Duncton Tales Page 11

  He meant Fieldfare most of all, but touchingly it was Chater who smiled and muttered, “Aye! She’s as worthy as they come of anymole’s trust.” At which all the others looked at Privet, and affirmed it in their different ways with nods, and smiles, and in the case of Drubbins, with a touch. It was for Privet a touching moment indeed, to know that these five moles so respected her.

  Then Stour said with great seriousness, “I now believe the day has come that I, and Drubbins here as well, have long feared might one day be. Duncton and its Library are under threat from the Newborn moles. A threat that runs deeper and is more serious than any faced in my lifetime, or that faced by any Duncton mole since the days of the defence of the Stone against the Word — a fact confirmed by news that Chater here has brought back to the system yesterday, at considerable risk to himself.

  “My love!” exclaimed Fieldfare involuntarily, but Chater merely smiled and nodded at her, and reached out a strong paw to shush her. There were, it seemed, more important things to discuss than any risks he might recently have taken.

  “For this reason have I summoned this meeting,” continued Stour, “to warn it of what might soon begin, to seek its counsel and approval of defensive preparations we must make, and to ensure that moles within the system, who can be relied on to act on their own initiative if they need to, know what the consensus is. If there are any here who wish not to accept responsibility for such deliberations let them leave now.”

  “But what of the Meeting I was told you had summoned in Barrow Vale?” asked Privet.

  “A ruse, I’m afraid, to ensure that nomole stumbled on us here. None will come to Drubbins’ place if they think there’s half a chance of a good discussion down at Barrow Vale.”

  “But won’t they miss us and put two and two together?” asked Maple, who must have been similarly fooled as Privet was.

  “The Meeting is not starting until this evening,” said Drubbins, who seemed to have been party to the ruse, “and by then, subject to what we decide here of course, I assume we will most of us have gone on down to Barrow Vale.”

  Stour nodded, looked around, and waited for any other comments. But there were none.

  “May the Stone bless this meeting, and guide us forward in its Light,” he said quietly. For a long time then he paused, his eyes open and clear and staring nomole knew where, but as he continued the silence among them deepened, and each felt that the Stone was with them.

  Then, when he was ready, Master Librarian Stour said, “Now, we must begin …”

  PART II

  Darkness Newborn

  Chapter Eight

  “What we must discuss is the expansion of the Newborns, and in particular their long declared intention of ensuring that the libraries of moledom are “fit” for Stone followers to study in,” began Stour.

  “In short, I believe they wish to censor and control the contents of the libraries of moledom, great and small. Now, this may not at first sight seem a great danger or problem to us in Duncton Wood, nor one which, as I put it earlier, seems like the greatest threat to moledom’s liberty since the coming of the Word.

  “So before I ask Chater to tell us what he has so grimly found in Cuddesdon, I want to say something about the reasons for my retreat, recently ended, which started a full cycle of seasons ago …”

  He spoke slowly and deliberately, and although it was his disconcerting habit to look moles he spoke to straight in the eye, occasionally he shifted his gaze from whichever he then happened to be looking at, to somewhere a little above their heads, as if pondering carefully what to say next. This gave them all the feeling that they were sharing in the process of the Master’s deepest thinking, a notion enhanced by the fact that he made no attempt to shorten or make easy his words, or simplify his ideas, but spoke to them as if each were a scholar and his equal, used to being treated as a colleague in a common cause.

  “It is important that each of you fully understands why I have summoned this meeting, because there may come a time, sooner than later, when each and all of us will be isolated and under pressure, and will need to know how to act in the knowledge that what we do is in agreement with what we would all do if we were together. Now, about my retreat …”

  He looked briefly at where his pale talons rested on the ground, and for an instant Privet saw, or imagined she saw, a tremor of trial and weariness cross his body as he turned his attention back to that long time of retreat. Then he looked up at them and smiled a gentle smile, of the same kind that he had given her when they had first met back in February.

