Unicorn Genesis (Unicorn Western)

by Sean Platt

  The boat’s slow rocking as it bobbed along (aimless, without a sail or regularly working oars, apparently) made Edward unsteady, so he lay down on the deck. Two human men passed with curious glances. If Edward had to guess, they were probably wondering why he wasn’t below with the other stinking cargo.

  “Noah,” said Edward. He hated how it sounded as the word flew from his mouth. He’d begun their short acquaintance by assuming an air of superiority, but Noah didn’t have the context to consider Edward superior, and Edward (who couldn’t fly or do decent magic) didn’t have the means to convince him. Now his words were coming out as if he were conversing with an equal. He had been so appalled by Grappy’s suggestion that they very well might be.

  Noah turned.

  “What do you call this place?”

  “‘Ark.’”

  “I mean all of this,” said Edward, gesturing out toward the water.

  “‘Big lake.’”

  “The whole of the world. The place you lived. Is it near Mead?”

  “Mead?”

  “Yar. Mead is where I’m from. Where we’d never seen a storm, and there were unicorns and trolls and ghryst and elves and … ”

  Edward stopped, realizing how different Mead was from this place. He remembered losing his sense of direction before blacking out, feeling that he could be anywhere. And with that came a sensation that some deep part of him remembered as if in a dream. Something his mind had hidden when he’d awoken: a sense of something huge and sturdy splitting into millions of little pieces. Edward couldn’t remember anything beyond that vague feeling, and a notion that tasted like desperation.

  “I’ve never heard of Mead,” Noah said. “Should we go there? I have no elves or trolls.”

  Edward got a brief mental picture, imagining Noah trying to shove elves into the hold. It wouldn’t be pretty. They would want to remain above deck, as Edward had, and would probably rope the humans and cast spells on their spindly bodies.

  “I don’t know where Mead is from here,” Edward answered. Saying it aloud made him sad. He couldn’t help but feel that wherever this place was (Noah still hadn’t answered that question), it was somewhere over the rainbow from Mead. He might never return.

  Noah shrugged then returned his eyes to the horizon. Edward looked up, seeing the sky empty and devoid of flying unicorns, wondering where he was.

  CHAPTER 14

  NIGHT MAGIC

  Noah was willing to let Edward bunk with the humans, but the other humans were less accommodating. This was fine with Edward because all of the humans stank. Unicorns stayed clean by virtue of the magic in their bodies. Humans seemed to require constant cleaning to remove the layers of filth that came not just from their environment but from within themselves. Edward had never realized this before and was disgusted to learn it. Apparently, humans were fluid factories, always pushing oils and liquids through their skins. The oils and liquids dried on them, forming a disgusting stew that crusted with tiny things that generated even more filth. If Edward had any magic at his disposal, he would’ve subjected them all to a daily scouring. The only way to bathe was to haul water up over the sides and rub down in a giant half barrel on the deck. Because this took so much effort, the humans never bothered. They all stank, so they stopped noticing the way everything else stank. Edward, who was used to the perfumed scents of unicorns and Mead flowers, did not.

  He found a sort of closet above deck and made it his home, fortifying it with some thankfully clean straw from the hold. He didn’t like straw; he was as used to soft grass (and, recently, his appy’s back) as he was to the Mead smells. The alternative was to lie on the deck boards, which Noah finally admitted, after some prodding, had been repurposed from an old pigsty.

  Everything in the ark was disgusting and loud and putrid and annoying. Edward felt as if he were sullied simply by being on it. His initial companionship with Noah had mostly held, but the fresh luster of seeing humans’ other side (the side that didn’t look like idiot barbarians when watched from afar) was quickly subdued by their general filth. The unicorn spoke with Noah because the others seemed disturbed by what they still thought was a talking horse (Edward kept his wings tucked around the others and allowed them to think what they wanted; it was just easier even though his pride protested) and because he was therefore the only sentient being he could talk to. Any conversational port in a storm, Edward thought — ironic, seeing as he’d apparently caught the end of a very long storm in this strange new place with its odd new animals and lack (for the most part) of the animals and beings he knew.

