Duncton Found

by William Horwood

  “Mistle, you are my life,” he said.

  “And you mine, my love.”

  “The Stone shall guide you to your task in Duncton Wood. Make a community once more. Lead it. Teach it. Be its mother and its father and trust the Stone.”

  “Will you come home to me?” said Mistle with terrible despair.

  Beechen looked at her for a long time, and then held her close. He moved back from her and gazed into her eyes.

  “One day I shall come back to you, but....”

  “But what, my dearest love?”

  A look of loss and trouble was in his eyes.

  “I don’t know. I fear what I feel I must say. I shall come back to you and yet you may not know me, or want to know me then.”

  Mistle smiled tenderly, and said, “My love, I shall know you always, love you always, and wait for you until the Stone sends you back to me safeguarded.”

  “The Stone is with us both,” replied Beechen. “Yet I feel that I have been searching for you from the beginning of time and that our parting now, when we have barely found each other, is a final test for us, and for moledom too. I do not understand quite what it is the Stone shall ask of us but one day perhaps we shall be free to love each other as we were meant to do.”

  Mistle reached out her paws to him and held his face and whispered, “I shall know you always and none other but you.”

  Then with one final embrace they turned from each other, and joined their separate groups.

  Then Beechen cried out, “Stone, help us all fulfil our tasks, and go like warrior moles towards the future that lies before us now!”

  Then one group turned for the north and darkness, and the other turned south to seek once more the light of Duncton Wood, and not a single mole among them paused or turned, or looked back to the life they left behind.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There is no doubt, none at all, that without Mayweed to lead them, Mistle and Romney would not have reached Duncton Wood alive.

  Grikes seemed everywhere along the route they took, and the first they came across – but a few hours after they left the others at Chadlington – were four thickset guardmoles hurrying rapidly along, and clearly under orders not to dally in their northward journey.

  Mayweed heard them before he saw them and, always ready for such problems, made sure they were well hidden in the scrubby ground they were then crossing, and the guardmoles went on their way none the wiser.

  “I hope the grikes won’t catch the others up,” whispered Mistle doubtfully.

  “Humbleness trained Holm himself,” said Mayweed. “They will be more than all right!”

  It was typical late December weather, wet, gloomy and cold, and as they neared Duncton at last their route took them alongside the roaring owl way under which they would finally have to pass if they were to get into Duncton Wood.

  They had already passed under it after leaving Rollright, but there the cross-under is almost underground and rises further off from the way itself. This was the first time Mistle had been so close to so large a roaring owl way and, with the embankment rising on their right, the sound of the roaring owls heavy and sending a rain of dirty spray out over the steep slope above as their gazes rushed by, she was awestruck, and stopped more than once to look.

  “Dangerous it is, Madam, never go up there unaccompanied. Moles die on roaring owl ways.”

  “Do they talk? Like moles?” asked Mistle.

  “They roar,” said Mayweed, wanting to get on, “like owls.”

  “And their gazes, what do they look at?”

  “The way ahead, humbleness should think, but sometimes when they cross the countryside in the distance on smaller ways they gaze all around.”

  “Do you think they think, like moles?”

  “Persistent Madam, Mayweed doesn’t know. He avoids them like the plague but if he must use a roaring owl way route he looks down at the way, and breathes out of the corner of his mouth away from them, to minimise the fumes. He hopes they think, but if they do they never seem to change their minds, which negates their thinking, doesn’t it? No good thinking if change does not result.”

  But the approach of more grike guardmoles ahead of them ended the conversation abruptly and Mayweed once more led Mistle calmly into hiding and the grikes went unknowingly past.

  “Madam Mistle and Romney Sir, follow closely now because we’re near to the cross-under. Rather a dirty route I fear, through a pipe, but it takes us to where we can observe what moles are about without being seen.”

  They followed him silently, and for Romney, who was the biggest of them, it was a tight squeeze, and he could see nothing much ahead but Mistle’s tail and an occasional flash of light at the pipe’s end far ahead.

