Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  We free their fur with… ’

  But old Hulver got no further. He half-turned at the final moment to face his attackers and Bracken saw that his talons were not raised at all—rather, his paws were outstretched as if he were blessing them. Just as he had blessed the worms at the very first meal they had taken together:

  ‘Let no mole adown my body

  That may hurt my sorrowing soul…’

  And then frail Hulver was gone, lost beneath their stabbing, vicious, thrusting, tearing talons, any sound he made drowned by the noise of their screams of anger and the panting of their murderous effort. Torn down where he stood in the shadow of the Stone, at the very heart of the system he loved, uttering the blessing on the youngsters in whose future he believed. Bracken was rooted to the spot, his heart screaming out at the agony of watching the mole he had so quickly grown to love, slaughtered before him. Yet he could not move. He did not have the courage, or the foolishness, to run out into the clearing and face Hulver’s killers.

  Then, in a moment, it was over. Mandrake stood back and the others fell away, and without a word to each other, they turned round like a pack of rats in the night and scampered out of the clearing. As they passed Bindle, lying stretched out on the ground, he stirred and moaned, but Mandrake said, ‘Leave him, let him be living owl-fodder.’

  They were barely gone before Bracken found his strength again and was able to run out into the clearing to Hulver.

  But Hulver was dead, and all he could see was the body of a time-worn old mole, terribly torn, small and crumpled in the moonlight, the left paw catching its light and curled softly like a young pup’s. There was the shiny blackness of blood on him, from his snout to his rump.

  With a terrible sob, Bracken ran over to Bindle, who was moaning and whispering, trying to raise himself on a shattered paw, the paw sliding out uselessly from under his weight. Bracken bent low over him and heard him whisper,

  ‘Bindle, my name is Bindle. I came back to say the ritual with my oldest friend. We almost finished it, didn’t we?’ His breath came rasping and painful, and Bracken’s heart ached to hear it. ‘We almost finished it. And in the end I knew the words. He never thought I knew them all, but I did. When they came at the end I remembered the words.’ Bindle tried to say more but he rasped and coughed, and gasped in his terrible pain. Bracken pressed against him, supporting his torn body, blood on his fur. Bindle started to speak again, each word a massive effort: ‘Listen, youngster, and try to remember them: “We… bathe… their… paws… in…”’

  Bracken looked up at the Stone and across to the body of Hulver, whose wisdom he now began to see. And then, at first very softly, but with increasing strength, he joined his voice to the dying Bindle’s:

  ‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,

  We free their fur with wind from the west,

  We bring them choice soil,

  Sunlight in life.

  We ask they be blessed

  With a sevenfold blessing…’

  Bracken spoke the words now with power, with the voice of an adult. They filled the clearing and carried on beyond it loud and clear, until they stopped Mandrake and his moles in their tracks.

  ‘The grace of form

  The grace of goodness…’

  A wild storm of racing blood and blizzard cold swept through Mandrake’s head and body; he seemed possessed by rushing darkness. With a mighty roar he turned back, thrashing up towards the clearing, tormented by the powerful voice that carried words that agonised his soul.

  ‘The grace of suffering

  The grace of wisdom

  The grace of true words

  The grace of trust

  The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’

  Bracken had moved to the Stone and now stood in its dark shadow turned towards Uffington, aware of everything about him: the dead Hulver, the dying Bindle and the agonised rushing of Mandrake fast approaching him, but he ignored it all.

  It seemed to Mandrake, as he arrived back at the clearing and saw at first only two moles lying on the ground, that the Stone itself was speaking:

  ‘We bathe their paws in showers of light,

  We free their souls with talons of love,

  We ask that they hear the silent Stone.’

  It was only with these very last words of the ritual that Mandrake saw Bracken in the shadow, and with a roar as agonised as it was angry, charged upon him.

  Bracken stepped forward for a moment into the moonlight, where Mandrake saw him clearly for the first time, and then ran behind the Stone, beyond the great beech tree, and into the wood in the direction of the chalky escarpment.

