The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

“We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”

possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery.

The sight of men filled her with an old, slow, strange mixture of tenderness and terror. She never let one see her if she could help it, but she liked to watch them ride by and hear them talking.

“Why did they go away, do you think? If there ever were such things.” “Who knows? Times change. Would you call this age a good one for unicorns?” “No, but I wonder if any man before us ever thought his time a good time for unicorns.

She had never minded being alone, never seeing another unicorn, because she had always known that there were others like her in the world, and a unicorn needs no more than that for company.

Men knew that the only way to hunt me was to make the chase so wondrous that I would come near to see it. And even so I was never once captured.”

“Mare?” she demanded. “I, a horse? Is that what you take me for? Is that what you see?”

I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else—what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?”

Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.”

You’d do much better to stay with me and be false, for in this whole world only the Red Bull will know you when he sees you.”

But she let the leap drift out of her, untaken, for she knew, although she could not see them, that the bars were still there. She was too old not to know.

So they circled one another like a double star, and under the shrunken sky there was nothing real but the two of them.

“Not alone!” the witch howled triumphantly at both of them. “You never could have freed yourselves alone! I held you!” Then the harpy reached her, and she broke like a dead stick and fell. The harpy crouched on her body, hiding it from sight, and the bronze wings turned red.

You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.”

When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be.”

How terrible it would be if all my people had been turned human by well-meaning wizards—exiled, trapped in burning houses. I would sooner find that the Red Bull had killed them all.”

His tricks were forgotten before he was out of sight, but his white mare troubled the nights of many a villager, and there were women who woke weeping from dreams of her.

They see what you have forgotten how to see.”

In fact, Schmendrick had never heard of Captain Cully before that very evening, but he had a good grounding in Anglo-Saxon folklore and knew the type.

I’ve come to think the Bull’s nought but the pet name you give your cowardice.

“I said that there were several songs about me. There are thirty-one, to be exact, though none are in the Child collection just at present—”

“One always hopes, of course, even now—to be collected, to be verified, annotated, to have variant versions, even to have one’s authenticity doubted . . .

I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree’s love.”

Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?”

But she was a unicorn still, with a unicorn’s way of growing more beautiful in evil times and places.

They were all purring together, and the sound was heavy with knowledge.

Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I—we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.”

But dragons could only kill her—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 would never catch the unicorn, not until Now caught up with New, Bygone with Begin.

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

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?”

My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known.

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

I warn you again: be slow to call that third male or female. Wait a little, and see what you see.”

Now I am two—myself, and this other that you call ‘my lady.’ For she is here as truly as I am now, though once she was only a veil over me. She walks in the castle, she sleeps, she dresses herself, she takes her meals, and she thinks her own thoughts. If she has no power to heal, or to quiet, still she has another magic. Men speak to her, saying ‘Lady Amalthea,’ and she answers them, or she does not answer.

In this form or my own, I must face him again, even if all my people are dead and there is nothing to be saved. I must go to him, before I forget myself forever, but I do not know the way, and I am lonely.”

As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying—generally you killed something—but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining.

Since then, there is no movement of yours that has not betrayed you. A pace, a glance, a turn of the head, the flash of your throat as you breathe, even your way of standing perfectly still—they were all my spies.

The Bull missed you because you were shaped like a woman, but I always knew.

“Do you still deny yourself?” he whispered. “Do you dare deny yourself? Nay, that’s as false and cowardly as though you were truly human. I’ll hurl you down to your folk with my own hands if you deny yourself.”

“I hope that’s spray. If you’ve become human enough to cry, then no magic in the world—oh, it must be spray. Come with me. It had better be spray.”

“I did not know what she was until now,” he said. “But I knew the first time I saw her that she was something more than I could see. Unicorn, mermaid, lamia, sorceress, Gorgon—no name you give her would surprise me, or frighten me. I love whom I love.”

Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”

It was not at all like the challenging bell with which she had first met the Red Bull; it was an ugly, squawking wail of sorrow and loss and rage, such as no immortal creature ever gave.

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

It suddenly seemed to her that the unicorn’s sorrow was not for Lír but for the lost girl who could not be brought back; for the Lady Amalthea, who might have lived happily ever after with the prince. The unicorn bowed her head, and her horn glanced across Lír’s chin as clumsily as a first kiss.

“The Red Bull never fights,” Schmendrick said. “He conquers, but he never fights.”

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 townsfolk sighed in resignation, but a middle-aged woman stepped forward and said with some spirit, “It all seems a bit unfair, my lord, begging your pardon. What could we have done to save the unicorns? We were afraid of the Red Bull. What could we have done?” “One word might have been enough,” King Lír replied. “You’ll never know now.”