The Last Unicorn

IX

The sentinels saw them coming a little before sunset, when the sea was flat and blinding. The sentinels were pacing the second tallest of the many wry towers that sprouted up from the castle and made it resemble one of those odd trees that grow with their roots in the air. From where they stood, the two men could survey the entire valley of Hagsgate as far as the town and the sharp hills beyond, as well as the road that ran from the rim of the valley to the great, though sagging, front gate of King Haggard's castle.

"A man and two women," said the first sentinel. He hurried to the far side of the tower; a stomach-startling motion, since the tower tilted so that half of the sentinels' sky was sea. The castle sat on the edge of a cliff which dropped like a knife blade to a thin yellow shore, frayed bare over green and black rocks. Soft, baggy birds squatted on the rocks, snickering, "saidso, saidso."

The second man followed his comrade across the tower at an easier pace. He said, "A man and a woman. The third one, in the cloak — I am not certain of the third." Both men were clad in homemade mail — rings, bottlecaps, and links of chain sewn onto half-cured hides — and their faces were invisible behind rusted visors, but the second sentinel's voice and gait alike marked him as the elder. "The one in the black cloak," he said again. "Do not be too sure of that one too soon."

But the first sentinel leaned out into the orange glare of the tipped-up sea, scraping a few studs loose from his poor armor on the parapet. "It is a woman," he declared. "I would doubt my own sex before hers."

"And well you may," the other observed sardonically, "since you do nothing that becomes a man but ride astraddle. I warn you again: be slow to call that third male or female. Wait a little, and see what you see."

The first sentinel answered him without turning. "If I had grown up never dreaming that there were two separate secrets to the world, if I had taken every woman I met to be exactly like myself, still I would know that this creature was different from anything I had ever seen before. I have always been sorry that I have never pleased you; but now, when I look at her, I am sorry that I have never pleased myself. Oh, I am sorry."

He bent still further over the wall, straining his eyes toward the three slow figures on the road. A chuckle clattered behind his visor. "The other woman looks sore-footed and bad-tempered," he reported. "The man appears an amiable sort, though plainly of the strolling life. A minstrel, like enough, or a player." He said nothing more for a long while, watching them draw near.

"And the third?" the older man inquired presently. "Your sundown fancy with the interesting hair? Have you outworn her in a quarter of an hour — already seen her closer than love dares?" His voice rustled in his helmet like small, clawed feet.

"I don't think I could ever see her closely," the sentinel replied, "however close she came." His own voice was hushed and regretful, echoing with lost chances. "She has a newness," he said. "Everything is for the first time. See how she moves, how she walks, how she turns her head — all for the first time, the first time anyone has ever done these things. See how she draws her breath and lets it go again, as though no one else in the world knew that air was good. It is all for her. If I learned that she had been born this very morning, I would only be surprised that she was so old."

The second sentinel stared down from his tower at the three wanderers. The tall man saw him first, and next the dour woman. Their eyes reflected nothing but his armor, grim and cankered and empty. But then the girl in the ruined black cloak raised her head, and he stepped back from the parapet, putting out one tin glove against her glance. In a moment she passed into the shadow of the castle with her companions, and he lowered his hand.

"She may be mad," he said calmly. "No grown girl looks like that unless she is mad. That would be annoying, but far preferable to the remaining possibility."

"Which is?" the younger man prompted after a silence.

"Which is that she was indeed born this morning. I would rather that she were mad. Let us go down now."

When the man and the women reached the castle, the two sentries were standing on either side of the gate, their blunt, bent halberds crossed and their falchions hitched round in front of them. The sun had gone down, and their absurd armor grew steadily more menacing as the sea faded. The travelers hesitated, looking at one another. They had no dark castle at their backs, and their eyes were not hidden.

"Give your names," said the parched voice of the second sentinel.

The tall man stepped a pace forward. "I am Schmendrick the Magician," he said. "This is Molly Grue, my helper — and this is the Lady Amalthea." He stumbled over the name of the white girl, as though he had never before spoken it. "We seek audience with King Haggard," he continued. "We have come a long way to see him."

The second sentinel waited for the first to speak, but the younger man was looking only at the Lady Amalthea. Impatiently he said, "State your business with King Haggard."

"I will," the magician replied, "to Haggard himself. What kind of royal matter could it be that I might confide to doormen and porters? Take us to the king."

"What kind of royal matter could a wandering wizard with a foolish tongue have to discuss with King Haggard?" the second sentinel asked somberly. But he turned and strode through the castle gate, and the king's visitors straggled after him. Last wandered the younger sentinel, his step grown as tender as that of the Lady Amalthea, whose every movement he imitated unaware. She stayed a moment before the gate, looking out to sea, and the sentinel did the same.

His former comrade called angrily to him, but the young sentry was on a different duty, answerable to a new captain for his derelictions. He entered at the gate only after the Lady Amalthea had chosen to go in. Then he followed, singing to himself in a dreamy drone.