  As Mandrake followed after him, Bindle moved for the last time, stretching a paw towards his friend Hulver, his snout turned towards the Stone into whose silence and light he felt himself flowing, away from the rasping breathing that was no longer his and numbing cold that had been spreading from his paws and flanks towards his heart, and thinking that the youngster somehow knew the words as well, and that was how it should be.

  On Bracken ran, his strength failing rapidly. He could no longer think clearly and his breath was coming in pants and rasps as Bindle’s had done. Behind him he could hear Mandrake getting nearer, carried forward as he was by an indescribable rage and malevolence, beech leaves and leaf mould scattering in his wake.

  To his left, Bracken could hear other moles running towards him through the undergrowth, Rune, Dogwood and the others. To his right, the hill rose towards its final height, where he and Hulver had lain in secret before tonight. But he knew he had no strength left to climb up and away from Mandrake. So he ran straight on, straight towards the void of the chalk escarpment, his heart pounding in pain and each breath harder and harder to grasp hold of. Mandrake could see him now, just ahead, paws scrabbling over themselves, back almost within talon range. With a final push forward Mandrake reared up to try to bring his talons down on the failing Bracken.

  Sensing what Mandrake was about to do, Bracken turned in mid-flight to make a valiant effort to ward off Mandrake’s blows. But as he raised his own talons to defend himself, he felt his back paws continue forward into nothing, sliding downwards through loose soil and vegetation, attempting, it seemed, to keep hold of nothing. As Mandrake’s talons crashed down towards his upturned snout he felt the nothingness of the void swallowing him, pulling him down into the blackness as his front paws flailed desperately at the cliff face to retain a hold. He felt a terrible pain in his left shoulder and the cliff face slipping past his snout, felt loose vegetation and flints scratching at his face.

  Above him he heard a mighty roar of triumph from Mandrake. But then, hardly realising what was happening, he felt his front paws fall suddenly forwards into an emptiness in the cliff face and caught hold of a surface. And he was flailing again, pulling himself forwards, back paws again in contact with the cliff face, pulling, heaving, shoving himself up until he finally lay on the smooth, flat floor of a tunnel exposed by some winter cliff fall, whose ancient dark depth echoed back his gulps for air and life. From above him came the thumping of paws and more paws, as Rune and Mekkins, Dogwood and Burrhead joined Mandrake at the cliff’s edge, and looked over into the blackness of its void.

  ‘He has gone, gone to his death,’ screamed Mandrake. ‘I caught him with my talon before he went and ripped his flesh.’ And then Mandrake laughed terribly into the darkness beyond.

  ‘Which mole was it?’ asked Mekkins, wondering at the courage and strength of the three moles they had killed that night.

  ‘It was Bracken,’ hissed Rune into the darkness beyond them. ‘The mole I found in Hulver’s tunnels. I should have killed him then but I did not wish to warn Hulver that something was wrong. I should have killed him painfully then.’

  ‘It was Bracken, was it!’ exclaimed Burrhead, trying to sound angry. But there was a hint of surprise in his voice, mingled with a touch of pride. He could not believe that it was his own strange son, whom he thought had been kil
led after leaving the home burrow without a word, who had given Mandrake so much trouble before his end. ‘Best say no more,’ Burrhead thought.

  Bracken heard them move off across the floor of the wood, back towards the slopes. Painfully he raised himself up, his left shoulder now stiff and almost lame, and pointed his snout forwards into the Ancient System, which, after so many generations, had at last opened its tunnels to a mole again.

  Chapter Nine

  Rebecca’s bleak mateless spring had become an early summer of delights. When Sarah’s litter by Mandrake arrived in April, Rebecca had the excuse she wanted to leave the home burrow to scrape a living for herself in her own tunnels. She had wondered whether to leave Barrow Vale altogether, to get away from Mandrake, but when it came to that, she had no real desire to do so. Perhaps she sensed that beneath his brutal hostility to her he loved her, the very viciousness of his assaults a sign of how deep his feelings ran.

