The Dubious Hills Read online

  “I hit him,” said Con.

  “Did you? Well, you’d better keep him happy while I sew this up, then. If he gets bored and fidgets at the wrong moment, it won’t be fixed as well as it should be.”

  Con looked helplessly at Arry, who was stricken with inspiration. “You may sing to him,” she said. “You may sing ‘I Had a Dove. ’”

  “I hate it!”

  “So does Beldi’s lip hate being split like a ripe plum. You sing. And next time you think about how you hated it, before you hit somebody.”

  Con, glowering, flung herself on her stomach on the floor between Beldi and Oonan and began bellowing into her brother’s face. “I had a dove and the sweet dove died.” Beldi beamed at her, as well as he could with his bleeding lip.

  Oonan got up stiffly, moved around Con, sat down on Beldi’s other side, and resumed getting his tools out of the box. The needle looked big enough to sew shoes with. The thread was as black as a sheep’s nose. He wiped them both with the potato liquor Jony made, out of the green glass bottle that came from Wormsreign. He threaded the needle, knotted the thread, and took Beldi’s chin in his hand. Con sang even louder, whether through duty or perversity Arry would not have wanted to say.

  She put her hands behind her back, squeezed them tight together, and watched the needle punch its first slippery red hole. The black thread followed it like a poisonous worm. Arry tucked her own lower lip under the upper one. This was not a situation in which informing the patient he was hurt would be useful. She just had to bear it. Beldi was perfectly happy. Con was well into the song’s second verse. She had better have the wit to start over again if she had to. Two stitches, three, four. Oonan made another knot and nipped off the thread.

  Beldi looked up at Arry and burst out laughing. “You look just like a rabbit!” he said. Con abandoned the tira-liras with which she had been filling out the end of the song, and laughed too. Arry untucked her lip.

  “Don’t go laughing like that all day, or you’ll undo all my good work,” said Oonan. He got up, still stiffly.

  His muscles hurt him; he must have been climbing too many hills.

  “What about Con’s fingers?” said Arry.

  Oonan walked over to Con and squinted at her hand. “Wash it,” he said. “And don’t go making mud pies until all this red—see, here—is hard and dark. Halver says that’s called a scab. It sits on top of the hurt tissue and keeps it safe until it’s healed.”

  Con went into Oonan’s kitchen to wash her fingers. Arry poured the rest of Oonan’s milk on the floor for the cats. Beldi said, “Was there a thing earlier that you couldn’t fix?”

  Oonan nodded, standing before his cold fireplace like an untidy tree. “I lost two sheep,” he said.

  “Maybe they’ll come home again,” said Beldi. “Gnosi says—”

  “No, not lost that way. They’re dead.”

  “What do sheep look like when they’re dead?” said Beldi.

  “Broken,” said Oonan.

  “Like my wagon?” said Con, returning. She shook water from her hands onto the cats, who leapt indignantly away and then circled, waiting to get back to the milk.

  “No,” said Oonan, thinking about it. “More like the tree the lightning struck last fall—remember?”

  “I can’t remember anything,” said Con, gloomily.

  “I can,” said Beldi, unwisely.

  Arry wondered if such a discussion was the reason Con had hit him in the first place. There might be no pain in the Dubious Hills, except in her, the Physici, but certain instincts to hurt remained. The History of Doubt denied this, but the History of Doubt was wrong.

  Arry knew this, though she would much rather not have. She knew that Oonan, too, often wished that he did not know what he knew. Pain and Death were among the things the Shapers had wanted to do away with. They had managed to preserve pleasure, but they had not managed immortality: they had created only ignorance of death, except in the Akoumi; and in a kind of slantwise fashion they had left knowledge of death in the Physici too. Ignorance is Bliss, they had said, and Halver said the same. Arry did not say that, but had not thought yet of what to say instead.

  Beldi added, “Derry says wolves don’t always come back.” Arry wondered if there were also some instinct to heal in all of them, not just in her. Beldi was looking at Oonan as if he wanted to sew up some part of Oonan not visible.

