The Dubious Hills (2 page)

“
Grownups do that.”

Arry did not say another word while Oonan finished
his tea, folded the blanket and gave it back to her, thanked her
and told her good night, and went away down the hill.

2

Arry had been dreaming about her mother, and when
the sparrows squabbling in the eaves woke her, she thought for a
moment that she was still nine and all was right with the world.
But then she saw that her pillow was blue, not green as it had
been then; and she remembered.

According to Halver, today was the first day of May
in the four-hundredth year since doubt descended. According to
Wim, it was the second hour after dawn. But since dawn in its
wandering way moved about, back and forth over the same small span
of hours like a child looking for a dropped button, some of the
leisured scholars at Heathwill Library (according to Mally they
were leisured, according to Halver they were scholars, according
to Sune there was indeed a structure called Heathwill Library) had
named all the hours of the day from their own heads without regard
to the shifting of the sun. By that naming, it was eight of the
sand (according to Wim), sand being the way (said Sune) that the
scholars (who were scholars, said Halver), numbered out the
hours—

“
Oh,” groaned Any into her pillow,
“I say, I do hate mornings. They make my head hurt.” She sat up,
disentangling herself from her long (Wim), black (Wim), all- too
(Arry) curly (Wim, who should not—said Mally— have known it) hair
(Halver).

“
Shut up,” said Arry, panting
slightly. “Just shut up. I wish I were nine again. I wish I were
five. I am certain of nothing save the holiness of the heart’s
affections and the truth of imagination. Bah!”

She got out of bed, and by performing her morning
routine without thinking about it, managed to get herself washed,
combed, dressed, and into the main room of the house. Her sister
(said Halver), named Con (said Frances, their mother), who was five
(Wim), knelt mumbling on the hearth. “I’m forgetting,” she said,
without turning, when Arry came in.

“
You’ll remember again later,”
said Arry, invoking their teacher Halver and her own experience.
“Try once more. Or we’ll have to get Niss in here to start the
fire, and she’ll laugh at you.”

“
Oh,” said Con, scowling
ferociously all over her round face, “for a Muse of fire, that
would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.”

The neat structure of wood that Arry had built the
night before took on flame like a garment.

“
There, you see,” said Arry. She
looked at Con’s cropped head, and she remembered the other thing
she must have in her mind today. Oonan had come and told her he had
lost two sheep to the wolves—or rather, to things that left
wolf-prints but did not act like wolves.

Their brother Beldi, who was nine, came in from the
kitchen, staggering a little with his full bucket of water. He
filled the iron kettle with half the water, hung that over the
fire, and put the bucket in its corner, where Con, after three
false tries and a flood of tearful proclamation that she would
never grow up if this was what it felt like, made the spell over
the water that would keep dust and flatness and the invisible
growers out of it.

When the water was hot Arry made them oatmeal, with
milk from Niss’s cow and honey from Vand’s hives. She felt a little
odd about the honey; it was a gift, not an exchange. She had told
Niss several times when the cow was hurt, so Oonan could fix it;
but the pains of bees, if any, were beyond her; and the sting of
the bees no longer hurt Vand in the least. Maybe Con or Beldi
would know something that could help Vand, when they were
older.

After they had eaten she set the younger ones to
washing the dishes, and went back to her own room to read over once
more what their teacher, Gnosi Halver, had said yesterday. She was
not very far into it when Con came shrieking through the door,
dragging a huge-eyed Beldi with her. His chin was covered with
blood.

“
Does that hurt him?” wailed
Con.

“
What did you do?”

“
I hit him.”

“
I’ve told you and told you not to
hit.” Arry crouched down to Beldi’s level and looked at his mouth.
His lip was well and truly split. His round brown eyes blinked at
her; but unlike most children who thought they might be hurt, he
was quiet. Probably he thought Con was making enough noise for both
of them. Arry put a firm hand on Con’s shorn dark head and shook it
a little. Con stopped yelling but looked ready to begin again. “Why
did you hit him?” said Arry.

