Duncton Found (70 page)

And lost was the word, for only Slighe knew the names and locations of all the moles confined, and if he made a slip – and he did – or lost interest in a mole, that mole was truly lost, and left to die in darkness and unloved.

By November the Sumps was in full use, and its wretched tunnels groaned and echoed to the sound of suffering moles who screamed, or coughed or bled their life away. It was a place that drove moles mad and Drule, the expert on its punishments, had quickly discovered – initially to his cost – that confinement in the Lower Sumps drove a mole insane if kept up too long. Twelve days was enough for most, though some had been permanently affected after only eight. Its most efficacious use was as a threat, meted out on those who had been sent down to it before and knew its horrors.

Perpetual darkness, rotten food, the real threat of drowning are enough to make a mole hallucinate and imagine horrors worse by far than any a torturer can inflict.

The Middle Sumps was where most prisoners were kept, eking out their days in crippling dampness, suffering the sadism of the guardmoles, malevolently forced to share cells with moles who hurt or raped them.

The Upper Sumps merely took a mole’s liberty, and was slow to harm him physically. Yet even here was a place, a chamber more than a cell, in which certain moles were taken for bloody questioning – for access to it was comfortable and easy for moles such as Lucerne and Terce who had no desire to sully themselves with the realities below.

In the Upper Sumps as well those most pathetic prisoners of the Word in Cannock, youngsters of adult inmates, were kept since they were not strong enough to survive the rigours of the damper cells. Usually alone, always afraid, and if unwanted then fearfully abused. To these poor creatures Slighe came and, if they were male, he would use them and abuse them unto death itself through his perverted lusts. As for Drule, he had the pick of females there and having had his way would pass them on for guardmoles to use. Few of them survived.

How much of this did Lucerne know? Mallice knew all, or if she did not then she was blind and deaf, for she frequently visited the Upper Sumps, and on occasion the Middle Sumps as well. The reason? One word will be enough: torture. Aye, that was what she liked.

All done, all of it, in the name of the Word. But then it might be said that when a mole was sentenced to the Sumps he or she is no longer mole. Only this explains why guardmoles, who in their quarters elsewhere in Cannock could play happily with their young and be affectionate with their mates would, when their leave or break was done, return and be monsters to mole once more. Yet guilt was alive – for how else does a mole explain the fact that nomole spoke of the Sumps?

We too would like to turn our backs from all awareness of the place, but we cannot. A mole we know, and one we were beginning to learn to love, was confined there.

Betony.

Squeezebelly’s daughter. Sister to Bramble, adoptive sister to Harebell and Wharfe.

Poor Betony. Suffering Betony. By November she was near death.

Aye, it was Mallice and her guardmoles who had snatched Betony from Beechenhill. From the moment she had realised exactly whatmole she had, which was some hours after her encounter with the party of watchers in which Betony had been, Mallice did not linger, but turned her snout towards Ashbourne, and thence to Cannock feeling her task in Beechenhill was now well done.

Betony was already half broken when she reached the Sumps, for on the journey there Mallice had tortured much information out of her.

Being the sideem she was, Mallice revealed the source of her startling revelations about Wharfe and Harebell being Lucerne’s siblings, and living in Beechenhill, only after Lucerne’s appetite had been whetted....

“Oh, and Master, one more thing. We have a rather special prisoner, my dear. One you will much wish to see.”

“Then bring him here.”

“It is best we visit
her
,” said Mallice, “she is not fit to travel far. She has hurt her paws.”

Then quickly she led Lucerne to a cell in the Upper Sumps, in which Drule and a repulsive female henchmole squatted staring at a mole. Lucerne saw that though the mole had been tortured and was limp, she was still alive. Four talons of one paw had been ripped out, two talons of another.

“It was necessary,” said Mallice, nodding at the wardress to leave them be. Drule stayed, smiling.

“Who is she?” said Lucerne, staring at the mole, utterly unmoved by the fear in her eyes, and the continual shudder of pain in her paws.

“She shall tell her name. Won’t she?” said Mallice, sliding one of her talons gently along Betony’s cut face. “She shall tell you everything, won’t you, my poor hurt love? She shall say again all and more than she has said to me. Then I suggest that Drule has his way with her to find out whatever still remains. There is something about Drule that
repulses
information from female moles.”

“Whatmole are you?” asked Lucerne.

“I am the friend of Wharfe and Harebell, I am their friend,” intoned Betony, a look of utter despair and hopelessness in her eyes.

“Who are they?”

The mole darted a frightened look at Mallice. A solitary tear coursed down her face, made ugly by the scars of her first torturing, which had long since congealed.

“They were Henbane’s pups.”

A look of surprise followed by exaltation crossed Lucerne’s face, but there was barely a pause before he asked the next question.

“How do you know this?”

“My father told me.”

“Who is your father, mole?”

“Squeezebelly of Beechenhill.”

“And what is thy name?”

“Betony, I think,” she said. Her eyes, though open, seemed for a moment to drift, as if the mention of her own name brought back a place and time and memory forever lost to her. “Please don’t hurt me any more, I don’t know anything more to tell.”

“Oh but you know so much more that you don’t know,” said Mallice.

“How came you to know this Wharfe and this Harebell?” He came closer to her, glaring, and she began to shake with pathetic fear.

