Duncton Wood Read online

  ‘Listen!’ he said urgently. ‘We will run across to the area between the two paths…’

  ‘But if they see us,’ faltered Mullion, looking up just a little at the owl gazes about them.

  ‘They mustn’t, and you mustn’t let them. Wait until I start and then follow, and do not look towards them, however near they may seem.’

  Boswell waited for another lull and then was suddenly off through the grass and on to a hard, wide path that smelt of death. In the distance an owl’s gaze shone up into the sky, round across the marshes behind them and then along the path towards them, casting their three shadows before it. ‘Run!’ gasped Boswell, hobbling across the road as fast as he could, the road so wide, the danger getting so near. ‘Run!’ The path stretched hard and black ahead of them as the roaring owl grew nearer, its noise shaking the air about them and its gaze bright and moving on their fur.

  Fast as they ran, the roaring owl seemed to fly faster towards them, getting bigger as the edge of the path they could now just see ahead of them seemed to retreat. Each pawstep forward seemed to take a lifetime, each second made the owl bigger and nearer, its eyes brighter as they tried to reach the centre, as Boswell trailed behind the other two.

  ‘Run!’ It was Bracken’s voice shouting out over the owl noise, urging Boswell on to the safety of the central edge. And he was almost there, his paws almost amongst the sparse vegetation that scraped a living there, when the roaring owl loomed mightily above him and roared past, the wind from its wings so powerful that he was bowled several moleyards along the road.

  In the silence that followed, Bracken and Mullion watching in dread, Boswell turned back on his paws, shook himself, and ran at last to join them. ‘Running’s not my strong point,’ he said, and Bracken shook his head in disbelief that a mole could make a joke of nearly dying. There was more to Boswell than met the eye.

  The central strip between the paths offered them some cover, though the creatures still flew close by in each direction, and every time they did so, the world seemed to be replaced for a few moments by hell itself.

  It was Boswell, once again, who urged them on, running out into the darkness of a lull once more, the others following.

  None of them knew quite what happened next. However it was, Mullion forgot himself when he was halfway across and looked up at another approaching owl, its eyes catching his in a transfixion of horror. He stopped and turned towards it, and it was only when the other two were across and looked back that they realised what had happened. There Mullion crouched, snout towards the approaching owl, quite still and waiting for death. It was Bracken who gasped, but Boswell who acted. He darted out into the path again, hobbled over to Mullion as fast as he could and went between him and the roaring owl. Bracken could not hear what he said but he saw him shouting, saw him cuff Mullion and saw Mullion shake himself as if awakening, and then Mullion turned and ran towards him to safety.

  But then something worse followed, the sight of which Bracken would never forget. As Boswell stood poised to follow Mullion, lit up by the owl’s gaze, there was the sudden ghostly shadow of a ragged translucent white in the sky as from it there dropped, at terrible speed, a tawny owl, its feathers caught in the glare and its talons heading straight for Boswell. The roaring-owl noise got louder and louder, the tawny owl fluttered for a moment above Boswell, its wings shining and shadowy with light, and then down the last few moleyards on to Boswell. There was a squeal, a fluttering of wings as the owl started to rise again, with Boswell as its limp prey. But beyond it, on the far path, a roaring owl passed by and the wind from its wings seemed to beat the tawny owl back down towards the ground, straight into the murderous path of the one that had caught Mullion in its gaze. There was a rush and a thump, a squeal, and a flying of feathers and the roaring owl passed by, taking with it the tawny owl and Boswell. Silence. Nothing. Bracken stared at the path in disbelief. He looked at Mullion, who looked despairingly at him and then into the path again.

  ‘It even eats its own kind,’ whispered Mullion.

  ‘But…’ began Bracken, utterly shocked by what had happened. Another roaring owl passed. Silence again. Boswell had gone.

  They retreated into the cover of the grass on their side of the path.

  ‘We had better get out of here,’ said Mullion matter-of-factly. ‘Which way did he want us to go?’

