He hated it because it had failed him. It had proved attainable, and vulnerable. It had let itself be dirtied. It was inadequate, as he was.
Its wounds, of course, marred it. There would always be scars, now from the teeth of the dogs, the arrow, the knives. But its fading was not due to these alone.
He had reached the fence. He waited, in an appalled foreknowing, for the beast to turn to him, to plead with him by means of its lusterless eyes. If it did so, he might kill it. For he knew, at last, it too was mortal, and could die. It had never existed in a second world of perfection at all. His mistake.
It lay like a sick dog and did not look at him, while the night murmured with the aftermath of the rain. Some minutes elapsed before Lauro leaned in across the gilded posts and stretched down to take the rich man's dagger from the mud.
An hour later, when his limbs were numb from standing rigidly in one place so long, and his spine ached and his head and his very brain ached, and the moon appeared over the trees and the unicorn had not looked at him, Lauro threw the dagger at the unicorn.
As he did so a cry burst from him. There were no words in it. Then the dagger struck the unicorn in the neck, or rather, it struck against the area where the chain had been locked to the collar.
Something happened. Something snapped inside the case of the lock. The lock mouthed open, and the chains snaked away and lay coiled on the mud among the scattered jewels. The collar spun from the neck of the unicorn as if propelled.
Lauro took a step backward. Then many more steps.
What had freed the unicorn seemed to be an act of magic, perpetrated through him, and through what had been intended as an act of malicious harm. A theory that the force and angle of the blow might simply have sprung the crude mechanism of the lock did not temper Lauro's reaction. As he stepped back, he examined the fence of posts, expecting it to dissolve or collapse. This did not happen.
Nor did the unicorn respond to its freedom for some moments. It seemed almost to consider, to debate within itself. Then, when the response came, it was complete. It sprang up, deftly, and the night seemed to slough from its body like a skin.
Set loose from this skin, as from the chain, the unicorn began to glow. It altered. Its eyes filled as if from a ewer and were charged again with depth and nameless color. The wounds glared, changed also like peculiar eyes, shot with incandescence—its new skin, or the skin beneath, was white again.
Lightly, and with no preliminary, it leapt the posts of the pen. And then once more, it halted.
Lauro was closer now to the unicorn, or the fantasy which was the unicorn, than he had ever been. He was not afraid, and no longer was he consumed with hatred and disgust or disappointment in it. These also had been sloughed. The unicorn was renascent, beautifully and totally. The wet mane was like silver. The horn of its head was translucent and the night showed through it faintly, and there seemed to be stars trapped within the horn.
Lauro waited, like a lover who is willing to permit an old love to resume its mislaid power upon him. He waited for his belief in the miracle of the unicorn to come back. And slowly and irresistibly it did come back, flowing in, touching him as before, so he felt the certainty of it in his bones, sounding them like a chord.
The unicorn began to move again. Its head was slightly tilted sideways. It looked at Lauro with one eye which had grown denser than the night.
He had believed in it, betrayed it, freed it. This time, he knew, the unicorn must acknowledge him. Lauro's awareness was unarguable. It was a fact for him. Perhaps it was his sureness itself which would cause the unicorn to do so.
The unicorn hesitated yet again. Lauro gripped the air and the darkness in each of his hands. He tried to memorize the image of the unicorn. Soon, it would be gone. Only the unlocking it would give to him, only this would remain. Twinned, bonded, they would have freed each other of their separate chains. That must last a lifetime. It would.
Then the unicorn moved. It raced towards the little garden and the walk beyond, unerringly seeking the environs outside the house. And, for a frantic instant, he thought it would avoid him. But as it passed Lauro, it turned its head once more. The silken, star-containing spike of the horn drove forward and to one side, laying Lauro's breast open, cloth and flesh and tissue peeled away, the beating heart itself revealed, and ceasing to beat.
