Robin McKinley - Pegasus

When they banked, steadied and then pulled the ropes taut again over another meadow, her heart began to beat faster. The landing itself was, of course, perfect, but she found that she was stiff with cold, which made her stagger a little, although that wasn’t why her heart was beating in her throat. She looked around, half in anticipation, half in foreboding, for a dark cave mouth, but she didn’t see anything but the meadow itself, spangled with spring flowers, and another pavilion at one edge. She looked again at the flowers: lavender, violet, yellow, blue—they were also new and strange to her. Even the flowers were different in Rhiandomeer.

Most of the pegasi who had attended the banquet had left before Sylvi’s little band had taken to the air, and since then Sylvi had seen only those she flew with. But now pegasi began to appear from among the trees, as if they had been waiting there for their arrival—as they had on her first day here with her father. She looked round at them—she recognised several from the last two days—and unthinkingly looked round for her father too. When she stopped herself looking, the stopping was an almost-physical pain.

For a moment she wished she’d gone home with him—that she’d never come, that Ebon hadn’t moved the many heavens and the one earth, as only Ebon could, to invite her, to enable her invitation to be made—that she ’d never seen this country, with its strange flowers and leagues of silent empty landscape, and its ability to make her doubt everything she had known about herself up till two days ago. For a brief, awful moment she couldn’t move; she was a statue in an alien landscape, its unknown flowers clustering round her feet, another of the bizarre, useless gifts humans had pressed upon the pegasi, which t he pegasi were too polite to refuse.

Feeaha and Driibaa unfastened the safety ropes, and the drai dropped away. She made herself move: one step, two steps. This was what it was like being human: this was how you moved, your queerly tubular and attenuated body swaying upright above a mere two legs, your long awkward arms and big outlandish hands pointlessly hanging....

Sylvi pulled the blanket around her, to wear as a shawl, although the two pegasi who had carried the two small bundles of her baggage individually round their necks came to her and bowed to the ground, rubbing the ropes off over their ears with their own hands, and she could have found something of her own. But the pegasus blanket was marvellously soft and comforting, and she didn’t want to give it up. One pegasus was detaching something from the back of her drai—she suddenly remembered her curiosity when she’d felt it being fastened there, when she could not see what it was. The pegasus came toward her—with her no-longer-wet clothing draped over his neck.

Sylvi laughed. She didn’t mean to; it burst out of her; it was about the strangeness and aloneness as well as about finding out that the answer to the mysterious question of what had been hung on the back of her drai was the mundane one of her clean laundry. When she laughed, several of the pegasi moved themselves as if into a new pattern—the pattern of looking at a human making an baffling and incongruous noise. She could feel her face heating up in one of her hair-frizzing blushes, but Lrrianay raised his head and called out—the resonant clarion sound that pegasi could make, except they rarely did so.

And one of the pegasi who had come shyly out of the trees and paused—paused so intently that Sylvi had noticed her at once among the others—now came dancing toward her. No, prancing, like a young pony or a long-legged puppy. She pranced directly up to Sylvi, lifting her knees very high and shaking her long glossy mane—and put her soft nose to Sylvi’s cheek.

Sylvi blinked; surely this was very brash for a pegasus one hadn’t been introduced to. She then said—something; it was very long, and had no audible breaks in it, and no consonants either, so far as Sylvi could hear, except she thought she might have heard Ebon’s name tucked in there somewhere. And there was a queer background hum or buzz, like a bee caught in her hair—no, caught in her skull.

“No, ” said Sylvi in sign. “Slower. ”

“Yooooo— mmwyy huma—Ebohnwaanno—Iha—onnyno.” Her ears and tail were going all the time, teasing and flicking; she nodded and shook her head, and rippled the skin over her shoulders, rustled her feathers. Sylvi thought, those aren’t just word breaks, those are all the interesting adjectives too, and I don’t know any of them.

“You’re Ebon’s little sister, ” said Sylvi. “Ebon. Shaarraia , ” she said, which she hoped meant “sibling.”

The pegasus reared up and clapped her wings together. Sylvi had never seen a pegasus do this before. This was not a gesture Sylvi could match in any way at all; she felt very small and boring and wrong as she anxiously said one of the first things Ebon had taught her, when they first knew that she would be coming to visit him here: “ swahavihaahwhahodh , ” and involuntarily made the old human gesture of apology and placation too, holding her hands spread and palm out.

The pegasus promptly dropped back to four legs again and put her nose into one of Sylvi’s hands, and without any thought or intention Sylvi brought her hands together, so they were cradling the pegasus’ muzzle—which was probably even more brash than the pegasus’ behaviour, but she seemed to like it, and leaned toward Sylvi till her nose was resting against Sylvi’s breast, and Sylvi’s hands ran up her chin, and stroked her face.

The pegasus sighed. “ Ebonfffffwahoowhooftha , ” she said. Ebon is lucky. All the ffff ’s meant very lucky.

“ Sahaliliyo ,” said Sylvi, which was one of the other thank yous she knew; she hoped it was the right one. This one was supposed to be for nonmaterial compliments when you wanted to be modest.

She was aware that the adult pegasi watching the two of them were watching very closely indeed; she had been constantly aware of their watching her since her father left—how could they not be watching her? But she somehow felt that this, now, meeting Ebon’s little sister, was more than that, more than meeting another member of her bondmate and host’s family; more than that she was about to be the first human to visit the pegasus Caves since the pegasi’s chronicles began several thousand years ago. Wasn’t that enough? She knew the pegasi wanted something from her, or from the visit, but—wasn’t the visit itself enough? But there was something else....

As she stroked Ebon’s little sister’s cheek she suddenly thought, I didn’t know there was a something else. A something besides, a something further. I didn’t know till right now. But I can feel it.

She looked up.

Lrrianay was standing at an angle in front of Ebon—a blocking sort of angle, she thought, as if Ebon was going to interfere and Lrrianay was saying “no, don’t.” But as she looked at Ebon he ducked round his father and trotted the few steps to where Sylvi and his sister stood—and bit his sister briskly over the withers. The young pegasus jerked her head up out of Sylvi’s hands and Sylvi didn’t need any help translating her open-mouthed snort as “ ow. ”

Hey, bird-face, you don’t rear at humans. They’re all smaller even than you are! Don’t you have any manners?

Sylvi thought, How very odd. I can hear him, and he’s not talking to me.

Of course I have manners, you big ugly thug! I’m very small and I know what it feels like when everyone tiptoes around you just because you’re small!

It was like—what was it like? It wasn’t like anything. It was like flying when you have no wings; it was like galloping on four legs when you have only two; it was like hearing the colour red; it was like being someone else. And, being someone else, you no longer know how to be you. Sylvi wobbled on her suddenly-too-few-for-balance legs, and—fell down.