Duncton Rising (21 page)

So on she hurried, ever faster, thinking only of how weak her words would sound on waking Lime at such an hour of the night – or dawn rather, for day was breaking now, and the light from the entrances she passed made the tunnel seem a gloomy, still place. Whilst out on the surface above all was silent, the fighting over for now;
everything
silent, but for the patter of Privet’s busy paws, and the thumping of her heart.

She stopped, and nearly turned back, suddenly painfully aware of her true reason for coming here, and feeling it unworthy to have such thoughts. It was almost day, and when she next saw Rooster she could try to break through the embarrassments and barriers, tell him she loved him, reach out to him, and soon, during the coming afternoon and night perhaps, they could retreat to the privacy of their tunnels and... make love. As other moles. Hamble had been right – it was time.

Thinking these more cheerful thoughts she turned away, and would have gone back; but just then, coming down the still tunnels, she heard – what? Lime’s voice? A nightmare become reality?

It
was
Lime’s voice. And what it asked was, “More...”

Silence, rustles, a deep chuckle or perhaps a groan.

“More, my love...” said Lime again.

Privet’s heart seemed to stop utterly for a moment, but then as she crept forward towards those sounds of love it started such a thumping barrage in her chest that others might almost have heard it beat.

“Want more,” Privet heard Rooster say. Agony, anger, violent thoughts were Privet’s now.

Then, “Yessss...” in Lime’s voice, and the beginning of a cry of ecstasy, and a strange groaning roar which must be,
was.
Rooster.

Privet crept on, driven by the terrible need to be sure, even though she knew already from the sounds of love alone, on and on until she came to a side tunnel whence the gasping, violent passionate sounds of love came forth.

Drawn in by the inexorable need to be sure, to witness, to
see,
she ducked under Lime’s portal and went to the entrance of the chamber where they were. Grey the light, loud and violent their gasps, and then, when she went near and stanced boldly and looked, she saw a sight nomole should see: her beloved taking another in his great grasp and giving her all, as she takes all, and taking her all as she in turn gives it, and more.

“More!”

Limbs, fur, snouts, opened mouths, gasps, moans, stressing, sliding, insinuating talons that caressed, and held, in forms and shapes that made two bodies one – grotesque and most horrible to the watcher who stood apart.

A nightmare then, fears come alive, jealous thoughts confronted with the naked, savage truth. Then worse still, she saw that the heaving corporeal coupling that she watched, watched her. It had a pair of opening eyes. As Privet froze in horror, part of that writhing thrusting body took shape and meaning; eyes gazed at her, wide, surprised, and then, more terribly still, triumphant.

Privet stared into Lime’s eyes, and Lime found perverse pleasure in being seen, as Rooster mounted her and entered her again and roared out his pleasure, not knowing he was watched. Then, worse yet, Lime’s eyes flickered with her mounting pleasures, and slowly closed as she yielded up to what Rooster gave her, yet had never given Privet; and Lime turned to him, and ignoring Privet, encouraged him with touch and teeth and writhing limbs.

“More!” she screamed.

Then Privet turned from the hateful, sickening sight, turned blindly away and ran for the dawning light of the surface, to escape from the suffocation of the chambers and tunnels and what she had seen, which was the end for her.

Numb, blind, broken, wild, filled with the hopeless desire to rip what she had seen from mind and memory.

where it burned and tormented her, she broke out on to the surface, and floundered eastward, towards where the Ratcher moles were encamped. Perhaps she screamed; perhaps she cried. Whatever sound she made, any watching mole on either side would have heard her, and known of her coming. Indeed, a Crowden guardmole turned to repel what he thought was an assault from behind as Librarian Privet, running wild and maddened, charged upon him along the way that led amongst Rooster’s dark delvings and out of the defences and then beyond to the mortal danger of Ratcher’s lines.

“You can’t!” he cried as she ran past, pushing him with violent strength. “They’re nearby, they’ve got another of our moles! You
can’t
!”

She reached the delvings before he could stop her, and raising her paws to them curled her talons and scored viciously down and then across, making the worst Dark Sound anymole had ever heard, made more dreadful still by her savage laughter, which mocked the sound and chased it into echoes of hatred and betrayal.

