“I said you were the Stone Mole,” said Poplar, staring at Beechen in awe.
Then he turned slowly back to Buckram and, reaching out his paw, touched him on the flank. Already the sores were healing, healthy skin growing in their place. “I said you had come especially for him. I said, I said....”
There, on that dry slope, where no Stone was, there rose a mighty Stone made of the rock of faith and shining with the light of faith. For there moles turned their fear to love, and with their love they touched one who they thought could give them nothing in return.
“Can you see your Stone now, Poplar?” asked Beechen.
Then Poplar looked at the moles about him, and saw them in a light brighter than he had ever known before, and he smiled and said that the Stone was there and he could see it, and knew he would always see it now.
From this time on news of Beechen’s coming began to spread, though confined at first to those few moles who had found safe places to hide and made their lives in the obscurity of the more inaccessible parts of the vale. How the news spread none can be quite sure, for Beechen always asked moles not to speak of what he did for them, saying that it was a matter between them and the Stone alone.
But moles will share the excitements that come into their lives, and even if they try to keep them secret others will see the light in their eyes and soon find out. Indeed, is not community a sharing of such light?
They stayed a few days more with Poplar and his family to see Buckram through the dark lone time that followed his healing, and even in that short space moles came over the slopes and up the brook side to meet the mole they were beginning to hear whispers of. Beechen turned none away, but when the bolder among them asked if he really was the Stone Mole he would say, “I am of the Stone and if you see the Stone in me you see only the truth in your own heart.”
Beechen spent time with Buckram, who before murrain had infected him had been a senior guardmole in Fyfield, and one much given to punishing others, and those of the Stone. But the eldrene, Wort, believing his spreading disease to be a judgement of the Word, ordered him to be outcast into the vale that his murrain might infect followers of the Stone.
That was the beginning of long moleyears of isolation for him, in which he learnt that nomole wanted him, and the only way he could make any respond to him was by making them afraid. Their fear was his only comfort, for through it he knew he was still ordinary mole.
“Why did you follow Poplar?” asked Beechen.
“I wanted to frighten him. He had what I didn’t have, his health and family and a place. I thought... I don’t know what I thought. He was there.”
“The Stone is there, always there, and you can hit it without hurting anymole but yourself.”
“But I couldn’t strike you,” said Buckram in alarm, thinking that Beechen meant himself.
“But some moles could,” said Beechen, “and one day I fear they will.”
Suddenly Buckram reared up, and in spite of his weakness and the newly healed sores they could see what a fierce and terrible mole he was. “Take me with you and let me protect you,” he said. “I shall let nomole harm you!”
But Beechen made no answer, though the light of utter faith was in Buckram’s eyes.
When Beechen judged it was time for them to leave, Buckram asked again that he might go with them.
“What can you do for me?” asked Beechen.
“When my strength returns it will frighten those that threaten you,” he said.
But once more Beechen made no reply.
Then, when they had said their farewells and started downslope from Poplar’s place, Buckram pulled himself from his burrow and came after them. Poplar and his family followed and listened as, for a third time, he begged to be allowed to travel with Beechen.
“What will you tell moles that threaten me?” asked Beechen, gazing on him.
“He’ll tell them where to go!” said Poplar.
“One shake of his talons and they’ll dare not harm you, Stone Mole!” said Poplar’s mate.
But as Beechen smiled and shook his head, Buckram lowered his great brutish snout and muttered, “No, no I’ll not do that. Not ever again. No, I’ll tell them not to be afraid, for I was afraid once and now I’m not. I’ll tell them that.”
Then Beechen looked at him with pleasure and joy and said, “Then I shall have great need of you, and you shall be with me, and be near me, for the day shall come when I shall be afraid and need your help.”
Then Buckram looked at the Stone Mole with love, and knew the Stone had given him a task that he would follow all his life.
“For now, Buckram, you shall stay here and grow strong. You shall help these others with your strength and faith to worship the Stone which will guide you in what to do. And mole shall remember the name of this place, and say that here at Sandford Heath was faith in the Stone reborn.”
“When shall I come to you?” asked Buckram eagerly.
“When the last tree is bare and the frosts begin, your work here will be done. Seek me out then where you first denied the Stone. I shall need such a one as you at my flank. Seek me there.”
The wondering moles watched as Beechen went on downslope, accompanied only by Mayweed and Sleekit.
“What did he mean, ‘where you first denied the Stone’?” asked Poplar.
“Fyfield,” said Buckram simply.
“But you were outcast from there. They’d kill you if you went back.”
“The Stone will guide me in safety,” said Buckram, “just as it guided me here.”
During the autumn and early winter of that time Beechen, Mayweed and Sleekit wandered within the limits of the northern part of the Vale of Uffington, and wherever they went moles gathered to listen to Beechen and to seek healing. Sometimes the numbers were small, no more than families of moles such as Poplar’s of Sandford Heath; at other times news of his coming went ahead and all the moles of a system were waiting to greet him.
It was a time of great happiness for him, when he had time to talk to the moles he met and learn much from them of their lives and experiences, listening as he had learned to do from the moles of Duncton Wood.
