Duncton Tales (22 page)

Alas, the reception she got at Rolls and Rhymes from Privet was even worse than she had feared in her darker moments of doubt. For Privet proved reluctant to take time off to listen to her, and when she did she was unwilling to discuss the issues Stour had raised, and could not conceal her desire to return to Keeper Husk, who seemed to have some kind of hold on her.

One of the things that Fieldfare had most wished to discuss was why it might be that Stour had chosen
her
to be part of the secret meeting. For surely she was no more than the mate of Chater and had no special gift or skill to give the system — the very notion which Stour had made her doubt, but which she wished to rehearse with a friend like Privet before rejecting it. Mind you, she had often said to herself in the troubled time just past, she was a mole who did not mind any challenge or any task. But then, until now such tasks as she had undertaken had been ordained by circumstance or custom.

“Now I’ve to find a route forward of my own through unfamiliar ways, you see’ (she had wished to say to Privet), “and, my dear, I’m not sure I know how to do it …”

But none of this was said, or could be said, to Privet, since Privet, after the briefest of conversations, said she had work to do and things to attend to and helter-skeltered off underground once more.

“Some friend!” said Fieldfare to herself, much hurt by this rejection. Then feeling most disconsolate, and unsure which way to turn to either confront the unexpressed thoughts which nagged at her, or escape them, she was on her way back to the Eastside in the vague hope that she might try to find Drubbins after all, when her brief outrage at Privet surfaced again in a more diffused sense of rebellion against everything in general, and her own acquiescence yet again in the idea that she needed another mole to give what she did any meaning.

“’Tis not Privet’s fault if I’m upset,’ she told herself judiciously, “it is my own! Fieldfare, my love, I despise you for being so pathetic! Today, here and now, you must be brave and dauntless like you said you would be earlier before you foolishly rushed over to Rolls and Rhymes!”

She stanced still a long time, staring among the trees, and breathing rather fast in an excited kind of way as unaccustomed thoughts of journeying crossed her mind in fleeting but alarming images of places to which she had never been, combined with thoughts she had never uttered. Not that either image or thought would have been very radical to moles like Chater, used as they were to travelling and thinking for themselves, or even Privet, despite her present flight into obscure seclusion with Husk and his texts.

No, plump Fieldfare’s thoughts were parochial: ‘There’s nomole to stop me travelling this very day, if I so wish, to … to … why, to the Westside!” she declared daringly to herself. “Or,
if I
wish, to the Pastures! Or to that mysterious stretch of the High Wood which lies
beyond
the Stone. I could, I could!”

As she thought of each of these places she turned and peered purposefully in their direction, debating the possibility of going there. But none of them quite suited the radical mood that was upon her, and that had to be satisfied.

Then Fieldfare furrowed her plump brow, and it was not long before a possibility more intimidating, and certainly more daunting, but infinitely more exciting, came to her.

“I couldn’t!” she whispered.

“I mustn’t!” she murmured.

“I shall!” she declared, and out loud too, to give her courage. “I shall go to the Marsh End and see what these Newborn moles get up to on their home ground! They always did say moles were welcome at their meetings, and if they are as dubious in their intentions as Chater thinks and Stour says then I shall go and see what they’re about for myself! Then, if I do have to confront them in the future I shall know all the better what I’m about!”

She could scarcely have guessed how original that thought and action would have seemed to many in the Duncton Wood of her day, nor could she have ever dreamed that it was his understanding that she might have such a quality of sensible enterprise and practical daring that had made Stour choose her as a member of his privy council. Perhaps it had not escaped him that a mole of Chater’s calibre was unlikely to have a weak mole for a mate.

So Fieldfare set off directly downslope, with that sense of mounting and most pleasurable freedom a mole gets when she puts her normal daily cares behind, and goes off on a risky adventure from which there is no turning back.

“I’ve not talked to that mole Bantam in ten moleyears at least!” she said cheerfully to herself as she went. “But she’s something important and maybe that’s done her some good. I’ll seek her out for a start, and at the very least I can spend an hour or two in her company before returning to the Eastside. What fun it will be to have something to tell Chater for a change!”

It would have been hard for anymole, intent upon getting in among the Marshenders — who had become even closer since they veered the Newborn way — to have chosen a better day than Fieldfare had done. For arriving that same afternoon, tired and hungry, she found the Marshenders in a mood of excited expectation and open to visitors.

So much so, that strange though she was to most of them, they seemed not a bit surprised to see her, believing, as she quickly deduced, that she had come to witness for herself the visitation of some special moles whose imminent arrival was the cause of excitement all over the Marsh End. Indeed, other Duncton moles, mainly ones who lived on the edge of the Marsh End and who half accepted the Caradocian way, had come for that very reason, so Fieldfare’s arrival seemed less remarkable than it might normally have done.

The cause of the excitement was that a group of Senior Brothers of the Order had been expected for some mole-months past and that very day news of their imminent arrival had come, and Chervil himself had set off upslope that very morning to the south-eastern Pastures to meet them. The Marsh End Newborns were now waiting excitedly for his return with the visitors, about whom they knew nothing but that they were Senior Brethren and were bringing joyful news that would end at last the Newborns’ self-imposed isolation in the Marsh End away from the Duncton Stone.

Chervil! But that’s Thripp’s son! thought Fieldfare, her heart suddenly in her mouth to find herself so near so sinister a legend. For a moment she thought she should flee back upslope to the Eastside, but then, since the name of the day was dauntless she felt she should continue as she had begun and see things through. It would be quite a thing to be able to tell her Chater that his beloved had seen Senior Brother Chervil, Thripp’s
son
, with her own eyes! And anyway, she felt hungry again, and fancied a nibble.