  When they reached the end Mayweed watched and waited for a long time before he would get out. But when he did he leapt nimbly down, snouted about, went straight into the centre of the cross-under and said in a voice that echoed off its concrete walls, “Astonishing, incredible, amazing, I never thought I’d live to see the day!”

  They followed after him and saw that the cross-under and beyond into Duncton Wood were quite unguarded with not a mole in sight.

  “Remember, Madam, if we’re stopped we’re Romney’s prisoners and we’re to act dumb and pretend to be followers and if there’s real trouble run in opposite directions and hope for the best.”

  But no moles appeared as they hurried through the wet and echoing cross-under. Everywhere had a derelict air and looked forlorn. The sound of the roaring owls was muffled and apart from the drip-drip of water from the way above on to the concrete floor of the cross-under, the only sounds were the ugly caws of distant rooks high on the slopes above.

  Despite Mayweed’s natural desire to get up through the High Wood and to the Stone as quickly as possible, Mistle could not help stopping and staring upslope in awe at the system she had only seen from a distance with Beechen.

  They were nearing the top when Mayweed called out from above in a distressed voice, “Mistle Madam, please, please come.”

  She went quickly up to him and saw that he was looking ahead up the slopes to just below the edge of the wood itself. The rooks they had heard were pecking there, and then rising a little into the air, stooping at each other and then dropping in an untidy way to the ground again and stalking about. Four of them. It was all too plain that they were feeding off carrion, and that the carrion was the dead bodies of moles that lay scattered about a little promontory or knoll that jutted out of the slope.

  “That’s the place the two moles I mentioned made such a fight of it,” said Romney grimly. He and Mayweed eyed the feeding rooks uneasily, but Mistle, well-used to surface travel, went boldly ahead, saying, “They’ll fly off if we make ourselves obvious enough. Come on, Mayweed.”

  “Oh Madam, Mayweed knows that,” muttered Mayweed. “He was not born yesterday. It’s what the rooks are feeding on that distresses him.”

  “Come on,” said Romney with surprising gentleness, “let’s get it over with.”

  They followed quickly after Mistle and reached her flank as the rooks, irritated and made noisy at their approach, rose and hovered low, their white bills dangerous, before suddenly angling into the light breeze and disappearing up into the trees beyond.

  They found themselves surrounded by a scene of stark devastation, the bodies of moles scattered all about, and some of them dismembered by the rooks.

  “Stone, may they be at peace and brought to your Silence safeguarded,” whispered Mistle, a look of pity on her face. She put a paw out to stop Romney from going to Mayweed, who had gone ahead among the bodies and was searching for his friends.

  “Let him be,” she said. “It’s best he’s alone at such a moment. He’ll call us when he wants us.”

  Rarely had Mistle seen so touching and pathetic a sight as the thin and ragged form of Mayweed wandering disconsolately among the bodies of fallen moles, reluctantly looking at each one to see if it was Skint or Sm
ithills.

  “I wish Sleekit was here,” said Mistle, “it’s her he needs.”

  “He’s quite a mole is Mayweed.”

  “He’s a great mole,” said Mistle passionately, “and if you knew what he’d done in his life, and the moles he’s helped....”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” said Romney placatingly, looking unhappily over the bleak scene.

  They saw Mayweed stop on the furthest point of the promontory where several bodies lay, they saw him peer down and then pull away the large body of a young-looking mole. Then he stared down at two bodies that lay so close they seemed to be touching each other, and they heard him sob, and stance still a long time, staring.

  Then he looked round and Romney said, “Go to him, mole, you’ll know best what to say.”

  She went, and as she reached him Mayweed gestured at the two moles she knew must be Skint and Smithills. Both had suffered terrible talon wounds to face and flanks.

  “That’s good-natured Smithills,” said Mayweed, pointing to the larger of the two, “and that’s Skint who found me in a seal-up in the Buckland Slopeside. They were never apart those two, and even now....”

