The Last Unicorn

  “I call it Alan-a-Dale picking,” the minstrel answered. He would have expounded further, but Cully interrupted him, saying, “Good, Willie, good boy, now play the others.” He beamed at what Schmendrick hoped was an expression of pleased surprise. “I said that there were several songs about me. There are thirty-one, to be exact, though none are in the Child collection just at present—” His eyes widened suddenly, and he grasped the magician’s shoulders, “You wouldn’t be Mr. Child himself, now would you?” he demanded. “He often goes seeking ballads, so I’ve heard, disguised as a plain man—”

  Schmendrick shook his head. “No, I’m very sorry, really.”

  The captain sighed and released him. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured. “One always hopes, of course, even now‌—‌to be collected, to be verified, annotated, to have variant versions, even to have one’s authenticity doubted…well, well, never mind. Sing the other songs, Willie lad. You’ll need the practice one day, when you’re field-recorded.”

  The outlaws grumbled and scuffed, kicking at stones. A hoarse voice bawled from a safe shadow, “Na, Willie, sing us a true song. Sing us one about Robin Hood.”

  “Who said that?” Cully’s loosened sword clacked in its sheath as he turned from side to side. His face suddenly seemed as pale and weary as a used lemon drop.

  “I did,” said Molly Grue, who hadn’t. “The men are bored with ballads of your bravery, captain darling. Even if you did write them all yourself.”

  Cully winced and stole a side glance at Schmendrick. “They can still be folk songs, can’t they, Mr. Child?” he asked in a low, worried voice. “After all—”

  “I’m not Mr. Child,” Schmendrick said. “Really I’m not.”

  “I mean, you can’t leave epic events to the people. They get everything wrong.”

  An aging rogue in tattered velvet now slunk forward. “Captain, if we’re to have folk songs, and I suppose we must, then we feel they ought to be true songs about real outlaws, not this lying life we live. No offense, captain, but we’re really not very merry, when all’s said—”

  “I’m merry twenty-four hours a day, Dick Fancy,” Cully said coldly. “That is a fact.”

  “And we don’t steal from the rich and give to the poor,” Dick Fancy hurried on. “We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back‌—‌most of them‌—‌and the rich take from us because they could wipe us out in a day. We don’t rob the fat, greedy Mayor on the highway; we pay him tribute every month to leave us alone. We never carry off proud bishops and keep them prisoner in the wood, feasting and entertaining them, because Molly hasn’t any good dishes, and besides, we just wouldn’t be very stimulating company for a bishop. When we go to the fair in disguise, we never win at the archery or at singlestick. We do get some nice compliments on our disguises, but no more than that.”

  “I sent a tapestry to the judging once,” Molly remembered. “It came in fourth. Fifth. A knight at vigil‌—‌everyone was doing vigils that year.” Suddenly she was scrubbing her eyes with horny knuckles. “Damn you, Cully.”

  “What, what?” he yelled in exasperation. “Is it my fault you didn’t keep up with your weaving? Once you had your man, you let all your accomplishments go. You don’t sew or sing any more, you haven’t illuminated a manuscript in years‌—‌and what happened to that viola da gamba I got you?” He turned to Schmendrick. “We might as well be married, the way she’s gone to seed.” The magician nodded fractionally, and looked away.

  “And as for righting wrongs and fighting for civil liberties, that sort of thing,” Dick Fancy said, “it wouldn’t be so bad‌—‌I mean, I’m not the crusader type myself, some are and some aren’t‌—‌but then we have to sing those songs about wearing Lincoln green and aiding the oppressed. We don’t, Cully, we turn them in for the reward, and those songs are just embarrassing, that’s all, and there’s the truth of it.”

  Captain Cully folded his arms, ignoring the outlaws’ snarls of agreement. “Sing the songs, Willie.”

