Duncton Rising (54 page)

“Didn’t,” he said at last. “Didn’t kill him.”

It was cold comfort, and how long they looked into each other’s eyes nomole can be quite sure. Even Madoc, the only witness who left a record of that moment, did not know herself. Longer, she thought, than moles might think.

Nor can we know what Privet or Rooster thought at this ominous and potent first meeting after so many years; except that Madoc believed that each felt that here and now was not the time to say more than had been said: “Rooster,” and “Didn’t”. Nor had he killed the mole, who was free to tell the tale in better days, in better places, to moles who could never quite believe a word he said.

At last the moment passed and Rooster turned from Privet as if he wished her away from there, stared malevolently at those who followed him and roared, “Only two females. Mean no harm. Won’t tell. We go.”

“Hamble’s not with us,” said one of the moles. “We’ve lost him.”

“He left,” said Rooster, “going now!” And off across the slope they went, contouring on as Privet and Madoc had intended to, all suddenly gone. Madoc’s record shows that Privet said one more thing before she too moved, not after him, but straight up the slope towards the Stones.

She said quietly, “If Rooster had killed that mole, he would have killed me, he would have killed us all. Madoc, my dear, stay close, be strong; the way to the Stone will be so hard. It will be so many years before we reach it.” Then, Madoc says, she wept the tears of a mole who has come to the edge of the void, stared over, and seen the darkness as it might have been.

Madoc stayed close, and supportive, understanding in those moments of insight that the journey she was making up the slope was very different from that of her companion. For Privet this was no journey of escape, but a casting-off, a preparation, a night of dying, and Madoc sensed that she was needed.

“It was then my own fear left me,” she scribed later, “for I felt as a mother feels when she accompanies a pup into a dark place of which it is afraid. The mother too might feel fear, but she cannot let it frighten her away, and does not, but finds courage for the pup’s sake. So I found courage for Privet’s sake, because I realized that the journey she had begun long, long before I knew her, was fearful indeed, and made my concerns of Newborns, or steep slopes, or great blundering grikes, seem nothing much at all... Her needs that night gave me courage to continue at her flank.”

For a time at least they made progress, though it was slow. Rooster was long gone, the crashing and then rustling of him and his small group fading off around the slope as they continued up it. Then the night deepened and became heavy with the sense of movement above and below, to right and to left, and of fearful moles. There were cries of command, cries of pain, cries of heartbreak, and the callings of moles one to another as one lost another, or a group became separated from one of its members and there was no time to go in search, no time at all.

The sky stayed generally clear and bright; the moon rose higher, the stars glittered and sparkled, and all moledom stretched out below them into a distant darkness, across which here and there the gazes of a few roaring owls went, yellow in the silver night. The air grew cold and still.

Twice so far the two moles had crossed the paths of others who had for one reason or another gone on by. The feeling that this gave them, to which Privet had given the Word “invisible’, increased now as they came across other parties. At one place further up the slope, a troop of silent dejected moles, some wounded about the head and shoulders, came stumbling past them, led by a Newborn, flanked by two more, and followed up by a fourth. They seemed to be going down into captivity and though Privet and Madoc made scant effort to hide themselves, they saw them not, but simply went by like ghosts in the night, unseeing, silent, all appearing doomed to play a part from which they could not escape.

This was the first of several such groups coming down from Caer Caradoc above, and the third and largest group came so close that the two females might have been trodden on and crushed into the rough rocky slope had they not backed off and lain low. Even then they seemed not to be seen.

It was at this enforced halt that Madoc remembered Privet turning to her and saying, “It is all true, Madoc, what happens when moles turn from the Stone. Now talk to me.”

For a time then Privet lowered her snout, her eyes open; with Madoc whispering at her side, she stared unseeing into the night, listening to Madoc telling of Bowdler and the Newborn way with females that Madoc had told her about earlier.

“They did these things, all these things? They do them still?”

“It is common knowledge.”

“Brother Squelch, Brother Quail the Inquisitor. All of them... Tell me all you know,” said Privet quietly; and Madoc did.

