Duncton Quest (29 page)

The guardmoles left him alone, and he was not taken for further questioning – interludes, he now realised, he had enjoyed as a respite from the lonely darkness of the cell. Despite the dampness he could tell that the summer was advancing, for the air grew a little warmer, and he became even more plagued by fleas.

It was then, at the time of despair and anticlimax that arose in the weeks after seeing Brevis, and greater physical discomfort and weakness, that Eldrene Fescue and Sideem Sleekit resumed their interrogation. To them Tryfan would be taken by bullying guardmoles and forced to suffer their questionings. That much he remembered subsequently, and that for answer to any questions they asked about Boswell or the scribemoles of the Holy Burrows, and others about Stillstones and the Book of the Word, the original copy of which they seemed to be seeking, Tryfan chose to talk about something quite different, which was Silence and the place he told them it might be found, which was in Duncton Wood. He remembered that this seemed to infuriate them, and that Sleekit, despite her involvement in the Seven Stancing was as ruthless as Fescue in ordering the guardmoles to hurt him.

But there came a time when their beatings and talonings had no more effect, and he retreated from them into a world of his own in which they could not reach him. So that then, when they told him Spindle was dead, their words had no effect on him, for he was able to evoke the memory of his friends so vividly that the Spindle he knew, like Bracken, and Boswell, and Rebecca, and good Comfrey, were alive and in his cell.

“No, no,” he would call out. “Spindle isn’t dead! He can’t be, he’s here, look! Spindle, talk to them!” When he started talking like that the eldrene seemed to go away and not come back, and Sideem Sleekit stared at him and then was gone, quite gone.

So Tryfan survived. But then there was a period of doubt, and uncertainty, and one he survived by prayer to the Stone and by practising his scribing on the dusty floor across whose narrow length, for two short periods each day, a dull grey light from some distant entrance cast itself. Here he wrote the names he loved – Boswell, Comfrey, Rebecca, Bracken, Spindle... and places he dreamed of visiting again – Uffington, the Holy Burrows, and... Duncton Wood. And he knew those moles were not in his cell at all. All gone. Even Spindle, too, it seemed. And Tryfan wept and did not touch the food the guardmole left.

Then, too, he strove to meditate on the teachings Boswell had given him, doing his best to use that time of enforced solitude well, as he felt Boswell himself would have done. He had often heard Boswell talk of his time in the silent burrows of Uffington, where moles sometimes chose to live isolated from all others for moleyears at a time, and some, even, until death took them to the Stone. He remembered that they ate little, but that they did eat, and drink, especially drink. So he did the same, licking the foul walls of his cell, eating the filthy food they left. Surviving.

It was then that Tryfan of Duncton, already disciplined by his years with Boswell, found a yet sterner discipline, and through the practice of meditation kept some measure of balance and harmony between his mind and his tortured body.

Throughout that dark night of his life Tryfan always thought of Spindle, not believing he was dead, but praying that the Stone might give the cleric strength to survive. And at darker moments still, Tryfan permitted himself the indulgence of reverie, remembering again the warmth and light of his puphood, when the beech trees on the high part of his beloved Duncton Wood had caught the light, and the leaves, first young and bright green and then bigger and duller, but yet magnificent, had fluttered in the breezes high above him as he explored the system in which he had been born.

“I will go back there when we are free of Buckland, go back there and find companionship and help, go back...” And though he did not know it he began to speak such thoughts aloud, mumbling the words in his weakness, his mind reaching the limit of its endurance and beginning to drift now... “Yes I will, and Comfrey will come to greet me, and I’ll find Boswell once more and show Spindle, yes Spindle, that was his name, a mole I knew long ago, Spindle....”

It seemed that he heard moles calling sometimes, and that sometimes it was night when it should be day, and that light across the floor of his cell was so dark, yes, yes it was, and those creatures there not meant for eating, unless they be there to eat him up! A blessed relief! Yes, yes, and he could laugh, and did, silently, and brought his mind back to things that made sense, names he remembered, like B – Bos... yes, yes, and R – Re... What was her name? Spindle,
that
was a name and a mole too. Ha, ha!

“Spindle!” he mumbled. “Spindle...” And Tryfan called out to the blinding light that seemed to come into his cell, and felt tears on his face fur. “Spindle....”

