Duncton Rising (23 page)

He looked back upslope towards the dark Moors and a shadow of apprehension crossed his face; Privet’s too, as she looked south, at the long, unknown way she must soon begin to travel alone.

“You go for all of us. Privet,
all
of us moles trapped on the Moors. Find a way to lead us out of there, out of our darkness. Seek out moles and places who will take you further on your journey. Travel for me, for Rooster, for Hume, even for Lime. Find a way to tell us what we should do, and where we should go.”

“I’m frightened, Hamble,” Privet said.

“You went out to Chieveley Dale, you were lost, and yet you found a way back. Go now. Privet, seek the task the Stone has set for you, and it will lead you back in some way to us. To me. Even one day to Rooster, who loves you.”

“And to the Master of the Delve?”

“Aye, the light I saw that made me bring you here was strong enough to show the way even to a Master of the Delve.”

“Hold me, Hamble, so close, so tight, that I shall never forget the way you feel, the way you are. Hold me, my dear.”

So there the two friends embraced one last long time, the future and task of one leading northward to the Moors once more; but for the other, southward into moledom, and a new liberty.

“Go,” he whispered.

But she shook her head. “You go first,” she whispered, “and don’t look back. Look after yourself, Hamble, and see that Lime is protected too. Tell her that I think no ill of her. I hope one day I shall see her or hers again. And guard Rooster, that he may return to me one day, as I to him, safeguarded, and as we were meant to be.”

Then Hamble turned from her, and climbed slowly back up into the Moors, until he was gone and out of sight.

Only then did Privet turn from what had been her life, to face the light of the sun, and to find what liberty moledom held for one who had lost all but faith in the Stone, and the courage to pursue it.

Chapter Eleven

A cold and fractious breeze worried at the vegetation around the little rise where Whillan and the others had settled down to hear Privet’s story. She had paused for a time, and then wandered off from them to stare over the Vale of Evesham and gather her thoughts once more. All of them knew that time was running out for this part of their journey; moledom, like the wind, was on the move, and they were moving with it, though to what destination or for what purpose, they did not know.

Returning to them at last, Privet looked uncertainly about as if deciding where to stance down to continue her tale, and then turned to Whillan, and smiled gently.

“You’ve said hardly a word since dawn,” she whispered, going to him, and reaching out to put her paw upon his. “I want you near me now as I tell what happened after I left the Moors. Strange, but the time taken up with that was almost as long as all that went before, and yet it seemed to pass in no time at all...” She laughed lightly again, looking around at her friends and seeming to sense the new and sombre mood that had come to them since Weeth had revealed his forebodings concerning Quail’s intentions at Caer Caradoc.

“You see, when moles suffer as I did, and lose everything, they do not easily recover themselves. Perhaps they never do entirely. For a long time after that I did not feel a part of life at all, but like a fallen leaf in autumn, hurled and swept along by the winds, pausing here, drifting there, with no power to move itself at all. Then rain comes and winter, and the leaf settles in some obscure place, and is lost, breaking down into fragments, until it is no leaf at all.

“That was how I felt in the moleyears of summer and autumn after Hamble left me at the edge of the Moors and I began my long journey into moledom, which in time brought me here with you now, the future no more certain than it has ever been.”

It was to fabled and holy Beechenhill, the system that lies south-west of the Moors in limestone country above the River Dove, and where the Stone Mole gave himself that moledom might be saved, that Privet found her way the following summer.
*

*
See
Duncton Found
, third volume of the Duncton Chronicles, for the story of the Stone Mole.

She had the advantage in her journeying of being female and harmless, no threat to mole at all. Then, too, it was the summer, when moles turn their minds from raising young and protecting their tunnels, and travel a bit, or are glad to welcome passing wayfarers to their tunnels, and hear their tales. How quiet and subdued the strange thin mole from off the Moors must have seemed, and how strange her Whernish accent, as she struggled to learn to speak Mole better; until then she had only kenned it at Shire’s arid flank, and scribed it in those texts she made on Hilbert’s Top.

At Beechenhill Privet came under the protection of Master Librarian Cobbett, who, though she discovered the fact and its significance only long afterwards, originally came from Duncton Wood and was the Master Stour’s brother. Cobbett was warmer, less orderly, less formidable than Stour, and soon had reason to welcome Privet’s arrival, for her ability to scribe and, even more, her knowledge of Whernish, made her a rarity in those far-off parts. Master Librarian Cobbett, battling as he was to establish a library in the furthest north of the systems chosen at the Cannock Conclave as worthy of receiving copies of the great texts, welcomed her as a most useful aide. The more so, perhaps, because despite the importance of Beechenhill as the place to which the Eldrene Wort had harried the Stone Mole, few journeymoles ever ventured up into the obscure hills where the system lay, and few aspiring scholars ever stayed long with the vague, eccentric Cobbett.

Set high among the limestone gorges of the River Dove, the system was quiet and few moles lived there. Its texts were in a sorry way, and it was not long before Privet found she had a useful role. The two got on well, and perhaps Cobbett, whose obsession was collecting tales and preserving them in scribed-down form, found Privet a rich source of Whernish lore.

Certainly, he put her to work on the Whernish texts his Library held, which were in truth its only claim to a specialty. So Privet found a place, and tried through the winter years following to come to terms as best she could with all that she had left and lost. How often she must have gone up to the Stone of Beechenhill, in the shadow of which her grandmother Wort had performed the deed against the Stone Mole for which moledom ever after reviled her, and reviles her still, despite her later redemption and Testimony! But there, as Wort had hoped her daughter’s daughter might. Privet began to find the peace of the Stone, and know something of its healing Silence.

