It was true, they had not killed her, but she might still die. Of boredom.
Three: The Unicorn
And in the third life, Lasephun was the unicorn.
In the beginning there had been only something white, white and gleaming as the centre of a flame. It moved like marsh gas, a disembodied, cool fire, or a breath of opaline wind. It entranced things to pursue it, may-flies, doves, fawns, but it did not consume them. Nor were they able to pass through it. Sometimes it rested, at others it ran. Its speed seemed dependent upon nothing, not even itself. Its repose was similar. It neither fed nor expelled any waste matter. It was not embryonic. It did not take on the forms of other things. At night, faintly, it emanated a pale, unimaginable glow. It was like the soul of a star, fallen in the wood.
One day, this luminous uncreature drifted from the wood, and skimmed over the surface of a pool. The pool faithfully reflected it for several moments, and then ceased to reflect it. The pool began to show instead another reflection, of something which had once been there, drunk from the pool, and spirited itself away.
This thing in the mirror of the pool touched its long slim horn to the wafting formless whiteness. When the white thing reached the other edge of the pool, it let down slender legs into the grass. A canine beautiful head emerged, an arching body. The starry spike broke from its forehead.
It had no particular memory, the unicorn. It did not know, therefore, it had been dead and had then existed as a spirit or a fable, or if now it was reborn. The pool had refashioned it in a partially earthly shape, as the eyes of a man would have done. Water, and human eyes, possessed this sorcerous ability.
The unicorn touched the earth with its feet.
The earth knew the feet of a live thing.
The trees, the air, knew it.
The recognition of presences about it solidified the presence of the unicorn. The unicorn was now solid, and externally actual. Inside itself, however, it remained phantasmal and fantastic.
The nature of the unicorn was like a prism, composed of almost countless facets. Each thought was a new dimension. The intensity of Lasephun, the obsessiveness, was demonstrated by the unicorn's adherence to each of these facets as it explored within itself.
Its life became and was self-exploration. It had no other function. It lived within, and where the external world brushed it—the scents of the wood, the play of light and shade, day and night, the occasional wish to drink from the pool, it explored these sensations within itself and its reaction to them. It had no gender, no creative or procreative urge. It was timeless, knowing neither birth nor death. It was refined like the purest distillation, and it was totally self-absorbed. So it lived and was happy, learning itself, finding always new aspects of itself and its relation to the objects around it. It was seldom seen, and never disturbed. Possibly a hundred years went by.
One dawn, the unicorn came from the wood as the sun was coming from the horizon. The world was all one contemplative and idyllic pinkness. Pink seemed in that instant the shade of all things lovely, ethereal and divine. As the unicorn lowered its head towards the spangling water of the pool, it sensed, for the first time it could ever remember, an expression of life nearby.
Startled, the unicorn raised its head, and water-beads glissanded from its brow as if the horn wept tears of fire.
The startlement might have resembled that of a deer alarmed at its drinking, but was not of this order. Never before had it encountered a corresponding life signal from anything about it. It had never known that such a note was capable of being sounded.
After a moment, confused and fascinated, the unicorn moved away from the pool, and glanced around itself.
Above the valley, a ruined town rotted graciously on a rock. Some way off in another direction, a slate-blue house sank in a dry moat: this was not visible from the pool. Beyond the pool another way lay the wood, while in the valley there were several trees. Beneath one of these a young girl lay asleep. Presently the unicorn came on her and paused.
Her long dark hair ribboned about her, her skin was white as cream, save where the freckling of leaf-shadows patterned it. A pannier lay beside her; she had been gathering roots and plants perhaps for use in some simple witchcraft.
The unicorn recognized her at some basic inexplicable level, and a fresh facet leapt into being in the prism of its awareness.
Decades and decades before, the unicorn had been human and a girl rather like this one. Yet there was more. The girl asleep under the tree was very young, and she was a virgin.
The magic of virginity—for magic it was—was quite straightforward. Its sorcerous value was that of energy stored, and was accordingly at its most powerful not in the celibate, but in the celibate who had never yet relinquished celibacy, and better still in one who had not even known himself. This, as it happened, the girl had not. Her life, just as the unicorn's had been lived inwardly, had been lived outwardly. Her meditation and her senses turning always outwards, she had not yet found herself, knew herself neither in the spirit, nor in the body. In this manner she was strangely asexual, as the unicorn was. While her extreme youth lent her also, briefly, an air of the ethereal. Her birth was close enough she had overlooked it, her death far enough away she had not considered it. Life and death and sex were, for this time, beyond the periphery of her sphere—yet only just. However, for this short season, the sounding note of her existence had paralleled the unicorn's own.
Aside from the sounding note, and despite recognition, the unicorn did not see the girl as what she was, but only as another external object, like a stone or a flower.
After it had observed her for some time, the unicorn pawed the turf a little. The gesture was reflexive, physical, a mere exercise of the muscles which now must be used. It looked nevertheless ferocious and dangerous, and it wakened the girl, who sat up, bewildered and staring, her hand to her mouth in fear.
It seemed she had heard old stories of what a unicorn was. She did not appear to be in doubt, only in amazement and fright. Then these emotions visibly faded.
