Unicorn Tracks (6 page)

When I finished setting up the tents, I found a seat on a rock as far away from her as possible and took my binoculars out to study the fields below. We were here to find answers, not play with the horses. They probably would have been happier left to graze on their own anyway.

A herd of wildebeest browsed the grass below us in the open field, with zebra and abada dotted amongst them. Watching the two-horned abada peacefully munch grass alongside the other animals, I was suddenly curious what made Kara and her father think that they were another species of unicorn. True, they had an equine-style body, with horns and hairy legs, but zebra stripes wound up their hind legs and their tails were tufted like a great cat’s. Their behavior was nothing like the unicorns: living in massive herds, grazing out in the open with little regard for humans or predators. Unicorns had a presence, a sense of majesty that the abada lacked. Since they wandered alongside the herds of wildebeest and zebra, I’d always assumed the abada was some sort of hybrid of the two.

I stole a glance over at Kara. She had stopped petting the horses and taken a seat herself, looking down the tunnel of her binoculars. Her head followed the herd, and I could guess what she focused on. A small foal trailed one of the abadas, head-butting his mother’s side with his blunt baby horns. His gangly legs twisted, and he toppled forward onto his muzzle, whinnying until his mother nosed him back onto his feet. Kara’s lips curved into a smile. I chuckled.

She looked up and scowled when she saw me watching her. Setting her mouth in a tight frown, she looked straight ahead again.

“Come on,” I said, a little nervous now that she might not speak to me at all for the rest of the stakeout. And what would Tumelo do if she told him about my outburst? The camp couldn’t afford to get a reputation for hiring rude guides with a temper. Maybe he’d finally do what my mama kept begging and send me home. “I had to drag you out. Those mermaids would have killed you. I’m sorry I shot the rabbit like that and didn’t explain things to you, though.”

Kara glared out across the field for a moment before sighing. She turned to face me. “I guess I’m not really angry with you.”

I let out a slow breath in relief.

“I’m just angry that there is so much I don’t know. There’s so much that’s not part of our literature at all. Most of our naturalists and scientists are away studying Zanchen and other places so far to the west. Nazwimbe is hard to get to. The only way is by ship and then by horse over land. The scientists that do come here, they all want to look at the griffins, hydras, leopards… killers.” Her shoulders sagged. “I just wish I had more time to study and have a life.”

I stood up and sat down on the rock beside her. “Can’t you just turn him down? Or delay it? Is there a timeline?”

“I have two years. Since I’m younger than him, when I turn eighteen, we have to get married. It’s the law.”

“Some birthday present.”

She laughed, but it was hollow.

I pointed out a group of baboons stooping by the edge of the lake to drink, hoping to distract her. She peered down at them, watching the babies dunk each other in the shallows. Slowly, she lost her thoughts in Nazwimbe.

The tourists who visited us always talked about how backward we were here, discussing the shortcomings of my country in front of me as if I were invisible. Our huts were too simple, our technology unrefined, our food too bland. We didn’t have buggies, and the potholes in our dirt roads made them sick to their stomachs. No streetlamps replaced the stars as our midnight guides. Sometimes, when I listened to them talk about their libraries full of books, their jewelry, and big, multilevel houses, I envied all the things they had. But we didn’t have a law that forced us to marry a person we didn’t want. Men could take more than one bride in Nazwimbe, a practice Echalenders found barbaric, but only if all the girls were willing. They all had to want him. In Nazwimbe, our General horsewhipped those who forced a girl to marry outside her will, and bride prices were illegal. I valued that little bit of freedom more than oil lamps.

A cloud of dust appeared on the horizon, growing larger on the edge of the savanna. I picked up my binoculars again and focused in on it. I expected more wildebeest or maybe the water buffalo herd. They liked to come down for an afternoon soak in the lake’s muddy banks. Instead I saw riders. A group of more than two dozen men cantered toward the ancient baobab tree.