  Mistle gazed down at them, and guessed that they must have fought for each other back to back to the very last.

  But there was something more than that. After they had been overwhelmed and the grikes had moved on, Smithills must still have tried to protect his old friend before he died because his broad back showed signs of having taken many talonings.

  “They came from Grassington,” said Mayweed, “and knew each other as pups. They were my friends.”

  Mayweed wept some more and Mistle stayed comfortingly close to him, as she imagined Sleekit would have done. She stared at the dead moles, and wondered how it was that two such old moles as these had found the strength and courage to have battled so hard as they had done.

  Mayweed sighed and said, “Mistle Madam, there’ll be other sad sights today, but I feel I’ve wept my tears now and am ready to move on.”

  They looked on up the slope and saw that already the rooks were circling out of the leafless trees and coming down their way again.

  “Come on, Madam, and you, rough Romney, this mole Mayweed is ready now to go on up into the High Wood and leave the rooks to do their work here.”

  The rooks flapped and snapped above them in the sky as they moved on with heavy hearts towards the trees of the High Wood.

  How sombre the wood seemed to Mistle as Mayweed led them through it, not at all as she had imagined it when Violet had first spoken to her of Duncton. The towering grey-green trunks of the beech trees utterly dwarfed them, and the smooth rustling floor of fallen beech leaves, which seemed half golden even in that dull winter light, stretched endlessly in all directions about them. The only relief was the occasional raft of dog’s mercury stalks, and a sporadic holly bush which had rooted in the deep leaf litter.

  “Wondering moles, the Ancient System lies beneath us and is not a place to venture down without extreme care, so don’t. The Stone rises straight ahead on the west side of the wood.”

  “Aye, I remember the direction well enough,” said Romney, “but the wood itself looks a lot grander in the daylight.”

  Mistle said nothing, for she was full of apprehension as well as having a curious and contradictory sense of excitement now she was among the trees. It was what they would find that concerned her, not the wood itself which, despite its size and the way it made a mole feel small, gave her a sense of belonging quite unlike anywhere she had been on her long journey here.

  “I was meant to come here,” she kept saying to herself, “and I was meant to come without Beechen at first so that I can get to know it in my own way. He said he’d come back, and I know he will, and I know that if I’m true to the Stone then this system will look after me.”

  The trees ahead thinned, they clambered over the surface roots of another beech tree, the ground dropped away slightly, and there, before them through the trees, they saw the great Stone of Duncton, its colour greener and more brown than the beech trees, but its surface having the same strange shining quality they held.

  Remembering Mayweed’s reluctance to go first on to the Pasture slopes, Romney went to the front saying, “I’ll take the lead, for it’ll not be a pleasant sight about the Stone.”

  On they went, past the last tree before the clearing and then out through the undergrowth before the Stone itself. Mayweed kept his snout low, and Mistle could hardly bear to look.

  But when they did so it was somehow not so bad as it had seemed on the slopes. There were bodies there, and owls and rooks had been, but somehow the trees surrounding them, and the Stone especially, put them into a different proportion. The clearing was peaceful, nature would take its course and the bodies would be gone.

  “Madam and Sir, if Tryfan has survived then where is he?” said Mayweed. “For he is not here.”

  Mistle stared up at the Stone whose face seemed to catch light in strange and subtle ways, even on a dull day like this. Romney shifted about uncomfortably.

  Mayweed snouted about a bit, stanced with his head on one side, ran hither and thither and finally came back, stopped, turned, and stared north out of the clearing.

  “Please to follow me,” he said, “and quietly.”

  As dusk fell on Longest Night and the grikes came, Bailey had not been in the Stone clearing, but hurrying over the surface of the Ancient System in the company of Marram.

  He should have been at the Stone but he had grown bored and, seeing Marram setting off to tell Skint and Smithills that everymole was waiting for them, had gone along to keep him company.

