Ariel (3 page)

* * *

Remembering Jacksonville as we walked down the Interstate, I reached out and stroked Ariel's shimmering mane. She shivered. "Do you want to call it a day and set up camp, horny-horse? Leg still hurting?"

She gave a gentle laugh like wind chimes tinkling. "No, I'm all right. We'll camp at sundown, same as always."

I agreed and we continued walking. I thought about her slowly healing leg as we plodded on. It had been over a year, and it still bothered her. I'd asked her about it, when she'd learned enough words to answer, but she refused to talk about it.

"Sunset, Pete," she announced after a while, knowing how much I liked the sunset effect.

I looked up at the horizon. Sunsets were bright and dazzlingly beautiful since the vanished air pollution had taken with it all the dim reds and burnt cinnamons. I looked away, and melted at the sight of Ariel. The fading light sent rainbow ripples spreading everywhere on her body, sweeping prism-broken light from neck to flank. Her spiral horn caught the sunlight and her tail looked like my memory of a fiber-optics lamp. I watched until the sun disappeared and all that remained was the faint glow of her horn.

We set up camp beside the Interstate. I unslung my sleeping bag and unrolled it on the grass. Ariel struck sparks on the road and I got a fire going. I opened a can and was soon eating hot beef stew. Ariel didn't eat anything. All I'd ever seen her eat was peppermint candy, and that only because she liked it. I don't think she needed to eat. I'd asked her, once, what kept her alive.

"I'm not sure," she'd answered. "The light from the stars. The music of crickets. Clean living."

"I'm serious. A creature can't live without some kind of sustenance."

"Those are the old rules, the ones that don't work the way they used to. Magic is what works now, and I'm a magical creature. You might as well ask why guns or electricity don't work anymore. You've told me that the world doesn't work like it did before. It's magic, and that's all there is to it."

The world doesn't work like it did before
. Wasn't that the truth.

I lay on my sleeping bag, staring at the night sky and remembering.
The light from the stars
. When had there been so many stars in the sky? Before the Change the city glow pushed them back and the cities were cut off from the rest of the universe under their own domes of light. Now the Milky Way spread out above me like a band of chalk dust.

The ghostly form of Ariel stirred beside me. "Pete?"

"Yeah."

"Is there any special reason we're going into Atlanta?"

"We've gone over this before. I want to go to a library. We haven't been to one since Jacksonville. What's the matter? You don't want to go into Atlanta?"

"Cities make me nervous. But whither thou goest  .  .  .  ."

Silence for a while. Then:

"Hey, Pete?" Softly. "Mmm."

"Sing me that song. You know, The Song."

"Sure."

Music was something I missed with a quiet pain, and I tried to make up for it by singing. The lyrics of the songs I liked had stayed with me, and I would sing them as Ariel and I walked the roads from town to town. But there was one song—I'd forgotten where I'd first heard it, or even what it was called. I just called it The Song, and I sang it whenever I was afraid of what might be waiting at the end of the road. I sang it to Ariel:

 
"So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
 
"For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself must rest.
 
"Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon."
 

A cry came from far overhead.

"Roc," I said. "Usually don't see them around here."

But Ariel was asleep.

I rolled onto my side and soon I was asleep, too.

* * *

We reached downtown Atlanta about five o'clock the next afternoon. The gold dome of the state capitol building gleamed from between the tall skyscrapers to my right. To the left was the squat, brooding shape of the Fulton County Stadium, where the Falcons and the Braves used to play. It reminded me of pictures of the Coliseum in Rome—a deserted, dead arena. I wondered who—or what—might be there now.

"Sure feels empty," observed Ariel, glancing around.

"Yeah." I smiled. "The whole world feels empty."

"We're being watched."

I looked at her. "From where?"

"Overpass. About a mile away, straight ahead. Three people. One of them is looking at us through—what do you call them? Bulky black things, make things far away look closer."

"Binoculars."

"Right. One of them's using binoculars. There's something perched on his shoulder—some kind of bird."

"A Familiar, maybe?"

"How would I know? Looks like a regular bird from here."

"Well, we're headed that way anyhow. We'll worry about it when we get there."

In ten minutes I could see them fairly well. One wore a shirt and blue jeans, one was decked out in a fancy assortment of knives, and the third wore a leather jacket on which the bird—a falcon, I now saw—was perched.

As we neared, the leatherjacketed one raised something to his lips and blew. I didn't hear anything, but Ariel's ears twitched and the bird flew straight up and began circling.

