Duncton Rising (4 page)

“But, Stone, I feel that of them all he’s the one who needs your help most, the one I should pray for above others. Therefore, Stone, give your help and guidance to Keeper Sturne, lead him back to thy good ways, and may the day come once more when he and I can share a worm or two in companionship, and look back at this time as a nightmare which is long gone and forgotten. Because you see. Stone, whenever others have said bad things about Sturne (and many have over the decades, I assure you, because he’s not a mole who endears himself to others, or makes friends), I have never once let those comments pass without supporting him, and saying that there’s something good in him, something solid, something
true,
and I say it again now, to you. Stone. Help him now in this time of trial, for even from our first day in the Library I felt that for all his talents with texts,
you
had given me something he did not have, which was a capacity for contentment, for happiness. Stone, Keeper Sturne has never given me or any other mole a reason to call him friend, but I count him among my friends, and pray for him now.”

Pumpkin bowed his wrinkled head towards the Stone, evidently glad to have got over his reluctance and spoken out on behalf of Sturne. He paused a little, nodded with new-found ease and contentment, and turned for the last time from the Stone and was lost among the great trees of the High Wood, as modest, as good, as loving a mole as there could be. One well worthy, indeed, to represent the legendary qualities of the moles of Duncton Wood, who have stanced boldly by the Stone in times of doubt and faithlessness, and uttered their prayers, and raised their paws in defence of the Light, and the truth, and the Silence, which are of the Stone.

But it seemed that he was right, for as he went there was nomole to say a prayer for
him.
None to petition the Stone on his behalf, or to speak aloud of his qualities, and commending them to the Stone, ask it to guide him through the great shadows that now beset him on all sides, and bring
him
through safeguarded.

Yet perhaps there
was
something more, and perhaps though he knew it not, those dear lost friends he had prayed for uttered their prayers for him that same dawn. For as he turned his back and wended his way wearily through the High Wood, the light about the Stone grew bright, and a warm spirit met the flurries of the cold wind and turned them and chased them away, a spirit of grace which danced from the Clearing after Pumpkin. So that when it caught up with him, and he was all unawares, its Light seemed to shine on his old fur, and its Silence to accompany him, to catch up with him, and be with him.

So much so indeed that he stopped and stared about in wonder, as if he half sensed something was there. His mild eyes were caught by a Light he could not see, and his loving heart was comforted by a Silence he could not quite hear. But something was there, something...

“Send a sign!” he had prayed, and at least he now under stood with the certainty of his great and simple faith that a sign
might
come.

Then Library Aide Pumpkin continued on his way, his step light for the first time in days, and a hum of pleasure mounting in his throat. For he realized that when all was said and done, and however grim things seemed, he was still what he most wished to be in the place he wished to be it; a library aide in what all his life had always been the greatest Library in moledom.

“And it will be again, it
will
!” he said to himself before resuming his cheerful humming, and thinking that even on a grey November dawn when there is as little hope among the trees as there are leaves, there was surely nowhere as beautiful in all moledom as the ancient High Wood of Duncton.

Pumpkin’s doubts and concerns about the state of moledom and the safety of his friends, not to mention uneasiness at his own dangerously isolated position in Duncton Wood, were well justified by recent events.

The slow insidious build-up of the Newborn presence in Duncton Wood, which had begun twenty moleyears before with the arrival of a small cell of Caradocian moles preach ing the creed as promulgated by the sinister Thripp of Blagrove Slide, had reached its culmination only shortly before Pumpkin spoke his long petitionary prayer before the Stone. Newborns had come up from the Marsh End one night, and though they may not originally have intended to go as far as they did, had killed old Husk, Keeper of Rolls, Rhymes and Tales, and had deliberately destroyed his great collection of texts.

But wise Stour, Master Librarian of Duncton Wood, had long since foreseen better than anymole what was coming. Having been raised in Duncton Wood, the system more dedicated than any in moledom to the rights and freedom implicit in worship of the Stone – which rights include the freedom
not
to worship the Stone – he foresaw the inevitable consequence of Thripp’s self-righteous movement, which was increasingly quick to condemn those who were deemed not to subscribe to the strict Caradocian way, and even to punish them.

Master Librarian Stour had long believed that once the Newborns had gained power and felt confident that none could easily stance in their path, then they would inevitably begin to censor moledom’s great libraries of any texts that might be construed as liberal, or in some way undermining the “true” Caradocian way. It had been against such possibilities, which his study of history had shown repeated themselves with grim regularity, that Stour had advocated long before, and then brilliantly carried through, the policy of copying and disseminating texts to twelve different systems in moledom, believing that their general availability – indeed their continuing existence – would thereby be assured. This policy, for which he won agreement at the famous Conclave of Cannock, which was convened soon after his appointment as Duncton’s Master Librarian over four decades before, was as much as moledom could have done to safeguard its texts, ancient and modern, but Stour can have little thought that its efficacy would have been tested in his own lifetime by such a censorious movement as that of the Newborns.

Yet finally the question had been, as the moles of Duncton had grown increasingly aware, exactly when Thripp and those close to him would decide to make a claim for control of moledom as a whole – in the name, naturally, of truth, justice and freedom. Stour had expected that when it came to Duncton Wood it would be in a form more subtle and less cruel than proved to be the case with the attack on Keeper Husk. But then, in the past, other more worldly Duncton leaders might have gathered intelligence from systems beyond Duncton Wood, guessing that the Newborns were unlikely to make a bid to control one of the greatest systems of moledom until long after they had secured their positions in other lesser systems.

