Duncton Quest (66 page)

When a count was taken more than half of all those escaping had been lost: more than half! And all the moles could do was comfort each other, and do as the few leaders surviving told them, which was to groom themselves clear of the cold mud and try to get warm.

Tryfan and Spindle and Mayweed were safe, and so was Smithills, who had personally saved several moles, and Marram and Alder. Comfrey was alive but in shock, for so many of his friends had been drowned.

Several, including Tryfan, watched over the terrible mud, but no life came from it, only the occasional rolling flank of a drowned mole, and then another. But they were left where they were, for what was the point of bringing them out, only to lie them down with the many other dead in that place?

Lorren found her sister Starling, and the two huddled together crying terribly for Bailey, who, with their mother, must surely be lost, and staying close to Mayweed as if they would die if he left them. Ragwort, of course, was lost as well, and others who had been in the deepest part of the tunnel. But grief brings its own terrible fatigues, and with night came fitful sleep, with Starling and Lorren flank by flank with Mayweed, his paws around them as he stared with lost eyes over the chamber.

“You’re looking after us now,” said Starling, waking suddenly, “aren’t you Mayweed?”

“Yes,” he whispered, “yes I shall. Now settle down, young Madam, please....”

Perhaps nothing else but their need for him could have kept poor Mayweed sane that night. His eyes were haunted with guilt and loss, for had it not been he who had first found the tunnel?

“They would have suffered a worse fate than that!” said Tryfan bitterly.

“But they’d still be alive, Sir,” said Mayweed.

“Perhaps.”

That long night Mayweed never slept. He kept his paws on his young wards, comforting them, and long afterwards Spindle, who was there, chronicled that sometime at dawn the look of a lost pup, which had always been with Mayweed, left his eyes forever. In its place came the look of an adult, angry perhaps, and forlorn, yet it had a will and purpose and would see life through. And as Starling fretted and stirred, Mayweed whispered hour after hour, “Mayweed won’t ever leave you, young Madam, not he.”

So the surviving moles slept, the restless sleep of the troubled and lost, who have only death behind them and danger ahead.

Morning came, and with it grim awakening. Tryfan wandered among the stricken moles with Spindle at his side, both disconsolate. Tryfan for all the moles who had suffered losses, Spindle for the fear that Bailey, his only pup, was lost to him forever, and not even Starling’s urgent clinging to the belief that Bailey
must
have survived could take the anguish from his thin face.

Only Comfrey seemed to have recovered, as if, in his old age, he could bear his losses in a different and silent way.

“We b-better have an elder meeting here, T-Tryfan,” he said slowly, “where all may hear us.”

Smithills came, and others grouped around.

But there seemed little to say. Barely one among them had not lost a friend or relative in the fighting or drowning, and their numbers seemed small. There was hope that some might have survived the drowning and been pushed by the water underground to the other side, but it was faint indeed. They knew that even had moles survived, the grikes would get them.

As for Skint and Tundry and... “Well, where are they, Tryfan? They weren’t in that last party coming over.”

But even then Tryfan could not tell the full truth lest, in one way or another, it got back to the grikes.

“They are safe enough, and some of your mates as well,” he said rather weakly, for he felt he had nothing to say that could cheer them. Anger suddenly mounted among the survivors.

“It would have been better to stay....”

“Aye, and I’d have a brother still,” said another.

“Only your word that the grikes are that bad. Can’t be worse than death....”

Tryfan and the other elders stared at them uncertainly, tired from the weeks past, shocked by the events of the day before.

“Aye it’s your fault Tryfan! Without you....”

“You’ll have to say something more forceful to us all,” whispered Spindle to Tryfan. “They don’t want a bunch of elders looking miserable, they want to be led... so lead them. Tell them you’re taking them eastwards for safety, and that you trust in the Stone to protect those remaining in Duncton Wood. Tell them.”

A hush fell. It was as if all there sensed that a moment of change had come. They looked at Tryfan and, troubled, he looked at them. The chill call of coot came down into the chamber, then the shrilking of geese, and a flapping woosh as they took off across the nearby river.

Tryfan sensed that they must move on, and take up the challenge the Stone had given them.

He raised a paw and said softly, “What I have to say I will say on the surface within sight of our great system.”

“Once-great, you mean!” said an angry mole.

“And will be again!” cried out Tryfan. “Aye, and
will
be again.”

Then by the sheer force of his presence he led them up on to the surface, in the wide and exposed area near the river, beyond which, dimly, they could see the slow rising of the trees up Duncton Hill. The weather had cleared since the day before though the sky was still cloudy. But the air was good and here and there pockets of sun rode across the ground and lightened the trees of the wood, then the tall swaying sedges of the river, and then themselves.

Tryfan turned instinctively eastwards, for that was where they were bound. There he might lose them in groups in other systems and there they would stay, biding their time until one distant day the Stone followers would return, with the coming of the Stone Mole, and those of Duncton Wood might find their way home.

Some of them might even go as far as the Wen and even on into it, and in time, too, bring back their stories, and enrich the canon of their system’s history. Some would never return.

Duncton was once, Duncton was future. But for now they were vagrants, travellers, lost moles, and each must find courage in memory, in hope, in faith, and in the trust of each other.

