The Dubious Hills (12 page)

“
Oh, no,” she said, with what
breath she had. “No wolves.”

She looked over her shoulder, and the mild meadow
smiled back at her. Her mother had once taught her a charm against
the nightmare, which she said worked for as long as a child had
need of it, even if the child’s other magic had waned already. She
said shakily, “You spotted snakes with double tongue, thorny
hedgehogs, be not seen; Newts and blindworms do no wrong.” She was
getting her breath back. “Never harm,” she sang, “nor spell, nor
charm, come our lovely lady nigh. So good night, sing lullaby.”
Which was funny enough in the bright morning that she laughed, and
got up, and went on. But she kept an eye on her shadow, in case she
should see another following it. She could not decide whether to
see Halver as soon as she had delivered Con, or to avoid him as
long as she could, while she gathered more stories.

Mally’s door was shut. Arry beat on it with the
knocker. She could hear the dog barking inside, but nothing else
for a long time. If Tiln had his knowledge, perhaps they had stayed
up late drinking to it. She banged again. It was not early by
anybody’s standards but Oonan’s.

“
They’re putting the beans in,”
said a shrill voice behind her.

Arry gripped the knocker hard, and managed not to
jump visibly. She turned around. It was Mora, Mally and Jonat’s
youngest; she was Con’s age, but they did not often play together.
They would do it today, if Arry had anything to say about it.

“
Are you all by yourself?” she
said.

Mora wrinkled her nose. Even so young, it looked
like Jonat’s formidable beak. “Blackie’s here,” she said.

“
But he’s in the house and you’re
outside.”

Mora looked guilty. “I was
going
in,” she
said.

Arry gave up any notion of leaving two children with
the dog instead of one. Suggesting that Halver let school out for a
few days had not been so fine a thing as she had thought.

“
You go in, then,” she said, “and
I’ll find Mally. I was hoping Con could come play with you
today.”

“
She likes Zia,” said Mora, with
finality. “I’m not brown enough for her.” She was in fact
greeny-brown like Jony, and her hair was much the same shade as her
skin.

“
I didn’t know Con demanded
brownness in her friends,” said Arry, rather
haphazardly.

“
Mally knows, though,” said
Mora.

There was no arguing with that. “Well, I’ll go talk
to her, then,” said Arry. She stood waiting, and after a moment
Mora opened the door, went into the house, and shut the door
again.

Arry set off down the hill for the bean fields. It
was getting warmer. As she came down the hill into the plowed
field, the heat hit her in the face as if she had leaned very close
to a fire. She passed Lina sitting on a rock, eyes closed, face
fierce. She was chanting, “Sumer is icumen in, lude sing
cuckoo.”

That spell was so old the language had changed since
somebody wrote it down. Arry went by her softly, and stood at the
bottom of the slope looking at the figures scattered over the
tumbled dirt. Most of them were small; but there was Mally. Arry
walked along the path until she was at the end of Mally’s furrow.
It was hugely and impossibly hot. The sun and sky could not have
made it so hot down here. Arry waved, and after a moment called.
Mally unstooped herself and came briskly along the furrow to Arry.
Her face was damp and shiny and red. Her white hair looked like a
hundred seeding dandelions after a rainstorm. She seemed extremely
pleased.

“
Why is it so hot?” said
Arry.

“
Beans need warm soil, but we
really couldn’t wait any longer to plant them if we want three
crops. Lina may be overdoing it a bit. Have you come to
help?”

“
I can’t today. I’m seeking
knowledge. I wondered if Con could come play with Mora, but Mora
says Con thinks Mora’s not brown enough. And two of them with only
the dog might mean mischief.”

“
Send her here,” said Mally.
“We’ll see if she can make the beans fly through the air and bury
themselves in the proper places.”

“
I will, then,” said Arry, a
little faintly. “Thank you. I wanted to ask,” she added, as Mally
showed signs of going back to work, “if she told me aright, that
you’ve given her very powerful spells and think she may not lose
her magic at all, and grow up to be a wizard.”