Most of the men looked like highway robbers or beggars. They wore shirts strewn with reddish dirt and trousers so full of holes it was a mystery how they stayed on. Their bodies were lean, skin tough and ashy from days spent working in the sun. Pelvis bones and ribs jutted under their mounts’ rain-rotted coats. But at the front of the vagabond cavalcade, an elegant businessman rode a foreign chestnut stallion. The stallion’s coat was polished like a brass plate, and his body was fleshed with muscle. The man wore a top hat, black pants, and a red vest, the style many of the Echalenders favored, but his skin was dark.

“Kara!” I hissed. They were too far away to hear us, but the look of the gang made me nervous. We were not supposed to be here, I was sure of it. We were not supposed to see whatever it was they were about to do. If they saw us, who knew what they would do to make sure we couldn’t give information away.

There were hundreds of baobab trees in Nazwimbe, but this one was especially remote with nothing but our camp for over fifteen miles. Their leader had picked it with care. The cliff sloped upward at the top, so our position concealed our stakeout camp, but while we sat up like this, gazing below, the men would easily see us once they drew closer.

Kara still sat angled toward the lake, watching the baboons chase each other and scoop algae out of the shallow water. She turned to me, her binoculars still held midair. I pointed toward the group. She looked down the lens and froze. We crouched low, looking over the ridge.

The men lined up, forming a crescent shape around the back of the huge tree. They dismounted, and one of them pulled a black box from his saddlebag. He scurried forward, bowing as he handed it to the man in the top hat. The leader opened the box and pulled out a semi-opaque stone the size of a watermelon. My jaw slackened. It was the biggest moonstone I’d ever seen.

He bent down and placed the stone in what looked like a hole in the ground. I twisted the dials on my binoculars, zooming in, and squinted. The hole was part of a long channel, narrow—a foot wide at most—that seemed to feed back into the lake. When we had investigated before, I’d been so transfixed by the sight of the horns that I hadn’t noticed the canal. A definite failure for a tracker. The leader stepped back and accepted a flask from one of his followers. The stone pulsed, then glowed white, casting an eerie light over the baobab tree. I felt the ground tremor.

For a moment, Kara and I sat with bated breath. I half expected a wild stampede of unicorns to materialize on the horizon beyond the lake. Instead we listened to the bored snorts of the horses below, the clash of horns as two abada stallions sparred off, and the ever-present, soft melody of the phoenixes.

Then Kara grabbed my arm. A charge of energy traveled from my wrist up to my heart as I turned to follow where she was looking. A lone stallion cantered across the field, whiter than summer clouds. His body heaved with muscle; thick feathers fanned his black hooves. Neck arched proudly, he carried a regal horn, twisted to the top with silver. The riders dismounted and reached for their lassos.

When he reached the baobab tree, the unicorn looked around in confusion. The trance of the moonstone seemed to break with the humans closing in on him. He sniffed the horns around him, squealing and pawing the ground in distress. Three of the riders threw their ropes, catching him around the neck. As he struggled to back away, the others advanced. Men taunted the stallion with their whips, making him kick and try to rear. When his feet lifted, they threw more ropes, circling the nooses around his powerful feet. As a group, they wrestled the unicorn to the ground, throwing themselves on top of him the moment his knees touched the grass.

Even with the weight of six on his back and men all around holding ropes anchoring him to the ground, the stallion kept fighting. His eyes rolled back in his head, his legs thrashed, and I could hear his screams from the cliff. I’d never heard a unicorn make a sound before, and hearing it now sent a chill through my entire body. His screams were different than a horse, higher in pitch, with a vibrating tremor that made him sound almost like a singer at the crescendo of a magnificent performance.

The leader of the group advanced on the now subdued unicorn, holding what looked like a handsaw. The stallion tried frantically to spear the man with his horn, but three of the followers held the animal’s head in place. Still he tried, snorting and staring his captor in the eye, silver-tipped horn poised like a sword toward the leader’s heart.

Kill him
, I found myself praying.
Fight them. Kill him, and it’ll all be over.

The saw began to tremble in the man’s hand as he swiped it again and again across the base of the stallion’s horn. Fragments the size of fingernail clippings covered the earth like snow. Beside me, I felt Kara start to shake. Her whole frame quivered with silent sobs. The horn fell to the ground, and all at once the stallion quit struggling. The men climbed off him and loosened their hold on the ropes that bound him.

