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by A. A. Attanasio

  *

  At the foot of Ygrane's bed stands a Fire Lord in

  luminous raiment and with a shining face of flames. No one sees him, because the queen's magic has passed away

  and with it has gone her sight. The world of gods, angels, and demons burns unseen before Ygrane, while a new

  world swells in her lap.

  The Fire Lord stares into her and backward across

  time. He watches Ygrane and sees her as a peasant child in the hills at play with the faeries, then later as a young queen, when she climbed into the Storm Tree and

  accosted the Furor himself. Closely, he peers at the time when Ygrane first confronted the unicorn.

  Time flexes like a lens, and Tintagel appears as it

  looked on that afternoon years ago, its ivory spires and terraced battlements afloat among flurries and sea spray.

  Spume from the breakers exploding on the cliff-rocks far below swirls about Ygrane where she stands in a wintry garden atop the west tower.

  The queen wears a gown festooned with feather

  amulets and bone-bead talismans designed to amplify her magic. She raises her arms, and the spindrift leaps into the wind with the blurred shape of the unicorn. Her spell soars into the thunder-noise of the sea.

  *

  Then, comes the cry—a reverberant call wide as

  thunder, insistent as the ocean's bellow, rolling across the snowbound horizon yet also pulling from within, like the sap's withdrawal at winter's touch.

  The mysterious call tugs at the unicorn, and the

  solar creature cannot help but respond. Pulled away from its seclusion in the forest as if by a leash, it slides westward.

  This is not the summons of the angels, it knows at

  once. The draw of this undercurrent is too cold, an arctic ebb tide luring it into the depths of winter. Escape is only possible upward. It must leave the Dragon's pelt entirely. It must bound away from the Earth and return to the fields of the sun. That is the only way it can break this mysterious bond that fetters it to the sunset sky.

  Who is calling it, then—it does not know. Yet, it

  knows full well that if it departs Earth to escape this call, it will not return. The love of the herd will be too strong after so long away, too many-voiced and familiar for it to return to this lonely and eerie place, no matter its loyalty to the Fire Lords.

  So, the unicorn travels west, head high, as if

  willingly. It must see who has shackled it and why. If necessary, it can always leap away from the Dragon and abandon the angels.

  Its fear flattens, and, calmly, it proceeds down the

  ebony steps of the horizon, through the rum-smoke of

  twilight, and into the west, touched red.

  *

  The unicorn steps from the sky, alighting silently on

  the flagstones of an aerie garden, a flat-crowned tower covered with loam and a spiral walkway. At the center of the winter-dead garden, the curving path finds a flat boulder of blue rock.

  Ygrane, a woman of twenty-two winters, stands atop

  the rock in white robes full of seawind. Her tresses shine cinnamon in the sharp sunlight, and her silver-ringed hands shimmer with transparent energies—the leash that the

  Furor placed in her grip years before.

  Soundlessly, the unicorn paws its blue opal hooves

  on the flagstone at the far end of the spiral path. Its long eyes carry the same emerald light as the Celtic queen's.

  Watching unblinkingly, the spike-browed steed walks the stone path at a stately gait. It bears its horn high, pulling back on the witch-queen's magnetic leash to demonstrate that it can rip free if it wants.

  Ygrane holds tight and even dares pull harder. For

  many seasons, she has been calling the unicorn with the magic that the Furor gave her in the Great Tree. Whenever she has visited Tintagel, she has worked this magic,

  patiently feeding the call with her life-force, feeling the connection reach out, make contact, and tighten. Hundreds of times she has stood here calling to the unicorn, drawing it closer across the years.

  Now that the magical being has been pulled into

  view, time weirdly accelerates. Clouds shred overhead, and the sun rolls to its southern retreat while the unicorn completes the spiral.

  When it stands before the queen, with the dark

  sockets of its nostrils exhaling summery hay-mown

  breaths, the world slows to dusk. Twilight's citrons and greens streak the sky and reflect in the animal's lustrous coat.

