Duncton Tales

by William Horwood

  With a final look back at the shadowed, narrow passage between bluffs of dark rock which marked the entrance to Charnel Clough, they were gone.

  Few escapes are so stirring as this fabled exodus of Samphire and the moles of Charnel Clough, and many are the accounts that have been left behind. None better known perhaps than that which Privet later scribed from Hume’s own words, which describes so graphically how Samphire led the moles up on to the Moors and thence by slow degrees, successfully avoiding all contact with Ratcher’s clan who came out in pursuit the following day; and how finally she led them to her birthplace, Chieveley Dale, where Rooster directed the others to create their extraordinary system of false tunnels and misleading chambers, protected by Dark Sound, and so made them safe from Red Ratcher for a time.

  Of these things Rooster spoke deep into that Longest Night, and at the end of how his mother Samphire never recovered from the blow Grear, her own son, had struck her near the Span. Weakened already by murrain, bereft without her Gaunt, she saw the little group she had led delve itself into safety in the Dale she loved. She saw life return to her old home-place, and in the molemonths following she watched her friends gradually recover from the loss each felt, finding enough in the future to recompense them for the losses of the past. In the clean air, and the good soil, and with worms as long as moles — just as she had said — Samphire had time to see that there was a possibility that some of them would survive.

  She saw how Rooster, though grieved at losing all hope of contacting Glee and Humlock again, shook off his pain, controlled his anger, and began to lead moles she herself had not strength to lead more. His energy and skills created their defences, and his restraint prevented anymole from seeking to confront the Ratcher moles when they came snooping. All this she saw, and had time to do one thing more before she died.

  “Climb to Hilbert’s Top, my love, and see what is there. It is your right and your duty to do it, for there you may find comfort for the pain you bear in the former Master’s delvings, and guidance too. Go, my dear …”

  So Rooster had gone, up to that mysterious place, in amongst its strange delvings, and sounded them, and heard their distant familiar cries — of mole calling from the past, or mole urging to the future, and of the rudiments of Prime, and Terce, and None, and Sext and Compline. All there, nascent, as yet unformed, a place where a Master found himself and his great task. Strange its sounding as he turned to leave like the final valediction of a mole hidden amongst delvings, an old mole, a wise mole, a mole Rooster had learned to love.

  “Mentor Gaunt,” he murmured, for it seemed it was his voice amongst the whisperers, saying his last farewell.

  Back down to the Dale went Rooster then, fearing long before he reached home that he was not the only mole who heard Gaunt’s voice that day.

  Aye, his mother Samphire seemed to have heard it too, and had turned her snout from life, looked into the Silence where her love had gone, and followed him, knowing perhaps that she had done enough. Others would have to carry on the task of bringing Rooster forward, and making him the Master of the Delve that moledom surely needed once again.

  She might have waited to say goodbye,” whispered Rooster when he told the tale to Privet, angry that she had not, and knowing his anger to be unreasonable, yet feeling it all the same.

  From that day forth Rooster was not of their world, nor able in his loss and loneliness to service the tunnels. Hume’s account tells how at last disease quite overtook them, and they became unable to maintain the specially delved tunnels they had made. Ratcher’s moles began attacking them, making incursions into their modest territory, torturing and killing the moles they caught. So were they forced to flee over the Moor to Crowden, and alert those sturdy moles to their plight, which first brought Hamble, Sward and Privet out in search of Rooster.

  “And you, my dear, did you not think of going too?” asked Privet at the end.

  Rooster shook his head. “Not the time. Was learning. Hilbert’s delvings spoke to me. Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “Your coming, Privet. Longest Night. Things. Had to delve my way out of darkness of Glee and Humlock not coming. Stone decided, I fought it. This is hard.”

  “At least …’ she began, thinking to say something consoling. But no words came. What consolation was there in thinking Glee and Humlock safe if they were so unreachable that they might as well be dead.

  “Couldn’t delve without them,” said Rooster, “before you came. Now … can delve a bit, but differently.”

  They were silent and sombre for a time.

  “This is Longest Night!” Privet suddenly declared.

  He nodded slowly. “Said I had the delving need!”

  “And …?”

  “It’s a Compline delving, a sounding of the future.”

  She nodded, only half understanding what he meant.

  “Where will you do it?”

  “Here,” he said, looking around their shared chamber, whose subtle walls and elegant portal he had made with such skill and love. “On our walls, somewhere.”

  “When?”

  “Now,” he said, frowning, and reached out a paw to touch the wall.

  Privet shrank back into the darkest shadows to give him privacy, feeling almost that she should leave, but he sensed that she might go and turned and said he wanted her to stay.

  “For us!”

  More than that he did not say, but became still and quiet, his only movement at first being an occasional touch of the walls, now here and now there, sometimes with both paws at once, as if trying to find something he knew was there but could not see.

  Occasionally he let out a slight groan or sigh, and even a ‘Hmmph!’, but after that he retreated to a low stance, and for a time Privet thought he had given up altogether in disgust. But then he started up again, raised his talons to the wall and made some sudden swift jabs, and a sweeping delve as well, before stopping as suddenly as he had started, and stancing quite still to stare in a most malevolent way at what he had so far done.

