Duncton Stone

by William Horwood

  Clouds had begun to mount in the sky, and a late afternoon chill came to the air, as often happens in October. The days were drawing in...

  “The decision’s made, then,” said Thorne forcefully, bringing to an end further discussion about the slain patrol. “We’ll attack the positions to the south-west on which we have had our eyes for a long time. We’ll do it in a limited way, and then seek to parley with Squilver. I prefer to persuade him to make Quail stance down, than to take Quail himself by force – it will be easier to contain things afterwards if we take power quietly.”

  “Quail will never go quietly,” said Chervil darkly, glancing at Rolt who shrugged unhappily and nodded his agreement.

  “He would rather die,” said Rolt.

  “He will die, then,” said Thorne grimly. “Meanwhile, tonight he will get a clear message that we mean business, and not before time. Now, we have moles to brief and plans to implement.”

  Rolt turned to leave, Chervil also, feeling perhaps that military matters were best left to Thorne, but the Brother Commander suggested they stay some moments more.

  “It’s not one of my senior commanders I’m going to speak to first, as a matter of fact, nor even the moles who will be mounting the night’s attack. No, it’s a mole we all have an interest in, and perhaps the time is right for him to succeed in a task at which so many have failed.”

  He summoned Rees, he who claimed to have been healed by Privet.

  “Sir? They said you wanted to see me.”

  Rees peered round at Chervil and Rolt, his poor sight making him seem over-inquisitive. But for all that he had a strong look about him, and a solid stance.

  “Aye, mole, we do,” said Thorne. “You’ve wanted a task, and in the past you’ve expressed a willingness to undertake a dangerous one.”

  “Aye, sir! But as you see, I’m past my fighting days, though I’m not a fool and could give a good account of myself if I chose my own ground, like a tunnel or chamber where I knew nomole was behind me. So just give the order and if it does not offend against the Stone —”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” said Thorne sharply. Give a mole a mite of worm and he’ll take the whole lot!

  “Yes, sir,” said Rees, chastened.

  “I want you to slip away from Leamington with the next pilgrims that come by.”

  “Sir?” said Rees, astonished.

  “Aye, that’s what I said. Become a pilgrim mole, just as you’ve wanted to. But a pilgrim with a task. I want you to find Privet, if you can.”

  “The whole of moledom’s been looking for her, sir.”

  “The whole of moledom does not know what she looks like. You do.”

  “I never actually saw her clearly, sir, for my eyes had been injured and what sight I have now returned only after she had gone. I just heard her voice, but I’d know that anywhere. At the end of my time with her and her two friends I did succeed in glimpsing her dimly. She seemed not to be a big mole.”

  “Quite right, she’s not,” said Thorne impulsively.

  “And how would you know that, sir?” said Rees, astonished.

  Thorne repeated for all their benefits the story of how he had arrested Privet on the Wenlock Edge, and how he had talked to her before delivering her up to Wildenhope, now much to his regret. He admitted too how much Privet had impressed him.

  “So you see, mole, I happen to recognize the mole you describe, and so do Senior Brother Chervil and Brother Rolt here, for reasons we have no need to go into.”

  The two moles nodded, Rolt with a look of concern and care in his eyes for the mole he had first met in Blagrove Slide so many years before as a Confessed Sister. Chervil, thus far, knew her only as a mole who had spoken so compellingly to him on the trek up towards Caer Caradoc for the ill-fated Convocation before the last Longest Night.

  “You see, Rees, I am sympathetic to her,” said Thorne. “Don’t ask me why, for she’s not Newborn. But...”

  “Exactly, sir.” There was surely more goodness and real faith in Privet than in a decade of Newborn “education”!

  Neither had to speak blasphemy against the Newborn way to think it, though whether Rees realized that Rolt and Chervil were thinking it too nomole can say.

  “You said she had two companions,” said Chervil. Ever since Wildenhope he had harboured suspicions about Privet that he scarcely dared believe, which Rolt had refused to assuage. “Describe them both.”

  Rees’ loyalties were divided; he felt he should obey the commands of senior moles he had come to respect, in whom he saw the only chance of recovering something of the idealism of the Crusades he had once believed in, yet he wished to protect the memory of two moles, Hodder and Arliss. He greatly respected Hodder, who had saved his life, and he had fallen in love with Arliss. One day, he dared hope, he might meet her again.

  “Well, sir, it’s hard, for both were good to me.” He repeated his story, and told how Hodder had come back to save his life, and how Arliss had helped heal him, before Privet – if it had been her – completed the process.

  “You sound like a mole in love,” said Chervil slowly, his dark eyes as warm as they ever were.

  Rees looked uncomfortable, scuffing his paws at the ground and smiling uncertainly.

  “What exactly do you want me to do, sir?” he said at last, turning back to Thorne.

  “Try to find her. Warn her that civil war is breaking out, and worse, if my guess about the follower Maple is right, for he’ll be active this autumn, bound to be. Find her, warn her, and tell her that it was I who sent you. Tell her... tell her to go home now, to Duncton Wood. Tell her that I don’t know why, but she’ll be needed there. And soon – before Quail gets there.”

