Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  “They’ll not talk, Rooster,” said the recovered Rollright mole, “they never talk but in rules and proscribings. You might as well talk to wormless ground as to them. Except —”

  “We do not kill moles, it is against our creed,” said the Newborn, quite unrepentant, and not showing much sign of fear. “We punish through the massing. It is your own foul-bodied crush that kills yourselves. We did not touch him with a single talon!” He was straining against Whillan’s hold as he pointed to the dead mole. Then he added, with contempt in his voice, “He killed himself with your help!”

  “We must get out of here,” said Chater urgently. “Let’s lose these bastards now.”

  “Aye,” said Maple, coldly. Then he grabbed the one Whillan held and lifted him off the ground. Tell them Rooster’s come if you like, and tell them there’s more where he came from, many more. Now get out of here …’ With that he hurled him bodily away.

  “And you!” said Chater in disgust, pushing the one he held after the first. Both scrambled up, stared one last time, and were gone.

  “That was well said, Whillan!” said Chater with a wink and a quick grin at them both. “Rooster indeed! You’re quicker-thinking than me! Now, what’s the way out of here?”

  “I’ll show you,” said the bright youngster with the thin face.

  “Right,” said Chater, taking overall command once more, “lead off sharpish. This kind of work is not just a matter of knowing where and when to turn up, you need to know when to scarper too. What’s your name, mole?”

  “Fiddler,” was the reply, and off he set.

  This extraordinary and frightening incident, early though it was in Whillan’s account of the venture to Rollright, was the most dramatic and telling of all the events and discoveries of their three-day stay in that subdued system.

  But before Whillan’s account concluded with the rest of what they discovered of the mysterious Rooster, Stour interrupted him; “This ‘massing’, as they call it, was something they had done before?”

  “Yes,” said Whillan, “mole after mole told us about it. The rules of their belief in the Stone, if it can be truly called that, say they cannot themselves kill a mole with their own paws. But moles who are deemed to blaspheme may be punished even unto death. By performing the kind of massing we witnessed they can claim that the victims effectively killed themselves … It needed only a few massings, always of three or more moles, to subdue the Rollright moles. As for Rooster —”

  “Aye, mole, but more of him later,” said Stour. “You have told us enough now for me to think it a matter of urgency that we satisfy ourselves what has happened to Fieldfare, and confirm at least that she is not in the Marsh End. For if she is..

  “And if she has been ‘massed’, Stour?” said Chater bitterly. “Where does that put your ideas of peaceful resistance then?”

  “It changes them not a bit, Chater,” said Stour sternly. “There will never be peace, never be Silence, for moles who match talon thrust with talon thrust, and killing with killing. Now, Drubbins and myself will hurry down to Barrow Vale in response to the report that there is to be a Meeting. If so, and if it has been invoked by this Chervil and the Newborn moles then we shall ensure that as many of them attend as can before the Meeting starts. That will be your opportunity to see what you may find in the Marsh End.”

  “I would prefer to go in there now,” said Chater, “for if Fieldfare’s there she’ll be in danger — she’s sure to say or do something that’s seen as blasphemy. She’s a mole who always speaks her mind.”

  “No, Chater, give the Master and Drubbins a start before we leave,” said Maple, “what he says makes sense.”

  “Well …” growled Chater miserably.

  “And you come with us, Whillan,” said Stour. “We may have need of a younger mole.”

  At which the two older moles and Whillan turned off downslope to the north-west for Barrow Vale, and the other two slowly made their way northward, to reach the edge of the Marsh End and wait until a little time had passed, and they judged it right to go further on, and try to find out what had happened to Fieldfare if they could.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Privet’s work with Keeper Husk had soon settled into the companionable routine of two moles who shared a passion for mediaeval texts and molish tales, and for whom ‘working’ at such things was a continual round of enjoyable study and enriching conversation.

  Husk had accepted with glad grace the text of tales Privet had brought with her, the more so when he learned that many of them were gleanings from tales that Cobbett himself had told her.

  Some of the old rivalry between himself and Cobbett, as well as Stour, might still survive, but he was obviously pleased, even so late in life, to have this addition from the North to his Collection, and one touched by the knowledge of so old a friend.

  Had the ages of Privet and Husk not been so disparate, and their inclinations so clearly celibate, others might almost have thought them mates, so much together were they, and so lacking in interest in the world beyond Rolls, Rhymes and Tales. Indeed, so suddenly and completely absorbed was Privet with her new-found task that a mole might almost have thought that she was escaping from something.

  As it was, Husk continued his disconcerting habit of sleeping when and where he felt like it — usually for only short stretches of time and with a text or folio clutched in his paws — while Privet delved a small uncluttered burrow near the only serviceable entrance into the tunnels, and retired there at night, usually after a lengthy conversation with the old mole which often ended with him telling a tale or two.

  As for their respective tasks, each kept to their agreement in meeting the other’s needs. Privet was allowed to work her way through the texts as best she could, separating out those she felt should be preserved in the Main Library. Initially she approached Husk formally over each one she wished to remove, but this so upset him, and provoked such lengthy and indecisive discussion of the relative merits of one text against another (which he could not quickly find) that both agreed it best she consulted him no more.

