Duncton Wood (84 page)

Authors: William Horwood

Tags: #Fiction, #General

BOOK: Duncton Wood

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“What did he do?” asked Bracken.

Bran turned to Celyn and consulted with him. The two talked rapidly in Siabod for a while until finally Bran came closer to Bracken and Boswell, speaking in a low voice as if he was going to be overheard by the passionless slate walls of the tunnel or the empty depths about them.

“He set off for Castell y Gwynt.” Bran paused to let the words sink in before adding slowly, “That’s what he did, see. That’s what he did.”

“But why?” asked Bracken. “Why?”

Bran ignored his question, his gaze fixed on some image in his imagination as he continued. “He must have gone up through Cwmoer because that’s the only route to the upper slopes, up into the desolate place where Arthur the Hound lives. It was thought, until you told your story, that he must have been torn to death. But he must somehow have got through and then gone on up to the wormless heights of Siabod and on to the holy Stones of Castell y Gwynt.” Bran paused and there was silence among them.

“But why?” persisted Bracken.

“Why? What mole can say the true reason why a mole risks death where every other mole fears to go? The reason he. gave, as it is said, was that the Stone does not exist. There is no Stone. Therefore the Stones themselves mean nothing. He wanted to show that the Stone all moles worship and Siabod moles have always revered is nothing. He wanted at once to show how he despised our fears and mocked our belief. Remember, in those days before the plague, all moles were made to worship the Stone, but Y Wrach taught him not to, at least she told him to take no part in our rituals. But then Mandrake said, “What Stone can exist when such suffering as was wrought by his own birth can exist? And after the plague came a lot of us came to see he was right, see?”

The thought hung about them, each considering it in a different way. For Boswell the answer was as simple and as peaceful as sitting still; for Bracken, who had seen plenty of suffering in his own time, it was a question he had never been able to answer. For Bran, it was not much worth thinking about. They could not tell what Celyn thought at all.

“And she’s still alive, after so long?” asked Boswell. “What is it that she’s waiting for?” He asked it with compassion, looking not at Bran but at Celyn. Bran repeated the question in Siabod and Celyn answered it very softly.

“Well?” asked Bracken.

Bran laughed and shrugged. “He says that she thinks that Mandrake will come back,” he said.

Bracken had never actually said that Mandrake was dead and now was even less sure what he should say. But Boswell got him out of the difficulty.

“Take us to her,” he said gently.

“But we need to rest, to sleep...,” complained Bran.

“Take us,” Boswell repeated, saying the words to Celyn, who seemed to understand and got up to lead the way forward again.

The second journey consumed several molehours more and took them into tunnels whose size and appearance was more fearful than anything a Duncton mole could even have imagined. The slate walls began to tower higher and higher above them, the floor to widen so broadly that it was sometimes hard to make out the far side. To keep a straight track they had to stay close to one wall, though that was difficult sometimes because the continual running of water down the walls had created great pools on the floor, which was made of slate flakes rather than soil. In several places great tunnels entered the one they were traveling down and there was the continual sound of the running of underground streams and even in one place of some subterranean waterfall. The quality of the echo became deep and sonorous so that even the smallest paw sound seemed made by a giant mole.

“What moles burrowed these?” asked Bracken in awe at one point, his voice echoing harshly into the distance.

“Not moles,” said Bran. “This is not the work of moles.”

In some places there were great chambers of slate, higher than a hill, taller than the biggest beech tree, and littered about the flat, lifeless floors were twisted, jagged shapes of rusting metal such as they had seen sometimes near where roaring owls ran. The air was chill with a death that had been dead many generations before.

“She lives
here?”
asked Bracken.

“No, this is just a quick way to reach her when there’s too much wet on the surface above. But we’re nearly there, see,” said Bran.

Celyn led them round another great chamber that echoed to the clatter of their paws on the slaty floor, then through a blissful mole-sized crack in the rock that sloped steeply upward but down which fresh cold air streamed. They scrambled up through the muck of slate fragments and muddy, fallen vegetation, scrabbling through sodden peat particles and back to near the surface into a proper tunnel, obviously mole-burrowed. Then out onto the surface where the evening was beginning to form in the angry gray sky. They could see Siabod more clearly now, nearer and more massive; more jagged, too, with black buttresses of rock jutting out and disrupting the smoother profile they had first seen and obscuring all but the highest part of the summit itself, over which gray mist lingered.

Then down into another tunnel, along for a quarter of a molemile, and into the tunnels of a damp and dismal little system that reminded Bracken of Curlew’s burrows in what had once been the Marsh End.

“It’s Celyn and Bran, Gwynbach,” called Bran. “And some friends for you to meet.”

They rounded a comer, went to a burrow entrance, and Celyn, signaling them to stop, entered. They heard him talking in Siabod and the murmur of a reply from a cracked and aged voice through which ran an edge as sharp as the thinnest of slate flakes. Celyn came out and beckoned Boswell and Bracken inside the burrow.

Y Wrach was crouched in a nest of dried mat grass and heather, and what pale fur she still had on her ancient body was gray and worn with age. Her face was contorted into a thousand wrinkles and her talons were short and worn – one had gone altogether – and their color was translucent gray rather than black. Her eyes were closed, blind and running, and Bracken noticed that her back paws were swollen out of shape by some disease or complaint that came with age. But her head movements were quick and acute, and she beckoned first Boswell and then Bracken over to her, seeming to know exactly where they crouched. She snouted at each one of them, running a paw over Boswell, lingering for a moment at his crippled paw and then pushing him away, turning to Bracken, whom she examined in the same way. He shuddered at her touch, which was like the caress of, disease, but he noticed that Boswell was looking intently at her, compassion and warmth in his eyes – and more than that, respect.

