Duncton Found (27 page)

Last of all to touch were four moles: Mayweed and Sleekit, Tryfan and Feverfew. Silent they were, and close, and they turned back from the Stone’s shadow and into the moonlight to see poor Beechen besieged by many a mole who wanted to offer him his help, to invite him to his burrow in the coming summer years and wish him luck and courage in his life to come.

“Madams and Sirs, Sirs and Madams, follow Hay and he shall guide you to a chamber humbleness knows well! Jollity is there, and revelry, and worms aplenty! Stories too, Sirs, and amazements, Madams!” Thus Mayweed directed the moles of Duncton underground into the Ancient System, there to enjoy the revels that traditionally follow the Midsummer rite.

So that finally Beechen and his mother alone remained, with those seven guardians who had encircled them after Beechen’s birth: Mayweed, Sleekit, Marram, Skint, Smithills, Bailey and Tryfan.

The light of the moon was in Beechen’s eyes, and on the great Stone that rose above him; beyond, the night sky glistened and shone.

“I feel... much loved,” said Beechen, close to tears.

“Then the Stone has helped us fulfil that task that Boswell sent us with your coming,” said Tryfan. “You’ll have to come back to the Marsh End with me for a while, for there’s much of scribing you must yet learn.”

Beechen looked both disappointed and concerned, for he had enjoyed meeting so many new moles and there was a sternness about the way Tryfan had said “come back” that implied it might be harder than before.

But the others seemed not to notice this as, one by one, they touched him, and told him those things they alone could teach.

The last to embrace him was his mother Feverfew.

“Myn owne sonne,” she whispered, “yow are and wyl ever be alweyes in myn herte with luv and tendrenesse. Lat mee lok on yow nowe.”

So she looked at him for the last time as her youngster, as her pup, and when she was done she let him go with the others to the revels below, excepting only Tryfan.

When they were gone Tryfan came to her right flank and together they stared up at the Stone.

“I yaf latte hym goe myn dere, and I am muche afeard. Soone yow wyl leve me too....”

Old Tryfan did not deny it but moved closer to her.

“Myn luv, what was that moule for wych you made an especyall prayer?”

“Henbane,” whispered Tryfan, “but I know not why.”

“Yew luved her once,” said Feverfew simply, “and yow luv her styll.”

“She bore the only pups I had that lived,” he said. “I thought of them tonight and so of Henbane. She... she...” And Tryfan wept from some sense he had of Henbane’s tragedy.

“She needs thy prayer, myn dere, more than I, for I yaf sene myn sonne growe stronge tonight, and at my syde yow are as wel. Whan shal he leve this place, myn luv? And wherefore?”

“In September when the beech leaves fall he must go. He will have learnt enough by then, and perhaps it will be as well for him to be away from here. I fear for what may come. I have one more thing to scribe before I’ve done, and I trust I may do it before anything befalls us here, as I fear it might.”

“Doe ytt sone this ‘one more thing’, then wee yaf a somertyme of luv to share,” said Feverfew with a smile.

“A long long time!” chuckled Tryfan.

The sound of laughter and good cheer came up to them from the communal chamber in the Ancient System and, touching each other, they went to join their friends and welcome the best of summer in.

PART II

To the Summer’s End

Chapter Twelve

After the pleasures of the Midsummer rite, and the sociable days leading up to it, Beechen had not been looking forward to returning with Tryfan to the Marsh End, and the hard task of learning the real nature of scribing.

His fears were soon justified, but not in the way he had expected. It was not the difficulty of the task that beset him, but a rapid and unpleasant change in Tryfan’s behaviour the moment they were back in the deep tunnels of the old Marsh End Defence.

The previously kindly and benign scribemole moved swiftly from pleasant to preoccupied, thence to indifference and finally (as Beechen saw it) to an almost constant irritability that bordered on malevolence.

