The Dubious Hills (6 page)

Arry poked around in the pantry and the root cellar
while Con was finding her socks and boots, which, along with the
rest of Con’s clothes, had a habit of scattering like spilt lentils
whenever Con took them off. Beldi would have to eat potatoes and
cheese. Arry went outside and dug in the leaves and old hay that
covered the garden. Cold May or not, the new onions were green as
emeralds. Arry stood there in the sharp wind, smiling, and pulled
up four of the thinnest ones. Beldi loved spring onions. He and
Mally and Frances all said so.

Con met her at the back door, wearing one red and
one brown sock. Her boots matched because this was the only pair
she had. “Aren’t you ready?” she said.

“
I want to leave Beldi the stuff
for his nuncheon, or he’ll feel deserted. Have you got your coat?
It’s cold.”

“
I want to get to school early and
talk to Tany.”

“
And I’ll talk to Halver,” said
Arry. “Where’s your coat?”

They set off finally with Con wrapped in an old
blanket of Beldi’s. The wind was fierce. The trees shivered in
their new leaves. Old and new grass together were whipped flat to
the ground. The sky was brilliant blue and full of minute clouds;
it looked as if the wind had broken them and would not let them
join again into the big clouds that brought rain. Arry didn’t mind.
It had rained enough for the year, Grel had said so.

All Con’s friends were playing in the mud outside
Halver’s house. Poor Halver was probably trying to drink his tea in
peace. He might not even have had time, yet, to delve in his
knowledge, his experience, and at a pinch in his books, to find the
answer to Arry’s question about Con. Arry was glad it was Halver
and not she who had to decide all this. Oonan and Zia and Mally had
a long-standing argument over whether the Gnosi, the Physici, or
the Akoumi had the most difficult task. Arry would have been
welcomed into the discussion, since difficulty and pain had a
common boundary; but she couldn’t see the use of it.

Con ran ahead of Arry and plumped down in the mud
between Tany and Zia. They both had very dark skin and very red
hair, Wim their father having come from the Outer Isles and Mally’s
mother Irene, their grandmother, from Fence’s Country. Every fall
when they gathered the walnuts Con would try to stain herself all
over to look like Zia. It never worked.

Arry left her there in the mud and went on up the
slope to Halver’s house. The door was ajar; she put her head
inside. Halver was indeed sitting on the floor with a mug of tea.
He was talking to Sune, who was showing him a large and raggedy
book with red edges and a drawing of a plant on each page. She was
flipping the pages rapidly, with a shocking disregard for their
fragility, but whatever she was looking for wasn’t there. No— Sune
thought it was, but Halver didn’t. Sune’s back hurt a little,
because of the baby.

Arry thought it might be better to go away, but as
she moved back in the doorway, Halver caught sight of her.

“
Come in, Physici,” he
said.

Sune looked up and smiled. She had a round face and
short yellow hair. “I’ve ruffled him up,” she said. She unfolded
her long legs and used Halver’s shoulder to help her stand up. Her
feet immediately began to hurt too. “You smooth him down.” She
started to bend, found it impossible, and gestured to Halver, who
handed her the book. Sune closed it and walked at Arry. Arry
stepped aside in a hurry, banging the door back against the rock
Halver kept there to prevent the door’s making a hole in his wall.
Sune went out, balancing carefully.

“
Have some tea,” said Halver, as
dolefully as if he were Con reporting some new loss of
memory.

There was something the matter with him. His head
hurt—no. His back, his eyes, his tongue, his knee he had hurt on
the mountain when Arry was two—no. What, then?

Halver smiled at her. “Sit down, do, have some tea.”
Arry sat, and he poured more tea into the mug Sune had left. “I
don’t know about Sune,” he said, still dolefully.

“
Of course you don’t,” said Arry,
in considerable surprise. “Mally does. Ask her.”

“
Mmmm,” said Halver, as he did
when the little ones worked their arithmetic
incorrectly.

