Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  No, talking was no use. Bracken tried to tell Boswell about the stone in the heart of the Ancient System but the words died in his mouth and he could not take Boswell past the Chamber of Echoes in his account, lying—‘No, no. I couldn’t get through, it’s impossible’—and the lie was better than betraying the memory of the glimmering stone where he and Rebecca were… what? ‘Where we were was the best way he could tell it to himself. Bracken wanted to leave Nuneham.

  So did Stonecrop, and Mullion as well; while Boswell left those things to Bracken, whose words were sometimes jumbled and confused but whose instincts he trusted and would always follow, as the Stone itself seemed to have instructed him to do. Medlar agreed. He had known before any of them that there was no more he could do—a mole must learn the rest himself. And anyway, he had more to learn himself, and a place he must go to.

  ‘You will find there is much more to learn,’ Medlar said finally at the end of the first week of June, ‘and that none of it is very far from your heart. Indeed, I will let you into a secret!’ Medlar said this jovially, for he was relieved that his task was done. June was a time to travel, and he wanted to leave Nuneham himself and head for Uffington, to where, he knew now, he had always been going.

  ‘You do not have to learn anything. You know it all already. Each one of you. It’s all here!’ And he thumped his old chest cheerfully, laughing gaily as if everything was really so simple that it was absurd worrying about it, which it was.

  ‘As for fighting, when you no longer need to fight at all, you will know when you have learned enough. This is not a mystery but a simple fact. A real fighter does not need to raise one single talon to quell an opponent—unless it be to teach him a lesson of the crudest sort!’ Medlar looked at Stonecrop when he said this, remembering their first meeting, and then laughed again.

  ‘We are living in a strange time, which is why I am going to Uffington. By the Stone’s grace I will get there. As for you, each of you has the strength to be a warrior, as have we all.’

  They said their farewells at night by the Nuneham Stone. Medlar spoke to each of them in turn—including Mullion, of whom he had grown especially fond—and then said a prayer to the Stone itself. Boswell said a prayer as well and then uttered the journey blessing on Medlar. And when Medlar had gone, he said it again, so that its protection would go with old Medlar, who had awakened so much in all their hearts.

  The June moon was waxing and strong. ‘We’ll travel all together,’ said Bracken with a strong spirit which they all respected, even Stonecrop. ‘We’ll head straight for the Duncton Stone. Just look at the moon! You know what it means for a Duncton mole? Midsummer’s coming! And there’s words I’ve promised to say by the Stone on Midsummer Night.’

  ‘We’ll have to push it to get there that quick,’ said Stonecrop.

  ‘We will!’ said Bracken. He stayed on alone by the Nuneham Stone for a moment after the others had set off, his snout pointing towards Duncton, whose pull he could feel and which would get stronger as the moon got fuller and the days advanced towards Midsummer. And looking at it, and then in the direction of Duncton Wood, he remembered another light, white, glimmering, and whispered ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ and laughed aloud into the night.

  Chapter Thirty

  Few springs had ever been as miserable in spirit as that in which Rune consolidated his power in Duncton Wood. Under his black thrall the system became in fact what the Pasture moles had always feared it was—a place where evil spells are woven by minds that lurk in darkness and by moles whose smiles are as warm as the welcome an owl gives to its prey.

  Rune’s power came initially from the vicious loyalty of the henchmoles whose favour he had fostered so successfully under Mandrake, and who now did his bidding whenever it came, and for whatever purpose.

  He was well aware that since the henchmoles had given him power, they could, in theory at least, take it away again. For this reason, once he was installed as leader of the Duncton system, he began a policy of winning their gratitude by granting them favours of territory and matings and securing their fear by imposing particularly cruel and rough punishment on those henchmoles who transgressed his deliberately arbitrary rules. He had noticed how Mandrake had made everymole fear him by occasionally picking on one at random and killing or maiming him for all to see.

