Duncton Stone by William Horwood
The stream tumbled over a waterfall above them, and after a slippery scramble through vegetation and between wet rocks the two females reached the edge of the pool from which the water flowed. Here, after a further struggle over loose stones, and a short swim across the pool itself, they reached the far side of the stream and greater safety.
“We’ll wait here,” said Arliss, pulling Privet down into lush grass, “he’ll be with us soon enough.”
He was too, appearing suddenly on the far side from where they had just come, bloodied but seemingly not seriously hurt. Arliss called softly to him and Hodder made his way across and sank down into the grass facing them, his fur dripping, the congealed blood of the guardmole he had taloned still red across his face, and a look of excitement and triumph in his eyes.
“Well? All got away?” said Arliss.
Hodder nodded, too breathless to talk for a few moments until, calming down a little, he described how the guardmole he had struck fell down, the other prisoners charged, and the escape was achieved.
“We’ve given the others their chance,” he said, “and we can’t do more. I knew you’d come this way so I just followed as soon as I could.”
They were suddenly aware of Privet, staring silently into Hodder’s eyes. Her own were dark and still as the deep pool they had crossed and before her gaze Hodder fell silent, his own eyes a little furtive, his breathing still heavy, and oddly troubled. He frowned.
“Had to do it that way,” he said. “Had to be decisive!”
His voice was defensive, and Arliss looked from him to Privet and back again, aware that some unspoken interrogation was taking place between them. Privet might be silent, but sometimes her silence was loud, and questioning.
“If I hadn’t taloned him the way I did...” began Hodder again. “I mean... he...”
Hodder’s snout lowered, and he looked distressed.
“Did you kill him?” asked Arliss quietly.
Hodder was silent; Privet stared; Arliss waited.
“Might have been better if I had,” muttered her unhappy brother. Then, after a pause, and as if sharing a guilty secret, he added, “I think I blinded him. His fellow guardmoles fled, and so did the other prisoners and I was left. It was just him and me. He asked me, he said...” And now Hodder looked up at them, real anguish in his face.
“What did he ask you?” whispered Arliss.
“He asked me to kill him. He was crying out in pain and shock, and he said if I didn’t his mates would, now he was no use to them. “Better you do it”, was what he said. I couldn’t say anything, but just came here and left him where he was.”
Hodder looked filled with guilt and distress.
Then, as he and Arliss stared at each other mutely, Privet suddenly rose up out of the grass, and began to make her way back towards the pool. So quick and determined was her movement that she had reached the water’s edge and was preparing to re-enter it before Arliss could get to her flank and restrain her.
“It’s all right,” called out Hodder with sudden decision. “I’ll go back for him.”
Relief and purpose was in his face as he brushed Arliss’s half-protest aside and went back into the water and re-crossed to the far side of the stream. Then he was gone back down slope and out of sight the way he had come with such alacrity but a short time before and, as it had seemed, such triumph.
Privet retreated into the longer grass, and settled down in a peaceful, meditative way, quite unconcerned that they were so close to the Newborn position, or that Hodder might now be recaptured. Wrong deeds, she seemed to have said, made moles go backwards, not forwards. Right deeds were the only way.
As the time dragged by and the morning gave way to afternoon, the normal equanimity that Arliss felt about her brother gave way to concern, and all kinds of doubts and wonderings troubled her. On the one paw she felt inclined to go back over the stream herself; on the other her duty lay with Privet.
“And what if Hodder had not taloned that guardmole?” she debated with herself. “It’s all very well for Privet to be high and mighty but if he hadn’t done what he did we might all be dead by now, or... or worse!” She glanced, as often in recent days, at Privet, and wondered again at the nature of her silence.
“The fact is she hasn’t said anything,” continued Arliss to herself. “That’s the strange thing about it – she says nothing but Hodder and I keep being provoked into thinking and doing things we mightn’t have before! If she had...”
If Privet had tried with words to persuade Hodder to go back to the guardmole’s aid, Arliss had been about to say to herself, then it was very unlikely that he would have done so. But silence, that was a very different and more powerful thing.
“Hmmph!” was the thought that Arliss was finally reduced to, as she waited with great unease and growing despair for Hodder’s return.
Then, as suddenly as he had gone, he was back in view again, and this time accompanied by a mole. There was no doubt which mole, for he was large, and dark, and his face was covered in blood as Hodder helped him slowly on. Their passage across the stream was an awkward one, marked by a dreadful cry of pain from the guardmole as cold water splashed for a moment into his torn eyes.
Then, with a final shove from Hodder, the great mole emerged from the water and fell amidst the gravelly mud of the river-bank, his breathing heavy and painful, his head poking and peering about sightlessly in a frightened way. More pathetic still was the way his left paw went out behind him to seek Hodder’s again, for in getting out of the water the two moles had lost contact.
“Come on, mate,” said Hodder, giving him support once more, “there’s just a short climb and then we’ll be in grass. There’s friends here.”
The guardmole tensed, half rearing up as if in expectation of attack, but whether from Hodder’s reassuring touch, or from loss of blood, his resolve lasted but moments and, head lowering, his limbs dragging, he struggled up the bank and into the grass near where Arliss and Privet lay.
