The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  “Let’s go talk to Niss,” she said, taking the coat from Oonan’s lap and folding it awkwardly. Oonan got up and collected the coat he had been sitting on, patted each of his cats on the head, and set off for Niss’s house.

  Vand was putting a new layer of whitewash on it. He waved cheerfully but said nothing. The door was open. Arry put her head inside, and Niss looked up. “Mally told me to expect you,” she said.

  They went in; Niss made them tea and gave them some oatcake to go with it; Niss’s white dog looked hopefully at the oatcake, and Oonan fed her pieces while Niss spread both the coats out on her table and considered them. She ran her hands over them, she lifted them and let them slump back onto the table, she stared at them, she leaned over and sniffed them.

  “Nice work,” she said at last. “But I wonder—” She stared at them again. “Soul clap its hands, and sing,” she said, “and louder sing, for every tatter in its mortal dress.” Nothing happened, but after a moment Niss nodded. “This isn’t wolf at all,” she said. “It’s hardly anything, truly. Cobweb and moonshine. It seems a wasteful way to go about it; you could put these properties into an ordinary wolf skin and have done with it.”

  “Maybe the maker hadn’t a wolf skin to spare,” said Oonan.

  Arry felt both extremely grateful and extremely cold.

  “Who is the maker?” she said.

  “I can’t tell,” said Niss, rubbing her hands over the coats again. “Not an enchanter, I think.” She stared into space for some time, and Arry fed the dog some oatcake. Finally she shook her head. “If wolves were wizards,” she said. “It must have been a shapeshifter of one sort or another. This is not magic, not really; it’s a thing natural to the doer.”

  “What does it do?” said Oonan. “Is it dangerous?”

  “It confers essence without actuality,” said Niss.

  Oonan looked at her. Arry saw Beldi smile. Niss said, “Those who sleep under it will dream they are wolves.” This did not seem to Arry to be at all what she had first said, but Niss always did say that magic was slippery. Maybe the language in which you spoke of it must be slippery also.

  “Is it dangerous?” said Oonan.

  Niss considered the coats again. “Not in itself,” she said at last.

  “Was it made with malice?”

  “Oh, no,” said Niss. “This is good work, very good indeed.”

  “Does it permit choice?”

  Niss stared at the coats yet again; she laid both hands flat on them and leaned hard for some time. Finally she said, “Those who sleep thereunder may not choose whether to dream, but they may choose whether to be.”

  “Can they choose whether to sleep thereunder in the first place?” said Arry.

  “It depends on who gives it them,” said Niss.

  Arry looked at Oonan. Oonan shook his head. Arry said, “What if Halver gave it?”

  “Well,” said Niss, “you must ask Mally, of course, but it seems to me that if Halver were the giver the choice would be what to learn.”

  “What did you learn, Beldi?” said Arry.

  Beldi blinked at her. “How to be a wolf?”

  “Probably not,” said Oonan. “Can you catch and eat a mouse? Or a sheep?”

  Beldi looked blank. “No,” he said.

  Niss sat down and drank all the rest of the tea. She was a great deal tireder than she had been when they got here.

  Arry asked her, “Why have you warded some places and not others?”

  “I do what’s needed,” said Niss, with her mouth full of oatcake.

  “Did you ward our house?”

  “No,” said Niss. She sat up straight. “Why?”

  “Somebody did.”

  “With what?”

  “Keep the wolf far hence, that’s foe to men.”

  “That’s a Hiddenlander spell,” said Niss. “I don’t use it, myself, except for burials.”

  “Will it work?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You didn’t tell me about this,” said Oonan.

  “There are things you don’t tell me, too,” said Arry. Then she thought, no, the only way out of this is to stop keeping secrets. “The warding letters were under an enormous pile of dead mice,” she said. “I found them yesterday morning.”

  “Frances,” said Oonan. “She said—” He shut his mouth hard.

  “Oonan, we have to break our word, both of us.”

  “She’s your mother,” said Oonan. “Halver is your teacher. They know what they’re doing; they must.”

