Duncton Tales (54 page)

“So it was that the Master gave us our pride and our purposes, and our rituals too — unknown though they mostly are, strange though they must seem. But now I must show you of what it is I speak, for delving is not a thing of words but deeds, and the Master intended that it should be seen and experienced, not merely talked about.”

“Now?” said Samphire faintly. “All of us?”

Drumlin nodded.

“Can Humlock come?” said Glee suddenly.

“It’s not for the likes of him,” said Sedum, “’tis best he doesn’t come.”

“But —” began Glee.

“Aye, ’tis best, my dear,” sighed Drumlin. “Where we must go is not always easy, not always safe: Humlock might be endangered there. Then too, how could he know what it is he cannot see, or what it is he cannot hear?”

“He …” said Rooster suddenly, all gruff and close to tears, “he
might
know.”

A sad smile came to Drumlin’s face, and Sedum went to Rooster in her direct and kindly way and touched his paw.

“Would his own mother deny him any right if she thought it was for the best?” she said with tears in her eyes. “I’ve done my best to love my Humlock from the first, from the first suckling, but never once has he responded to anything I’ve done, not because he won’t but because he can’t. To this day I must find his food for him, I must feed him, I must clean after him. ’Tis not his fault, but he was born not only without sight and speech and hearing, but without much of a mind as well.

“Bless you both, and I’m sure he gets something from your company, though nomole can know what. But you see he’ll never be able to be independent, he’ll always need the support of others to survive, he’ll never be able to give a thing in return. It might be easier if there were more outward signs of what he is but there aren’t. And he can’t even delve, you’ve seen that yourself, Rooster — he can’t learn it at all. Don’t you think I’ve tried day after day before now, like you did today? Don’t you think I know what must happen when Midsummer comes? I’ve suffered so much on his account, and the only thing that keeps me going is having faith that the Stone knows best and there’s a purpose to his life beyond my simple understanding.”

“Why would his being able to delve make things different?” asked Samphire gently.

“Because Master Hilbert said that a mole who can delve can learn, for each time he puts his talons to the soil he joins himself back to moledom and allmole, each time he makes a delving stroke and takes away what was there he comes nearer to something of himself. But poor Humlock here … how can he ever live like this?”

At this she broke down utterly, and putting her paws about her great hunched son, hugged him, and petted him, until her tears wet his fur, and her sobs grew quiet. But all the while Humlock hunched still, unmoved, and all uncomprehending as it seemed.

“Well,” said Glee in a tight voice, “whatever anymole says I know he knows. I can feel it. Humlock’s …
Humlock
, just as I’m
Glee
.”

As Sedum pulled away from Humlock, Rooster said, “Well, we could try just once more, just once …” And so he did, delving the ground in the midst of where they stanced, guiding Humlock’s great paw, raising the rough Charnel soil, and then casting it to one side. But it was no good, Humlock would not, could not do it for himself, and when Rooster let his paw go, it went back to the ground and did not move.

“Well,” said Rooster at last, “it doesn’t feel right not to take him with us, and I agree with Glee, there’s something there. But — I’m sorry, Glee. We must …”

She nodded in a sad resigned way and tried to get Humlock to go below ground, pushing and shoving him with all her might. But like some great rock he stayed where he was.

“It’s all right,” she said with a grin, “he likes to stay on the surface sometimes. I’ll take him to the protection of those boulders on the slope above, and don’t tell me he hasn’t got brains, for he’ll come with me now as if he heard the words I said.”

Which was true, for the moment she put her paw to his flank and pushed him in the direction of the boulders, he padded meekly upslope, and when she ran ahead to one side of him, his head touched her flank as they went, moving together like one mole, her white-pink body dwarfed by his dark flank and limbs. Once she had settled him among the boulders she scampered happily back, and the mood of the party changed to one of expectant excitement.

“We won’t be gone too long?” she asked, looking back up at Humlock.

Drumlin shook her head and said, “Not this first time, no. Later there’s no knowing. Now, follow me, and do as I say, and when we go down-tunnel Sedum will take up the rear lest any of you go astray. It’s this way.” And they began to traverse gently down-valley towards a group of large rocks that lay ahead and a little below them.

It was as they were dropping down a steeper part of the slope just before them, with the cliff seeming to loom higher and darker above them to the left and the ravens wheeled restlessly in the sky that they heard, suddenly, like a gust of stormy wind out of air that has been still too long, a strange and desolate cry. That it was of loss there was no doubt, but that it was mole was more questionable, for it had a sub-mole quality about it, which struck alarm into all who heard it, and awe as well. It was Sedum who responded first, starting up with a mother’s instinct.

“Humlock?” she said, or gasped, even before she turned to look back along the distant way to where they had left him.

“
Humlock
?” she cried, disbelieving what she saw.

He was no longer by the rocks where Glee had left him, but seemed to have managed to find his way back downslope to where they had been when Drumlin had told them Hilbert’s tale, where Rooster had tried yet again to teach him to delve.

There he was, staring blindly at the ground, and seeming to reach towards it, though if it had been he who cried out there was no sign of it now. As they watched they saw his right paw touch the ground, and he seemed to hesitate. Then he shifted forward a little even as Rooster, watching as the others did, whispered softly, “Yes, mole,
yes
!”

Then, his stance firmer, he pulled back his right paw for himself as Rooster had showed him, and without more ado lunged it powerfully into the ground. For a moment he held it there before, with a mighty delve, he raised it out again, soil and all, high. Then he slowly raised that great hunched head of his as if to look at his delving paw, but instead he snouted at it, scenting at the earth it held. He slowly turned his paw and let its burden pour out all down his snout and lace, down to the ground again.

