Duncton Wood (24 page)

He tried humming louder to see what would happen, and what happened was not pleasant. The sound had a dark quality to it. At first it was distant, coming from somewhere high up the wall some way beyond, hanging off the overhang and easily forgotten if he concentrated on the more pleasant sounds that came to him straight off the wall. But this became harder the farther he went, and, despite himself and his fear of being caught up again in dark sound, he continued to hum so that the darkness in the sound grew blacker and its lightness fled behind him to where the more melodious patterns and wall carvings were. This black sound began to overwhelm him and he began to push and stagger forward as if losing his sense of direction, trying to catch up with his breath and stop his own throat sending out these unnatural sounds that pulled him onward and on.

In front of him, a great jag of flint, black and shiny, rose up from the floor, set solid in the wall and tapering down into the floor. Its top was so sharp and fine that it was translucent, and a mole could have cut a single whisker with it. Bracken staggered around it to face another jag of flint, bigger than the first, that appeared to thrust toward him. He ran on, whimpering with fear. The sounds were dark, blacker and more and more owl-like, and he struggled desperately with himself to stop making them, his paw rattling its talons against his throat, scratching himself to stop the noise, conquer the terror.... Until there were no more flints and his breath came out shallower and he managed to twist his mouth to his paw and stop the sound, saliva running onto his talons with the effort. There was another set of the jagged chertlike rock beyond him, the same as the ones he had just passed by. They ran into the wall. His eyes followed their line upward to the great beak of shiny cold flint that curved up to two massive roundels of black-silver eyes, all of which seemed to form the massive face of an owl infinitely evil to look on. Its black, shiny flint seemed to give it a shimmering light.

The sound he had stopped making still echoed about the chamber, swirling blackly somewhere between him and the wall, caught between the flint talons that shot out on either side of him and seemed to draw him to the center of the wall. His eyes fell slowly and fearfully from those of the great owl to the wall beneath, the part that lay under the beak and between the great black talons. The part that lay straight ahead of him.

What he saw there made him gasp in horror. For there, ahead of him, was the start of the last tunnel, the seventh, the one he had been seeking; and crouched at the entrance, its head resting between its paws, the round, black voids of its eye sockets looking straight at him, was the blanched skeleton of a massive mole.

Beyond it he caught the full blast of the straining, creaking sounds he had first heard when he entered the chamber. Sliding, rasping, slowly crushing and melding, the rasp of wood on living wood, a sound like old branches rubbing against each other on a wild night, only below ground.

Then he knew what it was he was hearing: the sound of the roots of the great beeches that surrounded the Stone clearing and into which he now knew with terror this seventh tunnel must lead. As he listened, the sounds seemed to come to him through the gaunt holes of the skull’s eyes, or spat out at him from its vicious teeth, or sought to entangle him in its collapsed rib bones scattered on the ground behind the skull.

To reach the center of the system he would have to face the living roots he could hear but yet not see; and to reach them he would have to pass by this massive skeleton that seemed to carry the very essence of the root sounds themselves.

But not now, not at this moment. The fears he had so far controlled exploded inside him and turning, breath gasping, he started to run from the mole body in panic, heading across the great chamber and making instinctively for the tunnel to the northeast, which carried the scent of oaks and worms, and of a life that was now and that he needed.

   12  

A
UGUST
is an untidy month in Duncton Wood, when the leaves of the trees have lost both the virgin greenness in which they gloried up to June and their rich, rustling maturity, which was one of the pleasures of July. Now they are past their best. Here and there, passing August rain brings one or two leaves down, green but limp, onto the wood’s brown floor to die among the great blowzy fern and insinuating ivy into which they have fallen.

Birdsong wanes down to the fidgeting of yellow-hammer and greenfinch at the wood’s edge and along some of its more open paths and vales, while in its heart only the call of rooks, with the flapping of their wings, makes a noise that carries. Still, on the occasional hot day, when the sun forms warm pools of yellow light among the rich green undergrowth, a stag beetle may suddenly rise and buzz through the air, or ants rustle, or gall wasps drone. And then a mole in Barrow Vale may yawn and stretch and another may affect to ask what the fuss is all about.

While a mole on the surface might think, as the vagrant sun catches the pink petals of bramble flower, that spring is suddenly back again and it is wild cherry blossom that is on show. But not for long. Let the high banking clouds smother the sun and the brambles look again like what they truly are, a tangled untidiness bearing wavering petals which never seem quite to know how to stay crisp and neat. Still, what’s it matter? What mole cares? There must be something better to talk about....

Chatter. Gossip. Rumor. The three consorts of August. One for the lazy, one for the idle, and the third for the bored.

For the older moles of Duncton, the ones who have seen at least one Longest Night through, the main source of chatter and gossip in August lies in the doings of the youngsters. They have by now left the home burrow far behind and, after a molemonth or two of scurrying about in shallow runs and burrows, are just beginning to establish themselves – the ones who have survived, that is. For many have been taken by owls or lost strength in territorial fights and, unable to find sufficient food, died a lingering death in hot July to be pecked at by crows or colonized by carrion flies and egg-laying beetles.

