Duncton Stone (108 page)

With a final shove of his back paws, and clutching on to the Book, Pumpkin almost popped up into the light of day, and was astonished to find that spring had rather more than sprung.

For one thing, the grey drear light of winter had fled away completely, and in its place was that softer, warmer, brighter light under which new buds, unnoticed before, shine fresh, and through which breaks the busy brilliant sound of song – of bird, of insect, or so many creatures long lost to light.

Pumpkin paused, startled and confused, bewitched by the fresh and eager scent of spring, his paws caressed by the softness of the leaf-litter underpaw, his ears delighting in the sounds of new life, his eyes dazzled by the burst of beauties long forgotten.

He whiffled his wrinkled snout in the air, put down the Book on a surface root of a beech tree to keep it from the damp leaves, and caught his breath. Time seemed to be running amok about him, and something more than spring sang to him, and took the trouble and the stress from out of his old heart and replaced it in a trice with wonderment.

“But it cannot be!” he exclaimed, peering at the woodland floor and seeing snowdrops and yellow winter aconite, not bursting forth, but fading fast.

“Fading already, and giving way to bluebells and wild daffodils!”

He rubbed his eyes in disbelief and then...

“Stone,” he whispered, as he might to an old friend who had journeyed at his flank, turning a corner and seeing something that had taken them both utterly by surprise, “what’s apaw?”

There was quick movement behind him, or so he thought. He turned and looked back to the dark entrance from which he had just emerged, for he was sure there had been a mole there, a mole so close to him he might have been himself, and that mole – or aide – had paused with him, wished him well of the world to which he had now returned, and, laughing like wind-sound in a well-made tunnel on a summer’s day, had left him to go on by himself.

“Stone... mole... I do not understand,” he faltered aloud, except that he
did,
and his heart, so long oppressed, was filled with joy and certainty.

Wherever he had been, it must have been longer than he thought. Had the hours then been days, and the days...?

Sun shone across the trunk of the beech tree on whose surface root he had laid the Book, and the lichen on the bark was green and fresh, and up beyond it the pointed beech buds were beginning to grow full, while the sky beyond was blue.

Bewildered but content, sure that in some way the Stone had been watching over Privet in his absence, though unsure what the nature of that absence had been, Pumpkin bent down and lifted the Book once more. It was so heavy, so very hard to carry, but he could manage now down the slope, and with some strength to spare he could feel the energy of change and growth, and believe they were enshadowed in Duncton Wood no more.

“There you are, Pumpkin!” called out Fieldfare from the entrance to his tunnels, where, to his increased bewilderment, she was busying herself cleaning and making all orderly.

“What a day, what a day!”

“Privet...?” he began, utterly unsure.

Her face clouded and she said, “Ah, well, she won’t stance up on her own paws yet, but she may yet, she may yet. There’s nothing wrong that common sense won’t put right, but don’t try and tell her that. You and her – what a to-do I Books! Scribing! You can’t live on words alone! Look at you, Pumpkin, thin as old grass stems. But at least you’re up and about again, and doing. Doing with books, it seems.” She eyed the Book under his paw with disapproval. “Books is for libraries, not for comfortable homely burrows like I’ve made yours since you’ve been...”

Comfortable? Homely? Pumpkin’s heart sank. But wait...

“I’ve been what?”

But she had turned tail with a “Must get on!” and was gone before he could get an answer from her. What had he been? Ill, like Privet? He had no idea.

But he scented the air once more, felt the bliss of spring and all the joys of which such a day as this was the cheerful herald, and followed Fieldfare down.

Privet now lay in her own chamber, the one he and Rooster had first prepared for her, not in his own sleeping chambers where he had left her. Whatever fears he had about her dying fled away before the look that came upon her face when she saw him.

“Pumpkin!” she called out the moment she glimpsed him.

“I got the Book as you asked,” he said, feeling he had never made so gross an understatement in his life. “Got the Book”! Why, he had nearly died getting it! Yes, that was it. He had nearly died.

“Put it there, my dear, not too near and not too far. No, no, behind me here where I can touch it if I must, but others will not notice it. We’ll know where it is!”

