Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  “Find out that special thing, that sense of what moles in moledom are about, which military moles need to know if their decisions are to be of the best, and win greatest power and control for the least lives lost. I know you can find things out that others can’t, Weeth. It’s all I ask.”

  “Hmmph!” muttered Weeth to himself now, stomping his paws into the dusty ground, “‘It’s all I ask’ indeed! Well, I know nothing more than a thousand other moles, and that’s what I’ll tell Maple.”

  But this was not quite true. Most of Arvon’s force had wondered why their leader had let Quail live, but only to Weeth had he confided the reason, knowing that he would pass the knowledge on to Maple and Ystwelyn when he reached the Wolds.

  Arvon had explained that he had let Quail live because it seemed to him that if so debauched a mole was in control of the Newborns the followers had less to fear than if a strong mole was in charge. Arvon was subtler in his thinking than he seemed.

  “But you better get back to Maple fast, mole, for believe me, Quail won’t last long. Well, long enough to harm a lot of moles, but maybe not quite long enough to lose a war to us. No, some other mole will take over from him, and I’ll warrant it will be Thorne. So get back to Maple while we seek further information, and tell him we’ll cause as much confusion and delay in the Newborns’ forces as we can, and then head south back towards Duncton Wood, but not enter it again. Tell him Arvon will be at paw and ready to do his bidding when it comes to it.”

  All of which Weeth could have coped with happily enough had he not had the nasty feeling that events were building up too fast, stormclouds were looming, danger threatened on all sides and...

  “... and I’m sure there’s something I should be reporting to Maple which will help him make the right decisions. But what is it?”

  He looked about the gentle vales across which they were travelling with barely a pause, well aware that his two companions wanted to stop, but unwilling to do so until he had found an answer to a question he could not quite articulate; trying, too, to escape from quite other questions which loomed up before him most unexpectedly, and left him in a very irritable mood indeed. Why did the Stone allow such moles as Quail and Snyde to live, to exist at all?

  “Yes, why?” repeated Weeth much later as the first stars began to shine in a blue-black sky. But he had no answer to his question.

  “We’ll stop here,” he told the other two shortly, “but not for long. Eat, rest, watch in turn and then we’ll press on. We must get to Maple now and tell him all we know and what we saw.”

  “Saw something we should have killed,” muttered one.

  “Saw something that made me sick,” said the other.

  Weeth turned from them and surprised himself by muttering aloud, “Saw ourselves! Saw a darkness I’ve only known as a name until now. Saw the far side of the Stone. Saw the tunnel that does not lead to light. We... must... get... to... Maple.”

  They heard him muttering, exhausted; they saw him fall asleep. Disturbed by his words, they argued about who should take the watch, for neither could face sleep, tired though they were.

  Later, in the dead of night, Weeth woke suddenly, and lay staring at the stars above the entrance to the simple scrape he occupied. He had an overwhelming sense that Maple needed him again, and his usefulness anywhere else was over. Yet what more could he tell him? What was that “special thing”? The failure to identify it nagged at him, the more so because he began to feel it might exist.

  Tossing and turning, restless, unable to work things out yet unwilling to stop trying, Weeth suddenly decided they must leave. He almost burst out of the scrape into the night, and immediately one of the followers was at his flank with, “What is it, sir?”

  “We’ve got to go. We must get to Maple.”

  The follower, one of Arvon’s most experienced guards, put a restraining paw on Weeth’s shoulder and slowly shook his head.

  “Better rest up a bit more, sir. More haste... you know what the chief says. You’re overwrought, sir, which is not something I’ve seen in you before. Was it that Quail? Did you see something more than I did?”

  All the energy fled from Weeth’s body, and he looked into the mole’s eyes and saw how they shone with stars. He felt the mole’s touch, so like his father’s touch so long ago. He inhaled the mole’s scent, and it was that of a friend who cared. And he saw a young female dying before his eyes who had called out of her agony, “Help us.”

  Weeth wanted to weep. He turned away, fighting back his tears, but before they had time to flow his sorrow was overwhelmed by questions to which, for once, he could find no ready answers. He had heard the female die and her last scream haunted him.

