Duncton Rising (39 page)

In the end Spurling decided on a compromise, which was to set off in late afternoon and gain as much advantage as they could from failing light before they faced the trials of darkness. After that they would have most of the night to climb slowly on, and time enough to ensure that the pace of the group was that of the slower ones, so that all kept close together.

“We’ll wait for a day that promises a clear night so that the stars and moon can help us see each other,” decided Spurling finally, and two days later it came.

They started in late afternoon as planned, and to Noakes the biggest danger-point was soon after they started, when they had to cross the roaring owl way that runs along the bottom edge of the scarp, for apart from the dangers of roaring owls he believed it was here that he had been seen by watchers on his previous visit. But they crossed the way safely, and nor was there any challenge later when they started to climb up through the tussocky grass; nor even after that when, with much labour and shortage of breath, they ascended still higher into a night of stars and a bright moon, already waxing towards Longest Night.

They had taken a sighting on the upright of a wire fence which stretched tight and barbed across their route, its bottom strand so low that they had to duck under it as they went by. There was the smell of sheep about, though they had seen none, and the barbs of the wires had caught some of the sheep’s rough white hairs. Beyond this the grass was shorter, the slope steepened and the going became harder, especially for the old moles who found it difficult even to keep their balance, let alone climb. When they looked back they saw far below them, beyond the fence, the silvery line of the roaring owl way caught in the moon’s light, along which, their yellow gazes reaching ahead, roaring owls occasionally passed.

But most of the moles preferred not to look back down at all, but to struggle slowly on up the benighted hill as Spurling and Peach, Noakes and Fieldfare urged them on, that they might reach the prow of Uffington before dawn came, and find a place to hide where the Newborns might leave them well alone.

“Halt! You! Halt there!”

The shouts were male and commanding, and came from some way across the hill. Newborns!

“We could make a dash for it,” said Noakes immediately, realizing that watchers must be posted on these slopes and have seen them.

“Some of us might get away,” said Spurling, “but some would not.”

“There’s more of us than of them, I suspect, so we’ll just have to face it out!” said Fieldfare stoutly, thinking to herself that was what Chater would have done. Journeymoles often have to brazen things out, he always used to tell her, so they would do that now.

They did not have to wait long before two Newborn moles appeared out of the darkness slightly below them; big, young, confident. Perhaps they felt so because the group of refugees
had
stopped as ordered, and were clustering uncertainly, as best they could on the difficult sloping ground.

It is often at such moments of crisis that moles discover they have cool heads and strong talons they never dreamed they possessed, and Noakes discovered it now. Realizing that the two Newborns were at a disadvantage so long as they were on the slope below he moved forward towards them and cried out, “What do you want with us?” so firmly that the Newborns stopped short.

This gave the refugees heart, and they gathered more resolutely together; bright though the moonlight was, the Newborns perhaps could not quite see how frail some of them were. Even so they advanced warily upwards and one of them asked which mole was the leader.

Spurling boldly came forward and said he was, but what business was it of theirs anyway... and it was then that the Newborns, perhaps used to such confrontations, rushed up the slope together and grabbed Spurling, saying, “We’re taking him to a Senior Brother down below. If you lot move from here he’ll die a painful death.”

Even as they said this they began to haul Spurling downslope, hoping no doubt that the group would not react quickly enough to prevent them getting away below towards Newborn reinforcements.

But Noakes, having gained enough time a moment before for the group to form itself, now responded yet more effectively.

“You’re not taking him!” he cried, and aimed a powerful kick at the lower of the two Newborns, catching him painfully in the snout. There was a cry and curse, and a moment’s teetering struggle before Fieldfare, inspired by Noakes’ example, leaned forward and herself buffeted the Newborn in the face, pushing him finally off balance and causing him to fall backwards down the slope.

