Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  She ran her snout along her paws, felt a shiver of excitement and apprehension tingle along her flanks, and began the long watch. The sky lightened a little, but remained overcast with low cloud and the wood behind was silent; she saw occasional surreptitious movements by one or other of the grikes, getting into a better position for whatever they expected to come upslope, and time began to meld into a limbo nothingness.

  There was distant movement to her right, and she looked round and saw nothing, except that something was different, something … unfamiliar. A breeze touched her face-fur, she looked higher, and saw with a start that the mist that had dogged them so long had all but gone from the Tops. Even as she watched, the last of it lingered on the very peak of what she knew must be Hilbert’s Top. Lingered and did not leave, for the mist swirled here and there so that the Top’s form did not quite make itself fully plain.

  “Strange,” she whispered to herself, “and I wonder if he’s there.” Then, in a spirit made urgent by the fact that story and reality seemed now to be catching up with each other, she permitted herself to ponder the final part of the tale that brought Rooster in safety to the very Dale over which she now watched, and thence to Hilbert’s Top itself.

  It was not long before the youthful Glee fulfilled her undertaking to bring her shy mother, Drumlin, in the company of Humlock’s more sociable parent, Sedum, to meet Samphire.

  They came with the dawn of a May-day morn, and even in the Charnel the air, though chill, felt light and good and across on the Reapside the sun was soft among the grass and rocks. The Reap itself was subdued, with barely any misty spray rising from the gorge through which it ran, while up at the top end of the Charnel, beyond the great rockfall, the gullies between the three Creeds rose stark and black, the Creeds themselves bold, buttress-like and clear, not yet touched with sun.

  Drumlin and Sedum came up by a surface route, breathing heavily from the effort of the climb, and keeping to the shadows among the rocks. Glee made her chirpy introductions and quickly left, saying she wanted to find Rooster and Humlock who were already off higher up the slopes to be by themselves and clear of the adults. It was only when the three had exchanged pleasantries that the two visitors emerged out of the shadows to which they clung and Samphire saw what it was they were so eager to hide.

  Each had a goitre half the size of her head protruding from her neck, all blue-veined and bald, and accompanying the symptom of breathlessness she had already noticed were further signs of disease — scurvied patches of fur riddled with unpleasant sores and ulcers, and in Sedum’s case, protuberant staring eyes.

  Glee’s prediction proved right; Sedum was the more voluble of the two, and she began almost immediately to talk in a resigned and fretful manner of the ‘pity’ of what Midsummer would mean for ‘poor Humlock, bless im when ’e’ll be the better for being gone from this bitter world’.

  As she spoke thus, seeming almost to relish the inevitability of Humlock’s death (or ‘sacrifice to the Creeds’ as she strangely put it) there grew in Samphire the grim realization that however a mole might object to the tone and assumptions behind what Sedum said, something terrible was going to happen soon: moles would die when the Midsummer ritual took place. On this side of the Reap, what to the Ratcher moles was merely one of the seasonal cycle’s great spectacles seemed suddenly tragic, and real. Until that moment Samphire had thought only of the fit and able who crossed the Span, moles she had pitied for the brutal training they would receive; now she was able to put faces to the ones who were left behind — moles like poor Glee and tragic Humlock, moles who would die in a warped ceremony which was meant to prevent them suffering further, but which, from what Sedum was saying, had much also to do with propitiating the Creeds, which seemed to be some kind of Charnel deities.

  All the while Glee’s mother Drumlin, whose eyes had the same dark, alert quality as her daughter’s and belied the ravages of goitrous disease her body was suffering, stared silently but intelligently at Samphire, who began to think that she was being summed up. She, in her turn, said little, at first because it was hard to interrupt Sedum’s litany of gloom and doom, but eventually because she was simply too shocked by the implications of what was being said. Whether or not a mole was ‘vacant’ (as Sedum further described her son), if he had survived this long and grown so strong, should he not be given the chance to live and die as the Stone, not other moles, willed?

