Some Fairy Tales

The Rose:

Consider, if you will, the physics of riding a dragon. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Like the greatest roller coaster ride any amusement park ever came up with. Swoop and glide and soar high over the earth, look down at your friends and revel in what you’re seeing and experiencing that they never will.

Yeah, but keep in mind there are no seat belts. And dragons, who do not generally act as taxi services, are probably not particularly well-aware of a human’s needs or abilities: how would they know, for instance, exactly how many g-forces a human body could withstand comfortably, or how tightly a human could cling to their scales, to allow for how much rolling and looping through the sky, very, very high above anything like solid ground and security?

So dragon riding is risky, and you’d better be a hero before you even attempt it. Even at that, even if you are, there’s no guarantee you’ll have fun.

By the time Faraway landed, Seth wanted to throw up, fall to the ground, clutch his head to keep it from spinning, scream at the dragon, and stay very, very still forever. Since it wasn’t possible to do all those things simultaneously, he leaned over and gurgled. A few seconds later, he also threw up, just a little, over the dragon’s shoulder. Unlike, say, barfing in the midst of a killer hangover, which can make you feel much better, this did not prove to be a cleansing experience.
It did, however, mark a turning point, because when he’d finished gagging, Seth finally noted the smell he’d been smelling. It had reached out to pummel his nostrils from the first moment they approached this place, from when the light grew brighter and the dragon began to come in for a landing. But he hadn’t taken note, in the way that people in a burning building can fail to notice how ugly the carpet and the wallpaper are.

Imagine a stench– no, you can’t. Think, then, of fermented garbage– but that will not communicate it. Go stick your nose in a compost heap and breathe deeply, have someone dump a new load of garbage over your head, and then add in the sickliest, sweetest scent you can find – some kind of overpowering air freshener, or flowery soap, or a gallon bottle of perfume. This will not come close to equaling what Seth smelled, but it does give you the components.

Imagine a world overcome by vegetation. Not just a vegetable world, without people or animals cluttering the place up. Imagine a land where the very ground has disappeared, where the earth is buried in generations of vines and leaves turned to mulch; where greenery grows on greenery till the mass of it is almost black, and can no longer be separated, by the normal eye, into new growth and old death; where the pale young shoots are intermingled and enrobed with their slimy, decomposing ancestors and where the smell of decay is so ripe, so overwhelming, that the only response– as Seth found– was to gag again, to cling even tighter to the dragon’s hide and hope, vaguely, that this, too, would pass and disappear, and that he’d someday, somehow, feel normal again and able to sit up.

“Where are we?” he croaked, which was about all the sound that the miasma of stench would allow. It was overwhelming, which, technically, means “so great as to render resistance or opposition useless”—a remarkably clear and colorful definition—and which can therefore be somewhat freeing. When all hope is gone, in other words, despair gives up and goes home. What power does it possess? There is no fear anymore, when doom is certain.

So Seth realized he could face this stench. It did not lessen, and he did not get used to it so that it ceased to smell bad to him. It smelled horrible. More than horrible. There were no words for how it smelled. But he coexisted with it. He forced himself up, away from the dragon’s hot skin, and looked around.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A rose,” came the answer.

And this is how Seth’s thoughts went then (and how yours would, too, if you were even capable of thinking in that situation): -A rose. A rose? A rose? One? Oh, come on...

“What?”

“It has taken over the planet.”

To which Seth had no response, because there were simply too many possible questions.
—Planet? he thought. —This is a different planet? Come to think of it, the horizon does seem awfully close, and too curved. But wait a minute—would there be roses on another planet? And how could Faraway fly there? And... what?

He wondered if the rose’s stench were interfering with his thinking.

“I don’t understand,” Seth said out loud.

“Listen,” Faraway suggested.

Our hero did. There was a crunching, rustling kind of noise. He strained, and thought he could hear things pushing through the vines, leaves being made to scrape past each other, thorns catching and tearing. It came from all around them, from underneath the green. He reached and gripped his sword hilt, looking for enemies circling, for a pack of predators. But there was no disturbance in the green, only a leaf that fluttered here and there. He tightened his grip on his sword anyway, and held it in front of him.

That is what heroes do, in any story, when things start to threaten.

“Do you know what they are?” he asked Faraway. The sounds didn’t seem to be coming closer, but they were getting louder. As if all the beasts were rousing themselves, building up to a killing frenzy, readying for the attack. He still could not see any sign of their passage.

