Duncton Wood (100 page)

Boswell finally and slowly turned in his burrow and looked across it to Tryfan. The angry wind of a storm on the surface sounded about them.

“Go to the Stone now,” he said.

Tryfan did not want to leave Boswell, who had been weak and restless all day, refusing to eat his food and saying hardly a word. Tryfan had watched over him troubled, knowing that something was changing and that what they had waited for for so long was here; troubled by not knowing what it was.

“Where are you going?” he asked Boswell. “What are you going to do?”

Boswell went over to him. “Have trust in the Stone, which will tell
you
what to do,” he said. “I must go to the center of the Ancient System where the Stillstone lies and to where Bracken and Rebecca have at last found the silence to return. Pray that the Stone will give me strength, pray that it will send the help I need. Trust the Stone.”

Tryfan watched Boswell turning down toward the Ancient System to where the Chamber of Echoes was, and then turned himself up onto the surface, unhappy to let Boswell out of his sight. He looked so frail as he entered those great tunnels by himself, as if the wind that was growing in strength by the minute would blow him away.

Above Tryfan the beeches were now swaying massively in the wind, and the surface of the Ancient System reverberated to the creakings and knocking of their branches against each other.

The noise was even louder by the Stone, and the wind so wild that it was some time before he saw that Comfrey was crouched before it. He was weeping.

“What is it?” asked Tryfan. “What has happened?”

“I d-don’t know,” said Comfrey. “I’m sure I saw Bracken and Rebecca going to the Stone just like Rose the Healer went to the Stone when I was a pup.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tryfan.

“I d-don’t know,” said Comfrey. “I’m not sure.”

Tryfan stared up at the Stone, the only still thing on a wild and stormy night. He was in awe of it, and afraid now for Bracken, for Rebecca and for Boswell.

He repeated Boswell’s words to him over and over again – “Trust the Stone, trust it —” and then he began to pray, his words lost in the wind as Comfrey sat waiting beside him and the trees began to sway back and forth and against each other and there were sounds of falling branches and a whining and howling as the wind was whipped and cut by the leafless branches in the terrible darkness about them.

The tree by the Stone pulled and stressed above them, even its massive trunk beginning to move before the power of the wind, so that the ground beneath them began to shake and shudder with the stress of the roots pulling through it.

In among the roots of the beech by the Stone, the surface of the pool of rainwater caught among them, where Bracken had taken a drink earlier that day, began to shake with the straining of the tree in the mounting storm.

Boswell approached the Chamber of Echoes slowly, feeling the power of the storm above shaking the tunnel walls all around him. The sounds from the Chamber of Roots were so massive that they drowned out the patter of his paws on the tunnel’s floor but he went calmly, now at peace with himself.

When he stood on the threshold of the Chamber of Roots, which was in violent and dangerous motion everywhere, with crashing of chalk subsoil from the roof above and tearing and crunching across the floor as root fissures heaved and widened before him in clouds of dust and soil, he felt nothing but peace.

The light of the Stillstone led him through the roots safely and beyond to the buried part of the Stone itself.

Down into the depths beneath the Stone he went, the roots of the tree now pulling and straining about him, some twisting under windstress off the tunnel floor and then whipping or crashing down again, while others, enwrapped about the Stone, were pulling at it, pushing it under and around so that the very Stone itself was beginning to shake and move, the tilted end now rising higher above Boswell and then sinking ominously down toward him.

Deep under its lowest part crouched Bracken and Rebecca, the light of the Stillstone filling their fur with brightness and turning everything it touched into white.

As he went forward to this most sacred of places, Boswell sought to see what he had looked for for so long: the Seventh Book. The Stillstone was there, but where was the Book, where was it hidden? His eyes cast about into the shadows caused by the Stillstone among the shifting roots and into the recesses of the burrow in which Bracken and Rebecca crouched together.

