Duncton Wood (68 page)

“Did she tell you all that? Well, it’s true enough, though it seems so removed from
me
now that I sometimes think all that happened to two other moles. You can’t go backward, Boswell.”

Ostensibly they went to find out what the food supply would be like in the ancient tunnels, but having quickly established that it was no better there than anywhere else, the journey became a tour of the system conducted by Bracken for Boswell’s benefit.

They stayed there for three days, and in that time Boswell learned more about Bracken than he had ever known before. They went over to the cliff edge where Bracken had first entered the system; they traveled down the communal tunnel toward the center of the system; and they entered tunnel after tunnel and poked their snouts into many burrows even Bracken had not seen before.

Bracken spoke simply about the past, speaking almost as if it were a different mole he was talking about, but describing all the fears and excitements of the original exploration.

“Really, when it comes down to it, there isn’t much to see. It’s a deserted system, that’s all, with just the central part having any great interest... perhaps I’ll show it to you before we go back to the main system,” Bracken said mischievously, for he could see Boswell’s excitement at everything they saw – and, indeed, it rubbed off onto him.

So, when they finally reached the Chamber of Dark Sound, they were both equally excited, and ran down the final length of tunnel toward the echoes like a couple of youngsters. Boswell noticed that Bracken’s old good humor had come back – away from the main system he seemed more relaxed. Perhaps at heart he was a solitary mole, perhaps that was what was wrong – he could never be solitary in Barrow Vale.

The chamber was the same, except that the entrance to the tunnel to the most central part of the system had fallen in where Mandrake had destroyed it, and the half-buried bones of the henchmoles killed in the fall remained among the soil and rubbish. There was a way through, however, dug out no doubt by Mandrake in the time he lived in the tunnels alone.

The atmosphere, which had been dark and dangerous when Bracken first came there, was somehow lighter and more neutral. Bracken did not feel nervous about it, and dispassionately showed Boswell the embossed walls, whose patterns still gyrated and wound across its surface, changing into heavier, deeper patterns nearer and nearer the center where the owl face, still threatening, hung. How had he ever been afraid of it all!

“You know what I found out?” said Bracken, finding it strange to talk normally in this once-terrifying place. “If you hum in a certain way, you get sounds back.” He was about to show how when Boswell suddenly looked warningly at him, raised a paw and said quietly: “Be careful. Bracken. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Bracken began to protest but, as sometimes happened, there was a quality of fierceness to Boswell’s expression that made him hold back his words. His mouth opened and then shut, and it was Boswell who spoke.

“This wall is the work of long generations of graced moles. It is a wall of hope and warning and it is true that by humming in a certain way, something you have stumbled upon, you may get some of the power from its ancient script. There is a wall like this in Uffington, as there is one in each of the seven chosen systems. They are not to be played with and are traditionally guarded by a mole not only great in body, but wise in spirit as well. It was said that such a guard never left his place, which is at the center of the wall, whatever calamity befell.”

Bracken remembered then the mole skeleton that had so frightened him in the entrance in the center of the wall, the seventh entrance. So that had been the guard, and some calamity had befallen the ancient system. Yet he had stayed. Something of the awe that Bracken had once felt was returning in the face of Boswell’s transformation beneath the wall from follower to aide to teacher.

“What is the wall for, then?” asked Bracken rather humbly.

“It protects the most holy part of the system, the system beyond that entrance. Its shapes carry the voices of the moles of the past and the proper way to approach it is with a chant in the old language, which all scribemoles should know, though these days, alas, many do not know it well enough. If I were still a scribemole and bound by my vows, I would not be able to tell of this, or let you hear the language. But now, Bracken, I am beginning to see that the Stone works its wisdom in ways we cannot understand, and I think it has made me free so that you, who carry so much... may hear the proper sound of the wall.”

“What do you mean ‘carry so much’?” asked Bracken.

Boswell was getting sterner and stranger by the second, and Bracken felt almost intimidated. “We didn’t meet by accident. Bracken – surely you know that. You have a destiny I do not understand. But I know it is so. And the Stone had blessed me to help you fulfill it. Rebecca... the Seventh Stillstone which... you were so unwilling to talk about... the shadows that have fallen and continue to fall on the Duncton system... they are all a part of it. Every system seems to be in disarray – Nuneham, the pastures, Duncton, and many that I passed through when I came here. No mole trusts the Stone; no mole trusts himself. Fear is written on every face.” It was written on Bracken’s as he listened to Boswell. Who was he? What did the Stone want of him?

Bracken began to shake with fear, for as Boswell spoke, his voice seemed to grow louder and more sonorous and his very language changed as word by word it slid into the old language, which Bracken could not understand. Sounds hard; sounds mellifluous; sounds mysterious. Yet he did understand that there was worse than warning in Boswell’s words and that Boswell was more than mole... Boswell turned to the wall and his voice became a chant, in the language of the old moles, and it began to echo and reverberate a thousand times more powerfully than when Bracken had first discovered the effect a hum could have.

