Duncton Tales (37 page)

Yet Sward went, leaving the festive moles behind in Crowden’s communal chambers, and heading off to the austere place near the Library where Shire chose to live. There he found her, a look of displeasure on her bitter face because the distant festive sounds disturbed her work.

Work? Aye, Librarian Shire made a point of working on Longest Night.

“Heathen, their dancing and their singing is,” she hissed, when, with ill grace — and ill-concealed surprise — she had heard out his seasonal best wishes. “Longest Night is a night of contemplation and self-assessment,” she observed, for want of anything better to say. “Now, if you don’t mind —”

“But I do!” said Sward as jovially as he could. “This is a night of joy …”

“… of penances.”

“Penances, for what?”

“Past sins!”

“No, mole, ’tis a night of hope and thankfulness. A night of future dreams.”

“No, no!” she cried bitterly, “it is …”

And so they argued, and Sward saw the depth of her joylessness, and the cheerlessness of her narrow faith. He saw and began to quail, he saw and began to lose words to argue back, he saw and understood the dark void in which she lived.

“You shall leave now, Sward,” she said.

He stared and found no words to reply. He stared, his eyes on hers.

“You shall go. I … am grateful to you for coming. But you, I do not need your wishes, I …”

He stared.

“Shire,” he said at last, and so gently did he speak, and with such love for the young mole he remembered Shire had been once, that she fell silent at this single speaking of her name.

“Shire, it is I who need you,” said Sward.

“You?” she said faintly.

Bleakly he nodded. “Did you know I was there when your mother Wort brought you here?”

“I know only that she abandoned me here,” she said. “Gave me to
her
.”

“Oh no,” said Sward, shaking his head and half turning towards where the sounds of Longest Night, laughter and companionship and seasonal cheer, came to join their strange communion; ‘no, Shire, Wort never gave you away.”

“She …’ began Shire, then fell silent again before his presence and memory, and the understanding, new to her and disturbing, that she should say no more, no more at all: it was he who needed to speak, he who
needed
, and she who after all those bitter years had found at last that she had something to give. So Shire was silent, and Sward the Scholar, Sward the Eccentric, Sward the Courageous, Sward the Obsessive, and now, Sward the Needful, talked of a Testimony he had found that was her mother’s, addressed to a mole who was neither of them, but another, and one they must find.

So began the strange late love — strange awkward love though it was — of Shire and Sward, which led to their discovering they had things to share through those winter years whose theme was a love of texts born of a fear of life and giving.

Until, come early spring, and with news that the Ratcher moles were becoming active and violent across Saddleworth, they set off over the Moors to the Weign Stones, to recover the great collection of texts Sward had hidden away.

“At least, that’s what they
say
they’re going for,” chuckled Fey to Tarn, as she watched them leave, for though Tarn was too old now for such things himself, his Fey was still spirited enough to remind him of why it might be, when the winds grew warm and the sun melted the snows across the Moors, a male and a female should, for a time, wish to find a place to be alone together.

“No!” said Tarn.

“Oh yes,” said Fey, thinking that perhaps, after all, if the sun made the heather seem so sprightly, and the streams continued to run through Crowden as purposefully as they did, her Tarn might not be too old after all …

“No,” said Tarn again.

But Fey, who knew him well and loved him so, came closer still, all flank to flank and fur to fur, and spoke to him of love, and said that spring makes all moles young again.

Neither Shire nor Sward ever spoke of what occurred when they reached the Weign Stones up on the Moor, though much later, Shire, near her end by then, could not quite resist scribing something of it down.

How
could
she resist? For that trek up into the Moors that spring morning, that afternoon of discovery, that evening of touching the texts he showed her and that night by the awesome Weign Stones, all of it was the spring and the summer of Shire’s sparse life. Like a butterfly that opens its wings to the warmth of a dawn sun, and flies for a solitary day, Shire awoke to another mole for a few brief, unaccountable, frightening hours of her life.

Through that strange afternoon and evening she awoke to Sward’s instinctive sense of what she needed, until there, by the Stones, deep in the night, she was not Shire any more, but somemole other than any she knew. Then she was free to come to him at last.

Whilst he, at first puzzled by her ardour, astonished at what she seemed to know of the loving art, understood at last that here and now in that springtime night was when it was and all it would ever be for her. A solitary night in a whole lifetime when a mole was made to forget what life and circumstance had made her, and could be herself as she might have been.

“Why?” he might have asked, but didn’t.

“Because you never criticized my mother Wort, nor looked as if you thought of her with anything but love, and made me believe she was forgiven, and through her Testimony will one day be redeemed,” she might have replied, but had no need to. In that too short time she could reach out to him, she enjoyed it all without the need for words.

But when their sighing was done and in that afterlude when Sward felt the pain of Shire reverting to her bitter dismissive self once again, but then …

“What did we do tonight?” whispered Shire, for one last moment letting herself be her better self, and wonder at the stars as well. A star went right across the sky.

“What did we do?” she asked.

Then Sward reached out to her and touched her flank. Suddenly he knew, he knew so much. In the starlight he smiled and said, softly, “I think I know.”

“Know what?” she asked.

