Duncton Stone (42 page)

One other mole deserves mention: Sturne, still Acting Master of the Library and the only Duncton follower successfully fooling the Newborns into thinking he was one of them. Not that Brother Inquisitor Fetter did not have his suspicions – but then, they were suspicious of everymole. The worms of suspicion were their daily food. But Sturne’s bibliographical expertise was so great, and his manner so convincingly hostile towards the followers, that he had survived with the Inquisitors’ confidence in him intact.

Not that he had done so without enormous cost to himself. Desperately alone, publicly subscribing to views he detested, forced to be involved in Newborn rituals whose words and symbolism were an affront to his very being and beliefs, Acting Master Sturne had suffered during his lonely struggle for the Stone – a Task Master Librarian Stour had set for him, which now only Pumpkin in all the world knew of though Cluniac had guessed much of the truth.

But nothing had caused him more anguish and suffering than being forced to witness the torturing of the two followers caught by Newborns after their escape to the Ancient System. One was young, the other middle-aged, both with a life ahead; it might have been easier had the two been old; they might perhaps have not survived their ill-treatment so long. Being made to watch their torture in the bloodstained chambers of the Marsh End was a test, and a terrible one, for however much a mole may be justified in hiding his true affiliations he cannot but feel guilt when he is unable to intervene to prevent deliberate cruelty to an innocent mole.

In truth, had Sturne believed his intervention would have had even the smallest chance of success he would have tried it, but he knew otherwise; and it was no comfort to him to know that his brave actions since the Newborn takeover had saved lives, including all those presently hiding with Pumpkin in the Ancient System.

He had to watch as the two moles were harried and hurt in turn; after being cruelly beaten they were blinded and their snouts slowly crushed. Finally, the agony too great, they had betrayed their own kin and friends. It was then that Sturne, for the first time in his life, had allowed a tear to trickle down his face.

“So you feel sympathy. Acting Master Sturne?” whispered the ever-watchful Fetter.

Sturne had long since decided that where the Brother Inquisitors were concerned attack was the best defence: “Sympathy?” he cried out, wiping the tear away. “I feel rage that such scum as these are allowed to live. What is Newborn justice if the Snake is allowed to survive in a body, however broken? Do you think that Snake is dead because these two foul moles have finally told the truth about their fellow conspirators against the Stone in the High Wood? Yes, I weep to see such sinfulness still living in the world!”

“Well, Acting Master! Well! Passion at last, from the least passionate mole I have ever met!” said Fetter. “You have feelings after all, it seems. But if that is a plea for these moles to be executed in the name of the Stone then you do not understand the subtleties of punishment. They will suffer more if they live, and that is good, for it may mean the Snake in their hearts will die and we will have saved two more moles for the Stone. And, by confessing as they have, they have won the right to live. So your plea must be ignored – but it is appreciated.”

All this Sturne knew well enough, just as he knew too that the tortured moles both wished to die. Had they not both screamed out for death? And yet... but moments later they were past all thresholds of pain and into the saving grace of numbness, of confusion, or near-madness, and their agony was less. Time would diminish it further.

In that world they had no protectors but the one who was forced to watch their distress; Sturne himself And he, suffering with them, prayed to the Stone that it alone would decide their fate, and no mole.

“Stone, if they live, grant that I may be allowed to watch over them. Stone...” Then another tear had come, more painful to Sturne than a whole flood of tears to any other mole.

No wonder his chill eyes were colder now, no wonder the icy etchings of his face were deeper; no wonder the severe furrows of his brow and the hard downturn of his mouth were ever more intimidating. After the torture, even Brother Inquisitors Fetter and Law were half-afraid of him, and let him alone in the vast and echoing chambers of the Library, once so busy and productive, empty now except for the guardmoles who lingered there, hoping to catch sight or sound of the rebels they knew were hiding in the Ancient System nearby.

