The Dubious Hills

  “I know nothing of this,” said Oonan formally. Arry could feel how stiff he sat, and knew that he was offended, and then wondered if offense were a form of hurt, which seemed unlikely. But if it were not, she should not know it.

  “But,” said Oonan, “I can offer speculation.”

  “It’s all any of us has,” said Halver.

  That’s not true, thought Arry. She kept quiet. Something was happening here.

  “I am a healer,” said Oonan. “I know that fighting makes breakage, and this is wrong. But it does not follow, as the Eight seem to have thought, that whatever makes us fight is itself a breakage in some mechanism intended to work in a different way or to different ends. There is that in us that makes wrong without being, to our natures, foreign, or broken.”

  “So there is no way to prevent war?”

  “Of course there is,” said Oonan irritably. “We live under one method. But it may be there are many ways to prevent it that all do damage to our natures.”

  “Doesn’t war do damage to our natures?” said Arry, shocked.

  “Indubitably,” said Oonan. “But the spell we live under may do so also.”

  “Less damage, then?”

  “Different damage,” said Oonan. “So that the makers of the spell, once they saw it in its operation, perhaps thought that the peace they had bought was not worth the price.”

  “They thought,” said Halver, “that the spell they laid on our many-times-great-grandparents was not a spell to be laid upon themselves.”

  “Who says so?” said Arry.

  “Sune and Frances,” said Halver. He seemed about to say more, but shut his mouth on it.

  “What was it about the operation of the spell, then, that made them not wish to lay it upon themselves?”

  “Bear in mind,” said Halver, in his teacher’s voice again, “that the spell was laid doubly, on this place and on the people in it. Where it held sway, it became difficult, by the normal operations of human th“But our great-great-grandparents were well?” said Arry. “Or my mother—she came from outside.”

  “The people here when the spell was cast did not go mad,” said Halver. “At least, not in the same way as the outsiders who came in.”

  “But my mother,” said Arry again.

  “This is the part no one teaches,” said Halver, “because until last month at the full of the moon no one here knew it. Your mother knew it, Arry, but she could not see what to do about it. But now I know it.”

  Oonan moved impatiently, making the bed creak. Halver laughed up at him over the lantern. “When they saw what they had done, the Eight changed the spell,” he said.

  “But they still didn’t put it on themselves?” said Arry. “Or anybody outside?”

  “Well deduced, my student,” said Halver.

  “Why didn’t they?”

  “Because they chose to be free and endangered, rather than imprisoned and safe.”

  Oonan let his breath out in such a way that he was very close to making a snort or some other disgusted noise. Arry wondered what his knowledge, of wholeness and fitness or its absence, was telling him now about Halver. Hers said only that Halver was unhurt, for the moment.

  Oonan said deliberately, “That is outside your province, Gnosi.”

  “And so am I,” said Halver.

  Oonan started to say something, presumably, “Well, of course,” and then straightened and looked at Halver. Arry looked in her turn at Oonan. His face was rather like Con’s when Con first found out that their mother had left. Mally said it meant something like, “I can see such trouble.”

  Arry said rapidly, before she should think again, “Halver. If we had a blind child here—Oonan says we have had them sometimes—how would you teach it?”

  Halver said, “I’ve never had one to teach.”

  Oonan turned his head and looked at Arry. She could see quite well now in the light of the one lamp; so, one supposed, could he. They were thinking the same thing. She had meant to let Oonan say it: he was older than she was. But he felt as if somebody had hit him in the stomach. He made a little motion of his head in Halver’s direction, and Arry spoke to Halver.

  “You don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s true,” said Halver. “I do not, for the asking, know how to teach a blind child.”

  “But?” said Oonan, in a terrifyingly patient voice.

  “I remember how I did teach. I can read. I can reason. I could do it, if I had to.”

  “But how would you know you were right?” said Arry.

  “If it worked,” said Oonan, in the same patient tone. It was not like him.

