Sturne allowed a smile to play briefly about his mouth. “No, no, well, each to his task, mole, each to his task. Now, regarding the Master himself, I have been in the habit of leaving food for him at certain entrances into the Ancient System, when I have been able to rid myself of the attentions of the three Inquisitors. The Master has been in the habit of taking it and leaving a quick scribing as to the next location. In this I have been greatly helped by the records left behind by the great Mayweed, who, as you know, was moledom’s greatest route-finder, and at one time of his life took it upon himself to explore and describe the Ancient System.”
“I always thought he had left such records behind,” said Pumpkin, suddenly excited. Nothing thrilled him more than history local to Duncton Wood.
“Gradually, the instructions have indicated places nearer and nearer the Stone,” continued Sturne, “and I assume that the Master’s great and difficult work of carrying the six Books to the Stone is the reason for that. In short, as best he has been able, under cover of the Ancient System he has taken these great works to their final resting-place.”
“You mean beneath the Stone itself, beyond the Chamber of Roots?” said Pumpkin, his voice quiet, awed at mention of this most mysterious and dangerous of places, which lies beneath the ground around and about the Stone Clearing in the High Wood.
“Aye,” said Sturne. “I think – I believe – he has succeeded in getting all the Books very near that place, and wished to get them through the Chamber before Longest Night.”
“You said “wished” in the past tense, as if he now has no choice in the matter,” said Pumpkin, much concerned. For fearful though he was of anything to do with the Ancient System, Sturne’s solid and exemplary courage had stirred in him the desire to help as best he could, and he did not wish to hear that at the final moment the Master had been unable to continue.
“ “Wished” is the past form,” said Sturne impatiently, “so it would be in the past tense, wouldn’t it! Well, anyway, three days ago I finally found one of the Master’s scribings telling me to leave what food I could near the Chamber of Roots itself, which I duly did. The food has not been touched since, there is no sign of mole, and Longest Night is on us. Now, I must make an appearance before the Stone at dusk for the Newborn ritual which you will have been told about,” and here Pumpkin nodded, “but we cannot be sure when we go to the Chamber of Roots what we will find, or what task we must perform. I was reluctant to involve you, Pumpkin, but you are now the only mole I can trust, and I know how highly the Master regards you. I cannot fail to appear at dusk for fear of giving away the fact that I am not Newborn at all, but perhaps one of us will still be needed near the Chamber and you can stay on and fulfil whatever task remains, and you will not be missed.”
“Ah! Yes!” said Pumpkin non-committally. It was just the kind of nightmare situation he had feared earher on. Worse, in fact. However... “I wall not let you or the Master down!” he declared boldly.
“I’m sure you won’t, Pumpkin,” said Sturne.
“When are we going to go to the Chamber of Roots?” Pumpkin grinned madly, unable to believe he had asked such a question.
“Now,” said Sturne, “now we have eaten and are fit for any task.”
“We’re not waiting for the fog to clear?”
Sturne shook his head and stanced up.
“Well, can’t we just hang on while I tidy the place a bit? I like to leave things orderly, you know.”
Sturne shook his head again and began to climb up towards the portal.
“You don’t think later might be better than sooner?” Pumpkin called up after him.
“No, I don’t,” said Sturne. “Now is the time.”
“ “Now is the time”!” muttered Pumpkin, looking wildly round his snug chamber and modest tunnels. “Goodbye home! Goodbye peace! Know that I, Pumpkin, Library Aide, was happy here. Farewell!”
Then, raising his snout as best he could, and puffing out his greying, puny chest. Pumpkin set forth from his portal and into the mist after Sturne, wishing he knew how heroes felt, for knowing that might have helped. But then practicalities took over and, observing that Sturne was having trouble finding the way. Pumpkin caught up with him and said magnanimously, “Let me show you, friend, for we’re on my patch now.”
“Does your patch extend as far as the Ancient System?” growled Sturne.
“It’ll have to if we’re to get there, won’t it?” said Pumpkin, with the lunatic good cheer of a mole who has finally leapt into the void and, though he has no idea what is rushing up at him from below, knows he can do nothing more to protect himself from it.
