Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  “A mole doesn’t find another way through. He gets lost and he dies. If he comes out on this side, which is where he started, he is killed, so he doesn’t come out here.”

  As Spindle asked him some more questions Mayweed took Tryfan to one side.

  “Dear Sir, good Sir, who has done so much for Mayweed over the years, dejected he is and sad, and has no time to be. His paws itch, his chest expands, his heart aches, his mind races. All his instincts say he must leave now, and escape, and he does not know why. But here, brave Tryfan Sir, is the only place he may go. Here, Sir, now, Sir....”

  Lathe looked around at them, the Clints rising behind him, and the three moles, who had travelled so long together, seemed instinctively and without word to know how to behave. Tryfan and Mayweed yawned and looked a little bored while Spindle, at his most earnest and intense, asked Lathe another question in the answering of which he could display his knowledge and general superiority.

  Mayweed continued: “So, Tryfan Sir, I will shortly leave. No doubt they will search, but they will not find, not Mayweed, not he. But he will be near, Sir, because strong Tryfan will need him, and if he seems not near he will be – believe it, Sir. Mayweed has told Tryfan before and he tells him again: Mayweed loves Tryfan...” He spoke these words urgently and if Tryfan had been lulled a little by the warm day and Lathe’s calm and unprotected guiding of them, he felt lulled no more.

  Of all moles, Mayweed knew of the tunnels of darkness and of ways through them. On the long journey since the Wen, Tryfan had come more and more to appreciate that the Stone had sent Mayweed to be a guide through more than just physical places. He was in some mysterious way an unknowing guide into spiritual places too, and now must leave Tryfan from an instinct that told him if he was to be of further use he would need to make preparation by learning the tunnels and ways of Whern, unseen and unknown.

  “Mayweed suggests that Tryfan and Spindle take this last opportunity of escape, which he senses is now. Trust humble he, let yourselves be guided into the Clints, and he is confident he can get Sirs both away from this place that makes him tremble. Not. nice here, Sir, moles’ eyes are cold. Please leave, please come. Now is the last chance, Sir. Trust Mayweed, Mayweed knows....”

  “I know too, Mayweed. I know,” whispered Tryfan, “as you know, I must go on. But the Stone is with us and though it will bring us together again I fear much will soon have changed. Each of us has a part to play in the coming of the Stone Mole, though how or when I am no nearer knowing. You will always have a special place in my heart, Mayweed, and I think in moledom’s heart as well. You are a mole of courage, more than anymole may ever know. I know you will watch over us from the places you find, I know you will be near, and that gives me the courage to go on to where there will be no turning back.”

  “Sir,” said Mayweed, his voice almost breaking with emotion and his snout low as his mouth trembled, “if I am not near when the Stone Mole comes, will you tell him my name? Say Mayweed wanted to... see him. Good Sir, humble me asks only that.”

  “I shall tell him your name, and when I tell him what you have done for us he will repeat it with love.”

  That was as much as the two moles had time for. Lathe finished answering Spindle’s questions, looked at Tryfan and Mayweed curiously, thought no more of it, and led them on. Spindle followed, Tryfan came second and Mayweed last. And sometime then, as the September sun warmed the pale limestone about them and they climbed northward of the Clints, the sound of pawsteps behind Tryfan faded and when, a little later, he looked back, nomole was there. He saw only the great stretching maze the Clints formed, whose entrances were all enshadowed, and empty.

  “Foolish,” snapped Lathe, “and stupid. Though we expected something like it.”

  “He was confused by the Clints, he will surely be found.”

  “He will be found, or he will die. But when the grikes take him they may kill him. Foolish insulter to the Word. Foolish to so abuse our trust!”

  “I really think the Clints upset him... He’s rather a one for losing his way,” said Tryfan, looking at Spindle meaningfully to suggest the truth of Mayweed’s disappearance.

  “Weakness is not of the Word. Forget that mole now, he is as good as dead.” The brutality that lay behind the easy dismissal of an entire life angered Tryfan and outraged poor Spindle, who was not quite sure of Mayweed’s intent but understood that Tryfan knew more of it than he said.

