Duncton Quest (20 page)

For all that, a confident mole in spring travels with excitement as his friend and adventure as his mate, and traditionally finds welcome enough if his approach is right. For males, though tetchy, like to pass the time of day and grouse, while females are happy to talk with strangers who steer clear of their space and nestlings; and all want to find out what news there may be abroad and establish whither a traveller be bound.

At least that’s how it used to be in the southern systems before the plagues and the coming of the grikes, when moles were untroubled by doubts and bitter memories of death and loss.

“But two moles travelling?” declared Tryfan doubtfully one day. “A bit of a problem, Spindle, if we’re to avoid investigation. We’ll need some kind of story to explain what we’re about.” He paused and thought a little before adding, “I suppose I could be a herbalist – even the grikes will have a use for them, and I learnt a lot from my mother Rebecca and my half-brother Comfrey, who is healer still to the Duncton Wood system. You can be my assistant.”

Spindle looked about him uneasily, for they had travelled a good distance since they had left the Blowing Stone a week before, and had come off the chalk on to the clay vales to the north. The vegetation was different from anything he had ever seen. There were all sorts of shoots above ground and roots below which he knew nothing about, while some, like the delicate roots of harebell and the sturdy windings of knapweed, so useful to support tunnels in dry and friable soils, seemed scarce hereabouts and he missed them.

“Well,” he said finally, sounding as positive as he could, “so long as nomole asks me to name the plants I’ll get by, and I can learn their properties soon enough.”

Their alibi, however, was not to be tested quite yet, for it seemed sensible to Tryfan that once clear of Uffington and the possibility of pursuit they should rest in some deserted place, where they could enjoy the advance of spring, recover from the sudden flight from Uffington, build up their strength, and take advantage of swifter journeying once the warm dry weather of late April came. By then, too, mated moles would not be aggressive, and crossing their territory less of a problem.

No records exist of the place the two moles stayed, though many systems north of Uffington have been anxious to claim the honour to themselves.

Some say it was in the wetlands of the Lyford system, others that it was further west at Charney, birthplace of Skeat, one of the Holy Moles Boswell knew. A few believe that Tryfan travelled further north than that, given special swiftness by the Stone’s grace, and was at or near no less a system than Pusey, ancient and good.

But scholars ever wish to travel over the barren ground of surmise and make of life a guessing game. For moles who seek the silent centre of Tryfan’s life it is enough to know that they found a goodly place, worm-rich and quiet, empty of other moles because of the plague, and there lived out the remaining weeks of March and the first half of April until the warmer days of early summer came.

They learnt to live in harmony with one another. Freed of the self-imposed tasks they had had before and able to make their days their own, they had the space to come to terms with the grim moleyears they had each, in their own way, lived through. Spindle put on weight, though never in his legs, which remained as elongated and thin as ever. At least he did not look quite so hunted and pathetic as when Tryfan had first seen him.

Tryfan aged a little and gained the authority that always comes when a mole leaves another he has relied on, and learns that he must go out into the world, taking responsibility for his own place in it, and perhaps for others too.

Certainly in those molemonths Tryfan himself seemed to grow stronger and more impressive, his coat a glossy dark now and his snout mature and purposeful. He had, though he was not aware of it, an air of calm – the calm that came with the faith that had been his inheritance from Duncton Wood, and which Boswell had nurtured so well in him.

Nomole knows now how much Tryfan suffered from the loss of Boswell, but Spindle sensed it and was careful to help the young scribemole all he could – checking tunnels, worm-finding, clearing and maintaining; and by being quiet in those long periods when Tryfan wished to meditate and do those rituals which scribemoles must.

The two moles shared a communal burrow and came together there to eat and talk quietly of the day’s doings. It was Tryfan’s habit to start their meals with a grace, such as scribemoles normally speak, and he would vary them according to his mood.

Some days, when he was cast down by the loss of Boswell and worried for him, he might say the grace his father Bracken taught him:

Be with us, Stone, at the start of our feast

Be with us, Stone, at the close of our meal.

Let nomole adown our bodies

That may hurt our sorrowing souls,

Oh nomole adown our bodies

That may hurt our sorrowing souls.

Yet as spring progressed and summer came upon them, whatever crises Tryfan was passing through seemed to be over and he began to speak more positively of the future, and to invoke gladness and joy in graces that, later, Spindle remembered with love, and himself used on occasion:

Give us, O stone, with the morning meal

Health to the body, joy to the soul

Give us, O Stone, of the final worm

Enough for our need in the silence of sleep

To the greedy, too much

To the austere, good humour

To the wasteful, no second chance

To the unloved, thy love

That all may eat and be well blessed.

What Spindle did not yet see, or rather comprehend, was the weariness that was with Tryfan at times in consequence of the burden he felt Boswell had put upon him – a burden to quest for something he did not really understand: a quest for Silence, a quest to prepare the ground for a mole or moles that were coming and would bring the wonder of that great Silence to allmole.

What Spindle did know, however, was that at times Tryfan was troubled in sleep, tossing and turning and mumbling about a white light he had seen and which was on him, over him, and Boswell was lost in it and needed help. At other times, Spindle knew, his talons thrashed this way and that, seeking to cast off from him some burden too great for a mole to bear. Sometimes then, in those dreams, he called Boswell’s name, and sometimes tears were there, and then Spindle suffered too, his brow furrowed in distress, watching over Tryfan though never afterwards saying anything.