“A rose,” the dragon repeated. Then: “There is only one,” it added, apparently feeling it had not been as communicative as possible.

And then it said the words Seth might have been expecting, if he’d watched more horror films and spent less time heroing. The dragon said, “I am caught.”

Of course the dragon was caught. If he were free to fly away, there’d be no tension, would there? Now, with the rustling, crunching threat rising up upon them, of course he found that he could not move. Seth leaned far over, still watching the greenery down below with suspicion, and tried to inspect the dragon’s legs. They were sunk in the plant life, which was not surprising, but just as he was trying to lean farther, to see how entangled they might be, he heard a weird, wet slap behind him, and looked back to see that a particularly fat and heavy stem had fallen over the dragon’s tail. It shifted, slightly, as he watched, and settled securely. Suckers reached out to anchor themselves to the scaly hide, and new tendrils reached up, finding the light and the air.

“Jesus,” Seth breathed. He sat forward again, scowling and ready to move. “You’ve got to move, throw it off,” he directed.

“I cannot,” came the answer, and the dragon shifted slightly to show how firmly caught he was.

“Damn. Okay, let me cut it off– we’ll have to do this quickly or they’ll just reattach.”

Seth started to turn so he could deal with Faraway’s tail, but the dragon stopped him.

“Wait–”

“What?”

“It is coming to us.”

Seth sat up higher, held his sword ready, looked around for movement again, but nothing had changed.

“What–”

“Wait.”

There was a flicker, down by the dragon’s front leg. Seth craned over and saw a tiny, pale green shoot reaching up. He watched it darken, actually saw its color shift and deepen as it thickened and lengthened, and more pale green budded from its end. A leaf unfurled, and then a thorn punched its way out.

“What the hell?”

In the 1950s, there were lots of terrible horror movies about killer plants. Did you ever wonder, when you ran across them at 3:00 in the morning when you were twelve and loved the thrill of cheesy terror, just how the damn things moved? Did you see shots of fat, hungry vines snaking across floors, or little branches curling around some buxom blonde’s helpless limbs, and think to yourself, ‘What? Plants don’t have the muscles for that!’ Or did you just watch, and shiver, and maybe shift a little farther away from your mother’s philodendron?

The makers of monster movies are rarely hamstrung by a sense of logic. This story isn’t, either, but the explanation here, for those who want one, is that this overgrown escapee from a garden party didn’t really move or catch things, it just took advantage of the sunlight and the extremely nutritious compost provided by its own earlier iterations. It grew really, really quickly, in other words. It sent shoots up all around Seth and Faraway, and many of those shoots found handy notches and rough patches on the dragon’s hide where they could anchor themselves. And so it raised itself up till it crept over the dragon’s back and shoulders and sent one narrow tendril around his neck just about at Seth’s eye level.

“That’s far enough!” the hero announced. He’d stood up, balancing on the dragon’s shoulders, and now held his sword pointed at the neck-encircling vine, which particularly annoyed him. Climbing up legs was one thing, but strangling the dragon was offensive.

The vines stopped growing. Seth was surprised, but watched the shoot that faced him suspiciously, waiting to see what it would do next.

And around him, the growth had not exactly stopped, either. The vines stopped getting longer, but they thickened, and sent out leaves and thorns. And in front of Seth’s face a bud appeared. It thickened and colored, too, darkening from light green to dark, and then to purple before it burst open in a firework of petals. And then it was red, red. Red as a pair of lips, red as a drop of blood. Red as a rose, in fact: the prize rose at an international competition for redness, the envy of all rose growers everywhere who spent their lives seeking its color and lusting after its ripe pinnacle of blooming.

It stopped blooming abruptly, having hit that point of perfection when to grow more risks cartoonishness, ludicrous overkill. So many roses don’t know when to stop, and a bloom that has overreached itself has the same appeal as a carnival in the daylight. All its tatty crassness is exposed. But this bloom pulled back, stopped its explosive unfolding, and hung there, swaying slightly, bobbing before Seth’s nose in a picture of perfect rose-ness. Seth waited. He had no idea what to do now.

The flower coughed.

“It is very chilly here,” she complained.

Seth stared, nonplused.

“Has my prince sent you?” she went on. “Have you come to protect me until he returns? You should really say something, and not just stare at me like that with your mouth open. I admit I am beautiful, and most men simply like to look at me, but it is very rude when you are being addressed.”