  He fell silent, a little surprised by his own words. If she went, pilgrims would follow, and that might make things very hard for Quail, and easier for his own force to bring order back to moledom.

  “Well, now, that’s all very well,” exclaimed Rolt. “If he found her he would find a mole not easy to persuade to do anything. Why, Privet’s the most formidable mole I’ve ever met, along with Elder Senior Brother Thripp —”

  “Ah, so you know her, Rolt!” exclaimed Chervil.

  Rolt looked annoyed with himself and muttered, “I suppose I do. I suppose I did.”

  “Any questions, Rees?” asked Thorne, sensing there was more to this exchange between Rolt and Chervil than Rees needed to know about.

  Rees grinned and said, “Pilgrims prefer silence to questions, sir!”

  He grinned again, a curious look of relief in his scarred eyes and face.

  “You say she healed you, mole?” said Chervil, suddenly gentle.

  “Gave me back the faith that I’d see again, sir. I’d travel a lifetime to hear her voice again.”

  “Then get started, mole!” said Thorne. “You’ll be more useful in the coming days doing that, than fighting here with impaired sight.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Rees quietly. Then he added, gently, “And good luck, sir, with what’s coming and that! Good luck to all of you!”

  They smiled and watched him go, envying him suddenly. A pilgrim’s life might, after all, have more to offer a mole than the responsibilities they had.

  “Guardmole!” roared Thorne.

  Several came at double time.

  “Send for the following senior commanders,” he said, detailing a list of names, “and fast! No, no, I’ll come with you; I think these two moles have matters to discuss.”

  Then he too was gone, and Rolt and Chervil were left facing each other alone.

  “Well?” said Chervil quietly. “Well, Brother Rolt? Isn’t it time you told me the truth about Privet?”

  Rolt looked at the mole he had known ever since the day he was born. Thripp’s son, to whom he had been surrogate father. Chervil, of whom, if only at second paw, he felt so proud, the more so these summer moleyears past as he had seen his ward struggle to cast off the training and dogma of his past and make sense of a world that was changing
so quickly. Chervil was now a formidable and worthy mole. Perhaps all he needed was a mother’s love...

  All of which was the more moving because nomole knew better than Rolt the nature of the quest Thripp himself had set off on so many years before, which had gone so wrong and yet which still might turn out right.

  “She was the best thing in my life, the Stone speaking through her to me,” Thripp had said of Privet, and Rolt remembered how Thripp and Privet, both hurt so much by the past, had dared to discover love in each other.

  Nomole could yet guess Thripp’s true greatness, and how he had set out to remind moles of the nature of the Stone’s Light and Silence, feeling that though the distant war of Stone on Word had been won by the followers, its spiritual message had been all but lost. Charismatic and compelling, Thripp had persuaded a generation of moles to follow his lead back to a new austerity and purity, only to see ideals turned to nightmares as the dream was corrupted, and the dark side of moles’ nature emerged through the Brother Inquisitors.

  These things Rolt thought of in those moments of pondering how to reply to Chervil’s question about Privet, and who she was to him. Did he really not know? Could he not have guessed?

  The evening was drawing in; the summer years were over now, and the chill in the air and the distant cold mists might almost have been winter beckoning.

  “Mole,” said Brother Rolt gently, “there are many, many things I have to tell you and the time has come to do so, now that we are on the eve of violence that may escalate into war, though Stone knows none of us wants it. But, yes, there are things you should know, the knowledge of which I alone have been entrusted with these many years. Why do you think your father ordered me to leave him at Wildenhope and join Thorne?”

  “My father never had a simple reason for doing anything!” exclaimed Chervil ruefully.

  They laughed in the way moles who love and respect each other laugh when they are alone, talking of a mole they both love.

  “Well, that’s true enough! One of the reasons was because he knew you would join forces with Thorne sooner or later, and when you did I would be able to talk to you, as we talk now. He knew the right moment would come, and trusted me to know when it did. It has come today.”

  “You said you had many things to tell me, many things.”

  Rolt nodded, and began to talk, telling Chervil of what his father was like when he was young.

  “He preached like nomole I have ever heard, his eyes shining with the Light and truth of the Stone, his belief in a simpler way of contemplation and worship impossible to resist. Love, chastity, truth, compassion, discipline, all these things he spoke of, and some he practised.”

  “Some!” exclaimed Chervil.

  “‘Nomole is born perfect, and he must struggle along the hard way towards perfection, ever mindful that he needs the Stone’s Light to guide him, and its Silence to still him.’ Those were your father’s words, which have stayed with me since the first time I heard him preach beside the stream at Blagrove Slide. In its clear waters I, and many like me, committed ourselves to follow him: a stream which became muddy, whose currents became too strong, and whose power turned to corruption in the drownings at Wildenhope. You were there, mole, you were there.”

  “I was there,” whispered Chervil, remembering. “Why did my father let that be?”

  Rolt almost shuddered with distress as he shook his old head, and stared into Chervil’s troubled eyes.

