Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  Even in the short time they had been underground, the fire had advanced so much that they could feel that the temperature of the air had gone up and waves of heat were blowing up from behind them, with smoke and black soot. At one point Comfrey went off too far to the left and they lost him and had to stop and call until, scared and apologetic, he came spluttering back. ‘It’s even worse over there,’ he said.

  Bracken had memories of being chased through this same part of the wood by henchmoles, in the opposite direction, and remembered how they had advanced to his right and his left until they seemed to be all around him. He felt that the ‘thing’ behind them was doing the same—and although he sensed that it was impersonal, like rain, it was still frightening. Gradually the fire overtook them on the left and they veered away from it to the right, only to find its sound and roaring even louder there.

  ‘Faster! Faster!’ he urged them. ‘It mustn’t catch us!’ And they ran on.

  The fire had taken hold of the whole of the Marsh End, surging through the dried bracken and leaf litter and crackling at the base of trees before turning their bark black, while higher tongues of flame leaped up from dry fern and bracken and caught at the leaves of the lower branches which took the flames, curling them into death as they raced over the tree’s surface and then started at the twigs and branches as the fire took hold. Smoke billowed up from the wood, heavy with the feathery remnants of burning leaves and black ash, twisting and swirling into a great pall of smoke that drifted ahead of the fire through the drought-dry branches of the trees and undergrowth, towards the slopes.

  Sometimes, among the soaring fragments of ash, a delicate white admiral butterfly or garish purple emperor tried to fly clear of the heat and smoke, beating frail wings unnaturally high into the air against the sucking and hurling currents, fluttering the last of its life away before smoke choked it and heat turned the beautiful wings into crumpled ash, and it fell back into the flames, unrecognisable and lost.

  Death licked and darted its flaming way among the heavy tree trunks and branches, where, beneath the once protective bark, the larvae of stag beetles and longhorns or scuttling weevils found themselves trapped in the steam of boiling sap, their scrabbling bodies falling still as the fire burned away the life of tree after tree. While on the leaves, and especially the beloved oaks of Duncton Wood, the knobbles and carbuncles of the gall wasps and midges, where tiny young maggots lived in a cocoon of life, were suddenly gone, caught by a devastation more terrible than the plague that had swept through the moles below and one from which none escaped.

  Along the wood’s edge, in advance of the flames, the grass was alive with fleeing creatures: dormice, unused to the light of day; squirrels, tails dancing in tune as they ran and then stopped, still on two legs, to see if they could tell where the danger lay before running on again; stoats and bank voles, and, of course, those few moles who had survived the plague had been driven from their tunnels by the smell of danger. Creatures that were normally foes now lost their internecine fears and ran, or hopped, or hesitated, or fled as their nature and instincts told them. Few dared to venture out of cover on to the pastures, most preferring to run on through grass or undergrowth in advance of the fire, and hope that they might escape it.

  * * *

  On the hilltop by the Stone, among the great beeches, Boswell could sense the terrible devastation that was spreading through the wood below. He could smell the smoke, though the terrible pall that now covered the wood as far as the slopes was beyond his range of vision. And he could not know that below him the ancient and noble oaks of Barrow Vale were being taken for ever by the fire. He had heard the urgent wings of carrion crow high in the branches, flapping blackly up through the smoke-filled beech branches and out of the wood. Then the sudden flight of a spotted woodpecker, flying straight out of its territory and ignoring any danger but the fire behind. And an urgent scurrying of such normally unseen birds as nuthatches and tree-creepers, driven out of their cover by panic.

  There were other moles with Boswell, huddling by the Stone, most of whom had come to touch the Stone to avoid the plague and stayed there to avoid the danger in the system below. One or two had come up from the slopes, worried by the smoke and unnatural sounds.

