F&SF BK UNICORNS VOL 2.indb

by Gordon Van Gelder

  With the onset of poaching, the legendary unicorn herds numbering upwards of a thousand members no longer exist, and you’ll find that the typical herd today consists of from fifty to seventy-five individuals. The days when a photographer, safe and secure in a blind by a water hole, could preserve on film an endless stream of the brutes coming down to drink are gone forever—and it is absolutely shocking to contemplate the number of unicorns that have died simply so their horns could be sold on the black market. In fact, I find it appalling that anyone in this enlightened day and age still believes that a powdered unicorn horn can act as an aphrodisiac.

  (Indeed, as any magus can tell you, you treat the unicorn horn with essence of grach and then boil it slowly in a solution of sphinx blood. Now that’s an aphrodisiac!)

  But I digress.

  The unicorn, being a nondiscriminating browser that is equally content to feed upon grasses, leaves, fruits, and an occasional small fern tree, occurs in a wide variety of habitats, often in the company of grazers such as centaurs and the pegasus.

  Once you have spotted the unicorn herd, it must be approached with great care and caution. The unicorn may have poor eyesight, and its sense of hearing may not be much better, but it has an excellent sense of smell and an absolutely awesome sense of grimscb about which so much has been written that there is no point in my belaboring the subject yet again.

  If you are on a camera safari, I would strongly advise against trying to get closer than one hundred yards to even a solitary beast—that sense of grimscbagain—and most of the photographers I know swear by an 85-350mm automatic-focus zoom lens, providing, of course, that it has been blessed by a Warlock of the Third Order. If you haven’t got the shots you want by sunset, my best advice is to pack it in for the day and return the next morning. Flash photography is possible, of course, but it does tend to attract golem and other even more bothersome nocturnal predators.

  One final note to the camera buff: For reasons our alchemists have not yet determined, no unicorn has ever been photographed with normal emulsified film of any speed, so make absolutely sure that you use one of the more popular infrared brands. It would be a shame to spend weeks on safari, paying for your guide, cook, and trolls, only to come away with a series of photos of the forest that you thought was merely the background to your pictures.

  As for hunting the brutes, the main thing to remember is that they are as close to you as you are to them. For this reason, while I don’t disdain blood sacrifices, amulets, talismans, and blessings, all of which have their proper place, I for one always feel more confident with a .550 Nitro Express in my hands. A little extra stopping power can give a hunter quite a feeling of security.

  You’ll want a bull unicorn, of course; they tend to have more spectacular horns than cows—and by the time a bull’s horn is long enough to be worth taking, he’s probably too old to be in the herd’s breeding program anyway.

  The head shot, for reasons explained earlier, is never a wise option. And unless your wizard teaches you the Rune of Mamhotet, thus enabling you to approach close enough to pour salt on the beast’s tail and thereby pin him to the spot where he’s standing, I recommend the heart shot (either heart will do—and if you have a double-barreled gun, you might try to hit both of them, just to be on the safe side).

  If you have the bad fortune to merely wound the beast, he’ll immediately make off for the trees or the high grass, which puts you at an enormous disadvantage. Some hunters, faced with such a situation, merely stand back and allow the smerps to finish the job for them—after all, smerps rarely devour the horn unless they’re completely famished—but this is hardly sporting. The decent, honorable hunter, well aware of the unwritten rules of blood sports, will go after the unicorn himself.

  The trick, of course, is to meet him on fairly open terrain. Once the unicorn lowers his head to charge, he’s virtually blind, and all you need do is dance nimbly out of his way and take another shot at him—or, if you are not in possession of the Rune of Mamhotet, this would be an ideal time to get out that salt and try to sprinkle some on his tail as he races by.

  When the unicorn dictates the rules of the game, you’ve got a much more serious situation. He’ll usually double back and lie in the tall grasses beside his spoor, waiting for you to pass by, and then attempt to gore you from behind.