“Tell Rooster where I’ve gone,” she cried out to the guard with a wild laugh, “you’ll find him having Lime,” before running on and out through the last exit, to the exposed ground beyond and the besieging grikes.

They caught her easily enough – indeed, so careless was she, so desperate to escape the pain that Crowden represented for her now, that she welcomed the cautious advance of the first grike that saw her, and minded not his rough handling, and the way he pushed and shoved her into the area in which they had established themselves. She saw crude scrapes, a place where moles had groomed and defecated, and a low peaty bank on which two grikes lay wounded, one grey of snout and near death, the other with a limb that had been broken. All seemed no more than a dream, and she was, so far, quite unafraid. Moles stared at her intrigued, and if she saw lust and amusement in their eyes, she did not care.

“Take me to Red Ratcher,” she said, wincing at the strong hold the grike had on her.

Moles gathered about her; some prodded her lewdly, others stared, cold and malevolent, and all had the rancid smell of ungroomed bodies.

“Take her to Grear,” said a senior-looking mole. “He’ll know what to do with her.”

There were more crude laughs, and comments about how skinny she was, how small, how pointed her snout. If this was a Crowden female no wonder the Crowden males were failing...

Perhaps it was only then she began to feel afraid. Anger had carried her this far but now, as she was hustled along, she realized she had come to a place from which she would not escape. She heard a scream, turned a comer, and saw a mole laid out on his back; over him another loomed, raised his taloned paw and then thumped down hard into the tender parts between the mole’s pale, soft belly and left hindpaw.

It was a Crowden mole being tortured, screaming and jabbering, as grikes stanced about him, staring and bored, watching as the biggest of them questioned him. Some did not even watch, but ate worms carelessly; one even dozed. She knew even before he turned that the torturer was Grear. She recognized his rough fur with its russet tinge, and the great back, and the power; it might almost have been a slightly smaller version of Rooster she stared at. One last moment of defiance made her stance proud as Grear turned round to look at her, but then she saw his eyes, cold, hard, and pitiless, and she was struck still with fear, and the horror of where she was and what she had done.

Grear stared at her for a moment, turned back to what he was doing, and said to his victim, “The defences, mole, we want to know what you can tell us and then we might stop.”

The mole was crying now, huddled, bloody, shaking, and trying vainly to protect his softer parts and face and snout from the talons poised over him. Grear ordered another to carry on the vile work and turned back to her.

“Well?” His voice was deep.

“We found this mole —”

“A female?” Light glistened in Grear’s eye. He reached a bloody paw to her, played roughly with her face, and then caressed her flanks appraisingly.

“Take her to my father. She’s too small for me. Ask him not to kill her for when he’s done she’ll talk.
Explain
that to him or otherwise he’ll do what he usually does with females and kill her in the act.” He hunched forward and down towards her like a shadow from the sky. “What do you know, mole? Eh?”

“Nothing,” faltered Privet, her mind a blank.

He laughed. “They all know “nothing” until asked the right way.”

The Crowden mole nearby uttered a heartrending, hopeless cry as he suffered another talon-thrust; it was the cry of one abandoned, even by the Stone, and echoed what Privet was beginning to feel in her heart.

He
knew nothing until we asked him the right questions, then the answers started coming,” said Grear calmly. “Now? He has nothing left but the need to scream and, perhaps, to draw out his fellows from behind their strange defences to seek to rescue him. He is our bait. And you...” Grear’s eyes narrowed. “You may be our pleasure. But my father had best have you first, or he’ll object.”

He turned away.

“You missed a treat there, Grear!” she heard a mole say ironically as she was led away.

“A small treat,” said Grear, laughing, “yet... strange she should come.”

Numb, numb, numb. Privet’s feelings in the time that followed – an endless time of brute sound and mole, of odours and cries, of stares and vile touches, and a world that shook because she could not stop shivering. She slept, she woke to a mole hitting her, she slept again. Then she was dragged to a quieter place, where a vile old mole brooded and stared at her with cruel lust and then turned on her with such savagery that her world began to turn blank and dark.

