Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  ‘Wrong? What is that you’re saying, Rune? Come on, out with it.’

  ‘Fears are not always founded in fact. They are best left unspoken until they are known to be true. And then a mole may root out danger and treachery.’

  ‘Treachery? Rebecca? What do you mean?’ Mandrake was becoming angry, though not exactly with Rune himself, since nomole had been more loyal to him.

  ‘What mole did you fight?’ persisted Mandrake.

  ‘A mole I hope that Rebecca has not met,’ replied Rune, adding quickly, ‘but we will soon know… if Rebecca is back in her tunnels, I mean. I did not want to worry you about fears which, though black as shadows, may yet be groundless. You have other things to worry about and I am ever concerned to keep such smaller worries from you.’ Rune scratched himself again and smiled weakly at Mandrake, grimacing as if in pain.

  ‘What mole?’ asked Mandrake.

  ‘A Pasture mole,’ said Rune.

  ‘You killed him?’ asked Mandrake.

  ‘I wish I had. But there was more than one. Perhaps I killed one of them.’ He paused as if he were thinking and Mandrake waited impatiently for him to go on. Finally, he did.

  ‘We must be more wary of the Pasture moles, for they are getting subtler in their ways of attack, subtler than they once were. You know what I think, Mandrake?’

  Involuntarily Mandrake came closer, thinking that at last Rune would say what was on his mind.

  ‘I think that a Pasture mole likes nothing more than to take a Duncton female, the younger and more innocent the better, and to have her for his own, hard haunch hard into soft young haunch. To take her in the safety of the wood’s edge and to leave her to litter in shameful secrecy a brood of squawling Pasture pups in the heart of Duncton Wood.’

  As this image hung between them, a henchmole poked his snout through the entrance into the elder burrow in which Mandrake and Rune were talking and, seeing that they were silent, whispered: ‘Rune, sir, Rune! She is not there!’

  ‘Who is not where?’ thundered Mandrake, directing the frustration he felt at Rune’s careful vagueness at the henchmole, who stumbled and stuttered and looked desperately at Rune for help.

  Rune merely lowered his snout and shook his head sadly.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Mandrake of the henchmole.

  ‘Er—well—it’s Rebecca. She’s not in her tunnels.’

  ‘Where is she, then?’ roared Mandrake.

  ‘I… we… don’t know, Mandrake, sir,’ whispered the henchmole.

  ‘Rune?’ Mandrake turned aggressively back to Rune.

  ‘This was what I feared. This was what I hoped could not be true. Ah, Rebecca!’

  ‘Get out,’ shouted Mandrake at the henchmole. Then, turning to Rune, he said, ‘You had better start at the beginning, Rune.’

  ‘There is not much more to say now, Mandrake. Only things to do… But you know why Rebecca came to Barrow Vale?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘September is a time of change. Leaves may be a delicate green in June, but by September they decay. Some moles mate in September… some moles like it, want it… then. Or now, I should say.’

  ‘Mating… Rebecca… now…’ The elements were beginning to combine into swirling red and black poison in Mandrake’s mind.

  ‘On the wood’s edge, near the pastures,’ went on Rune, adding hastily, but deliberately not hastily enough, an explanation of what he meant: ‘That’s where I’ve been. Fighting Pasture moles who had taken a Duncton female into their darkness and done to her what she allowed them to do. Treachery and danger.’

  ‘You mean Rebecca?’ asked Mandrake, enraged but fascinated at the same time. With each word that Rune now spoke a picture of his Rebecca, his daughter Rebecca, his untouched child, hardened on the edge of his mind where nomole at first likes to look, but to which a jealous mole may easily be drawn. A picture of fur and darkness, of moving haunches and talon scratches on backs, of moist snouts long and pointing and open mouths, and white teeth and sensual smiles in the dark of a forbidden burrow. And his Rebecca among them. His daughter!

  ‘Rebecca? With Pasture moles? I hope not,’ said Rune. ‘I’m certain she couldn’t,’ he added, but with too little conviction to satisfy Mandrake.