Silent were they then around Tryfan, for they saw he was lost in some wonder, and that his tiredness and defeat were leaving him, and he was turning to them strong now, and seeming as if the very light of the Stone itself was in him, which it was. For had he not been to the Holy Burrows themselves, had he not been taught by Boswell, had he not...? And they hushed as he began to speak.

“We are the future,” said Tryfan quietly, “each one of us here, yes and any that survive still in our great system. Today the river divides us, loss divides us, fear breaks us, hopelessness defeats us, uncertainty weakens us, and yet...” He leaned forwards towards them, “We will survive, for the Stone is with us and in us and will be our guide. It will take us eastwards, even to the Wen itself, even into it.”

Many moles’ eyes were wide with wonder at this, and trepidation too.

“For how long will our troubles last?” asked an old male, who had known many who had died.

Tryfan smiled softly at such faith. The Stone was with him, the question could be answered.

“Until the Stone Mole comes,” he said. “Then will your time begin, then will the returning be. Until then I can promise you nothing but the rewards that will come with this great journey of the Duncton moles, rewards of companionship and faith, rewards of learning and courage, rewards that lead to the Stone’s great Silence. I can make no false promises or offer false hopes. Many of you will not come back, but your young may, or their young after them. So you here now must carry the story of these days to the future, and tell it where you go to moles you can trust, pass it on, and tell of a place that one day can be returned to, and whose name is Duncton Wood.

“Tell too of the declining that has been on the system, as it has on all systems of the Stone; tell of how the followers lost their way and the moles of the Word came offering something new and clearer, finding a way not by their strength but by our weakness. Tell your young of this, and of how you had to learn to replace weakness with strength and made a journey to discover it.

“We will start our journey now, but not as a crusade which others join. We will be the silent ones, and as we journey on, some will go one way some another, each to find out their niche for waiting, and for sharing what they know. One distant day we will come together again, but for now I lead you to nowhere but towards yourselves....”

He finished, and Comfrey broke the silence that followed with whispered blessings on them, and asked that one day, distant though it might be, the Stone would grant that the moles of Duncton return home again, safeguarded.

Then Comfrey turned to his half-brother Tryfan and said, “Lead us, T-Tryfan, take us from here. Guide us for the b-beginning of our journey until we have strength to go our own ways, for we trust you and we trust the St-Stone. Give us faith that one day the Stone Mole will come, and in his coming will some of us be blessed to f-find our way back to Duncton Wood again.”

“Then come,” said Tryfan finally, “come! For now our time here is over and our journeys into Silence must begin.”

Then one by one the others followed them by the route established already by Tryfan and Mayweed which began nearby. Some stared briefly to their right over the river, many did not, for their days at Duncton were over for now, and they must turn their gaze to what was to come. One by one they turned eastward, entered a tunnel once more, and were gone, leaving the place where they had been with just the tall sedge swaying and the deep water of the Thames flowing black and silent, forsaken of mole.

While beyond it the trees of Duncton caught the day’s changing summer light, sometimes dark, and sometimes in the sun.

Today, moles like to speak of the escape of the Duncton moles as a triumph, a turning point in moledom’s history, a success. But Tryfan never saw it as a success, and those close to him, who were aware of the trials and the stresses he suffered in the pursuit of his tasks for the Stone, knew that no event took greater toll of him than the terrible escape through the river tunnel, when so many moles were lost. Some say that he ever wished to be punished for it, as if in punishing he could assuage the pain those deaths caused. Others believe that Tryfan of Duncton was punished, terribly punished, in the moleyears that followed. But perhaps it is not for mole to judge the Silence that others, of their own free will, enter into; nor even to guess if it is punishment, or bliss.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Henbane of Whern was ready to kill. Wrekin, the head of all her guardmoles knew it. Sideem Sleekit knew it. Smaile, servant to all of them, doer of evil and unpleasant things, knew it.

But most of all, Weed, adviser to the WordSpeaker, was quite certain of it.

Never in all his long acquaintance with Henbane – “acquaintance” was exactly the right word since neither mole ever liked the other much, or could have been said to have been a friend – had Weed known her more dangerously angry. It would need but a slip from any one of them for her to turn, thrust, and kill.

Her anger had been mounting ever since entering into this Word-forsaken place the locals revered and called Duncton Wood, when they had discovered that there was not a mole in the system. Not one. Not a half one. None at all on whom Henbane might have vented her annoyance at the Duncton moles’ protracted defence. So annoyance changed to anger and now, by the look of it, anger was turning to murderous rage.

So the atmosphere about the great Stone as they crouched there a few days later having a “conference” was tense, and as explosive as the seed pods of rosebay willowherb on a hot September day....

From the first, the coming of Henbane and the moles of the Word to Duncton had been curiously ominous, and cast a shadow over what she had already been claiming as the end of her long campaign to conquer southern moledom, and annihilate the Stone followers.

For two days the Duncton moles had fought with unexpected courage and resolution, sustaining fewer losses than they inflicted, and causing the first real setback Henbane ever suffered, unless a mole included the irritation of Siabod, which resisted the Word still but which Henbane herself had dismissed as of no great consequence. But Duncton was different, more central, and demoralising to moles who had been nowhere near ever losing a battle.