  Certainly she was pleased when he gruffly took her aside at the end of April to say, ‘You’ll be leaving the home burrow now, but you’ll not go far, Rebecca—I want to keep an eye on you. There’s a burrow not far from here which I’ll show you…’

  She was surprised that one should be so conveniently free, and only long afterwards found out that Mandrake had driven away the mole who occupied it—an older female called Rue—threatening her with death if she tried to win it back. Not knowing this and flattered by Mandrake’s sudden interest in her wellbeing, she settled down happily to wait for summer. She cleared out the runs and burrows in her new tunnels, replacing the nesting material with sweet-smelling grasses and leaves she found on the wood’s floor. She opened up a new entrance which caught the morning sun, and another which threw light and fresh, cool air into her burrows towards the end of day.

  All this occupied her so much that she hardly missed not seeing Sarah during May and early June, by which time Sarah’s second litter was beginning to roam, and the two became friends again. They would talk of flowers and trees, and Sarah would tell her the ways of shrews and voles, laughing at their fights and antics. She warned of weasels and owls.

  The flowers that had carpeted the wood’s floor in spring died away as the trees above began to leaf, blocking the sun so that a heavier, duller undergrowth took their place. Rebecca, growing bolder as each summer day advanced, took to seeking out flowers and sunlight on the pasture edge, and in one or two more open places towards the Marsh End. She would have liked to explore deeper into the Marsh End itself, among the danker darkness of its trees, but there was a musty smell about the place, which she did not like on a summer’s day, created by the moss and fungi that grew about the one or two rotting trees and many fallen branches.

  But these herbal forays were interspersed by long periods of simply sitting still in her own tunnels or at their entrances, learning about the wood nearest to her. Its summer noises were less frenetic than the spring’s, but fuller and richer. Very near one of her tunnel entrances were a couple of small oaks with patches of bramble and ground ivy nearby, and here, just before she herself arrived, a pair of nightingales settled to breed and raise their young. As the summer moved into July, she grew to love their ferreting busyness as they grubbed among the undergrowth for spiders and worms, an activity often followed by the rich jug-jug-chooc-chooc of song, ascending to a powerful crescendo pioo-pioo which she could hear in her deepest burrow. A night was blessed that began with their song.

  Often ‘her’ nightingales joined the chorus that woke with her at dawn as a colourful medley from a blackbird or two joined the sounds of nuthatch, wren and tit, and the soft, distant cooing of wood pigeon over on the wood’s edge. The birds scurried about the dead leaves on the wood’s floor or flittered among living leaves above. And the smells of fresh growth! She loved that best of all as she and the woods grew into the season together.

  In this summer period she grew used to sounds that had frightened her at first—the scurrying of a hedgehog, often blindly running right past her snout, or the sudden buzz in her face of a flying beetle or searching wasp.

  One reason she tended to keep near her own tunnels was that if she was caught too far away by hunger or tiredness, she had to make a temporary burrow in a place whose noises were strange and threatening. It was a long time before she revisited the Eastside, for example, because when she stayed there overnight, she happened on a mating fight between a couple of badgers who sounded, in their thumping rushes and shrill, eerie screams, as if they were about to fall through the burrow roof on to her. They were, in fact, many moleyards away in the slopes of a bank where they had dug their own massive burrows, but how was she to know, never having heard them before? Worse than their terrible sounds was their rank smell, which wafted sickeningly into the tiny burrow and made her tremble and sweat with fear in the darkness.

  But far, far worse were the chilling sounds of tawny owls hooting at night. They cast a terrible fear into her. She knew little of them beyond the fact that they were the mole’s most terrible enemy in Duncton in summer and were the taloned death that came with silent suddenness out of the darkness above. There were one or two moles in Duncton—and Rebecca had heard one of them tell his tale—who had been caught by owl but by some freak chance escaped, talon-torn but alive. Some of the older moles said that to touch such a mole brought you luck, but Rebecca had been too shy to seek that privilege.

  Mandrake came to visit her two or three times in June and July. He always claimed to be just passing and pretended to have no interest in her doings. He sat about for a while, asked her a few monosyllabic questions, cast his glowering glance about her system, and was off as suddenly as he had come. She sensed that in his own gruff way he was keeping an eye on her, and that gave her pleasure as well.

