Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  ‘W-w-what’s wrong, Rebecca?’ asked Comfrey one evening by the Stone. ‘W-what is it?’

  His voice trembled with loss and fear for he knew, or could sense, that Rebecca was preparing to go away from Duncton Wood, just as Bracken and Boswell had done.

  Slowly she told of the calling from Siabod she had had, and as she did so she felt again the grip of Mandrake’s talons on her back as he had turned her to face the blizzard.

  ‘How will you f-f-find it?’ trembled Comfrey, muttering miserably to himself.

  ‘The Stones of Siabod will guide and protect me, just as they gave protection to Mandrake for so long. I’ll follow the line between the Duncton Stone and where they stand, just as Bracken once found his way to the Nuneham Stone and back, and must have since found his way to Uffington. And beyond.’

  She tried to sound bold about it, to convince herself, but she didn’t fool Comfrey. Yet he said something then that in a strange way gave her the strength she needed finally to leave Duncton:

  ‘What will we do w-w-while you’re gone?’

  Oh, she smiled; oh, she loved Comfrey! While she was gone! While! Nomole, not even Mekkins, had ever had such faith in her as Comfrey. To tell Comfrey you would do something was as good as making a promise to the Stone, and so as a final affirmation of her faith in the decision to leave she said, ‘While I’m gone’—and how she relished the phrase!— ‘while I’m away, you will be healer in the system for me.’

  Comfrey’s eyes opened wide in astonishment and he looked in puzzlement at his gentle, hesitant paws.

  ‘You know more about the healing herbs of the wood and how to use them than anymole Duncton has ever known,’ she said firmly, ‘and you knew Rose as I did, even though you were only a pup then. More important than this is that you have a faith in the Stone that runs very deep, and its power will always be with you, as it is already.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Comfrey, for if Rebecca said it then it must be true.

  * * *

  Rebecca would like to have left there and then but she rightly sensed that she was such an integral part of the system’s life that to leave without saying goodbye and trying to make others understand would be a betrayal of those who had given her love. So she said goodbye to each of them, saying again and again that she had faith in the Stone that she would be back, as they shook their heads and scuffed the ground with their paws.

  Some were angry and bold enough to say, ‘But what about Bracken and that Boswell? They never came back, did they? Got taken by owls if you ask me. Just as…’ but not many dared finish the thought to her face.

  ‘And who’ll take your place?’ asked others tearfully.

  ‘Comfrey,’ she smiled.

  ‘Comfrey? She must be bloody daft,’ they swore among themselves when she had gone to talk with other moles.

  Yet when, finally, she left, taking a route down near the marsh by way of the pastures, it was to Comfrey that they turned and asked ‘Will she come back?’ Will she?’

  ‘Yes, she will,’ said Comfrey firmly, ‘because she’s R-R-Rebecca and she will.’

  ‘And what about Bracken and Boswell?’ reminded the doubters, the angry ones who felt most betrayed. ‘They never came back.’

  ‘I d-d-don’t know about them. But she will.’

  But when they had all gone back to their burrows and Comfrey was sure there wasn’t a single mole to see, he felt all the loss and loneliness he had been trying to control begin to overwhelm him and he ran back and forth in the Stone clearing, peering first at the Stone and then out from the edge of the clearing towards where she had gone. All he could do was say, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ to stop himself crying, until he couldn’t even think her name without crying and wishing she was there for him to run to.

  The Stone watched over him, its power in him and its silence finally there as well. Until when his grief had played itself out, and he had slept, and he was ready to face the system as its healer, he found that he had the strength never to doubt, not for one single solitary lonely moment throughout the long moleyears that followed, that Rebecca would come back. He was just looking after things while she was gone.

  Chapter Forty

  Nothing more is known of Bracken’s and Boswell’s long journey between Uffington and Capel Garmon, which lies on the very threshold of the Siabod system itself, than has been recorded by Boswell himself. His account has left much technical information about the postplague state of the many systems the two moles passed through, but of the many long moleyears’ travel, and what happened during it, he scribed little and said less.

