Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  For knowledge, Rose had painfully discovered, was a very different thing from wisdom and common sense and may often come in the way of both. The sight of such innocent wisdom as she saw in Sarah’s and Mandrake’s child made Rose hesitate to try to explain these things. Faced by it, she felt her own ignorance, not as a negative thing but as a simple fact. And she saw again what her weariness, age and occasional loneliness had made her forget: that each mole is graced with different virtues, just as each herb is. She sensed that Rebecca had many graces and the awe she felt was of the power of the Stone that had put them there.

  These thoughts ran through Rose’s mind while she considered Rebecca’s question about the stars. She wished she had more power with words to explain the answer, though it was a wish that did her an injustice, since Rose could often explain things that other moles, who seemed more articulate, could somehow never grasp.

  She sighed and wondered where to start. She looked around her, at the ramsons, at the cluttered undergrowth of thorns and dark leaves, and at the light sky above and beyond.

  It was the gentle sound of a warm breeze in the trees that helped her. ‘Do you know what the top of a tree looks like?’ she asked Rebecca.

  ‘Well, of course!’ said Rebecca. ‘We’ve all been shown fallen branches with leaves on—they look like that.’

  ‘Can you remember the first time you saw one?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Oh, yes, it was disappointing!’ She paused, but Rose stayed silent, so she continued. ‘Well, I mean… before you see them, you imagine them, don’t you? And the roots of trees were so big, and the noise their tops made in the wind so powerful, that I imagined that trees went up and up for ever into the sky, and their tops were each as big as the whole of Duncton Wood put together. So when someone said “That’s a top of a tree” I was disappointed!’

  Rose laughed sympathetically—she had once felt just the same. ‘But really, my dear, treetops aren’t just branches and leaves, are they? Did you see the noise of the wind, for example? I’m sure you didn’t. Did you see all the branches together? Well, of course, you couldn’t have. There are a lot of things, the most important things, which you can never see and can only learn about in your own way. Just as the treetop you saw couldn’t tell you everything about treetops, so the starlike flowers of ramsons only hint at what stars are really like.’

  ‘But how does anymole know what they’re like?’ persisted Rebecca. ‘How can a mole be certain that they’re there?’

  A strange thing happened to Rebecca as she asked this question. As it hung in the air between them, she saw very clearly that it was a question impossible for Rose to answer. Perhaps it was because Rose was not trying to answer it that she saw this; perhaps it was also that she understood instinctively that Rose knew there were stars, even though she had never seen one. In that moment, Rebecca understood something quite different from what she had been asking about, that there are a lot of things moles can only come to know for themselves. Why, she had thought she knew all about treetops when she ‘saw’ one, but, of course, she didn’t! ‘Why, they really are majestic and powerful, just as I thought they were when I was a pup!’ she exclaimed to herself. It didn’t matter what stars looked like—Rose knew they were there and perhaps one day she would really know it, too.

  ‘Oh, I wish I could answer your question,’ exclaimed Rose, ‘but there are so many things that a mole can’t explain. You see, if you tried to explain to most moles about plants talking to you, they…’

  ‘I have, and they didn’t,’ sighed Rebecca. ‘I’ve given up trying!’

  ‘Well, it’s like that with most important things. A mole will come to know things if he’s going to, and no amount of talking about it will make him understand if he’s not going to. And even if he or she is going to get to know something, it’s no good trying to hurry the process up—it happens when it’s meant to and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Well, perhaps we can encourage it sometimes.’

  Rebecca liked talking to Rose because she talked to her as an equal. She made her feel that she wasn’t just a youngster who hadn’t mated yet. She made her feel that her paws were firmly on the ground.

  ‘Now,’ said Rose firmly, ‘I really must finish these ramsons off. You sit there quietly and listen if you like. You’ll want to ask questions, I wouldn’t wonder, but you won’t get any answers from me while I’m talking to the plants.’

