Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  Gaunt nodded slowly. “No, mole, Glee is not a delver as you are. But she has another talent, and one you will do well not to underestimate. She is a helper, a facilitator.”

  “Don’t know what that is,” said Rooster.

  “Quite so,” said Gaunt. “You had best learn to know that though moles may not have your skills they may yet have much to teach you. Glee has won the admiration and respect of None. Your delving task in this Chamber is to learn why, Rooster: do that and it will be sufficient in the limited time we can allow you here. Watch, listen, respect, obey, and always remember that delving comes from the heart and not the paws, and to master its arts you must learn to listen and be humble with allmole. Therefore, follow Glee without complaint and learn all you can from her.”

  Rooster did no more than growl.

  Gaunt gave him a sympathetic smile.

  “Come on, mole, ’tis not so hard to forget your pride with a mole you love.”

  “Love?” said Rooster, staring uncomfortably at Glee, and her pale fur, her sharp black eyes, and her small compact body with its pink snout.

  Glee grinned and nodded. “Course you do, Rooster, you and me and Humlock are friends and that’s the same as love. None said that. Love’s a good word for what we’ve got.”

  “Hmmph!” said Rooster.

  “Leave him to me, Mentor Gaunt, he’s not half as fierce as he looks; in fact he’s not even one quarter or an eighth as fierce as that.”

  “Could be twenty times more,” growled Rooster.

  “Then let Glee teach you not to be,” said Gaunt amiably. “The sanctity of life! That’s the joy of None. A delver makes and does not destroy, never ever. Glee will lead you towards that, won’t you, my dear?”

  “Will I?” said Glee archly, glancing affectionately at Rooster. “If he stops grumbling I might!”

  Rooster did stop grumbling, and having learnt the lesson that Gaunt wished him to learn he began to see anew the wonders of the None Chamber, where the light was bright, the day always promising, and the best delves the simplest and lightest, like a mole’s laughter on a summer morning when the darkness of preceding night and the greys of early dawn have fled, and the deeper hues of the day and coming dusk of Sext and Compline have yet to be.

  Rooster proceeded with his training with a speed and application that astonished all who witnessed it, and though he did not intend to, and was unaware that he did so, he attracted the enthusiastic support of those delvers who worked alongside him; they learnt that though his manner was brusque and rude he was at heart a kindly mole whose appreciation of delving was so quick and intelligent that others slower than himself thought he was merely impatient and unwilling to talk. Such was the excitement his skills created, and the unaffected wonder that his successive delvings provoked, that few in the system noticed that the shadows that lengthened over the Charnel with the rapid passage of summer into autumn and an inclement rainy October, were rather more than seasonal.

  For one thing, infectious murrain, the swiftest and most dreaded of the Charnel’s fatal diseases, began a resurgence once more, and weaker brethren among the delvers suffered its vile death; whilst others, Samphire included, were displaying the tell-tale symptoms of its lesser form, where fur begins to patch, and eyes to ache, and haunches to become gaunt.

  With this gathering shadow came another, which was the growing sense among the Senior Delvers, and a few other moles like Hume and Drumlin, that the notion of change that had seemed so exciting in the summer presaged an end to the Charnel as they knew it — which was just what Gaunt had privately predicted to Samphire. So a general restlessness came, and a feeling of purposelessness, as if moles sensed that time was in danger now of passing the Charnel by. The need for action had come, and the need was immediate.

  Samphire had fought a long battle with herself against Gaunt’s request that she think of a way of escape for Rooster, a battle made all the harder by the fact that Gaunt had not mentioned it again. She felt the onset of murrain in her body, and from Drumlin learnt its cause and its inevitable outcome, which would be a sudden decline into helplessness, and then a death that would be a merciful release. Samphire took this prediction stoically, but along with the communal restlessness, it helped persuade her that Gaunt might be right, and that at the very least she should consider how the problem of escape he had set might be solved.

