The Dubious Hills (25 page)

“
You’ll risk harm but I mayn’t?”
said Arry.

“
I was afraid of whom you might
meet,” said Oonan.

They both looked at Beldi, who was leaning on the
wall with his resigned expression.

“
Whom did you meet?” Oonan asked
him. “Nobody I can remember,” said Beldi.

“
What did you do?”

“
It was like a dream,” said Beldi,
patiently. “I ran through the woods. I ran through the high
meadow.” He considered. “I chased sheep,” he said.

“
Good,” said Oonan. “The sheep
were here last night. I counted them then, and again this morning.
You weren’t chasing real sheep, unless you went to Waterpale or
Greentree.”

“
I drank from the stream by Sune’s
house,” said Beldi. He paused. “Sune’s house smells odd if you’re a
wolf,” he said. “So does ours. I didn’t like the smell, I
think.”

And from the lion’s mouth that would you all in
sunder shiver, thought Arry. From the hag and hungry goblin, that
into rags would rend ye. Good. Niss is doing as she ought. But why
won’t she consult with us; why won’t she tell us what she’s
doing?

“
Let’s go talk to Niss,” she said,
taking the coat from Oonan’s lap and folding it awkwardly. Oonan
got up and collected the coat he had been sitting on, patted each
of his cats on the head, and set off for Niss’s house.

Vand was putting a new layer of whitewash on it. He
waved cheerfully but said nothing. The door was open. Arry put her
head inside, and Niss looked up. “Mally told me to expect you,” she
said.

They went in; Niss made them tea and gave them some
oatcake to go with it; Niss’s white dog looked hopefully at the
oatcake, and Oonan fed her pieces while Niss spread both the coats
out on her table and considered them. She ran her hands over them,
she lifted them and let them slump back onto the table, she stared
at them, she leaned over and sniffed them.

“
Nice work,” she said at last.
“But I wonder—” She stared at them again. “Soul clap its hands, and
sing,” she said, “and louder sing, for every tatter in its mortal
dress.” Nothing happened, but after a moment Niss nodded. “This
isn’t wolf at all,” she said. “It’s hardly anything, truly. Cobweb
and moonshine. It seems a wasteful way to go about it; you could
put these properties into an ordinary wolf skin and have done with
it.”

“
Maybe the maker hadn’t a wolf
skin to spare,” said Oonan.

Arry felt both extremely grateful and extremely
cold.

“
Who is the maker?” she
said.

“
I can’t tell,” said Niss, rubbing
her hands over the coats again. “Not an enchanter, I think.” She
stared into space for some time, and Arry fed the dog some oatcake.
Finally she shook her head. “If wolves were wizards,” she said.
“It must have been a shapeshifter of one sort or another. This is
not magic, not really; it’s a thing natural to the
doer.”

“
What does
it
do?” said
Oonan. “Is it dangerous?”

“
It confers essence without
actuality,” said Niss.

Oonan looked at her. Arry saw Beldi smile. Niss
said, “Those who sleep under it will dream they are wolves.” This
did not seem to Arry to be at all what she had first said, but Niss
always did say that magic was slippery. Maybe the language in which
you spoke of it must be slippery also.

“
Is it dangerous?” said
Oonan.

Niss considered the coats again. “Not in itself,”
she said at last.

“
Was it made with
malice?”

“
Oh, no,” said Niss. “This is good
work, very good indeed.”

“
Does it permit
choice?”

Niss stared at the coats yet again; she laid both
hands flat on them and leaned hard for some time. Finally she said,
“Those who sleep thereunder may not choose whether to dream, but
they may choose whether to be.”

“
Can they choose whether to sleep
thereunder in the first place?” said Arry.

“
It depends on who gives it them,”
said Niss.

Arry looked at Oonan. Oonan shook his head. Arry
said, “What if Halver gave it?”

“
Well,” said Niss, “you must ask
Mally, of course, but it seems to me that if Halver were the giver
the choice would be what to learn.”

