Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

* * *

  Four days and many more plague deaths later, Bracken had a visit in Barrow Vale from a Marshender. His message was stark and simple: Mekkins was dead. Just like that. Mekkins was gone.

  ‘Rebecca was with him but she couldn’t do nothing,’ said the Marshender, who had seen so much death that even Mekkins’ death had not affected him. ‘What mole can? It’s the Stone’s curse, and we’re powerless against it.’ Mekkins!

  There was no need to be told how, or when, or where. The fact of it was enough to take the last strength from his body and for despair to take him over. It was as if some thief had sneaked into his burrow in the night and taken something from him without him seeing it and which he could never recover. Nothing could have underlined the tragedy that had overtaken the system more than this. Mekkins! Who had talked to him only days before, who was always aggressive and full of life; who had done so much for him and Rebecca and so many other moles.

  He rose up from where he was crouched and began to roar in his shock and rage, raising his talons and bringing them down on the walls of the elder burrow, gasping out in his anger, grunting in his effort to attack and attack the earth around him, spittle forming on his mouth fur. He wanted to do something, anything, but there was nothing. He wanted to run roaring through the tunnels to the Marsh End, but what was the point?

  The Marshender watched him. He had seen it all before. Anger, rage, prayers, the whole bleedin’ lot. A bit of roaring and raving wasn’t goin’ to do no good. Still, didn’t hurt, either. Better tell him the rest.

  ‘Rebecca’s got it as well. She’s got the plague,’ said the Marshender.

  Horror and fear rushed over Bracken’s fur, then icy calm. ‘Where is she?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘Stone knows,’ said the Marshender. ‘She was only just took with it when I left—sweatin’ she was just like the others. I reckoned it was the plague. I scarpered. I mean, if the healer gets it, then Stone help us all.’

  Bracken was gone before he could say more, running down through the system towards Mekkins’ tunnels, for that was where she would be. Running and running as if death were chasing at his paws. Running and running through the flea-ridden, death-smelling, stifling tunnels with sweat in his fur and terrible visions of a dying Rebecca mixing with pictures of a dead Mekkins in his mind, and prayers, more wild and desperate than any he had ever felt tempted to utter running through his head. ‘Keep her alive,’ he begged as he ran, ‘keep her alive. Spare Rebecca… take me. Take me,’ as he ran and ran.

  She was not in Mekkins’ burrow, where only Mekkins’ body lay, hunched and sore-ridden like the rest. Oh, Mekkins! Mekkins!

  Rebecca! He looked around wildly, not knowing where to go, trying to think, trying to recover enough to think. Rebecca! He ran from tunnel to tunnel, seeking a mole to guide him to where she might be, meeting mole after mole who looked at him stupidly when he asked, ‘Where’s Rebecca?’ for they had problems of their own and how would they know where she was?

  Why hadn’t she come to him? Where would she have gone?

  He began to run towards the pastures, thinking that she must have returned to her burrow, but only when he was nearly to the wood’s edge did he remember that he didn’t know exactly where she lived there—up near the higher pastures? Down where Rose once lived? And anyway… he paused in his running, sweat now shining in his fur and his breathing desperate with effort… it didn’t feel right. He felt as if he was running away from her. He turned south, towards the Stone on top of the hill, the evening air in the tunnels around him heavy with dry heat and asked aloud, ‘Where are you?’ He wanted to call for her and hear her answer. He wanted Rebecca.

  Where would she have gone? He crouched down and closed his eyes, thinking himself into her mind as best he could and wondering where she might have gone. The Stone? Barrow Vale? Where else was there?

  Only one place, and it came to him quietly as he himself had once gone there. Curlew’s burrow. The place she had gone when she had been so ill before and where, by the grace of the Stone, she had survived to take care of Comfrey. She must have gone there. He was so certain of it that a peace came to him as he got up and set off eastwards across the Marsh End to the most forsaken part of the system. By the grace of the Stone… he prayed to it subconsciously, feeling guilty at asking it to keep her alive when he had doubted it so much. ‘If you keep her alive,’ he bargained, ‘I’ll go to Uffington to give thanks. I’ll do anything… only keep her alive.’

