Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  “For the rest, tasks will soon present themselves. I think we are not yet under pressure, but it is coming and we must be prepared in thought and ideas for it. Now, evening has come, and a Meeting was somewhat falsely summoned in Barrow Vale by Drubbins and myself. Let us go there, and speak of peace, and begin the task of preparing our moles for the struggle that will come.

  “May the Stone guide us all in thought and in deed. May it protect us. May it lead us to the Silence.”

  With that Stour had finished, and he did not wait for any comments or conversation. What he had said was a beginning, and it was one he wanted each of them to think about and discover for themselves.

  Nor did the others speak, but went out on to the surface and paused briefly, and stared at the coming stars, thoughtful and concerned. Then they turned to each other to talk in low voices, and share something of their thoughts. All, that is, but Privet. For when Fieldfare turned to talk to her, Privet was already hurrying away, head down, not looking back, wishing to talk to nomole.

  Fieldfare ran after her.

  “Privet, my dear …”

  Briefly, Privet turned back and faced her. But in her eyes was a strange lost look, and a look of terrible despair. But more than that, there was terrible hope as well.

  “Privet …” said Fieldfare again, but Privet shook her head vacantly, turned, and was gone into the dark as surely as if the last light had suddenly fled from the western sky.

  Chapter Ten

  Privet did not waste time before beginning her task. After only a brief return to her tunnels to clear out some old nesting material and seal up a few entrances against the pre-winter trespasses of the shrews and voles, she crossed the Wood and entered into a small and inconspicuous grove of beech trees that lies adjacent to the High Wood and some way to the west of the Library,

  It lay off any of the communal surface routes to the Stone, and she might easily have missed it had not Whillan some time previously pointed the place out to her, and told her who and what lay beneath its surface. The scene had an air of dereliction and decay caused, surely, by something more than the great tree that had fallen in some forgotten storm across the place and now lay rotted and broken upon the ground. Though the day was mild she shivered involuntarily before picking her way among the rotten wood and remnants of a patch of dog’s mercury.

  She peered about among the shadows for an entrance, wondering how Whillan had ever dared to make his way here, let alone venture down into the tunnels below and make contact with Keeper Husk. He must have more courage than she thought! And persistence too, for it took her a long time before she found a serviceable entrance, during which she was uncomfortably aware that if Husk was below he could hear her every move. But having found it she went on down into the tunnel beneath without further delay.

  It was so dark after the bright light above that a short way in she stumbled over a pile of texts, which in falling brought down others across the tunnel floor. She did her best to pile them up again and noticed as she did so that they were a complete jumble of subjects, shapes and sizes and in no order at all. Then, with extreme caution, she ventured on down the tunnel which, she was not surprised to see, was shoulder-high in texts and folios all along its length.

  Slowly her eyes adjusted to the light and she made out movement ahead, and then the shape of an ancient mole stanced poised and staring in a rheumy geriatric way in her direction. Keeper Husk.,

  “Go away, I’m busy!” he shouted. Indeed he did seem so, for he carried two texts against his scraggy furless chest with one paw, while he raised the other towards her, either to threaten her, or to shield his eyes from the light behind her so that he might see better.

  “Keeper Husk?” she said, advancing in a friendly way upon him. “The Master Librarian sent me.”

  “Oh he did, did he? What for?” His voice was still loud, though she was so near him now.

  “I’m one of his librarians. He would like me to help you.”

  “Ha, ha, ha!” he cackled, genuinely amused and dropping the texts as he fell into a wheezing fit of such noise and duration that Privet thought that he might collapse on the spot. But eventually he caught his breath, wiped his eyes, put out a paw against the dusty wall to support himself, and said, “Several decades too late I’d say, wouldn’t you?” and grinned wickedly.

  Privet peered around the place, and the more her eyes took in, the more untidy and chock-a-block it seemed.

  “It does look as if you have needed some help for some time,” she said politely.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Privet.”

  “I know that name!”

  “I’m the mother of Whillan who used to come here.”

  “You’re the one from the Moors.”

  She stared at him, astonished, and then remembered that Whillan had said that Husk had told him the same thing when he first came here.

  “I wouldn’t look quite so surprised if I were you,” said Husk; “Whillan’s a Peakish word and I assume you have some connection with the north to name him so.”

  “I …” began Privet, but she drew back from further explanation. In any case, now she was near him she saw with a shock that he was staring not quite at her but to her left flank, and could not really see her at all. Husk was blind. He seemed suddenly very vulnerable.

  “You were kind to Whillan,” she said quietly, “and I’m glad to be able to thank you. He enjoyed his times with you.”

  Husk’s old face broke into a sudden and touching smile.

  “Did he? Really? I used to tell him tales, you know. I miss him as a matter of fact, quite a lot. But I suppose he grew up and has gone off as young moles do, or something of the sort. When I heard you above I thought it might be him.”

  He ‘looked’ at her again, his sightless eyes mottled and watery, and she saw his head had a continual tremor.

  “I am quite interested in old and mediaeval texts, and in tales. I once studied them.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I studied them once, but I got over it. Studying’s not the way with tales, is it?”

