Duncton Stone (59 page)

“Well then,” said Snyde with a benign shrug, “what more can a mole say? Let alone a Senior Brother?
Least
of all the Senior Brother Inquisitor?”

Skua wisely said nothing more, and so Sturrick, his last chance gone, had been punished in the manner described, and wandered for three days and three nights east of Burwarton, until the rooks of Chatmore Wood harried him into death.

But let nomole think that Quail was merely clay in the paws of those about him. Had he been he would not have lasted so long, nor made such diabolic impact. On his good days, which were then still the majority, his mind was clear, and his energy and decisiveness almost as potent as they always had been.

He certainly arranged the secret passage of Thripp well enough, with Fagg in charge of the exercise, and Snyde given a watching brief over it. Nomole but those directly involved and some senior members of the Crusade Council seems to have guessed that throughout the journey Thripp was always near, though always hidden. In this Quail certainly calculated right, for had others known what mole it was, so privily conducted by night from place to place in the shadow of the main group of moles with Quail, there would have been much interest in him, and real danger of defection from Quail’s ranks back to the kinder and more benign influence of the former Elder Senior Brother.

Nor was Quail slow to ken the information gleaned from the systems through which they passed concerning growing divisions in Newborn ranks. As yet he said little of it, but he saw it, he almost smelt it, and he had his thoughts and bided his time. The journey to Duncton Wood, with all its attendant dangers and discomforts, was not the best time to reassert his authority. That, he believed, could wait, and in this his judgement was probably sound.

Indeed, had Quail not been a mole concerned so much with power and the domination of others, and with the perverted pleasures of imposing the extreme dogmas and doubts of the sect he had taken over, he might have been the very mole needed to carry on the best of the work first begun by Thripp at Blagrove Slide.

But he was not; and in addition to his basic malevolence towards life and the living was the dreadful fact that he was dominated almost hourly by the need to satisfy his sadistic lusts, or the planning for the prospect of doing so. Which made for poor judgement, and the appointment of self-serving subordinates more interested in maintaining their positions by servicing his weaknesses, than promoting a noble cause and being willing to stance up to a leader who seemed in the process of betraying it.
Such
excellent subordinates – Brother Bolt, for example – it had been Thripp’s gift to be able to find and appoint, though with Quail himself, Thripp seemed to have fatally failed.

Yet even had Quail, by some miracle of transmutation imposed upon him by the Stone, become a reformed mole, it seems unlikely that by the time the journey from Wildenhope to Duncton took place he could have done much to improve the situation. Not only because the process of civil strife within the Newborn movement seemed already irreversible, but also because his own illness, for that was plainly what it was, was beyond curing, and whatever caused the swellings, and the odours, and increasingly the rages, was beginning to overtake his sanity as surely as black ivy can cover and choke a healthy tree.

Quail’s progress to Duncton was not rapid, but it was steady, for he preferred not to stay in one place for too long, and by mid-August he had reached Banbury, which lies in the vale of the River Cherwell, a good way north of Duncton Wood. Their route had been chosen with some care – if they had gone further south as they might have wished then there would have been the possibility of a clash with the forces of the followers led by Maple from the Wolds, while a more northerly route would have risked bringing to a head the tacit but as yet unresolved conflict with Brother Commander Thorne, late of Cannock.

As it was they had reached Banbury with no opposition at all, the only violence being that which Quail himself had inflicted as “just punishment” upon whatever victims successive Commanders and Advisers were pleased to offer up to him. Indeed, Squilver, Supreme Commander and executant of Quail’s occasional military orders, congratulated himself on the safe and successful passage of the entourage to Banbury.

“From here,” he was able to predict confidently to a special meeting of the Crusade Council (special, because it was graced by the presence of a whole collection of Brother Commanders summoned from near and far), “it is merely a matter of following the vale of the River Cherwell down to Duncton itself, a journey that the Elder Senior Brother has chosen to make a triumph to express the glorious achievements of his personal crusade thus far.”

