Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  Her grief was real and to have denied it would have been to deny his own responsive feelings, and so naturally it evoked in him feelings of sympathy, and pity, and a desire to understand. Perhaps, too, he thought, so far as any mole could think in the presence of such elemental emotions as Henbane then displayed, that if he could reach out and understand, and show that he understood, he might achieve not only the freeing of Boswell and Spindle, but also perhaps some new tolerance towards the followers of the Stone; a tolerance, incidentally, that he had already thought was beginning from the fact that his own passage north had not been interrupted; and that no violence at all had been shown them in Whern. These hopes, then, combined with the natural sympathy for one who appeared so much in grief to cloud Tryfan’s judgement.

  Yet no doubt, too, he tried to hang on to the warnings about Henbane he had had from Sleekit, and Boswell, and the evidence of his own experience of what the grikes had perpetrated over the years. While all the time, before him then, was a mole in grief, and one who might have warmed the heart of ice itself.

  What is certain is the extraordinary, almost alarming, effect Henbane’s presence had on a mole when she wished it to. She was beautiful, she was one who held a fascination in her form whatever she said or did, as if through her body each emotion and purpose found its perfect expression. Hatred and animosity: they had been seen well enough at Harrowdown, but a mole forgets that when faced by an equally potent expression of grief and tragedy.

  “Tell me,” Henbane said suddenly, seeming to move out of grief to something else as fast as the sun appears from behind a racing storm cloud, “tell me, Tryfan, because I want to know, I really do: were you much loved as a pup?”

  Much loved. The expression Boswell had used so affectingly to Tryfan in the Fall. Only much later did it occur to him that Henbane, or perhaps another mole close to her – Rune perhaps, but he never knew – had overheard that conversation and now Henbane knew well how to play on it.

  “Was I much loved?” faltered Tryfan, and of course he knew the answer was that he had been, very much; as a mole should be. The love of Rebecca and Bracken for him and between themselves was at the very essence of his being.

  “I was,” he said.

  But barely were the words out of his mouth, indeed they were not quite out, before her quiet and beguiling query transmuted into dark and terrifying rage.

  “But I was not, Tryfan! I was not much loved. My father I know not; my mother I killed.”

  The chamber seemed to rumble and shake with the anger of her words.

  “You cannot understand that, you can never understand that, nomole can,” she said. “And yet all judge me!”

  So shock was followed by accusation, but before Tryfan could even catch up with that Henbane began to scream, so loud, so long, so violently that nomole but a deaf one would not have gone to her side to seek to comfort her. Tryfan was not deaf, and he was a caring mole, and so, in the face of such a sudden outburst, he did what most such moles would have done: he sought to comfort her by touch.

  Touch!

  Perhaps from that moment, in the High Sideem, when Tryfan was driven by an elemental scream for help by a mole who in one sense was never any more than a pup, though one with fearsome power and authority indeed, he was doomed.

  But he himself believed that all was not quite lost at that moment when he reached out to comfort Henbane. Comfort! That mole? Yes, comfort.

  She turned on him, her eyes expressing a desperate agony, her yearning for comfort and love irresistible, and she wept.

  “I was reared in a place called Ilkley, in a wormless place, and my mother’s name was Charlock.”

  There Henbane abruptly stopped what had seemed about to become a long, extended narrative and stared in great distress at nothing in particular as she thought about her mother. It was as if a wave of passionate regret had stopped inside her head where her face started and would any moment burst forth as tears more terrible than any she had yet shed. Then they came, but silently, great tears of grief that rolled down her face and glistened hugely in her fur.

  Then, as if with great difficulty – and once more before Tryfan could quite catch up with her emotions – she began to talk quickly but quietly of her past in Ilkley, of her mother’s cruel ways, of the lovelessness of her time on Rombald’s Moor, of her longings to know more of the Word, and, by degrees, of her desire to visit Whern and give herself in service to the Master of the Sideem himself.