  “It went wrong, it all went wrong. Yet did he not see a way of making it right, of containing it, of turning it back towards light, as the seasons turn at Longest Night?”

  “How contain something so grotesque as Quail? And what light?”

  “Quail? Snyde? Do you think if they had not come along there would not have been others to take their place? Do you think when they go there will not be others? There have always been such moles lurking in the shadows at the Stone’s base. But Thripp saw something others perhaps had not, though I do not think his vision of how such moles might be contained came suddenly. But I know when it began to be clear to him – when Privet came into his over-disciplined life as his Confessed Sister.”

  “Privet?” whispered Chervil, his eyes widening in surprise and his face deepening into thought and the beginning of insight into what it might be that Rolt was going to tell him.

  “Oh, yes, it was Privet all right who changed him as no other could.”

  Rolt talked then of Privet’s coming to Blagrove Slide and how of all the Confessed Sisters she was the only one who had strength of mind to resist the “education” such moles received.

  “Your father noticed her, perhaps seeing in her an intelligence and spirit something like his own. But more than that, he recognized in her the same loveless austerity of his upbringing, or something very like it. He was, I believe, frightened of the intimacy implicit in a brother’s work with a Confessed Sister and had until then resisted the very thing that most brothers, less pure in purpose than he, looked forward to as a reward for seniority.

  “I watched as a struggle of spirit and flesh, truth and falsehood, honesty and hypocrisy took place between them, though neither seemed to know it. I watched as she fought to retain her independence, and he strove not to lose his. I watched as the Stone led them both out of darkness through the passions of love and beyond.”

  “Privet...?” whispered Chervil again, remembering the mole who had talked to him just once, and disturbed him so much. A thin, middle-aged kind of mole, though with eyes as bright as stars – as he remembered it. But with his father?

  “Aye,” said Rolt, a shade tartly. “You may only see them as getting old, but I saw them when they were younger. I knew their passion, and it was a blessed thing, precious as life, which is why it made life.”

  Chervil’s eyes widened a little in surprise, and then he stared in astonishment.

  “Yes, mole, yes. I watched as Privet got with pup by your father, and discovered a different purpose to life, and new strengths; he tried to make sense of it, and he strove to find a way forward for the great dream he had through the narrow and confining prejudices of his birth and rearing. I watched, Chervil, and I suffered and rejoiced for them both.”

  “It was Privet who was my...?”

  There was more than surprise in his voice: there was a kind of wonder.

  “Aye, mole, Privet was your mother. And in your birth she found her salvation, and, though the years have been long, Thripp found his. A mole who had been taught all but love, which is the most important thing; yet he found it, and dared reach out to it. A mole who knew the vocabulary of all things spiritual, dared try to speak words for something nomole had ever taught him. A great mole who was flawed by life did that most difficult and fearful thing – he looked at himself and saw what he was and tried to change.”

  “And you, Rolt, what were you?”

  “I?” faltered Rolt, staring into Chervil’s eyes, and seeing the tears upon his face. “I was there. I loved them both. I tried to make them see what they were together. And when you and your siblings came...”

  “How many were there, mole?” asked Chervil huskily.

  “Four; three females and you.”

  “Three?”

  “One died; her name was Brimmel. But two survived, Loosestrife and Sampion.”

  “Loosestrife and Sampion? Striking names, not very Newborn.” His voice had become blank, as if he did not dare react to what he heard.

  “Privet chose them,” said Rolt, not without irony. If he felt lighter of spirit it was because Chervil did too, but then his eyes clouded again.

  “What happened to them?” asked Chervil. “Killed, I suppose.” His voice was bleak now, and he seemed afraid.

  “Oh, no, mole, no,” said Rolt gently, understanding Chervil’s fear, and his sudden tears at what he had not lost and yet not ever had. “Your mother, your brave and formidable mother, made Thripp promise to let them live. Which promise he kept, devolving their early rearing, along with yo
ur own, on me, who was but a Brother Assistant. When Loosestrife and Sampion were of an age to travel Thripp decreed that they went to a system out of harm’s way; the place chosen was Mallerstang – a system with a history of isolation and independence, in the far north-east. I know they got there because I took them myself.”

  “You! So, that was when you went missing!” said Chervil in wonder, beginning to make connections with events he had never quite understood. “And that was why at Wildenhope it was Mallerstang I had to say... Whillan...” His eyes clouded at the memory.

  “Aye,” said Rolt. “Mallerstang was where the two females were taken. Your mother had already had to leave – again, it was I who got her out of Blagrove Slide. It would not have been wise for her to stay, not wise at all. When I came back from taking the two females north, which was the longest until now I had ever been away from Thripp, I found that Quail had gained power and influence and even become involved with your education.”

  “He tried,” said Chervil grimly, “but with me he did not get far.”

  “I came back, regained my influence over you, and finally your father arranged for you to be sent to Duncton Wood to protect you from Quail and certain of the other Brother Inquisitors.”

  “To protect me! I thought I had been banished by you! I missed you, Rolt.”

  “I know it, Chervil, I know it well.”