Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  The rats came back, circling above, listening for the moles, ripping open roofs, watching, hounding them, attacking at the slightest opportunity, never letting them rest.

  So it must have been for Heath. So must he have been hunted, so must he have despaired. So Tryfan and his companions now. But worse than that, sickness struck them all, as if the rat bites were poisonous. Only Mayweed remained half well, seeming better able to withstand the poison that rats put into them.

  And Tryfan was beginning to die. He knew it when, for an hour or two, he came out of the delirium he was in, yet felt life leaving him. Which, when it became plain, seemed to urge the others towards a semblance of recovery, and they fretted and worried over what to do.

  Still the rats came. Digging down at them, so that the three moles had to drag Tryfan to safety, again and again, ever more desperate, as the tunnels available to them became more restricted, and all creatures on the surface seemed to know the moles were prey. Dogs came, huge and salivating, pawing the ground where they were. Herring gulls pecked. The very roofs of the fragile tunnel seemed to break about with the snarl of rat, the roar of dogs, and the pecking hiss of gull; as if the Wen itself had finally come alive in predation, and its only enemy was mole.

  Then Spindle acted. Ill though he still was, he told the others that whatever the dangers he was taking Tryfan out of that once safe-seeming place. Back by the conduit Heath’s marks had led them down, and then....

  “And then, Spindle Sir?” asked Mayweed.

  “North!” said Spindle.

  “Yes!” joined in Starling. “Tryfan said for a long time we should go north, and now we must get him away to safety. We must!”

  “But, merciful Miss, while Mayweed agrees, Mayweed wants to know where.”

  There is often a moment in a mole’s life when others who are close see that mole mature; as if all the strands of learning come together, and the puppish ways are spurned, and a mole takes stance and says, “Now! Now I shall speak as I am and do my best to do what I believe!”

  That moment came to Starling then, and in it Mayweed saw a beauty in her he had never seen before, and a concern which she had had once for her siblings, Lorren and Bailey, and would have still if they were there. Now Tryfan was there, only he, and he was their leader and he was stricken near to death, his wounds unhealed, the bites in his flanks inflamed, his fur grey with the fever of illness and the grime of journeying too long.

  Then Starling crouched up and she said, “We’ll take him north, and if we believe enough as he did when he was well, we’ll find the place we’ve come to find. We will! You lead us on the best route you can, Mayweed, as if all your life has been for this last part of our journey; you, Spindle, comfort Tryfan, for he loves you and knows you and trusts you; and I will do my best to guard you at the rear as Smithills taught me to. Between us we can get him out of Heath’s place. And what is more... I think... I feel... I think I can hear something to the north, something not so far. I think the Stone listens to moles who trust it, as we must now. I think it must help them then. So now I begin to hear something of the Stone, I do Spindle, oh I do, Mayweed!” She reached out her paws to each of them, and then they all touched Tryfan, and he opened his eyes from his illness and looked at them, and they saw he was afraid.

  “We are here, Tryfan, all of us, and we’re taking you to safety now,” whispered Spindle, his paws gentle on his friend. And Tryfan shook, sweating and full of nightmare, and he whispered and cried out and mumbled as they led him along those besieged tunnels. Past tooth of rat they led him, past claw of dog, past beak of vicious gull, past fuming of roaring owl, and past the endless mortal thunder of twofoot paws. Away from Heath’s tunnels, through the water tunnels north of it, and then not east, on the way they had been going, nor west, back the way they had come, but striking north into older, smaller, rounded, strange tunnels, as Tryfan called out from the illness on him, called out names he knew, events he had witnessed, fears he had. For Boswell he called, for Bracken his father. For his brother Comfrey he cried, the others having to fight to lead him on through the nightmare the Wen had become for him.

