Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  “None at all, Adviser Bunting?” hissed Quail, his bulging head growing more shiny and threatening by the moment.

  “Not of late, Elder Senior Brother, no, we have cleansed the tunnels and chambers of the system hereabout long since and are confident —”

  “Confident! He said confident, my good Brother Snyde!” said Quail softly over his shoulder. “Scribe it down: ‘confident’. A happy word.”

  “Happy indeed, Master, were it true.”

  “Ah, yessss... Scribe it, Snyde!”

  The chamber where they stanced was silent but for the scratching of Snyde’s scribing talon.

  “‘Confident’,” the distorted mole said lightly, permitting himself a little laugh.

  Quail stared at Shap and Bunting in turn, his black eyes impenetrable. Perhaps they knew then they stared into the eyes of their own death.

  “So, Brothers, you are both confident that the snakes of doubt, and the worms of treachery, are not here in these pure cleansed tunnels of – where did you say we were, Snyde?”

  “Stanton Long, Master.”

  “Just so. Stanton Long.”

  “I did not say...” gabbled Bunting, aware suddenly of his danger.

  “We did not mean...” faltered Shap.

  “The Snake never says, the worms never mean,” said Quail, expelling a sigh that sent a wave of foul air into the shaking snouts of Shap and Bunting. Bunting retched; Shap’s eyes watered with the strain of trying not to look as if the stench of Quail’s breath made him feel sick. Snyde, Fagg and Squilver almost quivered with the pleasure of coming punishments; Skua’s eyes were icily enraged at such palpable evidence of incompetence.

  “Well, then, Senior Brother Inquisitor, what shall we do with them?” purred Quail.

  “Arraign them, and let them be judged,” began Skua in his inquisitorial way.

  “No time for that!” said Quail sharply, frowning. He stared for a moment more and then his eyes wandered, a sign that he was growing bored.

  “Snout them at this system’s eastern edge,” he continued, “that other such brothers in responsible positions should be warned to be always vigilant, lest the snakes and worms creep into their own hearts. Aye, snout them!”

  This last he said so savagely that Shap fainted on the spot, and Bunting began to whimper and shake and beg forgiveness, saying he could find reprobates and miscreants aplenty but had not wished to besmirch the Elder Senior Brother’s day with such things as that.

  “Lies,” said Skua rightly, knowing a fabrication when he heard one.

  “Lies,” said Snyde, scribing the word down.

  “Lies,” repeated Fagg gleefully and encouraging others in the chamber to do the same so that before a mole could blink the place was filled with shouts of “Lies!” repeated over and over until they were all almost exhausted.

  Then the system’s guards and many others assembled on the eastern boundary, and Shap and Bunting were snouted on the spikes of a wire fence that ran there, their screams ignored but their ignominy not forgotten.

  After that there was a positive plague of victims found and kept at the ready in each system that Quail and the others came to, though whatmoles, or how many, or whether any at all were used and abused depended entirely on Quail’s mood of the day. To those like Fagg and Squilver and others near to Quail, who were able to observe and discuss such matters, it soon became clear that increasingly Quail’s mood could be manipulated by others, up. to a point.

  A well-timed word in his ear, the withholding of news good (or bad) from the outreaches of the Newborn territories, dark insinuations, even intimations that the weather might soon improve (or worsen) – all these were techniques used by his minions to try to swing him one way or another. In this way old scores might be settled – as with Fagg’s well-timed revelation of some minor losses in the Wolds to Maple’s forces just as Quail had settled down one morning for a consultation with the unlucky Brother Adviser Sturrick of Burwarton. Sturrick was an old enemy of Fagg, and earlier in his career had outshone him, gaining a promotion that the vengeful Fagg felt he had deserved more.

  When Quail arrived at Burwarton, whose cleansing Sturrick had organized with exemplary efficiency, and whose indigenous moles had over recent moleyears provided useful guards for training at Bowdler and Caradoc, and some memorable fodder for the lusts of Wildenhope, Sturrick might have seemed in a strong enough position to resist mere “moods”. Not so. Quail listened to Burwarton’s report on a day when his ailments were giving him some pain, and to those who knew him well it was plain he was irritable, and in danger of swinging from mere irritation towards rage.

