Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  “Aye,” said Tarn, “we’ve a couple like your Privet. But our first-born, Hamble, why, he’s like your Lime — big and strong and never a moment’s trouble. But Privet will come right, you’ll see; be patient and nurture her. The weakest are often the best.”

  But it seemed not in Shire’s heart to want to feel so, and from the first Tarn felt an instinctive need to watch over that one especially, and to seek to persuade the reluctant father to do the same.

  But Sward, having to the astonishment of all of Crowden succeeded in getting the dreadful Shire with pup, soon found she did not want him more, and blamed him for her continuing trials in raising pups. He tried to take an active role but failed, and devoted his attentions to the easier task of retrieving his hoard of texts from the Moors. At the same time he began to enjoy acceptance in the system, and for the first time in his life felt he had a home better than a temporary burrow in a stinking hag of peat, and one worth getting to know better.

  The system he had finally found acceptance in was well established, had learned to live in the shadows of the Moors and had a long history of successful defence against grikes and anarchy. In earlier decades, when Ashop was alive, it had had a fiercely pioneering spirit about it, and its worship of the Stone was obsessive, and its prejudice against all things grike and Moorish was complete.

  Things had become easier in recent years, and moles like Sans, who had reared Shire with such discipline, were rarer now, whilst half-grike moles like Sward, provided they showed they were loyal and useful to the place, were accepted well enough.

  The main system was located to the south of the Crowden Tarn and river, which formed its northern defence. At the East End, as moles called it, was a series of interlocking tunnels which confused moles who did not know them and provided many traps for the unwary. It was the task of young moles to maintain these tunnels, a process by which they got to know them well.

  The southern flank of Crowden was marshy and except in dry weather difficult for mole to cross who did not know the way, whilst to the west few dangers lay, for anymole coming that way would have had to outflank all three other sides and have long since been seen and attacked.

  It was a system in which aggression and fighting were appreciated, the delving art as well, for delvers were always needed to maintain the tunnels and improve them where they could. Crowden moles were rugged and proud of their system’s independence, but they were dull moles with little originality or willingness to do anything that might draw attention to themselves, whilst their faith was of a simple dogmatic kind in which right was right and wrong was very wrong indeed. Unfortunately, in such matters Shire had a certain sway and status, for moles were in awe of her great learning.

  The Crowden moles had no Stone about which to enact their rituals, but there was a spot, a little raised, in the centre of the system, at which moles collected to worship the Stone, whilst most families had a prayer or two they said each day — prayers which spoke grimly of protecting Crowden against the dark forces that surrounded it.

  Through the years the tradition of scribing, started by one of the moles who had first come to the system at the end of the wars of Word and Stone a century before, had become firmly established in Crowden. The Library Shire inherited from Sand had been created partly by the same acquisitive process that Sward had long practised, but also, and more interestingly for later scholars of that time, by the Crowden scribes who had maintained their own chronicles, concerned mainly with recording the vicissitudes of defence and attack that future generations might know what former generations had done to defend the place. Sward soon noticed that though the Library, which lay centrally beneath the place of worship, was the place moles liked to say they most wished to defend, the fact was that few moles ever visited it, or could even scribe very well. In that regard things had declined at Crowden, and Sward noticed that some of the defences were unrepaired for lack of moles as skilled as the older generation in such delving work.

  Meanwhile it mattered not that librarians like Shire were disliked for it was not them, but the idea their work maintained that ordinary Crowden moles were dedicated to defending, and despite their ignorance of scribing, would have defended to the death. Which being so, Sward did not find it difficult to persuade some of the younger males, together with Tarn who came along out of interest, to venture up into the Moors to the Weign Stones and recover his collection and bring it into Crowden.

