Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  Then last Longest Night, or just after it, he had found himself leading the rebel followers away from almost certain massacre by the Newborns at Barrow Vale, and lacking the strength or skills to lead so mixed a party, which included a number of elderly moles, into a fight with trained Newborn guardmoles, he had taken them instead to the one place the superstitious Newborns would not go, the tunnels of the Ancient System.

  “And how I wish I had found Mayweed’s map in the days when I had a chance!” he had said often since. “How much easier our life would be!”

  “But you’ve said again and again that it probably doesn’t exist,” said his friend Elynor, the redoubtable female follower who with her son Cluniac had helped Pumpkin lead the others into the Ancient System.

  “Yes, yes, so I have, my dear, so I have. But you know, so much else of those days when Tryfan and Mayweed were alive which moles only talked about, I was able through my private researches to establish as fact. And there is documentary evidence, dating from only a few years after Mayweed’s departure from Duncton, that such a map was said to exist. Nothing more, though; but how useful it would be now!”

  “You can say that again, Pumpkin!” muttered Cluniac, the bright-eyed youngster who had proved his worth again and again in the moleyears since Longest Night.

  They were stanced down, as was their habit, in a communal chamber they had delved on the northern periphery of the High Wood, choosing the place for its distance from the major tunnels, whose Dark Sound oppressed and harried them too much to want to live nearer it. Even so, as Cluniac spoke, he looked over his shoulder as if to acknowledge that even in that cramped and distant chamber Dark Sound threatened them.

  By Pumpkin’s time the art of delving the indentations and subterranean forms that generate Dark Sound had been lost, it being a skill known only to Masters of the Delve. Consequently the only places where moles were likely to come across it were in ancient tunnels and chambers in the systems once occupied by mediaeval moles, such as Duncton Wood and, most notoriously, the Scirpuscun chambers of Whern, where Scirpus established the Order of the Word, and was responsible for some of the grimmest Dark Sound ever known.

  Those who have never experienced Dark Sound find it hard to imagine how deeply it affects a mole. It reaches into a mole’s heart and mind, and plays upon his individual fears and flaws. Thus, the same Dark Sound will seem different to each mole, such was the skill of the Masters of the Delve. He whose deepest fear is drowning might hear (or think he hears) the rush of water through a tunnel; while one who fears more being crushed by the rising and twisting of roots on a windy day, will imagine he hears the strain and stress of roots, and might even think he sees them.

  Since few moles are without fear or flaw, most are affected by Dark Sound, which, in its worst forms, can affect all the senses, and bring about paralysis and death. Clearly, so potent an art was not one used lightly by the ancient Masters, and generally only where there were places or texts or other relics so holy, so precious, that they needed protection from intruders. In one or two cases, the most famous of which is that deep place of Silence beneath the Duncton Stone where the Stillstones and all the Books of moledom but that of Silence itself had their final resting-place, there may be additional protection – in this instance by the Chamber of Roots, the passage through which was fraught with physical danger.

  Indeed, the only moles ever to pass alive through the Chamber of Roots and out again were moles blessed by the Stone, whose hearts were pure, and whose faith was absolute, if not always, at least at the time of their entry there. Which points to something more: the nearer a mole is to the Stone in spirit, the less he has to fear from Dark Sound; the further away he is, the more likely he is to be affected. No wonder then that Pumpkin and his friends found sanctuary in the Ancient System, and the Newborns, far from the peace and love of the Stone as their sectarian dogmas had led them, thought it so dangerous to venture into the tunnels beneath the High Wood.

  But that all said, and moles being but moles, Pumpkin and his friends had found it no easy thing to dwell so long in and about the High Wood. Their waking hours were filled with fearful fancies and horrible hallucinations from which again and again they needed rescuing – a task which too often devolved upon Pumpkin himself for he was blessed of the Stone, and found it easier than most to go into the midst of Dark Sound and lead back to safety those who had ventured too far.

