Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  “We’ll be guided by the Stone,” said Tryfan carefully, but thinking that there were times when the Stone was use to neither mole nor beast.

  January is not a time for travel, nor February either, especially when the weather is as bitter as that long winter’s was. Wise moles stay underground when the ground is frozen and turn their thoughts inward to matters of the mind and heart.

  But when, finally, the first stirrings of spring started underground, when the frosts were still hard but the worms and pupae began to stir again in the soil, and root-tendrils to quiver and begin their silent white-green quests, then a few paw-picked moles poked their snouts out into the cold air, and heaved themselves abroad.

  These moles had been trained by Alder as watchers, and had volunteered to risk going out beyond the roaring owl way, to watch for signs of grikes, and arrange for other friendly moles to watch out as well. The lessons of Harrowdown had been learnt, and Tryfan and Skint intended never to let themselves be taken by surprise again.

  Meanwhile, the Duncton moles, and a few of the followers, chose to get on with what all sensible moles do as spring comes close, which is to find a mate and ready themselves for young. So that pair by pair, responding to the season, began to busy themselves about their tunnels in an exclusive kind of way, and spend time together talking about nothing in particular except the fact that they would prefer not to be disturbed by anymole else (except each other) if you don’t mind.

  All this being so, in the preceding weeks Thyme had found reason aplenty to talk with Spindle, who, while not overtly encouraging her advances, yet somehow found his way to her tunnels on one pretext or another when the gap between their “chance” meetings seemed too long. But pairing, even mating? Spindle denied any intention of such a thing, looking most embarrassed and saying he had task enough being companion and help to Tryfan than to think of that.

  “Well, Sir, if you don’t mind Mayweed observing this fact, Sir, it’s the sort of thing a mole does at this time of the year and nomole would be surprised if you and lovely Thyme, most good-looking Thyme, did, and would be disappointed and surprised if you did not,” said Mayweed, speaking for many a mole who hoped to see the shy Spindle pair.

  “Did not what?” asked Spindle, eyes innocent.

  “Most cunning, most clever, most unconvincing denial, Sir, Spindle, Tryfan’s friend, clever mole,” said Mayweed with a wide smile. “Secret meetings, that’s what; mating, that’s the thing; love they call it, yes, yes, yes!” said Mayweed, who for some reason laughed.

  “It’s not funny, and it’s not your business,” said Spindle. “So go away. I suggest you stop talking about it and go and find yourself a mate yourself. That’ll keep you busy!”

  At this, Mayweed looked hurt and sad. Then he smiled, but a brave hurt smile, and said, “Cured I may be, denying Sir, but allmole can see that my puny and pathetic body has been ravaged by disease and that my face is bald and my fur patchy. Nomole would have Mayweed, not now nor ever, and your friend Mayweed is to be alone and unloved all his life, such of it as yet he may have. In that respect, Spindle Sir, and only in that disadvantageous respect, am I like Tryfan. Both celibate, both unloved by female mole. Sad is Mayweed, miserable and physically bedraggled to think of it, and therefore uncomprehending why one such as your splendid and revered self should turn his back on love, especially with one so desirable to the discerning mole as Thyme.”

  “Well, yes,” said Spindle rather contritely, regretting that he had hurt Mayweed. “Anyway, I doubt that Thyme is interested in that sort of thing and certainly not with me!” Mayweed did not miss the query in Spindle’s voice.

  “Doubt it do you, Sir? Splendid and predictable. When love is so uncertain, love is on the way! Yes, Sir, good luck, Sir, the system wishes it to be so, Sir, and will be disappointed if it is not.”

  “Go away, Mayweed.”

  “Sorry, Sir!” And he was gone, and Spindle was in a bad mood all day after, and avoided Thyme’s company until the evening, when she found him, and they ate together with barely a word between them, and each wishing they could find a word to say.

