The Dubious Hills (32 page)

She said, “That sounds like the beginning of a long
speech. Will you come in and sit down?”

“
It’s spring in there, and cold
with it,” said Halver.

“
Come and sit in the wild thyme
and lean on the welcoming rock.”

Arry did so, cautiously. Halver sat down facing her.
“Now,” he said. “Pain was in the world from the beginning; we do
ourselves no service by trying to rid ourselves of it. We are made
to suffer it.”

“
Not here,” said Arry. “Not
here.”

“
Even here,
you
suffer
it.”

“
There’s a purpose in that,” said
Arry. “I suffer it, others don’t—and I know what to do about it.”
She began to add, “And it doesn’t frighten me,” but that was not
true and Halver had probably been told so. She said instead, “It’s
my province. It’s large and strange enough.”

“
It’s as small as these hills,”
said Halver.

Arry thought most vividly of her long walk with
Oonan: hill piled on hill, the small woods, diminutive meadow after
meadow, the deep pools and the gentians. She thought of the road
to Waterpale, which had taken her father and then her mother to so
strange a fate; she thought of the river crossing to the Hidden
Land. “It’s large enough for me,” she said.

Halver let his breath out, ran a hand through his
hair, and smiled. He had thought of another approach. “People are
entitled to their own pain,” he said. “It is itself a powerful
teacher.”

“
They’ve
got
their own
pain,” said Arry. “The pain of the heart, the mind, the soul,
whatever it is that is at the borders of my province, that makes
Con say ‘I hate this, ’ they can learn from that. They’d better; it
must be good for something.”

“
They can’t learn from it if they
don’t regard it.”

“
I’ll show them to regard it,
then. This is a life’s work in itself, Halver; I’ve got plenty to
do.”

“
You cannot do it under this
spell,” said Halver. “The pain of the heart is among those matters
the Eight felt they must deal with, that there would be no more
war. You cannot do it if you don’t come out.”

“
How do you know?” said
Arry.

She felt this was a telling retort, and for a moment
Halver seemed to agree with her. He looked utterly blank; then he
put his head in his hands. Arry half expected him to laugh, and
admit defeat. Instead he dropped his hands and stood up. “I feared
this,” he said. “Under this spell the intelligence cannot choose.
The heart cannot choose. That is why I have made the threat. Change
or die, that is the choice.”

“
You’re offering it to everyone?”
said Arry. She felt cold and full of dread, but for a moment she
almost laughed. What would all of them say?

“
How else?” said Halver. He
sounded, and suddenly felt, extremely tired. “I’d hoped to have
Frances and Bec to help me, but they don’t understand.”

“
They’re free of the spell,
they’ve been free longer than you, and yet they don’t agree with
you?” said Arry. “Is there no conclusion to be drawn from
that?”

“
That the world is wider than you
can think,” said Halver.

He stood over her, looking down; he reminded her of
an owl on a fencepost. Arry got up. He was going to say something
final. She said, “Why is it summer here?”

“
I don’t know,” said Halver. “I
assumed Niss was meddling with the coats. It doesn’t signify. Go to
sleep, and you’ll be home again.”

“
And what then?” said
Arry.

“
We’ll have school tomorrow,” said
Halver, “and I will tell everyone what’s to be done.”

“
You can’t,” said Arry. “You can’t
possibly kill any of us.”

“
That’s Mally’s province, I would
have thought,” said Halver. “But she might well say the same, and
if she did she would be right. It makes no matter. The wolf can.”
He turned and walked away across the meadow.

Sleep, thought Arry, oh, indeed. On a bed of planks
and dust, with a head full of terrors. Well, it must be done. It
could, at least, be done on a bed of thyme instead. She curled
herself into the sweet sharp smell of the bruised leaves and shut
her eyes. Blackie had vanished when she sat down to talk with
Halver, and she had not heard him come in, but he was licking her
face, with a very rough dry tongue for a dog. Arry put her hand out
to push him away, and encountered Sheepnose’s sleek short fur. She
opened her eyes.

