Pegasus, Lion, and Centaur

Knowing how much energy a horse needed to gain altitude, Yara let Eric fly to the south, keeping it along the dark edge of the lower cloud. The sky here had no clear boundaries. A large cloud dropped off like a mountain. At the base of the mountain smaller clouds were joined by limp beards. From where the sun’s rays got tangled in the beards, four points, like hay in the horse’s wings, suddenly appeared. With each second the points became larger. Soon Yara distinguished dense, leathery wings exactly like that of a dragon. These were hyeons. Tiny figures pressed onto their backs. “Hell! Trouble!” thought Yara.

At this moment four winged points broke apart into two teams of two. One team stayed circling below, the other dived for the cloud. “Look! Warlocks!” she shouted to Dennis, pulling down the scarf. He started to toss about and began to jerk the rein, confusing Delta. “Don’t! We have the advantage up high! They can’t gain height fast! Will be more dangerous on the way back!”

Yara did not pack much power into this second shout, knowing that the wind would nevertheless carry away three quarters of it. After ascertaining that Dennis no longer tried to turn Delta around, she gathered her fingers into a duck beak and poked downward. This was the signal to dive.

She hardly touched its neck with the reins and Eric responded. It leaned forward, pointed its snout to the ground and, accelerating, flapped its wings vigorously several times. After the fifth or sixth stroke it folded up its wings; however, because of Yara and the saddle it could not do this as in the stable. It turned out that it held her with the base of its wings at their widest part. Yara found herself between two shields protecting her all the way to her chest. Now and then it came to her mind that only this makes it possible to dive. Just have to understand: either by chance or deep thought-out regularity.

The horse gained speed. Gravitational force drew it to the ground. Yara leaned down, trying to take cover behind the horse’s neck. The wind was whistling keener and shriller all the time. The free end of the scarf whipped the back of her head painfully.

Yara attempted to look around in order to determine where Dennis was now. He turned out to be unexpectedly close. Frightened but not panicking. He seized Delta’s mane so as not to pull the reins. Also a variant. His face was white-red with clearly marked spots. The eyebrows were like two iced caterpillars. His ski cap had been torn away. The hair was standing on end like white peaks. “It means I also have the same eyebrows! That’s why it’s so painful to pucker up! Clever Delta! Didn’t lag behind Eric!” Two different thoughts collided in Yara’s consciousness.

Making use of the fact that Yara carelessly turned her body and removed it from under the protection of the wings, the wind hit her chest and cheek, almost knocking her off the saddle. Yara clung to the front pommel, perceiving herself not simply as a pitiful teapot but also a grotesque samovar. Likely trivial, but she lost several valuable seconds. When Yara again saw the ground, it was abruptly close. The silvery box of a trailer crawled on the grey loops of the highway. Yara understood that Eric could no longer lift up with its wings: the speed was too great. But Eric also did not intend to do so.

For a brief moment next to her flickered a dark side in stripes, a flat snout with protruding lower jaw, and closely planted eyes. The person pressed himself so close to the hyeon that they seemed like a two-headed essence. Yara understood that she had run into one of those two warlocks that dived for the cloud. The rider did not manage to turn the hyeon around: the speed of a taking-off hyeon was too incomparable to that of a winged horse almost going into a dive. Understanding this very well, the warlock on the off chance jerked up a hand with the dim half-moon of a crossbow. Eric twitched from the pain. Its elongated neck oozed a long ribbon of blood, as if the horse had been cut by a razor. “He thought that he couldn’t hit me and fired at the horse so that we would crash together,” Yara determined.

The horse rushed towards the ground, acquiring impossible strength with each instant. It was impossible to look at its wings. They did not become white or radiant, but they were blinding all the same and stinging the eyes, becoming too bright for them.

As Eric was transforming, everything around it paled. The hills, the pine trees, the highway were covered by a haze, watered down. At the same time Yara realized that the world remained the same as it was: completely substantial and not spectral. Simply Eric no longer belonged to this world, in which it was nevertheless a guest, although it was old and born here. Repeatedly Yara and other hdivers tried to describe the crossing to novices, but words were insufficient to explain how it was possible to become more real than reality itself despite that it would remain unchanged also.

