Duncton Wood Read online

  ‘Medlar has gone to a place which is to the west of Uffington Hill where the Silent Burrows are. It is not far, perhaps two miles at most, and it is connected to Uffington by a tunnel.’

  ‘What happens there?’ asked Bracken.

  ‘Well, that’s hard to explain. Nothing really. Nothing at all. There are special burrows there in which certain moles, only a very few, choose to live and rarely leave. In fact, the entrances are sealed up and they stay there in silence.’

  ‘What for?’ asked Bracken, incredulous.

  ‘Because they have reached a point where the only way forward is sitting still. Do you remember what Medlar used to say about the importance of doing that?’

  ‘Is that what he’s doing now, up there?’

  Boswell nodded.

  ‘But how does he stay alive?’

  ‘Other moles bring him food. It is an honour to serve a silent mole. At some time all novices take their turn in serving them.’

  ‘What about fouling the burrow?’ asked Bracken.

  ‘They use two burrows. One of them is cleaned out by the other moles. But, in fact, it is not a problem. After a while, a silent mole eats less and less and the process seems to purify him in a strange way.’

  ‘When do they come out?’ Bracken wanted to know next—he had never heard anything so extraordinary in his life.

  ‘Nomole can say. Some can only bear it for a few days, though that is very rare, for the preparation is careful. Medlar, for example, has been preparing for this for many moleyears, probably without realising it, although his case is unusual since he comes from outside and is not a scribemole in the normal way. Others, in fact most, stay in the Silent Burrows for at least two moleyears, often very much longer. Some choose never to emerge again and one day, when no movement has been heard for a full moleyear, and when no food has been taken, the Holy Mole orders that their burrow should be honourably sealed.’

  ‘But what do they do?’

  ‘Pray. Meditate. Forget themselves. Learn something of the glory of the Stone.’

  ‘What about the ones who come out?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Well, what happens to them?’

  ‘They continue to live ordinary lives. You have already met one: Quire was in the Silent Burrows for ten moleyears. But do not think his forgetfulness is as a result of that—he is very old now and, for all his bad temper, much honoured.’

  ‘Do all scribemoles go there?’

  Boswell laughed. He had never heard Bracken ask so many questions all at once.

  ‘No, very few. It requires great strength and simplicity. Medlar is probably the only one there now, and I think it is significant that he is not a scribemole. As Skeat has said, we live in a strange time when traditions are changing. I do not know if a nonscribemole has ever been in the Silent Burrows before, but I do not see why they shouldn’t. Getting close to the Stone is not a prerogative of the scribemoles only, as my journey to Duncton has shown me.’ He was referring to moles like Mekkins, Rebecca and Bracken himself who, in his opinion, had much to teach scribemoles. Hadn’t he learned much himself from them, and had he not still so much to learn?

  Boswell yawned, scratched himself, snouted this way and that and finally wandered off to his burrow to sleep. Bracken scouted around for some food and then returned to his own burrow to sleep, his mind full of images of moles in silent burrows. Uffington was a strange place, and he was not sure he liked it much. Well, he had done his bit and come here and thanked the Stone. The Holy… Skeat had blessed him, and Rebecca as well. His half-sleeping mind transmuted the image of silent burrows into one of the burrows he and Rebecca had found under the buried part of the Duncton Stone and he remembered them lying there together, touching and caressing, the light of the Stillstone all over the place, and he smiled, for nothing seemed more pleasant or comfortable. But then, as half-dreams often will, the image slid into something more fearful as he saw Rebecca in a silent burrow alone, waiting through the long moleyears, waiting and waiting, and he wanted to go to her now and take her protectively to him; as he wanted her now, in this strange place, where he was alone with Boswell. Tears wet his face fur, but the sudden pain of their separation was so strong in his mind that he did not notice them.

  ‘Protect her,’ he whispered. ‘Protect her until I can return and protect her myself. ’ And with this prayer to the Stone in his heart he fell asleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Nomole is so strong or unfeeling that it does not suffer a time during a prolonged period of endurance when courage begins to fail and spirits sag.

