The Last Unicorn

Chapter V III

SHE WAS THE COLOR OF BLOOD, NOT THE SPRINGING BLOOD OF THE HEART BUT the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A

terrible light poured from her like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. Her horns were as pale as scars.

For one moment the unicorn faced her, frozen as a wave about to break. Then the light of her horn went out, and he turned and fled. The Red Bull bellowed again, and leaped down after him.

The unicorn had never been afraid of anything. He was immortal, but he could be killed: by a harpy, by a dragon or a chimera, by a stray arrow loosed at a squirrel. But dragons could only kill him—they could never make his forget what he was, or themselves forget that even dead he would still be more beautiful than they. The Red Bull did not know him, and yet he could feel that it was himself she sought, and no black mare. Fear blew him dark then, and he ran away, while the Bull's raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley.

The trees lunged at him, and he veered wildly among them; he who slipped so softly through eternity without bumping into anything. Behind him they were breaking like glass in the rush of the Red Bull. He roared once again, and a great branch clubbed him on the shoulder so hard that he staggered and fell. He was up immediately, but now roots humped under his feet as he ran, and others burrowed as busily as moles to cut across the path. Vines struck at him like strangling snakes, creepers wove webs between the trees, dead boughs crashed all around him. He fell a second time. The Bull's hoofs on the earth boomed through his bones, and he cried out.

He must have found some way out of the trees, for he was running on the hard, bald plain that lay beyond the prosperous pasturelands of Hagsgate. Now he had room to race, and a unicorn is only loping when he leaves the huntress kicking her burst and sinking horse. He moved with the speed of life, winking from one body to another or running down a sword; swifter than anything burdened with legs or wings. Yet without looking back, he knew that the Red Bull was gaining on him, coming like the moon, the sullen, swollen huntress's moon. He could feel the shock of the livid horns in his side, as though she had already struck.

Ripe, sharp cornstalks leaned together to make a hedge at his breast, but he trampled them down. Silver wheatfields turned cold and gummy when the Bull breathed on them; they dragged at his legs like snow. Still he ran, bleating and defeated, hearing the butterfly's icy chiming: "They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them." She had killed them all.

Suddenly the Bull was facing him, as though he had been lifted like a chess piece, swooped through the air, and set down again to bar him way. He did not charge immediately, and he did not run. He had been huge when he first fled him, but in the pursuit he had grown so vast that he could not imagine all of him. Now he seemed to curve with the curve of the bloodshot sky, his legs like great whirlwinds, his head rolling like the northern lights. His nostrils wrinkled and rumbled as he searched for him, and the unicorn realized that the Red Bull was blind.

If he had rushed him then, he would have met him, tiny and despairing with his darkened horn, even though he stamped her to pieces. He was swifter than he; better to face him now than to be caught running. But the Bull advanced slowly, with a kind of sinister daintiness, as though he were trying not to frighten him, and again he broke before him. With a low, sad cry, he whirled and ran back the way he had come: back through the tattered fields and over the plain, toward Queen Helia's castle, dark and hunched as ever. And the Red Bull went after him, following his fear.

Sanjuanita and Milo had been spun away like chips when the Bull went by—Milo slammed breathless and witless against the ground, and the magician hurled into a tangle of thorns that cost her half his cloak and an eighth of her skin. They got up when they could, and went limping in pursuit, leaning on one another. Neither one said a word.