These were the last words that Tryfan of Duncton, son of Bracken and Rebecca, last scribemole ordained in Uffington ever spoke aloud. His friend and guide, the great route-finder Mayweed, held him close as he neared his end, and whispered, “Terrific Tryfan, you can find your way there now without me. You can, you know the way.” Then, with a contented sigh, Tryfan stirred one last time and breathed his last.
Yet Mayweed held him for some time more until, at last, he was ready gently to lay the scribemole’s head on the leafy floor of Barrow Vale and very slowly, very quietly, went to where the others stanced.
Where Tryfan lay they saw a slow light come in the dark, not powerful like the sun, or shining like the moon, but gentle, soft, and quiet. A great light that came over Tryfan in the heart of Barrow Vale, and gathered him into its Silence.
During the days that followed they were all subdued. Mayweed seemed suddenly to have grown old and grey, as if the death of Tryfan had robbed him of anything to live for.
Bailey was disconsolate with grief and shame, for he felt he had been a coward and had no right to live. Romney, too, was low, seeming to think that the emptiness of the wood and the lack of mole life there was his own fault. The sound of feeding rook and calling owl seemed to fill the wood.
The grey, cold weather continued into January until one morning they woke to find the lightest powdering of snow on the surface of the wood between the trees. The sun broke through and suddenly the wood looked beautiful once more. Rooks flapped and were gone; the owls fell silent once again.
That morning Mistle went to the Stone and, with the sun on her flanks, stanced before it to pray in silence for a long time, her snout low. When she had finished she looked up and her eyes were bright, clear and purposeful.
She went and found the other moles: Bailey stanced by a tree doing nothing, Romney fretting at a worm halfheartedly, Mayweed asleep.
“I want to talk to you,” she said to the first two, and then prodded Mayweed awake. “And you as well, Mayweed.”
Reluctantly, and looking truculent, they gathered round her.
“Somemole here’s got to say it, so I shall. Duncton isn’t a system for gloomy moles. Gloomy moles don’t look right here. Now I am not and have never been a gloomy mole. One day my Beechen is going to come back, and when he does I want him to come to a system sparkling with life. So, what are each of you going to do towards that?”
She looked at each of them in turn.
Bailey shrugged and said he didn’t know.
Romney said he’d do anything to make amends, even if it included trying to be more positive, but that wasn’t easy in the circumstances.
Mayweed said, “Magnificent Mistle, you are a felicitous fillip to this mole, who is not by nature gloomy either. No, no, no. He has a thought and will utter it. What did Tryfan mention before he died? Well?”
“He mentioned Seven Barrows,” said Mistle, “and he was right to say I have been there. The Stone must have told him that. He said you should go there.”
“Got it in one, Madam Mistle. ‘Go there, young mole!’ he more or less said. Well, Mayweed may be old but he’s not one to vegetate and would prefer to die while he’s route-finding rather than stancing still. So... Seven Barrows and Stillstones seems a good way for Mayweed to go in search of death! Humbleness has therefore decided to be off. Oh yes, and he’s taking Bailey with him.”
“But....”
“But, but, but, but, but,” said Mayweed. “Me, Mayweed, really doesn’t want to know. Trouble with you, Bailey, is you have never got over losing Lorren and Starling all at one go. Very careless that. Still, Lorren’s alive and well as I told you, and Starling could be too. Come with me, see the world and come back when you’ve got yourself sorted out. You’ll be no good here and that’s a fact, a very gloomy fact, eh, Mistle?”
He grinned and she laughed. The sun shone in the wood about them.
“And Romney?” said Mistle wryly. “Since you’ve got it all worked out, Mayweed, you better tell us what your plans for him are.”
Mayweed leered.
“Best way of ridding yourself of guilt is to work so hard you don’t think about it. Work him, Mistle, work him hard! Plenty to do, and one day moles will come back to this place that’s been a home to me and find it just right. I won’t come back, but others will.”
“But....”
“Bothered Bailey, don’t bother. I’ve heard it all before. If you say ‘but’ once more we’ll leave immediately. Be warned!”
