The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

  So I went to bed early that night, and I waited until everyone was asleep. I wanted to leave a note on my pillow, but I kept writing things and then tearing the notes up and throwing them in the fireplace, and I was afraid of somebody waking, or Uncle Ambrose leaving without me. Finally I just wrote, I will come home soon. I didn’t take any clothes with me, or anything else, except a bit of cheese, because I thought the king must live somewhere near Hagsgate, which is the only big town I’ve ever seen. My mother and father were snoring in their room, but Wilfrid had fallen asleep right in front of the hearth, and they always leave him there when he does. If you rouse him to go to his own bed, he comes up fighting and crying. I don’t know why.

  I stood and looked down at him for the longest time. Wilfrid doesn’t look nearly so mean when he’s sleeping. My mother had banked the coals to make sure there’d be a fire for tomorrow’s bread, and my father’s moleskin trews were hanging there to dry, because he’d had to wade into the stockpond that afternoon to rescue a lamb. I moved them a little bit, so they wouldn’t burn. I wound the clock‌—‌Wilfrid’s supposed to do that every night, but he always forgets‌—‌and I thought how they’d all be hearing it ticking in the morning while they were looking everywhere for me, too frightened to eat any breakfast, and I turned to go back to my room.

  But then I turned around again, and I climbed out of the kitchen window, because our front door squeaks so. I was afraid that Malka might wake in the barn and right away know I was up to something, because I can’t ever fool Malka, only she didn’t, and then I held my breath almost the whole way as I ran to Uncle Ambrose’s house and scrambled right into his cart with the sheepskins. It was a cold night, but under that pile of sheepskins it was hot and nasty-smelling, and there wasn’t anything to do but lie still and wait for Uncle Ambrose. So I mostly thought about Felicitas, to keep from feeling so bad about leaving home and everyone. That was bad enough‌—‌I never really lost anybody close before, not forever—‌but anyway it was different.

  I don’t know when Uncle Ambrose finally came, because I dozed off in the cart, and didn’t wake until there was this jolt and a rattle and the sort of floppy grumble a horse makes when he’s been waked up and doesn’t like it‌—‌and we were off for Hagsgate. The moon was setting early, but I could see the village bumping by, not looking silvery in the light, but small and dull, no color to anything. And all the same I almost began to cry, because it already seemed so far away, though we hadn’t even passed the stockpond yet, and I felt as though I’d never see it again. I would have climbed back out of the cart right then, if I hadn’t known better.

  Because the griffin was still up and hunting. I couldn’t see it, of course, under the sheepskins (and I had my eyes shut, anyway), but its wings made a sound like a lot of knives being sharpened all together, and sometimes it gave a cry that was dreadful because it was so soft and gentle, and even a little sad and scared, as though it were imitating the sound Felicitas might have made when it took her. I burrowed deep down as I could, and tried to sleep again, but I couldn’t.

  Which was just as well, because I didn’t want to ride all the way into Hagsgate, where Uncle Ambrose was bound to find me when he unloaded his sheepskins in the marketplace. So when I didn’t hear the griffin anymore (they won’t hunt far from their nests, if they don’t have to), I put my head out over the tailboard of the cart and watched the stars going out, one by one, as the sky grew lighter. The dawn breeze came up as the moon went down.

  When the cart stopped jouncing and shaking so much, I knew we must have turned onto the King’s Highway, and when I could hear cows munching and talking softly to each other, I dropped into the road. I stood there for a little, brushing off lint and wool bits, and watching Uncle Ambrose’s cart rolling on away from me. I hadn’t ever been this far from home by myself. Or so lonely. The breeze brushed dry grass against my ankles, and I didn’t have any idea which way to go.

  I didn’t even know the king’s name‌—‌I’d never heard anyone call him anything but the king. I knew he didn’t live in Hagsgate, but in a big castle somewhere nearby, only nearby’s one thing when you’re riding in a cart and different when you’re walking. And I kept thinking about my family waking up and looking for me, and the cows’ grazing sounds made me hungry, and I’d eaten all my cheese in the cart. I wished I had a penny with me‌—‌not to buy anything with, but only to toss up and let it tell me if I should turn left or right. I tried it with flat stones, but I never could find them after they came down. Finally I started off going left, not for any reason, but only because I have a little silver ring on my left hand that my mother gave me. There was a sort of path that way too, and I thought maybe I could walk around Hagsgate and then I’d think about what to do after that. I’m a good walker. I can walk anywhere, if you give me time.

