Duncton Quest (24 page)

“You two best rest and keep quiet,” he concluded. “Don’t bother us and we’ll not bother you. If you do need something just give a shout. My name’s Alder and my mate’s called Marram.” Alder was a big mole, and strong, and though his head and flanks were scarred and pitted from fighting, he had a friendly face and cheerful eyes, and he looked at a mole directly. His friend Marram was a little smaller, though still large and strong enough, and looked more concerned with life than Alder did: rather serious, perhaps. Spindle felt that, judging from the other guardmoles they had met, they could have done a lot worse.

“Can we go up on to the surface?” asked Spindle, indicating the surface entrance Marram was guarding. Marram came over and joined them and said immediately, “No, you can’t do that. You shouldn’t have a need to, and anyway, your friend doesn’t look up to much.”

“My friend might like some fresh air,” said Spindle.

“There’s owls about up there, and if they don’t get you the patrols will,” Marram said. “Best stay here.” He looked forceful, and Spindle knew they had no choice but to do as he said.

As if to take Spindle’s mind off the freedom the surface represented, Alder pointed an indifferent talon at the two moles in the far corner. They seemed miserable and tired, and looked grubby and abject.

“Don’t mind them, they’re vagrants waiting for instruction or Atonement.” Even from where he was, Spindle could tell from their stance and the subjected lie of their paws and snouts that they were apprehensive, or worse. One of them, a young male, looked briefly over towards them and then away again. The other, a female, appeared weak and restless, probably ill.

The guardmoles returned to their stance and had a quick whispered word with each other, looking over at Spindle and Tryfan, Marram looking worried, but Alder waved a friendly talon in their direction when he saw Spindle watching, as if to reassure him.

Some hours later, when dusk was creeping over the surface and the burrow was getting dark, Tryfan, whose sleep had been restless, fell still as if, finally, peace had come back to him and his breathing became deep and steady. Spindle continued to watch over him with protective concern, though to anymole else it would have seemed it was the thin and gaunt-looking Spindle who need the protecting, and the young and powerful Tryfan who would have provided it.

Then suddenly Tryfan stirred and opened his eyes, and stared with affection on Spindle, who immediately went to get him some worms which, despite their poor quality, Tryfan ate hungrily, as if he had not eaten for days.

“You know, Spindle,” he said eventually, “it was the fact that that mole had no name. No name. Nomole knew who he was, or where he came from. He could have been anymole... anymole.”

Spindle noticed that Tryfan’s voice had changed, though perhaps the full impact on Tryfan of the torture and death of a mole they had witnessed was not clear yet. But his voice was deeper, older, and there was to his stance the sense that he now accepted a responsibility and purpose he had not been able to before.

“I shall not forget that mole, not ever in my life,” said Tryfan, “nor the fact that I was afraid to help him.”

“You could have done nothing, Tryfan, nothing at all except get yourself killed, and me as well. Even as it is we are not exactly what I would call safe!”

For a time Tryfan was silent, thinking about it all. Then he said, “I know that is true, but I also know that there was something wrong about what we did and something right about what the mole did. He said simply, “I am of the Stone”, and the grikes could not stand that he did so. He had no name... no name. The Stone wants us to know something of that, something very important, but I don’t know what it is. When I touched him I felt the power of the Stone in me and though I could not hear the Silence myself I know that through me he heard it, and in giving him that way to the Stone I took upon my body the pain he had. It was hard, very hard, and I have been somewhere that one day I will have to find the strength to go back to.”

For a moment Tryfan’s voice trembled, and Spindle moved closer to him.

“I was there near, I was watching you, and I was frightened too, Tryfan, but I would not have left you and I never will.”

“I know you were,” said Tryfan. “I knew that all the time you were there, and your faith was there. But something... there is something I don’t know about it all, something that I must learn. “I am of the Stone,” that’s what the mole said. And I do not even know his name.”

Seeing them talking, though their voices were low, Alder ambled over and joined them.

“It’s not too bad here,” he said, “and it won’t be for long for you. Just a day or so. We’ve got another three or four days of this ourselves until those two get taken for instruction, always assuming that female makes it. She’s not well. You two to be initiated?”