This was all simply far deeper into the realm of fairy tale and silliness than our hero had been prepared for. Dragons, fine. Flying off to unknown lands where the horizon seemed too close and nothing moved but ridiculously overfertilized vegetation, fine. But really– talking, scolding flowers? Had he been reduced to this on his weird quest? Was this what happened to heroes who weren’t self-directed enough? Should he be expecting twittering bluebirds any moment, or chipmunks who’d scurry up onto his shoulders and give him pointers on swordplay?

“Are you ignoring me?”

“No— no,” Seth stuttered. “I was just—wondering how you could speak.”

“Why shouldn’t I speak? If you will only listen, you will find I have many interesting things to say. First, though, answer my questions. Are you my protector? Has my prince sent you to serve me?”

“I—no, ma’am.” Seth looked suspiciously toward Faraway, whom he assumed was listening but who hadn’t bothered to snake his head around to watch the scene. Seth frowned. “I do not know your prince, and I am on a quest of my own. I am not a gardener.”

The bloom pulled itself up haughtily. “I do not need a gardener,” it declared. “I need a hero. A prince to protect me. Perhaps you are not up to the task. I suspect you aren’t.”

Seth sighed. Not only scolded, but now scorned by a flower.

“I’m not sure what protection you need,” he suggested carefully. He hadn’t forgotten that Faraway’s legs were caught, and he understood that antagonizing this escapee from a lunatic potting shed could be very dangerous. He wondered if she’d actually eaten this prince she referred to. “You seem to have conquered this place,” he told her. He started to edge away from the flower, thinking of the fat vine that had wrapped itself over Faraway’s tail behind him. If he could get one good swipe at it, he might be able to cut it off. Then, if the dragon could somehow free his legs, they could be up and away before this blossom-in-imagined-distress knew what hit her.

“I have subdued my world,” she allowed as he slowly shimmied backward. “But one never knows when new predators may strike. And the cold wind still blows at night. I am very vulnerable.” She coughed again, quite piteously.

“I don’t think so,” Seth told her. And he pulled his sword around and sliced off the fat vine from Faraway’s tail.

“Oh—you wound me! You are a horrible villain. You are no hero!” the flower cried. Her stem, where Seth had cut it, fell away to both sides, and all the other loops seemed to loosen. “I—” her voice suddenly cut off, and the blossom fell over and wilted.

“Did I just kill it?” Seth wondered, and then he looked down to see how things were going around Faraway’s legs and lower body. “Can you move yet?” he yelled.

“It seems I must,” the dragon rumbled, and began to shift and struggle. Seth held on mightily, looking down at a seething, raging green mass. No more indistinct slithers and whispers now– the rose had given up subtlety and was boiling out new growth all around them. Seth saw buds fattening on at least half a dozen vines. He swung his sword, cutting any creepers he saw. “Move!” he yelled to Faraway. “It’s going to trap us again.” And he stood up on the dragon’s back, threw an arm around its neck, and leaned out as far as he could to lop off every vine he could reach. Pruning time! he might have yelled, if he’d been a hero in a badly-written movie. Or: Fertilize this! But, as a real hero caught in a real crisis, he just saved his energy for fighting and clinging, praying that the dragon would break free and fly soon.

“I fear,” he heard the dragon breathe.

“What? What?”

There was no answer. But a second later, there was a hollow sort of breath by his ear: a rush inward, all the air around him being sucked into some sudden vacuum. And then a roar, distant but growing instantly, and then jet engines of heat and fire burning by, flames scorching all the space around them. Black vines curling, disintegrating, turning into ash. A scream—surely that was only his imagination, it couldn’t possibly have carried over the roar of the fire, even if it had been uttered—from flowers that burst, exploded into burning petals, then turned to gray, ashy waste even as his eyes were dazzled. As Faraway breathed fire down and out in all directions, the rose retreated, the vines all fell away and blackened. And then—

“Hold on,” our hero heard, and he felt a leap and a thrust, and not only was the flame gone, but so was the ground, as the dragon beat up hard into the air above the vines, and Seth scrambled to get situated safely on his back again.

He looked down over the scaly shoulder, still clutching his sword. Beyond the ring of still-smouldering wreckage, the massive greenery of the Rose was untouched. It seethed and surged, new vines even now unfurling and flapping toward them before falling back. They were helpless, Seth saw, with nothing to anchor to.

“Should we go back?” he suddenly wondered. Had they acted too hastily? Had the flower really meant to trap them? “Was that the right thing to do?”

“Oh, yes,” the dragon told him. “She meant to kill us. Me first, while she forced you to tend her. But you, too, I think. Because you would not serve forever. Like her prince who left her. She did not mean to lose a prince again.”

