Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,145

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

who watched you lay her head

Here too are grasses

broken grasses

where she made her bed.

Tan-dara-dei

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

But in the end, the floor cannot be unwalked upon. It is not asked if it would prefer a surcease of shoes. It is trodden; it is worn. It is owned, and paid for, and it will lie beneath all those feet, it will lie beneath a severed white head preserved above the mantle, a white head and a gnarled horn, it will lie beneath those black-glass eyes and never complain. It is not paid to complain. It will sing, because it was made for singing, and because the feet would have their song.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

XII THE HANGED MAN

Lancelot

And when Sir Launcelot awoke of his swoon, he leapt out at a bay window into a garden, and there with thorns he was all to-scratched in his visage and his body; and so he ran forth he wist not whither, and was wild wood as ever was man; and so he ran two years, and never man might have grace to know him.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

Vespers—The Psalm of Forgetting

Perhaps I never saw her at all. Perhaps I