Duncton Wood (60 page)

Evil showed itself in other ways, too. Duncton’s normally bright and cheerful spring wildflowers seemed to grow prematurely withered out of the ground – wood anemones drooping, the white petals mottled and limp, while even the normally ebullient dog’s mercury grew rank and fetid where its spiky leaves pierced last year’s dead undergrowth. The sun, normally bright and warm for at least a few days at the end of March, stayed distant and watery, and even when its rays broke through the cloud they were chilly, and the light they cast was cold.

The trees were slow to take leaf, and by mid-April only the hawthorn and occasional horse chestnut was beginning to show green in its buds, miserable against the black trunks and leafless trees that gave the wood a wintry air.

Ordinary moles in the system did their best to keep their snouts out of trouble, staying as quietly as they could in their own tunnels or giving them up without a struggle if some bully of a henchmole fancied taking them. Some sought to find favor and settled old territorial scores by reporting their harmless neighbors to the henchmoles. Others crouched and shivered in their burrows, stirring only to find food, their spirits lowering as the weeks went by.

The fear and stress found their evil way into the very life of the system itself, for far fewer females became pregnant, and of those that did, far more than usual aborted their litter and went pupless into April. Such females were vulnerable to attack, for they were already weak, and Rune made his displeasure with them known. Those who littered were, however, favored – not because of the joy their pups might bring but because their young might make henchmoles in the future, and it was to the future that Rune’s black mind was looking.

As April advanced. Rune, the only mole in Duncton Wood who seemed positively glowing with health, began to relax about the possible return of Mandrake, which he had seen initially as a serious threat. Mandrake had last been seen bringing down the great flints in the Chamber of Dark Sound to halt the henchmoles’ assault upon him, and since then, nothing had been heard. Rune had left several henchmoles at key points around the Ancient System – at Hulver’s old tunnels, by Bracken’s tunnels in the area between the Stone clearing and the pastures, and a few other points where tunnels started. But Mandrake was never seen or heard, and Rune began to suspect that the inevitable had happened and that Mandrake had died in lonely madness somewhere in the forgotten tunnels, or perhaps had left the system altogether to seek out some other place as he had once sought out Duncton. But wherever he was, the henchmoles would never allow him back now.

In any case, as the warmer weather finally and reluctantly began to arrive in the second week of May, Rune became preoccupied with an idea that had been growing in his mind for many moleyears. He wanted to attack the pasture system.

He had suspected for a long time that the pasture moles were not as strong as the Duncton moles feared they were. The number of incidents between the two systems had declined steadily over the moleyears, and it was significant to him that there was no reaction from the pastures after the attack on Cairn. Rune wrongly assumed that the injured Cairn had made his way back to the pastures and from this believed that had the pasture moles been really powerful, they would have attacked Duncton, or at least sought reprisals. But even in the mating season, when there were usually a few incursions, nothing happened.

Rune decided that the time had come to launch a limited assault on the pastures. It was with this objective in mind that he started to gather his henchmoles on the westside at the end of May.

The death of Rose was a deep loss to the pasture system, where she was much loved, and in particular to Brome, who had always revered the trust and advice she had given and that had helped him to take control of the pastures peacefully and with justice.

When her death was reported to him, he had set off at once for Rose’s burrows, for it is the tradition in the pastures that the burrows of a healer are sealed by a mole or moles to whom they have been close. When he got there, he found the tunnels and burrows deserted except for the body of Rose, and a guardmole led him to her main tunnel’s exit on the surface where Rebecca was crouched, snout pointing across the open grass to the darkness of the wood she loved. She had a youngster at her side.

Because he was uncertain how to address a mole who had, by all accounts, lived closer than any other ever had to Rose, if only for the last few molemonths, he said rather formally “It is the custom to seal the burrow.”

Rebecca turned and looked at him, tiredness and loss in her eyes, but a sense of peace as well. Used as Brome was to deference from other moles, he was surprised but relieved to sense none at all in this Rebecca, only a sorrow for the passing of a mole she had obviously loved as well.

“In our system, it is the custom to let the owls have their way,” she said, quietly smiling to him as a token of her sense of his loss.

