“Yes, sir! Now, sir!” cried out his assistant, beginning to herd them out and away.
For a moment Privet and Thorne stared at each other. Then she came to him and reached out a paw to touch his face. It was a strange and moving gesture which brought a broken smile from the Brother Commander; her love was palpable, and in her touch, and in her eyes, was an acceptance of a depth he felt nomole had ever given him.
“May you return home safeguarded,” he found himself saying, but he knew it was what she was saying to him. Home to where a mole is loved; home to where the search is over, and the restless spirit can be still.
She turned, joined the two followers, and they were gone, and he was left staring after them and whispering to himself, “What is it I must do, mole? What is it I must do?”
Why had he let her go? Why did he feel utterly bereft now she was gone? Whatmole was she after all, to him and to all of moledom? Privet of Duncton, formerly of Crowden. He felt her touch upon his face and understood how through the power of her chosen Silence she was surely going to touch all moledom.
Evening. Night. Stars, and for a time Brother Commander Thorne abandoned his command to subordinates, to wander among the tragedy and emerging triumph that was the aftermath of Leamington. Sometimes he met moles, and they stared at him and fell away from him whispering.
“Sir!”
Not now mole, not this long night.
“Sir!”
Newborn or follower? He could not tell them apart now, for there was no difference, none at all.
“But sir!”
It was dawn, and he turned at last to attend to yet another guardmole who had come to him. An old campaigner, one of Adkin’s friends.
“Brought you some food, sir. Here, sir. Yes, you lay down there, sir.”
“Mole, there’s been others asking for me.”
“It’s no matter, sir, if Adkin was here he’d tell them to wait. They’ll wait all right. You eat this, sir, and you sleep.”
“What is it, mole?”
“Nothing, sir, you sleep now, you... It’s all right, sir, it’s been a long few days here, days we want to forget. I’ll watch over you, sir; it’s all right...”
Thorne was in a vale of tears. Those chambers, all those moles, all dead and dying, all lost. And Privet’s touch upon his face, and now, now, sleep, dark and troubled; sleep, slipping into it at last. Lost, and a paw reaching out to him, yes, oh yes.
Thorne woke to the afternoon sun. The kindly paternal guardmole, Adkin’s friend, was at his flank, tired but at the ready.
Thorne smiled.
“Better now, sir? Food here, drink over there.”
Thorne attended to his needs, and felt better than he had for molemonths past.
“Adkin’s coming, sir.”
Thorne’s assistant came hurrying – concern and then relief on his face.
“Thought we’d lost you, Thorne, sir, but... but you were looked after.”
“I was, Adkin,” said Thorne, smiling appreciatively at the guard who had watched over him.
“Well, now there’s moles come, sir, important moles,” said Adkin mysteriously and with some awe in his voice.
“Send them to me.”
“Yes, sir,” said Adkin with obvious pleasure and relief. His Brother Commander was himself again. He hurried off. Thorne stretched himself again in the sun; shadows fell, and he turned.
“Greetings, Brother Commander! I trust you slept well, for there’s work to do.”
Thorne found himself staring into the hard, glittering eyes of Chervil; with him was Brother Rolt. Behind them were ranged Chervil’s bodyguards – Feldspar, and his powerful sons Fallow and Tarn. Instinctively three of Thorne’s own guardmoles came to his flank along with Adkin, including the one who had watched over him with such sympathy and care through the night – and who would not mention his commander’s tears and strange distress to anymole, until he was old, and scribemoles tracked him down and persuaded him to talk of those times.
“Greetings,” replied Thorne, his mind as clear and purposeful as it had ever been. “Yes, there is much work to do now, and we shall do it.”
“Aye,” said Chervil, dismissing all but Feldspar, as Thorne dismissed his own guardmoles, “I believe that with your help, Brother Commander, and Brother Bolt’s here, if we act swiftly and with resolution, all is not lost. Now, listen...”
Across the surface of Leamington, and through its newly ordered tunnels, the word went out that Brother Commander Thorne, and Chervil, son of Thripp, and that important Brother Rolt, assistant to Elder Senior Brother Thripp himself, were deep in conference, and the future was being planned.