  Rune’s method was more subtle and perhaps even more effective. He would arbitrarily select a henchmole and accuse him of a crime that had not been a crime the day before, and was not one again in the days that followed. Perhaps a henchmole had killed another one unnecessarily in a mating fight—nothing normally wrong with that at all in Rune’s system: the more killing the better! But suddenly, out of the blue, that mole would be accused of harming Duncton by attacking a colleague and a friend, and Rune would throw his fate open to the whim of the group of trusty henchmoles who always stayed close by him, currying his favour. Great was their joy at not being the victim; pleasantly were their sadistic imaginations stretched to think of a way of punishing him. Injure him and leave him for the owls to take alive? Crush his snout and let him die slowly in full view of Barrow Vale? Whatever was decided, Rune liked to watch, and he rarely left a scene of punishment without his own talons being covered in blood and his unpleasant laughter carrying above that of the rest.

  At the same time, he encouraged henchmoles to spy on each other and on other moles, and to tell him what they had found out. His punishments for moles successfully accused were always grim and form part of one of the cruellest, and saddest, periods in the history of Duncton. Maimings, blindings, snout-crushings and enforced cannibalism—the list is as long, as dark and as bloody as each individual death the henchmoles devised.

  By the beginning of March, Rune had the henchmoles completely under his control, and with them all the system but the Marsh End. That he preferred to leave alone for a while longer, for fear that the disease that had broken out there—a rumour successfully propagated by Mekkins, who intended to resist Rune in every way he could—would spread into the main system. But if a henchmole could get hold of a wandering Marshender, that was fine, and what cruel pleasure was had by all before the poor creature died!

  As March had begun and the mating season got under way, there was a certain decrease of the violence, for it had served its purpose and the henchmoles deserved to take their pleasures in mating and fighting among themselves and others. The sight of the big and bullying Westsiders, from whose ranks most of the henchmoles came, as they roamed about seeking mates became familiar in all the system, where females waited in abject fear, and males from such areas as the Eastside and around Barrow Vale preferred to scurry away and hide, lest they be lured into a mating fight they could not win.

  The henchmoles did not, however always have things their own way. One female called Oxlip, who lived near the Marsh End, objected to the invasion of her tunnels by a henchmole and, with a combination of cunning and sheer anger, succeeded not only in killing him but also in injuring another henchmole who was lurking nearby.

  Rune’s reaction was to kill the injured one who reported the incident ‘for bringing shame to the henchmoles’ and then to send others to find the female. They failed, for Oxlip turned north to the Marsh End, where Mekkins accepted her as a Marshender, glad to have any mole brave enough to fight and flee from the henchmoles.

  But just as spiders suddenly appear from nowhere in damp September, so does evil manifest itself when a mole like Rune takes power. Strange, dark creatures of moles, diseased in mind, distorted in body, began to appear from the darkness in which they had so long lurked and to gather in the shadows that surrounded Rune. An old female from the Eastside, for example, appeared one day in Barrow Vale—her thin and haggard appearance and the cast of danger in her body all so threatening that the henchmole who found her and dared not touch her took her to Rune.

  Although her origin was vaguely known—she said herself that she came from beyond the Eastside—nomole knew her name. The henchmole called he
r Nightshade and Rune very quickly seemed to take to her, liking to have her misshapen form lurking in the tunnels and burrows from which he ruled Duncton. He saw the silly, superstitious fear she caused and so exploited it. It was said that she knew dark and secret rituals banished from Duncton by the moles of the Ancient System and handed down in some outback of the Eastside by generation after generation of moles waiting for just such a moment as this. However it was, no henchmole dared to risk angering her or getting in her way before dawn, when she liked to squirm about the surface muttering and cursing to herself and casting spells that left an odour in the air.

  Evil showed itself in other ways, too. Duncton’s normally bright and cheerful spring wild flowers seemed to grow prematurely withered out of the ground—wood anemones drooping, the white petals mottled and limp, while even the normally ebullient dog’s mercury grew rank and fetid where its spiky leaves pierced last year’s dead undergrowth. The sun, normally bright and warm for at least a few days at the end of March, stayed distant and watery, and even when its rays broke through the cloud they were chilly, and the light they cast was cold.

