Robin McKinley - Pegasus

“Ahathin says every human should study the roots of the Alliance. That if it were up to him every human would . The head librarian says it’s—it’s impertinent to want to understand everything, that what is important is to understand what comes of the things that have happened.” She made the Alliance gesture at Lrrianay, and drew her hand out to one side, which should mean “topic of conversation” or “studying.”

“They’re both right,” said the king.

Sylvi sighed inaudibly. That was exactly the sort of thing her father always said.

“But you can give this to the head librarian.” On the neat scrap of paper the librarian had sent he quickly drew the stylised replica of Balsin’s signature on the treaty of Alliance, which had been the official mark of the reigning monarch ever since. She’d never really thought about this before; she’d seen the mark, over and over again, all her life, and she knew what it was and where it came from. But she looked at it now as if she were seeing it as an older, wiser Sylvi, a Sylvi who had studied the Alliance and who understood what had happened as a result. And she thought of Fazuur, waiting in the anteroom....

She looked up and found both her father’s and Lrrianay’s eyes on her. She bowed to the pegasus king and he bowed back. She hesitated ; she had what she had come for—she should go. But she was very curious about what she had just seen. “I thought, after the binding, aren’t you supposed to start talking in your head too, the way the pegasi do, not just hands and mouth?”

She made a brave attempt to sign some of this for Lrrianay—it was considered rude to have a human conversation in front of a pegasus without making the attempt at inclusion, even if there were no Speaker present—but while she knew the signs for the binding and for the pegasi’s silent-speech, she didn’t know how to put them together. This could be her own ignorance, but it was also every human’s experience of the muddle of sounds, words, gesture and sign that was the means by which human and pegasus attempted, and mostly failed, to communicate with each other. You could never quite say what you wanted to; your mind seemed to slip from you, like a sled on a snow-slope, and the language seemed to writhe away from you like a small wild animal you had inadvertently caught: let it go, or it might bite.

“The silent-speech is in the annals,” said Sylvi’s father. “In practise, no. Has Ahathin told you we don’t know for sure how much the pegasi use silent-speech among themselves? We’re guessing—our magicians are guessing. The pegasi may also be using some subtle form of sign and gesture we’re too dull to pick up.” Her father’s hands were moving as he spoke, and he paused and murmured something, and there was a murmur—an answering murmur—from Lrrianay.

“After your binding there’s a ... a sense of someone else there, that you didn’t have before, like knowing there’s someone else in a dark room with you. Anything else ... it’s rather like weather. Every now and then you have a clear blue day and you can see a long way. Mostly it’s overcast and stormy—and the rain runs in your eyes and you can’t see a thing. That makes our Speakers a kind of ... waterproof, perhaps.” He smiled at her.

She took her cue, bowed to each king in turn and left. She’d never heard her father say anything sceptical about the Speakers before.... And the way Fazuur had bolted into the room, as if a taralian were after him ...

But everything about the pegasi, and about dealing with them, was rather daunting. It was enough—it was more than enough—that they flew, that they were every human’s secret fantasy, alive and breathing. And then they were so beautiful —it was impossible to get away from the fact of their astonishing beauty in any thoughts or contact with them, any more than you could forget that they could fly, and then you couldn’t help feeling that they must be grand and noble and so on because they looked it.

After the binding itself there were some silly sentences you had to say to your pegasus: “Welcome, Excellent Friend, into this our Court, and the Court of our Fathers and Mothers, and welcome too into our heart this glorious day, that we may be the best of companions for many long years” and so on. “Who wrote this stuff ?” she’d said to her father, outraged, after she’d read the script for the first time.

“No one knows,” said her father. “Perhaps it—er—sounded better then, whenever then was.”

“If no one knows who wrote it, and it wasn’t Balsin or Gandam or Fralialal, why can’t we change it?”

“Because, my love, you have to choose your battles, and that one isn’t worth engaging.”

She’d had her mouth open to ask who would care, but she shut it again. There would be people who cared. Great-aunt Moira would care. Senator Barnum would care. Sylvi sighed. It had been sheeting rain on her next-elder brother, Garren’s, twelfth birthday, and the drumming of the rain on the roof of the Inner Great Court was so heavy and loud no one could hear him speak. She had been very little then, and didn’t remember it very well, but she would be relieved if her glorious day was wet too. She was afraid she’d either laugh or forget her lines.

And besides, no pegasus was going to be her heart’s best companion, even with the binding, because how could you be best companions with someone you couldn’t talk to? Except through a magician ? What was there to be a companion about ? When pegasi came to court, or to a banquet, or some other organised human thing, you had to do things differently because they didn’t sit down and they didn’t eat human food. You couldn’t share your lessons with them because they didn’t read or write like humans. They had sigils and pictograms—they were supposed to have some record of the treaty of Alliance, besides Balsin’s opal, which Lrrianay still wore on important occasions—but mostly they told stories. And they also had the Caves. Sylvi didn’t understand the Caves very well, although Ahathin had tried to explain ssshasssha to her. The Caves sounded like a sort of large three-dimensional history in painting and sculpture. Which might be kind of interesting, but so far as she knew humans never went there.

Sylvi thought she could feel pretty bound to someone who was reading books and taking notes across a table from her, even if they were doing it in a different language (even if when they were released from their lessons they could go outdoors and fly ), but she didn’t know how she’d feel about someone reciting a long story. What humans heard of the oral pegasus language was rather shushing and whuffly, and she suspected that listening to a lot of it would put her to sleep, like the sound of the stream outside her window when she stayed with her Orthumber cousins. And she supposed they’d be telling it to a shaman—she wasn’t sure who taught pegasi children—royal humans were usually taught by magicians as soon as they outgrew their first tutors and governesses, so perhaps royal pegasi were taught by shamans. But the pegasus shamans rarely came over the border to human Balsinland, and never stayed long.

It might be an advantage that it was a different language, if they were telling their lessons out loud (if it didn’t put her to sleep); then she couldn’t be distracted listening to the story. But no one ever suggested putting human and pegasus children together for their lessons, and Sylvi wasn’t going to say anything that might make Senator Barnum notice her. She thought about it occasionally—it would be nice not always to be alone, or alone with grown-ups. She was the youngest of the palace children; even her parents’ aides’ children were older than she was. The only time she shared lessons was when she was visiting her cousins, and then they all managed to get out of most of them on the grounds that a visiting princess needed better entertainment than normal boring old lessons.