The Dubious Hills
The
Dubious
Hills
Books by Pamela Dean
The Secret Country
The Hidden Land
The Whim of the Dragon
Tam Lin
The Dubious Hills *
Juniper, Gentian, and
Rosemary
*
* Available from Blaisdell Press
www.dd b.net/blaisdellpress
The Dubious Hills
Pamela Dean
Blaisdell Press
This is a work of fiction. All the
characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and
any resemblance to real people or events is purely
coincidental.
THE DUBIOUS HILLS
Copyright © 1994 by Pamela
Dyer-Bennet
All rights reserved, including the
right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any
form.
Grateful acknowledgment is made
for permission to quote the following:
Lines from “The
Alchemist in the City” and “The Habit of Perfection” by Gerard
Manley Hopkins, from
The Poems of
Gerard Manley Hopkins
, edited by W. H.
Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (4th edition, 1967), reprinted by
permission of The Oxford University Press.
Lines from
“Shared World” by John M. Ford, from
Timesteps
(Rune Press, 1993),
reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 1993 by
John M. Ford.
Lines from
“Procession Day/Remembrance Night: “Processional/Recessional” by
John M. Ford, from
Liavek: Festival
Week
, edited by Will Shetterly and
Emma Bull (Ace, 1990), reprinted by permission of the author.
Copyright © 1990 by John M. Ford.
An excerpt
from
Possession: A Romance
by A. S. Byatt is reprinted by permission of
Random House, Inc. Copyright © 1990 by A. S.
Byatt.
Cover design by David
Dyer-Bennet.
First edition: Tor Books, April
1994
This edition: Blaisdell Press, March 2016 V0.7
Published by Blaisdell Press
www.dd-b.net/blaisdellpress
This edition of
The Dubious Hills
is
dedicated to David Dyer-Bennet, without whom it would not
exist.
Table of Contents
1
Arry opened the door to call the cats. It was a cold
night, but with a green spring cold, not the dry baked cold of
autumn or the damp and penetrating cold of winter. The moon was
full; it crowded out the stars in its half of the sky and put a
thin blue skim-milk light over the mud of the yard, the slate
stepping stones, the cover of the well, the lilac bushes with their
new leaves—and there was the white cat crouched under the pine
tree, from which during the day the squirrels teased her.
Arry stepped outside, leaving the door open. The
black cat shot around the corner of the house and through the
doorway. The white cat yawned.
“
Come in, Woollycat, you doubtful
beast,” said Arry.
Woollycat got up and walked around to the other side
of the tree. Arry’s mother had always said Arry was too tender of
those cats, which were supposed to spend their nights outside
working, catching rats and mice and the little sleek voles that ate
the tender shoots of the new oats. Arry preferred to have the cats
sleep on her feet, and she knew that cats loved to be warm. She
stepped into the mud and squelched her way over to the tree.
“
Arry?” said somebody out of the
dark at the bottom of the hill.
Arry flinched. Somebody was badly hurt; somebody
sounded as if he had fallen out of the tree and broken his back.
She began to skid down the hill, calling, “Who is it?”
“
It’s Oonan,” said the voice,
rather indignantly. How could anybody in that much pain be
indignant? And oh, wonderful, it would be Oonan. Oonan was their
Akoumi, the one whose province was broken things, and the fixing
thereof; you could hardly expect him to repair himself—could
you?
“
What did you do to yourself?” she
said, arriving at the bottom of the hill.
“
Nothing.” His voice had pain in
it and did not have pain in it. He was in her province but not in
it. Arry was silent, and Oonan added, “I didn’t think you’d still
be awake.”
“
I was cutting Con’s hair. Can you
walk up the hill, or should I get a light?”
“
I’m not hurt, Arry; I just needed
to clear my head, and I knew I’d have to come by in the morning, so
my feet led me here.”
“
Come and have some tea, then.”
Arry began slogging back up the hill, trying a little harder this
time to keep to the stepping stones. Oonan came behind
her.
“
Why would you have to come by in
the morning?”
“
Why did you cut your sister’s
hair?”
“
If Con were a sheep,” said Arry,
“she would sleep in a gorse bush. It was dreadful.”
“
It was pretty. It reminded me of
your mother’s.”
“
Mother combed hers.”
“
Con’s looked smooth enough to
me.”
“
She’d comb it on top and let it
go all to knots underneath. She said she was counting them. She
said she was having a race with Zia.”
“
So Zia’s won?”
“
Zia always wins,” said Arry, a
little grimly.
“
Who says so?”
“
Zia,” admitted Arry, and they
both laughed. Oonan’s laugh showed that his throat and ribs were
right. His step showed his legs and feet were right. Arry wondered
if he had been hit in the head.
