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CHAPTER TWO: THE LAST UNICORN

While humor is peripheral to much fantasy, it is central to Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Beagle creates a quasimedieval universe with built-in anachronisms to serve as the setting for his fairy tale that is at once high romance and self-parody. He presents a serious theme, that we are what people think us and we become what we pretend to be, with a comic technique, and much of the success of the novel can be traced to its humor.

Beagle leaves no doubt about his comic intentions very early in the novel. Before any of the important mortal characters are introduced, the unicorn meets a butterfly. While some important exposition is presented, the main purpose of the encounter is humorous. In Beagle’s world butterflies can talk, but all they can do is repeat what they have heard. This butterfly has apparently heard a lot of popular songs, a lot of television commercials, and a lot of Shakespeare and other medieval and Renaissance English poetry. Its speech is a combination of these elements, and the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime is very funny:

“Death takes what man would keep,” said the butterfly, “and leaves what man would lose. Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks. I warm my hands before the fire of life and get four-way relief.”

The other speeches from this brief section are just as incongruous. Responding to the unicorn’s question, “Do you know who I am?” the butterfly cheerfully pulls a few appropriate lines from its memory: “Excellent well, you’re a fishmonger. You’re my everything, you are my sunshine, you are old and gray and full of sleep, you’re my pickle-face, consumptive Mary Jane.” In response to nothing at all, but merely to pass the time, the butterfly leaps into the following soliloquy:

“One, two, three o’lairy.… Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, look down that lonesome road. For, oh, what damned minutes tells he o’er who dotes, yet doubts. Hasten, Mirth, and bring with thee a host of furious fancies whereof I am commander, which will be on sale for three days only at bargain summer prices. I love you, oh, the horror, the horror, and aroint thee, witch, aroint thee, indeed and truly you’ve chosen a bad place to be lame in, willow, willow, willow.”

It almost seems natural that, preparing to leave, the butterfly says: “I must take the A train.”

Incidentally, Beagle has recently said that the butterfly is as close to a self-portrait as he has ever written. A complete guide to the butterfly’s allusions will be contained in The First Last Unicorn and Other Beginnings, due from Conlan Press in 2012.

If the incongruities in the speech of the butterfly are rather obvious, they are only the beginnings of Beagle’s skillful use of incongruity for comic effect. We first learn the main character’s name, for example, in the following manner: “’I am called Schmendrick the Magician,’ he answered.” “Schmendrick,” of course, is a Yiddish word, meaning roughly “bungler,” from the same general group as “schlemiel.” Beagle says it means “someone who is out of his depth or his league, the boy sent to do a man’s job.” Schmendrick’s first words are in themselves funny, but the magician says the opposite of what we expect when he adds, “You won’t have heard of me.” Nor does it take a great leap of imagination to see “Schmendrick the Magician” as a play on words for “Mandrake the Magician.” Beagle has recently said that the idea for the character came from stories he used to tell his daughters about the world’s worst magician.

Incidentally, there is a delicious irony in Beagle’s use of the name “Amalthea” for the last unicorn in human shape. The mythology surrounding the young Zeus includes stories of the goat Amalthea who fostered him, one of whose horns the young god broke off and turned into the cornucopia, or horn of plenty. Amalthea in the myth thus became the first unicorn.

Beagle’s general use of incongruity is well illustrated in the following expository passage, where everything that is mentioned is twisted into the opposite of what is expected:

“He made an entire sow out of a sow’s ear; turned a sermon into a stone, a glass of water into a handful of water, a five of spades into a twelve of spades, and a rabbit into a goldfish that drowned. Each time he conjured up confusion, he glanced at the unicorn with eyes that said, ‘Oh, but you know what I really did.’ Once he changed a dead rose into a seed. The unicorn liked, that, even though it did turn out to be a radish seed.”

In most cases the incongruity involves an item that lowers the high, heroic tone that has been established: the incongruity deflates the puffed-up prose. In one instance, however, during the sequence in the camp of Captain Cully, a self-appointed Robin Hood, the incongruity serves to inflate the level. Jack Jingly, a member of the band of “merry” outlaws, says of the other men: “Cooped up in the greenwood all day, they need a little relaxing, a little catharsis, like.” It is also in the camp of Captain Cully that Schmendrick, to flatter his host, reels off a series of romantic escapades that he has heard of in connection with the Captain and then reveals to us that he “had never heard of Captain Cully before that very evening, but he had a good grounding in Anglo-Saxon folklore and knew the type.”

Beagle uses songs with incongruous elements throughout the novel, perhaps not surprising when we recall that he is an accomplished folk singer, at one time appearing at a local club in Santa Cruz, California, every weekend for 12 years. It is partly through these songs that the theme is revealed. Captain Cully is so concerned with songs about himself that he has written thirty-one of his own, and is constantly on the look-out for Mr. Child, in order to be properly classified and annotated. Cully has one of them sung to Schmendrick, whom he half-believes to be Mr. Child, and stanzas two and three (of the twenty-five!) show us Beagle’s technique:

“‘What news, what news, my pretty young man?

What ails ye, that ye sigh so deep?

Is it for the loss of your lady fair?

Or are ye but scabbit in your greep?’

‘I am nae scabbit, whatever that means,

And my greep is as well as greep may be,

But I do sigh for my lady fair

Whom my three brothers ha’ riven from me.’”

The two songs with incongruous elements that most clearly reveal Beagle’s theme are Prince Lír’s song to the Lady Amalthea, and Schmendrick and Molly’s song as they go away together at the end of the novel. Both deserve citing at length.

“When I was a young man, and very well thought of,

I couldn’t ask aught that the ladies denied.

I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins,

And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied.

And I said to myself, ‘Ah, none of them know

The secret I shelter and savor and save.

