Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  “Shut up and move on, you little turd,” said one of the grikes, buffeting Mayweed. They were probably an unpleasant, taciturn lot in any case, but as they climbed higher they grew increasingly irritable and, as it seemed to Tryfan, scared.

  “Who’s liaising?” said one as they reached a terrace of turf with yet another cliff of limestone ahead.

  “Lathe of Arncliffe,” said the leader.

  “Shit,” said one of the grikes. “Him I don’t need.”

  “You’re a silly bugger —”

  “I may be, but him I don’t need right now. I’ll lie low when —”

  “Lie where you like, mole. The Word will always know. Lie how you like, lie as you like, the Word will tell the truth!”

  The voice was smug and cold, and it was hard at first to say where it came from. Behind them? In front? They all froze.

  “Here, fools!”

  The mole was there, ahead of them, his head seeming to peer from the limestone cliff itself. Grey fur, aquiline face, cold grey eyes, and a mouth that seemed to sneer. Then it was gone, and there was a quick touch of talon on rock and the mole reappeared nearby.

  “Lathe,” said the mole to Tryfan.

  “Tryfan of Duncton.”

  “Dismiss,” Lathe said to the grikes.

  “But Lathe, Sir, there’s three of them and....”

  Lathe smiled thinly, showing his obvious contempt for them.

  “These are southern moles, they have come a long way and I doubt that they intend to flee or harm a humble mole like me. So leave us now and....” He waited long enough for the grikes to think that he had forgotten what one of them had said before saying, “You!”

  “Me, Sir?”

  “You, Sir. Here.” The mole who had mentioned his dread of Lathe came near. Though he was big he trembled. Tryfan noticed that Lathe’s muscles flexed. There was something vile about the power he wielded, and it was made worse by the fact that he evidently wished to demonstrate it to the strangers.

  “So, you don’t ‘need’ me ‘right now’ as you put it.”

  “I didn’t —”

  “We know why, don’t we?”

  There was a lifetime – no, centuries – of judgement and punishment in those words and the “we” had all the nauseous piety of the strong over the misdemeaning weak. Despite his size the grike looked wan and frightened.

  “Yes,” he agreed, lowering his snout.

  “Thrust or confession, mole?” asked Lathe.

  “Thrust,” muttered the grike.

  “So be it,” said Lathe. He darted a quick glance at the three of them, as if to make sure they were watching. Then he talon-thrust at the grike’s shoulder with astonishing power and grace, so fast that the blow seemed over before it had begun. Yet the grike spun back with a cry, and blood poured from a shoulder wound.

  “May you be at peace with the Word, mole. Now go!” said Lathe dismissing them all. Then he turned to lead Tryfan and his two friends through the portal of limestone he had emerged from, and as he went Tryfan saw a scatter of blood from the talon-thrust spotting and dripping on the limestone cliff. Tryfan shuddered, and felt that it might be a long time before he and Spindle saw the light of a good day again.

  The tunnels they found themselves in, and the chambers that they led to, were, and remain, some of the most extraordinary in all of moledom. Although no doubt they saw only a small part of Whern, it was enough to make them understand that moles who lived in that place might easily think of themselves as special and select.

  The tunnels were the size of the twofoot-made tunnels of the Wen but had none of the filth or regulation. They were tall and sinewy, towering away above, their passages undulating and curving with a sensuous beauty beyond the experience of a woodland mole used to earth and stones, and the roots of tree.

  Their striking size and shape was enhanced immeasurably by the nature of the light they attracted and gave out. There seemed to be innumerable outlets overhead – though what had made them was not immediately clear, since nomole could possibly reach so high or delve rock so hard.

  The air was clear, the windsound good, the light excellent, and it seemed as if the very walls of limestone that rose so sinuously above them caught the logic and grandeur of the passing sky.

  “But...” began Spindle, wondering what agency ever made such tunnels as those if mole had not.

  “Questioning Spindle,” said Mayweed with a delighted smile, “you see a power greater than the talons of miserable moles. You see the power of water’s flow.”