  It was a journey through death, for the Marshenders seemed even more stricken than the moles around Barrow Vale and he came across body after body, or poor creatures dragging themselves along in their final hours. Or others, who seemed to have gone insane, whispering in a kind of daze, ‘We have been saved from the plague, we had it, we had it, and we have been saved. Praise the Stone for saving us. Praise the Stone…’ And they reached out to touch Bracken as he passed them by, their faces and bodies still bearing the plague sores to show that it had, indeed, been their way, their eyes crazed by their strange deliverance.

  Until at last he was into the eastern part of the Marsh End, whose surface was now hard and friable but still had something of the dank shadowiness that it had always held. He had not been here since he had been chased from it by Rune so long before when… he almost said to himself, ‘When the world was right’.

  On and on he went, his heart quickening as he reached the end of the journey for what he might find when he got there.

  It was night and he had been journeying one way or another since the early evening. ‘Only let her be alive,’ he whispered again as he reached the last few yards, ‘and nothing else will matter. I will go to Uffington and give thanks, whatever the cost.’

  He found Curlew’s old tunnels with little difficulty, but stopped short outside the entrance because something lay there which he had not seen for a long time—a fresh flowerhead. Its petals were like a crocus, and a delicate mauve, its stalk white and vulnerable. Lying as it was among the aridness of drought-dusty, faded ivy that covered the tree trunk by the entrance and on top of rustling dry leaf mould, it presented a strange sight. He had never seen such a flower before and it made him pause and wonder at it before entering the tunnel carefully, snouting out ahead of him to see if life were there.

  There was life all right, and plague. He could smell the terrible plague odour and hear movement of some kind. At least she was still alive. He approached noisily and called out ahead of himself, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca! It’s Bracken!’ and ran on down.

  He was met at the entrance to Curlew’s old burrow not by Rebecca but by the stutter and stumble of Comfrey, whose thin snout peered out at him as he approached. ‘Hello, Br-Br-Bracken,’ he said.

  Before Bracken even wondered what Comfrey was doing there he asked, ‘Is she here? Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s g-g-got the plague,’ stuttered Comfrey. ‘She’s n-n- not very well.’

  Rebecca was crouching in the same corner she had occupied when she had been so ill before. Her eyes were swollen but not yet closed, while her mouth hung loose to ease her breathing. Already the swellings were starting on her face and snout. By her head on the floor lay the white shiny bulb part of a plant, the flower of which Bracken had seen on the surface.

  Comfrey stepped forward to Rebecca. ‘You’ve got to eat it,

  R-Rebecca,’ he said to her softly, touching her face to draw her attention. ‘You’ve g-got to try.’

  ‘Rebecca,’ whispered Bracken. ‘It’s me, Bracken.’

  She sighed and he saw that her eyes were running, though whether with tears or illness it was hard to say.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered almost inaudibly.

  ‘M-make her eat it,’ said Comfrey desperately to Bracken. ‘It will help her. I kn-kn-know it will.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Bracken.

  ‘I got it from beyond the Eastside where there’s pasture near the marsh. It’s called meadow saffron by the Eastsiders, though it’s so rare tha
t few of them have ever seen it. But I found it, and when I did I kn-knew it was for R-Rebecca. I knew it. I always kn-know when she n-needs help. It’s a special healing plant… I’ve often f-found plants when she needed them. But it’s always been for a m-mole she’s helping. I didn’t know it was for her.’ He sounded desperate and kept pushing the white flesh of the bulb at Rebecca’s mouth for her to take.

  ‘You mustn’t try to die,’ he said simply, almost scolding her. ‘It’ll take you longer to get better if you d-d-don’t eat it.’ Then he looked straight at Bracken as if reading his thoughts and said: ‘You don’t have to worry about her dying. She won’t.’ There was total faith in Comfrey’s words.

  If Bracken had not been in such a place at such a time he would have sworn that he saw a glimmer of the starting of a smile on Rebecca’s plague-ridden face, or perhaps even a laugh.

