Duncton Stone (53 page)

“... we need,” he continued in a placatory and servile way, “your advice, Master, your
guidance
.”

He who dared speak was none other than Fagg, former Brother Adviser to Thorne, and now well ensconced and thriving at Wildenhope. It helped that Squilver was a friend of his, their mutual admiration and interests going back to the days when they were in training as brothers, the one for military tasks, the other for a spying and inquisitorial role.

Quail’s face softened as he looked at Fagg, his bald head glowed rather than glowered in the morning light, and he smiled briefly before staring around at the Crusade Council, and even at Snyde tucked away in the shadows behind him, with a look authoritative yet paternal.

“We have indeed considered the point that Brother Fagg makes, and rightly makes,” he began. The Council visibly relaxed around him, especially Fagg, though he was careful not to let the smugness he felt show upon his face. “Supreme Commander Squilver will apprise you of our future plans. They will involve changes, new resolution, perhaps even some sacrifice.”

His knotted and bulging left eyelid dropped, blinked, and slowly opened up again, his head jerked very briefly to the right and a look suggestive of pain came to his face, though the moment it was gone the paternal smile returned. But probably nomole but Snyde noticed it, for Quail’s words were greeted with a sudden buzz of excitement, which died down swiftly into an apprehensive hush as Squilver came forward to speak.

“Let us pause only briefly over our successes,” he began, his voice sharply aggressive, his manner clipped and efficient, his nod towards Quail confident as the Elder Senior Brother beamed and shone, his eyes twinkling to show what great confidence he had in the new young commander.

“Wales is all but won, and may by now be completely Newborn. The north-east is purified, and the north-west will give us no further trouble. As for the south and southwest, an area close to our Elder Senior Brother’s heart, we need fear no resistance now. It is ours – Sapient and Turling have done their work well.”

There was a ripple of applause, a few excited shouts, and many smiles and the muttering of mutual praise.

“Yet,” continued Squilver quickly, his voice cutting through the self-congratulations, “there are still places of resistance to which we must direct our resolve. The treachery of Brother Thorne, of whom I myself warned this Council, is now amply confirmed. Beechenhill, though strategically unimportant, is now in followers’ paws thanks to Thorne’s support. The glorious victory at Leamington, in which a few brave brothers routed the follower hordes, has now been blighted by Thorne’s deviant and malicious intervention.

“The Duncton reprobate Maple remains at large in the Wolds, though surely not for long, for his support has dwindled before the truth and might of our Crusade, and many of his followers have come over to our side and found redemption through confession and abjection. Whilst at Seven Barrows, near notorious Uffington, a force of followers survives, claiming the sanctuary of the pagan Stones that rise there.”

Squilver, an impressive orator, paused and looked about the Council, his eyes dark and narrowing.

Mole glanced at mole, serious and expectant, and excited too. Although to those who ken his speech for the first time today he said little that was new, to his listeners at the time the very admission that some resistance was persisting and successful was like a breath of fresh air in the fetid, self-deluding atmosphere of Wildenhope.

Thorne alive and successful! The Wolds still under the control of the mole Maple! Followers holding on near Uffington!

“And Duncton Wood,” rasped Squilver dramatically. His eyes widened, his black glossy coat caught the light, and he frowned with puzzled disappointment as he continued. “Aye, fabled Duncton Wood is still infected. The worm feeds in its heart, the snakes of doubt and uncertainty seek still to entwine about its mind. We have heard that a few followers, not many, but one is enough, have fled into the Ancient System there and mock our Inquisitors’ great work. Worse, these same followers sneak out at night and attack our brave brothers when they can find them by themselves, and torture them. Some of our good brothers have been snouted, some blinded, by these so-called followers of the Stone!”

He. had begun slowly and quietly, but the pace of his speech had quickened, and his voice grew powerful and accusatory as he piled up these calumnies against the followers.

“But now their time has come!” he thundered. “The worm shall be crushed, the snake taloned, the —”

He got no further in his oratory, for Quail, not enjoying the spectacle of another mole holding sway over the Council, nor wishing his young protégé to overstep the fine line between humility and pride, interrupted him with a peremptory grunt and wave of his paw.

