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by A. A. Attanasio

  Ygrane rocks her. "I will save the people."

  "You!" A wrenched laugh, more like a shout of hurt, jumps from the gristle mass in Ygrane's arms. "You had your chance in the Storm Tree."

  "And I seized it, old woman. I seized it, and we have the unicorn."

  "We have nothing!" The hag uncurls and shoves Ygrane a bony arm's length away. "You were supposed to wed our clan to the Furor's. Are we not true kinsfolk to the Tribe of the Abiding North?" Her whiskered jaw clacks.

  "Are we not?"

  The queen shrugs, takes off her cape, and drapes it

  about the crone. "The Furor did not want me. We are lucky to have the unicorn."

  "Luck!" A vehement flicker of rage gouges from the hag's stare. "You paid for it with the pierced stone! There is no luck but what we make, child. Thirty thousand years of ancestry in that stone! Three hundred centuries of magic bartered for a horned horse. You, child—you pathetic

  child—you will not save the people with a unicorn."

  Ygrane smiles at the thought. It has never occurred

  to her to exploit the unicorn against her enemies. She helps the crone to her feet, awed by her dark wisdom.

  "Come, old mother. I will take you to the fireside, and we will talk about what can be done with a unicorn. Come. The sea air is chill with night."

  "You should have wed our clan to the Furor's,"

  Raglaw mutters, drained numb of all feeling. "The Romans cannot help us any more than the unicorn. No use wedding the Romans."

  "I did not want to wed—" Ygrane mumbles in reply, guiding the drowsy old woman toward the stairwell. "It was the Druids—"

  "Kyner it was—and the Christians." The crone nods drunkenly. "They foisted you on the Romans. And now we have our duke and our people forsaking the Dragon for the nailed god. Why did you stop me?"

  "The unicorn is beloved."

  Raglaw's bones creak under Ygrane's embrace as

  she pulls about to face the queen. "Child! The unicorn is prey for the Dragon. Feed the Dragon. Give strength to the Drinker of Lives. That is our only hope."

  In her younger days, Raglaw's dried turtle face inspired dread in her ward. This night, the queen feels only pity for this husk of her teacher. "No," she says with the conviction of her own mysterious powers, "there is a better hope. Did you not see him in the unicorn's eye?"

  "See him?" The tired old woman blinks and squints.

  "What? What did you see?"

  "Lailoken—the demon in mortal form." Ygrane pulls the cape tighter about her dazed companion. "Crone, you are too old for this magic. You nearly sacrificed our best hope."

  "A Dark Dweller in a human body?" Her black lips snarl with outrage. "Impossible, child. Wholly impossible.

  They are too powerful, the body too frail. Flesh would fly apart into its very atoms."

  "You saw him in the unicorn's eye." Ygrane tenderly turns the old woman about and guides her through the

  mallow grass to the lantern-lit hole in the loam. "You had your hand on its horn. You must have seen."

  "I did not believe." She shakes her tattered head, still not believing. "I let it pass through me, an apparition, a dream. He cannot be a real being. Who could fit a Dark Dweller into a mortal vessel? Into a great being, such as a behemoth, a whale, even a mountain troll, perhaps. They are big enough to hold pieces of the Dragon's dreamsong.

  But a man? Too puny."

  "A man, Raglaw," the queen says, stepping into the well of yellow light and turning to help the hag. "He is no dream."

  "Then why have we not seen him with the long

  sight? Why is there no prophecy of him?"

  "Think on that, teacher!" She supports Raglaw's frail weight as she descends into the stairwell. "Lailoken is not like other souls. He is not carried to us by the timewind, old woman, lifetime to lifetime. This is his first lifetime as a human being. His only life. He is an accident—a mistake of the Furor's magic. None have seen him coming—"

  "None—" The crone sits down on the stone stair to ponder this.

  "None but the Fire Lords," Ygrane whispers, sitting down beside her mentor. "They stole the demon Lailoken out of the Gulf, right from under the Furor's nose."

  "Yes, yes," the aged one mutters. "Many of the Crones have seen the Fire Lords snatch a Dark Dweller from the bright air. We could not find him after that. We thought he had fled back to the Gulf."

