Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  For each mole these moments lasted a very long time; for all of them together they lasted for no longer than it takes to draw breath. Then Mandrake’s paws dropped as he saw that the owl was no more than an image; the henchmole tried to recover his nonchalant stance, and Rune almost purred with pleasure at the sight before them. Rue’s screams could be heard coming up the tunnel from her burrow.

  ‘Shut her up,’ ordered Mandrake without taking his eyes off the image before him. The henchmole left the burrow.

  ‘Well, well!’ said Mandrake robustly. ‘So at long last the decaying Duncton system has actually sprung a surprise. You know what it is, don’t you Rune?’

  ‘I have an idea,’ lied Rune. It was the pleasant face of power, as far as he was concerned.

  ‘I have seen owl faces like this before,’ said Mandrake, ‘in burrows far from here, on my way from Siabod. They were used by ancient moles to create fear in the minds of moles who might feel tempted to see what secrets lie in the tunnels beyond. Very effective on some moles, not much use on a mole like me. See, they don’t really protect anything worth protecting. It’s all nonsense, isn’t it? Just a joke that ought to make a mole laugh.’

  Meanwhile, Bracken, who was listening to this from his vantage point beyond the flint but could not fully understand what was happening, had heard Mandrake’s blow on the flint and seen its effect—for it was so powerful it sent some remnants of the soil cover on his side down on to the tunnel floor and on to his coat as well. He didn’t dare shake it off for fear that he might be heard. Then a silence followed the terrible screech of talon on stone: he heard one of the moles scream and pawsteps fading away, he heard what sounded like Mandrake himself snarl with rage, but then nothing more for some moments. Until Mandrake’s deep voice gave an inaudible command, and then, a little muffled by the flint between, said, ‘You know what it is, don’t you, Rune?’

  So Rune was there! But what was ‘it’? He listened on.

  The conversation that followed was largely meaningless to Bracken until, at last, Mandrake said that he had seen ‘owl faces like this’ in a system he had lived in for a short time ‘on my way from Siabod’.

  So there was an owl face on the far side of the flint! And it was a scaring-off device.

  Beyond the flint, Mandrake and Rune finished their discussion. ‘So, for the time being, we’ll leave it as it is,’ Mandrake was saying. ‘We will create the impression that we have faced great dangers—an idea which will no doubt be reinforced by that shambling henchmole, who seemed very frightened indeed.’

  Then he added: ‘I’m glad you weren’t affected by it, Rune—I wouldn’t want to think that you are afraid of things like this.’ He tapped the owl beak with his talons, the sound echoing into the ancient tunnels beyond, way past Bracken.

  Rune smiled, pitying Mandrake for taking the owl so lightly. ‘We know better,’ he was effectively saying to himself, ‘we of the dark powers, we of the black beak and talon, we of the impenetrable eye.’

  Mandrake took his talons from the flint before him with an unaccustomed shiver. It was very cold and there was something in the way that Rune was looking at him which had the same blank quality of the owl’s eyes. He didn’t like Rune. You couldn’t trust a mole like him. Mandrake turned his back on the owl and left down the tunnel towards Rue’s burrow. His gait was suddenly heavy and ponderous and he felt tired. Tired and old. It was true that in his confrontation with the owl image he had, finally, lost all sense of physical fear, though Mandrake lived in too great a haze of anger and confusion to know the fact. But when a mole loses such fear, the freedom he finds may serve only to make him prey to the darker, more perilous fears that lurk beyond all moles’ bodies and inhabit their minds.

  Rune watched him go down the tunnel, perceiving the new fatigue in his movements as only a mole of his diabolic insight possibly could. Rune looked back to the black eyes of the owl, then forward again at Mandrake, and knew that the hour when he would take power in Duncton was getting nearer.

  Lacking any instruction, Rue followed the three big moles up out of the tunnels and on to the surface, where she crouched, blinking in the light, wondering what was going to happen to her.

