The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  “Con,” she said, “get him some tea. Never mind if it’s cold.”

  “I can heat it up,” said Con, dashing into the kitchen. She came back cradling the large blue mug that Frances had drunk hot chocolate from, when there were milk and chocolate enough to make this feasible. She was crooning to it, “Oh for a beaker full of the warm South.”

  Oonan’s tangled head came up sharply. He looked at Arry. She shrugged. “Con—” she said.

  Con handed Oonan the mug. He thanked her gravely and sniffed at it. “Con,” he said. “This isn’t tea.”

  “It’s the blushful Hippocrene,” said Con, quite smugly.

  “And what do you suppose the blushful Hippocrene is?” said Oonan.

  Con pointed at the mug.

  “Con,” said Arry.

  “I don’t know,” said Con. “Yet.”

  “You may as well drink it,” said Arry to Oonan. “It won’t hurt you if that’s all of it you drink.”

  “No?” said Oonan.

  “Con,” said Arry, “what made you think Oonan would like it?”

  “It’s for when your heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains your sense,” said Con.

  “Con, that’s a harvest spell,” said Oonan. “You really mustn’t misapply it.”

  “Who says?” said Con.

  “Jonat and Niss say it’s a harvest spell.”

  “Who says I mustn’t?”

  “I do,” said Oonan, with great firmness. “You’ll break it.”

  Con looked him hard in the face for quite some time. Finally she said, “Give me back the cup, then.”

  Oonan made a gesture at Arry and handed Con the cup. Con took it back into the kitchen. Arry let her breath out. Oonan had been right, she had been about to remonstrate.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” said Oonan.

  “What is?”

  “Who says I mustn’t?”

  “I don’t think it’s my question,” said Arry, carefully. He was very much put about, and still out of breath.

  “In a moment,” said Oonan; he seemed to be listening. Con was clattering and splashing in the kitchen—the kitchen she had refused to enter not so long ago. Arry looked at Oonan. He had his breath back. His throat still hurt a little, and his side; and whatever had made him run like that was still boiling in there.

  Con came back with a steaming mug, which she delivered to Oonan. “Thank you, Con,” said Oonan gravely.

  Con gave him another long, hard look. Beldi called her from the back of the house, and she turned without a word and went out of the room. Oonan took a sip of his tea, and burned his tongue.

  “What did she give you?” said Arry.

  “It’s just peppermint. However she may have obtained it.”

  “That’s all right, there was some in the kitchen,” said Arry.

  Oonan put the mug down on the floor and ran both hands through his damp red hair, so that it looked more like a bird’s nest than ever.

  “What happened?” said Arry.

  “The wolves came again,” said Oonan. He almost always peered intently at the person to whom he was speaking, but he addressed these words to the floor. “They left the sheep alone this time. They ran me up and down the meadow until the sun came up and after, until the moon went down.”

  Arry felt as if she had been running herself. “What then?” she said.

  “I can’t tell you,” said Oonan.

  “But the moon was down.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked at one another. “All three wolves?” said Arry.

  “No, the two smaller ones.” Oonan was talking to the floor again.

  “The large one came here last night,” said Arry. “And took me for a walk to—and made me stay with it. Until the moon went down.”

  “I think you should watch with me tomorrow night,” said Oonan.

  “Or you should sleep with me,” said Arry.

  Oonan laughed; after a moment, so did Arry.

  “I’m afraid,” said Oonan, “that if they come to the sheep and I’m not there, they’ll do more damage.”

  “Are you?” said Arry. He still would not look at her. She added, “I’ll come by—when?”

  “I think just after sunset should do nicely,” said Oonan. “Grel says the moon doesn’t properly rise at all tonight.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “You know they didn’t.”

  “There’s something going on inside you.”

  Oonan raised his head and looked at her much as Con had just looked at him. “Have you talked to Mally?”

  “I have. She wasn’t very helpful.”

  Oonan hit his forehead lightly with the heel of his hand and looked stubborn. “I can talk to her again,” offered Arry, with a despairing thought about what she could do with Con this time.