Now, too, for the first time, he met moles younger than himself, and recent mothers, and heard the different hopes they had, and felt their fears, sharing the ordinary things that make a mole’s life.
“Is the Duncton Stone very big? And... and what’s it look like?” one youngster asked him, for he had never seen a Stone at all and could not imagine what it might be like.
“It’s not big to me, nor to anymole who trusts it,” replied Beechen. “As for what it looks like, nomole could quite agree for it’s hard to see it all at once, and each time you see a new part of it what you saw before seems changed.”
“Oh!” said the youngster, pondering this. “But it would be big to me, wouldn’t it?”
The mole’s mother smiled and others laughed sympathetically, for they sensed, as Beechen did, that the youngster was afraid of this Stone the adults talked of. They, too, had been afraid when their parents had first talked of the Stone.
But Beechen did not smile or laugh, for he saw the youngster was truly afraid, and was not able to imagine that such a thing could be anything but big. And, being big, he felt it was not for him.
Beechen, ignoring the adults, snouted about the ground and found a small stone which he took in his paw.
“How big is this?” he asked the youngster.
“It’s not big, it’s small.”
Beechen asked the youngster to stance very still and placed the stone in the hollow between his shoulder blades.
“If you were the Stone and this little stone was the top of it, would it be big?”
“Only just, and then not very big!”
“But when you’re adult and you’ve grown, won’t it be bigger then?”
“Only just,” said the youngster, shifting about and trying in vain to see the stone on his shoulders, “because I’ll be bigger t
hen myself.”
“And what will it look like?”
“Me mostly, if I’m still the rest of it!”
“That’s how the Duncton Stone is to moles who see it right, it’s how the Stone always is. It is there as that stone on you is. It grows as moles do and is never far beyond their reach; and they need only know themselves as they can be to know what it looks like.”
Beechen took the stone from the youngster’s shoulders and placed it among the others on the ground.
“Which one was it?” asked the youngster.
“What is thy name, mole?”
“Milton,” said the mole abstractedly, staring at the stones. “Which one was it really? This one?” He picked up one of the stones and held it up.
Beechen shook his head.
“The stone I touched is not yet ready for you to find, Milton. The search for it shall take you and many like you where you may fear to go and there you shall find it.”
By the beginning of November, Beechen had been warned by several moles of the growing danger of what he was doing. The more he travelled, the bigger the crowds of followers that began to collect about him when he agreed to speak to them, the greater was the fear that the grikes would come to know that here was a mole who was beginning to be seen as more than a “Stone-fool’. Indeed, everywhere he went there were now those who openly called him “Stone Mole’, and there was an alluring but dangerous sense of excitement, of escalation, of massing towards the Stone.
“It will only need one more big gathering like this,” Sleekit observed at Frilford, “and the whole of the vale will know the Stone Mole is come. One more healing, one more preaching, one more something that shows you are truly of the Stone. Is this how you want it, Beechen? Starting something here that we have not the power to finish?... I know the grike guardmoles – they will take you and you will be lost to us, as your father Boswell was lost so long ago in Whern. Lost, or worse.”
“What do you think, Mayweed?” Beechen said.
Lately Mayweed had been subdued and quiet and Sleekit had confided that it was because their route had lately taken them towards Buckland.
“Think, Sir? Me, Sir? Humbleness? Confusion’s what I think. All going round and me here, Mayweed, without much to do. Boldness has become a leader of moles before my very eyes and I am amazed and task-less. Give me something to find and I shall find it. Leave me nothing to do and darkness and confusion beset me, and the thought of Buckland does not help as, no doubt, my comfortable consort has already whispered in your ear. “Poor old Mayweed,” sensuality herself has said, “now nerve-racked.” She is dead right as usual.”
“Well,” said Beechen, suddenly dispirited, “for myself I’m tired. In Duncton there was always somewhere a mole could be himself, but being here, there and everywhere is being nowhere. I think I need some peace, and comfort. I miss Duncton!”
“You’re surrounded all day long by moles who need you,” said Sleekit. “You need a period of retreat, and if you had one then this excitement around you would die down and we could choose our moments better.”
“Our moments for what?” said Beechen sharply. “Now is the only moment for mole, now. The mole who thinks only of tomorrow forgets today.”
“You know the warnings about Fyfield we’ve had, and Cumnor to the north. That leaves Buckland to the south, where Mayweed would die if he had to go again, and west round Fyfield to the Thames.”
“Yes, the Thames,” said Beechen softly. “I only saw it from a distance in Duncton. Everymole I meet who’s been there talks of it. That and Fyfield I would see. Yes....”
“If Mayweed finds a place that’s quiet and safe would you go there for a time?” asked Sleekit.
“If there’s peace there, and something that I seek, then yes I would.” He looked at Sleekit deeply and said, “Perhaps it’s for yourself and Mayweed you need it, not for me.”
“For us all,” said Sleekit with a smile.
Mayweed stared at them both, first one, then the other, and then he leered in a general way all about and said, “Ha! Humble he has a task again! His snout tingles! He shall away and come back another day! He feels himself again. Too many moles, too much of following, too much noise. Madam mine, I love you but I really think I ought to go. Farewell, embrace me, let your touch linger, show this innocent what passion is so that he has reason to come back!”
