"Oh, no!" Esther cried and attempted to scramble back, but Ted wouldn't let her go until the last bits of rock had stopped falling. The hole had disappeared. Whole slices of shale had slid out like shelves and buried it. Esther wanted to get picks and shovels. Ted told her she was wasting her time.
"It won't be there anymore, no matter how far you dig. It's gone." She said nothing. Of course he was right. The old man was a magician, and he had repaired whatever rent in space the boy had caused. She got up and hugged her husband.
"I'm glad I didn't see it alone. You'd never have believed me.
"Let's try to find Edgar," he said.
"All right."
They tramped home in a light rain. The woods seemed to thicken at the approach of evening. A thin mist curled in the valley, but they soon outdistanced it. They came within sight of their home without a sign of Edgar.
Ted started chuckling. "I can't help it," he said when she stared at him, "I'm forever going to see that stupid cat coming tearing out of that hole with his fur standing up and that teeny little knight chasing after him."
Esther thought about it and started laughing too. "He probably ran right through the kitty door in the garage and into the house."
"Lucky we had one, or he might have gone straight through the wall." They laughed a little more.
Once inside, they called his name, but Edgar didn't come out. Without removing her coat, Esther went in search of him. Ted fixed himself a drink. "Well," he crowed, "at least we've got ourselves a real live—well, dead—unicorn. "We've got proof." He took his drink into the living room. "Yessir, we've got that."
He sat on the couch. For a few moments he just stared at the plate and blinked. Then his face swelled with rage. "Where's that cat?" he yelled, standing again. "You find him? I'm going to kill him!"
She poked her head out of the den. "What's wrong now?"
He picked up the plate and carried it to her. "This is what's wrong. Look!"
All that remained on the plate were four little hooves and a small golden horn, and a tail. "Oh," she said.
"He'd better hide, the little sonofabitch. I get my hands on him, I'll—"
"We left it out on the table. It's not his fault. Besides, we don't know he ate it—maybe it just disintegrated.
"Why do you always take the cat's side?"
"He can't defend himself."
"Oh, so you're the Perry Mason of the furball set?"
She knew his mood—there was nothing to gain by trying to reason with him. She searched for the cat some more, but he was nowhere to be found. It was as if he'd disappeared along with the unicorn.
Ted rolled over. The light on Esther's night-table glared at him. His wife lay propped up beside him, neither reading nor trying to disguise the concern tormenting her. He was exasperated with the cat, but knew better than to express it. Instead, he said tenderly, "He'll come back."
She wouldn't look at him, but she replied, "The woods got him. When the big light flashed, it got him."
"Kind of a leap in intuition, isn't that?"
"I don't care. I know."
He opened his mouth to reply when there came a heavy pounding at the front door. "What was that?" he muttered. They traded looks. The pounding returned, hard enough to shake the foundations.
Ted sat up, grabbed his robe from the chair beside the bed, and stuck his feet in his slippers. "Somebody's at the door," he said, declaring the obvious.
He shuffled down the hall, Esther following him, and down the stairs to the split-level landing. Cautiously, he peered out through one side window while Ester peered out the other. Neither could see a thing, even after Ted switched on the yard light. Warily, he unlocked the door and opened it a crack. "There's nobody there," he said, although there was something odd about the trees across the yard that he couldn't quite place. He stuck his head out.
"Excuse me," a voice called. It was a big, deep voice, like rocks grinding together in an avalanche. The thing about it was, it seemed to be coming from the roof.
Together, the two of them stepped out onto the stoop, and looked up.
An enormous, bearded face, bigger than the moon, stared down at them. The moonlight outlined the shoulder and the bent back, which they traced down through the dark to the legs, which looked like a pair of extra trees—which, of course, was what Ted had seen but not comprehended. He tried fruitlessly to speak.
The giant said, "I brung ya back the littul kit-te." He lowered his hand, unfolded log-sized fingers, and Edgar jumped down and fled for his life between Ted and Esther into the house. "I didn't want he should get lost, ya know?"
"Thank you," Ted squeaked.
"Yes, thank you very much," Esther whispered. "We were worried about him. It won't—won't happen again."
"Oh, youse are very welcome, I'm sure." The giant straightened up, his head vanishing into the sky. His feet emerged from behind the trees and he tramped off across the lawn, leaving wading-pool-size depressions in the sodden turf.
Like a fairy couple enclosed in a cocoon of floodlight, Ted and Esther watched as the giant picked his way gingerly between the other houses, then merged into the blackness of the woods. A moment later, the trees lit up in a bright silent flash that soared into the sky like an aurora and was gone.
The Hunting of Death: The Unicorn
by
Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee is one of the best known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with over forty books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birth Grave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don't Bite the Sun, Night's Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, Night Sorceries, and the collections Tamastara, The Gorgon, and Dreams of Dark and Light. Her short story "Elle Est Trois (La Mort)'' won a World Fantasy Award in 1984, and her brilliant collection of retold folk tales, Red as Blood, was also a finalist that year, in the Best Collection category. Her most recent books are the novel The Blood of Roses and the collection The Forests of the Night.