Rebecca turned to him and looked as if she expected to see him there with them both, as if she could read his thoughts. There was no need for words, even if words could have been heard in the increasing sounds of rootstress and strain as the very world they were in seemed to be swaying and pulling and collapsing, and they were the only still things in it.

She looked at him as he at her and knew he was wondering where the Book was. Don’t you know? she seemed to be saying without saying a word. Oh, Boswell, don’t you know?

Bracken turned to him, a look of unutterable joy about him as the Stillstone glimmered and shone brighter about them and cast its light onto Boswell’s fur. The Book’s here, you have it, you have it. Bracken was thinking, and Boswell had no need to hear the words; he knew them. You have it, it is yours already.

The light from the Stillstone shone fully now on Boswell, whose fur seemed as white before it as that of Bracken and Rebecca.

The Stone above them began to move more and more, pulled and pushed by the roots of the tree that, high above where Comfrey and Tryfan waited and prayed in the storm, was caught more and more strongly by the wind, and its aged roots began a battle through the night against the storm’s might.

Now the Stone moved on the surface. A gap between its base and surrounding soil appeared that widened and narrowed to the swaying of the tree above it. The ground began to tremor and Comfrey began to pray aloud.

Among the roots beneath the great Stone in the silence created by love, Bracken turned to the Stillstone and took it up. Its brightness did not fade nor did its glimmering cease as it had when he had touched it once before. Now its light traveled into his paw and from there to his body and over his fur and into his eyes, and where his other paw touched Rebecca’s its light traveled on until both seemed aflame with the Stillstone’s light and there were no words, they were beyond words as Bracken joyfully passed the Stillstone to Boswell of Uffington.

As Boswell took the Stillstone he saw that its light stayed on with Bracken and Rebecca, for it was in them now and shining from them as their love had done, growing stronger and stronger every moment. Above them, the Duncton Stone’s tilted base began to rise and fall, and fall farther, and rise and fall farther again, and Boswell could only see them vaguely now, in the light of their love where they seemed to be dancing before him, laughing and dancing and singing “You have the Book, you have the Book” as the Stone was pulled at by the tree roots out on the surface tilting first toward Uffington and then away from it up toward the storm-filled sky, back and forth as the beech tree began to lose its battle with the wind, its roots growing weaker and weaker as the Stone swayed and pulled itself more and more upright, more toward the sky.

But underground Boswell could only see the white light of the Stillstone and feel the joy of holding it as he watched, or felt, the dance in its light of Bracken and Rebecca. Oh, he wanted to join them, to dance with them, to cast off the weight of his old body as they were doing and dance where his crippled paw would not slow him, nor his age, nor the cold, nor the wind that was straightening the Stone and making it fall blissfully upon them.

Did he want any more to find the Seventh Book? Did it matter when the dance in the light was such joy? As he started forward toward them he saw, from the brightness of where Bracken and Rebecca had been crouched together so peacefully, Rebecca’s smile coming toward him and love and trust for him in her eyes. He heard her voice with Bracken’s as they said, or called, or sang “Not yet, not yet, go back beloved, for yours is the task of the Seventh Stillstone, we give you the Book Boswell beloved, beloved mole who has loved us, we give you the Book that you may inscribe it, the great Book of Silence, the lost and the last Book, for you who have lived it are its author-protector scribe and creator and the Stillstone will give you the strength for the scribing beloved Boswell, White Mole of Uffington.”

Boswell reached a paw forward to touch his Rebecca, to feel the fur of Bracken, for he wanted to join them and not take this burden, for who was he before their light or before the Stone? “Help me,” he called out. “Help me!”

And the light from the Stillstone traveled into his paw and from there to his body and over his fur until it shone from his eyes so that he had the courage to turn away from their light into the sound of the wind and the cold, and feel again the weight of his frail body. But he knew that their love was within him and that he would scribe the great Book of Silence. The lost and the last Book.

