by PAMELA DEAN
Arry shoved irritably at a stray stick. She was beginning to feel that everything was a form of pain. Fear, anger, memory. She worked these theories out in detail, and felt herself smiling. Did that mean that thought could turn pain to pleasure? It seemed unlikely. What form of thought could turn Con’s hurt inside-out?
Arry sat up straight, shivering. Memory was pain, that was certain. She remembered her parents talking about Oonan, and her mother saying, in the outlandish accent Arry loved better than anybody’s, “Therein the patient must minister to himself.” But the patient couldn’t; that was what she and Oonan were for; the patient didn’t know anything, that was the whole problem with being a patient. Those who knew what hurt could make it stop.
“Ha,” said Arry. That was what they had told her; that was what she had thought. But it wasn’t what she knew; not after today. And it seemed that they had known what she knew now, and not told her.
Unless they were telling her now. Like the milkweed or the dandelion, did they send their knowledge floating through your heart, to take root when it would, far away from them and the flower that made it?
The seed knew how to grow by itself; Jony said so. Arry thought that perhaps she herself did not know how to do this. She lay on her back on the hard dusty floor, and through the window the wolf had leapt out of, she considered the close bright stars. Her mother had said Oonan snored; but he didn’t.
4
The wolves did not come back that night, and Oonan sent Arry home in the misty dawn. Con and Beldi had not burned the house down. Con had gone to bed in her clothes; Beldi had put on his nightgown. They had forgotten to feed the cats, who were sensibly asleep on the hearth when Arry crept in, but immediately leapt up, yelling their doubtful heads off. She gave them last night’s milk, which looked unpleasantly thick but smelt sweet enough. They glared at her and lapped it anyway.
She must find some way to keep the milk cool. She must find some way to do a hundred other things Con had done for three years. Beldi had done them before that. Frances had told her that Arry herself had done them first of all, but Arry remembered nothing of it. She wondered, if she did remember, if she could still do them. Were sour milk and a cold hearth hurts? Hunger and cold were, certainly; but the cure for them was food and warmth: magic did not enter into it. But if she could remember—It was no use asking Con, because Halver and Mally and Frances and Niss all said every child did these things differently. Beldi had never ceased to be horrified at Con’s method of calling the cats.
Arry’s fire had gone out. She drank cold tea from Con and Beldi’s pot and stared at the chess board, which of course they had not put away. If Con had stayed with the red pieces, she had learned fast and been about to win when they stopped. Beldi might have been letting her, of course. He had done it before. He had used to let Arry win at skipping rocks, until she found out and stopped playing with him.
She wondered now if that had hurt. Probably; everything did, it seemed.
No. Everything did not hurt. She knew that. Arry dropped her cup, which bounced on the hearth rug and rolled clanging into a corner. Arry let it go. Seeming and knowing made hideous faces at one another across the breadth of her mind.
“Arry?” said Con’s voice, clouded with sleep, and Con came padding barefoot across the floor, in her wrinkled red smock and trousers. She picked up the fallen cup, came slowly back across the room, and held it out to Arry as if it were something precious. Arry supposed it was. Halver had made it.
“Do you want your breakfast?” she said.
“You don’t have to hurry,” Con informed her, “because I’m already dressed. Why don’t people always sleep in their clothes?”
She sounded alarmingly pleased. Arry got up. “You think about the clothes you wore the day Wim made the mud slide. You wouldn’t want to sleep in those.”
“Why not?”
“Grel says it’s dirty. And the mud would dry up and fall off in little rocks and hurt you.”
“Huh,” said Con, trailing after her across the room.
Arry rummaged among their stores and discovered that Beldi had forgotten to get more oatmeal from Wim, and that if she had meant to make them bean porridge for breakfast, she ought to have set the beans to soak the night before.
“Fried potatoes and onions,” she said to Con, hopefully.
“That’s a very good idea,” Con said. “The smell will wake Beldi up.”
“When did you two go to bed?”