“Pa waddod ydych, sy’n ddieithriaid yma? Dywedwch yn eich geiriau eich hunain a siaredwch o’r galon.”

“She wants to know who you are and for you to tell her yourselves,” said Bran.

“Well, I’m not sure that we ought to tell her everything...” As Bracken hesitated and stumbled over his words, Boswell quietly interrupted him, speaking to Celyn and ignoring Bran.

“Where shall we begin?” he asked.

Celyn hesitated and then, to Bracken’s surprise, broke into mole, which he spoke very well though with a harsher accent than Bran.

“Tell her what’s in your heart. She will know it, anyway. I will translate.”

There was something almost ritualistic about the way Boswell set about telling their story – quite unlike the matter-of-fact approach Bracken used. First he settled himself down comfortably, close to Y Wrach, closing his eyes for a short while almost as if he were praying or invoking some power he felt the occasion warranted. To his surprise. Bracken saw that the ancient mole started to do the same, the two of them engaged in a kind of crouching mutual trance.

Finally Boswell said, softly, “What I shall say is from my heart to your heart, told with the truth the Stone itself put there, and which I shall try to honor.” He paused briefly, and Y Wrach nodded slightly, her snout bowed and her head a little on one side.

“My name is Boswell, scribemole of Uffington who has journeyed here for many long moleyears, through winter and snow, with news you have waited for for far longer than that. May the Stone give you strength to receive it.”

He paused between each sentence so Celyn could translate, and imperceptibly Bran and Bracken retreated into the farther shadows of the burrow as Boswell and Y Wrach began their talk, almost as if it were private. Even Celyn soon seemed to fade away, his voice speaking their words to one another as if he himself was not there, so that soon it was just Boswell and the old female talking alone together.

“The mole I have come with, who brought me safely here, is Bracken from Duncton which, like Siabod, is one of the Great Systems. No mole may be trusted more.” Y Wrach nodded gently, snouting over toward the shadows where Bracken crouched in silence.

“I will tell you of Mandrake, the mole of Siabod; I will tell you of changes that no mole may judge. I will ask you a favor of the great Stones of Siabod...” So Boswell began to tell their story, speaking in the traditional rhythmic way of scribemoles for whom truth is more important than time or effect, and who speak as moles can only ever truly speak, from one heart to another.

When Celyn reached the name of Mandrake in his translation, Y Wrach sighed very slightly and seemed to mutter to herself, peering blindly at Boswell and then round at the rest of them in the burrow, seeming suddenly to find more strength in her body and to hold herself more and more erect. Her face bore the pride of a difficult promise fulfilled. She spoke a few words in Siabod which Celyn translated simultaneously as she spoke them.

“Alas, Boswell, that you are not a female, for then, perhaps, there would be less need of words. Tell me of Mandrake whom I saved on the mountain, tell me it all and I will tell you its truth.”

So Boswell began the tale, telling of Duncton and of all Mandrake did there. Telling of Rebecca and speaking of Rune, sometimes softly referring to Bracken for details that he did not know or could not remember having been told. Until at last, in a voice as hushed as nighttime snow, he told of the fight by the Stone and of the death of Mandrake.

There was a sigh from Y Wrach as he told of this and a shaking of her old lined head. Then Boswell continued, telling of the Seventh Stillstone, of the death of Skeat, of the plague, and of all things that had happened to bring them to Siabod. As he spoke. Bracken saw for the first time that, looked at in the way Boswell had told them, all these things were linked to Mandrake. But then he thought that in another way they were linked to Rebecca, or to Boswell, or to Uffington. And the Stone. Their story was all one.

There was a long silence before Y Wrach began in her own turn to speak. As she did so, she seemed to rear up and grow in size, the great slab of slate that formed one side of the burrow seeming to shrink behind her, a black backdrop to her gray and wrinkled form. She spoke in a singsong voice, different from the one she had first spoken in, and the words seemed to come not from her but through her, from a different generation of moles and from a mole who was young and speaking reluctantly through a body that had nearly done with life:

Hen wyf i, ni’th oddiweddaf...

Crai fy myrd rhag gofid haint...

Gorddyar adar; gwlyb naint.

Llewychyd lloer; oer dewaint.

Ancient am I and do not comprehend you...

I am wasted from painful disease...

Loud are birds; streams wet

The moon shines; midnight is cold.

The Siabod she spoke was more rhythmic and musical than that Bracken had first heard from Bran and the other moles down in the valley. And as Celyn’s translation began, her own words seemed to form a wonderful, melodic accompaniment to his own rendering of it, so that the sense came from him, but the power and poetry of sound came from her.

At first Bracken found it hard to follow what she meant, until he realized that he was not listening to a series of logical ideas or explanations of anything so much as the outpouring of images and memories, from the heart of a mole who had struggled with age for many long moleyears and whose life is better explained by the running of a stream than the exposition of a scribemole. At the heart of all she said was her faith in Mandrake, or in the life force within him, whose power she believed would not have withered in the dull safety of burrows and tunnels, having survived the blizzard from which she saved him.