I wait for the one who will see through my seeming,

And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave.’

The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens;

The ladies went by me like snow on the wind.

I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled,

And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned.

But I said to myself, ‘Ah, they none of them see

There’s a part of me pure as the whisk of a wave.

My lady is late, but she’ll find I’ve been faithful,

And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave.’

At last came a lady both knowing and tender,

Saying, ‘You’re not at all what they take you to be.’

I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking,

And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea.

And I say to myself, when there’s time for a word,

As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved,

‘Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger,

And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.’”

The point is reinforced in Schmendrick and Molly’s song, which is the last thing that we read in the novel:

“‘I am no king, and I am no lord,

And I am no soldier at arms,’ said he.

‘I’m none but a harper, and a very poor harper,

That am come hither to wed with ye.’

‘If you were a lord, you should be my lord,

And the same if you were a thief,’ said she.

‘And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper,

For it makes no matter to me, to me,

For it makes no matter to me.’

‘But what if it prove that I am no harper?

That I lied for your love most monstrously?’

‘Why, then I’ll teach you to play and sing,

For I dearly love a good harp,’ said she.”

The theme is clearly stated by Schmendrick earlier in the novel, using a technique that is elsewhere used for comic effect: verse as prose. Schmendrick is speaking to the unicorn:

“‘It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is,’ he said. ‘There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so I must be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still I have read, or heard it sung, that un[i]corns when time was young, could tell the difference ‘twixt the two—the false shining and the true, the lips’ laugh and the heart’s rue.’”

The running gag is a favorite comic device, and Beagle makes good use of it. Speaking disparagingly about the power of Mommy Fortuna’s magic, Schmendrick says: “She can’t turn cream into butter.” A few pages later, Rukh tells Schmendrick: “You can’t turn cream into butter.” When Schmendrick later meets Molly Grue, she cheerfully deflates his ego by asserting the same thing: “You can’t turn cream into butter.” And finally, King Haggard, speaking to the Lady Amalthea about Schmendrick, quite independently comes to the not-so-surprising conclusion: “I don’t think he could turn cream into butter.” The running gag has run its course, each iteration delighting the reader more than the last.

By far the most important mode of humor used in the novel is anticlimax—a sudden drop from the dignified or important in thought or expression to the commonplace or trivial. Beagle uses this technique literally dozens of times, beginning on the first page with the description of the unicorn: “and the long horn above her eyes shown and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight. She had killed dragons with it, and healed a king whose poisoned wound would not close, and knocked down ripe chestnuts for bear cubs.” While perhaps not the most hilarious example that could be chosen, it certainly indicates that this will be a novel that does not take itself too seriously.

Schmendrick is responsible for many of the anticlimactic lines, which seems perfectly appropriate since the character resembles an out-of-work stand-up comic down on his luck. For example, when he introduces himself to the unicorn, he says: “…For I too am real. I am Schmendrick, the magician, the last of the red-hot swamis, and I am older than I look.” Speaking of their destination, Schmendrick explains its origins like this:

“Haggard’s fortress…Haggard’s dire keep. A witch built it for him, they say, but he wouldn’t pay her for her work, so she put a curse on the castle. She swore that one day it would sink into the sea with Haggard, when his greed caused the sea to overflow. Then she gave a fearful shriek, the way they do, and vanished in a sulphurous puff. Haggard moved in right away. He said no tyrant’s castle was complete without a curse.”

Approaching Hagsgate, Schmendrick seems surprised: “It must be Hagsgate, and yet there’s no smell of sorcery, no air of black magic. But why the legends, then, why the fables and fairy tales? Very confusing, especially when you’ve had half a turnip for dinner.”

We can always count on Schmendrick to break the mood. Having had too much to drink, he sounds as if he could be on The Tonight Show:

“‘You don’t know what a real curse is. Let me tell you my troubles.’ Easy tears suddenly glittered in his eyes. ‘To begin with, my mother never liked me. She pretended, but I knew—’”

Later, when the questing group is followed out of Hagsgate, Schmendrick tries to figure out why: “Perhaps Drinn has started to feel guilty about underpaying his poisoner.… Perhaps his conscience is keeping him awake. Anything is possible. Perhaps I have feathers.” Finally, at what could be a tender moment, Schmendrick advises the Lady Amalthea: “You are truly human now. You can love, and fear, and forbid things to be what they are, and overact.”

But anticlimax is not limited to Schmendrick’s speech. Molly, too, can change the mood with a word or two. After Schmendrick has turned the unicorn into the Lady Amalthea, he is explaining how he carries the true magic: “I am a bearer.… I am a dwelling, I am a messenger.” Without missing a beat Molly says: “You are an idiot.” Speaking about the need for wine to fulfill the riddle that will finally lead them to the Red Bull, Molly says to Schmendrick: “I thought if you had some water to start with…Well, it’s been done. It’s not as though you’d have to make up something new. I’d never ask that of you.”

The Lady Amalthea even gets into the act, as unlike that sweet and beautiful lady as that may sound. Trying to mislead King Haggard she says: “The Red Bull. But why do you think I have come to steal the Bull? I have no kingdom to keep, and no wish for conquest. What would I do with him? How much does he eat?” In a rare moment of candor, Prince Lír, too, uses anticlimax with the Lady Amalthea: “I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you. Also to find some way of starting a conversation.”

Minor characters as well use this comic device to good effect. Captain Cully, for example, wants to pump Schmendrick for news about Cully’s reputation in the wide world. He phrases his dinner invitation this way: “Come to the fire and tell us your tale. How do they speak of me in your country? What have you heard of dashing Captain Cully and his band of freemen? Have a taco.” The cat who tells Molly how to get to the Red Bull seems very mysterious—until the last line:

“‘When the wine drinks itself,’ he said, ‘when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time—only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull’s lair.’ He tucked his paws under his chest and added, ‘There’s trick to it, of course.’”

