Duncton Wood (59 page)

Bracken found it hard to understand these ideas but the exercises Medlar made him do made him
feel
the truth of them and so come to know them from within rather than from without. Discussing them with Boswell, he discovered that while Boswell often understood them better, he found it harder to feel them – neither was sure which was best, or worst.

So the molemonths passed, and the meadow grass on the surface of the Nuneham system began to grow green and lush with the coming of June. More and more grasses and flowers appeared, as the early spring plants gave way to red and white clover, the waving pink flowers of ragged robin, while white clusters of sneezewort and pink cuckoo flowers grew down nearer the river where, in moments of relaxation, the moles occasionally explored. While the river itself flowed more languidly, tiny whirlpools of water catching and circling into nothing at its edge, where the shadows of tall reed, reedmace and fluttering yellow flag fell; and the occasional chub or roach took food on the surface, the roundling circlets of their rise traveling and fading slowly with the flow.

Then, quite suddenly. Bracken began to miss Duncton Wood. He missed the high cover of green leaves, always rustling above, and the different sounds of birds – blackbird and thrush, treecreeper and chaffinch – scurrying and hopping, some on the surface, others on the branches, their massed song at daybreak sharper and much clearer than the more diffused song out here of a system in the open. He missed the beech trees he had grown to love. He missed the darker rich smell of the tunnels, where the worms moved easily, and the surface litter, so much richer in grubs and insects than green grass.

He missed the sound of a Duncton voice. He missed Rue. But most of all, and most mysteriously to him, he missed Rebecca. The more he sat and didn’t think, as Medlar insisted that he should, the more he learned to feel the spirit of Stonecrop or Boswell, and of himself; the more he turned to face the world about him through learning how to fight... the more he missed Rebecca.

There were days when her memory would nag at him, and he would look about him as if the world was incomplete, and there was something just outside his reach which needed to be put in place for it all to be right again. He remembered running through the chamber of roots beneath the Stone, when she was ahead of him. He could feel her touch on his shoulder and her voice, gentler and yet fuller than any birdsong he had ever heard, as it spoke again to him. My love. My sweet love. She
had
said those words to him, she had, she did, my love, my Rebecca. And the stone beneath the Stone, the stone that had glimmered and played its light around them! The Stillstone! He had touched it; he could still feel its pattern on his paw, and could scratch it on the ground and wonder at it, thinking of her. She had touched his fur, and he remembered touching hers, he did, he had, his love Rebecca.

Talking about her did not help, or any other of his Duncton memories. One day he suddenly took it into his head to tell Stonecrop about Cairn. He told him just as it was, the terrible love and ache of it all, his spirit turning weak from the telling. He said again what he had said then about Rebecca, and Stonecrop nodded because he remembered her. Stonecrop didn’t say much but just heaved his body sadly, the look in his eyes a mixture of loss and anger, and disgust at the memory of Mandrake’s odor in a temporary burrow by a wood’s edge, a smell he had not forgotten.

No, talking was no use. Bracken tried to tell Boswell about the stone in the heart of the Ancient System but the words died in his mouth and he could not take Boswell past the Chamber of Echoes in his account, lying – “No, no. I couldn’t get through, it’s impossible” – and the lie was better than betraying the memory of the glimmering stone where he and Rebecca were... what? Where we
were
was the best way he could tell it to himself. Bracken wanted to leave Nuneham.

So did Stonecrop, and Mullion as well; while Boswell left those things to Bracken, whose words were sometimes jumbled and confused but whose instincts he trusted and would always follow, as the Stone itself seemed to have insructed him to do. Medlar agreed. He had known before any of them that there was no more he could do – a mole must learn the rest himself. And anyway, he had more to learn himself, and a place he must go to.

“You will find there is much more to learn,” Medlar said finally at the end of the first week of June, “and that none of it is very far from your heart. Indeed, I will let you into a secret!” Medlar said this jovially, for he was relieved that his task was done. June was a time to travel, and he wanted to leave Nuneham himself and head for Uffington, to where, he knew now, he had always been going.

“You do not have to
learn
anything. You know it all already. Each one of you. It’s all here!” And he thumped his old chest cheerfully, laughing gaily as if everything was really so simple that it was absurd worrying about it, which it was.

“As for fighting, when you no longer need to fight at all, you will know when you have learned enough. This is not a mystery but a simple fact. A real fighter does not need to raise one single talon to quell an opponent – unless it be to teach him a lesson of the crudest sort!” Medlar looked at Stonecrop when he said this, remembering their first meeting, and then laughed again.

“We are living in a strange time, which is why I am going to Uffington. By the Stone’s grace I will get there. As for you, each of you has the strength to be a warrior, as we all have.”

They said their farewells at night by the Nuneham Stone. Medlar spoke to each of them in turn – including Mullion, of whom he had grown especially fond – and then said a prayer to the Stone itself. Boswell said a prayer as well and then uttered the journey blessing on Medlar. And when Medlar had gone, he said it again, so that its protection would go with old Medlar, who had awakened so much in all their hearts.