  “I’ll not.” The minstrel would not raise a hand to touch his lute. “And you never fought my brothers for any stone, Cully! You wrote them a letter, which you didn’t sign—”

  Cully drew back his arm, and blades blinked among the men as though someone had blown on a heap of coals. At this point Schmendrick stepped forward again, smiling urgently. “If I may offer an alternative,” he suggested, “why not let your guest earn his night’s lodging by amusing you? I can neither sing nor play, but I have my own accomplishments, and you may not have seen their like.”

  Jack Jingly agreed immediately, saying, “Aye, Cully, a magician! ’Twould be a rare treat for the lads.” Molly Grue grumbled some savage generalization about wizards as a class, but the men shouted with quick delight, throwing one another into the air. The only real reluctance was shown by Captain Cully himself, who protested sadly, “Yes, but the songs. Mr. Child must hear the songs.”

  “And so I will,” Schmendrick assured him. “Later.” Cully brightened then and cried to his men to give way and make room. They sprawled and squatted in the shadows, watching with sprung grins as Schmendrick began to run through the old flummeries with which he had entertained the country folk at the Midnight Carnival. It was paltry magic, but he thought it diverting enough for such a crew as Cully’s.

  But he had judged them too easily. They applauded his rings and scarves, his ears full of goldfish and aces, with a proper politeness but without wonder. Offering no true magic, he drew no magic back from them; and when a spell failed‌—‌as when, promising to turn a duck into a duke for them to rob, he produced a handful of duke cherries‌—‌he was clapped just as kindly and vacantly as though he had succeeded. They were a perfect audience.

  Cully smiled impatiently, and Jack Jingly dozed, but it startled the magician to see the disappointment in Molly Grue’s restless eyes. Sudden anger made him laugh. He dropped seven spinning balls that had been glowing brighter and brighter as he juggled them (on a good evening, he could make them catch fire), let go all his hated skills, and closed his eyes. “Do as you will,” he whispered to the magic. “Do as you will.”

  It sighed through him, beginning somewhere secret‌—‌in his shoulderblade, perhaps, or in the marrow of his shinbone. His heart filled and tautened like a sail, and something moved more surely in his body than he ever had. It spoke with his voice, commanding. Weak with power, he sank to his knees and waited to be Schmendrick again.

  I wonder what I did. I did something.

  He opened his eyes. Most of the outlaws were chuckling and tapping their temples, glad of the chance to mock him. Captain Cully had risen, anxious to pronounce that part of the entertainment ended. Then Molly Grue cried out in a soft, shaking voice, and all turned to see what she saw. A man came walking into the clearing.

  He was dressed in green, but for a brown jerkin and a slanting brown cap with a woodcock’s feather in it. He was very tall, too tall for a living man: the great bow slung over his shoulder looked as long as Jack Jingly, and his arrows would have made spears or staves for Captain Cully. Taking no notice at all of the still, shabby forms by the fire, he strode through the light and vanished, with no sound of breath or footfall.

  After him came others, one at a time or two together, some conversing, many laughing, but none making any sound. All carried longbows and all wore green, save one who came clad in scarlet to his toes, and another gowned in a friar’s brown habit, his feet in sandals and his enormous belly contained by a rope belt. One played a lute and sang silently as he walked.

  “Alan-a-Dale.” It was raw Willie Gentle. “Look at those changes.” His voice was as naked as a baby bird.

  Effortlessly proud, graceful as giraffes (even the tallest among them, a kind-eyed Blunderbore), the bowmen moved across the clearing. Last, hand in hand, came a man and a woman. Their faces were as beautiful as though they had never known fear. The woman’s heavy hair shone with a secret, like a cloud that hides the moon.

  “
Oh,” said Molly Grue. “Marian.”

  “Robin Hood is a myth,” Captain Cully said nervously, “a classic example of the heroic folk figures synthesized out of need. John Henry is another. Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl. Not that it isn’t a remarkable trick, of course.”

