Duncton Quest (94 page)

“Mayweed is grateful to Heath for waiting, Mayweed is tired, very; Mayweed is moved, very; Mayweed thanks Heath because this is not a time Mayweed wishes to be alone. Mayweed is very tired. He is.” And with that Mayweed settled down, and with a devotion and care astonishing for him Heath stayed exactly where he was, hungry and restless though he felt. While from out of those tunnels, over the sleeping form of Mayweed, came tired and restless sounds of moles from old to youngster, from youngster to newborn.

Mayweed awoke in the afternoon, ate, and slept once more. Not until the following dawn did he say, “Mayweed must return now to the westside and tell Tryfan what he has seen and touched and heard. Mayweed may have found, with Heath’s help, what it was that Tryfan of Duncton was sent here to find. Mayweed must make his report.”

But as they went up to the surface a heavy vibration suddenly ran through the tunnels, which stopped and then started again. Mayweed paused.

“Twofoots,” said Heath,’
and
yellow roaring owls.”

“Handsome Heath will explain to Mayweed now,” said Mayweed.

“North of here, saw them myself, last summer, huge roaring owls all yellow and with twofoots, big ones. Crunch in the gravel, splodge in the mud.”

“What mud, what gravel? Explain, dauntless Sir!” demanded Mayweed impatiently.

Since words seemed inadequate, Heath showed him, though it took them a good time to get there travelling north. A huge area laid waste, the grass all gone, gravel spread, and mud. A roaring owl, huge and yellow and with pale gazing eyes, and the cries of twofoots. The two moles peered about a bit before Heath said, “They’re nearer than they were last summer. Coming in this direction.”

“Mayweed wonders if Heath can surmise what all this is about,” said Mayweed.

“Bloody obvious, mate. It’s a roaring owl way, or will be. Twofoots make them, roaring owls use them. They all go into the Wen don’t they? This one will as well. These yellow ones come and pup ones all colours. Must do.”

“And you think this way will go straight over the tunnels I’ve got to tell Tryfan about?”

“Over, through, one day. Won’t be any of those old tunnels left at all. Though the rate they’re moving Heath here feels that there’s a couple of summers to go before they clear him out of the way. By then, what with Starling making her demands and one thing and the next, Heath will be so knackered that Heath won’t care much.”

Mayweed laughed appreciatively.

“Heath Sir, you are making Mayweed laugh by speaking like him; Mayweed prefers you not to do it, Mayweed’s sides will ache.”

Heath grinned.

“You know what I missed all those years I’ve been alone? A laugh. That’s what a mole’s usually missing when he feels he’s missing something but doesn’t quite know what: a bloody good laugh.”

“Humble Mayweed, who is more of an explorer and route-finder than anything else, will think hard and come up with a joke for Heath so that when he is alone he can tell it to himself and laugh. That will be Mayweed’s gift to Heath for the tunnels he has helped him find.”

Heath looked quite touched, and said rather gruffly, “Come off it, you silly bugger, you don’t have to think of a joke to make me laugh or smile. You’re one of life’s naturals as it is. Now let’s get you back to Tryfan.”

Tryfan was only too glad to hear Mayweed’s news, and willing enough to come with him since Squail assured him that “Yf povre Feverfewe (blessid may she bee) yaf nat ypuppe by none wil nat pup thise day springe afore.”

“Brilliant Sir,” said Mayweed, “what did the cronish Madam say?”

“We’ve to be back by dawn. Feverfew will not pup before then.”

“Then, harried Sir, Mayweed will take you to see what he has found, and will guide you back again before day breaks. Later on, perhaps, you will have more time on your paws and you and scholarly Spindle may return to look at those strange tunnels and chambers again.”

But scholarly Spindle, who had an unerring sense of when he should be at Tryfan’s side, appeared just then and, learning where they were off to, joined them.

It was just as the afternoon sun began to thin and glance weakly across the grass of the eastside an hour or so before disappearing over the brow of the west, that the three moles descended into the tunnels Mayweed had found.

“With respect, expectatious Sirs both, I suggest you stay near me and avoid wandering. These tunnels are deceptive, very, and in my modest judgement were made by a mole wise and clever who wished to disorientate and misdirect prying snouts without harming them. Let me demonstrate. Now where, towering Tryfan, do you imagine we go from here?”

After a steady plod along an old tunnel they had reached an intersection of three routes.

“This one,” said Tryfan confidently, pointing at the tunnel that continued the way they had been going and slanted downwards. “You can hear it goes deeper and these other two carry surface noise and must go up.”

Mayweed, grinning, went the way Tryfan suggested, and in moments, as it seemed, they were back on the surface and decidedly confused.

“Worse is to come, deluded leader,” said Mayweed. “Try going back the way you’ve come.”

Which Tryfan tried, only to find himself, after a very confusing run, underground somewhere quite different to where they had been before.