Then he shook his great head and did what he had never done,” never once in all the long days that Sedum had raised him. Humlock laughed.

And if that laugh sounded strange, from a voice that would never be normal, it was because he had never heard another laugh, and never would. But Humlock had delved his first deep delve and discovered in that place his own good laughter was to be found.

Glee did not pause a moment more before she was running back as fast as her paws could take her to where he was, to hug him, to hold him, to join her laughter to his own.

While Rooster turned to Drumlin and said gruffly, in a voice that was command rather than question, “He’s coming with us now, always and for ever. Humlock’s with us.”

And whatmole could doubt that there is a season when the young take up the tasks of older moles, a season that is not defined by wind or rain or temperature, and that this great season came to the Charnel on that day?

Privet might have journeyed further into what she then knew of the rest of Rooster’s story, had not her weary and stumbling paws pulled her past the last outcrops of dark grit through which she climbed, up on to the grassy undulations of Hilbert’s Top itself.

Then she could think of nothing else but the fear and unease she felt, as she heard sounds of calling mole across bleak spaces, and saw the ruined portals of ancient tunnels from whence those sounds seemed to come.

“Dark Sound?” she whispered to herself.

She shivered; the sky was a slaty grey and the air cold, and she felt more alone than she ever had. Dark Sound without a doubt, and she knew enough to know she must get away. Yet her paws took her forward towards those fearsome tunnels, drawn by a yearning the calling wrought within her heart, and youthful faith as well that somewhere Rooster might be found at last.

“I’ll go a little way …” she whispered to herself.

But a little way was far too far once the deep-delved tunnels in which she found herself — immeasurably more awesome than anything she had ever seen in Crowden — took her in. On she went, past portals beyond her imagining, through chambers with dark shining carvings that seemed to echo even her quiet breath, and turn it into the breathing of a frightened mole and one drawn into a darkness too great for her, and a danger that would destroy her very soul.

Lost, soon lost. Wandering, vagrant, frightened, her pawsteps became the pawsteps of the grikes who chased her, her gasps the screams of moles who died, until she began to run and run, not knowing where she went, but only that she was on the edge of a void of darkness wherein the Stone’s Light was not known, nor its Silence ever heard.

Turning from it she cried out to the Stone for help, now, “
Now
!”

But the grikes in her soul were made manifest, and were running after her and before her and at her flanks and she was unable to escape, whichever way she turned, and the Stone too far to reach, its Light too …

Its Light. Far in the distance, tiny, a distant portal to the day, ahead where the grikes that seemed to be would not dare to go, ahead was the only way to look, the only way to go.

Silence; there, beyond the Light. A hint of it at least, an under-echo to all the fearful sounds of calling, fleeing, chasing, screaming moles she heard in those great delvings where she was lost.

“Silence, Stone, lead me to it.”

Never had she made so real a prayer as that.

“Lead me …” and her voice was echoed back to her in waves, some bearable, some not, as the portal of Light grew greater and she ran on and on, feeling the dark carvings, on to the portal, on into its blinding Light, out through its shining arches, to fall and roll and tumble into the void of nightmare sleep beyond, and beyond that still to wake, her limbs aching on warm grass, her snout scenting at good air, and her flank stilling to the touch of a great mole’s paw.

She half turned, utterly unafraid, her long journey done. She opened her eyes and looked into the great frowning face of a rough-furred mole, his eyes were narrowed in his concern for her, gentle eyes, as gentle as his touch.

“Mole,” he said, his voice gruff and deep.

Rooster.

But she could not speak his name, hard though she tried, her mouth moving but not in her control, her paws struggling but too weak to move, her mind knowing, but too tired to think.

Rooster.

So she only stared into his eyes and slowly, a little fearfully perhaps, his eyes smiled into hers and Privet, sinking into peaceful sleep at last, knew that where she had come was where the Stone had wished her most to be.

“Rooster,” she whispered, as her eyes closed once more.

“Yes,” he said, at last.

Chapter Twenty-Five

When Privet awoke again, much refreshed, Rooster had gone, and in a way she felt relieved, for it gave her time to … to what? Catch up with herself perhaps. Scent his scent. Look about the place, and orientate herself, for all the Dark Sound had gone and she was herself again, not that beset and fleeing thing she had been before.

She found that the Top was elevated above the Moors, which stretched brown and bleak to east and south, which was the part she had crossed with Hamble and Sward on her way to the Dale. Hamble and Sward … she thought of them and then forgot them. That was the past and for now she was above all that, and not only literally, and wished to live in the present, and discover what she could of it.

Chieveley Dale lay westward on her left flank, and from that height, peering over the steep edge of the fissured scarp formed by the millstone grit, it looked like any other dale: flat, green where its stream ran down, broken up by a few outcrops of rock or boulders fallen from the Tops above, and finally inconsequential. Was down there where her life changed? She supposed it was, and looked northward.

There the undulations of the Top dipped finally away to reveal the blue mists of dim distance, and another rise of higher ground which must lead, she knew, to Whern. Well, that was not for her now, nor ever, she hoped. No no, such future as she had lay here and south of here, yes, to the south where civilized moledom lay. She and Rooster … and already she had started to dream.

She turned her attention to the Top itself. It was expansive and generally flat, the outcrops highest where she was, which was why the views were good. She realized with a start that in all her journeying so far she had never seen the Moors without their mists until now. She tried to retrace the route by which she had crossed them, but could not and did not try for long. It was a forbidding sight.