Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  “He was,” growled Tryfan. “Thy name, mole?”

  He spoke with his old authority and she answered him straight: “Rampion is my name and I am not ashamed of my faith in the Stone.”

  “Then, Rampion, an injured and tired mole would hear you say a prayer for him at the Stones.”

  “I’ll be glad to!” she said. Which she did, gracefully and well. When she had finished she asked them whither they were bound.

  “Duncton Wood,” said Tryfan. At which Rampion sighed a little sadly, for only outcasts went there now. Yet she smiled finally and said, “If you get there, say a prayer at its famous Stone for me.”

  “I shall, Rampion,” said Tryfan, and he touched her momentarily and she gasped for she felt she had been blessed. Then she was gone and Tryfan said with sudden energy, “Come, Spindle, come!”

  “Well,” declared Spindle, “so all it took was a young female to rouse you out of your pains and miseries!”

  Tryfan had the grace to smile.

  “Did you not recognise that ‘young female’?” he said.

  Spindle shook his head.

  “We met her here in Rollright once before. She is the daughter of Holm and Lorren.”

  “I thought there was something about her,” said Spindle. “You may have the worse sight of us two now, but you’ve the better memory for moles. I’m better at facts. But Holm might help us, Tryfan. Could we not visit him?”

  “I’m sure he would help, but too many moles have followed me to disaster for me to ever want to lead any more. So come, before Rampion tells her parents of the moles she met by the Stoats and they start wondering. Holm may be silent but he’s nomole’s fool. Come! That mole’s prayer stirred me and I am impatient at last to get home.”

  Tryfan’s concern was not entirely misplaced. Some days after her meeting with them at the Stoats, Rampion found herself back at the burrow where she had been reared as a pup, though she rarely went there since she had left her birth burrow the previous summer.

  But at Longest Night, making her trek to the Stoats for a vigil, she had been one of the many who had seen the eastern star. Crouched there in awe, she had found herself bathed in its light and seen not far off her mother Lorren and Holm, her father, whom she loved.

  That night Holm had, as was his habit, said very little, but Lorren, her eyes full of joy, had expressed their pleasure to see Rampion again, and asked after her siblings, also long gone from the burrow.

  But they were not there, and so it was only to Rampion that Lorren was able to suggest that she returned to their burrow before too much of January had passed, and certainly before mating time came and moles kept to their territories and avoided trespassing even where they had been born. Rampion, pleased to see her grubby parents once again, said she would, yes she would.

  But somehow young adults say such things and forget about them, as if going home is going back too far, and life should be ahead, away, always away from the birth burrow. But soon after meeting the strangers near the Stoats, and somewhat in awe of the way the scarred one had touched her, she found that her paws led her back by the old familiar ways to the tunnels of her birth.

  “Well, and this is a surprise!” said Lorren, dusting herself and trying to smarten Holm up a bit. “Rampion no less, and we gave up any hope you’d come. Better things to do I said!”

  “I just thought that it would be nice,” began Rampion rather lamely, “to see you both again.”

  Holm gazed at her in the way he had: a small mole, with wide eyes and an alert look, who knew more than he ever said. “Shy” should have been his other name.

  “Glad, to see you, I am,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Rampion, pleased nearly to tears.

  As Lorren chattered on with many an apology for the mess and the lack of good worms, and this and that, Holm just stared until at last there was a gap in the conversation and he felt able to touch his daughter tenderly and ask, “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Rampion settling down and shaking her head too much. “Nothing.”

  Holm stared some more and Rampion said, “I saw something so sad by the Stoats. I met two moles and one of them was so hurt.” Then she told them and they listened and then Holm got her to describe them and he looked very serious.

  “Tryfan,” said Holm. “And Spindle maybe.”

  “But they went to Whern and surely died,” said Lorren. “Such a long time ago and no news except stories of killing. They must be dead by now.”

  But Holm shook his head.

  “That was Tryfan,” he said again with confidence.