Here, in one of the most powerful stories ever written about the hunting of the unicorn, she leads us with style and grace through the steps of an intricate pavane of identity and passion . . . and death.
One: The Hunting
In the first life, Lasephun was a young man.
He was reasonably tall, of slender, active build, and auburn-haired. His skin, which was to be a feature of all this group of lives, was extremely pale, and lent him an air of great intensity. By nature, the being of Lasephun was obsessive. Charged with fleshly shape, the obsessiveness took several forms, each loosely linked. The first life, the young man, who was called Lauro, became obsessed with those things which were unobtainable, and hungered for them with a mysterious, gnawing hunger.
Firstly then, the motive force, which was creative and sought an outlet, drove him from place to place. In one, he would find a forest, and in the forest a shaft of light like golden rain, and the sight of this would expand in him like anguish. In a city, he would see a high wall, and over the wall the tops of crenellated towers, and beyond the towers the sky with thunder clouds, and somewhere a bell would slowly ring and a woman would go by picking up the whispering debris from the gutter. These images and these sounds would stay with him. He did not know what to do with them. Sometimes, like some intangible, unnamed scent, there would be only a feeling within him that seemed to have no cause, a deep swirling, disturbing and possessing him, which could neither be dismissed nor conjured into anything real.
At length, he learned how to make music on the twenty-two strings of the lutelin, and how to fashion songs, and he sang these in markets, inns, and on the steps of cathedrals for cash, or alone on the billowing roads and the sky-dashed face of the land for nothing—or for himself. But his songs and his music filled him with blunted anger. And as he grew, by mere habit, more polished, his anger also grew. For what he could make never matched the essence of what he felt. The creation was like a mockery of the stirring and dreaming within him. He almost hated himself,
he almost hated the gift of music.
To others, he was a cause of some fascination. To others he was attractive, phantasmal, like a moving light. They would come to him, and sometimes even follow him a short distance, before they perceived he no longer saw them. He never stayed long in any one place. As if he felt the movement of the earth under him, he traveled, trying to keep pace with it.
Proceeding in this way, it occurred to him one night that he himself did not move at all, but simply paced in one spot, while the landscape slid towards him and away behind him, bringing him now a dark wood, and now a pool dippered by stars, and now a town on a high rock where wild trees poured down like hanging gardens.
It was well past midnight. The morning, disguised as the night, was already evident on the faces of any clocks the town might hold. Lauro leaned on a tree in the vale below the town, not far from the pool which glittered and the dark wood which had gathered all the darkness to itself as if to be cool.
Was a world so beautiful, so unfathomable, also a disappointment to its Creator? Had the world failed to match the vision of the god who devised it? On his seventh day, not resting but lamenting, had he gone away and left his work unfinished, and somewhere else did some other world exist, like but unlike, in which had been captured the creative impulse entire and perfect?
Lauro touched the lutelin and the strings spoke as softly as the falling of a leaf.
And in that moment a white leaf blew out of the dark wood and flickered to the edge of the pool.
Lauro stared. He saw a shape, which was not like the shape of a horse, but more like that of a huge greyhound, and all of one unvariegated paleness so absolute it seemed to glow. He saw a long head, also more like that of some enormous dog, a head chiseled and lean, with folded glimmering eyes. And from the forehead, like the rising of a comet, frozen, the tapering crystalline finger of the fearful horn. And the horn lowered and lowered to meet the horn of another in the pool. Where the two horns met each other, a ring of silver opened and fled away. Then the mouth cupped the water and the creature drank.
As the unicorn was drinking, Lauro only watched it. To him it would have seemed, if he considered it at all, that the unicorn was not drinking, but only carrying out some ethereal custom special to its kind. For the unicorn was unearthly and therefore did not need to accomplish earthly things. The unicorn had strayed into this world, the second creation God had made, when the form had finally matched the vision.
So Lauro watched and did not move, probably did not even blink, his back against the tree's trunk, his hands spread on the strings of his lutelin. But then the unicorn raised his head from the pool, and turned a little, and began to come towards him.
All creative beings are capable of seeing in symbols, and each will seek analogy and omen, even if they deny the fact. Embryonic though Lauro's creative gift might be, his beautiful voice unrefined and his song-making erratic, uneven, and a source of rage to him, still, presented with this unique symbol, he recognized it. The sorcerous quality of the unicorn was inevitably to be felt. No one, however dull, could have mistaken that, and Lauro was not dull at all, but, if anything, too aware and too sensitized. The sight of the unicorn touched him and he resonated to the touch as the strings of the lutelin had resonated. It was not a voice which spoke to him, and there were no words uttered either in the darkness or within his own heart or brain, yet it was as if something said plainly to him: Here it is, here it approaches you, that which you require, that which for ever and ever you have pursued, not knowing it. The wellspring within yourself you cannot tap, the jewel in your mind you cannot uncover. And in that moment the miracle of the unicorn seemed to be that if he could only lay his skin against the skin of it, even so small an area of skin as a finger's tip, everything that burned and smoked within him would be, at last, his to use. He, too, laying hands on this creature of the second perfect world, would gain the power of perfect creation. But maybe also there was a part of him which recognized the unicorn in another way, as that thing which must always be pursued and never taken, the inconsolable hunger, the mirage which runs before and can never be come up with, since the consolation of hunger is satiety, and the end of the chase is stillness and death.
