Unicorns II Page 11

"I forget," said Lauro. "I forget who I am. I forgot in the moment I saw the unicorn."

  The Lord smiled. He glanced about. His men smiled to demonstrate they were of one mind with him. The townspeople smiled, or else lowered their eyes.

  "Perhaps," said the Lord, "I do not believe in unicorns. A fable for children. Describe what you saw. Probably it was a wild horse."

  Lauro got to his feet, slowly. His eyes were now wise and looked quite devilish. This was because he did not know any more what to do. He turned and walked, without another word, up the steps and in at the church doors.

  The Lord of the town was unused to men with devil's eyes who turned and walked wordlessly away from him. The Lord gestured two of his men from their mounts.

  "Go after him. Tell him to come back."

  "If he will not obey, my Lord?"

  The Lord frowned, visualizing a scuffle in the precincts of the church, damaging to his reputation. He dismounted suddenly. The Lord himself, with his two men at his back, strode up the steps into the church after the stranger.

  Lauro was standing at the church's remotest end, in shadow before the darkened window. His hands hung at his sides and his head was bowed. The Lord gripped him by the shoulder, and Lauro wheeled round with a vicious oath. Lauro had been in the other, second world, aeons away, where the unicorn was. His eyes flared up and dazzled, luminous as a cat's, and the Lord hastily gave ground.

  "Swear to me, on God's altar," said the Lord.

  "Swear to what?"

  "The unicorn."

  "An hallucination," said Lauro. "I am a liar. Or drunk. Or mad."

  "Swear to me," said the Lord.

  Lauro grinned, with his long mouth closed, a narrow sickle.

  "What will you do if you believe me?"

  "There were stories before," said the Lord, "when I was a boy. Years ago. I dreamed then I should hunt such a beast, and capture it, and possess it."

  Lauro put back his head and laughed. When he laughed, he looked like a wolf. Laughing, the wolf went to the altar and placed his hand on it.

  "I swear by God and the angels of God and the Will and Works of God, that there is a unicorn in your wood. And God knows too, you will never take, capture, or possess a unicorn."

  The Lord said:

  "Come to my stone house with me. Eat and drink. Tomorrow you shall ride with us and see."

  So Lauro lay that night in the Lord's stone house with its three dog-toothed towers. Sometimes before he had lain in the houses of lords. His envy and his ambition were not exacerbated by anything of theirs.

  Preparations for the hunting of the unicorn had begun almost at once. It occurred to Lauro that the Lord wished to credit the unicorn's existence, that on some very personal level the reality of the legend was highly important to him. But Lauro cared nothing for the desires and dreams of the Lord. The hunt was less convincing to Lauro than the memory of the unicorn itself which had now become ghostly. He believed in the unicorn rather less than the Lord believed, and yet he knew he had beheld it, knew that it waited for him in the wood. If it was possible to come at the unicorn by means of dogs and horses and snares, then he would accompany the hunt. But he did not believe in this, either, as he had said. It had come to be that what he believed credible was useless to him, and that what he did not believe could happen at all he believed would happen—since it had already happened once, and because it was essential to him. Actually, the hunt was as his song-making had been, a needful but flawed expression, inadequate but unavoidable. So he lay in the house, but did not sleep.

  In the morning, the Lord's underlings brought Lauro down again into the hall. People hastened about there with a lot of noise, and food was piled high on platters and wine stood by, just as on the night before. The dogs were out in the yard, a sea of brown and white that came and went in tides past the open door.

  Presently a girl was conducted in at the door. She was fair-skinned, and this skin had been dressed in a long green gown. Her hair and her eyes were both dark as the wood, and Lauro, looking at her as she curtsied for the Lord, knew her purpose. She knew it too. She was very solemn, and her eyes were strangely impenetrable, as if the lids were invisibly closed not over, but behind them.

  The Lord came to Lauro eventually.

  "I have only to give the word, now. Are you ready?"

  "Are you?" asked Lauro.

  "You show me no respect," said the Lord peevishly. "I do not trust you."

  "Did I say you should trust me?"