As the ultimate inaudible leaf-sounds of the unicorn's feet died in his ears, Lauro, lying on a bed of blood and hair and mud and rain, understood at last the rhythms and the means of his expression. The feeling like pain, like a death wound, swelled inside him, carrying him upward, and he was able, finally, to give it utterance. His lips parted to speak the glowing exactitude of the words which came. His lips stayed open, and when the rain began again, it fell into his mouth.
Two: Of Death
But in the second life, Lasephun was a young girl.
She was small in stature and slim. The pale skin was now in her almost white. Her hair was long and very dark, falling to her waist in black, shining streamers. The character of the being Lasephun's obsessiveness, in this, the second life, was muted and quiescent, although still in evidence in particular ways. But this life, a girl of sixteen who was called Sephaina, had been cared for in a unique manner, grown almost like a cherished plant. She had not yet had occasion to seek within herself, and so to be astonished, or to become dissatisfied.
Where Sephaina had been born she did not know, neither her parentage. These things did not matter to her. They had no relevance. Sephaina's awareness had begun in a slate-blue house, moated by brown water. Liliaceous willows let down their nets into the moat, and birds flew by the narrow windows with which the walls were pierced. Such pictures were set like stained glass into each of her days. The calm of the house, certain architectures, certain lights and shades incorporated in its geography, these were the balm in which the years of Sephaina floated. Her companions were several, and choice. The women who firstly cared for and then waited on her, were kind and elegant. The girl children who played with her grew up into beautiful maidens. Nothing ugly came in her way, and nothing more distressful than the death of a bird or a small animal from the meadows beyond the high walls of the house.
Within, the house was a puzzle of rooms bound by winding stairs and carven doors. From its tallest turrets the meadows, pale golden with summer and pale blue with flowers, might be seen stretching away to a sort of interesting nothingness, which was the edge of vision. Sephaina had seldom entered the meadows, then only to picnic beneath a tree, her girl companions spread about her, birdsong and the notes of mandolettes mingling. For Sephaina, the world was no more than these things. She had never been sick, or truly sad. The only melancholy she had known had been slight, and bitter-sweet. She was surrounded by love and devotion, and it was in the nature of this life to accept these gifts, and dulcetly reflect them. To be valued was as integral to her days as her curious adopted state. For she understood that others did not live as she did, while never questioning how she lived. From her first awareness, a sense of her own purpose, though unexplained, had been communicated to her.
Not, however, until the day preceding her sixteenth birthday was her destiny announced, and placed before her like a newly opened flower.
Shortly after noon, as Sephaina sat quietly with two of her women, a priest entered the room, and a group of men with them. Sephaina had, of course, seen and conversed with men, but never with so many at once. She was not shy with them, but she guessed instantly, and faultlessly, that something of great import was about to happen.
The priest addressed her without preamble.
"Tomorrow you will be sixteen years of age, and on that day your fate, which has always been with you, governing your existence—although unknown—will be fulfilled."
Then he extended his holy ring to her, and Sephaina kissed it.
The men nodded. None of them spoke.
The priest said to her: "Follow then, and learn what your fate is."
; So she rose, and the priest went from the room, up a winding stairway and into one of the turrets. Sephaina followed him, with her women, and the men walked after, the heavy brocade of their garments making a syrupy, sweeping noise on the steps.
If Sephaina had entered this turret before, she was uncertain. If she had ever come there, then the turret had since been much changed. There was a long and exotic tapestry worked in a multitude of colors, which covered every wall. A candle-branch burned in the middle of the floor, flickering somewhat, so the figures in the tapestry seemed to quiver and to breathe.
The subject of the tapestry was a great hunt, which pursued a white beast with a single horn through the glades of a wood, until a girl was found in its way, seated on the grass, and the beast lay down and put its head in her lap. At which the hunt drew close and with dogs and bows at first, and thereafter with knives and spears, appeared to kill the creature. It bled from many wounds but the blood did not reach the grass, which was starred instead by rainbow blossoms.