Yara looked askance at her own hands. This was the dispersion test well-known to hdivers. Next to Eric’s mane the hands seemed flat, cardboard-like. Much less real than Eric. Because of this annoying attack of the wind Yara had remained a part of her own world, whereas the horse no longer belonged to it. In a second or two Eric would pierce right through her world, and Yara, if she were unable to merge with it, would be stuck somewhere between the highway and a brush of pine trees on the small hill.

Yara acted instinctively. After realizing that it would be hopeless if left behind, she leaned down and clung to Eric’s neck as tightly as she could. Her cheek was buried in the stiff brush of mane. “Don’t leave me behind! All the same I won’t let go of you!” she whispered soundlessly, knowing that even if Eric heard, it would not be in words nevertheless.

And it did not leave her behind. It closed up base and changed the incline, after wrapping Yara up with its wings like dense sails. Time stopped. The small hill, no more than fifty metres away from Yara, blurred, as if water was splashed from a jar onto fresh watercolour. It did not make room, did not disappear, remained where it was, but Eric and Yara pierced it like a soap bubble, which closed up after them. Yara felt the tension of her own world sliding down along the horse’s wings shielding her. She took a risk and again looked around. Her world slowly floated back, screened off by invisible glass. Somewhere there the trailer was moving and birches grew. Ul also remained there. “Thank you!” Yara whispered. It became clear to her that at the last minute Eric dragged her, the perpetual latecomer, through to become the same as it.

But in front something messy, the colour of meat scum, was already moving up to Yara. A disgusting formless mass. It was impossible to pass over it or fly around it, only right through it. There was neither sky nor earth nor constellations here, only this mass. Swiftly revolving in the centre, it was lying motionless along the edges and forming a quiet little stagnant mass. Most of all it very much resembled dirty water with food scraps pulled into the drain with a squelch. And there, in this terrible centre, everything was boiling and seething.

Something flickered on Yara’s left hand side. After a hard look, she understood that this was Delta. Dropping behind a little bit in the dive, the mare quickly caught up. Yara did not immediately realize whether Dennis was on its back and experienced several unpleasant seconds. “But indeed he dived! Didn’t break up! Now if only he doesn’t start panicking in the swamp!” she decided.

Yara was shaken in the saddle. A wing, pulling back, touched her shoulder. Eric accelerated. Instead of flying into the calm and outwardly safe foam, it, after extending the snout, rushed straight into the revolving centre of “the sink.” Delta followed it. The spiral of the drain now thickened and calmed down, now coiled up into a thread, and then began to toss her from side to side. Yara knew, according to her own experience, that this was more terrible for a novice than falling together with the horse’s folded wings and waiting to hit the ground.

Before throwing itself into the seething volcano, Eric folded its wings. The wind plucked Yara off the saddle. The scum on her hdiver jacket broke off, hung on it, and ran off as if alive. Yara lost orientation for several seconds and thought only of one thing – not to lose the stirrup, not to let go of the rein.

Sensing that the hurricane was losing strength, Yara hurriedly sucked in air. She sucked in fiercely till it hurt in her chest, knowing that soon any breath would be a luxury. And indeed: Yara breathed out already in the swamp.

As in “the drain,” everything here was the colour of meat scum. A compressed, disgusting, still space supporting neither hope nor happiness nor motion. A world locked in itself and starting to reek as a nestling dead in an egg. Yara breathed out slowly, in small portions, with regret, trying to keep from pulling in what substituted as air here. The air in the swamp was inconceivably musty. It stuck to the cheeks like slush. It crawled into the nostrils and stung the eyes. The filthy toilet in a station would seem in comparison like the dream of an epicure. But all the same it was necessary to breathe. Yara opened her mouth and felt how she pulled into herself all this trash together with the air. Recently Yara had been hit by the wind. Here the wind was absent altogether. She flew and pushed with her tongue the prickly scarf climbing into her mouth.

Eric no longer kept its wings folded. It was flying but incredibly slowly. The wing feathers began to break off from the stress. It seemed it was forcing its way through glue. Each stroke of the wings moved them forward, but monstrously slowly. It seemed to Yara that they were not flying but crawling. Without a winged horse she could not cover even a centimetre here, though she would be raking up the sticky air with her palms over the centuries.

