 A Horned Beast © 2006 by Beth Stevens They arrived in the grey morning, after a night of storm and shipwreck. Eight of them climbed the twisting, crumbled path, leaving the slip of beach where their boat had come to grief and where the ninth lay draped across the rocks, limp and already half-forgotten, the sea's refuse. He was her husband's chaplain, but Kera could not remember his name or if she had liked him. Toiling up the cliff face, her gown and cloak sodden from the night's adventure, she knew only that it no longer rained and that her feet hurt. She tripped on the dragging hem of her sapphire cloak, and Rolf's hand steadied her. He backed her like a protective bulwark, bearded and massive, shutting away what lay behind. At the cliff top, they discovered a ragged plain overgrown with coarse, high grass. It stretched to the horizon in three directions, unbroken but for the single lankmark they had followed from the beach below -- a tower, white against the lowering sky, with one window at its apex like an eye looking seaward. Kera's legs folded under her. She looked up, seeing only the tower's tip from her nest of meadow grass. She never wanted to move again. She indulged a delicious fantasy of sliding down into the tall grass, letting it close above her like a gentle grave. She would be invisible here, lost forever beneath the stumbling feet of men, coming and going and calling her name. At one with uncomplicated earth, she would watch the terns wheeling and flashing above. She would feel tiny roots lodge hungrily in her body, and the play of wind and rain upon it, until like the peeling foundation stones of the tower, she took to herself that mute, ancient quality from which great edifices are built. "Come, we'd better get on." Rolf's square hand reached down to her in the grass, and after the slightest hesitation she grasped it to rise, brushing at her skirts. Ruefully she surveyed the ruin of her brideclothes. 'Twould be long before she owned another dress so fine. Rolf, though wealthier than her father, seemed equally determined to sink his substance in livestock and the land. They were much alike, the parent who had ruled her life until recently and the husband who ruled it now. Straightening her shoulders in a typical, unconscious gesture, she allowed herself to be propelled through the field of waving grass. The tower rose above them, closer and more weathered in detail. The consummation of her marriage, she now thought, would occur tonight within its walls. An open boat crowded with Rolf's men had offered no opportunity, so it was tacitly postponed to the ancestral bed at Carroden, the bed where Rolf had been born. But the wreck changed everything. If only it could grant her a livelier spirit, she thought. Experience was held to be the great teacher, but she had known women of middle age, even old, toothless women, who yet deferred to their menfolk at every turn. They seemed to her to live silent, wasted lives. Yet how did one break away from the obedience of a lifetime? Whence came the courage, the self-assurance, the glibness of tongue? She could not envision herself opposing Rolf's views on any matter. He who knew so much of which she was ignorant, who had traveled and fought and loved as a man may, while she stitched fine embroidery and attended to birthing women. What wisdom, she asked herself, grew out of that? An eye for detail; a narrow perfectionism; courage, perhaps, in the face of pointless quiet death. She grimaced. Her arm, held in his powerful grip, would show a ring of bruises by tonight. She absolved her husband of intent. He had no more real conception of her fragility than she had of her own power. A courtyard grown wild with vines and fruit trees surrounded the tower's broad base. Within they found all in disrepair, as if it had stood untenanted for some time. Yet it would serve their needs. Several of the men turned back to bring up their remaining blankets and dried food. They were long about it, and Kera thought the chaplain must have had Christian burial after all, though nothing was said in her presence. By the time they returned, she had swept and cleared a small stone building in the tower's lea and was struggling with a smoking fire built of wet wood. She left the fire to go gather figs and plums in the fresh-scented orchard, allowing Seth, the head boatman, to deal with it. He would get on faster without his master's feckless young wife fidgeting about. Rolf had gone up the winding inner staircase to find them a private sleeping place. Tomorrow, while master and men worked to repair the boat, she would explore by herself. Weariness had dropped from her narrow shoulders like a rain-weighted cloak. The tower, lonely and menacing before, seemed almost mellow in the evening light. She gazed out over the plain of waving grass, featureless and strange: seen through a chink in the orchard wall it was like a picture come to life, framed in white stone. Even the massed clouds looked remote and picturesque, no longer threatening, as though an enchantment clung about the place which the rain could not penetrate. In this one jagged piece of the world, she beheld it all, for in every direction, limitless and serene, it appeared the same. The ocean, grey and distant in the fading light, was but an extension of the grey sky. Nor could she tell where the cliff edge ran, when she looked through the open courtyard gates that stared directly out to sea. Even the sea's sound, which had underscored the hours of her marriage like a low fugue, came muffled and indistinct to her ears. The book in her hands had a peculiar lock, a double ring, its clasp delicately wrought in the form of a tiny unicorn. It was made of silver, and probably of magic, to have lain untarnished so many years in a tower by the sea. It reminded her of the wax seals used by noblemen -- like them, she thought, surely it would break with the slightest pressure of her fingers. She did not attempt to open it. The power of such a lock (like a lord's seal) lay more in symbol than in fact, and was perhaps the stronger for it. Her fingers traced a worn pattern on the leather binding. It, too, had escaped the ravages