Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  Mekkins had nothing for Curlew to do at all, but he knew that Rebecca had been worried about Bracken. ‘Let ’em have a few minutes together for Stone’s sake,’ he said to himself. ‘Don’t ask me what it’s about,’ he added, shaking his head and turning his attention to the gathering dark.

  But Mekkins’ sentimentality was misplaced. Bracken was too tired, Rebecca already too aware of the dangers in the system, and Comfrey too afraid of Bracken’s size and different smell for there to be much between any of them. Only Violet seemed unaffected by it all. Bracken laid his head on his paws and looked curiously at the thin and nervous Comfrey. Why, he liked Violet better! As for Rebecca and himself, neither could believe that they had really made a journey to the centre of the system together. Surely that had been two different moles? The burrow was small and cramped, the atmosphere fearful, and everything in flux. There was the feeling that nothing could be permanent and that the system of Mandrake was giving way to something worse. As for Bracken, he was beginning to feel tired of running, always running, and felt half inclined to go out on to the surface and do some final battle with the henchmoles. But then he fell asleep.

  Rebecca watched over him, wondering as she looked, almost for the first time, at a mole she hardly knew, and who seemed a stranger, why she was so moved by every start and turn in his fitful and uneasy sleep. ‘Who is he?’ she wondered. She wanted to draw Comfrey to her and say to him ‘Look, that’s your father. His name’s Bracken, he’s a brave mole.’ But wisely she let him be.

  Comfrey was having problems of his own, anyway, with Violet—who might just as well have woken from a long refreshing sleep for all the sign she showed of tiredness after a three-day escape from Rune’s henchmoles.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

  ‘C-C-Comfrey,’ he finally got out.

  ‘Why can’t you speak properly?’

  Silence.

  ‘Well, at least you could ask my name, which is Violet.’

  ‘Where do you come from?’ tried Comfrey.

  ‘Rue’s tunnels, near where the Stone Mole lives.’

  ‘Who’s the St-Stone Mole?’

  ‘He is, silly,’ said Violet, pointing at the sleeping Bracken. Violet turned away, looking a little miserable. Now that Bracken was asleep, she felt alone. He was all she had.

  Rebecca stretched a motherly paw to her and pulled her to her flank. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened, my love,’ said Rebecca, and bit by bit Violet did, her little defences dropping as she relaxed at last into a mole who seemed almost as cuddly as Rue. ‘What’s going to happen?’ Violet asked much later. Rebecca could see how alone she was, and how near to tears. Bracken’s daughter, Bracken’s son. He couldn’t have done more for them. Now perhaps she could care for them while they grew up.

  ‘Rebecca! Bracken!’ It was Curlew, running back into the burrow. ‘Wake up, Bracken! The henchmoles are coming!’ How Curlew had changed since Rebecca had first come! True, her fur was still rough and patchy—but her spirits were so full and high, and her body straighter and prouder than it had been. ‘You’ve got to leave, Rebecca, almost immediately,’ she said.

  Mekkins came running down. ‘They’re almost here,’ he said, ‘and they’ll find these tunnels very soon. There’s an exit nearer the marshes and I’ll take you all out by that.’

  Bracken did not move. He did not even get up. He was tired of running. ‘You go. I’ll stay. I can hold them back for a while.’

  As Mekkins and Rebecca started to argue, Bracken got up and slowly faced them. His gaze was clear and there was an enormous authority about what he said that left nomole there in any doubt that he would do what he intended.

  ‘I led them here and I’ll lead them away again, in a different direction to where you’re going. Don’t worry, Mekkins, I won’t try to fight them all by myself. But with luck I can lead them off your scent, and you, Rebecca and these two,’ he pointed to Comfrey and Violet, ‘can get away to Rose the Healer.’

  Violet started to protest, but Bracken gazed at her with such strength and love that she simply retreated back to Rebecca’s flank and waited for once for the adults to do whatever they had to do. ‘Rebecca will take care of you and I’ll be back,’ Bracken said gently to her. ‘And don’t you chatter so much this time!’

