Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  As they did so their fur, their outstretched talons, their eyes, the tunnel about them… all was covered in a glimmering white light, whose source lay on the floor of the hollow cave into which they had found a way.

  It was a stone, no bigger than a mole’s paw, oval, smooth and translucent, and from its centre came a light that was not bright like the sun, nor cold like the moon, nor fierce like an owl’s eye. Rather, it was a light like that which fills a raindrop caught by a soft, warm morning sun. As they advanced towards it, it seemed to change a thousand times each second, as the quality of light on a spring day changes with each station of the sun and shift in humidity in the air. Its glimmering had the endless fascination of the shifting windsound in an ash tree, whose leaves seem to dissect the wind into a thousand different whispers.

  Its rays shone and shot about the burrow in which it lay, lighting up first this side and then that, casting shadow here and chasing shadow there, always changing, never ending.

  Bracken slowly, fearfully, stretched out a talon to touch it, but Rebecca ran to him and pulled him back, whispering, ‘Don’t. There’s no need to touch it.’

  But Bracken only smiled, for never in his life had he seen or dreamed of anything so beautiful or felt at such peace, and he reached out again. Rebecca’s paw rested on his shoulder, her breath held still, for she, too, wanted to touch the stone. Then, as his paw touched it, its light was suddenly gone, and the burrow was plunged into a darkness so thick that a mole could not breathe.

  Rebecca gasped, Bracken pulled back, and as his paw left the smooth stone, the feel of it like the softest moss on his skin, the light in the centre of the stone glimmered dimly again and then, like some creature that has curled up in defence and uncurls when the danger is gone, it slowly came to life and light once more, the light advancing about them like a new dawn.

  They looked at each other in wonder, and then round at the burrow, noticing for the first time that its floor was strewn with vegetation and material so dry it fell to dust almost as they moved. Yet from it came the subtlest and the sweetest fragrances that either had ever smelt.

  Verbena, feverfew, woodruff and thyme, camomile and bergamot, germander, mint, and rose… blending into the fragrance of a warm spring and a celebration of summer, with a hint of the fruits of autumn and a touch of winter snow. It was so subtle, yet so essential to the burrow, that Rebecca stretched out her paws as if to touch it, and failing, turned back to Bracken and touched him.

  She caressed him with a wonder that made her gasp and sigh, for by the glimmering light of the stone he seemed more beautiful than anymole she had ever seen. His fur grey and his eyes soft. Bracken turned to her and touched the soft fur of her face, his eyes alight with a sense of the life that he saw within her which was a force and power he had never before felt within himself. They moved closer to each other, the stone to their side and the wonder of the world within each other’s gaze.

  Then they crouched nuzzling each other and sighing, saying words of trust and love, joy and intent, the jumbled words of love whose nonsense makes a greater sense than any reasoned sentence ever can.

  They drifted in and out of their newfound world, talking and laughing softly together, Bracken sometimes raising himself and looking down at Rebecca, running his talons through her fur, almost shoving and pushing at her as if he disbelieved that anything so beautiful could be at once outside his body and within his heart. They were pup and mother to each other, father and mate, friend and lover all at once, coming closer and closer to each other in their discovery of trust and love.

  And then, surrounded by the silence of the Stone, they began to talk of the things that had been in their hearts so heavily for so long and to heal each other of their memories. Rebecca’s lost litter, Bracken’s isolation in the Ancient System, Comfrey, their son by circumstance, and Cairn, oh Cairn. Sometimes they wept, sometimes their tears were dried by their laughter, sometimes they reached out to be touched, sometimes they lay still, but always the light of the stone glimmered and shone in the burrow about them.

  Bracken told her about the death of Cairn, repeating the words he had said to him about Rebecca at the end: ‘She is the wild flower that grows in spring, she is as graceful as the swaying branches of the ash, as light as pussy willow caught by sun, she is…’ and as he talked, using words he half remembered, he began to say them to her direct, his body against hers, her paws on his face, his snout to her neck fur, her body caressingly warm against him. ‘Yours is the love of life itself, yours is the life that flows from wood to pasture, from hill to vale; yours is the love in the tunnels of Uffington; yours is the love in the hearts of the White Moles.’