Arry was nettled. She looked at him again, seeing
with the part that knew. His hand hurt him: it was swollen between
the thumb and the first finger.

“
What did you do to
yourself?”

“
Sliver,” said Halver, much more
cheerfully. “It’s what Sune was talking about. She wanted me to try
drawing it out with herbs.”

“
Wouldn’t it come out?
Oonan—”

“
It didn’t need Oonan at all,”
said Halver. “She’s had this in her mind for months, but nobody has
obliged by getting a sliver.”

“
She should talk to Oonan—or to
me.”

“
Ah, well.”

“
Do you want me to take it
out?”

“
It’s not in,” said
Halver.

“
Then why was Sune—”

“
In case any was left.”

“
But—”

“
Never mind,” said Halver, rather
tiredly. Was there something hurting him besides the sliver that
wasn’t in? Arry couldn’t tell, which nettled her even
more.

She said, “What about Con?”

Halver looked so empty of thought that she knew at
once he had forgotten her question. After a moment he said, in not
quite his accustomed tones, “You’d best ask Mally, I think. She
knows Con.”

Nobody knows Con, thought Arry. She contemplated
that thought. It was as if somebody had said— though nobody
would—that water was dry.

“
I will, then,” she
said.

She went outside into the sunshine, and pushed
through the crowd of children, and took the path for Mally’s
house.

5

Mally’s house was midway down a hill, dug half into
the slope, its windows facing south and west. Tiln had painted the
shutters flat red on the outside, but on their inside surfaces he
had painted what the view through each window would look like in
the middle of the best summer the Dubious Hills had ever seen. It
made Mally’s house a crowded place in the winter, especially
during February.

Even from the next hill, even scrambling through the
mud, Arry could see that the shutters were all open. She could make
out the fragmented views of what, in summer, would lie behind her:
rolling hills and rocks all covered with flowers and vines and
scattered with clean sheep, and a hot dark-blue sky with the sun
glaring halfway down like a child refusing to go to bed. She
looked over her shoulder. The new green grass looked back at her,
bare and precise, and the shadows of the land lay all the other
way. She was looking at the western sky, and the sun was still in
the east.

Arry went on down the hill, splashed through the
little stream at the bottom, and climbed on up to Mally’s house.
The path had flagstones, but the winter had moved some of them
about, and there was a lot of mud. Arry’s father would have had
something to say about the state of her boots.

The door of Mally’s house was open, too, and on it
was painted the neat flagged path with thyme blooming in its
crevices and sundrops glowing just like their name on either side.
Arry looked over her shoulder again; she couldn’t help it. In the
cracks of the path last year’s thyme sifted in gray crumbles. Where
the sundrops would bloom, crocuses had come up and budded but not
yet opened. Arry felt oppressed.

From the house came the sound of Mally singing. “In
May get a weed-hook, a crotch and a glove, and weed out such weeds,
as the corn do not love.”

This was a spell that did not work on children. As a
spell, in fact, it did not seem to work on anybody. It was more in
the nature of a reminder, perhaps.

Arry put her head inside the doorway. Mally was
sitting on the floor, on one of her own red rugs, sorting the
dried peas for planting. Her short white hair stood out around her
head like the puff of a dandelion. On the hearth the black sheepdog
moved his tail briefly.

“
Good morning,” said
Arry.

“
A lot of use you are,” said
Mally. She was talking to the dog; she always said that when people
came in. Your telling her what use Blackie was was not what she had
in mind. “Come in,” added Mally. “More mud won’t make any
difference at all.”

Arry came in, surreptitiously scraping her boots on
the threshold, and sat down on the red rug next to Mally’s.

“
Mind Tiln’s brushes,” said Mally.
Her own brown leggings were smeared with orange and
purple.

Arry moved her skirt. Tiln might paint a landscape
so well you would try to walk into it, but he was only twelve, and
he left things lying about like anybody else.