  Such a time came to Rebecca in March at about the time that, unknown to her, Bracken and Boswell arrived in Uffington. From the moment of their departure, she had inspired the other dispirited Duncton and Pasture moles into occupying the Ancient System with enthusiasm and determination. It was she who suggested that they should occupy the eastern half near the cliff, where the soil was a little more worm-full and the tunnels less immediately forbidding; it was she who stopped the Pasture moles from occupying one section and the Duncton moles another, persuading them instead to mix and form a united group; it was Rebecca to whom the others came with their fears and doubts, hopes and ideas, and she who nudged one mole, twisted the paw of another, spent time with a third to ensure that they lived in health and harmony.

  For the other moles Rebecca was always available, always cheerful, always the one they could rely on, the one who made them see sense. And it was a task she took on willingly, for had not Rose taught her that a healer works in many different ways and will not even think about the fact that she puts herself last?

  But in March, after the long moleyears of winter, her spirits were low and it became a terrible effort for her to appear, as she successfully did, ever cheerful and happy to deal with the other moles’ problems.

  She had occupied the tunnels created by Bracken on the far side of the Stone near the pastures. ‘A healer shouldn’t live under the paws of other moles,’ Rose had once told her, ‘because she needs a space in which to find herself and the strength she needs to serve others.’ Rebecca not only followed this advice in choosing the location of her home burrow, but decided in March, when she felt so low, that it also meant she should spend rather more time alone occasionally. For short periods at least.

  This was, however, easier said than done, since as soon as moles suspect that a healer is no longer so available as she once was, they have the habit of finding a thousand excuses to go especially to see her. And how could Rebecca turn away a female who was worried that she wouldn’t litter or an older mole whose aches about the shoulders got unbearable when it tried to burrow? Or a male who had damaged his paw right at the start of the mating season? So, day after day, always for one good reason or another, Rebecca found herself preoccupied with other moles when she should have been sitting quietly doing nothing. And she began to get more tired and more irritable; and as she did so, she felt more and more guilty about it—for wasn’t she a healer and mustn’t she therefore always be cheerful and good-natured?

  But there were times when even with the best of wills she lapsed into distant and seeming coolness, and the mole who bore the brunt of this was Comfrey.

  Comfrey had chosen to live away from the others down on the slopes, choosing a place on the very edge of where the fire had reached. His reason, he told Rebecca, was because there weren’t enough herbs and flowers up among the ‘boring’ beeches and he wanted to be near what remained of the wood to see if any of the plants had survived the fire.

  He ranged far and wide in his pursuit of plants and almost every time he visited Rebecca, which he did when he returned from one of his trips, he would bring her something or other for her burrow. Even through the winter months he managed to find things: the red berries of cuckoo pint; gentle-scented fungi; and bright, shiny leaves of holly plants.

  ‘Where do you find them?’ she would ask.

  He would shrug his shoulders and say
he had been over beyond the Eastside where the wood hadn’t been touched by the fire. He often appeared when she was visiting in the Ancient System, with parts of plants he thought she might need, and became regarded by many of the moles there with the same affectionate awe in which they held Rebecca. Like Rebecca, he never seemed to expect thanks for what he did, regarding it more as something that just happened, like the weather.

  Rebecca’s occasional coldness to him in March upset him dreadfully. It happened in various ways, and always unexpectedly, as she slid away into a world of her own, no longer willing to make the effort to open herself to his stuttering and stumbling conversation.

  ‘Hello, R-Rebecca!’ he would say, putting a plant, or part of one, by her burrow entrance.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she would smile, her eyes drifting away from him and with none of the usual questions and laughter that he loved so much. Then silence, which would make him uneasy, and he would stumble over himself trying to fill it. His thin face would crease with the effort of trying to find something to say which would lift the impersonal smile from her face, which he felt to be in some way his own fault.