  It was as Samphire was silently worrying about such things that Sedum suddenly let slip something very odd indeed. She said, “And anyway, ’tis not just him being mindless as I believe, so the lad won’t suffer when Midsummer comes, nor even see what’s coming to him so it’ll be merciful, but he’s not delved a single pawful of soil in his life, so that chance can’t come his way either. No, moles say as he will be one of the Chosen, and I must say I …” Sedum puffed herself a little with pride as Samphire realized that ‘Chosen’ was a mere glorification of ‘chosen to die’.

  But what chance? Did the way Sedum had said ‘delve’, with a slight lowering of her voice, almost as if delving awed her, give a clue to what she meant, and that quick look she glanced at Drumlin as if to say it surely didn’t matter her mentioning delving? The fact that she hastily went on to other things suggested she had let slip something she should not have.

  Even as Samphire puzzled about this Drumlin shifted her paws uneasily, and stared in a sharp and almost impatient way at her friend. But then that look gave way to something kinder and more tolerant which Samphire instinctively understood to be the way one mother responds to another whose pup is so damaged and helpless as Humlock seemed to be.

  “How could delving help?” Samphire asked, cutting across what Sedum was saying, for she did not want their conversation to be all politeness and nothing of substance. Midsummer with its sacrifices would be upon them soon, and Samphire wanted to understand what the mystery was about the ritual.

  Sedum seemed about to reply when Drumlin cast her another glance, a ‘please be quiet’ kind of look, and speaking for the first time, responded to Samphire’s question with one of her own.

  “What do you make of Humlock?” she asked. Her voice was gentle yet firm, and the gaze that accompanied it was penetrating.

  “I don’t know him well enough,” said Samphire carefully, “but … well, my Rooster seems to like him, and Rooster’s not a fool. Is he really deaf and dumb as well as blind?” She hoped the answer would be ‘no’.

  Sedum stared, seeming a little shocked by the directness of the question, as if it was a reminder of a reality she had long since turned her back on.

  Drumlin said slowly, “He is all those things, which a mother cannot tell at birth, and so he survived. We have often had moles such as him in the past, and they are gently dealt with and cannot have known much before … going to the Silence. But with Humlock, well, you see my daughter Glee likes him and seems to think he has intelligence. Perhaps it’s more the pity if he has and I was beginning to think as Sedum does that come Midsummer it might be kinder if Humlock was Chosen. But then your Rooster took to him as well, and seemed able to talk to him in some way, or at least to make him understand …”

  Her sudden gaze upslope was followed by the other two and they saw the three youngsters huddled together, Glee’s whole fur bright and dangerously noticeable, the more so for Rooster’s dark brooding presence next to her, huge and powerful; while Humlock, larger still, made up the trio, snout to snout, Rooster and Glee periodically touching him and he reaching out to them.

  “He never smiles,” said Sedum suddenly. “Not ever.” As she said it she smiled wanly.

  Nor was he smiling now, so far as they could see. Just there, accepted by the other two, hulking and slow, his snout low, and just his great paws moving occasionally to touch the ground at his sides, or a rock nearby, or his two friends, the only friends in his dark and silent world.

  As they watched Rooster gently pushed Humlock to one side and signalled to Glee to move away on the othe
r, and began suddenly and rhythmically to delve.

  “So he does delve,” said Drumlin, half to herself.

  “He likes to do so,” replied a puzzled Samphire.

  “He’s well formed too,” said Sedum, a little enviously, “so he’ll have no trouble crossing the Span. It’s always the ones who don’t need it can delve.”

  Drumlin nodded and added mysteriously, “Yes, he looks well-made enough to be passed to cross the Span at Midsummer, but if not, with a liking like that for delving, he’ll be all right.”

  How delving would make things ‘all right’ for Rooster Samphire could not imagine. Surely moles that didn’t ‘pass’, in other words moles that were ‘Chosen’, had little to look forward to but that last, brief plunge into Silence in the Reap?

