Duncton Found

by William Horwood

  “This was the nature of the evil I saw then, this the allurement of a mole who enthralled all who heard him that night but me, guarded as I was by the Word’s wisdom and truth.

  “But yet I witnessed power. Others will deny it, others will not tell you the truth, for they will fear it, or be seduced by it. But I saw it, and witnessed it and tell of it now. I said that chamber was hot and fetid before the mole Beechen came: yet the moment he entered it was cool and sweet-scented like the grass in June, and moles who had been restless and excited grew calm and easy. Evil! I said there were cripples there, and the diseased. I saw it, and witnessed it: they called him ‘Master’, and their Master spoke of the Stone. The beset went to him and were touched by him and they were healed. I saw a mole who could only move by dragging himself along aided by others healed by the touch of his Master’s paws. I saw that mole return to his place unaided. I saw a mole blind, his eyes rheumy with murrain, with his sight restored, the filth plucked from his eyes by the talons of that mole. And I saw an idiot mole whose words were an incessant jumble of filth made whole again, and able to speak plain. Evil. All of it evil and vile.

  “But a greater trial for this servant of the Word was yet to come. I will not – I cannot – properly describe the course of that night, except to say that the healings were interspersed with prayers and incantations to the Stone of an ancient pagan kind. Sometimes the mole Beechen spoke them, sometimes moles present uttered them, crying them out, most frightening to see.

  “But it was when the mole Beechen asked that moles touch each other in love that my trial came. I did not feel the Word desired that I join in such a rite and, accordingly, pretended to touch the mole at my side on the flank, though I touched him not.

  “Even at the moment of my pretence the Stone Mole cried out as if in pain and said, ‘Which mole among you touches me not?’ And then again, ‘Which mole among you loves me not? He who touches another with his heart touches me!’ Then for the third time when I did not touch a mole he cried, ‘I tell you there is one among you who despises me, and who touches me not. The Stone will know her, the Stone will come before her and the Stone shall forgive her, for at the moment of my passing she shall cry out to me as I cry to her now, and she shall touch me when all others fear to. Her name will be reviled but she shall be forgiven. I have known her already and shall know her again. So may it be for all moles who fight against the Stone, that in the end they shall be forgiven!’”

  Her voice had changed as she spoke Beechen’s words, or supposed words, becoming soft and chanting as her face adopted a curiously beatific and gentle expression which only succeeded in highlighting its essential inflexible poverty of spirit.

  Then her manner changed violently as she denounced, in a rage the more shocking for the calm that had preceded it, all she reported Beechen as having said.

  “Evil, Vile evil! The abyss was before me and I felt the urge to leap forward into its dark depths. I, devout mole of the Word, servant of thee, Master. Strike me! Talon me! Hurt me! For I felt then the temptation to cry aloud, to touch, to know this false Silence of which the Stone followers speak. Even I felt it!” Her voice, which had started the denunciation in loud anger declined now to a whisper of abject horror as if she felt herself corrupt, and almost corrupting.

  But then Wort’s innate self-righteousness emerged once more, and an officious smug look came over her face, quickly masked, though not entirely successfully, by a sickening modesty.

  “But I did not yield. The talons of the Word were about me, and they did comfort and guard me. The moment of temptation passed and I was left stronger and fiercer in my support of the Word and recognition of the subtle and surreptitious nature of the Stone and the mole who is its representative in moledom. I saw he was a mole whose beauty masked a seductive horror greater than moles of the Word yet know. I witnessed it twice more, once in Fyfield where this Beechen took the meeting away from your sideem Heanor, and again outside my own system at Cumnor.

  “Master, as I stance here before you, I would have killed him there and then with my own talons... and I thought of doing so. But the Word chided me and said ‘Are you to take the law of the Word in your own paws? Are you to judge the punishment? This must be the work of the Master alone. He shall decide. Tell him what you have seen, and he shall judge and he punish.’ So seemed the Word to speak to me and this is what I have come to say to you.”