  “But there is no water!” said Spindle.

  Which seemed true, for the floor of the tunnel was sandy and dry. Mayweed pointed to the deposits of sand and gravel along the tunnel floor, and the deep undercutting erosion of its walls.

  “Sirs both, humble me guessed that we go up a passage down which an underground river once went,” said Mayweed, awe in his voice. They realised that water must still come sometimes because some crevices had small dark pools of water in them.

  “Listen, amazed mole! Hear, staggered Spindle! Enjoy, cultured Cleric! The sound of the liquid that makes the rivers that carves the tunnels that us moles are in! Water! Hear its drips, see its encrustations, suffer its damp, celebrate its power!”

  It was true, they could hear it. Everywhere. Above, below and about: the movement of water. Distant-seeming, rumbling, the echoed splash, the drip in a cavern dark as night. The rush of water through a crack of rock, but far? How far? They turned a corner, and there it was, Mayweed dancing about in excitement at the sight of it. A force of white water making a sound like thunder, spurting out of a cleft in the rock and then gone again into a sucking pool, a flash of white spuming water, ugly and yellow in its foam, right across the path they trod. Under it they went.

  “Wet Spindle! Splashed Spindle! Humbleness has proved his point, has he not?” shouted Mayweed over the din.

  “Humbleness has!” said Spindle

  “Humbleness usually does!” said Tryfan, more to himself than anymole else.

  The arched watershoot safely behind them, a corner turned, and its sound seemed as distant as the far side of a dale, and near them they heard as clear as a pup’s cry the single drip of water that fell from the point of a dropping encrustation from the chamber’s roof into a pool, so still that without the ripple of the drip they might have thought it was not there. The underground waterfall might never have been.

  Where light fell ferns grew on the damp ground, and in them delicate spiders, pale as a weak sky, moved.

  “Correct!” said Lathe to Mayweed, his voice echoing in a staccato half-shocked way among the stalactites that hung now above them, his body seeming to slide among the stalagmites that here and there rose from the floor.

  Some of the thinner stalactites trembled as they passed, and gave the chamber a kind of ringing that sounded their passage by.

  Then they turned up a cleft filled with stone and mud, their paws filthy with it and their bellies too, then on following Lathe’s rapid ascent until they came to a portal, and a short tunnel that levelled out to the edge of a deep pool. Beyond that was a great light chamber in which several moles crouched like dead things among the stalagmites.

  “These moles are novices and must reach such a state of peace that they notice not the moles who come and go,” said Lathe. “This is the start of the Whern of the sideem, and this the cleansing pool through which all novices must pass. It is cold, cold as death, and you three so far as I know are the first moles who have not professed the Word who have ever passed this way. It is by the WordSpeaker’s command you come.

  “Swim slow in the water until the cold feels mortal and be warned that currents suck at a mole’s paws and belly and would drag him down if they could. It has happened. Such moles are lost in the Sinks and are beyond redemption of the Word. So pass across confidently though not so swiftly that you are not cleansed. Each mole must learn his own time.”

  Without more ado Lathe slipped into the pool
and swam slowly across, the ripples from his passage dragging to his left and showing there was indeed a current there. Though no exit from the pool was visible, the water lapped and seemed to suck in a final way where the current met the wall and where the water was as black as night.

  Mayweed went first and once in did not dally, climbing out on the far side with a fixed dripping grin that signified his extreme cold and discomfort.

  Spindle let out a moan as he went in, and reached the other side shivering and deathly cold.

  Tryfan went more slowly, looking to right and left, and letting the bitter water flow into his fur and take the grime and dirt of their recent passage out of it. He felt good when he came out, and shook himself dry. The water glistened on his body and he contrasted with Lathe strikingly: both were fit and graceful, but while Tryfan had warmth and good humour to his body the other seemed ascetic and cold, his eyes unblinking and his gaze at once earnest and vain. He was not a mole who smiled, and nor, looking about at the novices, did the other moles seem to be.

