Duncton Stone (102 page)

The mists shifted, they saw first one Creed steep and dark and filled with ever steeper and deeper gullies down which the streams tumbled and grew white, and then a second beyond it, and then, briefly, the third in the distance. As if a giant mole, trying to escape from the Charnel, had reached up his huge talons to pull himself up and having failed and fallen back to his death had left three huge scars behind.

“No, the way in and out is way down in the valley, up along the treacherous slippery way alongflank the clough. You can see why Red Ratcher used it as his hideaway! Now, do you really want to go down and have a look? It’ll take half a day, mind, and all you’ll get is cooler and wetter and hungrier than you are now.”

Whillan stared down into the shifting mists, and to his right at the Creeds when they showed themselves, silent and thinking. It was from out of here that his father had come. But... that was in the past like all else. What use would it be now to go and stare across the Reap at the Charnel?

“Living moles were left there after the Span collapsed,” he said, “crippled moles, or moles blind and deformed and unable to travel.”

“Aye,” said Waythorn. “All dead now, all gone, with only their ghosts to haunt us now.”

“Glee and Humlock were my father’s puphood friends. Glee was an albino, and white as snow. Humlock couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see...”

Loosestrife signalled to Waythorn to let him talk, though it was bitterly cold, and she wanted to get down to lower, more sheltered ground. But she knew how much this part of their journey meant to Whillan, and if this was how he must say his goodbyes to what had been and find a way to move on, well, they could suffer a little cold and wet while he did so.

So he talked, telling them all he had been told, and they nodded and gritted their teeth against the wind, and nodded some more as the rain began, and ran in little runnels down their fur.

“No, Waythorn,” said Whillan at last, “I don’t want to go down there. My father went back once after he defeated Ratcher, to see if he could get over into the Charnel, but it was cut off, and all signs of life were gone. He said his farewells to his old friends, and I’ll say mine to their memory now. Let’s go to Chieveley Dale and then to Hilbert’s Top. What I really want to find is there.”

“What’s that?” asked Loosestrife.

“I’ll tell you when we’re dry and fed.”

They turned from the edge and trekked away, though it was a long time before the Reap’s roar faded from their ears. They found shelter, got dry, ate, and slept, and when they woke the mist had gone and they began the trek to peaceful Chieveley Dale. As they went Whillan told them about how Privet had first gone to Hilbert’s Top and how, up there, Rooster had made a delving for them both.

“She put her paw to it at his suggestion and scribed her name and his – but some way apart from each other. When he sounded it they heard the sound of Silence. It was there she buried Wort’s Testimony in the wall, and he sealed up the place. Well, we ought to go and take a look!”

But for all his excitement at this prospect Whillan grew very quiet when they got near Chieveley, upset no doubt by the thoughts provoked by the sight of the Charnel Clough. They stayed a day or two in the Dale, and then made the ascent to Hilbert’s Top and found the tunnels and chambers in which Rooster and Privet had first discovered their love. The tunnels seemed to disappoint Whillan at first.

“Needs wind to sound them,” he said obscurely.

Many of the tunnels had been ruined by wind and rain, and the delvings sounded in them only poorly when Whillan reached his talons to them. But as they explored they found deeper passages and Whillan grew quiet again. Waythorn, sensitive to their need to have time alone, and needing a little space himself, made his excuses and said he would wait for them down in the Dale where they had found some wormful tunnels, and a pleasant brook.

Whillan and Loosestrife spent two days and nights up on the Top. By day Whillan explored the deeper tunnels that they found, and marvelled at the delvings there, which were part Hilbert’s and part Rooster’s.

“How do you know?” asked Loosestrife.

“Every delver leaves his own marks, and his own sound,” said Whillan. “Listen...”

But she could not hear the difference when he sounded the delvings, wanting instead his paws about her, and for him to be still.

On the second night the wind grew strong and shifted direction, and the tunnels they were in began to sound.

“I’m frightened, Whillan,” said Loosestrife. “Let’s go down to the Dale and be with Waythorn again. He’ll worry for us.”

But Whillan was awake and tense, listening to the wind-sound.

“What is it?”

