Duncton Quest (111 page)

“Take him to the surface now,” said Rune indifferently, “and help me back to Henbane. She will be needing me now, very much, and desiring of my help.”

Spindle had time to see the sideem lead Rune away and to feel an overwhelming loathing which was alien to him. When he had been speaking Rune had commanded the chamber and nomole else in it seemed of significance; but as he went away Spindle saw how thin and frail he was, and that his skin was skeined and wrinkled on his flanks, and his fur thin. There was a sense of meanness about his gait, and indulgence – not of the body but of the spirit.

Spindle turned away in disgust as the sideem mole-handled him up to the surface. There he found himself on the westward flanks of Whern itself, and for a moment his doubts and fears were forgotten as he saw the great heathered rises of the lowering moor caught in late September sun and showing russet and purple. The sun seemed to ride southwards across the moor in waves where gaps in the cumulus cloud let it through, but the wind was cold.

“He’s there, mole,” said one of the sideem curtly, pointing to what Spindle had taken to be no more than shadowed roots about a hag of heather nearby, “and may the Word go with thee. Take him and leave here, leave now and be heard of no more. We shall give you no more than a few days and then if you are seen you shall be killed. Your day and that of the Stone is done, praise be the Word.”

The sideem left and Spindle moved cautiously in the direction they had pointed. Soon he saw that what he had thought was shadow was mole. The grass and heather all about was bloodied, the mole unrecognisable.

“Tryfan?” began Spindle doubtfully, feeling exposed and nervous. “It’s me, it’s Spindle.”

Tryfan did not move. Spindle approached nearer, and went round Tryfan’s prone body to look at his face and snout. They, too, were unrecognisable, but seemed at first a mass of blood and open wounds. Not “wounds” but wound, a single dreadful spreading thing that started at what Spindle saw was his mouth and spread across his snout and eyes and ears to all his head. Swollen, bloody, and strangely glistening. Spindle started back in disgust, for the bloody mess they had made of Tryfan was now the feeding ground for midges, thousands of them, which had settled on the congealing blood in grey and bristling rows.

For a few moments he angrily tried to brush these off but the slightest touch or movement brought a frightening gasp and screams of pain from Tryfan who, seeming to think that Spindle was one of the punishing sideem, sought pathetically to shrink away.

If Spindle thought then that he was in a nightmare, it was one that was only just beginning. For even as he stared in horror at what he saw, and began to notice that the wounds extended to Tryfan’s flanks and beyond, and then to his two front paws which had been horribly crushed and torn, a black shadow shot over them both, wheeled, hovered, stopped, and cried out its corvid hunger. Feeding raven. Then another. Then a third. They fluttered, half turned in the air, and dropped like plague among the heather and rocks. Then they rose up again and as one, it seemed, attacked.

Spindle turned with talons raised and protected Tryfan from the onslought, the midges feeding on, and only when dusk came did the ravens depart, their great beaks shining with the autumn sun.

That night Spindle found a use at last for the skill in corpse clearing he had learned at Skint’s paws in the Slopeside of Buckland.

He half carried, half pulled Tryfan downslope to the bank of a stream where limestone showed, and found sanctuary there under some rocks. He washed the wounds clean with his own spittle and the coolness of the rocks kept the midges at bay.

He was reluctant to leave Tryfan but had to do so to find food, which was difficult there. What little he found he brought back and masticated to a pulp for Tryfan in the hope that he might force some into his mouth.

Tryfan screamed again at this, and Spindle felt as if he was killing him and was in tears, but he persisted and a little of the food was taken. After that there seemed nothing for him to do but keep his friend warm and wait.

Nomole came that night, nor any creature, but in the morning there was the scutter of beaks on the rocks nearby. Ravens again. Then a stoat came whiffling near and Spindle crouched defensively by Tryfan, staring out from the rocks that protected them, watching back and fro and to the sides, in case of attack.

It came soon enough. Stoat claws thrusting under stone, muzzle snarling under rock, the foetid stoat breath making Spindle nauseous. But he struck back as hard and fast as he could and the attack died.

The afternoon came, dusk, then night once more. Nature seemed to sense that one of its own was vulnerable. Many circlings about that place that night: Fox? Stoat? Mole? Spindle never knew.

Dawn. Another day and Spindle knew that Tryfan must drink to live. The wounds had congealed into one bloody swollen mess. His eyes seemed gone, his snout was crushed and broken.

Most terribly, when Spindle began to move him once more, and lead him down to the stream to drink, poor Tryfan let out an anguished nasal scream of pain and began to shake. Spindle had to force himself to continue, and got Tryfan to the water, and helped his mouth into it, watching carefully that he did not drown. After one final scream as the water went on to his head the protest stopped and Tryfan drank. He did not acknowledge Spindle’s presence, and nor could he raise himself from the stream and up its bank, but had to be helped once more.

The stoats came back again; and again. The stench of fox nearby, tail whisking as it watched, Spindle defensive as before. The fox slunk about and then left.

