Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  “Above us on the surface night came. We found access to a ledge above the bed of the stream, which was beginning to fill with rubbish and slimy filth, and our passage became easier. Night deepened but no real darkness came for the tunnels were lit by lights from the surface. It was in this orange-yellowness that we slept. That night Haize woke me, talons to my mouth. Below us a huge shape came by, brown-black and smooth, and then another. Then a third and fourth. Smooth they went and heavy, snuffling and squeaking. Rats. I could smell them in the murk. I was terrified even though the ledge we were on was too narrow and slippery for such large animals to reach us with effect. But they seemed to have scented us for they ran back and forth, snouting up towards where we crouched. Then they were gone, their shadows running darkly ahead of them. Later we heard rats fighting or mating, hard to say which. Then silence. Long silence. We moved on while it was still night, leaving marks now at every junction, but we were very hungry and resolved to get back to the surface.”

  The moles found a smaller tunnel coming down into the river on its far side and scented fresh air riding on the dribble of water that came down it. They were able to cross the stream on rubbish piled in it and to climb up the tunnel.

  “It led to the surface and we unexpectedly found dank grass, black sticky soil, and a shrub of a kind. All was grimy, all blighted by the Wen. The only clean thing was birdsong and that was distant. Dawn light struck walls high above us but it was a long time before the sun reached us. We saw we were entirely enclosed. There was a sparrow but no other life. More foetid worms for food, and then we rested.

  “We resolved to end our journey there and return the way we had come. As we started back for the entrance to the small tunnel Heath paused on the grass. He sensed tunnels and burrowed and found one. A mole tunnel! Old, blocked by roots, barely passable, but undoubtedly made by mole. We went down it and it went straight for a time and then to a chamber. Just a tunnel and a chamber. Beyond that it was blocked by twofoot work. The other way the same. It was a fragment of a lost system.

  “I wish we had not found it. It kindled Heath’s interest. But since we all felt better for the rest on the surface, he insisted we continue a little way back down the twofoot tunnels, arguing that perhaps we could find more of the lost system, and even some tunnels to lead us on.” Rowan paused and fell silent.

  “Story-telling Sir, Mayweed awaits your next sentence with interest and curiosity, while thinking that headstrong Heath is, or was (you have not said, but Mayweed fears the worst) a mole after his own humble heart; which is to say an explorer, a searcher, a journeyer! So, bereft Sir, speak!”

  “Er, yes,” said Rowan scratching himself and puzzled at Mayweed’s sudden, and excited outburst. “We found tunnels all right and not much further down than the point from which we had been able to get to the surface. Lots of tunnels, but quite deserted, all blocked off by concrete walls built by twofoots. The structure even covered them so that these tunnels werre cut off from everything.”

  “Was there light?” asked Tryfan.

  “Near the entrances, there was twofoot light, but deeper inside no light, no noise. Nothing but... nothing but the sounds our talons made if —”

  “Yes?” said Spindle.

  “Pitch-black, no wind, no sound, nothing. Very old tunnels they felt, and among them a chamber whose walls were rough and yet, if a mole ran his talons down them as Heath did, and then I myself did, why there was sound: extraordinary sound.”

  “Dark Sound,” muttered Spindle, remembering the scribings at the Library entrance which he had used to try to frighten Boswell and Tryfan when they had first come to Uffington.

  “It was old sound, as of moles singing, deep and ancient. It was not frightening. Their song was an urging or a calling and I was never able to answer it.”

  “Answer it?” said Tryfan.

  “Yes, it was a calling to go on, and I knew as I heard it, and Heath sounded it again and again, that he would want to follow it. I knew that then. But that was not to be.”

  Eventually, the moles went back out into the main twofoot tunnel in which the stream ran, and it was there disaster struck them. From their right three rats attacked, quite suddenly and without warning. They bore down on the three and in the confusion each seemed to run a different way. From then on all was panic and confusion for Rowan. He felt the pain of a bite as instinctively he ran back the way they had so fearfully come, and as he went he heard a mole screaming, though whether it was Heath or his sister he never found out. The rats turned from him back to that scream as a pack and he took the opportunity to flee, making his way, though wounded, back to the place on the narrow ledge on which they had rested two days before, and from where they had first observed the rats.