“
Is Con giving you trouble?” said
Mally.

“
Yes, she is.”

“
It stands to reason,” said
Mally.

“
Because she’s almost
six?”

“
Because she’s Con. She loved
doing magic. It made her the biggest one in your household, even if
she was the smallest in body. She felt as if magic were what she
knew. Think about losing what you know; then you’ll know how she
feels.”

“
What about all the other children
who lose their magic?”

“
They want to grow up,” said
Mally. “You have to lose your magic to grow up.”

“
But Con doesn’t want to grow
up?”

“
Do you?”

“
Don’t you know?” said
Arry.

“
You know when Tiln’s tooth hurts;
he doesn’t. Don’t you tell him?”

“
But you’re asking.”

“
Yes, I am,” said
Mally.

This was Mally’s knowledge, so Arry thought about
it. “I think,” she said after a moment, “that I already am grown
up. I run the house, I know what I know, and I keep making
questions that nobody can answer.”

“
Before you were grown up,” said
Mally, with a peculiar expression on her face, “did you want to
be?”

“
I didn’t think about
it.”

“
Never?”

“
Well—I wanted to find out what I
was going to know; but I didn’t want to know it right away. I just
wondered sometimes.”

“
And I wonder,” said Mally, “if
Con’s going to be a wizard.”

Arry looked at her hard.

“
I wonder if she’ll be getting her
magic back again. Wim’s cousin was like that: she never gave
anybody a moment’s peace between losing her child-magic and getting
her knowledge.” Mally added reflectively, “She was slow, too. She
didn’t get her knowledge until she was sixteen. Everybody thought
she wouldn’t have any.” It might be a long ten years, thought Arry.
“Does anybody ever really not have any?”

“
Not here,” said Mally.

“
Here where?”

“
In the Dubious Hills.”

“
What made them think she wouldn’t
have any, then?”

“
All the farmers,” said Mally,
rather angrily. “If it hasn’t come by now, it won’t come, they kept
saying. You’d think they of all people would know better. Jony says
half the time when you plant chive seeds they come up two or three
years later in the wrong place.”

“
Maybe oats are
different.”

“
Maybe.”

“
What happened to Wim’s
cousin?”

“
She was so angry at them all that
she went away to Heathwill Library.”

“
In the Hidden Land?” Arry was
always interested in the country her mother had come
from.

“
North of there. Fence’s Country.
Sune showed me the map.”

“
Sune was trying to show Halver
something in a book, but he didn’t believe it.”

“
He may know better,” said Mally,
without any apparent thought; then she dropped the last pea onto
her right-hand square of clean cloth and looked at Arry. “What was
she trying to tell him?”

“
I’m not sure. Something about
herbs. I didn’t notice; I wanted to ask him about Con.”

“
You haven’t really asked me,
yet.”

You wouldn’t let me, thought Arry. She said, “I
think there’s something besides the magic. I think our parents’
going away hurt her. Could that happen?”

“
If you don’t know—”

“
It’s not like a broken leg!”
cried Arry. “It’s to do with people and what they’re
like.”

“
Pain is your province,” said
Mally. “But,” she added, forestalling Arry’s getting up and
flinging out of the house, “there are some stories that may help
you.” She got up heavily and went into the other room.

Blackie stood up from the hearth and put his muddy
nose into Arry’s ear. She rubbed the coarse fur around his neck and
wondered why he wasn’t out with Wim. He didn’t hurt anywhere. Mally
came back with three books, one covered in red leather, one in
green, and one a collection of scrolls in a cedar box.

“
Is anything wrong with the dog?”
said Arry. “Oonan told Wim to keep him home today,” said
Mally.

She didn’t sit down again, so Arry got up and took
the books.
“All
the stories in all three?” she said.

“
You like to read.”

“
I’ve been missing
school.”

“
That,” remarked Mally, “is why
you should reconsider this notion that you’re grown
up.”