  Their only comfort was Boswell’s calm and peaceful presence, and to him they looked again and again for reassurance, shivering with fear despite the heat of the day and the smoke, unwilling to flee beyond the Stone. Occasionally creatures ran across the clearing—a squirrel, a stoat from somewhere down on the slopes—but the pawful of moles stayed fast, waiting and waiting in the smell of the fire and the sound of Boswell’s prayers.

  * * *

  The fire finally caught up with Bracken, Rebecca and Comfrey when they were halfway to the slopes. The flames crackled and roared to their left and right, burning branches fell crashing into the flames of the undergrowth, the smoke began to choke them with its heat and they began to turn this way and that in an attempt to progress further. Until at last there was nowhere to go, and the fire was approaching from all around them, Bracken’s fur singed by its sparks and flames.

  It was then that they were forced underground again, into the plague-smelling, smoke-filled tunnels. Bracken led them down, past the dead and gaping bodies of moles, seeking out a tunnel or burrow that was smoke-free. To the left, to the right, through narrow tunnels they went, until they found a subsidiary tunnel that was clear—obviously because it led nowhere. Bracken saw Rebecca and Comfrey safely into it before following them and sealing it up, so that no smoke could enter, and then making a second seal for safety. The tunnel ran among the roots of an oak tree, thick and gnarled, and there they stopped, hoping that the danger would pass. They could hear the sound of the crashing fire above them, and worse, far worse, they could hear in the desperate sounds of the roots the useless fight of the tree against the fire that now overwhelmed it. Hissings and sobbings, groanings and cryings as the tree died above them, the roots sweating with its death. Branches crashing and cracking all about. Time stretched from desperate minutes into aching hours, and then on into an unseen dawn and another day.

  Occasionally they heard thumps and crashings above them, or felt the tunnels vibrate from some branchfall. But gradually thick silence fell, the only sense of the fire left to them being its smell, which filtered into even their sealed tunnel. The air in the tunnel grew heavy and warm with their confined presence, and fetid, too, though they could not tell it. They sweated and sighed, crouching in silence together, Bracken’s flank to Rebecca’s, and Rebecca’s paw touching Comfrey.

  But at least they found a little food—some worms and grubs that had made their way to the tree’s roots. At last the air became so unpleasant that they all wanted to move, and they were encouraged by the arrival of silence.

  ‘Right,’ said Bracken, breaking the silence, ‘we’re going to try to get out.’

  They broke through one seal and then, very slowly, poked a way through the other. The air beyond smelt of smoke but it was clear, and they passed without hesitation into it to find their way back to the surface.

  ‘Rebecca!’ called Comfrey as they ran down the tunnel.

  ‘What is it, my sweet?’ said Rebecca, her voice warm and healthy again.

  ‘There’s no smell of plague in the tunnel!’ And it was true—the dead moles were still there but somehow they were dry and did not seem ever to have been moles.

  ‘There’s no fleas, either,’ said Bracken in wonder.

  It was true—the smoke and heat from the fire had cleared the tunnels of plague.

  The entrance they had come in by had gone beyond recognition, for a great branch had shattered through the dry soil and the tunnel was open to the air, its roof torn and black, warm ash and occasional swirlings of smoke playing where the roof had been.

  Then they were out, on to what had once been the surface, but now lay black and waste, with not a hint of green in sight; just blackened roots of trees that had become no more than
huge black thorns pointing ruggedly to the bare sky.

  The surface felt exposed, as it did over on the pastures, and its air was heavy with the passage of the fire. They passed over the ashes of their wood, their black coats making them seem no more than shadows against its dark grey wastes. Where fire still smouldered at a root or branch, the smoke was swirled this way and that by a wind that seemed unable to make up its mind which way to blow. And the air hung heavier and heavier while the sky grew darker and more overcast. Ahead of them there was still an occasional crackle of fire, but it was sporadic and non-threatening and anyway, they could go no way other than up the slopes, for behind them their devastated wood stretched black and defeated, dead of all life.

