Duncton Tales (47 page)

When Privet awoke next day she lay dozing for a time, knowing it was late, yet unwilling to stir, for the images of the places in the dreams she had had in the night lingered with her still and dark though they were, and troubled though the moles who inhabited them seemed, she was reluctant to leave them for the realities of the journey she must resume.

When she finally went out on to the surface to groom, she found that the others had been long up and about, and were talking in low voices in the same safe overhang of peat where they had first found Turrell and his group.

“Were not going to move until late in the morning,” said Hamble, “because Sward thinks we need to rest a bit before the climb up Withens Moor to Twizle Head. But Turrell’s told us how best to reach Chieveley Dale without being seen by grike patrols.”

“But we won’t delay too long?” said Privet, who was filled with a desire to track Rooster down.

“Always take the third day of any journey easy, my dear,” said her father, “for it’s when travelling moles are at their most weary and vulnerable. I’m going to show these youngsters how to make a burrow in the
molish
way … We’ll set off again at noon.”

He grinned happily as the four youngsters tugged at his old paws and took him off upslope; Privet watched him go, thinking she had never seen him so relaxed and wishing wanly she had been allowed by her mother to get to know him as these youngsters seemed to be doing.

“Perhaps one day I’ll have young of my own,” she thought, and if I do I’ll tell them stories and teach them things and give them what I never had/She stared at the grim Moors about her, which if anything seemed duller and more desolate even than they had the day before, and was adding to her thoughts the resolution that she would never raise young in such a place and so must leave, when Hamble put a paw to hers.

“You look sad, Privet. Things will get better now. We’ll find Rooster and bring him back to Crowden and things will improve.”

Privet nodded vacantly and took up some food and pecked at it in silence.

“Come on, Turrell,” said Hamble, perhaps guessing at the cause of his friend’s gloom and determined to find a way to cheer her up, “tell us the rest of the tale you started last night. I fell asleep just when —”

“Just when Rooster was born,” growled Turrell. “A fat lot of good it is telling tales to moles who fall asleep, but at least Privet here heard me out, which fortunately for you, Hamble, was not long after you started snoring. Now …”

That morning, the unforgettable morning when Privet first heard of the raising of Rooster in the infamous Charnel and the circumstances of his escape from it, went swiftly by. But before she could take stock of what she had been told and begin to ask the questions that occurred to her, Sward came back and the time had come to leave their friends and set off once more into the Moors.

“Come back this way!” said Turrell. “It’s done us good to see you, and ’tis good for these youngsters to talk to other moles than me.”

“I’ve given them their instructions, old friend!” said Sward, touching his paw to Turrell’s great shoulder, “and sworn them to secrecy too.”

Turrell laughed and told his wards to accompany ‘the Scholar and his kin some part of the way upslope, as courteous moles should’, and then they were off. Only much later, when Sward had sent the youngsters back to their patch again, did Privet ask what instructions he had given them.

“Told them that in return for all Turrell’s done for them it would be their task one day to get him off the Moors to a place more amenable to mole. He’ll never go of his own will, but he might if they make him.”

“Perhaps he’s happy here,” said Hamble, amused.

Sward did not smile, but looking serious paused in the climb upslope and said to both of them, “
He’s
happy enough, as moles are when they know no better. But it’s
them
I’m thinking of. Without a task like that they’d never leave themselves, and it’s time my generation saw that whatever sins first brought moles to the Moors have been expiated, and it’s time moles stopped punishing themselves by living here.

“Same goes for Privet, as she knows. It’s my great wish she leaves the Moors and goes somewhere where her scribing skills will be appreciated. As for you, Hamble, there’s better things for those talons of yours to see to than matters on the Moors, and better things for your mind to think about.”

“I’m surprised you agreed to lead us on to the Moors then!” said Privet.

“Want you to see it while you can, and to meet some of its suffering moles. A mole should know his own place, and learn what there is to love in it, before he ever leaves it. I think there’ll be things you’ll learn on this journey. And anyway, I didn’t want to end my days in Crowden — too safe, too limited for me!”

“You’ll not be ending your days for a long time yet,” said Hamble.

To which the only reply Sward gave was a look, long and deep, at each of them, and a slight shake of the head. Then he turned and headed slowly upslope once more, with Hamble close behind, while Privet paused some brief moments longer and watched her father become but a vague distorted shape in the mists above and felt a curious sense of loss, as if he were leaving her for good. Then she sighed and hurried after them to take up once more her place of safety between them.

All that day and the next they trekked on into heights more wormless and desolate than any Privet could ever have imagined. The mist never cleared, but swirled in the chilly air to catch at the back of their throats and sting at their eyes as if it were malign and wished them to turn back.

To Privet it was a wonder that Sward pressed forward with such confidence, for she had long since grown confused as to where they were, or in what direction they trekked. Whichever way she looked there was only the white light of mist; no sign of sun or even a lighter sky to indicate where it might be. All colour was drained out of the heather and peat hags through which they passed, for their shadowless, dark brown hue seemed no colour at all but the negation of all life.

“You wait till the mists clear and the sun comes out and you’ll see colours you’d never guess were here,” said Sward. “You just wait and see!”

