Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  Glee saw the visitors first and gave a warning shout to Rooster, who was busy at the far end of the place, his paws working powerfully at a bare part of the wall.

  “Rooster! Rooster!”

  The great mole, hearing the warning note in her voice, turned and saw Gaunt and Prime, and the two mothers, staring at him and all his work.

  On Samphire’s face was a look of pride, while on Drumlin’s was one of wonder that youngsters such as these could have made anything so impressive, strange though it was.

  “Didn’t know you were coming,” said Rooster without pleasure.

  “Didn’t tell you,” said Gaunt.

  “It’s wonderful, all that you’ve done,” said Samphire, “it’s...”

  “Yes, my dears, you’ve all —” continued Drumlin.

  A frown from Gaunt, a wave of a paw from Prime, silenced them.

  Rooster came forward, his eyes on Gaunt and not on his mother.

  “Wanted to delve the feeling. Wanted to …’ He sounded defiant and wary at the same time.

  “Silence, mole!” commanded Gaunt.

  The Mentor signaled to Prime, and together the two slowly examined the chamber, peering up into its recesses, touching its walls and listening to its clumsy sound, shaking their heads in one place, nodding as they talked in whispers in another. The others awaited their verdict with bated breath. Rooster looked most uneasy, most unsettled.

  “They’ll like it!” whispered Glee. “You’ll see.”

  At last the two came back.

  “Well, mole?” said Gaunt.

  Rooster stared, not knowing what was meant.

  “I asked you to delve your feeling. Is this it?” He waved a paw dismissively about the great place.

  “Tried,” said Rooster uncomfortably.

  “But it’s very —” began Samphire defensively.

  “Madam, wordlessness is best on these occasions,” said Prime grimly. “Words do not help.”

  “Tried?” said Gaunt.

  “The feeling. The delving need. Put it on the walls. Learned how to do the high delvings. Asked others to help. Only Glee would help. Only Humlock. Tried to make the delving true.”

  Rooster spoke with increasing distress and anger.

  “And has it worked, mole?” said Prime suddenly.

  There was a long silence. Rooster looked about him, and at his work, and his breathing became rapid as he struggled with his feelings.

  “You told me that in your delving need you felt all was one. Is this fragmented, noisy, ugly place, all one?” whispered Gaunt. His voice was filled with despair.

  “It’s … it’s … it’s me!” cried out Rooster, turning from them and barely knowing what to do with himself. He raised his paws and crashed them down on one of the walls he had so intricately delved, and his work fractured and broke where his paws had struck.

  “It’s me!” he shouted, turning to face them and raising his paws in despair as he looked wildly at his work. “Tried to delve the feeling like you said. Tried and tried and tried.”

  “And is this it?”

  “ME!” bellowed Rooster, spit hanging from his mouth as he became utterly frustrated and enraged.

  “Mole!” said Gaunt. “It is you. The you I see. The you we see.”

  “Not the feeling. Can’t delve it. It’s … it’s …”

  He bowed his great clumsy head in utter despair and Glee went to him and put her paws to his.

  Don’t listen to him, Rooster. I can feel what it is you’re trying to delve. I can, even if they can’t.”

  As she tried to protect her friend from the assaults that seemed to be coming at him, Humlock suddenly appeared at the archway and entered. Slowly he made his way towards the two of them, seeming to sense their distress and need. He reached out for them, and Glee went to him and led him to where Rooster wept. There, by the scarred wall, the three moles huddled.

  “Humlock knows too,” said Glee.

  But Gaunt’s gaze was pitiless. “And you, Rooster, what do you know?” he said.

  Slowly Rooster raised his head and stared at the old mole. “Know it’s me but not me. Know I can delve better. Want to learn.”

  Gaunt nodded and whispered. “Yes, mole, I know you do. Now listen. You will go with Prime, Rooster, and he will teach what he knows. You, Glee, will go to None, for she has need of a female at her flank, and you will learn much from her that one day I think your friends will need from you.”

