Duncton Stone (10 page)

“Well, I’m not Newborn, that’s certain,” said Purvey with some asperity. “I hate them! But I am frightened of them too. My name’s Purvey. Lived here before the massacre. Came back after it. Have lived alone since.”

He spoke in short bursts, telling as sorry yet typical a tale of those times as Hamble had yet heard. And he added more to it when he discovered how far Hamble had trekked, and that he had met a mole called Chater, of Duncton, who had been at Cuddesdon but a day or two after the massacre.

Then, when Hamble had eaten and rested, Purvey insisted on taking him from one place to another, to show him, to tell of the experience and share the grief he had borne alone until now.

“This was our communal chamber... and here was the scriptorium where I learnt to scribe when I came as a young novice. And here... here I found the bodies of some of the Cuddesdon brothers, unidentifiable. And here... and all down that slope, down as far as the river below... I believe they were strettened and died. Most of the texts scattered and ruined. All gone when I came back. All finished. And now... now just me, just my memories to prove Cuddesdon was a very reverent, holy place. Just...”

Hamble let the mole cry, that much he had learnt to do in his travels. These days many moles cried, for loss, for betrayal, in the belief that the Stone had abandoned them. He looked at Purvey, all thin and haggard, and guessed him to be rather younger than he looked.

“Not much above my own age!” thought Hamble in wonder.

Days passed, spring advanced, and Hamble did not leave. Purvey no longer wanted him to, indeed he was almost pathetically anxious he should stay, and had been appalled when Hamble revealed that it was his intention to infiltrate Duncton Wood.

“There’ll be no followers left alive there now, not one,” he warned. “I heard that Newborn Inquisitors moved in last Longest Night, and everymole hereabout knows there was a Newborn cell in Duncton moleyears before that. Should have driven them out. Aye, the Master Librarian failed there.”

Though Purvey went on somewhat, making up for the long moleyears when he had nomole at all to talk to, yet Hamble did not mind. He was glad instinct had turned him this way, glad to pause awhile, glad to let his own dark memories find some kind of peace.

One bright April day he felt the time was right to ask Purvey about those texts he had been so eager to guard when Hamble arrived, and which, he knew, he occasionally slipped away to look at.

“Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling
you
,” said Purvey, almost conspiratorially.

“Better show me,” said Hamble.

“Could do. Will do. Would like to.”

With which he led Hamble off across the surface. With a dig and a delve, a heave and a shove, he soon broke through his own roughly-sealed tunnel that led to a deep chamber. As Hamble entered it, and his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he found his heart thumping with an excitement he had never felt around texts before. This was not an ancient chamber, but it was the best preserved he had seen in Cuddesdon, and to his eyes there seemed a lot of texts ranged about the shelves.

“Dear me, there used to be far more, but not here, you see. They were on open shelves for general use, which is why we lost so much. The ones here, the only ones that have survived intact, though I was able to save some good portions of a few of the others, and fragments of many more, are mainly original texts put here for safe-keeping. We don’t have any treasures here, I assure you! No Lost Books or any of that sort of thing!”

He moved to the shelves, his voice more animated than usual, and touched various texts as he talked.

Hamble was filled with sudden emotion, remembering just such a scene as this, moleyears before, when he was young, and had talked to Privet in the Crowden Library. She, too, had touched texts with love and he had always envied her ease with them. To her they were friends, to him...

“Mind you, this might interest you. It’s a text we were always proud to have, you know. Here...”

Purvey lifted a volume and proffered it to Hamble, who took it uneasily in his big rough talons.

“Of course all libraries have a copy of it, haven’t they?” said Purvey. “You can see the paw is a fine one, very fine. If we have a treasure at all, it’s this, and the volumes that go with it.” He paused, looking at Hamble quizzically.

“I’m sorry,” said Hamble awkwardly, “you see, I can’t scribe. Never learnt. Can’t ken, never learnt that either. I... I’ve no way of knowing what text this is.” He gave it back as awkwardly as he had taken it, his eyes a little troubled, feeling his ignorance like muck in his fur.

Purvey ignored Hamble’s evident discomfort and laying the text on the ground between them, opened it.

“This is the first volume of Woodruff of Arbor Low’s great account of the history of modern moledom,
Duncton Chronicles
,” he said.

