The Urban Fantasy Anthology (19 page)

“It’s hard to blame the poor thing,” Farrell mused. “For a unicorn, men would be a bunch of big, stupid guys with swords and whatnot. Women are betrayal, every time, simple as that. It wasn’t Gloria Steinem who wove that tapestry.” He squeezed toes gently with one hand, a bruised heel with the other. “What did they do when they actually saw it?”

The unicorn glanced at them over the edge of the cat box, where its visit had been cause for an orgy of squeaking, purring and teething. Julie said, “What do you think? It was bad. It got pretty damn awful. Some of them fell down on their knees and started laughing and crying and praying their heads off. There were a couple who just sort of crooned and moaned to it—and I told you about the poor Frozen-Yogurt Man—and then there was one guy who tried to grab it away and run off with it. But it wasn’t having that, and it jabbed him really hard. Nobody noticed, thank God.” She laughed wearily, presenting her other foot for treatment. “The rest—oh, I’d say they should be halfway to Portland by now. Screaming all the way.”

Farrell grunted thoughtfully, but asked no more questions until Julie was in bed and he was sitting across the room playing her favorite Campion lute song. She was nearly asleep when his voice bumbled slowly against her half-dream like a fly at a window. “It can’t know anyone who’s not in the tapestry. There’s the answer. There it is.”

“There it is,” she echoed him, barely hearing her own words. Farrell put down the lute and came to her, sitting on the bed to grip her shoulder.

“Jewel, listen, wake up and listen to me! It’s trying to find someone who was in that tapestry with it—we even know what he looks like, more or less. An old guy, ragged and dirty, big beard, sandals—some kind of monk, most likely. Though what a unicorn would be doing anywhere near your average monk is more than I can figure. Are you awake, Jewel?”

“Yes,” she mumbled. “No. Wasn’t anybody else. Sleep.”

Somewhere very far away Farrell said, “We didn’t see anybody else.” Julie felt the bed sway as he stood up. “Tomorrow night,” he said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday, they stay open later on Saturdays. You sleep, I’ll call you.” She drifted off in confidence that he would lock the door carefully behind him, even without a key.

A temporary word-processing job, in company with a deadline for a set of views of diseased kidneys, filled up most of the next day for her. She was still weary, vaguely depressed, and grateful when she returned home to find the unicorn thoroughly occupied in playing on the studio floor with three of NMC’s kittens. The game appeared to involve a good deal of stiff-legged pouncing, an equal amount of spinning and side-slipping on the part of the unicorn, all leading to a grand climax in which the kittens tumbled furiously over one another while the unicorn looked on, forgotten until the next round. They never came close to laying a paw on their swift littermate, and the unicorn in turn treated them with effortless care. Julie watched for a long time, until the kittens abruptly fell asleep.

“I guess that’s what being immortal is like,” she said aloud. The unicorn looked back at her, its eyes gone almost black. Julie said, “One minute they’re romping around with you—the next, they’re sleeping. Right in the middle of the game. We’re all kittens to you.”

The unicorn did a strange thing then. It came to her and indicated with an imperious motion of its head that it wanted to be picked up. Julie bent down to lift it, and it stepped off her joined palms into her lap, where—after pawing gently for a moment, like a dog settling in for the night—it folded its long legs and put its head down. Julie’s heart hiccuped absurdly in her breast.

“I’m not a virgin,” she said. “But you know that.” The unicorn closed its eyes.

Neither of them had moved when Farrell arrived, looking distinctly irritated and harassed. “I left Gracie to finish up,” he said. “Gracie. If I still have my job tomorrow, it’ll be more of a miracle than any mythical beast. Let’s go.”

In the van, with the unicorn once again curled deep in Julie’s pocket, Farrell said, “What we have to do is, we have to take a look at the tapestry again. A good long look this time.”

“It’s not going back there. I told you that.” She closed her hand lightly around the unicorn, barely touching it, more for her own heartening than its reassurance. “Joe, if that’s what you’re planning—”

Farrell grinned at her through the timeless fast-food twilight of Madame Schumann-Heink. “No wonder you’re in such good shape, all that jumping to conclusions. Listen, there has to be some other figure in that smudgy thing, someone we didn’t see before. Our little friend has a friend.”

