The Dubious Hills (13 page)

“
Oonan said you said that the
things that got his sheep didn’t kill like wolves?”

“
So they did not, though sheep
seem made for just this; they are so easy to panic, and where one
goes they all follow. But these creatures were much quicker about
it. Oonan wondered if very hungry wolves might do otherwise than a
wolf ought, but I know not. Also, if they had been hungry, they
would have eaten.”

“
What sort of predator does behave
like that?”

“
Killing and not eating?” said
Derry. “We do.”

“
We?”

“
Not here; we know better. But
people in the world, they do kill and not eat.”

“
Do all of us here know
better?”

“
I would expect so, but you’d best
ask Mally.”

The kettle was boiling. Derry poured the water over
the tea in the green pot, which revealed itself by the sharp smell
to be raspberry leaves and lemon verbena. Arry drank hers gloomily.
She was tired of asking Mally; and anyway, Mally so seldom gave you
a straight answer. Know better, she thought, nodding from time to
time and smiling when it seemed necessary at Derry’s account of
how cats hunted. We all know better than to kill and not eat. How
do we?

She put her mug down. Halver did not know better. If
he ever had, now he did not. He did not know what even the wolves
knew.

“
More tea?” said Derry. “Or home
to your hungry ones?”

“
Home,” said Arry. “Thank you.”
She waited while Derry put the food in a flat willow basket,
thanked her again, and went back outside. The wind had died. It was
warmer, though not a patch on the beanfield. Arry walked carefully
through the crocuses. Clothes, she thought, food, ask Derry, ask
Sune, ask Mally. Mally might answer better when she was not
sweating in the beanfield and supervising twenty-five children.
After supper, then.

Arry went home and baked scones.

11

When the scones were done and cooling, she swept all
the floors and, now that Con seemed resigned to using it, began
trying to make the kitchen habitable again. All the abandoned
messes and projects made her gloomy. She thought she might scrub
the pillows the cats had thrown up on and leave it at that. Oh,
doubt, what a pity there
was
no doubt what all that dried
stuff had been before it was eaten. She began to think hard to
distract her own stomach, which was unhappy with the pains of the
voles the cats had caught.

Halver was, of course, the prime thing to be
thinking about. Arry wondered whether it was worth the trouble to
go to bed tonight. Possibly Halver had made the revelation he
wished to make and would be satisfied; but just as possibly he
would want to argue with her again. Of course, he could do that in
the daytime. Unless he was now sleeping all day. Possibly, too,
what the wolf did and what the man did had no necessary or probable
connection. If he turned up tonight in the one form, she would
certainly ask him in the other. It would help her decide whether
she must do anything, whether his actions fell within her
province.

Con and Beldi came home. Con seemed smug and Beldi
exhausted. Arry washed Con, who had apparently preferred wallowing
in the dirt to firing off beans like stones from a sling, fed both
of them, and sat them down to their lessons. Beldi had brought
milk, herbs, potatoes, and, unexpectedly, a large sack of walnuts
that, he said, Zia had insisted on giving him when he fetched Con
from the beanfield. Arry suspected some less than benign intention
on Zia’s part, but Con had only looked mysterious, not put-upon.
Just the same, it seemed better not to leave them and go ask Mally
questions. Tomorrow would serve well enough.

Arry curled up in the chair, Sheepnose under it and
Woollycat in her lap, and thumbed through the last of the stories
Mally had given her. This collection was the strangest of all. It
was all in verse, like spells, but it was not spells; or at least,
while you could have used bits of it for magic, each piece of verse
seemed to be a story of one sort or another: people acted, spoke to
one another, lost or found things. Reminding herself to think of
change and its effects, Arry began to read.

“
There lived a wife in Usher’s
Well A wealthy wife was she She had three stout and stalwart sons
And sent them o’er the sea.”

The sons were lost at sea; whereupon, in a spell
Arry could tell was a powerful one, the wife threatened to make
storms until they returned to her in earthly flesh and blood. When
the nights were long and dark, they did return (Arry wondered what
all the wife’s neighbors had thought of the wind’s never ceasing,
nor flashes in the flood, all that time). The returning sons’ hats
were made of bark. Their mother blew up the fire and brought water
from the well and everything was as it had been, until the
blood-red cock crowed and then the gray, and the sons said it was
time they were away, that they must go from Usher’s Well to the
gates of Paradise. So they did. If their mother made more storms,
the story didn’t say anything about it.

“
The King sits in Dunfermline town
Drinking of the bluid-red wine O where shall I get a seely skipper
To sail this valiant ship of mine?”

