The Dubious Hills (5 page)

In here it looked enormous. She was afraid, not that
it would slash or bite her, as Derry said wolves did, but that if
it moved carelessly it would crush her against the wall and fill
her slowly full of splinters. Arry swallowed hard. She must be
imagining; and her mother had said they had had nobody to do that
for thirty years, since Arry’s grandmother died. Her father had
said it was not an enviable occupation.

The wolf whined, briefly, like a dog reminding you
that you had just been reaching for the bowl of scraps. Arry sat
down on the floor and held out her hand again. The wolf came
unevenly forward and stood holding the paw up. Arry took it. It was
as big as her face, smoothly furred on top, like a dog’s, and very
hot and tight about the pads. She felt gently at the hottest spot,
and frowned. There was something stuck in there, but what she could
not recognize. She wished Oonan were here, instead of guarding the
sheep from something that didn’t want them anyway.

She moved her finger around the edges of the stuck
thing. It was as big around as the tip of her littlest finger, but
must be narrower at its other end, or it would never have gotten
lodged in there. Arry wished she had obeyed her mother and not
bitten her fingernails. The thumbnail on the other hand was still
long. She shifted hands, got a delicate grip on the stuck thing,
and pulled gently. Her own stomach knotted up and the hair crawled
on her head, but the wolf made no motion. Arry pulled harder, and
in a small gush of hot blood and the throbbing pain you got when a
spider bite swelled up, the thing came out.

Arry leaned on her free hand, breathing hard. The
wolf backed two paces, lay down, and began licking the foot. That
hurt too, but more cleanly. Arry opened her bloody palm and held it
to the light of the fire. The thing in it looked like a thorn, but
a thorn from no tree she knew. The gorse prickles, painful though
they might be, were tiny compared to this.

Something scraped outside the door of the hut. The
wolf jumped straight over Arry and was gone out the window while
she was still thinking about being afraid. Oonan ducked in through
the low doorway. “I lost them,” he said. His voice altered. “Do I
smell blood?”

“
It’s the wolf’s,” said Arry. “He
had a thorn in his paw.”

“
He had a
what.”

Arry realized that this was not a question. Oonan
flung himself down on the floor beside her and peered at the thorn
in her hand. “That’s a nasty one,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve
seen it before. We must show it to Jony, perhaps.” His voice was
still rather flat. Arry could not recognize the tone; he wasn’t in
pain, exactly. He sounded almost as if he were trying not to
laugh.

“
How many of them did you tame?”
he said.

“
Just the one.”

“
I saw three. They move too light
for wolves; are you sure?”

“
Well, it was dark. You said it
was a wolf.”

“
I did?”

“
Well—”

“
Never mind.”

“
What happens now?”

“
I’ll go to sleep and you’ll
watch. When the moon touches the top of that birch, you’ll go to
sleep and I’ll watch.”

“
And if they come
back?”

“
Wake me up.”

“
Huh,” said Arry. “Mother always
said waking you was like bringing a rock to life.”

There was silence of a peculiar sort that Arry did
not recognize. The fire popped; the wind sighed; a sheep mumbled.
Oonan said, “Then you must say, ‘not marble nor the gilded
monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, ’ and I
will wake up.”

“
Who says?”

“
Niss!” snapped Oonan, and stamped
away into a corner of the hut, where there was a wooden bed with a
couple of wool blankets on it instead of a mattress.

“
Fine,” said Arry, and sat down on
the hearth. He was angry; why, she had no idea. She stared at the
small hollows of orange and red in the yellow mass of the fire, and
thought of the day her mother left.

Her father Bec had gone a month before, and Frances
had known that he would come back on a certain day; but he hadn’t.
None of the three children was old enough to know anything.
Remembering, Arry knew now that her mother had been frightened. But
Halver had not taught them about fear then; and she herself had not
known, as she just this moment began to, that fear is a form of
pain.

