Duncton Quest (125 page)

Skint and Smithills, too, were journeying, grumbling and arguing as was their way, yet making progress south, and glad, as Skint put it, “to be doing’. What they hoped to find when they reached Duncton Wood they had no idea, but they had heard enough from grikes on the way to know that trouble was astir across the land.

Orders had gone out from Whern, and travelled fast by messenger mole, that Tryfan and Spindle were to be found. Skint and Smithills certainly heard as much, and the information hardened their resolve to continue south as fast as they could, for old and decrepit though they sometimes felt, Tryfan might yet need their talons at his side.

But there was more to make them speed. They found that grikes were being sent westwards, for there was news of a Siabod rising, and a successful one, and forces were being massed against incursions east. Alder was behind it, and the gossip was that Wrekin himself would be summoned out of retirement, or else that Wyre, based at Buckland, might lead moles on Siabod himself.

War, fighting, suspicion: a bad time and a good time to be travelling. Grikes were too preoccupied to concern themselves with wrinkled moles like Skint and Smithills, but a mole had best watch his flanks and keep his snout clean.

The sideem were about as well, travelling fast and whispering: stories of Henbane, blasphemous tales, stories of the Master being dead, stories too black even to whisper. But the sideem were searching and questioning moles, and their quarry were two youngsters, plus a thin, scarred mole called Mayweed and a traitorous sideem called Sleekit. Skint and Smithills were as silent as a seal-up.

There were strange warnings, too, of sideem searching for a mole of moles, the Stone Mole no less, whose coming, it turned out, was dread Henbane’s fear. To the south she had sent the searchers, young, dangerous sideem, overtaking old moles like Skint and Smithills, and whispering of stars that shone and had a meaning that even the Word did not know.

Troubled times down moledom, and times when those few like Marram, Skint and Smithills, and others similarly moved, no doubt, had best go careful and keep their purpose and objective to themselves.

Travelling, too, was Feverfew, mole who spoke strange and suffered scalpskin. Strangest journeyer of all, with the light of that star in her eye and only her faith to see her through some of the most dangerous and tortuous tunnels of the Wen.

Yet singly she came, without guide or help but that provided by the Stone, which is the greatest of them all, to a wasteland Starling and Heath had told her of, and thence through an arched tunnel to find a waiting mole.

Old he seemed, and vulnerable, and he watched her come up the same filthel he himself had escaped from so long before. Where he had vowed to wait forever until Heath returned.

Now a female came and she spoke his name.

“Rowan,” she said, “wyl yow guid me a litel wave?”

Which he did, with hardly a word, as if caught in a dream that now it had come made him feel his whole life had been waiting for it.

Then to fat Corm they went, and he guided Feverfew further still, and after him came Murr, who led her through the complex tunnels on the Wen’s most westerly edge and delivered her to safety.

Barely a word she said, yet each of those moles, and others who later said they helped her then, told of how parting from her moved a mole to tears. And when they asked her where she went, she told them it was to where a star shone down, for there would be Silence and light and a task she had to do.

“What task, mole?” they asked.

But she only smiled and travelled on.

So Feverfew passed out of the tunnels of the Wen, helped by the Stone and by ordinary moles of whom only a few are now known. And she seemed to see a light others could not, until at last one winter’s day as dusk reared she began to climb up that escarpment at the top of which rose Comfrey’s Stone.

Mid-March and Bailey, and dusk. A clear sky when the stars begin to show early, first one and then another in a pale blue sky. While far across the Wen a myriad of lights slowly spread.

Bailey was worried and that look of self-concern and petulance long, long gone. Now there was care in his face, and tiredness too, and his gaze moved restlessly from the Wen’s lights to Comfrey’s Stone, and from that to the still, still form of old Boswell, thin now, his breathing painful, his face so weary. Restless, too, for his talons fretted at the snowy ground, and his head was not still.

“Stone,” whispered Bailey, “I ask that you help him for I cannot seem to help him more. I know he’s suffering but I don’t know what to do. He won’t eat or go aburrow. He’s so tired, Stone, and yet won’t try to sleep. He suffers but nothing comforts him. I’m just a mole, not clever or knowledgeable and....”

“Bailey,” whispered Boswell, “is she come yet? Ask the Stone to call her. Ask that.”

“I ask it,” said Bailey, looking up at the Stone and to the stars in the sky above. Then: “Boswell, I don’t know what more to do, I just don’t know!”

“Keep me warm until she comes....”

“Who will come? You never tell me. You’ve been calling for her for weeks and you never tell me.”

“You’ll know,” said Boswell. “Oh mole, you’ll know.”

For weeks Boswell had been ailing, perhaps ever since they had first got to Comfrey’s Stone and watched a light shine out which had died. In the days following he had gone aburrow when he should, keeping warm and eating. But he would come up regularly to the surface and face east over the Wen, whispering interminably, “She’s coming, and she needs my help to get here. She’s coming now, Bailey, and I’m so tired. Moles must do it alone, they must. Can’t do more. Pray for her, Bailey. Help her when she comes. That’s your task, my dear.”

Again and again had Boswell said it. When the snows came the wind came too, and drifted the snow away from the Stone so that it rose out of the thinnest layer of snow, and the grass to the edge of the long slope down to the Vale of the Wen was clear as well.

“To make it easier for her, Bailey. Help her when she comes. Pray for her... pray for me.” Sometimes then his mind began to wander and he called Bailey by different names, confusing him with Tryfan, and Comfrey, with Bracken and Rebecca, with others, too. Old names, names such as moles hear no more. Confusing him even with Ballagan, who was the first, and struck the blow that made the seven Stillstones.

“I’m Bailey,” Bailey would whisper and Boswell would reply, “No, no, my dear, no not Bailey now, allmole Bailey, you’re all the same my dear... is she coming? I long for her to come.”

So had those last terrible weeks gone by, with Boswell unwilling to leave his vigil over the Wen, until he had begun not to eat, and to weaken, and to fade before poor Bailey’s eyes.

All that last day he had breathed painfully, and his voice had become weaker, and yet he called out again and again, “Can you see her, is she come?” But Bailey could not see anymole, only the steep slope down to the Vale and stretching as far as the eye could see, and those lights that were stronger at first than the weak stars breaking through but which gradually that evening the stars outbrightened.

It was so cold that night and Bailey was tired and concerned at Boswell’s suffering. The Wen’s lights lurid, the sky above darkening, the stars ever more powerful and striking down so that the place about the Stone was light, and Boswell’s fur white, and his eyes longing for something he was too tired to go out and meet. No, must not meet. Must wait for. Yes. Must wait. That was his long suffering.

“Is she...? I need her now, Bailey... Is she coming?” whispered poor Boswell and Bailey was distraught. Staring up at Comfrey’s Stone, then at the stars, then at the Wen, then where the breeze blew flat across drifted snow, then at the Stone once more.

“Help him, Stone, send your Silence for him, help him now.”

Then Bailey crouched by Boswell as if to protect him from his own ailing, which nomole could have done, and Boswell muttered confused words, his mouth barely moving and his star-struck old body seeming to grow more fragile with each passing moment of the night.

“Is she...?”

“Yes!”

For suddenly Bailey saw her, coming over the rise, and she was thin and scalpskinned and like a terrible thing that came to take his Boswell from him. So Bailey reared up crying, “No, no!” for he was afraid of what she was, and what she meant, and afraid of that sound that seemed to have struck distantly across the sky and which he had heard before.