“We shall cross here and rest until nightfall. I would have us reach Beechenhill at dawn, and the Ashbourne moles say that from here the journey is not so far.”
She did not talk to Beechen or Buckram, or look at them, nor say her prayers to the Word. She was like a driven mole, her eyes only on the journey ahead and the coming day. This time Beechen and Buckram were allowed to rest near each other, but not to talk. When they laid their bodies down they slept the restless sleep of the tired suffering.
Deep in the night Beechen was woken by a henchmole.
“Eat,” he said.
Beechen looked at him and saw it was that same henchmole who he had sensed had wanted to help them before.
“Give it to my friend.”
“He has already said the same, mole,” whispered the henchmole with a half smile.
Beechen took the food and ate it and felt better for it.
“Whatmole are you?” he asked.
“I know not any more,” faltered the henchmole. And he wept.
Beechen reached a hurt paw to him.
“Then you too have begun your journey, mole,” he said gently.
“You will die tomorrow,” said the henchmole.
“He will not die,” rasped Buckram. “He shall never die.”
Another henchmole stirred at the sound of Buckram’s voice and a third came in and that was all that was said by the Stone Mole that night.
Before dawn came they left the Dove behind them and began the long climb into Beechenhill, following routes which their Ashbourne guides seemed to know. They saw little and remembered nothing but the endless painful struggle up the slopes. Except one thing: in the dark the henchmole who had spoken to them was able sometimes, under the guise of buffeting him, to help Beechen along.
First light, dragging, bloody steps; dawn, talon thrusts and pain; morning, and now this final climb, so slow, and the Stone rising ahead beyond the henchmoles’ swaying bodies, the sky cloudy and sheep’s wool fretting on the barbs of the wire that stretched across the field beyond the Stone.
“Stop!”
They stopped, and were turned, and through their pain, nausea and fatigue, saw the eldrene Wort stanced proudly by the Stone, staring at them.
Her eyes were blank, her mouth was whispering prayers to the Word, one paw was raised in a parodic benediction over them, as if she were the Master himself; as if she were the incarnation of the Word.
Beechen tried to speak, to tell her not to be afraid, for it was plain to him that she was afraid of much, but even if words had come she wished not to hear them, or anything else he might say.
She nodded her head and a henchmole hit Beechen again, so that he slumped and slewed to one side, while to his right Buckram was hit as well, and fell likewise.
In that moment, as Buckram fell, Beechen knew fear. He saw the Stone and the spirit of the evil Word in the form of the mole who stanced before it. He heard the distant chuckle and rumble of angry henchmoles. He heard the rattle of Buckram’s breathing. All of this and a spiralling darkness in the morning clouds, and he knew fear.
Slowly, desperately, he tried to turn his head to see
Buckram, but the grass, the hard earth, the whole of moledom perhaps, seemed against it. He felt a crushing blow to his left paw which made him roll and crush it more and he found himself staring into Buckram’s eyes.
“Stone Mole,” whispered Buckram, his mouth twisted and bloodied, his teeth broken now, “forgive me, I cannot stay with thee.”
A henchmole loomed over Buckram, and to Beechen, watching sideways on from where he lay helpless on the ground, it seemed the henchmole was part of the mounting dark cloud above, as if it had come down to wreak vengeance on stricken Buckram here before Beechenhill’s Stone.
“You should not have spoken,” said the angry cloud that was a mole.
Beechen saw the great taloned paw raised and saw the mole look towards the eldrene Wort, wait, nod his understanding of her command, and then bring down his paws one after another in two great thrusts into Buckram’s back, and then he moved and dealt a third blow, this time to Buckram’s neck.
For a moment Buckram’s mouth stretched wide in pain and he grunted deep and gutturally. The rear of his body seemed to twist and turn and then go limp and as blood poured down his side he strived to reach a paw to Beechen, and he said, “Forgive me. Be not afraid.”
And there, before Beechen’s gaze, in the shadow of the Stone, great Buckram died.