He got them there without difficulty, huffing and puffing misty breath back into the thick mist as they straggled at last into the Stone Clearing; peering carefully forward, and with extended paws, they finally groped their way to the darkly looming Stone itself
“Well now,” said Pumpkin, “what next?”
“Follow me,” said Sturne, who had got his bearings once again. He turned round the back of the Stone, left the Clearing and went in among the trees of the High Wood, whose trunks rose grey and strange into white nothingness, and came at last to an errant surface root from one of the bigger trees around the Clearing, and followed it deep into the wood.
“Here’s the place,” said Sturne.
He delved aside some twigs and leaves and before Pumpkin could say, “Library Aide!” he had shoved the smaller mole down the hole, and followed him into the echoing, mysterious space beneath.
“Be glad there’s no wind about. Pumpkin,” whispered Sturne, his voice echoing back eerily from the tunnel ahead, “for the wind-sound down here is like nothing I’ve ever heard. Even so...”
Even so indeed. For far off down the tunnels they could hear the awesome and strange sounds of the Ancient System – whispers and the pattering of pawsteps, faded cries and distant callings, such as any Library Aide in Duncton’s Library has heard on a winter’s night at the ends of some of the more dusty and forgotten tunnels, but never quite grows used to, and certainly never ventures near.
“The Chamber of Roots is not that far, so follow me, and don’t worry if you hear pawsteps following you, it’s the sound of your own, only multiplied!”
It was as well he had been warned, for however quietly he tried to put his paws down it seemed to Pumpkin that an army of moles was just at his rear. Most disconcertingly these phantoms did not stop when he and Sturne halted but, as it were, marched by and disappeared down the tunnel ahead of them.
“You never quite get used to it, but familiarity helps,” said Sturne.
They went on a short way further, turned a corner or two, passed through a portal, and Pumpkin found himself in the ante-chamber that surrounds the Chamber of Roots itself, famed in Duncton’s legends and fables but so rarely visited in recent times.
Seven portals open into the Chamber from this circular antechamber, each leading in among a maze of roots which not only fall from the roof to the floor, but intertwine themselves at angles, in twists and bends and folds upon each other; some massive and thick, others no more than slim tendrils in which the green juice of life flows between tree above and soil below.
This colour, this pale luminescent green, seems to tint the air of the place, and casts itself all about the roots, which, even on the stillest of still days – and this was a stillish day – contrive to move and twist, to rasp and sometimes suddenly jerk, so that to the green “mood” of the place, strange sounds are added, whining, cutting, rasping, mewling and groaning deeply, as if telling of life’s mysterious and inexorable process of birth and death and birth again. Occasionally the roots move and part and a mole can see in among them towards the centre of the Chamber, where, it was said, the base of the Stone plunges down into the soil. To this holiest of holy places few moles had ever ventured, and fewer still had returned alive. Down there the Seven Stillstones were returned, each to await the coming of its complementary Holy Book whose heart or esse
nce it represented.*
*The tale of the Stillstones and their return to Duncton Wood is told in Duncton Found.
Pumpkin stared in alarm through one of the seven portals into the Chamber of Roots, and then wandered on round the antechamber to the next, and the next after that, and the prospect of going through them seemed more terrifying each time.
So he circled round the Chamber of Roots uneasily, jumping at the sudden sounds, marvelling how sometimes at one portal or another the roots seemed to shift and open up a way down which a mole might venture, if he was inspired – or insane.
“The base of the Stone lies through there, doesn’t it?” he asked rhetorically. “That’s where great moles of the past took each of the Seven Stillstones. Into there Bracken went, didn’t he? All the great moles. Boswell, he went there.”
Sturne nodded. “Great Tryfan too,” he said.
“And now the Master Stour, he’s got to go in there,” said Pumpkin. “He’s got to take the Six Books, hasn’t he? And it’s here that when the Book of Silence, the Seventh and the Last Book, is found, that a great mole must bring it.” His eyes were wide with the vision of so awesome a thing, and he gulped and gasped to think that he, Pumpkin, was stanced so near such a holy place.
