The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  Halver put the wig back on, which seemed even stranger than his taking it off. “I’ll look,” he said, “and I’ll ask Sune, and I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, Gnosi.”

  “Thank you, Physici,” said Halver, as he ought. His head hurt again.

  “How much willow-bark tea did you take?”

  “Half a bowl.”

  “Well, have some more. You won’t sleep well if you don’t.”

  Halver laughed. Arry jumped. That was not a thing he did much of either, Mally said. She stared at him as sternly as she could; after a moment he said, “I will, of course.”

  “Good night,” said Arry, and went home hurriedly.

  3

  The fire had gone out, so Con and Beldi had made cold oatmeal-and-onion balls for dinner. They had forgotten the peppers and herbs that made this dish edible, but Arry ate it anyway. She felt that to save her life she could not have done anything to upset Con. She was also beginning to feel guilty about Beldi, but if he was unhappy, she did not know it.

  Not upsetting Con was a great deal of trouble. It meant settling her and Beldi with Frances’s chess set, which Arry did not like to bring out, and then slipping out the back way and trudging muddily through the dark to Niss’s house to beg a pot of coals for the fire. It was going to be like being bitten by fleas, this not having a magician in the house any more, one tiny itch after another until suddenly you were covered with welts and scratching like mad and snapping at your family.

  If their parents had been alive, of course, there would have been a two-year-old around by now, a little clumsy and overpowerful, but very happy to oblige, even while saying, “Won’t!” Arry thought of having one herself; but being pregnant with no magician in the house would be miserable. Besides, there were no fathers she fancied; and she supposed he might have to move in, too, and Beldi, for all his forbearance, might very well hate that. And so would Con, of course. If only we never grew older, she thought, bearing the little earthenware pot carefully up the last hill to home, we would get on very well.

  She had left the door open a crack; now she eased it over the wooden floor just to the place where it would stick, and slid through the opening, holding her breath. In the dark kitchen, she stood and listened.

  “Diagonals!” said Beldi. “The bishop moves on a diagonal, Halver says so.”

  “What’s a bishop?” said Con.

  “A mythological beast of the Hidden Land,” said Beldi, austerely. “Halver says.”

  “It looks like a magician with a stomachache.”

  Arry grinned and moved softly across the kitchen to the door of the main room. It was dark, too, except for the rectangle of lamplight from Arry’s own room, where she had installed her brother and sister with the chess set. She would have to cross the light to get to the main fireplace. She stood clutching the pot; she could feel its warmth through the thick wool wrapping Niss had lent her with it. It was not likely to burn her hand any time soon, but it ought to be dealt with.

  She thought of the cold kitchen hearth, unused for three years. Con had said “Won’t” and meant it, marched into the main room, and made a fire in there. The kitchen had become the place where you put things you didn’t have a place for. The bark and sticks and log laid ready that day three years past were still there, dusty and cobwebbed but certainly dry.

  Arry took the pot across the room, stumbling over a pile of Con’s outgrown clothes that nobody had gotten around to making rugs of, and then bumping Beldi’s wagon, which he would neither use nor give up. She had come back in here a week after Con’s rebellion and shut the damper. It would probably make an unknowable noise. Arry pulled cautiously on the chain. It felt very stiff, but slowly the damper gave to pressure, with only a faint groan that Con might, if she heard it, attribute to the wind.

  She knelt on the tiled hearth (tiles from Wormsreign, brought by her grandfather, said Wim), and lifting the kitchen tongs from the hook they had hung on for three years, took a red coal from the pot and started the fire. Niss had given her a lecture, derived from Lina, on how to make it sustain itself all night; she hoped she had paid enough attention. While it was still burning brightly she hung the kettle over it. Then she lit a candle or two, to keep her from falling over Con’s rocking swan or the pillows the cats had thrown up on, and sat down on a stool while the water heated.

