Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  It was so bad in some places that moles began to avoid certain of the communal tunnels and even to abandon affected sections of their own tunnels. Many of the Marshenders took the more drastic but effective step of gathering leaves and the yellow flowerheads of the fleabane that few down near the marshes to spread about their tunnels, which had the unfortunate effect on the system of forcing the infestations further towards the centre, where the fleabane did not grow.

  Such infestations had happened in summer before, though never so badly, but even this was regarded by the gossips of Barrow Vale as just another annoyance of an aggravating season. Certainly it was not of enough significance to stop Bracken deciding that, once he had had a rest from his tour of the tunnels, he would set off for the pastures to tell Stonecrop and the Pasture moles that they could occupy the ancient tunnels if they really wanted to. Then he would go and see Rebecca, hoping that she would come close to him again.

  But he was never to make either journey. As he was about to leave, Mekkins arrived from the Marsh End with some news so strange that he immediately accompanied him back, though taking a roundabout route to avoid the fleas.

  It seemed that the day before, three moles had been gathering fleabane by the marsh’s edge, when from out among its dry rustling grasses two strange moles had appeared. Never in living memory or legend had anymole ever come from across the marshes. The Marshenders were hostile—two standing their ground very firmly while the other got reinforcements and sent to Mekkins. Mekkins came quickly and interrogated them. The two strangers were friendly to the point of abjection. They had come a long way, they said; the marsh was caked over with dryness and there was no problem in crossing it. No, they had not crossed over by any route which the roaring owls took—a suggestion Mekkins made to them on the basis of what Boswell had told him about what lay beyond the marshes. No, they had come by some other way, though they seemed confused, or deliberately vague, about where. They kept asking questions themselves—what system was this, they wanted to know, and was everything all right?

  Mekkins answered no questions, but let them come into one of the burrows nearest the marsh where he there put some guards on them while he went to get Bracken. His instinct was to kill them there and then, but he felt that their visit was so unusual, and times were so strange, that it was a good idea to give Bracken and Boswell the chance to talk to them.

  So all three of them went back quickly to the Marsh End without pause, going right through towards the marsh itself. But before they got to the burrow where the strangers were being kept, they met the three Marsh End moles who had been guarding them coming towards them.

  ‘Why the ’ell aren’t you doin’ what you should be?’ demanded Mekkins. ‘Don’t you tell me that them two buggers have scarpered.’ He looked very threatening.

  One of the three spoke up: ‘It ain’t that they’ve scarpered, Mekkins. Worse than that. They’re dead!’

  ‘Yes, suddenly took ill last night with Stone knows what, and as soon as you know it, they were gone,’ said another. ‘Both of them?’ asked Mekkins.

  ‘Horrible it was,’ said the third. ‘In agony they were.’

  ‘Horrible it is,’ said the first mole. ‘Never smelt anything like it. You go an’ see for yerself, Mekkins.’

  The two dead moles presented a pathetic sight. One was still crouched upright on his paws, all hunched up with his snout tight between his forepaws, as if he had tried to protect himself from a headlong wind. His eyes were terribly swollen, while his snout, what they could see of it, was red and sore, and his fur mottled and caked with sweat. The other was on his side, paws out stiff, his mouth agape. His soft, pale belly fur was lank and diseased-looking, and in the soft part where one of the back paws joined his body there was a gaping sore, yellow with pus. It was from this that a terrible stench of death that filled the burrow seemed to emanate. There was one other thing. The floor of the burrow was bristling with fleas whose one objective seemed the same: to get to the open sores on the mole’s body. Some fleas were already there, sucking at the red and yellow patch. Others, satiated, occasionally lost their grip and fell off, their place taken immediately by new ones.

  ‘But they looked all right when I left ’em to go and get Bracken,’ said Mekkins to one of the guardmoles.

  ‘Well, we watched over them from the moment you went. Even offered ’em a worm or two, which is saying something these days, but they weren’t interested. Said they weren’t hungry. One of ’em got restless first and started sweating, a smelly kind of sweat. Then the other got all hot and bothered and says something like “We’re cursed, it will kill everymole”. So I asked him what he was on about and he said “You’ll soon find out” and started groaning and cursing while the other one—he’s the one who’s still on his paws— just sort of curled up and then shivered and started scratching his snout as if there was something on it, which there wasn’t. Then they got steadily worse and worse and I sent somemole over to the pastures to get Rebecca because I thought she would help out, but that was early this morning and you’ve got here first. Then the one that was groaning stopped groaning and sort of his breath came faster’n faster and he shivered. Then before we knew where we were they were both dead, one just where he was and the other keeling over and ending up where ’e is now, on ’is side. Well, then we noticed the smell getting bad, and then the fleas seemed to get worse, though Stone knows where they come from because this burrow was pretty clear of ’em.’

  ‘What did they mean?’ Bracken pondered aloud to himself. ‘“It will kill everymole”… What do you make of it, Boswell?’

  They turned to Boswell, who was looking closely at the dead moles. If ever a mole looked as if he knew more than he was saying, it was Boswell at that moment. ‘The best thing you can do for the time being is to seal that burrow,’ he said, not answering Bracken’s question.

