Duncton Quest (78 page)

“Murr!” warned Corm.

“Oh, well, all right, I suppose so. Regret finding you but will take you there.”

“Words of advice,” said Corm as they left. “One: watch out for cats. Give them a good talon-thrust on the nose and tunnel away. They don’t kill with one bite like a dog does. Two: ignore Rowan’s tears and tell him you’re in a hurry or otherwise you’ll be crouched there till Longest Night listening to him.”

“Longer,” muttered Murr.

“Three: if you find out anything interesting and survive to tell the tale I’ll be glad to hear of it, very interested in fact.”

“Where will we find you?” asked Tryfan politely.

“I don’t move much,” said Corm.

It took them all night to travel to where Murr wanted to take them, but they might have been quicker had not Mayweed stopped him from time to time to check out directions, for the route was through complex tunnels and surface ways and Mayweed liked to remember such things.

So it was dawn before they arrived, though nomole was immediately in sight.

“He’ll come,” said Murr, looking about uneasily. “I’ll leave you here.” As he went he tapped Mayweed on the shoulder and said, “See you later, Mayweed mate!”

“’Mayweed mate,’” repeated Mayweed with great delight. “Very droll, very jokey, and Mayweed likes that! He says in reply, “See
you
later, chum Murr!’” And Mayweed laughed himself silly as Murr left them.

“Shut up, Mayweed,” said Tryfan, irritable with tiredness.

Dawn came, and then dogs. Yapping, barking, spooring, sniffing, sniffling, pulling twofoots with them. The place was grass and concrete, and there were great concrete walls near and far, all very high. But Tryfan’s group were well hidden in tunnels, and nearby, flowing in a channel in the ground, very wide and grubby, was a stream which went to the northern edge of the grass and then under a huge arch and into deepening darkness, where it boomed and sounded frightening.

It was a dull day. The dogs and the twofoots went, and roaring owls sounded all about but quite unseen. Then a snuffle, and a shake, and from out of a crack in the concrete, near where they had taken refuge a mole appeared and made straight for them. He rushed into their tunnel, puffing heavily, and stared at each of them in turn.

“Greetings wanderers, greetings one and all. Rowan, that’s me. And you are...?” They told him their names in turn and he muttered words like “Good!” “Yes!”, “Well then!” and “Splendid!”

Though his voice was young and his looks eager, he was an old mole, wrinkled and grey. Like Corm, he did not look short of food, but he was unfit rather than obese. From the first he had stationed himself near the entrance to the burrow from where he could see right down to the archway into which the stream disappeared. He looked that way very frequently, as if he was expecting a mole to come any moment. His attention was taken up so much by this archway that Tryfan asked him, before they said anything more, if he
was
expecting anymole.

“Any moment, minute by minute,” said Rowan, frowning and worried. “Yes, any moment now they’ll come. Or I
think
they will.”

“Who?” asked Spindle.

“Moles I once knew,” said Rowan, but in such a way that the word “once” was suggestive of a very long time ago indeed.

“Where have they gone?” asked Tryfan.

“Where I once went,” said Rowan. “Oh, I did! Once. Long time ago.”

There was a terrible sadness in his voice, and a longing, as of a mole who has lost most of his life down a high arched tunnel, and is waiting for it to return.

“What were their names?” asked Starling softly. She went close to him and for a moment he turned to her, interested in a way he had not been before as if this mole among them all would understand what he had to tell them.

“Haize was my sister, Heath was a friend. Shall I tell you?”

He looked away from them, back towards the archway. His voice was diffident, as if he had no real hope that they would wish to hear.

Tryfan remembered Corm’s warning and looked around at the other three. He saw in each of their eyes sympathy for this old mole, and kindness, and curiosity too. He saw no impatience, no condescension. He saw the eyes of moles he had learned to trust and respect, he saw three moles that he had learned to love. He knew that he could find no other three with whom he would be more willing and confident to travel into the depths of the Wen, through the archway and down the tunnel at which Rowan gazed so longingly.

“I think we’d all like you to tell us,” said Tryfan with a smile.

“Really?” said Rowan, rather surprised.

“Please,” said Starling.

“Yearning Sir,” said Mayweed, “it would be this mole’s privilege to hear you.”

“I’m sure we all would like it,” said Spindle.

“Well then!” said Rowan, “I shall.” And he turned from his eternal watching, settled down, and told them of how he came to be where he was that day and every day and would be for evermore until that special day came – and he knew it would! – when the moles he waited for came back out of the Wen.

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was during that same wet and windy month of November, as Tryfan and his moles were finally poised to enter the most dangerous part of the Wen, and when moles look irritably for shelter and despair that good weather will ever return, that Alder and Marram first came near the last stages of the journey to dread Siabod.