  It is at this time that the hunter must have all his wits about him. Probably the best sign to look for is the presence of Fire-Breathing Dragonflies. These noxious little insects frequently live in symbiosis with the unicorn, cleansing his ears of parasites, and their presence usually means that the unicorn isn’t far off. Yet another sign that your prey is nearby will be the flocks of hungry harpies circling overhead, waiting to swoop down and feed upon the remains of your kill; and, of course, the surest sign of all is when you hear a grunt of rage and find yourself staring into the bloodshot, beady little eyes of a wounded bull unicorn from a distance of ten feet or less. It’s moments like that that make you feel truly alive, especially when you suddenly realize that this isn’t necessarily a permanent condition.

  All right. Let us assume that your hunt is successful. What then?

  Well, your trolls will skin the beast, of course, and take special care in removing and preserving the horn. If they’ve been properly trained, they’ll also turn the pelt into a rug, the hooves into ashtrays, the teeth into a necklace, the tail into a flyswatter, and the scrotum into a tobacco pouch. My own feeling is that you should settle for nothing less, since it goes a long way toward showing the bleeding-heart preservationists that a unicorn can supply the hunter with a lot more than just a few minutes of pleasurable sport and a horn. And while I’m on the subject of what the unicorn can supply, let me strongly suggest that you would be missing a truly memorable experience if you were to come home from safari without having eaten unicorn meat at least once. There’s nothing quite like unicorn cooked over an open camp-fire to top off a successful hunt. (And do remember to leave something out for the smerps, or they might well decide that hunter is every bit as tasty as unicorn.)

  So get out those amulets and talismans, visit those wizards and warlocks, pack those cameras and weapons—and good hunting to you!

  Next Week: Outstaring the Medusa

  —The End—

  Sportsman’s Difficulty

  Doris Pitkin Buck

  To every man, his favorite hunting;

  My game, the unicorn.

  Never a thunder like his trumpet throat.

  Never such lightning

  as flames, all gold or lilac, from that eye.

  I do not know how he can toss so proudly

  his horse’s head weighted with that vast horn.

  He is the king

  of all that tread on hooves;

  his own are windshod,

  and if you think wind is not hard like iron,

  go lean against it in a city canyon.

  I could have caught a herd of unicorns

  were the bait easier

  to find.

  The Lady’s Garden

  Jane Yolen

  IN THE LADY’S garden lived three unicorns. They were all old—Lady, garden, and unicorns—having been there from the beginning of things.

  The garden was kept from the sight of the World by a very large stone wall which was overgrown with spindly weeds and thistles, and hairy moss plugging up the chinks.

  When the sun shone down, the unicorns liked to lie under the apple tree, which was the oldest thing of all in the garden. Its branches hung down to the ground, gnarled and misshapen, but covered with the most delicious red apples the year round.

  When it rained, which was an hour every other day and twice on Tuesdays, regular as clockwork, the unicorns would stay in the stone barn, snugged together in the sweet-smelling hay. The patter on the barn roof then took on a soporific rhythm, and often the unicorns would doze and dream. Their dreams were always about running over great green swards, the wind through the white manes. Alwa
ys.

  If the Lady dreamed—or even she napped—no one knew for sure, for she only spoke of waking things: tide and sun and wind and rain and the changing of seasons.

  On one side of the garden was, as I have said, the World. On the other was the Great Ocean. It was the Ocean’s tide which was often the subject of the Lady’s discourse. And though she may have thought any trouble to the garden would come to it from the World’s side, it was the Ocean that did, in the end, bring about her direst time.

  Now, though the unicorns were all terribly old, they were not the same age. The oldest was Wishart, whose skin was almost translucent; it was a kind of pearly white, like the inside of certain shells. When he walked—and he never ran—he moved with an ancient grace. His breath smelled musty, like a bowl of crushed flower petals. He rarely listened to anything but the sound of the Ocean outside the wall.