To his credit, the other Newborn kept hold of Spurling and in his turn strove to push him downslope, at which he might have succeeded had not the redoubtable Noakes, by now emboldened by anger, come determinedly forward and sought to wrest Spurling from the Newborn’s grip. But the mole was young and strong, and vicious too, for he talon-thrust poor Spurling in the stomach and pushed Noakes to one side, so that the brave mole was sent plunging helplessly downslope after the first Newborn.

To the others, watching in horror as this violent confrontation unfolded, the moonlit scene seemed almost unreal, and for a few moments more not one of them moved. But then Spurling let out a cry of pain as the Newborn talon-thrust at him to make him more biddable, and out of the murk below into which Noakes and the first Newborn had disappeared, worse sounds came, of a mole in agony, a mole screaming suddenly into death. Fieldfare and Peach, the protective instinct in them aroused, rushed down to where Spurling was struggling, and threw their talons and their female wrath into the face of the Newborn. At first he almost seemed to laugh, but that only provoked them more, and they lunged at him, and grabbed him, and all four, for Spurling was now fighting as well, began a wild, struggling, shouting, violent descent of the slope as the Newborn, realizing he was out-taloned, tried to get away to his colleague below and re-group.

Pushing, shoving, he succeeded at last in holding them at bay, then turned and fled down the slope – straight into the treacherously sharp barbs of the tight-stretched wires. With a scream of pain he struggled to extricate himself from this unexpected and entangling hazard, pulling himself off and back a little way up the slope, unable to go higher, because there the others now stanced still, yet unable to go down until he saw a way through.

It was at this moment of sudden pause that he, Fieldfare and the others who had all tumbled down together saw the reason for the grim sound they had heard earlier. For there, stanced still and staring, was Noakes, and what he stared at was the first Newborn, who had rolled down the slope after Spurling had buffeted him, and fallen violently into the barbs, from which he hung now by his tender snout, emitting a gurgling, suffocating sound of death, as he drowned in the blood that the sharp barbs caused to flow down his snout and into his throat, and on into his lungs.

Panic overtook the second Newborn and in a sudden burst of energy, he turned from the horrors of his dying colleague and the watching moles above, to try once more to find a way under the wire and escape to his friends below. Which he might well have done had not Noakes, seeing his intention, suddenly and most violently lunged at him and taloned him without word or warning straight in his wild fearful eyes. Worse, Noakes followed it with two more talon-thrusts, hard and bloody, so that the bigger mole turned with a gasping cry and fell once more into the barbed wire which had so fatally prevented him fleeing to freedom. This time it was the stretch of higher wire that caught his desperately flailing paws and suddenly he was lifted off the ground, swinging in the night air; then after a final paroxysm of struggle, he was still, and the moonlight caught the swinging of his body, back and forth, back and forth.

Noakes stared horrified at the violence he had committed and the others stared with him at the two dead moles who hung, still and silent now, on either side of him.

“If he had got away downslope,” whispered Noakes, staring at his bloody paws and then in horror and disbelief at the Newborn he had killed, “he would have told others we were here, and they would have come... I did it to stop him. Somemole had to...”

Fieldfare was winded and shaken by the buffeting she had suffered, and Peach was exhausted, so it was Spurling who rapidly took charge once more.

“There is nothing we can do for these moles,” he said. “We will go back upslope and continue to climb up to Uffington Hill, and then we will find a safe place to hide. I do not like violence... but we
were
attacked, and but for Noakes and Fieldfare one or more of us might now be in the paws of the Newborns, and the rest uncertain what to do and likely to be taken prisoner before long. As it is we may yet escape undetected, for dead moles tell no tales.”

They turned from the grim moonlit spectacle, returned to their companions, and in silence and with a strange almost ferocious energy climbed on up through the night, so that as they clambered at last over the final gentler slopes, and faced the eastern horizon, they saw that dawn was already beginning to reach its talons to the sky.

Nor did Spurling let them dawdle once the party was all collected, and they had gained their breath. He had already instructed the fitter moles to gather food for the slower ones, and they ate it quickly, from hunger and a desire not to stay where they were for long, and then stanced up once more, ready to leave.