  Through ancient arches they went, confronting darkness and flood, beset by the steaming waters of pollution, north and north, step by step, each one helping the other on that awful way where rats lived, and brown filth crept, and caverns huge and noisome seemed to swallow them in their vastness: and Tryfan cried out all the things he had known, back and back, until he seemed a pup again, as once he was, lost in the very heart of Duncton Wood, beneath the Stone itself, lost as Boswell was, as his own parents found the very centre of the Stone and a light was on them white and beautiful. To that place he seemed to go as his body bled and his wounds suppurated.

  Spindle tried to find words to still him as Tryfan cried out in terror from his dark place, “Where are you taking me?” For he seemed to think they were taking him into the very darkness of the Wen itself.

  “We’re taking you to where the Stone will help you, we’re taking you to the place Boswell sent you to find so long ago, we’re taking you to the secret which the Wen holds true despite itself, for even in the greatest darkness there is light.”

  And as the others looked at Tryfan as step by terrible step he was helped on that infernal way, and poor Spindle wept for him, Tryfan whispered like the pup he had become, “Then you’re taking me to where the Silence will be one day, you’re taking me to there.”

  “Yes,” they whispered, shushing him, “yes, yes.” And each one of them prayed that it might be so.

  So those four moles dared journey to the dark heart of the Wen, where rat roams and creatures die. Ever more weakly they struggled into its most ancient parts, where even the twofoot tunnels began to die, their walls broken, their waters uncontrolled, earth seeping back to where once it had been removed.

  Stricken, weak, all ill, their leader nearly dead, they travelled on until they saw no further ahead of themselves than one paw’s pace. Until the day became night became day again, until waking slurred to sleep and sleep slunk into a kind of waking dream. So through darkness they went.

  Not seeing the light ahead when finally it came. Nor hearing the sound that was there too. Not noticing they were watched. Not scenting other moles shadowing them now, strange creatures that peered at them from corners of the ancient tunnels they had come to, moles who whispered and conferred, ancient moles of grey-white fur and dried wrinkled skin, moles who were afraid. Moles that whispered in a language none but dying Tryfan knew.

  An old language, a language only scribemoles learn, a language all but dead. Strange its sounds, but beautiful, not hard like Siabod, or soft like mole. But strong and sure, its words good, their meaning holy; their spirit of the Stone.

  So, unknowing, Tryfan came into that secret heart, sealed off and protected through the centuries by the Wen. Until a mole crouched in the January light of an old tunnel to greet them, saying in a voice cracked with age, and concern: “Quhateuer mowlitwerpe thou bee, quhateuer syknenesse thou haife, quhateuer quhateuer... the Stane ys hir!”

  Then the eyes of ancient moles watched them, and saw finally they were not enemy but sick, and ill and near to death. Then one by one those strange moles came out into the light and dared to touch them.

  If Tryfan’s companions had not understood their first words, they certainly understood what those moles said next. For taking them out on to the surface, to a magical place, as it seemed to them then, that was above the roar of owl and the stomp of the twofoot paw those grey-white moles greeted them, touched them, and whispered that word which all moles recognise, whether it be spoken old or spoken new: Welcomyne!

  Welcome! And they danced a dance of ritual welcome as stately as an old wood that has come to the very autumn of its years.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “But isn’t there a healer here?”

  It was Starling’s voice, and she sounded angry, frustrated, and impatient, but not a single mole in that strange chamber da
red look at her, mumbling to themselves instead, looking shifty, and reluctant to speak.

  “Don’t you realise he’s dying, and all you do is talk, talk, and more talk, and say invocations and....”

  “Ancient and crumbling Sirs, withered Mesdames, my friend and fellow traveller the mischievous Miss is upset by Tryfan’s illness and concerned, so forgive her...” began Mayweed, trying to placate the assembly of moles. But Starling wasn’t having it, not any more.

  “Well, I bet there is a healer somewhere or other if you only stopped standing on such ceremony and realised that Tryfan of Duncton is dying,” snapped Starling, for once ignoring Mayweed altogether and making even his determined smile fade. “So I shall go and look if nomole else will!”

