The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” said Mally.

  Arry looked at her. Not being Mally herself, Arry did not know what Mally was like. But she had experience; and her experience told her that it was unlikely, after such an exchange, that Mally would answer the question, no matter how long she was looked at.

  “I’ll send Con along,” said Arry, and turned back up the hill.

  Lina had stopped chanting, and when Arry drew level with her, she opened her eyes and said, “Is it hot enough for you?”

  “Yes,” said Arry. “But I’m not a bean.”

  “Beans like it hot,” said Lina. “Beans hate it cold.”

  “So I understand,” said Arry, and went her way. Having dispatched Beldi, scowling, with Con, protesting, she sat down on her own front doorstep and thought about the order of her visits. She thought Sune had agreed to come by for those old clothes of Con’s, but she could not remember. She could take the clothes to Sune, find out what stories Sune knew about wolves and what Sune thought of the stories Mally had lent her; then, when she had nothing to carry, she could go the long hilly way to Derry’s house and ask about wolves. Vand or Derry would give her honey and oats and possibly some aged cheese if it were ready, and milk if there was any and Sune hadn’t had it all. Oonan lived close to home: she could take him in last of all, and if she were lucky he would give her some tea.

  It would have been much easier just to go to school. Sune was sitting in her rocking chair and spinning, as she had been before; but she had moved the rocker outside into the sunlight. On her bent head the short, smooth yellow hair glowed like the flame of a well-tended lamp. When she heard Arry coming, she looked up. Her face was a little puffy, and she felt generally puffy as well; nothing hurt at the moment, though, and the baby was quiet.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Sune, looking at Arry’s basket of clothes. “Just put them inside the door.”

  “They’re not as tidy as I remembered them,” said Arry, coming back out and sitting down in the grass by Sune’s chair. “Con was very vigorous with them.”

  “Knot won’t mind,” said Sune. “Maybe by the time she’s old enough to notice I’ll have made her something new.”

  “Have you thought of her whole name?” said Arry.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking what Knot would be short for, but it’s heavy going. Nottingham, Nostradamus, that’s all I can think of. We might make a joke of it, I suppose. The Unicornish for knot is kathamma. That might be pretty.”

  Arry wondered if they would be able to ask Tiln. She had not asked Mally about him, nor seen him in the field. She said, “My mother said our grandmother was called Kath.”

  “That would be from Katherine,” said Sune, nodding. “That’s a common Hiddenlander name.” She smiled. “If I wanted a double joke, I could call her Katherine.”

  The baby kicked her.

  “Or maybe not,” said Sune. Then she smiled in a startled way, and Arry laughed, because what Sune had just said was a joke, too, but she had not meant it so. Sune put down her spindle and looked at Arry. “You wanted me to think on those stories, didn’t you, and read more of them?”

  Arry nodded.

  Sune said, “Some of them are history and some are mighthavebeens. But for the moment we’ll put them all together and call them stories. If we do, we see that they aren’t of a kind. Some of them are about parents leaving, and what happens to their children; but only some. That’s what you asked Mally about, isn’t it?”

  Arry nodded again.

  “So she wants you to think not just about parents leaving, but what kind of occasion that is. All I can see now is that all these stories are about change, change of every kind, and what people do when it happens. Some of them make it happen. And—I wonder if Mally meant this—many of them are about the kind of cruelty the Eight Shapers wanted to make impossible. It never happens here; none of us could do those things.”

  “Thank you,” said Arry, faintly.

  “Think about it,” said Sune.

  “I will. I also wanted to ask, have you any stories about wolves?”

  “I had most of them from Derry, who knows better than I,” said Sune, “except for one book from Fence’s Country about the Lukanthropoi.”

  “The what?”

  “Wolf-people,” said Sune.

  Arry felt cold. “What are they?”

  “A strange sort of shapeshifter,” said Sune. “They turn to wolves at the full of the moon, and they change whether they will or no. Prospero thinks it a curse of the Unicorns on oathbreakers; Chalcedony writes that it is one of the failed spells from the Wars of the Sorcerers’ Schools; but their accounts jar so it’s hard to know anything. I don’t like reading them close together, but that is how one must.”

