Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  “Aye,” purred Fagg, his eyes bright with the power of it all.

  “Aye,” whispered Snyde, thinking that here, this dawn, on Wildenhope Bluff, the rising sun found him as powerful as a mole could be.

  “Aye,” said Snyde again, as Thripp was lost from view, “all shall be well.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “She seems so sad,” Hodder whispered to Arliss on the second evening of their departure from Leamington, casting a worried glance at Privet who, ever silent, stared now across a darkening vale. “Are we doing right to take her this way?”

  Arliss stared at their charge, no more certain than her brother.

  “If only she would just say something,” she said, “something to show we are doing the right thing.”

  But to where can moles lead one whose journey is inward, whose voice is silent, and whose face betrays nothing but a wistful longing to reach a goal which has no name?

  “I feel we’re... we’re intruding.”

  “We may be,” said Arliss frowning, “but she seems grateful when we do things for her, like finding her food when we stopped this evening. She seems almost lost somewhere, lost and trying to find where to go.”

  “I don’t even know whether to talk to her or not.”

  They fell silent, watching Privet, and then looking beyond her to the mauve sky in which stars began to prick out one by one as the valley below lost its form and colour in the gathering gloom. So deep was the silence of the twilight, so immense the starlit sky above them, that they hardly noticed when Privet turned back towards them from the spot to which she had retreated for a time.

  When they did, she was already coming slowly towards them, her thin body struck with strange light, her eyes as bright as the reflection of stars in deep water. They were transfixed, breathless, hushed by her coming. Her face-fur shone with tears and never had they been looked on so gently in their lives. She reached a paw to each of them, though whether to seek reassurance, or to give it, they were not sure.

  “We don’t know what to do,” whispered Hodder, his normally confident Rollright voice faltering and quiet.

  Privet stared at him.

  “We don’t know what you want,” added Arliss. “We want to help, we want to know... to know we’re doing the right thing. We don’t even know where you want to go or what you need.”

  “If only you could speak, just for a moment, to tell us, to help us,” said Hodder, his voice suddenly hopeful. It seemed such a simple thing, such a harmless thing, just a word of...

  Reassurance; it was Privet who was giving it to them.

  “You don’t even know who we are, or where we’re from.”

  “We could tell you that...”

  Their words, their explanations, tumbled out, and all their story too; the horrors they had seen, the fears they had felt, the courage and faith that had kept them together and alive; and the miracle of their freedom now, and the task they had been given, for which they felt so inadequate.

  Then, when they had said what they must, and the night had darkened and deepened still more, and Privet had not withdrawn her touch from them, they fell slowly into silence for a time.

  “Feel better,” said Hodder, ruminatively.

  “Feel more certain now,” said Arliss.

  “We thought it was a trick or something by that Thorne to let us go, but it wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t think you were really Privet of Duncton when they first said your name,” said Arliss with the incredulous laugh of a mole who wonders how she could have been so silly as to doubt something that now seemed so evidently true. “Of course you’re Privet. You couldn’t be anymole-else.”

  “We’ve got to decide where to take you, haven’t we?” said Hodder rhetorically. “Well, I think —”

  “I think we should go by way of whatever Stones we can find.”

  “That’s what I was going...”

  Arliss grinned in the night. Hodder laughed lightly, easy with his sister.

  “Eventually,” he said heavily, daring her to interrupt him again, “we’ll go to Duncton, like Thorne said. But slowly, safely, beyond the ken of anymole. We’re good at that. It was only by chance we were caught. If you’ll only trust us...”

  “If you’ll believe in us we’ll see you home to Duncton safeguarded. We will!”

  They sensed that Privet did not doubt it, and she took her paws from theirs at last, and turned back to look at the sky.

  “There is somewhere you want us to go, isn’t there?” said Hodder. “There is,” he added for the benefit of Arliss.

  “Yes,” she said matter-of-factly, “and we’ll find it, we will.”

  But Privet had gone below ground to sleep.

  Those summer months of late June and early July, when Privet travelled south in the protection of Hodder and Arliss of Rollright, and they learned in the bleak wilderness of her silence to begin to trust themselves, was a time that moles all across the land remembered as oppressive and full of perils.

  Yet, in fact, the weather was fine and warm, though enough rain fell to green the trees and fill out the hedges with leaf and blossom. But when oppression and peril are in moles’ hearts, it is hard to see the light of the sun, or feel the warmth of its rays. All the more so as the moles whom the early success of the Newborns had elevated to power began to surrender to the brutal demands of ambition and warped self-righteousness, and fell victim to the inner decay that comes when inspirational leadership gives way to bullying and contempt by the oppressor for his victims’ weakening struggles against his greater force.

  So Hodder and Arliss might well wonder where to go and what to do, across a landscape of systems where the Newborns seemed to them increasingly to hold all power, and the voice of protest and revolt to be muted and fading. Well might they be uncertain when they knew that one false turn, one mistake, could put them back into the power of moles from whom their escape, and their new-found task, seemed but a lucky chance that would not be repeated.

