Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  For Rebecca, who was the cleanest and brightest of moles, and whose burrows had always celebrated with their scents and cheer the best of the life in the wood, this was a terrible thing.

  As her young grew inside her, she grew more fearful and her eyes, once so bright with joy, took on a sad and haunted look. She whispered for her mother, Sarah, begging her to hear her and come and help. And sometimes her mind wandered from its present pain to that day when she had danced with Stonecrop and Cairn on the pastures in the grass. ‘Oh, Cairn, please help me,’ she entreated, fearing he would never come. Not knowing he was dead.

  She tried to maintain her strength, knowing that it would be needed when the birth came, but fear and the desperate hopelessness over whatever it was that was coming began to take it from her. Until, at last, all she could do was to pray, beseeching the Stone to hear her and send its help. Prayers that were mingled with the tears and desperate love she felt for her growing young.

  She lost track of time and her sense of things seemed to change. Soon, the only thing that mattered, the only hope she felt she had, was that Mandrake might come to see her. Then, surely, she could make him see!

  One day she woke out of her nightmare drowsiness to the sound of whispers in the tunnel outside and the sight of two black eyes looking coldly at her from the entrance. It was Rune.

  ‘I hoped she would have got rid of them by now,’ he was saying to one of the henchmoles. ‘A pity. Give her less food and hit her when you feel like it. She’s bred with a Pasture mole and ought to be killed. But Mandrake…’ Rune shrugged and turned away.

  Rebecca got up heavily and tried to call to him, moving as quickly as she could to the entrance, and begging him. But he was gone, and one of the henchmoles hit her and she fell down. And one of her young moved inside her as she lay there and she wept until fear overtook her and she lay trembling in the terrible silence.

  She began to have fantasies and nightmares. In one of them her burrow was falling on her and she dug desperately at the wall trying to escape… to be awoken by the angry shouts of the henchmoles and the discovery that in her sleep she had started to burrow at the walls. In another, she was lost in a storm on a hill and there was a mole there, crouching, who surely would give her help and show her the way, but when she asked him and he turned to face her, it was Rune. Rune, laughing at her!

  Until suddenly, at last, her pups began to be born. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘Oh, no, my loves. Not yet! Not yet! Not here…’ and her eyes searched the burrow fearfully and she saw, her nightmare realised, that watching her was the massive form of Mandrake, his eyes cold and full of hate. Just watching her, as the pains drove into her, and she begged for her young not to be born.

  ‘She’s giving birth to her Pasture pups,’ she heard a voice hiss in the shadows next to Mandrake. ‘Which nomole here wants to see alive,’ said Rune.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she gasped. ‘Not here, my flowers, not here. Oh, Cairn, my—’ but they started to come, eyes blind, snouts pink, wet with blood and water, floppy as green wet leaves, tiny mouths mewing and seeking her teats. For a moment she saw them all. Four, or was it five altogether? Perfect and alive, their bleatings pure with life in her cursed burrow, their mewings drowned by a voice that urgently hissed. ‘They must be killed, Mandrake. They must go,’ and she tried to gather them to her, to protect them in the crescent of her soft belly and teats, to thrust away the cold, black talons that came among them, stabbing and stealing them, hurting them and making them bleat in their blindness. She tried to raise herself through her nightmare weakness and strike out into the darkness of bloody talons before her. She tried so hard to protect them as their bleats weakened or turned into pathetic last squeals and their mouths tried to suckle her teats even as they died in the darkness that lay between her and Mandrake. And in that moment, when he was murderous and full of hate before her, when he could not see, he could not see, it was not her love for him that he destroyed but her trust in life itself. And evil smiled to see its work well done.

  Until there was nothing but death and darkness before her, for the sounds of her litter were gone, arid only her voice remained whispering endlessly into the silence: ‘Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me…’

  And all of them were gone. Mandrake, Rune, the two henchmoles who had guarded the burrow and all the henchmoles around her entrances, leaving Rebecca alone in her burrow, and free now to go where she pleased.

  Chapter Nineteen

  If Bracken’s adulthood may be said to have started with his almost casual mating with Rue, his long march into maturity started somewhere in the depths of the Ancient System to which he returned after leaving her. There he began the first exploration of its centre since its desertion, isolation, and final forgetting so many generations before.

  But if he hoped, as he approached the Chamber of Dark Sound once more, that this time he would be quite unafraid, his hopes were shattered into a thousand fears when he got there. He could not see the owl face from the east side to which he came, but the chamber echoed with its dark menace even before he got there. Summoning all his courage, he made his way straight across the floor of the chamber towards where the owl face towered, his snout trembling with apprehension and his fur sensitive to the slightest danger.

  Finally he came near enough once more to see the dark glint of the flint parts of the face, and to look into the eye cavities of the mole skeleton that crouched at the entrance of the tunnel beneath.

  And what relief! The skull and skeleton seemed suddenly no more than the white bones they were, and Bracken saw that they could do him no harm. He had lived into death with Cairn and now, looking at this long-dead creature, he could only feel sorrow for its passing and wonder what strange story lay behind its presence here. He was afraid, certainly, but no longer of a mere skeleton.