Naturally, the skull the cat spoke of speaks, and just as naturally it uses anticlimax. When speaking to Schmendrick, the skull remarks: “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.… Not by most magicians anyway.” And while sounding the alarm for King Haggard, the skull shrieks: “Help ho, the king! Guards, to me! Here are burglars, bandits, moss-troopers, kidnapers, housebreakers, murderers, character assassins, plagiarists! King Haggard! Ho, King Haggard!”

It seems clear that this comic device is not being used for character delineation but simply for humorous effect. This belief is confirmed by the number of uses of anticlimax in narrative and expository passages where there is no dialogue. For example, the confrontation between the followers from Hagsgate and Schmendrick and company goes like this: “The magician stood erect, menacing the attackers with demons, metamorphoses, paralyzing ailments, and secret judo holds. Molly picked up a rock.”

A typical evening in King Haggard’s castle is described as follows: “And in the evenings, before she went to bed, she usually read over Prince Lír’s new poems to the Lady Amalthea, and praised them, and corrected the spelling.” Finally, Molly’s typical day is described:

“Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw.”

All of these uses of humor have a common effect: they break the empathic bond that the reader might form with the characters by drawing attention to themselves as devices of the author. There is no subtlety here, but a purposive and carefully planned exaggeration. The mechanics of the form are being laid bare, and the writer’s technique revealed. The basic critical question must by why, and the answer can be found in one final pattern of incongruity existing in the text: a consistent pattern of self-parody. The Last Unicorn is cast in the form of a fairy tale, and throughout the novel the various characters (but especially Schmendrick) make observations about the form and how their story fits it.

For example, in Hagsgate Drinn describes Prince Lír’s birth like this:

“‘I stood by the strange cradle for a long time, pondering while the snow fell and the cats purred prophecy.’ He stopped, and Molly Grue said eagerly, ‘You took the child home with you, of course, and raised it as your own.’ Drinn laid his hands palm up on the table. ‘I chased the cats away,’ he said, ‘and went home alone.… I know the birth of a hero when I see it,’ he said, ‘Omens and portents, snakes in the nursery. Had it not been for the cats, I might have chanced the child, but they made it so obvious, so mythological.’”

Molly, talking to Schmendrick about the apparent cruelty of leaving the child to die in the snow, says: “They deserve their fate, they deserve worse. To leave a child out in the snow—” Schmendrick, of course, knows better, and replies: “Well, if they hadn’t, he couldn’t have grown up to be a prince. Haven’t you ever been in a fairy tale before?” And on the next page he says: “It’s a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I’ve been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.”

Another reference to the story within the story occurs shortly after Schmendrick turns the unicorn into a human being:

“You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no. If you want to find your people, if you want to become a unicorn again, then you must follow the fairy tale to King Haggard’s castle, and wherever else it chooses to take you. The story cannot end without the princess.”

The exaggeration that we saw in Beagle’s description of Molly’s typical day is enlarged upon in Prince Lír’s discussion with Molly about his deeds:

“I have swum four rivers, each in full flood and none less than a mile wide. I have climbed seven mountains never before climbed, slept three nights in the Marsh of the Hanged Men, and walked alive out of that forest where the flowers burn your eyes and the nightingales sing poison. I have ended my betrothal to the princess I had agreed to marry—and if you don’t think that was a heroic deed, you don’t know her mother. I have vanquished exactly fifteen black knights waiting by fifteen fords in their black pavilions, challenging all who came to cross. And I’ve long since lost count of the witches in the thorny woods, the giants, the demons disguised as damsels; the glass hills, fatal riddles, and terrible tasks; the magic apples, rings, lamps, potions, swords, cloaks, boots, neckties, and nightcaps. Not to mention the winged horses, the basilisks and sea serpents, and all the rest of the livestock.”

Any one of these deeds, of course, would be sufficient to win the hand of the fair lady in the average fairy tale—but this is far from the average fairy tale. Prince Lír knows the way things are, and he tells the Lady Amalthea:

“My lady.… I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch’s door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophesies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”

After he becomes King, Lír says to Schmendrick: “A hero is entitled to his happy ending, when it comes at last.” But since Lír cannot have the Lady Amalthea, a substitute must arrive, and Beagle obliges. Just before Schmendrick and Molly ride off into the sunset, “out of this story and into another,” a damsel in distress (apparently out of another story, but certainly in need of a hero) rides up, saying:

“A rescue! a rescue, au secours! An ye be a man of mettle and sympathy, aid me now. I hight the Princess Alison Jocelyn, daughter to good King Giles, and him foully murdered by his brother, the bloody Duke Wulf, who hath ta’en my three brothers, the Princes Corin, Colin, and Calvin, and cast them into a fell prison as hostages that I will wed with his fat son, the Lord Dudley, but I bribed the sentinel and sopped the dogs—”

Shmendrick replies, apparently keeping a straight face: “Fair princess, the man you want just went that way.”

This continued reference to the story within the story has been called “metafantasy”, or more broadly “metafiction.” It is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, and it is perhaps somewhat surprising to see it as the centerpiece of Beagle’s communication with his audience. It certainly indicates that Beagle was not writing for children, or at least not for children only, in The Last Unicorn. Such a sophisticated technique can be used in a variety of ways, and we will see it again in Beagle’s later work.

Schmendrick and Molly and the others refuse to take themselves seriously in The Last Unicorn, and so the reader doesn’t take them seriously either. Beagle has carefully and lovingly created a work that satirizes and glorifies its form, much in the same way that the music of P.D.Q. Bach satirizes and pays homage to baroque music. Various forms of incongruity play a major role in the success of the enterprise.

