Duncton Stone (75 page)

Quail spoke in a clear, cold, dispassionate way, and a mole who did not know him as well as Snyde might have thought him a different mole altogether. Certainly what he said seemed true, and chillingly sane. What hope had Squilver against Thorne without Sapient’s and Turling’s forces to back him up?

“And so Squilver will fail, and then he will die. I will kill him myself. He is beginning to displease me.”

Quail’s gaze slid away to some vacant corner of the chamber. A dusty half-worm turned and twisted in the murk.

“But it does not matter. We have no need of guardmoles finally to keep us in power. The Stone is our army, our force, and it will crush the Worm and the Snake that seek to eat and entwine, to slither and to bite. Do you see, Snyde, do you see that all those things Squilver does – and Thorne, and that treacherous Sapient, the things they do as well – are in vain. The Stone will crush them all. Righteousness is our might. I shall be left, supreme; and you, Snyde, at my flank. Can you not see it coming soon now?”

“Yes, Master,” said Snyde. He sniffed at Quail, he closed his eyes, he thought of nothing but the day when Quail would die and he, Snyde, would have the ultimate pleasure of loving the mole that had been greatest in the land. Snyde eyed the living Quail with expectant lust and said softly, “Oh, yes, Lord.”

“Then shall the pains I have suffered for allmole,” went on Quail, “and borne without complaint, then, then,
then
shall they be banished from my body, and peace return once more, and Light, and Silence. Thripp will be there, his blood to anoint me. And Squelch, my son, his love to embrace me, and his song to soothe me; and she will be there, that Privet, that mole I was guided to let free: she shall be there to offer up the Book of Silence to my safekeeping, and for ever and all time I shall be remembered as the mole who brought the lost last Book to ground. She shall come back to Duncton Wood to love me, Snyde. Forgiveness is the greatest thing. And you...”

Unadulterated lust was in Snyde’s bent eyes but what he said was this: “And I shall be Master Librarian of Duncton Wood, successor to Stour. It is all I ask.”

“Yes...” said Quail vaguely, utterly uninterested in Snyde’s dream, utterly unaware of the nightmare nature of his real desire. “Can you not see?”

“Yes, Master. I see it all.”

“And Sapient will have Turling killed.”

This last was so unexpected and irrelevant to what had gone before, and spoken so simply and matter-of-factly, that Snyde almost thought he had misheard. But now he considered it, yes, it did seem the most likely thing.

“Master,” said Snyde, “your mind is the clearest of them all.”

“Pain has not conquered me. Pain has sharpened me. My hour will soon come and I shall be released from it a stronger and more powerful mole, my penance paid.”

“Master, you must sleep. Tomorrow your triumphal progress to Duncton shall begin, and you must look your best.”

“It does and it will; and I shall,” laughed Quail crazily, and with sudden and obscene intimacy he tried to get Snyde to join him in a dance.

Snyde declined, smiling most uncomfortably, backing away until Quail let him be.

“You see!” said Quail, as all his energy fled him and he dropped his outstretched paws; he looked old, and ugly, and frightened. “I too can be jocular.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

No struggle – not a single one from out of the grisly procession of wars in the mediaeval era, nor one from the ghastly catalogue of cruelty perpetrated by moles of the Word in more modern times – can compare for the fierceness of its fighting and the horror of its outcome to the battle of Buckland, waged over eight days that late October, in the period when Privet was returning to Duncton Wood.

The “failure” of the Newborns at Avebury had been a clever strategy by Sapient, planned long before against the possibility that his sojourn with Quail would be so long that he was unable to return to Avebury before the followers reached it. As we have seen, he did not get back and they
did
reach it, and so trusty moles like Dirke of Devizes oversaw a clever retreat from Avebury, keeping most of the Newborn force intact.

We know now that behind Sapient’s strategy was the desire to take over Turling’s command in Buckland, thus securing for himself sufficient territory, and moles, to emerge as undisputed master of the south. Sapient appears to have agreed to go up to Banbury partly to gauge Quail’s strengths and weaknesses, but also to investigate creating some kind of pact with Squilver. We may only guess at this, for no records remain, and Snyde seems to have been unaware of such possibilities – or, just as likely, was by then too uninterested in such details to bother recording them.

