The Dubious Hills

  “How did he sound?” said Oonan.

  “Like Halver,” said Jony.

  Con and Beldi had gotten bored as soon as the bandage went back on. Arry made sure she knew where they were—making a pile of slate over where a great piece of it was crumbling out of the ground—and sat down on the ground by Oonan. “You remember Mally says there are at least three Halvers?” she said to Jony. “The jolly, the stern, and the quizzical?”

  Jony nodded. “They run together at the corners, too,” she said, “like mint getting into all the bits of a knot garden. This was the jolly quizzical, I’d say.”

  “What did he say?” said Arry. If school were anything to go by, Jony had a good memory.

  “He wished me a good morning,” said Jony, apparently resigned to answering meaningless questions. “And he asked me why I had a bandage on my arm. I told him a wolf had bitten me. And he said, ‘That was a nip in play, in passing; a bite in earnest would not have let you get up this morning, let alone gather herbs as ever. ’ I asked him who had told him this, and he got very stern for a moment; then he laughed and asked me who I thought. I said Derry, and he laughed again. Then he asked me what had happened with the wolf, and I told him.”

  “You’d better tell it again,” said Oonan. “And if you can tell it to us just as you told it to him, so much the better.”

  “I was walking in the cool air,” said Jony, “and sniffing for herbs, though it’s too early for most. And I came around that outcropping of rock above Mally’s house, the one where the good thyme grows. There was a wolf sitting in the middle of the path. It had deep yellow eyes, the color of wool dyed with dock. It was larger than any dog we have. I stopped. And it spoke to me.”

  “Did its mouth open and shut?” said Oonan; almost at the same time, Arry said, “What was its voice like?”

  Jony frowned at her wool, rubbing her bandage a little. “No,” she said to Oonan at last, “its mouth did nothing. And its voice,” she said to Arry, “sounded like mine. I didn’t remember until you asked.”

  “And you told Halver all this?” said Oonan.

  “Yes. Except about its mouth and its voice, because he didn’t ask me. And I went on—shall I now?” Oonan nodded, and Jony went on. “It said, ‘Feet in the jungle that leave no mark, eyes that can see in the dark, the dark, tongue, give tongue to it, hark, o hark, ’ and then it laughed. That’s why I think its voice sounded like mine: I think I have a funny laugh.”

  “How did you feel when it said the rhyme?” said Arry.

  “Odd,” said Jony. “As if the ground had moved. I said, ‘Greetings, wolf, ’ not being able to think of anything else. It said, ‘Greetings, wolf to be. ’ I asked what it meant, and it said I could be a wolf for the mere recitation of a verse and the will to do it. I said No, thank you. It laughed again. It said, ‘Against the wolf courtesy avails you nothing. Will you not come and run under the moon? You may be restored to yourself long before dawn. ’ And I said, No, thank you again.”

  “Why?” said Oonan.

  “I should think you’d ask me why if I’d said yes,” said Jony, with some asperity.

  Arry touched Oonan’s arm, and Oonan said to Jony, “All right, go on.”

  “The wolf said, ‘Do not refuse the third time; that would seal all. No harm will come to you; you shall be restored before dawn. ’ So I said I would.” She looked at Oonan, but he did not ask her why. She said, “And it said the verse again, which felt even odder, as if there were an earthquake. I was looking at the place on the rock where the new thyme should be just starting under the dead stuff; and I could see it suddenly, much better—but I didn’t know what it was any more. And I said, ‘No, thank you! ’ very loudly, and lost my balance and sat down on the path.”

  She scratched at the bandage again.

  “Don’t do that, you’ll make the scarring worse,” said Oonan. “What then?”

  Jony rubbed her ball of wool instead. “It ran at me and tore my arm in passing and ran on into the darkness. It wasn’t like a dog, there was no warning. Why do they say in cold blood when blood feels hot?”

  “They mean the wolf’s blood, not yours,” said Arry, not very coherently.

