Lrrianay glanced at her. Yes, I’m here, she thought—to herself, she hoped. With my two legs and my preposterous hands. I wish I could stop thinking, so I could stop worrying about anyone overhearing me. But … She thought of Niahi: spooky, she’d said. Full. Very cautiously Sylvi tried to feel her way into the little anteroom of the Cave she stood in—“felt” in the way she “listened” to Ebon.
Spooky. No. Yes. No. Full—?
It was nothing like a velvet nose against her face or a friendly feather mattress curling around her as she slept, or even the shockwave of the ting as her father dropped a magician’s spiral on the floor of his receiving room. But there was something there—here—something besides pegasi and rock and candles. Something not unlike what had made her fall down, only three nights ago, when she’d heard Niahi speak for the first time.
That was three days ago, she thought. That is a long time. And time doesn’t matter in the Caves.
There were dark tunnel openings all round them, and Lrrianay chose one and led them into it.
It was a gentle downslope, but there were also small fat candles in niches along the walls, so it was easy enough to see your way. At first Sylvi kept her eyes on her feet, and then on Hibeehea’s long smoke-coloured tail, with occasional sidelong glances at the candles, as if checking that there was enough wax left that they would keep burning and not plunge them suddenly into darkness…. Her hand crept up again to the bead on its string round her neck. She kept wanting to hold it like a talisman, blotting out its light; she touched it and let her hand drop again. It was not only the darkness, the awareness of it barely held off by a few small candles and smaller beads; it was the awareness of the inconceivable weight of all the rock and earth of the mountain above them, as they went farther and farther down and in…. There was no record in the thousands of years the pegasi had been using their Caves of any ceiling or tunnel collapse; Ebon had told her this. Occasionally someone gets lost, he’d added cheerfully. But never for very long. We’ve always found ’em before they got very hungry.
Sylvi wanted to ask Ebon if he knew where they were going, if he recognised the tunnel his father had chosen, but she didn’t want to be overheard. She tried to concentrate on Hibeehea’s tail and wingtips, on the consciousness of Ebon just behind her, on Lrrianay leading them calmly and surely … where?
It’s just the dark, she told herself. It’s just the dark and the … the caveness, the mountain overhead. The rest is just … like the story of the prince who ran away; there wasn’t anything chasing him but fear. I am not going to be the princess who ran away….
It wasn’t sounds, exactly. There were sounds, of course: the soft tap of hoofs and the lighter, slappier tap of her own feet, the sound of Ebon’s breathing, the faint rustly noise of trickling water. But there was something else. She’d felt it in the anteroom. It had come with her. No, it was all around her.
Almost involuntarily her hand reached out and touched a smooth knob of wall. It was curious, she wasn’t used to caves, so why shouldn’t the walls here look strangely sheeny and almost fluid? She could hear the sound of water, but the wall she touched was dry. But these were the Caves; the pegasi had chosen them thousands of years ago because they were exceptional, because they were extraordinary. Because they were unique.
She knew, as soon as she touched the wall—knew—what did she know? That the wall was not like a human-built wall, not like even the oldest wall of the eight-hundred-year-old palace. She knew, of course, that the pegasus sculptors were greatly honoured; if the pegasi created hierarchies the way humans did, the sculptors would be behind only the shamans and the monarch: what the sculptors did created ssshasssha, which humans feebly translated as “recollection.”
She knew that the Caves contained hundreds of amazing chambers of thousands of years of sculptors’ work. She hadn’t realised that mere passageways had also been carved and shaped—she thought again of Niahi saying, They’re so full. As almost involuntarily as she had first put her hand on the wall, she stopped and put her other hand next to the first. The wall seemed almost to quiver, like a horse’s skin dislodging a fly. She lightened her touch and then thought despairingly, Oh, I’m human! Ebon, may I not touch the walls?—and she heard the pleading in her silent voice.