  The fire had stopped by the top of the slopes, turned back by the wider spacing of the trees and the lack of undergrowth. It had smouldered its way up among the first one or two beeches but could not get hold of the carpet of beech leaves or make headway against the massive bare trunks of the trees. One or two were charred, a few more blackened by soot, but none took the fire and it had stopped. It guttered and crackled still, but they were able to pick a way through it without trouble.

  Rebecca let out a cry of sheer delight when they were able to get their paws on unburnt leaf litter once more, and Bracken’s pace quickened. His mind was a whirl of thoughts and feelings as tiredness mixed with relief, sadness with delight, excitement with apprehension. They headed straight for the Stone, the air about them faintly hazy from the smoke that drifted up from the wood.

  Then they were there, the clearing ahead, the Stone looming up into the haze and then the Stone clear before them—and at its foot, in a motley cluster of all shapes and sizes, the moles who had survived the fire and, before it, the plague.

  And Boswell was there. Their Boswell, greeting them with a touch and smile as a gasp of wonder saluted their arrival and they were surrounded by the moles, some of whom knew Rebecca, while others recognised Bracken and welcomed their leader back.

  What mole can remember the laughter and blessings that were spoken then among the moles who had survived so much? What mole ever remembers such moments, when the past and the future are gone in the delight of life rediscovered and reclaimed? Each had a story to tell, each had struggled through surroundings of death. Not one mole there, save Boswell, failed to tell a story of how he or she had nearly died a dozen times. Only Boswell stayed silent, for he had come to the Stone before the fire even started, and prayed in its shadow, asking that the plague might go and knowing that however his prayer was answered, it would not be in a way he could predict or understand. Fire was not part of his prayer, but a prayer answered is a grace, for it takes a mole beyond himself and his present life and starts him on his way again.

  Boswell’s prayer had been answered for good or bad—and who was he to question the Stone? The results now clustered about him. And he was their silent centre. As he watched them, he began to understand better than any scribemole before him what the seventh Book must be about, and why the colour of its light was no colour at all, but white. The colour of silence. In the exultant activity of survival around the Stone, Boswell understood at last the name of the book he had sought so long. It was the Book of Silence, but where he would find it he could not guess.

  * * *

  Bracken, Rebecca and Comfrey were not the last moles to arrive. Some fifteen more came finally from off the pastures where they had crept as high as they could to escape the plague and then waited while the smoke and fire came up through Duncton Wood.

  Their own system had been decimated by plague, and they brought the news that Stonecrop had died of it, and all the Pasture elders. And somemole said that little Violet had died of it as well. So many gone! They were all gone but these few. Leaderless and lost. So they turned to the Stone.

  As evening fell, the moles about the Stone began to whisper, ‘What shall we do now? Where can we go?’

  Bracken heard them, and though he was still their leader, he asked himself what good he had done any of them.

  ‘What shall we do?’ They began to ask it of him directly, waiting for him to tell them, to show them a way of living beyond the devastation that had overtaken them all. He heard them, but had no wish to lead any mole anywhere ever again. A mole had best lead himself. He turned to Rebecca and called her name.

  She came to him silently, as if she knew what he was thinking, and together they moved away from the other moles to the west side of the clearing. Above them the trees stirred softly with a cool breeze and the air felt fresher than it had for months. The sky was still dark and the fraught colour in it had gone, so that it looked grey with moisture.

  ‘This is where you were crouching when I first met you here,’ she said softly to him. ‘So long ago now.’

  He stared again out through the wood towards the west, as he had then. He could feel Uffington’s pull as he always had and he turned to her and said. ‘That’s where Uffington lies.

  Rebecca…’ but he couldn’t finish his sentence or even whatever thought lay behind it, for as he looked at her, and she at him, they knew that they were at one again and that she was part of him now and always would be. But… but… and he stared out through the trees towards Uffington, through trees that shimmered and shook in his tears. He had fought through so much, as she had, but whenever they reached a point together again there was always something pulling. Uffington! Still looking out towards it, he reached out a paw and found hers, not daring to say what he would have liked to say. And anyway, there was no need, for she knew—she could tell.