By then
his
narrow vision had narrowed still further to the coming inauguration of Quail by the Duncton Stone as Prime Mole – or some such absurd over-reaching title – legitimized by the presence and blood of Thripp himself. We need not doubt Sapient’s assessment of Quail as a spent force, one literally dying; and of Squilver as a mole who did not have quite the ruthlessness to last long once his sponsors, Quail and Snyde, were gone. No, Sapient rightly saw that Thorne was likely to be the greatest obstacle between himself and real power, and his hurried return to the south and determination to take over Buckland and all its appurtenances, reflected the insight that unless he got on with fulfilling his ambition, it might be too late.

The matter of the followers concerned him rather less, though he was not so sanguine as Turling, a less cunning and imaginative Brother Commander, about their weaknesses. The followers under Maple had, after all, held the Wolds well against Caradoc and Wildenhope, and Sapient’s own forces from the south.

But like all arrogant bullies, success had blunted Sapient’s judgement, and he dismissed Maple’s Woldian campaigns as trivial and unimportant. Yet Maple’s rapid overwhelming of Avebury, achieved far more quickly and with far less loss of life than Sapient expected, caused him to revise his opinion.

“This is a mole who needs a beating,” he told Dirke of Devizes, two days out of Banbury and well on the way to the south, “and we shall see that he gets it.”

“You shall share the campaign against the followers with Brother Commander Turling, sir?” asked Dirke provocatively.

“Shall I?” said Sapient, eyes chilly, snout thrusting out as if considering a future shared with
anymole
as a most disagreeable prospect.

“Shan’t you, sir?” asked Dirke.

“I hope that Turling suffers no accident, mole, that will force me to assume responsibilities I have no wish for,” responded Sapient ambiguously, shifting his yellow eyes from the middle distance down to his sharp and shiny talons.

“Yes, sir,” said Dirke, smiling, “or do I mean no, sir?”

“You must decide, Dirke, and only you, what you mean by that.”

Dirke made his decision and a few days later, Brother Commander Turling was found dead at dawn in a temporary scrape near Littlemore, to the south-east of Duncton Wood. He had been suffocated, though only after a fierce struggle. His personal bodyguards, six in number, were unable to give a satisfactory explanation why not one of them was at least within shouting distance at the time, though one report states that all six were seen near Dirke’s quarters, in dubious female company, enjoying themselves.

Sapient expressed surprise and rage at the loss of so able a Brother Commander, and had all Turling’s guards drowned in the river near Sandford. Then, assembling such of Turling’s commanders as had travelled north with him, he announced that he must forthwith “assume responsibilities he had not wished to even consider”. In the circumstances loyalty would be demanded, and to emphasize the point Sapient had one of Turling’s commanders (who made the mistake of not declaring himself loyal to Sapient with quite sufficient alacrity) killed as well. So by the time Sapient approached Buckland some days later, he was able to claim to be its Acting Brother Commander.

He did not attempt to enter the infamous tunnels of Buckland until the large and well-trained force that had escaped Avebury had made contact with him, which it duly did at the place, and in the way, he had arranged. Indeed, an observant mole, able to watch the disposition of the Avebury Newborns about Buckland, might well have concluded that this was an invading force rather than one on the same side. But Sapient was not inclined to leave such things to chance, and wished to be sure that the Buckland Newborns would give him fealty.

He need not have worried. He sent Dirke himself in to the misleadingly clean and spacious lower tunnels of Buckland with the sad tidings of Turling’s demise, and before long all the junior commanders in Buckland, and four of the five senior commanders, were falling over themselves in rushing out and offering themselves up to Sapient’s leadership.

Two exceptions, one a cousin of Turling, and the other his oldest crony, were caught trying to escape, and put to death. A few others whom Sapient decided he could not trust were demoted, and so, with relative ease, Sapient took control of Buckland and, in effect, of southern moledom.

