Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  The mole headed for a narrow gap, which by the nature of the fall, and what remained of the walls and roof, was in the darkest part of the ruined place, paused and turned again and reached a paw to Whillan. Gently, for the rocks all about gave the sense that at any moment they could shift and slide and crush them both, he pushed him through the gap.

  He saw her but a little way beyond it, face down, her left paw trapped by rock, her white fur filthy with mud and grit. The other paw reached out along the ground and just touched the wall, and Whillan saw that the recent delving began and ended where her talons were.

  “Humlock?” she whispered, straining to look round, touching the delving as she spoke.

  The mewing came from beyond the gap, a shimmer of sound, communication.

  “I’m not Humlock,” said Whillan, “he brought me here. You’re trapped. No, no, don’t try to move...”

  She strove to turn her head to see him and as she did so pulled at her trapped paw. She began to panic. There was an ominous shifting of rock and Whillan looked up at the massed and looming rockfall, heard it groan and scrape, and knew how near it was to moving once again.

  “Whatmole are you?” she whispered, shivering.

  “Sshh!” he said, as quietly, “don’t talk. We’ll get you out of here, Glee.”

  He used her name as naturally as if he had known her all his life: Humlock and Glee, of course he knew their names, and what they were. These moles were once his father’s friends.

  “Mole, who sent you?” she whispered. “Let me see your face.”

  He moved round where she might see him and he saw a bloodied face, and black eyes that might in other circumstances have been bright and cheerful. Now they were fatigued and wan, and yet held warmth.

  “Rooster sent me a long, long time ago. I am Rooster’s son,” he said, and wished he had not, for she gasped, and heaved, and broke into the most terrible cries.

  Whillan felt himself lifted bodily from her, and Humlock took his place.

  “All right, it’s all right, my love, he’s of the Stone.”

  She spoke the words though Humlock could not hear them, but at the same time her talons ran and played across his face in movements that Whillan guessed was her speech to him. He touched her in reply and seemed to wait.

  Astonishingly, Glee laughed. “He wants to know whatmole you are, but I can’t tell him what you said. Now listen, Rooster’s son, if that’s what you really are. I cannot move and he can’t move me. If he tries the rocks shift. He might hold them back while I escape, but then he would be crushed. If he leaves me I die. If he stays with me we both die, which is what we thought was best. He lay with me, and fed me...”

  “How long?” asked Whillan.

  “Days and nights now, days. Humlock’s fed me, cleaned me, warmed me, just as I did him over the years when he’s been ill or lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “In himself, deep in his silent self, sometimes he gets lost and cannot find his way back to me. Now, mole, the Stone’s sent you and you must do the Stone’s work. Listen, for it will take you too long to find out for yourself. On past here is a delved chamber, the last of the great ones to survive.”

  “I understand,” said Whillan.

  “Yes, of course you would, you would. Rooster sent you! Oh mole, oh... You’ll need to sound the delvings there. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll try. And then...?”

  “Sound them, make them true, sound them hard, and then he’ll raise the rock as the sounds of the delvers of the past come here to help us before they’re lost for ever in the shadows of the rocks, and the light of the grey sky.”

  “There are other moles...?”

  “None living as we are. But generations live on in their delvings,” whispered Glee, with such conviction that Whillan almost believed it might be true.

  “Listen. Humlock will raise the rock, they will have a little time to hold the rockfall back and I shall... crawl, I expect, crawl as fast as my hurt paw will allow, and you will be ready to reach out and guide him over to us. For remember, the rocks will move, and the delvings break, and only you will be there to guide him out of here, and only I can guide you out of the chamber, and only he can raise the rock.”

  It was a roundel of destiny and Whillan could not doubt that it was true; whatever it meant, she had worked it out as it must be, and he had trust in her.

  “I’ll go and look...”

  “But hurry, mole, for the Stone has sent you, and the Stone moves on. We are the last moles and I wish to live! Don’t look, do!”

