The Dubious Hills (28 page)

Jony nodded. “They run together at the corners,
too,” she said, “like mint getting into all the bits of a knot
garden. This was the jolly quizzical, I’d say.”

“
What did he say?” said Arry. If
school were anything to go by, Jony had a good memory.

“
He wished me a good morning,”
said Jony, apparently resigned to answering meaningless questions.
“And he asked me why I had a bandage on my arm. I told him a wolf
had bitten me. And he said, ‘That was a nip in play, in passing; a
bite in earnest would not have let you get up this morning, let
alone gather herbs as ever. ’ I asked him who had told him this,
and he got very stern for a moment; then he laughed and asked me
who I thought. I said Derry, and he laughed again. Then he asked me
what had happened with the wolf, and I told him.”

“
You’d better tell it again,” said
Oonan. “And if you can tell it to us just as you told it to him, so
much the better.”

“
I was walking in the cool air,”
said Jony, “and sniffing for herbs, though it’s too early for
most. And I came around that outcropping of rock above Mally’s
house, the one where the good thyme grows. There was a wolf sitting
in the middle of the path. It had deep yellow eyes, the color of
wool dyed with dock. It was larger than any dog we have. I stopped.
And it spoke to me.”

“
Did its mouth open and shut?”
said Oonan; almost at the same time, Arry said, “What was its voice
like?”

Jony frowned at her wool, rubbing her bandage a
little. “No,” she said to Oonan at last, “its mouth did nothing.
And its voice,” she said to Arry, “sounded like mine. I didn’t
remember until you asked.”

“
And you told Halver all this?”
said Oonan.

“
Yes. Except about its mouth and
its voice, because he didn’t ask me. And I went on—shall I now?”
Oonan nodded, and Jony went on. “It said, ‘Feet in the jungle that
leave no mark, eyes that can see in the dark, the dark, tongue,
give tongue to it, hark, o hark, ’ and then it laughed. That’s why
I think its voice sounded like mine: I think I have a funny
laugh.”

“
How did you feel when it said the
rhyme?” said Arry.

“
Odd,” said Jony. “As if the
ground had moved. I said, ‘Greetings, wolf, ’ not being able to
think of anything else. It said, ‘Greetings, wolf to be. ’ I asked
what it meant, and it said I could be a wolf for the mere
recitation of a verse and the will to do it. I said No, thank you.
It laughed again. It said, ‘Against the wolf courtesy avails you
nothing. Will you not come and run under the moon? You may be
restored to yourself long before dawn. ’ And I said, No, thank you
again.”

“
Why?” said Oonan.

“
I should think you’d ask me why
if I’d said yes,” said Jony, with some asperity.

Arry touched Oonan’s arm, and Oonan said to Jony,
“All right, go on.”

“
The wolf said, ‘Do not refuse the
third time; that would seal all. No harm will come to you; you
shall be restored before dawn. ’ So I said I would.” She looked at
Oonan, but he did not ask her why. She said, “And it said the verse
again, which felt even odder, as if there were an earthquake. I was
looking at the place on the rock where the new thyme should be just
starting under the dead stuff; and I could see it suddenly, much
better—but I didn’t know what it was any more. And I said, ‘No,
thank you! ’ very loudly, and lost my balance and sat down on the
path.”

She scratched at the bandage again.

“
Don’t do that, you’ll make the
scarring worse,” said Oonan. “What then?”

Jony rubbed her ball of wool instead. “It ran at me
and tore my arm in passing and ran on into the darkness. It wasn’t
like a dog, there was no warning. Why do they say in cold blood
when blood feels hot?”

“
They mean the wolf’s blood, not
yours,” said Arry, not very coherently.

“
I think you had your warning
earlier,” said Oonan. “Nobody will tell me what I ought to have
done,” said Jony.

“
I think on the whole you did very
well,” said Oonan.

“
If I’d done very well you’d think
I wouldn’t be hurt.”

“
Would I?” said Oonan. “I don’t
know.”