  ‘That’s what I told him Rebecca, that’s what I said,’ whispered Bracken to her. ‘I could feel his pain, the terrible pain they made him feel; and I could feel his love for you, I could feel it…’

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I know, my own wildflower, my sweet love, I know… I love you, I love you,’ she said, and he said, endlessly, over and over again.

  At their side the light from the centre of the stone flared and flickered all around, and cast their shadows out on to the roots and walls of the chamber beyond the burrow where they crouched, where they mingled into one shadow, one shape, which shimmered and moved with the light. How many minutes or hours they stayed together in this state of loving grace nomole can say, or cares to try. But there came a time when, just as they had moved with one accord on their journey there, so they simultaneously began to be restless and to lose their sense of being at one with each other and the Stone, in whose depth they had found such peace. Perhaps it was their imagination, but the stone in the burrow seemed to flicker and glimmer more intermittently.

  Bracken suddenly found he was hungry, Rebecca that she wanted to get back to Comfrey. They began to feel the love they had touched slipping away. Both of them tried to reach out for it with new endearments of love and passion, deeper sighs and heavier caresses, for it was too sweet to lose. But it seemed to them to be fleeing away to some world they could not reach, whereas, in truth, it was they who were fleeing away from it as they returned to the world of time and worry, fears and fretting heaviness.

  Bracken turned to look at the stone again, for he knew he must soon leave and he wanted to remember it. After all, this was the heart of the system he had sought so long to explore. He looked at it now (as it seemed to him) more objectively, from the illusory world of time he and Rebecca were so reluctantly reinhabiting, and it no longer seemed quite so smooth or quite so oval as it had before. There was a delicate whorl of interlocking shadows on it… not shadows, but carvings, or rather embossments, like those he had seen before on a cruder and grander scale on the wall of the Chamber of Dark Sound.

  ‘I know those patterns,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I know their power. If you hum, they will make a music back to you.’ He half reached out towards the stone, as if warming his paws at its light, and began to hum. The burrow was soon filled with sounds in return, some far lighter and more beautiful than the most wonderful he had heard from the wall, others far darker and more unbearable.

  Rebecca began to writhe and gasp as the beginnings of a scream formed inside her, while Bracken felt fear and panic overtake him. He stopped humming and reached out involuntarily to the stone, as if trying to stop the sound coming from it, and as he touched it, the light plunged out once more, casting them not only into darkness but into a depth of despair—a sense of loss—that brought horror to them and made them both grasp for each other instinctively.

  As Bracken’s paw left to touch Rebecca, the light slowly returned again and their sense of loss began to fade. This time Bracken could feel the impression of the stone on his paw, not smooth like moss, but more like an embossed abrasion, like a pain that had a shape to it. Yet when he looked, there was nothing there.

  ‘Come on, Rebecca, we must go,’ he said, and without looking back he turned out of the burrow, down the big tunnel they had dug, and away un
der the rising ceiling of the Stone. Rebecca followed, more distressed than he, and kept close behind, fearful that he would go too fast. But this feeling lasted only for a short time and when they had climbed the root path back to the hollow of the tree and the Stone was behind them, they stopped and looked around, surprised again at its size and beginning to wonder what it was they had seen, and felt.

  ‘Will we ever come here again?’ asked Rebecca.

  Bracken whispered that he didn’t know, that he didn’t understand quite where they had been, and started again on the trek up the path. The sound in the tree hollow was now more stressed and great shatterings of straining noise cascaded about them, like the sound of lightning they could not see, great rumblings of a power so great that they felt they were nothing in the middle of a storm. There was windnoise, too, and the path ahead of them seemed to tremble or sway, not much but enough to suggest that out on the surface a morning wind was already awakening and stirring the tree that guarded the Stone.