She herself could later recall little of that time, mainly because of the trauma she suffered after she left Beechenhill. Only the sense that Cobbett watched over her, and led her through a study of texts that educated her in the modern history of mole, kept her balanced and at peace. There was much about the coming of the Seven Stillstones to Duncton Wood, and the coming of the Books, saving only the Book of Silence, whose whereabouts nomole knew. These stories resonated in her heart and helped her see her losses and troubles in perspective.

We do not know for certain how well Cobbett understood the nature and powers of the female scribe who had come so modestly into his little domain, but from all the evidence we may guess that, if only instinctively, he saw that she was rather more than the insignificant Whernish scholar that she seemed. It appears she did not tell him at all of Rooster, of delving, of her journey to Hilbert’s Top; nor that the Eldrene Wort was her grandmother, and that her coming to Beechenhill was part of a sense of mission whose nature and purpose she did not yet know. These things were held back from him, and yet Cobbett told her early on that if it was a task she sought, she could do no better than to ponder the last great mystery of modern molish times – the whereabouts of the Book of Silence.

“Of course, my dear, you’ll not find it by sitting on your rump. But equally you’ll not find it by rushing off and looking for it without pondering the problem first. Right thought
precedes
right action, as right action must be
followed
by right thought. It is an endless gyre of improvement by which moles ascend ever higher towards an understanding of themselves.

“I hesitate to use the word “thought”, since thought in too many moles’ minds is separated from feeling, which is that vast force of energies of which thought is merely a superficial expression. I used to argue this point with my brother, who was given rather too much to thought in my view, and too little to feeling. I argued too with another who felt the opposite, losing himself in the telling of emotional tales which were all very well and so forth but led, as it seemed to me, nowhere in particular.

“I, as you gather, am somewhere between these two views, which is why I urge you to learn to stance still with your paws firmly on the ground, and
think
before you
do.
Then when you have thought, you should do, for without that the previous thinking is somewhat of a waste.

“Therefore, since you seem a clever and industrious mole scholastically, but one who has no task, why not commit yourself to this small matter, which others seem to have forgotten, concerning the Book of Silence.”

“Where do I begin?” Privet asked.

“Oh, at the Stone of course, both figuratively and literally. Make a habit of going to our Stone – few do, you know, since most find doing nothing rather hard, so you won’t often be disturbed. Meditate before the Stone, ponder where the Book might be, and when you’re not doing that, ken what you can about recent times, and commit Woodruff’s “Duncton Chronicles’ to heart. If all that fails, and you need a break, then kindly help me with my Book of Tales.”

This set out Privet’s agenda for the long winter years she spent in Beechenhill, years which she now, before Whillan, Maple and Weeth, characterized as “numb” years, when she was seeking, as Cobbett realized, to define her task, and find ways of following it; a time, too, when she was striving to reconcile herself with parting from the Moors and Rooster for ever.

Yet numb though that time seemed, there were moments of respite, when the cares of the past and concern for the future gave way to enjoyment of the present, and of the rich and fecund landscape in which she found herself, such a contrast to the sterile Moors on which she had so far lived.

“My belief that moledom was a place of beauty was affirmed by all I saw after I left Hamble on the edge of the Moors and entered new territories. Beechenhill itself, which lies in an elevated position above the incised meanders of the Dove above the system of Ashbourne, was a place of natural beauty, whose tunnels had been delved in ancient times amidst light airy soils and the pale limestone, which formed scars high along the valley sides.

“When the snows came, the place seemed almost ethereal, and the sense of light enhanced my slow meditations upon Silence, before the Stone. I felt moments of great joy. Spring came, the ice and snow gave way to the pasture grass beneath, and the trees to which I was so unused began to spring and bud in the valleys below.

“The Stone Mole himself seemed near as I stanced before Beechenhill’s Stone, and the Eldrene Wort as well, for whom I asked forgiveness, just as she had asked the mole who kenned her Testimony to do. It was sometime then that I began to feel that the time was coming when I must journey south to Duncton Wood. It was what my mother Shire had been advised to do, but she had never been able to; but now I had the opportunity. To give me impetus and courage there were the stories of Cobbett, and my growing sense that the mystery of the Book of Silence must surely end in Duncton Wood, as so much else had done.”

Privet left Beechenhill in spring, with something of the pilgrim about her. She went alone, in hope and faith that the Stone would see her safeguarded, and with the belief that it would be in Duncton Wood that her true task would begin, as if all else had been a preparation.

“But... what I did not go with was any understanding of the ways in which the Stone orders the lives of moles, which is by offering choices they must take with truth and courage; what happens along the way may be very different from what a mole expects, and very hard to accept. I left Beechenhill with Cobbett’s blessing, believing that the hardest part of my journey was over, and the rest would be easier.”

“But something more happened, didn’t it?” suggested Whillan.

“Something more? Oh, many things,” said Privet vaguely, “but I remember few of them.”

“You remember one of them all too well, I think,” said Weeth sharply.

“I... I certainly had difficult times, yes,” replied Privet in a measured way, “but nothing that any of you would really be interested in.”

It was suddenly depressingly obvious that Privet did not wish to go on with her tale. She seemed to be reaching something too terrible for her to face, and Whillan looked despairingly at Maple, and neither knew how to break through her block. But Weeth looked at neither of them, staring intently at Privet instead, a puzzled frown on his face as if he could not quite believe his thoughts. Then he seemed to resolve the problem and his face cleared. He nodded and said, “To us you’ll say no more, Privet!”