  Rose’s eyes twinkled with affection at both Rebecca and the ramsons and she re-entered the clump of wild garlic and began her strange enchanting song again. Her voice went gently up and down, in and out, as if weaving and winding among the stalks and leaves of the ramsons like thin wisps of mist among the trees on an early summer’s morning.

  Gradually Rebecca noticed that she seemed to be talking to two or three plants in particular and though Rebecca couldn’t see that they looked different from the others, they definitely were, in some way. They seemed more… more… there.

  Suddenly Rose’s words became more distinct and Rebecca heard her singing:

  ‘Wild flower, kind flower,

  Petals for the sick;

  Wild plant, kind plant,

  A healing for the ill.

  Leaves for the sorrowful

  And stem for the sad,

  Bless them with your essence

  And their bodies will be glad.’

  As Rose sang these words, she picked a stalk from each of the plants she had been concentrating on, touching the rest of each plant gently with a paw. Then she brought the stalks over to where Rebecca was and placed them on the ground by her.

  ‘All over, all done,’ she said, yawning. ‘Oh, I am tired today!’ Then she told Rebecca, ‘Now, don’t you forget about picking plants at the right time, although you already seem to know something about that.’

  But before Rebecca could ask herself if she did know something about it, Rose continued: ‘And never pick too many, because you won’t need them. The less you use, the further they go—that’s why you can smell them better from further off than near to.’

  ‘But I don’t understand what you mean at all,’ said Rebecca, ‘or what you meant before when you said…’

  Once more Rose didn’t let her finish. Instead she laughed and said, ‘Now, Rebecca, my love, you take “understand” right out of your vocabulary as quickly as you can and then you’ll understand all the faster. I don’t understand anything myself, my dear, not one single thing. Well, of course, I do, so that’s silly. I understand that when you pick plants you must get on and use them, otherwise you’ll lose so much.’

  ‘I don’t understand again…’ sighed Rebecca. Rose didn’t seem to answer any of her questions. ‘What do you mean, Rose?’ she asked finally.

  ‘That’s better! What I mean is that generally when plants are ready to pick, they’re ready to use, which is what I’ve got to do with these now. There’s a mole that needs me in Duncton and I really only came here just to pick these and take them with me.’

  By now it was mid-afternoon and the wood had a warm, sleepy air about it. There was little birdsound, for with the passing of spring and early summer, their calls and songs had died away, leaving only the trills and whistles of yellowhammer and greenfinch along the woodland’s edge. Sometimes, as now, the distant harsh call of a crow would come cawing through the wood high above their heads, making it seem vast and roomy in the summer stillness.

  It was hard to think that anymole could be ill on such an afternoon but as Rebecca automatically followed Rose as she made her way towards the wood’s edge, she wondered again about the unease she had been feeling for so many days.

  ‘Rose?’

  ‘Mmm, my love, what is it?’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘No, my dear, not yet. I’ll let you come one day when you’re ready.’

  ‘Rose?’

  ‘My love?’

  ‘Which mole is it that’s ill?’ There was real concern in her voice, for the unease she had fel
t seemed now to turn into a sense that a mole was ill and was calling her from somewhere in the wood, for she could feel the suffering almost as if it was her own. She looked about as if expecting to see some suffering mole right there before them both.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Rose quietly. ‘I often feel the call for help long before I know what it is, or which mole is calling.’

  By now Rebecca’s afternoon content had been replaced by a restless unease as the strange feelings of distress she had felt, and which she had put aside, returned ten times more strongly. Oh, she could feel another mole’s pain and it was drawing her somewhere… where? She looked again about the still wood where only ants stirred and bees and wasps hummed.

  ‘Rose?’ She spoke the name almost as a call for help. ‘When a mole is ill, how can you feel it? Is it like… a… well, like a restless breeze that pulls you along, or a tunnel sucking you into its darkness, or a storm rising in the sky, higher and higher until you feel you’ll burst with it? Is it like that, Rose?’

