The Dubious Hills (26 page)

“
Being a shapeshifter,” said
Frances, sternly, “he did know nothing. It was this that Bec
forgot, when he sat in the sun all day and supped up the honey
breath of a thing hath no one nature.”

Oonan said quickly, “So you made the agreement with
him. What happened? How did he do it?”

“
It was the full moon that night,”
said Bec. “I met him in the pine wood above Waterpale. He said
that, if I truly consented to this bargain, I must say a rhyme.” He
pulled his knees up under the gray robe and rested his arms on
them. “I can’t forget it,” he said. “It was this: And then I hate
the most that lore that holds no promise of success; then sweetest
seems the houseless shore, then free and kind the wilderness.
Elected Silence, sing to me and beat upon my whorled ear, pipe me
to pastures still and be the music that I care to
hear.”

Arry saw Niss twitch when Oonan recited that
spell.

Oonan saw too; he nodded at Niss and said that he
did not care for the sound of that at all, but he had thought it
best to keep quiet.

“
And then,” said Bec, “he said a
rhyme himself. And this was it: Though they
are
fickle.
Let one go alive, he will run to the bosom of another and tell
lies: Adventures another had, or perhaps no one, or just a
different tale than the one to you.”

“
Rhyme?” said Oonan.

“
I said the same,” said Frances,
smiling a little. “Rhyme it hath none.”

“
He spoke it so,” said Bec,
patiently. “Like a song or a spell. And then we sat and waited for
moonrise. I fixed my eye on him, most constantly, for I wished to
see a man turn to a wolf, and I wished to see what I might look
like when I came to it. But as the moon rose, all the ground
beneath us seemed to fall sideways; and when I recovered my
balance, there was the wolf.”

“
And then?” said Oonan, though he
really did not wish to.

“
He trotted up to me,” said Bec,
“very much like a dog; and he sank his teeth into the meat of my
shoulder, just there; and the whole world moved sideways again,
very violently, and I was a wolf as well.”

There was a long silence.

“
What was it like?” said Oonan at
last; he felt it was expected.

“
No,” said Frances. “That is not
the question. The wolf-being is a play, it hath a kindness to’t,
any might wish to romp so for a night of bright moons. It is the
coming to oneself after that shows the crack in the
cup.”

“
Is that why you stayed away?”
said Oonan to Bec. Bec nodded. “I thought to send word,” he said.
“When she found me, I had a box of half-writ, unsent letters. I
think I wanted her to come.”

“
Faugh,” said Frances. “When I
could not write to Arry either, did I wish her to find
us?”

“
Maybe,” said Bec. “Maybe you did;
though you knew she mustn’t.”

“
She’s bound to soon enough, if
the sheep go on being killed, which hurts me,” said Oonan. “What
happened?”

“
Halver,” said Bec.

“
Yes, I assumed as much; but how
did he get into this?”

“
I did bring him,” said Frances,
grimly.

“
Why Halver?” said Oonan. “Why
didn’t you come to me?”

“
Not your province,” said
Bec.

Oonan made a furious sound that shook the low roof
of the dusty hut and made Frances, always inclined to slouch and
lounge, come up off the floor onto her knees as if she were ready
to wrestle.

“
Province, province, province,”
said Oonan, passionately. “Why are we so punctilious about
it?”

“
That’s war,” said Bec, sounding
faintly surprised. “People intruding on one another’s provinces. We
understand to stay out. We must stay out.”

“
All right,” said Oonan, breathing
through his nose like a woman giving birth, though presumably with
less pain, and where was Arry when you needed her to approve your
simile? “How is this outside my province, or inside
Halver’s?”

“
Education, knowledge, the
alteration of mind,” said Frances. “That’s Halver, Oonan; it might
be Mally also, but we thought not, then, that each person might
become a wolf differently, according to’s character. Perhaps we
should have thought. But we thought no harm, nor saw none
neither.”