  “If it worked,” said Halver, nodding.

  “You can’t possibly,” said Arry. “What if it didn’t work? You can’t go wasting a child as if it were a bad batch of yoghurt. You might as well say I could dose a stomachache with anything handy, just to see what happened.”

  “They do it outside every day,” said Halver.

  “We are not outside,” said Oonan.

  “But we might be,” said Halver.

  “Why?” said Arry. “Where’s the benefit?”

  “Try it and see,” said Halver.

  And he turned in his old gray blanket and walked out of the hut. Arry sat where she was. Oonan went out after him. He said something, and there was an explosion of growling. Arry jumped up, ran for the door, and collided solidly with Oonan as he came back in.

  “He’s gone,” said Oonan, breathlessly.

  Arry leaned her head on his chest and began to laugh. “Con would love that,” she said. “Say your say, walk outside, turn into a wolf.” She giggled.

  “It’s not funny,” said Oonan.

  “How do you know?”

  Oonan started to laugh, and stopped, and stepped back from Arry. She sat down again, still chortling.

  “And neither is that,” said Oonan.

  “They why are you laughing?”

  “I don’t know,” said Oonan; and they both laughed until they cried.

  14

  When they had finished laughing, they went soberly down the mountain to Oonan’s house. The moon was behind a cloud; the dark felt warmer. Arry carried her mind along as if it were a bowl of milk filled to the brim. Nothing that should not be there fell into it.

  Oonan put more wood on the fire and brought it back to life; then he took a spill and went around lighting all the lamps. His cats sat on the hearth and watched him. Arry sat in one of the chairs her mother had made and watched him too. He was upset. How do I know that, she thought? She consulted her knowledge, with considerable caution, lest things she did not and ought not know should sneak in. But she saw only the sober facts of her own province: heartbeat, breath, the slide of strange substances through the blood. Of course, she thought, when we get upset we make these substances and they make bodily reactions of the sort that I notice. Sometimes, anyway.

  “I’m going to make some tea,” said Oonan, in such a quiet voice that Arry didn’t even jump, “and then I am going to break my word to Halver.”

  He went off into his kitchen, followed by the cats. Arry sat looking at the fire. Sometimes, she went on thinking, I say to myself, Con’s upset, and it isn’t because of bodily reactions; it’s because once Mally told me that, when Con looks or acts like that, she’s upset, and I remember. But that’s memory, not knowledge. That’s all Halver has now, memory: no knowledge. Why does he call that freedom? If I broke my oath to Halver, as Oonan is about to break his, I could ask Mally. That might be a question she could answer. Unless Halver is outside her province, now. But no, he wasn’t outside mine: I knew when he had a fever and how his hand itched.

  Oonan came back with the tea. Arry, who was thirsty from climbing the mountain, and arguing with Halver in the dust, and climbing down again, took a healthy gulp and almost choked on it. Oonan had made the kind of strong and bitter brew he would use to stay up for the lambing.

  “Don’t be so greedy,” said Oonan sharply.

&nbs
p; Arry glared at him, but he was staring at the fire, as she had been. He said, “I don’t know what Halver said to you. He told me that he would deal differently with me, since you had denied him. But he didn’t deal differently enough, did he? I denied him also.”

  “Denied him what?”

  “He has a plan,” said Oonan. “He wants to free us all from the hill-spell by making us shapeshifters.”

  “He wanted me to choose to be one,” said Arry, “but he said part of the spell the shapeshifters said to him, he said it over me, and I felt it half working; it didn’t seem much like choice.” So easily she broke her word. The fire did not cower down nor the wind rise; her heart beat on quietly. Maybe it was more like a disease than an injury: the seed was sown but not yet sprouted. Perjury, shapeshifting: which was more mortal? “When it starts to work on you,” she said, “it feels like almost falling asleep and half-dreaming you’re falling, like the way you jump then, and wake yourself up. Has that happened to you?”