If Squilver sounded a little relieved as he made this announcement, it was because he had been greatly concerned that they had been obliged to take a route between two forces whose strengths and inclinations he was uncertain of. He was less sanguine than Quail, and indeed Snyde, about the potential threat of the followers under Maple. He tended rather to agree with Skua, who had thoughtfully observed that whilst no large force of followers had ever emerged out of the Wolds, yet whenever and wherever the Newborns attempted a foray into that higher ground, whether up some vale whose lower reaches they controlled, or over some fell which seemed devoid of mole, followers were always quickly to paw in just sufficient numbers, and just the right dispositions, to make further progress difficult and dangerous.

“Chance,” was how Snyde, not a military mole, dismissively put it, but this was rather too simplistic an explanation. No, Squilver, for all his arrogance and strategic inexperience, could recognize well-organized opposition when he saw it, and rightly guessed that Maple’s force was much more formidable than it had yet bothered to show itself to be.

As for the potential threat from Thorne to the north, that was a more difficult problem to analyse, and one of the reasons for the calling of the Council at Banbury – rather than later at Duncton Wood itself as Quail had originally intended – was to discuss it. The difficulty was that nomole yet knew Thorne’s intentions, since despite several direct and indirect efforts to communicate with him, he had refused to attend the Crusade Council, or send emissaries to it. Mysteriously, the messengers sent to him had simply not returned, leaving Quail’s informants generally in the dark.

Two attempts had been made, one involving Squilver’s paw-picked guardmoles, the other utilizing Fagg’s supposed contacts within Thorne’s camp, to force contact with Thorne. The first was a crude plan to abduct three of his guards, which ended in complete failure when all fourteen of Squilver’s team died in the attempt, with nothing but silent corpses left behind to tell what happened. Squilver barely survived this humiliation.

The second, of which historians have few details, involved certain of the forces once supposed to be loyal to the disgraced Brother Commander Dunmow of Ashbourne and by then under the influence of Thorne, and trusted by him. These were reached by one of Fagg’s minions, the slithery Purde, and they appear to have agreed to carry out a bold but doomed attempt to kill Thorne himself. Again all the Newborns implicated died, though Fagg’s original contact, Purde, withdrew before the coup was attempted and reached the safety of the Council.

This Purde was thus the only useful source of information the Council had of what went on within Thorne’s ranks. From him the Crusade Council first learnt of the arraignment and execution of the foul Sickle and his colleagues, instigators of the Leamington Massing. If this was not bad enough, and sufficient evidence to Quail of Thorne’s perfidy, worse was the news Purde brought that Thorne had moved to consolidate his hold on the territories east and west of Leamington, the region further north, and the north itself, as yet unreported on.

All this was unwelcome news, but it is often the way with tyrants to dismiss bad news and concentrate on the good, and discourage those around them who would like to breathe upon discussions the fresh air of truth and reality.

In this respect, despite his inexperience, Squilver did his best to guide deliberations at Banbury towards what was achievable, and might build upon the Newborn strengths.

“And what are these?” he asked rhetorically of one small private gathering of moles, which did not include Quail or Snyde, though Fagg and Skua were present – the record being kept privily by one of Snyde’s minions whose task was to spy on such occasions, and report back.

“What are our strengths? First, that we hold Duncton Wood and the territories like this one immediately around it, and have consolidated our position in the south at Buckland and Avebury,” said Squilver. “Next, that we hold all the territory to the west as far as Siabod, so that the Welsh Marches are ours. Recently, too, we have heard that Cannock is ours once more, Thorne having fled from it.
*
Our weakness is in allowing the followers in the Wolds under Maple to go unchecked, and I would prefer to see a resolute campaign against them before any decisive move is made against Thorne. In any case, that mole is plainly prevaricating, and I cannot believe he would openly defy the Elder Senior Brother.”

