The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  The celebration, which had had to wait until the bean crop was dealt with, had been awful too. Everybody treated her as if she were grown up, which was very nice, but it was all punctuated with the sensations of children burning their lips on their tea and Jony falling out of the pine tree and Con pulling the cat’s tail and Zia hitting everybody she could reach, which she had been doing all year: Mally said that since Zia had survived that year she would probably live forever. Arry sometimes felt that anybody else who had survived Zia’s bad year ought to live forever too.

  The knowledge of pain had narrowed and sharpened over time, until people could fall out of trees a few hills away without Arry’s starting up from her chair. But at the beginning it had been most horrible.

  Did the ugly mountains make Tiln feel that way? Did every less-than-lovely thing he saw sting like the burn of hot tea? She should have attended to him more. He hadn’t screamed, certainly.

  But thinking of people who ought to be attended to—Halver was extremely uncomfortable, between his itching hand and his headache. Arry wondered if the sliver had had a sickness in it. She would have to stay and talk to him about it.

  He was rather short with her when she did. “It isn’t the sliver,” he said. “Oonan looked at the wound and said all the wood was out and it would close up cleanly.”

  “Well, it’s something,” said Arry. “Maybe you should close school for a day or two, or let Sune read to us, perhaps.”

  Halver looked impatient, and then thoughtful. “Maybe I ought,” he said. “Just until half-moon.” He rubbed at his hand. “We’ll let everyone come to school tomorrow as usual, and I’ll tell them then, and give them a few lessons to do. And while school is closed they can help plant the beans.” He beamed at her.

  Arry felt uneasy, but she smiled back.

  8

  Once home, Arry fed Con and Beldi early and set them to throwing pinecones for the cats, while she settled down with the rest of Mally’s stories. The book covered in red leather had seven of them in it. The first one was called “The Cruel Sister.” In it the older of two sisters drowned the younger so she could marry the younger’s swain. The body of the drowned girl was found by two minstrels, who made a harp of her breastbone and took it to the wedding, where it accused her sister, who was then hanged. Arry could hardly bear to read it. What in the world was Mally thinking of?

  She made herself some of the strong green tea from Wormsreign and started cautiously on the second story. It was devoid of hurtful things, merely detailing a young boy’s meeting with a soldier on the road and their exchange of riddles. She looked at the third story. It was a song, but not one she had ever heard. In it a mother asked her son why his sword dripped with blood, and after telling her he had killed his hawk, his hound, and his horse without being believed, he told her he had killed his brother. She asked him what he would do now, and he told her; and when she asked what of his goods he would leave to his mother dear, he said, “The curse of hell to burn you with, mother, such counsels you did give to me.”

  Arry dropped the book. The cats both came running to see what it was, followed by Con and Beldi. Beldi picked the book up, smoothed the pages, and handed it to her.

  “What’s that?” said Con. “Will you read it to us?”

  “No,” said Arry.

  “Why?”

  “It’ll hurt you.”

  “I bet it won’t,” said Con, climbing onto the arm of the chair.

  Arry sighed and opened her mouth. Then she caught sight of Beldi. He was hanging back a little, his eyes still on the book he had handed back to her so carefully. He looked wistful.

  Arry said, “Well, the one about the riddles is probably safe. Bring up another chair, Beldi.”

  Beldi did so solemnly, but some small tangle at the edge of Arry’s mind smoothed itself out and vanished. She was still squinting after it when Con pulled her hair.

  “Don’t do that, it hurts,” said Arry, opened the book, and began to read.

  Con guessed all the riddles before Arry could read them. She did not word the answers as the book did, but Arry felt faintly alarmed nevertheless. Beldi looked chagrined.

  “Read us another one,” said Con.

  She was now sitting on Arry’s lap, and dislodging her would involve a great deal of work and more noise. Besides, it might be cruel. Arry paged past the awful song to the fourth story. Unlike the stories in the scrolls, none of these had a name. It began harmlessly enough—no swords dripping with blood, no vanishing parents, no older sisters—and if it were frightening, maybe that would show Con that Arry knew what she was doing. She began to read.

  “In the dark long-ago, before all countries and all wizards, before books and castles and candles and waterjugs, the first people in the world were cold.”

  The story was about a dragon, never named, who was always too hot because of her armoring scales. She came to live with the cold people and after a time took pity on them. She flew far through the bright black spaces around the world until she found a star so small nobody could see it, and this she swallowed, and brought back to them, and showed them all the things they could do with fire.

  Arry had begun to relax by this time: there seemed no hurt here. She read on through the triumphant cooking of food and forging of metal and baking of clay, until the dragon went back out to the bright black spaces, because it was too hot now where the people were. There the dragon met the great powers of the outside, who asked her what she had done with the star. When she told them, they were angry. And they took the dragon and put her in the hottest place they could find, and chained her to a rock, and sent an eagle every day to eat out her liver.

  Arry stopped.

  “Is that all?” said Con.

  Arry squinted at her. She looked unalarmed; in fact interested.

  “Did it hurt the dragon?” said Beldi.