  "No, Raglaw. The Fire Lords hid him. They hid

  Lailoken where the Furor would never find him. In the womb of a woman."

  The crone scowls, bewildered. "How can that be?

  The power it would take to squeeze such a prodigious

  being into so small a space defeats my imagining."

  "That is why the Fire Lords need the unicorn,"

  Ygrane says. "It can take and carry energy from the Dragon—and the Fire Lords have used it to shape a body that can hold a Dark Dweller from the House of Fog.

  Imagine it! A demon as a man!"

  "Demons are the enemies of the Fire Lords—"

  Raglaw presses two fists to her temples, forcing her

  thoughts. "If they have bound this demon ... this Lailoken, then they must have discovered a way to tame him, to win him to their purpose."

  "Yes. You see it now. Lailoken is a man with a

  demon's powers—"

  "And a soul—a soul shaped by angels," the crone concludes. "How sturdy is this newly fashioned soul, Ygrane? Will Lailoken truly use his demon powers to serve the Fire Lords and stand with us against the Furor? Or will he revert to his true nature? Will he become again a

  demon? And work evil?"

  "I do not know," the queen admits with quiet concern. "But we must not squander this opportunity out of our ignorance or fear."

  "He is a random being, Ygrane. His influence on the timewind is unknown—and dangerous."

  "I hold the leash to the unicorn that helped shape him—the unicorn that the Fire Lords command." Ygrane speaks slowly to contain her excitement. "I think Lailoken follows the unicorn. There is some kind of bond between them. We must not sacrifice this beast. If I am right, then Lailoken will soon be among us, and we will see then for ourselves if he is a being who can help us—or one who must be fed to the Dragon."

  The crone nods at this. "Perhaps it is well you

  stopped me, then." She scratches her chin reflectively and pieces flake off in tiny cinnamon sparkles. "Aye, young queen, time has worn me through." She sighs ruefully at her emaciated state and offers a lop-fingered hand. "Take me to the fireside, woman—and you tell me the magic you will work with the unicorn."

  *

  Morgeu, Ygrane's daughter of seven summers by

  her husband Gorlois, strolls with her mother through a furzed-over field on a mountain above a vale of primeval forest. Ygrane has promised to let her orange-haired, dark-eyed child ride the unicorn again.

  She does this for Morgeu, because she wants to please her daughter in a way her father the duke cannot.

  The child is visiting the Celtic queen's kingdom of Cymru only for the summer before returning to Tintagel and the Roman court.

  Her mother cannot compete with palace fineries, for

  her land is wilderness, her people scattered in clan

  territories across valleys and hillsides. There is one experience she can afford her daughter that no one else can.

  The queen calls for the unicorn while singing a

  gentle song, as though the plaintiveness of her voice is the summons. Out of the tree shadows on the slope above, the solar creature glides. It shimmers like silver dust fallen from the day moon floating above the mountain.

  When its ridged horn touches the ground, its

  muscled body darkens to a more solid shape and waits, head bowed, as Morgeu clambers atop its back. Then, with Ygrane mounted behind her daughter and gently holding the unicorn's mane, they ride across the field.

  The magnetic flow of blue serenity that blows off the unicorn's mane so
othes Morgeu, who is an otherwise

  restless, high-strung child. And in turn, the child's playfulness and vulnerability soothe the unicorn, still skittish after Raglaw's attack.

  Six days of strenuous calling by Ygrane lured it

  back. The unicorn will not be fooled by Raglaw's mimicry again. Since introducing it to Morgeu, however, it has come more readily and stays longer.

  Morgeu does not have the sight; so, her exposure to

  the unicorn's radiance does not invoke in her the seraphic rapture her mother feels. It is, even so, nothing less than the lordliest pleasure she has ever known or ever will. Atop the spellbound horse, her life whirls from her and splashes across the green and golden land before funneling back into her laughing body. For days afterward, she picks up pieces of her happiness wherever she goes.

