Ebon made the noise like a whinny with a hiccup again. I didn’t know pegasi laughed, she said. Well—out loud. Where humans can hear them.
Ebon shook his head so that his already-magnificent mane (pegasus manes didn’t usually come in fully till adulthood) whipped back and forth. The plaits were coming out fast, and it rained flowers. She bent to pick them up.
What a lot of old bores we are with you then, he said, but he said it with less than his usual vigour.
Maybe you don’t find our jokes funny, said Sylvi sadly.
There was a pause, and he answered soberly, I think we’re all too worried about getting along. It’s hard to know what to say to you. Especially since we mostly can’t.
You don’t, said Sylvi. Worry about what to say.
Well, I’m hopeless, said Ebon, recovering his spirits. Everybody says so. You can’t have been drilled any sillier in signing than I was in signing and manners after they decided I had to be your pegasus. Think of the breath stoppings and the heart burstings and the dumbfoundings if they’d had any idea we’d be able to talk to each other!
She’d laughed—she couldn’t help it—and too many people turned to look at her: at her and Ebon, standing a little apart from the rest of the crowd at that moment and only making half-hearted and erratic attempts at signing to each other. And yet she’d laughed. At what?
Silence fell, and the king, as if idly, as if his feet just happened to be taking him in the direction of his daughter, joined them, and with him came Lrrianay. Shortly after this the queen, equally idly, ended her conversation with some cousins, here from the other side of the country for the princess’binding, and drifted over with Hirishy, whereupon the king wandered away again. No more silences fell, but Sylvi didn’t laugh out loud again either; nor were she and Ebon left to stand by themselves again.
She lay in bed now, staring out the window. Her nurse always pulled the curtains closed, last thing before she blew out the lamp and after she made sure Sylvi was in bed instead of hiding somewhere with a book on hawks or a bridle she’d decided needed a different colour browband. After a few minutes, as soon as Sylvi was sure the nurse was really gone, she got up and pulled the curtains open again.
She had always felt shut in behind walls and doors; she was notorious for going for long tramps over open countryside even in the worst weather. Her father’s dogs tended to jump up hopefully when they saw her, because she took them for longer rambles than her father had time to do. One of the best things that had ever happened to her was when her mother declared that she no longer always had to have a nurse or a groom or a courtier go with her—but she did have to have either a dog or a pony, and she had to tell her mother first exactly where she was going. She wondered if Ebon liked to go for long walks ... well, not very likely, was it? He had wings. Who would walk who could fly?
But that wasn’t true. They did walk, he had told her. Flying is tiring, he said. Of course we walk. We walk more than we fly. He had told her too that, while their land centred on the Linwhialinwhia Caves, as Balsinland centred on the palace within its Wall, the pegasi did not live there. This made sense to Sylvi; to the extent that she understood ssshasssha at all, it made the Caves sound like a kind of very large library with pictures instead of books. And she preferred the outdoors herself.
The pegasi spent most of their time wandering through the high wild meadows that were their private country—as specified by the treaty—and foraging, and sleeping out of doors wherever the end of day found them; although they grew and tended certain crops for food, paper, dyes and paints, and weaving. These were planted around the shfeeah, which Sylvi tentatively translated as a kind of small village, where the craftspeople lived, and where other pegasi stayed for a time to help with the crops. The story-tellers and shamans roam with the rest of us, but the sculptors stay near the Caves.
Sylvi had some trouble with “sculptor,” although she heard the word clearly enough and she knew a little about the Caves: it was one of the things you learnt about the pegasi, with the Alliance and the gesture-language. The Caves had been there when the pegasi came, so long ago that even the pegasi only had myths about their origins; but, while extensive, they had been much smaller and far less beautiful. Thousands of years of pegasus sculptors, rubbing and smoothing and chipping and carving, using such small tools as their frail feather-hands could hold, and the Caves were—so beautiful you can’t really stay there long, you want to jump out of your skin and run for it. They’re perfect, you know, even though they’re not finished—will never be finished—it’s part of their perfection, that it goes on and on into the future and you’ll never see it, that us little short-lived mortals create perfection by not being there long, although we keep coming, us and our sons and daughters and their sons and daughters and so on.... Sorry. I’m sounding like a grown-up.
But the sculptors themselves don’t stay inside long—a few weeks or months—and then they come out and join us in the fields for a while, although they mostly don’t like to go far. “Remember how to not fly,” is the proverb: remember how to walk. They come out and join us in the fields. And teach their beginning apprentices sculpting on the pillars of the shfeeah. The Caves knock your Courts hollow, although this one’s pretty nice, he added, looking round consideringly. But it’s only barely just been built.
Sylvi, fascinated, forbore to say that the Outer Court was one of the oldest bits of the palace, over seven hundred years old.
You can see it too clearly, Ebon went on, where it begins and ends, your Court. It’s different in the Caves. The chambers and corridors all open out of each other and weave back and forth like the king’s plaits on coronation day. Very very occasionally, an old sculptor may ask for a decision to rub through a wall—the other sculptors have to agree, and the monarch and the decision-making shamans. It doesn’t happen often. And it becomes a permanent day on our calendar, the day that someone brushes the thin-made place on a wall and suddenly there’s a hole there, even if it took years to scratch open and it will be years more before the hole is big enough to climb through and see what’s on the other side. I was born on Damonay—the day three hundred and twenty-six years before that they had made a hole in Damonay chamber. Ambernia chamber, which is the one they let out of darkness, is all red stone and considered one of the most beautiful in all the Caves, so being born on Damonay is lucky.
Do humans ever go there? To your Caves?
Ebon looked at her, puzzled: head low, chin pulled in, one ear half back. Not that I know of. Humans don’t come to us. We come to you. The Caves aren’t a human sort of thing. He paused and—this was a frown, Sylvi thought: both ears half back, head raised again but held rather stiffly to one side. I ... I don’t know. They ... they wouldn’t fit around you, somehow. And it’s in the treaty that we’re supposed to come to you.