Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  These successes immediately helped contain disaffection among the lowslope moles, and a few brave moles, under the command of Cwm, were deputed to stay on in the lowslopes to “collaborate” with the grikes when they started their advance into the Siabod tunnels again, feeding them false information and slowing them.

  Meanwhile, traps were set in the higher tunnels to demoralise exploring grikes and increase Siabod’s harsh reputation. There were deluding tunnels to fearsome drops, diversions of water, and moles who knew the tunnels who could lead the grikes out into the frozen wastes and lose them there.

  But the essence of Alder’s plans, like Tryfan’s in Duncton Wood, was a long-term strategic retreat which hopefully would leave the grikes thinking that more Siabod moles had died than really had, while those that escaped went north of Siabod to the frozen Carneddau to hide until such time as their return was right.

  So, when January had come the Siabod moles started leaving for the north, many pairing as they went, the females giving birth in the dark and secret wastes that lie north of Nantgwryd while the grikes pressed on into the high system, finding little, losing moles, and growing dispirited.

  A few others, paw-picked by Alder for their intelligence and ability to work in small numbers, travelled south to make contact with that mole Alder had already marked out as one of great ability: Troedfach of Tyn-y-Bedw. It was hoped that they might train and mobilise moles along the Welsh Marches ready for the distant day when battle against the grikes might be mounted.

  As for Alder and Marram, they went up into the Carneddau to continue training and planning for the future. There, in April, they each fathered young, so giving their seed and blood to the Siabod cause, and growing nearer to their hosts as they, building a network of contacts across the northern hills of Wales with moles such as Caradoc, prepared for the day when moles of the Stone could show that they could face the grike, snout to snout, talon to sharp talon.

  So it was that by the end of March, the high tunnels of Siabod were empty of mole, and free for grike to travel in, if they were prepared to risk the dangers there. Some did, some died and by April the tunnels were cleared of traps, but sterile, worthless to grike. While the Stones of Tryfan remained in the distance, protected as always by the wormless heights of the Glyders, where few moles had ever been.

  It was then, in April, that two moles wearily ascended as high as it was safe to do on Siabod’s western flanks and stared about.

  “The very edge of the grike domain,” said one, “and as far as I’ll ever want to go. It sends a shiver down a mole’s spine and seems too empty to be true.”

  “It does!” said the other.

  “There was something about the feel of those deserted tunnels we passed through which reminded me of our arrival at Duncton Wood. An orderly retreat! I wonder if the same paw is in this as was there.”

  “Alder?” suggested the second.

  The first and older and more authoritative turned and stared up at bleak Siabod’s black impassive sides, then across the great vale that a mole must cross to reach the distant Glyders and the Stones of Tryfan they guard. Then round north towards the Carneddau.

  That mole was Wrekin, commander of all the grike guardmoles. The other was Ginnell his young second-in-command who had travelled ahead to Siabod a long time before and turned what had been a failure into a slow success. Suddenly, in March, resistance had died and though the retreating moles had left traps, few caused much damage.

  “Have we learned nothing from the Siabod moles we’ve interrogated?”

  Wrekin shrugged.

  “In all the long years of our campaigns I have never found a system whose moles talk less than they do in Siabod. They seemed proud to be snouted! But I’ve no stomach for that now. Too many moleyears on the march....”

  “But Siabod is the final victory,” said Ginnell.

  “Victory? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Were the moles of Whern ever vanquished? No! They held their last fastness until the time was right and a leader was found: Rune. So will the moles of the Stone stay in corners of moledom, waiting. Moles such as those of Siabod, and those of Duncton Wood. Especially Duncton Wood and its Stone. Then, one day, will come a leader, as one came to us.”

  Wrekin turned back west to look at Tryfan.

  “You know what that peak is called, the high grey one? Tryfan. You know what is said to stand at its summit where nomole has ever been but Balagan himself? The Sacred Stones of Tryfan. Tell me, Ginnell, have you ever heard of a mole they speak of called the Stone Mole?”