  Privet smiled, appreciating his comment. Her tutor Cobbett in Beechenhill had sometimes said the same.

  “I … I think perhaps it isn’t really,” she said.

  This unscholarly thought agreed, Husk turned from her, and reaching forward to guide himself along, led Privet on the strangest and most extraordinary textual tour she had ever ventured on.

  Though before he really got started he stopped again, turned, and said in a testing kind of way, “Any particular mediaeval scribe whose work you enjoy?”

  It was a long time since Privet had been asked such a question, a very long time.

  “Skelton,” she said without much hesitation.

  “Ah, yes! Skelton. What a good choice. A pity his works are so rare.”

  “I have only ever seen copies,” she said.

  “Ah!” he said again, and turned once more and led her on.

  She soon found herself in the first of a series of chambers of such utter chaos that it was hard to see which way to go. Texts and books, and folios, were everywhere. Piles of them, shelves bulging with them, stacks here and bundles there, dusty, torn, some half open, others standing on their ends, some stacked so high that she could not conceive how anymole could have got them there in the first place, let alone consult them later.

  Husk seemed unable to move quickly, or to venture off what seemed his regular route through this chaos, and in any case he soon grew tired and suggested that she looked about for herself and come back to him. She picked her way through the clutter towards what seemed a tunnel to another chamber, but found herself in a dead-end of texts and had to retreat, discovering as she did so all sorts of textual delights, amongst which she browsed and dawdled with growing pleasure.

  By the time she got back to where she had left Keeper Husk he had moved on and she had to follow him by sound, for in the confusion of stacks and shadows and muddle he was alre
ady out of sight. She went to the right, then forward, then to the left, and stooping down wriggled her way through into a low ill-lit chamber, which like the first was a chaos of stacks and shelves. There somewhere, heard but unseen, Husk moved about muttering, “Where is it? Where’s it gone?”

  Perhaps he was a little deaf as well, which would account for the way he sometimes shouted when he talked, for he did not hear her now, and she saw him long before he became aware of her.

  A small, old mole, unable to move well, and surrounded by such piles and multitudes of texts that he seemed yet smaller than he was. She saw that the joints in his paws were furless and painfully swollen, and the talons of both front paws bent and skewed one way with the disease.

  Pathetically he was snouting about, reaching his paws here and there, seeking something he could not find. Out of politeness and so she would not surprise him she called out his name, and then looked about a bit while he called that he was just coming, and wouldn’t be long and couldn’t she occupy herself, please. She began to feel that there was something peculiarly exciting about a place that was texts, and nothing but texts, all waiting to be looked at, browsed through, studied, and absorbed, and sorted. This was a worthy task.

  Since Keeper Husk seemed in no hurry to emerge from among the stacks in which he searched, she began to browse as bookish moles like to do, and to her delight fround a fragment of a mediaeval verse whose script was of the Obverse Middle period and whose sentiments were all too familiar to her … “My lefe is faren in a lond — Alas! Why is he so? And I am so sore bound I may nat com her to …”

  Then, nearby and quite out of any sequence or order, was a much-worn text entitled “The Cronycle of Feestes’, though what festivities it referred to she did not have the inclination to find out because her eye was suddenly caught by a more ancient text whose title was at first hard to make out.

  She ran her talons gently over it, snouted at it, looked askance at it to see the impressions better, and realized with a start that it was ancient scrivening.

  That she had not seen in all her time in Duncton. Indeed, she had not seen it since …

  Then Husk was there at her flank, breathing in his wheezy way, though this time from the effort of a successful hunt rather than from mirth. His eyes seemed almost bright, his look nearly triumphant, and he held in his paw a text which he was careful as yet not to let her see, while he peered very closely at what she had been examining as if he could see it; but it was only when he touched it with his talons that he relaxed. He was suddenly in his element, and spoke quickly and with infectious enthusiasm.

  “Ah! Yes! That’s Berners’ work. Quite a find, quite a chronicler. My father exchanged that text with a mole from Rollright for three worms and a burrow for the night. But Berners did better things and that’s a rather tedious exposition of Whernish ways, in my view, and of course much more entertainingly done by Buke of Howlat. Now …” He silently gave her the text he carried. “Have a snout at this.”

  She examined the text carefully and with a growing interest that changed rapidly to awe.

  “But …’ she whispered, marvelling at the beauty of its script, and impressed by the good condition it was in.

  “But …’ she whispered again, turning back to the beginning to check again in utter disbelief what text it was, her talons tracing and retracing the mediaeval scribing there.

  “Well?” he said at last, scarcely able to contain his impatience.

  She ran her talons through its first folios, and then snouted carefully down its last. She stanced back from it, scented it, and weighed it quizzically from one paw to another.

  “Impressive, eh?” he said, with a grin that revealed a few stubby yellow teeth. “Well?”

  Then, with great reluctance, and glancing at him in some alarm, she said firmly, “It’s a forgery.”

  There was deep silence. He looked about with what seemed outrage, and then cold anger, and then deep doubt, and yet throughout there was a half-hidden amusement about his face.

  “In fact,” she dared venture, “I would say it’s a forgery by an Uffington scribe, and Early Modern.”

