Duncton Quest (84 page)

They left two days later, following the route described by Rowan across the Wormwood Waste. From there they slipped down into the tunnel he had so desperately escaped from, the four of them moving carefully as one, Mayweed in front and Tryfan behind, with Starling and Spindle close by in between.

Almost immediately Mayweed was able to find one of Heath’s old marks, though a line of deposit from rising water had partly obscured it. From there they set off down into the sloping wet gloom of the filthel, so used from their summer’s wanderings in such places to the strange reflected lights and the echoing sounds that they were able to ignore them and concentrate on the route ahead.

They found the ledge on to which Rowan had struggled to escape the rats, and saw how precarious his position must have been. They stared round the wet walls and the arched roof above, and then along the race of the filthel’s stream where it ran among the rubbish and slime, and fancied that they might have found rats anywhere. But there was none, nor scent nor sign of any, and they boldly pressed on.

The filthel’s bed became so cluttered that they did as Rowan and his friends had done before them and went along the raised ledge above it. This made the journey easier and Mayweed set a steady pace, rarely needing to pause for the ledge was clear enough. Here and there the tunnel divided, and sometimes others came down into it, or orange gunge spewed out of some pipe set into the curving wall at their side. Occasionally they found another one of Heath’s marks and it was strangely comforting, as if the fact that others had been that way meant they were in some way safer. Tryfan especially was struck by this, thinking that perhaps a journey seems hard if not impossible to othermole simply because it has not been made, or
been known to be made
by mole before. But once done, then others can follow with more confidence. Perhaps Alder and Marram’s passage to Siabod would be the easier for knowing that Bracken and Boswell had made it safely but a few moleyears before.

Was the journey into Silence no different, then, than this? Made easier by the knowledge that others had gone before? Was that his task, and Spindle’s too: to make moles see that they could make such journeys of the heart and soul if only they had faith that they could do so?

As the grim walls of the Wen’s loathsome tunnels started to close on him, Tryfan began to see what a triumphant return from this journey might mean to all of moledom; that such a journey could be made and, likewise, that a struggle against the Word could be won.

“Come on!” Tryfan would call out to his companions at such moments of understanding, as if to affirm his own determination to reach the mysterious heart of the Wen, and return from it again.

Night came, at much the same place it had come to Rowan and his friends, and the hideous lights were lit on the surface above them and filtered down into the filthel. Tryfan and the others rested, one or other of them always on guard. There was no sign of life at all, but for the sound of twofoots and the roaring owls above.

Tryfan himself led them on the second day, and they eventually reached the point described by Rowan where a tunnel led out on to the surface. They ignored it, preferring to press on to find the old mole tunnels Rowan had described. Still the earlier moles’ marks were evident, Heath clearly being a careful mole however “mad” Rowan may have thought him, and these made it easy to find the old tunnels.

Mayweed went in first while the others waited outside, but it was not long before he came out again. They were not as extensive as Rowan had said they were, though they were quite as dark, but the chamber was there all right and its scribed walls. Mayweed had been disinclined to sound them, preferring to leave that to Tryfan, and anyway, there was one thing more. In that chamber, slumped beneath the scribing, was the body of a mole. Desiccated, female by its size: Haize, probably. Mayweed, was used to such things from his sojourn on the Slopeside, yet he seemed sombre from what he had found.

They deduced that she had escaped from the rats and hidden in the tunnels, that she had probably been wounded, and she had sounded out the ancient call on those walls which her brother had heard but been unable to answer. When nomole came for her then she, too wounded perhaps to move, had died in those tunnels, alone, forsaken. A chill came over the four moles, made worse by the knowledge that this must mean that Heath must have been the mole Rowan heard screaming and being killed. Each of them had hoped that one or other might have been alive, but it seemed it was not to be.

“I suppose it is possible, good Sirs and cast down Miss, that Heath escaped,” said Mayweed, ever hopeful. But Tryfan and Spindle only shook their heads and said that unless they found more marks soon they must presume he was long dead.

Tryfan and Spindle went back into the old tunnels and, briefly, sounded the walls there. It was a strange and haunting cry and students of Dark Sound have since maintained that those markings were made by Scirpus himself, though probably with the aid of Dunbar which is why they had a quality of light and goodness. Scholars agree that this fragment of system that remains may well mark the point where the dispute between Scirpus and Dunbar flared up, and that here the followers of Dunbar fled with their gentle leader eastward into the Wen. In those far off days, as the disposition of those tunnels suggests, the Wen had not yet grown to what it was later to become, and perhaps Dunbar was able to make his way eastward over the surface. Nomole can be quite certain, but as Tryfan heard that old wall sound he hoped that some good spirit of the Stone had come to the stricken mole who had died there, and brought comfort to her, and let her see the light and hear the Silence even in that dark forgotten place.