  “I think you had your warning earlier,” said Oonan. “Nobody will tell me what I ought to have done,” said Jony.

  “I think on the whole you did very well,” said Oonan.

  “If I’d done very well you’d think I wouldn’t be hurt.”

  “Would I?” said Oonan. “I don’t know.”

  “What did Halver say,” said Arry, “when you told him all this?”

  “He said experience was a hard school but fools would learn in no other.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “He said he must be off on his walk, and he would see me in one school or another when the time came.” Oonan stood up. “I think,” he said to Arry, “that we must be off on our walk as well. I’ll look at that again tomorrow,” he said to Jony. “Tell Niss that if she must work more sorcery on it she’s to speak to me first. And don’t use that arm for anything much.”

  They walked over to where Con and Beldi had built a pile of slate pieces as high as Con’s waist. “Where are we going now?” said Con. “When are we going to find them?”

  “I think,” said Oonan, looking at Arry, “that we need to ask Mally where they might go; and then go there.”

  If he thought he could fool Con into thinking a search for Halver was really a search for their parents, he was in for an unpleasant surprise, thought Arry. You might find them where you found Halver, but they did not seem to have been working together after the first night.

  When they got back to Mally’s house, Tany and Zia were throwing sticks for Blackie. Arry left Con and Beldi to help them and followed Oonan into the house. Mally was reading a book, and did not look overly pleased to see them.

  “If Halver had a whole day to go walking in,” said Oonan, with no preliminaries at all, “where would he go?”

  “Up,” said Mally. She considered. “And north as well, this time of year; the going’s dryer and there’s a clump of three oaks he likes.”

  “Can you show us on the map?” said Oonan.

  Mally fetched the map and showed them.

  “Con can’t possibly walk that far,” said Arry.

  “I don’t suppose,” said Oonan to Mally, “that you’ve any idea of where Frances and Bec might spend their day, under the circumstances?”

  “Watching Halver,” said Mally, “if they could find him.”

  “Well, that makes things easier,” said Oonan.

  “Shall I make them easier yet and take Con off your hands?” said Mally.

  “And Beldi,” said Arry.

  “He isn’t any trouble,” said Mally. She reflected. “Though if we go on giving him the notion that being troublesome means being well-loved, he can think of trouble none of us dream of.”

  “I’ve been worrying about that,” said Arry. “I’ll take Tany and Zia and Lina for you, Mally, as soon as this business is settled.”

  “Oh, excellent,” said Mally. “They can help Beldi think of trouble. Here, take some of these pies for your supper. And don’t stop to argue with Con. Go out the kitchen door—quietly—and take the little path past the thyme rock. I’ll talk to Con.”

  “I don’t know what we’d do without you,” said Arry, and hugged her.

  “I do,” said Mally dryly. “Go away, now.”

  They crept out the kitchen door and took the path through the pine woods. “It’s a pity Halver isn’t fond of these,” said Oonan. “Going for a long walk on a spring day is not my notion of fixing things.”

  They walked and walked and walked. If one’s mind were clear and happy, it would have been a fine day to do just this. It was warm and breezy. The tentative blue sky of spring was all laddered with thin white clouds. Their shadows sported over the hills like cats, chasing the sunlight over sparkling granite and dull slate, the bright dry grass and the small hidden gle
ams of water. The may was blooming, and the small wild cherry trees, and scilla and bloodroot and the strange leafless forsythia. Jony had pointed them out to Arry every spring since Jony got her knowledge.

  Arry had never walked in these parts before. She let Oonan find the paths and stand pondering at the places where they crossed or disappeared. She was thinking about Halver and what to say to him. They came out of the woods and walked up long hills of blowing grass with an occasional lost-looking bush or gnarled tree for emphasis. They climbed crumbling slopes of slate and crossed little hidden meadows all starred with white and yellow flowers. Arry finished with Halver and began to think about her parents. Keep the wolf far hence, that’s foe to men. They had meant Halver, of course, but they must also have meant themselves, or they would not have stayed away. Frances had said she wanted to write to Arry, but even that would not have kept the wolf far enough hence. Why, then, had she and Bec come back?

