Duncton Tales (33 page)

It seemed it sensed that in the tale that Privet had now agreed to tell there was a light it did not like, a hope it sought to kill, and a way forward it wished to block.

“We must hurry, my dear,” shouted Fieldfare against its noise, “for we’ve been longer than I thought and the worse this weather gets the more likely it is that my Chater will fret too much and come out in search of us.”

So hurry on she did, with Privet at her flank, fur flying in the wind, fighting the hurled wet leaves, scurrying from falling and crashing branches, seeking to avoid the rain and litter that was blown up into their eyes.

Sometimes the violence in the air was so great, so confusing, that they were brought to a stop by it, and were forced to shelter among the enshadowed surface roots of trees, and clutch on to what support they could find, lest they be blown off their paws and separated.

At other times it seemed that the wood ahead all changed, its surface sloping to the right instead of to the left even as they peered out into it, and they were thrown into confusion and uncertain which way to go.

Then once, the worst moment of all in that grim trek back to Fieldfare’s tunnels where the other members of the Stancing waited, it seemed they saw the hurrying spectres of moles pausing to peer out of the confusion at them, poised for a moment to come out and attack them, but then hurrying on. Male moles, dark-furred, half shadows, half substantial in the night.

“There was
something
, Fieldfare,” cried Privet in alarm, half turning to look back the way they had come and they had gone, “and I do not like to leave Husk alone on a night like this with only Pumpkin for protection. Let me go back … tomorrow will do as well as tonight to tell what I know of Rooster.”

“No, Privet!” replied Fieldfare with determination, grabbing her unwilling friend by the paw. “Tonight’s the night. Nomole but us would be fool enough to be out and about.

Twas the spectres of your own memories and fears you saw! You cannot run from them for ever.”

So the storm tried to defeat them, but so they conquered it and arrived, staggering, wet, bedraggled, heaving and puffing with the effort of it all, back at Fieldfare’s place where Chater waited at the surface entrance, Maple at his flank.

“Thank the Stone you’re here!” declared Maple, seeing Fieldfare come out of the night. “I had to stop your mate coming out after you and losing himself in this storm!”

“Where have you been?” demanded Chater, his sudden anger but his way of being concerned for her.

“Fetching Privet,” said Fieldfare turning to her friend as she came out of the dark, “for she’s the one to tell us of Rooster.”

“
You
?” said Chater in doubtful surprise on seeing Privet, who was quite unable to say a word in reply.

“Stop worrying, beloved, and let us in out of this wind. And fetch poor Privet food, for it’s thin fare she’s had with Husk these molemonths past.”

Then turning to Privet Fieldfare said more gently, “Now, my dear, come down into the warmth and be with friends, and tell them what you must …”

It was only later in the night, when the wind had abated a little and the rain settled into a steady roar that sent its drips and runs of water down the entrances above, that Privet recovered enough to break her silence.

“You’re welcome here,” Stour had said, “and welcome back! Fieldfare has told us only that she thinks you may know of the mole Rooster of Bleaklow Moor, also known as Master of the Delve.”

“She said he was in trouble …” Privet said, worry on her face as Whillan came nearer to comfort her.

“Aye, it may be so,” Stour had replied. “Let each of us here tell you what little we know and then you tell us what you know, and between us all we may find a way forward from this mystery, or opportunity, or whatever it may be.”

This they had done, and Privet had listened in silence, distressed and saddened by it all and all the emotions the memories of love, of trial, of loss and of loneliness may bring crossing her thin and sensitive face.

At last she had heard all they knew, and Stour glanced up at where the muted roar of rainfall came, and round at the largest tunnel out of the chamber, down which the steady sound of dripping came. Sometimes it was lit up with flashes of lightning, and at other times with the slower paler light of the moon as it came out from behind the huge, racing storm clouds of the night.

“It is a night for staying aburrow and telling tales,” he said. “A night when only moles with urgent business or malintent go forth. You, Privet, came to this system a full cycle of seasons ago and know that you have our trust. We have all seen how deep your feeling and experience runs concerning matters we so far know too little about. We ask you now to tell us what you know. I think perhaps we seven may never be as one again, and that after this night, and with the coming of the dawn, a trial will begin for each one of us whose outcome nomole can know. Much comfort and good may come from sharing what you know, which knowledge will provide us all with light to guide us on our separate ways in the days so soon to come. Therefore we wait in silence, Privet, to hear what you may say.”

Privet glanced nervously at them, reached out a paw to Whillan, and said in that quiet way she had, “The place and time to which I must take you is far, far from here. Of you all, perhaps only Chater, being a journeymole, can begin to imagine what the Moors of the north are like. Whilst only the Master Librarian, and perhaps you, good Drubbins, whose memories are long and experience of mole so wide, can truly guess the nature of the times of which I must first speak.

“So though I will do my best to tell my tale that all may make the most they can of it, if there are parts one or other of you do not understand, then tell me, and perhaps with others’ help I can make it plainer still …”

Then began Privet’s telling of Rooster’s tale, which was scribed down at the time by Whillan on Stour’s instruction and with Privet’s agreement. Scholars in later times have expanded parts of it, corrected details in others, but no subsequent research or recounting has ever bettered the extraordinary tale as she first told it. Nor has any ever doubted that the emergence of Rooster, Master of the Delve, out of the dark Moors whence he came, and into the ken of moledom as a whole, marked one of the great turning points in moledom’s modern history.