Then Beechen turned and tried terribly to stance up and all there heard him cry out to the Stone: “We are but mole and much afraid!” He faltered, and fell sideways, and cried out again towards the Stone saying, “Father, you have made me but mole!”
Then the henchmole who had killed Buckram came and stanced over Beechen and raised his bloody, taloned paw and turned once more to Wort.
Wort stared, and, most terribly, she smiled.
“Not yet,” she said, “the holy Word would not have him die so easily.”
“Shall we snout him then?”
It might have been any of them that gathered there who asked it. It might have been all of moledom that spoke it, so loud did it seem across Beechenhill.
Shall we snout him?
“Now?”
“No,” murmured Wort, “not yet.”
Then she stanced up, and came forward, and peered down into his eyes and reached out a paw as if to touch him, but she would not, or dared not.
“I do not hate you or anymole, Wort,” said Beechen feebly.
Then, for the first and only time, the eldrene Wort struck him, her paw and talons across his wounded face.
As his head fell back further on the grass she stared at her paw and saw his blood on it and a look of disgust and horror came to her face.
“Now, eldrene?” grinned the henchmole.
She seemed to want to say, “Yes”, but then she whispered, “It is temptation to want him dead, the temptation of pity to put him from his misery. Yet cruelty too, for he might yet redeem himself before the Word. So... kill him not yet. The Word will have its vengeance of him and choose its own time.”
Then, she wiped her paw hard and harder on her flank as she sought to clean it of the Stone Mole’s blood. But she seemed to fail in that and turned off downslope to where other moles were coming, led by sideem Merrick. And Merrick looked uneasy.
And well he might.
He saw the eldrene Wort coming towards him spattered in blood. He saw that behind her by the Stone the big mole Buckram now lay dead. He saw a cluster of blood-lusty henchmoles gathered about that other mole, the mole with eyes that were like talons of light into a mole’s heart. He saw that that mole was beginning to die.
And beyond it all were stretching barbed wires of a fence, black against the strangely mounting sky, taut in the heavy tense air. Merrick felt oppressed.
“And where are the Beechenhill moles, sideem?” said Wort. Her eyes were wild and her mouth a little open with her quick, sighing breathing, almost as if she had just been pleasured by a male. Merrick felt afraid of her, and of all of this.
“We think they have hidden underground just to the north-west.”
“All of them?”
He nodded abstractedly. “Yes, yes, all of them.”
“Then it is your duty to the Word to flush them out.”
He laughed, a little out of control. Some grass by the Stone was touched by a freshening wind and suddenly moved. His head felt pressured and strange.
“They might be got out, eldrene Wort, if we knew exactly where they were, had a moleyear to do it and could find a way of attacking them in a probably inaccessible place. But they cannot escape, of that we are sure. They are probably in the Castern Chambers, of which we know a little from information extracted over the moleyears from watchers we have captured. It won’t help us get at them, but at least the lower exit routes are covered, and I presume they cannot hide forever.”
Wort looked disgruntled for a moment, but t
hen her face cleared.
“The Word shall find a way of bringing them to us. The Word is all-powerful and will not be frustrated for long. Perhaps they will guess that we are avenging the Word through the Stone Mole, whom they value so highly, and will vainly seek to save him from his salvation in the talons of the Word.”
Merrick looked at the mole who lay injured and suffering before the Stone, and at his dead companion nearby.
“He looks no danger to anymole,” he said. “But if he is, then he should be killed forthwith.”
The truth was that Merrick felt pity for the mole, and did not want his death drawn out. A quick death would mean he could forget this troublesome mole, and more easily blame Wort for this invasion of an empty system. The more the affair dragged on the more he was concerned that the Master, presumptuously summoned by Wort in Ashbourne, might end up here in Beechenhill, and then Word knows what punishments might be meted out. Yet having come, he would make the best of what had happened, and perhaps in the end the retreat of the Beechenhill moles played into his paws. Of course, if they could get their paws on Henbane, the Master would forgive their transgressions in coming here in the first place; he would forgive them everything.
