Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  “As it was my destiny to be raised in the shadow of the Moors, so was it Rooster’s. Our paths crossed for a time; that gave meaning to my life which until the mention of his name earlier this day I thought I had lost for ever. But now … I begin to see that what seemed finished continues still, and a pattern of grace is still there waiting for moles to find and help fulfil. So, I must tell of these things preceding my meeting Rooster just as the Stone guides me, and then of how the delving arts were preserved against the vicissitudes of time and faithless moles. Moledom will, I believe, one day find its recovery through him, though the last mole in moledom to even guess such a thing would be Rooster himself.”

  “Tell it as you will, good Privet,” said Stour, “for the night is deep and will be long, and its wild winds too strange and unsettling for mole to sleep.”

  “I will,” replied Privet with the smile of one who has found courage to trek a hard journey, and will see it through right to the end.

  Sward the Scholar! What legends came to be attached to his name in the decades following the pup Shire’s sad deliverance to Crowden, and Sans’ guardianship. Sward the Vagrant! Sward the Eccentric!

  Perhaps, most truthfully, Sward the Obsessive, for once he had served his apprenticeship in Crowden’s Library, the confines of that worthy but parochial system became too much for him to bear and the discovery and recovery of texts was his only passion. How often he tried to persuade his good friend Tarn to accompany him on his journeys over the Moors! But how he failed! For kindly Tarn was not a venturesome mole, but liked the dull safety of routine library work, the pleasures in his life being of the quiet and loving kind that come with loyalty and love not to work but to a partner who loved him equally, whose name was Fey.

  These two were Sward’s only family, and the true starting point for all his journeying, and the true end as well. While he, living a vagrant’s life out on the dangerous Moors, chased by the grikes who had hegemony there, sometimes in danger for his life, always with adventures to report, and texts to hoard in his secret place up near the Weign Stones, was their journeying, their portal on the world beyond.

  In time Sward gained such respect for his scholarship and harmlessness that even the grikes let him be, even the dreaded Ratcher moles who lived over on eastern Saddleworth at infamous Charnel Clough.

  Strange decades those, when the moles of the Moors turned in upon themselves and none, not even those like Sward, thought to venture beyond their edge. How could they know that all moledom was the same through those long decades of recovery from the wars of Word and Stone? It was not a time of travelling.

  One dream, and a strange one, kept Sward a wanderer. It was to find a certain text, one that moles up on the Moors told rumours of, a text written in the last days of her life by Wort after she had left Shire in Crowden’s cold care. It had a name: ‘Wort’s Testimony’. And Sward, who as a youngster had witnessed Wort’s last coming to Crowden with Shire, believed that no text he could ever find would be as important as that.

  So he wandered on through the years, growing older, his fur going grizzled and grey, and his friends Tarn and Fey despairing that he would ever stop. Until, one winter, he came back, tired and beset, the spark of vagrancy gone from him, and desire to rest and sleep dominant at last.

  “He’s ill,” said kindly Fey.

  But Tarn shook his head and said,”

  “’Tis more than illness ails our friend, for he mopes like one who has seen a ghost.”

  Winter set in, Longest Night came, the time of tales and the seasons’ turn, time to cast off the past and turn towards new life once more. On that Night of Nights Sward told his friends why he had come back to stay and why he might never venture forth again.

  “I found the text it was my life’s work to seek. I found Wort’s Testimony.”

  “Where?” asked Tarn.

  “Off across Saddleworth, through the mists and drizzle of the Tops and beyond to Chieveley Dale. Then to a high place called Hilbert’s Top.”

  “Hilbert’s a northern name,” said Fey.

  “Hilbert was the last Master of the Delve,” said Sward, scholar-like. “He made a place of great grand delvings which nomole but I have visited — except that mole who took Wort’s Testimony and placed it in safety until the years of my life of journeying passed by and led me there.”

  “This Testimony …” began Tarn.

  “I kenned but its beginning,” said Sward in a voice filled with awe and with shadows in his eyes, “before I saw … I heard … I knew it was of the Silence and that her work, scribed I think near the Weign Stones even as she lay dying there, was meant for the eyes of but one mole alone. Certainly not mine.”

  “What did you do with it?” asked Tarn.

  “I left it where it was, secret and safe. It was not for me to know more than its beginning; more I could not know and live. But one day that Testimony will be kenned right through by the single mole for whom it was meant. That mole …” His voice grew more hushed as he continued; ‘Tarn, I heard the Silence, I saw the Stone’s Light, and I was afraid. So I came back here, to you, who are my friends, and I have no heart for texts now, nor desire ever to venture forth again. I feel I am on the way to death.”

  “And you have nothing left undone?” said wise and humble Tarn. “No more task that the Stone might have set you?”

  Sward shook his head.

  “And when we were young, Sward? Was there not a vow we made together?”

  How silent Sward was then, and how he wrinkled his thin grizzled face, and narrowed his eyes and tried to think of that distant day when Wort had come to Crowden Dale.

  “The pup Shire?” he said reluctantly.

