Duncton Stone (16 page)

He was tempted to include Thripp’s son Chervil in his accusations – had not Chervil shown sympathy to Rooster during his confession? – but this was going too far too soon, and Thripp himself was present. So lesser moles were arraigned, tried and held for future punishment, most of whom had shown the spirit of resistance to the new order under Quail. It was an easy way of ridding Caradoc of Thripp’s few remaining supporters, and among those arraigned though not yet killed were Arum and Boden, who had been so loyal to Thripp; of such confidants Brother Rolt alone was spared, perhaps because Quail felt he might be of use later, and that he was so demonstrably honest that his punishment would not be popular.

As for Rooster, and those who had escaped with him, Quail declared with absolute confidence, “They shall be found in time, for no shadow, no dark corner, no obscure tunnel shall be dark or obscure enough to hide them.” He let it be known that the mole who found them would be well rewarded, and none could doubt this would be so.

For our knowledge of the subsequent events at Caer Caradoc, through to the arrival of Privet at Wildenhope the following spring, we are indebted to the very remarkable records organized by Snyde, Duncton’s former Deputy Master Librarian. It is one of the ironies of Newborn history that the records which were kept with the intention of glorifying its achievements have become through time the source for its greatest indictments. And in Snyde, whose appointment as Brother Record-Keeper at the Convocation was made by Quail himself, tyranny found a fatally perfect scribe. It may be that Snyde still harboured ambitions to succeed Stour as Master Librarian of Duncton Wood, but as official recorder of the Convocation he discovered his true role in life, and one he fulfilled with near-genius.

Twisted, embittered, sexually frustrated, intelligent and highly adept as a scholar and scribemole, and manipulative too, he was the right mole in the right place doing the right task. Anymole who has made the journey to Caer Caradoc, and viewed the huge and orderly collection of records that Snyde and the veritable army of minor scribes he eventually formed have left behind, sees the work of an obsessive collector of facts and data. Perhaps no period in mole history has been better or more completely recorded, as Snyde, exploiting the position chance and circumstance had given him, extended the web of his recording scribes, until almost every meeting of Newborn moles, however small, however inconsequential-seeming, felt incomplete without one of Snyde’s moles present to scribe down its deliberations.

As for the policy meetings of Newborn Senior Brothers and Inquisitors, it was Snyde himself who recorded these, soon becoming a kind of background presence essential to all such meetings, where unobtrusively and without comment, he scribed down all he heard. Indeed Quail himself began to relish his presence, perhaps feeling that what he was saying and doing
should
be recorded for posterity, so important and “historic” did it seem. Eventually Snyde’s presence at a meeting seemed almost to legitimize it.

The trouble was that Snyde could not be everywhere at once, and so it was necessary for his subordinates to be increased in number and be always at paw to record events. In this he was only following a tradition begun by Thripp himself back at Blagrove Slide, where, in earlier and better days, the records had been kept with the sole purpose of ensuring that the background of young moles coming for training – birthplace, parentage, siblings, previous religious history, and kinship – was not forgotten. What was forgotten was the original purpose of these records,
*
but as is often the case in well-organized systems the bureaucracy continued and the solution became the institution.

*
In his early days Thripp is believed to have hoped that such background records of the brothers, when set against their subsequent actions, would prove a useful guide to the importance of influences. He subsequently lost interest in such ideas as he came to view dwelling on the past as a hindrance to fulfilling the present. But the fact remains that Thripp set a precedent for recording meetings which Quail, using Snyde, so fatefully extended.

The growth of the Inquisitors. under Quail meant that such records began to have new and more sinister uses, though difficulties in transporting them from one system to another limited their development. However, the emergence of Wildenhope as the main centre for the detention of miscreants and doubtful moles, once Caer Caradoc gained ascendancy, meant that inquisitorial records began to accumulate there.

