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Come, Dagonet, you must hunt with us to-day! Put on Lancelot’s livery, he will not mind!
Ah, gentlemen, I am full tired this morn. No fox is in danger of me, I am sure.
Come, Dagonet! We will not hear nay! Put on Lancelot’s helmet and hoist up his shield—it is no fox we hunt this day!
Ah, gentlemen, and I am no Lancelot. Surely you would rather have a jig? A pratfall?
Come, come! Nothing would amuse us more than to see our own Dagonet dressed up as a knight like a little girl in her mother’s gown!
One hunt, then. A fool must earn his penny.
She mounted up beside me on the young knight’s horse—a back broad enough to bear Atlas in his blue chair!—and I a-clang in the young knight’s armor, a poor Patroclus, all elbows, in Achilles’ bronze breastplate. A fool’s lady shares in his acts, his pantomimes, his jokes and jibes. She is his straight-man, she is his stage-hand.
Who is to say where Lancelot was that he did not hunt with his men? Not I; not the crocuses; not the roses. Not the queen.
No fox. Not a fox. A breath of white in the linden trees, a breath of ivory and silver against the tall white birches, a breath of hair like spun glass behind a weave of glossy green leaves. Never a fox. And it was my lady who tempted the beast, whose cheeks bloomed w
ith clover and hyacinth, though she laughed like irises opening—I am no maid, said she, and it was no jest. From the day the floor pushed her up like a stalk she thirsted for me and I thirsted for her and we were sunlight and water and dirt and air.
But you are a maid, for a fool is not a man, and thus.
Not a fox, not a maid, not a man.
The wood smelled of old campfires and stripped bark. Some flowers were there: mean and nameless things, little more than a smear of red or purple in the brush. Who was I to notice when the birches faded to redwoods and mist covered all things from nose to branch? I thought myself to smell the sea.
It was a unicorn they came to hunt. I tell this tale not to please.
The poor beast blundered into the sward when the apples were firm on the boughs, and was spotted—such a guileless thing cannot help but be spotted, caught, rendered into fat and bone and meat. These boys, these fine boys, a pack of young, bored lions, took themselves up after it, never expecting to find a maiden in any crook of that palace to lure a four-legged pearl from the fog. My lady was the best they could find, and I, as always, amuse them, pass the tedious stretches of a hunt which do not involve gouts of hot blood, but rather cramped muscles and waiting. How marvelous to dress me in a lion’s skin. I am a bow-kneed Hercules, and how my Nemean suit clatters and clangs.
My lady lifted her skirt of roses and stepped between the grotesque red trees, calling, calling her thrush-cry voice (tan-dara-dara-dei) calling for the unicorn which surely would not come to her, how could it come to her, whose legs clap strong as weeds around my waist, whose lips crushed against mine, whose kisses were so terrible and thick and sweet that our teeth clashed like tiles—what pure beast would come to her? Yet the birches seemed to bleed their white from bark to bark until it emerged, stepping lightly towards her, copper hooves dancing lightly here, there, like an impossibly delicate crab, unsure, hesitant, but drawn to her as though she held him on a string of pale, braided hair.
My lady always had open arms for any lost creature—how else could she have loved me? Her black hair blew back from her face like a nun’s veil as she held out her hands to it, smiling, laughing, coaxing, sitting as maidens will do, as they do in all the tapestries I have ever seen, cross-legged on a mossy patch of forest, with red leaves all around her, sticking in her dress and wind-plastered to her skin. In my memory, in my songs, I can never decide if the dress was red, too, or white.
It was a stallion. A fine white down covered his snowy testicles—I noticed that, of all things, thin pale fur like fishbones lying against his pink skin as he sank down into her lap, as if he were tired, an old man who cannot even bend far enough to take off his shoes when the day is done. His huge head nuzzled her laced breast, great black eyes shuddering closed. He quivered, his diamond hide twitched and his teeth ground together—he groaned in my lady’s lap, the usurper. And the horn—that horn!—long and twisted like an ice-casked branch, knotted and thick and not at all graceful. It a living limb, no ornament, no pretty bauble stuck to a horse’s head. Blood pale as champagne seemed to pulse faintly under the pocked and pitted pearl.
His legs folded onto the moss and my pride was stung—of course it was. They were right, she was a maiden still, and our nights together were as vapor, the seed I left in her no more than a blown dandelion. The head in her lap proved me nothing but a floor-tile, walking like a man, but no less terra-cotta. The silver of the unicorn’s cheek rippled against her skin, and she chuckled, my lady chuckled, her laugh like marigolds opening, and stroked his glassy mane. They laughed, too, the men, uproarious, slapping each other’s backs and pointing at me, at my lumpish shape which could not even take a maidenhead, swimming in armor too big for me.
It was when she touched him—he must have smelled me on her, must have smelled whatever nameless thing takes the place of virginity, buried deeper in her than other women, for my lady was a floor-flower, and who asks a lily if it has lain with another lily? He snorted; his breath was lilac and ice fogging her knees.
I do not want to sing of this. I do not want to tell you how her cheek flushed as though she had been slapped. I do not want to knit rhyme to rhyme just to tell you how the unicorn drew back, his crystalline nostrils flaring, betrayed and betraying, the scent of her a red smear in his perfect nose, how he drew back—I have no meter for it—how he drew back like an arrow and thrust the limb of his horn into her belly, through the skirt of roses and her belt of thyme, through her leaf-skin, her hyacinth-skin, and my lady opened her mouth as if to protest, and blood dribbled from it, black and ugly, falling onto the flaxen beast in long streams and wasn’t it funny to dress up a fool in a lion’s skin? Wasn’t it funny to call his whore a virgin? Wasn’t it funny, wasn’t it funny?
The blood seemed to burn him like a brand; he drove deeper into her, the twisted horn working and grinding against her spine, and he was screaming—a unicorn’s scream! A glass-scrape against gold against bone—screaming and hooves slipping in the moss and bucking against her broken hips as her belly fell into her hands, and she was not a flower, she was not a lily, she was wet and red and she was my wife and she is dead, dead, and I will never sing of anything anymore.
IV.
Stand ye yet, O lime trees
Where we two made our bed?
In the open field
in the open land
where I lay my lover’s head?
Tan-dara-dara-dei.
Stand we yet, we lime trees