  “His loss is of no account,” said Lathe halting by an entrance a molemile north east of the Clints. “In any case my job is as good as done. The WordSpeaker is interested only in Tryfan and I doubt if she’ll have much to say to your friend Spindle at all.”

  “He’ll have something to say to her I expect!” smiled Tryfan, calm once more. “Now, where do we go?”

  Whern now rose almost east of them across two miles or so of steeply rising moorland, and even though its gritty western edge caught the sun, yet it absorbed light to nothingness and seemed like solid shadow. It was no country for mole. They felt they were on the edge of what would be habitable. To their left, or westward, they saw across the ground they had covered, which was a mass of limestone outcrops and clint-like areas dissected by faults. While directly north of them the ground sloped away into a deep and shaded gorge whose depths were lost to view, beyond whose furthest side over the moor was what looked like a massive canyon in the ground from which rose steam, or spray perhaps, which was blown by a steady north-westerly wind towards Whern.

  “What’s that?” asked Tryfan, pointing a talon at the rising mist.

  Lathe lowered his snout towards it.

  “That is the Providence Fall,” he said, “where nomole but the WordSpeaker now goes, and senior sideem. It is the Master’s place, and in its galleries Scirpus himself once lived.”

  “Does the Master live there now?” asked Spindle, rather surprised that Lathe was so willing to talk to about it.

  “Oh yes, he lives there, but is not often seen.”

  All around they could hear the run of water, and beneath their paws they could sense a formidable world all echoing and strange. All the vast landscape they could see was grike country. It had a kind of sparse beauty and yet, never in his life – even including the worst times in the Wen – had Tryfan less wished to be where he was.

  “This is the place of the High Sideem, whose tunnels and chambers waited through the aeons for the coming of Scirpus, who discovered the Word here and made it known. The present Master was the one ordained to find a way that the Word might spread across moledom. He ordained the WordSpeaker and she saw his wishes through. We live in hallowed times, moles, and you are lucky to be here. So follow and be grateful.”

  They dropped a little downslope, travelled on some way, and then took a route adjacent to a sink hole below ground. Their pawsteps echoed through darkness for a time until, suddenly, there was light again, high above their heads, and they were in a chamber of great beauty.

  The echoes their passage made ran around them, redoubling, trebling, echoing all about before the echoes seemed to grow stronger and real pawsteps were heard approaching. If a mole’s head went dizzy with sound, his eyes could barely contemplate the light as, advancing towards whatever mole came, it was reflected from vents in the high roof and dazzled in the still pools that glistened everywhere.

  Ahead a mole stopped and waited for them. Light from a pool dappled across his face and seemed to run along his twisted snout. It was Weed.

  “Welcome,” he said with a vile smile. “Oh yes. Very welcome. Lost one have we, yes? Ah... it was Mayweed. We know him. He’ll get further than most, Lathe, but that’s not far, yes?” Weed laughed unpleasantly and nodded to Lathe, who, silently, left them.

  “Your coming here was much discussed. It was doubted in some quarters that you would come. I was certain of it, of course. Boswell I think was the lure. The WordSpeaker was sure of it. Wrekin, on the other paw, decided you would not be quite such fools. No spiritual imagination, Wrek
in. He could not think that a mole might be so illogical as to take such a risk as coming here is for you all. You ‘both’, I should say, now Mayweed has gone off, yes?” Weed laughed again, his small mouth tight and secretive.

  “But, well, Wrekin was getting old. You will not, I suppose, be pleased to know that his work in Siabod is over. That system is of the Word now, most of its moles killed. The WordSpeaker has sent Wrekin back to the system whence he came and others younger than he do his job better. But these matters will not concern you, yes?” His eyes smiled in the cold way they had.

  “There was a time when I would have enjoyed talking to you, Tryfan. You put up a resistance of sorts to us, one of the few moles who did. But now, well, all that is done. The Word is triumphant and nomole can gainsay it.”

  “Why were we allowed to come at all? Why not attack and destroy us as you tried to before?”

  “Times change, Tryfan. The way of snouting is done. Persuasion is better. To kill you on your journey north would indeed have been easy, but it would have martyred you. But here, well, a mole disappears and is forgotten.”