“Mayweed has made his point,” said Mayweed, “abject though he is. Mayweed has a feeling that his entire life has been a preparation for these very tunnels here, and, as he has already recently observed to that unkempt mole Heath, lost he doesn’t get. But that requires skill and concentration so if your splendidnesses could refrain from talking he will attempt to get us back to where we began before Tryfan offered us this exploratory parenthesis.”

Which he was forced to do by taking them back to the surface and starting the descent from where they first began all over again. But once down they travelled quickly enough, using marks which he had left from his previous journey.

The tunnels were dry and dusty, and here and there had fallen in, but then they deepened and were untouched. The echoes in them were strong and very confusing, making it seem that there were moles ahead coming towards them, and moles behind running away.

Then they came to a chamber, lit gloomily from a shaft, and they could see scribings on its walls. In places they were thick, in others there were none; altogether it looked as if the chamber was in some way incomplete, as if the scribemole making the marks had not finished his work.

“Try them, Tryfan Sir,” said Mayweed.

Tryfan reached up a taloned paw and touched the scribings lightly. A strange confusion of sounds came, like a hubbub of moles, as if all were talking but one was trying to be heard most of all. The sounds stopped as the scribing stopped, and Tryfan went to another on the same side of the chamber. They heard the sound of muttering and mumbling, a solitary mole. They might almost have fancied that he was behind them, and Spindle even looked around nervously in the gloom as if expecting to see him there.

The sound receded and they moved on, coming soon to a second chamber, the same size as the first. Once again the walls were scribed only in part, and Tryfan touched the first one he reached. Again an old mole’s voice, and still unclear, calling; then another scribing and another voice, but old again. Unformed.

Spindle touched the first scribing Tryfan had sounded and though the sound that came out from it was similar it was not quite the same; nor was the second when Spindle touched it.

“It seems to me that whatever mole made these was trying different scribings out,” said Spindle.

Mayweed, nodding his head eagerly, looked at Tryfan for confirmation of this.

“Or perhaps he was searching for something,” said Tryfan. “Do these chambers go on a long way, Mayweed?”

“Inquisitive Sir, they do. They branch off. They split and they divide. There are some deeper, perhaps, more than limited me has found. And I can save you time and energy by telling you this: they become more complex, the sounds become more distinct, and they become more absorbing.”

“Is there a pattern to them?”

“Mayweed is not sure. The tunnels become younger, if Mayweed can put it like that. From old mole voices to youngster voices, and then on to pups.”

“Take us there then,” said Tryfan, “for we can’t stay here too long. I want to get back to Feverfew by dawn.”

They travelled on, but were waylaid sometimes as the chambers grew ever more completed and rich. In some, they discovered that Dunbar – they assumed it was him – seemed to have tried to carry the theme of age to youth in a single chamber so that a mole, by touching the scribings in a spiral around the chamber’s side from the roof to the floor, could bring forth sounds of ever-increasing youth. The scribings did not work the other way, from floor to roof, sounding only harsh and conflicting when they tried it. Which was strange since moles start young and grow old. What was Dunbar trying to describe or achieve with these scribings?

In some burrows it seemed that Dunbar had worked on scribings for a particular age range, as if trying to find the perfect expression in sound which he might then have intended to incorporate with other such developed sounds into a completed chamber.

So they continued as night fell and the tunnels became lit by the lights of the Wen reflecting in the sky above, and the chambers and tunnels echoed with its rumbly nightsounds.

It became clear that their early guess that Dunbar had been experimenting with sound-scribings was correct, and that he seemed obsessed with the passage of age to youth. But why? They could not tell.

There had come over them all a kind of urgent fascination, as if they had to find the answer to that question, or at least find something, before they left. So they searched on into the night without rest, sounding walls continuously until by the gentlest touch they could tell it was “just” another wall of try-outs. While Tryfan and Spindle were sounding and listening, Mayweed was searching and, gradually, leading them to tunnels where the sounds were becoming clearer, as if the voices of the moles enscribed were becoming more individual. Which they were, for gradually at least one voice emerged, which was clearest of all in the more aged versions though uncertain in the younger. Dunbar’s voice perhaps? A mole in search of what he was before?

At the same time, as they travelled on, they found evidence that Dunbar, if it had been he, had aged as he made these great lost works. The scribings were no longer as high up the walls as they had been, and the talons were rougher, and the scribings less deep. The style changed as well, becoming freer and without the detail of the earlier chambers. Yet the sounds improved, as if Dunbar was beginning to find the very essence of what he wanted.

Still they were only voices sounding: not song, not spoken words. Nor was there any Dark Sound, as Tryfan understood it, which is to say sounds that wither a mole’s heart. The sounds they found were all good, all searching, all light.

“Perhaps he was searching for the sound of Silence,” Spindle surmised, “though I wouldn’t have thought that was a sound moles made!”

“Or perhaps these scribings are part of his prophecies, that the Stone Mole is coming and so on,” said Tryfan thoughtfully.