“Indeed,” Friedman said, nodding vigorously. “A very great power. This is why I hoped it might accomplish more than freeing us alone—not that I am not grateful to the Lord for preserving us, but what are we among so many?” He had another queasy flash of memory from the golem’s vision. That camp with arbeit macht frei on the gate had been huge—and were there more like it?
“The golem is a power,” Korczak repeated. “But—the Germans, are they not also a power? Ten years ago, who had heard of that mamzer Hitler? And when power meets power, who that is not a power can say which of them will break?”
Friedman thought it over. “Whether this is the answer, Jacob, I cannot say: I am no power, as we both know. But an answer you definitely have, one good enough for mortal men. I will say kaddish for Emes on his yortzeit each year.”
“And I,” Korczak agreed. He returned to more immediate matters. “Does Isaac truly know enough to keep from drowning us?”
“I think he may.” Friedman hesitated, then told his friend what he had not mentioned to his wife: “He says we are low on fuel.”
“Oy.”
Since that one word summed things up as well as anything Friedman could say, he kept quiet. The Pilsudski passed another light. Emma found some grimy wool blankets. She and the other mothers wrapped the children in them. Before long, in spite of the terrifying excitement of the day—maybe even because of it—the youngsters fell asleep.
Another light, this one higher and brighter than any of the rest. In its blue-white glare, Friedman saw that the long spit of the Hela Peninsula ceased. Isaac Geller saw that, too. The fishing boat heeled in the water as it changed course. Northwest now, Friedman thought, and remembered what the golem had shown him.
Northwest now, but for how long? He had to know. He went into the cabin, waited for Geller to notice him—who could say how complicated steering a boat was? After a while, Geller turned his head. Feeling as if he were asking a rabbi to explicate a thorny passage of the Talmud, Friedman said, “How do we stand for fuel?”
Geller scowled. “Not very well. I think the gauge is broken. It’s scarcely changed from when we set out.”
“That may be good news,” Friedman said. He was looking for good news. “Maybe it lies when it says we have only a little. Maybe we have a great deal.”
“We don’t,” Geller said flatly. “When I saw the gauge seemed stuck, I put a stick down into the tank to find out how much it held. What the stick says comes near enough to agreeing with what the gauge says.”
“Then—” Friedman quavered.
“Yes, then,” Geller agreed. “Then we will run out of fuel and the boat will stop. If God is kind, a Swedish ship or a Danish one or even a Russian one will find us and pick us up. If God is less kind, no one will pick us up and we will die. If God is most unkind, a German ship will find us.”
“A German ship.” Friedman hadn’t thought of that. Geller was right—it would be most dreadful to come so close to freedom only to have it snatched away by a ship flying the swastika banner. “Surely God would not permit it.”
“After what the golem showed us, Berel, who are we to say what God would and would not permit?”
“How can I answer that? How can anyone answer that?” Friedman left the cabin; between them, the rolling of the boat in the open sea and the stink of Geller’s cigar were making his stomach churn. So was worry. Back in Puck, running had seemed the only possible thing to do. Now when it was too late, he wondered whether running had been wise.
The last lighthouse faded astern. Friedman cast himself into the hands of God—not that he hadn’t been in them all along, but now he abandoned the usual human feeling that he had some control over his own fate. Whatever would happen would happen, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The fishing boat chugged along. After a while, a thick, clammy bank of fog rolled over it. It left damp droplets in the tendrils of Friedman’s beard. When he held his hand out at arm’s length, he could not see it. Maybe God was stretching His hand over the Pilsudski. No German ship would ever find them in this soup. Of course, no Swedish or Danish or Russian ship would, either.
Of course, likeliest of all was that no ship of any nation would come anywhere near. The Baltic Sea all around had seemed incomprehensibly vast, as if the fishing boat were traveling the dark of space between the stars. Somehow the fog intensified the effect rather than diminishing it.
