Duncton Found

by William Horwood

  Lorren looked at Holm, and then at them all and then at Holm again. She lowered her snout and Holm shifted about uncomfortably and together they gave the impression of moles who, had they been alone, would have comforted each other but that they could not do in front of others.

  Suddenly Mayweed struck the side of his head with a thump and, rolling over on his side, kicked his legs about.

  “Humbleness is abject. The idiot is a fool. The fool is dim as a dead lobworm. A lobworm is better than Mayweed! Madam, strike Mayweed. Go on, hit him.”

  Mayweed leapt up again, dashed over to Lorren, and thrust his flank towards her, declaring, “Mayweed is an insensitive mole, heartless mole, amnesiac mole. Let him suffer! He had forgotten that the likeable Lorren has had no news of the once-youthful Bailey since before he was a youth.

  “Madam, your long-lost Bailey misses you. Notice humbleness uses the present tense and not the gloomy past participle ‘missed’, which would indicate that Bailey is deceased, inanimate, inert or, to use another word, dead. No, no, no. To continue.... Bailey misses Starling. Mayweed knows it. How? Because humbleness thinks. Bailey has never once mentioned you or your sister to him, Mayweed, not once. Which must mean he more than misses you. Bailey knows his moles. When you were separated something in himself was lost and will not be found again until the day you see him once again.” Mayweed stopped talking and allowed Lorren to speak at last.

  “I miss him,” Lorren said, “very much. When he was young I was horrible to him, but I loved him and I just wish I had told him once, just once, that I loved him, before he, before we, before...” She paused, and stared, and her eyes brimmed with tears for the unrequited memory of the brother she thought she had lost in a flood.

  There was nothing anymole could say and so nomole tried. But then Lorren added, “It’s different with Starling. I survived the flood with her and when we parted we both knew it would probably be forever and ever.” The others smiled, for even now, so many years later when she was a mature if not quite aging mole, when she spoke of her siblings a sibling look came to Lorren’s face – protective and guilty where Bailey was concerned, and like a younger sister when she spoke Starling’s name.

  Sleekit, who knew much of the truth of Bailey’s long subjugation by Henbane in Whern, noted with approval that Mayweed had not gone into that, but created an image of Bailey in Lorren’s mind which though not quite untruthful yet left something positive and good.

  Perhaps Beechen sensed this too for he said, “Bailey was always my friend when I was young. I think he would have liked to have pups of his own but he never had the opportunity, for the females in Duncton were old and sterile. Even now, perhaps it is not too late....”

  Then, at last, Beechen told them what he thought they must do in the light of the grike descent on to Duncton.

  “Wherever my next ministry takes me from here I shall not rest until I know what has happened in Duncton. Hopefully the grikes who came simply passed it by but we all know that Tryfan has long believed that trouble might come, and that his urging for me to leave was partly due to those fears.

  “But I cannot continue my task until I know the truth, though in my heart I do not feel the Stone wishes me to return to Duncton yet.”

  He looked sadly at Mistle, whom they all knew had set her heart on going to Duncton Wood, and they reached out and touched each other and waited for him to say more.

  “I am much afraid,” he said quietly. “Afraid for the moles in Duncton whom I love and who made my life; afraid for you; and afraid for myself. When we were on the surface at the edge of Rollright last night and Mayweed told me what had happened here, I snouted in a circle all about moledom and felt, as I have before, that my way lies northwards, towards where Tryfan once went, and my father Boswell as well.

  “Mayweed and Sleekit know that I have believed for some time that the Stone shall part them, though I think it will only do so knowing that what they have discovered in each other means that, in truth, they can never be apart. But that is their own business and I shall not speak of it more.

  “But Mayweed’s task lies with Tryfan now and whatever anymole might say I know that to Tryfan he will go. Sleekit has been with me throughout my ministry in the vale, she has wisdoms that I have not and a different kind of faith, and followers, especially female ones, often go to her in preference to myself. More than that, she was witness to my puphood and witness to Duncton’s quiet discovery of itself with Tryfan, and she has much to give to other moles of love, of faith, and of the community that is Tryfan’s greatest teaching, and which we must all strive to live and teach. If I go north I shall need her at my flank, though I hardly dare ask it.”

