Duncton Tales (43 page)

“You’d leave these moles to the mercy of Ratcher’s crowd?” said Hamble, staring them all out. “Look at them and see what you yourselves might be!”

There were five refugees: two adult males, a female, and two frightened and shivering youngsters. All gaunt and thin, and with near-defeat about the way they stanced, as if they expected that life which had dealt with them so hard would not forgive them now. Clustered about Hamble as if he were the only thing between life and death, they stared pathetically at the Crowden moles.

Then with a look that combined impatience with contempt Hamble signalled to the leading male among the refugees to go forward.

“Hold your head high, mole, for what you’ve done was brave. There’s not a mole here will harm you now. May you and your friends and kin teach us all you know that we may the better resist Ratcher when he comes.”

Then a light of hope and courage came to that mole’s eyes, and turning to one of the youngsters he put his paw on his shoulder encouragingly.

“Come,” he said gently, in that deep and guttural voice of the Saddleworth moles, “we’re safe now, as Rooster said we would be. Come!”

With nervous smiles and muttered thanks they advanced among the Crowden moles, none smiling back until Privet dared come forward and with a glance at Hamble said, “Follow me, there’s moles will take care of you and your young and find you a place to eat and rest. Come!”

Many including Lime muttered and stared venomously at Privet and the strangers, but with Privet bold in front, and Hamble bold behind, none dared question it.

When they had gone Hamble said quietly, “For Stone’s sake, moles, let this be an end to our rejection of moles who seek our help. Our strength now will be more in the care and mercy we show others than in what we give only to ourselves. Crowden must look beyond itself at last.”

Hamble was never a mole for speeches, but such words as these he had heard his father say and they seemed to serve the purpose now.

“Aye! The lad’s right! Moles like this could be our strength!” muttered the others amongst themselves. “These moles have shown courage coming here. Stone knows we would not show as much out upon the Moors, and this place must be as alien to them as the Moors would be to us!”

It did not escape Privet’s notice that the name of Rooster had been invoked once more and, after all that had happened, how much more she wanted to learn about him! Once again she scribed down all that the strangers told her of him which only confirmed what she had heard before.

“He is a mole of peace,” they said, “and refuses to fight or hurt another. He came to us from Hilbert’s Top where he has retreated since Samphire’s death. He told us not to hurt another mole, but to turn from Ratcher’s moles and flee and find a place where we could learn of the Stone in peace. He told us to come here, and warn you that the murrain has been and gone in Ratcher’s place. These mole-years of summer past Red Ratcher has travelled north and gathered a great army of grike moles. Come the spring they will descend on Crowden. We cannot stay here after that. This much he believes.”

“We’ll fight such moles!” declared Hamble. “Crowden always has, and it will do again.”

“But did you meet this mole Rooster?” asked Privet of one of the refugees one day. The fact was that they were curiously reluctant to talk too much of Rooster, or to say anything of their previous history in the Dale.

But this one said, “Me? I saw him delve. I lived among his delvings. What need to see a mole when you’ve lived so, for there we knew him better than he did himself.”

“What is this delving that he does?” asked Sward excitedly.

But it was a question none of the refugees could easily answer. They looked vague, and shrugged, and searched for words they could not find.

“He is a Master of the Delve,” said one eventually.

“What’s that?” asked Sward.

“I don’t know,” whispered the mole, “it’s something that he is. He hurts nomole nor ever will. They say that if he does so he will die. A Master cannot fight or kill except himself, he delves.”

“Rooster, Master of the Delve …’ whispered Privet in the darkness of the burrow where she told her tale, where now, though it was black as night, the first dawn birds could be heard up on the surface of Duncton Wood. “Each time I scribed his name, or that word ‘delve’, I felt a tremor of destiny upon me. The idea of meeting him, a Master of the Delve, stirred me in a way that I had never known …”

She stared at each of them in turn, and they moved not, like shadows that were divorced from everything but the distant time and place to which she had taken them, and with which she was the only link.

“It seemed that all my life had been moving towards the decision I made one night then, at such a pre-dawn time as this. In my innocence of such things I decided that Rooster might be the mole to delve a place of protection for our Library. Therefore, I, Privet, weakest of moles, would set forth alone across the Moors, and using the information those refugees had given me, I would find him, and ask him to come to Crowden. He would delve for us, and teach us if he would. He might even lead us. Yes, that’s what I decided to do! Of course, I told myself it was only for the Library that I was going: how could a mole like me have guessed that deeper passions than libraries stir young females to set off on perilous missions across the Moors?”

don’t understand what you mean,” said Whillan, as innocent now as his mother had been then.

“She means love, dear,” said Fieldfare cheerfully. “For Rooster!”

“Ah!” said Whillan in a bemused and academic way. “Of course!”

There were smiles and then more silence, until Chater stirred and said what all were thinking, and speaking as if it was
now
Privet was making such a decision, not long before: ‘But mole, you’re not a warrior or fighter, but a female and a scribe. You’ll not survive on the Moors in winter, or among the grikes, not all alone. This part of your tale I’ll not believe!”

There was a murmur of assent at this from all but Stour, until Privet nodded, and smiled and said, “Yet that is what I had decided to do. Then and there! With no word to anymole, for they would only stop me! Well, it was time I was impulsive, and I had not forgotten that sense of freedom I had felt when I had first set paw upon the Moors, nor my father’s plea for me to leave Crowden. It all seemed to make sense then in that dark hour.”

