“So what’s the third?” Gillis asked, guessing from Jerry’s tone that there must be a third.
“Just to add to the second,” Jerry said, looking around, “if we’re in the real world, we’ve also moved in space, because this vegetation looks all wrong to me. I wish I knew what those trees were, and those bushes. The grass is not very long— I think it must be grazed.”
“Let’s have the third hypothesis.” Jerry sighed. “I think we’re in some faerie state. It just doesn’t feel quite real, somehow. That would explain the watches, too. Who put us here, I don’t know; they may be well intentioned or otherwise. We have no weapons and no food. I don’t know about you, but I could surely handle a large breakfast.” Carlo asked if that was all he could contribute, salting the question with his usual obscenities.
“That’s about it,” Jerry admitted. “Plus a smattering of Greek.”
“Why Greek?” Gillis demanded suspiciously.
“Just a hunch.” He shrugged. “I may be way off the mark, but doesn’t this vegetation look sort of Mediterranean to you?” Apparently none of them were conversant with Mediterranean flora and nobody had any helpful suggestions.
They could go ahead and look for breakfast, they agreed, or they could go back to where they had arrived, in the hope that the place was somehow important— but then they might starve to death.
“Pony!” squealed Alan.
Heads turned, then Jerry sat up, Ariadne rose to her knees, Lacey said, “Ooooo!” Standing in the middle of the track they had been following, slightly uphill from them, was the largest horse Jerry had never seen— a truly magnificent snow-white stallion with tail and mane sweeping almost to the ground and shimmering like spun glass. Dappled by sunlight through the trees, carefully posed before a dark mass of bushes, he looked every inch aware of his beauty and strength, arrogant, defiant, and contemptuous of mere bipeds in his forest. He tossed his head and whinnied quietly and then gazed carefully in their direction, while the sun flashed on the three-foot horn protruding from his forehead.
“Oh, Lord!” Gillis groaned. “If any of my colleagues ever hear that I’m seeing unicorns, I’ll be disbarred for life.”
“Nineteen hands if he’s an inch!” Ariadne whispered. “Superb!” Maisie crossed herself automatically and reached for the rosary she had been wearing around her neck. Jerry said, “No, Maisie! Not demon work this time!”
“No?” she said.
He knew he was grinning like a maniac, and his words almost fell over themselves as he tried to explain. Of all the monsters in the bestiaries— the griffins and yales and sphinxes and others— only the unicorn had a truly good reputation. It was not a Greek legend, but a Christian one. That probably meant that they had broken out of the evil influence of Asterios— although he still would not mention that name, just in case— or else, perhaps, some other power was making itself felt. The Romans had known of unicorns, but theirs were different and had black horns, and the Greeks had gone in for flying horses.
“Pegasus!” said Lacey.
Now he knew that they were not in any part of the real world, the world of machines and lawyers, but in some realm of faerie. And if he was going to trust anyone or anything, a unicorn would rank near the top of his scale of faith.
“Christian?” Maisie repeated when she got a word in.
“Father Julius is quite insistent,” Jerry said. “He considers the unicorn a symbol of the Savior.” Father Julius, with his medieval reasoning, was the most impossibly muddled thinker imaginable, an angels-on-pins man, a juggler of faulty premises and contorted deduction. An argument with Father Julius was a wrestling match with a team of giant squid, but his faith and good intentions were beyond question, and in this case his opinion impressed Maisie.
The unicorn whinnied quizzically and scratched the ground with a flashing silver hoof.
“Perhaps we’re supposed to follow him.” Ariadne suggested.
“Let’s try then,” Jerry said, rising cautiously. “I doubt if any of us is qualified to catch him. You don’t happen to be a virgin, do you, Carlo?” Carlo grabbed him by the cape and balled a fist; hastily Jerry explained that only virgins could catch unicorns.
The youth stared at him doubtfully and then released him, apparently deciding that the madman was trying to be friendly. “I lost that sort of virginity on the night of my thirteenth birthday,” he said… proudly? “To an uncle. And the other soon after.” Progress— it wasn’t much, but it was his first real conversation.
Gathering up their bundle of coats, the castaways stepped back to the road, Alan clutching his father’s hand, and Lacey now by her mother, shivering with excitement. They had only walked a few paces towards the stallion, however, when he dropped his head, waved his horn menacingly in small circles as though taking aim, and started pawing the ground with a great silver hoof.
Dead stop.
“Apparently that’s not the program,” Ariadne said. She smiled thoughtfully at Jerry. “Next helpful suggestion?” Jerry was visualizing a charge by that enormous beast, with himself shish-kebabbed on the horn. Ouch.
“Well, let’s try the other direction,” he suggested, afraid that honor required him to stay in the rear.
They turned around, walked a few steps, and stopped.
A short distance downhill, two more unicorns blocked their path— mares and not quite so gigantic, but positioned foursquare, dazzlingly white in a spread of sunlight, side by side in the roadway.
“Everyone back to the tree bench,” Jerry said unhappily. “Let me see if this is negotiable.” Wishing he had a wand or an Uzi with silver bullets, he advanced slowly toward the mares. The stallion whinnied warningly, and Jerry glanced back uneasily, then tried a few more steps forward. Both gleaming horns went down, silver hooves pawed. He turned and beat a quick retreat back to the others.
“On the other hand,” Ariadne said, “this is really a very pleasant spot to spend an afternoon.” Her show of courage amazed him. Perhaps it was for the children, but he hoped that a little of it might be for him. She certainly was smiling more in his direction.
A pleasant spot if it had boasted room service.
So they could proceed neither uphill nor downhill. On either side the scattered bushes and clumps of trees stretched off into a background of greenery, with hints of a skyline not far off. If the stallion wanted them to move laterally, then he could so indicate by moving around them, but he seemed to be content to stay where he was.
“I think we’re waiting for something,” Jerry said.
Then, like a magic show, quite silently and right where he happened to be looking, two more unicorns emerged from the undergrowth and stopped, another mare and a unicorn foal, gangly-legged and boasting the merest stub of a horn, a white button.
Lacey saw them and said, “0ooooo!” once more, turning to smile at her mother in great delight— apparently Ariadne ranked ahead of Maisie in horse matters. Alan squealed with excitement, although surely he was too young to appreciate the rarity value of horned horseflesh.
Beginning to feel that being taken prisoner by horses was a demeaning experience, Jerry turned around, and, sure enough, another pair of mares, younger-looking, had closed off the fourth direction. The humans were surrounded; time had come to circle the wagons.
“I wonder if they’ll throw us some hay before sunset?” he muttered. “There’s lots of grass to eat,” Maisie said. “Stop complaining.” Lacey and Ariadne laughed, and Jerry regarded her with some surprise.
Time began to drag. The stallion watched them intently, barely moving except for an occasional swish of that long snow-and-crystal tail. The mares started browsing, but their attention was obviously on the captives also, and the slightest movement would bring their heads up at once. They were waiting, obviously, but for whom, or what? Then the stallion suddenly whinnied like a trumpet fanfare, and a shriller, faint reply came floating through the forest.