  She told of how the mole Weed came, and in a hushed voice she justified the killing of her mother, that other moles might be safe from her sharp talons. Sometimes she paused and gulped, as if bravely holding back those tears that demanded to be wept, sometimes she came close to Tryfan and touched him, beseeching him not to leave her, to listen to her, to know the “truth”, and to understand that what she had done in the name of the Word was for the good of moledom and that now it was done she was forever alone and bereft.

  So spoke Henbane, and outside the light dimmed and Dowber Gill’s roar diminished, and it seemed to Tryfan that his world now was just this agonised and struggling mole who was not Henbane of Whern any more, but a pup who cried out for help from a desolate moor where her mother Charlock tortured her, punished her, and for whom the only hope was a distant mythical one called the Master of the Sideem, presented to her by cruel Charlock as a future lover.

  Did Henbane know what she did in those hours with Tryfan? He afterwards doubted it. Could she have guessed that of all moles she was ever likely to know the one most likely to understand and sympathise with a confusion between a mate and a parent was Tryfan, whose own mother Rebecca had been ravaged by her father Mandrake, another evil, angry mole? Did Tryfan in those hours as Henbane spoke to him begin to see what she herself never had and what only Weed so far knew: that Rune, who first took her, was her father. Did he, knowing Rebecca’s history, feel sympathy where another, like Spindle, for example, might not?

  Perhaps. Probably. It helps explain why he listened on, and why Henbane dared say so much; and perhaps seeing his sympathy she, moledom’s greatest mistress of inveiglement and evil, dared expose herself further and tell him everything.

  However it was, the night came, and Whern was hushed, and those two moles talked on, coming closer as moles will with time, and feeling that bonding that all moles feel that share dark, intoxicating secrets and emotions.

  Much earlier they had touched. Now, as darkness crept across the faces of the white limestone scars of Whern, and into the chambers and passages of the High Sideem, the world of those two moles came closer still. They were not Henbane and Tryfan any more but two of the many, two moles finding comfort, two moles in troubled times who find peace between themselves, and good feeling, and homecoming.

  There in that darkness, with the water’s roar nearby, their touching came closer yet, of flank to flank, of nuzzling teeth to caressing talon, of dark warmth and abandonment, where two moles lose themselves and make one, one unalone, and move towards a sensuous ecstasy that Stone or Word, or whatever power gives life and love, first ordained as desire and delight; and whose denial seems if only in its own fateful hour a denial of love itself.

  There, that night, as the Dowber Gill’s force and waterfall roared down, and all over Whern water roared and turned white in foam and spume and turmoiled into dark and sensuous pools, and moved silently and unseen within the very bowels of the earth itself, those two mated, time forgotten, friends forgotten, all purposes forgotten.

  In mating, as in all else, Henbane was more than passionate, more than alive. Those sighs and screams she made before, those tears, that anger through the years, that cruelty, all that a mole puts into life Henbane doubled there that night. For in mating, moles may put all of their life for good and bad, all their strengths and weaknesses, and that was what she did then; and Tryfan too.

  Others heard. Whern knew. Spindle, Lathe, Bailey, dark Rune smiling at the sounds of ecstasy, Boswell; oh yes, they heard. With the water�
��s roar they heard it and if Henbane and Tryfan knew they did not care. Such matings care for nothing but itself.

  Until at last all the sounds of passionate discovery and declarations between those fated two dissolved into the sighs of fulfilling peace, sighs of a male and female, and laughter such as moles who have known true mating can make.

  Whern heard it, and was struck still, restless, angry, amused, shocked; alarmed too, and wary. Sad, and bereft: each heard it according to his need.

  One other heard, and knew more than all those others but Boswell himself that if there was a Stone and a Word they were there with Henbane and Tryfan that night, and being there might help others who trusted them.

  That mole was surreptitious Mayweed, most clever Mayweed, who might have found the route through chaos itself, had there been one to find.

  “I will be near,” he had told Tryfan, and under cover of the violent sounds and reverberations of that night’s mating of two moles he made a route to Providence Fall.