  “It won’t break anything,” said Oonan.

  “I will, then. Do you want something to eat?” Oonan started to shake his head, and then looked at her. “I think I might,” he said.

  “Whom shall we ask?” said Arry, and leaving him laughing she went into the kitchen. Scones, cheese, honey. If Con really wanted to be helpful, she ought to speed up the process, whatever it was, that was the reason one soaked beans overnight before cooking them. Arry put three pounds of beans to soak and came back out with a tray. Oonan, his eyes closed, had leant his head against the wall behind him. His face was hollow, like a field after harvest. Arry put the tray down quietly, and he opened his eyes at once.

  “I’m going to try to put Con to bed,” said Arry.

  “I shall stifle my natural instincts, then, should I hear screams,” said Oonan.

  Arry found Con asleep at the foot of Beldi’s bed, wrapped in her towel. Beldi was in Con’s bed, curled up tightly, her bed being too short for him. Arry thought he was asleep, but when she bent to blow out the candle left reprehensibly alight, she saw the gleam of his eyes.

  “I’m sorry I fell asleep,” she whispered. “You should have waked me. Was she much trouble?”

  “Not as long as I did what she told me,” said Beldi, also quietly.

  “Did she tell you not to blow out the candle?”

  “It’s in a saucer of water,” said Beldi.

  “Do you want your bed back?”

  “I’d like it back tomorrow.”

  “You shall have it, then. Go to sleep.”

  “Go to sleep yourself,” said Beldi, as Arry had always said to their mother.

  “Put your nightcap on the shelf,” said Arry.

  “Put your heart in sleep’s soft hands.”

  “Loose your mind in dream’s dread sands.”

  Beldi smiled and closed his eyes, and Arry went back to Oonan. He was feeling better, but his heart still thumped. Arry sat down.

  “Arry,” said Oonan. “Are you thinking of having a baby?”

  Arry blinked at him.

  “I was,” she said, “but it would be such a lot of trouble. And Con and Beldi wouldn’t like somebody else’s moving in with us.” She added, since Physici, Akoumi, and Gnosi must be honest with one another, “And it would hurt.”

  “You’re too young,” said Oonan. “No,” as she frowned at him, “I don’t mean you are too young for it to happen, I mean you are too young for it to happen well. Your body isn’t settled.”

  “Well, good,” said Arry, “since I’d decided against it for now anyway. When would I be old enough?”

  “Four or five years, or six.”

  “Is this everybody, or me?”

  “It’s you, certainly,” said Oonan. “It’s everybody in varying degrees. Not many girls should have a baby at fourteen.”

  He was looking at her intently. Arry tried to stare him down, until she realized what really concerned him, and began to laugh. “No,” she said. “I’m not falling in love with anybody, either. Who is there, really?”

  “It’s a question that has exercised me for several years now,” said Oonan.

  “Shouldn’t
it be exercising Mally?” said Arry, a little absently. Then she said, “There’s nobody for you either, is there? Or for Halver. Why?”

  Oonan said, “We know too much.”

  12

  Wim came by the next morning while Arry and Beldi and Con were eating a belated breakfast. Con let him in and brought him into the kitchen. Arry had decided they might as well go back to eating there, but she wished Con had not brought a visitor while the cobwebs and dust of the room’s long neglect were so tawdrily displayed by the bright sunshine. Wim was tall enough to get cobwebs in his hair, and wide enough that the piles of discarded objects were in danger from his elbows.

  Arry offered him some tea. He thanked her and sat down, which made the room seem bigger, if no less tawdry.

  Con had been staring steadily at him ever since she brought him in, and now, just as he lifted his mug to his mouth, she said, “You don’t need walnut juice.”

  Wim drank some tea and put the mug down. Of course, he had small children too; in fact, he had Lina, and Tany, and Zia herself. Nothing Con could say was likely to make him so much as blink. He said, “It makes a good dye for wool.”

  “I mean you don’t need it,” said Con. “You’re brown enough.”