  “You know well she is a pup no more, but old now, as ourselves, but unhappy. I have done what I could to give her love, but against Sans’ cold and dreadful power it was not much. But now I am old and you have come back and this Longest Night you have told us a tale of fear and awe and something you have seen. But my friend, forgive me, but you think most of yourself. Well, Sward, think this night of Shire …”

  “She has no friends,” said Sward, “nor, from all I hear, does she want any. She’s a bitter mole, and has taken over Sans’ librarianship as if she was born to it. What would she want with me? She calls my texts all nonsense, and casts doubts upon my scholarship. She has no need of mole on Longest Night, least of all me!”

  “Allmole has need of mole, my friend, especially on Longest Night. No doubt of it, she is alone, and by her own choosing too. Unpupped like Sans, almost incapable of love. And you, Sward? Are you capable? What have you got when all is said and done? Some hoarded texts and a wish to die! No real wish for anything. At the very least you could bring your texts to Crowden, and at the most —” But Fey glanced sharply at him, and touched his paw, and he did not elaborate further.

  It was Fey who spoke next: “What Tarn says is true. Is that all your life has been? You saw a young and frightened mole once, and her name was Shire. That Shire still lives. Go to her, mole, tell her about the text her mother made, tell her what you believe this Testimony to be. Mole —”

  “I will!” declared Sward, half laughing, half shouting to stop his best friends’ demands. “I will. At least, I’ll seek her out and wish her well of Longest Night and if she bids me leave I’ll … I’ll stay my temper for thee and Fey, who I love more than anymole!”

  “Go and do it then!” said Fey with a friendly buffet, “and for goodness’ sake, Sward, eat more, sleep more, care for yourself this winter, for if you go on as you have you’ll not last it out and we two need you! Now, get along with you!”

  Thus scolded, and grinning for the first time since his return, Sward set off on what anymole in Crowden would have told him was a hopeless, thankless task.

  Enough has been said already of poor Shire and the circumstances of her parting from Wort and adoption by Sans, for anymole with half a brain to guess that she had little chance of being reared as a loving mole. But it wa
s worse than that. Whatever Sans had been, Shire was doubly so. Doubly forbidding, doubly dogmatic, doubly cruel to those she had power over, doubly dour and bitter and withered, and shrunken in her soul. Her only attributes were her skill in matters textual and a gift for teaching scribing and scrivening to those who could stomach her chill manner.

  Never, in all her life, until that Longest Night when Sward the Scholar came, had male dared go to her in friendliness. Or if they had, their smile had lasted no more than moments before it withered and died away before Shire’s icy gaze.

  Yet Sward went, leaving the festive moles behind in Crowden’s communal chambers, and heading off to the austere place near the Library where Shire chose to live. There he found her, a look of displeasure on her bitter face because the distant festive sounds disturbed her work.

  Work? Aye, Librarian Shire made a point of working on Longest Night.

  “Heathen, their dancing and their singing is,” she hissed, when, with ill grace — and ill-concealed surprise — she had heard out his seasonal best wishes. “Longest Night is a night of contemplation and self-assessment,” she observed, for want of anything better to say. “Now, if you don’t mind —”

  “But I do!” said Sward as jovially as he could. “This is a night of joy …”

  “… of penances.”

  “Penances, for what?”

  “Past sins!”

  “No, mole, ’tis a night of hope and thankfulness. A night of future dreams.”

  “No, no!” she cried bitterly, “it is …”

  And so they argued, and Sward saw the depth of her joylessness, and the cheerlessness of her narrow faith. He saw and began to quail, he saw and began to lose words to argue back, he saw and understood the dark void in which she lived.

  “You shall leave now, Sward,” she said.

  He stared and found no words to reply. He stared, his eyes on hers.

  “You shall go. I … am grateful to you for coming. But you, I do not need your wishes, I …”

  He stared.

  “Shire,” he said at last, and so gently did he speak, and with such love for the young mole he remembered Shire had been once, that she fell silent at this single speaking of her name.

  “Shire, it is I who need you,” said Sward.

  “You?” she said faintly.

  Bleakly he nodded. “Did you know I was there when your mother Wort brought you here?”

  “I know only that she abandoned me here,” she said. “Gave me to her.”

  “Oh no,” said Sward, shaking his head and half turning towards where the sounds of Longest Night, laughter and companionship and seasonal cheer, came to join their strange communion; ‘no, Shire, Wort never gave you away.”

  “She …’ began Shire, then fell silent again before his presence and memory, and the understanding, new to her and disturbing, that she should say no more, no more at all: it was he who needed to speak, he who needed, and she who after all those bitter years had found at last that she had something to give. So Shire was silent, and Sward the Scholar, Sward the Eccentric, Sward the Courageous, Sward the Obsessive, and now, Sward the Needful, talked of a Testimony he had found that was her mother’s, addressed to a mole who was neither of them, but another, and one they must find.

  So began the strange late love — strange awkward love though it was — of Shire and Sward, which led to their discovering they had things to share through those winter years whose theme was a love of texts born of a fear of life and giving.

  Until, come early spring, and with news that the Ratcher moles were becoming active and violent across Saddleworth, they set off over the Moors to the Weign Stones, to recover the great collection of texts Sward had hidden away.

