Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  Then he was scared. Scared sick. Henbane had gone cold, which she had never done on him since their first meeting by the Stone, and he felt that cold as if it was a winter freeze, all around him, robbing him of life. And he knew that what he had done, harmless enough though he thought it, would make her do something now. He did not know the words “revenge” and “retribution”, but he suddenly sensed the consequences of them, as a mole might know the cold grasp of an owl’s claws even as he gazes into its looming eyes.

  Unjust retribution came that day, and with it the shadows closed a little on Bailey and darkened him.

  Scurryings, arrestings, ordering, comings, summonings.

  “She wants you,” said a guardmole, insolent. His eyes hated him.

  He came. The youngster he had known had a mother, the mother was there. Just a mole, a guardmole’s mate. An imported female from Buckland way.

  Henbane was there, powerful and dark. The female was still as death, her fur wilted-wet with fear.

  “Watch this,” said Henbane when he came. She looked triumphant, she smirked, and her eyes joined all the others that hated him too.

  “Please don’t,” he said.

  Henbane talon-thrust the female to death. It took only a moment, which made it all the worse. Then, before Bailey could even begin to speak, her daughter, the mole Bailey had so briefly known, was brought in. She was laughing. A guardmole had gone for her and told her there was a pleasant surprise for her....

  Her mother dead. Those shadows reared and closed on Bailey as he heard her shouted cries.

  “It was your mother or this Duncton mole to die, one or the other,” said Henbane, “and I thought you would want the Duncton mole you like alive.” She spoke to the youngster, but looked at Bailey.

  The youngster was so shocked and distressed that she seemed almost to stop breathing. Then she looked at Bailey and he saw for the first time the desire in another’s eyes that he was dead. Henbane purred her pleasure at this cruel scene.

  “Get out!” she shouted, and they all got out, dragging the body too. All of them but Bailey.

  “You stay,” she screamed.

  Silence then. Heavy, heavy silence.

  “I had to do it,” said Henbane, again and again. “I am sorry to distress you, Bailey, but your actions made me do it. I am fond of you but you must not dishonour that fondness, no?” As she wiped the blood from her talons she wept real tears, which made Bailey cry as well. “Did you have to make me do it?” she said, again and again until it was Bailey saying sorry, and the darkness all about.

  For days Bailey barely slept, tossing in nightmares in which a mole, female, stared at him, hated him, rejected him, and that mole was Starling his sister, lost to him for ever; and Bailey cried.

  “What is it, my sweet?” whispered Henbane in the dark privacy of his burrow. “Don’t be sad.” She whispered words and ways of saying them she learnt from her dread mother Charlock, who taught her as she was teaching Bailey, and Bailey cried and accepted her comfort, confused and distressed for she was the cause of his hurt, and he felt he hated her, and yet it was she who was there comforting him.

  “I hate Starling, she left me,” he muttered, and Henbane smiled and said, “Yes, she did,” and turned that lost mole’s dark feelings on his sister Starling.

  And yet, a mole that is loved in infancy, truly loved, never quite loses the light of love from his eyes; and one not only loved of mole, but brought up near the Silence of the Stone, may hear that Silence, though he knows it not and the world has deafened him.

  So Bailey.

  One day, driven by a madness of despair, he escaped the watching guardmoles and even Weed himself, and made his way to Barrow Vale. He vaguely remembered that when he was a pup he was to go there if he needed to, and that was something Henbane did not know. None of them knew. Not that. So he went.

  He crouched, he cried, and, filled with darkness and guilt, he finally whispered one single awesome word: “Stone.”

  No answer. Nothing at all. Just the drag of a breeze above on the surface. Nothing to ease his distress, whose nature he could not understand, nor take away the fear and the love and the dependence on Henbane that pulled his heart this way and that.

  In agony he ran out on to the surface.

  “Mole! Be still!”

  Bailey stopped. He was on his way back, fearing to be seen, never wanting another to know where he had been and here was a mole, barely visible finding him.

  “Mole!”

