The Dubious Hills (8 page)

They went without saying anything else, and Arry
went back to her own bed. But she stared at the dark for a long
time, and wondered if Oonan too had been visited. When she slept,
it was to dream of snarling sheep with dogs’ teeth and glass
hooves.

She sent Con and Beldi off to school in the morning
and walked over to Oonan’s house to ask him. It was a cold gray day
with a wind like the slap of a wet cloth. Oonan’s house was
entirely surrounded by sheep. They were quiet for sheep crowded
like that. Oonan’s two dogs, Mud and Water, and Mally’s dog
Blackie, and Jony’s puppy Mouse, were keeping them from spreading
out all over the hill. Arry pushed through them, paused to let the
puppy sniff her ankle, and put her head into the open doorway.
Oonan was lying on the cold hearth with his head propped on his
hands.

Arry sprang through the door, and the thump of her
muddy boots brought Halver’s gray dog, Wind, in from the other
room. It was not until the dog barked at her that Oonan turned his
head. He had blue circles under his pale blue eyes and you could
have counted his freckles, if you had nothing better to worry
about. He gazed at her vaguely for a moment; then his whole face
sharpened, and he sat up, looking like himself.

“
What’s the matter?”

“
Nothing,” said Arry. “I mean—I
thought something was the matter with you.”

“
Are you sleeping?” said
Oonan.

“
Are you?”

Oonan drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around
them. “Sit down,” he said, very patiently, “and tell me why you
came to see me.”

“
I wanted to know if you’d had any
more wolves.”

“
You may well ask,” said Oonan.
“We brought the sheep down in the afternoon, and Wim stayed with
them, and I went back up to the meadow.”

“
And?” said Arry, though she
thought she knew.

“
I had wolves, yes,” said Oonan.
“Two of them. Not the sheep. They came to see me.”

“
What did they do?”

“
You tell me,” said
Oonan.

Arry sat down on a stool. “They looked at you,” she
said. “As if they were thinking what was wrong with you. And they
went away.”

“
Is that all?”

“
First they showed you their
teeth.”

“
How many visited you?”

“
Just one. The big
one.”

“
The same?”

“
I think.”

“
Well, did it limp?”

“
Oh. I don’t—I think I would have
seen, but maybe not.”

“
Mine didn’t. They weren’t very
large, as wolves are said to go.” He rubbed his eyes. “There was
something wrong with them. Was yours in pain?”

“
No.”

“
I didn’t think mine were either.
Something other was wrong.”

“
That’s what I think about Con,”
said Arry.

“
It’s not what I know about
her.”

They looked at each other for a long time. The wind
blew the smell of muddy sheep in through the open door, and the
cold green smell of spring, and a thread of woodsmoke from some
more responsible person’s fire.

“
Who should we ask?” said
Arry.

“
We’d have to ask Mally. This is
outside the bounds of anything she’s said to me.” Oonan rolled back
and stared into his fireplace.

“
I was just to see Mally
yesterday. She gave me some stories.”

Oonan looked at her again, but said nothing.

“
I couldn’t tell if they were
knowledge or history.”

“
Ask Sune.”

“
I didn’t think,” said
Arry.

“
I’ll come with you. I want to ask
her what the books say about wolves.”

7

Sune lived in a small house halfway down the hill
from Halver’s. Usually she was up at the school most of the day;
but this morning they found her at home, spinning. Her back hurt,
her feet hurt, and her stomach was uneasy. As they put their heads
around the door, the baby gave an enormous kick. The spindle sprang
out of Sune’s hand and wrapped its yarn around the rocker of her
chair.

“
I’m going to call this one Knot,”
said Sune, a little grimly. She ran the offending yarn through her
hands, shrugged, and let it fall. “What is it? Is the baby
coming?”

Arry began to laugh. What else should Sune think,
with both the Physici and the Akoumi come to see her
unexpectedly?

“
No,” she said, after looking at
Oonan in case he knew something she didn’t. “Mally gave me some
stories, and I don’t know what they are.”

She handed the cedar box to Sune, who said, “There’s
tea in the kitchen,” opened the box, and began to read.

Oonan went into the house’s other room and came back
with three mugs on a tray. Sune had the only chair, and all the
cushions, so Arry sat on the hearth rug. Sune moved her lips when
she read, and frowned heavily— not from the baby, who had quieted
down again. She took the mug Oonan handed her and held it without
drinking. Arry drank hers. Peppermint. Good for the uneasy stomach.
She wished Sune would drink some.

Outside a robin sang in the willows down by Sune’s
stream, and occasional bursts of laughter came out of the school.
Finally Sune looked up. “Why did Mally give you these?” she said.
She rolled them neatly as she spoke, and put them back into their
box.

“
I was asking her about Con,” said
Arry. “And if having one’s parents leave could be
hurtful.”

“
Ah,” said Sune. She had no lap to
lay the box in, and dropped it on top of her wool.

“
I can’t tell if it’s knowledge or
history.”

“
There’s something else,” said
Sune. “These are that.”

“
What’s it called?”

“
I don’t know. But I know it when
I see it.”

“
What else
is
there?”

“
Maybes,” said Sune,
incomprehensibly. “Might-have-beens.”

Arry looked at Oonan, who was in fact already
looking at her. Sune was the strange one, Mally had always said
so. Was she hurt or broken or simply herself, that was the
question.

“
I thought,” said Arry, “that you
knew what you read?”

“
I know about what I read, too,”
said Sune, rather wearily. It wasn’t the baby. Maybe she had told
Mally this already.

“
But not what it’s all
called?”

“
No. Nobody knows why I don’t know
that, not even Mally.”