  It was the seedy dandy Dick Fancy who moved first. All the figures but the last two had passed into the darkness when he rushed after them, calling, hoarsely, “Robin, Robin, Mr. Hood sir, wait for me!” Neither the man nor the woman turned, but every man of Cully’s band‌—‌saving only Jack Jingly and the captain himself‌—‌ran to the clearing’s edge, tripping and trampling one another, kicking the fire so that the clearing churned with shadows. “Robin!” they shouted; and “Marian, Scarlet, Little John‌—‌come back! Come back!” Schmendrick began to laugh, tenderly and helplessly.

  Over their voices, Captain Cully screamed, “Fools, fools and children! It was a lie, like all magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!” But the outlaws, wild with loss, went crashing into the woods after the shining archers, stumbling over logs, falling through thorn bushes, wailing hungrily as they ran.

  Only Molly Grue stopped and looked back. Her face was burning white.

  “Nay, Cully, you have it backward,” she called to him. “There’s no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!” Then she ran on, crying, “Wait, wait!” like the others, leaving Captain Cully and Jack Jingly to stand in the trampled firelight and listen to the magician’s laughter.

  Schmendrick hardly noticed when they sprang on him and seized his arms; nor did he flinch when Cully pricked his ribs with a dagger, hissing, “That was a dangerous diversion, Mr. Child, and rude as well. You could have said you didn’t want to hear the songs.” The dagger twitched deeper.

  Far away, he heard Jack Jingly growl, “He’s na Child, Cully, nor is he any journeyman wizard, neither. I know him now. He’s Haggard’s son, the prince Lír, as foul as his father and doubtless handy with the black arts. Hold your hand, captain‌—‌he’s no good to us dead.”

  Cully’s voice drooped. “Are you sure, Jack? He seemed such a pleasant fellow.”

  “Pleasant fool, ye mean. Aye, Lír has that air, I’ve heard tell. He plays the gormless innocent, but he’s the devil for deception. The way he gave out to be this Child cove, just to get you off your guard.”

  “I wasn’t off my guard, Jack,” Cully protested. “Not for a moment. I may have seemed to be, but I’m very deceptive myself.”

  “And the way he called up Robin Hood to fill the lads with longing and turn them against you. Ah, but he gave himself away that time, and now he’ll bide with us though his father send the Red Bull to free him.” Cully caught his breath at that, but the giant snatched up the unresisting magician for the second time that night and bore him to a great tree, where he bound him with his face to the trunk and his arms stretched around it. Schmendrick giggled gently all through the operation, and made matters easier by hugging the tree as fondly as a new bride.

  “There,” Jack Jingly said at last. “Do ye guard him the night, Cully, whiles I sleep, and in the morning it’s me to old Haggard to see what his boy’s worth to him. Happen we’ll all be gentlemen of leisure in a month’s time.”

  “What of the men?” Cully asked worriedly. “Will they come back, do you think?”

  The giant yawned and turned away. “They’ll be back by morning, sad and sneezing, and ye’ll have to be easy with them for a bit. They’ll be back, for they’m not the sort to trade something for nothing, and no more am I. Robin Hood might have stayed for us if we were. Good night to ye, captain.”

  There was no sound when he was gone but crickets, and Schmendrick’s soft chuckling to the tree. The fire faded, and Cully turned in circles, sighing as each ember went out. Finally he sat down on a stump and addressed the captive magician.

  “Haggard’s son you may be,” he mused, “and not the collector Child, as you claim. But whoever you are, you know very well that Robin Hood is the fable and I am the reality. No ballads will accumulate around my name unless I write them myself; no children will read of my adventures in their schoolbooks and play at being me after school. And when the professors prowl through the old tales, and scholars sift the old songs to learn if Robin Hood ever truly lived, they will never, never find my name, not till they crack the world for the grain of its heart. But you know, and therefore I am going to sing you the songs of Captain Cully. He was a good, gay rascal who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. In their gratitude, the people made up these simple verses about him.”

  Whereupon he sang them all, including the one that Willie Gentle had sung for Schmendrick. He paused often to comment on the varying rhythm patterns, the assonantal rhymes, and the modal melodies.

