Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  ‘Trust in the Stone!’ she shouted, her voice carrying to them all. ‘Trust in Bracken and the Stone!’ Her words carried even to Rune, who until then had not seen her clearly, and he faltered, as if uncertain whether she was really living or come back from the dead. Then he heard that it was her and she was shouting the name of Bracken. His eyes narrowed, he wondered whether he was fighting an army of ghost moles, for he remembered Bracken now; then, as ever, coolness returned and he fought on even more strongly, eager to get to the mole who must be Bracken—the tough one who stood fighting between the great mole from the pastures and Mekkins. That was him. He was the one to kill, before the massacre.

  His talons razed through the face fur of Bracken, and other henchmoles, sensing his intent, pressed towards Bracken as well, each trying to get their talons in his fur or snout.

  The noise was terrible. Screams. Roaring. But then another roaring. The sound came through like sudden wind in trees, a roaring louder than any they had yet heard. A monstrous roaring, accompanied by blunderings and crashings in the wood beyond the clearing, a sound made by no henchmole that had ever lived.

  Rune and his moles ignored it, fighting on to kill Bracken and the others. But facing the darkness of the wood as they were, Bracken and Stonecrop and Mekkins, blood flowing freely from their tired limbs, could not but see the sudden huge shadow that appeared at the wood’s edge, ten times bigger it seemed than the slinking form of Nightshade over which it loomed.

  It surged forward, caught the moonlight and became clear, a sight more fearful than a thousand henchmoles poised to kill.

  It was Mandrake—and he had not looked more terrifying since that spring day, so many moleyears before, when he had appeared at the wood’s edge and slaughtered his way into Duncton.

  ‘It’s Mandrake!’ cried Bracken, his voice suddenly clear and strong in the night.

  Rune and his moles stepped back for a moment, turning to see what it was. Mandrake stood facing them all, his eyes black and impenetrable as the most savage night, fur hanging in great folds about his massive body, his snout as ever like a talon before him.

  Nightshade turned round to look as well, but with one single blow of his right paw he swept her bloodily away, her body lifeless before it touched the ground. Mandrake was back.

  If days of destiny lead to a final hour and that hour reaches a last minute in whose seconds decisions that form life are made, this was it. Rune tried to grab it.

  ‘Here is the Stone Mole,’ he shouted, pointing his talons at Bracken. ‘He is the Stone Mole. Help us kill him, Mandrake.’ He turned back to complete the onslaught on Bracken. It was a cunning and brave manoeuvre by Rune.

  Mandrake said no word and only a vibrating growl came from him as he looked at them all. His gaze settled not on Bracken but on Rebecca behind him, and behind her on the youngsters gathered, terrified, around her.

  ‘Rebecca!’ he roared suddenly, moving forward like a black storm cloud across a windy, moonlit sky. ‘Rebecca!’ And his huge paws began to flay right and left, taking with each blow one or two or three henchmoles out of his path. Rune’s forces fell around him at Mandrake’s advance, and at last Rune himself, seeing his support going and his ploy failing, slunk to one side as Mandrake continued his advance, not on Bracken, not on Mekkins, not on Stonecrop, but towards Rebecca beyond them. ‘Rebecca!’ he cried. ‘Rebecca!’

  There came from him a smell so rank, so disgusting in its anger and wretched rage, that Mekkins and Bracken fell back before it, closing in front of Rebecca and raising their talons to protect her. But its effect on Stonecrop was just the opposite. He had smelt that odour before—in a temporary burrow where Rebecca and his brother, Cairn, had mated. This was the odour on which he had sworn to take revenge. He moved his own great body forward, his fur lighter and his muscles tauter than Mandrake’s, and with one massive lunge stopped Mandrake in his tracks.

  It was the first time since Mandrake had left the frozen slopes of Siabod so many long and cruel moleyears before that anymole had stood so solid in his path. He reared up, looking at Stonecrop as if he was in some way surprised to see him, as if he expected nomole at all to be there. As if the very nature of the world itself had suddenly changed.

