“I had an uncle,” said the wizard, “who hunted the creature, bagged one, cut out its ball of gold, and proceeded to eat the entire thing in one bound. After that, my uncle was sane only five times a day. Always, he had his hands up. His tongue was always wagging, his eyes shivering. He walked away from home one night when no one was watching. He wandered into the forest. There were reports for a while of a ragged holy man but then a visitor returned his ring and watch and told us his head had been found. Once it was safely under glass, I performed my first magic on it and had it tell me about its final appointment with a Manticore.
“Take a lock of this hair, boy, when we’re done,” he said. “When you get old, tie it into a knot and wear it in your vest pocket. It will ward off danger… to an extent.”
“How fast do they run?” I asked.
“How fast?” he said, and then he stopped walking. A breeze blew through the windows and porticos of the work room. He turned quickly and looked over his shoulder out the window. Storm clouds, lush hedge, and a humidity of roses and cinnamon. The flies now swarmed. “That fast,” he said. “Draw it.”
“Notice,” he said, “there is no wound. The hunters didn’t kill it. It died of old age and they found it.” He stood very silent, his hands behind his back. I wondered if he’d run out of things to say. Then he cleared his throat and said, “There’s a point at which a wince and a smile share the same shape and intensity, almost but not quite the same meaning. It’s at that point and that point alone that you can begin to understand the beast’s scorpion tail. Sleek, black, poisonous, and needle sharp, it moves like lightening, piercing flesh and bone, depositing a chemical that halts all memory. When stung you want to scream, to run, to aim your crossbow at its magenta heart, but alas… you forget.”
“I’m drawing it,” I said. “Excellent,” he said and ran his free hand over one of the smooth sections of the scorpion tail. “Don’t forget to capture the forgetting.” He laughed to himself. “The Manticore venom was at one time used to cure certain cases of melancholia. There’s very often some incident from the past at the heart of depression. The green poison, measured judiciously, and administered with a long syringe to the corner of the eye, will instantly paralyze memory, negating the cause of sorrow. There was one fellow, I’d heard, who took too much of it and forgot to forget—he remembered everything and could let nothing go. His head filled up with every second of every day and it finally exploded.
“The poison doesn’t kill you, though. It only dazes you with the inability to remember, so those teeth can have their way. There are those few who’d been stung by the beast but not devoured. In every case, they described experiencing the same illusion—an eye-blink journey to an old summer home, with four floors of guest rooms, sunset, mosquitoes. For the duration of the poison’s strength, around two days, the victim lives at this retreat… in the mind, of course. There are cool breezes as the dark comes on, moths against the screen, the sound of waves far off, and the victim comes to the conclusion that he or she is alone. I suppose to die while in the throes of the poison, is to stay alone at that beautiful place by the sea for eternity.”
I spoke without thinking, “Every aspect of the beast brings you to eternity—the smile, the purest gold, the sting.”
“Write that down,” said Watkin. “What else can you say of it?”
“I remember that day I came to serve you,” I said, “and on the long stretch through the poplars, my carriage was stopped due to a dead body in the road. As the carriage passed, I peered out to see a bloody mess on the ground. You were one of the people in the crowd.”
“You can’t understand my invisible connection to these creatures—a certain symbiosis. I feel it in my lower back. Magic becomes a pin hole shrinking into the future,” he said.
“Can you bring the monster back to life?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way. I have something else in mind.” He stepped over to a work bench, left the cane there and lifted a hatchet. Returning to the body of the creature, he walked slowly around it to the tail. “That was my wife you saw in the road that day. Killed by a Manticore—by this very Manticore.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d think you’d have tried harder to kill it.”
“Don’t try to understand,” he said. He lifted the hatchet high above his head, and then with one swift chop, severed the stinger from the tail of the creature. “Under the spell of the poison, I will go to the summer house and rescue her from eternity.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“You can’t go. You could be stranded in eternity with my wife and me—think of that,” said Watkin. “No, there’s something else I need you to do for me while I’m under the effects of the venom. You must take the head of the Manticore into the forest and bury it. Their heads turn into the roots of trees, the fruit of which are Manticore pups. You’ll carry the last seed.” He used the hatchet to sever the creature’s head while I dressed for the outdoors.
I’d learned to ride a horse before I went to serve the wizard, but the forest at night frightened me. I couldn’t shake the image of Watkin’s palm impaled on the tip of the black stinger and him rapidly accruing dullness, gagging, his eyes rolling back behind their lids. I carried the Manticore head in a woolen sac tied to the saddle and trembled at the prospect that perhaps Watkin was wrong and the one sprawled on the work table, headless and tailless, was not the last. For my protection, he’d given me a spell to use if it became necessary—a fistful of yellow powder and a half dozen words I no longer remembered.
I rode through the dark for a few minutes and had quickly had enough of it. I dismounted and dug a hole at the side of the path, standing my torch upright in it. It made a broad circle of light on the ground. I retrieved the shovel I’d brought and the head. After nearly a half hour of digging, I began to hear a slight murmuring sound coming from somewhere close by me. I thought someone was spying from a darker part of the forest, and then I took it for the whirring of a Manticore’s tri-toothed jaws and was paralyzed by fear. Two minutes later, I realized the voice was coming from inside the sack. When I looked, the smile was facing out. The Manticore’s eyes went wide, that chasm of a mouth opened, flashing three-way ivory, and she spoke in a foreign language.
I took her out of the sack, set her head up at the center of the circle of torch light, brushed back her hair, and listened to the beautiful sing-song language. Later, after waking from a kind of trance brought on by the flow of words, I remembered the spell Watkin had given me. Laying the powder out on the upturned palm of my hand, I aimed it carefully and blew it into the creature’s face. She coughed. I’d forgotten the words, so said anything that I recalled them sounding like. Then she spoke to me, and I understood her.
“Eternity,” she said and then repeated it, methodically, with the precise same intonation again and again and again…
I grabbed the shovel and started digging. By the time I had dug a deep enough hole, my nerves were frayed by her repetition, and I couldn’t fill the dirt in fast enough. When the head was thoroughly buried, its endless phrase still sounding, muffled, beneath the ground, I tamped the soil down and then found an odd looking green rock, like a fist, to mark the spot for future reference.
Watkin never returned from the place by the sea. After the venom wore off, his body was lifeless. I then became the wizard. No one seemed to care that I knew nothing about magic. “Make it up till you’ve got it,” said the King. “Then spread it around.” I thanked him for his insight, but was aware he’d eaten pure gold and now, when not soaring in his dreams, was rarely sane. The years came and went, and I did my best to learn the devices, potions, phenomena, that Watkin had bothered to record. I suppose there was something of magic in it, but it wasn’t readily recognizable.