Duncton Tales (64 page)

Rooster proceeded with his training with a speed and application that astonished all who witnessed it, and though he did not intend to, and was unaware that he did so, he attracted the enthusiastic support of those delvers who worked alongside him; they learnt that though his manner was brusque and rude he was at heart a kindly mole whose appreciation of delving was so quick and intelligent that others slower than himself thought he was merely impatient and unwilling to talk. Such was the excitement his skills created, and the unaffected wonder that his successive delvings provoked, that few in the system noticed that the shadows that lengthened over the Charnel with the rapid passage of summer into autumn and an inclement rainy October, were rather more than seasonal.

For one thing, infectious murrain, the swiftest and most dreaded of the Charnel’s fatal diseases, began a resurgence once more, and weaker brethren among the delvers suffered its vile death; whilst others, Samphire included, were displaying the tell-tale symptoms of its lesser form, where fur begins to patch, and eyes to ache, and haunches to become gaunt.

With this gathering shadow came another, which was the growing sense among the Senior Delvers, and a few other moles like Hume and Drumlin, that the notion of change that had seemed so exciting in the summer presaged an end to the Charnel as they knew it — which was just what Gaunt had privately predicted to Samphire. So a general restlessness came, and a feeling of purposelessness, as if moles sensed that time was in danger now of passing the Charnel by. The need for action had come, and the need was immediate.

Samphire had fought a long battle with herself against Gaunt’s request that she think of a way of escape for Rooster, a battle made all the harder by the fact that Gaunt had not mentioned it again. She felt the onset of murrain in her body, and from Drumlin learnt its cause and its inevitable outcome, which would be a sudden decline into helplessness, and then a death that would be a merciful release. Samphire took this prediction stoically, but along with the communal restlessness, it helped persuade her that Gaunt might be right, and that at the very least she should consider how the problem of escape he had set might be solved.

There were but two ways out. First, the forbidding Creeds, by which Hilbert had entered the Charnel and back up which, his prophecy said, a Master of the Delve would one day go. Rooster, perhaps? And the rest of them, what would happen to them? Samphire considered the idea and dismissed it: the fulfillment of prophecies was a matter for the Stone, not for mortal mole. If ever mole climbed the Creeds, and it seemed impossible that they would, then the Stone would decide the time, and the mole. Meanwhile, Stone forgive her, she would think of how to get Rooster out another way.

There was but one other possibility, and the more Samphire pondered it the less absurd it seemed, and the more her coming to the Charnel at this time seemed to make sense.

“The Span, Gaunt, that is the only way …”

There was excitement in her eyes when she finally told him, after days of stancing on the surface and gazing on the one place where Charnel moles habitually never looked, which was that spray-saturated hump of slippery rock and green vegetation over which, a lifetime before it seemed, she had come bearing her solitary surviving pup. There, beyond the spray, she sometimes caught a glimpse of the Ratcher moles, and wondered if Red Ratcher was there as well. The view was very hazy, the shadows long, the distant movement of mole hard to make out. That they stared she had no doubt, for once she had done the same.

But to cross it? With Rooster? And with others?

“Whatmoles can go?”

Gaunt studied her. “Across the Span?” he said in disbelief.

“Have you never considered it?” she asked.

He slowly shook his head, his eyes widening in surprise at himself that he never had. None of them had. From birth it was always impressed upon them as a way they could not go, because the Ratcher moles would destroy them, and because they could not give up their task in the Charnel. It had taken an outsider to state the obvious, which generations of moles had ignored.

“I think it might work, my dear, though until you mentioned it I never considered it myself. We are all bound by the constraints of what we know and have been taught, and the assumption behind them. Well, now. You say the Reapside moles are afraid of the Charnel and its moles, especially of its disease. You think they might simply fear to touch us and let us out into freedom?”

“There is no other way.”

“What of the moles who cannot trek? Only some of us could go. I myself … must stay.”

She gazed into his eyes but did not move nearer. Her look was bleak.

“My son … I would see him to safety,” she said. “You and I —”

“My time is near, Samphire, very near. And you have disease as well. Perhaps the Stone would wish us to part doing what we can for the future. I to serve out my days here until it is time for my trek to the Creeds, and you to serve us all by getting Rooster to safety. Perhaps if Red Ratcher sees you and seeks to confront you, or to stop you, you will find words to outface him. You will need to prepare for that.”

“We shall think about it, my love. We shall see.”

“Our thoughts run far ahead of what we dare say,” he whispered, shaking his head. “We know this is the way.”

She nodded, certain of it, as certain as she knew how near he was to trekking to the Creeds.

“Only the preservation of Rooster’s life, and other ambulant moles of the Charnel, could make me bear to part from you,” she whispered, coming close. Rut as she touched him, and he returned her touch, his so weak these days it was barely a caress, she knew the parting had already begun. Yet still Gaunt could surprise her with his continuing resolution.

“It must be done swiftly and boldly, like a just delve,” he said with sudden energy. “Consult Hume and choose moles of sufficient number and sufficient strength to form the beginnings of a system. Males, females. Drumlin, Sedum … no, no, I will not think of their names. Theirs is the future, mine the fulfillment of the past. My dear, you must do it. And soon. You must lead them.”