  Mayweed’s effusiveness about Thyme was not out of place. She had changed a great deal since Tryfan and Spindle had first come across her in Buckland when she had been so ill. Then her face had been gaunt and her eyes rather lost, and her illness had sapped her of energy and life. But the summer of travel and good company had brought a gloss to her coat, and a pride to her face that made her a worthy mole in any company, and a cheerful mole to have about the place. She was liked by the Duncton moles and soon accepted by them, respected for the travelling she had done and the way in which she made a good burrow, and kept visiting moles content, well-fed and cheerful.

  More than that, she believed in the Stone, and prayed to it, and though there were plenty of males who cast their eye upon her and pointed their snout in her direction – the more so as February came and the essential femaleness of her seemed indefinably to grow. Yet she was not interested: too few seemed true followers of the Stone.

  “I want a mate who not only says he believes in the Stone, but who lives by it and for it, and whose life is in it,” she confided one day to Maundy, with whom she got on very well and near whom she had occupied tunnels and created a charming burrow or two for herself.

  “Well now,” said Maundy wisely, “is there not a particular male you have in mind? February is advancing and you can’t dilly-dally the weeks away.”

  “Well,” began Thyme, looking shy, “I do have dreams, yes.”

  “Dreams?” repeated Maundy. “You mean longings?”

  Thyme pondered the word “longings” and conceded that yes, possibly, that was what they were.

  “Have you ever mated?” she asked Maundy, to avoid the issue.

  “And littered, and raised. But not for a time or two now. “And Comfrey needs me, you know, and I think he’s got his mind on other things.”

  Thyme laughed. “You mean better things?”

  Maundy smiled and said nothing.

  “You love him, don’t you?” said Thyme.

  “Yes,” said Maundy simply. “I believe I do.”

  They were silent for a time, and at peace.

  “So?” said Maundy. “Whatmole’s it to be?”

  “You know perfectly well,” said Thyme shortly, looking irritated.

  “But does he?” laughed Maundy, adding, “That’s a mole who may need encouragement.”

  Meanwhile, poor Spindle was in a growing agony as the days went by and the others about him seemed intent on talking only to the opposite sex. Alder had long since disappeared over to the Eastside, and now even Skint and Smithills, who he had thought were too old for “that sort of thing” as he put it, had gone “exploring’. He knew what that meant: females.

  Instead, Spindle busied himself preparing a chamber off a tunnel deep in a little known part of the Ancient System where books and texts might be stored as Tryfan scribed them. For Spindle too had a dream, as yet shared with nomole in its fullest glory, which was that one day there should be at Duncton a library such as moledom had never seen before outside the Holy Burrows, one to which the texts he himself had begun to preserve, first at Seven Barrows, then at Harrowdown, and now here at Duncton could be brought. Tryfan had already begun to scribe certain texts of his own, while Spindle and Mayweed, in their lesser ways perhaps, made scribings to chronicle the events of those times that moles of the future might know the truth of them. Those winter months had been the perfect time for Tryfan to continue the instruction he had started at Harrowdown, and both Spindle and Mayweed had learnt much. So Spindle the Cleric had constructed a library in a location discovered by Mayweed and then developed by him in such a way that to find it was hard indeed. In fact, when Tryfan had visited it he had gone right past the small tunnel that led down to it, not once but twice, and would not have found it had he not been shown. For the time being those three were the only moles allowed down to it, and Spindle was busy indeed dow
n there. His instinct told him that the day might soon come when the system might be partly or wholly taken by the grikes, and then it was essential that the embryonic library was not found.

  It was these concerns, and the labours they gave rise to, that had been disturbed by the mating season, and those curious unspoken longings which drove a mole to look at females and be with them.

  So Spindle had sought out Thyme, and that coming to nothing yet, sought consolation in Tryfan’s company by telling him that he felt decidedly “strange’.

  “Strange?” said Tryfan yawning, for he was growing tired of Spindle’s indecision on the obvious fact that he and Thyme should be together doing what moles at the

  end of February always do if they have opportunity and sense.

  “Well, peculiar,” said Spindle. “Odd. Uneasy. Unfamiliar. Strange.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Tryfan, “I’m vowed to celibacy.”

