Duncton Quest (11 page)

But the ruse worked only for a short time and the grikes charged in, and Spindle saw, from where he was hidden, the killing of the two moles and the terrible destruction of the Library as more grikes came in and began to pull down the Rolls and break the ancient bark books of Uffington.

Spindle knew that he would soon be found, and had no doubt that he would be killed. Yet even then, driven by an impulse he did not understand, he sought to hide the text Brevis had entrusted him with by burying it in a dusty shadowed corner of the Library.

The grikes did not seem to suspect that other moles might be in the Library and so did not set about searching its nooks and corners, or its darker recesses, preferring instead to systematically work their way along its shelves, embayment by embayment, destroying all they saw.

So Spindle was able to work undisturbed as he burrowed deep and put first Brevis’s text and then other ancient texts into the hole he made. In this way he had managed to hide nine or ten of the most ancient-looking books he could find before the grikes, perhaps hearing his movements, became suspicious and began searching for him.

He might then have been found, but their attention was diverted by the arrival of a few scribemoles making a belated and futile attempt to save the treasures that their forebears had protected for so long. During this brief diversion Spindle was able to bring down a wall adjacent to a stack of books and bury them as well, if not completely at least enough to make it look as if they were not worth digging out again merely to destroy them.

So, bravely, unable to escape, Spindle did what he could to save the books of the Holy Burrows knowing all the time that the outcome of his actions would probably be his own death.

Soon the grikes put down the scribemole counterattack and turned back to finding him and now, mortally afraid, poor Spindle retreated into ever-more obscure corners of that great Library, clambering among the shelves, scurrying between walls, desperate, in what he believed to be his final moments, to put off death a few moments more.

But to no avail. A shadow loomed behind him, he turned to face it, and two grikes were bearing down upon him, their shouts murderous and frightening. It was in that moment, as their talons raised upon high, ready to come down on the shadowy movement which was all they could see of him – for that part of the Library was dark indeed – that Spindle felt a paw at his flank, and heard a voice. A gentle paw, a gentle voice, yet strong, very sure, more certain and safe than anything he had ever known, such that he felt what he afterwards could only describe as the sense of coming back to his home burrow, where no harm could befall him.

That voice said, “Spindle of Seven Barrows there is something more for you to save than these old texts. Now come, come with me...” and he turned and he saw a mole about whom such light shone that he was dazzled at its brightness, and felt that he was nothing before it. Behind him, as if at a great distance, he heard the grikes confused and in disarray, shouting that they had seen a mole but lost him and making recriminations against each other.

Then he saw the face of the mole who had touched him, the eyes shining with love of mole. They were the eyes of a female who seemed young, barely more than a pup, and yet in her presence he felt safe and unafraid.

She took him, as it seemed, even further into the corner into which he had retreated, and from there to a chamber in which lay, in no particular order, six books. And on each was placed a stone, small and seemingly inconsequential. And in that chamber was a light and a sound more beautiful than any he had ever seen or heard, and that young female was everywhere it seemed.

“You will take the Books, Spindle, and you will hide them where they will be safe, with all the others that you find and collect. You will hide them so that future generations may find them, which they will. These stones you will take as well, but throw them amongst the pits by Seven Barrows, where all moles may see them but only moles who are ready will know what they see. There they will be safe until the time is right that they be taken up at last.”

“But what books are they? And what stones?” he managed to ask.

And she laughed, a laugh of such pleasure and joy that Spindle, even when he became very old, never forgot it, and ever desired to hear it again.

“It is better that you know not their names, or what they mean. Your task is hard enough without that, good Spindle.”

“How will I know where to take them?” he asked.

“You’ll know, you’ll know...” she said, laughing again.

“Well,” he declared, seeming to recover himself a little so that his normal curiosity got the better of him, “if those stones are what I think they are then there should one day be seven of them, for aren’t they the Stillstones the scribemoles have always guarded?”

