Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  Last there was Sleekit, doubted mole, nomole certain of her; watching Tryfan struggle before Henbane’s soft gaze and knowing that soon now, after so long, she might have a role to play, yes, knowing that. And feeling more alone at Henbane’s side than anymole knew then. The Stone discovers moles’ courage in many different ways, and yet if there is one truth a mole can speak of the Stone it is that it always gives a mole a task that mole can do, if he, or she, has the will to do it. It is in that choice, between success and failure, that the strength and the weakness of the Stone follower lies. Spindle, Sleekit, Tryfan, Mayweed – each with a task nearly impossible, assembled now at Whern. Oh yes, the Stone will find a way, but only if the moles who profess its faith have the courage and intelligence to act as they must to see the Stone’s purpose right.

  Henbane spoke, breaking across the thoughts of those moles.

  “So. And why have you come, Tryfan? Some doubted that you would, but I... did not. No, not I. And seeing you here, Tryfan of Duncton, in the flesh and the fur, talon so strong, flank so... strong as well, seeing you... I am not disappointed. A worthy leader of an ancient belief. It is a pity it is doomed. But I ask again, “Why have you come?” It would be nice to know.”

  “To profess my faith, Henbane,” said Tryfan.

  “Moles here call me WordSpeaker,” said Henbane with a sudden sharpness edging her soft voice.

  “They are of the Word, I am not,” said Tryfan. “Henbane is your name, as Tryfan is mine.”

  Henbane laughed, eyes glinting. She both liked his reply and hated it. In the sound of her laugh a wise mole might guess that the touch of her talons could be the sweetest caress or the cruellest torture.

  “Good,” she said ambiguously. “Call me what you will. Meanwhile, once again: why have you come? I have nothing you could want.”

  “Boswell.”

  “Ah! Yes... him. He’s an old fool.”

  “He’s alive?” said Tryfan immediately.

  “Some might wonder. But yes, I suppose he is. And you would see him, yes?”

  There was a quality to her voice which demanded that a mole agreed with her, but in agreement gave something of himself away. Of course Tryfan wished to see Boswell but to say “yes” was... weakness. It was most strange.

  “Yes,” said Tryfan.

  “Yes, of course. It will be, it will be.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, of course!” said Henbane, laughing. It was a dreadful thing, but her laugh was good, it was most beautiful. Not to laugh with it seemed almost like denying life itself. Tryfan had to flex his talons into the chamber’s floor to recall, again and again, that this was the mole he saw snout Willow and Brevis, this was the mole who overran moledom with her cruelty, this....

  “Tryfan, what are you thinking?” asked Henbane, stretching herself before him, overt in her sensuality. She sighed a lover’s sigh and gazed on Tryfan pleasurably, annexing something of him to herself.

  “Of Boswell,” lied Tryfan, who never lied; lying in Boswell’s name!

  Spindle glanced at him and knew the struggle there and in a way understood it. In other circumstances nomole would have been better suited to Tryfan than Henbane. Seeing them together it was as if no other mole was there or should be there, even though Spindle himself thought her disgusting. But more than that, he saw with an appalled clarity that Henbane was circling Tryfan, and making him think that giving in might be the only way to release Boswell. But was old Boswell really here?

  “Oh yes, Spindle, he’s alive,” said Henbane, reading his thoughts.

  “Well, we’d like to see him then,” said Spindle, which sounded so lame that the moment he said it he regretted it.

  Henbane shrugged and looked irritated, and all warmth in that burrow was gone and the air seemed suddenly chill.

  “Then you had both better see him, had you not?” she said, as if desiring to see Boswell was rejection of her. “After that, Tryfan of Duncton, you and I shall talk again.” With which she turned and abruptly left them.

  Her presence was such that its sudden absence had the power not only to make a chamber seem empty when she left it, but to make the moles there feel bereft as well. No wonder Bailey, only a youngster when he first met her, had found her both irresistible and confusing. But it was the same power that, when she was in a different mood, could make the very air smell of fear. Stone help anymole whose heart was hers. Stone help Tryfan who stared after her in silence.

