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  Books by Pamela Dean

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  Tam Lin

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  The Dubious Hills

  Pamela Dean

  Blaisdell Press

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  THE DUBIOUS HILLS

  Copyright © 1994 by Pamela Dyer-Bennet

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote the following:

  Lines from “The Alchemist in the City” and “The Habit of Perfection” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (4th edition, 1967), reprinted by permission of The Oxford University Press.

  Lines from “Shared World” by John M. Ford, from Timesteps (Rune Press, 1993), reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 1993 by John M. Ford.

  Lines from “Procession Day/Remembrance Night: “Processional/Recessional” by John M. Ford, from Liavek: Festival Week, edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull (Ace, 1990), reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright © 1990 by John M. Ford.

  An excerpt from Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt is reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Copyright © 1990 by A. S. Byatt.

  Cover design by David Dyer-Bennet.

  First edition: Tor Books, April 1994

  This edition: Blaisdell Press, March 2016 V0.7

  Published by Blaisdell Press

  www.dd-b.net/blaisdellpress

  This edition of The Dubious Hills is dedicated to David Dyer-Bennet, without whom it would not exist.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  1

  Arry opened the door to call the cats. It was a cold night, but with a green spring cold, not the dry baked cold of autumn or the damp and penetrating cold of winter. The moon was full; it crowded out the stars in its half of the sky and put a thin blue skim-milk light over the mud of the yard, the slate stepping stones, the cover of the well, the lilac bushes with their new leaves—and there was the white cat crouched under the pine tree, from which during the day the squirrels teased her.

  Arry stepped outside, leaving the door open. The black cat shot around the corner of the house and through the doorway. The white cat yawned.

  “Come in, Woollycat, you doubtful beast,” said Arry.

  Woollycat got up and walked around to the other side of the tree. Arry’s mother had always said Arry was too tender of those cats, which were supposed to spend their nights outside working, catching rats and mice and the little sleek voles that ate the tender shoots of the new oats. Arry preferred to have the cats sleep on her feet, and she knew that cats loved to be warm. She stepped into the mud and squelched her way over to the tree.

  “Arry?” said somebody out of the dark at the bottom of the hill.

  Arry flinched. Somebody was badly hurt; somebody sounded as if he had fallen out of the tree and broken his back. She began to skid down the hill, calling, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Oonan,” said the voice, rather indignantly. How could anybody in that much pain be indignant? And oh, wonderful, it would be Oonan. Oonan was their Akoumi, the one whose province was broken things, and the fixing thereof; you could hardly expect him to repair himself—could you?

  “What did you do to yourself?” she said, arriving at the bottom of the hill.

  “Nothing.” His voice had pain in it and did not have pain in it. He was in her province but not in it. Arry was silent, and Oonan added, “I didn’t think you’d still be awake.”

  “I was cutting Con’s hair. Can you walk up the hill, or should I get a light?”

  “I’m not hurt, Arry; I just needed to clear my head, and I knew I’d have to come by in the morning, so my feet led me here.”

  “Come and have some tea, then.” Arry began slogging back up the hill, trying a little harder this time to keep to the stepping stones. Oonan came behind her.

  “Why would you have to come by in the morning?”

  “Why did you cut your sister’s hair?”

  “If Con were a sheep,” said Arry, “she would sleep in a gorse bush. It was dreadful.”

  “It was pretty. It reminded me of your mother’s.”

  “Mother combed hers.”

  “Con’s looked smooth enough to me.”

  “She’d comb it on top and let it go all to knots underneath. She said she was counting them. She said she was having a race with Zia.”

  “So Zia’s won?”

  “Zia always wins,” said Arry, a little grimly.

  “Who says so?”

  “Zia,” admitted Arry, and they both laughed. Oonan’s laugh showed that his throat and ribs were right. His step showed his legs and feet were right. Arry wondered if he had been hit in the head.

  As they went through the door into the house, the white cat whipped between their feet, thudded across the wooden floor, and scrambled up the ladder into the attic. At least, thought Arry, she wouldn’t have to go out again looking for her later. She shut the door, and in the light of the lamps she had lit to cut Con’s hair she looked at Oonan.

  He was tall and thin, twenty years old last month, with a long nose and hair the color of maple leaves in the fall but the texture of a bird’s nest. He had not hurt his head. He was not in ordinary pain at all; but then why did he feel like that?

  “I lost two sheep,” said Oonan to the ceiling.

  He looked at Arry. He had such large eyes that he always looked surprised, but they were almost without color. “Wolves is what it looked like.”

  “Con can do a spell for—”

  “But it wasn’t wolves. I found wolves’ prints; Derry came up with me and said so. And they killed like wolves; but they didn’t eat. Wolves don’t do that, Derry said. Derry didn’t know what to think.”