“Perhaps they are!” said the young mole playfully.

“And those the Books for each one?” he added.

“More than likely,” she said.

He peered more closely at them, and she did not stop him, and then he ran his clerical paw – trembling no doubt – over them but the script was medieval and beyond his kenning.

“When shall I start to remove them?” he asked.

“Whenever you like, provided you can avoid the moles of darkness on your way.”

“Well if they are the Books and Stillstones I think they are then there’s one I’d prefer to carry first, and that’s the Book of Fighting! It’ll protect me, won’t it?”

“In a way it will. But your faith in the Stone will protect you more. Good luck, Spindle, worthy mole! Good luck!”

“But – but you – will
you
come back?” he had asked finally, fearing her departure.

“Oh yes,” he remembered her saying, “yes, for you I shall...” and she was gone, and her light and beauty with her, and he found himself crouched in the Library, and a grike ordering him up.

“Little bastard,” said the grike, in the charming language that they used, “come with me
now
...” and he was dragged out of the Library and before another grike who had at his side a broken, pathetic, tortured scribe-mole Spindle knew. And this creature simply shook his head and whispered, “He’s Spindle, he’s a cleric, he’s not... he knows nothing, nothing...” And so Spindle’s life was saved.

Yet there was more to that moment than that. For as the scribemole said, “He knows nothing...” he raised his agonised gaze to look in Spindle’s eyes and even as Spindle knew that he
did
know something, something important indeed, something that was the most important thing there was to know in the Holy Burrows, he knew that the broken scribemole saw it too, and was glad that his suffering was not in vain, and the Stone’s will might yet be done.

After that Spindle remembered little, but that he was harshly interrogated and eventually, along with others, taken south-westwards from Uffington at the beginning of a trek to Avebury. It was then he escaped, made his way to the Seven Barrows, and wandered about for days, perhaps weeks, among the Stones that had given him sanctuary when he was a young mole. But whatever else he might have forgotten he did not forget the young mole who had found him in the Library, and revealed the Books and the Stillstones, nor the task she had given him.

So it was that Spindle of Seven Barrows, a mole who was “not much of one for fighting or defence”, began his great task of carrying, without help or encouragement from anymole, in an isolation impossible to imagine, among burrows haunted by memory and death, those books he could salvage from moledom’s greatest Library, and most onerously of all, six of the seven great Books, and all but the last of the Stillstones whose secret place he had been shown.

Through those long and tortuous tunnels from Uffington to the Stones of Seven Barrows he carried them, starting in November and continuing for four moleyears through to the following March. Whatever mole it was had come to him, whatever it was she had shown him, it was not a dream or a vision: the Books were there, and the Stillstones, terrible for a mole to contemplate, nearly impossible to carry. Seven Stillstones, seven Books made, all but one have come to ground... and then the names of the Stillstones, one by one... of Earth for living, of Suffering, of Fighting, of Darkness, of Healing, of Light....

These six, one by one, good Spindle had to carry to safety before the grikes came back, and with them the Books. And so he had, each one seeming a greater burden than the last, and with the dreadful fourth one, of Darkness, he all but succumbed to its might, but the light of his great faith carried him through.

Down to the Stones he took them, hiding the Books in a chamber of his own finding, and hurling the Stillstones out on to the surface among other stones, so doing as the young mole whose name he did not know had told him. Until early in March his task was finished, and he slept and wandered in utter fatigue for many days. Then a new energy came to him and, knowing the Spring Solstice was coming, he spent a final few days searching the Library and taking what last significant fragments and folios he could, and hiding them where he had hidden the Books.

“And where is that? Are you going to show us?” asked Tryfan at the end of Spindle’s strange story.

“Of course I am. I can’t go through the rest of my life being the only one who knows, and if I can’t trust a White Mole and his disciple who can I trust?” said Spindle.

