Duncton Tales (27 page)

Husk’s obsessive work now seemed to be but a process of diminution whose inevitable end was that sooner than later there would be no text left at all of what might once have been moledom’s greatest book of tales.

The discards, as Husk himself called them, were another matter, and scholar and librarian that she was, once she realized their possible importance she felt that by rejecting them Husk had no further claim on them. At first she had barely looked at them, for it was Husk’s grubby habit, particularly on colder nights, and at even colder dawns, to use these crumpled and broken discards as nesting material into which he snuggled down to keep his scraggy old body warm.

The day when she realized these were rather more than mere scraps was when she discovered that he had been sleeping for several days on what, when she looked more closely at it, turned out to have been (at one time at least) the very first folios of his great work. What caught her eye and talon as she followed his scribing down the folios, was a tale whose title was, “The First Tale of Balagan, and how all moles began’. It was scribed more neatly and boldly than other things of Husk’s she had seen, and she concluded he had scribed it many, many years before.

The tale began, “There was a mighty Stone that stood in the eternal silence that was before mole began. This was the primal Stone, in which all life and all things were. This was the Stone out of which Balagan sought to find a way.

“One day the silence of eternity was broken by the sound of the Stone cracking, and at first the tip of a talon, then more talons, then a paw, and then a mole’s arm, struggled out of the Stone, and there was a panting, and a heaving, and groaning and roaring and thunder was born, which was Balagan’s voice; and lightning was born, which was Balagan’s eyes; and the wind was born, which was Balagan’s breath.”

At this point the first folio ended, and she had to scrabble round in the muck and filth of Husk’s chamber to find the next. It continued, “Then was a storm where the primal Stone had stood and Silence was no more …” and then was Privet carried away into the oldest Tale of them all, which is of the coming of Balagan the First Mole, and how moledom was made, and how its stones came to be, each of them fragments of the Primal Stone he cracked and broke in his desire to be free.

It was a long telling of a story she had heard, though in Peakish, when she was young. Yet skilled though her mother had been at such a story-telling, she recognized in Husk’s account something more. The language he had used was not one of the local dialects in which most tales are recorded, but ordinary mole. There was something strong and simple in the way he told it that made her see that the tale was no mere fantasy, or way to occupy an idle hour, but a reminder, deep and true, of something of where all moles began, as fundamental to all their lives as the Primal Stone itself.

Why then had he discarded so much of the book he had made, including even this most fundamental of the tales of moledom? When she asked him, which she soon did, for Privet was not a mole to be surreptitious or indirect on matters involving library work, his explanations were reluctant and vague.

Balagan’s story was too well known, he said, and anyway, he was dissatisfied with his telling of it. Then again, he said, when a mole tells a tale it is finally the gaps and silences between the words that mean most of all, for words themselves are but paltry unsatisfying things, which taken together rarely say what is in a mole’s heart when he makes a telling to another.

“So I work at my Book of Tales to simplify them, and you can help me, my dear, by listening … This is not work to do alone.”

“But do you mind if I collect what you call the discards?” she asked him one day. “It will make this place tidier for a start …”

“Collect them, if you must,” he said indifferently, “but leave fresh folios out for me, for old and tired as I am, I scribe new things, or rather new versions of very old things! My scribing however becomes more arcane, meaningful perhaps only to me; but there we are, a mole must scribe what he can. As for whether another can make sense of it, well that I rather doubt. And there you can help me too, by going over what I scribe until I feel it is ready to put into what remains of my little book.”

In this way Privet’s historic collaboration with Keeper Husk evolved into several tasks at once — rescuing his discards, which she kept separately in one of the chambers she had begun to clear of texts, re-scribing what he had scribed in a firmer hand, and listening when he felt it incumbent on her to scribe down what he said, just as he said it, and these tales too she carefully kept in folios, somewhere where he could not find them until she had gathered them together and created once more a text that might truly be called a Book of Tales. Some of her own work was in it, and all this she one day commanded Pumpkin to take to safety up in the main library.

So developed a relationship between two moles who spoke each other’s language, and shared the same love of words and old texts. Two moles who seemed never to stop talking, one of all he knew, and the other of all she could learn. Was it some time then that he first told her of a long lost tale entitled ‘The Sound of Silence’?

“It’s here somewhere,” he would say vaguely. “I’m sure it is …”

Above them, almost unseen — for now they rarely ventured forth from Husk’s tunnels, and Pumpkin had learnt not to venture down into them except to collect the texts left by Privet at the entrance — September ended and blustery October began, and the days drew in. The tunnels grew gloomier, the air more dank, but as the rest of Duncton Wood prepared itself for winter Privet and Husk barely noticed it, working now together in that world of tales that had been Husk’s alone for so long, and into whose endless tunnels, and eternal time, he had now welcomed Privet.

Yet removed though they seemed, and abstracted as Husk increasingly became in the throes of his solitary re-working and steady reduction of his text, Privet herself never quite lost sight of reality. As the days continued and the weather worsened, she could see that the old mole was visibly slowing. Sometimes he seemed unable to work at all; or, he was lost in some tale he had scribed before, weeping and laughing for moles whose lives he had made permanent between the folios of his Book, but whose record he now felt obliged to finally discard, muttering, “To Silence, aye, to Silence it must go! No good, Privet, not this tale, not near the truth of it at all. Better that moles make their own tales you see, live their own tales, that’s the thing; but I don’t know … I just don’t know any more!” And he stared at his ruined portfolio, closed the birch-bark covers on it and rested his weary paws for a long time, thinking.

