The Secret Country (38 page)

Ted and Patrick scrambled to their feet and turned around, and the scornful remark Ted had planned for the hunters and their clumsiness died in his throat. The unicorn had stopped just before the brambles, and stood waiting for the hunters under the pomegranate tree.

Ted saw the animal framed in trees: plum, holly, hazelnut, hawthorn. When he had hit himself in the head with the pomegranate tree and proposed his plan to Patrick, he had seen nothing on the ground but sticks and stones, nondescript greenery and the offensive bramble. Now the ground blazed with the crowded blooms of daisy, marigold, primrose, yellow flag: incredible gold, but it was not so bright as that horn; there was flaming and jubilant white, but a mere field and moonlight color beside the coat of the unicorn.

Ted had never paid any attention to the names of trees and flowers. He knew these because their names ran along under his mind as the names of the fencing moves had in his dream.

A spear whished between Ted and Patrick and hit the ground with two thuds, to be swallowed up in flowers. A second one hit the pomegranate tree, shook there for a moment, and flopped meekly down. But a third grazed the neck of the unicorn. Hunters and hounds pushed past Ted and Patrick, who stood staring, to close on the unicorn, which shook itself like a man interrupted in his daydreams, whipped itself around, and kicked vigorously. Two hunters fell back onto several hounds. The dogs yelped and everyone who had not fallen laughed. The unicorn cleared them all again and went, with a shower of water that caught almost everyone, into the middle of the stream.

Ted and Patrick turned around again and craned their necks to see over the crowd. Behind the unicorn on the banks of the stream and far up the thinly wooded slopes grew feverfew, love-in-a-mist, and forget-me-nots; down into the water crowded cattails and plantain and water soldiers. Water lilies covered the stream from bank to bank.

“What happened to the trees?” demanded Patrick in a whisper. “It was dark over there before, they were so thick.”

Two hounds bolted into the midst of the water lilies, snapping at the flanks of the unicorn. It put its head down, graciously, and touched the throat of one and the side of the other with its horn. The touch did not even ruffle their fur, but both of them yelped, much more loudly than they had when the hunters fell on them. They backed out of the stream in a flurry of water and fell over onto their sides, neatly and identically.

The unicorn looked at the hunters, daring them to move. One of them stepped to the water’s edge and raised his spear; the unicorn moved its head the barest distance, as if it had heard something far off, and knocked the spear aside with its horn. The hunter leaped backward, shaking his hand and gasping. Two more hunters moved forward. The unicorn slid out of the stream like a wisp of morning fog and was gone up the opposite slope. Two spears crashed into the underbrush far behind it, and several people groaned.

“This is worse than usual,” said one of the counselors; Ted thought a minute and remembered that this was Conrad.

“Remember that this is the unicorn’s sport as well as ours,” said Matthew, whom Ted had not noticed before.

“Even so, it could choose less brambly ways.”

The master huntsman looked around at the company and raised his eyebrows. “Beaten so soon?” he said.

“Early, but not easily,” said Randolph.

Ted wondered what had been happening to them while he and the others looked at the flowers, and while he and Patrick debated over the pomegranate.

“Well, if you choose to begin your feasting at noon and not at sunset, what is that to me?” The huntsman looked them over again. “Ellen,” he said.

Ted followed his gaze and saw Ellen standing between Ruth and Agatha. She was bedraggled, and had lost her boots.

“Sir?” she said.

“Make thy garden.”

Ellen came forward slowly, her great cloud of hair standing out in all directions and her eyes like a cat’s. She went by Ted and Patrick as if they were two more trees and strode barelegged into the brambles.

Ted, watching her progress, saw that as flowers had grown wherever the unicorn stood, all around Ellen the brambles were covered with roses. It was not that they sprang suddenly into being. They were not gone one minute and there the next. It was like looking at a tree and thinking that it was a bear, and then suddenly realizing that it was only a stump after all. Roots and lumps and oddities you had ignored when you thought it a bear, because they did not fit the bear shape, suddenly assumed their proper importance, so that you wondered now how you could have ever thought the stump was a bear.

