Duncton Stone by William Horwood
Next day he returned to a most terrible scene. She lay half-conscious, mumbling, the Book’s folios scattered, food he had left half-eaten and strewn about; while above her there hung down, like talons of death, great icicles amongst the frozen roots.
“Privet, this cannot go on,” he said, when he had warmed her, and she had revived and eaten a little.
“No, but it is not finished. One more night and one more day. There is so little left to do, look!” She almost laughed as she proffered him the broken, battered Book. “Look, my dear, is it not nearly beautiful? Is it not peaceful now?”
He turned its loose folios, though with considerable difficulty, for the Book was strangely heavy, strangely unmanageable, and he strived and struggled with it, panting with effort and feeling a dread.
Yet he pressed on, putting back in place those folios that slipped out, and seeing that one after another after the next all the words she had scribed on folio after folio were scored out. She had made new scribing between the lines of the first, but that was scored out too. And along the margins, and upside down, and everywhere, the scribing was scored out. He could not bear to look at all the folios. This was not scribing, this was a death of words.
“It told all I knew, Pumpkin, everything – but I had to take it out. Bit by bit it had to go. Husk did the same with Tales, but I did not understand. He knew, as Rooster knows. But I... I have not the strength to score out everything.”
“You seemed to have nearly done so!” Pumpkin exclaimed.
She sighed. “Give me another night and day. I shall try one more time. And don’t fret so, Pumpkin, I shall not die quite yet. What season is it?”
“March, winter, freezing,” he said.
Reluctantly he agreed to leave her, eyeing the icicles above her as he went, as if they were an enemy.
“I shall be back at midday on the morrow,” he promised. “And Privet, I swear that if you will not agree to come with me I shall drag you out!”
“Pumpkin!” But even as she exclaimed at his threat, her eyes wandered back to the Book, her paws reached out towards it, and he saw fear and apprehension, and age, creep over her, like shadows, like death.
He went to the Stone before returning to his burrow and his prayer was simple and direct.
“Stone, release her. Let her be free of this! Thy Silence cannot be so terrible that seeking it kills a mole. Release her now...” And he wept into the icy, unyielding ground.
He slept but fitfully, imagining he heard her screams and that she called his name; he must go back to her! He rose to do so, felt the bitter bite of cold, thought again he heard her call and slipped back into sleep. So tired... But when he woke he knew he was too late. He knew it as certain as the prick of thorns.
“Privet...!” and he hurried out of his burrow up to the surface and...
And she was there, fallen, her paw reaching out, calling his name in a voice that he could barely hear.
“Privet...” he whispered, appalled, helping her down into his tunnel, and putting her into his still-warm sleeping chamber.
“I called your name, my dear,” she whispered, “but you could not hear. All night I have called your name.”
All night! Her paws and face and flanks – all thin, almost nothing now – were icy, her voice insidiously soft and sleepy.
“Pumpkin, the Book... I could not, I cannot...”
He held her, warmed her, wept for her, and wondered what to do.
“Pumpkin, fetch the Book for me. Fetch it here. It will help me to have it now, unfinished though it is. Fetch it, mole.”
He warmed her more, settled her, saw that she ate a mite of worm, which was better than none at all, and he began to think she might recover.
“Fetch it, mole, now, now...”
It was then that he saw she was beginning to die.
“I cannot leave you. I must get Rooster. I must... I...” He stanced over her, shaking, muttering, uncertain.
“Fetch it, Pumpkin. For me...”
Then he settled her into the warmest place, his own sleeping chamber, and turned from her and ran from the burrow, panting and gasping up the frozen slopes, slipping and sliding on the ice and then down into the Ancient System, down through the icy tunnels, on and on into the heart of all that was lost and forgotten and so long forsaken. Running for his life, and for hers.
He turned towards the chamber, saw the glimmer of light, heard the icy whisper of Dark Sound, and ran in, his pawsteps racing ahead of him.
He stopped dead at what he saw, the echo of his pawsteps fading about him as he took in the scene. The chamber was filled with that light they had seen when first they came. And the chamber was clean and clear, or almost so. The litter of folios was gone. The bits of worm, the nesting material once strewn about had been removed; the chaos she had made about her, all was gone, all tidied away, all cleared.
Even the floor was clear and cleaned, as if a library aide had come after the mole he worked for had left, and had ordered things once more, and made them as they should be.
Only the Book was there, back on the dais where she had first found it, its folios neat and tidy and all made right again. Perhaps then, with one last effort, she had worked to leave things as she found them, and placed the Book back for another to find. Perhaps she had finished it.
But he felt that was not so. Nor did he believe that she could herself have cleared the chamber: it was more than she could have done.
“Much more,” he whispered; stancing now in the light about the Book, he looked around him. It was then that he saw that the body of the aide had also gone, his paws outstretched towards the dais no more, no mark of him left: his part of this awesome task complete.
Pumpkin felt awe and wonder, and knew then what mole had cleared the place, and made it whole again: Collis of Sedlescombe, the unknown aide.
