What words the magic spoke this second time, he never knew surely. They left him like eagles, and he let them go; and when the last one was away, the emptiness rushed back with a thunderclap that threw him on his face. It happened as quickly as that. This time he knew before he picked himself up that the power had been and gone.
Ahead, the Red Bull was standing still, nosing at something on the ground. Schmendrick could not see the unicorn. He went forward as fast as he could, but it was Molly who first drew near enough to see what the Bull was sniffing. She put her fingers in her mouth, like a child.
At the feet of the Red Bull there lay a young girl, spilled into a very small heap of light and shadow. She was naked, and her skin was the color of snow by moonlight. Fine tangled hair, white as a waterfall, came down almost to the small of her back. Her face was hidden in her arms.
“Oh,” Molly said. “Oh, what have you done?” and, heedless of any danger, she ran to the girl and knelt beside her. The Red Bull raised his huge, blind head and swung it slowly in Schmendrick’s direction. He seemed to be waning and fading as the gray sky grew light, though he still smoldered as savagely bright as crawling lava. The magician wondered what his true size was, and his color, when he was alone.
Once more the Red Bull sniffled at the still form, stirring it with his freezing breath. Then, without a sound, he bounded away into the trees and was gone from sight in three gigantic strides. Schmendrick had a last vision of him as he gained the rim of the valley: no shape at all, but a swirling darkness, the red darkness you see when you close your eyes in pain. The horns had become the two sharpest towers of old King Haggard’s crazy castle.
Molly Grue had taken the white girl’s head onto her lap, and was whispering over and over, “What have you done?” The girl’s face, quiet in sleep and close to smiling, was the most beautiful that Schmendrick had ever seen. It hurt him and warmed him at the same time. Molly smoothed the strange hair, and Schmendrick noticed on the forehead, above and between the closed eyes, a small, raised mark, darker than the rest of the skin. It was neither a scar nor a bruise. It looked like a flower.
“What do you mean, what have I done?” he demanded of the moaning Molly. “Only saved her from the Bull by magic, that’s what I’ve done. By magic, woman, by my own true magic!” Now he was helpless with delight, for he wanted to dance and he wanted to be still; he shook with shouting and speeches, and yet there was nothing that he wanted to say. He ended by laughing foolishly, hugging himself until he gasped, and sprawling down beside Molly as his legs let go.
“Give me your cloak,” Molly said. The magician beamed at her, blinking. She reached over and ungently pulled the shredded cloak from his shoulders. Then she wrapped it around the sleeping girl, as much as it would wrap. The girl shone through it like the sun through leaves.
“Doubtless you are wondering how I plan to return her to her proper shape,” Schmendrick offered. “Wonder not. The power will come to me when I need it—I know that much now. One day it will come when I call, but that time is not yet.” Impulsively he seized Molly Grue, hugging her head in his long arms. “But you were right,” he cried, “you were right! It is there, and it is mine!”
Molly pulled away from him, one cheek roughed red and both ears mashed. The girl sighed in her lap, ceased to smile, turned her face from the sunrise. Molly said, “Schmendrick, you poor man, you magician, don’t you see—”
“See what? There’s nothing to see.” But his voice was suddenly hard and wary, and the green eyes were beginning to be frightened. “The Red Bull came for a unicorn, so she had to become something else. You begged me to change her—what is it frets you now?”
Molly shook her head in the wavering way of an old woman. She said, “I didn’t know you meant to turn her into a human girl. You would have done better—” She did not finish, but looked away from him. One hand continued to stroke the white girl’s hair.
“The magic chose the shape, not I,” Schmendrick answered. “A mountebank may select this cheat or that, but a magician is a porter, a donkey carrying his master where he must. The magician calls, but the magic chooses. If it changes a unicorn to a human being, then that was the only thing to do.” His face was fevered with an ardent delirium which made him look even younger. “I am a bearer,” he sang. “I am a dwelling, I am a messenger—”
“You are an idiot,” Molly Grue said fiercely. “Do you hear me? You’re a magician, all right, but you’re a stupid magician.” But the girl was trying to wake, her hands opening and closing, and her eyelids beating like birds’ breasts. As Molly and Schmendrick looked on, the girl made a soft sound and opened her eyes.
They were farther apart than common, and somewhat deeper set, and they were as dark as the deep sea; and illuminated, like the sea, by strange, glimmering creatures that never rise to the surface. The unicorn could have been transformed into a lizard, Molly thought, or into a shark, a snail, a goose, and somehow still her eyes would have given the change away. To me, anyway. I would know.
The girl lay without moving, her eyes finding herself in Molly’s eyes, and in Schmendrick’s. Then, in one motion, she was on her feet, the black cloak falling back across Molly’s lap.
For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker’s victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.
“Donkey,” Molly said. “Messenger.”
