A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  10. On the Unicorn

  I have, in the course of my travels, taken part in many a unicorn hunt. Usually, they end quite merrily, with the horses and dogs exhausted, the men lying about in a forest clearing with a goodly number of wineskins open and a few kerchiefs of strawberries and walnuts and brown bread spread out on the orange leaves. The virgin, if we’d got a good one, sang a song or, if we’d got a very good one, danced in her white dress, spinning until the leaves flew around her like a little flame-colored storm. Unicorn hunts always struck me as civilized sorts of things, so long as no actual unicorns show up and spoil the fun. I’ve seen it happen—the beast all pale as bone, with a collar fastened round its throat from its last captivity. It fell on the maiden and upset the strawberries, spilling the wine and sending the poor dogs quite mad. I shouldn’t like to think what the creature meant to do to that wretched girl, but I fired my arrow true and had both the horn of the beast for a trophy and, before the night was out, the trophy of the maid. Still, it’s a nasty business when the quarry insists on being involved in the hunting.

  Unicorns in this part of the world are discomfiting and I do not like them in the least. Ysra and Ymra asked me to a hunt on the equinox, when the cinnamon forest had gone entirely fragrant and scarlet. They put on green hunting jackets and long knives, which ought to have been my first clue, as everyone knows arrows are the preferred weapon, if not a pole-ax. I packed up my kerchiefs and my wineskins and felt quite ensured of a pleasant afternoon.

  I learned the following points of interest with regards to the unicorn while on the forest path with the king and queen, who rode no horses nor even salamanders but walked hand in hand. I never saw them use any other means of transport.

  First, there are exactly five genuine unicorns in the world, in my world or Pentexore, which fact I’ve no notion of how they could know. What I think of as a unicorn is a mutant, they said, no more desirable or attractive than a mule. They really would not like to speculate on how the narwhal managed it.

  Second, the idea of the virgin was a result of bad translation. For catching a unicorn, what you want is a scholar. You can see why the clerks changed those nouns around—self-preservation has been the end of many a winsome couplet.

  Third, it was important that, should we own our luck, I be the one to make the kill. It was just bad manners for monarchs to kill their own creatures, even the poor, stupid unicorn. Besides, they said. A unicorn dies a big death. Not like a rabbit or a fox. We wouldn’t deprive you of it.

  We reached a clearing in the cinnamon wood where the blue sky shone through and the spiced wind kicked at the brush. Everything smelled crisp, as though the day could be snapped in half. I saw the scholar readily enough—though should she have been chained to a stake in the earth? Surely she volunteered. Surely she would grace us with a song later.

  “Scholars have temperaments little better than boars,” sighed Ysra. “You wouldn’t send a boar a formal invitation.”

  The scholar was quite naked; her silvery hair fell long enough to provide her some modesty, but her eyes darted quickly, here and there in terror, the whites showing, her wrists manacled and crossed over one another. I looked for her species but she seemed in all manner to me quite human, if small and delicate, and a shadow passed over my heart.

  “The beast will come, if we wait,” Ymra said, rubbing the cold from her knuckles in several complicated gestures of her six hands.

  Wait we did, in the slight chill of the day, while the scholar whimpered and I suppressed my growing urge to help her, to put my hunting coat around her shoulders and give her hot wine—my hosts would hardly allow my eyes to drift to her, as if they caught the drift of my thoughts.

  At last I heard a rumbling in the wood and I understood for the first time that the unicorn really meant to come for the girl, and I would be expected to kill the mute beast. A disquiet entered my soul and set the stakes of its tent there. The unicorn burst through the trees—and it was not a horse at all, or even a beast, but a young man with terribly white skin, covered in a soft down, glowing with a silvery countenance. His long hair brushed his shoulder blades and his eyes shone huge and dark, round and liquid as an animal’s. He wore a collar, too, from some past hunt or captivity or sovereign lord who kept the young man in his gardens with a strong fence to keep him still. His muscles seemed carved rather than grown, so stark and leonine were his limbs—and if I should dare to offend the sensibilities of refined folk who may read my words—the unicorn’s member stood rigid and enormous, a horn in truth, and a cruel one.

