think Kara would go to bed if she knew I was staying awake all night to keep watch.

  I started to pitch the tents, assembling the first one in minutes. Our travel tents were simple, triangular structures with only four pegs. But as I put the first peg of the second tent in the ground, Kara walked up behind me. “I don’t want to stay alone after seeing those men. Just put up one tent. They’re not so small. We can cuddle close,” she said.

  Her words almost made me choke. I paused, keeping my eyes fixed on the peg, afraid of what my face might show her. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” she said, her fingers wrapped around mine to pull the peg out of the earth. “It’ll be like when I was at boarding school. We can stay up late and tell each other stories. It might take our minds off what we saw today.”

  I couldn’t help it. When she wrapped her fingers over mine, my whole body involuntarily shivered.

  “You cold?” she asked. I couldn’t tell if her question was serious or not. “I packed an extra shawl in my saddlebag.”

  “No,” I managed to squeak back. A whole night, alone in a single-person tent with her. How could I spend the night swapping stories in the firelight, when I wanted nothing more than to run my fingers through the flames of her hair and press my lips to the skin of her back? Those thoughts terrified me. Where had they come from? Part of me longed to be with her, to explore her. But a deeper part of me feared what it would be like to make myself so vulnerable, to let someone touch me and look at my scars.

  Despite the warmth of her hand around mine, I felt frozen. I kept still while we held the peg together without putting it down. What did she mean, holding my hand like that? I swallowed. This was her adventure. I was part of her one adventure. But when she didn’t move to release my fingers, I let myself wonder, for just a second, if it were possible she wanted what I did and if she felt vulnerable too.

  When I turned to face her, her grip on my hand tightened. Color had risen to her face. Her pale cheeks and freckled nose glowed a soft pink. Specks of firelight glistened in her eyes. Her lips were so full and wet….

  I leaned in and pressed my mouth to hers. I felt awkward, unsure of what to do, or how she would react.

  Once upon a time, a man kissed me on the mouth, and his tongue forced its way inside like a gag, drowning out my screams. I closed my eyes against the pain of the memory, damming up the flood of tears. I tried to relish the softness of her mouth pressed closed against mine and the tiny step she took toward me, her free arm curving around the lower part of my back.

  Her tongue teased my mouth open. Instead of forcing, demanding, it suggested and coaxed. When my lips yielded, her tongue was cool with the water from her canteen. This time, it didn’t feel like an invasion, and I felt my body melt into her flesh.

  She led me into the tent by the hand, and I lay down on my back, waiting. I still wasn’t sure what was expected of me. Or that I was ready. When my mama had told me about what women must do, in marriage, she had told me to do my duty, to wait for the man’s lead and let him take his pleasure. I could take my own if I could, but always, my job was to please him. What did you do if there wasn’t a man to please? What did you do if experience had already taught you to expect only pain? How did Kara get the confidence to do this? It seemed so natural for her. A knot formed in my throat, and I wondered if it would ever feel natural for me.

  Kara began to kiss my neck, easing the tension. Her fingers slipped beneath my shirt to pull it off. I surprised myself by letting her, trying to relax as her fingers mapped my body. But when her eyes fell to the deep white scars spanning my stomach from the top of my ribs to below my navel, I crossed my arms to hide the marks.

  “I can’t,” I said. “We can’t go further. Stop.”

  She looked me in the eye, waiting. I closed my eyes again. My heart beat so fast it shook my entire body. With slow precision, she kissed each of the scars and laid her head down on my stomach.

  “Your tiger stripes,” she breathed, tracing over the crooked lines with her finger. And in that moment of complete acceptance, I knew I would never be the same. “They show how you resisted. They’re like your battle scars. Don’t be ashamed of them.”

  My fingers threaded through her hair, relishing the lightness of it, the sweet fragrance trapped within the layers.

  A tear ran down my cheek, and I was glad her head was turned so she couldn’t see. All this was just temporary—her one adventure—and she could never be mine.

  DESPITE MY promise to myself and Bi Trembla, I dozed off. When I awoke, Kara’s head was still resting on my stomach, and I could feel the warmth of her sleeping breath on my bare skin. Carefully I moved her head down to rest on the tent floor, arranging her thick hair like a cushion around her.

  In Nazwimbe, the day’s heat vanished with the sun, and the air outside was crisp and wet. Our fire still simmered. Scanning the grazing horses, I counted them and breathed a sigh of relief. At least I hadn’t been asleep so long that our fire went out and a predator snuck up on them. I knelt to feed the fire fresh kindling and brush, poking it gingerly with the sole of my shoe to stir it up again.

  The flat plains spanned around the cheetah’s roost. Somewhere far in the east, a soft glow loomed on the horizon. The light didn’t flicker the way a single campfire would, and it was larger, spanning an area, though I couldn’t make out any buildings. As far as I knew, there were no towns in this part of the savanna. The plains were a dangerous place to build: exposed, bare, full of the predators that stalked in the night. When I’d started guiding for Tumelo, I had memorized the maps of the area. A year ago no towns or villages had existed out here.

  When I’d marked our trail with the peg, we’d been heading east. My heart started to pound with fear. The light looked too bright to come from the campfires of even two dozen men. I had to be looking at a town, but where had it come from? And why had it been built?

  The tent flap opened behind me, and Kara climbed out. She had a wool shawl wrapped around her otherwise naked body. She sat down next to me, the peach fuzz of her legs brushing against my arm as she began warming herself at the fire.

  “It’s so quiet out here,” she said, drawing the shawl tighter about her shoulders. “I’ve never been somewhere so quiet. In Echalend, people are always rushing about, even at night. Dogs bark. You hear the horses outside on the cobblestones.”

  I nodded. It was quiet at the camp too
, but not like this. The smoke of our fire drove away even the crickets. Out on the savanna, at night, it was almost like the world stopped.

  Almost. I pointed to the east, and Kara’s eyes followed the line of my arm. She looked at the light in confusion and asked, “Is that a town? I thought most people in Nazwimbe lived in the mountains.”

  “It wasn’t here a year ago, when I learned all the routes and maps.”

  Her mouth set into a grim line. “It has to be where those men went.”

  “Could be. Let’s hope. Because if they went through it and didn’t stop there, finding their trail on the other side is going to be a whole lot harder.”

  “Maybe the town’s people would know where they went. A group that large, someone would have to know.”

  I shrugged, not wanting to tell her that if the men really were a gang of poachers, no one would tell us about them even if they did know. Villagers feared men who carried guns, enough to keep secrets for them in exchange for the illusion of protection. Men who carried guns and captured wild unicorns would terrify them.

  “You’ll have to cover your face and hair,” I said reaching out and giving one of her red curls a light tug. After last night, it suddenly felt easy to touch her. “Full sleeves. I have some gloves in the saddlebags. If they see your hair or your features, the whole village will talk about you. We need to blend in.”

  Kara raised her eyebrow. “How am I going to blend in? In this heat, with all these clothes on?”

  “A lot of merchants from Sylbaia come dressed like that. It’s their culture.”

  Kara nodded. Then she rose to her feet. She went to the saddlebags, taking out my gloves before fishing out the unicorn’s horn as well. She sat down again, turning it over in the firelight. Then she pushed it into the flames.