“Aye,” breathed Sturne, “it’ll be brought here and taken in. Then will all be put to rights, and the Stone’s Light and Silence safe for all time, for moles to seek out as they will, and strive to know as best they may. We must pray that Privet finds its whereabouts, for that is what her quest is for.”
A spatter of sound came from beyond an ancient portal, older certainly than that by which they had entered the ante-chamber. It had been brilliantly delved, such that its sides made use of two jags of black shiny flint, softened only by the gentle curve of the arch that linked them.
“The Chamber of Dark Sound is through there,” breathed Sturne. “It’s the way we’ll have to go.”
“We?” squeaked Pumpkin, horrified. Here was bad enough, but there, through that dark portal into the place allmole who had ever kenned the Duncton Chronicles knew perfectly well only very special moles dared venture.
In there was disaster, confusion, and a death caused by one’s own pawsteps and fearful breathing being reflected back as Dark Sound, which expressed the evils and flaws in even the best mole’s nature. There a mole made his own Dark Sound and died from it. There he. Pumpkin, would certainly not venture. Here was far enough.
He glanced away from the portal, back around the antechamber, and then into the Chamber of Roots with its peaceful green translucent light; among the high hanging roots, thick and gnarled stems intermeshed with the tendrils of fresh growth, and the whiter roots of a different age ran and then broke free and hung; there he saw a thing staring, merely in passing at first, and his eyes wandered to something else. Then his memory put its shapes and shadows into form and he realized what he had seen.
“Sturne!” he said, grasping his friend almost frantically. “Look there!”
They looked and saw that set into the roots, growing there like a living thing, though surely dead, was what seemed to be the face of a mole; snout, teeth, eyes and all.
“It is... mole,” whispered Pumpkin, shaken to his core.
“It is a skull,” said Sturne, barely less disturbed himself
It was a skull, round which the roots had grown and surged so that the eyes were living root-bark, and the tongue the russet of some lichen growth, and the teeth – the teeth were real. As, horror-struck, they followed this form further into the tangle of growth beyond, they saw thrusting out of young tendrils the mole’s skeletal paw, and talons, distended and twisted, turned and fully extended; still horribly identifiable, the ribs curved up behind, supported by the growth of which they appeared a part. The vertebrae seemed twisted into a spasm of living arboreal pain, and further off still was a single back paw, talons black and pointed. It was a mole who had ventured into the Chamber and become trapped and killed by the shifting roots, and now acted as a warning to others.
Behind them, a spatter of sound again, hinting at a shift in the wind out on the surface. The Chamber of Roots trembled and was still, and they saw here and there in its depths evidence of other moles caught in decades or centuries past by the shifting roots among which they must have vainly struggled. The roots trembled, there was a sudden rasping shift, something seem to break, and all began to move easily.
Pumpkin pointed a paw mutely at the skeletal form of the ingrown mole, and as they stared at it, the roots that held it swayed and rose and as they did so the mole’s bones moved and turned; the spine twisted, the head arced back as if in a scream, the paws seemed frantic for a moment, and then all was gone into the shadows of the be-rooted heights of the Chamber, and could be seen no more. Pumpkin’s fur almost stood on end and he let out a little bleat of dismay.
“Be not afraid, Pumpkin,” whispered a voice behind him – a voice that made him very afraid indeed – “these remnants of lost moles are all that remains of those who tried to enter the Chamber of Roots and desecrate it in years gone by. They are nothing now but a warning to those of us with too much vanity perhaps, or who venture where they have no task.”
A paw touched Pumpkin’s and he slowly turned and found himself face to face with Master Stour once again. Thin and wizened now, aged far beyond the span of time that had passed since Pumpkin had left him when he went into retreat, fur pale and thin and dusty, eyes all wrinkled, Stour stanced, staring, smiling, peaceful.
“Master,” whispered Keeper Sturne.
“Good Master Stour,” said Pumpkin, tears in his eyes as he lowered his snout in obeisance to the mole whose Library had been his life’s work.
