Duncton Stone (37 page)

And restful it was in some ways, that Midsummer Day. The Community of Rose all complete for once – and for one last time. Until dusk came and Sister Caldey addressed them, saying, “On the morrow some of you will leave us, and in the days that follow more will go. Until, at last, all of us will be gone, for as our Community here had its beginning, so now it has its ending. Brothers, Sisters, be of good heart, be of good cheer for the glories to come, even if we shall grieve at our parting, as we grieve already for beloved Brother Meddick.”

Here she was responding to the tears and sighs of many of the Community, who, as was their way, cried openly, or held each other for comfort.

“Those who have recently returned tell us that great changes are apaw in moledom. I believe we must be part of them, and give our help where we can. You know a little now of the Order of Caradoc, and the Newborn moles led formerly by Thripp of Blagrove Slide, but latterly by Brother Quail. Against him great resistance has begun, and there is a mole called Maple of Duncton Wood...”

Here she paused involuntarily, and glanced at Privet, as well she might. Though Privet’s face was impassive, how her heart had leapt at mention of Maple’s name! The Stone
had
guided him, he was doing what he had long been destined for, but... “Wisely Stone, I pray it is wisely!” she whispered to herself “... who is leading the resistance against the Newborns. It is not our task as healers to side with any faction or sect. The healing arts we have learnt together here are for allmole, without fear or favour. Therefore we shall go out as I have said, and the Stone will guide each of us to whatever task or tasks is best. I fear there will be fighting, and suffering; I fear we shall be greatly needed. I pray the day will come when peace returns.”

“When it does, Sister Caldey, can we not form our Community here again?” called out one of the brothers.

Speaking slowly now, Caldey said, “I have thought of this, and prayed about it, asking for Rose the Healer’s guidance on the matter. I believe we will form a community of moles again... but time must pass, and we must learn new things separately to bring back to teach each other. Perhaps we have become inward-looking... perhaps. Therefore let those of us who are still alive next spring, almost a full cycle of seasons away, make our way to the Redditch Stone, where Brother Meddick and I first met, and form whatever community then seems appropriate. Meanwhile... oh, do not weep, my good friends... or, at least, not for too long! This evening the sun sets on Midsummer, and we celebrate what is new. And
we
are new, all of us.
We
shall go forth, all of us. To serve, to heal, to love our brothers and sisters across moledom, as they may need us...”

The following dawn Privet and Caldey embraced, and Caldey wept.

“Sister, dear Sister, I wish I could have talked with you with words, though in spirit we have been, and will remain, closer than words could make us. I wish you well, my dear. Your task is a heavy one, and more than I guessed until I talked with the Brothers and Sisters fresh-returned from communities nearby. There is talk that you are taking the Book of Silence itself to Duncton Wood. Rumour no doubt, wishful thinking at a time of strife. After all, I see no Book. But Sister... I feel it may be true that you are seeking it, and will find it!

“So go carefully, know that my prayers and thoughts will be daily with you until I hear you are returned home safeguarded. I would send a Brother or two with you, but the Stone is your protector and is more powerful than any mole!”

They embraced one last time, and by the soft June dawn light Privet slipped away southward, her period of respite over, and the way ahead again unclear, uncertain, and without companionship.

“Stone, guide me,” she whispered to herself and was gone.

Chapter Nineteen

“Rooster’s no ordinary mole, and this is no ordinary tale,” was how Weeth began his account of Rooster’s survival of the Wildenhope Killings, “so don’t expect the beginning, middle and end of your average story! In fact, come to think of it, the end is really the beginning, the middle is all the way through and the end is where you start from!”

“Get on with it, Weeth!” said Maple with a frown, and then a half-smile at Rooster, and the young mole he had brought with him who Weeth had seemed in no hurry to introduce. Young, thin, with inquisitive eyes, and a way of constantly checking where Rooster was and if he wanted anything.

“‘Get on with it!’ he says,” continued Weeth unabashed, “as if so extraordinary and dramatic a tale as the one I am about to relate can simply be “got on with” like eating a worm or, or...”

