Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  Husk stopped, smiled, opened his eyes and said, “No text has ever given me greater comfort or greater food for thought than this. Skelton was a blessed mole indeed! His “Adawe” has greatly helped me in my work. Though now, alas …”

  Privet saw that he peered round towards the far end of the burrow where, at a small raised and well-lit earthen dais which was, or had been, his scribing place, there was a clutter of torn and crumpled folios, and among them a pile of neat unused ones, intended no doubt for some future scribing that his blindness and infirmity meant he could no longer so easily do. Of finished work she could see nothing, and presumed that that was under the pile of rejected folios, or carefully hidden away somewhere else.

  “Keeper Husk,” she said formally, “I told you that the Master Librarian sent me here to help. He did so because he believes that these ancient texts you guard may be in danger of destruction by a sect of moles called the Newborns. But from what he has told me I believe that neither he nor any other Duncton librarians are fully aware of the importance of the texts you hold here, which makes the need to sort them, and get the most important to a place of safety soon, even greater. I hope therefore you will help me fulfill this task he has given me.”

  “Yes, well, I wondered when you’d get round to saying something like that. Always was an organizer, Stour was. I’ve known that mole a long time — a long long time! Of course, he’ll have found some way of making it all sound very important to come here and help me out but finally, when all’s said and done, is anything so important as you know what? Eh? You know, Privet. Tales. That’s important! But a few texts …’ He waved his deformed paw about a bit and peered blindly here and there indifferently.

  “And anyway,” he continued, “the truth is that you may have some difficulty deciding which texts are important, even assuming that it is right to attribute relative importance to texts at all. The meanest, dullest-seeming scrap of text or folio may, for all you know, be seen as the most important by some future scholar. I have spent a lifetime learning that myself, and daring to assign to a lesser place in my work texts which once seemed the most important of all.”

  Yet the attempt must be made, Keeper Husk,” said Privet earnestly, “for we cannot hope to protect all the texts in the Collections now in Duncton. The Master has made a selection in the Main Library, and he hopes I shall do the same here. He has of course started with the Books of Moledom …”

  “Ah, yes, those,” said Husk rather more reverently than before. “It is a long time since I touched one of those … What precious things they are, what wisdom they contain. Would that the little book I’m working on contained a speck of those Books’ wisdom, eh?”

  “What is the book you’re scribing?” she asked.

  “Tales, or some of them. The best, or most interesting, or perhaps merely the most wise, since we’re talking of wisdom. Yes, the most wise. But it is a mere compilation of final versions of the Tales that seem important, and even those … No, I don’t know, my dear, about you working on the texts here … I’m not sure I want you poking about and disturbing things and more likely as not finding Tales and bits and pieces I should have included in my work …”

  Husk looked again in the direction of his scribing place and Privet sensed that he was losing his interest in her task, and that soon he might grow tired and order her to leave. This was not a task she could ever do without his help. Perhaps if she talked to him of the work that seemed to matter to him most it would help. She wanted to tell him about the work she herself had brought, feeling that after so long lingering hidden in her burrow this was one mole who might enjoy it. But somehow it seemed so presumptuous to offer up her little text to a mole who was clearly such a master of tales.

  “I wonder, Keeper Husk, if you are aware that there were other moles, or at least one other mole, who were working at something similar to yourself,” said Privet diffidently. She was hesitant, because no scholar likes to find another on his patch. But she need not have worried, for Husk’s response was immediate interest and pleasure.

  “Another mole worked on Tales? Tell me about him, mole, and what you know of his scribing, for no doubt I have much to learn, so much … What was his name and system, eh?”

  “He was of Beechenhill, Keeper Husk, and his name was Cobbett.”

  “Oh, him! You mean Stour’s brother?”

  “Brother?” repeated Privet, astonished.

  “Oh yes, Cobbett’s his brother all right. Fell out over a female seventy-odd years ago if a day they did and Cobbett wandered off on a pilgrimage to Beechenhill to recover himself and never came back. Funny tale that one, ha ha ha …’ Husk fell into another fit of cackling at the memory of this ancient gossip.

