Duncton Found (21 page)

“I refused her,” he whispered to himself, looking at the comely elegance of the female, “but this one I must train.” But incest was not in his mind, or even crossed it. His perversions lay at first remove in others’ lusts.

“Your name?” he asked the youngster, who was, after all, of his own seed.

“Mallice, father,” she said. Her eyes were not afraid. They were his own. Her spirit was Linton’s, her body young. Laughter first, now pride he felt. And then fear, terrible.
For she was not strong and even if she survived the Midsummer rite, which surely she could not, Henbane’s jealousy would take her.
Perhaps he had underestimated Linton to so devise a punishment of him.

“You are accepted,” he said, “but if you ever call me father again in that same moment I shall kill you.”

“I understand,” she said, and what he understood was that Linton had reared her to hate him. It was a pretty challenge.

He took her to the Mistress of the Word and the Mistress laughed even more.

“Well,” she said, staring at Mallice, “you have a motley crew of novices for the Midsummer rite, Terce. An ungainly clever mole called Clowder, a daughter whose mother seems to have named her well, and my son Lucerne.” She turned to Mallice again and fondled her, to Terce’s intense displeasure. “Why, truly this mole was sent by the Word. She pleases me, though I wonder if she shall survive the rite. She seems too weak...” Henbane’s eyes looked as cruel and malicious as they ever had.

“I warn you, Terce, and make an ordination of the Word. Train your trio of novices well and see that all survive, for if one does not then you shall die as well. I shall see to it myself. May the Word help you the day the rite comes by. Meanwhile I shall give a mother’s love to my Lucerne and entrust him to thee in the dark hours of Longest Night.”

“Mistress, forgive me but... remember to suckle him. It is meet that you do.”

“I know it,” hissed Henbane.

All this she remembered, all of it. And even more of that Longest Night....

It had been in a small antechamber, adjacent to the Rock, that the life of the then-innocent Lucerne was committed to Terce and seemed to kill forever a sense of joy within herself. Henbane remembered all the details of her last small journey with her growing son, his trust – how hard and falsely won! – his eagerness, his eyes that were wide with interest and intelligence; eyes that were beautiful. Yet behind it all was fear of the unknown, a fear that might have turned to terror had he or Henbane suspected what was soon to come.

But such suspicions were not held, and so it was that an innocent pup, a little afraid of the adult world, but one that might have served his fellows well, trotted obediently at Henbane’s side that Longest Night, going inexorably towards a doom about which
despite his fears
Henbane would only say that it was for his betterment.

Even then he felt an inner doubt.

“Why?”

The question he had asked again and again betokening a determination which, if perverted, might become a persistence for evil.

“Because thy time for growing up has come, my love. I can’t always look after you. I have things to do. And Terce can teach the Word better to you than I can. He is trained to it. But....”

“
Why
?”

“It is the Word’s will. As I was taught so will you be. You can’t be a pup for ever. And anyway, I shall love you more if you do it, and be proud of you.”

“
Why
?”

“Lucerne, be not afraid. Terce is kind and will care for you. Lucerne...” But even to the end young Lucerne cried.

Oh yes, Henbane remembered all of it, and the slow and skilful bullying and threats of withdrawn love she used to mould the pup she made to her dark wilful will, even to the last moments. His mouth trembling, desperate to trust but trusting not....

“Will it be all right? I mean... I’ll be able to see you? Often?”

“Yes, as often as you need.”
Need!
A weasel word, but what youngster knows to ask, “Who will judge what I’ll need?” What youngster could guess that the one he trusts most in all the world will commit sole judgement of that crucial need to a mole like Terce? Such betrayal of love leaves an infection more malodorous than the worst scalpskin or murrain. It can destroy a mole and often does.

In torment, Henbane remembered how the nights before Longest Night Lucerne awoke screaming. But how much greater her torment that even at the last moment, as they turned a corner into the antechamber where Terce waited, she still had doubts and could have acted on them.

“Why didn’t I? Why?” Bitter her torment, more bitter than death when life is much loved. Bitter as a life laid waste.

Then the dark corner was turned, Lucerne looked up at her with a final instinct for survival, and she said, “It will be all right,” echoing his fear that it would not.

Then as Lucerne gave the last brave smile that marked forever the end of his innocence, the cavernous limestone walls widened, and there, enshadowed, waited Terce, calm, assured, certain of his power. Smiling.

At his side were two moles no older than Lucerne himself.

They stared in awe at Henbane and whispered, one after the other, “Word Mistress! Word Mistress!” and deferentially inclined their snouts. And then they looked at Lucerne, and he at them.

“This is Lucerne,” said Terce.

“Clowder,” said the male. Awed but malevolent.

“Mallice,” said the female. Awed and calculating.

As Lucerne joined them and Terce turned to take them to the secret chambers to the north of the High Sideem where the long and arduous training would be carried out, Henbane felt utterly bereft.

“Too late,” she whispered as they went.

So Lucerne’s education began.

Even now the full horror of sideem training is not wholly known. Nothing like it exists in all the experience of moles of the Stone, not even during the most ascetic and obsessive periods at Uffington. The only detailed account of it is that scribed by Mayweed at Sleekit’s dictation moleyears after she had left Whern and turned her back on the Word, and lived in Duncton.