  Sleekit looked deeply at Mayweed, and it was clear that they had talked and resolved these eventualities. She went to Beechen and held him close as a mother might her son, and said, “My dear, you shall not have to ask. My way will be with you and what the Stone makes for my future and for my beloved Mayweed we shall accept and trust, though parting will be hard.”

  Then Beechen turned to Mistle, looked into her eyes and said, “The Stone knows the love I have for you, and I have grown in the love you give to me. These friends have witnessed it. I never want to part from you but if the Stone should ask it of us I pray that we shall have the strength to keep each other ever in our hearts as we are now, alone and with our friends. May the Stone help us to act true in the difficult days ahead.”

  It was a strangely affecting moment, for though Beechen had not said they must part, or why they might have to, yet there was the sense that there was little time left for them, and as a great tree must bend and accommodate the winds of change if it is to survive, so their love might soon be tested by the storm of darkness by which moledom was already beset.

  At that tender moment, the most stolid of them all seemed to be Buckram, who was stanced firmly behind Beechen, his great flanks and paws like walls and buttresses of strength to protect them all.

  “I’m not much of one for speaking,” he said, “unless it be to order moles about, in which I was well trained. But right now what I want are the words for a prayer, and I wish somemole here would tell me what they should be.”

  “Say what’s in your heart, Buckram. It’s all the Stone ever wants to hear,” said Beechen. “Say a prayer for all of us.”

  “Well,” began Buckram in his rough way, “it won’t be much and I’ll keep it short: Stone, moledom seems a dark and dangerous place to my friends and me and we’re not sure what to do. We don’t none of us want to part but we may have to if we are to serve you best. Help us find our best way towards your Silence; help us believe we can find that way; Stone, you help us now.”

  When he had finished they all nodded and Buckram, a little embarrassed, added, “Well, that’s what I want to say to the Stone and I’m glad I have. But I’ll tell you one thing: since I met the Stone Mole I’ve been parted from him twice. First when he left me to recover myself at Sandford, and the second when we got to Bablock. Now, you can talk till worms fly, but I’ll not be parted from him for a third time, so whatever happens, whatever mole goes where, Buckram here goes with him!”

  Something about the way that Buckram prayed and spoke changed their mood and raised their spirits, and Beechen said, “There’s seven of us here all unsure of ourselves, and all with good reason to know about Duncton. I think we should set off towards it very soon, taking the quickest way, and see what we can find out.”

  “Straight into trouble?” said Buckram dubiously. “Believe me, once the grikes have rumbled that the Stone Mole’s about – and they must have started to at Cumnor – then they’ll be on the lookout for him, especially near Duncton.”

  “True, true, worthy Buckram, but Mayweed’s observation is that moles looking for others look everywhere but in front of their snouts. They won’t be expecting us to come the obvious way, and as we shall expect them we shall see them first. Elegant that! When do we all start? Now?”

  It was as well that
Mayweed’s argument prevailed, for if they had set off on a more circuitous route, then two days later, when they were approaching Chadlington, they might easily have missed two moles travelling fast towards them: Rampion and Romney.

  But there they were and there they met, and there the terrible news of Duncton’s Longest Night was shared between moles who had no wish to impart such tidings and moles who had no wish to hear them.

  First Rampion described the scenes outside the cross-under before Longest Night, and the scurrying and hurried preparations that were made to ready the guardmoles for their mass entry into Duncton Wood. Though brief, her account left no doubt in the minds of those who heard it that hours before the invasion itself all there had guessed that the guardmoles’ intentions were murderous.

