Robin McKinley - Pegasus

“Thank you,” Sylvi had said.“I would much rather know.” She looked at her father now and thought, This is not the moment to remind him he was going to tell me, next time.

The next several weeks were an eon at least. Sylvi wasn’t the slightest bit interested in anything but going ; the details threatened to drive her mad. She couldn’t have cared less about what clothing to take with her—that it had to be lightweight, warm and not merely tidy and relatively hole-free which, Sylvi always felt when dressing for a formal occasion was quite enough to ask, but it had to look like, well, like she was a princess. She was going to have to try to look like a princess for three weeks, and it was going to kill her. She did understand about being respectful and so on: “But the pegasi won’t care what I’m wearing!” she wailed to her father.

“Sylvi—” he began.

She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear it! You’re going to tell me that I’ll know it! That after you leave I’ll be the sole representative of the entire human race and it’s a huge responsibility and I have to act like I know it and it means something even if I’m the only one knows that’s what I’m doing!”

“I have frequently had the suspicion that Ahathin gets more over to you than we think he does,” said her father, smiling.

“It’s not Ahathin,” she said sadly. “Or it’s not only Ahathin. It’s you and Mum and Danacor and . . . I’d rather wear clothes with holes in so they didn’t take me seriously but . . .” She stopped and then added, “Doesn’t it occur to you that if I did think about being the sole representative of the entire human race I’d just, you know, crumble?”

Still smiling, her father said, “No.” And then a runner was announced, with news of another taralian found and dispatched, and Sylvi had to leave, feeling a rather sick-making mixture of pride and dismay.

Even worse was writing her speech. There was going to be a banquet, of course, for her father. And for her, she supposed, since she was there too. She knew about banquets; she’d sat through a lot of banquet speeches. She was going to have to give one? That was worse than having to look like a princess for three weeks.

“It doesn’t have to be long,” said her father. “Just a few polite sentences. Oh, and—” He paused.

Sylvi’s heart sank. Every regular at the king’s court learnt to dread the king’s “Oh, and—” with the pause. If the rest of the sentence followed immediately, it would be okay. When there was a pause, there was trouble.

“I’d like you to give it in as much of the pegasus language as you can. You can use sign too, if you wish, but I want you to say at least a few words in our hosts’ own language. In what we think we know of our hosts’ own language.” Briskly he added,“You can ask Ebon to help you with your pronunciation.”

Sylvi’s heart continued sinking. It would reach the centre of the earth soon. What the humans understood and could use of the oral and kinetic pegasus language was of the grand and the courtly but mostly meaningless variety—the sort of language that appeared in the treaty. Every court meeting where pegasi were present began with a welcome that included hraasa ho uurha ,“esteemed allies,” and if you met one at a banquet and felt the need to say something, one of your choices was niwhi goaraio whanwaidio , which meant something like “I hope you will enjoy your food.” She’d been meaning to ask Ebon for a translation check, but it was one of those things she never thought of when she was with him.

“Are you going to speak in pegasi?” she asked mutinously; but she already knew the answer. Even though she had Ebon and he did not, he wouldn’t ask her to do anything he wouldn’t do.

“I’m going to try,” he said ruefully. “My speech will be longer than yours, and about half of it will be in something resembling pegasi, I hope. Remember we won’t have any Speakers with us—”

“We don’t need them,” Sylvi interrupted. “We’ll have the shamans, and you and Lrrianay nearly—and away from the palace Ebon and I—”

“It’s not the same thing,” said the king.

“Like wearing nice clothes,” said Sylvi, and sighed.

She did ask Ebon to help her. Your ears are going to twist themselves off if you spin them any harder, she said crossly. He stopped grinning, flattened his ears sideways and then, after a second or two, let out a guffaw they could probably hear on the other side of the Wall.

You sound like a donkey, s he said.

This is going to be fun, he said.

But he did help her. She’d never given a proper speech at a banquet before, even a short one—even in her own language—but she’d become accustomed to saying a few sentences at opening or closing ceremonies at fairs and name days and occasions when she was ranking royalty.

First there was the confusing business of stopping their silent-speech for the words spoken aloud so she could concentrate on the sounds of the oral language; and then there was the decision to dispense with trying to learn any of the pegasi kinetics—there were a lot of what Sylvi thought of as adjectives that the pegasi did in body language. But there isn’t a good way to, uh, translate the, uh, difference in body parts, said Ebon.

Yes, said Sylvi. Or that I’ve got ears but can’t wiggle them. The signlanguage is dire enough—and anyway I don’twant to be saying “it’s a pretty day but I think it will rain tomorrow.”

But the meanings of even the usual court-speech words seemed to keep slipping away from her, even with Ebon helping. They ran away like mice, or a handful of sand through your fingers.

It’s weird, isn’t it? said Ebon.

Yes, she said grimly. Very weird.

It’s like the binding, said Ebon. When it felt like they were separating us, rather than tying us together.

They had never said this to each other before.

Yes, said Sylvi.

There was an awful little silence, and then Ebon said, Well, it didn’t work . We got bound anyway.

And then there was her pronunciation. You haven’t got a tadpole’s chance at a heron party of saying that so anyone will understand you, Ebon declared in response to her first try, so they had to find other words that she could get her mouth around—could remember long enough to learn. Sometimes by the time they’d found a compromise, the original meaning of what she’d wanted to say had got lost on the way. It’s not like you’re such a—such an elocutionist in human, Sylvi said crossly, after Ebon had had to roll over on the ground and kick his legs in the air in reaction to her attempts to say honoured, which was gwyyfvva in pegasi.

“Hhhhh, eeeee?” said Ebon: Who, me? If the world depended on me giving a speech in human, the world would just have to end, okay? How about “respected”? That’s only “ fffwha, ” which you might manage.

“Fuwa,” said Sylvi. I’ve heard your dad speak human pretty well, she added.

“ Fffwha ,” said Ebon. Yes, and he’s impossible to live with for weeks before he does it too. Don’t go there. How’s your dad doing?

“Fuuuwa,” said Sylvi. You could say he’s impossible to live with. Although in my dad’s case, impossible to live with means because you never see him. Ebon raised his head from where he was still sprawled on the ground and looked at her and she looked back. Her father sometimes used a speech-writer for an ordinary human speech. Not this one.