  Shiny walls of flint rose on either side of it, grey flint rather than black, and stepping carefully past the skull, he moved through the entrance into the seventh tunnel.

  It was simple and uncarved and not as big as other ancient tunnels, and it ran only a short way before it cut into a tunnel that curved away to the right and left.

  He travelled carefully round this tunnel, which was roughly circular, as rapidly as he could, disturbing the chalk dust that had settled there through the ages and which flurried behind him in his haste. Its walls were of hard chalk subsoil, roughly burrowed, and it was clearly no more than a passageway. It took a long time to complete the full circuit, but when he had, he had a very much clearer idea of what he must do.

  In addition to the entrance he had joined it by, the circular tunnel had a total of eight different entrances leading off it. Of these, seven were flint-lined and led on towards the centre of the circle. From each came a curious murmuring, confusing rather than fearful, and not unlike the distant chatter of male moles—sometimes one sound rose a little above the rest, at others there was a momentary lull.

  The eighth entrance was simply a tunnel leading away from the circle on the far side where he had first entered. Here and there on the outer edge of the circle there was a root, half buried, sliding down the wall from above, which suggested that his location was in that treeless circle that surrounded the outer edge of the Stone clearing, adjacent to the trees that formed it, which meant that he still had the roots of the massive beeches that formed the clearing itself to pass through.

  It took him three hours or so to make the full circuit, and since, at this depth, there was no food supply at all and he was hungry and tired, he returned to the Chamber of Dark Sound and cut across it to the eastern entrance, along which he knew he would have no trouble finding food.

  He returned after a good sleep, carefully bringing with him some worms, which he stored in a cache in the circular tunnel; and then he went into the nearest of the flint-lined entrances towards the murmur of sound, anxious to get on with what he hoped was the final exploration into the heart of the Ancient System.

  The tunnel was small and crudely burrowed
into the subsoil, with a packed floor, rough walls and a simple rounding for the roof. After a short way, it split into two and, taking the right-hand fork, Bracken found that it almost immediately split into two again. Worse, the tunnel began to curve confusingly and then cut across other tunnels, and split yet more times. To add to this spatial confusion, the deeper he got, the louder the stressed murmuring he had first heard so ominously in the Chamber of Dark Sound became, while the echoes of his pawsteps kept coming back to him, running in from all directions, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to confuse him, disappearing off behind him. Until he stopped, lost, and with no idea of whether he was going forward or backward, away from the centre of the system or towards it.

  It took him two long hours to find his way back again, and then only with the greatest skill and patience as he marked each turn and thought carefully back to the twists and turns he could remember.

  It was while he was in the worrying process of doing this, crouching and thinking what to do next and making no noise himself, that he began to suspect what the vague murmurings he had first heard were, or might be. They were muffled and soft, but there was enough edge and harshness to the louder of them for him to think that they must be the sound of the roots of the beech trees that protected the buried part of the Stone. He was getting closer.

  When he finally got back to the safety of the circular tunnel and had eaten, he was sufficiently stirred by the realisation of how near he was to want to go back quickly and try again.

  What followed took him not minutes or hours but five days, and is now regarded as one of the greatest feats of tunnel analysis by any single mole. For the tunnel of echoes into which Bracken had entered, and in which he might easily have been lost and never heard of again, had been deliberately designed by the ancient moles to protect the Stone from just such interlopers as Bracken. Once, it had been protected by living moles as well, and he certainly would not have got as far as even the Chamber of Dark Sound. But the original designers of the system had foreseen that some catastrophe might one day overtake it, as it clearly had, and so had provided the Stone with the extra protection of the tunnels whose challenge Bracken now faced.

  His approach was careful and methodical, and it took a very long time. He began by marking each split or subsidiary tunnel he came to in such a way that only one route that he took was the ‘main’ one. When it circled back on itself or led to a dead end, he re-marked it, thus trying one permutation after another. He progressed slowly at first, but then found that at some points in the tunnels the sound of the roots was louder, perhaps nearer, and he rerouted his chief route in the direction of the sound. Because of the subtlety of the echoes, this often led him round, back to a way he had come, or again to dead ends. But slowly the route he developed did seem to go deeper into the circle and the roots’ sounds grew louder yet again, but again and again though it seemed to him that he was about to get there—wherever there was— they only led him nowhere.

  But then he began to notice a new element in the tunnels that went with the sound—tunnel vibrations. As the sound began to define itself more clearly into stresses and creaks, long moans and pullings, so, too, matching vibrations came down the tunnel and he felt them with his paws; shakings, jolts and shudderings.

  His excitement grew. As the sound got louder, the tunnel grew straighter until, pressing rapidly on and with no side turnings to worry about, he was suddenly out of it at last, and had successfully passed through the labyrinth of echoes into a place whose sights and shuddering sounds were of such enormity that he crouched there dumbfounded.

