Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  They crouched closer, though two moles trying to crouch and not lose touch with the caress that had started with such difficulty is a clumsy thing and the crouch was more a tumble, and the tumble turned the caress more into a friendly buffeting embrace – such that there were sighs from Thyme and groans from Spindle and there was nothing in the whole of moledom at that moment apart from what they were feeling for the other.

  “Ooooh!” sighed Thyme.

  “Yes!” said Spindle with more confidence.

  There was silence and the sun shone around them and their eyes were closed. And they touched each other in many ways, one to the other, in many, many ways, for a very long time until their sighs were more than sighs, and that sunlight in the wood was an ecstatic thing, golden about them, and bright too, shining, carrying their sighs into the very skies.

  Until, when they had done that, and done that some more, and the light had faded back to normal and they found the easy grace that moles have once they have been lovers, Spindle observed profoundly: “Love is a strange thing.”

  “Yes, it is,” replied Thyme eventually, and that was the full weight and extent of their conversation for a long time after. For more confident now, he reached out a paw and pulled her to him and she, resisting slightly, made him pull all the harder. Then she came to him, and he to her, and whatever they did moles had done a million times before, and as long as loving moles live it will be as good for them as it was then to Spindle and Thyme, for they were moles who have taken their courage in their paws and reached out and touched each other.

  Much later their conversation resumed.

  “Spindle?”

  “Mmm?”

  “What were we doing?”

  “When?”

  “Before.”

  “Finding Barrow Vale.”

  “Shall we do it now?”

  Spindle got up and stretched. Thyme snuffled. Spindle snuffled back. Both felt replete but had not eaten a single thing.

  “What was I doing?” asked Spindle.

  “Stretching,” said Thyme.

  “So I was,” he said lazily. And so, in a leisurely way, they got up and, with no difficulty at all, they found Barrow Vale.

  In the middle of which, surrounded by trees, snout stretched in the sun, Tryfan lay dozing.

  “Hello!” he said, alert before they even showed. He smiled to see Thyme coming ahead, and Spindle behind, a little sheepish and a little proud, certainly very different than he had been before.

  “Where’s Maundy?” asked Thyme.

  “Gone upslope,” said Tryfan. “You’ve certainly taken your time.”

  They spoke no words, but their gentle looks to each other told Tryfan that they had done what had seemed inevitable to everymole that knew them.

  “Well, then, this is Barrow Vale,” said Tryfan, and he took them about it and told them of the days of the elder meetings when Hulver had been alive and Mandrake; and Rune had come. Good moles and evil, all gone now, leaving behind them a derelict system. Then he led them down to the Marsh End, mysterious and gloomy.

  “Can’t we go down into the tunnels?” said Spindle.

  “Better not,” said Tryfan. “Comfrey made a rule about it – to leave the tunnels in peace for two generations.”

  “Haven’t they ever been cleared then?” asked Spindle.

  Tryfan shook his head.

  “Well, they’ve got some real live clearers in the system now so perhaps they should use us! You and me, Skint and Smithills – we could clear the tunnels in no time!”

  Tryfan said nothing. It wasn’t the time for that, there were other things before then. The system here was not ready for life again yet, as if it had to lie fallow for a while, its tunnels gathering dust, its burrows collapsing, the life that plague and fire had robbed it of slowly returning.

  The afternoon came as they explored here and there, and with it a slight chill to the air.

  “I’m glad you brought us here,” said Thyme, “because I feel as if I’m being introduced to a system that will be important to-to us...” She reached out a paw for Spindle, and Tryfan was glad to see their love beginning to be open.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s time to go. I’m heading back... you can find your way back, can’t you?” And with that he left them, and set off in a circuit of the Marsh End and the Eastside. Somewhere on the way he hoped he might find something of the burrow that Rebecca had once occupied, and which she herself had shown him, to which Mekkins, the greatest of the Marsh-Enders and a much loved mole, had brought Comfrey as a pup, that she might have one to love after she had lost her first litter.

