The Dubious Hills

  “Oonan!” she yelled belatedly, peering around in the dark. She ran up the next hill, and collided hard with somebody coming down. It was Jony, and her arm was torn open from the round outside bone of the wrist right up to the elbow.

  “What happened?” said Arry, ripping at her skirt since it was torn already. Oonan must sew this up, she thought, it will make a terrible scar even with a great deal of marigold, but I don’t think the muscle is hurt; that would feel different. “Oonan!”

  “It was a wolf,” said Jony. She sounded annoyed, but she was also quite shaky. It was hard to tell, but there seemed to be a lot of blood. Arry was not equipped to tell where it was coming from or how much of it there was really.

  “It asked me if I’d like to be a wolf too,” said Jony, “and I said I would; but then it started to change me, and I was looking at, right exactly at, a clump of thyme, and I didn’t know what it was, or where it grew, or when, or what its uses were. So I said I’d changed my mind.”

  “And it did this?”

  “And ran off.”

  “The wolf spoke to you?”

  “I thought it did,” said Jony, hesitantly. “Wolves don’t talk, do they? Where’s Derry?”

  Where’s Oonan, thought Arry. He had shown her some of the places to press to stop bleeding, and what he had shown her seemed to be working. But she wanted him to look at this before she did anything else. He would know how best to avoid the scarring, not to mention inflammation and what, if anything, you could catch from a wolf bite.

  “Can you walk?” she said. “I want to let Oonan look at this.”

  “Of course I can, it didn’t bite me in the leg,” said Jony. She consented to lean on Arry, and they started down the hill. “Does it hurt a great deal?”

  “It certainly did at first,” said Arry. “Now it’s more throbbing.”

  People were finally coming out of the house, demanding to know what had happened.

  “Where’s Oonan?” said Arry.

  “He went home,” said Wim. “Lina’s fetching him, she’s the fastest.”

  “She’d better be,” said Arry furiously, “there’s a wolf out there that just got Jony.”

  Wim and Niss and Grel went running down the path. Arry took Jony into the house, pressing the torn skirt against Jony’s arm as hard as she could. She could feel the blood trying to get out, which seemed foolish of it. The arm was beginning to hurt quite a lot. She sat Jony down. Where was Oonan? She asked Mally for some willow-bark tea and gave it to Jony, suppressing a mad urge to drink it herself. She had tried this once, of course; drinking it herself did nothing whatsoever to dim the knowledge of somebody else’s pain.

  All the children crowded around and gaped at Jony and looked hopeful. Arry was sure they wanted her to take off the bandage so they could get a good look at the wound. She snapped at them, calling them vultures. Some of them laughed; the rest looked hurt or taken aback. Where was Oonan? Where were any of them? Eaten by wolves, probably. Arry got Elec, who was reasonably reliable, to go on holding the cloth to Jony’s arm, and ran outside and up the path. She collided solidly with Oonan.

  “That bad, is it?” he said, taking her by the arm and rushing her back inside.

  Arry sat down hard on the floor. Her job was done. Oonan sent Mora for a bowl of water, which she spilled half of. With the other half he soaked the cloth off Jony’s arm. He sent Elec for goldenrod cream and marigold essence; he washed the wound and prodded at it, making Arry flinch. He took thread and needle and Jony’s own potato water out of his pouch and sewed the long wound up. The children crowded around. Oonan told them crossly not to breathe on the wound or he would sew their mouths shut too. They giggled and backed off.

  Arry went outside and sat down on a rock.

  “It’s safe now,” said Oonan at her elbow. Arry jumped.

  “You should go home and go to bed,” he said.

  Arry stood up tiredly. “Delighted,” she said. And then, “Where’s Beldi?”

  18

  Beldi was not in the house, not asleep in a corner, not sitting quietly by the dying bonfire, not eating the last bowl of dried blueberries, not visiting the goats or ferreting out the nest of new kittens in the hayloft. He was gone.

  “Leave Con with Wim,” said Mally, “and I’ll come with you.” Oonan also came. Arry could hear Con clamoring to be brought as well, that she could tell where Beldi would go; but whatever Wim might have had to do to prevent her, she did not actually come after them.

