Duncton Quest

by William Horwood

  The afternoon came, dusk, then night once more. Nature seemed to sense that one of its own was vulnerable. Many circlings about that place that night: Fox? Stoat? Mole? Spindle never knew.

  Dawn. Another day and Spindle knew that Tryfan must drink to live. The wounds had congealed into one bloody swollen mess. His eyes seemed gone, his snout was crushed and broken.

  Most terribly, when Spindle began to move him once more, and lead him down to the stream to drink, poor Tryfan let out an anguished nasal scream of pain and began to shake. Spindle had to force himself to continue, and got Tryfan to the water, and helped his mouth into it, watching carefully that he did not drown. After one final scream as the water went on to his head the protest stopped and Tryfan drank. He did not acknowledge Spindle’s presence, and nor could he raise himself from the stream and up its bank, but had to be helped once more.

  The stoats came back again; and again. The stench of fox nearby, tail whisking as it watched, Spindle defensive as before. The fox slunk about and then left.

  It was four days before Tryfan again took food, and that barely enough to feed a pup. He sucked at the worm Spindle had chewed for him as if his jaw was broken or giving pain. He allowed himself to be helped once more to the water, and then, for the first time, attempted to use his front paws. They collapsed under him and he fell terribly on to his wounded snout.

  His eyes were still bloody and swollen, and he showed no signs of hearing or seeing what Spindle did, but once: when Spindle moved away he managed to move a front paw painfully and, with the slightest of squeezes, to indicate that he did not wish him to leave.

  Spindle talked to him reassuringly before, once more, he went off to search for food.

  On the sixth night Tryfan cried, curious broken sounds of a mole in darkness and despair. Spindle held him and Tryfan fell into painful sleep.

  It was several days before the predators lost interest, sensing perhaps that they had lost the opportunity for easy prey because the wounded mole was strengthening.

  Tryfan had already recovered his hearing but now, as the swelling over his face lessened, his eyes became visible. They were cut and bloody, the left far more than the right, yet if he tilted his head leftward he seemed to be able to see a little.

  The swelling round his snout subsided and it was easy then to see the talon-thrusts that had so battered it: oval, angry holes in which blood congealed. It was his snout that gave him most pain.

  The weather began to worsen noticeably. One day, quite suddenly, hail fell and Tryfan made a pathetic attempt to find shelter from its stinging stones.

  The next day was warmer. With help at the beginning, Tryfan made a little progress on his own, climbing down to the water’s edge. But the effort was too much for him to crawl back up again to the stance Spindle had taken and for that he needed help.

  “We’ll have to move soon,” said Spindle. “This place is worm-poor and the soil not fit for tunnels. We must move because there’s nothing left for us in the north and we don’t want the winter to overtake us.”

  Tryfan snouted round towards him and listened, then his head slumped forward on the ground, his broken paws splayed out.

  Can’t move, he seemed to say.

  After that, each day, Spindle urged him to go down to the stream and back again, each day he resisted, but each day he made better progress.

  Until at last a day broke when Tryfan went there of his own accord, and was able, with painful slowness, to climb the slope back to Spindle. Later that day the weather cooled once more and the sky turned a miserable slate grey.

  Tryfan slept for a time and then awoke, and snouted up towards the sky.

  “Grey,” he whispered, “grey.”

  “Can you see?” asked Spindle.

  Tryfan nodded and then went still, thinking.

  At last he whispered, “Must go.”

  It was the first positive thing he had said since Spindle had started tending him.

  Tryfan turned to Spindle and did his best to rise up on to his paws. The effort made him tremble and shake and he let out little gasps of pain, yet he kept his stance. Slowly Tryfan pulled himself forward until he climbed out of the stream’s cut to where the fell was smooth and grassy above.

  For a long time Tryfan lay there totally exposed.

  Then he snouted southwards.

  “We can go a little southward,” said Spindle, “but I think it’s unwise to try to contact Skint in Grassington. The sideem warned me that if we are seen we will be killed. And in any case we would only bring trouble for our friends. But we can go southward to some anonymous place and overwinter there until you are fully recovered.”

