Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  As for beginnings, and starting a new life, well Boswell taught that that happened at each moment of the day. But the real beginning, to him, that went further back than anything, before he could remember, when, in a dark burrow, he had been safe and Rebecca had encircled him. When he looked at a mole as he had looked at Alder, and as he looked at Spindle now, he felt as if his shadow was not his own but Rebecca’s, and Bracken’s, who had made him, and they were there and always would be and so was the great love they had given him. They were there to show him how to see, through him and he of them, and behind all of them was the Stone where each one of them began, and which each one sought, in his different way, to return to. As for Boswell, who was old, so old, a White Mole, whose paws had touched his, and whose teaching was in his heart, why, Tryfan sometimes thought he went back further even than the Stone itself to the love which was before the Stone, and would be after it.

  “May you be protected Boswell,” whispered Tryfan, “and may you return home safeguarded.”

  The dawn light spread, the guardmole Alder stretched, and Tryfan called softly to Spindle, a call that Spindle immediately responded to, disengaging himself with some difficulty (and not a little surprise and embarrassment) from his entwinings with Thyme.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, looking about warily.

  “Nothing,” said Tryfan. “We must be alert today, and ready to move on.”

  “Yes,” said Spindle, “except that mole Sleekit has told the eldrenes everything about us by now. You shouldn’t have told her your name or admitted to the Stone even if —” Spindle’s brow creased as he tried to remember exactly what had happened the night before.

  “Even if she was part of the Seven Stancing?” said Tryfan. “Well Spindle, followers of the Stone will get nowhere if they lie about who they are.”

  “H’m,” said Spindle doubtfully, for though he was a truthful mole his time among the scribemoles had taught him that, at times, there was nothing wrong before the Stone in discretion. On the other paw... “You’re the scribemole, Tryfan, so you should know what can be admitted,” he conceded.

  “It seemed to be the Stone’s will to say my name,” said Tryfan a little defensively, for in the cold light of dawn it did seem that he may have been a little too open. “At least I didn’t say I was a scribemole, which is as Boswell wished!” he added.

  “You told that Sleekit everything but,” scolded Spindle.

  Thyme awoke, stretched, and as Spindle shifted away from her and pretended to groom himself, Pennywort eyed her in wonderment.

  “You’re better,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, yawning. “Feel much better. Feel good! Feel hungry!”

  So the burrow awoke as sunlight began to filter in and the moles groomed and readied themselves for the coming hours. And though nomole mentioned the events of the night before, yet all were quiet and subdued as if reluctant to break up whatever it was that had happened to them. Even the guardmoles moved little, and did not object when Spindle burrowed around to find some fresh food to start the day with. Of all the moles there, it was around Tryfan that the others seemed to centre, for there was something about him, as Spindle was often to remark, that brought moles together, and made them feel as one. And what had been a miserable burrow of separate moles when Tryfan had arrived was now cheerful, and positive, and purposeful.

  But a short time later, when a shaft of sunlight had broken down into the burrow and the distant rustle and thump above them on the surface indicated that a herd of cows was on the move their way, two guardmoles busily appeared, large and aggressive. They were grikes, menacing, with strong squat bodies. One said nothing at all, the other everything. He was one of the ones who had threatened them when they had stopped in the system’s main communal burrow.

  “Word be wi’ thee!” he said to Alder.

  “And thee!” said Alder automatically.

  “All well?”

  “Is well!”

  “And?”

  “And the Word not forsworn,” added Alder hastily, looking sheepish. He had forgotten to say the full greeting.

  “Smarten up you two!” said the guardmole. “Now... which are the newcomers?”

  Alder led him over to Tryfan and Spindle.

  “Which one’s Tryfan?” asked the grike.

  “I am,” said Tryfan.

  “Right, Eldrene Fescue is going to give you instruction so you and your so-called assistant are to shut up and follow me. Can’t expect her to come to you here, can you?”

  “We weren’t,” said Tryfan.