  For a moment Rebecca and Bracken stared across the burrow at each other and the light that seemed to have gone from them shone again, and time was not important. ‘Why, it’s there and always will be,’ thought Rebecca, knowing it was true.

  ‘I’m not going either,’ said Curlew suddenly. ‘These are my tunnels and they’ve served me well, and I’ll defend them. I couldn’t live anywhere else, anyway.’ Her mind was quite made up so that, with a shake of his head in puzzlement, Mekkins led Rebecca and the youngsters away, and the burrow was suddenly silent of them.

  ‘There’s a tunnel I’ll show you, off to the east,’ said Curlew. ‘It goes for quite a way. If they come, I’ve got a way of holding them up for a bit, so you go down there and lead them off away from the west, where Mekkins will be. Every little bit gives them time.’

  With a thumping overhead and shouts, the henchmoles did come, not long after, and Curlew tried her old trick on them. ‘There’s disease here, contagious disease,’ she hissed up the tunnel at them.

  It worked for a while, until a cold authoritative voice came out of the bitter night to the henchmole who was hesitating.

  ‘Get down there now or I’ll kill you with my own talons,’ it said. Down in the central burrow, Bracken recognised with a shudder the voice of Rune. So he was here! And then there was a thump and a gasp, and old Curlew was outnumbered and outfought as the henchmoles rushed past her and down to where Bracken crouched.

  He raced away along the tunnel she had shown him and out into the night, and chased desperately this way and that across the frozen ground, making as much noise as possible and heading for the north and east towards the marsh. Henchmoles were thick on the ground, and more than once he came face to face with one before twisting away into the dark, saved only by their own confusion at each other’s noise. Sometimes he hid in silence and let them chase around him; then, when they seemed to be drifting back to the west, towards where Rebecca, Violet and Comfrey might be with Mekkins, he would make a noise again and they would swing back towards him.

  If the night was cold, the dawn was colder. It rose bleakly on a wood full of hate and fear. There was a hoarfrost on the trees and ground which gave the wood a deceptive white calm but meant that the slightest movement brought a crackling of frozen leaves and vegetation.

  Bracken was now very tired and responded with a start of alarm at every movement around him. He wanted to run back, or forwards, or wherever they were and say ‘Here I am. Here! It’s over. You’ve got what you want!’

  Then a henchmole moved somewhere and he was off again, paw in front of paw, twisting and turning and trying to think ahead of himself, trying not to drown in his own breathlessness and succumb at last to the tiredness he felt. Noises all around, and white-coated twigs and leaves that would have seemed delicate and beautiful had a mole had time to look.

  On through the lightening mauve of dawn, nearer and nearer to the wood’s edge, nearer and nearer now to the marsh. He could sense the dreadful space stretching out somewhere beyond the trees and tried to cut away from it back into the bigger trees. But henchmoles were there, more of them running, distant shouts, nearby sneakings of talons on the frosty ground. He was forced nearer and nearer to the marsh.

  Sound to the right and left, the fearful light and space ahead, no other way to go for a desperate mole, paw after paw unsteadily in front of another, shoulders aching with effort.

  Then he was out of the wood and tumbling down a short bank under an old wire fence to a wall of alien marsh grass and the smell of the unknown. Off to the right two henchmoles came out of the wood as well, down the bank, looked right and then left and saw him; and they were coming, coming, their paws and
talons pounding, bigger and nearer with each moment. He looked back along the marsh grass to his left towards the west and there were other henchmoles, several, sneaking steadily along towards him. Desperate, he turned around to look back up the bank he had fallen down. It was so steep, and he was so tired, each gasp a pain for life. Perhaps he could make it back into the wood, perhaps his near-dead, aching paws would take him back. Perhaps.

  Then Rune was there. Rune out on the bank looking down at him. A nightmare come true. Rune triumphant. Rune about to say something. Rune’s mouth open and his talons ready, as left and right the henchmoles came.

  Bracken turned away from them all and faced the still, frosted wall of tall, haggard grass, diving into it and through, a final chase to his own destruction. Through the grass, leaving the shouts, into an alien world where the birds have eerie calls and slow flapping wings and long, sharp beaks enough to kill a mole. Running once more, but with the voices fading at last behind him.