  “At least, that’s what they say they’re going for,” chuckled Fey to Tarn, as she watched them leave, for though Tarn was too old now for such things himself, his Fey was still spirited enough to remind him of why it might be, when the winds grew warm and the sun melted the snows across the Moors, a male and a female should, for a time, wish to find a place to be alone together.

  “No!” said Tarn.

  “Oh yes,” said Fey, thinking that perhaps, after all, if the sun made the heather seem so sprightly, and the streams continued to run through Crowden as purposefully as they did, her Tarn might not be too old after all …

  “No,” said Tarn again.

  But Fey, who knew him well and loved him so, came closer still, all flank to flank and fur to fur, and spoke to him of love, and said that spring makes all moles young again.

  Neither Shire nor Sward ever spoke of what occurred when they reached the Weign Stones up on the Moor, though much later, Shire, near her end by then, could not quite resist scribing something of it down.

  How could she resist? For that trek up into the Moors that spring morning, that afternoon of discovery, that evening of touching the texts he showed her and that night by the awesome Weign Stones, all of it was the spring and the summer of Shire’s sparse life. Like a butterfly that opens its wings to the warmth of a dawn sun, and flies for a solitary day, Shire awoke to another mole for a few brief, unaccountable, frightening hours of her life.

  Through that strange afternoon and evening she awoke to Sward’s instinctive sense of what she needed, until there, by the Stones, deep in the night, she was not Shire any more, but somemole other than any she knew. Then she was free to come to him at last.

  Whilst he, at first puzzled by her ardour, astonished at what she seemed to know of the loving art, understood at last that here and now in that springtime night was when it was and all it would ever be for her. A solitary night in a whole lifetime when a mole was made to forget what life and circumstance had made her, and could be herself as she might have been.

  “Why?” he might have asked, but didn’t.

  “Because you never criticized my mother Wort, nor looked as if you thought of her with anything but love, and made me believe she was forgiven, and through her Testimony will one day be redeemed,” she might have replied, but had no need to. In that too short time she could reach out to him, she enjoyed it all without the need for words.

  But when their sighing was done and in that afterlude when Sward felt the pain of Shire reverting to her bitter dismissive self once again, but then …

  “What did we do tonight?” whispered Shire, for one last moment letting herself be her better self, and wonder at the stars as well. A star went right across the sky.

  “What did we do?” she asked.

  Then Sward reached out to her and touched her flank. Suddenly he knew, he knew so much. In the starlight he smiled and said, softly, “I think I know.”

  “Know what?” she asked.

  What they had done, and whatmole the Testimony was for. He held her close as long as her drifting back to coldness would allow, and prayed that if he was right one of the pups born of their brief union might one day be the one for whom Wort scribed her Testimony; and if that was so then perhaps the Stone would bless that pup with the love and companionship its parents never fully had.

  Silence came again to the chamber where Privet told her tale. Not so much as a breath was heard, and above the wind roared on, and the rain came in swathes across the wood. They waited for Privet to resume, and then she did.

  “It was I who was conceived that night,” she said. “I and my sister Lime. There came a day when my father Sward told me that he thought Wort’s Testimony was scribed for me!”

  She laughed dismissively and shrugged.

  “For me? Who as you shall find, harmed so many and brought happiness to so few. For me? Who in my arrogance tried to find Wort’s text but lost courage. Such a thing for me? No, no, dear Sward was not always right, you know! But I am sure he was right to think that one day a mole will be worthy to ken the whole of Wort’s lost Testimony, and then it will be recovered and moledom’s understanding of Silence much increased. For my grandmother Wort journeyed into the void, and came back again. Few moles have courage to do tha
t. Well … what will be will be, and we must strive meanwhile as best we may. But now, back to the Moors! Back to my bitter puphood and how I broke free of it!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Shire did not enjoy being with pup and from the first she longed for the day she would be rid of them. Throughout the long molemonth of April she was sick and uncomfortable, and afraid, and at the end she felt imposed upon, and what little care she had felt for Sward was all used up because of what “he has done to me”.

  Not for Shire any pride in what she would soon make, or the joys of reverie about her pups-to-be, nor even the natural wish to make a place to nest, a secret place where she and her pups might for a time be one and all unseen. Poor Shire, so coldly reared by Sans, did not know feelings such as those.

  At least when her pups started, the first, Lime, came with sudden and consummate ease, and for that Shire felt only eternal gratitude. But the second, Privet, came only after hours of pain and difficulty, and for that Shire never forgave her. Lime was large and healthy; Privet, puny and weak. Shire eyed her when she came out and wished her dead, and only Tarn’s ministrations kept the pup alive until it found strength to take suck.

  So Shire loved and favoured Lime from the first, the more that she behaved as Shire felt a pup should, which is obediently and to its parents’ greatest convenience.

  “But this Privet never sleeps or sucks when she should, and mews and bleats until she drives me half mad with tiredness,” Shire complained to Tarn.

  She might have spoken more to Fey, but her only female friend had, by some miracle, got with pup as well and was joyously raising a brood of four in her own burrows and would not venture forth, not even to see Shire’s two.