Since Privet did not move, Arliss left her flank and went to the injured mole, whispering words of reassurance to him before she reached out a paw to touch him, and examine the terrible wound that her brother had inflicted. As for Hodder himself, with a final comforting pat on the guardmole’s shoulder, he muttered, “This is my sister, she’ll do what she can for you,” and slumped down nearby, eyes closing with exhaustion.
Arliss had seen plenty of wounds before, and more gruesome ones too. Yet it seemed hard to believe that a single blow, however powerful and well aimed, could have caused such extensive damage to eyes and snout. Both eyes seemed punctured, and the lower part of the snout was crushed and open; the loss of blood was considerable, and continuing. It dribbled now from eyes and snout, deep red and beyond the power of all congealing and pressure to stop.
For a time indeed it flowed faster, for Arliss, who knew a little of the healing arts, took the mole back to the water’s edge and bathed his face and removed from the wounds the clogging of earth and filth that had collected there on his journey to their hiding-place. This procedure was not easy, for the mole was in constant pain, and the chill of the water only increased it.
To make matters worse for Arliss, the guardmole cried out in his suffering, cries that combined a most distressing hiss and bubbling of broken breathing where his snout was damaged and its structure exposed. As for the eyes themselves, once the congealed blood was cleared a little, and the yellow nasal phlegm removed, it could be seen all too well that they had whitened in parts, and seemed sightless; but when, occasionally, they moved a little, light seemed to reach into them like jagged thorns.
It was evening before Arliss felt she had done all she could, and she was aware that the guardmole was weakening still. He had not spoken since his coming, and now his cries and whimpers were fainter and more despairing, as if he felt life leaving him and he was unsure whether, after all, it was best to let it go. Once or twice he reared up his head towards the sky as if seeking some h
Throughout all this Privet only watched, her eyes small and bright, but full of concern. Sometimes she glanced at the sleeping Hodder, occasionally at Arliss, but for the most part she watched the guardmole. Arliss wished she might have helped, and felt annoyed when she did not.
“You’ll be all right,” Arliss whispered helplessly, “mole, you’ll find a way again.”
It was only as dusk came that he spoke intelligibly at last.
“Whatmoles are you?”
“Arliss,” she replied. “It was my brother Hodder came for you.”
“He was the one...?”
“Yes,” Arliss replied bleakly.
“Why did he come back for me? Better to have left me to die.”
Arliss shook her head and held him. A touch, a hug, speak louder than words to a mole in such a plight.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Guardmole Rees,” he said, and for the briefest of moments his voice held no pain and he sounded normal. He had the burrish accent of the southern Welsh border country.
But then quite suddenly, as if in speaking his name he had been reminded of what he had been a short time before, and now might never be again, he began to shake and sob, his rasping breathing horrible to hear, and blood flowing once more from one of his damaged eyes like terrible tears.
Nothing Arliss could do or say could still or comfort him, and though the shaking slowed, and the cries quietened, it was plain that he was beginning to fail rapidly. Arliss looked at the sleeping Hodder and then at Privet in utter despair, her own tears shining bright upon her face.
Then, as suddenly as he had started shaking he stopped, his breathing slowed, and he was still and almost quiet. He did not answer to his name but seemed unconscious, or lost in some place of his own.
“Is he dying?” whispered Arliss almost to herself, her paws tightening about him. She looked up at the darkening sky that Rees could no longer see and said, “Stone, help him. He is but mole and no real enemy of ours or yours. Just a mole in distress, so help him.”
She held him for a moment, and then, quite satisfied that there was no more she could do for him until he woke, and hoping that he would, for that seemed rather uncertain now, she moved a little from him amongst the grass, as exhausted as Hodder, and slept. Yet, later, before night quite came, troubled and turning in her sleep, she reached out a paw unknowingly to Rees, and put it to one of his.
Privet stared unblinking at the stars, apparently unaware of the sighs and grunts and troubled pain of the three sleeping moles about her.
Arliss had said, “He is just a mole in distress, so help him,” and they were words which seemed scribed in light across the great night sky.
A strange, disturbing clattering broke into the other sounds and though few moles would have known what it was, Privet knew. She had heard it sometimes at the Community of Rose in ill and feverish moles, or those near death. It was the sound of a mole’s teeth as he went into a rigor of shaking and despair before the tide of pain and injury that engulfed him, and threatened now to sweep him off for ever into the eternal darkness that death seemed to be. Privet moved, but not yet towards Rees.
She rose and shivered her thin flanks in a stretch. She stared at the stars again, and let her eyes wander their vast course. She shook her head, almost as a mole might shake off some troubling wraith of cobweb, or skein of cleaver-weed, that had clung on too long after a rough passage through tunnels and undergrowth whose difficulties were all past.
Then, these short moments of farewell to another life over, for that is what they were, she turned to Rees, went to him, gently removed Arliss’s paw from his, and reached out her paws to his wounded face. Starlight was on them, or in them perhaps, and slowly he stilled beneath her touch.