They knew little of Siabod but what Tryfan had been able to tell them of his parents’ own account of the place, and what they had picked up from other moles on the final stages of their journey.

They had travelled steadily and well, not using their own names, and the fact that they were grikes counted in their favour, for most of the systems they passed through were entirely grike-controlled and guardmoles were inclined to trust their own kind. All knew that a final assault on Siabod had been planned for many months and, though the main forces had gone on ahead, Alder and Marram were able to convince guardmoles they met that they had special skills and duties that might be needed in Siabod and had been sent up from Buckland to provide them. So they had no trouble getting help towards their destination along the way.

A few eldrenes had been suspicious, a few grikes unhelpful, but on the whole their passage was easy and they were glad, as autumn gave way to winter, that they had travelled fast and before the snows had come, for Siabod is not a place to be out in when ice and snow are about, let alone the blizzards that rage there when December comes.

“By Longest Night we’ll make it and have billets as comfortable as a home burrow in summer,” Alder had been saying cheerfully all the journey long. Marram was less certain and by himself might not have had the persistence that Alder showed. He was a mole like many who, given a lead, will perform great things, but without leadership may do nothing.

It is hard to say now whether already in the back of Alder’s mind were some of the possibilities for battles and campaigns which he would one day plan and seek to execute, as one of the great mole commanders of his time, if not the greatest. Some would suggest that the journey he took to Siabod was a deliberate way of gathering information about the state of moledom which was later to stand him in such good stead.

However that might have been, the fact was that on their long journey he was indeed able to learn a great deal about moledom in general, and some systems in particular, which he was later able to use successfully to the advantage of the moles of the Stone.

For now, it was enough that he saw how powerfully entrenched the grikes had become, and how wise Tryfan had been to retreat and disperse to await such time as conditions were ripe for the Stone followers to re-emerge into light. System after system that Alder passed near or actually went through was well organised for the Word, with powerful and effective eldrenes, obedient moles, and no evidence of much interest in the Stone. Such as there was was negative, for moles did as the sideem had planned they should, which was to blame the Stone for the plague years, and to see Henbane and the grikes as their saviours; and, most alarming of all, to dismiss the period of snoutings and massacres and outcastings as a necessary time of countering the evil of the Stone believers’ indulgence and superstition with the Atoning redemptive might of the Word.

News of Duncton’s defeat had gone ahead of Alder and Marram, along with stories of cowardice and treachery by the Duncton moles themselves. Since Alder and Marram knew these to be false, they were well able to disbelieve the more ominous story they also heard, of Tryfan’s capture and his betrayal of his fellow moles. Yet such stories naturally concerned them, and might in moles of lesser faith have bred doubt and disaffection. But Alder’s reaction to such false rumours was to make him all the more determined to establish contact with other moles of the Stone and organise resistance.

But Alder and Marram did more on that journey than observe the state of different systems. They also had the opportunity to learn something of what moledom had been before the decline of faith in the Stone. Coming as they had from systems of the Word and with a faith in the Stone that was so far untutored, they had none of the experience of rituals and traditions which moles from Stone systems had.

But they had curiosity, and for that reason, on the way to Siabod, Alder and Marram began to deviate from a direct route here and there to investigate those places which Tryfan had told them were once strong of the Stone, and still must have their Stones where a few brave followers might still be. No doubt they realised that such moles, if they still existed, would in future moleyears be needed and not only for the power of their talons. In fact they met few moles at such sites until later in their journey, and instead the visits were a time of wonder and contemplation as they stared, in simple awe, at the great deserted Stones and wondered where their power came from.

Alder remembered always the strange interlude with Tryfan out on the surface of Buckland, when by some power that Tryfan had drawn on he was made to see plain the wrongs of the Word as if he could see them all the way across moledom. He remembered too the peace he had felt afterwards, and something of its Silence, and matter of fact though he was by nature, that memory had left such a mark on him that he desired to meet moles who had faith, that he might learn from them, and know more of the Silence he had so briefly been made to hear.

In a strange way Marram understood this, as if Alder emanated some light from the memory he had and Marram could see it, and seek to follow it as well. Indeed, quite often, while Alder was busy assessing the systems they went through for their strengths and weaknesses Marram, dour though he might seem at times, was able to discover places of the Stone and lead Alder to them as if to say: There you are, it’s nothing much to do with me, but I thought you might like to see this Stone....

So it was that on the way to Siabod they visited many obscure Stone sites and found that while most of these places were quite deserted, some still had fresh tunnels and signs of mole habitation, though nomole came out of hiding to greet the two travellers.