  In that first, daylong instant, all the purpose and

  history of the young queen sluice through the unicorn. It has no interest in that. Its mind reaches deeper into the human animal that has summoned it. It sees through the vault of dolls that are Ygrane's thoughts and finds at the back of her soul the living gods that empower her.

  They are the Daoine Sid, the very old gods who

  served Mother in the time before the Chiefs. Their king is Elk-Head, self-named Someone Knows the Truth. Like the Furor and the other gods, he once dwelled with his clan in the branches of the Great Tree. Centuries ago, the Fauni defeated him and drove the Sid out of the bright boughs.

  The wounded gods scurried and crawled across the

  cracked hide of the Dragon, and many were devoured

  whole. The Dragon would have consumed them all, but

  there were too many to ingest at once. During that vital

  interval, with the Dragon swollen drunkenly on its feast, shrewd Elk-Head had time to gather from outside his tribe sacrifices for the voracious beast.

  Since then, the Sid have found sanctuary in the

  subterranean rootcoils of the Great Tree by feeding the Dragon regularly. They lure gods, giants, trolls, and people into the maw of the Dragon.

  The witch-queen Ygrane is one of their priestesses.

  They have charged her with tremendous power to minister to their elf armies, who prowl the western lands seeking sustenance for their draconic master.

  This woman is precisely the ally the unicorn needs

  to continue serving its masters, the Fire Lords, and it greets her with a chimeful cry and a gentle wag of its head.

  Ygrane accepts the happy greeting by offering her

  hands to the slant-faced creature. The silver rings on her fingers smell of thunder, and the unicorn nuzzles against her.

  Ygrane has foreseen this moment for years and is

  not surprised by the morning stars in the staring green eyes or the smoke-swirl of its fur. What surprises her is the blue quiet that uplifts her heart.

  And then, the unicorn is gone. Glimmering away on

  the shining wind, it disappears into the pond of the night.

  *

  In the cellar of Tintagel's north tower, Raglaw sits in darkness. The crone gnaws a knob of dream-root and

  listens to the timewind buffeting her skull. The current, swift all around her, carries echoes and a voice. The echoes are the tread-falls of her heart and the crepitance of her brittle joints. The voice is a demon's—the demon who fell from the sky during the Furor's powerful spell.

  Dame Raglaw knows that the demon's fall was not

  the accident it appeared. Crones have the sight. The

  timewind shapes the smoke of their minds, and every

  crone who watched the Furor summon demons from the

  Gulf felt the fateful currents spin wildly. Some saw the timewind outline the seraphic rays of a Fire Lord on the mountaintop where the demon collided with the Dragon.

  Others saw nothing.

  The crone witnessed enough to listen, and

  eventually she heard what she expected—the telepathic sorrows of a demon trapped by the Fire Lords.

  A voice of shadows crosses the borders of

  hearing—

  *

  "Woman. Everything I am I owe to Her. All the good and the bad in my life. All the sorcery and mystery. All the wisdom
and madness. Even in the very beginning, before there could be space, or time either, when every point of each of us touched every point of each of the others, She was there. She was Herself the one point out of which everything has come. And She was the coming, too. Why do you think we left but to follow Her?

  "In the very, very beginning, before there was a beginning, when everything was one point, Woman was all the incomprehensible meaning we needed. She held us

  together. She made us one. Wholly promiscuous, for we were all together with Her—yet wholly chaste, for She was utterly alone with each of us. We were one whole and

  single point. What greater happiness could there be?

  "That was the question that doomed us. That we

  could think it at all bespeaks a terrible flaw in an otherwise perfect wholeness. Of course, it was our perfection that inspired the question in the first place. How much happier could we be if we were to be a part of Her yet apart from Her? How much more happiness would there be if we

  could see Her and be seen?

