Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  He would laugh even more when he got there, and learn something about a kind of mole he had never had anything to do with—young pups. For Rue had littered just a few days before and, for the time being at least, would be delighted to see Bracken again, provided he didn’t come into her birth-burrow uninvited. He could fetch a few worms now and again, and keep away intruders.

  Chapter Twenty

  A cold wind blew on the wood’s surface above Rebecca’s burrows where the snout of a brave mole quivered in the shadow of a root. He was the henchmole who had finally refused to let Mekkins enter Rebecca’s tunnels but who had promised to deliver his message and, shocked by what had happened though still fearful for his own safety, had crept back in the depth of the night to see if there was anything he could do—ostensibly to help Rebecca but in truth to rid himself of the uneasiness he felt at being a party, however coerced, to what had happened.

  He crept down the deserted tunnels to her burrow, ready to retreat at the slightest danger. He was a tough mole, a henchmole of experience, an aggressive Westsider, but what he saw when he got there made him tremble with a fear greater than any he had ever felt before a fight, or after a close-won victory.

  Rebecca lay still as death on the far side of the burrow. The bodies of her five young lay about the burrow, tangled up with nesting material, scattered like leaves. He picked his way with a beating heart among them and it was only when he was close up to her and he heard the soft moaning of her breathing, distant as a falling pulse, that he was sure that she was still alive.

  What use his message now? For a moment he wanted none of it, telling himself, ‘I don’t know what the hell this has to do with me. Stone knows what I’m doing here—they’ll kill me if they find out. What a bloody mess this is!’

  Then he cuffed her lightly with his paw and said gruffly, ‘Here you—you wake up. Got to get you out of here quick. Wake up! Come on, lass…’

  Rebecca stirred and was then awake instantly. She started to scream and he cuffed her again, none too softly.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said, ‘but we’ll both cop it if they find me here, so shut up!’ She fell silent, looking at him fearfully.

  ‘I know a mole who can help you,’ he said more gently. ‘Name of Mekkins. He tried to see you before… before this bloody thing happened.’

  Rebecca did not respond.

  ‘Come on, love,’ he said suddenly, gruffly gentle, ‘you can’t stay here. Got to get you away…’ He quickly pulled her to her paws and, talking desperately fast so that her attention would not wander to the dead litter about her, he hurried her out of the burrow, down the tunnel, and up to the entrance. But when she got into the night air, she seemed to come round to understanding where she was and what had happened. She started to shiver violently and sob out words so shaken by her distress that it was a long time before he could make out what she wanted. ‘I c-c-can’t leave them there,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘I c-c-can’t.’

  He was impatient with this, very conscious that the noise she was making might easily attract the attention of a mole like Rune, prone to skulk about at night, or even an owl. But hard though he tried, she would not leave. At last he said brutally, ‘Right! You’re on your own, then! I’m off…’ and off he went.

  But not far. His heart wouldn’t let him. Instead, he crouched in the protective shadow of the root he had first hidden by and watched over her, thinking that she would soon come to her senses. But what he then witnessed was the ancient and instinctive ritual of a bereft mother.

  She turned back down into the tunnel and after a long wait, in which he almost decided to leave her to her fate, she came back out into the night. She was carrying one of her dead young by the scruff of the neck, just as a mother carries a squalling pup. This one hung down limp and dead, and she laid it on the surface by the tunnel entrance. Then, one by one, she brought out the other four and laid them where the wind might touch them and the owls come and take them.

  Then he watched as she crouched in the shadows by them, whispering words of love and sorrow, chanting the ancient songs of the bereft, whose words and sounds of loss have no need of being set down or learned, for they are written in the depths of every soul.

  Then she crouched down with them to wait for the owls to come. But he was not going to wait for that and ran back over to her and said, ‘Come on, Rebecca, come on, love. There’s nothing more you can do. There’s nothing left to do.’

