Duncton Found (23 page)

With these words, Henbane ended the Declaration of Assent, which is the first part of the liturgy of anointing, and nodded sternly at the First Keeper to continue.

In a daze, it seemed, terrified certainly, the novice mole backed slowly into the lake until his rear part was submerged and his balance only kept by the firm hold the Keeper had taken of his right shoulder. It seemed quite certain that the quality of the Word’s mercy was about to be tested.

The Fourth Keeper, who was the novice’s seconder, now came into the water too and, crossing his left paw over the First Keeper’s, he grasped hold of the novice’s left shoulder.

“By this anointing may he be judged,” said Henbane as the two Keepers placed their talons around the mole’s throat and, with an almost violent movement, arced him back into the water with a splash so that he was suddenly totally immersed.

Sleekit’s account of what that baptismal act is like says that nothing before prepared her for the jolting shock of the freezing water on her face, snout and eyes, which seemed like sharp stars of pain. To add to the dismay of the moment was the complete disorientation and vulnerability a mole feels in such a posture, made all the worse by being held there until the breath began to burst in the lungs, and panic set in.

Then, said Sleekit, as sudden as the submergence, is the re-emergence into the bright and blinding shaft of light from the fissure high above. Talons, sharp and pressing, turn the novitiate about to face the Rock even as the swirl of dark sound made by the echoed chant of moles against the Rock seems to present a new drowning, and one yet more terrible.

Then the Keeper whispers an urgent, “Swim! And may the Word be with thee, mole! Swim and remember all you have been taught! Keep to the left, and do not pause or falter for a single moment. Swim!”

Out into the frightening, chilling, numbing cold of the lake and through the blinding light towards the Rock, which seems to recede with each desperate stroke, seems too far, for the cold numbs the mind almost as fast as it numbs the body. A terrible crushing thing about a mole’s flanks which causes pain between the paws, which stirs at her and seems to seek to suck her down.

So Sleekit told Mayweed and so must it have been for the novice Brenden of Howke as, with the eyes of all upon him, he set off to swim out and make his scriven mark upon the Rock, and then swim back. Anything less was failure. To turn back too soon, the task incomplete, meant a taloning to death by his tutor Keeper and the seconder. To linger too long, to slow, to lose orientation, to succumb to the cold and begin to wander, that meant death as well: the sucking death among the currents that run strong and deep near the centre of the Rock.

“Keep left! Always left!” was the traditional advice, and generation after generation of novices wondered why the tutor Keepers were so insistent on it, so boringly repetitive.

But now that novice began to know, by the dread Word he knew! The water was a tightening clasp of cold about him as he passed beyond the shaft of light into the dappling darkness there, and heard what he had been warned he would hear then: the sound of his own frightened and desperate gasping echoing back as dark sound from the Rock ahead.

“Turn it to your purpose,” he had been told. “Feed on its strength to make more strength, or its weakness will weaken you.”

But he
did
feel weak, and panicky too, for from the uncharted darkness beneath him he felt the first entwinings of a current, cold and powerful, diverting his paws as they sought to swim him forward. His breath came fast and desperate, and the dark sound worsened into weakness.

That novice tried, as so many had before him, to call upon the long moleyears of training he had had, to conserve his strength to swim resolutely forward to the left side of the Rock and through the strait of death he now found himself in.

“To the left, to the left,” his chattering mouth sought to whisper as he saw, nearer now, the ghastly dark maw at the centre of the Rock in which water slurped about and towards which the unseen current began to drag him, and into which a failed mole flounders before he is lost to the eternal damnation of the Sinks.

“To the... left?” The memory of his training was leaving him, despair was overtaking his desperate paws, the dark sound echoed back his own slow drift towards surrender and whatever he had been taught seemed beyond his grasp now, lost in the confusion that overtakes a mole succumbing to such death.

His paws reached forward towards the Rock.
The left! The left!
faint memory said – but the left was drifting away and the dark centre was coming nearer and the lake’s current growing stronger and remorseless.

Fatally he paused to look around for help that was not there, and saw only a shaft of light and the distant shapes of moles, as the current bore him on into the very centre of the dark sound of his own fear. Fear palpable; fear tangible; fear felt as growing pain, and his strokes, such as they were, grew wild and desperate, the Rock huge above him, and on its face the scrivens none had ever seen so close but those about to die.

Then he screamed, the novice Brenden born of Howke, and of his scream the Rock made a dark sound more dread than any yet heard. Like a black talon to pierce and turn in a mole’s gut it came, worse than a snouting it was, and only another scream could he make as the dark water sucked him and turned him as, with one last desperate surge of rational strength, he reached up and touched the Rock even as he was swept into its maw and beyond all hope, ever, of recovery.

A final despairing scream, the scrivening scratches of his paws along the lowering ceiling of the cavern which lies beyond the maw, and then rock abrading his head, water sucking him beneath it, pain all through his body, and the last hopelessness of a mole who knows that all his life’s trials, all his hopes, all his fears, all of everything, even love, even first memory, were leading him to nothing but this dawning hateful unredemptive terror, and the beginning of the bursting of his lungs.

So the novice Brenden was lost to the world. Gone but for his last scream and scratching which redoubled in the Rock’s dark echoes and cast a deep fear and dread over the remaining novices. It was a sound that made the Keepers seem the very agents of judgement and death, and made the Mistress Henbane – dark and still, alluring and merciless – the very embodiment of the Word itself.

“Next!” she said, and the First Keeper’s second pupil stumbled forward, and the rite began again.

Three more died before one survived, and that the last of the First Keeper’s group. An ominous beginning, and enough to cast a pall over that Keeper’s future. By the pupils let the tutor himself be judged, so saith the Word.

