Free Duncton Found by William Horwood Page B

through me they shall know it too. Teach me to know things as they are: the light and the dark, the noise and the Silence, those that take and those that give; help me to so love them that they shall hear thy Silence beyond the life I dedicate to them.”
    So prayed Beechen, where Tryfan and Feverfew found him, crouched before the Duncton Stone, his left paw touching it, and all about him the sense of others near, and holiness, and Silence. They went to him, and touched him with their love and were silent with him before the Stone.
    The sun darkened before the clouds that came and mounted up. Dark clouds of warning and trial. The sky cracked, and from it rain fell and shrouded all moledom in its wet and noise.
    Yet Beechen knew only joy and said, “I am not alone. There are others with me though I remember not their names. But they shall wait for me. They shall know me and help me until, back here where I was born, and where I come today, I shall be born again and they shall know me, and know themselves.”
    And his tears and those of his mother and of Tryfan were at one with the rain that fell; and the good soil of Duncton knew it, and the Stone as well.
    Yet, as they turned from the clearing, the Stone trembled and over its wet facets the reflections of the clouds still went. A mole had dedicated his life to the Silence, but great was the darkness, and a mole but small. The Stone trembled in Duncton and began to wait.

    While in one place only across all of moledom the sun shone again that day, bringing to life the wet faces of its pale scars and high fells. At Whern it shone, and on Lucerne its light fell, and his eyes narrowed against it and liked it not.
    He turned back underground, his eyes dark and his mouth cruel, his body bent towards a future grim that would start where he himself began, by the still pool of the Rock of the Word. So to there he went, and found Henbane.
    “What shall you do?” she said, for the day of dark and sun, when her only pup had hit her, was a day when life turned and set itself anew.
    “I like not the light, nor the Stone,” Lucerne whispered across the dark pool to the Rock of the Word. Then he was silent as he began to plot the final fading of the light, and the destruction of the Stone.
    “Its fall shall be your ministry,” she said. “I shall not oppose your accession when the time comes.”
    “No,” said Lucerne evenly, “you shall not.”
    Lucerne turned and stared into her eyes and, powerful though she was and still remained, his gaze was the greater, and she looked away. At the Rock? At tunnels that led to where nomole knew?
    “Leave me,” said Lucerne.
    Neither Rock nor tunnel was it that she saw as she left. But rather a memory, as faint and uncertain as the light that tried to glimmer at the fissure high in the roof above. A memory before any she had ever caught before. A memory born in this very chamber, when she herself was born. A memory of a momentary shaft of light, lost in the fell years when Charlock her mother and Rune her vile father bore down upon her. Lost until now. And knowing it Henbane, for the first time since that nearly forgotten time when she was still wet from her mother’s womb, faltered.
    “Leave me!” roared out Lucerne.
    Which Henbane did, scattering the sideem that clustered about the higher tunnels, breathless, desperate for the surface and what it had which Whern could never have. Which was light, light of a June day almost done, light that follows the cleansing rains of a storm.
    “Light,” said Henbane softly as if she saw it for the first time, and she wept for what she was and what Lucerne had now become. Wept for the life and lives she had lost, and could never find again.
    “Help us,” she whispered as she watched the light of that day fade now across Whern, and all moledom too, and saw the darkness come. But whether her prayer was answerable, whether by the Word or something greater than the Word, nomole could know. Moledom