They crossed a cobbled courtyard where cold laundry groped their faces, and passed through a smaller door into a hall so vast that they could not see the walls or the ceiling in the darkness. Great stone pillars rushed up to them as they trudged across the hall, and then leaned away without ever really letting themselves be seen. Breath echoed in that huge place, and the footsteps of other, smaller creatures sounded just as clearly as their own. Molly Grue stayed quite close to Schmendrick.

After the great hall, there came another door and then a thin stair. There were few windows, and no lights. The stair coiled tighter and tighter as it ascended, until it seemed that every step turned round on itself, and that the tower was closing on them all like a sweaty fist. The darkness looked at them and touched them. It had a rainy, doggy smell.

Something rumbled somewhere deep and near. The tower trembled like a ship run aground, and answered with a low, stone wail. The three travelers cried out, scrambling to keep their feet on the shuddering stairs, but their guide pressed on without faltering or speaking. The younger man whispered earnestly to the Lady Amalthea, "It's all right, don't be afraid. It's just the Bull." The sound was not repeated.

The second sentinel halted abruptly, produced a key from a secret place, and jabbed it — apparently — straight into the blank wall. A section of the wall swung inward, and the small procession filed into a low, narrow chamber with one window and a chair at the far end. There was nothing else: no other furnishings, no rug, no draperies, no tapestries. In the room were five people, the tall chair, and the mealy light of the rising new moon.

"This is King Haggard's throne room," said the sentinel.

The magician gripped him by his mailed elbow and turned him until they faced each other. "This is a cell. This is a tomb. No living king sits here. Take us to Haggard, if he is alive."

"You must judge that for yourself," replied the scurrying voice of the sentinel. He unlaced his helmet and lifted it from his gray head. "I am King Haggard," he said.

His eyes were the same color as the horns of the Red Bull. He was taller than Schmendrick, and though his face was bitterly lined there was nothing fond or foolish in it. It was a pike's face: the jaws long and cold, the cheeks hard, the lean neck alive with power. He might have been seventy years old, or eighty, or more.

The first sentinel came forward now with his own helmet under his arm. Molly Grue gasped when she saw his face, for it was the friendly, rumpled face of the young prince who had read a magazine while his princess tried to call a unicorn. King Haggard said, "This is Lír."

"Hi," said Prince Lír. "Glad to meet you." His smile wriggled at their feet like a hopeful puppy, but his eyes — a deep, shadowy blue behind stubby lashes — rested quietly on the eyes of the Lady Amalthea. She looked back at him, silent as a jewel, seeing him no more truly than men see unicorns. But the prince felt strangely, happily certain that she had looked him round and through, and down into caverns that he had never known were there, where her glance echoed and sang. Prodigies began to waken somewhere southwest of his twelfth rib, and he himself — still mirroring the Lady Amalthea — began to shine.

"What is your concern with me?"

Schmendrick the Magician cleared his throat and bowed to the pale-eyed old man. "We seek to enter your service. Far and wide has the fabled court of King Haggard —"

"I need no servants." The king turned away, his face and body suddenly slack with indifference. Yet Schmendrick sensed a curiosity lingering in the stone-colored skin and at the roots of the gray hair. He said cautiously, "But surely you keep some suite, some following. Simplicity is the richest adornment of a king, I grant you, but for such a king as Haggard —"

"You are losing my interest," the rustling voice interrupted him again, "and that is very dangerous. In a moment I will have forgotten you quite entirely, and will never be able to remember just what I did with you. What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place." As he said this, his eyes, like those of his son, turned to meet the Lady Amalthea's eyes.

"My court," he continued, "since you choose to call it that, consists of four men-at-arms. I would do without them if I could, for they cost more than they are worth, like everything else. But they take their turns as sentries, and as cooks, and they give the appearance of an army, from a distance. 'What other attendants should I need?"

"But the pleasures of court," the magician cried, "the music, the talk, the women and the fountains, the hunts and the masques and the great feasts —"

"They are nothing to me," King Haggard said. "I have known them all, and they have not made me happy. I will keep nothing near me that does not make me happy."

The Lady Amalthea moved quietly past him to the window, and looked out at the night sea.

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."

"Light a light then," said Molly Grue. The calmness of her own voice frightened her more than the fury of the old wizard had. It is easy to be brave for her sake, she thought, but if I begin being brave on my own account, where will it end?

"I never light lights," the king replied. "What is the good of light?"

He turned from them, muttering to himself, "One face is almost guileless, almost foolish, but not quite foolish enough. The other is a face like my face, and that must mean danger. Yet I saw all that at the gate — why did I let them enter, then? Mabruk was right; I have grown old and daft and easy. Still, I see only Haggard when I look in their eyes."

Prince Lír stirred nervously as the king paced across the throne room toward the Lady Amalthea. She was again gazing out of the window, and King Haggard had drawn very near before she wheeled swiftly, lowering her head in a curious manner. "I will not touch you," he said, and she stood still.