Tryfan said he was not sure. He thought so probably.

“It’s a doddle if you keep your trap shut. Listen right, do as they say, and a mole like you with a bit of sense to him will get a good billet and easy worms.”

“‘Billet’?” repeated Tryfan, nodding in a friendly way at the guardmole. They kept using words he did not understand.

“You know, burrow; what a mole lives in. Billet’s what we call it where we come from.”

“Where are you from, then?” asked Spindle, always curious, for he was a collector of information, and curious about the whys and wherefores of other moles and their systems.

“North,” said Alder unhelpfully, and they noticed for the first time that he had the same shortened hard accent as the other grikes they had met, and a slight defensiveness beneath his natural friendliness. There was silence.

“North?” repeated Spindle, frustrated at the short answer.

Alder relaxed again, as if pleased that they were interested. “Came down with the second push after Henbane left. Sent off by Rune himself we were.”

“Did you see him?” asked Tryfan, coming closer.

“Did we
see
him?” he repeated slowly. “Well, that would be hard to say exactly, wouldn’t it? Whern’s a dark sort of place where the shadows are confusing and a mole does well to keep his snout low and his thoughts to himself. There was a mole up there, old and with fur that shone like I’ve never seen, all dark and glittering, and they said he was Rune and I stole a quick look but I was scared... we all were. “That’s Rune!” somemole said, and I was willing to believe it, the burrow felt so... so
important
with him in it.”

“Did he say anything?” asked Spindle, fascinated.

“A bit, but I can’t remember much. Angry he was, his voice suddenly rising loud and he said the time had come to go south and take the systems that were ours by right. Death to the Stone followers, he said, and then he was silent, and that’s the bit I remember best.”

“The silence?” whispered Tryfan.

Alder nodded. “Terrible it was, him just up there with his coat all darkly glittering and silent, like sharp talons are silent, and it seemed to last forever; and then he was gone and we knew where we had to go, and what we had to do.”

He pulled himself up short as if surprised to find himself speaking so much and then, to change the subject, looked over at the two moles in the corner appraisingly. “
They
won’t be up to much if you ask me. Nice for a show at Midsummer but that’s about it. Eldrene Fescue’s not one to tolerate weakness, know what I mean? I served with her at Rollright, and I’d say if they put one paw wrong, and with Fescue all it takes is to breathe wrong once, and they’ll be sent up the Slopeside or snouted sooner’n you can say “dead”!” He thought this very funny and laughed loudly. The male mole looked nervously over towards them, and then back to the female, moving closer to her as if to protect her from the guardmole’s laughter.

Alder wandered off and took up his station again at the entrance as Tryfan pondered what he had said about Rune.

He and Spindle settled down as night fell, affecting indifference to the other moles while looking carefully about and considering what their options might now be.

From the thumping and shuffling overhead and the pulling up of grass it was not hard to deduce that cows were grazing above and that they were beneath some pasture land, or very near it. Probably adjacent to it, decided Tryfan, for the rotten base of a fence post thrust down on one side of the burrow formed a buttress to the surface entrances, while spreading across the ceiling were the roots and tendrils of giant thistle and broom, such as grew in the wasteland between pasture and wood. A good place for exits and entrances and one which often defined the boundary of a wood-based system. But Tryfan had not seen or smelt evidence of woody tunnels and guessed that much of the system lay beneath untended scrubland, offering its young the opportunity of expanding up into woodland or down to pasture. The “Slopeside” was presumably the area that stretched up under the woodland, and Tryfan, a woodland mole, felt an instinctive interest in it, however grim might be the dangers it harboured. He missed tunnels which held the sound and complexity of tree roots and disliked the straightness and sterility of these lowland systems.

With such thoughts, and following Spindle’s lead, he had a little more food and then went back to sleep.

Shortly afterwards, from the shadows of the entrance through which they had come, there was a sly dark movement, and Sideem Sleekit emerged. The guardmoles immediately crouched to attention saying, “Word be with thee.”

“And thee,” said the sideem indifferently. “Any problems?”

“None, Miss.”