Above him the great mass of the Stone’s base began finally to sink down upon him and behind him upon Bracken and Rebecca, roots breaking about him as it crashed down through them, but holding the Stillstone he ran from under the Stone’s base as his old limbs raced to escape the cracking roots and shattering soil; he heard the thump of the Stone behind him and he began to turn back up the tunnel to the hollow of the tree, which swayed and shook before him as he picked his way around its edge, limping and hobbling with great difficulty because of the Stillstone, trying to get away as the tree began to pull out its roots beneath the Stone and start to sway and crash and begin to fall.

As the tree began its final descent he called out “Tryfan, Tryfan, help me. Now you can help me. Tryfan, yours is the power.”

Mole upon mole had come to the circular chamber around the Chamber of Echoes, from which the fiercest sounds came, drawn by a sense that a great moment of change was taking place in the system, fearful of the sounds and awed by the majesty.

They chattered and stamped their paws with fear, for somemole had said he had seen Bracken and Rebecca go into the chamber and that Boswell was there as well and all moles could sense that danger and great joy were there together.

“Should we go in, should we help, can we do anything?” they whispered and muttered to each other, looking fearfully at the entrances to the chamber, not one there with the courage to enter in. Some braver moles wandered from entrance to entrance, passing by all seven of them still unable to find the strength they needed to risk going in. Most just stared.

But all of them agreed afterward on one strange and mysterious fact. As they watched and trembled they seemed to hear the singing of a sacred song whose words they knew but which they had, until then, forgotten. And all began to sing it, a song of hope and exaltation that spoke of the coming of a White Mole.

Then suddenly, as their song gained strength, Tryfan entered the circular tunnel, the only completely calm and silent one among them. He stared for a moment at one of the entrances into the Chamber of Echoes by which so many of the moles had been crouched hesitating. He was strong and purposeful and, moving without pause or apparent hesitation, he boldly entered into the echoing tunnel from whose darkness the sounds of stressing destruction were coming. He did it so naturally that, seeing him, a mole might have thought he had been that way before....

The strange thing is that afterward each mole in the circular tunnel swore, and would have sworn by the Stone, that it was the entrance that they were standing near by which Tryfan entered – which is impossible, for how could Tryfan or anymole enter all seven entrances at once?

As he disappeared from sight the song fell away from them and they waited in terrible fear as the root-pulling and stressing reached a climax of destructive sound. Yet although many of them wanted to run away to a place of safety not one moved, for they sensed they were witnessing a moment of profound change, a moment of wonder.

And then back out of the tunnel Tryfan came, half carrying and half pulling old Boswell of Uffington, who was covered in dust and grime and barely conscious from the power of the forces that had so nearly overwhelmed him. And who carried, clasped against his old chest, a small pebble or stone that looked as if it had nothing special about it to make a mole want to carry it out from such destruction.

Up on the surface by the Stone, where he had watched the storm continue into the first light of a wild, gray dawn, Comfrey saw the beech by the Stone finally sway back and back, and back and down, as its crown and branches and trunk crashed through the surrounding trees, and one by one its roots tore themselves from the soil around the Stone, which swayed and rocked on the edge of the crater they had left.

Then, as he watched, the Stone slipped back and down into where the roots had been until it stood firm and upright, no longer tilted by the roots toward Uffington, but upright as it must originally have been, with its great sides and top thrusting straight up into the sky.

But even though the crashing tree thundered and shook through all the tunnels of the Ancient System and the walls of the circular tunnel where the moles had gathered cracked and fissured by the shock,, that was not what the moles noticed. What made them gasp in awe, and sing the sacred song that all moles thought they had forgotten, was that they saw that Boswell was changed. In the time he had been caught in the violence of the Chamber of Roots and seen the Stillstone’s light pass into Bracken and Rebecca, he had become a Holy Mole surrounded by silent love; and they saw that his fur had turned completely white. The White Mole had come. They sang in exaltation and reached out to touch him.

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