Pegasus

by Robin McKinley

  But it was—worth the thinking of, Lrrianay went on, tentatively, watching her, watching her closely, earnestly, kindly, gauging her reaction to what he wanted to tell her—reminding her, suddenly, powerfully, in that gentle but implacable watchfulness, of her own father. That your father and I can half talk to each other is much more than most bondmates have. True talking is so unimaginable that we barely tell stories about it—we pegasi do not, nor humans either, I believe. Your magicians translate, as our shamans may also; what real need have we to talk? It is the way things are. But we—your father and I—hoped that what we had might repeat itself. We have thought of it since before Danacor and Thowara were born. But it seemed less likely after each of your brothers was bound, and none of them can talk to their bondmates even so much as your father and I can. I was not thinking of it at all when Ebon said you should have Niahi, and not him. There are precedents for such discontinuous bindings.

  Ebon put his nose in Sylvi’s hair and said, “Phoooooey.”

  We did think of it: the youngest child of the king and the only sister after several brothers. But the shamans advised against it, and so it was done the usual way.

  But it was Niahi just now—began Sylvi.

  Yes, said Lrrianay. It was. It may only have been that you were another day distant from your own land—a day distant from your father’s departure—a day farther into our land. Perhaps also that Niahi was very—er—eager to meet you. We did not allow her to come to your banquet, much to her dismay, hoping that these other things might help produce a new connection with the sister of your bondmate, the sister you might have been bound to, when you finally met her. It was nothing we did that put those words in your mind last night—but you are right that we took note that you used—could use—them.

  I’m afraid, he went on, I’m afraid this has been in our minds since the beginning—since the extraordinary binding between you and Ebon. Since Niahi is a king’s daughter and your father has no more children, and because she is small for her age and until this year would have found the journey to your palace difficult, we have been able to avoid binding her. Because we have been wondering …

  Sylvi said sadly, None of us has wondered anything. To us—to us humans—Ebon and I are just freaks. The magicians translate; that is the system. There is nothing to—to talk about. She looked at Lrrianay, and he looked back, from his dark, deep, inscrutable pegasus eyes. What are you still not telling me? she said. There was a pause. She took a deep breath, finished letting it out and said, It’s about our magicians, isn’t it?

  There was another, longer pause. The other pegasi had now retreated a little farther—beyond eavesdropping distance, Sylvi assumed; she’d heard Niahi being herded away by her mother, protesting every step.

  You have held to the treaty, Lrrianay said at last, and that great promise has given us our lives, by your strength to hold. And your commitment to our bonding ritual tells us that we are a part of your lives and not merely ink marks on an old page.

  Ebon interrupted. What Dad will take the next day and a half to say in king talk is yes, the problem is your magicians, or anyway the magic they do, or the way they do it—it’s all wands and smoke and—and—stuff. Have you ever wondered why none of our shamans seems to stay long when they visit your palace? And you don’t see the same one very often? Is there any shaman you knew by name but Hissiope? At first—eight hundred years ago—they thought it was just that we were so strange to one another. Later they decided that the magic your magicians made was keeping it that way.

  Lrrianay said gravely, There has never been any such decision—

  Oh, Dad, that’s king talk again! Can we please go the short way? We already know Fthoom is a bad guy! Syl and I have known it since our binding—or anyway I knew it then and I guess Syl has known since she first met the brute. It stands out around him like that weird robe he likes to wear. Syl?

  It was a long journey, Sylvi thought, going Ebon’s short way. I’ve always been afraid of Fthoom, which isn’t the same thing. It wasn’t till the binding … I knew something was wrong. And … not all our magicians are bad. Ebon, you know Ahathin.

  Yes, said Ebon. He’s another freak.

  I take my son’s point about—er—king talk, said Lrrianay, but it’s not as simple as that human magicians are the villains in our story. There is a great deal of strength in humankind that we do not have. It is a good strength when it stops the taralians and norindours from killing all of us, but it is not a good strength when one of your villages goes to war with their neighbours over the ownership of a field. We think there is something of the same about your magicians’ powers. It was a good power when it forged our Alliance, much quicker, and possibly more securely, than our shamans would have been able to do it. But it was … perhaps not the best alliance that could have been made.

