Duncton Quest (108 page)

As for those few critical hours in the company of Henbane, until now the truth of them has remained obscure, and what should be the best source, and generally the one it is the wisest to follow – which are the texts left us by Spindle the Cleric who was witness to so much that happened in those days – is on this one subject not to be entirely trusted. Great historian that he was, Spindle was, after all, but a mole like any other, and on some things perhaps less of a judge than others. He was fortunate to have a successful mating in his life, with doomed Thyme, and after that not to need, as others might, anything more than the pursuit of texts and learning, and the company of good friends.

So perhaps his account judges rather too harshly what occurred between Tryfan and Henbane in Whern. And, too, it was scribed before the full truth of the coming of the Stone Mole was known, and before anymole could hope to understand his purpose.

But we are now able to turn to another source than Spindle’s, though some might say that it, too, is biased and uncertain, and they would no doubt be right: for that new and so-far unrecorded source is Tryfan himself.

He has left an account of that time with Henbane, though how he came to do so, and why, it is not yet our task to recount. But tell of it he did, and so many of its details are now confirmed by other sources that we have good reason to think that this version is as near to the truth – the terrible truth – as we are ever likely to get.

So, this explanation made, we who would continue our journey at Tryfan’s side and help him with our prayers, must travel back to that strange and beautiful chamber that it pleased dread Henbane to call her den, and know what took place after Sleekit had so cleverly arranged, at Tryfan’s urgent suggestion, Bailey’s meeting with Boswell at Provident Fall....

After they had gone, Henbane stared at Tryfan a long time, saying nothing but seeming to put herself into thoughts that troubled her, and made her seem weak and vulnerable. Whatever Tryfan might have expected it was not that.

For there, unprotected before him, the leader of the grikes stared at him until her eyes filled with tears and the chamber they were in seemed almost overcome with the power of her grief. And grief for what?”

“You dislike me,” she said, “and yet I have no such feelings towards you, and nor have I ever had towards anymole of the Stone. But you
do,
Tryfan of Duncton, and I feel that dislike as a pain here!” And she thumped a paw to her chest and, as it appeared to Tryfan, burst into a paroxysm of tears.

“I am not loved!” she declared. “I am alone!”

If there was something Tryfan should have said he did not know what it was. Whatmole would have done? Easy now, looking back, to think what might have been said, but at the time? Tryfan himself reports that such was the potency of Henbane’s grief that it was like a natural force about him, and he felt it as he had felt the power of her attraction at their first meeting in Whern some days before and the confusion of his senses that accompanied it.

Her grief was real and to have denied it would have been to deny his own responsive feelings, and so naturally it evoked in him feelings of sympathy, and pity, and a desire to understand. Perhaps, too, he thought, so far as any mole
could
think in the presence of such elemental emotions as Henbane then displayed, that if he could reach out and understand, and show that he understood, he might achieve not only the freeing of Boswell and Spindle, but also perhaps some new tolerance towards the followers of the Stone; a tolerance, incidentally, that he had already thought was beginning from the fact that his own passage north had not been interrupted; and that no violence at all had been shown them in Whern. These hopes, then, combined with the natural sympathy for one who appeared so much in grief to cloud Tryfan’s judgement.

Yet no doubt, too, he tried to hang on to the warnings about Henbane he had had from Sleekit, and Boswell, and the evidence of his own experience of what the grikes had perpetrated over the years. While all the time, before him then,
was
a mole in grief, and one who might have warmed the heart of ice itself.

What is certain is the extraordinary, almost alarming, effect Henbane’s presence had on a mole when she wished it to. She was beautiful, she was one who held a fascination in her form whatever she said or did, as if through her body each emotion and purpose found its perfect expression. Hatred and animosity: they had been seen well enough at Harrowdown, but a mole forgets that when faced by an equally potent expression of grief and tragedy.

“Tell me,” Henbane said suddenly, seeming to move out of grief to something else as fast as the sun appears from behind a racing storm cloud, “tell me, Tryfan, because I want to know, I really do: were you much loved as a pup?”

Much loved.
The expression Boswell had used so affectingly to Tryfan in the Fall. Only much later did it occur to him that Henbane, or perhaps another mole close to her – Rune perhaps, but he never knew – had overheard that conversation and now Henbane knew well how to play on it.

“Was I much loved?” faltered Tryfan, and of course he knew the answer was that he had been, very much; as a mole should be. The love of Rebecca and Bracken for him and between themselves was at the very essence of his being.

“I was,” he said.

But barely were the words out of his mouth, indeed they were not quite out, before her quiet and beguiling query transmuted into dark and terrifying rage.

“But I was not, Tryfan! I was not much loved. My father I know not; my mother I killed
.”

The chamber seemed to rumble and shake with the anger of her words.

“You cannot understand that, you can never understand that, nomole
can
,” she said. “And yet all judge me!”

So shock was followed by accusation, but before Tryfan could even catch up with
that
Henbane began to scream, so loud, so long, so
violently
that nomole but a deaf one would not have gone to her side to seek to comfort her. Tryfan was not deaf, and he was a caring mole, and so, in the face of such a sudden outburst, he did what most such moles would have done: he sought to comfort her by touch.

Touch!