  The unicorn spied the scholar and rushed to her, standing terribly near, and they looked at each other, afraid and aroused and alert, and he put his hands on her face, and she looked into his eyes and wept suddenly, as completely as I have ever seen a soul weep for another.

  “Do it now,” said Ysra mildly, without urgency, nearly bored. “In a moment you’ll lose your chance.”

  “But sire, that’s only a young man. I don’t feel right at all about it. Why don’t we let them alone and have our picnic?”

  “Don’t be simple,” Ymra snapped, her gaze instantly terrible. “It’s a unicorn. Kill it. You said you’d killed one before.”

  “And you said it was no unicorn but some kind of whale!” I protested.

  “It will ravish the girl and leave her pregnant with its colts,” insisted the king Ysra.

  “She doesn’t seem as though she’d mind,” said I, and in truth the scholar caressed the cheek of the unicorn with tenderness. Her gaze said she knew everything one could know about unicorns, and accepted this one anyway.

  “You are our guest and our chattel!” hissed the queen Ymra. “Kill the unicorn or call yourself a treason and look to your cell!”

  The thing about lying is that it’s best to do it only for fun, for delight and a prettier kind of world. Lies told to cover your own skin pervert the purity of the art. I want to lie to you—oh, how I would like it. To say I defied the king and the queen, I let the unicorn and the scholar make love in the autumn wood and drank my wine and went home to dry my socks by the great hearth. Instead I can at least say I made it quick. I cut his throat, and his blood flowed as clear as seawater, and the wood filled with howling: the scholar in grief, the unicorn in death, the monarchs in triumph, and myself, your John, in horror and shame.

  11. On the Practical Results of Killing a Unicorn

  I did not know until much later. I could not know. But it would appear that a unicorn’s horn is little, if anything, like the horn of a man. It pierces the air; it is the mate of the wind; it is an anchor. And with the anchor gone, strange ships may begin to drift out to sea.

  I did not like it so much in Pentexore after that. I wished for home.

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  We made a city where we stood, on our side of the river. The barrels of our sword-trees, heavy with sticky hilts, made a barricade, our cannon-flowers, too, our buckler-vines. Our own knight-hedge, grateful for the water of the river, happy for the oily yellow sun of this new world, and the old world’s black earth still deep and moist to suckle in. The tents went up, green and silver and rose and black, pits dug for pots to boil over, animals—when we found animals—to roast over, and all our little things we’d hoped to trade. We laid down our beds on the lean summer earth, we lay down and looked up into the stars, our stars after all, and each of us asked the other: What is wrong with us? What is so wrong that the river has such grudges against us? Were we false to our own river, so that it told its cousin not to set her table for us, when we came?

  I asked John to kiss me and he would not. He turned his head so I would not see his tears—but I am stronger than his secret griefs. I have always had to be. I took his face in my hands and moved his mouth to mine, his head in the curve of my waist, and between kisses I whispered: “Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.”

  He answered, “God has barred me from my home.”

  “I am your home.”

>   But John would not take my comfort. “I am two men,” he said. “And one of them drank from that Fountain and felt its vigor though he knew how dearly he might buy it, and one of them never left home, never knew there was another land but the one that bore him. And I do not know which man is me, and which is dead and gone, as dead as any bone on the bank of this river.”

  I went to the water’s edge, the water’s edge in the moonlight, and stood with only the tips of my toes wet in the current. The sounds of the camp murmured and rolled behind me. A man joined me, lean and lovely and dark, and he had hands like a giant’s.

  “Is it Yerushalayim?” he said to me. “The white city, with the starlight on it?”