  He became angry again and said: ‘If you don’t bloody well come now, then I really will push off. I’m only doing this for Mekkins. Come on!’ And, more or less dragged along by him, she went with him, shaking and sobbing to leave all she had left of her litter behind in the night, tiny and pathetic on the cold surface of the wood.

  No record has been kept of how this unnamed henchmole succeeded in leading Rebecca down to the Marsh End and how he protected her from the Marshenders until Mekkins was found. But it is in such forgotten moles as he, as well as in those whose names are recorded in the books of Uffington, that the actions of truth and love fulfil themselves. So, nameless though he is, let him be remembered.

  Mekkins took one look at Rebecca, out of whom all spirit of life had gone, and knew without being told what had happened, and what to do.

  Half pushing, half carrying and constantly urging her, he took her towards the east side of the Marsh End, where the soil is dank and the vegetation heavy; a place in the wood where nomole goes and fallen wood rots unnoticed.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ she whispered hopelessly, more than once.

  ‘Somewhere Mandrake and Rune will never find you, and where you’ll have time to find your strength again.’

  ‘I don’t want to be alone,’ she sobbed, ‘not here in this terrible place.’

  ‘It’s all right, Rebecca,’ he soothed her, ‘you won’t be. There’s a mole there will help you. She’s known trouble herself and will know what to do.’

  But Rebecca became afraid again and refused for a while to go on.

  ‘Look, my love,’ said Mekkins, desolate to see Rebecca so changed, ‘there’s nowhere else I can take you. Mandrake and Rune will be after you—they’ll want you killed. I know them. It’s a miracle you’re still alive as it is, though perhaps, at the time, that’s something even Mandrake couldn’t do. Not to you he couldn’t.’

  At this second mention of his name Rebecca sobbed again and then fell into a torpor of desolation. But when Mekkins urged her on, she agreed, as if everything was hopeless and even resistance was futile. Mekkins saw then that she wanted to die.

  They came at last to a far corner of the wood which edged the marsh and where the wind carried into the wood’s depths the eerie call of marshbirds unknown to mole—snipe, curlew and clamorous redshank—telling of the wet desolation all moles fear. It was a damp and dismal place where Mekkins finally stopped, by a dank and diseased-looking entrance, hung over with rotting wood. He peered into it and was about to call down, when an aged, frightened voice whispered out of its dead depths: ‘Disease! There is disease here! Disease and death!’

  Rebecca shrank back, pleading with Mekkins to take her away, but he put a paw on hers and said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not as bad as it sounds. She only says things like that to keep others away.’

  He turned back to the entrance. ‘’Ere, Curlew! Don’t be so daft! It’s Mekkins… I’ve got a friend with me for you to meet.’

  ‘I have no friends here,’ the voice said again, ‘only the darkness of disease, only the dankness of the earth.’

  Mekkins shrugged his shoulders and, with an encouraging pat on Rebecca’s shoulder, pushed her down the burrow ahead of him.

  The tunnel was both dank and dark and it was a long time before she could make out clearly the appearance of the old female who, muttering and cursing, retreated before them. ‘Trouble is,’ whispered Mekkins, ‘she lives alone so much that she takes a while to get used to strangers. And she likes to put on a bit of an act at first. B
ut she’s got a heart of gold and if she takes to you, she’ll see you right as rain.’

  At last Rebecca could see her clearly and had she been anything less than near collapse, she might well have run away there and then.

  Curlew was small and wasted, her whole body twisted subtly out of true by some past disease or abnormality; she had no fur on much of her face and what there was on her thin flanks was sparse and grey. Her front paws were almost translucent with weakness.

  But her eyes! It was as if they had, temporarily, taken refuge in the wrong body, for they were bright and warm with kindness and compassion, beautiful with life, and Rebecca realised that the frightened voice that had come up to them really had been an act.

  The moment Curlew saw Rebecca clearly, she came forward, though a little diffidently, and said, ‘My dear!’ in a voice of such compassion that Rebecca knew that she, too, had suffered in some terrible way and that she understood. Then Rebecca settled down, weary beyond words but feeling safer than she had for a very long time. She crouched down in the corner of Curlew’s little burrow, with its wet walls and miserable air, settled her snout between her paws, and simply closed her eyes.

