Duncton Wood

by William Horwood

  It was obvious. You should never take Rune at face value. Oh yes, Mekkins was right—never trust Rune. He had not been beaten, but had cleverly seized the opportunity presented to him by the appearance of so many Marshenders on the pastures to redeploy his forces, tired though they were, out of the pastures and down to the now defenceless Marsh End. For there, as he must have guessed, only the spring youngsters remained with a few of the older females— offering him the perfect opportunity to wipe out the next generation of Marshenders, and make their annihilation from the system so much easier… As for disease, well! they wouldn’t all be here if that story was true. Never trust that Mekkins!

  Then Mekkins was running, with three of his strongest moles at his side, up on the surface and ignoring the owls… running across the pastures, down the slopes towards the Marsh End, with the other moles following behind. Running through the night with a terrible fear at his paws to spur him on, an icy coldness in his heart to keep him company. It was so obvious!

  Down, down through the night, the warm air no comfort to their fur, down towards the Marsh End that lay below them still and strangely silent. Running on and down to the edge of the wood itself, and there stopping and listening for sounds, hoping that somewhere they would see a youngster who should be aburrow, a female who couldn’t sleep, some kind of Marsh End life. But there was nothing.

  Then, creeping skilfully by secret Marsh End routes towards the tunnels themselves, and his terrible fear confirmed—for the sound of the deep bully voices of henchmoles could be heard in the tunnels where Marsh End youngsters had so recently run and played and females gossiped.

  No good four of them attacking—best find out the worst. Creeping again by secret ways, looking for what they feared to find—the massacre of their youngsters. Henchmoles here and there but no bodies yet … and then to the central place, in and out of the shadows, fugitives in their own tunnels, seeking the sight that would make them fugitives for life. Were they all dead, all killed?

  It was only after peering down into many tunnels that Mekkins and his three friends began to realise that there were no Marsh End youngsters or females here at all, dead or alive. Not a single one.

  ‘They’ve all gone!’ said Mekkins. ‘They’ve gone!’ And it was confirmed by a conversation they overheard between two henchmoles: ‘Bloody waste of time, this jaunt were. That Mekkins must have taken the whole pack of them on to the pastures, youngsters and all! Cunning little bugger, isn’t he?’

  But ‘that’ Mekkins had done nothing of the kind. Mekkins crouched in the shadows as a sense of wonder and disbelief settled over him. They could not all have gone!

  ‘But they have!’ said one of the three with him. They checked again on the surface, down to the marsh edge, creeping silently along for fear of disturbing the henchmoles, peering into tunnel after tunnel and burrows when they could. But not a sign of life could they find. Just a few grumbling henchmoles in the deserted tunnels of Marsh End.

  They stopped still again up on the surface, which was bright with the cold light of a nearly full moon. Out from the marshes came the call of curlew and snipe, calls which every one of the four had heard a thousand times and which they barely noticed. Leaves of oak and ash rustled gently above them, catching the moonshine. Mekkins looked about him in wonder and then, very slowly, his face and snout rose to point up towards the moon.

  ‘It’s nearly full strength,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Nearly full. You know what tomorrow will be?’ There was silence so he answered his own question: ‘It’ll be Midsummer’s Night, that’s what!’ He turned away from the marsh to face southwards, up towards the distant hill now sunk in wooded darkness, where the Stone stood waiting.

  ‘You know where youngsters go for Midsummer Night, don’t you? I think I know where ours have gone. They’ve not gone, they’ve bloody well escaped!’ Then he laughed gently with wonder and relief and added, ‘And I’ve got a damn good idea who’s leading ’em there!’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Rebecca had sensed something wrong in Duncton Wood two hours after Mekkins had left in the early evening with a band of Marsh End males and the stronger females to enter the pastures to try to help Brome. They had gone off amid excited chatter and cheering, eager to be a party to a possible defeat of Rune.

