The Dubious Hills (3 page)

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?”

Halver put the wig back on, which seemed even
stranger than his taking it off. “I’ll look,” he said, “and I’ll
ask Sune, and I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“
Thank you, Gnosi.”

“
Thank you, Physici,” said Halver,
as he ought. His head hurt again.

“
How much willow-bark tea did you
take?”

“
Half a bowl.”

“
Well, have some more. You won’t
sleep well if you don’t.”

Halver laughed. Arry jumped. That was not a thing he
did much of either, Mally said. She stared at him as sternly as she
could; after a moment he said, “I will, of course.”

“
Good night,” said Arry, and went
home hurriedly.

3

The fire had gone out, so Con and Beldi had made
cold oatmeal-and-onion balls for dinner. They had forgotten the
peppers and herbs that made this dish edible, but Arry ate it
anyway. She felt that to save her life she could not have done
anything to upset Con. She was also beginning to feel guilty about
Beldi, but if he was unhappy, she did not know it.