“I am glad you came, Pumpkin, you of all moles! The last moments of my task have come but I cannot do what I must without your help. Nor without yours, faithful Sturne. Listen, my good and worthy friends, my body is even weaker, even frailer than it seems. You see a mole who has survived far beyond his years and whose body would crumble to dust if it were not for his mind. Well, I am near ray time of rest and Silence. I have traversed whole worlds alone here in the Ancient System, and with the Stone’s help I have brought to the portal of the Chamber of Dark Sound the Six Books. Now I shall take them to their final resting-place through the Chamber of Roots at the base of the Stone itself, where, if all we have learnt is true, I shall find the Seven Stillstones. Six at least can be redeemed. Such is my task and you must help me, Sturne, and you. Pumpkin, by bringing the Books one by one to me here.”
He spoke clearly and slowly; his eyes had grown pale and rheumy, and when he blinked the lids moved only slowly, and his body trembled, and sometimes he seemed to wince with pain.
“It is Longest Night?”
“It is approaching, Master,” said Sturne. “Outside we have done all you asked of us, but we have no news of Privet or the others. No news yet...”
Stour shook his head, and waved a paw dismissively. “No, no, Sturne, tell me not. I am dead to that world now, though I care for it. I pointed a few moles in the right direction, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Master Stour, oh yes you did!” said Pumpkin eagerly. Stour nodded vaguely. “It seems that was a long time ago, so long ago. Maple, he was strong and will do what he must, I know. And Drubbins...”
“Master, Drubbins died.”
“Yes, yes, he died,” he said indifferently, as if he had known it would happen. “Fieldfare, she can be relied on, and Chater, the best journeymole I ever knew. Whillan, a mole I feel I failed and yet, in my time here, I have learnt that great moles are beyond others’ failure and success. He is a great mole you know, that Whillan; he will come through. We did not understand. And Privet. Care for her, Pumpkin, care for that mole. Her journey is the hardest of them all. Pray for her this Longest Night, for as I end my task she will begin hers. Oh, she will. Care for her, mole, care for her beyond care. The world beyond... what a strange hurt thing it has been.”
He fell into silence, almost int
o sleep indeed, but roused himself suddenly to reach out and grab Sturne’s paw with something of his former vigour, and said, “Go, mole, go to the portal and bring whatever Book you first find there.”
As Sturne went Stour peered after him and said with a smile, “Book of Healing, Book of Fighting, Book of something or other, that’s what he’ll find. I had to carry them all this way. Not easy. Wouldn’t have started if I’d realized. Well, well, we’ve got “em here now and all I’ve got to do is get “em in there! Eh, Pumpkin?”
“Yes, Master,” said Pumpkin.
“Well, it won’t be easy.”
“It won’t. Master.”
“Pumpkin, you are the best Library Aide in moledom, remember that, won’t you?”
Pumpkin grinned feebly. “I’ll try, Master.”
“Don’t try, do,” said Stour, frowning. He stared with some severity the way that Sturne had gone, evidently impatient for his return. Sturne reappeared, carrying one of the Books, which though not large, seemed to weigh him down mightily. Sweat was streaming off his back, and his breathing was coming in gasps.
“That’s why I needed two of you,” said Stour drily.
Sturne placed the Book on the ground in front of Stour and the ancient Master peered at it and then reached a paw to touch it.
“Book of Suffering,” he said dismissively, “wrong one. Might as well do this in the right order. Pumpkin, off you go and get another Book, there’s a good mole.”
Pumpkin duly did so, peering nervously round the dark portal beyond which, but a few paces on, was a jumble of Books. He darted in, grabbed the nearest, and was well on his way out again when a great rumbling sound of pawsteps charged him down and he found himself flat on the ground, the Book slipping from his grasp.
“Will have to try harder,” he muttered, hauling himself up and taking the Book up again with much greater difficulty, for it seemed to slip and slide in his paws. As he grunted with the exertion of trying to hold it and take it out towards the portal, his gasps and groans and pawsteps all echoed and re-echoed and rumbled and roared about his head, confusing him.