Julie considered briefly, then shook her head. “No. No way. There was the knight, the squire, and that woman. That’s all, I’m sure of it.”

“Um,” Farrell said. “Now, me, I’m never entirely sure of anything. You’ve probably noticed, over the years. Come on, Madame, you can do it.” He dropped the van into first gear and gunned it savagely up a steep, narrow street. “We didn’t see the fourth figure because we weren’t looking for it. But it’s there, it has to be. This isn’t Comparative Mythology, Jewel, this is me.”

Madame Schumann-Heink actually gained the top of the hill without stalling, and Farrell rewarded such valor by letting the old van free-wheel down the other side. Julie said slowly, “And if it is there? What happens then?”

“No idea. The usual. Play it by ear and trust we’ll know the right thing to do. You will, anyway. You always know the right thing to do, Tanikawa.”

The casual words startled her so deeply that she actually covered her mouth for a moment: a classic Japanese mannerism she had left behind in her Seattle childhood.

“You never told me that before. Twenty years, and you never said anything like that to me.” Farrell was crooning placatingly to Madame Schumann-Heink’s brake shoes, and did not answer. Julie said, “Even if I did always know, which I don’t, I don’t always do it. Not even usually. Hardly ever, the way I feel right now.”

Farrell let the van coast to a stop under a traffic light before he turned to her. His voice was low enough that she had to bend close to hear him. “All I know,” he said, “there are two of us girls in this heap, and one of us had a unicorn sleeping in her lap a little while back. You work it out.” He cozened Madame Schumann-Heink back into gear, and they lurched on toward the Bigby Museum.

A different guard this time: trimmer, younger, far less inclined to speculative conversation, and even less likely to overlook dubious goings-on around the exhibits. Fortunately, there was also a university-sponsored lecture going on: it appeared to be the official word on the Brueghels, and had drawn a decent house for a Saturday night. Under his breath, Farrell said, “We split up. You go that way, I’ll ease around by the Spanish stuff. Take your time.”

Julie took him at his word, moving slowly through the crowd and pausing occasionally for brief murmured conversations with academic acquaintances. Once she plainly took exception to the speaker’s comments regarding Brueghel’s artistic debt to his father-in-law, and Farrell, watching from across the room, fully expected her to interrupt the lecture with a discourse of her own. But she resisted temptation; they met, as planned, by the three tapestries, out of the guard’s line of sight, and with only a single bored-looking browser anywhere near them. Julie held Farrell’s hand tightly as they turned to study the middle tapestry.

Nothing had changed. The knight and squire still prodded a void toward their pale lady, who went on leaning forward to drape her wreath around captive space. Julie imagined a bleak recognition in their eyes of knotted thread that had not been there before, but she felt foolish about that and said nothing to Farrell. Silently the two of them divided the tapestry into fields of survey, as they had done with the gallery itself when the unicorn first escaped. Julie took the foreground, scanning the ornamental garden framing the three human figures for one more face, likely dirty and bearded, perhaps by now so faded as to merge completely with the faded leaves and shadows. She was on her third futile sweep over the scene when she heard Farrell’s soft hiss beside her.

“Yes!” he whispered. “Got you, you godly little recluse, you. I knew you had to be in there!” He grabbed Julie’s hand and drew it straight up to the vegetable-looking forest surrounding the distant castle. “Right there, peeping coyly out like Julia’s feet, you can’t miss him.”

But she could, and she did, for a maddening while; until Farrell made her focus on a tiny shape, a gray-white bulge at the base of one of the trees. Nose hard against the glass, she began at last to see it clearly: all robe and beard, mostly, but stitched with enough maniacal medieval detail to suggest a bald head, intense black eyes and a wondering expression. Farrell said proudly, “Your basic resident hermit. Absolutely required, no self-respecting feudal estate complete without one. There’s our boy.”

It seemed to Julie that the lady and the two men were straining their embroidered necks to turn toward the castle and the solitary form they had forgotten for five centuries. “Him?” she said. “He’s the one?”

“Hold our friend up to see him. Watch what happens.”

