Duncton Rising (20 page)

As the days passed, and the siege and attempted incursions all about the system continued. Rooster suffered more and more from doing nothing. While Hamble and other males fought to preserve the system, all he could do was delve – and despite others’ praise for what he did, to him it was not enough. So that nowhere was the agony of war.

its fears and its rising hatreds, greater than in Rooster’s head and heart, and passive paws.

The siege went on, and on, and the Ratcher moles, soon learning that the Dark Sound of the eastern defences was impossible to pass, began to probe Crowden’s periphery in places they had not been to before. They were sighted by day, and Hume and Rooster confirmed that the mole who seemed to be in charge and helped do the torturing was Grear, whom they had seen on their escape from the Charnel. But they saw Red Ratcher too, lurking and laughing among his kin, making his violent gestures and shouting obscenely.

They gained intelligence from the prisoners they took that the grikes had come in greater numbers than before, and that under Grear’s and Ratcher’s more effective leadership some from the southern Moors had been persuaded to join the fray. Crowden was in mortal danger, and grim fear and gloom pervaded its tunnels, despite Hamble’s every effort to rally morale.

The Crowden moles, it must be said, stopped short of torturing the grikes they caught, though only because of Hamble’s direct intercession. However, there were some things he could not stop, and questions were not asked about what happened to the prisoners once they had given what information they could – nor about the bodies of grikes that drifted grimly in the lake adjacent to the outer defences to the north.

Meanwhile, Rooster could not be hemmed in all the time, and sometimes when things were quiet he went out on the surface, despite the pleas of Hume and Privet, and Hamble himself. He was drawn to where the action was, as bees are lured to the sweetest flower, and there was no shortage of young moles willing to go out and guard him, as if they felt he was special, and almost a leader. Indeed, none could fail to see that morale lifted and moles felt reassured when he showed his snout.

“He’s a natural leader, Privet, a warrior greater than any of us,” said Hamble. “You can see it in his face, you can almost smell it on him. It’s no good you, or Hume, or any other moles pretending otherwise. He’s made for it.”

“He’s a
delver,
never forget that, for on it so much depends,” insisted Privet. “I’m beginning to wish I’d never brought him here.”

Early summer came across the Moors as April gave way to May, and still the attacks continued, and the grikes dug into positions all about the system. Slow molemonths of attrition, and occasional mistakes by the Crowden moles. One night, after an ill-conceived attack on the Ratcher clan went wrong, they lost part of their defences when the grikes burrowed in from above and destroyed something of what Rooster’s skill had made, so that ground was lost, and moles as well.

Then more sights of blood and pain, more sounds of agony that moles could not escape; not even Privet down in her Library, working now to seal up as many of the precious texts as she could in secret burrows, against the day when the system might have to be abandoned, or worse, was overrun. In that, at least. Rooster could work with her, and for a time both sought escape from the agonies above in hard work far below, and many texts were hidden.

But now Lime began to be more bold, as if sensing that Crowden was fragmenting in spirit, and opportunities might exist for... play. She became insinuating and clever, whispering things to Rooster when Privet was watching at which he could not but smile, wheedling her feminine attractive way into Rooster’s confidence as he, ever more discontented and restless at being unable to help Hamble more, turned his frustration on those he loved.

Lime was seen with him here, accompanying him there, touching, reaching, mouth open and moist pink tongue that showed when she laughed as she cajoled him to come...

“Where?”

“Oh Rooster! Anywhere.”

All of this poor Privet saw, and suffered at, trying to tell herself that the turmoil and unreasonable jealousy that surged in her, and had her watching out for him and wondering where he was, and what he was doing, and going to places she would not normally go to see if he and Lime were there, and thinking that if they were not, where were they... was uncharitable, before the greater tragedy that was beginning to take Crowden by its throat and destroy it for ever.

Then, suddenly, one afternoon, when Privet was in her Library and blessedly free from jealous fears, all unknown to her Rooster was involved in an affray: nothing much, little more than a brush with grikes down in the defences when he pulled a mole to safety through Dark Sound and faced a talon-thrust towards himself. He did nothing, but the blood of the mole he saved was on him, and he was bruised where he was hit; Lime was quickly in attendance.

“Come, Rooster, they don’t like you here,” she purred, and her paw caressed Rooster’s back as they went, and Rooster turned and frowned, not at her, but at the evil that was on them all, which he was, as he had said, prevented from trying to stop. A guard saw them go and grinned and thought of certain things that he would like to do with Lime again – for he had done them once. Lime was a mole who liked males.

“Come delve with me,” she purred to Rooster, and for relief perhaps from the violence of the grikes and the pressure of his peers. Rooster went with her.

A mole need be neither old nor especially wise to imagine what occurred, just as that guard had already imagined what
might
occur. A pause in a tunnel, the hot breath of a whisper, a quick caress, and Lime, who knew it all, aroused what Rooster thought was his anger, but she knew was his angry lust.

“Leave me. Want Privet now. Not you.”

“Yes, my dear, then go,” she said, her sliding subtle talons hurting him just enough where they explored and caressed to make him feel more angry still, yet stay for more.

“Not here,” she whispered as his great paws turned on her roughly, “not
here,
my love.”

“Wasn’t going to hurt you,” he said in dismay, as he tried to push her away and she clung on in pretended fear, closer still.

“No,” said Rooster, finding he was holding her.

“Oh yes,” she said, as somewhere out on the edge of the system more screaming was heard as the grikes and Crowden warriors fought again. “Unless you want to be a real mole and go to that.”

“Can’t,” said Rooster.