“Another mole.”

“Here...?”

“Not alive, another talon in the delving, another sound and one... I... know.’

He looked somewhat apprehensive, and then, without seeming to be interested in anything but the sound he heard, he began to wander almost aimlessly about the dark whispering tunnels, touching a wall here, delving at another there, sounding, listening, perplexed, and searching.

“What is it, my dear?” she asked.

“Sshh!” he said gently, raising a paw and continuing on his way.

Then, as suddenly as he had started his search he seemed to end it. With a cry of excitement, his paw stopped at a place on what seemed a part-delved wall.

“It’s a sealed-up portal. And beyond it is where the sound came from.”

He turned to Loosestrife who had followed him throughout and said, “Mole, come here!”

He looked suddenly powerful and sure.

“Now listen. If you’re not used to the sounds real delvings make then be ready to feel fear. I’m going to break this seal and Stone knows what we’ll find beyond. Stay close to me, and keep quiet.”

He raised his paws, and crashed them on to the seal-up, once, twice, and then a third time. There was dust, and an avalanche of sound, and they were through into a chamber, richly delved, and humming with the wind.

Whillan snouted at the walls, and said, his voice full of awe, “Look, look, Loosestrife, these are the delvings my father made. These are...”

He reached out his right paw and softly sounded the delvings, which turned and swirled with love about them.

“My father, your mother,” he said.

“So gentle, so nervous, so unsure,” whispered Loosestrife.

“There’s more,” said Whillan, pointing to deeper delvings to right and left, and arching overhead. “These are serious and speak not of love but of need.”

“Wort’s Testimony is buried here, somewhere.”

He explored the delving minutely and then, suddenly, pulled away and said, “Look! There! Hidden until you see it.”

“What?”

He took her paw and touched it about a lighter delving.

“Scribing,” he said. “It’s Privet’s name.”

Loosestrife sighed at the touch of it and wept.

“And Rooster’s name is here, for she scribed that too.”

He pointed to a deeper scribing far away from the first. Deeper, darker, and then lost among the delvings he had described as more serious.

“Here, I think she buried it here!”

Impulsively, Loosestrife dug at the wall before Whillan could stop her. There was a mounting of sound as the soil fell away, a sound which grew even deeper as she cried out that she had found a text, the one Privet buried so many years before.

“Whillan! Look, my dear!”

It was too late, for her voice and the sound of the digging provoked the delving, harried it, and it deepened and grew more savage so that Whillan had to reach up into it, to sound it his own way, to control it, to bring it back to where they were.

“Whillan!” she cried out, reaching out to him.

Dark was the sound, like the rush of a torrent, and strange the shapes, and bitter the wind that seemed to tear at their fur; and desolate the deep cry of a mole in distress. Desolate and lost as he reached across the torrent he could never cross. Melancholy, lost, with the roaring, raging grief of a mole who has saved his life but lost something of his heart.

“Whillan! Whillan!”

She held him as the sound retreated, called out to him as if he was lost himself, and touched the tears that filled his eyes, and begged to know what caused his sudden grief.

“It was for me he made this delving,” he whispered. “He knew that one day a mole would come who could sound it, and hear it, and know that he must do what Rooster could not do himself.”

“Do what, my love? What do you mean?”

He rose from her, ignoring the text, which she took up, and led her out of the tunnel to the surface of Hilbert’s Top.

“What
is
it?” she cried into the wind after him.

He turned back to her and said, “Go down to Chieveley Dale and find Waythorn. Tell him to guide you back to his tunnels below Top Withens. I’ll come there when I’m done, for what I must do I must do alone.”

“Whillan!” she cried again. “What must you do?”

He stared at her from such a distance that she knew he was already lost to her, and might never be found again.

“I must go to where Rooster could not return. I must go to the Charnel Clough.”

“Whillan...!”

But he was gone, off among the rocks of Hilbert’s Top, through them and beyond, so that by the time she reached the other side of them, he was far, far across the Moor and on his way back to the Charnel Clough.

