Duncton Wood (4 page)

“He’s the clever one, he is,” moles were inclined to whisper about him. “He’ll know when his opportunity comes. He’ll take over the system one day with his cunning ways and warning words.”

Two elders came from the south of the system, Mekkins and Dogwood. Mekkins was the nearest the system ever got to having a marshender as an elder, for his mother was from there, though he was raised in the neutral territory south of Barrow Vale. He spoke in the quick snouty way marshenders used, and enjoyed combining direct talk with a mocking turn of phrase.

“Yer not going to tell me yer serious about that daft idea, Burrhead me old lad?” he’d say to one of the west-sider’s more ponderous ideas. “You’ll not get anymole
I
know ter go along with it. I’ll tell you that right now.”

His contacts with the marshenders made him a useful elder, while his contacts with the other elders made him useful to the marshenders. He was tough and quick, and likely to flare up for no reason at all, as it seemed to the victims of his temper. Dogwood, the other elder from the south, was his close friend and, as close friends often are, a complete contrast. He was plump and perennially cheerful. He had the reputation, envied throughout the system, of being the best wormfinder in Duncton Wood. “He’d find a worm in a snowflake if he had to” was how Mekkins once put it.

The oldest of the elders was Hulver, who had seen six Longest Nights through – six! – and it made many a Duncton mole gasp to think of it. But he was old now, very old, and had not mated last spring. But he was still cheerful and sprightly, with a way of laughing at the end of a sentence that made a mole think that nothing he said was more than a joke. But wiser moles knew better, and listened well to what he had to say. In his lifetime he had seen the system decline and had often said so. He was one of the few who remembered the old rituals and sayings and he talked of the Stone as if it were a friend at his flank.

“The less that he do say, the more then he do mean,” his confidant, colleague, fellow elder and hearty protagonist, Bindle, was fond of saying. Bindle himself had seen four Longest Nights through and though he fought little and was one of the eccentrics who lived over on the poor eastside near the chalk escarpment, he was never short of a mate.

He and Hulver would often meet and chatter in the wood, old moletalk about worms and past summers, and mates and litters the like of which you never see today. No, sir! The females just aren’t what they used to be!

Between them, Hulver and Bindle had taken over the duties of conducting the rituals, principally the two treks up to the Stone at Midsummer and Longest Night. Only Hulver knew all the rituals, and he worried that no other mole knew them as he did. But somehow, Bindle himself never wanted to learn them, not the important parts, the parts that mattered. And the truth was that Hulver didn’t want to teach them to him. For to speak the rituals you had to know that power of life was in the Stone, and outside it, too. And you had to see that an acorn, a worm, an anemone in Barrow Vale, and even a swooping owl were finally the same, and that a mole’s strivings were nothing but the crack of an acorn husk in a deserted wood.

Hulver tried to explain to Bindle, but the words couldn’t come right: and Bindle, who loved old Hulver as if he were his own father, could only smile and nod as he tried to explain, and wish he could please his old friend by understanding. But both knew he did not.

So there they were, six out of the seven elders; Burr-head, Rune, Mekkins, Dogwood, Bindle and Hulver. An unimpressive bunch when set against the elders of the past who had fought and bred in pride when the system was on top of the hill in every sense of the word. None of them, with the exception perhaps of gentle Hulver, remains even a whisper in the tunnels of memory.

But there was one more, the seventh. A mole whose shadow had the smell of evil, whose very name still seems a curse on the mole who utters it.

Many a mother has tried to still the tongues of youngster moles who ask in an excited, unknowing whisper “Who was Mandrake? Tell us about
him!”
Many a father has cuffed a son as he pretended to be “as strong as Mandrake was.” They felt his name was better left unsaid, his memory much better scratched with talons from the recesses of the mind.

But that is not the way to fight evil. Let its name be called. Let the fire of the sun do battle with its form until it lies dried out ond colorless in the evening shade; no more than a dead beetle’s wing to be carried off on the midnight wind.

But there
are
books in Uffington that tell his tale and this must do the same. For he is the shadow against which the light of the love of Bracken and Rebecca should be set. But let compassion and burning love be in the heart of any that thinks, or speaks, or dreams or reads the name of Mandrake.

   3  

H
E
came to the system over the open fields, unopposed by owl or pasture mole, a thunderstorm that rained down blood. He cast his shadow on the wood long before he reached it, for the adult males shuddered and shook in advance of his coming, gathering first at Barrow Vale and then going in twos and threes down the tunnels to the westside, where the pastures are.

They saw him in the setting sun one spring evening, his silhouette growing bigger and more threatening as the sun set. They scuffed and stamped in the tunnels, running this way and that, crying out in fear and upset, half attacking each other before turning to face a mole whose very size made their muscles grow weak.

Saying nothing, he slowly advanced on them all, his great head hunched forward, his snout like a huge talon, his shoulders like yew trunks.

The first that came to him he hardly seemed to touch, yet down he fell, not only dead but torn to death; the second died of a talon thrust so powerful that it seemed to start at his snout and end at his tail; the third turned to run even before he attacked, but too late. A mighty lunge from Mandrake caught him too, and he lay screaming, his black fur savaged open, red blood glistening. And as Mandrake passed by, he coldly crashed his snout and left him there arced out in
a
bloody, searing, ruthless death. Then they backed before him this way and that, chattering in fear, running away, taking to surface routes in their fright.