Those moles who have kenned the Duncton Chronicles will be familiar with the position of this most notorious of systems, and the role it played in the war of Word on Stone. Suffice it to say that the system lies on a low bluff of ground some way to the south of the River Thames. The place is wormful, and its tunnels, though generally nondescript, are airy and well suited to supporting a large number of moles. For this reason, and because of its position between Duncton to the east, Uffington and Seven Barrows to the south, and Avebury to the south-west, Buckland is a system suitable as the headquarters for any army of moles that wishes to dominate southern moledom.

Although in itself it has little to commend it, it has a certain appeal to those with a ghoulish or twisted curiosity, since the southern part of the system, named the Slopeside, is where the zealots of the Word perfected their punishment system by which moles were condemned as “clearers” and forced to cleanse out the Slopeside tunnels, wherein, during an earlier time of plague, countless numbers of moles had been, confined to live and die.

It was in this nightmare place that history’s greatest route-finder, Mayweed, was born, and there the moles who helped Mayweed free himself from this terrible past – Tryfan, Spindle, Skint and others – were confined for a time.

It is not surprising therefore that when the Newborns began to gain power, Buckland should once again be used as the system from which the new tyranny could be imposed. Nor will anymole who knows anything about the Newborns once they became corrupted by Quail be astonished that Buckland was used both as a place of confinement for recalcitrant moles like Spurling of Avebury, and of reward to Newborn brothers and guardmoles who had earned the thanks of their seniors. For “reward” ken “respite” and for “respite” ken “food and females” – such were the rewards of service to the noble Newborn cause.

We know from the testimony of moles like Spurling, and Noakes as well, that the Slopeside was used little by the Newborns, extensive and well designed for confinement though its tunnels were. It seems that they were nervous of its reputation as a place of ill-health and ill-fortune: moles who were confined there for any length of time a century before had usually suffered from scalpskin, a debilitating and disfiguring condition of the fur, afflicting particularly the face and flanks, from which, indeed, Mayweed himself had suffered.

The place was said to be infested too by the more lethal talon worms, shiny, carnivorous worms, some black, some white, which invaded a mole’s body and fed off him internally until he died – a danger the great Tryfan himself faced in the Slopeside, and against which he was warned.

There was some early attempt by the Newborns to use the Slopeside for their prisoners, but this was stopped by Quail himself who, staying at the system for a time, indulged his debauched interests in such things and explored the Slopeside before declaring it out of bounds. The single entrance into the Slopeside from the main system was well sealed up once more and the few prisoners already living there were left to die, their feeble knocking at the seal and cries for mercy at the ruined and guarded exits to the surface the last thing anymole heard of them.

Such was Buckland when Sapient came to it that October, except that since Quail’s days successive Brother Commanders had developed and improved the defences of the place against the day that the followers might gain sufficient strength of numbers and purpose to attack.

Although this had seemed less and less likely, Sapient had persuaded Turling to continue such improvements, saying no doubt that it would be a prudent and wise thing to do. In fact, we may guess that he did so knowing that the day would come when he would seize power from Turling, and thus inherit a system which not only dominated the south, but from which it would be extremely difficult for any enemy, follower or Newborn, to dislodge him.

We may imagine too that Sapient was overjoyed to discover that the followers had been unaccountably slow to journey up from Avebury following their victory there, giving time for the defences to be improved still more, first by Turling’s subordinates, and then by Sapient himself after he had entered Buckland.

“It may be that Maple is a fool and did not realize that he should have followed on from his assault on Avebury with an attack here,” he was able to say but a day or two after his arrival, and following a tour of the system, “or it may be that our little diversion at Barbury Hill had more effect than we expected. No matter, the delay has given us time to make ourselves as nearly impregnable as a system can be. But not entirely – no system can be that, for there is always the worm of treachery within. But Maple has left it too late, and now he will lose ten moles to every one of ours if he ever tries to take Buckland, and will run out of moles in the attempt long before we do!”

The wisdom of Maple’s delay at Barbury will be argued as long as there are moles to discuss it, and many will say that he should have taken a lower moral stance than he did and charged north-west once Avebury was secure, and taken Buckland before Sapient arrived.