by Lisa Mangum
“You understand what you must do?” John asked.
Sharareh nodded.
John regarded her expectantly, and Sharareh lowered her gaze and spoke. “I am to sit on the bank, a slight distance from the water. I am to be quiet and still. I am to wait until the unicorn comes to drink, and if it does not take notice of me, I may sing softly, to draw its attention. I am to allow it to come to me, and it will lay down before me and put its head in my lap, and I may stroke it to lull it to sleep. Once I am certain it is asleep, I am to raise my hand to summon you, and I am to continue soothing it until …” Her voice broke. “Until you are in position to collar it or cut its throat, or until it bolts to its feet and threatens to trample me.”
Assuming a unicorn did indeed appear, trampling was a likely outcome of the encounter. It depended on how close the unicorn got before it recognized the anger in her thoughts, or the utter lack of purity in her soul.
At a distance, a unicorn would simply run the other way, and if she were lucky, John and her father would blame the unicorn’s flight on her loud breathing, or her sisters’ perfume on her clothing, or if she were very fortunate indeed, on some ill omen wholly beyond her control.
If she were not lucky, John would call her a liar and a harlot, and she would not be able to convince her father otherwise. She thought again of Rasheesh, and how her father already had his profit from these men. It might be better if the unicorn failed to realize its error until she touched it. It might be faster, less painful, to die beneath its hooves.
John’s upper lip curled into a hunter’s smile. “Exactly,” he said softly, and his approval was a cold and dismissive thing. He turned his back on Sharareh and filled his own water skin, then turned his gelding loose and led his men to cover in a clump of long grasses several paces downwind.
As instructed, Sharareh found a place a few paces from the water where the desert palms cast strong shadows and the ground appeared comfortably dry. She sat down on the short grass and crossed her legs, arranging her skirts around her. From the corner of her eye she could see John and his men settling into their hiding places. The shadow of a vulture passed between the sand and the sun. Sharareh shivered, despite the fierce heat of the midday desert.
It would be a long wait. Sharareh steeled herself for strength. These Northerners were impatient; mad, even. There would be no animals moving about now. Creatures waited in shady nooks for the setting sun to bring some relief to the desert. They went about the business of eating and avoiding being eaten during the cool of the evening. Sharareh tried not to think about the corpses of the caravan slowly cooking in the sun, or what might have been responsible for putting them there.
Sharareh did her best to stay still in both body and mind, but as the sun crawled across the heavens, her muscles cramped painfully and her thoughts chased themselves round and round in circles. If there were a God, should she pray for Him to bring a unicorn to her lap, or to chase them all far away from here? Sharareh’s head nodded as fatigue led her into a near-trance. Her lips cracked, but rising to sip from the oasis pool would doubtlessly irritate John. She could hear her father now, cautioning her against “unnecessary motion.”
She licked at her mouth with a tongue swollen with thirst, pretending she was drinking. She could almost taste sweet water. Sharareh could imagine how it would feel to plunge her hands into the cooling pool of the oasis, to raise her cupped palms to her mouth and suck water through her lips. She could hear the light splashing …
She could hear.
Sharareh startled, as though emerging from a deep and dark sleep. Claws of thirst still scratched at her throat, threatening to gag her, but she forced herself to swallow down a passage that ached with dryness. She lifted her gaze to the spring and held her breath at the creature that stood there, knee-deep in the pool, its arching neck curved to the surface of the water, its long black tongue lapping up life-giving moisture.
Death was drinking there.
Sharareh had seen a unicorn once, a pale and spindly thing hardly bigger than a goat, standing on the crest of a faraway dune, the desert moon turning its heels and horn to silver. The Northerners had hunted them to the brink of extinction, driving them ever farther from their native habitat. Now only a handful remained, crouching on the verges of the Northerners’ voracious civilization. Her tribe knew that the Northerners had been coming here to the desert to make war for generations, that these Crusaders had driven unicorns before them as they’d advanced, and that a few of the elusive beasts survived in hidden oases even now. These were the animals John and his men were hunting.