  We feel that perhaps the misfit of our Alliance is coming to a time of crisis. It is interesting that you—the link that you and Ebon have—should come at the same time as the magician Fthoom. It is that sense of crisis, I believe, that made your father force through an acceptance of you coming to us. He had to … displease some people it would have been better not to displease.

  Lord Kanf, Sylvi thought. Senator Barnum. “The king is the most tightly tied by his freedom to rule,” was one of Ahathin’s favourite maxims, and she tried not to believe it because she knew it was so—and because she was the king’s daughter.

  Only about ten days before she had been due to depart, and when she knew that the senate had still not officially ratified her going, one of the oldest of the king’s council members had sought her out at one of those state dinners she was now obliged to attend. She knew that Senator Orflung was one of those who were against her journey. She braced herself, and tried not to let it show that she was bracing herself.

  “My lady, my apologies for my presumption”—which was a phrase she was accustomed to hearing in her father’s court but she’d never heard it addressed to herself before—“but would you be good enough to tell me if you—you yourself, with no one whispering in your ear—if you want to visit the pegasi’s land?”

  She looked at him blankly for a moment, as if he were a strange pegasus speaking pegasi. She had given a short, formal speech to the combined senate when her father had first introduced the news of her impending journey, in which she had said that she did want to go, very much. But she had also been saying it to two hundred senators, lords, ladies, barons and granddames, and she had been concentrating on getting through it, not on being convincing. She noticed now—having not studied his face close up before—that there were deep smile lines round Senator Orflung’s eyes and his mouth, and the frowning look he wore at present was more worried than angry or bullying. She relaxed a little. “Yes, my sir, I do wish to visit it. The—the full senate is very intimidating, you know.”

  The frown disappeared and he smiled. “Yes, my lady, I do know. After forty years I still have to take a deep breath before I climb to my feet to address it.” The smile disappeared. “I am, of course, aware of the prohibition against querying you about the pegasi. But I would ask you to indulge me so far as to tell me … you feel you and Hrrr Ebon to be true friends, is that correct? As—as you might be friends with my daughter.”

  His youngest daughter was eight years older and a foot taller than Sylvi, and almost as daunting as her father. “Ebon and I are friends, yes,” she said carefully. “And I can speak to him as I could speak to your daughter.” She realised that this might sound too similar to what she had said to the senate, and cast around for something she could add that would sound genuine, that would not sound as if she were hiding some important truth. “We can laugh together. He—he teases me. He tells terrible jokes.”

  The smile crept back into his eyes again. “The pegasi tell jokes? I am glad to know that. They are always so grand and solemn at court—and we rarely see any but those who are human bound. We never see th
e little ones, the children—I understand that it is too long a flight for them. Do they play, like human children? Do they scamper and jump and fall over? It is not only that we cannot speak to them clearly—how can you know anything about a people if you have never seen its children? But I am sure, if they tell jokes, that their children also play.

  “And I will ask you one more question, and then excuse you from the burden of my company any further. My lady, forgive me, but I wish to recast the question I began with. Do you want to visit your friend at his home? Aside from any other question of who you are or who your friend is, or what your parents’—er—colleagues think of the matter, or whether anyone else with a friendship such as yours has done such a thing. Do you want to go—not just over the Starclouds to somewhere no human has been, but to visit your friend, because you can laugh with him, and exchange terrible jokes?”

  She thought, how odd that no one has asked me this but my mother and father, and Danacor, and Lucretia and Diamon—Ahathin didn’t have to ask, and Glarfin would think it was none of his business. But it was easy to answer immediately: “Yes, my sir, I do wish to go. For just those reasons. Because he visits me at my home. I want to visit him at his.”

  He nodded, staring at her. “Thank you, my lady. I believe you.”