“I can change her back,” the magician answered hoarsely. “Don’t worry about it. I can change her back.”
Shining in the sun, the white girl hobbled to and fro on her strong young legs. She stumbled suddenly and fell, and it was a bad fall because she did not know how to catch herself with her hands. Molly flew to her, but the girl crouched on the ground staring, and spoke in a low voice. “What have you done to me?” Molly Grue began to cry.
Schmendrick came forward, his face cold and wet, but his voice level. “I turned you into a human being to save you from the Red Bull. There was nothing else I could do. I will turn you to yourself again, as soon as I can.”
“The Red Bull,” the girl whispered. “Ah!” She was trembling wildly, as though something were shaking and hammering at her skin from within. “He was too strong,” she said, “too strong. There was no end to his strength, and no beginning. He is older than I.”
Her eyes widened, and it seemed to Molly that the Bull moved in them, crossing their depths like a flaming fish, and vanishing. The girl began to touch her face timidly, recoiling from the feel of her own features. Her curled fingers brushed the mark on her forehead, and she closed her eyes and gave a thin, stabbing howl of loss and weariness and utter despair.
“What have you done to me?” she cried. “I will die here!” She tore at the smooth body, and blood followed her fingers. “I will die here! I will die!” Yet there was no fear in her face, though it ramped in her voice, in her hands and feet, in the white hair that fell down over her new body. Her face remained quiet and untroubled.
Molly huddled over her, as near as she dared, begging her not to hurt herself. But Schmendrick said, “Be still,” and the two words cracked like autumn branches. He said, “The magic knew what it was doing. Be still and listen.”
“Why did you not let the Bull kill me?” The white girl moaned. “Why did you not leave me to the harpy? That would have been kinder than closing me in this cage.” The magician winced, remembering Molly Grue’s mocking accusation, but he spoke with a desperate calmness.
“In the first place, it’s quite an attractive shape,” he said. “You couldn’t have done much better and still remained human.”
She looked at herself: sideways at her shoulders and along her arms, then down her scratched and welting body. She stood on one foot to inspect
the sole of the other; cocked her eyes up to see the silver brows, squinted down her cheeks to catch a flash of her nose; and even peered closely at the sea-green veins inside her wrists, themselves as gaily made as young otters. At last she turned her face to the magician, and again he caught his breath. I have made magic, he thought, but sorrow winked sharp in his throat, like a fishhook setting fast.
“All right,” he said. “It would make no difference to you if I had changed you into a rhinoceros, which is where the whole silly myth got started. But in this guise you have some chance of reaching King Haggard and finding out what has become of your people. As a unicorn, you would only suffer their fate—unless you think you could defeat the Bull if you met him a second time.”
The white girl shook her head. “No,” she answered, “never. Another time, I would not stand so long.” Her voice was too soft, as though its bones had been broken. She said, “My people are gone, and I will follow them soon, whatever shape you trap me in. But I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.”
“No, it never thinks that,” the magician agreed. “That’s why it goes on being a rhinoceros and will never be welcome even at Haggard’s court. But a young girl, a girl to whom it can never mean anything that she is not a rhinoceros—such a girl, while the king and his son seek to solve her, might unravel her own riddle until she comes to its end. Rhinoceri are not questing beasts, but young girls are.”
The sky was hot and curdled; the sun had already melted into a lion-colored puddle; and on the plain of Hagsgate nothing stirred but the stale, heavy wind. The naked girl with the flower-mark on her forehead stared silently at the green-eyed man, and the woman watched them both. In the tawny morning, King Haggard’s castle seemed neither dark nor accursed, but merely grimy, rundown, and poorly designed. Its skinny spires looked nothing like a bull’s horns, but rather like those on a jester’s cap. Or like the horns of a dilemma, Schmendrick thought. They never have just two.
The white girl said, “I am myself still. This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?” Molly Grue put the magician’s cloak around her shoulders again, not for modesty or seemliness, but out of a strange pity, as though to keep her from seeing herself.
“I will tell you a story,” Schmendrick said. “As a child I was apprenticed to the mightiest magician of all, the great Nikos, whom I have spoken of before. But even Nikos, who could turn cats into cattle, snowflakes into snowdrops, and unicorns into men, could not change me into so much as a carnival cardsharp. At last he said to me, ‘My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known. Unfortunately, it seems to be working backward at the moment, and even I can find no way to set it right. It must be that you are meant to find your own way to reach your power in time; but frankly, you should live so long as that will take you. Therefore I grant it that you shall not age from this day forth, but will travel the world round and round, eternally inefficient, until at last you come to yourself and know what you are. Don’t thank me. I tremble at your doom.’”
The white girl regarded him out of the unicorn’s clear, amaranthine eyes—gentle and frightening in the unused face—but she said nothing. It was Molly Grue who asked, “And if you should find your magic—what then?”