  It did not occur to them that in its wisdom the Stone had known how to find just the right two moles for the task of protecting Privet in those perilous months. Though they came from Rollright, a system that like Duncton Wood itself had always provided its share of courageous moles to stance up boldly without fear or favour, and fight for the rights of the Stone’s traditional followers, they did not pause to consider that they were part of a great tradition. They had a task, perhaps the greatest of their lives, and they would fulfil it as best they could.

  It cannot be said that before they met Privet, Hodder and Arliss were deeply spiritual. Their faith was simple, their observance of the rituals of worship straightforward, and their spirit that of moles who have been reared to be loyal to their system and their kin, and to trust the Stone boldly, and with good hearts. Yet as the days went by in Privet’s silent company both found themselves drawn to thoughts of the spirit they had never had before, let alone expressed, as they understood with increasing depth and awe the lonely striving and journey that their ward was making. They discovered too that her silence was not mere wordlessness, but many things, and at many levels. And though it was her struggling sadness they had noticed at first, now they saw that she experienced strange joys and ecstasies as well, and times of utter indifference to the normal dangers and pleasures of daily life.

  Rain? Often she ignored it until she was led to shelter.

  Food? Usually she did not seek it unless it was placed before her.

  Heat and dust? What were such trivial discomforts to a mole whose journey seemed to have been greater than a thousand lifetimes, and still had more than a lifetime to go?

  “She’s old enough to be our mother,” observed Arliss some days after their fugitive journey had begun, “and yet I feel we’re mothering her.”

  “And fathering,” said Hodder drily. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so protective towards a mole in my whole life, except you.”

  He looked at his sister with bright clear eyes
, and if she knew that he had never been moved to speak so to her, or express his love for her so directly, she did not say so. As she hugged him close she thought to herself with gratitude that while Privet’s silence might be strange, and hard to live with day by day, it was a powerful force that brought forth good, and stripped away pretensions and embarrassments that got in the way in ordinary life, even for such close siblings as she and Hodder. Faced with such discoveries, how could Arliss and Hodder not begin to love Privet, and feel a burning and passionate need to keep her safe from threat and danger while she pursued the task she had taken upon herself?

  So far as the two had different roles, Hodder’s was to route-find and scout ahead, while Arliss stayed close by Privet, observant of her needs, and not just for food and shelter, but for companionship as well. For sometimes, and once for more than a day and a night, Privet was struck still and weeping, seemingly beset by fears and horrors she found in the lonely place that she was in. Then would Arliss gently lead her to a snug, safe scrape, and Hodder be watchful for danger thereabouts.

  Perhaps the Stone, aware of the siblings’ need to learn to understand Privet and come to terms with their own personal discoveries in her company, had at first directed their paws by safe and peaceful ways, for in those initial

  days and weeks they met with little trouble.

  They led Privet south by way of routes overlooking the Cherwell valley, whose soft green ways and water-meadows are the natural route from the midlands to Duncton Wood. But higher up the valley sides, on tracks Hodder had heard of from his father, and explored on their journey north from Rollright, they met only a few over-curious vagrants, a patrol they easily evaded, and the Newborn system of Upper Gaydon, into which they made their way by mistake, and found it hard to leave without causing untoward interest.

  It was mid-June before they experienced real difficulty, and that was when, with some misgiving, they dropped downslope near muddy Wardington, where they ran straight into a rapacious rabble of Newborns. Fresh from making massacre and mayhem at nearby Banbury, and led by Jugly, a minor Inquisitor of the cruel and brutal kind then beginning to take local control, these fearsome moles were on the way north for the easy pickings they believed they would find there.

  Hodder, realizing his mistake too late, found himself prevented by the wet and muddy ground from leading Privet and Arliss away from the danger. Overtaken by an advance group, herded up with some other strays and vagrants much as ants herd maggots for their later exploitation, it was all too plain that their position was serious.

  The usual claims that they were good Newborns on their way to “serve in Duncton Wood” did not cut much ice with moles whose pastime was murder, and whose pleasure was rape. It was as well for Arliss that Jugly was already satiated with another wretched victim, who having been used and abused now lay half dead, too weak to scream, her eyes deadened with shock and the realization that she could not survive much longer.

  “Aye, you can take her, lads, if you want,” declared Jugly brutally, as he eyed Arliss with lascivious interest, “but this one I’ll have later.”

  The vile leader watched with weary amusement as two of his colleagues, great tough moles with scarred faces and the arrogant ease of bullies surrounded by others of their kind, beat Hodder into the ground because he protested too much.

  Yet, most oddly, Privet they ignored. Indeed it was almost as if, as a recovered Hodder later observed, they were afraid of something about her. It would have been hard then to say quite what it was, for she looked thin and insignificant, just a dried-up pupless female with lowered snout who could do with a bit of flesh on her body. The kind, in fact, that such ravaging Newborns frequently abused for a moment or two and then left to wander bereft, often badly injured, and die, forlorn and forgotten.

  But this was not to be Privet’s lot it seemed, not among these Newborns. When the quick-thinking Arliss, ignoring her own mortal danger, asked if “her old mother” might stay with her, a ruse which served not only to keep Privet nearby but also to take the moles’ attention away from Hodder, Jugly nodded indifferently. He called his guardmoles off, leaving a couple to watch over Arliss and the others, along with some poor moles who had been rounded up, and moved on. Except that...

