Chapter 7
Chapter
Guillaume de La Trémoille had lain awake all night, heedless of the fleas, his heart thumping, picturing the noblest beast in Christendom being brought to bay, imagining himself staring into its eye while his spear thrust home and spilled the heart’s-blood onto the hungry faces of his waiting dogs.
But a unicorn was not a stag. It must be tempted, brought near, and then undone by the maiden. That was the part he did not quite understand, the part he did not know how to fit within the great ritual of the hunt.
When he went to the kennel at dawn, he found the huntsman already there, talking caressingly to his lymers in Breton, pushing back their great ears, while the hounds licked his hands or raised their big, broad-browed heads in the morning air.
This huntsman had been voluble in his tale the night before—how he’d been out with his hound leashed, seeking game for his master, when he came into the thicket and saw a blaze of sun on white.
How he’d thought it a leftover patch of snow, then a white stag, already a magnificent prize, and then he saw the horn.
He described its length, the spiraling ivory chased with pink like my lady’s pearls, the fall of its mane, the build of its body, a little like a horse, a little like a deer.
Fairer than any other beast, Monseigneur, the noblest game ever seen.
“And,” added the huntsman stoutly, as La Trémoille’s translator fought to keep up, “I do tell you that it lies up in the flowery meadows and not in thickets. Always near silvery pools that it cleans with its horn. My grandsire said so. He said that the unicorn will be the hardest to catch of any beast, for if not caught quick, it might retreat into the Lost Lands.”
“But,” said La Trémoille, “what are these Lost Lands?”
“No man knows. It is not like hunting the hart, I fear.”
That was certain. With the whole hunt assembled, the company was rather small but very brilliant in silks colored like summer and autumn, stiffened with linen and buckram, and jewels sewn to hats and cuffs and collars, with the cloth of cloaks and the silver-threaded pennons snagging in shining whorls on the bushes and trees.
Every man had tried to outdo his fellow, if he had to go into debt to do it.
The eager dogs surged, too well-bred to bark, but their tongues lolled uncertainly.
They had been whining their eagerness all night, but the grand procession that marched out of Trécesson with no scent to follow perplexed them.
The scent-hounds strained at their leashes; the sight-hounds were chained in watchful pairs, haughty and beautiful with their flat heads and slender loins and woolly gray coats.
La Trémoille was pleased. He could picture the wandering unicorn, long ears pricked, slipping through the trees, coming nearer and nearer to see them, full of vain curiosity.
The sun was just clearing the horizon somewhere beyond the haze, turning the mist to silver smoke, clearing their sightlines, when the riders came to the pool the huntsman had described: small and perfect and spring-fed, dark in that cloudy morning light.
La Trémoille’s horse thrust its muzzle in and drank.
The forest whispered all around them, muffling the harness-bells with moss and dew, catching faint sunlight in interlaced branches.
When the duchess arrived, she was gowned in white, riding a white palfrey, with only a silk net pinned to her half-loosened hair.
La Trémoille’s first thought was that her clothes would get dirty.
But he had to admit that she looked precisely how a virgin on a unicorn-hunt ought to.
Small and soft and pure, a little undone.
Surely she would bait the beast. It was like staking out a nursing goat for a pack of wolves.
The duchess favored them all with her sweet smile. “I hope you have not been waiting long.”
“No, Highness,” said La Trémoille, eyes on her hair, dark as clouds over the moon-white dress. He had not thought her so pretty before. This would be a day of sport to remember.
The huntsman bowed to the duchess, full of the authority of his position and the day. “Highness, if you would go apart into the clearing?”
All the hunters tensed. The dogs felt the change in atmosphere and whined.
The horses’ ears pricked up; a few tails lashed their shining flanks.
Anne’s hulking oaf of a brother was eyeing the French officers very coldly.
Perhaps they were too intent on the duchess’s loosened hair. Well, let them stare.
Then the duchess turned her pretty mare and rode alone into the clearing.
Anne thought she had never seen a fairer glade than that one, which she rode into alone.