  There were but two ways out. First, the forbidding Creeds, by which Hilbert had entered the Charnel and back up which, his prophecy said, a Master of the Delve would one day go. Rooster, perhaps? And the rest of them, what would happen to them? Samphire considered the idea and dismissed it: the fulfillment of prophecies was a matter for the Stone, not for mortal mole. If ever mole climbed the Creeds, and it seemed impossible that they would, then the Stone would decide the time, and the mole. Meanwhile, Stone forgive her, she would think of how to get Rooster out another way.

  There was but one other possibility, and the more Samphire pondered it the less absurd it seemed, and the more her coming to the Charnel at this time seemed to make sense.

  “The Span, Gaunt, that is the only way …”

  There was excitement in her eyes when she finally told him, after days of stancing on the surface and gazing on the one place where Charnel moles habitually never looked, which was that spray-saturated hump of slippery rock and green vegetation over which, a lifetime before it seemed, she had come bearing her solitary surviving pup. There, beyond the spray, she sometimes caught a glimpse of the Ratcher moles, and wondered if Red Ratcher was there as well. The view was very hazy, the shadows long, the distant movement of mole hard to make out. That they stared she had no doubt, for once she had done the same.

  But to cross it? With Rooster? And with others?

  “Whatmoles can go?”

  Gaunt studied her. “Across the Span?” he said in disbelief.

  “Have you never considered it?” she asked.

  He slowly shook his head, his eyes widening in surprise at himself that he never had. None of them had. From birth it was always impressed upon them as a way they could not go, because the Ratcher moles would destroy them, and because they could not give up their task in the Charnel. It had taken an outsider to state the obvious, which generations of moles had ignored.

  “I think it might work, my dear, though until you mentioned it I never considered it myself. We are all bound by the constraints of what we know and have been taught, and the assumption behind them. Well, now. You say the Reapside moles are afraid of the Charnel and its moles, especially of its disease. You think they might simply fear to touch us and let us out into freedom?”

  “There is no other way.”

  “What of the moles who cannot trek? Only some of us could go. I myself … must stay.”

  She gazed into his eyes but did not move nearer. Her look was bleak.

  “My son … I would see him to safety,” she said. “You and I —”

  “My time is near, Samphire, very near. And you have disease as well. Perhaps the Stone would wish us to part doing what we can for the future. I to serve out my days here until it is time for my trek to the Creeds, and you to serve us all by getting Rooster to safety. Perhaps if Red Ratcher sees you and seeks to confront you, or to stop you, you will find words to outface him. You will need to prepare for that.”

  “We shall think about it, my love. We shall see.”

  “Our thoughts run far ahead of what we dare say,” he whispered, shaking his head. “We know this is the way.”

  She nodded, certain of it, as certain as she knew how near he was to trekking to the Creeds.

  “Only the preservation of Rooster’s life, and other ambulant moles of the Charnel, could make me bear to part from you,” she whispered, coming close. Rut as she touched him, and he returned her touch, his so weak these days it was barely a caress, she knew the parting had already begun. Yet still Gaunt could surprise her with his continuing resolution.

  “It must be done swiftly and boldly
, like a just delve,” he said with sudden energy. “Consult Hume and choose moles of sufficient number and sufficient strength to form the beginnings of a system. Males, females. Drumlin, Sedum … no, no, I will not think of their names. Theirs is the future, mine the fulfillment of the past. My dear, you must do it. And soon. You must lead them.”

  “I know,” said Samphire softly. She continued to touch him, but already her gaze was far away, and a name whispered itself across the dream she saw.

  “Chieveley Dale,” she said. That’s where I shall lead them, my love.”

  Perhaps she would, but Gaunt was drifting into sleep and only nodded his head vaguely, and made a noise to indicate he heard, or almost heard, before he slept.

  If he dreamt, his dreams stopped at the Span, just as his life had always done. The greatest journeys of some moles begin only when they themselves have gone into Silence, and they are re-born in the tales and histories of others, whence they journey on beyond their mortal span to be known and loved even in the furthest and most obscure tunnels of moledom.

