Duncton Wood (28 page)

So it was that Barrow Vale was treated to the rare sight of a quaking Rue leading the mighty Mandrake and Rune, along with the attendant henchmole, through their tunnels and on to the communal one leading toward the slopes.

Rue, however, was a poor leader. She felt nervous and sick at the strain of it all and at one point actually collapsed, unable to go on. “Get her food,” snapped Rune impatiently to the henchmole, who did so with ill grace.

“Last bloody time I find worms for a female, I can tell you that,” he muttered angrily as he hurled three worms down before her in the tunnel where she lay. Rune noted this remark down in his memory. He didn’t trust moles who lost their tempers over something as trivial as that, or even lost their tempers at all.

“Well now, is her ladyship ready to move her ass forward then?” asked the henchmole sarcastically when she had eaten the food. She nodded and got up, feeling very shaky and nervous, for to add to her fear of Mandrake and Rune, there was her apprehension about what might be waiting for them in her tunnel.

Eventually she reached the end of the communal tunnel, led them out onto the surface, and from there pressed on the last few hundred moleyards to her tunnels.

“Well!” said Rune when they got there, with sarcasm lurking behind the good-humored tone in his voice. “This is where it all happened, is it?”

Rue nodded her head miserably. She felt she was going to be attacked at any moment by one of them, or perhaps all of them.

“Why didn’t you say that this was Hulver’s old system right from the start?” Rune spoke the words silkily, but to Rue they sounded as threatening as a thousand moles. And she didn’t understand what he meant at all.

Her terror, her general miserableness, now gave way to tears and she gulped her next words out: “I don’t know what you mean. I only did what you said. This is where I heard it and there is a mole up there on the higher slopes and I don’t know if his name is Hulver or anything. I didn’t even know moles lived in the Ancient System and I don’t know what you want me to say or do.”

“Be quiet!” Mandrake brought her flood of tearful words to a short, sharp stop as he raised his talons by a tunnel entrance and snouted inside. “There is a mole here, or has been recently,” he said tersely. “You two wait here and let no mole out, no mole. I will see what we may find, for there is a scent here like none I have found before in the Ancient System – dry and dusty, old in its impression but fresh in its strength.” With that, Mandrake boldly went into the tunnels, while Rune covered those entrances that lay nearby and the henchmole went off to cover more.

Mandrake was right – Bracken had been in the tunnels, having gone there for comfort after Rue had fled four moledays before. But he was getting wiser and, having worked out that if any mole returned it would almost certainly do so from the direction of the communal tunnel, he had kept himself as far over the other side of the tunnels as possible, with a line of retreat ready. On hearing the arrival of several moles, and in particular the whimpering of a female, he quietly crept out of the tunnels by a little entrance higher up the slopes, which he blocked behind him, and made his way down into the tunnel on the far side of the stone seal. He was very cautious, indeed, and blocked up each tunnel as he went.

Mandrake explored the tunnels in a no-nonsense fashion, quite ready to do battle with whatever creature he might find there. The scent puzzled him, for it was strange and strong, but he could not trace its source. He called the others down, and Rue, still trembling, led them past the main burrow up to the stone seal. She told them what she had heard, pointing a talon at the blank wall of the seal on the far side of which, unknown to any of them. Bracken crouched listening.

Mandrake sent Rue and the henchmole back to her burrow while he and Rune discussed the situation.

“Mmm... It’s a seal, that’s for sure,” mumbled Mandrake, “which means there must be a tunnel beyond it.”

“A tunnel leading into the Ancient System?” Rune asked it as a question, for he liked Mandrake to feel he had the initiative all the time, but it was more an obvious statement of fact. Mandrake nodded.

“No wonder Hulver chose to live here, where he could be so close to his beloved dead tunnels of the past,” said Rune.

Mandrake looked up at the seal and finally decided what he must do. A bold gesture was needed. He still doubted very much that there was anymole in the Ancient System – indeed, if there had been, whatever it was would surely have destroyed the seal and entered these tunnels. The fact that something had suggested to Mandrake that it was, as he always suspected, just an ordinary mole – whom, when the time came, he would kill. If he was in the forgotten tunnels beyond, then well and good, let him know that Mandrake was here. He raised his massive talons to the seal, not knowing that beneath its cover of packed soil it was massive flint, and brought them down upon it, just as Bracken had done.

