Duncton Tales (3 page)

“Well …” began Privet doubtfully.

“But then again, if you want to preserve your anonymity as they say, I will be only too pleased to tell you all about myself and about Duncton, and whatever else you may be pleased to know. In short, Privet, I’m fed up with being alone and I fancy a natter. What do you say?”

“Well, I don’t know … I’m not sure … I mean … yes, please, I
would
like that!” said Privet with resolution, suddenly very tired indeed, and with a tremor to her voice which suggested that tears she did not wish to shed in front of a stranger were imminent.

The kindly Fieldfare stared at her, silent and thinking, reached out a paw, and said, “There, you’ve arrived now and there’s no need to struggle more. Duneton’s a place that heals moles. Always was and always will be. You’re
welcome
, mole.”

“Am I?” said Privet staring, her eyes full of tears.

Fieldfare seemed to know it was a question asked not of her but of all moledom. “Yes,” she said, “I’m sure you are.”

In truth, Privet felt happy to be so warmly welcomed at the end of her long journey, happier than her reserved nature could easily allow her to admit. It seemed that Duncton moles were as friendly and as direct as moles had always said they were. It seemed …

“Come on then,” said Fieldfare firmly, stancing up and thinking perhaps that if they carried on like that
she
would be in tears as well, and for what? She had absolutely no idea. “Follow me and we’ll be there before darkness falls, and snug and replete before you can say “lobworm”!”

“Thank you,” said Privet, tiredness, gratitude, and relief flooding into her with each step she took, as she followed Fieldfare downslope through the wood.

Chapter Two

“Now,” said Fieldfare, as soon as had they settled down in her homely if untidy burrow, “I’ve not brought you far from where you want to go, for the Library’s not fer off from here. If the weather eases off a bit overnight I’ll show you the way there in the morning when I go back to do my stint of waiting for Chater once again. Meanwhile let’s forget duty and good intentions, and talk! But put that text of yours over there, it makes me nervous the way you clutch it. Now, tell me about your journey getting here, and what bits of moledom you’ve seen.”

“What parts do you know?” asked Privet.

“Me? Oh, none at all. I’m Duncton born and bred. I’ve never been out of the system in my life. Never seen the need so far — too busy having pups and pushing them out of my tunnels and into the world. I doubt if even Chater could get me to leave now. But I’ve heard lots because when he’s home Chater tells me, and down in Barrow Vale the visitors tell us what they’ve seen and all the news.”

Privet listened to the howling wind outside, snuggled into the comfortable nesting material Fieldfare had spread about her burrows, and began to think she had never felt better in her life.

“What news have you heard lately?” she asked.

“Nothing much. Rollright’s got a new lot of elders, and about time too. Cannock’s finally been repopulated after the nasty goings on at the time of the Word. The so-called Newborns are making a nuisance of themselves even here with their preaching, and moles generally are getting worried about them. That’s about it really.”

She looked hopefully at Privet and said, “Tell me something
juicy
.”

Privet smiled and looked apologetic. “I think I know what you mean,” she said, “but really I’m not that kind of mole. You’re the first mole I’ve talked to for days and the last was just a youngster. But …”

She frowned, and Fieldfare looked at her with concerned interest.

“What I’ve seen of the Newborn moles is a bit worrying,” said Privet finally.

Tell me about them if you like,” said Fieldfare, “and when you’ve done I’ll tell you about Duncton Wood.”

“Agreed!” said Privet.

Each mole was as good as her word, and they talked in the way that moles who know they are going to become friends talk, deep into the night, with never a pause or break, except for food, and to listen to the changes in the wind.

Privet told all she knew of how the Newborn sect had started and developed at Caer Caradoc, one of the seven ancient systems, lying far to the west of Duncton in the Welsh borderland. Caradoc had played a heroic role in the days of the defence of the Stone against the Word a century ago, but it was a high wild place which attracted strange moles and extremists, and after peace had been restored to moledom, the moles there had reverted to old ascetic ways of worshipping the Stone. However that mattered little, for if moles wish to plague themselves with guilt and self-inflicted punishments of body and mind, and deprive themselves of worms, let them do so. They’ll see their foolishness in time.

But
this
sect not only believed its Newborn way was right, but, more sinisterly, that other moles who did not follow its beliefs were blasphemously wrong. Perhaps punishably so. Here then was the making of a new war, different from that of Word on Stone: a war in the name of the Stone upon moles who already believed in the Stone; a sectarian war, than which none can be more bitter nor more cruel.

It seemed that in recent years the long-lived Elder Senior Brother (as Cadarocian moles called their leader) had come under the influence of a much younger and more aggressive mole who had begun to send out young male missionaries to convert neighbouring systems to the Newborn way. Latterly these groups had gone further afield, and especially to the other ancient systems, including Duncton Wood itself, where they were tolerated but disliked.

“I mean,” declared Fieldfare, “we may not seem to be ardent worshippers of the Stone, being a quiet lot that way and leaving much unspoken when it comes to faith, but we’re followers through and through. What we don’t need and don’t like is those Newborns coming up from the grubby Marsh End and singing their stupid songs about love and the Stone’s light being in the dew-drops, and the sinners among us blowing away before the Stone’s anger like leaves from a dead tree. Nor do we want those preachers of theirs rabbiting on about Silence only being for those who follow the true way, which so far as I can see involves singing those songs and listening to those preachers — all male, I might say, every one of them — with adoration in our eyes like they was the Stone itself!”

Fieldfare was breathing heavily by the time she reached the end of this outburst, and briefly glared at Privet as if
she
might be a Newborn.

Then, calming down again, she said in a very different voice, “Have you come across any of the Newborn moles then? And what about this mole who leads them by the snout?”