"Why do you linger at the window?" he demanded. "What are you looking at?"

"I am looking at the sea," said the Lady Amalthea. Her voice was low and tremorous; not with fear, but with life, as a new butterfly shivers in the sun.

"Ah," said the king. "Yes, the sea is always good. There is nothing that I can look at for very long, except the sea." Yet he stared at the Lady Amalthea's face for a long time, his own face giving back none of her light — as Prince Lír's had — but taking it in and keeping it somewhere. His breath was as musty as the wizard's wind, but the Lady Amalthea never moved.

Suddenly he shouted, "What is the matter with your eyes? They are full of green leaves, crowded with trees and streams and small animals. Where am I? Why can I not see myself in your eyes?"

The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. King Haggard swung around to face Schmendrick and Molly. His scimitar smile laid its cold edge along their throats. "Who is she?" he demanded.

Schmendrick coughed several times. "The Lady Amalthea is my niece," he offered. "I am her only living relative, and so her guardian. No doubt the state of her attire puzzles you, but it is easily explained. On our journey, we were attacked by bandits and robbed of all our —"

"What nonsense are you jabbering? What about her attire?" The king turned again to regard the white girl, and Schmendrick suddenly understood that neither King Haggard nor his son had noticed that she was naked under the rags of his cloak. The Lady Amalthea held herself so gracefully that she made shreds and tatters seem the only fitting dress for a princess; and besides, she did not know that she was naked. It was the armored king who seemed bare before her.

King Haggard said, "What she wears, what may have befallen you, what you all are to one another — these things are fortunately no concern of mine. In such matters you may lie to me as much as you dare. I want to know who she is. I want to know how she broke Mabruk's magic without saying a word. I want to know why there are green leaves and fox cubs in her eyes. Speak quickly, and avoid the temptation to lie, especially about the green leaves. Answer me."

Schmendrick did not reply quickly. He made a few small sounds of an earnest nature, but not a sensible word was among them. Molly Grue gathered her courage to answer, even though she suspected that it was impossible to speak the truth to King Haggard. Something in his winter presence blighted all words, tangled meanings, and bent honest intentions into shapes as tormented as the towers of his castle. Still she would have spoken, but another voice was heard in the gloomy chamber: the light, kind, silly voice of the young Prince Lír.

"Father, what difference does it make? She is here now."

King Haggard sighed. It was not a gentle sound, but low and scraping; not a sound of surrender, but the rumbling meditation of a tiger taut to spring. "Of course you are right," he said. "She is here, they are all here, and whether they mean my doom or not, I will look at them for a while. A pleasant air of disaster attends them. Perhaps that is what I want."

To Schmendrick he said curtly, "As my magician, you will entertain me when I wish to be entertained, in manners variously profound and frivolous. You will be expected to know when you are required, and in what guise, for I cannot be forever identifying my moods and desires for your benefit. You will receive no wages, since that is certainly not what you came here for. As for your drab, your assistant, whatever you choose to call her, she will serve me also if she wishes to remain in my castle. From this evening, she is cook and maidservant together, scrubwoman and scullery maid as well."

He paused, seemingly waiting for Molly to protest, but she only nodded. The moon had moved away from the window, but Prince Lír could see that the dark room was no darker for that. The cool brightness of the Lady Amalthea grew more slowly than had Mabruk's wind, but the prince understood quite well that it was far more dangerous. He wanted to write poems by that light, and he had never wanted to write poems before.

"You may come and go as you please," said King Haggard to the Lady Amalthea. "It may have been foolish of me to admit you, but I am not so foolish as to forbid you this door or that. My secrets guard themselves — will yours do the same? What are you looking at?"

"I am looking at the sea," the Lady Amalthea replied again.

"Yes, the sea is always good," said the king. "We will look at it together one day." He walked slowly to the door. "It will be curious," he said, "to have a creature in the castle whose presence causes Lír to call me 'father' for the first time since he was five years old."

"Six," said Prince Lír. "I was six."

"Five or six," the king said, "it had stopped making me happy long before, and it does not make me happy now. Nothing has yet changed because she is here." He was gone almost as silently as Mabruk, and they heard his tin boots ticking on the stairs.

Molly Grue went softly to the Lady Amalthea and stood by her at the window. "What is it?" she asked. "What do you see?" Schmendrick leaned on the throne, regarding Prince Lír with his long green eyes. Away in the valley of Hagsgate, the cold roar sounded again.

"I will find quarters for you," said Prince Lír. "Are you hungry? I will get you something to eat. I know where there is some cloth, fine satin. You could make a dress."

No one answered him. The heavy night swallowed his words, and it seemed to him that the Lady Amalthea neither heard nor saw him. She did not move, and yet he was certain that she was going away from him as he stood there, like the moon. "Let me help you," Prince Lír said. "What can I do for you? Let me help you."