  "And with that question came the necessity for the space to see and the time in which to be seen, the space a hug needs, the time a kiss requires, a space and a time capacious enough to embrace all the mystery of Her and equally ample to make room for all of us that wanted to see and hold Her.

  "There were many more of us than any of us could have imagined. Each of us had thought we were the one and only until we fell apart.

  Our clamoring for Her drove Her away from us—and

  naturally we followed, out into space and into time, wanting to be with Her as we have always been with Her. But in a new way. And so space and time came into being. Only

  none of us, except perhaps for Her, could have known how cold and dark it was going to be.

  "And none of us, surely not even She, could have anticipated the woe that was to follow—and the joy that woe would require to make itself whole again. And none suspected the sorcery and wisdom that we would have to learn and possess to match the mystery and madness of losing Her.

  Nor did we realize the immeasurable distances, the

  expanding light-years of space and what great aeonian spans of time it would take even to begin to approximate the completeness we had enjoyed when we were all at one

  point.

  "Little did any of us foresee our bizarre fate out here in space and time. How strange that each of us is so wholly separate from the others. How strange that She is

  everywhere and yet nowhere.

  How much stranger yet that She has become

  woman—and out of woman's diminishment has come man.

  Out of the ovaries' exile from the body to become testicles, out of the stunting of her nourishing breasts to useless nipples, out of the maiming of the fullness and symmetry of her chromosomes to a genetic mutation has come the

  distortion that is man.

  "Is there any wonder then that we men suffer and in our suffering we rage? We are the immortal points that broke apart from the one point to follow Her here. We are the eternal wanderers. And where is She now? She is

  everywhere and nowhere. She is the embrace of the great emptiness that is the universe. She is the long-lingering kiss of time. She is everything She always was—and

  everything we always wanted Her to be. Now we serve Her or we rail against Her, because we can never escape Her or ever really find Her. She is nameless and She is the very breath of all names—for She is the truth that finally embraces us all. She is God."

  *

  The unicorn returns to Tintagel whenever it is

  summoned. Atop the aerie garden, it meets with Ygrane on the spiral path. There is ample opportunity to share

  themselves with each other, now that there is no resistance between them, no distorting of time as at their first meeting.

  She touches its braided horn, and azure silence fills her with incomprehensible peace and the serene joy of wild things. Motionless clear immensity encloses her, in which everything has already happened and her brief history as a woman and even her previous histories in other lives are so much spindrift. In this expansive quiescence, all her troubles fade. The plight of her people, the dark

  confessions of war, even the death of hope and desire close around this one eternal instant of bliss.

  While Ygrane drifts enraptured, the unicorn's

  sentience reaches within her, seeking contact with her gods, allies of the Dragon. They are far away, beyond the horizon's unswerving boundary, underground among the

  tangled rootcoils of the Great Tree.

  The witch-queen's body serves as an antenna. So

  long as she holds the unicorn's own antenna, the solar being can feel past the warm oxidation of carbohydrates

  and amino acids in the human's body to the electrical presence of the gods.

  In the unicorn's acute mind, these deities appear as

  what they are: rapid, furious bodies of pure energy. To humans, they appear human, and if the unicorn wished, they would shape space like one of its own breed. But the unicorn is not calling to them for communion, only for knowledge.

  From the subterranean gods of the Celts, it learns of secret clefts in the gorge-walls of the planet, trapdoors covered over by deceptively solid sheets of diorite. To a puny electrical being such as the unicorn the ground would seem solid enough, yet if it crossed that terrain, it would become easy prey for the Dragon.

  With each visit to the aerie garden, the unicorn

  learns another of the Dragon's secrets: the cycles of its dreamsongs, the creature's fear of the vaster silence that encloses the songs, and the wonder the Dragon feels for its own magnificence.

  And with each visit, the seasonal change to spring

  moves closer. The wind off the grasslands carries a

  fragrance of nectar. Sheets of snow vanish on the mauve mountains. And the garden blooms as the reign of the sun lengthens.

