“Buckram, you too shall come with us, to help protect us along the way, not with your talons, though if they frighten away our enemies that will be no bad thing, but with the growing strength of your spirit.
“You, Mayweed, must surely go to Duncton, for if Tryfan has survived, and he has survived much before this, then nomole in moledom can serve him better than you can. You, Mistle... you must go with him, for your task lies in Duncton and not yet with me. Our day shall come. Romney, I charge you to go with her, and as you regret the passive part you played on Longest Night, the Stone shall know those active things you do to help Mistle in the great task she shall find awaits her in Duncton Wood.
“As for you, Holm and Lorren, you must decide, for I would not part you. Perhaps ’tis best now if you returned with us towards Rollright where we can leave you to continue the Stone’s work there.”
“I wanted to go to Duncton to find Bailey, but he is taken from me!” wept Lorren. “And now, now I shall lose my Holm. Tell them what you must do, my dear! Tell them!”
Holm stared miserably about him, then at Lorren, then at Beechen. Eventually he turned to his friend and said desperately, “Mayweed, tell me!”
“Tell you what, unhappy Holm?”
“What to do.”
Mayweed looked from Holm to Lorren and back again, he leered, he shook his head, he scratched himself.
“Grubbiness,” said Mayweed at last, “me Mayweed always thought next to him you were the best route-finder he ever found, and in wet and muddy places perhaps even better. You are better than Beechen here, Mayweed knows that, and it’s saying a lot. Yes, yes, yes. Now, humbleness knows that though the Stone Mole, Buckram and his beloved Sleekit make a splendid trio, they are lacking a route-finder to help them along. Holm must draw his own conclusion and decide. Whatever he decides Mayweed loves him.”
Holm looked this way and that in continuing desperation, and then opened and shut his mouth several times before saying what he wanted to.
“Holm will route-find for the Stone Mole. And.”
“And what, arrested Sir?” said Mayweed.
“And come home again.”
Then he rushed up to Lorren, touched her in a quick, jerky, yet most tender way and made what for him was a long speech. “Holm will come back to you because he loves you very much. Rampion, stay by your mother!” Then all three hugged each other close, and grubby Holm was lost in the loving paws and heartfelt tears of the two females he most loved, as if they were saying goodbye there and then.
“Come,” said Beechen to them all, “we must part. Lorren and Rampion, we shall see you safely back to Rollright and then go on.”
Then the others said their distraught farewells, Mayweed and Sleekit first, and then Buckram to Mayweed and Mistle whom he had grown to love.
For a time Beechen and Mistle remained alone, the two sorry groups ready to leave on either side of them.
“Mistle, you are my life,” he said.
“And you mine, my love.”
“The Stone shall guide you to your task in Duncton Wood. Make a community once more. Lead it. Teach it. Be its mother and its father and trust the Stone.”
“Will you come home to me?” said Mistle with terrible despair.
Beechen looked at her for a long time, and then held her close. He moved back from her and gazed into her eyes.
“One day I shall come back to you, but....”
“But what, my dearest love?”
A look of loss and trouble was in his eyes.
“I don’t know. I fear what I feel I must say. I shall come back to you and yet you may not know me, or want to know me then.”
Mistle smiled tenderly, and said, “My love, I shall know you always, love you always, and wait for you until the Stone sends you back to me safeguarded.”
“The Stone is with us both,” replied Beechen. “Yet I feel that I have been searching for you from the beginning of time and that our parting now, when we have barely found each other, is a final test for us, and for moledom too. I do not understand quite what it is the Stone shall ask of us but one day perhaps we shall be free to love each other as we were meant to do.”
Mistle reached out her paws to him and held his face and whispered, “I shall know you always and none other but you.”
Then with one final embrace they turned from each other, and joined their separate groups.
Then Beechen cried out, “Stone, help us all fulfil our tasks, and go like warrior moles towards the future that lies before us now!”
Then one group turned for the north and darkness, and the other turned south to seek once more the light of Duncton Wood, and not a single mole among them paused or turned, or looked back to the life they left behind.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
There is no doubt, none at all, that without Mayweed to lead them, Mistle and Romney would not have reached Duncton Wood alive.
