Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  As for himself, Tryfan was calm and resolute, determined to keep the spirits of his friends high, but knowing that they could not stop here for long and that he must time their departure well. There would be no second chance. He was pleased with the positive way most of them had taken stance, not realising that it was his own confidence and purpose that gave them hope. Skint and Munro could be relied on as fighters, along with himself; Smithills was tired now, but loyal and dependable; Spindle would hold his own and had shown cunning and courage in equal measure these past weeks. Willow was weak and confused, and Brevis very tired, but both could be got away with help and encouragement. Which, with Mayweed, made eight of them, an awkward number which could not safely be split up.

  “Please, Sir,” said Mayweed, interrupting his thoughts and seeming to read them, “Mayweed doesn’t want to go where you’re going. Mayweed is safer here, which is his home. Mayweed won’t ever be caught here by guardmoles... but if Mayweed leaves he will be caught and if he’s caught he will be hurt and if he’s hurt he doesn’t know what he’ll do.”

  “Or say,” muttered Skint. The others shifted uneasily at Mayweed’s outburst.

  “It’s best you come,” said Tryfan quietly.

  “But, Sir...” whined Mayweed.

  “But nothing,” said Tryfan. “Falter and I will not hesitate to kill you, Mayweed. If you are caught your end will be painful and I do not doubt you would tell them what you know of us first.”

  “Know, kind Sir? Mayweed knows nothing. Nothing. Not your name, not your sex, not your intention, not your destination, no nothing! At all, at all!”

  “Now remember, we will move swiftly as one, hoping there will be better cover by the stream across the slopes above. Do you know how far it is, Mayweed?” he asked.

  “Honoured to be asked, privileged to reveal: two flaps of an owl’s wings, two hundred of a pigeon’s, confident Sir, name of Tryfan.”

  “What’s that in moleyards?” growled Smithills.

  “Can’t do it in one run, wise Smithills, might do it in two if you didn’t have a mole as venerable as Willow with you and another as weak (through no fault of his noble self) as Brevis. Yes. About that.”

  “The guardmoles won’t be expecting us to go that way, and might not even see us,” said Tryfan, talking to Skint more than anymole else. “But if they do they will hesitate to follow singly, for fear of owl, and we will gain some time.”

  He looked at them all and instinctively they became more alert. He had made a decision. The time to leave was nearly on them.

  “Skint and Smithills: you will take the front flanks; Brevis, Willow, Spindle and Mayweed: you will be in the centre. Munro and I will take the rear, and if we have to we will talon you forward....”

  “Sir —” began Mayweed.

  Sudden sound, nearer, and a single look from Tryfan shut Mayweed up.

  “We’re going to have to surface it,” whispered Tryfan, starting to brief them for their attempt at escape. The others looked at him in surprise, except for Skint and Smithills who had made escapes of their own. They nodded approvingly. On the surface an escaping mole could run fast, was less easily trapped, and had the advantage of surprise.

  The steady thumping mounted again... and faded. Guardmoles hurried this way and that, sometimes unpleasantly near, and harsh shouts sounded, but Tryfan kept them all calm and resisted the impulse to flee too soon. Yet how slowly the sun seemed to sink, how slow the light was to fade. But fade it did, the colour draining from the roots and walls about them, and the trunk above turning pink and then dulling down as the sun set to the west. To the northwest, which was the direction they were going, the sky now steadily darkened, giving them the promise of better cover.

  Thump, thump, thump... “Try higher up, this tunnel has not been checked yet...” and they knew the guardmoles were near now, and heard a new voice in charge, and one that was strong and full of authority.

  “Weed!” whispered Spindle. “And they seem to have found the tunnel here.”

  Silently Tryfan looked around at each of them in turn, nodding purposefully, giving encouraging touches, and letting Skint and Smithills past him, as they would lead them out. From the tunnel behind them they heard talon scrapings and heavy pawsteps.

  “Still want to stay behind, Mayweed?” asked Skint grinning.