  "You have nervous hands," said the Lord. "I would think you were a musician, but you have no instrument with you. Walk with the grooms, in front of me. I want you in sight."

  Lauro shrugged. He was not really aware he did so.

  They went out into the courtyard, and the dogs began to bark. Overhead the sky was clear, and all around the air was sweet. The girl in green was put on a horse, which she rode with both her legs on one side, in the manner of a lady. Because it was the custom of the legends and stories, she had been set at the head of the hunt, and the dogs, which were leashed, tumbled after the tasseled hoofs of her horse. Lauro walked with the grooms, behind the dogs and before the horses. The hunt-master, and the Lord and his men, each with their swords and knives, came clanking on. There were three bowmen, and two boys to sound the horns. The hunt-master himself carried a long blade in an ornate scabbard, but he was frowning, angry or unnerved.

  The townspeople stood watching in the streets, and they scarcely made a sound, though some of them indicated Lauro to others who had not seen him previously.

  As the hunt left the town and began to pick a way down the rock, with the dogs whining impatiently and the green-clad virgin riding sidesaddle before them all, everything became, for Lauro, measured as a planned and stately dance. The falling verdure of the trees that flooded round the track as they descended, meshed with the sun and confused his eyes, so he partly closed them, and the noises of the dogs and the metal noises of the men made his ears sing, so he ceased mostly to listen.

  Apart from the girl, it was like any other hunt, for meat or sport. He knew, when they reached the wood—day-green and opaque—they would not find the unicorn. The wood was like a curtain or a tapestry. It was possible to thrust through to its other side, but not to discover any substance in it.

  They entered the vale under the town. They rode through the vale, between the solitary trees with their caps of sunlight, and over the long rivers of their shadows. The pool appeared, a shallow rent in the fabric of the land, with the sky apparently beneath and showing through it. At this sky-pool, the unicorn had drunk, or performed its ritual of drinking. Behind lay the wood like a low cloud balanced against the earth and the horizon. He remembered the wood and the pool as if he had lived in this spot since childhood, he who had always been wandering. But then, these also had become figments of the second perfect world which, in some esoteric way, he had indeed always known.

  The girl cast one glance behind her before she rode among the trees. As she lowered her eyes, they met Lauro's; then she turned away again.

  The hunt trotted into the wood about twenty paces, and then stopped still, while the hunt-master ordered his men ahead to search for droppings and other indications of the presence of a large beast. Lauro moved aside and leaned on a tree, and smiled coldly at the ground. A unicorn could not be taken in such a fashion. His mind seemed to drift out into the wood, searching and searching itself for some permissible, ethereal trace, like an echo, of the unicorn, but the greenness was a labyrinth where his mind soon lost itself. He sensed the girl had moved ahead alone. He closed his eyes, and all of them were gone.

  Then—he did not see or sense it, he knew it—then the unicorn came, as if from nothingness, and stepped across the turf, ignoring the hunt, the dogs, the girl, looking at him. And Lauro felt the shadow of the unicorn wash over him, like a faint breeze.

  Lauro opened his eyes. There was nothing there, where he was gazing. But something was happening to the Lord's men, a susur
ration not of noise but of silence. There was a great heat in the wood.

  The girl had indeed moved forward alone, and she had dismounted or been lifted down. She stood between two trees, and the unicorn stood beyond her. It was like a statue, immobile. It did not look real.

  There was nothing to be done. The creature did not move. If the men should move, the unicorn would run. So much was obvious. But the hunt-master, used to his craft, to the unsupernatural deer and starting, panic-swift hares, signaled to one of the boys who carried a hunting horn, and the boy, his eyes bursting, blew the horn—since he had always done so—and the men by the hounds slipped their leashes, again from habit.

  The pack flung itself forward and the surge of it hit the girl as she stood there before the unicorn. She was tossed sideways, and would have gone down, but one of the grooms snatched her up and away out of the foam of dogs.