Beagle published The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version, containing the text of his first start at The Last Unicorn from 1962, in 2006. He says in his Introduction that he began the book “with absolutely no plan for anything except a light, Nathanesque fable of modern society, and equipped only with a hazy vision of a unicorn journeying somewhere with some sort of companion.” He abandoned it after about eighty pages.

In The Lost Version the unicorn’s traveling companions were Azazel and Webster, the two heads and personalities of a demon exiled from hell. Beagle says the “snarky” dialogue between them “is clearly modeled after the conversations, private jokes, and role-playing games that Phil and I entertained ourselves with in those days, during long late-night waits for the D train, and in the cabin, and during our arduous scooter trip across America.” “Phil” was Phil Sigunick, Beagle’s closest childhood friend, with whom he rented a cabin in Massachusetts during the summer of 1962 and with whom he went on the trip memorialized in I See by My Outfit.

There are other significant differences from the published version as well. The butterfly was the one original character beyond the unicorn who survived, but its dialogue was wider-ranging. There was a dragon which was a major character which disappeared completely, and the time was most definitely the twentieth century instead of once-upon-a-time. Beagle in his Afterword says of both of these things that in order “to recast the story as a fairy-tale, the dragon had to go, along with the entire twentieth century.”

There are two encounters that stand out in The Lost Version, one with a beautiful female demon sent to pursue Azazel and Webster and who fools Azazel into giving her all of his jewelry, and the other with a modern city. The first is a source of mirth, as the demon is beaten at her own game, while the second appears merely to provide an excuse for Beagle’s lamentation on life in the modern world. Neither episode survived into the published version, although a fat man who tries to capture the unicorn while seeing her as only a horse appears with his wife in The Lost Version, and there is a encounter with a virgin that also survives.

Very little need be said here about The Lost Version. It is interesting only as a curiosity to committed fans, with little of the charm or metafictional elements which stand out in the published version. Beagle, however, has also published a short story sequel to The Last Unicorn that is worthy of examination. “Two Hearts,” winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Fantasy Novelette, first appeared in the October/November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and was reprinted in The Line Between in 2006. It is especially interesting that Beagle eventually wrote a sequel to The Last Unicorn, since in his Foreword to Giant Bones he asserted emphatically that “never for a moment did I feel the least interest…in what became of Molly Grue and Schmendrick the Magician.…” His fans apparently did, however, and Beagle obliged with “Two Hearts.”

The narrator of “Two Hearts” is a nine-year-old girl named Sooz, but the more interesting characters are Schmendrick, Molly, and King Lír. The story picks up the characters many years later, and shows us how life goes on for them.

Sooz tells us she will be ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. It stayed in the Midnight Wood, and ate sheep and goats until the last year, when it began eating children. The men tried to organize some sort of patrol, so they could see when the griffin, with its lion’s body and eagle’s wing, with its great front claws like teeth and a monstrous beak, was coming. They sent messages to the king, who sent first a single knight and then five knights together. They rode into the woods, and all but one were never seen again, and that one died before he could tell them what happened. The third time an entire squadron came, and after that they didn’t send to the king any more. Then the griffin took Felicitas, Sooz’s best friend even though she couldn’t talk. That was the night she set off to see the king herself.

She thought the king must live somewhere near Hagsgate, which was the only town she had ever seen. So she sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night and hid under some sheepskins in her Uncle Ambrose’s cart, knowing that he would leave for Hagsgate early in the morning. When they turned into the King’s Highway, she jumped out of the cart without being seen and watched it roll away down the road. She had never been so far from home before, or so lonely.

Sooz had no idea which way to go, and she didn’t even know the king’s name. She turned to the left, for no reason than that she wore a ring on her left hand that her mother had given her. She found a stream and drank until she couldn’t hold any more. She looked up only when she heard horses nearby, playing with the water. They were ordinary livery-stable horses, one brownish, one grayish. The gray one’s rider was out of the saddle, peering at the horse’s left forefoot. Both riders had on plain cloaks, dark green, and trews so worn you could hardly make out the color. She didn’t know one was a woman until she heard her voice. The other voice was lighter and younger-sounding, and Sooz already knew he was a man because he was so tall. The man started to get off of his brown horse to look at the other horse’s forefoot, but before he did so he placed two hands on his horse’s head and mumbled a few words that Sooz did not hear. Amazingly enough, the horse answered him.

The man looked at the hoof and discovered a stone splinter. He stood over it, as Sooz had seen the blacksmith do, but he had no blacksmith’s tools. Instead he sang to it, for a long time, until all at once he stopped singing and straightened up, holding something that glinted in the sun. He showed it to the horse, then threw it away.

He told the woman they ought to camp there; the horses were weary, and his back hurt. At that she laughed and said, “The greatest wizard wallking the world, and your back hurts? Heal it as you healed mine, the time the tree fell on me.” He touched her hair, which was thick and pretty, even though it was mostly gray. “You know how I am about that. I still like being mortal too much to use magic on myself. It spoils it somehow—it dulls the feeling. I’ve told you before.”

The woman sounded irritable for a moment, but then told him in a softer voice that she sometimes wished with all her heart that they could both live forever, and she thought he was a great fool to give it up. Then she remembered things she’d rather not remember, and she thought perhaps not. The tall man put his arms around her, and for a moment she rested her head upon his chest. Sooz didn’t hear what she said after that.