  With this lengthy project completed, and Shire’s continuing rejection of his attempts at helping to rear their pups, Sward felt he had done enough to earn the right to spend his days contemplating life and chatting to older moles like Tarn. The time soon came when he and Shire barely talked at all. They were bound only by their pups, and for the time being that was Shire’s province and if Sward was allowed to venture near them, as at communal ritual times, it was as a token gesture which he was encouraged to keep as brief as decency allowed.

  He enjoyed much more his status in Crowden as ‘conqueror’ of Shire, and took to wandering the edges of the system when he was not working in an increasingly desultory way among his own texts in the Library, staring out at the Moors to which it seemed unlikely he would ever return. As for his attendance at Stone worship, it was erratic and disconcerting, for he was inclined to mutter provoking comments about life, atheism and the void during the solemn liturgies. It was a testimony to how far the defensive Crowden system had come that Sward was tolerated at all. He spoke like a Moorish mole, and some said it was obvious from his dark thick coat, now flecked with grizzled grey, and the way he talked of heathen things, that he had grike blood in him.

  But raggety and wild though he seemed, Sward soon established a niche for himself with his gift of the gab and a demonstrable knowledge of the Moors which surpassed that of anymole in Crowden. Older males riposted the plaints of the religious females about him by saying that if ever Ratcher out on Saddleworth became serious in his attacks on Crowden moles, then Sward’s knowledge of the Moors might be invaluable.

  Meanwhile Shire brought up her two daughters in a way as partial as her response had been at their birth. Lime was favoured, Privet unfavoured. The one was always right and spoilt, the other always wrong and rejected. The one was pretty, the other plain. The first was first in every thing, the second last in all.

  Privet might have helped herself more had she not done so much to exemplify Shire’s unpleasant view of her. She did whine, and she did do wrong, she was clumsy and timid where she might so easily have been elegant and bold. But there it was, and there she was, miserable, isolated, beset, unattractive, and everything her mother said she was.

  Yet there they were, trying to live as a family. Midsummer passed, and Privet survived, smaller than Lime and plain as a puddle, the weakest not only of her little family, but also of the gaggle of youngsters that formed around the tunnels in that part of the system. Like all such smaller ones she learned how to avoid trouble and keep a low snout, and to say nothing when Lime put on her airs and graces and was unkind and unfair.

  Yet such hurts run deep, and for Privet they ran deeper when their mother continued to take Lime’s side as the two grew up. Shire always had time for Lime, time to talk waspishly of other moles, time to chatter as they rearranged their respective burrows, time most hurtfully of all to laugh in a way that excluded others; Sward, for example, when he came visiting, but most especially Privet.

  How Lime posed and preened when Sward was there, and shared those secret offensive laughs with Shire, throwing glances at poor Privet, to be sure she knew she was not part of things.

  “Privet, fetch some food! Privet, clear out that nesting material by your burrow …”

  “It’s Lime’s and it’s not fair I should do it.”

  “Do it, Privet,” hissed Shire, cold and threatening. She said the name ‘Privet’ as if it needed spitting out. She never said it with love at all.

  “But —”

  “Better do it, mole,” said Tarn, “look, I
’ll get you started …”

  Then Lime’s smirking glance, and tears in the dust as Privet worked and ached with that most unanswerable of the questions of beset youth: why are things unfair?

  Yet Tarn was always a comfort and so too was Sward on those rare occasions when he could see her while Shire was absent and so unable to spoil their meeting. She would listen as her father told his tales of the wild Moors and of days when he was young and danger lurked between and behind every peat hag, and moles were known to set forth to drink in a nearby clough and never be seen again.

  “Where did they go?” wondered Privet, wide-eyed.

  “Eaten by the ghost of Black Ashop!” said Sward with a manic grin. For Ashop had already become a nightmare legend across the Moors.

  Lime sneered at such tales and superstitions, affecting a boredom with it all and yawning in a preeny way, and licking her glossy coat and let Shire groom her head with quiet complicity.

