The Dubious Hills (17 page)

“
What?” said Oonan.

“
Oonan. Who knows about
Unicornish?”

“
Sune, I suppose.”

“
That’s all?”

“
I believe so. Frances did, of
course.”

“
That wasn’t her knowledge, was
it?”

“
Language was,” said
Oonan.

“
Was that why she never lost her
magic?”

“
Possibly. I’d ask
Mally.”

“
Why don’t you ever
ask
Mally, then!” snapped Arry. “My asking her doesn’t do an oatgrain’s
worth of good.”

“I
don’t want to be informed of all these things,” Oonan snapped
back.

Arry let her breath out and rubbed her eyes. The
light falling in the door was brighter. “Did I wake you up?” she
said.

“
Maybe a little,” said Oonan, in a
smiling voice.

They sat on in silence. Arry was afraid to let her
mind wander, lest somebody else’s certainties flood it again. She
supposed she must ask Mally about this. She blamed it on Halver,
but that might not be right. “Oonan?” she said.

“
What now?” said Oonan, sleepily
but not unkindly.

“
Who knows about the workings of
the mind?”

“
It’s a field of knowledge that’s
divided into small plots,” said Oonan, still drowsily. “I know
somewhat, Mally knows somewhat, so does Sune; so, of course, does
Halver.”

“
So he does,” said
Arry.

Oonan sat up; she could feel him looking at her.

“
Afterwards,” said
Arry.

Oonan stood up all the way and began pacing the
floor again. Arry watched him. They did this for a very long weary
while. Arry’s chin bumped her chest. She pulled her head back up,
blinking. A great dark shape came through the open door, darted
past Oonan, and seized the blanket of the bed in its jaws. Arry
shot off the bed. The large wolf gave her a brief considering
glance, curled its lip at her, and dragged the blanket back out the
door.

“
What was that all about?” said
Oonan. He had stood quite still while the wolf came in. “Was that
your wolf?”

“
Yes,” said Arry. “And you’ll see
in a minute.” She remembered the wolf's leading her to Halver’s
house and vanishing into the other room so that it could reappear
clothed. People bathed in the streams all summer with nothing on
whatsoever; but perhaps wolves felt differently about such
things.

Nothing happened for some time. Then Arry twitched
all over and almost fell off the bed, and at the same moment Oonan
tripped over something and bumped the wall, or at any rate that was
what it sounded like. They had not heard the wolf come, but in the
quiet after Oonan bumped the wall they heard the sound of a bare
foot stirring the gravel, and then someone was standing in the
doorway, blocking all the light.

Oonan went into one corner and lit a lantern. He
stood up, holding the light out before him, and made a sound as if
somebody had hit him in the stomach.

“
Oh, yes,” said Halver. He had
wrapped the blanket around himself, and looked rather like Beldi
playing Prospero in the autumn celebration of the Descent of Doubt.
“It’s I, O Akoumi. And how will you fix this?”

“
What’s to be fixed?” said Oonan;
this was a ritual response, but he moved suddenly after he said it,
as if he had not meant to speak, and then he put the lantern down
in the middle of the floor and said sharply, “Shut the door. It’s
getting cold out.”

“
Is he cold, Physici?” said Halver
to Arry.

“
Very,” said Arry, almost at
random. Why, she thought, they don’t like one another. She felt
cold herself.

Halver shut the door.

“
Arry,” said Oonan. “Is this the
wolf you saw before?”

“
Yes,” said Arry.

Oonan said to Halver, “Where are the other two?”

“
Hunting,” said Halver,
calmly.

“
Release me from the oath I swore
them.”

“
I cannot.”

“
Then tell me one sufficient
reason that I should not break it here and now.”

“
Because you are not a breaker,”
said Halver.

“
You swore Arry to secrecy as they
did me?”

“
I did,” said Halver.

Oonan took two awkward steps and sat down next to
Arry. “What did he tell you?” he said. “What happened?”