A little discomfited by the directness of her gaze, Brome asked “What’s
his
name?” looking at Comfrey. Rebecca said nothing, making it clear that Comfrey was old enough to reply for himself.

“My name’s C-C-Comfrey,” he said, looking at Brome with his curious mixture of timidity and interest, “and I’m from D-D-Duncton Wood.” Brome nodded and smiled, but Comfrey went on. “My father was Bracken who went into the marshes. H-He’s coming back.”

Brome had heard about the sad story of Bracken from Mekkins, so he smiled again and nodded his head vaguely, thinking that this was some kind story Rebecca had reassured the youngster with, for no mole returns from the marshes. To his astonishment he saw a look on Rebecca’s face that seemed almost angry, with him, as if she suspected this thought and wished to underline that what she had told Comfrey was indeed true.

This mute exchange surprised Brome and he looked at Rebecca more closely, his curiosity sliding very quickly into a kind of uneasy awe. Never before had he been in the presence of a mole who gave him the impression that she knew exactly what he was feeling. He saw as well that she was very beautiful, with a coat of dark, silvery gray, whose sheen held the light of a clear sky after rain.

He had a dozen things in his mind to say, but they all fell away before her still gaze and he said what was in his heart: “What are we going to do, Rebecca?” She came forward and touched him for a second, a touch that reassured him, and then she led the way back to Rose’s tunnels where, without another word, they sealed the tunnels together, soil falling on their fur as with burrowing sweeps of their paws they retreated before it. It was the pasture way of doing things.

“Will you stay here?” he asked. It was really a plea, for such a mole could bring nothing but good to the system and the pastures had lost much in the passing of Rose.

She nodded, suddenly weary, for she knew that Rose had left her the task of filling her place as healer, a prospect that seemed unreal and impossible to achieve. There was so much she didn’t know and so many things she wished she had asked. So she would be a healer and for the time being she would stay here, for there was nowhere else she could go – certainly not to Duncton, not yet. It was Brome’s turn to sense what was in her mind, for he came nearer her and crouched quietly, his big limbs stretched comfortably by the untidy seal of soil they had just made as he said: “It will be all right here, you know. There are many moles that will need you.”

For a while he hesitated to say more, but finally said “There may be problems if they know that you and Cairn...”

Rebecca looked sharply at him and his words froze in his mouth. Rebecca had a power in her he had never seen before in anymole. “The only way possible for a healer is to live in the truth,” she said. “Cairn and I mated, and he was killed by Mandrake and Rune, two Duncton moles.”

“Well,” said Brome, “I will see that all moles know who you are and why you are here. Only
you
can allay any doubts or fears or hostility they may have.”

“If Stonecrop were here and I could talk to him, he would understand,” she said.

Brome shook his head sadly. “Stonecrop left the system – he wanted to avenge Cairn’s death – but I persuaded him that it would not be right, or safe.” Rebecca smiled, for that was just what Stonecrop would have wanted to do.

“He heard that a great fighter had come to a system said to be quite near here, beyond the pastures, and in company with other moles he went off to find him. The others have come back, but Stonecrop was not with them.”

Rebecca lowered her head. Stonecrop dead, or lost? Another mole gone? Cairn, Bracken, Hulver, Stonecrop, Mandrake. Why so many? She felt as if they were all leaving her, and immediately felt that the thought was wrong. I’m so self-centered! she scolded herself. Then she said: “Bracken was with Cairn when he died,” as if to reassure Brome about Cairn’s death, and through him other pasture moles.

“Who is this Bracken? Everymole I meet from Duncton seems to mention him – you, Mekkins, even Comfrey. Was he one of your mates?” She shook her head. “He was a mole who lived in the Ancient System by the Stone – he knew the tunnels there better than anymole ever has. He is a very special mole.”

“But he’s lost if he’s gone out onto the marsh – no mole ever comes back from there,” said Brome.

“
He
will,” said Rebecca, closing the subject.

Rebecca made her own tunnels quite near where Rose’s had been – but how bare her burrow seemed compared with the cluttered, untidy place that Rose’s was! How she missed the scents and smells of a thousand different herbs!

