Dark Moon

by Meredith Ann Pierce

  “Greet-ings, Tek, Jah-ama’s daughter,” the elder, Sismoomnat, pronounced carefully, her birdlike inflection strangely melodious. “Wel-come to our home. We have brought you ama’s herbs. Ama has told us you would find your way to us before the win-ter was out. We are so glad that you have come, and that at last we may behold you. Wel-come, foster sister. Wel-come home.”

  19

  Sweetmeal

  Awakening, the dark unicorn felt sluggish, strangely fatigued, though he was aware he must have slept long and deep. His mouth felt gummy, dry. It was morning now. He remembered vaguely leaving the palace grounds and wandering the city. How long ago? He stirred, trying to gather his clumsy limbs. With great effort, he heaved himself up and stumbled to the water trough, drank — but his head did not clear. All he longed for was to drift. He sensed movement and turned — very slowly. Ryhenna stood in the stall opposite his, her look one of apprehension. Her sisters occupied other stalls.

  “How dost thou fare, my lord?” she asked. “Thou didst sleep so late, I had begun to fear....”

  The dark unicorn blinked, tongue fumbling over the words. “Tired,” he told her. “Very tired.”

  A hazy memory came to him of green-clad two-foots leading the mares into the warm enclosure. His head nodded, thoughts slipping away. Time passed. A sound at the end of the aisle roused him. The dark unicorn swung himself slowly around to see the chon’s purple-badged minion coming down the aisle, carrying a steaming wooden hollow. It bore the delicious fragrance of sweetmeal. Tai-shan moved forward eagerly as the two-foot emptied the steaming meal into his trough.

  Followers of the daïcha accompanied the male two-foot, but the hollows they carried contained only dry grain, which they poured into the troughs of the other stalls. As Ryhenna and her sisters dipped their noses to the feed, it occurred to Tai-shan to wonder why the mares should receive fare different from his own. He struggled to speak, but the same dulling sense of drowsiness he had suffered the previous evening was stealing over him again. He lay down heavily, numb.

  Across from him, the coppery mare lifted her head from her trough. A worried expression furrowed her brow as she gazed at the dark unicorn. Tai-shan’s vision blurred. Sleep dragged at him. He would speak with Ryhenna later, ask her about the feed, about what troubled her. Soon. Just as soon as he had rested and his mind grew clear.

  Time drifted by. He could not say how long. Weeks perhaps. His injured throat seemed to heal in moments. The dark unicorn was only dimly aware of winter passing, waning. It would be spring again soon. Ryhenna and her sisters remained stabled with him within the warm enclosure, but Tai-shan never mustered energy enough to ask the coppery mare what plainly continued to disturb her. If only he were not so sleepy all the time! Sweetmeal was all the two-foots fed him now.

  The daïcha returned at intervals to gaze at him, talk to him, stroke his neck. She seemed unbearably sad somehow. Messengers from the chon often called her away. The chon himself never appeared, though the ruler’s purple-plumed minions stood constant watch outside the warm enclosure’s egress. They no longer allowed the lady to lead Tai-shan to the yard for exercise along with the mares. The dark unicorn raised no protest. His strange, all-pervasive lassitude made any effort impossible.

  But troubling dreams began to invade his sleep: a Vale shrouded deep in drifted snow, winterkilled unicorns lying frozen, others starving. He saw a night-dark stallion, stark-eyed and fanatical, haranguing the cowed, exhausted herd, a crescent-shaped smear of white mud marking his brow. Equally fervent companions surrounded him, their fellows moving in a pack through the crowd: harassing and bullying, demanding answers.

  “Where is she, the pied wych? Did you help her to escape?”

  About whom were they speaking? The dreaming unicorn could not begin to guess. All he saw seemed familiar somehow — yet memory slipped away from him the moment he woke.

  Soon he no longer slept the nights through. Restless, unable to recall what frightening images had tangled through his sleeping brain only moments before, he often remained awake the balance of the night, reluctant to return to the unremembered country of his dreams. Mornings and afternoons, he dozed. Ryhenna, though clearly distressed, seemed hesitant to disturb him. As spring approached, his reveries grew more vivid. Often now he remembered snatches: before him in dreams, the moon-browed stallion reared.

  “I am your Firebringer!” he shouted. “Come spring, we must find and slay the pied wych who seduced my son. Only thus may we gain Alma’s blessing for our war against the gryphons!”