  He thrust his withered snout at hers, narrowed his eyes, and said conspiratorially, “So would I. Didn’t get near to fooling you, did it? Didn’t fool my father either. But he liked forgeries, you see, said the moles who did them loved their work.” He cackled again, and reached out for the script from her, which she put into his paws. He caressed it, and sniffed at it in a friendly kind of way, and with a final and affectionate pat put it down.

  “Now, before you say anything, mole, let me show you some more of my little collection. That part you saw first I’ have really abandoned now, being old and my sight having failed so badly, and my work with them being over, but where we’re going now I’ve kept my favourite texts and I can find them easily enough.”

  With that Husk signalled Privet to follow him yet again and led her on a confusing voyage among the crumbling shelves and stacks of texts to chambers far beyond the first until they came to a drier, smaller, chamber which was a good deal tidier, though by the standards of the Main Library, it was still chaotic enough.

  Cluttered it may have been but whenever Privet reached out to touch a text Keeper Husk followed her direction to it, touched it, and every time a gleam of recognition would come to his wrinkled eye and he would say things like, “Ah yes! The oral tradition of the Welsh Marches, unsurpassed!” or “Beatty? There was a rogue poet if ever I knew one, eh Privet?” or “The ‘Lachfield Roll’, eh! As scurrilous as they come! Challow who scribed it can always be relied on for some light relief … but of course he fought a hopeless struggle against his carnal desires. Yes, yes, some moles are like that.”

  He clearly knew every text in his collection and loved them all and as they went he recounted their history — how they came to be discovered, and how they made their way to Duncton Wood.

  “Ah, yes, my dear! There’s a tale behind every one of these old texts, quite apart from what’s scribed in them. Why, my father used to stance me down where you’re stanced now, take up a Roll or Tale, and tell me all he knew about its provenance. Happy days! But of course young librarians aren’t interested in this kind of thing these days; oh no, not they. Mediaeval texts were all the rage in my young days, but contemporary history’s the thing now, as if there was ever really such a thing, since it’s a contradiction in terms!

  “But my dear, any one of these texts, whether Rolls recounting the doings of a system, or rhymes scribed for fun, or Tales told to scribemoles and scribed down, has more fascination to it than modern texts. Why? Because these days moles merely record the doings of others, which one way or another have to do with fighting and war, whereas in former times moles were concerned with the things they did themselves, like founding systems, or colonization, or delving, or love. Let me show you what I mean …”

  This time he soon found what he wanted, and offered it to her almost diffidently, as one might introduce a mate to an old friend, secretly proud, yet uncertain that he or she will be appreciated.

  “There,” he said, giving her a small and ancient text, “there!”

  It looked modest enough, its covers faded, its scribing weak and hard to make out, its folios much worn and ragged at the edges. But for all that the text had a real sense of mystery and age about it, and the feel of something that had been scribed with love, and kept through the centuries since its creation by moles who had loved it too, the latest of whom stanced watching her, old and touchingly concerned to see how she reacted.

  She did not need to examine it for long before she knew with utter certainty what it was, or rather, guessed what it could only be.

  “But this is …’ she began, unable to speak its name, so awestruck was she by what she held in her paws.

  “Yes,” he said, taking it back from her, and holding it with love, “this is Skelton’s ‘Adawe’, the original.”

  “But generations of scholars, knowing it once exis
ted, have wondered where it was and searched for it,” she exclaimed. “Most believed that it had long since been lost.”

  “It was lost, my dear, but not destroyed. My father found it in a burrow at the deserted system of Ashbury Top, along with a number of Rolls of eastern systems.”

  “May I …?” she asked, reaching out her paws.

  He gave it back to her and she laid it down and ran her talons over the title scribings.

  “‘Adawe’, she repeated aloud, “or ‘On the way to Silence, by Skelton of Blagrove Slide’. I didn’t know he came from Blagrove! How strange, I thought … but it’s where Thripp comes from.”

  “Thripp?” said Husk.

  “No matter,” she said hastily, for mention of him here and in this context seemed almost blasphemous. She resumed reading aloud, turning the folio to the first full page of text: “‘It was in the Autumn year of October, after the Scirpuscun schism had run its course, that I tired of my life in Uffington and, gaining a dispensation from the Holy Mole, set off into moledom …’”

  “‘… with only the novice Butem to aid me on my way’,” continued Husk from memory, with his eyes half closed and a dreamy look on his face, “‘and the sun by day, and the moon by night, to guide our faltering and uncertain steps. Of plan or purpose we had none, or if we had, we soon left it behind us like a shadowed time of past trouble that a mole has no more need to burden himself with. Thus set free, we turned our snouts north-westward, and before long Uffington, and all the cares of the world, seemed so far behind us that they might never have been. As for Silence, we sought to forget that that was what we desired, Butem singing a song when the shadows of that desire beset him, while I, for my part, resolved to seek the truth in the small things of each moment of the day and night and thus clear my mind of the dismay and restlessness a mole feels when he contemplates the fact that there is a Silence he has not yet reached. It was not long before we reached that great river which...’”