Brocéliande was a dark forest, as a rule, full of shadows like cobwebs and the whisper of unseen water, starred with black springs and strange stones set by long-dead hands.
But here the primroses were just opening, like stars in the green grass, like the unsullied memory of a glade from long ago.
She drew rein, and Jonquil halted, ears swiveling from Anne to the dogs in the thicket, silent except for their panting mouths.
She disliked her half-bound hair, her impractical dress.
But she had not wanted anyone to think she was giving less than her utmost. No rumor must go forth that she had not really tried to bait a unicorn.
Henri and the well-paid Breton huntsmen had worked out, privily, what was to follow: the stag started at a distance, the winded horn, the dogs startled into flight, the mistaken chase, and La Trémoille baffled and annoyed at the end of a fruitless day, but none the wiser about Anne’s true purposes.
The Breton huntsmen thought all this a mere jest to annoy the French and had entered into the scheme with enthusiasm.
Now Anne waited. A hush settled into that clearing.
She couldn’t even hear the panting dogs anymore, or the swish of the horses’ tails.
Just the droning of bees, and the whisper of water, somewhere out of sight.
Jonquil did not put her head down to try to crop the grass, but she dozed, her weight on three legs, while the mist collected on the leather of her saddle and sparkled on her bit.
Suddenly, distantly, Anne heard horns blowing the avaunt—the cry for a general chase—and with them a great baying of hounds. But the clamor was far away, distant noise in the gray morning.
Those are not ours, she thought in astonishment. There is another hunt.
The Breton hounds had not set up their own barking, though they must have heard the distant dogs. There was no sound at all from her own party hidden in the trees. She couldn’t even see them moving.
A creature came bolting between a gap in the trees, sides heaving. The ragged quarry of that distant hunt.
Jonquil shied.
Anne thought her heart would stop.
The beast’s neck seemed too slender to support the weight of the horn, as long as a broadsword and glowing like fine-carved alabaster.
The eyes were dark as winter water, the coat raw white silk, stretched tautly over her panting ribs.
She was like the first snow of a bright winter, unsullied and shining.
The unicorn saw Anne and raised her head, nostrils flared red like a horse’s.
Anne realized that the glow in the horn was not some inner light.
It was a strong sunlight shining through the ivory.
But what sun? That day was all ragged clouds and mist, veiled still after that night’s storm.
She was reminded of anaon, of a room with impossible moonlight.
Hoofbeats were rattling nearer; smears of color moved in the woods behind the unicorn. The strange horns sounded again. Anne could not make out any of the hunters’ faces. She caught a flash of light from the blade of a spear.
The unicorn took a single soundless step, and Anne saw the crushed primrose where her foot had been. The glow went from the horn, as though she’d stepped out of the brilliant sun.
The other hunt disappeared. For a breath, it was just they two, alone in that clearing, standing startled under the light of the same gray day. Anne knew in that moment that to kill the unicorn would be a monstrous and deadly sin, and that she had made a terrible mistake.
Then seven hells broke loose at her back. A horn winded; twenty voices shouted, urging the dogs forward. Distinct among them was the voice of La Trémoille, crying out in wordless savagery at the sight of the beast.
“Go!” cried Anne to the unicorn. “I’m sorry, forgive me—you have to go!”
The unicorn did not move.
The first of the hounds shot into the clearing, doing the work they were born for, which was to startle the beast into flight.
Still the unicorn stood, head raised, staring at Anne.
No, oh, God, no. Anne had never imagined coming across a unicorn; nor that the legends spoke truly, and the unicorn would stand beside her and let herself be slain.
She imagined La Trémoille’s face triumphant, her white gown streaked with the unicorn’s blood. The horn chopped off, the skin flopping loose on a houndsman’s saddlebow, all of it to be carried straight to the court of France.
The dogs shattered the peace of the glade with their barking, and behind them came the lords of France and Brittany, hefting their spears. The unicorn kicked the first dog away, but the others were swarming. Anne snarled at her in Breton, “You must run!”
And when the unicorn still did not, she wheeled Jonquil and set the mare galloping away into the trees.
The unicorn followed.