  “Halver’s a wolf,” said Arry. “His knowledge is all disrupted. He’s doing harm, is what he’s doing.”

  “That’s your province,” said Oonan.

  Arry was so angry she could not speak. Then something in his tone made her think. She smiled at him. “So it is,” she said. She thought, carefully. “I charge you, then, by the knowledge that is in me, to tell me what I must hear to deal well in my province.”

  “I thought you would never do it,” said Oonan. “Niss, shall we go away and let you rest?”

  “No,” said Niss, heaving her small self out of her chair and heading for the kettle. “I fear this will be in my province also, before all’s done. I’ll make stronger tea.”

  19

  Oonan was a good storyteller; he had learned how, he said, when everybody had the white fever, so that their bodies required rest but their minds were raging and required occupation. Arry thought, too, that he understood how hungry she and Beldi were to hear all they could about their parents. Sitting in Niss’s little house and warming his hands on a mug of tea he never drank from, he told as slow and careful a story as any in the books Sune and Mally had lent her.

  He did skimp a little on the opening, in which the two wolves had run him up and down the high meadow until moonset. Arry didn’t blame him. He made clear enough the combination of terror and hilarity that all this galloping up and down and being snapped at by jaws that never quite met in his flesh, no matter how slow or clumsy he was, had caused him. Finally the wolves chased him into the sheep hut, which he was very reluctant to enter, he said, because then they would have him cornered. But they chivvied him into it exactly as if he were a sheep and they two very well-trained dogs.

  He sat down hard on the floor, covered in sweat and breathing like a bellows. The dust he had raised made him cough. And then it felt as if the entire world had taken a giant step sideways, as if it had been dancing on a low platform and missed the edge. He could not fall in fact, of course, because he was sitting on the floor already; but his mind felt as if it had dropped down an unexpected step.

  He rubbed his eyes, and when he looked up, Frances was carrying a lantern into the sheep hut, and Bec came behind her with a basket. He recognized them at once, but the way they looked shocked him just the same. Frances had cut off all her red hair; it was shorter than Oonan’s; she looked like a new-shorn sheep, only less pleased. She was too thin. Bec looked much the same as he always had, short and wide and dark-haired, with the greeny-dark skin he had from his connection with Jonat and Wim’s families. But Oonan had never seen his brother look other than cheerful, and now he looked as little pleased as Frances.

  “I cry you mercy,” Frances said to Oonan, and she set the lantern in the middle of the floor.

  “I’ll consider it,” said Oonan dryly. “Where have you been?”

  “Give you good den, Bec,” said Frances. She used the tone in which she reminded her children to say “please.” “‘Greetings to thee, Frances; thou hast been long away; it joys my heart to see thee once again.’”

  “My house is yours,” said Oonan, making a sweeping gesture around the hut. “Dust, straw, and all: I pray you partake.”

  Whereupon they all laughed, but Oonan did not feel much comforted. Frances and Bec sat down on the floor with Oonan, as if they were all going to play noughts and crosses in the dust. They were both wearing long coarse gray robes, and they were both barefoot. The clean soft state of their feet made it
clear that they usually went shod. Bec opened the basket and took out strange foods from the Hidden Land: meat pies made with beef and cinnamon and cardamom, apple tarts made with pepper, honeycake made with rye rather than oat flour. He and Frances began to eat at once; they seemed very hungry. Oonan ate a little for the sake of courtesy, and finally asked them to tell him their story.

  “When I left three years ago,” said Bec, still with his mouth full, “I went as I always did, to Waterpale to see what the traders had brought in from the Hidden Land. There was one from Wormsreign.”

  “Where the people, the children and the very mice, are all shapeshifters,” said Frances.

  Bec looked at her, and she smiled and was quiet.

  “He was sitting on a rug, like the others,” said Bec, “but he had nothing with him, no goods at all. He wore red silk. I had looked at all the other goods, and seen nothing I wanted, and yet I was loth to go home with nothing. The children always hoped for strange things. So I asked him what he was selling. He laughed. He said he sold nothing, but would give to those worthy of the gift.”