  No surprise will it be that since his separation from Tryfan and Spindle, he had found out many strange and curious things about Whern. Among them was the discovery such a mole would make, that the secret of route-finding through Whern was to know the way the waters ran. Made by water, dominated by water, follow water, have no fear of water: that was the way to conquer Whern.

  Far and wide had Mayweed roamed, watching, listening, learning. Never once suspected. Missing, presumed dead, by all but Tryfan and Spindle. Now he came, by ways diverse and strange, to the Fall itself, down through fissures at its western end, and heard the sighing echoes of Henbane’s ecstasy and Tryfan’s pleasure. Heard them and knew they marked a moment of change, though for what end he could not guess but that it made him afraid and purposeful.

  As for Boswell, Mayweed already knew he was somewhere in the Fall, that much he had learnt from listening. He knew too that Rune was hidden there as well, very old he believed, but still a mole to avoid.

  So as dawn rose, and the mating of Henbane and Tryfan began to ail, Mayweed crept among the shadows of the Fall searching for an old White Mole.

  What he found he could never have expected, not in a million years of imagining.

  There was Boswell, even more ancient than Mayweed had expected, with, of all things, a fat mole whose flanks were so plump that they struggled with each other when he moved; a mole with the eyes of a lost pup and a body so useless that it deserved to die. This he saw before he made himself known.

  He sensed other moles about and, moving on up the chasm towards where he heard a waterfall driving down from the surface above, even as grey light advanced across that dreadful place, he saw them: sideem. Lurking, waiting, preparing.

  “Boswell and that Bailey have talked all night,” said one.

  “Some have done more than talk,” said another. “Filthy and vile are those who stray from the Word.”

  “Silence,” ordered a third, a female, her voice severe yet not quite cold. She Mayweed could not see.

  “I shall go and get Bailey now,” she said, “and bring him here, for Henbane would see him.”

  “May the Word have put sense into him,” said another. More chill laughter of a kind Mayweed had got used to in his long reconnaissance of Whern’s tunnels.

  Hearing the name Bailey, Mayweed was naturally astonished since the only other mole he had ever known so named was Starling’s brother. But he had been a pup, innocent, young, eager with a pup’s eyes....

  A pup’s eyes! Mayweed’s own eyes widened in alarm, and he felt then the power of the Stone, and the ways it saw its task come to pass. Bailey? That obese mole – Bailey? Did Mayweed then run back to reach them quickly? Not he. Mayweed was a route-finder, with a route-finder’s habits and instincts, and he turned quickly past the group of sideem and went to the great stream’s fall and stared at its deep, surging pool, and on to the sucking roaring disappearance of its treacherous flow beneath an overhang of rock into the unknown deeps below.

  Then he crept back, past the sideem, and heard them arguing with the only female among them saying it was their duty to come with her, for this Bailey might give her trouble and Henbane would want to see him, and getting him back up the steps to her chambers was going to be a major task since he was so fat he could hardly move four steps without a pause.

  So they all set off as Mayweed, unseen by them, ducked away and took another route and went now as fast as he could and made his plan as he went. Yes, yes! But Stone help them all!

  So he burst in upon the strange conversation between Boswell and Bailey, who looked at him in blank astonishment.

  “Decrepit and crumbling Sir, White Mole of Uffington, and mole of great gravity, Bailey. Time is short and words are long!”

  “But...” began Bailey, his eyes popping out of his plump head as he saw a mole he knew and loved and had never thought to see again.

  Mayweed raised a paw.

  “No buts, overweight Sir, no doubts. Listen and follow. Sideem come. Sideem will kill. Boswell to be saved. Humble me called Mayweed has a plan of startling complexity which he has not time or inclination to explain. Unbothered Boswell, will you trust me?”

  Boswell smiled.

  “I will, Mayweed, and so will this one here despite his protests. Now tell us what to do for we have both grown impatient with waiting to leave this place.”

  “Sirs both, follow, follow now, and pray.”

  “We will,” laughed Boswell like a pup, and doing something most ungentle for a White Mole, which was to talon-thrust poor Bailey in the rump to start him moving.