  “Like Boswell?” said Tryfan.

  “Like Boswell,” agreed Weed.

  “I wish to see him,” said Tryfan.

  “Oh yes, yes I’m sure you do,” said Weed. “But you must address that request to the WordSpeaker in the first instance. But why delay? You would like to see her, yes? She would you.”

  They followed him as other sideem, all lithe and muscular as Lathe had been, and mostly male, emerged from the shadows and the bright light thereabouts, to stare at them and, as it seemed, to watch and guard them.

  They went through great chamber after chamber with galleries high up and peepholes in crystalline white limestone, past droplets of water shining with light, the air chilly and clean. On they went, along ways cut and eaten into the limestone by water, across chambers large and dark. Never a river’s flow, but always pools still as night sucking and stirring downwards to the Sinks. Yet somewhere water splashed, and somewhere else it seeped away.

  Downslope they went, through cracks of rock to reach yet other chambers, to where the walls were scribed, and Weed warned them not to touch the scribing. But clumsy Spindle’s flanks brushed it at one point and that was enough for nauseous sound to overwhelm them, and their ears to ache and their snouts to run. Filthy sound, and Spindle retched.

  “Warned you, yes?” grinned Weed, eyes bright. “Do not vomit on the way.” It was a place of mounting terror where moles seemed to appear and disappear and from where, Tryfan somehow knew, moles did not escape without detection. Mayweed’s timing had been good.

  “Not nice, Tryfan,” muttered Spindle through gritted teeth.

  “Not nice,” Tryfan agreed.

  Then sunshine cut in a great shaft across a chamber they entered and ahead the tunnel seemed to run straight out into a void, for they could see purple heather across a moor where, superb, the dark chasm they had seen was cut, out of which the spray rose dramatically. It was caught by sun, drifted west, and the vegetation below it was wet and shiny with sky. It was hard to judge, but it seemed to drop down sheer to a gorge where a beck, which they could only hear, and the wind, roared softly at the opening’s edges. But where they were was deathly still.

  “May the word be with thee, Tryfan,” said a voice they knew, a female voice, floating among the high stalactites, tumbling to the stalagmites, as smoothly caressing as the surface of the deep dark pools between them: “You like my den?”

  They turned sharply, but in what direction to look they did not know. In that cavern direction seemed to vanish.

  “Here!” said Weed, directing them to an arch, through which they found a burrow as grand as a burrow could be. Lofty, elegant, shining with light, with a pool that surged and played from some inlet underneath and then sucked softly away into the wall. There, with dried heather to make the place soft, curled Henbane of Whern.

  “You really are most welcome,” she said.

  She seemed bigger than they remembered, and had aged. That she was beautiful could not be denied, but it was a beauty beyond mere form. There was something about her that made a male tremble with longing, as if he had been brought to see something he never knew he had missed; as if life before Henbane was incomplete, and away from her would never be the same.

  Looking at her, Tryfan found his emotions separating from his head and the first beginning to dominate and influence the second, which hung on with increasing difficulty to the knowledge that this mole was evil and destructive. Yet his emotions, and the desires of his body, told him: “No, no, that’s a memory, here she is not what she was, she cannot be. I want to be near her.” But though this conflict caused a turmoil in him he did not immediately show it, only staring at her without expression and then, taking his eyes from her hypnotic and alluring gaze with difficulty, he looked at the two moles who crouched on either side of her.

  To her left side was a female they both knew, to her right a male that might have been a mole.

  “Sleekit you know,” said Henbane. “A sideem I trust more than any other.”

  Sleekit stared at them, unaged from when they had last seen her, and impassive. There was no recognition of them at all in her eyes and yet they remembered she had been a mole who shared with them the Seven Stancing in Buckland so long before. A mole marked by the Stone with a task no doubt. Tryfan looked into her eyes and knew suddenly they were blessed to have her there, and sensed that Henbane knew it not. It made Henbane fallible. Sleekit’s presence strengthened him from whatever chaos waited so near now for him to plunge on into it.

