The Dubious Hills (27 page)

“
You said that was my
province.”

“
We share it,” said Oonan. “A
foolish arrangement, but there you are.”

“
Oonan, who does say what is whose
province?”

“
Well,” said Oonan, stopping on
the path that led up to Halver’s house, “we suspect it, Mally
confirms it, and then we all say it for ourselves.”

They stood watching Mally and Niss stride up the
hill, still arguing, and Beldi and Con struggle up behind them, not
talking any longer. Con wore a distinctly lowering expression.
Beldi looked resigned.

“
Has it occurred to you,” said
Arry, “that many of these things were easier when we didn’t think
about them?”

“
Yes,” said Oonan.

Mally and Niss arrived. “We’ll ask him, that’s all,”
said Mally.

“
That won’t prove a thing,” said
Niss.

“
Oh, yes, it will,” said Mally.
“Halver doesn’t lie.”

Con and Beldi labored up to them. “What are you
standing around for?” said Con.

Oonan turned and walked up to Halver’s shut door and
knocked upon it.

“
I want to see my mother,” said
Con.

“
So do I,” said Arry.

Oonan knocked again.

“
She always had a good reason for
everything she did,” said Mally.

“
And she’s supposed to tell us
what the reason is,” said Con. Arry, focusing knowledge on her, saw
to her surprise that Con was feeling far less hurt and hollow than
she had been. Well, after all, Frances had not just looked for Bec,
she had found him, and both of them were alive, and perhaps even
well, bodily anyway, whatever might be wrong with their
minds.

“
She can’t tell us the reason for
not wanting to see us,” said Beldi, “if she can’t see
us.”

Oonan knocked again.

“
She could have told Oonan,” said
Con, sitting down on a rock.

“
I think she did,” said Beldi,
“only not in so many words.”

“
Well what is it then?”

Oonan walked around the side of the house, where he
could be heard calling Halver and banging on windows.

“
No school today?” said Niss to
Mally.

“
We thought it better,” said
Mally. “I suppose he might be helping them get the oats planted.
It’s not very like him.”

Oonan reappeared around the opposite side of the
house. “I don’t think he’s there,” he said.

He was not visiting Sune, either; nor was he helping
to plant the oats. He was nowhere. They looked for him; they even
got Blackie and Oonan’s two dogs to help them. But they did not
find him.

20

Early afternoon found them footsore and bewildered
back at Mally’s house, eating cold leftover party food and soothing
a wild-eyed Tiln, who had been left too long with too many small
children. Mally devoted most of her attention to devising
amusement for the small children in question and in feeding
everybody, but from time to time she would murmur, “I don’t
understand what he’s doing.”

“
Frances said they were outside
all provinces but life and death,” said Oonan. “If Halver is also,
then of course you wouldn’t know any longer what he would
do.”

“
I know that!” Mally snapped at
him. “But experience, memory, and reason must be good for
something.”

“
For all their sakes you’d better
hope they are,” said Oonan.

“
For all our sakes,” said Mally,
still snappish, “you had better hope they are. It would take a
powerful lot of knowledge, Akoumi, to repair this entire
community.” Arry got up from the table where she was sitting with
them and made her way to the corner settle where Niss was eating
her lunch and staring at nothing.

“
Those coats,” she said. “What
would be best to do with them?”

“
I can’t disenchant them,” said
Niss. “I can keep them safely; there isn’t, on the coats
themselves, any compulsion at all, and the charm itself requires
free choice to fuel its operation.”

“
Could we burn or destroy them?
They don’t seem likely to to do other than hurt, do
they?”

Niss looked rather shocked. “They’re very fine
work,” she said. “And dreaming of being a wolf hurts nobody, does
it?”

“
I don’t like the conditions,”
said Arry. “It’s asking for trouble. Especially if Halver is going
to disappear like this. Once people have slept under the coat three
times, how long have they got to report to Halver before they die,
for mercy’s sake?”

