Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

Some of them might even go as far as the Wen and even on into it, and in time, too, bring back their stories, and enrich the canon of their system’s history. Some would never return.

  Duncton was once, Duncton was future. But for now they were vagrants, travellers, lost moles, and each must find courage in memory, in hope, in faith, and in the trust of each other.

  Silent were they then around Tryfan, for they saw he was lost in some wonder, and that his tiredness and defeat were leaving him, and he was turning to them strong now, and seeming as if the very light of the Stone itself was in him, which it was. For had he not been to the Holy Burrows themselves, had he not been taught by Boswell, had he not...? And they hushed as he began to speak.

  “We are the future,” said Tryfan quietly, “each one of us here, yes and any that survive still in our great system. Today the river divides us, loss divides us, fear breaks us, hopelessness defeats us, uncertainty weakens us, and yet...” He leaned forwards towards them, “We will survive, for the Stone is with us and in us and will be our guide. It will take us eastwards, even to the Wen itself, even into it.”

  Many moles’ eyes were wide with wonder at this, and trepidation too.

  “For how long will our troubles last?” asked an old male, who had known many who had died.

  Tryfan smiled softly at such faith. The Stone was with him, the question could be answered.

  “Until the Stone Mole comes,” he said. “Then will your time begin, then will the returning be. Until then I can promise you nothing but the rewards that will come with this great journey of the Duncton moles, rewards of companionship and faith, rewards of learning and courage, rewards that lead to the Stone’s great Silence. I can make no false promises or offer false hopes. Many of you will not come back, but your young may, or their young after them. So you here now must carry the story of these days to the future, and tell it where you go to moles you can trust, pass it on, and tell of a place that one day can be returned to, and whose name is Duncton Wood.

  “Tell too of the declining that has been on the system, as it has on all systems of the Stone; tell of how the followers lost their way and the moles of the Word came offering something new and clearer, finding a way not by their strength but by our weakness. Tell your young of this, and of how you had to learn to replace weakness with strength and made a journey to discover it.

  “We will start our journey now, but not as a crusade which others join. We will be the silent ones, and as we journey on, some will go one way some another, each to find out their niche for waiting, and for sharing what they know. One distant day we will come together again, but for now I lead you to nowhere but towards yourselves....”

  He finished, and Comfrey broke the silence that followed with whispered blessings on them, and asked that one day, distant though it might be, the Stone would grant that the moles of Duncton return home again, safeguarded.

  Then Comfrey turned to his half-brother Tryfan and said, “Lead us, T-Tryfan, take us from here. Guide us for the b-beginning of our journey until we have strength to go our own ways, for we trust you and we trust the St-Stone. Give us faith that one day the Stone Mole will come, and in his coming will some of us be blessed to f-find our way back to Duncton Wood again.”

  “Then come,” said Tryfan finally, “come! For now our time here is over and our journeys into Silence must begin.”

  Then one by one the others followed them by the route established already by Tryfan and Mayweed which began nearby. Some stared briefly to their right over the river, many did not, for their days at Duncton were over for now, and they must turn their gaze to what was to come. One by one they turned eastward, entered a tunnel once more, and were gone, leaving the place where they had been with just the tall sedge swaying and the deep water of the Thames flowing black and silent, forsaken of mole.

  While beyond it the trees of Duncton caught the day’s changing summer light, sometimes dark, and sometimes in the sun.

  Today, moles like to speak of the escape of the Duncton moles as a triumph, a turning point in moledom’s history, a success. But Tryfan never saw it as a success, and those close to him, who were aware of the trials and the stresses he suffered in the pursuit of his tasks for the Stone, knew that no event took greater toll of him than the terrible escape through the river tunnel, when so many moles were lost. Some say that he ever wished to be punished for it, as if in punishing he could assuage the pain those deaths caused. Others believe that Tryfan of Duncton was punished, terribly punished, in the moleyears that followed. But perhaps it is not for mole to judge the Silence that others, of their own free will, enter into; nor even to guess if it is punishment, or bliss.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Henbane of Whern was ready to kill. Wrekin, the head of all her guardmoles knew it. Sideem Sleekit knew it. Smaile, servant to all of them, doer of evil and unpleasant things, knew it.

