by Mindi Meltz
“Second, I want to show you what is beautiful here in the forest and fields. I want to tell you, when you build your City again, to build it like this. Build it in this language, because then it will always feed you. Build it in a sacred language, because I am telling you a truth you have forgotten: this, your City, is the heart of this world.
“And, third, I want to tell you that you are not the only City or the only world. Perhaps you will meet the peoples of other cities one day. You will travel to other lands and meet other creatures, beings, and gods. And you must have a story by which to know yourselves. You must have a story, with gods and miracles in it, to guide your choices, keep you anchored, and remind you how to be human.”
Then he turned to the Princess and took her hands in his. They were sitting on the ground. It was the end of the day. Only one bird was still singing, trilling up and trilling down, as if it sang both a question and an answer. He whispered to her, but everyone heard him.
He said, “I am yours, Beloved. Thank you for bringing me back to the world. I am alive again.”
Then the Princess put her face in her hands and began to weep. Though it seemed perfectly natural, given what would happen, we at first felt a great fear. Though we had all seen loved ones die, and though we had spent the last season telling our stories and accepting the feelings we felt, the Princess’s tears came as a shock to us, as if even now we thought she would save us by being above the things we felt. We did not know, at first, what to do. She sobbed and sobbed as if she would never stop, and the Prince just held her in his bony, frail arms.
Then some of us came to our senses and began to gather in, so that we made a circle around them instead of a crowd before them. Children picked up pretty things from the forest floor—fallen flowers, fantastically shaped seed cones, and lichen-laced branches—and wove them in a sort of wreath around the two of them, like a little nest, the way the Prince had always woven a safe space around our Councils by speaking with the winds and the other beings. When all of this was done, the Princess was finally quiet. The Prince was weak and had lain down on the earth, and the Princess, in order to keep her face close to his, had lain down beside him. We looked at their faces, as they looked into each other’s eyes, and we could not see inside the secret of their love. Yet we recognized this moment in our hearts, and we cried for them, and it did not feel strange to us that we stood present at such an intimate, personal time.
“But what is your real name?” we heard her beg. “Leave me with that, at least.”
“It is the name you knew me by,” he answered. “That is my real name. This life with you—this has been my real life.”
She was hiccuping with the tears again, like a child.
“Tell them,” he whispered to her, as if he could no longer find the voice to speak aloud to such a great multitude—and yet all of us heard. All of us. “Tell them I forgive them.”
Then he closed his eyes.
We never knew what he meant, exactly, by those words, but we sighed when we heard them, as if we had been holding our breaths. We no longer felt afraid of what was happening or of what would happen next. We no longer felt afraid to travel beyond into the other lands of our dreams.
From the Prince we learned not to be afraid, as our old god Hanum had taught us to be afraid, of aging and dying. We learned that through age, one becomes deeper with love and closer to what one loves, and that through dying, one gives and is reborn.
We stayed there through the night, and the Princess did not move from the ground, though he was clearly gone. We did not move from where we were. Some of us slept and some of us stayed awake with our heads bowed, in respect for him and in wonder at the feelings we felt, which we could name now.
When the morning came, and she still had not moved, an old woman came forward and laid a hand on her shoulder. Then a few others came around her and gently shook her. As if waking for the first time, she gazed around at us like a child. For a moment, we thought she was lost to us. But then she reached out her hands and clasped at ours. We reached back—not the way we had reached for her in the beginning, grabbing and clawing, but with tenderness now, with love. How she needed us then! We did not know that she could need us as much as we had ever needed her. We caressed her head; we let her cry on our shoulders; we wrapped our arms and bodies around her to comfort her. And it seemed as if she had never known this comfort before. As if she had not known that, when he died, we would be there to catch her: that this is what community is for. She had not known that she could touch us in this way, nor had we known that she would let us touch her.
Something changed that morning. Already, she was becoming like one of us. Already, we were seeing that the power, the healing, and the light they had seemed to carry was really ours. We had this to give, with merely the touch of our human hands, which was already magic.
We helped her to her feet. She stood with that joyless, determined strength that we had all had to find in ourselves this past year—that would make her go on and do what she had to do. We walked close beside her and helped her to carry his body all the way back through the forest and fields, walking all day and into the next night.
For though we thought we should bury him there, in that nest of beauty made by children, among the trees who seemed to know him so well, the Princess said no, that he must be buried in the City. That seemed wrong to us at first, for there were so many dead there already who had not even been buried properly. But we did as she asked. We carried him all the way back.
As we walked, she told us of the place he came from. She told of it as if she had been there, though she said she never had, and the love she seemed to feel in telling of it must have given her the strength to go on.
She told us of animals we had never seen and a color green we had only seen in dreams. She told us of a deep underwater darkness and a sweet, rising light—both of which we knew and remembered, or so it seemed to us. Then she told us that this place used to lie where the City Center was built. She said we had to bury him there. And when we protested that we could never clear so much rubble and concrete away, she insisted with a kind of fury in her eyes; she said that it would be so, even if she had to do it alone.