Privet nodded seriously. “You mean Thripp of Blagrove Slide?”

“If that’s his name, he’s the one I mean. They call him Head of Missions or some such nonsense. Titles! Duncton moles don’t go in for them, except in the Library, though even there they’re a bit over the top. Cause more trouble than they’re worth!”

“I don’t know much about Thripp apart from his name, except that the Newborns seem to fear and respect him. These days they keep themselves to themselves in the systems I’ve visited where they have a presence, because they came up against the kind of resistance they obviously found here. Some say they’re biding their time before becoming more aggressive again. In fact, I did meet a few of them in Rollright, where they tried to persuade me of the error of my ways!”

Privet smiled the tight smile of a mole who knows her mind and does not appreciate being evangelized by self-righteous moles convinced that they know best. Rollright was the nearest of the seven Ancient Systems to Duncton Wood itself, being but a few days’ journey to the north.

“You’re of the Stone then?” said Fieldfare, more interested now in Privet than the Newborns.

“I am,” said Privet briefly.

“Brought up in a system with a Stone, were you?” asked Fieldfare hopefully. But not for the first time in their conversation Privet proved unwilling to talk about her background and past, and fell silent.

“Yes, well, there we are,” said Fieldfare.

But she was a mole not easily put out, and she changed the conversation back to Newborns by asking if they had tried to persuade Privet from her beliefs.

“Once they realized I was not prepared to ‘open my heart’, as they put it, they were courteous enough to me,” said Privet, “but then moles usually are. I seem rather dull and harmless, I suppose, and not much use to anymole!”

“And aren’t you?” said Fieldfare with a grin.

“I hope not, but then I’ve always been interested in scribing and texts and know nothing else as yet. One day perhaps …’ She looked coyly at Privet.

“No two ways about it,” said Fieldfare firmly, “if a mole wants something badly enough she shall have it in time! Be it a worm, a friend, or an attractive male! It’s deciding to get on with it that’s the difficult bit. So you’d be a scholar then, or a journeymole perhaps, seeing as you’ve brought a text for the Library?”

“A scribemole really, scholar perhaps,” replied Privet. “This text is just a few tales scribed with the help of a friend whose dying wish was that I bring them to Duncton Wood and continue my researches here. I really don’t want to do anything more than that — it’s enough to have got here, let alone try to do more!” She said this last quite vehemently, concerned, it seemed, with something Fieldfare had not even asked.

“Well, I’m sure nomole in Duncton will ask you to do what you don’t want to,” Fieldfare felt obliged to say.

“If they do I’ll not answer them, and I might even leave!” declared Privet. “All I ask is to be left alone and given a chance to begin again!”

In the face of such an outburst Fieldfare felt it best to say no more.

The wind suddenly shook the roof above their heads and sent bits of chalky earth down on them. Fieldfare dusted herself off, looked up, and said, “Oh Chater my love. I hope you’re safe and sound and snug. I want you back in one piece!”

“Tell me about Duncton Wood,” said Privet, hoping to take her new friend’s mind off her worries, “and about the Library, and Stour, and any other mole you think I ought to know about!”

“I will, I will,” said Fieldfare, crunching at a worm and wondering where to start. “I will!”

At the time this tale begins, no system in all of moledom attracted more interest, more pilgrimages, nor more anecdotes than Duncton Wood. For all moles knew that of all the seven Ancient Systems it was the one with the longest and proudest history of protecting Moledom’s freedom against those incursions of body and spirit that from time to time evil moles seek to impose upon it. Indeed, Duncton had been at the forefront of the struggle of followers of the Stone against the cruel Word, a bitter fight that had ended seven Longest Nights of nearly a century before, but whose livid scars remained to that day in many of moledom’s systems.

True, places to the north like Beechenhill, where the Stone Mole served his final ministry, and found his greatest trial, were for a time a greater focus of reverence and quiet journeying; while the dread system of Whern, for those travellers whose natures bent darkly to visiting the terrible and odd, undeniably held a morbid fascination. Then, too, Siabod to the far west in Wales, and ruined Uffington to the south, had their share of legend and story for a generation that had been too young to remember the cruel war wreaked by disciples of the Word upon the followers of the Stone.

But Duncton was the system moles most liked to hear their elders tell about, and no Longest Night could pass by and be
called
Longest Night, without a tale or two of the heroic deeds and doings of the moles who in the days of Bracken and his son Tryfan, kept their faith with the Stone and struggled to vanquish the vile terror that had been the Word, and whose full history was first chronicled by Woodruff of Arbor Low.

It had been most wisely decreed at the great Conclave of Cannock, when the last followers of the Word were arraigned and their crimes finally punished or absolved, that copies of Woodruff’s great work should be made and distributed to all the seven Ancient Systems, and five systems beside including Beechenhill, so that allmole might have access to the sobering history therein.

In the period when there were moles still alive who had stanced flank to flank with Tryfan himself, or had heard the teachings of the Stone Mole with their own ears, much else had been scribed down, and there had begun a tradition that the texts from Duncton (and other places too) should be spread far and wide, and not be confined and held secretly as such texts had been in the not-so-distant days when only the holy system of Uffington had been allowed to train scribemoles. Added to which, those twelve systems mandated at Cannock to hold copies of the great mole texts were likewise told to encourage the teaching of scribing, so that the office of scribemole should be free to all willing to strive for it, a freedom first dreamed of by Tryfan himself.

So it was that in the moleyears and decades following the coming of the Stone Mole and the mystery of his passing, words of scribe and storyteller served not only to consolidate moles’ faith in the Stone once more, but also to emphasize that pre-eminent among all the systems of moledom as a place of faith, community and love of mole for mole, was Duncton Wood.