Seth looked back up at the back of the massive, scaly head stretched before him. “Why did you take me there?”

The dragon actually made a show of glancing back as it flew. Seth caught one instant’s glimpse of a yellow eye, unblinking and impenetrable. “It is a human story, which speaks of purpose and heroism. I thought to learn what it meant.”

“What are you talking about?” our hero shouted. But he wondered where he’d heard of something like the Rose, on a very small planet, before.

“We must try another.”

And with that, the blackness closed in, and our hero clutched the dragon’s neck tightly, and ground his knees down into its scaly hide, and clung desperately, hoping only that he wouldn’t fall off before this weird beast reached its next destination.

What else can you do, if you’re a hero who’s joined with a dragon, chasing a quest that makes little or no sense, pursuing it through worlds you don’t know?

The Virgin:

Having met, and jousted verbally with, and finally overcome a Rose, our Hero and his Dragon friend next sought a Virgin.

What could be more natural? Heroes and virgins are surely made for each other, and we’ve already established that virgins and dragons are no strangers. So as Seth found himself circling down over a lushly forested landscape on Faraway’s back (after another of the long interludes of darkness, rushing winds, unidentifiable sounds, lights, and dizziness that seemed to comprise traveling with dragons), he rejoiced.

“This looks better,” he called to the dragon. “Where are we this time?”

Faraway didn’t answer for so long that our hero thought he hadn’t heard him. He was just wondering if he should shout louder, or if that would be a waste of energy, when he heard some low words coming back to him through the brisk air.

“We seek a woman.”

And seeking a woman sounded all right, so Seth was more than happy about their new destination. He was especially happy about it in light of their last stop. He wasn’t sure, thinking through it, precisely what the incident with the Rose had been meant to accomplish, but he couldn’t help but feel he’d failed at it.

“That’s good,” he called back to Faraway. The dragon didn’t answer.

And so they circled, and swirled, and banked and slid, till the treetops were brushing Seth’s ankles. And then those highest branches were above his head, and the forest floor came closer, and then with a final whoof of cupped air under his wings, Faraway pulled himself tight to fit into a small space between the trees, and landed. Seth caught his breath at the sudden silence of no wind rushing past him and no great dragon wings beating, beating. He swung his leg over the dragon’s shoulder and slid to the ground.

A couple of birds began to chirp again as he walked forward toward Faraway’s head, and the forest resumed its normal rustling, twittering pace. Seth glanced around and felt pleased.
“Where is this woman?” he asked. “Are we here to save her? Is she imprisoned? Captive?” A fairytale setting and a downtrodden female boded well to his hero ears. This new adventure might offer balm to his slightly-sprained pride.

“I do not know,” the dragon said. “You must tell me.”

Which wasn’t exactly the tale of terror and bloodshed, and injustice ripe for righting which the hero might have hoped for, but he simply frowned and looked around again.

“Well, where is she?” he asked.

“She is this way,” the dragon told him, and began sliding through the parkland, slithering sinuously between close-set trees and looking snakier than Seth had ever noticed before. He suppressed a shudder.

And then he hurried to catch up with the monster’s head, and walk alongside, because even if he had to rely on a dragon, traditional foe of both heroes and maidens, to lead him to a girl in peril, at the very least he meant to stride alongside it, rather than having to jump and crawl and dodge snapping branches in its reptilian wake.

The forest continued twittering and rustling around them. Seth did wonder, now and then, why the small birds and other creatures weren’t frightened off by the giant dragon slipping past them. Didn’t they know that Faraway could swallow them all, probably all at the same time, with one good gulp?

On the other hand, perhaps he wouldn’t bother, perhaps anything smaller than a sheep (or a virgin) wasn’t worth his time, and the birds knew that.

Which suggests, if you think about it, that these were awfully thoughtful birds, well nigh intellectual, which isn’t usually an adjective applied to anything that comes in flocks. But these were the hero’s thoughts, not mine, so just accept them.

The forest was an oddly patterned one, he also thought, and there we must agree with him. The grass they were walking over, when he looked down to inspect it, seemed almost woven. The bark of the trees had a sort of warp and woof to it, as if it had been loomed. Even the pale sky, when he caught sight of it between the leaves, had a slight knobby texture. The whole scene might have been woven onto stretched canvas. It was a very stately scene, and vaguely, teasingly– as with the Rose’s planet– familiar to him.

