Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  “And Weeth, did you meet him?”

  “I did, and liked him a great deal. He told me to tell you, Privet, that he wishes to watch over Maple until he is sure he is settled to his new task and then, as he put it, ‘I will take the first opportunity to return to Duncton, in time for Midsummer I hope!’”

  “And you, mole?”

  “Well, I wanted to serve in the Community, but Maple said I was not suited to so silent and dedicated a life, and I think he felt I had gone into the Community for the wrong reason.”

  “Which was?”

  But that Myrtle would not tell, only adding, rather lamely, “Well, that’s all I have to say.”

  It was a tale well told, but it left Pumpkin unsatisfied.

  “Mole!” he said, calling her over to him, as the evening’s conversation moved on to other things. “What is it you’ve not told us? Whatmole is it you seem to fear, and keep looking over your shoulder for? Is he or she here? Eh?”

  “There was a missive went out, asking for the mole to come forward who stanced up for Keeper Sturne; well...”

  “You!”

  She nodded her head, and her story tumbled out of how she came back to Duncton and tried to seek out Maple and then had been too intimidated by Sturne’s position as Librarian, and, and...

  “Well, we had better see about that!” said Pumpkin.

  “But he’s so important, and I don’t know what to say to him, and all I want to do is see him just once more because, well, things were not quite finished. I —”

  “Now!” said Pumpkin.

  “Now?” she gasped.

  “Now is best,” said Pumpkin. “Follow me and we might get there before nightfall.”

  “But he’ll be working.”

  “Of course he’ll be working, he does nothing else but work, does Sturne. It’ll do him good to...” and here Pumpkin might have said many things but he confined himself to the tamest of all... “to have a chat to the mole who saved his life. He would want to say thank you!”

  “Oh! Well, perhaps it’s best we get it over with. I won’t sleep well until I do.”

  Without more ado, and eager to reach the Library before twilight, Pumpkin led Myrtle off by the quickest route he knew.

  “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” she said, as they reached an entrance and went down into the echoing tunnels.

  “I am. Nomole knows Sturne better than me, not one. This is the very best thing to do.”

  They ventured into the gloom of the Main Chamber, Myrtle staring up in awe at the great stacks and rows of books, and into the places of study and scholarship.

  “Who’s there?” called out Sturne’s voice from the Master Librarian’s gallery. “Speak up, it’s echoey up here and I’m busy.”

  “It’s me, Sturne, and I’ve brought a mole to see you.”

  “Oh!” said Sturne, still not appearing at his study cell portal. “If it’s some mole or other who wants to study, tell him to come in the morning and I’ll be much obliged.”

  For Sturne this was relatively affable, but it was not quite what Pumpkin had in mind.

  “It’s not ‘some mole or other’, Sturne,” Pumpkin called up, “it’s a female come to see you.”

  “A female? I don’t know any females, not one. Never have, doubt I ever will.”

  “Sturne,” called out Pumpkin warningly, “I’m getting on in years, but I tell you if you don’t put down whatever text or folio you’re studying and come down here this instant I shall... I shall... drag you down!”

  There was silence, and finally, and slowly, Sturne appeared, looking over the gallery down towards them.

  “I can’t see very well from up here.”

  “Then come down, mole, for goodness’ sake. Or we’ll be off, this female and me, to have a merry evening together.”

  “What female is she that she claims to know me?”

  “Sturne, you may be clear-headed with texts, but you are dungle-headed in all else. You met her, you may dimly recall, in the cross-under in November, when she saved your life.”

  Sturne was suddenly silent.

  “Perhaps we better go and come back another time,” whispered Myrtle, much alarmed by all this.

  “Go? You’ll go nowhere! You’ll stay right where you are and he’ll come down here. Won’t you, Sturne?” he called.

  With that Pumpkin left them, and tempted though he was – very tempted indeed – he did not linger to find out how Sturne made his acquaintance of a female who had occupied his thoughts every day of every molemonth in the long long terrible times since November. But later, through the services of Fieldfare, who heard the story at first paw from Myrtle herself, he learnt what happened.

  Sturne came down the slipway from the gallery like a mole about to face his doom. Nothing had ever frightened him so much, and each step was hard to take. But there she was, staring at him, and as frightened as he was.

  He reached her and stopped, and stared.

  “You!” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “I wanted...”

  “I wanted...”

  What did they both want? They wanted to talk. They wanted not to be alone. They wanted to share.

  If getting down to where she stanced was hard enough, words proved nearly impossible.

  “I... really... I don’t know what to say, “he said. “Your name?”

  “Myrtle,” she blurted out.

  “Myrtle,” he muttered.

  Why, he thought to himself, it was a lovely name, a beautiful name, the finest name he had ever heard. But could he say such things? He could not.

  “I’m Sturne,” he said.

  “Master Librarian,” she replied.

  If there was a moment when their nascent relationship might have stumbled, and veered into something inconsequential, ending in polite words and a farewell of moles who did not know how to reach each other, that was it.

  But some distant sense of what was fitting came to Sturne’s heart and he found the right words to say.