What they had done, and whatmole the Testimony was for. He held her close as long as her drifting back to coldness would allow, and prayed that if he was right one of the pups born of their brief union might one day be the one for whom Wort scribed her Testimony; and if that was so then perhaps the Stone would bless that pup with the love and companionship its parents never fully had.

Silence came again to the chamber where Privet told her tale. Not so much as a breath was heard, and above the wind roared on, and the rain came in swathes across the wood. They waited for Privet to resume, and then she did.

“It was I who was conceived that night,” she said. “I and my sister Lime. There came a day when my father Sward told me that he thought Wort’s Testimony was scribed for
me
!”

She laughed dismissively and shrugged.

“For me? Who as you shall find, harmed so many and brought happiness to so few. For me? Who in my arrogance tried to find Wort’s text but lost courage. Such a thing for me? No, no, dear Sward was not always right, you know! But I am sure he was right to think that one day a mole will be worthy to ken the whole of Wort’s lost Testimony, and then it will be recovered and moledom’s understanding of Silence much increased. For my grandmother Wort journeyed into the void, and came back again. Few moles have courage to do that. Well … what will be will be, and we must strive meanwhile as best we may. But now, back to the Moors! Back to my bitter puphood and how I broke free of it!”

Chapter Eighteen

Shire did not enjoy being with pup and from the first she longed for the day she would be rid of them. Throughout the long molemonth of April she was sick and uncomfortable, and afraid, and at the end she felt imposed upon, and what little care she had felt for Sward was all used up because of what “he has done to me”.

Not for Shire any pride in what she would soon make, or the joys of reverie about her pups-to-be, nor even the natural wish to make a place to nest, a secret place where she and her pups might for a time be one and all unseen. Poor Shire, so coldly reared by Sans, did not know feelings such as those.

At least when her pups started, the first, Lime, came with sudden and consummate ease, and for that Shire felt only eternal gratitude. But the second, Privet, came only after hours of pain and difficulty, and for that Shire never forgave her. Lime was large and healthy; Privet, puny and weak. Shire eyed her when she came out and wished her dead, and only Tarn’s ministrations kept the pup alive until it found strength to take suck.

So Shire loved and favoured Lime from the first, the more that she behaved as Shire felt a pup should, which is obediently and to its parents’ greatest convenience.

“But this Privet never sleeps or sucks when she should, and mews and bleats until she drives me half mad with tiredness,” Shire complained to Tarn.

She might have spoken more to Fey, but her only female friend had, by some miracle, got with pup as well and was joyously raising a brood of four in her own burrows and would not venture forth, not even to see Shire’s two.

“Aye,” said Tarn, “we’ve a couple like your Privet. But our first-born, Hamble, why, he’s like your Lime — big and strong and never a moment’s trouble. But Privet will come right, you’ll see; be patient and nurture her. The weakest are often the best.”

But it seemed not in Shire’s heart to want to feel so, and from the first Tarn felt an instinctive need to watch over that one especially, and to seek to persuade the reluctant father to do the same.

But Sward, having to the astonishment of all of Crowden succeeded in getting the dreadful Shire with pup, soon found she did not want him more, and blamed him for her continuing trials in raising pups. He tried to take an active role but failed, and devoted his attentions to the easier task of retrieving his hoard of texts from the Moors. At the same time he began to enjoy acceptance in the system, and for the first time in his life felt he had a home better than a temporary burrow in a stinking hag of peat, and one worth getting to know better.

The system he had finally found acceptance in was well established, had learned to live in the shadows of the Moors and had a long history of successful defence against grikes and anarchy. In earlier decades, when Ashop was alive, it had had a fiercely pioneering spirit about it, and its worship of the Stone was obsessive, and its prejudice against all things grike and Moorish was complete.

Things had become easier in recent years, and moles like Sans, who had reared Shire with such discipline, were rarer now, whilst half-grike moles like Sward, provided they showed they were loyal and useful to the place, were accepted well enough.

The main system was located to the south of the Crowden Tarn and river, which formed its northern defence. At the East End, as moles called it, was a series of interlocking tunnels which confused moles who did not know them and provided many traps for the unwary. It was the task of young moles to maintain these tunnels, a process by which they got to know them well.

The southern flank of Crowden was marshy and except in dry weather difficult for mole to cross who did not know the way, whilst to the west few dangers lay, for anymole coming that way would have had to outflank all three other sides and have long since been seen and attacked.

It was a system in which aggression and fighting were appreciated, the delving art as well, for delvers were always needed to maintain the tunnels and improve them where they could. Crowden moles were rugged and proud of their system’s independence, but they were dull moles with little originality or willingness to do anything that might draw attention to themselves, whilst their faith was of a simple dogmatic kind in which right was right and wrong was very wrong indeed. Unfortunately, in such matters Shire had a certain sway and status, for moles were in awe of her great learning.

The Crowden moles had no Stone about which to enact their rituals, but there was a spot, a little raised, in the centre of the system, at which moles collected to worship the Stone, whilst most families had a prayer or two they said each day — prayers which spoke grimly of protecting Crowden against the dark forces that surrounded it.