He turned to Faraway. “Where, exactly–”

But the dragon had stopped. “She is there.”

And so she was, and she was everything a maiden, virgin, fairytale damsel should be.

She was sitting on the grass, leaning against a very tall tree just in front of Seth and Faraway. One ring of trees and a few bushes still stood between them and her, so she hadn’t seen them. Moreover, a little enclosure, a sort of ornamental knee-high fence, ran around her and the tree that she leaned against. She was arrayed, as only fairytale princesses can be; in other words, she was so set within her scene as to be a perfect cameo, a subject for artists, the very ideal of lost maiden in medieval woods.

And the unicorn didn’t hurt that effect, of course. It lay before her, its horned head in her lap, and she was crooning to it as she stroked its fur.

“Wow,” Seth muttered. Did I mention she was blonde? That is a given, right? With long rings of hair tumbling down around her hidden face, and richly jeweled clothes and little, fetching soft shoes peeking out from under her skirt. They were completely impractical for doing anything other than curling up against a tree with a unicorn in your lap. We can’t blame Seth for his simplistic reaction. Everything about her was constructed to make men say wow. Or whatever was the analogous expletive in their own vernacular.

She looked up. “Oh,” she said softly.

Seth stepped forward. “Madam,” he began, “Forgive me if I’ve startled you.” And even he was surprised at how courtly he sounded suddenly. It seemed to come naturally in this place. “I offer my service. Do you wish to flee this place? Save this creature who so obviously adores you? Is this ring of wood around you enchanted? Holding you helplessly captive?”

She hadn’t stopped stroking the unicorn’s soft head. It rolled its eye toward Seth, regarded him, but seemed uninterested. The eye closed again, and it nestled a little closer into the maiden’s lap. Its back legs twitched, ever so slightly.

“I, captive?” she laughed. It was a trill, a tripping brook, amused water words bouncing against hilarious rocks and having a laugh together. “More likely the dogs are captive, who will shortly arrive to rend this rare, rutting flesh. My own future lord, who leads the hunt, might be captive more than I. On this day, kind sir, I rule them all. I am no more captive than the North Star, set at the crown of heaven to guide sailors in their way, whither it be to or fro, their way home or their path to adventure. I am no more captive than that, sir.”

Seth took a moment to work his way through this speech. When he was sure he understood it, he cocked his head at her.

“I only wondered because you are surrounded by a fence, my lady, which seems to have no opening.”

Again, she trilled with laughter. Perhaps it was her habitual way of starting a conversation.
“Oh, sir,” she returned, “This would hardly hold me. I am the daughter of dukes and earls, the Tower itself is required to hold one such as I. No, this small palisade may appear strong wood and nail to you, but it is ruse and ritual, most thoroughly. This furred one, alone, is held, who enters it only once, as all his kind do– as a fish into its net or a bird into its snare, coming home to their justly decreed offering.”

This time, Seth’s translation talents failed. “I beg your pardon?” he asked. “What do his kind do?”

Her voice took on a storytelling sing-song, and her laugh came more lightly and briefly as she told her tale. “When a one such as me, a daughter of ten generations, foretold to be the mother of ten more, jewel of a known house, enters this encircled space, stepping into it lightly as into a ring of soft moonlight readied by the forest spirits for us, knowing as they do the proper times of all things, birth and death and maidenhood, the forest stills as when prayertime bells forth in a village, silencing its streets as sweetly as a mother her fussy babe. And then one and only one of these fabled horned ones, miles or even days away, perhaps, points that gift which gives him fame to the sun, and, figuring his sacrifice, stretches his neck to cover all that canny distance, and looses a long, warbling cry to ring through the forest. No bird ever cried like that, nor other creature, neither, and all who hear it—who are all, all in the forest, as the creature’s sound ripples like water spreading through the trees, sir—all know that one more of these proud beasts is come to his end, that their number is diminished by another digit, that one less blessed stalk and pair of sky blue eyes will haunt the earth’s park, for that cry is both an announcement and a query, and the beast who utters it has to me proposed his end, and my and my line’s beginning.”
Seth did some mental prestidigitation, playing shell games with her statement to see what a little rearrangement would reveal.

“Then,” he began carefully, “You’re here specifically to lure a unicorn to its death?”

A longer, louder trill. The unicorn in question shifted again, nuzzling deeper and kicking its legs as it lay there. “How else should we catch them, I ask you?”

“Why do you catch them? Why do you wish to?”