Sephaina looked at these scenes of cruelty, deceit and death, and she wept a moment, as at any of the few deaths she had seen. But her tears ended almost immediately. She was perturbed, and turned to the priest for his answer. He gave it.
The creature in the tapestry was a unicorn. A thing part fabulous and partly earthbound. It was not necessary that one either believe or disbelieve in it. There had been an era when the unicorn had been hunted, had been slain or captured, cut and roped, demeaned, used to increase some lord's vainglory or pride of acquisition, or bloodlust. But the death of the unicorn was, in fact, largely inconsequential. It was conceivable only a single beast had ever been killed, or that none had been killed. Or that all the unicorns then extant in the world at that time had died—only a dream left behind them capable of seeming life, or that they had been reprocreated by mystical means from some eerie quickening between foam and shore, cirrus and mountain-top. Neither did truth or falsehood rate very highly in this case. The core of the story of the unicorn, its humiliation, in some ways paralleled the history of the Christ and might be said to represent it. And now, as the debasement of Christ had been raised to worship, so the unicorn, ghost or truth or simply dream, was propitiated and adored. The clue to existence was the protean ability of man to alter things. To balance the ignominy of the unicorn's death, whether false or actual, the ritual of the hunt had transformed into a festival of love.
They would advance into the trees of the wood, not with horses, dogs and weapons, but now on foot, unarmed, with flowers and fruit and wine. And to lead the procession there must be a maiden, who would charm by the magic force of her virginity, not in order to betray, but in order that they might do homage. And if it should come to her, laying its long head, horned as if with polished salt, in her lap, then the offerings could be made to it. Or if not, still the beauty of the tradition had been honored, and the spirit of the unicorn with it.
"And you," the priest said to Sephaina as she stood between him and the circling tapestry, "you have been reared in perfect harmony and happiness to be that maiden who will lead the procession into the wood. Your years have been kept lovely in order that you be wholly lovely for him, the white one, so he will wish to come to you and give his blessing to what we do, and his forgiveness of what has been done. Every sixteen years, this is the custom. You are very special. You were chosen. Do you understand?"
"Yes," she said. The men behind the priest murmured then.
Sephaina lowered her eyes and saw the unicorn imprinted on the floor. It was different from the entity in the tapestry. It glowed, and its horn had a light within it like that of burning phosphorous. In some strange way, she remembered the unicorn. To be told of it was no amazement to her. That it might dwell in the world, that it might come to her indeed, did not seem incredible. But, for the first time also, something twisted inside her, a feeling very old, though new to her: it was fear.
They showed her the gown she was to wear. It was the palest green, sewn with flora of blue thread. They showed her the oils and perfumes they would use for her skin and hair, and these were scented like a forest and the most delicious plants that might be discovered there.
Sephaina walked through the house, gazing at everything in it. She had a feeling of loss, as if she could never come back there. No one had told her if she would. Something had prevented her asking.
As the sun began to set, something odd happened in the meadows beyond the house. There began to be fire-flies, dozens of them, scores of them, and then hundreds upon hundreds. They were not, of course, fire-flies, but the flames of torches and of lamps. The meadows, from the far distance to the edge of the moat, were dark with people, and on fire with lights. Bizarre shifting patterns, like those in a weird mosaic, formed and fell apart. Sephaina watched the lights, knowing why people gathered about the house. She had never known her power before, though she had, at some oblique station of her heart and mind, accepted her rarity long ago. To see the demonstration of her power, her influence, her emblematic worth, stunned her.
She brooded on it, pausing for long minutes, transfixed at one after another of the high windows. She wondered if they saw her, the ones who waited in the meadows. She imagined that perhaps they did, although not with their eyes.