  The only time she left Husk and ventured over to the Main Library was soon after she started, when she told the Master what she was about, and asked that Pumpkin or some other aide might come routinely and take the rescued texts across-slope to safer sanctuary in the Library.

  “Pumpkin it shall be,” said Stour immediately. “As for the relationship of Husk to me …” (for Privet had mentioned Husk’s claim, though without reference to Fat Pansy) “… it was all a long time ago. He has his task and I have mine.”

  At first Pumpkin had come only sporadically, but it was not long before Privet had got herself into an efficient routine, and he came daily to see her to remove texts, and found another aide to help as well. But as time went on they rarely saw her, for it seemed she wished to get on with her task uninterrupted and chose to leave what texts were ready for collection set apart for them near the tunnel entrance.

  As for Husk’s work with scribing tales, Privet kept her side of the bargain she had made, and for a time each morning and afternoon joined Husk in his inner chamber, and helped him as best she could. It soon became obvious to her that the ‘task’ that he wished her to do regarding his work was very different from the task she felt sure she should be doing, whose nature put her into something of a quandary. For it seemed that so far as his Book of Tales was concerned Husk had been too close to it for too long and had lost his judgement of what should be included, or more particularly, of what should be taken out.

  The mystery of the discarded and scored-out folios about his scribing place, and the seeming absence of completed and corrected work was soon sadly resolved. From what he told her and what she observed it seemed that he had long since completed his great work, in which, successively, he had retold the great tales of moledom, extracting them in much the way that Privet had observed Cobbett do in Beechenhill, from the hundreds of tales in his great Collection, made originally by his fath
er, his own work being based on the collecting rather than scholarly zeal of his father.

  The reason why this great Collection was not in the Main Library was one of inertia — arising from the difficulty of moving it — combined, Privet suspected, with stubbornness on all sides arising from the argument originating over Fat Pansy.

  Quite when Husk had completed his ‘book’ — it was less a book than a portfolio of tales — Privet could not find out, but certainly a long time before. However, he himself had not judged it complete, feeling there was too much in and that before he declared it satisfactorily done, and showed it to other moles, he must excise parts to make it ever more simple, more direct, more ‘true’, whatever that might mean.

  Privet had arrived at the end of this second stage of his self-appointed task in time only to see the ruins of the great work that had once been — literal ruins, in the sense that the discarded material was all about in the tunnels, or if it was retained in the book itself, was now in the form of scored and broken folios.

  It was this hotchpotch of a thing, hardly book at all, over which the now blind Husk huddled painfully every day, and had never shown to anymole, and would not show to her. She saw its battered birch-bark covers, white and peeling, and its crumbling crazy contents, from a distance, but never more than that; and even when he left it on his dais and went up to the surface to groom, and she might have looked at it if she had cared to, it was understood that she would not, and this was a trust she would have preferred to die before betraying.

  Husk’s obsessive work now seemed to be but a process of diminution whose inevitable end was that sooner than later there would be no text left at all of what might once have been moledom’s greatest book of tales.

  The discards, as Husk himself called them, were another matter, and scholar and librarian that she was, once she realized their possible importance she felt that by rejecting them Husk had no further claim on them. At first she had barely looked at them, for it was Husk’s grubby habit, particularly on colder nights, and at even colder dawns, to use these crumpled and broken discards as nesting material into which he snuggled down to keep his scraggy old body warm.

  The day when she realized these were rather more than mere scraps was when she discovered that he had been sleeping for several days on what, when she looked more closely at it, turned out to have been (at one time at least) the very first folios of his great work. What caught her eye and talon as she followed his scribing down the folios, was a tale whose title was, “The First Tale of Balagan, and how all moles began’. It was scribed more neatly and boldly than other things of Husk’s she had seen, and she concluded he had scribed it many, many years before.

  The tale began, “There was a mighty Stone that stood in the eternal silence that was before mole began. This was the primal Stone, in which all life and all things were. This was the Stone out of which Balagan sought to find a way.

  “One day the silence of eternity was broken by the sound of the Stone cracking, and at first the tip of a talon, then more talons, then a paw, and then a mole’s arm, struggled out of the Stone, and there was a panting, and a heaving, and groaning and roaring and thunder was born, which was Balagan’s voice; and lightning was born, which was Balagan’s eyes; and the wind was born, which was Balagan’s breath.”

  At this point the first folio ended, and she had to scrabble round in the muck and filth of Husk’s chamber to find the next. It continued, “Then was a storm where the primal Stone had stood and Silence was no more …” and then was Privet carried away into the oldest Tale of them all, which is of the coming of Balagan the First Mole, and how moledom was made, and how its stones came to be, each of them fragments of the Primal Stone he cracked and broke in his desire to be free.

  It was a long telling of a story she had heard, though in Peakish, when she was young. Yet skilled though her mother had been at such a story-telling, she recognized in Husk’s account something more. The language he had used was not one of the local dialects in which most tales are recorded, but ordinary mole. There was something strong and simple in the way he told it that made her see that the tale was no mere fantasy, or way to occupy an idle hour, but a reminder, deep and true, of something of where all moles began, as fundamental to all their lives as the Primal Stone itself.