  Every lesson Stonecrop had learned from Medlar now came into play. Sensing Mandrake’s surprise, Stonecrop acted immediately, lunging forward with a talon cut that scored another wound on Mandrake’s lined and pitted face.

  Then Mandrake did a strange thing. Instead of immediately counterattacking, he seemed to try to peer round Stonecrop as if baffled by an obstruction on a path that had once been clear; trying to get a better look at Rebecca and calling, crying, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ And still he did not try to strike Stonecrop back.

  Behind Stonecrop, Bracken turned to Rebecca, who was trying to come forward towards Mandrake as she herself called out from some terrible distance, ‘Oh Mandrake, Mandrake!’

  Stonecrop hesitated, not knowing whether to yield to his desire to try and kill Cairn’s murderer or to listen to some half-heard instinct that told him… told him something he could not quite catch… something desolate in Rebecca’s voice.

  There was movement behind him as Bracken and Mekkins forcibly stopped Rebecca running forward and Bracken shouted grimly, ‘Kill him, Stonecrop. Kill him!’ Then, as Rebecca let forth a terrible cry of, ‘No… no…’ that seemed to fill the clearing, and beyond it the beech trees and beyond them the whole of Duncton Wood with despair, Stonecrop lunged forward against Mandrake again.

  ‘He will kill you, Rebecca,’ shouted Bracken, as Rebecca’s talons tore at him and Mekkins in her desperation to go to her father. ‘He wants to save me,’ she cried, as once more Mandrake roared out, ‘Rebecca, I’m here, Rebecca,’ and she heard him cry, his voice calling from out of a blizzard of icy winds and sleet that ravaged the high slopes of Siabod, where once, so long ago and so terribly, he had been born. She heard his cries of ‘Rebecca, Rebecca’ as the cries of a pup which feels itself lost for ever in a storm, she heard them as the mewings and bleatings of a litter she could not save. Her talons tore uselessly, desperately, into the face and fur and flanks of Bracken as beyond him she saw Stonecrop bear down at last on Mandrake, beginning, lunge by terrible lunge, to kill him. There were growlings and roars, there was blood on angry talons, but most of all, and worst, there was the huge impersonal back of Stonecrop, his massive shoulders working methodically forward as lunge after cut after talon thrust he destroyed Mandrake before her eyes. Mandrake’s cries of ‘Rebecca!’ continued between grunts of horrid pain and the last tired lunges of a fighter who has no more will to fight; the last calls of a pup in a blizzard whose cold has taken him for its own. And then they grew weaker, despairing, and finally fell silent until, at last, Stonecrop seemed to be hitting not straight ahead of him but down, near the ground, where Mandrake had fallen into his own blood, his paws feeble and his breath weakening, his eyes closing, and finally, his life force gone. Then, Stonecrop was over him, shoulders weak from the kill, Mandrake’s blood on his paws and fur, the living looking at the dead.

  He turned back towards the Stone where Rebecca now crouched, Mekkins and Bracken still holding her, and each of them saw that his face was contorted by a horror of something his eyes had seen and his talons felt. Then he said, almost by way of explanation and with unnatural calm: ‘He killed Cairn. He killed your litter. He…’

  ‘He loved me,’ cried Rebecca. ‘He was calling for me. And I couldn’t… You wouldn’t… let me…’ Then her sobs were wild and desperate, a weeping for something that can never be brought back, while to Bracken it seemed that they were not just for Mandrake, but for all the moles who lay dead and dying about the Stone clearing—Brome, Mullion, Oxlip, Burrhead, his own father now dead before him, Pasture moles, Duncton moles, males and females, and Rebecca’s tears seemed for them all. Worst of all, they were for him as well.

  He tried to comfort her but she pulled away, looking at him from a cold and far-off place he k
new he could never reach. His hold on her fell limp and she crossed over to where Mandrake lay, paused for a moment as she touched his head gently, looked back at Bracken and Stonecrop with a fierce and cold pity, and then went out of the clearing and into the dark.