of sea air, but had been much handled. The carving was no longer discernible to the eye, although her sensitive fingers picked out something -- a letter -- a face? She could not be sure. Catching at the cobwebs in her way, Kera moved to a slitted aperture. From here she could watch the men descending to the beach, Rolf at their head. They were rested and cheerful this morning, predicting an early sailing. Her ears caught a snatch of song before the breeze took it. This chamber opened from the stairtop just above the room where she and Rolf had slept, with the one real window. Here were only bowmen's slits, regularly spaced around the tower's top. Its stone walls were too thick, and the slits too narrow, to allow more than a severely restricted view. Standing in the room's center, she twirled on her toes, faster and faster, until the slit-pictures merged into a blurred whole. Then dizziness overtook her, and she stumbled and sat down all in a heap, with a shaky laugh. She still clutched the book, thinking that it would be a bridegift from this isolated spur of land, this ancient watchtower, to take with her into her husband's country. That afternoon a fitful sun emerged from hiding; insects began a sleepy hum among the orchard fruits; and in the still meadow she could see spots of vivid color where hummingbirds hovered. From this height white boulders showed here and there in what had seemed, yesterday, under clouds and at ground level, an unbroken expanse of grass. A line of lusher growth, wandering raggedly inland, told of a brook. With sudden headlong joy in this time alone, she determined to follow it. Coming out by the orchard gate she was momentarily at a loss -- again all landmarks had sunk into the plain of waving grass. She turned, absurdly relieved to find the tower undiminished above her. It would be impossible to lose herself, yet she felt oddly exposed. Making her way through the thick sea of green and brown, stooping occasionally to touch a flower or examine some bright-colored insect, she followed the water's sound until, with a quick invisible crumbling, her shoes were in the brook. Pulling back her hair, which had worked loose and hung in dark strands before her eyes, she scrambled a safe distance from the muddy slough, checking the tower still clearly visible at her back, and then turned to follow where it wound. Sometimes she caught a bright glance of light off the little stream, but for the most part it ran beneath the meadow's surface like a secret way, leading her onward in blind expectation. She stopped to rest where a white rock jutted into the stream. Here she could sit directly above the water, remove shoes and stockings and blissfully dangle her feet. The boulder's spine made a less comfortable seat than she might have wished. A taint of guilt hung over her naked legs, glistening in the sun. They reminded her of last night, of the masculine act of ownership -- but her mind shied away, uncertain and disturbed. Making for a line of odd-shaped boulders some distance ahead, she resolved to turn back after exploring them. The men must not return to find her gone. Glancing at the sky, she hurried her footsteps, and came around the closest rock to nearly stumble over an animal lying in its shade. Kera teetered for a moment, then came down flat on her heels with one hand pressed against the rock. Before her a considerable area had been trampled and cut by restless hooves. A clear path of matted grass led to the brook. Directly in her way lay a small, white-coated horse, rump toward her and legs curled against its body. Was it sleeping, or dead? That her careless approach had failed to waken it seemed significant, and a sudden sickness gripped her. Then the beast lifted its head, sending a cloud of flies buzzing, and turned a graceful neck to stare at her. It was not a horse, but a unicorn. She who had lived her life among horses could not be mistaken in those delicate bones, the manelike tuft of beard, the otherworldly face. She thought that its eyes were the same color as her own; no one had told her a unicorn's gaze would be deep and fathomless and blue. Foolish! She shook herself slightly, and the beast seemed to follow her tiny movement. Something registered in her mind that had been obscured by the wave of impressions flowing over her, and she was taken with a terrible pity. The unicorn's forehead, where the horn should be, was a putrid mass of mud and hair and clotted blood. Part of its forelock had evidently lain across one ear and dried into the wound while it slept, so that the ear was bent at an awkward angle by the thick strand of hair. Mud stained its legs and belly, and along one shoulder slanted a narrow scab, half peeled to show the puckered line of new skin beneath. Kera sank down in the grass, her skirts billowing. "You're no bigger than a deer," she marveled; then flushed with embarrassment at having spoken aloud. Could it comprehend human speech? It regarded her stoically, the pointed chin sunk on one foreleg as if that small effort to lift its head had exhausted all its strength. It seemed beaten, resigned, watching her like a detached soul to whom her feelings and actions could not matter. She had believed a unicorn to be like a ghost, something that would appear to one in a mist, distantly, and fade away. Not this tangible piece of nature with delicate, whorled hooves, one chipped from walking on the stones. Not this spent, bloodied little creature lying in the mire, bearing its pain dumbly as animals do. "May I...?" She reached out to touch its flank, halted a hairsbreadth away, and withdrew. The unicorn did not stir. She felt reluctant to involve herself in this monstrous distortion of reality, as strange and unsettling as if the cock on her father's weathervane had flown down among the yard fowl and begun to crow. If I touch it, a voice inside her whispered, it will be true, and I shall have to tell Rolf. Somehow the unicorn's existence, here in this field under a hot blue sky, must be her own fault. Had she stayed in the tower today as her husband instructed, embroidering his new dress tunic -- had she behaved like the grown woman last night had made her, and