This time her laugh sounded sharper, less amused by him. “Oh, sir,” she remonstrated. “Heaven has decreed to all things their time and space, and their continuance. This one lives to die for me. As without him I would die a lordless old hag. His blood is made to quicken mine, and the life he gives up will sweeten when it is reborn into many sons.”

“Then,” Seth said slowly. “This is a marriage rite?”

“Oh, sir!” And this time the delight was back, but it sounded exaggerated, overdone. “What else makes the heavens spin, turns night into day and back again when they would have grown too bored to do aught but sleep and mutter to themselves like old men, but the thrill of birth and new life? We all play our parts, and I merely follow the lead of my grandmothers, as this beast follows its fathers here to seek me!” And here she actually gave him what he was certain was intended as a saucy, naughty wink.

His brow furrowed. “I–” The unicorn shifted again, straining in the grass to nuzzle deeper into her skirts, and Seth saw that she caught her breath, her face frozen for a second while the creature rooted around and pressed closer.

Something, he’d identified, was definitely odd in this. “I fear–” he began conversationally, but he couldn’t juggle the high-flown phrases this time, so he broke off and just stared at the two of them.

It had looked so peaceful and childlike at first. The woman– girl, one or the other, all blond and ringletted, not a child but surely young, fresh– she sat demurely, her skirts spread around her. And the unicorn lay in her lap, its head ready to be petted.

But its nose was deep in her skirts, and as Seth watched, it shoved its hooves against the grass once more, and more of its muzzle disappeared among all the heavy fabrics. The maiden started again, and then let out a long aaaahhhhh, a jarring sound in the parklike, faintly twittering forest.
“Is this beast...” Seth wondered how in the world to express his thought in her flowery, obfuscated style, “Does this beast take liberties, madam? Does it molest you?” And he drew his sword, to show that he was ready to defend her.

A trill of laughter, cut short by a quick gasp.

“Oh, ‘tis not abuse, kind sir, though a deeper– aaahh– sensation than any tales would have told me. My own mother spoke of icicles, plunging deep within her gut, but to me ‘tis more like– ah ahh— rushing brooks, oh cold, clear water, dashing on its way who knows—aaahhh—where?”
Seth blinked. “Indeed,” he said gravely. “And—” he paused as she and the animal both shifted slightly, “This does not disturb you? I would be happy to, um—” he waved his sword vaguely, “dispatch the creature for you.”

“Oh no, sir!” she said quickly. “How else would I step forth into my womanhood, how else be set on my course to wifehood and motherhood? This beast gently—ah-aahhh!—nudges me to immortality, sir.”

“I see,” Seth said, though he didn’t. The unicorn, whose long, downy snout had almost half disappeared into the tangle of fabric of the girl’s skirts, snorted and rooted ever deeper, causing her to shiver and roll her head back against the tree behind her.

“I shall dine richly indeed,” she continued, her voice raised in pitch and sounding a bit strained, “with the memories of—this—” a sudden gasp, “this moment as sauce for this beast’s meat.”

Our hero, who was beginning to feel more than slightly revolted, took a half step back and thought about this comment. “You mean you’re going to eat it?” he asked.

She focused on him long enough to give a smile that, had she been any less fresh-faced and any less lovely, Seth would have had to describe as a leer. “Its loins for my breakfast, its rump for my lunch, its sweet brains pickled for my supper.” She caught her breath again and closed her eyes for a second. “And its blood fermented for my wine to drink all through my first year married. How else? It is how the world turns and how we—ah—we grow immortal in our husbands’ beds. Ohhhh—” her voice dropped an octave, and when she recovered and focused on Seth again, she seemed to have moved on to an entirely new thought. “I have learned a new prayer,” she said. “I beg God in Heaven to grant me sons, boys to give my husband, never daughters. For sons can get their pleasure by drawing blood and killing anywhere, but daughters—ah!” the pitch of her tone went up again, “my daughters will be condemned to a pleasureless, half existence without these—ahhh!—beasts to come—ah ah ahhhh—to them. Oh, I do pity daughters born in these days, with the earth bereft of these horn—oh—” she’d grabbed the unicorn’s horn where it pressed against her belly, and now she rubbed it mindlessly, up and down, as her eyelids fluttered, “—horned ones.”

“You mean this is the last one?” Seth demanded, scandalized.

“There are three, perhaps four, but this race runs only to males, no female has been seen since my father’s father’s time, and that was the beast that came to his wife and mother. Ahhhhh.”
Seth did not waste time trying to untangle her family relations. “So you’ve made them extinct, just so you can—” he wasn’t sure how to say it. “—just for your pleasure? And now they’ll be gone?”