And then, from out of nowhere, felt and heard rather than seen through the mist, a huge shape, vaster than the great fish that had swallowed Jonah, flowed blindly past the bow of the boat. From the cabin came Isaac Geller’s startled exclamation: “Gevalt!” Friedman had not even the wit for that. He waited, heart in his throat, for the brusque hail that might mean rescue or disaster. No hail came. The big ship sailed away, intent solely on its own concerns.
Friedman said, “That was close.”
From out of the fog somewhere close by, Jacob Korczak answered, “That was very close.” He called to Geller, “How are we doing for fuel?”
“I’ll check,” Geller said from out of the pale, milky smudge that marked the cabin’s place. After a pause, he went on, “We still have—about what we set out with.” He sounded surprised, but far from displeased.
“How could we?” Korczak demanded. “We set out quite a while ago, so surely we’ve burned some.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Geller said. “I’d think so, too. But the gauge doesn’t think so, and the stick doesn’t think so, either. The gauge may be mistaken. How the stick could be mistaken, I tell you I do not see.”
“It makes no sense,” Korczak complained. “Fuel burns, it burns just so fast. When so much time is gone, so is the fuel.”
“Tell it to my stick,” Geller said. Korczak subsided with a wounded sniff.
Northwest, northwest, northwest . . . Friedman hoped it was northwest, hoped Geller was minding the compass. For all he could tell, the Pilsudski might have been sailing in circles. He recognized Emma’s footsteps on the deck before she came close enough to be seen. “Berel, are you here?” she called. “Oh, you are here. Good. Look—I found more blankets.”
“Thank you.” He took one and draped it over his shoulders like a huge prayer shawl. It smelled of wool and stale tobacco and even staler sweat; Friedman’s opinion of Tadeusz Czuma’s cleanliness, already low, fell another notch. Emma was already swaddled against the chill and fog. He turned to her. “You ought to sleep if you can.”
“So should you,” she retorted. He nodded; he knew she was right. Neither of them lay down. She moved a step closer to him, lowered her voice. “Berel . . . is it going to be all right? Why is Geller going on about how much fuel we have?” He heard the undercurrent of reproach in her voice: why didn’t you tell me about this?
He answered the undercurrent, not the question: “I didn’t want to worry you.”
She amazed him by starting to laugh. “I had a golem come into my living room, I ran from the house where I lived since I was married to you and the town where I lived all my life, German soldiers shot at me and I watched them die, and you didn’t want to worry me about fuel?”
“All right, all right.” He started laughing, too; looked at from that direction, it was funny. But his self-conscious chuckles quickly faded. “The trouble with the fuel is, we don’t have much.”
“We’ve come this far,” Emma said.
“Already it’s farther than Geller thought we could.”
“If it’s already farther, then what does Geller know?” she said, and nodded decisively, as if she’d just won a subtle point of logic. “We’ll sail as far as we’ll sail, and please God it will be far enough.”
“All right, Emma,” Friedman repeated. Oddly, her reasoning reassured him. If he was in God’s hands, then God would take care of things. And if God would take care of things, then Berel Friedman didn’t need to stay awake to watch. He redraped the blanket so it covered all of him. “Maybe I will try and rest.”
>
“This is sensible,” Emma agreed. They stretched out side by side on the hard planks of the deck. He took off his hat and gave it to her for a pillow. She shook her head. “I’ll ruin it.”
“If everything turns out all right, I can get another hat. And if everything does not turn out all right, what difference will a ruined hat make?”
She put it under her head. “Sleep well, Berel.”
“And you.”
He didn’t think he would sleep at all, let alone well. But when his eyes opened, the black mist surrounding the Pilsudski had turned gray. His neck, his back, his legs were stiff; everything crackled like breaking ice as he painfully got to his feet.
The children were already awake. They’d adapted to life on the fishing boat faster than their parents; they sat in a circle round a spinning dreidel one of them must have stuffed into a pocket when they fled the house. “Gimel!” Friedman’s daughter Rachel shouted. She couldn’t read, but she knew her Yiddish letters, and they sprang from the Hebrew ones. She knew something else, too: “I win!”
