Duncton Quest by William Horwood Read Free Book Online Page A

he never complained nor harried me. As summer advanced I grew to like my new place and the tasks I was set, which were varied and involved travelling about Uffington on Brevis’ business. Being naturally curious, especially about the way the tunnels were made – for they were much grander than those I was brought up in – I got to know them well. This knowledge, and the fact that of all moles there I was attached to Brevis, later saved my life.”
    Sprindle paused briefly and he sighed. The tale he was telling was clearly burdensome to him and revived memories of a mole whom he had grown to respect and perhaps love – a feeling Tryfan understood from his own time with Boswell – but which he had been able to forget in his long isolation these past moleyears. Then he settled down again and began to tell of how news of the grikes first reached Uffington, and of their subsequent arrival, and the brutal destruction they wrought.

    The earliest rumours of the coming trouble reached Uffington in August, when travelling moles from the systems to the north arrived and confirmed what had followed in the wake of the plagues that had troubled moledom for many years: the coming of a new terror in the shape of grike moles.
    The plagues themselves had caused division in Uffington, some scribemoles saying that their most ancient task was to heal, and that allmole would benefit if the scribemoles were seen to be fearlessly going out to bring help and preach the Stone’s Silence. But others, and they were the more dominant, said the role of the Holy Burrows was to set an example by prayer and learning; the plagues were, surely, a punishment for moledom’s loss of belief and faith in the Stone over the past decades. The scribemoles need do nothing; the Stone would decide the future.
    Spindle’s master Brevis was one of the spokesmoles for the former group and argued for scribemoles going forth and doing healing work – but the final word was with Medlar, the Holy Mole, who had aged in recent moleyears and in that hour of crisis erred to caution and non-action. So, along with the heat of that summer, dissension, uncertainty and a fatal paralysis came to Uffington.
    Then, in August, there began to come to the Holy Burrows ominous stories that missionary moles of the long disregarded Word were rapidly spreading from the north in the wake of the plagues and were now within reach of Uffington itself. Three of the seven Ancient Systems – Caer Caradoc, Stonehenge and Rollright – had already been taken over and the scribemoles in the Burrows began to feel that they were gradually being surrounded.
    These invading moles were called “grikes”, though what the derivation of this name was, none at Uffington, not even the oldest scholars, was able to establish. All that was known, from the ancient reports, was that the original grikes were dark of fur and snout, clever, lithe of body and strong. They had little humour but much self-confidence, the frightening confidence of moles who know they are right, and were inclined to talk calmly but forcefully. If provoked they did not hesitate for one minute to fight, and to claim as they did so that right must be on their side.
    Grikes, it seemed, were not believers in the Stone and despised those who were. They were, rather, followers of the “Word” and it was their duty to preach the Word, to convert moles to it, and to make Stone-believers see the folly of their ways, however it had to be done.
    The Word was not unknown to Uffington. Although its disciples evidently believed that it was of divine origin, scholars in the Holy Burrows had established decades before that the Word was the work of a corrupt and evil scribemole of early medieval times whose name was Scirpus. From a system in the north had he come, a young, unlettered mole driven by faith in the Stone to make his way alone to Uffington. There had he learned scribing, and become a great scholar whose commentary on the early