by Jack Dann
Well, well, very well, then. Here we have unicorn's horn. But, there being, really, I am afraid, no such actual thing as a unicorn—what were all those people taking, who thought they were taking unicorn's horn (alicorn, licorn?) What were they applying to the food and drink on those lavish tables? Bezoar-stone, snake' s-tongue, terra sigilata, eagle-stone, snake-stone, toad-stone, cerastes, vulture's and raven's claw, vulture's claw, rhino horn, walrus tusks, stalactites, stalagmites, powdered stag's horn, tongue-stone, burnt horn, whalebone, limestone, fossils . . . This list may pose as many questions as it answers. Bezoar-stone, for example, is a concretion which may be found in the tummies of turtles and of serpents as well as in those of cattle and goats. In my "Adventure in Unhistory, An Abundance of Dragons" (IASFM, July 6,1981), I have attempted to connect it with the so-called treasure-hoards of precious stones guarded by the Great Worm. Snake's tongue may have been, indeed, snake's tongue; similia similibus curantur, like cures like, the poisonous tongue of a snake was—obviously—good against poison; the fact that the venom of a venomous snake is not distilled through its tongue was not fully realized. Tongue-stone was "really the petrified tooth of a shark;" Shepard doesn't say which shark; Fred, maybe. Terra sigilata means "sealed earth." The earth was taken from a place in the island of Lemnos for well over 2,000 years, stamped with whatsoever signs, and used for cups, as well as being eaten. One of the signs was the sign of the unicorn. Perhaps the consumption of the terra sigilata may be associated with the phenomena variously called pica, geophagy, or clay eating; Shepard doesn't say; I say. Also the earth was certainly one of the "native earths," largely (perhaps) aluminum silicate, used in modern times for stomach ailments such as ileitis. Eagle-stone is also a concretion (look up "concretion"); old John D. Rockefeller used to carry one in his pocket to keep off rheumatism, and, possibly, competition and trust-busting; for the last 40-odd years of his life he lived on milk, poor-rich guy, his stomach being able to hold nothing stronger—you think it's a cinch, being the richest man in the world?—popular belief says it was mother's milk, skeptics say it was merely that of mother goats. Maybe he should have tried terra sigilata, or one of its successors.
Toad-stones, despite Shakespeare's assurance that "the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in its head," were actually "the fossilized teeth of the stingray."—And so on. As for fossils, if, as often, these were fossilized bones, the calcium content might well have been useful to the consumer.
However. When we read of the alicorns being some-limes seven feet long, and sometimes decorated with silver and with gold, clearly we are not dealing with some nugget extracted from the belly of a goat, nor with a fossilized fish-tooth, a walrus tusk, or a concretion able to fit into a pocket . . . even a millionaire's pocket. Nor was it a cerastes, or viper's horn . . . what? A horned snake? Isn't this about as fabulous as a horned (as distinct from a horny) jack-ass? Let us to Webster's Collegiate (I use no other), what does it say, it says
ce-ras' tēs [L. a horned serpent, fr. Gr. kerastēs, horned, fr keras, horn] A venomous viper . . . of the Near East, having a horny process over each eye;—hence often called horned viper.
Well, I snum. Whether or not Herodotus snummed, I can't say, but he referred to "horned asses," too . . . and, clearly, his creatures were not rhino. What were they? Don't you wish you knew? Stick around. Rome wasn't built in a day. Andrea Bacci . . . says that in his time a pound of powdered alicorn was commonly sold in Florence for 1,536 crowns, the worth of a pound of gold at the time being 148 crowns. More than they pay me. Of course, I'm not working. I'm just writing. ("Are you working these days, Avram? Or just writing?") And if you knew how many years I have been accumulating these data, you would shake your heads in shame at the mere trifle you have paid to read it. Onward.