  He was among the living roots of one of the gigantic beeches that protected the Stone, and they moved continually in response to the eternal swayings and stressings of the wind-touched tree whose trunk and branches they fed and supported. From a darkness high above him they plunged down through the soil, massive and vibrant, twisting down through the chalky floor on which he crouched. They stretched beyond him in a tangle of verticals and angles, some massive and thick, others fine and thin: some entwined about each other, some vibrating tautly. Each made some kind of noise, each noise was different. The whole made a sound that was distorted and tangled, like a thicket of dry brambles blown by the wind. There was no clear path ahead, for the roots snaked down this way and that, and their continuous movement gave him the impression that if there was a route, it was always changing.

  To add to his confusion and sense of there being no direction ahead, there were no walls to the chamber into which he had entered. The roots not only stretched in a terrifying tangle into the distance ahead of him, but to either side as well.

  He noticed that imprisoned among some of the tight vertical tangles of the roots were great lumps of hard soil or rock, which seemed either to have fallen from the ceiling or been lifted bodily from the floor, imprisoned in a cage of living, moving bars. Sometimes dust or small fragments fell from them as a result of the stress they were under. He saw plunging from ceiling to floor one root which seemed to pull upwards periodically and then sink back. With each upward pull, a long boulder of chalk rose higher and higher from where the root left the ground until, before Bracken’s startled eyes, the fragment, which was many times bigger than himself, pulled out of the ground and toppled with a crash of dust and fragments on to the floor of the chamber, breaking one of the thinner roots, which twanged loudly into the darkness above as it snapped apart.

  In some places the roots seemed to have forced themselves through the floor so powerfully that great fissures and crevices radiated dangerously from them, and when the roots moved dust and sound seemed to fly up from the jagged depths beneath.

  Bracken looked on this terrifying scene for a very long time before turning his back on it and returning through the circuitous, echoing tunnels whose labyrinths absorbed the rootsound behind him, back to the outer circular tunnel. He was not yet ready to press on among the roots themselves.

  It was at this point that Bracken showed again his special skill and foresight as an explorer. Some instinct, perhaps an awe of the venerable place he was in, told him that he must not leave the route he had found so clearly marked as it now was. And so, after more rest and food, he set himself to memorise it, slowly removing each marking the further his memory took him towards the roots.

  Until at last he could run the whole route almost by instinct, navigating the labyrinths all the way to the Chamber of Roots without any need of markers. Only then was he prepared to press on, but still he did not do so. Instead, he began his exploration of another of the entrances, progressing up it the same way, though finding his task much easier now that he had done the same thing already.

  In this way Bracken taught himself to find his way among three of the ways into the centre and in doing so discovered, or rather deduced, that the labyrinth of echoes was interconnected right round the perimeter of the Stone, while the Chamber of Roots was really one big chamber, with no walls but those formed by roots. Though what lay beyond them he did not yet know and was a mystery he would need great courage and fortune to solve.

  Yet, when the hour came to set off among the roots themselves, his attempt to pass through was a failure, and a curious one. It was not that he was afraid of the roots exactly, though their massive movement and confusing noise was enough to terrify anymole; nor was it that it would not have been possible to find his way into them in much the same way as he had through the labyrinths of echoes. It was subtler than that.

  In his first attempt, for example, he got no further than perhaps ten moleyards before his mind began to wander and he began to wonder why he was there and what the point was. He was out of the Chamber of Roots almost before he knew what he was doing, and only two or three hours later wondered why he had not gone on.

  Another time he made a more determined effort and indeed got further into a complex of roots from which he could no longer see the entrance to the chamber. But then the roots got denser and more sinewy, even the marks he made just behind h
im on the ground seemed to start disappearing, and he got the feeling that he was being watched from somewhere to his left. By mole? By beast? He felt panic coming over him and, try as he might to control it, he could not—though it cleared the moment he turned round and started back, stumbling quickly through the noise and heaving roots, afraid for a time that he would not find the way out again.

  He tried once more, on a day that must have been calm on the surface, for the roots were whispering quietly, and he did quite well until he suddenly felt a pleasant tiredness coming over him and the roots ahead seemed to open out invitingly for him to lie down… He had to shake himself to keep awake, only realising when he did so that what lay ahead of him was a great crevice, wide and deep, and delving down to a rugged darkness from which slidings and hissings of thin roots seemed to come. Once more he turned back.

  Each time he got back to the entrance of the chamber, however, these curious feelings immediately cleared and, looking back at the roots, they seemed their normal massive, threatening selves, but no more than that.

  Finally, he decided to take a break—perhaps, after all, the time had come to return to the surface, for he had been involved in this exploration for many days. He had lost his sense of timing, thinking that perhaps only fifteen or twenty days had passed since he had left Rue, yet when he finally reached the surface he was surprised to find it was chilly, even though it was afternoon. The wood was filled with the chill light of the end of October, when most of the leaves have gone and the wind stirs the remainder irritably.

  Then he knew that he must have been gone for many moleweeks and wondered what it was about the Ancient System that made a mole seem to lose his sense of time.

  Bracken shivered at the cold and felt in need of company. Well, he could visit Rue; she was always glad to see him—and always glad to see him go! He laughed a little as he bustled off down the slopes to see her, thinking that he was getting to know her ways, and how pleasant it was to feel the fresh air in his fur and smell the clear scents of the wood again.