“I know,” said Samphire softly. She continued to touch him, but already her gaze was far away, and a name whispered itself across the dream she saw.

“Chieveley Dale,” she said. That’s where I shall lead them, my love.”

Perhaps she would, but Gaunt was drifting into sleep and only nodded his head vaguely, and made a noise to indicate he heard, or almost heard, before he slept.

If he dreamt, his dreams stopped at the Span, just as his life had always done. The greatest journeys of some moles begin only when they themselves have gone into Silence, and they are re-born in the tales and histories of others, whence they journey on beyond their mortal span to be known and loved even in the furthest and most obscure tunnels of moledom.

Perhaps Gaunt guessed the difficulties and disputes that would arise at even the first hint that some of the Charnel moles would, under Samphire’s leadership, attempt to cross the Span to pastures new. Certainly, once the decision had been made he resisted all persuasion to become involved in its execution, saying only that as he would not be going it was up to moles who were to decide how and when the attempt would be made. As for which moles would go, well, others must decide, though he thought that the Stone would decide that in its own inimitable way. In fact, Samphire and Hume conferred long and hard on which moles might go, and then they took the Senior Delvers into their confidence. To a mole they shared Gaunt’s belief that the coming of Rooster had so changed matters in the Charnel that escape out into moledom was now the only way to carry its useful work on into the future. The time of hiding was over.

The arguments against, and there were no doubt many, Rooster himself did not dwell upon afterwards in his account to Privet, perhaps because his last days of study and meditation upon delving in Compline Chamber, which he had finally reached, absorbed him utterly, and brought him into a similar union of spirit with Humlock which he had already worked so hard to achieve with Glee in None Chamber.

Of the issues of change and escape that were now sweeping through the Charnel, he knew only that something great was apaw that would affect them all, and that it had to do with matters of delving, and his own undoubted skills in the greatest of moledom’s arts.

By the time his training of Rooster was done Senior Delver Compline left him in no doubt as to the nature of the challenge his skills posed him. Perhaps at Gaunt’s prompting, or perhaps of his own accord, Compline told him outright that his skill was such that he was the nearest the Charnel had ever come to a Master since Hilbert’s day.

“Which means you have a responsibility greater than you know!” he said, using this as justification for the severity of his training of Rooster’s mind and paws concerning the deep delves of the end of day and dusk, and the approach of night, wherein a mole’s greatest and most difficult journeys take place.

“These are the essence of what you have learned in Compline Chamber, and by now you will have understood that our Chambers here, as created by Master Hilbert, represent not just the journey through the hours of day and night back to day again, but the journey moles make through the days and nights of their lives. A delver touches these things in what he makes, and a Master of the Delve touches these things absolutely. It is a grave challenge, and one which I believe grows more difficult the nearer you get to achieving it. Learn from us all, and learn especially from Humlock!”

These were the lessons he learnt in those last days, which in later years he understood were the last days of his youth. In Compline, where many of the most crippled of the delvers worked out their lives, and willingly showed the young Master in the making all they could, and adjured him to learn from Humlock the art of being still and silent, Rooster saw most graphically how all the delvers’ arts turn in the end towards a celebration of life. Compline ends the day, as it ends life itself, and offers a mole a time in which to reflect on what has been, and prepare for what is to come. If life, then let it be a better and more responsible one than heretofore; if death, then let a mole approach the Silence with joy for all he has known and made in his life, however brief, however long, for reality is what he brings to Silence.

“It is what the Delvings are all finally about,” explained Compline, “and the whispers from the past, and the cries, and the calls that a sounding across delving resurrects, are the sounds of moles who once lived as you live, and left behind the best they had. A mole who does that may turn his snout to Silence with pride.”

“Like my Mentor Gaunt,” said Rooster sombrely.

“Yes, like Gaunt.”

The unpleasant weather of October eased for a time into milder days, when the sun cast russet rays out of a pale blue sky and lit up the cliffs across the Reap, and made more gentle the intimidating dark fissures of the Creeds. The tufts of heather and crowberry that grew among the scree had held their autumn colour well, and now shone in their final hour of glory before winter came and stole their brightness away. Even the ravens in the crumbling cliffs above the Channel seemed more benign as they enjoyed leisurely flights off their sheer roosts, and tarried in the sun, their wings shining and their beaks glinting as they turned.

But the Reap was less benign, for the earlier rains had put it into minor spate, and some shift of the massive rocks in its gorge during the spring melt-spates meant that the spray was higher than mole ever remembered it, shooting over on to the Charnel’s edge and beyond into puddles that sometimes spread dangerously near to floods, and up on to the Span itself, which at times was lost to sight.

“Come winter that’ll freeze,” said Hume uneasily. “I’d swear it’s narrower than it was when I last had a good look at it. Ice would bring the whole lot down and then the Charnel would be lost to itself for all time and all our work a waste. If some of us are going to go across we’d better get it over and done with while we can!”

He tried to sound his normal cheerful self but even he was nervous at the prospect of crossing the Span.