  “No, no, not Master Librarian,” he said. “I am... I am just... well, a mole. That’s all I am and all I really ever wanted to be.”

  He looked at her then with such appeal in his eyes, as if to say “Help me, for I don’t know what words to say and never have, but now more than anything I want to learn to say them,” that she could only stare, and not care if slow tears trickled from her eyes.

  “I came back to see you,” she sniffed, “because after what happened, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and then, well, and then...” and it tumbled out, every bit of it.

  “You came back here to Duncton?” he said, dumbfounded. “You slept rough in the Eastside, when I was... well, nearby! And I didn’t know!”

  She nodded, and she could not doubt from the lost look in his face how welcome she would have been, and how much he had needed her.

  “I don’t know what to say, you see,” he said, frowning and really not knowing at all. “I, well, I’m not used to talking to females, I just have never...”

  He stopped, unable to go on, as bewildered and lost in the world of feelings as she might well be in the world of texts and folios.

  “My dear,” she said, coming to him at last and taking him in her paws, “you need say nothing at all, nothing.”

  “But I... I don’t... I... mole... I am so afraid to cry.”

  Then poor Sturne, who had so rarely cried, began to cry his heart out as she held him. Tears born not of molemonths but of moleyears past, hard years, when he had been so much alone, and so lost.

  Twilight gave way to dusk, and still he cried. Dusk to darkness, and still he sniffled and snuffled. Darkness to night, and finally he stopped.

  “We better move,” she said.

  “Mmm, we had, I suppose,” he mumbled.

  “Can you find the way out?”

  “I...” Bump!

  “Perhaps...” Crash!

  “Take my paw...” Wallop!

  S
uddenly, in the pitch black of the Library, she found herself in his paws.

  “I’m lost in my own Library,” he confessed.

  “We could stay here until dawn.”

  “It wouldn’t be right,” said Sturne, not moving at all.

  “It would be very right indeed,” said Myrtle gently. Then, “What are you doing?” For he was doing something.

  “I’m smiling,” he said, “I think that’s what it is, at any rate.”

  “I can’t see your smile at all,” she said, “it’s too dark.”

  And quietly, perhaps a little diffidently, for he was unused to such excess, Sturne dared to laugh in the darkness; and in all his long life the Main Chamber of Duncton Library had never felt so right a place for him to be as it did then with her.

  Other strangers came to Duncton who brought happiness to others as Myrtle did, and when Pumpkin heard such tales he was well pleased. This was Duncton after all, and such things could happen there, and each one that did made the darker memories of recent moleyears easier to bear.

  One such visitor gave him unexpected pleasure, and confirmed his long-held belief that if moles are tolerant, and don’t jump to hasty judgements, the Stone will put things right in its own way. She was dark, and she was most beautiful, and she appeared at Pumpkin’s portal like some exotic creature that floats through a woodland glade on the wings of the summer breeze.

  “My name is Morwenna of Siabod, and it’s Whillan that I seek.”

  Well, now, here was a thing! Whillan’s mysterious past come to haunt him no doubt, and she not a mole to give a single thing away, but rather, to curl up in a male’s burrow and treat it like her own, and not many males mole enough to stop her!

  Of Siabod too!

  She waited languorously until Whillan came over from Cuddesdon, and many a mole wanted to be there when they met.

  “Well!” said Whillan. “Well!”

  She embraced him, her glossy fur making him look almost old, and she whispered to him. Then, with no explanation given – and nomole daring to seek one, for together they made a formidable pair – they set off for the Marsh End.

  Later, much was revealed.

  “Squelch’s daughter?”

  Well... what could a mole say? Nothing, it seemed.

  But away from their stares, down in the dank paths of the Marsh End, she was a different mole, and a nervous one.

  “Madoc didn’t want me to come, but I did all the same. Maybe she did really. She loved you, Whillan. Then after she had us she didn’t need to love you any more.”

  “Yes,” said Whillan.

  “And now?”

  They talked with an affection born of having a common bond in Madoc, and the free spirit that such journeyers share. He told her everything, of his past, and of his present happiness. She told him but little, for the past mattered not to her, nor the future.

  “How is he?”

  Whillan told her Squelch worked and worked at his singing and melodies, and that he had learnt mediaeval notation and made things nomole-else could understand.

  “He sings still?” she asked softly, her eyes eager.

  He shook his head. “Morwenna, there’s something you should know. The notations he makes, they are for you. I have heard him say as much.”

  She accepted it as if it were her right.

  “Well then, let us go and see him.”

  “He’s grown old.”

  “Madoc said he was horribly fat.”

  “No more.”

  “Take me to him, Whillan,” she said, taking his paw, and for that short journey to Squelch’s modest tunnels, he might have fancied that he went with Madoc once again.

  Squelch had aged, and when they found him he was hunched over some scrap of bark, humming loudly to himself and stabbing at it, making marks as he did so. His tunnels were a chaos of folios, and odd texts that he had made for himself.

  “Squelch! It’s me, Whillan.”

  “Ah,” sighed Squelch, peering round, “a friendly voice. You are welcome, mole. You have somemole with you?”

  “I have, Squelch. It is your daughter, Morwenna.”