  That same day Holm ventured up to the Stoats, going his own secret way, for he had been Mayweed’s companion once and he and that great mole knew more than most about route-finding. Holm felt sad, and knew that if it had been Tryfan something was wrong that he had not come to greet them. Some great hurt had been done him, as Rampion had suggested. Holm went to the Stoats and there he stayed for all that day, wondering. He snouted towards the south, where Duncton lay, and he asked that the Stone tell him what to do. He had seen that star, and he believed that the Stone Mole was coming. He had heard Tryfan’s own teaching, and he listened to the Stone.

  It told him to be still, and to wait, and to trust. Tryfan would have come to them if he needed them, Tryfan would.

  So Holm made his way back to Lorren and when Lorren talked he told her what he believed, and that he was afraid.

  “Why, Holm, that’s a lot for you to say!” said Lorren going close to him reassuringly. Sometimes she liked to show she loved him. Small and grubby though he was, she had never looked at another mole in all her life. He was hers and would always be so.

  “But there’s two things I’d like to do, but you know that!” she declared.

  Holm nodded and grinned. One thing was to go back to

  Duncton Wood’s Marsh End near where she had been raised and find a really comfortable muddy tunnel; and the other was for Lorren to meet Starling and Bailey once again because both were alive, they were. His Lorren would rather die than think they were not.

  Holm sighed.

  Lorren grinned and cuddled him.

  “You believe it’ll happen one day, don’t you?”

  Holm nodded his head vigorously.

  “And Mayweed will come back,” he said, scratching his muddy flank.

  “One day...” said Lorren, and they both thought of a star they had seen and the sense of hope they felt. One day....

  Tryfan and Spindle reached the cow cross-under back into Duncton Wood a little after mid-January, at much the same time as Skint and Smithills said farewell to Beechenhill.

  They had both been so tired in the latter part of the journey that they had felt little fear or even curiosity about what lay ahead in Duncton Wood. But when their route brought them alongside the roaring owl way that ran by the system’s south eastern flank, and they began to be stopped by grike patrols and asked whither they were bound, the fear set in.

  The guardmoles were heavy on the ground, and it seemed they had been deployed to watch more than just the main cross-under ahead. Though Tryfan said nothing, Spindle remembered him describing ways out of the system along the drainage pipes through the roaring owl way, though the routes were of great difficulty and danger if guarded on the other side.

  It seemed that this was what was in the minds of the grikes now, and Spindle and Tryfan saw evidence of punishment and even snouting along the way, and were told – warned, more like – that that was what happened to moles who tried to escape Duncton.

  “They know that,” a grike told them, “but conditions are bad in there at times and maybe they prefer to chance their paw out here than stay inside where henchmoles of the leaders kill them.”

  “But what for?” asked Spindle, but got no satisfactory reply. Was Duncton such a grim place to live in that moles risked death to leave it? It seemed so.

  Except that he noticed one strange thing. The snouted moles they saw alon
g the way were all females.

  Once they knew that the two moles intended to outcast themselves into Duncton, the grikes were surprisingly friendly to Spindle and Tryfan, though in a dismissive superior kind of way. They preferred not to come too close, perhaps because of the risk of disease, and no names were asked. Tryfan and Spindle did not risk trying to find out if the grikes knew their names or if they had heard such moles might try to enter these parts, but anyway nomole could have suspected the limping and scarred mole that passed through their lines was the Tryfan who had once been the leader of the Duncton moles.

  There was almost a grudging respect paid to them for coming to Duncton of their own accord, but they discovered they were not unusual in making a request to go into the system, for diseased moles had heard – as Wyre of Buckland made sure they did – that for misfits Duncton was the place to go. There they had freedom, and of that moles of the Word made proud, as if they believed that by labelling a ghetto a place of freedom where moles could believe what they liked they could claim that the Word showed a mercy and tolerance it did not really possess.