Although Sooz didn’t think she had made any noise, the man looked directly at her and said that they had food. She moved toward them, and they stood very still, waiting for her. Close to, the woman looked younger than her voice, and the tall man looked older. She wasn’t young at all, but the gray hair made her face look younger, and she held herself really straight. The woman’s face was not beautiful, but it was a face you’d want to snuggle up to on a cold night. The man first looked younger than her father, then older than anybody she ever saw. His eyes were the greenest green she had ever seen; greener than grass, greener than emeralds, maybe as green as the ocean, although she had never seen the ocean. If you go deep enough into the woods, sooner or later you will always come to a place where even the shadows are green. That was how green his eyes were. She was afraid of his eyes at first.

She told them, when they asked, that she was not lost, her name was Sooz, and she had to see the king. They looked at each other for a long time and the woman said that the king did not live nearby, but he did not live very far away, either, and they were going to visit him themselves. Sooz was immediately relieved, and said she would go along with them, but the woman was troubled. She said that they didn’t know how things were. The king was a good man, and a good friend, but people change, kings more than ordinary people.

The man replied that the two of them had once asked to be taken along on a quest; that he himself had begged, in fact. The woman, however, wouldn’t let up, insisting that they could be taking the girl into grave peril. They could not take the chance; it wasn’t right.

Sooz, though, interrupted. She was coming from great peril; there was a griffin nested in the wood, and he was eating children. She burst into tears. The woman comforted her, but she only stopped crying when the man pulled a big red handkerchief out of his pocket, twisted and knotted it into a bird-shape, and made it fly away.

The man’s name was Schmendrick, and the woman’s was Molly Grue. Molly told her the king’s name was Lír, and that they had known him when he was a young man, before he became king. He was a true hero, a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he is a good man. They aren’t always. But Molly was worried that he may have changed; he may no longer be the man he was. Schmendrick, though, took a notion that Lír needed them, so there they were. You couldn’t argue with him when he got like that.

Sooz replied that her mother said thay you just wait until he goes out, or is asleep, then do whatever you want. Molly told her Schmendrick and she were not married, just together, and they had been together quite a long while. To Sooz they looked married, sort of.

Sooz wondered if it would take them long to reach the king. Molly wanted to know what she expected when she met the king; what did she have in mind when she set off to find him? Sooz didn’t even have to think about it; she wanted the king to come and take care of the griffin himself. He’s the king; it’s his job.

They started off the next morning, Schmendrick singing a lot as they rode along, sometimes in languages she couldn’t make out a word of, sometimes making up silly songs to make her laugh, like this one:

“Soozli, Soozli,

speaking loozli,

you disturb my oozli-goozli.

Soozli, Soozli,

would you choozli

to become my squoozli-squoozli?”

He never did any magic, except once when he seemed to call a hawk to chase off a crow that kept diving at the horses. At least she guessed that was magic.

They passed through pretty country, which Schmendrick told her had all been barren desert where nothing grew before Lír. It was said the land was under a curse, but Lír changed everything. Except poor Hagsgate.

Schmendrick was sure that as soon as she told him her troubles he would snatch up his great sword and spear, whisk her up to his saddlebow, and be off after her griffin with the road smoking behind him. Young or old, that’s always been his way. Molly overworries; that’s her way. We are who we are. Schmendrick then sang another verse:

“Soozli, Soozli,

you amuse me,

right down to my solesli-shoesli.

Soozli, Soozli,

I bring newsli—

we could wed next stewsli-Tuesli.”

Sooz learned that the king had lived in a castle on a cliff by the sea when he was young, less than a day’s journey from Hagsgate, but it fell down—he would not say how—so he built a new one somewhere else. She was sorry about that, because she had never seen the sea, and she had always wanted to. But she had never seen a castle, either, so there was that.

It took them three full days to reach King Lír. Sooz was disappointed; the castle was pretty, but she wanted a fortress. The moment she saw that nice, friendly castle, with its one blue banner with a picture of a white unicorn on it, she was afraid the king would not help her, hero or not. They did not go to the top, either; Schmendrick led them through the great hall and on past the kitchens and the scullery and the laundry, to a room under a staircase. The king was in there, all by himself.

He was sitting in an ordinary chair, not a throne, and it was a really small room. Sooz was ready for him to have a long beard, spreading out all across his chest, but he only had a short one, like her father, except white. He wore a red and gold mantle, and there was a real golden crown upon his white head. He had a kind face, with a big old nose, and big blue eyes like a little boy. But his eyes were so tired and empty Sooz didn’t know how he kept them open. He peered at the three of them as if he knew them, but not why. He tried to smile.

Schmendrick very gently told him that it was Schmendrick and Molly Grue. Molly added that it was Molly with the cat—he remembered the cat, didn’t he? Schmendrick told Molly that she would often forget herself like that, and then Molly would always have to remind him that she was a unicorn.

At the word the king changed. All at once his eyes were clear and shining with feeling, like Molly’s eyes. He recognized them, and stood to embrace his friends. Sooz saw then that he had been a hero, that he was still a hero, and that maybe everything was going to be all right after all. She told him about the griffin eating children, and when she told him the name of her village he surprised her by saying he knew it, and he had been there. Now he would have the pleasure of returning.

They were interrupted by a small, dark woman who introduced herself as Lisene, the king’s secretary, translator, and protector. Schmendrick had never known him to need any of those things, especially a protector, but she told him: “Time sets its claw in us all, my lord, sooner or later. We are none of us that which we were.” The king sat down obediently in his chair and closed his eyes.

Schmendrick was angry, and growing angrier, but did not show it. Sooz knew it because that is how her father gets angry. He told Lisene that the king had agreed to return to the girl’s village with her to rid her people of a marauding griffin. They would leave the next day.

Lisene, however, would not hear of it. The king was in no fit condition for such a journey, let alone such a deed. They came seeking the peerless warrior they remembered, but found instead a spent, senile old man.