Chapter Forty-Seven

A day later Whillan stanced alone in the dark heart of the Charnel Clough, facing the broken ruins of the Span, across which Rooster had come so many years before with Samphire and those able to travel out of the Charnel itself. The place was far worse than Waythorn had described, or Whillan imagined.

The Reap made a roar so loud that even when Whillan dropped rock on rock the sound could not be heard. The spray was savage on the errant winds that blew and tore about the narrow place, and caught at his eyes when he raised them, higher and higher, trying to make out the very top of the forbidding cliffs on either side.

As for the Charnel itself, a jumble of rockfall and dark green verdure that lay unreachable on the far side of the Reap, it was visible only through gaps in the flying spray, and looked as isolated and lifeless as anywhere Whillan had ever seen.

He trekked up on the Reapside towards the soaring Creeds, which were so large and formidable that they looked much nearer than they were. Hours later, when he reached as far as he could go and the Creeds rose almost vertically before him, he was wet and tired and cold. The three streams of the Creeds joined forces far above, and crashed down together into a yellow-white pool of wild water which surged off downslope and back the way he had come to from the Reap. There seemed no crossing-place, none at all, and Whillan could see why Rooster had turned back.

Yet he searched on, driven by the sound his father’s delving need had made, crawling down the treacherous sides of rock and scree to the water’s edge itself, seeking a way across.

“There is none, there is... none,” he whispered.

The wind buffeted him, the waters raged, the cold ate at his flesh.

He looked upstream – or, more accurately, up-torrent, for it plummeted down from an overhang of cliff far above his head – and saw the fall of rock into which the waters broke and split before they crashed into the pool, rocks brought down from higher up by the waters themselves.

He clambered up among them, water all about, his talons slipping on the slimy surfaces; sometimes he fell back, or forward, sometimes sideways towards the dangerous waters. A great plume of spray mounted, turned, caught him and winded him against sharp rock.

He cried out in his frustration and rage, and clambered on, out among the rocks, out over the rushing flows of water, with the Reap roaring off below him to his right, and the rocks rising up towards the towering fall of white water to his left.

The noise and isolation reached suddenly into his mind, and Whillan forgot his fear. He raged, he clambered, he swore, he moved slowly on; the slightest slip, the smallest hesitation in any move and he would be torn from his precarious holds and rushed into the torrent.

“It is not possible!” he shouted, and still he clambered on until, astonished, he found himself in the middle of the roaring falls of water – and mortally afraid. If he stayed here he was safe enough, but any move – forward, sideways and down, sideways and up, back – seemed too dangerous now to risk.

He huddled against the rock as if it were his last friend on earth. He stared down at the tumbling yellow Reap. He was assailed by noise so loud that he fancied he heard silence. And then he saw what he would do: go on.

“If I fall I strike out for that rock into which the pool’s water is channelled before it flows down into the Clough itself;
if
I fall...”

A huge thundering came about him, all vision was lost in water, the rock that was his friend shifted and slid, and he pulled his paws away to stop them being crushed until, slowly, unstoppably, he felt himself slipping down, faster, caught by water, caught by wind, and then flipped suddenly upside down and lost into white boiling nothingness.

He surfaced, reached, strove, sank, was winded once more by a rock at his chest, saw the rock he had thought of as a haven rushing at him, then past and beyond him, reached out, caught hold of some underwater projection, and scrabbling, slipping, screaming, pulled himself up and up above the torrent, up on to grit and wet moss.

It gave way in his grasp and he began to slip back, but then, with a final surge of strength he scrabbled up again, dragging himself, crawling, his snout full of grit, his breath all gone, until, safe at last, he lay on the Charnel side.

Later, how much later he had no idea, he rose to his paws, aching and bleeding, and stumbled downslope and on to the greenest, lushest grass and spread of dwarf fern that he had ever seen. Then on down towards the Charnel itself, down to where, he guessed, moles once lived.

He passed among fresh-fallen jagged rocks from the cliffs high to his left, among taller ferns and giant versions of plants he had only ever seen as small, down to where the Span had been, on whose opposite side he had stanced half a day before. He found worms enough and a drier place, and slept. He woke in the night and slept again until the dawn and wondered why he had come to this bereft, forgotten place and how he would ever get away.