She knew him. The knowledge was a facet of her fear.
At last she said: "What must I do to be rid of you?"
"Nothing, yet. I shall step from your window, in the same way I stepped up here. You will come with me."
Sephaina visualized the drop from the window to the moat below.
"You mean to kill me."
"No. Why not put your trust in me? You are willing to trust all others—your servants, your friends, the priest. The unicorn."
Sephaina stared. She began to pray, and fell quiet.
The demon only said, "Give me your hand."
At which Sephaina, without knowing why, gave him her hand.
Immediately she was weightless. The covers of the bed drifted away from her. Linked to the demon, she too now glided across the room, her feet half the height of her own body from the ground. Seeing which, she would have let go of him, but her hand would not leave go.
"Why fear this?" he inquired of her, almost with irritation. "There are other things you should fear."
And even as he spoke, he passed through the window and out onto the broad cool highway of the night sky, and she was taken with him.
The roofs of the house lay below, uncertainly gleaming, like tarnished pearl. The moat had become a circle of mist. The meadows were a great fire which had burned down to embers, for only here and there were the lamps still lit, and these looked very small to one who moved through the air, as if they no longer had any significance for her.
How was it possible to travel in this way? It occurred to Sephaina that maybe she had left her body behind. Yet her form was opaque, though weightless as a feather. The demon, too, appeared physical rather than astral, and as they clove the dark air, sometimes strands of his hair would blow across her face, stinging her cheeks: both things had substance and were real.
The arc of the sky, like a glorious cathedral ceiling, benighted, swung and dipped above them.
The land below sheered away, amalgamated and no longer discernible. Sephaina, who all her days, as he said, had been able to trust—and so was in the habit of trusting—commenced trusting her devilish guide somewhat. She was not afraid of being suspended in space. In her limited experience so many things were miraculous. Anything different was a wonder. A wonder, therefore, eventually seemed merely different. And besides, she knew him. Of course, one life ago she had been him, or she had been what he appeared to be. She became relaxed, and it made her impatient that she could not tell what the landscape was that unfolded below them. She wanted to see it; she had seen so little, save in books.
Then the flowing abstract knit together. Sephaina saw they hovered like two birds above an ebony cloud, which as they sank lower grew gilded veins and smoky fissures. A waterfall of leaves brushed her face. They had come to a wood.
Inside the upper levels of the trees they moved with a darting precision, like that of fish. There was an opening, a glade like a bubble, and the demon drew her into it. They rested on invisible nothingness.
"Look down," he said to her. "Look about. What do you see now?"
Sephaina looked into the slightly luminous black heart of the glade. Enormous sallow flowers dimly shone back into her eyes.
At last he said, "Did you never see bones, before?"
"Yes—the bones of a bird—once."
"These are the bones of other things," he said.
They dipped again, and the grass-heads met their feet. She stood a few inches above the carpet of the glade, and she recalled irresistibly the tapestry of the unicorn, where the ground was strewn by blossoms. Here, bones lay thick as snow.
He led her. They spun over the glade. She was glad she need not walk on the bones. So she looked into the sockets of skulls and of pelvises. The demon drew a thigh-bone from the grass. He examined it and threw it aside with the contempt of some great inner pain. The form of this long bone, as it fell, reminded Sephaina of the spike on the unicorn's forehead.
They came into a second glade, adjacent to the first. Here too there were bones, but fewer of them. In a third glade, the bones were scarce and mostly concealed among the tree-roots, or in the tangle of the undergrowth. Some of the bones were smudged with moss.
"And who do you suppose left their skeletons here?"
"Are the . . ." she whispered, "are these the bones of unicorns?"
"These are the bones of countless young girls that unicorns have killed."
Although she did not want to, Sephaina raised her head and looked into his eyes. His eyes were unkind and clever, and exceedingly honest.
She did not question him. Presently he said, "In reparation for the ancient hunting, for capture and for death. A sacrifice. The maiden is perfect and her life is also without blemish. No disease. No sorrow. They have told you, you will wait, and the unicorn will come to lay its head in your lap. That is true enough."
He continued to speak to her, and after a moment Sephaina screamed.
He was a demon. He told her lies. Yet behind her lay the snow of glistening bones. The bones of the young girls who had been pegged out, naked and spread-eagled, awaiting the supernatural beast from the wood. Which, scenting them, did indeed come, and did indeed lay its head in the lap of each—breaching her virginity and impaling her womb upon the blade of its monstrous horn.
The chosen sacrifice, brought to death by those she loved. Judas' kiss. The crucificial nailing. A reversal of the image of Christ and of the unicorn. Animal for god, the female for the male. The lore of the wood. Of death.
Her hand was still molded to the hand of the demon. When she cried out, she felt the cry pass into him.
"You think you do not credit what I say. But what I say is the truth, as the unicorn is also truth."
"No," Sephaina said.
So he made her go back, back through the glades, and he made her see, again and again, the bones of dead women. Again and again he murmured to her of how it had been, how it was. Tomorrow she, like the rest, would lie on the floor of the wood, and next year, on her seventeenth birthday, she too would be bones.