The learned Mr. Robert Silverberg, in his monumental Prester John, gives us the following report:
Byzantine writers testify to the continuing power of Axumite Ethiopia in the 5th and 6th centuries. Ethiopian ambassadors were in attendance at the courts of Constantinople, Persia, India, and Ceylon. Ethiopian caravans spanned the desert route to Egypt and went up from Yemen across Arabia to Mesopotamia; Ethiopian vessels were active in the Red Sea. Kosmas Indicopleustes, who visited Ethiopia about 525, set down a vivid account of the great expeditions of traders sent from the Axumite capital every other year to the Ethiopian interior to bargain for gold, offering the primitive natives salt, iron, and cattle in return. Kosmas also told of the king's palace at Axum, with four great towers topped by four statues of unicorns, and marvelled at the tame elephants and giraffes in the palace courtyard.
Were these the unicorns of Ctesias, from far-off India? If the ambassadors of Axumite Ethiopia went as far as Ceylon, a commerce with India would not be out of the question;—or, on the other hand, were these unicorns the "horned asses" mentioned by Herodotus as being "in the eastern side of Libya, where the wanderers [i.e. nomads] live"? The name of the modern nation of Libya is a fairly recent borrowing of the ancient Greek term which included most of cisequatorial Africa aside from Egypt. Perhaps we shall find out. Perhaps not. Who knows what we shall find.
"I saw 32 unicorns there. This is an amazingly fierce creature, in every way similar to a fine horse, except that it has a stag's head, feet like an elephant, the tail of a boar, and a black horn on its forehead, six or seven feet long, which generally hangs down like a turkey-cock's comb. When it wishes to fight or use it in any other way, it raises it stiff and straight. I saw one of them in the company of several other wild animals, purifying a fountain with its horn. [ . . . ] The unicorn purified the water of pools and springs from any dirt or poison in them, so that these various animals could drink in safety after it."
Who saw? One Reverend Father François Rabelais, M.D., is our source here, in his book Gargantua and Pantagruel (Penguin, 1955). As old Rabelais was a funny fellow, it is likely that he is funning here; despite the quotations from Solinus and "the pilgrim John of Herse." There is always more in a work of art than its creator intended, says Marianne Thalmann; and it is certain that in the reference to the "horn . . . which generally hangs down like a turkey-cock's comb . . . [and sometimes is raised] stiff and straight" there is more intended than the good father's religious superiors intended he should intend; eh, Mr. Wong, Mr. Ong, Mr. Dong?
And surely it is now time to state that in the whole legend of the unicorn and the virgin (recall that it is a small v, and that we are dealing merely with a popular legend and not with any article of religious belief) there is scarcely a trace of mysticism, that the allegory or metaphor is purely, I would not wish to say "impurely," a phallic one; that the horn which sometimes hangs down and sometimes rises stiffly erect is the same phallus which every male mammal has—or, for that matter, largely (ho ho) every male vertebrate—that, whether or not Ovid was correct in stating, "after coitus all animals are sad," it is certainly correct that after coitus all phalluses are flaccid. The whole thing was merely a tolerable joke which got, so to speak, out of hand; scarcely did one know it, before it had entered the realm of metaphor and art. The savage creature persuaded to lay its fierce-horned head in the virgin's (maiden's) lap, after which it fell asleep and was easily captured—what else is this but that which everyone knows as a commonplace? the pricking of the sleep-thorn? Samson shorn in the arms of Delilah as he slept? Sisera, sleeping, slain by Jael? Need we go on? Not really.
In Europe (merely to sum up) the horned unicorn yields to the charms of sex. In Asia the unicorn's horn gives capacity to prolong sex. To this day in southern Italy, corno, or "horn," refers to the penis, to the horn-shaped charm so puissant against all magic, and to magic—in its malign form—itself. I've said it once, and once again and no more say it I will: horn = horny.
Rapidly to ascend to a higher sphere, have I not hinted that there may have been Biblical elements in the legend of the unicorn? I have. There are verses. God hath brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn, Num.
23:22 (a marginal note—wild oxx). The them/he in question seems to be Jacob/Israel. Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilst thou trust him because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn? Job, 39:9-12. These are among the great many rhetorical questions in the great Book of Job. And, to swing back to both Ctesias and Herodotus, earlier in the 39th Chapter of Job we find this: Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. However . . .