  When they saw that the two moles were not obviously diseased, but that one was badly injured from fighting, and the other a follower of the Stone prepared to declare himself and be outcast in Duncton Wood but otherwise harmless, the grikes were laudably reluctant to let them through the cross-under and inside the system without first making sure they both wished to go.

  “More fool you, mate,” one said to Spindle, “though I won’t say I don’t admire you. But if you won’t Atone or offer yourself to an eldrene for teaching, well, there’s nothing for it, is there? It’s Duncton for you. But you must have known that. What of your friend, is he a believer too?”

  “He is,” said Spindle.

  “Mind you, I can see why he’s come. Wouldn’t survive in a normal system anyway without help.” The mole peered at Tryfan’s deformed face.

  “Can he see?” he asked Spindle.

  “Well enough,” said Spindle, “but I help him when he needs it. He’s clumsy along a route and his worm-finding’s poor.”

  “Can he hear?” shouted the guardmole.

  “When he wants to,” grunted Tryfan, turning on the guardmole. He could still be very intimidating when he wanted to be, though it was not now his normal way, and the guardmole backed away in alarm. For the most part moles ignored him, but that suited Tryfan’s desire for peace and quiet.

  “Remember, once in you don’t come out,” warned the guardmole, staring ahead at the great cross-under. Spindle could believe it. The entrance looked dank and gloomy, and this side of it there were a dozen solid guardmoles, and more nearby.

  “I know that,” said Spindle.

  “Speak posh, don’t you?” said the guardmole. “I repeat like Wyre’s told us to: you don’t have to go in yourself provided you’re in sound health and of the Word.”

  “I was reared of the Stone,” said Spindle proudly, “and I shall die that way.”

  The guardmole grunted and showed no more interest in them. He had done his duty and now had others to attend to.

  “Take them in then,” he ordered another mole, “and warn the poor buggers what to expect.”

  The second guardmole led them by a surface route to the cross-under.

  “Don’t mind him, it’s not that bad if you keep your snouts low and don’t try and retaliate. You two don’t look much good for anything so nomole will want you in there. Keep to the Eastside, don’t trespass, head down for the Marsh End, that way you might survive. Anyway the Marsh End’s where the believers go.”

  “Are there any guardmoles in there?” asked Spindle.

  “Used to be. Beake herself was eldrene here. She died. A lot of the guardmoles got scalpskin and a lot of them died. Well, of course, they had to stay inside and that caused a to-do. Wyre’s no fool, though. Sent reinforcements, and it was nasty for a time. Be grateful you didn’t come here then ’cos you two wouldn’t have survived a day. But things settled down. Lot of the fight’s gone out of the moles in there now. They’re just getting old, aren’t they? Dying, that’s all. It’s a cursed system this one. Nomole’ll ever come here willingly to live, not unless they’re idiots like yourself or injured like your mate. No... the only real trouble we get is females trying to get out. Have to kill them or, if we can, persuade them to go back in. Depends who’s on duty....”

  “Why is it females trying to escape?”

  “Want pups, don’t they?” grunted the guardmole. “Not going to get any in there!”

  With no further explanation, and quite without ceremony, Spindle and Tryfan were pushed through the lines of the guardmoles. They passed through the concrete cross-under, and found themselves on the south-eastern side of Duncton Hill whose slopes were slushy with cow-stained snow.

  The rumble of the roaring owls came from high above them, and the rise of the Ancient System seemed dark and inaccessible ahead. It was not the return Spindle had quite imagined, nor perhaps one that Tryfan could ever have wished for when they and so many other moles had first left Duncton Wood long before. But it was a return, and with a heavy sigh but no word at all, Tryfan stared briefly up at where the Ancient System was and then did as the guardmole suggested, turned north along the Eastside, and headed for the distant Marsh End.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The Pasture slopes that a mole must climb from the cross-under into Duncton Wood before he can turn north and head along the eastern side of the system towards the Marsh End were streaked with icy snow.