  Fagg whispered his bad news at just the right moment to touch off Quail’s anger, knowing that it would be visited upon Sturrick – and it was.

  “Eh? What did you say? Speak up, mole,” rasped Quail, the skin at the back of his neck creasing and bulging, his diseased eye swelling dangerously, the eyelid drooping; the protuberance at his rear developing a stiff little tremor, which was a sure sign of approaching fury.

  “I said nothing, Elder Senior Brother, I mean to say...” whimpered Sturrick, helplessly borne into the maelstrom of rage and anger from which he did not escape with his life.

  “Take him; he bores me, he wriggles, he whines...” snarled Quail at the end.

  “What would you have me do with him, Elder Senior Brother?” wondered the foul Fagg, smiling evilly.

  “What you will, what you will,” said Quail, dismissing them both, along with the guardmoles who were always at the ready for such moments.

  “Make him excommunicate?” hissed Fagg, delighting in the widening into fear of Sturrick’s eyes, and the squeaky way his voice vainly implored their master for mercy, and the cold sweat that prickled at his flanks as witness to his terror.

  “Yes, yes, yes, good Fagg, you are right. Take him, I wish to know him no more.”

  Sturrick was taken to the surface of the system he had commanded so effectively and faultlessly for so long. He was maimed in the front right paw and the left hind paw, so that he could only crawl; he was mutilated so that his maleness was all gone; his snout was sheered off at its tip, to cause him agony.

  “And finally,” scribed Snyde in his relentless record of those evil days and nights, “the screaming Sturrick was pushed and dragged beyond any territory that he knew and there, despite his pleas, Fagg blinded him and left him to wander, if so maimed a mole could wander, to his death, an excommunicant.”

  Two moles surpassed all others in their skill at manipulating Quail, and by the time of the exodus from Wildenhope and the passage to Duncton Wood, they were in conflict. One was Skua, so long Quail’s ally and inquisitorial helpmeet, but now a falling star; the other was Snyde, Quail’s deformed shadow, observer, recorder, conniver, and, increasingly, sole adviser. It was Quail’s delight to remind each of these moles of their vulnerability by choosing, at times, to favour the other – and though few doubted that Snyde would now finally win the struggle for their master’s favour, Skua was given sufficient encouragement for a significant proportion of the Senior Brothers to believe he might still be the victor, and so they continued to give him tacit support.

  Thus, even as Brother Adviser Sturrick was dragged away from Quail’s presence, Skua, very aware that he was a worthy Newborn and not one to be easily replaced, strove to change Quail’s mind. On some days he might well have succeeded but on that day he was out of favour, and Snyde was very much in Quail’s warm thoughts.

  “Well, Brother Snyde, you have heard your esteemed colleague plead for the wretched Sturrick’s life, and a commutation of his sentence. Haven’t you, haven’t you?”

  Snyde inclined his pointed head and opened his shining eyes a little wider to indicate that he had indeed heard.

  “So what do you think? Give us the benefit of your judgement.”

  “I think,” said Snyde in his weaselly but measured way, “that our master has been wise, even tolerant.”

  “Tolerant always
,” interjected Skua carefully, “but perhaps —”

  “Not wise?” said Snyde quickly.

  “Always wise of course, but...”

  “Well then,” said Snyde with a benign shrug, “what more can a mole say? Let alone a Senior Brother? Least of all the Senior Brother Inquisitor?”

  Skua wisely said nothing more, and so Sturrick, his last chance gone, had been punished in the manner described, and wandered for three days and three nights east of Burwarton, until the rooks of Chatmore Wood harried him into death.

  But let nomole think that Quail was merely clay in the paws of those about him. Had he been he would not have lasted so long, nor made such diabolic impact. On his good days, which were then still the majority, his mind was clear, and his energy and decisiveness almost as potent as they always had been.