  Whillan went through the far portal into the chamber, which, so long before, Privet had described when she told Rooster’s tale. Huge and dark it was, but dripping now, shifting, full of wind yet still integral to itself as Whillan reached up to the richest and most ancient delvings he had ever seen and without more ado began to sound. Round and round he ran, and swooped, and up he reached, to delvings that sounded, up to more, higher and higher towards the arched heights above.

  “Rooster’s son...” she cried out, and he ran back in time to see huge Humlock, made dwarflike by the fall of rocks he strove against, reach his talons to the rock that pinned her down, and unfortunately held them all, and begin to raise it. Even as he did the sound in the chamber became a vast furore of noise and thundering paws that spiralled down through time and swept from behind him, through him, over him, and out towards the broken light and rocks, out to where Humlock heaved, to help...

  His back was to the rock, his forepaws stretched under it, his back paws pushing as his shoulders bulged and his belly stretched out and up with effort.

  “Now!” Glee cried.

  Then Whillan, forgetting what he was meant to do, the dark and light sound all about, ran to her, grasped her good paw, pulled and pushed her towards the portal into the chamber and then turned and saw the rock that Humlock had raised fall back, Humlock lift his paws to his ears as the delving sounds were lost and he “heard” only chaos. He staggered, confused and lost in space and time as all about him the rocks began to roar and move and crush down against him, pushing him forward in dust and noise, unbalancing him and he not knowing where he was and slumping down, head lower, body curling, down, down out of this world and into his own lost place where he could only wait to die.

  It was Glee’s shout that shook Whillan from his horror and reminded him what he must do: “Go to him, mole, guide my beloved out of there!”

  Whillan went, grasped Humlock’s paw even as the first rocks rained down on him, savagely pulled him clear and brought him into the chamber, whilst behind them the rocks poured down, and mounted up and rolled after them in terrible pursuit.

  “Now, follow me!” cried Glee.

  As the chamber’s walls shook and vibrated ever more violently, and the delving sounds cracked and broke and generations of moles cried out their last lost cries, they followed her up and away through tunnels wide and narrow, through chambers dark and light, up and up, away from the sound that followed them, away from the walls that crashed after them, each place they had run through breaking into ruins behind them.

  Up and out to the light of day and the roar of the Reap as the Charnel rocked and broke about them.

  “Up to the Creeds!” cried Whillan, grasping at Humlock’s paw again as if in the hope that he would understand. He seemed to, for then, half carrying, half pushing Glee, they ran from where the rocks crashed down and the cliffs slid and heaved, up to safer, more secure ground, if any there was safe. Up until they fell, far short of where the Creeds rose darkly ahead, but clear of the crashing dangers below.

  Of what happened next the memories came only slowly back to Whillan later, in flashes of light which gave him only incoherent glimpses of the three of them, chasing upwards, and the cliffs coming nearer, and then the Creeds, and then an ascent into a void that was above them making all seem reversed and upside down.

  A torrent; the rush of raven’s wings; slipping down and looking down and turni
ng back; Humlock defying gravity to climb on up and push them on; Glee suddenly screaming out into some gullied place, not from fear but for release, to make the darkness echo, to remind them that they lived.

  The Creed (which one Whillan never knew) took them unto itself and it became their vertical, terrifying world, and they its pups, clinging on to its flanks, seeking out its safe depths, fearful when it rose and swung on them; and sometimes looking down, down to the rocks below them, down beyond them to the screes, and beyond even them to the Reap, yellow-white and rushing far from them down into the Clough.

  Once they sheltered under a fall of water and found green ferns as beautiful as flowers; another time, upon a ledge, trembling in the winds that never ceased, three white starry saxifrage waited for them, as if summer were still there, and signalled them on. When they looked back the flowers had gone, swept down by rockfall, that way no longer passable.

  Time they forgot, and finally fear as well, for this was all their world and to it they cleaved and knew only the never-ending upward push of paw on rock, and pull of broken, blunted talon in the crevice, and the swing of paws across a void to scrabble for a hold in another cleft.

