The Dubious Hills

  Oonan gave every appearance of listening to her, but he had nothing to say except, “What happened then?” and “I see,” until she came to the strange story of daylight on the windowsill. That made him sit up straight and look at her. He made her recite as much of it as she could remember, which was easier than she would have expected: maybe it was a spell of sorts after all. The note in the margin made him frown.

  “Once out of nature,” he said, when she was done.

  “What is the work of will?”

  “Nobody’s ever said,” said Oonan. “‘Hail the Lord of Human Fears’—that sounds like the way Sune says they speak of death in the Outer Isles.”

  “I asked Sune what out of nature was,” said Arry. “What did she say?”

  “Dead.”

  “Really.”

  “Well, what would you say?”

  “Not my province,” said Oonan.

  “But you think something, even if you don’t know it.” Oonan neither confirmed nor denied this. Arry said, “Does everybody?”

  “Ask Mally.”

  Arry made an impatient huff, as if she were Con thwarted in some grand scheme.

  “Where’s your jacket?” said Oonan. “We don’t want to miss our visitors.”

  Arry’s jacket felt rather too hot. The air was still damp and hardly cooler than it had been in the afternoon. The smells of water and earth and green things lay heavily all around; when they passed a patch of grape hyacinth the scent made Arry want to sit down under it and rest. She trudged on after Oonan.

  Oonan led her into the hut, left the door open, and began to pace. It was much colder in the hut, but just as damp. Arry sat on the hard bed and said, “Do you think they’ll run us up and down the meadow?”

  “I am hoping,” said Oonan, “that now I have seen them and shown myself willing to converse, they will, as Frances used to say, abjure the preliminaries.”

  He very seldom mentioned Arry’s mother. She looked at him, but in the darkness of the hut there was nothing to see except the impatient line of his shoulders.

  “Maybe they won’t come until the moon sets, then,” said Arry.

  Oonan stopped pacing, and probably stood looking at her. “I had thought of that,” he said. “Grel says that will be between two and three hours after the sun rises.”

  “We should have brought a chess set,” said Arry. “Or a whistle.”

  “Or our spinning,” said Oonan, irritably.

  “When’s Sune’s baby coming?”

  “In five or six weeks, most likely.”

  “I think she’s worried about it.”

  “She reads too much,” said Oonan, more irritably. “That baby is fine and strong and not too large. Sune is fine and strong and large enough. She’s been filling herself up with horrors and then, you see, she knows them. Even though I know she won’t encounter them.”

  “She doesn’t know that she can trust what you know?” said Arry.

  Oonan sat down on the floor; Arry could feel him staring at her. “Nobody has ever said it in quite that way to me,” he said. “Do we all know that, that we can trust what others know?” He paused, and Arry saw the pale movement as he pushed one hand through his hair. “What others say they know,” he said. “We don’t know they know it—except for Mally.”

  “I’ve never thought about it quite in this way either,” said Arry. “It’s because of Con, and wondering if there are hurts not physical. Each question seems to make more.”

  “And what made Con behave so that you wondered?”

  “I think it was my parents’ leaving.”

  “And Mally doesn’t know?”

  “She doesn’t say, anyway. She gave me all the stories.”

  “About wolves?” said Oonan sharply.

  “No, I asked Sune for those. About children whose parents leave them. But none of the things that happen in the stories has happened to Con.”

  “No,” said Oonan.

  Arry waited, but he was silent. Arry was tired of talking around and around questions she had no answer for. She tried to think of what they had talked about before she started wondering about the kinds of pain Gossip, small news, games, music, dancing, the weather the sick and hurt people they both dealt with, Con’s mischief, whether Beldi was too quiet. It all led back to the same questions.

  Arry thought her mind must be tired. It would not, in a sensible fashion, lie down and rest. So she let it go where it liked. It wandered slowly around the dark hut noting how her eyes had adjusted so that she could see Oonan’s face and hands and the ragged outline of his bird’s-nest hair against the darker wall, and the gleam of his eyes, and the moonlight falling through the open door to make strange and fantastical the bits of straw and clods of mud that lay on the smooth-packed dirt of the floor.