  “Why do you think Stour’s got such a long face, my dear?” he continued when he had recovered. “Unrequited love! Worse than worms in your guts that is! Eats you up, withers you, leaves you a mere shadow of your former self. I ought to know …” But he started laughing again until tears rolled down his scrawny face. For a mole so infirm he seemed very much alive and to know how to enjoy himself.

  “Dear me,” he said clutching his stomach, “dear oh dearie me. Phew! Laughing’ll be the death of me. You see, Privet, and you’ll not believe this I know, being young and not believing old moles like Stour and myself, and Cobbett come to that, were once young too and had feelings, but — sorry, I’ve got to laugh, I must have been mad at the time — I loved the lass myself! Do you know what her name was?

  Mind you, you must promise never to mention it to Stour of course, as he’ll have a fit at the mere mention of it. I expect I’m the only one who knows her name now, bar him and Cobbett. Her name was Pansy and she was fat.”

  “Fat?” repeated Privet faintly.

  “Stour called her comely, Cobbett called her magnificent if I remember right, but as I was the one to get closest to her first I think I have the right to tell the truth and call her fat. Fat Pansy, that’s what others called her. Made a fool of all of us, as she took a Cumnor mole to mate and left Duncton Wood altogether. I ask you. Dear me! I haven’t thought of Fat Pansy in decades and I don’t suppose I ever will again! Can you imagine …?” concluded Husk, laughing again, but more scurrilously than before.

  But from the dubious and prudish expression on poor Privet’s race it did not look as if she could imagine quite what he meant.

  “Yes,” said Husk at last, “I heard from a visitor forty years ago that Cobbett was scribing what he rather pompously called a Book of Tales.”

  “Yes,” said Privet defensively, “he did call it that. It’s a long time since I was there …”

  But Husk’s mood seemed to have changed suddenly into almost depressive quiet. His head was low, and shook once more, his sightless eyes gazed at texts unseen.

  “Though Stour was my brother,” he said at last, as if the fraternal state was one that could be sundered, and had been, “Cobbett was my friend. It is a terrible thing to lose a friend. We don’t have many chances of making friends, you see.” He reached out a paw and grasped hers with remarkable strength. “Have you had true friends you’ve lost? Friends whose minds and hearts seemed to know your own? Eh mole, have you?”

  “I … well … yes …” she began.

  “Don’t let them go,” he said urgently. “And if they seem to have gone get them back. Do anything not to lose them. The Stone may never send you another and in losing them part of you has died! I never found a friend like Cobbett, not ever again. Of course he’s scribing a Book of Tales! It was what he and I shared, you see, and all this, and all my father taught us here. And that silly business with Pansy, and Stour being jealous and uppity, and suddenly Cobbett was gone, gone for ever. How strange you should have come here all the way from Beechenhill. Tell me of him, my dear, tell me all you remember.”

  His old face was smiling, his eyes shone with tears, his paw held hers with trust and eagerness.

  “I … I liked him so much,” said Privet. “He was kind to me, a
nd taught me much, and told me Tales I have never heard before.”

  “Yes,” sighed Husk, “my Cobbett was like that: now tell me …”

  And so they talked, and night came, and Privet found herself inextricably caught up in the clutter and magic of Rolls, Rhymes and Tales. For when daybreak came, and she woke up, she found old Husk had wandered off and found her some food, and was already busying himself with sorting out some texts which he hoped she would agree ought to be saved.

  “Later, you can help me with my work, that’s the arrangement. I let you sort the texts, you help me with my work! Eh? Fair’s fair. And seeing as you’ve been tutored by Cobbett it’ll be like having part of him back here at my flank again, to share and advise, to sort and reject, to choose and decide, and then? Why then to scribe the chosen Tale, and after that to score bits out, and then to take still more away until —”

  Privet laughed.

