“They say that about Hagsgate too,” Schmendrick replied. “You mustn’t believe everything you hear, Drinn.” He walked to the door of the inn, and Molly followed him. There he turned and beamed at the folk of Hagsgate, hunched in their finery. “I would like to leave you with this last thought,” he told them. “The most professional curse ever snarled or croaked or thundered can have no effect on a pure heart. Good night.”
Outside, the night lay coiled in the street, cobra-cold and scaled with stars. There was no moon. Schmendrick stepped out boldly, chuckling to himself and jingling his gold coins. Without looking at Molly, he said, “Suckers. To assume so lightly that all magicians dabble in death. Now if they had wanted me to lift the curse—ah, I might have done that for no more than the meal, I might have done it for a single glass of wine.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Molly said savagely. “They deserve their fate, they deserve worse. To leave a child out in the snow—”
“Well, if they hadn’t, he couldn’t have grown up to be a prince. Haven’t you ever been in a fairy tale before?” The magician’s voice was kind and drunken, and his eyes were as bright as his new money. “The hero has to make a prophecy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him—though in another kind of story, it’s more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he’s not a real hero. It’s a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”
The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark. Molly said, “If Lír is the hero, what is she?”
“That’s different. Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I—we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.” Schmendrick yawned and hiccupped and shivered all at once. “We’d better hurry,” he said. “Perhaps we should have stayed the night, but old Drinn makes me nervous. I’m sure I deceived him completely, but all the same.”
It seemed to Molly, dreaming and waking as she walked, that Hagsgate was stretching itself like a paw to hold the three of them back, curling around them and batting them gently back and forth, so that they trod in their own tracks over and over. In a hundred years they reached the last house and the end of the town; in another fifty years they had blundered through the damp fields, the vineyards, and the crouching orchards. Molly dreamed that sheep leered at them from treetops, and that cold cows stepped on their feet and shoved them off the withering path. But the light of the unicorn sailed on ahead, and Molly followed it, awake or asleep.
King Haggard’s castle was stalking in the sky, a blind black bird that fished the valley by night. Molly could hear the breathing of its wings. Then the unicorn’s breath stirred in her hair, and she heard Schmendrick asking, “How many men?”
“Three men,” the unicorn said. “They have been behind us since we left Hagsgate, but now they are coming swiftly. Listen.”
Steps too soft for their quickness; voices too muffled to mean any good. The magician rubbed his eyes. “Perhaps Drinn has started to feel guilty about underpaying his poisoner,” he murmured. “Perhaps his conscience is keeping him awake. Anything is possible. Perhaps I have feathers.” He took Molly by the arm and pulled her down into a hard hollow by the side of the road. The unicorn lay nearby, still as moonlight.
Daggers gleaming like fishtrails on a dark sea. A voice, suddenly loud and angry. “I tell you, we’ve lost them. We passed them a mile back, where I heard that rustling. I’m damned if I’ll run any farther.”
“Be still!” a second voice whispered fiercely. “Do you want them to escape and betray us? You’re afraid of the magician, but you’d do better to be afraid of the Red Bull. If Haggard finds out about our half of the curse, he’ll send the Bull to trample us all into crumbs.”
The first man answered in a softer tone. “It isn’t that I’m afraid. A magician without a beard is no magician at all. But we’re wasting our time. They left the road and cut across country as soon as they knew we were following. We could chase along here all night and never come up with them.”
Another voice, wearier than the first two. “We have chased them all night. Look over there. Dawn is coming.”
Molly found that she had wriggled halfway under Schmendrick’s black cloak and buried her face in a clump of spiny dead grass. She dared not raise her head, but she opened her eyes and saw that the air was growing strangely light. The second man said, “You’re a fool. It’s a good two hours to morning, and besides, we’re heading west.”
“In that case,” the third voice replied, “I’m going home.”
