Authors: William Horwood

Tags: #Fantasy

Duncton Rising (77 page)

“Would one of you enlighten us?” said Weeth.

“Well,” said Privet, “I had thought stomping the bounds was a tradition of Longest Night, but —”

“That’s right, it is,” said the mole. “To demarcate a mole’s territory prior to joining with the community and celebrating Longest Night.”

“But tonight is not Longest Night,” said Weeth.

“I know that,” said the mole testily, “it was three nights ago. But since the weather was poorly, and I felt ill, and there was no mole about to know, I had an amicable talk with the Stone and decided to delay matters for a few days until I felt better. I cannot say I feel perfect now, indeed I feel somewhat restless and uneasy.”

To his surprise several of them nodded vehemently.

“Ah! You seem to know what I mean! It’s not just me then. A very strange night this, cold and getting colder and I should be aburrow, but I can’t sleep a wink. I thought I might divert myself somewhat from my unease by singing the stomping song and getting on with things. Naturally I had not expected to meet moles
here,
but life never ceases to amaze me. It is usually we who are dull, not life. But We do not generally start talking in earnest until after this part of the evening is done. I assume from the fact that you talk civilly and do not talon me into the ground and then act the inquisitor that you are not Newborns? So... I have asked you if you wish to be within or without. If without, then I stomp
that
side of you and go on my way. If within, I stomp on the far side of you and on we go together, singing the song, bashing the ground with our paws and generally getting into the spirit of things whilst we complete the tour of the system’s bounds and all head back to the centre.”

“The custom died out in most places as bigger communities formed and the bounds grew too large,” said Privet in her old, scholarly way. Being “within” means we are within the bounds of the Stone.”

“Is there a Stone here?” asked Whillan.

“Well, now, that’s an interesting question to which there is no clear answer,” replied the mole. “There is a Stone, in a manner of speaking, and the erudite madam here is quite right: I am stomping to define its boundary of influence. However, the Stone itself is something of a disappointment, as you will soon see if you join me. Enough of talk. There is as much difference between talking about customs and doing them as between night and day... Now, are you...?”

“Within!” declared Maple. “Eh, Rooster?”

“Within!” said Rooster, giving the ground a mighty thump.

“Within!” said Whillan with unfeigned pleasure and relief Whatever it was they must do, he felt this would get them nearer to it.

“That’s settled then,” said their host, “off we go! We had got to, ‘Rise to adore...’”

With that, and much muttering and laughter as they struggled to get into the rhythm of the thing, the four moles followed their new-found leader backwards in the stomp. “Rise to adore (bang!) the mystery of the Stone (bang! thump!), Which waits now to hear (bang!) your voice join mine (bang!). Hark to its call (bang! thump! bang!), sing out...”

As they set off, quickly getting into the routine of the stomp, the moon rose higher still, but from the eastern horizon clouds began to loom, while above them a rough wind worried at the trees. But soon all reservations and concerns were cast aside. It was a dance of movement, of song, of merriment and of laughter, and the fact there were no more moles to be within or without mattered not one bit, for here all the good feelings of moledom were suddenly free to flow.

“Don’t know what we were all so worried about earlier!” exclaimed Maple.

“No!” agreed Privet breathlessly.

Madoc laughed, Weeth danced a circle all by himself, and even Whillan seemed to be beginning to forget his strange apprehension.

But not Rooster: he danced well enough, he lumbered about, but his eyes were everywhere as he looked among the trees with apprehension, and his frown grew deeper.

Nomole can say how many times they sang the stomping song, certainly not the moles who sang it that starry night; nor how many times they beat the ground to mark out their shared territory and (as Privet later maintained) to liberate the good spirits of the earth that they might celebrate the seasons’ turn.

One thing only was certain, and that was the name of the mole who led them. For at some point during the dance one of them asked his name and he replied most solemnly (before tumbling, or being tumbled, headlong over Madoc):

“Hobsley is my name, and this coppice is...”

He was going to say what he was only able to say later, namely that the coppice had only been his home since the autumn just past, and that nomole-else lived there, and they were his first visitors.

“This coppice must be Hobsley’s Coppice, then!” declared Whillan, looking about them all, at the moonlight among the trees which shone also in Madoc’s eyes, and thinking he had rarely – no,
never –
seen anything as beautiful. “And I’m Whillan, and this is Madoc, and this...”

And so as they neared the end of their dance, and Hobsley led them back to where he had begun, which was on the far western side of the little wood, they exchanged names, and wove them into the banging and the rhythm of their song.

Until at last, paw to paw, they circled to a stop among some ancient oaks whose roots were rimy with frost.

“Well now,” said the breathless Hobsley, still holding the paws of the moles on either side of him so that the others all continued to do the same, “let’s see if I can remember all your names. Well, Madoc to my left, I know yours, and yours as well, Whillan. Then Maple, and Privet, and Rooster, who could forget your name? And finally on my right is... Weeth!”

There was a general shout of congratulation at this feat of memory.

“Which means, if I am not mistaken, that there are seven of us altogether, which makes us...” and here his voice dropped a little and became more serious, more reverential, “... seven. Seven in all. Which means... Well, I believe Privet here can tell you what it means.”

“It makes us a Seven Stancing,” she said, “and means our meeting and communion tonight is blessed.”

“I would be grateful, madam,” said Hobsley courteously, now very solemn indeed, “if you could say a prayer appropriate to the occasion. I am sure you can think of one.”

“There is a prayer moles say on Longest Night,” she said, “and I am beginning to think that the Stone has given us back three lost days that we may celebrate tonight together.”