Spring had come across Duncton as elsewhere, and there in the Library, among its texts and shelves, vast walls and deep tunnels hushing the joyful sound of bird and mammal from the surface above, Sturne had begun the most dangerous and most important part of his work: liaising with the hidden force that Pumpkin and Hamble now led in the long-lost tunnels beneath the High Wood.

Never for a moment had the Inquisitors suspected that Sturne of all moles was working with the followers hiding in the Ancient System, rather than against them. Never for a moment had anymole questioned the advice Sturne gave about the tunnels, or doubted that the map of them he had forged, claiming it as Mayweed’s own original, was anything but genuine.
*
It is a measure of Sturne’s extraordinary courage that he knew what would happen to him, slowly, down in that bloodstained chamber in the Marsh End, if his collusion with the followers was ever discovered.

*
See
The Duncton Chronicles
for mention of the possible existence of this map, made by Mayweed, one of the greatest route-finders moledom has ever known.

Meanwhile, despite these enormous pressures, it was Sturne who brilliantly misdirected the campaign of Fetter’s guardmoles to bring out into the open the moles they sought. Against the few disasters – the death of the young mole in a skirmish at the Stone, the capture and torture of the two already mentioned, must be set the success with which the rest of the rebels eluded capture and detection. The revelations of the tortured moles proved worthless, for the rebels had already flown from the tunnels where they were reported to be hiding and all the guardmoles’ best efforts produced nothing.

Where then
were
the rebels? And how did they achieve their success? Most accounts have made their exploits heroic, and have much romanticized their bravery, the more so that many were elderly, and all knew the fate that awaited them if they were captured.

The truth is that from the time of their going to ground until the coming of Noakes that June, they lived a scurrying, fearful kind of life, with no contact with the outside world (except briefly with Sturne through Pumpkin, who had to keep his source of help secret), with little food (the Ancient System’s tunnels are notoriously wormless) and, most seriously, without sufficient water for most of May (when Duncton suffered an unseasonable drought).

All this in tunnels beset by the Dark Sound and other horrors that past Masters of the Delve had carved and etched into the dark and gloomy walls and chambers, leaving traps and devices whose insidious tensions could turn moles half-mad with fear and desolation. These delvings seemed designed primarily to protect the Stone itself, and only the truly innocent and pure in heart, or morally powerful, or profoundly faithful, could long survive them. But the longer the rebels were forced to live among them the more they came to see that as well as the Stone, which lay on the west side of the Ancient System, the Dark Sound seemed also to protect the very centre of the High Wood. Several of the more venturesome rebels did their best to enter that forbidding place, but none got far and all reported that so far as they could tell the tunnels there were now ruinous and root-filled, and surely beyond the ken of mole.

Pumpkin had early on decided against saying anything to anymole, excepting Sturne himself, about the strange and frightening experience he and Cluniac had suffered in early spring when they had tried to venture through immediate dangers to whatever lay beyond.

That something did lie beyond he had no doubt, and it filled him with awe and disquiet. That the tunnels there were the source of much of the Dark Sound that echoed almost continuously through the Ancient System, he was sure, and so were his rebel colleagues. But more than that, and what suspicions he had, he did not say, and nor did anymole-else ask him. As the molemonths of summer passed by the rebels ceased talking about the Dark Sound, or its source, and a conspiracy of silence about it developed; only tearful glances, or the occasional muttered reference about “not going
that way
betrayed their unease. Certain tunnels, certain filled-in portals, were avoided, and the rebels created routes that minimized their exposure to these disturbing places, and the sound they seemed to provoke.

Often the sense of this unknown and unexplained place, lost now to mole, was oppressive, and many was the time one or other of the rebels sought to escape the gloom and doom of their refuge, or refused to travel even into those tunnels that
had
been explored, riddled as they constantly were by the sounds of danger.