“When will you go?” said Mistle.
“Before I think about it twice.”
“I have been to Seven Barrows,” said Mistle. “It was magical.”
“Amazing Mistle, if I was younger I could love you, but as I’m not I’ll merely say they didn’t make moles then like they do now. Except, of course, for Sleekit who is one in a million.” He smiled that happiest of smiles, which is that of a mole who has known true love and has no need to speak of it.
“But,” said Bailey.
“Ah! The third ‘but’. The moment has come. Goodbye, Madam, goodbye, Sir, I don’t want to leave you but I think Bailey ought to go. A long journey suits him. Last time he lost weight. This time he’ll find himself. Farewell one and all!”
“Er, goodbye, Romney. And you, Mistle,” said Bailey.
Mistle gave them both a warm hug and started to go a little way with them.
“No, Madam, no, Sir, do not accompany us! Mayweed hates goodbyes and a route-finder likes to leave others standing exactly where they are. It gives him a sense of identity. Ha, ha, ha. Perturbed Bailey, get your snout straight and your paws set, Mayweed’s going to make a mole of you at last!”
With that they set off across the wood, and were gone into the morning sun.
“Just like that!” exclaimed Romney, wondering. “You moles of the Stone are like nothing I’ve ever known.”
Mistle was smiling after Mayweed and Bailey, with tears in her eyes.
“So what do we do now?” said Romney looking around and feeling a little daunted.
“Why Romney, we work, that’s what we do! To make Duncton live again, to make Beechen know that the Stone is loved and cherished in the system in which he was born.”
“But if...” began Romney, sounding one last doubt.
“But he will, he will come back,” said Mistle fiercely. “He told me that he would, and so he will.” And that was an end of that.
Then she put her paw to Romney’s, and said warmly, “Come, let us explore the system to which the Stone has sent us. Let us see the place that is our home.”
The winter sun was all about them, and the leafless trees of Duncton shone bright; and if the breeze made any sound at all, it was like whispered welcomes among the trees and tunnels from old moles of faith and courage, filled with joy to see their young back home at last.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It is many moles’ hope to see snow on Longest Night, and as systems of the Stone go, Beechenhill, being northerly, was normally luckier than most. But that cycle of seasons, though the weather was cold, the snows did not come until the third week of January.
Then, when they came, they were sudden and severe, as easterly winds drifted deep snow across the lower slopes and covered the higher parts with a crust of fluted ice through which the ends of mat grass stuck stiffly.
Treacherous though this surface was, two moles struggled at that time to find a route through the frozen, fractured communal tunnels there to get as near to the Stone as they could. They should not have done so, but Harebell insisted that she wished to go to the Stone, and Wharfe refused to let her go unaccompanied.
The day they chose was clear and bright, and when they finally stanced unsteadily on the exposed and icy surface by the Stone, all their adopted system lay stretched out beneath them, glinting in the south-east where the sun had risen low. All was white, all beautiful. The only sound was the thin whine of wind in the wire fence that lies north of the Beechenhill Stone, the only movement the fli
ck-flack shift of sheep’s wool caught on the wire’s barbs.
“We must not stay here long, Harebell,” said Wharfe.
“I know. I just want... just for Betony.”
“I know you do,” said Wharfe, for ever since Betony had been lost, Harebell had come regularly to the Stone to pray for her, whatever the weather and whatever anymole said.
That day, despite the difficulties of getting there, the system looked purer and more peaceful than they ever remembered, even on the gentlest summer day. White, pure, good.
“When will moledom’s darkness and the siege of Beechenhill ever end?” asked Harebell. “It has been going on so long. I’m so tired of it, Wharfe. But I’m sure the Stone Mole has come and that he’ll find Betony for us and she’ll be safe.”
Wharfe smiled bleakly but said nothing. He wished he could go out and look for Betony, but he did not know where to begin. While Harebell felt the loss emotionally, he felt somehow responsible, as if he had failed Betony, and more than once before he had wanted to go off in search of her. The winter years were beginning to seem long and slow, and he had never thought a system could change so much, and come to seem so hateful. It was no consolation that Squeezebelly had warned him that it would be so.