  “I’m sure it did,” said Arry.

  “Why were they angry?”

  “I don’t know, it doesn’t say.”

  “Is that all?”said Con.

  “How could it eat her liver more than once?” said Beldi. “Do dragons have lots of livers?”

  “It says it grew back so the eagle could eat it again.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that—”

  “Not quite,” said Arry, resigning herself. “‘And this is the fate of teachers, the best of which do their job featly just the same.’”

  “That’s all,” said Con, contentedly, and she wormed her way down from Arry’s lap and hurled a pinecone across the room.

  The cats had long since fallen asleep on the hearth. Woollycat opened one eye, stretched, and subsided again. Con went over to poke their bellies and generally stir them up before they were ready, and Beldi said, “Is that really the fate of teachers? Will an eagle come and eat out Gnosi Halver’s liver?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Arry. “I’ll ask Mally, shall I, and Sune; they know about these stories.”

  Beldi looked at her with no expression, nodded, and went away into the room he shared with Con. To the sounds of Con harrying the cats around the room, Arry began to read the fifth story. It was about a strange faraway place where it was never night except once in ten thousand years, and the bizarre ways in which people behaved when they were in darkness for the first time.

  She was in darkness herself now: the last light of sunset was almost gone. The cats were back on the hearth in a heap.

  “Con, Beldi,” she called, “did you work your lessons?”

  “You said no school tomorrow,” said Con from their room.

  “That’s not the same as no lessons.”

  “But we can stay up far into the night and work them, then.”

  “Only if we light the lamp.”

  There was a stifled pause. Then Con said, “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, the earth, and every common sight, to me did seem appareled in celestial light.”

  The banked fire flared up like a hundred sunflowers
. The lamp at Arry’s elbow, two others awaiting cleaning in the corner, the long-unused one by her father’s chair, burst into brightness. Arry jumped out of her chair and ran into the kitchen. Three more lamps, containing neither oil nor wick, burned like the sun in August. Arry moved pillows away from them and made certain there was nothing on the floor near them that might burn. Then she turned to go deal with Con, and found Con at her elbow, looking smug.

  “Con, what did you do?”

  “It’s a spell,” said Con. “Niss gave it to Mally, and Mally gave it to me. Mally said sometimes stronger spells work until you’re seven or eight. She said some people don’t ever lose their magic at all.”

  “Did she say you were one of them?”

  In the brilliant light, Con’s face took on a look that Arry instantly pegged as untrustworthy, though character was not her province and she did not remember seeing it on Con before. Con said, “I am one of them.”

  Arry bit her lip until the urge to reiterate her question had passed. “Do we have to have all of them burning?” she said, as temperately as she could manage. “It seems a bit of a waste.” She was sorry as soon as she had said it, but Con’s face did not fall.

  Con said, staring hard at the three flaring lamps, “Turn whereso’er I may by night or day, the things that I could see I now can see no more.”

  The lamps went out. Arry turned fast, feeling frightened; but the glow from everything burning in the other room was still there. She went back to it, and Con went with her. After a while, Arry remembered to thank her.

  Con and Beldi did stay up far into the night working their lessons. Arry sat in the chair and pretended to read more stories. She had had enough for the time being; she felt like an overrisen loaf, and expected to collapse into a flat puddle of sour thoughts at any moment. Just before she roused herself to hustle Con and Beldi off to bed, she did page through the green-covered book and find one very short story that looked as if it might not bite one’s mind. It was called “King Conrad and the Forty-Nine Advisors,” and was a tale of the Hidden Land. Arry read it with considerable satisfaction. Then she packed Con and Beldi off to bed (where they were willing to go by then, although they put up a protest to retain their dignity), and fell blankly into bed herself.

  She woke suddenly to a cold gray light punctuated with the howling of wolves. Arry got up in a hurry, entangled in her quilt, and made sure Con and Beldi were still sleeping. Then she stood for a moment until she thought she had located the howls, and pressed her nose to the glass of her bedroom window.

  She jumped back before she could govern herself. The largest wolf was right outside the window. When it saw her, it stopped howling. Once again, it stared at her with a disapproving, bitter scrutiny that no wolf's face was made to express. Arry stepped forward again. Was it hurt?

  The wolf held up one front paw. She could see nothing amiss with it in the moonlight, but it might well have festered; or perhaps she had not gotten quite all the thorn out; or the thorn had carried dirt or irritant sap into the wound. Any of those was quite possible. She knew nothing, but with the glass and the walls of the house and this being a wolf and not a fellow person, she might not know unless she were closer, as she had been on the night she took out the thorn.

  She would have to go out, and go out in such a way that the wolf would stand no chance of getting in.

  She put on an assortment of warm clothes over her nightgown, and went into the main room to get her boots from beside the fire. She picked up the poker, and put it down again. It had not hurt her before; why should it hurt her now? Because it’s a wolf, Derry would say, and that is its nature.

