Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  “Remember this tree, Maple, and that its old dead trunk, which seems to have nothing left to give, can still tell a tale worth remembering to the mole who knows what language it speaks. And though the names of the moles who once sheltered here may be forgotten — and certainly none could remember them when I first heard the tale on this very spot from my father’s mouth — their courage and their faith lives on. Our heritage is something we all need at some time to remind us of our origin and identity. Remember that, Maple, always remember it.”

  Maple stared down at the old mole and saw as it seemed for the first time how solid his paws were upon the ground, for all their pale frailty. Before such wisdom, and such truth to the past, all present troubles seemed as nothing.

  “Master …” began Maple, for he sensed suddenly that such another chance as this to talk to moledom’s greatest scholar and librarian might never come his way, and he felt time was running out and that all his years of waiting as a warrior in the side tunnels of life were over, and great things, dangerous things, were on them now and that here, right here before him, was the making of memory he might one day need. So …

  “Master,” he began, wondering what it was he sought.

  “I see you need reassurance, Maple,” said Stour. “Fear not, for though I myself have never been as close to the Stone as I would wish since doubts get in my way, I know it is there for all to find and trust. It will give you no task you have not strength and courage to fulfill, nor place you before any enemy you cannot overcome, so long as its Light and Silence are in what you seek to do.”

  “And you, Master? Will you be safe?”

  Old Stour smiled, his pale eyes clear, his gaze on Maple like that of a father upon a son: “No, no, I shall not be safe. None of us are ever ‘safe’. But loved in the Stone I shall be, even I who have so many doubts of faith and whom some have called an unbeliever! The Stone’s Silence is my destination now and I shall be safer in retreat trying to find it than if an army of the greatest Siabod moles that ever lived came to look after me.

  “But now the Wood trembles for itself, the winds fret, and this old librarian grows cold and hungry and tired. Lead me on, Maple, deliver me up to where I would be ‘safe’! And remember that I loved this system, and value more highly a single morning in its company than all the honours and the power that my years of scholarship and work with moledom’s greatest texts might bring.”

  “I will, Master, always!” said Maple fervently.

  Soon after that their route grew clearer and they passed into the High Wood, so that a journey that had seemed so slow to Maple at first, was suddenly and regretfully over. The entrance down into the Library loomed and Stour paused one last time to look about the leafless beeches of the High Wood, and through the windswept dells that stretched into the distance to east and to west, over to the south, and back downslope to the north.

  Stour’s face grew grim, as did Drubbins’ beside him, and when in later years Maple recounted that historic moment, he would say that though he had no sense then that moledom’s history was turning there in the wood that day with them, yet something made him look around as well, as if it felt important that he should remember the Wood as Stour then saw it.

  “Remember!” the Master had said, and looking around him Maple knew he always would, and that one day when time had given perspective to that moment and that day, he would understand better what it was he had been party to. He moved a little way from his charges the better to look about.

  He was brought out of this moment of reverie by the sound of movement, and looking back to Stour and Drubbins once more he found they had turned from the scene about them, ducked their heads, and were halfway through the entrance of the tunnel that led into the Library, and their pawsteps were already echoing ahead of them into a dark future nomole could foresee.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  But the future was already happening, and bringing discomfort and dismay to the moles who might have seemed the least endangered of all: Fieldfare and Pumpkin.

  After the others had set out on their risky treks across the Wood, Pumpkin had lain meekly enough for a time, recovering from the battering and shock he had received, first with fitful sleep, then with the food and tender loving care that Fieldfare was so adept at providing to anymole that needed looking after, and then with a time of deeper sleep. But then he woke, and he felt refreshed and restless and was up on his paws and eager to be doing.

  “Doing what, Pumpkin? Our orders are to stay here and stay here we shall,” said Fieldfare.

  “Doing something,” he replied, “that’s what. Why, a library aide can’t just lie about with the day advanced, the Master on the way to the Library, with scholars needing help all over the wood and with Rolls, Rhymes and Tales in ruins and awaiting attention. Why, this is a crisis, Fieldfare, and nomole is going to say that old Pumpkin failed to serve when he was most needed!”