  He reached the ledge as the rats returned and one tried to pull him back down. Somehow he climbed high, just out of its reach. There was no sign of his two companions, but several of the rats had blood around their mouths and claws as they clustered beneath him, scrabbling up the wall to get at him. They were so near he could smell their vile breath. He talon-thrust one in the eye, and he bit the paw of another. One climbed on another’s back to reach him and nearly forced him off the ledge, but he was able to pull himself out of its reach.

  For two days he lived in a nightmare of fear and growing weakness as the huge rats tried to reach him, replacing each other in an endless relay of snarling and claws. If it had not been for the moisture on the walls, thick, evil-tasting condensation, he might have died, for it was the only nourishment he had. Even so, lack of solid food caused him agonies of hunger until, after two days, passivity and weakness began to overtake him. Yet, somehow, he fought off the rats’ attempts to take him, shuffling first this way and then that along the ledge, just out of their reach.

  It was sometime in the evening of the third day, when Rowan’s world seemed to have reduced itself to feeble pushes at ever more powerful thrusts from rats whose teeth and red eyes and smell was all he knew, that the rats below him suddenly fell away and hunched on the floor below, snuffling at each other and hesitant, and then rearing back on their haunches and snouting the long way up the tunnel westwards, towards the direction in which Rowan and his friends had first come. Two suddenly ran that way and then came skeltering back. Then they all turned, and without a further look at Rowan disappeared down into the subterranean depths of the Wen.

  There was a period of silence, then a rush of air down the tunnel from the west, and then an ominous roaring sound and Rowan knew a flood of water was coming. Ahead of it there flowed a sickening enfeebling smell, and even as it attacked his snout and eyes he saw coming towards him a great wave or rush of water, foaming and brown, thick and turbulent, running down the tunnel as high if not higher than the ledge he was on. He had barely time to take stance and find what grip he could upon the slippery ledge before the flood was on him, at him, pulling him, noisy, violent, vile in its suffocating stench, filthy in its touch, slithy in its effect.

  The air was full of the racing roaring sound of it and he felt it swirl at his haunches and paws, loosening first one and then the next, lifting him bodily, swirling him, turning him, taking him, throwing him as parts of its brown filth forced their slippy way into his mouth and snout and he felt himself drowning, turning, thrown, thump!

  “I was dislodged by it, then nearly drowned by it, and finally hurled by it into some eddy that pushed me back on to the same ledge I had been pulled off, but further down the tunnel. There I clung as near death as a mole can be, until the flood eased and then stopped as quickly as it had started.

  “From there I fell, weak and gasping, on to the filthy floor, water flowing round me.” He paused, looked about them with a distaste so palpable upon his face that it seemed almost that he was covered again in the muck and excrement of that filthel’s flow. He shook himself with disgust, as if to be free from that memory.

  “And what saved me? How did I escape? I heard then, from further down the tunnel, the same call or song th
at the scribings made in those lost mole tunnels we had found. I looked that way and saw, staring at me, the eyes of a rat, and then another, then a third. Red, bitter, greedy. I saw death in those moments. Yet the soundings went on and I knew it was Haize or Heath signalling they were still alive. I could not know which. Alluring was that call, most beautiful, and those rats, that had hidden in some foul place from the flood and had re-emerged to come for me once more, heard that sound too. First one, then another, then the third turned, their tails slithered in the light, their paws squelched, and they were gone.

  “I turned and ran, up that long tunnel, away from that place, leaving whichever mole it was had survived to his or her fate. One by one I found those marks Heath had made and used them to guide myself out. Sometimes I heard pursuit, or thought I did. I did not stop to see but eventually came back to the Wormwood Waste, and then made my way back to here. I had no courage to return, nor have I ever found it since. So I wait here now, hoping that the Stone may forgive me, or that one day a mole will come through that archway who I abandoned long ago.”

