‘We’ll still see each other often, pet,’ said Grandma, this time to try to convince herself. If only things were different, she thought suddenly. If only this was the sort of world where hopes came true, where small girls did play with unicorns.
‘Grandma?’
‘Yes?’
‘Amfylobbsis just said not to worry. He said everything will work out fine.’
‘Thank you, Amfylobbsis,’ said Grandma gently.
‘He’d like to say goodbye now.’
‘Goodbye Amfylobbsis,’ said Grandma.
‘No, goodbye properly,’ said Emma. ‘Because you’re the only one who believes in him except me. Because he loves you too.’
Grandma smiled. ‘How do I say goodbye properly?’
‘Hold out your hand,’ whispered Emma.
Grandma held out her hand.
Nothing happened. She half expected Emma to put a lolly in it … a jube, maybe, she and Emma both loved jubes. Then suddenly …
The touch was gentle, moist and very warm. The hint of hot breath, the touch of whiskers round a soft damp mouth …
‘Goodbye, Grandma,’ whispered Emma.
Grandma listened to her footsteps run along the corridor, and faintly, very faintly, the light clicking of hooves.
Spots
The room smelt of sweat and old bedding. The child sat in the corner, spooning soup.
‘It’s a miracle,’ the woman said. ‘A true miracle.’
The girl shook her head. Her face was pale and thin, but not too thin. The illness had been too brief to really mark her face.
‘I knew I would get better,’ she said. ‘The girl came.’
‘What girl?’
‘The girl with the unicorn,’ said the child matter-of-factly. ‘When she comes you get better. Everyone knows that.’
The woman shook her head. ‘There are signs and portents everywhere,’ she said quietly. ‘They say that when the plague comes to a village the first sign is a tall man carrying an axe, his head cloaked, and shining evil eyes. No one who’s seen him has ever lived to tell the tale …’
‘Then how do people know about him?’ asked the child. ‘I didn’t see a man, though others say they did. But all of us saw the girl.’
‘No one really sees him,’ said the woman. ‘You just had fever dream. That’s what it was. But you’re better now, and soon we’ll be taking you home …’
‘But I did see her!’ insisted the child. ‘She was young and had long hair, and she was dressed all in white and the unicorn was white as well.’
‘A unicorn, was it? Well, that proves it was a dream.’
‘I did see her,’ said the child stubbornly, laying down her spoon. Tears ran down her cheeks suddenly. ‘She came riding up the path and her cloak was white and the unicorn had big blue eyes and she carried a basket. But she came too late for Ma and Da …’
‘Well, yes,’ said the woman comfortingly. ‘If that’s what you saw, well, that’s what you saw. You’ll be home with us and you’ll forget it all soon. There’ll be kittens for you to play with and your cousins to play with too and …’
‘But I don’t want to forget the unicorn!’ cried the child. ‘It put its face through the window and blew through its lips at me. And the girl came inside and felt my forehead and her hand was cool, so cool. And she took a sweetie out of her basket, a little white one, and she made me swallow it. Then she took Ma and Da outside.’
‘Sure and sure she did,’ soothed the woman. ‘Or maybe it was the neighbours took them.’
‘No one would touch the dead!’ said the child. ‘Not till the girl came on the unicorn! She gave the sweeties to everyone, two every day, and no one died after that. And she gave us water — funny sweet water and strange cakes to eat, and …’
The woman leant over the child and wrapped another shawl around her. ‘And here’s your uncle with the cart,’ she said. ‘It’s time to take you home. Your new home.’
The child nodded. ‘I was asleep the last time she came,’ she said. ‘I just remember her pushing the last sweetie in my mouth, then I fell asleep again. So I never said goodbye. Or thank you.’ She looked up at her aunt. ‘Do you think if I said goodbye now she’d hear me?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ said her aunt, for after all it was no lie. Dreams could hear you anywhere.
‘Thank you,’ said the child earnestly, gazing out the door as though she expected the unicorn to appear again. ‘Thank you for looking after me. Thank you for making me well. And thank Spots, too.’