“
There
was
harm,” said
Oonan, again passionately. “I’d have known it before I knew
anything. How could you be so blind?”

“
Not our province,” said Frances,
very gently.

“
Faugh!” said Oonan, and jumped to
his feet. “It’s change; change may be harm; you don’t know, that’s
why you have me, why didn’t you
ask
?”

Frances looked up at him, her short red hair
disordered on her lined brow. “Because that is what we lost,” she
said. “That is the crack i’the cup.”

Oonan sat down, hard, on the bed of planks. A little
dust puffed out and danced in the light of the lantern. “Say that
again,” he said. He understood already, in his heart; he remembered
Halver’s answer about teaching a blind child, and he had used the
word himself just now.

“
We are outside now,” said
Frances. “Outside all provinces save life and death. We remember,
but we do not know; what we were taught grows dim in us.” She gave
the lantern a shake, and the flame flickered and made all the dark
shadows jerk and shiver. “Even for practical purposes,” she said,
imitating Bec imitating Halver’s speech, and sounding very scornful
as she did so, “we have not our knowledge now.”

“
Yet you bethought you of Halver,”
said Oonan. “Reason would do as much as that,” said Frances.
“Reason is what we have now.”

“
So you told Halver,” said Oonan.
“What happened then?”

Bec answered him. “He got enthralled. You know— you
understand—you remember how he does. He walked up and down his room
and talked and shouted. This was true learning, he said, this was
education, what he had done until now with every child under his
care was mere—mere—” Bec looked at Frances.

“
Rote and eyewash,” said Frances
precisely.

“
No, not that, I could remember
that myself. The Draconian word.”

“
Ah,” said Frances.
“Indoctrination.”

“
What?” said Oonan.

“
When the Dragons use it, it still
means just education,” said Bec. “But in Wormsreign it means
otherwise, and that’s what Halver meant.”

“
Where did he come by a word like
that?” said Oonan.

“
I told it him,” said Frances.
“Very long ago; the year Arry was born. He would ask me for words
as a child asks for honey. Thinking them even less harmful, I gave
him them.”

“
They aren’t harmful,” said Oonan
absently, “in themselves.” He slid off the bed and sat over the
lantern with them again. His eyes met Frances’s. “How can you
live?” he said. “How can you live, not knowing?”

“
People manage it, all over the
world,” said Frances, dryly.

“
Well, but Halver wants us to
manage it?”

“
He does so.”

“
And yet you don’t wish him to
make us?”

“
You don’t wish to be forced to’t,
do you?” said Frances.

“
Children don’t wish to learn
arithmetic, either,” said Oonan. And hit himself gently in the
forehead. “That is the very problem, of course,” he
said.

“
Aye,” said Frances, with the
Hiddenlander accent surfacing very strongly. “Ye needs must choose,
and choose his way.”

“
Or what?” said Oonan.

“
He will teach how he may,” said
Frances.

That, said Oonan, made them all silent and gloomy.
He collected his mug full of cold tea, and drank all of it down
without stopping. Arry sat staring at him. He talked to my mother,
she thought. I want to talk to my mother. “Why didn’t they come
talk to us?” she said.

“
Well,” said Oonan, “Halver swore
them to secrecy, as Gnosi. And they think you are better here
without them, than outside with them.”

“
Why can’t they be here with us?”
said Beldi.

“
They can’t live here now,” said
Oonan, patiently. “In them our spell is broken.”

“
Halver is living here now,” Beldi
pointed out. Then he looked at Arry, and said as if no one else
were present, “She’d rather be with him than with us.”

“
Halver’s living here now, Beldi,”
said Arry, “but he’s sick most of the time.”

“
You have all of us,” said Oonan.
“Once Bec became a wolf and gave up his music, he had nothing
except Frances.”

“
Why,” said Niss, as if nobody
else had spoken since Oonan finished his story, “does becoming a
Lukanthropos break the spell we live under? There’s no sense in
that.”