  “What about Humlock?” said Glee, a little aggressively.

  Gaunt smiled. “Ah, yes. Take him to Compline. That mole will know what to do with him, for I have instructed him already. Now go! All of you, go! But for you, Samphire, I will have need of your help out from here. Go!”

  When they were gone Samphire turned angrily to Gaunt.

  “You are too harsh, Gaunt, far too harsh.”

  “Am I, my dear?” he said, turning from her and looking about the chamber. “Listen!”

  He ran a paw over some delvings Rooster had made, and rough strange sounds echoed about the place, roarings and bellowings, breakings and fracturings.

  “Listen!” he said more softly.

  As the ugly sound died away, beyond it, for a short moment, they heard a quieter, gentler sound, peaceful, graceful, loving.

  “That is your son,” he whispered.

  “And this? Is it so bad?” said Samphire. “Can it be so bad if there is a touch of something better in it?”

  “Bad?” said Gaunt in astonishment, as if he could not understand why she could not understand. “This chamber Rooster has made is the work of a Master of the Delve. In this beginning is our ending.”

  “Then why …?” said Samphire amazed.

  “Because if he does not learn how to make as he truly feels he will be destroyed by the knowledge of what he cannot do. And he knows it, he knows it.” Gaunt said these last words in wonder. “He knows he is not ready to delve the feeling he knows he has.”

  “When will he be ready?”

  Gaunt shook his head. “It may take him a lifetime to discover it. But what he has made here already, a hundred lifetimes of Charnel delvers could not have made. Fear not, Samphire, for the Stone is with your son, and will protect him and guide him in ways beyond the capacity of moles like us. But we can set him on the path, now that he is ready to go down it.”

  “Then why do you weep, Gaunt?” said Samphire coming close.

  “For joy,” whispered Gaunt, “that such a mole has come to my ken in my own lifetime. For joy and regret. The days of the Charnel are numbered and now moledom must prepare to take back what it once drove into secrecy here. The Charnel, and the moles in it, will soon be no more. A Master has come, as Hilbert said one day he would, and all will change, all be as a dream that was. The work of generations is nearly done.”

  As if responding to what Gaunt said, the chamber whispered his voice back to him, rumbling, ugly, yet with whispers of beauty beyond. And where Rooster had crashed his talons into his own work and wept, a fragment of his delving fell down on to the floor, and after it a scatter of soil, and particles of rock.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  But again and again, no sooner had Rooster begun to tell her what really happened in the Delvings than Privet found there was a limit to what he would say about the world from which, miraculously as it increasingly seemed to her, he had escaped to live in isolation on Hilbert’s Top. But it was a limit which gradually receded, for little by little in those days of deepening winter, when the two moles shared time together in such isolation from the rest of moledom, Rooster revealed more of himself.

  Yet, telling of it so many moleyears later to her friends in Duncton Wood, she would pause and remind her listeners that her narrative was continuous and logical, whereas the story came from him only in strange fits and starts.

  “There would be days and days when he would not speak at all,” she explained, “or occasions when he would mention some detail to expand what he had said before,
or tell me the name of a mole he had never mentioned but whom later he would come to.”

  “It sounds frustrating and uncomfortable,” said Whillan, “I mean … him not coming right out with it. All of it.”

  “It was, my dear — at the beginning. Until a day came when he began to say he feared he wanted to hurt me, and the storm came, and winter really started. Oh, I wanted him then, all of him. But … we were not ready for that, and so we found another way forward, perhaps a deeper way, the most peaceful time of my life. You see, I understood him.”

  “Understood him?” said Fieldfare, nudging Chater meaningfully. “Well, you have to do that with a male who doesn’t find it easy to talk about his feelings! If you want to get on with him that is. If —”

  “If you want to love him,” said Privet, “if … if you want that.”

