Duncton Wood (14 page)

Although Bracken appeared half asleep as Hulver finished the tale, he had never been so awake. The tale had the effect of carrying him far beyond Duncton Wood and to make him see again, as he had seen before, that Duncton was just one system, one place, one corner of the world. He wondered where his task lay, for he supposed he had one.

Above them, on the surface, the wind stirred and a beech leaf tumbled noisily against their temporary burrow entrance. It settled for a moment and then scurried off a moleyard or two before eddying to a stop against a beech-tree trunk, joining the others already there.

The evening wind had come and the light was beginning to lose its shine as the sun settled down toward the distant hills no Duncton mole could ever see.

“It’s time to go,” said Bracken. “Show me the direction, but let me go first, for I’m used to sensing danger and can find my way very quickly.”

They trekked up to the southwest, away from Hulver’s burrow and the danger of Rune. Bracken had imagined his first climb up into the Ancient System, thinking that the sun would be high in the sky and he would walk boldly upward. Instead, here he was with very real danger about, skulking his way through the twilight. But there was something sweeter than his most delightful imaginings in having as a guide and friend this old mole for whom he was beginning to feel such deep affection and reverence.

It got darker as they rose higher, yet the farther they went, the stronger did Bracken feel the pull from the top. He felt it as a good wormhunter feels his prey. They scurried from tree to tree, from root to root, always seeking the darkest shadow. Here and there they came across a bare patch of chalk, white in the evening gloom, and they avoided it for fear that their movement might be seen against it by any predators that lurked in the trees above. Once they passed by a massive tangle of roots rising starkly into the air, the bowl of a tree that had toppled over in some storm. They steered well clear of its long trunk and shattered branches on the ground – what mole could tell what might be nesting there.

As they rose higher, Hulver suddenly stopped and put his paw on Bracken’s shoulder, bringing him to a halt. “We are on the Ancient System,” he whispered. “From here it runs upward and across the hill.”

But Bracken knew it already, for he had sensed they were crossing old forgotten tunnels lost deep beneath the mold and debris of ages. His heart was beating with excitement for he felt as if, after a very long time, he was coming home. He knew the Ancient System was around him, he could
feel
it. It lay beneath them waiting, as it had waited for generations. And he could feel more than ever the great Stone which they were getting nearer and nearer.

“We’ll go right to the Stone, now,” he said quietly to Hulver, “and from there we’ll know what to do.”

It was at that moment in the evening when an eye-blink separates day from night. In the moment that a mole might wonder if it is still day, the question is answered by a sudden pall of purple in the sky. Bracken’s snout pointed up through the wood directly toward the Stone, although he had never been there. “There is no mole here,” he told Hulver, certain of himself, “and there is none on the Ancient System. Can’t you feel it?”

Hulver couldn’t feel it, didn’t like it, and couldn’t understand Bracken’s certainty; but he followed after him, for as he watched Bracken’s flanks disappearing upward into the dark and looked about him at the black tree-shapes with the wide open spaces in between, nothing else seemed as safe. He could feel that Bracken was gaining strength with each moment that passed. There was a power about him that swept Hulver along and he had the feeling that through this mole the Stone was revealing to him a tiny part of its pattern, the whole of which he could not see or feel, although he knew it to be there.

With this feeling, a slow calm fell over him that was never to leave him again. In some way he was watching a battle start, an enormous battle, a terribly dangerous time. It would happen, whatever happened, and his own part in it, if part he had, was best played by him being at peace with himself and the world about him.

“Hulver!” The whispered urgency of Bracken’s voice struck Hulver as comic, but with compassion for the youngster he restrained himself from laughing happily. Instead he watched with love as Bracken ran back toward him, to hurry him up, no doubt.

To Bracken, Hulver looked so gentle in the soft night, he expressed such peace and love, that his nerves were suddenly calmed within themselves and his fear and nervousness became as easy to brush away as dust on his fur. “Come on,” said Bracken softly, “come on, Hulver!” But there was no need, for Hulver was already starting up the hill again, and for some reason was chuckling quietly to himself.

As the hill leveled off and they reached its summit, Bracken slowed, almost afraid to advance, for he knew they were now very near the Stone. The windnoise in the trees was high and strong, swinging back from one side above them to the other as the wind billowed from one group of trees to another. It was a mass of great, invisible waves rolling across the top of the wood and way beyond it. “There!” said Hulver, pointing a talon forward into a clearing ahead of them. “There is the Stone.”

And it was, huge and massive, towering upward, solid in the windy night. Ten or twelve moleyards from it stood an ancient beech tree, its roots plunging along and into the ground, across the clearing’s floor to the Stone itself. From where Bracken crouched, the roots appeared solid waves that had rolled and heaved against the Stone, so that it tilted a little away from the tree away toward Uffington.

There was no other tree near it, for the clearing was quite wide, and as they ran across toward the Stone, the windnoise above them fell quieter, staying with the trees at its edge and Bracken had the impression that he had come into somewhere very quiet and still. But he felt the thunder of the generations and knew that all around him and beyond the clearing the Ancient System stretched forth, its lost tunnels hidden beneath the ages of leaf mold on the spare surface of the hill. He was at the heart of the Ancient System but more than that; he was home, at the center, at the true center of the system into which he had been born.