  ‘Rebecca?’

  He had promised the Stone that he would go to Uffington if she survived, and she had. He had made a bargain with himself. They were at one with each other and yet a promise to the Stone that had brought them together now stood between them. He wished he understood better, and it wasn’t so confused and that he could be at peace with the Stone. Perhaps the answer lay in Uffington, but he wished he could be certain.

  ‘Rebecca,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to Uffington.’

  ‘I know, my dear,’ she whispered, her eyes fixed on the west whose sky was lighter for the dark angry clouds that now loomed around and above it.

  He turned abruptly towards the Stone, and Boswell came towards him. ‘They want you to tell them what to do,’ he said.

  ‘That’s something nomole can do,’ he said softly, ‘and certainly not me. And anyway, I must leave Duncton.’ ‘Where will you go?’ asked Boswell, though he knew the answer and was smiling before Bracken gave it.

  ‘Uffington,’ said Bracken. ‘And you’re coming, Boswell.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Boswell. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Bracken went to the moles by the Stone and looked gently at them. ‘There is only one place for you to go now that the wood is destroyed, and the pastures are plague-ridden.’ He waved his paw towards the beech trees behind the Stone. ‘A long time ago, for reasons we can never know, the moles who lived in the Ancient System left it. Many must have gone down the slopes and created a new system there, whose tunnels have been the inheritance of many of you. Some, perhaps only a few, must have left altogether, perhaps travelling on the long journey to Uffington, to give thanks for deliverance and to pay homage to the Stone. But they left an inheritance, and it is one that each of you may now accept if you wish it: the ancient tunnels which they left behind. They are yours to make of what you can. They lack only life, and the laughter and dance and cries of the young. I will show you them and leave you there, for I must go to distant Uffington.’ There was a groan among the moles, and a shaking of heads.

  ‘I will give thanks that each of us has lived. But I will leave behind much of my spirit, which has dwelt already in the ancient tunnels where you will make a place of love; and I will leave behind Rebecca, who was taught by Rose the Healer. Guard her well, for she is your healer. Cherish her, as she will cherish you. And trust the Stone as, slowly, I have come to do.’

  When Bracken had sh
own the moles the way into the Ancient System and left them to discover the tunnels for themselves and create a system born of the union of Duncton and Pasture moles, he returned with Boswell and Rebecca to the Stone clearing.

  Night was coming on fast, and the air was pleasantly cool. Approaching them from the west was a front of rain—rain that would end the drought, the first rain of September.

  It was a good time to go and they said very little. What need three moles who love each other say when they part?

  ‘Take care, my love,’ whispered Rebecca. ‘Come back to me.’ They touched and caressed and nuzzled, and Boswell, too, felt the warmth of Rebecca’s great love.

  ‘I’ll look after him,’ Boswell whispered to her, limping slowly out of the clearing after Bracken as they started on their journey.

  ‘I know you will,’ said Rebecca, thinking that she could wish for no other mole than Boswell, however great or strong, to protect her Bracken from the dangers and trials that faced him.

  Then they were gone into the night, towards Uffington, their paws scuffling through dry leaves, leaving Rebecca to crouch by the Stone as the first drops of rain began to fall through the swaying beech leaves above and down into the dry and blackened soil of the system below the slopes, which had once been theirs. And then rain at last fell, September rain, the sound of which drowned out the final rustles of Bracken and Boswell as they left Duncton Wood for the dangerous world beyond.

  Part Four

  Siabod

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The following March Bracken and Boswell finally came to within a day’s journey of the Blowing Stone, which stood at the foot of Uffington Hill, and more than six long moleyears had passed. They had faced every kind of physical danger moles can face—river, ice, owls and weasels, and marsh—and worse, had seen that system after system had been devastated by the plague. In many only a few solitary moles survived, turned half mad by the mystery of why they had not die or showing such a fear of strangers that Bracken and Boswell might have been the plague incarnate.