  * * *

  One hot July evening, when every insect in the wood seemed busy, Mekkins passed her way and she heard for the first time of the deaths of Hulver and Bindle. On Mandrake’s orders the story had been kept dark for weeks past, but the idle summer months are a time for gossip and chatter and such a tale must eventually come out.

  Mekkins, who felt the whole story to be a shadow on Duncton, would have preferred to keep silent about it with Rebecca. She was so young, so innocent, so full of the joy of the season, that telling her seemed as shameful as trampling on a wood anemone. But she was so overjoyed to see him, though he knew her only passingly, and fixed him with such an open gaze that he found it impossible to tell a lie when she suddenly asked, ‘Where can I find Hulver, the elder?’

  He hesitated to answer, playing for time with ‘Why?’ She told him how Hulver had talked to her before the June elder meeting and told him the legend of Rebecca the Healer, and about a mole called Bracken who was somewhere up on the slopes. Hulver had told her about Bracken with such a curious passion that she had taken to heart his odd suggestion that she should make sure that Bracken was all right.

  As Mekkins looked at her, free from the threat of Mandrake—with whom she had been the last time he saw her—he felt he had never seen such light radiance in a female before. He tried to say that he didn’t know about Hulver or Bracken, that perhaps they were up on the slopes, that he was old now and… but one by one the lies dried up before her simple gaze. Mekkins was clever, a survivor, one well used to telling half-truths to get his way. But, well, there are times when a mole wearies of the effort of not telling the truth, and he admired the stand Hulver had made too much to want to tell any lies about him. And he remembered the strong adult voice of that strange mole, Bracken, whom none of them had ever quite seen, who had cried out from the clearing those ritual words of the Midsummer blessing, words that had often come back to him: The grace of whole-souled loveliness… and now, before the radiant Rebecca he could tell nothing but the truth. As she gazed happily at him, with joy in her movements and life radiating from her, Mekkins felt a poverty in his own spirit about the murders by the Stone, and his snout lowered as his gaze fell to the wood’s floor.

  Slowly, and
with a low voice, he told her exactly what had happened on Midsummer Night—as far as he understood it. He ended finally with a description of the shock that had run through the elders when, en route back to Barrow Vale, they were stopped short by the voice of an unknown mole uttering the sevenfold blessing loud and clear through the wood after them. ‘The grace… the grace… ’ He could hear the words now.

  ‘What mole said them?’ asked Rebecca, who crouched by him, listening, still and sombre.

  ‘Bracken, Burrhead’s son, we think it must have been him.’ Rebecca’s heart seemed to stop when he said Bracken’s name, and every word Mekkins spoke seemed to be of great importance. Mekkins described the chase Bracken had led them on, speaking of the bravery of one so young as if it were a legend and not something that had happened only a short time before.

  ‘Who is he?’ whispered Rebecca, almost to herself. ‘Who is he?’

  Mekkins repeated that he was Burrhead’s son, one of Aspen’s spring litter; but that was not what Rebecca meant. She explained that Hulver had said of Bracken that Rebecca the Healer had led them to one another. Now here he was again, the only mole in Duncton, so it seemed, who could lead Mandrake on a chase and get away with it.

  ‘Oh, but ’e didn’t!’ exclaimed Mekkins. ‘’E was killed. He ran clean over the chalk cliff edge trying to escape from Mandrake.’

  The hot July sun was suddenly cold. Every insect in the wood froze to its spot. The evening breeze ceased. The air was loud with anger.

  Rebecca had listened in silence to Mekkins’ miserable tale. She had heard him out in peace as he described the hunt for the most venerable mole in the system and his subsequent murder with Bindle. But now, with the news of Bracken’s death in her ears, she reared up in terrible anger and for the first time attacked, really attacked, another mole, and her talons descended on Mekkins. She tore at him as if he were evil itself. And as she did so, she began to weep, striking out blindly through her tears.