  The guardmole looked around the burrow and then, as if to assert himself said, “Bloody shambles this place. You two better get it sorted out before the day’s end.”

  With that he turned back to Tryfan and Spindle.

  “Met you before,” said the guardmole. “Didn’t like the snooty look of you then. Don’t now. Follow me.”

  They were only able to say the briefest of goodbyes to Thyme and Pennywort before they were harried out of the burrow and marched rapidly down the tunnel, back the way they had originally come. Before they left Alder whispered, “Act stupid, say little and agree to everything,” while Thyme touched them briefly in turn, her paw lingering on Spindle’s who looked at once confused and pleased until he was pushed on by the second guardmole with a painful talon-thrust.

  They soon found themselves back in the system’s communal burrow, which was now nearly deserted of mole. At the far end, however, in the area near where the tree roots descended, they saw Eldrene Fescue and Sideem Sleekit. At the sides of the burrow, posted at the entrances, were guardmoles whose presence and appearance was threatening. They openly scowled at Tryfan and Spindle, sucking and picking malevolently at their teeth with their talons, as if their meal had been interrupted by Tryfan and Spindle’s arrival.

  “Move it,” said the guardmole leading them, and the one behind pushed them roughly forward until they were a few feet from Eldrene Fescue, who looked down on them, as Sleekit did, from the slightly raised stance they had taken.

  “Are these the ones?” asked the eldrene.

  “Sleekit nodded. “Yes, we have reason to believe they are. This one” – she indicated Tryfan – “is Tryfan of Duncton whom we have been seeking since Boswell’s capture. He claims to be a herbalist – the latter fact may well be true by the accounts I have had. The other mole is called Spindle and is from Uffington way. They are confessed Stone followers, for I have talked with them.”

  “Do you confess it?” asked the eldrene. Tryfan gazed at her steadily but Spindle could hardly bear to for her face was a deep displeasure to look upon. She had tiny grey eyes flecked with yellow, and the meanest, thinnest, bitterest, most wizened looking snout Tryfan had ever seen.

  “Well?”

  Her voice was mean as well, and hard, pitiless as a stoat’s.

  Tryfan looked at her, then briefly at Sleekit, then back again. He hesitated, wondering if he might be able to gain information about Boswell. The guardmoles at either side of him and Spindle began to grow restless. Sleekit stared, her eyes small.

  “Answer the eldrene, mole,” one of the guardmoles began, but Fescue raised her talons to silence him and Spindle noticed they were translucent and cracked, the talons of a sterile mole.

  “I was with Boswell in Uffington,” said Tryfan finally, “but this mole Spindle is barely known to me and has accepted the Word.”

  “Has he now?” said Fescue maliciously. “Ask him!”

  Before either of them understood her command the larger of the guardmoles, who towered over Spindle, drove his talons viciously into Spindle’s flanks, drawing blood. Spindle half fell against Tryfan who put out a paw to support him and turned on the guardmole to attack in return. But he was rapidly restrained by guardmoles from behind and powerless to stop a second strike at Spindle, who gasped out in pain.

  “I am of the Stone,” said Spindle bravely, “and I always shall be.”

  “Brave mole!” said Fescu
e heavily, turning indifferently from him, and back to Tryfan.

  “So this is the power of your Word, to torture and hurt defenceless moles!” said Tryfan.

  “We have no wish or desire to hurt another,” said the eldrene, “but we must combat the evil of the Stone with strength and, if necessary, force. You are, evidently, Stone believers.”

  Tryfan smiled grimly.

  “And you have seen what happens to such moles?”

  “We have seen the evil that the Word does, yes,” said Tryfan.

  “Well now, as a friend of Boswell you might well have information that will be useful to us,” said Fescue, “but I rather doubt, even from the little I have seen of you, that you will freely confess it, even if that were desirable. Nor do I think either of you will yield to reason before you accept Atonement and the power of the Word. So... there are other ways.”