Curt commands to get more food, complaints about its quality when it arrived (preceded by moans about it being late), maddening grumbles about untidiness in others (from a mole untidier than most Beechen had seen) were not all Beechen had to contend with. Extreme impatience regarding anything to do with teaching scribing, a task which, judging from Tryfan’s attitude towards it, the youngster had to assume that he greatly regretted embarking on, probably because Beechen had no talent for it. Whenever Beechen asked for guidance on some scribing task, all Tryfan would say were words such as, “Mole, you can see I am busy and yet you persist in interrupting me. Copying and more copying is the way. You have plenty of texts about you, and even if your comprehension of them is minimal you ought to be able to get
something
from them.”

“But Tryfan.

“What is it now?”

“Well, I can’t
understand
everything that I’m copying and you don’t say if what I do is any good.”

“Can’t you? Don’t I? Eh? Let’s look then, come on, come on... Can’t understand this? Why mole, it’s perfectly obvious, isn’t it? Even to a mole of low intellect. Couldn’t be more obvious if it spoke for itself, but you don’t seriously expect that, do you? Eh? Say something if you’re thinking it! I don’t like sulking. Now, you were whingeing about me not saying if your copying is any good. Frankly it’s not. It’s a disgrace. You must try harder... Now, I really must get some work done... Oh, and as for understanding everything you copy – well! I understand less the older I get. You should be grateful, not aggrieved....”

Added to all this was Tryfan’s habit of impulsively disappearing to the surface without saying where he was going or when he was coming back. All he did offer were strict orders that Beechen himself should stay where he was, but if he
must
go to the surface, he should confine himself to the immediate orbit of the nearer entrances.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Tryfan was charm itself when the only three moles who paid them visits – Hay, Teasel and Mayweed – came to call. Laughter, good cheer, the sounds of eating, even occasional song drifted to him from Tryfan’s burrow, all of which Beechen was excluded from since Tryfan would set him especially onerous tasks when these visitors came, saying that he could join them once the tasks were finished. But too often the visits were over by then, leaving Beechen frustrated and with the uncharitable feeling that Tryfan was glad he had missed the opportunity for the pleasure of the visit.

Many a time in this period Beechen was inclined to leave and seek his way across the surface above, where he imagined the sun shining and entrances down into tunnels where he might find a warm welcome among moles such as those he had met at Barrow Vale. How he missed the freedom he had enjoyed in the days when he had lived in his home burrow; how he missed Feverfew’s warmth and good humour! What would he not have given to listen to Dodder and Madder arguing once more, or even stolid Heather earnestly preaching of the Stone.

What stopped him from leaving was his own obstinacy and determination not to fail, combined (he reluctantly confessed to himself) with a peculiar and growing fascination with scribing and the texts stored so methodically by Spindle outside his burrow.

In fact, as the moleweeks went by, he discovered that Tryfan had taught him sufficient to understand at least the simpler parts of those texts, and the more he copied the scribing the more they made sense to him. Out of sheer contrariness he refused to copy any of Tryfan’s texts with the result that his own paw, on the rare occasions he scribed something of his own making, was based on the neat, clerical script of Spindle and, consequently, a pleasure to touch.

As he became more fluent in both copying and understanding the texts his interest in those things that Spindle scribed about, which were many and varied, increased. Places like Whern and Uffington, Rollright and the Wen he knew of from the many conversations about them he had listened to between Feverfew and Tryfan through his puphood. Now he learnt more about them, and about the moles whom Tryfan and Spindle had met on their travels, for they were all brought to life in Spindle’s histories. But more than that: Beechen now began to learn about the deeper ideas of the Stone and Silence, of the Word, and of the things that moles did in opposition to each other. Sometimes, when Beechen forgot for a time the unpleasant restraints he worked under with Tryfan, it seemed almost as if Spindle was there and talking to him, and he all ears to hear.

In a real sense Spindle became a much-loved mole for Beechen, and he gained comfort and some wry amusement from Spindle’s descriptions of and loving complaints about Tryfan, whose behaviour when he was scribing had been at times no different in Spindle’s day than it was now.

