Duncton Stone (46 page)

“With such words as these the positive pilgrim can remind himself of his responsibilities, and avoid the sloughs of despond into which he will be in danger of floundering from time to time on his long journey. Certainly it worked on that occasion for me and I raised my snout, took a good look around, and decided that my task must be to help those poor moles of Leamington as I myself had been helped by the healers of the Community of Rose.

“I am not a healer, and know little of Such matters as herbs, and touch, and prayer, as healers need to know. However, it is my observation that moles know more about helping others than they realize, and they may draw upon it, as a honeybee draws upon the nectar of a flower, much more easily if they forget their own little trials and tribulations. A self-absorbed mole is not much help to others, justified though his self-absorption might be! And it is a strange paradox of life, which I will not try to explain here or anywhere else, that a mole often finds that the quickest way to help himself is to help another. I resolved therefore to give what aid I could, and bring what healing to the injured and comfort to the dying I was able.

“Ah, but little did I know how dire was our situation at Leamington, nor how onerous and long would be the time I was forced to spend there!”

Hibbott, as unwittingly as ever, had journeyed straight into one of the most notorious massings of those times, in which some two-thirds of Leamington’s followers died in circumstances of much horror and suffering. Deprived of food and water, unable to relieve themselves but where they lay, and with the heat of summer adding to their discomforts, disease and death was their slow lot.

It was Hibbott’s fortune, if such a word can apply to such a circumstance, that he was captured towards the end of the massing when the Newborns were growing unwilling to impose the harshest disciplines in the chambers where moles were held, because the conditions had become so foul that guardmoles would no longer venture in. For this reason he had considerable freedom of movement, and as he was in good health, and elicited the sympathy of one or two of the guards, he was able to secure at least a little food and water for those he tried to help. For himself he took the minimum, sensing that he had longer to die than the others, and that if he might keep a few moles alive a few more days then the decline of his own health and strength would be worthwhile.

Never once in his account of those terrible times does he complain of his own grim lot, nor does he make much of his own great contribution. Indeed it has only been through the recent scholarship of Bunnicle the Second (of Witney), that we have come to realize that the shadowy mole mentioned in many of the contemporaneous accounts of the Massing of Leamington as having been a source of comfort and healing to many a mole, was in fact good Hibbott himself

Yet his is not the only mystery attached to that terrible incident, though it has taken many years for scholars to make sense of the clues; for it is now known that Privet herself was involved, and even more anonymously than she was in the Community of Rose.

This later passage in Hibbott’s until now obscure
Pilgrimage,
both explains his anonymity in relation to Leamington, and provides the missing clues which connect Privet with the same affair, and indeed with Hibbott himself

“I believe,” says Hibbott, “that after some two mole-months of these conditions, and doing all I could for my fellow moles to keep my own spirit up, I succumbed to fatigue and illness. Certainly I grew gaunt and thin, as one of my charges constantly told me, and my mind began to wander.
*

*
This was the redoubtable Spire of Leamington, one-time elder, whose
Out of Disaster Came Triumph
, though occasionally inaccurate, offers a personal and moving account of the most notorious Newborn massing of those times. His reference to the mole we know to be Hibbott graphically describes how he ministered to others despite the slow decline of his health, how towards the end he refused several opportunities to escape, and how his faith and prayers sustained the lives of so many until the massing was finally ended.

“For this reason I can remember little of Leamington’s now famous relief at the paws not of followers but of a new contingent of Newborns led by Brother Commander Thorne of Cannock. Starved and ill as I was, I remember days of wandering, though I now believe that this was largely in my fevered mind. But I woke to reason, and the beginnings of health once more at the gentle paws of a healing mole, a middle-aged female of greying fur, and thin face. She did not speak then, nor did I ever hear her speak, yet to her many found themselves talking, as if in her silence they found a release for their own doubts and fears, hopes and joys.

“I found myself among many others who had barely survived the massing, and in need of time and respite while we recovered ourselves, much as wounded moles from a battle might recover together in some safe place. I remember only that dear, silent mole who came and tended me day and night, as others did, and it was to her visits that I most looked forward.

“I talked little, and nor did I desire to when others asked me whatmole I was and whither I was bound. Certainly I did not dare at first say that it was Privet of Duncton Wood I sought, for what trouble had that got me in already! Yet one night I found myself whispering Privet’s name to that silent mole, feeling it was safe to do so, for she never spoke and would not give my secret away!

“Soon I found myself speaking less of Privet than of the many feelings and experiences that had so far arisen in the course of my pilgrimage. It may seem strange that I should have asked her questions knowing she would not answer, but there is something about silence in another that encourages a mole to seek answers to questions he has not dared even ask before. So then I began to do what I had not yet done, which was to wonder why I was upon a pilgrimage, and what it was I hoped to discover.

“‘It isn’t Privet herself I seek,’ I told my confidante, ‘but something about the idea she represents. Yes, I’m sure it’s that. Her stance at Wildenhope, of which no doubt you’ve heard, made me realize that there comes a moment in a mole’s life, perhaps many moments, when he must take stock and ask himself truly whither he is bound. I believe with my whole heart that the Stone will guide me to Privet when the time is right, but to discover that moment I must journey trustfully, trying not to strive for what I seek, trying not to seek at all! I feel
you
understand, I feel sure you do!’

“How her clear eyes seemed to bore into me with love and understanding, how careless I was of her and concerned with my own thoughts and desires! How free I felt to talk of things I had never thought of before. To journey without hope! To seek without desire! To find without searching! What strange ideas were these? What perplexing paradoxes! Yet such are the questions a pilgrim begins to ask himself along the way, shedding hope and desire, ceasing striving, letting his hungry spirit be as free and vagrant as his roaming body and errant mind!

