The Dubious Hills (10 page)

Arry had begun to relax by this time: there seemed
no hurt here. She read on through the triumphant cooking of food
and forging of metal and baking of clay, until the dragon went back
out to the bright black spaces, because it was too hot now where
the people were. There the dragon met the great powers of the
outside, who asked her what she had done with the star. When she
told them, they were angry. And they took the dragon and put her in
the hottest place they could find, and chained her to a rock, and
sent an eagle every day to eat out her liver.

Arry stopped.

“
Is that all?” said
Con.

Arry squinted at her. She looked unalarmed; in fact
interested.

“
Did it hurt the dragon?” said
Beldi.

“
I’m sure it did,” said
Arry.

“
Why were they angry?”

“
I don’t know, it doesn’t
say.”

“
Is that
all
?”said
Con.

“
How could it eat her liver more
than once?” said Beldi. “Do dragons have lots of
livers?”

“
It says it grew back so the eagle
could eat it again.”

“
Oh.”

“
Is that—”

“
Not quite,” said Arry, resigning
herself. “‘And this is the fate of teachers, the best of which do
their job featly just the same.’”

“
That’s all,” said Con,
contentedly, and she wormed her way down from Arry’s lap and hurled
a pinecone across the room.

The cats had long since fallen asleep on the hearth.
Woollycat opened one eye, stretched, and subsided again. Con went
over to poke their bellies and generally stir them up before they
were ready, and Beldi said, “Is that really the fate of teachers?
Will an eagle come and eat out Gnosi Halver’s liver?”

“
I don’t think so,” said Arry.
“I’ll ask Mally, shall I, and Sune; they know about these
stories.”

Beldi looked at her with no expression, nodded, and
went away into the room he shared with Con. To the sounds of Con
harrying the cats around the room, Arry began to read the fifth
story. It was about a strange faraway place where it was never
night except once in ten thousand years, and the bizarre ways in
which people behaved when they were in darkness for the first
time.

She was in darkness herself now: the last light of
sunset was almost gone. The cats were back on the hearth in a
heap.

“
Con, Beldi,” she called, “did you
work your lessons?”

“
You said no school tomorrow,”
said Con from their room.

“
That’s not the same as no
lessons.”

“
But we can stay up far into the
night and work them, then.”

“
Only if we light the
lamp.”

There was a stifled pause. Then Con said, “There was
a time when meadow, grove, and stream, the earth, and every common
sight, to me did seem appareled in celestial light.”

The banked fire flared up like a hundred
sunflowers. The lamp at Arry’s elbow, two others awaiting
cleaning in the corner, the long-unused one by her father’s chair,
burst into brightness. Arry jumped out of her chair and ran into
the kitchen. Three more lamps, containing neither oil nor wick,
burned like the sun in August. Arry moved pillows away from them
and made certain there was nothing on the floor near them that
might burn. Then she turned to go deal with Con, and found Con at
her elbow, looking smug.

“
Con, what did you do?”

“
It’s a spell,” said Con. “Niss
gave it to Mally, and Mally gave it to me. Mally said sometimes
stronger spells work until you’re seven or eight. She said some
people don’t ever lose their magic at all.”

“
Did she say you were one of
them?”

In the brilliant light, Con’s face took on a look
that Arry instantly pegged as untrustworthy, though character was
not her province and she did not remember seeing it on Con before.
Con said, “I am one of them.”

Arry bit her lip until the urge to reiterate her
question had passed. “Do we have to have all of them burning?”
she said, as temperately as she could manage. “It seems a bit of a
waste.” She was sorry as soon as she had said it, but Con’s face
did not fall.

Con said, staring hard at the three flaring lamps,
“Turn whereso’er I may by night or day, the things that I could see
I now can see no more.”

The lamps went out. Arry turned fast, feeling
frightened; but the glow from everything burning in the other room
was still there. She went back to it, and Con went with her. After
a while, Arry remembered to thank her.

