The Dubious Hills Read Free

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.
    “