The Dubious Hills (14 page)

“
It’s just peppermint. However she
may have obtained it.”

“
That’s all right, there was some
in the kitchen,” said Arry.

Oonan put the mug down on the floor and ran both
hands through his damp red hair, so that it looked more like a
bird’s nest than ever.

“
What happened?” said
Arry.

“
The wolves came again,” said
Oonan. He almost always peered intently at the person to whom he
was speaking, but he addressed these words to the floor. “They left
the sheep alone this time. They ran me up and down the meadow until
the sun came up and after, until the moon went down.”

Arry felt as if she had been running herself. “What
then?” she said.

“
I can’t tell you,” said
Oonan.

“
But the moon was
down.”

“
Yes.”

They looked at one another. “All three wolves?” said
Arry.

“
No, the two smaller ones.” Oonan
was talking to the floor again.

“
The large one came here last
night,” said Arry. “And took me for a walk to—and made me stay with
it. Until the moon went down.”

“
I think you should watch with me
tomorrow night,” said Oonan.

“
Or you should sleep with me,”
said Arry.

Oonan laughed; after a moment, so did Arry.

“
I’m afraid,” said Oonan, “that if
they come to the sheep and I’m not there, they’ll do more
damage.”

“
Are you?” said Arry. He still
would not look at her. She added, “I’ll come by—when?”

“
I think just after sunset should
do nicely,” said Oonan. “Grel says the moon doesn’t properly rise
at all tonight.”

“
Did they hurt you?”

“
You know they didn’t.”

“
There’s something going on inside
you.”

Oonan raised his head and looked at her much as Con
had just looked at him. “Have you talked to Mally?”

“
I have. She wasn’t very
helpful.”

Oonan hit his forehead lightly with the heel of his
hand and looked stubborn. “I can talk to her again,” offered Arry,
with a despairing thought about what she could do with Con this
time.

“
It won’t break anything,” said
Oonan.

“
I will, then. Do you want
something to eat?” Oonan started to shake his head, and then looked
at her. “I think I might,” he said.

“
Whom shall we ask?” said Arry,
and leaving him laughing she went into the kitchen. Scones, cheese,
honey. If Con really wanted to be helpful, she ought to speed up
the process, whatever it was, that was the reason one soaked beans
overnight before cooking them. Arry put three pounds of beans to
soak and came back out with a tray. Oonan, his eyes closed, had
leant his head against the wall behind him. His face was hollow,
like a field after harvest. Arry put the tray down quietly, and he
opened his eyes at once.

“
I’m going to try to put Con to
bed,” said Arry.

“
I shall stifle my natural
instincts, then, should I hear screams,” said Oonan.

Arry found Con asleep at the foot of Beldi’s bed,
wrapped in her towel. Beldi was in Con’s bed, curled up tightly,
her bed being too short for him. Arry thought he was asleep, but
when she bent to blow out the candle left reprehensibly alight, she
saw the gleam of his eyes.

“
I’m sorry I fell asleep,” she
whispered. “You should have waked me. Was she much
trouble?”

“
Not as long as I did what she
told me,” said Beldi, also quietly.

“
Did she tell you not to blow out
the candle?”

“
It’s in a saucer of water,” said
Beldi.

“
Do you want your bed
back?”

“
I’d like it back
tomorrow.”

“
You shall have it, then. Go to
sleep.”

“
Go to sleep yourself,” said
Beldi, as Arry had always said to their mother.

“
Put your nightcap on the shelf,”
said Arry.

“
Put your heart in sleep’s soft
hands.”

“
Loose your mind in dream’s dread
sands.”

Beldi smiled and closed his eyes, and Arry went back
to Oonan. He was feeling better, but his heart still thumped. Arry
sat down.

“
Arry,” said Oonan. “Are you
thinking of having a baby?”

Arry blinked at him.

“
I was,” she said, “but it would
be such a lot of trouble. And Con and Beldi wouldn’t like somebody
else’s moving in with us.” She added, since Physici, Akoumi, and
Gnosi must be honest with one another, “And it would
hurt.”

