Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  “Where do you hail from, Brother?” fellow travellers sometimes asked him, but he only shrugged. His past was lost somewhere behind him now.

  “Do you need help across this stream, friend?” others might suggest, seeing him trying to focus his poor eyes upon the water’s flow, to find a pawhold and a safe way across.

  “Aye, and thank you!” he would say, no longer proud nor always striving to be independent, understanding that in accepting help he gave something in return.

  “Come on then... hold my paw... no, not there with the right paw, a little to the left... that’s it, mole, nearly there...”

  Nearly there! He had almost given up thinking he might be nearly anywhere, preferring now to journey as his heart led him, pausing awhile in places, being alone, or sharing a worm or two with fellow travellers like himself.

  Then, when one day he plodded on and the wind turned to a gale and he felt his heart fill with hope and purpose and he heard a mole say who sheltered out of the bad weather, “That’s another of them, those pilgrims, trekking on in some bloody silly hope of finding that Privet mole,” he knew it was so: he was a pilgrim now and a Newborn no more. But he was different from the others he met. He heard their excited talk of what she would be like, what she would or would not say to them. But he had felt her paw upon his hurt face; he had heard her voice.

  When moles asked where he hailed from, and whither he was bound, he could no longer satisfactorily answer the first question, and was uncertain about the second. She had touched him, she had spoken to him, and when she had left him and gone off in the safe company of the followers Hodder and Arliss, she had taken something of his spirit with her, as Arliss had taken something of his heart.

  Now, each step he took, each stumble he suffered, each dim dawn that alighted on his scarred face and peering eyes, brought him nearer to the place towards which his life would always be directed. But if that was whither he was now bound, he had no name for it. It left him wordless, passive yet purposeful, and others watched him pass silently by and shook their heads. There were plenty of such moles about, disturbed by the anarchy of the times and pursuing a search for new faith, and there would be more.

  So, mostly alone, he journeyed on, believing that when the Stone willed it, it would lead him to her. And then he would know what to say and what to do. Sometimes he thought of Arliss, Privet’s helper, and wondered at the way the love he had felt for her when they had met and then parted had become subdued, passive, dormant, like a plant that dies away to nothing as autumn turns to winter, and needs the coming of the spring to wake to life again.

  Arliss. Sister of Hodder. Helper of Privet, Mole of Rollright. Yet passive though it seemed Rees wondered at the simple certainty of the love he felt, which awaited so patiently their reunion. Her last touch upon his paw he felt still, and he now began to think of it not as last, but first, and to believe there would be many more.

  Meanwhile... he would find Privet as pilgrim and not as Newborn. He would tell her what Brother Commander Thorne had said about going to Duncton Wood, though he doubted if such words from him would make the slightest difference to anything. And he would meet Arliss again and see if his thoughts of her, wild and compulsive when they had first parted, but now subdued and confusing, were anything at all like her thoughts of him.

  Such were Rees’ feelings and musings through the first two thirds of October, when, choosing a route along the High Chilterns, he made his way among isolated systems asking after Privet. When that had no result, he simply wandered watchful and with his ears open. Many others were doing the same, some genuine and some spies, but after Ivinghoe, where the route dropped away towards the vale of Thame, many turned south, believing their best hope of finding Privet lay Dunctonwards.

  The fact that it might be dangerous, being territory under the control of the Crusades, mattered not to most moles, though their internecine feuds had been such that up in the Chilterns the Newborns’ control was now but nominal. Yet Rees chose not to go that way, not for fear of the dangers, but because he believed that had Privet gone that way she would long since have been captured, and he would have heard of it. No, if he had been Hodder and Arliss, he would have taken her further south and east, perhaps even down into the grim periphery of the Great Wen which, from the vantage of the Chiltern Ridge, could be seen stretching away in a grey-blue haze by daytime and as an awesome spread of lights at night, above which the clouds loomed lurid and threatening. Between Ridge and Wen a strip of mucky landscape ran and it was here, Rees believed, that Privet must be hidden and where he began to search for her.

  The storms he had endured earlier came again and now, though the sun shone once in a while, trees were leafless and bleak, dykes filled with water, and even the most sheltered scrapes and hides felt draughty and uncomfortable. Such systems as there were seemed hopeless places, with moles who cared not for the Stone, and had not heard of wars, civil or otherwise. Newborns, followers, darkness, light, all seemed the same to them. Oppressed by the proximity of two-foots, their territories crossed by roaring owl ways, sick with the pollution and fumes that beset such areas, the moles Rees met were haggard and thin.

  Yet despite their ignorance of almost everything else, many of them had heard of Privet of Duncton Wood, and their narrow eyes would light up at the mention of her name, and their gaunt faces smile for a moment at the thought of her.

  “Lost her whole family, she did, at a westward place called Wildenhope, and went into the Silence to search for them.” Such was their version of events. No matter, they had heard of her, and some from even these communities had gone in search of her.

  “Heard she was going to Duncton Wood. But has she been this way? No, not her, though you hear things from time to time, you know?”

  “What things?”

  “Things.”