It was four days before Tryfan again took food, and that barely enough to feed a pup. He sucked at the worm Spindle had chewed for him as if his jaw was broken or giving pain. He allowed himself to be helped once more to the water, and then, for the first time, attempted to use his front paws. They collapsed under him and he fell terribly on to his wounded snout.

His eyes were still bloody and swollen, and he showed no signs of hearing or seeing what Spindle did, but once: when Spindle moved away he managed to move a front paw painfully and, with the slightest of squeezes, to indicate that he did not wish him to leave.

Spindle talked to him reassuringly before, once more, he went off to search for food.

On the sixth night Tryfan cried, curious broken sounds of a mole in darkness and despair. Spindle held him and Tryfan fell into painful sleep.

It was several days before the predators lost interest, sensing perhaps that they had lost the opportunity for easy prey because the wounded mole was strengthening.

Tryfan had already recovered his hearing but now, as the swelling over his face lessened, his eyes became visible. They were cut and bloody, the left far more than the right, yet if he tilted his head leftward he seemed to be able to see a little.

The swelling round his snout subsided and it was easy then to see the talon-thrusts that had so battered it: oval, angry holes in which blood congealed. It was his snout that gave him most pain.

The weather began to worsen noticeably. One day, quite suddenly, hail fell and Tryfan made a pathetic attempt to find shelter from its stinging stones.

The next day was warmer. With help at the beginning, Tryfan made a little progress on his own, climbing down to the water’s edge. But the effort was too much for him to crawl back up again to the stance Spindle had taken and for that he needed help.

“We’ll have to move soon,” said Spindle. “This place is worm-poor and the soil not fit for tunnels. We
must
move because there’s nothing left for us in the north and we don’t want the winter to overtake us.”

Tryfan snouted round towards him and listened, then his head slumped forward on the ground, his broken paws splayed out.

Can’t move, he seemed to say.

After that, each day, Spindle urged him to go down to the stream and back again, each day he resisted, but each day he made better progress.

Until at last a day broke when Tryfan went there of his own accord, and was able, with painful slowness, to climb the slope back to Spindle. Later that day the weather cooled once more and the sky turned a miserable slate grey.

Tryfan slept for a time and then awoke, and snouted up towards the sky.

“Grey,” he whispered, “grey.”

“Can you see?” asked Spindle.

Tryfan nodded and then went still, thinking.

At last he whispered, “Must go.”

It was the first positive thing he had said since Spindle had started tending him.

Tryfan turned to Spindle and did his best to rise up on to his paws. The effort made him tremble and shake and he let out little gasps of pain, yet he kept his stance. Slowly Tryfan pulled himself forward until he climbed out of the stream’s cut to where the fell was smooth and grassy above.

For a long time Tryfan lay there totally exposed.

Then he snouted southwards.

“We can go a little southward,” said Spindle, “but I think it’s unwise to try to contact Skint in Grassington. The sideem warned me that if we are seen we will be killed. And in any case we would only bring trouble for our friends. But we can go southward to some anonymous place and overwinter there until you are fully recovered.”

“Sp —” he began, and Spindle went close to him. “No, not just southward. Sp – Spindle, take me home. Take me to Duncton Wood.”

Then he turned his hurt snout to Spindle’s side as a pup might to its mother and wept.

While Spindle looked about the slopes of Whern despairingly and then turned his face southward, too, a look of determination came over it.

“One step now is one less to make to Duncton Wood. Come then, Tryfan, let us begin.”

Then Tryfan did so, taking first one step, then another, and then a struggling third, as the two moles began the long trek home.

The sudden and unexpected disappearance of Boswell and Bailey into the waterfall pool in Providence Fall caused dissension and dismay among the sideem, and brought extreme judgement on three of them.

Those were the guards in the Fall itself who, it was assumed, had somehow let in the weak and diseased alien mole who had led the two moles to their deaths in the torrent because, it was surmised, that was better than allowing them to submit to the Word. The Master himself talked with the culprits, but it was Henbane who sentenced them of the Word, and decided that they should be forced to enter the Clints and let the Word decide whether they die of starvation or find a way out. The Word decided: not one was seen again.

As for Sleekit, she was closely examined by the Master and suffered the agony of Dark Sound. All moles heard her screams. Yet, at the end of it, he pronounced her blameless but listened to the warnings of Weed who cautioned him against letting her roam quite as free as she had before.

“Let her stay with Henbane,” said Weed with the maliciousness of which he was the master. “What harm can she do there?”

Rune nodded his head and agreed. “Staying with Henbane” was Weed-words for being made prisoner, for that was what Henbane had become. Weed had succeeded in avoiding any involvement in the actions of those days as if sensing what might happen on Tryfan’s arrival would be of more than the passing interest Henbane and the Master themselves attached to it. Now, as news of Boswell’s drowning and Tryfan’s punishment and rejection from Whern with Spindle became known, Weed heard that the Master was on the way to see Henbane, and nomole knew better than he what that might mean.