  For a long time after she had finished Lucerne continued to stare at her, utterly still. No testimony ever brought before him had ever been so stark or clear, nor its warning more plain.

  Then Terce came to Lucerne and whispered to him, and Lucerne nodded, looked at Wort, and nodded again.

  “Master-elect,” said Wort, seeing this, “if I have done wrong then punish me. I did all that I did in the name of the Word.”

  “I know it, mole. Now tell me, what is thy Master to thee?”

  “The source of all truth about the Word.”

  “Would you lie to your Master?”

  “May the Word strike me into eternal suffering if it should be so.”

  “Then answer me this question, eldrene Wort, and answer it truthfully, for if you do not eternal suffering may be yours sooner than you think.”

  “Master-elect?”

  “What do you know of the deaths of Heanor and those in his trinity?”

  Wort seemed surprised at the question, less for its implications as for its unimportance.

  “I killed them myself, in the name of the Word. They had abused the Word.”

  “And Wyre?”

  “Not him, he died naturally. But the eldrene Smock I killed.”

  Lucerne smiled cruelly.

  “Then, mole, you have robbed us of both a trinity and the eldrene of Fyfield.”

  “It was just, Master-elect, you would have done it yourself had you been there.”

  “Drule, Slighe...” said Lucerne coldly, “take the eldrene Wort outside, watch over her, and await my summons to come back here.”

  Wort’s eyes widened in dismay as she saw the dreadful Drule and Slighe bear down on her, but she said nothing when they led her away.

  “Well?” said Lucerne.

  “A dangerous mole,” said Terce.

  “Not one I would want to share a burrow with,” said Clowder.

  “Well!” declared Mallice, admiration in her voice.

  “I was impressed by her,” said Lucerne. “We have either to punish her for a succession of blasphemies and abuses of power which few moles can have ever exceeded, or we give her a task to suit her many abilities. I favour the latter.”

  “You have a task in mind?” asked Clowder.

  “Several. She has that quality even a lot of sideem lack: an ability to think for herself and do something about it.”

  “It is a pity she takes herself so seriously,” said Clowder.

  “Is it? I think not – it may be the very quality we need if such a mole is to fulfil the function which I think the Word intended for her. She is a mole of formidable resource and courage, and she is as loyal to the Word as anymole we are likely to find. We need moles we know can keep a secret, moles strong enough to report only to us.”

  “But she has no experience wider than the one she recounted, and nor is she sideem.”

  “A mole does not have to be sideem to be useful to the Word, and to ourselves. There is something absolute in the faith this mole has and in the rightness of what she sees and does that I like, and which I think will strike fear and respect into the hearts of all those under her.

  “But most of all I like the darkness of her mind, the secrecy in which she prefers to live and work. I have no doubt she does not reveal to her right paw what her left is doing without pondering it first. But she needs others to watch over her, just to be sure she does not decide you have blasphemed, Terce, or you, Clowder! Let alone myself, of course! Let’s get her and the others back in here.”

  When they came in, Wort looking somewhat subdued for she
thought she was to be punished, Lucerne said to Drule and Slighe, “Range yourselves by this mole Wort! Aye, so!”

  The three moles stared about uncomfortably. Drule glowered, Slighe blinked, Wort looked uncertain of herself.

  Lucerne smiled benignly.

  “You have been too long confined in Cannock, Drule.”

  “Master?”

  “And you as well, Slighe.”

  “But I am here to serve you Master-elect.”

  “Quite so. As for you, eldrene Wort, words fail to express the admiration I feel for you. You shall continue to be known as the eldrene Wort of Cumnor though Fyfield shall now be yours to command as well, and the moles within it. But in truth you shall be something more than that, for you shall work for the good of the Word with Drule and Slighe as your comrades in crusade. Aye... no need to protest, Drule, you will do it very well and it will not be for too long. Nor you, Slighe, more action and less scrivening will do your talons good. Yes, you shall all have a very special task, which must be done by moles I trust always to tell me the truth, whatever they may tell other moles.”

