by Marc Secchia
“He did, the poxy son of a gecko. My wounds are not serious. I’ll be able to heal myself once we leave this swamp. Is that –”
“Yes. Fairy-pony, would you lead us out of the swamp? If possible, the route should avoid any major predators, but take us quickly to a place of safety. Prince Jesafion is wounded.”
“You speak as if it understands all that.”
For once, no contempt. He sounded genuinely curious. “Her,” said Zaranna, definitively. “She understands our needs. I see no reason to treat her as less than a friend. Follow me. This is no good place for our kind.”
She almost thought his lip would curl at the mention of ‘our kind’, or her treating the pony o’ the wisp as a friend. But perhaps the Pegasus was more beaten-up than he admitted, for he only hung his head and dogged her footsteps. Steadily, the Human disguised as a Plains Horse and the Pegasus trailed through the endless swamp, searching for sunshine.
Chapter 9: Equinox
HAVING SPENT THE night’s darkest hours negotiating the tricky outer reaches of the swamp, and having to call the pony o’ the wisp back to the struggling equines time and time again, Zaranna whickered in relief to feel solid ground at last beneath her hooves, only to find herself faced with a dangerously steep, brush-covered slope – almost a crumbling cliff-face. Dismay turned her exhale into a deep groan. Her legs quivered uncontrollably.
“Rest,” wheezed Jesafion.
Oh, blessed relief! “Up here,” she encouraged him. “Come out of the water.”
To her surprise, he said, “Never looked less a Pegasus Prince, hrrr?”
She peered at him, wondering what the odd puff of breath across his vibrating lips meant. It sounded exactly like the game of blowing raspberries on a baby’s stomach, but coming from a chunky Pegasus, it seemed rude and out of place.
“You look magnificent, your Highness. Parade-ground perfect.”
He snorted with laughter. “You’re a strange one.”
“Can you see much?”
“There’s an oddly-shaped white blob talking to me.” He shrugged, folding his wings neatly crosswise over his back and croup. “Tomorrow, we should find a river or a gulley leading down here. That’ll be the surest route out. Then, we must search for food – unless a Plains filly discovered something edible in that repulsive fungus-graveyard? Hrrr!” He snorted again. “I thought not.”
“Jez, what were you doing –”
“Jez?” His voice struck a painfully shrill note.
“Uh … sorry, Prince Jesafion.”
“I’ve no want of titles,” he said grandly, “especially since I saved your life several times back there. I wasn’t aware of the contraction of names in Plains culture. Is that your tribe’s normal practice?”
What he wasn’t aware of could fill a goodly number of libraries, Zaranna fumed. Yet, he had thanked her in his inimitable ill-mannered way. She bowed her head, saying with a goodly slice of irony, “I’ve never been more grateful for your evident prowess in battle, o Prince.”
Wow. That was so stilted, it almost walked off and became a circus performer in its own right. Naturally, Jesafion accepted the compliment as his rightful due.
“Indeed, I was awesome,” he neighed.
Honestly? “Jesafion, what were you doing out there when we ran into the Darkwolf Clan?”
“Patrolling the borderlands,” he replied, with a sleepy ruffle of his mane. “The Pegasi maintain the magical borders of our land, renewing the wards for warning and protection against equinoctial storms and ensuring scum like the Darkwolf Clan, Outlanders and creatures of the Beyond are kept out. We Pegasi are the most powerful magic users in all Equinox. The dangerous work of protecting our lesser kin and charges falls to us, as you saw. In the course of my duties I became separated from my constellation of Pegasi. And, by the Earthen Fires, I never expected to run into an impudent, disrespectful Plains Horse this far … North …”
Without warning, he fell asleep mid-sentence!
Zaranna stared at the softly-snoring Pegasus. Well. Could she honestly become so thoroughly frustrated in a dream, she craved nothing more than to nip a nice chunk out of the prince of the realm’s haunches? Then again, she had no desire to gag on sour prissiness.
Now, had those been the haunches of a certain Paramedic Murray … she chuckled wickedly. Enough said!
