Duncton Quest (89 page)

Tryfan’s illness lasted much longer than a “sevennyght”, for January passed and February was nearly done before days began to come when he was fully conscious and beginning to feel at last what it might be to be well once more. He was weak, and nightmares came, and often still he wept, as he had through the worst part of his illness, and images of the past came before him which he thought were real.

He did not speak but to himself, but consciousness must have come because he knew when Feverfew was near and protested weakly when she went away, even for a moment, and gentled into sleep at her touch. So Feverfew stayed near, caring for him, while Spindle was close by, watching over them both and beginning to see that, as he had had his Thyme, and known love forevermore through her, so now Tryfan was beginning to know that love two moles can have if only they will let each other to each other’s heart. And Spindle snouted west and thanked the Stone that it had brought Feverfew to Tryfan.

It is clear from Spindle’s chronicle that he felt no jealousy of Feverfew as other moles in his position might. He saw only that she gave something to Tryfan no other mole could give, and he understood, better even than Feverfew herself, for he knew Tryfan better, that the agony of body and spirit that Tryfan suffered in those long molemonths were the accumulation of so much that had come from his past.

For in his agonies he had cried out of things that went back to the very beginning of his life, of moments when he endangered his life protecting his siblings, of a time when he grew apart from Bracken and Rebecca and lived alone across the Pastures near Duncton Wood, of those long years when alone he protected Boswell on his journey to Uffington. Years when others saw him as a strong mole, but when he had to deny himself so that other lives were safe.

Then, too, was the distress Spindle now found Tryfan had felt so deeply for the moles who suffered and died in Buckland’s Slopeside. And the horror of the escape from Duncton Wood for which he took the blame. Then the final blow that broke him, which was the belief that, having persuaded Spindle and the others to accompany him into the Wen, they would die by the claws and teeth of rats.

By the side of all this was Tryfan’s doubt of his worthiness before the Stone, and the terrible loneliness any leader feels and which he had suffered all those years, for a mole needs a mate, and the whole love a mate gives.

Perhaps, too, Tryfan of Duncton needed peace from responsibility, and time to meditate and scribe as his training had prepared him to. So now his illness enforced stillness, and through that stillness he journeyed, not alone in body for his friends were there, but in spirit Spindle knew he was alone, a solitary mole on a way of nightmare agony reaching through illness and pain for some understanding of how a mole might hear Silence.

When those better days came, at the end of February, Tryfan said few words, but would stare out of the westward entrance Feverfew insisted he was placed near, his eyes softer now, his face thinner and older, his nature softer than it had been, as if he understood better other moles’ suffering.

One dusktime he turned to Feverfew in that burrow of recovery and said, “Thy name is Feverfew?”

“Yt ys,” she whispered in reply, “and you are Tryfan mowle.” It seemed to each of them that they were coming out of a long time in which they had dreamed of the other, and now were meeting in reality at last.

“I want to go to the surface,” he said.

Then, slowly, painfully, he hauled himself what seemed a long way to the surface as she helped him along. When they reached a point that seemed to satisfy him he snouted to the west, where the sun was setting, as to the south, their left, the lights of the Wen were beginning to come on.

But it was the west he wanted to show her and looking at the dying sky Tryfan said, “Duncton Wood is there, Feverfew, a long way away. I come from there.”

“I ken yt wel,” she said. “Yte yow hav jorneyied longe and fer fro ther.”

“I want to tell you of it.”

“Then tell me,” she whispered, her flank to his as the first star shone in the eastern sky.

“I shall,” he said in the old way, “from my heart to your heart I shall tell you, of a system that lost its way as moledom lost its way, and of how the Stone did not forsake it, and of a few moles who dreamed of finding Silence, and helping allmole hear its sound.”

“And when you have done that,” said Feverfew, “I shall tell you from my heart to your heart of how Dunbar has told us that the Stone Mole will come, of how he will help allmole hear that sound of Silence, and of a mole, humble and unknown, who shall be the first to know the full Silence of the Stone and show what all moles may know if they choose.”

Then, to each other, touching each other, those two moles spoke, while the sun set in preparation for a better day, and the stars turned in the night sky far above them towards their great destiny, and that of moledom’s too.

Chapter Thirty-Five

It was soon clear to the rest of the moles in the Wen system, as it had been to Spindle from the first, that Tryfan and Feverfew would make a pair and, if the Stone ordained it, would have young. Nor was Spindle surprised when their quiet and almost secret union seemed to have a calming effect on the others there.

Or perhaps it was just that as matings go it was late, and the months of January and February, when mate-questing moles are irritable and easily hurt, had passed, and the other moles had better things to do now that the first signs of spring were showing, than continue their feuds when the fight was so clearly lost.

For Mayweed and Spindle had both made their desire for singleness well known, while Starling, who seemed ever stronger and more full of life with each passing day, so terrified the craven males of Wen that, with the exception of Paston, who treated her as a father, none dared talk to her.

So Tryfan and Feverfew paired, and the system seemed content that it should be so, and that they should have privacy as the excitement of spring took over. For exciting it was, and is, and evermore will be, to even the oldest-seeming mole, or the most insensitive. That first touch of spring sunlight in the dew, that first fresh burst of birdsong in the bush, that always unexpected green of fresh young growth, so long absent but then suddenly returned once more, new and eager. All the more poignant at a system hemmed in by roaring owls ways, concrete structures, twofoot ways and underlain by tunnels, filthy in places and sterile in others.