  Yet, despite that, Samphire did not welcome the sudden image she had of him crossing the Span back to the Reapside to … to what? A training in brutality at his father Red Ratcher’s paws; a life she did not want for him, which would be for ever beyond her reach; a spiritual death.

  “I do not want Rooster to cross the Span,” she said impulsively, “but I don’t want him to die.”

  “But you’re from the Reapside, mole,” exclaimed Drumlin in evident surprise.

  “I don’t want him to go back to all that I have had to suffer these years past, with Ratcher and all of that!” She waved a paw somewhat wildly up towards the surface and in the direction of the Reapside. “You see, Drumlin, I was never happy there, I mean I didn’t want to be there at all. Perhaps you don’t realize but —”

  “We know nothing about you,” said Drumlin, “though a few of us think … but no matter. Tell us about how you came to be a Ratcher mole.”

  The request was put politely, almost indifferently, and Samphire was tempted to ignore it and press on with her own questions. But there seemed no harm in saying a little of how she came to be there, even if for the first few moments of her account of her life Drumlin’s attention was as much engaged in watching the three youngsters upslope as with what her new friend had to say. But the moment Samphire mentioned that she came from Chieveley Dale all changed.

  “Chieveley!” whispered Drumlin, looking round at Sedum and then hunching forward into an attitude of intense concentration, while Sedum’s breathing grew more rapid, and she blinked her protuberant eyes several times as if not quite believing what she heard.

  “Yes, Chieveley. You know of it?” said Samphire, and if she sounded surprised it was because she thought that the Charnel moles could know nothing much of moledom beyond the Span, and certainly nothing of an obscure Dale which probably few moles now remembered.

  “So you will have seen the mountain called Hilbert’s Top?” said Drumlin.

  “It’s not quite a mountain,” laughed Samphire, pleased to hear that name again, “but more just a high fell to the east side of the Dale. My father took me there a day or two before Red Ratcher came. It was, it remains, the happiest day of my life.”

  “You have been to Hilbert’s Top?”

  “Yes. Is that strange?”

  Drumlin waved a paw for her to continue, saying, “Of that we’ll talk later, and its strangeness.”

  “You don’t know who Hilbert was, then?” said Sedum.

  Samphire shook her head, her puzzlement increasing, but neither mole said more and she continued to tell of how the moles of Chieveley Dale were slaughtered, and she was the sole survivor, brought into the Charnel for the personal gratification of Red Ratcher himself; of how she learnt to tolerate Ratcher and his love for her, and finally of his rejection of her and her sole surviving pup, and her banishment across the Span.

  It was a sombre telling, and one which more than once brought tears to the eyes of her listeners — tears which were more eloquent of their sympathy and trustworthiness than words could have been; tears, indeed, that eventually brought out many sweet memories of a lost past she had kept hidden too long, and bitterness at a wasted life that she had not expressed before.

  Yet, along with the tears in her listeners’ eyes was excitement too. This was especially true of Drumlin, who by the end looked more amazed than anything else, as if some kind of prayer she had offered up in times past but long since given up hope of receiving an answer to, was being answered now.

  “… Of course,” Samphire concluded, “I was very nervous when I crossed over to the Charnel. You see, I saw the sacrifices when I first came and I was told that pups who are not deemed fit to cross the Span are thrown into the Reap —” wasted” is the crude word Ratcher uses.”

  Drumlin winced, and nodded. “Yes, we know that they see it as a kind of summer entertainment,” she said quietly, “and us Charnel moles as deformed cruel moles who wield dark powers in our talons of which they are afraid. No doubt too they fear that they will catch disease from us, or bring down upon their snouts evils they cannot combat with the strength and ruthlessness that they regard as such virtues. But Samphire, the truth is very different: we are the moles who are cursed by their presence, and the diseases that beset us and now threaten us with extinction, come from them.”

  “Are you going to tell her?” said Sedum suddenly, breathless, tired, frowning. “She doesn’t know a thing, Drumlin, can’t you see that?”

  “Tell me what?” said Samphire, wishing suddenly that Rooster was near, and feeling impatient and suspicious of these two moles who seemed nice enough, but gave nothing away and said such strange things about delving and Hilbert’s Top.

