Duncton Wood (53 page)

He saw, too, that Bracken himself was not aware that he had this effect – perhaps not even aware of the sufferings and joys whose power was revealed so well in the way he sometimes talked and by the way his eyes would seem to seek out, even in the burrow where they crouched, the moles he mentioned or the places he described so reluctantly, all of which he had so recently left behind.

He mentioned a mole called Hulver, for example, with a tremble in his voice, as if he had not got used to the fact that Hulver had died long before, violently it seemed. Yet when Boswell asked a little more about him, Bracken avoided the subject, saying, “He was only an old mole I knew who talked too much!” But the look in his eyes betrayed how much more Hulver meant to him than that.

Then there was a mole called Rebecca, of whom, when he finally mentioned her, Bracken said, “She was a mole I met in a rainstorm by the Stone on top of the hill. She was as lost up there as I was, in a different way, and she touched me.” Bracken’s voice had lowered when he said this, as his snout had, and for a moment Boswell felt as if he was walking with Bracken through the silence of a forgotten wood that even & single breath would blow away. Which, indeed, it did. For Bracken changed when pressed about Rebecca and laughed about her, pretending she was just “one of the Duncton females, and a very pretty one, too.”

It was the same with the Ancient System, which was what Boswell wanted most to know about. Bracken said hardly anything about it, but when it did get mentioned, his whole body seemed to alternate between fear and peace and Boswell felt he was watching a changeable spring day pass by.

It was seeing these things in Bracken that made Boswell, who was so quick with words and so used to the learned cut and thrust of Uffington, understand that the message in something a mole says may lie not in the words spoken, or the sense imparted, but in the impulse of feeling behind them which they themselves may change or distort. The more he spoke with Bracken, the more he had the feeling that the Stone itself had brought them together and that this strange mole was one he would follow wherever he went. It seemed to Boswell that Bracken held in his heart a secret of which he was not aware but whose revelation was a joy and pain to which, in some way, both of them must surrender themselves.

So it was that Boswell’s initial impatience with Bracken’s unwillingness to talk about Duncton in detail gave way to an affectionate silence from whose simplicity Boswell really began to hear the words the other spoke and, through him, the words all moles speak.

There was another way in which his dialogue with Bracken was a new experience for him as well: the fact that since the preceding September, when he had left Uffington to come to Duncton, a period of several mole-years, he had become increasingly unwilling to talk about the sacred Holy Burrows to anymole. Yet when Bracken started asking him questions so enthusiastically, he found only pleasure in giving him the answers. His reluctance simply vanished.

“What are they
like?”
asked Bracken. “And do scribemoles still live there?”

“They are on top of a chalk plateau many thousands of molefeet high, which is steep to its north side and gentle to the south. The tunnels are very big and spacious, unlike any tunnels I have seen since elsewhere. It is the most peaceful place I know.”

“But what are the Holy Burrows?”

“A group of burrows in the center of the Uffington system where only moles who have taken certain vows of obedience may live. Fighting is not allowed. Many of the moles there decide to stop talking and live in a silence of contemplation. Those that talk try only to say those things that are essential and truthful.”

“Are they all White Moles?” asked Bracken, fascinated by everything Boswell was saying.

“No, none of them is. There are no White Moles – well, there were once, starting with the first of them all. Linden, the last son of Ballagan and Vervain...”

“Yes. They tell that story in our system, though I’ve only heard it vaguely because it’s one normally only for Longest Night and I was... well... nowhere where stories like that were told on Longest Night.”

So, piece by piece, Boswell told Bracken about Uffington and its lore, learning something about it himself too as he talked, for he had never really thought about it objectively before. He realized that he missed the Holy Burrows, the libraries and some of the moles there, like Skeat, whom he had grown up to know so well; yet he saw, too, how ignorant he had been of the world outside and how many of the scribemoles he had known, for all heir learning and wit, worshiped the Stone through ignorance rather than wisdom. Perhaps Uffington was as much in decline as so many of the systems he had passed through seemed to be. “Why did you leave?” Bracken had asked. And Boswell had told him, describing as best he could the urge he had felt to leave, though not mentioning that it was to Duncton that he had felt directed to come.

He even recited the text he had found hidden in the depths of the libraries, the indirect cause of his breaking his vows and departing for Duncton.

Seven stillstones, seven Books made,

All but one have come to ground.

First, the Stone of Earth for Living

Second, ‘Stone for Suffering mole;

Third of Fighting, born of bloodshed

Fourth of Darkness, born in death;

Fifth for Healing, born through touching

Sixth of pure Light, born of love.

Now we wait on

For the last Stone

Without which the circle gapes

And the Seventh

Lost and last book,

By whose words we may be blessed.

As Boswell was about to recite the second stanza, Bracken interrupted.

“What’s all that mean?” he asked. “Well, it’s obvious, it’s saying that —” “No. I mean, what’s a Stillstone?” It had not occurred to Boswell that he didn’t know such a simple thing.

“There are six of them – well, seven, according to this text – but the ones that are known are somewhere in the Holy Burrows where only the Holy Mole and the masters have seen them. They are Stones that legend says contain the essence of the seven Holy Books, one Stone for each book. I’ve never seen them myself, of course, but they say in Uffington that each one contains a kind of light, like the sun or moon only colored, one for each book. They —”

“How big are they?” interrupted Bracken. He almost whispered it, an extraordinary sense of being carried along on a great wind or flood overtaking him and stilling him to the ground.

“Well, I’ve no idea, since the masters never spoke of them; indeed, it is forbidden to speak to the masters about them. But – well – scribemoles like a chat like anyone else.”

“What are they for, exactly?”