Arry shoved irritably at a stray stick. She was
beginning to feel that
everything
was a form of pain.
Fear, anger, memory. She worked these theories out in detail, and
felt herself smiling. Did that mean that thought could turn pain to
pleasure? It seemed unlikely. What form of thought could turn Con’s
hurt inside-out?

Arry sat up straight, shivering. Memory was pain,
that was certain. She remembered her parents talking about Oonan,
and her mother saying, in the outlandish accent Arry loved better
than anybody’s, “Therein the patient must minister to himself.” But
the patient couldn’t; that was what she and Oonan were for; the
patient didn’t know anything, that was the whole problem with
being a patient. Those who knew what hurt could make it stop.

“
Ha,” said Arry. That was what
they had told her; that was what she had thought. But it wasn’t
what she knew; not after today. And it seemed that they had known
what she knew now, and not told her.

Unless they were telling her now. Like the milkweed
or the dandelion, did they send their knowledge floating through
your heart, to take root when it would, far away from them and the
flower that made it?

The seed knew how to grow by itself; Jony said so.
Arry thought that perhaps she herself did not know how to do this.
She lay on her back on the hard dusty floor, and through the window
the wolf had leapt out of, she considered the close bright stars.
Her mother had said Oonan snored; but he didn’t.

4

The wolves did not come back that night, and Oonan
sent Arry home in the misty dawn. Con and Beldi had not burned the
house down. Con had gone to bed in her clothes; Beldi had put on
his nightgown. They had forgotten to feed the cats, who were
sensibly asleep on the hearth when Arry crept in, but immediately
leapt up, yelling their doubtful heads off. She gave them last
night’s milk, which looked unpleasantly thick but smelt sweet
enough. They glared at her and lapped it anyway.

She must find some way to keep the milk cool. She
must find some way to do a hundred other things Con had done for
three years. Beldi had done them before that. Frances had told her
that Arry herself had done them first of all, but Arry remembered
nothing of it. She wondered, if she did remember, if she could
still do them. Were sour milk and a cold hearth hurts? Hunger and
cold were, certainly; but the cure for them was food and warmth:
magic did not enter into it. But if she could remember—It was no
use asking Con, because Halver and Mally and Frances and Niss all
said every child did these things differently. Beldi had never
ceased to be horrified at Con’s method of calling the cats.

Arry’s fire had gone out. She drank cold tea from
Con and Beldi’s pot and stared at the chess board, which of course
they had not put away. If Con had stayed with the red pieces, she
had learned fast and been about to win when they stopped. Beldi
might have been letting her, of course. He had done it before. He
had used to let Arry win at skipping rocks, until she found out and
stopped playing with him.

She wondered now if that had hurt. Probably;
everything did, it seemed.

No. Everything did not hurt. She knew that. Arry
dropped her cup, which bounced on the hearth rug and rolled
clanging into a corner. Arry let it go. Seeming and knowing made
hideous faces at one another across the breadth of her mind.

“
Arry?” said Con’s voice, clouded
with sleep, and Con came padding barefoot across the floor, in her
wrinkled red smock and trousers. She picked up the fallen cup, came
slowly back across the room, and held it out to Arry as if it were
something precious. Arry supposed it was. Halver had made
it.

“
Do you want your breakfast?” she
said.

“
You don’t have to hurry,” Con
informed her, “because I’m already dressed. Why don’t people
always sleep in their clothes?”

She sounded alarmingly pleased. Arry got up. “You
think about the clothes you wore the day Wim made the mud slide.
You wouldn’t want to sleep in those.”

“
Why not?”

“
Grel says it’s dirty. And the mud
would dry up and fall off in little rocks and hurt you.”

“
Huh,” said Con, trailing after
her across the room.

Arry rummaged among their stores and discovered that
Beldi had forgotten to get more oatmeal from Wim, and that if she
had meant to make them bean porridge for breakfast, she ought to
have set the beans to soak the night before.

“
Fried potatoes and onions,” she
said to Con, hopefully.