  Why, despite what Drumlin said, she had seen the sacrifices at Midsummer, and through the years she had seen the bodies of deformed and wasted moles in the Reap, and washed up sometimes on the Reapside; and since she had lived here in the Charnel, had she not seen moles being forced upslope towards the Creeds, to take part in some primitive rites that ended in their death and disappearance?

  “I don’t believe there can be any truth about this place, and the moles who live in it, but a horrible one; and even if you carry out your rituals and sacrifices in the name of a faith of your own, I don’t like it. Your assumption that moles must die if you decide they cant live is not one I would make. ’Tis not of the way of the Stone by which I was brought up in Chieveley Dale.”

  “The ‘Stone’,” whispered Drumlin dreamily, as if that were a thing far, far from the Charnel. Then she whispered ‘Chieveley Dale,” as if that place were further still.

  Samphire decided to say no more, but stared in what she hoped was an unyielding way at Drumlin, and waited for her to do something other than not answer questions and ask ones of her own all the time. Then Drumlin smiled in the most disarming way, drew a little nearer as if in conspiracy, and asked what proved to be her last question of Samphire for a long time.

  “You mean us no harm, do you, Samphire? You really were banished here, and not sent to spy on us? You —”

  “Is that what you thought, all of you,” cut in Samphire wildly, “that I was hostile to you, and a minion of Red Ratcher? Is that why I’ve seen nomole at all in the time I’ve been here but those you are taking to sacrifice up by the Creeds? Is that …”

  But she could not go on, for she felt suddenly very alone, rejected not only by the Reapside moles, but by those of the Charnel as well. Whilst, silly though it seemed, the sight of Rooster upslope and absorbed in his games with Humlock and Glee reminded her that whatever happened, very soon he would have grown up and away from her and she would be left alone for ever in a place that was as alien as any place could be. The thoughts flooded into her as the tears flooded out. All this time raising Rooster, afraid for him, afraid for him still, and not another adult mole to talk to and now these two thinking she was a spy when it seemed to her they had come to talk to her for no other reason than to spy on her.

  So she wept, then stopped, only to start again even more deeply when she felt come around her the motherly paws of Drumlin, and heard her whisper soft words of comfort and explanation.

  “My dear, in the circumstances it was natural for so
me of us to be suspicious of you, and to fear you.”

  “But n … n … not all of y … you?” said Samphire through her tears, seeking some comfort where she could find it.

  “Some of us felt your coming meant something very special, and that you were sent to us by the Creeds to help us,” said Drumlin, still embracing Samphire, who in her turn clung on to Drumlin, goitre and all, as if to let her go was to be abandoned for ever.

  “I’m just an ordinary mole,” mumbled Samphire.

  “An ordinary mole from Chieveley Dale,” said Drumlin, a little ironically. Then pulling back a little and looking up at their three youngsters, Drumlin added with strange wonder in her voice, “But perhaps it is not you who were sent but him.”

  “Rooster?” said Samphire, her face all wet with tears as she too looked upslope.

  Rooster was delving once more, but this time with Humlock at his flank as he tried to guide the silent mole’s paws in the act of delving. Meanwhile Glee stanced before them both, urging Humlock on with words he could not hear and actions he could not see, hoping that somehow or other he would understand what his friends were trying to make him do.

  But it was no good, for the moment Rooster took his paw away Humlock fell still once more, and his snout lowered as he hunched back into the position that seemed to exclude the world from himself, and himself from the world.

  “But he must learn how to do it!” Glee said, loud enough for the adults to hear. There was desperate sadness in her voice, and mute appeal in the way she looked at Rooster.

  Rooster stayed still a moment more, and then he separated from his two new friends and went upslope a little and stared up at the cliffs, and then round and up the valley towards the three dark scars of the three Creeds. Perhaps he was praying, perhaps just thinking, but whatever it was it seemed plain that in his own dark ungainly way he was trying to find a way forward for Humlock.