Duncton Quest (85 page)

There
was
a way forward, as Mayweed had guessed from his examination of the gloomy depths beyond the grille, for high overflow pipes ran down from where they had reached to where the water raged on the far side of the grille. The pipes were small but accommodated a mole well enough except for one detail Mayweed might have guessed but did not mention: the rounded bottoms of these pipes were slimy and once a mole started down them it was hard to stop himself slithering, and once slithering it was difficult to prevent a slide, and once sliding it was utterly impossible to control it before it became a shooting, heltering, skeltering, tumbling, thumping, headlong fall along and around and down and out of that pipe, splash! Straight into a pool of water at its bottom. And splash again! And twice more before they all emerged wet, filthy, and breathless.

“Wonderful, you astonishing Sirs and dripping Miss! Mayweed salutes you all!”

They looked back up above them and saw the grille they had traversed, and the water shooting through it as a waterfall, and surging down into the pool into which, nearly but not quite, the pipe Mayweed had made them go down had fed them.

There were other pipes there too, from other places above, some gunge, some dry; of them all theirs appeared to be the slimiest, and they spent time grooming themselves clean before saying much at all.

Spindle was the grumpiest, for he liked to keep clean, and clean he was not. Yet his frown changed suddenly as he pointed a talon at the entrance to the pipe they had come down and Starling let out a delighted cry. For there, clear as daylight itself, was a mark: Heath’s mark! The mark of life and of living.

“But how...?” asked Tryfan for all of them.

“How indeed, ruminative Sir!” said Mayweed and, with one of his old winning smiles, such as he had been more inclined to make before they left Duncton Wood than since, he pointed a talon further down the thundering tunnel to another mark upon the wall, and led them from that on down to a third.

Over the next few days the moles were able to establish that Heath had indeed survived the rat attack and, more than that, had made his way as they had done to these same tunnels. Better still, he seemed from time to time to have retraced his steps as, finding alternative routes to the ones he must initially have taken, and thinking perhaps that one day Rowan might follow him, he had marked his route twice, and on occasion thrice. It was as if he wished to make quite clear to whatever mole followed that there were good ways to go, and bad.

They were able to adduce as well that he had lived somewhere further down those tunnels for some considerable time, probably moleyears, for the markings developed from the initial single mark to something more, and it was Tryfan who surmised that the additional marks were warning signs: for rats, a kind of hooking mark; for water, a rush of lines; and for something else, though what they could not guess, a smaller mark than the others. More than that, the original mark was sometimes doubled, and the further they went it was trebled, and Tryfan believed this indicated that poor Heath, caught forever in these tunnels of the Wen, and learning to survive dangers only a few of which they had yet met, had seen three Longest Nights through at least.

It took them nearly a molemonth more to venture to the places where the worm mark trebled, which, they believed, meant they were near where Heath must have established himself and might still be. In that time their earlier training on the northern peripheries of the Wen served them well. They began to find surface exits to the tunnel, though very few permitted them to venture outside. Those ways were always finally barred – by slippery concrete slopes or vertical walls, or grilles too fine for mole to creep through, even had they wanted to.

For now they heard no sound of bird at all, and never scented grass or trees. Just roaring owls and the thumping of twofoots day and night.

Food there was of a pallid kind: worms, maggots, moths, muck-filled spiders, and scraps of such a loathsome kind that a mole had better not examine them too close if he is to eat them and not be sick.

Rats they saw from vantage points of higher pipes that Mayweed found, and they guessed they themselves were now so scented from the filthels they had passed through, and inwardly from the food they scavenged, that they emitted only a filthel smell and the rats did not notice them. Perhaps in less noisy tunnels they might have sensed the moles more easily by vibration, but one way or another they avoided them.

Yet they knew the day might come when they would have to fight, and continued to travel as a pack themselves, always ready to defend themselves, and remembering the single lesson they learnt from Rowan’s account when Heath had instinctively attacked the single rat they met on the Wormwood Waste, and it had retreated.

A greater daily danger were the surges of water that came down the pipes sometimes, but these they learnt to predict and took stance on ledges above the flow. More serious, and unavoidable, were flows of hot and scalding water which none of them had seen before, filled with fuming effluent which stung their snouts and eyes. Spindle was caught by a surge of this evil water, and its heat caused his back paws to swell and pain him for several days.

The other danger was cuts, which all suffered from, and these healed only slowly, and some not at all, causing pain and ulcers and, in Tryfan’s view, a general debilitation of the moles.

They might have tried to venture out on to the surface in one or two places but when they snouted up it was clear that December had set in harshly. The air was cold there now, and in one tunnel, where a grille was set in the roof high above, hail had fallen into the tunnel and formed a circle of white-grey that copied the grille’s circular shape. They stared at the hail, and touched it in wonder, for it seemed white and pure, and its light brought back memories that seemed so far distant it was like puphood recalled, when they had been on the surface, among trees and grass, where birds sang and the wind blew free and scented good; a world away from this darkness they were lost in now.