But this time the result was startlingly different. Again there was the terrifying screeching sound that Rue had told them about, but from behind the mass of dust and debris something far more frightening appeared. As the covering peeled away under Mandrake’s blow and the dust settled, there, staring at them all, and bigger even than Mandrake, was an image of an owl just like the one Bracken had already found in the Chamber of Dark Sound. Its eyes, its beak, its talons – each was picked out through the calcite covering of the flint so that they shone black with the hard, glossy shine of the raw stone underneath, while the screech of talon on flint sounded harshly about them, as it had sounded about Rue before, seeming to come from the owl face itself.

Their reactions to this sudden apparition were all different. Rue simply covered her ears with her paws, looked at the image forming in front of her and fled to her burrow. The henchmole staggered back from the sound and sight, his mouth open, trying to say something in his fear and surprise, but failing.

At first sight of the owl face, Mandrake reared up snarling before it, his talons poised on a level with the owl’s eyes, and his mouth open and ready for any kind of fighting. He was feeling that at last, in this system to which life, had so miserably driven him, he had an adversary worth facing. And in that moment of poised action, he crossed over a boundary beyond which a mole never again knows physical fear.

Crouched behind him, Rune’s response was altogether different. It was an inward reaction, for outwardly he showed little or no response – a momentary look of surprise, an instinctive clawing of talons, but no more than that. But as Rune looked into the sudden black eyes of the owl face that materialized before him, he saw the power for evil which he had pursued for so long. His pulse quickened, he gazed with excited awe on the owl face, and he shivered with a frisson of sensuality far deeper, and for him far more exciting, than any he had felt with Rebecca. With her he was in charge and playing a game; here, he was surrendering his will to what, for him, was the only reality of life, its dark and arcane side where a mole may learn to agonize the souls of others by wielding the same black power that seemed to lie behind the shining flint eyes of the owl.

For each mole these moments lasted a very long time; for all of them together they lasted for no longer than it takes to draw breath. Then Mandrake’s paws dropped as he saw that the owl was no more than an image; the henchmole tried to recover his nonchalant stance, and Rune almost purred with pleasure at the sight before them. Rue’s screams could be heard coming up the tunnel from her burrow.

“Shut her up,” ordered Mandrake without taking his eyes off the image before him. The henchmole left the burrow.

“Well, well!” said Mandrake robustly. “So at long last the decaying Duncton system has actually sprung a surprise. You know what it is, don’t you. Rune?”

“I have an idea,” lied Rune. It was the pleasant face of power, as far as he was concerned.

“I have seen such images before,” said Mandrake, “in burrows far from here. They were used by ancient moles to create fear in the minds of moles who might feel tempted to see what secrets lie in the tunnels beyond. Very effective on some moles, not much use on a mole like me. See, they don’t really protect anything worth protecting. It’s all nonsense, isn’t it? Just a joke that ought to make a mole laugh.”

Meanwhile, Bracken, who was listening to this from his vantage point beyond the flint but could not fully understand what was happening, had heard Mandrake’s blow on the stone and seen its effect – for it was so powerful it sent some remnants of the soil cover on his side down onto the tunnel floor and onto his coat as well. He didn’t dare shake it off for fear that he might be heard. Then a silence followed the terrible screech of talon on stone: he heard one of the moles scream and pawsteps fading away, he heard what sounded like Mandrake himself snarl with rage, but then nothing more for some moments. Until Mandrake’s deep voice gave an inaudible command, and then a little muffled by the stone between, said “You know what this is, don’t you. Rune?”

So Rune was there! But what was “this”? He listened on.

The conversation that followed was largely meaningless to Bracken until, at last. Mandrake said that he had seen “owl faces like this” in a system he had lived in for a short time “on my way from Siabod.”

So there was an owl face on the far side of the stone! And it was a scaring-off device.