  He felt a little lost and alone, the more so because of Spindle’s happiness, and thought this visit to a place near where his mother had been would give him strength. So he turned and left them, and was gone, a rather lonely figure, into the winter-bare wood.

  The sun began to set, its light fading over the Marsh End as slowly, forever stopping and touching, Spindle and his Thyme went back the way they had come and found themselves, as the bare, battered tree trunks about them caught the pale pink of the dying sun, in Barrow Vale once more.

  There for a short time they crouched until Thyme said, “I would like to go down into the tunnels for a moment, just to see.”

  “Tryfan said...” began Spindle uncertainly. “I mean, there won’t be much to see.”

  “Spindle, can’t you feel it, something special here? Something here for us?”

  “I don’t think so...” he said, hesitating. “I can’t, I...” But above them the pale evening sky held its first white points of stars though the sun was still just up, and the daytime noise of the wood had faded to near silence. Then deep Silence and there was peace in Barrow Vale.

  “Yes,” he said with confidence, “I can feel it.”

  So they crouched together in awe, flank to flank, and about them the light seemed shining and white and they knew the Stone was with them and of them.

  One or the other must have gone first, but after neither remembered which: rustling among the undergrowth in search of an entrance until, turning round upon themselves they saw an entrance, clear as daylight, as if it had always been there, and around it a light of welcome and the hushed whispering of a breeze that said, “For now this is your place and your presence honours it. Come, come to me...” and they entered in that strange entrance and found themselves in the great and famous communal barrow of Barrow Vale, dust thick on the ground yet still each pawstep echoing. Around them the ancient roots of trees that had burnt away still twisted and turned, cracked now in death; tunnels went this way and that out of the burrow. But the air was sweet and warm and good.

  “Thyme...” and Thyme turned to him as he to her and his talons were on her back, not nervous now or unsure as they made love and life together, their own sighs of ecstasy echoing and rushing around them. Until when they had finished it seemed that Barrow Vale was theirs and always would be now; their place, yes, theirs and all their kin.

  “Spindle,” whispered Thyme. “Can you hear it?”

  “Yes,” he said in awe. “It is the Silence of the Stone.”

  “Here in Barrow Vale it will be, the end and the beginning, for the Stone is the symbol not the place, its place is everywhere. Oh here, here,” she sighed, “I can feel it coming from a long way in the future. And we are of it, Spindle, strangers here, strangers still to each other, unknown and nomole knowing that we came.”

  “I don’t know, I’m not really sure,” said Spindle, “but...” But he stopped speaking because around them was the light of Silence, white and clear, and from its deepest place the mewings and callings of young came, and beyond them the chatter of growing pups, and beyond that the run and play of siblings and other young, and far, far beyond that, no more than a whisper, the calling of one saying a name neither could quite hear, to which there was a reply that seemed all around them in the light, a reply of warmth that filled their eyes with tears and made them clasp each other.

>   “Spindle, I’m frightened,” whispered Thyme, for she had heard the life inside her and its generations yet to be.

  “Thyme,” said Spindle, his thin form proud and sure, “may the blessings of the Stone be on us and our young.”

  “My love,” she whispered, “if ever we are separate, whatever may still be, let this place be our place, the place to which we come.”

  “Barrow Vale of Duncton,” whispered Spindle. “Yes.

  “Our place,” she sighed. “Our sanctuary.”

  “To here we shall return,” said Spindle, “from wherever we go and whatever we may be. We will tell our young, and they will tell theirs.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “whatever we may be, and wherever the Stone may send us this is our place.”

  Then they turned back from the burrow, and found the entrance they had come in by and went back to the surface where dusk had settled and the colours gone.

  “We must go back upslope now,” said Spindle, as the first owl called.

  “Yes,” said Thyme vaguely, for she was looking about Barrow Vale trying to find something. She came close to Spindle for comfort and said, “Where is that entrance we went down? It isn’t there.” And nor was it, for it had gone as if it had never been.