  “But don’t think I won’t be back, for you,” he rasped at Arliss, “so you lot keep your frigging paws off of her.”

  Shoved and harried, they found themselves in a little dell along with ten or twelve other captives, with just three guards to keep an eye on them all. Escape seemed unlikely – some of the moles were too shocked to talk or even move, several were bruised and injured like Hodder; only a couple showed defiance, and all were very apprehensive indeed. Nor did the site help, for it was a steep-sided little place, with muddy slopes to three sides and a turbulent stream rushing noisily along the fourth, giving the air a cold, dank feel.

  The guards watched them idly, quite evidently irritable and bored, eager no doubt to join their colleagues in whatever savage pillaging of the local system they were undertaking. One of the stronger moles tried arguing with them and was severely taloned for his pains. Hodder meanwhile, his wounds bloody but superficial and his natural fortitude soon overcoming any shock he felt at the battering he suffered while trying to protect the other two, assumed an abject and miserable stance while using his sharp eyes to reconnoitre the ground. Arliss, understanding what he was about, tended Privet, or simply looked afraid, wandering here and there among the group to assess their strengths and weaknesses, and the possibilities for escape.

  “One thing’s certain,” whispered Hodder when the guards weren’t looking, “we’re not going to hang about here waiting for that foul leader of theirs to come back and... and...”

  “No,” said Arliss firmly, “we’re not. I’ve already told Privet that, and though she didn’t say anything of course, there was a determined look in her eyes.”

  “What about the others here, have you had a chance to talk to any of them?”

  “’Ere you two, shut up your talking!” cried out one of the guards.

  “He’s not well and needs tending,” responded Arliss boldly, partly because it was her nature to be bold rather than meek, but also because experience told her that a resolute mole is often a mole who survives.

  “He’ll need a sight more than tending, he will, if you don’t...”

  The guardmole started towards her, Hodder prepared to defend her yet again, but one of the others pulled his friend back.

  “Leave her be, mate; she’s the one Jugly’s got his beady eye on. She won’t give trouble after that!”

  The guardmole retreated and he and his friends laughed knowingly and winked at each other. The sky suddenly seemed a little gloomier, and the day colder.

  “Yes,” whispered Arliss later when the guards were preoccupied once more with their own talk and things had settled down, “those two over there are game for a fight, and that one...” (she pointed to a large male who had been injured as Hodder had and stanced now scowling at the ground), “... he’s ready to have a go, he told me. We could —”

  “We could indeed,” said Hodder resolutely, “and we will. I’ll have a word with him myself. Get Privet near you so you’re ready to help her make a dash for it when the moment comes. The sooner the better, I reckon.”

  Arliss grinned conspiratorially. She and Hodder had been in many a scrape together, and when that fierce and determined look came into his eyes, and his voice lowered to its present subdued snarl, she rather pitied the moles he was up against. As for being “ready when the moment comes’, it was one of the great strengths of the two of them that they understood each other so well that they acted together in moments of crisis, almost telepathically. It had been like that when they were pups, and remained so now.

  Arliss drifted as inconspicuously as she could over to Privet’s flank, while Hodder, staggering and dragging one paw lamely behind him, went up to the guards and begged them to allow him to go down to the stream to d
rink.

  “Get on with it then, and no funny business,” one said, and Hodder limped slowly back, his route taking him past the moles Arliss had pointed out, to whom he simply whispered, “It’s now or never, so you wait for the signal and go for them. Otherwise we’re all dead.”

  He did not dally, sensing that once the warnings had been given it was best not to let the moles he was about to lead have time for doubts.

  He got his drink, washed his wounds, staggered about a bit more, and then meandered back, seemingly half dazed. Arliss watched his every move, and she saw others doing the same. She had warned Privet to be ready and had seen a flicker of response.

  “Just follow me!” Arliss had told her, hoping she would.

  At such moments surprise is a potent force, especially when an attack by one brave mole is followed by the charge of a mass of angry and aggrieved moles, ailing and injured though they may be.

  Hodder chose his moment well, suddenly rising up from his abject stance and crying out, “Here, you!” in a loud voice. This served not only to bring the guardmole swinging round nicely into taloning range, but acted as a rallying cry to those hardy moles already alert and willing to follow. No doubt fear as well as anger put power into their paws, for” no sooner had the hapless guardmole turned and been taloned hard in the face by Hodder than those behind him charged to his flanks, and those that remained soon found courage to do the same. What might have been an untidy tussle turned into a bloody rout of the remaining guardmoles, and three of their companions who came running.

  Arliss did not dally. With a firm, “You’re coming with me!” she took a hold of Privet and hustled her upslope away from the now triumphant prisoners, over a ridge and out of sight amongst the undergrowth alongside the stream beyond.

  She had no need to worry that Hodder would not know what she was about – and nor did she fear for his safety. He would send their fellow prisoners on their way and, returning after the two of them, soon catch up with them. Such was the trust and understanding between the siblings that when Arliss at last saw what she was looking for she felt no need to mark the place.