  The fiana watch from the tree line, and sometimes the queen and her child slide off in front of them, dizzy with giddiness— and then, the men leap at the unicorn. None can touch it, for it shies like smoke. Sometimes, if they leap with exceptional swiftness and all their might, they graze its cold, rippling shadow, and astonishing euphoria tosses in them. It leaves them gasping in the bent grass, weighed down by longing, all the heavier for having tasted lightness.

  After two or three jumps, they want no more of that

  dangerous joy-

  But Morgeu is insatiable and slips out one night from the queen's tent. Unaware of the fiana that her mother

  sends to watch over her, she hurries to the dark field and summons the unicorn. She hums the same quiet song

  Ygrane pretends to use—and the spectral steed pronks

  from the forest, its long, sharp body shining with starfire.

  Morgeu rides endless zeroes through the field, until

  her mother comes for her. No matter Ygrane's

  admonitions, she slips away the next night, and the next.

  She goes every night, and she comes back to camp each dawn with candle-points of light in her hair.

  *

  In a rush of night-shadows and moon-fire, the

  unicorn canters a spiraling circle through a glade of mammoth oaks. It moves on hooves made of silence—and

  upon its back rides a young child.

  Even in the tarnished light of the moon, the child's

  long, crinkly tresses shine golden red, luminous and

  wavery as fire's hair. Clinging with one hand to the

  unicorn's mane, the small girl rides with exhilarating abandon, leaning far back, knees jerking above the

  animal's withers, laughing in staccato peals of joy.

  A hoary old man in rags leans upon a gnarled staff

  and watches, hidden among the giant oaks. He is the

  demon Lailoken. Darkness glowers from the pits of his sunken eyes, and his long, skinny body entwined in the coils of his beard seems floated out of a deathly dream.

  The unicorn spots him and rears back abruptly. With

  a cry as startled as a clang of brass, it throws the girl from its back and bolts from the glade.

  The lanky old man rushes to the fallen child and

  finds her lying on her back in the hoof-chewed turf, all life fled from her. She cannot be more than seven. Quickly, he feels for the placement of bones in her neck and finds them unbroken.

  "She is whole," he gnashes aloud to himself. His wild face locks with chagrin, unsure what to do next.

  Under the chill of moonlight and the scrambled

  whispers of wind sifting through the trees, Lailoken draws strength from the magnetic field of the planet. Frosty energy lifts out of the ground, siphoning upward through his thighs, pelvis, and spine. Thundery air thrums around him, and he directs this force through the open gate of his chest.

  The demon's heart-force carries living power into the slight body beneath him. Her flesh shudders from its roots, and, with a gasp of watery breath and a flutter of dark eyes, she awakes.

  "Art thou an angel?" she asks in a thin voice of

  archaic Latin.

  "No, child," the old man answers with a smile and a deeply relieved sigh. "I saw your fall and came to revive you."

  "Where are my guards?" Her round face winces as she sits up. "How did you get past them?"

  Rising from his knees, the demon Lailoken leans on

  his staff and gazes down at her, his cadaverous visage alarmed. "Do not summon your guards. I go now. Yet before I am gone, child, tell me who you are and how you came to ride the unicorn."

  The girl stares at the old man with anthracite eyes,

  defiant and remote, gauging the full measure of his

  inquiring look. She reads the fright in his hairy face and senses something else, a greater emptiness behind his stare than she ever faced at any cliff's edge.

  "I am Morgeu," she finally says with a haughty air,

  "daughter of a Celtic queen and a Roman duke. Because I am noble, the unicorn obeys me." She lurches to her feet and glares at him angrily. "Do not make the mistake of treating me as a child. Answer my questions. Who are

  you? And how did you elude my guards? Are you a

  wizard?"

  "I am following the unicorn," Lailoken replies.

  Her features shift mischievously. "You are a wizard, then, aren't you?" She looks him up and down. "You have the guise of a wild man in those tatty animal skins. But you talk like a noble. What is your name, old man, and whom do you serve?"

  There is such a strength of sureness in the way she

  appraises him, the gaunt man can hardly believe this is a child. "I am Lailoken—and I serve God."