  Everyone seemed taken by surprise at his own actions. The unicorn, for an instant, seemed surprised, too. But Lauro laughed again, as he had in the church. He was dubiously glad the hunt had come to defile the unicorn's sanctity and purity and solitude. Glad for the yelping and shouting, and the blundering of hoofs. Yet he did not suppose any true defilement was likely.

  But the unicorn ran, and the dogs belled and swirled after it. Men and horses rushed by.

  There was a long aisle between the trees, tenuously barricaded at intervals by screens and sheer sloping walls of blinding sunlight. Down this aisle the unicorn ran. And suddenly Lauro realized he could see the unicorn running, that it was perceptible to him. Before, the speed and articulation of the unicorn had been quite invisible.

  As he noticed this, with a kind of slow searing shock, one of the bowmen let fly an arrow.

  The unicorn was so white, so luminescent even by day that it seemed the shaft was drawn after it by magic, magnetized to the shining skin.

  Lauro saw, or thought he saw, the arrow penetrate the right flank of the unicorn. It seemed to stumble. It was like a star clumsily reeling in its smooth and faultless flight. Lauro could not now believe what he saw. The unicorn had become a deer, a white stag, nothing more. Lauro was running, with the rest. So he beheld the foremost handful of dogs catch up to and leap on their prey.

  The unicorn fell. It was very sudden, and the dogs gushed over it. He saw teeth meeting in the sorcerous skin. And then, something more terrible. The unicorn, like almost anything at bay and pulled down, began to fight. First one dog was spitted, screaming and lathering on the slender tower of the impossible horn, and then another. Each, as it was impaled, was thrown away, its entrails loose as ribbons. And the fabulous horn was red.

  A man raced forward shouting, laughing or appearing to laugh. He thrust the tip of his short knife into the unicorn's side. Another was driving a blade in the arching throat. The blood of the unicorn just like that of the dogs, was only red.

  Lauro dropped to his knees, and the hunt went by him and covered the sight of the fallen unicorn which was only a white stag. It had not made a single sound.

  Someone dashing by, kicked Lauro. He felt the blow from a distance of many miles. No blow, no pain, no warmth could come at the cold thing inside him.

  The horns were winded, and the hunt-master swore in a business-like way. They had hunted the unicorn, wounded it, bound it. It was taken. The whole event had been very quick.

  Lauro continued to kneel, as if he prayed, on the trampled turf.

  At some juncture, he was offered payment. This was after he had followed the hunt back into the town. He had walked a quarter of a mile behind them, then a mile, two miles. He had not seen what had happened as they entered the town, but when he came there the streets were empty. It had begun to rain, gently at first, but with increasing violence. If blood had trickled into the streets from the unicorn's wounds, it had been washed away. The people, too.

  If any had watched the hunt's return, they would have seen an animal, slung between staves, its feet obscurely roped, its head hanging down. It had looked dead, dead and bloody and of a surpassing, horrid ordinariness.

  But the slung carcass of the unicorn was not dead.

  Lauro himself had not looked at it.

  Somehow, however, he had followed them all, and come in the end to the three-towered house, and at the door men had been waiting and taken him in.

  The Lord sat in a carved chair and drank wine. He was rain-wet, and his clothing steamed. The hall was full of such steam, and the yard full of the steaming, snarling hounds, who had tasted blood and been given no portion of a slain beast to devour.

  The Lord stared at Lauro. The Lord was gross and ruddy.

  "Well. You will wish to be paid. I have gained a rare animal. I may henceforward collect such oddities. It might amuse me to do so. What price do you ask for your information?" And when Lauro said nothing, staring back with his cold inhuman eyes, the Lord said: "It was worth something, and you know it. I had heard rumors, from my boyhood. Many heard these tales. But it took you, stranger and vagabond, to suss the creature out for me."

  "For you," Lauro said.

  "For me. What price then?"

  Lauro said, "Where do you mean to keep it?"

  "Penned. On grass, under trees. A pavilion. Something pretty. The ladies shall tame it. In three months it will eat from my hand, like a lapdog."

  Lauro looked right through the Lord and his hall, and saw a pavilion on grass, and the unicorn gamboling. It occurred to him, with an uncanny frightening certainty, that since the unicorn had only been a legend before, he himself, by his desire and his desperation, had somehow conjured it. Conjured, witnessed, and betrayed.