When she spoke aloud, the unicorn, having no longer any knowledge of the human vernacular, did not understand her. Nor did it seek to understand. It sensed exultation in her voice. It sensed itself the cause of this exultation—and not the cause. What in fact she had said amounted to the words: "You are my sign from God. Now I know the one I love will come also to love me." For in fact the very innocence of her meditation had already, through itself, brought itself to an end. She loved.
The unicorn had forgotten almost altogether the aspirations and the inner processes of men and women. It looked, with its shadowy, gleaming eyes, that were like burned yet burning violets. It watched as the girl obeised herself before the unicorn which had become her omen of love. As she did so, the unicorn felt itself harden once more inside the shell of its physical existence. So all things may be fixed by the regard of others.
But before she could try to touch it—it had some dim memory, perhaps a race-memory of its kind, of such touchings—the unicorn drew away and vanished in the wood.
Then from the wood's edge, its eyes piercing through the foliage which was like curious jewelry, the unicorn continued to watch. Rising and picking up her pannier, with a strange half-weeping sigh, yet smiling, the girl moved away across the valley. She began to climb towards the ruined town, and the unicorn watched.
A village leaned against the walls of the town. The unicorn saw the girl enter the village. It saw her step into a little hovel with a roof of golden thatch. She sat down at a spinning wheel. The wheel spun. The girl whispered dreamily. Magic as well as thread was unfolded from the primitive machine. By now the unicorn felt as much as it saw. It had ceased to view with its eyes alone. Some aspect of itself, still fluid and supernatural, had followed the girl and now hung against a wall. It was reminiscent of a cobweb, pale and luminous, unobserved.
Dusk seemed to enter the room suddenly, like smoke. A moment after, the girl raised her head and her face lost
all its faint color. A shadow, intensely blue in the evening light, fell across the room, the spinning wheel. It was the shadow of a young man. Even in the gathering darkness, the color of his hair was apparent. It was auburn, as the hair of Lauro had been. The phantasmal cobweb that lay against the wall, the perception of the being which had become a unicorn, clung again itself. It had now recognized, without recognition, the two lives which it had formerly been. The purpose of this representation, its earthly male and female states, filled it with strange longings, a sort of nostalgia for mortality it did not comprehend.
The young man spoke. Then the young girl.
The cobweb essence of the creature which had become a unicorn listened. It began, at last, by some uncanny osmosis of thought—telepathy, perhaps—to distinguish the gist of the conversation.
"I have thought of you all day," the young man said. "I do not know why."
"You are uncivil to say this. Am I not worth recalling?" And the wheel spun, as if it, not she, were hurt, excited and unsure.
"I think you are a witch, and put a spell on me." But he laughed. His laugh was Lauro's. In this way the unicorn had laughed, long, long ago.
"So I might. So I meant to."
"And why?"
"To test my skill. Another man would have done as well. You are nothing to me."
"If I am nothing to you, why do you sit and gaze at me in church?"
"Who told you that I did?"
"Your own face, which is red as a rose."
"It is my anger," she said.
But he went close to her and sat beside her, following the wheel with Lauro's eyes, as she followed it with Sephaina's.
The light faded, and at last he said: "Shall I light the lamp for you?"
"You are too kind. Yes, light the lamp, before you go to your own house."
"May I not stay, then, in your house?"
"If you stay," she said above the flying wheel, "the village will remark it. I have neither father nor mother, nor any kin. If you stay, you must wed me, they will all say. And the priest will demand it."
"The priest already knows I am here. I took care that he should."
Then the wheel was left to itself and whirled itself to a standstill.
The cobweb clinging to the wall beheld itself embrace itself, the two it had been as one. But the anguish and the urgency of love it did not pause to examine, for some noiseless clamor drove it abruptly away.
As the lovers twined in the hovel, therefore, the unicorn walked delicately to the pool in the valley. It touched the tip of its unbelievable horn to the reflection there. Its calm eyes were two purple globes, shining, and its whiteness was like summer rain.
A human would have been thinking: Ah, I must consider this. I must know this. But the unicorn only considered, only knew. It returned to the black wood, wrapping itself in the blackness, fold on fold, until it was utterly invisible, even to itself.
The brief mortal kindling it had witnessed—or possibly imagined that it witnessed—held its awareness as its own life and the manifestations of life had formerly held it, and nourished it. It turned about within itself the images of the perfectly commonplace coupling, the commonplace wishes and desires which had heralded it. It turned them about like rare gems to catch the light of the rising moon.
The unicorn lay down in the blackness of the forest. It drank from its own brain.
Sometimes the blackness of the wood grew green or gold or rose. Sometimes there were faraway voices, or thunder, or the velvet sound of falling snow. Flowers burst out or withered under the body of the unicorn, which was no longer perceptible as anything like a body.
The magic of virginity, which had drawn the symbol of the unicorn on the air, both for the virgin and for itself, a virginity ironically almost instantly given up, drifted like a spring leaf on water. Then down and down through the unicorn's prismatic awareness.
At last this floating leaf, a green mote, struck the floor of the unicorn's intellect. It felt a cry within itself, a terrible cry, aching and raging, and full of inhuman human despair.