  Mayweed went near to Lathe and offered him one of what he hoped was his most endearing smiles, every single one of his yellow teeth showing, and said, “Most impressive and knowledgeable Sir, awed me would like to know what the Sinks are.”

  Lathe looked indifferently at Mayweed, and then back at the pool, and finally deigned to answer.

  “A place of doom, mole, where moles go who are not of the Word. Cold it is, and eternally wet, and there a mole drowns forever, lost in darkness that never ends, suffering for the wrong of his failure.”

  “Terrifying Sir, you mean this pool we have crossed is one of many leading to the Sinks?”

  “All water flows there, down to that eternal darkness where no Word is heard or scribed, and where sinning moles suffer without end.”

  “Humble I, named Mayweed, is aghast at the horror of it, lissome Lathe.”

  “Good, mole. Respect and awe are worthy feelings. Now....”

  And as the meditating sideem continued to pay no attention to the visitors, which appeared to please Lathe, he led them on towards where sun came down into the chamber, and then up to the surface once more.

  It was a relief to be in the open again and to feel the warmth of the sunshine and see far below the prospect of Wharfedale, now quite free of mist. Kilnsey Crag lay far below them, massive still, but with the sun upon its eastward face it looked more benign. Across the dale the sun caught other limestone scars. From this vantage point Whern did not seem so bad.

  Yet as they turned back from where they had come and faced again where they must yet go, they sensed again the higher glowering mass of Whern. No bright warm sunshine anywhere in moledom would have been warm enough to change the chill they all felt in their hearts as Lathe, turning north east towards where the ground sloped inexorably upward towards an unwelcoming moor, said, “Now, I shall take you to the WordSpeaker, who will talk with you.”

  “A moment, mole,” said Tryfan taking a firm stance. “You mean that Henbane’s tunnels are not here but higher up?”

  “We do not use the WordSpeaker’s personal name,” said Lathe sniffily. “Few have that privilege. But to answer your question: her tunnels are indeed much higher, for that is where the High Sideem is and you are lucky to be allowed to see it. Some sideem never even get asked before they leave for their missionary work, others go there only for ritual, and only a very few of us are allowed, in the line of our work, access when we need it.” Lathe smiled smugly, and looked most insufferably vain.

  “Esteemed Sir, mole of calibre and cleverness, may I ask a question of trivial importance?” said Mayweed. It was hard to say if he was being sarcastic, but he probably was: his normally smiling eyes were cold and wary, and both Spindle and Tryfan could see that he was acutely aware of his surroundings and the lie of the tunnels and the surface. But Lathe seemed unaware of Mayweed’s humour, or his continual observation and took at its face value his grandiloquence.

  He inclined his snout in haughty acknowledgement of Mayweed, and to signal that he was prepared to answer a question.

  “Wonderful Whern is very large, and I wonder whether anymole is clever enough to know all its tunnels and ways?”

  “Nomole is so clever,” said Lathe, “nor so foolish to try. We believe that only Scirpus himself had a spatial intellect vast enough to absorb and remember his chosen system. Even such an area as that...” He waved his talon at what seemed, from where they had taken stance, a low cliff. “... could not be encompassed by a single mole, let alone the system as a whole. Indeed it is one of the disciplines that novices must face: to learn part of this area I point to.”

  “Doesn’t look much to me!” said Spindle. “Just a cliff.”

  Lathe smiled in a condescending way and Mayweed, as if to get himself on Lathe’s side, said, “Asinine Spindle, mulish mole, I am sure that likeable Lathe here will say that that ‘cliff’, as you put it, is much more than it seems! Is Mayweed right, or is he wrong? Sir, you adjudicate.”

  “Oh you’re right, mole, very right,” said Lathe.

  Diverted for a few minutes at least from his morning’s task of taking them to Henbane, as no doubt Mayweed had hoped he might be, he led them the few moleyards to the low cliff, found a way up a cleft of the kind they were getting used to, and with a clear instruction not to wander if they valued their life, found a way that brought them on top of the cliff itself.

