Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  “Leave now. Go, now. Must not,” he shouted at her, almost inarticulate. “Take you!”

  “Where?” she cried out, desperate, and frightened.

  “Crowden!”

  Such power as Privet had revelled in but moments before was all gone, replaced by terror and helplessness. His paw was at her rump, and she rushed and running, tripping and supported by him as the flat surface of the Top, with its hags and clear spaces, rocks and stones, dashed at her, and the light was still bright as they splashed and ran and hurried through the puddles the sudden thaw had left.

  “Rooster!” she screamed, beginning to find her voice again as she realized he meant it, he was taking her, they were leaving, now. “No!”

  But her cry seemed only to strengthen his terrifying resolve to rid the Top of her, for suddenly they were among the fissures of the outcrop at the Top itself, hurrying through them, his grip on her so tight and powerful that she felt quite helpless.

  “Rooster, I didn’t mean —”

  “Meant!” he roared. “I mean! Always I mean. My words mean! You cannot do that!”

  Then they were through the outcrop and beyond to that slope down across the Moors which led all that difficult and sullen way to distant Crowden.

  “I can’t,” she wailed, suddenly distraught with tears, and weak, and very, very frightened.

  He stopped as suddenly as he had started, so suddenly indeed that had he not had so tight a grip of her she would have shot forward and tumbled down the slope ahead among the wet heather and black peat hags. He stopped, and ignoring all her cries and wails, stared through narrowed, furious eyes across the Moor.

  There, coming towards them, even more massive than him, was a great wall of grey driving rain, and playing above and beyond it were flashes of lightning. He let go of her and went forward a short distance towards it. Shaking, crying, shocked, Privet stared as he raised his disproportioned paws in a gesture of defiance at the approaching storm. His huge dark form was black against the fast-approaching slate-grey clouds from which, in a great slant sweep across the Moors below, rain or hail seemed to fall.

  As she watched the sound of thunder grew louder, the lightning flashes wilder, and she saw before she turned back towards the shelter of the outcrop the Moors turn white beneath the stormfall, though whether with water or hail she could not tell.

  When she reached the outcrop once more, and turned to look back, the light growing more darkly menacing all the time, she saw that Rooster was returning as well. It seemed to her, watching him then, that he was the embodiment of the storm he preceded, and far from seeming dwarfed by its banking, driven clouds and slanting fall behind him, he controlled it; he was it.

  He reached her, stared at her, and she saw horror in his eyes; horror that she knew came in some way from her, or from what she had done.

  “Rooster …” she tried to say, reaching out to him.

  “You stay. You shelter. You shelter now!”

  He gesticulated ahead of him and she ran back the way they had come, the lightning crackling all about them and what had been bright day turned now to flashing night.

  “Back to our tunnel!” he roared, his voice rising above the thunderstorm.

  Lightning cracked, thunder crashed and she ran towards the entrance; her fear had rushed her through before she felt his paw on hers, guiding, gentle, firm, strong, powerful, and she heard him growling ‘our tunnel’ and felt at last that they might be one, they might, one day.

  “Yes!” she cried ahead of him. “Yes Rooster, yes!”

  As they reached the entrance and dived down into it the first hail fell, heavy and stinging on their backs, scattering around their paws, and then they were safe again. She turned to him and looked at his huge dark shape where it loomed at the portal, as beyond it the dark sky was filled with lightning-lit hail.

  He reached to her as she to him and he took her in his paws, tight and powerful, and she felt his huge body pressed to hers, and his strength, and heard him cry, “Wanted to kill you, wanted to hurt you, wanted wanted wanted that!”

  Then, breaking from her, he rushed past as if fleeing from the raging storm itself, and passed on down the tunnel, crying, roaring, raging, she did not know.

  “Rooster!” she cried after him, but her voice was drowned by the storm sounds all about.

  “Let him go, let him be, let him be …” she heard herself whispering, as she lowered herself slowly to the ground, back to the portal, the tunnel ahead lit up by recurrent flashes of lightning, as she gave herself up to tears and cries and knew that somewhere ahead, somewhere among his delvings, he was doing the same.

  ‘Our’ tunnel lay before her, and Privet knew she was not afraid of it now, or its darkness, or its light, for what was there was meant to be: she would play the games of anger and reproach no more, but strive to be as near like herself, as she felt herself to be.

  “Stone, give me strength for it and for him; give me strength to love him. Help me, Stone.”

  Help me, Stone — the prayer all moles must make if they are to turn from the narrow way of their past’s forming, to the wide confusing plain of their personal discovery whose breadth only they, and they alone, can chart, The moments are few when historians can say that there, in that hour, something happened that changed the course of moledom’s history. This was one of them.

  Recovering herself, and as the storm continued, Privet followed Rooster down the tunnel, and turned the way he had gone, to those places beneath Hilbert’s Top where she had never been. His ragings she could hear, and the crashings of his talons, and his cries and grunts. But she ventured on, for he was her destiny and she would shirk it no more.

