Duncton Quest (119 page)

“Seeking healing,” said Spindle.

“May the Stone protect you!” she replied. “
He
looks as if he was in a fight and a half!”

“He was,” growled Tryfan. “Thy name, mole?”

He spoke with his old authority and she answered him straight: “Rampion is my name and I am not ashamed of my faith in the Stone.”

“Then, Rampion, an injured and tired mole would hear you say a prayer for him at the Stones.”

“I’ll be glad to!” she said. Which she did, gracefully and well. When she had finished she asked them whither they were bound.

“Duncton Wood,” said Tryfan. At which Rampion sighed a little sadly, for only outcasts went there now. Yet she smiled finally and said, “If you get there, say a prayer at its famous Stone for me.”

“I shall, Rampion,” said Tryfan, and he touched her momentarily and she gasped for she felt she had been blessed. Then she was gone and Tryfan said with sudden energy, “Come, Spindle, come!”

“Well,” declared Spindle, “so all it took was a young female to rouse you out of your pains and miseries!”

Tryfan had the grace to smile.

“Did you not recognise that ‘young female’?” he said.

Spindle shook his head.

“We met her here in Rollright once before. She is the daughter of Holm and Lorren.”

“I thought there was something about her,” said Spindle. “You may have the worse sight of us two now, but you’ve the better memory for moles. I’m better at facts. But Holm might help us, Tryfan. Could we not visit him?”

“I’m sure he would help, but too many moles have followed me to disaster for me to ever want to lead any more. So come, before Rampion tells her parents of the moles she met by the Stoats and they start wondering. Holm may be silent but he’s nomole’s fool. Come! That mole’s prayer stirred me and I am impatient at last to get home.”

Tryfan’s concern was not entirely misplaced. Some days after her meeting with them at the Stoats, Rampion found herself back at the burrow where she had been reared as a pup, though she rarely went there since she had left her birth burrow the previous summer.

But at Longest Night, making her trek to the Stoats for a vigil, she had been one of the many who had seen the eastern star. Crouched there in awe, she had found herself bathed in its light and seen not far off her mother Lorren and Holm, her father, whom she loved.

That night Holm had, as was his habit, said very little, but Lorren, her eyes full of joy, had expressed their pleasure to see Rampion again, and asked after her siblings, also long gone from the burrow.

But they were not there, and so it was only to Rampion that Lorren was able to suggest that she returned to their burrow before too much of January had passed, and certainly before mating time came and moles kept to their territories and avoided trespassing even where they had been born. Rampion, pleased to see her grubby parents once again, said she would, yes she would.

But somehow young adults say such things and forget about them, as if going home is going back too far, and life should be ahead, away, always away from the birth burrow. But soon after meeting the strangers near the Stoats, and somewhat in awe of the way the scarred one had touched her, she found that her paws led her back by the old familiar ways to the tunnels of her birth.

“Well, and this is a surprise!” said Lorren, dusting herself and trying to smarten Holm up a bit. “Rampion no less, and we gave up any
hope you’d
come. Better things to do I said!”

“I just thought that it would be nice,” began Rampion rather lamely, “to see you both again.”

Holm gazed at her in the way he had: a small mole, with wide eyes and an alert look, who knew more than he ever said. “Shy” should have been his other name.

“Glad, to see you, I am,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Rampion, pleased nearly to tears.

As Lorren chattered on with many an apology for the mess and the lack of good worms, and this and that, Holm just stared until at last there was a gap in the conversation and he felt able to touch his daughter tenderly and ask, “What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” said Rampion settling down and shaking her head too much. “Nothing.”

Holm stared some more and Rampion said, “I saw something so sad by the Stoats. I met two moles and one of them was so
hurt
.” Then she told them and they listened and then Holm got her to describe them and he looked very serious.

“Tryfan,” said Holm. “And Spindle maybe.”

“But they went to Whern and surely died,” said Lorren. “Such a long time ago and no news except stories of killing. They must be dead by now.”

But Holm shook his head.

“That was Tryfan,” he said again with confidence.

That same day Holm ventured up to the Stoats, going his own secret way, for he had been Mayweed’s companion once and he and that great mole knew more than most about route-finding. Holm felt sad, and knew that if it had been Tryfan something was wrong that he had not come to greet them. Some great hurt had been done him, as Rampion had suggested. Holm went to the Stoats and there he stayed for all that day, wondering. He snouted towards the south, where Duncton lay, and he asked that the Stone tell him what to do. He had seen that star, and he believed that the Stone Mole was coming. He had heard Tryfan’s own teaching, and he listened to the Stone.

It told him to be still, and to wait, and to trust. Tryfan would have come to them if he needed them, Tryfan
would.

So Holm made his way back to Lorren and when Lorren talked he told her what he believed, and that he was afraid.

“Why, Holm, that’s a lot for you to say!” said Lorren going close to him reassuringly. Sometimes she liked to show she loved him. Small and grubby though he was, she had never looked at another mole in all her life. He was hers and would always be so.

“But there’s two things I’d like to do, but
you
know that!” she declared.

Holm nodded and grinned. One thing was to go back to

Duncton Wood’s Marsh End near where she had been raised and find a really comfortable muddy tunnel; and the other was for Lorren to meet Starling and Bailey once again because both were alive, they
were.
His Lorren would rather die than think they were not.

Holm sighed.

Lorren grinned and cuddled him.

“You believe it’ll happen one day, don’t you?”

Holm nodded his head vigorously.

“And Mayweed will come back,” he said, scratching his muddy flank.

“One day...” said Lorren, and they both thought of a star they had seen and the sense of hope they felt. One day....

Tryfan and Spindle reached the cow cross-under back into Duncton Wood a little after mid-January, at much the same time as Skint and Smithills said farewell to Beechenhill.

They had both been so tired in the latter part of the journey that they had felt little fear or even curiosity about what lay ahead in Duncton Wood. But when their route brought them alongside the roaring owl way that ran by the system’s south eastern flank, and they began to be stopped by grike patrols and asked whither they were bound, the fear set in.

The guardmoles were heavy on the ground, and it seemed they had been deployed to watch more than just the main cross-under ahead. Though Tryfan said nothing, Spindle remembered him describing ways out of the system along the drainage pipes through the roaring owl way, though the routes were of great difficulty and danger if guarded on the other side.

It seemed that this was what was in the minds of the grikes now, and Spindle and Tryfan saw evidence of punishment and even snouting along the way, and were told – warned, more like – that that was what happened to moles who tried to escape Duncton.

“They know that,” a grike told them, “but conditions are bad in there at times and maybe they prefer to chance their paw out here than stay inside where henchmoles of the leaders kill them.”

“But what for?” asked Spindle, but got no satisfactory reply. Was Duncton
such
a grim place to live in that moles risked death to leave it? It seemed so.

Except that he noticed one strange thing. The snouted moles they saw along the way were all females.

Once they knew that the two moles intended to outcast themselves into Duncton, the grikes were surprisingly friendly to Spindle and Tryfan, though in a dismissive superior kind of way. They preferred not to come too close, perhaps because of the risk of disease, and no names were asked. Tryfan and Spindle did not risk trying to find out if the grikes knew their names or if they had heard such moles might try to enter these parts, but anyway nomole could have suspected the limping and scarred mole that passed through their lines was the Tryfan who had once been the leader of the Duncton moles.