“Four, as a matter of fact,” said Rolt.
“So what do you know?”
“I have met him,” admitted Rolt. “He is, I would say, impressive, which means well-kenned in military history, fair-minded, brave, and an inspiration to those he leads. Worthy to be counted among the best of the long line of Duncton warriors.”
“But inexperienced.”
Rolt shrugged and said, “I can think of moles who have been good in war without much prior experience. It is, I presume, spirit that matters as much as experience. In any case he knows how to appoint subordinates who complement his strengths with their own.”
“Aye, I’ve heard as much. I am told he relies on the Siabodian warrior Ystwelyn, whom of course I know from my days along the north Welsh borderland. A formidable mole, who would not second himself to just anymole. Then there is Arvon, who is a brilliant leader of small forces and the kind of risk-taker I would like to have on my own side.”
“You are well informed, Brother Commander.”
“I need to be with so few friends in the Crusade Council. I have spies of my own. Yes, Maple’s force has proved impressive so far, but he has not really been tested. But Brother Rolt, you have drawn me out enough. What task is it that the Elder Senior Brother asks of me? You know I will do it if I can.”
“He knows that, and is sure you will. First, he asks that you trust me as you would him.”
“Of course I do, Brother, of course. I can say the same of no other mole.”
“Well then, listen to me. You must not go to Wildenhope, or obey any command to do so.”
“I have received no command to that effect,” said Thorne with a blank stare, “or none that has been passed on to me. Nor would I go if I did. I value my life too well.”
“Nor must you appear to ignore Quail’s orders, for that will provoke him to send moles to pursue which would be... tedious, and complicating. No, you must be in the wrong place at the right time: you must travel east towards Ashbourne.”
“Will you give me a reason, or must I trust you blindly?”
“I will give you a name: Chervil. He has been in the north, conveniently out of the way, sent by Quail who thought thereby to neutralize a potential rival.”
Thorne’s eyes darkened. “But Chervil it was personally killed the Duncton mole Whillan and by that proved he was loyal to Quail. I did not think...”
His voice faded as he gazed into the subtle eyes of Rolt. Did they twinkle, or did they glitter? Thorne could not say.
“Chervil,” muttered Thorne, pondering, calculating, wondering: “they say he was as much your son as Thripp’s.”
“If he was the mole killed Whillan he is no son of mine, nor Thripp’s.”
“If it was not him then who was it?”
Rolt did not reply, and seeing he would give nothing of that away Thorne moved on to something else: “And what do you want me to do at Ashbourne?”
“Not be here, of course. And to wait.”
“Wait until the right time comes to move against the rebels and set right this disarray Quail has brought to the Caradocian Order?”
“Perhaps,” said Rolt judiciously. “It is all Thripp asks of you.”
“For now!”
Rolt grinned faintly. “It will be enough.”
“Well then, let it be so. I shall leave guardmoles enough at Cannock to watch over it well. We must prepare against the possibility of some kind of move from Wildenhope against us here. This system has seen war before, and a bloody one, and it has a modicum of good defences. I would not have minded defending it against the incompetents that Quail might send. But I must not talk treason. I am, after all, simply making myself scarce, along with my best guardmoles, and then... waiting!”
“Have you a Brother Adviser here who may be difficult?”
Thorne laughed. “We had, Brother Rolt, until this evening. The treacherous Fagg, one of Quail’s worst. But I understand that when he heard, which guardmole Adkin made sure he did, that messengers with orders from the Crusade Council have come in my absence, and now mistakenly gone south to find me, he went hurrying after them. In any case he has been in collusion with Squilver and I have no doubt he will follow him to Wildenhope. We shall leave tomorrow, and if he does follow us it may take him time to catch up with us by the time he has gone south, come north, and chased around in the wrong direction. No, Fagg is a fool and as great an example of Quail’s misjudgement as we need.”
“I understand that your predecessor here, Brother Commander Squilver, has gained some advantage at Wildenhope.”