  ‘Shall I have her killed?’ asked Rune, looking at Mandrake and aware that the henchmole was itching to do it. Rue cowered pathetically before them, staring at the big henchmole whom she knew hated her. Too cowed even to raise her talons in self-defence. She knew she was going to die.

  Mandrake looked round at her. It would be wrong, quite wrong, to say that the light of pity shone in his heart. ‘Pity’ was a word that Mandrake never knew. It was sheer tiredness with the effort of violence. Time was when he would have nodded his head, and Rune would have raised his talon as a signal, and the henchmole would have plunged his talons as a pleasant job. Not now.

  ‘What’s the point?’ said Mandrake, looking blankly at Rue. Rune and the henchmole looked at Rue with complete contempt and then all three of them turned away from her as if she did not exist anymore. And the sense that she was so worthless that she wasn’t worth killing was so great in Rue that she just crouched there stunned, unable even to relax in the knowledge that at last they had gone and she was safe. Then she started to cry, for she could not follow them back to Barrow Vale and she could not return into the tunnels that had started to be her home. She seemed to have nowhere to go. In her misery she wanted to do nothing but die, to forget the system into which she regretted ever having been born.

  And there, a few molehours later, exposed in the open and vulnerable to owl attack, Bracken found her. He had heard her first, for after the moles had gone from the tunnels, he crept over there himself and, having established there was nomole there, went up on to the surface where he heard the shaky breathing and occasional sobs and he quietly went out to see who it might be.

  He watched her for a long time, puzzled that she should stay crouched out in the open as dangerous dusk fell and trying to decide for one last time whether he should risk making contact with another mole.

  Finally he came forward to her with enough noise for her to know that he was there. She looked at him but did not run away as he expected. Instead, her snout lowered in a gesture of total defeat and she asked him quietly, ‘Have you come to kill me?’

  Such a thought was so far from his mind—indeed, it was so far from his experience—that it quite took his breath away. He saw that she was small and bedraggled and seemed very frightened, while he (and he looked at the now much glossier fur above his paws and felt the much more powerful muscles that had developed since he had started to regain his strength) was fit and well and must seem confident. Why, he was an adult, and a male, and strong!

  Bracken laughed and said that the only killing he knew of was when moles tried to do it to him. She sniffled and wiped her face with her paw, comforted by his laugh but troubled by the curious wildness about his appearance and the strength that seemed to come from him, even though he wasn’t as big as that Rune and the henchmole. As for that Mandrake, well… nomole was as big as him!

  ‘What mole are you, and where are you from?’ Bracken asked.

  ‘My name is Rue from beyond Barrow Vale,’ she said, ‘but my tunnels were taken away by… they were taken from me. I lived here until the Stone Mole came. What mole are you?’

  ‘Bracken, from the Westside.’ The answer was, in his own mind at least, untrue, for he was really of the Ancient System now. But ever cautious, Bracken had worked out that if he should meet another mole, he would first find out where they were from and then say he was from anywhere else but the Ancient System.

  ‘I knew Hulver,’ he added, by way of explaining why he was there. There was a pause while they considered what to say next. Then each asked a question simultaneously.

  ‘Who’s Hulver?’ asked Rue. ‘Who’s the Stone Mole?’ wondered Bracken. They laughed, their mutual interruption breaking the awkwardness between them. They each sensed that the other meant no harm.

  ‘
It’s a bit unsafe staying here,’ said Bracken. ‘It would be safer in the tunnel.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t go in there,’ said Rue, horrified. ‘The owl’s there.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bracken to her surprise. ‘That’s what I want to see.’

