Duncton Wood (39 page)

It took him three hours or so to make the full circuit, and since, at this depth, there was no food supply at all and he was hungry and tired, he returned to the Chamber of Dark Sound and cut across it to the eastern entrance, along which he knew he would have no trouble finding food.

He returned after a good sleep, carefully bringing with him some worms, which he stored in a cache in the circular tunnel; and then he went into the nearest of the flint-lined entrances toward the murmur of sound, anxious to get on with what he hoped was the final exploration into the heart of the Ancient System.

The tunnel was small and crudely burrowed into the subsoil, with a packed floor, rough walls and a simple rounding for the roof. After a short way, it split into two and, taking the right-hand fork. Bracken found that it almost immediately split into two again. Worse, the tunnel began to curve confusingly and then cut across other tunnels, and split yet more times. To add to this spatial confusion, the deeper he got, the louder the stressed murmuring he had just heard so ominously in the Chamber of Dark Sound became, while the echoes of his pawsteps kept coming back to him, running in from all directions, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to confuse him, disappearing off behind him. Until be stopped, lost, and with no idea of whether he was going forward or backward, away from the center of the system or toward it.

It took him two long hours to find his way back again, and then only with the greatest skill and patience as he marked each turn and thought carefully back to the twists and turns he could remember.

It was while he was in the worrying process of doing this, crouching and thinking what to do next and making no noise himself, that he began to suspect what the vague murmurings he had first heard were, or seemed to be. They were muffled and soft, but there was enough edge and harshness to the louder of them for him to think that they must. be the sound of the roots of the beech trees that protected the buried part of the Stone. He was getting closer.

When he finally got back to the safety of the circular tunnel and had eaten, he was sufficiently stirred by the realization of how near he was to want to go back quickly and try again.

What followed took him not minutes or hours but five days, and is now regarded as one of the greatest feats of tunnel analysis by any single mole. For the tunnel of echoes into which Bracken had entered, and in which he might easily have been lost and never heard of again, had been deliberately designed by the ancient moles to protect the Stone from just such interlopers as Bracken. Once, it had been protected by living moles as well, and he certainly would not have gotten as far as even the Chamber of Dark Sound. But the original designers of the system had foreseen that some catastrophe might one day overtake it, as it clearly had, and so had provided the Stone with the extra protection of the tunnels whose challenge Bracken now faced.

His approach was careful and methodical, and it took a very long time. He began by marking each split or subsidiary tunnel he came to in such a way that only one route that he took was the “main” one. When it circled back on itself or led to a dead end, he remarked it, thus trying one permutation after another. He progressed slowly at first, but then found that at some points in the tunnels the sound of the roots was louder, perhaps nearer, and he rerouted his chief route in the direction of the sound. Because of the subtlety of the echoes, this often led him round, back to a way he had come, or again to dead ends. But slowly the route he developed did seem to go deeper into the circle and the roots’ sounds grew louder yet again, but just when it seemed to him that he was about to get there – wherever
there
was – they only led him nowhere.

But then he began to notice a new element in the tunnels that went with the sound – tunnel vibrations. As the sound began to define itself more clearly into stresses and creaks, long moans and pullings, so, too, matching vibrations came down the tunnel and he felt them with his paws: shakings, jolts and shudderings.

His excitement grew. As the sound got louder, the tunnel grew straighter until, pressing rapidly on and with no side turnings to worry about, he was suddenly out of it at last, and had successfully passed through the labyrinth of echoes into a place whose sights and shuddering sounds were of such enormity that he crouched there dumbfounded.

He was among the living roots of one of the gigantic beeches that protected the Stone, and they moved continually in response to the eternal swayings and stressings of the wind-touched tree whose trunk and branches they fed and supported. From a darkness high above him they plunged down through the soil, massive and vibrant, twisting down through the chalky floor on which he crouched. They stretched beyond him in a tangle of verticals and angles, some massive and thick, others fine and thin: some entwined about each other, some vibrating tautly. Each made some kind of noise, each noise was different. The whole made a sound that was distorted and tangled, like a thicket of dry brambles blown by the wind. There was no clear path ahead, for the roots snaked down this way and that, and their continuous movement gave him the impression that if there was a route, it was always changing.

To add to his confusion and sense of there being no direction ahead, there were no walls to the chamber into which he had entered. The roots not only stretched in a terrifying tangle into the distance ahead of him, but to either side as well.

He noticed that imprisoned among some of the tight vertical tangle of the roots were great lumps of hard soil or rock, which seemed either to have fallen from the ceiling or been lifted bodily from the floor, imprisoned in a cage of living, moving bars. Sometimes dust or small fragments fell from them as a result of the stress they were under. He saw plunging from ceiling to floor one root which seemed to pull upward periodically and then sink back. With each upward pull, a long boulder of chalk rose higher and higher from where the root left the ground until, before Bracken’s startled eyes, the fragment, which was many times bigger than himself, pulled out of the ground and toppled with a crash of dust and fragments onto the floor of the chamber, breaking one of the thinner roots, which twanged loudly into the darkness above as it did so.