And so, for one reason or another, as the unicorn moved towards him, Lauro broke from his trance and moved forward one step in answer.
At which the unicorn, perhaps seeing him for the first time, stopped.
At which Lauro took another step.
At which the unicorn became the single blink of a white lid on the night, and was gone.
Nothing natural could have moved so very fast. It had not even seemed to turn, but just to wink out like a flame. Nevertheless, Lauro knew it had gone back into the wood, which must be its habitation. A vague succession of stories came to him which explained how a unicorn's wood might be beset by perils, by phantoms, by disasters. These did not stop him. He ran at the wood and straight into it.
It was like falling off the edge of the night into a black pit. The pit was barred over by raucous branches which slashed his face and slammed across his body, full of earth which gave way under his feet and the tall columns of the trees which met his body with their own. He fell many times, and once he was almost blinded when an antler of branches stabbed into his face. But presently he glimpsed a white gleam ahead of him, and knew it for the unicorn, and he shouted with fury and joy. And then he fell a long way down, as it seemed into the black soul of the wood, and lying there on the black soul's floor where there were decayed leaves like old parchment, and some tiny flowers that shone in the darkness, he dazedly saw the white light coming back to him. This time for sure the unicorn might savage him. He thought of this with awe but not terror. The touch that would unlock the- genius within himself could not kill. Whatever wound there was, he would be healed of it. The fall had stunned him, and he was conscious that the neck of the lutelin was snapped off from the body.
Then the unicorn came between the trees, and it was only the moon.
Lauro knew despair then, and a sort of anger he had never felt before. He lay watching the moon, its light making his face into a bone in the black cavity of the wood.
When the day came, he was able to climb out of the cavity, which had not seemed possible before, although conceivably it had been possible. He put the broken lutelin into his pack, and walked out of the trees. By day, the wood had a different appearance. It was very green, but the green of undisturbed deep water. On all sides the trees, though struck by sunlight, seemed impenetrable.
It was silent. No birds, no winds moved in the unicorn wood.
A while before noon, Lauro entered the town on the rock.
It was like many other towns, and he scarcely looked about him. Others looked at him, and he felt their eyes on him. This was because he was a stranger, but also because he was himself and there was that quality to him of the fire, or the moving light, a quality in fact curiously like that he had noted in the unicorn.
And today, besides, his obsessive intensity was very great. It was like a wave banked up behind his eyes. And when he sat on the steps of the stone church, under the high doors and their carvings of martyrs and demons, his face was like these stone faces, with the reddish autumnal hair falling leadenly round it. His hands were stiffly clasped, without even the lutelin now to lend them life.
After a while, a woman came to him and offered him bread from a basket, and he would not take it, and later another offered him fish and he refused this too. Then a priest came out, and offered him holy comfort, and Lauro laughed, high, and pitched as if he sang. There were others, all eager in their timid solicitous ways to aid him, for they sensed his pain, and they came to him and the cold fire of his pain, like moths to the candle. He refused them all. They could not help him. They knew it and they went away. Even the child who tugged on his sleeve, looking up into his eyes and their black centers, even the child, at whom he briefly smiled, ran away.
The day gathered in the town until it was the co
lor of strawberries, and the rays of the sunset fell through the church windows from within and out upon the steps, and upon the face of Lauro. He could not play or sing what he had known, could only speak it, and had not been able to.
He had been there seven hours when the Lord of the town came riding to Mass in the church, a thing he did not generally do. The strawberry sky was behind him and behind the eight dark horses and the dark forms of the men who rode on them. The horses were not remotely like the unicorn. Even if they had been given crystalline horns that flamed in the sunset, they would not have been like. Someone had told the Lord of the stranger with the lank red hair and the frozen face and hands. They had reported him as a seer or a poet, one who has witnessed some portentous thing; and so he had.
The Lord reined in his horse at the foot of the stair.
He looked at the stranger with his Lord's proud and self-blind eyes, and suddenly the stranger looked back at him with eyes that had seen far too much.
"You," the Lord said. "Why are you sitting there? What do you want?"
Lauro said, "There is a unicorn in your wood."
"A unicorn," said the Lord. "Who reckons so?"
"I do."
"You may be mistaken. You may be drunk or mad. Or a liar. You. What are you?"
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