“Please don’t... not again. I told
her
they were brought to Beechenhill by the moles Mayweed and Sleekit. They were left for my father to rear.”

Lucerne turned to Drule and ordered him away.

“Sleekit! I know that name,” he said, for once showing his anger. He turned back to Betony. “This mole is cursed of the Stone, but she has value. Great value. Drule shall
not
have her yet, for once he has done with a mole she is good for nothing more. We must learn all we can of Beechenhill, and she shall be kept alive. Alive, Squeezebelly will still give much up for her; but dead she will add resolution and righteousness to his spirit.”

Mallice nodded.

“She should have been physically unharmed,” said Lucerne, still annoyed.

“She would have been silent if not harmed,” said Mallice matter of factly. “Her will was strong.”

Lucerne stared at Betony.

“What are they like?” he asked eventually. Mallice came close to him and tried to draw him away. “What are they like?” he said again, more forcefully.

Betony looked at him, and into his eyes, and at his flanks and paws and snout.

“They are... they are....”

“Yes, mole?”

“But for their eyes they are like you.”

“Their eyes?” whispered Lucerne, who seemed for the first time in this terrible interview to be discomfited rather than merely angry.

“Their eyes are not like yours but like their... like your father’s. Their eyes are Tryfan’s eyes and full of love. Not like yours.”

“My love,” purred Mallice with delight, “you can make her tell you things she would not tell me.”

Betony’s eyes began to close.

“She is not so hurt...?” began Lucerne.

Mallice smiled and said, “Your consort knows her art. This mole shall not die quite yet. But she is tired and the pain dulls, and she must be allowed to sleep.”

“Be it so. You have done well, better than well. This mole shall be the destruction of Beechenhill. My own siblings there, and of the Stone! Of the mighty Stone! From Henbane they came, of Tryfan were they the spawn. And the Word shall punish them through me, born with Rune’s blood in my veins, true Master of the Word. This delights me, Mallice.”

“I thought it might,” she said softly.

He laughed and turned from that burrow, excited and pleased, exclaiming, “Thou art mighty, Word, and thy servant glories in thy justice. Thy talons shall make of Beechenhill a desolation that such punishments as that of Mallerstang, and others yet to come, shall seem but pleasant interludes on the way to the Stone’s agony. Blessed be the Word!”

“Blest be!” responded Mallice as they swept out of that drear burrow in the Sumps where Betony now lived a living death.

So Betony’s agony in Cannock had begun, and many the time she had wished to die, and would have done so had she had her way. But Drule’s fat mate kept her alive, and when she worsened she was allowed out briefly into fresher air, and as the molemonths dragged by her brain began to dull, her mind to numb, as if something inside of her was protecting her from the terrible reality of her lot. One thing she could not know was that her presence disturbed Lucerne because it stirred that place within his heart which he might have hoped to leave alone, which was curiosity about the siblings he had had at birth. Until Betony came he assumed they must be dead, as Henbane had reassured him they were; but once he knew they lived he was consumed with desire to know about them.

Then too there was the knowledge that Tryfan, his father, had been
seen
and talked to by this vile female who was now his prisoner. Was he dead? He must be. Even if he survived the journey back to Duncton Wood, the plagues and diseases of that place surely would have killed him by now. So often he found his sleep was disturbed with such unanswered thoughts.

“Master mine?”

“Mallice?”

“Come closer to me. It will help you rest and sleep.”

“That mole....”

“Dear Betony?”

“The same.”

“What of her?”

“I would talk with her. I would hear more now of Beechenhill.”

“Again? She cannot tell you more. And anyway, my love, have we not pups to make?” She smiled, she shifted her haunches near and invitingly. Pups were her desire now, pups by the Master, to find an heir, to confirm her supreme position as mother of a Master yet to be.

Since Betony’s coming the same thought had consumed Lucerne as well, as if by making young he could in some strange way blot out the void in his life that the loss of Henbane, and then the discovery of siblings he had never known, had created.

He turned back to her, and took her. Oh yes, they mated savagely, and in the way his taloned paws raked Mallice’s back, and his teeth bit at her shoulders, a mole might have learned how near love is to hatred, and hatred is to murder.

“Am I your mother that you hate me so?” screamed Mallice with delight.

She was uncomfortably near the truth.

But when they had done, and their energies were spent, then she let him leave her for his long sessions with Betony, during which, it seemed, he did little but stare and ask the same question, again and again.

“What are they like?”

“I cannot say more...” whispered Betony.

“You must, or I shall send you to the Lower Sumps again in punishment as I did last time. Tell me one new thing and you shall be spared that place.”

“They...” And Betony wept, broken, for every secret moment of her life with Wharfe and Harebell this mole who looked like them had ripped from out her heart. But worse, she had begun to hate them for what her knowledge of them made this mole do to her.

“Blessed art thou by the Word, Betony,” he said to her, “acknowledge me as thy Master, let this be thy Atonement to the Word, let the Word’s power take the shadow of the Stone from off your body.”

“But... b —” She gazed through eyes brimming with tears at the ragged scars where her talons had been, stared at the flattened damp floor, and at the shadowed walls and high fissures where dead light lurked. Somewhere a mole screamed, and Betony dared to say, “B-but the Stone is all I’ve got.”

“There is no Stone.”

Where does a mole find such courage as Betony so long found, where such hope?

“There is,” she said, “and it shall find you out.”