Eric and Delta made their way along a narrow tunnel. It was drilled by the hurricane and had clear sticky walls, which sucked in everything but let nothing out. Yara was amazed by the wisdom compelling the horses to rush to the centre of the hurricane. It would be unrealistic to fly through the quagmire in all the other places. Here the hurricane opened a breach.

Something brightened hazily in front, although it was a dense, sucking darkness to the right and left. Yara stubbornly tried to look only at the horse’s mane, knowing that it was mortally dangerous to avert her eyes from it. She understood the melancholy of those who once got stuck in the swamp. To sit eternally in the sticky scum, which held on such that you would be unable to blink or stir a finger. And all this time guessing at the something close by, something completely different – bright, real, flamboyant.

In the dense darkness drifted sluggish grey shadows, similar to clay-covered dwarfs with googly eyes. These were elbes. The shadows were shifting and approaching the walls of the tunnel. When the dwarfs touched the walls, they fired off something not unlike gossamers. A piece of gossamer touched Yara’s jacket and immediately burst.

Yara felt the short probing twinges almost continuously and surmised that there were lots more elbes than she was capable of discerning in those two-three seconds that she had the courage to look. At the moment of the touch of prickly little gossamers Yara experienced sometimes a wolf hunger, annoyance, greediness, sometimes sluggish sleepiness and indifference. But again and again Eric’s wings traced a semicircle and tore up the gossamer.

After ascertaining that their attacks were futile, the elbes changed tactics. They upped the stakes. Now instead of hunger and melancholy they proposed pleasures of the most different kinds to Yara. All this time they were probing Yara, attempting to find a flaw in her. So, you do not want to put your arms up to your elbows in the gold coins of an Indian rajah or stroke the fur of a tame tiger? How about running with cheetahs or standing under the rainbow jet of a waterfall? Shashlik with hot mulled wine? Again no? Maybe, sinorita prefers furs, a long car and a taciturn chauffeur, who will slowly transport her along the streets at night to the sound of cocaine jazz?

The imageries were so distinct, so visible that Yara no longer distinguished them from reality. She could scarcely determine where she was in reality – under the waterfall, at a noisy eastern market, or in the thick swamp shaking like a jellied dish. Dreams, hardening, were transformed into reality. She wanted to doze off, to relax, and to give herself up to their lulling power.

Say “yes,” little one! My little, beloved, warm little one!

Say “yes,” essence!

Say “yes,” trash!

Yara knew: all these juiced up imageries, which they stuffed her consciousness with, were nothing to the elbes themselves. Elbes were cold as ice. They did not sleep and did not grieve. Their enjoyment was in another realm, which was impossible for her to comprehend. Gold, food, romance had no greater value to them than a fat worm moving on a hook did to a fisherman.

Yara knew that if she would be friendly now and give internal agreement, it would be impossible to break the fetters later. She would be stuck here and would remain forever in the swamp. It had happened many times that hdivers, even the most experienced and hardened, indifferent to pain and easily putting off hunger, jumped off the saddle, after becoming prisoners of a cherished mirage. And they would hardly find their mountain streams, their smile of a beauty, or fantastic cities there, in the thick fumes of the swamp.

Wanting to warm herself with something warm and important, Yara began to think about Ul, but suddenly realized that she completely did not love him. A boor, a brute, a barbarian! Hid flowers in attics and she chased after them only to get dirty all over in pigeon crap! If he would at least be a handsome man, but his teeth are uneven, his legs short! Neither apartment nor distinct future. And even counts each kopeck in a cafe! Minor little offences crawled like agile cockroaches along all the cracks in her mind.

Yara understood that Ul never needed her. He simply wanted a girl, any who would agree to endure his tricks. The other girls do not give a hoot about him of course, and likely, the whole HDive is laughing at her! If Ul would turn out to be here now, Yara would pounce on him as a cat would, begin to scratch and bite. She wanted to turn the horse around in order to sort it out finally with this freak. The hatred was so strong that Yara even saw black spots with her open eyes. She no longer kept her eyes closed. Why? Damn the swamp! Her chief enemy is Ul!!!