“
You’re too young,” said Oonan.
“No,” as she frowned at him, “I don’t mean you are too young for it
to happen, I mean you are too young for it to happen well. Your
body isn’t settled.”

“
Well, good,” said Arry, “since
I’d decided against it for now anyway. When would I be old
enough?”

“
Four or five years, or
six.”

“
Is this everybody, or
me?”

“
It’s you, certainly,” said Oonan.
“It’s everybody in varying degrees. Not many girls should have a
baby at fourteen.”

He was looking at her intently. Arry tried to stare
him down, until she realized what really concerned him, and began
to laugh. “No,” she said. “I’m not falling in love with anybody,
either. Who is there, really?”

“
It’s a question that has
exercised me for several years now,” said Oonan.

“
Shouldn’t it be exercising
Mally?” said Arry, a little absently. Then she said, “There’s
nobody for you either, is there? Or for Halver. Why?”

Oonan said, “We know too much.”

12

Wim came by the next morning while Arry and Beldi
and Con were eating a belated breakfast. Con let him in and brought
him into the kitchen. Arry had decided they might as well go back
to eating there, but she wished Con had not brought a visitor while
the cobwebs and dust of the room’s long neglect were so tawdrily
displayed by the bright sunshine. Wim was tall enough to get
cobwebs in his hair, and wide enough that the piles of discarded
objects were in danger from his elbows.

Arry offered him some tea. He thanked her and sat
down, which made the room seem bigger, if no less tawdry.

Con had been staring steadily at him ever since she
brought him in, and now, just as he lifted his mug to his mouth,
she said,
“You
don’t need walnut juice.”

Wim drank some tea and put the mug down. Of course,
he had small children too; in fact, he had Lina, and Tany, and Zia
herself. Nothing Con could say was likely to make him so much as
blink. He said, “It makes a good dye for wool.”

“
I mean
you
don’t need
it,” said Con. “You’re brown enough.”

“
Who says so?” said Wim, flicking
a glance at Arry. Her mother had sometimes looked like that at her
father, when one of the three of them—usually, as now, Con—said
something strange or outrageous. She felt suspended between being a
parent and being a child.

Con said, with a fair degree of impatience and less
courtesy than Arry would have liked to hear, “Zia does.”

“
Ah,” said Wim, and drank more
tea. “It’s Zia who sent me,” he added, giving Arry a glance of a
sort she did not, this time, recognize. “Since school won’t start
until the moon changes, she has a plan she needs you
for.”

Zia’s plans were invariably dirty, disruptive, and
productive of other plans that, in the end, led to loud
disappointment on somebody’s part, often Con’s. Arry didn’t care.
They were proposing to take Con off her hands— and Beldi’s—for an
entire day and possibly, if past experience could be a guide here,
the night as well.

“
I’ll come right away,” said Con,
and started to scramble down from her stool.

“
She says you must have had a good
breakfast first,” said Wim, not looking at Arry at all this time.
He addressed Beldi. “She needs you, too, Beldi, if your elder
sister can spare you.”

His elder sister had not considered it one way or
the other. She nodded vigorously. Beldi looked less than
willing.

Hurt again, thought Arry. She said, “I do need him,
but I can manage by myself, if he wants to go.”

“
Zia says it’s a very large plan,”
said Wim. He did not seem apprehensive. “She’s asking for Tiln and
Jony and Elec as well; children of all sizes.”

This was probably what had been making Beldi
reluctant: not knowing if he would be spending his day with five
or ten Cons. He said, “If Arry can manage, I’ll come.”

“
I can,” said Arry. “Do
go.”

Beldi nodded, and went back to his oatmeal. The
three of them went out shortly after that, Con chivvying the other
two along and leaving Arry with a table full of dirty dishes. She
went out to the well, frowning.

The outside was much warmer than the house, and
damp, and full of green sappy flowery scents. The birds were as
noisy as children. There were more crocuses under the pine tree
than there had been yesterday, vivid and precise and delicate as
one of Tiln’s paintings. All around the well the white starry
flowers of Bedlam and the small blue squills were blooming, that
yesterday had looked like so much rank grass. Arry trod as
carefully as she could, getting her water.