  “Do you want me to come and look at them?” Arry asked hesitantly. Pain was her province; Death might come out of it, but she did not know Death.

  He tilted his head at her and let his breath out. “No,” he said. “If it happens again, perhaps.”

  Arry held her hand against the side of the teapot; she decided lukewarm tea was good enough, and poured him a bowl.

  “Sit down by the fire,” she said. “You’re cold. Where’s your jacket?”

  Oonan sat, and took the bowl from her. “I don’t remember,” he said; he sounded surprised. “Wait—I took it off, when I got up there. I’d been running, and then there was the blood.”

  He took a swallow of tea.

  “Why were you running? Did you hear the wolves howling?”

  “No, they were entirely silent. To my ears, anyway. I had a dream that woke me up.”

  He drank more tea and settled back in the cha
ir Arry’s mother had made, just before she went looking for Arry’s father. It was a good chair of its sort, but it creaked.

  “What sort of dream?” said Arry.

  “The sort that wakes you.”

  Don’t let me help, then, thought Arry, irately; then she remembered that he was not Con, not a child: he knew what he knew, and perhaps talking about his nightmares would not help him in the least.

  “At the end of the dream, all the sheep had gone,” said Oonan. “So I thought, what harm would it do to go and look at them? Do you understand about those times when you can’t be certain you banked the fire, and even though you think you did, you must go and look? I felt like that. So I went up to the meadow.”

  “Were they gone?”

  “No, they were all there. I counted them. But they were uneasy.”

  “Because you’d sneaked up on them in the night?”

  “No. They recognize me. It was cold, I thought it might be that; but they didn’t act cold. The meadow felt as if it were at the bottom of a well, and the moonlight was worse than darkness.”

  He shivered; but he was not cold. The fire was flushing all one side of his body. He shivered again. Arry got up and put on her jacket, and gave Oonan a blanket. He wrapped it around his legs without saying anything.

  Arry hugged herself under the red wool jacket and stared at him. He was whole and sound, yet in considerable pain. If he was afraid, it did not feel like fear—and anyway, Oonan wasn’t afraid of anything. He was the one who helped people have their babies, even though having a baby was a thing that hurt, and therefore was Arry’s province. Having a baby was rarely Oonan’s province, because it was rarely a thing that need fixing. But it frightened her, and it did not frighten him.

  What had happened up there in the meadow? The meadow was only a triangular flat space where the mountain, in a fit of absentmindedness, went out for a bit instead of down. On one side of it the rest of the mountain stood up like the tallest wall in the world; on all the others was the blue air, with the round hills everybody toiled up and down all day as small as stream pebbles at the bottom. Arry’s mother had liked it: she said it was the only place in three days’ walk where you could see what might be sneaking up on you.

  It was an alarming place in the dark—only it would not have been dark when Oonan went up there, but full of blue moonlight and strange shadows. More alarming, according to what he said. Rocks that looked like sheep, sheep that looked like bushes, and then moved; the few small trees like hands, flexing their fingers in the spring wind. Moonlight and shadow on the grass like a net to catch your feet; smooth ground roughened by shadows, rough ground made smooth by light.

  “Which way did the wolves come from?” she asked him.

  “The prints showed they came down off the mountain and went on down along the river. I didn’t hear them at all. The sheep and I were there, and then the wolves—if they were wolves—were there. They didn’t make a sound. I smelled the blood before I heard a thing, and then what I heard was the sheep, crying.” He put his bowl down on the flagged floor with a rattle. “They didn’t take any lambs,” he said.

  “Oonan, are you sure they didn’t get you too?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “You sound different than you feel.”

  “Grownups do that.”

  Arry did not say another word while Oonan finished his tea, folded the blanket and gave it back to her, thanked her and told her good night, and went away down the hill.

  2

  Arry had been dreaming about her mother, and when the sparrows squabbling in the eaves woke her, she thought for a moment that she was still nine and all was right with the world. But then she saw that her pillow was blue, not green as it had been then; and she remembered.

  According to Halver, today was the first day of May in the four-hundredth year since doubt descended. According to Wim, it was the second hour after dawn. But since dawn in its wandering way moved about, back and forth over the same small span of hours like a child looking for a dropped button, some of the leisured scholars at Heathwill Library (according to Mally they were leisured, according to Halver they were scholars, according to Sune there was indeed a structure called Heathwill Library) had named all the hours of the day from their own heads without regard to the shifting of the sun. By that naming, it was eight of the sand (according to Wim), sand being the way (said Sune) that the scholars (who were scholars, said Halver), numbered out the hours—

  “Oh,” groaned Any into her pillow, “I say, I do hate mornings. They make my head hurt.” She sat up, disentangling herself from her long (Wim), black (Wim), all- too (Arry) curly (Wim, who should not—said Mally— have known it) hair (Halver).