  With that she stormed out of the chamber and on to the surface and rushed off down a tunnel in a generally westward direction but without having any goal in mind. She only stopped when she heard the patter of paws behind her and one of the more ancient moles breathlessly caught up with her and said, “Cum fast awaye with me and yow to myn douchter shalle I tak. Cum, let us go thyder togyder!”

  “A mole with common sense at last!” she said, and with that she allowed herself to be led away to meet what she assumed from what little she understood of what he had said must be his daughter. Which was good news to her since she had begun to think there was no such thing as a young mole in the whole of that place....

  They had been initially welcomed and looked after well enough, and for the first few days none of them had stirred from the large and comfortable burrow they were taken to while they recovered from their grim ordeal. Tryfan had been put into a separate burrow.

  Tryfan was so ill that he had been put into a smaller burrow, where he would be kept warm and attended to, which had seemed the best thing to do.

  How long it was since they had left Heath’s Tunnels not one of them knew with certainty, but a molemonth at least had passed, probably more, and they were into January and there was snow on the surface outside.

  Only when they began to recover did they learn something of the system they had come to, and it was not until Spindle was fit and well that they were really able to communicate with their hosts, for his training at the Holy Burrows made it easier for him to understand their language. Indeed, it is one of the great good chances of recent mole history that Spindle the Cleric was a member of the party that penetrated through the Wen and reached the moles who had been confined there so long. For he was able to record all that he saw and learn there before it was dispersed and gone forever*.

  *See On the Extraordinary Discovery and History of the Wen Moles, with an Appendix of Dunbar’s Prophecies scribed by Spindle of Seven Barrows.

  It is enough now to say that the moles of the system Tryfan’s party discovered, or more accurately rediscovered, were the descendants of that small group of moles which had first travelled into the Wen with Dunbar himself centuries ago, following the historic schism and departure of Scirpus and Dunbar from Uffington.

  Dunbar, taking the Scirpuscan revolt as the starting of a decline of the Stone in moledom, and believing that only the Stone Mole could reverse this fall from faith and peace, had resolved to preserve the old ways in a system that might not be corrupted by moles of the Word, whom he believed would one day take power in moledom. He established this community of moles near the very heart of the Wen, on a hill that overlooks its central wormless part. Bounded when he first came by the Wen to the south, but with open fields to the north, it had seemed as good a site as any, and better than most.

  Before his death, Dunbar had made a number of prophecies of the future, which he had scribed and left as texts to be preserved by his followers.

  There were twenty-one separate prophecies, but the three most significant were these: first, that the Holy Burrows of Uffington would fall into decline and the scribemoles be “disbanded’; second, when the time was right, the Stone Mole (an ancient mole belief in its own right) would come out of the Wen and make himself known to allmole; third, for moledom to be spiritually safe for the future, it would need but one solitary mole to find the courage to hear the full Silence of the Stone. Many might strive for the Silence, and some begin to hear it, but only when one was able to know it full in his heart would all be able to reach into that great light in the Stone.

  At some point early on, the vows of celibacy that many of Dunbar’s moles had taken had necessarily been allowed to lapse. It may be that some of his followers were only novitiates or clerics rather than ordained scribemoles, and their natural will had prevailed. What had been intended as a male community of scribemoles evolved into a mixed system, and one in which, uniquely in moledom, all moles learned scribing, and indeed were required to scribe texts of their own.

  By then the system had become cut off, first to the north east, then to the north and finally to the west, except for tunnels leading north to an area of wilderness called Hampstead, to which, for several centuries ensuing, Dunbar moles of both sexes went to find mates. The Dunbar moles must have been strong and fierce in those years, for they preserved their identity well, and the very high standards of order and discipline set by Dunbar himself, and the wise Rule he scribed for the good conduct of his system, were maintained for many decades.

  Perhaps, too, because the system was under threat from the Wen itself and all the predatory creatures that it spews forth, the Dunbar moles were alert and their numbers kept at the right level to maintain order and belief in the Stone.