‘Spots?’ asked the woman.
‘That’s what she called the unicorn,’ said the child.
‘But I thought it was a white unicorn!’ protested the woman.
‘It was,’ said the child sleepily. ‘But it was still called Spots.’
She lifted up her arms to be carried.
Ten minutes away, a thousand years away, another world away, the girl got off the unicorn and led it tiredly into its stable. It snickered at the horse in the next stall, then bent its head to its hay.
‘Hard time?’ said a voice behind the girl.
The girl turned. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘It’s always hard. Sometimes …’
‘Sometimes what?’
‘Sometimes I wonder if it’s right. To interfere. To pretend to all those people.’ She patted the unicorn absently.
‘We have to pretend,’ said her friend. ‘What would people like that say if we came just like we are? They’d be terrified. No, it has to be this way. Disguised as the sort of visions they dreamt about in those days … and the unicorn was a touch of genius. Whoever thought of the unicorn?’
‘Thaddeus,’ said the girl. ‘It was Thaddeus of course. Just a little fiddle with the DNA, he said, and there we had a unicorn. Though it was spotty, not pure white, something went wrong there, but nothing that some hair dye wouldn’t change. And its blue eyes. The blue eyes were a shock to Thaddeus too. No one quite knows where the blue eyes came from.’
The unicorn blew gently at its hay for a moment, almost as though it was laughing.
‘You know, it’s funny.’
‘What?’
‘The last village I was in and the one before — they said they’d seen another vision.’
‘Another unicorn? Maybe it’s a story passed about from some other village you went to.’
The girl shook her head. ‘A tall man with an axe. Before the plague arrives, they said. Every time, the man appears.’
Her friend was silent. ‘Who knows where the plague came from?’ she said. ‘All we know is why it stops. Because of us. Because of antibiotics disguised as sweeties. Because of the unicorn.’
The girl smiled suddenly. ‘We’re a match for anyone, aren’t we, Spots?’ She patted the rough back. ‘You know, sometimes I wonder if you’re not magic after all. Real magic.’
Her friend laughed. ‘Don’t let Thaddeus hear you say that. You’d be in for a long lecture. Come on. We’ve waited dinner for you.’
The girl patted the unicorn one last time. ‘See you tomorrow, Spots,’ she said.
The unicorn winked at her with one blue eye.
The Taming of the Beast
The beast had pale skin, paler than she’d ever seen before. It hovered nervously at the edge of the clearing.
It was scared. Even from here she could see that it was scared.
She started to speak to it; then stopped. Of course it wouldn’t understand. One animal never understood another’s words. Each creature had its own language and that was how it always was … it was the tone of the words that animals understood, the music behind the words …
The beast hesitated. Was it going to run? It had been plucking apples, she noticed. One lay on the ground where it had fallen, still with the imprint of the beast’s sharp teeth.
She stepped forward quietly. One harsh move and the beast would vanish. What sort of creature was it? She’d never seen its like before. A strange beast. An almost frightening beast. But the
re was something about it that called her to it. As though they belonged together, as though once they’d been a partnership, or would be friends …
Another step. The beast looked wary, but it held its ground. A brave beast, she thought exultantly. A good creature for a friend.
Another step. Another. Now the beast stepped forward, too, the long hair down its neck shaking a little as it trembled. But it still came on …
She could smell the beast now, a strange smell, deep and warmly musky.
One more step. Slowly … very slowly … she reached towards the creature.
The beast flinched, then smiled. She knew it was a smile. Who would have thought a beast like that would smile, too? The smile looked different, that funny mouth, those crazy teeth. But still she knew it was a smile.
Slowly … very slowly … the beast reached towards her, too.
Its skin was warm, and smoother than she’d thought. What now? What now?
Suddenly it was simple. As though not only were they meant to be together but she knew how … and the creature knew it, too.
The beast laughed and she laughed too, and though their laughter was different each understood.
Then she was galloping, galloping through the shadows of the leaves, with the beast clinging to her back, its two long legs on either side, its face bent low so the long hair on its head tangled her mane and fluttered up towards her horn.