  “When will I get to say something?” said Con.

  “When you’re ten.”

  Con glowered.

  “Halver says.”

  “I really hate this, Arry,” said Con crossly. “Why can’t we keep our magic until we get our knowledge?”

  “Halver says, so we can play for a little between our first responsibility and our last.”

  Con seemed to consider this for a moment and then shrug it off as foolish. She said, “Can’t Oonan fix it?” Oonan looked amused. “No, my puppy, I can’t fix it, because it is not broken. It is what happens.”

  “But I hate it!”

  Oonan said again, “It’s what happens.” He looked rather helpless.

  “Con,” said Arry, “you and Beldi run along to school. You’ll really hate what Gnosi Halver says to you if you’re late.”

  “What about you?” said Beldi.

  “Tell him I am conferring with Oonan and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Wish I were fourteen,” said Beldi.

  “No you don’t. Go on, now.”

  They departed, leaving the door open. A damp, green-smelling breeze came in from outside. Oonan sat down, with a tremendous thump for such a thin person, in a tall carved chair, and waved at the other one. Arry’s mother had made those chairs, and her father had bought white cloth from the traders of Wormsreign and dyed it red and sewn and stuffed the cushions. The cushions were a little faded, and furry each on its right front corner where Oonan’s and everybody else’s cats scratched them. The chairs had darkened a little from their first pale pine-color, but were otherwise just the same.

  Arry sat down on the floor, almost in the damp spot left by the puddle of milk. “Did you lose more sheep, Oonan?”

  “Just the two,” said Oonan. “Wim says we can afford so many, or even three times so many. But I hate it.” His slight smile commiserated Con and mocked himself all at once.

  “Is Con really unbroken?”

  “Entirely.”

  “But why does she hurt?”

  “What?” said Oonan, with extreme sharpness. “Did she say her hand hurt?”

  “No, I don’t mean that. But doesn’t it seem to you that her hating what is happening must be a hurt also?”

  “If you say so, Arry, then it is so.”

  “But a hurt is a breaking, and if you say Con is not broken and I say she does hurt, then what?”

  Oonan leaned his bright head back against the red cushion of the chair and closed his eyes. “I’m older than you are,” he said, “but pain has precedence. Might we ask Gnosi?”

  “I’ll talk to him after school,” said Arry.

  “Good,” said Oonan, without opening his eyes. “Your head hurts,” said Arry. “Take some almond-water.” Willow-bark tea would be better, but Oonan wouldn’t drink it.

  “I will,” said Oonan. Still without moving, he added, “I’m going to watch with the sheep tonight.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “Can you bear it?”

  “Can you?”

  Oonan sat up with a jerk and glared at her. “This isn’t a spelling game.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I suppose you didn’t. Mally says people who perceive pain always talk oddly. I should have remembered. Meet me here at twilight, then.”

  Arry got up, shook out a foot that had fallen asleep, and went out.

  The sky was the faint color of Oonan’s eyes. The new green of the Dubious Hills was as flat as one of Beldi’s paintings. The grazing sheep were as still as stones. Mally said it was a late spring. It was
certainly cold yet, and the leaves on the thornbushes and the small trees beside the stream were as little as the ears of a squirrel. Arry stood still on Oonan’s worn slate doorstep. Nobody had had to tell her that the sky was the color of Oonan’s eyes, that the grass in this odd light looked like Beldi’s paint or that the sheep looked like the rocks that were everywhere on the hillsides. She had thought of it; but she didn’t know it as she knew that Oonan’s head and Beldi’s lip and Con’s skinned fingers meant pain. She had thought of these things; nobody had told her; were they true?

  Her own head hurt. That was true. Arry rubbed the back of her neck and walked briskly down Oonan’s hill.