  It had just begun to rumble when Arry realized that if she gave Con and Beldi tea, Con would ask where the fire had come from. She had hoped to use the tea to make them sleepy, so she could join Oonan in his watch before whatever was going to happen began. There was no point in making Beldi sleepy if that meant he couldn’t keep an eye on Con should she get exercised and go on a rampage.

  Arry took one of the candles and the packet of sleepy tea, went into the other room, put the sleepy tea back in its cupboard, and got out the strong black tea from the Outer Isles. They could both stay awake, then, and make sure the house didn’t burn down.

  “What are you doing?” called Beldi.

  “Making some tea. I’ll bring it.”

  When she came in with the tray, they had, as usual, ceased actually playing chess and were engaged in enacting the story of the Dragon King and the Little Girl’s Brown Cat. Con, once she had looked up, never took her eyes off the tray; but she did not say a word.

  “I have to go help Oonan with his sheep tonight,” said Arry.

  “I’m not going to bed,” said Con.

  “No, I understand that you aren’t; that’s what the tea’s for.”

  Con scowled; Beldi gave Arry a pleading look that she could only counter with a shrug. She said, “There’s a fire in the kitchen.”

  “Who the doubt put it there?” shrieked Con.

  “I did,” said Arry coolly. “Don’t swear. Do you want to be cold and wet as well as unhappy? Don’t you think that cold hurts too? And screaming makes my ears hurt, and Beldi’s. Act your age.”

  And that was going too far. Con, however, did not protest; but she did open her soft brown eyes very wide and fix Arry with a look that hurt the heart as fire hurts the skin. Something would have to be done about Con. It was all very well to say that pain had precedence; Arry was beginning to think that all that really meant was, “You deal with it, Arry.”

  “I’ll be back very late,” she said to Beldi. “Con needn’t go to bed until she wants to.”

  She turned quickly away from whatever look Beldi might be going to give her, and went out into the damp night.

  Oonan was cloaked and booted and waiting for her. He fussed at her for coming out in only her shirt and skirt, as if he knew what cold was, and gave her an old sheepskin jacket. “I’d give us both a suit of armor if I had it,” he said, shooing his cats inside and shutting the door. Arry realized he had been thinking about whether the wolves would bite her, and not about cold at all.

  They climbed Oonan’s hill to the hill above it, where the sheep grazed. It was overcast again and very dark. Arry had forgotten a lantern, as she had forgotten her coat. But Oonan ought to have remembered. He was out here often, for lambing, or if a sheep were sick for some other reason, or just if they had seemed restless to him.

  “Can you see in the dark?” she said.

  “My feet know the way,” said Oonan.

  Arry was as much startled as if he had said, the other night, that Niss knew what hurt. “How?” she said.

  “They remember,” said Oonan, rather hurriedly.

  Arry, chewing over the difference between knowledge and remembrance for the first time—that she could remember, she thought, and almost giggled—did not answer him. The path got steeper and rockier; the wind began to strengthen. They came finally to the meadow halfway up the hill where most of the sheep, Oonan said, gathered for the night; and where last night had come the things that Oonan said Derry said were not wolves.

  There was a stone hut with a fireplace, for the lambing. They went in. Oonan always put the fire out, he said, for fear of burning the m
eadow. Arry stood in the sheep-smelling dark and listened to him find flint and tinder, without fumbling. He got a spark at the first try, and the dry grass at the bottom of his ready-built fire caught so fast Arry wondered if he had oiled it.

  “Where are the dead sheep?” she asked.

  “I gave them to Rista and asked him to salt the meat and wait to give it out until we’d found out what killed it.”

  “I don’t suppose I’d have been able to tell much if they were dead already.”

  “I thought of that,” said Oonan, “but there’s time enough for that if it happens again.”

  “What hour did the wolves come?”

  “Last night of all, when yon same star—”

  “One. Why are we here so early?”

  “Because they might come earlier this time.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I got a spell from Niss.”

  “But who’s going to cast it?”