  Fescue looked round briefly at Sleekit, and the two seemed to reach some tacit agreement about what to do with them. But then Fescue seemed to have a sudden thought. She relaxed and smiled a little – if smile it was that lighted those evil eyes – and Tryfan was on his guard.

  “I can see you are a mole of intelligence, Tryfan, however misguided you may be,” said the eldrene. “Now tell me, for what purpose did Boswell travel from Duncton Wood to Uffington?”

  “Has he not told you?” asked Tryfan carefully.

  “He has freely told us much,” said Fescue, “but we like to be sure.”

  “What has he told you?” Tryfan said, feeling relieved as the eldrene’s answer indicated that they did not know, or were not sure, of the existence of the Stillstone. It also suggested that Boswell had resisted attempts to convert him to the Word; but best of all what she said suggested that Boswell was still alive.

  “Why did he travel to Uffington? Answer the question, mole, or it will be worse for your friend,” said Eldrene Fescue, her mask of civility slipping. She nodded at the guardmole who gave Spindle another quick talon-thrust.

  “Don’t worry about me!” gasped Spindle.

  “Oh but he does and how much!” said the eldrene peering closer at Tryfan. “Very noble. Very stupid. I have seen such concern before on the faces of Stone followers.”

  “Boswell travelled to Uffington,” said Tryfan heavily, his paw outstretched to Spindle whose breathing was heavy and laboured from the thrusts he had received, “because it was his home burrow. He desired to die at the place of his birth, as all moles do.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “He told me nothing more. What might there be?”

  “A Stillstone, for example,” said the eldrene, her eyes suddenly greedy. Sleekit moved a little nearer, her black eyes searching Tryfan’s face.

  “A Stillstone?” repeated Tryfan.

  “Taking one to Uffington,” said the sideem.

  “If anymole would have known, it would have been me,” said Tryfan. “And I saw no Stillstone on all that long journey.” Which was true enough.

  There was silence as they contemplated his answer.

  The eldrene turned and whispered to Sleekit and then looked around at them again.

  “Well now,” said the eldrene, “we are inclined to believe you. Tell us this. Does a Stillstone exist? You Stone followers seem to believe so much in them.”

  “I believe they do.”

  “‘They’...?”

  “There are said to be seven.”

  “And would you know where they are?” The eldrene’s eyes were still as a frosty night.

  “No,” said Tryfan, which was also true, for he did not know their precise location.

  To his relief the eldrene did not press him further on this, but asked him instead which was the most important Stillstone.

  “All moles know that,” he replied. “It is the Stillstone of Silence.” As he said this last word his gaze shifted from Eldrene Fescue to Sleekit and he gazed deep on her, and she looked away.

  Fescue shifted her talons and seemed in pain as, suddenly, she lost interest.

  “It is well. He will say more later,” she said tersely. “Take them to the burrow-cells and feed them ill. We will talk again, but a time of discomfort may help you both understand that the Stone does not help its own.” Then, turning to the guards, she said, “Take them the public way that others might see and know them, and express their feelings on Stone followers who desecrate one of our systems with their presence.”

  Now began the dark and desolate period of Tryfan and Spindle’s time at Buckland which scribes, retelling those historic events, have usually passed only briefly over, perhaps because the two moles themselves later had other, and more difficult, matters to attend to. But an account does exist, and it was truly scribed by the one mole who was witness to those terrible weeks that Tryfan and good Spindle suffered in the burrow-cells. His name... but let his name be told in due time, as it became known to each of them.

  They were taken from their first interview with Eldrene Fescue by a long route deliberately chosen to expose them to the scorn and talon-thrusts of those guardmoles who happened to meet them on their way. So that by the time they arrived at the burrow-cells, which lay then at the damp south end of Buckland, they were half unconscious and bleeding from the many buffets and wounds they had received.