But when he who survived clambered ashore the palpable fear that had haunted the chamber was overridden by an extraordinary zeal. If one could, others might. The possibility was there. It
could
be done.

The Second Keeper began his round of anointings, and throughout that Midsummer day, deep in the black heart of Whern, the rite went on. The ominous beginning gave way to a run of survivals as the shaft of light travelled on across the lake towards the Rock.

Then, at the thirteenth anointing, and on to the Fourth Keeper’s group, another death; and another after that; and then a third. Now a grim and dour mood came upon the witnesses to this rite, for moles others knew were dying and more would die among those who waited with nothing to do but stare in growing awe at Henbane or the Keeper performing the ritual, and envy those who had survived.

Over these survivors a striking metamorphosis had taken place. The light of success and confidence seemed to have settled on them, a hard cruel light of moles who have been tried and tested and now feel exclusive, not recognising as worthy of respect any who have yet to prove themselves. Such demeaning of others in the survivors’ eyes is a prime purpose of Whern’s Midsummer rite, and prepares such moles for the tasks of subjugation and tyranny soon to come.

Meanwhile, among those waiting, were brooding Clowder; Mallice; and Lucerne.

It is part of the Twelfth Keeper’s great art to keep the stolidity and confidence of his own group intact as the rite wears on and his novices face a double undermining – from watching moles die, whilst having to face longer than any other group the new power discovered in those who have survived.

Terce seemed to have done his work well, for none of his three pupils flinched or looked unsettled as the day progressed. Their stances were relaxed and sure, and at different times each of them sunk into a whispering meditation. The only perceptible difference was that Terce moved closer to them, and they to him, so that they seemed to form almost a solid mass of mole, formidable and fearsome. Even Mallice, the weakest of the group, seemed to have gained composure.

Above them Henbane stanced her ground unmoving, and yet a watcher might have perceived a change gradually come over her as the rite’s progress led to the Tenth Keeper’s charges (one dead) and then the Eleventh’s (two out of four lost into the Rock’s maw).

Few yet knew for sure, though many guessed, of the struggle that had developed between Henbane and Lucerne in which, so far, Terce had played an ambiguous part. Henbane, who had been hemmed in ever since her return to a semblance of normality by Lucerne and those sideem Terce had set to the task of over-watching her, had agreed to participate in the rite only because she had no other choice.

She did not trust or love her son. Thus far her sole intent was to try and undo what she had done, which was to help others and the Word make of Lucerne’s life a growing evil. Yet she felt powerless and had watched over the course of the rite with growing despair and self-hatred. Those lives that were lost in the maw of the Rock were wasted lives, pointless lives, and she was herself the very instrument of their doom. Yet what confusion swirled inside her as the dark sound swirled without, for each time she raised her paws, each time she spoke that dread word “Next!’, she found it harder to keep her composure, harder not to scream out her self-misery.

But she knew well enough that Terce, Lucerne and the others, whatever else they might be, were her guards, and from here there was no easy escape. After the rite was done, and Lucerne legitimised, she knew her life would be forfeit. So what to do but hope, even at this last hour as the rite continued, that some way of stopping Lucerne might still be found.

Outwardly calm, Henbane had inwardly debated long and vigorously what she could yet achieve. Kill him, her son! It might be just possible if he had been nearer. Had she not killed Rune in this same place? Yes, the thought occurred and recurred as the day went by. But if she failed... if others stopped her... then her ignominy would be a glorious beginning to his reign. And, too, killing was not to her talons’ liking any more. Life was what they craved; the life and light they should have known before....

Or hope, perhaps, that he might not survive the rite? That had been her wish when the day began, and before. It would be a fitting end. But watching him, seeing his confidence, seeing that lesser moles than he survived, sensing the confidence that Clowder and Terce seemed to have as well, she doubted that he would fail. Only Mallice seemed weak. That mole might fail, but not Lucerne.

Yet suddenly then she relaxed and seemed to know what to do, and Terce seemed to sense it for he tensed and kept looking at her, his mind puzzling over what she might have thought of. Well... he was prepared for all things. The plans of the great Rune, of which he was the executor, would go on.

The last of the pupils of the Eleventh Keeper stumbled back to land, and already, with but the last three to go, a mood of excitement had come over the assembly. With Lucerne, son of the Mistress, to go, and Mallice, daughter of the Twelfth Keeper, there was a certain gratuitous interest in the success or otherwise of the remaining novices.

Interest, excitement... and tension, too, which came most of all from the Mistress herself. Never had she stanced so still, never with such fearsome authority, and never had her fur seemed so full of light and graceful age, and her eyes so impenetrable.

“Next!” she said, and Terce nodded to Lucerne, and slowly Lucerne rose and followed the Keeper to the water’s edge. The rite began as it had so many times already: the tutor Keeper went out into the water, he turned, he raised his paws.

Behind him the great shaft of light began at that moment to shine at last upon the Rock itself, at its dark centre, where the water flowed deep and dangerous and whence the bleakest suckings came. What had been obscure before now became clear, for the watching Keepers, the newly anointed sideem and the three waiting novices could now see all too well the terrible nature of the cavern into which the lake flowed. Above that dark place the light of sun – direct at the base, reflected and dappled above – caught at the great scrivenings of the Rock and made them seem like wild scrivens across a great sky, beautiful and awe-inspiring. The dark sound muttered, water lapped and, once, high and unseen, a bat shrilled.

As Terce opened his mouth to summon Lucerne into the water and begin the Declaration of Assent, Henbane hunched suddenly forward, the first movement she had made for hours. It was enough to shock and still the watching moles.