Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  Spindle looked about him uneasily, for they had travelled a good distance since they had left the Blowing Stone a week before, and had come off the chalk on to the clay vales to the north. The vegetation was different from anything he had ever seen. There were all sorts of shoots above ground and roots below which he knew nothing about, while some, like the delicate roots of harebell and the sturdy windings of knapweed, so useful to support tunnels in dry and friable soils, seemed scarce hereabouts and he missed them.

  “Well,” he said finally, sounding as positive as he could, “so long as nomole asks me to name the plants I’ll get by, and I can learn their properties soon enough.”

  Their alibi, however, was not to be tested quite yet, for it seemed sensible to Tryfan that once clear of Uffington and the possibility of pursuit they should rest in some deserted place, where they could enjoy the advance of spring, recover from the sudden flight from Uffington, build up their strength, and take advantage of swifter journeying once the warm dry weather of late April came. By then, too, mated moles would not be aggressive, and crossing their territory less of a problem.

  No records exist of the place the two moles stayed, though many systems north of Uffington have been anxious to claim the honour to themselves.

  Some say it was in the wetlands of the Lyford system, others that it was further west at Charney, birthplace of Skeat, one of the Holy Moles Boswell knew. A few believe that Tryfan travelled further north than that, given special swiftness by the Stone’s grace, and was at or near no less a system than Pusey, ancient and good.

  But scholars ever wish to travel over the barren ground of surmise and make of life a guessing game. For moles who seek the silent centre of Tryfan’s life it is enough to know that they found a goodly place, worm-rich and quiet, empty of other moles because of the plague, and there lived out the remaining weeks of March and the first half of April until the warmer days of early summer came.

  They learnt to live in harmony with one another. Freed of the self-imposed tasks they had had before and able to make their days their own, they had the space to come to terms with the grim moleyears they had each, in their own way, lived through. Spindle put on weight, though never in his legs, which remained as elongated and thin as ever. At least he did not look quite so hunted and pathetic as when Tryfan had first seen him.

  Tryfan aged a little and gained the authority that always comes when a mole leaves another he has relied on, and learns that he must go out into the world, taking responsibility for his own place in it, and perhaps for others too.

  Certainly in those molemonths Tryfan himself seemed to grow stronger and more impressive, his coat a glossy dark now and his snout mature and purposeful. He had, though he was not aware of it, an air of calm – the calm that came with the faith that had been his inheritance from Duncton Wood, and which Boswell had nurtured so well in him.

  Nomole knows now how much Tryfan suffered from the loss of Boswell, but Spindle sensed it and was careful to help the young scribemole all he could – checking tunnels, worm-finding, clearing and maintaining; and by being quiet in those long periods when Tryfan wished to meditate and do those rituals which scribemoles must.

  The two moles shared a communal burrow and came together there to eat and talk quietly of the day’s doings. It was Tryfan’s habit to start their meals with a grace, such as scribemoles normally speak, and he would vary them according to his mood.

  Some days, when he was cast down by the loss of Boswell and worried for him, he might say the grace his father Bracken taught him:

  Be with us, Stone, at the start of our feast

  Be with us, Stone, at the close of our meal.

  Let nomole adown our bodies

  That may hurt our sorrowing souls,

  Oh nomole adown our bodies

  That may hurt our sorrowing souls.

  Yet as spring progressed and summer came upon them, whatever crises Tryfan was passing through seemed to be over and he began to speak more positively of the future, and to invoke gladness and joy in graces that, later, Spindle remembered with love, and himself used on occasion:

  Give us, O stone, with the morning meal

  Health to the body, joy to the soul

  Give us, O Stone, of the final worm

  Enough for our need in the silence of sleep

  To the greedy, too much

  To the austere, good humour

  To the wasteful, no second chance

  To the unloved, thy love

  That all may eat and be well blessed.