  “Hilbert came down this way,” were the only words that Whillan afterwards remembered being spoken, though whether it was he who said them, or Glee, he never knew.

  Night came. Day followed. Rain came. Sun shone far from them. Winds blew. Silence reigned. Then noise. Then night, another and another and another before day.

  They ate, Whillan remembered that. Red worms. Dead raven. The soft green roots of mantle-flower. And they drank of the chill, clear water of the Creed.

  Then one day when they had forgotten about the life that lay behind them, and were too weary to believe that anything could lie ahead, they reached up their paws and the rocks fell away and there was green grass ahead; and light, endless; and an horizon, frighteningly far off.

  There, in this new and dangerous world, two old moles, withered by rains and mists, harassed by worry and doubt, stanced waiting for them.

  One was Loosestrife, almost as exhausted as they were; the other was Waythorn, sniffing at the drizzle on his snout, staring at the ghosts that finally came alive out of the Charnel Clough.

  “She said to wait!” he said. “Privet’s did.”

  “And he said to wait, because Rooster’s would,” she echoed.

  Then she was in Whillan’s paws, never wanting to let him go, or to forget what it felt like to lose the mole she had only in the days past realized she had come to love.

  Whillan had left her on Hilbert’s Top as friend and kin; he returned to her as a mate. All of that, and a future, was in their long embrace.

  Nor was Glee unmindful of her own one and only love, who, sensing the strangeness of where he was, and that his life and world would never be the same, and likewise exhausted from the days of climbing, began to hunch up into himself like a huge frightened rock. She touched his face and paws again and again, whispering words of reassurance he could not hear and he began to relax. Then she turned round and stared down through the mists out of which they had climbed, and turning for a moment to the other three said, “Leave us be for a time. Leave us be...”

  They did, making a scrape nearby, getting food ready, and saying nothing when the two strange moles came and slept and then went out together again to stance above the world which had been their only life. One day. Two days. Five days, before at last Glee said, “We’ve said farewell. Humlock is confused by the wind and the vibrations which do not come back. He wants to know where this place stops.” She waved a paw across the distance that was moledom.

  They tried to explain what moledom was, and where they were, and how they must travel to get anywhere, but none of it made sense to Glee and Humlock. Without the confines of the cliffs, and the roaring of the Reap, they had no place to turn. Nor did tunnels help, not even when – as they always did – they delved to make the place their own.

  “Whillan, they seem so lost and sad,” said Loosestrife on the third day after they left the Charnel heights, and rested in Waythorn’s place.

  He nodded and went out on to the Moor alone to think, and was gone until nightfall. When he came back he called them to him, including Waythorn, and said, “It’s time we travelled south. We’re going to Duncton Wood. Waythorn, you’ll come with us, for we’ll need your help and skills.”

  “But what of the Newborns, and what of —”

  “It’s time, that’s all I know,” said Whillan wearily. He turned to Humlock and reached up to his face and touched it, and then said to Glee, “Tell him that this place will stop, but when I don’t know.”

  She told him and then said, “He wants to know where it stops, not when. He’s afraid of getting lost where there are no cliffs or delvings or Reap to guide him.”

  “Tell him,” said Whillan finally, “that this place will stop at Rooster.”

  Humlock stilled at Glee’s next touch and then raised his great head and for a moment his white eyes showed. He roared, he seemed to seek the very stars, and then, as gently as a pup, he touched each one of them, and roared again, a strange unearthly Charnel sound.

  “Is he weeping?” wondered Whillan.

  “No,” said Glee, her white paws to Humlock’s, who grew still again. “That’s Humlock’s laugh.”

  Fieldfare’s chamber was hushed as Whillan’s voice stopped, and the dawn light after Longest Night began to fill it.

  They were all still, all touched by his tale.

  “Rooster’s!” said Rooster finally, buffeting Whillan with a chuckle. Then his face was serious: “Where are they?”

