Duncton Found (74 page)

“Aye, let it be so!” they all cried, satisfied with the fitting justice of their intent, all but for Terce. Though he too cried “Aye!” he looked uneasy, and shadowed.

“To Duncton then!” said Wort, triumphant.

“To Duncton it shall be!”

But when all but Terce had gone Lucerne said, “Twelfth Keeper, what troubles you?”

But what really troubled Terce he would not say, for beyond his Master now was the sacred destiny of Rune.

“Be ever wary of the Stone, Terce. Its cunning is more clever than moles know. The way to ascendancy of the Word lies closed indeed to the Stone’s suffocating light.”

“What troubles me, Master, is the Stone,” said Terce, who found that the best lies were those nearest to the truth. “The Duncton Stone is said to be one of very great power. Even Master Rune respected it. It may belittle thee and thy ordination.”

“I suppose it may, Terce, but we shall be nothing if we do not try to be everything. I find the eldrene Wort’s reminder of the Stone’s power timely, most timely. Yet it is that very fact that puts me in mind to be ordained in Duncton. Is their water that for anointing?”

“I think not, Master-elect. The scrivenings describe it as being on a hill.”

“Then the tears of followers shall be our cleansing and their blood our anointing.”

“Yes, Master-elect, they shall have to be.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Moles have ever the need of a place to dream of, a place to where they may travel in their mind and be happy once again, when they are beset, when the aging body aches, when the heart pines for loves and friends once known and times remembered.

A place simple and right, with its parts so harmonious that though each may be but modest and unremarkable, together they seem to make perfection in real life.

Some – perhaps many – will say there is no such place but in memory, which so easily removes trial and tribulation to leave a remembrance in a sunlit glow without a threat in sight.

Others will smile and say it was really so, just as they remember it, and that it was no dream. So do adults remember their days as pups, and they are right, for puppish days may well seem sunlit when the menaces and threats of life are borne by parents.

Yet there is one happy group of moles who knew a reality that really was as good as memory of it later claims. These are moles who know, or knew, an adult love. Not the first love, which is often blind (and all the better for it!), nor the second, whose passion may not last, but that later love of moles who look each other in the eyes and know each other as they really are, and love them still, and grow with knowledge to love them even more.

Such moles in old age, when describing what they once had, will say that she, or he, was most beautiful,
the
most beautiful, and where they lived, why, it
must
have been a goodly place for sure: did not their love thrive there?

Yet, when all is said, some places – a very, very few – have about them a harmony of parts that makes others remember them with special fondness. Happy the mole who falls in love in such a place, or having found their love renews it there.

Such a magic place was, and is, Bablock, along the River Thames. Quiet, modest, secret as a sunlit vale deep in a wood is secret, and with that extra quality which nomole can arrange or pre-ordain: surprise.

One moment a mole is trekking on a way along a riverbank, the next he is in Bablock Hythe. One moment a mole is coming off the heathy slopes above the river valley, the next he turns a corner, snouts round a bend, peers under a fence and blomp! he is in Bablock Hythe.

Yet where it begins, and where it ends, nomole can accurately say, and many a mole, in all other respects intelligent and sensitive, may pass right through from one end of Bablock to the other, and not remark a thing.

In short, the Bablocks of moledom do not simply find their moles: moles find them as well. Indeed, moles can lose them too, if they lose touch with themselves, and swear that their Bablock is the dullest place. While others, quite lost it seems, can be stanced in a Bablock all their lives and not know it until one day – one very happy day – they look about themselves and say, “Why, I never knew it until now, but this
is
Bablock Hythe!” While all about them dance with relief and say, “He’s seen the light at last!”

When Mayweed set off from Frilford that early November in search of a place where Beechen might rest in anonymity for a time, he only half knew he was looking for a Bablock. That half was made of a nagging doubt about his life with Sleekit, whom he had loved devotedly since the moment he so dramatically discovered her in the Providence Fall at Whern.

Devoted he may have been, but Mayweed was always a mole travelling a route to somewhere he never quite arrived. So being peaceful and content, stancing still, watching the day’s butterflies go by, was not his nature. It left him uncomfortable, as if something dark might come along from the route behind and overtake him once again.

So on he went, taking those moles he loved along with him on his sometimes frantic way.

His consort Sleekit, on the other paw, was a still mole. Trained in Whern in the ways of meditation and discipline, naturally reticent, intensely loyal, she found contentment in thoughts, and stancing quiet. Her love for Mayweed was a mystery to many, but perhaps in him and his aching restlessness she found an outlet for that nurturing love she had only ever been able to show to Wharfe and Harebell in the all too brief period when she and Mayweed reared them, first in the Clints of Whern, then in Beechenhill.

Yet, in that strange interlude with Beechen in the ancient tunnels of Duncton, when Mayweed had been beset by dark sound and she had gone to him, something changed within them both. Beechen had warned them then that before long they would part, and advised them to make the best of their time together, for it was now limited. Which they had done since then in Duncton Wood, and would have done more had not the darkness begun to fall across the wood, and the imperatives of Beechen’s escape from it become paramount. So, once more, had Sleekit found herself travelling on with her love with little time to themselves.

