Duncton Tales (62 page)

Such Dark Sound existed here and there in the Charnel, and was not pleasant to any mole, and most hurried by, snouts low, praying aloud against the mounting confusions and doubts Dark Sound — which is no more nor less than the reflection of their darker selves — put into them.

But Humlock seemed nearly unaffected by such places and on occasion had been found happily resting and chewing a worm in places where no other mole would linger for long at all, not even the Mentor himself.

“Perhaps he’s able to deafen that inner ear which “hears” the vibrations of the delvings and listen only with his outer, truly deaf ear,” said Hume.

“That’s it!” said Glee.

“Or it’s because he’s perfect!” said Rooster gloomily. “Eh, Humlock?” he added, digging his friend in the ribs. “We’re saying you’re perfect!” Humlock grinned and pushed Rooster’s great paw away with his own huge one, and then laughed in his strange disturbing way as if he understood — which perhaps he did.

“He’s a mole and a half,
he
is!” said Hume. “What he could tell us if he could talk!”

“He
can
, in his own way,” said Glee, ever defensive of the mole she loved so dearly.

But the comforts of intimacy are inclined, from time to time, to bring the discomforts of revelation, and to Rooster’s already stressed world came the news, from Glee by way of her mother Drumlin, that Samphire had grown close to the mole he had come to dread and dislike, Gaunt. This was not something Samphire talked of, nor something a mole like Rooster would have been likely to notice; and nor was Glee’s information passed on maliciously. Few moles were ever as innocent of such flaws as those three moles. No, in the spirit of curiosity combined with pleasure at what seemed Samphire’s happiness, Glee cheerfully informed Rooster that his mother was, to all intents and purposes, sharing quarters with Gaunt.

The deeper implications of this were quite lost on Rooster; it was enough that she was intimate with his tormentor, or as Glee put it in the carelessly sharp way she sometimes had, his Tor-Mentor. Ha, ha!

Rooster sulked, and refused for a time to talk to Samphire, only going into his work more passionately and taking out his feelings of jealousy and rejection on the walls he was learning to delve. As for Gaunt’s dismissal of his work, he positively reveled in it, and his disdain of rejection, his deep laughter at the words ‘Do it again!” and the energy he found to do what would have caused lesser moles than he to sag and wilt, became the talking-point of the Charnel.

This response, natural as it was, underestimated the nature of Samphire and Gaunt’s relationship. From the first there had been a natural accord between them, and a deep sense that they had been as one before and now fate had brought them together once again, in new lives and for different tasks. Perhaps they spoke of love, perhaps they were intimate in a way that Rooster was mercifully too innocent even to imagine. Perhaps.

It is enough to know that in Samphire, the Stone in its ineffable wisdom had provided for Gaunt that new spur to life and energy which with the youngsters’ coming he needed, and without which he could not have done the work with them he did. For nomole understood better than he the nature of the task their coming set him, or guessed better its possible importance for moledom.

His harsh treatment of Rooster was at first a bone of contention between Samphire and himself, but as the weeks went by and he began to shape and mould the youngster’s near-indomitable will to his own, that he might truly master his genius for delving and make it serve the Stone rather than himself, Samphire began to understand his purpose. She grieved to see her son oppressed, but was proud to see him survive, and excited that he might indeed become the Master Gaunt said he would surely be.

As for her feelings, her love, for Gaunt, they deepened as time went by until theirs was a sharing of minds such as neither could have dreamed was possible. Two moles, caught in a dreadful place, discovering a harmony of thought and spirit that freed them to travel where they might.

No wonder, then, that Samphire should share quarters with Gaunt, nor any wonder either that in so generous a system, with moles dedicated to life and celebrating it as best they could, those around them should be pleased for them, and give them privacy. If envy there was at first, Samphire soon dealt with it by the unstinting help she gave the ailing Gaunt, and the way she supported him, provided for him, and brought back to his kindly eyes and lined face that sparkle and glow for life that the older moles in the Charnel well remembered, and rejoiced to see again. None doubted that with Rooster’s coming something important and most purposeful had come to the Charnel, and when moles saw Samphire’s and Gaunt’s deep love, they declared that whatever it was that had come must be blessed if it brought such happiness, and be of the Stone.

Yet where it was all going none but Gaunt himself could easily guess, and what its implications were he kept at first to himself. He had caught a glimpse of it and expressed his fears to Samphire when he had seen Rooster’s delvings in the high chamber, warning her that the end to the world of the Charnel was imminent.

As the months and years of summer went by, and Samphire’s closeness to Gaunt increased, even as Rooster’s prodigious talent showed itself more, the old mole began to understand the grave and tragic nature of the task the Stone had set him. He had discovered love, but in the interests of the Charnel and for the preservation of the life of the young Master who had come among them for training, he must put his love second; worse, he feared he might have to put it aside.

In late July, Gaunt was summoned once more to Prime Chamber to view Rooster’s latest work — an extraordinary delve of sweet and gentle line, quite unlike the public character Rooster showed, a delve so elegant in its perfection that the delvers of Prime had already surreptitiously invited their peers in other Chambers to view the work, and marvel at it.

Indeed, the whole of the Charnel seemed to know of it before Gaunt himself, and all waited for his verdict, wondering how the Mentor could possibly fail to find something positive to say this time. As for Rooster, he was more tired than apprehensive, for the main thrust of the delve had been completed in one long night-time session, and its conclusion had run through the whole period of Prime, until, as the delvers of the Terce Chamber came slowly on duty as the first light of the full sun found its way into the deepest parts of the Charnel, Rooster reached a talon out and in one rapid final motion, delved the last mark of all.