What drank from the oasis was not a Northern unicorn.
From fireside tales she knew the creature’s name. Taller than the hunter’s horses, taller even than John’s great black gelding, the beast was easily the size of a camel. Like a camel, its hooves were split in two, the better to carry it across the shifting desert sands. Its tongue descended to the surface of the pool from between two razor-sharp fangs that protruded over its lower lip. Its horn was a serrated scimitar, caked with dried blood. Its thick hide, like leather armour, glistened in the sunlight, glittering the resplendent purple of kingship. Sharareh beheld it and understood why the storytellers called it the lord of the desert.
Sharareh looked closer at its groin, her eyes narrowing. This lord was, in fact, a lady; worse, then, for Sharareh, for the female of the species was said to be even more deadly than the male. Her eyes returned, unbidden, to those dagger fangs and the gory horn, and she remembered that while Northern unicorns fed on flower petals and dew, this one preferred to sate itself on brambles and freshly spilled viscera.
She looked back over her shoulder, seeking direction from her employers. Surely John would have mercy. Surely. Sharareh had been willing to bait a Northern unicorn; she had been prepared to grovel shamelessly if she failed.
She had not expected to face down a karkadann.
John’s face was too far away for her to see clearly, but from his rough and vigorous gesturing—turn around, turn around—she could guess he was angry. Automatically, Sharareh obeyed, her head turning and bowing even as her mind caught up with her and screamed that she should be running, that the karkadann was a far more immediate danger than John’s displeasure. Did John even understand that the purple beast with the crescent horn was as merciless as the desert heat, as relentless as the infinite dunes, and as vicious as a sandstorm that flayed flesh from bone?
From under lowered eyelids, Sharareh lifted her gaze to the creature and her breath shriveled in her throat. The karkadann had noticed movement, and it had left off drinking, regarding her with an eye that burned hot like the desert sun.
Sharareh watched the karkadann watching her and was aware, more than aware, that to pretend to be a dull-witted virgin was a death sentence. She was looking at the end of everything and now, face to face with the destroyer, she had only one choice to make: to meet it on her knees, or to meet it on her feet.
She remembered Rasheesh crying and kissing the shaykh’s sandals, praying for a mercy that was not granted. She remembered kneeling in her father’s tent when Abbas entered with his bag of gold and told her that she would go with John and do as he said. She felt the bruise on her cheek, recalled the greed in John’s eyes, and within her soul a smoldering ember burst at last into flame.
She had done nothing to earn this fate. To the Inferno with her father, who had sold his daughters for lucre. To the outer wastes with the Northerners, who knew nothing of the desert and cared only for their own profits. She could bow her head and accept this final injustice, or she could practice how she would face her God when He condemned her for the sins of a disobedient heart and a wrathful spirit.
Sharareh rose.
The karkadann stepped towards her, and Sharareh saw its great cloven hoof press upon the moist earth where the soil met the oasis pool. The urge to turn and flee crashed over her with the fury of a flash flood, accompanied by a voice in her head that sounded like her fath
er’s demanding to know why she was not already moving. She spat back at him that she again had a choice to make: to die running or to face down the karkadann. The thought of Rasheesh’s bloodied and broken body filled her with fury. It sickened her to imagine her father shaking his head, looking down on the corpse of his cowardly and useless daughter. No. Her father would know at the end of things that she had been irredeemable, defiant to the last.
The purple lady of the desert came to a halt barely a step away from her. Sharareh hardly dared to breathe. Her mother had taught her that when confronting a wild animal, she should pretend it was her father and never look it in the eye. It would only provoke the creature, she said, only incite it to wrath; but if Sharareh glanced away, she might as well be running.
Sharareh met the karkadann face to face, eye to eye. A sliver of lavender iris formed an endless ring around the karkadann’s huge black pupil. The lady of the desert looked at her and through her in a manner that stripped her bare, tore off her veil, flung open her robes, pushed aside her flesh, and stabbed straight through to her soul. For a moment it seemed to Sharareh that she could see something in the karkadann’s eye, not the reflection of a child bride, but a glimpse of a warrior-woman regarding Sharareh with her head lifted in challenge.