“Say it,” said Rooster. “Make Longest Night be here and now!”

“That’s right,” said Weeth.

“Seems very apposite to me,” said Hobsley.

“And... us,” said Whillan, daring to speak for Madoc too, whose paw he held tightly in his own.

“Well then...”

But before she could begin Hobsley said, “This spot is where I spend the daylight hours, for I like the shelter of the oaks and the view westward towards the setting sun.

Most suitable for an old mole whose days are numbered. But there is a place nearby which I feel I should show you if we are to speak the ancient liturgy of Longest Night. It is but a few paces, in among these trees...”

“Where Stone is,” said Rooster, and even as he said it the mood changed utterly; wind rushed in the trees above, and the first spots of sleety snow drove in among them. It was not that the song and dance had been displaced, so much as that they had faded before a sudden and more urgent need of community. The chatter quietened, the laughter died, and they followed Hobsley into moonlight and shadows, past dark crannies of woodland floor, round the huge contortion of an oak tree’s surface roots, to what, by the night’s starry moonstruck light, at first appeared to be part of a fallen treetrunk, now overgrown with moss and black ivy, whose leaves were white with frost. Or perhaps it was the stump of an old tree, as Weeth suggested, until he saw how it extended massively along the wood’s floor.

Hobsley nodded his head. “Aye, I thought as much myself at first, and that was by daylight. But don’t you notice something about this place, different from where we were just now?” He looked up at the massive trunks all about them, and his voice echoed up among them, and out to the stars. “One day I looked more closely at that fallen “tree”, and you know what? It’s a Stone, that’s what it is, a fallen Stone.”

It was Rooster who spoke first, his voice but a rough whisper.

“It’s a delved place, this. A holy place.”

One by one they went to the strangely overgrown Stone, parting the foliage, peering into its shadows, and staring about behind them as Hobsley had done, as if half expecting to see other moles, or their spirits, nearby.

Only Rooster did not touch the Stone, but he was not idle. He peered here, and snouted there, his paws touched and buffeted at trees in the shadows about them, and too at their roots and the soil itself, until at last he came back to the Stone. He seemed somehow bigger before it, and strangely in command.

“What’s beneath?” he asked Hobsley.

“Haven’t looked. Haven’t thought to; perhaps it wouldn’t be right if I did. This is a holy kind of place, as you say, and the soil’s best left undisturbed.”

Rooster stared at him and blinked. He reached out a paw as the others had done and pushed his huge talons through the pale frosty foliage to the surface of the Stone beneath. It was like a healer examining a sick mole.

“This Stone is waiting,” he muttered. “There’s delving beneath and around, deep delving. Long time fallen. Long time waiting. Rooster feels it. Place of need. Rooster knows. Privet, you say that prayer now, bring light to this dark place, say it now.”

He spoke more powerfully and when she hesitated his voice was a sudden command:
“Say
it, can’t you feel the need? Longest Night has not been celebrated here for centuries past, so that’s its need. A mole found this place, alone. Delved here, alone. Knew one day a Seven Stancing would be here. Us! Now! Tonight! Listen! This place was delved for tonight.”

He held up a paw and all of them were still, his command to Privet temporarily forgotten. He seemed to hear something, but they did not; and yet so strong was his presence now, and so unpredictable his actions that not one of them moved or spoke.

He looked around at them enquiringly and said, “Hear?
Now?
No?”

“Yes!” whispered Whillan, “I can hear something, I can...” His face expressed wonder and awe.

“No time, no time, need is now, tonight.”

“Duncton,” said Whillan matter-of-factly. “It does need us, I know it does.”

“Maple?” said Privet. “Do you feel or hear anything? You’re the only other mole here who was born at Duncton.”

Maple said, 1 feel uneasy, nothing more than that. I wouldn’t know it was Duncton. I mean —”

“It
is,
”
said Whillan, as if others doubted him. “Rooster understands. Must act, mustn’t we, Rooster?”

“Was waiting for you to say it,” said Rooster. “Can now, and will!”

Suddenly, and violently, he drove his front paws into the foliage covering the Stone and began to rip it away. It was like watching a great warrior delving up a mole that is helplessly buried and needs rescuing. Up flew bits of black ivy, dead leaves, moss, and whole stems and roots of plants that had begun to grow on and around the Stone. His assault was fast and furious and it was not long before he moved back and pointed to part of the Stone’s face, wet and shiny in the night and smelling of humus and the sap of broken plants. Across the surface he had revealed a thin strong root curving its light-restricting way up from one side and down the other, and this successfully resisted his efforts to move it.

“Listen now,” he said, moving forward and thwacking the Stone mightily with his paw. “Hear it?”

And they did, like the rumble of thunder beneath them, like the running of great moles among the trees, ancient sound, echoing and feeding back into the vast chasm of time whence Rooster had briefly freed it.

The moles responded very differently to this performance by Rooster. Maple was simply astonished; Weeth intrigued; Privet calm; Hobsley dancing about with excitement; Madoc overawed; and Whillan... Whillan was touched deeply by the sound Rooster had resurrected. He recognized it as akin to the sounds he had sometimes heard from some of the tunnels of Duncton Wood’s Ancient System, but this sound moved him as a mole’s call for help from across a valley would move others; and when it had gone, and been unanswered, would leave them restless and concerned.

“Now, Privet, say the words,” said Rooster.

Privet gathered them about the small part of the Stone Rooster had cleared, joined their paws, and said this prayer: