Duncton Quest (98 page)

It was with a freer spirit that Tryfan arrived at Rollright some days later, knowing that from now on Mayweed would take all responsibility for guiding them, and feeling that in this the Stone was directing.

They made their way cautiously into the system from the south west and reached the Whispering Stoats without a mishap. There was nomole there, but they decided to stay quietly among the trees nearby in the hope that a St one follower might come who could give them news of the friends from whom they had parted so long before. They settled down for a long wait.

It was three days before they made the contact they sought, and in that time they saw several patrols and a couple of individuals, but none of them came near the Stoats. But on the evening of the third day a mole approached cautiously from the west, snouting about the area with great care before advancing into the enclave of the Stones. There he crouched for a little, and then said a rough prayer, looking up at the Stones and touching one of them.

He was of good size and strong, but it was clear that he had been in a good many lights because his flanks and snout were scarred, and he seemed to have lost a talon from his left paw. There was something familiar about him, but none of them could quite place him.

They waited until he came out of the enclave before addressing him, and, after a moment of stancing in which he left them in no doubt that he would have fought for his life formidably, he came forward with a mixture of surprise, relief and pleasure on his face.

“Why, ’tis Tryfan and Spindle the Cleric if I’m not mistaken, and both alive. And you...” He looked at Mayweed but obviously did not know his name.

“Before you, fearless follower, is moledom’s humblest, moledom’s least: Mayweed by name. But what we wish to know, and in double quick time before the gormless grikes hear us, is who you are and what news you have for us.”

“Mayweed too, eh! Well, bless me, there’s a lot more moles than me will be glad to see you three alive. I’m Tundry, and I expect I’ve changed a bit since you saw me last, Tryfan Sir. Skint’s group, the Marsh End Defence, Duncton Wood.”

Tryfan suddenly remembered. This mole had been a last-minute replacement in the Marsh End group.

“So what news of Skint?”

“Safe Sir, and well so far as I know. Smithills too. They waited here at Longest Night having damn near broke their necks getting here to meet you, and then hung about a bit after. But they decided to travel on and as I was the one deputed to stay at Rollright under cover of following the Word, they trusted me to make contact with you and tell you where to find them should you want to... But I know a better place than this to talk, and a mole who would like to see you, so follow me now.”

He took them downslope away from the main system, at first through dry runs but later into damp soil, and then into downright wet soil.

“Not pleasant but grikes never come here,” said Tundry.

As he spoke a couple of youngsters peered out at them from a side tunnel, both filthy, their faces as begrimed with mud as it is possible to be. Mayweed stared at them hard, a look of puzzled recognition on his face.

They went on a little way and a third youngster popped her head round a corner, as muddy as the first two. All silent, very.

“Mayweed suggests that there is something very familiar about these tunnels, and requests permission to go ahead.”

“You’re in charge anyway,” said Tryfan.

“Mayweed goes ahead hopefully, into tunnels whose cut and whose general air of untidy order and muddy filth warms his heart as much as it besmirches his paws.

Mayweed’s heart is suddenly
full
of hope that not far from here is a mole he feared he might not meet again. Mayweed....”

But Mayweed said no more for as they rounded a corner into a communal burrow, as messy as the tunnels that preceded it, they found themselves face to face with not one mole but two. The cleaner of them was a female, though she was grubby enough, yet cheerful and well rounded, with fur that went this way and that in a carefree way and an eagerness about her that reminded them of somemole they had met before. But it was at the male next to her that Mayweed stared in delighted disbelief.

“Mayweed cannot believe his eyes,” said Mayweed.

For the mole before him, who stared with wide eyes and said not a word, was Holm. Silent Holm, whose fur was still mud-covered. Mute Holm, who was almost as good a route-finder as Mayweed himself. Speechless Holm, who had first showed Mayweed the way out of Duncton Wood.

And Holm said not a word, yet what he did do could not have said more for what he felt. For he stared at Mayweed and tears came to his eyes and his snout lowered and his little marshy body heaved and puffed with emotion. Then he turned to the female and made what was, for him, a long speech: “I’m happy,” he said. And then, “I’m happy, Lorren!”

Lorren! Starling’s sister. Lorren?

But she was tubby, she was dirty, she was....

“Happy!” said Mayweed, speaking for them all. As he spoke the three youngsters they had seen earlier poked their heads out from the tunnel at the back of the chamber and stared in awestruck silence.

“Sirs,” began Mayweed, “Sirs, all five of us, Madam, all one of you, alias large Lorren, and wondering youngsters, Mayweed repeats the only word worth saying twice on this occasion: Happy. And he says it a third time, because seeing these two before him, once helpless Holm with once pupless Lorren, should give Tryfan here and Spindle too the encouragement they need, and moledom too, so he pronounces: Happy.”

