The Dubious Hills Read Free Page B

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