Chapter Ten

Privet regained consciousness to the violent grip of talons at her face. Unable to move, shocked and in pain, she struggled to open her eyes, only to be half blinded by sun. Then the red-eyed face of the vile mole blocked light out as it came close and stared at her.

“What’s yer name, mole?”

“Privet.”

His teeth were yellow, and the stench of his fetid breath made her retch; his eyes were the most evil she had ever seen; his face had Rooster’s furrows and shadows, and in his fur was that same russet tinge. She had seen Rooster in Grear; now he loomed over her in the form of Red Ratcher.

“Scared?”

She nodded.

He grinned malevolently. “I would be,” he said. He turned on the two moles who stanced nearby, watching. “Bugger off.”

She stared immobile and mute and watched his paw, rough and gnarled, reach out even before the others had gone. It grasped her flank, its talons curled painfully into her flesh, it groped and gripped at her and his huge ugly head was near, and his breath hot and vile on her face and clustering in her snout like filth.

“Is this dying?” she asked herself, as he slowly drew her more and more tightly to him, “is this the dark and fearful way of death?”

She screamed as sudden pain was like a talon in her, hard and piercing, and her eyes filled with tears that felt like blood.

He made a sound of sorts, a filthy guttural baying sound, and his breath and teeth and moist tongue were at her face and then shifting to her back, and she knew he was going to take her then and there, going to hurt her like Rooster hurt Lime only
that
was not hurt, that was... The pain again, deep and mortal, pain a mole cannot forget, and then he laughed, and bit her back; his great paws slid down her flanks on either side and his full weight was on her, at her haunches, crushing her, and the pain was pushing deep at her, terrible, and she was drowning in a sea of dark, wild, forbidding agony, screaming as she sank into a humiliation that she had never known a mole could suffer, nor another create.

“NOOOO!” But it was not her voice.

Ratcher’s movement over her stopped, and she felt his paws hasten and scrabble from her, and the pain withdrew. She was buffeted aside by a violent blow across her head, and the clouds about her grew darker still; the voice she had heard began shouting and screaming in rage.

“NO!” The tone was deep, angry – and familiar.

She turned, strove to see, then crawled further back into the shadow of a peat hag, expecting that at any moment his paw would take her once again; none touched her, while struggle and raging filled the space about her. As the pain in her haunches lessened her vision cleared; she tried to focus her eyes, succeeded at last, and saw Ratcher, snarling, staring, talons out, his body hunched against a foe far greater than himself.

“No!” she had time to cry in vain as the full horror of the scene became clear to her – a horror greater than the obscene death she had been about to die. She saw Rooster rampant. Rooster with his great paws raised high above Ratcher’s head, the talons pointed and ready to strike the life from those red eyes for ever.

“NOOOO!” she cried, knowing it was too late.

The Master of the Delve’s delving paw descended, talons out, and before her gaze it seemed to travel so slowly that she saw, or seemed to see, every detail of its strike, and to hear every slow moment of Rooster’s blood-lust roar. Ratcher’s head shot back as the thrusting talons burst into it, and smashed it; then the bloodied paw rose again and struck down where Ratcher’s head was already rent, his eyes already smashed and dead.

“NOOO!” roared Rooster, and his strike went into that vile old body and burst its bag of fleshy fur and blood and bone. Rooster’s paws and face and shoulders were turned red with his father’s life before he raised the body up and hurled it out across the Moors. Then he reared and turned, and found himself staring at four great grikes who now faced him, amongst them his brother Grear.

In the numbed and silent world from which Privet watched the tragedy unfolding before her, it seemed to her that the outcome of the fight was inevitable, and events moved forward with the same slow unstoppable power of the black storm she and Rooster had once watched crossing the Moors near Hilbert’s Top. Perhaps the quartet of huge moles who now advanced upon him did not think quite the same thing, but they must have felt a certain trepidation arising from what had just happened, unknown to Privet, and from the bloody evidence that Rooster had just hurled from him with such power and disgust.