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.