  Cluniac, too, was well-favoured, for young and inexperienced though he was when he first came into Pumpkin’s life, his faith was strong and his courage great. It may have been, too, that his very inexperience allowed him into places all others but Pumpkin found difficult, and that in later years, if he had tasted greater fear and discovered his flaws, passage into Dark Sound would prove harder for him. All of this meant that the followers’ explorations of the Ancient System were sporadic and incomplete and that the dark, deep tunnels, with their twists and turns, held enough dangers for them all that Pumpkin naturally wished he had the map which Mayweed was said to have scribed.

  He tried to scribe one of his own, but it proved a paltry thing, and somehow, especially after a day of winds had stressed and shifted the roots below ground, the tunnels seemed to change, and new ways to open up and old ways to close, and the Dark Sound drifted from one place to another as if it sensed moles might get used to it if it did not shift and change as the roots did.

  So far as there was a pattern to the tunnels it seemed to be that they all finally led to the Chamber of Roots, those on the larger eastern side of the High Wood (the Stone rising near the western edge) entering it via the Chamber of Dark Sound. To the east there was a large and deep communal tunnel that led from the slopes right under the High Wood, emerging at the edge of the Wood near the northern pastures.

  This tunnel, or Main Tunnel as the followers came to call it, was not always easy to follow, for the Dark Sound sometimes entered it and there were stretches, generally darker, deeper, and narrower, where the sound was never far away and a mole went quietly lest his pawsteps echo and return a thousandfold, like the tramp of an army bent on death. From such places Pumpkin and Cluniac had often had to rescue others who, suddenly confused, barely able to do more than crawl, had huddled down or, worse, wandered off into adjacent passages.

  The tunnels themselves were astonishingly well preserved in these central reaches, and of the mediaeval arched style in which, by some alchemy long lost, the delvers had found flints and other stones below ground to use above portals, or to mark a tunnel’s turn. In many places the walls were still etched with the original talon-marks of their makers, and were as graceful, or as stolid, as the talons were thin or thick. But such differences from one stretch to another served only to add a richer texture to the whole, and a harmony, as if to show that these great delvings were made by a community at one with itself.

  Here and there were chambers and cells, many mysteriously delved up the walls far higher than a mole could reach. They stretched up towards the rutted root-bound roof the cracks in which were the general source of light in the Ancient System; these indentations twisted and swirled, bent and retreated, so that a mole could not long look at them without his head seeming to swim as the walls did, and his eyes losing their focus. Then it was that the Dark Sound might start, catching the stress of his breathing, or the scuff of a nervous paw upon the ground, and he had to flee before the darkness of his mind overtook him.

  “But how did they delve such things, and so high?” Cluniac asked Pumpkin on many occasions. But Pumpkin did not know – that was a mystery only a Master of the Delve might satisfactorily explain.

  The winter had proved hard, and though the Newborns had not attempted any systematic pursuit of the followers, their patrols were always about and Pumpkin and his friends felt the constant stress of having to be careful about where they went and what they did. Then, as spring advanced and the weather improved, the Newborns began regular sorties into the High Wood.

  March was a terribl
e month. Three of the elderly followers died, suffering perhaps from the cold and the inadequate diet that the High Wood soils provided, and one had been killed by Newborn guards. This more than anything had distressed Pumpkin, and though he did his best to appear cheerful and optimistic, privately he suffered much.

  “Will we be rescued by moles from beyond Duncton Wood?” he was often asked. “Will a time of peace return when we can go back downslope to Barrow Vale, and the tunnels we loved?”

  “Yes! That day will come!” he would tell them, but how much it cost him to say it! How uncertain were his prayers to the Stone! How much he felt it had failed him!

  If he had any consolation, though a cold one, it was that Sturne, now Acting Librarian in the service of the Newborns, was even more isolated than he was. Pumpkin alone knew the truth about Sturne, and how Master Librarian Stour, before his death, had entrusted him with the future of the Library, and the care of texts that between them they had managed to hide away from the Newborns’ cleansing.

