The Dubious Hills (18 page)

“
No, indeed nobody did,” said
Halver. “And why not, do you suppose?”

Oonan made a restless movement, and Halver’s gaze,
even in the flickering light of their single lantern, seemed to
fasten on him as if Halver had walked forward and taken Oonan by
the collar of his jacket. “You may answer instead, Akoumi,” said
Halver.

“
I know nothing of this,” said
Oonan formally. Arry could feel how stiff he sat, and knew that he
was offended, and then wondered if offense were a form of hurt,
which seemed unlikely. But if it were not, she should not know
it.

“
But,” said Oonan, “I can offer
speculation.”

“
It’s all any of us has,” said
Halver.

That’s not true, thought Arry. She kept quiet.
Something was happening here.

“
I am a healer,” said Oonan. “I
know that fighting makes breakage, and this is wrong. But it does
not follow, as the Eight seem to have thought, that whatever makes
us fight is itself a breakage in some mechanism intended to work in
a different way or to different ends. There is that in us that
makes wrong without being, to our natures, foreign, or
broken.”

“
So there is no way to prevent
war?”

“
Of course there is,” said Oonan
irritably. “We live under one method. But it may be there are many
ways to prevent it that all do damage to our natures.”

“
Doesn’t war do damage to our
natures?” said Arry, shocked.

“
Indubitably,” said Oonan. “But
the spell we live under may do so also.”

“
Less damage, then?”

“
Different damage,” said Oonan.
“So that the makers of the spell, once they saw it in its
operation, perhaps thought that the peace they had bought was not
worth the price.”

“
They thought,” said Halver, “that
the spell they laid on our many-times-great-grandparents was not a
spell to be laid upon themselves.”

“
Who says so?” said
Arry.

“
Sune and Frances,” said Halver.
He seemed about to say more, but shut his mouth on it.

“
What was it about the operation
of the spell, then, that made them not wish to lay it upon
themselves?”

“
Bear in mind,” said Halver, in
his teacher’s voice again, “that the spell was laid doubly, on this
place and on the people in it. Where it held sway, it became
difficult, by the normal operations of human th“But our
great-great-grandparents were well?” said Arry. “Or my mother—she
came from outside.”

“
The people here when the spell
was cast did not go mad,” said Halver. “At least, not in the same
way as the outsiders who came in.”

“
But my mother,” said Arry
again.

“
This is the part no one teaches,”
said Halver, “because until last month at the full of the moon no
one here knew it. Your mother knew it, Arry, but she could not see
what to do about it. But now I know it.”

Oonan moved impatiently, making the bed creak.
Halver laughed up at him over the lantern. “When they saw what they
had done, the Eight changed the spell,” he said.

“
But they still didn’t put it on
themselves?” said Arry. “Or anybody outside?”

“
Well deduced, my student,” said
Halver.

“
Why didn’t they?”

“
Because they chose to be free and
endangered, rather than imprisoned and safe.”

Oonan let his breath out in such a way that he was
very close to making a snort or some other disgusted noise. Arry
wondered what his knowledge, of wholeness and fitness or its
absence, was telling him now about Halver. Hers said only that
Halver was unhurt, for the moment.

Oonan said deliberately, “That is outside your
province, Gnosi.”

“
And so am I,” said
Halver.

Oonan started to say something, presumably, “Well,
of course,” and then straightened and looked at Halver. Arry looked
in her turn at Oonan. His face was rather like Con’s when Con first
found out that their mother had left. Mally said it meant something
like, “I can see such trouble.”

Arry said rapidly, before she should think again,
“Halver. If we had a blind child here—Oonan says we have had them
sometimes—how would you teach it?”

Halver said, “I’ve never had one to teach.”

Oonan turned his head and looked at Arry. She could
see quite well now in the light of the one lamp; so, one supposed,
could he. They were thinking the same thing. She had meant to let
Oonan say it: he was older than she was. But he felt as if somebody
had hit him in the stomach. He made a little motion of his head in
Halver’s direction, and Arry spoke to Halver.

“
You don’t know,” she
said.

“
That’s true,” said Halver. “I do
not, for the asking, know how to teach a blind child.”

“
But?” said Oonan, in a
terrifyingly patient voice.

“
I remember how I did teach. I can
read. I can reason. I could do it, if I had to.”

“
But how would you know you were
right?”
said Arry.

“
If it worked,” said Oonan, in the
same patient tone. It was not like him.

“
If it worked,” said Halver,
nodding.

“
You can’t possibly,” said Arry.
“What if it didn’t work? You can’t go wasting a child as if it were
a bad batch of yoghurt. You might as well say I could dose a
stomachache with anything handy, just to see what
happened.”

“
They do it outside every day,”
said Halver.

“
We are not outside,” said
Oonan.

“
But we might be,” said
Halver.

“
Why?” said Arry. “Where’s the
benefit?”

“
Try it and see,” said
Halver.

And he turned in his old gray blanket and walked out
of the hut. Arry sat where she was. Oonan went out after him. He
said something, and there was an explosion of growling. Arry
jumped up, ran for the door, and collided solidly with Oonan as he
came back in.

“
He’s gone,” said Oonan,
breathlessly.

Arry leaned her head on his chest and began to
laugh. “Con would love that,” she said. “Say your say, walk
outside, turn into a wolf.” She giggled.

“
It’s not funny,” said
Oonan.

“
How do you know?”

Oonan started to laugh, and stopped, and stepped
back from Arry. She sat down again, still chortling.

“
And neither is that,” said
Oonan.

“
They why are you
laughing?”

“
I don’t know,” said Oonan; and
they both laughed until they cried.

14

When they had finished laughing, they went soberly
down the mountain to Oonan’s house. The moon was behind a cloud;
the dark felt warmer. Arry carried her mind along as if it were a
bowl of milk filled to the brim. Nothing that should not be there
fell into it.