Hamble eyed the folios with diffident curiosity, a little fearful and over-respectful, but also with the look of a mole who wants something he cannot have.

“Would have liked to scribe and ken texts, but where I was raised, in Crowden up in the Moors, all our time was spent protecting what we had from the incursions of the Ratcher moles. The females like Privet and her mother Shire did the scribing and book-learning.” He stared at the text and finally reached out a blunt talon to feel the scribings he could not interpret. “Duncton Chronicles, eh? That’s a story I only ever had told me; a great story.”

“Not a story, Hamble, a
history.
And not so long ago either. We’re both being thrown about by the same tides and currents of life and death as Tryfan and Henbane, Rune and Mayweed.”

“But it starts with a mole called Bracken...”

Purvey nodded and flicked back to the beginning of the text. He snouted at the first folio there, ran his paws over the scribings, and then began to ken the words aloud: “‘Bracken was born on an April night in a warm dark burrow deep in the historic system of Duncton Wood, six moleyears after Rebecca. This is the story of their love, and their epic struggle to find it...’”

Hamble stanced down, growing more easy by the moment, and said, “Go on, mole, go on. Ken some more for me...” and Purvey did.

His voice grew more assured and confident as he continued, and Hamble breathed more deeply and steadily as he forgot his “ignorance” and allowed himself to journey into the history that Woodruff had scribed down a century before.

Two moles, tossed and turned, as one of them had rightly observed, by “tides and currents of life and death’, sharing now their common heritage. Two moles in Cuddesdon, cast together for a time, learning together, going forward towards an understanding of the Silence, their ways different yet shared there and then.

“You’ll ken some more tomorrow, eh mole?” said Hamble when Purvey had grown tired, but not so tired that he did not think to stop just when Mandrake, evil genius of Duncton in the days of Bracken, was about to do terrible things.

“I want to know what
happens
,” Hamble went on sleepily. Then, after a long contemplative silence, he said, “I’d like you to ken the Chronicles to me at least until we get to the part concerning the mole my heart goes out to almost more than any other mole from those times.”

“And whatmole might that be?” asked Purvey.

“Mayweed,” said Hamble, “great route-finder, humble mole, magnificent!”

Purvey laughed and said, “It’ll take a time to get to him. He doesn’t appear in Woodruff’s history until a good way into the second volume.”

Hamble shrugged and closed his eyes. “I’ll just have to stick around a bit longer then, won’t I?”

“Yes,” said Purvey softly, trying to hide the gratitude he felt. He stared at Hamble as the big mole fell asleep, his scarred, rough face more gentle in repose. Why had he come to Cuddesdon? What was the Stone preparing for him in Duncton Wood?

“And why,” mused Purvey, “do I have the feeling that this text was brought here years ago for just such a kenning as this, to a mole who needs time to be told this history, to be prepared?”

So it was that Hamble came to Cuddesdon, and stayed there for longer than he had expected, preparing himself for the trials to come. Until at last, in April, he had woken one day and known he must leave for Duncton. Purvey had kenned the whole of the Chronicles to him, and along the way taught him a little of scribing; now, in a rough and ready way, Hamble could scribe his own name, and that of Crowden, the system where he was born.

“Hamble of Crowden,” he would scratch out into the earthen floor of a tunnel, staring at it with real pleasure and thinking that nothing had ever given him a better sense of who he was.

“And what are you going to do now I’m leaving?” he asked of Purvey.

“You know perfectly well, Hamble, I’m going to scribe an account of Cuddesdon, as far as I know it, right up to your coming. I was trained as a scribe and a scribe I shall be. Stone willing, by the time I finish my self-appointed task I’ll be too old to care much for the tribulations of this world. The Newborns will have power over all moledom, you’ll be long gone, killed in some skirmish or another – though, mole, you
could
stay here...”

“No, Purvey, I couldn’t. Privet sent me to Duncton, and now I must go there. As for being killed in a skirmish, I won’t be. And nor will the Newborns survive for much longer. The Stone will see right done. As for you being too old to care, I don’t believe it. Mark my words, one day there’ll be young moles climbing back up this slope, come all the way from Duncton, because they’ve heard from me there’s a timid scribe of a mole up here, who kens a text better than most, and has things to teach them, like he taught me. And I’m talking of more than just scribing down my name and home system.”