Of course we could not let her do it alone. And truly, after all the years that great steel building had stood in silence, forbidden to us and yet holding our very life’s blood in its tight fists, we found some fascination in wondering what forgotten land might have lain beneath it—that we now, at least through memory, would discover.
So we did it. We dug up the crumbled pavement with our hands and the most basic of tools, and we lifted away the rusted steel, and we dug into the forgotten earth beneath it. We did it even though we were starving, even though we were almost dying ourselves, because we felt that if we did not do something meaningful, if we did not do one thing truly good right now, we could not bear all the trials that would come after. We needed to know that we could count on our own hearts.
We helped her to bury him, and when we had done, she turned to us with her radiant face and said simply, “Thank you.”
Then she walked into the crowd.
But we did not feel her warm, beautiful passage as we had in the past; we did not part around her light. Instead she seemed to fade, as soon as she entered in among us, into one of us. Almost immediately, we lost her. We had seen her walk in among us, and all eyes had followed her, and yet, suddenly, she could not be identified. We turned every which way in confusion. We knew she was here, that she had not disappeared. But we could not recognize her now. Each of us started after someone different, thinking it was her, until that person turned around and we were unsure now of the face. She could have been any one of us. We no longer knew.
We know that dreams are real now. We know there are gods walking among us and begetting our children, though we can only guess at who they are, and perhaps by the time you read this we will all be a little bit
god and a little bit human.
None of us ever saw the Princess again. Yet most of us believe that we see her every day and simply do not know that we see her.
For we see such beauty, every day, that we never saw before.
Through the Story that the Princess and Prince gave to us, we learned the seasons for the first time—the seasons by which we would structure our lives, and survive, and keep this sacred place, the Heart of the World.
Spring was when the Princess first arrived: she tore away our old prejudices and gave us loved ones we had lost—and hope.
Summer was the time when miracles sustained us, when we followed in the wake of beauty; we discovered that, when we dared to look within ourselves, we found not emptiness after all, but riches.
Autumn was the time of harvest, when we buried the Prince’s body in that land where he was born. In that deep earth which we never knew was there, we planted the Prince like a seed. And afterward, every vegetable and fruit and living thing that could sustain us magically bloomed. When we saw it growing, we cleared away the rest of the debris. We cleared away many city blocks’ worth of land where the City Center once stood, and this was our new Center now: this garden of food, which began from the body of a god and which, over the years that would follow, we would keep alive with the work of our human hands.
Winter was the time of dreams, when we reflected on what had happened and on what we had done, when we felt the safety and pride of the new home we had begun to build for ourselves, and when we sat in gratitude for the final gift the Prince and Princess had left for us— from which, in their absence, we were able to begin again. It was the time of writing down the story of Spring, Summer, and Fall, a story that will be told over and over by the generations that come after us, when we who are now young become elders, and then the ancestors of the future.
I was not included in the Story; I was not written in any Chronicle.
The Prince from the swamp, where long ago the sea and the earth made love, did not speak of me to you. How I wish, sometimes, that you could see me. Yet he could not call upon me with only words, nor could he decide for you when you were ready to see me. So he protected me with his silence. Indeed, he never spoke of me to anyone but his love, who at that time—long ago on a mountaintop—was called Lonely.
Some things are so silent that they are continually forgotten and lost between the cracks of eras, like the truth that Unicorns existed, and what we were for. It is right that I am forgotten. It is in the forgetting that I am released, so that I may one day be reborn.
My first duty, when I left that human form for the last time, was to the elements, from which life is made. I went up on the mountaintop again and spoke with the sun. I spoke with Fire, and Fire was angry. It had been misused, mishandled, and forgotten. It was hungry. I asked it what it wanted, and it said it wanted food. It wanted to give life even as it took life, and after it died, it wanted to be remembered and brought back to life, over and over again. So I said that I would carry that message.
I went into the valley and spoke with the ground. The Earth was afraid, for it had been beaten and gutted and shamed. I asked what it wanted. And the Earth wanted to give, and it wanted for that giving to be honored, the way the heart wants its love to be taken. It wanted the security of seasons. It wanted peace and to be fed with the remains of the dead. So I said that I would carry that message.
I wandered throughout the many landscapes and spoke constantly with the wind. I asked the Air what it wanted. It said it wanted nothing. But when I stopped asking and only listened, for many, many days, it said it wanted freedom. It wanted to bring empty purity with every breath, and nothing more. So I said that I would carry that message.
I went back to the sea, and asked the Water what it wanted. The Water was sad, for it wanted to remain pure, so that it could give life. It wanted the joy of running, and the peace of stillness. But it did not ask for anything. It only wanted to fall deeper and deeper toward the center, and never stop. So I said that I would carry that message.