Thorne’s eyes glittered with distaste. “A dangerous mole, who can make others follow him but allows his judgement to be clouded by a desire for personal gain. Now, Brother Rolt, if you’ll forgive me, we have things to do which cannot wait. I assume you will be travelling with us now, for you’ll not be safe anywhere else. Expect to leave for Ashbourne on the morrow. Meanwhile, get some sleep, for the coming days will be long.”
“And not just for us!” said Rolt. “May the Stone protect the Elder Senior Brother!”
“Aye,” growled Thorne, pausing in prayer for only a moment before he summoned Adkin, and began the complex process of selecting which of his guardmole forces were to stay behind at Cannock, and which to go with him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
So it was that the balance of power in moledom began to shift away from Quail as Thorne, having effectively secured Cannock, and the systems north and north-east of it, journeyed eastward with Rolt, imposing his benign discipline and influence as he went.
System after system he reached, assessed, and quickly won the confidence of the demoralized Newborn forces he found there, pausing only as long as it took to put one of his own supporters in control, taking with him any that might have proved troublesome had they been left behind. It was as plain as the trunk of a silver birch at twilight that confidence in Quail was seeping away, even amongst those brothers who had attended the Convocation of Caer Caradoc. No doubt those who had gained places in the more important systems like Rollright and Avebury were satisfied with the power they had acquired, and glad to give their support to Quail; but there was much unrest in the small peripheral systems to which less able or less well connected brothers had been sent, and here Thorne made easy headway.
Not that he represented himself as in opposition to Quail in any way. Rather, as he seemed strong-minded and competent, with a solid and well-disciplined force of guardmoles at his flanks, those systems he visited were happy to accept his claim that he was “expanding the Crusade Council’s powers from Cannock’, and willing to yield authority to him.
His ruse of absorbing troublesome brothers into his own ranks was a clever one, for it would have taken a powerful and resourceful mole to resist Thorne’s authority once he was in the midst of Thorne’s ablest guardmoles; and a fit one too, for Thorne worked the newcomers hard, and gave them little space for causing trouble. In this way he gained useful extra guardmoles and commanders, while reducing the chances of leaving hostages to fortune behind him in territory he had gained.
By the end of June Thorne had reached Ashbourne, and was able to approach it in the knowledge that the systems to its west were already his. Its proximity to the fabled Beechenhill, where the holy Beechen had died at the paws of Eldrene Wort, which lay a little to the north, meant that he proceeded cautiously.
Advance reconnaissance, and contact with a couple of disgruntled guardmoles from Ashbourne who had been deputed to watch over the grubby and rebellious little system of Ellastone, was reassuring. The Brother Commander of Ashbourne was the ageing Dunmow, once a rising star among the Inquisitors and assistant to Skua himself; but he had offended his superior in some way and been relegated to the outpost of Ashbourne. For a time, however, Dunmow had redeemed himself with a brutal campaign of violence against sundry systems round and about his new domain. His ill-disciplined and unkempt guardmoles, finding little opposition amongst the small settlements of those parts,
had raped, plundered and tortured their way over hill, down dale, and across valley. But they had no grasp of strategy, and easy success bred indolence and indifference to the task at paw, so that the advantages that might have been reaped from their early progress by a leader such as Thorne were let slip.
Local communities rallied, leading followers escaped, and soon all that Dunmow controlled was an empty landscape of deserted systems from which moles had fled to the north and east, beyond the reach of his lazy guardmoles. Meanwhile the reports that reached the Crusade Council in Wildenhope continued to sound good, and Quail concentrated his efforts on areas further south, where his intelligence was better. Ashbourne and the north seemed of little consequence – and in any case, Senior Brother Chervil was out that way, and if problems arose, no doubt he could deal with them...
“The Crusade Council makes a mistake in thinking that because it is isolated in these northern parts, Beechenhill lacks importance,” observed Brother Rolt sagely, with that special glint in his eye that Thorne now recognized as prefacing some little scheme or subtle plot. “It is not isolated in moledom’s heart, and nor in the hearts of the rebel followers. Fancy visiting it, Brother Commander?”