  ‘I’ve b-b-been a long way in the last few d-d-days,’ he might say.

  ‘Have you?’ Rebecca would respond dispassionately.

  ‘Y-yes, all the way d-down to the m-marsh.’

  Smiles. No questions. No encouragement.

  ‘It was in-in-interesting,’ he might add weakly.

  He would try for a bit longer, but was no good at it, and when Rebecca was like that, his whole world seemed to grow dark and he wanted to escape.

  Sometimes Rebecca would say she was sorry and it wasn’t his fault. At other times she would let him go without saying a word, feeling a numbness within herself and unable to do anything but, eventually, weep. Or she would do busy things around her burrow, losing herself in rearranging it or cleaning out already clean tunnels.

  Sometimes he would stay quietly with her when she wept and hear the things she said, and could have said in the hearing of no other mole in Duncton, about how she had no strength to serve them all and how they came all the time and they needed her help and how she ought to have the strength to give it if she was to honour Rose’s memory. She would weep and even scream sometimes. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ And he would listen to her, too slow in his speech to say anything, light only dawning in him very slowly that sometimes she needed a mole to run to, as he ran to her and the others did. It was then, too, that he wished there was a mole like Mekkins had been, whom she could rely on and lean against sometimes. He wished he was like that and not, as it seemed to him, so weak. Still, he could go to the Stone, which he did, and pray that perhaps the Stone would let Bracken come back so he could help Rebecca.

  It was after one of these dispiriting times in March that Comfrey went to the Stone and crouched there, racking his brains about the way he could help. Several days later, Rebecca noticed that not a single mole had visited her, which was odd. She had never been left so blissfully and peacefully alone before. She began to worry about them, and after fretting for a whole day, went down to see what was apaw.

  The first mole she met, a female, looked surprised, even alarmed, saying, ‘Oh! Rebecca!’ and scampering away.

  The second, a male well known for his habit of finding things wrong with himself when everything was all right really, because he needed Rebecca to tend to him once in a while, said a strange thing when he saw her. ‘Hullo, Rebecca! I’m just fine. Nothing troubling me at all… no, not a single thing!’ he added with a merry, unnatural laugh.

  She finally got the truth out of an old female who was genuinely unwell and whose distress she could sense before she even entered her burrow. It seemed that Comfrey had gone around the tunnels virtually ordering all moles to stay away from Rebecca ‘b-b-because she needs a rest’. If anymole needed her desperately they must go to him on the slopes and he would do what he could for them without disturbing Rebecca. Which was an odd thing, because if there was one thing Comfrey didn’t like, it was being disturbed in his own herb-laden burrow.

  She went down to the slopes herself to see him and scolded him for what he had done—but very half-heartedly because, in truth, she could hardly remember anymole doing anything so kindly for her benefit and she loved him for the care he had taken and the love he had shown.

  But her low spirits persisted as March progressed, increased, rather than lifted by the exciting arrival of the first litters in the ancient tunnels for many generations. Most of the females had mated and the first litters, although a little late, began to arrive towards the end of the month.

  The excitement! The rushing! The chatter in the great old tunnels! The hurried, whispered thanks to the Stone! But at the end of the day, Rebecca, the loveliest mole in the system, the most beautiful, the one who so desired to cherish and nurture a litter of her own, remained mateless and litterless. The truth was that she might well have accepted one of the males in the system had they not all been so afraid of her, and in awe of her healing power. But none dared step forward and she thought wistfully of Cairn, of moles like Bracken and Mekkins, and, yes, even of Mandrake. She wished that the shadow of a male such as they had been would cross the entrance to her tunnels. But then she told herself that perhaps it wasn’t just a mate she wanted, and she dared to think it was Bracken alone she needed, whom she loved and who she feared might never return. She let herself weep for him, her face fur contorted with her sense of loss and despair and with the weakness, as she thought of it, of feeling such things. She looked out towards the west and trembled to think that he would never come back.