  “I’ve got to eat first, Keeper Husk,” she said, looking around i the cluttered chamber as it filled with morning light, feeling closer to her destiny than she ever had before. And thinking about so many things they had talked of the night before, so many memories, of friends, of loves, of tasks, of things undone that might, after all, still be done.

  “I’ll stay,” she agreed, not thinking it was paradoxical ending up agreeing to perform a task she had set out to do in the first place: nor realizing that perhaps the real task she was about to become involved in was really to do with Husk’s own, and Cobbett’s, which was not concerned to preserve texts but to explore them to find the inner truth of Tales.

  “But I’ll have to go back to my own tunnels for a short time, just to make sure they’re safe for the winter, and to tell friend Fieldfare to keep an eye on them.” And too, though she said nothing of this, to collect her own small text and bring it here as an offering to this good old mole.

  “Don’t be long gone,” he said fretfully, “for I’m beginning to get used to you being here!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Fieldfare responded very differently from Privet to Stour’s appeal at the secret meeting, becoming restless and fretful, and suddenly concerned by issues that had never worried her before. However Stour had touched the others, with her he had disturbed her peace, and made her question the meaning of how she lived, and to wonder if perhaps the most living she had done was through Chater, and not through herself at all.

  “Pups I’ve raised and sent them off!” she said to herself again, but it was not enough.

  “I’ve made a clean and comfortable place for Chater to come back to!” But now that seemed rather less important than it once had.

  “I’ve friends amongst all kinds of moles in the system!” But for what? What had she ever discussed with them? Nothing but trivia, it seemed. Not the great issues of peace, and serving the Stone, and suchlike matters as the Master had raised. It takes courage and honesty for a mole to confront ‘suchlike matters’ as these, and kindly Fieldfare had both, and was discovering the painful, uneasy consequences of it.

  Perhaps it was best she was alone to wrestle with such things. But Chater’s departure with Maple and Whillan for the dangerous mission to Rollright, soon after the meeting, left her without the companion she needed to debate these doubts and occasional excitements of thinking about what Stour had said. Nor did she have a task, as Privet did, to take her’ mind off her thoughts, or away from her worries that so soon after his escape from the Newborns in Cuddesdon, Chater was off again on what might be an even more dangerous mission, and for a period of time he had been quite unable to specify.

  For long days she stayed in or near the tunnels she shared with Chater, her thoughts confused and her actions strangely slow and routine: waking, grooming, feeding, sleeping, waking … Then she took to wandering off to visit Drubbins, the only mole whom she felt it would be possible to talk to since she knew that Privet was now much occupied at Rolls and Rhymes and in what Fieldfare called her ‘library mood’, which meant preoccupied and uncommunicative.

  Somehow the time passed, and the last warm days of September gave way to a windy October and a reminder that she should clear out the deeper tunnels of her and Chater’s place in preparation for winter. Since she knew that Drubbins needed help with his winter quarters, and what with discovering, or perhaps making, new things to do in her tunnels and his, Fieldfare continued to succeed for a time to suppress her excitement and dismay at all that Stour had said. Yet as the October days went by it became harder to do so, and she grew more restless still.

  But then one day too many passed when she found herself discontentedly alone and without a companion, and she felt disinclined to go off yet again to talk to Drubbins. Oh, he was a nice mole, a likeable mole, but he was not suited to her need today; her need now.

  For hours she dithered about her place, the great trees above her swaying in the October winds and shedding their leaves across the Wood’s wide floor. Then suddenly her doubts were gone: it was a day for doing, a day for daring, a day for being dauntless.

  Fieldfare patted her ample flanks, ran a paw over her chubby and wrinkled face, and thought that though being dauntless might not be her thing, dauntless today she must still be. And if friends were not for talking to when they were needed most they were NOT friends. And so …

  “I’ll visit Privet up in Rolls and Rhymes!” she said to herself. “She’s had time enough to get most of her task done, for there can’t be that many texts for her to sort out. I dare say she’ll be glad to see me now … and if she isn’t, well … well then, I’ll make her be!” Such, in Fieldfare’s mind that day and thus far, was what being dauntless meant.

