Duncton Found (2 page)

PART I

Rites of Midsummer

Chapter One

June; and in the hushed cool depths of Duncton Wood sunlight dappled through the branches and across the great and lovely beech tree trunks. A light that travelled on to every nook and cranny of the wood’s floor and shone where dry leaves curled and the lightest of breezes lazed along the grey tree roots and then lost itself amongst the green leaves of dog’s mercury.

June, and the light of a summer’s day, a light so pure and good that it seems to renew everything it touches, so that the humblest flower, the most nondescript patch of chalk soil, the most gnarled of surface roots, seemed resplendent and shiny new.

This is light that heralds the coming of Midsummer, when all moles know they may petition their dreams to the Stone, and hope that such troubles and despairs as they have will find their solutions soon enough to bear the waiting, and then be gone.

That same light, that June morning, caught the fur of two moles who had come to the surface and were looking upslope towards where the Stone rose hidden among the trees. One was Tryfan, born of Duncton, now returned and never wishing to leave again. Once he had the nervousness and eagerness of youth about him and his fur had been glossy and black. Now he was much older, his face and back scarred by fighting, his fur patchy in parts and greying now.

The suppleness and grace of youth had gone, but in their place was now the quiet strength of a mole who had learnt to put his four paws on the ground and only move them when it is necessary.

His sight was not good, for he had never fully recovered
from the savage attack by the dark moles of Whern, and so to know and enjoy all that was about him he had to listen as much as he looked, crouching still with his head a little to one side to hear the rising summer sounds of a wood and a system as venerable as any in the whole of moledom, though one that had fallen now on difficult times.

The second mole was Feverfew and she crouched at his side. She was younger than Tryfan, though not by many moleyears, and like him her body was worn with experience and life, as well as the scars of scalpskin that had at one time ravaged her. But strong she was in spirit and now snouted out the good day all about her with evident delight.

They remained in comfortable silence for some time, as moles will who know each other well and trust each other more, and from the occasional touches they gave each other and the slight nodding of a head or pointing of talons to indicate some new leafy wonder of the morning and the slopes above, anymole who has ever been half in love could tell that these two were a pair, and as close in love and caring tenderness as any pair could be.

“Well, Feverfew, if today’s not the day to take the youngster up to the clearing and show him the Stone I can’t imagine what day would be!”

“Ytt ys, myn love,” she replied, speaking in the soft and rounded accent of the old language of the Dunbar moles, the colony in the distant Wen where Tryfan had first found her, and from which she had trekked alone so bravely to join him in Duncton Wood and give birth to “the youngster” and so begin a destiny that all moledom had waited for.

“Where’s he got to, tunnelling or exploring?” Tryfan spoke of Feverfew’s son with a special love and affection, for though he was not his by birth it was his task, ordained by old Boswell himself, that Tryfan should rear the pup equally with Feverfew and be to him what a father would have been. Out of all males in moledom, Boswell had chosen Tryfan of Duncton to be his main guardian,
knowing that the pup would be the Stone Mole, come at last to show moles how to hear the Silence of the Stone.

“
He cums nu herre along,” said Feverfew, turning to look at a tunnel exit which lay a little downslope of them. Tryfan followed her gaze, wondering, for though it was true that Feverfew could hear better than him yet sometimes it seemed to him that her knowledge of where her son was and what he was doing was more than physical. Never having reared pups of his own he was not familiar with a mother’s sense of what ails her pups and when they need her. But even so Feverfew’s instinctive knowledge of the mole seemed exceptional, and made all the more poignant and difficult for her the changes in recent weeks towards his independence which this day seemed about to mark.

Her day-by-day task was nearly done and now it was for Tryfan to take over and begin the training in scribing and lore which both of them knew had become the Stone Mole’s own desire and need.

As they waited for him to appear it seemed that at the exit Feverfew had pointed to all the light of the June day began to gather and, special and clear though it already was, yet there it seemed more bright.

Then he emerged, first a snout and then a young paw, the light clear about him and seeming to radiate and shimmer over the trees and leaves above, to mark out the place for anymole that watched.

He came out on to the surface and, as Tryfan and Feverfew had before him, stared up in pleasure and wonder at the day all about. His eyes were wide and innocent, his fur still soft, his form just gaining that touching gawkiness all youngsters have as they pass beyond being youngsters and their body takes on a will of its own and grows now here, now there, and they, bemused, cannot yet find an adult’s comfort in it.

He ran quickly over to Feverfew’s side, but it was to Tryfan that he spoke.

“Will you take me to the Stone today? You said that when Midsummer approached and the sun was bright, you would. Will you
today
?” His eyes and manner were eager and intense.

“Yes, yes the time’s come.” And there was something about the mole and his way that filled Tryfan’s eyes with tears, though he was not sure why. Some premonition, perhaps, that one day, upon this young mole’s slender and innocent back the weight of moledom’s greatest cares and troubles would be placed.

Then, staring upslope once more among the lichen-green and sinewy trunks of the beech trees that rose up towards the highest part of the wood, Tryfan sought out a route towards the Stone.

Yes, yes it was time he was taken to touch the Stone and be told his sacred heritage. Tryfan snouted about slowly, quite unconscious of the fact that he bore himself so very peaceably these days that his solid, easy stance calmed those about him, and made them wait instinctively on him as if to hurry him would be to try to move moledom itself. Tryfan
was:
that was what his training, his years of living in a world about which he had never ceased to care, and his faith, had made him.