  As they reached the entrance to the hollow, they heard even more fearful sounds coming from the tunnel beyond, and as they ran down it, faster and faster, they saw that the roots of the tree were beginning to stress and strain. They ran and pushed, and Bracken herded Rebecca through the roots threatening to crush them, on and on now, anxious to get out. They felt they had stolen the sight of something sacred and the noise was pursuing them to take it back.

  When they got past the outer roots of the great tree, they made their way down the rough tunnel back to the roots, but it was like running from the talons of an owl into the fatal rushing of a flood. For the Chamber of Roots was now filled with sinister slidings and pullings, terrible rackings and stretchings, crushings and stranglings, as the mass of roots, which had been so still when they first passed through them, started to respond to the wind on the surface.

  Bracken looked up to the roof of the chamber, wondering if they could escape that way, by burrowing up somehow on to the surface—but it was too high, and the jags of thrusting flint too difficult to negotiate.

  Rebecca ran forward to the heaving roots and Bracken followed to stop her. ‘It’s impossible!’ he shouted over the noise. ‘We’ll be lost forever in there.’

  But Rebecca twisted away from his grasp and ran between the first roots, shouting back to him, ‘Think of the stone we saw, think of its protection…’ and she was gone among them.

  He stretched a paw after her, hesitating for a moment, but then, feeling again the strange itching impression of the stone on his paw, he remembered the light of the stone and ran after her. They twisted their way among the treacherous roots—each movement forward just in time to escape the crushing behind them of roots between which they had passed, a path opening up before them as roots parted just in time for them to escape the opening of fissures in the ground or the crashing down of debris from above. On and on they went, Bracken following his Rebecca, Rebecca feeling that Bracken was pressing her on from behind, two moles as one, one mole escaping the roots. Always thinking of, and clutching on to, the memory of the stone and its glimmering light, always trying to hold that in their hearts to keep at bay the horror around them. Each moment held a terrible death for them, each moment was a miraculous escape, until their breathing came gasping and desperate and they felt they could not run on through the racking darkness of the roots. On and on until they were led forward by instinct and trust as a blind pup might find its mother’s teats.

  Then they were clear, back to the entrance into the labyrinth of echoes, the roots reaching out at them from behind, trying to pull them back as Bracken led them out through the labyrinths into the sudden, unbelievable silence of the circular tunnel.

  Without a word to each other they wended their way back to Bracken’s burrow, where they found Mekkins still asleep, paws curled to his belly and a contented purr coming from his mouth. They looked at each other in deep silence, there being no words to express the joy and then the dark they had experienced together.

  In the peace and homely comfort of his own burrow, Bracken could barely believe that he had seen what he had, and the memory, both good and bad, seemed already to be slipping away. Remembering it was too much for him to want to face.

  For Rebecca, however, the memory was clear and she guessed that they had seen something more wonderful than some moles ever dream of. She touched Bracken with her paw to tell him that it was real and that he must not let it slip away, but he only looked at her in a kind of dawning fear, compounded partly of a sense of loss of what he could not quite remember, partly from having faced for a moment a truth he could face no longer.

  Then they slept the fitful sleep of the deeply tired, waking only to the sound of Mekkins’ singing as he groomed and stretched himself in preparation for leaving with Rebecca.

  They said few words—indeed, Mekkins said most of the farewells. But they touched again and Bracken knew that Rebecca and he had, for a time at least, been at one with one another and that a part of himself was for ever in her heart, as part of her would always be in his.

  He saw them as far as the Stone clearing where, for a brief moment, they looked up at the great Stone, leaning into the morning wind, the beech branches waving against a cold white sky above it.