“
If you don’t know, Niss,” said
Oonan, “nobody does.”

“
It can’t be the magical end of
it,” said Niss, stubbornly. “I told you, it must inhere in
character.”

“
What’s Halver going to do?” said
Arry.

“
What are we going to do, that’s
the question,” said Oonan.

“
Well, but we can’t answer if we
don’t understand what Halver will do. Would Mally know?”

“
You have to fetch Con anyway,”
said Oonan. “We may as well ask her, once more.”

“
How could Bec lack for novelty
when he had Con?” said Arry.

“
Mally always said she took after
him,” said Oonan. “Maybe she wasn’t novel to him, if her mind
worked as his did always.”

They all stirred, and drank up their tea, getting
ready to leave. Beldi said to Oonan, “What about the coats?”

Oonan shrugged. “Frances and Bec said nothing about
them.”

Everybody looked at Niss. “What kind of work are
they, exactly?” Arry asked her.

“
Oh, Wormsreign,” said Niss, as if
Arry had stood in the middle of a field at broad noon on a clear
day and asked her where the sun was.

“
Oh, Wormsreign,” Oonan mimicked
her; then he smiled.

“
Faugh,” said Niss, without heat.
Frances had always said that, and had further remarked, as a
private joke with Arry, that it seemed to be catching. Niss got up
and went and leaned on the coats again. “In fact,” she said
thoughtfully, and stopped speaking.

Arry started to say something, but Oonan waved her
to silence.

“
This is truly good Wormsreign
work,” said Niss. “But there’s something else.” She ran one hand up
and down the uppermost coat and shut her eyes. “Oh,
Halver
.” she said, exasperatedly.

“
What?” said Oonan. He said it
with a marvelous lack of emphasis.

“
He’s put it on those who dream
under these coats to find him,” said Niss. “Well, he’s tried.
Teacher or no, inside or outside whatever it is he’s inside or
outside of, he is not a wizard.” She brooded over the coats a
little longer. “Or is he?” she remarked. She opened her eyes
suddenly and gazed at Oonan. “Somebody is,” she said. “Never let me
say again that children ought not to ask questions.”

“
What?” said Beldi,
promptly.

Niss laughed. “Let me look a little further,” she
said. “This is clever, clever, but it is not good.” She screwed her
face up, like Con drinking buttermilk. “I spoke wrongly,” she said
in an extremely formal tone, and unscrewing her face she
straightened up fast. “Whoso sleeps under either of these coats
three times, by choice, must come to Halver to be made a wolf, or
die.”

“
No,” said Oonan.

“
Oh, yes,” said Niss.

“Now
is it everybody’s province?” said Arry.

“
Where did he get them?” asked
Beldi.

“
Wolves run far and fast,” said
Niss. “Derry says so.”

“
We must fetch Mally,” said Oonan,
“and all of us must speak to Halver.”

Fetching Mally was easy enough; she was home
playing with Con and Lina and Zia and Tany, and Arry thought she
looked as if asking Halver questions about a dire and hurtful plot
would be easier. Mally set Tiln to watching the children, except
for Con, whom they brought along rather than argue with her. Con
and Beldi lagged behind. Beldi would be telling her Oonan’s whole
story, and there would be that to deal with along with everything
else.

Fetching Mally was easy; persuading her was not. “I
don’t believe it,” she said, at intervals more regular than the
call of the cardinal. “Not Halver.”

“
The coats do what they do,” said
Niss, placidly.

“
But not by Halver’s will,”
retorted Mally.

They lagged, too, arguing, though not so far behind
as Beldi and Con. Arry and Oonan hurried on, getting hot and
thirsty all over again. Halver would give them all some tea, too,
no doubt.

“
What are we going to ask him when
we get there?” panted Arry.

“
I don’t mean to ask him
anything,” said Oonan. “I mean to tell him several.”

“
You think Niss knows more than
Mally, then?”

“
I know less harm will be done by
assuming so,” said Oonan.