For a while, afterward, she tried to forget how grudgingly she had reached into her coat pocket and slowly brought her cupped hand up again, into the light. Farrell shifted position, moving close on her right to block any possible glimpse of the unicorn. It posed on Julie’s palm, head high, three legs splayed slightly for balance, and one forefoot proudly curled,
(exactly like every unicorn I ever drew when I was young.)
She looked around quickly—half afraid of being observed, half wishing it—and raised her hand to bring the unicorn level with the dim little figure of the hermit.

Three things happened then. The unicorn uttered a harsh, achingly plain cry of recognition and longing, momentarily silencing the Brueghel lecturer around the corner. At the same time, a different sound, low and disquieting, like a sleeper’s teeth grinding together, seemed to come either from the frame enclosing the tapestry or the glass over it. The third occurrence was that something she could not see, nor ever after describe to Farrell, gripped Julie’s right wrist so strongly that she cried out herself and almost dropped the unicorn to the gallery floor. She braced it with her free hand as it scrambled for purchase, the carpet-tack horn glowing like abalone shell.

“What is it, what’s the matter?” Farrell demanded. He made clumsily to hold her, but she shook him away. Whatever had her wrist tightened its clamp, feeling nothing at all like a human hand, but rather as though the air itself were turning to stone—as though one part of her were being buried while the rest stood helplessly by. Her fingers could yet move, enough to hold the unicorn safe; but there was no resisting the force that was pushing her arm back down toward the tapestry foreground, back to the knight and the squire, the mincing damsel and the strangling garden. They want it. It is theirs. Give it to them. They want it.

“Fat fucking chance, buster,” she said loudly. Her right hand was almost numb, but she felt the unicorn rearing in her palm, felt its rage shock through her stone arm, and watched from very far away as the bright horn touched the tapestry frame.

Almost silently, the glass shattered. There was only one small hole at first, popping into view just above the squire’s lumpy face; then the cracks went spidering across the entire surface, making a tiny scratching sound, like mice in the walls. One by one, quite deliberately, the pieces of glass began to fall out of the frame, to splinter again on the hardwood floor.

With the first fragment, Julie’s arm was her own once more, freezing cold and barely controllable, but free. She lurched forward, off-balance, and might easily have shoved the unicorn back into the garden after all. But Farrell caught her, steadying her hand as she raised it to the shelter of the forest and the face under the trees.

The unicorn turned its head. Julie caught the brilliant purple glance out of the air and tucked it away in herself, to keep for later. She could hear voices approaching now, and quick, officious footsteps that didn’t sound like those of an art historian. As briskly as she might have shooed one of NMC’s kittens from underfoot, she said, in the language that sounded like Japanese, “Go on, then, go. Go home.”

She never actually saw the unicorn flow from her hand into the tapestry. Whenever she tried to make herself recall the moment, memory dutifully producing a rainbow flash or a melting movie-dissolve passage between worlds, irritable honesty told memory to put a sock in it. There was never anything more than herself standing in a lot of broken glass for the second time in two days, with a faint chill in her right arm, hearing Farrell’s eloquently indignant voice denying to guards, docents and lecturers alike that either of them had laid a hand on this third-rate Belgian throw rug. He was still expounding a theory involving cool recycled air on the outside of the glass and warm condensation within as they were escorted all the way to the parking lot. When Julie praised his passionate inventiveness, he only growled, “Maybe that’s the way it really was. How do I know?”

But she knew without asking that he had seen what she had seen: the pale shadow peering back at them from its sanctuary in the wood, and the opaline glimmer of a horn under the hermit’s hand. Knight, lady and squire—one another’s prisoners now, eternally—remained exactly where they were.

That night neither Farrell nor Julie slept at all. They lay silently close, peacefully wide-awake, companionably solitary, listening to her beloved Black-Forest-tourist-trash cuckoo clock strike the hours. In the morning Farrell said it was because NMC had carried on so, roaming the apartment endlessly in search of her lost nursling. But Julie answered, “We didn’t need to sleep. We needed to be quiet and tell ourselves what happened to us. To hear the story.”

Farrell was staring blankly into the open refrigerator, as he had been for some time. “I’m still not sure what happened. I get right up to the place where you lifted it up so it could see its little hermit buddy, and then your arm…I can’t ever figure that part. What the hell was it that had hold of you?”