With which he took them back underground, in and around and among the tunnels they had been through before and by others they had not noticed, until down there somewhere, deep across that legendary vale, in a place that only moles of faith and courage will find, Spindle led them to a chamber lined with stone, made by twofoots in the centuries before mole memory, and showed them the result of his courage and long industry.

There were eighty-seven complete books and a further sixty major fragments. As he could not read scribing very well, Spindle had little idea what he was rescuing, but he had tended to go for older books which he could recognise by the colour of the bark and the style of scribing.

Boswell stared at the great array of books – carefully ranged and stacked, and went to them and touched them. Many were the treasures there, including a number of the historic Rolls of the Systems, which are the accounts of travelling scribemoles of the different systems they visited and reported on.

But most important of all there were the six Books, scribed at different times, starting with the oldest of all, which is the Book of Earth, and scribed, it is said, by Linden, who had loved Ballagan, first mole, whose talon strikes upon the very Stone of Stones had made the chips which are the seven Stillstones.

Boswell looked briefly at the six Books, touching them lightly, and inviting Tryfan to do the same, that he might know the feel of these Books, each written in a different age, by moles – White Moles – who had reached enlightenment.

All there but the last Book, the Book of Silence. And Tryfan saying nothing, for he knew that in their final moments, before the Silence took them, his parents Bracken and Rebecca, had given not only the seventh Stillstone to Boswell, but the Book of Silence, or its secret, as well. They had understood that he was the mole who would scribe it.

Now Boswell crouched before the six Books, his snout low, and his flanks pale and worn.

“Will you scribe the last Book?” asked Tryfan boldly. “Will you, Boswell?”

“Each of the Books marks a stage in the maturing of mole,” replied Boswell, “and many moles have had to struggle to make such moments possible. Now the last Stillstone is nearly come to ground, as the ancient text puts it, and already the Book of Silence is being scribed. I have been scribing it a long time, Tryfan, such a long time.”

“But I haven’t seen you scribe, except for teaching me, in all the years of our journey to Uffington.”

“Haven’t you?” said Boswell. “Well, I have been, and for a long time before that. Yes, yes, a long time now. I hope that one day you’ll know it.”

There was silence among them and they contemplated Spindle’s great work of rescue. Then Tryfan asked Spindle, “Where did you hide the Stillstones?”

“I didn’t hide them,” said Spindle, “I did what that youngster told me and put them with ordinary —”

“But where?” said Tryfan urgently.

“Well... er... it’s hard... you see....”

“You haven’t forgotten!” said Tryfan, appalled.

“I don’t think I ever knew, as a matter of fact,” said Spindle defensively. Then, turning from the chamber and leading them once more to the surface, he waved the talons of his right paw somewhat vaguely over the slopes and vales of Seven Barrows.

“I brought the first Stillstone up here and thought I
would
try to put it somewhere where I could find it and I
thought
I had – well I threw it in a stonepit and watched it carefully but I couldn’t exactly be sure that the one I thought it was
was
the one it had been... so then when I brought the second Stillstone, and it’s no good looking so disapproving, Tryfan, because the Stillstones aren’t exactly fun to carry even if they are small and I doubt
very
much if you would have done better even if you are stronger than me because there’s something about them that weighs down a mole. So anyway... I got the second one and took it to the same stonepit except that I wasn’t sure by then if that had been the one I threw the first one in... and by the third I was utterly confused, and by the fourth, which was no joke at all being the Stillstone of Darkness, all I wanted to do was get rid of the thing and I can’t remember much at all about the last ones...” He tailed off.

“Well, it sounds a bit pathetic to me. You’re sure you don’t know exactly where they are?” said Tryfan suspiciously. But Spindle gave him such a look of hurt honesty that Tryfan apologised and then fell silent.

“All I do know,” said Spindle finally, “is that each of the Stillstones went in a pit near one of the six Stones, which has an obvious kind of logic, I suppose. It’s the sort of thing the Stone would make a mole do!” He laughed, a little ruefully.