“
I wanted to see what
happened.”

“
I’ve told you and told you what
happens.”

“
I forgot.”

“
That’s not the sort of thing you
forget.”

Con stared at her.

“
Mally says,” said Arry. “Now show
me the hand you did it with.”

Con proffered it, still gulping. She had split the
skin over two knuckles.

“
It did hurt,” said Arry. “It hurt
so much it hurt you too. Now you both must go to Oonan and we’ll
all be late for school.”

“
What do you want Oonan for?” said
Con, looking with fascination at Beldi. “It’s not dripping
much.”

“
I want Oonan because it needs
must be sewn up like the burst elbow of a shirt,” said Arry, in
their mother’s accents. “Now put your hurt fingers in your mouth,
thus, and come with me.”

“
Gnosi says it’s dirty to put your
fingers in your mouth.”

“
That depends on where they’ve
been,” said Arry, hauling the heavy door of the house shut and
shaking her head at the two cats who arrived, just too
late.

“
Beldi’s mouth,” said
Con.

“
Well, you think it over. Let’s
go.”

They went, followed by two hopeful cats, down the
hill their house sat on, and along a rocky, muddy path, much rutted
with spring rains, between their hill and Niss’s; and then around
the side of Niss’s hill and up and down and up and down again and
up once more to Oonan’s door.

The door was open. The cats bounded through it,
making enthusiastic noises. Arry followed with her brother and
sister and found Oonan sitting on a pile of cushions staring at his
fire. There was a cup of milk on the brick floor beside him. Both
cats made for it, and bumped heads. Oonan tipped the milk onto the
floor, and they began lapping busily. Oonan looked up. His face was
sadder than usual; maybe he wasn’t really awake yet. He liked to
stay up half the night, but most people who hurt themselves, he
said, did it in the morning. Arry disbelieved him, but there was
no use, said Mally, in telling him so.

“
Good,” Oonan said, when he caught
sight of Beldi. “Something I can fix.” Arry remembered his lost
sheep. Of course he looked sad. It was she who wasn’t awake yet;
and no wonder, after wrestling with Con’s hair for half the night
and listening to Oonan sound hurt when he wasn’t for the other
half.

Oonan got up and took the wooden box that held his
tools from its corner. Then he sat Beldi down on the floor in the
light from the southern window. “What happened?”

“
I hit him,” said Con.

“
Did you? Well, you’d better keep
him happy while I sew this up, then. If he gets bored and fidgets
at the wrong moment, it won’t be fixed as well as it should
be.”

Con looked helplessly at Arry, who was stricken with
inspiration. “You may sing to him,” she said. “You may sing ‘I Had
a Dove. ’”

“
I hate it!”

“
So does Beldi’s lip hate being
split like a ripe plum. You sing. And next time you think about how
you hated it, before you hit somebody.”

Con, glowering, flung herself on her stomach on the
floor between Beldi and Oonan and began bellowing into her
brother’s face. “I had a dove and the sweet dove died.” Beldi
beamed at her, as well as he could with his bleeding lip.

Oonan got up stiffly, moved around Con, sat down on
Beldi’s other side, and resumed getting his tools out of the box.
The needle looked big enough to sew shoes with. The thread was as
black as a sheep’s nose. He wiped them both with the potato liquor
Jony made, out of the green glass bottle that came from Wormsreign.
He threaded the needle, knotted the thread, and took Beldi’s chin
in his hand. Con sang even louder, whether through duty or
perversity Arry would not have wanted to say.

She put her hands behind her back, squeezed them
tight together, and watched the needle punch its first slippery red
hole. The black thread followed it like a poisonous worm. Arry
tucked her own lower lip under the upper one. This was not a
situation in which informing the patient he was hurt would be
useful. She just had to bear it. Beldi was perfectly happy. Con was
well into the song’s second verse. She had better have the wit to
start over again if she had to. Two stitches, three, four. Oonan
made another knot and nipped off the thread.