Let us recollect that the Bible was not originally issued in English, and take note that every Biblical use of unicorn is in the Old Testament, which came out, the first time around, in Hebrew. The world used was re' em, pronounced rem, and Bible scholars seem to agree that it really means "wild ox;" so say the Jewish translations, and so says a marginal note in the (Nelson) edition of the King James, or Protestant, version from which I have quoted. Other verses, which I have not quoted, seem to emphasize the horn—except sometimes, sigh, it is horns. Nowhere does the Bible indicate that this beast has only one horn. The implication must have entered via the Latin and the Greek translations, both of which had been revised after the first one(s); it is not possible for me, writing with the valor of ignorance, to say at which date implication of single-hornedness entered the texts—certainly, though, after the time of Ctesias or Herodotus. I conjecture visions of a translation committee wondering what re' em is, considering that it was anyway a horned animal living in the wilderness and not domesticable, and deciding that it might be the unicorn.
And that's as far as I go.
As for the moon, the fancied resemblance of the crescent moon to horns enters the symbolism of mankind earlier than we are able to trace; as for the pollution or poisoning caused by nocturnal demons, we have here, I think, a conflation of nightmares and wet dreams with the same half-awareness of the origin of a major plague which has given us the word malaria: mal aria, bad air. Webster's Collegiate again,
archaic: air infected with a noxious substance capable of causing disease.
As I have expressed my simple but certain conviction that "horny" = "horn," and that "horn" = "horny," it will come not as a shock when I state further that behind the "poisons of the night" may well lie the so-called "nocturnal pollution" which consists of, simply, the phenomena well-known to every man and boy under the common term of "wet dream"—that is, a dream of sexual intercourse which results in an emission of semen. As for water, there was the obvious fact that water sometimes, often, was polluted (and what do I mean, "was"?), plus the not so obvious fact of stagnant water harboring mosquitoes which sometimes spread disease.
Let me attempt my reconstruction, then. The crescent moon rises and sets over a body of water, that is, it dips its horn in it. By day time many of the mosquitoes have gone back to their ponds and marshes, therefore the day is healthier than the night, that is, the dipping of the horn has purified the water. All horns are powerful, the rarer they are the more powerful they are, that of the unicorn is the rarest and thus the most powerful, so if you dip the unicorn's horn in water it will purify the water. Pollution is poison, and so the unicorn's horn will both prevent and cure poisoning.
Q.E.D.
Many items, we have seen, were passed as unicorn (licorn, alicorn), but the one which became recognized as unicorn's horn, the most obvious and excellent, was the long, straight, spirally one. There was nothing else really like it, it was obviously . . . well, whatever it was . . . and, by Jove! It looked like it damned well ought to be the horn of the unicorn. —And, after it had been so depicted in art long enough, the matter came to admit of no doubt. Until.
Until someone began to do a little book-keeping. The unicorn, it was generally accepted, lived in the south and the south-east. Hot countries. Yes? Yes. So . . . how come . . . how come that all the best—and, in fact, all the spirally—horns—came from the north? This question was long in being asked and was long in being answered; when the answer finally came, sometime in the 1600s, the effect was devastating: "The unicorn's horn is the tooth of a fish which lives in the great northern ocean!" —or, in modern terms, it is the tusk of the narwhal or narwhale. Back to Webster's Collegiate:
tusk . . . 1. an elongated greatly enlarged tooth that projects when the mouth is closed and serves for digging food or as a weapon . . .
and
nar-whal also nar-wal . . . or nar-whale . . . an arctic cetacean (Monodon monoceros) about 20 feet long with the male having a long twisted ivory tusk of commercial value.
Only, any longer, not that damned valuable! For, you see, it was not the innate value of the article which gave it its value; it was the belief that the article came from the magical land-animal which gave it its value; if it was not from the unicorn then it had no more value than if it had come from, say, the hippo. Ivory, although valuable, was, after all, merely valuable as ivory. The elephant could cure nothing, neither could the hippo, neither could the walrus, and so, certainly, neither could this damned Norwegian dolphin . . . or whatever it was . . . And after that, it was down-hill all the way.
The narwhale is born with the roots for two tusks, but only one of them grows out? Who cares. There is an antelope called the oryx with a long spiral horn, or horns, and sometimes one breaks off, or if viewed in profile the two look like one single horn? Who cares. It is possible to transplant the horn-buds of a bull-calf to the middle of its forehead so that it will have one centrally-located horn? Who cares. If the puissant horn was not in fact grown upon the brow of a classy-looking horse-like creature in a remote wilderness and taken after its capture by a virgin—if it was merely a damned fish-tooth washed upon a barren strand somewhere in Scandinavia . . . why . . . then . . . the hell with it.
