“Then we must not let them,” said Sleekit.
“No...” said Henbane, “please not... You must help them, despite what I say or do, you must help them. Get them to safety, take them from here. You must do it, Sleekit, please do it whatever may happen.”
But what Sleekit could do she did not know: only hope that an opportunity would come which, with the Stone’s help, she could take. She only knew that when the pups came she would do her best for them, and if that meant losing her life she would still do what she must. She felt strong and positive where most others might have gone in fear, as if after so many long years of living a lie and doubting that she had any faith, she had found her faith strong and purpose clear. It was for this task alone she felt she had been sent, and this she would try to fulfil.
A few days later Henbane’s birthing movements began once more. The watching sideem acted at once.
“Come!” they said. “Prior orders of the Master.”
Henbane looked in appeal at Sleekit who went up to the sideem and asked them where they wished to take Henbane.
“To serve the Word,” said one.
“To the Rock of the Word itself, that the pups may be judged for their mother’s wrongs and blasphemies,” said another.
“Can Sleekit come?” asked Henbane, tired and distressed. Her swelling was larger and the skin tight and lumpy at her sides. She had no energy to resist.
“She’s to come, all right!” said the sideem with a hard laugh.
They set off south westwards to the most sacred part of the Whern, to which few ever went, and even Henbane had only rarely been. The caverns and limestone tunnels gave way to ancient molemade ones but the way was steep in places and hard for Henbane. Sometimes she stopped and gasped, but the sideem cruelly pressed her on, and though Sleekit tried to slow the pace there was little she could do.
Henbane knew that it was at the Rock that Rune himself had taken power as Master of the Sideem with the connivance of Charlock, mate of the previous Master. Grikes and guardmoles all believed that their names would be scribed on the Rock of the Word if they acted well and true for the Word, but Henbane knew in her heart it was a place of treachery.
They followed the molemade tunnels until they narrowed back into a limestone tunnel of great height and there all but one sideem left them, he driving them from behind.
So narrow was the tunnel that there was no hope of turning back and attacking him even had they wished it. Indeed, Henbane had the greatest difficulty making passage at all and knew as she went on that if the journey itself had not brought her time nearer, this part of the passage would.
The sideem behind them said, “Here I stop. Our orders are to kill you if you attempt to return this way without the permission of the Master himself. May the Word be praised and your actions be true. Now go!”
There seemed nothing for it but to proceed, and soon the tunnel widened on either side and got higher as well. Then round a corner and they were in the chamber of the Rock. Enormous and strange, with sloping rock down to a pool that stretched blackly out before them to where, on its far side, rose sheer the Rock of the Word. A cliff most severe, absolutely vertical, black in effect yet shimmering darkly.
The source of its light was the pool itself. High above in the chamber’s roof a single opening let in a shaft of light that came down upon the pool which seemed to move and shimmer into its turning depth, cold grey, black, dark blue, and yellow. The Rock rose beyond it, seeming dark at first but then, as a mole’s eyes got used to it, more grey-black and shadowed as the water reflected slow-moving light across the Rock’s great face.
There was a continuous sound in the great chamber, as when thunder rolls across some distant horizon and gives the air the sense of an imminent charge of sound that will be loud and fearsome when it comes. Strange roarings, though whether of water or wind was hard to say.
Rune was there, staring, quite alone. He crouched on a platform of rock which formed the floor of a cave that receded deeply and from which flowed a stream, the source of water for the pool. At the platform’s edge, just behind Rune, the water tumbled down into the pool which spread out to his right.
“Your time has come to deliver the pups,” he said, beckoning Henbane.
“They shall not be thine!” said Henbane, panting and gasping with the pain of contractions.
“They are the Word’s,” said Rune.
“Mine,” said Henbane.
“Well, whatever... Come, my dear, you will be more comfortable here.”
There was something alluring about the way he spoke, and the platform of rock seemed a better place to pup than the bare stark shore of the pool.
Henbane dragged herself up and settled down. Sleekit looked about, searching for a way to escape.
The receding cave, down which the stream came, was more than uninviting, it was menacing. Never had Sleekit seen rock which exuded water as that place did. Above their heads a hundred thousand thin stalactites pointed down, their colours strange, and at the tip of each hung a drip of water.
Drips which fell now here, now there, now behind, plop! plip! plup! Where they fell, and had fallen through the long centuries, they formed rounded depositions, green-brown, brown-yellow, yellow-black. All ominous and strange, many bigger by far than mole, and intimidating. Of these there were many, and because they were wet and shining, and the stream flowed among them, they seemed almost alive, almost to move.
Their effect was made more sinister by the fact that they seemed almost mole-like in their shape, and for paws had rounded melted forms of rock, as if the sun had shone down and bloated dead moles up and then melted their forms and disfigured them, to turn them into huge parodies of what moles might have been.
“Welcome to the chamber of Rock of the Word,” said Rune. “Here shall your young be born.”
His sharp voice echoed unpleasantly about them and finally lost itself somewhere in the heights of the Rock itself.
“You seem afraid, Henbane. And you, Sleekit. What do you fear...?” The words slipped and crept between them. Henbane sighed in obvious discomfort.