Things often do,” said Drubbins wryly, “at that hour! The true light of dawn returns a mole his common sense.”

“Well, be that as it may, I rose from my burrow and set off for the East End there and then. My only fear was not the Moors but getting through the defences, but by then I had seen enough to remember them. My training as a scribe had given me a good memory. It took time, and I had to hide from the watchers more than once, but eventually I got out at last to the Moors and —”

“And?” said Fieldfare impatiently.

“Hamble was there waiting for me! ‘You!’ he said, laughing. He had long since been warned that a mole was skulking among the defences and had guessed it was one of the refugees wanting to escape the confines of Crowden. I explained as resolutely as I could what I was doing. He told me I couldn’t. We had an argument … I wonder if all ventures begin in such a way?”

“Some do,” said Chater, glancing at Fieldfare with a grin. Above them a blackbird scurried near and called. Dawn was coming fast.

“We argued until at last I told him it was for me as it had been for him when he had gone out to bring the refugees into Crowden. ‘I will do it, my dear,’ I said, ‘whatever you do.’

“‘Well then,’ he said at last, resigned, ‘you’ll not do it without me. I’ll go with you, or you’ll not go at all.’”

“For an innocent female, as you called yourself, you didn’t do badly!” declared Fieldfare approvingly.

“It gets worse, I’m afraid,” said Privet contritely. “For then Hamble said, ‘But we’ll need a guide, and there’s only one mole can give that service — your father Sward, and don’t tell me he’s too old. He’s hankered after travelling the Moors again for years and a mole like him will find his strength again when he needs to!’”

“Well!” declared Fieldfare. “Hamble’s certainly a mole who knows how to get things moving.”

Privet laughed. “He always was.”

“And he helped you go to find Rooster?” asked Drubbins.

“Of course,” said Privet, but the calm way she tried to speak was belied by the shadows of new memories that now crossed her face.

Chapter Twenty-One

Although alarm and horror spread through Crowden when the news broke of Privet’s and Hamble’s foolhardy venture with Sward on to the Moors to contact Rooster, it was too late to send a party off to bring them back.

All moles could do was stare up from the safety of Crowden’s ramparts to the Moors and the drizzly cloud that rode on the wind there, and ponder on the stupidity of youth, and reflect what a loss the system had sustained: its most promising young campaigner, and its best young scribe. As for Sward, he always was a daft mole anyway, and had not been the same since Shire and Tarn had died. Perhaps it was best that he was away; but then, if any mole could guide Hamble and Privet back to safety, it was he.

The fears for the trio’s safety were well justified, as they themselves might soon have agreed had they known what they would find if fate and fell circumstance combined to deliver them to Ratcher’s moles. But they did not, and proceeding on to the Moors oblivious of what lay ahead, they were concerned only to make their way towards the secret system of Chieveley Dale as quickly as they could, and then find clues to Rooster’s whereabouts.

They journeyed in single file, with Sward taking the lead, Privet in the middle and Hamble at the rear. Sward knew the first part of the route quite well, and went south-east across the Moors to keep well clear of the great stretch of water that floods the vale eastward and might have hemmed them in if grikes were about.

They travelled in silence, partly because of the need to go unobserved, but also because each in different ways was greatly affected by the emergence from the limitations of Crowden and its Vale on to the wider expanse of the Moors.

Sward was simply happy, for the Moors had been his life, and only as he set paw on them again, and scented once more the dank clean smell of peat, and heard the curlew’s cry, did he realize how much he had missed such a sense of freedom for so long. He felt liberated from what he had come to regard as his responsibility to Shire and through her to his texts, and now it seemed he had only this final task of bringing Rooster to Crowden to delve a safe place for the texts, before his life’s work was done and he was free to live only for himself once more.

Hamble, for his part, felt not liberty but responsibility, though it was a feeling he welcomed. He knew he was the warrior in the group, and that on him would fall the task of protecting the other two should danger threaten. Not for the first time he looked at Privet’s slight form as she picked her way through the heather and peat hags ahead, and felt affection and liking for her, as well as a wish that he might have loved her as a mate would. But that had never been and he was content to travel out on this first great venture from Crowden with the mole he now regarded as his greatest friend.

For her part, Privet felt nervous of where she was, but safe: for she trusted her father Sward’s knowledge of the Moors, and knew that she could have no better fighter at her flank than Hamble, if fighting were needed. But that much known, her thoughts moved on swiftly to other things: the sense of escape from her home system was one of them, the realization which grew as the day went by that moledom was vast indeed, and thus far she knew so little of it. With each step she took, Crowden seemed to grow less important, and less like the place in which she wished to spend the rest of her life. Had not Sward often mentioned Beechenhill as a place to which a scribemole might go, and fabled Duncton Wood? Of course he had, and now with beating heart she began to see that if she could come out on to the Moors, why, she could go almost anywhere!

But more powerful than such ideas by far was her growing sense that this journey to find Rooster had something of destiny about it. All that she had heard of him, and all the circumstances that had given her the impulse to come on to the Moors, made her think that in some way her life and his were bound together. So it was that in those first hours of their journey, until nightfall brought them to a halt, it was dreams of love fulfilled that Privet had, the natural but naive dreams of one who has never loved or been fully loved, but who has ached and hoped for it, and secretly prayed that one day it might be.