  Chapter 6

  Captain Cully fell asleep thirteen stanzas into the nineteenth song, and Schmendrick‌—‌who had stopped laughing somewhat sooner‌—‌promptly set about trying to free himself. He strained against his bonds with all his strength, but they held fast. Jack Jingly had wrapped him in enough rope to rig a small schooner, and tied knots the size of skulls.

  “Gently, gently,” he counseled himself. “No man with the power to summon Robin Hood‌—‌indeed, to create him‌—‌can be bound for long. A word, a wish, and this tree must be an acorn on a branch again, this rope be green in a marsh.” But he knew before he called on it that whatever had visited him for a moment was gone again, leaving only an ache where it had been. He felt like an abandoned chrysalis.

  “Do as you will,” he said softly. Captain Cully roused at his voice, and sang the fourteenth stanza.

  “There are fifty swords without the house, and fifty more within,

  And I do fear me, captain, they are like to do us in.”

  “Ha’ done, ha’ done,” says Captain Cully, “and never fear again,

  For they may be a hundred swords, but we are seven men.”

  “I hope you get slaughtered,” the magician told him, but Cully was asleep again. Schmendrick attempted a few simple spells for escaping, but he could not use his hands, and he had no more heart for tricks. What happened instead was that the tree fell in love with him and began to murmur fondly of the joy to be found in the eternal embrace of a red oak. “Always, always,” it sighed, “faithfulness beyond any man’s deserving. I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree’s love.”

  “I’m engaged,” Schmendrick excused himself. “To a western larch. Since childhood. Marriage by contract, no choice in the matter. Hopeless. Our story is never to be.”

  A gust of fury shook the oak, as though a storm were coming to it alone. “Galls and fireblight on her!” it whispered savagely. “Damned softwood, cursed conifer, deceitful evergreen, she’ll never have you! We will perish together, and all trees shall treasure our tragedy!”

  Along his length Schmendrick could feel the tree heaving like a heart, and he feared that it might actually split in two with rage. The ropes were growing steadily tighter around him, and the night was beginning to turn red and yellow. He tried to explain to the oak that love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal, and then he tried to yell for Captain Cully, but he could only make a small, creaking sound, like a tree. She means well, he thought, and gave himself up for loved.

  Then the ropes went slack as he lunged against them, and he fell to the ground on his back, wriggling for air. The unicorn stood over him, dark as blood in his darkened vision. She touched him with her horn.

  When he could rise she turned away, and the magician followed her, wary of the oak, though it was once again as still as any tree that had never loved. The sky was still black, but it was a watery darkness through which Schmendrick could see the violet dawn swimming. Hard silver clouds were melting as the sky grew warm; shadows dulled, sounds lo
st their shape, and shapes had not yet decided what they were going to be that day. Even the wind wondered about itself.

  “Did you see me?” he asked the unicorn. “Were you watching, did you see what I made?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “It was true magic.”

  The loss came back, cold and bitter as a sword. “It’s gone now,” he said. “I had it‌—‌it had me‌—‌but it’s gone now. I couldn’t hold it.” The unicorn floated on before him, silent as a feather.

  Close by, a familiar voice said, “Leaving us so early, magician? The men will be sorry they missed you.” He turned and saw Molly Grue leaning against a tree. Dress and dirty hair tattered alike, bare feet bleeding and beslimed, she gave him a bat’s grin. “Surprise,” she said. “It’s Maid Marian.”

  Then she saw the unicorn. She neither moved nor spoke, but her tawny eyes were suddenly big with tears. For a long moment she did not move; then each fist seized a handful of her hem, and she warped her knees into a kind of trembling crouch. Her ankles were crossed and her eyes were lowered, but for all that it took Schmendrick another moment to realize that Molly Grue was curtsying.

  He burst out laughing, and Molly sprang up, red from hairline to throat hollow. “Where have you been?” she cried. “Damn you, where have you been?” She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.

  When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. “You don’t talk like that,” he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. “Don’t you know how to behave, woman? You don’t curtsy, either.”

  But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. “Where have you been?” Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn’s old dark eyes that looked down.