Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  NMC raised an ear and opened an eye, and Julie turned her head to see the unicorn once again poised atop the steamer trunk, staring down at the Frozen-Yogurt Man with the soft hairs of its mane standing erect from nape to withers. (Did it pick that up from the cats? Julie wondered in some alarm.) “He’s harmless,” she said, feeling silly but needing to speak. “There must have been lots of people like him in your time. Only then there was a place for them, they had names, they fit the world somewhere. Mendicant friars, I guess. Hermits.”

  The unicorn leaped at the window. Julie had no more than a second’s warning: the dainty head lowered only a trifle, the sleek miniature hindquarters seemed hardly to flex at all; but suddenly—so fast that she had no time even to register the explosion of the glass, the unicorn was nearly through. Blood raced down the white neck, tracing the curve of the straining belly.

  Julie never remembered whether she cried out or not, never remembered moving. She was simply at the window with her hands surrounding the unicorn, pulling it back as gently as she possibly could, praying in silent desperation not to catch its throat on a fang of glass. Her hands were covered with blood—some of it hers—by the time the unicorn came free, but she saw quickly that its wounds were superficial, already coagulating and closing as she looked on. The unicorn’s blood was as red as her own, but there was a strange golden shadow about it: a dark sparkling just under or beyond her eyes’ understanding. She dabbed at it ineffectually with a paper towel, while the unicorn struggled in her grasp. Strangely, she could feel that it was not putting forth its entire strength; though whether from fear of hurting her or for some other reason, she could not say.

  “All right,” she said harshly. “All right. He’s only the Frozen-Yogurt Man, for God’s sake, but all right, I’ll take you to him. I’ll take you wherever you want—we won’t wait for Joe, we’ll just go out. Only you have to stay in my pocket. In my pocket, okay?”

  The unicorn quieted slowly between her hands. She could not read the expression in the great, bruise-colored eyes, but it made no further attempt to escape when she set it down and began to patch the broken window with cardboard and packing tape. That done, she donned the St. Vincent de Paul duffel coat she wore all winter, and carefully deposited the unicorn in the wrist-deep right pocket. Then she pinned a note on the door for Farrell, pushed two kittens away from it with her foot, shut it, said aloud, “Okay, you got it,” and went down into the street.

  The sun was high and warm, but a chill breeze lurked in the shade of the old trees. Julie felt the unicorn move in her pocket, and looked down to see the narrow, delicate head poke out from under the flap. “Back in there,” she said, amazed at her own firmness. “Five hundred, a thousand years—don’t you know what happens by now? When people see you?” The unicorn retreated without protest.

  She could see the Frozen-Yogurt Man’s naval cap a block ahead, bobbing with his shuffling gait. There were a lot of bodies between them, and she increased her own pace, keeping a hand over her pocket as she slipped between strollers and dodged coffeehouse tables. Once, sidestepping a skateboarder, she tripped hard over a broken slab of sidewalk and stumbled to hands and knees, instinctively twisting her body to fall to the left. She was up in a moment, unhurt, hurrying on.

  When she did catch up with the Frozen-Yogurt Man, and he turned his blindly benign gaze on her, she hesitated, completely uncertain of how to approach him. She had never spoken to him, nor even seen him close enough to notice that he was almost an albino, with coral eyes and pebbly skin literally the color of yogurt. She cupped her hand around the unicorn in her pocket, smiled and said, “Hi.”

  The Frozen-Yogurt Man said thoughtfully, as though they were picking up an interrupted conversation, “You think they know what they’re doing?” His voice was loud and metallic, not quite connecting one word with another. It sounded to Julie like the synthesized voices that told her which buttons on her telephone to push.

  “No,” she answered without hesitation. “No, whatever you’re talking about. I don’t think anybody knows what they’re doing anymore.”

  The Frozen-Yogurt Man interrupted her. “I think they do. I think they do. I think they do.” Julie thought he might go on repeating the words forever; but she felt the stir against her side again, and the Frozen-Yogurt Man’s flat pink eyes shifted and widened. “What’s that?” he demanded shrilly. “What’s that watching me?”

