Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Beagle, Peter S.

  “Could it breathe in that damn tapestry?” Farrell’s voice was rough and tense, but he touched Julie’s hand gently. “It’s all right, Jewel. It stood there and looked at me, and sort of watched me picking it up. Let’s get on back to your place and figure out what we do now.”

  Julie sat close to him on the way home, her hand firmly on his coat-pocket flap. She could feel the startlingly intense heat of the unicorn against her palm as completely as though there were nothing between them; she could feel the equally astonishing sharpness of the minute horn, and the steady twitch of the five-century-old heart. As intensely as she could, she sent the thought down her arm and through her fingers: we’re going to help you, we’re your friends, we know you, don’t be afraid. Whenever the van hit a bump or a pothole, she quickly pressed her hand under Farrell’s pocket to cushion the legend inside.

  Sitting on her bed, their coats still on and kittens mewling under the sink for their absent mother, she said, “All right, we have to think this through. We can’t keep it, and we can’t just turn it loose in millennial California. What other options do we have?”

  “I love it when you talk like a CEO,” Farrell said. Julie glared at him. Farrell said, “Well, I’ll throw this out to the board meeting. Could you and your grandmother possibly put the poor creature back where you got it? That’s what my mother always told me to do.”

  “Joe, we can’t!” she cried out. “We can’t put it back into that world, with people capturing it, sticking spears into it for the glory of Christian virginity. I’m not going to do that, I don’t care if I have to take care of it for the rest of my life, I’m not going to do that.”

  “You know you can’t take care of it.” Farrell took her hands, turned them over, and placed his own hands lightly on them, palm to palm. “As somebody quite properly reminded me a bit back, it’s a unicorn.”

  “Well, we can just set it free.” Her throat felt dry, and she realized that her hands were trembling under his. “We’ll take it to the wildest national park we can get to—national wilderness, better, no roads, people don’t go there—and we’ll turn it loose where it belongs. Unicorns live in the wilderness, it would get on fine. It would be happy.”

  “So would the mountain lions,” Farrell said. “And the coyotes and the foxes, and God knows what else. A unicorn the size of a pork chop may be immortal, but that doesn’t mean it’s indigestible. We do have a problem here, Jewel.” They were silent for a long time, looking at each other. Julie said at last, very quietly, “I had to, Joe. I just never thought it would work, but I had to try.”

  Farrell nodded. Julie was looking, not at him now, but at his coat pocket. She said, “If you put it on the table. Maybe it’ll know we don’t mean it any harm. Maybe it won’t run away.”

  She leaned forward as Farrell reached slowly into his pocket, unconsciously spreading her arms to left and right, along the table’s edge. But the moment Farrell’s expression changed she was up and whirling to look in every direction, as she had done on the museum stair. The unicorn was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the cat NMC. The six kittens squirmed and squeaked blindly in their box, trying to suck each other’s paws and ears.

  Farrell stammered, “I never felt it—I don’t know how…” and Julie said, “Bathroom, bathroom,” and fled there, leaving him forlornly prowling the studio, with its deep, murky fireplace and antique shadows. He was still at it when she returned, empty-handed as he, and her wide eyes fighting wildness.

  Very quietly, she said, “I can’t find the cat. Joe, I’m scared, I can’t find her.”

  NMC—theatrical as all cats—chose that moment to saunter grandly between them, purring in throaty hiccups, with the unicorn limp between her jaws. Julie’s gasp of horror, about to become a scream, was choked off by her realization that the creature was completely unharmed. NMC had it by the back of the neck, exactly as she would have carried one of her kittens, and the purple eyes were open and curiously tranquil. The unicorn’s dangling legs—disproportionately long, in the tapestry, for its deerlike body—now seemed to Julie as right as a peach, or the nautilus coil inside each human ear. There was a soft, curling tuft under its chin, less like hair than like feathers, matched by a larger one at the end of its tail. Its hooves and horn had a faint pearl shine, even in the dim light.

