Duncton Wood Page 48

  After a few minutes of half-hearted talk, Stonecrop left with only the promise that Bracken would let him have an answer in the next few days. Well, a week at most. But Stonecrop let it be known that he wasn’t sure that he would be able to hold his moles in control that long unless something changed very dramatically. If it didn’t, and Bracken remained uncooperative, then he would have to consider whether the help his moles had given Bracken did not give them the right to take the Ancient System by force…

  The effect of Stonecrop’s visit on Bracken was immediate. As soon as he had gone, he ordered the other Duncton moles out of the elder burrow and turned to Boswell. ‘Right. We’re going to the Ancient System to see what the food situation is there. It was never up to much when I lived there, but you never know, it might have changed. But first we’re going to find out what the position is in Duncton. I’ve been thinking this drought would soon go away, but we’d better face the fact that it might stay for many weeks yet, perhaps even months. We owe something to the Pasture system. We had better make some plans, but you can’t do that without facts.’

  Boswell could hardly believe his ears. For the first time since Bracken had taken over the system he seemed to have real fire in his spirit. His eyes were brighter, there was a combativeness in the way he spoke. More than that, Stonecrop’s suggestion seemed to have opened the way to Boswell finally getting to see the Ancient System with Bracken.

  They went first to the Westside, then down to see Mekkins in the Marsh End. They talked to mole after mole, getting a detailed picture of what effect the drought was having on the system. Then back to the tunnels of Barrow Vale, where the moles were at first surprised to see Bracken so personally interested in what they had to say, then falling over themselves to tell him their woes. Finally they went to the Eastside before starting on the trek up the slopes towards the Ancient System.

  By then the picture they had formed—not only from what they had been told but also from what they had seen—was a grim one. The system was on the verge of disarray and fights over food were already becoming more frequent.

  Along the wood’s edge, the normally green grass and burgeoning brambles had turned yellow in the dryness. Everything creaked and crackled for want of moisture. The very air itself seemed to be made of oppressive dust, the light was harsh and bare—though because of the pall of white haze that seemed to have fallen on the earth, the sun rarely shone directly. On some of the more exposed trees, particularly on their south-facing side, the leaves had dried and crinkled and turned prematurely autumnal. The moisture that normally stayed throughout the summer just beneath the first layer of leaf litter seemed all to have gone, and what grubs there were had buried themselves deeper than usual, along with all the worms, making the normal summer surface runs useless for getting food. The worms also seemed to have bred much less prolifically, so that there was a general shortage. It was not acute, but to survive a mole had to spend much longer each day, and range much further, to find enough food. As a result there were more fights, for territory was more valuable, and anyway, any shortage of food makes moles aggressive and irritable. At the same time, the number of owls in the wood seemed to have increased—summer was always a bad time as the tawny owls’ own young were learning to fly and feed, and took any young moles in the wood or on the pastures they laid their yellow eyes upon. By the end of August, however, this bloody threat was normally over, for the youngsters that were going to be taken had gone, and most moles were sensibly underground. This time, however, the weather seemed to have prolonged the owl threat, whose hanging presence added to the grim atmosphere in the wood.

  Mole after mole complained to Boswell and Bracken that something was wrong, very wrong, and they were afraid, very afraid. The Stone was angry and something was going to happen to them. And everymole they met complained of something they themselves had noticed in Barrow Vale: there was an unpleasant infestation of fleas in the tunnels all over the system.

  So it was in a mood of foreboding that Bracken and Boswell turned at last up to the slopes and towards the Ancient System. The slopes were more populated with youngsters than Bracken could ever remember having heard of. Unable to find territory in the main system because its residents were keeping a larger portion of it for themselves, many youngsters had come to the traditionally impoverished slopes and established a meagre existence for themselves in the dilapidated tunnels that were distant remnants of the original migration from the Ancient System. They were a skinny, frightened, sorry lot, somehow symptomatic of the arid days through which the system was going. Most ran away and hid when Bracken and Boswell approached.