“
What did you learn, Beldi?” said
Arry.

Beldi blinked at her. “How to be a wolf?”

“
Probably not,” said Oonan. “Can
you catch and eat a mouse? Or a sheep?”

Beldi looked blank. “No,” he said.

Niss sat down and drank all the rest of the tea. She
was a great deal tireder than she had been when they got here.

Arry asked her, “Why have you warded some places and
not others?”

“
I do what’s needed,” said Niss,
with her mouth full of oatcake.

“
Did you ward our
house?”

“
No,” said Niss. She sat up
straight. “Why?”

“
Somebody did.”

“
With what?”

“
Keep the wolf far hence, that’s
foe to men.”

“
That’s a Hiddenlander spell,”
said Niss. “I don’t use it, myself, except for burials.”

“
Will it work?”

“
Certainly.”

“
You didn’t tell me about this,”
said Oonan.

“
There are things you don’t tell
me, too,” said Arry. Then she thought, no, the only way out of this
is to stop keeping secrets. “The warding letters were under an
enormous pile of dead mice,” she said. “I found them yesterday
morning.”

“
Frances,” said Oonan. “She said—”
He shut his mouth hard.

“
Oonan, we have to break our word,
both of us.”

“
She’s your mother,” said Oonan.
“Halver is your teacher. They know what they’re doing; they
must.”

“
Halver’s a wolf,” said Arry. “His
knowledge is all disrupted. He’s doing harm, is what he’s
doing.”

“
That’s your province,” said
Oonan.

Arry was so angry she could not speak. Then
something in his tone made her think. She smiled at him. “So it
is,” she said. She thought, carefully. “I charge you, then, by the
knowledge that is in me, to tell me what I must hear to deal well
in my province.”

“
I thought you would never do it,”
said Oonan. “Niss, shall we go away and let you rest?”

“
No,” said Niss, heaving her small
self out of her chair and heading for the kettle. “I fear this will
be in my province also, before all’s done. I’ll make stronger
tea.”

19

Oonan was a good storyteller; he had learned how, he
said, when everybody had the white fever, so that their bodies
required rest but their minds were raging and required occupation.
Arry thought, too, that he understood how hungry she and Beldi
were to hear all they could about their parents. Sitting in Niss’s
little house and warming his hands on a mug of tea he never drank
from, he told as slow and careful a story as any in the books Sune
and Mally had lent her.

He did skimp a little on the opening, in which the
two wolves had run him up and down the high meadow until moonset.
Arry didn’t blame him. He made clear enough the combination of
terror and hilarity that all this galloping up and down and being
snapped at by jaws that never quite met in his flesh, no matter how
slow or clumsy he was, had caused him. Finally the wolves chased
him into the sheep hut, which he was very reluctant to enter, he
said, because then they would have him cornered. But they chivvied
him into it exactly as if he were a sheep and they two very
well-trained dogs.

He sat down hard on the floor, covered in sweat and
breathing like a bellows. The dust he had raised made him cough.
And then it felt as if the entire world had taken a giant step
sideways, as if it had been dancing on a low platform and missed
the edge. He could not fall in fact, of course, because he was
sitting on the floor already; but his mind felt as if it had
dropped down an unexpected step.

He rubbed his eyes, and when he looked up, Frances
was carrying a lantern into the sheep hut, and Bec came behind her
with a basket. He recognized them at once, but the way they looked
shocked him just the same. Frances had cut off all her red hair; it
was shorter than Oonan’s; she looked like a new-shorn sheep, only
less pleased. She was too thin. Bec looked much the same as he
always had, short and wide and dark-haired, with the greeny-dark
skin he had from his connection with Jonat and Wim’s families. But
Oonan had never seen his brother look other than cheerful, and now
he looked as little pleased as Frances.

“
I cry you mercy,” Frances said to
Oonan, and she set the lantern in the middle of the
floor.

“
I’ll consider it,” said Oonan
dryly. “Where have you been?”