  “If I could have found a way into Duncton Wood to warn the moles I would have taken it, but all of us servers were watched, and I did not get very near the cross-under itself. The only other way was over the great embankment of the roaring owl way and they guarded even that. The eldrene Wort who had gone ahead from Rollright was in charge of the organisation and she made sure that moles stayed where they were meant to. Everything seemed so dark, and I feared something terrible was going to happen, and it did.”

  Then Romney took up the tale, speaking quietly and somewhat shakily, because even after three days the memory was still as vivid as if it was happening as he told it and he could guess how much what he was saying must mean to his listeners.

  Almost at once, as he described the unexpected opposition by two old moles on the south-east slopes, Mayweed, Beechen and Sleekit guessed with mounting grief the names of the moles he was describing, and the full horror of what he had been part of came to them.

  “You say one was small and spare, one large and scalpskinned and dark-furred?”

  “Yes, they fought together and I’ve never known moles, young or old, fight as those two did.”

  “And they...?”

  “Yes,” said Romney, “yes. They both died.”

  There was silence until Sleekit whispered their names: “Skint and Smithills, that’s who they were. It must have been them.” Then she said, looking strongly at Romney, “You know they were once both moles of the Word, guardmoles like yourself. They stanced their ground as moles who believed that others could live as they wished, provided they hurt no other mole.”

  “Well they died fighting for their freedom, and no death could have been braver than theirs.”

  Beechen said gruffly, “What then, mole? What happened next?”

  Romney told them, trying his best to make something coherent of the confused succession of horrific events of that night. His account was sombre enough until he got to Dodder and then, hardy and experienced guardmole though he was, he broke down, mixing his description of Dodder’s defiant end with that of his memory of the mole who had trained him when young.

  After that all of them wept, and all sought to comfort the three Duncton moles when it was realised from Romney’s description that the last mole to die was Beechen’s mother Feverfew. All the other moles in the wood as well, it seemed, must have been killed, but for Tryfan himself, whose stolid defiance throughout and unwillingness until Feverfew was threatened with death to renounce the Stone was like no trial of mole any of them had ever heard.

  “He was left alive to suffer,” said Sleekit. “Oh, poor Tryfan, he will be so lost.”

  Mayweed wept, terrible inconsolable tears intermingled with mutterings and self-accusations that he should never have left, or should have gone back sooner.

  “You would be dead yourself if you had,” said Romney quietly. “I tell you, not a mole but Tryfan survived. I have done many things in the name of the Word in my time, many with my own talons, but nothing matches the wrong I feel I did that night when I did nothing but watch. I cannot put it from my mind.”

  Nor could the others, all of whom but Buckram and Mistle had lost moles they knew and loved.

  “There is one more thing,” said Romney, who wanted to tell them all he knew, however hard it might be, “but it is not something I could bring myself to tell Rampion these past days nor something I witnessed myself. I heard the senior guardmole Drule, who was the last mole with him at the Stone, say that Tryfan was... blinded. It was their final act, and he was left there to fend for himself.”

  “Blinded,” whispered Mayweed. “Tryfan! Sleekit, I must go to him now. Sleekit, my dear....”

  Tears, anger, grief, confusion, all and more were with them then.

  “But why?” whispered Lorren, for whom the great tragedy in what she had heard was the loss for the second time of all hope of ever seeing her brother Bailey again, “why does the Stone allow such things. Where was the Stone’s power when it was most needed?”

  The question hung in the air about them, a voicing of what most of them felt, and somehow then it was to Beechen that they all turned, who had lost a mother and all the moles of his life, and more than likely Tryfan as well, for how could he have survived alone and so dreadfully wounded?

  Beechen was stanced in their midst, his snout low, his eyes half closed, and he said as if speaking to himself, “The Stone’s power comes from ourselves alone, and from our past and our present. It was moles that failed in those hours on Longest Night by the Duncton Stone, not the Stone itself. Until moles understand that, they shall not be true moles, but dependents on a Stone that can never satisfy their needs and cravings. I tell you, this failure is all moles”. There shall soon come a day when moles know this and they shall see that what is is what they are. Then will moledom tremble between final darkness and the discovery of the way to light and Silence. That day is near to us, and we who live now must prepare for it.”