  He certainly arranged the secret passage of Thripp well enough, with Fagg in charge of the exercise, and Snyde given a watching brief over it. Nomole but those directly involved and some senior members of the Crusade Council seems to have guessed that throughout the journey Thripp was always near, though always hidden. In this Quail certainly calculated right, for had others known what mole it was, so privily conducted by night from place to place in the shadow of the main group of moles with Quail, there would have been much interest in him, and real danger of defection from Quail’s ranks back to the kinder and more benign influence of the former Elder Senior Brother.

  Nor was Quail slow to ken the information gleaned from the systems through which they passed concerning growing divisions in Newborn ranks. As yet he said little of it, but he saw it, he almost smelt it, and he had his thoughts and bided his time. The journey to Duncton Wood, with all its attendant dangers and discomforts, was not the best time to reassert his authority. That, he believed, could wait, and in this his judgement was probably sound.

  Indeed, had Quail not been a mole concerned so much with power and the domination of others, and with the perverted pleasures of imposing the extreme dogmas and doubts of the sect he had taken over, he might have been the very mole needed to carry on the best of the work first begun by Thripp at Blagrove Slide.

  But he was not; and in addition to his basic malevolence towards life and the living was the dreadful fact that he was dominated almost hourly by the need to satisfy his sadistic lusts, or the planning for the prospect of doing so. Which made for poor judgement, and the appointment of self-serving subordinates more interested in maintaining their positions by servicing his weaknesses, than promoting a noble cause and being willing to stance up to a leader who seemed in the process of betraying it. Such excellent subordinates – Brother Bolt, for example – it had been Thripp’s gift to be able to find and appoint, though with Quail himself, Thripp seemed to have fatally failed.

  Yet even had Quail, by some miracle of transmutation imposed upon him by the Stone, become a reformed mole, it seems unlikely that by the time the journey from Wildenhope to Duncton took place he could have done much to improve the situation. Not only because the process of civil strife within the Newborn movement seemed already irreversible, but also because his own illness, for that was plainly what it was, was beyond curing, and whatever caused the swellings, and the odours, and increasingly the rages, was beginning to overtake his sanity as surely as black ivy can cover and choke a healthy tree.

  Quail’s progress to Duncton was not rapid, but it was steady, for he preferred not to stay in one place for too long, and by mid-August he had reached Banbury, which lies in the vale of the River Cherwell, a good way north of Duncton Wood. Their route had been chosen with some care – if they had gone further south as they might have wished then there would have been the possibility of a clash with the forces of the followers led by Maple from the Wolds, while a more northerly route would have risked bringing to a head the tacit but as yet unresolved conflict with Brother Commander Thorne, late of Cannock.

  As it was they had reached Banbury with no opposition at all, the only violence being that which Quail himself had inflicted as “just punishment” upon whatever victims successive Commanders and Advisers were pleased to offer up to him. Indeed, Squilver, Supreme Commander and executant of Quail’s occasional military orders, congratulated himself on the safe and successful passage of the entourage to Banbury.

  “From here,” he was able to predict confidently to a special meeting of the Crusade Council (special, because it was graced by the presence of a whole collection of Brother Commanders summoned from near and far), “it is merely a matter of following the vale of the River Cherwell down to Duncton itself, a journey that the Elder Senior Brother has chosen to make a triumph to express the glorious achievements of his personal crusade thus far.”

  If Squilver sounded a little relieved as he made this announcement, it was because he had been greatly concerned that they had been obliged to take a route between two forces whose strengths and inclinations he was uncertain of. He was less sanguine than Quail, and indeed Snyde, about the potential threat of the followers under Maple. He tended rather to agree with Skua, who had thoughtfully observed that whilst no large force of followers had ever emerged out of the Wolds, yet whenever and wherever the Newborns attempted a foray into that higher ground, whether up some vale whose lower reaches they controlled, or over some fell which seemed devoid of mole, followers were always quickly to paw in just sufficient numbers, and just the right dispositions, to make further progress difficult and dangerous.