  ‘The whole system’s falling apart,’ growled Bracken once when this happened, unaware that just as once he had been afraid of fully mature adult males, so these timid youngsters were afraid of him. Had Boswell been by himself, the story might have been different, for Boswell was the most approachable of moles.

  Hulver’s old tunnels were unoccupied and they entered the ancient tunnels by the route carved out by the side of the owl face by Mandrake. As they did so, Boswell felt obliged to reveal to Bracken what Rebecca had told him about their experience together in the central part of the system and what they had found together under the Stone. But whereas before Stonecrop’s visit Bracken would surely have been angry, now he seemed, if anything, relieved.

  ‘Did she tell you all that? Well, it’s true enough, though it seems so removed from me now that I sometimes think all that happened to two other moles. You can’t go backwards, Boswell.’

  Ostensibly they went to find out what the food supply would be like in the Ancient System, but having quickly established that it was no better there than anywhere else, the journey became a tour of the system conducted by Bracken for Boswell’s benefit.

  They stayed there for three days, and in that time Boswell learned more about Bracken than he had ever known before. They went over to the cliff edge where Bracken had first entered the system; they travelled down the communal tunnel towards the centre of the system; and they entered tunnel after tunnel and poked their snouts into many burrows even Bracken had not seen before.

  Bracken spoke simply about the past, making it sound almost as if it were a different mole he was talking about, but describing all the fears and excitements of the original exploration.

  ‘Really, when it comes down to it, there isn’t much to see. It’s a deserted system, that’s all, with just the central part having any great interest… perhaps I’ll show it to you before we go back to the main system,’ Bracken said mischievously, for he could see Boswell’s excitement at everything they saw—and, indeed, it rubbed off on to him.

  So, when they finally reached the Chamber of Dark Sound, they were both equally excited, and ran down the final length of tunnel towards the echoes like a couple of youngsters. Boswell noticed that Bracken’s old good humour had come back—away from the main system he seemed more relaxed. Perhaps at heart he was a solitary mole, perhaps that was what was wrong—he could never be solitary in Barrow Vale.

  The chamber was the same, except that the entrance to the tunnel to the most central part of the system had fallen in where Mandrake had destroyed it, and the half-buried bones of the henchmoles killed in the fight remained among the soil and rubbish. There was a way through, however, dug out no doubt by Mandrake during the time he lived in the tunnels alone.

  The atmosphere, which had been dark and dangerous when Bracken first came there, was somehow lighter and more neutral. Bracken did not feel nervous about it, and dispassionately showed Boswell the embossed walls, whose patterns still gyrated and wound across the surface, changing into heavier, deeper patterns nearer and nearer the centre where the owl face, still threatening, hung. How had he ever been afraid of it all!

  ‘You know what I found out?’ said Bracken, finding it strange to talk normally in this once-terrifying place. ‘If you hum in a certain way, you get sounds back.’ He was about to show how when Boswell suddenly looked warningly at h
im, raised a paw and said quietly: ‘Be careful, Bracken. You don’t know what you’re doing.’

  Bracken began to protest but, as sometimes happened, there was a quality of fierceness to Boswell’s expression that made him hold back his words. His mouth opened and then shut, and it was Boswell who spoke.

  ‘This wall is the work of long generations of graced moles. It is a wall of hope and warning and it is true that by humming in a certain way, something you have stumbled upon, you may get some of the power from its ancient script. There is a wall like this in Uffington, as there is one in each of the seven chosen systems. They are not to be played with and are traditionally guarded by a mole not only great in body, but wise in spirit as well. It was said that such a guard never left his place, which is at the centre of the wall, whatever calamity befell.’

  Bracken remembered then the mole skeleton that had so frightened him at the entrance in the centre of the wall, the seventh entrance. So that had been the guard, and some calamity had befallen the Ancient System. Yet he had stayed. Something of the awe that Bracken had once felt was returning in the face of Boswell’s transformation beneath the wall from follower to aide to teacher.