Truthful though she was it seems likely that her account is incomplete, though whether from fear of unknowingly tainting those who might later work on Mayweed’s text, or because she blanked out memory of much that happened, is hard to say. Certainly it was part of the sideem training that the sideem
did
forget. But the arcane rituals, the harsh austerities, the self-abuse and punishment, the use – to death – of youngster grikes from outside Whern, the training in interrogation and torture, the inculcation of a creed of indifference to all but those who confessed the Word and Atoned – all these Sleekit gave some account of.

We do not know all, but it is enough to say that during the long moleyears between Longest Night and the Midsummer rite, Clowder, Mallice and Lucerne were in the talons of a Master corrupter, and by the time June came round what innocence, what kindness, what true care for others they might once have had was all gone. A kind of cold glittering dust of age had settled on them, the knowingness of moles who have seen more than moles should see, done more than moles should do, whose dreams and frightening fantasies had been lived out and made satiate; moles whose training had aimed at but one thing: to teach them how best to turn others to the service of the Word by making them masters of the use and corruption of other moles.

But if that was the norm for the sideem – the norm that Sleekit later partially described – the training of those three by Terce had one further aim, unique in the dark annals of Whern, though originally prophesied by Scirpus and made real by Rune posthumously through Terce.

Clowder and Mallice and Lucerne were to be a trinity whose sole purpose was the final ascendancy of the Word. The New Age which Rune had begun, and Henbane had continued, was to find its fulfilment through Lucerne with those two on either flank. This had been Scirpus’s belief and Rune’s desire. Now it was Terce’s task to see it to fruition.

So his training did not make ordinary sideem out of his novices that cycle. The three he made were to be arch-sideem and together do and be what a single mole could not: one to lead with strength – Clowder; one to corrupt – Mallice; and one whose name would be used to exalt for ever the honour and inviolability of the Word – Lucerne.

Let us not mince words.

By mental torture Terce did it. By deprivation in darkness. By starvation. By abuse at the talons of moles brought in secret for that task alone, and then killed. By utter satiation of adolescent lust. By rote learning of the Cleave words to exhaustion. And the only deference ever shown to Lucerne, and that an evil one, was that he was allowed to suckle his mother still.

Dark, dark and never-ending those moleyears must have seemed. Sadism and masochism touched with the fire of delight. Memories and frightened youngsters done to death as sacrifices to the Word. Blood on talons. And all about the great dark subterranean lake north of Dowber Ghyll, on whose banks Terce made them live, and in whose waters he made them submerge themselves almost to death itself, that they might be the more ready for the Midsummer rite to come.

Nomole but Terce could have performed his task so well.

And Henbane saw the progression of Lucerne’s training, for daily she fed him, daily she suffered his hatred of her failure to take him out of there, daily she saw the change. She was witness and aide to his corruption. She was party to evil.

“
I WAS evil. I am evil. I killed my son’s innocence, which is the joy in life; now I must kill him
.”

This was Henbane’s summation of her role in those moleyears and its inevitable consequence. But how to kill a mole whose very training had left him powerful, and at whose flanks went Clowder, Mallice and Terce, three moles dedicated to his ascendancy, which must give them power and glory too?

So again and again she asked. “What is his weakness?” and prayed (to what power, provided it was not the Word, she did not care) that the day would come when she would know. And that that day might come before Midsummer, before it was too late.

Chapter Ten

As Midsummer dawned across bleak Whern, the black and awesome darkness in the subterranean Chamber of the Rock of the Word began to weaken towards light, and the sinister shapes of moles to show themselves.

The novices awaiting the terrible rite of acceptance to the sideem had long since gathered, and now formed a mass of moles in the lowest part of the chamber, which ran down to the edge of the lake, on the far side of which the Rock itself rose.

Gradually through the night all twelve Keepers had taken up their stances about the edge of the chamber, except for its furthest, darkest, higher part where nomole but the Mistress of the Word might go.

As the distant rising sun began to play its light at the contorted fissure in the roof high above, all was still and waiting. No sound but the drip and play of water and the high-pitched call of bats above, disturbed by the light, shifting their roosts, uneasy.

Then the Twelve Keepers, as one, began chanting the long gradual which is the preliminary to the rite; a chant whose ancient and subtle timings announce and follow the slow progress of the great shaft of light which comes down into the chamber once the sun is high enough.

At first showing, the shaft of light is but short and stays high among obscure crevices, but then as the gradual continues and the sun above rises, it strengthens deeper into the chamber and brightens all in its path.

The awed novices watch on until suddenly, in a moment they never forget, it reaches the spot where, most mysteriously, the Mistress or Master of the day is revealed in meditative stance: still, fur ablaze with light, eyes impenetrable pools of darkness, ready to give the command that even the most confident novice must dread.

The chant of the gradual deepens and grows louder, the novices feel themselves drowning in its sound as the shaft travels on to the very edge of the lake. As its first dappling reflections shoot out and up and on to the face of the Rock far beyond, the Master or the Mistress speaks.