Duncton Found (19 page)

“It’s just a fern,” grumbled Crosswort, unconvinced.

“‘Just a fern’!” laughed Madder with the genuine delight of a mole who knows others are wrong but that when they see the error of their ways and drop their prejudices what a delight they have in store for themselves!

“Perhaps so,” he added, leaving the others to judge for themselves. Which they did, and found in Madder’s favour.

There were so many more things to see in this enclave of peace Madder had made by his tunnels’ exit that the moles were reluctant to follow him as he hurried on to show them other treasures.

The wood seemed to open past the fern into a path, crooked and secret. It was arched over with the russet stems of wild rose, and its floor was softened with crunchy beech leaves which gave the route a dry, good scent. As they went they lingered, for here and there the path branched up some tempting byway, or opened out into a prospect a mole could not simply pass by. He or she must linger there, and stare, and think that moledom must be great indeed if in so small a space there was so much to see.

“It’s not easy to keep up,” Madder said. “Voles
will
use it as their run – I can’t think why – and when the wind comes from the east, which it has a lot this June-time, the under-leaves are disturbed and need attending to. So much to do!”

“Looks wormful,” said Borage.

“Wormful? Oh, I don’t eat the worms hereabout,” said Madder with faint disapproval. “That would only increase my work, wouldn’t it?”

“Er, yes,” said Borage, supposing it would.

Madder hurried on until the path opened out into a second enclave very different from the first. It was dominated by a great holly tree, whose shining leaves gave dark light to the place. Other leaves had fallen from it but lay undisturbed on the ground, brown with their points yellow-dry.

Beyond it they climbed to a raised area of ground at the top of which was some exposed chalky soil. Such places occur across the Eastside of Duncton Wood and occasionally in the high wood too. The soil seems to rise above the level of the humus, or perhaps some natural minor anticline of strata creates an exposure over whose top the wind is always sufficient to clear what leaves fall there. A process aided by the liking other creatures have for such exposed spots across the wood’s litter layer.

As the moles ascended the little rise they saw the spoor of rabbit, and there was the whiff of weasel there as well.

“We all come here,” said Madder, as if he thought moles were no different from the other creatures and were all one in the wood. “There’s three kinds of trees grow in this part, the ash, the oak and the beech, and I can see the light of them all from here. Swaying and graceful for the ash, its leaves soon gone; green and airy for the beech, its leaves the true whisper of these woods; and the oak, not so great in Duncton as in other places I visited when I was younger, but a solid presence all the same. All have their ways and, as my mother used to say, a mole never learns them deep enough.

“This is the spot I stopped at when I decided that I was going to have to stay in Duncton Wood, like it or not. I felt at peace here for the first time since leaving my home system. I thought, well, there’s no river to scent nor coots to call here, there’s no sedge to watch rise and hear the stems rustling, there’s no yellow flag opening out all pretty in the wind; nor kingfisher’s dart, nor trout’s sudden splash, nor any of the sights and sounds of the Avon that I love. But, mole, there’s new things to see, new things to hear, and many a new thing to scent. And there’s places aplenty to make good with plants as my mother taught me, and none to harass, and none to spoil.

“That’s what I said to myself when I came. And so I thought it was as I found things I’d only ever heard of. Beech tuft all slimy on the beech, and slipper orchid down among the ash, and baneberry to scent out downwind of it on a July day, and its black berries to warn a mole of sin and shame. I come here when I want to think.”

Then suddenly, to everymole’s alarm, Dodder, who had said nothing at all for a long time past, turned to Madder and said, “I must say I would not let my tunnels get into the mess yours are in. But then....”

He looked about the lovely ways Madder had led them on and added, “But I’d say you’ve got something I never had. Yes, and never will have.”

“Which is what, surprising Sir?” asked Mayweed softly, with a quick glance about and a gleam to his eye that stopped others saying anything to spoil the moment.

“Ability to make a place feel like home,” said Dodder, “and not like temporary accommodation. Your patch would scare the paws off most guardmoles because it’s got the whiff of insubordination, but I’ll be quite frank, Madder... I envy it.”