  “Really?” said Spindle. “I didn’t hear any vows about that when Boswell made you a scribemole.”

  “It’s how it is,” said Tryfan, and it seemed he accepted the fact now, and certainly felt no inclination as the other males did to pursue females.

  “Of course I like Thyme a lot,” said Spindle, adding, as if it was a thought that had taken him by surprise and had nothing to do with feeling ‘strange’, “she’s very nice.”

  “Nice!” said Tryfan. “If that’s all you think her then I wouldn’t blame her if she found somemole else.”

  “Why, is she thinking of it?” said Spindle in alarm.

  Tryfan had the sense to stay silent and let Spindle suffer this thought to whirl about in his mind.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I mean more than ‘nice’. She’s – well – she’s, um, sort of... well, you know.”

  “What?” said Tryfan.

  “Well, um, beautiful.”

  Spindle darted his eyes this way and that and lowered his voice as if to utter the word was a terrible admission.

  “When are you going to ask her then?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Spindle immediately and with dubious conviction. “Or the next day. When I’ve practised the words. Yes, definitely the next day.”

  “Definitely?”

  “Almost certainly,” said Spindle uneasily.

  Tryfan laughed.

  The day after, it happened that Maundy met Tryfan near the Stone.

  “Will they or won’t they?” she asked.

  “I hope they do,” said Tryfan, “but Spindle won’t get on with it.”

  “Maybe they need help. That’s what Comfrey says.”

  “Help?” Tryfan gazed at her, perplexed.

  “You’re a wise mole, Tryfan,” said Maundy, “but there are some things you don’t know anything about yet.

  “Lots of things I should think,” said Tryfan ruefully. Sometimes he felt so young – and his return to Duncton had increased the feeling.

  “Maybe,” said Maundy after some thought, “you would take us on a tour of the lower slopes. Choose a nice sunny day when the tunnels will be light and the surface safe and show us Duncton Wood as it was.”

  “Us?” repeated Tryfan.

  “Spindle, Thyme, and me.”

  “Why?” asked Tryfan artlessly.

  “Nice things happen on such tours of systems, moles get to know each other, opportunities arise.”

  So it was to be, for a day or two later – and Spindle still hesitating – the rendezvous was made and all four, under Tryfan’s guidance, headed off down the slopes. The day was cold but crystal clear, the leaf mould on the surface beautiful with hoar frost which, even as they travelled, melted magically underpaw into drops of water that caught the sun like crystals scattered on their path.

  For some reason Spindle kept clear of Thyme, and on the one occasion when the configuration of the surface caused their flanks to touch, he seemed almost to jump out of his skin, and Thyme did not know where to look.

  So it was Maundy and Tryfan who made the conversation: “And what’s this place?” she asked, knowing the answer anyway and ignoring the silence between Thyme and Spindle.

  “This is what used to be called the Westside,” said Tryfan, taking them to an edge of the wood adjacent to the Pastures. “My father Bracken was born here but he did not stay after May because he was the weakest of his litter and was driven out.”

  “I thought he was a powerful mole,” said Thyme, for lack of something better to say.

  “He was,” said Maundy, “but he only became that with time.”

  “Not this “Thyme”!” said Spindle, making a bad joke and laughing in a strange high-pitched way.

  Tryfan and Maundy looked at each other and laughed. Thyme did not.

  Spindle looked about the places they went with a complete lack of curiosity. That day, with Thyme so near and him not knowing what to say, and him thinking such strange thoughts, and him a mole in love and with unfamiliar desires and not knowing what to do about it, that day, a tree might have toppled over in front of him and him not notice it.

  “They say it was a worm-rich place before the fires,” said Tryfan.

  “It was,” said Maundy, “but I never came here. Very high quality moles the Westsiders, and rather exclusive.”

  “Where were you from, Maundy?” asked Thyme.

  “Near Barrow Vale,” she said vaguely, snouting over towards the east.