At last he drew her away, back up into the night, where the stars hung, brooding on their longevity. She saw the stars, and the world below. They meant nothing to her. This fresh miracle, the miracle of betrayal and horror, she had also accepted, or so it seemed.
"Now you believe," he said to her, "I will tell you how you may evade your destiny. Would you like to hear?"
"Is there a way?" she asked.
"More than one. I can set you down in the meadows beyond the house. There any able man, ignorant of who you are, can deprive you of your virginity. Without this ceremonial enticement, the unicorn will not seek you out. Or I can carry you to some far-off country where no one will think to search for you."
"But you are a demon," she said. "And this is a dream. Wherever you took me, I should wake in the house."
"Should you? Then do only this: approach those who come for you tomorrow. Reveal your knowledge and your reluctance. They will not press you, for the sacrifice must go willingly. You will, of course, be cast from the house, and will become an exile. No one, any more, will care for you, and few will offer you love. But you will avoid the agony and death of the sacrifice."
Sephaina gazed at the stars, which lived for ever, or very nearly.
She beheld the land below, so distant it did not seem she need ever return to it.
"I do not know," she said. "Tell me what I must do."
"No," he said, "my part is played out. I will tell you nothing more."
Sephaina shivered. Her hand in his was changing into ice.
"Then let me go. Let me go back and wake."
"This is no dream," he said. He smiled. His mouth was a crescent, his eyes were colder than her hand.
Then the night was emptied away. Winds and stars and darkness and the earth, all emptied at a vast and improbable speed, through her eyes and in through her window.
The last thing she was aware of was the separation of their icy fingers, his de
ad, hers merely frozen.
She did not sleep after that, but rather she ceased temporarily to exist. When once more she grew to a consciousness of her surroundings, the dream remained vivid and actual, as if it lay in shards about the room. She had only to take up these shards, examine them, bring them together. She did so, trembling. She lived again each minute of her flight and her time in the wood of bones. Very little was missing. And she knew it was not a dream, as in the dream she had known it was not.
When this had been accomplished, Sephaina lay like a stone, and gradually the window, where stars had framed the demon, began to pale and greyly glow.
Soon the sun would rise, and they would come for her. They would bathe her and anoint her and dress her in the green gown embroidered with blue and heavenly flowers. They would take her among the trees of the wood. They would strip her and chain her and death would come, white as the moon, with starlight caught even by day inside its killing horn.
Sephaina lay, and she considered how the demon had offered her freedom from this death, and how she had not allowed him to help her, and she wondered if he would have helped her.
To lie with a man—she could not have done that. She had been nurtured in a certain way, and was quite innocent. Never having thought of the sexual union between man and woman, as if knowing she must die a virgin, such an act was now like a myth, and useless to her. But to be carried to safety in some other place, far from the house, the moat, the meadows. How would she live there? And lastly, if she herself were to deny her fate to her attendants, to the priests—crying out when they came to her that she had learned they meant to give her to death—if she did that, pleaded for her survival, won it . . . How should she fare on the raw face of the world, untutored, unguided? She who had always been cherished and trained to find her cherishing natural, therefore necessary.
Yet to live, to evade pain and horror, and whatever abyss or ascent, hellish, supernal, stood beyond mortality. Surely to escape this was worth all exile, despair and loneliness.
Then she thought in bewilderment of those she loved, and how they had always intended to destroy her. The very shock of it made her, somehow, certain that it was so. Such a thing as this could not have been invented.
But neither had their love been false.
With puzzled wonder, she considered this final absurdity. Love her they did. Simple instinct reaffirmed her belief in their sincerity, just as the same instinct had believed the warning of the demon.
As the warmth of dawn started to powder the greyness, she rose and stood at her window. She watched the birds begin to fly upwards, and the light begin to hang the heads of the willows beyond the wall with thin chains of greenish gold.
When the sun lifted, the sky flushed, blushed with joy. Sephaina felt her own heart lift, despite herself. She felt herself to resemble the sky. She had been cultivated to openness and beauty, and she knew a sudden extraordinary happiness. It dazzled her. She sought for reasons. It had come to her, she was an atom of the whole creative, created landscape, of the air, of the sun. Her course, too, had been fixed: to rise and to go down. For this lovely and poignant day she had been bred. Because of her value on this day, she had been loved. She was the sacrifice by means of which earth and heaven might touch. The hands of the clock might not terminate their progress. The shadow on the sundial could not hide itself. Some things must be.
With a sigh that was like the loss of blood, and yet also like the loss of poison, Sephaina bowed her head. She would not step aside. She would say nothing. If it must be she would be hurt and she would die. But not in negation, not from fear of other things, not out of slavish acquiescence and blindness. She saw within herself, as if in a dawn pool, the reflection of all her years. It had been impossible to think of her life drastically changed, continuing elsewhere, not because she was ill-equipped to live it in such a way, but because her whole life had been a building towards this end. Her death, the last stitch in the tapestry, upon which all other stitches rested. She could not break the thread. Harmony was her familiar. Harmony she recognized, and must yield to.