  There was silence when he had finished and though each one of his listeners sought for words to comfort him none came, for a mole must first forgive himself if he is to truly accept the forgiveness of others.

  Eventually he stared at each of them and said, “Do not venture there. It is not a place for mole and the wrath of the Stone will be upon you if you try.”

  It was Mayweed who broke the silence, and by his question affirmed for all of them whatever the warnings old Rowan made they would venture on together.

  “Stricken Sir,” said Mayweed, “this humble mole wishes to know for his own interest and pursuit, what mark your friend Heath made upon the walls which guided you back to safety.”

  “Mark?” said Rowan in an abstracted voice as if he was still living the horrors he had described. “Yes, yes... I can make it still.”

  With that he reached a worn talon forward and scribed a mark on the tunnel floor into the dirt there. Long it was and curved, and looped at one end.

  They stared at it and Tryfan came round to Rowan’s side of it and snouted it, and then ran a talon gently along its line.

  “Well, well!” he said in some surprise.

  Spindle touched it and looked puzzled. Mayweed peered at it one way and then another and said, “Humble me, Sirs and delightful Miss, has learned a little scribing, but this is just a mark is it not, educated Sirs?” Starling ran a paw over it and looked enquiringly at Tryfan. She had not learnt scribing yet but could see the mark interested Tryfan.

  “Tell me Rowan, was there scribing in Ickenham?” he asked.

  “I was too young to know that. But scrivening, yes. At Longest Night and Midsummer we said a prayer or two, and made some marks. I never learnt them, but I think perhaps Heath, being the mole he was, did try.”

  They all looked at Tryfan, sensing there was something behind his question.

  “This “mark” your friend Heath made is not just a mark, it is scribing.”

  “But I don’t recognise it as such!” said Spindle whose scribing by then was equal to Tryfan’s own.

  “This mark is ancient, as ancient perhaps as those tunnels you found and sounds you heard. It is medieval mole and is the first scribing a scribemole learnt in the old way, when he was taught by a master as I was taught by Boswell. But more than that,” whispered Tryfan, staring at Rowan’s scribing as if he was seeing his own past, “it is the mark a White Mole makes to show he has passed that way!”

  “Does it mean anything?” asked Starling in awe.

  “Oh yes, it means a very great deal. It means almost everything. Scribing came first from ideas, and although moles make ideas complex yet all start simply enough. A mole does well to remember that! This scribing represents no more nor less than a worm, and a worm is food. In old mole this scribing represents a word, and that word is ‘life’.

  “Your friend Heath could not have found a more potent scribing to mark a way through the tunnels of the Wen. However he learnt it – for I don’t think that he guessed it – and whether he knew its meaning, which I doubt, he chose a White Mole’s symbol for life itself. It saved your life, Rowan, by guiding you back out of the tunnels. Let us pray to the Stone that it saved Heath or Haize’s life by guiding them onwards.”

  “But the rats...” whispered Rowan.

  “Nomole can know, not yet. But when you scribed that word without knowing its meaning on this floor you gave me faith to want to go on. I think the others will come too, and that you, Rowan, will wait on here, but with faith now, and hope, for we will try to return or send you news that may free you of the horror you saw and heard, and from which you never escaped.”

  “We certainly shall come!” said Spindle.

  “Splendid Sirs, Miss, Mayweed is not filled with delight at the awful prospect but will go all the same.”

  “Oh good!” said Starling. “When?”

  They left two days later, following the route described by Rowan across the Wormwood Waste. From there they slipped down into the tunnel he had so desperately escaped from, the four of them moving carefully as one, Mayweed in front and Tryfan behind, with Starling and Spindle close by in between.

  Almost immediately Mayweed was able to find one of Heath’s old marks, though a line of deposit from rising water had partly obscured it. From there they set off down into the sloping wet gloom of the filthel, so used from their summer’s wanderings in such places to the strange reflected lights and the echoing sounds that they were able to ignore them and concentrate on the route ahead.

  They found the ledge on to which Rowan had struggled to escape the rats, and saw how precarious his position must have been. They stared round the wet walls and the arched roof above, and then along the race of the filthel’s stream where it ran among the rubbish and slime, and fancied that they might have found rats anywhere. But there was none, nor scent nor sign of any, and they boldly pressed on.