  Tryfan and Spindle plodded up them and then veered over towards the first trees. They were leafless, dark and uninviting, and the ground under them felt cold and without life. Yet there was an infectious energy and purpose about Tryfan that grew all the time.

  “We’re here again at last, Spindle! Back again!”

  But Spindle felt nervous rather than excited. He peered about the wood expecting to find aggressive moles watching them from the crooks of twisted roots, and moles he would not wish to meet. Diseased moles, miscreants, deviants of body and spirit. But there was nothing but the gloom of winter, and the only movement was the twist and turn of dead twigs as they fell from the branches high above and settled on the wood’s dead floor.

  The impression he had got of Duncton Wood from the grikes was that it was full of moles. But if it was they were doing a good job of keeping themselves hidden away down the tunnels whose entrances they occasionally saw, though there was little sign of passage and use about them.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked, meaning what tunnels were they going to seek – old ones to occupy, or new ones to delve.

  But Tryfan took his question another way entirely.

  “We are going to keep our snouts low to save all our energies for scribing”, was his surprising reply.

  “Scribing? Of what?”

  Tryfan laughed out loud.

  “Of what we talked to Whern,” he said. “I was ordained a scribemole and it’s about time I started behaving like one.”

  “But your paws...” said Spindle, for though his wounds had long since healed, Tryfan’s paws had remained clumsy for delicate work. He could travel well enough, but subtler delving or worm-gathering was hard for him, and always would be, and scribing might be harder still.

  “No, they are not quite what they once were. But as Boswell so often told me, scribing comes from the heart not the talons. My script may not be as elegant as it once was, but others will be able to make sense of it and that’s all that matters.”

  “What will you scribe?”

  “I don’t know yet, Spindle. Perhaps of things we’ve done, things we’ve thought. So much was lost at Uffington, and it may be years before those texts you buried at Seven Barrows can be recovered, if they’re still there, so I think we had better start scribing something for future generations of the times we lived through. Somemole’s got to start, let it be you and I.

  “But we may have little time, for if the Stone Mole
comes then we will want to go to him and serve him in whatever way he asks us to. So we must find a place to work, and work hard. I am eager to begin!”

  “But what about the dangers of Duncton?”

  “What dangers?” said Tryfan, looking about the empty wood carelessly. “I see none.”

  “Well... they’re probably watching us, or waiting to see what we do.”

  “Who?”

  “Moles,” whispered Spindle, now making himself thoroughly nervous.

  “They told us we would not survive the Slopeside but we did. Most would have said it was impossible to survive Whern yet here we are, a bit battered, feeling rather weak, but here all the same – and together. So I think we should be able to survive in Duncton Wood well enough. Now come, we had better start for the Marsh End and see what we find.”

  Yet Spindle’s instincts were sound. As they moved off once more a mole followed them, her sightless eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her snout inquisitive. She kept downwind of them because she smelt, and because that way she could the more easily scent them....

  Sniff, snuff, sniffle, wrinkle and whiskery whiffle: she scented two of them, definitely strangers, strong, tired, one limping slightly with weak paws, talking of scribing, talking of the system as if they were familiar with it, one called Spindle the other as yet unnamed. See where they go and then report. Good worms were the reward for such reports. Or would have been once, might still be. Things not what they were. No. But worth a try. Follow then, quietly. The blind female went straight into a root and fell, and then lay still lest her quarry heard her. They did not. She got to her paws, gathered her strength, and wearily set off again. No, it wasn’t the worms she did it for, it was the reward of company. Pleased they’d be to get news of strangers, and give her a worm or two and maybe let her stay a little and feel, once more, she belonged and that somemole cared. Sniffle, sniff, northward go and follow. She felt so weary, so ashamed of what she did.

  It was when they were halfway across the Eastside and it became easier to take to the tunnels than stumble on over the surface that Tryfan and Spindle began to come across evidence of other moles.