Smiling, Friedman stepped around the game. In the cabin, Isaac Geller still stood at the wheel. His face was as gray as the fog all around him, gray with fatigue. The cigar in his mouth had gone out; Friedman didn’t think he’d noticed. But he steered on.
Friedman said, “The fuel hasn’t run out, I see.”
Geller jerked violently; he’d forgotten everything but the wheel, the compass, and the window that barely showed him the boat’s bow. “Oh, it’s you, Berel,” he said, as if reminding himself. “No, the fuel hasn’t run out. Ask God why; I’ve given up trying to figure it out.” He sounded indignant; maybe he held Friedman responsible for the engine’s still chugging along, or maybe his friend just made an easier target than the Lord.
Outside in the mist, Rachel Friedman squealed, “Another gimel! I win again!”
“If she keeps on like that, she’ll end up owning this boat,” Friedman said, hoping the feeble joke would help keep Geller alert and ease his burden. He went on, “The little one, she’s always been lucky with a dreidel. I remember once when she—”
He stopped. Thinking about dreidels made him think about the letters on them, about what those letters stood for, and about the nature of the miracle they commemorated.
“You remember when she what?” Geller snapped. “Don’t just stand there like a cow, with your mouth hanging open. Say something if you’re going to talk. Otherwise, go away.”
“Isaac, last night was the first night of Chanukah,” Friedman said softly.
“Nu?” Geller said: “So what? I take it back. You shouldn’t talk if you’re going to wander all over creation and confuse me.”
“I’m sorry,” Friedman said, bowing his head. “I just thought to wonder whether God, who made one day’s worth of pure oil burn for eight days in the Temple, might not let a tiny bit of fuel take a few of His people farther than anyone would guess. You said to ask God why it hadn’t run out. I think I just have. On that night, with what happened that night . . . what do you think, Isaac my friend?”
Geller slowly turned his head. Now his mouth fell open. The dead cigar fell out. He nodded, once, twice, his eyes wide. Then he gave his attention back to the Pilsudski.
Less than a minute later, the fishing boat came out of the fog bank. All at once, the winter sun sparkled off the ocean, cold and bright and clear. Ahead—not far—lay the Swedish coast. The engine kept running.
Honeymouth
I’ve written a fair number of werewolf stories. I’ve written a fair number of vampire stories. Doing strange things while staying within the conventions and traditions of such tales is a challenge for a writer; it makes one think left-handed, so to speak. “Honeymouth” is the only unicorn story I’ve ever done. I take a certain modest pride in noting that it’s one of the raunchier unicorn stories ever written.
* * *
The charge of unicorn cavalry would be the most deadly tool of war, were it not for one small difficulty.
The Emperors of the East try to get round the problem by mounting eunuchs on their special steeds, but western knights reckon this company lacking in courage. “No balls,” they say, and laugh at their own wit.
Yet the westerners’ efforts to use unicorns to their best advantage are makeshifts, too. The Duke of Hispalis used to maintain a Stripling Squadron, a hundred youths ages fourteen to seventeen. They did well enough, but lacked the experience (and often the bulk) that would have ensured success against seasoned troops on more ordinary mounts. And, youths fourteen to seventeen being what they are, the Duke often found the unicorns would not let half of them ride when they set out on campaign.
For a while the Kings of Gothia raised an Amazon Corps, but it suffered from the same problems of size and inexperience as the Stripling Squadron. Further, should anyone think women immune to the calls of the flesh, let him examine the rosters of the Amazon Corps year by year.
In every generation arose one or two warrior-saints who genuinely were immune to sensual allure, but unicorns bear such more gladly than princes. Armored in righteousness, they obeyed only their own consciences, and so hardly made pleasant company for the usual run of ruler. They also had the unfortunate habit of telling the truth as they saw it.
That unfortunate habit was one of the two things they had in common with Coradin the mercenary, called Honeymouth. Coradin was a warrior, but no saint he. His every third word was an oath, foul enough to account for his ironic nickname. When he was not swearing, he was mostly drinking. He betrayed whomever he pleased, whenever he pleased. Like too many such rogues, he had more than his share of luck with women. They fell all over him, and he did nothing to discourage them.
