Zombies vs. Unicorns (14 page)

Holly
: Unicorns are a study in contradictions. They are portrayed as both gentle and fierce, spiritual and animal, healers and death-bringers. In addition to having healing properties, the horn that sits on a unicorn’s brow is thought to be a deadly weapon and the unicorn itself is depicted as so fierce that it would rather die than be taken alive. Although often shown to be gentle, a unicorn will attack its natural enemy, the lion, without provocation. And the unicorn itself is found in medieval manuscripts associated both with celibacy and with desire.

Margo Lanagan’s “A Thousand Flowers” is a masterful story exploring the contradictory nature of the unicorn.

Justine
: Much as it saddens me to say so of work by a fellow Australian, this is by far the grossest story in the anthology. Eating brains, you say? So much less gross than Margo Lanagan’s story. Here’s why you should skip this one: B***iality as a defense for unicorns? I think I’m going to be ill.

Holly
: Now, Justine, don’t tell me a unicorn story made you feel squeamish? I thought we were supposed to look into the face of darkness? Face our fears?

By Margo Lanagan
 

I walked away from the fire, in among the trees. I was looking for somewhere to relieve myself of all the ale I’d drunk, and I had told myself—goodness knows why—in my drunkenness that I must piss where there were no flowers.

And this, in the late-spring forest, was proving impossible, for whatever did not froth or bow with its weight of blossoms was patterned or punctuated so by their fresh little faces, clustered or sweetly solitary, that a man could not find any place where one of them—some daisy closed against the darkness, some spray of maiden-breath testing the evening air—did not insist, or respectfully request, or only lean in the gloaming and hope, that he not stain and spoil it with his leavings.

“Damn you all,” I muttered, and stumbled on, and lurched on. The fire and the carousing were now quite a distance behind me among the treetrunks, no more than a bar or two of golden light, crossed with cavorting dancers, lengthened and shortened by the swaying of storytellers. The laughter itself and the music were becoming part of the night forest noise, a kind of wind, several kinds of bird cry. My bladder was
paining
me, it was so full. Look, I could trample flower after flower underfoot in my lurching—I could
kill
plant after plant that way! Why could I not stop and piss on one, from which my liquids would surely drip and even be washed clean again, almost directly, by a rain shower, or even a drop of dew plashing from the bush, the tree, above?

It became a nightmare of flowers, and I was alone in it, my filth dammed up inside me and a pure world outside offering only innocents’ faces—pale, fresh, unknowing of drunkenness and body dirt—for a man to piss on. Which, had he any manners in him at all, he could not do.

But don’t these flowers grow from dirt themselves?
I thought desperately.
Aren’t they rooted in all kinds of rot and excrements, of worm and bird and deer, hedgehog and who knows what else?
I scrabbled to unbutton my trousers, my mind holding to this scrap of sense, but fear also clutched in me, and flowers crowded my eyes, and breathed sweetness up my nose. I could have wept.

It is all the drink,
I told myself,
that makes me bother this way, makes me mind.
“Have another swig, Manny!” Roste shouted in my memory, thumping me in the back, thrusting the pot at me with such vigor, two drops of ale flew out, catching my cheek and my lip two cool tiny blows. I gasped and flailed among the thickening trees. They wanted to fight me, to wrestle me down, I was sure.

I made myself stop; I made myself laugh at myself. “Who do you think you are, Manny Foyer,” I said, “to take on the whole forest? There, that oak. That’s clear enough, the base of it. Stop this foolishness, now. Do you want to piss yourself? Do you want to go back to the fire piss-panted? And spend tomorrow’s hunt in the smell of yourself?”

I propped myself against the oak trunk with one hand. I relieved myself most carefully against the wood. And a good long wash and lacquering I gave it—aah, is there any better feeling? I stood and stood, and the piss poured and poured. Where had
I been keeping it all? Had it pressed all my organs out to the sides of me while it was in there? I had not been much more than a piss flask—no wonder I could scarce think straight! Without all this in me I would be so light, so shrunken, so comfortable, it might only require a breath of the evening breeze to blow me like a leaf back to my fellows.

As I shook the very last droplets into the night, I saw that the moon was rising beyond the oak, low, in quite the wrong place. Had I wandered farther than I thought, as far as Artor’s Outlook? I looked over my shoulder. No, there still was firelight back there, as if a house door stood open a crack, showing the hearth within.

The moon was not the moon, I saw. It gave a nicker; it moved. I sidled round the tree very quietly, and there in the clearing beyond, the creature glowed in the starlight.

Imagine a pure white stallion, the finest conformed you have ever seen, so balanced, so smooth, so long-necked, you could picture how he would gallop, easy-curved and rippling as water, with the mane and tail foaming on him. He was muscled for swiftness, he was
big
around the heart, and his legs were straight and sound, firm and fine. He’d a grand head, a king’s among horses, such as is stitched upon banners or painted on shields in a baron’s banquet hall. The finest pale velvet upholstered it, with the veins tracing their paths beneath, running his good blood about, warming and enlivening every neat-made corner of him.

Now imagine that to that fine forehead is affixed a battle spike—of narwhal horn, say, spiraling like that. Then take away
the spike’s straps and buckles, so that the tusk grows straight from the horse’s brow—
grows
, yes, from the skull, sprouts from the velvet brow as if naturally, like a stag antler, like the horn of a rhinockerous.

Then …

Then add magic. I don’t know how you will do this if you have not seen it; I myself only saw it the once, and bugger me if I can describe it, the quality that tells you a thing is bespelled, or sorcerous itself. It is luminosity of a kind, cool but strong. All-encompassing and yet very delicate, it trickles in your bones; slowly it lifts the hairs on your legs, your arms, your chest, in waves like fields of high-grown grass under a gentle wind. And it thins and hollows the sounds of the world, owl hoots and rabbit scutters, and beyond them it rumors of vast rustlings and seethings, the tangling and untangling of the workings of the universe, this giant nest of interminable snakes.