  The second oldest was Tartary. Her skin was like vellum and looked brittle but wasn’t. In fact it was as soft as an infant’s and smelled that sweet-sour infant smell, as if talc and sour milk had been mixed together. Tartary listened only to the Lady’s voice.

  The third oldest—they called her Infanta when they called her anything at all—still had a bit of spirit to her walk, and a bit of flint in her amber eyes. Even her horn was still the gold of new-minted coins, while the other unicorns had horns more like the color of the full moon.

  If Wishart listened only to the sound of the Ocean, and Tartary listened only to the Lady, Infanta heard the sounds of the earth growing: grass and leaves and timothy in the fields. She could distinguish between oak and ash on the rise, though the sound of rowan growing made her tremble all over.

  And the Lady? She was old but she never seemed to age. Except her eyes, which were once the deep, rich blue of a Spring sky and were now faded like the skies over Winter.

  Now the way that trouble came to the garden was this. It was a small thing, but the Lady should have known that small things carry the greatest dangers. Didn’t a tiny viper bite the heel of the hero and bring him low? Didn’t ants tunnel through the great walls of Cathay and grind whole sections to dust?

  For the first time in years—in centuries, actually—there was a strange sound outside one of the gates in the wall. Those gates, normally so overgrown with bramble hedge and briar on the World’s side and so besieged by the Ocean on the other, needed no guards or wards. In fact, the Lady and the unicorns scarcely remembered from one year to the next that the gates existed. But this one lambent spring day, right after the hour’s rain, there was something rather like the wailing of a discontented child by the Northeastern gate. No, exactly like the wailing of a discontented child. The wailing went on from the moment the rain ended until quite past teatime, or about three hours. At that point, Infanta stomped three times with her left forefoot and shook her head until the white mane flew about as light as milkweed milk.

  “What is that noise?” she asked.

  Neither Tartary—who listened to the Lady—or Wishart—who listened only to the sea—bothered to answer. But Infanta asked anyway. “It is louder than grass growing. Louder than a gully full of Queen Anne’s lace and campion. Louder even than the bursting open of marigolds, which is very loud, indeed.” And she went to complain directly to the Lady, who had heard the sound already.

  “If I didn’t know any better,” said the Lady, “I would say it is a child—and a very young child at that—lying in a reed basket washed up upon the Ocean’s small shingle.” And because the Lady was blessed with a certain amount of prescience, which is another way of saying she could see a bit into the future, Infanta knew exactly what they would find.

  The Lady sent one of her most trusted winds to leap over the wall and report back. It was a very small wind, hardly more than a breeze, really. When it returned, it reported in a voice made sweet with baby’s breath and tart with brine. “It is a very young child lying in a basket.”

  “A reed basket,” the Lady said, a great deal of satisfaction in her voice.

  “Well, nettles and linen, actually,” the breeze answered. Breezes, for all they are lightweight, insist on being factual. It is the habit of preachers and politicians as well.

  The Lady made a face at the breeze. She hated making any kind of mistake. But then she smiled at the breeze because it had, after all, merely been reporting, not making judgments. And then the Lady instructed slightly larger breezes to waft their gauzy shifts together and make a rope to hook through the handles of the basket. In this way the child was raised up and over the wall and into the garden proper.

  And that, you see, was the Beginning of the End.

  The child was a boy. That was evident at once. And he was hungry. That, too, was evident. But whose child he was or why he was there at all, those questions could not be answered, not even by the Lady. Indeed those questions were never to be answered, but by teatime the next day it didn’t matter because by then they were all thoroughly besotted with him.

  Infanta was the first to fall under his spell, when he raised his little hand up to her mane and tangled his chubby fingers in it.

  The next to fall was Tartary. “He has,” she cooed to the Lady, “your voice.” By which she meant she was listening to him, though not really hearing him, for certainly the baby did not have the Lady’s voice at all, hers being low and rounded and full, and his just being full.