The wind tore away their laughter and mingled it and sent it flying through the trees.
The Lady of the Unicorn
The hill was steep, the grass a strange unearthly green. The unicorn picked his way uncertainly among the bones and rubble. His hooves looked very white among the green. His flanks were wet with sweat when Ethel patted them. The hill stank too, thought Ethel, as she clung to the unicorn’s mane. This wasn’t the Hall’s familiar smell of chamber pots and dogs and winter sweat. This was a sharper smell, of bones withering in sunlight, of hot rock and decomposing flesh … and something else …
The unicorn dodged around a chunk of rubble, worn smooth by rain and wind till it almost looked natural, higher than Ethel’s head even when she was riding. At least the piles of rubble shielded her from sight if anyone looked down.
But of course no one was looking down. No one lived on the hill. The giant on the hill was just a tale of Ma’m Margot’s to frighten children if they yelled too loudly in the Hall. It was just a trick of Uncle Maddox’s in the days when he could tell her what to do. Don’t go to the forest, you’ll be eaten by a dragon, don’t climb the wild hills or a lion will tear off both your arms.
Don’t climb up the hill or the giant will suck your bones …
Giants were olden day myths, Ethel thought, like werewolves and koalas and dragons. No one she knew had ever really seen a werewolf or even a giant, though Ma’m Dorothy the Baker had seen a lion when she was young.
But lions were real. The old books agreed that lions were real, just like sheep and goats had once been real before they interbred as geep. There’d been lion parks in the old days, then in the wild days the lions had escaped. But werewolves and giants and dragons and monsters were all imaginary. The old books said they were.
The unicorn stumbled, then righted himself. Ethel glanced down at a large bone, a thigh bone from a cow maybe or from a horse. Who would eat a horse? A giant maybe or a …
There were no such things as giants.
The bone was splintered at one end, as though it had been crunched in giant jaws. A few bits of meat clung to the other end. Raw meat, rancid and festering in the sun. A fly buzzed, slow and sleepy, then settled back onto the meat.
Ethel hesitated. Many things might carry away a bone … foxes, eagles … Just because there was a bone didn’t mean there was a giant.
Would a fox or an eagle splinter a bone like that?
The bone had been baking at least two days. Whatever had crunched it was probably long gone. Ethel patted the unicorn again to tell him to keep climbing. The unicorn stumbled again. Ethel dismounted and began to lead him.
Round a hunk of concrete, crowned with twisted steel, then round another. A snake slithered slowly into a crevice, its belly red against the sandy stone. The grass was soft and still, and that strange and brilliant green. Maybe grass just grew well between the rocks. Maybe the giant cast a spell …
There was no such thing as spells either, Ethel told herself firmly.
The stench grew stronger instead of weaker. High above a pair of crows yelled into silence.
Surely she must be nearly at the top. But the piles of rubble stood too high, with chunks of concrete, fat as Ned the Barrel Maker. It was impossible to see above them to see how far she had to climb.
The unicorn whinnied softly, distressed by the stench. Ethel shivered. What if the giant heard it — though of course there was no giant. But there was no need to take the unicorn further either. She’d be faster, quieter on foot.
Ethel assessed the rubble quickly. Surely there must be a place to tie the reins. There were no trees, no bushes, the steel was all too rusty, it would never hold … But there must be something …
Finally she chose a cow’s skull, wedged firmly between great hunks of stone. She slipped the reins around the horns, then patted the unicorn, murmuring to him in the no-words language that they shared. The unicorn butted her shoulder with his warm white nose. The whites of his eyes were showing around the clear soft blue of the iris. His ears were narrow and pointed. They twitched towards the top of the hill as though listening to sounds that Ethel couldn’t hear.
‘I won’t be long,’ whispered Ethel, hoping that the unicorn understood the tone if not the words. ‘You’ll be safe here.’
She hoped that she was right.
Up the hill, twisting between the rubble, through the too-green grass. Suddenly the rubble cleared. The top of the hill opened in front of her.