  “Of course I have. The moles round here will talk of him if you hurt them enough. Threaten you with him they will. ‘He’s coming’, they say. And so he may, but do you think your guardmoles cannot defeat him?”

  “You’ve heard of Tryfan of Duncton?”

  “Allmole has. Escaped Henbane in Buckland, and then made a fool of us at Duncton. But he’s been caught and turned.”

  “He hasn’t. That was a lie. He has not been caught and nor has he turned, and nor do I believe many followers of the Stone believe he has. In that sense he has not been beaten.”

  “He is the leader you’re worrying about then?”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not. My point is that such leaders are not easily defeated, even though they and the moles who follow them have given all their ground to us. And believe me, they have. Henbane has seen to that! Nomole will return to Duncton Wood, the place is like a living sore with all the diseased scum of moledom in its tunnels, making their malformed young, no doubt, destroying it more effectively than we ever destroyed Uffington.

  “Yet still the name of Tryfan lives. That is why I fear that if this Stone Mole comes he will not be easy to destroy. He will be a dream that moles of the Stone follow, as Scirpus made a dream of the Word that others follow. I said the moles of the Stone will wait, as we did, until the time is right. That time will be when the Stone Mole comes.”

  “Soon they say!”

  “Not soon enough for me!” said Wrekin grimly. “The battles against the southern moles may now all be won, and no important system remaining that is not of the Word. But I would rest happier knowing that the Stone Mole, whatever he is, has come. Because if we cast him into oblivion as Henbane and Rune have done to another mole who might have been a danger....”

  “Boswell?”

  “Boswell. If they can do to the Stone Mole as they have to him and preserve order long enough across moledom that the rule of the Word is ascendant and memories of the Stone die, then we may have nothing more to fear. Or you may not. I doubt that I shall live that long!”

  Wrekin waved aside Ginnell’s courteous protest and continued, “Until then we had best be careful, and watchful. A time of doubt is coming, a time when we will grow slack, a time when the eldrenes will need to take over the ruling of moledom from the guardmoles, which is as it should be. But until that taking over is complete, and this mystery of the Stone Mole is demystified, I warn you that each of us should be careful. For if such a mole should come, Word knows what a force he may unleash. And so long as there are moles about like Tryfan and Alder, that following may be organised and effective against us.”

  “So, Wrekin, are you travelling back to Buckland as Henbane bid you do, and sending another to Whern to advise her of this Siabod victory?”

  Wrekin laughed grimly.

  “I have not lived this long by being so foolish. Buckland is under the command of Wyre now and I have no doubt that Henbane and Weed have commanded him to kill me. No, I shall go north as soon as the snow clears, north to Whern where this long campaign began and take the Siabod news myself. You survive in this world, Ginnell, by being where the power is. Where Henbane is, and Weed, I must be. And to whom shall I talk? Neither of them. No, no. I shall speak only to Rune. He will not have me killed as Henbane might!”

  Ginnell looked doubtful.

  “I am told he sees nomole,” he said.

  “But for young females, and White Moles,” said Wrekin cryptically.
“Meanwhile, I suggest you strengthen our defences to the north.”

  “But such Siabod moles as have survived will have gone south.”

  “They would, a grike wouldn’t. And what is familiar about this place, as it was familiar about the defences of Duncton Wood, was that a mole with grike training commanded the retreat. I believe Alder is hereabouts. I recommend you to be ready for assault from the north. Now, let’s leave this Word-forsaken place. The last battles for moledom may seem to have been fought, but I somehow doubt it. When that time comes it will not be at the edges that the victory will be won, but in the centre. Remember that, and beware of this Stone Mole when he comes!”

  “For a mole in his moment of final victory you sound sombre indeed.”

  “I’m a military mole, not like Weed or Henbane. They have needed me because of the talons I command. Well, I hope they sense as I do that another kind of moledom may be coming, one where battles might be fought not with talons but with hearts, not with shouts of rage but with prayers of love.”

