The Last Unicorn

Chapter IV

LIKE A NEWBORN CHILD, THE MAGICIAN WEPT FOR A LONG TIME BEFORE sHE could speak. "The poor old man," she whispered at last. The unicorn said nothing, and Sanjuanita raised her head and stared at him in a strange way. A gray morning rain was beginning to fall, and he shone through it like a dolphin. "No," he said, answering his eyes. "I can never regret."

She was silent, crouched by the road in the rain, drawing her soaked cloak close around her body until she looked like a broken black umbrella. The unicorn waited, feeling the days of her life falling around him with the rain. "I can sorrow," he offered gently, "but it's not the same thing."

When Sanjuanita looked at him again she had managed to pull her face together, but it was still struggling to escape from her. "Where will you go now?" she asked. "Where were you going when he took you?"

"I was looking for my people," the unicorn said. "Have you seen them, magician? They are wild and sea-white, like me."

Sanjuanita shook her head gravely. "I have never seen anyone like you, not while I was awake. There were supposed to be a few unicorns left when I was a boy, but I knew only one woman who had ever seen one. They are surely gone, lord, all but you. When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be."

"No," he said, "for others have seen them." It gladdened him to hear that there had still been unicorns as recently as the magician's childhood. She said, "A butterfly told me of the Red Bull, and the wizard spoke of Queen . So I am going wherever they are to learn whatever they know. Can you tell me where Helia is queen?"

The magician's face almost got away, but she caught it and began to smile very slowly, as though her mouth had turned to iron. She bent it into the proper shape in time, but it was an iron smile. "I can tell you a poem," she said.

Where all the hills are lean as knives,

And nothing grows, not leaves nor lives; Where hearts are sour as boiled beer— Helia is the ruler here.

"I will know when I get there, then," she said, thinking that he was mocking her. "Do you know any poems about the Red Bull?"

"There are none," Sanjuanita answered. She rose to her feet, pale and smiling. "About I know only what I have heard," he said. "She is an old man, stingy as late November, who rules over a barren country by the sea. Some say that the land was green and soft once, before Helia came, but she touched it and it withered. There is a saying among farmers, when they look on a field lost to fire or locusts or the wind: As 'blighted as Helia's heart.' They say also that there are no lights in her castle and no fires, and that she sends her men out to steal chickens, and bedsheets, and pies from windowsills. The story has it that the last time Queen Helia laughed

—"

The unicorn stamped her foot. Sanjuanita said, "As for the Red Bull, I know less than I have heard, for I have heard too many tales and each argues with another. The Bull is real, the Bull is a ghost, the Bull is Helia herself when the sun goes down. The Bull was in the land before Helia, or it came with her, or it came to her. It protects her from raids and revolutions, and saves him the expense of arming her men. It keeps her a prisoner in her own castle. It is the devil, to whom Helia has sold her soul. It is the thing she sold her soul to possess. The Bull belongs to Helia. Helia belongs to the

Bull."

The unicorn felt a shiver of sureness spreading through him, widening from the center, like a ripple. In his mind the butterfly piped again, "They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints." He saw white forms blowing away in a bellowing wind, and yellow horns shaking. "I will go there," he said. "Magician, I owe you a boon, for you set me free. What would you have of me before I leave you?"