  “Floor,” though you might not realize it from hearing it, was a Unicornish word. In that language, which assigned genders to its nouns, the feminine form meant a field or meadow, while the masculine form meant what one normally would think of as a floor.

  Arry’s foot jerked as she fell down a step that was not there, in a walk she was not taking. She heard herself make a noise like somebody poked suddenly by the cold nose of a cat.

  “What?” said Oonan.

  “Oonan. Who knows about Unicornish?”

  “Sune, I suppose.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I believe so. Frances did, of course.”

  “That wasn’t her knowledge, was it?”

  “Language was,” said Oonan.

  “Was that why she never lost her magic?”

  “Possibly. I’d ask Mally.”

  “Why don’t you ever ask Mally, then!” snapped Arry. “My asking her doesn’t do an oatgrain’s worth of good.”

  “I don’t want to be informed of all these things,” Oonan snapped back.

  Arry let her breath out and rubbed her eyes. The light falling in the door was brighter. “Did I wake you up?” she said.

  “Maybe a little,” said Oonan, in a smiling voice.

  They sat on in silence. Arry was afraid to let her mind wander, lest somebody else’s certainties flood it again. She supposed she must ask Mally about this. She blamed it on Halver, but that might not be right. “Oonan?” she said.

  “What now?” said Oonan, sleepily but not unkindly.

  “Who knows about the workings of the mind?”

  “It’s a field of knowledge that’s divided into small plots,” said Oonan, still drowsily. “I know somewhat, Mally knows somewhat, so does Sune; so, of course, does Halver.”

  “So he does,” said Arry.

  Oonan sat up; she could feel him looking at her.

  “Afterwards,” said Arry.

  Oonan stood up all the way and began pacing the floor again. Arry watched him. They did this for a very long weary while. Arry’s chin bumped her chest. She pulled her head back up, blinking. A great dark shape came through the open door, darted past Oonan, and seized the blanket of the bed in its jaws. Arry shot off the bed. The large wolf gave her a brief considering glance, curled its lip at her, and dragged the blanket back out the door.

  “What was that all about?” said Oonan. He had stood quite still while the wolf came in. “Was that your wolf?”

  “Yes,” said Arry. “And you’ll see in a minute.” She remembered the wolf's leading her to Halver’s house and vanishing into the other room so that it could reappear clothed. People bathed in the streams all summer with nothing on whatsoever; but perhaps wolves felt differently about such things.

  Nothing happened for some time. Then Arry twitched all over and almost fell off the bed, and at the same moment Oonan tripped over something and bumped the wall, or at any rate that was what it sounded like. They had not heard the wolf come, but in the quiet after Oonan bumped the wall they heard the sound of a bare foot stirring the gravel, and then someone was standing in the doorway, blocking all the light.

  Oonan went into one corner and lit a lantern. He stood up,
holding the light out before him, and made a sound as if somebody had hit him in the stomach.

  “Oh, yes,” said Halver. He had wrapped the blanket around himself, and looked rather like Beldi playing Prospero in the autumn celebration of the Descent of Doubt. “It’s I, O Akoumi. And how will you fix this?”

  “What’s to be fixed?” said Oonan; this was a ritual response, but he moved suddenly after he said it, as if he had not meant to speak, and then he put the lantern down in the middle of the floor and said sharply, “Shut the door. It’s getting cold out.”

  “Is he cold, Physici?” said Halver to Arry.

  “Very,” said Arry, almost at random. Why, she thought, they don’t like one another. She felt cold herself.

  Halver shut the door.

  “Arry,” said Oonan. “Is this the wolf you saw before?”

  “Yes,” said Arry.

  Oonan said to Halver, “Where are the other two?”

  “Hunting,” said Halver, calmly.

  “Release me from the oath I swore them.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Then tell me one sufficient reason that I should not break it here and now.”

  “Because you are not a breaker,” said Halver.