  “The othermole, Mayweed, where is he?” asked Sleekit.

  Weed scratched himself and settled down before he answered.

  “Lost. Made a run for it. He was near the Clints.”

  Sleekit then looked at Tryfan without expression.

  “He will die,” she said. “A pity. I had heard he was a mole worth talking to.”

  “Really?” said Weed. “Now had you? I wonder why.”

  “He led these two into the Wen, and got them out again. Of that I would like to hear.”

  “He will die,” said Tryfan looking at Sleekit strongly. He meant: he will not! Did Sleekit understand that? Did

  Weed know what he really said? Sleekit held his gaze steadily, and Tryfan knew she understood, and that if there was a way she would find it and reach Mayweed. Then Tryfan felt tired and turned to Weed.

  “Henbane seemed to say we were to see Boswell. When?”

  Weed laughed unpleasantly and looked first up at the roof, then round behind himself, and then out through the fissure in the chamber’s wall across the moor to the place where they had said the Master Rune was in retreat.

  “Now,” said Weed.

  Now! New life in Tryfan’s paws, new hope. Now, at last, after so many years, Boswell once again. Beloved Boswell. Half disbelieving what they did, they followed Weed from that strange chamber with relief and expectation.

  Above them, somewhere high among the stalactites, where the rock arched one way into light and in another turned to some shadowed place where there was a gallery and sound stilled to nothingness, there in that bleak silence an ancient mole stirred. He had watched Bracken and Rebecca’s son, he had listened, and now he followed them.

  His coat, black. His eyes shining black. His mouth cold. His teeth white and sharp. His flanks as graceful in the cruel way an old mole’s can be when his life has been austere and mean. His shoulders scarred, his gait slow. About him was a shadowed darkness that would have seemed to turn the tunnel he was in about and around and over into confusion for any other mole who was there. None was. That mole had watched alone.

  Henbane’s father. Evil Rune.

  He turned, and senior sideem came forward and supported him out and away to follow where the others went.

  While down in the empty chamber where Henbane and the others had been, light played and a fat mole came. A tired mole, a corrupted mole, whose every step was an effort, whose fur glistened with unhealthy sweat. Poor Bailey.

  To the very edge of the fissure he went and he looked out towards Providence Fall, watching the swathes of spray that flew up and faded out across the moor.

  He was thinking of Spindle. He was feeling the shame of a mole who feels worthless, utterly; and beyond saving. Helpless and alone.

  Poor Bailey cried like a pup and looked across a scene that was to him so desolate. He cried until at last he dared whisper a name, the name of a place, the memory of which was his sanity.

  He cried and he whispered it, tears salty in the corners of his mouth. Again and again he whispered it.

  “Barrow Vale,” was the name he said. Barrow Vale, the lost heart of Duncton Wood.

  And then, in the very heart of Whern, he added to that hopeless litany a simple and courageous prayer: “Please Stone, I want to go home and be where Starling is. She’s my sister. I want to go home.” And poor Bailey cried alone.

  Chapter Forty

  The route that Weed and his attendant sideem led them on was through limestone and in places cut into open galleries which hung, as Henbane’s
chambers did, over the gorge they had first seen when Lathe brought them to the High Sideem.

  “The stream which runs through the gorge is called Dowber Gill,” said Weed, who seemed more friendly once they were clear of Henbane’s tunnels. They crossed the head of this stream and then dropped down north westward.

  “But doesn’t Rune have his burrows this way, by a waterfall called Providence Fall?” asked Spindle.

  “Not a waterfall, mole, a roof fall. Yes, the Master does have his burrows near here, but here too is Boswell confined. No doubt the Master wished to keep an eye on him.”

  Weed’s voice was both serious and direct, and Tryfan detected a difference in his attitude to Rune than to Henbane. Of the first he seemed in respectful awe, of the second afraid.

  As Tryfan followed on, the sideem all about watching his every step, he felt a strange disquiet about Henbane. It was more than the discomfort a mole might naturally feel to find himself attracted to a mole he had good reason to distrust and hate. Now they were away from her he felt more able to combat her overt intent to charm him. No, it was not that but, rather, a sense of pity that he felt.

