Duncton Wood (78 page)

But his game and his anonymity were brought to a sudden halt when, turning a corner, he found, as he suspected that he eventually would, that he had by this roundabout route made his way into the main library. Quire was there, ferreting around among the books as usual, and on seeing him Bracken was suddenly weary of his game and the isolation it caused him. He greeted Quire with a reverence he genuinely felt and explained that he was in search of Boswell.

“Why should I know where he is, might I ask?” said Quire, peering at Bracken. “Wait a minute – know you. You’re the Duncton mole, aren’t you? The one who’s seen the Seventh Stillstone. Where
is
Boswell?”

Patiently, Bracken explained what had happened and how puzzled he was by the secrecy among the moles in the tunnels that day.

Quire smiled and shrugged. “Yes, they do make rather a meal of it. There’s no mystery. Today is the day when the secret song is sung. You know, Merton’s task and all that. Now
that
may be a mystery, but the fact of its being sung is known to all moles. That’s what all the fuss about chosen moles was about, you see. They like to enter their names in the book before the song is sung, all twenty-four of them. You’ll probably find. Bracken of Duncton, that Boswell has been chosen. Hence the secret. We’ll soon know, since the Holy Mole will return the book tomorrow with the new names neatly scribed. Of course, you’re not meant to read them but, well, the book’s kept on the shelves and it’s an open secret. As a matter of fact, there is an exceptional number of new chosen moles this time because so many of the last lot died of the plague. That’s why you’ll find there’s not that many about. After the devastation of the plague it’s a miracle that there’s enough moles to sing the song.”

“Where do they sing the song?” asked Bracken.

“Never been there myself, of course, not being chosen, but it’s somewhere up near the silent burrows. In a special chamber. Said to be the oldest in Uffington, though, strictly speaking, it’s not in Uffington but up where the silent burrows are. About two molemiles yonder...” He waved a paw toward the west.

“Could I get there?” asked Bracken.

“Whatever for?” asked Quire. “I never can understand why you youngsters are always rushing off to see and hear things somewhere else when there’s plenty to see and hear where you happen to be crouching at the moment. You’ll be asking me next what I thought about all those moleyears I was in the silent burrows. You wouldn’t be the first.”

Bracken couldn’t help laughing. It was true. Quire wasn’t as daft as he seemed. Then Quire laughed, too.

though his laughter rapidly degenerated into a wheezing and coughing through which he finally said “I thought about nothing, don’t you see? Mind you, that’s easier said than done for most.”

There were times when Bracken thought himself completely stupid, when his brain seemed to register things so slowly that he found it embarrassing to contemplate the process as it happened. It happened now, as everything about him, all the secrecy and rushings about, fell into place. They were going to sing the same secret song that Hulver had once told him about when he told the story of Merton, and Merton’s task. Linden had been the scribe who wrote about Merton, the selfsame scribe, presumably, who made the first entries into the Book of Chosen Moles. Why didn’t somemole
say,
and then he wouldn’t have got worried about Boswell. In fact, come to think of it, he felt proud of Boswell. Him, a chosen mole! A feeling of awe came over him... there was something special about a day when they sang a song that had been passed on in secret through generations and which was sung once in twelve moleyears, and which would only be sung to all moles and then by them when the Blowing Stone sounded seven times.

“Quire, have you ever heard the Blowing Stone sound?”

“Many times, many times. A mole may often hear it in a storm sounding the odd note. As a matter of fact, I once heard it sound three times in succession and it was that which made me decide to go to the silent burrows. It seemed significant at the time. I never regretted it.”

“What did it sound like?”

“Oh dear! More questions? You can ask things until your snout turns blue, but you’ll only ever really find the answers yourself. Now, why don’t you stop asking questions and go up onto the surface and get some fresh air? Make your way up to the surface near the silent burrows and crouch among the grass and trees up there. It’s a good place to be.”

“How will I find it?”

