The Dubious Hills (16 page)

“
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.

Oonan gave every appearance of listening to her, but
he had nothing to say except, “What happened then?” and “I see,”
until she came to the strange story of daylight on the windowsill.
That made him sit up straight and look at her. He made her recite
as much of it as she could remember, which was easier than she
would have expected: maybe it was a spell of sorts after all. The
note in the margin made him frown.

“
Once out of nature,” he said,
when she was done.

“
What is the work of
will?”

“
Nobody’s ever said,” said Oonan.
“‘Hail the Lord of Human Fears’—that sounds like the way Sune says
they speak of death in the Outer Isles.”

“
I asked Sune what out of nature
was,” said Arry. “What did she say?”

“
Dead.”

“
Really.”

“
Well, what would you
say?”

“
Not my province,” said
Oonan.

“
But you think something, even if
you don’t know it.” Oonan neither confirmed nor denied this. Arry
said, “Does everybody?”

“
Ask Mally.”

Arry made an impatient huff, as if she were Con
thwarted in some grand scheme.

“
Where’s your jacket?” said Oonan.
“We don’t want to miss our visitors.”

Arry’s jacket felt rather too hot. The air was still
damp and hardly cooler than it had been in the afternoon. The
smells of water and earth and green things lay heavily all around;
when they passed a patch of grape hyacinth the scent made Arry want
to sit down under it and rest. She trudged on after Oonan.

Oonan led her into the hut, left the door open, and
began to pace. It was much colder in the hut, but just as damp.
Arry sat on the hard bed and said, “Do you think they’ll run us up
and down the meadow?”

“
I am hoping,” said Oonan, “that
now I have seen them and shown myself willing to converse, they
will, as Frances used to say, abjure the preliminaries.”

He very seldom mentioned Arry’s mother. She looked
at him, but in the darkness of the hut there was nothing to see
except the impatient line of his shoulders.

“
Maybe they won’t come until the
moon sets, then,” said Arry.

Oonan stopped pacing, and probably stood looking at
her. “I had thought of that,” he said. “Grel says that will be
between two and three hours after the sun rises.”

“
We should have brought a chess
set,” said Arry. “Or a whistle.”

“
Or our spinning,” said Oonan,
irritably.

“
When’s Sune’s baby
coming?”

“
In five or six weeks, most
likely.”

“
I think she’s worried about
it.”

“
She reads too much,” said Oonan,
more irritably. “That baby is fine and strong and not too large.
Sune
is fine and strong and large enough. She’s been
filling herself up with horrors and then, you see, she knows them.
Even though I know she won’t encounter them.”

“
She doesn’t know that she can
trust what you know?” said Arry.

Oonan sat down on the floor; Arry could feel him
staring at her. “Nobody has ever said it in quite that way to me,”
he said. “Do we all know that, that we can trust what others know?”
He paused, and Arry saw the pale movement as he pushed one hand
through his hair. “What others
say
they know,” he said.
“We don’t know they know it—except for Mally.”

“
I’ve never thought about it quite
in this way either,” said Arry. “It’s because of Con, and wondering
if there are hurts not physical. Each question seems to make
more.”

“
And what made Con behave so that
you wondered?”

“
I think it was my parents’
leaving.”

“
And Mally doesn’t
know?”

“
She doesn’t say, anyway. She gave
me all the stories.”

“
About wolves?” said Oonan
sharply.

“
No, I asked Sune for those. About
children whose parents leave them. But none of the things that
happen in the stories has happened to Con.”

“
No,” said Oonan.

Arry waited, but he was silent. Arry was tired of
talking around and around questions she had no answer for. She
tried to think of what they had talked about before she started
wondering about the kinds of pain Gossip, small news, games, music,
dancing, the weather the sick and hurt people they both dealt with,
Con’s mischief, whether Beldi was too quiet. It all led back to the
same questions.

Arry thought her mind must be tired. It would not,
in a sensible fashion, lie down and rest. So she let it go where it
liked. It wandered slowly around the dark hut noting how her eyes
had adjusted so that she could see Oonan’s face and hands and the
ragged outline of his bird’s-nest hair against the darker wall, and
the gleam of his eyes, and the moonlight falling through the open
door to make strange and fantastical the bits of straw and clods of
mud that lay on the smooth-packed dirt of the floor.

“
Floor,” though you might not
realize it from hearing it, was a Unicornish word. In that
language, which assigned genders to its nouns, the feminine form
meant a field or meadow, while the masculine form meant what one
normally would think of as a floor.

Arry’s foot jerked as she fell down a step that was
not there, in a walk she was not taking. She heard herself make a
noise like somebody poked suddenly by the cold nose of a cat.