  She put on her boots and went to the door. It opened inward, unfortunately. The wolf howled again, from the back of the house. Well, then. Arry moved the bolt back, opened the door a very little, slid herself through the smallest opening, and shut the door. It was cold out. The moonlight made it colder. A little wind searched out the vents in her strange assortment of garments. With a slither of fur and the click of claws, the wolf came around the side of the house and stood still, looking at her.

  Then the wolf came towards her, not quickly. Arry clenched her hands in the pockets of her jacket and stayed where she was. The animal padded right up to her and pushed her shoulder with its nose. Arry heard herself squeak, a foolish sound.

  “What?” she said.

  The wolf pushed again. Arry turned her back on it, which made her stomach hurt though her stomach was not injured in the least, and took a few steps. It slid past her and trotted ahead, just like a huge dog, except that it did not wag its tail or even look over its shoulder to see if she were following.

  She followed. They came to the top of a hill; the wolf stopped and sat down. Arry, who was out of breath, stopped too. All the houses she could see were dark. The moonlight made them like toys to hang on your winter tree, little and shining. She wished it would do the same to the wolf, but the wolf was too close, and breathing. She thought about its paw again. It was a little sore, perhaps.

  “Let me look at your paw,” she said, frightening herself even as she made the words.

  The wolf, unperturbed, held up one paw without looking at her. Arry squatted down and took it. Yes, this was the one, healing well but still tender.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t walk on that,” she said.

  The wolf turned its head and stared her in the eyes. Its breath dampened her cheek. Its eyes were green, were red, were silver in the moon. It exhaled suddenly in a sound that was not exactly a growl. Arry sat down just as suddenly, in startlement; and the wolf made a sound that was nothing like a bark, a kind of strangled wheezing, like somebody trying to laugh with no breath left.

  The path was damp. Arry put her hand on a cold rock and got up again. The wolf gave another wheeze or two, and getting up itself it went trotting down the path, tail waving. Arry went after it. She hoped Con and Beldi wouldn’t wake up and go padding around in the dark looking for her.

  Up hill and down and up in the chilly spring night, where the mist lay on the new grass and the trees rustled their new leaves. The wolf was going to Halver’s house. Was Halver hurt, had the sliver in his hand festered, had the wolf hurt him—and come for help? Arry snorted under her breath; the wolf never looked back.

  The door to the schoolroom was open. Firelight and lamplight slid out and made a strange green and gold square in the dim moonlit dark.

  “Halver?” called Arry; it seemed wrong to let a large wolf walk over his threshold without giving some sort of warning.

  The wolf looked over its shoulder at her and then trotted briskly into the house. Arry followed, taking the time to kick off her boots and leave them on the rug by the door. The wolf was leaving muddy footprints all over.

  The lamp was in the schoolroom, the fire in Halver’s room beyond. Arry had seldom been there. She put her head around the edge of the door. The bed was empty, flat and smooth. The window was open. The clothes Halver had been wearing earlier were folded and stacked on the clothes-chest.

  The wolf was sitting in Halver’s red chair; Arry’s mother had made that one, as she had made many of the chairs people seemed to like best.

  “You’re getting that all muddy,” said Arry. Her voice cracked. “Where’s Halver?”

  The wolf lifted one front paw and licked at it, delicately. It itched. Oonan would know if the thorn were all out, if the wound would heal cleanly.

  People broke in much the same ways, said Oonan; but no two people hurt in the same way, each of them felt different from all the others.

  “Halver,” said Arry.

  The wolf came down from the chair and licked her hand.

  9

  Arry sat on the floor with the mud Halver had tracked in soaking through her nightgown, and Halver laid his large hairy gray point-eared head on her knee, and they waited. She asked him several times what they were waiting for, but he only growled a little. She was puzzled because, aside from the paw, he was in much less pain than he had b
een earlier today, when he was not a wolf. Headache, irritation, sleeplessness, none of those troubled him in the least. Arry tried to notice the other forms of hurt, the ones she was just discovering; but with Halver in this form she could notice nothing. She thought a great deal about wolves. Her mother had told her that the Hidden Land had fought several great battles with shapeshifters (nobody in Arry’s village knew about shapeshifters), but none of those had been wolves.

  Her left leg fell asleep. When she twitched it, Halver growled again.

  “My leg’s asleep,” said Arry.

  Halver got up, walked around behind her to her other side, and settled back in with his head on her right knee. The bar of moonlight moved across the room. The fire burned low. Arry dozed and woke and thought she stayed awake until a shrill outburst of birdsong made her open her eyes. The sun had come up. Arry was considering what might be the effect of announcing that she was cold, when Halver shot to his feet and ran through the doorway into the schoolroom. When she stood up stiffly, he growled. Arry stood shaking the cramps out of her knees and listening for what he had heard. The sun could slip only a sliver of light into this shuttered room, and the fire gave no useful light.

  Arry was assaulted by a sensation less like pain than like an enormous dislocation, like the huge twitch one sometimes gave just before falling asleep, having halfdreamed that one had stepped too near the edge of a cliff and slipped. In the schoolroom, something rustled, and somebody two-legged strode across the floor and stopped in the doorway.

  “Let’s have some light, shall we?” said Halver.