Duncton Stone (70 page)

“You are tired, Elder Senior Brother.”

“And you are...” But Quail’s anger or irritation was that of an old mole, or a pup’s, petulant, puppish, weak. “The pains, Snyde, they are deep today, deep as sin.” He shook his head low and wept silently as Snyde touched him. Quail’s voice was that of a mole who knows he is slipping into a void of helpless pain.

“Sleep, Master; forgetting. I shall find another healer for thee.”

“A healer!” protested Quail. “Oils and embrocation, massage and the useless word. The last healer, the last...”

The last healer Quail had crippled and then killed, for he had caused too much pain. Quail’s eyes wandered as his voice faded; he could not remember what he had done with the last healer.

“Privet,” he said suddenly, and without apparent relevance, “she escaped.”

“Probably dead.”

“
She
might have healed me,” said Quail, and laughed a strange, hysterical, almost silent laugh.

Snyde stared at him coldly. He must get him to Duncton Wood. They must not dally too long fighting Thorne. Time was running away ahead of them, and they were being left behind.

“You knew Privet, Snyde.”

“Yes, Master, so I did. She was a scholar and a scribe-mole, not a healer.”

“No?” said Quail, almost mockingly, almost smiling. “Yet she escaped?”

Snyde frowned, not liking the turn that Quail’s thoughts were taking.

“Master, I shall find you comfort for the night.”

“Not a healer, mole, not one of those.”

“Not that kind of comfort, no.”

“Some little mole whose dalliance will help me forget the pain.”

“Just so, Elder Senior Brother, just such a mole.”

“When Fagg sends for Squelch to go to Duncton Wood, let him say that his father loves him.”

Quail turned slowly and painfully towards the portal, his left paw dragging now as he went, the protuberances on his head and neck and rear swaying and pulling at themselves as night approached.

The Caradocian attack on Thorne’s forward positions took place next dawn, suddenly and with brutal effect. Across a field of dew the first moles led, and many followed and the autumn cobwebs were rent by the screams and spattered with the blood of Caradocian and Thorne guardmole alike.

All that day they fought there; and the next elsewhere; and the day after that somewhere else again, and so began a bloody campaign along an east-west front that would have no easy end.

October advanced into interminable days of struggle and war as from south of Banbury, around Rollright, Brother Commander Sapient brought forces northward which he had been hoping he would not have to commit. But his hopes of returning to Avebury soon were dashed as the war with Thorne dragged on and slowed. The hope he and Squilver had of a quick end to the fighting blew away to nothing, like leaves on the autumn winds; while their enemy, Thorne, began to accept that the struggle would be longer than he wished as he watched it settle upon them all like steady autumn rain.

Yet there
was
one small group of moles most satisfied with the way matters were turning out, and that was Arvon’s force. Having so successfully provoked the fighting between the two sides, first by killing some moles on Thorne’s side and making conversation that would be overheard by survivors who would identify them as Quail’s guardmoles, then by covertly attacking Squilver’s moles, they slipped away back to their secret headquarters at Gaydon. From there Arvon led them southwards, to take up their position near the entrance to Duncton Wood, and await news of Maple and all those who fought with him, and to offer what further help they could to the followers’ cause.

It was during one of the violent gales that swept across eastern moledom that October that Bees cast off for ever the Newborn bonds that had restrained him for so long, and began a far greater journey than the simpler one he had set out upon – he became a pilgrim journeying south to find not just Privet, but the Stone in himself.

When the rain pelted down, he had not minded; when the way had been all mud, he had plodded on; when the wind had driven the dead leaves far ahead of him, he retained his faith that he would get there in the end.

“Where do you hail from, Brother?” fellow travellers sometimes asked him, but he only shrugged. His past was lost somewhere behind him now.

“Do you need help across this stream, friend?” others might suggest, seeing him trying to focus his poor eyes upon the water’s flow, to find a pawhold and a safe way across.

“Aye, and thank you!” he would say, no longer proud nor always striving to be independent, understanding that in accepting help he gave something in return.

“Come on then... hold my paw... no, not there with the right paw, a little to the left... that’s it, mole, nearly there...”

Nearly there! He had almost given up thinking he might be nearly anywhere, preferring now to journey as his heart led him, pausing awhile in places, being alone, or sharing a worm or two with fellow travellers like himself.

Then, when one day he plodded on and the wind turned to a gale and he felt his heart fill with hope and purpose and he heard a mole say who sheltered out of the bad weather, “That’s another of them, those pilgrims, trekking on in some bloody silly hope of finding that Privet mole,” he knew it was so: he was a pilgrim now and a Newborn no more. But he was different from the others he met. He heard their excited talk of what
she
would be like, what she would or would not say to them. But
he
had felt her paw upon his hurt face; he had heard her voice.

When moles asked where he hailed from, and whither he was bound, he could no longer satisfactorily answer the first question, and was uncertain about the second. She had touched him, she had spoken to him, and when she had left him and gone off in the safe company of the followers Hodder and Arliss, she had taken something of his spirit with her, as Arliss had taken something of his heart.