*
This was the period when the cruel Brother Zeon had taken power in Cannock, though Squilver was not to know that it was at Thorne’s initiative. Far from “having fled” Thorne decided to withdraw his own guardmoles from Cannock for use in the battles he was then planning, and allowed Zeon to take over, whom he knew to be corrupted. Zeon was, of course, assassinated by the Confessed Sister Suede the following October, creating precisely the kind of anarchy that Thorne had expected, and which later he might exploit.

It seems that the powerful and independent Brother Commanders Sapient and Turling of Avebury and Buckland respectively, who were present at this secret meeting, agreed with Squilver, both giving their support to the plan that if he invaded the Wolds from the north they would move in from the south.

“But this should not be done until the Elder Senior Brother is secure in Duncton Wood,” stressed Squilver.

It is hard now to know quite what to make of such a report. Did Snyde immediately reveal its contents to Quail when he learned of it? Were Sapient and Turling preparing a takeover of power from Quail once they had secured the Wolds, perhaps with the intention of getting rid of Squilver also? Did Quail himself set up this “secret” meeting, perhaps with the connivance of Snyde, so that he might have reason later to rid himself of one or other of Squilver, Sapient and Turling (or all three), at some future date?

Not unnaturally, historians of that period have had to ask such questions, though we, whose eyes are on the coming of the Book of Silence, need concern ourselves only with the fact that they need to be asked, revealing as this does the internecine double-dealing of Quail and all around him, and the treachery and feuding that ultimately made him and his entourage all but impotent.

One thing is plain enough about the discussion at Banbury that August – the position of Chervil, and his decision to side with Thorne, was not yet known to Quail. We know this not only because there would have been mention of it in Snyde’s records, but also because the Crusade Council, at Quail’s suggestion, sent emissaries north to Whern, to make contact with the elusive Chervil, the hope being that he might journey southwards and apply pressure on Thorne.

The fact was that Chervil had deliberately led the Crusade Council to think he was still active on their behalf – sending occasional missives to them, always (so he said) when he was on the move and prosecuting some new local Crusade against the snakes and worms of doubt and faithlessness up there in the north in Whern. So Quail, with Thripp under secret and close guard and Chervil now apparently an active Crusader, out of harm’s way, naturally felt a certain confidence, a view shared by most moles at the Banbury discussions.

Then, one sultry August night, all suddenly changed when a curious incident turned into a bloody skirmish, which led inexorably to a series of engagements, and those to a winter of war. The incident, which took Squilver and his guardmoles completely by surprise, occurred deep in the night, which was the hot humid kind in which sweat trickles uncomfortably down a mole’s flanks, and sleep remains elusive for hours on end, yet he has not quite energy enough to rise up and do other things.

Quail’s headquarters were on the bluff of ground local moles call Calthorpe, which looks north-eastward down to the River Cherwell. The surface is mainly grassland pasture, though here and there an isolated tree rises up towards the sky. The place was well guarded, though after so long without incident the guards had become complacent, and the close night air did not help their concentration.

Yet, even had they been fully alert, it is doubtful whether they would have spotted the four moles, no more than shifting shadows, who expertly moved up from the softly-flowing Cherwell to reach the bluff, and then shifted from clump to tree, from tree to sparse bush, and then on to shadowed clump again.

Nor would they have heard them as they snouted down entrances, sent out as signals soft whistles that seemed no more than some day-bird waking into night and calling out of dreams and back again. Finally, turning back to each other, they whispered of what they had seen and surmised, and what they must do.

“Quail’s west of an entrance just over there,” said one. His voice was calm, his eyes steady, his body powerful.

“Three guardmoles above him; two to east, and three more to north,” said another tersely.

“Wind north-westerly,” said the third, needing to say no more. Such a wind, over a bluff with a north-east aspect, made things more difficult.

“But the route out’s clear, and the escape route too.”

“Aye, by tunnel and only two guards.”

“You stay, both of you. Ready to warn, ready to guide, and we’ll fetch Arvon,” said the mole who had first spoken.