Ebon’s nearer wing unfolded, and his feather-hand lay lightly over hers, pressing it delicately—so delicately—against the wall. She could never quite adjust to the fineness, the fragility of pegasus hands, especially Ebon’s—Ebon who was nearly as big as a small horse, and could fly even carrying her on his back. Suddenly she was trembling, trembling as she imagined the wall was trembling—surely it could not really tremble, rock and earth and mountain that it was?—in the overwhelming knowledge of the thousands upon thousands of tiny pegasus sculptor hands that had made even an ordinary passage wall beautiful. It was perhaps as astonishing as the touch of a human hand was to the Caves, accustomed to thousands of years of the pegasi.
They’re so full, Niahi had said. If the corridor walls were overwhelming, what would the chambers be like?
She would not be the princess who ran away.
With Ebon’s hand over hers she dared keep hers against the wall a little longer. She rested only her fingertips and the heel of her hands against the wall, as lightly as she could, as lightly as Ebon’s hand touched hers; the tenuousness of contact seemed to sharpen her senses, so her fingers seemed to identify each individual grain of the stone, each tenderly-sculpted brush-stroke. She was still shaking as if with shock; but then it was as if the wall bloomed under her fingers. It was no longer stone, but silken-warm like a pegasus’ side. What she’d thought was trembling was the rise and fall of its breath….
For a moment she thought nothing at all. She was not Sylviianel, daughter of Corone, who was king of his land; she was not the first human to set foot in the pegasus Caves in thousands of years; she was not standing in those Caves with her hands on a corridor wall and her bound pegasus standing next to her with his hand over one of hers. She was nothing; she was Cave; she was pegasus; she was everything … ssshuuwuushuu.
It was over in a heartbeat, and she was Sylvi again, standing in a dark tunnel with a mountain over her head and candlelight flickering across the wall and making it look as if it was moving. Lrrianay and Hibeehea had stopped as soon as she did, as soon as she had spoken to Ebon. She dropped her hands and turned away from the wall, toward them, and toward the way they had been going. She felt Ebon’s feather-hand just touch her hair and then withdraw. She was still shivering somewhere deep inside herself, but much of the light-headed, off-balance, wrong feeling she’d had for the last three days, since she’d heard Niahi speak and had rediscovered herself as awkward and bizarre, had faded away. Walking on her hind legs seemed normal again, acceptable. She was human. She took a deep breath, aware of how shallow her lungs were in comparison to a pegasus’, but aware that that was as it should be. She was small, and human.
Child, are you all right? said Lrrianay.
She did not know how to answer him; she knew that she heard “all right” because her human mind, her use of language did not contain what he asked her: was she at peace with herself was perhaps closer. She could not think how to put her answer—her question—in pegasi terms. Have I just passed another test? she said, knowing the pegasi did not set tests any more than they created hierarchies.
There was a pause as Lrrianay thought this over. What we show you depends on what you see, yes, he said. And we hoped you would see the walls here, yes.
She thought, His “see” is not quite what it means anywhere but here. It was the “see” that the queen had used: May you see all that you will see.
What you would see if we told you to look, and where to look, would be different, said Lrrianay.
Less, she said, but she was thinking, that is another human concept, less.
There was another pause and this time Hibeehea answered: Not less, different
. But we would have you as much like us as possible, yes. To see these walls, as you evidently do see them, is like us.
But they are strange to me. Strange. She could not think of the right word, a word that would reverberate not only through her bones, but through Hibeehea’s, and Lrrianay’s, and the bones of this mountain.
We can turn around now, child, if you wish, said Hibeehea, and there was only kindness in his silent voice. We have our answer, and you have visited the Caves.
Oh, no! she said before she thought. I have only seen one corridor! A little of one corridor! I mean—whatever you say, great lord, srrrwa! But—I—please—sir!