Eric started to neigh sorrowfully. She did not hear its neigh, but guessed it from the impatient movement of the head and the snout covered with a cap of foam by the nostrils. After a second, the horse began to heel over and tip sideways. They were no longer advancing but hovering over one spot. Something that could not be broken off caught Eric’s right wing. The left wing was convulsively scooping up the sticky air. Yara saw that the horse would now overturn, and she herself would hit against the wall of the tunnel. The grey dwarfs also considered this and, pressing against each other, they quickly crawled together into one place.

Not understanding what was happening to Eric and why he was falling, Yara lowered her eyes and saw how above her boots, a gossamer, thickened into a fat white root, had quickly entered her leg. Small beads rolled along the gossamer from an elbe to Yara. At the moment when the beads touched her leg, she experienced new jabs of hatred towards Ul. True, now it was technically complicated to hate. Her knees slid along the saddle, the left stirrup was dangling, the saddle girth loosened, and any minute now the saddle itself must turn out to be under the horse’s belly. Good that the bent front pommel held on behind the base of the wings.

“I… love… Ul. It’s… all… the elbe!” Yara thought, forcing her way through the quagmire of hatred. The next bead could not infiltrate under the skin. It rolled away and collided with the one following. The gossamer swelled, could not maintain the tension and broke. Its strength turned out to be deceptive. Eric scooped the thick stinky air with the freed wing. The elastic bones bent. The stallion neighed from the pain and, wing feathers almost broken, straightened itself. Yara managed to reach the muscular base of its wing and returned to the saddle. “Relaxed! Believed that I can do anything! Called myself a guide!” Yara berated herself. Delta had long since passed ahead and Yara even could not imagine approximately where and when she would meet up with Dennis.

Eric gained speed slowly, with effort. For the first twenty-thirty strokes it barely advanced. Now and then it needed several jolts with the wings in order to remain simply on the spot. Then it jerked its head and briefly neighed reproachfully. Yara touched its back. It was slick and sweaty. The fur shone like it was greased with fat. It was not possible to stop in the swamp. It mattered not that Eric was an enormous, strong stallion, it would get stuck here forever.

Everything blunted in Yara: her love for Ul, pity for the horse, uneasiness about the tiny girl. She remembered only one thing: never let new roots enter her, because this would be death. The hatred for Ul had drained her spirit. She even did not feel the jabs. She dully looked at the mane and tried not to open her eyes.

Yara did not know how much time had passed here. Time in the swamp flew according to its own laws. With the utmost internal concentration on a good horse it would be possible to cross the swamp in ten minutes. Possible in half-an-hour, an hour, and also possible not to break through at all. The number of divers stuck in the swamp was in the dozens and hundreds. More often it was not even known whether a diver got stuck on the way there or was intercepted on the way back. And intercepted by whom. The elbes? The warlocks? Maybe his horse broke a wing, he flew off the saddle or, listening to the whisperings of the swamp, he was unable to break the gossamer and is still languishing somewhere in the sucking gloom, where a lie is like the truth and where you believe in hatred more than love. Twice in the history of HDive it happened that a diver, solidly convinced that he had spent no more than twenty-four hours in the swamp, dived back into the human world after several decades.

Now Yara was also not thinking about this. She chased all thoughts away without exception, including the most innocent, knowing with what ease the swamp would distort, substitute, and secretly connect them, using any thought as a bridge to itself.

Suddenly Yara felt a light push. An unknown elastic force touched her entire body at one go and then parted, after recognizing and letting her through. She felt heat warming her face frozen in the dive. Something showed pink beyond the closed eyelids. She pulled back the scarf and then even tore it off completely. The dull stench had disappeared. Yara opened her eyes. Eric was flying above the ground easily, without the least effort. The remains of the swamp melted on its sides sunken from fatigue. Above ground and not in the narrow tunnel in the swamp.

It was much brighter here; however, the light seemed pale, as if predawn. A forest was discernible below. Beyond the forest began a field with a sluggish and frequently looping creek. “DUOKA!” exclaimed Yara, although this was only its beginning.

