The Dubious Hills

by PAMELA DEAN

  “People manage it, all over the world,” said Frances, dryly.

  “Well, but Halver wants us to manage it?”

  “He does so.”

  “And yet you don’t wish him to make us?”

  “You don’t wish to be forced to’t, do you?” said Frances.

  “Children don’t wish to learn arithmetic, either,” said Oonan. And hit himself gently in the forehead. “That is the very problem, of course,” he said.

  “Aye,” said Frances, with the Hiddenlander accent surfacing very strongly. “Ye needs must choose, and choose his way.”

  “Or what?” said Oonan.

  “He will teach how he may,” said Frances.

  That, said Oonan, made them all silent and gloomy. He collected his mug full of cold tea, and drank all of it down without stopping. Arry sat staring at him. He talked to my mother, she thought. I want to talk to my mother. “Why didn’t they come talk to us?” she said.

  “Well,” said Oonan, “Halver swore them to secrecy, as Gnosi. And they think you are better here without them, than outside with them.”

  “Why can’t they be here with us?” said Beldi.

  “They can’t live here now,” said Oonan, patiently. “In them our spell is broken.”

  “Halver is living here now,” Beldi pointed out. Then he looked at Arry, and said as if no one else were present, “She’d rather be with him than with us.”

  “Halver’s living here now, Beldi,” said Arry, “but he’s sick most of the time.”

  “You have all of us,” said Oonan. “Once Bec became a wolf and gave up his music, he had nothing except Frances.”

  “Why,” said Niss, as if nobody else had spoken since Oonan finished his story, “does becoming a Lukanthropos break the spell we live under? There’s no sense in that.”

  “If you don’t know, Niss,” said Oonan, “nobody does.”

  “It can’t be the magical end of it,” said Niss, stubbornly. “I told you, it must inhere in character.”

  “What’s Halver going to do?” said Arry.

  “What are we going to do, that’s the question,” said Oonan.

  “Well, but we can’t answer if we don’t understand what Halver will do. Would Mally know?”

  “You have to fetch Con anyway,” said Oonan. “We may as well ask her, once more.”

  “How could Bec lack for novelty when he had Con?” said Arry.

  “Mally always said she took after him,” said Oonan. “Maybe she wasn’t novel to him, if her mind worked as his did always.”

  They all stirred, and drank up their tea, getting ready to leave. Beldi said to Oonan, “What about the coats?”

  Oonan shrugged. “Frances and Bec said nothing about them.”

  Everybody looked at Niss. “What kind of work are they, exactly?” Arry asked her.

  “Oh, Wormsreign,” said Niss, as if Arry had stood in the middle of a field at broad noon on a clear day and asked her where the sun was.

  “Oh, Wormsreign,” Oonan mimicked her; then he smiled.

  “Faugh,” said Niss, without heat. Frances had always said that, and had further remarked, as a private joke with Arry, that it seemed to be catching. Niss got up and went and leaned on the coats again. “In fact,” she said thoughtfully, and stopped speaking.

  Arry started to say something, but Oonan waved her to silence.

  “This is truly good Wormsreign work,” said Niss. “But there’s something else.” She ran one hand up and down the uppermost coat and shut her eyes. “Oh, Halver.” she said, exasperatedly.

  “What?” said Oonan. He said it with a marvelous lack of emphasis.

  “He’s put it on those who dream under these coats to find him,” said Niss. “Well, he’s tried. Teacher or no, inside or outside whatever it is he’s inside or outside of, he is not a wizard.” She brooded over the coats a little longer. “Or is he?” she remarked. She opened her eyes suddenly and gazed at Oonan. “Somebody is,” she said. “Never let me say again that children ought not to ask questions.”

  “What?” said Beldi, promptly.

  Niss laughed. “Let me look a little further,” she said. “This is clever, clever, but it is not good.” She screwed her face up, like Con drinking buttermilk. “I spoke wrongly,” she said in an extremely formal tone, and unscrewing her face she straightened up fast. “Whoso sleeps under either of these coats three times, by choice, must come to Halver to be made a wolf, or die.”