In some places the roots seemed to have forced themselves through the floor so powerfully that great fissures and-crevices radiated dangerously from them, and when the roots moved dust and sound seemed to fly up from the jagged depths beneath.

Bracken looked on this terrifying scene for a very long time before turning his back on it and returning through the circuitous, echoing tunnels whose labyrinths absorbed the rootsound behind him, back to the outer circular tunnel. He was not yet ready to press on among the roots themselves.

It was at this point that Bracken showed again his special skill and foresight as an explorer. Some instinct, perhaps an awe of the venerable place he was in, told him that he must not leave the route he had found so clearly marked as it now was. And so, after more rest and food, he set himself to memorize it, slowly removing each marking the further his memory took him toward the roots.

Until at last he could run the whole route almost by instinct, navigating the labyrinths all the way to the Chamber of Roots without any need of markers. Only then was he even prepared to press on, but even then he did not do so. Instead, he began his exploration of another of the entrances, progressing up it the same way, though finding his task much easier now that he had done the same thing already.

In this way Bracken taught himself to find his way among three of the ways into the center and in doing so discovered, or rather deduced, that the labyrinth of echoes was interconnected right round the perimeter of the Stone, while the Chamber of Roots was really one big chamber, with no walls but those formed by roots. Though what lay beyond them he did not yet know and was a mystery he would need great courage and fortune to solve.

Yet, when the hour came to set off among the roots themselves, his attempt to pass through was a failure, and a curious one. It was not that he was afraid of the roots exactly, though their massive movement and confusing noise was enough to terrify anymole; nor was it that it would not have been possible to find his way into them in much the same way as he had through the labyrinth of echoes. It was subtler than that.

In his first attempt, for example, he got no farther than perhaps ten moleyards before his mind began to wander and he began to wonder
why
he was there and what the point was. He was out of the Chamber of Roots almost before he knew what he was doing, and only two or three hours later wondered why he had not gone on.

Another time he made a more determined effort and indeed got farther into a complex of roots from which he could no longer see the entrance to the chamber. But then the roots got denser and more sinewy, even the marks he made just behind him on the ground seemed to start disappearing, and he got the feeling that he was being watched from somewhere to his left. By mole? By beast? He felt panic coming over him and, try as he might to control it, he could not – though it cleared the moment he turned round and started back, stumbling quickly through the noise and heaving roots, afraid for a time that he would not find the way out again.

He tried once more, on a day that must have been calm on the surface, for the roots were whispering quietly, and he did quite well until he suddenly felt a pleasant tiredness coming over him and the roots ahead seemed to open out invitingly for him to lie down... He had to shake himself to keep awake, only realizing when he did so that what lay ahead of him was a great crevice, wide and deep, and delving down to a rugged darkness from which slidings and hissings of thin roots seemed to come. Once more he turned back.

Each time he got back to the entrance of the chamber, however, these curious feelings immediately cleared and, looking back at the roots, they seemed their normal, massive, threatening selves, but no more than that.

Finally, he decided to take a break – perhaps, after all, the time had come to return to the surface, for he had been involved in this exploration for many days. He had lost his sense of timing, thinking that perhaps only fifteen or twenty days had passed since he had left Rue, yet when he finally reached the surface he was surprised to find it was chilly, even though it was afternoon. The wood was filled with the chill light of the end of October, when most of the leaves have gone and the wind stirs the remainder irritably.

Then he knew that he must have been gone for many moleweeks and wondered what it was about the Ancient System that made a mole seem to lose his sense of time.

Bracken shivered at the cold and felt in need of company. Well, he could visit Rue; she was always glad to see him – and always glad to see him go! He laughed a little as he bustled off down the slopes to see her, thinking that he was getting to know her ways, and how pleasant it was to feel the fresh air in his fur and smell the clear scents of the wood again.

He would laugh even more when he got there, and learn something about a kind of mole he had never had anything to do with – young pups. For Rue had littered just a few days before and, for the time being at least, would be delighted to see Bracken again, provided he didn’t come into her birth-burrow uninvited. He could fetch a few worms now and again, and keep away intruders.

   20  

A cold wind blew on the wood’s surface above Rebecca’s burrows where the snout of a brave mole quivered in the shadow of a root. He was the henchmole who had finally refused to let Mekkins enter Rebecca’s tunnels but who had promised to deliver his message and, shocked by what had happened though still fearful for his own safety, he had crept back in the depth of the night to see if there was anything he could to – ostensibly to help Rebecca but in truth to rid himself of the uneasiness he felt at being a party, however coerced, to what had happened.

He crept down the deserted tunnels to her burrow, ready to retreat at the slightest danger. He was a tough mole, a henchmole of experience, an aggressive westsider, but what he saw when he got there made him tremble with a fear greater than any he had ever felt before a fight, or after a close-won victory.