She remembered the lamps burning out in the meadows. She thought of the burning lamp of faith, contained in herself. Sephaina shuddered. She had thought of bones. But her resolution did not slip away.
When the gentle rap came on the door, the early sunshine had overbrimmed the window and lay across Sephaina's body. When her attendants entered, she saw their faces in this silken light. Anguish and pleasure were mixed in each face, and a calm, saddened hope.
She was not afraid of them. She could not hate them. She was their hope, and her death was what had saddened them. Their hands touched her with love, as if she were very precious. She would not cry out at them. She touched them as carefully as they touched her.
There was a stillness in her, like death already. Yet it was warm.
So they took her through the meadows where the people kneeled, and along a narrow road, and through a valley, and came to the wood. They entered the wood, entered its hot, green essence where the sunlight dripped down and the shadows spun like spiders. There were no bones in the grass, and neither any flowers.
They brought her a crystal cup with a dark drink in it, but she put the cup aside. She had already begun to cry, but softly, almost unobtrusively. Her maidens kissed her hands, the priests blessed her. The older women took her away, and drew off her garments, concealing her with their bodies. No one explained to her what they did. Sephaina did not question or protest. Her tears fell noiselessly down onto her own skin.
She lay on the ground between the margins of her black hair. The women put the bracelets of the shackles, which were light and delicate and did not chafe her, on her wrists and ankles. With great decorum, circumspectly, they arranged her limbs, until she was a white cross on the grass. Men pegged the ends of the shackles into the ground, some distance from her, their faces averted so they should not shame her by looking at her nakedness.
Then, everyone of them left her.
Through the scent of her own tears, Sephaina could smell the fermentations of the wood, like the perfumes with which they had dressed her. She heard the faintest whispering, also, that might have been the wings of insects, or the leaves brushing one another as they grew. Above, the green roof was burnished by the sun. Rays of sun leaned like spears all about her. Like a fence of gilded posts. It was peaceful. These instants seemed timeless, and might go on for ever, and while they did so, she was secure. Then she heard something step through the grass towards her, and the sound was scarcely discernible, not remotely human.
The unicorn leaned over her like a tower.
It was dark against the flaring leaves above, its whiteness curbed. It seemed the largest single entity in the world. The horn on its head was like another shaft of sun.
Sephaina clenched her whole body, but she could not shut her eyes, she could not look away from the unicorn. When it touched her, she would die, in terrible agony, and beyond the agony an unknown whirlpool gaped.
There was a pause. She gazed at the mask of death, and felt a stasis, an unconscionable waiting. And then the birdlike soaring sense of lightness, in fact of perfection, came to her again, even in her fear. Her entire body quickened, seemed elevated. She knew pain could not hurt her, and she smiled, in welcome. The unicorn seemed to read her mind. He swung his gigantic head and the blazing spike of the horn ran down.
There was a rending. Feeling nothing at all, she was confused. Then the rending came again, and twice more, and the ropes of grass which had bound her wrists and ankles lay dismembered. The unicorn stepped across her body, laving it with shadow. The curtain of the trees drew back and the unicorn re-entered the deep of the wood. There was a flash of whiteness, the curtain fell and the unicorn was gone.
Out of the green space, women came and clothed her, and lifted her. A priest came and took her hands. They were ghosts, but the ghostly priest talked to her.
"It is always done in this way," said the priest to Sephai
na, under the sun-broken trees. "There is a warning given. For each, it will be unique; the demon within arises. It may take any form, that of some secret misgiving, perhaps, or some awful memory. It speaks the words of death and nightmare. Many of our daughters cannot endure the thought of what lies before them. They are shown the bones, bedded deep in the wood. The bones, you must understand, do not exist, but seem most real, as you recall. Those young women who cannot bear their fate fly to the meadows or the lands beyond, or else fall to their knees before us, begging us to release them. This too is always done, they are sent away, and thereafter without true happiness and without sanctity we must live, until the next sacrifice is due. For almost fifty years, Sephaina, the sacrifice has failed. For she must accept her death, and go consenting, to set the balance right. But to consent is all. Then death is not needful. You live, and we are holy, because of you."
Sephaina said, like one waking from a dream, "What now, then?"
And he told her now she would live in honor and luxury in the house, among the women she had always known, who had tended her. And that when the next chosen came to them, a little child, she too would help to care for it and rear it to its purpose, as she had been cared for and as she had been reared.
They carried her back to the slate-blue house, singing, with garlands, wine and laughter. The people in the meadows also sang, and gave her gifts. For today at least she remained wholly special.
But after today . . .
Seeing the house she had not expected to see again, the flowers, the lilies on the polished moat, Sephaina knew disillusion in her rescue as she had known a wild elation in her fear. The shining building of her years had collapsed. She had met death, who had turned aside. Her sunset went unrequired, though like the sun her glory faded. She was to be an attendant. She was to wait upon another. She was no longer the chosen one. Another would be that.
After the vision and the vision's ending, how drained and commonplace and far away the world seemed. A collection of plants and stones and random flesh, now only paintings in another book.
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