Duncton Found

by William Horwood

  Shapes came out of the dark, two great guardmoles each guiding a female. The first to come was breathing heavily, and in some pain.

  “Hello, Harebell,” said the stranger in the dark, his voice mock warm and therefore cruel.

  The second guardmole brought the Mistress Henbane.

  “Hello, mother,” said Lucerne. “I have found a challenge for thee greater than any you have faced before. You will not like it, but I shall – very much – and so shall the Word.” This was Lucerne’s greeting to his mother after so long: cold, cynical, matter-of-fact.

  Henbane’s eyes widened fractionally, and though when Harebell turned and looked at her in alarm she nodded a sign to keep calm, she herself felt shock. He was here sooner than she could have expected; and vile Terce as well.

  With that instinct she herself had bred into him, and which Terce had trained and refined still more, she knew why he had come: he was here for the kill.

  “Now follow me, all of you,” he said, and she knew their true ordeal was beginning. To Harebell he spoke no more.

  While in the shadows near that place Holm stared at Sleekit, and Sleekit stared at the tunnel entrance, empty now of moles. She turned to Holm and said quietly, “Listen now, my dear, and listen well. You are a route-finder; you never were and I think the Stone never desired you to be, a fighter. I do not know what is going to happen tonight, but I think there will be much violence. It is plain that Harebell is near her time, and already Mallice has begun. Lucerne means no good in bringing them together here.

  “Yesterday, when Squeezebelly spoke to us, he asked that survivors should seek to escape while they still could. I trust that some did so. We got away, this far at least, and I think that others might have done. For myself... when I said goodbye to Mayweed at Chadlington I knew that I was beginning a task from which I might not come back. My beloved Mayweed knew it too. We have had our time, and he is always with me, as I am with him.

  “But you and Lorren, your time must not be yet. So promise me, Holm, that you will escape from here and not try to fight. Promise me, my dear.”

  Holm looked at her in the dark, his eyes wider than ever, and he said, “Sleekit, I don’t want to travel alone. I don’t want to leave you.”

  “Promise it, my dear. I need to know to have the strength for what I think that I must do. Henbane needed me once before like this, she needs me now. I owe it... I owe it to myself, and to the memory of Tryfan, who knew her truer than anymole, and loved her as I do. But this is not your fight and not your task.”

  “Could help though,” said Holm miserably.

  Sleekit smiled.

  “Yes, you could! The others will not be so well guarded this terrible night. There might be a chance for them. Soon you can leave me, go back to the tunnel into the garrison and wait your chance, for a mole there might need guidance.”

  Holm perked up.

  “But first,” she whispered, “guide me into the tunnel the Master has taken Henbane down. We need a route by which we can escape. Will you do that?”

  Holm nodded.

  “Stay here, don’t move, I’ll come back,” he said. And soon he was, grubbier than ever.

  “Found one.”

  Then, secret as water in the night, he led her upslope above the tunnels and then through faults and solution crevices in the limestone and so into the tunnels below.

  Mallice was near pupping when Lucerne and the others reached her, and the guardmole there was much concerned.

  “Dismissed,” said Lucerne quickly. He wanted moles loyal to him alone here now.

  “Yes, Sir!” said the guardmole, and scrabbled to get away.

  Lucerne turned to Mallice and said pitilessly, “You needed company, my dear, and now you have it. This is the Mistress Henbane, and this her daughter, my sister, Harebell. Near pupping too, it seems! Well, well, and what shall we all do? I’ll tell you what you’ll do, and I’ll tell you once only. But first I’ll tell you why.

  “Sweet Mallice here, whose very life I once saved – remember, mother? I’m sure you do – Mallice carries bastards in her womb and now they struggle to get out.”

  He held up a paw to stop Mallice’s whimpering her feeble protest as she screamed out a contraction again.

  “Harebell too will soon start pupping and I intend to leave. She, like me, is too young to remember it, but mother does. We were made separate at birth, and I was reared and groomed in Whern for the Mastership. She I know not as a sister, but as a rival she... exists. That will not do.