Now, each step he took, each stumble he suffered, each dim dawn that alighted on his scarred face and peering eyes, brought him nearer to the place towards which his life would always be directed. But if that
was
whither he was now bound, he had no name for it. It left him wordless, passive yet purposeful, and others watched him pass silently by and shook their heads. There were plenty of such moles about, disturbed by the anarchy of the times and pursuing a search for new faith, and there would be more.

So, mostly alone, he journeyed on, believing that when the Stone willed it, it would lead him to her. And then he would know what to say and what to do. Sometimes he thought of Arliss, Privet’s helper, and wondered at the way the love he had felt for her when they had met and then parted had become subdued, passive, dormant, like a plant that dies away to nothing as autumn turns to winter, and needs the coming of the spring to wake to life again.

Arliss. Sister of Hodder. Helper of Privet, Mole of Rollright. Yet passive though it seemed Rees wondered at the simple certainty of the love he felt, which awaited so patiently their reunion. Her last touch upon his paw he felt still, and he now began to think of it not as last, but first, and to believe there would be many more.

Meanwhile... he would find Privet as pilgrim and not as Newborn. He would tell her what Brother Commander Thorne had said about going to Duncton Wood, though he doubted if such words from him would make the slightest difference to anything. And he would meet Arliss again and see if his thoughts of her, wild and compulsive when they had first parted, but now subdued and confusing, were anything at all like her thoughts of him.

Such were Rees’ feelings and musings through the first two thirds of October, when, choosing a route along the High Chilterns, he made his way among isolated systems asking after Privet. When that had no result, he simply wandered watchful and with his ears open. Many others were doing the same, some genuine and some spies, but after Ivinghoe, where the route dropped away towards the vale of Thame, many turned south, believing their best hope of finding Privet lay Dunctonwards.

The fact that it might be dangerous, being territory under the control of the Crusades, mattered not to most moles, though their internecine feuds had been such that up in the Chilterns the Newborns’ control was now but nominal. Yet Rees chose not to go that way, not for fear of the dangers, but because he believed that had Privet gone that way she would long since have been captured, and he would have heard of it. No, if he had been Hodder and Arliss, he would have taken her further south and east, perhaps even down into the grim periphery of the Great Wen which, from the vantage of the Chiltern Ridge, could be seen stretching away in a grey-blue haze by daytime and as an awesome spread of lights at night, above which the clouds loomed lurid and threatening. Between Ridge and Wen a strip of mucky landscape ran and it was here, Rees believed, that Privet must be hidden and where he began to search for her.

The storms he had endured earlier came again and now, though the sun shone once in a while, trees were leafless and bleak, dykes filled with water, and even the most sheltered scrapes and hides felt draughty and uncomfortable. Such systems as there were seemed hopeless places, with moles who cared not for the Stone, and had not heard of wars, civil or otherwise. Newborns, followers, darkness, light, all seemed the same to them. Oppressed by the proximity of two-foots, their territories crossed by roaring owl ways, sick with the pollution and fumes that beset such areas, the moles Rees met were haggard and thin.

Yet despite their ignorance of almost everything else, many of them had heard of Privet of Duncton Wood, and their narrow eyes would light up at the mention of her name, and their gaunt faces smile for a moment at the thought of her.

“Lost her whole family, she did, at a westward place called Wildenhope, and went into the Silence to search for them.” Such was their version of events. No matter, they had heard of her, and some from even these communities had gone in search of her.

“Heard she was going to Duncton Wood. But has she been
this
way? No, not her, though you hear things from time to time, you know?”

“What things?”

“Things.”

It was enough to keep Bees plodding on, the escarpment to his right paw, the Wen to his left, the south ahead, and a slim chance of finding out something about Privet in between.

There were sometimes more than rumours. At Tebworth he met a mole who claimed to have met a party of three moles some molemonths before trekking by themselves near Leighton, which lay westward. One of them was a female and silent, and, “I didn’t put two and two together until later I had a friend who met a mole who cured her of ague by touch alone. ‘Silent as death’ she said she was and I thought, ‘That’s Privet, that is.’ But I said nothing.”

“Why not? And why tell me?”

The mole shrugged and said, “Some you speak to, some you don’t. She was heading south-east, Totternhoe way.”

Rees found nothing there, but in nearby Eaton, to the south-west, the story of three moles was confirmed, and the other two were a female and a male,
from Rollright
.

And so it went on, day by day, better than rumours but not quite fact, enough to keep Rees in an area which others rejected as being marginal, a place to pass through, and in any case not near enough to Duncton Wood, to where, allmole said, she would eventually have to go.

Then suddenly he learned quite positively where she was. Indeed, the moles who had heard of it were in such a hurry getting there that they had no time to do more than shout, “It’s true! We’ve heard! Privet’s in Amersham! Everymole in the vicinity is going there!”

“But how do you —”

“No time to stop and talk about it, mate! There’s times you’ve got to go for it and this is one.”

“How far’s Amersham?”

“Four days, no more. Come with us, we’re all strangers to each other and making a party of it. But don’t dawdle.”

“Where have you come from?”

“Thame way,” they said, slowing only momentarily as he caught up with them. They went faster than he customarily did and their conversation was as breathless as their pace, their minds being set on the way ahead and not on any talk for long.