"Buddy," I said.

"They keep their bases covered." This from a creature who hadn't the vaguest notion fswhat baseball was.

"Yeah. Let me do the talking, okay? They may not have seen a unicorn before; we don't want them knowing any more than they have to."

We stopped, looking up at the three men on the overpass.

"What's your business?" asked Leatherjacket in a mild Southern accent.

We seek the Holy Grail
—it was tempting. "We're trying to get to the public library," I said.

"Public library. What's there?"

"Books."

He flared. "Smart guy."

"No, really. I need to look at a road atlas and some maps."

They stared at me. "Whyn't you go to a gas station?"

"I want old maps. I'd like to make it to the library before dark, if you don't mind."

They were silent.

"Well?" I demanded.

"That yours?" He indicated Ariel.

"We're Familiars, yes. Anything wrong with that?"

"Don't be so defensive, son. We just like to keep track of what animals come and go in our fair city, both four- and two-legged."

"Besides," broke in the one wearing knives, "unicorns are pretty rare. They're supposed to have a gift for healing. They say if you grind the horn into powder and mix it with—"

"That's enough," said Leatherjacket.

The man in the T-shirt and jeans tapped him on the shoulder and whispered into his ear. Leatherjacket's eyes widened and he seemed to want to laugh. "That right?" he asked.

T-shirt nodded.

Leatherjacket looked at me. "Does your Familiar let you touch it?"

I flushed. Damn! "Yes," I admitted.

"You've never had a woman?"

Now it was my turn to stare.

"You'd best be careful around here," said T-shirt. "There's some awful mean women around, hide in dark places and grab you just like that." He snapped his fingers. The other two snickered.

"Well, I can't see any harm in letting them go to the library," said Leatherjacket. "Long as you don't wander around the streets. It'll be dark soon. Ain't safe."

"I'll remember." I took out the city map I had obtained from an abandoned gas station and unrolled it.

"Don't bother with that," he said. "Just take this exit. Turn left at the second red light and go on down the street until you see it on the right side. About a mile."

"Thanks."

We started to walk on, but he yelled for us to stop before I had taken two steps. I halted and looked up at him.

"Don't move until I call Asmodeus," he said, pointing toward the hunting falcon circling overhead. "She'll rip your eyes out otherwise."

"Don't bother." I looked at Ariel, who nodded. She snorted, tossed her head, and looked up.

The falcon settled gently onto her back.

Leatherjacket's jaw dropped. The other two looked at him wide-eyed, almost as if they were afraid for him.

"No one—I was told nobody could order that bird but me!"

I just smiled.

Leatherjacket's eyes formed two slits. He lifted the whistle to his mouth and blew. The bird didn't move from Ariel's back.

"Let her go, Ariel," I said.

Ariel tossed her head and snorted. The bird flew off and glided to Leatherjacket's shoulder. He was still glaring at me, and the other two looked on with their mouths pressed into angry lines.

"Let's go, Ariel."

We went.

* * *

"That was a damned stupid thing to do," observed Ariel once we were out of earshot.

"Sue me."

"I'm serious. Let me do the talking, you said. We don't want them knowing anything more than they have to, you said. So what do we do? We show off! Now there'll be talk, and if word gets around that we bypassed an obedience spell—even if it was just a bird—people will get curious."

I said nothing.

"It was a childish thing to do."

I glared at her but remained silent.

"Well? Why'd you want to show off like that?"

"I was embarrassed," I muttered.

"You were what?"

"I was embarrassed, dammit!"

"Why? What was there to be embarrassed about?"

"I'm a virgin."

"So am I."

"That's different. You're not a human. You aren't a man. See, human males have this  .  .  . this  .  .  .  . Oh, forget it."

"Pete, there is great virtue in being pure. If you weren't a virgin, you couldn't have me."

"Look, just drop it, okay?"

"All right." She fell silent, and neither of us said another word until we found the library.

* * *

The library was of ultramodern design—few windows and now-useless electric glass doors. I looked around for something I could break in with.

"Don't bother," said Ariel sullenly, and she ran for the glass front door, head down and horn aimed straight ahead.

"No!"

But I was too late. She had already bolted up the steps, sparks streaming from her hooves, and leapt into the air. Her horn hit the glass and shattered it; her momentum carried her through.

"You idiot!" I ran up the steps to find her standing quietly amid the broken glass. "What are you trying to do, turn yourself into hamburger?"