  Hearing him a mole might have thought he was angry, but he spoke rather with a kind of savage disappointment, and there was apprehension in his voice, and despair.

  Then Romney spoke, saying, “I’ll tell you one more thing then, Beechen of Duncton, before you decide what you must do. The rumour among the guardmoles is that the eldrene Wort of Fyfield has been given the task of rooting you out and delivering you to the judgement of the Word. Her reputation is fierce. Therefore one thing is certain: every pawstep you take towards Duncton is a pawstep nearer to this Wort, and, whatever your task may be, if you are taken by her it will not be well served.

  “More than that, the gossip is that Tryfan betrayed his friends and that’s why he was allowed to live; and no doubt they’ll say the Stone Mole is a coward for escaping Duncton at such a time as this.”

  “Yes, I had thought that might be,” said Beechen wearily. “I am beginning to understand the mind of grikes. So now does our trial and despair truly begin, for now we must part. Now we must put much behind us and turn to the tasks the Stone is giving us.” They nodded, grateful in a grim way that one among them was taking charge at such a time.

  “I shall take my ministry northwards as I thought I must. I have teachings to make, and word of the Stone to impart before moles such as this Wort catch up with me. Sleekit, you have said you shall come with me.

  “Buckram, you too shall come with us, to help protect us along the way, not with your talons, though if they frighten away our enemies that will be no bad thing, but with the growing strength of your spirit.

  “You, Mayweed, must surely go to Duncton, for if Tryfan has survived, and he has survived much before this, then nomole in moledom can serve him better than you can. You, Mistle... you must go with him, for your task lies in Duncton and not yet with me. Our day shall come. Romney, I charge you to go with her, and as you regret the passive part you played on Longest Night, the Stone shall know those active things you do to help Mistle in the great task she shall find awaits her in Duncton Wood.

  “As for you, Holm and Lorren, you must decide, for I would not part you. Perhaps ’tis best now if you returned with us towards Rollright where we can leave you to continue the Stone’s work there.”

  “I wanted to go to Duncton to find B
ailey, but he is taken from me!” wept Lorren. “And now, now I shall lose my Holm. Tell them what you must do, my dear! Tell them!”

  Holm stared miserably about him, then at Lorren, then at Beechen. Eventually he turned to his friend and said desperately, “Mayweed, tell me!”

  “Tell you what, unhappy Holm?”

  “What to do.”

  Mayweed looked from Holm to Lorren and back again, he leered, he shook his head, he scratched himself.

  “Grubbiness,” said Mayweed at last, “me Mayweed always thought next to him you were the best route-finder he ever found, and in wet and muddy places perhaps even better. You are better than Beechen here, Mayweed knows that, and it’s saying a lot. Yes, yes, yes. Now, humbleness knows that though the Stone Mole, Buckram and his beloved Sleekit make a splendid trio, they are lacking a route-finder to help them along. Holm must draw his own conclusion and decide. Whatever he decides Mayweed loves him.”

  Holm looked this way and that in continuing desperation, and then opened and shut his mouth several times before saying what he wanted to.

  “Holm will route-find for the Stone Mole. And.”

  “And what, arrested Sir?” said Mayweed.

  “And come home again.”

  Then he rushed up to Lorren, touched her in a quick, jerky, yet most tender way and made what for him was a long speech. “Holm will come back to you because he loves you very much. Rampion, stay by your mother!” Then all three hugged each other close, and grubby Holm was lost in the loving paws and heartfelt tears of the two females he most loved, as if they were saying goodbye there and then.

  “Come,” said Beechen to them all, “we must part. Lorren and Rampion, we shall see you safely back to Rollright and then go on.”

  Then the others said their distraught farewells, Mayweed and Sleekit first, and then Buckram to Mayweed and Mistle whom he had grown to love.

  For a time Beechen and Mistle remained alone, the two sorry groups ready to leave on either side of them.