  The trees were slow to take leaf, and by mid-April only the hawthorn and an occasional horse chestnut were beginning to show green in their buds, miserable against the black trunks and leafless trees that gave the wood a wintry air.

  Ordinary moles in the system did their best to keep their snouts out of trouble, staying as quietly as they could in their own tunnels or giving them up without a struggle if some bully of a henchmole fancied taking them. Some sought to find favour and settled old territorial scores by reporting their harmless neighbours to the henchmoles. Others crouched and shivered in their burrows, stirring only to find food, their spirits lowering as the weeks went by.

  The fear and stress found their evil way into the very life of the system itself, for far fewer females became pregnant, and of those that did, far more than usual aborted their litters and went pupless into early summer. Such females were vulnerable to attack, being already weak, and Rune made his displeasure with them known. Those who littered were, however, favoured—not because of the joy their pups might bring but because their young might make henchmoles in the future, and it was to the future that Rune’s black mind was looking.

  As April advanced, Rune, the only mole in Duncton Wood who seemed positively glowing with health, began to relax about the possible return of Mandrake, which he had seen initially as a serious threat. Mandrake had last been seen bringing down the great flints in the Chamber of Dark Sound to halt the henchmoles’ assault upon him, and since then, nothing had been heard. Rune had left several henchmoles at key points around the Ancient System—at Hulver’s old tunnels, by Bracken’s tunnels in the area between the Stone clearing and the pastures, and a few other points where tunnels started. But Mandrake was never seen or heard, and Rune began to suspect that the inevitable had happened and that Mandrake had died in lonely madness somewhere in the forgotten tunnels, or perhaps had left the system altogether to seek out some other place as he had once sought out Duncton. But wherever he was, the henchmoles would never allow him back now.

  In any case, as the warmer weather finally and reluctantly began to arrive in the second week of May, Rune became preoccupied with an idea that had been growing in his mind for many moleyears. He wanted to attack the Pasture system.

  He had suspected for a long time that the Pasture moles were not as strong as the Duncton moles feared they were. The number of incidents between the two systems had declined steadily over the moleyears, and it was significant to him that there was no reaction from the pastures after the attack on Cairn. Rune wrongly assumed that the injured Cairn had made his way back to the pastures and from this believed that, had the Pasture moles been really powerful, they would have attacked Duncton, or at least sought reprisals. But even in the mating season, when there were usually a few incursions, nothing happened.

  Rune decided that the time had come to launch a limited assault on the pastures. It was with this objective in mind that he started to gather his henchmoles on the Westside at the end of May.

  * * *

  The death of Rose was a deep loss to the Pasture system, where she was much loved, and in particular to Brome, who had always revered the trust and advice she had given and that had helped him to take control of the pastures peacefully and with justice.

  When her death was reported to him, he had set off at once for Rose’s burrows, for it is the tradition in the pastures that the burrows of a healer are sealed by a mole or moles to whom they have been close. When he got there, he found the tunnels and burrows deserted except for the body of Rose, and a guardmole led him to her main tunnel’s exit on the surface where Rebecca was crouched, snout pointing across the open grass to the darkness of the wood she loved. She had a youngster at her side.

  Because he was uncertain how to address a mole who had, by all accounts, lived closer than any other ever had to Rose, if only for the last few molemonths, he said rather formally, ‘It is the custom to seal the burrow.’

  Rebecca turned and looked at him, tiredness and loss in her eyes, but a sense of peace as well. Used as Brome was to deference from other moles, he was surprised but relieved to sense none at all in this Rebecca, only a sorrow for the passing of a mole she had obviously loved as well.

  ‘In our system, it is the custom to let the owls have their way,’ she said, quietly smiling to him as a token of her sense of his loss.