  ‘He’s gone into the marsh, the silly bugger!’

  ‘Who was ’e then? Never seen him before.’

  ‘’E’ll be drownded or eaten ’fore the hour’s done.’

  ‘Who was he, Rune?’

  ‘Somemole we’ll wait for, that’s who. So patrol this edge until I’m satisfied he’s gone for good,’ said Rune.

  Silence came and the wood was gone for ever behind Bracken as he wearily wended his way over the tussocks and ice of the frozen marsh. No food, no shelter, little hope. Lost in a frozen waste. No good going back.

  On he went into a fearful day, with whispers of wind in the reeds above his head, the frozen debris of an alien world at his paws. And hunger bearing down on him. A long day of fear, a night of rustling ahead. Another dawn came, a day of gnawing at dry grass stems and snouting out the dangers that seemed to wait at every turn. Another afternoon. A sudden spell of bright, cold sun that made him feel as vulnerable as a flea on an open paw. Night and cold. Day and fear. A starting up of blustering winds as hunger weakened him step by step. The carcass of a dead and frozen bird, torn by other scavengers more used to the marsh than he. A tearing of teeth at it, something to eat, a frozen survival, and then black crows wheeling from the sky and down at him, and he was off again, shaken by the cawings and wheelings of blacksheen wings.

  Then the worst horror, the ultimate fear of everymole in nightmare straits: oozing mud. The wind brought a thaw and that brought a softening to the grasses, and a heaving to the ground. Where it had been solid to his tired paws, it now squelched wet. Where it had supported his weight, it now let him sink. His belly was covered in the slime of mud as finally, and desperately, he dragged himself on. Everything gone, why cling to life? But what makes a mole fight death? What force drags one tired paw before the other?

  His progress—to where? he wondered—grew slower. If he stopped, he sank. If he went on, he grew more and more in need of sleep. A great crow dived from the white sky again, wheeling and calling about him. On and on, with talons ready, Bracken tried his best.

  His best was just good enough, for as the marsh thawed out behind him, the frost quite gone, and pockets of water appeared again where ice had been, Bracken neared a wall that skirted its northern edge. The grass adjacent to it was a little drier and he was on it, and up to the wall, and suddenly alive for a moment more as the crows wheeled about and he looked for cover. The smell of a hole, damp and cool, and he was chasing to it… along the wall to a great round drainage pipe set into it, and into its dank shelter. Behind, against the white sky, there was the flutter of a black wing, the hang of a dark grey claw, the tap of a death beak. He turned away in fear into the strange round tunnel and started down it, only trying to stop himself when it was too late. For it sloped down steeply, its bottom was slimy with mud and as the sides were too wide for him to reach to grip, he could not stop himself sliding faster and faster down it, a tired anger mounting in him at falling to his death like this.

  Then, slipping helplessly towards a bright light where the tunnel ended in a void, he fell tumbling in a shower of mud and water into a stone drainage way, beyond the marsh and the wall.

  He opened his eyes into a waking nightmare. For fighting and clawing at each other in the mud and slime that had fallen with him on to the hard ground of the drainage channel were two moles, both intent, it seemed, on finding any worms or other food that had come from the pipe in his fall. There was something wild and desperate about each of them—their fur was unkempt and their flanks thin from starvation—and one of them was rapidly losing the fight. Indeed, so unequal was the struggle that the smaller of the two was simply retreating from the other by the time Bracken first fully realised what was happening.

  With one final clout, the bigger one turned back to where Bracken lay, to search for food in peace, the other watching from a distance, hoping, perhaps, to pick up a scrap or two.

  All this Bracken took in very quickly, and as he did so he felt himself suddenly lifted on to his paws by a sense of anger and outrage. Had he run and run and run from fighting in Duncton only to find himself landing straight into more fighting even in this evil-smelling place?