  Rune’s plans ran deep, deeper perhaps than even he realised. He recognised Mandrake’s jealousy for Rebecca because he had felt something of it himself, though being cold and cerebral, his was the jealousy of non-possession rather than of blood right and lust, as Mandrake’s was. He thought of Rebecca and Cairn, and his eyes had the black glitter of the owl face in Hulver’s tunnels, for evil takes its greatest pleasure in tearing the innocence and happiness from the face of joy.

  ‘Did you see her there?’ demanded Mandrake, now shaking with anger and the need for action.

  ‘I heard a female there, taking her pleasure with a mole or moles. A Duncton female from the scent. Thrusting her open haunches to a male, or males, from the pastures. She was there… but whether or not it was Rebecca I cannot be sure.’

  ‘Rebecca?’

  ‘Perhaps it was another female, but I cannot be certain,’ said Rune.

  His Rebecca. His child. Her haunches open to another male… Mandrake shook with the thought of it until finally he shouted the words that Rune most wanted to hear. ‘Take me there and let me see!’

  Yet even then Rune pretended to hesitate. ‘Perhaps it is but a mistake, a silliness on my part. It was raining, a heavy storm; the senses play tricks in such weather. I may be very wrong and nomole would wish harm on a mole such as Rebecca, sweet Rebecca, less than I.’

  ‘Take me there,’ ordered Mandrake with a terrible coldness in his voice that warmed Rune’s heart.

  Night-time, and Rebecca and her Cairn slept on. Nighttime, and the urgent pounding of Mandrake’s heavy pawsteps grew nearer and nearer to the wood’s edge. Night-time, and up in the black and barkless wastes of a dead elm, the yellow eyes of an owl stared down and down at the wood floor beneath, talons itching round the branch they clasped as it waited for the sight and smell of prey.

  Mandrake and Rune finally broke out on to the surface of the wood, near the pasture, just before dawn, when the only sound is the distant squeal of a field mouse or bank vole taken by a tawny owl. At such a moment only troubles wake a mole and make him toss and turn in his half-sleep; only a cold wind disturbs the wood floor and makes a bramble thorn rasp against its own hard stem; only a cold moon casts a light, though even that is fading as the moon sinks down beyond the distant vales.

  Cairn stirred. He knew that his time with Rebecca was almost up. Rebecca moved even closer, even more content. She had mated and she would litter. She knew it with sweet certainty. But she knew that Cairn, her love, was restless and that dawn was coming. He wanted to return now to his own system to find the tunnels he felt safe in and talk again to his brother, Stonecrop.

  Rebecca and he had come together in joy but both wanted to part now, as mated moles eventually must. Rebecca sighed, nuzzling him close and smiling, for she was thinking of the pups he had given her, while Cairn smiled to think of Rebecca with her pups, tumbling and playing with them, suckling them to her body, against whose soft warmth he now lay.

  Close by, and getting closer, massive Mandrake and Rune crept along the edge, Rune pretending to snout his way there with difficulty, though knowing very well exactly where he was leading Mandrake.

  ‘Here,’ hissed Rune.

  ‘Where?’ demanded Mandrake.

  ‘There.’ Rune pointed, his talon indicating the entrance to Rebecca’s temporary burrow, the disturbed earth rough and shadowy around it in the dim, cold light.

  Meanwhile, for Rebecca and Cairn the minutes that had once seemed hours now turned to seconds as their time together sped by. Soon it would be dawn and they would part. They began to talk the sweet goodbyes of lovers, but as they did so, there was a snarl and a roar and it seemed as if the tunnel outside their burrow was filled with the movement of a thousand predators. It was Mand
rake who, remembering what Rune had told him, or seemed to have told him, had broken the sullen stillness of the last of the night and moved hugely into the tunnel leading to the burrow with his talons ready to kill, and kill powerfully, anymole, male or female, that showed its snout.

  Moments after this sudden disturbance, and as Cairn instinctively turned with his talons to the burrow entrance, there came the scent that Rebecca knew too well and which made her cry out in fear. The odour of Mandrake. It was strong and aggressive and angry, and it put fear into the heart of even Cairn, who waited now a second time to defend his right to Rebecca. But this time he did not laugh, and when Rebecca started to tell him who it was, he pushed her back and away, for he knew he would need all his concentration to survive this fight.