  “I cannot know, Houd,” said I, for I remembered him from the ship, and liked him well enough to call him by name. His presence felt rigid and thin next to me. “I think it might be. The hedge spoke of that place, where their god was born and died, and they said ugly things, about thorns and crowns and governors.”

  “I… have heard tales of it. Of autumn-time in Yerushalayim, and wonderful foods on wonderful tables, and wonderful men telling tales of a golden world.”

  If my girl had been brought up by us, she would have heard tales of Houd.

  For his sake I called that city Yerushalayim, and dreamed of a hundred gods walking its streets, each with bull horns and wings like mine, each garlanded with orange boughs fiery with fruit. In his sleep Houd stirred beside me, and I pulled his hands over us both.

  I could not bear him any longer. I have a limited capacity for despair. It takes so much strength to be sad. My muscles ached with it. I sought out, as I ever sought when my husbands were miserable and drawn up into themselves like night-snails, when Astolfo, my first mate, scowled and frowned, when John wanted to talk about God and I wanted his body in mine, or to eat sweet things, or to dance in the pavilion, anything but contemplate the wounds of a man I never knew, and their cosmological significance, I sought out Hadulph, my red lion. He eschewed a tent, finding the air warm, and lay on the side of the river, peering into the running water, the strong, strong current. I lay down beside him; I put my hands into his fur. With John there could be kissing, but the mouths of blemmye and lion do not fit together. Instead there are hands and paws and tails, manes and tongues and claws. He growled at me, and I knew—it had been so long since I had come to him, my marriage took so much work, I hardly had the time.

  John had known long before we married, and, well, I think he learned a lesson in his world, and that lesson was that a king cannot dishonor. We draw little difference between a king and a queen, and this was enough to addle his ideas about adultery a little. I had no particular ideas about adultery; I did not consider adultery. Love is love. There is time enough in the world for everything. Hadulph, I knew, loved also a tensevete out on the icy wastes, and I did not begrudge either of them. Why should I? And since I loved Hadulph before John, he was the interloper, in truth. All this meant was that he chose not to think on it, and I chose not to discuss it. Only once did he tell me I endangered my immortal soul. I said: A lion is worth a soul. And besides, I thought I didn’t have one?

  Hadulph growled and rolled me as lions do, wrestling gently, biting softly. I lost myself in it, in scratching him, in the roughness of his fur, in the drawing back of his muzzle, in the light of the moon on his whiskers. I felt each tooth like all the teeth he had ever sunk in me, I heard his purring as all the purring he had ever made in my presence, all the occasions of our mating, in pepper fields and parchment fields, in palaces. I had known him almost all my life, and when he took me it was all the times he had ever taken me, that I had ever taken him, happening together, the young lion pouncing on me and knocking me to the ground, discovering the bigness of our bodies, the strength we could inflict on the other, comparing bruises and laughing so low and so long. All the wordlessness we had shared, for where John insisted on theological debates, Hadulph and I had enjoyed silence, or growling, and that seemed to contain all we needed to know. We were rooted in each other, wherever our branches grew.

  Finally, we quieted. We looked into the water together. We leaned forward, pressing against whatever kept us back, the invisible wall which made us not even want to cross the river. Hadulph put out his great paw against it, flexing his claws.

  “Why do you think we cannot cross?” I said. “It cannot really be that we are demons. If demons are as he says, I don’t think water would pose much trouble.”

  Hadulph yawned. His vast pink tongue lolled out. “I think that they have all been praying on the banks of this river for so long that the weight of their wanting made it so. They wanted to believe the river kept them safe from anyone not them. That’s all demon means. It means not us. It’s obvious there’s no such thing as God, and that’s all right. I never felt the lack. There is so much in the world, insisting on a kindly god is greedy. But if there were I would say that God is wanting, the power of it, the incarnation of it. They all wanted to keep out the not-us. And they have.” Hadulph scratched the soil. “Of course, that means John is not-them now. You and I… we never were.”