  “They say, Travel not in the Hidden Land,” said Oonan, “but I hadn’t realized we must say, Travel not even so far as Waterpale.”

  “I asked him what worthiness was,” said Bec. “He said it was knowledge. I told him that in the Dubious Hills he would find both knowledge and doubt, and that sometimes those who sought the one might find the other.”

  “Bec, Bec,” said Oonan. “Didn’t you heed what Sune told you about challenging Wormsreigners?”

  “Sune also told me,” said Bec, with perfect mildness, “that one might summon music out of the air.”

  “Did you ask Niss?” said Oonan.

  Bec went on as if he had not spoken. “We sat and talked the sun down the sky, about knowledge and memory and experience. He was himself a musician, though we at home would not have said that he knew music. He had a tongue like honey and a mind like an April day, always shifting. Fran will scold me yet again if I explain to you all the shifts he used on me, so I will say just this: he persuaded me that if I gave him my knowledge I would have it still, for all practical purposes, for I would remember it. And he said he would give me in turn the power to become a wolf at the full moon, and that I would then know, as Derry could not, as no woman nor man ever could, the wolf and all its thoughts and doings.”

  Frances looked very much as if she would have liked to scold him anyway; all she did was to lay her hand on his knee and put on a resigned face, very like Beldi’s.

  “And I agreed with him to do this thing,” said Bec.

  “Why did you?” said Oonan.

  “You would have to ask Mally, I suppose,” said Bec.

  Frances laughed. Bec looked at her, and then he laughed too. “Old habits,” he said. “Though even now it may be that Mally could tell you what I cannot. But this is why I think I did agree. Mally told me once that I need new things: not large ones nor many, but new. There was nothing new in music, in the Dubious Hills. I thought, that if I wanted novelty in music, I must travel, to Wormsreign or even the Outer Isles; but if I changed my field of knowledge, I could stay home. Wolves are at home with us, after all.”

  “Did you plan how many of my sheep you would eat each full moon?” demanded Oonan.

  “No,” said Bec, mildly. “I thought I would make do with mice. As indeed we have, for the most part.”

  “They’re better stewed,” said Frances, making a face. “But then, no doubt mutton is better roasted also. We are not truly wolves; I think there, my love, he lied to you.”

  “He might not know,” said Oonan. “Being a shapeshifter.”

  “Being a shapeshifter,” said Frances, sternly, “he did know nothing. It was this that Bec forgot, when he sat in the sun all day and supped up the honey breath of a thing hath no one nature.”

  Oonan said quickly, “So you made the agreement with him. What happened? How did he do it?”

  “It was the full moon that night,” said Bec. “I met him in the pine wood above Waterpale. He said that, if I truly consented to this bargain, I must say a rhyme.” He pulled his knees up under the gray robe and rested his arms on them. “I can’t forget it,” he said. “It was this: And then I hate the most that lore that holds no promise of success; then sweetest seems the houseless shore, then free and kind the wilderness. Elected Silence, sing to me and beat upon my whorled ear, pipe me to pastures still and be the music that I care to hear.”

  Arry saw Niss twitch when Oonan recited that spell.

  Oonan saw too; he nodded at Niss and said that he did not care for the sound of that at all, but he had thought it best to keep quiet.

  “And then,” said Bec, “he said a rhyme himself. And this was it: Though they are fickle. Let one go alive, he will run to the bosom of another and tell lies: Adventures another had, or perhaps no one, or just a different tale than the one to you.”

  “Rhyme?” said Oonan.

  “I said the same,” said Frances, smiling a little. “Rhyme it hath none.”

  “He spoke it so,” said Bec, patiently. “Like a song or a spell. And then we sat and waited for moonrise. I fixed my eye on him, most constantly, for I wished to see a man turn to a wolf, and I wished to see what I might look like when I came to it. But as the moon rose, all the ground beneath us seemed to fall sideways; and when I recovered my balance, there was the wolf.”

  “And then?” said Oonan, though he really did not wish to.

  “He trotted up to me,” said Bec, “very much like a dog; and he sank his teeth into the meat of my shoulder, just there; and the whole world moved sideways again, very violently, and I was a wolf as well.”

