Peter Beagle - The Last Unicorn

Schmendrick hid his face like a child, though he was a great magician. "I am sorry, I am sorry," he mumbled into his wrist. "I have done you evil, as Nikos did to the other unicorn, with the same good will, and I can no more undo it than he could. Mommy Fortuna and King Haggard and the Red Bull together were kinder to you than I."

But she answered him gently, saying, "My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy — save one, and I thank you for that, too. Farewell, good magician. I will try to go home."

She made no sound when she left him, but he was awake, and the crook-eared cat was miaowing lonesomely. Turning his head, he saw the moonlight trembling in the open eyes of King Lír and Molly Grue. The three of them lay awake till morning, and nobody said a word.

At dawn, King Lír rose up and saddled his horse. Before he mounted, he said to Schmendrick and Molly, "I would like it if you came to see me one day." They assured him that they would, but still he lingered with them, twisting the dangling reins about his fingers.

"I dreamed about her last night," he said.

Molly cried, "So did I!" and Schmendrick opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

King Lír said hoarsely, "By our friendship, I beg you — tell me what she said to you." His hands gripped one hand each of theirs, and his clutch was cold and painful.

Schmendrick gave him a weak smile. "My lord, I so rarely remember my dreams. It seems to me that we spoke solemnly of silly things, as one does — grave nonsense, empty and evanescent —" The king let go of his hand and turned his half-mad gaze on Molly Grue.

"I'll never tell," she said, a little frightened, but flushing oddly. "I remember, but I'll never tell anyone, if I die for it — not even you, my lord." She was not looking at him as she spoke, but at Schmendrick.

King Lír let her hand fall as well, and he swung himself into the saddle so fiercely that his horse reared up across the sunrise, bugling like a stag. But Lír kept his seat and glared down at Molly and Schmendrick with a face so grim and scored and sunken that he might well have been king as long as Haggard before him.

"She said nothing to me," he whispered. "Do you understand? She said nothing to me, nothing at all."

Then his face softened, as even King Haggard's face had gone a little gentle when he watched the unicorns in the sea. For that moment he was again the young prince who had liked to sit with Molly in the scullery. He said, "She looked at me. In my dream, she looked at me and never spoke."

He rode away without good-by, and they watched after him until the hills hid him: a straight, sad horseman, going home to be king. Molly said at last, "Oh, the poor man. Poor Lír."

"He has not fared so badly," the magician answered. "Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale." But his voice was a little doubtful, and he laid his arm softly around Molly's shoulders. "It cannot be an ill fortune to have loved a unicorn," he said. "Surely it must be the dearest luck of all, though the hardest earned."

By and by, he put her as far from him as his fingers' ends and asked her, "Now will you tell me what it was she said to you?" But Molly Grue only laughed and shook her head till her hair came down, and she was more beautiful than the Lady Amalthea. The magician said, "Very well. Then I'll find the unicorn again, and perhaps she will tell me." And he turned calmly to whistle up their steeds.

She said no word while he saddled his horse, but when he began on her own she put her hand on his arm. "Do you think — do you truly hope that we may find her? There was something I forgot to say."

Schmendrick looked at her over his shoulder. The morning sunlight made his eyes seem gay as grass; but now and then, when he stooped into the horse's shadow, there stirred a deeper greenness in his gaze — the green of pine needles that has a faint, cool bitterness about it. He said, "I fear it, for her sake. It would mean that she too is a wanderer now, and that is a fate for human beings, not for unicorns. But I hope, of course I hope." Then he smiled at Molly and took her hand in his. "Anyway, since you and I must choose one road to follow, out of the many that run to the same place in the end, it might as well be a road that a unicorn has taken. We may never see her, but we will always know where she has been. Come, then. Come with me."

So they began their new journey, which took them in its time in and out of most of the folds of the sweet, wicked, wrinkled world, and so at last to their own strange and wonderful destiny. But that was all later, and first, not ten minutes out of Lír's kingdom, they met a maiden who came hurrying toward them on foot. Her dress was torn and smirched, but the richness of its making was still plain to see, and though her hair was tumbled and brambled, her arms scratched, and her fair face dirty, there was no mistaking her for anyone but a princess in woeful distress. Schmendrick lighted down to support her, and she clutched him with both hands as though he were a grapefruit hull.

"A rescue!" she cried to him, "a rescue, au secours! An ye be a man of mettle and sympathy, aid me now. I hight the Princess Alison Jocelyn, daughter to good King Giles, and him foully murdered by his brother, the bloody Duke Wulf, who hath ta'en my three brothers, the Princes Corin, Colin, and Galvin, and cast them into a fell prison as hostages that I will wed with his fat son, the Lord Dudley, but I bribed the sentinel and sopped the dogs —"

But Schmendrick the Magician raised his hand, and she fell silent, staring up at him in wonder out of wide lilac eyes. "Fair princess," he said gravely to her, "the man you want just went that way," and he pointed back toward the land they had so lately quitted. "Take my horse, and you will be up with him while your shadow is still behind you."

He cupped his hands for the Princess Alison Jocelyn, and she climbed wearily and in some bewilderment to the saddle. Schmendrick turned the horse, saying, "You will surely overtake him with ease, for he will be riding slowly. He is a good man, and a hero greater than any cause is worth. I send all my princesses to him. His name is Lír."

Then he slapped the horse on the rump and sent it off the way King Lír had gone; and then he laughed for so long that he was too weak to get up behind Molly and had to walk beside her horse for a while. When he caught his breath again, he began to sing, and she joined with him. And this is what they sang as they went away together, out of this story and into another:

THE END

Peter S. Beagle, born in New York City in 1939, was graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1959. His first book, the novel A Fine and Private Place , was published the following year. He lived in Paris and traveled in France, Italy, and England and then spent a year at Stanford University on a Writing Fellowship. His second book, I See by My Outfit , an account of a cross-country trip by motor scooter, was published in 1965. Mr. Beagle has published stories and articles in The Atlantic and Holiday , among other periodicals. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.