modeled after the conversations, private jokes, and role-playing games that Phil and I entertained ourselves with in those days, during long late-night waits for the D train, and in the cabin, and during our arduous scooter trip across America.” “Phil” was Phil Sigunick, Beagle’s closest childhood friend, with whom he rented a cabin in Massachusetts during the summer of 1962 and with whom he went on the trip memorialized in I See by My Outfit.
There are other significant differences from the published version as well. The butterfly was the one original character beyond the unicorn who survived, but its dialogue was wider-ranging. There was a dragon which was a major character which disappeared completely, and the time was most definitely the twentieth century instead of once-upon-a-time. Beagle in his Afterword says of both of these things that in order “to recast the story as a fairy-tale, the dragon had to go, along with the entire twentieth century.”
There are two encounters that stand out in The Lost Version, one with a beautiful female demon sent to pursue Azazel and Webster and who fools Azazel into giving her all of his jewelry, and the other with a modern city. The first is a source of mirth, as the demon is beaten at her own game, while the second appears merely to provide an excuse for Beagle’s lamentation on life in the modern world. Neither episode survived into the published version, although a fat man who tries to capture the unicorn while seeing her as only a horse appears with his wife in The Lost Version, and there is a encounter with a virgin that also survives.
Very little need be said here about The Lost Version. It is interesting only as a curiosity to committed fans, with little of the charm or metafictional elements which stand out in the published version. Beagle, however, has also published a short story sequel to The Last Unicorn that is worthy of examination. “Two Hearts,” winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Fantasy Novelette, first appeared in the October/November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and was reprinted in The Line Between in 2006. It is especially interesting that Beagle eventually wrote a sequel to The Last Unicorn, since in his Foreword to Giant Bones he asserted emphatically that “never for a moment did I feel the least interest…in what became of Molly Grue and Schmendrick the Magician.…” His fans apparently did, however, and Beagle obliged with “Two Hearts.”
The narrator of “Two Hearts” is a nine-year-old girl named Sooz, but the more interesting characters are Schmendrick, Molly, and King Lír. The story picks up the characters many years later, and shows us how life goes on for them.
Sooz tells us she will be ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. It stayed in the Midnight Wood, and ate sheep and goats until the last year, when it began eating children. The men tried to organize some sort of patrol, so they could see when the griffin, with its lion’s body and eagle’s wing, with its great front claws like teeth and a monstrous beak, was coming. They sent messages to the king, who sent first a single knight and then five knights together. They rode into the woods, and all but one were never seen again, and that one died before he could tell them what happened. The third time an entire squadron came, and after that they didn’t send to the king any more. Then the griffin took Felicitas, Sooz’s best friend even though she couldn’t talk. That was the night she set off to see the king herself.
She thought the king must live somewhere near Hagsgate, which was the only town she had ever seen. So she sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night and hid under some sheepskins in her Uncle Ambrose’s cart, knowing that he would leave for Hagsgate early in the morning. When they turned into the King’s Highway, she jumped out of the cart without being seen and watched it roll away down the road. She had never been so far from home before, or so lonely.
Sooz had no idea which way to go, and she didn’t even know the king’s name. She turned to the left, for no reason than that she wore a ring on her left hand that her mother had given her. She found a stream and drank until she couldn’t hold any more. She looked up only when she heard horses nearby, playing with the water. They were ordinary livery-stable horses, one brownish, one grayish. The gray one’s rider was out of the saddle, peering at the horse’s left forefoot. Both riders had on plain cloaks, dark green, and trews so worn you could hardly make out the color. She didn’t know one was a woman until she heard her voice. The other voice was lighter and younger-sounding, and Sooz already knew he was a man because he was so tall. The man started to get off of his brown horse to look at the other horse’s forefoot, but before he did so he placed two hands on his horse’s head and mumbled a few words that Sooz did not hear. Amazingly enough, the horse answered him.
The man looked at the hoof and discovered a stone splinter. He stood over it, as Sooz had seen the blacksmith do, but he had no blacksmith’s tools. Instead he sang to it, for a long time, until all at once he stopped singing and straightened up, holding something that glinted in the sun. He showed it to the horse, then threw it away.
He told the woman they ought to camp there; the horses were weary, and his back hurt. At that she laughed and said, “The greatest wizard wallking the world, and your back hurts? Heal it as you healed mine, the time the tree fell on me.” He touched her hair, which was thick and pretty, even though it was mostly gray. “You know how I am about that. I still like being mortal too much to use magic on myself. It spoils it somehow—it dulls the feeling. I’ve told you before.”
The woman sounded irritable for a moment, but then told him in a softer voice that she sometimes wished with all her heart that they could both live forever, and she thought he was a great fool to give it up. Then she remembered things she’d rather not remember, and she thought perhaps not. The tall man put his arms around her, and for a moment she rested her head upon his chest. Sooz didn’t hear what she said after that.
Although Sooz didn’t think she had made any noise, the man looked directly at her and said that they had food. She moved toward them, and they stood very still, waiting for her. Close to, the woman looked younger than her voice, and the tall man looked older. She wasn’t young at all, but the gray hair made her face look younger, and she held herself really straight. The woman’s face was not beautiful, but it was a face you’d want to snuggle up to on a cold night. The man first looked younger than her father, then older than anybody she ever saw. His eyes were the greenest green she had ever seen; greener than grass, greener than emeralds, maybe as green as the ocean, although she had never seen the ocean. If you go deep enough into the woods, sooner or later you will always come to a place where even the shadows are green. That was how green his eyes were. She was afraid of his eyes at first.
She told them, when they asked, that she was not lost, her name was Sooz, and she had to see the king. They looked at each other for a long time and the woman said that the king did not live nearby, but he did not live very far away, either, and they were going to visit him themselves. Sooz was immediately relieved, and said she would go along with them, but the woman was troubled. She said that they didn’t know how things were. The king was a good man, and a good friend, but people change, kings more than ordinary people.
The man replied that the two of them had once asked to be taken along on a quest; that he himself had begged, in fact. The woman, however, wouldn’t let up, insisting that they could be taking the girl into grave peril. They could not take the chance; it wasn’t right.
Sooz, though, interrupted. She was coming from great peril; there was a griffin nested in the wood, and he was eating children. She burst into tears. The woman comforted her, but she only stopped crying when the man pulled a big red handkerchief out of his pocket, twisted and knotted it into a bird-shape, and made it fly away.
The man’s name was Schmendrick, and the woman’s was Molly Grue. Molly told her the king’s name was Lír, and that they had known him when he was a young man, before he became king. He was a true hero, a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he is a good man. They aren’t always. But Molly was worried that he may have changed; he may no longer be the man