* * * *
Dawn sulked through the leaden swamp skies. To add insult to injury, rain had begun to sift down just before first light – but oddly, the water tasted of peppermint. Zaranna licked her unfamiliarly large teeth, thinking that this put a new spin on minty-fresh toothpaste advertisements. How did horses approach personal hygiene, anyways? Her own hide was obviously regarded as decent attire, although it did rather make her feel that certain parts of her were … waving in the breeze, so to speak. And how was it that she dreamed within a dream? She had expected to return to Earth, but had only managed to dream about a date with Alex.
Huh. If she was in a bad mood, then the Princely Prodigy might as well join her.
Zaranna turned to bunt him awake with her nose, only to find Jesafion already cleaning himself with his magic. “May the Sky-Fires imbue your soul with brilliance,” he greeted her.
She ventured, “You … too?”
Far from being charmed at her attempt to return his peculiar greeting, he corrected sententiously, “You say, ‘And may your hooves thunder over the Earthen Fires,’ Zaranna. Have you truly forgotten so much? For a Pegasus, due to the considerable difference in our social standing, you might add, ‘o mighty Pegasus’ or ‘o high one’. For a Prince, that would be, ‘o mighty Prince’, if we were in a formal situation. Go on, say it.”
Ten seconds and she was ready to kick him into the dog-box and bolt the door for good. Zaranna seethed sweetly, “And may your hooves thunder over the Earthen Fires, o Wingéd Wonder.”
This earned her a snort of steamy air above her ears. “You seem quite mad, little filly. But I like you. You should meet Cyantoria, my intended, my beautiful muse! She’d enjoy your refreshing attitude.”
Refreshing? She pictured giving him a refreshing boot up the … oh, whatever. Zaranna was becoming rather puzzled by her horse’s personality. Rather more porcupine than equine. Perhaps she ought to work on her diplomacy skills while she learned about Equinox. That seemed infinitely preferable to being eaten by the next Darkwolf Twisted thing they ran across.
With a pleasingly deft conversational sidestep, she said, “Tell me about Cyantoria, Jesafion. What’s she like?”
“An excellent proposal!” he enthused. “Let’s head West to find a way out of the swamp, Zaranna. Shall I cleanse your coat for you until you remember how to use your hide-magic?”
West? She rapidly pictured a compass in her head. “Yes, thank you.”
Her skin tingled pleasantly from his ministrations as Zaranna oriented herself, before taking several cautious steps up over a large, moss-slick boulder. She realised the Pegasus was staring after her with a bemused expression. He said, “Perhaps we might try the other West? Unless you know something I don’t?”
“Uh …” Oh, pantyhose. She could not put a single hoof in the right direction.
She yelped and jumped as the tingle washed over a private location, but the Pegasus seemed unconcerned. Zaranna flicked her tail in annoyance; dirt simply crumbled off the long hairs, leaving her tail surprisingly long and plumy, right down to her fetlocks. Perfect, in fact. Fine. A girl ought to look her best, even in the most adverse conditions. Holly would definitely approve.
With a toss of her mane, firmly discounting any nagging sense of unreality, Zaranna set off toward the other West, clambering carefully over boulders and loose shale at the base of the cliff.
Cyantoria was Blue Sky-Clan Pegasus, apparently a clan of slightly lower standing than Jesafion’s White Thunder Clan, who were the acknowledged rulers of the Pegasi and evidently the greatest, most magnificent, inimitable and illustrious – blah, blah, yawn – of all Equine
s. Cyantoria hailed from a faraway Vale called Amorix, which meant ‘valley of waterfalls’, which was also the holiest valley for River Horse-kind. Their betrothal represented not only a fine alliance amongst the Pegasus Clans, but it was also more than evident from Jesafion’s sighs and long-winded explanations that they were very much in love, and once she managed to wade through his poetical descriptions of Cyantoria’s flowing turquoise mane and peerless azure hide, her dainty hooves and curvilinear form, her temperate personality and – Zaranna almost wanted to shout ‘There’s a Dragon behind you!’ just to jolt Jesafion from his romantic stupor – everything that was wonderful about the Delicate Doyenne of Equine Delights, she had to acknowledge that the Prince might possess the odd sweet bone in his body. Cyantoria also came furnished with various titles – Lore-Giver, Seer and Mystic Reader of Sky-Fires being among the more comprehensible ones. Zaranna pictured her as a scholar and healer.