  But Weed knew Sleekit might not be trusted, and Tryfan sensed it. Which, if it were so, meant that Sleekit had much cleverness for Weed did not allow doubtful moles to stay long near Henbane. Perhaps Henbane knew after all, but liked the conflict between two moles. Yes... that might be it. With such thoughts Tryfan, still quite impassive, stilled his mind, finding it easier if he avoided Henbane’s gaze.

  He looked at the male on her right.

  “As for this one,” said Henbane, putting a possessive paw on that mole’s shoulder, “I think you know him too.” Henbane smiled while she caressed the mole’s plump side.

  It was a mole they supposed, though as for recognising him that was less certain. More a creature, really. Plump to obeseness, his face puffy with fat and his mouth weak; his eyes dead in their stare at them, and his fur all pampered and falsely glossy. His flanks were unmarked, his talons weak. He smiled, and in that moment when his face moved to that empty smile his eyes changed, and in them they saw a flash of real emotion – shame and corruption – and, terribly, Tryfan knew his name.

  “You know him I think, or he knows you. Tell them your name, my dear,” purred Henbane. Her talons played sharply at his neck.

  “My name’s Bailey,” he said, “and I come from Duncton Wood.”

  Tryfan knew it before the mole spoke, but poor Spindle did not and he started, genuinely shocked. Weed watched, watched everything.

  “Hello, Bailey,” said Spindle to his only son, Henbane’s plaything. Though his voice was steady Tryfan could feel him trembling and knew the shock he felt and the awful dismay to find his son had survived for this.

  He knew, too, that Henbane knew the cruelty that she did to confront a pampered, spoilt young mole of Duncton to two of its leaders.

  “You see, Tryfan, I have my own follower from Duncton Wood, my favourite whose company I enjoy and who reminds me of the simple things in life. What a sweet system Duncton must have been to produce such... naivety. But run along, Bailey, we wish to talk.”

  Bailey heaved himself up and looked around briefly, nodding his head in a weak half idiotic way, and waddled off, his fat rear barely squeezing into the tunnel he went down.

  “He keeps me amused,” said Henbane, adding so quietly that at first it might have been a whisper in the mind until a mole thought about what it really meant: “But now you’re here, Tryfan, I don’t need him, do
I?”

  Tryfan’s glance had lingered on the departure of that corrupted thing that had been a goodly youngster he once knew, and Spindle’s son, and he knew the first feelings of a horror that he could not have imagined before. For he began to guess why the Stone might have sent him and what it might ask him to do.

  Afterwards, witness to that moment, Spindle scribed a strange and tragic thing: that Tryfan then, there, in Henbane’s seductive burrow, had never looked so strong and fit and sure before, and never did again. It was the moment of moments in a mole’s physical life that he strives to reach and never knows, until the moment has long past and age has crept up unawares, that that was the moment. The moment when a mole might do anything and of which Tryfan, looking back, might yet wish he had reared up then and struck down the vile thing beautiful Henbane was.

  It was Tryfan’s burden: he knew, and understood that in some way the Stone wished it so, that he might be a sacrifice to Henbane so that Boswell, and Spindle too, might be free. Yes, and Bailey. It was in the knowing and the facing of it that Tryfan’s greatness lay.

  “My favourite” she said of Bailey, but it was on Tryfan she looked now and the “favourite” was, as Lathe might put it, “as good as dead’. And yet knowing that, and that such would be anymole’s fate who lingered with Henbane and was allured by her, he felt again as their eyes met in that enchanted burrow, where light played like a May wind in trees about them, his sinking towards an adoration of the mole he most despised.

  To make it worse, each mole in that chamber knew what was happening, for Henbane and Tryfan had eyes for none other.

  Spindle knew it.

  Weed, watching now, knew it well; his eyes narrow and his mouth moist, aware of the males that had preceded Tryfan and what had happened to each of them. What he now saw so cynically was the continuation of a desire Henbane had from the day Tryfan successfully eluded her in Harrowdown and made fools of all the grikes at Duncton. She had both wanted him and wanted to destroy him, and Weed knew that her desire to do both in her own way, pleasurably, was one of several reasons why she had permitted this arrogant mole’s naive trek from south to north to the very heart of the Whern. So, knowing this, Weed watched and felt certain he knew what the outcome would be.