“Such were the ideas I expressed to that silent healer that long night! And the most abiding impression of all? The sense she gave me that I was free to say what I most feared to say and she would not judge or admonish me. I was free, free to speak what darkness or silliness or nonsense came to my mind, and had time to do so, for she was there like the Silence of the Stone itself.

“I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I remember was that it was dawn, she had gone, and that I was well, if weak, and ready to resume my pilgrimage. I felt stronger in my mind than I ever had, and all because of a conversation with a mole who never said a word. There is something to be learned from that!

“I knew my time of respite was over and I resolved therefore to slip away from Leamington as anonymously as my silent mentor had slipped away from me. I rose, went quietly and without interruption up to the surface, surveyed the unfamiliar landscape and said to myself, ‘Well, Hibbott, and in which direction will you point your snout?’

“The sun was rising, there was a morning hush across the distant trees, and I swear I heard a voice, a voice out of Silence, a female voice, and, yes,
her
voice, say, ‘Mole, you surely know that your way now is south, south to Duncton Wood’.

“So, as simply as that, the decision was made. And what did it matter if I knew already that Duncton was occupied by the Newborns, as all the major systems were? It did not. It was there the Stone wished me to go, and if I was captured again, so be it. If I found Privet there, well and good! If not, at least I had followed my pilgrim heart to where instinct and trust had told me I should go. I turned and said a silent farewell to Leamington, I whispered a prayer for the many moles I had come close to in the mole-months past and whom I was now leaving behind, and, shaking the dust from my paws, and whiffling my snout at the cool morning air, I was off and away, and free once more!”

Certainly, then, this passage shows that Hibbott had not then realized that the mole who had helped care for him after the Leamington massing, and to whom through that night of self-confession he had confided the purpose of his pilgrimage, was Privet herself.

But had anymole identified her?

They had, and that a Newborn, and arguably the one with most to gain from her capture and deliverance to the enraged paws of Elder Senior Brother Quail: Brother Commander Thorne, scourge of Cannock, most able of the Newborn Commanders, and the one Newborn capable of cutting through the panic and incompetence of Quail’s military leadership, and put his Crusade back on course to a crushing victory over the followers.

Few things are so strange in the long course of moledom’s modern history, nor so significant, as how it was that Thorne discovered Privet at Leamington, and let her go.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The vital importance of Thorne’s coming to Leamington, not only in his actions when he discovered Privet but also regarding his attitude towards the Crusade Council and his transfer of loyalty elsewhere, is most easily understood in the context of events at Wildenhope.

By the third part of July even the over-confident Crusade Council could not deny that the reports coming back were not quite as convincing in their claims of victory as they would have liked, and that in some places the Newborns had even been a little on the retreat.

Two events towards the end of June had tipped Quail over the edge into what Snyde, the greatest of the contemporary chroniclers, and the closest to Quail himself, privately called “a madness of rage, retribution and misjudgement”.

“He,” continues Snyde’s startlingly honest private record – created with the help of the now alienated Squelch who had access to (and was the butt of) Quail’s worst excesses of mindless anger and cruel punishment of aides he believed had been disloyal or transgressed Newborn dogma – “became increasingly unbalanced and deranged as the molemonths of June passed by into July, and it became all too plain that the Crusades were not proceeding as smoothly as we had hoped.

“The first time I saw him kill an aide with his own paws or rather with his teeth, for he bit the mole to death – was when a messenger brought the news from Evesham that Finial’s attempts to subdue Maple in the Wolds had ended in failure and the capitulation of the important system of Broadway to the rebels, which meant that they thereafter controlled the north-eastern approaches into the Wolds.

“When he heard that Finial was killed in that engagement, along with many of his best commanders and guardmoles, Quail’s face suddenly became suffused with a kind of swelling anger, in which the blood vessels about his eyes and snout distended and engorged, his eyes took on a strange, fixed, bulging look and his snout turned a violet-red colour which would have been comic had not his murderous and arbitrary rage been so terrifying to those about him.

“The snout of the messenger, whose name I was unfortunately unable to obtain, turned as white as Quail’s turned puce, and his eyes widened in abject fear. Then, with a snarl of rage, Quail lunged forward into a ghastly embrace, his teeth about the other’s throat. He stanced up, twisted and ripped at the mole and hurled him bodily towards the Council chamber’s portal. Blood was everywhere, not least about the mouth of Quail, who, no sooner was the deed done, assumed a benign smile, wiping the blood from his face before ordering that the dying victim be dragged away by guards so that the Council could resume its debate.

“I noted a curious odour in the chamber afterwards, a rotten odour, as of decaying flesh whose fumes of putrefaction have been only partly disguised by some herb or other. It was faint, but quite nauseating, and I reluctantly concluded that its source was in some way Quail himself Others seemed not to notice it at the time, and certainly none later admitted to doing so, though I and my minions questioned them several times.

“As for the murder of the messenger, it seemed afterwards almost as if it had not occurred. Not one Brother Inquisitor who was witness to it ever mentioned it to me again, and nor, later, when my enquiries were beginning to concentrate upon Quail’s growing insanity and its source, was it ever referred to.

“The second occasion on which Quail’s rage over-reached itself was rather more public, yet the culture of pretence that nothing untoward had taken place again obtained. This was that afternoon at the beginning of July when news reached Wildenhope that the mole Rooster, supposed Master of the Delve, had survived, and was alive somewhere high in the Wolds.

“This news was brought to us by the informer Kritch of Norton, aide to Stow, and one of the few followers ever to betray his cause. Kritch’s absence from the rebels’ ranks went unnoticed because of his clever stratagem of pretending to have been mortally wounded at the engagement in Broadway in which Finial was killed.