  Gnosi Halver’s house was by itself, halfway (Wim said) along the road to the next fort of reason, which (Halver and Sune said) was called Waterpale. The people there did not raise sheep (Mally said), but fished and quarried stone and, either because of their proximity to the Hidden Land or a gap in their knowledge, used money instead of barter. Arry had two of their copper coins that her mother Frances had brought back. Each of them had square letters on one side, the same square letters, though nobody could read them. On the other side one coin had a running fox and the other an oak leaf.

  Arry stepped into a deep puddle, started, and looked around her. She had passed Gnosi’s house without seeing it and was therefore more than halfway to Waterpale. Return would be as tedious as go o’er, her mother used to say, before Con was born, when she would take Arry and Beldi berrying and Arry would whine at her for both of them that they were tired. She looked behind her. She was standing between two steep hills, which explained the puddle, and the muddy road stretched wearily up to the misty sky.

  Her feet were cold, though the water had not yet seeped through the seams of her boots. Arry stepped out of it slowly, on the home side of the puddle. She thought of a whole fort smelling of the dried fish Frances had brought back from Waterpale with the coins; of an entire town dusted in the powder of worked stone; of a river wider than all Oonan’s fields, with on its other side the wide grassy plains and strange-spoken folk of the Hidden Land.

  They said, travel not in the Hidden Land. The two coins were in a box in Arry’s room. She was late for school. The hill on Waterpale’s side of the puddle was just as high as the hill on the side of home. Arry turned and squelched up the home hill.

  From its crest she could see Halver’s little stone house. It was really too small for school; but Halver’s mother had been the master of herbs, which required more space outside than in; and the old Gnosi’s daughter was Mally, who did not know what a teacher must, so that was that.

  Arry started downhill again, and Halver’s blue door burst open and let out a flood of small children. She had missed the entire memory time and was about to miss the middle lessons, where she belonged. She went on squelching, down and up again, and stopped in Halver’s muddy yard to speak to Con, who was scowling at the crowd of fascinated children around Beldi.

  “I’m the one who did it,” said Con.

  “But you shouldn’t have. He suffered it; he should get the attention.”

  “I don’t guess you’d hit me,” said Con, with hope but no expectation, the way she always asked for a fourth oatmeal cake at midsummer.

  “Don’t tempt me,” said Arry.

  Con stared at her. “Do you want to? Why, if it’s so awful?”

  “Because I know,” said Arry, between her teeth, “and you don’t.”

  “But Gnosi says people who know about pain never want to cause it.”

  “I’d be sorry, after,” said Arry.

  “What’s sorry?”

  “I’d hate having done it.”

  “If I hate the way nobody talks to me and they all look at Beldi, does that mean I hate hitting him?”

  “Having hit him. I think so.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I’m only fourteen!” snapped Arry.

  “Well, there isn’t anybody else to ask!”

  “No, there certainly isn’t.”

  “When I know something,” said Con, “I won’t just think so.”

  “Wait and see,” said Arry, and went into Halver’s house.

  He was sitting on a stool her mother had made, surrounded by the eight members of Arry’s class, who were sitting and lying on a carpet of Mally’s that Mally had botched the pattern of. Halver, like Oonan, had not slept well and had a headache. The gray teacher’s wig he wore hurt his ears and made the headache worse. None of this showed in his voice at all. He was telling the class about the geometry of the sphere.

  Arry got her school book from the shelf beside the door, crept quietly across the bare stone to the carpet, and sat down carefully beside Niss’s daughter Elec. Elec wrote the best notes of geometry, said Halver, though for history you might as well assume she had never been in class at all. Halver noticed Arry’s arrival. His head hurt more as he did, probably from the way he looked out of the corner of his eye. But his voice didn’t show that, either. He went on talking; and when he needed a figure drawn, he got up, strode to the open door, and hollered for Con.

  “Gnosi?” said Arry. “She’s almost six, Wim says.”

  “And?”

  “She’s forgetting.”

  “Well, let’s see what happens,” said Halver.

  Con came breathlessly in the door and glared at Halver. “I can’t remember anything,” she said.

  “You haven’t forgotten how to talk, have you?”

  “I can’t remember anything important.”