  “Sp —” he began, and Spindle went close to him. “No, not just southward. Sp – Spindle, take me home. Take me to Duncton Wood.”

  Then he turned his hurt snout to Spindle’s side as a pup might to its mother and wept.

  While Spindle looked about the slopes of Whern despairingly and then turned his face southward, too, a look of determination came over it.

  “One step now is one less to make to Duncton Wood. Come then, Tryfan, let us begin.”

  Then Tryfan did so, taking first one step, then another, and then a struggling third, as the two moles began the long trek home.

  The sudden and unexpected disappearance of Boswell and Bailey into the waterfall pool in Providence Fall caused dissension and dismay among the sideem, and brought extreme judgement on three of them.

  Those were the guards in the Fall itself who, it was assumed, had somehow let in the weak and diseased alien mole who had led the two moles to their deaths in the torrent because, it was surmised, that was better than allowing them to submit to the Word. The Master himself talked with the culprits, but it was Henbane who sentenced them of the Word, and decided that they should be forced to enter the Clints and let the Word decide whether they die of starvation or find a way out. The Word decided: not one was seen again.

  As for Sleekit, she was closely examined by the Master and suffered the agony of Dark Sound. All moles heard her screams. Yet, at the end of it, he pronounced her blameless but listened to the warnings of Weed who cautioned him against letting her roam quite as free as she had before.

  “Let her stay with Henbane,” said Weed with the maliciousness of which he was the master. “What harm can she do there?”

  Rune nodded his head and agreed. “Staying with Henbane” was Weed-words for being made prisoner, for that was what Henbane had become. Weed had succeeded in avoiding any involvement in the actions of those days as if sensing what might happen on Tryfan’s arrival would be of more than the passing interest Henbane and the Master themselves attached to it. Now, as news of Boswell’s drowning and Tryfan’s punishment and rejection from Whern with Spindle became known, Weed heard that the Master was on the way to see Henbane, and nomole knew better than he what that might mean.

  Weed knew that it was one thing for Henbane to take young males in the privacy of burrows far from Whern, but it was another to know Tryfan in the very heart of the High Sideem itself. Weed guessed at Rune’s jealousy, and that repossession would now be Rune’s vile and lustful purpose, and he feared the consequences. The more so because he had heard of Tryfan’s vile – but correct – assertion that Rune was Henbane’s father.

  He knew Henbane’s character better than most, and could guess at what the consequences of the Master’s desires – or their frustration – might be. Accordingly he ordered that the tunnels be cleared so that but for himself none would know what took place between Henbane and Rune.

  Weed was proved right. She rejected Rune’s jealous caresses, she insulted him, and so was ordered by him to meditate a while within the confines of her tunnels. Her own sideem were removed and his senior sideem took their place. And it was to mollify her rage that Weed suggested Sleekit should be sent to her, thus keeping in one place two moles who, for the time being, were suspect.

  The atmosphere in the High Sideem got steadily worse as Henbane
, formerly all-powerful, now found herself confined and powerless. She raged. She wept. She attacked. But all to no avail. Nor would Rune come to her, not even Weed. She had only Sleekit to talk to, only doubtful Sleekit to trust.

  But as the days passed into moleweeks and October began and lengthened, a new and unexpected element entered the dark, oppressive atmosphere of her chamber. She herself did not know what it was, but Sleekit guessed and so, too, did Weed, watching as he did from the galleries above, and seeing the shifts in Henbane’s moods and her growing tiredness.

  Tiredness and sickness. The unthinkable had happened. The WordSpeaker was with pup by a Duncton mole.

  Sleekit knew it because she knew the way of moledom and knew Henbane well. She saw her growing fractiousness, her sickness, her distress. For the same reasons spying Weed knew it too.

  But more ominously, Rune knew it without once seeing Henbane, without even talking to Weed about her. He knew it because as Boswell was a mole of light Rune was a mole of darkness who sensed what might be. That would be. Yes, it would.