So Mandrake entered the Duncton westside, resistance by the toughest moles in the system crushed, and made straight for Barrow Vale. There, he roared and smote the walls so that all the system would know from the shuddering vibrations that he had come. “My name is Mandrake,” he roared, “Mandrake! Let anymole that opposes me come forward now.” But the three bravest were dead and not one single mole more stirred. Then he cried out in a strange, harsh tongue, the language of Siabod, which lay far to the northwest and was a system of which no Duncton mole had ever even heard at that time.

“Mandrake Siabod wyf i, a wynebodd Arthur Helgi Cwmoerddrws a’i anwybyddu. Wynebais Gerrig Castell y Gwynt a’u gwatwar. Ga dewch i unrhyw wadd a feddylio nad yw’n f’ofni wynebu’m crafangau nawr.” Whatever it meant its intent was clear. It was a threat, and one no Duncton mole dared answer.

He had come at mating time, a full cycle of seasons before Rebecca’s maturing and Bracken’s birth, and he traveled to all parts of the system killing male after male to take their females. Even the males that refused to fight, or tried to run clear, he killed. Fighting is one thing, killing another, and no mating time in Duncton was ever so overcast as that. And when it was over and the warmer days of May came on, he brooded here and there – now over to the westside, now down to the Marsh End. He said barely a word throughout this terrible time, a brooding, silent curse upon anymole whose territory he moved into. Many were the empty burrows that he found, still warm from the moles who had left in haste to avoid facing him. Only mothers with young remained, watching terrified as he stared at them from a burrow entrance, his head massive and his eyes as black as night, staring at their children. But these, at least, he didn’t harm.

He became an elder without asking or being asked, after killing an elder in a mating fight and taking his place.

He said nothing at the first elder meeting he attended, merely staring at the others, who conducted the business in a hurried hush with furtive glances in his direction. Only two males showed any reaction other than fear at the meeting: Hulver greeted him formally and then ignored him, refusing to be hurried or harried by the others into doing
his
part of the business any faster, while Rune, ever conscious of where he might find advancement, made ingratiating comments like “We would all agree that it would be a privilege if he that is new, and welcome, among us might give us his view.” To which Mandrake said absolutely nothing.

In May he attended his second elder meeting, again saying not a word. But at his third, in June, when plans for the Midsummer trek to the Stone were being debated, he made his first move.

There were now grave doubts among some of the younger elders as to whether the Midsummer trek was worthwhile; Burrhead, in particular, argued that the known presence of more owls up on the hill, combined with the scarcity of worms that year and the many changes that had come over the system (they all knew that he was referring to the many deaths that had overtaken them following Mandrake’s arrival) were all factors that made the Midsummer trek of doubtful value. Rune agreed, adding that the trek was merely a sentimental throwback to the past when “aims were different than they are now and there was a greater need to keep the system together by a show of unity such as the trek represented.”

“We’ve grown beyond that now, and many of us,” and Rune glanced slowly round at them all in turn, his dark gaze settling finally on Hulver, “no longer accept the kind of invocations and nonsense that the Midsummer ritual involved.”

This was too much for old Hulver, who found that a combination of anger and fear ran through him as he listened to Rune’s words: “I am the oldest here,” he started, sensing immediately that it was just the wrong thing to say, “and I tell you that our ancestors would shudder if they thought that the Midsummer trek, the happiest celebration in the system, was talked of as a sentimental tradition. It is a part of the system, a celebration of the fact that, individually, we are nothing” – and he looked at all of them in turn as Rune had done, including Mandrake, who sat brooding at the end of the burrow —” but that we acknowledge in the Stone the presence of something beside which we may feel we are nothing but without which, I tell you all, we truly are nothing, however strong we may think we are.”

His words, especially the last ones, hung ominously over the meeting for a while as everymole there expected Mandrake to react to them. But he stayed still, listening. Then Hulver came forward into the center of the burrow so that he was in their midst, his aging, wrinkled snout and graying fur contrasting with the younger, glossy fur all about him. “Something has happened in our system,” he said quietly, “something more difficult to fight than owls, or wormless soil, or a gang of pasture moles. I wish I had the words to explain to those who do not understand how bold and true Duncton moles once were. They were warriors, not fighters; believers, not arguers. And that is how they still could be and how, deep down and with the right leadership from us elders, they still are.”

He paused for a moment, sensing that of them all only Bindle was truly listening and even he, for all his love, could not understand.

His snout wearily touched the burrow floor for a moment, despair seeping through his body, for he had not the strength or the words to say what he meant. He wanted to wrench out the feeling that was so strong in his heart and show it to them and say “Look,
now
can you see it, now can you see what we must do?”

But he could only wish he could conjure up before these young tradition-killing moles what it was once
like,
when fighting and worms and territory weren’t everything. But finally all he had strength to say, and then really only to himself, was “We must go on the Midsummer trek to the Stone and speak the ritual as our fathers have, as their fathers did, as we always have. This is not a thing to talk about but do!” Then, looking at each in turn, an upright pride replacing the despair in his stance, he added: “Let anymole who doubts my word go up to the Stone now and crouch in its shadow and feel its strength. Feel, as you crouch there, that far beyond this stricken system, as I believe it has now become, there are other systems – wiser and better than ours. Feel, if you have the strength to do so that...”