Written for Yuletide 2004. Characters belong to Peter S. Beagle. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback. Loving Mere Folly Luna
Winter had gnawed the year to its crust, chewed the color from the leaves and sky and left a rime of frozen spittle on the fields. The cold burned through fur, wool and skin. At the height of the day, there was barely enough sunlight to slant a shadow. But it was well past the height of the day, and the magician was still traveling.
Schmendrick was an old man. He stooped as he walked ahead of his horse, though he carried nothing but a warped walking stick. His heavy beard seemed always in danger of trailing in the dirt. But his eyes still flashed green as a vein of running water within a thick shroud of ice. He seemed untroubled by the weather, and the starved wolves that saw him let him pass.
The sky was the color of wet ink when Schmendrick's road led him into the reach of a forest. He watched his steps on the slippery trail, his feet shuffling straight ahead with no doubt as to where they were taking him. He was less sure of himself: not of his destination, but of where he would find it. A light flared at the top of his staff, and he saw his way to a clearing.
When he stopped, he realized he'd walked all the way into spring.
Young grass purred under his feet. The trees cradled new fruit beneath their softly singing leaves. A noise of sleep rose from their branches and roots, where robins and foxes were snoring. Schmendrick had long since stopped feeling the cold; now the warmth of spring shocked him. He breathed it in, and smelled--and tasted--lilac.
The name of Schmendrick the Magician was spoken with awe by kings and queens; was written in glorious illumination on venerated scrolls of parchment; was passed in a poisonous hush by sea monsters to their young. He had become such a legend that many did not believe he was still alive. Fewer would have believed what they saw, if they had been there to see this: the great man buckling to his knees, his forehead touching the ground, and the sound pouring from his throat. It was mixed with laughter, first. Soon it was only weeping.
*
"Stop that noise," Molly had said to him, years before, and she had nudged his ribs with an elbow not as sharp as it once was. They'd been camping on the western side of a castle, where the last rays of sunlight lay warm on the earth. Neither of them had ever learned to sleep well in luxury. The stone walls would press in around them; they would be caged by the stillness of the air.
The fire had crackled then, and Schmendrick squinted toward it. "What noise?"
"You were whistling."
"Was I?" He hunched forward so that his chin rested on the knob of one knee. "It's that song the young princess is always singing. It's gotten in my head." He made a show of tapping the heel of his hand against his ear, trying to shake the caterpillar tune from its nest. Molly's mouth crooked upward at this, and he whistled a few more bars of the song, then sang out the refrain.
"Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly!
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly."
"A lot of song for such a small child," he said.
"Are you sure you got the curse off her completely?"
"Sure? Woman, I have lifted curses from entire countries. I moved the Mountain of Manderley. I named the Four Swords and the Seven Corners. Of course I'm sure." He scratched at his brown beard. "I should have them burn all their spinning wheels. Just in case."
"Or teach the silly girl to spin without pricking her finger," Molly said, tossing her tumbleweed hair back over her shoulders. "She's got a good heart, but she is a silly girl. The whole court spoils her, and her parents are the worst of all."
"Parents spoil children," Schmendrick said grimly. "Children are born into this world from anotherworld, complete, with everything inside them that they'll ever be or dream, and everything there is to know. And then their mothers step in, and buy them toys, and teach them rules...we forget all we ever knew."
A smile winged across Molly's pale face, barely brushing into her eyes before it was gone again. She stretched her thin hands toward the fire, trying to catch hold of its heat, or its light. "And what would you know about mothers and children? You never had one."
"I had a mother! Do you think wizards grow under toadstools?"
She did not say anything, and he knew what she was saying. Without a sound, he shifted his body closer to hers, but Molly had slipped far inside herself, and her eyes were a desert no magic could help him across. He waited. Far overhead, the sky bloomed like a new bruise.
"She was something like a daughter," Molly whispered at last. "She was ours just a little, wasn't she?"