  Everymole had to learn scribing, everymole had to make texts, and for two centuries an extraordinary flowering of scribing took place in that system, which all the time was becoming more isolated and unknown. Stories of its doings came out only from the Hampstead system, but as the Hampstead moles were under pressure from the growing canker of the Wen, real knowledge of the Wen moles was finally lost. Yet stories of them passed into myth and legend, which preserved only the simplest fragments of the past: that there were moles in the Wen, ancient moles, and that from among their number one good day the legendary Stone Mole would come.

  So, hidden away, all but forgotten, the Dunbar moles lived out their lives, a system unique in moledom in teaching that scribing was a thing all moles could and must do.

  This being so, and the Rule being strict, the language and liturgy was preserved as it had been, not evolving as a purely spoken language does by contact with different moles, different languages, and usages. It evolved, however, of itself, which was what made the language especially hard quickly to understand, even for the few moles remaining who, like Tryfan and Spindle, had some textual contact with it.

  It is to the credit of the Dunbar moles that in more recent centuries there had been efforts to reach the outside world but these had failed, for no such contact is known. Whatever expeditions set off must have perished in the tunnels of the Wen.

  However, more recently, perhaps less than ten generations before Tryfan’s coming, an insidious and finally fatal enemy had crept upon the Dunbar system, and one they could no nothing about. Perhaps it was pollution of the Wen’s water or poison in worm, perhaps some inherent problem with a population of moles into which new blood was no longer coming: whatever the cause, fertility decreased. Not only did the total number of litters decline, but the number of pups in each litter fell and gradually the population began to age so that the few youngsters who were reared found themselves surrounded by older and often bitter pupless males and females. Strange and sterile attitudes developed which increased the population decline. The Rule was made suddenly stricter so that youngsters were forced to pair with the oldest moles, while jealousies of the few successful pairs became rife. Inevitably internecine feuds developed and a period of shocking violence ensued in which, most dreadfully, the youngsters were pitched against the numerous old and many died.

  The system of Dunbar, a system of which its great founder had predicted that one distant day from out of it the Stone Mole would come, had begun to kill itself.

/>   Somehow peace came to the broken system, but then a worse trouble came: plague. The same plagues that had beset the rest of moledom somehow reached the Wen moles. Nomole knows how. Tragically it took more of the younger moles than the old, and left a system desolate and sad and without the possibility of recovery.

  But what of its faith in the Stone, and what of its worship? The system had no Stone, only memories passed down by generations. It had a place of worship though, a high point on the hill beneath which the system’s pride and glory lay close guarded: its Library.

  There the texts of the Wen moles were kept, a Library quite different from Uffington’s for it preserved texts known in no other system, and on subjects never known to mole before. For there, hidden, almost lost, seemingly without hope of preservation, was the work of centuries, work which marked the birth, and the flowering, the glory and the great delight, the decline and the sadness: works of spring, of summer and of autumn, great works in forms never developed at the Holy Burrows where scribemoles were secretive and overly religious, and few ever scribed for the pleasure of it. Texts of poetry, of stories, of philosophy, of imagination and even of natural history, for the Wen moles were the first to scribe of the twofoots, and one courageous Wen mole even made a study of roaring owls.

  On the surface above the Library where these unique texts were kept, for centuries past, the rituals had been spoken by moles taught to face to the distant west where, as their founding brothers had told them the Holy Burrows of fabled Uffington lay. That way, too, the great Stones of the seven Ancient Systems rose: of Avebury, of Uffington, of Caer Caradoc and of Siabod; of Rollright, of Fyfield and nearest of all, of Duncton Wood. These names, in their ancient forms, were preserved and spoken, and the rituals had engendered a great longing in that system to know those Stones. With that longing went the belief that, one day, the Wen moles would find a leader able to take them back to the good place from which they had first come. That leader might perhaps be the Stone Mole himself, or rise up when the Stone Mole had come.