Squilver had the sense to fall silent immediately, lowering his snout to his mentor, and casting a glance at his friends Snyde and Fagg which seemed to say, “I was perhaps going a bit too far, but the Elder Senior Brother surely appreciates a mole who dares!”

Perhaps this was true, for the moment Squilver had stanced down Quail’s face assumed its former look of arrogant condescension.

“The Supreme Commander speaks clearly and well, but he has no need to be inspiration with us!” he said.

It was a cheerful admonition, accepted with good grace by Squilver, who grinned ruefully when the Councillors laughed in a brotherly way.

“Be inspirational with your forces. Commander, and leave us to inspire each other.”

It was hardly funny, but since it was the nearest Quail had approached to a joke for a long time the assembly felt obliged to laugh at it, which they did rather too long and rather too loudly, as if vying with each other to show their leader how appreciative each was.

“We have resolved,” continued Quail quietly, his voice silencing everymole with the gravity of the morning’s real message, “to leave these hallowed tunnels and chambers of Wildenhope and Caer Caradoc and journey forth upon a final Crusade to moledom’s heart!”

There was a gasp and then a ragged cheer – the gasp expressing amazement at so radical a step, the cheer because it seemed appropriate to welcome it; but the voices died away as Quail continued.

“The early work has been done by our fellow brothers who have long since gone forth to cleanse moledom of the worm and snake. But their strength and their will, though great, is not yet enough. We must now commit our spirits and our bodies to the final struggle. We must forsake our spiritual home and discover ourselves anew on the crusading pilgrimage to take up our rightful place in those tunnels, and chambers, and across those surface runs, to which all-mole looks for leadership and support.

“In a few days’ time we shall set forth for Duncton Wood and end the great Crusade to establish the only true way to worship the Stone! My fellow brothers, fellow Caradocians, are you ready to forsake your past and set forth to the future?”

“We are!” cried out the Council.

“Are you ready to forsake those friends who have faltered on the way, and falter still, and so threaten the Crusade’s passage to the Stone?”

“Oh, we are, Elder Senior Brother, yes, we are!”

“I am ready to sacrifice my own life in this last struggle for our great cause,” said Quail quietly, bowing his swollen, shiny head, dropping his bulging, bloodshot eyes, and lowering his excrescence of a snout.

“And so are we,” cried his fellow Councillors, echoing his foul and hypocritical servility towards the Stone they could not see, even if it had appeared amongst them, so clouded by dogma was their vision.

Quail panted with the effort of his speech, his stomach palpitating, his odour wafting all about like the stench of death, the strange projecting growth at his rear end stiff and quivering like some pus-filled swollen talon pointing backwards towards fate.

“Brother Squilver, you shall order the military exodus to protect our front, rear, and flanks. Your best guardmoles will range ahead, ready to bring back news of infidel followers. See to it!”

“I will, Elder Senior Brother.”

“You, Brother Fagg, will bring to me a list of those brothers and anymole else adjudged by the Council, after due consultation this day, to be unfit for the final Crusade. Know neither fear nor favour in your work. See to it!”

“I shall, Elder Senior Brother,” whispered Fagg, betraying no surprise at this sudden elevation to a position that would inspire fear in allmole at Wildenhope.

“And you, good Brother Snyde, shall stay close by me, recording our words and deeds in the days following, that in time to come moledom shall know of these great events.”

“Indeed I will,” purred Snyde, breathing in Quail’s stench with pleasure.

“Go to it, Brothers, go to it! Plan and prepare; prepare, and be ready for the glory of the Crusade into spiritual triumph! For the worm shall turn no more, nor the snake entwine, but they shall be crushed and taloned, and laid waste before the accusing Light of the Stone, and its judgement!”

Quail ended with a laugh, now deep, now falsetto, and tears rolled down his furless face, and his distended eyelid blinked by itself as if he was winking grotesquely at some image of the Stone that was all his own.