Lrrianay wrinkled his nose and flicked his ears. I see again why you and Ebon are so close, he said. I wonder how much that closeness has to do with how much you were alike before you met? Very well. We will go on. And then he turned away from her and led them on the way they had been going.
She thought of the sky and the trees and the daylight. But she was not sorry she had answered as she had; she did not now want to turn around, even if the ceiling did seem to lean down toward her—as if it would stretch down a stony hand and smack her forehead. The pegasi’s heads on their long upright necks were higher than hers, and they did not stoop. She squared her shoulders—such a human gesture—and followed.
The corridor walls around her opened, and she was walking on grass under the sky with many pegasi all around her—white and cream-coloured, all the shades of golden from flaxen to dark honey, amber-red to russet-red, coppery and tawny and dark loam brown; silver to twilight-grey; and occasionally black. They were cantering past her, their wings half spread, the occasional pale feather in a dark wing catching her eye. Where were they all going? They streamed past her, hundreds upon hundreds of them; occasionally one would turn its head and nod at her, although she recognised none of them. They seemed to be going somewhere, and they seemed to be drawing her along with them: where her slow walking feet were taking her was ultimately where all their quick cantering feet were taking them.
Then the landscape, or her dream, changed, and there was a small round valley in the hill before them, and this was their destination. Or, no—this was her destination, for most of the pegasi ran on, parting around the way into the little valley and disappearing behind the shoulders of the hill. A few pegasi slowed to a walk and accompanied her.
But the moment she entered the little circle of the valley she wanted to go no farther; her feet slowed, dragged, and finally stopped. The pegasi with her quietly stopped too.
The valley, now that she was in it, was bigger than it had looked from outside. A group of perhaps twenty pegasi stood in the flat centre of the valley, and with them stood a group of perhaps thirty humans. Sylvi saw the humans with a shock like a blow: how graceless they were, both squat and elongated—how ungrounded and unbalanced—with their strange thin pawing arms and huge clutching hands—and she forgot again that she had remembered how to be human, and she grieved that she was one of them.
A few of the pegasi standing with the humans turned their heads and acknowledged the newcomers, but most did not. None of the humans looked at them. And now, with another shock, Sylvi recognised that the humans were wearing armour, worn, stained armour, and they wore it as if they were used to wearing it and had been wearing it for a long time. They had swords slung round their hips or over their shoulders, and two or three had bows and quivers, and she saw one with a short dagger and halberd; all their faces were tired and grim.
As she noticed these things it was as if the scene were building itself around her. She knew, suddenly, that there was an army camp on the far side of the hill; now that she knew it was there she could hear it, smell the smoke of its cook- and watchfires; there was even a sentinel standing on the brow of the little hill to her right. He could not have been there before—she could not have missed him? Surely she could not have missed him?
She glanced back over her shoulder. The land was empty and silent. All the galloping pegasi were gone, all but the few who stood with her, and the grass they had galloped across was a smooth unruffled sea. Pegasi ordinarily left little mark of where they had been, but there had been hundreds of them, and even if they had contrived to bend not a single grass-stem, her plodding human feet should have broken a path—and there was no sign of her passage either.
She turned forward again. There was a small table, now, at the centre of the valley, around which the humans and the pegasi stood—or rather, on either side of which they stood, the humans on one side and the pegasi on the other. This distressed her; she wanted to walk forward and join the pegasi, or seize two of those ugly human arms with her own ungainly hands and draw them toward the pegasus side of the table. It was not good that they should stay so divided from each other. Was that not why she was here? To help end—to help soften—that division, between human and pegasus?
But where was she? She was walking in the Caves, the pegasus Caves, where no human had ever walked before. She was with Ebon and Lrrianay and Hibeehea….
Where was she?
The armour the humans wore was unfamiliar to her. Old-fashioned perhaps—some of the poorer barons were still using armour their grandparents’ troops had worn, and some of the bits and pieces still in use in the practise yards at the palace were older still—but this seemed to her more than merely that. These men and women did not carry themselves like soldiers in a held-together-with-string unit—nor would one of the poorer barons have twenty pegasi as members of his company.