  But most of all, Weed, adviser to the WordSpeaker, was quite certain of it.

  Never in all his long acquaintance with Henbane – “acquaintance” was exactly the right word since neither mole ever liked the other much, or could have been said to have been a friend – had Weed known her more dangerously angry. It would need but a slip from any one of them for her to turn, thrust, and kill.

  Her anger had been mounting ever since entering into this Word-forsaken place the locals revered and called Duncton Wood, when they had discovered that there was not a mole in the system. Not one. Not a half one. None at all on whom Henbane might have vented her annoyance at the Duncton moles’ protracted defence. So annoyance changed to anger and now, by the look of it, anger was turning to murderous rage.

  So the atmosphere about the great Stone as they crouched there a few days later having a “conference” was tense, and as explosive as the seed pods of rosebay willowherb on a hot September day....

  From the first, the coming of Henbane and the moles of the Word to Duncton had been curiously ominous, and cast a shadow over what she had already been claiming as the end of her long campaign to conquer southern moledom, and annihilate the Stone followers.

  For two days the Duncton moles had fought with unexpected courage and resolution, sustaining fewer losses than they inflicted, and causing the first real setback Henbane ever suffered, unless a mole included the irritation of Siabod, which resisted the Word still but which Henbane herself had dismissed as of no great consequence. But Duncton was different, more central, and demoralising to moles who had been nowhere near ever losing a battle.

  Indeed, but for Weed’s military leadership, and Henbane’s determined purpose that brooked no failure, and the guardmoles’ fighting strength, the defence might easily have been even more successful.

  Eventually the Duncton moles had weakened and retreated, first from the cow cross-under that witnessed so many grike deaths, and then upslope by as clever a line of defences as Weed and Wrekin had ever seen. From there they had held out another half day, even mounting an effective counter-assault downslope, which slowed the guardmoles yet more for a time.

  Then suddenly they were gone, gone on all fronts. Surface burrows deserted, defence tunnels empty, quite gone.

  Few guardmoles who were there then forgot – or allowed others they told to forget – their first eerie entry into the Duncton system. The slow advance upslope expecting ambush at any time, the entry into the wood itself and the graceful ancient tunnels they found there, deserted but for the strange rootsound of the high trees which made a moor mole nervous and jumpy. So much so that there were at least two incidents of grikes believing they had seen an attack coming and assaulting their own moles. Unheard of.

  But there was no doubt about it, the place was deserted, from south to north, from west to east, quite empty, the moles gone. Not a trace, and, to make it worse, the tunnels were left tidy and the burrows clean, so there had been no panic or disruption; and, as more than one grike whispered nervously looking over his shoulder, “as if they are going to come back.”

  W
hile looming over it all, threatening to moles of the Word, was the great Stone of Duncton, silent, always silent; a silence that was an intimidation every moment of the day and into the far reaches of the night. A silence that made a mole want to scream.

  Then there was the curious report of the guardmole Thrift, who claimed to have spoken with the leader of Duncton, Tryfan, during the battle. Incredible. Wrekin did not believe a word of it, but Weed did, and got as much of the truth from the mole as he was ever likely to. Enough to bring Thrift privately before Henbane herself and have him repeat what he had been told to say by this Tryfan, which was that if Henbane would find the moles of Duncton let her “listen to the Silence” of the Stone. It was when she heard that, that Weed observed Henbane’s annoyance first shift towards anger, and stay there, and he wondered if Thrift would be the victim of her anger for bringing such a message. But no, stranger still, she asked him to describe this Tryfan again and again, and she listened to the guardmole’s faltering and limited words (‘big’, ‘strong’, ‘powerful gaze’, ‘seemed kind’ – kind!) with evident fascination. Henbane had always liked moles who stood up to her, even if she killed them or had them killed in the end.