Lost. It was not a word they spoke. Yet but for those marks of Heath that drew them on they might have felt so. Eastward they had travelled, and far eastward they had come, yet Tryfan’s scribemole sense of the Stone’s way now urged him increasingly to travel up the northern tunnels that came sometimes into the route they went down. And so they might, but that Heath’s markings drew them on, as if they might find some guidance from the base he must have made. So Tryfan had Mayweed lead them eastward yet, ignoring the call that got stronger each new December day as Longest Night came near, that they should turn north.

When they finally reached the place where Heath had established himself it was both a surprise and a disappointment. The route he had marked out veered off quite suddenly to the south and took narrow squared conduits for a while, perilously close to roaring owl ways. So close indeed that the conduit reverberated with them as they passed by, and for the first time they were fumed by them, and made to feel ill and nauseous. Water and filthy slush dripped into this long run, and they were conscious of concrete all about them, above and below, and continual noise. The place was wormless and the only life was pigeons which they heard and scented nearby but never saw. Except once, when a pigeon must have sensed them near for its grey-blue beak pecked viciously at a crack above their heads as they went by; down and down it came and then was gone.

Yet they pressed on in the narrow place, pleased to be clear of water for a time, able to cope with the cold and the slush until finally suddenly, blissfully, a mark was at a point where the conduit was cracked, and they squeezed through into something they had not seen for mole-months: soil. Real soil, though compacted, sterile and cold. But Heath’s tunnel was real enough and they travelled down it to where the soil was better and found food again.

They called this place Heath’s Tunnels but it was clear soon enough that he was not there, nor had been for a long time. The tunnels were dusty and in places collapsed, but they were extensive, and ran under an area of short grassland which they explored in the days ahead. To breathe real air again, to feel wind of a sort, and finally to find water, a great expanse of it, was bliss indeed. It was there they spent Longest Night, recovering themselves from the long journey they had made, thankful that they had survived it, glad to rest.

They knew well that they must travel on soon, and all of them now accepted Tryfan’s instinct that they must go north. But they dallied for a while. At night, when they went out on the surface, they found themselves surrounded by sights they never forgot – of lights bright and fierce, of a rising sky that was lit from below, of twofoots wandering, and always round and round and round the place they were, the roaring of roaring owls: never ever ceasing. A place of terrible and fearsome beauty, yet a place of living death for mole.

Here, as they found, Heath must have lived in lonely solitude. Here he had found sanctuary but no rest. Here he made tunnels that started good and true, and ended, as his sojourn there must have ended, strange and eccentric, maddened by his loneliness, desolate. Yet, as Mayweed discovered, the tunnels had a kind of logic, for convoluted and pointless though they seemed, they had an encircling pattern, though what lay at its centre they could not guess since no tunnels ran there, and concrete blocked all subterranean ways.

One night Tryfan and Spindle took a surface passage to this centre and found there a most strange and pathetic thing. A stone yet not a Stone. A stone of concrete. At its base a tunnel and a chamber. Here poor Heath must have come, and at its base he made a place that must have comforted him, for there was dried grass and a cache of long dead worms.

“He must have pretended this was a Stone,” said Tryfan, “and perhaps come here to seek guidance as to what he must do.”

“Why didn’t he just journey on from here?” said Spindle. “He had done well enough, there must be many ways to continue passage. Why did he continually retrace his steps and mark the passage of the years?”

“I think, for reasons we cannot guess, he lost his courage. Something happened to him. Loneliness can do that to a mole I think.” There was about that little chamber, beneath the concrete post that a mole pretended was a Stone, a terrible desolation and a sense of trial.

“Yet he did leave,” said Spindle.

“Or was taken, or died, or simply was lost in the waters of the main tunnels.”

Yet a few days after they had celebrated their desultory Longest Night, thinking of the meeting they had arranged with Skint and Smithills that they should meet at Rollright, and ruefully understanding how impossible such a meeting would have been, they found the reason for Heath’s final loss of courage. And they found it only after they had become careless because, having survived so far, they forgot the real danger they were in.

First, quite suddenly, there was dog, huge and smelling, thrusting its paws and mouth into a tunnel where Starling was, and nearly tunnelling her out. As it was she was bitten on the paw, and in great pain. Then a day or two later, when they were out on the surface at night staring at the sky, rats came. Of that grim fight Spindle has left a full account, and frightening it is. From right and left they came, suddenly, darkly, bloodily. The moles circled together and tried to burrow down: no good, the soil too hard, the nearest entrance controlled by rats. So careless! So then they fought, for their lives they fought, with Tryfan at the front and Starling at the rear, fighting as any creature fights when its life is threatened. From fear at first, and then from anger, and then from mortal fear again, as the enemy prevails and bites, and claws, and teeth and rat-red eyes fill the world, and each moment seems the last. Lurid that great sky above them was then, gashed with red it seemed, thunderous the noise those roaring owls made all about as if triumphantly knowing of the mortal fight between four moles and rats that came and went in the dark. How many rats? It might have been six, and might have been a hundred.

They survived, but only just. All bitten, Tryfan worst of all, his flank torn open and his right paw half ripped apart yet he it was who stayed out on the surface to the last when they finally reached a tunnel entrance and he pushed the others down. Yes they survived, helping each other drag themselves down those tunnels, their confidence gone, their fears made real. Not that they
had
escaped....