The Last Unicorn

“I will tell you a story,” Schmendrick said. “As a child I was apprenticed to the mightiest magician of all, the great Nikos, whom I have spoken of before. But even Nikos, who could turn cats into cattle, snowflakes into snowdrops, and unicorns into men, could not change me into so much as a carnival cardsharp. At last he said to me, ‘My son, your ineptitude is so vast, your incompetence so profound, that I am certain you are inhabited by greater power than I have ever known. Unfortunately, it seems to be working backward at the moment, and even I can find no way to set it right. It must be that you are meant to find your own way to reach your power in time; but frankly, you should live so long as that will take you. Therefore I grant it that you shall not age from this day forth, but will travel the world round and round, eternally inefficient, until at last you come to yourself and know what you are. Don’t thank me. I tremble at your doom.’”

This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?

“You have magic,” she said. She heard her own voice, as deep and clear as a sibyl’s. “Maybe you can’t find it, but it’s there. You called up Robin Hood, and there is no Robin Hood, but he came, and he was real. And that is magic. You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it.”

The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark. Molly said, “If Lír is the hero, what is she?”
“That’s different. Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I—we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.”

Drinn said, “’Yet none but one of Hagsgate town may bring the castle swirling down.’ How can we delight in our good fortune when we know that it must end, and that one of us will end it? Every day makes us richer, and brings us one day nearer to our doom. Magician, for fifty years we have lived leanly, avoided attachments, untied all habits, readying ourselves for the sea. We have taken not a moment’s joy in our wealth—or in anything else—for joy is just one more thing to lose. Pity Hagsgate, strangers, for in all the wretched world there can be no town more unhappy.”

“I told you that I was older than I look,” he said. “I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful—more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?”

A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.”

The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names.

But she was a unicorn still, with a unicorn’s way of growing more beautiful in evil times and places.

Under the dirt and indifference, she appeared only thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old—no older than Schmendrick, surely, despite the magician’s birthdayless face.