When she turned back to the house she saw that the
ivy her father had planted and the woodbine her mother had made
them leave alone when they found it climbing up the house had both
come out in tiny leaves. The woodbine held the new ones bristling
over the bed of red leaves it had dropped the autumn before. Con
had raided the red leaves even before they came off the vine, in an
attempt to make a pair of boots out of them; but she had not taken
them all.

Arry took the water back inside to the stuffy
kitchen, started the water heating, and opened all the windows. By
the time she had washed and dried and put away all the dishes and
repaired or disposed of a great many objects, the kitchen looked
the same except for an area of cleared floor about two feet by
three, and she was both ravenous and very disinclined to stay
inside any longer. She took cold potatoes and a selfishly large
lump of cheese and a couple of withered apples, of the same
vintage as the red leaves, and sat down on the front step to eat
it all.

The black cat came down out of the pine tree,
stretched all four legs in four directions, yawned, trotted over,
and hooked a pawful of cheese out of her hand. Arry looked at her.
“Are you pregnant again?” she said. Sheepnose, having bolted the
cheese, turned her back and began washing her whiskers.

Arry sighed. When the Woollycat had her kittens, Con
and Beldi had taken the cat up to Oonan, and Arry had gone as far
in the other direction as she could walk in a morning, following
the river until it disappeared thunderously down a rocky falls.
When Sheepnose had her first litter, Arry’s mother had still been
here, and had attended to everything, with Arry crouched in the
bedroom, pillow over her head and fingers in her ears, though the
only noise the black cat made was panting, and the minute cries of
the kittens had been untroubled.

She rolled an apple core over the rocky ground to
Sheepnose, who sniffed it, gave her a look of profound disgust, and
went back up the pine tree, never crushing a single crocus.

Arry sighed and got up. Another round of visits,
asking questions and getting new questions, or the answers to
questions she had not asked. Sune first, she supposed, and then
Mally.

Most of the mud had dried. New flowers were
everywhere in the rocks, all the early blooms you would expect in
March or April now hurrying to catch up with the weather. And where
there had been brown stalks, or rusty red seed heads, or nothing,
were new green and yellow-green and new dark red, where later
flowers would open. Stonecrop, yarrow, goutweed, alyssum, rock
cress, wormwood, bellflower, tickseed, willow grass, fleabane,
catmint, soapwort, sage, meadow sage, lavender, goldenrod,
lambsear, thyme, and speedwell.

Arry fetched up with a violent jerk, as if she had
missed her step on a rocky slope. The path was flat and solid. She
sat down on a rock and shut her eyes hard. No wolves, she thought,
and almost giggled. No flowers? If Halver could turn into a wolf,
could he turn into a clump of alyssum? She opened her eyes and
looked back along the path. The long, feathery leaves of the yarrow
were known to her, at this moment, not because Jony had said so
every spring, but because she knew. Maybe she should talk to Mally
first. But looking the other direction, she saw Halver’s house
looking back at her, all its windows shuttered. Sune was just down
the next hill. Arry got up and went on.

She went past Halver’s house in a hurry, with her
breath and heart pounding as if she had been running for miles. She
felt better, for no known reason, once she was out of its long
morning shadow. She went on down the hill, admiring the daffodils
that edged this part of the path, and the new chickweed sprawling
where the mud had been. Jony said chickweed was good in salads, but
Con wouldn’t touch it. Arry stopped walking. She looked at the
chickweed again. Jony said that was chick- weed. Arry knew nothing
about it.

“
I hate this,” said Arry, invoking
Con; and she went on up to Sune’s door, which was shut. It had no
knocker. Arry banged on it with her fist. In Sune’s willow tree a
lot of house finches were squabbling. After a few moments she
knocked again, and this time felt as hard as she could for any sign
of hurt. Nothing. The house finches burst in a body out of the tree
and flashed off like a batch of Lina’s bubbles, in brown and white
and reddish-purple. Arry went down to the willow, and around its
massive trunk.