  “But now I need an heir. I thought Mallice would provide and so she might, if the Word allows it. The pups she carries might well be mine. Who knows? She does not, nor I. Nor the mole Weld who is at this moment cast down into the Lower Sumps of Cannock.”

  He turned to Harebell as Mallice screamed again.

  “Where, you may like to know, certain other moles are kept. Poor Betony for one, mindless now. Wharfe, for another, our dear brother. Yes, yes, he is there, forgotten, dying slow.

  “Now you, Harebell....”

  Harebell gasped with coming pain, and turned to Henbane in horror at what she heard, and at the coldness she saw. Henbane stared out rejection and contempt at her son. Harebell gasped again.

  “Males are not wanted here, Terce, so we shall go, but for safety’s sake these guardmoles can remain. Know only this. I want to see none of you alive again, not one. But your pups, well, that’s a different thing. One will do. Yes, one. Guardmoles, bring the last surviving pup to me. He, or she, shall be the one. The Word shall judge which one is best. If Mallice’s, why, then the Word surely intends me to know that the pups she carries were mine after all. If Harebell’s, then at least they are my kin. One will do. As for you, my mother dear, you have been dead to me for many moleyears past, and you are dead still.

  “Terce? No comment? We’ll leave it to the Word and a mother’s love to decide. One only of you all shall survive, and that a pup. Sort it out between yourselves. Now we shall go, and you guardmoles shall kill anymole that tries to escape. And when the pupping is done let these females decide among themselves which is to survive.

  “Questions?”

  The guardmoles frowned and shook their heads. Talking was not necessary.

  “Come Terce, let us leave the future to forces greater than ourselves.”

  With one last look at Mallice, who was now in a corner of the unpleasant chamber and breathing fast and ever faster, Terce turned and left. Lucerne smiled, the madness of evil on his face, and followed.

  The guardmoles raised their talons, and forced Henbane and the weeping Harebell fully into the chamber.

  “Get on with it, you bitches,” the senior guardmole growled.

  Some of this – enough – Sleekit and Holm had heard in the shadows of the tunnel Holm had found. They had frozen where they stancea when the dismissed guardmole had gone by, and then again when Terce and Lucerne left.

  “You will wait here until I come back, and guide anymole with me out of this place. Then you must go as you promised,” breathed Sleekit.

  Holm stared at her.

  “When I go home, and if I see Mayweed, what shall I say to him from you?” he whispered.

  She smiled, tears in her eyes.

  “My dear, I think I know where my Mayweed will be and that I shall see him there before you do. But if you find him before me, you shall know what to say on my behalf! Now, I must go, and when your chance comes, as it will, take it knowing the Stone is with you. And then get yourself back to Lorren as quickly as you can!”

  “Bitches!” muttered the guardmole again, and Sleekit prepared herself for the bloody hours soon to come.

  There are times when anymole, even a Chronicler devoted to the truth, hesitates to scribe, still less to speak. He turns from the evidence in grim despair, tears in his eyes; he turns back to it and tries again but cannot; he ventures to the surface and seeks comfort in the trees and in the skies, but sees them not, for the shameful images of what he knows f
ills his mind and sickens his heart.

  Nor is there consolation in knowing that even worse horrors than what happened at Lucerne’s command in Mallice’s birth burrow that night have happened elsewhere, and are recorded. No doubt they have. But what he knows is here and now, and that is quite enough.

  Of what happened that night this Chronicler has scribed, and then been forced to scratch his talons across it all. Horror happened there. Pups were pupped to die.

  Mothers defended their own to the very death. Darkness was red with blood. Mewings started and then died. Seven pups born and Henbane and Harebell forced to defend half of them. Half? Three and a half is half of seven, and this much we can say: if it had come to ripping into two the one who survived the others then had they had the chance Mallice and Harebell would have done it. Aye, mole, it would have come to that and was beginning to when the guardmoles intervened. Their task was to see that one pup alone survived and nomole else. They turned on Harebell and then on Mallice, both already weak from pupping and from wounds the other had inflicted. It was in that moment of murder Henbane took up the one surviving pup.

