Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  Spindle came closer too and stared down at her.

  “Is there anything you can do?” he whispered to Tryfan. “For she seems a worthy mole.” But he needed to say no more, for Tryfan was already stancing himself over Thyme, and bringing his paws to her and there was stillness about him now which Spindle recognised as that of a true scribemole.

  As Tryfan touched Thyme’s flank he felt within himself the power of the Stone and it was as if his body was shaken with her sickness and he too was ill. He felt her suffering as he had felt the pain of the nameless mole the day before.

  Would it then always be so hard to be a healer? Was this what his brother Comfrey felt?

  He turned to Pennywort and said, “I remember a blessing my mother used to say.”

  “It is not allowed. They’ll stop you,” said Pennywort, looking nervously towards the guardmoles. Indeed, Alder, who had been watching them from across the burrow, got up and began to come purposefully towards them.

  “The guardmole Alder’s coming!” hissed Spindle.

  But Tryfan ignored this warning altogether and, to Spindle’s surprise, when Alder reached them he was not aggressive.

  “Better you than me,” he said mildly. “Could be residual plague she’s got. We never wanted her in here in the first place. But —” He shrugged. “I don’t suppose a bit of old-fashioned laying on of paws’ll hurt anymole. The eldrenes should have sent somemole here before this so I’ll not be reporting what you do.” Alder went off and engaged in conversation with the other one on the far side of the burrow who, it seemed from snatches of conversation they heard, was not quite so keen on a healing going on, old-fashioned or not.

  As Tryfan turned back to Thyme, Spindle too went close to her, and with such concern in his thin face that Pennywort moved not a talon to stop him.

  It was at this moment that Thyme, perhaps feeling Tryfan’s presence, opened her eyes and found she was looking into the eyes of Spindle. She was too weak to recoil from the stranger.

  “It’ll be all right,” faltered Spindle. “My friend will help you.”

  She tried to speak but could not, and Spindle said softly, “Now don’t you say a thing. My friend...” And he looked round at Tryfan with appeal in his eyes. “... knows what to do.”

  The Stone grants to all moles the capacity to heal, though few know it or, if they do, honour it. Until then Tryfan had done little more than touch other moles in friendliness, but now he felt at last the sure calm nature of healing, and understood the effort it required.

  As Tryfan’s paws touched Thyme’s flanks, he found himself whispering of seven moles, seven Books, seven Stillstones and as he did so, as the Stone’s grace is sudden and always unheralded to mole, power was there and light and Tryfan began the task for which his life so far had been the preparation.

  He seemed quite unconcerned by the presence of others, friendly or not, and no longer adopting the low concealing voice he had first addressed Pennywort in, he began a healing chant Rebecca his mother had taught him:

  May Stone’s silence be thine

  And well and seven times well may you become

  The warmth of the Stone be about thee....

  He spoke powerfully, and everymole in that burrow knew instantly that something strange and powerful was apaw. Hearing his voice the guardmoles looked round: “healing” was one thing but this was much more than that and now the guardmole Marram started to come across the burrow to tell him to stop.

  The warmth of the Stone be about thee

  The shadow of Stone to protect you

  From the crown of thy head

  To the soles of your paws

  The light of the Stone for your health....

  “One of the guardmoles’s coming again!” cried out Pennywort, instinctively moving closer to Thyme to protect her. But Tryfan had neither thought nor eyes for anything but Thyme, and simply continued chanting the invocation in an ever-more powerful voice so that the walls and ceilings of the burrow seemed to shake with change and light:

  The light of the Stone for your health

  And the love of the Stone for your eyes.

  And well and seven times well may you become

  “Alder, he speaks in awe of the Stone!” cried out Marram in fear.

  “Yes,” said Alder, “yes...” And there was joy in his voice to hear Tryfan’s words and he made no attempt to stop them, nor to help Marram to do so.

  “He must be stopped!” shouted Marram, running forward again.

  But when he reached Tryfan all his talons could do was flail the air powerlessly as if upon a fortress of light no dark talons could destroy.