This Coradin rode a unicorn.
“Are you sure it’s Coradin, my lord?” Milo the seneschal of the County of Iveria asked without much hope when his suzerain summoned him to the audience hall one fine spring morning. He was a big, dark, stolid man with wide shoulders and a slow walk.
Count Rupen, by contrast, was short, lean, handsome in a foxy way, and red-headed to boot. He also had a waspish temper. He scorched Milo with a glare as he paced quickly up and down the hall. “Who tethers a unicorn outside a whorehouse?”
“Coradin,” Milo said. His head started to ache. Sometimes he wished his father had been a serf; he would have inherited a simpler calling. He suspected this was going to be one of those times.
“Huzzah,” Rupen said sourly. He rubbed his little chin-beard. After a bit, he went on in a musing tone, “Milo, I have a task for you.”
Milo had a bad feeling he knew what the task was going to be. “Sir?” was all he said. He might have been wrong.
He wasn’t. “Get yourself down to that brothel and find out how this cursed Coradin can wench and wench without a thought in the world past his prick and keep a unicorn, where everyone else loses the beast with his cherry. If I can learn his secret and pass it to my knights, then let my neighbors beware.” Rupen’s eyes were foxy, too, the exact shade of amber; they had a greedy gleam in them, like a fox’s when he spots a henroost.
Knowing it would not help, Milo protested, “People have been trying to learn Coradin’s secret for a dozen years now. No one has yet. What makes you think I’ll have better luck than the wisest—to say nothing of the sneakiest—men in the western realms?”
“Because I told you to,” Rupen snapped. “Do whatever you have to. Hire him into the army, bribe him—pay him as much as he asks.”
Milo’s bushy eyebrows rose. Rupen was serious—he squeezed every piece of bronze till the copper and tin separated. The seneschal, however, was unhappily aware that richer treasuries than Iveria’s had opened for Coradin. With characteristic skill, the mercenary had collected from several of them—and kept his secret.
Milo sighed. “Which crib is he at?”
“The Jadeflower.”
“Can’t fault his taste.” The Jadeflower was the best—and the most expensive—joyhouse Iveria boasted. Milo si
ghed again. “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Just do what I told you,” Rupen said, but he was talking to the seneschal’s back.
“Make way! Make way, there!” Milo elbowed through the milling crowd in front of the Jadeflower.
“Watch it!” someone snarled, whirling angrily. When he saw who was behind him, his face cleared. “Oops—sorry, sir.” The fellow raised his voice. “It’s the lord count’s seneschal.”
That helped clear the path; if not widely loved, Milo had earned solid respect in Iveria. He squeezed up to the Jadeflower’s hitching rail and gaped with the rest of the throng at the unicorn.
He had seen the magnificent beasts only two or three times; Rupen did not keep a squadron of them. To find one tied in front of a whorehouse was like finding a nightingale singing from a dungheap.
Snow, milk: those were the comparisons that sprang into the seneschal’s mind. He gave them up. The unicorn was past comparison. It was simply white. It gazed at Milo with absolute unconcern for its surroundings. The man it had chosen was somewhere near, and that sufficed.
The crowd whooped when Milo, tearing himself away from the unicorn’s perfection, strode up the broad marble steps toward the Jadeflower’s door. Someone shouted, “Rupen’s bumped his pay!”
Several people made it into a chant: “Bump, bump, bump!” Milo felt his ears grow hot. He was happily married, and not given to straying.
The door swung open on silent hinges. When it closed behind the seneschal, the ribald noise outside vanished as if it had never been. Standing in the vestibule waiting for him was the Jadeflower’s proprietress. Her name, he knew, was Lavria. She was plump now, and her hair silver, but it was easy to see she had been a famous beauty not so many years ago.
“What an unexpected pleasure,” she said with the slightest hint of malice. She knew he was faithful, then.
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