Yet as Merrick weighed up these possibilities his eyes drifted involuntarily once more, as did his mind, towards the mole who lay beside his dead companion staring at the Stone. Indeed, Merrick found he could not keep his eyes off the mole, for there was something about him that seemed to make everything there, even Wort herself, seem secondary to his presence. Not just visibly but mentally too. Merrick had the uncomfortable feeling that his convoluted thoughts, his sideem thoughts, were, in this mole’s presence, utterly inconsequential.
“Temptation,” said Wort, her eyes sharp upon him. “You are suffering the first temptation that the Stone Mole’s cunning creates in moles’ hearts. I see it in your eyes, sideem Merrick, you are thinking nothing else matters, that only this mole matters. I too was so tempted, but conquered it with the Word’s help.”
Conquered it! thought Merrick with an inward laugh. Mole, you are obsessed by Beechen of Duncton Wood!
Wort said, “Now pray with me, mole, and help save yourself: holy Word, I feel the temptation of the Stone thrusting its talons in my heart, I feel the caressing of the Stone upon my flanks, I feel a false ecstasy that makes me forget thy glory and power and my loyalty to thee. Help me, Word, help me!”
Merrick found himself mouthing this prayer, but even then thinking of the Stone Mole, and finding his eyes drawn to him even more.
“I do not understand,” he whispered. Which is the beginning of all understanding.
The hours were dragging slowly in the Castern Chambers and were not helped by the growing sense, gained from a darkening of what sky they could see and a heaviness in the air, that outside and above a storm was coming.
An air of dejection had come over the moles. They lay still and so far as any of them talked it was to wonder if, and when, one of the watchers might get through with news of what was happening in Beechenhill.
But one mole was not still, but stanced up and staring all about, twitching with nerves: grubby Holm.
He had been nervous from the first moment they had entered the limestone tunnels, and grown more so as they had gone deeper in. He had tried at one point to turn back but Sleekit had stopped him, and now she crouched near him talking to him softly, trying to get him to tell her what was wrong.
He was stanced nearly upright, snout whiffling and sniffling at the damp air, and looking extremely unhappy as he had done from the first.
“You can tell me, Holm, and I won’t tell anymole else unless you want me to. What’s wrong?”
He turned his head sharply towards her, opened his mouth to speak, frowned, narrowed his eyes, widened them, breathed in and out several times, and just when she thought he was once again going to say nothing, said, “Wrong? Everything’s wrong. We can’t stay here. Can’t. Mustn’t. Won’t.”
“Why not?” she said, hoping that he might be soothed by talking.
He would not say immediately, but stanced tensely and getting tenser until he spoke again.
“Explore, Sleekit, you and me,” he said.
So they did, Holm leading her here and there through the chambers, pushing his snout up even the smallest and dampest clefts in the limestone, going everywhere.
“No. No, no, no,” was all he said.
They went eventually to the higher chamber where Harebell and the others were and this he did not like either, having to paddle through the water of an underground stream to get there.
“No, no, no,” he muttered urgently to himself.
“No what, Holm?” said Harebell, smiling. Being with pup had made her calm, and the pups were clearly showing. She was stanced close by Henbane, and not so far above, but out of reach, a fissure opened to the sky. They could see the day was darker than it had been.
“Holm doesn’t like the Castern Chambers,” said Sleekit.
“Why not? Is it the cockroaches?” asked Harebell.
Holm shook his head.
“Do you?” he said unexpectedly, darting a look at Henbane.
“No,” said Henbane quietly, “I don’t.”
“She’s from Whern. Mayweed told me about Whern. Water’s the worry here, not the food.”
“Water?” said Harebell, puzzled.
“I think by water Holm means floods,” said Henbane.
“Oh!” said Sleekit looking around. “Oh dear.”