  Mayweed led them along the cliffs of the chasm, and even as they left Boswell’s clearing they heard the sideem arrive, exclaim, cry out to each other, and begin to snout about. High up on that chasm’s walls the first light of the morning’s sun stuck, and the shadows weakened, and Mayweed knew their cover would soon be gone.

  But before that the sideem might catch up with them, because the ground was rough with scree and, though limping Boswell managed well enough, poor Bailey was almost unable to get over some of them, and between others he got struck.

  “Is it far?” he panted.

  “It is a very long way indeed, staggeringly obese Bailey, so Mayweed suggests you concentrate your energies on moving not talking.”

  There was silence behind them for a time as they struggled along, getting nearer and nearer to the great raging pool. Then they heard a shout go echoing up among the chasm’s walls and the drumming of paws coming up behind them.

  “Struggling Sirs,” entreated Mayweed, looking as patiently as he could at the moles he was trying to rescue as they did their best to clamber over increasingly slippery and awkward rocks and came within range of the waterfall’s spray and neared the pool, “do your best!”

  The sounds of the shouts of the chasing sideem, and the sudden appearance of other sideem at the entrance to the tunnel by which Bailey had come down to the chasm, who began to give chase as well, spurred Boswell and Bailey on to the pool’s edge.

  It had no lip, but rather an ominous sinking past a few peat-stained boulders into black water, in which were the yellow, surgings of fierce currents and flows.

  “Where do we go now?” asked Bailey, reasonably enough, eyeing the approaching sideem with fear and distaste, and the pool with horror.

  “Sirs, we do what moles must always do if they are to progress in life! We take a leap into the unknown!”

  “In there? said Bailey in disbelief.

  Mayweed nodded.

  “But we’ll drown!” said Bailey.

  “Humble Mayweed takes comfort from this undeniable fact. If the oldest mole in moledom, and the fattest, survive submersion in this pool then it seems likely that he himself, pathetic though he is, will do so too!”

  With that, and as the nearest sideem negotiated the final few boulders towards them, Mayweed pushed protesting Bailey into the water, where he struggled briefly until the current caught him, turned him, began to suck him down
. His paws reached vainly for the receding sky above, he let out a gulping corpulent scream and vanished from sight.

  Boswell, his faith in Mayweed complete, entered with more grace, and was gone in a flash, his white fur turning grey and then his form quite lost in the swirl of currents as he was dragged rapidly underwater towards the lowering overhang of cliff beneath which the waters disappeared.

  Which left Mayweed alone at the pool’s edge, to take one last look back at their pursuers. A look which was as brief as the blink of an eye, and yet which took in a sight he had waited all his adult life to see.

  As he stared at the sideem reaching out for him, he forgot his own natural fears of the pool he was about to dive into and remembered, of all things, a tunnel in the Wen a long time before, and a meeting with Tryfan, and a conversation about whether he would ever mate, during which Mayweed had said, “I have not the precise female in mind... but when I meet her I shall know!”

  There, in the chasm with two moles lost in the pool behind him, and sideem all but taking him, Mayweed knew. For behind the group of male sideem was the single female whose voice he had heard earlier. Sun shafted down at that auspicious moment and struck a sheening light into that female’s grey fur, and her eyes stared at the extraordinary mole who had paused on the brink of death, or eternal torture in the Sinks. So Sleekit saw Mayweed.

  A mole who stared at her with the brightest and most ironic eyes she had ever seen. A mole who seemed oblivious of all the dangers about him in that chasmed place. A mole who, to her astonishment, raised a paw and cried out a commanding, “Silly sideem, stop!” And gave himself the brief space to say with a kind of exaltation to his voice, as he gazed into her eyes, “Nonplussed Madam, Mayweed, who is me, will come back for you from death itself!”

  With which he turned, and as boldly and heroically as he could manage, dived into the pool and was sucked out of sight to the depths below.

  As the first rays of sun entered that chamber where Tryfan had spent the night with Henbane, and even as he woke and understood the danger he had put himself in, Henbane disentwined her limbs from his, and said. “You must leave, Tryfan of Duncton, now.”