Worms aplenty were available and the Marsh End was in festive mood, and Fieldfare was at leisure, for the time being at least, to take in the scene. She had not been in those tunnels since she was a youngster, and the place seemed more modest, less dank, and less forbidding than it had then to her young eyes. Even so, the soil was darker and more moist than that upslope in the main part of the system, and the trees smaller, and the ground-cover thicker and muckier, making the surface ways winding and enclosed, and likely to confuse a mole who erred off the communal paths.

“Greetings, Sister!” moles said brightly when they saw her, approaching with smiling eyes and adding with irritating cheerfulness, “This is a happy day, come celebrate with us!”

At first Fieldfare was uncertain whether these invitations were general to the day and season, or specific to a place and time within the Marsh End. Certainly the further she advanced along the Marsh End’s main surface communal way, past entrances down into its tunnels, the more she came across the sight and sound of festivity of anything but a sombre religious sort. The Newborns, it seemed, could enjoy themselves.

Eventually she was stopped by the sheer force of numbers of one such group of brothers and sisters whose members had sprawled across the way, and through whose songs, prayers and eating it would have been hard to pass without seeming rude.

“Have a lobworm, Sister, and rejoice in the Stone’s bounty!” a fellow-sister said to her, giggling as she presented Fieldfare with a broken lump of worm. “It’s a miracle, isn’t it, the Senior Brothers coming this day and …
this
.”

Fieldfare looked in the direction indicated, which was a side turn off the main way, and she was astonished to see a massed tangle of shining healthy lobworms in a pile as big as a mole, and moving moistly. Fieldfare liked her food, but there was something over-generous about this mound of worms to which, in its juicy repulsiveness, the gluttony of the Newborns was a ghastly counterpoint. For the self-same paws that were soggy with the entrails of half-eaten worms were raised from time to time to the sky in supplication to the Stone, while those same stuffed and overflowing mouths were mumbling dribbling prayers of thanks.

Where the worms had come from Fieldfare had no idea, though she had heard it said that sometimes in the autumn, after especially hot summer years, there was a second breeding of such lobworms as these in the Marsh End, which resulted in their effusion from the worm-saturated soil on to the surface.

Perhaps this was the cause of the ‘miracle’ which Fieldfare’s new friends were celebrating, but it was very soon a feast from whose nauseous sights and sounds she wished to escape. But out of the need to seem to be a part of things Fieldfare continued to nibble at what she was offered, whilst searching among the excited mass of moles to see if she might find Bantam or pick up a clue to her whereabouts.

Failing that, she talked a little to what moles were near and, between gorging and pious prayers, discovered that Sister Bantam was not fer off below ground in a communal chamber, and that Chervil and the Senior Brothers were expected imminently. Mention of the fact, which came from two excited moles who had just appeared along the same route that Fieldfare had taken, had the effect of suddenly sobering up the joyful throng, as if they sensed that whilst celebration was in order, visiting Brothers, especially senior ones, might find fault with the present wormful excess. Having discovered where Bantam was, and sensing that the local festivity she had come across was not the best place to be, Fieldfare hurried on in the company of the two new arrivals, who led her underground to the communal chamber.

The place was crowded but orderly and since other moles came pressing in from behind her, Fieldfare soon found herself in the midst of what she suddenly realized was a congregation, whose prayerful actions and liturgy were being conducted by a mature male, dark-furred, whom she recognized as one of the Carodocians who had long since come to the system.

He was stanced at one end of the chamber, intoning prayers of praise to the Stone, which those all around her knew by heart, and cried out zealously after him. Fieldfare could only just see his head and snout, for the throng of moles in front obstructed her view.

She decided that just as she had nibbled at the worms on the surface to appear to be an enthusiastic part of things, she might as well nibble away at the service underground, to show willing and remain unnoticed by others there. But the liturgy being strange to her she had trouble keeping up with it and no sooner did she bob her snout low, in accord with the others, than they were raising theirs to the roof; and no sooner was she shouting out ‘Stone I praise thee!” than they had fallen silent. Luckily other moles were scattered among the throng who seemed as ill-attuned to the service as she was, added to which there was all about her a certain undercurrent of spiritual chatter or noise, generated mainly by older and scraggy females, who seemed quite carried away by their own fervour. Ignoring the male leader entirely, they were conducting their own special form of worship, which consisted of half-prayers, half-songs, half-praisings, and half-gestures of abasement and joy, all to the apparent indifference of those nearest to them.

However, although they seemed utterly lost in a zealous world of their own, this proved not to be the case. For suddenly, the male stanced down and disappeared from Fieldfare’s sight and in his place reared up a female, who cried out the single word ‘Peace!” with such ear-splitting and harsh command that everymole in the room fell silent.

“Why, ’tis Bantam!” exclaimed Fieldfare to herself, instinctively retreating behind the mole in front of her, lest Bantam see her before she had a chance to decide if it was wise that Bantam knew she was there. Already grave reservations were coming into Fieldfare’s mind about this whole venture, and she had decided that she had been dauntless enough, and when the right moment came to leave unnoticed she would take it. The silence did not however last for more than a moment or two before one of the oldest and wildest of the fervent females began singing out her joys once more in a cracked voice and disturbing the sudden peace.

Bantam nodded sharply to an attendant male who, Fieldfare saw for the first time, was one of several who were stanced guard-like at intervals around the edge of the great chamber. Although the other moles held their snouts low in expectation of some new turn in the liturgy for which Bantam’s command of silence had prepared them, Fieldfare surreptitiously watched as the male, also dark, but younger than the seeming leader, pushed his way with a colleague through the congregation and unceremoniously grabbed the offending female and very rapidly and very roughly removed her, dragging her screaming towards an exit at the back of the chamber, and then up an unseen tunnel, whence her screams continued in a muffled way before suddenly, and most sickeningly, coming to a stop in mid-flight.