Duncton Quest (90 page)

“Go away,” she said.

The following morning Spindle turned up.

“I hate you all,” said Starling. “Please leave me alone forever.”

“Er, yes, fine,” said Spindle.

Starling suddenly and unaccountably felt hopeful. She cleaned her talons once more, re-groomed her fur, and sallied forth. Lady’s smock were beginning to flower, and some daffodils had bloomed and now caught the sun, but she did not notice them. A peculiar and terrifying purposefulness had come over her. She snouted ahead with as much focussed determination as a fox stalking prey. She seemed to sense something about.

“Male,” she muttered. “Or sort of male.”

She heard noises in the grass ahead and crouched down into an indifferent and nonchalant stance. She affected not to notice the world about her at all, whereas in fact nomole in the whole of history has ever been so acutely aware of the world about her as Starling was then, in particular of the snuffly sound of an innocent and unaware male enjoying a solitary meal on a fine spring morning, and humming to himself.

Very definitely male, she decided, quietly uncrouching and advancing towards the sound ahead with a heart that suddenly beat twice as fast as usual, but with paws that stayed steady.

“Well!” she declared to herself at what she saw as she rounded a corner on the hill, with the Wen stretched out below. Well!

There, in the sun, eating a worm, and definitely male, was a mole. But what a mole! He was not the obvious answer to a female’s prayer. He certainly was not young, and he certainly was not large, and he certainly did not have glossy fur or especially clean talons. He was... wild. Unkempt, in fact, with fur that seemed to go this way and that in a ragged cheerful way, and a line to his limbs that was easy and muscular, and unconcerned with trivia. A travelling sort of mole who was content with his own company. He ate slowly and with relish, stared out over the Wen thoughtfully as he hummed, ate, and hummed again.

“Hello!” said Starling, suddenly very nervous indeed.

The mole’s reaction was total. He dropped the last of the worm, spun round, backed off, took stance with wide eyes and an astonished look on his otherwise cheerful face.

“Stone the crows!” he said. “You gave me a fright. Don’t ever do that again!”

“Sorry,” said Starling with unaccustomed meekness.

“So you should be,” said the mole, and then more calmly, “so you should be. Dear me! Phew! Gave me a shock that did!” Then he settled down and looked at her.

“You’re not very young,” said Starling.

The mole said nothing.

“You’re really very ungroomed,” she continued.

The mole retrieved his food in an unconcerned way and stared at her.

“In fact you’re a bit of a disappointment,” said Starling.

“Do you know what you are?” said the mole.

“No,” said Starling, preening herself as if some male mole was better than none.

“You’re a pain in the arse,” said the mole.

There was a very long silence indeed during which Starling attempted to resolve (but failed to) one of the many paradoxes in mole relationships, namely that when a male mole is direct and seems to be rude but speaks the truth, the female who is the object of his attentions finds him infinitely more attractive.

So Starling then.

“Oh!” was all she could say. “That’s a vile thing to say!”

“Yes, it probably is, but it’s not very nice to be told you look like a rat’s dinner by a mole you’ve never met before. It’s even worse when the mole concerned is the first mole you’ve met for so long that you can hardly remember the last time.”

“I know who you are, you’re Heath!” said Starling. “The Stone saved you because of me! That’s fantastically romantic, even if you are old.”

“Wait a minute,” said Heath, unaccountably warming to this female who, the more he looked at and listened to her the more he liked her. “How did you know my name, and anyway what are you doing here?”

“I bet you’d like to know!” said Starling giggling.

“Yes I would as a matter of fact.”

Then Starling, as if not quite believing her good luck, looked earnest and serious and said, “But friends of mine called Tryfan and Spindle said you had probably gone mad or something because....”

Starling hesitated because Heath was frowning and muttering to himself, “Mad?
She’s
the one who’s mad. I don’t
need
this!” and beginning to look as if he might wander off.

But Starling was a persistent mole.

“
They
said your tunnels went sort of funny and wandery and you must have well, sort of gone
strange
, you know, being alone so long.”

Heath grinned in a doltish way.

“Do I look strange?”

“Yes,” said Starling, “very. But I don’t mind.”

“As a matter of fact your friends Trindle and Spiffan were right in a way but when a mole’s chased by rats for months on end, lost in horrible tunnels, short of water, and has no company for moleyears what do you expect?