  Tryfan ignored him utterly, his paws on Thyme as the fur on his back and side matted with sweat in his effort to invoke the powers that a healer must. Around him was light, and darkness too, effort and trouble, and all there felt the sickness in Thyme as if it was a haunting of their making which only together they might exorcise.

  “Help me!” cried out Tryfan suddenly. “You must all help me!” His voice thundered about the burrow, and whatever protest Marram had been making, and any doubt that Pennywort had had, were forgotten as the moles ranged behind Tryfan, staring and helpless as Thyme lay writhing in distress now, and shivering, and Tryfan tried to hold her, as if her very life was caught between the light he held and the darkness all about.

  “Help me!” he cried out urgently again. And then he began to mutter desperately, as if his own strength was beginning to fail and the healing still not done, “Seven moles come, seven Books made, seven, seven... We need another, Spindle. We need one more. Six here only, six including Thyme. Spindle, help me.” And as Spindle, desperately uncertain what to do, reached out a paw to touch poor Thyme as well, and the others joined their paws together too, Tryfan sighed and said, “We need a seventh here among us!”

  Then as all seemed subsumed in the effort of helping Thyme, all hunched over her, Spindle said, “But there’s only five of us Tryfan, five.”

  “Six with Thyme: these two guardmoles, you and I, Pennywort and Thyme. Six moles making, yet seven are now needed.”

  Dark had that burrow become, desperate, and Thyme was slipping from them, weakening as even Marram joined in the touching and said gruffly, “Can’t you help the lass? She’s dying under our very paws!”

  “Seven,” said Tryfan weakly. “Seven needed.”

  Unnoticed, silent, staring, puzzled, alarmed, that seventh came. Behind them she came, advancing forward from where she had crept, at first to spy. Angry at first, then wondering, then she came near them in awe, though fighting it as if it was not allowed.

  Sleekit: grike, sideem, dark mole. Of all moles, the Stone sent her.

  Then Tryfan sensed her presence, turned and called out, “Touch her now and heal her. Ours is her sickness, ours is her healing!”

  Then the others saw her, and were not afraid.

  “Touch her!” others shouted, even Alder, even Marram, both fearless now.

  Yet Sleekit only stared. Caught in some moment of change that her years of harsh sideem training had never prepared her for. Caught and commanded.

  “Make the seventh!” called out Spindle, barely knowing what he meant.

  And Sleekit raised a paw, and reached forward and held it above Thyme’s weak and shivering flank, as Pennywort cried out, “Touch her, complete us, help us now!”

  Sleekit stared, fear on them all.

  Then Thyme, with one last effort, turned her head and looked at Sleekit and whispered, “For love once given you, once long ago, do it now for me who you know not.”

  Then Sleekit, with a sigh and a cry remembered love once given, and reached down and touched Thyme, and there was a sigh among them as of a storm that passes.

  “This,” whispered Tryfan, as Thyme lay suddenly peaceful beneath them, “this is the first Seven Stancing. Here, now, with us. Whatever moles we are, whatever mole we were, whatever moles we may still be, here the healing of moledom begins. We made it, each to come
here to this burrow, seven moles come, each with trouble, each with faith, each with hope: seven moles come. Yes. This is the first Seven Stancing.”

  For a moment there was silence, and then a fading. Then, most strange of all, it was as if the Stancing had not been, for the moles slipped back from one another, guardmole with guardmole, Pennywort with the now sleeping Thyme, Tryfan with Spindle, and alone, powerful, forbidding, accusing, Sideem Sleekit, dangerous mole indeed.

  “You!” she said sharply, staring at her taloned paw as if scarcely believing that a moment before she had touched another with it in a caring way. “You!”

  “Yes?” said Tryfan.

  “Whatmole are you?”

  “A healer,” he said.

  “Of which system?” she asked, as if choosing to forget the extraordinary moments that had just passed between them all.

  “East of Fyfield,” said Tryfan. “I told your guardmole that when we first arrived.”

  “You did,” said Sleekit, “but I liked not the way you did it. What do you know of the Stone?”