Niss frowned. “Now there’s a curious thing,” she
said. “I didn’t notice; perhaps I was careless, but it makes me
wonder.”

“
Say that again,” said Mally from
the table.

Niss obediently repeated what she had said; Mally
said, “Didn’t notice what?”

“
Arry asked about those who have
slept under the coats, in what space of time they must report to
Halver lest they die; but I couldn’t say.”

Mally chuckled. Then she laughed. Then she leaned
her head on her hands and wheezed. “Oh, Halver,” she said finally,
wiping her eyes.

The rest of them looked at her; Arry thought they
all had expressions very like Beldi’s. Mally said, “This is not a
threat; it’s one of Halver’s lessons.”

“
Go on,” said Oonan, a little
blankly.

“
Are shapeshifters immortal?”
Mally asked Niss.

“
Those of Wormsreign are,” said
Niss. “I don’t know about the Lukanthropoi. I should have to look
at one and see the shape of the spell—if it is a spell at
all.”

“
Assuming they are,” said Mally,
“then the lesson is obvious.” Seeing that they were all regarding
her as blankly as Oonan had spoken, she added, “If you know Halver.
Remember the traps in logic he used to lay, Oonan. If one does not
report to Halver to be made a wolf, one will die—in time. Not as a
direct result of failing to deliver oneself, but as the natural
end.”

“
And yet of course it
would
be a result of not delivering oneself, if the wolf
spell confers immortality,” said Oonan.

“
If it does,” said Niss, “there’s
a price for it.”

“
Loss of knowledge,” said Oonan.
“Halver and Frances and Bec all told us that.”

Niss frowned a little. “It’s usually blood,” she
said.

“
Mally,” said Arry, “are you
certain?”

“
I’ll sleep under Tiln’s coat
three nights running and not go to Halver after,” said
Mally.

“
But will you let Tiln do
it?”

“
No,” said Mally. “Any more than
Frances and Bec would let you.”

“
Keep the wolf far hence,” said
Arry.

“
I’d advise it,” said
Niss.

Oonan got up and walked the length of the room and
back again. “Why has Halver vanished?” he said. “What sort of
lesson is that?”

“
From time to time he leaves his
pupils on their own,” said Mally. “This is not reason and memory,
Oonan: this is knowledge.”

Halver did, too, do just that: memory told Arry he
did; but she felt uneasy, and she could see that Oonan was not
altogether believing either. She thought about it, eating one of
the honey-and-walnut crescents that Mally and the children had made
last night, or rather early this morning. “Are immortal people out
of nature?” she said.

Everybody looked at her; nobody answered. “If they
are,” Arry said to Mally, “would you know what they were like?”

“
Nature has nothing to do with
it,” said Mally.

“
It has everything,” said
Niss.

“
How so?” said Mally; Arry had
never heard her sound so haughty.

“
Define nature,” said Niss, like a
flash.

Mally began to laugh again. “The nature I deal with
is not the nature you deal with,” she said. “Let be.”

“
Why are you arguing?” said
Arry.

“
Now that,” said Mally, turning
from Niss, “is a worthy question. I am arguing because I feel the
foundations of my knowledge shook. Niss is arguing for precisely
the same reason. And that is why you are asking such large
questions.”

“
I’ll ask you a smaller one,
then,” said Arry. “Why did Halver hurt Jony?”

“
If he did,” said Mally, “it was
to teach her something.”

“
What?”

“
I think you would have to ask
Jony,” said Mally.

“
If you come along with me,” said
Oonan as he passed them on one of his trips down the room, “you may
do just that. I must look at that arm.”

Arry got up. “Can Con and Beldi come too?” she said.
She had some hope that Mally would offer to keep them longer. Oonan
also looked at Mally; but she said nothing.

“
Why not?” said Oonan at
last.