  He remembered his mother Rebecca telling him once of Mandrake, her father. A murderous, evil mole in everything he did, she said, and yet when she went to Siabod and saw where he had been raised she began to understand why, despite all he had done, she loved him. She loved the pup in him, she loved the mole he might have been deep, deep down, beyond recall, perhaps he was.

  Now, here in Whern, in the very tunnels of the High Sideem, where Henbane lived, surrounded by tunnels too grand and beautiful for ordinary mole, and quite bereft of any homely sense, Tryfan felt pity for her. Pity for a mole who had ordered so many to die! Pity for the enemy of the Stone! Yes, pity.

  The ground became wet, their fur was bedabbled with droplets of water, and Tryfan realised they had reached the place where spray rose so strangely from the great chasm in the ground. But before they could see more of it they were led underground into rough-hewn tunnels which reverberated with the roaring of water. After a steep downward run, they emerged into the open almost beneath a great waterfall, which thundered down from somewhere far above their heads and made the very air recoil with its sound.

  The rocks at the tunnel exit were wet with its spray and in the cracks between them, and up the broken limestone cliff face above, grew ferns and pennywort. The waterfall formed a turbulent pool at the far end of which, to the left-paw side, was a short stream that flowed into a bigger, deeper, stiller pool whose far end butted against the towering side of the chasm, and was there sucked evilly down into darkness.

  Since talking was quite impossible because of the water’s roar, all they could do was stare, and their gaze was drawn inexorably up the black cliffs of the chasm until they had to tilt their heads awkwardly back to see the distant sky.

  Although the chasm ended starkly enough with the deep pool to their left, to their right it stretched out a long way until, in the murky distance, a jumbled rock fall and more rising cliffs marked its furthest extremity.

  In the central part of this awesome place were huge broken rocks, which had once formed the roof of what must have been a cavern bigger than any they had yet seen.

  In places the ground was fiat, or nearly so, and there was grass and heather, and a few stunted trees.

  “This is Providence Fall,” shouted Weed against the noise. “In the galleries above us the Master lives, but down here Boswell survives.”

  Tryfan looked around the cliffs above and saw a few dark fissures and clefts that must, he supposed, be outlets from Rune’s tunnels. On the floor of the Fall itself, he saw no sign of Boswell or anymole. The place appalled him: it had no entrance but the one they had come down, and no exit either but for the sucking peat-stained waters of the dreadful pool, a place of certain death for mole.

  Weed took them some way into the gorge where, behind a rock which gave some shelter from the sound and spray, he spoke briefly to one of the sideem who, pointing at a tree in the distance at a place where thin sunshine came down from the heights above, said, “He’s there, usually. At night he’s in a cleft.”

  “And food?” said Tryfan, knowing they were talking of Boswell. “What of that?”

  “Oh, there’s worms,” said the sideem, “and dead sheep, too, if you like that sort of thing.” He indicated a vile heap of white wool and yellow bones among the rocks. “They fall,” he said shortly. “The spring thaws take them away if there’s been no flood before.”

  “You can go and find your Boswell,” said Weed, “we’ll stay here. Don’t bother with trying to escape, it isn’t possible.” Then, pointing at Spindle, he added, “Not you, though. You’re staying with us!”

  So Tryfan set off across the Fall alone, the cliffs towering up all about him, great fallen rocks looming, and the sense of being watched from above, by raven if not by mole.

  The roaring of the waterfall receded as he went among the rocks and it was replaced by the sound of his pawsteps echoing all about. But it seemed to him to sound like his pounding heart, for he felt nervous and strange going forth in this dreadful place to see a mole he had once loved as he had loved his parents, and a mole lost so long. Here? Boswell? Mole of Uffington. White Mole?

  “Tryfan!”

  It seemed as if the rocks themselves had spoken, or that this dreadful place was the mouth of the great earth speaking out his name.

  “Tryfan!”

  Not shouting it, not calling, not questioning, but stating his name as he was: Tryfan.

  “Boswell?”

  And there, by the bole of a stunted birch, Boswell crouched. Smiling. Gentle. Beloved.