  The sun rose and fell and rose and fell as John brooded on our situation, reluctant to walk downstream and attempt to signal across the river. What if they should see us all, in our finery, in our scales and furs, and send their numbers against us at once?

  I believe John simply forgot. He forgot what we looked like to him when he first arrived. How he cried out, terrified of the gryphon and the amyctryae, how he thought Grisalba a demoness, how he would not even look at me because he could not bear to look upon a woman’s naked breast. He had come to love us, and forgot that his countrymen would see us as did he, at first, not as he saw now. He had forgotten the company of those who looked like him, and we seemed in his sight as beautiful as angels. John had imagined himself riding home with an army of angels at his back. Instead, he had only us. And the river saw no difference between himself and his countrymen.

  “I cannot see why I should not be able to cross,” he said weakly.

  He sent Qaspiel to find a way around the river. He bade it fly north and west, to fly high so that he would not be seen, and return to us, tell us if we could walk the distance, if a path through the blue net of rivers that caught up the land John knew could be found.

  “I do not wish to leave you, John. Nor Hagia—Hagia tell him, tell him I can be of use here, send a gryphon or one of the little dragons.” I could only hold it, my closed eyes against its familiar chest that still smelled faintly of vanilla, as though his years in the fields had never ended.

  John looked down uncomfortably. The fullness of it was coming to him. “If you are caught,” he said, “they will not hurt you. They will think as I thought once, that you are… an angel. A gryphon alone, without me to explain, to teach them how to see her… she would be slaughtered.”

  And so it understood, and so it went. And the trouble of what we were to do unraveled itself almost as soon as Qaspiel became a speck in the sky.

  A man came walking over the hill.

  In green and silver, with a sword and a helm under his elbow. And handsome, black curls and a long nose, a clear narrow face, a shining black beard, and he looked at us and blinked.

  He was not afraid, or disgusted by us. He did not run, or laugh, or swoon. He seemed surprised. We, too, watched him, waiting for his fear, looking for our own, wondering if we would find it, if this was the enemy we had come to fight, if we would be expected to fall upon him. If he would speak kindly. If we would understand him when he spoke. Without much concern the man walked down to the river, knelt, and drank with cupped hands. He looked up at the sun, and back towards us, most especially myself, and raised his hand a little, in greeting.

  “Sir,” said Houd, standing somewhat behind Anglitora, his huge hands shaking, his eyes wet and eager, “is that Yerushalayim? The city on the hill?”

  The man in green looked toward the distant domes of the city and smiled. He answered us in Greek, for
which we were grateful.

  “No, my lad, that is Mosul,” he answered, chuckling. “Where you stand now was once Nineveh, a thousand years ago, and five hundred more. I think you might be stepping on the Shamash Gate. Jerusalem is, oh, far to the south. But perhaps not so far. I expect only a few years away now. And in a decade, well, the distance between Mosul and Jerusalem may be small indeed.”

  We looked at John, whose face had fallen. He studied the earth, his shoulders soft and defeated.

  “I am John of Constantinople,” he said finally. “I came to defend Jerusalem from the Saracen, from the fire.”

  “Well,” laughed the man in green, broadly now. “You’re early! I haven’t taken it yet. I am Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi, and at the moment I am besieging Mosul. When that is done, I promise, I will devote all of my love and attention to the Holy City.”

  “Where is your army?” Anglitora demanded. “Where are your knights? How came you to be wandering around on the other side of the river from the thing you claim to be sieging?”

  Salah ad-Din filled a flask from the river. “Have you ever commanded a siege, madam? It is a long and boring business. Mostly, you stand outside a very large wall and try to keep your own army from killing each other for lack of anything more amusing to do. Occasionally I come to the ancient city you are all roasting birds over to meditate and pray. I get bored, too. Now, since I know your aim and you know mine, tell me, does your diadem indicate you are a king? Where have you come from? How did you come across such extraordinary beasts?”