  Why then had he discarded so much of the book he had made, including even this most fundamental of the tales of moledom? When she asked him, which she soon did, for Privet was not a mole to be surreptitious or indirect on matters involving library work, his explanations were reluctant and vague.

  Balagan’s story was too well known, he said, and anyway, he was dissatisfied with his telling of it. Then again, he said, when a mole tells a tale it is finally the gaps and silences between the words that mean most of all, for words themselves are but paltry unsatisfying things, which taken together rarely say what is in a mole’s heart when he makes a telling to another.

  “So I work at my Book of Tales to simplify them, and you can help me, my dear, by listening … This is not work to do alone.”

  “But do you mind if I collect what you call the discards?” she asked him one day. “It will make this place tidier for a start …”

  “Collect them, if you must,” he said indifferently, “but leave fresh folios out for me, for old and tired as I am, I scribe new things, or rather new versions of very old things! My scribing however becomes more arcane, meaningful perhaps only to me; but there we are, a mole must scribe what he can. As for whether another can make sense of it, well that I rather doubt. And there you can help me too, by going over what I scribe until I feel it is ready to put into what remains of my little book.”

  In this way Privet’s historic collaboration with Keeper Husk evolved into several tasks at once — rescuing his discards, which she kept separately in one of the chambers she had begun to clear of texts, re-scribing what he had scribed in a firmer hand, and listening when he felt it incumbent on her to scribe down what he said, just as he said it, and these tales too she carefully kept in folios, somewhere where he could not find them until she had gathered them together and created once more a text that might truly be called a Book of Tales. Some of her own work was in it, and all this she one day commanded Pumpkin to take to safety up in the main library.

  So developed a relationship between two moles who spoke each other’s language, and shared the same love of words and old texts. Two moles who seemed never to stop talking, one of all he knew, and the other of all she could learn. Was it some time then that he first told her of a long lost tale entitled ‘The Sound of Silence’?

  “It’s here somewhere,” he would say vaguely. “I’m sure it is …”

  Above them, almost unseen — for now they rarely ventured forth from Husk’s tunnels, and Pumpkin had learnt not to venture down into them except to collect the texts left by Privet at the entrance — September ended and blustery October began, and the days drew in. The tunnels grew gloomier, the air more dank, but as the rest of Duncton Wood prepared itself for winter Privet and Husk barely noticed it, working now together in that world of tales that had been Husk’s alone for so long, and into whose endless tunnels, and eternal time, he had now welcomed Privet.

  Yet removed though they seemed, and abstracted as Husk increasingly became in the throes of his solitary re-working and steady reduction of his text, Privet herself never quite lost sight of reality. As the days continued and the weather worsened, she could see that the old mole was visibly slowing. Sometimes he seemed unable to work at all; or, he was lost in some tale he had scribed before, weeping and laughing for moles whose lives he had made permanent between the folios of his Book, but whose record he now felt obliged to finally discard, muttering, “To Silence, aye, to Silence it must go! No good, Privet, not this tale, not near the truth of it at all. Better that moles make their own tales you see, live their own tales, that’s the thing; but I don’t know … I just don’t know any more!” And he stared at his ruined portfolio, closed the b
irch-bark covers on it and rested his weary paws for a long time, thinking.

  “Perhaps tomorrow, my dear, we can delve at this some more, and make some sense of it, so that something useful’s left,” he said at last. Then, more cheerfully, he added, “Mind, I have something to scribe down, not a tale you know, but just a thought, a thing. So give me a clean folio and leave me be, and I’ll do with it what I can. Dear me, what a to-do life seems when a mole gets to the end of it. All a big to-do about nothing much at all. Now, let me see … ha! That’s a laugh! I’ll never see again, and you know what, old Husk doesn’t care a jot because he’s got imagination to see with, and voice to speak with. That’s all you need for tales, my dear, for a mole to listen, and time to make a telling. Such a to-do, and it’s all so simple in the end. Now! Leave me, mole! Take away all these discards of mine before I sit on them or sleep on them or otherwise do something you’ll disapprove of with them. I know, I know, you’re a hoarder like my brother. A true librarian. But what would librarians say if the grubby moles who made the texts they love to hoard came ambling along their way? Eh? Ha ha ha!”

  Then in mid-October Husk was taken ill, and grew incapable of any work at all, even the discarding of what little remained in his portfolio. Privet hardly left his flank, for she knew he was ailing and had come now to rely on her, and grew distressed if she was gone to the surface too long.

  She managed to continue her sorting work — indeed she did more than formerly, because there was no work of his to do except sometimes to scribe down tales he told in his delirium, strange tales of endings and beginnings, of beginnings and endings.

  “Stone,” she prayed quietly as he slept, “help him find peace and an end to his great task. Give him strength to take it to its conclusion …” For she sensed that near though he was to death he still did not himself feel his task was complete, and wanted to stay alive until it was.