Beyond the stone. Mandrake and Rune finished their discussion. “So, for the time being, we’ll leave it as it is,” Mandrake was saying. “We will create the impression that we have faced great dangers – an idea which will no doubt be reinforced by that shambling henchmole, who seemed very frightened indeed.”

Then he added: “I’m glad you weren’t affected by it. Rune – wouldn’t want to think that you are afraid of things like this.” He tapped the owl beak with his talons, the sound echoing into the ancient tunnels beyond, way past Bracken.

Rune smiled, pitying Mandrake for taking the owl so lightly. “We know better,” he was effectively saying to himself, “we of the dark powers, we of the black beak and talon, we of the impenetrable eye.”

Mandrake took his talons from the flint before him with an unaccustomed shiver. The stone was very cold and there was something in the way that Rune was looking at him which had the same blank quality of the owl’s eyes. He didn’t like Rune. You can’t trust a mole like him. Mandrake turned his back on the owl and left down the tunnel toward Rue’s burrow. His gait was suddenly heavy and ponderous and he felt tired. Tired and old. It was true that in his confrontation with the owl image he had, finally, lost all sense of physical fear, though Mandrake lived in too great a haze of anger and confusion to know the fact. But when a mole loses such fear, the freedom he finds may serve only to make him prey to the darker, more perilous fears that lurk beyond all moles’ bodies and inhabit their minds.

Rune watched him go down the tunnel, perceiving the new fatigue in his movements as only a mole of his diabolic insight possibly could. Rune looked back to the black eyes of the owl, then forward again at Mandrake, and knew that the hour when he would take power in Duncton was getting nearer.

Lacking any instruction, Rue followed the three big moles up out of the tunnels and onto the surface, where she crouched, blinking in the light, wondering what was going to happen to her.

“Shall I have her killed?” asked Rune, looking at Mandrake and aware that the henchmole was itching to do it. Rue cowered pathetically back, staring at the big henchmole who she knew hated her. Too cowed even to raise her talons in self-defense. She knew she was going to die.

Mandrake looked round at her. It would be wrong, quite wrong to say that the light of pity shone in his heart. Pity was a word that Mandrake never knew. It was sheer tiredness with the effort of violence. Time was when he would have nodded his head, and Rune would have raised his talon as a signal, and the henchmole would have plunged his talons as a pleasant job. Not now.

“What’s the point?” said Mandrake, looking blankly at Rue. Rune and the henchmole looked at Rue with complete contempt and then all three of them turned away from her as if she did not exist anymore. And the sense that she was so worthless that she wasn’t worth killing was so great in Rue that she just crouched there stunned, unable even to relax in the knowledge that at last they had gone and she was safe. Then she started to cry, for she could not follow them back to Barrow Vale and she could not return into the tunnels that had started to be her home. She seemed to have nowhere to go. In her misery she wanted to do nothing but die, to forget the system into which she regretted ever having been born.

And there, a few molehours later, exposed in the open and vulnerable to owl attack, Bracken found her. He had heard her first, for after the moles had gone from the tunnels, he crept over there himself and, having established there was no mole there, went up onto the surface where he heard the shaky breathing and occasional sobs and he quietly went out to see who it might be.

He watched her for a long time, puzzled that she should stay crouched out in the open as dangerous dusk fell and trying to decide for one last time whether he should risk making contact with another mole.

Finally he came forward to her with enough noise for her to know that he was there. She looked at him but did not ran away as he expected. Instead, her snout lowered in a gesture of total defeat and she asked him quietly, “Have you come to kill me?”

Such a thought was so far from his mind – indeed, it was so far from his experience – that it quite took his breath away. He saw that she was small and bedraggled and seemed very frightened, while he (and he looked at the now much glossier fur above his paws and felt the much more powerful muscles that had developed since he had started to regain his strength) was fit and well and must seem confident. Why, he was an adult,. and a male, and strong!

Bracken laughed and said that the only killing he knew of was when moles tried to do it to him. She sniffled and wiped her face with her paw, comforted by his laugh but troubled by the curious wildness about his appearance and the strength that seemed to come from him, even though he wasn’t as big as that Rune and the henchmole. As for that Mandrake, well... no mole was as big as him!