The boy was not sure of the way at first, the little smudge marked out on the map on the wall of the Abbey and later traced in ink on a scrap of cloth in his pocket seemed abstract, of no relation whatever to the dream in the cave and the only hint he had personally been given to where he was supposed to go was the great rock on which he had first laid and a brief glimpse of the shore to the east, a crescent of land distantly yawning. But though he had been skeptical that his boyhood playmate had remembered the place from his own journeying, a specific inlet a hundred miles away on the coast from where the Abbey stood atop the golden hill, the oracles had been clear enough and Durwin had been assured that he need only follow the sea cliffs and that the God would make it know when he arrived. So Durwin pricked his way through the stretches of dry chaparral, keeping well away from the few signs of men he did see from a distance in that unpopulated country. At last, he crested a hill and saw at a hazy distance the blue and white of the coast and, further north, the sweeping bend of the land into the sea. His hands trembled as he pulled out the travel stained map-cloth but he didn’t even really need to look at it to feel the giddy sense that he was close to where he had been called. But though his heart was eager and his body strong from the many years of labor that had been part of his upbringing, he had traveled many miles over rough terrain, alone, and knew it was too far for him to reach the bay even if he traveled into the nearing nightfall. He made camp as the Brothers had taught him when they had driven sheep over the hills together, tucking himself out of sight under the cover of a scrubby juniper, sacred to the God and fitting for the journey of the God’s hopeful acolyte. Too frustrated with desire to sleep and to weary to continue, he lay a long time before the dream came.
Male and female voices whispered, overlaid in the blooming and bearing of the golden poppies. The touch of hands traveled, soft and strong and broad and graceful, over his flesh. He was small in those hands and he curled himself up in the upturned palm of one like a mouse, long fingers a cage of protection from all harm. It was a confirmation indeed, though when Durwin woke to the predawn blue, the branches of the tree an inverted cage over him, he could not clearly remember it but was left with the effervescent stillness that had so far marked every meeting with the Diety. Even as his body ached from another night on the hard ground and the rising fog had dampened his cloak and socks, he rose gladly and shook out the pains. That morning, he did not break his fast with the remaining provisions from the abbey and instead brewed a strong herbal tea over a little fire. This was all that he would have to sustain him until the final trial, despite the protests of his stomach at the bitter mixture. He drank his fill and, when it was cool, poured it into his canteen and began the final leg of his journey. The veil of mist shrouded all, silenced all, so that he could only make his way by keeping the diffuse glow of the rising sun to his back.
The sparse yellow-green grass and woody stalks of wildflowers gave way to the bulbous foliage of iceplant which squeaked and crunched as Durwin picked his way over it, nearly losing hsi footing in places where the thick mat of the plant disguised the burrows of coyotes and ground squirrels. This in turn thinned over the dunes, clinging to firm ground between swaths of shifting sand white as bone. This was loose, especially where it had blown and settled over compacted almost-stone and made what would have otherwise been a leisurely descent into something that required all of Durwin’s attention to keep from falling. Even so, he picked his way downward until the path he had decided for himself reached a nearly flat expanse of sand, curving through great white deposits of driftwood and the heaped remains of desiccated seaweed until at last he saw what he had heard with so much longing those hours - the fog blanketed sea.
It felt right, but he could not see through the mist. Even then, he could only make out vague silhouettes with little sense of how far beyond the roiling shore they lay. He squinted hard at the obscured horizon, hoping to spot the rock from his dream, its contour etched into his mind indelibly, but could not find it. He tried and failed not to let anxious disappointment creep into his thought. Instead he stripped to bare skin for what he was sure would be a hard swim while chanting a child’s prayer for strength to the God under his breath. He bunched up his clothes and shoved them and his pack into a crevice high above the normal tide-line, knowing that he would either return to them before the turning or else he would not survive the swim and would no longer need them. Finally, he turned, rubbed his goose-pimpled arms, and gawked as the sky, shrouded in mist long before daybreak, split in a matter of moments to reveal the sun, the blanket burning into silvery tendrils even as he watched and the sea shrinking away to the great blue horizon.
The light was a comfort and his heart leapt with thankfulness as well as trepidation when he saw the great grey rock of his dream standing sentinel over the churning waves. They crashed against it, hard and foaming and the between the rock and the shore where he stood was black with the shadows of kelp. It was deep and bitter cold and Durwin could swim but was still only a boy about to be a man. The ritual prayer he had rehearsed so many time escaped his memory but was engraved so deeply in his heart that he offered without speaking, and though he could offer nothing but his fear, that he offered also and so plunged into the water, knowing, hoping, wishing that should the God will, he would not drown before reaching that distant promontory.