  * * *

  Comfrey saw this side of her as well and wished there was some comfort he could bring her, however slight.

  It was in the second week of April, with the weather still changeable and cold, that he tried once more to help.

  He arrived at her tunnels and said, ‘Let’s go for a w-w-walk.’

  He ignored her reluctance, her distance, her coldness and her wish to be alone, and almost literally dragged her out.

  ‘Come on, Rebecca! You used to love going and l-l-looking at things. Well, let’s g-g-go and see if we can find spring.’

  The weather could hardly have been less springlike, being cold and damp, with the great leafless beech branches swishing around irritably in a fretful wind. Rebecca was even more reluctant to go when Comfrey began heading off down the slopes towards what the moles in the Ancient System now called, ironically enough, the Old Wood. She had not been back since the fire and found she had a real fear of going there. It was all right for Comfrey; he was hardly old enough to remember it as it had once been—the Westside, the Marsh End, Barrow Vale—and could not feel the loss now that it was all gone.

  But he went off so quickly that she had to follow, if only to stop him, and then she found she was twisting and turning down the slopes behind him, her eyes softening as she settled happily into being led, and she remembered how Bracken had led her once down the slopes, almost on this self-same route. Why! How big Comfrey was now compared with the weakling he had once been! He was thin and nervous, but he moved with a certain assurance through the wood. It was good being led by him. At the same time, there was an unusual air of secrecy, or suppressed excitement, about him that intrigued her. Comfrey was a strange mole!

  The slopes were covered in sludgy leaf litter—mostly beech but with a few rotted oak leaves from the previous autumn and fresher ones that had blown up here from the few oaks still standing after the fire—all in the narrow zone at the bottom of the slope where both sets of trees grew uncomfortably together.

  Rebecca knew when they were approaching the fire-devastated wood by the fact that the trees ahead suddenly lightened out, where once it had grown darker and more dense as they had gone under the thicker mixture of oak and ash branches and holly and hazel shrubs. The wind was freer than before as well, and there was a silence from the place ahead where once there might, even in this weather, have been the start
ings of a spring bird chorus.

  Then they were there, among the stark, burnt stumps that stood stiff and unnatural above the ashy wood floor.

  ‘Comfrey! Comfrey!’ called Rebecca, wanting to stop him going any further into this desolate place, but he ran on, pretending not to hear, which wasn’t like him either. ‘Oh, Comfrey,’ she sighed, following on.

  They skirted round blackened tree roots, over tangles of ashy bramble skeletons, round jumbles of shattered, burnt branches, black and wet and lifeless. She looked in vain for something she recognised, some scent, some tunnel entrance, some shape to the roots that might tell her where she was. But the air was dead of scent and nothing was familiar, and anyway, Comfrey was running on so fast that there was no time to stop and pause.

  Here and there the wood floor was thick with a white, sodden ash where the fire had been so hot that it had reduced wood to bleached-out embers. In other places the heavy rains of winter, unimpeded in their drainage by undergrowth and living plant roots, had eroded out little gulleys that zigzagged downwards for a short way, with a few flints and stones left clear of ash and soil in their centres, like miniature dry river beds.

  Then she saw something among the ashes that brought her to a startled halt. Fresh spring green it was, peeping from among grey ash.

  ‘Comfrey! Look! Stop, Comfrey, and look!’ It was the first pushings of a fern shoot, curled up tight and hairy, parts of it green, fresh green, among the dead ashes. Then she saw another, which had forced aside two or three lumps of grey-black wood ash to get at the light and air for its growth.

  ‘Comfrey! Stop!’ Oh, she was so excited! There was life still in the soil of the burnt-down wood and it would come up in the next few weeks and cover the dead, white, grey, black ashes of the fire with a carpet of green.

  But Comfrey didn’t stop. He went on, darting this way and that, looking over his shoulder sometimes to see that she was following and then pressing on again. And he was smiling to himself, excited and pleased to see her excitement. ‘Where are we going, Comfrey?’ she called.