Pegasus

by Robin McKinley

  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.

  But some time during the second day she found herself walking with a longer stride, breathing more deeply, looking around more freely. She saw the Forest of Areeanhaaee several times, and once she heard the birds singing, and once she heard the faint, ghostly thunder—because pegasi never thunder—of hundreds of galloping pegasi. She saw the first meeting of Doaor and Marwhiah, when the two tribes of pegasi met, who would decide to unite; she saw how the pegasi learnt to sow crops and to build pavilions and shfeeah, to knap flint and press fibre into paper—and many times she saw the finding of the Caves. She saw the greearha—the crowning—of many kings and queens, and their families and shamans and carrfwhee, their court. But most of all she saw trees, flowers, running water and quiet lakes; birds and deer and nahneeha, frogs and toads and newts, butterflies and fish and iorabaha.

  She was in the pegasi’s Caves, and she had been invited; she was welcome. She did not think of where Lrrianay and Hibeehea took her; she followed, and she looked. The Caves themselves seemed to beckon to her, even to summon her, and everywhere she looked her eye was drawn farther: every leaf on a tree, every feather on a bird, every hair on a nahneeha, had a clear individuality.

  Sculptors don’t sculpt, you know, Ebon said. They set things free.

  As a welcome guest, she wanted to take in as much as she could; she found herself murmuring to the vivid walls, as if they had begun a conversation. When a sculptor bowed to her she bowed in return, gladly—perhaps almost as gracefully as a pegasus herself. And her second, third and fourth nights in the Caves she dreamt of flying, but they were joyous dreams, and when she woke again, wingless and human, curled up against Ebon’s side and warm beneath his feathers, the joy remained.

  And on the fifth day, as they climbed the last gradual but steady incline to the door to the outside world, her feet dragged, and she was clumsy again, who had not tripped over a hummock in the floor for three days. It was difficult for her to take that final step across the threshold, even knowing that she would stand under the sky again, and hear the wind in the trees, and walk on grass. It was difficult, because she loved the Caves—and because the Caves too held sky and wind and trees and grass—and she did not know when she would see them again.

  And after she left the Caves, although she still had several days remaining in the pegasi’s country, it was all about leaving, about saying good-bye.

  The first person she saw as she came out of the Caves was Niahi. There were other pegasi present, but as she took that last step across that threshold, with her arm lying along Ebon’s crest and her hand buried in his mane, Niahi took a hesitant step forward, and Sylvi’s eyes focussed on her. Oh, Niahi, said Sylvi, you’re right about the Caves. They’re amazing and wonderful—and scary—and very, very full. And then the tears came—she hadn’t known she was going to cry—but once she started she couldn’t stop. Oh, why am I crying? I don’t want to cry!

  Niahi trotted forward from what Sylvi dimly realised must be an official welcoming party. The queen followed her daughter, and the two of them stood near Sylvi as if protecting her from a cold wind, or even an attack from an enemy. Lrrianay joined them, and Sylvi was the hub of a little wheel of pegasi. She dug both her hands into Ebon’s mane and tried to stop crying, tried to stop her legs from trembling and her back—where no wings grew—from aching, aching, as if when she left the Caves she had again taken up a burden too heavy for her—or as if she were leaving her wings behind.

  Hibeehea appeared between Lrrianay and Ebon, who made room for him, but Sylvi stumbled as Ebon moved, trying to press herself away from the pegasus shaman, whom she was suddenly afraid of as she had been at the beginning, poor human thing that she was, wailing like a baby, her nose running and her tears dripping off her chin.

  No, child, youngling, you have nothing to fear of me.

  And she couldn’t even keep her thoughts to herself.

  With something she recognised as amusement, Hibeehea continued, Speech is a skill like any other. Do not your babies shout when they learn new words? Fall down when they are learning to walk? I believe human and pegasus children have these things in common. And our children often weep when they visit the Caves for the first time.

  But I’m falling to pieces, she thought, but she knew he heard her.

 
You are not. Five days is a long time to be in the Caves for anyone but a sculptor or a shaman; no one is expected to remain in the Caves five days on their first visit. But we did not have time to be gradual. We wanted you to see…. Child, may I touch you?