  “Maybe she can tell,” said Arry uneasily, as they paused on the path that would take them to Niss’s, or else back home.

  “Better than I can?” said Mally.

  Arry supposed not. “Where shall we go, then?” she said.

  “Tiln saw Beldi last just when Jony left,” said Mally. “He’s such an obliging child, that’s the difficulty, he would go with two wolves or with one. If it were Con, I’d know it had to be your parents.”

  “If it were, I wouldn’t worry,” said Arry. “I think we should assume it’s Halver; that will prevent more harm.”

  In the still cool darkness all riddled with green scents, she could feel Oonan and Mally looking at one another as clearly as if they had all been standing in the sunlight and she could see them.

  “What do you know about my parents?” she said to Mally.

  “For all love, let’s walk somewhere or other while we’re arguing,” said Oonan.

  “We’re arguing about where to walk,” said Arry. “Where would Beldi go to begin with, so a wolf could find him without alarming the entire party?”

  “The goat barn,” said Mally. “You didn’t look for tracks, did you, when you were out there?”

  “It’s mostly rock,” said Arry.

  “I’ll get a lantern just the same,” said Mally, and went back into her house.

  “You know you’d feel it if he were hurt,” said Oonan.

  “It depends how far away he is.”

  “How far could he get in half an hour?”

  “How far could a wolf get?”

  “He’s too heavy to ride a wolf,” said Oonan. “I asked Derry, while you were looking for him. Con, now, if it were Con gone missing that would be a possible thing.”

  “I thought it would be Con,” said Arry. “I always thought, whatever happened, it would be Con it happened to.”

  “Con makes things happen, that’s why,” said Mally; Arry wondered how long she had been standing there with the lantern. Arry was very tired and her mind seem to go in erratic jumps, like a spring lamb frolicking. She did not feel frolicsome.

  They took the lantern all around the outside of the goat barn. There were no tracks. The path itself here was rock, and while some of the small flowering plants that grew in its cracks were bruised, there had been so many people walking here today that this meant nothing.

  Arry looked up the dark hill. It was crowned with a clump of birch trees. Their patchy white trunks seemed to glimmer a little; their new leaves made a sharp and precise darkness between them and the sky. “Mally?” she said. “Might he go sit up there?”

  “Very like,” said Mally.

  They all climbed the hill as fast as they could go. Arry found breathing difficult; she was filling up with a kind of thick dread that seemed to leave no room for air. When they got to the outermost tree she hung back, and Mally and Oonan went through before her, with a crackling of fallen twigs.

  “Ah,” said Oonan.

  Arry craned forward, and took hold of the nearest birch trunk. It was cold. Beldi was curled up on the ground with his head in a pile of dead yellow leaves and Tiln’s wolfskin coat spread over him. He wasn’t hurt at all, any more than the leaves were.

  “Wake up,” said Oonan irritably.

  Beldi raised his head and blinked in the light of the lantern. Arry almost fell down, although both her feet were firmly on the ground and she was holding onto the tree. Death was not her province, after all; but she had so thought Beldi was dead it had been almost
like knowledge. She would have to ask somebody about fear.

  “Where’s Halver?” said Beldi. “I wasn’t done dreaming.”

  “What are you doing with Tiln’s coat?” said Arry.

  “That isn’t Tiln’s coat,” said Mally over her shoulder. “I saw Tiln’s coat in the front room when I went back for the lantern. Besides, the colors are different. This one is mostly black and gray; his has more cream in it.”

  “It’s Halver’s,” said Beldi, sitting up. He looked resigned and rather grumpy. He was not, in fact, hurt in the least, unless you counted a small pain in his arm where he had lain on a stone.

  “What happened?” said Oonan. He sat down in the leaves next to Beldi. Mally loomed over them with the lantern. Arry stayed where she was.