  Whose was that pup?

  Perhaps one day your Chronicler will know.

  “The bitches have decided, give it to us,” they said to Henbane, reluctant to go for her lest the pup was hurt.

  “No!”

  It was then, with Henbane’s terrible cry, that Sleekit came out of the dark behind the grikes.

  The only one there who had never had young, fighting as if all the world were her own pups.

  “No!” she cried as well.

  Fighting with all the life she had.

  Fighting for the life of the pup she saw was left and Henbane held.

  The scene she saw she had lived and heard a thousand times in the minutes that preceded it. Mallice dead; Harebell dead. Pups all... but of that we cannot bring ourselves to speak.

  Henbane, potent, dangerous, stancing with the solitary pup that was left and shouting that great “No!” at those males who loomed angrily over her, demanding the pup of her before they killed her.

  “No! It is not thine to take from me. It is my kin and it shall live!”

  That was the scene that Sleekit routed.

  And then those guardmoles found they faced not two females in disarray but two as one, defending a solitary pup. They might as well have faced an army as face that!

  No training could have prepared a mole for the force that Sleekit was. No courage could have bettered the courage that Henbane had.

  So Sleekit came and violently taloned one guardmole to one side, and then she and Henbane taloned at the other.

  “Take it, Henbane, take it now and run!”

  So Sleekit cried and so Henbane did, taking the pup up by the neck and running from that burrow of blood; and Sleekit followed her. Their advantage was not much, but it was enough to give Sleekit hope that Henbane and the pup might be got away.

  “Run, Henbane! Run! When you see Holm, follow him and look not back. Oh run....”

  Desperate, panting, the grikes now close behind and angrier than storms, Sleekit ran and urged Henbane on. Ahead, a shadow. The shadow moved, had eyes, saw, and heard. Holm was ready there.

  “Go, Holm, lead her, take her to safety now. Go!”

  Then Holm turned and Henbane followed, but then turned briefly back as if hesitating at the final moment of escape.

  “You gave me your pups once and gave me life,” gasped Sleekit, “now take this for yourself, Henbane, and give back to it what you once lost! Oh, run!”

  Then Sleekit turned and as the two great guardmoles bore down upon her, she gathered all her strength and, raising her talons, launched back at them as she had done before, striking, and striking more, taloning, her strength, her speed, her instinct quite beyond their ken.

  “No!” she cried, and even as they struck mortally, she had the sense and strength to retreat into that tunnel, to block it, to hold them off still more.

  “No!” she cried again more quietly now.

  Yet the last words that she spoke were not “No!” or “Run!” but gentle, and to a mole she had once known, and knew that when the Stone willed it, she would know again. “Mayweed...” was the last she spoke.

  But Henbane had never felt so alive as she did then. She ran out into the night where Holm had led her and quickly laid the pup down and stared at him.

  “What did Sleekit say to thee?”

  “She said I must not fight.” Holm stared at Henbane who looked wild and dangerous and loomed over the pup as if she felt the whole of moledom endangered it, even him.

  “Leave me now, Holm. Make your own way from here, for what I must do I had better do alone. I thank you, Holm, and one day this pup I bear shall be told your name and he shall honour it. Now go, and look not afraid for you are as brave as anymole I ever knew.”

  “Not Tryfan,” said Holm.

  Henbane almost smiled.

  “Not him, perhaps!” said Holm, looking at the pup that lay between her paws.

  “Him...?” she said staring at the pup. Her voice was a mother’s voice, gentle and concerned.

  Holm saw her take the pup from off the ground, saw it dangle in the night, saw her look to right and left.

  “Up’s best,” he said, “then east.”

  He watched her off to safety in the dark, and then turned and stared downslope and sighed, indeed he almost bleated with distress. He shook his head. He stared some more. He opened his mouth and closed it. He listened, and he swallowed, and he blinked in the dark.