  Somewhere further down the tunnel there was movement and they heard the deep rasping voice of Mandrake saying ‘Stay out on the surface, Rune, for this is my task. I will kill them myself.’

  Rebecca wanted to run out past Cairn, to protect him from the terror that was coming and that such a mole as he could surely never imagine could exist. But if he could not have imagined it before, he knew it now, for even his bold young heart sickened at the smell of Mandrake’s rage and quailed before the sight of Mandrake’s mighty talons lunging suddenly through the murk of the tunnel and straight towards his snout. That would have been as far as most moles ever got with Mandrake. But not Cairn, for he was powerful and very quick and had fought enough times on his own account to know how to avoid the first lunges of a fight without becoming impaled upon the second.

  Cairn did not even strike a blow before he retreated into the burrow and crouched, appalled by the sight he had seen approaching him as Mandrake’s smouldering size seemed to fill the tunnel.

  Mandrake crouched for a moment in silence beyond the entrance, looking at them both, surprised at Cairn’s size. But though Cairn was bigger even than Burrhead, who was the biggest Duncton mole next to Mandrake, he was not as big as Mandrake himself.

  Cairn snarled, his great shoulders flexed and ready, as Rebecca whispered urgently to him from the end of the burrow where his movement had forced her: ‘Run if you can, my love, for nomole has ever defeated him and none ever will. Oh, run, my Cairn!’

  If Cairn had not already mated with Rebecca he would have fought to the death there and then, and died. But he had mated and their time was over, and more than anything else, more now even than Rebecca, he wanted to be back in the fresh air of the pastures, where he would not be surrounded by alien scents and evil moles.

  ‘If I escape,’ he said to Rebecca without looking at her, for his every sense was concentrated on the burrow entrance through which Mandrake was wondering how to pass without exposing his snout too much, ‘I will return and we will mate again.’ He spoke the words quite clearly so that Mandrake would hear them, for he hoped they would enrage Mandrake enough for him to move carelessly and give him the chance he needed to give Mandrake a wounding thrust with his talons.

  Mandrake reacted by rearing up and plunging his talons at Cairn once more; he, instead of retreating, came viciously forward with his own talons, the two becoming locked in a bloody struggle at the entrance to the burrow.

  When one or other of the two great males hit the side of the entrance, the whole burrow shook and earth flew, as Rebecca watched them, at first helpless and confused. As she did so, a powerful and unwanted excitement ran through her, a forbidden and obscene excitement that she tried to blot from her mind: the excitement of seeing the two huge males, both of whom she loved, fighting for her.

  There was a momentary lull in the fight as Mandrake stepped back in preparation for a complete push forward into the burrow, and in the lull she could hear her Cairn’s desperate gasping of breath as his snout lowered from the enormous effort he had had to make to survive so far. It was this hopeless sound that made Rebecca act.

  As Mandrake plunged forward into the burrow, she powered her way past Cairn, with her talons out for Mandrake and a cry of, ‘Run, Cairn, run!’ Mandrake moved to one side to avoid Rebecca, at the same time trying to land his talons on the suddenly rapidly moving Cairn, but he was too late, and Cairn was past him and out into the tunnel and running down towards the entrance to the surface.

  Mandrake swung back through the entrance, knocking part of its lintel of solid earth flying, and managed to bring his talons with terrible force on to Cairn’s fleeing back. Cairn grunted with terrible pain but pulled himself away, leaving Mandrake’s talons hanging still for a moment in the middle of the tunnel, covered with his blood. Then he ran on, down the tunnel, the sound of Mandrake snarling and massive behind him. Then up desperately through the entrance, an instinctive memory of the trick Rune had tried to play before making him power his front paws ahead of him with talons splayed out, into the greying night.

  But Rune was not to be caught a second time. He crouched to one side of the entrance and, as Cairn came out, plunged his talons with deadly accuracy towards the Pasture mole’s snout and face. One tore through the left side of the snout, another cut savagely into his left eye, in one terrible instant turning Cairn’s face into an open wound that, after no more than a second, began to pour blood.

  At the same time, behind him in the tunnel, Mandrake brought down his talons a second time on Cairn, this time tearing his haunches and hind quarters and only failing to stop the fleeing Pasture mole dead in his tracks because Cairn’s initial thrust out of the tunnel had been so powerful.