  “Who says so?” said Wim, flicking a glance at Arry. Her mother had sometimes looked like that at her father, when one of the three of them—usually, as now, Con—said something strange or outrageous. She felt suspended between being a parent and being a child.

  Con said, with a fair degree of impatience and less courtesy than Arry would have liked to hear, “Zia does.”

  “Ah,” said Wim, and drank more tea. “It’s Zia who sent me,” he added, giving Arry a glance of a sort she did not, this time, recognize. “Since school won’t start until the moon changes, she has a plan she needs you for.”

  Zia’s plans were invariably dirty, disruptive, and productive of other plans that, in the end, led to loud disappointment on somebody’s part, often Con’s. Arry didn’t care. They were proposing to take Con off her hands— and Beldi’s—for an entire day and possibly, if past experience could be a guide here, the night as well.

  “I’ll come right away,” said Con, and started to scramble down from her stool.

  “She says you must have had a good breakfast first,” said Wim, not looking at Arry at all this time. He addressed Beldi. “She needs you, too, Beldi, if your elder sister can spare you.”

  His elder sister had not considered it one way or the other. She nodded vigorously. Beldi looked less than willing.

  Hurt again, thought Arry. She said, “I do need him, but I can manage by myself, if he wants to go.”

  “Zia says it’s a very large plan,” said Wim. He did not seem apprehensive. “She’s asking for Tiln and Jony and Elec as well; children of all sizes.”

  This was probably what had been making Beldi reluctant: not knowing if he would be spending his day with five or ten Cons. He said, “If Arry can manage, I’ll come.”

  “I can,” said Arry. “Do go.”

  Beldi nodded, and went back to his oatmeal. The three of them went out shortly after that, Con chivvying the other two along and leaving Arry with a table full of dirty dishes. She went out to the well, frowning.

  The outside was much warmer than the house, and damp, and full of green sappy flowery scents. The birds were as noisy as children. There were more crocuses under the pine tree than there had been yesterday, vivid and precise and delicate as one of Tiln’s paintings. All around the well the white starry flowers of Bedlam and the small blue squills were blooming, that yesterday had looked like so much rank grass. Arry trod as carefully as she could, getting her water.

  When she turned back to the house she saw that the ivy her father had planted and the woodbine her mother had made them leave alone when they found it climbing up the house had both come out in tiny leaves. The woodbine held the new ones bristling over the bed of red leaves it had dropped the autumn before. Con had raided the red leaves even before they came off the vine, in an attempt to make a pair of boots out of them; but she had not taken them all.

  Arry took the water back inside to the stuffy kitchen, started the water heating, and opened all the windows. By the time she had washed and dried and put away all the dishes and repaired or disposed of a great many objects, the kitchen looked the same except for an area of cleared floor about two feet by three, and she was both ravenous and very disinclined to stay inside any longer. She took cold potatoes and a selfishly large lump of cheese and a couple of withered apples, of the same vintage as the red leaves, and sat down on the front step to eat it all.

  The black cat came down out of the pine tree, stretched all four legs in four directions, yawned, trotted over, and hooked a pawful of cheese out of her hand. Arry looked at her. “Are you pregnant again?” she said. Sheepnose, having bolted the cheese, turned her back and began washing her whiskers.

  Arry sighed. When the Woollycat had her kittens, Con and Beldi had taken the cat up to Oonan, and Arry had gone as far in the other direction as she could walk in a morning, following the river until it disappeared thunderously down a rocky falls. When Sheepnose had her first litter, Arry’s mother had still been here, and had attended to everything, with Arry crouched in the bedroom, pillow over her head and fingers in her ears, though the only noise the black cat made was panting, and the minute cries of the kittens had been untroubled.

  She rolled an apple core over the rocky ground to Sheepnose, who sniffed it, gave her a look of profound disgust, and went back up the pine tree, never crushing a single crocus.

  Arry sighed and got up. Another round of visits, asking questions and getting new questions, or the answers to questions she had not asked. Sune first, she supposed, and then Mally.