  Magnificently indifferent to Farrell and Julie’s gaping, NMC promenaded to her box, flowed over the side, and sprawled out facing the kittens, releasing her grip on the unicorn’s scruff as she did so. It lay passively, legs folded under it, as the squalling mites scrimmaged across their mother’s belly. But when Farrell reached cautiously to pick it up, the unicorn’s head whipped around faster than any cat ever dreamed of striking, and the horn scored the side of his right hand. Farrell yelped, and Julie said wonderingly, “It wants to be there. It feels comforted with them.”

  “The sweet thing,” Farrell muttered, licking the blood from his hand. The unicorn was shoving its way in among NMC’s kittens now: as Julie and Farrell watched, it gently nudged a foster brother over to a nipple next down from the one it had chosen, took the furry tap daintily into its mouth, and let its eyes drift shut. Farrell said it was purring. Julie heard no sound at all from the thin blue-white throat, but she sat by the box long after Farrell had gone home, watching the unicorn’s flanks rise and fall in the same rhythm as the kittens’ breathing.

  Surprisingly, the unicorn appeared perfectly content to remain indefinitely in Julie’s studio apartment, living in an increasingly crowded cardboard box among six growing kittens, who chewed on it and slept on it by turns, as they chewed and slept on one another. NMC, for her part, washed it at least twice as much as she bathed any of the others (“To get rid of that nasty old medieval smell,” Farrell said), and made a distinct point of sleeping herself with one forepaw plopped heavily across its body. The kittens were not yet capable of climbing out of the box—though they spent most of their waking hours in trying—but NMC plainly sensed that her foster child could come and go as easily as she. Yet, unlike its littermates, the unicorn showed no interest in going anywhere at all.

  “Something’s wrong,” Farrell said after nearly a week. “It’s not acting properly—it ought to be wild to get out, wild to be off about its unicorn business. Christ, what if I hurt it when I picked it up in the museum?” His face was suddenly cold and pale. “Jewel, I was so careful, I don’t know how I could have hurt it. But I bet that’s it. I bet that’s what’s wrong.”

  “No,” she said firmly. “Not you. That rope around its neck, that man with the spear, the look on that idiot woman’s face—there, there’s the hurt, five hundred years of it, five hundred frozen years of capture. Christ, Joe, let it sleep as long as it wants, let it heal.” They were standing together, sometime in the night, looking down at the cat box, and she gripped Farrell’s wrist hard.

  “I knew right away,” she said. “As soon as I saw it, I knew it wasn’t just a religious allegory, a piece of a composition. I mean, yes, it was that too, but it was real, I could tell. Grandma could tell.” NMC, awakened by their voices, looked up at them, yawning blissfully, round orange eyes glowing with secrets and self-satisfaction. Julie said, “There’s nothing wrong with it that being out of that damn tapestry won’t cure. Trust me, I was an art major.”

  “Shouldn’t it be having something besides cat milk?” Farrell wondered. “I always figured unicorns lived on honey and—I don’t know. Lilies, morning dew. Tule fog.”

  Julie shook her head against his shoulder. “Serenity,” she said. Her voice was very low. “I think they live on serenity, and you can’t get much more serene than that cat. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Us? Us old guys?” Farrell was playing absently with her black hair, fanning his fingers out through it, tugging very gently. “You think we’ll remember how it’s done?”

  “Don’t get cute,” she said, harshly enough to surprise them both. “Don’t get cute, Farrell, don’t get all charming. Just come to bed and hold me, and kee
p me company, and keep your mouth shut for a little while. You think you can manage that?”

  “Yes, Jewel,” Farrell said. “It doesn’t use the litter box, did you notice?”

  Julie dreamed of the unicorn that night. It had grown to full size and was trying to come into her bedroom, but couldn’t quite fit through the door. She was frightened at first, when the great creature began to heave its prisoned shoulders, making the old house shudder around her until the roof rained shingles, and the stars came through. But in time it grew quiet, and other dreams tumbled between her and it as she slept with Farrell’s arm over her, just as the unicorn slept with NMC.