As Feverfew and the Stone Mole waited for Tryfan to decide on a route upslope, he himself was thinking of something quite different as he stared at the play of light among the trees. It was this: that surely somewhere there in the light and shadows about them, unseen and perhaps never to be seen again, Boswell was with them, watching over his son as he watched over all of them and always had – with love and with hope that they would find their way to Silence.

“Yes...” whispered Tryfan roughly, his eyes filling once more with tears, for now he was growing older and he felt sometimes the loneliness that wisdom brings, and wished that Boswell was there to talk to and ask questions of. Why, there were so many things he wished he had asked when he had the chance... when he was
this
mole’s age. He grimaced ruefully, the play of emotions plain upon his lined face, and wondered what he could possibly teach the Stone Mole. Something or other about living, he supposed.

“Thiden is the daye, thiden is the houre,” Feverfew told her son gently. Then, putting her paw to his flank, she said to Tryfan. “Latte us goe now, myn dereste luv, alle thre togider, to showe hym whar he was borne and tel hym wheretofore.”

“I’m frightened,” said the youngster, not moving at all. The wood was suddenly hushed and awed about them, and the air stilled as the light seemed to tremble and darken.

“The best way with fear is to turn your snout towards it and put one paw resolutely in front of another,” said Tryfan. “Come now, for the June sun has summoned us today and beckons us up through the wood... Come, for I have things to say that you must know.”

Then one after another, with Tryfan in the lead followed by the youngster and Feverfew protectively at the rear, they set off upslope to find the clearing in the high wood where Duncton’s great Stone stands alone and mighty, always ready and waiting for anymole that comes to it in humility and faith.

Chapter Two

For days after his birth they had not known how to name him, for “Stone Mole” is no name for a mole to live by. But a name is more than some moles think, for with it is inherited something of everymole that bore that name before, and offers the chance of passing something on to namesakes yet to come.

Few names, if any, are all dark, but some seem so more than others. So is Mandrake dark, and Rune; so is Bracken good and stolid, and Rose a name for moles whose lives give much to others. But how to name the Stone Mole?

Tryfan knew that his own naming came with his father Bracken’s first sight of him when, as a newborn pup, he climbed higher than his siblings and snouted upwards, making a form whose shape, Bracken said, reminded him in miniature of the solitary peak near Siabod on whose summit the Stones rise.

Remembering this Tryfan felt he should be the one to name the Stone Mole, and so for several days after his birth he huffed and puffed about it, looking this way and that for an inspiration that did not come.

But one day, as mothers will – as mothers must – Feverfew whispered nothings to her pup as he nestled contented at her belly. And Tryfan, allowed near for once, smiled to see them both content, and barely heard the words she spoke... “Yowe are myn sonne, and may yowe bee the sonne for alle of us....”

Myn sonne. Owre sonne.

She spoke the words not as mole speaking mole speaks it, but accented long as if she said “sowne”, which the flowers are when the wind blows hot on a late summer’s day and the seeds scatter and drift to hide in the earth’s warm heart until a new spring comes.

But “sonne”, however pronounced, meant something else as well. Tryfan, knowing the traditions of the Dunbar moles of the Wen as he did, and having read many of the texts in their crumbling library, understood Feverfew’s natural play on words and that she was saying that the Stone Mole was not just her son, or Boswell’s, or both, but that he was the sun that would shine upon them all and bring them new life.

So much Tryfan understood, but he felt more instinctively, not fully understanding the way his thoughts ran, or towards what end. For in the moment he knew that for Feverfew “sonne” meant several things, his own thoughts moved on from that and he remembered a day – a warm
sunny
day! – when he had first arrived at Beechenhill, and had the sense that in that good place, which seems to lie at the very heart of a natural beauty moledom has forgotten, a part of him had come home.

Beechenhill, whose mists and sun and curving fields, whose height and favoured prospect give it a wider fuller sky than most other systems he had ever seen. Beechenhill! A place where a mole such as the Stone Mole might have done better to be born than in outcast Duncton. Yes, Beechenhill.

The very place to which Mayweed and Sleekit, acting on a similar instinct, had taken Tryfan’s two pups by Henbane and so saved them, for as surely as the sun rose each day Tryfan felt that Wharfe and Harebell were safe and hoped that one day they might know him, or know at least that he had cared.

And thinking that, Tryfan trembled and then whispered as he looked on the Stone Mole pup: “His name could be
Beechen,
my love, after a place which all moles who visit it learn to love. A place of good moles, loving moles, moles trusted with my own. It is a worthy name.”

Feverfew thought, and touched, and whispered, and the pup turned and came closer. She whispered it yet more, annexing the name to him and to herself, and as she did so she did not see the tremble in Tryfan’s flanks, nor guess the sweet sorrow in his heart, nor see at once the tears that ran down his face. But when she did....

“Myn luv!” exclaimed Feverfew, concerned.

“Well, a mole may cry if he likes,” mumbled Tryfan, looking at Beechen and then at her. “’Tis something about the name and his vulnerability. I fear for him, Feverfew, and wonder what you and I can do for one marked out as he is.”

“Luv hym trewe,” said Feverfew, touching Tryfan’s face gently where his tears were. “Feare nat, the Stane ys his fader and we fynde favowre to watch over hym. Wan that we yaf doubts and troublis we wyll togider aske of the Stane ytys holpe and yt wyll guyde us tway. Beechen ys nowe hys nam.”

So Beechen got his name and Tryfan knew that one day, whatever other places the Stone Mole might visit, he would go to Beechenhill. Then Tryfan was thankful that the Stone had ordained that his own pups were living there, and might learn of their father from Beechen while they, in their turn, would be witness to Beechen’s coming, and give what support he might need.