  “We must leave now,” said Spindle, and so they did. But as they reached the edge of the circle of trees that surrounds Barrow Vale, Thyme paused. Spindle put a paw out to her and both were suddenly still, for ahead of them on stem and leaf and branch and twig was a light that came from behind, from where they had been.

  “Don’t look back,” whispered Thyme, “my own love, don’t look back.” And nor did Spindle do so, but rather crouched low and humble for a time and then, that light shining still before them, they journeyed on.

  While behind them, where the entrance into the burrow had been, an old mole, a White Mole, watched after them, and he reached out his talons to them, through the wood he reached as if he was everywhere, guiding them this way and that so that without knowing it they found the safest route back to the top of Duncton Wood: free of owl and free of fox.

  Then that same ancient mole, White Mole, beloved mole, reached out to touch another with his blessing: Tryfan, scribemole, brave mole, leader, and for now alone.

  Tryfan, who had found Rebecca’s old burrow, gone down into it, and there for a brief moment had lain down where once Rebecca had suckled Comfrey and whispered, “Help me.”

  He felt low and alone, and knew now that he could not stay forever in Duncton, but had come here to gain strength, and allow the others with him to breathe something of the good air of a system still blessed by the Stone and free of the Word.

  “Guide me, for I feel comfortless and lost in darkness.”

  Then the night breeze stirred in the wood above, and whispered, “You are much loved Tryfan, much cared for,” and Tryfan heard its voice and knew that the Stone was with him and felt the touch of its love gentle on his flanks. Then Tryfan went out on to the surface, and saw a light about him and felt the presence of an old mole, a mole he loved and knew, and wept that he missed him, that he knew him, that he loved him, and that he trusted he was safe.

  Then Tryfan began his solitary trek back to the great Stone, in deep Silence and quite unafraid to thank it for its guidance.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was at the end of March, after a final burst of bitter winter weather and when the surface was thaw-wet with melting ice and snow and the sun so bright that a mole had to screw up his eyes on first sight of the surface, that a frightened male, weary and half-starved, arrived at Duncton Wood.

  He was escorted up from the roaring owl way by Ragwort, who had become one of the watchers Alder had sent out in February, and had come from a system near Buckland itself by way of Fyfield, where he had very nearly been caught and made to serve as a clearer.

  He had come, he said, because he had heard of a mole called Tryfan, who had defeated Henbane of Whern and killed twenty of her guardmoles single-pawed. A mole who was just and believed in the Stone. A mole who would right wrongs, and lead those who supported him to freedom, a mole, a mole....

  And Tryfan, listening to the distraught young male, who had witnessed the snouting of all three of his siblings, and the crippling of his mother, and had only been saved by the courage of his father before he too had been snouted... Tryfan guessed that this might be but the first of the many who in the molemonths, or the years, ahead would come forward to be led. Some from faith, some from fear, some from greed for a better life, some to serve dark ends another way. As he gazed on that eager, willing male, Tryfan felt that the burden of the task Boswell had given him was heavy.

  He prayed silently: “Help me, O Stone, to be true to thy Silence, and guide these moles forward with justice for justice, with peace for peace, with truth for truth. Help me.” For he guessed, as he listened to that first vagrant refugee, that it was one thing to lead a small group of moles on an escape from Buckland to Duncton, but another, and far harder, to lead a group of vagrants and refugees from grike systems to... to where?

  “Help me avoid making the cause of the Stone no different from the cause of the Word. Help me towards light, and towards Silence. Help me guide these moles to thy peace.”

  “Where is this Tryfan?” asked the young male. “Take me to him so that I may pay my respects and pledge my loyalty to him.”

  And the scribes say that Tryfan replied, “The Tryfan of whom you’ve heard, and you have described, does not exist.”

  The mole bewildered, said, “But this is Duncton Wood. Is he not here?”

  Tryfan said, “He is but a mole like you, and if you will be led by him then let him make obeisance to thee and all thy kind, and obey him only in one thing, first and last.”

  “I shall!” said the mole at once, but was still puzzled.