“Tryfan! Tryfan! Can you hear me? Tryfan!”

It was Spindle, talking to him from somewhere among the trees near Duncton’s great Stone, calling to him....

“
Tryfan!!
”

It
was
Spindle. But here, really here, in the sudden light at his cell entrance, which the guardmoles had unblocked.

“Spindle?”

“Yes, Tryfan. Me. Spindle. Your friend.”

An old-seeming Spindle, even thinner than before, his flanks gaunt and hurt with half-healed scars, his talons broken and blunted, his fur ragged and patchy... not the Spindle he had known....

“Tryfan... They’re taking us out of here! – and not, I think, to snout us.”

Tryfan’s paws seemed slow to move, and his body ached, and the guardmole had to come in to help him towards the entrance of the cell before he was able to whisper, “Spindle? You?” And he reached out and touched him as if he doubted his ears and eyes. And they wept and praised the Stone that brought them together again.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“But you look so old,” protested Tryfan, suddenly bad-tempered. “You’re a fraud!”

A weak smile came to Spindle’s face.

“No more than you,” he said. “Come, we’re to leave here now! Come Tryfan.” And Tryfan permitted himself to be helped out of the foul cell that had been his world too long.

As he went he tried to remember something, something he had to remember,
must
remember to tell Spindle, if this was really him. Something scribed.

“Brevis!” said Tryfan suddenly. “I saw him. He’s here, Spindle.”

“Yes, I know,” said Spindle. “These last few moleweeks I have been better cared for, as he has too, and I have been in a communal cell with him. I’m afraid I did not have your strength for isolation, Tryfan, but I am better now. Much have I learnt of Buckland that may be useful.”

“Good, good,” said Tryfan, stopping, so that the guardmoles cursed him. Ahead, across the tunnel, fell a shaft of sunlight, and it was this that Tryfan had stopped to stare at. And the sound that seemed to come from it: of birdsong out on the surface above, high and beautiful, and life busy and good.

“We survived,” whispered Tryfan. “We did, Spindle. And by this confinement the grikes have made us stronger. It is the Stone’s will.” To Spindle’s astonishment he seemed to have found something of his old strength and purpose, for he asked boldly, even if he did totter against the tunnel wall as he did so, “Now tell me, where are we going and why?”

They soon found out, for after making a journey down tunnels in which guardmoles jeered and buffeted them, they were pushed before Eldrene Fescue in that same communal chamber they had good reason to fear, filled once more with a mob of moles, talking and eating excitedly, as they seemed to like to do before an Atonement or a punishing.

How loud and big and strange so many moles seemed to Tryfan, who had known only solitariness for so long.

Fescue crouched with Sleekit at her side, both looking smug. Tryfan looked to see if he could find the slightest trace of pity or concern in the eyes of Sleekit, for he could not comprehend how she had shared the Seven Stancing and yet be so cold ever since. Unless she had been afraid of that Silence she had heard. Yes, thought Tryfan, a mole might be afraid of that and need much help towards it.

“Well, well!” said Fescue coming close to Tryfan, her talons poking painfully at his shoulders and ribs, lingering there a little too long. “I see your Stone has not protected you. See!” she cried out, her harsh voice silencing the rabble of guardmoles who turned to listen, sadistic smiles on their faces. “Here we have two Stone followers. Won’t listen to the Word. Don’t want to know the Word. I and Sideem Sleekit have questioned them and got the most we can expect to get. This one here even knew one of the Uffington scribemoles, a White Mole no less! Now I’m wondering....”

Her voice dropped to a whisper as she paused for effect. “I’m wondering what to do with them....”

Tryfan and Spindle instinctively moved closer together, as if each might protect the other from the hostility about them.

“Snout the bastards!” shouted a guardmole.

“Aye, snout them slow!” cried another.

A guardmole came up to them, breaking past the ones who had brought them there, and thrust his yellow evil-smelling teeth towards each in turn.

“Thought you were scum, said you were scum, now you are scum,” he snarled. He was the grike who had first accosted them in the burrow, and who had ordered them to call him “Sir’.

“Snout the scum,” he shouted suddenly, turning towards his friends.

Fear is a numbing thing when there is no recourse to hope or escape, and Tryfan and Spindle began to feel that now as the grikes shouted all around, calling for their death.