  Neither had suspected anything was wrong until they reached the edge of the High Wood and heard shouts and commands coming from the slopes below. Bailey had peered out from the cover of the wood with Marram and been faced by the most terrifying sight coming up out of the gloom below that he had ever seen.

  Dozens and dozens of grike guardmoles came inexorably up towards them. Even as they saw them they heard grikes crashing into the wood on either side of them and knew it was too late to even attempt to get down and reach Skint and Smithills, assuming they were still there.

  “We must go and warn the others,” said Marram, turning and starting back the way they had come.

  But it was too late, the moles on either flank had heard them and even as they rushed back towards the Stone clearing the grikes turned to cut them off, hissing commands to each other. Bailey felt he was about to die.

  “Hide there!” commanded Marram, “There! Now! And don’t move whatever happens, whatever happens.” Then, shocked and in a daze, Bailey scurried into the shelter of some roots and dog’s mercury. Even as Marram turned from him and had moved no more than a few paces away, he was confronted by grikes coming from all directions.

  Bailey heard a strong confident voice say, “Here’s the one we heard.”

  “What’s your name, Stone-lover?” said another.

  “Marram, I....”

  Then there was a sickening thump, a weak diminishing cry, a grunt, and then the grikes rushed on as more came up behind them and Bailey’s world seemed to turn mad around him.

  He began to shiver and shake, and as moles went here and there and all about, he covered his head with his paws and kept them there for what seemed an interminable time.

  Then as things fell silent and the last of the grikes seemed to have run past, Bailey heard a rasping voice he did not at first recognise.

  “Bailey!” it called, and it might have been death itself speaking his name.

  He dared to peer out of his hiding place and saw poor Marram stretched out and dying.

  “Bailey,” rasped Marram, “hide. Go down into the Ancient System. Hide. One must survive: you. Hide.”

  “But Marram, b-b-but....”

  “Bailey...” It was the last word Marram said, for he coughed and died even as Bailey reached out to him.

  Nothing can describe the talon-crumbling, m
ind-numbing, heart-stopping panic that Bailey then felt. Not a thought did he have for Tryfan and the other moles in the clearing nor, as he turned and rushed blindly from Marram, for anymole else but himself. He ran about, stumbled over roots, crashed into fallen branches and then, when he heard a grike call out, “Whatmole’s that?” he tried to scrabble at the leaf litter and chalky soil beneath him and make good his escape.

  “Hey! You!”

  He gave up trying to delve and dashed off, first here and then there until he tried to delve once more, desperate to escape from the death that seemed about to descend on him.

  Once more the ground was too hard. He heard moles coming for him and he ran blindly on again until he scented the ground below was more moist, and he delved down and succeeded in tunnelling out of sight. His breath came out in grunts of fear despite all attempts to silence it, his mouth was full of soil and he pushed wildly on. Then he stopped, listened, realised nomole was following, pushed a paw forward and found himself tumbling headlong into a pitch-black tunnel.

  “Where’s the bugger gone?”

  He heard death’s hard voice on the surface above, soil and litter dropped down into the black space around him, sweat poured down his face, and then the voices were gone.

  He stayed quite still until the cold began to get at him and, feeling his way along in the blackest tunnels he had ever known, he began to explore. Had he not been to the Ancient System before, which he had as a pup in Henbane’s day, and more recently when Mayweed had shown him where his father Spindle had hidden his own and Tryfan’s texts, he might have felt more nervous, for the windsound is most attenuated and strange, and that night seemed full of rushing above, and ominous cries and screams.

  At first he did not know where he was or where he could go, but after a long and increasingly miserable wandering he came to a tunnel he knew, lit by moonlight. He decided to go to the secret place Mayweed had shown him and somehow he got himself to it: a burrow hidden among the roots of a beech tree, itself empty but leading most cleverly by way of a tilted flint through a concealed entrance to a safe burrow for texts.