“You I fear,” she said.
“The Word I fear,” whispered Sleekit, trembling. It was not true any more but she felt she should say it, and as she did she felt Rune’s dark eyes bore into her. She was trying to think and calculate because she knew Henbane’s birthing was beginning and she must do her best to save the young. She looked desperately up the stream chamber to see if there was a way out there, but saw only murkiness in which other distorted forms lived their eternal lives beneath the dripping water.
“The pups need not die,” purred Rune, as if knowing both their thoughts. “No, no I have ordained they should not. Trained they shall be, yes all of them, trained and then...” He smiled.
“Then?” asked Henbane.
“Let me point out to you something which few moles ever see.” He waved his left paw at the stream chamber, and at the formations they had already felt menaced by.
“Here is Whern’s true history,” he said.
At first neither of them had any idea of what he meant at all, and Henbane was now gasping regularly with the pain of pupping as Rune, seemingly oblivious, talked about what appeared to be trivialities. Even so she must have begun to have a suspicion of what he was leading to. The curiously shaped deposits which were all rounded and spreading seemed to menace them.
Henbane’s unborn pups turned and struggled inside her as she stared and began to understand, while Sleekit sensed that the secret they were being told was so dark and unshared that she would not be allowed to leave the chamber alive. Those waiting sideem would kill her, though no doubt Rune would tell her she could return to her duties in safety. No doubt.
They stared at the curious shining forms with mounting suspicion of what they were as Rune whispered, “Come, see them. They are the Masters of the Sideem. Here they went into their final meditation. Here the water enshrines them forever in its encrustations.”
As Henbane screamed, though whether in horror or pain, or both, it was hard to say, Rune waved a mean talon at the eerie shapes.
“They are all there, including even Scirpus himself. See!”
Even as Henbane’s first pup began to show, and she gasped and strained, she found herself staring as Sleekit did at a huge deformation bigger than the rest because older, voluptuous in its shape, a huge high elongated form of rounded rock, glistening with water flow. At its base were projections of huge paws of rock, whose ends slunk thinly over the chamber’s floor like cruel bleak talons that have grown after death, and seek to stab at the living from the place where death resides.
Many of the other forms were nearly as large, yet some nearby were smaller and a very few barely bigger than mole, but all glistened with that seeping water, lifeless yet having life, caught in an eternal crouch, snouts leaking solidly over the chamber floor. Sleekit stared at them in mounting horror, and at the veil of moisture and veined-purple colour of them, and then at the living pup that sucked in and out and in and out once more, as Henbane, screaming, pushed out her first.
It lay, the deformations all about obscene bloated copies of its tiny so far breathless shape, womb muck draped over it, still, crouched, lifeless yet. Rune stared at it, motionless, and Sleekit was quite still, instinctively leaving well alone.
Then Henbane pushed again, her body shaking and then rising obscenely open as the second showed, was sucked back in, and then pushed out again and more, and more, and then was there, across the other. Blind floppy things, and then, like light in a forbidden place, a sudden breath, a hacking mew and life came to the first and echoed Henbane’s tired screaming voice as a single tear might signify a whole life’s grief. Then life struggled into the second and survived.
While dripping from the stalactites above, on and on and ever more, drips fell on to those moles immured in stone which loomed about them, immobile yet in their ghastly way, growing.
“The Word has spoken to me, Henbane, and made me understand your blasphemous plight,” cried out Rune, his eyes wild before her pupping. “You bear the pups of a Duncton mole, and one who has been close to the Stone and loved by Boswell. Boswell is dead, as dead as he will ever be, and Tryfan was close to him and known throughout moledom by those few remaining followers of the Stone.
“Yet I have fretted over the long power of the Stone and wondered what the Word might say for its final demise. Say and do. Weed advised the killing of your pups, but the Word said otherwise and made you the agent of his death. Wise Word. In that at least you redeemed yourself.
“Your young —” At that moment Henbane sighed and then screamed and struggled to pup one more.
“Yes, release the pain, scream out their birth, for these young will be trained by the sideem and one of them will emerge as Master when I have gone. The Word has spoken that this will be so. Scream out, Henbane, let your screams be rejoicing, for all of moledom will know that we have taken the pups even of Tryfan himself and made them of the Word. So strong the great Word, so weak the craven Stone!”
Sleekit looked about the great chamber in desperation as Henbane entered the final stages of her pupping and the third began to show. Sunlight shone down into that dark place, the waters swirled and moved. Sleekit watched as the pup came, a darker thing than the first two, and small. But a pup for all that, and living, and Henbane’s own.
As Henbane stopped screaming and pushing and brought her head round to look at what she had made, Rune backed away. So Sleekit alone, of any living mole, saw something no other mole could have guessed could be, which was joy in Henbane’s eyes and wonder as she licked and nuzzled at the pups she bore.
They mewed and bleated and Henbane stared at them, nuzzling them, whispering at them and then looking round to Sleekit, her only support, and saying, not in her normal powerful voice but tenderly and with the wonder of a youngster who ventures out into a tunnel alone for the first time and then returns to tell the tale: “I made them Sleekit, I made them!”
