Duncton Rising (51 page)

“You’re to hide up here,” he said, reaching the Stones, “because Quail’s moles are afraid of the Stones.
That
much is sacred at least. I’m a bit afraid of them myself, but Duncton moles like you won’t be.”

“The Stone doesn’t harm moles,” whispered Whillan somewhat fiercely, “but a little awe doesn’t hurt.”

“As Privet would say!” said Maple, eyeing the great Stones with something like awe himself.

“Quite so,” said the mole, glancing at the Stones uneasily. “Now, follow me this way...” He veered right among a cluster of smaller Stones and then wound his way between much bigger ones, their bases lost in black shadow where the moon’s light did not reach.

Ahead, beyond where the Stones’ line ended, they saw the grass at Caer Caradoc’s north-eastern edge, silver in the moonlight and shivering with the wind which whined above them. The mole pulled them to the very edge and they stanced alongflank him and peered over what appeared a vertical drop into black nothingness which, as their eyes grew accustomed to the strange light, they saw was really a steep inhospitable slope with pits and falls, hummocks and fissures; here and there, where the slope was not too severe, the husky remnants of bracken jittered in the night wind.

But that was not all: “Look!” whispered Whillan in horror, pointing off to the right. They saw that what had seemed black shadows down the slope were the still forms of murdered moles, one on his back with his taloned paws curled up into the night air, and the moon’s light on his snout.

“Bloody murder,” whispered the old mole. “Quail’s doing. Only visitors so far: but moles like me will be lucky to survive the coming days.”

“Who are you, mole?”

The old mole turned to Whillan and said, “Who was I, you mean? I was once one of the twelve Master Brothers, as Thripp called us in the days when we had great dreams and he was definitely first among equals. None of those twelve is a Master now, and the position of Master Brother, with all its concomitants of learning, charity, leadership and, one might hope, of wisdom, has been eliminated by the Inquisitors, led by Quail. The hierarchy is dominated now by the Senior Brothers, of whom Thripp is Elder. And only the Elder Senior Brother remains stanced between Quail and the final turning of dreams to nightmares. Warned him, I did, when he made Quail a Master. “Never trust a prematurely bald mole,” said I. I’ll tell you this, moles of Duncton, if they get me I’ll be relieved to go. That things should come to such a pass!”

“You said we were to wait for Privet,” said Maple, bringing the mole back to the present.

“She’ll come up this way, hopefully. That’s the plan, anyway.” He let out another thin laugh, and peered dubiously downslope and added cryptically. That’s Brother Rolt for you! Always hopeful that it would turn out in the end! Always hopeful. Convinced that the Elder Senior Brother Thripp had a grand strategy that would transform our broken dreams back into spiritual triumph. Some hope, I would say. You have come too late, and there are too few of you. But we must keep the faith to the end, however bitter it may be. Oh, but it’s gone all wrong, all so wrong. Dreams is all it was.
You
’’ll be lucky to get out of this alive.” Then his voice changed from the despair and helplessness he obviously felt to a matter-of-fact lack of involvement: “You’re to stay here and wait and Brother Rolt will —”

He stopped quite suddenly as the soft sound of scurrying mole came to them from back beyond the Stones; he turned away from the steep drop, darted back the way they had come, peered into the clearing around which the Stones of Caradoc form a semi-circle, and turned back to the two moles. His face was transformed by a look of fierce and passionate concern, and it was evidently not for them.

“You’re to stay here!” he said.

With a half-sigh, half-sob, he went out from the protection of the Stones and turned to the right just out of sight. It was as if he had quite suddenly lost all interest in them before the call of something infinitely more important and consuming.

Maple, disinclined to call attention to himself, stayed where he was, but Whillan’s curiosity got the better of him and he crept forward among the Stones so that he could peer out unseen from their shadows to see what was apaw. Perhaps it was because he was tired, and because they had suffered two stressful days followed by this fugitive night, but what Whillan then saw had about it a dreamlike muted quality, in which a mole experiences absolutely what he sees, and his emotions are engaged by something beyond all he has ever known, and to which, as yet, he can put no name.