Distantly, Sharareh heard a sharp noise like two rocks banging together. The karkadann ignored the sound, so Sharareh did as well. Then a whistle, unlike the sound of any desert bird, pierced the air. Sharareh realized it must be John’s men, attempting to get her attention without spooking the karkadann by using human language.
What did those fools want her to do? Sit, and pray the karkadann would kneel? The lady of the desert would not kneel. This purple shaykha would be no slave; she was no man’s servant.
Did they want Sharareh to cast herself on the karkadann’s horn, then? To sacrifice her life on the altar of their greed?
Sharareh felt a mantle of disdain settle on her shoulders. Let them come this close to a karkadann and see how well they fared.
The lady of the desert lowered her head and whuffled softly.
Disbelieving, Sharareh wound her hand into the thick bristles of the karkadann’s mane. For a moment, she hesitated as a ribbon of fear coiled around her heart. Then she thought of that bridal tent, that future as bleak as a desert horizon, and she asked herself, On my knees or on a karkadann?
Sharareh clasped her other hand as far over the creature’s back as she could and jumped, and the karkadann bent her knees and dipped. Sharareh could not determine the degree to which she threw herself onto the karkadann from the degree to which the karkadann maneuvered to catch her, but the next thing she knew, the purple shaykha had turned her back on the Northerners and was walking away from the oasis, with Sharareh clinging to her neck.
They had moved several paces before the Northerners understood that they had been dismissed. Then the men started shouting, swearing, John roaring out Sharareh’s name. All the while the karkadann moved serenely forward, as though she were a vast ship sailing over a smooth and placid sea, undeterred by the obnoxious cries of birds.
John began to scream and curse, yelling all manner of hateful epithets, and Sharareh could not help but tremble. She had seen her father in such a state far too often, and she knew what would come next. The noisemaker rocks would be thrown at her, pulverizing her bones, like poor Rasheesh. Or the men would raise their long guns to their shoulders and fire, not caring if they shot Sharareh so long as they brought down the karkadann.
The karkadann raised its neck and tilted its head, rolling one eye to look back at her, and it whickered, as though amused.
Sharareh, filled with hope, smiled. Her fingers wound tighter into its mane.
Then they were galloping forward over the sands. Guns fired with a volley of pops and snaps, and Sharareh was certain she saw a bullet glance off the karkadann’s thick purple hide, but surely she dreamed such a thing. Surely. The karkadann sped up, and time around them seemed to slow. Sharareh saw the surface of the water float gently past below them, and droplets rose up in twin plumes behind them, leaving a rainbow to mark their passage. The rock wall rose ahead in a sheer, smooth barrier, impossibly high, and Sharareh braced herself. If the karkadann did not balk, they would be dashed against the stone.
The lady of the desert reared up onto an outcropping. Then she tucked up her knees and soared. Her powerful hindquarters launched them skyward with a force no horse could match. They were airborne, flying over the canyon wall, the horizon a brilliant blue and countless leagues away.
For just an instant, Sharareh looked back. The last thing she saw was not John or his men or the last vestiges of her old life vanishing behind her, but John’s nameless gelding, watching them with an expression Sharareh could only describe as envy. Sharareh’s destiny stretched out into the far distance ahead, unseeable, unknowable, but the moment did grant her a revelation: whatever her future, it would not be the same as his.
* * *
Sharareh did not know how long she rode. She was dazzled by thirst, overcome by fatigue, dizzied by the sheer power of the karkadann and the fierce, intoxicating taste of freedom. It might have been minutes or days before the purple shaykha slowed to a trot, and when Sharareh focused her eyes on the sight before her, she saw the fantastic mirage of a flaming sun setting behind the walls of a city whose name she did not know, and a still more impossible sight standing just outside its gates.
Sharareh let go of the karkadann’s mane and rubbed at her eyes, convinced that she must be sunstruck. She scoured until her eyeballs ached, but when she moved her hands away and opened her eyelids, the vision remained.