The arrival of Snyde on the scene, used as he was to ordering texts in a large library, brought a new dimension to Newborn record-keeping. As a historian of the Modern period he was acutely aware of how the lack of good records hindered historical research and commentary; as a Newborn convert he sincerely believed in the greatness of his sect; as a mole he was obsessively inquisitive and prying; and as a librarian he loved nothing better than acquisition, and more acquisition. It was less the knowledge that mattered, and what the texts contained, but more the texts themselves and the pursuit of completeness, as if in the world of records he might find an order and security, and finally a control, he could never find among moles, or hope, in his personal vileness and unpopularity, to impose on others.

In appointing Snyde his official record-keeper Quail had unwittingly appointed a monster to a task he would make monstrous – his obsessive energy and secret endeavour turned ordinary scribes into a ruthless team of enquiry, and a hotchpotch of twisted records into the greatest collection of testimony and verbatim evidence of evil and tyranny that is ever likely to exist. Snyde was truly the spider at the centre of a web whose extent only he knew, or could ever hope to use.

Through the long harsh winter years that followed the Convocation of Caer Caradoc, Snyde and his minions busied themselves; first at Caradoc, then at Bowdler and finally at Wildenhope creating the structure of his system – vast, orderly, chillingly clean chambers into which the records of life outside, of Elder Brothers’ meetings, of confessions, of inquisition, and of secret plots and counterplots would flow, and be stored for posterity. Once the Crusades started in spring he was ready to send out his spies and recorders in the form of the Brother Advisers, attached to every part of the Crusade – a representative specimen we have already met, in the vindictive and self-serving form of Fagg.

The Inquisitors certainly knew the worth of what he was doing, and he made sure of this, thus ensuring they would sanction him and his workers to record all they did. Equally, Quail saw to it that his own achievements were recorded by Snyde, who as spring approached had so gained Quail’s confidence that he seemed almost like his twisted shadow, following him wherever he went and attending his meetings discreetly, silent but for the sliding and scratching of his scribing talons on bark.

But if these moles thought they knew the full extent of what Snyde was doing they were mistaken – they did not; nomole at that time did. For in addition to the “official” records of inquisition and Newborn affairs, at some time in that period Snyde began to collect records to gratify his own peculiar interests and private obsessions.

These began with the obscene and filthy scribings that Squelch, Quail’s obese and deviant son, one day showed him – records of certain activities, of intercourse with young unfortunates placed in Squelch’s power for “correction’, so foul that even now few have ever been allowed to see them. Censorship may be a bad policy, but there are some things so corrupting, so evil, that it is surely better that they are not generally available to mole. Such were the scribings Squelch tentatively proffered Snyde, and it is better not to think too much about the heavy excitement and the eager lustful way the deformed librarian kenned them, his excitement mounting much as the normal passion of a young male in love with a female might mount in spring. We have already witnessed Snyde’s necrophilic lusts at Ludlow, where he found filthy climax and fulfilment with the corpse of the guard who had been strettened. But generally Snyde was more fantasist than doer.

But what Squelch did, Snyde kenned, and the two began a relationship whose fervour and most passionate expression found its life in the pornography of the text. This was Snyde’s first acquisition for his private collection, and it took him into dark tunnels of deviance and infamy in which sexual torture and cruel fantasy vied with the voyeuristic darkness and acts of obscenity and the necrophilia, real and imagined, already referred to. Snyde had a snout for such things, and the moles who indulged in them, and if the word “great” can be associated with such an enterprise, his collection of such textual obscenities remains the greatest and most complete in moledom.

But much of the time Snyde was concerned with recording mundane trivia of the kind only an obsessive would bother with, and whose value or interest emerged only at later times. Thus did he depute a mole to set up a system of records of all who had reason to visit Wildenhope, whether as prisoners or guards – or as Newborns on the official business of arraignments and inquisition. So it is we know precisely whichmoles were held in Wildenhope from shortly after the end of the Convocation right through until... but a chronicler must beware of going forward too fast and revealing in the wrong sequence the infamous and historic events of those times.

