A Dirge for Prester John

First, there are exactly five genuine unicorns in the world, in my world or Pentexore, which fact I’ve no notion of how they could know. What I think of as a unicorn is a mutant, they said, no more desirable or attractive than a mule. They really would not like to speculate on how the narwhal managed it.

Second, the idea of the virgin was a result of bad translation. For catching a unicorn, what you want is a scholar. You can see why the clerks changed those nouns around—self-preservation has been the end of many a winsome couplet.

Third, it was important that, should we own our luck, I be the one to make the kill. It was just bad manners for monarchs to kill their own creatures, even the poor, stupid unicorn. Besides, they said. A unicorn dies a big death. Not like a rabbit or a fox. We wouldn’t deprive you of it.

We reached a clearing in the cinnamon wood where the blue sky shone through and the spiced wind kicked at the brush. Everything smelled crisp, as though the day could be snapped in half. I saw the scholar readily enough—though should she have been chained to a stake in the earth? Surely she volunteered. Surely she would grace us with a song later.

“Scholars have temperaments little better than boars,” sighed Ysra. “You wouldn’t send a boar a formal invitation.”

The scholar was quite naked; her silvery hair fell long enough to provide her some modesty, but her eyes darted quickly, here and there in terror, the whites showing, her wrists manacled and crossed over one another. I looked for her species but she seemed in all manner to me quite human, if small and delicate, and a shadow passed over my heart.

“The beast will come, if we wait,” Ymra said, rubbing the cold from her knuckles in several complicated gestures of her six hands.

Wait we did, in the slight chill of the day, while the scholar whimpered and I suppressed my growing urge to help her, to put my hunting coat around her shoulders and give her hot wine—my hosts would hardly allow my eyes to drift to her, as if they caught the drift of my thoughts.

At last I heard a rumbling in the wood and I understood for the first time that the unicorn really meant to come for the girl, and I would be expected to kill the mute beast. A disquiet entered my soul and set the stakes of its tent there. The unicorn burst through the trees—and it was not a horse at all, or even a beast, but a young man with terribly white skin, covered in a soft down, glowing with a silvery countenance. His long hair brushed his shoulder blades and his eyes shone huge and dark, round and liquid as an animal’s. He wore a collar, too, from some past hunt or captivity or sovereign lord who kept the young man in his gardens with a strong fence to keep him still. His muscles seemed carved rather than grown, so stark and leonine were his limbs—and if I should dare to offend the sensibilities of refined folk who may read my words—the unicorn’s member stood rigid and enormous, a horn in truth, and a cruel one.

The unicorn spied the scholar and rushed to her, standing terribly near, and they looked at each other, afraid and aroused and alert, and he put his hands on her face, and she looked into his eyes and wept suddenly, as completely as I have ever seen a soul weep for another.

“Do it now,” said Ysra mildly, without urgency, nearly bored. “In a moment you’ll lose your chance.”

“But sire, that’s only a young man. I don’t feel right at all about it. Why don’t we let them alone and have our picnic?”

“Don’t be simple,” Ymra snapped, her gaze instantly terrible. “It’s a unicorn. Kill it. You said you’d killed one before.”

“And you said it was no unicorn but some kind of whale!” I protested.

“It will ravish the girl and leave her pregnant with its colts,” insisted the king Ysra.

“She doesn’t seem as though she’d mind,” said I, and in truth the scholar caressed the cheek of the unicorn with tenderness. Her gaze said she knew everything one could know about unicorns, and accepted this one anyway.

“You are our guest and our chattel!” hissed the queen Ymra. “Kill the unicorn or call yourself a treason and look to your cell!”

The thing about lying is that it’s best to do it only for fun, for delight and a prettier kind of world. Lies told to cover your own skin pervert the purity of the art. I want to lie to you—oh, how I would like it. To say I defied the king and the queen, I let the unicorn and the scholar make love in the autumn wood and drank my wine and went home to dry my socks by the great hearth. Instead I can at least say I made it quick. I cut his throat, and his blood flowed as clear as seawater, and the wood filled with howling: the scholar in grief, the unicorn in death, the monarchs in triumph, and myself, your John, in horror and shame.

11. On the Practical Results of Killing a Unicorn

I did not know until much later. I could not know. But it would appear that a unicorn’s horn is little, if anything, like the horn of a man. It pierces the air; it is the mate of the wind; it is an anchor. And with the anchor gone, strange ships may begin to drift out to sea.

I did not like it so much in Pentexore after that. I wished for home.

THE BOOK

OF THE RUBY

We made a city where we stood, on our side of the river. The barrels of our sword-trees, heavy with sticky hilts, made a barricade, our cannon-flowers, too, our buckler-vines. Our own knight-hedge, grateful for the water of the river, happy for the oily yellow sun of this new world, and the old world’s black earth still deep and moist to suckle in. The tents went up, green and silver and rose and black, pits dug for pots to boil over, animals—when we found animals—to roast over, and all our little things we’d hoped to trade. We laid down our beds on the lean summer earth, we lay down and looked up into the stars, our stars after all, and each of us asked the other: What is wrong with us? What is so wrong that the river has such grudges against us? Were we false to our own river, so that it told its cousin not to set her table for us, when we came?

I asked John to kiss me and he would not. He turned his head so I would not see his tears—but I am stronger than his secret griefs. I have always had to be. I took his face in my hands and moved his mouth to mine, his head in the curve of my waist, and between kisses I whispered: “Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed.”

He answered, “God has barred me from my home.”

“I am your home.”

> But John would not take my comfort. “I am two men,” he said. “And one of them drank from that Fountain and felt its vigor though he knew how dearly he might buy it, and one of them never left home, never knew there was another land but the one that bore him. And I do not know which man is me, and which is dead and gone, as dead as any bone on the bank of this river.”

I went to the water’s edge, the water’s edge in the moonlight, and stood with only the tips of my toes wet in the current. The sounds of the camp murmured and rolled behind me. A man joined me, lean and lovely and dark, and he had hands like a giant’s.

“Is it Yerushalayim?” he said to me. “The white city, with the starlight on it?”