“
I told you I thought she might be
a wizard,” said Mally. “There’s no knowing until the time comes. I
do think she may never lose her magic.”

“
Doesn’t that always mean a
wizard?”

“
No,” said Mally. “Your mother
never lost hers either.”

“
She wasn’t even born
here.”

“
It’s the water,” said Mally. “The
earth, the air, something. Born doesn’t matter.”

“
Mally, do wizards, or people who
are going to be, hurt differently than others?”

“
How should I know?” said Mally,
gently enough.

“
Isn’t that a part of what they’re
like, a part of their character? Wouldn’t you know?”

“
You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”
said Mally.

Arry looked at her. Not being Mally herself, Arry
did not know what Mally was like. But she had experience; and her
experience told her that it was unlikely, after such an exchange,
that Mally would answer the question, no matter how long she was
looked at.

“
I’ll send Con along,” said Arry,
and turned back up the hill.

Lina had stopped chanting, and when Arry drew level
with her, she opened her eyes and said, “Is it hot enough for
you?”

“
Yes,” said Arry. “But I’m not a
bean.”

“
Beans like it hot,” said Lina.
“Beans hate it cold.”

“
So I understand,” said Arry, and
went her way. Having dispatched Beldi, scowling, with Con,
protesting, she sat down on her own front doorstep and thought
about the order of her visits. She thought Sune had agreed to come
by for those old clothes of Con’s, but she could not remember. She
could take the clothes to Sune, find out what stories Sune knew
about wolves and what Sune thought of the stories Mally had lent
her; then, when she had nothing to carry, she could go the long
hilly way to Derry’s house and ask about wolves. Vand or Derry
would give her honey and oats and possibly some aged cheese if it
were ready, and milk if there was any and Sune hadn’t had it all.
Oonan lived close to home: she could take him in last of all, and
if she were lucky he would give her some tea.

It would have been much easier just to go to school.
Sune was sitting in her rocking chair and spinning, as she had been
before; but she had moved the rocker outside into the sunlight. On
her bent head the short, smooth yellow hair glowed like the flame
of a well-tended lamp. When she heard Arry coming, she looked up.
Her face was a little puffy, and she felt generally puffy as well;
nothing hurt at the moment, though, and the baby was quiet.

“
Oh, thank you,” said Sune,
looking at Arry’s basket of clothes. “Just put them inside the
door.”

“
They’re not as tidy as I
remembered them,” said Arry, coming back out and sitting down in
the grass by Sune’s chair. “Con was very vigorous with
them.”

“
Knot won’t mind,” said Sune.
“Maybe by the time she’s old enough to notice I’ll have made her
something new.”

“
Have you thought of her whole
name?” said Arry.

“
Well, I’ve been thinking what
Knot would be short for, but it’s heavy going. Nottingham,
Nostradamus, that’s all I can think of. We might make a joke of it,
I suppose. The Unicornish for knot is kathamma. That might be
pretty.”

Arry wondered if they would be able to ask Tiln. She
had not asked Mally about him, nor seen him in the field. She said,
“My mother said our grandmother was called Kath.”

“
That would be from Katherine,”
said Sune, nodding. “That’s a common Hiddenlander name.” She
smiled. “If I wanted a double joke, I could call her
Katherine.”

The baby kicked her.

“
Or maybe not,” said Sune. Then
she smiled in a startled way, and Arry laughed, because what Sune
had just said was a joke, too, but she had not meant it so. Sune
put down her spindle and looked at Arry. “You wanted me to think on
those stories, didn’t you, and read more of them?”

Arry nodded.

Sune said, “Some of them are history and some are
mighthavebeens. But for the moment we’ll put them all together and
call them stories. If we do, we see that they aren’t of a kind.
Some of them are about parents leaving, and what happens to their
children; but only some. That’s what you asked Mally about, isn’t
it?”

Arry nodded again.

“
So she wants you to think not
just about parents leaving, but what kind of occasion that is. All
I can see now is that all these stories are about change, change of
every kind, and what people do when it happens. Some of them make
it happen. And—I wonder if Mally meant this—many of them are about
the kind of cruelty the Eight Shapers wanted to make impossible. It
never happens here; none of us could do those things.”