For once Madder’s paws stopped fretting at his fur and a glimmer of real pleasure came to his skewy eyes as they settled in their eccentric way on Dodder.

“You... like it then?” he said with touching and genuine modesty.

“Best place I’ve seen in Duncton,” said Dodder with certainty. And then, evidently finding it all right after all to say something nice to Madder, he dared to add, “Apart from the neighbours, of course. No imagination. Complainers. Moles of the Word or...!” Pausing, Dodder enjoyed the joke at his own expense and beamed expansively at Madder, then at Crosswort, and finally at Flint... “or moles of no particular belief at all.”

“Well said, formerly grouchy Sir!” said Mayweed, and everymole agreed, and felt relief that peace could be established between the two rivals on such a delightful day.

Others, seeming to have heard that Tryfan was about with Beechen, joined them during the course of the afternoon – among them Bailey and Sleekit – and the moles talked, and slept, and grew excited at the prospect of Midsummer by the Stone.

Skint told the story of how Tryfan, guided by Mayweed, had once rescued him from certain death at the paws of a patrol in the infamous Slopeside of Buckland. Teasel showed how, if a mole tumbled the petals off a briar stem, she could tell of his past and his future and moles queued up for the privilege.

But when Beechen tumbled the petals so a pattern might be formed, a breeze blew and the petals drifted through the wood, and far out of sight.

“What’s it mean?” said Beechen, but Teasel only smiled in a troubled way and said she knew not, and the sky was darkening, and they had all best travel on, and bide by Madder’s choice.

“We’ll go to Feverfew’s,” said Madder, a popular choice and one Tryfan greatly welcomed, for he knew that his consort would be awaiting him and Beechen, for the morrow was Midsummer, and all moles must go to the Stone.

As they wandered on upslope, for Feverfew’s tunnels lay that way, Mayweed lingered by Teasel and said, “Woebegone Madam, what was it you saw in the fall of petals young Beechen made?”

Teasel shivered.

“The night he was born his touch restored my sight, but would I had never regained it if it had meant I did not see what those petals showed. He’ll need moles near him. He’ll need us all. Nomole can go so far as he must and not need help.”

“Madam, he has us all,” said good Mayweed, and Teasel’s gaze followed his own as they watched the moles go forward up the hill with Beechen in their midst, laughing and at ease.

“He’s so young,” whispered Teasel, “and I wish Midsummer did not have to come; but it must, and a mole grows old.”

“Metaphysical Miss, a mole does, even those as humble as ourselves! And we slow, yes, yes, yes; and we worry, yes, yes; and we wonder. Yes?”

“Yes,” agreed Teasel.

Mayweed grinned and together they followed on after the others, as fast as they could.

Chapter Nine

In the moleweeks since she had reluctantly agreed to help Lucerne and Terce make preparations for the Midsummer rite, Henbane, beleaguered Mistress of the Word, confronted an enemy greater and more subtle than any she had ever faced: her own desire for the truth about herself, the Word, and the making of Lucerne.

Something was wrong but she did not yet know what. Something must be done, but of its nature or implications she knew nothing. Only a mole who has tried to face such questions can fully know the isolation she began to feel.

For Henbane had lost faith in the Word, but found no comforting substitute to cling on to, as the nightmare reality of what the Word was and had been under Rune and herself, and would more than likely continue to be under Lucerne, became progressively more clear to her. The first insight had come in that appalling moment when Lucerne had struck her; its revelations of horror continued to come upon her in the days and weeks afterwards, like ungovernable waves of flood water down a tunnel in which a mole is lost.

All was terrible doubt and uncertainty, and the pain of a mole who hates herself for what she is and what she has done which can never be undone.

Not that the sideem or even Terce yet knew it. But they mattered not to her now: it was what Lucerne was becoming that beset her, and him she feared, for she guessed that he now suspected her commitment to the Word and would be wary of all she did and said.