  ‘To the west,’ said a voice from the darkness behind them. It was Boswell! He was covered with blood. ‘Not going without me, are you?’

  Bracken ran back to him, reaching forward before Boswell collapsed from his injuries.

  ‘It’s owl’s blood, not mine,’ said Boswell. ‘He got killed when the roaring owl went over him, but I didn’t. It went over me, too, but by the Stone’s grace his talons missed me. Now. Shall we get going? Again.’ Even his normal calm sounded just a little shaky.

  They followed him down the path under cover of the grass that grew there, so shocked by what had nearly happened that the proximity of other roaring owls going by no longer disturbed them. They hid each time a yellow gaze lit up the path and grass near them, then went on again, until the night grew deep and the roaring owls came less often.

  Until at last they came to a part where the path gave way to gravel and then a wall, creeping along its edge, round its far corner, and then blissfully away from the path and down an embankment again, this one drier and less steep. As they went down, they moved into a beautiful darkness, the sounds of the owls now high above them, and never had Bracken appreciated more the stillness of his own world.

  Boswell insisted on leading them on along the edge of a field—to get them away from the owl paths as quickly as possible—until there was no more than a distant occasional roar, and they were back in the elements of earth and silence and rustling that they knew. A quick, tired digging of temporary burrows, a snouting out of a couple of worms each, and then tumbling head over heels and falling down a dreamland embankment of moss and soft grass into the sleep of the tired and safe.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  They stayed for several weeks near the field to which Boswell had led them. Not only were they all tired and in need of rest and food to regain their strength, but February was just starting and with it the worst of the winter. The thaw was soon followed by more snow, which gave way to freezing rain that finally slunk into miserable cold days when the nights dragged on and on and the days were so gloomy they barely got started before they were finished.

  Mullion, being a Pasture mole and used to open ground, stayed out in the field, quickly taking the opportunity of the thaw to create a simple but extensive system deep enough underground to avoid the frost, which, when it came again, drove worms and grubs down into his tunnels. His lines of freshly dug molehills began to poke out of the snow for a wide area over the field.

  Bracken hunted around along the edge of the field until he found a small copse just beyond the fence furthest from where they had first come, where he created a more complex Duncton Wood-style of system, with subtly connecting tunnels and secret entrances concealed by long grass or leaf mould.

  As for Boswell, he refused Bracken’s offer to help him build tunnels and worked slowly on his own to create his own system—starting it from inside an abandoned rabbit tunnel. Bracken was surprised at how big Boswell insisted on burrowing his tunnels and it was several days before he realised that the feeling of familiarity they gave him, as if he had been there before, came from the fact that they were not unlike some of the tunnels in the Ancient System.

  But it did not need this to prompt him to satisfy his curiosity about Uffington. Indeed, he could hardly wait for Boswell to recover from their ordeal before asking him a dozen questions. His curiosity was matched by Boswell’s about Duncton. But asking questions is one thing, giving answers quite another. The fact was that Bracken was not very eager to talk about it in detail. So he merely outlined the system’s geography, described its personality, explained where he had come from, but affected vagueness a
bout the Ancient System and never even mentioned Rebecca.

  These glimpses scarcely satisfied Boswell, whose eagerness after so many moleyears to talk to the one mole he had met who knew anything about Duncton was only tempered by Bracken’s almost painful inability to talk in detail about it. He guessed its causes and, with a compassion and wisdom that Bracken did not sense, eventually stopped seeking the information he felt he needed to pursue his quest for Duncton.

  In fact, his self-denial in not pressing Bracken surprised Boswell, for if there was one vice of which he was aware in himself it was impatience. Again and again he had caused annoyance and trouble with other moles he had met since leaving Uffington with his habit of saying too directly what he thought, and his habit of jumping five paces ahead of anymole talking to him.

  His fault lay in his own quick intelligence, which made it almost painful for him to have to sit and listen to somemole prattling on towards a point that was perfectly obvious the moment he had opened his mouth.