  “Not yet. I think he’s of two minds,” said Oonan. “He can’t tell how important the choice is. He would enspell us all in a heartbeat if he thought we would be as he is; but he doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know anything,” said Arry. It shocked her to say it, but she did, and more. “He’s a child again. Only he has no magic.” Fire is cold, she thought; water burns; fish fly and sparrows swim.

  “He knows nothing now,” said Oonan. “As the moon shrinks his old knowledge will grow again.”

  “Won’t he change his mind then and stop wanting to make us all shapeshifters?”

  “Remember he is in his second month of this. It has not happened yet.”

  “But you don’t know?”

  “That’s Mally’s province.”

  “We could ask her.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said Arry.

  “Drink your tea first,” said Oonan. “You’ll need it.” He would know, so she drank.

  The wind had picked up when they went outside again, and ghostly clouds were sailing up over the dark lumpy horizon and into the clear and glittering sky. The air smelled of rain.

  Mally’s house was, not unexpectedly, dark and quiet. Oonan caught Arry’s sleeve as she headed for the door to knock on it, and drew her around to the side of the house. He stood under a small round window and said softly, “Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, trampled to the floor it spanned, and the tent of night in tatters straws the sky-pavilioned land.”

  Arry cast a wild glance over her shoulder, but the sun did not in fact seem about to spring over the hills. A light did flare after a moment in the round window, and Mally, looking even more like a dandelion puff than usual, peered out at them censoriously. Oonan pulled Arry into the new light, and Mally’s face changed. She went away from the window, taking the light with her. Oonan and Arry went back around to the door, and after a moment Mally opened it, carried her lamp outside, and shut the door again.

  “What’s the matter?” she said to Oonan. She looked perturbed.

  “One of my strange not-wolves is Halver,” said Oonan.

  “But he would swear you to secrecy, by his power as Gnosi,” said Mally. Arry opened her mouth, and Mally added, “And you would break your word, both of you— why? What is he doing?”

  “Go on,” said Oonan, smiling, “you’re doing well.”

  “Who are the other two?” said Mally.

  “Now that, I cannot tell you,” said Oonan.

  “Why? Whom will it break?”

  Oonan shrugged. Mally looked at him over her lamp. A few early insects came and danced around the light. Arry considered Oonan, his nerves and his joints and the pathways of his blood. Mally was considering others of his pathways. Arry thought, carefully, over what Halver had said to her. Not much, she realized; she had cut his speech short, perhaps. She thought over what he had said to both of them, to her and Oonan. Frances knew, he had said, although what he said she knew was not really in her province.

  “Oonan,” said Arry. “It’s my mother. It’s my mother, isn’t it?”

  “And your father,” said Mally, still looking at Oonan. “Wherefore he would not tell you.”

  “Oonan,” said Arry.

  Oonan looked at her. “I thought they would come tonight,” he said.

  “Halver would tell them not to,” said Mally.

  “I have to talk to them,” said Arry. There is another hurt, she thought, an entire other world of hurt, and this is it, I am in it. “I have to talk to them at once,” she said, as if she were telling somebody to apply pressure to a wound.

  “I let Halver go,” said Oonan. “They could be anywhere on the mountain, Arry, or anywhere for miles around. Wolves run fast and far, Derry says.”

  “I don’t think you can talk to them until they want you to,” said Mally. “They may have their reasons.”

  “What if they do want to and Halver won’t let them?”

  “There are two of them,” said Mally reflectively.

  “Halver is larger,” said Oonan.

  “Is he really?” said Mally. “Frances is taller than he is and Bec is wider.”

  They looked at one another again. Finally Mally said, “So Halver makes a better wolf.”

  “Are you surprised?” said Oonan.

  And Mally said, “No.”

  Arry gave up trying to think about Halver. I never wondered, she thought, I never wondered where they were. They were just gone; I wished they weren’t gone. Why didn’t I wonder?

  “We’ll think of a way to thwart Halver, so they may come to you if you wish it,” said Oonan. “Now you should sleep.”