Footsteps started briskly back up the road. The first man called, “Wait, don’t go! Wait, I’ll go with you!” To the second man, he muttered hastily, “I’m not going home, I just want to retrace our trail a little way. I still think I heard them, and I’ve dropped my tinderbox somewhere…” Molly could hear him edging off as he spoke.
“Damn you for cowards!” the second man swore. “Wait a moment then, will you wait till I try what Drinn told me?” The retreating footsteps hesitated, and he chanted loudly: “‘Warmer than summer, more filling than food, sweeter than woman and dearer than blood—’”
“Hurry,” the third voice said. “Hurry. Look at the sky. What is this nonsense?”
Even the second man’s voice was growing nervous. “It isn’t nonsense. Drinn treats his money so well that it cannot bear to be parted from him. Most touching relationship you ever saw. This is the way he calls to it.” He went on rapidly, quavering a little. “‘Stronger than water and kinder than dove, say the name of the one you love.’”
“Drinn,” rang the gold coins in Schmendrick’s purse, “drinndrinndrinndrinn.” Then everything happened.
The ragged black cloak whipped against Molly’s cheek as Schmendrick rolled to his knees, groping desperately for the purse. It buzzed like a rattlesnake in his hand. He hurled it far into the brush, but the three men were running at them together, daggers as red as though they had already struck. Beyond King Haggard’s castle a burning brightness was rising, breaking into the night like a great shoulder. The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.
With an old, gay, terrible cry of ruin, the unicorn reared out of her hiding place. Her hooves came slashing down like a rain of razors, her mane raged, and on her forehead she wore a plume of lightning. The three assassins dropped their daggers and hid their faces, and even Molly Grue and Schmendrick cowered before her. But the unicorn saw none of them. Mad, dancing, sea-white, she belled her challenge again.
And the brightness answered her with a bellow like the sound of ice breaking up in the spring. Drinn’s men fled, stumbling and shrieking.
Haggard’s castle was on fire, tossing wildly in a sudden cold wind. Molly said aloud, “But it has to be the sea, it’s supposed to be.” She thought that she could see a window, as far away as it was, and a gray face. Then the Red Bull came.
Chapter 8
He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were as pale as scars.
For one moment the unicorn faced him, frozen as a wave about to break. Then the light of her horn went out, and she turned and fled. The Red Bull bellowed again, and leaped down after her.
The unicorn had never been afraid of anything. She was immortal, but she could be killed: by a harpy, by a dragon or a chimera, by a stray arrow loosed at a squirrel. But dragons could only kill her—they could never make her forget what she was, or themselves forget that even dead she would still be more beautiful than they. The Red Bull did not know her, and yet she could feel that it was herself he sought, and no white mare. Fear blew her dark then, and she ran away, wh
ile the Bull’s raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley.
The trees lunged at her, and she veered wildly among them; she who slipped so softly through eternity without bumping into anything. Behind her they were breaking like glass in the rush of the Red Bull. He roared once again, and a great branch clubbed her on the shoulder so hard that she staggered and fell. She was up immediately, but now roots humped under her feet as she ran, and others burrowed as busily as moles to cut across the path. Vines struck at her like strangling snakes, creepers wove webs between the trees, dead boughs crashed all around her. She fell a second time. The Bull’s hooves on the earth boomed through her bones, and she cried out.
She must have found some way out of the trees, for she was running on the hard, bald plain that lay beyond the prosperous pasture lands of Hagsgate. Now she had room to race, and a unicorn is only loping when she leaves the hunter kicking his burst and sinking horse. She moved with the speed of life, winking from one body to another or running down a sword; swifter than anything burdened with legs or wings. Yet without looking back, she knew that the Red Bull was gaining on her, coming like the moon, the sullen, swollen hunter’s moon. She could feel the shock of the livid horns in her side, as though he had already struck.
Ripe, sharp cornstalks leaned together to make a hedge at her breast, but she trampled them down. Silver wheatfields turned cold and gummy when the Bull breathed on them; they dragged at her legs like snow. Still she ran, bleating and defeated, hearing the butterfly’s icy chiming: “They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them.” He had killed them all.