  “Well, if you can’t remember, I can’t believe what you say; you’ll have to show me. Mora here needs to see this flat thing made round.” He handed her the board he had been drawing on.

  “Can it be purple?” said Con.

  Halver rubbed his aching forehead with two fingers, and Arry prepared to intervene. But Halver said only, “If you like.”

  Con screwed her round face up ferociously and said in grim tones, “All sorts of things and weather Must be taken in together To make up a year And a Sphere.”

  In the middle of the air, right over Elec’s head, a faint violet ball as big as the rising harvest moon took on form, deepened to a violent purple, faded, deepened again, and with a bewildering silence disappeared.

  “I told you,” said Con.

  Halver patted her shoulder; Arry hunched up her own back as if she had been bitten by a spider. Con’s face was expressionless, and Halver would never, never hurt anybody—but in Con, that was pain. “Five years of freedom for you, then,” said Halver. “You’ve earned them. No more work until you’re ten. Send Lina to me, Con, and then please yourself.”

  Con ran out the door. She was not going to fetch Lina, whom in any case she scorned for a coward because Lina knew what burned and would not ever light a fire or a lantern. Arry went after Con, but Con was gone already when she got outside. Arry found Lina in a mud puddle, and sent her in. She ought to go in herself: her geometry was better than Elec’s, Halver said, but far from good enough. Con would go home and sit on the potatoes in the root cellar. If Arry went after her, what would there be to do? Almond-water and black thread would not help this pain.

  Arry slunk back into school a second time, and tried to attend to Lina’s bright red bubbles.

  At lunch time, Arry told Halver to take some willow-bark tea, and went home. Con was indeed sitting in the root cellar, and had progressed to carving horrible shapes out of the potatoes with their father’s vegetable knife, brought with considerable trouble from the Kingdom of Dust.

  She had not, for a wonder, cut herself. Arry delivered a lecture on the dangers of knives. Then she dragged Con, and her works of art, up the ladder to the kitchen, and made her cook them. The two of them gulped the hot mess, liberally decorated with cheese, and trudged back to school in silence. If Con wanted to talk, she would talk; if she didn’t, no earthly force would move her. Mally said so. Arry wanted desperately to tell Con to talk, as she had told Oonan and Halver to take their almond-water and willow
-bark tea. But that would make things worse. She considered forbidding Con to talk: they had once gotten Beldi to eat turnips by telling him not to dare do any such thing. But Con, as Mally had said often enough, was made of sterner stuff. She did what she had decided; that was all.

  Halver would know what to do. That was what he was for.

  Arry endured a miserable afternoon of history, poetry, and logic. Then she sent Beldi and Con home with instructions to make dinner, any dinner, so long as it had no potatoes in it; and waited while Halver dealt with three transgressing students and two who wanted to ask him long involved questions. The willow-bark tea had made his head hurt less, but he was not in a very happy state when he finally beckoned her up to his stool and said, “And what can I tell you?”

  “I have a difference with Oonan,” said Arry, formally.

  Halver closed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, ended by pinching the bridge of his nose, and then dug the heel of his hand into his forehead. None of this helped his headache in the least. “What is it?” he said.

  Arry told him.

  Halver looked at her with his brown eyes just like Beldi’s, very large; he had forgotten his headache for a moment, she was pleased to see, but in its place was a pain something like Con’s. Then he rubbed his hand over his forehead again, and when he got to the edge of the gray wig, he pulled it entirely off his head and dropped it onto the floor. He had yellow hair. Arry had been told this already, because Halver seldom put the wig on with any great care, and Wim said it was yellow, after which one could see for oneself if one looked. But Halver had never taken the wig off before—Mally said so. Teachers usually did, when they were not teaching, Mally said—but Halver did not. And it was not because of the headache that he had done it now.“Pain has precedence,” said Halver.

  “That’s what Oonan said.”

  “What else is there to say?”

  “But I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “If you don’t know, Arry, nobody does.”

  “I’m only fourteen. Is there something I could read?”