  It was as if his frustration with Rune and Mandrake, at Cairn’s death and the henchmoles, even back to Root and Wheatear—all moles who had faced him in one way or another with fighting from which he had run—had finally boiled over into rage. He snarled, his talons extended, and without any more ado he attacked the bigger mole viciously. There was no fear in what he was doing, and little thought. He simply crashed down his paws and talons, grunting and snarling with each lunge, encouraged to even greater violence by each successful contact with his surprised, and then frightened, adversary. For a moment, the mole fought back, but then, lowering his snout in a gesture of defeat, he turned tail and ran off down the channel, out of the range of Bracken’s sight.

  Bracken watched him go, shaking with anger, and then turned to the smaller mole who crouched quite still looking at him. Quite what Bracken expected he did not know—but certainly not the response he got. For, instead of showing any thanks for his deliverance from the bigger mole or any acknowledgement of Bracken’s superiority, or even any fear, he had the nerve to ask ‘What mole are you, and where are you from?’—the traditional greeting of the superior mole to the inferior.

  Bracken was so taken aback by this insolence that he very nearly started laying into this mole as well, but then the sight of one so weak and pathetic-looking being so bold struck him as frankly comic.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve,’ he said. ‘My name’s Bracken, from Duncton Wood.’

  This appeared to have as startling an effect on the small mole as his own question had had on Bracken.

  He darted forward, limping in a curious way as if he was injured, and exclaimed, ‘You mean the Duncton system?’ Bracken began to nod and then asked: ‘And what mole are you, for Stone’s sake?’

  ‘Boswell of Uffington,’ the mole replied.

  Part Three

  Bracken

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Uffington! No single word could have heartened Bracken more at that moment. A mole from Uffington! It had always been Hulver’s greatest wish that he should live to see such a thing and now, here in this strange place, Bracken had been led to just such a mole by the Stone’s grace.

  His excitement was, however, tinged by a sense of disappointment, for this Boswell did not in any way look as Bracken had imagined one of the legendary moles from Uffington would look. He was small and crippled, his weak paw making him walk in a darting, hobbling way that had his head swinging to the left—the side of his weak paw—then up away from the ground on his right and then down again. His coat was a very dark grey flecked with white and he looked half-starved.

  He spoke in a quick staccato way as if he could not get his thoughts out fast enough to keep up with his words, and he had a habit of interrupting Bracken when he spoke with a, ‘Yes, yes,’ as if he knew what he was going to say before he said it. Which, often, he did. />
  Despite his overt weakness he seemed quite unafraid, although a semblance of fear—very like that he had shown before the other mole—would sometimes cross his face. Bracken soon realised that this was a guise, a kind of mask he wore to appear so pathetic that nomole would wish to persist in attacking. ‘Perhaps that’s why he’s managed to survive,’ thought Bracken, whose only knowledge of crippled moles was that they never survived their first summer because they could not get territory of their own.

  Perhaps the most disconcerting quality he had lay in the way his eyes, small and bright as a bark beetle’s wing, fixed Bracken with a gaze so direct and penetrating that at first Bracken felt positively shifty looking at him.

  ‘So you’re from Duncton, are you?’ said Boswell, before Bracken could get a word in. ‘Just the mole I’ve been looking for.’

  ‘Well, it would be nice to know a bit more…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Boswell, ‘all in good time. Right now there’s no time. If you want to rest you had better forget it. We’ve got to get out of here as fast as we can.’

  ‘We’ve got to—’ started Bracken, who had no intention of allying himself to anymole just like that, whether he came from Uffington or not.

  ‘That’s right. We. You can try it on your own but you won’t succeed.’

  It did not take Boswell very long to persuade Bracken that they—and his ‘they’ included the other mole, who now lurked near them looking both angry and fearful at the same time—were in a desperate situation.

  The place into which Bracken had fallen was a long, narrow drainage channel made of a smooth unnatural stone, which smelt wrong and had high impassable walls. On one side was the marsh, on the other side an embankment that rose massively upwards and sloped away out of sight. But though Bracken could not see its end, he could smell and hear what was there—creatures whose noise was loud and rumbling, so great, indeed, that the very ground shook with their passing and whose smell was so sick with death that it made a mole’s snout go numb.