“But this useful spear will hang above my bed always,” she crooned, stroking the glistening member as she caught her breath and the unicorn lay, for the moment, still. “And ‘twill serve me, and bring this sweet moment back to me all my life.”

“But—but that’s—”

Seth found himself wordless again, and he stepped back once more and looked around to see what Faraway was doing.

What the dragon had done was to slither into the trees again, retreating from the maiden and her apparently besotted prey, and he watched now, his yellow eyes shining faintly, from the leafy shadows some yards away.

“What am I supposed to do here?” Seth hissed.

Faraway turned his ponderous head to focus on the hero, and might have answered, but the moment was interrupted.

The maiden had leaned back against the tree once more. Her posture was no longer elegant. Her legs were open widely across the turf, and the unicorn lay as if boneless on top of them. Its head was now entirely concealed, and only its pearlescent horn extended free of her skirts to rub steadily against her thigh and stomach. She seemed utterly insensible of the world around her. Seth doubted whether she’d notice if he and the dragon left, or ate popcorn and watched, or waged fierce battle all around her.

“But she’d notice if we dragged that unicorn away,” he muttered. And then he didn’t have any more time for random musing, because there were sounds through the trees beyond her, noises of dogs and horses and men. The hunt, to which she’d alluded earlier, was arriving.
“Oh my lord,” the lady gasped out, “the beast—is—nearly ready for your swift stroke.”
There were a dozen riders, and half a dozen dogs. They milled and walked through the trees in front of Seth, and came up to the little fence inside which the lady lay, nearly insensible, and looked on with interest. One or two of them acknowledged Seth, nodding to him mildly. But the scene at the tree’s base held much more interest.

The lady’s lord, a huge man in dark leathers, riding a horse that could nearly have looked eye-to-eye with Faraway, pushed his way through to approach the maiden. He loomed over her, though Seth doubted she noticed, while his horse stamped occasionally and the other riders held back, waiting. The man himself gazed down at his fiancé with something less, our hero thought, than adoration. He frowned, and stared at the unicorns hind legs shifting, shuffling in the dirt, its entire head and shoulders lost to sight, and he waited. If watches had been available in his land and time, he no doubt would have tapped his.

Seth stepped forward. This whole travesty, he thought, must not be allowed to simply play out without some re-examination. “Sir,” he began, “forgive me, but your lady and I have spoken, as she waited here for—” Seth glanced down at the maiden and her creature, both twitching and emitting curious sounds as they lay entangled on the turf, “you. And I must question whether it is wise to strike down nearly the last of its kind. If it lived, more might be found, and a female, even, to perpetuate its—” he glanced down again, and grimaced, “noble race.”

“Bah.” The huge man spat down on the ground, a prodigious distance, but he aimed away from our hero, so Seth didn’t take it as an insult. “Filthy, rutting beasts. You’d have me allow it its freedom after it’s dishonored me?”

“But—” the fact that the lord was standing by and patently waiting while the aforementioned dishonor was finished seemed to undercut his argument, but Seth wasn’t sure how to politely explain that.

“The thing’ll give me sons, I’m told,” the lord cut his thoughts off. “Other than that, it has no use on earth.” He glanced back at his lady, now slid down nearly flat on her back, her head pressed hard against the treeback. “Bah!”

“Sons? Really?” Seth questioned. The maiden had said something about sons, too, but they certainly weren’t her primary concern at the moment. Seth risked one look her way, and found her looking back, through nearly closed eyes. Her lips quirked, slightly, as if sharing a dark secret, and then her mouth fell open, her eyes closed tightly, and she emitted a piercing wail that went on and on and on until all the horses of the hunt grew restive and their riders muttered and buzzed among themselves. The dogs howled.

The sound cut off suddenly, and the lord hesitated not one single second. “That’s the thing, then,” he growled, and he swung his sword down, practical and ruthless, leaning far over to reach it past the small fence. His reach was huge, Seth noted. He stabbed the unicorn, thrust the blade in, pulled it out with a gush of blood that splattered in all directions, and then jumped down from his horse, kicked over a wooden crosspiece, reached out to grab the unicorn’s hind legs, and jerked it out into the muddied earth, pulsing and fountaining its life’s blood. Wasting no time, he swung his sword and began to hack away at it. By the time he’d severed its head from its body, he’d been joined by his companions, all intent on dismembering the thing into as many pieces as possible, apparently.

