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

the clear spring sky of late afternoon, and the fine view across the vale to the east where they should have been travelling, seemed to taunt them all, and leave them to dwell upon, or avoid, as their temperament dictated, what might have been.
    What Rooster’s thoughts were beyond the bleak offer of hope implicit in “there is light beyond the void” was anymole’s guess. As they were led off southwards he travelled with head low, his great paws thumping the ground and crackling the husks of winter-dead plants beneath them, ignoring his guards altogether.
    Some way behind him went Madoc, to whom the spring had brought health and comely beauty, which might have been why Thorne had assigned two older, grizzled-looking guards to her, lest younger ones be tempted by the attractions of their charge. Her eyes were brave but bleak, and if she looked behind her occasionally and saw Whillan, they betrayed no recognition. Perhaps her pretence of loving another – the fictional Cripps – now meant that she could not acknowledge the mole who might have given most comfort, and whom she wished to console.
    Of them all, Whillan was having the most obvious difficulty. The battering he had received earlier to make him reveal if other moles were about meant that he now limped, and since one of his eyes was badly swollen he was forced to tilt his head awkwardly to see the path ahead more clearly.
    A long way behind them came Privet, the only one able to see all the others, and with an aching heart she discerned Whillan’s difficulties, guessed the turmoil in Madoc’s thoughts, and imagined the dark confusions that must now have returned to Rooster’s mind. And yet...
    And yet those last words of his, “Rooster knows!”
    “Oh my love,” Privet whispered to herself as they went along, “you have journeyed further than any of us into the darkness which most moles avoid, which lies beyond the shadows of their mind. Where fear and confusions meet, there you have been; and where each step a mole takes heads him further from the safety of his own self And now... Whillan, your son, caught as you have been. Perhaps because of you.”
    How hard Privet had tried to make Rooster talk; but he understood things best in the inarticulate deeps of his great heart, and expressed himself not through words but through the delving arts he had so long eschewed.
    Until now, that is, down there in that scrape of a chamber where he had made a thing of beauty and compassion beyond words – a delving which he had not intended anymole ever to see. A delving which miraculously created life, out of what he had learned of Whillan’s past through the winter years in Hobsley Coppice. It is one thing. Privet mused, to scribe down facts that have been gathered and ideas learned, and a history surmised, but quite another to make a delving that could sound out another’s life, and predict the darkness that lay ahead.
    She remembered again what she knew of Whillan’s terrible beginnings in the cross-under beneath the roaring owl way to the south-east of Duncton Wood. Had she ever talked of that to Rooster? She did not think so. Could Whillan have done? The two moles got on so badly that she doubted it, even if Whillan knew much himself Why, the Master Stour, who was the only mole present around the time of Whillan’s birth, never said anything more about it, as far as she knew. Yet there in the delving was all of it... the desperate last flight to Duncton of Whillan’s mother, Lime, the fatal attack by rooks, and the birth into death of all the litter but for Whillan himself: all had been there, all somehow felt and resurrected into a tragic beauty by Rooster.
    “Oh Stone, protect him, guide him, let him live, for in his talons, and by his suffering for others, he strives to do your work!” she prayed, passionate and vehement in her faith that the Stone would not allow Rooster’s life to be taken. If her prayer was answered, all this they were going