  “What shall be our task, Master-elect?” asked Wort, immediately taking charge of this gruesome trio.

  “To investigate ways and means of seeing that Beechen of Duncton is punished of the Word, and finally made dead with such dishonour that it will cast a pall of shame forever over the faith of which he is supposed to be the greatest son. How you will do it I cannot tell, and you shall report back on that. Meanwhile together, and with those moles you shall now have at your command, eldrene Wort, you shall make a strike that we need and have long debated.”

  “What strike?” asked Wort.

  “Explain to her, Slighe, now, so we are all agreed what it is we are talking about.”

  Wort listened intently to Slighe’s succinct account of the debate that had overtaken the tunnels and conclaves of Cannock in the moleweeks past.

  “I see,” she said at the end. “I see. Yes.”

  “Yes?” said Lucerne.

  “Oh yes, Master-elect, I understand. Moledom needs to see the power of the Word and be impressed by its great might. What may be obvious to moles like us may not be so to those less thinking or devout. We must begin to curl the talons of the Word about the Stone Mole in readiness for the Word’s just vengeance.”

  “Yes?” encouraged Lucerne. He liked this mole’s mind.

  “Then we must destroy where the Stone Mole first thrived. As the Holy Burrows were laid waste so must we lay waste Duncton Wood. The place is already feared and outcast, and followers and moles of the Word alike regard it as diseased. We shall purge moledom of it, and the moles who still struggle to live there.”

  “But Tryfan shall not be touched. If he be alive I shall deal with him myself. And I stress we shall not punish the Stone Mole with death, yet,” said Lucerne. “Cut off from his home system, driven from the peripheral tunnels and burrows that give him succour, we shall let him wander pathetically across moledom, growing ever more isolated and weak. It would be most fitting – would it not? – if Duncton Wood were destroyed on Longest Night, for that is the night I shall be ordained Master of the Word.”

  “But that leaves us little time,” began Slighe.

  “’Tis a long way to travel by then and organise,” said Drule.

  “The Word shall guide your talons as it guides mine!” said Wort fervently. “Blessed be the Word!”

  “Blest be,” whispered Lucerne.

  “Master-elect, I would have liked to witness your ordination on Longest Night,” said Slighe, reluctant to set off quite as soon as the irrepressible Wort.

  “My dear Slighe, you shall. I shall be ordained on Longest Night in the blood of the moles you choose to destroy by Duncton’s Stone. Let our time of rejoicing be as a blasphemy to them, let the Word be so well pleased with us that we can outface the hallowed Stone in its name, in the very place that spawned the Stone Mole. And if the Word has spared my father, why, what pleasure for me, what an honour for him, to see his son ordained.” Lucerne laughed at his irony and said acidly, “It shall be the last thing he sees.”

  “Aye, let it be so!” they all cried, satisfied with the fitting justice of their intent, all but for Terce. Though he too cried “Aye!” he looked uneasy, and shadowed.

  “To Duncton then!” said Wort, triumphant.

  “To Duncton it shall be!”

  But when all but Terce had gone Lucerne said, “Twelfth Keeper, what troubles you?”

  But what really troubled Terce he would not say, for beyond his Master now was the sacred destiny of Rune.

  “Be ever wary of the Stone, Terce. Its cunning is more clever than moles know. The way to ascendancy of the Word lies closed indeed to the Stone’s suffocating light.”

  “What troubles me, Master, is the Stone,” said Terce, who found that the best lies were those nearest to the truth. “The Duncton Stone is said to be one of very great power. Even Master Rune respected it. It may belittle thee and thy ordination.”

  “I suppose it may, Terce, but we shall be nothing if we do not try to be everything. I find the eldrene Wort’s reminder of the Stone’s power timely, most timely. Yet it is that very fact that puts me in mind to be ordained in Duncton. Is their water that for anointing?”

  “I think not, Master-elect. The scrivenings describe it as being on a hill.”

  “Then the tears of followers shall be our cleansing and their blood our anointing.”

