The Dubious Hills (19 page)

“
I have to talk to them,” said
Arry. There is another hurt, she thought, an entire other world of
hurt, and this is it, I am in it. “I have to talk to them at once,”
she said, as if she were telling somebody to apply pressure to a
wound.

“
I let Halver go,” said Oonan.
“They could be anywhere on the mountain, Arry, or anywhere for
miles around. Wolves run fast and far, Derry says.”

“
I don’t think you can talk to
them until they want you to,” said Mally. “They may have their
reasons.”

“
What if they do want to and
Halver won’t let them?”

“
There are two of them,” said
Mally reflectively.

“
Halver is larger,” said
Oonan.

“
Is he really?” said Mally.
“Frances is taller than he is and Bec is wider.”

They looked at one another again. Finally Mally
said, “So Halver makes a better wolf.”

“
Are you surprised?” said
Oonan.

And Mally said, “No.”

Arry gave up trying to think about Halver. I never
wondered, she thought, I never wondered where they were. They were
just gone; I wished they weren’t gone. Why didn’t I wonder?

“
We’ll think of a way to thwart
Halver, so they may come to you if you wish it,” said Oonan. “Now
you should sleep.”

“
Now,” said Arry, out of her
aching throat, “we should consider what’s to be done—about all of
it.”

“
Not here,” said Oonan. “Grel says
this kind of sky and air mean rain.”

Mally glanced around at her own front door, but said
nothing.

“
We’d best return to my house,”
said Oonan. “There’s nobody there to wake up. Unless you’re
worried, Arry.”

“
Leaving Con to her own devices
should worry anybody,” said Mally. “If we sit in your kitchen,
Arry, and speak quietly?”

“
But no blushful Hippocrene, I beg
you,” said Oonan.

They all laughed, a little hollowly, and walked
along to Arry’s house.

“
Waterpale has a town hall,” said
Oonan, “where anybody may consult at any hour and wake only the
dogs. It has pillars carved with roses, and a spring in the
courtyard. Sune says so; so did Frances.”

“
Waterpale is larger,” said Mally,
“and full of stone-workers. Frances said that, too.”

Arry left them conversing companionably on the
doorstep while she got a lamp lit and the kitchen fire built up and
burning. She filled the kettle and hung it over the fire and got
out the mugs and the morning tea. The cats came stretchily out of
unknown sleeping places and sniffed her ankles and asked for milk,
so she gave them some. The water boiled; she made the tea. She sat
down at the table and drank a mug of it; then she remembered that
Oonan liked honey in his, and got up and fetched the honeypot and
put it on the table. She sat down again. The white cat got into her
lap and settled down, purring and kneading Arry’s leggings with
both front feet. She leaned her elbow on the table and rested her
chin in her hand.

They’re not dead, thought Arry. They went off and
turned into wolves. Or my father did and then my mother went to
find him. Who turned
him
into a wolf? Did he choose? Did
she? Why did they come for Halver and not for me? Maybe they don’t
like being wolves. But then why come for Halver?

Halver liked being a wolf. Halver required change
and variety and new experience: this community, this whole country,
was too small for him, although certainly being Gnosi and having
new children to teach, and children who might as well be new
because they were learning and growing, was the best occupation he
might have had; it was a mercy his knowledge did not involve sheep
or oats or the behavior of owls, which would have driven him to
drink or murder in a month’s time. If that were possible: one did
not know, and could not think how to find out, whether one’s
knowledge was always congruent with one’s nature.

Arry’s elbow slid off the table, taking her tea mug
with it, and the side of her face cracked resoundingly onto the
tabletop. Woollycat sprang out of her lap and fled under the table,
where she sat hissing. Arry sat up, rubbing her jaw: there would be
an almighty bruise there by morning and probably a big bump, too,
but the hinge of the jaw and her teeth were unhurt. You could not
say as much for the mug, which lay in three large pieces and a
powdering of smaller ones on the flagged floor.