When something like this appears before you, let me tell you, you must look at it; you must look at nothing else; your eyes are pulled to it like a falcon to the lure. Twinned to that compulsion is a terror, swimming with the magic up and down your bones, of being seen yourself, of having the creature turn and lock you to its slavery forever, or freeze you with its gaze; whatever it wishes, it might do. It has the power, and you yourself have nothing, and
are
nothing.

It did not look at me. It turned its fine white head just a touch my way, then tossed its mane, as if to say,
How foolish of me, even to notice such a drab being!
And then it moved off, into the trees at the far side of the clearing.

The rhythm of its walking beat in my muscles, and I followed; the sight of it drew me like pennants and tent tops on a tourney field, and I could not but go after. Its tail, at times, braided flowers into itself, then plaited silver threads down its strands, then lost those also and streamed out like weed in brook water. Its haunches were pearly and moony and muscular. I wanted to catch up to its head and ask it, ask it … What impossible thing could I ask? And what if it should turn and answer—how terrible would that be? So, all confusion, I stumbled after, between the flowers of the forest, across their carpet and among their curtains and beneath their ribbons and festoons.

We came to a streamside; the creature led me into the water, stirring the stars on the surface. And while I watched a trail of them spin around a dimple left by its passing, it vanished—whether by walking away, or by leaping up and becoming stars itself, or by melting into the air, I could not say, but I was standing alone, in only starlight, my feet numb and my ankles aching with the water’s snowmelt cold.

I stepped out onto the muddy bank; it was churned with many hoofprints, all unshod that I could distinguish. There was no magic anywhere, only the smell of the mud and of wet rock, and behind that, like a tapestry behind a table, of the forest and its flowers.

Something lay higher up the bank, which the horse had fetched me to see. It was a person’s body; I thought it must be dead, so still did it lie.

Another smell warned me as I walked closer on my un-numbing feet, on the warm-seeming mud, where the trampled
grass lay bruised and tangled. It was not the smell of death, though. It was a wild smell, exciting, something like the sea and something like … I don’t know, the first breath of spring, perhaps, of new-grown greenness somewhere, beckoning you across snow.

It was a woman—no more than a girl—and indecent. Lace, she wore, a lace-edged under-dress only, and the lace was torn so badly about her throat that it draggled, muddily, aside and showed me her breast, that gleamed white as that horse’s flank, with the bud upon it a soft round stain, a dim round eye.

Where do I begin with the rest of her? I stood there stupidly and stared and stared. Her storm-tossed petticoats were the finest weavings, broiderings, laces I had seen so close. Her muddied feet were the finest formed, softest, whitest, pitifullest feet I had laid eyes on in my life. The skirts of the underclothes were wrenched aside from her legs, but not from her thatch and privates, only as far as the thigh, and there was blood up there, at the highest place I could see, some dried and some shining fresher.

Her hair, my God! A great pillow of it, a great swag like cloth, torn at the edges, ran its shreds and frayings out into the mud. It was dark, but not black; I thought in proper light it might show reddish lights. Her face, white as milk, the features delicate as a faery’s, was cheek-pillowed on this hair, the open lips resting against the knuckle and nail of one thumb; in her other hand, as if she were in the act of flinging it away, a coronet shone gold, and with it were snarled a few strands of the
hair, that had come away when she tore the crown from her head.

I crouched a little way from this princess, hissing to myself in awe and fright. I could not see whether she breathed; I could not feel any warmth off her.

I stood and tiptoed around her, and crouched again, next to the crown. What a creation! I had never seen such smithing or such gems. You could not have paid me enough to touch the thing, it gave off such an atmosphere of power.

I was agitated to make the girl decent. I have sisters; I have a mother. They would not want such fellows as those back at the fire to happen on them in such a state. I reached across the body and lifted the lace, and the breast’s small weight fell obedient into the pocket and hid itself. Then, being crouched, I waddled most carefully down and tried to make sense of the lace and linen there, not wanting to expose the poor girl further with any mistaken movement of the wrong hem or tatter. I decided which petticoat piece would restore her modesty. I reached out to take it up with the very tips of my fingers.

A faint step sounded on the mudded grass behind me. I had not time to turn. Four hands, strong hands, the strongest I had ever felt, caught me by my upper arms and lifted me as you lift a kitten, so that its paws stiffen out into the air, searching for something to grasp.

“We have you.” They were soldiers, with helmets, with those sinister clipped beards. They threw me hard to the ground away from the princess, and the fence they formed around me bristled with blades. Horror and hatred of me bent every back, deformed every face.

“You will die, and slowly,” said one in deepest disgust, “for what you done to our lady.”

They took me to the queen’s castle and put me in a dungeon there. Several days they kept me, on water-soup and rock-bread, and I was near despair, for they would not tell me my fate nor allow me to send word to any family, and I could well imagine I was to spend the rest of my days pacing the rough cell, my brief time in the colorful out-world replaying itself to madness in my head.

Guards came for me, though, the third day. “Where are you taking me?” I said.

“To the block, man,” said one.

My knees went to lily stalks. The other guard hauled me up and swore. “Don’t make trouble, Kettle,” he told his fellow. “We don’t want to bring him before them having shitted himself.”

The other chuckled high, and slapped my face in what he doubtless thought a friendly way. “Oh no, lad, ’tis only a little conference with Her Majesty for you. A little confabulation regarding your misadventures.” Which was scarcely less frightening than the block.