  “Near Rollright. We travelled south, we took the high route of the Chilterns but there was Newborn confusion and danger about. We heard a rumour from some pilgrims of Privet’s coming and so I found them a safe place and left Waythorn to watch over them, and came on alone more quickly. I felt I was needed here.”

  “What of Loosestrife?” Privet and Chervil looked at each other and smiled, for both had spoken at once.

  “Loosestrife is well,” said Whillan carefully. “She... won’t come yet. I sent Hamble and Frogbit here to see that they were safe and they say they are, and they led them on to Cuddesdon, nearby and secure. Loosestrife is not ready to see Duncton or the moles in it. She’s curious, but wary. She’ll come when she’s ready.”

  He spoke dispassionately, but it was evident that in some way he agreed with her. It had to do with Privet. Loosestrife, it seemed, was not the only mole who chose to be “wary” – Whillan was as well.

  “When they come? Humlock and Glee?” asked Rooster.

  “Tomorrow or the next day!” said Frogbit. “Humlock’s big as you, Rooster, and bigger.”

  Rooster smiled. “Can delve with them. Can delve things long forgotten. Can delve the grief of years away. And will.”

  “And Wort’s Testimony?” said Privet in a strange dry voice.

  “Brought it back and gave it into Pumpkin’s care,” said Hamble.

  “It waits for you, Privet, near the Book,” said Pumpkin. “It seemed the best place for it.”

  The tale was done, but they were not yet a community again. The Book was what separated them all now, or Privet’s distance; and Whillan’s. Which might all be the same thing. There was much to heal and the only comfort was that all of them knew it, and all had faith to wait.

  “Come, Pumpkin, dawn is with us and I am tired,” said Privet. “Today we have work to do. Tomorrow, and the day after that: work!”

  She said it almost bitterly, nodded to them as if they were not kin and friends at all but passing acquaintances, and left, Pumpkin following her.

  “Miss her,” said Rooster, “that mole I knew at Hilbert’s Top. Loved and lost her. But friends come back and she will and then will delve for her again.”

  A beautiful smile of peace and patient love came to his face, and, as touching, a look of pride in Whillan.

  “Did well, mole,” he said. You knew
what to do. Now Glee coming here, and Humlock. Loosestrife will one day for Privet when she’s done. Not before. Will delve cliffs for Humlock and Glee, and the Reap, and they will want to stay.”

  They came three days later, on the Night of Rising, which commemorated Pumpkin’s leadership of the rebels into the Ancient System a full cycle of seasons before.

  Humlock, Glee and Rooster together by the Stone.

  “Never be far apart again but when we die,” said Rooster, and their coming set a tradition that on the Night of Rising, wherever it was commemorated, strangers were made welcome into the system to which they came. Then they celebrated until dawn, a time enjoyed by all but Privet, who was not seen at all.

  “Where is she, Pumpkin? Not scribing through the night?”

  “She’s not scribed a word since kenning Wort’s Testimony. Maybe I should go and see...”

  But he dallied, for the night was convivial and a welcome respite from the winter, which would be upon them soon enough once more. But then he thought he would stretch his paws in the night, and just see that Privet was all right... just see.

  The look on his face when he returned told them she was not.

  “Why, Pumpkin... mole, what is it?”

  It was Hamble who asked, and Sturne who went to him.

  “What is it, Pumpkin? What’s wrong? You can tell any one of us, or all...”

  “It’s the Book,” Pumpkin whispered, his face expressing puzzlement and shock. “She’s begun to destroy all the scribing that she’s made. It was nearly done, all the folios filled, all there waiting for her to simply say it was done. But now...”

  “Now, what, mole?”

  “She’s scoring out every single word she’s scribed.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “Place the folio there, Pumpkin,” said Privet, irritably waving a paw at a pile of jumbled folios strewn across the awesome chamber where the Book had been found, and where she now chose to scribe.