Eventually her women persuaded her to the bedchamber where she had always slept. They washed and braided her hair with herbs, ready for the morning. When she lay down, they drew the covers over her. One read her a passage from a beautiful book which told of enchanting and lustrous things, towers built upon water, boats sailing the air, lovers who loved and lost and refound each other at the brink of violent seas where birds spoke in human voices. Then, her ladies and her maidens kissed Sephaina, and they went away to the antechamber beyond her door. Here, two of them would sleep each night, in case she should want something and call out. This had not happened since she was a little child.
Sephaina lay in the familiar bed, and watched the bedroom in the mild irradiation of a single low lamp. She remembered nights of her childhood, and how the shadows fell at different seasons, or when the moon was full, and how the room would be when the sun rose again. Her window was sheltered, however, by the ascension of the wall, from the vantage of the meadows, and so from the lights of those who stood about the house. And she wondered all at once if this room, whose window, unlike all the other upper windows of the house, was shielded from the meadows, was always given to the chosen maiden for just this reason: to allow her peace on this one night of her life, the eve of her sixteenth birthday.
The words of the priest came and went in her head all this time, behind every one of her other thoughts.
She had only seen depictions of woods, she had never seen a real one. The wood in the tapestry had been very dense, very darkly green, with slender tree-trunks stitched on it, and with blossoms thick on the grass, and yet there had seemed no way to go through the wood. And the unicorn. How would it be to wait for it to come to her, how would it be to know she herself was the magic thing which drew the magic thing towards her? It was curious. It was as if all this had happened to her before, yet in some other distorted way . . .
Sephaina closed her eyes, and was startled that two tears ran from under her lids.
But she had been trained by serenity to sleep easily and deeply, and already her mind moved forward from the shore, slipping into the smooth currents of unconsciousness. A dream rose from the threshold, and greeted her. She beheld a drinking cup of crystal and a long and fluted stem. The drink in the cup was very dark. She stared, and saw the wood and the unicorn inside the drink, inside the cup. Then she swam by the dream into the depths of sleep.
Sephaina woke to a huge silence that was uncanny. It was an actual presence in the room filling and congesting it. It might have been that her own heart had stopped beating. Or it might have been the heart of time which had stopped, every clock in the house, or the world, stilled. Yet she breathed, was capable of movement; her heart sounded. These things she discove
red by cautiously testing them.
At length she sat up, the ultimate test, and so she saw that a shape crouched in the embrasure of her sheltered window, between the room and the starry night.
Fear has many forms. Sephaina's fear burned low as the low-burning of the lamp, yet, like the lamp, pervaded the chamber. Fear was also so novel to her that it seemed quite alien. She could barely control it. The twisting she had felt within herself when they had told her of her destiny, the ebbing and swelling flow of unease and isolation that had mounted as she watched those hundreds of lights swarm upon the meadows, now gained a quiet and terrible dominion over her.
She could not have cried out, even if she thought to do so, and somehow the ambience of her fear prevented her from thinking of it. She was alone, on the whole earth, with the shape, whatever it should be, which had manifested between light and night.
Then the shape altered, melted upward. It slid from the embrasure, and began to come towards her, gliding, taking no steps. The lamp did not in any way describe it, except that, with no warning, its eyes flashed, cat-like and appalling. And in the very same second, dry summer lightning also flashed. It shattered the window and the room together. By means of this freak illumination, she saw the outline of the invading demon. It had now assumed, or perhaps had consistently possessed, the structure of a man, rather tall, physically agile and long-haired.
It seemed to her he addressed her. In the dreadful silence, she replied.
He said: "Would you see me?"
She replied: "No."
At that he laughed. She was sure enough of the laugh. He sung it to her, and it was very cruel. Just then the tinderish lightning ignited again in through the window, and he seemed to catch flame from it, absorbing, vampire-like, colors and equilibrium. She knew him instantly, the demon. His hair was red as rust, his eyes were bleak, and his face like a bone. Across his breast a flap of cloth hung loose and ragged. Under this rent was an incoherent darkness that evaded or tricked her gaze.
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