  “I am,” said Oonan.

  Arry peered at him with considerable alarm. In the firelight she could not see much. Then he grinned at her. “Niss says that if I say certain words before I begin the spell, it will reach out and take her power—which she’s stored up, I gather, as if it were raspberries dried, and the words the water you soak them in—and so work the rest of the words as if she herself said them.”

  “What does the spell make the wolves do?”

  “What I tell them,” said Oonan.

  “How can they understand?”

  “If they’re wolves, as dogs do. If they are something else, as children do.”

  “Have you got a knife, Oonan?”

  Oonan laid his hand on his belt, where his knife always hung, as far as Arry could remember, and looked impatient. Arry decided to keep quiet, and found herself asking, “How will you know when they’re here?”

  “Niss thinks they’re broken,” said Oonan.

  “What if they’re just wolves?”

  “Then the other spells here will keep them from us.”

  Arry heard in his voice a tone she often used to Con. She kept quiet. After a moment she sat down on the floor. Oonan went on standing. The fire crackled. Arry thought about Con, and in particular about Con’s refusal to make a fire in the kitchen after their parents left. She mulled it over for some time, and knew finally that Con had been hurt then, as hurt as she was now over the loss of her magic. Con had been hurt for three years, and Arry had only just noticed.

  She thought about Beldi. He had not refused to do anything after their parents left; nor had he insisted on doing anything. He had been just the same, except that now he made their clothes, with some help from Mally, and he watched Con when Arry couldn’t. But of himself he did nothing. Arry could think of nothing he used to do that he had stopped. But she felt an obscure unease about him just the same, as if she would know what was wrong with him if she could just be quiet enough.

  Oonan was quiet, leaning in the door of the hut with his back to her. Outside was quiet too; inside only the fire talked to itself. Arry thought about Con, and Beldi, and Con again. Their mother was the one who was supposed to know these things. Halver was supposed to know some of them. And he had said there was no fixing them.

  “I hear something,” said Oonan, and darted out the door.

  Arry got up, stiff from sitting on the cold floor, and looked out the doorway. It still seemed very dark, but because Oonan was moving she could see him striding towards the far end of the meadow, where there was a pile of rock fallen from the hill above. The sheep often gathered there, though Oonan tried to prevent them, since Inno said that where rock had fallen once it usually fell again. You could not tell that to sheep, apparently, or expect them to know it.

  Oonan’s voice broke out of the darkness. “Property was thus appalled,” he cried, “That the self was not the same; Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was called.” There was a moment in which Arry heard a sheep make a querulous noise, and then Oonan bellowed as if he were trying to be heard over a howling blizzard. “Hence loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn ’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy, Find out some uncouth cell, Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings; There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks, As ragged as thy locks, In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.”

  Arry stood stock-still, staring. She did not know what half the words of the spell meant, but she knew that this was the worst curse she had ever heard in her life. A single howl rose out of the meadow, and something large and dark came towards the hut with a peculiar lurching gait. It was not running as fast as she would have run, had those words been directed at her; and it was not running down the hill. It was coming to the hut. Arry slid back into the room and snatched a burning stick from the fire.

  The irregular footfalls had ceased. Something dark and bristling was standing in the doorway. It was as tall as Beldi. Arry came slowly forward. She knew what the stick would do if she thrust or slapped with it. “Go away,” she said, but her voice cracked.

  The shape in the doorway made no sound. Arry brought the burning stick closer to it, and saw gray and cream fur, and green eyes where the reflection of the flame stood like a window into blinding sunlight, and tall pointed ears. And she saw something else. “Your paw hurts,” she said.

  The animal blinked once, the way Halver did when you startled him. Arry knelt on the rough floor. Oonan and Halver said wolves would hurt you; but she knew that something else had hurt this one already. Teaching fought with knowledge, and lost. She held out her hand.