  With this he looked about the chamber for a way out on to the surface, and seeing it, struggled to raise himself up and head towards it. But seeing his intention, and wishing to thwart it, Fieldfare placed her ample frame in front of the only exit and looked determined.

  “Maple said we were to stay here until he or Chater came back and that’s what we’ll do —”

  “Is that the way out?” interrupted Pumpkin, pointing over her plump shoulder, then trying ineffectually to squeeze by.

  “It doesn’t matter if it is, we must stay here, my dear,” said Fieldfare. “Have another worm and rest, you can do no good out there.”

  “I can do no good in here!” declared Pumpkin, too polite to try to push his way past, even if he could have managed to shift her, and so dancing about from paw to paw. “There’s work to do, Fieldfare. Dear me, I can’t just stay here.”

  “You must, Pumpkin.”

  “Let me by!” said Pumpkin, suddenly making a dive for a gap a quarter his size between her rounded flank and the portal’s side. They locked in a reluctant embrace which after only a few moments left Pumpkin breathless and dazed. He was not made for fighting, nor even tussling, and never had been.

  “Dear oh dear, this is unseemly and quite unnecessary!” he sighed at last, falling back and pawing at his patchy fur to get it straight again. “How can I persuade you to let me go and do my duty?”

  “I’m only doing mine,” said Fieldfare amiably, “and I must say you are making it very difficult …”

  But, if she had been about to say more, or Pumpkin about to continue the argument, neither did so, but instead fell silent. From somewhere above them, out on the surface, came a shout and the patter of solid, stealthy paws. Then more such sounds, and the gathering of three or four moles right above their heads.

  Fieldfare backed away from the entrance she had been defending, her eyes suddenly afraid.

  “They’re Newborns, Pumpkin,” she whispered, “I know they are.” Anger, despair, fear and apprehension were in her face.

  The pawsteps ran about above them, there was another shout, and the sounds went away, beyond the chamber’s roof.

  “They’ve found the eastern entrance,” whispered poor Fieldfare, coming clear of the portal and stancing close to Pumpkin.

  For a moment the library aide saw his way was clear to escape, and indeed he considered doing so. But only for a moment, for his sense of duty to the Library was quite overcome by the need, most unfamiliar to such a mole as he who until the night before had never been in trouble in his life, but who now once more … by the need … to defend Fieldfare. Redoubtable she might be, but despite her protestations the night before about having lost all fear, a sense of horror came over her as the stealthy pawsteps and voices began to echo about her tunnels reminding her of her time in the Marsh End and then, horror compounded with horror, to come closer. And with them voices …

  “This way!”

  “It goes on down here!”

  “I’m sure these are the tunnels where Sister Fieldfare and her consort in sin the journeymole C
hater live!”

  Sister Fieldfare?

  It was enough to freeze Fieldfare into a stance of despairing hopeless fear, in which her kindly face, her generous flanks, her gentle paws, seemed to shrink and wither before Pumpkin’s eyes.

  “The Stone will protect us!” he said fiercely, outraged that anything or anymole could have such an effect on good Fieldfare.

  “They’ve come for me,” whispered Fieldfare, “as they said they would!”

  “The Stone will not have this!” declared Pumpkin stoutly, Fieldfare’s terrible fear his sudden strength. “Stay still and say not a single word!” he ordered. “Leave things to me!”

  “To you?” said Fieldfare, looking wildly around the chamber as if in hope of finding something or somemole more substantial than Pumpkin.

  “Sister Fieldfare!” came the Newborn call again, insinuating itself down the nearby tunnel and into the chamber where they now stanced in dismay and fear. Hearing it Fieldfare wilted still further, and all her normal resolve was gone, as with one last vestige of courage and concern for others she said hopelessly, “I must go to them and perhaps they’ll not find you …”

  “Yes, me!” cried out Pumpkin, brushing busily at his flanks and sleeking his meek face-fur down as if in hope of making himself more presentably fierce. “Leave things to me. Certainly you must.”