  But Rebecca had stayed behind and only later did she begin to know why. Something was wrong. She had the same impending fear she had felt on that night when Rune and Mandrake had come and killed her litter. She went up on to the surface, where the light of the rising moon against a still sky was just beginning to filter among the trees and fall weakly on the wood’s floor, and snouted up in the direction of Barrow Vale. Dark shadows, talons, the shifting unease of danger was what she sensed. She went down into the tunnels where burrow after burrow was filled with the gentle sound of youngsters, some still suckling, others rolling and fighting each other with the strength and independence they had found by their third week of June.

  Mothers relaxed with their young, a few older, litterless females gossiped among themselves, chattering about the excitement of seeing Mekkins off ‘to give that Rune a taste of his own violence’.

  It was quiet and peaceful with just a hint of laughter in the air. Rebecca paced about uneasily, the few Marshenders who met her smiling, for they knew from Mekkins who she was and that she was a healer like Rose had been.

  ‘Tell us a story, Rebecca!’ a giggling youngster asked her, pushed forward by his less bold siblings. She touched him, shook her head and passed on, her tail twitching with tension. Something was wrong. Then up on to the surface again and the growing feeling that there was a terrible danger coming through the night, down here where only youngsters played and females were unprotected.

  Birdcalls drifted in from the marshes, as they had on the night Bracken had gone; a tree occasionally stirred and whispered in a breeze that ran above the wood but not on its still floor.

  Fear began to come into her, her eyes widened in the night, her snout pointed and pointed to the dark towards Barrow Vale. She felt that she was the only thing protecting the Marsh End… from what? The moon rose slowly, stronger, full, the sky finally turning black, and somewhere a small branch fell rolling through the fresh-leaved branches of a tree, tumbling round and down leisurely until it hit the wood floor and all was silent again.

  There was danger, and it was coming. And she knew suddenly, and with a ruthless certainty, that she must take them away to somewhere safe where no hurt could befall them. These youngsters were in her protection, just as once her own litter had been. This time there would be no mistakes.

  So powerful was her sense of danger and so determined her resolution, that there was no argument. The females with litters heard her in silence, her instinct for protection of the young soon becoming theirs.

  Urgent whispers, silent runnings through tunnels, low voices, scurrying, sleepy youngsters suddenly awake and standing still waiting for instructions, last-minute checkings of more distant tunnels and then off together through the tunnels to the east, where nomole likes to go. Where that Curlew had lived. Youngsters running and scrabbling to keep up, calm fear of mothers knowing they must not panic, away and away through the night tunnels, to where the soil is damper and the smell is strange.

  Rebecca leading them, away from a danger she had not yet seen but which was coming, towards a place to rest on the east side of the Marsh End and then on, the massed sound of escaping paws pattering in the silent night.

  On and on she led them, letting none lag behind, the youngsters holding back their tears and tiredness before the urgent seriousness of adult moles.

  Even at Curlew’s place there was no safety in the air. The wood was too still in the light of a nearly full moon. Where to take them? Where to lead? Again and again her snout led her round and up towards the distant slopes where once, on Longest Night, she had gone with Mekkins. Beyond, the Stone waited. It always waited. A full moon, and nearly Midsummer, when the Stone blessed the youn
g. One day to get there, sneaking through the wood. She could try along the east side, up on the surface, pray to the Stone and take them there. The Stone would protect them on Midsummer Night. On to the Stone.

  * * *

  Mekkins and the moles who had followed him finally got back to Brome in the Pasture system at dawn, fatigued beyond sleep.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ Mekkins said blankly to Brome. ‘Rebecca must have taken the Marsh End youngsters over to the east side so that Rune and the henchmoles couldn’t get them. She’ll probably try to reach the Stone. We’ll have to help…’ But his body could hardly hold itself straight he was so tired, and his eyes could not focus.

  ‘Try to sleep,’ urged Brome, ‘and when we have all rested we will work out what to do. We will help you as you helped us. If need be our moles will die for your youngsters.’