Schmendrick cut her off, eyes flashing. He pointed his finger at the woman, and Sooz expected her to catch fire. He said, “Hear me now, I am Schmendrick the magician, and I see my old friend Lír, as I have always seen him, wise and powerful and good, beloved of a unicorn.”

And with that word, a second time, the king woke up, blinked, and grasped the arms of the chair. He looked at Lisene, and told her he would go with them. It was his task and his gift; she would see to it that he was ready. When she begged him to reconsider, he reached out tenderly and took her head between his big hands; Sooz saw there was love between them. He said, “It is what I am for. You know that as well as he does. See to it, Lisene, and keep all well for me while I am gone.”

Lisene looked so sad, and so lost, that Sooz didn’t know what to think, about her, about the king, about anything. Lisene told the king that she would see to it. As she left the room, she turned and said to Schmendrick, “His death be on your head, magician.” Sooz thought she was crying, only not in the way that grownups do.

Schmendrick replied, with a voice so cold Sooz wouldn’t have recognized it if she hadn’t known it was him speaking, “He had died before. Better that death—better this, better any death—than the one he was dying in that chair. If the griffin kills him, it will yet have saved his life.” Sooz heard the door shut as Lisene left the room.

Sooz asked Molly what Schmendrick meant about the king having died before, but rather than answer Molly knelt at the king’s feet, took one of his hands between hers, and begged him to remember. The old man was swaying on his feet, but he placed his other hand on Molly’s head and assured Sooz that he would come to her village.

“The griffin was never hatched that dares harm King Lír’s people. But you must remind me, little one. When I…when I lose myself…when I lose her…you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting…that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place…I sit…because a king has to sit, you see…but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always with her.…”

Sooz had no idea what he was talking about then. Later, when she told the story, she did.

Lír fell asleep again, then, holding Molly’s hand. Sooz tried to write a letter home, but she fell asleep, too, and slept the rest of the day and all night, too. When she awoke Schmendrick was at her bedside, urging her to rise. They would start by noon, anyway, if he could get Lisene and the others to realize they were not coming along. When he said he might have to turn the lot of them to stone Sooz thought he was joking, but with Schmendrick you never knew. He told her King Lír was not mad, or senile; he was Lír still. She noticed the change in him when Schmendrick spoke of one unicorn who loved him. He had not seen her since he became king, Schmendrick told Sooz, but he is what he is because of her. When they spoke of her, or said her name, which they had not yet done, then he was recalled to himself, as they often had to do for her, so long ago. Sooz did not know that unicorns had names, or that they loved people, and Schmendrick explained that they did not, except this one. Her name was Amalthea.

When Sooz next saw the king he was so changed that she froze in the doorway and held her breath. Three men were bustling around him like tailors, dressing him with his armor. He looked like a giant. When he saw her he smiled, and it was a warm, happy smile but it was a little frightening, too. It was a hero’s smile; she had never seen one before. He asked her to come and buckle his sword. She managed to do so, and he swore to her that the next time that blade was drawn it would be to save her village.

When Schmendrick complained that it was four days’ ride, and that there was no need for armor until he faced the griffin, the king reminded him that he went forth as he intended to return; it was his way. Molly, seeing him in his armor, could only exclaim how grand and beautiful he was. Molly wished she could see him. The three of them stood there for a long time, then the king looked at Sooz and said, “The child is waiting.” And that was how they started off for Sooz’s home, the king, Schmendrick, Molly, and Sooz.

Sooz rode with the king most of the time. Lír assured her that his skittery black mare would be at her best when the griffin swooped down on her; it was only peaceful times that made her nervous. Sooz still didn’t like the mare much, but she did like the king. He didn’t sing to her, but he told her stories, real, true stories about things that happened to him. She knew she would never hear such stories again.

Lír told her many things, but when she asked him why the castle fell down, he wouldn’t exactly say. His voice became very quiet and faraway. “I forget things, little one.… I try to hold on, but I do forget.” She could never get him to say a word about the unicorn.

Lír’s mind kept moving in and out. Frequently at night he would wander away, and often Schmendrick or Sooz would bring his mind back in focus by mentioning the unicorn. One day he charged at a rutting stag that was pursuing them, and that night he sang an entire long song about the adventures of an outlaw named Captain Cully. Sooz had never heard of him, but it was a really good song. Lír apologized for putting her in danger; he had forgotten she was with him. Then he smiled that hero’s smile of his, and said, “But oh, little one, the remembering!”

They reached the village on the fourteenth day, and Schmendrick told Sooz it would be better to tell the people that this was just the king’s greatest knight, and not the king himself. She had to trust him; he always knew what he was doing. That was his trouble.

Sooz did as she was told, but her father was not happy about it. Just another knight would be dessert for the griffin; you could be sure the king would never come there himself. He might have cared once, but now he was an old man, and old kings only care about who is to be king after them.

The next morning when Sooz came to the camp, Molly was helping the king put on his armor and Schmendrick was burying the remains of the last night’s dinner. Sooz ran up to Lír and threw her arms around him, like Lisene, begging him not to go. The king kept trying to pet her with one hand and push her aside with the other. He said,

“No, no little one, you don’t understand. There are some monsters only a king can kill. I have always known that—I should never, never have sent those poor men to die in my place. No one else in all the land can do this for you, and for your village. Most truly now, it is my job.”

And he kissed her hand, just like he had kissed the hand of so many queens.

Molly came to her then and took her from him, telling her that there was no turning back for him now, or for her either. It was her fate to bring this last cause to him, and his fate to take it up. Neither of them could have done differently, being who they were. She must be as brave as he is, and see it all play out. Or rather she must learn about how it all plays out, because certainly she was not coming into the forest to see for herself.