Meanwhile Pumpkin and Hamble inspired them to control their fears and to survive, the former feeding their collective memory of what Duncton had once been and might be again if only they could show the will to survive, while the latter’s stories of the mounting danger of the Newborns in the outside world left them in no doubt where their duty lay. Cold, starvation, boredom, fear, hopelessness, despair – such were the enemies these brave moles faced in that nightmare time of isolation and exclusion.

Brave Pumpkin! What a leader he proved to be. Cheerful, resolute, modest and able to inspire or shame them into never forgetting what a Duncton mole should be. How many times did he conquer his own fear to lead others on and out of danger? Countless times! But at least he was aided and abetted in these acts of courage by the two moles who had first shown such willingness to help him, Elynor and her son Cluniac.

And brave Hamble too, who had finally rejected violence and turned his back on Rooster; he lived with his new-found pacifism, applying all his skills of fieldcraft and warfare, not against the Newborns (who might have suffered heavily at his paws in so secret a war as that which could have been waged in the High Wood), but to help the rebels survive.

So it was that by June, when Noakes arrived, rebel watchers trained by Hamble and posted across the High Wood had spotted the coming of the strangers and spied on them. For molemonths past Hamble had forecast that sooner or later moles would come in from the outside world, to bring news of what was happening and, more important still, to give Hamble and Pumpkin some guidance as to how best to continue their occupation of the High Wood.

“They’ll need help reaching the safety of these tunnels when they come,” Hamble had warned, and sure enough, when Noakes arrived, if the rebel watchers down by the cross-under had not diverted the guardmoles the newcomers would certainly have been spotted before they reached the High Wood.

We may imagine the excitement in the rebels’ tunnels that greeted the news that after so long, and so many disappointments, three moles had arrived from the outside world of moledom. But there was some consternation that two of them had lain low, while the other set off westward across the wood.

“What’s he about then?” growled Hamble.

“As far as I could work it out,” the watcher said, still breathless from running to report, “he’s off to the Stone in the hope that he’ll find a follower.”

“Strange they were able to get through so many defences, even if in the end it was our watchers made it possible for them to reach the High Wood undetected,” said Hamble. “It could be one of the Newborns’ little tricks. They send in a few moles from “outside” and wait for us to make contact. Then in come their forces...”

“On the other paw,” observed Pumpkin, who always took a positive view of moles, “if they
are
genuine then one or other of them will run straight into a Newborn patrol before the day’s out, and we know what that’ll mean for them. We had better reinforce the watchers already with them and take them in for questioning somewhere neutral where we’ll give nothing away of ourselves.”

It was in this context, then unknown to him, that there followed a day Noakes never forgot, and an evening he would never wish to repeat. The High Wood through which he travelled seemed to be populated with moles he could not quite hear, and not quite see. Skilled in fieldcraft as he had become, he had the sense that moles were following him who were more experienced than he – at least in that strange and largely silent environment of high and ancient trees, fallen rotting branches, whose mosses and coloured lichens showed they had been undisturbed for many a year, and massive grey beech roots whose shadows could hide a thousand secrets, and many a watching mole. As for moving silently, it was nearly impossible, for the Wood’s floor was covered by a deep layer of golden-brown leaf-litter which rustled and crackled as soon as a mole looked at it.

By the time the trees thinned towards what he felt sure was the Stone Clearing he was tired out with the stress of it all, and sweat trickled down his back, though it was not that warm. Then, through the trees, not quite fully visible, he saw for the first time a gathering of light about a rising, soaring form, grey-green, powerful beyond the branches. He sensed that he was about to enter the presence of something living and potent, awesome beyond anything he had ever dreamed.

“The Duncton Stone,” he whispered, putting one faltering paw ahead of the next, his heart thumping, his breathing quickening.

“Aye, mole, so it is!” said a rough voice behind him as four great paws descended, crushed him down to the ground and held him motionless.

“Well, and what are you doing here?” the voice whispered heavily in his ear as he struggled in vain to turn around to see the faces of his captors, rather than merely their solid and determined paws which ranged the ground around him.