  “No,” said Oonan.

  “Oh, yes,” said Niss.

  “Now is it everybody’s province?” said Arry.

  “Where did he get them?” asked Beldi.

  “Wolves run far and fast,” said Niss. “Derry says so.”

  “We must fetch Mally,” said Oonan, “and all of us must speak to Halver.”

  Fetching Mally was easy enough; she was home playing with Con and Lina and Zia and Tany, and Arry thought she looked as if asking Halver questions about a dire and hurtful plot would be easier. Mally set Tiln to watching the children, except for Con, whom they brought along rather than argue with her. Con and Beldi lagged behind. Beldi would be telling her Oonan’s whole story, and there would be that to deal with along with everything else.

  Fetching Mally was easy; persuading her was not. “I don’t believe it,” she said, at intervals more regular than the call of the cardinal. “Not Halver.”

  “The coats do what they do,” said Niss, placidly.

  “But not by Halver’s will,” retorted Mally.

  They lagged, too, arguing, though not so far behind as Beldi and Con. Arry and Oonan hurried on, getting hot and thirsty all over again. Halver would give them all some tea, too, no doubt.

  “What are we going to ask him when we get there?” panted Arry.

  “I don’t mean to ask him anything,” said Oonan. “I mean to tell him several.”

  “You think Niss knows more than Mally, then?”

  “I know less harm will be done by assuming so,” said Oonan.

  “You said that was my province.”

  “We share it,” said Oonan. “A foolish arrangement, but there you are.”

  “Oonan, who does say what is whose province?”

  “Well,” said Oonan, stopping on the path that led up to Halver’s house, “we suspect it, Mally confirms it, and then we all say it for ourselves.”

  They stood watching Mally and Niss stride up the hill, still arguing, and Beldi and Con struggle up behind them, not talking any longer. Con wore a distinctly lowering expression. Beldi looked resigned.

  “Has it occurred to you,” said Arry, “that many of these things were easier when we didn’t think about them?”

  “Yes,” said Oonan.

  Mally and Niss arrived. “We’ll ask him, that’s all,” said Mally.

  “That won’t prove a thing,” said Niss.

  “Oh, yes, it will,” said Mally. “Halver doesn’t lie.”

  Con and Beldi labored up to them. “What are you standing around for?” said Con.

  Oonan turned and walked up to Halver’s shut door and knocked upon it.

  “I want to see my mother,” said Con.

  “So do I,” said Arry.

  Oonan knocked again.

  “She always had a good reason for everything she did,” said Mally.

  “And she’s supposed to tell us what the reason is,” said Con. Arry, focusing knowledge on her, saw to her surprise that Con was feeling far less hurt and hollow than she had been. Well, after all, Frances had not just looked for Bec, she had found him, and both of them were alive, and perhaps even well, bodily anyway, whatever might be wrong with their minds.

  “She can’t tell us the reason for not wanting to see us,” said Beldi, “if she can’t see us.”

  Oonan knocked again.

  “She could have told Oonan,” said Con, sitting down on a rock.

  “I think she did,” said Beldi, “only not in so many words.”

  “Well what is it then?”
r />   Oonan walked around the side of the house, where he could be heard calling Halver and banging on windows.

  “No school today?” said Niss to Mally.

  “We thought it better,” said Mally. “I suppose he might be helping them get the oats planted. It’s not very like him.”

  Oonan reappeared around the opposite side of the house. “I don’t think he’s there,” he said.

  He was not visiting Sune, either; nor was he helping to plant the oats. He was nowhere. They looked for him; they even got Blackie and Oonan’s two dogs to help them. But they did not find him.

  20

  Early afternoon found them footsore and bewildered back at Mally’s house, eating cold leftover party food and soothing a wild-eyed Tiln, who had been left too long with too many small children. Mally devoted most of her attention to devising amusement for the small children in question and in feeding everybody, but from time to time she would murmur, “I don’t understand what he’s doing.”

  “Frances said they were outside all provinces but life and death,” said Oonan. “If Halver is also, then of course you wouldn’t know any longer what he would do.”