As they went through the door into the house, the
white cat whipped between their feet, thudded across the wooden
floor, and scrambled up the ladder into the attic. At least,
thought Arry, she wouldn’t have to go out again looking for her
later. She shut the door, and in the light of the lamps she had lit
to cut Con’s hair she looked at Oonan.
He was tall and thin, twenty years old last month,
with a long nose and hair the color of maple leaves in the fall but
the texture of a bird’s nest. He had not hurt his head. He was not
in ordinary pain at all; but then why did he feel like that?
“
I lost two sheep,” said Oonan to
the ceiling.
He looked at Arry. He had such large eyes that he
always looked surprised, but they were almost without color.
“Wolves is what it looked like.”
“
Con can do a spell
for—”
“
But it wasn’t wolves. I found
wolves’ prints; Derry came up with me and said so. And they killed
like wolves; but they didn’t eat. Wolves don’t do that, Derry said.
Derry didn’t know what to think.”
“
Do you want me to come and look
at them?” Arry asked hesitantly. Pain was her province; Death might
come out of it, but she did not know Death.
He tilted his head at her and let his breath out.
“No,” he said. “If it happens again, perhaps.”
Arry held her hand against the side of the teapot;
she decided lukewarm tea was good enough, and poured him a
bowl.
“
Sit down by the fire,” she said.
“You’re cold. Where’s your jacket?”
Oonan sat, and took the bowl from her. “I don’t
remember,” he said; he sounded surprised. “Wait—I took it off,
when I got up there. I’d been running, and then there was the
blood.”
He took a swallow of tea.
“
Why were you running? Did you
hear the wolves howling?”
“
No, they were entirely silent. To
my ears, anyway. I had a dream that woke me up.”
He drank more tea and settled back in the chair
Arry’s mother had made, just before she went looking for Arry’s
father. It was a good chair of its sort, but it creaked.
“
What sort of dream?” said
Arry.
“
The sort that wakes
you.”
Don’t let me help, then, thought Arry, irately; then
she remembered that he was not Con, not a child: he knew what he
knew, and perhaps talking about his nightmares would not help him
in the least.
“
At the end of the dream, all the
sheep had gone,” said Oonan. “So I thought, what harm would it do
to go and look at them? Do you understand about those times when
you can’t be certain you banked the fire, and even though you think
you did, you must go and look? I felt like that. So I went up to
the meadow.”
“
Were they gone?”
“
No, they were all there. I
counted them. But they were uneasy.”
“
Because you’d sneaked up on them
in the night?”
“
No. They recognize me. It was
cold, I thought it might be that; but they didn’t act cold. The
meadow felt as if it were at the bottom of a well, and the
moonlight was worse than darkness.”
He shivered; but he was not cold. The fire was
flushing all one side of his body. He shivered again. Arry got up
and put on her jacket, and gave Oonan a blanket. He wrapped it
around his legs without saying anything.
Arry hugged herself under the red wool jacket and
stared at him. He was whole and sound, yet in considerable pain.
If he was afraid, it did not feel like fear—and anyway, Oonan
wasn’t afraid of anything. He was the one who helped people have
their babies, even though having a baby was a thing that hurt, and
therefore was Arry’s province. Having a baby was rarely Oonan’s
province, because it was rarely a thing that need fixing. But it
frightened her, and it did not frighten him.
What had happened up there in the meadow? The meadow
was only a triangular flat space where the mountain, in a fit of
absentmindedness, went out for a bit instead of down. On one side
of it the rest of the mountain stood up like the tallest wall in
the world; on all the others was the blue air, with the round hills
everybody toiled up and down all day as small as stream pebbles
at the bottom. Arry’s mother had liked it: she said it was the only
place in three days’ walk where you could see what might be
sneaking up on you.
It was an alarming place in the dark—only it would
not have been dark when Oonan went up there, but full of blue
moonlight and strange shadows. More alarming, according to what he
said. Rocks that looked like sheep, sheep that looked like bushes,
and then moved; the few small trees like hands, flexing their
fingers in the spring wind. Moonlight and shadow on the grass like
a net to catch your feet; smooth ground roughened by shadows, rough
ground made smooth by light.
“
Which way did the wolves come
from?” she asked him.
“
The prints showed they came down
off the mountain and went on down along the river. I didn’t hear
them at all. The sheep and I were there, and then the wolves—if
they were wolves—were there. They didn’t make a sound. I smelled
the blood before I heard a thing, and then what I heard was the
sheep, crying.” He put his bowl down on the flagged floor with a
rattle. “They didn’t take any lambs,” he said.
“
Oonan, are you sure they didn’t
get you too?”
“
Can’t you tell?”
“
You sound different than you
feel.”