  What Spindle did not yet see, or rather comprehend, was the weariness that was with Tryfan at times in consequence of the burden he felt Boswell had put upon him – a burden to quest for something he did not really understand: a quest for Silence, a quest to prepare the ground for a mole or moles that were coming and would bring the wonder of that great Silence to allmole.

  What Spindle did know, however, was that at times Tryfan was troubled in sleep, tossing and turning and mumbling about a white light he had seen and which was on him, over him, and Boswell was lost in it and needed help. At other times, Spindle knew, his talons thrashed this way and that, seeking to cast off from him some burden too great for a mole to bear. Sometimes then, in those dreams, he called Boswell’s name, and sometimes tears were there, and then Spindle suffered too, his brow furrowed in distress, watching over Tryfan though never afterwards saying anything.

  It has to be said too that Spindle, cleric though he was, and scholarly though his nature, had, through the moles he had known at Seven Barrows and from his master Brevis, learnt something more of the world than Tryfan had been able to while in the company of Boswell. So Spindle, inexperienced though he was, knew that spring was a time for mating, and if sometimes Tryfan was out of sorts and irritable it might have to do with the lack of female company; indeed the lack of any company but his own and Spindle’s. As for Spindle, now that the Stone had sent him from Uffington and since he had taken no strict vows as Tryfan had, he saw no good reason why a bit of consorting and canoodling might not, of a young summer’s evening, be in order, and good order too. So...

  “Whither shall we be bound when we leave?” Spindle began to ask in mid-April, when the birds of hedge and copse were busy with their nestlings, and the ground was alive with the green growth of plants.

  “I know not,” said Tryfan, “but the Stone will guide me.”

  “When?” asked Spindle impatiently.

  “I cannot know that. But soon now, very soon. Are you restless of this place?”

  “Yes,” said Spindle simply. “Not exactly full of moles is it? Bit on the solitary side. Not much life, if you know what I mean.”

  “Have you been bored, Spindle?”

  “No, only lately. When the cold side of spring is over and the early summer sun starts lighting up the entrances once more, and other creatures are about, then a mole wants to busy himself and say hello.”

  Tryfan laughed.

  “Does he?” he said.

  “Or she!” said Spindle with a sideways glance.

  “She?” said Tryfan frowning.

  “Well... yes. I didn’t expect to mate after Longest Night, nomole to mate with. And now I’m your companion I don’t suppose there’ll be time for that sort of thing even if the season is right. But I wouldn’t mind saying hello to a female or two!”

  Tryfan looked at Spindle’s thin fur and awkward paws, and the way his eyes were both humble and intelligent, and declared in some surprise that “the thought never crossed my mind.”

  “Ah well, Tryfan, you’re a scribemole, aren’t you? And celibate. Mind you, I’m not saying the thought might not cross your mind, but not quite the thing, is it? Not that the moles in Uffington were perfect in that respect. There was always a bit of wandering down to Seven Barrows in January and who’s to say what goes on in tunnels in deep winter, or from where a litter comes? Not me! Suspiciously intelligent some litters in Seven Barrows were, considering that the local males
themselves were never famous for their quick wits and repartee! Thick as lobworms, in fact. Why, some say that I myself might well have been fathered by a scribemole!” Having announced which he fell silent, blinked, and then looked rather smug.

  Tryfan stared at him for some time, and finally said, a little stiffly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Spindle.”

  Spindle laughed and then stopped suddenly.

  “Not yet you don’t, but you will!”

  “H’m,” said Tryfan and went off in a most un-scribemole-like huff to meditate, except that the thoughts he had were too confused and mixed up to be called contemplative.

  Females? He hadn’t thought about them until now. Other moles? Society? Mixing? Tryfan wished his mind were his own but sometimes it did not behave as if it was, and the thoughts of the Stone he wished to have were not there.