  A little discomfited by the directness of her gaze, Brome asked. ‘What’s his name?’ looking at Comfrey. Rebecca said nothing, making it clear that Comfrey was old enough to reply for himself.

  ‘My name’s C-C-Comfrey,’ he said, looking at Brome with his curious mixture of timidity and interest, ‘and I’m from D-D-Duncton Wood.’ Brome nodded and smiled, but Comfrey went on. ‘My father was Bracken who went into the marshes. H-he’s coming back.’

  Brome had heard about the sad story of Bracken from Mekkins, so he smiled again and nodded his head vaguely, thinking that this was some kind story Rebecca had reassured the youngster with, for nomole returns from the marshes. To his astonishment he saw a look on Rebecca’s face that seemed almost angry with him, as if she suspected this thought and wished to underline that what she had told Comfrey was indeed true.

  This mute exchange surprised Brome and he looked at Rebecca more closely, his curiosity sliding very quickly into a kind of uneasy awe. Never before had he been in the presence of a mole who gave him the impression that she knew exactly what he was feeling. He saw as well that she was very beautiful, with a coat of dark, silvery grey, whose sheen held the light of a clear sky after rain.

  He had a dozen things in his mind to say, but they all fell away before her still gaze and he said what was in his heart: ‘What are we going to do, Rebecca?’ She came forward and touched him for a second, a touch that reassured him, and then she led the way back to Rose’s tunnels where, without another word, they sealed the tunnels together, soil falling on their fur as with burrowing sweeps of their paws they retreated before it. It was the Pasture way of doing things.

  ‘Will you stay here?’ he asked. It was really a plea, for such a mole could bring nothing but good to the system and the pastures had lost much in the passing of Rose.

  She nodded, suddenly weary, for she knew that Rose had left her the task of filling her place as healer, a prospect that seemed unreal and impossible to achieve. There was so much she didn’t know and so many things she wished she had asked. So she would be a healer and for the time being she would stay here, for there was nowhere else she could go—certainly not to Duncton, not yet. It was Brome’s turn to sense what was in her mind, for he came nearer her and crouched quietly, his big limbs stretched comfortably by the untidy seal of soil they had just made as he said: ‘It will be all right here, you know. There are many moles that will need you.’

  For a while he hesitated to say more, but finally said ‘There may be problems if they know that you and C
airn…’

  Rebecca looked sharply at him and his words froze in his mouth. Rebecca had a power in her he had never seen before in anymole. ‘The only way possible for a healer is to live in the truth,’ she said. ‘Cairn and I mated, and he was killed by Mandrake and Rune, two Duncton moles.’

  ‘Well,’ said Brome, ‘I will see that all moles know who you are and why you are here. Only you can allay any doubts or fears or hostility they may have.’

  ‘If Stonecrop were here and I could talk to him, he would understand,’ she said.

  Brome shook his head sadly. ‘Stonecrop left the system—he wanted to avenge Cairn’s death—but I persuaded him that it would not be right, or safe.’ Rebecca smiled, for that was just what Stonecrop would have wanted to do.

  ‘He heard that a great fighter had come to a system said to be quite near here, beyond the pastures, and in company with other moles he went off to find him. The others have come back, but Stonecrop was not with them.’

  Rebecca lowered her head. Stonecrop dead, or lost? Another mole gone? Cairn, Bracken, Hulver, Stonecrop, Mandrake. Why so many? She felt as if they were all leaving her, and immediately sensed that the thought was wrong. ‘I’m so self-centred!’ she scolded herself. Then she said: ‘Bracken was with Cairn when he died,’ as if to reassure Brome about Cairn’s death, and through him other Pasture moles.

  ‘Who is this Bracken? Everymole I meet from Duncton seems to mention him—you, Mekkins, even Comfrey. Was he one of your mates?’ She shook her head. ‘He was a mole who lived in the Ancient System by the Stone—he knew the tunnels there better than anymole ever has. He is a very special mole.’

  ‘But he’s lost if he’s gone out on to the marsh—nomole ever comes back from there,’ said Brome.