Who cares.
Nobody.
After that, all the work of scientific skepticism and empiric investigation was largely beside the point. After that, the merchants of Venice, who had made many a killing in unicorn horn, after that, after asking the familiar question of What news on the Rialto?—the Venetian commercial district—did not bother to quote unicorn. Probably they quoted, instead, spaghetti. Which, after all, if not as romantic, is certainly a lot tastier.
Please pass the grated cheese.
Introduction to Theodore Sturgeon's "The Silken Swift":
Theodore Sturgeon is one of the true giants of the field, a seminal figure whose influence on the development of SF itself is hard to overestimate. Whether he was writing for John W. Campbell's Astounding during the "Golden Age" of the forties, or for Horace L. Gold's Galaxy during the fifties, or for the original anthologies of the sixties and seventies (or for F&SF, or Playboy, or . . . ), Sturgeon has for more than forty years been in the business of producing stylish, innovative, and poetically-intense fiction. Sturgeon was one of the best short story writers ever to work in the genre, and even a partial listing of his short fiction will include major stories that helped to expand the boundaries of the SF story and push it in the direction of artistic maturity: "It," "Microcosmic God," "Killdozer," "Bianca's Hands," "The Other Celia," "Maturity," "The Other Man," and the brilliant "Baby is Three," one of the best novellas of the fifties. "Baby is Three" was eventually expanded into Sturgeon's most famous and influential novel, More than Human. Sturgeon's other books include the novels Some of Your Blood, Venus Plus X, The Dreaming Jewels, and the collections A Touch of Strange, Caviar, and The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon. His most recent books are the collections The Stars are the Styx and The Golden Helix.
In "The Silken Swift," one of the most renowned of all unicorn stories, he explores the subtle differences between those who are blind and those who will not see.
THE SILKEN SWIFT
Theodore Sturgeon
There's a village by the Bogs, and in the village
is a Great House. In the Great House lived a squire who had land and treasures and, for a daughter, Rita.
In the village lived Del, whose voice was a thunder in the inn when he drank there; whose corded, cabled body was golden-skinned, and whose hair flung challenges back to the sun.
Deep in the Bogs, which were brackish, there was a pool of purest water, shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspen, cupped by banks of a moss most marvellously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there were strange pipings in mid-summer. No one ever heard them but a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed. Her name was Barbara.
There was a green evening, breathless with growth, when Del took his usual way down the lane beside the manor and saw a white shadow adrift inside the tall iron pickets. He stopped, and the shadow approached, and became Rita. "Slip around to the gate," she said, "and I'll open it for you."
She wore a gown like a cloud and a silver circlet round her head. Night was caught in her hair, moonlight in her face, and in her great eyes, secrets swam.
Del said, "I have no business with the squire."
"He's gone," she said. "I've sent the servants away. Come to the gate."
"I need no gate." He leaped and caught the top bar of the fence, and in a continuous fluid motion went high and across and down beside her. She looked at his arms, one, the other; then up at his hair. She pressed her small hands tight together and made a little laugh, and then she was gone through the tailored trees, lightly, swiftly, not looking back. He followed, one step for three of hers, keeping pace with a new pounding in the sides of his neck. They crossed a flower bed and a wide marble terrace. There was an open door, and when he passed through it he stopped, for she was nowhere in sight. Then the door clicked shut behind him and he whirled. She was there, her back to the panel, laughing up at him in the dimness. He thought she would come to him then, but instead she twisted by, close, her eyes on his. She smelt of violets and sandalwood. He followed her into the great hall, quite dark but full of the subdued lights of polished wood, cloisonné, tooled leather and gold-threaded tapestry. She flung open another door, and they were in a small room with a carpet made of rosy silences, and a candle-lit table. Two places were set, each with five different crystal glasses and old silver as prodigally used as the iron pickets outside. Six teakwood steps rose to a great oval window. "The moon," she said, "will rise for us there."