  There was a long silence.

  “What was it like?” said Oonan at last; he felt it was expected.

  “No,” said Frances. “That is not the question. The wolf-being is a play, it hath a kindness to’t, any might wish to romp so for a night of bright moons. It is the coming to oneself after that shows the crack in the cup.”

  “Is that why you stayed away?” said Oonan to Bec. Bec nodded. “I thought to send word,” he said. “When she found me, I had a box of half-writ, unsent letters. I think I wanted her to come.”

  “Faugh,” said Frances. “When I could not write to Arry either, did I wish her to find us?”

  “Maybe,” said Bec. “Maybe you did; though you knew she mustn’t.”

  “She’s bound to soon enough, if the sheep go on being killed, which hurts me,” said Oonan. “What happened?”

  “Halver,” said Bec.

  “Yes, I assumed as much; but how did he get into this?”

  “I did bring him,” said Frances, grimly.

  “Why Halver?” said Oonan. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  “Not your province,” said Bec.

  Oonan made a furious sound that shook the low roof of the dusty hut and made Frances, always inclined to slouch and lounge, come up off the floor onto her knees as if she were ready to wrestle.

  “Province, province, province,” said Oonan, passionately. “Why are we so punctilious about it?”

  “That’s war,” said Bec, sounding faintly surprised. “People intruding on one another’s provinces. We understand to stay out. We must stay out.”

  “All right,” said Oonan, breathing through his nose like a woman giving birth, though presumably with less pain, and where was Arry when you needed her to approve your simile? “How is this outside my province, or inside Halver’s?”

  “Education, knowledge, the alteration of mind,” said Frances. “That’s Halver, Oonan; it might be Mally also, but we thought not, then, that each person might become a wolf differently, according to’s character. Perhaps we should have thought. But we thought no harm, nor saw none neither.”

  “There was harm,” said Oonan, again passionately. “I’d have known it before I knew anything. How could you be so blind?”

  “Not our province,” said Frances, very gently.

  “Faugh!�
� said Oonan, and jumped to his feet. “It’s change; change may be harm; you don’t know, that’s why you have me, why didn’t you ask?”

  Frances looked up at him, her short red hair disordered on her lined brow. “Because that is what we lost,” she said. “That is the crack i’the cup.”

  Oonan sat down, hard, on the bed of planks. A little dust puffed out and danced in the light of the lantern. “Say that again,” he said. He understood already, in his heart; he remembered Halver’s answer about teaching a blind child, and he had used the word himself just now.

  “We are outside now,” said Frances. “Outside all provinces save life and death. We remember, but we do not know; what we were taught grows dim in us.” She gave the lantern a shake, and the flame flickered and made all the dark shadows jerk and shiver. “Even for practical purposes,” she said, imitating Bec imitating Halver’s speech, and sounding very scornful as she did so, “we have not our knowledge now.”

  “Yet you bethought you of Halver,” said Oonan. “Reason would do as much as that,” said Frances. “Reason is what we have now.”

  “So you told Halver,” said Oonan. “What happened then?”

  Bec answered him. “He got enthralled. You know— you understand—you remember how he does. He walked up and down his room and talked and shouted. This was true learning, he said, this was education, what he had done until now with every child under his care was mere—mere—” Bec looked at Frances.

  “Rote and eyewash,” said Frances precisely.

  “No, not that, I could remember that myself. The Draconian word.”

  “Ah,” said Frances. “Indoctrination.”

  “What?” said Oonan.

  “When the Dragons use it, it still means just education,” said Bec. “But in Wormsreign it means otherwise, and that’s what Halver meant.”

  “Where did he come by a word like that?” said Oonan.

  “I told it him,” said Frances. “Very long ago; the year Arry was born. He would ask me for words as a child asks for honey. Thinking them even less harmful, I gave him them.”

  “They aren’t harmful,” said Oonan absently, “in themselves.” He slid off the bed and sat over the lantern with them again. His eyes met Frances’s. “How can you live?” he said. “How can you live, not knowing?”