  “Whatmole is it?” he asked, frightened.

  “Sideem Sleekit.”

  He relaxed. Nomole trusted her, but she did not scare him physically as most of the others did.

  “I’ve been looking for food,” he lied.

  “You have been praying to the Stone,” she said.

  “I haven’t!” he almost shouted. And then more quietly, almost pleadingly, his plump sides going in and out breathlessly, “I haven’t.”

  The sideem came out of the shadows. She stared at him. He saw no hatred. Nothing much at all.

  “When the Duncton moles were here —”

  “Yes?” he whispered.

  “— did they ever talk of Silence?”

  He dared say nothing, but he nodded.

  “What is it?” she asked. “This Silence?” Her eyes were wide, and he recognised something he knew because he had felt it before and felt it now, perhaps. He saw fear and doubt and searching.

  “Don’t know,” he said.

  “Can’t you remember?”

  “It’s where a mole’s safe, it’s hard to get to.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Near the Stone,” he whispered.

  “What is it?” she asked again.

  It was as if his heart opened and cried out; it was as if Starling was there to run to; it was as if, once again, he was safe, going as once he had up these slopes to the Stone, beside a male called Spindle who was special and told them all about a mole called Thyme. It was as if Thyme was there to go to and he wanted to, he needed to. It was as if the Stone had heard him and would let him hurt it, shout at it, threaten it, hate it and still be there for him to feel safe by.

  So Bailey cried. Before Sideem Sleekit he lowered his snout with shame and loss too terrible for him to bear, and he cried his heart out. No words, just tears and sobs. But he knew she would not tell, would never, ever tell. He knew he had a friend. He knew more than that: he knew he had made a friend and that something in him was still good, something was there of what he was. He knew that. So he looked at her in wonder and then he left her knowing something good had been.

  When he was gone Sleekit stayed quite still. Nothing in all her life, with all her training, with all the power of the Word had prepared her for this. It had started with Tryfan in Buckland when she had been part of a Seven Stancing. For the moleyears since then it had troubled her. It had worsened before the Stone of Duncton, to which, when she first came, she knew instinctively her life had been directed. Now, here, quite unexpectedly, it had found its blossoming with the tears of a mole for whom not one in that subjugated system had anything but contempt. Yet he had cried before her, and given an answer she had sought so long, to a question she had hardly dare ask: “What is it, the Silence?”

  But not with words had he answered. There between them had been the Silence, where no words were. And Sideem Sleekit was joyful and wanted nothing more then than to go upslope and give thanks before the Stone. And as she went she knew that Henbane must not know, nor Weed; and that it was more important now than it had been in the moleyears before. They must not know. If they did they would not understand, but they would destroy her to find out from some dark instinct they had for what was dangerous to them.

  That mole Tryfan had told the guardmole Thrift that the Duncton moles might be found in the Silence. For a time it had maddened Henbane, who liked not riddles except of her own making. Then she seemed to have forgotten it, though Sleekit doubted that she had. Henbane forgot n
othing.

  But Sleekit understood now why Tryfan might have said it. Of course. For a mole seriously to seek anything in the Silence was to know something of the Silence; and knowing that, a mole might well find Tryfan, but if he, or she, did so, then knowledge of the Silence could only make them wish to join him, not to kill him.

  Sleekit laughed, and ran. And she saw beauty among the trees of Duncton and could guess how much a mole who loved this place might miss it. Yet the Duncton moles had gone. Then she saw how dark the Word must be to drive out such moles. And she had a wish to join them by searching for the Silence. Oh yes! Sleekit, a sideem, felt humble. A mole had opened his heart to her, and trusted her, and given her an answer whose meaning was great indeed.

  “Help him!” she whispered.

  But she knew it was for another mole than Bailey that she prayed. A mole who was female; a mole who was a sideem; the mole who was herself. A mole endangered now.

  “Help me!” she said.

  With September the moles of disease and deformity that Henbane had decreed should be settled in the system began to arrive, and with their arrival most healthy moles there felt the strong urge to leave.