Suddenly the Bull was facing her, as though he had been lifted like a chess piece, swooped through the air, and set down again to bar her way. He did not charge immediately, and she did not run. He had been huge when she first fled him, but in the pursuit he had grown so vast that she could not imagine all of him. Now he seemed to curve with the curve of the bloodshot sky, his legs like great whirlwinds, his head rolling like the northern lights. His nostrils wrinkled and rumbled as he searched for her, and the unicorn realized that the Red Bull was blind.
If he had rushed her then, she would have met him, tiny and despairing with her darkened horn, even though he stamped her to pieces. He was swifter than she, better to face him now than to be caught running. But the Bull advanced slowly, with a kind of sinister daintiness, as though he were trying not to frighten her, and again she broke before him. With a low, sad cry, she whirled and ran back the way she had come: back through the tattered fields and over the plain, toward King Haggard’s castle, dark and hunched as ever. And the Red Bull went after her, following her fear.
Schmendrick and Molly had been spun away like chips when the Bull went by—Molly slammed breathless and witless against the ground, and the magician hurled into a tangle of thorns that cost him half his cloak and an eighth of his skin. They got up when they could, and went limping in pursuit, leaning on one another. Neither one said a word.
The way through the trees was easier for them than the unicorn had found it, for the Red Bull had been there since. Molly and the magician scrambled over great treetrunks not only smashed but trodden halfway into the ground, and dropped to hands and knees to crawl around crevasses they could not fathom in the dark. No hooves could have made these, Molly thought dazedly; the earth had torn itself shrinking from the burden of the Bull. She thought of the unicorn, and her heart paled.
When they came out on the plain, they saw her—far and faint, a tuft of white water on the wind, almost invisible in the glare of the Red Bull. Molly Grue, a little crazy with weariness and fear, saw them moving the way stars and stones move through space: forever falling, forever following, forever alone. The Red Bull would never catch the unicorn, not until Now caught up with New, Bygone with Begin. Molly smiled serenely. But the blazing shadow loomed over the unicorn until the Bull seemed to be all around her. She reared, swerved, and sprang away in another direction, only to meet the Bull there, his head lowered and his jaws drooling thunder. Again she turned, and again, backing and sidling, making crafty little dashes to this side or that; and each time the Red Bull headed her off by standing still. He did not attack, but he left her no way to go, save one.
“He’s driving her,” Schmendrick said quietly. “If he wanted to kill her, he could have done it by now. He’s driving her the way he drove the others—to the castle, to Haggard. I wonder why.”
Molly said, “Do something.” Her voice was strangely calm and casual, and the magician answered her in the same tone. “There is nothing I can do.”
The unicorn fled once more, pitifully tireless, and the Red Bull let her have room to run, but none to turn. When she faced him for a third time, she was close enough for Molly to see her hind legs shivering like those of a frightened dog. Now she set herself to stand, pawing the ground wickedly and laying back her small, lean ears. But she could make no sound, and her horn did not grow bright again. She cowered when the Red Bull’s bellow made the sky ripple and crack, and yet she did not back away.
“Please,” Molly Grue said. “Please do something.”
Schmendrick turned on her, and his face was wild with helplessness. “What can I do? What can I do, with my magic? Hat tricks, penny tricks, or the one where I scramble stones to make an omelet? Would that entertain the Red Bull, do you think, or shall I try the trick with the singing oranges? I’ll try whatever you suggest, for I would certainly be happy to be of some practical use.”
Molly did not answer him. The Bull came on, and the unicorn crouched lower and lower, until she seemed about to snap in two. Schmendrick said, “I know what to do. If I could, I’d change her into some other creature, some beast too humble for the Bull to be concerned with. But only a great magician, a wizard like Nikos, who was my teacher, would have that kind of power. To transform a unicorn—anyone who could do that could juggle the seasons and shuffle years like playing cards. And I have no more power than you have; less, for you can touch her, and I cannot.” Then he said suddenly, “Look. It is over.”