  Only it’s easier on a real road. The path gave out after a while, and I had to push my way through trees growing too close together, and then through so many brambly vines that my hair was full of stickers and my arms were all stinging and bleeding. I was tired and sweating, and almost crying‌—‌almost‌—‌and whenever I sat down to rest bugs and things kept crawling over me. Then I heard running water nearby, and that made me thirsty right away, so I tried to get down to the sound. I had to crawl most of the way, scratching my knees and elbows up something awful.

  It wasn’t much of a stream‌—‌in some places the water came up barely above my ankles‌—‌but I was so glad to see it I practically hugged and kissed it, flopping down with my face buried in it, the way I do with Malka’s smelly old fur. And I drank until I couldn’t hold any more, and then I sat on a stone and let the tiny fish tickle my nice cold feet, and felt the sun on my shoulders, and I didn’t think about griffins or kings or my family or anything.

  I only looked up when I heard the horses whickering a little way upstream. They were playing with the water, the way horses do, blowing bubbles like children. Plain old livery-stable horses, one brownish, one grayish. The gray’s rider was out of the saddle, peering at the horse’s left forefoot. I couldn’t get a good look‌—‌they both had on plain cloaks, dark green, and trews so worn you couldn’t make out the color‌—‌so I didn’t know that one was a woman until I heard her voice. A nice voice, low, like Silky Joan, the lady my mother won’t ever let me ask about, but with something rough in it too, as though she could scream like a hawk if she wanted to. She was saying, “There’s no stone I can see. Maybe a thorn?”

  The other rider, the one on the brown horse, answered her, “Or a bruise. Let me see.”

  That voice was lighter and younger-sounding than the woman’s voice, but I already knew he was a man, because he was so tall. He got down off the brown horse and the woman moved aside to let him pick up her horse’s foot. Before he did that, he put his hands on the horse’s head, one on each side, and he said something to it that I couldn’t quite hear. And the horse said something back. Not like a neigh, or a whinny, or any of the sounds horses make, but like one person talking to another. I can’t say it any better than that. The tall man bent down then, and he took hold of the foot and looked at it for a long time, and the horse didn’t move or switch its tail or anything.

  “A stone splinter,” the man said after a while. “It’s very small, but it’s worked itself deep into the hoof, and there’s an ulcer brewing. I can’t think why I didn’t notice it straightaway.”

  “Well,” the woman said. She touched his shoulder. “You can’t notice everything.”

  The tall man seemed angry with himself, the way my father gets when he’s forgotten to close the pasture gate properly, and our neighbor’s black ram gets in and fights with our poor old Brimstone. He said, “I can. I’m supposed to.” Then he turned his back to the horse and bent over that forefoot, the way our blacksmith does, and he went to work on it.

  I couldn’t see what he was doing, not exactly. He didn’t have any picks or pries, like the blacksmith, and all I’m sure of is that I think he
was singing to the horse. But I’m not sure it was proper singing. It sounded more like the little made-up rhymes that really small children chant to themselves when they’re playing in the dirt, all alone. No tune, just up and down, dee-dah, dee-dah, dee…boring even for a horse, I’d have thought. He kept doing it for a long time, still bending with that hoof in his hand. All at once he stopped singing and stood up, holding something that glinted in the sun the way the stream did, and he showed it to the horse, first thing. “There,” he said, “there, that’s what it was. It’s all right now.”

  He tossed the thing away and picked up the hoof again, not singing, only touching it very lightly with one finger, brushing across it again and again. Then he set the foot down, and the horse stamped once, hard, and whinnied, and the tall man turned to the woman and said, “We ought to camp here for the night, all the same. They’re both weary, and my back hurts.”