Meantime, they plodded along the swamp’s shore, having to detour several times to avoid towering piles of boulders tumbled down from above, and once a Sentalia tree, which was so thick that the grey, stippled trunk towered to four times Zaranna’s height. The first fresh water they stumbled across trickled down from way above. Horse and Pegasus took turns letting the tumbling drops slip down their upturned throats. Shortly they struck a gully, but were stymied by a ten-foot waterfall not far in. The walls were too narrow for Jesafion to employ his wings. An hour later, Zaranna became aware of a louder rushing sound. Aha. Her spirits picked up.
By this time, she was so hungry that even the variegated mosses were starting to look tasty. She asked Jesafion about perhaps taking a nibble of one or two, but he cried out in horror that the swamp was noxious.
She should have known. Luminous green and yellow blotches on boulders were probably not horse food, although she was certain she had read about horses eating mosses and bark in a pinch. No mind. By now, her stomach had given up feasting on her backbone and resorted to sulking in a tight knot instead. Turning into a wide gully scooped out by a decent-sized flow at its base, Zaranna began to pick her way upstream. Jesafion followed just a step behind, peering myopically at the boulders and stones underfoot.
They waded through the distinctly violet-tinged waters and scrambled over boulders and ledges, moving steadily from pool to pool. Progress was slow due to the treacherous footing. Hooves did not lend themselves to prancing up a series of small waterfalls; Jesafion used little hops aided by his wings, while Zaranna picked her way along with the occasional bold leap to take her up a boulder or a four-foot tumble of chuckling, conspicuously pink water. Meantime, they drew closer to the Vale’s western periphery, a towering ridge many thousands of feet tall, formed in rugged grandeur from a type of warm, ruddy sandstone she did not recognise. She counted over twenty waterfalls up there, falling from the unseen heights above or pouring out of what appeared to be dark-mouthed, fern-fringed caverns. Beauty usurped the swamp’s darkness. As the mists disappeared, so the plants became more profuse and fruitful, berry bushes in the main, and she heard unfamiliar, piping birdsong and the buzzing of insects – at least, what she took for insects until she realised they were tiny, bee-sized flying horses with three miniature pollen-pouches on either side of their flanks.
Tiny green equine bees? Cute, but bizarre.
Perhaps four hours of climbing later, the easterly side of the ravine had flattened out noticeably and Zaranna realised they were emerging into Sentalia Vale itself, according to Jesafion’s flow of information, which had continued unabated since dawn. He certainly revelled in the grandiose flow of his own narration.
The fiery orange sun loomed close overhead, perhaps three or four times the size of the Earth’s Sun, appearing congenial and cheering after days spent in the swamp. When she looked through her forelock, which kept dangling over her eyes so that she had already developed the habit of twitching her neck to swing it aside, or through her lashes, which were so long she could see them curling away from her eyes, Zaranna found she could look almost directly at the sun to observe the regular sun-flare activity, which her native tour guide had instructed her to look out for. Apparently, this was a reliable method of counting time. Zaranna sighed over the maths involved. Ugh. Seven long flares in one cycle that repeated every five hours, a different, bi-hourly three-flare cycle, a sunspot cycle every week and a half – even Yolanda would have developed a headache over Equinox’s minor rash of timekeeping systems. And that was hardly the half of it, since the calendar followed certain types of equinoctial storm activity and had something to do with spotting different colours of Storm-Pegasi – amethyst, maroon, black, dark garnet and moon-blue being enshrined in the local almanac. Today was apparently four sunspots past an Amethyst Advent.
This might coincide with her dream of an amethyst storm-sky over Noordhoek Beach, depending on how this world’s time matched up with Earth’s. Or not. Wasn’t she crazy even to be asking the question?
She gazed out over Sentalia Vale. One thought dominated her mind. Stunning. An absolute breath-stealer, a place which showcased the kind of natural beauty that squeezed her chest so hard, tears started in her eyes. It began in the North, the direction from which they had come, with snow-tipped tan mountains looming above a lilac-bellied cloudbank. So clear was the air, Zaranna imagined she could reach out and touch those peaks. Then, the eye traversed the great sweep of red sandstone mountains with their waterfalls rushing white and wild down the slopes like the manes of many horses, thick with hanging ferns and flowering heathery brakes, toward the South, where the forests began. Sixty miles of rainbow-hued forest stood between them and the place where Rhenduror had ambushed Zaranna, the low hills which signalled the start of Pegasus-controlled territory. The forest covered the gentler slopes to the South so densely she could not imagine any horse could penetrate such a thicket, but toward the middle of the valley, broke up into meandering meadows covered in bright patches of flowers that even from this distance, appeared to shimmer with life and insects and pollen.