But Stour was first and foremost a scholar and librarian, not a military or political mole. And yet... as those few moles who like Pumpkin were not yet intimidated by the Newborn presence reflected on such matters, they could not but admit the fact that the Master had
never
really been “only” a librarian, and concede the possibility that his seeming indifference to the rise of the Newborns over the previous two decades might conceal a deep and thoughtful strategy.

Certainly Pumpkin himself now believed that the reason for the only other retreat the Master had made into the tunnels of the Ancient System (in the spring years prior to the present crisis) was his need to reflect on the best way for Duncton moles to respond to the Newborn move to take control when it came. Pumpkin was sure that Stour was not interested in wars – the decades of peace that followed the terrible war of Word and Stone a century before reflected moledom’s general desire to avoid such conflicts again. Nor were there many systems in moledom that did not still harbour the bloody ghosts and shadows of the war of the Word, in tunnels that had been sealed up to hide the massacred dead from sight: such tragic tunnels, their corpses turned to skeletons, all intertwined with the roots and tendrils of trees and plants from the surface above, were found from time to time, a reminder to living moles of the dangers of war and religious strife. Few vales and rises, few quiet places in woods and by streams, had not heard the cries of the victims of the Word.

On these things Stour must have reflected long and hard as the shadows of strife lengthened once more. Having pondered the past, he had decided that so far as he could influence it future defenders of the Stone must seek a different solution for peace as the Newborns gained strength; and certainly, they must explore every peaceful means available before resorting to fighting.

Stour had said as much to those moles he had commanded to escape the system, whom Pumpkin had just prayed for; he had done so in the belief that the solution to a peaceful future lay in the discovery of the Book of Silence, popularly known to moles as the “lost and last” Book, for it was the only one of the seven Books of Moledom which had not been recovered through the decades and brought to the care of successive Master Librarians of Duncton Wood. By the time Stour took up the Mastership six of the seven Books had “come to ground” (as the ancient prophecy put it), and only the Book of Silence remained to be found and brought to Duncton to be reverently laid once more in its rightful place, which was with the other six beneath the Duncton Stone itself.

So Stour’s answer to the rise of the Newborns had finally been not a counter-struggle by armies of Stone followers, but the sending of a single mole. Privet, supported by only a few others, to search for the “lost Book”; and while she did that, he himself went into a final retreat in the eerie tunnels of the Ancient System beneath the High Wood, whose ways nomole knew, and whose Dark Sound nomole could surely long survive. Yet there he had gone, taking with him the six Books of Moledom already in the Library and, as Pumpkin and the others had discovered to their astonishment, a whole host of other texts which he had secreted away in the tunnels against such dire days of Inquisition and censorship as had now come about. His task was to hide these precious texts until better times came, and to be a living example in prayer and retreat of spiritual resistance to the new evil.

Of allies left in Duncton Wood, apart from Pumpkin himself, there seemed only one: Drubbins. He was Stour’s contemporary and oldest friend, the mole who had led the system in all general matters which had nothing to do with the Library itself, but who was now too old to hope to travel. He had, in any case, preferred to stay, and, with Pumpkin, do what he might to bamboozle and hinder the Newborn Inquisitors – a thankless and probably hopeless task.

But the other mole who had stayed behind had not been revealed by Stour as an ally at all – indeed most of Stour’s friends regarded him as a dour, unlikeable kind of mole – Keeper Sturne. Morose, silent, without the natural good grace and friendliness of a Drubbins or a Pumpkin, his career in the Library had long been overshadowed by other moles, notably Snyde, brilliant scholar, vindictive librarian, warped mole who had the odour of a deviance which had not yet fully emerged; the mole whom Stour had, unaccountably as it seemed, appointed Deputy Master in preference to Sturne.

Chapter Two

The escape of Privet and the others from Duncton Wood in the face of Newborn attack, guided by Chater, had gone unnoticed, and by the time dawn arose on the seventh day following their departure they were well away. They had lain low for several days somewhere in the flat flood plains of the Thames that lie to its south.

“Seeing as Fieldfare here has never ventured a single pawstep out of Duncton before, and you, Whillan, have but little experience of journeying, we’re going to take things slowly at first,” said Chater purposefully, once it was plain that the Newborns had not followed them, and they had all recovered from the rigours of the previous days and nights. He was a solid, rough-furred journeymole, some thing past middle age, with a gravelly voice and direct manner that belied the good nature that made him so much beloved by Fieldfare, his lifelong mate.

“This is anonymous sort of ground to cover with a thousand different ways to go, and a mole would have to be unlucky or foolish for pursuers to find him here. Anyway, I think that the Master was right to say that if Snyde does set off to find you, Privet, and with others too no doubt, he’ll go by the more obvious northern way, by Rollright – so he’ll get further away with each day that passes until such time as your Caradoc route swings you north and towards him once again.

“Now I said we’ll go slowly, but I didn’t mean easy. Trouble is, as a journeymole I’m trained to feel responsible for you all and since Fieldfare and I are going to part company from you at Swinford I’ve only got until then to teach you what I can about the business of journeying. Of course, Keeper Privet here, as with much else, probably knows a lot more than she lets on – must do, to have got down to Duncton from the north in safety all those years ago. But then maybe she’ll have forgotten a bit, and won’t mind —”

“I don’t mind at all,” said Privet promptly, a little smile softening the natural severity of her face. “You tell us all you think we need to know, and anything else besides.”