The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  “Yes, I know both those stories,” said Sune readily. “The writer means death.”

  “That’s what out of nature means?”

  “Well, it’s all I can think of. Whether the Lukanthropoi are a made race or are enspelled, they partake of the nature of things.”

  “But the dead don’t?”

  “No. Death is natural, but what comes after is indeed out of nature.”

  “What does come after?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sune.

  “Who would?”

  Sune shook her head. Arry tried to think of some way to ask Sune who else might know about nature at all, but realized that she would be seeming to doubt Sune if she did this. She looked cautiously at Sune, ready to look away at once; but all she knew was that Sune’s feet were swollen and her back painful and various parts of her complaining, more or less loudly, about being pushed out of their proper places. She said, “Is there anything I can do for you while I’m here?”

  “You can tell me why you want to know about the Lukanthropoi.”

  “Derry says the wolves that got the sheep didn’t act like wolves.”

  “Ah,” said Sune.

  Arry said, “What does that mean?”

  Sune looked slightly startled, but she answered. “It means, of course, I should have remembered.” She moved both hands over the baby, which kicked her gently. “One gets preoccupied,” she added.

  “I suppose one would,” said Arry.

  “You aren’t thinking of finding out for yourself, are you?”

  “First Oonan, now you,” said Arry, half amused and half annoyed. “Is there a way you people can tell when you should ask? Ought I to worry?”

  “Maybe Oonan has a way,” said Sune. “I haven’t. But because of young Knot here, I’ve been remembering my own growing up, and today I was thinking about the summer I was fourteen.”

  “Did you want to have a baby?”

  “No,” said Sune, smiling, “but what I did want would have got me one.”

  “There isn’t anybody, really,” said Arry.

  Sune seemed to be thinking this over. The baby kicked her again, rather hard, but she didn’t notice. She said, like somebody listing the items to be taken on a journey, “You were the only baby born in your year; I remember everybody’s remarking on it. Boys mature later than girls. Even then there’s only Tiln. Oonan is your uncle.” She looked up. “Halver?”

  “No,” said Arry, before she had decided whether to speak or not.

  Sune seemed to accept this. “Well, you know, your father had to go to the Hidden Land to find your mother,” she said.

  “Why are you trying to find somebody for me to have a baby with if I’m too young to have a baby in the first place? By the time I’m old enough Tiln would be, too.”

  “I’m thinking about displaced energies,” said Sune.

  “What?” said Arry, and realized with irritation that she sounded just like Con.

  “What do you think about?” said Sune.

  “Con and Beldi,” said Arry. “The cats. The house. The weather. The planting. The songs Bec used to play. Why leaves turn yellow in the fall. Whoever’s hurt. What hurt means, really, how many kinds of hurt there are, what’s to be done about them all.”

  “Ah,” said Sune again.

  “What should you have remembered now?”

  “That I’m not like you. When one knows what one reads, one needn’t define one’s knowledge in the same way, finding the boundaries. Almost it has none.”

  “How strange,” said Arry, again involuntarily.

  “You seem strange to me, too,” said Sune; she sounded a little wistful.

  “We all seem strange to one another,” said Arry. “Mally says so.”

  “She would,” said Sune. She shifted her body and braced herself with her arms. “If you would help me up, I think I’ll go inside and attempt to be useful. Would you like some tea?”

  Arry declined on the grounds that she had a great deal to do yet today, and helped Sune get off the log. Standing up made Sune’s back hurt. She walked Sune back up the slope to her house and saw her safely inside. Then she set off for Mally’s house. It was almost hot out now, and the air felt heavy. Arry stopped at home to get a drink of water. The empty house felt strange, and, after the huge spaces of the spring sky, small and a little musty. The cats were nowhere in sight. Arry stood in the kitchen drinking absently out of Beldi’s breakfast mug and trying to formulate her questions to Mally in such a way that Mally might actually answer them.