“
Give you good den, Bec,” said
Frances. She used the tone in which she reminded her children to
say “please.” “‘Greetings to thee, Frances; thou hast been long
away; it joys my heart to see thee once again.’”

“
My house is yours,” said Oonan,
making a sweeping gesture around the hut. “Dust, straw, and all: I
pray you partake.”

Whereupon they all laughed, but Oonan did not feel
much comforted. Frances and Bec sat down on the floor with Oonan,
as if they were all going to play noughts and crosses in the dust.
They were both wearing long coarse gray robes, and they were both
barefoot. The clean soft state of their feet made it clear that
they usually went shod. Bec opened the basket and took out strange
foods from the Hidden Land: meat pies made with beef and cinnamon
and cardamom, apple tarts made with pepper, honeycake made with rye
rather than oat flour. He and Frances began to eat at once; they
seemed very hungry. Oonan ate a little for the sake of courtesy,
and finally asked them to tell him their story.

“
When I left three years ago,”
said Bec, still with his mouth full, “I went as I always did, to
Waterpale to see what the traders had brought in from the Hidden
Land. There was one from Wormsreign.”

“
Where the people, the children
and the very mice, are all shapeshifters,” said Frances.

Bec looked at her, and she smiled and was quiet.

“
He was sitting on a rug, like the
others,” said Bec, “but he had nothing with him, no goods at all.
He wore red silk. I had looked at all the other goods, and seen
nothing I wanted, and yet I was loth to go home with nothing. The
children always hoped for strange things. So I asked him what he
was selling. He laughed. He said he sold nothing, but would give to
those worthy of the gift.”

“
They say, Travel not in the
Hidden Land,” said Oonan, “but I hadn’t realized we must say,
Travel not even so far as Waterpale.”

“
I asked him what worthiness was,”
said Bec. “He said it was knowledge. I told him that in the Dubious
Hills he would find both knowledge and doubt, and that sometimes
those who sought the one might find the other.”

“
Bec, Bec,” said Oonan. “Didn’t
you heed what Sune told you about challenging
Wormsreigners?”

“
Sune also told me,” said Bec,
with perfect mildness, “that one might summon music out of the
air.”

“
Did you ask Niss?” said
Oonan.

Bec went on as if he had not spoken. “We sat and
talked the sun down the sky, about knowledge and memory and
experience. He was himself a musician, though we at home would not
have said that he knew music. He had a tongue like honey and a mind
like an April day, always shifting. Fran will scold me yet again if
I explain to you all the shifts he used on me, so I will say just
this: he persuaded me that if I gave him my knowledge I would have
it still, for all practical purposes, for I would remember it. And
he said he would give me in turn the power to become a wolf at the
full moon, and that I would then know, as Derry could not, as no
woman nor man ever could, the wolf and all its thoughts and
doings.”

Frances looked very much as if she would have liked
to scold him anyway; all she did was to lay her hand on his knee
and put on a resigned face, very like Beldi’s.

“
And I agreed with him to do this
thing,” said Bec.

“
Why did you?” said
Oonan.

“
You would have to ask Mally, I
suppose,” said Bec.

Frances laughed. Bec looked at her, and then he
laughed too. “Old habits,” he said. “Though even now it may be that
Mally could tell you what I cannot. But this is why I think I did
agree. Mally told me once that I need new things: not large ones
nor many, but new. There was nothing new in music, in the Dubious
Hills. I thought, that if I wanted novelty in music, I must travel,
to Wormsreign or even the Outer Isles; but if I changed my field of
knowledge, I could stay home. Wolves are at home with us, after
all.”

“
Did you plan how many of my sheep
you would eat each full moon?” demanded Oonan.

“
No,” said Bec, mildly. “I thought
I would make do with mice. As indeed we have, for the most
part.”

“
They’re better stewed,” said
Frances, making a face. “But then, no doubt mutton is better
roasted also. We are not truly wolves; I think there, my love, he
lied to you.”

“
He might not know,” said Oonan.
“Being a shapeshifter.”