Duncton Stone (54 page)

Though Quail’s voice was weak, he was playing now, foreplaying. It was true that he dreaded the night
alone,
and could no longer fall into sleep until he had satisfied his lusts. But since he was not alone, and had no intention of being so, fear was not what he now felt so much as pleasant expectation. It was a game that Snyde, his pimp, counter-pointed to perfection by hesitating, titillating, and then, at the right moment, providing.

“Master,” he said smoothly, “do you not wish simply to sleep on your last night, without interruption?”

Quail laughed loudly at the absurdity of it. Then, when Snyde held back just a moment too long his eyes hardened and his voice found its usual edge. The games were over.

“Snyde, what have you for me?”

“Female, master. Untouched. Welsh. Young.”

“Frightened?”

“Very.”

Quail smiled once more, a cruel, sadistic smile.

“She awaits your pleasure,” said Snyde.

“Send her to me.”

“And after?”

“Yours, yours this night. Services well rendered. But see about that other matter first.”

Snyde left him, and signalled to the guardmoles nearby to bring the female, who approached him as if it was he whom she had been sent to pleasure. Which though it might later be true, was not yet so. She was shaking, and as she reached Snyde her eyes widened in horror at the sight of the distended fur across his twisted knobbly back, and his skewed snout.

“Take her in to him,” said Snyde.

“Come to me, my dear,” said a voice behind them both.

Impatient, Quail had come to welcome her through his portal, and stanced now staring, his mouth open in a ghastly smile, his eyes like bloody holes in his shining head, his eyelid drooping, his few discoloured teeth glistening with spit.

The female gasped and began to cry and struggle.

“Come, my dear,” said Quail, and his talons were sharp and vicious at her back and haunch as he hauled her into the darkness of his den; her fearful cry echoed down the tunnels ahead, as Snyde, chuckling, went on his busy way.

Dawn, and a glow of rising sun lit the summer grasses of Wildenhope.

An old mole surfaced, preceded by two guards, flanked by two more, and followed by a fifth and a sixth. He paused momentarily and breathed in the clear air. It was Thripp.

“Where are we going?” His eyes narrowed against the unfamiliar light, but they were pale and clear, and filled with calm resignation. “Has my time come on such a day as this?” he mused, staring across the water-meadows to where the river, the place of punishment, waited. He had been confined so long below he had forgotten the glory of a summer dawn. “Have they fattened me up for this?

“Where?” he asked again, his voice gentle yet compelling.

“A long way, sir,” muttered one of the guards, glancing at the others as if to say, “we must tell him
something
.”

Thripp frowned for a moment, thinking. A long way, and they were turning from the meadowlands to go north along the bluff, which led, he knew, to the two-foot crossing-place.

A long way...

Newborn code for death? Was he to be finally disappeared? The sun grew warmer with every moment and the nightmare of his moleyears of confinement in Wildenhope receded with each step on the springy turf, each glistening of light in grass and thistle, each shimmer of the river that flowed slowly southwards in the vale to his right.

A long way...

“We’re going to Duncton Wood, sir,” whispered the guardmole, “think you can make it?”

“Duncton...” whispered Thripp, his snout lowering with emotion before he nodded almost imperceptibly to the friendly guard.

Duncton... and the sun rose in the east, bright and clear, warm and good, and its rays troubled the portals of Wildenhope, and harried at the last screams and tears, and drove them away, and half-blinded Snyde as he watched Thripp’s departure, with Fagg at his flank.

“Going to his death, isn’t he?” said Fagg.

“He should have been killed moleyears ago,” snarled Snyde. “As long as he’s alive he’s a rallying-point.”

Fagg grinned. “As I say, he’s going to his death. Squilver’s arranged it all. Watch him go, for when he’s out of sight of here he’s history.”

“I’d have preferred to have seen him dead with my own eyes,” said Snyde with a twisted smile, “but the master would not have it so, or any other way but this.”

“The master...” began Fagg.

“... is weak where Thripp is concerned,” said Snyde. “How else would he be? He
said
he wanted Thripp at Duncton Wood, but he is too kind, too generous. Our duty lies in thinking and doing for him what he cannot for himself

“Aye,” purred Fagg, his eyes bright with the power of it all.

“Aye,” whispered Snyde, thinking that here, this dawn, on Wildenhope Bluff, the rising sun found him as powerful as a mole could be.

“Aye,” said Snyde again, as Thripp was lost from view, “all shall be well.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“She seems so
sad
,” Hodder whispered to Arliss on the second evening of their departure from Leamington, casting a worried glance at Privet who, ever silent, stared now across a darkening vale. “Are we doing right to take her this way?”

Arliss stared at their charge, no more certain than her brother.

“If only she would just say
something
,” she said, “something to show we are doing the right thing.”

But to where can moles lead one whose journey is inward, whose voice is silent, and whose face betrays nothing but a wistful longing to reach a goal which has no name?

“I feel we’re... we’re intruding.”

“We may be,” said Arliss frowning, “but she seems grateful when we do things for her, like finding her food when we stopped this evening. She seems almost lost somewhere, lost and trying to find where to go.”