Seth grimaced, not enjoying the carnage. He saw a brief flutter, and noticed that the maiden—was it still correct to call her that?—had stood up against her tree and was waiting, watching avidly, for the hunt to finish its work. She was licking her hand, which had been splattered with blood.

“Why did you bring me here?” our hero asked Faraway, but the dragon either didn’t hear or didn’t care to answer. It was lurking back in the forest, maybe watching him struggle through this chaos, maybe just waiting in its inscrutable way.

“Well, will you join us?” a voice boomed. Seth refocused on the scene before him to see the Lord standing there, fists on hips and looking much happier, dripping with blood, and waiting for an answer.

“Uh... it looks as though you’re finished.”

“Ha ha,” the man boomed even louder. “That pile o’ fur and blood is only the beginning. Join us for the feast, man, the celebration. Besides—” he fingered the hilt of his sword as his eyes roved past Seth, “There be other things to slay today.”

Seth glanced back at Faraway. “Him? Oh no—no, that’s my—we’re traveling together. He brought me here.”

“Did he indeed. A lucky choice, for you, man.” The Lord’s fingers were gripping and beating on the hilt of his sword as if it were the world’s biggest TV remote and he were desperate to discover all its features at once. “Come, you’re holding your sword. Put it to use, and prove yourself one of us.”

It was at this moment that our hero realized the other members of the hunt had spread out and were all standing around him. They’d moved individually, and without fuss, as they’d finished slicing and stacking the bits of unicorn near the maiden. Now they faced him on three sides, only the dim forest and Faraway clear behind him. He felt s distinct reminder of schoolyards and bullies here.

“Go, my lord,” came a muffled voice from behind the crowd of bodies. Seth craned as they all turned to look, and found the putative lady stepping forward, swaying slightly, and dripping unicorn blood from her skirt and hands. “Strike down this creature of nightmare, show yourself a terror against evil. Fill this forest with the screams and rendings of—” she wobbled and leaned against the tree, passing a bloody hand over her face, “your love for me.” She finished and dropped down again.

Everybody turned to watch her lord’s reaction.

“Bah,” he spat. He looked back at Seth and, meaningfully, past him at the dragon.

“I don’t think—” our hero began, taking half a step back.

“What’s to think, man?” the Lord growled. Growled? That’s too aggressive. The man rumbled, he purred. It was almost as if he were seducing Seth, forget the sanguine virgin ten paces to his rear. “Swing your sword, as you were born to.” He’d taken a step to match the hero’s. “Join us, and be our brother.” The crowd around them and stepped forward, too.

“No. He’s my companion,” Seth said.

“A monster’s no fit companion for a hero,” the man said, and he was suddenly much closer, looming, towering over Seth. “Take your place among men, or will ya abandon your own kind for a great slimy snake, unnatural to God and man?”

“He’s not—” Oddly, it was the word “slimy” that caught Seth’s attention. He’d had his own doubts about his current status as partner to a creature usually well-established as Dark and Evil, but as to Faraway’s physical characteristics, he was quite clear. If this man couldn’t even get that right, he thought, then clearly he had no idea what he was talking about.
Seth’s logic may have been unreliable, but his conviction was clear.

“He’s not slimy,” he declared. “His skin is quite dry. He keeps me warm—it’s very cold, when we fly.”

And then, without planning it in advance, or really thinking much about it, Seth turned and ran, dashing toward Faraway and yelling, waving his sword wildly, jumping over tree roots and leaping bushes, calling something like “Get ready!” to the dragon. He saw, through the dimness, the great legs tense, saw the neck lower and coil itself as it did when the dragon was preparing to leap free of earth, and he hoped, for one brief second, that he hadn’t misjudged, that Faraway didn’t plan to fly off before he got there. But no, the dragon crouched but paused, and waited for him, and as he made a final, Olympic-caliber leap, arms and legs flying, sailing through the air, feeling branches scratch him and at least two or three other impacts on his body that might have been thrown rocks, the dragon rose up to meet him, and he landed heavily, nearly blacking out, on its back. And so they took off, Seth clinging as well as he could, the dragon crashing, breaking through the trees on all sides, shedding greenery and raining down broken branches, and the hunt scattering below, even as their Lord stood and waved his sword after them, catching one of Faraway’s legs with a deep chop that got a deafening bellow, and finally they were out, they broke free, and the air was clearer and the sounds of tumult below them faded.

NEXT POST: THE CRONE (Monday 11/9)