‘Very late,” said Con, also hopefully, though Arry could not make out what she hoped. Unless it was to be scolded, which made no sense, because, by the new laws Arry was discovering, scolding hurt. She sliced an onion, thinking about that. Did it hurt invariably?
“Can we put in the mustard seed?” said Con.
“A little of the black, if you like. Why don’t you mix it up with the butter and put it in the iron pot?”
Con did these things with a willingness that made Arry deeply suspicious. Unless Con had just decided that helping in mundane ways rather than magical ones was better than not helping at all.
“Can you go over to Niss’s and get me some fire?” she said, as if she were asking Con if it were raining. She did not dare look at her.
There was an ominous silence, during which Arry decided not to peel the potatoes and chopped them up briskly.
“If I can go barefoot.”
“You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Will not.”
“Will you look very carefully for rocks and not step on them?”
“Yes,” said Con, scornfully.
“Go, then.”
Con went. Arry shoved aside a pile of cut onion about the size of an egg, for flavoring the butter and mustard seed, and set about reducing the rest of the onions and potatoes to a coarse mush. Most people fried them in large pieces, but Bec had always done them this way for Frances, and everybody was used to it now. And if Con was any example, being deprived of what you were used to certainly hurt.
But if you were used to a lame leg, or the sore throat Arry had had all one winter? Arry went on chopping.
“Seeds’re popping,” said Con, appearing suddenly at her knee. She had brought the fire and the wood in, laid the wood, started it burning, and melted the butter, and Arry had never seen her.
“Let me look at your feet,” said Arry.
Con sat down on the floor and thrust her legs out in front of her. Her feet were dirty, but not cut or bruised.
Arry got up, carried her piece of wood over to the fire and scraped the large onion pieces into the butter. They made a fury of bubbles and sent a fine smell up. It was odd that chopping an onion into little pieces and tossing it into hot fat didn’t hurt it in the least. Even pulling it up out of the ground, though it made Arry wince, did not hurt the onion. Not that Arry knew. She shoved her mush of onion and potato into the pot. Con, without being asked, had gotten the wooden spoon and at once began stirring.
Arry stood there with the board dangling from one hand, dripping starchy oniony juice on the floor, and wondered if she should ask Jony if it hurt onions to be pulled up. Or roses to have blight. Or grass to be gnawed by sheep or oats to be cut at harvest time.
“Doubt,” she said fiercely.
Con looked over the pot at her, shocked.
“Never mind,” said Arry; and she yawned.
“Are you coming to school today?” asked Con.
Arry began to shake her head, and then remembered that she had missed part of school yesterday, and that Halver had promised to find out about Con for her. She nodded.
“Because Tany says he knows when he hurts, but other people don’t hurt.”
“Tany’s only four. He doesn’t know anything.” Arry felt cold just the same. Tany was Niss’s youngest, and those children all knew things before their time. Everybody said so.
“Why’s he say it, then?” demanded Con.
“We’ll ask Halver,” said Arry. “Go see if Beldi’s awake.”
Beld
i was not awake and did not want to be awake. Con suggested dumping the cats on his head; Arry decided that it was Beldi’s turn to miss school, and put the cats outside lest Con be tempted past bearing.
They ate their potatoes and onions. Arry wondered when there would be eggs to put in with the morning meal. Nobody knew about hens just at the moment, though the ones that lived at Niss’s and at Mally’s seemed to be going on as usual. Sune had read about hens, and the book she used seemed less doubtful than some of her other books. Arry could ask her, anyway; then both of them would at least share what the book said, though Arry could not be said to know it. She felt sorry for Sune, doomed to believe what she read whether it was true or not.
Arry poked around in the pantry and the root cellar while Con was finding her socks and boots, which, along with the rest of Con’s clothes, had a habit of scattering like spilt lentils whenever Con took them off. Beldi would have to eat potatoes and cheese. Arry went outside and dug in the leaves and old hay that covered the garden. Cold May or not, the new onions were green as emeralds. Arry stood there in the sharp wind, smiling, and pulled up four of the thinnest ones. Beldi loved spring onions. He and Mally and Frances all said so.