  The cells were hewn in the interstices of soil between flints and rocks in which, centuries before, twofoots had lain underground. They were narrow, barely big enough for a mole to crouch in comfort, and they were deep, down in sterile subsoil that dripped moisture and chill, even in those summer months. Several guardmoles were there watching the tunnels outside the burrow-cells, and the prisoners were separated so that none easily knew how near or how far others might be.

  There was about the place the smell of blood, and excrement, and hopelessness; and others were there unseen but often heard. For there was evil in that place of interminable darkness followed by dim light, followed by darkness once more. Screams of pain, the laughter of grikes... all melded into one as the days (or were they weeks?) passed by. At intervals, but not regularly, Tryfan was dragged out and interviewed, sometimes by grike guardmoles, sometimes by the eldrene Fescue, and sometimes by the Sideem Sleekit. He saw nothing of Spindle and, apart from a last whispered word of reassurance and blessing, had been able to say nothing to him since their appearance before the eldrene.

  They were brought food erratically – and never wholesome worms. Instead they found such fare as maggots, or rotting rat, or the entrails of sheep infested with vile worms. At first Tryfan refused to eat, but when he realised he was beginning to weaken he made himself eat the foul stuff and ignore the guardmoles who peered in at him saying nothing. At least it gave him strength to resist their questionings, or at least give little enough away. There were fleas, too, glinting in the gloom, and for water Tryfan was told to lick the slime that dripped and trickled down the flints that formed two walls of his cell.

  Escape there was none: the subsoil was too hard for burrowing, the guardmoles too many to fight, even had his strength been good. But he knew he was weakening for lack of air and exercise and yet his resolve to survive, and to resist the ministrations of the eldrene about the Word, did not fade. Rather it grew stronger, and from clues they gave – small impatiences – he surmised that Spindle was alive and resisting as well, inhabiting a cell somewhere nearby.

  He knew, too, that others were there, for he heard the guardmoles shouting at them, he heard punishment, and twice he heard screams after struggles to the surface which, he guessed, was the dread sound of a snouting.

  Some guardmoles were less aggressive and uncommunicative than others, and gradually as the days wore into weeks he learnt a good deal about Buckland, and the grikes. For one thing, he learnt that there would have been more snoutings but for the imminence of Longest Day and the intention of Henbane to visit the system then and conduct a ritual snouting of Stone followers.

  It was confirmed, too, that the system was to be a centre for guardmole training and acti
vity and that it was being prepared for this. More than that, he learnt that the Slopeside, which formed the northern part of the system, was presently still being cleared of plague corpses – a dangerous and perilous task, for most of the moles doing that work died eventually of disease, and a disease whose name was whispered in disgust and loathing: scalpskin. Though what this was, or what it looked like, Tryfan did not know since in all his induction into healing he had never once heard of the complaint.

  “How are these clearers directed, and by which moles?” he had asked one of the more friendly guardmoles.

  “Zealots of one Longest Night,” was the reply. “Young moles willing to lay down their lives in the cause of the Word. Strong must they be, and believers. If they survive their term they are given a good command, and if not, well, glory will they have.”

  “What glory?” Tryfan had asked.

  “Names scribed on the Rock in Whern where the Word be spelt. This is a glory Word followers strive for, to have their name so scribed. Names that will live for ever more. Aye, and that’s an honour.”

  But what Rock this was, and where the Word might “be spelt”, Tryfan did not know, but it was one of the things he vowed to find out if the Stone spared him. And he had no doubt that Spindle, a more curious and persistent mole than he for facts, would, should he survive, make it his business to find out.

  Of the other moles who were incarcerated with him in the burrow-cells he knew little, but for the sounds of suffering they made. Talking was not allowed between cells, and nor was one mole allowed out at the same time as another. Yet by peering out from his cell Tryfan occasionally caught a glimpse of some other poor mole taken off for questioning and sometimes, he knew, such mole did not return. His time would come. If not through weakness and death here, then at Midsummer when, he had little doubt, this Henbane would make him one of her snoutings to the Word. And thinking of that, Tryfan knew fear.