Inside the house the fire, obedient to Con’s
commands though now somewhat short of actual fuel, burned on.
Beldi was asleep on the threshold. Arry pushed the wolfskin coat to
the floor and got up. Beldi had probably seen nothing but his older
sister snoring under a coat. Or no, he would have seen a wolf
sleeping in the hollyhocks. The way for him to come with her was,
of course, for him to sleep under the coat as well. It was probably
better that neither of them had thought of that—but she would have
been very glad of a witness.

Then again, tomorrow after school she would have all
the witnesses she could ask for. She thought it over. Halver had
said he could not kill the recalcitrant, but the wolf could; which
presumably meant that he must wait until the moon was full again.
Even the new strange Halver would be fair enough, in any case, to
give people time to consider the choice he was offering them.

How do I know that? thought Arry. I don’t, of
course. And Mally may not know either. Nobody knows at all. It’s
possible even Halver doesn’t. I’m going to ask Mally just the same.
It can’t hurt. And I want to talk to Niss, and to Oonan.

She went inside and sat down limply on top of
Sheepnose, who had crawled into the warmth of her chair and gone to
sleep again. Sheepnose made an irate noise and squirmed. Arry got
up again and sat on the wolfskin coat. I don’t want to ask anybody
anything, she thought, ever again. I want to do something, just to
do it quickly. Not, I daresay, a very good reason for wishing to do
anything.

She put some wood on the fire; the fire consumed it
instantly and then died down properly to a bed of coals. Arry woke
Beldi up just enough to walk him into his bedroom. He would be
indignant with her in the morning. Then she took off the clothes
she had been wearing, had a bath, put on fresh clothes in case the
very act of sleeping had become irretrievably enchanted, and went
to bed in her own bed with harmless linen and wool as her
covering.

She dreamed of nothing at all. What woke her was,
once again, Con and Beldi quarreling in the kitchen. Arry put her
shoes on and dipped her head in cold water before she went to face
them. It was a cool gray dripping sort of morning, and Con was not,
for a mercy, making pancakes, though somebody had made a pot of
tea. Both of them whipped around when they heard her footstep, and
Beldi, for a wonder, got his word in first.

“
Tell her I didn’t!” he
said.

“
Didn’t what?”

“
Ruin my fire,” said
Con.

“
I put wood on it so it would
proceed naturally,” said Arry. “Beldi was asleep. What do you want
for breakfast?”

“
Relish sweet,” said Con. “Manna
wild and honeydew.” She marched out of the kitchen.

Arry looked at Beldi. “Did anything extraordinary
happen while I was gone?” she said.

“
I didn’t even know you
were
gone,” said Beldi. “You turned into a wolf while I
was looking at the stars, and then you went to sleep. You snored a
little. After a while I went to sleep too. What
happened?”

“
Are you awake? Can you remember
what I tell you? Halver’s going to tell everybody about it at
school today, he says, but I want you to hear and remember what he
told me.”

“
Let’s make some more tea first,”
said Beldi.

“
I’ll tell you while the water’s
boiling; Con’ll be back soon enough.” She told him everything that
had happened. He frowned several times during her recitation of
the argument. Arry was not sure if this came from not
understanding, or from understanding all too well. The water
boiled; she made tea; she made oatmeal pancakes and fried potatoes;
she and Beldi ate them. Arry got up tiredly at last and went to pry
Con far enough out of her sulks to enable her to eat her breakfast
before school. School was a wearing business at the best of times,
and today would not be the best of times.

Con was not in the house. Arry was hardly
surprised.

Beldi did not seem so either. “It’s probably Zia’s
plan,” he said.

“
Well,” said Arry, “you go along
to school; we need one representative of the family there, at any
rate, and I already understand what Halver will say. I’ll go to
Mally’s and see if I can find them. Where were they going to burn
their herbs?”

“
In the pine woods,” said
Beldi.