“But not Brother Rolt?” whispered Privet towards the end, near despair.

“He’s a kind mole, he’s not one of them. We see little of him, and the old Master Brothers as they were called. No, they’re not part of it.”

Privet stared at nothing as Madoc spoke, and fretted impatiently when Madoc stopped talking and tried to move them on, not wishing to stir until she heard it all. Historians may well speculate why it was that Privet seemed increasingly to wish – to need – to pause and think, even to live through, matters which even now are too obscene, too disturbing, for ordinary moles to contemplate.

Yet so she appears to have done. It is enough only to hint at these things that a mole may know that Privet did not shrink from unpalatable truths, and may understand that through the long time of her ascent of Caer Caradoc she was perhaps making a passage through many things that she might come nearer to a vision of the Stone’s Light and Silence.

Let us be plain, but mercifully brief. What Madoc had told her was simply this: the relationship between Confessed Sisters and Senior Brothers that Privet herself had witnessed and experienced at Blagrove Slide had become corrupted at Caer Caradoc, and the evil mole who sanctioned the corruption, who created it, was Brother, Quail.

The mating of Senior Brothers with sisters as Privet had known it was not all bad – she herself had experienced ecstasies and pleasures she had not known before, or since, flawed and ruined though they were by the stealing of her young, and the possibility that her female pups had been killed. That possibility, however, seemed less, from what

Rolt had said. At least, there was hope for some. But with Quail’s ascendancy the corruption of the selected males became possible and perhaps inevitable, corruption and control of mind through body, and certain of the Senior Brother Inquisitors had preferences and skills that way. Even this might be tolerated, almost. But what was certainly obscene and evil was the fate of those poor male pups who through weakness of intellect or natural timidity failed to pass the tests of education and achievement which the Senior Brothers and Inquisitors set for them.

For Brother Quail desired that only the best male pups be recruited to his hierarchy of Inquisitors, which meant that as he gained power all others were, by definition, second-best, and therefore, in the twisted minds and logic of those Quail gathered about himself, no longer mole, and therefore to be used and abused as seemed best.

Many became the Newborn guards already spread so widely across moledom – cold, efficient in their way, willingly subordinate to the Inquisitors and Senior Brothers, punitive in their attitude to any of their own kind who, showing a spark of individuality perhaps, transgressed their own harsh vows and rules. From such moles came the strettenings.

This much Privet may well already have guessed, though Madoc confirmed it. What she had not known, and her new friend made incontrovertible, was what happened to those pathetic male pups, often weak, very vulnerable, who failed even to have potential as Newborn guards.

Of these Squelch was not only the disgusting prototype but the arch-abuser, and it was common knowledge who he was: Quail’s own son. But worse: he was neither male nor female, but both, as indicated by his high voice, his untoward obesity, his corrupted caresses of anymole unfortunate enough to come into his power.

Hushed, whispered, shaming even to utter, was the account Madoc gave Privet of how Squelch came to be made what he was when Quail vented his rage filthily on him when he realized he would never be a “proper” brother. Or so moles said. Aye, moles had best avert their gaze, or move on past this moment in our tale if they are squeamish, or too innocent, too trusting, to accept that what mole will do to mole at times beggars belief. In his anger, in his rage, in the humiliation he felt the pup Squelch’s slowness imposed on him, Quail ravaged his own son, and in whatever moments of evil ecstasy he thereby found, he bit him deep enough to leave the scars that his subsequent obesity made seem mere folds in flesh and fur. By the time the youngster’s screams were done he could be, he would be, normal no more.

It was then, said Madoc, that for the first time Squelch did what he did supremely well – he sang. He sang his grief and shame, and to that sad theme his singing often returned, especially after he had vented his urges on some poor young mole, as Quail had on him. Then he sang so well, so beautifully, that moles wept to hear him.