  She had entirely forgotten the human ban on touching pegasi; the silk of Ebon’s mane and the velvet of his shoulder were as familiar to her as his words in her head, and since she had been here in their country, especially since she had first heard Niahi, she had fallen in with the pegasus habit of touching each other as they spoke—of touching as part of communication.

  Except the shamans. She learnt, without realising she had learnt it, to recognise the shamans partly by the fact that no one touched them, except formally, and with permission first formally granted. She had been presented to several other shamans after her dramatic first meeting with Hibeehea, but she had known, before she had been told, that they were shamans; she had thought it was the slightly aloof, rather regal austerity they all seemed to bear that gave them away; it took her a little while to realise that an important clue was that no one touched them. And they did not touch you. She thought now that she could still feel the spot where Hibeehea had touched her—so lightly and briefly—with the tips of his pinions, at the end of that first meeting, so long ago. She hadn’t thought about it at the time; only that she’d needed to prevent herself from flinching.

  Ye-es, she said now, hiccupping through her tears even in her mind-speech. I—I would be honoured.

  He unfolded his wings with a tiny, curiously silvery noise like the faintest distant sound of ringing bells, and reached his feather-hands toward her, and touched her temples. It was not a quick brush of blessing, this time. He touched her, and left his fingers pressing gently against her skin.

  It was like … the warmth of summer with the endless skies of a cold winter day; the bursting greens of spring and the rich russet-gold of autumn. It brought her back into time, into her body; her feet were on the earth, her hands were tangled in Ebon’s mane, and Hibeehea’s feather-hands were touching her temples. Some thing, some energy, passed between them, real as his hands on her face, something … slow, liquid, viscous … something tawny or golden, like barley syrup or honey. Without meaning to, she let go of Ebon’s mane with one hand and held it out, cupped, as if the syrup-honey were a real liquid being poured…. She looked down, and something translucent pale gold was pooling in the palm of her hand. She raised her hand to lick it off … and saw a woman standing smiling at her, holding a small ewer whose lip glinted with the amber yellow that also lay in Sylvi’s hand.

  As Sylvi’s tongue touched the little shining puddle, the woman said, “We’re not all bad. Don’t make that mistake.”

  Sylvi said wonderingly, “You’re a magician.” The taste in her mouth was a little like barley syrup, a little like honey … but most like something else. Something sublime.

  “I am.” The woman laughed. Her hair was grey and her hands gnarled, but she laughed like a young woman. “Your amazement is not flattering. Minial is a magician. Ahathin is a magician.”

  “Yes. I—I sort of keep forgetting. Minial mostly knits. And she talks to you like you’re just another person. Ahathin does too. Athathin doesn’t—he doesn’t act like a magician.”

  “How should a magician behave? Ahathin is a very good magician.”

  “Is he? Who are—oh”—because at that moment she realised that some of the dark dappled shadows in the trees behind the woman was a pegasus, coming to join them. He was a dark iron grey—not quite so dark as Ebon’s blackness—and as he stepped out of the trees and the sunlight struck him, he briefly glinted silver, and she found herself bemusedly thinking of the Sword: so too did it flash suddenly, as if it were alive, like a pegasus or a human was alive. She looked at him wonderingly. Pegasi were nothing like swords.

  I am Redfora, said the woman. This is Oraan.

  She knew at once and without thinking answered silently, as the woman had spoken: You’re bound.

  We are, said the pegasus.

  But—magicians aren’t bound.

  Occasionally they are. I too am the daughter of a king. And Oraan is the son of another.

  But—Sylvi had only just realised they were using mind-speech—And you can speak to each other!

  Yes.

  Why have I—why don’t we know about you? Who is your father? Are you queen after him? I need to know about you—Fthoom—Ebon and I—

  But they were gone, and she was standing outside the Caves with Hibeehea’s hands on her temples, and she had stopped crying. Hibeehea was looking into her face as she blinked and looked back at him.

  He said, Are you with us again here, little one?

  Redfora and Oraan, she thought. Yes. A woman gave me— She looked down; she was still holding her hand out, elbow bent and palm up, but there was nothing in it now. Hibeehea dropped his hands and stepped back.

  I am further in your debt, she said, and bowed.

  We are more in yours, said Hibeehea. Who is the woman you saw?

