Duncton Quest (54 page)

As April came others arrived at Duncton in ones and twos, telling as the first one did bleak stories of atrocities and takeovers by the grikes; each arrival had known the shadows of horror and loss on the way behind them.

It was Spindle who suggested that as these moles arrived accounts of how they came to leave their home systems and make their way to Duncton should be scribed down, work begun by Tryfan and continued by Spindle aided by Mayweed. From these scribings not only was Tryfan able to build up a record of the strength and disposition of the grikes, but Spindle was able to start those records which today are known as the Rolls of the Refugees, and chart the scourge of the Word as well as setting down as much oral history of each system, its rhymes and traditions, as the ever-curious Spindle was able to gather.

From all this information, Tryfan and the other senior moles were left in no doubt that as spring advanced towards summer the grikes were massing in the systems around Duncton, and an attack on a large and probably unstoppable scale was going to come, and before long.

From some of the more discerning arrivals there came another and more sinister report. It was that the methods of the grikes had changed since last Longest Day and brutality and snoutings had given way to subtler methods of the kind Tryfan himself had already observed in Frilford and Bladon. As young moles were born, so their minds were twisted with the Word, and the Stone was mocked and reviled to them. A process helped, it seemed, by the fact that grike males seemed more fecund than southern plague-touched males, and females preferred them when the mating season came, so that many of the youngsters being born were half-grike, and the more easily influenced.

“I tell you, Tryfan, this may be a greater danger than it seems,” warned Spindle, “for we may be fighting no vicious newcomers but a way of life accepted by increasing numbers of moles.”

“But a way of life without a centre,” replied Tryfan. “Without the Silence of the Stone. One that will finally fail unless it finds a centre that can sustain a mole’s inner life, or change it for the better.”

Spindle shrugged.

“What ordinary mole knows of such Silence, or ‘inner life,’ or cares for it? If they have order, and health, worms, and a warm burrow, and can pup in peace and fight once in a while well....”

“Then why do refugees seek out Duncton?” asked Tryfan.

“I am just warning you of what moles say,” said Spindle.

Tryfan smiled, and then looked serious.

“Stay close to me, Spindle, whatever I may say or do. The burden of leading these moles is heavy and will be heavier yet, and I sometimes desire to be alone. There is no time... Stay close, warn me if I grow distant, remind me that I am but ordinary mole for I will always listen to you.”

“I will, Tryfan,” said Spindle, “even if the day comes when you do not wish it!”

“That will never come,” said Tryfan.

Spindle made no comment, but left soon afterwards when Skint and Smithills came to talk over the need to prepare for the coming of the grikes as quickly as they could.

It was in this atmosphere of preparation and change that the youngsters of that spring were born, and those few who survived ever afterwards remembered the excitement of those times. The adults seemed constantly busy, many of the males and the unpupped females were trained as watchers under the overall command of Alder and Smithills, and involved in making defences on the south east side of the system where only the roaring owl way protected it.

As for the pupping females, the fact was that fertility was not high. Many of the females had aborted, and the relatively few who gave birth managed litters of only one or two with just a very few of three. The females themselves knew the cause well enough: disease. Ever since the plagues fertility had been low, and it did not go unnoticed that where a female was clean and a male diseased, even if his disease was now healed and gone, pups were aborted or born deformed. In those few cases where such females did give birth, their burrows were dark indeed, for the young had to be killed lest the moles forthcoming, poor deformed things, should survive and shame their parents.

That this was so was generally unknown to the males for males were not present at birth, nor allowed by other females near birth burrows, and what male could argue when a mother reported the young dead?

Yet Tryfan knew that “dead” meant “killed”, and his source was Smithills.

Smithills’ mate, an Eastside female, had borne young and he had been told they had been born dead.

“I thought ’twas to be expected, Tryfan,” he explained sadly. “Anymole who knows anything about scalpskin knows that a mole that has had it, whether male or female, does not make healthy pups. Pregnant she may become, with pup may he make her, but if one or other has had the sores then those pups will not be born at all, or if they are they’re as good as dead.”

“But your scalpskin was cured,” said Tryfan, who had done it himself.

“Begging your pardon, Tryfan, but you didn’t cure me, you healed the sores, and that’s a different thing. I’m not saying I’m not grateful, just that I know ’tis too late for me to have young now.”

“Did you tell your mate that?” asked Tryfan.

“Course I did – for it wouldn’t be fair otherwise. But you know what females are: if they think there’s a chance of a pup and there’s no other male around they’ll have even a rough old mole like me, and I’ll not stop ’em.”

Tryfan chuckled but, uncharacteristically, Smithills did not and Tryfan saw he had more to say.

“Fact is, that there was young born alive of my mate’s litter, but they were killed.”

“Who did that?” asked Tryfan appalled.

“Other females. ’Tis the way. They stay in the birth burrow and watch over, and if the young aren’t right why, they kill them.”

“By who’s authority?” asked Tryfan.

“By tradition’s,” said Smithills. “I asked my mate and she said that ’twas the desire of the Stone. ‘And what was wrong with the mites?’ I asked. ‘Three paws upfront, and no snout,’ she said. ‘No shame to kill them, but shame for male to know.’”

Smithills lowered his great snout.

“They say it has been bad that way since the plagues, some say even before. And now it’s worse, Tryfan, and surviving young are few.”

“And the more precious to us,” said Tryfan.

