THE MAIDEN'S REVENGE

I think Balthazaar looked something like this

Why - or rather what - is she looking at?  In the early morning light from her house on the hill?  And, of course, why is she up so early? 

Maybe she is revising for an exam - an early medical student perhaps, though I'm not sure why she keeps a hat beside her.  At any rate it will fall off the dressing table soon.  Maybe she has just picked it up and has now perched herself on her stool again, one leg tucked neatly under her bottom to see if what she saw really was what she thought she saw; before she finds her slippers and goes out over the wet grass to discover the beast for herself.

But she's a little wary.  She's a medical student, as we have established, and she is still in her calico nightdress and she fears that it may have been over-zealousness towards her studies that has made her see things.  So she looks again.

Yes, there he is.  And he looks so dazzlingly white. And he is wearing a golden chain around his powerful neck. His mane is swishing in the light breeze and his rump looks powerful and muscular where the sun catches it.  He is stamping his four black hooves, which shine in the dewey sunlight.

Delicate feet, she thinks. But it is his horn by which her gaze is transfixed. That long tapering and spirally grooved horn of white ivory, as long as her arm.  She has never seen such a horn, or such a beast.  No wonder that she can't decide whether to fetch her slippers. 

The unicorn is caught, its feet entangled in brambles.  Should she run to help it? Or call others?  But if she went to help, might she not be caught too?  Not by the brambles, perhaps, but by the horn. She could become impaled and left dying on the dew while the beast snorted and flew off into the sky. She supposed a unicorn could sprout wings - or maybe it didn’t need wings - at all.  Her medical textbook was silent on this point.

No, of course,  the beast wouldn't impale her, but would instead go down on one knee, bowing its head and showing its golden chain. Perhaps it would neigh softly.  She would talk to it and give it sweet dandelions and plat its mane with daisies in the morning sun.  It might even tell her its name.  Balthazaar! 

She had always fancied Balthazaar as a name for a unicorn  She would laugh and, holding her hat, would kiss the beast's nose, enticed by its rich, leathery and equine smell.  Then, knowing her mother would scold her, she would abandon caution and clamber on the beast's back and all at once it would rear up and she would clutch at the golden chain and grip tightly with her knees lest she tumble into the brambles and close her eyes and the next moment they would be far away up in the sky heading for a different land, the wind whistling about her ears and the beast stretched out, the horn a compass needle to a future world.  She would awake, and he would lay her down gently, in the sand, somewhere to the south of Samarkand, beside a merchant selling silk and spice.

In this way have many potential female doctors been lost to science and many young women been enticed into the spice trade.  But wait!

When she came to her senses she noticed there were actually quite a few unicorns about the merchants' enclosure, most with their heads stuck in nosebags. Whatever they were eating it wasn't dandelions, nor probably oats either.   Nor were the unicorns any more a dazzling white but a kind of dusty grey.  Moreover,  their golden chains, she thought - unless she were very much mistaken - were in reality just a species of brass. 

A few hours ago she had been struggling to remember the anatomy of the gall bladder.  Now the choice seemed to be whether she should try walking back to Berkshire in her nightdress, or stay and become part of the merchant’s Samarkand entourage.  She looked to the Unicorn for inspiration.  But Balthazaar merely winked.  

Could one stow away on a unicorn? she wondered.  The exams were, after all, terribly important.  And the Samarkand desert wasn’t renowned for its sweet daisies and dandelions.  The vets were better too, she whispered into Balthazaar’s ear, as the darkness closed around them.