Grikes seemed everywhere along the route they took, and the first they came across – but a few hours after they left the others at Chadlington – were four thickset guardmoles hurrying rapidly along, and clearly under orders not to dally in their northward journey.
Mayweed heard them before he saw them and, always ready for such problems, made sure they were well hidden in the scrubby ground they were then crossing, and the guardmoles went on their way none the wiser.
“I hope the grikes won’t catch the others up,” whispered Mistle doubtfully.
“Humbleness trained Holm himself,” said Mayweed. “They will be more than all right!”
It was typical late December weather, wet, gloomy and cold, and as they neared Duncton at last their route took them alongside the roaring owl way under which they would finally have to pass if they were to get into Duncton Wood.
They had already passed under it after leaving Rollright, but there the cross-under is almost underground and rises further off from the way itself. This was the first time Mistle had been so close to so large a roaring owl way and, with the embankment rising on their right, the sound of the roaring owls heavy and sending a rain of dirty spray out over the steep slope above as their gazes rushed by, she was awestruck, and stopped more than once to look.
“Dangerous it is, Madam, never go up there unaccompanied. Moles die on roaring owl ways.”
“Do they talk? Like moles?” asked Mistle.
“They roar,” said Mayweed, wanting to get on, “like owls.”
“And their gazes, what do they look at?”
“The way ahead, humbleness should think, but sometimes when they cross the countryside in the distance on smaller ways they gaze all around.”
“Do you think they think, like moles?”
“Persistent Madam, Mayweed doesn’t know. He avoids them like the plague but if he must use a roaring owl way route he looks down at the way, and breathes out of the corner of his mouth away from them, to minimise the fumes. He hopes they think, but if they do they never seem to change their minds, which negates their thinking, doesn’t it? No good thinking if change does not result.”
But the approach of more grike guardmoles ahead of them ended the conversation abruptly and Mayweed once more led Mistle calmly into hiding and the grikes went unknowingly past.
“Madam Mistle and Romney Sir, follow closely now because we’re near to the cross-under. Rather a dirty route I fear, through a pipe, but it takes us to where we can observe what moles are about without being seen.”
They followed him silently, and for Romney, who was the biggest of them, it was a tight squeeze, and he could see nothing much ahead but Mistle’s tail and an occasional flash of light at the pipe’s end far ahead.
When they reached the end Mayweed watched and waited for a long time before he would get out. But when he did he leapt nimbly down, snouted about, went straight into the centre of the cross-under and said in a voice that echoed off its concrete walls, “Astonishing, incredible, amazing, I never thought I’d live to see the day!”
They followed after him and saw that the cross-under and beyond into Duncton Wood were quite unguarded with not a mole in sight.
“Remember, Madam, if we’re stopped we’re Romney’s prisoners and we’re to act dumb and pretend to be followers and if there’s
real
trouble run in opposite directions and hope for the best.”
But no moles appeared as they hurried through the wet and echoing cross-under. Everywhere had a derelict air and looked forlorn. The sound of the roaring owls was muffled and apart from the drip-drip of water from the way above on to the concrete floor of the cross-under, the only sounds were the ugly caws of distant rooks high on the slopes above.
Despite Mayweed’s natural desire to get up through the High Wood and to the Stone as quickly as possible, Mistle could not help stopping and staring upslope in awe at the system she had only seen from a distance with Beechen.
They were nearing the top when Mayweed called out from above in a distressed voice, “Mistle Madam, please, please come.”
She went quickly up to him and saw that he was looking ahead up the slopes to just below the edge of the wood itself. The rooks they had heard were pecking there, and then rising a little into the air, stooping at each other and then dropping in an untidy way to the ground again and stalking about. Four of them. It was all too plain that they were feeding off carrion, and that the carrion was the dead bodies of moles that lay scattered about a little promontory or knoll that jutted out of the slope.
“That’s the place the two moles I mentioned made such a fight of it,” said Romney grimly. He and Mayweed eyed the feeding rooks uneasily, but Mistle, well-used to surface travel, went boldly ahead, saying, “They’ll fly off if we make ourselves obvious enough. Come on, Mayweed.”