Con met her at the back door, wearing one red and one brown sock. Her boots matched because this was the only pair she had. “Aren’t you ready?” she said.
“I want to leave Beldi the stuff for his nuncheon, or he’ll feel deserted. Have you got your coat? It’s cold.”
“I want to get to school early and talk to Tany.”
“And I’ll talk to Halver,” said Arry. “Where’s your coat?”
They set off finally with Con wrapped in an old blanket of Beldi’s. The wind was fierce. The trees shivered in their new leaves. Old and new grass together were whipped flat to the ground. The sky was brilliant blue and full of minute clouds; it looked as if the wind had broken them and would not let them join again into the big clouds that brought rain. Arry didn’t mind. It had rained enough for the year, Grel had said so.
All Con’s friends were playing in the mud outside Halver’s house. Poor Halver was probably trying to drink his tea in peace. He might not even have had time, yet, to delve in his knowledge, his experience, and at a pinch in his books, to find the answer to Arry’s question about Con. Arry was glad it was Halver and not she who had to decide all this. Oonan and Zia and Mally had a long-standing argument over whether the Gnosi, the Physici, or the Akoumi had the most difficult task. Arry would have been welcomed into the discussion, since difficulty and pain had a common boundary; but she couldn’t see the use of it.
Con ran ahead of Arry and plumped down in the mud between Tany and Zia. They both had very dark skin and very red hair, Wim their father having come from the Outer Isles and Mally’s mother Irene, their grandmother, from Fence’s Country. Every fall when they gathered the walnuts Con would try to stain herself all over to look like Zia. It never worked.
Arry left her there in the mud and went on up the slope to Halver’s house. The door was ajar; she put her head inside. Halver was indeed sitting on the floor with a mug of tea. He was talking to Sune, who was showing him a large and raggedy book with red edges and a drawing of a plant on each page. She was flipping the pages rapidly, with a shocking disregard for their fragility, but whatever she was looking for wasn’t there. No— Sune thought it was, but Halver didn’t. Sune’s back hurt a little, because of the baby.
Arry thought it might be better to go away, but as she moved back in the doorway, Halver caught sight of her.
“Come in, Physici,” he said.
Sune looked up and smiled. She had a round face and short yellow hair. “I’ve ruffled him up,” she said. She unfolded her long legs and used Halver’s shoulder to help her stand up. Her feet immediately began to hurt too. “You smooth him down.” She started to bend, found it impossible, and gestured to Halver, who handed her the book. Sune closed it and walked at Arry. Arry stepped aside in a hurry, banging the door back against the rock Halver kept there to prevent the door’s making a hole in his wall. Sune went out, balancing carefully.
“Have some tea,” said Halver, as dolefully as if he were Con reporting some new loss of memory.
There was something the matter with him. His head hurt—no. His back, his eyes, his tongue, his knee he had hurt on the mountain when Arry was two—no. What, then?
Halver smiled at her. “Sit down, do, have some tea.” Arry sat, and he poured more tea into the mug Sune had left. “I don’t know about Sune,” he said, still dolefully.
“Of course you don’t,” said Arry, in considerable surprise. “Mally does. Ask her.”
“Mmmm,” said Halver, as he did when the little ones worked their arithmetic incorrectly.
Arry was nettled. She looked at him again, seeing with the part that knew. His hand hurt him: it was swollen between the thumb and the first finger.
“What did you do to yourself?”
“Sliver,” said Halver, much more cheerfully. “It’s what Sune was talking about. She wanted me to try drawing it out with herbs.”
“Wouldn’t it come out? Oonan—”
“It didn’t need Oonan at all,” said Halver. “She’s had this in her mind for months, but nobody has obliged by getting a sliver.”
“She should talk to Oonan—or to me.”
“Ah, well.”
“Do you want me to take it out?”
“It’s not in,” said Halver.