  He had seen the darkness that moles fear, he had smelt the Dark Sound that kept moles out of the deepest parts of the High Wood, and he no longer knew who the female’s collective “us” included. Rather more than just victims like herself, he saw now. A chink of light revealed itself at the end of a very long tunnel in his mind.

  “What was her name?” he said aloud.

  “Whatmole’s that, Weeth, sir?” asked the nearest follower.

  “The one he killed. Whatmole was she? One of...”

  All of us. Yes, everymole of us. Hers was the cry of allmole for allmole. The darkness he had seen was his own. The stench was his; the crippled mind of a distorted mole, his too. The den they had seen, a place that existed somewhere in his own heart.

  “You better try to rest, sir.”

  “You’re right, mole. Thank you, you’re right. Get some rest yourself.”

  “My watch, sir.”

  “And mine?” asked Weeth, for with Arvon’s moles it was share and share alike and no exceptions except for the wounded.

  “I’ll wake you, sir, never fear, but the night’s got a way to go yet.”

  Yes, Weeth felt solemn and he feared it might be a long time before he laughed again. He knew now what it was they struggled for, and that Maple’s reluctance to attack and kill and do the obvious thing was justified. He remembered Pumpkin’s quiet expositions of what the Master Stour had argued, that peace was the only way. He remembered those gentle old moles, fugitives all, who lived so meagrely up in the High Wood, the last followers left in Duncton Wood. Suddenly, as real as if it had risen up before him then and there, he saw the Duncton Stone and round it many moles, Pumpkin among them. Many Pumpkins. And himself, but tired after a journey he had never known he was on.

  “Help us,” he whispered to the sky, and to the Stone, and his tears flowed silently and long, and he knew he had much to say to Maple, and they all had much to do now, for all the horizons were dark and threatening, and moledom was vulnerable and weak.

  A paw shook his shoulder, and he woke to the warmth of sun on his face, and an ache in his head that would leave him much sooner than the ache in his heart.

  “You took my watch for me,” he admonished the mole gratefully.

  He grinned. “You’ll be taking mine tonight, sir, and I’m looking forward to it already.” This was typical of the rough and cheerful exchanges of such followers.

  “So... a few more days and we’ll be back with Maple and Ystwelyn.”

  “Aye,” growled the other, munching some food and contemplating the vale below them which they had to cross to reach higher ground ahead. “Bit quiet for my liking.”

  They all stared ahead, wary. Always wary. It was how moles survived.

  “But not how they succeed,” Arvon had once said in a rare philosophical moment. “Risk is what it’s finally about.”

  “Hmmph!” muttered Weeth, finishing his food. “Better be off.”

  And off they went, leaving no trace where they had been, nor more than momentary shadows along an empty path.

  But if talk about it being “too quiet” usually signalled trouble, this was an exception. They met nomole for two more days, and when they finally did it was but a solitary traveller, middle-aged, gentle of expression, and singing to himself. Having washed
in a stream and had a meal (all observed by Weeth and his two friends for a long time before they revealed themselves), he lay out in the afternoon sun and rested. When their shadows fell across his face he opened his eyes, but it cannot be said he showed much inclination to defend himself.

  “Follower or Newborn?” one of them asked, looking about warily, though by then they were sure he was alone.

  The mole laughed and said, “Neither. I’m a pilgrim. Hibbott’s my name, and if you want to join me, do. I could do with the conversation. If you want to kill me, do. But if you want to convert me, I’m afraid it’s too late. I’m too old to change.”

  “Hibbott of...?”

  “Ashbourne Chase, a system nomole has ever heard of, unless it be in association with Ashbourne, which lies downstream.”

  “And where are you off to, may we ask?”

  “You may, good moles. And I’ll tell you, for I’ve quite given up dissemblement.”

  “‘Dissemblement’?” repeated one of the followers suspiciously. “Is that a sect?”