  In the morning, both of them late for work, unscrambling tangled clothing and exhuming a fossilized toothbrush of Farrell’s (“All right, so I forgot to throw it out, so big deal!”), they nearly overlooked the unicorn altogether. It was standing—tapestry-size once again—at the foot of Julie’s bed, regarding her out of eyes more violet than purple in the early light. She noticed for the first time that the pupils were horizontal, like those of a goat. NMC crouched in the doorway, switching her tail and calling plaintively for her strange foundling, but the unicorn had no heed for anyone but Julie. It lowered its head and stamped a mini-forefoot, and for all that the foot came down in a bright puddle of underwear it still made a sound like a bell ringing under the sea. Farrell and Julie, flurried as they were, stood very still.

  The unicorn stamped a second time. Its eyes were growing brighter, passing from deep lavender through lilac, to blazing amethyst. Julie could not meet them. She whispered, “What is it? What do you want?”

  Her only answer was a barely audible silver cry and the glint of the fierce little horn as the unicorn’s ears slanted back against its head. Behind her Farrell, socks in hand, undershirt on backwards, murmured, “Critter wants to tell you something. Like Lassie.”

  “Shut up, Farrell,” she snapped at him; then, to the unicorn, “Please, I don’t understand. Please.”

  The unicorn raised its forefoot, as though about to stamp again. Instead, it trotted past the bed to the rickety little dressing table that Farrell had helped Julie put together very long ago, in another country. Barely the height of the lowest drawer, it looked imperiously back at them over its white shoulder before it turned, reared and stretched up as far as it could, like NMC setting herself for a luxurious, scarifying scratch. Farrell said, “The mirror.”

  “Shut up!” Julie said again; and then, “What?”

  “The Cluny tapestries. La Dame à la licorne. Unicorns like to look at themselves. Your hand mirror’s up there.” Julie stared at him for only a moment. She moved quickly to the dressing table, grabbed the mirror and crouched down close beside the unicorn. It shied briefly, but immediately after fell to gazing intently into the cracked, speckled glass with a curious air almost of puzzlement, as though it could not quite recognize itself. Julie wedged the mirror upright against the drawer-pull; then she rose and nudged Farrell, and the two of them hurriedly finished dressing, gulping boiled coffee while the unicorn remained where it was, seemingly oblivious of everything but its own image. When they left for work, Julie looked back anxiously, but Farrell said, “Let it be, don’t worry, it’ll stay where it is. I took Comparative Mythology, I know these things.”

  True to his prediction, the unicorn had not moved from the mirror when Julie came home late in the afternoon; and it was still in the same spot when Farrell arrived after the restaurant’s closing. NMC was beside it, now pushing her head insistently against its side, now backing away to try one more forlorn mother-call, while the first kitten to make it into the wide world beyond the cat box was blissfully batting the tufted white tail back and forth. The tail’s owner paid no slightest heed to either of them; but when Julie, out of curiosity, knelt and began to move the mirror away, the unicorn made a sound very like a kitten’s hiss and struck at her fingers, barely missing. She stood up calmly, saying, “Well, I’m for banana cake, Bringing Up Baby, and having my feet rubbed. Later for Joseph Campbell.” The motion was carried by acclamation.

  The unicorn stayed by the mirror that night and all the next day, and the day after that. On the second day Julie came home to hear the sweet rubber-band sound of a lute in her apartment, and found Farrell sitting on the bed playing Dowland’s “The Earl of Essex’s Galliard.” He looked up as she entered and told her cheerfully, “Nice acoustics you’ve got here. I’ve played halls that didn’t sound half as good.”

  “That thing of yours about locks is going to get you busted one day,” Julie said. The unicorn’s eyes met hers in the hand mirror, but the creature did not stir. She asked, “Can you tell if it’s listening at all?”

  “Ears,” Farrell said. “If the ears twitch even a bit, I try some more stuff by the same composer, or anyway the same century. Might not mean a thing, but it’s all I’ve got to go by.”

  “Try Bach. Everything twitches to Bach.”

  Farrell snorted. “Forget it. Bourrees and sarabandes out the yingyang, and not a wiggle.” Oddly, he sounded almost triumphant. “See, it’s a conservative little soul, some ways—it won’t respond to anything it wouldn’t have heard in its own time. Which means, as far as I can make out, absolutely nothing past the fifteenth century. Binchois gets you one ear. Dufay—okay, both ears, I’m pretty sure it was both ears. Machaut—ears and a little tail action, we’re really onto something now. Des Pres, jackpot—it actually turned and looked at me. Not for more than a moment, but that was some look. That was a look.”