  As for Henbane herself, she did not guess it for many moleweeks, for she had known males enough before to think she was not prone to having young. Discomfort sometimes, abortions occasionally, pupping never, ever. She knew only that following the destruction of Tryfan by the old sideem she felt increasingly tired and distressed as the days went by and seemed to lose control of herself in a way she never had before. She felt sick, and she felt strange, and her body did not seem quite hers any more.

  Whatever it was it seemed to her that it hung over her and her den like a cloud, and one in which, increasingly, she seemed to see and hear Tryfan make his final cry to her about Rune being her father. That fact – for fact it evidently was – plagued her continuously so much that she attributed her sickness to anger, concern and outrage.

  But then, one day, suddenly, turning at her stance her body seemed most strange and clumsy, and in that moment she knew.

  She went to the sideem and asked for Weed. He came not.

  November started and her swelling showed thick and ugly. She felt impotent with rage at the creatures that were spawned and kicking inside her. She hated them, she hated Rune, she hated everymole.

  “Please, tell Weed I need his advice,” she cried out finally, slumping into misery with Sleekit in attendance as a final part of her performance. The sideem had no need to send word to Weed, he heard from his privy place.

  The sideem, tired of Henbane’s pleadings and rage, advised him to see her and he, flattered that Henbane “needed his advice”, went to a gallery and overlooked her. She looked submissive and tired. He consulted the Master, who granted his permission. There were things Weed might find out, questions of birthing, questions of attitude.

  “The pups of course must die,” said Weed. “It is inconceivable that a Stone follower’s seed should sully the heart of Whern.”

  “Is it?” said Rune quietly. “Was not Scirpus himself once of the Stone? Might it not be that among her filthy young will be one who can be trained to succeed as a future Master? Eh, Weed? The ways of the Word are strange, and the Word may have it so.

  “Go to her since she asks for you. Find out from her or Sleekit when she is due. She will pup at the Rock of the Word as she herself was pupped. But give orders that Tryfan and Spindle are found and killed. That must be.”

  “I have already seen to it, Master. I have sent grikes out. The miscreants will be found soon enough and Tryfan and Spindle killed immediately so that nomole ever knows. Sleekit must be silenced too, but only on the birth of the young. She will be useful in attendance. As for the pups and the Word’s purpose with them, that is the Master’s own business. He knows more of such things than Weed.”

  So Weed came once more to Henbane’s den, entered in, and found her passive and obedient. He smiled and his snout turned with pleasure to know that he had understood her well and never failed the Master in his task.

  “When are the pups due?” he asked.

  “Soon will the vile things come and I shall see to them. They shall not live,” said Henbane.

  Oh yes, she would say that, she might even think it, but mothers are never to be trusted before birth or after it. Before conception they will kill for a mate. After conception they wish to die. After birth they will kill for their young. Then, when the spring comes once more, they will drive out their young and murderously seek a mate once more. Trust not a mole in heat or one in pup.

  “That will be wise, WordSpeaker.” Weed smiled, his old smile, and Henbane seemed to soften.

  “But you sought advice, WordSpeaker, and I will give it if I can, though on matters such as pups I am hardly well qualified.”

  “Not the pups, Weed,” said Henbane in a frail and beaten voice such as would soften the heart of the hardest mole. “No... not pups....”

  She looked at the sideem nearby, and then at Sleekit, and took him away from both to the only place they might get some privacy, which was where the wind and water roared their sounds at the great fissure over the gorge at the northern side of her chamber.

  Her frailty fled, her softness left, her weakness vanished. Henbane was Henbane once again.

  “Weed,” she asked coldly, loud enough for Sleekit to hear, and in a tone that made her suddenly watchful and Weed wary, “all these long years, have you known that Rune was my father?”