As time passed, they'd begun to speak of the unicorn less and less, though she had not faded from their thoughts. Time did not blur her shape; she was as fixed in their minds as the evening star in the sky, and as bright. Schmendrick could tell when Molly had dreamt of the unicorn by the smile that dawned on her face. He tried hard not to be so transparent, but when the wind blew from the ocean, and their eyes met, they both remembered a certain radiance. A cool, whistle-clear white light.
"Creatures like that are their own," he said, but his voice stumbled. "Always, only their own."
"Unicorns are," Molly said. "But she was also human, for those few weeks, wasn't she? Human enough to forget, human enough to feel love, and loss. You made her a girl, and I dressed her for the first time. For that season she was all the daughter we'll ever have. And no amount of talk or time will change that; I know it in my heart." She fell silent, then, and turned away from Schmendrick, but her profile in the dark was whiter than his memory of the unicorn.
He stood up and stretched to his full height, arching his long arms high above his head. He paced around the fire and came back to look down at Molly. "It was not so," he said in his most authoritative tone. At least, he meant it to be authority, but his nose twitched and his voice got away from him again. "We trailed in her wake like ducklings, helpless in almost everything, but serving where we could. That's why she chose us, though she didn't know it. We were hers."
Molly's laugh rustled like the last dry leaf on an autumn tree. She picked Schmendrick's hand up and held it in both of hers. "And you think that mothers don't belong to their daughters? Idiot," she said gently.
She walked away from him, disappearing into the flap and shadow of the tent.
Black clouds had been shirring across the sky. Schmendrick had shaken his head as he watched them, wondering exactly how many worlds there were, and how many he would never visit. At last he'd thrown a handful of sand onto the fire and turned away. As he'd walked into the tent, the last sparks had leapt from the dry wood, spinning upward in a frenzy, desperate to meet the stars before they died.
*
Under the spreading trees, Schmendrick lifted his head from a patch of clover. The tears dried into a silver map on his face. The pain that felled him did not vanish, merely subsided enough to let him breathe.
Molly had been dead for six years, and beside her stone he had left his last faintly glowing hope. If the unicorn would ever come, she surely would have come for Molly. Schmendrick struggled to his feet. His head rang with the perfume of lilacs and the salt of his tears. In his bewilderment he took off his peaked hat, held it crushed in his hands as he looked around the clearing once more.
It lived. It brimmed and overflowed with life. Every leaf, every weed and mushroom, the rabbits and foxes in their burrows and the insects pillowed in the yellow hearts of daisies. Schmendrick felt the life of the forest wrap around him like a velvet coat. Its warmth was far more real than the winter back on the road.
He knew his death was on that road somewhere, and he was traveling to meet it. He was never meant to find a unicorn's home.
Time slipped backward and away from him, an ebb tide draining from the shore. The lines and trenches of his face softened; the knots in his fingers came loose. His tongue tasted of fresh greens and clear water, and the sweetness of it threatened to shove him to his knees again. His hands opened. His mouth opened. Remembering Molly Grue, remembering helplessness, remembering how fate balanced on the point of one delicate horn, Schmendrick the Magician gathered his voice.
"Do not show yourself to me," he cried. "Stay where you are!"
The leaves of even the oldest trees shook at his words. Fireflies sprang out of their hidden nests and flew to the magician, spangling his tattered sleeves. Squirrels stood at attention. Bears stirred from their deepest sleep. And every single thing that breathed there held its breath.
"The world has gotten smaller since I knew you," Schmendrick called, into the dark. His voice was the voice of a storm. "I have learned the tricks and troubles of a hundred roads. I have read a million words, a million times over. I have performed miracles, because that's what I was made to do. I have filled my senses with magics and mysteries. I have never found anything to match you." He closed his eyes.
With Molly, he had seen the curled black edge of the sea, like burnt parchment. They had met nixies and trolls, more than one dragon, a horse with wings. Still, what he remembered of beauty was the curve of the unicorn's long white neck, the radiance reflected on Molly's face, the poise of a single cloven hoof. She flamed star-white against his eyelids.