Purvey’s eyes lit up as he imagined such a glorious dream becoming reality.

“Youngsters coming here, to learn?” he whispered. “Cuddesdon alive once more? Its tunnels repaired, its texts out of hiding, and scribing and scholarship hereabout once more?”

“Why not? Pray for it and it might be,” said Hamble, giving his friend a last hug and turning downslope and westwards.

“I’ll pray for
you
,” said Purvey, tears in his eyes.

“Pray for dreams, not battered old warriors like me,” called back Hamble.

“It’s “battered old warriors’ like you who make the dreams come true,” whispered Purvey with affection, and with hope.

Less than two days later, though it felt to him like a lifetime, Hamble found himself safely ensconced on a valley terrace on one side of a roaring owl way, looking across it at the rising mass of Duncton Wood.

As it happened, it
was
as dark as Purvey had suggested, for the morning was a cloudy one, and the air gusty and wet. Hamble knew himself to be a very different mole indeed from the one who had left Privet at Caradoc the previous December. He was fitter, he had lost that weariness with life that had beset him in his last molemonths with Rooster, and he knew now he would never strike another mole again in his life: his paws had found peace along the way, and peace-loving they would remain.

“But that’s not to say I can’t advise others how to carry themselves and use their heads to save their bodies,” he muttered to himself, casting an expert eye on the lie of the land between where he had stanced down and the high part of Duncton hill ahead of him.

He knew that the way into Duncton was by the cross-under which lay almost directly below him, but he also guessed it would be close-guarded by Newborns. So, too, would the more obvious nearby routes over the roaring owl way.

“Hmmph!” he muttered to himself. “I’ll set off anyway, but go a long way round. Yes...”

And so he did, taking his time, waiting for the midday lull in the flow of roaring owls, easing his way down the far embankment, swimming across the water-filled drainage dykes with easy strokes, and then up on to the pasture ground beyond. He stared upslope, waited patiently for twilight shadows to appear, and then using all the skills that years of eluding Newborns had taught him, he made his way steadily upwards, until at last he heard the gentle roaring that could only be one thing: the wind in the ancient beech trees of Duncton’s High Wood.

“And may the Stone be with me,” he whispered as he went on up to them, his heart thumping – not with fear of the Newborns, but with the awe he felt, to have reached so famous and so revered a place, and to know a new life of service to the Stone was now beginning.

Chapter Six

Since the Night of Rising, a few days after Longest Night, when the followers had fled to the Ancient System, the winter years had taken their toll of Pumpkin, now their reluctant leader.

But it was not just the winter, cold and bitter though that had been. It was the Ancient System itself, which nomole forced to spend a night there, let alone as many as the followers now had, could describe as the ideal sanctuary. For should not a sanctuary be hospitable and warm, a place of respite from the chill winds of life beyond?

It should, but the Ancient System was not. Nomole now really knew (not even Pumpkin, who knew more about the history of Duncton than most) why the tunnels and chambers of the Ancient System had been deserted by mole. The story went that there had been a schism in moledom in mediaeval times when Scirpus, student of Dark Sound, had split with Dunbar, then moledom’s holiest mole. Scirpus had travelled with his disciples to the north, to ill-starred Whern, where he had become the proponent of the infamous Word, the dogma which centuries later so nearly led to the extinction of the peaceful followers in Bracken’s and Tryfan’s day, as told in the
Duncton Chronicles.

Moles said that with the coming of schism the Stone frowned upon Duncton’s fabled Ancient System and it became wormless, and its inhabitants were forced to leave. Certainly Dunbar and the scribemoles and spiritual seekers departed from Duncton, and the system fell into decline. The remaining inhabitants founded a new communal centre down in Barrow Vale, which lies beyond the slopes that lead to Duncton’s High Wood, and so modern Duncton came into being. Gradually all real knowledge of the tunnels of the Ancient System that lay below the High Wood was forgotten, and the fact that they emitted terrible Dark Sound to any who ventured into them – no doubt as a result of deliberate delvings by the last of the delvers who lived there – meant that they became feared.