For there, where the old mole had gone, before one of the biggest Stones at the far end of the highest part of Caer Caradoc, he saw that a mole had come, accompanied by two others who were bent over him as if to assist him with their strength to a place of homage before the Stone. Their guide joined the strange group, talked for a moment to the mole about whom they were clustered, and then he and the other two retreated a little, leaving the one they were helping alone before the Stones.

If they were old, this one seemed ancient in the moonlight, or more than ancient. He seemed to have lived beyond age or infirmity and moved into a physical state which was all his own, and for which “age” or “infirmity” or even “death” were words too muted and too weak to express the impression that he made.

He was alive, that much Whillan could tell from the slight movement of his shaking head. His paws, though pale and wraithlike, appeared able to support his ghost of a body, if only just. The moon’s shining pallor seemed to find affinity with his frail and woefully thin body, for it made it seem almost white.

If Whillan had been looking for evil that night he did not find it here; nor blood-thirstiness, nor aggrandizement, nor any sense of worldly power and mal-intent. For from that ill and shaking mole, whose head now slowly rose so that he might gaze up at the Stones, came only a sense of awesome and ruthless spiritual purpose. Never in his life, not even with the Master Stour, had Whillan felt himself to be in the presence of a mole to whom all others were subordinate. The power of his presence was so great that it seemed almost indecent to spy on him as he began what was, quite evidently, a time of prayer and contemplation, for which the looming presence of the great Stones of Caradoc seemed entirely appropriate.

“What is it?” whispered Maple from behind, for the line of shadows and positions of the Stones were such that if he had tried to go round Whillan to get a clear view he would have had to go out into the light.

“It’s a mole,” was Whillan’s inadequate reply.

Maple’s paw eased Whillan back so that he too might take a look, and when he had done so he retreated into the deeper shadows, looked at Whillan and said, almost with wonder, “You know whatmole I think
that
is? I think that is the Elder Senior Brother Thripp.”

As Maple spoke the title Whillan realized that he did so with respect, and that a mole they had referred to throughout their long journey dismissively as “Thripp” demanded now that they entirely re-think their ideas of him.

“He is not the kind of mole I expected,” said Whillan.

“Aye, it must be Thripp,” muttered Maple after taking a second look. He was as awed as Whillan by what he saw.

For a few moments neither mole moved, but then when more whispered liturgy and prayer came from the clearing, Whillan crept back to his former vantage-point. He was reminded of how in Privet’s tale, Rooster had first caught sight of his delving Mentor, Gaunt, and seen a mole ravaged by disease and approaching death. But Thripp (and Thripp it surely was, for the rumours said he was a mole stricken by a wasting disease) did not look ill so much as like a mole whose body had been wasted by life, leaving a spirit and mind to inhabit a thin shaking thing that was barely a body at all.

But here was the remarkable thing: appalling though the impression of his body’s frailty was, a mole felt most a sense of his mental strength and spiritual purpose. Thripp seemed, indeed, like a mole who by a slow and painful process had been stripped of all but that, and the effect was made the greater by the self-evident loyalty and love shown by the three moles who attended him and who now stanced back in the shadows watching respectfully. For each shaking move Thripp made, each turn of his head, each muttered prayer, was accompanied by movements in sympathy by his companions.

For Thripp’s part, he behaved as if they were not there, pausing as he wished, lowering his head, sometimes turning a little as if to stare at this or that among the Stones. His words were indistinct, but it was Whillan’s impression that not all he said was prayer, nor even to the Stone. He seemed also to be thinking out aloud, and using the Stones there as a mole might use others to have a conversation with about an issue that greatly concerned him which he could not resolve alone. It was almost as if, having failed to find living moles to counsel him, he had turned to the Stones for guidance.

As Whillan watched he noticed two more things. One was the curious fact that it was hard to distinguish Thripp’s face, for though it turned sometimes into moonlight it seemed enshadowed, an impression greatly increased by the fact that his eyes were deep-set and hard to make out.