Tryfan spoke out an invocation then, and touched Haize’s body, and asked for guidance for the others and himself.

A melancholy mood descended on the moles now, and a grim resolution that having started on their journey they would finish it, but be wary and careful and protective of each other. At the same time, as they journeyed on past the furthest point Rowan and his friends had reached, the tunnel itself seemed to deepen, and the surface outlets in its ceiling to rise higher so that they were but points of light far above.

It became a place of cavernous shadows and water noise, a chill place of rushing, stirring, bubbling, dripping waters, and tunnels that came in on right and left, some dark, some with a glimmer of blue-grey light, each a little different in their scent. A place of wet reflections and glancing echoes. Yet always now the great tunnel pulled them on, ever eastward, a wind from behind seeming to encourage them though its sound and those from the Wen above made them sometimes take stance by some rubbish or concrete promontory, to gain a moment’s peace.

They travelled on down this great filthel into another night and then, after a short restless sleep, on into a further day. The only sign of life they saw was dead: a cat, its black and white fur partly awash, its pale mouth gaping in rigor stiffness, its eyes gone soft and white. A predator had gnawed at its stomach, which lay clear of the water, to expose the entrails. Maggots moved there, blanched white, and it was a long time before any of them could eat, especially of the thin worms in the waste that spread into the filthel where pipes ran down from above, which was all the food they could find.

Though Mayweed snouted here and there, peering up each pipe opening they passed, or pausing to note the direction of the air currents and the feel of the scents, there was no question but that their route should follow the main filthel eastwards.

Then, quite suddenly, the filthel swung right and steepened, and there ahead of them the tunnel was barred, literally. Vertical metal bars, which ran from floor to ceiling, made a grille that stopped the rubbish dead but allowed the water to flow on through. Beyond they could hear falling water, and they were able to creep between the bars and follow the water on down.

It now flowed more clearly, over a filthel floor that was all of stone, along whose sides ran several ledges formed in the sides of the concave walls. It was an uncomfortable place for mole as there was no way of escape, and the few pipes were too high up the slippery walls for mole to reach. It was here, for the first time, they scented rat and saw their claw marks on the ledges. Distant and old though the scent was, yet it made them nervous and had them hurrying on.

It was late on that third day, when they were tired and hungry, that the great tunnel they had followed came to an end and joined three others in a chamber higher and wider than any they had ever seen. Here all sound was confusion, and waters flowed into a raging pool too turbulent for them to swim. On the far and darkest side there was another grille and into this the water flowed, or rather seemed to be sucked, hishing and rushing away into a blackness from which only roarings and rumblings came. Evidently no way for mole. Yet which way? Not up any of the four entering tunnels for they sloped to north and south or back westward the way they had come.

Mayweed snouted this way and that and eventually ventured precariously around the pool to the grille itself against which the rushing waters had thrown some debris of wood and thinbark from the other tunnels. Such rubbish kept its place simply from the pressure of the current of the water flowing over and around it.

Mayweed approached the first piece of this rubbish and, leaning his right flank on to the grille itself, put his paws out and stepped over the racing water. Then on to the next piece, and the next, the wood or thinbark he trod on sinking sometimes into the violent flow and throwing a spray upon him, and seeming to seek to clutch at him to dislodge his paws, and suck him between the bars and take him beyond recall. So he progressed, gaining in confidence until he was moving steadily, the noise great about him, and he was in the very centre of where the grille and water met, the race thundering all about him, and rusting bars rising into the gloomy arches high above.

They saw him pause then and peer down into the depths they could not see from where they crouched. A long time he stared, looking this way and that, until, with infinite care he turned back the way he had come, the debris bobbing up and down beneath his paws, and the water rushing over them.

Then he was back, shivering wet, but his eyes cheerful as ever, and that old smile, half pleading, half hopeful, on his face.

“Dry Sirs, elegant-for-now Miss, you’ve seen me do it, now you can do it yourselves. Mayweed confesses he was nervous, Mayweed agrees it is madness, but Mayweed’s instincts tell him this will do, must do, will have to do, if we are to continue with this journey to a place unknown!”

“But is there a way on from the other side?” asked Spindle dubiously. Of them all he was the least good at balancing and heights, being one of those moles before whom even the widest ledge seemed too narrow, making his gawky paws shake, his head swim.

“Mayweed will be frank and to the point, superb Spindle, venturer extraordinary: probably! So now... Onward! Forward! Never backward!”

So over they went, Tryfan first, then Spindle, then Starling and finally Mayweed, and if one slipped here, and another nearly fell in there each helped another, all got wet, all found their hearts thumping and all, with a final rush and a relieved jump reached the far side of the sucking grille.