The presence of Newborns so high up made Spurling suspect that Noakes’ belief that the Newborns stayed clear of the Hill might not be true any longer, a suspicion confirmed by a quick examination of some of the tunnels they found. In former days, they knew, the system of Uffington had been extensive and most splendidly delved, but most of what they found was ruinous and open to the sky. Here and there the beginnings of ancient arches survived, and a few tunnels stretched away, their roofs still intact. But there was sign and scent of recent unknown and unseen mole about, and with that, and no promise of good cover or ways of escape, it was plain that so large a group as theirs would be conspicuous and it would be unwise to linger.

To the west the escarpment stretched into a ridgeway of lingering darkness, while southward its dip-slope went gently down across fields, amongst hedgerows, to dry valleys in which copses nestled.

But it was to the east that Noakes turned.
“That
way,” he said, “lies the Blowing Stone, if I’m not mistaken; it has always been a place of sanctuary.”

“Aye!” said several of the moles, who remembered hearing of it in tales of the old days, and whose imaginations, when they were pups, had been stirred by tales of how the strange fissures and contours in its sides caught the wind, and sounded a deep roaring note – once as a warning, twice for guidance, three times for sanctuary.

“Aye, and “seven times and moles shall rise and know their way”!” said one of them, quoting an old legend of those parts.

But the air was still, and there was no chance the Blowing Stone would sound now, not in warning, nor to guide or offer sanctuary.

“We could go along the ridgeway to the place where once the Silent Burrows were...” mused Spurling.

“But we’re not sure how to find them, or even if they’re still there,” said Peach.

But Fieldfare had been staring steadily to the south-east, and watching how the strengthening dawn lit up the graceful curving vales which seemed to invite a mole to follow them.

“Seven Barrows is down that way,” she said, “and according to old Duncton legends that was where good Mayweed, greatest route-finder that ever lived, found his way to Silence. I feel that it is a place where we could go and find safety, and as a Duncton mole I would like to pay homage to my forebear.”

As she spoke she felt a strange, sweet surge of certainty that it was the place to which they must go, and she went a little forward of the group and stared ahead, suddenly excited.

“This is the way Chater would have led us if he were here, for he is a journeymole and always said that Seven Barrows with its mysterious Stones was the place in moledom to which he most wanted to go. Oh, Chater...” she whispered, and longed for his affectionate presence, his good humour, his growling impatience with her at times, his love; “you
want
me to go that way.”

But if he was not there, the Stone seemed to be, for from over the dark high pastures to the east came a haunting note carried on the wind; and then another. Deep and sonorous, mysterious, and if not quite frightening, then enough to awe the troubled moles.

“The Blowing Stone!” whispered Fieldfare. “That’s what that must be. It sounds when... when it needs to, when followers need to hear it. In the wind..

“There isn’t much wind now!” said Spurling softly.

“No,” said Fieldfare, “but we may be guided by its sounding. In all the old legends of this place, when the Blowing Stone sounds then moles should be alert. Oh, Spurling, we must go to Seven Barrows. I’m sure of it now...”

“Then it’s the way we’ll go!” said Spurling, going to Fieldfere’s flank and nudging her affectionately. “We’ll find sanctuary among the Stones of Seven Barrows, and the time to decide what we should do next.”

So off into the dawn they wearily went, wending their way from the summit of Uffington Hill, and leaving behind its ruined tunnels, forgotten and unvisited ways, and wild historic surface. Only when they were gone did the winter day rise, and what little touch of cold breeze there was turned and wound, swirled and fell, to find its way down the steep slope they had climbed, to linger for a time where barbed wire stretched and two moles dangled dead. Above them two black rooks circled, eyes sharp, beaks eager, before they dived at the carrion, to remove all evidence that violence, of a kind that might soon come across all moledom, had visited that desolate place the night before.