However, one day, soon after I left the tunnels you saw, I decided enough was enough. Bugger the rats, I said. Bugger the tunnels. I shall now take a more calm and philosophical view of life. Heath will become happy. So, I crouched down quietly until all my problems seemed to go away, then when they had I moved on and soon after that I arrived here. Naturally when I saw other moles were about I steered well clear of
them.
Moles mean trouble, moles are the equivalent of rats, tunnels and come to that loneliness. Heath had discovered the secret of happiness and was not about to throw it away. Then, today, when I’m hurting no mol
e, you
turn up.”

Starling considered this long speech for a time until, sighing in a contented way and utterly ignoring the implications of what Heath had said, declared, “Don’t you think there’s something very special in the air today?”

Heath looked about dubiously, snouting here and there before he looked back at her.

“Do you want an honest answer, or the answer you want?” he said.

“Both,” she sighed.

“The air seems perfectly normal to me, and yes, there’s something very special about it today. So what happens next?”

Starling looked shy but it didn’t last long.

“Love and pups,” she said.

“Not until you’ve answered some questions,” said Heath, “the main one of which is ‘How did you get here?’ followed by the second, which is, ‘How fast can I get out?’”

“Would you like to come to my burrow so I can answer all your questions?” said Starling pleasantly.

“With deep and lasting reluctance,” said Heath. But he followed her, attempting to groom himself into some semblance of kemptness as he went.

But in some places Spring, and mating love, had not yet arrived, and one of them was bitter and besieged Siabod.

After their meeting with Glyder and the others, Alder and Marram had been led underground to the high and dangerous south-eastern parts of the system. Here the tunnels are twofoot made and cold, running always with torrents of water except when in winter they freeze and the echoing drip of water is replaced by the rasp of cracking ice and the crash of rockfalls in the dark depths of that grim place.

Yet the Siabod moles have, over the generations, made their own strange quarters here, running their tunnels up faults in the slate, taking them through wormless peat, building chambers in the few wormful parts which, often, open out on to sheer drops down to the tunnelled depths below. Dangerous indeed.

So sporadic and scarce is food that a mole must know exactly where to go unless he is to die between one stop and the next, wandering out onto the sterile snowy wastes, his snout so cold, his resistance so low, that he cannot function for long before he ails and his paws freeze to the surface and corvids pick him off.

The Siabods are of two kinds. Those on the lower northern slopes which overlook the Nantgwryd Valley are smaller, thinner, wilier, and are mean with their worms and speech, and look at strangers sideways and drop into their native Siabod and exclude them. They are the watchers, the manipulators, the clever ones, and they often affect to despise the second group of Siabod moles, though they have not guts enough to say so. Yet from this group also come the story-tellers and moles of imagination. Bran, the Siabod mole who first made contact with Bracken on his arrival and later accompanied Rebecca back to Duncton and lived there for a time, was such a lowslope mole.

The second group, of which Glyder and his brothers were members, and from which tragic Mandrake came as well, live on the high slopes. They are bigger, stronger, bolder but uneasy with words, though most speak mole.

These are the true Siabod moles, the moles of Siabod legend, who have since Balagan’s time provided the protectors of Siabod’s great heritage, the sacred Stones of Tryfan.

Perhaps in all systems there are the moles who talk and those that do; moles of the mind and moles of the heart. In Siabod these groups happen to be very evident, and yet over the generations the system has maintained its integrity, and usually found a leader from one or other group who is accepted by all. But at the time that Alder came to Siabod, the system was in disarray because the lowslope moles, the crafty ones, had, on the whole, begun to yield to the grikes’ pressure and compromised their wills and their tunnels in the vain hope of saving their lives.

It was for this reason that the moles summoned by Glyder to meet the southerners and share their knowledge of the grikes, came solely from the moles of high Siabod. Even so Glyder warned Alder that many would not trust outsiders and might need to be won over. Alder smiled at this: he remembered having to win over the Duncton moles, and saw no reason why he should have difficulty in Siabod.

“But let me do it my way, Glyder, as Tryfan would if he were here.”

“I shall trust you as I would trust him,” promised great Glyder.

The moles took several days to gather but when they had they wasted few words on formalities. Nowhere in high Siabod was wormful enough to support so many for long, especially in winter when the cold has set in.

As Glyder introduced Alder and Marram to the others they saw they were a grim-looking lot. Huge and ugly of snout, heavy of shoulder, with talons that seemed to dent the earth where they rested, and with solitary natures that did not mix easily with each other. Cwm was the only lowslope mole there, and though he would have been regarded as an average-sized mole in most systems, he seemed small in that great company.

There was an impressive solemnity about them all, and their deep throated reverence as they followed Glyder in prayer impressed Alder greatly.