  Weeth grinned for the first time since leaving Banbury, and said, “It might seem so to some, perhaps. It means pretence. Being what you’re not. This mole is saying he wishes simply to be what he is.”

  “Correct, mole. Well put. ‘Where are you off to?’ you ask, as if I were on some little jaunt a mole might begin in the morning confident that he’ll be back in his burrow by late afternoon! I’m off to find a mole Called Privet, whom I expect eventually to find by the Stone in Duncton Wood – that’s where I’m off to.”

  Weeth stared at him in astonishment, for he spoke as if Privet might be round the next corner; as if he knew...

  “Explain yourself, mole,” said Weeth.

  Hibbott sighed; “Well now, it all started rather a long time ago really. A lifetime or three ago, in fact. You see, well...”

  So Hibbott began to tell them of his journey and his astonishing adventures, of his departure from Ashbourne Chase; of his trek across the Midland Wen; of his sojourn with Sister Caldey in the Community of Rose; of his coming to Leamington and the arrival of Brother Commander Thorne; of a silent female healer who listened to him...

  “Thin, and grey, and middle-aged, but...”

  “Thin and grey and middle-aged,” repeated Weeth, remembering a female he knew who fitted that description perfectly.

  “And she didn’t speak?”

  “Not once,” said Hibbott. “Now, where had I got to...”

  He told them of his departure from Leamington and how the Newborns under Thorne simply let him go, and how he had begun to realize that finding Privet by way of searching for her directly, as it were, was not the thing at all.

  “No, no, my friends, I decided that a pilgrim is more likely to find what he wants by not looking for it, or not looking directly at it – rather as some moles see things better in the dark if they don’t look straight at them.”

  Somehow or other he had heard the rumour that Rooster, Master of the Delve, had not only survived Wildenhope, but was now safely living up in the Wolds and it was to find him that he was now journeying in the hope he would lead him to Privet.

  Such was his story, and it was all the more astonishing that a mole so evidently without the resources of strength, or aggression, or even cunning, had so cheerfully survived the trials of his journey.

  “Well, that may be, that may be. But, well, I always say to myself that Privet of Duncton is worse off than I am, seeing as she is on a journey into the interior, as it were, which is a fearfully hard thing, you see. Why, praying in silence – and I mean real silence – for more than a few moments is something I find so very hard to do. But she – it is what she is trying to do all the time.”

  “How do you know that, mole? And why so sure she is still alive?”

  “I know it because I have thought it. As for her being alive, well!” Hibbott shrugged and smiled, and there was not one tiny shadow of doubt in his eyes.

  What he had told them had been extraordinary, though he seemed unaware of its military importance. He had been in and out of Thorne’s territory and might even have met Thorne himself. His account made plain as a paw in front of a mole’s snout that Thorne was the real danger now, and it was but a matter of time before he took power from Quail, in the way Arvon had predicted but days before.

  Weeth had no doubt, from Hibbott’s account, that Thorne was likely to be a far more formidable opponent than Quail. Maple was going to have to act quickly and decisively to retain the initiative over the Newborns. Weeth shuddered at the thought, his new seriousness diluting the thrill of excitement he had anticipated for so long when the days of campaigning came.

  “We’re going to have to get back to Maple as quickly as we can,” he muttered to his two friends unnecessarily, when Hibbott had gone back to the stream for a drink.

  “Rum mole, that one. Not scared of a bloody thing. You going to tell him you know Privet, sir?”

  But Hibbott came back, and Weeth left the question unanswered.

  They ate and rested for a time, and talked again only much later.

  “You’re some way off the path to Duncton Wood,” said Weeth.

  “You know it then?”

  Weeth smiled. “We’ve come from there as a matter of fact.”

  “Ah!” observed Hibbott with scant interest. “Yes, it’s certainly no place to stay, from all accounts. Riddled with Newborns.”

  “You could say,” said one of the followers heavily.

  “But you said...” prompted Weeth, continuing his inquisition of the mole.