“It’s all happening now,” said the guardmole who had watched over Thorne to Tarn. “I tell you, this is where it’s at now. There’ll be things happening soon we’ll be telling our pups about one day.”
Tarn nodded his head grimly: “If we’re not pushing up daisies first!”
“Not with the Brother Commander in charge, mate. Talk about being Newborn – he looked
reborn
when he woke up this afternoon.”
“He’ll need to be if Senior Brother Chervil’s involved!” said Fallow. “Now, let’s get some food ourselves, for they’ll be talking till dusk or beyond.”
Which they did – far beyond, and into another night.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Leamington Massing was but one of many excesses that had afflicted moledom since Quail’s assumption of power at Wildenhope the previous Longest Night.
There were certainly many more such “excesses” – some well known, others that were only discovered or revealed in the years and decades following, and many that will remain ever unrecorded, unless the shadows and ill-winds that lurk still in the tunnels and vales where they took place be taken as evidence.
Certainly, few moles now venture through the broken portals and into the crumbling tunnels of such systems as Swindon, south-west of Duncton. There is every reason to believe that the complete disappearance of moles from that formerly populous system in Newborn times was accompanied by an appalling orgy of violence and extended suffering. Only screams on a wild winter’s day, and untraceable whimperings in the night, heard by frightened travellers who hurry quickly on, now tell of what once happened. All else is lost.
But evidence of an even larger and viler massing than Leamington has recently emerged at Malvern, in the Welsh Borderland, possibly involving the infamous dark-furred moles of the Forest of Dean. Many local moles, and even some visiting researchers, have said that the curious red stains on the tunnel walls, and up the lower trunks and trees of Malvern, were made by followers’ blood. Others, less superstitious, have said the cause is simply a local variety of the poisonous death-scent lichen. No matter: there is truth in fancy as well as fact, and both speak with equal force of those harsh times.
Yet morbidly fascinating though such local tragedies may be, a historian is aware that they were but symptoms of the deep and vile malaise that had overtaken moledom after Quail had supplanted Thripp as Newborn leader. Some historians have said that Quail was already suffering from a growing dementia by that fateful Longest Night at Caer Caradoc when Thripp lost power, but “dementia” is only a convenient label for a vile and evil condition of the spirit.
Much of our evidence concerning Quail at that time comes from Snyde, whose meticulous records of the high councils of the Newborns are especially detailed where Quail was concerned, indeed, obsessively so. It would seem that having weaselled. his way into Quail’s confidence, Snyde did everything he could to exploit and extend the power of his position.
What makes Snyde’s scribings so horrible for those who ken them now is his evident pleasure in Quail’s insane energy and his gradual surrender to seemingly uncontrollable rages and evil lusts. It is all too plain that Snyde saw Quail not only as master, but as an object of study as well, observing his progress into madness as dispassionately as an adder might watch the death struggles of a vole. Not only that, but Snyde and one or two others who contrived to gain Quail’s trust learned how to encourage and connive at his madness, and use it to their own advantage.
Thus, for example, did the mole Squilver, whom Thorne had demoted in Cannock, who had fled to Wildenhope in the hope of gaining advantage, have his rivals for command eliminated. This with the help of Snyde, who was aware that he himself did not have the qualities needed to take military command and was always eager to help those who did, and so gain their favour. The emergence in the third part of July of Squilver as Supreme Commander of the Newborns says as much about Snyde’s cunning and Quail’s clouded judgement as it does about the deviousness of Squilver himself.
The title “Supreme Commander” was a new one, but it was almost meaningless from the beginning since the few competent Brother Commanders in the field had taken local matters into their own paws and were openly ignoring the Crusade Council’s orders. It may seem odd that Quail should permit another to bear so exalted a title, especially a mole as relatively unknown as Squilver, when allmole knew only too well that if anymole was “Supreme Commander’, it was Quail himself. But perhaps Quail enjoyed the unctuous flattery of Squilver, and liked even more the knowledge, shared by many at Wildenhope, that one so easily raised to “supreme” command might as easily be reduced to supreme humiliation.