  It was as feeble a war-cry as ever moledom heard, yet war-cry it was, if only for an army of one, and with it, and with no thought of his own safety at all, Pumpkin turned towards the portal which until then had been denied him by the very mole he was now seeking to protect, and went out into the tunnel to face their Newborn adversaries.

  When he was gone Fieldfare sank down to the earthen floor, head low, snout abject, eyes half closed as her spirit began to die. And so she stayed, even when voices drifted down to her, the first being Pumpkin’s.

  “Looking for Sister Fieldfare?” he called out.

  “We are!” cried out several purposeful voices.

  “Well, you’ll not find her here. Wrong tunnel, wrong burrow.”

  “And who are you?” a cold voice asked. Young, strong and zealous.

  “Library Aide Pumpkin and you’re in my tunnels.”

  “Brother, would you not welcome us?”

  “Welcome you? Me? Old Pumpkin’s glad to see anymole, of course. Ha, ha, ha.” Pumpkin’s cracked laugh was the laugh of nervousness and fear.

  “Any other moles down there with you, Brother?”

  “Hundreds!” said Pumpkin. “Oh yes, they all flock to Pumpkin’s flank! Pumpkin’s so incredibly popular! Ha, ha, ha! Come and see for yourself!”

  There was a dreadful pause, and then these nightmare words from another mole, a female mole, a mole Fieldfare knew.

  “We will,” said Bantam, and pawsteps came nearer, and long shadows and the acrid scent of zealots played at the portal beside which Fieldfare crouched. Her fur was spiky with the sweat of terror, her eyes staring, her chest tight, and heaving with the gulping, shallow breaths of panic.

  “I thought these were Fieldfare’s tunnels,” said Bantam.

  “They were,” piped Pumpkin, “but she consorts now with Chater the journeymole and lives upslope of here.”

  “Hmmph!” muttered Bantam, pausing but moments from the portal, her fierce shadow falling upon the floor of the chamber.

  Bantam’s snout appeared at the portal; then a glimpse of a paw, then a flank, and in Fieldfare’s chest her heart beat again and again and again, faster and faster, such that it must surely be heard. And she wanted to cry out, “I am here, take me! Release me from this doubt!”

  “Here,” said Fieldfare to the portal at last, “I am here!”

  But her terror was too complete for her voice to carry far, and before her whispered declaration could be heard Bantam turned and was gone.

  Fieldfare could not afterwards remember what happened next, except for some dim sense that she had been rushed out through the tunnels, and out on to the surface to a place of safety, away from the Newborns.

  However it had been, she ‘woke’ from a state of shock to the urgent bidding of Pumpkin’s voice, and found herself in the rough shelter of a tangled bramble bush out on the slopes far enough away from her burrow not to recognize the place.

  “Come on, Fieldfare, you’ve got to move, more might come. You must try because I haven’t got the strength to take you any further. More Newborns might come, or the others might come back.”

  So, in response to his urgent pleas, she came out of the fear she had been in.

  “Where are we?” she began.

  “As far from your burrows as I could get you before you collapsed,” said Pumpkin, somewhat ruefully. If her chest had been thumping earlier from fear, his was heaving in and out now from the unaccustomed and unwelcome effort of pushing and shoving a female mole twice his size through the Wood.

  “I didn’t go upslope towards the Library,” he explained, “because that’s the way they went, thinking they’d find you there. I didn’t go east because that would have brought us to the Wood’s edge and with nowhere left to go, I didn’t go north downslope because that’s where they came from. So I brought you westward. And anyway …”

  As he explained himself in his roundabout and pedantic way, Fieldfare had time to catch up with herself, realize she was all right and they were both safe; having passed through the death of extreme fear she was beginning to feel the surging courage of rediscovered life.