  “You, Privet, were not yet in Duncton when I went into retreat, but no doubt others have told you that it seemed connected with a visit made to the Library by two of the Newborn moles from the Marsh End. That visit was the first real intimation that I had that for all their appearance of reasonableness and concern with the Stone, the Newborns had a fell intent. Namely, to commandeer our Library, and any other library they could gain control of, to their false and biased intent.

  “This worried me, for the whole ethos of a library is anti-censorship. It is to provide a resource of text and learning from every sphere which moles may freely consult, and from which they may freely learn, without restraint. Its very essence is that texts and folios are collected for their interest, for the range and shades of opinions and feeling that they represent.

  “It was my knowledge that we in Duncton, through historical circumstances and the chance of attracting exceptional moles to our system, had gathered together a unique collection which, by definition, was unavailable except to moles who travelled here to study it, that made me determined that through copying, other systems might in time build libraries as complete as ours and so be free to study as they wished. Our responsibility has always been to create a library that is open to all — as open for textual matters as the community that great Tryfan re-established here in Duncton Wood was to be open to all in matters of the heart and spirit.

  “I was greatly concerned therefore when I spoke to the Newborn moles, and realized that they were as dedicated to a closed system of censorship for our great Library as we were dedicated to the opposite.

  “Yet, my friends, that was not my only worry after that meeting, nor reason enough to go into retreat. For what concerned me was the calibre of one of the moles who came to see me that day. His name, you will know, is Wesley, but I’ll warrant that none of you have seen him for a long time.”

  “The story is he’s dead,” said Chamfer. “He’s not been seen since I don’t know when.”

  “In fact I’d guess he’s not been seen, Chamfer, since he came to see me in the Library, or rather, since I went into retreat. Aye, moles, there is a connection. For know this: when I talked to Wesley that day, and toured the Library with him, I was astonished to find the range of his learning, the quality of his thinking, and the depth of his reverence for the Stone …”

  “Reverence my arse!” exclaimed Chater.

  “Aye, Chater, reverence, though reverence that is in my judgement most gravely flawed. For one thing, he made me well aware of the fact that he felt that many of the texts in the Library were either dangerous for moles to see, or positively blasphemous, to quote the word he used. The texts on Dark Sound, and on fighting, fell into the former category, while Spindle’s accounts of Tryfan’s doings and certain of the Cuddesdon texts he felt to be blasphemous.”

  “Spindle, Tryfan, Cuddesdon … blasphemous!” said Maple. “I may not be a scholar myself, but I’ve heard the stories many times since I was a pup and if those moles’ deeds were not of the Stone then I’m not Maple of Duncton Wood!”

  “Ah, but you must understand the way such moles inclined to censorship think. They are of two kinds. First are those who censor the truth knowingly, to aid their cause. Such moles are easiest to deal with because they have no faith but lies, and truth will always outlive them. But secondly are those like the Caradocians, who sincerely believe all they say and do, and believe it right to censor out
all ideas, or thoughts, or reports, which conflict with their flawed idea of what is good and just. They believe that any text that contradicts them is evilly inspired and that it, and anyone who defends it, should be destroyed.

  “Now, the truth of Tryfan was that he was but mole — he was prone to violence in his younger days, he allowed himself to follow his heart, he was impetuous, he made mistakes. Whilst Spindle, as good a mole as ever lived, was inclined to scribe down inconsequential things or, when he felt inclined, to report the flaws he saw in Tryfan as well as the virtues. The reverent Cuddesdon too was not without fault, and in his later scribings expressed his deep doubts about his faith in the Stone openly — a fact which to many moles since who have sought to find a way towards the Silence has been a comfort and solace at their darkest times of trial, for if such a holy mole as he had doubts, then their own doubts did not seem quite as bad …”

  Stour smiled wryly, and Privet, who listened so closely to all he said, felt sure that in what he had just said of doubts, he described himself, and that he had found Cuddesdon’s scribings a special comfort during his recent retreat.