  "So, Lailoken, you are a holy man. My mother fears holy men, for your ilk steal her people. But my father says that you are not to be feared, that your piety is weakness, because the meek do not inherit the earth, only the graves in it."

  Alternately amused and startled at this small

  person's arrogance and precocity, Lailoken inquires, "What do you think, Morgeu?"

  "I think you are a wizard, Lailoken," she says, hands on her hips. "A truly holy man would not pursue a unicorn.

  The unicorn would come to him."

  Lailoken accedes with a nod. "How came you to ride the unicorn?"

  "I told you, I am noble. I am the daughter of the Celtic queen. Someday I will be queen. The unicorn obeys me."

  "If this is so, then call it back for me."

  "Why?" Her eyes narrow suspiciously. "The unicorn is afraid of you. It ran away at your approach. Your

  intrusion could have killed me." She backs away. "I think you are a wizard—and a wicked one at that." From under her ankle-length robes, her hand emerges, clutching a silver dagger. "Stay where you are, Lailoken. I am taking you for my prisoner. Guards!"

  Lailoken's heart jumps. "Morgeu! I am no threat. I have saved you."

  "You tried to steal the unicorn from me." She waves her dagger over her head, calling guards, who already are sprinting toward her across the moon-blotched clearing.

  Lailoken sits down and lays his staff across his

  knees. In moments, the fiana surround him, spears pointing at his narrow breast.

  "Do not harm him," Morgeu commands her men and adds with a lilt of pride in her soft-palated voice: "He is a prize for my mother—a wizard I have captured by my own magic."

  *

  At a diorite shelf among boulders, on the cliffs that face the western sea, the unicorn pauses. Strands of star vapors tangle overhead, and below, black velvet waves roll out of the night, hissing and booming on the beach with a ghostly froth. From far beneath this broken shoreline, the Dragon stirs.

  The unicorn senses the iron-dark shadow of the

  huge beast. It swipes its horn against the jagged rocks, depositing thin, crystalline flakes in the crevices, where they will eventually melt and soak into the earth, carrying the savor of unicorn to the depths.

  Friskily, it prances on the ledge, feeding on the

  upwelling of electrical force as the Dragon ascends.r />
  Then, at the last possible moment before the

  magnetic talon-grasp of the stupendous creature becomes too strong to elude, the unicorn bounds away, taking with it the strength from the Dragon that the solar steed needs to serve the Fire Lords.

  *

  The last time that the unicorn saw any of the Fire

  Lords, rain swept the land. From over its shoulder, coins of light fell and glittered at its hooves among dead leaves and tiny, instantaneous crowns of impacting raindrops.

  The unicorn curled about to see an angel among the

  avenues of trees. His luminosity frosted the underside of far-off boughs and leaves. In his enormous eyes,

  unachievable distances opened.

  With bowed head, the unicorn attempted to touch

  the angel with its horn, hoping to receive a communication through this antenna. It remembered earlier encounters when Fire Lords placed their shining hands on its tusk and ideas flooded its mind with glorious knowing. It learned then of the fiery origin of the universe and of what came before—the place of infinities, wider than time, smaller than the smallest node of space, and it held these ideas in the deep quiet of its own skull.

  On this drenched day, no ideas flowed through the

  long horn into the beast.

  The angel watched silently, and its huge stare

  inspired something proud and strong in the animal. Head high, mane, beard, and fetlocks streaming backward in a magnetic breeze, the unicorn stepped closer.

  The presence of the angel suggested a higher order

  of energy than terrestrial things. With this thought, the world around the unicorn went transparent. It could see through the stone crust, the tectonic plate, the planetary hide to the living Dragon below.

  Magma glowed incandescent as blood. Veins of

  electric force, arteries of living current outlined a slitherous body, long and coiled as the horizon. Surges of heat and shadow breathed from the molten creature as it curled around itself, somersaulting the quartz length of its spine.

  Its mountainous, black diamond head swelled closer, a grin of undershot jaw aged and malevolent, eyes smoking

  purple.

  Nervously, the unicorn pranced side to side. A

  rumbling sound vibrated through its legs. Thunder from below harped in the trees.