The Incorporated Knight by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp Page A

Entelodontidae. The spirally twisted horn, rising from the animal's forehead, is actually not one horn. This would be impossible because of the frontal suture, along the mid-line of the forehead. It is, instead, a pair of horns twisted into a single spike. The legend that the beast can be rendered mild and tractable by a human virgin appears to have a basis in fact. According to the story ... ' But ye know the tale, Eudoric."
     
                  "Aye," said Eudoric. "You get a virgin—if you can find one—and have her sit under a tree in a wood frequented by unicorns. The beast will come up and lay its head in her lap, and the hunters can rush out and spear the quarry with inpunity. How could that be?"
     
                  Baldonius: "My colleague Doctor Firmin hath published a monograph—let me look—ah, here tis." Baldonius pulled a dusty scroll from his cabinet of pigeonholes. "His theory, whereon he hath worked since we were students at Saalingen together, is that the unicorn is unwontedly sensitive to odors. With that great snout, it could well be. Firmin deduces that a virgin hath a smell different from that of a non-vigin human female, and that this effluvium nullifies the brute's ferocious instincts. Fieri potest."
     
                  "Very well," said Eudoric. "Assuming I can find me a virgin willing to take a part in this experiment, what next? It's one thing to rush upon the comatose beast and plunge a spear into its vitals and quite another to catch it alive and unharmed and get it to Sogambrium."
     
                  "Alas! I fear I have no experience in such things. As a vegetarian, I have avoided all matters of chase and venery. I use the latter word in its hunting sense; albeit the other meaning were also apt for an abstemious widower like myself*."
     
                  "Then who could advise me in this matter?"
     
                  Baldonius pondered, then smiled through his silvery waterfall of beard. "There's an unlikely expert dwelling nigh unto Baron Rainmar's demesne, namely and to wit: my cousin Svanhalla."
     
                  "The witch of Hesselbourn?"
     
                  "The same, but don't let her hear you call her that. A witch, she insists, is a practitioner, of either sex, of black, illegal goetics, whereas she's a respectable she-wizard or enchantress, whose magics are all benificent and lawful. Mine encyclopedia traces the derivation of these words—"
     
                  "Never mind," said Eudoric hastily, as Baldonius began to turn the pages. "I've not met her, but I've heard. She's a cranky old puzzel, they say. What would she know of the techniques of hunting?"
     
                  "She knows surprising things. ' Twas always said in the fraternity, if ye wish some utterly useless bit of odd information, which nobody on earth could rightly be expected to have—say, for ensample, what Count H olmer the pretender had for breakfast the day they cut off his head—go ask Svanhalla. I'll give you a letter to her. I haven't seen her for years, for fear of her raspy tongue."
     
    -
     
                  "So now ye be a knight?" said Svanhalla, sitting with Eudoric in the gloom of her hut. "Not by any feats of chivalry, ta-rah! ta-rah! But by shrewdly taking advantage of what luck hath brought you, heh? I know the tale of how ye slew that Pathenian dragon— how ye missed clean with the Serican thunder tube and ran for your life, and how Jillo by chance touched off the sack of fire-powder just as the beast waddled over it."
     
                  Silently cursing Jillo's loose tongue, Eudoric kept his temper. "Had I been twice as brave and thrice as adept with the thunder weapon, Madam, 'twould have availed us nought had luck been against us. We should have made but toothsome morsels for the reptile. But let's to business. Baldonius says that you can advise me on