  “You swore Arry to secrecy as they did me?”

  “I did,” said Halver.

  Oonan took two awkward steps and sat down next to Arry. “What did he tell you?” he said. “What happened?”

  Arry said, “I’ll tell you later, in the light. Halver, what do you want?”

  “I am a teacher,” said Halver, “and I will teach as I must.”

  “How did this happen?” said Oonan.

  “Why, Akoumi, don’t you know? Cannot you tell merely by looking what it is that has deranged my form and so disposed my hours that I must sleep by day and in the night prowl with the fox, the barn owl, and the shrew?”

  Oonan moved beside Arry, and she looked at him. In the light and shadow made by the lantern his eyes were very wide; he was biting his lip and staring less at than right through Halver. “Tell me how it happened,” he said, not quite steadily. “When children fall and skin their knees, I know what’s to be done, but I still ask. And I ask you.”

  Arry did not recognize that line, but it too had the flavor of ritual. Halver seemed to think so too. He raised his chin a little, so the shadows moved over his face. “In the pursuit of my duty,” he said, “I went out last month with Sune and Wim to consider the motions of the moon.”

  “Sune shouldn’t have been tramping about the hills,” said Oonan indignantly. Arry put her elbow gently into the nearest available part of him, which turned out to be his own elbow; she winced and he twitched, but he didn’t say anything more.

  “Sune turned back early,” said Halver, with no matching indignation. “Wim and I went on. Then Tiln came to say that Zia wouldn’t go to bed until Wim had told her the thirteen-times table. So Wim made sure I remembered what he had told me and what Sune had read to us, and he went home with Tiln.”

  He sounded more like himself now. Arry tried to listen as if he were ill or injured. He did not sound either. He was tired and rather cold; the blanket was scratchy and his hand still itched. He was neither sweaty nor feverish nor afflicted with a headache. He was saying, “I climbed up to the top of the cliff there, and sat on the edge to watch the moon rise. I was running over in my mind what I would teach tomorrow, thinking especially about Con. You may remember, Arry, that she was not amenable to learning to count past ten.”

  Arry nodded. Halver said, “They came up behind me as silently as the moon rising, and one of them bit me here,” and he put a hand up to the right side of his neck, “where the neck joins the shoulder.”

  Arry put her own hand up to where her neck joined her shoulder, and clenched her teeth. Halver sounded as if he meant it.

  “Then they sat, one on either side of me, and did not let me get up,” said Halver.

  “Did it bleed much?” said Oonan, in his brisk, reasonable way, not at all the tone he had been using. “You haven’t a scar—I don’t recall seeing a wound at all. You didn’t consult either of us about it.”

  “No,” said Halver, with a tinge of mockery in his voice that Arry did not much care for, “it didn’t bleed much. They sat with me until the moon went down; then they trotted off into that clump of aspen, the one Mora fell out of last October,” he said to Arry, “and just as I had stood up and was rubbing the bite and wondering what to do, two people came out of the aspen; and they talked to me until dawn.”

  Does he think I don’t remember what he said to me, thought Arry, or does he think I’ll keep quiet to see what he says, or does he know I can’t tell Oonan afterwards no matter what I say I’ll do? She did want to see what Halver would tell Oonan, and she did keep quiet. Oonan said, “Talked to you of what?”

  “Disenchantment,” said Halver, softly.

  Next to Arry, Oonan had become perfectly still, not something one could often observe in him. He was a fidgeter; he had as much energy as a five-year-old. Arry blinked, hard. No, she thought. Whatever you are doing, whoever you are, no. That’s Mally’s province. It isn’t mine. Pain’s mine; where is your pain?

  Oonan said, just as softly, “Whose disenchantment?”

  “Those who choose,” said Halver. “Or are chosen.”

  “Which do you propose for us?”

  “I have given Arry the means to choose already. I give it you also. What Physici, Akoumi, and Gnosi wish to do with the rest of them, we have the power to effect.”

  “Or will, should we choose disenchantment.”

  “Or will,” said Halver.