She saw little of Violet, who had a sort of a burrow of her own nearby but was rarely seen near it for she was quickly getting absorbed into the pasture system and even beginning to speak in the quicker, higher intonation of the pasture moles. Comfrey stayed near – big enough now to make his own burrow, digging it into a long and winding shape, quite unlike any burrow Rebecca had ever seen before. He preferred her not to enter it, and, like Rose, seemed inherently untidy, though always clean.

The fascination with herbs that Rose had inspired in him persisted, and his first long expedition away from Rebecca and the burrows arose out of it. He heard her say one day that she missed the smells of herbs and looked forward to the day when she could go back to Duncton and get some. The following day he disappeared. He returned two days later with a lot of noise and deposited outside her burrow a pile of fresh light-green leaves.

“It’s ch-chamomile,” he said matter-of-factly. “Just the leaves. The flowers aren’t out yet, b-but when they are I’ll get you some. The leaves smell fresh.”

Something else happened that same day that made her feel that at last the clouds that had been above her so long were beginning to lift. There was a timid scratching near her burrow, and when she looked outside, a young and nervous-looking female was standing there in a worried sort of way. She started back when Rebecca appeared and seemed to find difficulty saying anything. She looked very miserable.

“What is it, my love?” asked Rebecca gently. The female stayed where she was, dug her talons nervously in and out of the soil of the tunnel floor, and eventually managed to say “Violet said you would help.”

Rebecca went forward to her until they were almost touching and asked “Are you a friend of Violet’s?” The female nodded, but said nothing. “What’s worrying you?” asked Rebecca gently.

For a moment the female swayed back and forth, her eyes fixed in a mute appeal on Rebecca, and then burst out “I don’t know!” in a voice of despair and started to cry. Rebecca touched her with her paw, felt that her fur was clammy and cold and her head too hot, and somehow she caressed her, held her, touched her, and the female slowly calmed and settled down. Rebecca found herself muttering healing words softly to her, nothing talk, talk about the herbs she wished she had, talk from one heart to another whose individual words are of no account. Until eventually the female got up, eyes bright, and with barely a word went off down the tunnel, leaving Rebecca quite exhausted.

A few days later a male came, saying, “You helped a friend of mine and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, and I don’t know why I’m here, in fact, I think I’ll go away again, it hurts here, well not there
exactly,
I don’t know why I didn’t see to it before, for years actually...” And so, by word of mouth, Rebecca’s work as a healer gently began.

Rune finally launched his attack on the pasture system in mid-June in a spirit of cold curiosity. Like every other aggressive mole in Duncton, he was interested to find out what the pastures, and the moles who lived in them, were like. This factor, coupled with a few well-chosen words to his henchmoles about how “pasture moles periodically murder our females and youngsters” and how “the pride of Duncton Wood is threatened by these cowardly moles” and so on and so forth, was sufficient to give the henchmoles the motive they needed to pass over the wood’s edge and onto the pastures, and from there to make the trek to find tunnels down which they could mount their attack.

But Rune was no fool and he was well aware of the dangers inherent in leading a body of moles who had no experience: at all in warfare. So he was also curious to see how the henchmoles would perform as an attacking group and to find out what lessons he might learn for future, more serious affrays.

His caution was wise. The assault on the pastures might well have been a complete disaster had not the pasture moles been as ill-prepared for a sudden night attack as he was in making it, and had he not had a superiority of numbers. His objective was to locate and kill a few pasture moles and this was only achieved by the henchmoles with a great deal of rushing about, shouting, bumping into each other, wounding one another by mistake, and generally inefficient turmoil. They killed four moles, wounded seven and frightened a dozen more.

However, they were also very nearly cut off from the wood by a rapid and efficient counterattack led by Brome, and they retreated, as they had arrived, in disarray. Near-disasters are, however, usually labeled complete victories by cunning leaders and this one was no exception. It was true that the henchmoles lost three of their number, but once back in the westside with no sign of pursuit by the pasture moles, they celebrated the “victory” as if they had conquered the whole of the pasture system in two hours’ work, recalling the deeds of their lost colleagues with relish.