  The decimated ranks of unicorns groaned. Half looked as though they would not survive till spring — much less make war. Appalled, the dreamer recoiled. If only these dying unicorns had possessed fire, he realized, they could at least have combatted the cold!

  Though the fearful images still faded rapidly upon waking, their foreboding lingered. By night, Tai-shan grew increasingly restive, and soon became too restless to doze the day away. Gripped by a vague yet mounting anxiety, he paced his stall for hours, ignoring queries from Ryhenna, whose concern now clearly verged upon alarm. Then, very near the start of spring, a vision came to him: he saw the unicorns’ mad ruler ramping before the starving herd.

  “By Alma’s divine will, I command you — speak! Who among you aided the wych?”

  His bullies nipped and harried the silent, sullen crowd. The black unicorn stamped, snorting. Impatiently, he reared — and suddenly his torso began to flatten, shrink. His lower limbs rapidly thickened and changed. For an instant, he stood with the body of a two-foot, moon-blaze white upon the breast, his hornless unicorn’s head glaring wildly, teeth bared, hot breath smoking in the cold. Then the head, too, abruptly altered and shrank, becoming the dark-bearded face of the chon.

  The bullying pack had all sprouted violet plumes from their brows. In another moment, they, too, had transformed into two-foots. The unicorns before them grew bonier, coats colorless drab, manes thinned to bristles, horns broken and falling away — until they had assumed the shape of flatbrowed, beardless daya, flinching beneath the bite of the purple-plumes’ flails. The dreamer tried to cry out, “Apnor, ’pnor!” Enough, enough! in the two-foots’ tongue — but coils of vine were strangling his voice.

  Without warning, two-foots and daya melted from view. The dreamer found himself high on a peak overlooking the Vale. A great storm brewed overhead, black thunderheads churning and roiling. Merciless strokes of lightning flashed like the hooves of an angry god. Before their fury, tiny figures fled — but whether unicorns or hornless daya, the dreaming stallion could not say.

  The stormclouds swept on, topping the snow-bound crags bordering the Vale and gusting out over the wild southeast hills. Winter snows melted, clearing a frozen pass through the crags. Suddenly, it was spring. Still spilling torrential rains, the stormclouds battered the wilderness, loosing mudslides and flash floods.

  Wolves coursed the hinterlands, catching hares, foxes, ptarmigan, deer — even hapless pans foraging the verges of their Woods. The dreamer twitched. The dream wolves shifted, turned into bony haunts hunting down some unseen quarry, crying out above the stormwind in long wailing harks that sounded more like the belling of hounds than the voices of unicorns:

  “Where is she hiding? Where can she be? We must track her down at the king’s command!”

  Still the dreamer had no notion about whom they spoke. On a cliffside above, watching as they pounded by, stood a roan da mare. The moon lay like a pool of silver at her feet. She bent to sip from it, and her color darkened, intensified to true cherry mallow. A black horn thrust like a skewer from her brow. Lifting her head, she faced the dreamer, gazing at him with her black-green eyes.

  “Little did my former masters guess,” she said, “that the fare whereby they sought to tame thee would only open thy dreams to my warnings at last. Behold.”

  The red mare vanished into the rain. Beside where she had stood, the perfect disk of the moon lay flat upon the ground. It tipped upright, balanced
erect on its edge and became a mare. Mottled like the moon, her color deepened from ash and silver to black and rose. Heavy in foal, her sides hugely swollen, she trotted restlessly, her labor pains begun.

  Below her, the circling haunts raised their muzzles, turned. Baying and whinnying, bones rattling like hail, they bounded across the meadow toward her. Alarmed, the dreamer thrashed, struggling to vault down from his mountain fastness and stand between the bloodthirsty haunts and this unknown mare. But walls of timber sprang up around him; vines suddenly ensnared him.

  “Where is the midwife?” the dark unicorn shouted.

  With a mighty effort, he burst the vines and vaulted the wall, clipping one hind pastern painfully against its rough upper edge. Plunging down the mountain’s side, he found himself running with ghostlike slowness, floating almost, as though he were swimming. Then he realized he was swimming: stormrains had risen in a furious floodtide. An ocean now parted him from the pied moon mare.

  “Too soon,” she moaned, gasping, unmistakably in travail. “Before my time ...”