"I got us in, didn't I?"

"So what? You could have waited another two minutes while I found something to bust it open with, rather than jumping through like some comic-book hero. You could have cut yourself badly. I don't have any way to treat you if you ever really hurt yourself, you know that? What if you snapped your horn?"

"It can't snap. Not while I'm alive. Besides, unicorns avert harm. We rarely get injured, and when we do, we heal fast."

"Oh? And how, may I ask, did you manage to get your leg broken nearly in two, despite all this ability to avert personal injury?"

Her nostrils flared. "I don't want to talk about it." Her coal eyes blazed.

"Why not?"

"Why don't you want to talk about your virginity?"

"Oh, go to hell."

She snorted and walked farther into the library.

Three

Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

—
Shakespeare
, King Henry IV

Nobody ever thinks to use a library. Most people feel they're too busy trying to stay alive to take time to fool around with books. They're right, to some extent, but libraries have given me books on camping, food storage and preservation; backpacking, arms and armor, self-defense, magic, mythology, and mythological animals—to name but a few. Libraries have probably saved my life a dozen times. Even before I met Ariel I went to them to read books on how to survive, and after she came along I also read books on magic and mythology. I read anything that might help me understand what the world had become.

I remember the librarian at my junior high school who always reprimanded me for not being quiet. She and all the librarians in the world now had their revenge: the place was like a tomb. I smiled: a tomb for tomes.

Ariel and I checked upstairs and down to make sure the building was empty. The clocks had all stopped at four-thirty.

Before dark I looked through the card catalog and gathered what books were new to me, piling them atop a desk in a corner of the first floor. I would read them over the next few days. Most of the books I wanted weren't there.

When darkness came I unloaded gear and set up "camp" on the second floor, beside the staircase. I couldn't light a fire for food, so I opened a packet of dried beef. I drank water from my
bota
—a kind of kidney-shaped wine flask with a nipple end. I lit two small candles, retrieved from the nether regions of my backpack.

I leaned the crossbow against the banister alter cocking it and readying a bolt. It was a Barnett Commando, self-cocking, one hundred seventy-five pound pull, scope, three hundred yard range. I won't say how I got it; it cost me dearly.

The nunchakus—two tapered, foot-long pieces of wood joined at the smaller end by a short length of rope allowing it to be used as a flail—were on my left side; the Aero-mag blowgun was on my right, a dart half-loaded.

Ariel watched me quietly, tail swishing rhythmically. She knew I was still mad at her, and damned if I didn't have good cause to be. Trying to act like some superhero just because she's a unicorn. That horn of hers must have been embedded deep into her skull, for all she—

"Talk to me," she said.

"What about?"

"Oh, come on. You're acting like a little kid."

"I am not. And besides, how would you know what a little kid acts like?"

She cocked her head curiously. "Now, isn't that odd? How would I know that?"

Despite my sullenness I was interested. "Listening to me, maybe." I took another drink of water. "Can you remember what it was like where you came from, before you came here?"

"I—I don't remember any place but this one."

"Well, what's your earliest memory? When did you first become aware of yourself?" I'd asked her this before, but it was before she'd learned to speak well and she hadn't understood.

"That's odd—I've never really thought about it before." She sounded distressed. "The earliest thing I can remember is  .  .  . waking up one day. That's all, really. I felt warmth on one side and it was the sun, and I stood up—I remember my legs were wobbly—and I looked around. I was beside a railroad track, and even though I didn't know what it was, somehow—I don't know—it didn't seem
right
, it looked like it didn't belong. Same for the roads and road signs, and later for houses and buildings and cars stopped on the streets. They didn't fit." She looked at me with a strange, half-fearful look in her eyes. "You know, nothing I saw—except for the magical animals I encountered and the things that were, I don't know, natural, like forests and lakes and the sky—nothing else seemed right. Until I met you."

"Me?" I hadn't expected that.

"Yes. You were  .  .  .  ." She stopped for half a minute. "It's hard to put the feelings into words. I guess you were pure, a virgin, I mean, and you fit in with the kind of creature that I am."

"How do you know so much about being a unicorn?"

"How do you know so much about being a human? You learn about yourself as you grow. I certainly had enough other things to compare myself to."

"You were a baby, that day you woke up by the railroad track?"

"Of course. I was still pretty much a baby when I met you, wasn't I?"