  The storm’s conclusion delighted the humans. Edward, who had seen clear skies for the week or so he’d been flying (it certainly hadn’t been forty days), was less impressed with the current clear skies. Watching the ark's handful of human occupants smile and mill the decks, Edward began to get an impression of what their long stay in the cramped ark must have been like. He listened to their tales, and he asked Noah about his adventures when they were alone together. He learned that unlike in Mead, the flood here had started slowly following a very hard, very steady rain that was, more often than not, accompanied by wind and lightning. Noah had tried to keep an eye on the humans from his village, but quickly it was all lost as waters and wind swept everything away. Sometimes it rained without storming, but the rain never ceased, until there was nothing but the ark and an endless horizon.

  When night came, much of Noah’s wild-eyed, bushy-haired mania seemed to vanish into the evening’s somber mood. The stars were bright overhead — different, Edward was sure, from the stars he was used to. There were moments when he panicked and wondered if he was the mad one, and moments when he thought back to the storm and his dim memory, buried in a dream, of some great thing breaking. There were moments when Edward considered Grappy’s stories about other worlds, as fantastical as those had always seemed. Mostly he tried to forget everything so he could be a colt standing on a deck in the dark, speaking to a voice that he could pretend, if Edward looked away, was another unicorn back in Mead.

  “Did it really just happen, Noah?” Edward asked. “There were no signs? No indications as to what might have caused it?” The unicorn didn’t elaborate but didn’t trust himself to do so. “It” to Noah would mean the flood. To Edward, “it” meant much more — his dislocation from everything he’d ever known, for instance.

  “I heard that voice. Then I started to build. Just as I finished, the rains came.” Edward looked over, despite the reminder that his companion was human. Noah met his eye.

  “The rains waited for you to finish?”

  “That’s when it started. That’s all I know.”

  “Why you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you traffic in magic?”

  It was the first time Edward had mentioned magic. They’d been on the boat for five days by Edward’s count, floating along as the floodwaters hopefully receded (there was no way to tell without landmarks), and waiting for land to show so they could finally disembark. In all that time, Edward had kept magic to himself. He didn’t want to draw attention, to elicit an expectation that he should be able to perform (to make the water go away or repair leaks in the boat, for instance), but after enough time watching the humans, Edward began to doubt they knew the concept.

  “Magic?”

  “Yar, magic. Using the universal mind, focusing energy … ” The unicorn reminded himself that humans didn’t have magic within themselves. “Using enchanted objects.”

  “As far as I know, Edward,” said Noah, and the unicorn was reminded that of all the humans, only Noah ever used his name, “only the stars and skies use magic.”

  “So you have never encountered anything that … seemed to do things that only Providence could do.”

  “Providence?”

  “Mayhap the voice you mentioned,” Edward said. “We might call that Providence.”

  “Hmm. In ‘Mead.’”

  “Yar.”

  Noah thought t
hen shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. You have magic in Mead?”

  “All unicorns are magic.”

  “Really? Can you get us to land?”

  Edward realized he probably shouldn’t be discussing any of this with the crazy, wild-eyed human. But something told him to continue, so he did.

  “No. I don’t have magic yet. I mean, I have it. But I can’t use it because I’m too young.”

  “And because your horn is small?” Noah added.

  Edward felt his lip curl. “Yar, that too. But it will grow.”

  Finally Noah said, “Why did you ask about magic?”

  “I was just thinking about something my grap … my grandfather told me,” Edward said, switching to the word Noah would understand. “He was afraid that humans were … ” Edward trailed off, unsure if he was doing something wrong by conveying Grappy’s suspicions to Noah. Did it matter that the humans knew what they were doing was wrong? How could that matter, seeing as the humans on the ark had no magic? If Noah had been from the Realm, he’d have a magic boat propeller. Noah was floating. He didn’t bathe. He chewed dried corn soaked in rainwater rather than using a mealstone to generate tasty food for his whims.