“
Why would she give me these
books, then?”

“
Ask Mally.”

“
I mean, what’s in them that would
tell me what might hurt Con?”

“
I can’t think,” said Sune.
“You’re supposed to know what hurts Con already.”

Arry took a deep breath. “If there are other kinds
of hurt, I might not know it yet. Could these stories help me
know?”

“
I don’t see how,” said Sune. “But
I’ll read them again if you like.”

“
What do they tell
you?”

Sune considered. The baby kicked her again. She was
crowded in there, though not dangerously. “What does a chair tell
you?” said Sune. “Or wait, no, not a chair.” She thought some more.
“Think of the prettiest thing you can,” she said.

“
Sunset,” said Arry, cautiously.
They had no Kallosi at present, nobody who knew what was beautiful.
But Mally had talked to the the old one a lot; Frances said the old
one had been Mally’s sister. Frances said she herself had been
friends with a Kallosi in the Hidden Land.

“
Sorry,” said Sune; she felt, in
fact, rather happier than she had before. “Something a person has
made, the prettiest one of those you can think of.”

Arry thought of Tiln’s paintings; of the vest her
father had made for her when she was five, with triangles of blue
and green cloth in the shape of the sun and a mountain; of the
kaleidoscope Oonan had, that came from Druogonos with the milk
pans. She even thought about the milk pans. “Jony’s garden,” she
said finally. “Not now, but in July.”

Sune smiled. “Why?” she said.

She was acting just like Mally—though Mally wouldn’t
say so. But this was the field of Sune’s knowledge, so Arry
thought as well as she could.

“
When you come into the garden,”
she said, “you see the marigolds, all bright and crowded. And then
the daisies, white and crowded. And then you go around the side of
the hill and there’s the crabapple tree with the spurge and the
borage under it. The colors are different and they look
airier.”

She paused for breath. This was hard. You had to
remember what name and color you’d been told the flowers were, and
then say what you had seen. “Then you go around the next part of
the circle and see the long straight path with enormous white
lilies and the arch at the end of it with red roses all over it.
And through the arch you can see the water, and the purple
loosestrife. And if you go all the way through the arch and cross
the water on the stones, then you go along another path with red
lilies and through another arch that has white roses, and there’s a
birch tree with yellow lilies under it and then more marigolds, and
then you’re out again on the grass.” She breathed and looked at
Sune.

“
Why is that pretty?” said
Sune.

“
I’m not sure it is,” said
Arry.

“
Yes, of course you’re not. If it
were, though, why might it be?”

“
It’s the same and different at
the same time.” “Why is it prettier than the high meadow in
spring?”

“
Because it’s ordered.”

“
Ah,” said Sune.

Arry looked at Oonan. He shrugged.

“
So are the stories,” said Sune.
“More than history, and more than knowledge, the stories are
ordered. Also—” The baby kicked her again, and she caught her
breath. “This one doesn’t want to me think,” she said. “Also—you
can make a bigger order out of stories of the same type. Mally gave
you stories about children whose parents left. With them you can
make a pattern.”

“
I don’t know how to do
that.”

“
Mustn’t Mally know you can do
it?”

“
Oh,” said Arry.

“
Must she?” said Oonan.

“
Oh, not necessarily, I suppose,”
said Sune, irritably. Once again, the source of her irritation was
not the baby, not her stomach or her feet or her back. It seemed to
be Oonan.

Arry got up. Oonan said, “Sune, in the intervals of
being pummelled, might you see what the books say about wolves? In
especial their more strange behaviors with regard to approaching
people and with regard to things they choose not to eat?”

“
Did you lose some sheep?” said
Sune.

“
Two,” said Oonan.

“
The lambs?”

“
No, they left the
lambs.”

“
I’ll look as soon as I finish
this spinning. If young Knot’s to have a blanket to receive her, I
must be busy.”

“
We’ll leave you to it,” said
Oonan.

“
If you need other clothes,” said
Arry, “you could have some of Con’s.” Since there won’t be any more
babies in this family any time soon, she added silently.

Sune smiled. “I’ll come and look at them tomorrow
after school, shall I? I can bring your stories back then,
too.”

“
Yes, do,” said Arry, and they
thanked Sune for the tea and went outside. The wind pounced on them
hard. It had blown some of the clouds away and stretched the rest
across the sky like rags on a loom to make a rug. A blue and white
and gray rug like that would be pretty, thought Arry. But how do I
know that? Do I know it?

“
What now?” said Oonan.

“
I expect I should go to
school.”

“
Or to sleep.”

“
School’s easier.”

“
Go, then. I’ll talk to you after
Sune’s told me about the wolves.”

“
Or if you think of anything about
Con.”

“
Well, yes,” said
Oonan.

He turned and went back down the hill, past Sune’s
little stone house and into the willows, his jacket flapping in
the wind and his red hair blown straight backward. Arry looked
after him until the wind made her eyes tear. Then she turned around
and stood with the wind at her back, looking up at Halver’s house.
She could go see Mally and ask if Mally thought she was good at
making patterns.

Or she could try making some and see how far she
got. She hadn’t read all the stories yet, either. But what of the
ones she had?

“
It was the mothers that left,”
she said, to the mud and the rough pink speckled rocks and the
tentative green around them. “And the fathers found new mothers
and they were all cruel.” But her father had gone first, and her
mother after him; nobody had gone and brought Arry home, she had
been home already, she was one of the children. She shivered inside
her jacket, the jacket her father had made. Was the cruel mother
coming? But who should choose her?

She thought she could guess what Mally would say
about her talent at making patterns. Mally said school could teach
you most things. She walked up the hill through the mud and went
into the school.