“Stone protect us, Spindle, that cell I have been in seems a sanctuary compared to this.”

Spindle, whose thin flanks were shaking, said, “I don’t like this Tryfan! I mean what can the Stone
do
?”

What
could
the Stone do? Tryfan had to struggle to shake the numbing tide of fear in him before he was able to adopt a stance of stillness, feeling his four paws on the chamber’s floor, and fixing his gaze a little over the heads of the rabble of grikes and beyond to the silverine and russet roots of birch that came down into the tunnel beyond the eldrene’s place. The Stone, he was thinking, would do something as it could only ever do something – through another mole; yes, through mole. A mole
here
;
there must be one to help them, as he himself had been here before to bring hope to the heart of that nameless mole they had seen killed in this chamber. Tryfan’s fear was suddenly replaced by calm and certainty: even in the face of these rabbling calls for their death he was certain now they would not die. Not yet. Not here. More to do, so much more. He stretched out a paw and even as the shouting reached a climax about them and the grikes turned back towards Eldrene Fescue for her verdict, Spindle felt his calm and was calm too.

“The Stone will save us,” whispered Tryfan. “Now show them you have no fear.”

But whichmole would do the Stone’s work? Which one here...?

Tryfan began to look about the chamber, but all he saw was one frenzied guardmole after another, eyeing them with hatred and triumph, looking for their death. One after another he stared at them, their shouts ever louder, and he knew that what he sought was a mole in doubt and fear, one in whom was the light of the Stone’s grace, however feeble it might yet be. But nomole that he could see held such a light in his eyes. Beginning to despair he turned to look at Fescue, as the grikes were, and saw only her evil eye, and then looked again at the vertical roots of the birch, which plunged down behind Sleekit, silvery and beautiful, shining, yes, yes, shining on Sleekit’s glossy coat, grey light, good light, shining. Tryfan looked on her and into her eyes, and he saw the fear he sought, and the doubt, and he knew that only in thatmole, who had been caught by the Stone at the strange Seven Stancing, lay now the hope of life for Spindle and himself. And as so often with Tryfan, he saw more than the immediate need; he saw also the future way. For if his life lay now in Sleekit’s paws – though he could not see how she could do much to save them now – so in the future would the great quest towards Silence on which they had been sent depend always on others. He was but the pointer to the way, others would help him onwards, and others might finally reach the place where that quest ended. He was a scribemole, and nothing: always needing others, as he and Spindle needed Sleekit now. And he understood what Boswell had once said to him: “We scribemoles are the leaders, and yet we must be led.”

Spindle felt Tryfan’s stillness and saw the direction of his gaze, and that Sleekit looked uneasy, her talons stressing the soil before her, her eyes not meeting theirs, or anymole’s.

“What are you waiting for, Eldrene? Tell us to snout them!” shouted the grikes. “Or mark them! Aye a marking! A marking!”

As guardmoles nearby began to turn and flex their talons, and more than one prodded and poked at Tryfan and Spindle, Tryfan saw Sleekit grow suddenly still, her talons become more certain, her command return.

“Enough!” cried out Fescue suddenly, raising her paw, and everymole fell silent, heaving and breathing and sweating in their bloodlust, spit on their mouth fur, waiting for the eldrene’s command.

“Well? All of you have made your feelings of revulsion and dislike of these Stone followers known but one, and that is the esteemed Sideem Sleekit here. And what do you think, my dear?”

The eldrene turned a slitty eye on Sleekit and the excitement in the mob abated a little, for few there liked the sideem, least of all Sideem Sleekit, whose power they were afraid of, and whose authority was mysterious but certainly greater than it seemed – more, perhaps, even than the eldrene’s. So yes, yes, yes, what did Sideem Sleekit think? The grikes leaned forward, listening, mouth open, the air rank with their sweat, the burrow shaking with their desire for a snouting.

Sleekit came forward a little, and for a moment so short that very few noticed it she looked in the direction of Tryfan, then she smiled strangely and then her face went hard.

“Snouting,” she began, the word provoking a wide sigh of relief among the moles throughout the chamber. “Snouting,” she continued, the repetition of the word almost massaging the sigh into a groan, “is... too... kind a punishment for these moles.”