  Arriving one soft, glamorous morning, having

  received the vibrant tug on the magnetic leash that binds it to Ygrane, the unicorn finds the aerie garden abloom with newly sprouted herbs—mustard, bluestem, lady fern,

  spikenard, goldenrod, sage, hyssop, mugwort, pearly

  everlasting, fireweed, blue ginger, oxeye, and hemlock in wild abundance. But Ygrane is not there.

  At the center of the spiral pathway, among a

  conflagration of blossoms and bumbling bees flying about like sparks, a scrawny old woman in tattered deerskin waits.

  Her scattered hair is fire-frizzed, and her shrunken

  face has black lips. Deep lines crisscross scorched cheeks, and her wilted nose has shriveled almost to a skull-hole.

  This is the crone Raglaw. She has charred her body

  conducting magical currents far too strong for the human shape to carry. And, now and then, pieces of her fall off and burn up before they reach the ground, like shooting stars.

  The sight of Raglaw and the absence of Ygrane

  frighten the unicorn, and it attempts to back away. But the crone holds firmly to the magnetic leash and slowly,

  powerfully, draws the horned beast closer. In a panic, the animal of light leaps upward and staggers back, its

  strength spilling into the flagstones.

  Blue-green with copper, the rock spiral conducts the unicorn's power to the center, where the crone stands, her calcined body an antenna. She receives the creature's waveform and directs it through the tower into the Earth, where she has tied it to the Dragon's hide. As the planet turns, it inescapably draws the unicorn toward the center.

  The sun slides swiftly across the sky toward its

  northern retreat. Its slanting seams fan across the lavender mountains and the blue enamel sea. By dusklight, the dark, bone-pit eyes of the crone reach across the last inches toward the alien's vertical pupils.

  In those dark flames, the crone sees an old, old man

  curled up in his extensive beard like a knobby insect unsheathed from a cocoon. T
he aged man's face looks

  sunken as a skull. In his sockets, two limpid pools of water fracture light to rainbows that arc away toward cosmic darkness.

  The spanless depths in those eyes reveal a demon's

  presence.

  A predatory look tightens the hag's features. She

  seizes the twisted horn in a three-fingered hand and poises her other claw close to the corner of the unicorn's eye.

  It sees a twinkle of metal there and jolts still with fear. The crone presses a thin silver blade against the rim of its sight, and it knows by the masterly pressure of her grip that there is no mercy or flight possible.

  The crone intends to sacrifice the unicorn to her

  divinity of the earth-wall, the Drinker of Lives, the Dragon.

  She does not feel the blue stillness within the living horn.

  That vigorous serenity carries its light cleanly through her and down the blue rocks of the tower. At the base, it seeps into the Earth, a salty, shining flavor of eternity.

  The Dragon tastes this rare light and instantly

  rouses from its intent dreamsongs. Lightning tangles in the clear, sunset sky on the ocean's horizon, and it rises toward the offering.

  "Raglaw!" Ygrane cries from among tall mallow grass. She climbs from the stairwell hidden there and clambers over the wooden hatch, trampling a moist bed of cowslip in her hurry to stop the crone.

  The shout strikes Raglaw, slackening her grip for an

  instant, and the unicorn spills away like quicksilver.

  "Wau-wraugh!" the crone cries with livid pain as the Dragon's gravity tugs at her, falling back morosely from its lost prey. Thunder rolls in from across the sea, and stars shiver in their sockets.

  Ygrane pries the silver blade from the crone's hand,

  drops it to the flagstones, and pulls the old woman tightly to her body, pressing the pain from her. "You're too old to be

  tying dragon-knots," the queen scolds.

  The cinder of a human visage nods wearily. Her

  leather-scented atmosphere bears a sour taint of decay from what is already dead in her, and she leans heavily on the young queen as they sink to their knees.

  "The people die," Raglaw rasps, clenched around her pain.