“
Thank you,” said Arry,
faintly.

“
Think about it,” said
Sune.

“
I will. I also wanted to ask,
have you any stories about wolves?”

“
I had most of them from Derry,
who knows better than I,” said Sune, “except for one book from
Fence’s Country about the Lukanthropoi.”

“
The what?”

“
Wolf-people,” said
Sune.

Arry felt cold. “What are they?”

“
A strange sort of shapeshifter,”
said Sune. “They turn to wolves at the full of the moon, and they
change whether they will or no. Prospero thinks it a curse of the
Unicorns on oathbreakers; Chalcedony writes that it is one of the
failed spells from the Wars of the Sorcerers’ Schools; but their
accounts jar so it’s hard to know anything. I don’t like reading
them close together, but that is how one must.”

“
Do you think,” said Arry, she
could not tell why, “that the stories might be mighthavebeens and
not history?”

“
I’ve thought of it,” said Sune,
“but—” She frowned.

“
I have never found anybody who
understood this,” she said. “Some things I read I know are true;
some things I know are not; but many may be either, and then
there’s only feeling, like one thread in a carpet. My feeling says
there is history here. But sometimes a thing might
feel
true to me, not because it is, but because the writer believes it
is.”

Arry stood up. “I have to go about and collect food.
Do you need anything?”

“
No,” said Sune, placidly. “The
clothes were all. I’m well provided otherwise.”

Arry went off thoughtfully. Sune was not obliged to
say who Knot’s father was, but Mally said Sune was the first mother
since Mally’s own great-grandmother who had chosen not to say. Sune
had no brother or sister to object if a father moved in with her;
but perhaps she liked her solitude. How strange it sounded, not
even to read a thing and know it, truly or falsely; how strange to
have a thing neither known nor denied, in the very field and center
of your knowledge. Perhaps it was hard to live with anybody else’s
certainties. She would have to ask Mally, in case this might hurt
one day.

Vand and Derry lived in a large stone house with a
slate roof. Wim said it was the oldest house in the Dubious Hills.
The path leading up to it was of slate too. Alongside the path and
in every crack it offered, the crocuses, like Arry’s, were
blooming. All of these were purple. Vand and Derry’s three black
dogs lay in the sun by the front door. None of them got up, but
their eyes followed Arry. She banged the knocker, an iron bee with
outspread wings, onto the iron sunflower intended for this
purpose.

Derry opened the door, and smiled at once. “I
wondered where you were,” she said. “You three must be getting
hungry. Come in.” She was very tall, and large as well, with short
black hair and blue eyes and a nose like the curved bill of one of
her known birds.

“
I wanted to ask you some things,
too,” said Arry, following her into the kitchen, which the builders
of the house had put at the front. On the wooden table were a bag
of oats, a crock of honey, and a large wheel of cheese. Arry felt
cheered.

“
You forgot your basket,” said
Derry, putting the kettle on the stove and opening the oven door to
poke at the fire.

“
Oh, I did—I took some of Con’s
clothes to Sune in it.”

“
I’ll find you an old one.” Derry
spooned tea into a green pot and sat down at one end of the table.
“What did you want to know about wolves?”

“
Well,” said Arry. It struck her
that she wanted to know only about those aspects of the wolf that
Halver might manifest. “Just what you’d tell the children if Halver
asked you down to school.”

“
Didn’t you listen the last time I
came?”

“
That was the day Zia ate the
nightshade.”

“
Of course,” said Derry. “Well,
then.” She folded her large hands under her chin, and her face grew
vague. “Wolves live all over the world,” she said. “In the
mountains of Druogonos, on the plains before Wormsreign, in the far
frozen wastes both north and south, in the forests of the Secret
Country and the jungle of the Outer Isles and in our own hills.
They are of the family of dogs and foxes and jackals, as can be
seen by the skull and the foot and the tooth of all these. They may
hunt alone or in little groups or in packs of many. They run their
prey until they have tired or trapped it and then they
kill.”