  “Then pledge your loyalty to the Stone and not to him, except so far as he is of the Stone. And serve him by letting him serve thee. If you do this, mole, than you are truly a follower.”

  “I’ll try!” said the mole, “I will! Let me tell him so myself.”

  Tryfan smiled and said, “Thou hast done so,” and he lowered his snout before the mole, and asked that he touch his right shoulder in acknowledgement of the importance of what he had said and to emphasise for all to see that among the followers of the Stone it is the leaders who are privileged and who should make obeisance to the led.

  As April came others arrived at Duncton in ones and twos, telling as the first one did bleak stories of atrocities and takeovers by the grikes; each arrival had known the shadows of horror and loss on the way behind them.

  It was Spindle who suggested that as these moles arrived accounts of how they came to leave their home systems and make their way to Duncton should be scribed down, work begun by Tryfan and continued by Spindle aided by Mayweed. From these scribings not only was Tryfan able to build up a record of the strength and disposition of the grikes, but Spindle was able to start those records which today are known as the Rolls of the Refugees, and chart the scourge of the Word as well as setting down as much oral history of each system, its rhymes and traditions, as the ever-curious Spindle was able to gather.

  From all this information, Tryfan and the other senior moles were left in no doubt that as spring advanced towards summer the grikes were massing in the systems around Duncton, and an attack on a large and probably unstoppable scale was going to come, and before long.

  From some of the more discerning arrivals there came another and more sinister report. It was that the methods of the grikes had changed since last Longest Day and brutality and snoutings had given way to subtler methods of the kind Tryfan himself had already observed in Frilford and Bladon. As young moles were born, so their minds were twisted with the Word, and the Stone was mocked and reviled to them. A process helped, it seemed, by the fact that grike males seemed more fecund than southern plague-touched males, and females preferred them when the mating season came, so that many of the
youngsters being born were half-grike, and the more easily influenced.

  “I tell you, Tryfan, this may be a greater danger than it seems,” warned Spindle, “for we may be fighting no vicious newcomers but a way of life accepted by increasing numbers of moles.”

  “But a way of life without a centre,” replied Tryfan. “Without the Silence of the Stone. One that will finally fail unless it finds a centre that can sustain a mole’s inner life, or change it for the better.”

  Spindle shrugged.

  “What ordinary mole knows of such Silence, or ‘inner life,’ or cares for it? If they have order, and health, worms, and a warm burrow, and can pup in peace and fight once in a while well....”

  “Then why do refugees seek out Duncton?” asked Tryfan.

  “I am just warning you of what moles say,” said Spindle.

  Tryfan smiled, and then looked serious.

  “Stay close to me, Spindle, whatever I may say or do. The burden of leading these moles is heavy and will be heavier yet, and I sometimes desire to be alone. There is no time... Stay close, warn me if I grow distant, remind me that I am but ordinary mole for I will always listen to you.”

  “I will, Tryfan,” said Spindle, “even if the day comes when you do not wish it!”

  “That will never come,” said Tryfan.

  Spindle made no comment, but left soon afterwards when Skint and Smithills came to talk over the need to prepare for the coming of the grikes as quickly as they could.

  It was in this atmosphere of preparation and change that the youngsters of that spring were born, and those few who survived ever afterwards remembered the excitement of those times. The adults seemed constantly busy, many of the males and the unpupped females were trained as watchers under the overall command of Alder and Smithills, and involved in making defences on the south east side of the system where only the roaring owl way protected it.

  As for the pupping females, the fact was that fertility was not high. Many of the females had aborted, and the relatively few who gave birth managed litters of only one or two with just a very few of three. The females themselves knew the cause well enough: disease. Ever since the plagues fertility had been low, and it did not go unnoticed that where a female was clean and a male diseased, even if his disease was now healed and gone, pups were aborted or born deformed. In those few cases where such females did give birth, their burrows were dark indeed, for the young had to be killed lest the moles forthcoming, poor deformed things, should survive and shame their parents.