  “Morwenna,” he exclaimed, darting out to see and too astonished to seem surprised. It was hard to say at that moment what his feelings were. He seemed perplexed.

  He stared at her and she at him, and then she laughed and said, “You’re thin!”

  “Not fat now,” he conceded with a rueful smile.

  “What are all those?” she asked, moving past him with grace and waving a paw at his work.

  “Melodies, songs, and other things,” he said.

  “Whillan said they are made for me.”

  “Did he? He’s right – not you in the body, you in my head. In the body you may be a different thing.”

  “Madoc said that the one good thing about you is that you could sing. Whillan says you don’t sing any more, so things don’t sound promising.”

  “He’s right. Better not sing. My penance for wrongs done. I put it down here instead,” and he picked up a pawful of folios.

  “Sing to me,” she said.

  “Well then, perhaps I will. Perhaps I will.”

  He would not for a time, only looking at her, getting them food, fussing about, and trying to order his tunnels and chamber, which proved quite impossible.

  “Sing to me,” she said.

  “Well, I could I suppose. There’s a lifetime of singing here. Just one, perhaps.”

  “Sing to me, father,” she said passionately. “It is why I have journeyed from Siabod, so that I may one day tell my pups that I heard you sing.”

  He looked at her, and at Whillan, and went to the back of the chamber. He touched one folio, and then another, turning them over, peering at them, seeming unsure quite where to begin.

  But then, softly, he began, his strange, high, haunting voice filling the chamber, filling their hearts. Of her coming he sang, and of dreams, and of all there could be when moles came together whom life had pushed apart.

  “And another,” she whispered when he had done. “Another,” she breathed.

  He sang then of torment, and loss, and reunion.

  “Another.”

  He shook his head, and said his voice was cracked and old and not what it once was.

  “I know,” she said, “I know... but it is the song I shall remember, not the voice. Sing of my mother Madoc.”

  A dark look came across his face, a look of shame.

  “My voice is not good enough for that,” he said.

  “Sing,” she whispered, and it was like the command of wind and sky.

  He began, and then, as his voice did break, did crack, she began to sing softly too, gentle as the wind, embracing as the sky.

  “You?” he whispered.

  And then she sang for him, of loss and of forgiveness, of the light that comes after darkness with the seasons’ turn.

  “You...” he said, tears coursing down his face, for she sang with the beauty that his own voice once had.

  “You are my daughter,” he said.

  Then she sang for him, and for the first time in his life he knew real joy.

  So Morwenna came for a time to Duncton Wood. She stayed with Squelch and he taught her what he knew. The melodies he made, the songs, the great works which he called “other things” she understood and she learnt from them all she could. Perhaps nomole has ever given moledom so rich a legacy of moving song and chant as Squelch, and that great collection that he made, at her request, was taken not into Duncton Library, for she deemed it not quite suitable, but to Cuddesdon, where Whillan was.

  At his end, which was when June came, but before Midsummer itself, she nursed him until he died, and she sang a lament which was his own, made for allmole, but never sung as beautifully again as that first time.

  Then, as mysteriously as she had come, she was gone, and Squelch’s great legacy was left safe for evermore.

  At that time, too, Elynor passed away, and Pumpkin began to grow
old as well. As Privet finally regained her health, he declined, all his great tasks fulfilled; and surely there was nothing more for him to do. Now, as he had cared for her when she had seemed near her end, so she cared for him.

  “Midsummer’s coming, my dear, and I wish you to be there to witness it before the Stone,” she told him many times.

  “Aye, Pumpkin, we all wish for that,” Sturne agreed, for when Privet was not near at paw, Sturne took her place. And, if Sturne had been called away, why, there were a hundred moles who would have been there to watch over Pumpkin in those last days.

  Two days before Midsummer Weeth appeared, just as he had promised he would do; and, to everymole’s amazement, he had a mole with him who had come from the far side of the Wolds: Dint, Frogbit’s adoptive father. Tales, stories, arrivals and delights... that was ever the way the days before Midsummer should be, and that blessed Midsummer was no exception.

  As indefatigable as ever, Pumpkin rallied on Midsummer’s Eve and declared that nothing would stop him going up to the Stone for the ritual: “Even if it’s the last time I ever go there. Aye, I’ll get there!” So he did, with Sturne to help him on one flank, and Hamble on the other, and Brimmel tagging along behind. The trek up the Slopes and across the High Wood was slow, and Pumpkin had to make a good few stops.

  “Not what I was, am I?” he said. “Brimmel? Where’s that mole! Brimmel, you see that tree there? Well, that’s where Bracken nearly got caught by Rune a century ago, and if he had been, how different things would be! Eh?”

  “That’s right, sir!” said Brimmel, who had spent many a happy hour with Pumpkin in the days before he was confined to his tunnels, being shown the old places, being taught the old lore.

  “Got a taste for it, he has,” Pumpkin had told Privet, and so it seemed.

  So now, on what few could doubt was his last trek, Pumpkin was still wanting to show Brimmel things.

  “Wait a moment – what do you mean, ‘That’s right’?” said Pumpkin.