  It’s time we got on with the journey, he said to himself eventually, and from the way he suddenly felt light-hearted, and the sudden singing of the birds and warming of the sun, and the exciting sense that beyond this forgotten place where they had been staying awhile there was a whole world to explore whose excitements and challenges were barely known... from all this, Tryfan might reasonably say, as he did to Spindle, that the Stone was telling him at last it was time to move on and that in a few days they would go.

  The night before their departure the two moles crouched on the surface in the darkness and watched the moon rise and light up the vales over which, in the days and weeks to come, they would travel.

  “Is it true a scribemole like you can read the ways of the Stone?” asked Spindle, staring out into the darkness and wondering about the world beyond them.

  “Anymole can, it’s just that I’ve been taught how to be still enough to do so easily.”

  “Well I couldn’t!” said Spindle.

  “You could more easily than you think! You could scribe as well come to that. It’s just that moles like to make a mystery of things, and then they can’t do them.”

  Spindle’s eyes lit up. “Now there’s a dream, to scribe like a scribemole! I know what I’d scribe.”

  “What?”

  “History, that’s what. What happened in moledom, when and why. Very interesting that, to scribe the things that moles say happened and then work out if they really did happen that way! Differences you see, the accounts all have differences. So where does the truth lie, Tryfan?”

  “In moles’ hearts I should think,” said Tryfan. Then he said nothing for a while, for history did not much interest him; it was the now that Boswell had taught him to take notice of. He tried to relax and feel the vibrations of the Stones near and far, a pattern of feelings that Boswell had taken pains to teach him. But it was hard at first because the power of nearby Uffington and the Blowing Stone was so strong, and made stronger on this line because beyond them was the great Avebury system whose stones are famed over moledom.

  “I don’t know anything about the systems beyond Uffington, except a few names,” said Spindle a little wistfully.

  “I know them only from other moles who have travelled, as my parents did, and as Boswell has,” replied Tryfan.

  “Make a tale of what you know then,” said Spindle, for he was a mole who liked to talk on a clear night, and would himself make a tale of anything.

  So Tryfan told how, long ago, he had learnt from Boswell the directions of the seven Ancient Systems, and of the Stones that mark not only their location, but the communal ways between.

  Each system has its own feel which is like a distant call, almost a vibration, he explained, and within the orbit of the Seven Systems each one could be felt, the changes in their relative strengths and tones being a scribemole’s guide to where he was, and where he was heading.

  Of the Seven Systems only one, the grim westerly system of Siabod, lies beyond the reaches of the three Rivers. These are the Thames, river of light and dark; the Severn, river of danger, which a mole must cross to reach Siabod; and the Trent, river of no return, beyond which, Tryfan had been told, lay territories unrecorded even in the Rolls of the Systems, except for those stories associated with Scirpus and the system of Whern.

  Tryfan remembered his mother Rebecca telling him of the North and tried to remember it for Spindle now: “Nomole can know what lies in the northern ranges, a land bleak of worm and dank of soil, where if moles live they know not of the Stone, or of the sun in summer. There the ground freezes up with cold and the tunnels, if they could be made, would burst with ice and crush a mole as if he never was.”

  Bracken had said the same, adding that it was a place of giants and of fear. Yet a mole’s heart quickens to hear the stories of the North, where the First Moles lived, who were made of the sparks hammered out by Ballagan when he smote the Stone in his time of doubt – smitings that finally produced the seven Stillstones; and the many legends of giants and snakes and natural dangers like the ice and the roaring mud; and the rain that eats a mole’s skin and poisons his soul.

  “If mole has been there, he or she has not come back to tell of it,” Boswell told him, “but there is not a system that does not have its moles who have left to find the North, or legends of moles that have come back.”

  Of all this Spindle knew something, but was glad to crouch low in the May night and hear Tryfan’s account.

  “And what of the places you were told of as a youngster?” asked Tryfan in his turn, when he had finished.