Of the terrible days that followed we need barely speak. Fagg did his work well and thoroughly. Those poor youngsters who remained untouched and unsullied in the cells were subject to peremptory and final abuse, or cast into the river and drowned, or both. Various of the older brothers, mainly those once made venerable by early association with Thripp, but tainted now by the very fact of survival, were catalogued and listed, and after a brief nod of agreement by Quail, made eliminate. Most were taloned to death and left where they fell, others were drowned. A very few, who guessed their likely fate and sought to flee, were picked up by guardmoles posted out by Squilver for just such an eventuality. These few were kept alive by Quail’s command until the last moments of the exodus.

“We shall need them. Hurt them not.”

“Which leaves one mole more, sir, one I did not put on the list.”

It was a hot afternoon, their last at Wildenhope, and Fagg whispered these words to Quail as sweat trickled down both their faces.

“Hmmph!” said Quail. “And which would that be?”

“Thripp,” said Fagg softly, hardly daring to speak the name without the title of Elder Senior Brother before it.

“Thripp is coming with us, isn’t he, Brother Snyde?”

Snyde smiled, familiar yet obsequious. “You have said so, Master, and I have no reason to doubt that it will be so. Most sensible, most wise.”

“There you are, Fagg, Brother Snyde says I am sensible and wise. As for Thripp, a mole I once loved and respected as my own father –
he
has not been sensible or wise. He has betrayed the cause. Yet none must know of that, or that he travels with us. No, no, it is better not. He... is... still...
loved
. He would be a focus of discontent.”

Nomole dared respond to this, not even Snyde. It was certainly true that Thripp was loved by Newborns who did not know better all across moledom. It was also plain that the fact – the injustice of it, the unfairness too – caused Quail pain.

“But what of it?” he rasped. “What are we, when all is said and done? Servants of the Stone, that is all. As is Thripp. He shall make sacrifice before the Duncton Stone and his blood – whether that of a holy mole or a hypocrite matters not – shall be seen to anoint the mole who must lead us to the future. Anointing of the head and body, imbibing of the blood. The old shall give way to the new; the ill to the whole; the then to the now. I
shall
be Prime.”

Quail mumbled and muttered these words as if for him they embodied a ritual, and perhaps this was so, for he waved his paw suddenly in Snyde’s direction and barked, “Get them down, scribe them down, for a liturgy must be prepared.”

“I have, Elder Senior Brother, I am,” said Snyde soothingly, nodding at Fagg to wait awhile.

“I am in pain,” whispered Quail quietly, “caress me.”

His voice seemed suddenly that of a pup.

Snyde ran his deformed paws over Quail’s back and flanks, over his haunches, over his oily face, down his spine, and then, slowly, over that thing that grew from him and was so foul, kneading it like a well-filled teat.

“Master, you do too much for us, too much. You must rest.”

“Fagg,” said Quail, his eyes closed, “let nomole see Thripp. Let him be kept from my sight, but never let him far from me. Arrange it with Squilver.”

“I will, Elder Senior Brother. He shall ever be near you, none but his guards will know it, and you will not be troubled by the sight of his vile form.”

“Not vile,” whispered Quail as Fagg left, “never vile. He was my
master,
Snyde, as I am yours. Do you understand? He was most beautiful, his eyes most bright. I... miss him, Snyde.”

“I know it, Master, and how he has caused you suffering. Yet still you shall honour him before the Duncton Stone and immortalize his memory with his own blood.”

“Yesssss...” sighed Quail.

“Do you wish to see...?”

“No, no,” said Quail weakly, a look almost of pleading in his eyes. “It is such pain to me to see him as he has become. A betrayer now, the very harbourer of worm and snake. No, no, I shall not see him again until he atones with his life at the Duncton Stone, and through my supping of his blood he may be purified in me once more, and I made whole again with he who was once so much to me.”

If Snyde realized that at moments such as this Quail was approaching the borderlands of his sanity, he did not show it. In his sympathetic smiles and grunts, his gentle caresses and empathic winks and nods, he seemed the very image of care and concern, though an image made grotesque by his own deformities, and the unmistakable evidence of Quail’s bodily decay.

“Shall I myself go and oversee Fagg’s administration of his departure, that nomole but trusted guardmoles know that it is Thripp himself who journeys forth?”

“I would be grateful if you would,” said Quail softly. “Meanwhile, my dear Snyde, night approaches and I fear it. The last at Wildenhope. Shall I get through it, do you think?”