Secondly, and more remarkably, was the fact that the presence of Thripp was such that he seemed to have the power to slow down time, and bring a calm about the place in which he stanced. Until now, for Whillan and Maple, the night had been one of rush and stress, but here before the Stones, Thripp changed all that.

As Whillan was pondering this point, and wondering why it might be so, Thripp turned slowly away from the Stone in his direction and appeared, suddenly, to be gazing straight at him, to his considerable alarm. Whillan could only stance quite still and hope that he was not seen among the shadows; but if he was not, then what was it at which Thripp seemed to be staring?

Face-on he was a bigger mole than Whillan had first thought, or the outline of his head and shoulders showed that he must once have been of good size. Whillan dared hardly breathe, as peering more closely at where he stanced, Thripp slowly raised his head so that the moonlight was shining on his face, and into his deep-set eyes.

It was then, for the first time, that Thripp came fully alive to him, and he saw a quality in his eyes so powerful, so alluring, that he understood in an instant why so many moles had followed Thripp to Caradoc, and why a new generation had accepted his teachings concerning the Stone; and why, despite the rising challenge of the younger Quail, he must still hold power.

They were not the eyes of a cold sectarian mole such as Whillan and Maple had been taught by all they had heard that he must be. His eyes were pale and clear, as of a mole who had once seen a vision so potent and magical that nothing else could ever matter to him. It was a vision of order, and of love; a view of moledom in which moles abided by the Stone’s ways and willingly lived out their lives in its long shadow.

But Whillan saw more than that. There was, too, the hint of ruthlessness, of a belief in his vision that would have no patience with others who did not, or could not, share his view. Yes, there was impatience that others could not see the vision as clearly as he had. All this Whillan saw and absorbed, and understood in that breathless moment when Thripp gazed on him but did not see him. In the moments after he saw something more, for the moon’s cold light caught well the way that time, and bitter experience, had etched into Thripp’s face a slow dispiriting understanding that his vision was not going to be realized, and that something else was happening, something beyond his control which frightened and concerned him.

It’s about that he was praying to the Stone,” said Whillan to himself, astonished at his own calmness and clarity of thinking at such a moment. “He wants to change things, he’s determined to change things and he won’t yield up finally to his infirmity until he has!” Whillan had no doubt that his insights were correct.

Thripp turned back to the Stone, and then raised a paw and whispered a name, bringing to his flank the old mole who had earlier acted as guide to Whillan and Maple. The two whispered for a time and then the old mole stanced back, stared to where Whillan thought himself hidden and then hurried over to him.

“Oh dear,” he whispered irritably, “I did tell you to lie low. The Elder Senior Brother saw you there and wondered which mole you were. You are the Whillan one, are you not?”

Whillan nodded, his heart thumping in his chest.

“Well come along then, come along, now the Elder Senior Brother’s seen you, he wants to talk to you.”

But before he led Whillan into the clearing he emitted one of his laughs and followed it with a most strange aside: “He’s always looking for a mole he can never find, you see, one who can treat him equally. A mole like him craves ordinariness but can never have it, nor find others who are ever in anything but awe of him. They say he found one once, but that was all lost. All lost to him, and yet still he searches. Perhaps you are that mole. Ha! Well, well, mole, so he must spend time with you before he’s disappointed once again!”

Nervously, and feeling foolish for having been discovered, Whillan went out into the light of the clearing and made his way towards Thripp. Behind him, he heard Maple move forward and knew he would watch over him lest any trick or attack be attempted, though in his heart the younger mole knew none would be. Time was standing still, all was calm, and he had never felt so safe in all his life as in the presence of this strange inspired mole, and the circle of the Stones of Caradoc.

Uncertain what to say, Whillan said nothing, but stanced respectfully still facing Thripp, who gazed steadily at him in an enquiring and sympathetic way.

After what seemed a very long silence he said quietly, “A long time ago I had a dream about Duncton Wood. I dreamt it was the place to which I must lead the others. It was the place where the long and troubled history of modern moledom, which has been about rediscovering the Silence of the Stone, began, and would end, and a new beginning be made.”