  Many of the trees about them still carried evidence of the fire that followed the plague, being dead or burnt up one side: the wind that had driven the fire through the wood had been from the north, driving over the marshes into Marsh End, and then upslope almost to the Stone itself. Up there the great beeches had withstood it, for they were spaced apart and had too little undergrowth beneath them for the fire to take effective hold.

  But down here, where the four wandered that day, the wood was derelict, though many of the trees still had life in them and were beginning to burgeon and shoot again. While between them, taking advantage of the extra light that the thinner canopy allowed, shoots and saplings of birch and ash were already pointing up their stiff stems, while around them wild flowers were starting, though few were yet in bloom.

  Anemone and bluebells, and wild daffodils where none had been before; and the shoots of rosebay willowherb which would, once summer came, rise into their full red-pink glory and sway as tall as the foxgloves midsummer through. But not yet: for now just the snowdrops glistened here and there, and yellow aconite.

  But insects were astir and ants beginning to scurry as Tryfan led them on through the wood, telling them with Maundy’s help, of its recent past, which now seemed like an age gone by.

  “Mandrake had his burrows here somewhere, in easy reach of Barrow Vale itself because in those days that was the centre of the system where everymole met and had a gossip – except in the breeding season, when things always go a bit quiet.” Thyme looked shyly hopeful; Spindle affected gawky indifference.

  “Let’s find Barrow Vale!” declared Maundy, “I think it’s this way,” she added, going in the wrong direction.

  “I don’t think it is,” said Tryfan, surprised. She rested a paw on his and turned to Spindle and said, “Tryfan may be right... you take Thyme that way and see if it’s down there.”

  “But I —” began Spindle.

  “I’d really rather stay with —” continued Thyme.

  But Maundy had turned and gone, dragging Tryfan with her, and the reluctant Spindle was left alone with the uncertain Thyme as the wood around them filled with winter sun, and every surface, every tiny shoot, seemed alight with it; while on the trees the lichen was green with life, and even last year’s leaves were full of richness and colour beneath their paws. Somewhere near a wren flew and stopped, darted and peered, whirring away only when a female blackbird scuttled among some dead bracken searching for a twig or stalk for the nest she was beginning to build.

  “Well, I don’t know why they went off like that,” said Spindle grumpily.

&
nbsp; Thyme was silent, looking at her talons. Then she looked up, her head jerking with nervousness.

  “I feel very strange,” she said.

  Spindle did not know where to look, but crouched with his head on one side as if thinking very hard and in fact thinking of nothing at all except that he ought to say something but could not think what.

  “Really?” he said eventually.

  “Yes,” she said with sudden certainty and feeling a lot better for saying so, “I do.”

  Spindle said, “I feel a bit strange too. Um... um.”

  Um. The word hung between them and Thyme suddenly looked a little irritable.

  “Well, Spindle?”

  “Um.” He said again, daring to look at her this time. She returned his gaze.

  “Er...” he said, his paws all awkward, “I suppose... we had better... go...” His voice slowed breathlessly as they continued to look at each other and Spindle discovered that it was nice doing so and not going anywhere.

  “... We had... er... better go...” he suggested again.

  They came fractionally closer.

  Spindle said, “I’m not very good at this.”

  Thyme stared at him.

  “I don’t think you are,” she said. But she didn’t look away and Spindle was so close he was almost touching her. “I don’t think I’m much better,” she added helpfully.

  “No I don’t think you are,” said Spindle. “I mean, you’re not much help.”

  They were now so close that if either had moved one hair’s breadth closer... if either... and both did.

  “Mmm,” breathed Thyme.

  Spindle’s view of the trees and roots and sky were obscured and fuzzed by Thyme’s fur, and his senses overtaken by the warmth of her body.

  “Mmm!” he said as well, since it seemed as good a thing to say as anything else.

  “Thyme?” he said.

  “Mmm... mmm?” she whispered, her flank blissfully

  firming against his, all warm and delicious and like nothing he had ever felt.