Peter Beagle - The Last Unicorn

Molly agreed promptly. "Aye, before the men stumble on us and slit your throat for cheating them, the poor lads." She looked over her shoulder. "I had some things I wanted to take, but they don't matter now. I'm ready."

Schmendrick barred her way again as he stepped forward. "You can't come with us. We are on a quest." His voice and eyes were as stern as he could make them, but he could feel his nose being bewildered. He had never been able to discipline his nose.

Molly's own face closed like a castle against him, trundling out the guns and slings and caldrons of boiling lead. "And who are you to say 'we'? "

"I'm her guide," the magician said importantly. The unicorn made a soft, wondering sound, like a cat calling her kittens. Molly laughed aloud, and made it back.

"You don't know much about unicorns," she repeated. "She's letting you travel with her, though I can't think why, but she has no need of you. She doesn't need me either, heaven knows, but she'll take me too. Ask her." The unicorn made the soft sound again, and the castle of Molly's face lowered the drawbridge and threw wide even its deepest keep. "Ask her," she said.

Schmendrick knew the unicorn's answer by the sinking in his heart. He meant to be wise, but then his envy and emptiness hurt him, and he heard himself cry out sadly, "Never! I forbid it — I, Schmendrick the Magician!" His voice darkened, and even his nose grew menacing. "Be wary of wousing a wizard's wrath! Rousing. If I chose to turn you into a frog —"

"I should laugh myself sick," said Molly Grue pleasantly. "You're handy with fairy tales, but you can't turn cream into butter." Her eyes gleamed with a sudden mean understanding. "Have sense, man," she said. "What were you going to do with the last unicorn in the world — keep her in a cage?"

The magician turned away to keep Molly from seeing his face. He did not look directly at the unicorn, but stole small sights of her as stealthily as though he could be made to put them back. White and secret, morning-horned, she regarded him with piercing gentleness, but he could not touch her. He said to the thin woman, "You don't even know where we are bound."

"Do you think it matters to me?" Molly asked. She made the cat sound once more.

Schmendrick said, "We are journeying to King Haggard's country, to find the Red Bull."

Molly's skin was frightened for a moment, whatever her bones believed or her heart knew; but then the unicorn breathed softly into her cupped hand, and Molly smiled as she closed her fingers on the warmth.

"Well, you're going the wrong way," she said.

The sun was rising as she led them back the way they had come, past Cully, still slumped asleep on his stump, across the clearing, and away. The men were returning: dead branches cracked close at hand, and brush broke with a splashing sound. Once they had to crouch among thorns while two of Cully's weary rogues limped by, wondering bitterly whether the vision of Robin Hood had been real or not.

"I smelled them," the first man was saying. "Eyes are easy to deceive, and cheats by nature, but surely no shadow has a smell?"

"The eyes are perjurors, right enough," grunted the second man, who seemed to be wearing a swamp. "But do you truly trust the testimony of your ears, of your nose, of the root of your tongue? Not I, my friend. The universe lies to our senses, and they lie to us, and how can we ourselves be anything but liars? For myself, I trust neither message nor messenger; neither what I am told, nor what I see. There may be truth somewhere, but it never gets down to me."

"Ah," said the first man with a black grin. "But you came running with the rest of us to go with Robin Hood, and you hunted for him all night, crying and calling like the rest of us. Why not save yourself the trouble, if you know better?"

"Well, you never know," the other answered thickly, spitting mud. "I could be wrong."

There were a prince and a princess sitting by a stream in a wooded valley. Their seven servants had set up a scarlet canopy beneath a tree, and the royal young couple ate a box lunch to the accompaniment of lutes and theorbos. They hardly spoke a word to one another until they had finished the meal, and then the princess sighed and said, "Well, I suppose I'd best get the silly business over with." The prince began to read a magazine.

"You might at least —" said the princess, but the prince kept on reading. The princess made a sign to two of the servants, who began to play an older music on their lutes. Then she took a few steps on the grass, held up a bridle bright as butter, and called, "Here, unicorn, here! Here, my pretty, here to me! Comecomecomecomecome!"

The prince snickered. "It's not chickens you're calling, you know," he remarked without looking up. "Why don't you sing something, instead of clucking like that?"

"Well, I'm doing the best I can," the princess cried. "I've never called one of these things before." But after a little silence, she began to sing.

So she sang, and sang again, and then she called, "Nice unicorn, pretty, pretty, pretty," for a little longer, and then she said angrily, "Well, I've done as much as I'll do. I'm going home."

The prince yawned and folded his magazine. "You satisfied custom well enough," he told her, "and no one expected more than that. It was just a formality. Now we can be married."

"Yes," the princess said, "now we can be married." The servants began to pack everything away again, while the two with the lutes played joyous wedding music. The princess's voice was a little sad and defiant as she said, "If there really were such things as unicorns, one would have come to me. I called as sweetly as anyone could, and I had the golden bridle. And of course I am pure and untouched."

"For all of me, you are," the prince answered indifferently. "As I say, you satisfy custom. You don't satisfy my father, but then neither do I. That would take a unicorn." He was tall, and his face was as soft and pleasant as a marshmallow.

When they and their retinue were gone, the unicorn came out of the wood, followed by Molly and the magician, and took up her journey again. A long time later, wandering in another country where there were no streams and nothing green, Molly asked her why she had not gone to the princess's song. Schmendrick drew near to listen to the answer, though he stayed on his side of the unicorn. He never walked on Molly's side.

The unicorn said, "That king's daughter would never have run away to see my shadow. If I had shown myself, and she had known me, she would have been more frightened than if she had seen a dragon, for no one makes promises to a dragon. I remember that once it never mattered to me whether or not princesses meant what they sang. I went to them all and laid my head in their laps, and a few of them rode on my back, though most were afraid. But I have no time for them now, princesses or kitchenmaids. I have no time."

Molly said something strange then, for a woman who never slept a night through without waking many times to see if the unicorn was still there, and whose dreams were all of golden bridles and gentle young thieves. "It's the princesses who have no time," she said. "The sky spins and drags everything along with it, princesses and magicians and poor Cully and all, but you stand still. You never see anything just once. I wish you could be a princess for a little while, or a flower, or a duck. Something that can't wait."