  “Summon the midwife!” he cried out again. The pied mare snorted hoarsely, in grave distress. The red one could have aided her — but was nowhere to be seen. Frantically, the dreamer struggled across the endless watery gulf. In the distance before him, the moon mare shuddered, collapsing to her knees. Bounding up the sheer cliffside, her skeletal pursuers closed around her.

  “The time of the Mare of the World betides!” the dark unicorn thundered — and wrenched awake as one hoof struck the near wall of his wooden stall with a report like a thundercrack.

  The warm enclosure around him was all dimness and shadow. Little white tongues of fire within the lampshells by the distant egress burned low, fizzing in the silent air. Tai-shan struggled to his feet, heart racing, the clear memory of his dream hurtling through him still. Who were the figures he had seen there? He knew them all somehow — though he could no more recall who and what they were to him than he could recount his own true name. Ryhenna, shaken from sleep, peered at him across the darkness from her own stall.

  “Moonbrow!” she exclaimed. “My lord, what aileth thee?”

  “I must get home!” he cried, staring about him.

  He scarcely recognized his present surroundings, the vision still coursing through his mind. The dream of that faraway Vale and the unknown mare seemed so vivid, so real, it was the chon’s comfortable stable that felt unfamiliar — unnatural — to him now. Surely no unicorn was ever meant to be housed in such a place: fed, groomed, and tended by sorcerous two-foots; head compassed in silver; mind, will, and energy sapped by luxury.

  Across from him, the coppery mare murmured, “Home? My lord, this is thy home!”

  Tai-shan shook his head. The adornment slapped against his muzzle, jingling.

  “It isn’t,” he answered. “My home lies far away from here. It is a great Vale, I think, nearly surrounded by woods. I must find it! My people are unicorns, not daya. I have stayed too long.”

  Ryhenna gasped. “Nay, my lord,” she protested, “thou must remain! Thy presence among us is the will of Dai’chon.”

  The dark unicorn stopped short. That baffling word again.

  “Dai‘chon,” he muttered, cocking his head. “What is this Dai’chon of which you speak?”

  Ryhenna gazed at him blankly a moment, uncomprehending, then gave a nervous nicker. “Dai‘chon is the one true god, of course! Master of the celestial fire, all-knowing and all-powerful — it was he that made our keepers and gave them dominion over daya and all the world. Why didst thou reck the chon keepeth this vast stable? We bluebloods here are sacred to Dai’chon.”

  The dark unicorn stared at her. “The two-foots’ god — ‘Dai’chon’ is a name?”

  Ryhenna nodded. The dark unicorn’s mind buzzed. Until this moment, he had thought it merely another indecipherable word.

  “Dai‘chon ...,” he mused, tasting the syllables on his tongue. Dai’chon had been the first word the daicha had ever spoken to him. “It sounds very close to the name the daïcha gave me — Tai-shan.” The dark unicorn shifted, suddenly remembering: “That morning in the square — half the crowd cried out ‘Dai’chon!’ to me instead of ‘Tai-shan.’”

  Again Ryhenna’s nervous laugh. “Not by chance, my lord, for thou greatly resemblest the god. The chon is little pleased.”

  The dark unicorn wheeled. “Resemble — ? What do you mean?”

  Ryhenna tossed her head and snorted, surprised. “Hast thou not seen Dai’chon’s image, my lord — as black of body as thou, but with limbs and torso of a keeper and the head of a da? He carrieth the crescent moon upon his breast, as thou dost upon thy brow, and thy tail is unlike the full, silky tails of daya, more like a whip or flail.”

  The dark unicorn felt his limbs go cold. He recalled the image before which the daïcha and her followers had bowed that first night upon the beach. He recalled similar figurines seized by the chon’s purple-plumes in the square as well as the unicorn-headed figurines that had so enraged the chon. The coppery mare spoke on.

  “When the great streak of fire hurtled out of the sky on the first day of fall, the daïcha declared it a sign from Dai’chon and set out in search of the firegod’s gift.”

  Memory welled up in the dark unicorn’s mind of standing soaked and exhausted upon a silvery, windswept beach and seeing a red plume of fire plunge out of heaven.

  “Weeks later,” Ryhenna told him, “the daïcha returned with thee, calling thee Tai-shan. From the first, daya and keepers alike have whispered thou art the very image of Dai’chon: his steed, perhaps — or his messenger?”