They were a blighted mother and ascendant son, circling each other as they waited for the other to make a strike, though each knowing that that moment would most likely come on, or very soon after, the Midsummer rite. Until then each needed the other and each must play the game of honeyed words and hypocrisy.

In that hiatus period in the High Sideem, the main thrust of Henbane’s thought was this: what was the nature of the education Lucerne had, and what, if any, was the weakness in him that it left behind? Where, in short, was Lucerne vulnerable?

Mixed with this was a mother’s guilt, a mother’s shame, a mother’s tortured recall of a puphood which she knowingly maimed, of a youngster she helped corrupt... and whose outcome, terrible and now unstoppable, would soon have its triumph. She knew with certainty that once Lucerne had gained the legitimacy that the rite would give, all his striving would be for Mastership, and all Henbane’s for survival, and her life.

So, as mother and son exchanged their pleasantries and smiles of hate, with Terce hovering between them both, his dissembling art experiencing its greatest test, Henbane strove to make her plans or, more accurately, strove to understand the nature of the son she had made, that she might know how to destroy him.

Her task would have been easier, and its outcome more certain of success – if filicide can ever be called “success” – if she had understood
why
she thought thus. But so far she did not, nor why, at the end of her life, she should even attempt to redress wrongs too great for mole to contemplate.

Henbane had not had a sudden revelation of the truth, but, rather, something harder for a mole to contemplate, which made her contemplation of it all the more courageous. For as good and evil are the light and shade of the same thing, in the same fleeting moment when Lucerne had hit her and she had seen the evil of the Word she had glimpsed as well something greater and more beautiful than she could ever before conceive.

Once glimpsed, that “something” – that light, that Silence, that fierce fire burning towards the truth – becomes a portal that can never close, beyond which a mole sees fearsome things of beauty not seen before.

But Henbane had, though all too briefly, seen the light itself before. At her own birth, shafting down in the chamber of the Rock, a light before which Rune and Charlock had trembled. To that distant, unconscious memory something in Henbane had returned, and that light it was that cast itself now across her life and made her see anew what she had barely seen before.

These recollections of her life became her torment now, for she saw that, despite what she was and all she represented, life had given her much whose beauty she had not recognised or which she had affected to despise.

There must have been many such memories for Henbane then, but we who have followed her story know for certain only a few of them. Some seem surprising now... like the memory she had of Brevis, scribemole of Uffington and the mole who, along with old Willow, was snouted at Harrowdown on her direct command. At the time she had discounted their bravery, only now did she wish she might have talked to them, two different moles, both wise, whom she had killed with barely a moment’s thought. Two of many such....

But if such a memory was representative of many, a few stood out alone and by themselves, and none more so, perhaps, than that evening and night when she and Tryfan of Duncton had known each other in her chambers in the High Sideem. Passion and delight, abandonment, and they had made love. Now, moleyears later, for the first time in her life she knew loss and regret – for she knew their time together could never be again, and she saw too late its full beauty, its goodness. Yet she marvelled that such light should have been known to her, and of all places
here,
in Whern. And she wept that she had not treasured or honoured it, and ached and sighed with remorse.

Which regretful memory led to the last and greatest realisation of all, which had to do with Lucerne. For the result of that union with Tryfan was, significantly enough, the only pregnancy she had ever had, the only life, as it now seemed to her, she had ever made.

She wept now at the memory of how Tryfan’s pups grew inside her, so slowly, as if knowing that it would take time for her to even sense that here, at last, was something good to come of her, something unsullied by the Word. Despite her weakness in the days before her time came, despite all fears, and most of all despite the loss she knew would result from what she did, she yet had the courage to command Sleekit to take those pups from her. In the event two were saved – or at least got out alive.

“May they be safe, may they be strong... may their parentage be forever unknown that they live in anonymity...” she whispered often to herself those days before Midsummer.

But the third pup, Lucerne, had not been got out of Whern, but had been hers to keep and in that keeping she had for a time found new and terrible strength. For him she had killed her father Rune and later, had not the Rock sounded its dark sound in her soul and kept its corrupting hold upon her, she might still have saved him too.