  “Mayweed’s changed his mind, Sir, Mayweed’ll go with you, Mayweed wants to go now,” whimpered Mayweed. “Please?”

  With a nod from Tryfan they took their positions. Skint breathed deeply, thrust a front paw up on to the nearby surface, heaved himself up and, after a quick look above, whispered back down, “All clear for now, come on!” And then they did, rapidly, and as soon as they were assembled in the dusk beneath the old tree they turned, snouted the quickest way towards the stream whose running dampness they could sense clearly, and set off....

  Today story-tellers make much of that desperate journey across the fields of carnage which the Slopeside had become. One after another they ran, with the stronger helping the weaker, and with each playing his own part. Of the owls that swooped they tell, and how Munro warded them off: of the guardmole patrol that reared out of the gloom, the very same four who had abducted and nearly killed Skint... and how Tryfan and Smithills took them on, and Munro too, brave Munro, who in that skirmish for other moles’ lives took the blow that was so soon to lose him his own. Of how they lost their way after the guardmoles fled, turning too soon to the west and hesitating as other moles came up behind. Yes, lost! Then Mayweed, strange Mayweed, suddenly ran to the fore and said, “Please, Sirs, please Madam, please to follow me for Mayweed has a snout that finds out ways that others never know! Follow!” And despite Skint and Tryfan’s curses, for surely the mole was going the wrong way, he led them, led them in those crucial minutes back on the path they needed, then below ground, and out, suddenly, on to the bank of the raging stream.

  Then, of all moles there, it was Willow who went forward, saying she liked a stream, especially a rushing one, and this must be the Wharfe itself to be so fine! (Though it looked dark and dangerous indeed to the southern moles.)

  So forth she went, and Skint with her, then Smithills, the other northern mole, took a stance midstream, and helped the others, pulling poor Mayweed, who was terrified of the water, and bodily got him across.

  But Munro did not cross that stream alive. As the others began their passage over he heard more guardmoles coming, and bravely went back and led them another way. But he was weakened by wounds, and when he reached the stream, far lower down, the grikes off-scent now, all he could do was hurl himself into the water and it took him, and turned him, and drowned him dead. The first mole to die on Tryfan’s long and terrible march towards the Silence of the Stone.

  But Munro’s life saved the others, for they were not seen to cross, and the grikes went no further, hesitating on the bank of the stream for a time as the remaining seven huddled and hid unseen in the grass on the far side.

  Later Tryfan and Smithills went in search of Munro, and they found him, washed up on the bank of the stream and slumped there, touching but never knowing the land beyond that stream. Some say that Tryfan made a prayer for him, others that they crouched in silence for a time; but the best source of all, the cleric Spindle, has this to say of the last journey of Munro: “My master Tryfan and Smithills of Grassington pushed his body back out into that stream, and watched it float away, and Tryfan uttered a prayer that Munro’s body might not be taken by owl, but might join the great Thames itself, and journey down that river to reach the place that one day they would try to go to, which is called the Wen, and take there, ahead of them, his good spirit of courage and companionship.”

  However it was, Tryfan returned with Smithills and rallied them all, giving them the courage and strength to press on there and then, not downslope, as would have been easier, but upslope to that isolated copse of trees which moles call Harrowdown.

  They reached that place deep in the night, and crouch
ed in silence staring out over the darkness of the vales north and east of Buckland, where only the occasional light of a roaring owl showed.

  Down they stared at the darkest part of all, which was the Thames, and Tryfan said a prayer, that all of them repeated, in memory of Munro and in thanksgiving for their lives.

  “Here we’ll stay awhile, for the place has a Stone, I’m told, and is protected. It will give us a haven for a time, and when we have strength, and the grikes have given up searching for us in the vales below, we’ll head north to the river, and then find a crossing place and then....”

  “Yes, Tryfan?” said Spindle.

  “To Duncton we will go. For there will be sanctuary and support, and there the Stone will give us guidance. But for now, sleep,” whispered Tryfan wearily. “Yes, sleep.”

  “But we must not tarry long,” advised Spindle. “Not for too many days.”