Arry fetched them from the kitchen, where they were
(they said) building a library out of all Mally’s pots and arguing
with Zia and Tany about where they would get the books to put in
it. They did not seem to mind leaving. They ran ahead of Oonan and
Arry, chasing the blue butterflies that were suddenly everywhere
and shouting and singing the silly songs of spring.

“
I don’t feel somehow,” said Arry,
staying with Oonan’s more sedate pace, “that we’ve accomplished
anything at all; I feel as if we were going backwards. I’d have
known better what to do a few days ago than I do now.”

“
Must you do anything?” said
Oonan.

“
There’s hurt here, a great deal
of it.”

“
Quite often, you realize,” said
Oonan as they came down the last slope before Jony’s house, “when
you find it, you turn it over to me to fix.”

“
You don’t seem to know how to fix
this kind.”

“
I’m not sure it indicates a
breakage,” said Oonan.

“
Well, I can’t abide
it.”

“
Ah,” said Oonan; and then they
were at Jony’s house.

Jony was sitting in a willow chair padded with
blankets, scowling at a pair of knitting needles and a ball of
blue wool. When Oonan called to her, she looked relieved; then,
when she saw his entourage, she looked a little alarmed.

“
You needn’t offer us tea,” said
Oonan, dropping to the ground beside her chair, on the side with
the bandaged arm. “Niss and Mally have given us plenty already.
In any case, this is a visit of knowledge. May I look at your
arm?”

Con and Beldi came up quietly on Jony’s other side,
big-eyed, not quite avid. Oonan looked at Arry.

“
It’s very sore,” she said, “but
not throbbing the way they do. I’d wager, Oonan, you won’t find any
infection.”

“
I wouldn’t wager against you,”
said Oonan, unwinding the bandage. “This isn’t the one I put on
last night. Has Niss been at this?”

“
She said you gave her such a
scolding for not changing the one on Tany’s foot the time he trod
on the flint arrow, that she would change this one every hour and
you could—” Jony stopped speaking, but she could not help grinning
at Arry, who smiled back.

“
That’s not what I meant,” said
Oonan. “Has she been at it with magic?”

“
What do you think?” said Jony.
“It doesn’t need Mally, surely, to tell you the answer to
that?”

“
I wish she wouldn’t, until I’ve
seen what there is to see,” said Oonan, laying bare the long red
wound all neatly stitched with black. “It puts a fog in my
way.”

He wrapped his finger in a fold of the bandage and
prodded delicately at the edges of the wound. Arry flinched. When
he looked at her, she shrugged. The pain was not bad, but the wound
should be let alone. Oonan did in fact let it alone after that,
dabbing on a little more of the ointment of goldenrood, rewrapping
the clean bandage and warning Jony about a variety of things she
should watch for. Then he said, “What precisely happened?”Jony
said pleadingly, “I told Niss already, and Mally, and Halver. I
told you, too, Arry, last night.”

“
Halver?” said Oonan. “When did
you see Halver?”

“
This morning,” said Jony. “I was
looking for the early chives, and the watermint, down by Sune’s
part of the stream.”

“
What was he doing?” said
Oonan.

Jony eyed him a little warily. She did not often
hurt herself, and had not even as a smaller child; but it did
probably seem likely to her that such questions were no part of the
Akoumi’s business. She answered him patiently, in the same way
Arry had heard her speak to Tany. “Sitting on the bank of the
stream eating an oatcake,” she said. When Oonan did not seem
satisfied with this information, she added, “He was dressed for
climbing, and he told me that since Jonat’s sudden determination
to put the oats in had given him a holiday, he was going to walk as
far as he liked and see where it took him.”

“
How did he sound?” said
Oonan.

“
Like Halver,” said
Jony.

Con and Beldi had gotten bored as soon as the
bandage went back on. Arry made sure she knew where they
were—making a pile of slate over where a great piece of it was
crumbling out of the ground—and sat down on the ground by Oonan.
“You remember Mally says there are at least three Halvers?” she
said to Jony. “The jolly, the stern, and the quizzical?”