  ‘Rebecca,’ he said urgently. ‘Rebecca…’ His voice changed almost to a command and he said, ‘You’re bloody going to eat this thing Comfrey’s got for you!’ With that he took the bulb himself, bit off a piece, chewed it lightly into a mush, and putting it on his paw, started feeding it to Rebecca. She couldn’t chew but she was able to take it piece by slow piece and swallow it, like a pup taking its first solid food.

  As she did so, he too knew with absolute certainty that she was not going to die—or rather that Comfrey, for all his hesitation, had spoken with such total faith in a voice that Rebecca had heard, that she could not die.

  ‘Most of them die because they don’t eat anything and b-because they can’t breathe properly,’ said Comfrey matter-of-factly, now content to watch over Rebecca and Bracken as if they were one mole—and one who had given him a rather unnecessary scare. ‘Rose told me about meadow saffron in a rhyme she said once, b-b-but I didn’t know that “pestilence” meant plague. Then an Eastsider told me, so I knew.’

  Bracken did not take much of this in, though much later Rebecca was to remember every word. The horror of the plague was that the mind stayed quite clear while the body would no longer obey it.

  Perhaps Bracken sensed this, for he talked to her as if she could hear him, treating her as if she were the most precious thing in the world, as, indeed, she was. The ugliness as the plague swellings grew worse, the stench of the sores when they came, the abjection of the affliction… neither he nor Comfrey noticed or afterwards remembered. It was Rebecca they loved, and she was not a swelling or a sore but a mole who had tended so many and suffered so much, and whom, in their turn and in different ways, they now tended, each giving her something different from their own spirits. Comfrey’s certain knowledge that she would live was one strength; Bracken’s force of love was another.

  Present with them in Curlew’s burrows was a third strength—the power of the prayers that Boswell spoke up at the Stone, so far away, thinking of them both, and of all the other moles of Duncton and the pastures whom his great love encompassed through the Stone.

  Crouched in the darkness of that long night, when Rebecca lay so ill, perhaps sensing that she was, he whispered the prayers he had learned as a scribemole but never thought he would himself have the power to say. Though now, as he said them, they came as naturally as breathing, each one calling out through him the blessing of the silence of the Stone:

  ‘Power of the Stone come into thee

  All of thee in quiet;

  Power of the sun come into thee

  A part of thee in warmth;

  Power of the moon come into thee

  A part of thee feel cool;

  Power of the rain come into thee

  A part of thee refreshed;

  Power of death depart from thee

  Taken by the Stone;

  Power of life return to thee

  Borrowed from the Stone;

  Power of the Stone is with thee

  For you are the Stone,

  All of you the Stone.’

  He said it for the system’s sake, he said it for the pastures, he said it for the moles he had seen suffer and the moles who would never know the Stone; he said it for Bracken, and he whispered it for Rebecca. And if its effect was to bring quiet and silence, this was the third strength that came into Curlew’s burrows and accompanied Bracken and Comfrey and Rebecca on her journey through the plague.

  And though its talons may have cast her down, they took with them, when they finally left her three days later, the power that Mandrake’s dreadful death had held over her. After two long days and nights she began to breathe easily, and on the fourth, she smiled again at last, and all of them could smile. And she had the strength to tell them both that they were her loves, as they had always been, father and son.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  On the fifth day in Curlew’s burrows, when Rebecca had almost recovered, a mist unlike any mist Bracken had even seen came over the surface from the marsh. It was thin and swirling at first, noticeable more for its smell than its sight. It was dry and woody and smelt like some musky flower. Sometimes it was stronger, sometimes weaker and sometimes minute black dusty particles, light as the seedsails of rosebay willowherb, floated down in it.

  Bracken did not know it, but it was the smoke of a fire that was spreading slowly across the dried-up marsh, crackling inexorably among the husky tall grass and reeds, curling and licking its way from reed stem to stem, its flaming reds and oranges paled by the sunlight. Here and there, where the reeds were thicker and the fire caught hold better, the smoke curled in thick waves of choking blue-grey, then rose and swirled away, revealing the brighter red of flames as they turned the yellow dry vegetation black and travelled on, leaving smouldering charred remnants behind.