Behind them, Rune, unnoticed for the moment, moved slowly into the shadows, down from the floor of the stream chamber and over towards the entrance beyond which the sideem lay in wait.
Then Henbane, with courage delved from the very depth of her distorted and warped heart, yet none the less for that, and deserving of moledom’s respect, whispered urgently and pathetically – for what hope of help was there there in that place then? – “Take them as I commanded you, take them, Sleekit, help them....”
Then as Sleekit looked this way and that in growing fear and desperation, Henbane turned to where Rune should have been, saw that he had slid away to fetch the sideem to take her pups, and heavily followed him, blood and afterbirth in a trail behind her and leaving her pups bereft, like sacrifices before the Rock of the Word.
Yet not quite so. For that sunlight that shafted down came strong and as some shimmered on the Rock, some too dappled softly on the mewling pups.
As Rune called out and sideem came, Henbane took a frightening, bloodied stance to defend her own against the vileness that gave her her own life.
“Help them!” she cried out once more to Sleekit, her voice echoed darkly by the Rock. “Help them!”
Words that echoed among the long encrusted forms, words that mixed now with the running drum of sideem paws, as that cry “Help them helpthem helpth...” declined into nearly nothing where Sleekit, and the pups, and the Masters of the past waited in their different ways – for what none knew. Yet it was there.
It moved. It turned. Its glistening back, its encrusted snout, its elongated talons, its dead-living snout moved.
Sleekit stared, eyes wide. Pups mewed. Sideem, across the chamber, cried out.
Then Sleekit gasped, as near to death from fear as ever mole can be. Utterly frozen as she saw that what seemed immobile before, moved, and turned and opened its mouth.
Mayweed. Masquerading Mayweed. Many-sided Mayweed. Now medieval Mayweed come to life.
“Quite overwhelmed Madam, hello. Humble me emerges from the wet he’s hidden in too long, and will be brief and to the point. Desperate us can take only two pups, so decide.”
“I don’t know, I can’t...” said Sleekit, overwhelmed indeed.
As she spoke the pups wound themselves around each other, climbing on one another, their tiny snouts vainly searching for their mother’s teats, their eyes bulging blue beneath the unopened lids, their paws pink, their talons soft.
Then Sleekit hesitated no more.
“This one and this one,” she said taking one by the neck and indicating the other nearest one.
“Madam, go that way!” he urged, pointing a talon at the shadows beneath the paws of the great form that had once been Scirpus.
As she turned to flee, a pup dangling helplessly from her mouth, Mayweed stared at the other she had pointed to. It was the small one, smaller and darker than the other and he liked it not. It felt to him like a tunnel with no end, no good promise, and his instincts, subtler than any mole in moledom for routes – and was not this moment a route of routes in moledom’s history? – made him turn to the other.
“May humble me be forgiven if he what he does now is wrong!” said Mayweed, ignoring the pup Sleekit indicated and taking up the fairer of the two and turning to follow fast after Sleekit, and overtake her at the far shadow’s edge, to lead her down tunnels at the end of which, if the Stone would grant it, there might be light at last.
Henbane saw what had happened, or if she did not see she sensed, for she let out a terrible scream of loss and found the strength to kill with one blow the first sideem that dared come and then strike down the next.
Then, as the other sideem ranked and got ready to charge Henbane took, at last, her vengeance and her birthright. She lunged massively at Rune. Nomole could have stopped her then, none would have dared, and as if by arcane instinct the sideem did not try.
They watched coldly as Henbane used her final resource of strength and purpose to drag Rune back to the platform where her last remaining pup lay. He did not even struggle as she threw him up and followed him, and as the tiny black shining pup quested its mean snout blindly up she taloned its grandfather against first one formation and then the next, on and on into that hateful place until with one final thrust she stabbed Rune to death against the greatest deformation of them all, Scirpus himself.
She stared down at his body and watched as, from above, the first drip of a million million drips dropped down, spattered into his bloodied fur and there, as it slid into nothingness, it left a tiny shining crystalline encrustation, the first beginning of the end of Rune under that immortal subterranean rain.
Henbane, knowing what she did, turned her back on him, went slowly back to her pup, stared briefly at it, and then unhurriedly, and utterly ignoring the awed sideem, stared up at the Rock of the Word. Then to it she made obeisance, and silently and proudly entered the sacred pool, darkness into dark, and there she cleansed herself in water coldly lit.
That done she emerged once more, shook herself, and went straight to her mewing pup, encircled it, and guided its mouth gently to a teat and started to suckle it.
Then, slowly, and at peace with herself, she plumped herself about it, and looked up as the sideem advanced upon her, their claws sharp, their eyes cold, their teeth white.
“What are thy orders, Mistress of the Word?” the oldest said.
She smiled and her body tightened about her solitary pup whose suckling was eager. She looked over her shoulder for a moment at the Rock, and then smiled again. Powerful was Henbane, in control once more. Utterly, at last.
“Find them, kill them.”
“And the pups?” they said.
Duncton Quest Page 79