They all of course had to say goodbye. Molly said she knew they would see each other again, and Schmendrick told her she had the makings of a real warrior queen, only he was certain that she was too smart to be one. King Lír said to her very quietly, so no one else could hear: “Little one, if I had married and had a daughter, I would have asked no more than that she should be as brave and kind and loyal as you. Remember that, as I will remember you to my last days.”

And then the three of them rode into the wood, only Molly looking back to make sure Sooz was not following. And perhaps she would not have followed, had it not been for her dog, Malka. Malka should have been with the sheep, of course; that was her job, just as being king and going to meet the griffin was Lír’s job. But to Malka Sooz was a sheep, too, the most stupid, aggravating sheep she had ever had to guard, forever wandering into some kind of danger. What Malka did was jump up on Sooz until she knocked her down, and then take the hem of her smock in her jaws and start tugging her in the direction the dog thought she should go. This time, though, after knocking Sooz down Malka stared past her at the wood with all the white showing in her eyes and making a sound Sooz didn’t think she could make. The next moment Malka was racing into the wood with foam flying from her mouth and her big ragged ears flat back. Sooz had no choice but to follow. Lír, Schmendrick, and Molly all had a choice, going after the griffin, but Malka did not know what she was facing, and Sooz could not let her face it alone.

Sooz ran and walked and ran again, following the hoofprints and the dog tracks, when all of a sudden the forest exploded a little way ahead of her. Malka was howling, and Schmendrick or the king or somebody was shouting, although she couldn’t make out the words. Underneath it all was something that wasn’t loud at all, a sound somewhere between a growl and that terribly soft call, like a child. Then just as she broke into the clearing she heard the rattle and scrape of knives, as the griffin shot straight up with the sun on its wings. Its cold golden eyes bit into hers, and its beak was open so wide you could see down and down into the blazing red gullet. It filled the sky.

And King Lír, astride his black mare, filled the clearing. He was as huge as the griffin, and his sword was the size of a boar spear. He shook it at the griffin, daring it to light down and fight him on the ground. But the griffin stayed out of range, circling overhead to get a good look at these strange new people. Malka screamed and hurled herself into the air again and again, snapping at the lion’s feet and eagle claws, but coming down each time without so much as an iron feather between her teeth. The last time she leaped the griffin swooped and caught her full on her side with one huge wing, so hard she couldn’t get a sound out. She flew all the way across the clearing, slammed into a tree, fell to the ground, and after that she did not move.

Molly told Sooz later that that was when King Lír struck for the griffin’s lion heart. Sooz did not see it; she was flying across the clearing herself, throwing herself over Malka in case the griffin came after her again. She did hear the griffin’s roar when it happened, and when she could turn her head she saw the blood splashing along its side. Lír threw his sword into the air, caught it, and charged in for the kill, ignoring Schmendrick who was standing by yelling, “Two hearts, two hearts!” until his voice split with it. Sooz didn’t know what happened right then; all she was seeing and thinking about was Malka, feeling her heart not beating under her own. Malka, who guarded her cradle when she was born; Malka, on whose ear she had cut her teeth.

King Lír wasn’t seeing or hearing any of them. There was nothing in the world for him but the griffin. When it flopped and struggled lopsidedly in the clearing, he got down from his black mare and went up to it, and spoke to it, lowering his sword until its point was on the ground: “You were a noble and terrible adversary—surely the last such I will ever confront. We have accomplished what we were born to do, the two of us. I thank you for your death.”

And on that last word, the griffin had him. It was the eagle, lunging up at him, dragging the dead lion half along. King Lír stepped back, swinging the sword fast enough to take off the griffin’s head, but the griffin was faster. The dreadful beak caught him at the waist, shearing through his armor the way an axe would smash through pie crust. There was blood, and worse; she could not have said if the king were dead or alive. Sooz thought the griffin was going to bite him in two.

Schmendrick could do nothing, since he had promised Lír that he would not intervene by magic. Sooz was not a magician, though, and she had not promised anyone anything. The griffin did not see her coming. She had a big rock in her left hand and a dead branch in her right, and the griffin looked up fast when the rock hit it on the side of the neck. It didn’t like that, but it was too busy with King Lír to bother with her. She threw the branch as far as she could, and as soon as the griffin looked away she made a big sprawling dive for the hilt of the king’s sword. She knew she could lift it because she had buckled it on him, but she couldn’t get it free; he was lying on it and was too heavy. She kept pulling on the sword, while Molly kept pulling on her, and the griffin lifted her up and threw her on top of the king, his cold armor so cold against her cheek it was as if his armor had died with him.

Griffins do not speak, as dragons can (but only to heros, Lír had told her). But as the griffin looked into her eyes, it was as if it was telling her that although it would die, it had killed them all, and it would pick their bones before the ravens had his. The people would remember it, and what it did, when there was no one left who would remember her name. So it had won. And there was nothing but that beak and that burning gullet opening over her.

And then there was. Sooz thought it was a white cloud, only traveling so low and so fast that it smashed the griffin off King Lír and and away from Sooz and sent her tumbling into Molly’s arms at the same time. Molly held her tight, and it wasn’t until she wriggled her head free that she saw what had come to them.

They didn’t look anything like horses; Sooz didn’t know how people got that idea. Schmendrick was on his knees, with his eyes closed and his lips moving, as though he was singing. Molly kept whispering, “Amalthea…Amalthea…,” not to Sooz, not to anybody. The unicorn was facing the griffin across the king’s body, dancing with its front hooves, and with its head up. Then it put its head down.

Dying or not, the griffin put up a furious fight. It wasn’t a bit fair, though, and Sooz did not feel sorry for the griffin. With its last strength the griffin flung itself on the unicorn, trying to rake its back and bite down on its neck as it had with the king, but the unicorn reared up, flung the griffin to the ground, whirled and drove its horn straight into the eagle heart.