“Keep them here without fail. It’ll be a snouting for you both if you lose them.”

“Don’t worry, Miss, we’ve warned them off the outside already. Er... whatmole are they?”

“Stone followers,” said Sleekit. “Watch them carefully. Your names?”

“Alder,” said the one who had talked about Rune.

“And mine’s Marram, Miss,” said the second.

“I’ll not forget,” said the sideem. “Until morning, then. Now rest easy.”

“Aye, aye!” said Marram.

They breathed more easily once she had gone.

“Wonder whatmoles they really are,” said Alder, who had an intelligent and interested face and was obviously a mole who wanted to know things.

“She said they were Stone followers, didn’t she? That’s all we need to know. Now you take the first night watch and let me get some rest,” said Marram turning away to sleep.

Alder settled his snout on his extended paws, and fixed his gaze on Tryfan’s sleeping face, and afterwards, long, long, afterwards, when he was an old mole with memories of great things to tell his grandchildren’s pups, he remembered how, as he gazed on that mole he was guarding, his heart seemed suddenly beset by a blizzard wilderness, caused perhaps by being asked about where he had come from and why, and he had a longing he could not account for to know of the Stone which was said to be so bad. And then, he said, he found that the eyes of Tryfan (as he later knew him) were open on him, staring at him, and he could not look away and he swore, though it was a strange thing to remember, that Tryfan came over to him and said, “Why do you punish Stone followers when they cause you no harm? Why?” Yet when Alder found courage to look again he only saw Tryfan asleep, and his eyes closed. Then Alder seemed to see before him all the many sufferings and torments of Stone followers he had witnessed and knew that the mole was near him then and willing him to remember. And Alder was ashamed.

Then, try as he might not to, for he had taken the watch, he slipped into sleep. As dawn came, and as he turned to check the mole who troubled him so much was still there, he found that Tryfan was there at his side, and there was nothing in the burrow but him, and his gaze upon Alder, and Alder was afraid.

“Come,” said Tryfan, “for I have something to show you.”

And Alder, unprotesting, driven by something in the mole’s terrible strength and sadness, followed him; and they went to the surface.

It seemed to Alder then, as he ever afterwards remembered it, that the rising sun was in the tunnel ahead of the mole and its light was all around him and there was something he would see and he was afraid of it; for it made him cry, and he was a grike, a Northerner, a campaigner, and he was only doing his job....

Tryfan led him out on to the surface and, avoiding the patrols, they went a good way through and under the protection of straggly gorse and broom to a clear patch in whose centre, near another entrance, lay the body of a mole. Marked was he, terribly, and his snout crushed, and he lay curled into death, his mouth a little open. Dew had formed on his fur and the sun’s dawn rays were caught in it. It was the mole who had been killed the day before.

“Do
you
know his name?” asked Tryfan. “Do you?” And he stared down at the mole, his snout low, and he wept before Alder and Alder stared at him, his world suddenly numb to him, and he saw the pity of the mole that had died.

“Why do you punish Stone followers, Alder?” asked Tryfan again, but repeating his name this time. “Tell me, why? This mole was a follower of the Stone, and so am I, and in punishing us you punish only yourself. Why do you do it?”

“But I...” But there was nothing he could say, for Tryfan looked at him with an open heart, and he could not bear the stillness there.

Then Tryfan turned from him and went back and crouched by the entrance to give him time for his own thoughts. Alder stayed where he was, staring, and he saw in that nameless mole who had been killed by the grikes the day before, the tens, the hundreds, the thousands that had died in the long march of the grikes to the south.

“But I...” Alder’s mouth trembled, and he heard their cries again, around him, the many, the nameless many, and he felt ashamed and he was blinded with tears.

Then he turned, his body heavy, his paws aching, and he saw Tryfan waiting for him.

“What shall I do?” asked Alder.

“Listen for the Silence of the Stone,” said Tryfan, and his eyes were like the sun on Alder.

“Whatmole are you?” asked Alder in a whisper. “Whatmole?”

“I am nomole,” said Tryfan, “but there is one coming before whom you will forget all others and he will be of the Stone’s Silence. And you will know him, and help him.