Duncton Found (121 page)

“Did I ever tell you about two brave moles who tried to cross the River Dove and failed? Now
that’s
a story you should know about!”

She shook her head and whispered that he had not told her that tale, but she would be grateful if he would and did he mind if she closed her eyes so that she could imagine it all the better?

The seasons of moles’ lives turn, young mature, parents age, and the old begin to slow and live on through the young. This is the passage that Midsummer sees through, this the passage into the years of summertime. For some moles the passage is peaceful, for others the Stone demands a different way.

Out of the talons of a bloody death Henbane had taken Woodruff and saved him, and now the Stone had one last task for her.

“Soon,” she was inclined to say in those days of June. “Soon will be Midsummer, and then, my dear, I think I can say I’ve done enough!”

Soon... but not quite soon enough.

It was an afternoon a day or two before Midsummer when three moles crept among the shadowy ways a mole can find if he looks hard enough on the slopes below the west side of Arbor Low.

We know these moles. We have been expecting them. Perhaps, indeed, the Stones have been expecting them as well. Perhaps, in truth, Henbane too had expected them and known no other way to prepare Woodruff for their coming than to rear him as she had, and to bring him here and trust that in some way the Stones would, finally, protect him well. Perhaps.

It was Lucerne who came that day, wild now and strange; and Terce, aged too like Henbane; and the guardmole who had first discovered Henbane here sometime in the days past and whom, too briefly, Woodruff had caught a glimpse of.

Now they crept, unseen this time, up towards Arbor Low on a summer’s day when skylarks sang above and insects scurried among the fresh grass.

“Master, the top of that bank ahead looks down upon the Stones and that’s where I saw them,” said the guardmole quietly.

“Good,” said Lucerne, eyes staring, eyes hungry, mouth open, breath quick. “You stay here.”

“Master, the pup’s no pup now but a sturdy youngster. Shall I come with you?”

Lucerne glared coldly at him.

“I said stay here. This is a private matter.”

“Yes, Master,” said the guardmole, and as they turned from him and crossed the field to the bank and climbed up it he shrugged and muttered, “Yes Master, please Master, and bugger
you,
Terce.”

Travelling here with them he had come to the conclusion that Terce was as vile a mole as ever he had met, and the Master was mad. He muttered for his mother in his sleep. Gazed at his paws for hours on end. Couldn’t settle in a burrow until things were arranged just so – which could take him hours to achieve. Barmy. Daft. Dulally.
Mad.
The guardmole stanced irritably. Since Beechenhill something had changed in him and he was tired of fighting, tired of guarding moles like...
these.
Bugger the lot of them!

The guardmole stretched out his snout along his paws, felt the summer sun begin to warm his fur, and thought of the home system which he had left so long before.

Henbane saw them first, a sudden blackness breaking the line of the bank behind the only standing Stone. Then another. Both staring.

If luck can ever be said to have been in Henbane’s life it was there then: that Woodruff was close by. He might have been caught by them on the slopes; he might have been below ground. But he was there and when he heard her sudden sharp call he sensed its urgency and came to her immediately. He saw where she looked and looked there too and saw two moles beginning to descend the bank towards them.

His instinct was to go forward and protect her but already she had put a restraining paw on his, calm and still. She was not Henbane, former Mistress of the Word, for nothing.

“Listen, my dearest,” she said softly, not taking her eyes from where the other moles came. “I want you to do exactly,
exactly
what I say, whatever it may be. Will you do that for me?”

He nodded.

“Come close,” she whispered, “yes, just so. And if they speak to you say nothing. Your life may depend on it.”

He was a little in front of her, with her right paw on his neck. She lay on her side, her belly exposed.

“Who are they?” he said as they came past the Stone and stopped.

They were two males, both frightening in a way far worse than the two guardmoles he had once seen. Both still, and both with eyes that stared. About them, it seemed to Woodruff, the summer air was cold.

“Who are we?” smiled the younger of the two. “This is Terce, Twelfth Keeper. And I am Lucerne, Master of the Word.”

They came a fraction closer and Woodruff felt Henbane’s talons tighten on his shoulder, and her body stiffen. The sunlight was across their faces and Woodruff could see every line, every piece of fur, every wrinkle. Their eyes were black and dead, not like Henbane’s at all. There was... nothing in them but dislike, and in Lucerne’s pure hatred. Woodruff felt as if his breathing had stopped, as his heart thumped in his chest and trickles of sweat were on his neck and flanks.

“Well, mother, and so we tracked you down,” Lucerne said. “And this is the pup?”

“He is,” said Henbane.

“Now tell me,” said Lucerne, “whose pup is he? The sideem Mallice’s or my sister Harebell’s?” Woodruff saw the Master’s talons fretting at the ground. He seemed poised to leap forward. He was not large so much as powerful of presence, almost overwhelming. There was something
suffocating
about him.

For a moment Henbane’s talons stayed tight on him and then to his astonishment he felt them begin to relax. Something... she was going to do something. The world seemed very still to him.

Henbane said, “He is the pup of Mallice. He is thy pup, Lucerne.”

Woodruff saw the Master’s talons still. He saw him lightly smile. Yet as he saw it her words seemed to repeat themselves within him: “He is thy pup, he is thy pup.” It was not what she had ever said before. More words thundered in his head. “He is thy father, the Master is thy father.”

Lucerne turned his head and looked at him.