  He sighed and scratched his head. “Not that any of this is any help to anybody. It’s just that I’ll never have another chance to play this old stuff for an informed critic, as you might say. Somebody who knows my music in a way I never will. Never mind. Just a thought.”

  Julie sat down beside him and put her arm around his shoulders. “Well, the hell with unicorns,” she said. “What do unicorns know? Play Bach for me.”

  Whether Farrell’s music had anything to do with it or not, they never knew; but morning found the unicorn across the room, balancing quite like a cat atop a seagoing uncle’s old steamer trunk, peering down into the quiet street below. Farrell, already up and making breakfast, said, “It’s looking for someone.”

  Julie was trying to move close to the unicorn without alarming it. Without looking at Farrell, she murmured, “By Gad, Holmes, you’ve done it again. Five hundred years out of its time, stranded in a cat box in California, what else would it be doing but meeting a friend for lunch? You make it look so easy, and I always feel so silly once you explain—”

  “Cheap sarcasm doesn’t become you, Tanikawa. Here, grab your tofu scramble while it’s hot.” He put the plate into the hand she extended backwards toward him. “Maybe it’s trolling for virgins, what can I tell you? All I’m sure of, it looked in your mirror until it remembered itself, and now it knows what it wants to do. And too bad for us if we can’t figure it out. I’m making the coffee with a little cinnamon, all right?”

  The unicorn turned its head at their voices; then resumed its patient scrutiny of the dawn joggers, the commuters and the shabby, ambling pilgrims to nowhere. Julie said, slowly and precisely, “It was woven into that tapestry. It began in the tapestry—it can’t know anyone who’s not in the tapestry. Who could it be waiting for on East Redondo Street?”

  Farrell had coffee for her, but no answer. They ate their breakfast in silence, looking at nothing but the unicorn, which looked at nothing but the street; until, as Farrell prepared to leave the apartment, it bounded lightly down from the old trunk and was at the door before him, purposeful and impatient. Julie came quickly, attempting for the first time to pick it up, but the unicorn backed against a bookcase and made the hissing-kitten sound again. Farrell said, “I wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, I definitely would,” she answered him between her teeth. “Because if it gets out that door, you’re going to be the one chasing after it through Friday-morning traffic.” The unicorn offered no resistance when she picked
it up, though its neck was arched back like a coiled snake’s and for a moment Julie felt the brilliant eyes burning her skin. She held it up so that it could see her own eyes, and spoke to it directly.

  “I don’t know what you want,” she said. “I don’t know what we could do to help you if we did know, as lost as you are. But it’s my doing that you’re here at all, so if you’ll just be patient until Joe gets back, we’ll take you outside, and maybe you can sort of show us….” Her voice trailed away, and she simply stared back into the unicorn’s eyes. When Farrell cautiously opened the door, the unicorn paid no attention; nevertheless, he closed it to a crack behind him before he turned to say, “I have to handle lunch, but I can get off dinner. Just don’t get careless. It’s got something on its mind, that one.”

  With Farrell gone, she felt curiously excited and apprehensive at once, as though she were meeting another lover. She brought a chair to the window, placing it close to the steamer trunk. As soon as she sat down, NMC plumped into her lap, kittens abandoned, and settled down for some serious purring and shedding. Julie petted her absently, carefully avoiding glancing at the unicorn, or even thinking about it; instead she bent all her regard on what the unicorn must have seen from her window. She recognized the UPS driver, half a dozen local joggers—each sporting a flat-lipped grin of agony suggesting that their Walkman headphones were too tight—a policewoman whom she had met on birdwatching expeditions, and the Frozen-Yogurt Man. The Frozen-Yogurt Man wore a grimy naval officer’s cap the year around, along with a flapping tweed sport jacket, sweat pants and calf-length rubber boots. He had a thin yellow-brown beard, like the stubble of a burned-over wheatfield, and had never been seen, as far as Julie knew, without a frozen-yogurt cone in at least one hand. Farrell said he favored plain vanilla in a sugar cone. “With M&Ms on top. Very California.”