Arry got up and had taken two steps in the direction
of the broom when her mind began to work again. She ran out of the
kitchen and through the front room to the doorway where she had
left Oonan and Mally.

They were gone. Arry thought she felt her heart
stop, though in fact, and of course, it did nothing of the sort;
there was a kind of constriction of the muscles around the chest,
and a matter of breathing, that was all. She stood in the doorway,
peering at the dark yard. It had started to rain, very fine and
misty. Deciding what to lock and what to take out into the dark on
her search made her decide to call first. She drew in her breath
for a huge bellow, and Mally, still carrying the lantern, came
around the corner of the house followed by Oonan.

“
What doubtful way were you
going?” said Arry vehemently.

They blinked at her.

“
Come in, for certain sake; the
tea’s getting cold.”

They squeezed past her damply, and stood dripping on
the floor while she shut and barred the door.

“
There were wolf tracks,” said
Oonan, “or something very like them; I didn’t want to go waken
Derry. We were following them.” His hair was beaded with small
drops, like the redbushes up the mountain with their white
berries.

Arry stalked past the two of them and into the
kitchen; they followed her, sat down at the table, and began
pouring the tea.

“
Where did the tracks go?” said
Arry; as in dealing with Con, it was better to let them get what
concerned them out of their heads before turning to their
transgression.

“
Down to the stream,” said Oonan,
glumly, “and perhaps through it, or along it; but a healer and a
soul-knower with a single lantern could see no more.”

“
Were the tracks
fresh?”

“
Yes,” said Oonan,
positively.

“
How do you know?”

Oonan opened his mouth, and closed it again. He
looked at Mally. “Were they fresh?”

“
How should I know?”

“
But how should I?” said Oonan.
“For I did.”

“
It’s been happening to me, too,”
said Arry. “I think it’s the wolf-spell.”

“
But why?”

“
That’s what Halver meant,” said
Arry. “About the breaking of history.” She was pleased with herself
for a moment, but then she remembered. “But he didn’t have his own
knowledge,” she said.

“
If the wolf-spell is a spell of
ignorance,” said Oonan, “then maybe this is our own hill-spell
fighting back. We’d have to ask Niss.”

“
What are we going to
do?”
said Arry.

“
Whose province is it, that’s the
question,” said Mally. She frowned, and ran both hands through her
hair. “It may well be Niss’s, now that I think of it. Halver is
very likely under a spell, after all.” She yawned. “I wish I’d
thought of that an hour ago,” she said.

“
I could bring her up to the hut
tomorrow night,” said Oonan, wearily, “and see which of them pokes
its whiskers in.”

“
I want to come too,” said Arry.
Or do I? she thought. What if they came here, tonight, and found I
was gone? What if they come back here? What if they come back here
tonight?

“
Bring some beer and a fiddle,”
said Oonan, standing up. “We’ll have a celebration.” He put his
mug down on the table and walked out. Arry heard the door open, and
close again.

She looked at Mally, who was draining her own mug
and fastening up the jacket she wore over her nightdress. “Is that
all?” said Arry. “Let Niss look them over, and ask her?”

“
It may be her province,” said
Mally, standing. She considered Arry’s face for a moment, and
added, “I’ll think whose else it might be, if it isn’t hers; we
could talk to them tomorrow and see what they think.” She put her
hand lightly on Arry’s head. “Go to sleep,” she said. “Before Con
wakes up.”

And she left, too.

Arry did not go to bed. She almost fell asleep where
she sat; then she went into the front room and opened the door
wide, and sat in the largest chair, listening.

15

When she woke up it was full bright sunny day, and
the black cat was standing on her chest and yowling. Arry sat up in
the chair, rubbing her eyes. The cat jumped down, still yowling,
and began pacing around the chair. Arry had been sitting on her
right foot, and it was asleep. She untucked it laboriously and
leaned forward, rubbing it. Sheepnose came around the side of the
chair and stood in front of her, still yowling. She was standing by
a pile of dead mice, quite a large pile, thirty or forty of
them.