  Yet as she neared the place, and peered among the dark trees there — for it was not an easy place to find — doubts set in. Perhaps after all … but dauntless was the word today! Perhaps she could make the excuse of having come to offer her services down in Rolls, Rhymes and Tales, for she knew that Privet might be working hard and imagined she might now be pleased to see her.

  Alas, the reception she got at Rolls and Rhymes from Privet was even worse than she had feared in her darker moments of doubt. For Privet proved reluctant to take time off to listen to her, and when she did she was unwilling to discuss the issues Stour had raised, and could not conceal her desire to return to Keeper Husk, who seemed to have some kind of hold on her.

  One of the things that Fieldfare had most wished to discuss was why it might be that Stour had chosen her to be part of the secret meeting. For surely she was no more than the mate of Chater and had no special gift or skill to give the system — the very notion which Stour had made her doubt, but which she wished to rehearse with a friend like Privet before rejecting it. Mind you, she had often said to herself in the troubled time just past, she was a mole who did not mind any challenge or any task. But then, until now such tasks as she had undertaken had been ordained by circumstance or custom.

  “Now I’ve to find a route forward of my own through unfamiliar ways, you see’ (she had wished to say to Privet), “and, my dear, I’m not sure I know how to do it …”

  But none of this was said, or could be said, to Privet, since Privet, after the briefest of conversations, said she had work to do and things to attend to and helter-skeltered off underground once more.

  “Some friend!” said Fieldfare to herself, much hurt by this rejection. Then feeling most disconsolate, and unsure which way to turn to either confront the unexpressed thoughts which nagged at her, or escape them, she was on her way back to the Eastside in the vague hope that she might try to find Drubbins after all, when her brief outrage at Privet surfaced again in a more diffused sense of rebellion against everything in general, and her own acquiescence yet again in the idea that she needed another mole to give what she did any meaning.

  “’Tis not Privet’s fault if I’m upset,’ she told herself judiciously, “it is my own! Fieldfare, my love, I despise you for being so pathetic! Today, here and now, you must be brave and dauntless like you said you would be
earlier before you foolishly rushed over to Rolls and Rhymes!”

  She stanced still a long time, staring among the trees, and breathing rather fast in an excited kind of way as unaccustomed thoughts of journeying crossed her mind in fleeting but alarming images of places to which she had never been, combined with thoughts she had never uttered. Not that either image or thought would have been very radical to moles like Chater, used as they were to travelling and thinking for themselves, or even Privet, despite her present flight into obscure seclusion with Husk and his texts.

  No, plump Fieldfare’s thoughts were parochial: ‘There’s nomole to stop me travelling this very day, if I so wish, to … to … why, to the Westside!” she declared daringly to herself. “Or, if I wish, to the Pastures! Or to that mysterious stretch of the High Wood which lies beyond the Stone. I could, I could!”

  As she thought of each of these places she turned and peered purposefully in their direction, debating the possibility of going there. But none of them quite suited the radical mood that was upon her, and that had to be satisfied.

  Then Fieldfare furrowed her plump brow, and it was not long before a possibility more intimidating, and certainly more daunting, but infinitely more exciting, came to her.

  “I couldn’t!” she whispered.

  “I mustn’t!” she murmured.

  “I shall!” she declared, and out loud too, to give her courage. “I shall go to the Marsh End and see what these Newborn moles get up to on their home ground! They always did say moles were welcome at their meetings, and if they are as dubious in their intentions as Chater thinks and Stour says then I shall go and see what they’re about for myself! Then, if I do have to confront them in the future I shall know all the better what I’m about!”

  She could scarcely have guessed how original that thought and action would have seemed to many in the Duncton Wood of her day, nor could she have ever dreamed that it was his understanding that she might have such a quality of sensible enterprise and practical daring that had made Stour choose her as a member of his privy council. Perhaps it had not escaped him that a mole of Chater’s calibre was unlikely to have a weak mole for a mate.