  The water tasted odd. Not flat or spoiled; a little sweet, almost bubbly, like the cider Wim sometimes made when there were too many apples. Arry supposed it was the blushful Hippocrene again. She would have to speak to Con. Whatever was the matter with Con, getting her magic back did not seem to have helped it. Arry left the mug on the table and went to see Mally.

  The door was open today. The black dog slept in the shade of the lilac bush. There was a great deal of noise in the house, laughter and trampling and shrill children’s voices. Oh, no, thought Arry, Zia’s plan. She put her head around the edge of the door, cautiously.

  All the furniture had been pushed to the walls. Tiln sat just to the right of the door, in a carved chair much too big for him. On the other side of the chair was the kitchen table. Lined up from the table all around the room and through the door into the kitchen were what what seemed like every child in the whole village. They were all clutching something, sheets and rolls of paper, dolls, jewelry, garden tools, clothing. Beldi was in the middle of the line, looking resigned. He had one of their mother’s blue plates. Arry couldn’t see Con, or hear her either, which was remarkable. Zia seemed to be missing as well.

  The far end of the line was disorderly, with shoving and shrieking and consequent crumpling of paper and tears and recriminations; there was also a lot of laughter and at least one game of chess. The children closer to Tiln were quiet, peering over one another’s shoulders to see what he was doing.

  What he was doing, just now, was looking at a doll held by his sister Mora. Her face was deeply worried. Tiln just looked thoughtful. The doll was one of the rag ones that Rine made, according to Mally, when she got bored. They all had black wool hair and blue embroidered eyes and red embroidered lips; they were made with various kinds and colors of cloth all stained a uniform color with walnut juice, and dressed in red smocks, trousers, and boots from a lot of cloth Arry’s mother had had sent from the Hidden Land but not, when she saw it, cared for the quality of.

  “Zia says it’s ugly,” said Mora.

  Tiln picked the doll up by the waist and stared at it. He seemed uncomfortable. Arry thought for one appalling moment that he had something severely wrong with his stomach; then she realized that he was at least as worried as Mora, and that worry made his stomach hurt.

  “No,” said Tiln flatly.

  Mora snatched the doll from him and galloped into the kitchen, shouting, “Ha! Ha, Zia! Ha!”

  Tiln did not roll his eyes as a brother might; he just looked miserable. Arry cleared her throat. Tiln jumped and stared at her, and all the children clutching their objects hushed and stared too.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Arry, “but I wanted to speak to Mally.”

  “I’ll show you where she is,” said Tiln, and got up with alacrity.

  He gestured Arry back out the door and took her around the house to the goat barn. Mally was sitting on the fence scratching the smallest goat behind the ears. She turned and saw them. She said to Tiln, “You needn’t go on with this if you don’t like it.”

  “It’s easier than listening to Zia.”

  Mally grimaced. “Tell her no. A little noise won’t hurt us.”

  “Will it?” said Tiln to Arry.

  “Not physically,” said Arry.

  Mally looked at her for the first time. Mally was underslept, though less severely than Halver, and her joints were a little sore from planting all the beans. “Still worrying at that, a
re you?” Mally said.

  “Didn’t you know I would?”

  “If you hadn’t had a satisfactory answer, yes.” Mally looked back at Tiln. “Shall I tell Zia?” she said.

  “Of course not,” said Tiln. “I have to go back now, or they’ll be all over Wim.”

  He turned around and trudged over the new grass to the house as if he were going up a very steep slope indeed. Arry and Mally both watched him. Arry said, “What’s Zia doing?”

  “She claims,” said Mally precisely, “that she is helping his knowledge to unfold faster by having every child in the place bring him objects and ask him whether or not they are ugly.”

  Arry found herself shivering. “I’m glad she wasn’t born yet when I found out what my knowledge was.”

  “Truly,” said Mally, “you are.”

  “I talked to Derry about wolves,” said Arry. “And she said that wolves know better than to kill and not eat, and so do we, here in the Dubious Hills; but that people outside don’t.”

