The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

they could never make her forget what she was, or themselves forget that even dead she would still be more beautiful than they.

The Red Bull did not know her, and yet she could feel that it was herself he sought, and no white mare. Fear blew her dark then, and she ran away, while the Bull’s raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley.

the Red Bull went after her, following her fear.

Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.

“Why did you not let the Bull kill me?” The white girl moaned. “Why did you not leave me to the harpy? That would have been kinder than closing me in this cage.”

Her voice was too soft, as though its bones had been broken.

“My people are gone, and I will follow them soon, whatever shape you trap me in. But I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.”

Rhinoceri are not questing beasts, but young girls are.”

“I am myself still. This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?”

The white girl regarded him out of the unicorn’s clear, amaranthine eyes—gentle and frightening in the unused face—but she said nothing.

Whatever can die is beautiful—more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.

“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.”

“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.”

I will keep nothing near me that does not make me happy.”

“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.

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.

The sight of her makes me want to do battle with all evil and ugliness,

That’s a terrible sound they make when they’re really hurt. When they stop, it’s like a song.”

“I want to serve her, as you do, to help her find whatever she has come here to find. I wish to be whatever she has most need of. Tell her so. Will you tell her so?”

Rather, the winter had sharpened her beauty until it invaded the beholder like a barbed arrow that could not be withdrawn.

She was offering her open palm to the crook-eared cat, but he stayed where he was, shivering with the desire to go to her.

“No, he does not want my thoughts,” she said softly. “He wants me, as much as the Red Bull did, and with no more understanding. But he frightens me even more than the Red Bull, because he has a kind heart. No, I will never speak a promising word to him.”

Slowly the deep, secret sea returned to the Lady Amalthea’s eyes, filling them until they were as old and dark and unknowable and indescribable as the sea. Molly watched it happen, and was afraid, but she gripped the bowed shoulders even more tightly, as though her hands could draw despair like a lightning rod.

“My lady,” said the oldest of the men, “command your servants. We are used men, spent men—but if you would see miracles, you have only to request the impossible of us. We will become young again, if you wish it so.”

“When you are old, anything that does not disturb you is a comfort.

“If she had touched me,” he said very softly, “I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me, but I could not let her. No cat will. We let human beings caress us because it is pleasant enough and calms them—but not her. The price is more than a cat can pay.”

A cat can appreciate valiant absurdity.”

“They are within sight of your lady’s eyes, but almost out of reach of her memory. They are coming closer, and they are going away.”

“A dream that returns so often is like to be a messenger, come to warn you of the future or to remind you of things untimely forgotten.

her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining.

It was a small smile, like the new moon, a slender bend of brightness on the edge of the unseen,

It is said that love makes men swift and women slow.

“I suppose I was young when I first saw them,” King Haggard said. “Now I must be old—at least I have picked many more things up than I had then, and put them all down again. But I always knew that nothing was worth the investment of my heart, because nothing lasts, and I was right, and so I was always old. Yet each time I see my unicorns, it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself, and anything can happen in a world that holds such beauty.”

Then he turned to look at her again, and his eyes were as gentle and greedy as Prince Lír’s eyes became when he looked at her.

There are spells to make everything speak. The master wizards were great listeners, and they devised ways to charm all things of the world, living and dead, into talking to them. That is most of it, being a wizard—seeing and listening.”

She knew the silence of mockery too well to mistake it for death.

You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.”

“When I was alive, I believed—as you do—that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said ‘one o’clock’ as though I could see it, and ‘Monday’ as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year’s Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.”

“I love whom I love,” Prince Lír repeated firmly. “You have no power over anything that matters.”

The Lady Amalthea fell as irrevocably as a flower breaks.

I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.

Then Schmendrick stepped into the open and said a few words. They were short words, undistinguished either by melody or harshness, and Schmendrick himself could not hear them for the Red Bull’s dreadful bawling. But he knew what they meant, and he knew exactly how to say them, and he knew that he could say them again when he wanted to, in the same way or in a different way. Now he spoke them gently and with joy, and as he did so he felt his immortality fall from him like armor, or like a shroud.

For Molly Grue, the world hung motionless in that glass moment.

The unicorn lowered her head one last time and hurled herself at the Red Bull. If he had been either true flesh or a windy ghost, the blow would have burst him like rotten fruit. But he turned away unnoticing, and walked slowly into the sea. The unicorns in the water floundered wildly to let him by, stamping and slashing the surf into a roiling mist which their horns turned rainbow; but on the beach, and atop the cliff, and up and down through all of Haggard’s kingdom, the land sighed when his weight had passed from it.

The wave fell like a cloudburst of chains. Then the unicorns came out of the sea.

She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand.

Prince Lír put his hands out to her like words. She said, “I remember you. I remember.”

“This is not the end, either for you or for her. You are the king of a wasted land where there has never been any king but fear. Your true task has just begun, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail. As for her, she is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her.”

“Unicorns have passed here,” she whispered to the magician. “Is that the cause, or is it Haggard’s fall and the Red Bull’s going? What is it, what is happening?” “Everything,” he answered her, “everything, all at once. It is not one springtime, but fifty; and not one or two great terrors flown away, but a thousand small shadows lifted from the land. Wait and see.”

the unicorns, that you saw the Red Bull hunting, and pretended not to see.