“More
questions? Go and try. And if you see Boswell anywhere tomorrow when it’s over, tell him he hasn’t finished here yet. I thought he said he was going to do some filing for me,” and Quire turned away from Bracken and started poking about among the books. As Bracken set off out of the library to find a way to the surface, his spirit was very calm and peaceful. He might not be able to sing a song or take part in the special rituals the scribe-moles seemed involved in, but in his own Duncton way he could perhaps go and crouch on the surface and offer some invocation to the Stone on this special day, and think of Boswell, who perhaps needed a little extra strength in the next few hours.

Up through the tunnels he went, back the way he had first come with Boswell with a smile of affection for Quire on his face and moving with an air of reverence and peace which, though he did not know it, was exactly the same as that in which the two scribemoles had originally passed him by in the tunnel. The spirit of Uffington, ancient and reverent, had finally caught up with Bracken.

The weather was cold, wet, and messy, as gray sweeps of rain came across the vales below Uffington and swirled up the hill into the long, coarse grass into which Bracken emerged from the tunnels below. Not normally conditions in which a mole much likes to wander about, but Bracken did not mind, for there was a certain wild freshness about the air that suited his mood.

He headed westward, as Quire had suggested, and with his usual talent for finding the right route, soon came upon a run of long grass that gave him good protection and headed the right way. He did not know what he was looking for but, as often in the past, he knew he would find it when he got there. It was hard to say at what time of day he set off, because the sky was so overcast that the sun might as well not have existed.

But there was the feeling of late afternoon to the air when he finally began to think he ought to arrive somewhere, and the sky was beginning to gloom over even more. To the right of the line of grass in which he made his way was a plowed field of thin soil, more gray than brown and with many flakes of mottled blue flint and hard off-white chalk, and not a single sign of plant growth yet. To the left was a rutted, grassy track, potholed and puddly, where the soil and chalk had formed a light-gray clay. If Bracken had been able to fly up into the air, he would have seen what he knew by instinct, that the chalk downlands stretched far away all around him, except to the right, beyond the plowed field, where the chalk escarpment fell many hundreds of molefeet downward.

Then he heard a familiar and welcoming sound, the rushing of wind through bare beech-tree branches and twigs somewhere ahead. Its sound was subtle and variable, so that at first he had to pause in his passage through the long, whipping grass to catch it. But it soon got stronger and more persistent and he had the illusion for a moment that he was moving up the slopes of Duncton Hill toward the beeches that surrounded the Stone.

The air was clearing of rain as the wind increased and he found that he was, indeed, moving uphill and that ahead the light was darker and more confused as the great, tall shapes of the beech trees he had heard came into view. They were thinner than the Duncton trees, giving the illusion that they were taller, and stood in such a neat, tight group that from the distance their branches seemed to form one great crown, as if there were only one tree there.

They were to the right of his path, fenced off all by themselves in the middle of the plowed field he had been skirting, so that he had to pick his way across the wet earth, flints and chalk fragments to reach them. The trees whipped and whistled high above him, and as he entered among them he saw that they formed a single oval stretching away from him, and there was such a pool of quietness in the center where the wind was still that it was like entering into a peaceful burrow.

Inside the oval, nearest to where he had entered it, stood a sight more magnificent than any he had ever seen on the surface before. Four great sarsen stones stood in a gnarled, dark line with a gap in the middle between them beyond which there were more stones sunk into the ground. Among them were deep shadows and a wet, dark stillness and they formed an entrance to a great mound or barrow that stretched to the far edge of the oval of beeches. There was an air of great solidity and silence about the whole place, as if the very weather itself stopped and knocked before it entered. The sky above formed a great oval of light, though for the time being it was gloomy and lowering gray.

The grass in the oval was short and soft, and it covered the barrow behind the stones, although here and there a smaller sarsen stone poked its gray, wet snout out of it on the edge of the barrow and formed a pattern that delineated its long shape.