  As Rebecca spoke, Rose felt a great releasing flow through her body, as if she was returning to a welcoming burrow whose nest was warm and where she could lay her head and sleep at last. She had only ever once heard another mole describe the force of compassionate love that pulls a healer from her burrow, however weary she may be, so that she may find the strength to tend and cherish the distressed and sick. The last mole that spoke such words to her was the old female who had first taught her about healing. In all those long and often lonely moleyears since, she had forgotten how gentle was the sound of a healer’s voice when it sounded in her own ears.

  From the moment she had scented Rebecca coming with the wildflower smell of her kindness and youth, Rose had sensed, but not dared to believe, that another healer was near. Everything Rebecca had said to her had shown that her instinct was right, but again and again, as they had talked, Rose had not dared to accept the idea, for fear that it was her own hopes rather than the Stone’s desire talking. But now, hearing Rebecca describe the restless impulse that leads a healer to the sick, she knew that her instinct about Rebecca had been right from the first.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what it’s like, Rebecca. That’s what it will always be like.’

  If only she had the power to save this young creature from the pain and suffering the process of becoming a healer seemed so often to bring. But she had learned long ago that there were things nomole could change—a mole’s freedom lay only in finding the courage to face with truth the darkness and light which the Stone would bring.

  ‘Well, if it’s like that,’ said Rebecca firmly, surprising herself with what she was saying so boldly, ‘then I think the mole you’re going to is called Bracken. You’ll find him somewhere up on the Ancient System. He was a friend of Hulver’s when Hulver… before my… before Hulver… He told me to take care of Bracken but I didn’t know what he meant, since I didn’t even know him and have never met him.’

  Rebecca continued, less excitedly and more slowly as, with a brief glance to the south where the Ancient System lay, she turned to face her own part of the wood. ‘Hulver did say to take care of him but, well, perhaps he just meant for me to mention his name to you so you’d know. Mekkins told me he was dead, but I knew he wasn’t. In fact, I thought he was all right at first, but now I think something’s wrong—I’ve been feeling that restless feeling for days, but I didn’t know what it was. It’s what brought me over here today.’

  She finally stopped and Rose could feel how troubled she was. ‘I’ll take care of him, my love, just as you would—try not to fret about him, for he will be safe.’

  ‘Who is he, Rose? Why is he special?’

  Rose could only shake her head, for she did not know the answer. She only understood that Rebecca, too, was special, more special than anymole in Duncton could know, thought Rose, looking at her passionate innocence and watching her light-hearted ways.

  ‘You leave your Bracken to me for the time being. I will take care of him, really I will.’ Rose moved gently over to Rebecca and nuzzled her in the soft part between shoulder and neck. ‘My dearest creature,’ she whispered. Then, taking up the ramson, she turned back towards the wood’s edge so that she might take a route along it up to the Ancient System, and was gone.

  Chapter Ten

  The Ancient System took in the injured Bracken as a mother tending a gravely hurt pup. It caressed him with its silence, soothed him with its darkness, and its labyrinths were to give him space in which to find himself again.

  He was badly hurt. The wound where Mandrake’s talons had torn into his left shoulder quickly turned septic so that even the strength that had allowed him to pull himself into the precipitous cliff face entrance ebbed away. He could do no more than crawl up and down the tunnel where he first arrived, taking whatever worms and beetles he found there.

  For the first two or three days he looked forward to recovering and heading off into the tunnels beyond. The one he found himself in was big and well burrowed, its roof arching above his head and the pale chalk-dusted soil in which it was hewn, catching the light that came in from the cliff opening.

  But soon his interest in the Ancient System left him, as the poison in his wound seeped by degrees to the rest of his body and all he could do was to lie in the tunnel groaning and gasping with pain and distress.

  The roots of his illness lay deeper than the wound itself. They went back to the trials and humiliations of his puphood, his uneasy passage into June, and the final shock of seeing the death, in the Stone clearing, of the one mole in whose presence he had begun to feel himself.

