Robin McKinley - Pegasus

Ebon made it for me, she said proudly, and looked round for him. He was standing with his father, but as if he felt her gaze on him he immediately looked toward her. He made a tiny, curiously stiff bow of acknowledgement to the sculptor she stood with, and looked away again. Surprised, she looked at the sculptor, who was smiling.

He works hard, said the pegasus. The extra burdens on him must make him weaker or stronger, and they have made him stronger. We are all bound by what fate chooses for us. I am proud of him. I am proud of you too, not-little Sylvi. And he turned away from her, and picked up his brush again.

They walked farther and farther into the labyrinth of the Caves, and while Lrrianay went always in the lead Sylvi was glad of the presence of the shaman, even when that shaman was Hibeehea—although she could not have said why she was glad, nor why she knew that Lrrianay depended on him too. Sylvi also knew by the third time they stopped to rest and eat that they would not leave at nightfall, that they would sleep in the Caves. But her fears of the morning seemed long ago, almost as long ago as the last time she had seen her father. By that third stop—leaning against a wall with a candle in a niche just over her head, a piece of bread in one hand and a handful of dried plooraia in the other—she had already watched the signing of the treaty and spoken to the sculptor; nor had her sense of ssshuuwuushuu left her. She was still aware of the weight of the mountain over her head—and it was by this that she knew that they were going farther in—but she also sensed Cuandoia looking out over his domain, and felt no apprehension.

They slept in special chambers that the pegasi had hollowed out or closed off from the surrounding Caves for this use. These were small and plain, but Ebon taught her to recognise them by the small low doorways and the scatter of single flowers carved round the openings—and in each there was a strong draught of fresh air, like opening a window before you went to bed in your bedroom. (There were equally mysteriously well-ventilated little water-closets at irregular but frequent intervals along the corridors, awkward but not impossible for a small human to use, and with sweet-smelling rushes scattered on the bare floors; there seemed always to be one close to a bedchamber.)

At their first evening halt she was missing the prospect of hot food very badly—if it was evening, and if it was the first and not the fifth: the breadth and balance of sshuuwuushuu or no, Sylvi was so exhausted that she was occasionally putting a hand against a corridor wall to push herself upright. Some weary longing for sky and grass and trees had also crept into her consciousness, and she was cold and stiff and feeling her most homesick and alien, but she was careful to say (and think) nothing about it, and tried not to let her drooping spirits be too visible to her companions.

But she was tired enough that the moment they walked into one of the little rooms and there were a few of the familiar bags and panniers of her journey with the pegasi waiting for them, she sat down at once, as if her knees had given way. Ebon dropped down to lie beside her, and put a wing round her, and she felt more relaxed and a good deal warmer immediately. She leant back against his shoulder and sighed. You should stuff mattresses when you moult, she said. You’d make a fortune selling them to us.

What would we do with a fortune? said Ebon. Our old feathers go with the rest to fertilise our fields. But I’ll save you some if you like. They’ll keep you a lot warmer and softer than dumb old duck or goose.

Lrrianay and Hibeehea were still standing, and she tipped her head back to look up at them. Pegasi didn’t stand up as much as horses did, but they didn’t immediately sit or lie down when they were tired the way humans did either. She still had to listen carefully to understand pegasus speech, and it generally had to be addressed to her for her to understand it; two of them speaking quickly and emphatically to each other made a musical, if in this case somewhat edgy, noise in her head, but was entirely untranslatable. The one thing she thought she could pick out was that Lrrianay and Hibeehea’s body language declared they were not happy with each other.

She felt the ripples running along Ebon’s skin and realised he was laughing. What? she said.

It’s about how we’re going to sleep, Ebon said. You’re such a little bit of a thing anyway—

I wish everyone would stop calling me little, she muttered.

Little bit of a thing, repeated Ebon firmly, and you haven’t even got any hair to speak of, let alone feathers, and bony—

I am not bony! she said.

And the ground here is rock where it isn’t dirt, hard-trodden dirt, and you’re going to have kind of a rough night. Nights, because after your—after what’s happened today we’ll be here as long as we can.

I am not pathetic, she said, trying to sound not pathetic, trying to remember how she had spoken to Lrrianay and Hibeehea after she had watched the treaty being signed—remembering the sculptor saying, I am proud of you too. Trying not to quail at the prospect of more days without daylight. She said, I know there are two blankets because I rolled them up myself. They’re in that pannier right there. I’ll be fine.

So the obvious thing is that you sleep with me, continued Ebon as if she had not spoken. But Hibeehea is getting his tail in a bramble because it’s not proper.

We travel, you know? We don’t have houses and beds. When you’re little you sleep with your parents and when you’re a little bigger you sleep with each other. About the time you’re old enough and big enough not to need someone else’s back or wing to keep you warm all the time, if you do sleep with someone else it had better be an elderly relative or someone of your own gender. We don’t make love lying down the way you do—I don’t think we can—but it’s the same idea. Mwrrrala—um, pairing off, what do you say, wedding?—sometimes happens really young, and if you’re both the same gender it doesn’t matter, but we’re really strict that mixed gender hrmmmhr pairs don’t produce babies too young, and sleeping together is seen as encouraging, uh, intimacy. So people our age . . . Dad is saying you and I are not the same species and the rule doesn’t apply. Hibeehea is quoting a lot of dusty old chronicles at him about incorrect behaviour leading to moral ruin. None of which apply to bond-humans in the Caves, but that’s not stopping him. Shamans get like this—the chronicles are more real to them than we are. Sculptors can get like that too about what’s on the walls here....

Sylvi could feel herself blushing, but she sank down a little farther till Ebon’s wing was covering her face as well. And she was so worn out she fell asleep—even without her blankets to pad the hard ground—and didn’t move till the smell of hot food woke her. Hot food: they had made her soup. There were carrots and djee and dumplings floating in it. Oh—thank you, she said, again trying not to sound pathetic. Ebon stood up and shook himself before moving over to the great heap of llyri grass that Lrrianay and Hibeehea had already begun on. Little, he said. And bony.

But she was too busy eating to reply. The soup smelled of daylight—as did the grass—and suddenly a few more days in the Caves was wonderful—was nothing like enough.

Some time during the second day the Caves became . . . she didn’t know what to call it. Normal was the best she could do, but that wasn’t it; but common or ordinary was worse—was all wrong. It was reassuring and frightening all at once, the normality. It was a little like the evening she had met Niahi and had begun to hear the other pegasi speaking; it was an enormous thing, a glorious and sublime thing—but she feared it too, feared it drawing her away from her life, from her humanity—to where? She remembered her father’s unspoken words: They were weaving a net to pull you away from us. She looked at her hands often, in the company of the pegasi; but she looked at their wings more often.