  It was enough to keep Bees plodding on, the escarpment to his right paw, the Wen to his left, the south ahead, and a slim chance of finding out something about Privet in between.

  There were sometimes more than rumours. At Tebworth he met a mole who claimed to have met a party of three moles some molemonths before trekking by themselves near Leighton, which lay westward. One of them was a female and silent, and, “I didn’t put two and two together until later I had a friend who met a mole who cured her of ague by touch alone. ‘Silent as death’ she said she was and I thought, ‘That’s Privet, that is.’ But I said nothing.”

  “Why not? And why tell me?”

  The mole shrugged and said, “Some you speak to, some you don’t. She was heading south-east, Totternhoe way.”

  Rees found nothing there, but in nearby Eaton, to the south-west, the story of three moles was confirmed, and the other two were a female and a male, from Rollright.

  And so it went on, day by day, better than rumours but not quite fact, enough to keep Rees in an area which others rejected as being marginal, a place to pass through, and in any case not near enough to Duncton Wood, to where, allmole said, she would eventually have to go.

  Then suddenly he learned quite positively where she was. Indeed, the moles who had heard of it were in such a hurry getting there that they had no time to do more than shout, “It’s true! We’ve heard! Privet’s in Amersham! Everymole in the vicinity is going there!”

  “But how do you —”

  “No time to stop and talk about it, mate! There’s times you’ve got to go for it and this is one.”

  “How far’s Amersham?”

  “Four days, no more. Come with us, we’re all strangers to each other and making a party of it. But don’t dawdle.”

  “Where have you come from?”

  “Thame way,” they said, slowing only momentarily as he caught up with them. They went faster than he customarily did and their conversation was as breathless as their pace, their minds being set on the way ahead and not on any talk for long.

  He soon worked out that they had no facts at all on which to base the idea that Privet was at Amersham. It
was merely a rumour, yet one which had more force than most since as they travelled along others joined them and they heard that moles from all directions were converging on a system that until then had been but a name to him. But as for where the rumour had come from, nomole knew nor even cared. Like moles fleeing a flood because others have told them of its coming, they seemed caught up in a journey with which they would not be satisfied until they reached its destination.

  Their numbers increased as they drew closer to Amersham, and they overtook moles along the way, for many had grown tired, or were ill, or lame, or simply old and slow.

  “She’s there all right,” moles said, “give us a paw and help us along the way. The Stone’ll bless you if you will.”

  But there was no time to linger and help such moles: if they could not get there on their own four paws then it was a pity, but they must fend for themselves! So Rees found himself caught up in the same panic – there was no better word for it – as come a new dawn, they were off again.

  It was near Chesham that he called a halt to his mad march with the mob to Amersham, as suddenly and impulsively as he had begun it. It was something to do with the scrabble to get on along the way, and the indifference shown to those who fell by the wayside. They had passed a couple of sick old males who had stanced down to rest, and had watched with something dangerously close to amusement as two younger moles, the old moles’ kin, had grown angry with their relatives and finally after much shouting and cursing had abandoned them, saying that they would find them on the way back.

  “But it’s for us and our illness that we set off in the first place,” one of them cried out pathetically, his voice shaking, half with anger, half with tears.

  Rees had gone on some way after that with growing self-disgust, thinking of those poor moles left behind, and reflecting on the fact that Hodder had turned back and helped him and perhaps he ought to do the same. But worthy thoughts are one thing, worthy action another, and Rees tramped on until dusk, his conscience wrestling with the sense that if he did not go on he might miss the only opportunity he would ever have to see Privet and the others again.

  At dusk, when the company stopped to rest, he was silent and refused all food, his new-found friends wondering what was wrong. Then, peremptorily, he told them he had had enough, that they were all wrong to go on as they were, that there were better things in life than... than... Then, only feeling worse for his outburst, he turned back to retrace his steps and see if he could find the moles who had been left behind.

  He never did. Sleep overcame him and he lay his head upon a grassy bank and took his rest where he was.

  “Mole, mole!” a voice said waking him. “Are you ill? Can I help?”

  It was an old female, one they had also passed earlier that day for she went but slowly, pausing frequently to catch her breath, which was raspy and troubled.

  “You help me?” he exclaimed, feeling light and refreshed from his sleep, and thinking that the morning air felt good for the first time in days, “I should help you.”

  He found her food; and he talked, and confessed to her his discomfort with himself.

  She laughed in a wheezy, patient kind of way. “And what do they expect to gain when they find Privet? If she’s silent, as they say, she’ll not tell them anything at all. If she speaks, why, they’ll be disappointed in her!”

  “So where are you going then, if not to Amersham as well?” he said.

  “Me? I’m bound for Comfrey’s Stone, which lies some way east of here.”

  He had heard of it – it was where Comfrey of Duncton Wood had died decades before, and for a time had been a place of pilgrimage.

  “No more, of course, for moles soon forget such things. Whatmole remembers Comfrey now, but as a mole in a story of long ago?”

  “Why are you going there, mole?”