  Cairn staggered heavily forward, swinging instinctively round towards Rune, whom he could now only vaguely see through the haze of pain and blood round his face, catching him savagely in the breast with a cutting sweep of his talons that, had they been lunging instead of swinging, would certainly have killed Rune. As it was, the blow was sufficient to knock him backwards past the entrance and to give Cairn time to turn to the fresh air and openness that he could sense off to his right. He began to run and stagger towards it with the desperation of a mole who has faced death, who may soon die, but who seeks one last chance to live.

  He might still have been caught by Mandrake, had Mandrake wished it. But as the great mole squatted back ready to burst out of the entrance, he heard Rebecca whimpering and crying in the burrow where she had, for one brief second, blocked Mandrake’s way and allowed Cairn to escape, and savagely, the blood of her mate on his talons and fur, he turned back towards the burrow.

  As his shadow blackened the entrance to the burrow again and he entered it, Rebecca stopped sobbing and looked up at him. She saw again the great scars made by talons that ran and rumpled down his face, and the new talonscores that Cairn had made on his shoulders, which were bloody and red. She felt the power of his presence over her, and looked up at him as her mother, Sarah, must once have done; she looked into his angry eyes that saw so little and yet sought so much.

  She thought he was going to kill her and expected the talons he had raised above his head to strike down upon her. They did come down, massively, not to kill her but to possess her as, without a word and with only the sound of anger in the burrow, he took her, he took her, he took her for his own, savaging his way into her as the burrow exploded about them both into a redness and black, and shafts of light and terrible pain. Rebecca! Rebecca!

  She did not know if it was Mandrake who cried her name through the exquisite storm of agony in the burrow about her, and inside her, or a memory of her beloved Cairn saying it. Or whether it was another memory, of she herself calling it into the wet wood up through the slopes after Bracken had left her. ‘My name is Rebecca!’ Or perhaps she was calling out her name to herself as she drowned in the flood of bloodlust that came over her.

  Until, at last, she knew it was herself, and Mandrake, too. ‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ He spoke it deeply into her, his body in her and, for that brief moment, hers.

  ‘Rebecca!’ he repeated as he finally pulled away and back into the world of darkness in which he lived but from which, for a moment, he had escaped with her a
s he once had with Sarah.

  ‘Rebecca,’ she said softly, crying and shuddering with pain and loss.

  * * *

  ‘Rebecca…’ whispered Cairn as he crawled up the hill along the wood’s edge by the pasture with a throbbing of pain in his back and haunches and head that was almost too much to bear. ‘Rebecca,’ he whispered into the deaf grass that swayed towards him and struck his snout powerfully, ‘find my brother Stonecrop for me. Send him to help me.’

  But no answer and no Stonecrop came, and he stumbled desperately on, unwilling to stay still where he might be found, yet afraid to break cover on to the pasture from the longer grass by the wood’s edge because he would be too slow to avoid any owl that saw him. On he struggled up the hill, not knowing that he was getting nearer and nearer to the Stone or that across its soaring face, now grey with dawn, the first dead beech leaves of autumn were beginning to fall.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was among a fresh-fallen scatter of beech leaves near the Stone that Bracken first saw him. He was trying to run, but in fact was only just crawling, and Bracken had never seen a mole so terribly wounded yet still alive. His snout and cheek were crushed, his shoulders and flanks ragged red, his left eye torn and blinded, and his back legs seemed only good for dragging along, while his hind quarters had suffered deep wounds which seemed the result of several massive talon thrusts.

  Bracken had never sensed such suffering in a mole, and perhaps he himself was only able to do so because of what he had suffered in the tunnel by the cliff before Rose the Healer came.

  The injured mole advanced a little way towards the Stone, tried to snout up at it for a short while, but then staggered and swayed round to one side. For a moment Bracken thought he was coming straight at him, where he crouched half visible on the other side of the Stone, and he grew frightened. It was as if death itself was approaching him. But the mole did not see Bracken and anyway swung round again, gasping and panting with pain and effort, as he dragged himself slowly across the clearing away from the Stone and towards the pastures.