In the same way, as the change in the mind from stump to bear takes no time, so, suddenly but not unnaturally or magically, for it was his eyes changing, not the forest, the tangled sprawl of brambles became a hedge of roses.

There was an arched opening in the hedge, and through it Ted saw a garden and a fountain.

“Well,” said Patrick in Ted’s ear, “she always was good with the garden.”

A rabbit hopped over Ted’s foot, and another, and two more. He watched them lollop through the arch in the hedge, and then he saw two pheasants balancing on the rim of the fountain. A wanking and a flapping from behind made him wince, and two mallards landed noisily in the stream. Two white ducks came more sedately after them.

“Criminy,” said Ted as Patrick’s fingers dug into his arm. He wondered if Patrick realized he was doing this: It was a most uncharacteristic gesture. Finding it more comforting than otherwise, he did nothing to disturb it.

Two lions came drifting through masses of violets and cornflowers and the three shadings of the periwinkle. Behind them, treading delicately in the path they had made, was a stag. Caught in its antlers were trailing ribbons of green leaves. A hissing made Ted look from the stag back to the stream, where two ruffled swans and a serene heron now paddled and sailed. Ted looked at Patrick.

“There must be a forest fire somewhere,” said Patrick, but he did not sound as if he believed it.

The heron came out of the water right next to Ted and began to preen itself. Ted jumped, and hit his elbow: He was standing under a peach tree. He had thought it just another brambly bush, and a danger only to the shins.

“Come along in,” said Matthew behind him. Ted was holding up the procession.

Ted obeyed him. The fountain had several intriguing but not pleasant stone heads, of no clear family. They spat torrents of water back into the stream, which had suddenly developed a branch of itself in the garden. The smooth lawn around it was aswarm with animals. Ted saw foxes, and squirrels, and one lynx, staring down one of the hounds from a nest of pimpernel and ground cherries.

The crowd of people was quite silent, and the animals were so still that Ted wondered if they were illusory. Then the breeze shifted, and he caught a whiff of lion. He was not sure whether he recognized it from trips to the zoo, or whether the back of his mind was telling him things again.

Ellen stood under an apple tree just beyond the fountain. She looked bemused. The unicorn turned its head one way and then the other, surveying its serene animals and its sweaty pursuers. Then it knelt and dipped its horn into the stream. The bowl of the fountain was hidden in roses. In the silence Ted could hear water trickling. Ellen sat down in the grass and held out her hand to the unicorn.

“Please come,” she said. She did not speak very loudly, but in that quiet she did not have to.

The unicorn stood up and looked at her. It reminded Ted of a cat deciding whether to obey you. Then it lowered its head and went to her. It slid to its knees with a movement very like a cat’s, certainly more like a cat’s than a horse’s, and laid its great head on her knee. Ellen was as pale as the unicorn. She put a hand on its ear and burst into tears.

A cluster of hounds bowled over the rabbits and birds and swarmed upon the unicorn. The birds squawked, the hounds barked, and Ellen shouted, “Get away!” Two hunters picked her up from under the unicorn’s head and put her down in a cloud of milk thistle.

The master huntsman put his spear to the breast of the unicorn. The unicorn flung itself into the air with a terrible cry, its horn flashing, but the hounds fastened themselves on its flanks and bore it down. The unicorn seemed to hover a moment, its shadow a dark stain on the green lawn. Then it dropped to earth with a force that shook the forest from end to end.

Birds flew shrieking from the trees. The animals vanished into the brush and flowers. The bowl of the fountain burst and soaked everyone’s feet. People put their heads in one another’s shoulders, cringing. The sunlight darkened and went gray.

In the silence that followed, they looked at the unicorn. It lay in the dimness, shining with its own light. The hounds, the only moving things in all the landscape, stood four feet away from it and extended their long heads, sniffing cautiously. The master huntsman, his bright colors quenched, stood like a figure in a tapestry, staring not at the unicorn but at his fallen spear.