  The unicorn was halfway out of her coat pocket, front legs flailing as it yearned toward the Frozen-Yogurt Man.

  Only the reluctance of passersby to make eye contact with either him or Julie spared the creature from notice. She grabbed it with both hands, forcing it back, telling it in a frantic hiss, “Stay there, you stay, he isn’t the one! I don’t know whom you’re looking for, but it’s not him.” But the unicorn thrashed in the folds of cloth as though it were drowning.

  The Frozen-Yogurt Man was backing away, his hands out, his face melting. Ever afterward, glimpsing him across the street, Julie felt chillingly guilty for having seen him so. In a phlegmy whisper he said, “Oh, no—oh, no, no, you don’t put that thing on me. No, I been watching you all the time, you get away, you get away from me with that thing. You people, you put that chip behind my ear, you put them radio mice in my stomach you get away, you don’t put nothing more on me, you done me enough.” He was screaming now, and the officer’s cap was tipping forward, revealing a scarred scalp the color of the sidewalk. “You done me enough! You done me enough!”

  Julie fled. She managed at first to keep herself under control, easing away sedately enough through the scattering of mildly curious spectators; it was only when she was well down the block and could still hear the Frozen-Yogurt Man’s terrified wailing that she began to run. Under the hand that she still kept in her pocket, the unicorn seemed to have grown calm again, but its heart was beating in tumultuous rhythm with her own. She ran on until she came to a bus stop and collapsed on the bench there, gasping for breath, rocking back and forth, weeping dryly for the Frozen-Yogurt Man.

  She came back to herself only when she felt the touch of a cool, soft nose just under her right ear. Keeping her head turned away, she said hoarsely, “Just let me sit here a minute, all right? I did what you wanted. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. You get back down before somebody sees you.” A warm breath stirred the hairs on Julie’s arms, and she raised her head to meet the hopeful brown eyes and all-purpose grin of a young golden retriever. The dog was looking brightly back and forth between her and the unicorn, wagging its entire body from the ears on down, back feet dancing eagerly. The unicorn leaned precariously from Julie’s pocket to touch noses with it.

  “No one’s ever going to believe you,” Julie said to the dog. The golden retriever listened attentively, waited a moment to make certain she had no more to confide, and then gravely licked the unicorn’s head, the great red tongue almost wrapping it round. NMC’s incessant grooming had plainly not prepared the unicorn for anything like this; it sneezed and took refuge in the depths of the pocket. Julie said, “Not a living soul.”

  The dog’s owner appeared then, apologizing and grabbing its dangling leash to lead it away. It looked back, whining, and its master had to drag it all the way to the corner. Julie still huddled and rocked on the bus stop bench, but when the unicorn put its head out again she was laughing thinly. She ran a forefinger down its mane, and then laid two fingers gently against the wary, pulsing neck. She said, “Burnouts. Is that it? You’re looking for one of our famous Avicenna loonies, none with less than a master’s, each with a direct line to Mars, Atlantis, Lemuria, Graceland or Mount Shasta? Is that it?” For the first time, the unicorn pushed its head hard into her hand, as NMC would do. The horn pricked her palm lightly.

  For the next three hours, she made her way from the downtown streets to the university’s red-tiled enclave, and back again, with small side excursions into doorways, subway stations, even parking lots. She developed a peculiar cramp in her neck from snapping frequent
glances at her pocket to be sure that the unicorn was staying out of sight. Whenever it indicated interest in a wild red gaze, storks’-nest hair, a shopping cart crammed with green plastic bags, or a droning monologue concerning Jesus, AIDS, and the Kennedys, she trudged doggedly after one more street apostle to open one more conversation with the moon. Once the unicorn showed itself, the result was always the same.

  “It likes beards,” she told Farrell late that night, as he patiently massaged her feet. “Bushy beards—the wilder and filthier, the better. Hair, too, especially that pattern baldness tonsure look. Sandals, yes, definitely—it doesn’t like boots or sneakers at all, and it can’t make up its mind about Birkenstocks. Prefers blankets and serapes to coats, dark hair to light, older to younger, the silent ones to the walking sound trucks—men to women, absolutely. Won’t even stick its head out for a woman.”