Sheepnose yowled again, and then hissed. Arry
recognized that this was not the mighty-hunter cry, but a serious
protest. She supposed the white cat might have brought the mice in,
but it seemed unlikely. Woollycat was lazy. Besides, while both
cats might have caught all those mice in a night’s work, it looked
more like the product of dozens. It could take Sheepnose a week to
clean out a moles’ nest, after all.

Arry climbed slowly out of the chair, wondering if
this was how Sune felt every time she had to stand up. She gathered
her breath and bellowed, “Con!”

Con came in the front door immediately. “I thought
you’d never wake up,” she said. “Look at all those mice.”

“
Did you see Sheepnose bring them
in?”

“
No.”

“
Or Woollycat?”

“
No.”

“
Somebody else’s cats?”

“
I just woke up and came out and
they were there,” said Con. “When’s breakfast?”

“
Let me take a bath first,” said
Arry. “Where’s Beldi?”

“
Doing his lessons,” said Con,
scornfully. “He says we have to go back to school tomorrow. How
would he know?”

“
Asked Wim, I expect,” said Arry,
heading for the washing room. “Con, could you take those mice
outside? They already smell.”

“
Sheepnose,” said Con sternly.
“Take those mice outside again right now.”

When Arry came out drying her hair, Sheepnose had
done nothing of the sort; neither had Con, who was nowhere in
sight. Arry went out the front door and almost tripped over the
white cat, who was sniffing deeply and repetitiously all around the
path. And no wonder, thought Arry, kneeling for a better look. The
soft dirt was pocked with very large tracks, a great many of them,
heading for the door and going away again. Arry stood up and
followed them. These did not go around the back of the house and
down to the stream, as Mally and Oonan had said the ones they had
followed did. Arry could see the single line Oonan and Mally must
have seen. But the overlaid and multiplied tracks went the other
way, past the pine tree and down the hill and up and down again,
into one of the water meadows where there were, indeed, a great
many mice.

“
Not any more,” said Arry,
giggling; and then shivered in the warm sun and bright open spaces
of the water meadow. She had not heard them, not one of them, as
they came in the door and laid those mice at her feet.

She went home in a hurry and made oatmeal pancakes
and cheese scones and tea. Beldi emerged as she was taking the
scones off the griddle, and poured out the tea for her.

“
Where’s Con?” he said, sitting
down.

“
Oh, heavens,” said Arry. “I don’t
know. Not in the water meadow.”

She made a swift search of the house; Con was not,
of course, in it. She put her head in the kitchen door and said to
Beldi, “Come help me find her.”

Beldi put a scone whole into his mouth and got up
willingly enough. He choked, however, when he saw the pile of mice.
Arry hurried him outside and then stood in the sun, at a loss. Con
had said nothing that might give a clue to where she was going.
Arry had asked her to remove the mice. She might have gone to get
somebody to help her, or to do it for her.

“
Run on over to Mally’s,” she said
to Beldi, “and see if she’s there. And bring her home if she
is.”

Beldi gave her a reproachful look, swallowed the
rest of his scone, and went off over the hill. Arry started to go
the other way, to Halver’s house, and then realized that if Con
came home and nobody was there, she might wander off again. Arry
called her a few times. Then she bethought herself of the other
line of wolf-tracks, and followed it down to the stream. The path
was scuffed here and there and some of the tracks half gone, but
small children did not weigh as heavily on the ground as grown
wolves, and Con usually walked in the grass or climbed on the rocks
anyway. Arry called her again.

Nobody answered. But when Arry came down to the bank
of the stream, she found Con sitting in the sunniest, shallowest
part of the water, trying to catch minnows in her fingers. The
sunlight glittered on the water, and on the silver specks in the
gray and pink rock, and on the smooth gray pebbles in the
streambed, and even in Con’s tangled black hair. The hazel bushes
on the far side of the stream were coming into leaf. All the ground
under them was covered in daffodils. No wolf had gone that way, or
the flowers would be crushed.