  Mekkins awoke restless and worried. It was late morning and the tunnels of the pastures were light with warm air and the soft smell of summer wafting down from the surface. Then a curious, distant rumbling slowly filled the tunnels as he woke up, quite unlike any sound he had ever heard, and it brought him wide awake out into the communal tunnel before he could blink twice more. A passing Pasture mole must have seen his concern, for he said the single word ‘cows’ as he went by. The rumbling stopped and started, passing overhead like a summer day’s cloud that hides the sun for a while in its passing. ‘Cows!’ muttered Mekkins in a grumbling voice, finding a tunnel to the surface, and going to see them close to. He smelt them before he got there, heavy and sweet, and then watched their black and white flanks swaying and stalling above his gaze against a blue sky, the tearing sound of the grass they grazed filling the tunnels and mixing with the slow sound of their chewing and breathing and the chomping and thumping of their hooves. All harmless and sad. ‘Bloody cows!’

  The wood was too distant for Mekkins to see, but the sun was high enough to have caught its western edge billowing green above the pasture, dark at its base where the trunks and shadows were and then bright-lit greens of great branches of leaves, thousands on millions; and a shimmer of the lightest blue haze covering them all as soft flaps and sounds of lazing birds, mainly wood pigeon and magpie, broke out through the haze and drifted over the pasture towards him. A couple of young thistle plants, spikes still soft with youth, cast a shadow on the entrance where he crouched.

  He would lead them to the Stone, for it was Midsummer, and tonight, surely, that was where they should be. They would wait for the safety of dusk and then start the trek towards the high wood, into the rustling shade of the beeches as the day drew in, and then over to the Stone. He was restless and worried, but never had he had so much faith in the Stone.

  Brome joined him, snouted out into the air, and said ‘It’s the kind of day Pasture moles love, when the young can play and us adults can find a bit of food early and then laze around doing nothing!’

  ‘We ain’t no different,’ said Mekkins. ‘Pasture, wood… moles don’t change. Not really.’ He told Brome his plan and Brome nodded: he knew it would be hard to persuade his own forces to follow Mekkins so soon into Duncton Wood, but if he had to kick them all the way there he would see they went. And anyway, wasn’t this what they needed—access to the Stone? They would see when they got there, just as he had. There was nothing worthwhile in the world—or nothing he knew—that a mole didn’t have to fight for.

  * * *

  As the warm day slid imperceptibly into the evening of Midsummer Night, Rebecca moved silently among the sleeping mothers and youngsters where they lay hiding and resting in an old tunnel she had found for them.

  The mothers dozed rather than slept, looking anxiously over the young who snuggled against them to see that they were safe. Some of the youngsters lay separately, paws out and snouts stretched, like the young adults they almost were. As Rebecca passed them by, she was aware that they looked at her with mute concern, just to see if she was really confident that where she was leading them was all right and that she knew they would be safe. She could sense that panic was not far below their seeming calm, and knew that if it broke out they would all be lost. So she went by calmly, deliberately slowly, saying a word here, pushing a youngster out of the main tunnel there, every second seeming an hour to her.

  She was almost reluctant to leave, for once they got to the Stone, what then? It was like leading them to the edge of a void with the enemy behind and wondering how, exactly, they were going to fly to safety when they got there. She had no wings for them.

  Henchmoles were about. Earlier she had met one, scurrying busily down towards Barrow Vale, and with the rest of them freezing into the wood’s floor, he had questioned her briefly and she had lied that she was from the Eastside. ‘Well, get on back there now, you know the rules. If I weren’t in a hurry, you’d feel the strength of my paw!’ Big and mindless his voice was, and the youngsters from the Marsh End shivered when they heard it, their mothers’ eyes silent on them, imploring them to keep quite still.

  As dusk began to fall, Rebecca led them off on the trek again, cutting straight up the slopes to the Ancient System. There, the massive grey trunks of the beech trees soared above as the last light of the sun died in the highest leaves against the sky, turning in seconds from pinks and greens to the rustling warm grey that would soon be a thousand tiny black silhouettes. Nearer the wood’s floor great beech branches looped down from the main trunks and hung still and low, the leaves getting a lighter green as darkness fell, for they were set against darkening shadows rather than a lighter evening sky as the leaves high above were.