  Creatures ran in panic and confusion before it, many waiting as long as they could, for they had never seen a fire, then running before its heat and in the waves of panic of other fleeing creatures; fieldmice, a couple of voles, a hare that had strayed on to the dry marsh in search of food, and hundreds more.

  A long olive grass snake delayed too long and its back-and-forth snaking became quicker and more rushed as it tried to escape, until smoke came into its throat and its shaking became a thrashing as the fire ran over and under it and its body curled and blackened into an agonised death, the skin cracking as the life in the flesh hissed out. The fire passed on, leaving the snake’s burnt corpse behind with the other distortions of life among the ashes.

  As the afternoon progressed, the mist by Curlew’s burrows grew thicker and more difficult to breathe in, and the sounds in the wood no longer seemed right. The mist was beginning to smell in the burrow and though it smelt cleaner than the plague, a mole would be foolish to stay there too long.

  Rebecca was strong enough to move—indeed, for a full day she had begged Bracken to let her go out, but he had resisted the idea: best to take it easy. And anyway, where could they go that wasn’t plague-ridden? Best to stay still. But now things were different and he was going to lead them up through the wood, away from the marsh, which he had never liked and from where this mist was drifting in.

  ‘We’re going,’ said Bracken. ‘Now.’

  The smoke on the surface was getting steadily thicker, but the evening sun could still penetrate into it, giving the wood a luminescent blue appearance, with the trees looming out of it paly. Black sooty specks of burnt grass drifted along with the smoke towards the interior of the wood, and Bracken led Rebecca and Comfrey along with them, instinctively following a route away from the advancing fire—which had now reached to within a few moleyards of the wood and whose urgently sharp crackling could be heard.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Comfrey, curious rather than afraid.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bracken, ‘but it’s dangerous. Now come on.’

  But though Rebecca could move, she could not move fast, and with Comfrey unable to keep in a straight line for continually snouting after things and trying to satisfy his curiosity about them, their progress was slow.

  Behind them the fire had reached the reed wall at the marsh e
dge and burst through it with low rustlings and crackles as orange flame licked at the dry grass of the bank that led up to the shrubs and smaller bushes that grew at the wood’s edge. At one point it took hold and crossed to the bank, encouraged by the lightest of breezes that came off the marsh. Then, at another point. Then a third. Until the whole bank had taken, and the fire was sweeping up it through the shrubs to the first trees of the wood. As it reached them and started at the heavy dry leaf litter, the quality of the fire and smoke changed. It grew thicker and heavier as curls of grey-yellow smoke came from the leaf litter and the breeze carried it through the wood, where it overtook the lighter blue smoke with its white-yellow, and this drifted on more urgently into the wood, obscuring the sun, enshrouding the trees and soon catching up with the fleeing moles.

  Bracken was more worried about Rebecca than Comfrey, for her strength was not as great as either of them had thought. He had taken a place behind them both and urged them on, especially Rebecca. ‘My love, you’ve got to keep going. It’s getting thicker and the noises are louder. It is coming nearer.’ Behind them the crackle of the fire increased, changing here and there into a roar as it passed over what had been Curlew’s burrows and trees and branches fell under its heat and destroyed her tunnels for ever.

  Sometimes, the breeze of smoke through the wood, which was getting stronger, carried a roaring of fire sound rather than just a crackle.

  They ran on, smoke at their throats and eyes, now frightened by the thing that sounded so massive and threatening behind them, their own rustles and scamperings drowned by the fallings, crashings and roarings from the fire.

  Once clear of the isolated area of woodland in which Curlew’s tunnels were they came across entrances to tunnels into the system, and to get them away from the smoke Bracken led them down. The air was blissfully easier to breathe, but once down they noticed immediately the nauseating odour of plague and ahead of them saw the rotting body of a mole.

  ‘Come,’ said Bracken wearily, ‘we had best stick to the surface.’