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His chest squeezed tight with the first shock of the plunge and the current was stronger than he had imagined from shore. The boy paddled, trying to keep his head above swell and the rock which was his destination in sight, but he kept getting dragged away and under until he was no longer fighting to reach the rock but instead simply struggling to crest the surface for a single breath, then another. He choked on air. Another wave poured over him and he was plunged down into silvery bubbles that scattered into the turbulent dark. Durwin was near exhaustion already and the cold had begun to addle his mind so that he found it hard to figure out which way was the surface, much less able to reach it after being sent tumbling. Blearily, he eventually found which way the light came in jagged rays between the swaying tendrils of kelp, unreachable. The seaweed dragged along his body in the current and twisted about his legs so that he was held suspended in the water column, even at the pulsing waves pulled at him.
There was no breath left in him for prayer, and he dreaded to have come so near to the longing of his heart - all he had wanted since he had first seen the beautiful reclusive creatures, the half-souls of the Brothers who had raised him as a son. The God had found him wanting, and he resigned himself at last to the sea. Then, around him, a roiling mass dragging him up, up, up out of the dark.
The boy felt them before he saw them, a hundred thousand fish with bodies like silver foil swirling against him, all one motion with many bodies. The kelp could not bind him and the current parted aside in their ascent and soon Durwin broke the surface again with a joyous, sputtering breath. Before him, a few body lengths away, the rock stood strong. The water rose as another wave pushed Durwin up and he managed to ride the water to where he could grab a handhold. His arms felt weak but even so he managed to hand on and hoist himself up beyond the reach of the water, finding the sun-warmed top, where he collapsed, thoroughly bruised, soggy, and exhausted. He did not know how long he laid there, but his skin was dry and sticky with salt when he opened his eyes again, turning to his side just in time to watch as a wave struck the great rock, sending a glittering spray upward and over the dry surface. He hauled himself up onto his knees and watched it fall again, collecting in something blue and shiny wedged into one of the crevices. He crawled closer and saw that it was a shell, abalone, and that the sea spray had collected in the basin of it. It was beautiful and he longed to touch it so he stretched out his hand, unthinking. No sooner had his fingertips brushed the nacre surface, then a flash of the sunlight striking the surface of the water blinded him and there was tremendous pain. The splitting of his soul, his own nature changing, being born into the seashell’s foam was torture and satisfaction both. He opened his eyes to see the divine blessing given form, she the unicorn, with flanks of opalescent dusky blue and lavender and mane as white as the sea-foam that engendered her.
He stared up at her, his body aching from the aftershock of birth, voice raw with the gasping scream of a boy drowned not long before and face streaked with tears. She, all as a warhorse but foalish, lightly touched her horn to his lips and though it was dull and rough like the outside of the shell from which she had been made, it was sharp enough to pierce his flesh. He was still holding the shell, cradled in his lap, and this caught the dribble of blood that dropped from the corner of his mouth and the tip of her horn, mingling it with the seawater. He found that he could speak again, and found he was grateful in a way that he never expected to be for the Brothers’ insistence on recitation and memory. He fell back on well-practiced words now, voice a wrung out whisper.
“I thank the God of the Hidden Name that you have come to me, soul-creature. I offer my devotion and my chastity if you will deign to take the name I offer and suffer to bear me forth.”
In his heart, Durwin hear the words that she did not speak aloud, her voice like his but softer, a girls voice, soon to be a woman.
“Courageous youth, favored of heaven, and mirror of our soul, I accept the name you offer.”
Then with dream-words he had said in every dream of the God, forgotten and now suddenly brought to mind, he said, “You are called Sibbe.”
“Sibbe,” said the unicorn, “I am pleased. Durwin of the Golden Hill, let us go, before the tide.”
Though she was slender with youth, the strength of her heavenly source had not yet gone out of her coalescing form and she bent to take him on her back. He pulled himself over her, thrilling the first time his bare skin brushed the silken softness of her flank and their bodies tingled at the touching of one soul magnified, split, and reunited for the first time. Carefully, he clutched the shell, an object sacred to the God and an object for ritual that he would treasure. As soon as he was seated, his fingers entwined in the curling strands of her mane, she bounded away, over the foaming sea to the white cliffs.