  “Now, to moles like the Carodocians, bound as they are to a simple and rigorous faith that sees only the black night of evil and the white light of good, anything between, especially if it makes moles they revere — such as the three I have mentioned — seem less than perfect, is an embarrassment. It puts doubts into the minds of their followers. And there must be no doubts … And so, they justify censorship in the very name of the truth and mature faith which it denies; and they finally go the fatal way into calling moles who admit their doubts, and seek through learning, scholarship, or thought, to expose those healthy doubts to the light of day, evil moles.

  “And, my friends, the worst is this: these censoring moles believe they are right in what they do, and that it is just to punish through deprivation or even death those moles who simply dare to question them. When I pointed out to Wesley that moles study to be scholars that they may learn to discern truth, and that truth is not achieved by denying that even the great moles of the past made mistakes or themselves had doubts, he replied in all seriousness that not all moles were capable of such training, and these lesser moles needed protecting for their own good. By “protecting” he meant that libraries should be censored and, in certain circumstances, texts should be destroyed.

  “Yet even this was not quite all that concerned me. I had no doubt that Wesley was a great, if flawed, scholar and I wondered why he had chosen to live in the Marsh End where, to my knowledge, there were no texts.

  “His reply astonished me, and changed my life. For he said he had gone to the Marsh End expressly to be away from texts, and all but a few moles who might minister to his needs. In effect, he said, he was in retreat and thinking about moledom’s future. Naturally I assumed that what he was doing was of his own volition, and one must respect a mole who denies himself so much. But I became alarmed when he went on to tell me that it was not his decision to go into retreat in Duncton’s Marsh End, but that of the then new Head of Missions at Caradoc, Thripp of Blagrove Slide. It was he who had decreed Wesley’s retreat, and what was more sinister, the retreat of other such Senior Brothers (as I understand they are called) in ten of the other systems with libraries, making eleven in all. The twelfth of course is Caer Caradoc itself.

  “But though greatly alarmed, I was impressed as well, perhaps because in days of old scribemoles went into periodic retreats and always learned much from them. There is something about silence, clearing the mind, and ending one’s preoccupation with daily things, that focuses a mole’s attention on the essentials of life and death. Perhaps all moles cannot do it, but some surely must. The fact that the Newborns were being led by moles who believed in contemplation and retreat, and had sent out moles of Wesley’s character to retreat in our system, suggested that this was a force to reckon with even with — or perhaps because of — their belief in censorship.

  “Wesley made his points, I rejected them, and more or less in violent disagreement we parted — he to return to the Marsh End to begin his retreat and I to … what? His visit made me decide to do what I had long thought I should do as a scribemole, go into retreat myself and ponder the very points his discussion with me had raised. There was one particular issue that I had long wished to contemplate, and again it was underscored by the meeting with Wesley. You see, I became more aware the more I talked to him that when the day came for him and those others like him to emerge from their retreats back into the day-by-day world of communal living, they would be ready and all too willing to enforce their belief in censorship, and all the grim things it implies, throughout moledom.

  “And now,” continued Stour, hunching forward towards them and fixing each of them in turn with his clear intense gaze, “we come to the central issue this brought into my mind, and one which has concerned many moles through time. Regarding the Newborn moles it was this: do we or do we not personally resist with force a forceful takeover of our Library?”

  “You’d have to!” declared Chamfer immediately. “Couldn’t let them get away with that!”

  Stour remained silent, waiting for other responses.

  “We may be peaceably minded in this system, Stour, but I don’t think I could allow the Library simply to be invaded by Newborn strangers because of some scruple you have about violence,” said Drubbins.

  “Anyway,” said Maple in a conciliatory way, “there’d be moles enough would fight the battle for you, Master, you’d not be expected to sully your own paws with blood!”

  Stour nodded his understanding of what they said, but not his agreement with it.

  “Any other views?” he said eventually. “Chater, for example?”