  “Yes, Master-elect, they shall have to be.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Moles have ever the need of a place to dream of, a place to where they may travel in their mind and be happy once again, when they are beset, when the aging body aches, when the heart pines for loves and friends once known and times remembered.

  A place simple and right, with its parts so harmonious that though each may be but modest and unremarkable, together they seem to make perfection in real life.

  Some – perhaps many – will say there is no such place but in memory, which so easily removes trial and tribulation to leave a remembrance in a sunlit glow without a threat in sight.

  Others will smile and say it was really so, just as they remember it, and that it was no dream. So do adults remember their days as pups, and they are right, for puppish days may well seem sunlit when the menaces and threats of life are borne by parents.

  Yet there is one happy group of moles who knew a reality that really was as good as memory of it later claims. These are moles who know, or knew, an adult love. Not the first love, which is often blind (and all the better for it!), nor the second, whose passion may not last, but that later love of moles who look each other in the eyes and know each other as they really are, and love them still, and grow with knowledge to love them even more.

  Such moles in old age, when describing what they once had, will say that she, or he, was most beautiful, the most beautiful, and where they lived, why, it must have been a goodly place for sure: did not their love thrive there?

  Yet, when all is said, some places – a very, very few – have about them a harmony of parts that makes others remember them with special fondness. Happy the mole who falls in love in such a place, or having found their love renews it there.

  Such a magic place was, and is, Bablock, along the River Thames. Quiet, modest, secret as a sunlit vale deep in a wood is secret, and with that extra quality which nomole can arrange or pre-ordain: surprise.

  One moment a mole is trekking on a way along a riverbank, the next he is in Bablock Hythe. One moment a mole is coming off the heathy slopes above the river valley, the next he turns a corner, snouts round a bend, peers under a fence and blomp! he is in Bablock Hythe.

  Yet where it begins, and where it ends, nomole can accurately say, and many a mole, in all other respects intelligent and sensitive, may pass right through from one end of Bablock to the other, and not remark a thing.

  In short, the Bablocks of moledom do not simply find their moles: moles find them a
s well. Indeed, moles can lose them too, if they lose touch with themselves, and swear that their Bablock is the dullest place. While others, quite lost it seems, can be stanced in a Bablock all their lives and not know it until one day – one very happy day – they look about themselves and say, “Why, I never knew it until now, but this is Bablock Hythe!” While all about them dance with relief and say, “He’s seen the light at last!”

  When Mayweed set off from Frilford that early November in search of a place where Beechen might rest in anonymity for a time, he only half knew he was looking for a Bablock. That half was made of a nagging doubt about his life with Sleekit, whom he had loved devotedly since the moment he so dramatically discovered her in the Providence Fall at Whern.

  Devoted he may have been, but Mayweed was always a mole travelling a route to somewhere he never quite arrived. So being peaceful and content, stancing still, watching the day’s butterflies go by, was not his nature. It left him uncomfortable, as if something dark might come along from the route behind and overtake him once again.

  So on he went, taking those moles he loved along with him on his sometimes frantic way.

  His consort Sleekit, on the other paw, was a still mole. Trained in Whern in the ways of meditation and discipline, naturally reticent, intensely loyal, she found contentment in thoughts, and stancing quiet. Her love for Mayweed was a mystery to many, but perhaps in him and his aching restlessness she found an outlet for that nurturing love she had only ever been able to show to Wharfe and Harebell in the all too brief period when she and Mayweed reared them, first in the Clints of Whern, then in Beechenhill.

  Yet, in that strange interlude with Beechen in the ancient tunnels of Duncton, when Mayweed had been beset by dark sound and she had gone to him, something changed within them both. Beechen had warned them then that before long they would part, and advised them to make the best of their time together, for it was now limited. Which they had done since then in Duncton Wood, and would have done more had not the darkness begun to fall across the wood, and the imperatives of Beechen’s escape from it become paramount. So, once more, had Sleekit found herself travelling on with her love with little time to themselves.