  Day after day, molemonth after month, right through the winter years, Sturne had had to stay at his post, pretending to be one thing so that he might protect the others; so too that he might inform Pumpkin of any dangers or changes he should know about. But their meetings were difficult, for nomole could be allowed to know the truth about Sturne, none at all.

  So it was that Pumpkin had continued his lifelong habit of going to the Stone alone – to pray and contemplate he said, but also now to give him opportunity to slip away across the dangerous surface of the High Wood, and meet Sturne in some fretful shadowed place, or draughty tunnel, and exchange information.

  How little these two old friends guessed how much these meetings meant to each other. Pumpkin, friendly, modest, worried, great-hearted, was reminded that Sturne was far more alone than he, witnessing painful things among the Newborns, and forced to tell terrible lies, which offended him deeply. No, Pumpkin could not have carried on alone for long in such circumstances.

  While Sturne, unbending, unsmiling, his face etched with severity and too much scholarship, compelled to seem a traitor to all he believed in, was given the chance to pass a few hurried moments with the library aide he trusted and admired and, yes, loved, more than any in the world, the only mole he had ever dared call a friend. The mole with whom, in better days, he had spent the festival days, like Longest Night or Midsummer’s Eve, when he felt lonely. Then he had thanked the Stone with all his heart that he could, in his severe and uncommunicative way, share the hours with good Pumpkin.

  These two then were partners in the strangest secret in Duncton Wood, each a support to the other, though their time together was snatched from the jaws of the Newborns themselves, and passed always too quickly.

  “Must go, Sturne, must go now,” Pumpkin would be the one to say, for Sturne could never bear to initiate their partings.

  “Yes, I suppose you must, Pumpkin. But, mole, be careful, I... I would not wish any harm to come to you. You are needed in Duncton by others now. Much needed!”

  It was the nearest Sturne ever got to saying he needed Pumpkin as much as any mole. As for touching his friend, well, he could not bring himself to so overt an expression of friendship. But Pumpkin could and did, patting Sturne’s paw and saying, “There’ll be help come soon, now that spring’s here. You’ll see!”

  How long the feel of Pumpkin’s thin paw on Sturne’s remained after Pumpkin had gone, as he stared unmoving at where his friend had been; and how often in those terrible moleyears did Sturne feel the fears and rushes of emotion that came when he thought – though he quickly blocked it out of his mind – what it would be like if Pumpkin were taken, if his dear friend were to find himself again in their paws.

  No, no, Sturne could not bear to contemplate for long so dreadful a thing, before tears began to prick at his cold eyes, and a lump came to his throat.

  “No!” he would whisper harshly, as much to the emotion as the nightmare that provoked it. “No, it must not be!”

  Yet several times it nearly was, though Pumpkin never admitted it. For those journeys to meet Sturne were dangerous, and it seemed only a matter of time before Pumpkin was caught again. Twice it nearly happened, and a third time, at night, he was chased all the way back towards the Stone, only eluding his pursuers at the very end when, by some chance, they headed off in another direction.

  Then he had lain panting at the Stone, thanking it for his deliverance, until Cluniac joined him and together they had returned to the followers.

  “Did you pray all night?” Cluniac had asked innocently.

  “All night, Cluniac,” lied Pumpkin, yawning. “Yes, all night...”

  But it had been no “chance” that had led to the Newborn guards being diverted. For what Pumpkin did not know was that it had long been Cluniac’s habit to follow the old library aide across the Wood, and to watch over him secretly against just such dangers as that particular night had brought. Nor did he suspect that Cluniac had finally observed that meetings with no less a mole than Sturne were the reason for Pumpkin’s mysterious and dangerous disappearances. At first he had deduced that Pumpkin must be a traitor, for allmole knew that Sturne was Newborn. But after a time Cluniac had come to realize that the unbelievable was true: Sturne was a follower, and his acceptance of the Newborn dogma a pretence.