  Wishart actually held out the longest, until the breezes lifted the child onto his back. The baby crowed his delight, and if you could at that moment have seen the look in Wishart’s old pearly eyes, you would have been sure they had turned to oceans themselves. He trotted around the inner path, past the herb gardens, stepping over rockery plants with a lightness he hadn’t shown in years.

  The Lady changed the baby’s clothes and fed him pap she mixed herself, and wiped both his face and his bottom as if that were something she had always wanted to do. And she sang to him as she cleaned, songs like “Dance to Thy Daddy, My Little Laddie,” and “Trot, Trot to Boston,” which hadn’t even been invented yet. And “Western Wind,” which had.

  Eventually, after months of squabbling, they settled on Waverly as his name.

  “Because the waves brought him,” the Infanta said, looking down fondly into his crib.

  As long as Waverly was a baby and then a child, there was no trouble in the Lady’s garden. After all, except for uprooting some of the slighter plants—to see what held them to the ground—Waverly was a good boy, if overly curious. Of course curiosity was not something either the Lady or the unicorns really understood. But they realized, if somewhat begrudgingly, that curiosity would serve young Waverly in his education, and so they did not stifle it.

  By the time he was ten and had gone through “What’s that?” and “Why’s that?” and on to “Why not?” however, they had all begun to lose patience with him. With their sense of time, it seemed that only yesterday they had drawn baby Waverly up from the basket, though to Waverly it was ages and ages earlier.

  Where, they wondered, is the sweet-smelling, charming, compliant infant we fell in love with! And who is this loud, boisterous, dirty boy who has taken his place! And slowly, though they certainly didn’t mean to, they all fell out of love with him. Just a little.

  Just enough.

  Now Waverly did not know what was happening, but he certainly felt that something was. One moment everyone—Lady and unicorns and breezes—had all been lovely to him, giving him whatever he asked for and praising him. And then suddenly they said “No!” all the time. “No, you cannot make a fortress in the rockery garden.” “No, you cannot put a house up in the apple tree.” “No, you cannot scale the wall.” “No, you cannot . . . must not . . . shall not . . . may not . . .” to everything that seemed even the slightest bit interesting or exciting or dangerous.

  So Waverly did what every child at ten does. He did it all anyway.

  Neither the Lady nor the unicorns knew the slightest thing about giving out punishments. It was not in their makeup.
So they did what they had done before Waverly had ever arrived. Wishart started listening only to the sound of the sea. Tartary listened only to the Lady’s voice. Infanta listened only to the sounds of the earth growing. And the Lady—she worked in the garden, she kept the great house clean, and she spoke to Waverly only when forced to. When forced to say, once again, “No!”

  So it should not have been surprising—though it was—that on the morning of Waverly’s sixteenth birthday (or at least the morning of the anniversary of the sixteenth year he had been drawn up out of the sea) they were all awakened by the sound of loud chopping. When they got out to the garden, there was Waverly, an axe in hand. He had just finished cutting down the apple tree and hollowing it into a boat.

  “A boat ?” the Lady asked for she knew right away what he was doing, her prescience working as well as her eyes. “And where did you learn about boats?”

  “Where I learned about the Ocean and where I learned about the World,” Waverly answered sensibly. “In your library.”

  “But the apple tree is the oldest thing of all,” the Lady said.

  “And I am the newest,” Waverly said. “Would you have had me make a boat from stone?”

  “We wouldn’t have you make a boat at all,” the Lady said. “Would we?” she asked the unicorns.

  Wishart did not answer, for he was listening only to the sea which was issuing a strange siren call. Tartary did not answer, for she was waiting for the Lady’s answer. And Infanta was too busy weeping over the demise of the apple tree.

  Still, they didn’t stop the boy, because he was already halfway through building the boat. And besides, they didn’t know how.

  It took him three days to make the boat and rig a sail, just as he had seen in one of the books in the Lady’s library. And that very night, without so much as a goodbye, he was gone with the boat over the wall. They had no idea how he had managed; they’d had no idea he was so resourceful.