  “To touch it. To find a healing for my breathlessness. All the summer years I promised myself I would, but what with one thing and another, well, time’s slipped away. Autumn came, and the wind and rain, and I knew in my heart that I would not survive the winter unless I did something like this. So here I am, overtaken every day by moles bound for Amersham to find Privet.”

  “I’ll come with you!” said Rees impulsively.

  “Sleep on it, mole,” she said gently, and he thought that perhaps she preferred to travel alone.

  He slept well and deeply the rest of that day and following night, and was only woken occasionally by the sound of travellers on the way, jostling and pushing and giving him the same looks of pity and contempt that he (he now realized) had given others who had stopped. The female was still there.

  “I’d still like to help you on,” he said, “at least part of the way.”

  “You don’t want to go with them?”

  He shook his head and the decision was made: “No, I’m coming with you,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It was late October when Maple and the followers finally got within striking distance of Avebury. They had assembled their forces a little to the north-east on Barbury Hill, to regroup and recuperate from their arduous journey, and form a plan of attack.

  Having travelled in three groups, partly to confuse the Newborns, but also to gather as much information and support along the way as they could, they were more powerful and better prepared than Maple and Ystwelyn had dared hope. Mole after mole had joined them, and here and there groups of Newborns had given up without a struggle. But in the main the Newborns they met had either offered immediate resistance, and very bloody some of the fighting had been, or they had retreated for a time only to return later in greater numbers. So the going had been tough, and the setbacks many. Both sides had lost moles, and certainly Maple had wounded followers to think about now as well – which was one reason why he had ordered the rest on Barbury Hill.

  “When we go on,” he said confidently, “at least we can be sure those moles who cannot go with us will be safely out of the way, ready to join us when we press over the vales to Buckland. Meanwhile we shall wait for a few more to join us, and some of us can reconnoitre Avebury and decide on the best approach.”

  In the days that followed a good many more moles joined them and proper plans were made.

  “We have, I’m afraid, lost all chance of surprise,” observed Maple at a final council of war, “but our numbers are increasing and our spirits high, and in the hard molemonths of journeying past, and especially the past few days, we have shown that we are a match for the Newborns.”

  There was a grim nodding of heads, but little more, for the Newborns had proved to be rough and dogged fighters who gave little quarter, and showed no mercy to those they caught. But if they hoped that torturing and killing prisoners, or snouting them along barbed fences where they knew the followers would find them, would deter Maple’s forces, they were badly mistaken. Such tactics might terrorize and subdue small isolated communities, but the followers under Maple were made of sterner stuff, and these crude devices served only to harden their resolve. Of more concern was that some elements amongst the followers became vengeful once more towards the Newborns, so much so that Maple had to discipline them harshly, and warn what he would do if he found any further retaliation.

  “We are for freedom and tolerance, and if we do to the Newborns what they do to us we do not help our cause. We fight only as hard as we need to, to win, and after that we think of the peace to come.”

  They were noble words, and none doubted that Maple would stance by them, but it was hard for moles not to want revenge in kind, who heard the screams of their friends as they died in agony across the vales, and later found their corpses hanging along the way in postures so twisted and distorted, and with mutilations so vile, that none could doubt the suffering they had endured before they died.

  Maple did not underestimate the difficulties of taking a system such as Avebury, which had by now been so long occupied by the Newborns that its defences were well developed. But his knowledge of pas
t wars and battles was great, and the experience of moles like Ystwelyn considerable, and he had the inestimable advantage of disciplined and motivated moles who would do as they were ordered, and fight to the end.

  “Also, moles who have been in occupation of a system so long become lax, and forget how it might be if they were attacked,” he said the night before the assault. One other advantage he had, and it was one he had planned for carefully, and fully prepared. He had four moles who knew Avebury well. Two were Newborn guards, captured in recent days, who had been “turned” to inform to save their lives. These had been caught and interrogated separately, and the information they gave was consistent. Areas of doubt remained, but broadly Maple and his subordinates had as good an idea of the disposition of Avebury’s tunnels and defences as anymole then alive.

  The other two moles were followers who had lived in Avebury and escaped from the Newborns. One had made his way to the Wolds, and had long since told Maple and the others all he knew, and been ready to guide them as best he was able when it came to an attack.

  The second was none other than Spurling, the brave refugee from Avebury and later Buckland, and latterly leader, along with Fieldfare, of the rebels hiding out at Seven Barrows. It had been Weeth’s idea to make his way to Uffington and find some former Avebury moles, having heard from Noakes before the two had gone their separate ways after the raid on Banbury that there were moles aplenty at Seven Barrows just waiting to get their talons on the Newborns.

  Weeth had wanted to take a younger mole than Spurling, who was old and slow, but for one thing it was plain that he had clear memories of Avebury and particularly of the complex tunnels about its library, and for another he was determined to go. Most touchingly, Fieldfare wanted to go with him, but that Weeth would not allow. He knew from what he saw, and from what Noakes had told him, that she was effectively joint leader with Spurling of the rebels, and Maple had made clear to him that her greatest usefulness would be helping with any future relief of Duncton Wood, not in bloody campaigns across the southern vales for which she was ill-fitted.