Oonan put more wood on the fire and brought it back
to life; then he took a spill and went around lighting all the
lamps. His cats sat on the hearth and watched him. Arry sat in one
of the chairs her mother had made and watched him too. He was
upset. How do I know that, she thought? She consulted her
knowledge, with considerable caution, lest things she did not and
ought not know should sneak in. But she saw only the sober facts of
her own province: heartbeat, breath, the slide of strange
substances through the blood. Of course, she thought, when we get
upset we make these substances and they make bodily reactions of
the sort that I notice. Sometimes, anyway.

“
I’m going to make some tea,” said
Oonan, in such a quiet voice that Arry didn’t even jump, “and then
I am going to break my word to Halver.”

He went off into his kitchen, followed by the cats.
Arry sat looking at the fire. Sometimes, she went on thinking, I
say to myself, Con’s upset, and it isn’t because of bodily
reactions; it’s because once Mally told me that, when Con looks or
acts like that, she’s upset, and I remember. But that’s memory, not
knowledge. That’s all Halver has now, memory: no knowledge. Why
does he call that freedom? If I broke my oath to Halver, as Oonan
is about to break his, I could ask Mally. That might be a question
she could answer. Unless Halver is outside her province, now. But
no, he wasn’t outside mine: I knew when he had a fever and how his
hand itched.

Oonan came back with the tea. Arry, who was thirsty
from climbing the mountain, and arguing with Halver in the dust,
and climbing down again, took a healthy gulp and almost choked on
it. Oonan had made the kind of strong and bitter brew he would use
to stay up for the lambing.

“
Don’t be so greedy,” said Oonan
sharply.

Arry glared at him, but he was staring at the fire,
as she had been. He said, “I don’t know what Halver said to you. He
told me that he would deal differently with me, since you had
denied him. But he didn’t deal differently enough, did he? I
denied him also.”

“
Denied him what?”

“
He has a plan,” said Oonan. “He
wants to free us all from the hill-spell by making us
shapeshifters.”

“
He wanted me to choose to be
one,” said Arry, “but he said part of the spell the shapeshifters
said to him, he said it over me, and I felt it half working; it
didn’t seem much like choice.” So easily she broke her word. The
fire did not cower down nor the wind rise; her heart beat on
quietly. Maybe it was more like a disease than an injury: the seed
was sown but not yet sprouted. Perjury, shapeshifting: which was
more mortal? “When it starts to work on you,” she said, “it feels
like almost falling asleep and half-dreaming you’re falling, like
the way you jump then, and wake yourself up. Has that happened to
you?”

“
Not yet. I think he’s of two
minds,” said Oonan. “He can’t tell how important the choice is. He
would enspell us all in a heartbeat if he thought we would be as he
is; but he doesn’t know.”

“
He doesn’t know anything,” said
Arry. It shocked her to say it, but she did, and more. “He’s a
child again. Only he has no magic.” Fire is cold, she thought;
water burns; fish fly and sparrows swim.

“
He knows nothing now,” said
Oonan. “As the moon shrinks his old knowledge will grow
again.”

“
Won’t he change his mind then and
stop wanting to make us all shapeshifters?”

“
Remember he is in his second
month of this. It has not happened yet.”

“
But you don’t know?”

“
That’s Mally’s
province.”

“
We could ask her.”

“
Now?”

“
Yes, I think so,” said
Arry.

“
Drink your tea first,” said
Oonan. “You’ll need it.” He would know, so she drank.

The wind had picked up when they went outside again,
and ghostly clouds were sailing up over the dark lumpy horizon and
into the clear and glittering sky. The air smelled of rain.

Mally’s house was, not unexpectedly, dark and quiet.
Oonan caught Arry’s sleeve as she headed for the door to knock on
it, and drew her around to the side of the house. He stood under a
small round window and said softly, “Wake: the vaulted shadow
shatters, trampled to the floor it spanned, and the tent of night
in tatters straws the sky-pavilioned land.”

Arry cast a wild glance over her shoulder, but the
sun did not in fact seem about to spring over the hills. A light
did flare after a moment in the round window, and Mally, looking
even more like a dandelion puff than usual, peered out at them
censoriously. Oonan pulled Arry into the new light, and Mally’s
face changed. She went away from the window, taking the light with
her. Oonan and Arry went back around to the door, and after a
moment Mally opened it, carried her lamp outside, and shut the
door again.

“
What’s the matter?” she said to
Oonan. She looked perturbed.

“
One of my strange not-wolves is
Halver,” said Oonan.

“
But he would swear you to
secrecy, by his power as Gnosi,” said Mally. Arry opened her mouth,
and Mally added, “And you would break your word, both of you— why?
What is he doing?”

“
Go on,” said Oonan, smiling,
“you’re doing well.”

“
Who are the other two?” said
Mally.

“
Now that, I cannot tell you,”
said Oonan.

“
Why? Whom will it
break?”

Oonan shrugged. Mally looked at him over her lamp. A
few early insects came and danced around the light. Arry considered
Oonan, his nerves and his joints and the pathways of his blood.
Mally was considering others of his pathways. Arry thought,
carefully, over what Halver had said to her. Not much, she
realized; she had cut his speech short, perhaps. She thought over
what he had said to both of them, to her and Oonan. Frances knew,
he had said, although what he said she knew was not really in her
province.

“
Oonan,” said Arry. “It’s my
mother. It’s my mother, isn’t it?”

“
And your father,” said Mally,
still looking at Oonan. “Wherefore he would not tell
you.”

“Oonan,”
said Arry.

Oonan looked at her. “I thought they would come
tonight,” he said.

“
Halver would tell them not to,”
said Mally.