  As this welcome change came over her, Pumpkin had looked slowly westward, and interrupted himself in a strange voice and with those words: “And anyway …”

  His breathing slowed, light came to his eyes and with it a look of purpose quite different from that which had overtaken him when Fieldfare had been in such peril. Now another kind of strength entered him, and he stanced up, mouth half open with his unfinished thought and sentence, looking like a mole who has caught sight of something among distant trees, something he cannot see clearly but for which he has searched for a long time.

  “What is it, Pumpkin?” asked Fieldfare.

  “It’s Rolls and Rhymes, yes, it’s there. We must go there. It’ll be all right if we go there.”

  “Then let’s go there!” said Fieldfare, now quite ready to do whatever the brave and courageous and most purposeful Pumpkin advised her. He had been right thus far and she had no reason to think that the Stone would not see him right to the end.

  “Work to do …” he muttered, “lots of work …” and away he busily led her, out of the temporary shelter he had found and on through the Wood towards where once old Husk had lived.

  But they had hardly started before scattered drops of rain came down, now before them, now behind them, now to their right and left. Then the rain stopped and wind flurried by. Then a few drops of rain fell once more, and the sky darkened with heavy clouds that were the tide of time.

  “Must get there quickly, Fieldfare, to save what texts we can,” said Pumpkin, and Fieldfare saw that his eyes still held the light of a task ahead.

  It was that same rain which woke Privet, Whillan and Chater from the strange sleep they had fallen into.

  They had left the clearing after Husk’s death and final passage to the Stone’s Silence, but their plan of going to Rolls and Rhymes had soon faltered, and it was not Privet who slowed them down, but Chater.

  Just as, unknown to each other, Pumpkin in one place, and Maple in another, had had revealed to them a glimpse of the Stone’s Light and need for their support, so Chater had as well. The strongest had weakened, for not long after leaving the clearing he had paused and said he felt … Well, he knew not what he felt: strange; tired; sick.

  But to Privet it seemed that the light in his eyes was more alive than anything she had seen there before, and to Whillan this sudden faltering of Chater was all of a piece with the mystery of that morning, when the Stone rather than themselves seemed to be directing them.

  “Can’t go on, Privet, must rest for a bit
,” Chater had said, astonished at his own feebleness, and wishing to reach out for something that lay ahead of him at the same time as he wanted to find a temporary burrow and close his eyes and yield up to the heavy tiredness that inexplicably beset him. It was Whillan who took charge, finding a scrape that would serve to give them shelter from the adversities of the day, where they might rest until Chater was recovered.

  But what began as rest for Chater drifted in no time at all into sleep for all of them, and huddled together in fatigue they slid into a dreamless darkness, and the Stone watched over them.

  Until, towards midday, the plop! plop! plop! of rain on the leaf-litter just above their heads woke them with a start, and they knew as one that they must go to Rolls and Rhymes immediately. It was just that they had needed time to pause.

  So it was that by the time they arrived at the ruins of Rolls and Rhymes, Pumpkin and Fieldfare had been there all morning, and long since discovered that there was little left to save but the few broken fragments of texts and folios which had by chance found shelter from the torrential storm under some fallen branch or projecting root when the Newborns had done their destructive work. But almost all the precious material had been scattered out on to the open surface, and exposed to wind and rain the long night through, and was now sodden, broken, indecipherable — lost to moledom for ever.

  When he had first seen the ruined tunnels of the place, and the destruction the Newborns had so effectively wrought, the light of hope that had shone in Pumpkin’s eyes had faded, and he had wept. But then his long training in the care of texts had reasserted itself, and he had wandered here and there, sifting out the few remnants that made sense to him, while Fieldfare kept watch, and encouraged him as best she could in his work.

  They knew what they were doing, Deputy Keeper Privet,” he said sombrely. When he heard of Husk’s death he openly broke down and cried, as much for what seemed the death of a lifetime of work as for Husk. “They made sure the rain got to everything, and even waited to see that it did, pulling out texts which were protected by others so that all suffered the same fate,” he said, his normally cheerful and positive voice as near to bitterness as any of them ever heard him get. “But at least Keeper Husk is in the Silence of the Stone, which is a blessing in such a troubled time as this seems to be. We have that to be thankful for.”