  ‘This mole is Rebecca from Barrow Vale,’ said Mekkins. ‘And she needs help and protection. That’s why I’ve brought her here, Curlew, ’cos I reckon you’ll know how to get a bit of life back into her.’

  Rebecca felt a gentle paw caressing her face and heard a gentler voice saying, as if from a great distance, ‘It’s all right, my dear, you’re safe now, quite safe.’ And then she fell asleep.

  When Mekkins told Curlew the story of what had happened, she sighed to hear it, speaking of ‘the wickedness of it’ and the ‘dark shadows that curse Duncton’, looking at the sleeping Rebecca, the tears in her kind eyes running down her bald face.

  She too had wanted a litter, but the disease that struck her down in her first summer so long before had for ever deprived her of the chance. No male would take her and the story in the Marsh End for a long time was that she had become simple as a result and been taken by an owl.

  But this was not so—as Mekkins, in one of his explorations of the perimeter of the Marsh End when he was a youngster, found out. He came across her little system, burrowed in a ramshackle way in the soft wet soil, and for a long time got no response but ‘There’s disease here’ from her. Until, bit by bit, he cajoled his way into her tunnels and there found Curlew, who had had no contact with anymole for many years, preferring to hide her disfigurement in the isolated place she chose to live in. Unlike other moles who had seen her in the past, he showed no fear of her and treated her as he would any other mole. Then, over the years, he had seen her change, losing some of her shyness and finding more and more peace in her life and teaching him that a mole may live alone for many years and learn a great deal of wisdom and find much love in the small things about its tunnels.

  She refused to leave her tunnels because, as she explained, this was probably the only place in the system where her weak paws could manage to burrow and repair tunnels, and then only untidily. But, yes, she had known sadness, and had always wanted young of her own, though now she knew she could never have them. It was knowing this that made Mekkins bring Rebecca here, for surely Curlew would take care of her as if she were a pup of her own.

  But in the next few days, Rebecca’s condition got steadily worse. She grew weaker and more and more unresponsive, hardly bothering to eat the food that Mekkins and Curlew brought her. The light had gone out of her eyes and the gloss from her fur, which now hung about her like dead ivy.

  On the fourth night she was there, Curlew went to wake up Mekkins, prodding him urgently and asking him to come.

  ‘She’s dying, Mekkins, and there’s not much anymole can do. Her teats are hard with unsuckled milk and they’re swollen and are paining her in her troubled sleep. I think we may be too late to save her.’

  Mekkins looked at Rebecca, his snout low with grief and desolation, his eyes restless with the need to do something for her. ‘Rebecca,’ he whispered to her. ‘Rebecca. It’s Mekkins! You’re safe now. Listen, Rebecca!’

  She stirred and turned a little to him, her forehead furrowed and her eyes hauntingly lost. ‘Listen to what?’ she whispered. ‘They’ve all gone. I heard the last of their cries. He’s taken them.’

  ‘But there’s so much, Rebecca, so much. The flowers you love, the ones you showed me in the summer, they’ll come again. And spring, that’ll come, you’ll see. You’ll see…’ But Mekkins couldn’t go on. He could find no words to say because he could not think of a reason why she should want to live. If only Rose were here, he thought, she’d know what to say.

  Looking at her there, he felt himself almost absurdly strong and healthy, realising what a gift it was, almost for the first time. But he would have given it all to see Rebecca look up at him with the laugh and dance in her eyes that he remembered and loved so well.

  He left her and Curlew and went grimly up to the tunnel entrance and stayed there looking into the night. From somewhere off in the marshes came the haunting single call of a solitary snipe. Otherwise the wood seemed to be settling into the darkness of winter.