  “Now,” said Arry, out of her aching throat, “we should consider what’s to be done—about all of it.”

  “Not here,” said Oonan. “Grel says this kind of sky and air mean rain.”

  Mally glanced around at her own front door, but said nothing.

  “We’d best return to my house,” said Oonan. “There’s nobody there to wake up. Unless you’re worried, Arry.”

  “Leaving Con to her own devices should worry anybody,” said Mally. “If we sit in your kitchen, Arry, and speak quietly?”

  “But no blushful Hippocrene, I beg you,” said Oonan.

  They all laughed, a little hollowly, and walked along to Arry’s house.

  “Waterpale has a town hall,” said Oonan, “where anybody may consult at any hour and wake only the dogs. It has pillars carved with roses, and a spring in the courtyard. Sune says so; so did Frances.”

  “Waterpale is larger,” said Mally, “and full of stone-workers. Frances said that, too.”

  Arry left them conversing companionably on the doorstep while she got a lamp lit and the kitchen fire built up and burning. She filled the kettle and hung it over the fire and got out the mugs and the morning tea. The cats came stretchily out of unknown sleeping places and sniffed her ankles and asked for milk, so she gave them some. The water boiled; she made the tea. She sat down at the table and drank a mug of it; then she remembered that Oonan liked honey in his, and got up and fetched the honeypot and put it on the table. She sat down again. The white cat got into her lap and settled down, purring and kneading Arry’s leggings with both front feet. She leaned her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand.

  They’re not dead, thought Arry. They went off and turned into wolves. Or my father did and then my mother went to find him. Who turned him into a wolf? Did he choose? Did she? Why did they come for Halver and not for me? Maybe they don’t like being wolves. But then why come for Halver?

  Halver liked being a wolf. Halver required change and variety and new experience: this community, this whole country, was too small for him, although certainly being Gnosi and having new children to teach, and children who might as well be new because they were learning and growing, was the best occupation he might have had; it was a mercy his knowledge did not involve sheep or oats or the behavior of owls, which would have driven him to drink or murder in a
month’s time. If that were possible: one did not know, and could not think how to find out, whether one’s knowledge was always congruent with one’s nature.

  Arry’s elbow slid off the table, taking her tea mug with it, and the side of her face cracked resoundingly onto the tabletop. Woollycat sprang out of her lap and fled under the table, where she sat hissing. Arry sat up, rubbing her jaw: there would be an almighty bruise there by morning and probably a big bump, too, but the hinge of the jaw and her teeth were unhurt. You could not say as much for the mug, which lay in three large pieces and a powdering of smaller ones on the flagged floor.

  Arry got up and had taken two steps in the direction of the broom when her mind began to work again. She ran out of the kitchen and through the front room to the doorway where she had left Oonan and Mally.

  They were gone. Arry thought she felt her heart stop, though in fact, and of course, it did nothing of the sort; there was a kind of constriction of the muscles around the chest, and a matter of breathing, that was all. She stood in the doorway, peering at the dark yard. It had started to rain, very fine and misty. Deciding what to lock and what to take out into the dark on her search made her decide to call first. She drew in her breath for a huge bellow, and Mally, still carrying the lantern, came around the corner of the house followed by Oonan.

  “What doubtful way were you going?” said Arry vehemently.

  They blinked at her.

  “Come in, for certain sake; the tea’s getting cold.”

  They squeezed past her damply, and stood dripping on the floor while she shut and barred the door.

  “There were wolf tracks,” said Oonan, “or something very like them; I didn’t want to go waken Derry. We were following them.” His hair was beaded with small drops, like the redbushes up the mountain with their white berries.

  Arry stalked past the two of them and into the kitchen; they followed her, sat down at the table, and began pouring the tea.

  “Where did the tracks go?” said Arry; as in dealing with Con, it was better to let them get what concerned them out of their heads before turning to their transgression.