  They came in twos and threes, herded along by most reluctant guardmoles, sore-ridden, lame, pathetic. Some seemed struck mute with their disease, others were blind, some worse than blind, for their eyes and snouts were eaten away by that disease for which there was no name, but of which the dread scalpskin had been the precursor.

  They were brought into the system by way of the south-eastern cow cross-under, but then hurried, on pain of death (though few seemed able to put up much resistance), along the Eastside, and thence down to the filthy Marsh End.

  It was a natural choice for the grikes to make, for, so far as they had formed any notion of where the hidden moles might be who attacked them from time to time, it was at that northern end of the wood where the air was damp and the vegetation foul. So... discard fearsome moles in a feared place.

  “What would they have us do here?” the diseased moles asked.

  “They want us to stop here,” said the deformed.

  Their fear turned to silence, and their silence to laughter when they were told they were to do nothing but live, and die.

  “Live?” said one, out of a body so stricken that it was his torment minute by minute.

  “Here?” whispered another, who could not see much of the sky above, nor ever again hear the birds sing. But the grike she could see, keeping well clear, signing her to go where she wanted.

  So through September they came, the new inhabitants of Duncton Wood, summoned by Henbane’s order: and such moles as these would send a shudder through moledom when it was known they lived in one place, making their own rules, making their own maddened laws, electing their own elders, governed by only one simple grike rule: they must never leave. Here they had come, here they must stay, making whatever hell they liked of a system that had once been venerated and loved.

  So little by little, trickle by plague-touched trickle, as all the diseased, disabled, maladjusted, discontented, belligerent, psychotic misfits and miscreants, dissenting, lawless and ailing, queer, wasting, palsied and cancered moles that the grikes could find in adjacent systems were brought to fabled Duncton Wood and set free.

  Henbane was well pleased, and Weed and Smaile, who had overseen the settlement, were impressed. Murders were already starting. Gangs forming. Disease spreading.

  “Snoutings have had their day, Weed. The punishment by banishment to this new Duncton is a worse thing, and more fearful thing, and will be judged to be so across the whole of moledom once word of it spreads. A banishing to Duncton will be worse than snouting. It will be a living death.”

  “How will the word spread?”

  Henbane shrugged.

  “It will, it always does. But I have sent for Eldrene Beake to make the final arrangements. She will order the sealing off of the system, and appoint guardmoles to patrol. In time patrols will not be needed, except perhaps occasionally if the new Duncton moles become overconfident in their filth and seek to spread forth. Then they will be dealt with. But I believe that here in Duncton will develop a system so foul, so unkempt, so undisciplined that nomole will ever come here, or wish to, but those we choose to punish by sending here.

  “And what will moledom say? It will say that the Stone, of which the Duncton Stone is such a great emblem, did not protect its own. It will laugh and it will mock. But most of all it will desire that those moles who are strange, or misfits, or disobedient, or diseased, or sick, or unpleasantly individual... why, it will ask they be sent to Duncton. Yes?”

  Weed smiled. Clever, very.

  “Rune will be well pleased,” he said.

  “Rune...” she sighed. “He will send word soon?”

  “He will,” said Weed. He hoped. It seemed so long since he sent word north... and nothing back, nothing at all. Except a false alarm when a mole arrived who proved to be Beake. She was displeased at her new command, but nomole could deny Henbane.

  But at last Rune’s messenger came. Up through the cross-under with an entourage of grikes. Original grikes. Dark, strong, expressionless. It would have done Wrekin’s heart good to see them.

  “Take me to the WordSpeaker,” their leader said curtly. He had a voice a mole obeyed. Weed, hearing, smiled. He knew him. He had last seen him as a vicious pup. Rune had chosen Henbane’s successor wisely. He hurried to find her.

  “They have come,” he said.

  “You have spoken to them?” asked Henbane.

  “Seen them, heard them, know him,” said Weed.

  “What mole has Rune sent?”