  Yet, as he crouched there, upset and frustrated, from the light-filled recesses of his soul, where the cherished things of the heart lie still and waiting, there came a memory of the Stone. Not as he had last seen it, with the blood of Hulver and Bindle staining its shadow, but as he had first seen it so long ago when he was little more than a pup and had been led up Duncton Hill on the long trek, when there was no shame in celebrating Midsummer.

  It had stood massive, awe-inspiring and, somehow, safe, and he had looked up at it, as the elders did their chanting, and all had faded away from his mind but its size and majesty, and his sense that he was part of it. In the many moleyears since, he had only ever thought of the Stone as a distant thing, for the sense of grace that flowed into him then was overshadowed by the fighting and living, and the mating, that was the reality of Duncton in his time.

  But now the grace returned, distant and uncertain, but there all the same. He turned back down into the tunnels and went straight to Curlew.

  ‘How long can she live?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘There are herbs I know, healing charms I heard my mother say. She may cling on for a few days…’

  ‘She must,’ he said urgently, ‘she must. For a few days you must make her. I have to go, but I will be back.’

  ‘Where to?’ asked Curlew, suddenly afraid to be left alone, with Rebecca now so certain to die.

  ‘I’m going to the Stone, Curlew, to ask for its ’elp. I don’t know nothing about praying but I’m bloody well going to try.’

  * * *

  It took him a full night and day of travel to reach the massive, silent Stone. Mekkins had never prayed in his life before and so, lacking any preconceived idea of how a mole should pray, he spoke to it as he would to anymole. ‘She’s a good mole, better than anymole I know, so why’s she dying? What’s the use in it? Look… I’ll do anything I can do to ’elp her out…’

  But the Stone was silent.

  ‘Look ’ere,’ tried Mekkins again, his paws now touching the base of the Stone, ‘there can’t be any sense in lettin’ her die now, can there? I’ve seen her dance in the sun and say her rhymes and all sorts of things and you didn’t make her learn to do those things so she should die like she is. You made her so that other moles could understand ’ow to live properly in this forsaken bloody system of ours.’

  But still the Stone stood silent, its cold height rising above and beyond Mekkins’ vision to the nearly leafless branches of beech trees high above, which made an interlocking craze of silhouettes against the bleak white clouds of the October dusk.

  He crouched by the Stone for a long time saying nothing. He had nothing to say. He looked around at the trees, then at his own strong paws, and then out across the lower wood in the direction of Marsh End. Then he got angry and star
ted shouting at the Stone, almost attacking it in his anger: ‘What the ’ell are you anyway?’ he shouted. ‘I come all the way ’ere to ask for your help and I ain’t never asked for your ’elp before and all you do is nothing at all. Just stand there silent. Silent as the stone you are. You know what? You’re nothing, that’s what you are, nothing!’

  Wild anger flowed through Mekkins, feelings of a power and rage he had never felt before. They were the more powerful for the sense he felt of the Stone’s betrayal of the feeling of grace and hope that had inspired him to come so far in the first place. He turned away from the Stone and half hit, half collapsed on the ground, his movements as restless as the roots that ran this way and that around the Stone and formed the dark shadows at its base.

  He half sobbed, half shouted in his rage until, slowly, the hatred for what was happening to Rebecca and his anger at the Stone began to fade into weariness and helplessness, so that even his strong shoulders and sturdy body could not stop wilting and sagging into a posture of defeat. He turned back to the Stone, his snout low and his anger quite gone.

  ‘’Elp her,’ he whispered finally to the Stone. ‘’Elp her for my sake,’ he said simply.

  Mekkins finally left the Stone as dawn was breaking the next morning. His spirits were too low for him to want to face the chatter of Westside or Barrow Vale, so he turned east, taking a route by the central slopes and contouring his way round, and slowly down towards tunnels that would eventually lead to the Marsh End.

  His route took him by Hulver’s old system and it was as he passed near it that he felt the faintest of vibrations and smelt the faintest of cheerful scents. He stopped and snouted about, glad to know there was life here again and then, finding an entrance, he went down into it, careful to make plenty of noise so as not to take any mole by surprise.