Sensing that he was in a very holy place. Bracken skirted around the edge of the stones and barrow at first, traveling its full length and then back the other side. Only when he had made a full circuit did he plunge into the gap between the stones, sniffing among them for molescent. There was nothing much, certainly nothing fresh, until he went right into a cell formed by the stones from beyond which, through gaps between them, he sensed the presence of recent mole activity. The scent was dry and a little mysterious, like sun-bleached wood or the husks of beech nuts. He fancied he sensed movement, secretive and silent, ritualistic and arcane – or was it vibrations from the great, shadowy stones about him, before which many a mole ritual must have been enacted, that he heard? He moved carefully and silently, as if the slightest movement would disturb the peace about him.

He was tempted to go beyond the stones into the cave through the gap between them, but one thing he had learned in exploration of a new place was that it was best to approach by the least obvious way. It was not that he was afraid for himself here so much as that he felt himself on the edge of some religious rite for the Stone and preferred to be as unobserved as possible. For this reason he retreated out of the stone caves and climbed up on top of the long barrow where, rather to his surprise, he found evidence of molehills, though they were old and half washed away by weather.

It was now growing dark and the wind had died a little so that the trees swayed only very slightly, whispering occasionally around the barrow and giving the impression of a growing calm. He snouted from one molehill to the next until he found one where the scent had completely gone and what remained of it was just wet and muddy. Experience now told him that such an entry was likely to be unobserved and forgotten, and he was right. The entrance was virtually blocked up with age and he had to burrow some way down, taking care to let no soil fall downward, before he found the tunnel he was looking for.

The soil was darker than the chalky soil he had gotten used to in Uffington, and the tunnel itself was smaller. It led along a short way and then down almost vertically, and then on again and down once more, as if he was dropping into a deeper and deeper silence. There was molescent about, but it was distant and still. It was as if he had descended vertically into a sleeping burrow, except that there was no burrow as such and, as far as he could see, there were no moles near.

The tunnel came to a sudden end, sealed irrecoverably by a massive sarsen stone. He put a paw to it and then his snout, sensing that beyond it lay something which would be very worthwhile seeing. Bracken very much wanted to get beyond it and was tempted to burrow round it until, feeling the hard, caked soil in which it was embedded, he realized that the attempt would make far too much noise. Yet, at the same time, he felt a sense of urgency to press on, a confusing mixture of awe and disregard for the place coming over him, with the same feeling of certainty that he would get through he had had in the Chamber of Roots with Rebecca when they had passed on to the buried Stone itself. He retreated, looking for the slightest burrowable chink in the wall. •

Soon he found one, at the bottom corner of another sarsen stone that lined the wall and in which the soil was not packed so tight. Careful not to scratch the stone with his talons and so make a noise, he rapidly burrowed the chink bigger so that his snout was into the hole behind his paws, and then his shoulders, and he was pushing the dry soil behind him in great scoops, until the earth ahead collapsed forward and he was in a burrow or small chamber. There was an entrance on its far side and through it he could hear, from somewhere far off, even farther off than the scent, the faintest vibrations of voices, as if many moles were gathered together and whispering in a chamber that echoed their sound. He went through this chamber into a tunnel off which there were many turns to left and right. The walls were partly composed of dark earth and partly of dark-olive sarsen stones, which gave any sound in the tunnel a heavy thunking echo in which even the lightest cough might sound serious.

Bracken headed downward as fast as he could without making a noise, the mutterings and coughing sounds seeming to come from several directions at once and giving him the feeling that he was on the edge of something important which he could not quite reach. He sneaked his way along, keeping to the inside edge of the wall where it curved, just in case there were moles ahead. The sound of voices grew louder and richer and he very nearly stopped, convinced that at the next corner he would come to a great mass of moles. But each turn in the tunnel brought nothing but a louder and louder sound of the mole voices echoing around and past him.

Ahead, the air gained a spacious quality that warned him long before he reached it that he was about to approach a gap in the tunnel or a precipitous void, and he snouted ahead very carefully until, quite suddenly, the floor ahead disappeared and he found himself crouching at the end of a huge drop into the biggest, deepest chamber he had ever seen. It was not so wide as the Chamber of Dark Sound, but it was certainly deeper, and it was some moments before he could make out anything in it, though the echoing and coughing and throat-clearing that came up from below made it obvious that the moles he had heard were gathered somewhere in the gloom below.