She laughed half nervously, half indifferently, as if it was something she felt she ought to think about, but preferred to forget if she could. He looked at her and saw that though she looked less near death than when she had come to his burrow that dawn – and already that dawn seemed many, many dawns ago – she was very frail.

Her eyes, her face, the way she looked sometimes beyond him at the chamber’s portal, belied that smile upon her face, the cheerful words. Plainly, she was very ill.

“Privet, I saw —”

“No, no, my dear, don’t tell me what you saw in the Ancient System. I saw things too but was not strong enough to stay; whatmole could be? The Book will wait, and one day, one distant day perhaps, somemole will have the strength to come and finish it.”

“You will have the strength, Privet, and then you’ll find the strength to live again.”

He did not know where his words came from, but he felt them to be true.

“I might ‘have the strength’ as you put it, Library Aide Pumpkin, but I do not have the will. I looked into the void of Silence and felt the nothing I would be. It is not strength I need, but an ability to let go, and that I don’t have. It is... so hard, so confusing, and my mind was in such a whirl of scoring, and scrivening, scratching and scribing, words and words and words until there was hardly anything left of me at all.”

“Your name, Privet, that was left.”

“Ah, yes, that: what I am. Well, mole, the Stone cannot ask
that
of me and I fled when it did, and, as you see, am much better now for doing so! It was killing both of us, and look at us now. Why, mole, you’ve ventured forth on to the surface day by day and the warm weather of spring is well and truly here, and now you’ve even brought the Book. For old time’s sake if nothing else!”

She laughed that thin uncertain laugh, and again glanced at the Book in the shadows behind her.

“Privet,” he said, with terrible resolution, “you say ‘look at us now’ and I look at you and I see —”

“Happiness! Contentment! Release at last! No, no, don’t say what you were going to because it is not true.”

“I am your library aide, and I must —”

“You must do as I say then, my dear, and leave me be!”

Her voice had begun sharply, but it ended soft and slow.

“There now!” cried Fieldfare from the portal. “That’s enough, Pumpkin. You get worse as you get older. Leave her be she said, and she was right. Got to feed her now, got to let her rest, for visitors are coming.”

“What visitors?” asked Privet querulously.

“Hamble, for one. Rees is coming again today, and Sturne might look in, Stone help us all.”

“Fieldfare, don’t be unkind, Sturne is a great mole in his way.”

“A great deal too serious to be visiting a mole who needs sunshine, and rest, and time.”

She turned from Privet for a moment and Pumpkin caught the expression on her face nomole was meant to see. It was full of doubt and care.

“Loosestrife, will she come to me at last, will she?”

Privet was growing more weak and tired by the moment, and more tearful too. As Pumpkin slipped away he heard Fieldfare say, “Soon, when her pups are a little older, and you’re a little stronger. She’s been ill and tired with rearing, and they’ve been sick as well. Whillan will bring them all over from Cuddesdon when the weather’s warmer, and you’ll take them up on the surface and play with them as their grandmother should.”

“It’s Loosestrife I want,” sobbed Privet into sleep.

It was Sturne who later told Pumpkin how things were.

“Found you wandering in the ice and snow myself, and took you to my burrow,” he said. “You were as near death with cold and hunger as anymole could be, but all you could talk of was that Privet needed help in your tunnels, and you needed to get the Book. But you don’t remember any of it?”

Pumpkin shook his head.

“Well, mole, I thought you were going to die. I... I really... I just didn’t know...”

Sturne almost allowed himself to weep.

“It’s not for me you should feel sorry,” said Pumpkin finally, “but yourself.”

“Hmmph!” said Sturne, dabbing at his face-fur and frowning. “If I wept for me I’d never stop.”

“Yes, you would, Sturne, and you’d feel better for it.”

“Well, that’s as maybe, and unlikely to happen now. I’m too old for tears.”

“You just nearly wept at the thought of me dying!”

“That’s different. You really are an irritating mole, Pumpkin. Obstinate, I’d say.”

Pumpkin laughed and asked what happened after he had been found.

“Well, I got Fieldfare and Hamble to go down to your tunnels, and there was Privet in no better state than I found you, except that you’d had the sense to tuck her up in your own sleeping chamber with some food. We thought you’d both die, but you haven’t, though, Privet —”

“She’s weak,” said Pumpkin.

