Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  As he disappeared into the undergrowth, Bracken felt the pain as if it were his own. There was a sense of loss and failure over the mole that made Bracken want to run after him and say, ‘No. It’s not like that, it’s not.’ Though why he wanted to say such a thing, or about what, he did not know.

  The mole’s progress was not hard to follow, for he made a lot of noise and, despite his fear, Bracken followed him. He staggered this way and that, crashing painfully through some brambles and leaving a red-brown smear of blood on a young sapling he brushed against. The more Bracken watched him the less he was afraid and the more he wanted to help in some way. There must be something he could do. Fetch Rose? He would never know where to find her. Rue? Too far, and he doubted if she would want to leave her tunnels having only just refound them.

  He remembered that once Hulver had told him that the juice of sanicle was good for rubbing into wounds, but he didn’t even know what it looked like, whether it was in season, or where to find it. And anyway, looking at this hurt creature, whose wounds looked all the worse for his being so big and once-powerful, Bracken thought that there was no herb that would help him now.

  What would Hulver have done? He would have comforted the mole by talking gently to him. It was this conviction that made Bracken finally break cover, though he did it with some care—approaching the mole from his right side from where, given his wounds, he could more easily see and scent Bracken. He deliberately made a noise as he came near and the mole came to a clumsy halt.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Bracken, ‘I will not harm you.’

  The mole turned his snout painfully towards Bracken and even tried to raise himself on his back paws for a few terrible seconds.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Bracken again. ‘I may be able to help.’

  ‘Where are the pastures?’ asked the mole. ‘Where are my tunnels?’

  ‘The pastures are only fifty yards more,’ said Bracken. ‘Not far.’ Bracken turned towards them and led the way, slowing down when he sensed that even though he was going at a snail’s pace, it was still too fast for the other mole. Finally they reached the wood’s edge where the long grass grew on the wood side of the fence, stirred by the wind that always seemed to come off the pastures.

  The mole slumped down, snout low, and Bracken asked,

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Cairn. From the pastures.’ For him to say that took a long time, for his voice came slowly and with pain.

  ‘Did a Duncton mole do this,’ asked Bracken, ‘because you’re from the pastures?’

  ‘It was a mating fight. I took a woodmole for a mate. A mole called Rune found us. Do you know Rune?’

  There was fear in Cairn’s voice, for it occurred to him that Bracken might be one of Rune’s friends. But then the thought weakened into hopelessness; if he was, so what? It didn’t matter anymore. He knew he was going to die.

  ‘Rune!’ exclaimed Bracken. ‘Yes. I know Rune. Everymole in Duncton does.’

  ‘He found us several days ago and I fought him and chased him away; I should have killed him. It was my first mating fight. He brought another mole and I could not fight him. Not to win. His name was Mandrake.’

  Bracken looked with renewed horror at Cairn. No living mole knew better than he what that meant. Surely there was something he could do.

  Cairn seemed lost in a world of his own, for his head hung down on to the ground, tilted to one side so the wound did not touch the grass, and the only movement was his quick, shallow breathing that made one of his limp paws twist fractionally to the left and then back again with each in-and-out of his breath.

  It occurred to Bracken finally that if only he could get Cairn to go a little way further up the hill to where the Stone faced the west towards far-off Uffington, the line on which he himself had automatically crouched when he had first come to the Stone and on which Hulver had died, there might be some power for comfort there.

  Somehow he coaxed Cairn along, though each step was painful, until at last Bracken could sense that they were in the right place. Cairn seemed to sense it, too, for he slumped down again with a sigh. His breathing grew easier and he was happy to be able to point his snout out over the pastures he loved. It was afternoon and the sky was light, with a few high clouds and some haze far off below them over the vales.

  It was peaceful there and as Bracken faced in the direction of Uffington and felt its power coming to them, with the strength of the Stone from behind, a peace was beginning to fall on the broken and suffering Cairn.