  It was getting hot. They stopped to drink at the next spring they found. They both took off their jackets, and Arry took her skirt off as well; she could go on in her leggings and shirt. The skirt was cooler than the leggings, but not as easy to climb and walk in. Arry thought of Frances and Bec in their long gray robes, and wondered how easy they had found this path.

  They rolled the clothes in a ball and tucked them under a rock. Oonan said that, with luck, they could come by here in time to eat their supper, just when the evening was growing cool and they would want the clothes again.

  “I just thought,” said Arry. “Mally gave us enough for five or six people.”

  “Yes,” said Oonan.

  They walked on; or climbed, mostly: things were getting more and more vertical, though from time to time they found another high meadow, blue with gentians. Experience is a hard school, thought Arry, but fools will learn in no other. Experience was what you had to go by if you had no knowledge. Halver had no knowledge now. Was he calling himself a fool? Or, as seemed more likely, had he been calling Jony one? But if what she had refused from him was not experience, then what was it?

  The sun was three-quarters down the sky and Arry’s feet and knees hurt by the time they trudged up one last bare slope and saw against the sky the three small twisted oak trees. The wind was blowing towards them. Arry heard nothing, and Halver would smell nothing. They kept walking. Halver could probably hear their breathing by now, but he did not come out. They passed under the shadow of the trees, which still held grimly to last year’s brown leaves; they walked rustling around the three rocks drifted with more brown leaves and hollow acorns and twigs. Halver was not there. Nobody was there.

  “Mally was wrong,” said Arry. She said it almost to see if the words would come out at all. They did.

  “We may just be late,” said Oonan. “He may have been here and gone.”

  “Does it look like it?”

  “No,” said Oonan, reluctantly; “but I’m not Karn, after all.”

  He leaned heavily on a large gray rock. Arry walked around the top of the hill, peering here and there, looking for a tuft of wolf-hair, blackened rocks, ashes, a nest in the heaped leaves, gnawed bones. Wolf or person, he would have left some trace. He had had Karn teach them that much. She stood on the northern crest of the slope and looked north, at sharp hills piled ever sharper until they disappeared into the clouds. Nothing moved but a raven, and the shifting sunlight. A mind like an April day, Bec had said the trader from Wormsreign had. He had meant something more changeable than this, a day where it rained hard one minute and shone brilliantly the next.

  “Or we may be early,” said Oonan.

  “Jony saw him this morning; he had hours on us. If he was here at all, he was here before us.”

  Oonan rubbed the sweat from his face, leaving a smear of dust. His mouth twitched. He began to laugh.

  “What if Halver knew,” he said, “that we would ask Mally where he would go? Then he would go somewhere else.”

  “But Mally should have known that, too,” said Arry.

  “Should she?” said Oonan, still laughing a little. “Or should we have asked a different question?”

  “She’s not a divining-game!” said Arry.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “We asked her what Halver would do,” said Arry, “and she told us, and he didn’t do it.”

  “If you can talk so much, you must be rested,” said Oonan. “We have a long walk home, and dark before we get there.”

  21

  The way home was mostly downhill, but it did not seem easier or shorter. They wanted their extra clothes long before they got to them, and they had eaten their supper before they began to want the clothes. They came sorely and wearily out of the pine woods to find Mally’s house all dark. But as they sat down at the edge of the woods to rest before the last little walk home, somebody got up from the bench next to the well and walked across the pebbles to where they sprawled on the lovely damp cool of the moss.

  “What news?” said Mally.

  “Halver wasn’t there,” said Arry. Oonan made some movement next to her, but said nothing.

  Mally was perfectly silent. The dark solid form of her, between them and the lighter sky, did not move at all; even her wispy ephemeral hair did not stir. Arry was aware, more precisely than ever before, not of just perceiving, but of having herself caused hurt. And she had caused it with the truth.