Beldi looked up at Arry and burst out laughing. “You
look just like a rabbit!” he said. Con abandoned the tira-liras
with which she had been filling out the end of the song, and
laughed too. Arry untucked her lip.

“
Don’t go laughing like that all
day, or you’ll undo all my good work,” said Oonan. He got up, still
stiffly.

His muscles hurt him; he must have been climbing too
many hills.

“
What about Con’s fingers?” said
Arry.

Oonan walked over to Con and squinted at her hand.
“Wash it,” he said. “And don’t go making mud pies until all this
red—see, here—is hard and dark. Halver says that’s called a scab.
It sits on top of the hurt tissue and keeps it safe until it’s
healed.”

Con went into Oonan’s kitchen to wash her fingers.
Arry poured the rest of Oonan’s milk on the floor for the cats.
Beldi said, “Was there a thing earlier that you couldn’t fix?”

Oonan nodded, standing before his cold fireplace
like an untidy tree. “I lost two sheep,” he said.

“
Maybe they’ll come home again,”
said Beldi. “Gnosi says—”

“
No, not lost that way. They’re
dead.”

“
What do sheep look like when
they’re dead?” said Beldi.

“
Broken,” said Oonan.

“
Like my wagon?” said Con,
returning. She shook water from her hands onto the cats, who leapt
indignantly away and then circled, waiting to get back to the
milk.

“
No,” said Oonan, thinking about
it. “More like the tree the lightning struck last
fall—remember?”

“
I can’t remember anything,” said
Con, gloomily.

“
I can,” said Beldi,
unwisely.

Arry wondered if such a discussion was the reason
Con had hit him in the first place. There might be no pain in the
Dubious Hills, except in her, the Physici, but certain instincts to
hurt remained. The History of Doubt denied this, but the History of
Doubt was wrong.

Arry knew this, though she would much rather not
have. She knew that Oonan, too, often wished that he did not know
what he knew. Pain and Death were among the things the Shapers had
wanted to do away with. They had managed to preserve pleasure, but
they had not managed immortality: they had created only ignorance
of death, except in the Akoumi; and in a kind of slantwise fashion
they had left knowledge of death in the Physici too. Ignorance is
Bliss, they had said, and Halver said the same. Arry did not say
that, but had not thought yet of what to say instead.

Beldi added, “Derry says wolves don’t always come
back.” Arry wondered if there were also some instinct to heal in
all of them, not just in her. Beldi was looking at Oonan as if he
wanted to sew up some part of Oonan not visible.

“
When will
I
get to say
something?” said Con.

“
When you’re ten.”

Con glowered.

“
Halver says.”

“
I really hate this, Arry,” said
Con crossly. “Why can’t we keep our magic until we get our
knowledge?”

“
Halver says, so we can play for a
little between our first responsibility and our last.”

Con seemed to consider this for a moment and then
shrug it off as foolish. She said, “Can’t Oonan fix it?” Oonan
looked amused. “No, my puppy, I can’t fix it, because it is not
broken. It is what happens.”

“
But I hate it!”

Oonan said again, “It’s what happens.” He looked
rather helpless.

“
Con,” said Arry, “you and Beldi
run along to school. You’ll
really
hate what Gnosi Halver
says to you if you’re late.”

“
What about you?” said
Beldi.

“
Tell him I am conferring with
Oonan and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“
Wish I were fourteen,” said
Beldi.

“
No you don’t. Go on,
now.”

They departed, leaving the door open. A damp,
green-smelling breeze came in from outside. Oonan sat down, with a
tremendous thump for such a thin person, in a tall carved chair,
and waved at the other one. Arry’s mother had made those chairs,
and her father had bought white cloth from the traders of
Wormsreign and dyed it red and sewn and stuffed the cushions. The
cushions were a little faded, and furry each on its right front
corner where Oonan’s and everybody else’s cats scratched them. The
chairs had darkened a little from their first pale pine-color, but
were otherwise just the same.