“But it is on high ground, and some way off our destination, which is Ashbourne itself,” said Thorne.
“But supposing you were to find Beechenhill ill-guarded, which against the forces you command will likely be the case. If it is, then you have the perfect excuse to dispossess your incompetent fellow Brother Commander Dunmow of his power at Ashbourne. You might charge him with, let us say, dereliction of duty. You military moles probably have a word for it. Whatever, he is unlikely to get much support from a Crusade Council in which Skua is so powerful.”
Thorne smiled broadly. He liked travelling with Brother Rolt, for in addition to the subtlety of his thought there was his ironic sense of humour, unusual in a highly-placed Newborn.
“I shall send a small force under Adkin, who is good at that kind of work; that will be swifter than if all of us go. It need only take a matter of days.”
It took four days, and Adkin came back with the news that not only was Beechenhill ill-guarded but the library had been virtually destroyed by marauding guardmoles from Ashbourne. Dunmow’s guardmoles. It was enough to allow Thorne to approach Ashbourne with equanimity. In a quick and effective operation he imposed his authority on a soon-terrified Dunmow, isolated him in a cell, and gained ascendancy over his large, ill-led force of guardmoles, who were too craven to do anything other than welcome Thorne.
“It is a beginning,” said Thorne with satisfaction some days later, “and a good one. We have a secure base from which we can begin to impose some order on the Crusade Council’s thinking. It is time we made an effort to contact Chervil, for surely the future lies with the son of Thripp. Yet he has been strangely silent for so important a mole, and when moles talk of him being “in the north” I’m not sure what that means.”
But discovering whatever it did mean would have to wait a while, for but a short time later first news of the terror and shame of the Leamington massing reached Thorne, in the shape of two brave young Newborns. Frightened witnesses of some of the worst of the early brutality, probably saved from death only by being young, male, and having good potential as guardmoles, they had been isolated for education in a small colony of similar moles, and all but forgotten.
As Leamington declined into starvation, disease and hopelessness, and the guardmoles under the leadership of Assistant Brother Commander Sickle became brutalized and satiated with violence, the two moles tried to help certain of the victims. What they saw and heard, and the privations to which they themselves were subject, had rendered one of them mute, and the other as gaunt as death itself Yet, somehow, they found the strength and inspiration to escape, believing that what was happening must be stopped. Then, learning that only days before Brother Commander Thorne of Cannock had taken over Ashbourne, they had fled north to appeal to his known sense of justice.
Having heard their story Thorne did not hesitate – recognizing, it must be said, not only the need to eradicate a blot on Newborn’s reputation, but also a further opportunity to annex territory and demonstrate that Quail was unfit to lead the Crusade Council. He took a force of experienced moles and set off for Leamington at once, leaving Rolt behind at Ashbourne to discover the whereabouts of Chervil.
Nothing in Thorne’s experience prepared him for the chaos and horror of the foul and odorous chambers of Leamington. Not only had the elderly and female population of the system been crammed into them, with little food and no access to water, but prisoners from adjacent systems had been driven down into them, day after day, molemonth after molemonth. No wonder that it was not long before the guardmoles refused to go down into the main tunnels and chambers, staying instead at or near the surface, to prevent those poor moles who had gone in from coming out again.
The smell of the place was evident to Thorne and his force even some way out of Leamington – a heavy, sweet, sickly odour of death, so foul it made a mole retch. But Thorne went on, his progress unchallenged by the fat and diseased guards, and ventured down into the tunnels, and saw for himself the shame that was Leamington.
Mole had eaten mole to survive; the air was fetid and hot, and it was impossible to breathe without sucking in myriad of the tiny flies that flew and crawled in the darkness, hatched in the summer heat from the maggots that infested the dead. Yet when the bodies themselves became too rotten to eat, many moles, half mad with starvation and fear, had taken to eating the maggots instead. Others, eyes sunken, silent, lay trembling or deathly still, staring at nothing, dying. Yet more, maddened by it all, had turned violent, and killed the weak and sick where they lay, or maimed them out of some inner rage at what life had done to them.