Con and Beldi did stay up far into the night working
their lessons. Arry sat in the chair and pretended to read more
stories. She had had enough for the time being; she felt like an
overrisen loaf, and expected to collapse into a flat puddle of sour
thoughts at any moment. Just before she roused herself to hustle
Con and Beldi off to bed, she did page through the green-covered
book and find one very short story that looked as if it might not
bite one’s mind. It was called “King Conrad and the Forty-Nine
Advisors,” and was a tale of the Hidden Land. Arry read it with
considerable satisfaction. Then she packed Con and Beldi off to bed
(where they were willing to go by then, although they put up a
protest to retain their dignity), and fell blankly into bed
herself.

She woke suddenly to a cold gray light punctuated
with the howling of wolves. Arry got up in a hurry, entangled in
her quilt, and made sure Con and Beldi were still sleeping. Then
she stood for a moment until she thought she had located the howls,
and pressed her nose to the glass of her bedroom window.

She jumped back before she could govern herself. The
largest wolf was right outside the window. When it saw her, it
stopped howling. Once again, it stared at her with a disapproving,
bitter scrutiny that no wolf's face was made to express. Arry
stepped forward again. Was it hurt?

The wolf held up one front paw. She could see
nothing amiss with it in the moonlight, but it might well have
festered; or perhaps she had not gotten quite all the thorn out; or
the thorn had carried dirt or irritant sap into the wound. Any of
those was quite possible. She knew nothing, but with the glass and
the walls of the house and this being a wolf and not a fellow
person, she might not know unless she were closer, as she had been
on the night she took out the thorn.

She would have to go out, and go out in such a way
that the wolf would stand no chance of getting in.

She put on an assortment of warm clothes over her
nightgown, and went into the main room to get her boots from beside
the fire. She picked up the poker, and put it down again. It had
not hurt her before; why should it hurt her now? Because it’s a
wolf, Derry would say, and that is its nature.

She put on her boots and went to the door. It opened
inward, unfortunately. The wolf howled again, from the back of the
house. Well, then. Arry moved the bolt back, opened the door a very
little, slid herself through the smallest opening, and shut the
door. It was cold out. The moonlight made it colder. A little wind
searched out the vents in her strange assortment of garments. With
a slither of fur and the click of claws, the wolf came around the
side of the house and stood still, looking at her.

Then the wolf came towards her, not quickly. Arry
clenched her hands in the pockets of her jacket and stayed where
she was. The animal padded right up to her and pushed her shoulder
with its nose. Arry heard herself squeak, a foolish sound.

“
What?” she said.

The wolf pushed again. Arry turned her back on it,
which made her stomach hurt though her stomach was not injured in
the least, and took a few steps. It slid past her and trotted
ahead, just like a huge dog, except that it did not wag its tail or
even look over its shoulder to see if she were following.

She followed. They came to the top of a hill; the
wolf stopped and sat down. Arry, who was out of breath, stopped
too. All the houses she could see were dark. The moonlight made
them like toys to hang on your winter tree, little and shining. She
wished it would do the same to the wolf, but the wolf was too
close, and breathing. She thought about its paw again. It was a
little sore, perhaps.

“
Let me look at your paw,” she
said, frightening herself even as she made the words.

The wolf, unperturbed, held up one paw without
looking at her. Arry squatted down and took it. Yes, this was the
one, healing well but still tender.

“
Maybe you shouldn’t walk on
that,” she said.

The wolf turned its head and stared her in the eyes.
Its breath dampened her cheek. Its eyes were green, were red, were
silver in the moon. It exhaled suddenly in a sound that was not
exactly a growl. Arry sat down just as suddenly, in startlement;
and the wolf made a sound that was nothing like a bark, a kind of
strangled wheezing, like somebody trying to laugh with no breath
left.