  “Very little,” said Tryfan.

  “Would you forswear it?”

  “I think I have many times,” he said.

  Sleekit gazed at him coldly.

  “Would you forswear it?” she repeated.

  Tryfan sighed as if whatever subtle evasion he had been practising was no longer desirable.

  “Not consciously,” he said.

  “You are of the Stone?”

  “I am, as you are, as all moles are.”

  Sleekit smiled slightly, and her eyes lightened, as a mole’s does when faced by a challenge she, or he, might enjoy.

  “And the Word?” she whispered.

  “What of it?” said Tryfan sharply.

  “Indeed,” said Sleekit, her eyes narrowing. “What of it?”

  “I know it not,” said Tryfan.

  “It is merciful,” said Sleekit. “To allmole. You may be initiate. And your friend. Indeed... anymole may be.”

  “Well,” said Tryfan, “and if I was, would I still be of the Stone?”

  “Of course not!” said Sleekit.

  “Are you sure?” said Tryfan, suddenly menacing in spirit.

  “The two conflict,” said Sleekit. “You would forswear the Stone?”

  “I might,” said Tryfan, “but I fear the Stone would not forswear me or anymole. Not even thee, Sleekit.”

  Sleekit was suddenly angry, though it would be hard to say quite why everymole in that chamber knew it for she appeared quite expressionless.

  “Your true name, mole?”

  “Tryfan,” he replied. “Of Duncton born.” And Sleekit sighed as if she had been expecting such a response, and was relieved now to hear it.

  “I have met others like you, Tryfan, obdurate. That one you saw punished in the chamber was one such. Tomorrow you will meet Eldrene Fescue, and she may or may not listen to you. I doubt that she will. But if she does I suggest you speak more carefully, more meekly, than you have to me.”

  “And you,” she added, meaning Marram and Alder. The two of them, Marram especially, looked utterly abject and frightened, as if sure that what they had allowed to take place earlier meant a snouting for them. But Sleekit seemed not to be much concerned with it, and all she said was, “Make sure these moles are here tomorrow or else....”

  “We shall,” said Marram hastily.

  Sleekit glanced at the six of them, shook her head with distaste, stared once more in puzzlement at her paw, and said, rather weakly, “Do nothing against the Word and it will be merciful. Blessed is the Word!” And with that she left.

  “Well!” said Spindle.

  “You heard what she said,” began Marram aggressively. “No wandering, no escaping; in fact, no talking.”

  “Any sleeping?” said Tryfan mildly. With which he settled down, rested his head along his paws, and peacefully closed his eyes as the guardmoles went back to their stances.

  For a time Spindle and the others watched him, restless and worried by Sleekit’s visit. Finally Spindle went close to him and whispered, “Tryfan? Tryfan!” And when Tryfan opened his eyes he said urgently, “What are we going to do?”

  “Sleep, I hope.”

  “But tomorrow....”

  “Tomorrow the Stone will protect us,” he said. Then he closed his eyes again, and the others, flank to flank, seemed to sigh and relax around him as night came: Pennywort with Thyme, Tryfan and Spindle, Marram and Alder.

  “I’ll take the watch!” said Marram, trying to sound stern.

  But he spoke to moles who were one by one slipping into sleep, good sleep, peaceful sleep, and his voice echoed around a burrow that, though ill-kempt and dirty, now carried a kind of hope.

  Then sleep came into that burrow, where moledom’s first Seven Stancing had taken place, and sleep took him too. So that, watcher though he was, he did not notice Sleekit return and pause for a long time at the burrow entrance, staring at the moles there, and most of all at Tryfan. Nor did Marram hear her when, much later, she crept away, as if to disturb that peace was blasphemy, but against something greater by far than that in which until that day she had been trained to believe, which was the Word, whose name was blessed. As if, perhaps, she had heard the sound of a Silence that day and she crept from it with a fear and awe the Word could not help her with.

  Chapter Eleven

  Tryfan woke suddenly to find the half-light of dawn coming in at the surface entrance. The others were mostly deep asleep, their bodies as dull and featureless as molehills on a misty morning, but Marram, the guard-mole, was half-awake, quietly grooming himself.