  ‘Tell me about the Stone,’ he whispered. ‘She talked about the Stone. She said, Rebecca told me, that she came up to the Stone after I left her to chase the Rune mole away. She talked a little about it.’

  ‘But nomole has been here,’ said Bracken, until he remembered that a mole had. A female. And he felt again her caress on his shoulder and knew that she had been Rebecca. If only he had stayed to ask her name. If only. For some reason this discovery made him feel at one with Cairn, and he began to understand something of the sense of loss he carried with him.

  ‘Was your mate Mandrake’s Rebecca?’ asked Bracken needlessly.

  Cairn nodded painfully.

  Bracken moved closer to Cairn, flank against flank, trying to warm his body with his own as it grew colder and weaker.

  ‘Talk to me, Bracken. Tell me about the Stone. Tell me about Rebecca.’

  What could Bracken say? He knew little about either, far too little when he thought about it. And what comfort can a mole give to one so injured?

  ‘The Stone is the centre of the Ancient System,’ he began, wondering how to go on. ‘And… and it’s so big that a mole cannot see the top of it. It soars up like a tree without leaf or branch. But you must have seen it when I first saw you, for you were by it.’

  Cairn said nothing, so Bracken continued. ‘It’s where the rituals are carried out, on Longest Night and Midsummer Night, and in the old days rituals now long forgotten were carried out there. They say it will always protect you, but—’ But Bracken did not believe that. It had not protected him or Hulver from Mandrake. It had not miraculously healed Cairn when he came near the Stone.

  Yet—yet the more Bracken saw of the Stone, and was near it, the more he felt its power and understood that it did hold an awesome mystery that a mole was unwise to turn his back on.

  ‘Tell me about Rebecca,’ said Cairn quietly.

  ‘Well, I don’t know much about her, only what other moles have said. She’s big for a female and lives down beyond Barrow Vale; somewhere near Mandrake, I was told once. I’ve heard them say she’s beautiful.’

  He thought of the mole he had guided back to the system two days before and wondered if she was beautiful. It hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘She was always getting into trouble when she was a youngster—you should have heard the stories they told about her in Barrow Vale! Eating worms she shouldn’t, getting her brothers lost accidentally on purpose—that sort of thing. Hulver said something about her once (he was an old mole I knew), he said that she was so full of life that it frightened other moles. But then, a lot of things he said didn’t make much sense, though I think they meant something.’

  Bracken stopped for a moment, but from the way Cairn moved and looked at him, he could tell he was enjoying him talking like this and so Bracken continued.

  He told him the full story about Rebecca stealing the worms from the elder burrows. As he told it, however, a sense of panic began to creep over him, for he sensed that Cairn was slipping away from him—or at least his body was. It was getting stiller and colder, and his breathing was becoming almost imperceptible.

  When Bracken finally stopped talking and could think of nothing else to say, Cairn did not even try to look around at him, though his uninjured eye was half open and looking over the pastures. For a moment Bracken thought that he was… but then Cairn began to talk.

  ‘She told me that story in our burrow when we mated, and how frightened she
was when she was questioned by Mandrake about the worms. Having fought with him and lost, I know she was right to be frightened. There is nomole like Mandrake in the Pasture system, and nomole like that Rune either.’ Each word was painful for him and occasionally he shifted his body heavily, as if in an effort to make it easier for him to speak, and Bracken saw that every word he spoke must have meant a great deal for him to have suffered the pain of getting it out.

  Cairn went on. ‘She said she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about and didn’t see why they didn’t find more worms, which they must have done anyway.’

  Bracken nodded but said nothing, not wanting to interrupt Cairn’s painful flow of words.

  ‘Rebecca said she couldn’t understand why behaving “naturally”, as she put it, should be such a crime. What was worse for her was that Mandrake made her be polite with the other moles—which, as she didn’t like some of them, was “unnatural”. She was made to speak only when she was spoken to—which must have been hard for her.’ Cairn almost managed a little laugh and Bracken saw his face wrinkling a little, where it could, into lines of love and affection for his Rebecca.