Yet while Squilver’s methods can never be condoned, killing to gain position seems somehow less shocking than murder for sexual gratification, which was Snyde’s predilection. We have seen already that his secret pleasures were taken with corpses, and we know now through the evidence of his own scribings that he was well aware that the decline of his master’s reason gave him the opportunity, frequently taken, of having innocent moles done to death that he might be rewarded with their cadavers. For Quail was dominated by evil lusts; in plain language, he took a sadistic delight in perverting and destroying the lives of young moles – whether male or female mattered not to him. It was now the province of the crooked and deformed Snyde, acting as his pimp, to bring these unfortunates to his private chambers, night after night.
These murderous nocturnal atrocities were an open secret in Wildenhope; allmole knew of them, though they were never discussed. Brother Advisers like the wretched Fagg, so despised by Thorne, knew well that it was part of their task to provide what were euphemistically called “Assistants to the Crusade Council” – usually young, appealing, malleable moles abducted from systems under their control. These victims (there is no better word for it) were then taken to Wildenhope and conducted into its cells by an entrance to the south-east of the system used for no other purpose.
These young moles, often deluded into thinking opportunity had come their way (though many were no doubt stricken by growing fears that only made worse the tortures to come), were then selected for use by the hierarchy of Wildenhope, beginning with Quail himself, who, towards the end of his time there, allowed the choosing to be done by Snyde. We may all too easily imagine that bent and twisted mole scurrying down the secret tunnels of Wildenhope to view the latest arrivals, eyeing them with Stone knows what filthy criterion of shape, colour, size, and raising his stunted talon to point out one or the other; no doubt too, with his perverted predilections, while he thought of them alive for Quail, he imagined them dead for himself.
From that moment of special selection on they were better dead than alive; or, if alive, better off if they came into Quail’s private chamber to find him in a killing mood. Most lived but a few hours once his brutal attentions began. But some survived for three days in that place; a few four; and one, a male from Wantage, endured eight nights of pain and terror at Quail’s malodorous paws, though he was quite mad by the end. We know all this because Snyde, utilizing his peepholes, and occasionally permitted to witness the final killing of these victims, recorded every loathsome detail.
Yes, “malodorous” is by now the correct word. The curious odour which Snyde had recorded Quail as giving out when he was enraged, increased in frequency and duration through that July, and like many other things, was an unspoken fact of life in Wildenhope. Nomole dared speak of it and Quail himself seemed not to notice. But he was fetid now, the stench connected perhaps with the foul and oily sweat that seeped from his furless skin when he grew excited or angered.
Snyde himself, who especially delighted to record in detail such obscene matters, blamed it on some unnamed illness or malignant disease. Certainly something dire was now physically wrong with Quail, of which his baldness had been but the first sign. Throughout July, in addition to the bodily odour he emitted, it became undeniably clear that slowly and inexorably swellings or growths were beginning to disfigure him.
The first noticeable one was on the left side of his face, at his jawbone; he began to look as if he held some foreign object in his mouth. This growth increased slowly and the skin covering it grew taut and shiny, in contrast to that on the rest of his head which was criss-crossed by a thousand tiny creases, like ancient bark.
The second swelling, and this less subtle, was a distended and twisted growth at his rear end which, from some angles, and in certain lights, gave the foul impression of a stool that had not been quite evacuated from his body. Whether or not he knew of its existence nomole can say: Snyde recorded its onset and its development – for it grew as Quail’s malady worsened – but it seems none ever dared mention it to Quail himself, nor heard him refer to it.
Another excrescence emerged upon his body at this time – a growth above his left eye which caused the eyelid to droop, and sometimes to close involuntarily for a moment or so.
Lastly, in this catalogue of bodily decay, so lovingly detailed in Snyde’s records, we might note that it was during that same summer that Quail’s teeth, once so white and sharp, began to discolour and fall out. Perhaps they were rotting, and certainly those moles unfortunate enough to come within range of his breath could not avoid its moist and clinging stench.
Yet, for all this, Quail had not entirely lost his power to lead, and to describe him as merely “demented” is to do him a disservice. When he was calm, and before his evening lusts overtook him, his mind was clear enough. If there was a sign of madness, it was that his decisions, always harsh and cruel, grew more so.