  “Do you think,” said Arry, she could not tell why, “that the stories might be mighthavebeens and not history?”

  “I’ve thought of it,” said Sune, “but—” She frowned.

  “I have never found anybody who understood this,” she said. “Some things I read I know are true; some things I know are not; but many may be either, and then there’s only feeling, like one thread in a carpet. My feeling says there is history here. But sometimes a thing might feel true to me, not because it is, but because the writer believes it is.”

  Arry stood up. “I have to go about and collect food. Do you need anything?”

  “No,” said Sune, placidly. “The clothes were all. I’m well provided otherwise.”

  Arry went off thoughtfully. Sune was not obliged to say who Knot’s father was, but Mally said Sune was the first mother since Mally’s own great-grandmother who had chosen not to say. Sune had no brother or sister to object if a father moved in with her; but perhaps she liked her solitude. How strange it sounded, not even to read a thing and know it, truly or falsely; how strange to have a thing neither known nor denied, in the very field and center of your knowledge. Perhaps it was hard to live with anybody else’s certainties. She would have to ask Mally, in case this might hurt one day.

  Vand and Derry lived in a large stone house with a slate roof. Wim said it was the oldest house in the Dubious Hills. The path leading up to it was of slate too. Alongside the path and in every crack it offered, the crocuses, like Arry’s, were blooming. All of these were purple. Vand and Derry’s three black dogs lay in the sun by the front door. None of them got up, but their eyes followed Arry. She banged the knocker, an iron bee with outspread wings, onto the iron sunflower intended for this purpose.

  Derry opened the door, and smiled at once. “I wondered where you were,” she said. “You three must be getting hungry. Come in.” She was very tall, and large as well, with short black hair and blue eyes and a nose like the curved bill of one of her known birds.

  “I wanted to ask you some things, too,” said Arry, following her into the kitchen, which the builders of the house had put at the front. On the wooden table were a bag of oats, a crock of honey, and a large wheel of cheese. Arry felt cheered.

  “You forgot your basket,” said Derry, putting the kettle on the stove and opening the oven door to poke at the fire.

  “Oh, I did—I took some of Con’s clothes to Sune in it.”

  “I’ll find you an old one.” Derry spooned tea into a green pot and sat down at one end of the table. “What did you want to know about wolves?”

  “Well,” said Arry. It struck her that she wanted to know only about those aspects of the wolf that Halver might manifest. “Just what you’d tell the children if Halver asked you down to school.”

  “Didn’t you listen the last time I came?”

  “That was the day Zia ate the nightshade.”

  “Of course,” said Derry. “Well, then.” She folded her large hands under her chin, and her face grew vague. “Wolves live all over the world,” she said. “In the mountains of Druogonos, on the plains before Wormsreign, in the far frozen wastes both north and south, in the forests of the Secret Country and the jungle of the Outer Isles and in our own hi
lls. They are of the family of dogs and foxes and jackals, as can be seen by the skull and the foot and the tooth of all these. They may hunt alone or in little groups or in packs of many. They run their prey until they have tired or trapped it and then they kill.”

  “Oonan said you said that the things that got his sheep didn’t kill like wolves?”

  “So they did not, though sheep seem made for just this; they are so easy to panic, and where one goes they all follow. But these creatures were much quicker about it. Oonan wondered if very hungry wolves might do otherwise than a wolf ought, but I know not. Also, if they had been hungry, they would have eaten.”

  “What sort of predator does behave like that?”

  “Killing and not eating?” said Derry. “We do.”

  “We?”

  “Not here; we know better. But people in the world, they do kill and not eat.”

  “Do all of us here know better?”

  “I would expect so, but you’d best ask Mally.”