I dipped my horn into the sea and into the wind, and into the earth and into the sun, and I made them pure again, at least for now. I made them whole again; I made them new. Now everyone could receive the gifts of these elements again; now all creatures would be able to trust the Fire, the Water, the Air, and the Earth to give them the life they were meant to have—without poison hidden within it. I purified the elements so that even the people could receive these gifts again, like forgiveness.
My next duty was to the plants, who are the first life. The mosses, the ferns, the grasses, the flowers, the trees. They had little to say, and of course they did not ask for anything. But their language, after so many years of taking poison from the elements, had begun to change from the original language. It had become a language of suffering, anger, and fear. Trees grew in uglier shapes, and were stunted; flowers forgot to yield fruit. Fields were thorny and spoke a monotone of brambles, and forests were shallow, with only two scrubby levels of life. So I had to teach them the original languages again: the languages of beauty. That took a long time.
I gave my whole being to these healings. And in between these conversations, I would have died without Dragon.
The stories that are told throughout time, where the Unicorn encounters the Dragon, and every time one slays the other, are not true. Great wars and injustices are perpetrated in the name of this misunderstanding.
The truth is that I needed Dragon, and we were part of each other. Dragon was the very source, the very energy with which I made my healing. He was the life force that I transformed into whatever was needed, to heal the pieces of this world. He was also, at the same time, that which reminded me to feel compassion in spite of everything; without him, I would not have felt the motivation to go on, to give light not only to all the elements and beings of the world, but also to the human beings.
Dragon was also, of course, as he wished to be, my protector.
He came steadily with me as I traveled from one land to another. He walked by my side over field and forest, desert and plain, river and barren cliff. Because in my new activity everywhere, I was more vulnerable than ever before, he stayed by me during those times in between, when someone might see me and not understand, when someone might try to steal the light. This partnership was a healing for both of us, for in order to exist and act in the world, we had also both come from mortal selves. Besides being the Dragon, he was once also the boy who had not known how to love, and besides being the Unicorn, I was once also the girl who had not been able to receive it. So we needed each other now.
When I returned from my last Council, the Council of Animals, Dragon was sleeping. The last thing he remembered was Coyote walking toward us—the last animal to be found and called to the circle. Coyote was laughing, the black hole of his mouth smelling of swamplands.
Now I stood over Dragon, and he scrambled to his knees, and almost cried out at the sight of me. I know why. My horn was nearly gone—only the palest strand of light echoing where it once was. I was blind. My fur was rough and ragged, my legs fleshless and trembling, my body scarred, bleeding, and cold, my neck bald and my tail gone. All my beauty, all my magic—gone. Poor Dragon: it was a nightmare for him.
“What has happened to you?!” he roared, feeling like a child all over again, with the Mother once again stolen from him. “Why didn’t you take me with you?”
It’s all right, I said to him in my voiceless voice, my breath labored. No human or god came to this Council. Not even you.
But Dragon had felt so needed, and now, at the last moment, he felt betrayed.
Don’t be angry, I said. Did you come for pride? Did you come to prove something?
“No, I came to help you. I came for you!” His voice sounded desperate, reminding him terribly of the lonely boy he used to be.
I am grateful, Dragon. Please stay with me. Now comes the hardest
part for me.
For in that Council, each of the animals had come forward to the Unicorn for healing.
They came forth to me one by one from the great circle, to where I lay in the center. Each confessed the wounds that he or she had suffered at the hands of humanity.
The wolf, hanging his head, whispered his humiliation. His ancient clan, his power and respect among all the animal world, his friendship with the moon, all meant nothing to the human hunters. All his stealth and physical wisdom were reduced to startled whines of pain at the shot of a gun, and wolf children left their burrows to find their great elders—their heroes—dead.
The frog told of the poison in his skin, how he could not breathe. The honey bee told of hives without dances, without food, without flowers. The birds told of landing in parking lots— exhausted, disoriented, hungry—where lakes used to be. The deer’s senses were confused by the cacophony of sounds and the broken shapes of the forest; she had lost her grace and her memory.
The dog admitted that, after all, he had never been loved back. The cat described a harsh world where hunger and fear disabled all instincts for friendship.
The spider’s spirit was wounded by the endless hatred aimed at her, her webs all destroyed whenever they were found, and her babies killed by poison. The turtle had been mishandled by scores of angrily bored children, and she could not cross the road fast enough. The snake had been hated again and again, beaten, skinned.
The whale could no longer communicate with her family under the water, could not find them. Their calls were lost in the terrible noise. The seal had swallowed plastic. The owl flew and flew against the moon on cloudy wings and would die without ever finding a piece of forest wide enough to raise her children in.
I could not change the shape of this world but I could help them remember the truth of their own beauty and their roles in this world, for, as you now know, once you lose those truths you have nothing. So to each of the animals I said, “Please forgive. Please help them anyway, though it seems impossible, though they have treated you cruelly. You are the only ones who can show them the way home.”