  She realized Mally had stopped breathing only when she started again. “He must have been there,” Mally said, quite calmly.

  “We started later than he did, Mally, and we were a long time getting there,” said Oonan. “We probably missed him.”

  “But he’s sleeping there,” said Mally.

  “Did he tell you so?” said Oonan.

  “No, of course not,” said Mally. She sat down rather heavily next to Oonan. “I knew he was there,” she said.

  “I thought you did,” said Oonan. “That’s why we walked so far.” His tone was not reproachful; it was even soothing; but it hurt Mally even more than what Arry had said.

  None of them said anything for some time. The night breeze lifted the hair stuck to Arry’s neck and breathed the scent of the hawthorn into her dusty head. The stars stared down as they always had. A few bats skittered across the sky. It was so quiet that Arry could hear the faraway streams running over their rocks. Then something small rustled in the pine needles not far behind them, which made Mally jump; and Arry spoke.

  “Oonan, I have to go. Mally, I’ll come for the children in the morning.”

  “Oonan will take care of me,” said Mally.

  Arry got up, creakily, and walked away. Behind her Oonan said, “There’s nothing wrong with you.” Mally laughed, and Arry walked faster. Mally was in Arry’s province, well and truly in the very heart of it; and Arry was walking away. She broke into a run for a few steps, but she was too stiff and tired. She went on as fast as she could.

  Niss’s house was not dark. Niss liked to work at night, Mally had often said so; Vand, she said, could sleep through anything, and often did. What if that’s wrong, too, Arry thought suddenly. But no, that’s from before; it should be all right. She walked up to the open door, from which was issuing a less than pleasant red light. They had all been taught from a very early age never to interrupt Niss when she was working. One was to stand there until one was noticed; she would notice eventually.

  Arry stood in the doorway, straining her eyes to see what was happening inside. She could not make the light and shapes mean anything, but presently she heard Niss singing. “What wondrous life is this I lead. Ripe apples drop about my head; the luscious clusters of the vine upon my mouth do crush their wine; the nectarine and curious peach into my hands themselves do reach: stumbling on melons, as I pass, ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.”

  It sounded better than the hag and hungry goblin. Arry arranged herself comfortably against the doorframe. She had run through several arrangements and was wondering if sitting down on the threshold would be too distracti
ng, when Niss said, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Arry.”

  “Come in,” said Niss, and the red light went out. Niss added absently, “Look, the dawn in russet mantle clad,” and the fire in the fireplace woke like a cat stretching, gathered itself and slowly fluffed up into a strong blaze.

  Arry went in.

  “Why abroad so late?” said Niss. “Sleep charms?”

  “I need to borrow the wolfskin coat,” said Arry.

  “I can hardly keep Beldi’s from you,” said Niss slowly.

  “In fact, I’d rather have Tiln’s,” said Arry. “Beldi’s slept under his once, and I don’t want him near it.”

  “Who should want you near either of them?”

  “Halver, by the look of it,” said Arry. “Might this be a way to find him? Could the coat summon him, after somebody had slept under it three times?”

  Niss regarded her steadily in the flickering light of the fire. She had to tilt her head back to do it. I must have grown again, thought Arry. Niss sighed, and went to a chest in the corner, and opened it and took out the wolfskin coats. She said briskly, “Do you think I am easier to be played upon than a pipe?” Nothing happened, but after a moment Niss said, “The coat could summon him, certainly; but on what occasion I know not.”

  “I’ll find out for you,” said Arry, holding out her hands.

  Niss dropped one coat back into the trunk and came across the room with the other one bundled in her arms. She looked reluctant. “It does seem,” she said slowly, “that people ought not to go turning themselves into wolves without consulting me.”

  “I don’t mean to turn myself into a wolf,” said Arry.

  Niss looked at her steadily. “Dying’s not my province,” she said, “but I don’t advise it.”

  “I don’t plan on it, any time soon,” said Arry.