  “Yet you’ve chosen us already.”

  “Mally always said you should have been a poet,” said Halver; his tone was light but not, thought Arry, as pleasant as he would have liked to make it. “I chose you that you might choose, if you like.”

  “You won’t bite us, then, as you were bitten?”

  “Do you think that is the mechanism, then?”

  “I know it,” said Oonan, and all the fine hairs on Arry’s neck stood straight up.

  “And what does that avail you?” said Halver.

  Oonan continued very still. He did not answer. Halver stood where he was, with the lantern making his yellow hair shine, and said nothing either.

  Arry said, “What about the breaking of history?”

  She made Oonan jump. Halver did not move.

  “What about it?” said Oonan.

  Arry looked at Halver, who said, in precisely the tone he would use at school, “How does our history begin?”

  “With the War of the Sorcerers’ Schools,” said Arry, almost without thinking.

  “Go on,” said Halver. “You had this, I believe, two years ago; let us see how your memory has kept it.”

  He always said this, or something very like it; but there was a sound in his voice that made Arry look hard at him. He was still standing on the other side of the lantern in the dusty gray blanket, arms folded across his chest, as always when he was awaiting a recitation. Arry swallowed carefully, and began.

  “Four hundred years ago, the four schools of wizards were fighting each other, for reasons nobody is sure of to this day, because whenever anybody tries to find out, the wizards all start fighting again. Four hundred years ago, they had been fighting for seven years, and some of them got tired of it.” She paused. “Sune says,” she added.

  Halver shifted his bare feet on the hard earth floor, in a movement, when performed in boots on the carpet of the schoolroom, that usually meant you had waited too long to attribute your sources. Arry didn’t think she had. She went on.

  “These some—there were eight of them in all— went quietly away to the Kingdom of Dust, which has no wizards, and there they sat in some tents lent them by the Dusters, and all through spring when the desert bloomed and summer when it blazed and autumn when it bloomed again briefly, they talked about what made people fight at all, and how they might make people st
op. Sune says all of this,” said Arry, “and Karn and Grel and Wim say the weather in the Kingdom of Dust’s desert is indeed like that and has been so for perhaps six hundred years.

  “And when they thought they had found a way, they went to the Dubious Hills, which then were just a place that the Dusters did not claim because the water you could find there was not worth the weather that made it, and the rocks were bad for their horses’ feet. It was also a place the Hidden Land did not want because they thought it would grow only oats; and a place the people of the Forested Slopes held in derision because all its trees were stunted. It was called the Sheepcots, when anybody bothered to talk about it, Sune says, and so do you, Halver.”

  This got her no reaction at all. She added, “You said that the people here called it the Small Hills, because, Sune said, they came from the mountains north of the Secret Country and the hills looked small to them,”

  “And they did,” said Halver, in a curious tone Arry had never heard from him before; she wished Mally were here to label it. “Indeed they did look small.” Arry waited to see if he would say more, but he just sat down abruptly on the floor, rearranged the blanket, and said, “Go on,” just as he always said it.Arry collected herself and did so. “The Sheepcots had wizards, but these were not wizards who had ever gone to school, and they were too busy raising sheep and coaxing their oats along to bother about the fighting wizards. Sune says.

  “The Eight thought this country would suit them perfectly. So they put on all the people there the spells they had drawn and written and sung and carved, to make the nature of people such that people would no longer fight.”

  Arry stopped, and Halver said, “Well?”

  “So we are as we are,” said Arry. “And we don’t fight, either.”

  “Why, then, didn’t the Eight put this same spell on everybody? On the people in the Hidden Land, and Fence’s Country, and Druogonos?”

  Arry had never thought about it before. “Nobody ever said,” she answered.

  “No, indeed nobody did,” said Halver. “And why not, do you suppose?”

  Oonan made a restless movement, and Halver’s gaze, even in the flickering light of their single lantern, seemed to fasten on him as if Halver had walked forward and taken Oonan by the collar of his jacket. “You may answer instead, Akoumi,” said Halver.