Sleekit laughed and went close to Mayweed, her healthy fur mingling with his thin, patchy coat, their paws touching, their snouts snoodling, their eyes smiling. Anymole seeing them – and Beechen was the only one who did – saw true partners there, perhaps the strangest and sweetest, and thus far the most secret, in all moledom.
“Don’t go near Buckland, my love,” she said, worry in her voice.
“Anywhere but, the exact opposite, contrariwise I shall go, let’s see... now, yes... there!”
As he had said this, he had disengaged from Sleekit and performed an extraordinary turn or two before, as he cried out the word “There!” he pointed his talons to the far north-west.
“Where’s “there”?” said Sleekit.
“Peace and quiet, the river, and what Beechen most needs,” said Mayweed.
“We need peace too,” said Sleekit.
“Madam! Farewell!” and with a laugh and affectionate grin he was gone.
Sleekit stared after him for a few moments and then, turning back to Beechen, she said, “I hope the Stone will one day find you such love as I have found.”
“The scribemoles of old Uffington were celibate,” said Beechen with a rueful grin, “and I suppose I’m a scribemole of sorts. Though after snouting through Spindle’s accounts of the goings on at Uffington there’s reasonable grounds for thinking that not all scribemoles were celibates at all.”
Sleekit sighed and settled down.
“I know all about celibacy,” she said. “As a sideem I was meant to be celibate and was so too, for years. Even now when Mayweed calls me sensuous I feel I’ve sinned. I think I withered without knowing it in those years. But I must admit that after I left Whern....”
“With Mayweed,” said Beechen.
“... after Mayweed and I left Whern things were rather different. I can remember what celibacy is like, and strangely I can imagine going back to it, though I wouldn’t from choice. I’ve learnt so much with Mayweed – though I suppose we must seem an odd pair.”
“No odder than any other pair when you get to know them. I mean my mother and Tryfan aren’t exactly matched, are they?”
Sleekit laughed and said, “If followers could hear you – it’s not how they would expect the Stone Mole to talk!”
“‘Stone Mole’! I’ve no wish to be anything other than what I am – that’s what Tryfan taught me, and Feverfew too. They certainly weren’t celibate! And my father, Boswell, if he was my father....”
“Was?” said Sleekit.
“Well,” said Beechen a little defensively, and looking embarrassed too, “it’s not something Feverfew ever talked about. But if he was he can hardly have been celibate!”
“Feverfew wouldn’t talk about it, but Bailey was there.”
“All he remembers was the Stone’s light and my father... Boswell calling out for Feverfew.”
“You don’t really want to be celibate, do you?” said Sleekit.
“Well, I mean, well... no!” declared Beechen, looking rather young again.
She laughed again and patted him amiably on the shoulder.
“If they ever scribe of you, my dear, and they will, then I’m sure they’ll not scribe of this. They’ll want to think you pure. I’ll say one thing for the Masters and Mistresses of the Word: celibacy was one pretence they did not bother to maintain, though that was the only one!”
“You see,” continued Beechen earnestly, still lost in his thoughts, “the moles I meet are most of them paired or mated or have had pups, or if they haven’t they want them, and I feel they have something I don’t understand.” He looked almost comically
baffled, but Sleekit was sensitive to how serious he was being. She remembered Tryfan saying that the Stone Mole was first “but mole’, and had to be, if he was to touch other moles’ hearts. Only after that was he the Stone Mole.
“You know much that they do not understand and which they need to be led towards, just as you led Mayweed and myself through the Chamber of Dark Sound in Duncton,” she said.
Seeing that this did not satisfy the ache in Beechen’s heart she added, “Mole, the last thing on my mind at the moment I met Mayweed in Whern was love and mating. I could not have even dreamed of it happening. Others I know dream and search for it all their lives and never find it. You have told many in the time you have been in the vale of how a mole should not search for what he has not got, but rather be patient with the Stone, and trust that it will give him what he needs when he needs it. If love is to come your way it will come.”
“I know that,” said Beechen softly. “I believe ’tis so. Yet the longing I sometimes feel... remember the mole Poplar, and the family he had and sought to protect? How much he had, how much. Yet not all moles know it. Surely mating and pups are the greatest gift the Stone can give a mole, for it is not for everymole to choose celibacy, or to be a scribemole or a sideem. But when moles touch a pup that is their own, then if they have eyes to see, and a heart to feel, they may know the vulnerability and strength of life itself. How can anymole who has truly touched his own pup hurt another? How can he not feel love for all others? Somewhere there the Silence lies.”
“I never had a pup of my own,” said Sleekit, her snout low.
“But you chose another way towards the Silence, and through moles you’ve known found moles to help you there. And anyway, you raised two of Tryfan’s young, which is the next best thing.”
Sleekit’s eyes softened in love and memory.
“Wharfe and Harebell. I named them myself.”
“I sometimes feel they are the nearest I shall ever have to brother and sister and I’ve never met them.”
“There was a third, Beechen,” said Sleekit darkly. “I saw him with my own eyes.”