“Why?”
The question he had asked again and again betokening a determination which, if perverted, might become a persistence for evil.
“Because thy time for growing up has come, my love. I can’t always look after you. I have things to do. And Terce can teach the Word better to you than I can. He is trained to it. But....”
“Why?”
“It is the Word’s will. As I was taught so will you be. You can’t be a pup for ever. And anyway, I shall love you more if you do it, and be proud of you.”
“Why?”
“Lucerne, be not afraid. Terce is kind and will care for you. Lucerne...” But even to the end young Lucerne cried.
Oh yes, Henbane remembered all of it, and the slow and skilful bullying and threats of withdrawn love she used to mould the pup she made to her dark wilful will, even to the last moments. His mouth trembling, desperate to trust but trusting not....
“Will it be all right? I mean... I’ll be able to see you? Often?”
“Yes, as often as you need.” Need! A weasel word, but what youngster knows to ask, “Who will judge what I’ll need?” What youngster could guess that the one he trusts most in all the world will commit sole judgement of that crucial need to a mole like Terce? Such betrayal of love leaves an infection more malodorous than the worst scalpskin or murrain. It can destroy a mole and often does.
In torment, Henbane remembered how the nights before Longest Night Lucerne awoke screaming. But how much greater her torment that even at the last moment, as they turned a corner into the antechamber where Terce waited, she still had doubts and could have acted on them.
“Why didn’t I? Why?” Bitter her torment, more bitter than death when life is much loved. Bitter as a life laid waste.
Then the dark corner was turned, Lucerne looked up at her with a final instinct for survival, and she said, “It will be all right,” echoing his fear that it would not.
Then as Lucerne gave the last brave smile that marked forever the end of his innocence, the cavernous limestone walls widened, and there, enshadowed, waited Terce, calm, assured, certain of his power. Smiling.
At his side were two moles no older than Lucerne himself.
They stared in awe at Henbane and whispered, one after the other, “Word Mistress! Word Mistress!” and deferentially inclined their snouts. And then they looked at Lucerne, and he at them.
“This is Lucerne,” said Terce.
“Clowder,” said the male. Awed but malevolent.
“Mallice,” said the female. Awed and calculating.
As Lucerne joined them and Terce turned to take them to the secret chambers to the north of the High Sideem where the long and arduous training would be carried out, Henbane felt utterly bereft.
“Too late,” she whispered as they went.
So Lucerne’s education began.
Even now the full horror of sideem training is not wholly known. Nothing like it exists in all the experience of moles of the Stone, not even during the most ascetic and obsessive periods at Uffington. The only detailed account of it is that scribed by Mayweed at Sleekit’s dictation moleyears after she had left Whern and turned her back on the Word, and lived in Duncton.
Truthful though she was it seems likely that her account is incomplete, though whether from fear of unknowingly tainting those who might later work on Mayweed’s text, or because she blanked out memory of much that happened, is hard to say. Certainly it was part of the sideem training that the sideem did forget. But the arcane rituals, the harsh austerities, the self-abuse and punishment, the use – to death – of youngster grikes from outside Whern, the training in interrogation and torture, the inculcation of a creed of indifference to all but those who confessed the Word and Atoned – all these Sleekit gave some account of.
We do not know all, but it is enough to say that during the long moleyears between Longest Night and the Midsummer rite, Clowder, Mallice and Lucerne were in the talons of a Master corrupter, and by the time June came round what innocence, what kindness, what true care for others they might once have had was all gone. A kind of cold glittering dust of age had settled on them, the knowingness of moles who have seen more than moles should see, done more than moles should do, whose dreams and frightening fantasies had been lived out and made satiate; moles whose training had aimed at but one thing: to teach them how best to turn others to the service of the Word by making them masters of the use and corruption of other moles.
But if that was the norm for the sideem – the norm that Sleekit later partially described – the training of those three by Terce had one further aim, unique in the dark annals of Whern, though originally prophesied by Scirpus and made real by Rune posthumously through Terce.