  It is known that the two moles spent Longest Night at Caer Caradoc, a system near the Welsh Marches, after which, says Boswell’s account, ‘we were soon able to gain access to Offa’s Dyke, by which route Bracken of Duncton was able to find a rapid and safe approach for us to the forsaken system of Capel Garmon’.

  This brief sentence, which covers a period of many moleyears, gives no hint of the hard winter conditions through which they had to travel, or of the intriguing question of why they made for Capel Garmon. Certainly Boswell regarded Capel Garmon, a miserable and insignificant place now but for its association with these two courageous moles, as a turning point on their journey. Perhaps the stones that now squat lifeless and grey in that dank place still retained some of the power they have now entirely lost.

  But the true answer can only be found by a mole who has crouched among the squalid, bare moorlands of Capel Garmon and turned his snout to the west and contemplated the fact that his long journey northwards from the warmer south is over and he must now turn irrevocably west to the heights of worm-poor soils that are the grim prelude to the mass of Siabod itself.

  But let the name of Capel Garmon send a shiver down the spine of anymole who knows what it feels like to crouch on the edge of a dark country into which he must, for whatever reason, reluctantly travel and from which death is a more certain gift than a safe return.

  The two moles paused there for only two or three days before the hour came when Bracken crouched on the surface, his snout due west, and said: ‘We are near to Siabod now, Boswell; I can feel it, and we must go while we still have strength.’ He was shivering and his voice was strained because he was afraid of the power of Siabod. ‘We must go now.’

  Boswell smiled and nodded, for he had often heard Bracken say the same thing when they faced a danger ahead and he wanted to face it and get it over. Bracken always found it hard to wait. But even Boswell felt a sense of dread, for there was something worse than forsaken about a place where a system had once thrived (according to the record of the Rolls of the Systems) but of which there was now barely a sign. The soil was soggy with rain and thawed snow, and there had already been long stretches, many molemiles wide, in which they had had to scratch around for hours to find a decent worm. Now there was just the sodden rustling of last year’s bracken and heather and the plaintive bleating of grubby, dung-caked sheep among the scattered bleakness of rocks whose colour was so dead that when light from the sky touched them they seemed to turn into shadow. Yet, with the prospect of Siabod before them, even Capel Garmon seemed a haven. But finally, wet, cold and hungry, the two moles made the turn west for the last part of their journey. Yet, even at the grimmest moments, a mole may see some reminder of hope, and Bracken saw it. Among the lifeless stones through which they passed he came upon a wet and stunted bush of gorse on which, joyous in the April murk, was a cluster of orange-yellow flowers, fresh as a happy spring. ‘They grow like that, only bigger, up on the chalk downland above Duncton Wood,’ he told Boswell, ‘and one day, if we ever get out of this alive, I’ll show you. I’d give anything to be able to be there now!’

  Although in the final stages of their journey to Capel Garmon they had managed to avoid all contact with roaring owls, the route on which Bracken now led them took them steeply down into a river valley in which, as they knew from experience, they would sooner or later have to cross a roaring-owl route. In fact, it came so
oner, right at the bottom of a steep valley side. They were glad to reach the bottom, for the valley side was wooded with coniferous trees, never a good place to find food. They pressed on over the roaring-owl way without difficulty, using the technique they had developed over the moleyears—a long touch of the snout on the hard, unnatural ground they found in such places and then, when both agreed that there was no vibration, a fast dash across.

  Once on the other side, they found that the air was heavy with the scent of a deep, cold river and though tempted to press on and find it, for rivers were a good place for food, Bracken insisted that they stay higher up the valley by the roaring-owl way and follow along by the side of it. It was a wise decision, for this route took them to a bridge over the river from whose height they could hear that it would have been too fast and wide for them to have swum across safely. They waited until dusk before risking the bridge, but once across, dropped right to the river’s edge, where they found food on the thin strip of rough pasture fields that ran by its side.