  “I know that!” Mally snapped at him. “But experience, memory, and reason must be good for something.”

  “For all their sakes you’d better hope they are,” said Oonan.

  “For all our sakes,” said Mally, still snappish, “you had better hope they are. It would take a powerful lot of knowledge, Akoumi, to repair this entire community.” Arry got up from the table where she was sitting with them and made her way to the corner settle where Niss was eating her lunch and staring at nothing.

  “Those coats,” she said. “What would be best to do with them?”

  “I can’t disenchant them,” said Niss. “I can keep them safely; there isn’t, on the coats themselves, any compulsion at all, and the charm itself requires free choice to fuel its operation.”

  “Could we burn or destroy them? They don’t seem likely to to do other than hurt, do they?”

  Niss looked rather shocked. “They’re very fine work,” she said. “And dreaming of being a wolf hurts nobody, does it?”

  “I don’t like the conditions,” said Arry. “It’s asking for trouble. Especially if Halver is going to disappear like this. Once people have slept under the coat three times, how long have they got to report to Halver before they die, for mercy’s sake?”

  Niss frowned. “Now there’s a curious thing,” she said. “I didn’t notice; perhaps I was careless, but it makes me wonder.”

  “Say that again,” said Mally from the table.

  Niss obediently repeated what she had said; Mally said, “Didn’t notice what?”

  “Arry asked about those who have slept under the coats, in what space of time they must report to Halver lest they die; but I couldn’t say.”

  Mally chuckled. Then she laughed. Then she leaned her head on her hands and wheezed. “Oh, Halver,” she said finally, wiping her eyes.

  The rest of them looked at her; Arry thought they all had expressions very like Beldi’s. Mally said, “This is not a threat; it’s one of Halver’s lessons.”

  “Go on,” said Oonan, a little blankly.

  “Are shapeshifters immortal?” Mally asked Niss.

  “Those of Wormsreign are,” said Niss. “I don’t know about the Lukanthropoi. I should have to look at one and see the shape of the spell—if it is a spell at all.”

  “Assuming they are,” said Mally, “then the lesson is obvious.” Seeing that they were all regarding her as blankly as Oonan had spoken, she added, “If you know Halver. Remember the traps in logic he used to lay, Oonan. If one does not report to Halver to be made a wolf, one will die—in time. Not as a direct result of failing to deliver oneself, but as the natural end.”

  “And yet of course it would be a result of not delivering oneself, if the wolf spell confers immortality,” said Oonan.

  “If it does,” said Niss, “there’s a price for it.”

  “Loss of knowledge,” said Oonan. “Halver and Frances and Bec all told us that.”

  Niss frowned a little. “It’s usually blood,” she said.

  “Mally,” said Arry, “are you certain?”

  “I’ll sleep under Tiln’s coat three nights running and not go to Halver after,” said Mally.

  “But will you let Tiln do it?”

  “No,” said Mally. “Any more than Frances and Bec would let you.”

  “Keep the wolf far hence,” said Arry.

  “I’d advise it,” said Niss.

  Oonan got up and walked the length of the room and back again. “Why has Halver vanished?” he said. “What sort of lesson is that?”

  “From time to time he leaves his pupils on their own,” said Mally. “This is not reason and memory, Oonan: this is knowledge.”

  Halver did, too, do just that: memory told Arry he did; but she felt uneasy, and she could see that Oonan was not altogether believing either. She thought about it, eating one of the honey-and-walnut crescents that Mally and the children had made last night, or rather early this morning. “Are immortal people out of nature?” she said.

  Everybody looked at her; nobody answered. “If they are,” Arry said to Mally, “would you know what they were like?”

  “Nature has nothing to do with it,” said Mally.

  “It has everything,” said Niss.

  “How so?” said Mally; Arry had never heard her sound so haughty.

  “Define nature,” said Niss, like a flash.

  Mally began to laugh again. “The nature I deal with is not the nature you deal with,” she said. “Let be.”

  “Why are you arguing?” said Arry.

  “Now that,” said Mally, turning from Niss, “is a worthy question. I am arguing because I feel the foundations of my knowledge shook. Niss is arguing for precisely the same reason. And that is why you are asking such large questions.”