Clowder and Mallice and Lucerne were to be a trinity whose sole purpose was the final ascendancy of the Word. The New Age which Rune had begun, and Henbane had continued, was to find its fulfilment through Lucerne with those two on either flank. This had been Scirpus’s belief and Rune’s desire. Now it was Terce’s task to see it to fruition.
So his training did not make ordinary sideem out of his novices that cycle. The three he made were to be arch-sideem and together do and be what a single mole could not: one to lead with strength – Clowder; one to corrupt – Mallice; and one whose name would be used to exalt for ever the honour and inviolability of the Word – Lucerne.
Let us not mince words.
By mental torture Terce did it. By deprivation in darkness. By starvation. By abuse at the talons of moles brought in secret for that task alone, and then killed. By utter satiation of adolescent lust. By rote learning of the Cleave words to exhaustion. And the only deference ever shown to Lucerne, and that an evil one, was that he was allowed to suckle his mother still.
Dark, dark and never-ending those moleyears must have seemed. Sadism and masochism touched with the fire of delight. Memories and frightened youngsters done to death as sacrifices to the Word. Blood on talons. And all about the great dark subterranean lake north of Dowber Ghyll, on whose banks Terce made them live, and in whose waters he made them submerge themselves almost to death itself, that they might be the more ready for the Midsummer rite to come.
Nomole but Terce could have performed his task so well.
And Henbane saw the progression of Lucerne’s training, for daily she fed him, daily she suffered his hatred of her failure to take him out of there, daily she saw the change. She was witness and aide to his corruption. She was party to evil.
“I WAS evil. I am evil. I killed my son’s innocence, which is the joy in life; now I must kill him.”
This was Henbane’s summation of her role in those moleyears and its inevitable consequence. But how to kill a mole whose very training had left him powerful, and at whose flanks went Clowder, Mallice and Terce, three moles dedicated to his ascendancy, which must give them power and glory too?
So again and again she asked. “What is his weakness?” and prayed (to what power, provided it was not the Word, she did not care) that the day would come when she would know. And that that day might come before Midsummer, before it was too late.
Chapter Ten
As Midsummer dawned across bleak Whern, the black and awesome darkness in the subterranean Chamber of the Rock of the Word began to weaken towards light, and the sinister shapes of moles to show themselves.
The novices awaiting the terrible rite of acceptance to the sideem had long since gathered, and now formed a mass of moles in the lowest part of the chamber, which ran down to the edge of the lake, on the far side of which the Rock itself rose.
Gradually through the night all twelve Keepers had taken up their stances about the edge of the chamber, except for its furthest, darkest, higher part where nomole but the Mistress of the Word might go.
As the distant rising sun began to play its light at the contorted fissure in the roof high above, all was still and waiting. No sound but the drip and play of water and the high-pitched call of bats above, disturbed by the lig
ht, shifting their roosts, uneasy.
Then the Twelve Keepers, as one, began chanting the long gradual which is the preliminary to the rite; a chant whose ancient and subtle timings announce and follow the slow progress of the great shaft of light which comes down into the chamber once the sun is high enough.
At first showing, the shaft of light is but short and stays high among obscure crevices, but then as the gradual continues and the sun above rises, it strengthens deeper into the chamber and brightens all in its path.
The awed novices watch on until suddenly, in a moment they never forget, it reaches the spot where, most mysteriously, the Mistress or Master of the day is revealed in meditative stance: still, fur ablaze with light, eyes impenetrable pools of darkness, ready to give the command that even the most confident novice must dread.
The chant of the gradual deepens and grows louder, the novices feel themselves drowning in its sound as the shaft travels on to the very edge of the lake. As its first dappling reflections shoot out and up and on to the face of the Rock far beyond, the Master or the Mistress speaks.