“Oh Madam, Mayweed knows that,” muttered Mayweed. “He was not born yesterday. It’s what the rooks are feeding on that distresses him.”
“Come on,” said Romney with surprising gentleness, “let’s get it over with.”
They followed quickly after Mistle and reached her flank as the rooks, irritated and made noisy at their approach, rose and hovered low, their white bills dangerous, before suddenly angling into the light breeze and disappearing up into the trees beyond.
They found themselves surrounded by a scene of stark devastation, the bodies of moles scattered all about, and some of them dismembered by the rooks.
“Stone, may they be at peace and brought to your Silence safeguarded,” whispered Mistle, a look of pity on her face. She put a paw out to stop Romney from going to Mayweed, who had gone ahead among the bodies and was searching for his friends.
“Let him be,” she said. “It’s best he’s alone at such a moment. He’ll call us when he wants us.”
Rarely had Mistle seen so touching and pathetic a sight as the thin and ragged form of Mayweed wandering disconsolately among the bodies of fallen moles, reluctantly looking at each one to see if it was Skint or Smithills.
“I wish Sleekit was here,” said Mistle, “it’s her he needs.”
“He’s quite a mole is Mayweed.”
“He’s a great mole,” said Mistle passionately, “and if you knew what he’d done in his life, and the moles he’s helped....”
“Yes, I’m sure,” said Romney placatingly, looking unhappily over the bleak scene.
They saw Mayweed stop on the furthest point of the promontory where several bodies lay, they saw him peer down and then pull away the large body of a young-looking mole. Then he stared down at two bodies that lay so close they seemed to be touching each other, and they heard him sob, and stance still a long time, staring.
Then he looked round and Romney said, “Go to him, mole, you’ll know best what to say.”
She went, and as she reached him Mayweed gestured at the two moles she knew must be Skint and Smithills. Both had suffered terrible talon wounds to face and flanks.
“That’s good-natured Smithills,” said Mayweed, pointing to the larger of the two, “and that’s Skint who found me in a seal-up in the Buckland Slopeside. They were never apart those two, and even now....”
Mistle gazed down at them, and guessed that they must have fought for each other back to back to the very last.
But there was something more than that. After they had been overwhelmed and the grikes had moved on, Smithills must still have tried to protect his old friend before he died because his broad back showed signs of having taken many talonings.
“They came from Grassington,” said Mayweed, “and knew each other as pups. They were my friends.”
Mayweed wept some more and Mistle stayed comfortingly close to him, as she imagined Sleekit would have done. She stared at the dead moles, and wondered how it was that two such old moles as these had found the strength and courage to have battled so hard as they had done.
Mayweed sighed and said, “Mistle Madam, there’ll be other sad sights today, but I feel I’ve wept my tears now and am ready to move on.”
They looked on up the slope and saw that already the rooks were circling out of the leafless trees and coming down their way again.
“Come on, Madam, and you, rough Romney, this mole Mayweed is ready now to go on up into the High Wood and leave the rooks to do their work here.”
The rooks flapped and snapped above them in the sky as they moved on with heavy hearts towards the trees of the High Wood.
How sombre the wood seemed to Mistle as Mayweed led them through it, not at all as she had imagined it when Violet had first spoken to her of Duncton. The towering grey-green trunks of the beech trees utterly dwarfed them, and the smooth rustling floor of fallen beech leaves, which seemed half golden even in that dull winter light, stretched endlessly in all directions about them. The only relief was the occasional raft of dog’s mercury stalks, and a sporadic holly bush which had rooted in the deep leaf litter.
“Wondering moles, the Ancient System lies beneath us and is not a place to venture down without extreme care, so don’t. The Stone rises straight ahead on the west side of the wood.”
“Aye, I remember the direction well enough,” said Romney, “but the wood itself looks a lot grander in the daylight.”
Mistle said nothing, for she was full of apprehension as well as having a curious and contradictory sense of excitement now she was among the trees. It was what they would find that concerned her, not the wood itself which, despite its size and the way it made a mole feel small, gave her a sense of belonging quite unlike anywhere she had been on her long journey here.