But already the moles had seen spring underground in the shooting of the white roots of primroses and lady’s smock, and the slow turn of waking grubs, while on the surface the first white flowers of snowdrops and purple of crocus came, and the fresh beauty of yellow celandine. Warmer air too, and better light, among which all, slowly at first and then with growing strength, Tryfan went, and Feverfew, talking as moles discovering love
will
talk, of everything and nothing, from day to deepest night.

If Spindle had feared that Tryfan would fight the obvious love he felt, pleading a vow of celibacy, racking his heart from some false sense of honour to a dead scribemole code, he need not have. Tryfan was changed in body as well as mind, and peaceful. He was thinner now, and here and there his fur was grey. But his look was strong and powerful, and about his eyes was a purpose and certainty that had not been there before. His heart had known pain, and lived through it, and his eyes looked at the world with a new simplicity. But though Tryfan’s wounds had healed he remained scarred on both paw and flanks so that when the sun caught his sides he looked older. Indeed the scars fell in such a way that he looked as if he was about to spring forward. But close to, a mole could see that the scars ran deep and the skin was bare where the fur had not grown back.

He contrasted with Feverfew who, it happened, was the same age as he. She frowned a little, as if she had been at her texts too long, but when she looked up her face softened and her eyes were warm, and she moved with that same grace and youth Tryfan had once had, but which he had lost in the course of journeying and illness.

Together they seemed one, and quite formidable, as if they were not just a pair together but a whole belief, a whole purpose, and one that could not be forsworn. Never was the union of two moles more clearly of the Stone. Their faith was shared, and their journey each day up to the top of the hill to face west and pray gently reestablished the habit of worship on many of the Wen moles.

The strange thing was that neither Tryfan nor Feverfew seemed aware of the effect they had or that their simplicity in each other, and sense of a shared life that was like a shared smile, brought tears to the eyes of Spindle and Mayweed, and even, as time went on, to some of the more accepting of the Wen moles.

Yet, there was a dark side to the system’s response to them, for jealousy was still there, and now there was fear too, for the faith Tryfan had was not routine but daily felt, and the words he used were mole not old mole, and offensive to some ears. Such darker feelings need but an excuse to harden and find expression, and where malevolence exists such excuses are quickly found. But not quite yet. Tryfan and Feverfew had peace to love each other for a while.

But what of Starling? From the moment that it became obvious that Feverfew and Tryfan would pair she, most uncharacteristically, became morose, and uncompanionable. The old females understood well enough, and smiled malevolently to themselves, and slyly too, for they knew how such a female might feel in such a system at such a time. But the males did not, least of all Spindle and Mayweed, who never saw Starling
that
way. So while they took it into their heads to study the contents of the Wen Library, and began to record the histories of the Wen moles much as they had taken data down of the refugees in Duncton Wood, Starling took herself off to the eastside and busied herself making a burrow and tunnels in the Duncton Style: plain, serviceable, and solid.

“We wot nat what the wynche wrocht, nor wherefore!” the old females whispered giving each other meaningful glances, for it looked as if Starling was preparing to mate. But with whom?

One day, when the March sun shone strong, Spindle came over to Starling’s new burrows and, with much humming and haaing, told her the good news (as it seemed to him) that Feverfew was with pup. How bright was Starling’s reception to this, how overly cheerful her smiles of pleasure at the news, and how good-natured the message she gave Spindle to take back to them. But when he left her burrows he remained puzzled in his clerical way as to why she seemed irritable beyond belief and she had not offered him a single worm in all the time he had been there.

Irritable was an understatement. Furious was more like it: that fury a mole uncharitably feels when another has got what she wants
and can’t be blamed for it
! For a day and a half Starling stomped about her tunnels and burrow very angrily indeed. At the end of that time she decided to tell the Stone what she thought of it.

“Look,” she said, taking stance in quite the wrong direction since she was facing towards the Wen, but then what she had to say was so
severe
that whichever way she faced the Stone would hear her. “I am not a pleased mole. First you make me look after Lorren. Then you foist Bailey on to me, and did I complain? No, I did not! I looked after them until
you
took them from me (and you’ll have a great deal to answer for if they don’t turn up again in one piece). As if that wasn’t enough, you make me come all this way through quite horrible tunnels, with smelly old rats in them, until I end up in this really awful place with no males around at all. I mean you can’t seriously expect me to be thinking of Spindle or Mayweed because if you are that will be the final straw. No, even you couldn’t be so idiotic. So what I want you to do is to find me a male who’s bigger than me, not decrepit, can speak normal mole, and is capable of fathering the pups that I intend to have
very soon.
Now kindly get on with it as fast as you can as time is running out and you haven’t seen me
really
furious yet.”

Having made this clear statement to the Stone, Starling went off and found a lot of food and, basking in the springtime sun and feeling very much better than before, she had a feast all by herself. Then she touched up her burrows a bit and had a good sleep.

The following morning, bright and early, she gave herself a final groom so that her already full and glossy fur had an extra shine to it, and her talons, never the most delicate, at least looked sparkly clean.

With that she went out on to the surface and said to the Stone, “Right, I am now ready, please do your bit.”

A day passed, and then two. Starling was studiedly calm. A third day passed. Starling became irritable. A fourth day passed, Starling felt depressed, and wept briefly in renewed rage and frustration. A fifth day came and the sun shone bright and Starling sighed and spent the day resigning herself to puplessness.

That evening Mayweed came visiting.