  Do you know a human king’s daughter named Redfora, bound to a pegasus named Oraan, son of his king?

  There was a pause, and gestures she didn’t recognise flickered over both Hibeehea and Lrrianay. If they were human, she thought, they would look at each other. She thought there was a quick burst of silent-speech between them. She couldn’t hear any words, but she felt Ebon, as she was still leaning against him, startle.

  It was Lrrianay who answered her. They are a tale out of legend. She was great-granddaughter to Balsin, your first king—so the story goes. She was the eldest child of her father, but while that should have made her queen, her brother said she was not fit, because she had trained as a magician. Lrrianay paused. And because she could speak to her pegasus. That is almost as much of the story as there is. No one knows what the people thought, nor what the king thought, nor if the brother was honest—nor why she trained as a magician, for your monarch’s family does not take such apprenticeship, I believe.

  The only other part of the story is that the question was never put to trial, because while her father was still king, she—and Oraan—disappeared.

  Lrrianay stopped. After a moment Sylvi said, Disappeared?

  That is all the story says. That, and that either her father or her brother declared that her name should be erased from all records of the realm.

  Sylvi found herself wrapped fiercely in a large black wing as Ebon said, Well, we aren’t going to disappear.

  Let go, said Sylvi. I’m going to break feathers just by breathing, you’re holding me so tight. Of course we’re not going to disappear. And I’m not a magician. I’m not the oldest, either, and Danacor is very honest—and there’s Farley and Garren after him too. She thought of the sharp silver flash as Oraan stepped into the sunlight. I wonder if anyone asked the Sword what it thought about Redfora?

  I hope they ran away, said Niahi. I hope they ran away because everyone was being so stupid. I hope they ran away to somewhere really nice.

  So do I, said Hibeehea. So do I.

  They flew with the rising sun almost at their backs, now, back toward the border with the human land, but they did not hurry, and it took them four more days. Sylvi noticed that on the second day they flew more north than west and toward evening there was a silver dazzle in her eyes as well as the red-gold sun-dazzle.

  Dreaming Sea, said Ebon.

  But that’s—that’s a legend, said Sylvi. Like—Redfora and Oraan.

  I think everybody has a Dreaming Sea, said Ebon. You may have a different one. This is ours. And it’s a legend too. The water’s still wet, though.

  Hibeehea stood as if waiting for them as Sylvi’s troupe landed, galloped, halted and let her gently down. She wiggled out of her ropes and blanket, looking at him looking at her. She waited till Ebon had been helped out of his harness, so she didn’t have to approach
Hibeehea alone.

  It is at my request we are here, Hibeehea said, and turned, in obvious expectation that they would follow, and led the way through the long grass and the last ragged row of trees. The water whispered against the shingle, and Sylvi stared out across it till the water met the horizon, and imagined the folk standing on the opposite shore somewhere, staring back toward them. Were they human or pegasi or something else? She had been to the rocky seacoast of her own country only rarely, but she remembered the astonishing expanse of water, the sense of standing on the edge of another world, a water world; this was different yet. At home she knew the names of the other ports, the countries on the far side of the ocean; this was a Dreaming Sea….

  Watching the silky, late-afternoon-sunlit ripples moving toward them, listening to the tiny gasping noises they made as they broke on the shore, she said, Our stories about the Dreaming Sea say that if you sail on it, you can sail for ever and ever and will never get out of sight of the shore you set out from, and never catch sight of any other shore. But I don’t know where it is. I don’t think it can be this one; Viktur mentions it in his journal as something they left behind. And he quotes Balsin saying as a kind of joke that he’d decided to climb the mountains that lead to the wild lands and see what was beyond them because he was afraid Argen would order him to take ship and cross the Dreaming Sea, to be rid of him. It was the most she’d ever said in Hibeehea’s hearing, and she thought, I never heard that the Dreaming Sea makes you brave.

  It is called the Dreaming Sea because it is said that if you sleep beside it you will dream true, said Hibeehea.

  Eah, said Ebon. If you’re desperate enough, you swim in it first and then lie down on the shore sopping wet, and near enough that the water touches you. Not recommended during the winter. And I’d’ve thought your dreams would still only be about how uncomfortable you are.