  After a lot of persuasion, he managed to get Rue back into the safety of the tunnels, telling her that the owl would not attack her and, should Mandrake and Rune return, he knew a quick way out to safety. But it was more the simple fact that he so obviously intended not to harm her, and even seemed to have her safety at heart, that finally got her back to the burrow at the heart of Hulver’s system. He even went so far as to get her some worms, and without any difficulty either, since he seemed to know the tunnels quite well. Once fed, they snuggled down on either side of the burrow, where they answered each other’s questions about Hulver and the Stone Mole. Bracken told Rue all about Hulver and Rue explained what she knew, and had heard, about the Stone Mole. He realised long before she got to her own experience in these very same tunnels that he, himself, was the Stone Mole.

  ‘Show me where it happened,’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ whispered Rune, who had worked herself up to a terror just telling the story.

  ‘It won’t hurt you,’ said Bracken. ‘It’s only an image.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Rue.

  A mole like Rune would not have answered this question, for he would have known that a mole’s power often lies in keeping others ignorant, and that it was in Bracken’s interest that nomole knew who he truly was. But Bracken was not aware that he had an interest, being more concerned to reassure Rue, who was the first mole who had been friendly towards him since Hulver himself.

  However, there is a difference between naivety and ingenuousness, and Bracken’s fault, if fault it was, was that he was naive. He told her no more than that he had been into the tunnel behind the great flint and possibly what she had heard had been his noise and actions on the other side—as he had heard Mandrake’s earlier that day. As for the sights he had seen in the Ancient System, and the sounds he had heard, there was something about them that warned him to keep them secret. Some things, especially when a mole does not understand them, are best honoured by being kept secret in the heart rather than scattered to the winds as words.

  Rue would only go so far as the last curve in the tunnel leading to the great flint seal, peering on from there nervously as Bracken went on to the end, raising his voice over his shoulder to keep her reassured.

  He told her ‘It is just an image, just a carving—something the ancient moles used to do to frighten other moles away.’ He raised his talons to the flint on a level with the curve of the beak and scratched it very slightly to show how the sound was made, and its screech whispered round the tunnel like a distant echo of the terrifying sounds he had heard before. She started to cover her ears again, and Bracken stopped. He looked at the owl face, surprised to find that it held no fear for him as the other one had. Looking at it, he felt a different mole from the one who had looked at the other, and he hoped that at last he had found the strength to delve back into the tunnels and make his way to the Chamber of Dark Sound, and beyond.

  ‘Is there a giant mole in there?’ asked Rue.

  ‘There aren’t any moles in there at all, not a single one.’

  ‘But the Stone Mole lives there!’ Rumours die hard, even when the subject of them is there to put the record straight.

  It was late and both of them needed sleep. Bracken thought it wiser to abandon the main burrow, since Mandrake and Rune might come back at any time, and so they occupied instead tunnels to the west of Hulver’s system, where a few abandoned ones remained from some system of the past.

  Even then, Rue might have been reluctant to stay there had not Bracken said that he would stay on a few moledays to help her seal up the connection between these tunnels and the others, so that Rue would have the makings of a system of her own. It was no hardship to him and, indeed, sometime before dawn, he awoke briefly to hear Rue’s deep, peaceful breathing in a burrow near the tunnel where he slept, and was grateful to have company again, even if only temporarily.

  * * *

  Rue was a survivor, and recovered fast from her ordeal. With Bracken there to help her seal off her new system and to burrow out one or two new tunnels and entrances, it very soon took shape. Better than that, it gave Bracken an opportunity to put into practice one or two of the subtleties of shape and sound he had observed in the Ancient System as he created a couple of bigger-than-normal tunnels which Rue looked at in surprise and soon adopted with pleasure. Somehow they managed to pick up the sound of the September rustles of beech leaves from the surface, where hints of the autumn were just beginning to show, and carry them on into the more traditional tunnels that were the basis of her new system.

  There was change in the air. The distant smell of autumn. And not so distant either when the wind blew, carrying a few beech leaves down to the wood’s floor or scurrying the more crinkled leaves of the few oaks that grew on the slopes along between the trees.

  After three moledays, the tunnels began to look spick and span and Rue said, ‘Are these your tunnels?’