  Whatever that message about listening to Silence meant, (Weed was careful not to have Thrift repeat the nonsense about a healing. In battle? By one foe to another? Ridiculous!) it was one more dark portent that the takeover of the system which had most significance for Stone followers, because of its ancient connection with the Stone, was not as happy as it might be for moles of the Word. Never had a takeover been so marred, for there seemed no satisfaction in conquering moles who were not there or pleasure in a system whose very tunnels seemed to make guardmoles disgruntled and uneasy.

  But if their initial unease was caused merely by ill-temper mixed with superstition, they soon had something more real to go on. Within a day of their arrival, a group of guardmoles exploring the Ancient System made their way down to the great vertical lines of the roots of the trees that formed a protective circle round the buried part of the Stone. They were hoping to find a way to the Stone’s base, but the roots barred their way. In truth they had none of them seen anything quite like it: strange twistings and torsions of tree roots, some old and grey, others young and palely moist, all quivering and vibrating and sounding to the movement of the trees they fed and supported.

  Among them they went, trying to seek a way through, a little unnerved by the way the roots hummed and shifted, making them lose their orientation, coming close to them, touching them, pushing them, catching them, and suddenly loud in their noise and vibration as great gusts of wind seemed to catch the trees above ground and turned the chamber of roots into a crushing, grinding, twisting place of horror. One after another the guardmoles saw each other caught and turned, pinioned and wrought, and then crushed; eyes bulging, veins breaking, mouths gaping, jaws cracking, stomachs bursting, the others’ screams the last thing they heard as the roots took them into painful death.

  Six died that way, and word went about that that was six for each of the Stone followers’ seven Ancient Systems. Would have been seven if Siabod had been taken, aye and there would be a seventh killed if it ever was....

  What was subtly worse was that Henbane and Weed were within earshot of those terrible deaths and came running and could do nothing but helplessly watch their own moles die. Afterwards not a guardmole dared go among the roots to get the bodies, which hung twisted and broken before them, the roots quivering like living things. So a few tree roots showed that Henbane was not infallible, and some tiny part of her credibility died with those moles.

  Then, two days later, two guardmoles were found, dead, in quite different parts of the system. Talon-thrust to death in public communal places where others should have seen; but there was never a sign nor sound of othermole. Then a third guardmole simply disappeared, sent on some errand or other and gone: no sound, no trace. Then yet another! Panic and unease, patrols only willing to go out in twos and threes. Henbane was formally approached by guardmoles through Wrekin himself and asked to speak the Word and protect them from further “assault” from the ghosts of dead Stone followers.

  Which she refused to do, dismissing the guardmoles’ superstitious fears, and ordering instead a systematic search of the system to find the moles perpetrating the attacks, who must be hidden somewhere or another. Which Wrekin had done from the high wood down to the very Marsh itself. Nothing, no trace of mole. She ordered that the routes in and out, which in this system were well defined, be guarded, lest these moles were creeping in, killing and creeping out again. For a week guardmoles kept to their stations and nothing more happened and confidence began to be restored. Then suddenly another mole was killed inside the system, the ninth so far, and the two others who had vanished. His body was found at night after the strangest and eeriest of sounds, a calling, a haunting, a frightening.

  So the guardmoles had been sent out to search the system yet again, and Henbane had summoned the moles she relied on to the Stone to hear Wrekin’s report. But the search had once more drawn a blank and not a living mole had been found. Henbane, now crouched staring, had become more frustrated and enraged. For a time she had stared malevolently at the great Stone, seeming to see more in it than Weed could. To him it was just a... Stone. He had seen them before, most impressively at Avebury. High rising things that caught the light strangely.

  So she had stared, and then she had muttered, “Silence? What Silence? What Silence? How does a mole hide in Silence, let alone a whole system of moles?”

  Then her eyes shifted this way and that, staring at each of them, looking, Weed knew well, for weakness. She found it soon enough, in Smaile of course. But he was not going to be killed. Moles who carry out orders as well as he, moles who keep their traps shut, moles whose highest ambition is to do unpleasant things for others are rare indeed, and Henbane too clever to kill them. Her anger was not yet that mad.