  In one thing at least Privet was better than Lime, though a mole would not have guessed it from the criticism Shire directed at her: scribing. Privet had a snout for it, and inelegant (compared to Lime’s) though her talons were, poor crabbed things and weak, yet she learned scribing well — the love for it coming from her father, and the discipline from harsh Shire.

  Lime would not and could not scribe, and in this she was a disappointment to her mother, who soon gave up making the spoilt mole even try.

  “She can do it well enough for both of us!” said Lime, pointing spitefully at Privet. “And if she wants to spend her life with her snout in boring texts, bad luck to her! I don’t!”

  “I do,” said Shire reasonably, for once not altogether pleased with Lime.

  “You’re Shire,” said Lime fawningly, all fluttering and warm, “and you’re respected in Crowden so it’s different. She’s not and won’t be, and anyway … she can’t delve for anything, not even love!”

  “Don’t be unkind, Lime,” said Shire, smiling despite herself and looking at Privet coldly and thinking it was true. So weak, so graceless, unable to delve even for love! Thin, gaunt, hunted, but with eyes that were clear and from somewhere deep inside accusing.

  “Moles say she’s like the Eldrene Wort,” crowed Lime, pointing a talon at her weaker sister and gloating over the anger this caused her mother to feel. For at mention of that dread name Shire grew yet colder, and hit out powerfully at Lime for mentioning it (who dodged the strike and ran) and viciously at Privet, on whom it landed and drew blood.

  Yet it was true. Moles with memories long enough said that there was about Privet the look and stance of Wort, a likeness that increased as she grew up. A likeness too that made old Tarn come to believe that his first instinctive wish to protect Privet was well-founded — there was something about the youngster and her suffering that stirred in him a sense that in Privet there lay a destiny, terrible perhaps, great perhaps, but one which had started long before with Wort, whose rejection from Crowden and last trek back into the Moors he and Sward had watched with such tears.

  Meanwhile Privet could at least scribe, and Lime could not, and there was a kind of comfort for the bullied youngster in that. At least when she was in the Library helping, her mother was less hurtful to her, and so it was to there she went more and more as the summer years passed by. Until the day came when Lime said yet again, “Please, I don’t want to scribe, I never want to scribe, ever.”

  “Well then,” said Shire softly in a voice Privet never ever heard her use to her, “there are things other than that, I suppose, many other things. Come, my dear … and you, Privet, stop staring, and find something useful to do in the Library.” And Privet knew that she had found a place at last in her mother’s heart, however small, and that now at least in scribing she would never be surpassed by Lime.

  Such were Privet’s memories of her puphood with Shire and they were hard and bitter and ungiving, and as she spoke of them on that long night of change so many mole-years later in Duncton Wood she felt again the unassuaged hurt and anger she had felt then, and remembered dark nights when she was young, and heard her mother go to Lime and talk and laugh, and wished it was to her she came.

  Yet it was not in Privet’s nature to let bitterness override her better memories and her eyes lightened again as she said, “But I did have friends, oh I did …” And she smiled with eyes that filled with tears for a mole remembered with affection.

  “You mean Tarn, my love?” said Fieldfare, to encourage her. “And your father Sward, he seems to have been nice to you.”

  “Oh yes, them, them … but mole wants a friend of her own generation too and there was one, just one …”

  The mole she was thinking of was Hamble, the strongest of the males pupped by Fey in the tunnels adjacent to Shire’s place, who was soon the natural leader of the gaggle of youngsters from that end of Crowden’s system. Although not the largest of the males he was powerfully built and had a decisiveness and sense of justice that others liked. He was a good-natured mole whose face though not handsome was pleasing to look at, but when he was crossed, or otherwise felt he must assert himself, he came forward without fear, frowning and formidable.

  As such natural-born leaders often will, he protected the weakest even while asserting his rights as the strongest, and since Privet was the weakest he took her part from time to time, his stolid shadow falling over whatever mole was picking on her, even Lime, and with a glance and a buffet if need be, he made them clear off and leave her alone.