She knew a little about armour; lessons with Diamon included learning about your equipment and its history. This armour was like nothing she had seen before, mostly leather and very little chain, and the chain curiously linked; they wore no chausses or greaves, and their gauntlets and gorgets were peculiarly cut, as were the panels of their leather cuirasses. When one turned and spoke low-voiced to another, she could half hear the words, which seemed to be at least half known to her but strangely pronounced, and the rhythm of the sentences was odd and outlandish.
The one who had spoken glanced up. There was something odd about him; something about him marked him out from the others … no, the man standing next to him was another like him…. But what was the oddness? Did they stand differently, move differently, was their skin a different colour, their armour a different kind? They were both wearing slightly shabby once-grand gowns over their armour, but so were several of the others. Nothing she could put her finger on but she was certain….
One of the two drew a short baton from under his surcoat, held it flat across his palms and offered it to the other one.
She’d seen that gesture at hundreds of rituals. They were magicians. And in the rituals she knew, that particular gesture heralded some confirmation, validation, agreement—although the baton was usually brought by a third, more subordinate magician. She looked round again. But the rituals she knew took place at the palace, or at carefully planned and organised festivals elsewhere. This was not a battlefield, but the battlefield was obviously nearby.
Two humans unrolled a large, long sheet of what, by its pliancy, must be pegasus-made paper. The humans, perhaps disconcerted by something so unlike stiff, crackly parchment, handled it uneasily and laid it—cautiously, warily, protectively, attentively—on the table. Everyone was staring at it. The two humans holding it touched it as if they weren’t sure what sort of beast it was: was it an ally, was it hostile?
A battlefield alliance …
The strange armour, the language whose words were familiar but whose rhythms were not …
One of the magicians looked tired and worried and grim, like all the other humans.
The other one turned and looked at her …
… and for a moment he was Fthoom.
And she was walking in the Caves again, except that she wasn’t walking. She was standing still, and her three companions were standing with her. Lrrianay and Hibeehea were gravely watching her, and Ebon had
his nose on her shoulder.
You okay?
She nodded. And then, startled, looked around. They were no longer in the long corridor, but a huge room, the ceiling lost in shadows overhead. There were other pegasi here—three that she could immediately see—one of them was lighting a candle in a niche in the wall. There were candles all around the walls at irregular intervals, and as the niches were various sizes, so were the candles. In the centre of the room, a low table stood, a dozen tall lamps on it, blazing with light.
In the light she could see the walls…. Millennia of tiny, frail feather-hands, smoothing and scooping, carving and scoring the natural walls of the cave….
There were portraits of pegasi everywhere on the walls, walking and flying, standing, running, lying, bowing, pawing, dancing, rearing, and doing other things she had no names for, as when two stood face to face and clasped their feather-hands together; or when, again face to face, four stood in a four-pointed star, knelt and bowed their heads, and wrapped their wings over each other. The curves of one pegasus, the billow of one tail or the fall of one mane, became a curve or a billow or a fall of the next; and in the flicker of the light, the rounds and hollows of all seemed to move as if with life.
Among the stone pegasi there were other things: trees and flowers and climbing vines, leaves and branches and blooms, saplings and bushes and forests—rabbits, deer, foxes, fornols, badgers, bears, birds—many, many birds, from the tiniest wrens to great raptors with wingspans nearly as great as the pegasi’s own—spiders and beetles and butterflies and bees. There was a stone stream near where Sylvi stood with several pegasi prancing in it: every drop of water was clearly and lovingly detailed.
And humans. Sylvi had been turning slowly round as if looking for something—and yet she did not want to see humans—see them here, surrounded by pegasi, to be forced to look again at the coarseness and gracelessness of what she was herself. She wrapped her gawky arms around her clumsy body and hunched her shoulders.