Of all of this Tryfan later questioned Maundy in Comfrey’s burrow.

“Smithills is right,’tis females’ lore,” she said. “Seems cruel, I know, but it’s for the best. A female can’t be trusted to do it for herself, though some are willing enough. But we try to have another there to help.”

“To murder you mean,” said Tryfan angrily.

“Such young are better dead,” said Maundy matter of factly.

“But Boswell himself was such a one, wouldst thou have killed him?”

Maundy stared at Tryfan and said, “Aye, in this system such a mole would not have lived.”

“It’s not right, Maundy. The Stone is life itself and desires not that its young be killed however hurt they may seem to be.”

“Then may the Stone itself grant that you never witness some of the births I have seen since the plague,” said Maundy, “or have to decide what pups of a bad litter must live and what must die.”

When she had gone Tryfan asked Comfrey, “Did you know of this?”

“N-not many males know, but I d-did, T-Tryfan. Yes I d-d-did.”

Later, when he was calmer, Tryfan asked Maundy, “Have any scalpskinned moles ever parented successful young?”

“Never have to my knowledge, never shall is my belief, not ones with sores. Nor moles touched by plagues, nor murrain, nor any such. There’s many a mole in moledom would have young if they could, but their body’s been tainted with disease, and the Stone won’t permit them young. But there you go.”

Tryfan saw there were tears in Maundy’s eyes, and sadness, for a mole likes to make her own young, and teach pups what she knows.

Learning this, Tryfan was not surprised to hear that Thyme, too, had difficulty pupping after she and Spindle had mated. Spindle had not caught scalpskin in the Slopeside and seemed clean enough, but Thyme had been ill when they first met her, and was ill again during her pregnancy. So ill, indeed, that both Comfrey and Maundy tended her and Maundy herself stayed to watch over her when she pupped.

That was a long and dangerous thing and the young when it was born, for there was only one, was weak. But not so weak as Thyme herself, who seemed to suffer a recurrence of the illness she had suffered in Buckland and was quite incapable of tending to her pup. More than that her bleeding would not stop, and no amount of care from Maundy or herbs from Comfrey could prevent it stopping either. So for a time after the birth the youngster was left to mew alone, unsuckled and alone while Thyme fought for her life. But then the moment came when Thyme seemed to accept that her weakness would not improve, and she bravely asked Maundy to find another, stronger mother for the little thing.

“Ask Spindle himself to take him, he’ll find a female will have want of him,” she said.

“It’s better I do it,” said Maundy. “Female won’t take it from a male.”

“No, no, let Spindle take him,” whispered Thyme. “He’ll know where to go.”

So it was that Spindle was summoned to Thyme’s birth burrow and there he saw his love so weakened by the birth she could barely reach for him; and at her dry and wasted teats he saw their male pup, tiny and striving.

“Take him,” whispered Thyme. “While there’s time take him, my love.”

“But I didn’t know you were so...” said poor Spindle, shocked to see Thyme so ill and thin with the effort of birth and the ravaging of her illness.

“Surely he’ll be all right if only —”

But Thyme shook her head.

“Don’t delay, Spindle, take him now. Find a female who will care for him. Go now, please go....”

“I don’t know where,” said Spindle.

Then Thyme reached for his paw and, touching it, said, “There is a place you know, a place we said we’d always meet, the place where we first found our love; take him there, my dear, but hurry now.”

So Spindle took his pup up by the skin behind his neck, awkwardly, for a male is not so good at such a thing, and Thyme smiled and said, “Bring him to me.”

Which Spindle did and laid him before her. Thyme looked at her one and only ever pup and said, “My father’s name was Bailey, let that be his.” Then she spoke as best she could to Bailey, and caressed him, saying again and again, as if those words she spoke then were all the words that pup would ever hear from its own mother, and they must say everything, “You are much loved.”

Again and again and again, but weaker and weaker, her voice fading in that dark burrow.

Then Maundy nodded to Spindle, who took up Bailey once more, and turned away and did not hear as Thyme whispered after him, “And you, Spindle, never forget you too are loved, so much.”

Then Spindle was gone, down the long slopes of Duncton Hill to the north, knowing where he must go, which was Barrow Vale, where he and Thyme had known their love and sworn to meet again one day, or tell their kin to do so.

Of that long journey Spindle left no account, nor of what happened when he got to Barrow Vale. But another mole did, one other mole knew, and she remembered and repeated what she knew.

There in the dark of Barrow Vale, where the roots of dead trees were, and dust of the past, Spindle brought Bailey and found a female waiting. Gaunt she was, but her teats were full and her longings were great.

“Whatmole are you?” asked Spindle when he saw her and placed Bailey before her.

“Prayed to the Stone,” whispered the female, very afraid. “Said to come here. Said...” But she stopped there and bent to tend the pup, licking him, caressing him, and curling her body to his that he might suck.

“What is your name?” asked Spindle.

“He’s a lovely thing, what’s his?”

“Bailey,” said Spindle.

“A good name,” said the female, trying to suckle the pup.

“Have you young?” asked Spindle, puzzled.

“Aye,” said the female. “Two good, one bad. The bad was killed. Bailey’ll replace him.”

Spindle wanted to say, “Tell him he was of Thyme and Spindle,” but instead he told her, “Tell him that when in doubt in days to come he’s to trust the Stone and come to Barrow Vale where you found him. Will you do that?”