  The next day her father said to her, “I don’t know what you said to old Orflung last night—I saw you talking to him—but Barnum tried to begin a last-minute rebellion this morning about your journey and Orflung essentially shouted him down. Said you were no longer a child but a young woman and you knew your own mind and wanted to go, and we should let you. Finally. Barnum wouldn’t have won, if it had come to that—I’d’ve invoked king’s fiat. But I have hoped I wouldn’t have to—and everyone listens to Orflung. But why it never occurred to anyone before to ask you—I’ve even suggested it two or three times, to Orflung among others.”

  “It’s because I’m so little,” said Sylvi. “I’m just big enough to be a parcel to be wrapped up and sent somewhere. Or not.”

  The king snorted. “Helpless wrapped-up parcels don’t knock their experienced sparring partners over—with tricks the sparring partners have taught them.” Lucretia had been so delighted by her protégé’s progress she’d brought the story to the king herself.

  “You should have let me challenge Barnum to single combat. I’d’ve shown him what a parcel can do.”

  “I should have,” said the king half ruefully.

  Sometimes even being the king isn’t the answer, she had thought then, and thought again now, sitting on the llyri grass, talking to the king of the pegasi. Sometimes one of your oldest councillors does the job better. Sometimes your daughter is the only one who can do it at all.

  What do I do now? she said.

  Lrrianay wrinkled his nose and did a very unkingly ear-whirl. Eat dinner. Sleep. Wake and rise tomorrow morning and come with us to the Caves. That is all.

  And talk to you.

  Lrrianay bowed his head solemnly, arching his neck so that his forehead nearly touched the ground, and his long mane fell over his face, so she could see only the stiff alertness of his ears. When he raised his head again all the mischief was gone and he looked every inch a king, even lying on the ground with his legs folded under him and his wings negligently crossed over his back. Yes. If it is not too great a strain for you. I would like you to find out how many of us you can talk to, and how well.

  Sylvi let go of Ebon’s mane to press her hands together and bow her own head. It is my honour to do as you would wish me to do, great lord. Then she put her hands carefully on the ground, and began to try to stand up. Ebon stood up first, with that quick forehand-first heave that should have been very like a horse’s but was not—especially when he had one feather-hand still in her hair. Climb up my leg, why don’t you. Go on, borrow one of mine. Then we’ll have three each.

  Sylvi laughed a small croaking laugh and cautiously stood up. She didn’t quite climb Ebon’s foreleg, but she certainly hung on to it—and once upright she transferred her grip to his mane again. Niahi, her head over her mother’s back, half shouted and half whinnied a noise like cheering, and opened her wings and shut them again instantly, like a sort of applause.

  They were all watching her, all the pegasi, beautiful, poised, attentive—several of them held their wings half roused—hopeful. One of the things she’d learnt just in the last two days was that there was a hopeful half-rousing as well as a wary one. She would have liked knowing this more if it didn’t make her aware that she’d only ever seen the wary one at the human king’s court.

  The hopeful gesture was more open. Hopeful of what she might do for them, for all of them—her people, Sylvi’s people too. But the faces looking at her now were all pegasi. Niahi’s tail was lashing back and forth in what Sylvi was reasonably sure was excitement; Sylvi didn’t have a tail to lash. As she stared at them, their motionlessness—barring Niahi’s tail—made them, in her still rudimentary understanding of them and in the newness of this moment, almost expressionless—as if by gaining speech she had lost the fragile beginnings of her kinetic understanding. She looked again at the half-roused, hopeful wings: but there was no individuality that she could read. They were an artist’s representation of pegasi, beautiful and enigmatic.

  She was conscious of Ebon’s skin beneath her hand: the warmth, the silkiness of his black hair, the feel of his breathing as his shoulder rose and fell—the ordinary, the habitual feeling of these things. She held out her free hand, caught Niahi’s eye—which was not difficult—and waved her hand back and forth in a swishy sort of gesture, like a switching tail. Niahi made a noise very like a giggle, ducked her head and whipped her tail twice as fast. Sylvi grinned—and saw the smile-wrinkles appear on Aliaalia’s nose.