“Having a crap?” called out one anonymous mole from the Wolds, evoking general laughter. But they all appreciated Weeth’s eccentric ways, and those who had already enjoyed the privilege of hearing him tell a tale knew that his preambles and brief diversions were just his way of getting attention, and leading them to settle down to the kind of appreciative silence he liked.

Then, with a friendly grin, and a wink in the direction of Rooster’s anonymous young friend, Weeth quickly
did
get on with it...

As Rooster broke free from his guards on Wildenhope Bluff that April morning when so many moles were killed, it seemed to him that all the dark and terrible forces that had beset his life had in those moments of Whillan’s punishment gathered as one and burst out in his mind.

Perhaps nothing could have prepared anymole for the dreadful sight of his son – his newly-discovered son – being so cruelly taloned and then dragged to so sudden, so horrible, and so public a death; nothing could have forewarned him of the overpowering rage and grief he felt as Whillan was thrown over the edge of the river-bank, to disappear from sight for long and sickening seconds before reappearing as a body already caught and dragged along like inconsequential flotsam in a torrent of water.

All the grief that Rooster had ever felt, all the rage, all the bleak confusions and loneliness of the years, and the belief that he had failed to honour his task as Master of the Delve – all this was in that explosion of darkness and red light that his mind became.

So he had hurled his guards aside, and with only the mad and surely impossible hope to sustain him that he might somehow save Whillan, he bore down upon Chervil, Feldspar and his two sons. And yet...

Aye, and yet...

Even as he did, even at such a moment, even when he was over and into and lost in the dark void to which his life had brought him, the Stone, which seemed to have been so silent for so long, spoke to him. Not with words, but with a feeling, one whose origin he knew without knowing; it came from a moment long, long before when his mother Samphire held him again after his father Red Ratcher, having so nearly thrown him down into the torrential Reap in the Charnel Clough, brought him back alive to her; and she told him with whispers and caresses that she loved him more than anything and would never let him die.

When a mole is touched by such parental love it is as if he or she has been given a power that lies dormant within heart and body, ready one day, when most it is needed, to emerge once more. It is the power to love another, if only briefly, as we were once loved. This is the gift a good parent gives, and the salvation he or she can deny. This was the gift Samphire had given Rooster, and which had lain dormant in his heart, since before ever he became so troubled and confused.

So then, as Rooster approached Chervil with rage and hatred in his heart, wanting and willing to kill him, if not with a talon-blow then by tumbling him into the river, he felt that power of love. Not as some vague and vapid sentiment, but as a force more powerful by far than the very torrent towards which he rushed.

Chervil finally turned, Rooster bore down on him, and the great mole knew that he could no more harm Chervil, or the guardmoles with him, than harm Privet or Hamble or... or any of the moles who had loved him so well and so long. With a sob of relief to know that he could feel so potent and so total a love for the life of another – and ones who in the circumstances seemed the very last moles in moledom to deserve to be the beneficiaries of such a feeling – Rooster veered one way to avoid Chervil, and another to avoid his henchmoles, and plunged over the bank, out into the void, down towards the grey and angry rush of the water.

What he felt in that poised moment of fall was as unexpected and ultimately important as the surge of love for molekind he had just experienced. Indeed it was part of the same continuum or gyring of emotion which stirs a mole with the courage to feel and move on from security to risk.

So now for Rooster love was followed by bleak, black, all-consuming fear. This was not the false fear of what might be if such and such occurred. This was the real fear, which is darkness in all directions, in which breathing constricts and paws are clenched tight and motionless, and the stomach contracts into a knot of terminal pain, as hope, all hope, is gone. This was the fear of death itself, of being made nothing – the fear all warriors, whether of the mind or body or spirit, must in some way conquer.

For Rooster, the river he now fell towards was not that into which Whillan had been thrown just before and from which he had vainly hoped to save him. This river was now the Reap in the Charnel Clough from which his father saved him, and he was falling back through time to the moments before his father thought again.

