Duncton Stone (58 page)

“Now, mole, listen, and listen well...”

Then did my master speak to me one last time, his paw to mine, his voice growing weaker, but his eyes brightening with the light he saw. He told me what he had told no other, how he saw the lost Book’s truth. He told me of the part he played, which some have said was nearly the greatest of all, but which he said was but a part of something far greater than himself.

“Understand that!” he said again and again. “Understand!”

It was as he said it would be. He told me what he needed to and then he turned towards the Silence, his paw to mine, and I led my dear master up through the trees of the High Wood and back to the Stone itself. I think others joined us, to witness his passing, but I do not really remember them. Only him, and the sound of Silence about him, and the Light of the Stone, and my tears that he was leaving me and I would hear his beloved voice no more.

“Journey as they did, mole; go to the holy places; listen to “the winds that whispered and roared where they went; sound the delvings that they knew. Then come back to Duncton Wood and finish for me the tale that I began here by our Stone so long ago. You will be ready then.”

Did he speak these words? I think he did. I think I heard them from out of the Silence to which he had finally turned. I felt his paw in mine, I saw him stare up at the Stone with eyes that saw mortal things no more, and then I knew he had gone on ahead of me, into the truth of the tale he told.

“Master,” I whispered after him, “you never let me speak my name, never once in all the moleyears I was with you.”

Nor had he. To him I was always “mole”. No more, no less.

“Master, my name is...” and I told him then, or told it to the Stone.

Then I turned from where he lay and I think that others came and said prayers of celebration and farewell to the last mole who remembered Privet, and knew the truth of what she had done for all of us.

I turned and I did not look back, but set off as he had bid me do, to the holy places, to where the wind blew, to where great delvings had been made. To Caer Caradoc I went, to Blagrove Slide; to Cannock and to Hobsley Coppice, to see the risen Stone; to Beechenhill and on to Whern; and, yes, to Mallerstang, even to there I went. To Sedlescombe, where I myself began...

Then back through the years I came by ways strange and dark, back to the Light of Duncton’s Stone, to fulfil the task my master set me, which was to end the tale that he began.

Only as I did so did I come to understand why for this last part of the tale I had needed to journey alone; and why my master always said he had no need to know my name.

As for whatmole he was, where he came from, what he did, we must journey some way yet to find.

Through darkness must we go, through danger, to that place far beyond where we may hope the Book of Silence awaits our coming...

Stone, guide us, for darkness comes upon us now, the Worm turns, and the Snake entwines...

The progress of Quail and his entourage to Duncton Wood that late July is too well chronicled for us to record it here in detail – not only because the indefatigable Snyde has already done the job for us in repugnant detail, but also because the impact of Quail’s passing is etched like acid across the face of innocence in the communal memories of system after system unlucky enough to be upon his route.

We are striving to reach Silence, not to explore every unwashed and odorous cranny of the Newborn’s ailing body. Let us, then, be as brief as possible...

Quail chose to take his time, and in each place he came to it was his pleasure to mete out exemplary punishment to whatever hapless moles were presented to him by the Brother Commander in charge. Whether these victims were followers or Newborns mattered not, provided there
were
victims;
that
much successive Brother Commanders and the Brother Advisers working with them came to understand very quickly.

Which was not surprising after news reached them of Quail’s treatment of Shap and Bunting, Brother Commander and Adviser respectively of Stanton Long, the Newborn stronghold that lay on the east side of the Biver Corve beyond Shipton. Shap was one of the older Commanders who had first gained ascendancy under Thripp, and perhaps as a result was not likely to be much favoured by Quail and his acolytes. Bunting was not one of the brightest of the Advisers but should have known better than to have no victims at all in readiness for the Elder Senior Brother Quail’s arrival; or to have rustled some up when it became clear that Quail was displeased.

“No tainted moles, Brother Commander?”

“None, Elder Senior Brother,” declared Shap with fatal smugness, feeling that to have none meant he was doing his job well, which normally it would. Such “tainted moles” as had come his way had long since been confined, reeducated, or done to death.

“None at all, Adviser Bunting?” hissed Quail, his bulging head growing more shiny and threatening by the moment.

“Not of late, Elder Senior Brother, no, we have cleansed the tunnels and chambers of the system hereabout long since and are confident —”

“Confident! He said confident, my good Brother Snyde!” said Quail softly over his shoulder. “Scribe it down: ‘confident’. A happy word.”

“Happy indeed, Master, were it true.”

“Ah, yessss... Scribe it, Snyde!”

The chamber where they stanced was silent but for the scratching of Snyde’s scribing talon.

“‘Confident’,” the distorted mole said lightly, permitting himself a little laugh.

Quail stared at Shap and Bunting in turn, his black eyes impenetrable. Perhaps they knew then they stared into the eyes of their own death.

“So, Brothers, you are both
confident
that the snakes of doubt, and the worms of treachery, are not here in these pure cleansed tunnels of – where did you say we were, Snyde?”

“Stanton Long, Master.”

“Just so. Stanton Long.”

“I did not say...” gabbled Bunting, aware suddenly of his danger.

“We did not mean...” faltered Shap.

“The Snake never
says,
the worms never
mean
,” said Quail, expelling a sigh that sent a wave of foul air into the shaking snouts of Shap and Bunting. Bunting retched; Shap’s eyes watered with the strain of trying not to look as if the stench of Quail’s breath made him feel sick. Snyde, Fagg and Squilver almost quivered with the pleasure of coming punishments; Skua’s eyes were icily enraged at such palpable evidence of incompetence.

“Well, then, Senior Brother Inquisitor, what shall we do with them?” purred Quail.