  The woman laughed. A deep, sweet, slow sound, it was. I’d never heard a laugh like that. She said, “The greatest wizard walking the world, and your back hurts? Heal it as you healed mine, the time the tree fell on me. That took you all of five minutes, I believe.”

  “Longer than that,” the man answered her. “You were delirious, you wouldn’t remember.” He touched her hair, which was thick and pretty, even though it was mostly gray. “You know how I am about that,” he said. “I still like being mortal too much to use magic on myself. It spoils it somehow‌—‌it dulls the feeling. I’ve told you before.”

  The woman said “Mmphh,” the way I’ve heard my mother say it a thousand times. “Well, I’ve been mortal all my life, and some days…”

  She didn’t finish what she was saying, and the tall man smiled, the way you could tell he was teasing her. “Some days, what?”

  “Nothing,” the woman said, “nothing, nothing.” She sounded irritable for a moment, but she put her hands on the man’s arms, and she said in a different voice, “Some days‌—‌some early mornings‌—‌when the wind smells of blossoms I’ll never see, and there are fawns playing in the misty orchards, and you’re yawning and mumbling and scratching your head, and growling that we’ll see rain before nightfall, and probably hail as well…on such mornings I wish with all my heart that we could both live forever, and I think you were a great fool to give it up.” She laughed again, but it sounded shaky now, a little. She said, “Then I remember things I’d rather not remember, so then my stomach acts up, and all sorts of other things start twingeing me‌—‌never mind what they are, or where they hurt, whether it’s my body or my head, or my heart. And then I think, no, I suppose not, maybe not.” The tall man put his arms around her, and for a moment she rested her head on his chest. I couldn’t hear what she said after that.

  I didn’t think I’d made any noise, but the man raised his voice a little, not looking at me, not lifting his head, and he said, “Child, there’s food here.” First I couldn’t move, I was so frightened. He couldn’t have seen me through the brush and all the alder trees. And then I started remembering how hungry I was, and I started toward them without knowing I was doing it. I actually looked down at my feet and watched them moving like somebody else’s feet, as though they were the hungry ones, only they had to have me take them to the food. The man and the woman stood very still and waited for me.

  Close to, the woman looked younger than her voice, and the tall man looked older. No, that isn’t it, that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t young at all, but the gray hair made her face younger, and she held herself really straight, like the lady who comes when people in our village are having babies. She holds her face all stiff too, that one, and I don’t like her much. This woman’s face wasn’t beautiful, I suppose, but it was a face you’d want to snuggle up to on a cold night. That’s the best I know how to say it.

  The man…one minute he looked younger than my father, and the next he’d be looking older than anybody I ever saw, older than people are supposed to be, maybe. He didn’t have any gray hair himself, but he did have a lot of lines, but that’s not what I’m talking about either. It was the eyes. His eyes were green, green, green, not like grass, not like emeralds‌—‌I saw an emerald once, a gypsy woman showed me‌—‌and not anything like apples or limes or such stuff. Maybe like the ocean, except I’ve never seen the ocean, so I don’t know. If you go deep enough into the woods (not the Midwood, of course not, but any other sort of woods), sooner or later you’ll always come to a place where even the shadows are green, and that’s the way his eyes were. I was afraid of his eyes at first.

  The woman gave me a peach and watched me bite into it, too hungry to thank her. She asked me, “Girl, what are you doing here? Are you lost?”

  “No, I’m not,” I mumbled with my mouth full. “I just don’t know where I am, that’s different.” They both laughed, but it wasn’t a mean, making-fun laugh. I told them, “My name’s Sooz, and I have to see the king. He lives somewhere right nearby, doesn’t he?”

  They looked at each other. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but the tall man raised his eyebrows, and the woman shook her head a bit, slowly. They looked at each other for a long time, until the woman said, “Well, not nearby, but not so very far, either. We were bound on our way to visit him ourselves.”

  “Good,” I said. “Oh, good.” I was trying to sound as grown-up as they were, but it was hard, because I was so happy to find out that they could take me to the king. I said, “I’ll go along with you, then.”

  The woman was against it before I got the first words out. She said to the tall man, “No, we couldn’t. We don’t know how things are.” She looked sad about it, but she looked firm, too. She said, “Girl, it’s not you worries me. The king is a good man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even more than other people, kings change.”