  As they spoke, and Wrekin was about to turn back into the dark Siabod tunnels, the sky cleared to the west and the sun shone briefly across the faces of Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr, and then upon Tryfan itself. Its peak rose snow-white in the sky, but for its steepest part where grey rock rose sheer.

  “Impressive,” said Ginnell.

  “Beautiful is the right word, Ginnell, but moles like us are not meant to say such things. Imagine a mole that could command such beauty! How would our guardmoles defeat him?”

  “The Word is wise and will instruct us against whatever mole endangers it.”

  Wrekin laughed deeply and bitterly, and looked at Tryfan’s heights as a mole might look who senses that his life’s task might seem small against such majesty.

  “Anyway,” added Ginnell as an afterthought, “whatmole could, as you put it, “command” such a thing?”

  “Well I don’t know, I follow the Word. But it worries me, and I hope it may worry the great Rune himself, that there are moles who even as we snout them call out the name of a mole they believe will command more than talons ever can and whom, they say, will come.”

  “Well you come now, Wrekin, come north to the lowslopes and tell me how you’d dispose the guardmoles to face an attack from the north....”

  With that the two moles turned their backs on Tryfan’s peaks and went underground. But long after they had gone the sun shone distantly and bright upon those western peaks, and then it widened north, and touched the secret heights of the Carneddau with colour, and hope.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  If the call of Whern had now gone out to Wrekin, as it had long since to Henbane, let nomole be surprised that it was soon heard too in the tunnels of the Dunbar moles, or that it brought with it darkness and dread and the separation of two moles who had found each other and their love but a short time before.

  Already by the end of March both Feverfew and Starling had grown heavy with pup; and of the two, Starling rather heavier.

  Heath and she had paired well, if eccentrically, for Heath was not a mole to stay in a tunnel for long, especially ones as curious and strange as those he found in the heart of the Wen. He had soon confirmed that he was the maker of what Tryfan and his companions had come to call “Heath’s Tunnels” and that he had vacated them, as they had, under grave and nearly fatal pressure from the rats.

  But of his journeys prior to that, and those subsequent, he made light, as if the long moleyears of his travelling had become jumbled into one confused memory which charted a mole’s passage into a not unpleasant solitariness in which each new day is accepted as such, without especial regret for the day before, or special concern for the day following.

  His attitude to Starling, and to the prospect of pups, reflected this, for he seemed only vaguely bothered about either, as if he had had little to do with them at all. As for the excitement the Wen moles showed over the whole business, it baffled him, as they themselves did, though (to his own surprise) he found their company pleasantA enough.

  The Wen moles did not know what to make of him at all, nor of his habit of turning up at their burrows and settling down to help himself to their food, ignoring entirely their territorial assumptions and rights, which had grown complex and subtle over the decades.

  One or two attempted to challenge him but they were old and less strong than he was, and anyway, he had the habit of continuing to eat whatever worm it was he had purloined, as a mole moaned on, until that moaning mole had nothing left to say. A mole who had successfully survived in the filthels of the Wen for so many moleyears, and who had faced more rats, floods, and near drownings, more twofoots and more roaring owls than most moles could even start imagining, is not liable to be put out by an irritable and aged mole or two.

  “All right then?” Heath would conclude another mole’s diatribe against him, as if he had had a fit of colic. “Ready for a chat now, are we?” If the chat soon veered round to the subject of mating, and young, and litters and survival, Heath would say, “Don’t ask me, mate, ask her. She’ll tell you,” adding with approval, “Competent mole is Starling, very.”

  It should be added that Heath was as little concerned about Rowan, who no doubt was still waiting for his return at the far end of the Wen tunnels, as he was for the niceties of Wen mole territory. Nor even for Haize whom he now only dimly remembered. But, accepted for what he was, which was a passer through, Heath was good company.