The stait of mole dois change and vary

Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary

Now dansand mery, now like to dee

Our plesance heir is all vaneglory;

This fals world is bot transitory

The flesh is brukle the dark is sle

We that in heill wes, and gladnes

Are trublit now with gret seiknes

And feblit with infermite...

As he chanted these ancient words, few of which Bracken could understand, it was as if the wall echoed back the actual chant of ancient moles, powerful moles, and dark sound began to come at Bracken, louder and louder, so that he wanted to run from it. But whichever way he turned, however he tried to escape, it came louder at him, surrounding him in its catastrophe, running at him from every tunnel in the Ancient System, a storm of sound.

As he began to cry out for the terror of it, he thought only of himself and could not know that its echoes and reverberations traveled far beyond the chamber they were in, down the tunnels, booming and vibrating up to the surface, encircling and then issuing from the Stone itself, and then out over the slopes, down toward Barrow Vale, a sound of disaster.

Mekkins heard it, stopping in midsentence down in the Marsh End, shaking his head in puzzlement, then running to the surface and snouting up toward the distant Stone from where the deep chant of ancient moles seemed to be coming.

Comfrey heard it, in the shade of the wood’s edge where he vainly sought herbs long since killed by the drought, and he turned toward the hill, the name Rebecca forming helplessly in his mouth as fear filled him and he sought the comfort her name always gave him.

Rebecca heard it, down in her burrows, and she knew that what it was they had been waiting for for so long, for generations, perhaps before any of them had been born, had come.

Stonecrop heard it and mole after mole, like him, stopped what they were doing and paused fearfully, as the sound from the Stone came down to them like thunder through the trees.

“Stop!” cried Bracken to Boswell. “Stop the sound!” he shouted, turning this way and that in his desperation. And Boswell’s voice began to soften and change back, his words still thundering but no longer echoing with dark sound, as Bracken heard him say “You argue with Stone-crop, you argue with Rebecca, you argue with yourself. All of you argue, but now the time is coming when you must listen to the Stone. Now the last shadow is falling.”

Bracken stared at Boswell and saw that he too was shaking, sweating and afraid himself. He seemed possessed by some power that only reluctantly let him go and Bracken called again to him, no longer in fear, but in pity and compassion for them all.

The last shadow had fallen. The last shadow? It was with this mysterious knowledge hanging over them, and not knowing what it meant, that Bracken finally led Boswell – both of them very subdued – through the seventh entrance and on to the central core.

In this moment of long-awaited arrival at the heart of Duncton Boswell said. nothing, for he felt the dread of a threat outside the ancient tunnels far more than the promise and excitement of finding the Seventh Book, or clues to it, within them. But they pressed on. Bracken leading them quickly to one of the entrances into the Chamber of Echoes, and from there, without faltering once, through the complex labyrinths where the echoes played among the chalky walls and on to the edge of the Chamber of Roots.

There they stopped and looked at the sinews and shadows of the roots massing before them, seeming utterly still for once, but even then sounding the whine and shrill of the subtlest of shiftings from some deep crevice or high cleft as the roots responded to the stresses of the trees. The drought extended even down there, for the air was dry and the root sounds were tauter and higher-pitched.

“The buried part of the Stone is beyond the roots,” said Bracken, pointing half-heartedly at them, “and since we’re here, we might as well try to get through. But... well, you’ll see.”

Bracken led slowly off among the roots, taking care to mark the ground from the beginning so that they could find their way out. But, as he expected, they did not get more than a few moleyards beyond the first of the roots before the lethargy and loss of purpose that had affected him before struck them both. A voice kept saying to each of them “What’s the point?” and “You know you can’t get through, it’s too far” until they seemed to veer off the course Bracken was trying to lead them on, round and round, and out again, back to the edge.

“You see what I mean?” said Bracken. “I was only able to get through there with Rebecca. We just went straight through without any confusion at all. But if you want to get to the Stillstone, that’s where you’ll have to find a way through, Boswell.”

Boswell was not really listening. He was uncomfortable and restless, feeling that something was nagging at him from behind, a looming shadow he could not quite make out.

Bracken said, “Come on, I’ll get you out. Another time... I’ll bring you here again. Anyway, there are things to do. I’ll tell Stonecrop he can bring what moles he likes into the ancient tunnels. I’ll go and see Rebecca. It will be all right, Boswell.”

He saw that the things he must do were really quite simple, and as he did so, felt relieved and clear-headed. He might even have felt light-hearted but for the oppression of the drought and the feeling that Boswell, who was now so silent, was full of fear or dread.

He took them out by his own series of tunnels that led over toward the wood’s edge, describing to Boswell how he had escaped through them with Violet. They found a little food there, but ate it quickly because they wanted to get back onto the surface and down the slopes to the main system. When they did, they found the air was still as dry as bone.

“It’s just the same as it was!” said Bracken with relief, as if he had expected the whole wood to have disappeared. “That place can leave a mole full of fears! Nice to be out again!” He tried to be as positive and as cheerful as possible, but Boswell did not react.

“I can’t see what you’re so miserable about,” said Bracken, exasperated. “There’s nothing wrong – except the heat.”

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