  ‘Why does all this have to happen?’ asked Cairn, his words now so weak that Bracken could hardly hear them. ‘Why do moles sometimes get so angry that they kill each other? What was wrong with me and Rebecca being together? I was just going when they came. A few more minutes and I would have been gone. A few minutes and it would have been different. You ask your Stone why. I’d like to know what it answers.’

  Cairn turned with great difficulty to Bracken and the bewilderment in his voice was replaced by real pride as he said, ‘She was my first mate.’ Bracken hardly dared draw breath for the frailty he now saw in the once-powerful mole beside him. ‘She was my only mate,’ he said softly.

  ‘Then Mandrake came and just took it away. Him and that Rune mole. I could have killed him before.’ There was a long silence that Bracken did not try to break. Finally Cairn found the strength to go on: ‘He’s killed me. If Stonecrop had been there we would have killed them both. He’s my brother. He can fight like no other mole in the pastures. Why does a mole like Mandrake come? Why me?’

  ‘Why him,’ Bracken wondered. Why him? At that moment he could have wished almost any other mole to be suffering in Cairn’s place, himself included. Why him?

  ‘Why not me?’ Bracken muttered to himself, not realising that he too had suffered and might yet suffer much, much more.

  ‘I don’t know the answer to anything,’ said Bracken, ‘at least to anything like that.’

  Cairn suddenly began to tremble violently and when Bracken put a paw on his back to comfort and still him, he found the fur was wet with cold sweat. The blood of the wounds on his face and back had congealed, though a trickle of fresh blood still flowed down from the wounds at his back haunches; fresh blood from the wound on his back had trickled between the two moles and hardened their fur together.

  The evening was near enough for the air to have started to cool, but far enough for the sky still to be light.

  ‘Have you the strength to move?’ Bracken asked. ‘I could help you across the pastures to one of your tunnels and perhaps somemole could try to find Rose the Healer.’ It was a brave suggestion, for if Pasture moles had found Bracken with Cairn in this condition they would have killed him first and asked questions afterwards.

  But Cairn shook his head and settled even further into the thick grass, leaning his weight more against Bracken’s body.

  ‘It’s a good spot, this,’ he whispered. ‘You chose well. One half of me in the wood where I mated, the other half in the pastures where I lived.’

  There was a very long silence between them, then Cairn said: ‘There’s so much, Bracken, so much more to it than I thought. Well, I didn’t think before now. But you’ll have time to find it.’

  Bracken heard the first stirrings of the evening wind in the beech trees above them. A few autumn leaves drifted leisurely down, bouncing somewhere above and behind them against the branches through which they fell. There was the sudden flap of a wood pigeon somewhere along the wood’s edge below them. High above there was the soaring trilling of a skylark, sometimes strong, sometimes distant, dropping and rising against the wind in the sky. The sun, which had not really shone all afternoon, was dropping below the great mauve bank of cloud that had hidden it and was now pale and a little watery because far off, over where it hung in the sky, there had been rain. For a few minutes its rays below the cloud were light and golden, but as it sank further and further, they began to redden, and the bank of cloud it had left behind changed from mauve to a magnificent purple that faded into deep pink at the edges.

  ‘Find what?’ wondered Bracken. What was it Cairn had seen that had the power to put peace into his body, despite his wounds and agony? Bracken felt lonely suddenly, even though he had never ever been so close to anymole as he was now to Cairn, flank to flank, haunch to haunch.

  He wanted to help Cairn so much, but did not know what more he could do, not knowing that he had already done far more than most moles ever could. Cairn trembled violently again, and Bracken put his paw softly on his great hurt back, holding him still and warming him as best he could with his own body.

  ‘Tell me about Rebecca again,’ whispered Cairn, so softly that Bracken had to bend his head to hear, so that it almost touched Cairn’s. ‘Tell me everything that you know about her.’