  “No, no, Spindle, not for long....”

  Then Tryfan slept, and Willow and Mayweed too, and Brevis.

  But Spindle watched over his friend, nervously looking back in the direction of Buckland while Smithills and Skint took up watch positions, and the night deepened yet further over Harrowdown.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Again and again in the chronicles of moledom, chance and circumstance combine to bring the full weight of a great moment of history upon a system unknown before, but whose name is not forgotten afterwards.

  Such a place, that June, was Harrowdown, though it is unlikely that the small group of moles gathered there then knew or even sensed the importance of the change of which they were the essential part. Unless it was Spindle, whose early training in the Holy Burrows and subsequent attachment to Tryfan of Duncton, uniquely placed him to observe and wish to record all that he saw and experienced in those brave and dangerous times. Perhaps it was at Harrowdown, in the quiet days that followed their arrival there and which preceded the celebration of Midsummer, that Spindle first felt the desire to learn scribing.

  Today, when all moles of intelligence and common sense can scribe, it is hard to imagine the great change in thinking that the expression of such a desire in a mole like Spindle demanded. But Spindle was trained only as a cleric and assistant, taught from his earliest moments that scribemoles were apart and special, and that scribing as such was a mystery and skill that only scribemoles learnt or could learn.

  Yet even as that long journey from the protection of the Blowing Stone on the morning of their departure from Uffington started, Spindle began to believe that what he was witness to should be recorded, and that he might be the mole to do it.

  These radical possibilities he did not communicate to Tryfan, not from any shame or wish to keep his desire secret, but rather out of modesty, and the sense that Tryfan, who was the living embodiment of the historic change that was apaw, but which might yet come to nothing, should not be bothered with records, chronicles, accounts or history. Yet Spindle was concerned, for he saw what nomole before him had seen, unless it was Boswell himself, that the time for scribing to be secret and hidden, and concerned only with rolls and records of the often arid kind that the isolates of the Holy Burrows had kept, was over. Moledom was changing, the plagues had done more than the Word or the Stone to see to that, and if the truth was to be known then records of it must be kept.

  It is part of Spindle’s greatness that even before he learnt the art of scribing, he saw that the “truth” was not a constant thing, and nor was it something a single mole could hope to record. It was for others to judge long after the chroniclers were dead. All a mole who was so minded could do was to be curious, to observe, to record, and to preserve. So it was that Boswell, White Mole, had chosen Tryfan’s companion wisely: for few could have been better suited to be such a scribemole’s companion than one who not only had faith and loyalty to the central core of Tryfan’s quest, which was Silence, but who had been trained as a cleric by a mole like Brevis, and had the imagination to see that the destruction of the Holy Burrows was not an end of scribemoles but a new beginning for them, and one in which all moles might play a part. It was at Harrowdown that Spindle first began to see that records of Tryfan’s quest must be kept.

  Perhaps in times long past the name “Harrowdown” applied to more than the copse that stands there still, isolated today as it was then, windswept and off any regular track known to mole. Twofoots knew it well enough, for they had ploughed the fields all about and for reasons of their own had barbed it round and left it to the wind and the creatures that called it home.

  But anymole visiting that place knows well enough why twofoots let it be. For there, not large but large enough for mole, rises a Stone, caught among the stunted trees, and twofoots touch not Stones. So, the copse was small and poor in worms, and all else too, for it was set high, and exposed to winds whose steady assault had bent the young ash and oak trees that were established there. Badgers there were, living over on the north side which reached down to the distant river. A fox too, judging by the droppings, though they never saw him. There was evidence still of the moles who had lived there until the grikes came, but as far as tunnels went there were only poor burrowings and the simplest of runs.

  On the southern side, the remnants of snouted moles hung on the barbs, pathetic and soggy with decay, placed there by the grikes. Most were skeletal: remnants of a meagre life that ended terribly. When the wind blew from the north those bodies could be scented still and a living mole might feel sick in the stomach as well as sick in the heart.