“Getting weaker in my view, and not a thing a mole can do about it. And what’s most strange, Rooster won’t help at all. Been to see her, talked about Silence, and voids, and so on and so forth which only got her agitated, and then left her to think about what he’d said!”

Pumpkin smiled to himself, imagining the scene. Rooster might be many things but he was not a healer, or not in the normal sense of the word.

“So now she’s fading away before our eyes and all Rooster does is gallivant about the system delving tunnels and burrows.”

“Delving?”

“Other moles” tunnels, not his own. One’s enough for him, thank you very much. No, he goes and helps others out, which is to say the moles who have settled back in the system down by Barrow Vale, and over on the wormful Westside. He’s helped a lot of the old moles who you led up into the Ancient System, I’ll say that much for him, including Elynor. He may be a Master for all I know, but all he does with his skills is make moles tunnels.”

“Are they happy with what he delves for them?”

“Happy? Of course they’re happy, Pumpkin! Wouldn’t
you
be happy if a great big brute of a mole came and delved out your springtime tunnels for you? I know I would!”

Pumpkin grinned. “Ask him what he’s about then!”

“Hmmph!” muttered Sturne.

“Perhaps he’s keeping his paw in.”

“He could keep his paw in in the Library, which is falling to rack and ruin and needs a delver. More than one in fact. But no, he won’t do it. Says the Duncton delving’s done, whatever that means. But at least he went over to Cuddesdon the moment the spring came.”

“When was that? When did I go back to my own tunnels?”

“Oh, that,” said Sturne vaguely. “It seemed moleweeks ago now, yes... but you remember!”

“Yes, maybe I do,” said Pumpkin, giving up. What did it matter? “Privet was saying that she wants Loosestrife to visit her.”

“Ah, well, I don’t know all the ins and outs of that. She’s had pups by Whillan and they’ve all been ill, that much I heard from Rooster himself. That’s why Whillan won’t leave Cuddesdon. Naturally Privet would like to see her daughter, never yet having done so, which seems hard even to a mole like me who’s never had a family. I would have thought that Loosestrife could have made the trek from Cuddesdon if she wanted.”

“These things are sometimes best left until the right time,” said Pumpkin.

“Like when?” said Sturne.

Pumpkin looked about the High Wood, scented the balmy air, settled his belly into the warm litter more comfortably, and said, “Well, a day like this, only a little warmer. When April comes.”

“It
is
April, mole.”

“Well, then,” said Pumpkin, trying not to let his astonishment show, “later in April, when pups can travel a bit in safety and their parents don’t have to fret. If it was me I’d not let
my
pups travel till May-time.”

“Well, anyway, that’s how it is. Now I’ve work to do, mole, and though I need a lot of help I won’t ask you in your weakened state.”

“Come on, Sturne, you know it’s work that makes me well. Privet’s in good paws for now, and has visitors today, so I’ll come to the Library with you and see what you’ve been up to – Master Librarian! Well, then, it really came to pass.”

“Aye,” said Sturne, “it does seem to have done...”

But still, even now, even on a day such as this – perhaps especially on such a day, and with many more in prospect, Sturne looked bleak, and much alone.

“It’s good to have your company, Pumpkin, it really is...”

Sharing his tunnels as she now did, Pumpkin saw more of Privet than any other mole, and more privately too. The ready cheer of moles like Fieldfare, the rough good nature of Hamble, and the quiet faith of Arliss and Rees were well and fine, but
they
did not see how Privet collapsed the moment they had gone; nor did they hear the sighs and moans night after night, when she slipped into fretful sleep, and seemed to live again all those unimaginable days of her long and lonely spiritual quest for Silence, which being incomplete, seemed nothing but a failure to her now.

She wept sometimes, and held his paw, nodding in the evening light, staring, worrying about shadows only she could see. The coughing, which had gone for a time, came back, a dry hacking thing to which Pumpkin would sometimes wake at night, and listen to wearily, until, unable to sleep, he would go to her and help her to the surface, to drink where the rain left water in a treetrunk cleft nearby. She would not go out by day at all, but on those nights she would sometimes linger for a moment or two, and stare up at the stars.