  Perhaps Gaunt guessed the difficulties and disputes that would arise at even the first hint that some of the Charnel moles would, under Samphire’s leadership, attempt to cross the Span to pastures new. Certainly, once the decision had been made he resisted all persuasion to become involved in its execution, saying only that as he would not be going it was up to moles who were to decide how and when the attempt would be made. As for which moles would go, well, others must decide, though he thought that the Stone would decide that in its own inimitable way. In fact, Samphire and Hume conferred long and hard on which moles might go, and then they took the Senior Delvers into their confidence. To a mole they shared Gaunt’s belief that the coming of Rooster had so changed matters in the Charnel that escape out into moledom was now the only way to carry its useful work on into the future. The time of hiding was over.

  The arguments against, and there were no doubt many, Rooster himself did not dwell upon afterwards in his account to Privet, perhaps because his last days of study and meditation upon delving in Compline Chamber, which he had finally reached, absorbed him utterly, and brought him into a similar union of spirit with Humlock which he had already worked so hard to achieve with Glee in None Chamber.

  Of the issues of change and escape that were now sweeping through the Charnel, he knew only that something great was apaw that would affect them all, and that it had to do with matters of delving, and his own undoubted skills in the greatest of moledom’s arts.

  By the time his training of Rooster was done Senior Delver Compline left him in no doubt as to the nature of the challenge his skills posed him. Perhaps at Gaunt’s prompting, or perhaps of his own accord, Compline told him outright that his skill was such that he was the nearest the Charnel had ever come to a Master since Hilbert’s day.

  “Which means you have a responsibility greater than you know!” he said, using this as justification for the severity of his training of Rooster’s mind and paws concerning the deep delves of the end of day and dusk, and the approach of night, wherein a mole’s greatest and most difficult journeys take place.

  “These are the essence of what you have learned in Compline Chamber, and by now you will have understood that our Chambers here, as created by Master Hilbert, represent not just the journey through the hours of day and night back to day again, but the journey moles make through the days and nights of their lives. A delver touches these things in what he makes, and a Master of the Delve touches these things absolutely. It is a grave challenge, and one which I believe grows more difficult the nearer you get to achieving it. Learn from us all, and learn especially from Humlock!”

  These were the lessons he learnt in those last days, which in later years he understood were the last days of his youth. In Compline, where many of the most crippled of the delvers worked out their lives, and willingly showed the young Master in the making all they could, and adjured him to learn from Humlock the art of being still and silent, Rooster saw most graphically how all the delvers’ arts turn in the end towards a celebration of life. Compline ends the day, as it ends life itself, and offers a mole a time in which to reflect on what has been, and prepare for what is to come. If life, then let it be a better and more responsible one than heretofore; if death, then let a mole approach the Silence with joy for all he has known and made in his life, however brief, however long, for reality is what he brings to Silence.

  “It is what the Delvings are all finally about,” explained Compline, “and the whispers from the past, and the cries, and the calls that a sounding across delving resurrects, are the sounds of moles who once lived as you live, and left behind the best they had. A mole who does that may turn his snout to Silence with pride.”

  “Like my Mentor Gaunt,” said Rooster sombrely.

  “Yes, like Gaunt.”

  The unpleasant weather of October eased for a time into milder days, when the sun cast russet rays out of a pale blue sky and lit up the cliffs across the Reap, and made more gentle the intimidating dark fissures of the Creeds. The tufts of heather and crowberry that grew among the scree had held their autumn colour well, and now shone in their final hour of glory before winter came and stole their brightness away. Even the ravens in the crumbling cliffs above the Channel seemed more benign as they enjoyed leisurely flights off their sheer roosts, and tarried in the sun, their wings shining and their beaks glinting as they turned.

  But the Reap was less benign, for the earlier rains had put it into minor spate, and some shift of the massive rocks in its gorge during the spring melt-spates meant that the spray was higher than mole ever remembered it, shooting over on to the Charnel’s edge and beyond into puddles that sometimes spread dangerously near to floods, and up on to the Span itself, which at times was lost to sight.