  “I heard of Siabod, that’s a system and a half that is. Wouldn’t want to go there in a hurry! And the others of the Seven, including your own Duncton Wood. But what used to give me nightmares when I was a pup was my father’s stories of the Empty Quarter known as the Wen which Boswell himself mentioned before we left Uffington.”

  Tryfan nodded, settling down, for it sounded as if Spindle knew something of that and desired to tell of it.

  “Yes,” continued Spindle, “that’s a place where the great Thames is swallowed underground and nomole lives.”

  “Nomole?” said Tryfan, surprised, for he had heard that mole did live there, legendary mole.

  “Well, that is to say, nomole lives there now I should think. Might have done in the past. Systems come and go. Sometimes moles used to come to Uffington from the distant east and they had tales of the Wen.”

  “What is it exactly?” asked Tryfan.

  “A twofoot system, not for mole. A place of rushing sucking water and disease. Rats black as night and the roaring owl, and fire at night so the sky is lurid with it. Nomole there!”

  “Bracken said there might be,” said Tryfan. “He said...” and suddenly an early memory of his father came to him and, in the darkness, Tryfan smiled a little sadly, for his father had meant much to him, and when he was young had told him a tale or two up by Duncton’s great Stone on such nights as this one.

  “My father believed it was the place of the roaring owl and all the roaring owl ways lead there, and they have tunnels larger than the greatest Stone and there is the march of twofoots all day long. There the old moles live who speak the old language, and everymole can scribe —”

  “Everymole?”

  “Yes. There are no scribemoles, but everymole must learn. From there the scribemoles first came as the grikes have come now, to interpret the Stone to mole and teach of the Silence that may be found.”

  “So your ancestors came from the Empty Quarter!” said Spindle, a little light-heartedly.

  “And yours.”

  “And our cousins may still be there! With roaring owls for friends, and rats for good company!”

  “You may laugh,” said Tryfan, “but did not Boswell say we might go “even to the Empty Quarter”?”

  “Yes, but....”

  Tryfan smiled in the dark.

  “But nothing,” he said with as strong and humourless a voice as possible. “I hope that you remember your task is to keep with me.”

  “But, Tryfan... you’re not...?”

  “The Stone will guide us,” s
aid Tryfan with a maddening calm, “and it will lead us to where we must go.”

  “It’s getting cold,” said Spindle to change the subject. “When will we set off, and for where?”

  “Dawn for Buckland,” said Tryfan distantly. “Dawn...” and he hunched forward, snout a little to one side, moonlight in the fur on his back, eyes enshadowed, his voice strange suddenly.

  Just below them there was a short bark and a shrill

  squeal, and a fox paused for a moment, rabbit in jaw, and stared up in their direction before slinking into the darkness of a ditch. Downslope to the right a tawny owl called sharply and both moles instinctively moved nearer together, flank to flank.

  Tryfan shivered suddenly, frightened perhaps by the prospects of journey and responsibility before him. Spindle tried to comfort him.

  “Boswell said this was your task. I heard it. Good Boswell said I was to go with you, and I shall, though I am shaken with fear sometimes and won’t be much good to you when you need strength, or quickness, or rituals. Won’t be much good at all, I’m afraid. But I can find worms, I can make a tunnel the proper way, and, and... I’ll never leave you, Tryfan, so long as you need me.”

  And he paused apologetically, as if this, which was all a mole could give, was not enough.

  “You have forgotten what Boswell saw as your greatest strength,” said Tryfan, his voice stronger for Spindle’s encouragement and trust. “You have not mentioned your faith in the Stone; that may, at times, be your greatest gift to me.”

  “I have that and will not lose it.”

  “Whatever happens?”

  “No, never,” said Spindle firmly. “Not so long as the memory of Boswell and what he said to me lives, not ever. Now, Tryfan, you had best sleep through these last hours of the night.” And together they crept underground to their burrows, and slept the light and troubled sleep of uncertain travellers on the eve of a journey, who do not know their journey’s purpose, or where its end might be.