Schmendrick and Molly raced to King Lír. He was still alive, barely. He did not know them, but he knew Sooz. As he looked past her he saw the unicorn, and his face was suddenly young and happy and wonderful. All you could see in the unicorn’s dark eyes was King Lír. Sooz moved aside so she could get to him, but when she turned back he was gone. She was nine, almost ten; she knew when people were gone.

The unicorn stood over King Lír’s body for a long time. Sooz went off the sit beside Malka, and Molly went with her. Schmendrick stayed by the body of the king, quietly talking to the unicorn. Sooz couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could tell he was asking for something, a favor. Unicorns can’t talk, either, but after a while it turned its head and looked at him. Schmendrick walked away.

Sooz and Molly talked about Malka, each trying to comfort the other. Sooz did not notice the unicorn until the horn came slanting over her shoulder. The horn touched Malka, just where Sooz had been stroking her, and Malka opened her eyes. It took her a while to understand she was alive, and it took Sooz longer. She only started crying when Malka licked her face.

When Malka saw the unicorn she did a funny thing. She stared at it for a moment, then made a bow or curtsy, in a dog way. The unicorn nosed at her, very gently. It looked at Sooz for the first time; or maybe Sooz looked at it for the first time. What the unicorn’s eyes did was to free her from the griffin’s eyes. The unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world that Sooz was never going to see, and it didn’t matter any more because she had seen it and it was beautiful.

None of them saw the unicorn go. Sooz heard Schmendrick tell Molly: “A dog. I nearly killed myself singing her to Lír, calling her as no other has ever called a unicorn—and she brings back, not him, but the dog. And here I’d always thought she had no sense of humor.”

But Molly told him it was because she loved him, too. That was why she let him go.

Sooz worried that she would never see them again, any more than she would see the king. But again Molly had an answer. She gave Sooz a tune to whistle on her seventeenth birthday, and assured her that someone would come to her. Maybe it would be the greatest magician in the world, or maybe just an old lady with a soft spot for impudent children. Maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see her again, and will be listening for her. Someone will come.

They took her home, on their way to taking the king to his long home, and Molly reminded her to wait until she is seventeen. Sooz practices the music in her head every day, and even dreams it some nights, but she never whistles it aloud. She talks to Malka about their adventure, because she has to talk to someone. Promises her that on that special day in the special place she has already picked out, Malka will be there with her.

Sooz hopes it is them. A unicorn is very nice, but they are her friends. She wants to feel Molly holding her again, and hear the stories Molly didn’t have time to tell her. She wants to hear Schmendrick singing the old song again:

“Soozli, Soozli,

speaking loozli,

you disturb my oozli-goozli.

Soozli, Soozli,

would you choozli

to become my squoozli-squoozli?”

She could wait.

In “Two Hearts” Beagle gives his readers what they want, more about Schmendrick and Molly and Lír, and especially more about the unicorn. He also gives them a reiteration of some of his most important themes from the earlier work. But the writer of “Two Hearts” is almost forty years older than the writer of The Last Unicorn, and it would be strange indeed if he still saw the world the same way. Indeed, we see that Schmendrick and Molly no longer epitomize what they stated explicitly in The Last Unicorn: that we are what people think us, and we become what we pretend to be. There is no more need for pretense. In “Two Hearts” people do what they must, being who they are. The difference is significant.

It is also significant that the two hearts of the title is a pun in Beagle’s inimitable style. On one level, the two hearts are those of the griffin, the heart of a lion and the heart of an eagle. But to the reader the two hearts are those of Schmendrick and Molly Grue, beating together over the years.

Beagle’s sense of humor is not so overpowering in “Two Hearts.” There is the occasional pun, the occasional snide look back to the earlier text, and the iterated ironic song. But the main purpose here is nostalgia; the reader wants to know whatever happened to Schmendrick and Molly and Lír and the unicorn. And a secondary purpose is looking forward; Beagle sets up his sequel. On her seventeenth birthday, Sooz will whistle Molly’s tune, and someone will come. No doubt the ensuing adventure will include Schmendrick and Molly, and probably the successor to King Lír. The unicorn will figure into the climax, as she did in “Two Hearts.” And I wouldn’t bet against Sooz turning out to be the warrior queen at the center of it all.

For not only did Beagle write a short story sequel for The Last Unicorn, he has gone on record in the foreword to it in The Line Between promising a novel-length sequel. When or whether it will see the light of day remains to be seen.

A multi-issue comic book adaptation of The Last Unicorn, published by I.D.W., appeared in 2010. Adapted by Peter B. Gillis and with art by Renae De Liz, the first issue takes the unicorn through the confrontation with the butterfly while the second continues through Mommy Fortuna and her meeting with Schmendrick. The first issue contains a new Introduction by Beagle and the first part of “A Conversation With Peter S. Beagle,” originally posted on the internet. The second part appeared, naturally enough, in the second issue, and was concluded in the third. All six parts were combined in a graphic novel, published in February, 2011.

The illustrations are handsome, inspired by the animated film, perhaps, but ultimately a complete visual reimagining. They are printed with a mauve or lavender cast, which gives the art an appropriately sad nostalgia. The adaptation is straightforward, but as you might expect from the format opts for the simple rather than the complex, and thus the wonderful comic irony of the original is mostly lost. This is virtually inevitable in any adaptation, which by definition must be briefer than the original; the screenplay for the animated film suffered from the same defect, and Beagle wrote that adaptation himself. The released version of the film cut even more or Beagle’s script, as he makes clear in his narration on the Blu-Ray version released in 2011.

The animated film version, comic books, and the graphic novel are interesting in themselves, if less so than the work upon which they were based, and have served and will serve as an introduction to one of the great modern fantasy novels for a new generation of readers.