Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  As for Rune being killed, it must be said that the consensus of communal opinion in the Ancient System, fickle as ever, was now that ‘he never was a nice one, that Rune, and I always said it was a bit suspicious the way that he came back like that and pretended to be doin’ us all a great big good turn…’

  ‘That’s wot I thought exactly, only I didn’t like to say because, well, you don’t like to carp when things seem all right about a particular mole even though you yourself have your own doubts…’ And so forth.

  Comfrey, of course, was their darling again and now that Rebecca was definitely out of the running, there was no doubt in anymole’s mind who the healer was.

  It all made Comfrey smile, but he didn’t mind because, like Rebecca, he healed and listened and cared for them for no other reason than that he wanted to—it was the Stone he tried to listen to, not the changing words of other moles.

  Rebecca’s litter came one night two hours before dawn in early June and was the last to be born that summer. Its birth was quick and joyous, all four pups being nudged at and licked to start their tiny scrabble into life almost before a mole could blink.

  It was her third litter and the second she had reared, and she did it as simply as eating or breathing.

  Bracken heard the births and stayed nearby but did not enter her burrow, much though he wanted to. But a day or two after they came and their bleats and mewing were beginning to carry, she called out for him and he came slowly into her tunnels to look at them.

  How big he seemed to her, crouching at the burrow entrance and looking in wonder at the four pups who seemed to be permanently trying to untie the knot into which they had tied themselves as pink, soft paws and questing snouts jostled and pushed at soft, furless bodies and they climbed over each other with innocent indifference.

  Rebecca had three of their names already—Rose and Curlew for the two females and Beech for the smaller of the males. This last was a common name and Rebecca knew it had always been Bracken’s favourite tree to shelter by, so he did not bother to tell her that one of Rue’s litter by him had been called the same.

  As for the fourth, she hesitated over what name to give it, wondering if she might not choose the name of one of the moles they had both loved—Mekkins or Boswell.

  Bracken shook his head. It wouldn’t have been right. This mole did not look (if pups can look like anything) like either of them. He was, in fact, the largest of the litter and though not the quickest to fight his way through a scrabble for a suckle (that was Curlew’s place), he was always close behind.

  Bracken watched indifferently—names didn’t mean much to him. In fact, he was thinking of something else, as fathers often do when faced by the wonder of new life they have not borne themselves yet have helped to create and before which they may often feel a curious impotence. ‘Can these pups really live to be adult?’ they think, as they gaze in awe at the weak, blind things that carry life in every single movement they make.

  The four rolled and tangled up before him and Bracken’s mind took him back to the blizzard on Moel Siabod and he wondered how such tiny things—for Rebecca’s Siabod litter could have been no bigger—could ever have survived conditions in which he himself had nearly died. The thought was horrifying. For a moment their paws all piled on top of each other and then splayed out in tiny protracted talons, and he thought of the great rock splinters and fragments near Castell y Gwynt; and the mixing of their mewings seemed like the winds he had heard howling there.

  Then suddenly, for a moment, the so-far-unnamed mole scrabbled his way to the top, his snout shooting up above them all, his paws clutching out into thin air and failing to catch on to anything to stop him falling back down again, away from Bracken, and behind the pile formed by the other three.

  It seemed to Bracken that he was back beside the desolate Stones near Siabod and slipping and falling as his son had just done, down into the nameless cwm with the great peak of Tryfan which was, for that moment, his son’s tiny snout, above him and he falling away from it. He shivered with the memory and yet felt the wonder again of seeing Tryfan.

  ‘Call him Tryfan,’ said Bracken simply.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rebecca, not needing to ask the reason. ‘Tryfan, sweet thing; Tryfan, my love…’ It was the first of their pups Bracken heard Rebecca talk to by name.

  * * *

  Close though Rebecca’s tunnels were to the Stone, the litter seemed too young to go up to it out on the surface a few weeks later, when Bracken was to speak the Midsummer ritual once again.

  But they sensed the excitement and knew that the adults were doing something special, for all of them were restless and fractious that day, bleating especially loudly and mewing for no reason at all.

  In fact, by Midsummer Night they had already started to wander far and wide in Rebecca’s tunnels and she often had to round them up and shoo them back to her main burrow because she still liked them all to sleep together. Because of this, one of the females from the system agreed to come to watch over them while Rebecca went up for the ritual itself at midnight, so that she would know they were safe.

  Even so, they must have sensed that she was leaving them for the surface, because they stumbled bleating after her when she left, despite her smiles and love words to them, and the female had to quiet them with her own words. ‘There, there, she’s not going far, you silly things; she’ll come back, so don’t you go fearing over that. Shhh, my darlings, shhh.’

  What a night it was! Warm and clear, with a moon that shone as powerfully as a sun, and beech-tree branches that swayed against it high above the gathering moles, the shiny sides of the beech leaves shimmering with pale light in a faint breeze.

  What excitement for them all to know they were going to hear the ritual as it should be spoken, by Bracken who had travelled off so far—all the way to Uffington and further, so they said—and who was taught the ritual by as fine an elder as Duncton Wood had ever seen, name of Hulver!