  The filthel’s bed became so cluttered that they did as Rowan and his friends had done before them and went along the raised ledge above it. This made the journey easier and Mayweed set a steady pace, rarely needing to pause for the ledge was clear enough. Here and there the tunnel divided, and sometimes others came down into it, or orange gunge spewed out of some pipe set into the curving wall at their side. Occasionally they found another one of Heath’s marks and it was strangely comforting, as if the fact that others had been that way meant they were in some way safer. Tryfan especially was struck by this, thinking that perhaps a journey seems hard if not impossible to othermole simply because it has not been made, or been known to be made by mole before. But once done, then others can follow with more confidence. Perhaps Alder and Marram’s passage to Siabod would be the easier for knowing that Bracken and Boswell had made it safely but a few moleyears before.

  Was the journey into Silence no different, then, than this? Made easier by the knowledge that others had gone before? Was that his task, and Spindle’s too: to make moles see that they could make such journeys of the heart and soul if only they had faith that they could do so?

  As the grim walls of the Wen’s loathsome tunnels started to close on him, Tryfan began to see what a triumphant return from this journey might mean to all of moledom; that such a journey could be made and, likewise, that a struggle against the Word could be won.

  “Come on!” Tryfan would call out to his companions at such moments of understanding, as if to affirm his own determination to reach the mysterious heart of the Wen, and return from it again.

  Night came, at much the same place it had come to Rowan and his friends, and the hideous lights were lit on the surface above them and filtered down into the filthel. Tryfan and the others rested, one or other of them always on guard. There was no sign of life at all, but for the sound of twofoots and the roaring owls above.

  Tryfan himself led them on the second day, and they eventually reached the point described by Rowan where a tunnel led out on to t
he surface. They ignored it, preferring to press on to find the old mole tunnels Rowan had described. Still the earlier moles’ marks were evident, Heath clearly being a careful mole however “mad” Rowan may have thought him, and these made it easy to find the old tunnels.

  Mayweed went in first while the others waited outside, but it was not long before he came out again. They were not as extensive as Rowan had said they were, though they were quite as dark, but the chamber was there all right and its scribed walls. Mayweed had been disinclined to sound them, preferring to leave that to Tryfan, and anyway, there was one thing more. In that chamber, slumped beneath the scribing, was the body of a mole. Desiccated, female by its size: Haize, probably. Mayweed, was used to such things from his sojourn on the Slopeside, yet he seemed sombre from what he had found.

  They deduced that she had escaped from the rats and hidden in the tunnels, that she had probably been wounded, and she had sounded out the ancient call on those walls which her brother had heard but been unable to answer. When nomole came for her then she, too wounded perhaps to move, had died in those tunnels, alone, forsaken. A chill came over the four moles, made worse by the knowledge that this must mean that Heath must have been the mole Rowan heard screaming and being killed. Each of them had hoped that one or other might have been alive, but it seemed it was not to be.

  “I suppose it is possible, good Sirs and cast down Miss, that Heath escaped,” said Mayweed, ever hopeful. But Tryfan and Spindle only shook their heads and said that unless they found more marks soon they must presume he was long dead.

  Tryfan and Spindle went back into the old tunnels and, briefly, sounded the walls there. It was a strange and haunting cry and students of Dark Sound have since maintained that those markings were made by Scirpus himself, though probably with the aid of Dunbar which is why they had a quality of light and goodness. Scholars agree that this fragment of system that remains may well mark the point where the dispute between Scirpus and Dunbar flared up, and that here the followers of Dunbar fled with their gentle leader eastward into the Wen. In those far off days, as the disposition of those tunnels suggests, the Wen had not yet grown to what it was later to become, and perhaps Dunbar was able to make his way eastward over the surface. Nomole can be quite certain, but as Tryfan heard that old wall sound he hoped that some good spirit of the Stone had come to the stricken mole who had died there, and brought comfort to her, and let her see the light and hear the Silence even in that dark forgotten place.