What was the meaning of this?
The unicorn did not know it, but time was also like the wood. As the wood had grown tall and tangled and old, so time had grown, hedging the unicorn round as if with high reeds, or a fence of gilded posts.
When it ran lightly over the pool, it did not notice it ran across water, as in the beginning.
The trees on the rock had also grown old. The unicorn passed through them, unimpeded, like fluid. The throbbing centre of the pain which had somehow reached the unicorn was to be found on the track that ran through the middle of the village.
Under the broken ancient wall of the town, an elderly woman was crying and lamenting, not loudly, but with a desperate intensity. To the human eye, her trouble was immediately quite plain. Two men had between them a covered figure on a bier. One hand, like a parcel of bones, stuck out, and this the woman held and fondled. A man was dead and due for burying, and the old woman, probably his wife, overcome at the final undeniable fact of parting, had halted the proceedings with this eruption of passionate grief. All around, others stood, trying to comfort or dissuade.
To the unicorn, only the outcry and the anguish were decipherable. They needed no explanation. And then it saw auburn hair and black, and recognized, or so it seemed, the lovers from the earlier night.
The unicorn moved closer. It stepped across the broken sunlight and the shadows and drew near to the old woman who wept and softly cried out, endeavoring to distinguish the young man and the young woman who were, in their physical forms, its own self from two other ages.
Then came a separation, of persons, of thought. The young man who resembled Lauro was younger than he had been when last the unicorn looked at him, and his hair was blacker than a coal. It was the girl, older than remembered, older than Sephaina, whose hair hung red as rust all down her back as she held the weeping woman and took her hand from the dead hand on the bier.
"Mother, my mother," said the girl, "my father is dead and we must let him go to his rest. Has he not earned his rest?" said the girl, gently, calmly, and it was the young man now who began to weep. "Let him be on his way."
The old woman allowed her hand to be removed from the stick-like fingers. She stood in the street, sunken and soulless, staring as the men with the bier moved off from her.
The unicorn sighed.
It had seemed only yesterday, or seven days before, or maybe at most a month, or a season ago, that it had left them, embracing and new and brimmed with life and trust beyond the spinning wheel. But summers had come and gone, winters, years and decades. Their children had grown. The son had his mother's hair, the girl her father's. And the maiden who had slept under the tree was gnarled and bent like a dehydrated stem, and the young man who had wooed her was an empty sack of flesh, its motive force spilled out.
"No," said the old woman tiredly. "How am I to live, how am I to be, now, alone?"
The unbeautiful, incoherent words conveyed her desolation exactly. She was rooted to the track. She saw no need to go on, or to return. Meaningless and stark and horrible, the world leaned all about her, a ruin, shelterless. Her poor face, haggard and puckered. The filmy eyes that had been dark as the pool beside the wood, all of her flaccid as the dead man carried away from her. Her mouth continued to make the shape of crying, but now even the tears would not come. She had reached the ultimate lethargy of wretchedness. And tug at her arm as the red-haired daughter might, or try to steel and support her as the black-haired son did, the old woman, who had been young and a virgin, stood on the track and saw her wasted life and the bitter blows of life, and all of its little, little sweetness, now snatched from her for ever.
And then something changed behind the dull lenses of her vision. Something seemed to open, some inner eye.
She had seen the unicorn standing not three paces from her.
"Mother—Mother, what is it now?" the girl asked anxiously.
"Hush," said t
he old woman. She was apparently aware her daughter could not see the silver beast with its greyhound's head, its amethystine eyes, its body like a moonburst, its single horn like a cone of stars—that no one could see the unicorn but she. "Hush. Let me listen."
"But what are you hearing?"
"Hush."
So they fell silent in the street. The men and women looked at each other, fearing for the wits of this one of their number. Yet, politely, they waited.
The unicorn stood, a few inches from the ground, visible only to one, fixing her first with this lambent eye, then with that. The unicorn, of course, did not speak. It had no speech. But lowering its neck, it set the tip of its horn, like a silver pin, to the old woman's forehead.
There is no death. Beyond life, is life. Whatever suffering and whatever disappointment, whatever joy, whatever bewilderment, there is more time than can be measured to learn, and to be comforted. Blindly to demand, meekly to consent, inwardly to know, these are the stages of existence. But beyond all knowledge is another, unknown knowledge. And beyond that unknown knowledge, another. Progression is endless. And to be alone is the only truth and the only falsehood.
The unicorn vanished on this occasion like a melting of spring snow. The old woman noted it, and she smiled. She walked firmly after the bier, crying still somewhat, from habit.
She was to live to a great age. One evening in the future, she would tell her daughter—then rocking her own child in the firelight—"On the day of your father's burying, I saw the Christ. He wore the shape of a white unicorn. He promised life everlasting."
But that was far away, and now the unicorn ran, like the wind, and as it ran it left humanity behind itself for ever. It dissolved and was a burning light.
The light asked nothing of itself, it was content to blaze, which also, surely, was another truth.
The being of Lasephun was presently transmuted, passing into some further, extraordinary stage, the name of which creature is unknown, here.
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