His paw dropped to his flank, he stared at what he had done, grimacing and blinking with fatigue as one of the helpers, sensitive to the moment, had quietly come and offered him food. Rooster ate it absently as he continued to stare at what he had made.

“Are you not going to sound it, mole?” one of the delvers asked. For once a delve is done, as often during it, a delver will run his talons through it to hear its sound and check out its course.

But Rooster only shook his head and asked simply that Prime be called. Then Prime had come, and seen the work, and without sounding it had known that it was good: better indeed than any work he had ever seen done before in Prime Chamber.

“Have you sounded it, mole?”

But it was one of the other delvers who replied, for Rooster seemed almost dead to their ordinary world, only staring at his work, and seeing how the changing light played on it, and it played back the light; whispering in the recesses of what he had delved from depths he did not know he had, the sound waited, waited to be heard, already almost audible.

So Gaunt had been summoned, and all the system was abuzz, and if moles in other Chambers delved, it was but half-heartedly, for they waited on news of the Mentor’s word.

Prime attended Gaunt to the new delve, which Rooster had made not in the main Chamber itself, but in a side tunnel such as beginning delvers used, one which had links with other chambers more ancient; some so old, so ruinous, that their configurations were long since nearly lost, and their floors covered in debris and dust.

All work in Prime Chamber ended, not simply from the excitement moles felt at Gaunt’s coming, but from a deeper sense that what Rooster had done somehow brought to an end in a rightful way all the work ever done in their Chamber. Try as they might they could not delve more, for their taloned paws hesitated before the walls at which they had been working all their lives, as if they knew that whatever was delved more would only detract from what had already been done.

Only two moles appeared unaffected by the excitement. One was Gaunt, who pulled himself slowly through the tunnels and chambers with no other expression than the now too-familiar look of doubt he always had about Rooster’s work; the other was Rooster himself, who, having recovered from his earlier fatigue, now waited in an attitude of genuine humility, as if the efforts of the past hours had taken from him all the anger and frustration that he had so often shown and expressed, leaving only a mole who had done his best, and offered it humbly to his Mentor.

Gaunt came finally before the delve’s central part, stared at it, cocked his head a little to one side to listen to the magical whispers the delve already made, and said, “Well, mole, and is this the best you can do?”

A shudder of disappointment went among the moles who heard his words, and all eyes were fixed on Rooster who, surely, would now rise in just indignation, and what fellow-delver could blame him, whatmole would …

“It is the best, Mentor,” said Rooster. Astonishment.

“Yes …” sighed Gaunt gently. “Sound it for us, mole; sound out the delving you have made.”

“Another mole should,” mumbled Rooster, his great head low. “Prime said.”

“Did you, Prime?” said Gaunt.

“You taught me that yourself, Mentor Gaunt: the true test of a good delving is the sound another’s touch makes upon it.”

“Yes, yes, so I did.”

How Gaunt’s eyes shone.

“Would like you to,” said Rooster.

“It’s your best is it, Rooster?” said Gaunt again, using Rooster’s name for the first time any of them could remember, but ignoring his bold request that he should sound it.

Rooster nodded. “Now it is,” he said. “Can’t do more, now.
You
sound it.”

“Mole, ’tis not for you to ask the Mentor that!” exclaimed Prime, concerned that Rooster should spoil such a moment.

But Gaunt smiled faintly and shook his head to indicate he did not mind. “Well then,” he said, raising an arthritic paw with difficulty and pain, “you shall help me, mole.”

Rooster advanced obediently and reached out his paws to support the Mentor. How huge he seemed, and how small was Gaunt; the one with life before him, the other with life nearly done. The one with dark bristling fur, the other with grey patchy skin, a symptom of his weakness and mortal malady.

“Just so!” said Gaunt, raised and propped by Rooster.

His paw reached out, and deep silence fell among the attendant moles; then, gentle as the lightest breeze, Gaunt touched the delving’s central part, and ran his talons first one way and then another. Even at his first touch, the sounding began, gentle at first, but then burgeoning more powerfully, a sound that came not from where he touched, but from far off in an obscure recess of the Chamber, where dust and debris lay. There a delve made by a forgotten mole in ancient time found its long-silent moan in deepest night, when the primal dawn is no more than a momentary frown in sleep.

In black night it began and from there travelled on through time, first here, then there, all about them, re-discovering ancient echoes of the past, before the dawn when Prime starts, in that benighted hour which presages the light to mole who holds the faith that dawn will come. A time to say farewell to darkness past and turn a snout towards the time to come. That was where Rooster’s delving began, its growing vibration casting off the dust from delvings so obscure that Prime himself did not know that they were there.

Then on it went, on about them all, finding new places to reverberate, places not of black but grey, where dawn light began, where hopes dared rise, where life quickened once again after the death of night. On and on through the Prime Chamber it went, as an echo travels up a fissure into light, touching one wall and then another, and each time making more joyous and more waking sound; on and on, and with it came the voices, the calls of moles long dead, the brethren of the Charnel whose memorial was here and now, here in the sounding of Rooster’s delving, here when Prime Chamber reached its climax with the light, here where old Gaunt had touched the delving a young mole made, and touched an ending and beginning.

Here, where the sounding began to fade and silence to begin, greater by far than that which preceded it because it was touched by the living voices of the past, and showed by its depth and light the place where they had gone. From them and to them Rooster’s delving took those awestruck moles.

Then silence only, and slow forgetting, for nomole can remember such sounding as was then, only the feeling of it and the joy, and the knowledge that it was, and is, and ever more will be so long as moles live on with ears to hear and hearts to feel such things. They had trained Rooster to make a delving to justify their lives; they had witnessed the true birth of a Master of the Delve.