So, that Midsummer morn, Henbane spoke.
“Begin,” she said.
None but a sideem who has survived the ritual can know the shudder of awe, fear, dread, excitement and terror that overcomes the novices at that moment: “Begin!”
Lives hang now in the balance, and as some will surely end before the day is out, so, truly, do many indeed begin again, changed and wrought darkly by the most testing of the rituals of the Word.
As Henbane spoke the command that Midsummer day a mortal silence fell over the gathering, and the gaze of the novices was concentrated with a fearful intensity on the solitary shaft of light that even now moved on, half on the lake’s shore and half into its deepening edge where, pale green, the limestone shore shelved out and then was gone into the shimmering chill of the water.
The shaft’s brightness served only to make all the rest of the chamber seem dark, but for the massive dappling of the light’s reflections on the water that played back and forth across the Rock and would remain much the same for some hours yet until, its journey across the lake complete, it reached the face of the Rock itself and rose back whence it came, towards the darkness of the night. But by then many of the young eyes now hypnotised by the light would be drowned and dead, and see light no more. It is – or was – one of the great ironies of moledom that moles of the Word celebrate Midsummer during the day, whilst those of the Stone made their ritual when that day ended, and night returned. But for now... suffer the Word’s vile way....
Henbane remained elevated on that rocky outcrop on the far side of the chamber behind which a high cavern runs into which no sideem may go. There are the remains of previous Masters, their body shapes preserved in the slow encrustations which form as ceiling water drips and water trickles out of unseen tunnels and runs on to feed the great lake.
It was up one of those tunnels, tiny, dark, almost unexplored, that Mayweed had led Sleekit moleyears before, each carrying one of the pups Henbane had borne after her mating with Tryfan. Nameless then, Wharfe and Harebell later, they had been carried past the surface cemetery of the Masters and up into the darkness, their escape made the easier by the awe in which the sideem held that place, and the reluctance with which they followed Henbane’s command to pursue and kill.
Indeed, not a single one of the five sideem who had obeyed her command had returned, lost in the swilling darkness of the tunnels and perhaps taken by drowning into the dread Sinks into which failed sideem are sucked. For in Whern such tunnels are inclined to flood, and moles to drown. There, too, it was presumed, Mayweed, Sleekit, and the pups had been lost and now none but Henbane herself, hoping with a mother’s hope that those pups survived, believed them still alive.
More than once Henbane cast her gaze behind her towards that cavern and the distorted shapes of the Masters dead; her gaze settled on the newest corpse there: Rune’s, the father she killed. Already the surface of his body was slaked and hardened with shining crystals of lime, his black talons turned a milky white, his back sheening into the grotesque and arching form of a centuries-old Master behind him, his snout extending beyond its normal length and dribbling with the drips of that wet place. At his rear, past his distorted right paw, the biggest of the feeder tunnels stretched away to blackness, half blocked by his body. Water trickled out from it; water that might become a flood. Henbane shuddered and turned back to watch the rite commence.
Although at first the mass of moles might have seemed in no special order, in fact to one who knew them it was plain that near each Keeper those novices attached to him had gathered. Apart from Henbane herself, four moles stood out from the rest and these partly by virtue of having taken their places immediately under the spot where she had stanced: Terce, Clowder, Mallice and Lucerne.
Such was his chilling authority that Terce would have been noticeable at any time in any company, but there, that day, for this rite, this quality he had was especially marked.
His large thin body was so still that a mole looked twice to see if he was alive, to which the clues were only his open staring eyes and the just perceptible in and out of his breathing. A little below him, to his right, was Clowder, full grown now and dark, his gaze pitiless, his physical power overt and frightening; to Terce’s left flank was the mole many had looked forward to seeing – Mallice, his daughter. The likeness was unmistakable, for her body and head were thin and dark like her father’s, the eyes similar. Though smaller than both Terce and Clowder there was a quality to her eyes and set of her jaw that warned a mole not to cross her path, the more so that Midsummer day because like others there she was afraid, and fear made her beauteous face look vicious.