After a long time one of the hounds whined, and the huntsman moved. He looked over the fallen unicorn at his group of men, and gestured with his hand. Two hunters carrying long horns pushed through the group of rigid hounds to stand before the unicorn. They blew their horns, and in a blare and flash of gold the sun came back. The unicorn stood up like a flower opening and bowed its head to the hunters. People shook themselves and began to murmur, and all the animals crept out of the bushes, twining and rubbing on people’s ankles as they went, and fawned upon the unicorn.

Patrick let go of Ted’s arm. “I’d hate to see a real hunt,” he said.

One of the hunters crossed to where Ellen still sat in the milk thistles, and bowed to her. She stood up with a rebellious air and looked at him. He held out to her a gold collar. Ellen took it and looked at the unicorn.

Ted watched her across the broken fountain, which still gurgled cheerfully to wet all their feet. He had been observing Ellen’s expressions ever since she had been old enough to play with him, and he recognized this one. He knew, with a dreadful certainty which threatened to turn to laughter, that Ellen was going to throw the collar right into the stream. Beside him Patrick drew in his breath.

Ellen, with a wild grin, lifted her arm, and froze as the unicorn came toward her and bowed its head for the collar.

“That’s right,” said Patrick, under his breath. “The unicorn wouldn’t like it.”

Ellen put the collar around the unicorn’s neck, fumbled, and fastened it with a distinct and final-sounding click.

“Not for them,” she said, in a voice that could probably be heard back at the castle, “but for you.”

The unicorn said something in her ear, but Ted could not hear it. They turned together, Ellen’s hand hooked in the collar, and sloshed peacefully past the fountain and across the garden, followed by the hunting party and an exaltation of animals.

In the middle of the garden was a peculiar tree with a fence around it. It was another pomegranate. Ellen led the unicorn inside the fence, came back outside, and shut the gate on it. The unicorn lay down neatly, its forelegs stretched out before it like a cat’s and its plumy tail draped over the fence. It looked smug.

Ted and Patrick, by dint of pushing and elbowing, managed to find themselves places at the front of the throng. There were a fox and a lion in front of them, but the fox was not in the way and Ted did not feel like disputing with the lion. Patrick did not seem to like being so close to it.

“You can’t trust them even when you think they’re tame,” he informed Ted.

The lion turned around and yawned at him.

Ted’s stomach quivered, but he also wanted to laugh. “You should be more polite, then,” he said.

The master huntsman made his way through all the live things and stood near the fence. “Let the First Riddler come forth,” he said.

“I hope,” said Patrick, “that somebody told the King about Shan’s Ring.”

King William came gravely out of the crowd with a cardinal on each shoulder, and stood outside the fence before the unicorn. He did not bow, probably because of the cardinals, but he inclined his head.

 

 

 

“What?” said Patrick.

The King had taken his counselors by surprise too. Ted, by craning his neck, could see that Andrew was pleased, Matthew astonished, and Randolph furious. He could not see Fence.

The unicorn’s head came up a little, and it fixed the King with its great eye as if it hoped to make him back down. The King stood patiently. The cardinals, against his white hair, looked as if they had been cut out of cardboard.

At last the unicorn spoke. Its voice was clear and piercing, like the sound of a flute. It said,

 

 

Ted looked as if by compulsion at Randolph, who smote his forehead in exasperation. A lynx leaped at the swinging tassel of his sleeve. It missed and landed upon two squirrels. They scolded. It spat at them. The unicorn looked at them and they quieted down like guilty children. Randolph was bright red, and Ted felt a treacherous laugh welling up in him. He began to wonder if he could get through this ceremony without disgracing himself. The crowd was remarkably quiet. Many people were grinning, but no one laughed or spoke.

The King retired back into the crowd, grinning himself, and the master huntsman said, “Let the Second Riddler come forth.”

“All the riddles on the same day?” whispered Patrick.

“Put it on your list,” said Ted.

Conrad came forward, followed by a number of ducks that muttered behind him like a gossipy chorus.