“Mole,” she whispered, “listen now to me. The Stone is with thee, by thee, in thee, and your long night will become day once more. Be still now, be still.”
How long Privet offered her healing paws and words to him nomole could ever say, certainly not Guardmole Rees, who woke to the gentlest touch he had ever felt, and thought he saw the most beautiful stars where before there had only been the pain of eternal darkness.
Nor Hodder, who stirred and thought he dreamt, and afterwards was almost sure he had: for he saw in the night the mole Privet, stanced up before the injured Newborn, her paws to his face, and her voice like the very sky itself.
Nor Arliss, who woke and knew she did not dream, and saw paws filled with light upon the face of Rees, and a mole she had never seen or heard before, talking to him, praying for him, guiding him out of the darkness of the vales into which he had slipped, back towards the light of dawn and life.
“Yes, yes, there was a mole,” she sometimes said later, her voice always hushed, “but I cannot say it was Privet, not in any form of her that I knew. Before I turned to sleep that night, having done all I could for Rees, I prayed for the Stone. At dawn I woke, and knew the Stone had come. The Stone was there, and Rees was being healed, and we were all safe. But Privet? I think... she was asleep. She was...”
Privet was asleep, when the others woke to morning sun, and the sounds of the guardmole grumbling and splashing at the water, grunting sometimes with pain.
“Come back up here where you can’t be seen,” said Hodder, going to him.
“Throat like bloody oak-bark, mole,” said Rees, “and can’t see except for shadows. Shit!”
A shaft of sunlight had caught his face and he turned from it. Hodder helped him back into the shade.
“I didn’t mean...” began Hodder, wishing to apologize for something too big for sorrow.
“Don’t be bloody stupid, mole, you did well. Caught us unawares. Did what any fighting mole would have done. I’m hungry as a stoat, but if I try to scent worms it feels like talons up my snout.”
He swore once more, turned, and blundered into Arliss.
“You!” he said, feeling her touch.
“You’re improved!” she said in astonishment.
Rees laughed ironically. “Never been better,” he grunted. “Was it you in the night who talked to me? Didn’t think it was, but was it you?”
“Me?” said Arliss, wondering, and half remembering.
“Not you,” said Rees, not taking his paw from hers. “Different voice. Like a gentle brook. Beautiful. Knew I d be all right.”
“You will be,” said Arliss, glancing round to where, oblivious to all this, Privet slept.
“Wasn’t her,” said Hodder, “she never talks.”
“It was somemole,” said Rees quietly, all his strength suddenly deserting him. “Now, you better leave me, for they’ll come searching.” He sighed and his breathing deepened.
“We’re staying here,” said Arliss fiercely, never more certain in her life. “Till you’re better. Till...”
“He’s asleep,” said Hodder, grinning weakly, a sense of relief flooding into him. “I think he’ll see again.”
He looked at the drying wounds on Rees’ face, where only one eye still seeped, and he said slowly, “As long as I live I swear I’ll never strike a mole again. It isn’t the right way, Arliss, it can’t be right, not this...”
Rees’ protests continued in the days that followed, but all three moles ignored him, and each helped him in different ways: Hodder by finding food, and keeping a watch out for the Newborn patrols, one of which it was necessary for him to divert and lead off when they came too close; Arliss with words of comfort when the guardmole suffered an occasional relapse into pain and doubt that his sight would ever recover; and Privet by an occasional touch, a silent prayer.
Only slowly it seemed did Rees become aware of Privet’s presence, but when he did he did not doubt that in some way he did not understand it was really to her that he owed his recovery. Not that he spoke t
“Who is she?” he whispered to Arliss one night.
“Just a mole,” she replied, a little too quickly.
“Just a mole my arse!” said Rees in a growly kind of voice. “She’s the one, isn’t she?”
“Which one? I don’t know what you mean!” said Arliss too quickly again, her voice high and strained with the effort of lying.
Rees grinned, the better of his eyes blinking with sudden pain where his face creased and caught his healing wounds. He almost winked, and Arliss allowed herself a quick smile.
“You know which one,” he said quietly.
Arliss looked at him, familiar now with his torn face and strong, scarred body, and the different ranges of his voice, which was presently in its reverential mode. She would not concede for one moment who Privet was, yet she knew that he knew, though not how. She turned away.
“You fancy him, Arliss,” teased her brother later.
“No, I don’t; of course I don’t,” responded Arliss, her snout turning pink. Hodder enjoyed seeing his sister discomfited in this way, and knew he was right. As for Rees, Hodder was beginning to feel a bond with him which was almost brotherly.
“Can you see more clearly?” he would ask him each day. Rees would nod, and grumble, and peer, and all of them could see his eyes were becoming less cloudy; the better one was almost clear.
“Aye, I can see shapes now as well as light and dark, but I’ll never see the same way as before.”
“Yes, you will,” Arliss would earnestly reply, “your sight will come back completely.”
“I don’t mean seeing with my eyes, mole. Don’t mean that.”
Suddenly, they woke up one morning and there was the sense of parting in the air. Privet, who often slept longer than the others, was already up and about, and when they surfaced she went off through the grass to peer upslope to the east.