“Mole,” he whispered, his voice echoing forward to the Book, and then to where the aide had been and then beyond, though whether back or forward he did not know.
“Mole,” he whispered in gratitude, for the aide had been there to watch over her, “mole...”
“Mole,” that whisper came back to him, back to the now where Pumpkin was, back in gratitude, aide to aide, mole to mole and Pumpkin understood that now had come, and here he was, to do what he must do.
“Stone,” whispered Pumpkin, and the answer came back to him with the clinging of an echo:
“Mole...” whispered the aide.
Pumpkin went to the Book. He opened its time-worn covers, and turned its ruined folios, and saw such scorings that no single word on page after page could he ken at all. Not one word seemed left.
Then one he found. Untouched, unscored. As perfectly scribed as it had first been. He turned further on and then to the end of the Book, but all else was ruin and lost words, and nothing at all. He turned back to the single word that remained, and the unscored space about it that was white with light.
He reached out his old paw and touched the scribing she had first made.
“Privet,” he kenned aloud.
It was her own name she could not score out, her very self. That alone she could not let go. It was the last word she had found, and she could not let it go.
Privet...
And Pumpkin wept for the mole he served. He took up the Book, and felt how heavy it was, how hard to carry, and he turned from the light where it became harder still.
“Help me bring it to her, Stone, help me now.”
At the portal from the chamber he turned back, for he heard a new sound, a clean and steady sound. He put the Book down to see what the sound was. It came from the dais where the Book had been, but it started high above, where the light was bright as stars.
The sound again, deep, sudden; then again.
He looked down at the dais, up at the light, and seeing the great white icicles that hung there pointing down, he knew the sound for what it was.
Drip!
Drip!
And Drip!
A sound as old as time, the sound of a season’s turn, when winter ends, and spring begins. The water dripped upon the dais that had held the book, and the dais began to crumble and erode away before his eyes, and meld back into the earth from which it had been formed.
He took up the Book again, though it was a struggle to do so, and then, his paws dragging, the tunnels seeming endless, he began to carry the Book out of the Ancient System. And if, sometimes, in that long trek he felt the Book grow lighter, and a paw at his flank, and heard words of encouragement, he fancied that another aide was there to lighten his load a little, an aide who had served, as he did now; a mole who understood.
“Privet,” he whispered as he came to the tunnel end and towards the light of the High Wood, “I am coming. Wait now... wait.” And as best he could, but like a mole who is sure he is too late, old Pumpkin reached up towards the light of day once more.
Chapter Forty-Nine
With a final shove of his back paws, and clutching on to the Book, Pumpkin almost popped up into the light of day, and was astonished to find that spring had rather more than sprung.
For one thing, the grey drear light of winter had fled away completely, and in its place was that softer, warmer, brighter light under which new buds, unnoticed before, shine fresh, and through which breaks the busy brilliant sound of song – of bird, of insect, or so many creatures long lost to light.
Pumpkin paused, startled and confused, bewitched by the fresh and eager scent of spring, his paws caressed by the softness of the leaf-litter underpaw, his ears delighting in the sounds of new life, his eyes dazzled by the burst of beauties long forgotten.
He whiffled his wrinkled snout in the air, put down the Book on a surface root of a beech tree to keep it from the damp leaves, and caught his breath. Time seemed to be running amok about him, and something more than spring sang to him, and took the trouble and the stress from out of his old heart and replaced it in a trice with wonderment.
“But it cannot be!” he exclaimed, peering at the woodland floor and seeing snowdrops and yellow winter aconite, not bursting forth, but fading fast.
“Fading already, and giving way to bluebells and wild daffodils!”
He rubbed his eyes in disbelief and then...
“Stone,” he whispered, as he might to an old friend who had journeyed at his flank, turning a corner and seeing something that had taken them both utterly by surprise, “what’s apaw?”
There was quick movement behind him, or so he thought. He turned and looked back to the dark entrance from which he had just emerged, for he was sure there had been a mole there, a mole so close to him he might have been himself, and that mole – or aide – had paused with him, wished him well of the world to which he had now returned, and, laughing like wind-sound in a well-made tunnel on a summer’s day, had left him to go on by himself.
“Stone... mole... I do not understand,” he faltered aloud, except that he did, and his heart, so long oppressed, was filled with joy and certainty.
Wherever he had been, it must have been longer than he thought. Had the hours then been days, and the days...?
Sun shone across the trunk of the beech tree on whose surface root he had laid the Book, and the lichen on the bark was green and fresh, and up beyond it the pointed beech buds were beginning to grow full, while the sky beyond was blue.
Bewildered but content, sure that in some way the Stone had been watching over Privet in his absence, though unsure what the nature of that absence had been, Pumpkin bent down and lifted the Book once more. It was so heavy, so very hard to carry, but he could manage now down the slope, and with some strength to spare he could feel the energy of change and growth, and believe they were enshadowed in Duncton Wood no more.
“There you are, Pumpkin!” called out Fieldfare from the entrance to his tunnels, where, to his increased bewilderment, she was busying herself cleaning and making all orderly.