  When they were gone, he turned back to his tunnel and down to his burrow where he crouched in silence, a sense of wonder and disbelief mixing with a terrible feeling of loss. His left paw vaguely itched or burned, but when he looked at it, there was nothing there. But the irritation stayed with him and eventually, with his right paw, he tried to scratch the pattern that he had felt on the stone on to the burrow floor, an interlacing of lines and circles. Again and again he traced it in the dust, scratching it out with his paw until slowly it seemed to come right. Again and again, until, like the tunnels in the Chamber of Echoes, he knew it by heart. The itch began to fade and as it did so, he began to sink into a deep sleep, his right paw still extended where it was tracing the pattern of the stone yet again, before he finally slept.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  With the passing of Longest Night, which he spent completely alone, Mandrake sank finally into obsessive madness. He ranged about his tunnels, or Barrow Vale, muttering and cursing violently, often in the rough hard tongue of Siabod, the language of his fathers. Occasionally he caught some unfortunate mole unawares and—whether young or old, male or female—would attack it savagely for some imagined wrong it had done, leaving it wounded or, more than once, dead.

  Trembling moles would hide in tunnels and burrows as he passed heavily by, wondering at his continual calling out for Sarah and Rebecca, whom he no longer seemed to think were dead but gone to the Stone Mole in the Ancient System, leaving him alone and forsaken. As the days slipped by into cold January, he could be heard sounding curses in his own language: ‘Gelert, helgi Siabod, a’m dial am eu colled trwy ddodi ei felltith ar Faenwadd Duncton’—‘May Gelert, hound of Siabod, avenge for me their loss by bringing his curse on the Stone Mole of Duncton.’ Gelert was the legendary hound of Siabod who was believed to protect its holy stones, though none in Duncton knew of his name then.

  Any lesser mole than Mandrake would have been killed by other moles, or driven out of the system, but there was none in Duncton prepared to start a fight with him. And only one—Rune—with the courage even to talk to him.

  Rune listened with almost a purr of pleasure to his ravings about the Stone Mole and his threats to summon the mythical Gelert. He knew that with each day that passed, the system was slipping out of Mandrake’s talons and into his own. It was just a matter of time and opportunity.

  Inevitably, plots were made against Mandrake, especially since the murder of Rebecca’s litter, which had appalled so many moles, as Rune had hoped it would. Rune positively licked his lips with pleasure when dithering henchmole after henchmole came to him with some feeble plot or other. ‘A group of us feel, and it’s only a feeling, and we wouldn’t do anything without your approval and support, Rune, sir, that the s
ystem is overdue for a change…’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that as long as Mandrake is here in good health and in charge we none of us need worry…’ Rune would reply hypocritically to would-be revolutionaries in his maddeningly measured and reasonable way. And they would retreat, murmuring to each other ‘Rune’s too loyal for his own good!’ or ‘Far too modest, that Rune—doesn’t realise his own worth.’

  But if there was going to be a revolution (and that was precisely what Rune intended there should be), it would be done in his own way and in his own time. And as Mandrake’s ravings about the Stone Mole got worse, he began to see that there was a way, and its path lay towards the Ancient System.

  * * *

  So the shadows on the system continued to fall, and with them the bitterest weather of winter came. The first snow fell after two cold days in the second week of January, and though it did not stick, the skies remained grey and cold, and the wood silent but for the wind. Then, in the third week of January, it turned even more bitter and thick snow finally came, the silent brightness it brought to the wood almost a relief after the previous gloom.

  The winds drove the snow into the tree trunks so that on some of them, especially the rougher-barked oak, the snow formed a vertical line on the windward side, making the trees seem even higher and more ethereal than they normally did in snow. The brambles, which retained their leaves through much of the winter, were bowed down with white, while the orange stalks of the dead bracken, lost until now against the leaf-fall of autumn, stood out brightly against the snow.

  While, but for the occasional dropping of dead twigs and the odd branch under the weight of snow, the wood fell into a cold, white silence.

  The shadows cast by Mandrake’s rule did not fall on all burrows equally. Some, like the tunnels of Rue and of Curlew, were brighter for the presence of growing pups. Rue’s four were lively and, by the third week of January, beginning to have minds of their own, chattering and squabbling among themselves so much that Rue was glad that they were able to look after themselves so much more, only clustering around her when they had had enough of each other’s company and fancied a snuggle.