The last of this quartet was Lucerne, who had taken a place of special privilege behind and above Terce, and nearest of all to his mother Henbane. The most frightening thing about Lucerne was the fearlessness with which he seemed to face the coming rite. From his dark eyes there came a look of utter confidence overlain with tension and concentration. He did not look like a mole who could fail.
Taken together, these four presented a formidable front and from their position might almost have been taken for a protective guard about Henbane; or else a custodial guard, which many there knew was more the case.
Few truly believed that the Mistress was cured of the madness that had overtaken her earlier in June, and Whern was rife with rumours that these four moles, led by either Terce or Lucerne himself, had nurtured her back to sanity for this day’s rite, and that alone. After... nomole could know. She would have fulfilled her task. Lucerne would be legitimised by the rite and ready to take her place, leaving Terce, his tutor, the second most powerful mole in moledom. If Lucerne wished so to do, none there would gainsay him: the sideem would rather have a strong Master than a failing Mistress.
Other lesser rumours abounded too, of Mallice especially, and of how Lucerne and Clowder had used her – with her acquiescence – and even, darker still, how she and her own father, Terce... but few moles there dared stare at her for long. She seemed to sense when others gazed on her and turned her narrow eyes on them, and left a mole feeling marked for future vengeance if he displeased her. She had something of the power and allurement of Henbane, but none of her strange charm. But now... all that was as nothing before the reality of the rite to come.
“Begin!” Henbane had said, and as the echo of her solitary command died away in the high darkness of the Rock the First Keeper came forward.
He was an old, thin mole of withered mouth, but dignified, and he advanced into the water and turned to face the way he had come. As he did he signalled a novice forward and a male broke ranks and came to him. The Keeper began the low chant, in little more than a guttural whisper, which is the start of the ancient liturgy of anointing, his voice cold and strangely powerful in its whispering age, and finding awesome echoes in the distant Rock. Light seemed to thunder down about him as he spoke, and the black water of the l
ake stirred and lapped away with his movements into the darkest corners of the chamber.
“Forasmuch as all moles are conceived and born in shame and weakness, spawned of lust and born out of the flesh; forasmuch as born moles cannot please the Word until they have Atoned; forasmuch as allmole without instruction of the Word and mandate from it will die cursed in everlasting pain, and unfulfilled, the Word ordains that chosen moles go out into moledom’s bleak places to convert the lost and blind, to destroy the mindless and the wilful, to set example in word and deed and bring Atonement to those cursed.”
The First Keeper paused and stared about, his front paws dropping half submerged into the water. He stared down at the mole before him who crouched at the very edge of the lake, his snout low.
“By words and deeds!” the First Keeper cried out suddenly.
“Is it not so?” spoke Henbane sharply.
“It is so!” the Keeper whispered back.
“Forasmuch as this mole has been admitted to the knowledge of the Word,” continued the Keeper, the other novices now utterly transfixed and staring, “may he thank the Word for its complaisance and its pleasure and now be grateful to stand trial in the chill waters of the Word’s judgement. To be found worthy is to live; to be found wanting is to die and journey to the Sinks and there repent his failure in just and everlasting torment. Art thou grateful for this chance?”
“I am,” whispered the novice humbly.
“Art ready?”
“I am,” he said yet more softly, his flanks visibly trembling.
“Then prepare now to submit thy will, and the last vestiges of thy shame and vanity, to the Word’s power and might, here, today, now, before us thy witnesses.”
“I do!” said the novice.
The First Keeper now laid his paws on his pupil’s head, and Henbane spoke out the following words in a commanding voice: “Of those before us now, some, mighty Word, are unsure and weak, their desires false, their intentions misaligned from thy intent. May thy dark waters punish and damn them and we be witnesses to their shame.”
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