“I don’t even know whether to talk to her or not.”

They fell silent, watching Privet, and then looking beyond her to the mauve sky in which stars began to prick out one by one as the valley below lost its form and colour in the gathering gloom. So deep was the silence of the twilight, so immense the starlit sky above them, that they hardly noticed when Privet turned back towards them from the spot to which she had retreated for a time.

When they did, she was already coming slowly towards them, her thin body struck with strange light, her eyes as bright as the reflection of stars in deep water. They were transfixed, breathless, hushed by her coming. Her face-fur shone with tears and never had they been looked on so gently in their lives. She reached a paw to each of them, though whether to seek reassurance, or to give it, they were not sure.

“We don’t know what to do,” whispered Hodder, his normally confident Rollright voice faltering and quiet.

Privet stared at him.

“We don’t know what you want,” added Arliss. “We want to help, we want to know... to know we’re doing the right thing. We don’t even know where you want to go or what you need.”

“If only you could speak, just for a moment, to tell us, to help us,” said Hodder, his voice suddenly hopeful. It seemed such a simple thing, such a harmless thing, just a word of...

Reassurance; it was Privet who was giving it to them.

“You don’t even know who we are, or where we’re from.”

“We could tell you that...”

Their words, their explanations, tumbled out, and all their story too; the horrors they had seen, the fears they had felt, the courage and faith that had kept them together and alive; and the miracle of their freedom now, and the task they had been given, for which they felt so inadequate.

Then, when they had said what they must, and the night had darkened and deepened still more, and Privet had not withdrawn her touch from them, they fell slowly into silence for a time.

“Feel better,” said Hodder, ruminatively.

“Feel more certain now,” said Arliss.

“We thought it was a trick or something by that Thorne to let us go, but it wasn’t.”

“I didn’t think you were really Privet of Duncton when they first said your name,” said Arliss with the incredulous laugh of a mole who wonders how she could have been so silly as to doubt something that now seemed so evidently true. “Of course you’re Privet. You couldn’t be anymole-else.”

“We’ve got to decide where to take you, haven’t we?” said Hodder rhetorically. “Well, I think —”

“
I
think we should go by way of whatever Stones we can find.”

“That’s what I was going...”

Arliss grinned in the night. Hodder laughed lightly, easy with his sister.

“
Eventually
,” he said heavily, daring her to interrupt him again, “we’ll go to Duncton, like Thorne said. But slowly, safely, beyond the ken of anymole. We’re good at that. It was only by chance we were caught. If you’ll only trust us...”

“If you’ll believe in us we’ll see you home to Duncton safeguarded. We will!”

They sensed that Privet did not doubt it, and she took her paws from theirs at last, and turned back to look at the sky.

“There is somewhere you want us to go, isn’t there?” said Hodder. “There
is
,” he added for the benefit of Arliss.

“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly, “and we’ll find it, we
will
.”

But Privet had gone below ground to sleep.

Those summer months of late June and early July, when Privet travelled south in the protection of Hodder and Arliss of Rollright, and they learned in the bleak wilderness of her silence to begin to trust themselves, was a time that moles all across the land remembered as oppressive and full of perils.

Yet, in fact, the weather was fine and warm, though enough rain fell to green the trees and fill out the hedges with leaf and blossom. But when oppression and peril are in moles’ hearts, it is hard to see the light of the sun, or feel the warmth of its rays. All the more so as the moles whom the early success of the Newborns had elevated to power began to surrender to the brutal demands of ambition and warped self-righteousness, and fell victim to the inner decay that comes when inspirational leadership gives way to bullying and contempt by the oppressor for his victims’ weakening struggles against his greater force.

So Hodder and Arliss might well wonder where to go and what to do, across a landscape of systems where the Newborns seemed to them increasingly to hold all power, and the voice of protest and revolt to be muted and fading. Well might they be uncertain when they knew that one false turn, one mistake, could put them back into the power of moles from whom their escape, and their new-found task, seemed but a lucky chance that would not be repeated.

It did not occur to them that in its wisdom the Stone had known how to find just the right two moles for the task of protecting Privet in those perilous months. Though they came from Rollright, a system that like Duncton Wood itself had always provided its share of courageous moles to stance up boldly without fear or favour, and fight for the rights of the Stone’s traditional followers, they did not pause to consider that they were part of a great tradition. They had a task, perhaps the greatest of their lives, and they would fulfil it as best they could.

It cannot be said that before they met Privet, Hodder and Arliss were deeply spiritual. Their faith was simple, their observance of the rituals of worship straightforward, and their spirit that of moles who have been reared to be loyal to their system and their kin, and to trust the Stone boldly, and with good hearts. Yet as the days went by in Privet’s silent company both found themselves drawn to thoughts of the spirit they had never had before, let alone expressed, as they understood with increasing depth and awe the lonely striving and journey that their ward was making. They discovered too that her silence was not mere wordlessness, but many things, and at many levels. And though it was her struggling sadness they had noticed at first, now they saw that she experienced strange joys and ecstasies as well, and times of utter indifference to the normal dangers and pleasures of daily life.

Rain? Often she ignored it until she was led to shelter.