  “Of course they don’t,” said Mally. “That was the whole point of the spell that makes us different. What do you think war is?”

  “How should I know?” said Arry.

  “Well, come to that,” said Mally, “how should I? But that’s what Sune says. What were you really asking me?”

  “If everybody here really does know better. Than to kill and not eat.”

  “Certainly,” said Mally.

  Arry leaned on the fence and rubbed the goat’s back. Wolves knew better; people here knew better; yet when Halver was a wolf, what did he do but kill and not eat. She sighed.

  “That’s not what’s worrying you,” said Mally.

  Even I know that, thought Arry. She said, “Everybody has started asking if I want to have a baby and then pointing out that there’s nobody for me to have one with.”

  “Who is everybody?”

  “Oonan and Sune. They also say I shouldn’t have one, so I don’t see why it matters that there isn’t anybody to have one with.”

  “But?”

  “But Oonan and I realized, there isn’t anybody for Oonan or for Halver either. And I wondered why.”

  “Did Oonan wonder why?”

  “He said we knew too much.”

  Mally laughed. She laughed so hard she affronted the goat, which twitched itself from under Arry’s forgetful hand and tore across the yard to the other side, where it thrust its head over the fence and began eating a branch of lilac. Mally said, “First, you should remember that if, like Sune, you just want a baby, anybody here will do for that. If, like Oonan, you want a companion, then matters become more difficult.”

  “I don’t want either at the moment,” said Arry. “I’m too busy. But I wondered why they both brought it up. Why did you laugh?”

  “What Oonan said was so like Oonan,” said Mally. “Was he wrong?”

  “I don’t know. But he was very like himself when he said that,” said Mally, and chuckled again.

  Arry leaned on the fence. The sun poured down on everything like honey. Around her feet bloomed grape hyacinths that the goats had not yet eaten. “Was he very like himself when he brought the matter up?” she said.

  “I think so,” said Mally. “You seem thoughtful and fretful by turns, and very full of questions. It’s a restless age, fourteen. Oonan will try to fix it, when the only answer is to live it.”

  “Do people who are fourteen think their knowledge is larger than it is? Do they imagine it covers things it doesn’t?”

  “Not generally,” said Mally.

  “Because,” said Arry, who had not specifically planned to say anything about this, lest it impinge on her promise to Halver, “I sometimes think I know things I can’t. The names of flowers.”

  “Jony has told you so often that you remember.”

  “But I thought I knew them. The names just came.”

  Mally bent and pulled something from under the flat leaves of the grape hyacinths: a round yellow flower with five petals, no bigger than the end of her little finger. The leaves looked like clover. “What’s this?” said Mally.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Arry.

  “Jony says it’s sorrel,” said Mally.

  “Oh.”

  “What else do you think you know that you oughtn’t?”

  “Hurt that’s not of the body,” said Arry.

  “Now that I might expect,” said Mally. “That might be a genuine broadening. But the flowers, no. Surely that’s just memory doing its dance.”

  She did not sound sure. Arry felt too tired to pester her further. After a moment Mally said, “Shall we go see how the torment of Tiln is progressing?” And they walked back to the house, with Mally plaiting the sorrel into her short white hair.

  13

  Mally and Wim asked the entire youthful population of their house to stay for dinner, including Arry. She spent a little time telling children what did or did not hurt, finding one actual sliver in a foot (Mora) and one actual bump on the head (Tany), and then went into the kitchen to see if she could help Mally. So many children made a tremendous racket. They were never so noisy in school, that she could remember. She wondered what Halver’s secret was, and then shivered.

  Mally was making root and cabbage stew, with bacon, and accepted an offer to cut up the turnips.

  “They’ll be back in school soon,” said Arry, slicing vigorously. She needed to either bring all their own knives to Inno for sharpening, or ask Con to see to it.

  “Do you know what’s wrong with Halver?” said Mally abruptly.