“Arraign them, and let them be judged,” began Skua in his inquisitorial way.

“No time for that!” said Quail sharply, frowning. He stared for a moment more and then his eyes wandered, a sign that he was growing bored.

“Snout them at this system’s eastern edge,” he continued, “that other such brothers in responsible positions should be warned to be always vigilant, lest the snakes and worms creep into their own hearts. Aye, snout them!”

This last he said so savagely that Shap fainted on the spot, and Bunting began to whimper and shake and beg forgiveness, saying he could find reprobates and miscreants aplenty but had not wished to besmirch the Elder Senior Brother’s day with such things as that.

“Lies,” said Skua rightly, knowing a fabrication when he heard one.

“Lies,” said Snyde, scribing the word down.

“Lies,” repeated Fagg gleefully and encouraging others in the chamber to do the same so that before a mole could blink the place was filled with shouts of “Lies!” repeated over and over until they were all almost exhausted.

Then the system’s guards and many others assembled on the eastern boundary, and Shap and Bunting were snouted on the spikes of a wire fence that ran there, their screams ignored but their ignominy not forgotten.

After that there was a positive plague of victims found and kept at the ready in each system that Quail and the others came to, though whatmoles, or how many, or whether any at all were used and abused depended entirely on Quail’s mood of the day. To those like Fagg and Squilver and others near to Quail, who were able to observe and discuss such matters, it soon became clear that increasingly Quail’s mood could be manipulated by others, up. to a point.

A well-timed word in his ear, the withholding of news good (or bad) from the outreaches of the Newborn territories, dark insinuations, even intimations that the weather might soon improve (or worsen) – all these were techniques used by his minions to try to swing him one way or another. In this way old scores might be settled – as with Fagg’s well-timed revelation of some minor losses in the Wolds to Maple’s forces just as Quail had settled down one morning for a consultation with the unlucky Brother Adviser Sturrick of Burwarton. Sturrick was an old enemy of Fagg, and earlier in his career had outshone him, gaining a promotion that the vengeful Fagg felt he had deserved more.

When Quail arrived at Burwarton, whose cleansing Sturrick had organized with exemplary efficiency, and whose indigenous moles had over recent moleyears provided useful guards for training at Bowdler and Caradoc, and some memorable fodder for the lusts of Wildenhope, Sturrick might have seemed in a strong enough position to resist mere “moods”. Not so. Quail listened to Burwarton’s report on a day when his ailments were giving him some pain, and to those who knew him well it was plain he was irritable, and in danger of swinging from mere irritation towards rage.

Fagg whispered his bad news at just the right moment to touch off Quail’s anger, knowing that it would be visited upon Sturrick – and it was.

“Eh? What did you say? Speak up, mole,” rasped Quail, the skin at the back of his neck creasing and bulging, his diseased eye swelling dangerously, the eyelid drooping; the protuberance at his rear developing a stiff little tremor, which was a sure sign of approaching fury.

“I said nothing, Elder Senior Brother, I mean to say...” whimpered Sturrick, helplessly borne into the maelstrom of rage and anger from which he did not escape with his life.

“Take him; he bores me, he wriggles, he whines...” snarled Quail at the end.

“What would you have me do with him, Elder Senior Brother?” wondered the foul Fagg, smiling evilly.

“What you will, what you will,” said Quail, dismissing them both, along with the guardmoles who were always at the ready for such moments.

“Make him excommunicate?” hissed Fagg, delighting in the widening into fear of Sturrick’s eyes, and the squeaky way his voice vainly implored their master for mercy, and the cold sweat that prickled at his flanks as witness to his terror.

“Yes, yes, yes, good Fagg, you are right. Take him, I wish to know him no more.”

Sturrick was taken to the surface of the system he had commanded so effectively and faultlessly for so long. He was maimed in the front right paw and the left hind paw, so that he could only crawl; he was mutilated so that his maleness was all gone; his snout was sheered off at its tip, to cause him agony.

“And finally,” scribed Snyde in his relentless record of those evil days and nights, “the screaming Sturrick was pushed and dragged beyond any territory that he knew and there, despite his pleas, Fagg blinded him and left him to wander, if so maimed a mole could wander, to his death, an excommunicant.”

Two moles surpassed all others in their skill at manipulating Quail, and by the time of the exodus from Wildenhope and the passage to Duncton Wood, they were in conflict. One was Skua, so long Quail’s ally and inquisitorial helpmeet, but now a falling star; the other was Snyde, Quail’s deformed shadow, observer, recorder, conniver, and, increasingly, sole adviser. It was Quail’s delight to remind each of these moles of their vulnerability by choosing, at times, to favour the other – and though few doubted that Snyde would now finally win the struggle for their master’s favour, Skua was given sufficient encouragement for a significant proportion of the Senior Brothers to believe he might still be the victor, and so they continued to give him tacit support.

Thus, even as Brother Adviser Sturrick was dragged away from Quail’s presence, Skua, very aware that he was a worthy Newborn and not one to be easily replaced, strove to change Quail’s mind. On some days he might well have succeeded but on that day he was out of favour, and Snyde was very much in Quail’s warm thoughts.

“Well, Brother Snyde, you have heard your esteemed colleague plead for the wretched Sturrick’s life, and a commutation of his sentence. Haven’t you, haven’t you?”

Snyde inclined his pointed head and opened his shining eyes a little wider to indicate that he had indeed heard.

“So what do you think? Give us the benefit of your judgement.”

“I think,” said Snyde in his weaselly but measured way, “that our master has been wise, even tolerant.”

“Tolerant always,” interjected Skua carefully, “but perhaps —”

“Not wise?” said Snyde quickly.

“Always wise of course, but...”