  “He will tell you his own name, Henbane. He will be loyal. He will do as you say and what you order. Rune has chosen wisely for it will need a mole of much ruthlessness and small imagination to succeed you in the south.”

  Henbane smiled.

  “We will keep him waiting,” she said, impatient though she was to see this mole. The hours passed. She played with Bailey. Laughter was heard. The mole who had travelled so far was furious. Night. Sleep. Restlessness throughout the system.

  Morning came.

  “Summon him,” said Henbane.

  He came, strong, younger than Wrekin, but with talons not yet so astute.

  Henbane regarded him silently.

  “WordSpeaker,” he intoned, as if he was speaking to a deity. Henbane purred.

  “Your name?”

  “Wyre,” he said.

  “You have a message?”

  “Rune would have you home to Whern. Soon. He is well pleased.”

  “And you, Wyre, what are you to do?”

  “To take your place in the south.”

  “Then you will do so.”

  Privately – except that Weed was there and Sleekit – Henbane told him what he must know. It took a time, and they ate. He told her of his journey. Moledom was subdued. Plenty of rumours. Recently of Duncton, and how it was outcast and not a place for mole. Tryfan taken, moles knew of that.

  “Not so, but good,” said Henbane. “Very good.”

  A day later Henbane and her party prepared to leave, to travel north. Beake, reluctant, was to stay at Duncton and see it sealed and guarded. Wyre was to go on west to Buckland.

  “I would speak privately with you, Wyre,” Henbane said before they left.

  On the surface she did it, in the open, nomole near.

  “Weed listens otherwise,” she said by way of explanation.

  “His job,” said Wyre.

  Henbane smiled, then her eyes went cold.

  “How is Rune?” she asked.

  “Tired,” said Wyre. “Desiring your return. I will fulfil your expectations, WordSpeaker. It is an honour.”

  She waved him to silence. He looked at her.

  “You would have me do anything else?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “When Wrekin returns to Buckland, Siabod will be subdued. Moledom will be entirely ours.
So —”

  “Yes, WordSpeaker? My will is yours.” Wyre’s dark eyes glinted. He had the eager stupidity of the earnest young to make their mark. But Henbane had no doubt that he would do so. A good choice for the time being.

  “So Wyre... when Wrekin returns, kill him.”

  Then Henbane of Whern turned from him, and with Weed nearby and Bailey in her party, and Sleekit too, she and a few select guardmoles made their way down to the cross-under and passed under it. A few deformities of moles were pulled into the shadows by the guardmoles who were bringing them. Their bereft eyes travelled from the awesome female passing by on to the hill before them, and the wood that covered most of it.

  “Be happy in your new home, scum,” said one of Henbane’s guardmoles with a laugh, relieved to be leaving.

  Henbane passed on by, and then, without one glance back at the system she had destroyed, she turned northward, to start the long trek home to Whern.

  PART IV

  Journeys Into Silence

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was November and nearly six moleyears had passed since Tryfan and the three brave moles with him had set off east from Comfrey’s Stone to journey to the very heart of the Wen. There, they hoped, some mystery of the quest Boswell had sent Tryfan on might be solved, there some guidance found that would illuminate all of moledom with its light....

  But whatever hopes and expectations of a quick and easy passage they might have had at starting, were soon modified and then all but abandoned as they made their way into that vast dereliction which is called by mole the Wen. Healers know a wen as a tumour or a goitre, or cancer that sits on flank or face; a wen may be many things, but always it is a disfigurement.

  For moles such as those four were, used to woody ways and chalky heights, where roaring owls are but distant things unless a mole chooses to travel, and twofoots are rare if not unknown, the Wen’s noisome dangers and lurid lights were an affront to their minds and bodies, and took time to get used to – so far as they ever did.

  Tryfan, seeing this might be so in the first few days of their journey, and taking the advice of Mayweed who had never seen tunnels or ways like those before, wisely decided to proceed with caution. If there was going to be danger they had best get used to its nature, and if there was to be grike pursuit they had best shake if off before attempting to make progress ahead too fast. That way lay discovery or death.