  How quietly she spoke, with what subdued passion and heartbreaking memory. She lowered her head and her voice quavered and tears came to her eyes such that several of them started towards her to comfort her, and Stour, not for the first time, said, “If you would prefer … you don’t have to talk … you are free …”

  “No, no,” she replied, grateful for their sympathy but waving them away, “I want to talk about that time now, I want you to understand, I want to talk.”

  But Fieldfare, so loving, so caring, could not bear the tears that came to Privet now, and went to her and held her close, and let her cry; whilst the other moles, sensible of Privet’s wish to share her past with them and, perhaps, aware that an understanding of it was important in some deep way to understanding Rooster, and all he might yet mean to moledom, stayed close and quiet and patient.

  “These aren’t tears of sorrow,” said Privet eventually, “not really. Well, they are as well, but it’s just that in the time that now began to come to Rooster and me up there so far from everything I felt as if I was awakening to life. And everything since has been … less intense, less real. I so often remember those days, and am grateful that I had something so few other moles had. I would like to talk about it if I may, because we touched something so near the Stone then. If I cry a little do not mind …”

  “We don’t mind, mole,” said old Drubbins, tears on his face, “if you don’t mind.”

  They all nodded and murmured their agreement with that, for none of them were far from tears.

  “Well,” began Privet, taking a deep breath and looking around appreciatively, “I wish I could say exactly when our love began to be expressed, but I’m not sure that I can.

  Yet I suppose there was a day not long before Longest Night when suddenly we …”

  The ice and snow that had appeared in November were not repeated, but the weather grew colder and the ground stayed white and grey. Chill winds blew off the Moors, carrying with them the dust and detritus of peat and dead heather, which dirtied the snow and, in moments of brief sunlight when the top thawed, settled down into it. Then when it re-froze, and the winds wore the surface ice smooth and shiny, the ground took on a dirty gleam. The rocks of the Top gained a verglas sheen which caught the grey evening light and gave Privet the feeling that they were in a great structure of dull ice from which they might never escape.

  These were strange days, of the kind when Rooster disappeared for long spells into the tunnels where he delved, far beyond where Privet herself ever went. Until then the peace that had come over her on the Top, once she and Rooster had begun to talk, had not left her. But now, with winter set in, and the surface icy and uninviting, and the prospect of Longest Night approaching and the reality that she would be away from all she knew, she began to feel lonely and distressed.

  She felt angry at Rooster for leaving her alone for so long, angry that when he was with her he would not or could not talk to her of the delvings he made, or continue his account of the Delvings in the Charnel; she suddenly began to miss Hamble, and the moles in Crowden, and texts. Texts!

  It was then that her long reluctance to begin the search for Wort’s Testimony, which her father Sward had found among the tunnels of the Top and had left behind only half-kenned, feeling he was trespassing into a world that was not his own, changed to an obsession to find it. All her frustration and anger began to focus on that search, and if Rooster would not talk to her, she would not talk to him. If he had delvings into which he could plunge his need for privacy, she had the hunt for a text meant only for her into which she could plunge hers. If he asked, she would not tell.

  And ask he did. But the colder the weather grew, the harder the ice outside, the more sharp and shiny, impenetrably grey and slippery became her determination not to answer his questions.

  He lingered near her more often, looking miserable and out of sorts, and in his monosyllabic way began to ask what was wrong.

  “Nothing. I just want to be alone!”

  How his great paws pawed the air in dismay.

  “Looking for something. You are?” he said.

  “I’m looking for nothing that’s any of your business,” she said unpleasantly.

  “You are angry!”

  “I’m not!” she spat out at him, impervious to the hurt helplessness in his voice.

  “Can’t delve,” he said. “Not with this.”

  “Then don’t,” she snapped, and set off again, up-tunnel and down-tunnel, day after day, into each night, looking, pushing, touching, trying to find a place the text might be. The sounds of the tunnels that had so confused her when she first arrived she hardly seemed to hear at all, her anger and rage and obsession to find all but blotting them out. When she slept, her sleep was deep and without dreams. When she woke it was to the need to eat quick, groom swift and be off.

  “Rooster can help!” he said.