Hulver crouched down before the Stone and Bracken followed him. Up here the wood defined itself by wind-noise. Off to the west lay the pastures, the wind running up off them and then through the massive branches above them. To the east was the escarpment where upward eddies of air met the wind in the trees and the wind tumbled above on the edge of the void. Below them were softer noises of the main wood itself, quieter then this, deeper. By the Stone there was silence, and a calm Bracken had never known anywhere in the wood.

He looked all around, got up and ran to the edge of the clearing in the direction toward which the Stone tilted: “How far is Uffington, Hulver?” he asked.

Hulver came to his side, both their snouts pointing out through the trees toward the west. Hulver was still breathing heavily from the long climb up from the slopes. “A long way, a very long way, but not so far if you have the Stone behind you.”

“No, it’s not so far, not too far,” said Bracken to himself, for he could feel Uffington pulling him. “It’s not that far, Hulver,” he said quietly, “I can
feel
it.”

When Hulver used the words “not so far if you have the Stone behind you,” he was giving the standard reply senior moles used to give to youngsters who asked the once-inevitable question about Uffington. But as Bracken crouched there, Hulver saw it in a different way than he had before: perhaps it meant exactly what it said: perhaps Uffington
was
in some way nearer if you kept the Stone always directly behind you as you progressed toward it. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? And he had been struck by the way in which Bracken had run exactly to the point on the edge of the clearing that lay nearest Uffington, without having been told.

“How do you know where Uffington is?” asked Hulver curiously. Bracken interested him more and more. “I can
feel
it. If you stand with the Stone behind you,” said Bracken, “you can feel it pulling. Well,
you
know...”

But Hulver didn’t, though he understood what Bracken was saying better than Bracken himself.

He would have stayed there all night if Hulver had not at last said “Come on. Bracken, we must hide ourselves now. We must find worms to eat and we must rest. There is much for you to learn tomorrow.”

They finally hid themselves among the surface roots of the old beech in the clearing by the Stone. The soil was hard there, but there was mold and leaves to burrow under and the nearer the Stone they were, the safer they felt themselves from the danger of Rune.

Bracken was never sure afterward whether he slept right through until the sun rose or whether he kept waking up and looking at the Stone. But dream or reality, he later remembered a changing vision of the Stone, first deep black in the night, later mellowing to purple, suddenly very dark gray, gradually lightening to a dull gray before lighting to pink and soft gray and yellow as the sun broke through the beeches behind them with the dawn.

When he finally woke up, there was the Stone rising protectively above him, the soft gray and greens of the beech trees in June behind, and the sky beyond that. A shaking of leaves off his fur, two or three steps forward, and he was able, at last, to reach out with his paw and touch the Stone in the morning light.

   8  

T
HE
threat from Mandrake against Hulver and Bracken over the performance of the Midsummer ritual was very real. At the previous Midsummer, Mandrake had not felt secure enough to order Rune to kill Hulver at the Stone. But now he had the system so cowed that he felt strong enough to kill off its old traditions and anymole who stood by them.

At the June elder meeting, which Hulver had left Bracken to attend, Mandrake left no doubt about his intentions. The Midsummer ritual must not be spoken, he told the elders, and no mole must go up to the Stone. This was an absolute ruling for which he now expected each elder publicly to signal his support. If it should be disobeyed, he stressed, then that would result in the death of the disobedient.

Before he asked each elder to show his support, Mandrake made himself very clear a final time: ‘T understand that a certain mole here among us performed the ritual last Midsummer Night, despite our agreement that it should be abandoned. I was prepared then to give him the benefit of my tolerance.. Mandrake looked about him with avuncular concern. “But no mole should depend on it again.” He paused to let the message sink home, fixing Hulver with his gaze. “Now do we agree that the ritual must not be performed?”

One by one the elders signaled agreement. Except for Hulver, who stayed silent and motionless, snout on his paws and his eyes half closed. Very peaceful.

Mandrake affected to ignore him. “We have made our decision, then, and will see that it is carried out,” he said with a heavy menace that amounted to a command to them all: he did not actually say that they must all take part in what looked to most of them like the inevitable slaughter of Hulver up by the Stone, but anymole there who refused to be involved, and take responsibility, had better watch out!

But Hulver was not the only mole there to disagree with Mandrake. Mekkins, the half-marshender, had no intention of adding his talons to those who might strike Hulver down on Midsummer Night. True, he had signaled agreement, and he would go along with Mandrake’s suggestion that they all take part in any punishment meted out to the “disobedient” – but Mekkins was good at appearing to do something and doing something else. He might not be a very moral mole – how could he be while he acted for Mandrake and the marshenders at the same time? – but he had never yet killed a youngster or a mole too old to defend himself and he wasn’t going to start now. He would fight anymole that got in his way, but he didn’t set out to kill them because they did something to which he was utterly indifferent, like the Midsummer Night ritual.

Soon after the decision on the ritual, the elder meeting fizzled out. Rune left early, muttering something about an important job as Mandrake gave him a nod of approving dismissal. Hulver was suspicious, and on his way out with the others, he stopped one of the youngsters hanging about Barrow Vale and asked if he had seen Rune pass by. The answer was as he had feared: “Yes, sir, he went up by the tunnel to the slopes. Not so long ago, so you might catch him.”