  Pennywort was curled into a corner, while Spindle was stretched out with his paws angled against Thyme, whose head rested against his flank.

  Tryfan stared peaceably at them for a few moments thinking it was good to be with other moles, and to see Spindle in company, for the cleric had suffered terrible loneliness in the long years he had hidden in the Holy Burrows.

  As for himself, Tryfan knew – or thought he knew – that because he was a scribemole and a leader, his could not be the way of ordinary mole – to mate and attach himself as... as... as Spindle might do with somemole one day. Thyme turned and moaned a little in her sleep, settling her head more comfortably into Spindle’s flank while he brought a paw protectively over her shoulder and sighed.

  Tryfan felt a sudden, unexpected and unwanted pang of loneliness and, understanding something of the true isolation of a scribemole, he shivered. Then he looked around uncomfortably, hoping it might be just the chill of dawn and not something more, much more. But he remembered Boswell explaining that scribemoles are no more isolated than other moles – for all moles are isolated before the Stone – but they may seem to be because they have stripped away other diversions and truly faced the isolation of the way they go.

  He knew the life he was embarking on was his own choice, and he recalled how one day long ago in Duncton Wood, as the other youngsters played about him, he sensed he was a youngster no more and he had left the system, crossing the pastures to live in temporary burrows for a time and listen to the sounds of the night and watch the days go by. His peers had been surprised because he had been liked and needed; then he was gone, with no word nor explanation.

  When he had returned moleyears later, the youngsters he remembered had long since grown up and dispersed, and he had found his way to Duncton’s Stone and there had met Boswell for the first time. Then, he had felt, his life had begun.

  Crouched now, in the dim light of that Buckland burrow, with slumbering moles about him, it struck him that a mole’s life alternated between times of security and times of risk. Each was a mole’s own choice but for the first, which was the birth in the home burrow.

  How strange, thought Tryfan to himself, that a moment ago I should have remembered my meeting with Boswell as the time when my life began! Did it not begin at my birth? Is it not beginning again now as I realise that my long journey with Boswell is over, qu
ite finished, and his teaching done? Now I have begun something new, and though I have Spindle for a companion yet I am alone. Perhaps the fear of taking risks is but the fear of being alone which is where change and newness puts a mole.

  Tryfan looked across at Thyme and Spindle once again, thinking that now they were locked most gracefully together, and he remembered their conversation about females and mates, and wondered at his own choice, which seemed implicit in his life as a scribemole, to have no mate at all. A choice with which Spindle was in tacit agreement. Yet he... Tryfan smiled, though somewhat wanly, and reflected ruefully that it was one life for a scribemole, and another for everymole else. So he sighed, and felt alone, but an aloneness that went far deeper than the yearning for a mate inspires. An aloneness that even a mate cannot overcome, for it is the isolation a mole feels when he turns at last to face the Stone’s Silence and chooses not to run from it.

  Well, whispered Tryfan to himself then. Well, and could I not meet another who might stand beside me in that place where the Stone rises and the Silence begins? Could not the Stone grant me that comfort, to know another, one other – and not just Boswell! – who knows that isolation too? One to comfort the other? Could it not? Surely, if a scribemole was to find such another as he, but female, would the Stone stop them loving each other and mating?

  The vows he had taken that night on Uffington Hill before Boswell did not mention celibacy as an absolute prerequisite of a scribemole’s life, though others – including Boswell himself – seemed to accept such a restraint. Tryfan pondered this yearning some more, and felt better for concluding that if ever such a female came along, well... he could behave as other moles did. But she would have to be... And Tryfan laughed to himself. Making conditions! Ordaining what only the Stone could ordain! He would trust the Stone to do what was right, and “she” – if she existed at all which he doubted – would be what she would be, and meanwhile... he must get on with the tasks each day presented and order them to take Spindle and himself onward, towards that strange quest whose direction and object he knew not, but whose purpose was a preparing for Silence among allmole.