Something burned her forehead. This was a big melted plastic hairpin, which Yara had forgotten about. Yara quickly got rid of the soft mass sticking to her fingers, until it no longer spread over her head. This was what Ul warned Dennis about. Here, on Duoka, nothing secondary or derived could exist. No synthetics or polymers. Only skin, cotton, iron. Everybody remembered the story of the new girl, who attempted unnoticed to use plastic girths. Crossing the swamp on her return she had to break through without a saddle, after tying herself to the horse’s neck. Yara recalled how often she got caught by this and wondered that she did not become more careful. Several successful dives and you automatically become arrogant. You stop checking pockets, thinking about hairpins, and boldly open your eyes in the swamp. The only way to regain the sense of reality is to get it on the forehead.

The further Eric flew, the brighter it became. If earlier Yara only discerned a forest below, now she distinguished separate trees. If in her first minutes here Duoka was almost colourless, dark, and only somewhat outlined, now, with each new stroke of Eric’s wings, it became more detailed. An invisible hand unhurriedly threw paint on the trees and generously poured out sounds and smells from a warm palm.

Yara’s forehead was covered with sweat. She wiped it with the back of a hand and thought that today everything began somewhat early. The delay in the swamp had affected her. She had swallowed too much filth there.

Eric listened and took off more to the left. Yara trusted it, although it seemed to her that they were not flying there. Soon, after taking a good look, she distinguished on the meadow a spot, which turned out to be Delta grazing. She saw Dennis only when Eric had descended beside him. He was lying in the shadow of the bushes, in his unbuttoned hdiver jacket, and seemed barely alive. His face was soaked and streaked. Yara had never seen people sweating in stripes. Sections of the skin were red, white, red, white. And all with clear boundaries. Only the nose had no boundaries and jutted out like the usual pierced radish.

Dennis was pulling air in slowly, and breathing out just as carefully. “It’s always so at first. Suffer. Soon it’ll be easier,” said Yara. Dennis opened his eyes and attempted to smile. “I saw how Eric got stuck… But didn’t notice you at all. It seemed the saddle was empty. I pulled the rein, fat chance! It didn’t listen! And later I clung to the mane altogether, such nonsense crawled into my head. That I was always a burden to mother, and sister stole money from the piggy bank. And I was thinking: where have they disappeared to? Then I understood I was only in the swamp.” This did not surprise Yara. The swamp was the eternal place of such insights.

“Did you try to stop Delta in the swamp???” she asked again. “Of course! You’re my guide. I thought: it must be so. But the cursed stool wouldn’t obey! It misinterpreted me!” Continuing to lie on his back, Dennis folded up his hands like a scoop and passed them along his face from top to bottom. It seemed he was not wiping off sweat but washing. “You’re the stool! If Delta had stopped…” Yara did not finish talking.

Dennis looked at his hands. The sweat was flowing from his fingers even now. His wrists were covered with indecent beads. “It pinches. Gets into the wounds and pinches…” he complained. “Strange!” “What?” “Huh? The burning heat, but the water in the stream is cold. But what’s killing me more is the dew. Why didn’t it evaporate?” Yara laughed. Every hdiver poses this question during his first dive.

“It isn’t hot here.” He looked at her with bewilderment. “How isn’t it hot? Do you see me?” “I see you, but all the same it isn’t hot. Look at Eric, look at Delta. Look at me, although today I’m a poor example.” Dennis sat up on the grass, distrustfully looking at her face closely. “Didn’t even unbutton the jacket,” he said with envy. “Everyone goes through this. The main thing, Duoka let you in. It happens that a novice passes the entire way through the swamp and is forced to turn the horse around. And the heat… It seems to me filth comes out of us.” “Cursed swamp! It was the end of me!”

Dennis staggered forward and got up. A branch got him in the eyes. He brushed it aside. “Likely no longer so scabby… Let’s search for markers! Where are they?” he said decisively. Yara glanced over at the meadow. She was holding Eric by the rein, afraid that it would enter the stream and, excited, would begin to drink. “No markers here. Too close to the swamp. Must fly further.”

“Perhaps we can wait till dawn?” Dennis with hope proposed. “Nothing to wait for.” “How nothing? Already any minute now!” “Here ‘any minute now’ stretches to eternity,” said Yara and, feeling that Dennis understood nothing, added, “It’s always cloudy dawn in this meadow and nothing else. In order for it to become brighter, we must fly further. Or remain and be satisfied by what is. But then, no markers.”