  Most of the mud had dried. New flowers were everywhere in the rocks, all the early blooms you would expect in March or April now hurrying to catch up with the weather. And where there had been brown stalks, or rusty red seed heads, or nothing, were new green and yellow-green and new dark red, where later flowers would open. Stonecrop, yarrow, goutweed, alyssum, rock cress, wormwood, bellflower, tickseed, willow grass, fleabane, catmint, soapwort, sage, meadow sage, lavender, goldenrod, lambsear, thyme, and speedwell.

  Arry fetched up with a violent jerk, as if she had missed her step on a rocky slope. The path was flat and solid. She sat down on a rock and shut her eyes hard. No wolves, she thought, and almost giggled. No flowers? If Halver could turn into a wolf, could he turn into a clump of alyssum? She opened her eyes and looked back along the path. The long, feathery leaves of the yarrow were known to her, at this moment, not because Jony had said so every spring, but because she knew. Maybe she should talk to Mally first. But looking the other direction, she saw Halver’s house looking back at her, all its windows shuttered. Sune was just down the next hill. Arry got up and went on.

  She went past Halver’s house in a hurry, with her breath and heart pounding as if she had been running for miles. She felt better, for no known reason, once she was out of its long morning shadow. She went on down the hill, admiring the daffodils that edged this part of the path, and the new chickweed sprawling where the mud had been. Jony said chickweed was good in salads, but Con wouldn’t touch it. Arry stopped walking. She looked at the chickweed again. Jony said that was chick- weed. Arry knew nothing about it.

  “I hate this,” said Arry, invoking Con; and she went on up to Sune’s door, which was shut. It had no knocker. Arry banged on it with her fist. In Sune’s willow tree a lot of house finches were squabbling. After a few moments she knocked again, and this time felt as hard as she could for any sign of hurt. Nothing. The house finches burst in a body out of the tree and flashed off like a batch of Lina’s bubbles, in brown and white and reddish-purple. Arry went down to the willow, and around its massive trunk.

  Sune was sitting in the grass, leaning on the tree, still spinning. She felt fairly awful, but nothing was actually happening. She glanced up, saw Arry, and looked as
if she might have been startled if she could have found the energy.

  “That isn’t very comfortable,” said Arry.

  “What, lumpy cold damp ground underseat and a great willow root pressing one’s spine the wrong way? It’s much the same whether I’m here or in the rocker.” Oonan and Mally both said, and Arry was beginning to know, that pregnant women often knew about discomfort, though not usually pain. Arry wondered, for the first time, if this said something about the exact nature of the spell that blessed them all, or about the nature of pregnancy. This was probably not the time to ask Sune about it.

  She sat down on a fallen branch. The deep grass was scattered with snowdrops, though it was late for them according to Jony. Bluebells were up but not blooming yet. Jony said they were late this year as well.

  “If you’re coming every day about the baby,” said Sune, “I don’t mind, you needn’t invent questions.”

  Arry said, “Well, I don’t invent them, they just arrive.”

  “Ask away, then. How is the baby, though? I’d like to know.”

  “Crowded,” said Arry. “Not hurting at all. You could ask Oonan, though, to be certain; he could tell you more.”

  “I don’t wish to hear that much, perhaps,” said Sune.

  Arry looked at her. Worry, like a teardrop or a candle flame, of which the blurred or bluish edges were fear. It made the heart feel heavy somehow, it was as bad as a stomachache. Unlike most stomachaches, it seemed to have no cause, or none she knew how to distinguish. Arry blinked, and the sudden dislocation of her knowledge, like a step missed on a rocky path, almost made her fall off the log.

  “What did you want to ask?” said Sune.

  Arry blinked again, and steadied herself with one hand on the damp rough surface of the log. “Are the Lukanthropoi out of nature?” she said.

  “Are they what?”

  “Mally gave me a story about children in the forms of things unknown and it had written in the margin, ‘once out of nature. ’” Arry did not look at Sune; she was afraid of what else she might see that she was not supposed to be seeing, that lay outside her field of knowledge.