“
Of course, where else? In the
place with the most flammable floor of all. Go on to school; we’ll
come when we can.”

Beldi went slowly off towards Halver’s house, and
Arry pelted in the other direction as fast as she could go. She did
not know why she was anxious, but it was better to run for nothing
than to be too late for something. She went on past Mally’s house
and up into the pine woods, where she stopped to breathe and also
to listen. Children’s voices drifted with the wind and the smell of
burning, over the crest of the hill. Arry crashed through the
woods, climbing as fast as she could, gained the top of the hill,
put her foot into a spring there, and slid down the other side next
to the stream it became. In the first clearing she came to she
found Zia and Con and Tany and Lina.

Lina had at least seen to it that they cleared all
the dry needles away and surrounded their fire with rocks. She was
sitting with her back to the fire, and to Arry, rather hunched up.
Arry thought she understood how Lina felt. It was odd that the
field of one’s knowledge so often made one feel so, when you
thought of it.

“
Con!” she yelled.

Con straightened from helping Zia make little piles
of dried leaves and flowers, and regarded her with no expression at
all.

“
What are you doing?” said Arry,
arriving breathlessly at the edge of their circle of
rocks.

“
Playing,” said Zia.

“
No, you’re not. You’re
conjuring.”

They all stood and looked at her. Even Lina stood up
and came to stand behind Con, though she eyed the fire unhappily.
They did not plead, or make excuses, or try any more lies or
explanations. They just looked.

Arry looked back at them. Lina had scratched her
hands moving the rocks; Zia had a bruise on her shin and another on
her elbow; Tany had a burned finger, though there was no fire lit
here as yet; Con was hungry. She looked harder. This is my
province, she thought; this is my field of power; I know what I
see. I know what hurts. I know what is hurting each of them, now
and always. She looked harder still. We flinch from pain, she
thought, whether we know it’s there or not. I know why Con is doing
this: she thinks it will get her Bec and Frances back; and why else
did I sleep under the wolfskin coat in the hope of finding
Halver?

She looked at Lina, who was older than Con, Zia, and
Tany but smaller than any of them, who wished her short sleek brown
hair, like an otter’s, would curl and spring all over her head like
Con’s or Arry’s. She was afraid of the lightning and the lightning
bug alike; she would eat all her food cold and raw if she could;
Halver said her knowledge would not grow properly if she hedged it
in so, but would warp and twist on itself like an oak high up in
the cold wind. Such oaks were struck by lightning, in summer
storms. He said Grel said so.

She looked at Tany. He was the only one there was.
The rest of them lived in his liver, that was why it was called
that. He let them out when he was bored or lonely, though they
never did much for the being lonely. He believed there were others
somewhere, but whenever he thought he had found one it merely
melted into himself at the moment he had the highest hopes. Halver
said he could learn if he would think about it, but all the things
Halver wanted him to think about were curled up already, tight as
new ferns, in the parts of him named for them. He had asked Oonan,
when he thought Oonan was another person, for the names of all the
parts. But Oonan had the names wrong, which showed he was just Tany
too. Halver said Oonan was right, which showed exactly the same
thing.

Arry shivered and looked at Zia. At first she
thought that everything that existed hurt Zia. But that wasn’t it.
Everything was hugely and fiercely important to Zia. When Con told
Tiln, “Everything matters to me,” she had been imitating Zia again.
And who wouldn’t, who wouldn’t warm her hands at that fire? Even
Lina followed her, if at a distance. Halver said she had no sense
of proportion, and that nobody without one had ever become a wizard
in the entire history of the world.

Arry sat down on one of their rocks. “You’d better
tell me,” she said.

“
Why?” said Zia.

“
Because I think I can help you.”
Halver is hurting them, she thought. Mally says he does that to
teach them. But he’s hurting them just the same.

“
You want to beat Halver at his
own game,” she said.

Zia nodded.

“
You think his game is being a
wolf.”

Zia nodded again.