The Dubious Hills (4 page)

Not upsetting Con was a great deal of trouble. It
meant settling her and Beldi with Frances’s chess set, which Arry
did not like to bring out, and then slipping out the back way and
trudging muddily through the dark to Niss’s house to beg a pot of
coals for the fire. It was going to be like being bitten by fleas,
this not having a magician in the house any more, one tiny itch
after another until suddenly you were covered with welts and
scratching like mad and snapping at your family.

If their parents had been alive, of course, there
would have been a two-year-old around by now, a little clumsy and
overpowerful, but very happy to oblige, even while saying, “Won’t!”
Arry thought of having one herself; but being pregnant with no
magician in the house would be miserable. Besides, there were no
fathers she fancied; and she supposed he might have to move in,
too, and Beldi, for all his forbearance, might very well hate that.
And so would Con, of course. If only we never grew older, she
thought, bearing the little earthenware pot carefully up the last
hill to home, we would get on very well.

She had left the door open a crack; now she eased it
over the wooden floor just to the place where it would stick, and
slid through the opening, holding her breath. In the dark kitchen,
she stood and listened.

“
Diagonals!” said Beldi. “The
bishop moves on a diagonal, Halver says so.”

“
What’s a bishop?” said
Con.

“
A mythological beast of the
Hidden Land,” said Beldi, austerely. “Halver says.”

“
It looks like a magician with a
stomachache.”

Arry grinned and moved softly across the kitchen to
the door of the main room. It was dark, too, except for the
rectangle of lamplight from Arry’s own room, where she had
installed her brother and sister with the chess set. She would have
to cross the light to get to the main fireplace. She stood
clutching the pot; she could feel its warmth through the thick wool
wrapping Niss had lent her with it. It was not likely to burn her
hand any time soon, but it ought to be dealt with.

She thought of the cold kitchen hearth, unused for
three years. Con had said “Won’t” and meant it, marched into the
main room, and made a fire in there. The kitchen had become the
place where you put things you didn’t have a place for. The bark
and sticks and log laid ready that day three years past were still
there, dusty and cobwebbed but certainly dry.

Arry took the pot across the room, stumbling over a
pile of Con’s outgrown clothes that nobody had gotten around to
making rugs of, and then bumping Beldi’s wagon, which he would
neither use nor give up. She had come back in here a week after
Con’s rebellion and shut the damper. It would probably make an
unknowable noise. Arry pulled cautiously on the chain. It felt very
stiff, but slowly the damper gave to pressure, with only a faint
groan that Con might, if she heard it, attribute to the wind.

She knelt on the tiled hearth (tiles from
Wormsreign, brought by her grandfather, said Wim), and lifting the
kitchen tongs from the hook they had hung on for three years, took
a red coal from the pot and started the fire. Niss had given her a
lecture, derived from Lina, on how to make it sustain itself all
night; she hoped she had paid enough attention. While it was still
burning brightly she hung the kettle over it. Then she lit a
candle or two, to keep her from falling over Con’s rocking swan or
the pillows the cats had thrown up on, and sat down on a stool
while the water heated.

It had just begun to rumble when Arry realized that
if she gave Con and Beldi tea, Con would ask where the fire had
come from. She had hoped to use the tea to make them sleepy, so she
could join Oonan in his watch before whatever was going to happen
began. There was no point in making Beldi sleepy if that meant he
couldn’t keep an eye on Con should she get exercised and go on a
rampage.

Arry took one of the candles and the packet of
sleepy tea, went into the other room, put the sleepy tea back in
its cupboard, and got out the strong black tea from the Outer
Isles. They could both stay awake, then, and make sure the house
didn’t burn down.

“
What are you doing?” called
Beldi.

“
Making some tea. I’ll bring
it.”

When she came in with the tray, they had, as usual,
ceased actually playing chess and were engaged in enacting the
story of the Dragon King and the Little Girl’s Brown Cat. Con, once
she had looked up, never took her eyes off the tray; but she did
not say a word.

“
I have to go help Oonan with his
sheep tonight,” said Arry.

“
I’m not going to bed,” said
Con.

“
No, I understand that you aren’t;
that’s what the tea’s for.”

Con scowled; Beldi gave Arry a pleading look that
she could only counter with a shrug. She said, “There’s a fire in
the kitchen.”

“
Who the doubt put it there?”
shrieked Con.

“
I did,” said Arry coolly. “Don’t
swear. Do you want to be cold and wet as well as unhappy? Don’t you
think that cold hurts too? And screaming makes my ears hurt, and
Beldi’s. Act your age.”

And that was going too far. Con, however, did not
protest; but she did open her soft brown eyes very wide and fix
Arry with a look that hurt the heart as fire hurts the skin.
Something would have to be done about Con. It was all very well to
say that pain had precedence; Arry was beginning to think that all
that really meant was, “You deal with it, Arry.”

“
I’ll be back very late,” she said
to Beldi. “Con needn’t go to bed until she wants to.”

She turned quickly away from whatever look Beldi
might be going to give her, and went out into the damp night.

Oonan was cloaked and booted and waiting for her. He
fussed at her for coming out in only her shirt and skirt, as if he
knew what cold was, and gave her an old sheepskin jacket. “I’d give
us both a suit of armor if I had it,” he said, shooing his cats
inside and shutting the door. Arry realized he had been thinking
about whether the wolves would bite her, and not about cold at
all.

They climbed Oonan’s hill to the hill above it,
where the sheep grazed. It was overcast again and very dark. Arry
had forgotten a lantern, as she had forgotten her coat. But Oonan
ought to have remembered. He was out here often, for lambing, or if
a sheep were sick for some other reason, or just if they had seemed
restless to him.

“
Can you see in the dark?” she
said.