  With Bracken he found he did not feel this frustration—not that Bracken’s thinking was so swift and clear that he never wandered in talk; he did, but there was a quality in Bracken that aroused in Boswell feelings he had not known before and swamped any impatience he might have felt. It was as if Bracken had unknowingly opened a tunnel for Boswell into a world of suffering and joy he had never entered before.

  The books he had read, the writing he had learned to scribe and interpret, the two works he himself had worked on all seemed quite irrelevant beside the unfamiliar breathless feeling of being on the brink of something when talking with Bracken.

  He saw, too, that Bracken himself was not aware that he had this effect—perhaps not even aware of the sufferings and joys whose power was revealed so well in the way he sometimes talked and by the way his eyes would seem to seek out, even in the burrow where they crouched, the moles he mentioned or the places he described so reluctantly, all of which he had so recently left behind.

  He mentioned a mole called Hulver, for example, with a tremble in his voice, as if he had not got used to the fact that Hulver had died long before, violently it seemed. Yet when Boswell asked a little more about him, Bracken avoided the subject, saying, ‘He was only an old mole I knew who talked too much!’ But the look in his eyes betrayed how much more Hulver meant to him than that.

  Then there was a mole called Rebecca, of whom, when he finally mentioned her, Bracken said, ‘She was a mole I met in a rainstorm by the Stone on top of the hill. She was as lost up there as I was, in a different way, and she touched me.’ Bracken’s voice had lowered when he said this, as his snout had, and for a moment Boswell felt as if he was walking with Bracken through the silence of a forgotten wood that even a single breath would blow away. Which, indeed, it did. For Bracken changed when pressed about Rebecca and laughed about her, pretending she was just ‘one of the Duncton females, and a very pretty one, too’.

  It was the same with the Ancient System, which was what Boswell wanted most to know about. Bracken said hardly anything about it, but when it did get mentioned, his whole body seemed to alternate between fear and peace and Boswell felt he was watching a changeable spring day pass by.

  It was seeing these things in Bracken that made Boswell, who was so quick with words and so used to the learned cut and thrust of Uffington, understand that the message in something a mole says may lie not in the words spoken, or the sense imparted, but the impulse of feeling behind them, which they themselves may change or distort. The more he spoke with Bracken, the more he had the feeling that the Stone itself had brought them together and that this strange mole was one he would follow wherever he went. It seemed to Boswell that Bracken held in his heart a secret of which he was not aware but whose revelation was a joy and pain to which, in some way, both of them must surrender themselves.

  So it was that Boswell’s initial impatience with Bracken’s unwillingness to talk about Duncton in detail gave way to an affectionate silence from whose simplicity Boswell really began to hear the words the other spoke and, through him, the words all moles speak.

  There was another way in which his dialogue with Bracken was a new experience for him as well. The fact was that since the preceding September, when he had left Uffington to come to Duncton, a period of several moleyears, he had become increasingly unwilling to talk about the sacred Holy Burrows to anymole. Yet when Bracken started asking him questions so enthusiastically, he found only pleasure in giving him the answers. His reluctance simply vanished.

  ‘What are they like?’ asked Bracken. ‘And do scribemoles still live there?’

  ‘They are on the top of a chalk hill many thousands of feet high, which is steep to its north side and gentle to the south. The tunnels are very big and spacious, unlike any tunnels I have seen since elsewhere. It is the most peaceful place I know.’

  ‘But what are the Holy Burrows?’

  ‘A group of burrows in the centre of the Uffington system where only moles who have taken certain vows of obedience may live. Fighting is not allowed. Many of the moles there decided to stop talking and live in a silence of contemplation. Those that talk try only to say those things that are essential and truthful.’

  ‘Are they all White Moles?’ asked Bracken, fascinated by everything Boswell was saying.

  ‘No, none of them is. There are no White Moles—well, there were once, starting with the first of them all, Linden, the last son of Ballagan, and Vervain…’

  ‘Yes. They tell that story in our system, though I’ve only heard it vaguely because it’s one normally only for Longest Night and I was… well… nowhere where stories like that were told on Longest Night.’