“
What did Halver say,” said Arry,
“when you told him all this?”

“
He said experience was a hard
school but fools would learn in no other.”

“
Did he say anything
else?”

“
He said he must be off on his
walk, and he would see me in one school or another when the time
came.” Oonan stood up. “I think,” he said to Arry, “that we must be
off on our walk as well. I’ll look at that again tomorrow,” he said
to Jony. “Tell Niss that if she must work more sorcery on it she’s
to speak to me first. And don’t use that arm for anything
much.”

They walked over to where Con and Beldi had built a
pile of slate pieces as high as Con’s waist. “Where are we going
now?” said Con. “When are we going to find them?”

“
I think,” said Oonan, looking at
Arry, “that we need to ask Mally where they might go; and then go
there.”

If he thought he could fool Con into thinking a
search for Halver was really a search for their parents, he was in
for an unpleasant surprise, thought Arry. You might find them where
you found Halver, but they did not seem to have been working
together after the first night.

When they got back to Mally’s house, Tany and Zia
were throwing sticks for Blackie. Arry left Con and Beldi to help
them and followed Oonan into the house. Mally was reading a book,
and did not look overly pleased to see them.

“
If Halver had a whole day to go
walking in,” said Oonan, with no preliminaries at all, “where would
he go?”

“
Up,” said Mally. She considered.
“And north as well, this time of year; the going’s dryer and
there’s a clump of three oaks he likes.”

“
Can you show us on the map?” said
Oonan.

Mally fetched the map and showed them.

“
Con can’t possibly walk that
far,” said Arry.

“
I don’t suppose,” said Oonan to
Mally, “that you’ve any idea of where Frances and Bec might spend
their day, under the circumstances?”

“
Watching Halver,” said Mally, “if
they could find him.”

“
Well, that makes things easier,”
said Oonan.

“
Shall I make them easier yet and
take Con off your hands?” said Mally.

“
And Beldi,” said Arry.

“
He isn’t any trouble,” said
Mally. She reflected. “Though if we go on giving him the notion
that being troublesome means being well-loved, he can think of
trouble none of us dream of.”

“
I’ve been worrying about that,”
said Arry. “I’ll take Tany and Zia and Lina for you, Mally, as soon
as this business is settled.”

“
Oh, excellent,” said Mally. “They
can help Beldi think of trouble. Here, take some of these pies for
your supper. And don’t stop to argue with Con. Go out the kitchen
door—quietly—and take the little path past the thyme rock. I’ll
talk to Con.”

“
I don’t know what we’d do without
you,” said Arry, and hugged her.

“
I do,” said Mally dryly. “Go
away, now.”

They crept out the kitchen door and took the path
through the pine woods. “It’s a pity Halver isn’t fond of these,”
said Oonan. “Going for a long walk on a spring day is not my notion
of fixing things.”

They walked and walked and walked. If one’s mind
were clear and happy, it would have been a fine day to do just
this. It was warm and breezy. The tentative blue sky of spring was
all laddered with thin white clouds. Their shadows sported over the
hills like cats, chasing the sunlight over sparkling granite and
dull slate, the bright dry grass and the small hidden gleams of
water. The may was blooming, and the small wild cherry trees, and
scilla and bloodroot and the strange leafless forsythia. Jony had
pointed them out to Arry every spring since Jony got her
knowledge.

Arry had never walked in these parts before. She let
Oonan find the paths and stand pondering at the places where they
crossed or disappeared. She was thinking about Halver and what to
say to him. They came out of the woods and walked up long hills of
blowing grass with an occasional lost-looking bush or gnarled tree
for emphasis. They climbed crumbling slopes of slate and crossed
little hidden meadows all starred with white and yellow flowers.
Arry finished with Halver and began to think about her parents.
Keep the wolf far hence, that’s foe to men. They had meant Halver,
of course, but they must also have meant themselves, or they would
not have stayed away. Frances had said she wanted to write to Arry,
but even that would not have kept the wolf far enough hence. Why,
then, had she and Bec come back?

