CHAPTER 2
Eight hundred years before, the pegasi marched (and flew) with their new allies to engage the forces assembled against them, but they were not much good at fighting. They are astonishingly nimble in the air and can splinter an enemy’s wing with a well-aimed kick, and a blow from a pegasus wing can break a norindour’s back; but they are too small and too lightweight for close work. And, as Balsin said after the first battle, while no one could doubt their courage, they aren’t devious enough. It was the human swords and spears, arrows and maces, with help from human magicians’ wiles, which won the war. The ladons and wyverns were killed or driven right away, and those who fled perhaps went in search of their larger and even more dangerous cousins, the dragons; if so it was a long search, for they were not seen again for generations. A few taralians and norindours fled into the wild lands beyond what Balsin declared were his kingdom’s boundaries, and there they were allowed to remain, so long as they caused no trouble beyond the theft of an occasional sheep; although the striped pelt of an unusually large taralian was a highly-regarded heirloom in a number of baronial families, and the sharply-bent wings of the norindour appeared on a number of family crests, as indicating courage and ferocity in all forms of struggle and combat.
While this was not in the original treaty, the humans’ superiority at warfare came slowly to be reflected in all relations between the two species, but the pegasi, mild and courteous, never gave any indication that they resented this. By Sylvi’s day, the ruler of the pegasi had for many generations been expected to do ritualised homage to the ruler of the humans on feast days, and to attend the royal court, with a suitable entourage of attendant pegasi, often enough to be seen as a regular presence. Some human rulers were greater sticklers about frequency than others, just as some pegasi rulers appeared to enjoy the visits, or appeared not to, more than others. But it was quickly noted that the more often the pegasi visited the human palace, and the more of them who did so, and the longer they stayed, the more the country ruled by the human monarch appeared to thrive.
Balsin himself had predicted something of the kind. Viktur wrote,
Balsin does strongly hold that we do hold our sweet green land by favour and sanction of thee pegasi, and as it is, so far as we do know, thee only land that do so hold pegasi, in some manner and disposition do thee pegasi hold thee land. Gandam agreed to this with great solemnity and declared that Balsin showed great wisdom for a warrior-king; and Balsin laughed and said that Gandam was an old worrymonger and that magicians see spears when warrior-kings see blades of grass. Gandam, who commonly did laugh at Balsin’s teasing did not in this instance but said instead, king, this land is beautiful but strange and we as yet understand it little; and forget not thee story of thee six blind men and thee Oliphant. Then did Balsin understand that Gandam spoke in all seriousness, and said, very well, I shall make it easy for those who come after us to remember that we hold our mandate from thee pegasi: and he with Badilla did create thee emblem of thee crowned pegasus which do appear upon thee banner that do goe with him on every occasion when thee king do ride out over his lands, in war or in peace, and which withal appears at thee peak of the arch into thee Great Hall where hangs thee Sword, and in divers places about thee palace.
But Balsin’s coat of arms showed only the Sword and the palace and the Singing Yew.
Furthermore the human sovereign, and certain of the sovereign’s extended family, were each assigned an individual pegasus, as a kind of ceremonial companion, as if such blunt discrete pairings might ease or soften the lack of communication between the two peoples. Most of these couples saw, and expected to see, each other rarely: those humans who did not live within the Wall might not see their pegasi from one year to the next. For the sovereign’s immediate family it was different: those pegasi were often at the palace, and something like a relationship sometimes grew up between human and pegasus. There was genuine friendship between Sylvi’s father and his pegasus, who was the king of his people, and, it was said, they could almost understand each other, even without the services of the human king’s Speaker.
Some form of Speaker—of translator—had been obviously necessary from the beginning; the human magicians and pegasus shamans were the only ones who could speak across the species boundary at all. Even the sign-language, as it was developed, was unreliable and prone to misinterpretation, because of the enormous differences in anatomy between the two peoples. At first it had merely been that anyone on either side who seemed to have some talent for it learnt what they could, and the numbers of magicians and shamans were about equal. But the magicians seemed slowly to take the charge over, echoing—or perhaps going some way to causing—the tendency that in all things the humans should be superior and the pegasi should defer. The idea of the bound pairs had been Gandam’s; the idea of the Speakers, magicians specially trained to enable what communication there was between human and pegasus, was Dorogin’s. It had been Dorogin’s idea also that the sovereign, the sovereign’s consort and the sovereign’s children should each have an individual Speaker as each was bound to a pegasus.
The binding was done when both human and pegasus were children; when possible the human ruler’s children were assigned the pegasus ruler’s children. This was supposed to promote friendship between the two races, although the children did not always cooperate.
The royal human child and its pegasus were introduced to each other for the first time on the human child’s twelfth birthday. At this time several of the royal magicians would create a spell of binding between the two which was supposed to enable them some communication with each other. The spell of binding was specific, between that one human child and that one pegasus child; occasionally it worked, and there was a real connection between the two—emotional if mostly wordless—and more often it did not. Who beyond the immediate royal family was selected to be bound to a pegasus was an erratic process ; the children of anyone who had grown close to or performed a significant service to the sovereign might be added to the list as the children of third or fourth cousins who never came to the palace might drop off it. It was the greatest honour of the human sovereign’s court for someone’s child to be nominated for binding, but it was a slightly tricky honour, because it bound the child to the sovereign and court life as well.
When a royal marriage could be predicted sufficiently in advance, the future consort might be bound to a member of the pegasus royal family, but these forecasts had a habit of going wrong. What often happened was that some adult human became a member of a royal or noble family by marriage, and thereupon was assigned a pegasus; but while the binding spell was just as punctiliously made, there were no records that these late pairings ever learnt to empathise, or to communicate beyond the few words of gesture-language common to anyone who cared to learn them. One of Sylvi’s uncles, brother-in-law to the king, was famous for saying that he had more fellow feeling for his boots, which were comfortable, protected his feet and didn’t make him feel like a hulking clumsy oaf.