  ‘What is the wall for, then?’ asked Bracken rather humbly.

  ‘It protects the most holy part of the system, the system beyond that entrance. Its shapes carry the voices of the moles of the past and the proper way to approach it is with a chant in the old language, which all scribemoles should know, though these days, alas, many do not know it well enough. If I were still a scribemole and bound by my vows, I would not be able to tell of this, or let you hear the language. But now, Bracken, I am beginning to see that the Stone works its wisdom in ways we cannot understand, and I think it has made me free so that you, who carry so much… may hear the wall’s proper sound.’

  ‘What do you mean “carry so much”?’ asked Bracken.

  Boswell was getting sterner and stranger by the second, and Bracken felt almost intimidated. ‘We didn’t meet by accident, Bracken—surely you know that. You have a destiny I do not understand. But I know it is so. And the Stone has blessed me to help you fulfil it. Rebecca… the seventh Stillstone which… you were so unwilling to talk about… the shadows that have fallen and continue to fall on the Duncton system… they are all a part of it. Every system seems to be in disarray—Nuneham, the Pastures, Duncton, and many that I passed through when I came here. Nomole trusts the Stone; nomole trusts himself. Fear is written on every face.’ It was written on Bracken’s as he listened to Boswell. Who was he? What did the Stone want of him?

  Bracken began to shake with fear, for as Boswell spoke, his voice seemed to grow louder and more sonorous and his very language changed as word by word it slid into the old language, which Bracken could not understand. Sounds hard; sounds mellifluous; sounds mysterious. Yet he did understand that there was worse than warning in Boswell’s words and that Boswell was more than mole… Boswell turned to the wall and his voice became a chant, in the language of the old moles, and it began to echo and reverberate a thousand times more powerfully than when Bracken had first discovered the effect a hum could have.

  ‘The stait of mole dois change and vary,

  Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

  Now dansand mety, now like to dee,

  Our plesance heir is all vaneglory;

  This fals warld is hot transitory,

  The flesh is brukle, the dark is sle,

  We that in heill wes, and gladnes,

  Are trublit now with gret seiknes

  And feblit with infermite…’.

  As he chanted these ancient words, few of which Bracken could understand, it was as if the wall echoed back the actual chant of ancient moles, powerful moles, and dark sound began to come at Bracken, louder and louder, so that he wanted to run from it. But whichever way he turned, however he tried to escape, it came louder at him, surrounding him in its catastrophe, running at him from every tunnel in the Ancient System, a storm of sound.

  As he began to cry out for the terror of it, he thought only of himself and could not know that its echoes and reverberations travelled far beyond the chamber they were in, down the tunnels, booming and vibrating up to the surface, encircling and then issuing from the Stone itself, and then out over the slopes, down towards Barrow Vale, a sound of disaster.

  Mekkins heard it, stopping in mid-sentence down in the Marsh End, shaking his head in puzzlement, then running to the surface and snouting up towards the distant Stone from where the deep chant of ancient moles seemed to be coming.

  Comfrey heard it, in the shade of the wood’s edge where he vainly sought herbs long since killed by the drought, and he turned towards the hill, the name ‘Rebecca’ forming helplessly in his mouth as fear filled him and he sought the comfort her name always gave him.

  Rebecca heard it, down in her burrows, and she knew that what it was they had been waiting for for so long, for generations, perhaps before any of them had been born, had come.

  Stonecrop heard it, and mole after mole, like him, stopped what they were doing and paused fearfully, as the sound from the Stone came down to them like thunder through the trees.

  ‘Stop!’ cried Bracken to Boswell. ‘Stop the sound!’ he shouted, turning this way and that in his desperation. And Boswell’s voice began to soften and change back, his words still thundering but no longer echoing with dark sound, as Bracken heard him say, ‘You argue with Stonecrop, you argue with Rebecca, you argue with yourself. All of you argue, but now the time is coming when you must listen to the Stone. Now the last shadow is falling.’