“
My feet know the way,” said
Oonan.

Arry was as much startled as if he had said, the
other night, that Niss knew what hurt. “How?” she said.

“
They remember,” said Oonan,
rather hurriedly.

Arry, chewing over the difference between knowledge
and remembrance for the first time—that she could remember, she
thought, and almost giggled—did not answer him. The path got
steeper and rockier; the wind began to strengthen. They came
finally to the meadow halfway up the hill where most of the sheep,
Oonan said, gathered for the night; and where last night had come
the things that Oonan said Derry said were not wolves.

There was a stone hut with a fireplace, for the
lambing. They went in. Oonan always put the fire out, he said, for
fear of burning the meadow. Arry stood in the sheep-smelling dark
and listened to him find flint and tinder, without fumbling. He got
a spark at the first try, and the dry grass at the bottom of his
ready-built fire caught so fast Arry wondered if he had oiled
it.

“
Where are the dead sheep?” she
asked.

“
I gave them to Rista and asked
him to salt the meat and wait to give it out until we’d found out
what killed it.”

“
I don’t suppose I’d have been
able to tell much if they were dead already.”

“
I thought of that,” said Oonan,
“but there’s time enough for that if it happens again.”

“
What hour did the wolves
come?”

“
Last night of all, when yon same
star—”

“
One. Why are we here so
early?”

“
Because they might come earlier
this time.”

“
What are you going to
do?”

“
I got a spell from
Niss.”

“
But who’s going to cast
it?”

“
I am,” said Oonan.

Arry peered at him with considerable alarm. In the
firelight she could not see much. Then he grinned at her. “Niss
says that if I say certain words before I begin the spell, it will
reach out and take her power—which she’s stored up, I gather, as if
it were raspberries dried, and the words the water you soak them
in—and so work the rest of the words as if she herself said
them.”

“
What does the spell make the
wolves do?”

“
What I tell them,” said
Oonan.

“
How can they
understand?”

“
If they’re wolves, as dogs do. If
they are something else, as children do.”

“
Have you got a knife,
Oonan?”

Oonan laid his hand on his belt, where his knife
always hung, as far as Arry could remember, and looked impatient.
Arry decided to keep quiet, and found herself asking, “How will
you know when they’re here?”

“
Niss thinks they’re broken,” said
Oonan.

“
What if they’re just
wolves?”

“
Then the other spells here will
keep them from us.”

Arry heard in his voice a tone she often used to
Con. She kept quiet. After a moment she sat down on the floor.
Oonan went on standing. The fire crackled. Arry thought about Con,
and in particular about Con’s refusal to make a fire in the
kitchen after their parents left. She mulled it over for some time,
and knew finally that Con had been hurt then, as hurt as she was
now over the loss of her magic. Con had been hurt for three years,
and Arry had only just noticed.

She thought about Beldi. He had not refused to do
anything after their parents left; nor had he insisted on doing
anything. He had been just the same, except that now he made their
clothes, with some help from Mally, and he watched Con when Arry
couldn’t. But of himself he did nothing. Arry could think of
nothing he used to do that he had stopped. But she felt an obscure
unease about him just the same, as if she would know what was wrong
with him if she could just be quiet enough.

Oonan was quiet, leaning in the door of the hut with
his back to her. Outside was quiet too; inside only the fire talked
to itself. Arry thought about Con, and Beldi, and Con again. Their
mother was the one who was supposed to know these things. Halver
was supposed to know some of them. And he had said there was no
fixing them.

“
I hear something,” said Oonan,
and darted out the door.

Arry got up, stiff from sitting on the cold floor,
and looked out the doorway. It still seemed very dark, but because
Oonan was moving she could see him striding towards the far end of
the meadow, where there was a pile of rock fallen from the hill
above. The sheep often gathered there, though Oonan tried to
prevent them, since Inno said that where rock had fallen once it
usually fell again. You could not tell that to sheep, apparently,
or expect them to know it.

Oonan’s voice broke out of the darkness. “Property
was thus appalled,” he cried, “That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was called.” There
was a moment in which Arry heard a sheep make a querulous noise,
and then Oonan bellowed as if he were trying to be heard over a
howling blizzard. “Hence loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus and
blackest midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn ’Mongst horrid
shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy, Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the
night-raven sings; There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks,
As ragged as thy locks, In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.”

Arry stood stock-still, staring. She did not know
what half the words of the spell meant, but she knew that this was
the worst curse she had ever heard in her life. A single howl rose
out of the meadow, and something large and dark came towards the
hut with a peculiar lurching gait. It was not running as fast as
she would have run, had those words been directed at her; and it
was not running down the hill. It was coming to the hut. Arry slid
back into the room and snatched a burning stick from the fire.

The irregular footfalls had ceased. Something dark
and bristling was standing in the doorway. It was as tall as Beldi.
Arry came slowly forward. She knew what the stick would do if she
thrust or slapped with it. “Go away,” she said, but her voice
cracked.

The shape in the doorway made no sound. Arry brought
the burning stick closer to it, and saw gray and cream fur, and
green eyes where the reflection of the flame stood like a window
into blinding sunlight, and tall pointed ears. And she saw
something else. “Your paw hurts,” she said.

The animal blinked once, the way Halver did when you
startled him. Arry knelt on the rough floor. Oonan and Halver said
wolves would hurt you; but she knew that something else had hurt
this one already. Teaching fought with knowledge, and lost. She
held out her hand.

The wolf made a whining growl and stayed where it
was, the hurt paw held a little off the floor. Arry knew what it
wanted; the glowing stick hurt it more dimly but just as truly as
whatever was wrong with the paw. She got up and put the smoldering
end of the stick back into the fire, and when she looked back the
wolf had come into the hut.