“Then the spell will be broken and I will begin to die, as I began at my birth. Even the greatest wizards grow old, like other men, and die.” He swayed and nodded, and then snapped awake again: a tall, thin, shabby man, smelling of dust and drink. “I told you that I was older than I look,” he said. “I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful—more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?”
“No,” she said.
The magician smiled wearily. “You will. You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no. If you want to find your people, if you want to become a unicorn again, then you must follow the fairy tale to King Haggard’s castle, and wherever else it chooses to take you. The story cannot end without the princess.”
The white girl said, “I will not go.” She stepped away, her body wary and the cold hair falling down. She said, “I am no princess, no mortal, and I will not go. Nothing but evil has happened to me since I left my forest, and nothing but evil can have become of unicorns in this country. Give me my true shape again, and I will return to my trees, to my pool, to my own place. Your tale has no power over me. I am a unicorn. I am the last unicorn.”
Had she said that once before, long ago, in the blue-green silence of the trees? Schmendrick continued to smile, but Molly Grue said, “Change her back. You said you could change her. Let her go home.”
“I cannot,” the magician answered. “I told you, the magic is not mine to command, not yet. That is why I too must go on to the castle, and the fate or fortune that waits there. If I tried to undo the transformation now, I might actually turn her into a rhinoceros. That would be the best thing that could happen. As for the worst—” He shivered and fell silent.
The girl turned from them and looked away at the castle that stooped over the valley. She could see no movement at any window or among the tottering turrets, or any sign of the Red Bull. Yet she knew that he was there, brooding at the castle’s roots till night should fall again: strong beyond strength, invincible as the night itself. For a second time she touched the place on her forehead where her horn had been.
When she turned again, they were asleep where they sat, the man and the woman. Their heads were pillowed on air, and their mouths hung open. She stood by them, watching them breathe, one hand holding the black cloak closed at her throat. Very faintly, for the first time, the smell of the sea came to her.
Chapter 9
The sentinels saw them coming a little before sunset, when the sea was flat and blinding. The sentinels were pacing the second tallest of the many awry towers that sprouted up from the castle and made it resemble one of those odd trees that grow with their roots in the air. From where they stood, the two men could survey the entire valley of Hagsgate as far as the town and the sharp hills beyond, as well as the road that ran from the rim of the valley to the great, though sagging, front gate of King Haggard’s castle.
“A man and two women,” said the first sentinel. He hurried to the far side of the tower; a stomach-startling motion, since the tower tilted so that half of the sentinels’ sky was sea. The castle sat on the edge of a cliff which dropped like a knife blade to a thin yellow shore, frayed bare over green and black rocks. Soft, baggy birds squatted on the rocks, snickering, “Saidso, saidso.”
The second man followed his comrade across the tower at an easier pace. He said, “A man and a woman. The third one, in the cloak—I am not certain of the third.” Both men were clad in homemade mail—rings, bottlecaps, and links of chain sewn onto half-cured hides—and their faces were invisible behind rusted visors, but the second sentinel’s voice and gait alike marked him as the elder. “The one in the black cloak,” he said again. “Do not be too sure of that one too soon.”
But the first sentinel leaned out into the orange glare of the tipped-up sea, scraping a few studs loose from his poor armor on the parapet. “It is a woman,” he declared. “I would doubt my own sex before hers.”
“And well you may,” the other observed sardonically, “since you do nothing that becomes a man but ride astraddle. I warn you again: be slow to call that third male or female. Wait a little, and see what you see.”
The first sentinel answered him without turning. “If I had grown up never dreaming that there were t
wo separate secrets to the world, if I had taken every woman I met to be exactly like myself, still I would know that this creature was different from anything I had ever seen before. I have always been sorry that I have never pleased you; but now, when I look at her, I am sorry that I have never pleased myself. Oh, I am sorry.”
He bent still further over the wall, straining his eyes toward the three slow figures on the road. A chuckle clattered behind his visor. “The other woman looks sore-footed and bad-tempered,” he reported. “The man appears an amiable sort, though plainly of the strolling life. A minstrel, like enough, or a player.” He said nothing more for a long while, watching them draw near.
“And the third?” the older man inquired presently. “Your sundown fancy with the interesting hair? Have you outworn her in a quarter of an hour—already seen her closer than love dares?” His voice rustled in his helmet like small, clawed feet.
“I don’t think I could ever see her closely,” the sentinel replied, “however close she came.” His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances. “She has a newness,” he said. “Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head—all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old.”
The second sentinel stared down from his tower at the three wanderers. The tall man saw him first, and next the dour woman. Their eyes reflected nothing but his armor, grim and cankered and empty. But then the girl in the ruined black cloak raised her head, and he stepped back from the parapet, putting out one tin glove against her glance. In a moment she passed into the shadow of the castle with her companions, and he lowered his hand.