  "By the Christ," said the Lord, growing furious all at once, "name your price, you insolent devil."

  The thoughts and the words combined. Lauro smiled.

  "Thirty pieces of silver," he said.

  With a curse or two, and a clinking of coins like curses, they paid him. Afterwards, he went outside, and around the wall of the Lord's house, from sight. He sat down by the wall, in the rain. He could think of nothing, yet the image of the unicorn remained. After a time, deep within himself, he felt the mysterious formless stirring which tortured him, as always, unable to find its expression. He understood that this occasion was no different. But he was now like a dumb man in enormous pain who could not cry out.

  At some point he slept under the blanket of the rain.

  When he woke, there were warm and fluttering lights in certain high windows of the house. He wondered where the unicorn was, in some stable or outhouse, perhaps, and he wondered if it would die, but it did not seem to him it had lived. He slept again, and on the second awakening the lights in the house were out. He got to his feet and rain fell from him like water from a bucket. He began to move around the wall, searching for something, at first not comprehending his search. Eventually, he became conscious that he was seeking a secretive way back in, a way to reach the unicorn. But he did not know why he did so, or what use it might be. He did not even know where the unicorn had been imprisoned.

  He came to a part of the wall which seemed, even in the wet darkness, to be different. He could not tell what it was. But then the notion began to grow that it was different in some mode of the spirit, because it was connected to his purpose. Almost immediately he found a thin wooden door. He rapped on the door, and received no answer. There were rotted timbers in the door, that sagged when his knuckles met them.

  For maybe an hour he worked at the rotten wood, and when some of it gave way, he worked on the rusty bar within. Ivy clung to the bar and insects skittered away from his probing, wrenching hands. The joints of his shoulders jarred in their sockets and sweat ran down his back and across his breast, turning icy cold when it touched the heavy rain in his clothes.

  When the door opened he no longer thought it would, and had been working on it from mere momentum, as if hypnotized.

  Inside the door was an obscure stone-arched walk. Lauro went into it, and through it, and came out in an old yard framed by t
he tall blank walls of the house. Another door, this one unbarred, led into a little garden. Beyond the garden, still inside the precinct of the house, was a patch of muddy ground. Distantly a tower loomed up, before the tower several cumulous-like trees rose in a bank of shadow. A lamp burned, showing two men asleep under an awning, an empty wine-skin between them. These things were like messages inscribed on the stones, the earth, the dark. In the very centre of the dark, far beyond the scope of the lamp, against the trees, was a dim low smolder, like a dying fire, except it was white. It was the unicorn.

  A fading ember, a candle guttering. The flame of the unicorn dying down, put out by rain and blood.

  Lauro went forward, past the drunken sleepers, out of the light. He padded across the grass, and came under the rustling, dripping trees. The rain eased as he did so, and then stopped. He saw the unicorn clearly.

  It was seated, with its forelegs tucked under it, like a lamb or a foal. The fringe of its mane was somber with water. Its head was lowered, the horn pointing directly before it. And the horn was dull. It looked unburnished, ugly, natural, like a huge nail-paring. He could not see its eyes. Though they were open, they were glazed; they had paled to match the darkening of its flesh until the two things were one.

  There was no protection for the unicorn from the elements, but then, it had lived in the wild wood. What held it penned was a fence of gilded posts, no more. They were not even high enough that it could not have jumped over them. What truly held it was the collar of iron at its neck, and the chain that ran from the collar to an iron stake in the ground.

  Something glittered in the mud, more brilliantly than the unicorn now glittered. As Lauro came nearer, he saw there were small gems and coins lying all about the unicorn. A ruby winked like a drop of wine. Some man had thrown a jeweled dagger, some woman a wristlet of pearls.

  Bemused, Lauro stood about five paces from the gilded fence. There had been no emotion in him he could identify, until now. But now an emotion came. It was disgust, mingled with hatred.

  He approached two more paces, and hated the unicorn.