There were four of them, each mounted on a unicorn, and they all stood as still as a carved relief against the limestone walls.
The rider to the left had pale skin like John’s and hair the colour of ripe grain. She wore heavy metal armour on her chest, shoulders, and thighs. The biggest sword Sharareh had ever seen hung at her side, long and straight and broad; it would surely take two hands to lift it. Her mount, too, was massive: its back wide like a rhino’s, and its feet the size of a water pail, fringed with wispy hair. Its nose was blunted, and its horn was thick at the base, tapering rapidly into a long, narrow lance.
Next to her rode a fine-boned woman with dark and perfectly straight hair worn loose over her shoulders. Sharareh at first thought the stranger squinted at the sky until she realized the other woman’s eyes held that shape permanently. Her clothes were made of finely embroidered silk and featured a strange vertical collar embellished with ornate ties. She carried a rippled blade that appeared, to Sharareh, like water incarnate in a sword. She rode a creature with a horn that branched into two points, so that from a distance it might almost resemble a gazelle’s antlers.…but no gazelle had a long, thick tail like a serpent, or fine scales that Sharareh had almost mistaken for armour.
The third … Sharareh had no words for the third. It seemed, on first glance, to be a man: he had soft down on his face, the beginnings of a beard, and his shoulders were broad beneath his robes. Yet the person was shorter than Sharareh and wore long, braided hair and the traditional robes of a woman. She—or he, Sharareh could not guess which—sat astride a delicate white Northern unicorn, with its tiny beard and tasseled lion’s tail. Sharareh smiled, wondering what John might have said had he seen the prey he sought with the strange company it kept.
And the fourth—the fourth sat mounted on a karkadann, a mare even larger than the purple desert princess that bore Sharareh. The other karkadann’s hide gleamed golden yellow, and its back was striped with striking blue slashes the colour of sapphires. Its horn, a brass sabre, sat on its brow like a crown.
The karkadann rider was no less regal than her mount. Her skin was as dark as the fabled soil of Kumat, and on her head she wore a diadem in the shape of a cobra, dangerous and proud. Her hair had been woven into short, strong tails tipped with beads, like the tendrils of a whip. She wore the leathers of a warrior tailored to fit her f
eminine form, and she held a scimitar, the blade of the prophets.
Sharareh had heard tales of the people of Kumat and their rich black land faraway across the red desert. The leaders among them were called pharaoh: god-king. Sharareh had imagined a god-king to be much like her own tribe’s shaykhas, but now, ah, now she understood the difference. No shaykha would dare sit astride a karkadann as though it were a camel; no shaykha would wear both the garb of a woman and the blade of a warrior, in defiance of all man’s laws. Only God could judge this dark rider, and Sharareh was not convinced the pharaoh woman was not divine herself.
“Ho,” she said in Sharareh’s own tongue, her voice husky and low. “Azazel returns.” Her head tilted with curiosity as her full lips formed a half-smile. “And what is this she has brought with her?”
“I think it is a desert rat,” laughed the woman in silks. “Azazel, you should put it back.”
The creature beneath Sharareh spoke, and the deep vibration of the karkadann’s words traveled through her thighs and shook her bones, until her whole being trembled with the power in the purple unicorn’s speech. “Would you go back home, little one?”
Sharareh’s throat tightened with fear. She could hear her mother’s soothing voice in her mind, calming her, telling her she needed only speak a few words. Just a few words, and the karkadann would return her to her father’s tent, unharmed. Just a few words and she would be back where she belonged, back among the familiar, safe …
No. Not safe. Never safe, in a tent where her father would sell her to the highest bidder for a goat and a bag of shekels. Never in a family where a mother stood meekly aside while her own daughter became sacrifice. Never among a people who called such actions virtue.
Sharareh’s hands tightened in Azazel’s short mane until the wiry strands threatened to cut through her skin like garrotes. The word she had retched halfway up her throat and gulped back down to gag on for her entire life spewed forth at last.