  Occasionally a youngster would stop, from tiredness or plain awe, and look up and around into the massed depths of the trees, like nothing ever seen in the danker closed-in Marsh End. The bleak hooting of a tawny owl cut suddenly through the night from somewhere on the slopes below them, and as they froze to a halt, a distant echoing answer came back from somewhere higher up the hill towards the Stone.

  ‘Ssh!’ hushed Rebecca softly; ‘hussh,’ for she was used to the sound and in a way it gave her confidence. It was the sound of her wood and it was a long time since she had heard it. ‘They’re no more dangerous to us here than those eerie birdcalls you get from off the marshes,’ she said reassuringly, though it wasn’t quite true. But if an owl came, well, that was that! But she could feel the Stone getting nearer and trusted in its protection.

  She ran ahead in the dark, having made them spread out among the roots of two adjacent beech trees, so that she could see if the Stone was clear of mole. When she got there, the light was just as it had been the night before, with a moon beginning to show and cast a thin, milky glare in the Stone clearing. At first she could not see the Stone, but then it was there, stretched up into the dark of the sky, the leaves of the beech tree that stood so near it rustling in the night above. It was the start of Midsummer Night, and the full cycle of seasons had run since the last Midsummer, when Hulver had died. Mandrake. Rune. Bracken. Curlew. The image of them rushed and mixed in her mind—so many moleyears had passed! Why, she was an adult; many of the mothers with young whom she had led up here were younger than she was.

  There was an air of expectation in the clearing before her. It seemed to wait as she remembered Barrow Vale had sometimes waited for some old storyteller to set the place alive with the action of a tale of old.

  She ran back and brought the Marshenders forward to the edge of the clearing, hiding them in the shadows by its edge on the safer side, away from the slopes. They were glad to rest but were hungry, and Rebecca let them go into the darkness to seek some food, litter by litter, telling them to be quiet and quick about it. In such a place, and with so much heavy expectation in the air, they did not need much telling. Most of them just stared from the shadows across the clearing at the Stone, and waited.

  The night air cooled slowly as the full moon rose behind the trees, its light filtering down into the clearing and making it seem almost bright against the shadows of the wood around, which grew black
er and more impenetrable. None of them knew what they were waiting for and all Rebecca could do was look up at the Stone in the centre of the clearing, now rugged and grey in the moonlight, and pray that in its depths it would find protection for these young. She felt that it was their life that was in her charge, rather than their personalities, and, indeed, she was indifferent to them individually. She comforted them, or touched them, if need be, but it was their force for life that she cherished.

  To their left, through the wood and by the pastures at the wood’s edge, the wind stirred high in the branches, running lightly through the trees towards them. Then again, stronger. Then stillness. Then wind rippled away over the slopes, disappeared into the night across the wood to the vales and silent places of the Eastside. A youngster rustled and was hushed. Another snuggled closer to its mother, half its face lost in her fur, eyes opening and closing towards sleep.

  It was Midsummer Night, and bit by bit the wood was beginning to be alive with the rustles of movement. Wind? Moles? Predator? It was the night the Stone gave its traditional blessing to the young.

  * * *

  If there was one mole who knew what Midsummer meant better than any other, it was Bracken, who had been the fearful witness to the terrible death of Hulver in this very spot twelve moleyears before on the last Midsummer Night. Then he had spoken the words of the Midsummer blessing, moving himself towards adulthood as he said them. Now, Bracken was nearly back, rustling into the long grass and the old year’s leaves at the wood’s edge as he re-entered Duncton Wood.

  ‘We’ll soon be there, Boswell,’ he whispered, ‘and you’ll see the Stone at last.’ Behind them Mullion and Stonecrop crept, wishing they could go straight down to their own tunnels on the pastures but agreeable to sticking with Bracken right to the very foot of the Stone. And anyway, they wanted to see it.