  ‘This ain’t the Pasture system, me old mate,’ said Mekkins. ‘They may do that there, but they ain’t taken over Duncton yet. I don’t want a couple of diseased strangers rotting in my tunnels, thank you very much.’

  Just as Bracken was about to step in and settle the argument there was a commotion at the other end of the tunnel and the mole who had been sent to get Rebecca appeared.

  ‘She ain’t there,’ he said. ‘Gone to deal with something or other over in the far pastures she has, so some berk of a Pasture mole told me. They’re thick as lobworms, them lot. I left a message. Let’s hope he’s not too thick to pass it on.’

  ‘Right. We’ll wait till Rebecca gets back before deciding what to do with these two,’ said Bracken firmly. ‘Now, can we go somewhere more pleasant, Mekkins, and decide what we are going to do?’

  Two hours later one of the moles who had been guarding the two strangers began to sweat. Six hours later he was dead. That same evening a mole came to tell Mekkins that two more who lived near the burrow where the two strangers had died had been taken ill—sweating, irritable, very thirsty and weakening by the hour.

  Bracken, now increasingly worried and restless for something to do before Rebecca arrived, went to look at them. Rebecca came straight from the pastures on receiving the message and it was here that she found him. He was looking at their suffering and feeling the agony of helplessness that the healthy feel before extreme illness in another. If they heard him in the tunnel where they were crouched motionless, they did not show it, and they could not have seen or scented him, for the skin around their eyes was painfully swollen and their snouts were running with a foul-smelling mucus.

  ‘Bracken?’ It was Rebecca’s voice, and then her touch. ‘Bracken?’

  He turned to her, his suffering for them so much a part of him that his gaze on her was direct and open. The last thing he was thinking about was Rebecca’s attitude to him. ‘Can you help them?’ he asked, but before the question was fully out he could see her answer. She looked tired and stricken.

  ‘There are many moles like this on the pastures over on the far side,’ sh
e said. ‘Some moles came in from another system and must have brought the disease with them. One of them has been lucky and is not ill, but he says that most of the moles in his system died from the disease.’

  ‘The whole system?’ whispered Bracken.

  Rebecca nodded. ‘Bracken, there was nothing I could do for them. The ones who died didn’t respond to anything I gave them. The one who lived—or has so far—didn’t survive because of anything I did.’

  Mekkins suddenly joined them. ‘A couple of moles have come over from the Eastside and there’s death there now.’ He shrugged hopelessly. ‘You know what it is, don’t you? It’s the plague, and there’s not a blind thing anymole can do about it—not even you, Rebecca.’

  ‘But Rose might—’ she began.

  ‘She couldn’t,’ said Mekkins firmly, ‘so put that idea out of your head.’

  Boswell joined them quietly as well, and all four looked at each other in a dawning horror. Each one had heard stories of the plague, though none knew the history of its, terror more than Boswell, who had read some of the Rolls of the Systems, whose records had been mysteriously interrupted two or three times in molehistory when most of the chroniclers themselves had suddenly died or disappeared in a waste of history that reflected plague and only a single account had remained to tell the story.

  ‘The shadow has fallen’ was the phrase with which one of the most famous Rolls of the Plague ended, written as it had been by the last survivor, a scribemole, in a system to the west, whose account was left unfinished before he himself had died. It was the same phrase that Boswell, or the moles that possessed him, had used by the wall in the Chamber of Dark Sound.

  But Boswell, who knew so much, had nothing to say. Crouched together in the tunnel, the four began to feel the full weight of the waves of death that were rolling towards them, a flood far more powerful than the one Bracken and Boswell had faced in the drainage channel. Then, hour by hour, the reports began to stream in.

  ‘Five moles in the Eastside…’

  ‘A female in Barrow Vale itself…’

  ‘Three Westsiders, two males and a female…’

  Panic and fear began to take over the system as each began to fear for his or her life. Everymole sought some remedy or escape and when moles found that Rebecca was among them, with Mekkins, they besieged and beseeched her for help—for a charm, for a prayer, for a herb that would save them. But the more they asked, the more impotent Rebecca felt, for there was nothing her normally healing words seemed able to do, and no herb that she knew seemed to help.

  By the third day, when Bracken and Boswell had moved back to Barrow Vale to see if they could at least control the panic, leaving Mekkins and Rebecca in the Marsh End—the one because he wanted to be in his own tunnels, the other because she felt instinctively that that was where she could give most comfort—there were so many dead in the system that the living could no longer move them from where they had died. Dead, odorous moles lay in tunnels, in burrows, halfway out of entrances, some even lay in the very place they had been burrowing for worms before the plague crept up on them and took them away.

  Each corpse was flea-covered, each carried the stench that the first two had had, and each showed the same grim progress of symptoms. And the stifling heat that continued seemed only to speed up the process of decay and spread the smell of death.

  By the third day there was not a mole in the system who did not have a friend or close relative who had died. Some had lost each one of their siblings; some had lost each of their neighbours; many marvelled to find themselves alive. In one or two places—on the slopes and in parts of the Westside— hardly a single mole died and the moles marvelled at their fortune, seeking vainly for an explanation of it.