not a truant child -- she wouldn't be caught now between her husband's needs and the unicorn's. Stumbling through heavy growth, she glanced back at the tower in fear of what might follow. She bore precious packets of herbs, pots of salve, given by the wise woman whom she had assisted at many a deathbed and birthing. These potions were to make a healer of her, to help win over her husband's people. Kera knew the servants and boatmen disdained their master's young wife. She cut a poor figure. She had not the habit of command, nor was she easy and warm with charm to break down their prejudices. I am not of their kind, she thought dully, slogging along the path she herself had worn. Behind her the setting sun flushed the tower's walls with soft radiance. She couldn't treat the wound and return before dark. She was hot, disheveled, angry. What had begun this morning as a pleasant escape, for a little while, from the strict confines of womanhood into a child's carefree world, had become this weary, deadly serious business. He would not understand -- this she knew. He would be baffled and angry, and what she did for the unicorn would mark her for all time in his eyes. No heir to Carroden, no years of quiet obedience, could wipe away this rebellion. A part of her found these ideas absurd, and wondered how she could be so certain of Rolf's antipathy to the unicorn. Another part knew. The little creature lay as she had left it, curled in upon itself. Its soulful eyes were closed. For a moment she entertained a suspicion, compounded of fear and guilty hope, that it might have died. She would have trudged back here for nothing; explanations would still need to be made. Yet the thing that frightened her, the indefinable threat of a living unicorn, would be gone. Pushing aside the thought, she knelt by its head and touched its bent ear. Flies rose from the sticky wound, and the blue eyes opened. Setting her mouth, Kera tore a clean cloth into quarters and went to the stream to wet them. The unicorn was patient, far easier to tend than a horse. Kera trusted the merit of her medicines; if they had power upon magic flesh as upon mortal, then she could feel confident. She doubted that the horn would ever grow back, though when one dealt with unicorns, who could tell? Perhaps the beast didn't need her help at all, but represented a test set for her. She finished quickly, rubbing her fingers in the grass to clean them. Gathering the medicines in a bundle, she rose to wash her hands more thoroughly in the stream. The unicorn struggled to its feet and trailed after her, dipping its muzzle in a pool to blow and drink. It favored the right hind hoof, but not too badly. Its lameness, she thought, should pass off in a day or two. She eased a hand down the leg and the hoof lifted obediently. While accepting her ministrations, the beast continued to drink. As she had seen earlier, the hoof showed a ragged edge and the frog was slightly inflamed, but no pebble or thorn now remained. Shrugging, she lowered it to rest in the mud. It would heal. Kera splashed water in her face, and stretched her arms and back. The distance back to the tower seemed like an impossible journey. The sun cast gold reflections into the sea, while far off gulls cried, greeting the night. She noticed what had not caught her attention before, when the unicorn occupied her whole mind -- a line of dark forest, barely breaking the horizon on the landward side. It made the featureless plain of grass feel less hostile confined within that distant border. The unicorn moved slowly toward its trampled bed, cropping and chewing as it went, and finally lay down with a heavy sigh. Kera's very bones echoed that sound. She turned toward a vista of faded gold, with the white tower a shimmering beacon at its heart, and began her long walk back. Dark silhouettes of men moved around a leaping fire. As she approached the stone hut, Rolf rose from the shadows to meet her. Some trick of the dancing light made him seem huge one moment, diminished the next. He didn't take her by the arms and shake her, demanding to know where she had been, what she meant by her behavior, as her father would have done. He stopped several feet away, eyeing her uncertainly. "Are you safe, Kera?" His voice was low. His hand moved to his belt, fingered the ornate buckle, touched the hilt of his sword, reached toward her and withdrew. "Yes." She moved past him to the fire. "Tired and hungry. I walked farther than I meant." Seth, his eyes lowered, offered her hard bread and ale. Her husband stood back from the light, watching her. He didn't speak again until they were ascending the stairs to sleep. "Boat's about ready," he said then, gripping her arm automatically to steady her on the slanted steps. "We can go on tomorrow." She climbed beside him, reviewing in her mind this episode of their journey, one night and a day, which loomed so large in her narrow experience. She said aloud, "I found a book of the old magic. A book with a unicorn clasp. I mean to carry it away with me as a gift for my daughters. I think perhaps it is not mine to read, but only to bequeathe." The words sounded strange to her even as she spoke them. With unaccustomed calm, she awaited his anger. He had paused one step below. In the dark she couldn't make out his face, now level with hers, only the outline of a burly body. His free hand, twice the size of her own, tugged and twisted at his wiry dark beard. At last he nodded once, sharply, as if to an equal, and climbed past her, leading the way to their bedchamber. That night his passion flowed fiercer than it had done, as if something drove him. Yet she no longer feared it, and her own desire, unexpected, rose in her and grew to meet it. She heard him whispering to some personal god or demon that lived in her hair, and a strange temptation to laugh bubbled up inside her even as her hunger struggled to match his, to surpass it. She did not know what had become of the girl-child Kera -- drowned in this sea of lust, perhaps, or floating above it somewhere in a private dream. For she saw herself now as two creatures, and the beast trotting whitely in her soul was strong and magical. |