  It was but a distance of a few yards and yet, suddenly, they found themselves looking on a world nomole could have imagined. It was a plateau of limestone dissected by dozens of deep clefts like crevices in ice, which plunged down into a gloom in which ferns and shrubs grew. Here and there across this limestone plateau trees grew up, the lower half of their trunks quite buried in the limestone. The area stretched ahead on either side of them so far that the rising ground beyond was hazed by warmth, and the sheep that wandered there seemed small.

  “What is this place called?” asked Spindle.

  “Bycliffe Ground is its formal name,” said Lathe, “but sideem call it the Clints, and like it not. You see, this is a testing place for young sideem.”

  “How so?” asked Tryfan.

  “I’ll show you...” He led them back down to the cliff’s bottom edge and took them some way along it, past several deep and shadowed entrances into one that seemed more worn than most.

  He turned to them: “Now follow me close and do not wander.”

  They went in the entrance and the cleft’s sides rose above them, and ahead the path ran turgidly among ferns and the pink flowers and reddening stalks of herb robert.

  The line of the clefts above, where they opened to the sky, seemed to bear no relation to their line at the base, so that as a mole travelled along the world above seemed to move in a different way than the path he trod. Then the path divided, then again, and again after that and they were dizzy and confused with it.

  “If I left you here,” said Lathe, “I doubt that any of you would ever be seen again.” They looked around at the shadowed walls, and at the hart’s tongue fern that rose above their heads and whose leaves reflected dark light. Whichever way they looked seemed different and as they turned they had the strange sensation that the sky was turning as well so that even the way they came seemed obscure. To make it worse, high cloud drifted in the sky, but down there inside the Clints it seemed that the walls were in a perpetual state of falling down.

  Tryfan did not doubt that Lathe was right and instinctively looked over at Mayweed, who was not a mole to get lost easily.

  He was staggering about, with one paw to his eyes and muttering, “Sir, Sir, take us from here. This totally unimportant mole is confused and turmoiled by this place. Please, good Sir, help him escape!”

  Lathe smiled broadly at the other two and, ignoring Mayweed’s apparent distress, said, “For the novices the Clints becomes a final test of learning and trust. Each sideem must cross through the Clints and to do that he must know the way, and he can only learn to kn
ow the way by rote: left paw, left and right, right, right, and left and left and left, right, right, and so on.” His voice assumed a strange singsong tone as he said these directions. “But if the novice makes a mistake well... he is lost. Each year a few are lost.”

  “As a test of learning I can understand it, but as a test of trust?” said Tryfan.

  Lathe shrugged.

  “The novice must hope he has the right directions, and even at moments of doubt on the way – and there are many – he must trust. I fear some are misled, but that is the WordSpeaker’s right. Sometimes moles became too familiar, and must be taught a lesson.”

  “You mean,” said Tryfan, “they are deliberately misled and sent to their deaths?”

  “I mean,” said Lathe coldly, “that erring moles must be punished by the Word.”

  Spindle and Tryfan looked around in horror, while Mayweed had collapsed against a wall and was moaning to himself and again asking to be taken out.

  “You only mention males, and we only saw males. Are there females?”

  “Of course, some very senior ones. Why one of the closest to the WordSpeaker is a female, and one who has travelled to the parts you come from. Sleekit. She had no trouble with the dints! I always knew she would go far!” He smiled, a little wanly, and for the first time they saw from the wrinkles around his eyes that he was older than he seemed, much older in fact. Tryfan remembered Boswell telling him once that some moles, those who live a life of austerity and freedom from the pressures of life, develop such a youthful fur but a certain emptiness of feature which moles who have lived more fully do not have.

  Lathe led them out again, and once there, Mayweed seemed to recover himself.

  “Loquacious Lathe, what happens if a mole finds a different way through the Glints?” he asked, his paws restless. Tryfan could see he was longing to go exploring on his own, and did not believe for one minute that his distressed behaviour was other than an act.