  How tempted the young mole had been to confront Pumpkin with his discovery, but instinct told him not to, nor to confide in anymole-else, not even his mother Elynor. After his discovery Cluniac felt greatly in awe of Pumpkin and Sturne, astonished that moles he regarded as old and frail should be so steadfast and courageous. He understood then the true nature of the Duncton spirit, and saw with his own eyes the kind and calibre of mole who had always emerged from Duncton Wood when they were needed to uphold the followers’ traditions of tolerance, love, and faith in the old ways of worshipping the Stone.

  Sometimes then, though Cluniac never admitted it, he would himself pray to the Stone, asking it to protect Pumpkin and Sturne, and others like Privet, Maple, Fieldfare and Chater, who had left the Wood for a time to see what they might do to conquer the Newborn.

  “Stone, give me such courage. Teach me to be a true Duncton mole. Help me support Pumpkin in every way I can...”

  So the days had gone by, and April had come, and Pumpkin saw as yet no answer to his prayers, nor any hope in the warmer sun and the return of spring. Yet still he crossed the surface to see Sturne, whose news was still of brutal Crusades, and disaster, and massacres, and all this time, unknown to him, Cluniac followed in the shadows, ready to do his young best to protect Pumpkin, with his very life if need be. For the day was surely coming when the Newborns would no longer tolerate the survival of the rebel followers in the High Wood, and begin to flush them out.

  Finally, that day did come. In mid-April it started: surprise patrols, shouting through the wood, the sudden rush of guardmoles from out of nowhere, the eerie thumping up on the surface by Newborns who had deduced that such simple tactics would produce terrifying Dark Sound underground.

  A shadow came over the followers’ spring as Pumpkin, Cluniac and the fitter of the others desperately tried to keep the followers together, and protect them from their own mounting fears and doubts.

  “If we give ourselves up, like some of them have been shouting at dusk, they’ll surely treat us fair...”

  “I can’t stand the strain any more, Pumpkin, sir, I just can’t...”

  “It’s no good, Pumpkin, it’s never been any good; it’s all hopeless now...”

  These last were the final words of an old Eastsider, worn down first by the winter, and now by being harried from tunnel to tunnel. He could take no more, and one April morning as a sun that might otherwise have seemed beautiful rose through the dew-gemmed High Wood, he died in Pumpkin’s paws.

  Then, two days later, two foolish followers, disobeying all instructions, ventured out on to the southern pastures in the hope of finding better worms than they had fed on in molemonth
s past. They did not return. Their cries were heard, the hulking forms of guardmoles were seen, and then they were gone, and Pumpkin spent his last strength persuading Cluniac and one or two young moles from trying to rescue them.

  It almost broke Pumpkin’s heart, and for the first time he could find neither words nor example to encourage the followers and give them hope. They waited in vain for their two friends to return, but nomole came until four days later when some guardmoles appeared up by the Stone, thumping and shouting.

  “We know you’re there, and we know your numbers. There’s...”

  The brutal voice told how many there were, mentioned many names, and spoke of the chamber on the far side of the High Wood where they had hidden, but which Pumpkin had forbidden them to return to against just such a discovery as this.

  “Your friends died lingeringly and horribly, for they were sinners and suffered just punishment. Crush a mole’s snout slowly enough and he’ll tell you anything. By the end they had nothing left to say. Give yourselves up! Give yourselves a chance to live, for you’ll not be punished. But if you resist the true path longer you’ll one by one go the way of your two friends.”

  Aye, April became a dark time in the High Wood, and Pumpkin had no way of alleviating it, for he felt as dark and oppressed as any of them. Even praying by the Stone became nearly impossible, and very dangerous, for the guardmoles were often posted there, and twice more he was nearly caught.

  “Don’t risk it any more. Pumpkin!” Elynor begged him. “For all our sakes don’t! Things will get better; you’ve always said it, and now I’m saying it.”

  But he was not cheered, for he could no longer believe it, much as he wanted to.

  For three more days he barely moved, and scarcely tasted the meagre worms that Cluniac put before him. Then, finally, he slipped up to the surface, “Just to see the Stone, just to keep my spirit alive...” and at a nod from Elynor, who knew that part of the secret at least, Cluniac followed after him.