The unicorn was standing very still before the Red Bull, her head down and her whiteness drabbled to a soapy gray. She looked gaunt and small; and even Molly, who loved her, could not keep from seeing that a unicorn is an absurd animal when the shining has gone out of her. Tail like a lion’s tail, deerlegs, goatfeet, the mane cold and fine as foam over my hand, the charred horn, the eyes—oh the eyes! Molly took hold of Schmendrick’s arm and dug her nails into it as hard as she could.
“You have magic,” she said. She heard her own voice, as deep and clear as a sibyl’s. “Maybe you can’t find it, but it’s there. You called up Robin Hood, and there is no Robin Hood, but he came, and he was real. And that is magic. You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it.”
Schmendrick regarded her in silence, staring as hard as though his green eyes were beginning the search for his magic in Molly Grue’s eyes. The Bull stepped lightly toward the unicorn, no longer pursuing, but commanding her with the weight of his presence, and she moved ahead of him, docile, obedient. He followed like a sheepdog, guiding her in the direction of King Haggard’s jagged tower and the sea.
“Oh, please!” Molly’s voice was crumbling now. “Please, it’s not fair, it can’t be happening. He’ll drive her to Haggard, and no one will ever see her again, no one. Please, you’re a magician, you won’t let him.” Her fingers struck even deeper into Schmendrick’s arm. “Do something!” She wept. “Don’t let him, do something!”
Schmendrick was prying futilely at her clenched fingers. “I’m not going to do a damn thing,” he said through his teeth, “until you let go of my arm.”
“Oh,” Molly said. “I’m sorry.”
“You can cut off the circulation like that, you know,” the magician said severely. He rubbed his arm and took a few steps forward, into the path of the Red Bull. There he stood with his arms folded and his head high, though it droope
d now and then, because he was very tired.
“Maybe this time,” Molly heard him mutter, “maybe this time. Nikos said—what was it that Nikos said? I don’t remember. It has been so long.” There was an odd, old sorrow in his voice that Molly had never heard before. Then a gaiety leaped up like a flame as he said, “Well, who knows, who knows? If this is not the time, perhaps I can make it so. There’s this much of comfort, friend Schmendrick. For once, I don’t see how you can possibly make things any worse than they already are,” and he laughed softly.
The Red Bull, being blind, took no notice of the tall figure in the road until he was almost upon it. Then he halted, sniffing the air, storm stirring in his throat, but a certain confusion showing in the swing of his great head. The unicorn stopped when he stopped, and Schmendrick’s breath broke to see her so tractable. “Run!” he called to her. “Run now!” but she never looked at him, or back at the Bull, or at anything but the ground.
At the sound of Schmendrick’s voice, the Bull’s rumble grew louder and more menacing. He seemed eager to be out of the valley with the unicorn, and the magician thought he knew why. Beyond the towering brightness of the Red Bull, he could see two or three sallow stars and a cautious hint of a warmer light. Dawn was near.
“He doesn’t care for daylight,” Schmendrick said to himself. “That’s worth knowing.” Once more he shouted to the unicorn to fly, but his only answer came in the form of a roar like a drumroll. The unicorn bolted forward, and Schmendrick had to spring out of her way, or she would have run him down. Close behind her came the bull, driving her swiftly now, as the wind drives the thin, torn mist. The power of his passage picked Schmendrick up and dropped him elsewhere, tumbling and rolling to keep from being trampled, his eyes jarred blind and his head full of flames. He thought he heard Molly Grue scream.
Scrabbling to one knee, he saw that the Red Bull had herded the unicorn almost to the beginning of the trees. If she would only try one more time to escape—but she was the Bull’s and not her own. The magician had one glimpse of her, pale and lost between the pale horns, before the wild red shoulders surged across his sight. Then, swaying and sick and beaten, he closed his eyes and let his hopelessness march through him, until something woke somewhere that had wakened in him once before. He cried aloud, for fear and joy.
The Last Unicorn Page 10