On cue, her stomach rumbled urgently.
“A view of the Vale makes you hungry?” asked Jesafion.
“I could eat a hor … uh, a lot of grass?” said Zaranna. Phew. A cat’s whisker from sealing her madness in the Pegasus’ mind.
“We should find good eating lower down,” he said. “I’m quite certain your nose will not have forgotten how to sniff out the best fodder. Keep an eye out for Darkwolf Clan, Zaranna. They’ve been as thick as an infestation of fleas in the armpit of this area recently. We can move faster now, too. If you can direct us to a meadow, I should be able to find the herbs I require for my eyes.”
“Shall I head more for the middle of the valley, then?”
“No, keep to this western edge, but take us progressively lower,” Jesafion directed. “It’s a shame you can’t fly like a Pegasus. You know what they say. Lords to the skies, peasants to the fields.”
Classic. Lest she lose sight of her lowly status, his Lordship had a few special words just to put her in her place.
* * * *
Toward evening, having spent most of the day travelling at a brisk trot over anaemic-looking grassland and scrubby low bushes that Zaranna’s nose told her held no nutritional value whatsoever, they approached a gap in the forest’s fringe. The trees towered mightily above her, making a Plains Horse feel insignificant and fearful of Darkwolf Clan hiding behind every bush. But the gap led to a picturesque meadow fed by a burbling spring, resplendent in the sun’s lowering rays. All at once, a marvellous aroma tickled Zaranna’s nostrils. It was ice cream on a parched afternoon, ambrosia to her horsey senses. She sucked in a lungful. Magnificent! Before she knew it, she voiced a ringing whinny of delight and pranced out into the open.
The grass was lush and springy, a brilliant emerald green with stalks topped by white seed-pods. One whiff of that pollen and Zaranna felt utterly giddy. She wanted to roll, to frisk, to dance – and she did, laughing and exclaiming words that made not a jot of sense. Th
e larger Pegasus stepped carefully onto that magic carpet. She was sure he would prance, at the very least, but he first looked around carefully, perhaps using his magic to check for danger, before bending to crop the grass. The merest sigh of pleasure escaped his lips.
Ha! The jumped-up old fraud. Jumping and bucking and spinning until she was dizzy, Zaranna kicked up a fair storm of the gorgeous white pollen before she bent and greedily began cropping mouthfuls with her sharp incisors. A few chews brought the grass back to her molars, and oh! The explosion of sensation in her mouth! The grass-sap seemed to fizz across her tongue, before spreading honeyed fire down her throat. Her stomach groaned and scrunched up in pleasure.
“Fan-tas-tic!” she gasped. “Wonderful!” She scoffed another huge mouthful, laughing with childish abandon. Around the stalks poking out of her mouth, she mumbled, “Jezzer, old chap, this was the best idea ever. No wonder you told me to wait. You’re a marvel!”
Jesafion ate with perfect Pegasus manners. Each bite was carefully measured, a neat crop of his clean white incisors before being tossed into the back of his mouth, chewed methodically and swallowed.
He eyed her warily.
Who cared? She could not stuff enough in her mouth at once. Zaranna moved with tiny dance steps, mowing an uncertain line into the meadow, trapped in a world of equine epicurean bliss.
“Careful, you’ll bloat,” said Jesafion.
“Um.”
“The sugar-ponies will charge out.”
Now he was onto another of his incomprehensible explanations. Suddenly, Zaranna’s eyes crossed toward her nose. The pollen – if pollen it was – galloped away from her in a flash of powdery white wings. Huh? She became aware of movement all around her. All over the meadow. Tiny white ponies, exactly like little sugar-sculptures, only brimming with evident life. She sneezed violently, blowing dozens of the tiny creatures out of her nostrils, spreading a trail of destruction.