“He is thine own, Lucerne, but I have trained him to hate thee and you will never win his heart.”

It seemed to Woodruff that her voice was strange, lulling, unlike the way he had ever heard her speak. Her body was relaxing at his flank. Her haggard belly breathed slowly in and out. Her black teats were empty things that showed. The grass....

“Yet I shall have him now. Mother, make it easy for us all. Give him to me.”

The place they were in seemed to move slow, the air was chill and cold and still. At Lucerne’s flank and just a little further back, Terce stared. Behind him was the solitary upright Stone. Woodruff glanced again at Lucerne and saw he was watching Henbane’s every move and that surely there was nothing anymole could do against such a mole. They were looking at the poised talons of death.

Suddenly Henbane laughed, a strange young laugh, the laugh of a passionate mole, the laugh of one who is used to having her way. Not the laugh of one afraid at all.

“No,” she said, shaking her head a little. Then she turned her gaze from Lucerne to Woodruff, eased herself back so that her belly showed more and her ancient teats were proud, and said in a gentle voice as her paw pulled him down towards her, “Come, suckle me, Woodruff, and be my love.”

The words were smooth, incestuous, mocking, but most of all, the words were exclusive to him. Not for Lucerne, nor any other mole. He was the one she suckled, he was her love.

He stared down at her teats and disgust came into him, but her talons tightened again and he seemed to hear her voice, “Do exactly,
exactly
, what I say!”

Woodruff had time to see the look of jealous outrage suffuse Lucerne’s face before he bent down towards her. As the nearest teat came close and his mouth opened towards it he heard Lucerne’s roaring cry of
“
No!
” and all suddenly was wild and terrible.

He heard Lucerne move wildly forward and felt the powerful grasp of desperate talons at his flanks.

Even as Woodruff sought to do the unthinkable and take Henbane’s teat within his mouth he felt her thrust him violently aside and he saw the mistress of the killing art begin to kill Lucerne.

For in that moment of enraged jealousy that Henbane had provoked in him, when he had rushed forward and sought to oust Woodruff, Lucerne exposed the upper half of his body to her.

What she had made she could take back again. With a sudden shocking cry she thrust her talons up into Lucerne’s snout and throat, and then, more terribly still, she pulled out the talons in his throat, raised them, and stabbed them down into his eyes and kept them there.

Blood was everywhere, and more than blood. From Lucerne’s mouth came an unforgettable bubbling scream, and up in the air went his paws as Henbane clung on and tightened her terrible hold.

“Run now, run now!” she cried out to Woodruff.

He saw Lucerne’s talons thunder down into Henbane’s belly. A gasp, a second fading blow and Woodruff had time to see Henbane’s talons thrusting even tighter in. Lucerne’s snout burst, his whole body seemed to scream and his left paw taloned its dying thrust into Henbane’s throat. Mother to son, mole to mole, they were caught in a tearing, bloody embrace of death.

Then Woodruff turned, and saw Terce triumphant straight ahead – triumphant! Worse, he looked smug. In that moment Woodruff looked upon the face of evil and, though he did not know it then, he saw a mole who believed he had achieved his end: Lucerne and Henbane passing beyond life towards a divine history he would fabricate. Terce fixed exultant eyes on Woodruff, but the last thing Woodruff saw in them was surprise at what he himself did next. Without thought of what might happen, he pushed hard at Terce so that he fell against the Stone behind.

Then he was trying to get past him as angry Terce shouted, “No! You! Come with me! I can make thee immortal.” And he felt an old mole’s talons grasping thin and tight at his right paw. He heaved and pulled and floundered past, and up the bank and over, Terce just behind.

Woodruff, hampered by Terce’s grasp, tumbling and turning down, fell into the dry ditch below the bank. He looked up, saw that enraged austere face falling towards him and, turning to one side, thrust up his talons into its cold eyes. He felt a shuddering pain up his paw and shoulder, and down his back. A terrible pain from the power of his blow. Terce slumped beside him and blood dripped upon the ground.

Woodruff stared down at his talons and found them impaled in Terce’s face. He pulled them out with a terrible cry of horror at what he had done, then turned round to run, and there, over him, more powerful than him by far, a great guardmole stanced.

The guardmole looked at him, and then at the dead Terce. Woodruff was quite still but his breath rasped in and out as if he had climbed a mountain for his life and there, on its summit when all his strength was gone, he had found death waiting. The guardmole looked down again.

“Shit,” he said.

The guardmole grabbed his paw, pulled him almost off the ground, and in a few mighty steps was up and over the bank and back to where Henbane and Lucerne lay. Lucerne was dead, Henbane nearly so.

They gazed down at her, their shadows across her head. Her eyes were still half open.

“Live for me, my dear,” she said, and slowly her eyes closed, and slowly, slowly she breathed her last.

The guardmole’s grasp was tight, and he stared down at the Master Lucerne and the former Mistress Henbane in a state of shock. He stared about the Stones of Arbor Low, which lay peaceful and white in the sun.

Then back at the two bodies before him.

“Shit!” he said again.

Slowly his tight grasp of Woodruff’s paw slackened, and then it let go altogether.

Woodruff was too shocked to move. He gazed at Henbane and then up at the great guardmole.

The guardmole looked wearily at him.

“Scarper,” he said.

But still Woodruff could not move, but gazed on at where Henbane, all his world till now, lay dead.

The guardmole bent down towards him and roared, “Go on, get out of here.”