  Weed’s eyes had barely widened in surprise before Henbane was up and massive and powerful and her talons at his neck so hard that he began to choke as she drove him back with one mighty lunge. Straight to the fissure she took him before a single sideem had time to move. Then, as they did so, she pushed him right to the lip of the fissure, where the wind caught his fur viciously, and there she held him out on the edge with her left paw as she readied her right to strike the first sideem that came near.

  “Touch me and Weed will die,” she said.

  So they hesitated, as others rushed away to summon the Master.

  “Did you know?” demanded Henbane, her talons thrusting into Weed and drawing blood as he teetered on the void and the wind grabbed at his paws to unbalance him.

  “The Master —” began Weed, lying.

  The sideem, seeming to guess that Henbane had not the answer she sought and that Weed could cause her to hesitate and give them the chance to take her, advanced slowly.

  But if that was their hope, Henbane acted with sudden and terrible resolution to frustrate it. She turned her back on the sideem to face Weed, and so huge was her rage and purpose that it seemed the fissure’s whole light was blocked out and her chamber thrown into darkness.

  In that moment she took Weed powerfully with both taloned paws and cried out at him to say again who her father was, and as her talons entered his snout and face and the floor of the gorge seemed to waver up towards them she whispered, “He is my father, is he not?”

  Then she smiled and said, “I shall know the truth when you speak it, Weed, so tell it now and you shall be safe.”

  At that moment Weed must have known that death faced him at the paws of Henbane if he lied and at the paws of Rune if he told the truth, but since it was only the vicious pain-dealing paws of Henbane that kept him from death at this instant, he told her the truth.

  “He is,” he screamed.

  But then his scream continued, arcing out over the void below as Henbane, with a cry of rage at final confirmation of what Tryfan had said, hurled him bloodily from her out into the void and his snout turned about him as he fell on to rock and from there his body battered its way down to the the waters of Dowber Gill.

  All was still in her chamber as Weed’s scream faded into nothing. Then she turned back to a silent circle of senior sideem, and for once their eyes showed emotion: shock, and fear, and, most terrible of all, respect. While Sleekit, forgotten for the moment, simply stared.

  Henbane breathed heavily, painfully, her paws to her swollen sides, struggling with herself.

  “Leave me, now,” she said.
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br />   “But we do not wish to,” said a cold voice, and the sideem parted and Rune was there.

  He eyed her swollen heaving sides without compassion, and smiled evilly.

  “Leave me!” cried out Henbane, distressed, and feeling the first waves of birthing coming. “Leave me!” she screamed.

  But Rune did not, but came closer with the sideem watching her every move, and began to tell her of Charlock and her vileness, seeking to provoke Henbane to a further rage. All the time the cold eyes of the sideem looked on.

  Sleekit came closer and Henbane instinctively reached out a paw to her as her contractions got stronger.

  “Tell them to leave,” she pleaded.

  Rune laughed, and the sideem smiled. There was obscene curiosity in some of their sunken ascetic eyes, males peering at exposed females. Males whose dry talons had never known a female’s love.

  Rune talked on, speaking the filth a corruptor speaks, revelling in the distress he caused.

  Then suddenly, and the very air in the chamber seemed to change when this happened, Henbane relaxed and took up once more the control of herself she seemed to have lost for so long. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and peace came gently to the chamber and the contractions slowed. She had lost blood but Sleekit attended to it. The sideem were suddenly shamed into restlessness and embarrassment. Rune fell silent.

  Henbane breathed on ignoring him, deeper and deeper, and for the first time since Tryfan’s departure seemed at peace. By giving up she had gained some subtle initiative in a nameless battle between Rune and herself.

  Displeased, Rune left and the sideem backed away. Outside the November wind drove cold at the fissure and the Dowber Gill roared. Whern was settling towards winter. Snow was in the grey sky.

  That night, deep in the night, Henbane spoke to Sleekit naturally, as one female to another.

  “I felt them move as he crouched staring at me and they were not alien,” she said, and there was a pup’s wonder in her voice, and an innocent delight lost sight of long ago. “I can feel them, Sleekit. I do not want them to die.”