  The coppery mare watched him as she spoke, as though in hope of either confirmation or denial of her words.

  “Many,” she continued, “even dare to say thou art the god himself, openly calling thee ‘Dai’chon’ in defiance of the chon’s edict and bowing down before images of thee instead of those of the real Dai’chon. Perhaps it is the daïcha’s fault in calling thee a name so close to the god’s — for now the people have confused the two, and the chon is furious.” A moment later, as in afterthought, she added, “Furious, too, that thou hast delayed so long in taking up thy duties as First Stallion.”

  “What do you mean?” the dark unicorn asked again, baffled. He had lost her thread.

  Ryhenna snorted, tossed her head.

  “The First Stallion exists to get foals and fillies for the sacred stable,” she exclaimed. “Yet I and my sisters frolicked daily with thee for weeks, and thou madest not the slightest advance.”

  Tai-shan shook himself, staring at the coppery mare. “You mean the chon intends you — you and your sisters — to be ... my mates?”

  Ryhenna stamped impatiently. “Of course. What else might I and my sisters be to thee? The chon is anxious for thee to sire more homed marvels such as thyself — not steal the people’s worship from their god.”

  Tai-shan fell back a step, appalled.

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded hotly. “Surely the chon knows — must guess — I have always meant to depart as soon as spring arrives, to seek my homeland and my people once more. I must leave this place!”

  “No! The chon considereth thee no more than a strange sort of da,” the coppery mare replied. “He will never let thee go.”

  “Ryhenna,” the young stallion told her, “I am no da but a free unicorn. How may the chon hold me if I mean to be gone?”

  “By the same means he holdeth all my race,” the da mare answered softly. “With ropes and tethers, locked stalls and barred gates. With whips and bits and hobbles — and with tainted feed that taketh away even thy will to rebel.”

  Her eyes flicked to his empty feeding trough. Following her gaze, Tai-shan felt a sudden chill.

  “Tainted?” he said slowly, stupidly. “Tainted feed?”

  The coppery mare avoided his eyes, her voice a whisper. “The sweetmeal the chon ordered for thee is laced with dreamroot. A healing herb, it speedeth the mending of wo
unds and numbeth pain — yet it can also induce trance, making the rebellious docile to the firekeepers’ will.”

  The realization reverberated inside his skull like a thunderclap. The black unicorn stood trembling, stunned. The stable around him seemed to grow darker. Wind moaned beyond the warm enclosure’s draft-tight walls. He felt buffeted, cold.

  “So many times,” the da mare whispered. “So many times I longed to tell thee — yet feared to rebel against my captors and my god.”

  Violently, Tai-shan shook himself. “The daïcha,” he gasped. “The daïcha would never . . .”

  “The daïcha hath no choice in the matter! The chon is her master as well as ours.” Ryhenna shook her head, speaking more forcefully now. “The dreamroot he ordered lest thou go abroad in the city again, inciting heretical adoration.”

  Despite his belly’s insistent rumbling, the dark unicorn felt his gorge rise. He’d not touch another mouthful of that tainted meal! Tai-shan ramped and sidled, scarcely able to contain his agitation. His mind raced.

  “I must find a way to flee this place!”

  Ryhenna ignored his protests. “Nay. Escape is impossible. Put it from thy mind. Repent thy rebellion and accept the will of Dai’chon. If thou wilt not, my lord Moonbrow, then I fear for thee in sooth. Even now, it may be too late.”

  “Too late?” the dark unicorn murmured.

  Ryhenna looked at him hard. “I fear Dai‘chon’s judgment upon thee, my lord! Surely to entice the people’s heterodox worship in defiance of the chon cannot have been the purpose for which Dai’chon sent thee among us.”

  “I am no envoy of this Dai’chon,” the dark unicorn protested.

  “The two-foots’ confusion of me with their god is none of my doing!”

  “Such mattereth nothing to Dai‘chon,” the coppery mare snapped. “One may hide one’s inmost heart from one’s fellows, Moonbrow, but mighty Dai’chon recketh all. Twice yearly he cometh to judge the sacred daya. None can ever hope to escape his judgment — not even thou! I have seen his vengeance. It is swift and terrible. Dost thou not understand thy peril? The equinox is coming!”