  No stabbing talon could ever have thrust itself with such pain into Bracken’s heart as that terrible look from Rebecca before she turned her back on him and was gone. He felt himself cut off from life itself. He ran from the Stone towards the clearing edge, calling, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ but the name did not seem to carry, and even the light in the clearing grew weaker as the moon began its fall behind the trees.

  Then Boswell’s voice came to him gently from the Stone. ‘Say the blessing, Bracken, say the Midsummer blessing for the young.’

  Bracken turned to look back at the Stone, which stood darker now, the bodies of the dead moles about it no more than rounded shadows in the weakening light. He could see the snouts of the youngsters they had saved moving and bobbing by the Stone, with the bigger forms of their mothers about them. A stronger shaft of light seemed to fall on Boswell, who stood to one side of the Stone, his eyes compassionately on Bracken, to whom it seemed that Boswell was part of the Stone, a living part.

  He was weak and utterly desolate and his breathing came quicker and more shallow as if he was going to weep. He had lost his Rebecca. He knew it as certainly as he knew it was night.

  ‘Say the blessing, Bracken,’ whispered Boswell—or did he shout it?—‘Rune has gone, the Stone has given its protection.’

  ‘The stone has given its protection to everymole but me,’ Bracken thought bitterly. ‘And Rebecca.’

  He came forward, moving slightly to the right to stand to the west of the Stone, in the direction in which it tilted. He looked up at its highest point, the only part that still caught the moonlight clearly, and began to speak words he had learned so reluctantly, so long ago. First the prefatory chants that he did not even know he knew, and then finally, the last words of the blessing:

  ‘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 …’

  As his voice faltered and caught sobbing in his throat, Boswell’s voice joined him, its strength giving him strength and its faith giving him a kind of desolate hope. The voice of Boswell spoke from some ancient past that stretched back to a time before even the tunnels around them were made, and which went forward to a future that trembled now in his heart:

  ‘We ask they be blessed

  With a sevenfold blessing:

  The grace of form

  The grace of goodness

  The grace of suffering

  The grace of wisdom

  The grace of true words

  The grace of trust

  The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’

  If Bracken’s voice faltered as he spoke the words none there noticed it, for Boswell’s voice mingled powerfully with it as, without knowing what he was doing, Bracken moved among the youngsters, touching them as his Rebecca might have done.

  ‘We bathe their paws in showers of light,

  We free their souls with talons of love,

  We ask that they hear the silent Stone.’

  ‘So Boswell knows the words as well,’ thought Bracken, vaguely. ‘Then who is Boswell?’ he asked himself.

  ‘The wood is safe,’ Bracken found himself saying to the Marsh End mothers, ‘so take your youngsters back to the Marsh End.’ Then, one by one, the moles left the Stone—the Pasture moles cutting off westwards, through the wood, Stonecrop leaving with them, as the Marshenders began their long trek home. There were henchmoles there, but Bracken saw they were no longer threatening, just ordinary moles who had lost their way. They began to cluster silently around Bracken, Mekkins and Boswell, looking to them for guidance, and Bracken noticed that beyond them other Duncton moles came from out of the shadows—Eastsiders, females from the Westside, moles from the slopes, all scraggy with age. Even some of the Marshenders stayed behind with Bracken. Then they began to whisper in a curious, almost primitive, chanting way, ‘Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale…’ and Bracken knew he must lead them there. He turned his back on the Stone to take up the power Mandrake had held, and then Rune, and that had destroyed both of them.

  Among the moles who followed Bracken down, gleefully chanting ‘Barrow Vale’ and then ‘Bracken, Bracken,’ there was only one who stayed silent and yet who truly loved him. And that was Boswell, who followed limping behind, trying to keep up with them so that he could always keep Bracken in his sight.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Duncton Wood quickly settled down to summer and Bracken’s rule. There was some preliminary skirmishing with the remnants of the henchmoles, some of whom claimed that since Rune had not been killed and was nowhere to be found, there was no reason to think that he wasn’t coming back. But Bracken quickly put a stop to this with a coupled of swift and deadly fights against the toughest of the remaining henchmoles, which killed one and injured the other.