Ethel gasped; she closed her mouth, afraid that she’d been heard.
Once the top of the hill must have been bare as Uncle Maddox’s head, a grassy clearing grazed perhaps by nimble geep. Now it was divided neatly into gardens, each edged by jagged rocks, as though the chunks of rubble from below had been split and shattered. Fruit trees clustered against sun-warm walls. A mound of even larger chunks of rubble clustered in the centre of the clearing. Ethel blinked and saw it was a hut.
A strange hut, a massive hut, more like a cave than any hut should be, but built by human hands none the less. Tree trunks poked out above thick walls, roofed with long thin slabs, like shingles that someone had turned to stone. The hut would just look like a pile of rubble from a distance, thought Ethel. You’d never know a hut was here from below.
Now she was closer she could see smoke as well. It came from the far side of the hut — clear, hot smoke from long-dry wood, so the air merely shimmered instead of clouded grey.
The stench was even worse.
She should run. She had to run. She had to get her feet to work. Ma’m Margot was right. Even Uncle had been right.
She had to run …
Suddenly her feet began to move. Down between the rubble, to the right and to the right again, never mind the easiest way now, just the quickest to get down, to get away, down to her unicorn and home.
‘Aaaaah!’ Ethel bit the sound back. Something gripped her foot. A snare of plaited leather grew tighter as she pulled.
Ethel froze. She mustn’t make a noise. She mustn’t panic. She wasn’t a wallaby or wild geep to be caught blindly with a bit of leather. She only had to stop and wriggle her foot free … but even as she thought it she realised that it made no difference what noise she made. A bell was ringing high up on the hill.
The snare must have set off an alarm.
It was a dull bell, not like the sharp tuneful bells at home, more like a clapper against a ring of steel than a proper bell cast in a forge, all its proportions right to sing its note. But this wasn’t a singing bell, or a bell to call you in from the fields. This was a hunter’s bell
, a command to come and fetch your prey.
Ethel tore urgently at her foot. A wild dog might bite through the snare. Her teeth weren’t as sharp as a wild dog’s teeth, but maybe she could manage it — but not in time, not in time. Maybe if she pointed her toes downward her foot would be narrower and might slip out. Yes, that was it. She took her slipper off. But the snare stuck around her heel and held it firm.
A noise came from above. Like a crow learning to sing, thought Ethel with half her mind. She struggled frantically, but knew it was too late.
Footsteps. Heavy footsteps. A chunk of rubble rolled as something large brushed against it — ca-thunk, ca-thunk, ca-thunk down the hill, till it crashed against another and was still.
The booming sound came closer.
‘And he sang as he stuffed that jumbuck in his tucker bag …’
Ethel froze. It was a song from the olden days. She’d read it in a book in the Hall. One of her greatest joys at the Hall was the big room full of books. There’d been music written for this song too, but no one at the Hall could play it …
The giant stepped around the boulder.
It was small for a giant, was her first thought. She’d always thought that giants would be much bigger. Though this was big enough.
The giant was no taller than two men, though its arms and legs were slightly longer in proportion, so the hands hung down below the knees.
It was cleaner than Ethel had expected too, the long hair plaited neatly and wound about its head. Its head was bare. Ethel had thought only the T’manians had bare heads. Perhaps neither they nor giants ever got the sun sickness. It wore a shapeless tunic, like faded dark green curtains, belted roughly several times with a leather thong below its breasts and sewn roughly at the shoulders and down part of the side so that its lower legs gleamed long and bare and hairy.
The giant was definitely a woman.
The giant stopped singing. She blinked at Ethel. Her eyes were just a little larger than they should be too. And then she grinned.
‘A mouse,’ she boomed. ‘A little mousie! How are we meant to dine upon a mousie then? There’s not much meat upon a mousie.’ Her teeth were whiter than any Ethel had ever seen, and longer than they should be. It looked like she still had all of them, though she must be Ma’m Margot’s age or more.
The Book of Horses and Unicorns Page 19