Arry said, “I’ll tell you later, in the light.
Halver, what do you want?”

“
I am a teacher,” said Halver,
“and I will teach as I must.”

“
How did this happen?” said
Oonan.

“
Why, Akoumi, don’t you know?
Cannot you tell merely by looking what it is that has deranged my
form and so disposed my hours that I must sleep by day and in the
night prowl with the fox, the barn owl, and the shrew?”

Oonan moved beside Arry, and she looked at him. In
the light and shadow made by the lantern his eyes were very wide;
he was biting his lip and staring less at than right through
Halver. “Tell me how it happened,” he said, not quite steadily.
“When children fall and skin their knees, I know what’s to be done,
but I still ask. And I ask you.”

Arry did not recognize that line, but it too had the
flavor of ritual. Halver seemed to think so too. He raised his chin
a little, so the shadows moved over his face. “In the pursuit of my
duty,” he said, “I went out last month with Sune and Wim to
consider the motions of the moon.”

“
Sune shouldn’t have been tramping
about the hills,” said Oonan indignantly. Arry put her elbow gently
into the nearest available part of him, which turned out to be his
own elbow; she winced and he twitched, but he didn’t say anything
more.

“
Sune turned back early,” said
Halver, with no matching indignation. “Wim and I went on. Then Tiln
came to say that Zia wouldn’t go to bed until Wim had told her the
thirteen-times table. So Wim made sure I remembered what he had
told me and what Sune had read to us, and he went home with
Tiln.”

He sounded more like himself now. Arry tried to
listen as if he were ill or injured. He did not sound either. He
was tired and rather cold; the blanket was scratchy and his hand
still itched. He was neither sweaty nor feverish nor afflicted
with a headache. He was saying, “I climbed up to the top of the
cliff there, and sat on the edge to watch the moon rise. I was
running over in my mind what I would teach tomorrow, thinking
especially about Con. You may remember, Arry, that she was not
amenable to learning to count past ten.”

Arry nodded. Halver said, “They came up behind me as
silently as the moon rising, and one of them bit me here,” and he
put a hand up to the right side of his neck, “where the neck joins
the shoulder.”

Arry put her own hand up to where her neck joined
her shoulder, and clenched her teeth. Halver sounded as if he meant
it.

“
Then they sat, one on either side
of me, and did not let me get up,” said Halver.

“
Did it bleed much?” said Oonan,
in his brisk, reasonable way, not at all the tone he had been
using. “You haven’t a scar—I don’t recall seeing a wound at all.
You didn’t consult either of us about it.”

“
No,” said Halver, with a tinge of
mockery in his voice that Arry did not much care for, “it didn’t
bleed much. They sat with me until the moon went down; then they
trotted off into that clump of aspen, the one Mora fell out of last
October,” he said to Arry, “and just as I had stood up and was
rubbing the bite and wondering what to do, two people came out of
the aspen; and they talked to me until dawn.”

Does he think I don’t remember what he said to me,
thought Arry, or does he think I’ll keep quiet to see what he says,
or does he know I can’t tell Oonan afterwards no matter what I say
I’ll do? She did want to see what Halver would tell Oonan, and she
did keep quiet. Oonan said, “Talked to you of what?”

“
Disenchantment,” said Halver,
softly.

Next to Arry, Oonan had become perfectly still, not
something one could often observe in him. He was a fidgeter; he had
as much energy as a five-year-old. Arry blinked, hard. No, she
thought. Whatever you are doing, whoever you are, no. That’s
Mally’s province. It isn’t mine. Pain’s mine; where is your
pain?

Oonan said, just as softly, “Whose
disenchantment?”

“
Those who choose,” said Halver.
“Or are chosen.”

“
Which do you propose for
us?”

“
I have given Arry the means to
choose already. I give it you also. What Physici, Akoumi, and Gnosi
wish to do with the rest of them, we have the power to
effect.”