Now he hung above the torrent, now he knew the ultimate rejection – to be destroyed by the parent who made him – but now, now as he fell, he knew his father had never changed his mind; no, no, his father let him go after all, and fear of death and rejection was as real as the waters of the Reap which roared up towards him, to engulf him and take him for its own.

The fear from which Rooster had been trying to escape all his life was made real, and waited for him now in the Reap. And, he thought, with the wondrous clarity of such infinitesimal moments, he deserved this. Had not his father spared his life? He had. And had Rooster not later taken Red Ratcher’s life? Aye, he had. So, of course, he deserved to die, and for his guilt to be assuaged in being made nothing. But the fear was more terrible than he could ever have imagined, as the torrent reached up its grey, remorseless, uncontrollable mass and embraced him to its raging heart. He did not want to die.

Rooster plunged into the water and felt each of his limbs taken by it, and heard a roaring in his ears; there were violent pressures at his eyes and mouth and snout, and all about him, like a tunnel caving in and crushing him, a cold, chill, freezing force such as he had never known. Does a mole scream and roar with shock and fear beneath the water? Rooster did.

And he struggled, desperate to rise towards air again, desperate to reach out a paw to Whillan. But for what? So
that his own son could save him.
In Rooster’s wild and terrible fear, lost as he now was in the waters he had sought to avoid all his life, saviour had become victim, and victim sought saviour. It was only that hope that he might be found that kept him struggling for life.

He surfaced, looked desperately about, and was dimly aware of moles on the receding river-bank chasing and shouting after him. He turned, saw a glimpse of a paw, Whillan’s paw, before it disappeared under water ahead of him, and he cried out for help. He lunged forward in the water to try to reach it, and as he saw that ahead of where it had gone the water turned white-yellow, racing and impossible for mole to control, he felt a surging current at his rear, and then at his front, sucking him forward and down, down beneath the water, down and turning him so that direction had no meaning, and a strength ten thousand times greater than his own gripped his body.

For a moment Rooster wanted to submit to his fear and the power of the river, but mortal terror generates its own strength and fighting against these feelings he struggled and forced his way towards the surging light he could dimly see through the water, now above, now to the side, now below.

Below! Light, life and air was... below. Utterly disorientated, he swam what felt downwards to save his life and was thrust suddenly out – and up! – bursting into the air and light. Whillan... and Rooster felt his left paw touch something soft and moving – soft, but horrible. His saviour felt foul. Fear ate him and he it, and he was fear palpable.

And for a second time he felt himself pushed down, and that urge to give up returning, because he was tired now and his paws were beginning to ache and nomole could fight such forces as these; and anyway, to give up was to be free of all the darkness he had ever known, free of...

He felt his body turned and pushed against another in the drowning darkness of the water. Whillan again. The Stone had delivered him up. A chance to save or be saved.

Rooster grasped his son, his personal fear subsumed by parental love, and struggled up and up and desperately up now to the light and air and life once more. Up through the downward force of that water trying to obliterate them, but against which Rooster knew he must fight for both.

Up and out once more, one paw holding on to Whillan and the other flailing, pushing, powering against the water to keep them both afloat. Whillan...

Rooster, in control again, carried along but still at the surface, looked for the first time at Whillan, pulled his head out of the water, struggled to keep them both upright, looked for signs of life, and saw...

“Not!” roared out Rooster. “Not him!”

Nor was it Whillan, but some other mole; fatter, thinner; darker, lighter; older, younger, he did not know. But bloated and decayed, the eyes staring, the mouth flopping open and foul, the paws heavy and clinging, wrapping around him, climbing on top of him, trying to drown him... the odorous mouth trying to embrace him; but not Whillan, not his son. Relief mixed with strange self-mockery to think that all his huge effort and struggle, a journey of a lifetime’s striving it seemed, had as its result the embrace of a rotting unknown corpse that was, now (as it seemed) doing its dead best to drown him.