  “It’s hard to blame the poor thing,” Farrell mused. “For a unicorn, men would be a bunch of big, stupid guys with swords and whatnot. Women are betrayal, every time, simple as that. It wasn’t Gloria Steinem who wove that tapestry.” He squeezed toes gently with one hand, a bruised heel with the other. “What did they do when they actually saw it?”

  The unicorn glanced at them over the edge of the cat box, where its visit had been cause for an orgy of squeaking, purring and teething. Julie said, “What do you think? It was bad. It got pretty damn awful. Some of them fell down on their knees and started laughing and crying and praying their heads off. There were a couple who just sort of crooned and moaned to it—and I told you about the poor Frozen-Yogurt Man—and then there was one guy who tried to grab it away and run off with it. But it wasn’t having that, and it jabbed him really hard. Nobody noticed, thank God.” She laughed wearily, presenting her other foot for treatment. “The rest—oh, I’d say they should be halfway to Portland by now. Screaming all the way.”

  Farrell grunted thoughtfully, but asked no more questions until Julie was in bed and he was sitting across the room playing her favorite Campion lute song. She was nearly asleep when his voice bumbled slowly against her half-dream like a fly at a window. “It can’t know anyone who’s not in the tapestry. There’s the answer. There it is.”

  “There it is,” she echoed him, barely hearing her own words. Farrell put down the lute and came to her, sitting on the bed to grip her shoulder.

  “Jewel, listen, wake up and listen to me! It’s trying to find someone who was in that tapestry with it—we even know what he looks like, more or less. An old guy, ragged and dirty, big beard, sandals—some kind of monk, most likely. Though what a unicorn would be doing anywhere near your average monk is more than I can figure. Are you awake, Jewel?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled. “No. Wasn’t anybody else. Sleep.” Somewhere very far away Farrell said, “We didn’t see anybody else.” Julie felt the bed sway as he stood up. “Tomorrow night,” he said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, they stay open later on Saturdays. You sleep, I’ll call you.” She drifted off in confidence that he would lock the door carefully behind him, even without a key.

  A temporary word-processing job, in company with a deadline for a set of views of diseased kidneys, filled up most of the next day for her. She was still weary, vaguely depressed, and grateful when she returned home to find the unicorn thoroughly occupied in playing on the studio floor with three of NMC’s kittens. The game appeared to involve a good deal of stiff-legged pouncing, an equal amount of spinning and side-slipping on the part of the unicorn, all leading to a grand climax in which the kittens tumbled furiously over one another while the unicorn looked on, forgotten until the next round. They never came close to laying a paw on their swift littermate, and the unicorn in turn treated them with effortless care. Julie watched for a long time, until the kittens abruptly fell asleep.

  “I guess that’s what being immortal is like,” she said aloud. The unicorn looked back at her, its eyes gone almost black. Julie said, “One minute they’re romping around with you—the next, they’re sleeping. Right in the middle of the game. We’re all kittens to you.”

  The unicorn did a strange thing then. It came to her and indicated with an imperious motion of its head that it wanted to be picked up. Julie bent down to lift it, and it stepped off her joined palms into her lap, where—after pawing gently for a moment, like a dog settling in for the night—it folded its long legs and put its head down. Julie’s heart hiccupped absurdly in her breast.

  “I’m not a virgin,” she said. “But you know that.” The unicorn closed its eyes.

  Neither of them had moved when Farrell arrived, looking distinctly irritated and harassed. “I left Gracie to finish up,” he said. “Gracie. If I still have my job tomorrow, it’ll be more of a miracle than any mythical beast. Let’s go.”

  In the van, with the unicorn once again curled deep in Julie’s pocket, Farrell said, “What we have to do is, we have to take a look at the tapestry again. A good long look this time.”

  “It’s not going back there. I told you that.” She closed her hand lightly around the unicorn, barely touching it, more for her own heartening than its reassurance. “Joe, if that’s what you’re planning—”

  Farrell grinned at her through the timeless fast-food twilight of Madame Schumann-Heink. “No wonder you’re in such good shape, all that jumping to conclusions. Listen, there has to be some other figure in that smudgy thing, someone we didn’t see before. Our little friend has a friend.”