“How do you know which way to go?” she asked him.

“By the lie of the heather and the run of the ginnels in between. The prevailing wind hereabout is westerly and you judge your direction by that. As for place, well, that’s a matter of experience. We’ll find a drainage valley and trust to the Stone we get the right one for Chieveley Dale.”

He scratched his grizzled fur and screwed up his eyes against the mist in the general direction in which they seemed to be going. Around them the breeze hissed in the heather, and the hags loomed; now near, now far, according to the thickening and weakening of the mist. Their face-fur was wet with condensation. Each of them was hungry, though nomole mentioned the fact, for the brackish black water in the puddles and small tarns they passed was their only sustenance. They knew that this was as wormless as a place could be and that if Sward could not get them off the Tops to lower and more wormful ground to the north they would surely starve before ever they could make their way back the way they had come.

Despite the desolation there was the sense, peculiar and frightening, that grikes might be about, a possibility confirmed by the sudden discovery of pawprints by a place where they stopped to drink, which though blurred by rain and wind were recent enough to warn them against complacency.

Yet they saw no other sign of mole and as dusk gathered on the second evening after leaving Turrell, and they might normally have considered establishing a temporary burrow, the ground began to slope northward and they came into the beginning of the upper end of a drainage gully that Sward thought might help lead them off the Tops.

By now Privet’s paws were as weary as they had ever been and the sudden drop through rocky outcrops and among sharp shards of scree taxed all her strength and endurance. She stumbled more than once, and cut her paws on the sharp stones, while the wind drove sharply up at her and brought tears to her eyes to impede her downward progress still more.

“Not far now, my dear, and we’ll be at the stream’s edge and the going will be easier,” Sward called over his shoulder from below.

“What stream?” she said dubiously, for the mist was as persistent as ever and all the wind did was blow it about some more.

“You can hear it,” growled Hamble behind her.

And so she could, a racing sound somewhere below which grew louder and louder until the mist cleared for a moment and she saw the blessed sight of swards of green grass along a small stream’s edge.

Easier going! Food! Clear water! Rest! Sleep!

Not quite! For Sward and Hamble were for pressing on to find a place less exposed than what seemed too obvious a route off the Tops for them to risk stopping near. The light had long since gathered into gloom, but after the most perfunctory of rests Privet was prodded awake again by her father; with her paws only half responding to the way she wished them to go, she tottered and dragged herself on downslope for what seemed to her half the night. Then she became aware of the sound of wind in trees, looming shapes on either side, the stream growing ever bigger, the scent of wormful soil and with a turn off their route and a shove from behind by Hamble, she followed Sward to a den of a place at the edge of a copse.

Perhaps she ate, perhaps she burrowed, or perhaps she simply laid down her head upon her paws and without more ado fell into the dead and heavy sleep of the very tired. She did not know. But when she woke it was still pitch-dark, and there was the sound of rain on trees, and Hamble’s great strong flank was warm against her own, and gently moving with his breathing. They were in a burrow of some kind which scented fresh and newly delved. The stream’s racing roar was nearby, and somewhere across from where she lay she heard her father’s laboured breathing, and the occasional snuffle of his snout. But nothing could she see, no light at all.

Tired though her body felt, and sore though her paws and talons were, her mind was active, even excited. They had crossed Twizle Head, they were on wormful ground once more, and soon, perhaps very soon, they would reach Chieveley Dale and begin at last the final part of their journey to find Rooster.

At the very thought of him, and the silent repetition of his name, she felt again the stirring of curiosity and a determination to meet him. But when she thought of the second part of the tale Turrell had told, that stirring turned to the breathless excitement and nervous awe moles feel when they sense they have caught a glimpse of their destiny, and know that whatever the future may bring, and the dangers they may face, their paws are set on a journey from which there is no turning back.

Until the day of Rooster’s birth and her banishment over the Span, Samphire had little knowledge of and no contact with the moles of the Charnel, and that nightmarish first sighting of them at the Midsummer sacrifice so many years before was mercifully now almost forgotten.

So it was not until she was across the Span and halfway towards the slopes that rise to the cliffs on the Charnel’s dark north side that her distress and anger with Red Ratcher, and maternal need to save at least one of her pups, gave way to those fears that distant memory, and all she had heard since, had nurtured, if only unconsciously.

But so enshadowed was the place she found herself in, so alien its rough grassy surface with huge rocks and boulders that seemed freshly tumbled from the great black cliffs ahead, that fear suddenly beset her, and a moment of paralysis. Her pup hung from her mouth as she stared nervously about her, fearful of the shadows and the slight movements, of watching moles perhaps, or something worse she seemed to see there, and only the pup’s bleats brought her back to the reality that another now depended on her, and she must do her best for it.

She had no doubt at all she was being watched — indeed, soon after her numb pause and recovery from it, she saw in the dark lee of a huge boulder an ogreish female all swollen and vile staring malevolently at her — and resolutely decided that the best thing to do was to force herself to keep moving, and seek out a place up on the slopes above beneath the cliffs. She believed that such a spot would be unoccupied because of the danger of raven and rockfall, and that and its height would give her some vantage if Charnel moles came after her.