“Then come with me, my dear, come with me,” and though her paw was ever so gentle in his, its pull was a command, and Rooster was led down one tunnel, and then another, and then a third, to a place all dark and soft and warm which scented good, where a mole did not have to think or. speak, but only touch, and explore, as if it were a delving that he made.

“No,” he said one last time, as her paws rose up his body, firm and sure.

“Forget yourself,” she said.

He tried, and found it was not hard. “Want to hurt you,” he rasped, his paws strong on her, and she curled her body into his, biting and scratching him to make him want to hurt her more.

“Then hurt me. Rooster, if you can,” she gasped, as she felt a strength in him greater by far than of any mole who had ever taken her before. “Do to me what you want to do.”

“Want to... hurt you!” he said again, as she felt his lust begin to mount, and the passion in his suddenly hard delving paws all urgent, potent, living; matching her lust, meeting her need, as she pushed at him, and bit at him and made him so angry that he roared, and turned, and took her to him as she screamed for more and more and more of his hurting, of what he wrongly felt was his destructive force.

“More,” she sighed, stronger than him in that at least, “more and more.”

“Yes,” said Rooster, and lost in her, he forgot himself.

When Rooster did not appear in their tunnels at dusk, nor later as night deepened and the fighting began again over on the eastern part of the system. Privet worried for him and wondered what she might do. Not for one moment did she think he might be with Lime, being now more concerned with the dreadful difficulties he was having over the fighting and his non-involvement with it. Some time in the night she could no longer bear tossing and turning and fretting, and went off to find him, or news of him.

She got none, or none that was direct. Instead she saw some injured moles near the defences, and heard that earlier there had been more vicious fighting and that Rooster had been seen just before that. There was something shifty in the way she was told this, as if her informant, a guard, knew something more; but more was not forthcoming. Nor did she suspect the real cause of his absence even then, for Hamble came by and it was plain from what he said that the Crowden system was in deeper jeopardy than he and other elders had previously thought.

“Unless we can muster a counter-attack on the Ratcher moles we are going to be driven further and further back into our system, and eventually we will be forced to yield to them,” he said.

But they had long since prepared plans for this eventuality, so used were they to the attacks of grikes, and there was a drill for retreat into inner tunnels and chambers from which it would be hard to flush them out. What was more, if such a retreat should ever happen, and it had only once in the distant past, there was a well-arranged system of escape through deep tunnels which not only evacuated females and pups and older moles up into an adjacent dough, but enabled the defenders to emerge in a position to ambush the incursive grikes from behind, when they would be in tunnels that were unfamiliar to them. This long-standing arrangement gave the Crowden moles their calm confidence, increased these days since Rooster and his delvers had improved the defences of these inner sanctums of retreat and escape.

“I’m not saying it’ll come to that later tonight, or tomorrow. Privet, but things are as hard as I remember them, and this mole Grear is working with Red Ratcher now and seems a sight more astute in his management of attacks than Red Ratcher himself. Since you’re here, I think you better go back to the inner tunnels and just make sure that everymole’s where they should be in case there is an incursion and we have to act quickly. Come to that, what
are
you doing here?”

“Have you seen Rooster?”

“Ah!” Hamble shook his head uneasily. If a guard had told him something he wasn’t saying. “He’s not fighting, if that’s what you mean. If he was, and giving us the leadership he could, then we wouldn’t be in the position we are!” He laughed affectionately. “He’s a mole I admire more as the days go by,” he continued. “It must be hard for him having moles like me making no bones of the fact that we think he’d be a fine fighter. But don’t worry, Privet, I’ve promised to keep him out of it and I shall, and if I weaken there’s always Hume hovering about like a mother watching over a pup. He’d rather die than see Rooster raise a paw to anymole. But dammit, it might be just the thing he needs.”

“So you don’t know where he is?”

“I must go. Privet,” said Hamble, and was gone as quickly as he could, but not so fast that Privet did not have time to see the hesitation in his eyes.

She went back to the inner tunnels, checked that all was well, and in the evening she went slowly back to her own chambers, half hoping as she reached them that Rooster would be there. But he was not, so where could he be?

How slowly the time passed as she lay and tossed to and fro, thinking of all the possibilities, turning them over, dismissing them, recalling them, worrying at them, on into the deepest, darkest part of the night when vague possibilities become probabilities, suspicions develop into dark certainties, and a mole’s silliest fears seem to change into oncoming nightmares. Suddenly Privet recalled Hamble’s hesitation, and the guard’s reluctance to talk, and having decided they were withholding something they knew, she quickly convinced herself that she knew what it was, and that its name was Lime.

Lime! Yes! That was undoubtedly it! He was with her
now.

Privet was wide awake immediately, her heart thumping with the implications; Lime and Rooster, all this time together and out of sight! Had not Hamble
warned
her that somemole, some female, might seek Rooster out and steal him from her? He had not mentioned Lime but then he would not have done; he too had once desired her, and perhaps had his reasons not to name her.

By now, having convinced herself that something was apaw between Lime and Rooster this very night. Privet was up and stanced by the portal of her tunnels wondering what, if anything, she could do.

“But I haven’t warned Lime about what Hamble said, of the need to be especially careful, and I must! Now!” That it might have waited until morning did not occur to her, nor that the true reason she wanted to go to Lime’s burrow there and then was nothing to do with her sister’s safety, and all to do with satisfying herself that her suspicions were untrue. That they might be true did not occur to her, as without more ado she hurried along the communal tunnels and turned into the less familiar ways that led to Lime s burrow. Nightmares live in fearful imagining rather than stark reality. It was simply a matter of satisfying herself that her fears were groundless; then she could go back to her burrow and sleep. Yes... it would be for the best.