  Certainly, over the duration of Starling’s pregnancy Heath, quite without trying to, won over the moles of the Wen whose females especially, in the tight and prim way elderly moles sometimes accept the cruder, rough young, adopted both of them, and fussed them silly in preparation for Starling’s littering. A situation not helped by Heath’s magnanimous acceptance on Starling’s behalf of any help offered, so that, so far as Starling could tell, just about every female in the system had been promised the job of watching over her when the great day, or night, of pupping came.

  But attitudes to Feverfew and Tryfan were not as friendly, and before Feverfew had pupped they were to become downright hostile.

  From the first the two moles had stayed in Feverfew’s burrows which, being on the far westside of the system, were well away from its centre and near the Library. Try fan discouraged visitors, but could not prevent all contact nor change the tradition that decreed, as it did in Duncton Wood itself, that a pupping female should be watched over, lest there was a deformity of birth which needed dealing with. Few females had the will to kill their own young.

  Squail, the emaciated female deputed to watch over Feverfew, at first seemed harmless enough. Like most of the females in the system she had not pupped and therefore had little to convey to Feverfew of a practical nature. This did not stop her, at every opportunity, from warning Feverfew of the pains and agonies of pupping, and the dangers too, all of which she did with a smug and disapproving I-told-you-so look, as if she took pleasure in Feverfew’s discomforts. Feverfew might have borne this well enough, for Tryfan was nearby and able to get Squail out of the way from time to time, but that Squail was a fusser, a fiddler, a meddler in another’s burrows, always poking her snout here and lifting some object there. She was a gossip, a peeker, a listener, and neither Tryfan nor Feverfew could stand her company.

  Yet they had no choice but to accept her for there was precedence in such matters, and, in any case, so many other females were involved in watching over Starling that none other than Squail seemed willing to do it for Feverfew. As for whether they needed her at all, that was the only matter on which Feverfew and Tryfan disagreed, and Tryfan lost the argument.

  Even then, none of this might have mattered but for the terrible fact that not long before her ward was due to pup, Squail discovered, or said she did, signs of disease on Feverfew’s flank.

  Her mouth pursed, her brow furrowed into hypocritical anxiety while her eyes looked very pleased, and she said, “Humph!” in a disapproving way. Then, saying nothing
more, went off to the main tunnels to discuss things with her meddlesome and ill-natured friends.

  Before Tryfan had discovered what was apaw or able to stop it, those same ill-natured females came and investigated, first demanding that he left Feverfew’s burrows, and then after mutterings about “vystytacyon forfeblit” pronounced that the disease was incipient murrain and Feverfew’s pups would inevitably be “defawtes”.

  “Which means what?” asked Tryfan after the old hags had gone and he had got Feverfew to calm down. But Feverfew could not bring herself to say, and it was Spindle who translated the word into mole: deformities.

  Now a shadow hung over what had been a happy burrow, and Squail positively fluffed up with the drama and tension of it all, the I-told-you-so look ever more triumphant in her puffy eyes. Yet Feverfew refused to dismiss Squail as if fearful that that would only increase the doubts and hostilities she felt; but then she would cry inconsolably, and Tryfan felt helpless and concerned.

  As the final days went by the disease, which looked to Tryfan alarmingly like scalpskin, and one of a very virulent sort, got worse. Dry skin spread across Feverfew’s flank in a matter of days, and then cracked and opened bloodily, and her face thinned with worry and she seemed unable to accept comfort from Tryfan as, becoming more tired and strained, she began to settle in the birth burrow where no male must go.

  It was about then, when he was at a loose end, that Tryfan one day came across Mayweed on the westside, wandering about and lost in thought. He was, he explained, exploring....

  The fact was that none of Tryfan’s party had really explored the system at all prior to his recovery at the end of February. They had been too weak, or, when they had got better, too concerned watching over him to go exploring.

  Even Mayweed, never a mole to crouch still when a little bit of exploration was possible, had stayed close by until Feverfew’s coming and even after that had been reluctant to wander far until Tryfan had recovered.