  Downslope below him at the tunnel entrance to where Mallice had been captive he could hear angry guardmole shouts. In the ground beneath his paws he could feel the vibration of moles in tunnels, big moles.

  He slipped downslope in the dark as the most senior of the guardmoles emerged where Henbane and he had come.

  “Here!” Holm dared to cry... And drawing the guardmoles away from where Henbane had gone, he darted among the shadows of rocks and scrub until, familiar with the ground, he left the guardmoles utterly confused, and made his way back into the grubby tunnel that led down to the garrison.

  There, breathing heavily, he stopped and watched and before long his patience was rewarded.

  “Quick, out you lot!” a guardmole shouted down the gloomy main tunnel.

  “But Sir, there’s nomole else on guard.”

  Running paws, a hurried conference beneath where Holm watched down.

  “There’s trouble where they kept that Mallice bitch. The Master’s mad. He wants us out and searching for the Mistress Henbane who’s escaped.”

  “She won’t get far. But what about the ones in here? There’s nomole to cover for me.”

  “Threaten them. Tell them that if one so much as moves they’ll all be killed. We’ll not be long. Get on with it!”

  He did, and Holm heard him snarl a warning to the captives there and then come on out again, and set off for the hunt.

  Holm waited until he had gone, scrambled down with some difficulty from the narrow ledge where his fissured tunnel came, and hurried quickly to where the captives must be.

  He found them cowering in a corner of their chamber, and felt scared himself just seeing them.

  “Come!” he said. “Quick, quick!”

  Two of the three shook their heads.

  “Please!” he begged. “It’s safe for now.”

  “He’s Holm, the mole who came with Harebell,” said Quince. “He’s all right.”

  Holm stared and they stared, looking petrified.

  “They’ll kill us if we move,” said one.

  “Come on!” pleaded Holm. Then turning to Quince he said, “Make them, Miss!”

  But she could not, and they would not and uselessly stared and trembled, and kept their snouts all low.

  “You come then,” said Holm firmly to Quince.

  Then he turned and ran and Quince, with a final look of despair at the trembling females, followed him.

  As
they went they heard the pawsteps of a mole coming towards them and Holm ran faster, gasping with fear as he hurried to get back to his point of entry into the tunnel. Quince, who was bigger than him, ran at his flank.

  “Here!” said Holm triumphantly pointing up at the ledge he had scrambled down from. But his triumph faded, for try as he might he could not quite reach up to it, and the limestone walls which had been easy enough to scramble down were too slippery and awkward to climb up again.

  In any case, it was too late, for round the corner came a guardmole.

  “What the...?” he shouted angrily when he saw them.

  Holm gulped.

  “Luck’s run very out,” he said.

  “Stay where you are and don’t move,” said Quince of Mallerstang, an adept of an ancient martial art, very quietly. She went a pace forward and, as it seemed to Holm, leapt upward, turned slowly in the air and merely touched the guardmole on the flank with her paw. The guardmole fell back as if a hillside had hit him.

  “What’s...?” he began.

  Quince struck him but once more and Holm could see the surprise in his eyes as he turned, fell back, smashed against the opposite side of the tunnel and slumped, unconscious for all Holm knew, upon the ground.

  “Oh dear,” said Holm. More pawsteps were coming down the tunnel.

  “Is that the way you came in?” said Quince, pointing a talon at the fissure out of Holm’s reach.

  Holm nodded bleakly, and was still nodding as he felt a paw thrust under his rear and he was lifted bodily up and found himself scrabbling into the tunnel.

  “Pull me up,” ordered Quince from below.

  Holm turned round, peered down, and saw a paw reaching up to him.

  “Quick,” said Quince.

  The pawsteps were getting nearer, and across the tunnel the guardmole was beginning to stir and mutter darkly to himself.

  Holm grabbed the paw and tried to pull Quince up.

  “You’re big, I’m small,” he said hopelessly.

  “Imagine I’m something you want,” said Quince.