Ian had never seen a unicorn’s horn before, although he knew that the king of Denmark had an entire throne made of them. A unicorn’s horn is a thing of power. It purifies water, nullifies poison. The witch reached out to Ian, slit his thumb with her one long nail, so his thumb ran blood. Then she touched the wound with a piece of horn. His thumb healed before his eyes, healed as if it had never been cut, the blood running back inside, the cut sealing over like water.
In return Ian gave the witch what she asked. He had given her his godliness, too, but he didn’t know this at the time. When the witch was gone, Ian took the horn and ground it into dust. He subjected it to one more test of authenticity. He mixed a few grains into a hemlock concoction and fed it to his cat, stroking it down her throat. The cat followed the hemlock with a saucer of milk, which she wiped, purring, from her whiskers.
Ian had already put down a very fine single malt whiskey, many bottles, enough for the entire McBane clan to toast the coronation of Charles Stuart. It was golden in color and 90 proof, enough to make a large man feel larger without incapacitating him. Ian added a few pinches of the horn to every bottle. The whiskey color shattered and then vanished, so the standing bottle was filled with liquid the color of rainwater, but if you shook it, it pearled like the sea. Ian bottled his brew with a unicorn label, the unicorn enraged, two hooves slicing the air.
Have you ever heard of the American ghost dancers? The Boxers of China? Same sort of thing here. Ian distributed his whiskey to the McBanes before they marched off to Culloden. Ian assured them that the drink, taken just before the battle, would make them invulnerable. Sword wounds would seal up overnight; bullets would pass through flesh as if it were air.
I don’t suppose your Disney says very much about Culloden. A massacre is a hard thing to set to music. Certainly they tell no stories and sing no songs about the McBanes that day. Davie McBane was the first to go, reeling about drunkenly and falling beneath one of the McBanes’ own horses. Little Angus went next, shouting and racing down the top of a small hill, but before he could strike a single blow for Scotland, a dozen arrows jutted from him at all points. His name was a joke and he made a big, fat target. His youngest brother, Robbie, a boy of only fifteen years, followed Angus in, and so delirious with whiskey that he wore no helmet and carried no weapon. His stomach was split open like a purse. An hour later, only two of the McBanes still lived. The rest had died grotesquely, humorously, without accounting for a single enemy death.
When news reached home, the McBane wives and daughters armed themselves with kitchen knives and went in search of Ian. They thought he had lied about the unicorn horn; they thought he had knowingly substituted the inferior tooth of a fish instead. Ian was already gone, and with enough time and forethought to have removed every bottle of the unicorn brew and taken it with him. This confirmed the women’s suspicions, but the real explanation was different. Ian had every expectation the whiskey would work. When the McBanes returned, he didn’t wish to share any more of it.
The women set fire to his home and his brewery. Ian saw it from a distance, from a boat at sea, exploding into the sky like a star. The women dumped every bottle of whiskey they found until the rivers bubbled and the fish swam upside down. But none of the whiskey bore the unicorn label. Ian was never seen or heard from again.
“Whiskey is subtle stuff. It’s good for heartache; it works a treat against shame. But, even laced with unicorn horn, it cannot mend a man who has been split in two by a sword stroke. It cannot mend a man who no longer has a head. It cannot mend a man with a dozen arrows growing from his body like extra arms. It cannot give a man back his soul.”
The story seemed to be over, although Prince Charles had never appeared in it. Bobby had no feeling left in his hand. “I see,” he said politely.
McBean shook him once, then released him. He fetched a pipe. When he lit a match, he held it to his mouth and his breath flamed like a dragon’s. “What will I do to you if you tell anyone?” he asked Bobby. This was a rhetorical question. He continued without pausing. “Something bad. Something so bad you’d have to be an adult even to imagine it.”
• • •
SO BOBBY TOLD ME none of this. I didn’t see him again that day. He did not come by, and when I finally went over, his mother told me he was home, but that he was not feeling well, had gone to bed. “Don’t worry,” she said, in response, I suppose, to the look on my face. “Just a chill. Nothing to worry about.”
He missed school the next day and the next after that. When I finally saw him, he was casual. Offhand. As if it had all happened so long ago he had forgotten. “He caught me,” Bobby said. “He was very angry. That’s all. We better not do it again.”
It was the end of our efforts to put a Stuart on the throne. There are days, I admit, when I’m seeing the dentist and I pick up People in the waiting room and there they are, the current sad little lot of Windsors, and I have a twinge of guilt. I just didn’t care enough to see it through. I enjoyed Charles and Diana’s wedding as much as the next person. How was I to know?
Bobby and I were less and less friends after that. It didn’t happen all at once, but bit by bit, over the summer mostly. Sex came between us. Bobby went off and joined Little League. He turned out to be really good at it, and he met a lot of boys who didn’t live so near to us but had houses he could bike to. He dumped me, which hurt in an impersonal, inevitable way. I believed I had brought it on myself, leaving him that day, going home to a warm house and never saying a word to anyone. At that age, at that time, I did not believe this was something a boy would have done.
So Bobby and I continued to attend the same school and see each other about in our yards, and play sometimes when the game was big and involved other people as well. I grew up enough to understand what our parents thought of McBean, that he was often drunk. This was what had made his nose purple and made him rave about the Stuarts and made him slip in his snowy yard, his arms flapping like wings as he fell. “It’s a miracle,” my mother said, “that he never breaks a bone.” But nothing much more happened between Bobby and me until the year we turned sixteen, me in February, him in May.
He was tired a lot that year and developed such alarming bruises under his eyes that his parents took him to a doctor who sent him right away to a different doctor. At dinner a few weeks later, my mother said she had something to tell me. Her eyes were shiny and her voice was coarse. “Bobby has leukemia,” she said.
“He’ll get better,” I said quickly. Partly I was asking, but mostly I was warning her not to tell me differently. I leaned into her and she must have thought it was for comfort, but it wasn’t. I did it so I wouldn’t be able to see her face. She put her arm around me, and I felt her tears falling on the top of my hair.
Bobby had to go to Indianapolis for treatments. Spring came, and summer, and he missed the baseball season. Fall, and he had to drop out of school. I didn’t see him much, but his mother was over for coffee sometimes, and she had grown sickly herself, sad and thin and gray. “We have to hope,” I heard her telling my mother. “The doctor says he is doing as well as we could expect. We’re very encouraged.” Her voice trembled defiantly.
Bobby’s friends came often to visit; I saw them trooping up the porch, all vibrant and healthy, stamping the slush off their boots and trailing their scarves. They went in noisy, left quiet. Sometimes I went with them. Everyone loved Bobby, though he lost his hair and swelled like a beached seal and it was hard to remember that you were looking at a gifted athlete, or even a boy.