These struggles go on into the middle of August-and many a Barrow Vale mole, complacent in the knowledge of having his or her own territory (though not
too
complacent because some of these westside youngsters are still very hungry indeed for territory), will pass the time of day with the kind of talk that begins “Have you heard what happened to...?” or “One of them marshenders had the effrontery to....” And so on, and so forth.

In an August when things are well settled by the third week and when there is enough food about and a mole gets bored, rumor may take over from gossip. Who can say where it comes from or why one story seems more fascinating than another? Some rumors fly on a breeze of hope to float about the burrows brightly and give pleasure to those who hear them, and those who pass them on. Others sneak in on the winds of discontent, shadows on whispered conversations whose dark pleasures lie in the fact that if what they say will happen really does, it will be somewhere else, to some other poor mole.

Occasionally, very rarely, a rumor may come which contains both the seeds of hope and the germs of discontent, and seems to herald change of a kind that will affect everymole, not just one.

Such a rumor arose that August in Duncton Wood, and unknowingly Bracken was the cause of it.

His panic flight from the Chamber of Dark Sound (as he now called it) took him toward the slopes, and the pleasant woodland scent of the tunnel lured him finally outside. But his surface senses had been dulled by the long time underground and by his illness, and without realizing what he had done, he went straight into the path of a westside youngster who was establishing his territory. Bracken looked so wild and desolate that the youngster (who was no older than Bracken himself) fled back to his home burrow with a garbled story of a wild monster mole he had seen coming from the Ancient System. The story soon got round the westside, and what good August story it was for moles to get their teeth into!

Then Bracken was spotted over on the eastside, and an exaggerated version got back to Barrow Vale – a wild mole seen on the Ancient System, massive and fearless, who would kill anymole that tried to get near him.

It was enough to get the rumor going even more strongly, and the eastsiders, a superstitious lot, resurrected an old legend that one day the Stone would send its own mole to bring havoc on the system as a punishment – though for what no mole was certain. And if was from this story that Bracken unwittingly gained himself an awesome name that became the subject of rumor, thrilling fears, and an exodus of youngsters who might otherwise have tried to make territory near the slopes: he became the Stone Mole.

“Aye, he’s up there all right, you mark my words; and he’ll be down this way, I shouldn’t wonder,” was how one Barrow Vale gossip put it, his words heavy with complacent warning. “Just been biding his time, he has, just waiting for the right moment, and now he’s come. The eastsiders call him the Stone Mole, and that isn’t such a bad name if you ask me...”

When Mandrake first heard the story, he thought it was amusing, and laughed. Probably some pasture mole gone astray, he thought. Well, he’d sort it all out when he felt like it. As for Rune, he latched onto anything that had possibilities for his own advancement, and there was a way the Stone Mole rumor could help him. His smile was smug with the potential of it all.

Had Bracken any inkling that such a rumor had gained ground, he would have been amazed. He regretted the contacts with moles he had so unsuccessfully made on two different occasions since he emerged out of the confines of the Ancient System, because he now reckoned that it was best, on the whole, to continue to lie low.

The first, with the mole on the west side of the slopes, was just an accident. Nothing he could do about that. The second was more regrettable, since it was born out of a desire in him to make contact with somemole somewhere after such a long isolation. The two old eastsiders looked friendly enough – and what a relief it had been to hear mole being talked. It was almost like listening to Hulver himself talking, so learned did they seem. And they used one or two words of the old language that Hulver had sometimes used. Spurred on by the promise of this and their seeming gentleness, he had come out into the open after listening to them for a while, and approached them.

When they challenged him with the traditional greeting, he tried to answer as best he could but, well, he wasn’t sure quite where to say he had come from and, anyway, he was so unused to talking to another mole, let alone moles, that somehow he stumbled over his words. Then they looked frightened and ran away from him and he looked back behind him to see if there was some big mole or other creature that was threatening them, not realizing that it was he, himself, they were running from.

This incident saddened Bracken, for it made
h
im feel isolated and lost and left him craving contact with another mole, anymole, even more. The idea that they were running from him dawned on him slowly as he scratched his side and felt his fur still hanging loose on his gaunt body, while he thought of the two older moles so plump and sleek who had fled from him.

“I must look a pretty sight,” he whispered to himself, snouting first at his flanks, then at his scarred shoulder, and finally rubbing his paws down his thin face.

Bracken did not know it, but he looked a lot better than when he had first emerged from the Ancient System’s tunnel and started to live in the warmer air and wormier soil of the slope surface. But while a mole will normally recover from injury or illness very fast, swinging back from near death to full health in a matter of moledays, one that has been as ill as Bracken had been, both physically and emotionally, may take moleweeks or even moleyears to recover fully. Just as such illness may be moleyears ra the making, so the route back to health may be moleyears in the finding.

Still, physically at least, he was improving. In the days that followed the distressing incident near the eastside, he took it easy, eating as much as he could, sleeping a great deal and keeping well hidden. He still wanted to make contact with another mole, more and more so as he began to feel healthier, but he was regaining his normal caution and would try to be more careful next time.