“
That’s a very good idea,” Con
said. “The smell will wake Beldi up.”

“
When did you two go to
bed?”

‘Very
late,” said Con, also hopefully, though Arry could not make
out what she hoped. Unless it was to be scolded, which made no
sense, because, by the new laws Arry was discovering, scolding
hurt. She sliced an onion, thinking about that. Did it hurt
invariably?

“
Can we put in the mustard seed?”
said Con.

“
A little of the black, if you
like. Why don’t you mix it up with the butter and put it in the
iron pot?”

Con did these things with a willingness that made
Arry deeply suspicious. Unless Con had just decided that helping in
mundane ways rather than magical ones was better than not helping
at all.

“
Can you go over to Niss’s and get
me some fire?” she said, as if she were asking Con if it were
raining. She did not dare look at her.

There was an ominous silence, during which Arry
decided not to peel the potatoes and chopped them up briskly.

“
If I can go barefoot.”

“
You’ll hurt yourself.”

“
Will not.”

“
Will you look very carefully for
rocks and not step on them?”

“
Yes,” said Con,
scornfully.

“
Go, then.”

Con went. Arry shoved aside a pile of cut onion
about the size of an egg, for flavoring the butter and mustard
seed, and set about reducing the rest of the onions and potatoes
to a coarse mush. Most people fried them in large pieces, but Bec
had always done them this way for Frances, and everybody was used
to it now. And if Con was any example, being deprived of what you
were used to certainly hurt.

But if you were used to a lame leg, or the sore
throat Arry had had all one winter? Arry went on chopping.

“
Seeds’re popping,” said Con,
appearing suddenly at her knee. She had brought the fire and the
wood in, laid the wood, started it burning, and melted the butter,
and Arry had never seen her.

“
Let me look at your feet,” said
Arry.

Con sat down on the floor and thrust her legs out in
front of her. Her feet were dirty, but not cut or bruised.

Arry got up, carried her piece of wood over to the
fire and scraped the large onion pieces into the butter. They made
a fury of bubbles and sent a fine smell up. It was odd that
chopping an onion into little pieces and tossing it into hot fat
didn’t hurt it in the least. Even pulling it up out of the ground,
though it made Arry wince, did not hurt the onion. Not that Arry
knew. She shoved her mush of onion and potato into the pot. Con,
without being asked, had gotten the wooden spoon and at once began
stirring.

Arry stood there with the board dangling from one
hand, dripping starchy oniony juice on the floor, and wondered if
she should ask Jony if it hurt onions to be pulled up. Or roses to
have blight. Or grass to be gnawed by sheep or oats to be cut at
harvest time.

“
Doubt,” she said
fiercely.

Con looked over the pot at her, shocked.

“
Never mind,” said Arry; and she
yawned.

“
Are you coming to school today?”
asked Con.

Arry began to shake her head, and then remembered
that she had missed part of school yesterday, and that Halver had
promised to find out about Con for her. She nodded.

“
Because Tany says he knows when
he
hurts, but other people don’t hurt.”

“
Tany’s only four. He doesn’t know
anything.” Arry felt cold just the same. Tany was Niss’s youngest,
and those children all knew things before their time. Everybody
said so.

“
Why’s he
say
it, then?”
demanded Con.

“
We’ll ask Halver,” said Arry. “Go
see if Beldi’s awake.”

Beldi was not awake and did not want to be awake.
Con suggested dumping the cats on his head; Arry decided that it
was Beldi’s turn to miss school, and put the cats outside lest Con
be tempted past bearing.

They ate their potatoes and onions. Arry wondered
when there would be eggs to put in with the morning meal. Nobody
knew about hens just at the moment, though the ones that lived at
Niss’s and at Mally’s seemed to be going on as usual. Sune had read
about hens, and the book she used seemed less doubtful than some of
her other books. Arry could ask her, anyway; then both of them
would at least share what the book said, though Arry could not be
said to know it. She felt sorry for Sune, doomed to believe what
she read whether it was true or not.