“What a day, what a day!”
“Privet...?” he began, utterly unsure.
Her face clouded and she said, “Ah, well, she won’t stance up on her own paws yet, but she may yet, she may yet. There’s nothing wrong that common sense won’t put right, but don’t try and tell her that. You and her – what a to-do I Books! Scribing! You can’t live on words alone! Look at you, Pumpkin, thin as old grass stems. But at least you’re up and about again, and doing. Doing with books, it seems.” She eyed the Book under his paw with disapproval. “Books is for libraries, not for comfortable homely burrows like I’ve made yours since you’ve been...”
Comfortable? Homely? Pumpkin’s heart sank. But wait...
“I’ve been what?”
But she had turned tail with a “Must get on!” and was gone before he could get an answer from her. What had he been? Ill, like Privet? He had no idea.
But he scented the air once more, felt the bliss of spring and all the joys of which such a day as this was the cheerful herald, and followed Fieldfare down.
Privet now lay in her own chamber, the one he and Rooster had first prepared for her, not in his own sleeping chambers where he had left her. Whatever fears he had about her dying fled away before the look that came upon her face when she saw him.
“Pumpkin!” she called out the moment she glimpsed him.
“I got the Book as you asked,” he said, feeling he had never made so gross an understatement in his life. “Got the Book”! Why, he had nearly died getting it! Yes, that was it. He had nearly died.
“Put it there, my dear, not too near and not too far. No, no, behind me here where I can touch it if I must, but others will not notice it. We’ll know where it is!”
She laughed half nervously, half indifferently, as if it was something she felt she ought to think about, but preferred to forget if she could. He looked at her and saw that though she looked less near death than when she had come to his burrow that dawn – and already that dawn seemed many, many dawns ago – she was very frail.
Her eyes, her face, the way she looked sometimes beyond him at the chamber’s portal, belied that smile upon her face, the cheerful words. Plainly, she was very ill.
“Privet, I saw —”
“No, no, my dear, don’t tell me what you saw in the Ancient System. I saw things too but was not strong enough to stay; whatmole could be? The Book will wait, and one day, one distant day perhaps, somemole will have the strength to come and finish it.”
“You will have the strength, Privet, and then you’ll find the strength to live again.”
He did not know where his words came from, but he felt them to be true.
“I might ‘have the strength’ as you put it, Library Aide Pumpkin, but I do not have the will. I looked into the void of Silence and felt the nothing I would be. It is not strength I need, but an ability to let go, and that I don’t have. It is... so hard, so confusing, and my mind was in such a whirl of scoring, and scrivening, scratching and scribing, words and words and words until there was hardly anything left of me at all.”
“Your name, Privet, that was left.”
“Ah, yes, that: what I am. Well, mole, the Stone cannot ask that of me and I fled when it did, and, as you see, am much better now for doing so! It was killing both of us, and look at us now. Why, mole, you’ve ventured forth on to the surface day by day and the warm weather of spring is well and truly here, and now you’ve even brought the Book. For old time’s sake if nothing else!”
She laughed that thin uncertain laugh, and again glanced at the Book in the shadows behind her.
“Privet,” he said, with terrible resolution, “you say ‘look at us now’ and I look at you and I see —”
“Happiness! Contentment! Release at last! No, no, don’t say what you were going to because it is not true.”
“I am your library aide, and I must —”
“You must do as I say then, my dear, and leave me be!”
Her voice had begun sharply, but it ended soft and slow.
“There now
“What visitors?” asked Privet querulously.
“Hamble, for one. Rees is coming again today, and Sturne might look in, Stone help us all.”
“Fieldfare, don’t be unkind, Sturne is a great mole in his way.”
“A great deal too serious to be visiting a mole who needs sunshine, and rest, and time.”
She turned from Privet for a moment and Pumpkin caught the expression on her face nomole was meant to see. It was full of doubt and care.
“Loosestrife, will she come to me at last, will she?”
Privet was growing more weak and tired by the moment, and more tearful too. As Pumpkin slipped away he heard Fieldfare say, “Soon, when her pups are a little older, and you’re a little stronger. She’s been ill and tired with rearing, and they’ve been sick as well. Whillan will bring them all over from Cuddesdon when the weather’s warmer, and you’ll take them up on the surface and play with them as their grandmother should.”
“It’s Loosestrife I want,” sobbed Privet into sleep.
It was Sturne who later told Pumpkin how things were.
“Found you wandering in the ice and snow myself, and took you to my burrow,” he said. “You were as near death with cold and hunger as anymole could be, but all you could talk of was that Privet needed help in your tunnels, and you needed to get the Book. But you don’t remember any of it?”
Pumpkin shook his head.
“Well, mole, I thought you were going to die. I... I really... I just didn’t know...”
Sturne almost allowed himself to weep.
“It’s not for me you should feel sorry,” said Pumpkin finally, “but yourself.”
“Hmmph!” said Sturne, dabbing at his face-fur and frowning. “If I wept for me I’d never stop.”
“Yes, you would, Sturne, and you’d feel better for it.”