"Yeah. Those were the good old days, before you knew more than about two words." She'd also grown a lot. My eyes now came to just above the level of her shoulder.

She snorted. "If I hadn't come along you'd still be talking to yourself."

I looked to my left. "You hear that?" I asked, jerking a thumb at Ariel.

"Cute." She walked to my open pack and nosed it. "Hey—no peppermint!"

"You're slipping, you horse with a horn. Why don't you just zap some into existence the way you used to, instead of making me scrounge deep, dark, and dangerous candy stores to satisfy your sweet tooth. Teeth."

"What little power I have was ill spent when I was younger. Spells shouldn't be wasted."

"Easy for you to say. You aren't dying for a cigarette."

"Suffer."

I started to make a retort but froze when a thump and a scuffling came from downstairs. I blew out the candles and whispered to Ariel. "Stay up here. He'll see your glow if you go down." Sure, she was quiet as snowfall, but a huge, ghostly white unicorn sneaking around inside a dark library is not inconspicuous. I wiped my fingers on my pants and picked up the crossbow. Listening carefully for a moment revealed nothing more. I was about to tell Ariel to come around behind me when a deep voice reverberated below.

"Hello?"

I cradled the Barnett and crept down the stairs, hugging the banister.

"Hello, is anybody here?"

I saw him now, a faint, fairly large figure in front of the card files. His back was to me. I brought the Barnett up, resting it on the banister. "Don't move," I said, knowing full well that when he heard my voice he would move anyway. Sure enough, he turned toward me.

"Don't move," I repeated, "or I'll kill you."

That stopped him. I'd figured that, too.

"I don't want any trouble," he said. "I'm looking for a kid. Came in today with a unicorn."

"Why?"

He stepped toward me. "Hey, is that a rifle you're holding? Don't you know that guns won't—"

"It's not a rifle."

"Oh."

"You were saying."

"Huh? Oh, yeah. This guy—I guess you're him; nobody else would be in here—you and your buddy—"

"She's not a buddy. She's my Familiar."

"Sorry. You and your Familiar managed to override my buddy's obedience spell. I want to find out how you did it. I never heard of it happening before; the guy who set the spell for me said it couldn't be broken."

"You were on the overpass? With the leather jacket?"

"Yeah."

Snap decision: "Hungry?"

"Since you mention it, yes."

"I've got some food upstairs. Come on over here, but keep your hands where I can see them and move slow."

He did as I said and stopped in front of me. "Oh," he said, seeing the Barnett, "a crossbow. I shoulda known. Stupid of me."

I didn't bother to contradict him.

"Name's Russ Chaffney."

I lowered the crossbow. "Pete Garey." He held out his hand. We shook.

"Food's upstairs," I said. "You'll have to go first. Ariel won't like it if I go ahead of you; she'll think you might have a weapon at my back."

He agreed and I called to Ariel that we had company and were coming up. At the top of the stairs he hesitated, seeing Ariel watching him warily. She saw me behind him with the Barnett and relaxed.

"Ariel, this is Russ Chaffney," I said. "Chaffney, my Familiar, Ariel."

He looked at me as if I were crazy, then looked at Ariel. "Um, how do you do?" he managed.

"Do what?"

He gaped. He stood there, speechless. Looking at him, I told Ariel, "It's just a figure of speech. It means, how are you?"

"Oh. I'm wonderful, except I want some peppermint candy. You wouldn't happen to have any, would you?"

"I, uh, no, I don't have any candy. Sorry."

"Don't worry about it," I said. "She eats too much of it anyway. She's getting fat. I'm going to ditch her in someone's stable if she doesn't leave the stuff alone."

She lifted her nose. "Unicorns don't get fat."

"Don't believe her," I stage-whispered. "She used to be skinny. Now look at her."

"I was not skinny!"

I shrugged. "Have it your way." To Chaffney: "She's always been fat."

"Do you two always talk like this? I mean, I didn't know unicorns could talk." He was having trouble coping.

Ariel pounced on the chance to use the old joke. "We can't talk. The hairless monkey over there is a ventriloquist."

"Who you calling a hairless monkey, conehead?"

Chaffney folded his arms and looked at her critically, trying to appear unfazed. "I also didn't know they could do magic," he said.

"Magic?" she asked innocently.

"Yeah. At the overpass this afternoon. Asmodeus—my falcon."

"Oh. I thought I recognized you from somewhere. Humans all look alike to me."

I made a rude noise.

"Come on," I said. "I'm still hungry."