“When the worms go deep, and moles follow them and are confined, then trouble starts; always did, always will,” Squeezebelly had told him. “That’s when a system shows its strengths and weaknesses.”
“Stone,” said Harebell, “bring our Betony back to us safeguarded and send the Stone Mole to us here in Beechenhill.”
“Yes...” muttered Wharfe, too tired and dispirited even to speak a prayer.
Then Harebell turned back the way they had come, and Wharfe followed behind her and they went back down out of the light.
Such a harsh season is a difficult and fractious time in any system, for just when moles want to be out and about and beginning to think about a mate they find themselves confined below ground and inclined to be restive and quarrelsome.
In Beechenhill the situation had been made worse because since November the grikes had successfully caused dissension and disaffection in the system with a policy for which there seemed to be no precedent. On the one paw, they had steadily increased the sense the system had of being besieged by closing more and more of the routeways out, especially to the west, which had always been the best source of news. On the other paw, and most dubiously, the unheard-of had occurred – a sideem and some guardmoles from Ashbourne had made friendly contact with some watchers before Longest Night and claimed that they were interested in an exchange of views on matters of faith.
Even more surprising was the fact that the Ashbourne sideem, Merrick, sent a messenger to inform Squeezebelly that he was willing to have the discussions in Beechenhill or in his own system, whichever they preferred.
The moles of the Word could not have found a more effective way of dividing the system, for while moles like Squeezebelly and Wharfe believed it was merely a way to spy on them, many others, including Squeezebelly’s son Bramble, and the now well respected Mallerstang mole Skelder, argued that they should respond positively.
“You’re beginning to see shadows where there are none,” said Bramble, who, since Betony’s tragic disappearance had become bitter and estranged from Squeezebelly, and Wharfe and Harebell too, as if he blamed them for the loss of Betony.
“My dear Bramble...” began Squeezebelly.
“But I agree with him, Squeezebelly,” interrupted Skelder. “If we don’t even try to talk to them then they can rightly say to anymole in moledom that we’re closed to all discussion, and afraid of the Word.”
“What’s more if we talk to them there might be a chance of finding out something about Betony, or had you forgotten about her altogether?” said Bramble.
“That’s unreasonable, Bramble, and you know it,” said Wharfe.
“No, Wharfe, I think Bramble’s got a point,” said Squeezebelly, a master of compromise and diplomacy, who had put up with worse things from Bramble and some other of the younger generation of moles than their present anger and dismissiveness. He had been through the winter years before.
“I remain very suspicious of their true intentions, but if they really want a ‘discussion’ about our beliefs and theirs (the Stone help us all!) then perhaps they can demonstrate their new spirit of cooperation and tell us what happened to Betony... It’s the not knowing I cannot bear.” Squeezebelly sighed and shook his head sadly.
He had aged since Betony had disappeared, and his face had lost its normal good cheer and humour. He felt he had lost not only a daughter but, indirectly, a son as well, and he was aware that matters were not helped by the now obvious fact that of all the new generation of moles Wharfe not Bramble was the most able successor to his role as first among equals in the Beechenhill hierarchy.
But they had all been much affected, though in different ways. While Wharfe remained passionate with anger about Betony’s loss, Harebell, partly because of her close friendship with the Mallerstang female Quince, had had more recourse to the Stone.
On the very rare occasions that news came to Beechenhill through itinerant moles who had made a successful entry into the system, she now always asked of matters of the Stone, and whether any news had yet been heard of the coming of the Stone Mole.
Just as she clung on to the belief that Betony was still alive, so too she had faith even now that the Stone Mole would come. Indeed, she often asked Squeezebelly if she might not attempt to escape the system by the well-concealed escape routes through the limestone tunnels that lay to the north, but he said no, arguing that it was bad enough losing Betony, but if she, daughter of Henbane and therefore sister of Lucerne, were ever discovered or caught, her life would no longer be worth living. Of that Squeezebelly had no doubt, for he knew the ways of the Word and its moles. For that reason, too, he could guess all too well what, if Betony was still alive, she might be suffering, and wondered if it might be best if she were not alive....