While away from it all, on higher ground and upwind of the stench, Thorne’s guardmoles found Sickle, and the bullying, debauched subordinates he favoured, in wormful tunnels, near clean running water, enjoying the company of laughing and hysterical consorts who, it seemed, were the pick of the female prisoners.
Thorne did not waste much time on Sickle, the more because he seemed unable to understand what he was or what he had done, but only laughed, and railed at never having been promoted beyond the rank of Assistant Brother Commander.
“That old fool Dunmow told me to cleanse Leamington of blasphemy and that is what I am doing. Let the bastards and the bitches who call themselves followers die in their own excrement. Let them suffer in life as they will in death when the Stone takes them into eternal punishment. Let them —”
Thorne turned to his aides. “Arraign him and his colleagues and bring Dunmow from Ashbourne to stand trial as well; scribe down the proceedings fully; call witnesses; leave no possibility of doubt about what has occurred here. Do it swiftly and thoroughly.”
“And the punishment, sir?”
Thorne’s eyes were at their coldest. “Let seven moles decide and I will sanction their decision.”
“It may be death, sir, and the execution of such senior brothers as these surely needs the sanction of the Crusade Council itself; perhaps even Elder Senior Brother Quail.”
“We are at war, and I am in command here,” said Thorne. “If death is the sentence, death it will be, and I will take responsibility for it. Now take these scum out of my sight and deal with them as I have instructed. If the sentence is death I myself will act as executioner, that none other may be accused of doing so.”
Death it was, quick, brutal, despite the pleas, squeals and weeping of those senior Newborn brothers.
Nine times Thorne raised his right paw above their heads; nine times he plunged his talons down and killed a mole. Before witnesses, with a scribemole in attendance, that none could ever say it was done privily, or shamefully, or without good cause.
“I was only doing what I was told to do!” sobbed Sickle at the end, shaking and sweating before his awesome executioner.
“A brother takes responsibi
lity for himself, just as he should for those in his care. It has been adjudged that you have done neither, and so, culpable thereby of murder, and of undermining the justice of the Newborn cause, you must be punished.” And so Sickle died, and much more swiftly and less painfully than many of his victims. Accounts of the outrage and Thorne’s resolute response to it filtered out into moledom, and few things did more to undermine the position of Quail and enhance the reputation of Thorne.
It was now, in the aftermath of the relief of Leamington, when the survivors were taken to clean quarters on higher ground, and the worst of the chambers where the massing occurred were sealed, that Thorne came upon Privet.
She was among those who had appeared at Leamington soon after Thorne’s coming, emerging from the surrounding countryside as life emerges after winter, some to help, some to trace missing kin and friends, many just to mourn. No doubt Privet’s wanderings had brought her into contact with followers who had kin at Leamington, and when the system was relieved she journeyed with them to serve as silent healer and helpmeet to those who needed her.
In those sombre days when the summer sun beat down on moles with shadowed hearts and clouded minds, Newborn and follower freely mixed, their mutual fear and antipathy subsumed by the horror of what had taken place, and the peace preserved by the character and discipline of Thorne’s forces. It was an extraordinary achievement, and gave the lie to the conflict and distrust between two systems of belief which had given rise to this situation.
It was in those strange days that Adkin, accompanying his Brother Commander in a review of the system and what had been achieved, passed by one of the healing chambers and caught sight of something that stopped him in his tracks.
“Come on Adkin, stop dawdling!” called out Thorne ahead of him. “We’ve much to see, and other work to do. Why, mole, what is it?”
Silently Adkin pointed a talon through a portal and down the length of the busy chamber. Thorne retraced his steps, looked, and was at once astonished and appalled. The two moles simply stared. Privet was much changed since they had known her on the fraught journey from Wenlock Edge to her captivity in Wildenhope: thinner, shrivelled, lost in a silent world of her own. But both knew her at once, less by her appearance than by the spirit of faith and truth she projected.
Duncton Stone Page 37