Holm had been with Tryfan and Mayweed when the tunnel had collapsed and so many moles were drowned.
“Is it flooding you fear?” said Sleekit.
Holm stared at her, nodded his head, and his wide eyes filled with tears.
“Once is enough,” he said.
“I doubt if they’d flood here,” said Henbane. Then she lowered her voice and said, “I did think about it when we came but really the risk is small, less than facing the guardmoles on the surface. But I did not mention it because moles panic so easily.”
“Floods,” said Holm.
“Holm, if I tell Squeezebelly, would that satisfy you?”
“Getting out would satisfy me,” said Holm, “but telling’s a start.”
On their return Squeezebelly listened to what they had to say, but said talking about it would hurt morale, and that he had been down here when it was wet above and the water levels did not rise.
“Depends, that does, doesn’t it?” said Holm. “Holm knows his water. Let’s leave now.”
Squeezebelly smiled and shook his head.
“No, no, but we’ll keep a weather eye open, Holm. In fact, would you do that for us?”
Holm nodded, pleased to be asked, and left them.
“He’s not usually wrong about such things,” said Sleekit.
“If we have to go up on the surface we shall all die,” said Squeezebelly wearily. “It’s as simple as that. Now, let’s see how we can pass the rest of this first day and the coming night... If there’s any sign of a real storm we’ll get moles to the higher places, Sleekit.”
The “sign” was coming.
At the Stone the wind, which had grown persistent by midday, died off again in the afternoon, and the previously noticeable heaviness to the air came back threefold.
Merrick had gone off to lead the searches for the hidden Beechenhill moles and left the eldrene Wort in possession of the Stone. She had been still and praying for an hour or more, and Beechen half conscious and limp, when she suddenly stared up abstractedly at the Stone, then at the Stone Mole, and then back to the Stone again. Then she turned and looked behind him to the wire fence.
“Henchmole,” she said softly.
“Eldrene?”
“Barb him on the wire.”
“Eldrene?”
“The Word has spoken to me at last. Barb him.”
“To die?”
“To die slow.”
“He is weak.”
“It shall be fi
tting that he lasts a full night and at least until this time tomorrow.”
“He may not.”
“The Word shall decide.”
One of the other henchmoles came forward and whispered to their leader who listened, nodded, and turned back to Wort.
“Eldrene, we... we have not eaten since dawn.”
“Nor have I,” said Wort sharply and frowning. “Barb him now, and leave two watching him. The rest may eat.” She glanced down at Beechen, and then immediately looked back at the henchmoles.
“Do it now,” she said, turning quickly away towards the Stone and beginning to mutter her prayers again.
It was a scene to which the others there seemed indifferent, but then such moments of punishment and torture upon followers had been repeated too many times in the moleyears past to attract much interest. A snouting was always worth watching, of course, but a barbing... The only interest was predicting when the mole would die. The weakest-looking often lasted the longest.
Two of the henchmoles grabbed Beechen under the paws and dragged his limp body towards the taut wire. They stared up at the barbs appraisingly and chose one which was angled upwards. Some of the barbs were corroded and there was the smell of sheep’s urine about, and a piece of fleece fretted nearby on the wire.
The two dragging Beechen looked towards the leader for directions.
“Which paw?” said one. Back paws killed quicker, front paws made it more difficult to get the victim on.
“Front paw left. She wants him living for a time and facing this way. High up. We don’t want it ripping through like with that Rollright mole we did.”
“Yes, Sir.”
They pulled him to a position directly under the fence and looked up again at the barbs above. Beechen was conscious now, but he seemed not to understand what was happening to him.
“Nearer the post where the wire’s higher,” they were commanded. “When he’s up we want his back paws clear of the ground and giving him no support.”
It was not as easy as a snouting, and Beechen was heavier than they expected, and so only at the third attempt and with a heave and shove and a helping paw from their leader did they get him in the right position. Now Beechen seemed to understand what they were doing and he was looking about as if for help.
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