  “Were what?” said Noah. In the dark, his voice seemed calm — nothing like crazy daytime Noah.

  “Where I’m from,” Edward began again, looking up at the unfamiliar stars, “humans have learned to harness magic. But because they don’t understand it, Grappy feared they were causing a … a kind of rift.”

  Edward looked over at Noah, anticipating a string of endless questions. Noah simply said, “Oh.”

  “Grappy worried that humans tinkering with magic would cause some sort of a calamity. I was wondering if you’d tinkered.”

  “And caused the flood?” Noah seemed almost offended.

  Edward shrugged.

  “Well,” said Noah, “that voice said a lot of things. Like, it said to collect sand fleas. But I didn’t collect sand fleas … though somehow I’m sure they’ll survive anyway.”

  Edward looked over then out on the dark water.

  Beside him, Noah said, “This magic. What can it do? And what kind of artifacts have humans around you learned to use?”

  “It could propel your boat. It could mayhap allow us to fly above the water if there were a reason. It could make heat, cold, clean water, food … ”

  “Where can I find these things?”

  The question made Edward uncomfortable. Noah’s voice was light, but in it he could hear the small speck of greed that all humans had, whether they knew it or intended it or not. Helping to balance his discomfort came another thought planted by Grappy back at the haven: Humans were necessary for unicorns. Grappy had wanted them to pair so the unicorn’s pure mind could absorb some of the humans’ impurity. Partnering with humans gives us our peaches, he’d said, referring to the dark tree’s fruit. Mayhap it was okay to discuss these things with Noah. Mayhap it was even what Grappy had meant when he’d said Edward would play an important role — mayhap it was right that Edward was partnering in this way, swapping light and dark across species.

  “They may not exist here,” Edward said. “This place is different from Mead. Mayhap there is no magic here.”

  That didn’t make sense. The world was the world, and every world’s beginning was birthed in magic. If Edward wasn’t in the world of Mead anymore, the magic here would simply take a different form.

  “Oh.”

  “But if it did,” the unicorn said, “you’d have to understand that it comes in equal parts, light and dark. If humans here discover magic, you’d have to accept both.” He tried to remember what Grappy had said, feeling reckless for even broaching the topic. “You’d have to accept that dark magic is as valid as light, and its necessary antidote. And that you’d have to … like … combine them.” Edward was reaching. He’d arrived at the end of his knowledge, and had perhaps gone beyond it. He was, in other words, speaking out of his hindquarters.

  Noah nodded. “It’s like the flood.”

  Edward’s head snapped sideways.

  “Water,” said Noah, looking out. He was quiet for long enough that Edward thought he’d lost what he wanted to say. Then he continued: “Once I realized what was going to happen — and started trying to warn others to build boats, and man, did that not go well — I asked the voice, when it would talk to me, why it would be a flood, and why I alone was tasked with helping at least a few of us to survive. It said that everything has a dual nature, and that while water sustains and cleans, it can also kill us. It said that we were supposed to be fruitful and multiply, but that we’d been too fruitful in some ways.”

  “So you were being punished?” Edward asked. “According to this voice?”

  Noah shook his head. “The flood wasn’t a punishment. It was a consequence.”

  “A consequence of what?”

  “Something,” said Noah. “But I was being warned, not threatened. I got the impression that the flood would be our fault — mayhap even my fault, though I don’t see how that’s possible — without being something set upon us because we’d done wrong. We did something, and the flood happened. But we brought it upon ourselves.”

  “How?” said Edward.

  “I don’t know,” Noah said. “The voice had an annoying tendency to show up and tell me to do things, but it never seemed willing to answer questions. I thought it was messing with me.”

  Edward recalled how Grappy had spoken of the voice — and yar, Noah’s assessment seemed about right. Then he thought of Mead’s flood, and how it had arrived with much less pomp and circumstance than it had in Noah’s world, and that seemed less right. Whether or not the reasons were clear, this world seemed to have experienced a cycle of trespass and consequence. Mead, by contrast, had simply been blindsided, also by water.

  Finally Noah stood and slapped Edward amiably on the back.