  Then, at last, Bracken sensed what he must say to Cairn. He must give to Cairn something that lay in his heart and spirit, rather than his mind. He must weave a tale of truth for Cairn about a mole he didn’t know but whose spirit, for one brief caressing moment, had touched his own. He must honour that memory and through it bring the peace and comfort that Cairn yearned for and which he could until then only have got from Rebecca and Stonecrop, two moles who loved him. At that fearful moment, Bracken must make the effort to love Cairn.

  ‘Rebecca is a giving mole,’ he began, ‘a wonderful mole—’ and his pawhold on Cairn grew softer yet infinitely stronger as he began to weave a picture of Rebecca, finding his words from the woods that surely she, too, must love; from the wild flowers that she danced by and whose scent she knew; weaving words from the breeze that had so often rustled his fur, as it must have rustled hers.

  ‘Rebecca is the wild flower that grows in spring, whose leaves are the freshest green; she is as strong and graceful as the tallest grass that grows down the Marsh End. Rebecca’s laughter and dance are like the sun dappling the wood’s floor when the trees sway lightly in the summer wind. Hers is the love of life itself, and love with her is as big and strong as a great oak tree, with a thousand branches for its feelings and a million trembling leaves for its caresses. And because your heart was open to hers, the love you found was far, far greater than the love each of you gave. If Rebecca were here now, she would take away your agony and desolation because she would be all you need, and all you are. As you are, and have been, for her…’

  Bracken spoke to Cairn with the same voice of power that had come from him once in the Stone clearing, on Midsummer Night; the voice of an adult who is blessed for a moment to see far beyond himself. A voice that spoke words that drew on his own heart’s deepest yearnings and gave the answers to his heart’s own despairs. Expressing to Cairn the love that lies waiting in everymole.

  ‘But Rebecca is here, Cairn, for she has touched your heart for ever with her love. There is nothing you can know or feel that she has not already given you and with which you are not already touched. Hers is the love in the very earth and burrows in which we live and sleep: hers is the sun that warms us in the morning: hers is the bliss of sleep that brings us peace and sees our troubles through. She is there in the pastures where you and Stonecrop ran, as she has always been and always will be; she is behind us in the wood among the trees and flowers; she is the love in which you made your life. She is here, Cairn, she is here with you now.’

  But Cairn did not hear Bracken
’s final words, for in the peace that Bracken brought him, his agonies were gone and his injuries mattered no more.

  He died with Bracken’s paw on his back, holding him close, the fur of their flanks mingling as one.

  ‘She is there in the pastures,’ Bracken had said, and Cairn had run there to join her, to dance with his Rebecca again across the dew-touched grass, their paws warmed at last in a rising sun. They had run and danced with Stonecrop in the warmth of the sun, which grew lighter and brighter about them until all was pure and white; and all that remained was the pattern of their dance on the pastures by Duncton Wood, where their paws and bodies had caught the morning dew.

  * * *

  The sun set slowly behind the distant hills, casting reds and pinks into the darkening sky above, while the vales beneath Duncton Hill grew misty blue before they fell into darkness. As the last light of the sun faded from the trees that rose behind Bracken, he finally took his paw from Cairn’s back and moved away from his body.

  He felt a terrible desolation. It was as if Cairn had gone to the world of the living, leaving him in a place of the dead.

  He crept away from Cairn’s cold body back into the wood and across to the Stone. For a time, as darkness fell, he stayed there, his tail moving restlessly this way and that as the only sign of how unsettled and without a place he felt.

  He wanted another mole to talk to him, as he had talked to Cairn. He wanted to be touched by another mole. He wanted thereby to find that last portion of the courage he would need to return to the Ancient System, as he knew he very soon must.

  But not yet—not now; not with the bleak reality of Cairn’s death and the lost warmth of those words of love he himself had spoken and which hung over him like a shroud.

  But there was a mole who knew who he was and who might, for a short time, give him the reminder of life that he needed—Rue. When the thought came to him in the darkness, he did not hesitate over its possibility for one moment, but ran busily out of the Stone clearing and diagonally down across the slopes, wondering if she would be surprised to see him again so soon.