After the Downfall

“It won’t carry me, the stupid creature,” Rautat said. The glare the unicorn gave him told the world he was right, honeycomb or no honeycomb.

Wondering whether the unicorn disliked Grenye men in particular, Hasso asked a cook’s wife if she wanted to try it. “Sure, if the creature will let me,” she said.

She giggled when he lifted her off the ground. He didn’t giggle; she was at least fifteen kilos heavier than Drepteaza. But the unicorn made it very plain it didn’t want her on its back. “Sorry,” Hasso said, setting her down.

“Don’t worry about it, foreign sir,” she replied with more grace than a lot of noblewomen probably would have shown under the same circumstances. “I know I’m no priestess. The unicorn must know the same thing.”

Did it? If it did, how? The cook’s wife smelled of garlic. But so did Drepteaza. All Bucovinans did; they ate the stuff with everything except melons and strawberries. So what made the difference? The unicorn wasn’t talking.

Lord Zgomot came over to see why people were kicking up a fuss. “A unicorn?” he said. “Well, well. I have never been lucky enough to see one close up before.” He gave Hasso something that was more than a nod but less than a bow. “An advantage to having a wizard with us that I had not thought about.”

“It let me on its back, Lord!” Drepteaza exclaimed. “Me!”

“Really?” Zgomot did bow to her. “I am jealous.”

“Do you want to try, Lord?” Hasso asked. Zgomot wasn’t much heftier than the cook’s wife. Hasso thought he could get him onto the unicorn’s back. Whether the unicorn would put up with it…

“Me?” The Lord of Bucovin sounded surprised.

“If it doesn’t want you up there, it lets you know, but it doesn’t hurt you. It is a polite unicorn,” Hasso said.

That made several Bucovinans smile, so it probably wasn’t just the word he should have used. But what the hell? It got his meaning across. And the cook’s wife affirmed that she’d tried, failed, and still had all her giblets. Lord Zgomot plucked at his beard. “Well, why not?” he said. “Let us see what will happen.”

The unicorn let him come up alongside it. It let him touch it, which seemed to impress him as much as it had Drepteaza. “Can you lift me up there?” he asked Hasso.

“I think so, Lord,” the German answered. “You don’t eat a big lunch, I hope?”

Zgomot smiled a crooked smile. “No, I was moderate.” Wonderingly, he stroked the unicorn again. You had to touch a unicorn like that. If you were a man, it was like touching your first girl, only more so. “Whenever you are ready,” Zgomot said.

Hasso picked him up. The unicorn laid back its ears and snorted when the Lord of Bucovin’s behind touched its back, but it didn’t buck or run wild or do any of the other things that could have made Zgomot’s bodyguards use Hasso for a pincushion. “You are on a unicorn,” Hasso told him.

“I am on a unicorn.” Lord Zgomot sounded amazed. Well, who could blame him?

How the Bucovinans cheered! Drepteaza looked as proud of her sovereign as could be. And Hasso said, “King Bottero never does this.”

“No? He is missing something, then,” Zgomot said. “Will it walk for me?” He urged the unicorn forward as if it were a horse. But it wouldn’t go, not even the couple of steps it had for Drepteaza. Shrugging, Zgomot slid off. “I am a Grenye, and I have been on a unicorn,” he declared, as Drepteaza had. By the way he said it; he might have been the first man to set foot on the moon.

His subjects cheered louder than ever. Hasso looked at the unicorn. It looked back at him. If it didn’t wink, he was losing his mind. Or maybe he was losing his mind if he thought it did wink. No one else seemed to notice. Was he going to start collecting omens and portents?

Why not? Everybody else in this world did. And, as far as he could see, a winking unicorn couldn’t be anything but a good one.

A Bucovinan named Shugmeshte was almost out of his mind with glee. He was one of the gunpowdermen who’d gone forward to slow down Bottero’s advancing army. “I fooled ‘em!” he told Hasso and Zgomot. “Bugger me blind if I didn’t fool ‘em!”

“What did you do?” Hasso asked.

Shugmeshte swigged from a mug of beer. “So I dig holes in the road and run fuses to them, right? This is before the big blond bastards get there, you understand. So then I plant some real jugs in the field alongside, but real careful-like, so you can’t spot ‘em easy.”

Hasso grinned.” I think I like the way this story is going.” The Lord of Bucovin nodded. Hasso said, “Well? Tell us more.”

“So the blond pricks come by,” Shugmeshte said. “So they see there’s trouble in the road. So they get smart – or they think they do. So they ride into the field so whatever happens in the road doesn’t hurt ‘em. So I light the fuses, and bam! They go flying! I blew up a unicorn, I did.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear that,” Hasso said – he was still riding the wild one himself. But he clapped Shugmeshte on the back. “You do good – you did good. And this says something important.”

“What?” Zgomot asked.