Perhaps from that moment, in the High Sideem, when Tryfan was driven by an elemental scream for help by a mole who in one sense was never any more than a pup, though one with fearsome power and authority indeed, he was doomed.

But he himself believed that all was not quite lost at that moment when he reached out to comfort Henbane. Comfort!
That
mole? Yes, comfort.

She turned on him, her eyes expressing a desperate agony, her yearning for comfort and love irresistible, and she wept.

“I was reared in a place called Ilkley, in a wormless place, and my mother’s name was Charlock.”

There Henbane abruptly stopped what had seemed about to become a long, extended narrative and stared in great distress at nothing in particular as she thought about her mother. It was as if a wave of passionate regret had stopped inside her head where her face started and would any moment burst forth as tears more terrible than any she had yet shed. Then they came, but silently, great tears of grief that rolled down her face and glistened hugely in her fur.

Then, as if with great difficulty – and once more before Tryfan could quite catch up with her emotions – she began to talk quickly but quietly of her past in Ilkley, of her mother’s cruel ways, of the lovelessness of her time on Rombald’s Moor, of her longings to know more of the Word, and, by degrees, of her desire to visit Whern and give herself in service to the Master of the Sideem himself.

She told of how the mole Weed came, and in a hushed voice she justified the killing of her mother, that other moles might be safe from her sharp talons. Sometimes she paused and gulped, as if bravely holding back those tears that demanded to be wept, sometimes she came close to Tryfan and touched him, beseeching him not to leave her, to listen to her, to know the “truth”, and to understand that what she had done in the name of the Word was for the good of moledom and that now it
was
done she was forever alone and bereft.

So spoke Henbane, and outside the light dimmed and Dowber Gill’s roar diminished, and it seemed to Tryfan that his world now was just this agonised and struggling mole who was not Henbane of Whern any more, but a pup who cried out for help from a desolate moor where her mother Charlock tortured her, punished her, and for whom the only hope was a distant mythical one called the Master of the Sideem, presented to her by cruel Charlock as a future lover.

Did Henbane know what she did in those hours with Tryfan? He afterwards doubted it. Could she have guessed that of all moles she was ever likely to know the one most likely to understand and sympathise with a confusion between a mate and a parent was Tryfan, whose own mother Rebecca had been ravaged by her father Mandrake, another evil, angry mole? Did Tryfan in those hours as Henbane spoke to him begin to see what she herself never had and what only Weed so far knew: that Rune, who first took her, was her father. Did he, knowing Rebecca’s history, feel sympathy where another, like Spindle, for example, might not?

Perhaps. Probably. It helps explain why he listened on, and why Henbane dared say so much; and perhaps seeing his sympathy she, moledom’s greatest mistress of inveiglement and evil, dared expose herself further and tell him everything.

However it was, the night came, and Whern was hushed, and those two moles talked on, coming closer as moles will with time, and feeling that bonding that all moles feel that share dark, intoxicating secrets and emotions.

Much earlier they had touched. Now, as darkness crept across the faces of the white limestone scars of Whern, and into the chambers and passages of the High Sideem, the world of those two moles came closer still. They were not Henbane and Tryfan any more but two of the many, two moles finding comfort, two moles in troubled times who find peace between themselves, and good feeling, and homecoming.

There in that darkness, with the water’s roar nearby, their touching came closer yet, of flank to flank, of nuzzling teeth to caressing talon, of dark warmth and abandonment, where two moles lose themselves and make one, one unalone, and move towards a sensuous ecstasy that Stone or Word, or whatever power gives life and love, first ordained as desire and delight; and whose denial seems
if only in its own fateful hour
a denial of love itself.

There, that night, as the Dowber Gill’s force and waterfall roared down, and all over Whern water roared and turned white in foam and spume and turmoiled into dark and sensuous pools, and moved silently and unseen within the very bowels of the earth itself, those two mated, time forgotten, friends forgotten, all purposes forgotten.

In mating, as in all else, Henbane was more than passionate, more than alive. Those sighs and screams she made before, those tears, that anger through the years, that cruelty, all that a mole puts into life Henbane doubled there that night. For in mating, moles may put all of their life for good and bad, all their strengths and weaknesses, and that was what she did then; and Tryfan too.

Others heard. Whern knew. Spindle, Lathe, Bailey, dark Rune smiling at the sounds of ecstasy, Boswell; oh yes, they heard. With the water’s roar they heard it and if Henbane and Tryfan knew they did not care. Such matings care for nothing but itself.

Until at last all the sounds of passionate discovery and declarations between those fated two dissolved into the sighs of fulfilling peace, sighs of a male and female, and laughter such as moles who have known true mating can make.

Whern heard it, and was struck still, restless, angry, amused, shocked; alarmed too, and wary. Sad, and bereft: each heard it according to his need.

One other heard, and knew more than all those others but Boswell himself that if there was a Stone and a Word they were there with Henbane and Tryfan that night, and being there might help others who trusted them.

That mole was surreptitious Mayweed, most clever Mayweed, who might have found the route through chaos itself, had there been one to find.

“I will be near,” he had told Tryfan, and under cover of the violent sounds and reverberations of that night’s mating of two moles he made a route to Providence Fall.