  “I’ll ask you a smaller one, then,” said Arry. “Why did Halver hurt Jony?”

  “If he did,” said Mally, “it was to teach her something.”

  “What?”

  “I think you would have to ask Jony,” said Mally.

  “If you come along with me,” said Oonan as he passed them on one of his trips down the room, “you may do just that. I must look at that arm.”

  Arry got up. “Can Con and Beldi come too?” she said. She had some hope that Mally would offer to keep them longer. Oonan also looked at Mally; but she said nothing.

  “Why not?” said Oonan at last.

  Arry fetched them from the kitchen, where they were (they said) building a library out of all Mally’s pots and arguing with Zia and Tany about where they would get the books to put in it. They did not seem to mind leaving. They ran ahead of Oonan and Arry, chasing the blue butterflies that were suddenly everywhere and shouting and singing the silly songs of spring.

  “I don’t feel somehow,” said Arry, staying with Oonan’s more sedate pace, “that we’ve accomplished anything at all; I feel as if we were going backwards. I’d have known better what to do a few days ago than I do now.”

  “Must you do anything?” said Oonan.

  “There’s hurt here, a great deal of it.”

  “Quite often, you realize,” said Oonan as they came down the last slope before Jony’s house, “when you find it, you turn it over to me to fix.”

  “You don’t seem to know how to fix this kind.”

  “I’m not sure it indicates a breakage,” said Oonan.

  “Well, I can’t abide it.”

  “Ah,” said Oonan; and then they were at Jony’s house.

  Jony was sitting in a willow chair padded with blankets, scowling at a pair of knitting needles and a ball of blue wool. When Oonan called to her, she looked relieved; then, when she saw his entourage, she looked a little alarmed.

  “You needn’t offer us tea,” said Oonan, dropping to the ground beside her chair, on the side with the bandaged arm. “Niss and Mal
ly have given us plenty already. In any case, this is a visit of knowledge. May I look at your arm?”

  Con and Beldi came up quietly on Jony’s other side, big-eyed, not quite avid. Oonan looked at Arry.

  “It’s very sore,” she said, “but not throbbing the way they do. I’d wager, Oonan, you won’t find any infection.”

  “I wouldn’t wager against you,” said Oonan, unwinding the bandage. “This isn’t the one I put on last night. Has Niss been at this?”

  “She said you gave her such a scolding for not changing the one on Tany’s foot the time he trod on the flint arrow, that she would change this one every hour and you could—” Jony stopped speaking, but she could not help grinning at Arry, who smiled back.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Oonan. “Has she been at it with magic?”

  “What do you think?” said Jony. “It doesn’t need Mally, surely, to tell you the answer to that?”

  “I wish she wouldn’t, until I’ve seen what there is to see,” said Oonan, laying bare the long red wound all neatly stitched with black. “It puts a fog in my way.”

  He wrapped his finger in a fold of the bandage and prodded delicately at the edges of the wound. Arry flinched. When he looked at her, she shrugged. The pain was not bad, but the wound should be let alone. Oonan did in fact let it alone after that, dabbing on a little more of the ointment of goldenrood, rewrapping the clean bandage and warning Jony about a variety of things she should watch for. Then he said, “What precisely happened?”Jony said pleadingly, “I told Niss already, and Mally, and Halver. I told you, too, Arry, last night.”

  “Halver?” said Oonan. “When did you see Halver?”

  “This morning,” said Jony. “I was looking for the early chives, and the watermint, down by Sune’s part of the stream.”

  “What was he doing?” said Oonan.

  Jony eyed him a little warily. She did not often hurt herself, and had not even as a smaller child; but it did probably seem likely to her that such questions were no part of the Akoumi’s business. She answered him patiently, in the same way Arry had heard her speak to Tany. “Sitting on the bank of the stream eating an oatcake,” she said. When Oonan did not seem satisfied with this information, she added, “He was dressed for climbing, and he told me that since Jonat’s sudden determination to put the oats in had given him a holiday, he was going to walk as far as he liked and see where it took him.”