  Youngsters from early litters were brought up to the clearing and crouched about in groups or scampered when they shouldn’t, wondering what the fuss was about until they saw the Stone and were awed by its great size and the way it seemed to move against the rising moon.

  How many mothers whispered, ‘Now don’t you forget what you’re going to be seeing and hearing tonight, because this is for you, this is, and Duncton’s honoured to have a mole like Bracken here to say those holy words he learned when he was scarcely older than you are now! So don’t you forget!’ And strange to say, although their puppish eyes wandered here and there, and they thought mainly of play and worms and chasing their siblings through the tunnels, there was many a youngster who did always remember that special night.

  But there was one who was not there—not on the surface, anyway—who would have an even more special reason to remember the Midsummer Night when Bracken spoke the ritual: Tryfan.

  He was not only bigger than his siblings, he was now also by far the most adventurous; and even the most careful of the females can lose track of a single pup when she’s trying to keep track of four of them at once. So, as they scampered round in Rebecca’s burrow, the female looking after them did not see Tryfan scramble out into the tunnel.

  Did he go looking for Rebecca, or was it just the excitement of exploring the tunnels once again? He himself was never able to say, for all he could remember were snatches of images, moments of places, wondrous and fearful incidents such as any pup remembers of something that happened when he was very young and which made an impression for a lifetime upon him.

  He remembered the sound of his siblings’ play, suddenly distant, and wondering why he was alone; he remembered the tunnels seeming huge and chalky and looking around behind him and hearing his lonely bleat echo about him, confusing him. He remembered running into tunnels that felt old as time, and curving round and seeing chalk dust on his paws.

  He heard the murmur of moles on the surface above where the moles were collecting, carried by some tunn
el wind or rootway of vibration, down to where he actually was—the round, circular tunnel that surrounded the Chamber of Echoes, the tunnel from which Bracken had first started his exploration of the central core of the Ancient System. Now Bracken’s son, Tryfan, wandered there alone, and tiny, his fur too young to show, snouting this way and that and not knowing where he was.

  Moleyears later Tryfan remembered finding himself in the Chamber of Echoes itself, his pawsounds and whimpers echoing around him as if there were a whole lot of youngsters lost like him, but not one of them near enough to give him comfort.

  ‘But then, all of a sudden, even though I was lost and should really have been very frightened, I knew it was all right,’ he was to recall. ‘I didn’t know what it was then, but I know now, as I know that Midsummer Night is the night for the blessing on the young, when the Stone gives them its protection. That’s what it did for me.’

  As Tryfan was later to remember, there shone in the confusing tunnels around him a light—not all around him but from somewhere ahead—and with its white glimmer on his snout and pale fur he turned to face it and ran towards it without question, knowing he would be quite, quite safe—just as he would have done had he heard Rebecca calling for him: ‘Tryfan, my love, I’m here!’

  So he scampered towards the light, but whenever he thought he had reached it, he found it was ahead of him again, until he was in a great chamber, bigger than the place of echoes, with swaying, sliding tree roots all around, towering high into the darkness above him and plunging into crevices along whose edge he teetered, led forward among them by the light.

  How long this took he never knew, but eventually he was beyond the roots and inside the hollow of a great tree from whose heights echoed down the faintest sound of wind among beech leaves and the murmur of adult voices chanting and saying prayers.

  Then he followed the light around the side of the tree’s deep hollow, the sound of the wind above so distant that it might have been another world.

  The next thing he remembered, and what he remembered most of all and yet most confusedly, was plunging into the ground even deeper, over and among great roots that towered and rolled above him, the light getting stronger and warmer and all around him the massive, tilted underside of the Stone of Duncton.

  Right under the buried part of the Stone he went, towards the source of the light itself, which was a stone, a Stillstone, the seventh Stillstone, whose glimmering lit up his fur and cast his shadow on the roots of stone and chalk walls about him as if he were a huge, strong mole, and adult, with not a single trace of fear in the way he boldly stood, looking into the eternal light of the Stone itself.

  He remembered that as he stood there he heard the deep voice of his father, carried down to where he was by the hollows and convolutions of the ancient beech whose roots encircled the Stone, as he said the final words of the Midsummer ritual. But of course he could not yet understand the words:

  ‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,

  We free their fur with wind from the west.’

  Then, as the seven blessings began to be spoken, the wonder of the Stillstone became too much for Tryfan, and as any youngster would, he stepped forward and touched it with his left paw. Instead of its light going out, as it had when Bracken had touched it, it seemed to glimmer even more—so brightly, indeed, that had any other mole been watching, he, or she, might have sworn that Tryfan was suddenly completely white with light.

  ‘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.’