Privet had believed, sincerely too, that her concern was with a Book of Tales, but now she herself told a tale that might make moles see that Book as being a way towards another, greater one, the long lost Book of Silence whose coming allmole sought.

PART III

Rooster

Chapter Sixteen

The Bleaklow and Saddleworth Moors form the northern Hank of the High Peak, though moles who live in systems about its fringes and know it best give it the more ominous name of the
Dark
Peak.

To its north, through those fastnesses which moles traditionally believed impassable, lies the dreaded Whern, harbinger of the moles of the Word, for so long a source of vile imposition upon moles of the Stone.

To the south are Beechenhill and Ashbourne, and famed Arbor Low, that circle of Stones which most accept as marking out the end of wormful moledom, and the true beginning of the north.

Whichever way a mole approaches the Moors, whether from the sunnier south or glowering north, they rise up formidably into rank peat bogs, and gullies, in which brown-stained rivers race, and slurp, and suck to death all living things that fall, or slide, or are pushed into them.

Dark are the Moors, high, worm-poor, desolate, nearly unvisited, forsaken, terrible, corrupting of a mole’s spirit, a place of desertion and death. It is the last place in moledom where mole would choose to live. A place indeed to which even a guilty mole fleeing from his righteous persecutors, might, if he knew its full terrors, and realized its final desolations, choose to balk at entering.

For make no mistake, a mole
enters
the Moors, climbing in among the peat hags, searching among the dried-up heath and noisome pools, seeking whatever scraps of food and distort worm he can find. Or she, perhaps.

Once into them, a mole soon feels he may never get out again. This is truly a place of death and ending, for if a stranger ventures here, and loses his way among the high hags that hem him in, he’s as like to starve as to be picked off by the ragged rooks that are the only form of life that seems to thrive. Though even these are skinny, errant, aged things driven from the easier and more desirable pickings in the valleys below by their plumper and more powerful peers. Has-been rooks clinging meanly on to life, feeding off other vagrant creatures that crawl, and limp, and snivel their way about.

What moles then could ever wish to live there?

Until the wars of Word and Stone ended with the Stone’s victory, nomole lived there that was not mad, or bad, or both. But afterwards … afterwards one group of moles was glad of any sanctuary it could find, even Saddleworth or Bleaklow Moors.

These moles were the filthy relicts of the Word, those who through murder or guile, dark chance or strange destiny had survived pursuit by followers of the worthy Stone and then, sneaking, slinking, skulking, like noxious fumes absconding in the night, had made their way to the one place in moledom where not even righteousness and justice followed them: the Moors.

Most, in their unpleasant way, were strong and competent. Well able, that is, to betray another to make their way, or lie and cheat to escape, or to kill a friend to survive.

They came from two directions. The earlier incursion on to the Moors was from the south and west, of moles of the Word and their creatures and minions, mainly corrupted Stone believers, fleeing the justice of followers of the Stone. These moles made their home in the marginally less desolate Bleaklow Moor.

The second and larger group came from the north, and these were grike moles, that darker, dimmer, nearly prehistoric form whose vile genesis and talent for obedience to the Word is described by Woodruff in the Duncton Chronicles.

These grikes escaped in powerful gangs when their bases near Whern were taken by Stone followers, and fleeing southward they settled initially in forsaken Saddleworth, which lies but a few days’ journey north of Bleaklow.

Soon these gruesome murdering grikes, driven by a wormless period following drought, crossed the vale of Crowden and went up into Bleaklow. We dare not even think of the chaos their coming caused as, in the darkened secret places of the Moors, grike marauders met the already established relicts of the Word. A decade of anarchy followed all across that wretched place, until under a grike leader called Black Ashop, peace of a kind prevailed. There was law, there was justice: the one simple and clear and created by Black Ashop, the other swift and brutal and meted out by Ashop’s aides. It was the last place in moledom where snoutings continued, but at least the initial anarchy, rape and mayhem ceased as grike learned to live with Whernish mole and a kind of civilizing began.

Such was Bleaklow Moor twenty moleyears after the end of the war of Word and Stone. A place unto itself, a place where nomole went, a place where moles, guilty of past crimes, hid and eked out a life that some might say was a punishment for what once they had done to innocent moles. While northward, across the Crowden Vale, a few families of brutal and secretive grikes vied for power in their ruthless way.

As for the rest of moledom, it knew of the Moors only as the name of a vile and lawless place to which grikes and others had fled, and in which they were welcome to stay for eternity. Out of sight was out of mind, and apart from the occasional incursion of Bleaklow mole down to the richer valleys below, the one was not disturbed by the other, and each might have regarded the other as a race apart.

Yet, for all the dark history of the moles who had made their way to Bleaklow, they were not entirely forsaken by the Stone, and for those few moles there who might somewhere in their dark hearts find a place for Silence and Light, there was the possibility of redemption.