  “No,” said Arry, truthfully, since shapechanging was not a form of injury; but she felt a little strange about her answer just the same.

  “Does Oonan?”

  “He may,” said Arry. She looked over the table to where Mally stood at the big sink scrubbing potatoes. “Don’t you?”

  “No,” said Mally. “It is therefore not a defect of character.”

  “Might something be worrying him?”

  “It might,” said Mally. “But when that happens, he talks to Sune, or Oonan, or sometimes Wim.”

  “And he hasn’t?”

  “He has not.”

  “If he were worried about Sune or Oonan or Wim, then what?”

  “He must be worried about Sune and Oonan and Wim, then,” said Mally.

  If I see him tonight, thought Arry, I’ll ask him. Luckily, finding things for Tiln to judge the ugliness of had tired Con and Beldi out. Arry got them home and washed and abed and asleep just after sunset. She shut the cats in the house, put up all the shutters, and went up the hill to Oonan’s in the windy spring dark, trying not to step on any flowers.

  Oonan’s door was shut, but a great deal of light bloomed in all the windows. Arry knocked, and he let her in at once, into a room that looked as if Con had been at it with her new light spells. Oonan looked as if something had been at him, too.

  “You’re early,” he said, shutting the door behind her. “Do you want some spoonbread?”

  “You should take a nap,” said Arry.

  “Oh, no, dear Physici,” said Oonan. “Think again. In this nutshell of a house here we have very bad dreams.”

  “Have you been reading too?”

  “What need reading, when wolves that are not wolves are so obliging as to chase me up and down my own sheep meadow?”

  “Are you running a fever?”

  “You tell me,” said Oonan, stopping in his pacing of the room.

  “No,” said Arry, who had known this even as she spoke but was utterly at a loss as to what else she might say.

  “I wish I could see now,” said Oonan, beginning to pace again, “if we would meet my wolves, or your wolf.”

  “Both would be better,” said Arry. “Then we would have seen all the same things, and we could talk about it.”

  “Do you think that would help?”

  “Let me tell you what Derry says about wolves and what Sune says about shapeshifters and the Lukanthropoi
.”

  “Why not?” said Oonan, falling into the nearest red chair, which creaked alarmingly. “Let us talk on the edge of ruin, for it will come will we or nill we.”

  “Oonan,” said Arry, considering his blood and brain. “Have you been at the ale?”

  Oonan laughed, which, as it often did, made him feel much better, at least while he was doing it. “Would that I had,” he said.

  Arry sat down in the other chair and considered him. “Will I find out why tonight, if your wolves come?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Oonan.

  “Could we talk about something else until then? Unless you think there’s something you ought to be doing?”

  “Let’s eat something, then,” said Oonan, getting up with the same abandon with which he had just sat down. Arry followed him into the kitchen, shaking her head.

  Oonan’s kitchen made Arry’s seem even worse. It looked as if nobody ever used it—which might, of course, be the case: people Oonan fixed often gave him food, and he did not actually look as if he ever ate anything. In fact, while he gave her a very good soup made of beans and odd early-spring greens of the sort Jony could always find, and an excellent barley bread with cheese melted over it, he ate very little himself. Arry began to wonder with increasing apprehension what could be so much worse than finding out Halver was a wolf. That was what she knew would happen to Oonan tonight, and she was perfectly able and happy to eat a second supper. What did Oonan know was going to happen to her that made him lose his appetite? What had he found out from the two wolves who had visited him that could be so much worse? That Mally was a wolf; Sune; Wim, Niss, Grel, one of the children?

  When she had finished eating and Oonan had finished breaking his bread-and-cheese into bits and losing the bits in his soup, Oonan made some tea and they went back into his front room. Oonan gave the soup to his cats, and for some time the only sound was the hiss of the lamps and the minute laps of cat tongues picking their way around all the greens to find the cheese. Arry finally grew restive and began telling Oonan about all the stories Mally had given her to read.