  “I walked away from the fire after the dancing,” said Beldi. “Arry says I always get too hot and should remember to cool off. So I walked up the hill, and I met Halver coming down. He had the coat over his shoulder. He asked me if I’d like to be a wolf. I said I had never thought about it; I told him he ought to ask Mally. He told me that if I came into this place and covered myself with the coat and went to sleep, I would dream about being a wolf, and then I would know.”

  “He said just that?” said Oonan.

  Beldi nodded. “I asked him if that would be my knowledge, then, what it was like to be a wolf. I thought that was strange, but I didn’t think I’d mind. He laughed. He said that would be only the smallest part of my knowledge. And he said it was part of my education. That’s his province; so I did as he told me.”

  “What was it like?” said Oonan. And when Beldi said nothing, he added, “Did you like it?”

  Beldi looked at Mally.

  “Not altogether,” said Mally.

  “Except that I wasn’t finished when you woke me,” said Beldi.

  “What didn’t you like?” said Oonan.

  Beldi looked at Mally again, but she said nothing. At last Beldi said, “There was nobody to ask.”

  “You were alone?”

  “Yes, but that isn’t what I meant. There was nobody to ask, anywhere.”

  “How could you tell?”

  Beldi scowled; momentarily, he looked just like Con. “I don’t remember,” he said. His face cleared a little. “It was a dream,” he offered. “Niss and Sune both say—”

  “Yes,” said Oonan.

  He and Mally looked at one another over the lantern. Arry could not really see what their faces were saying. She thought of Halver’s face, lit by the lantern in the sheep hut.

  “Perhaps we’d better not start school again tomorrow after all?” said Oonan.

  “Truly,” said Mally. “I believe it must be time to put in the oats. I’ll talk to Jonat.”

  “Somebody should show that coat to Niss,” said Arry. “And Tiln’s too.”

  “Somebody should be certain Tiln doesn’t sleep under his tonight,” said Oonan.

  “Why?” said Beldi, standing up and folding the coat. It was almost as big as he was. “I couldn’t tell anything for certain,” he said, delivering the coat to Mally, “because I haven’t my knowledge yet. But Tiln would know, wouldn’t he, if it would be a beautiful or an ugly thing to be a wolf?”

  “The question is, is true choice allowed?” said Oonan. He relieved Mally of the lantern. “A question for Niss, in the morning, I assume.”

  “A question for Niss, now,” said Arry. But her voice cracked, with fatigue and distress and bewilderment, and she could see, as plainly as if she knew it, Oonan and Mally’s sudden alliance as adults against an overtired and importunate child.

  “We’ll keep Con tonight,” said Mally; and, as Arry opened her mouth, added, “and keep a watch over her. Go home and sleep. You can fetch her after you’ve talked to Niss. Tomorrow.”

  Mally went off down the hill with the wolfskin coat, leaving the three of them with the light.

  They walked home slowly, not speaking. There was a heavy dew, and the first few birds were talking to themselves by the time the three of them got to Oonan’s house. Oonan handed Arry the lantern. “Come fetch me when you’re ready to talk to Niss,” he said, and turned away up his own hill.

  Arry and Beldi walked on, squelching a little on the grassy parts of the path. Arry was wondering so hard why Halver had not tempted either her brother or her sister with their parents that she could not speak; she was afraid she would tempt Beldi herself. Beldi and Con were the only other people who would understand how important it was, yet she could not tell them, and not only because she had given her word. There should be somebody she could ask, she thought hazily, as they climbed the hill to their house, whether you could break your word to somebody who would hurt Jony’s arm like that.

  The house was faintly green, as Sune’s had been.

  “Tread carefully,” said Arry to Beldi.

  There were no frogs on the doorstep. Arry opened the door, and both cats burst outside, complaining and purring at once. Beldi went in first, and as he crossed the flagstones where the green letters had been, he staggered and put out his hand to the wall.

  “What?” said Arry, leaping through the door and staring at him.

  “I felt as if I’d put my foot down on a step that wasn’t there,” said Beldi. He pushed his hair back and blinked several times. “I must be walking in my sleep.”

  “Go to bed, then,” said Arry. “Or do you want tea first, or something to warm you up?”