  Hey, aren’t you hungry? said Ebon. Thinking always makes me really hungry.

  Yes, said Sylvi. Yes, I’m very hungry. It was only then that her stomach roared like six taralians and she realised she’d been smelling for some little while not only the faint sharp whiff of wood smoke but also the mild grainy scent of the porridgy stuff that the pegasi often made for her since she had this queer predilection for hot food. And she further realised that the pegasus porridge, which she’d never had before she’d come to visit Ebon at his home, was no longer strange to her. It was just food. Good food.

  She ate, and listened to a rustle of silent voices, like wind through slender trees. But the only pegasi who had addressed her directly were Ebon and Lrrianay and Niahi; and while she ate, only Ebon stayed near her, eating from a bowl that had been brought with her porridge. It looked like chopped-up grasses speckled with seeds, but it smelled both spicy and flowery. His bowl was refilled three times while she ate her porridge, but he never left her, while the other pegasi wandered, as they usually did.

  But when she laid her bowl down and licked her fingers, she saw a shadow pass very near her and looked up quickly: the queen, Aliaalia. She was still wearing Sylvi’s garnet, but now it hung on the gold chain that had been Sylvi’s official gift to her. Ebon put his nose to Sylvi’s hair, gave a brief, gentle tug, came gracefully to his feet, bowed to his mother, and left them. Sylvi scrambled to her own feet, stopping herself from looking after him apprehensively. The queen paused, almost hesitantly, Sylvi thought, taken aback, as if she was not quite sure of her welcome.

  Queen, said Sylvi, and bowed. Great Lady.

  It’s true, then, said the queen. I knew it was—Niahi told me—Niahi has told everyone—and she laughed, both silently and aloud: wheeeee. But we, like you, grow up knowing we cannot talk to each other. This—today—is a story come to life, a story as amazing as any that our bards tell us. How hard this must all be for you, my dear. A little exciting too, I hope, but hard. How much we all hope from you—how much we cannot help but hope, while we try not to. Do not let us crowd you too closely!

  But I hope too, said Sylvi. And my father does, and my mother, or they would
not have let me come, I think—it was very hard to let me come, you know. We cannot help hoping either. And if—if you crowd me very closely, you will hold me up, and I will be grateful because I—I am oddly wavery, since—since Niahi spoke to me.

  You poor child, said the queen. Is there anything I can do for you?

  Talk to me, said Sylvi. So it doesn’t seem so … strange. So that it’s just talking. What are the stories your bards tell you?

  The queen raised her head and looked away from Sylvi. Sylvi followed her gaze—as dark dappled Hibeehea seemed to materialise from the shadows. She had not seen him since the first evening. He bowed to them—to her and the queen, and the queen bowed back—Sylvi hastily following suit. Hibeehea, she thought. Oh dear. The queen then looked back at her, and her voice in Sylvi’s mind sounded grave and sad and proud. Our favourite stories are that we have hands, she said. Hands like yours: strong to grasp and hold, and wrists that turn back and forth.

  Sylvi spent most of the next day asleep. She woke once, early, and lay quietly, watching the sunrise, pink and gold and soft blue-green, thinking sleepily, wistfully, confusedly, that it was the sort of sunrise that ought to happen in the pegasi’s land, beautiful but somehow enigmatic and unattainable; and then she thought, But why should either a sunrise or a pegasus be attainable, that its not being attainable should make me feel all doleful and spooky? And she turned over and wriggled farther into her friendly feather mattress, and went back to sleep.

  She woke again and found a bowl of fruit by her pillow: two apples and three pears and a handful of plooraia, which the pegasi grew instead of grapes, because grape-vines here (Ebon had told her) only grew leaves and hard, sour, inedible black pebbles. And it was raining gently, but the pegasi had thrown something like a tent roof over her, tied to tree branches above her head; she could hear the rain as it fell, and smell the wet earth, but she was dry, curled up in her feather-bed. She ate a pear, thinking, It must be late, I must get up, and only managed to finish it before she fell asleep again.