  “Come winter that’ll freeze,” said Hume uneasily. “I’d swear it’s narrower than it was when I last had a good look at it. Ice would bring the whole lot down and then the Charnel would be lost to itself for all time and all our work a waste. If some of us are going to go across we’d better get it over and done with while we can!”

  He tried to sound his normal cheerful self but even he was nervous at the prospect of crossing the Span.

  “Well, the plans are well made and the Senior Delvers have drawn up their lists of the moles who are to come, and what their order is to be,” said Samphire. “There’s little now to hold us back but fear.”

  Hume nodded, staring at the spray and straining his eyes to see beyond.

  “What’s moledom really like, do you think? I mean, is it so different from our home here?”

  Samphire looked round at ‘our home’ — our enshadowed home — and remembered Chieveley Dale, her first home.

  “Moledoms different,” she said, “and warmer. There’s places in moledom where the sun shines all day long and the rocks grow warm with it, and the soil as well. And the worms can be as long as a mole.”

  “Long as a mole!” exclaimed Hume smiling. “No, Samphire, that’s just your memory as a pup. No worm could be that long!”

  “You wait and see!”

  Hume looked at her. “When are we going then? Eh? When’s the big day? Is it leaving Gaunt that’s delaying you?”

  She nodded. “You’re a perspicacious mole, Hume. You’ll do well out there in moledom.”

  “Now there’s a word, “perspicacious”!” said Hume, grinning. His face grew serious. “It’ll be dangerous crossing the Span, more dangerous meeting the moles of the Reapside —”

  “We’ll do it,” said Samphire fiercely. “Ratcher’s moles only know the language of force.”

  “There’s not a mole among us will strike another mole, not even to save our life!” said Hume quickly. “That’s not the Charnel way.”

  “No, I know,” she replied, “but I believe there’ll not be the need to. We’ll look fierce, and we’ll look odd, and they’ll be afraid of our seeming strength and our appearance. But most of all they’ll b
e afraid of the disease we carry. We’ll be over and past them before they’ve time to recover from their surprise and decided what to do about it.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll go to Chieveley Dale!”

  Forgive me, Samphire, but after so long can you find the way?”

  “I shall never forget it,” she said. “I remember every rock Red Ratcher dragged me past, every stream we crossed, every patch of heather and grass, every peat hag over the high moor. Each one was one further from my home, where all my kin died. Get me beyond the Reapside, Hume, and Rooster at my flank and all his friends, and I’ll not fail to lead you to a home you can only begin to dream of.”

  “Well, we better get on with it while the weather’s mild. Once winter comes …”

  “Soon, we’ll go.”

  “And Glee and Humlock, are they on the lists the Senior Delvers have made? They’ll be missed amongst the helpers.”

  “Rooster would not go without them, though with Humlock’s disabilities, and Glee’s white fur, they’re not a couple will ever find survival easy.”

  “Aye, but you’re right, Rooster’ll never go without ’em. It’s not for me to say it but I will: that mole may be a Master of the Delve one day but I’ll swear he’ll only be Master with Glee and Humlock at his flanks. They began in the Delvings together, they made their high chamber when they shouldn’t have done, and I’ll wager they’ll finish up together. The Stone made them for each other, and anyway, do you think Masters in the old days worked alone? Not a bit of it! Delving’s a communal art for communities, and a Master cannot delve alone without something in him dying.”

  “Oh, but what of the ones we must leave behind, Hume?” she said sadly.

  “Aye,” said Hume shaking his head, “aye, that’ll be hard.”

  “Be bold and swift,” Gaunt had said, yet still Samphire hesitated, lingering out last days with Gaunt, though all knew now that the risky departure must be imminent. Days of adjustment, and of sadness, for friend must part with friend, as the system began to part from itself, and leave behind those moles and helpers who had no ability or wish to leave.