  And that, or rather the sounds of the words, was all that Tryfan ever remembered. Except that much later that night, when he was very tired, he heard voices calling ‘Tryfan! Tryfan!’ and scampering, urgent paws running here and there; and it took him a long time to find them, until he turned a corner in tunnels he knew again and an adult voice said, ‘There you are! We’ve been looking for you everywhere!’ Then his mother, Rebecca, was there and for a moment he thought she’d be so angry, but all she did was take him into her paws and he could feel her love and it was safe, so safe, like a light he had seen and was beginning to forget he’d seen because he was so tired now and Rebecca’s fur was all around him and he was safe again, snuggling into the safety of her love.

  * * *

  But those adult paws searching for Tryfan after the Midsummer ritual was over were not the only paws that scampered and urgently raced that Midsummer Night.

  There were some that did the same in Uffington as well. From the Silent Burrows they ran, down the long tunnels, through the deep night, on and on they ran to find Medlar, the Holy Mole, in the Holy Burrows.

  ‘What is it?’ he gently asked the two novice scribemoles who finally gained an entrance to him. ‘What is it that makes you run in the Holy Burrows on this happiest of nights?’

  ‘It’s Boswell,’ they gasped out. ‘He’s leaving the Silent Burrows. He wants to come out.’

  ‘Yes?’ smiled Medlar.

  ‘But that’s not all. He began to scratch at the wall inside the burrow, where the seal is, and then, when we heard that, well… there was suddenly a light—’ began one.

  ‘All around the outside of his burrow,’ continued the other, ‘shining and bright.’

  ‘Sort of white and glimmering,’ finished the first.

  Medlar could see the awe in their faces. Indeed, he could see something of the reflection of the light they had seen.

  He raised a paw and spoke softly to them: ‘This is a blessed night, a holy night, and what you have witnessed may be remembered for generations to come. I have felt the peace in the Holy Burrows, felt the silence.’ He stopped and stared at them, and they saw that awe was on his old face as well. ‘Come,’ said Medlar, ‘come. We will return to the Silent Burrows and see what we may do.’

  So back went Medlar and several of the masters, with the novices as well, gathering in a circle around the burrow in which Boswell was sealed. The light the novices had spoken of was gone, but the weak scratching continued sporadically, and as several of the moles went forward to start breaking the seal from the outside, Medlar raised his paw to stop them.

  ‘Let Boswell do it for himself,’ he said quietly, ‘for he would wish it to be so.’

  They crouched in silence, whispering and chanting prayers of thanksgiving as Boswell continued slowly to burrow his way through the seal, his sounds falling silent for long periods as, no doubt, he rested from the effort of it. He had, after all, been sealed in the Silent Burrows for no less than ten moleyears, nearly eleven. He must have been very weak.

  But eventually dust began to fall from the outside of the wall, a tiny crack appeared in the seal, crumbling soil fell on the floor at the paws of the waiting moles; and the seal began to break away.

  Then, as they caught sight of his paws at the widening hole, while the others continued to pray, two or three of them did step forward to help him tear down the last of the seal and to bring Boswell out into the main chamber.

  He looked as frail as a pup and almost translucently thin, his fur pale and his snout even paler. Yet from him there came a strength that filled all who saw him with exaltation and wonder. There came from his eyes a brightness, a light, a life and a love that made each one of them feel that they had come home.

  They stood in awe about him as he looked slowly around him, and at each of them, and then said softly, ‘Blessed be thou, and ful of blisse,’ and they had never heard the blessing said with such power. They were blessed to hear it.

  He was silent for a long time, as if thinking, and then he spoke again, with an authority that made each word he spoke seem absolute, so that none doubted that what he said would come to pass: ‘Soon the seventh Stillstone will come to Uffington from Duncton, in whose ancient tunnels it lies waiting. With the Stone’s guidance I shall make a f
inal trek there myself and find it. There, too, I will meet a mole whose life will be a blessing on us all, and those who follow us, and only with his help will the seventh Stillstone come back here. For he has seen its light and been graced with it, and it is of him that the ancient text that I myself found so long ago is finally about:

  ‘Find the lost Book, send the last Stone,

  Bring them back to Uffington.

  Send a mole in courage living

  And a mole compassionate,

  With a third and last to bind them

  By the warmest light of love…’

  Bracken, Boswell and Rebecca, they were the moles, they were the ones. But as Boswell paused in the middle of the verse and looked at them all with gentle love, he was thinking only of the fourth mole, the mole he would himself guide back to Uffington but whose name he did not yet know. So he continued:

  ‘Song of silence,

  Dance of mystery,

  From their love one more will come…

  He the Stone holds,

  He the Book brings,

  His the Silence of the Stone…’

  There was silence as he finished, until one of the moles there whispered, ‘Will you bring the seventh Book as well? Will he bring it?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Boswell softly. ‘Only the seventh Stillstone will come. I do not know about the Book,’ he whispered.

  They went to his side, for he was suddenly very weak, and held him until he was steady again, and then they led him slowly back to the Holy Burrows, their prayers changing to songs of exaltation as they went.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  By August Rebecca’s litter had nearly caught up with litters born in April and was almost ready to leave the home burrow. In some ways they had already, for all of them spent longer and longer away, roaming and exploring about as they began to put out feelers for territory of their own.