A bonny boy who sat at the King’s right knee said
Sir Patrick Spens was the very best sailor who ever sailed upon the
sea. Sir Patrick, when they came and told him, said he didn’t know
a thing about it, but he took the King’s ship anyway. He saw the
new moon with the old moon in her arms, and there was a dreadful
storm, and the ship sank. Arry untucked the foot that had fallen
asleep and tucked the other one under her. The white cat jumped
down and bit the black one’s tail; the black one hissed and they
both tore across the room, and back, and into the kitchen.

The cats made more sense than the story, thought
Arry. She felt exasperated. But why? Things happened, after all,
and history told of them. Sune and Mally said so. Because these
stories rhymed, or because Mally had told her to read them, she
wanted them to make sense.

“
It little profits that an idle
king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not
me.”

The idle king had been far from idle, it appeared:
he had been to places that sounded as if they came from the same
language as those in the curse Oonan flung at the wolves; he had
sailed and fought and governed. He meant to leave the savage race
to his son to rule and sail off again with all his mariners, even
if the gulfs washed them down. He did not speak of his wife again,
though he had said that old age had still its honor and its toil.
He sounded, in his characterization of his subjects, like Halver on
a very bad day.

Arry shook her head, and read on.

“
Daylight’s on the windowsill Come
you who are faithful still Celebrate the work of will.”

Arry did not understand most of it, but it rocked
her on to its ending, thus:

“
Though their elders shield the
eye Trembling as He passes by Children know they cannot
die.”

Arry sat looking at this one for some considerable
time. She had not the faintest notion of what it might mean, but it
made the hair stand up on the back of her neck as if Con had left
the door open in midwinter. She even got up and looked, but the
door was shut, and bolted, and all the windows closed and shuttered
too. She read again the lines that had made her go looking for the
cold draft:

“
Children on the streets
alone

Wearing masks of black and bone

In the shapes of things unknown.”

Not if I can help it, thought Arry. She saw then
that somebody had—of all the doubtful things—written in the margin
of the book, just beside those lines, in a small square script:
“Once out of nature.”

This story made even less sense than the previous
one, but it certainly had change in it. Once out of nature, what?
Children would wear the forms of things unknown? Out of nature,
thought Arry. Was that what Halver was? And yet shapeshifters were
natural. Would Sune understand being asked if the same were true of
the Lukanthropoi? She had better try it.

“
O what can ail thee, Knight at
arms

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the Lake

And no birds sing!”

The Knight replied that he was sad because he had
met a beautiful lady in the meads, who took him up on her horse,
fed him honeydew, sang to him, and kissed him, none of which seemed
sad to Arry. But then he fell asleep, and dreamed he saw pale
warriors, who cried, “La Belle Dame sans Merci thee hath in
thrall,” and he woke up on the cold hillside.

In her warm chair, Arry hugged herself. She thought
of the cruel stepmothers. Some of them were just cruel; some of
them spoke kindly and then were cruel in the background. But the
stepchildren had not seen any starved lips in the gloam, with
horrid warning gaped wide. The Knight was luckier. But he was sad
just the same. She turned the page.

“
And what was she, the Fairy
Melusine?

Men say, at night, around the castle-keep

The black air ruffles neath the outstretched
vans

Of a long flying worm, whose sinewy tail

And leather pinions beat the parted sky...”

Arry fell asleep, in the chair, pondering, and did
not dream. One moment she was reading the long, difficult tale of
the Fairy Melusina and her sons and husband, and the next somebody
was making a doubtful racket and Con was pulling her sleeve and
saying, “Arry, somebody’s at the door.”

Arry sat up, rubbing her eyes. The fire and the
candles still burned bright. Con was still dressed. Arry got up
stiffly. Somebody was indeed pounding on the door. Beldi stood
staring at it, with the poker from the kitchen fireplace in his
hand. He was wearing his nightshirt, and his hair stuck up all over
his head.

“
Who is it!” Arry yelled over the
pounding.

“
Oonan!” came the
answer.

Arry unbolted the door and opened it a crack. Oonan,
looking wild; nothing and nobody else. She let him in, slammed the
door, and looked at Beldi, who leaned his poker against the wall
and shot the bolt again. Oonan’s chest hurt from running, his
throat tasted like blood, he had a stitch in his side. He sat down
on the nearest cushion and put his head between his knees. Behind
the expected and familiar distresses of somebody who has run too
far were pains Arry tried her best not to distinguish. Oonan had
already made it quite clear that he did not want her identifying
them.

“
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.