  So, piece by piece, Boswell told Bracken about Uffington and its lore, learning something about it himself too as he talked, for he had never really thought about it objectively before. He realised that he missed the Holy Burrows, the libraries and some of the moles there, like Skeat, whom he had grown up to know so well; yet he saw, too, how ignorant he had been of the world outside and how many of the scribemoles he had known, for all their learning and wit, worshipped the Stone through ignorance rather than wisdom. Perhaps Uffington was as much in decline as so many of the systems he had passed through seemed to be.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ Bracken had asked. And Boswell had told him, describing as best he could the urge he had felt to leave, though not mentioning that it was to Duncton that he had felt directed to come.

  He even recited the text he had found hidden in the depths of the libraries, the indirect cause of his breaking his vows and departing for Duncton.

  ‘Seven Stillstones, seven Books made,

  All, but one, have come to ground.

  First, the Stone of Earth for living,

  Second, Stone for Suffering mole;

  Third of Fighting, born of bloodshed,

  Fourth of Darkness, born in death;

  Fifth for Healing, born through touching,

  Sixth of pure Light, born of love.

  Now we wait on

  For the last Stone

  Without which the circle gapes;

  And the Seventh Lost and last Book,

  By whose words we may be blessed.’

  As Boswell was about to recite the second stanza, Bracken interrupted him.

  ‘What’s all that mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious, it’s saying that—’

  ‘No. I mean, what’s a Stillstone?’

  It had not occurred to Boswell that he didn’t know such a simple thing.

  ‘There are six of them—well, seven, according to this text—but the ones that are known are somewhere in the Holy Burrows where only the Holy Mole and the masters have seen them. They are stones that legend says contain the essence of the seven Holy Books, one stone for each book. I’ve never seen them myself, of course, but they say in Uffington that each one contains a kind of light, like the sun or moon only coloured, one for each Book. They—’

  ‘How big are they?’ inte
rrupted Bracken. He almost whispered it, an extraordinary sense of being carried along on a great wind or flood overtaking him and stilling him to the ground.

  ‘Well, I’ve no idea, since the masters never spoke of them; indeed, it is forbidden to speak to the masters about them. But—well—scribemoles like a chat like anyone else.’

  ‘What are they for, exactly?’

  ‘It’s a good question, and one every newcomer to Uffington asks. The best answer is in the Book of Light, though I can’t remember it well enough to quote exactly.

  But it explains that each Book has a stone so that by looking at it a reader of the Book may be reminded that truth lies not in scribed words but only in the heart that scribed them and the heart that reads them, just as the light lies inside the stone and not outside it.’

  Bracken fell silent. He was thinking of the stone he and Rebecca had found in the Ancient System. He felt at once full of wonder and very frightened. Had it been a Stillstone? Was it the seventh Stillstone? He wished he could reach out and touch Rebecca now, just as he had then. He wished her paws were round him. He silently begged the Stone to keep her safe, and his paw, the one that had touched the stone, began to burn and ache. He looked at it, but there was nothing there.

  ‘Probably doesn’t make much sense,’ said Boswell, thinking his silence meant incomprehension.

  ‘No,’ said Bracken. ‘I was just thinking… I was wondering… well, what the “seventh stone” is, the last one, the one in that verse.’

  ‘The seventh stone is a Stillstone; it doesn’t have a name. But the last book, the seventh Book—ah! Well! That’s the question every scribemole in Uffington wants an answer to. Nomole knows—it is not written anywhere.’

  Boswell fell silent, thinking. Then he said, ‘Of course, everymole has made guesses—the most popular being that it’s the Book of Love, but I don’t think that’s likely. For one thing, anymole who’s read the Book of Light knows that that’s the one about love, really, which the sacred text confirms; and anyway, love isn’t exactly an easy word to define, is it? It’s not absolute, like fighting or earth, if you see what I mean. No. It’s not love. The other idea in Uffington about the seventh stone is that it is simply the Book of the Stone. Makes sense in lots of ways.’