“Perhaps tomorrow, my dear, we can delve at this some more, and make some sense of it, so that something useful’s left,” he said at last. Then, more cheerfully, he added, “Mind, I have something to scribe down, not a tale you know, but just a thought, a
thing
. So give me a clean folio and leave me be, and I’ll do with it what I can. Dear me, what a to-do life seems when a mole gets to the end of it. All a big to-do about nothing much at all. Now, let me see … ha! That’s a laugh! I’ll never
see
again, and you know what, old Husk doesn’t care a jot because he’s got imagination to see with, and voice to speak with. That’s all you need for tales, my dear, for a mole to listen, and time to make a telling. Such a to-do, and it’s all so simple in the end. Now! Leave me, mole! Take away all these discards of mine before I sit on them or sleep on them or otherwise do something you’ll disapprove of with them. I know, I know, you’re a hoarder like my brother. A true librarian. But what would librarians say if the grubby moles who made the texts they love to hoard came ambling along their way? Eh? Ha ha ha!”

Then in mid-October Husk was taken ill, and grew incapable of any work at all, even the discarding of what little remained in his portfolio. Privet hardly left his flank, for she knew he was ailing and had come now to rely on her, and grew distressed if she was gone to the surface too long.

She managed to continue her sorting work — indeed she did more than formerly, because there was no work of his to do except sometimes to scribe down tales he told in his delirium, strange tales of endings and beginnings, of beginnings and endings.

“Stone,” she prayed quietly as he slept, “help him find peace and an end to his great task. Give him strength to take it to its conclusion …” For she sensed that near though he was to death he still did not himself feel his task was complete, and wanted to stay alive until it was.

“Shall I get Stour?” she said one day.

“No!” he said loudly. “He’ll only blather on about Fat Pansy like he did last time.”

She could not help smiling. “Last time’ was more than seventy years before. So many decades, such a waste …

“Did I tell you the story of Fat Pansy?” he whispered, turning painfully to her, his paw out to hers, his unseeing eyes upon her.

“Some of it,” she said.

“I’ll tell you the rest then …”

But he never did, for it was that same day, that same time, that Privet heard mole sounds at the entrance to the tunnels and went out to investigate. It was Fieldfare, and for the first time since Privet had been in Duncton Wood she was not glad to see her friend or eager to talk. Even less so was she when Fieldfare went on about her worries about the things the Master had said at the secret meeting. Why, all
that
had long since fled Privet’s mind, and now Husk was dying, and in his last days he had to be helped to find strength to complete his work. She could not have stopped, her mind was only on Husk and there seemed so little time.

But within three days of Fieldfare’s visit, Husk had recovered somewhat and was even grumbling about wanting to get back to his scribing, and Privet was suddenly filled with a sense of guilt at having given her friend so little time. So much so that she could not bear the oppression of the tunnels any more and went up to the surface. It was morning, and misty, and the ground was wet with a heavy dew. But looking up Privet could see the mist adrift among the nearly leafless branches of the trees, and it held that pink warm light that suggested that the late autumn sun was trying to break through.

She watched the mist lighten all about, and autumn colours come to the branches and leaves above, and then to the surface of the Wood on the slopes above, where sun began to shine through hazily at last.

But downslope of her the mist was still thick, and resisting the warmth of the sun. Fieldfare had told her that at this time of year such mists as these lingered in the lower parts of the Wood and particularly about the Marsh End.

The day could be warm and bright in the High Wood whilst down there the chill mists lingered to catch at a mole’s throat, while the day stayed gloomy, and dank. Privet stared that way, shivered with unease, and turned back down to the realities of tunnels she knew rather than a contemplation of tunnels she did not.

That same dawn Fieldfare awoke and knew that her resistance to the Newborns, which had been waning for days and nights past, was near its end. How hard she had fought the pressures of the Brothers’ ministering in that chamber of subjugation, acquiescence, and death.

Her strategy of pretending that she agreed with what they said had finally failed, because
what
they said, to which she and others said, “yes, oh yes” changed, oh it changed. What was right one hour was wrong the next; where cries of “yes!” in response to a question were greeted by food and caresses one moment, they were ridiculed and punished the next, though the question was the same.

The tiredness grew, for though they were allowed to sleep they were woken at sleep’s deepest point, and dragged with blows and smiles, shouts and caresses, back into this world of contradiction, where there was no right or wrong but what the Brothers said was right and wrong, however much it changed from one moment to the next.

“The Brothers are always right!” Fieldfare declared — still stubborn and clever enough to think that this nonsense might be the way to survive. But no! More blows.

“The true way to the Stone is right!” they said. Ah! Yes! The true way. Sleep, that would seem true enough. Escape from the images of Bantam, and the nightmare of snurtish Snyde, and Fieldfare unable to feel anything at all in the long days that shifted into nights, and nights that changed back to days in which the light was so bright, and hurt her heavy painful eyes and felt like talons thrust deep into them. Yes, no, yes, no, she would do anything and say anything if the Brothers would let her sleep. But doing, and saying, was not enough. She must
become
. Day, night, day
 
—
it was enough to break a mole, or drive her mad.

And that morning, when she woke, the light was dim and she thought that she was going blind. She peered, moved, expected a blow and none came; said yes, said no
 
—
no response. She peered, and saw the Brothers across the prone unconscious bodies of those others being punished with her.

The ‘oohhnnn’ hum was starting; Bantam was there, no sign of Snyde. Perhaps he had never been. The Brothers were beginning a chant to the Stone. She scented the air. Darkish, dankish, moistish, the scent of a Marsh End mist. Memories of puphood. Memories of a mole she had been before …
this
.