The June moon was waxing and strong. “We’ll travel all together,” said Bracken with a strong spirit which they all respected, even Stonecrop. “We’ll head straight for the Duncton Stone. Just look at the moon! You know what it means for a Duncton mole? Midsummer’s coming! And there’s words I’ve promised to say by the Stone on Midsummer Night.”

“We’ll have to push it to get there that quick,” said Stonecrop.

“We will!” said Bracken. He stayed on alone by the Nuneham Stone for a moment after the others had set off, his snout pointing toward Duncton, whose pull he could feel and which would get stronger as the moon got fuller and the days advanced toward Midsummer. And looking at it, and then in the direction of Duncton Wood, he remembered another light, white, glimmering, and whispered “Rebecca, Rebecca,” and laughed aloud into the night.

   30  

F
EW
springs had ever been as miserable in spirit as that in which Rune consolidated his power in Duncton Wood. Under his black thrall the system became in fact what the pasture moles had always feared it was – a place where evil spells are woven by minds that lurk in darkness and by moles whose smiles are as warm as the welcome an owl gives to its prey.

Rune’s power came initially from the vicious loyalty of the henchmoles whose favor he had fostered so successfully under Mandrake, and who now did his bidding whenever it came, and for whatever purpose.

He was well aware that since the henchmoles had given him power, they could, in theory at least, take it away again. For this reason, once he was installed as leader of the Duncton system, he began a policy of winning their gratitude by granting them favors of territory and matings and securing their fear by imposing particularly cruel and rough punishment on those henchmoles who transgressed his deliberately arbitrary rules. He had noticed how Mandrake had made everymole fear him by occasionally picking on one at random and killing or maiming him for all to see.

Rune’s method was more subtle and perhaps even more effective. He would arbitrarily select a henchmole and accuse him of a crime that had not been a crime the day before, and was not one again in the days that followed. Perhaps a henchmole had killed another one unnecessarily in a mating fight – nothing normally wrong with that at all in Rune’s system: the more killing the better! But suddenly, out of the blue, that mole would be accused of harming Duncton by attacking a colleague and a friend, and Rune would throw his fate open to the whim of the groups of trusty henchmoles who always stayed close by him, currying his favor. Great was their joy not to be the victim; pleasantly were their sadistic imaginations stretched to think of a way of punishing him. Injure him and leave him for the owls to take alive? Crush his snout and let him die slowly in full view of Barrow Vale? Whatever was decided Rune liked to watch, and he rarely left a scene of punishment without his own talons being covered in blood and his unpleasant laughter carrying above that of the rest.

At the same time, he encouraged henchmoles to spy on each other and on other moles, and to tell him what they had found out. His punishments for moles successfully accused were always grim and form one of the cruelest, and saddest, periods in the history of Duncton. Maimings, Windings, snout-crushings and enforced cannibalism – the list is as long, as dark and as bloody as each individual death the henchmoles devised.

By the beginning of March, Rune had the henchmoles completely under his control, and with them all the system but the Marsh End. That he preferred to leave alone for a while longer, for fear that the disease that had broken out there – a rumor successfully propagated by Mekkins, who intended to resist Rune in every way he could – would spread into the main system. But if a henchmole could get hold of a wandering marshender, that was fine, and what cruel pleasure was had by all before the poor creature died!

As March had begun and the mating season got under way, there was a certain decrease of the violence, for it had served its purpose and the henchmoles deserved to take their pleasures in mating and fighting among themselves and others. The sight of the big and bullying west-siders, from whose ranks most of the henchmoles came, as they roamed about seeking mates became familiar in all the system, where females waited in abject fear, and males from such areas as the eastside and around Barrow Vale preferred to scurry away and hide, lest they be lured into a mating fight they could not win.

The henchmoles did not, however, always have things their own way. One female called Oxlip, who lived near the Marsh End, objected to the invasion of her tunnels by a henchmole and, with a combination of cunning and sheer anger, succeeded not only in killing him but also injured another henchmole who was lurking nearby.

Rune’s reaction was to kill the injured one who reported the incident “for bringing shame to the henchmoles” and then to send others to find the female. They failed, for Oxlip turned north to the Marsh End, where Mekkins accepted her as a marshender, glad to have anymole brave enough to fight and flee from the henchmoles.

But just as spiders suddenly appear from nowhere in damp September, so does evil manifest itself when a mole like Rune takes power. Strange, dark creatures of moles, diseased in mind, distorted in body, began to appear from the darkness in which they had so long lurked and gather in the shadows that surrounded Rune. An old female from the eastside, for example, appeared one day in Barrow Vale – her thin and haggard appearance and the cast of danger in her body all so threatening that the henchmole who found her and dared not touch her took her to Rune.

Although her origin was vaguely known – she said herself that she came from beyond the eastside – no mole knew her name. The henchmole called her Nightshade and Rune very quickly seemed to take to her,, liking to have her misshapen form lurking in the tunnels and burrows from which he ruled Duncton. He saw the silly, superstitious fear she caused others and so exploited it. It was said that she knew dark and secret rituals banished from Duncton by the moles of the Ancient System and handed down in some outback of the eastside by generation after generation of moles waiting for just such a moment as this. However it was, no henchmole dared to risk angering her or getting in her way before dawn, when she liked to squirm about the surface muttering and cursing to herself and casting spells that left an odor in the air.