Beechen could not help but reflect upon the bold things that Tryfan had done in his younger days, the places to which he had led other moles, for good and ill, and the change in him which became apparent in Spindle’s accounts, from a mole who was ready to fight with talon and tooth, and encourage others to do so, to a mole willing to be led by the anarchic leaders of the Westside to within a whisker of death by lynching at the Stone and never once raising a paw to defend himself and so break the pacific creed he had adopted.

Some accounts of this long and difficult period for Beechen with Tryfan in the Marsh End attribute his determination to stay with the scribe-mole to exceptional fortitude and an almost holy tolerance, which is hard to believe in one so young even if he did have the great destiny that Beechen faced.

But is it any wonder that he stayed, despite all he had to put up with, when, day by day as he laboured to learn scribing, he found himself copying passages like this one from the retrospective diary that Spindle made of the two moles’ journey from Whern back to Duncton? It reads thus:

As we came to within a day’s journey of Duncton Wood I unfortunately fell ill through eating poisoned worm. Despite the danger we were in, for the place was busy with grike, Tryfan insisted that I stay still, and tended to me. The exertion and difficulty of finding food was great for him, for his wounds were still painful, and I think may always be so, and he had little sleep. I had no doubt that had we been discovered in those several days when I was very weak and barely conscious, he would have fought for my life and been willing to sacrifice his own.

It was during those days that I realised again, and fully appreciated for the first time, that in all the long years of our difficult trek from Whern he had never, not once, complained of the pain he felt or the sufferings he had. A mole whose sight had once been good, and whose body strong, had been reduced by the terrible attack Rune and his sideem made on him to a mole nearly dead. He often thanked me for his recovery, but never accepted the credit which he owed himself. He is not the easiest mole I have known but he is my greatest friend.

And again, elsewhere, here is a passage Beechen transcribed, giving an account of how Tryfan of Duncton helped two moles they had met who were terminally diseased:

He insisted on staying with them for several days but would not allow me near, saying that their condition was infectious and I must stay clear. When I remonstrated with him he said that such moles needed some care and comfort, and since he had little else to give it would be a poor thing if he did not give it. He stayed with them until their deaths, and only when he felt certain that he had not contracted their murrain did he join me again. I prayed to the Stone that in my absence, or if it should take me first, then there is a mole near Tryfan when
his
end comes who gives to him that comfort he gave those moles then, and lets him know to the very end that he is loved and not alone.

It seems likely that in those hard moleweeks Beechen came to understand, partly through what he learnt in this way, and partly through observing Tryfan, that the old scribemole was struggling to put something into his scribing he found very hard to do. Beechen came to see that what he suffered through Tryfan’s irritability was nothing compared with the darkness and difficulty that beset Tryfan, but about which he would not talk.

It is certain, too, that Beechen received encouragement from Tryfan’s visitors, when he was permitted to see them, though the only mole who has left records concerning the matter is Mayweed, the discovery of whose final scribings has now made a record of Tryfan’s last moleyears possible.

Teasel was a comfort, for she never failed to talk with Beechen after her visits to Tryfan – meetings which the older mole was probably aware of though he preferred not to let Beechen know it.

But it was Mayweed who seems to have been most active in bringing some cheer into Beechen’s otherwise cheerless life with his brief but challenging visits, several of which he made at that time, and all of which must have given the youngster pause for thought.

“Studious Sir,” said Mayweed, after listening one day to Beechen’s many complaints, “humbleness hears what you say and declares, ‘Leave now
if
” and falls silent.”

“What do you mean ‘Leave now if’? If what?”

“Miserable mole, this less miserable mole Mayweed has absolutely no idea. ‘Leave now
if
you really think you must’, perhaps. Or, ‘Leave now
if
you are so pathetic and dim-witted that you can’t see that troubled Tryfan is doing his best’. Or even, laughable lad, ‘Leave now
if
you have already learnt scribing so perfectly that the greatest scribemole of our time has nothing more to teach you’.”

“Of course I haven’t,” protested Beechen.