  Worse, he looked round at her, the unpleasantness still in his gaze, and she was about to say something when she realized that he did not see her at all, but something else far away in a distance of time and space. He seemed to be awaiting a call.

  The call must have come, for he turned back to the wall, and reaching forward sounded the few delves he had already made, which emitted a broken kind of sound, pained and disturbing.

  “Ha!” muttered Rooster to himself, not at all displeased, hunching purposefully over the wall and seeming suddenly to have gained control of something he had struggled with.

  “Yes!” he cried out.

  Then his delving truly began, strong and purposeful, mark after mark, delve after delve, the thinner talon followed by the blunt, the scratch followed by the score, the score by the finishing touch. As he did so the chamber was filled with sound, though it was muffled and muted, as if it came from beyond an obstruction.

  “Portal!” he whispered to himself. “Must remember. Will! Ha!”

  As she watched him delve, Privet saw and heard a Rooster she had not known before, and felt him too, for the Chamber was filled with a growing sense of ease and confidence. This was not an inarticulate mole struggling to find speech, which, when it came was usually monosyllabic, at best only stilted. This was a mole in communion with himself and allmole, a mole speaking his language at its highest level, a mole of power and absolute clarity.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” he declared suddenly, stancing back from the wall, peering round at the chamber’s only portal, and then back at the vast and elegant pattern he had made, which now slowly revealed itself in the dawning light.

  “Is it …?” she began.

  “Nearly!” he said sharply, silencing her. He fell into thought again, peering at his work, and then round at the portal that seemed to worry him so much. He reached out a paw and sounded part of the delving, and though it was still muffled and strained, Privet thoug
ht she could hear a voice calling, or voices.

  “You!” he said turning on her. “You delve now?”

  “Me?” she said faintly. “What? And where? I can’t delve, Rooster.”

  “All moles delve all the time. It doesn’t matter. It’s your mark, your touch that counts. Now, before you think too much! NOW, PRIVET!”

  His voice was suddenly urgent, and his great paw pulled her forward and almost hurled her at the wall.

  “But what?” she said.

  “Your mark!”

  She turned, raised a paw, and paused as he had done at first, and as she always did before she began a scribing. Her eyes travelled over the wall, she saw a space that summoned her talons, and there, impulsively, she began to scribe her name. She stopped when she had done so, not because she did not know what she wanted to scribe next, but because the space that followed did not seem right.

  She stanced back from the wall, watching the light shimmering on its protrusions, dark in its recesses, brighter elsewhere, and impulsively once more she went to a different place and scribed again. When she had finished she pulled back, and felt sudden fatigue come to her paws and body as if she had scribed a great thing.

  “Done?” said Rooster.

  She nodded, vaguely.

  “You delved good.”

  “I only scribed,” she said.

  “Same,” he declared appreciatively, going to the two places she had scribed and touching them.

  “What?” he asked.

  “That’s my name,” she said pointing to her first mark, “and that’s yours, my dear,” pointing to the second. “Rooster.”

  “So far away, one from other.”

  “Felt right,” she said.

  He chuckled in his warmest, nicest way.

  “Was right,” he said. “Far, far apart. We’ve made a delve to make us one again.”

  “Have we? Can I sound it?”

  “Not properly. Portal’s involved and must be sealed and then broken, then will sound like it should.”

  “When?”

  He shook his head. “Longest Night over. Must sleep, both together.”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “I love you, Rooster.”

  “Know it,” he said matter-of-factly, “it’s in your delving.”

  They slept, paws about each other, deep, deep, trusting sleep.

  When they awoke the burrow was filled with light and they both wanted to go out on to the surface and see the new day.

  But before they went through the portal out of the chamber Privet asked, “What is the delving of? Can’t I sound it just a little?”

  For once Rooster looked gentle, his familiar frowns giving way to an unwonted smile, the menace of his form lightening into something more approachable.

  “A bit, you can,” he said, evidently pleased with himself, like a pup who wants to show off something he has found, or made.

  She touched it lightly, and the chamber was filled with the muted call she had heard before, but of two moles, far in the distance, in different places, muffled, lonely; sounds whose full strength could not yet be heard because they had not yet been made.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  As she spoke Rooster reached up to her paw and, touching it, drew it across the delving again or, rather, drew it down and through it, following some line that he had made among the many, and which he knew and wished her to know too.

  As he did so she felt the line like the touch of a forgotten friend or the scent of some long-forgotten place where she had once loved to be. With these feelings came a fuller richer sound amongst the others, sudden and powerful, sweet and overwhelming in its effect, such that she gasped before it, and turned to him and looked into his eyes, as he into hers.

  “What is it?” she whispered. To him? To herself? Or of the sound? The question was for all these things.

  “That is the sound of Silence,” he said, “which I was taught to make, though I have never made it until now, not like that, not for another mole. Made it for us, for you. Masters don’t do that!” He grinned as the sound faded about them, and restrained her paw when, almost instinctively she tried to sound the delve again. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “not yet for us. But don’t forget. One day might help. Had need to show you.”