  The kettle was boiling. Derry poured the water over the tea in the green pot, which revealed itself by the sharp smell to be raspberry leaves and lemon verbena. Arry drank hers gloomily. She was tired of asking Mally; and anyway, Mally so seldom gave you a straight answer. Know better, she thought, nodding from time to time and smiling when it seemed necessary at Derry’s account of how cats hunted. We all know better than to kill and not eat. How do we?

  She put her mug down. Halver did not know better. If he ever had, now he did not. He did not know what even the wolves knew.

  “More tea?” said Derry. “Or home to your hungry ones?”

  “Home,” said Arry. “Thank you.” She waited while Derry put the food in a flat willow basket, thanked her again, and went back outside. The wind had died. It was warmer, though not a patch on the beanfield. Arry walked carefully through the crocuses. Clothes, she thought, food, ask Derry, ask Sune, ask Mally. Mally might answer better when she was not sweating in the beanfield and supervising twenty-five children. After supper, then.

  Arry went home and baked scones.

  11

  When the scones were done and cooling, she swept all the floors and, now that Con seemed resigned to using it, began trying to make the kitchen habitable again. All the abandoned messes and projects made her gloomy. She thought she might scrub the pillows the cats had thrown up on and leave it at that. Oh, doubt, what a pity there was no doubt what all that dried stuff had been before it was eaten. She began to think hard to distract her own stomach, which was unhappy with the pains of the voles the cats had caught.

  Halver was, of course, the prime thing to be thinking about. Arry wondered whether it was worth the trouble to go to bed tonight. Possibly Halver had made the revelation he wished to make and would be satisfied; but just as possibly he would want to argue with her again. Of course, he could do that in the daytime. Unless he was now sleeping all day. Possibly, too, what the wolf did and what the man did had no necessary or probable connection. If he turned up tonight in the one form, she would certainly ask him in the other. It would help her decide whether she must do anything, whether his actions fell within her province.

  Con and Beldi came home. Con seemed smug and Beldi exhausted. Arry washed Con, who had apparently preferred wallowing in the dirt to firing off beans like stones from a sling, fed both of them, and sat them down to their lessons. Beldi had brought milk, herbs, potatoes, and, unexpectedly, a large sack of walnuts that, he said, Zia had insisted on giving him when he fetched Con from the beanfield. Arry suspected some less than benign intention on Zia’s part, but Con had only looked mysterious, not put-upon. Just the same, it seemed better not to leave them and go ask Mally questions. Tomorrow would serve well enough.

  Arry curled up in the chair, Sheepnose under it and Woollycat in her lap, and thumbed through the last of the stories Mally had given her. This collection was the strangest of all. It was all in verse, like spells, but it was not spells; or at least, while you could have used bits of it for magic, each piece of verse seemed to be a story of one sort or another: people acted, spoke to one another, lost or found things. Reminding herself to think of change and its effects, Arry began to read.

  “There lived a wife in Usher’s Well A wealthy wife was she She had three stout and stalwart sons And sent them o’er the sea.”

  The sons were lost at sea; whereupon, in a spell Arry could tell was a powerful one, the wife threatened to make storms until they returned to her in earthly flesh and blood. When the nights were long and dark, they did return (Arry wondered what all the wife’s neighbors had thought of the wind’s never ceasing, nor flashes in the flood, all that time). The returning sons’ hats were made of bark. Their mother blew up the fire and brought water from the well and everything was as it had been, until the blood-red cock crowed and then the gray, and the sons said it was time they were away, that they must go from Usher’s Well to the gates of Paradise. So they did. If their mother made more storms, the story didn’t say anything about it.

  “The King sits in Dunfermline town Drinking of the bluid-red wine O where shall I get a seely skipper To sail this valiant ship of mine?”

  A bonny boy who sat at the King’s right knee said Sir Patrick Spens was the very best sailor who ever sailed upon the sea. Sir Patrick, when they came and told him, said he didn’t know a thing about it, but he took the King’s ship anyway. He saw the new moon with the old moon in her arms, and there was a dreadful storm, and the ship sank. Arry untucked the foot that had fallen asleep and tucked the other one under her. The white cat jumped down and bit the black one’s tail; the black one hissed and they both tore across the room, and back, and into the kitchen.