  “It’s all beyond me, Edward,” he said. “And right now, I just need to sleep. Because tomorrow will be the day we find land.”

  Edward almost laughed. He didn’t, but he almost did. It was the closest he’d come to being friendly since making the humans’ acquaintance. Noah said the same thing every night as a matter of ritual. Yet still the world held nothing but endless blue above and below.

  In the morning they saw a small strip of green in the direction of the sunrise. When the sun cleared the horizon, the strip was still there. The ship’s few oars were brought out, and the humans rowed. The water was still, and the wind was absent. The going was slow, given the ark's size and weight, but by evening the front of their hull had settled into the wet ground with a squishing sensation.

  The gangway was lowered. The humans anchored the boat and stepped down, finding their feet immediately in mud. They laughed. Edward, whose feet had only so briefly touched land since the day his grappies had died, laughed too. The ground was too wet for Edward to disembark but he did anyway, and he sank, then soldiered forward and soon found himself on land that was sun-dried enough to support his weight.

  He looked down as his white legs shed the mud and became pristine. He found himself standing in green grass, long enough to have been growing for weeks. When Edward looked below the boat’s prow, he saw long grass there too, growing impossibly below the water’s surface.

  CHAPTER 15

  A VERY MYSTERIOUS CAT

  The humans wanted to lie in the grass and hug the land. It became a very spiritual experience, which in Edward’s mind meant stupid. The unicorn wasn’t ready to give up on Mead. If he’d made it to where he was, he could get back. The humans weren’t interested in leaving; as far as they were concerned, this brick of impossible land (how had the grass grown underwater?) was only one thing: a gift. Despite Noah’s words, it quickly became clear that most of the humans did consider the flood to be a punishment, and the last thing they wanted to do was annoy whatever it was that had punished them by leaving. Going, they seemed to think, would be ungrateful.

  B
ut to Edward, who had things to do and places to go, moving on was sensible. The land’s sudden appearance seemed too fortuitous and too downright strange (Edward kept thinking of the grass) to be anything other than magic. It didn’t seem like a flood that was receding. It seemed like a ready-made new world surfacing to replace the old one. Despite Noah’s suggestion that there was no magic in this world, Edward, once attuned and on land, found Noah’s blindness baffling. How could humans not feel the land’s immense magical wealth? How could they not see what was all around them? The sun shone. The plants grew. Noah had saved many animals, but Edward could already see that plenty had survived on their own. There were birds in trees farther on, yet Edward could see floodwater lines on surrounding hills that clearly indicated the trees had been underwater. Yet the trees had survived, the birds had survived, various roaming animals had survived. It could only be magic.

  Edward said his farewell to Noah and the ark's crew — both smelly humans and smelly animals — and started to walk. There was nobody around to ask the unicorn where he was going, but if Edward had been asked, he would have answered, “Away.”

  As the unicorn continued to walk, he found himself more attuned to the world around him. Edward could see animals that he and Noah both knew (honeybees) and animals he’d seen on Noah’s boat that he’d never seen before (long-legged creatures he believed were called “deers”), but Edward also started to see creatures that Noah had said he’d never heard of. There were pixies collecting morning dew from the lips of bright blue forget-me-knots. He saw a stirring that, though it was only from the corner of his eye, Edward thought might be fairies. Beyond all of these, the unicorn began to see creatures and features he’d never heard of. There were tiny human-shaped things that hid in the brush as he passed, then swarmed behind him as if curious and unwilling to approach. There were strange, large grasshopper-like insects with bright eyes that could climb trees then pivot their rear legs and walk upright like people. There were mushrooms everywhere, multicolored and spotted, sturdy enough for even Edward to sit on, if unicorns had been able to truly sit. There were occasionally intelligent-looking creatures clambering on the mushrooms, naked, watching him. They had small, sharp teeth and tails yet held no menace in their expressions as he passed. They seemed to travel in groups of three, and as Edward went by, the nude peach things would run in front, watch him go by from atop the large mushrooms, then scamper past again.