“
Or will, should we choose
disenchantment.”

“
Or will,” said Halver.

“
Yet you’ve chosen us
already.”

“
Mally always said you should have
been a poet,” said Halver; his tone was light but not, thought
Arry, as pleasant as he would have liked to make it. “I chose you
that you might choose, if you like.”

“
You won’t bite us, then, as you
were bitten?”

“
Do you think that is the
mechanism, then?”

“
I know it,” said Oonan, and all
the fine hairs on Arry’s neck stood straight up.

“
And what does that avail you?”
said Halver.

Oonan continued very still. He did not answer.
Halver stood where he was, with the lantern making his yellow hair
shine, and said nothing either.

Arry said, “What about the breaking of history?”

She made Oonan jump. Halver did not move.

“
What about it?” said
Oonan.

Arry looked at Halver, who said, in precisely the
tone he would use at school, “How does our history begin?”

“
With the War of the Sorcerers’
Schools,” said Arry, almost without thinking.

“
Go on,” said Halver. “You had
this, I believe, two years ago; let us see how your memory has kept
it.”

He always said this, or something very like it; but
there was a sound in his voice that made Arry look hard at him. He
was still standing on the other side of the lantern in the dusty
gray blanket, arms folded across his chest, as always when he was
awaiting a recitation. Arry swallowed carefully, and began.

“
Four hundred years ago, the four
schools of wizards were fighting each other, for reasons nobody is
sure of to this day, because whenever anybody tries to find out,
the wizards all start fighting again. Four hundred years ago, they
had been fighting for seven years, and some of them got tired of
it.” She paused. “Sune says,” she added.

Halver shifted his bare feet on the hard earth
floor, in a movement, when performed in boots on the carpet of the
schoolroom, that usually meant you had waited too long to attribute
your sources. Arry didn’t think she had. She went on.

“
These some—there were eight of
them in all— went quietly away to the Kingdom of Dust, which has no
wizards, and there they sat in some tents lent them by the Dusters,
and all through spring when the desert bloomed and summer when it
blazed and autumn when it bloomed again briefly, they talked about
what made people fight at all, and how they might make people stop.
Sune says all of this,” said Arry, “and Karn and Grel and Wim say
the weather in the Kingdom of Dust’s desert is indeed like that and
has been so for perhaps six hundred years.

“
And when they thought they had
found a way, they went to the Dubious Hills, which then were just a
place that the Dusters did not claim because the water you could
find there was not worth the weather that made it, and the rocks
were bad for their horses’ feet. It was also a place the Hidden
Land did not want because they thought it would grow only oats; and
a place the people of the Forested Slopes held in derision because
all its trees were stunted. It was called the Sheepcots, when
anybody bothered to talk about it, Sune says, and so do you,
Halver.”

This got her no reaction at all. She added, “You
said that the people here called it the Small Hills, because, Sune
said, they came from the mountains north of the Secret Country and
the hills looked small to them,”

“
And they did,” said Halver, in a
curious tone Arry had never heard from him before; she wished Mally
were here to label it. “Indeed they did look small.” Arry waited to
see if he would say more, but he just sat down abruptly on the
floor, rearranged the blanket, and said, “Go on,” just as he always
said it.Arry collected herself and did so. “The Sheepcots had
wizards, but these were not wizards who had ever gone to school,
and they were too busy raising sheep and coaxing their oats along
to bother about the fighting wizards. Sune says.

“
The Eight thought this country
would suit them perfectly. So they put on all the people there the
spells they had drawn and written and sung and carved, to make the
nature of people such that people would no longer
fight.”

Arry stopped, and Halver said, “Well?”

“
So we are as we are,” said Arry.
“And we don’t fight, either.”

“
Why, then, didn’t the Eight put
this same spell on everybody? On the people in the Hidden Land, and
Fence’s Country, and Druogonos?”

Arry had never thought about it before. “Nobody ever
said,” she answered.