  “No,” said Beldi, “thank you, good night,” and he went slowly across the front room and into the scrubbing room.

  Arry looked at the floor. It needed washing, except for the spot where the mice had been, which was clean and gray. No green letters. Keep the wolf far hence, she thought. Just you do that. She shut the door, and went to bed.

  She dreamed of the Fairy Melusine, who had a tail like a fish, and whose children all were monsters. What woke her was the smell of frying onions. Arry went sleepily into the kitchen and found Beldi making breakfast. He never cooked, because, he said, he could never be as good a cook as Bec had been. He smiled apologetically at her over his steaming pan and said, “I thought I’d make up for being troublesome last night.”

  Arry almost did it. She almost laughed and told him he was never troublesome. Half the laugh came out, but she squashed the rest of it and said swiftly, “Maybe you were a little. You shouldn’t wander off without saying anything.” She remembered that he had missed the uproar over Jony, and added, “Jony got bitten by a wolf last night: it might just as easily have been you who was hurt.”

  “I was with Halver,” said Beldi.

  “So you were. I forgot.”

  Beldi set his pan on the hearth and stirred the iron kettle. He must have made enough oatmeal for an army. Well, they could always make bread out of it, now that there was honey. He said, “I couldn’t have bitten her, could I?”

  “Wouldn’t you remember?”

  “It was very like a dream,” said Beldi. He reflected, stirring. “I don’t remember being angry, or hungry either, so perhaps I didn’t.”

  “We can ask Niss,” said Arry, “but I don’t think, if you were asleep under a wolfskin, you could have bitten Jony. She wasn’t dreaming, she was just going for a walk.”

  “Wandering off,” said Beldi.

  “It’s been safe here,” said Arry. “I think now it isn’t.”

  “Breakfast is ready,” said Beldi, spooning potatoes and onions onto Arry’s plate. He stood and held it out to her, and suddenly looked stricken. “I forgot to make the tea.”

  “Never mind,” said Arry, taking her plate. “I’ve had enough tea this month to last the rest of my life.”

  Getting everybody fed and washed and dressed was much easier when everybody did not include Con. It was only the middle of the morning when they walked over the green hills to Oonan’s house. Arry had assumed they would have to wake him, but he was sitting on the stone wall of his garden with all three cats. He looked and felt very much as if he had not been to s
leep at all. He was sitting on one wolfskin coat and had the other over his lap, stroking the thick stiff fur.

  “Did you sleep under those?” said Arry sharply.

  “I did indeed,” said Oonan. He smiled crookedly. “As you might, perhaps, expect, even without asking Derry, a wolf knows not what is broken nor how it may be fixed. There is a certain sensation of wrongness in some circumstances, and a set of behaviors to go with them, but no knowledge.”

  “What did you do?” said Arry, and when Oonan only looked at her, she said, “As a wolf, in your dream, or whatever it was, what did you do?”

  “I can’t tell you,” said Oonan. He lifted a fold of the coat over his lap. “After Niss has looked at these, you may wish to sleep beneath one yourself. If she says it will cause no harm.”

  “You’ll risk harm but I mayn’t?” said Arry.

  “I was afraid of whom you might meet,” said Oonan.

  They both looked at Beldi, who was leaning on the wall with his resigned expression.

  “Whom did you meet?” Oonan asked him. “Nobody I can remember,” said Beldi.

  “What did you do?”

  “It was like a dream,” said Beldi, patiently. “I ran through the woods. I ran through the high meadow.” He considered. “I chased sheep,” he said.

  “Good,” said Oonan. “The sheep were here last night. I counted them then, and again this morning. You weren’t chasing real sheep, unless you went to Waterpale or Greentree.”

  “I drank from the stream by Sune’s house,” said Beldi. He paused. “Sune’s house smells odd if you’re a wolf,” he said. “So does ours. I didn’t like the smell, I think.”

  And from the lion’s mouth that would you all in sunder shiver, thought Arry. From the hag and hungry goblin, that into rags would rend ye. Good. Niss is doing as she ought. But why won’t she consult with us; why won’t she tell us what she’s doing?