  “Don’t want your help.”

  “Can’t delve now.”

  “And I don’t care,” she thundered at him, as much as Privet ever thundered; but her eyes were like flashes of cold lightning.

  The quarters they had taken up involved sharing a communal way and chamber, delved long ago by Rooster, though expanded by him since she had come so that, in quiet times, they could stance down in it together with enough space to be comfortable separately, but not so much that they were too far apart.

  It had been here that Privet had first seen Rooster delve, and here that he had learnt to try to talk to her. But in those angry days she did not come to their shared chamber, but went to her own burrow, slept, woke, searched, slept again; and if she could not sleep she brooded, listening to the icy wind above, and the spatter of dust from off the Moors as it swirled about the Top, from one obstruction to another, or came down in its sudden way into their tunnels. She glowered at it, as she did when Rooster dared approach, as she did at everything — for everything it seemed conspired to stop her finding the text she was confident was still here.

  She would have told Rooster about it, but that the last thing she wished in her present mood was to give him the opportunity of helping her; she did not wish her anger to be forced away by the need for gratitude. She liked her anger and the feeling of power it gave her, power over him.

  She might well have, for Rooster remained miserable and confused, and if Privet understood why better than he himself did — because he had never in his strange and sheltered life experienced another mole’s hostility, and did not yet understand that it had a language of its own, and was a cry to be heard — she did not care; she had turned down a tunnel of dark rage and there was no going back, only forward to its end.

  So those hard days of cold passion went by, and might have continued a little longer if their end had not been signalled by a sudden and unexpected change in the weather over the Moors. It came by night, stealthily, a wind-shift westward, air that was warmer, and by dawn there came the drip, drip, drip of melting ice at the entrance, echoing down the tunnels.

  “It’s better,” tried Rooster that same day when they met in the runnel. “Isn’t it, Privet?”

  She watched him and his suffering face, and how his paws
always reached out and nervously delved the air when he was unsure. She saw how he waited, no, how he hung, on the change he so needed to come over her, the change she did not want to make. She heard how his breathing was shallow and fast as his eyes, yes, his ugly eyes, watched her to gain a clue to what she would do.

  And Privet felt power and control and hated him, and liked his suffering, and heard herself say, “If it’s getting better it means I can get away from this loathsome place. I hate it, Rooster, and I never want to come here again.”

  He stared at her, eyes widening in dismay, and she felt herself go forward at him, felt herself bigger and stronger than him, felt herself powerful over him.

  “I don’t like being here with you and all this talk which never goes anywhere, and all this activity I never see, all this … this delving.” She spat out the word as if it were putrid food, and marvelled at the power and life she felt in herself as she did so, and how he stared at her, dumbfounded, unable to respond. Unable; disabled.

  “You …” He began to rear up, only dark and frowning at first. “… not …”

  She backed a little, suddenly alarmed. His paws were beginning to rise over her, not nervously now, but fiercely … “… No.” … angrily, his huge paws rising as high as the tunnel’s arch as his great chest heaved and he tried to speak but could not, for he was too angry, too outraged.

  “No!” he roared, looming over her. “No, cannot, must not …”

  She tried to back away quickly, raising her own thin paws in self-defence, her anger giving way first to alarm and then almost instantly to fear as he brought one paw crashing to the floor before her.

  “NO!” he roared, and more than roared, the whole tunnel shaking with his black anger, and the other paw beginning to descend, nightmare-like, slowly, hugely, down towards her snout, down at her. “NO!”

  She turned to escape, blundering into the wall, feeling his rage like talons on her, so frightened that her scream was mute as she reached a paw out towards the entrance, to escape, to get away, to …

  “CAN’T!” he cried, and shouted and roared at her, his paws pushing her one way and another towards the entrance, lifting her, carrying her as it seemed, violently down the tunnel whose walls seemed to rush at her from each side as she tried to orientate herself. But his rage mounted even more, and the entrance rushed towards her, and the bright light outside, blinding, confusing, was on her, and she on it.