  It was a strange question, for Bracken had never thought for one moment that they were. His future lay with the Ancient System and his time here was a welcome respite from pursuing his explorations of it to the end. The question was Rue’s way of asking him when he was leaving. She was restless and increasingly proprietorial about the place and wanted him gone. She wanted to dwell in her own place, or so it seemed to Bracken.

  He looked wearily in the direction of the higher slopes and knew that he must be off. He was beginning to like Rue now that he had seen the nervousness fall off her to be replaced by the good sense that was her nature. She made a mole feel comfortable, even if not always welcome. But that was the way with some females, Burrhead had once told him. Sometimes he was surprised to find that he even felt aggressive, like an adult male, towards her.

  ‘Are these your tunnels?’ The question still waited between them. Well, of course they weren’t. He felt he wanted to mock-fight with her and pretend they were and to let their laughter fill the place with sound, as once or twice his laughter had mingled with Wheatear’s when they were very young pups and when Root wasn’t around to break up their games.

  ‘No, they’re yours. You know that, Rue.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And she got up, restless and a little irritable, and though he didn’t want to go, he felt he should.

  Outside, above the biggest beech on the higher slopes, the September sky was changing. Now blue and clear, now white and cloudy, as the morning hesitated over whether it was the remnant of a defeated summer or the vanguard of a new autumn.

  ‘Well, I’ll go then,’ said Bracken, a little miserably, as he led the way to one of the entrances higher up the slopes. Rue stayed in the burrow as she watched his departure. She was glad to see him go, because there was an uneasy power about him like that of some of the youngsters she had had who had not yet learned their strength and were clumsy in their ignorance. Only this mole’s strength wasn’t physical but something else. He was such a strange mole to be with.

  September. Such a funny month for a female who hasn’t mated in the spring. September. And the morning in the sky above seemed to decide to be a part of autumn.

  Somewhere near the entrance where Bracken paused, his sense of isolation very rapidly returning, a great plop of rain fell; and then another, almost into the entrance itself, spattering on to Bracken’s face and hiding drops of silver in his fur. With a sigh he left the shelter of the tunnel.

  The air Bracken stepped out into was getting heavier by the minute with the pressure of an impending storm, and the blue, clear patches in the sky, now pushed to the end of the wood, were disappearing fast, squeezed out by the heavy grey clouds that darkened the sky and told of the coming of the first autumn storm.

  Several more drops of
rain, and Bracken turned to look at Rue again, but he couldn’t make her out any more in the shadows of the entrance, so he turned away and set off, swinging spontaneously to the southwest towards the Stone rather than towards the place where he could get back into the Ancient System.

  ‘If the Stone calls you,’ Hulver had told him, ‘you go to it, because it knows best.’ In his misery and renewed loneliness, as he left Rue and her tunnels behind, the Stone was calling Bracken, and he obeyed its command.

  Down among the shadows of her tunnel entrance, Rue watched him go, cursing herself as a fool for letting him go just yet, but remembering with a little giggle, which made her sound almost a youngster again, that males, even strange ones like Bracken, have a habit of coming back again when they are needed. Especially by females.

  Chapter Fourteen

  From the moment Rebecca left Barrow Vale for the Westside, after Rune had been called away to hear Rue’s story, she saw what she was doing as a journey of discovery. Perhaps she wanted to find the pastures and to test their scent; perhaps to press on up the legendary slopes to see the Stone; perhaps even to make contact with Bracken at last, though she was now a little nervous of doing so, because part of the price she had paid for holding on with such conviction to the idea that he was alive was that she believed him to be, at the very least, a mole almost as big and powerful as Mandrake himself.

  But these were the vaguest of hopes, for Rebecca lived more in the delightful present than most moles, having little time for reveries concerning herself when there was so much to see, to do, and feel now. And as her journey coincided with the start of autumn in Duncton Wood, there was the excitement of the wood’s sudden surrender to the season of change for her to enjoy.