The path was damp. Arry put her hand on a cold rock
and got up again. The wolf gave another wheeze or two, and getting
up itself it went trotting down the path, tail waving. Arry went
after it. She hoped Con and Beldi wouldn’t wake up and go padding
around in the dark looking for her.

Up hill and down and up in the chilly spring night,
where the mist lay on the new grass and the trees rustled their new
leaves. The wolf was going to Halver’s house. Was Halver hurt, had
the sliver in his hand festered, had the wolf hurt him—and come for
help? Arry snorted under her breath; the wolf never looked
back.

The door to the schoolroom was open. Firelight and
lamplight slid out and made a strange green and gold square in the
dim moonlit dark.

“
Halver?” called Arry; it seemed
wrong to let a large wolf walk over his threshold without giving
some sort of warning.

The wolf looked over its shoulder at her and then
trotted briskly into the house. Arry followed, taking the time to
kick off her boots and leave them on the rug by the door. The wolf
was leaving muddy footprints all over.

The lamp was in the schoolroom, the fire in Halver’s
room beyond. Arry had seldom been there. She put her head around
the edge of the door. The bed was empty, flat and smooth. The
window was open. The clothes Halver had been wearing earlier were
folded and stacked on the clothes-chest.

The wolf was sitting in Halver’s red chair; Arry’s
mother had made that one, as she had made many of the chairs people
seemed to like best.

“
You’re getting that all muddy,”
said Arry. Her voice cracked. “Where’s Halver?”

The wolf lifted one front paw and licked at it,
delicately. It itched. Oonan would know if the thorn were all out,
if the wound would heal cleanly.

People broke in much the same ways, said Oonan; but
no two people hurt in the same way, each of them felt different
from all the others.

“
Halver,” said Arry.

The wolf came down from the chair and licked her
hand.

9

Arry sat on the floor with the mud Halver had
tracked in soaking through her nightgown, and Halver laid his large
hairy gray point-eared head on her knee, and they waited. She asked
him several times what they were waiting for, but he only growled a
little. She was puzzled because, aside from the paw, he was in much
less pain than he had been earlier today, when he was not a wolf.
Headache, irritation, sleeplessness, none of those troubled him in
the least. Arry tried to notice the other forms of hurt, the ones
she was just discovering; but with Halver in this form she could
notice nothing. She thought a great deal about wolves. Her mother
had told her that the Hidden Land had fought several great battles
with shapeshifters (nobody in Arry’s village knew about
shapeshifters), but none of those had been wolves.

Her left leg fell asleep. When she twitched it,
Halver growled again.

“
My leg’s asleep,” said
Arry.

Halver got up, walked around behind her to her other
side, and settled back in with his head on her right knee. The bar
of moonlight moved across the room. The fire burned low. Arry dozed
and woke and thought she stayed awake until a shrill outburst of
birdsong made her open her eyes. The sun had come up. Arry was
considering what might be the effect of announcing that she was
cold, when Halver shot to his feet and ran through the doorway into
the schoolroom. When she stood up stiffly, he growled. Arry stood
shaking the cramps out of her knees and listening for what he had
heard. The sun could slip only a sliver of light into this
shuttered room, and the fire gave no useful light.

Arry was assaulted by a sensation less like pain
than like an enormous dislocation, like the huge twitch one
sometimes gave just before falling asleep, having halfdreamed that
one had stepped too near the edge of a cliff and slipped. In the
schoolroom, something rustled, and somebody two-legged strode
across the floor and stopped in the doorway.

“
Let’s have some light, shall we?”
said Halver.

He walked on past Arry, bent to the embers of the
fire, and stood up with a lighted lantern in his hand. He had put
on a black gown; Arry and Oonan each had one like it, for greeting
strangers, when there were any. He was barefoot. His yellow hair
curled over his forehead and around his sweaty neck. His head hurt,
his back hurt, his hand hurt. He was feverish.

He smiled at her. The light flashed on his teeth and
put a red spark in each eye. A man who had been a wolf was far more
a cause for unease than the wolf he had been.