  On the side of the river from which they had come the ground rose steeply with massive coniferous trees covering it in darkness and stiff silence, while higher up on their own side a smattering of deciduous trees, mainly oaks and ash, gave way to rougher, starker ground that grew thicker with coniferous forest the higher it went. They pressed on downstream until, after only four or five molemiles, a tributary flowed down into the main river, a tumbling, rocky stream too rough for a mole ever to cross.

  ‘But then, we don’t need to,’ said Bracken. ‘That’s where Siabod lies, off up this valley somewhere.’ He pointed his snout upstream and they both headed westwards again, wondering what lay up the valley above them.

  Their progress was mainly slow, for the valley was steep and rocky, but here and there it flattened out into sheep-pasture fields where the food was good and the going easy. But however flat the ground immediately ahead of them sometimes was, they were aware, constantly and claustrophobically, of the steep valley sides rising to their left and beyond the river to their right, and of the dark green forest that clothed it, out of which ugly snouts and flanks of grey-black rock protruded more and more frequently. Bracken felt he was taking them straight into a rocky trap from which, should they run into trouble, there would be no easy escape. The river raced and roared down past them and occasionally its sound was joined by the rumble and rattle of a roaring owl as it went by on the way that ran a little higher up the valley side.

  Because the valley was so closed in they could get no sense of what lay beyond it, either to the side or straight ahead, while from down the valley and into their faces ran a continual run of bad weather, rain and wind, sometimes hail, and air that got colder and colder. It gave them the feeling that their situation was only going to get worse.

  It was on the fourth day after crossing the bridge that they ran into their first snow—not falling from the sky, but lying in wet, streaky patches in hollows in the ground and several days old, judging from the way it had been trodden over and messed on by the sheep. It was grubby, half-thawed snow and it matched the place they were in. High above them, where rock was exposed, an occasional snow patch glared against the dark rise of trees, though these had now shed whatever snow had settled on them from their steep branches. As night fell, the temperature dropped and the snow patches began to freeze and crackle at a talon touch, their icy surfaces catching the last purple glimmer of daylight in the chill sky above.

  It was on the following day, the fifth in their journey up the valley, that they met their first Siabod mole. It happened suddenly among some tussocky brown grass near the river’s edge where they had gone to take a drink in a tiny backpool made accessible by treading sheep.

  They heard his voice from the tussocks above before they saw him: ‘Beth yw eich enwau, a’ch cyfundrefn?’ They did not understand the language at all, though from its tone and his stance it was obvious what it meant.

  ‘We’ve come from Capel Garmon,’ said Bracken, to make things simple.

  ‘In peace,’ added Boswell.

  ‘Dieithriaid i Siabod, paham yr ydych yma?’ His words were a question, but that was all they could tell. They waited in silence. If he was a Siabod mole, he was not what either of them had expected, which was a mole as big as Mandrake, and as fierce.

  He was thin and wiry and had a wizened, suspicious expression on his face that spelt distrust. His snout was mean and pinched, and his fur looked more like a bedraggled teasel than anything else. His small black eyes travelled rapidly over them, taking in their strength, their relative size, Boswell’s crippled paw, their position (which was lower than he, down by the water), and generally giving them the feeling that they were being picked over by the snoutiest little mole they had ever come across.

  Then Boswell spoke again. ‘Siabod?’ he asked.

  The mole stared at them, his eyes flickering from one to the other, the faintest wrinkles of contempt forming in minute folds down the furless part of his snout.

  ‘Southerners, are you?’ he asked, speaking in ordinary mole so they could understand, but in such a way that the question was also an accusation and with a harsh, mocking accent to the words.