  “I have to see him,” I said. “You go on, then. I’m not going home until I see him.” I finished the peach, and the man handed me a chunk of dried fish and smiled at the woman as I tore into it. He said quietly to her, “It seems to me that you and I both remember asking to be taken along on a quest. I can’t speak for you, but I begged.”

  But the woman wouldn’t let up. “We could be bringing her into great peril. You can’t take the chance, it isn’t right!”

  He began to answer her, but I interrupted‌—‌my mother would have slapped me halfway across the kitchen. I shouted at them, “I’m coming from great peril. There’s a griffin nested in the Midwood, and he’s eaten Jehane and Louli and‌—‌and my Felicitas—‌” and then I did start weeping, and I didn’t care. I just stood there and shook and wailed, and dropped the dried fish. I tried to pick it up, still crying so hard I couldn’t see it, but the woman stopped me and gave me her scarf to dry my eyes and blow my nose. It smelled nice.

  “Child,” the tall man kept saying, “child, don’t take on so, we didn’t know about the griffin.” The woman was holding me against her side, smoothing my hair and glaring at him as though it was his fault that I was howling like that. She said, “Of course we’ll take you with us, girl dear‌—‌there, never mind, of course we will. That’s a fearful matter, a griffin, but the king will know what to do about it. The king eats griffins for breakfast snacks‌—‌spreads them on toast with orange marmalade and gobbles them up, I promise you.” And so on, being silly, but making me feel better, while the man went on pleading with me not to cry. I finally stopped when he pulled a big red handkerchief out of his pocket, twisted and knotted it into a bird-shape, and made it fly away. Uncle Ambrose does tricks with coins and shells, but he can’t do anything like that.

  His name was Schmendrick, which I still think is the funniest name I’ve heard in my life. The woman’s name was Molly Grue. We didn’t leave right away, because of the horses, but made camp where we were instead. I was waiting for the man, Schmendrick, to do it by magic, but he only built a fire, set out their blankets, and drew water from the stream like anyone else, while she hobbled the horses and put them to graze.
I gathered firewood.

  The woman, Molly, told me that the king’s name was Lír, and that they had known him when he was a very young man, before he became king. “He is a true hero,” she said, “a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he’s a good man as well. They aren’t always.”

  “But you didn’t want me to meet him,” I said. “Why was that?”

  Molly sighed. We were sitting under a tree, watching the sun go down, and she was brushing things out of my hair. She said, “He’s old now. Schmendrick has trouble with time‌—‌I’ll tell you why one day, it’s a long story‌—‌and he doesn’t understand that Lír may no longer be the man he was. It could be a sad reunion.” She started braiding my hair around my head, so it wouldn’t get in the way. “I’ve had an unhappy feeling about this journey from the beginning, Sooz. But he took a notion that Lír needed us, so here we are. You can’t argue with him when he gets like that.”

  “A good wife isn’t supposed to argue with her husband,” I said. “My mother says you wait until he goes out, or he’s asleep, and then you do what you want.”

  Molly laughed, that rich, funny sound of hers, like a kind of deep gurgle. “Sooz, I’ve only known you a few hours, but I’d bet every penny I’ve got right now‌—‌aye, and all of Schmendrick’s too‌—‌that you’ll be arguing on your wedding night with whomever you marry. Anyway, Schmendrick and I aren’t married. We’re together, that’s all. We’ve been together quite a long while.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know any people who were together like that, not the way she said it. “Well, you look married. You sort of do.”

  Molly’s face didn’t change, but she put an arm around my shoulders and hugged me close for a moment. She whispered in my ear, “I wouldn’t marry him if he were the last man in the world. He eats wild radishes in bed. Crunch, crunch, crunch, all night‌—‌crunch, crunch, crunch.” I giggled, and the tall man looked over at us from where he was washing a pan in the stream. The last of the sunlight was on him, and those green eyes were bright as new leaves. One of them winked at me, and I felt it, the way you feel a tiny breeze on your skin when it’s hot. Then he went back to scrubbing the pan.