Lorren laughed in a rounded generous kind of way, looked serious, and immediately asked about Starling. And then she was in tears as they told she too had pupped, and she was safe, and hoped one day to return to Duncton Wood.

Then those moles told each other their news, the youngsters asked by Tryfan himself to stay, for the future of moledom would depend on such moles as them, and they must learn of their past and the moles that fought for it so that one day they would know what it meant, and how much of the past a good future holds.

When news of each other was done, the three travellers turned to Tundry, who, with due solemnity, told them what happened to Skint’s group in Duncton Wood after Henbane took the system over, and how it was they left.

The first molemonths after Duncton moles’ departure went exactly as Skint and Tryfan had planned it should: the grikes were harassed, several were killed, they were forced to patrol in groups of two or three but even then Skint’s moles succeeded in picking off a few.

It seemed to have dawned only slowly on the grikes that covert moles were lodged in tunnels in the wood, and when it did searches were started and patrol upon patrol tramped about the Marsh End seeking them. But they were never successful and, indeed, in all the time they were there, the Marsh End Defence was never found. Though whether it had been subsequently Tundry did not know.

Then towards the end of September they noticed a change come over the system. For a start there was a long period when no patrols appeared at all. The atmosphere became as eerily quiet as the autumn mists that drifted from the marshes in among the trees. Then there were scurryings in the wood, and secret comings and surreptitious goings. Screams, sometimes of violence and of terror. Skint’s moles heard these things and yet, when they ventured out on to the surface, they found nothing and saw nothing in the mists and rains. The wood seemed deserted, and there was even a day or two they began to think that Henbane’s grikes had left altogether.

Yet an atmosphere of fear and horror had overtaken the once peaceful wood.

“I cannot put it into words, Tryfan Sir, not having your way with them, or Spindle’s here, so I can only say that with the grikes about a mole knew what he was up against,” recalled Tundry. “But when that change came you knew there was something else, and it hid. It didn’t show its snout, and you knew it was dangerous and clever. Lurking, evil, very dangerous.

“Naturally we decided to find out about what had happened to the grikes, and Skint himself and two others set out one day to head up south to the Ancient System’s tunnels. Well there were grikes there all right. No doubt about that: thick as fleas on an old mole. And evidence of occupation in tunnels on the east slope, and hiding moles... but we could not have guessed what was going on.”

Then, in October, they found out. One wet day they heard a commotion on the surface near their defence and investigated. Moles fighting, to the death. Big moles, desperate moles. They heard the death blows and the dying screams but as their orders had always been to stay covert they did not interfere. When all was quiet they went out on the surface and found a dead mole.

“Never forget it,” said Tundry. “He was dead from talon-thrusts all right, but you might as well say he was dead from disease. His sides were eaten raw with it, and there was maggots in there, and must have been there when he was alive. He was big, that mole, muscular, and whatever mole or moles had killed him would have been strong. Skint ordered that we didn’t touch him and it seemed owls wouldn’t either, though we heard them investigate. Didn’t like the scent, and don’t blame them. Stunk our tunnels out because he rotted where he was. And that was only the beginning.”

“Of what?” asked Spindle.

“Of an invasion the like of which nomole has ever seen, and one which nearly took us lot over and killed us. Well, it did, some of us....”

Skint and his group were in the perfect position to watch the tragedy that unfolded across Duncton Wood as Henbane’s policy of importing all the misfits, miscreants and diseased moles who were near enough to make the journey to Duncton Wood. Part of her unpleasant genius was to order that such moles were not forced to come but, rather, were offered the opportunity of a better life, a freer life, somewhere where they could dictate their own destiny, subject only to the rules they created for themselves; along with certain rules laid down by Henbane and enforced by her successor Wyre through his representative in Duncton Wood. The rules were simple enough: nomole to set paw in or on the Ancient System, nomole to attempt (therefore) to visit the Stone and, finally, nomole to leave the system.

The grikes effectively isolated themselves from the newcomers, releasing them northward into the system immediately on arrival at the cow cross-under over which the grikes and Duncton moles had fought so bitterly. The new arrivals went one way, the grikes another, their routes to the Ancient System being clear of the other tunnels.

What happened in the lower tunnels the grikes neither knew nor cared, least of all Beake, the eldrene in charge of them. She was as bitter a mole as ever lived, and was happy to kill with her own thin talons anymole from the lower slopes who transgressed the rules. Some did early on, simply for lack of knowledge of the system, but the others soon learnt from their deaths and the sight of their torn bodies which the guardmoles dragged back into the lower slopes were a terrible reminder. Others were too ill, physically or mentally, to know where they were, and they were killed if they trespassed. And a few, outcast for being Stone followers, strove to reach the Stone in the belief that it might take them out of the torment which they gradually began to realise they had been brought to. Such moles too were killed.