  On the first full day they were there, Brevis led Tryfan and Spindle to that side of the copse to make a prayer and commendation in memory of the snouted moles, some of whom he had known, and they crouched in respectful silence in the summer sun. Skint and Smithills, though they were not of the Stone, came along too, and crouched respectfully enough, but Willow stayed away, for such things were not her way, while Mayweed watched uneasily from a distance, screwing his face up against the holy words Brevis spoke, and looking over his shoulder unhappily at the Stone that rose quietly among the trees.

  “Mayweed doesn’t have to touch it does he, Sir?” he had asked Brevis. Brevis had simply shaken his head, a mole of few words.

  A few days later Skint and Smithills had gone and removed the bodies, dragging them out among the green wheat of the field and leaving them there. It was a distasteful job and left them feeling angry and dejected.

  “Your Stone did not protect them Brevis, did it?” Skint said bluntly afterwards. “No more than the Word did much to protect those moles in the Slopeside. No offence, of course, but to practical moles like Smithills here and me, the Word and the Stone are as bad as each other!”

  “The Stone cannot prevent suffering,” said Brevis.

  “Not much point in it, is there then?” said Skint.

  “Clever Skint Sir, clever and astute!” said Mayweed suddenly, delighted. “Mayweed, suffering as he does from fear, disease, humbleness, and a general awareness of his complete and abject inferiority, has often and frequently thought the same! “Not much point in it” are words he has often muttered to himself, yes, yes. Mayweed awaits the brilliant Brevis’s answer and riposte, he does.”

  “Brevis has no “brilliant” anything,” said Brevis wearily. “Brevis knows that life is difficult and that moles who do not accept that fact are likely to waste time trying to put things right that can’t be put right. Whether or not there is the Stone or the Word, moles will still die, some terribly by snouting as the harmless Harrowdown moles did, some by talon, but most from disease and decay. Life is difficult.”

  “H’m,” growled Smithills. “Then Munro’s well out of it, isn’t he? Doesn’t leave much for us to look forward to, being told “Life is difficult”!”

  “Agreed, agreement and concord with your friend Mayweed, sanguine Smithills,” said Mayweed. “And what does Tryfan say?”

  Tryfan had said very little those past days, and had spent much time alone, crouched before the Stone, meditating. The ot
hers had left him alone, except for Spindle, who was rarely far away, and Brevis, who talked with him. But all there respected Tryfan’s silence, and knew that he was in some way preparing himself for the journey ahead.

  “We need to be peaceful, to rest, to find our health again, and then we shall be ready to go. Just rest, and thank the Stone, or the Word, or whatever you chose to believe, that we are safe. When the time is right we will leave.”

  He spoke these days with a new authority, one that was partly physical, for he had survived the rigors of the burrow-cells and the horrors of the Slopeside better than most, and of them all was the strongest and healthiest looking. And these few days past a peace and acceptance had come to his eyes, and growth in purpose, and the space and silence the others had given him was as much out of respect for some inner and indomitable will as of liking for him. Indeed, there was – as Spindle later recorded – a distance or aloofness in Tryfan that made it hard for other moles to get close to him, and it was already showing itself then. Although none but Spindle and Boswell knew that Tryfan had been ordained, yet those who knew him then, and many subsequently who did not suspect the truth, instinctively understood that he was a mole apart, with a mission different from the norm and one which might demand that sometimes he seemed distant and unreachable.

  “You could find time to talk with them,” said Spindle one day. “We are all a bit afraid for the future, and uncomfortable staying here in case the grikes come.”

  “Too tired to move yet,” said Tryfan.

  “You could talk to them, to Smithills, Willow and Mayweed. His sores especially are worse....”

  “Mayweed’s well enough,” said Tryfan, sharply.

  But a little later he did at least take time to talk to all of them together, making them feel he was of them utterly, and his words were theirs alone, special; the words of a loving mole, and one who cared. And so believers and doubters alike, the young and innocent and the old like Willow, came closer and listened. Such a moment came in June shortly before Midsummer when Mayweed asked him if he agreed with Brevis’s dictum that life is difficult....