"Molly never stopped looking for you," he called, even louder now. "I did. I fooled myself into believing that I still hoped, but I did not. I believed that you had gone from my life, and I grieved, but my grief troubled me less and less as time went on. I remembered you without hope. I'm sorry for that, but you must not come to me now. I don't have the strength I had when I was powerless."
The magician paused and smiled a smile bitter and ancient as a glacier. "You could keep me from dying," he said. "I think you might, if only because I am the last man living who would know you for what you are. If only to keep remembering you the way I always have. If not for me, for yourself. And for yourself when you were Amalthea." At the name, his voice cracked like ice. "I hope for you now and it hurts. I doubt I could resist immortality if you offered it to me."
He raised his arms and his full power thundered swiftly into him, filling the spaces between the old bones, flooding his veins. His feet were lifted from the ground; his eyes wet and alight.
"Do not come to me," he roared with all his might. "Come to me!"
Echoes flew wildly around the small wood, shaking the trees to a silvery haze, scything through the forest on wings of grief and greed. And then they flew away, and silence rushed in to fill the night.
Suddenly, Schmendrick felt every year and day and second of his age. His gnarled body shrank in on itself, and he ran a hand that was nearly all bone across his riddled brow. He fumbled his walking stick to the ground and spoke a few words to it, sideways. The stick obediently rolled over, unfurling a camp bed, a canopy, a lantern already aglow.
"What is gone," the magician whispered, hoarse yet almost humming, "is gone."
Mute and raw as a newborn, he curled up on his side, and collapsed into sleep.
*
The tallow light of the lantern fled before a paler glimmering. The unicorn stepped lithely from between the trees, her horn alive with a seashell light. Her hooves made no sound on the soft grass. Unicorns, of course, are never any younger than time or any older than the moment. That is the way of immortal things.
She lowered her head toward the sleeping man, but not too close. He did not wake; he only scrunched his eyes shut a little more tightly, like a baby whose mother had brushed a fingertip against his cheek. The unicorn saw this and chimed a soft, sorry sound.
"A magician has to be able to fool himself, first," she said. "How else did you hide your power from yourself, for so long? I think that was your greatest illusion."
Her presence calmed the trees and the ferns, which were still trembling. Night flowers bloomed in her shadow. The magician shivered, his hand stealing toward the empty space beside him, twig-thin fingers tracing the curve of an invisible shoulder, a backbone. The unicorn shivered, too, and her sharp shoulders bowed slightly under the weight of time.
"For all your million, million words, Molly's heart was wiser than you," she said. Her voice was soft, and yet it hurt her. "When I was a human being, I belonged to everyone but myself. She was your creation, the Lady Amalthea, yours and Molly's, and--" She stopped short, on the edge of a deep chasm containing a deeper darkness. The light of her horn glanced off Schmendrick's cheek, and his lower lip puffed out as if he were about to speak. But he slept on.
The unicorn studied him with eyes that held the darkness of the ocean and the brilliance of moonlight splashed across its surface. Her eyes held the flames of the Red Bull, the turrets of a fallen castle, the puppy smile and bloody hands of a prince. For a moment the eyes were startlingly human, and then it passed, and her beauty was wilder than ever.
"I would not give you immortality," the unicorn told him at last, "if you had been foolish enough to ask me. It is only fear of death that makes you call for such things. Why should you fear dying? I do not, and Molly never did." She whinnied a laugh, and the flowers tolled like nervous bells. "What can die is beautiful," she murmured. "What is gone, is gone. I will remember you as kindly as I can--"
In his sleep, the magician clutched the air as though it were a blanket. His hands struck short of the unicorn, but she sprang backward all the same. His face as she watched him was eased almost into childhood, almost a smile, and her eyes shimmered so that you would be forgiven for thinking that a unicorn could weep.
She looked just long enough to add this last smile to her long memory, and then she was away, bounding through the darkness with the swift, sorrowful grace of a dying swan, a sinking star. She was gone so fast that her whiteness and light lingered a little in the glade. But these ghosts followed the unicorn at last, and it was only a cold dark night waiting for a distant dawn.