  Wrekin would not weaken before her gaze, and nor would Weed himself; Weed knew that. But Sideem Sleekit? Mmm... Weed eyed her. Promoted above the heads of all the sideem currently serving in the south, picked out at Buckland soon after the death of Eldrene Fescue.

  Weed knew the type, he had trained that type of sideem in the days when he was in Whern with Henbane, coaching her for Rune. Yes, Sleekit was the type all right: clever, cold, secretive of speech, utterly cynical, organised. And yet: something. Weed knew not what. Something. Something about her that made him think she was not quite right; had been once, was not now. Something. So he had Henbane promote her so that he himself, sideem too of course, very special sideem, could watch her the better.

  Until here, today, this fretful afternoon, with Henbane malevolent, Weed had had a clue, and at first dismissed it as unthinkable. Impossible. And yet there it was, in her eyes, nearly all of it disguised. But he was a trainer, an expert, and not passionate like Henbane, so he could see that tiny part the sideem could not hide. Awe before the Stone. It was not that she was afraid of it, what grike wasn’t? Unless he was stupid. No, not afraid, but in awe, yet more than awe. Love. That was the bit she could not hide. Love. Tiny, fractional, distant, but there. A sideem in love with the Stone. Quite unthinkable. And of course unstoppable. She probably did not even yet know it herself. He must think of a way of using it. Most original. Don’t tell Henbane. Don’t let Sideem Sleekit know I know, thought Weed. Yes, yes, use a sideem who is in awe of the Stone. Use her to reach this Tryfan. Mmm....

  Weed turned his attention back to Henbane, his face inscrutable. She was going to speak. About time too.

  “And where, Wrekin, do you imagine they’ve gone?” said Henbane. She was well aware that Wrekin, like Weed, was one of the very few moles who had no fear of her. “And where do these invisible moles who kill your guardmoles appear from? What of the Pasture moles to the west?”

  “We have sealed their system off and have guards at all entrances.”

  “Are there no other signs of mole at all?”
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br />   Wrekin was prepared for this and had his little surprise, perhaps kept back to deflect Henbane from the matter in paw. Anyway, Weed listened....

  “No signs that are fresh. But we know, or think we know, how they escaped. To the north are marshes, beyond them the River Thames. We found tunnels to its edge, and temporary chambers there filled with mud.”

  “Moles never escape through mud!” said Henbane impatiently.

  “There is more than mud there, WordSpeaker. There are bodies as well. Many of them. Drowned moles. We think that they made a hasty tunnel under the river, that they tried to escape through it, and that some of them drowned when the tunnel collapsed.”

  A tunnel under the river? Henbane mused on it and relaxed. Such a tunnel was a sign of panic and disarray. Such a futile attempt pleased her, made her feel less affronted. The Duncton moles were not so clever after all.

  “Are there no survivors?” Her voice was cold and she asked in the hope of retribution on those surviving, not out of charity or care.

  “None that we have seen. But naturally, it is possible, and unfortunately the Marsh End of the wood is not only foul and filthy, but riddled with tunnels of a kind. We are searching them thoroughly, and if moles did survive then we will find them in due course. But the idea that such moles are causing these other deaths seems to me farfetched. Moles who survive such a thing as a water-collapsed tunnel do not usually mount covert attacks.”

  Then Wrekin added thoughtfully, “If that was the means of escape, rather than some twofoot crossing we have so far missed, it shows these moles to be resourceful and bold. I say that merely to warn you that it is easy to underestimate one’s enemy after as long a series of successes as we have had. Needless to say, many of the guardmoles are attributing magical powers to the Duncton moles for escaping, but of course there will be a rational explanation and I now think the tunnel is it.”

  Henbane stared at the stolid fighter and, had she not been in such a grim mood, she might have smiled darkly. Wrekin won systems by logic and reason, and in the moleyears he had campaigned for her he had developed a nearly infallible approach to taking over systems. One after the other had fallen to his guardmole forces.