  “I will never forget,” she said.

  As their paws withdrew from the delved wall together they brushed some other part of the great delve, and another sound came then, far off, heavy, dragging, like shadows of mole across a vale, striving to reach something beyond their easy reach.

  “It’s the sound of us, one day,” he said sombrely.

  “It’s so sad,” she said, suddenly clinging to him.

  “Us …” he said. “We will need help, Privet, we will. This delving will show a mole how. Don’t know why, or how; don’t know where sense comes from. But felt it, and my paws delved it, had to delve it, would die if I could not. This is my delving need.”

  “When will mole find it?”

  “Long after we’ve gone.”

  “To the Silence?” she whispered, afraid.

  “No, no, no!” he said, laughing. “When we’re gone from here.”

  “We’re going?”

  He touched the delving he had made again.

  “All’s finished here, have no more need here. When snow goes, we’ll go.”

  “Where to?” she said faintly.

  He grinned. “Your home system, of course. Crowden! Rooster’s ready to try to be a Master now.”

  Sudden excitement came to her. They were leaving Hilbert’s Top! When spring came they could travel. Relief flooded into Privet as she sensed that their test here was over. They were ready to move on.

  “Come on,” she cried, “let’s go to the surface. Let’s look at the Moors. Let’s guess how long before the snows will thaw.”

  “Too long!” said Rooster. “Want to go now!”

  Privet laughed aloud, almost for the first time during her telling of her tale in Fieldfare’s chamber in Duncton Wood.

  “He was so impatient you see, a wise mole in some things, a pup with everything to learn in others. And spring took a long time coming over the Moors, longer probably than anywhere else in all moledom! But there we were, and there we stayed until the rooks winged their way over the thawing snow, and settled again on the black grit outcrop of the Top to tell us it was almost time to go.

  “I finished my scribing of the long time we had had together, and Rooster visited the tunnels and finished things off he had been unable to do before. We spent long hours together and talked of the days in the future when we might make tunnels together and have young.

  “Yes, we talked like that. Talked, but did nothing more. Sometimes he wanted more; sometimes I did. Spring was coming after all!”

  “And …?” said Fieldfare, ever curious about such things, and liking mole to find happiness through having young, as she and Chater had.

  Privet shook her head. I’m sorry, Fieldfare,” she said with a smile, “but we never did express our … passion. It was there all right! But the time wasn’t right, it was too soon. Rooster was still angry, and the loss of Glee and Humlock seemed to hold him back from many things, including that, though he never talked of it. And he still feared the feelings he had had of wanting to “hurt” his father Red Ratcher, for he knew he would have done if he had had to defend the Charnel moles against attack. And then, where would his responsibilities as Master of the Delve be? He knew a Master must never hurt another.

  “As for love … he seemed to think that wanting me, loving me with all of him, was so powerful and dangerous that it felt like wanting to hurt me. He knew no different, and how could I, so innocent, so young, explain? I was almost as ignorant of such things as he was.”

  “So you never knew him, never made love, and never pupped?”

  A dark look went across Privet’s face. “No, I never knew him, as you put it, Fieldfare. But I did have pups. I did!”

>   There was an astonished silence in the burrow at this late and unexpected revelation. The dawn wind rattled vegetation at the tunnel portals, and somewhere across the Wood something crashed down.

  Privet’s friends were still, and silent, as she began the last part of her tale.

  Despite its frustrations, the period following Longest Night on Hilbert’s Top before they felt it was safe to set off for Crowden was one of relief and happiness for Privet and Rooster. From the moment his delving for the future of them both had been made and they had gone on to the surface it seemed that a great weight had been lifted from his mind.

  An important and original delving had come to him, and he had no doubt it had the blessing of the Stone, and that made him believe that the loss of his friends in the Charnel, and his guilt at not being able to return to see if they were safe, or could be reached, was something he need no longer feel. The Stone would watch over them better than he could, and its purpose was something he could not question or comprehend. He believed that they were still alive, and had the consolation of knowing that they were for ever safe from the world of trouble and danger into which the escape had led him — and which had already claimed the lives of so many others from the Charnel.

  Perhaps, after all, such moles as they, the one so disabled and the other so distinctive in appearance and vulnerable, were never meant for the real world and could not long have survived in it. At least they had each other, and their companionship and love was more than most moles had, as he understood from all that Privet had told him.

  Stirring in him too was something he had not felt so powerfully before, because of the dark seclusion of the place he had been in: spring. As the snows melted away from the Top, and all across the Moors the white gave way to sodden greys, and then in late February to brighter colours of renewing heather and green bilberry shoots here and there amongst the hags, Rooster felt the mysterious stirring of the new season.

  The rooks had begun to arrive, and down in Chieveley Dale they saw the stream run white and then blue, and grass began to turn a brighter shade of green as other birds, too far off to identify, began to flock down there, and the striving sun to lighten all before its weak rays.