  Not that he ever said much then, for Hamble was a doer, not a talker, and his pre-eminence he gained as much from strength as cleverness, though tunnel-wise cunning he certainly had.

  “Stop provoking them, mole, and they’ll leave you alone,” he would say to her. But her very weakness and vulnerability provoked.

  “Stance up to them and they’ll clear off,” he would suggest, but Privet barely knew the meaning of ‘stancing up’ to anything. Aggression was not her way and those few and feeble attempts at assertion she had made earlier on, Shire had crushed and destroyed.

  “Well then,” said Hamble, despairing, “keep out of their bloody way.”

  He little knew how grateful she was to him, and would not have guessed that for a time she thought she loved him with a passion that felt stronger than the fiercest storm, and brighter than the brightest sun. But shy Privet never spoke of such things, never once, not even to Sward. She only dreamed them, and hid herself away miserably, and lost herself in texts.

  The summer years passed and bit by bit that generation changed and grew apart, the tensions growing subtler, as did the likes and dislikes of one for another, shifting and changing as old passions faded and new passions dawned.

  “Did I love Hamble?” Privet asked herself one November day, when she saw him across the sun-filled surface, the moorland rising far beyond. The bullying by others was long since over and the old wounds had healed but left their scars, and she had become what she would always surely be, physically the least significant of her generation, already bound to Library work and scribing, under the influence and control of her disliked mother Shire.

  Lime had fallen out with Shire over a male from the East End of Crowden, whom Shire thought beneath her precious elder daughter. But Lime tossed her head and said she would see him anyway and with not a jot of gratitude, left their home burrow never to return.

  So Privet was left alone with her mother, having nowhere else to go and no other mole to turn to; nor did she have the nerve to break away as Lime had done. They maintained an uneasy truce helped by living at far ends of the same tunnels, talking mainly in the Library, and seldom in their home. It was a comfort of a sort. Yet a creeping loneliness, whose name she knew not, had come to Privet. An ache to be alone, a restlessness, a failure to be absorbed in the scribing that had, thus far, been her only solace. A longing, an understanding of which she only came near when she saw others of her generation with companions, or her sister Lime, flaunting her male friends. Poor Privet, shy
timid Privet, did not know how to talk to other moles, and if they tried to talk to her she shied away, snout low and blushing pink. What a dull mole she seemed, how worthless, and how uninteresting.

  “She’ll be like her mother before long!” she heard one mole say to another, and though it hurt she did not know what more to do than grieve. She hated Shire sometimes, hated her, and yet knew that sometimes now she herself looked as severe as Shire did, or turned her snout as Shire did, or felt arrogant about her learning, as Shire did. Such experiences felt like a clinging plague upon her, and one she could not get rid of, ever. She felt doomed to loneliness, and yet, each day, turned to the tunnels of the Library once more and felt the comfort of familiar greetings of moles who knew her rounds.

  “Nice day, Miss Privet!”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Busy are you then?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, then, see you around.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  But that November day when she saw Hamble on the surface, she had felt a little wild. The sun was shining, the Library did not appeal, her mother was not around to make her feel guilty if she did not work all day, and so, deviating from her normal route she had surfaced to scent the fresh air. And there was Hamble, looking … well, not quite like himself.

  She had not talked to Hamble for molemonths past, and never, as far as she could remember, in any personal way at all. He had simply been there, and her gratitude to him had never been expressed. Seeing him now, stanced by himself in the sun, she felt a surge of affection that took her by surprise. She was diffident about going up to him, and so began to turn away towards the tunnels and the safety of the Library, where in any case she ought to be, but fortunately he saw her and called out a greeting.

  And then again, “Hello, Privet,” when she drew near.

  Yes, she thought, I feel affection. She analysed it like a text. Affection, not love. In that was freedom! She dared to look into his eyes and was not afraid. She saw friendliness and disquiet.