  “I did, I did: that I was going to Duncton and in search of Privet,” rejoined Hibbott, with a faint hint of reproach in his voice. “I am, I am, but this is a pilgrimage, not an errand. I shall reach Duncton eventually I daresay, and when I stop seeking her I shall find Privet, with the Stone’s help. At this moment – and it might change on the morrow, for I am learning to think in the present – but as of now, I am still hoping I might meet the mole Rooster, for he is a friend of Privet and might advise me on how to reach her. But enough of me! I have talked too much! Yourselves, yourselves! Not mere pilgrims, it seems. Very much on an errand I should say!”

  Weeth grinned. “Heading in your direction, you might say. Going up into the Wolds. But we’re travelling rather faster than you, I think.”

  He gave little away, not because he distrusted Hibbott, but because Hibbott might be caught by Newborns again, Stone help him, and be forced to tell what he knew. Yet Weeth felt uncomfortable... dissembling. He would have liked to talk further to Hibbott. His account of Leamington and Thorne had been interesting enough, but his description of the female who had nursed him even more so. Thin, silent, a little more than middle-aged, peaceful... had she been Privet? Weeth was inclined to think so. Was this the “special thing” he had been sent to find out?

  “There are others like me, you know, quite a few of us I think,” said Hibbott suddenly out of the dark, as if he had lost interest in finding out about Weeth and his friends and wished simply to spend the remaining time sharing thoughts of his own.

  “Are there?” said Weeth, thinking suddenly of that female, and her cry in Quail’s den.

  Hibbott’s snout, pale in the night, moved up and down as he nodded, and he came a little nearer.

  “I think moledom is tired now, and wants peace. It is to Privet we look, not the others. Not the mole Maple and those like him, who perhaps you are going to. Oh, they’re needed, very much so. But we who have started our journeys already, our thoughts are on the Silence Privet has entered before us. There are many of us, and we travel alone. We have to, it is the only way.”

  “Aren’t you afraid, mole? Alone, and Newborns about?”

  It was one of the follower guards, and Weeth recognized the respect in his voice.

  “No. Not in the sense you mean. I was; for a long time I was. But the Stone is ahead of me and I see its Light, and I hear its Silence and I know it protects me. I cannot hide from it, so
why hide from the Newborns or anymole-else? I help nomole doing so, least of all myself. Sometimes I meet another like myself and I am comforted and feel less alone. Often such moles have no idea they are pilgrims.” He smiled. Weeth was sure Hibbott’s eyes were fixed acutely on his own.

  “I’m tired,” said Hibbott quite suddenly, “and my snout is burning from too much sun. Tomorrow I shall stay in the shade. And by then you will probably be gone, as silently as you came.”

  “Aye,” conceded one of them.

  “Well then, watch out for Privet for me. And if you reach her before I do, tell her that Hibbott of Ashbourne Chase seeks her. Watch out for me too, for I too am heading for Duncton Stone. We all are, all of us travellers.”

  “Mole,” whispered Weeth gruffly, “will you say a prayer? We would be obliged.”

  “Well, I... I may be a pilgrim but I am not much of a one for saying prayers with others. I’m not sure I know how. The words, I mean.”

  “Try, mole,” said Weeth.

  Hibbott stared at the stars for a time as all of them settled down into a comfortable stance.

  “It’s not just us four, is it, Stone?” he began. “Therefore, help us all, wherever we may be. Help us...”

  Weeth heard no more, for ahead, or above in the night sky perhaps, or across the darkened vale, he thought he glimpsed for a moment the Stone’s Light, and he fancied he heard the whisper of the Stone’s Silence, and he knew that even he, even cunning Weeth, was one of those whom Hibbott had described, who were travellers alone, as that lost female had been.

  “Help us...” whispered Weeth as dawn came, and he and his companions quietly rose and left Hibbott of Ashbourne Chase soundly asleep behind them; and as they went Weeth glanced back and for the first time had an idea of what that special thing might be that Maple had bid him seek out. It was, as Hibbott had suggested, that there were many more like him, many many more, and together they would be an army more powerful by far than the forces of Newborn and follower combined, and their mission was for peace, and would make the prosecution of war redundant almost before it started.