It was getting hot. They stopped to drink at the
next spring they found. They both took off their jackets, and Arry
took her skirt off as well; she could go on in her leggings and
shirt. The skirt was cooler than the leggings, but not as easy to
climb and walk in. Arry thought of Frances and Bec in their long
gray robes, and wondered how easy they had found this path.

They rolled the clothes in a ball and tucked them
under a rock. Oonan said that, with luck, they could come by here
in time to eat their supper, just when the evening was growing cool
and they would want the clothes again.

“
I just thought,” said Arry.
“Mally gave us enough for five or six people.”

“
Yes,” said Oonan.

They walked on; or climbed, mostly: things were
getting more and more vertical, though from time to time they
found another high meadow, blue with gentians. Experience is a hard
school, thought Arry, but fools will learn in no other. Experience
was what you had to go by if you had no knowledge. Halver had no
knowledge now. Was he calling himself a fool? Or, as seemed more
likely, had he been calling Jony one? But if what she had refused
from him was not experience, then what was it?

The sun was three-quarters down the sky and Arry’s
feet and knees hurt by the time they trudged up one last bare slope
and saw against the sky the three small twisted oak trees. The wind
was blowing towards them. Arry heard nothing, and Halver would
smell nothing. They kept walking. Halver could probably hear their
breathing by now, but he did not come out. They passed under the
shadow of the trees, which still held grimly to last year’s brown
leaves; they walked rustling around the three rocks drifted with
more brown leaves and hollow acorns and twigs. Halver was not
there. Nobody was there.

“
Mally was wrong,” said Arry. She
said it almost to see if the words would come out at all. They
did.

“
We may just be late,” said Oonan.
“He may have been here and gone.”

“
Does it look like it?”

“
No,” said Oonan, reluctantly;
“but I’m not Karn, after all.”

He leaned heavily on a large gray rock. Arry walked
around the top of the hill, peering here and there, looking for a
tuft of wolf-hair, blackened rocks, ashes, a nest in the heaped
leaves, gnawed bones. Wolf or person, he would have left some
trace. He had had Karn teach them that much. She stood on the
northern crest of the slope and looked north, at sharp hills piled
ever sharper until they disappeared into the clouds. Nothing moved
but a raven, and the shifting sunlight. A mind like an April day,
Bec had said the trader from Wormsreign had. He had meant something
more changeable than this, a day where it rained hard one minute
and shone brilliantly the next.

“
Or we may be early,” said
Oonan.

“
Jony saw him this morning; he had
hours on us. If he was here at all, he was here before
us.”

Oonan rubbed the sweat from his face, leaving a
smear of dust. His mouth twitched. He began to laugh.

“
What if Halver knew,” he said,
“that we would ask Mally where he would go? Then he would go
somewhere else.”

“
But Mally should have known that,
too,” said Arry.

“
Should she?” said Oonan, still
laughing a little. “Or should we have asked a different
question?”

“
She’s not a divining-game!” said
Arry.

“
No, I suppose not.”

“
We asked her what Halver would
do,” said Arry, “and she told us, and he didn’t do it.”

“
If you can talk so much, you must
be rested,” said Oonan. “We have a long walk home, and dark before
we get there.”

21

The way home was mostly downhill, but it did not
seem easier or shorter. They wanted their extra clothes long before
they got to them, and they had eaten their supper before they began
to want the clothes. They came sorely and wearily out of the pine
woods to find Mally’s house all dark. But as they sat down at the
edge of the woods to rest before the last little walk home,
somebody got up from the bench next to the well and walked across
the pebbles to where they sprawled on the lovely damp cool of the
moss.

“
What news?” said
Mally.

“
Halver wasn’t there,” said Arry.
Oonan made some movement next to her, but said nothing.

Mally was perfectly silent. The dark solid form of
her, between them and the lighter sky, did not move at all; even
her wispy ephemeral hair did not stir. Arry was aware, more
precisely than ever before, not of just perceiving, but of having
herself caused hurt. And she had caused it with the truth.