  The cats made more sense than the story, thought Arry. She felt exasperated. But why? Things happened, after all, and history told of them. Sune and Mally said so. Because these stories rhymed, or because Mally had told her to read them, she wanted them to make sense.

  “It little profits that an idle king,

  By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

  Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

  Unequal laws unto a savage race

  That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”

  The idle king had been far from idle, it appeared: he had been to places that sounded as if they came from the same language as those in the curse Oonan flung at the wolves; he had sailed and fought and governed. He meant to leave the savage race to his son to rule and sail off again with all his mariners, even if the gulfs washed them down. He did not speak of his wife again, though he had said that old age had still its honor and its toil. He sounded, in his characterization of his subjects, like Halver on a very bad day.

  Arry shook her head, and read on.

  “Daylight’s on the windowsill Come you who are faithful still Celebrate the work of will.”

  Arry did not understand most of it, but it rocked her on to its ending, thus:

  “Though their elders shield the eye Trembling as He passes by Children know they cannot die.”

  Arry sat looking at this one for some considerable time. She had not the faintest notion of what it might mean, but it made the hair stand up on the back of her neck as if Con had left the door open in midwinter. She even got up and looked, but the door was shut, and bolted, and all the windows closed and shuttered too. She read again the lines that had made her go looking for the cold draft:

  “Children on the streets alone

  Wearing masks of black and bone

  In the shapes of things unknown.”

  Not if I can help it, thought Arry. She saw then that somebody had—of all the doubtful things—written in the margin of the book, just beside those lines, in a small square script: “Once out of nature.”

  This story made even less sense than the previous one, but it certainly had change in it. Once out of nature, what? Children would wear the forms of things unknown? Out of nature, thought Arry. Was that what Halver was? And yet shapeshifters were natural. Woul
d Sune understand being asked if the same were true of the Lukanthropoi? She had better try it.

  “O what can ail thee, Knight at arms

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has withered from the Lake

  And no birds sing!”

  The Knight replied that he was sad because he had met a beautiful lady in the meads, who took him up on her horse, fed him honeydew, sang to him, and kissed him, none of which seemed sad to Arry. But then he fell asleep, and dreamed he saw pale warriors, who cried, “La Belle Dame sans Merci thee hath in thrall,” and he woke up on the cold hillside.

  In her warm chair, Arry hugged herself. She thought of the cruel stepmothers. Some of them were just cruel; some of them spoke kindly and then were cruel in the background. But the stepchildren had not seen any starved lips in the gloam, with horrid warning gaped wide. The Knight was luckier. But he was sad just the same. She turned the page.

  “And what was she, the Fairy Melusine?

  Men say, at night, around the castle-keep

  The black air ruffles neath the outstretched vans

  Of a long flying worm, whose sinewy tail

  And leather pinions beat the parted sky...”

  Arry fell asleep, in the chair, pondering, and did not dream. One moment she was reading the long, difficult tale of the Fairy Melusina and her sons and husband, and the next somebody was making a doubtful racket and Con was pulling her sleeve and saying, “Arry, somebody’s at the door.”

  Arry sat up, rubbing her eyes. The fire and the candles still burned bright. Con was still dressed. Arry got up stiffly. Somebody was indeed pounding on the door. Beldi stood staring at it, with the poker from the kitchen fireplace in his hand. He was wearing his nightshirt, and his hair stuck up all over his head.

  “Who is it!” Arry yelled over the pounding.

  “Oonan!” came the answer.

  Arry unbolted the door and opened it a crack. Oonan, looking wild; nothing and nobody else. She let him in, slammed the door, and looked at Beldi, who leaned his poker against the wall and shot the bolt again. Oonan’s chest hurt from running, his throat tasted like blood, he had a stitch in his side. He sat down on the nearest cushion and put his head between his knees. Behind the expected and familiar distresses of somebody who has run too far were pains Arry tried her best not to distinguish. Oonan had already made it quite clear that he did not want her identifying them.