  Bracken stared at Boswell and saw that he too was shaking, sweating and afraid himself. He was possessed by some power that only reluctantly let him go and Bracken called again to him, no longer in fear, but in pity and compassion for them all.

  The last shadow had fallen. The last shadow? It was with this mysterious knowledge hanging over them, and not knowing what it meant, that Bracken finally led Boswell—both of them very subdued—through the seventh entrance and on to the central core.

  In this moment of long-awaited arrival at the heart of Duncton Boswell said nothing, for he felt the dread of a threat outside the ancient tunnels far more than the promise and excitement of finding the seventh Book, or clues to it, within them. But they pressed on, Bracken leading them quickly to one of the entrances into the Chamber of Echoes, and from there, without faltering once, through the complex labyrinths where the echoes played among the chalky walls and on to the edge of the Chamber of Roots.

  There they stopped and looked at the sinews and shadows of the roots massing before them, seeming utterly still for once, but even then sounding the whine and shrill of the subtlest of shiftings from some deep crevice or high cleft as the roots responded to the stresses of the trees. The drought extended even down there, for the air was dry and the root sounds were tauter and higher pitched.

  ‘The buried part of the Stone is beyond the roots,’ said Bracken, pointing half-heartedly at them, ‘and since we’re here, we might as well try to get through. But… well, you’ll see.’

  Bracken led slowly off among the roots, taking care to mark the ground from the beginning so that they could find their way out. But, as he expected, they did not get more than a few moleyards beyond the first of the roots before the lethargy and loss of purpose that had affected him before struck them both. A voice kept saying to each of them, ‘What’s the point?’ and, ‘You know you can’t get through, it’s too far,’ until they seemed to veer off the course Bracken was trying to lead them on, round and round, and out again, back to the edge.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ said Bracken. ‘I was only able to get through there with Rebecca. We just went straight through without any confusion at all. But if you want to get to the Stillstone, that’s where you’ll have to find a way through, Boswell.’

  Boswell was not really listening. He was uncomfortable and restless, feeling that something was nagging at him from behind, a looming
shadow he could not quite make out.

  Bracken said, ‘Come on, I’ll get you out. Another time… I’ll bring you here again. Anyway, there are things to do. I’ll tell Stonecrop he can bring what moles he liked into the ancient tunnels. I’ll go and see Rebecca. It will be all right, Boswell.’

  He saw that the things he must do were really quite simple, and as he did so, felt relieved and clear-headed. He might even have felt light-hearted but for the oppression of the drought and the feeling that Boswell, who was now so silent, was full of fear or dread.

  He took them out by his own series of tunnels that led over towards the wood’s edge, describing to Boswell how he had escaped through them with Violet. They found a little food there, but ate it quickly because they wanted to get back on to the surface and down the slopes to the main system. When they did, they found the air was still as dry as bone.

  ‘It’s just the same as it was!’ said Bracken with relief, as if he had expected the whole wood to have disappeared. ‘That place can leave a mole full of fears! Nice to be out again!’ He tried to be as positive and as cheerful as possible, but Boswell did not react.

  ‘I can’t see what you’re so miserable about,’ said Bracken, exasperated. ‘There’s nothing wrong—except the heat.’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  But the system was not quite the same. While they had been in the ancient tunnels, the sky had taken on an eerie, threatening colour, as if a thunderstorm of heat was about to break but could never quite manage it. At the same time, the flea infestation, which Bracken and Boswell had noticed on their tour of the system, had got suddenly worse. A mole could not enter the tunnels and burrows to the north of Barrow Vale without brown-orange fleas hopping on and off his face and paws, bristling among his fur and itching and biting. They seemed attracted to the fine layer of dust and grit that had formed on the floors of the tunnel with the drought, and although not at first easily seen, the floor was sometimes literally alive with them.