The group’s leader reached for one of the ropes around the unicorn’s neck. He turned and the stallion followed him, as meek as an old broodmare. His eyes seemed to blink back a heavy sadness, the only echo of his proud battle song.

THEY CAPTURED
another before they rode away: a filly, small and with delicate-looking legs and bones. The men underestimated her, and I almost cheered when she drove her horn into the thigh of one of her would-be captors. When they finally wrestled her to the ground, her success cost her. The injured man’s friends whipped her mercilessly until her white coat ran with dark blood.

When their dust trail cleared on the horizon, Kara pulled her knees up to her chest. Her eyes and cheeks were puffy with tears. She struggled to speak, but her voice choked and clogged. “I’ve never seen anything so awful. I’ve been dreaming about seeing the unicorns for years. When that stallion appeared, he was everything I’d ever imagined and more… beyond beautiful. And what they did to him… what they made him….”

I nodded, wrapping my arm around her shaking back.

“I want to know what they do with them,” she said, wiping her eyes and peering up at me. “I have to know.”

“I don’t think we want to know.”

She lifted her head from my shoulder and looked me in the eye. “No, I have to know. Not knowing is the worst for me. I’ll imagine everything possible. We have to find out. Please.”

The way her blue eyes widened would be my undoing.

I knew those men were dangerous. They carried guns and whips and braved the unicorn’s sharp horn to get what they wanted. If they could wrestle down a 1300-pound unicorn stallion, a beast made of solid muscle, what could they do to us? Plus, I’d never seen a stone like that before. It seemed to harness energy from the lake. But, against all logic and sense of self-preservation, I found my mouth forming the words: “It’s only noon now. We still have the night and the morning tomorrow before anyone will expect them back… if they’ve not gone more than a few miles, I could track them.”

Kara sprang up. “Tell me how I can help.”

“It’s not safe,” I warned, climbing slowly to my feet. My knees ached from crouching so low for so long. “Bi Trembla will hang me from my feet and skin me alive if she ever finds out I agreed to this.”

I didn’t say that Tumelo would fire me, even though I was sure he would. Cousins or not, there was only so far I could push. This would cross the line. I had avoided my village for so long that the camp had become my home. I closed my eyes to clear a wash of nostalgia. At least if he sent me home, I’d be out of reach of Bi Trembla’s wrath.

“I won’t say a word,” she whispered. “My father can’t know either. He’s progressive, but he would keep me chained to his side until I marry if he learned I went chasing after a poaching gang.”

I spat into my palm and offered it to her. When Kara wrinkled her nose in revulsion, I chuckled. “That’s how we seal a deal in Nazwimbe.”

She rolled her eyes but spat into her own hand and shook mine.

I dismantled the tents while Kara grouped the horses together, tightened their girths, and offered the mules some water from her canteen. It wasn’t ideal, tracking a group while dragging three pack animals behind us, but there was no way we could bring them back to the camp without raising Bi Trembla’s suspicion. When I went tracking for practice, deep out in the wild, I liked to go with just my horse, another person, a gun, and enough water to survive. I could find shelter beneath a tree, or sleep under the stars, gather berries, and hunt rabbits. Traveling light made it hard for someone—or something—else to follow your trail, while you followed them.

We mounted up and carefully steered our horses down the ridge to the base of the baobab tree. I could see the area where the two unicorns had fought for their freedom. A jagged circle of frantically trampled grass and the heavy impressions their knees made on the soft earth remained. Kara dismounted again and went to retrieve the stallion’s horn. She ran her hands along the silver ridges and then tucked it into one of our supply packs.

“I can’t see which one belonged to the filly,” she said, putting her foot into her gelding’s stirrup and swinging back on. “There are so many smaller ones. I almost feel like we should bury them. The horns, I mean. It’s like the unicorns’ spirits just died the minute those men cut off the horns.”

“In Nazwimbe, we burn the dead. We could try to burn the stallion’s horn when we make camp tonight. Wherever that may be.”

A broad smile appeared on Kara’s face, but her eyes remained downcast. “I’d like that. And I think it’s right, to do it the Nazwimbe way. He was from your country, born and bred.”