  It seemed to Tryfan that his heart was open to the world, the long years of a journey nothing, and that here, before this old mole who had made his life what it was, he had come home.

  “Tryfan,” repeated Boswell, coming slowly forward and with evident pain, “I knew that one day you would come.”

  But Tryfan could not speak, nor move, nor barely think. He could only lower his snout before the mole he loved and weep. So it was that Boswell came to him, touched him as he used to do, nuzzled him, and said, “There is no need for tears, mole, not yet anyway! No, no need for those. As for my slow gait, don’t worry about it. Old moles stiffen easily, especially if they meditate too much in the same position. I’m fitter than I look!”

  Tryfan dared to look at him and saw that though he was older, and his fur whiter, and his wrinkles deeper, yet truly he had not changed. His eyes were bright, his stance eager, his sense of curiosity as evident as ever.

  “Well, and have you lost Spindle? I told him to look after you.”

  “He has, Boswell, he’s here. But Weed kept him back. I think otherwise he thought I might find a way for us all to escape.”

  “Well, my dear Tryfan, I hope you will! A mole can’t live in a place like this forever! Now tell me... tell me everything.”

  So then Tryfan told him, of his and Spindle’s journeys and struggles, of the changes that had overtaken moledom, and of the many moles he had met, and of how the followers had dwindled until only a few survived, scattered, leaderless, waiting.

  “For what?” asked Boswell finally. “Tell me, Tryfan, what do they wait for?”

  “For the Stone Mole’s coming, for the Silence he may bring. For that they wait, Boswell.”

  Boswell nodded and reached out and touched Tryfan once more.

  “And you, Tryfan. Have you survived?”

  “I’m alive but my heart is bleak and sometimes I have lost faith. Since Feverfew...” And Boswell nodded, Tryfan had told him of her. And many others too.

  “Feverfew, Comfrey, Alder, Tundry, Skint, Smithills, Thyme, Starling, Mayweed... so many, so very many,” whispered Boswell. He thought for a moment and then said, “This mole, Mayweed. Tell me more of him.”

  Which Tryfan did, leaving Boswell in no doubt about how highly he regarded Mayweed, and that, despite his disappearance near the da
ngerous Clints, he had no doubt that Mayweed was still alive, and somewhere nearby.

  “Yes,” said Boswell, “I like the sound of this mole. I like the sound of all of them, Tryfan. I am... well pleased with them.” He seemed suddenly tired, and his eye drifted away to the high and distant prospect of the sky at the far end of the Fall.

  “You have done well, Tryfan, you have led them well.”

  “I have led them nowhere, Boswell, and I am no nearer the Silence you used to talk about, and nor did I find it in the Wen.”

  “You did, my dear, but you could not hear it. But its sound will be heard, soon now, yes, yes it will. But we have not much time. I must leave now, I have things to attend to in that wide world you know only as moledom. I may be fit but I am somewhat in decline, as I have a right to be at my age. One loses the will, you see.” He said this last rather irritably, as if it was a state that had crept up on him unawares, and all too soon.

  “You must be the oldest mole alive!” said Tryfan. “But that’s because you’re a White Mole.”

  Boswell laughed suddenly, a frail but wheezy kind of laugh.

  “Oh I’m sure I’m old, but the oldest? I doubt it.” A look of real alarm came over his face, and he frowned. He glanced up somewhere at the walls about him, as if searching for Rune in the black and dripping fissures where the ravens went.

  “You’ve said nothing of yourself, Boswell, but then I didn’t get much out of you about you all the time we journeyed from Duncton Wood to Uffington, so I doubt that I’ll get much here and now.”

  “I’ve been living simply as a mole should, here where Rune lives. I think he hoped he might learn something from me but I have been a disappointment to him. I have done little but crouch in silence and watch the seasons pass. In Uffington we called it going into the silent burrows, and I did my share of that. Here the sideem call it confinement. But that is only a word, Tryfan, that a mole chooses to use – usually of himself. I have food, I have shelter, I have a safe place and here I have known Silence, but now I have a task for which I need the help you have prepared for me.”