It is enough to say that Snyde’s records make it possible to construct a very full account indeed of affairs at Wildenhope as they affected Privet and the others, and to describe in as much detail as is appropriate the true horrors of that chilling place of punishment, death, and manipulation of minds, which is what Quail and his Inquisitors made it. But as we do so it is hard to forget that at our shoulder limps the deformed shadow, and pokes the weaselly snout, of Snyde, a scribemole of flawed genius; while beyond what we ken from his public record is a more private one, material for which his narrow, lustful, deviant eyes continually seek out, but which, thank the Stone, we will but rarely have to sully our minds and memories with.

Wildenhope has sometimes been compared to the Sumps, those deep and treacherous tunnels in the Cannock system which the moles of the Word used as a place of confinement and punishment when they moved their government of moledom there. Certainly it was used for a similar purpose, and the horrors of torture and inquisition were a feature of both. But Wildenhope was on a bigger scale, and much less obviously a place of evil and oppression. The bluff of land which held it was inconspicuous, and the tunnels themselves clean, spacious and well-ordered – more so than at Caer Caradoc. The surface was rough pastureland, which dropped away east and south to the wet meadowlands that bordered the river on one side and its tributary on the other. It is the kind of ground that youngsters spread across in summer when it dries out, worm-rich and easily delved but offering no permanence because of its vulnerability to flooding. All, that is, but for a raised pathway across it to the spit of ground where river and tributary meet and drop away steeply in cascading rapids.

When Privet and the others were brought to Wildenhope they were taken across the surface far enough to look across this wet ground, flooded now by the rain that had hindered them so much. They could see the raised causeway emerging from submerged fields on either side, and past it the river-bank beyond whose edge the yellow rush of water could be seen.

“The water doesn’t stay long on the surface,” one of their guards observed to another, who was unused yet to the place. “It drains away, adding to the river’s flood. The river is bloody terrifying close to, I can tell you! A mole looks down on to moving, rushing death!”

After this brief glimpse of distant terrors the four moles were taken below ground into wide, featureless tunnels. From here each was led a different way and, their separate protests ignored, for naturally they wanted to be together, they were placed in rough sandstone cells, lit from above, and well guarded. The only sounds were the distant roar of the river, the quiet and disciplined chat of the guards, and the occasional moans of other prisoners, heard but rarely seen.

Had the four moles been able to compare notes, they would have realized that they had been placed in near-identical cells. Each was round with a portal which widened upwards, making it impossible to get in and out without an awkward struggle which automatically drew the attention of nearby guards; and each could only be reached down a long tunnel whose entrance was close-guarded. They were set deep below soil level, in underlying sandstone, so that escape by tunnelling was impossible.

But to describe these extraordinary cells simply as “lit from above” is to fail to convey any idea of the single feature which their unfortunate occupants soon came to regard with the greatest dislike. For the cells had no roofs, and the walls rose narrowly and inclined inwards, so that the perimeter at the top was only half that of the base. Above this nonexistent ceiling, or hole as it appeared to those below, was the much higher roof covering all the cells, which were in effect small roofless chambers within one greater chamber.

This was not all. The main roof was fissured and open to the sky, and even on dull days such as that of their arrival the light appeared bright, blindingly so, to those peering up from below. Around the perimeter of the top of these strange exposed cells were routeways patrolled by guards whose heads, in featureless silhouette against the light beyond, would appear suddenly above, as they checked the presence of each prisoner in the cell below, who thus could not identify who was spying upon them. Since the guards rarely spoke, and never from above, the prisoners had the feeling, which soon became obsessive and deeply unsettling, that they could see nothing of the world, but the world could see them. Not for one moment could they feel private or unobserved, except at night, provided it was moonless and without stars. To add to the sense of isolation and helplessness thus created was the way the prisoners were fed – worms were dropped down from above, usually thin and inadequate, always sporadically and without even the comfort of regularity or routine.