  The wolf made a whining growl and stayed where it was, the hurt paw held a little off the floor. Arry knew what it wanted; the glowing stick hurt it more dimly but just as truly as whatever was wrong with the paw. She got up and put the smoldering end of the stick back into the fire, and when she looked back the wolf had come into the hut.

  In here it looked enormous. She was afraid, not that it would slash or bite her, as Derry said wolves did, but that if it moved carelessly it would crush her against the wall and fill her slowly full of splinters. Arry swallowed hard. She must be imagining; and her mother had said they had had nobody to do that for thirty years, since Arry’s grandmother died. Her father had said it was not an enviable occupation.

  The wolf whined, briefly, like a dog reminding you that you had just been reaching for the bowl of scraps. Arry sat down on the floor and held out her hand again. The wolf came unevenly forward and stood holding the paw up. Arry took it. It was as big as her face, smoothly furred on top, like a dog’s, and very hot and tight about the pads. She felt gently at the hottest spot, and frowned. There was something stuck in there, but what she could not recognize. She wished Oonan were here, instead of guarding the sheep from something that didn’t want them anyway.

  She moved her finger around the edges of the stuck thing. It was as big around as the tip of her littlest finger, but must be narrower at its other end, or it would never have gotten lodged in there. Arry wished she had obeyed her mother and not bitten her fingernails. The thumbnail on the other hand was still long. She shifted hands, got a delicate grip on the stuck thing, and pulled gently. Her own stomach knotted up and the hair crawled on her head, but the wolf made no motion. Arry pulled harder, and in a small gush of hot blood and the throbbing pain you got when a spider bite swelled up, the thing came out.

  Arry leaned on her free hand, breathing hard. The wolf backed two paces, lay down, and began licking the foot. That hurt too, but more cleanly. Arry opened her bloody palm and held it to the light of the fire. The thing in it looked like a thorn, but a thorn from no tree she knew. The gorse prickles, painful though they might be, were tiny compared to this.

  Something scraped outside the door of the hut. The wolf jumped straight over Arry and was gone out the window while she was still thinking about being afraid. Oonan ducked in through the low doorway. “I lost them,” he said. His voice altered. “D
o I smell blood?”

  “It’s the wolf’s,” said Arry. “He had a thorn in his paw.”

  “He had a what.”

  Arry realized that this was not a question. Oonan flung himself down on the floor beside her and peered at the thorn in her hand. “That’s a nasty one,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen it before. We must show it to Jony, perhaps.” His voice was still rather flat. Arry could not recognize the tone; he wasn’t in pain, exactly. He sounded almost as if he were trying not to laugh.

  “How many of them did you tame?” he said.

  “Just the one.”

  “I saw three. They move too light for wolves; are you sure?”

  “Well, it was dark. You said it was a wolf.”

  “I did?”

  “Well—”

  “Never mind.”

  “What happens now?”

  “I’ll go to sleep and you’ll watch. When the moon touches the top of that birch, you’ll go to sleep and I’ll watch.”

  “And if they come back?”

  “Wake me up.”

  “Huh,” said Arry. “Mother always said waking you was like bringing a rock to life.”

  There was silence of a peculiar sort that Arry did not recognize. The fire popped; the wind sighed; a sheep mumbled. Oonan said, “Then you must say, ‘not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, ’ and I will wake up.”

  “Who says?”

  “Niss!” snapped Oonan, and stamped away into a corner of the hut, where there was a wooden bed with a couple of wool blankets on it instead of a mattress.

  “Fine,” said Arry, and sat down on the hearth. He was angry; why, she had no idea. She stared at the small hollows of orange and red in the yellow mass of the fire, and thought of the day her mother left.

  Her father Bec had gone a month before, and Frances had known that he would come back on a certain day; but he hadn’t. None of the three children was old enough to know anything. Remembering, Arry knew now that her mother had been frightened. But Halver had not taught them about fear then; and she herself had not known, as she just this moment began to, that fear is a form of pain.