Squeezebelly knew, too, that Bramble’s present discontent, exacerbated by being winter-bound in the system, arose as well from the fact that he had vied with Wharfe for Quince’s affections, and as everymole knew he would, he had lost.
Not that Quince was giving much away – after all it was not even near springtime yet – but the time she and Wharfe spent together, and the impressive pair they made, left little doubt what the outcome would be.
Bramble’s chances were not improved either by the fact that Quince, like Wharfe, was dubious of the sideem Merrick’s intentions with their proposed religious discussion, saying that it was not the nature of the Stone to be evangelical. Moles must learn from each other by example, not the spoken word – words, she argued, were only a means by which moles got themselves into a position for doing things. Bramble was a talker. She, like Wharfe, preferred to be a doer.
Squeezebelly was too wise and experienced a mole to involve himself directly in such matters, but he did what he could to keep Bramble and Wharfe apart, and sent them, as he did other moles, out into the wintry system to help repair tunnels against the ice and snow, and to delve them deeper where need be. Physical activity, he knew, was good for moles. Meanwhile he used the excuse of Betony, and his suspicions that the sideem of Ashbourne must know where she was, to keep the discussions at bay.
Only at the end of January, after repeated denials by the sideem of Ashbourne that he knew anything of the female in question, Squeezebelly finally yielded and agreed that discussions could take place – in tunnels at the edge of the system where nothing about it would be given away.
The discussions were as innocuous as Squeezebelly expected, but he attended them with some interest if only to meet the sideem Merrick directly, for until then their contact had been through intermediaries. Merrick was harmless looking enough, and might have been mistaken for diffident but for the firmness and clarity of his arguments when he was pressured by the Beechenhill moles. Squeezebelly observed with fascin
ated distaste the way in which this clever sideem’s apparent reasonableness seemed to impress moles like Bramble and Skelder. Nothing that was said changed his mind that the Word was merely a heartless system of oppression which made moles ruled by it miserable.
Then, after several fruitless days, the discussions were suddenly terminated by the sideem Merrick for the unconvincing reason that the Beechenhill moles were “not cooperating”. This, it seemed, referred not to the discussions but because the moles of the Word felt insulted not to be let further into the system. Rarely had Squeezebelly’s leadership and command been so sorely tested, for Bramble and Skelder argued he was being unreasonable, but he succeeded in asserting his wishes, sensing that the slow attrition of the Word might one day be too much for Beechenhill moles if too many of them were like Bramble. He hated to think such a thing of his own son, but thank the Stone for Wharfe!
In fact he was too canny a mole to believe the reason given for terminating the discussions, and observed to Wharfe and some other moles, “Something has happened outside which they are not telling us about. Did you notice that there were fewer of their moles there today, and only very senior and dependable ones?”
“Aye, and hardly any of them spoke at all in contrast to previous days, leaving it all to the sideem.”
“Something has happened which they do not want us to know about, something important, and we must find out what it is.”
“You know, I’m willing to try to get out,” began Wharfe.
“And me,” said several voices.
Squeezebelly allowed himself to smile.
“I know perfectly well that you’re all very willing to leave the system to go and find out what you can... and I also know that the grikes will be waiting for you. Even so, I must say that if the weather was not so severe I would let one or two of you go but you know as well as I do, better in fact for I don’t venture out much these days, that the chances of them getting you in these conditions are too high to be worth the risk.”
Some of the less experienced moles there muttered that they did not agree, but others, including Wharfe, knew that what Squeezebelly said was true. In warmer weather the surface provided good safe cover, but when the ground was frozen then a mole driven to the surface was dangerously exposed, and could not rely on snow for cover. Drifts were safe enough, though they disoriented a mole, but clear frozen ground was treacherous. As for the normal routes – grike guardmoles watched over them day and night. The watchers confirmed that.
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