Peter Beagle - The Last Unicorn

Schmendrick came about to catch the wind again, and declared, "I understand you perfectly! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to you all the uses of this world! You are bored with bliss, satiated with sensation, jaded with jejune joys. It is a king's affliction, and therefore no one wants the services of a magician more than a king does. For only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power. To a magician, March is May, snow is green, and grass is gray; this is that, or whatever you say. Get a magician today!"

He finished on one knee with both arms flung wide. King Haggard stepped nervously away from him, muttering, "Get up, get up, you make my head hurt. Besides, I already have a royal magician."

Schmendrick rose heavily to his feet, his face red and empty. "You never said. What is his name?"

"He is called Mabruk," King Haggard replied. "I do not often speak of him. Even my men-at-arms do not know that he lives here in the castle. Mabruk is all that you have said a wizard should be, and much more that I doubt you dream of. He is known in his trade as 'the magician's magician. I can see no reason to replace him with some vagrant, nameless, clownish —"

"Ah, but I can!" Schmendrick broke in desperately. "I can think of one reason, uttered by you yourself not a minute since. This marvelous Mabruk does not make you happy."

Over the king's fierce face there fell a slow shadow of disappointment and betrayal. For a breath, he looked like a bewildered young man. "Why no, that is true," King Haggard murmured. "Mabruk's magic has not delighted me for a long time. How long has it been, I wonder?" He clapped his hands briskly, crying out, "Mabruk! Mabruk! Appear, Mabruk!"

"I am here," said a deep voice from a far corner of the room. An old man in a dark, spangled gown and a pointed, spangled hat was standing there, and no one could say surely that he had not been standing there in plain sight since they entered the throne room. His beard and brows were white, and the cast of his face was mild and wise, but his eyes were as hard as hailstones. "What does Your Majesty wish of me?"

"Mabruk," King Haggard said, "this gentleman is of your fraternity. His name is Schmendrick."

The old wizard's icy eyes widened slightly, and he peered at the shabby man. "Why, so it is!" he exclaimed in seeming pleasure. "Schmendrick, my dear boy, how nice to see you! You won't remember me, but I was a dear, dear friend of your tutor, dear old Nikos. He had such high hopes for you, the poor man. Well, well, this is a surprise! And are you really still in the profession? My, you're a determined fellow! I always say perseverance is nine-tenths of any art — not that it's much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course. But what can it be that brings you here?"

"He has come to take your place." King Haggard's voice was flat and final. "He is now my royal magician."

Schmendrick's start of amazement was not lost on old Mabruk, though the wizard himself seemed little surprised by the king's decision. For a moment he obviously considered the worth of wrath, but instead he chose a tone of genial amusement. "As Your Majesty wills it, now and always," he purred. "But perhaps Your Majesty might be interested in learning a bit of the history of his new magician. I'm sure dear Schmendrick won't mind my mentioning that he is already something of a legend in the trade. Indeed, among adepts, he is best remembered as 'Nikos's Folly. His charming and complete inability to master the simplest rune; his creative way with the most childish rhyme of theurgy, let alone —"

King Haggard made a thin motion with the edge of one hand, and Mabruk was suddenly silent. Prince Lír giggled. The king said, "I do not need to be persuaded of his unfitness for the position. A single glance at him tells me that, as a glance makes it plain that you are one of the great wizards of the world." Mabruk swelled gently, fondling his glorious beard and wrinkling his benign brow.

"But that also is nothing to me," King Haggard went on. "In the past, you have performed whatever miracle I required of you, and all it has done has been to spoil my taste for miracles. No task is too vast for your powers — and yet, when the wonder is achieved, nothing has changed. It must be that great power cannot give me whatever it is that I really want. A master magician has not made me happy. I will see what an incompetent one can do. You may go, Mabruk." He nodded his head to dismiss the old wizard.

Mabruk's semblance of affability vanished like a spark on snow, and with the same sound. His whole face became like his eyes. "I am not packed off as easily as that," he said very softly. "Not on a whim, even a king's whim, and not in favor of a fool. Beware, Haggard! Mabruk is no one to anger lightly."

A wind began to rise in the dark chamber. It came as much from one place as another — through the window, through the half-open door — but its true source was the clenched figure of the wizard. The wind was cold and rank, a wet, hooty marsh wind, and it leaped here and there in the room like a gleeful animal discovering the flimsiness of human beings. Molly Grue shrank against Schmendrick, who looked uncomfortable. Prince Lír fidgeted his sword in and out of its sheath.

Even King Haggard gave back a step before the triumphant grin of old Mabruk. The walls of the room seemed to thaw and run away, and the wizard's starry gown became the huge, howling night. Mabruk spoke no word himself, but the wind was beginning to make a wicked, grunting sound as it gained strength. In another moment it would become visible, burst into shape. Schmendrick opened his mouth, but if he were shouting a counterspell it could not be heard, and it did not work.

In the darkness, Molly Grue saw the Lady Amalthea turning far away, stretching out a hand on which the ring and middle fingers were of equal length. The strange place on her forehead was glowing as bright as a flower.

Then the wind was gone as though it had never been, and the stone walls were around them once more, the dull chamber as gay as noon after Mabruk's night. The wizard was crouched almost to the floor, staring at the Lady Amalthea. His wise, benevolent face looked like the face of a drowned man, and his beard dripped thinly from his chin, like stagnant water. Prince Lír took him by the arm.

"Come on, old man," he said, not unkindly. "This way out, granddad. I'll write you a reference."

"I am going," Mabruk said. "Not from fear of you — you lump of stale dough — nor of your mad, ungrateful father; nor of your new magician, much happiness may you have of him." His eyes met King Haggard's hungry eyes, and he laughed like a goat.

"Haggard, I would not be you for all the world," he declared. "You have let your doom in by the front door, though it will not depart that way. I would explain myself more fully, but I am no longer in your service. That is a pity, for there will come a time when none but a master will be able to save you — and in that hour, you will have Schmendrick to call upon! Farewell, poor Haggard, farewell!"

Still laughing, he disappeared; but his mirth dwelled forever in the corners of that chamber, like the smell of smoke, or of old, cold dust.

"Well," said King Haggard in the gray moonlight. "Well." He came slowly toward Schmendrick and Molly, his feet silent, his head weaving almost playfully. "Stand still," he commanded when they moved. "I want to see your faces."

His breath rasped like a knife on a grindstone as he peered from one of them to the other. "Closer!" he grumbled, squinting through the dark. "Come closer — closer! I want to see you."