  By the first week of July all was quiet and Bracken was in total command and the henchmoles were but a memory fading into the shadows from whence they had come, as Bracken’s days became taken up with the settlement of the usual disputes and wrangles that beset any system in the idle months of summer, when the only real interest lies in what territory the youngsters are winning for themselves.

  The summer grew increasingly hot. Not the occasional heat of a couple of days that gives way rapidly to great lumbering cumulus clouds that sail across the face of the sun and remind moles to enjoy the sun while they may, but the heat that starts slowly and then simply stays, beating down day after day and making green leaves begin to look wan and desperate in its hazy stillness. The kind of heat that produces an endless palling stillness through which the sun seems almost to filter itself of good cheer, becoming instead faceless and impersonal. Rain, when it fell, was almost dry before it hit the ground, and by the third week of July it seemed to have been all used up.

  Against this background, Bracken’s rule settled into routine. He gave advice and help when it was sought and visited the pastures, where Stonecrop had assumed control, agreeing that the Stone should be made accessible to any Pasture mole who wanted to visit it. Soon there was a feeling of lightness and relief in both systems and Bracken began to feel, with some justice, that in most respects Duncton Wood was a better place than it had been for many many moleyears.

  Yet all was not well. As the molemonths passed into August, he began to change in ways that were imperceptible to himself. For one thing, it proved impossible to remain as accessible and friendly as he had initially been to everymole who came to see him.

  Most moles seemed to want to set him apart, eager to respect him, and to listen with irritating seriousness to what he said. Others, even the biggest Westsiders, seemed afraid of him, and his initial attempts to put them at their ease gave way eventually to an unconscious contempt for them and a subtly growing idea that, yes, indeed, he must be a special mole and perhaps everything he said was interesting.

  When he wanted things done, he began to find it easier to be tough and terse in issuing instructions than careful and polite. It was much less fuss, and anyway, as he grumbled to Boswell in an irritated rationalisation of his growing autocracy, the moles of Duncton liked to be led and have their minds made up for them.

  It was easier, too, to have other moles do certain things for him—to listen to complaints, to advise on which issue Bracken would, or would not, prefer to make his own judgement about personally—and so a corpus of moles, many of them from Barrow Vale and a few from the Eastside, began to grow up who acted as a buffer between Bracken and everymole else.

  There was nothing unusual or sinister about such a development—most systems have something like it at one time or another—but in Bracken it combined, unfortunately, with his own growing unspoken restlessness,
whose causes he did not seek to know, since he was not even aware of the changes overtaking him.

  He became irritable and sharp; some of his judgements were hasty and ill-advised. He stepped in on one territorial dispute, for example, up near the slopes between youngsters who should have been left to settle it themselves, and so caused resentment all round. Whole days would pass when he refused to talk to anymole, preferring to stay in his tunnels near Barrow Vale or wander over to the more deserted areas of the slopes.

  The only mole who retained constant contact with him was Boswell, though even with Boswell Bracken was increasingly offhand and indifferent.

  In Barrow Vale they began to call Bracken standoffish and superior, though his achievements in getting rid of Rune, in being the one to order the killing of Mandrake, and his now legendary crossing of the marsh were sufficient for nomole to doubt that he was their leader.

  But soon there were other things to gossip about, like the continuing hot weather which, it was said (though nomole was sure by whom), was beginning to affect the worm supply on the pastures, and some of the Marshenders were saying that the marshes were smelling terrible and hadn’t been so bad in living memory, while everymole agreed that the heat and dryness was enough to make a mole thoroughly irritable, not to say fed up, wasn’t it?

  But while other moles thought of other things, Boswell concerned himself about what lay at the root of the change in Bracken. He had been bleak witness to the terrible shock that crossed Bracken’s face when Rebecca left them in the clearing on Midsummer Night, since when, so far as he knew, the two had not met again. Now he could not help but notice that whereas Bracken had once talked often of Rebecca, especially on their journey from Nuneham, he never mentioned her name now, although sometimes, in the presence of one of the brighter younger females or up on the surface when a wind ran among the trees, he would see Bracken look about him sadly, his normal mask of cool command dropping for a while, as if there were something nearby he thought he had lost.