  How strange and striking the tunnels she found herself in, arched askew and carved with thin lines and stark embossments which harboured sound, and echoed it. Here and there were places where the walls were shiny, while in other spots the mole who delved the way had made use of outcropping rock to create great shadows across vast walls, from which, infrequently, there thrust out into the light some stone, or ancient root of a long-lost tree.

  The meaning of it all defeated her, but she felt its presence and its beauty, and suspected from the feeling of age about the place that this was Hilbert’s work. Beyond was Rooster’s place, and when she came to it she knew that whatever it was he had made he was destroying in his rage.

  The tunnels reverberated with the storm of thunder above, and with Rooster’s sounds, but Privet was not afraid, only sorry for what she felt she had done, and anxious to make amends. How she would do so she did not know, but from the moment he had taken her to him, so briefly, so wildly, she had felt tenfold the aching need for him that she had felt in her fantasies before ever she had come to Hilbert’s Top. It was this need, physical and emotional, that drove her on without thought of its real nature, or any understanding of what it might mean.

  She turned a corner and his sounds grew louder, and as she did she saw that the carvings were all new, and the tunnel different; delicate, light, insinuating. She paused in wonder at what she knew he must have made. Then more crashes came, more sobs, and she started forward more quickly, understanding that in the rage she had put into him he was destroying something of what he had made. She turned another corner in time to see, amidst the dust and debris of a great chamber, Rooster stanced with his paws upraised towards the furthest wall.

  She saw enough to cause her to cry out, “No!” but it was too late. His taloned paws came down on what she knew was most beautiful.

  “No!”

  In those moments she had time to see, before it was destroyed, a carved wall and arch of complex beauty, all intricate and turned in and out, with light from above which shifted and played upon the place he had made. As she stared at it she realized too that the sound of storm and rage that echoed in the place came not from the tempest outside, but was reflected from the wall and all its subtle hollows and was the Dark Sound of Rooster himself.

  Dark Sound! She had kenned it
in the Crowden texts, but known it only to be something insupportable. Here, and Rooster’s, it was not so much dark as muted, sad, the yearning call of a mole who knows not what to do. Rut beyond all that was the sense she had that what she saw in that last moment of its existence could not be replaced. The cracking, frightening sound in that chamber was the sound of a mole rending from something he could not bear to hold on to longer.

  So when Privet cried out ‘No!” she knew already it was too late and that her cry was as redundant to the life that was as a surviving mole’s tears are to a mole that’s gone. It was a sound she had heard before — the sound she had made inside herself, unheard by anymole, when she had found the body of her father Sward down in Chieveley Dale.

  “Rooster!” she called, and went to him, and reached her paws up to his great rough back and touched him, even as he continued to raise his paws and pound them down to break and smash the lovely, intricate, detailed thing he had made.

  “Rooster!”

  The sound of dying began to fade, dust fell, fragments slipped, and only his heavy tired breathing remained, and her paws upon him, light and almost nothing to his strength.

  “My dear,” she whispered, her head bowing to his flank; ‘My darling’ she wanted to say but dared not.

  My dear.

  He turned and stared down at her, his face-fur dark with dust, the creases about his eyes and forehead filthy with it, his chest heaving, his great mouth open.

  “Rooster, I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m … so … sorry,” she cried, “I didn’t understand.”

  Understanding by her of him, and by him of her, was almost audible in the ruined, broken place, for even after all he had done the remnant carvings and delves held sound, and whispered it, and all was gentle, all quiet, all close. She reached out to him and he to her, and for a second time that day they held each other, and never in all her life, never in all her dreams, never among all her hopes, had there been such closeness as she now felt, such oneness.

  So huge was his strength and yet so gentle his hold that Privet had the illusion — and not entirely an illusion, since her paws now barely touched the ground — that she was floating in a place of security and love such as she had sought all her life, had often missed, yet had never imagined what it might be like.

  Indeed, so gentle did it seem, and so beautiful, that as he held her, and as she felt their need for each other begin to shine and ripple like early summer sunlight on a clear blue lake, she wept silent tears, and her sounds were the murmured sobs of one who has come home. But to Rooster it was not of his own strength that he was conscious, but the feel of her paws about him, and the warmth of her body, and all the love and passion he felt flowing from her, which made him feel wanted and desired, loved and cherished.

  Which being so, when he opened his eyes after their long embrace — and held on to her lest she let him go — it was not ruin he saw about him, or broken walls, or delvings destroyed, but the wonder of a world which was suddenly his own, and a passion and a trust that was returned. In his own deep way he laughed, happy at what he saw beyond the destruction his rage had caused.

  “Why do you laugh?” she whispered, pressing ever closer to him, and feeling shy and wanton, embarrassed and brazen, and beyond all that the sense that there was nowhere else in the whole of moledom that she would rather be than where she now was.

  “Thinking that what I just did, here, is the best delving I ever did!”

  “Oh, but you ruined it, Rooster. It was so beautiful.”

  “Better now. Wasn’t right before. Made me angry with myself …”

  “I made you angry, not talking, not sharing …”

  “Was angry before; have been angry a long time. Long time.”