  I’d stance at Maple’s flank any day, Master, but more to defend your life than your texts and folios!”

  “And I’d stance at his side,” said Fieldfare, stoutly, “because where he goes now I go. If there’s danger in the system I’ll not let him out of my sight any more. Chater, my dear, your days as a journeymole are over!”

  Chater growled a grumbly kind of sound, but his eyes softened in appreciation of Fieldfare’s passionate concern.

  “Drubbins?” said Stour. “You have more to say?”

  “In my younger days I was as tough as any mole, but I’m older now and wiser. I’d never raise my talons to another mole now, whatever the circumstances,” he said quietly. “I’m a peace-maker, not a destroyer. Fighting will never be my way.”

  There was silence after this so-far solitary dissent from the violent way, until Stour turned to Privet.

  “And finally, you, Privet. What do you say?”

  It was very plain that Privet not only did not know quite what to say, but also was troubled by the question Stour had posed.

  “I’m not sure, Master … I think, I’m sure, I would fight to protect the lives of moles I love. Of Whillan for example, and … and Fieldfare here. And others I might name. But to defend texts … I don’t know. You see …”

  “Yes, Privet?” Stour’s voice was very quiet.

  “I saw terrible fighting once, terrible deaths. The cause was just but the results were so bitter, so terrible, that I thought then as I think now, that there must be another way.”

  What fighting she had seen she did not say, but surely all of them guessed that in describing it so briefly she had come a little nearer to talking of her past.

  Stour nodded appreciatively and repeated quietly the last thing she had said, “‘there must be another way …’ Exactly. And I am sure there is. It was over this problem, this paradox, that I went into retreat and sought the Stone’s guidance. Only when I felt I had resolved the paradox did I come out of it again, as, I dare say, a much happier mole. It seems that good Drubbins here has come to the same conclusion as I but without the stress and strain a retreat involves!”

  Drubbins smiled and shrugged self-deprecatingly.

  “But most of you, for reasons that not only seem laudabl
e, but are laudable, would fight to save our Library. And all but Drubbins it seems would fight to save the lives of moles you love.”

  All but Drubbins nodded their agreement with this.

  “Well now, I believe that the issue I have raised is one so central to our lives, and to the furtherance towards Silence of our faith in the Stone, that I ask for your patience while I explain why I have come to the conclusion that I have, and why I hope you will come to see that as the threat of the Newborns now begins to grow, a few of us here today must begin to seek a consensus among ourselves about what we shall do in the event of a Newborn attack or attempted takeover.

  “But before I do that I want Chater to tell you of his recent experience in Cuddesdon. What you will hear will shock you, and in the normal course of events would strengthen your stated resolve to fight back. Indeed you might, once you have heard what Chater has to say, feel that to the simple will to resist might legitimately be added the right of revenge. But I pray each one of you, keep an open mind about the best course to take until after you have heard Chater’s account, and my own conclusions.”

  The chamber grew hushed and the light of the afternoon a little faded. Somewhere nearby wind rustled at dried leaves, and flurried, and leaves scuttered across the surface of the Wood over their heads. Finally all eyes were on Chater, who cleared his throat and looked about a bit, smiling in a consoling way at Fieldfare.

  “Could make it long, could make it short, but I’ll make it middling,” he said, one paw rising momentarily to his injuries as if he were unconsciously preparing to remind himself of the circumstances in which they had been suffered. “You all know that the religious community of Cuddesdon was founded there by a mole of the same name at the end of the war of Word on Stone. It was a place of worship, study and refuge for moles who have a preference for celibacy and the life of worship.

  “We journeymoles go there from time to time, as much to collect texts originated there as to take copies, for it is not a main or even minor library; but unlike most its moles are inclined to scribe of matters religious and spiritual and the Master here feels that such texts should be disseminated. ’Tis not more than three days’ journey from here, on a rise above the vales to the east, a good warm spot as ever was, but not one much visited.