Free Duncton Stone by William Horwood Page A

angrier and more dangerous the further downstream they looked.
    One of Privet’s guards stopped momentarily and pointed a talon downvale into the distance, where the river’s torrential flow was lost in rain and what seemed swirling mist in the middle of flat meadowland on the far side of which the landscape rose into wet haze. Sometimes the mist shifted and the dark and lowering line of an ancient river terrace could be seen downstream on the far side of the vale.
    “Wildenhope,” muttered the guard; “Stone help us all!”
     

Chapter Five
    It was April and Hamble had reached the last stage of his long journey from Caer Caradoc. But the mole he was with was reluctant for him to leave... “So you’re going to Duncton Wood, Hamble? Well, yes, you’ll not mistake it when you see it! Half a day’s journey and you’ll be in sight of it, and as near the place as you’ll ever wish to be. It rises dark these days, on the far side of a roaring owl way nomole in his right mind would try to cross. What rose glorious in the morning sun when I was a pup is now en-shadowed by moles who are not likely to be removed in my lifetime. No, no, it’s not a place to visit. But you’ll not be the first mole who felt the need to at least go to just look at it, to remind themselves of the great things we have lost and will never find again. Oh, but I shall miss you, mole...”
    Hamble listened to the old mole patiently, though he was anxious now to get away and make the final trek to the system he had travelled so long to reach. The time had come to end the journey begun when Privet had sent him away from Caer Caradoc, which had become, he found to his surprise, a kind of personal pilgrimage. How little he had known himself in the days he was with Rooster. How much he had discovered since; how much more there was to find out.
    His friend’s name was Purvey, and Hamble had found him living alone and frightened among the ruined tunnels of Cuddesdon, to the east of Duncton Wood, a place of prayer and scholarship founded a century before in the glorious days when the followers had defeated the forces of the Word, and made Duncton a centre of reverence and freedom once more.
    Instinct had driven Hamble to Cuddesdon after he left Rollright in early spring, and curiosity too. The instinct he no longer tried to fathom or understand, but followed with an easy and wry good humour.
    The curiosity arose because a mole – a Newborn indeed – he met along the way mentioned “ruined Cuddesdon’, revealing that “Newborns do not bother to occupy it now, it being wormless and somewhat off the beaten track and quite inconsequential’. But Hamble remembered Privet mentioning it to him when they had talked at Caradoc, and the journeymole Chater had told him a little of Cuddesdon and his last visit there before he had died.
    Why, Chater had nearly been killed by the Newborns who had taken it over, and it was said not one of the quiet and ageing scribemoles who lived in a brotherly community had survived. So when Hamble realized he was near it, and knowing he did not yet feel quite ready for the dangers of entry into Duncton Wood, he had made his way to Cuddesdon and climbed its desolate slopes to see the place for himself.
    There he had found the mole Purvey, who had survived the Newborn massacre by virtue of being away from Cuddesdon for a few days in a nearby system. He had had the terrible experience of coming back, discovering the mutilated bodies of moles he knew and loved, and then being forced to retreat when he realized that Cuddesdon was occupied. Whatmole knew the terrors he suffered in the moleyears that followed? Like a forlorn pup without a home, he had lurked about the streams and banks of the vales below Cuddesdon, unable to go to the only place he knew, yet without another sanctuary.
    Then, that spring, when the Crusades had begun again, Purvey had seen the Newborn Brothers leave in haste; he ascended the slopes of Cuddesdon, and