  “Chance,” was how Snyde, not a military mole, dismissively put it, but this was rather too simplistic an explanation. No, Squilver, for all his arrogance and strategic inexperience, could recognize well-organized opposition when he saw it, and rightly guessed that Maple’s force was much more formidable than it had yet bothered to show itself to be.

  As for the potential threat from Thorne to the north, that was a more difficult problem to analyse, and one of the reasons for the calling of the Council at Banbury – rather than later at Duncton Wood itself as Quail had originally intended – was to discuss it. The difficulty was that nomole yet knew Thorne’s intentions, since despite several direct and indirect efforts to communicate with him, he had refused to attend the Crusade Council, or send emissaries to it. Mysteriously, the messengers sent to him had simply not returned, leaving Quail’s informants generally in the dark.

  Two attempts had been made, one involving Squilver’s paw-picked guardmoles, the other utilizing Fagg’s supposed contacts within Thorne’s camp, to force contact with Thorne. The first was a crude plan to abduct three of his guards, which ended in complete failure when all fourteen of Squilver’s team died in the attempt, with nothing but silent corpses left behind to tell what happened. Squilver barely survived this humiliation.

  The second, of which historians have few details, involved certain of the forces once supposed to be loyal to the disgraced Brother Commander Dunmow of Ashbourne and by then under the influence of Thorne, and trusted by him. These were reached by one of Fagg’s minions, the slithery Purde, and they appear to have agreed to carry out a bold but doomed attempt to kill Thorne himself. Again all the Newborns implicated died, though Fagg’s original contact, Purde, withdrew before the coup was attempted and reached the safety of the Council.

  This Purde was thus the only useful source of information the Council had of what went on within Thorne’s ranks. From him the Crusade Council first learnt of the arraignment and execution of the foul Sickle and his colleagues, instigators of the Leamington Massing. If this was not bad enough, and sufficient evidence to Quail of Thorne’s perfidy, worse was the news Purde brought that Thorne had moved to consolidate his hold on the territories east and west of Leamington, the region further north, and the north itself, as yet unreported on.

  All this was unwelcome news, but it is often the way with tyrants to dismiss bad news and concentrate on the good, and discourage those around them who would like to breathe upon discussions the fresh air of truth and reality.

  In this respect, despite his
inexperience, Squilver did his best to guide deliberations at Banbury towards what was achievable, and might build upon the Newborn strengths.

  “And what are these?” he asked rhetorically of one small private gathering of moles, which did not include Quail or Snyde, though Fagg and Skua were present – the record being kept privily by one of Snyde’s minions whose task was to spy on such occasions, and report back.

  “What are our strengths? First, that we hold Duncton Wood and the territories like this one immediately around it, and have consolidated our position in the south at Buckland and Avebury,” said Squilver. “Next, that we hold all the territory to the west as far as Siabod, so that the Welsh Marches are ours. Recently, too, we have heard that Cannock is ours once more, Thorne having fled from it.* Our weakness is in allowing the followers in the Wolds under Maple to go unchecked, and I would prefer to see a resolute campaign against them before any decisive move is made against Thorne. In any case, that mole is plainly prevaricating, and I cannot believe he would openly defy the Elder Senior Brother.”

  * This was the period when the cruel Brother Zeon had taken power in Cannock, though Squilver was not to know that it was at Thorne’s initiative. Far from “having fled” Thorne decided to withdraw his own guardmoles from Cannock for use in the battles he was then planning, and allowed Zeon to take over, whom he knew to be corrupted. Zeon was, of course, assassinated by the Confessed Sister Suede the following October, creating precisely the kind of anarchy that Thorne had expected, and which later he might exploit.

  It seems that the powerful and independent Brother Commanders Sapient and Turling of Avebury and Buckland respectively, who were present at this secret meeting, agreed with Squilver, both giving their support to the plan that if he invaded the Wolds from the north they would move in from the south.

  “But this should not be done until the Elder Senior Brother is secure in Duncton Wood,” stressed Squilver.