  They held each other close again and where earlier she had wept tears from the sense of wonder and beauty she felt, she now wept tears of release, and sorrow. Tears for that world which she had seen and to which she had heard him bid farewell.

  “Want to talk,” he said. “Want to tell. “Bout Glee and Humlock. About my mother, about the Charnel. And … and …”

  “And, my love?”

  “Want to listen, want to learn, want to know about you and moledom.”

  “Me and moledom?” she repeated with a gay laugh. “Moledom and I? I’m not sure that moledom knows much about Privet yet!”

  “Rooster knows less,” said Rooster. “Want to know …”

  So they touched and held and began to love, unwilling for a long time to let each other go. Rut finally they pulled apart, stared into each other’s eyes in wonder, touched and touched again, and touching still as if to affirm that each was there they went back down the tunnel to their communal place.

  On their way they turned back to the portal outside. The storm had passed, and in its place had come the heavy pure silence of a steady fall of snow, great and beautiful, as if to cut them off for ever from any world but their own.

  Rut Rooster said, “When spring comes, Privet, we’ll be ready to go.”

  “Until then we have each other to ourselves.”

  “We have!” he said in wonder.

  They turned and went back to the chamber they had shared for molemonths past and stanced in silence for a moment, unsure what to say.

  “Feel like delving,” said Rooster before long. “Feel like delving a place for us. Feel like delving something I never have before. Will delve.”

  She looked at him with love. “Does that mean I’ve got to go somewhere else?”

  He grinned lopsidedly and shook his head slowly. “Want you near. Want to talk.”

  “Rooster?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know something? For the first time since I left Crowden I feel I want to scribe. All my life I’ve been with texts and studied them. Now I want to scribe, to make something. Like you want to delve.”

  “The delving need,” he said, “like that?”

  “Yes,” she said happily, “I’m sure it’s like that.”

  “We will,” he said.

  He reached his paws to her and she came to him and he looked down at her and said, “When I was angry, when you wouldn’t talk, I wanted to hurt you. Wanted to kill you. But in the Delvings they said a mole must never feel that. Never. A Master of the Delve can never be a Master if he has hurt a mole. Never ever ever. But I wanted to hurt you.”

  “I wanted to hurt you, Rooster.”

  He grinned, relieved. “Shall scribe, shall delve, shall talk: that’s us. Not hurt.”

  “And eat!” said Privet practically.

  “And touch,” said Rooster with slight but delicious menace to his voice.

  “When?” asked Privet breathlessly, her heart pounding, her body weakening towards his.

  “When …?” he mused.

  His paws reached for her, massive and inexorable; her paws stretched out to his, timid and thrilled. Reaching, stretching, yearning wanting … how each generation of moles that hears their tale reaches with them, stretches to them, and yearns and aches that their consummation was there, and then, so much needing love, so unknowing that what they felt and needed was what all moles sometimes need.

  “Afraid,” said Rooster, eyes wide and wild, afraid of the power he felt surging in himself, afraid of the great waves of desire that battled to overtake the fear and ignorance instilled into him in the Channel.

  Whilst Privet, unused to such a moment, not knowing that all she had to do was touch him now as she had touched him earlier by his delving, sensed his fear and was afraid herself. If only you will touch me, each said to themselves as their paws hovered, faltered, and fell back; if you wanted to you would, so as you don’t you can’t want to, not, not, not yet …

  “Rooster?”

  He stared, utterly confused.

  “Will you hold me like you did before?”

  “Will,” he said, and came to her and clumsily took her in his paws. She felt his strength, closed her eyes into his good scent, as hidden from his sight two
tears coursed down her thin face. Not for herself entirely, but for him as well, for the pain she felt in him, and the remorse, and the guilt …

  “Wanted to hurt you before,” he mumbled again, shocked.

  Her tears came again, for she felt a sense of loss suddenly for something they had so nearly touched moments before, but which had now retreated before them, and might never come back again. He held her as a brother might and that power she had felt and for a moment seen, that open, raging sexuality — whose name she did not know, whose existence she had never before guessed — was repressed again.

  The talons of his paws moved and kneaded into her back, and for a moment the thrill returned.

  “Gone. Wanting to hurt you gone,” he said. “Feel the delving need, feel it strong. But stronger still want to tell you, want to share.”

  His voice sounded lighter and more excited by the moment, as if the burden of years was lifting from him.

  Joy came back to her, but joy at a friend’s call, not that of a lover.

  He pulled her closer and she positively gasped, laughing at the same time.

  “You are a strange mole, Rooster,” she said, not without disappointment.

  He pulled away from her, grinning. They had been somewhere dangerous, they had touched things they were not yet ready to touch, and they had come back to the real world, still together, and closer still.

  “Wanted to hurt you but didn’t,” he said. “Feel better. Can talk now.”

  “About what?”

  “About being Master of the Delve.”

  She stared at his laughing eyes and saw the way his whole body was easier and in control once more. How could such a mole, so cumbersome, so heavy, so strong, seem to her so beautiful? It was the only word she knew.

  “Master?” she said faintly.