  Then there was a lull for two days which brought sudden false hope, and the gossips in Barrow Vale, who chattered now more wildly and more desperately, started to say that the plague was over and Stone knows why they had been spared but… but on the next day the plague returned, in a new form. It was as if, unable to kill all the moles quickly, it had adopted a new guise to take them in a different way, one that was slower.

  Moles broke out in sores under their bellies and on their flanks, painless but odorous sores, which came with the sweating. Then swellings and nodules of hardness under the skin appeared on their faces and snouts, blocking them and making their breathing laboured and terrible to hear. At the same time, the disease seemed to go to the lungs of the moles, causing them to cough and retch. And a mole that began to cough blood was a mole soon dead.

  The system began to be filled with a strange moaning sound, the cries of moles in distress to whom there was none to minister, few to give comfort. Those that survived, untouched by the plague, seemed to wander about in a daze, unable to stay still in the face of such total tragedy but unable to help those suffering around them.

  The system soon started to collapse around Bracken. Many of the moles who had been his executives and aides simply disappeared; others joined in the incessant talk that now took over the panic-stricken Barrow Vale, where moles seemed to find refuge in congregating together and discussing the latest plague news and noting with alarm and self-satisfaction why more moles seemed to die in the morning before sunrise than at any other time, while more moles seemed to develop swellings around the belly and groin which became sores after two or three days. Death from the new form of plague took up to four days and the only consolation that the moles could find was that not all the sufferers seemed to die, though most still did.

  Not everymole panicked. At least one, Comfrey, stayed calm and left the pasture, crossed through the wood and began searching for something that he remembered Rose talking about a long time before. ‘If only I c-c-could remember properly,’ he scolded himself.

  The talk in Barrow Vale soon concentrated on the idea that the plague came from the Stone and was its judgement on them, a punishment for a system that had let the old ways slip under the rule of Mandrake and Rune.

  From this idea came the belief that the only way of combating the plague was to visit the Stone and touch it—eagerly accepted confirmation of which was that one of the moles who had recovered from the plague had previously been up to the Stone and touched it, living proof that the Stone worked.

  ‘Is it true, Boswell, or is it just another superstition?’ asked Bracken, making it more a statement than a question. He had noticed that several moles who had been to the Stone had subsequently died and was cynical about the ‘explanations’ offered by the Stone’s proponents that these moles had transgressed in other ways and so the Stone did not favour them.

  ‘In the sense you mean, it is untrue,’ said Boswell, breaking the silence in which he had been lost for most of the time since the plague came upon them. ‘These moles do not understand that the Stone is not a power by itself. Its power is invested in each one of us, whether it is a power for good or for evil. If you touch the Stone with faith, perhaps that does release a power, but only one that exists already inside you. For all your cynicism, Bracken, you have that power as well.’

  ‘Can I stop myself getting the plague?’ asked Bracken bitterly, thinking of the many who had died. ‘Could they have?’

  Boswell was silent, which turned Bracken’s bitterness into anger. He felt, as so many other moles did themselves, that the plague was in some way a judgement on him. But his feeling was the stronger for his being leader of the Duncton system and, though no other moles said it, he felt responsible for what was happening. Like Rebecca, he felt the terrible frustration of not being able to relieve the suffering, almost as if it was a guilt. He turned these feelings back on Boswell, and through him on to the Stone.

  Boswell was silent.

  ‘Where is this power of the Stone when it is most needed?’ demanded Bracken angrily. ‘You’re clever at making the Stone seem important, but when it’s needed, really needed, what good is it? Why does it let this happen?’ Bracken waved his paws around the tunnels of Barrow Vale, now full of
frightened survivors of the plague, in a way that took in their fears and took in as well the dead, the stench of the dead and the distant moans of the dying.

  ‘Well, Boswell?’

  But Boswell was silent. He knew the Stone was inside Bracken and one day he would know it. The plague was no more a judgement on the system or the moles in it than the idea that the sun was a bonus for living a good life was true. The plague was a part of life, as death was, but Boswell did not know what words could express such thoughts in such a place as this.

  ‘I will go the Stone myself,’ he said finally.

  ‘To pray?’ mocked Bracken. ‘Or to touch the Stone so you don’t get it…’ His voice trailed off as he heard his own tired bitterness. He was so weary, and suddenly afraid now that Boswell was going to leave. Impulsively he went up to Boswell and stopped him leaving.

  ‘What will happen to us all, to the system?’ Boswell looked at him with those bright dark eyes that held such understanding and warmth to anymole willing to raise his own eyes and look into them. He understood Bracken’s anger and torment, for he loved him with a love that grew stronger and fiercer in him day by day. He knew that a mole like Bracken might be angry with the Stone as well as in love with it. Indifference was the greatest threat.

  ‘I will pray for you, Bracken, for Rebecca and for all moles…’ But Bracken turned away again, thinking that prayers would be of no help to the moles in his system who had died already and to whom he had been unable to offer any protection. Yet his heart sank to see Boswell go. He wondered if he would ever see him again.