CONTINUED
IT SIDLED, DID MY RESCUE. IT APPEARED UNDER the hoofprint moon, washed in white, the distant grass brushing its knees. My rescue approached hesitantly—it sniffed the air, stuck out its tongue once or twice to taste it. It took a few steps, then stopped to watch me, then a few steps more. The moon was very high by the time it was near enough for our eyes to connect like copper key and copper lock. My frozen tears shattered as I smiled.
It was a unicorn.
I have heard that unicorns are pale and perfect, all white and silver like a bride’s veil—those are silly tales, told by sillier uncles and grandfathers. They are dark, dark as race-horses, brown and jet, with the tails of lions, and a boar’s cloven hooves. They have little black beards that hang from their chins like unchewed grass, and their horns are not pearl and gold, but twisted bone, the stuff of antlers, twisted round in yellow and red and black. Those horns are thick as my own arm, and sharp as shears—but the horn of this unicorn was severed a little above the base, and the stump had bled, scabbed over, bled again. It was a mass of hardened, blackened blood, and only hints of horn gleamed through.
The mutilated beast sidled closer to me and though she drew back, much as a wild horse fearing that the hand that holds the apple has a mate which conceals a bridle, she nuzzled my cheek with her nose, soft as a mule’s.
“I smelled you,” she said. A unicorn’s voice is a low, liquid thing, like pomegranate wine.
“I wonder you could smell anything buried in sod.” I laughed. A unicorn is fearful to see, but it is not a hedgehog, and my heart was lighter for that.
“I smelled your innocence, like baking bread. It called me over the wood and the field.”
“I am wicked, not innocent.”
“Do not tell me my business. Innocence is a tec
hnical thing—I do not care what menial vices you think you have committed. I misjudged purity once, so you ought to believe I am careful enough these days.”
“Can nothing be done?” I asked shyly, trying not to look at her ruined forehead.
“Like innocence, a horn once squandered cannot be regained.”
I tried to shift my weight inside the house of sod, for my legs were stiff and heavy. Often in those days I wondered if I would grow in this hunched position and become a bent-back long before I became the kind of crone who ought to have one. The unicorn moved her dark eyes over me.
“You are in pain,” she said distractedly.
“Yes. I’m afraid you cannot lay your head in my lap.”
Her nose wrinkled. “I do not want to! Why should I want to lay my head in a child’s lap? I am too old for such games!” Her eyes slitted in anger and could I have run, I would have, for her snorting and pawing were awful to see.
“I’m sorry. I ought not to believe dusty old tales—enough are told about my kind that I ought to know better.”
She calmed somewhat, and moved nearer to me again. I looked up at her through my pinioned hair. “But I am in pain, unicorn, and should you help free me, if perhaps your head were to fall—in sleepiness, no more!—into my lap, who should blame either of us?”
She gnashed her yellow teeth a little. “If I free you, you will only run away and I will have to chase you, and then I will be sleepy indeed.”
“I will not run.”
“You will! You do not like me; you only want to use my teeth and my horn and such for your own ends—that is how all of you are. I am nothing but a shop to you, where you may reach onto the shelf and take anything you like.”
“Then tell me a true tale—tell me how you lost your horn, and keep me company, if I am innocent enough to pull you over the fields like a plowshare.”
A TALE
OF
HARM
I AM NOT INNOCENT. CONSIDER THIS: IF A UNICORN is innocent, if she is the core and pivot of all possible purity, why should she seek it out? Why should she care if some other creature is innocent, if she herself runneth over with virtue? Why should she, time and time again, though she knows better—she must know!—be lured from the deep and shadowy green-wood by the simple presence of a girl in a white dress? Ridiculous. We want it because we have no idea what it is, except that we know its smell, its weight, its outline against a gray sky. We want it because it is new. We go toward it hoping that we can touch it, that we can understand it, that we may become innocent ourselves. You might chase down a cooling cake, but not if your belly is full. So it is.
The science of innocence is complex and technical—I shall not worry your little ears with such talk. Suffice it to say the hymen is irrelevant, as irrelevant to us as trousers. The word innocent means without harm—did you know? Your mother ought to have taught you what a dictionary was. There is some debate, when unicorns gather, as to what, exactly, the definition ought to be: one who has not been harmed, or one who has done no harm. The smell is different, of course, and everyone has their tastes. I have always held that those who do no harm are the most rarefied creatures—which is why we draw back in such horror when the huntsmen come. Suddenly the dove who opened its little wings to us is a dove no longer, but a thing which has caused harm, great harm, which has brought arrows and knives, and smells like burning crusts, scorched flour.
It should be clear that whatever interpretation is supported by the majority of the herd, it is a thing we have no part of. We do not have this horn for hanging laundry upon, or water-divining, or lock-picking. It is for gouging and puncturing, it is for ripping the flanks of deer and punching through the shells of turtles. It is perhaps for piercing, even, the skins of innocents—I will not say that the first unicorn to discover one ran her through immediately, and the scent of her blood was so sweet and spiced that we have sought it ever since. I will not say it, but it may be true. We are carnivores, we are horses and more—we mate and maul and shatter trees with our hooves, we fight each other with tangled horns, we race with such speed that the earth is torn to strips beneath us. We harm. We are not ashamed of it; it is our nature. But like all things we are drawn to that which is our opposite. And we are harmed in our turn—oh, doubt it not, child.
And yet our horn is not a dead, mute knife: It is our secret self. When the wind blows it plays the slivers of space between red horn and black like a flute of flesh, and the most terrible and radiant songs are heard—but only by us. It is for mating, and for mothers with colts at their teats. I remember that my father knelt in a storm and let his horn sing me to dreaming once, when the forest was full. The voice of his horn was high and sad and bright as lightning, and I loved him. But he is gone now, and no storm can move me.