She didn’t mean to, but thoughts and silent-speech still got confused, and she said so that he could hear her, I am not little.
His laugh started with the nose-wrinkle smile and ran in ripples all the way to his hindquarters. He was a dappled brown, and his dapples twinkled as he laughed. He was smaller than Ebon or Lrrianay, but not so small as Hibeehea. I beg pardon, he said. When I was younger, I went several times to your palace, and I have seen a few humans, and they were great clumsy creatures. You are not. You are smaller than I was expecting. Smaller and neater.
For an awful, heart-stopping moment she thought—He’s guessed about Ebon and me, he knows about the flying!—and she clutched that thought to her as she might clutch an escaping puppy, all legs and wriggle, that the sculptor should not hear it too. I am sorry, she said. I have always been . . . among humans I am too small. She thought—and pushed that thought forward, toward the dangerous speech boundary—of the years she had spent sitting on cushions so she could eat supper with her family, and the fact that she still used a child’s sword in the practise yard.
You are not too small here, he replied. Here you are just right.
She couldn’t help smiling. Thank you, she said, but her eyes drifted to the wall, where the pegasus had been working. Sometimes the walls were sculpted only, but here there were colours too: yellows, browns, umbers, dark reds and blues and greens. She thought she saw tree shapes, and if they were tree shapes, she thought she saw bird shapes among their branches.
It is the Forest of Areeanhaaee in autumn, said the pegasus. Where we hold our main harvest festival, and the birds sing so loudly you cannot hear the sound of hundreds of us running the great rune-sign that is laid out as a path among the trees.
There is so much I—we—humans don’t know, she said sadly. I do not know the Forest of Areeanhaaee, although Ebon has told me something of your festivals.
You know more now, said the pegasus. And you will take it home with you, and tell other humans, and you will tell it well, because you have been to the Caves and spoken to its sculptors. You will find the Forest and the festival on many other walls here, till it is more familiar to you than if you had been there—because that is what happens in the Caves. He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and then unfolded one wing, and tapped the bead that hung round her neck with a tiny feathery finger. That is nicely done, he said.
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.