  “Shut up,” said Arry, panting slightly. “Just shut up. I wish I were nine again. I wish I were five. I am certain of nothing save the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination. Bah!”

  She got out of bed, and by performing her morning routine without thinking about it, managed to get herself washed, combed, dressed, and into the main room of the house. Her sister (said Halver), named Con (said Frances, their mother), who was five (Wim), knelt mumbling on the hearth. “I’m forgetting,” she said, without turning, when Arry came in.

  “You’ll remember again later,” said Arry, invoking their teacher Halver and her own experience. “Try once more. Or we’ll have to get Niss in here to start the fire, and she’ll laugh at you.”

  “Oh,” said Con, scowling ferociously all over her round face, “for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.”

  The neat structure of wood that Arry had built the night before took on flame like a garment.

  “There, you see,” said Arry. She looked at Con’s cropped head, and she remembered the other thing she must have in her mind today. Oonan had come and told her he had lost two sheep to the wolves—or rather, to things that left wolf-prints but did not act like wolves.

  Their brother Beldi, who was nine, came in from the kitchen, staggering a little with his full bucket of water. He filled the iron kettle with half the water, hung that over the fire, and put the bucket in its corner, where Con, after three false tries and a flood of tearful proclamation that she would never grow up if this was what it felt like, made the spell over the water that would keep dust and flatness and the invisible growers out of it.

  When the water was hot Arry made them oatmeal, with milk from Niss’s cow and honey from Vand’s hives. She felt a little odd about the honey; it was a gift, not an exchange. She had told Niss several times when the cow was hurt, so Oonan could fix it; but the pains of bees, if any, were beyond her; and the sting of the bees no longer hurt Vand in the least. Maybe Con or Beldi would know something that could help Vand, when they were older.

  After they had eaten she set the younger ones to washing the dishes, and went back to her own room to read over once more what their teacher, Gnosi Halver, had said yesterday. She was not very far into it when Con came shrieking through the door, dragging a huge-eyed Beldi with her. His chin was covered with blood.

  “Does that hurt him?” wailed Con.

  “What did you do?”

  “I hit him.”

  “I’ve told you and told you not to hit.” Arry crouched down to Beldi’s level and looked at his mouth. His lip was well and truly split. His round brown eyes blinked at her; but unlike most children who thought they might be hurt, he was quiet. Probably he thought Con was making enough noise for both of them. Arry put a firm hand on Con’s shorn dark head and shook it a little. Con stopped yelling but looked ready to begin again. “Why did you hit him?” said Arry.

  “I wanted to see what happened.”

  “I’ve told you and told you what happens.”

  “I forgot.”

  “That’s not the sort of thing you forget.”

  Con stared at her.

  “Mally says,” said Arry. “Now show me the hand you did it with.”

  Con proffered
it, still gulping. She had split the skin over two knuckles.

  “It did hurt,” said Arry. “It hurt so much it hurt you too. Now you both must go to Oonan and we’ll all be late for school.”

  “What do you want Oonan for?” said Con, looking with fascination at Beldi. “It’s not dripping much.”

  “I want Oonan because it needs must be sewn up like the burst elbow of a shirt,” said Arry, in their mother’s accents. “Now put your hurt fingers in your mouth, thus, and come with me.”

  “Gnosi says it’s dirty to put your fingers in your mouth.”

  “That depends on where they’ve been,” said Arry, hauling the heavy door of the house shut and shaking her head at the two cats who arrived, just too late.

  “Beldi’s mouth,” said Con.

  “Well, you think it over. Let’s go.”

  They went, followed by two hopeful cats, down the hill their house sat on, and along a rocky, muddy path, much rutted with spring rains, between their hill and Niss’s; and then around the side of Niss’s hill and up and down and up and down again and up once more to Oonan’s door.

  The door was open. The cats bounded through it, making enthusiastic noises. Arry followed with her brother and sister and found Oonan sitting on a pile of cushions staring at his fire. There was a cup of milk on the brick floor beside him. Both cats made for it, and bumped heads. Oonan tipped the milk onto the floor, and they began lapping busily. Oonan looked up. His face was sadder than usual; maybe he wasn’t really awake yet. He liked to stay up half the night, but most people who hurt themselves, he said, did it in the morning. Arry disbelieved him, but there was no use, said Mally, in telling him so.

  “Good,” Oonan said, when he caught sight of Beldi. “Something I can fix.” Arry remembered his lost sheep. Of course he looked sad. It was she who wasn’t awake yet; and no wonder, after wrestling with Con’s hair for half the night and listening to Oonan sound hurt when he wasn’t for the other half.

  Oonan got up and took the wooden box that held his tools from its corner. Then he sat Beldi down on the floor in the light from the southern window. “What happened?”