Did she complain? Not once. She travelled with Mayweed during Beechen’s First Ministry, and did what she had to do to help them both. But that day when Sleekit said that Beechen was tired, Mayweed had seen that Sleekit was tired as well. Seen their whole life together for what it had been for her, which was journeying and travail, in concert it is true, but not in peace.

So when he left them, and Sleekit, loving and knowing him as she did trusted him to be safe, and said not one word of how much she would miss him while he was gone, Mayweed knew in his heart that he was looking for a Bablock for them both. A place where finally, in that little time they had left for one another, he hoped Sleekit might feel secure, and loved, and content to know that he was content as well. A place that would see the culmination of their love, a place to take them to its heart and let them love it as true as they sought always to love one another.

As for Beechen, why, he could take his chance with them! Yes, yes, yes, he could! He was young, he had strength, he had no need of a Bablock! No, no, no!

So in a cheerful spirit, and more partisan to Sleekit’s needs than Beechen’s, Mayweed had set off to find a route that led to a place where a mole might most wish to take his much beloved.

Where, when, how, or why he came to Bablock we do not know nor care. But, one day his route at last took him along the River Thames, and he turned a corner, and watched a cloud, and pondered a coot, and debated a worm, and came upon a mole stanced quiet, and watching the river flow by.

“Plump Sir, you look content!”

“I am.”

“Contented mole, may humbleness ask what you are doing?”

“Nothing much.”

“Ah!”

“There’s nothing much to do in Bablock Hythe but what I’m doing. It’s always been like that and always will I hope.”

“Rotundity, this place sounds good to me,” observed Mayweed, stancing down, “the sort of place I’m looking for.”

“It’s a lot better than the place where you seem to be hurrying to.”

“Where’s that?” asked Mayweed, curious, and grinning.

“What an astonishing grin. It’s almost a leer. I haven’t been leered at for a very long time. No matter. You look as if you’re going somewhere
busy
.”

“No, no, no, no, mistaken mole, that’s exactly where I’m not going.”

“Well have a worm and stance still because you’re not going the right way about it.”

Mayweed, who delighted in moles who used words as he did, settled down and crunched the proffered worm.

“Mayweed is my name,” said Mayweed eventually.

“Tubney,” said Tubney. Who added after a very long pause during which he stared at the river that flowed past them in a deep dark way, “What sort of place
are
you looking for?”

“Humble me does not ask for much. He is in love and wishes to find a place which is quiet, peaceful, doesn’t mind a visitor or three, and is not likely to be invaded by grikes, or anymole else come to that.”

“You’ve arrived,” said Tubney, “so have another worm.”

“Forgive humbleness for raising a doubt, but how can Sir be sure? How can Sir not have a fretful talon or a restless tail or twitching fur for thinking that just beyond where he now is is not something better? Is Sir not curious?”

“Um. Curious?” said Tubney slowly, frowning and staring at the slow water, and then at the sky. “Am... I... curious? Well, I suppose I am, sort of.”

““Sort of’!” exclaimed Mayweed. “Sort of Sir, a mole cannot be sort of curious. Curiosity is an absolute where he personally is concerned. If you are curious you fall off your paws satisfying it. If you’re not... you’re dead.”

“Clever but untrue my friend,” said Tubney. “The reason I am contented with where I live is because everymole who ever comes here looks about and tells me that I should be. Now, taken together, they have travelled more than I ever shall so it makes sense and is much easier to believe them. Of course they could be wrong, which is why I’m
sort of
curious to see if they are right. But not
so
curious that I can be bothered to find out. Take yourself, Mayweed. Have you travelled much?”

“More than much. Show me a route and I may well have been along it.”

“Just what I thought. Now, go and look around Bablock, say hello to a few moles, pass the time of day with them, and then come back here and give me one good reason why I should leave the place.”

“I shall!” said Mayweed. And he did.

He explored the wormful tunnels, he said hello to the pleasant moles, he wandered the bank of that wide and curved part of the River Thames along which the system lies. He looked at the swirls of slow water, he followed the progress of a feeding coot; he stanced still and listened to the water’s flow, and he scented the meadows and the leafless winter hedgerows beneath which the berries of cuckoo pint shone red and bright.

Nearly a day passed in such wandering before his route took him back to Tubney’s place.

“Well?” said Tubney.

“What did Sir say the system’s name was?”

“Bablock Hythe.”

“Perfection.”

“Almost but not quite, otherwise it would be too dull.”

“Explain, explain, please, please!” said Mayweed, increasingly delighted with Tubney.

“Well, you see, visitors
do
come. Some have said they are a nuisance and that without them things would be perfect – to use your word. But it is in the very nature of visiting that visitors leave. If they did not they would be residents. And what do I find when visitors leave? Peace, Mayweed. Blissful, delightful, unutterable peace. So my welcome is warm to visitors because being restless they will go and when they go I am reminded of what I had forgotten I have.”

“Philosophical Sir, I shall scribe that down, since it seems to contain a deep truth about happiness.”

“Ah, well, if you can scribe that makes you an interesting visitor, which is, of course, a mixed blessing. Interesting visitors tend to impose themselves a bit, make moles question things, can be disruptive. It can be hard while it lasts, but then when they leave....”