  Julie considered briefly, then shook her head. “No. No way. There was the knight, the squire, and that woman. That’s all, I’m sure of it.”

  “Um,” Farrell said. “Now, me, I’m never entirely sure of anything. You’ve probably noticed, over the years. Come on, Madame, you can do it.” He dropped the van into first gear and gunned it savagely up a steep, narrow street. “We didn’t see the fourth figure because we weren’t looking for it. But it’s there, it has to be. This isn’t Comparative Mythology, Jewel, this is me.”

  Madame Schumann-Heink actually gained the top of the hill without stalling, and Farrell rewarded such valor by letting the old van free-wheel down the other side. Julie said slowly, “And if it is there? What happens then?”

  “No idea. The usual. Play it by ear and trust we’ll know the right thing to do. You will, anyway. You always know the right thing to do, Tanikawa.”

  The casual words startled her so deeply that she actually covered her mouth for a moment: a classic Japanese mannerism she had left behind in her Seattle childhood.

  “You never told me that before. Twenty years, and you never said anything, like that to me.” Farrell was crooning placatingly to Madame Schumann-Heink’s brake shoes, and did not answer. Julie said, “Even if I did always know, which I don’t, I don’t always do it. Not even usually. Hardly ever, the way I feel right now.”

  Farrell let the van coast to a stop under a traffic light before he turned to her. His voice was low enough that she had to bend close to hear him. “All I know,” he said, “there are two of us girls in this heap, and one of us had a unicorn sleeping in her lap a little while back. You work it out.” He cozened Madame Schumann-Heink back into gear, and they lurched on toward the Bigby Museum.

  A different guard this time: trimmer, younger, far less inclined to speculative conversation, and even less likely to overlook dubious goings-on around the exhibits.

  Fortunately, there was also a university-sponsored lecture going on: it appeared to be the official word on the Brueghels, and had drawn a decent house for a Saturday night. Under his breath, Farrell said, “We split up. You go that way, I’ll ease around by the Spanish stuff. Take your time.”

  Julie took him at his word, moving slowly through the crowd and pausing occasionally for brief murmured conversations with academic acquaintances. Once she plainly took exception to the speaker’s comments regarding Brueghel’s artistic debt to his father-in-law, and Farrell, watching from across the room, fully expected her to interrupt the lecture with a discourse of her own. But she resist
ed temptation; they met, as planned, by the three tapestries, out of the guard’s line of sight, and with only a single bored-looking browser anywhere near them. Julie held Farrell’s hand tightly as they turned to study the middle tapestry.

  Nothing had changed. The knight and squire still prodded a void toward their pale lady, who went on leaning forward to drape her wreath around captive space. Julie imagined a bleak recognition in their eyes of knotted thread that had not been there before, but she felt foolish about that and said nothing to Farrell. Silently the two of them divided the tapestry into fields of survey, as they had done with the gallery itself when the unicorn first escaped. Julie took the foreground, scanning the ornamental garden framing the three human figures for one more face, likely dirty and bearded, perhaps by now so faded as to merge completely with the faded leaves and shadows. She was on her third futile sweep over the scene when she heard Farrell’s soft hiss beside her.

  “Yes!” he whispered. “Got you, you godly little recluse, you. I knew you had to be in there!” He grabbed Julie’s hand and drew it straight up to the vegetable-looking forest surrounding the distant castle. “Right there, peeping coyly out like Julia’s feet, you can’t miss him.”

  But she could, and she did, for a maddening while; until Farrell made her focus on a tiny shape, a gray-white bulge at the base of one of the trees. Nose hard against the glass, she began at last to see it clearly: all robe and beard, mostly, but stitched with enough maniacal medieval detail to suggest a bald head, intense black eyes and a wondering expression. Farrell said proudly, “Your basic resident hermit. Absolutely required, no self-respecting feudal estate complete without one. There’s our boy.”

  It seemed to Julie that the lady and the two men were straining their embroidered necks to turn toward the castle and the solitary form they had forgotten for five centuries. “Him?” she said. “He’s the one?”