So Squelch survived, and incredibly he was if anything yet closer to his father, yet more eager to please him. He grew, he fattened; his falsetto singing was perfect, but his drives were strange, cruel, terrible. Whether from remorse, or a need to find an outlet for his own wilder fantasies. Brother Quail began to yield to his son’s importunate demands for, yes, young, vulnerable pups, male or female, who like him were not going to be Inquisitors, nor grow to be Newborn guards.

Nor did many of them ever have the chance once Squelch had had his way with them, and played with them, and corrupted them until, growing bored, eager for a new plaything – which his father would most willingly provide – he ended their puphood, and in some cases their maleness, for ever. The screams that marked that vile rite of passage into neuterdom Madoc herself heard more than once.

So there was a third kind of mole, called the “suborns” in the slang of Bowdler. They spoke strangely, were slow and fat, and generally cruel; but where the sisters were concerned they were very safe indeed, and an errant Newborn guard might well watch out, for the fate worse than death that he might suffer, worse than any strettening, was that Brother Quail might yield to Squelch’s persistent but mercifully rarely satisfied plea, that a guard’s punishment might be that he be “given” to the suborns...

There! That was the heart and root of Quail’s corruption of Caradoc, the known secret, the matter which, Madoc informed Privet, the Elder Senior Brother, by then already strangely ailing, did not at first know about; and when he did it was too late to act.

It was Privet’s wish to contemplate these unpleasant realities during the pause in their journey of ascent, and no doubt they shocked her. But, if Thripp had discovered these things, no wonder he sent his son Chervil to the safe haven of Duncton Wood; no wonder too, as Madoc believed, he had been seeking out some way of ridding the Caradocian Order of the monster that had taken effective power over it.

These things Privet pondered, along with others which had to do, as Madoc rightly guessed, with her long journey to Caradoc, which began, she now saw, before even her own birth, in moledom’s modern history.

“Madoc,” whispered Privet sometime in that night, “I want to tell you about a mole you may barely have heard of, the Eldrene Wort.”

“I know her,” said Madoc. “She persecuted the Stone Mole, she —”

“She did. But she did more. She found the Stone’s forgiveness. I want to tell you a little about that because... because I think
that’s
where my journey began. She was my grandmother and she scribed a Testimony and, oh Madoc, I want to tell somemole now...”

“Tell me, then,” said Madoc.

The night wore on with memory and movement, chance and change. But at the end of Privet’s telling of Wort and how she sought a way to communion with an unborn mole – who Privet thought must be herself – they heard more screams, and the thumping down of what they were sure were bodies amongst the rocky outcrops across the slopes above.

“Not ready yet,” whispered Privet finally. “I am without my grandmother’s final courage and unable to go higher now. No more, no more...”

She spoke like a mole dreaming, and when Madoc, thinking to help, put a paw to hers, she pushed her away with unexpected strength.

“Must go the way Rooster did, down, down, not ready for Caradoc yet. Not quite.” And she did, with poor Madoc utterly confused, looking up now and then as they went down and thinking that if they had to climb up that way once more she would be unable to.

“Please, Privet, I won’t have the strength of courage to come this way again —”

“Sssh!” said the now-strange Privet, “and be still.”

They crouched down again for no reason Madoc could see or hear and Privet said, “I heard a mole calling me, I’m sure I did.”

Was it then that Brother Quail came by? Just above them, almost within touching distance, in almost total silence, his bald head a smaller version of the moon that made it shine, his eyes dark slits, his snout sensual, leading ten Newborn guards the way Rooster had gone. What made the sight of him, and them, so terrifying was that they were all running in the same deadly swift and silent way that told the watching moles their purpose was pursuit and capture, their intention to kill the moles they found.

Worse came at the end of this venomous procession: Chervil! His fur glossier and more abundant than the others’, his profile somehow cleaner, his presence brooding, and as he ran quick little bursts of breath came from him. Then they were gone, off into the night of menace and murder; a night darker now, for the moon had begun to set. No sooner were they gone than Privet stanced up and began to go on downslope with Madoc following and protesting as they went.

“I thought we were going up, not down. Up there. To the Stones. We’re just wandering about.”