“It’s a good question, and one every newcomer to Uffington asks. The best answer is in the Book of Light, though I can’t remember it well enough to quote exactly. But it explains that each book has a Stone so that by looking at it a reader of the book may be reminded that truth lies not in scribed words but only in the heart that scribed them and the heart that reads them, just as the light lies inside the Stone and not outside it.”

Bracken fell silent. He was thinking of the stone he and Rebecca had found in the Ancient System. He felt at once full of wonder and very frightened. Had it been a Stillstone?
Was
it the Seventh Stillstone? He wished he. could reach out and touch Rebecca now, just as he had then. He wished her paws were round him. He silently begged the Stone to keep her safe, and his paw, the one that had touched the stone in the Ancient System, began to bum and ache. He looked at it, but there was nothing there.

“Probably doesn’t make much sense,” said Boswell, thinking his silence meant incomprehension.

“No,” said Bracken. “I was just thinking.,. I was wondering.... Well, what the Seventh Stone is, the last one, the one in that verse?”

“The Seventh Stone is a Stillstone; it doesn’t have a name. But the last book, the Seventh Book – ah! Well! That’s the question every scribemole in Uffington wants an answer to. No mole knows – it is not written anywhere.”

Boswell fell silent, thinking. Then he said, “Of course, everymole has made guesses – the most popular being that it’s the Book of Love, but I don’t think that’s likely. For one thing, anymole who’s read the Book of Light knows that that’s the one about love, really, which the sacred text confirms; and anyway, love isn’t exactly an easy word to define, is it? It’s not absolute, like fighting or earth, if you see what I mean. No. It’s not love. The other idea in Uffington about the Seventh Stone is that it is simply the Book of the Stone. Makes sense in lots of ways.”

Bracken rubbed his paw, which was still itching. He had the impulse to scratch out the pattern from the stone in the Ancient System on the burrow floor, but some deep instinct told him that much though he wanted to, he must give no mole any clue of what he and Rebecca had seen. It was something they had shared, for some reason he didn’t know, but it would be wrong to the Stone itself to talk about it.

He looked at Boswell and, just as Boswell had felt that his destiny was in some way tied to Bracken, so now in his own turn Bracken sensed that this strange Boswell, so full Of information and knowledge, was a precious mole, a mole to protect; and he understood why the Stone had protected Mm from the certain death that surely went with Ms being crippled, and as he did so he saw, or felt he saw, that in some way the burden of protecting Boswell had somehow passed to him.

As February passed into March and the heavy, bitter gloom of the past long weeks gave way to changeable cold winds and rain, with an odd hour or two of watery sun, Mullion grew increasingly restless.

He had kept very much to himself since they had arrived in the field, not out of any hostility but because the winter months are a time when pasture moles lie still, not having the protection of a wood or its undergrowth overhead. But then, as the weather began to improve, he started burrowing at a shallower level, throwing up a new set of molehills in place of the ones he had created when they first came, and which had now been beaten down into muddy remnants of themselves by the weather.

Occasionally he came over for a chat – principally to try to satisfy his curiosity about Duncton Wood, in whose shadow he had lived through two Longest Nights. Bracken’s monosyllabic answers about it confirmed his belief that the Duncton moles were a silent, secretive lot, prone to keeping things to themselves – a theory he expounded to Boswell one day.

“No doubt about it, Boswell. Those Duncton moles are shifty and dangerous, like what we’ve always been told by our elders. They do strange rituals in that wood of theirs, and weave evil spells. They’d turn a mole into a root as soon as look at him. You wouldn’t get me within a long tunnel’s length of that place.”

Suddenly afraid that Boswell might pass all this on to Bracken who, though younger, had beaten him in a fight, he added: “Mind you, I’ve got nothing against
Bracken
 – look at the way he got us out of that channel! I admire a mole with what my father used to call resources. Know what I mean?”

Boswell did and smiled. Mullion yawned and stretched himself.

“We’ve got to have a talk about where we’re going. Can’t stay here much longer, that’s obvious. I mean, there’s nothing here, is there? Maybe a few moles about somewhere, but I haven’t seen signs of any yet. And anyway, there’s somewhere I want to go to...

Boswell listened, as talking with Bracken had taught him to. Now that Mullion had fattened up, he had lost some of the aggression he had shown when they had first found themselves imprisoned together in the channel and Boswell got on well with him. He was a big mole, as pasture moles generally were, but a little clumsy. Inclined to bump into entrances when he entered burrows and throw out molehill soil a bit too enthusiastically so that it fell in a mess. But he was good-natured with it – which made the objective he had in mind when he had first left the pastures slightly comic.

It seemed there was a story current in the pastures that there was a mole come from the north who now lived in the nearby system of Nuneham, a fighter who taught other moles to fight. No mole knew his name, but the story was that he was not staying in the Nuneham system for long. Several pasture moles had left to join him to see what they could learn, and Mullion, who had been undecided about whether to join them, had changed his mind and set off later on his own.

“Then I came a cropper in the channel and thought that was it. But now, what with spring coming along soon and this being only a temporary place for the winter, I reckon it would be good to see if we could get to the Nuneham system.”

“What you mean is that you want us to go with you because three is safer than one,” said Boswell.

“That’s about it,” Mullion agreed. “Unless you’ve got a better suggestion.”

Boswell knew what he, personally, wanted to do, what he
must
do, but he also realized that Bracken was not yet ready even to think about returning to Duncton. At the same time, Mullion’s story interested him, for (as he explained to Bracken after Mullion had put his plan to him himself) there were many accounts of such wandering fighters in the records of Uffington. Indeed, the Book of Fighting had been written by one of them after he had taken his vows, among them the vow not to fight again.