“Then why was Sune—”
“In case any was left.”
“But—”
“Never mind,” said Halver, rather tiredly. Was there something hurting him besides the sliver that wasn’t in? Arry couldn’t tell, which nettled her even more.
She said, “What about Con?”
Halver looked so empty of thought that she knew at once he had forgotten her question. After a moment he said, in not quite his accustomed tones, “You’d best ask Mally, I think. She knows Con.”
Nobody knows Con, thought Arry. She contemplated that thought. It was as if somebody had said— though nobody would—that water was dry.
“I will, then,” she said.
She went outside into the sunshine, and pushed through the crowd of children, and took the path for Mally’s house.
5
Mally’s house was midway down a hill, dug half into the slope, its windows facing south and west. Tiln had painted the shutters flat red on the outside, but on their inside surfaces he had painted what the view through each window would look like in the middle of the best summer the Dubious Hills had ever seen. It made Mally’s house a crowded place in the winter, especially during February.
Even from the next hill, even scrambling through the mud, Arry could see that the shutters were all open. She could make out the fragmented views of what, in summer, would lie behind her: rolling hills and rocks all covered with flowers and vines and scattered with clean sheep, and a hot dark-blue sky with the sun glaring halfway down like a child refusing to go to bed. She looked over her shoulder. The new green grass looked back at her, bare and precise, and the shadows of the land lay all the other way. She was looking at the western sky, and the sun was still in the east.
Arry went on down the hill, splashed through the little stream at the bottom, and climbed on up to Mally’s house. The path had flagstones, but the winter had moved some of them about, and there was a lot of mud. Arry’s father would have had something to say about the state of her boots.
The door of Mally’s house was open, too, and on it was painted the neat flagged path with thyme blooming in its crevices and sundrops glowing just like their name on either side. Arry looked over her shoulder again; she couldn’t help it. In the cracks of the path last year’s thyme sifted in gray crumbles. Where the sundrops would bloom, crocuses had come up and budded but not yet opened. Arry felt oppressed.
From the house came the sound of Mally singing. “In May get a weed-hook, a crotch and a glove, and weed out such weeds, as the corn do no
t love.”
This was a spell that did not work on children. As a spell, in fact, it did not seem to work on anybody. It was more in the nature of a reminder, perhaps.
Arry put her head inside the doorway. Mally was sitting on the floor, on one of her own red rugs, sorting the dried peas for planting. Her short white hair stood out around her head like the puff of a dandelion. On the hearth the black sheepdog moved his tail briefly.
“Good morning,” said Arry.
“A lot of use you are,” said Mally. She was talking to the dog; she always said that when people came in. Your telling her what use Blackie was was not what she had in mind. “Come in,” added Mally. “More mud won’t make any difference at all.”
Arry came in, surreptitiously scraping her boots on the threshold, and sat down on the red rug next to Mally’s.
“Mind Tiln’s brushes,” said Mally. Her own brown leggings were smeared with orange and purple.
Arry moved her skirt. Tiln might paint a landscape so well you would try to walk into it, but he was only twelve, and he left things lying about like anybody else.
“Is Con giving you trouble?” said Mally.
“Yes, she is.”
“It stands to reason,” said Mally.
“Because she’s almost six?”
“Because she’s Con. She loved doing magic. It made her the biggest one in your household, even if she was the smallest in body. She felt as if magic were what she knew. Think about losing what you know; then you’ll know how she feels.”
“What about all the other children who lose their magic?”
“They want to grow up,” said Mally. “You have to lose your magic to grow up.”
“But Con doesn’t want to grow up?”
“Do you?”
“Don’t you know?” said Arry.
“You know when Tiln’s tooth hurts; he doesn’t. Don’t you tell him?”
“But you’re asking.”
“Yes, I am,” said Mally.
This was Mally’s knowledge, so Arry thought about it. “I think,” she said after a moment, “that I already am grown up. I run the house, I know what I know, and I keep making questions that nobody can answer.”