It has to be said too that Spindle, cleric though he was, and scholarly though his nature, had, through the moles he had known at Seven Barrows and from his master Brevis, learnt something more of the world than Tryfan had been able to while in the company of Boswell. So Spindle, inexperienced though he was, knew that spring was a time for mating, and if sometimes Tryfan was out of sorts and irritable it might have to do with the lack of female company; indeed the lack of
any
company but his own and Spindle’s. As for Spindle, now that the Stone had sent him from Uffington and since he had taken no strict vows as Tryfan had, he saw no good reason why a bit of consorting and canoodling might not, of a young summer’s evening, be in order, and good order too. So...

“Whither shall we be bound when we leave?” Spindle began to ask in mid-April, when the birds of hedge and copse were busy with their nestlings, and the ground was alive with the green growth of plants.

“I know not,” said Tryfan, “but the Stone will guide me.”

“When?” asked Spindle impatiently.

“I cannot know that. But soon now, very soon. Are you restless of this place?”

“Yes,” said Spindle simply. “Not exactly full of moles is it? Bit on the solitary side. Not much life, if you know what I mean.”

“Have you been bored, Spindle?”

“No, only lately. When the cold side of spring is over and the early summer sun starts lighting up the entrances once more, and other creatures are about, then a mole wants to busy himself and say hello.”

Tryfan laughed.

“Does he?” he said.

“Or she!” said Spindle with a sideways glance.

“She?” said Tryfan frowning.

“Well... yes. I didn’t expect to mate after Longest Night, nomole to mate with. And now I’m your companion I don’t suppose there’ll be time for that sort of thing even if the season is right. But I wouldn’t mind saying hello to a female or two!”

Tryfan looked at Spindle’s thin fur and awkward paws, and the way his eyes were both humble and intelligent, and declared in some surprise that “the thought never crossed my mind.”

“Ah well, Tryfan, you’re a scribemole, aren’t you? And celibate. Mind you, I’m not saying the thought might not cross your mind, but not quite the thing, is it? Not that the moles in Uffington were perfect in that respect. There was always a bit of wandering down to Seven Barrows in January and who’s to say what goes on in tunnels in deep winter, or from where a litter comes? Not me! Suspiciously intelligent some litters in Seven Barrows were, considering that the local males themselves were never famous for their quick wits and repartee! Thick as lobworms, in fact. Why, some say that I myself might well have been fathered by a scribemole!” Having announced which he fell silent, blinked, and then looked rather smug.

Tryfan stared at him for some time, and finally said, a little stiffly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Spindle.”

Spindle laughed and then stopped suddenly.

“Not yet you don’t, but you will!”

“H’m,” said Tryfan and went off in a most un-scribemole-like huff to meditate, except that the thoughts he had were too confused and mixed up to be called contemplative.

Females? He hadn’t thought about them until now. Other moles? Society? Mixing? Tryfan wished his mind were his own but sometimes it did not behave as if it was, and the thoughts of the Stone he wished to have were not there.

It’s time we got on with the journey, he said to himself eventually, and from the way he suddenly felt light-hearted, and the sudden singing of the birds and warming of the sun, and the exciting sense that beyond this forgotten place where they had been staying awhile there was a whole world to explore whose excitements and challenges were barely known... from all this, Tryfan might reasonably say, as he did to Spindle, that the Stone was telling him at last it was time to move on and that in a few days they would go.

The night before their departure the two moles crouched on the surface in the darkness and watched the moon rise and light up the vales over which, in the days and weeks to come, they would travel.

“Is it true a scribemole like you can read the ways of the Stone?” asked Spindle, staring out into the darkness and wondering about the world beyond them.

“Anymole can, it’s just that I’ve been taught how to be still enough to do so easily.”

“Well I couldn’t!” said Spindle.

“You could more easily than you think! You could scribe as well come to that. It’s just that moles like to make a mystery of things, and then they can’t do them.”

Spindle’s eyes lit up. “Now there’s a dream, to scribe like a scribemole! I know what
I’d
scribe.”

“What?”

“History, that’s what. What happened in moledom, when and why. Very interesting that, to scribe the things that moles say happened and then work out if they really did happen that way! Differences you see, the accounts all have differences. So where does the truth lie, Tryfan?”

“In moles’ hearts I should think,” said Tryfan. Then he said nothing for a while, for history did not much interest him; it was the now that Boswell had taught him to take notice of. He tried to relax and feel the vibrations of the Stones near and far, a pattern of feelings that Boswell had taken pains to teach him. But it was hard at first because the power of nearby Uffington and the Blowing Stone was so strong, and made stronger on this line because beyond them was the great Avebury system whose stones are famed over moledom.

“I don’t know anything about the systems beyond Uffington, except a few names,” said Spindle a little wistfully.

“I know them only from other moles who have travelled, as my parents did, and as Boswell has,” replied Tryfan.

“Make a tale of what you know then,” said Spindle, for he was a mole who liked to talk on a clear night, and would himself make a tale of anything.