Read Online Duncton Found by William Horwood - Free Book Online Page A

its effect as persistent as a hungry pup’s cry.
    “We’re wanted!” cried out Wharfe with certainty. “It’s as it was when one of us called when we were young, and the others knew he was needed and must go quick.”
    The others looked at him in alarm, and at the coming clouds, and then reared up in readiness as he himself reared up, turned and said, “I’m needed by the Stone. Now. We’re all needed, and I don’t know why. All moledom’s needed. Can’t you feel it?”
    He turned and began to run back upslope and Bramble, who least understood the terrible urgency of the moment, called after him, “You never said where we would meet to be together again. You never said....”
    “At our own Stone, at Beechenhill: there we must go now, and there one day we’ll be needed and we’ll meet again. At the Stone of Beechenhill....”
    Then Tryfan’s son by Henbane was gone upslope among the grass, faster than they could follow up the long, long way towards Beechenhill’s Stone.
    As he went, quicker and quicker, urgent against the darkening sky, the June sun faltering on his back, the others came after him, and moles they passed watched and wondered what the fuss was about before they too stared up at the forbidding sky, and began to think a storm was on the way for the air was restless, and heavy, and the light now strange indeed.
    While on ran Wharfe, leaving his sister and friends further and further behind as he strove to reach the Stone before the darkening sky overcast it with shadow and driving rain. As he went he felt that in some terrible and mysterious way the very future of moledom was in his paws. Yet not just in his own: in all their paws, to make or mar as they themselves decreed.

    North now, beyond the Dark Peak and into the turbulent shadows that confuse a mole that travels on from there.
    Past fair Grassington. Past the crag of Kilnsey and then over the River Wharfe, which marks the edge of Whern and gave Tryfan’s son by Henbane his name, and up the limestone terraces that form Whern’s westward flank.
    No sun there now. Its light has gone and June seems all unknown.
    Lucerne is abroad.
    Lucerne come with his mother to take pleasure in the livid and corrupted sky.
    Lucerne, dark one of the three. Henbane’s own, cherished and cosseted by her, reared for fell purpose and darkest of intents, the hope for redemption of generations of moles who chose scrivening and dark sound.
    Lucerne, a mirroring of his brother Wharfe, but a reflection seen in the black alluring depths of an evil pool. Eyes and body much the same but biased too well to elegance, his body and limbs making their stance too well to trust. His arrogant beauty abnormal and most sinister.
    Just as one forebear, Mandrake, was in Wharfe’s rich veins so another’s blood had seeped like disease into Lucerne’s: Rune’s own.
    “What is it, my sweet?” asked Henbane, smiling from the shadows of Whern’s tunnels where she preferred to stay.
    “The light I hated has gone out across the fell and darkness is going south from here, as I decreed it should,” whispered Lucerne. He turned and, though almost an adult now, he bent to suckle her, his smooth mouth to her sleek teat, his paws to her flank in a perverse adult copying of a pup’s natural need. While sensuously, Henbane stroked his fur.
    “The light is gone,” he whispered once more, lifting his head from her belly and her thin milk streaked on his well-made cheek.
    “Good,” said Henbane. “Good.” But there was distant weariness in her eyes, as of a mole who, finding her task almost complete now, begins to doubt its worth. To reassure herself she came out into what light there was and caressed Lucerne’s flank. He did not respond, and his eyes were alert on the billowing sky.
    “I want to see the Stone,” he said. “Soon.”
    “There are many, my love, too many for a single mole to see. What would you do with the Stone?”
    “I should have it for the Word. I would