  With the passage of each day, each one that succeeded it became longer and more painful. The agony of his shoulder spread to all parts of his body so that everything about him seemed to ache and throb. At the same time, the spirit that had started to grow in him in Hulver’s presence began to wither as the hopes and interests in his mind became replaced by despair and weariness. As each passing day brought again the painful light from the tunnel end, it showed his fur to be more clogged and fading, while his snout and mouth were soon running with fever and disease.

  His hunt for food became slower and more dragging, while even the slowest of dank grubs seemed to find the power to escape his painful attempts to catch them. Once, a red cardinal beetle fell down on its back before his snout and gasping mouth. As if in a nightmare, he watched it struggling to turn itself over and escape, while he, even more slowly, tried to bring his paw to bear on it. But his limb was like a root stuck in deep and paining ground, and by the time he finally dragged it to its target, the beetle had manoeuvred itself upright, waved its antennae around to find an escape route, and was gone—its shiny redness lost in the swirling blackness of the tunnel beyond and Bracken’s own tortured mind.

  There were fresh roots enough, and the occasional live catch to keep him from dying quickly. His decline was gradual as, with too little food and moisture, the poison racked his body more and more and his sense of time, of place, of life itself, changed to a sense of eternal suffering. As week after week went by and summer took over the surface above, he slowly began to starve. Time lost its meaning.

  Memories came back to him, clear and painful. Root, Wheatear, Burrhead. So much torment. A snatch of one of Aspen’s stories and he would be crying in the vale of its words, the tears running furrows down his fur and hot and salty into his open mouth. Sometimes he seemed to hear rasping shouts directed at himself, or the thunderous sound of pursuit, but it was only the gasping of his own stricken voice and the shiver of his fevered paws on the tunnel floor.

  Beyond the tunnel in which he lay so ill, the tunnels of the Ancient System turned this way and that, echoing the rhythms of emptiness that had occupied them for so many generations. From far off, though Bracken was too ill to hear it, there sometimes came the soft hiss of a minor roof-fall; or the plop and sliding back to safety of a worm; or the creaking, primal vibration of a tree root as it moved massively a fraction of a
hair’s breadth in its growth among the tunnels.

  A day came at the beginning of August after weeks of illness, when he had no more strength even to eat the food that presented itself to him. A great lobworm that arced in and out of the tunnel wall seemed to sense that the mole who lay beneath him was not dangerous, and ran its pink, moist length over Bracken’s flanks, snaking in a curl of life along his back and fur. A black, shining beetle, caught for a moment in the light from the cliff end, stood poised before Bracken’s snout, its antennae questing and curious at the mole that seemed dead and yet still made a faint noise of desperate life. A flea hopped and bristled in the dust in which Bracken lay, our of his fur and into it, and then out once again.

  Yet, in these hours of decline, he did not want to die. Deep, deep within his heart the pup who had had the strength to find his lonely way up out of the Westside and on to the slopes now stretched his soft paws out and called for help. Beyond the seeping wound and fading body, the spirit that moves a pup to bleat or a beaten male to raise his talons one last time went out, insubstantial as mist, vulnerable as an autumn leaf before an eastern wind. But who could hear?

  What mole could know that on a warm August night, when the rest of Duncton lay at peace, a precious mole lay dying in the dark of a forgotten tunnel?

  Only one, and she was at that moment by the Stone and able to hear his unspoken cry. Rose had come the long, weary way up the wood’s edge and then cut into the wood to the Stone, and now crouched praying that it might lead her to the mole whose call both she and Rebecca had heard. It was not that she doubted she would find him—it did not occur to her that she would not—but rather that she needed the Stone to lead her. Now that she was on the Ancient System, she sensed that her meeting with Rebecca and the desperate call from Bracken were all part of a profound change that was coming over the system, and perhaps all systems.

  Rose could almost smell the forces for love and evil that intertwined in the air about her and shuddered in the tunnels below. She had never in her life entered the tunnels around the Stone, though she had long ago known that one day she might, when she had the strength.