  But before they had time to reply, he darted back into the grass from which he had emerged, and by the time Bracken had climbed up to it, was gone. Bracken called after him, shouted out that they intended no harm and asked him to come back, but the only reply lay in whatever words a mole cared to divine in the rushing and rippling of the cold, indifferent river.

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Bracken.

  ‘Let’s press on,’ said Boswell, ‘as you have said more than once. Anyway, he’ll be back.’

  ‘Yes, and with other moles. He was a Siabod, all right. He spoke with the same accent Mandrake had,’ said Bracken.

  ‘Well, I can’t see where else he can be from up here,’ said Boswell, running along a little behind, ‘and that must have been Siabod he was speaking and—’

  ‘He was so pathetic,’ said Bracken contemptuously. ‘He reminded me of nothing more than a wireworm in a tunnel when you expected to see a lobworm. Nasty little character he was. I mean, he might have helped us…’ The anger in Bracken’s words reflected his apprehension about what they might soon face.

  They pressed on, a new life flowing through them now that they had made contact, if contact it was, with somemole, however contemptible he seemed to Bracken.

  Indeed, they were so full of the encounter and the discussion of the possibilities of the first mole bringing others, and their decision just to push forward and see what happened, that they hardly noticed that the wood on their side of the river suddenly gave way to clear, rough pasture, while the valley widened out to their left into a gentler slope. As they moved forward, their snouts to the ground ahead and not looking up at the prospect that very slowly began to loom before them, they did not notice that beyond the now gentler valley side, off to their left, what looked like a mist was beginning to swirl in, swath after swath, among the upper branches of the highest trees. Not mist but low cloud, whose lower edge smoked like moist grass caught by fire, while beyond the gaps in these low clouds there was not more sky but a grim, great blackness, spattered here and there with specks of pure white, that rose soaring high and massive like a wall above the valley: a mountain.

  Because the mist was so pervasive and changeable, it would have been impossible, even had Bracken and Boswell been aware of the scene looming so high beyond them, to make out the complete shape of the gloomy heights above the valley side.

  But no sooner were they conscious that the valley had widened and that the quality of windsound had grown deeper and heavier than the mist began to fall in waves towards them into the valley. At first it was only a thin veil that softened and deadened the russet and grey slopes behind it, but as it crept, swirled and surged lower, its higher parts grew thicker and the valley sides above them were lost in an impenetrable murk like the opaque off-white that slinks across the eyes of the creat
ure going blind with age.

  Then, faster than a forest fire, more silent than snow in the night, more unexpected than an owl’s attack, the mist was down across the ground where they crouched, racing and running between them in cold and clammy fronds, robbing everything of colour before masking everything in grey.

  It was like no mist either of them had ever seen on the chalk downland they knew, where a mist generally came with cold, still air and a mole waited patiently for it to go. This one was moving and racing and challenging, a living mist that disorientated a mole by putting its chill around his snout and forming mysterious shapes in its layered depths that seemed to move around him, or make him feel he was moving when he was, in fact, crouching still.

  ‘Boswell?’ called Bracken to his friend, who, though only a few moleyards away, was becoming obscured by the thickening white between them that not only cut off sight and smell but muffled and distorted sound as well.

  ‘Boswell, stay close to me or we’ll get separated.’

  When the two moles came together, each noticed that the other’s fur was coated with the finest of condensation and that their talons were shiny and wet with it.

  With no reference points of sight or smell around them but the now-muffled river, they instinctively tried burrowing, but the ground was so wet and full of flat, granular stones that jarred the shallowest talon thrust that they gave it up.

  ‘I don’t like this one bit,’ said Bracken, looking around at the mist in which the light intensity continually changed as the layers between them and the sky thickened or thinned with the run of the breeze. ‘I’ve never felt so exposed in my life. Let’s make for the river and we can find a temporary burrow in its bank.’

  Bracken started off one way, then paused and, shaking his head, went another before stopping and moving in yet a third.

  ‘I think the river’s that way,’ said Boswell, pointing in a fourth direction.