Duncton Stone (13 page)

And all he could do was burst into tears, and sob his heart out while Cluniac held him, as a son might hold a father who had fought alone long and hard for his family and now was alone no more.

Chapter Seven

“Wildenhope!” whispered Privet to herself, staring at its distant dark shape. Then, from the valley far below, came the ominous roaring of water.

“And how will we cross the river?” asked Privet.

Below her, surrounded by guards, Rooster had also stopped. Between them was Madoc with her group and Whillan with his.

“With difficulty,” said her guard.

As if he heard them, though he was too far off to have done so, Whillan turned and looked up to Privet. Beyond him and far below her was the white-grey rush of the river they must cross and she felt sudden desperate fear as if she sensed a danger she could not name. Indeed, so powerful was the feeling that quite involuntarily she pushed forward to reach Whillan, and for the first and only time her guards had to restrain her. The moment passed and the parties set off once more, but Privet was left with an aching unease which would not go away.

By the time they reached the bottom of the Wenlock Edge escarpment it was dusk and Thorne and Fagg decided it would be better to cross the river by daylight.

“It will be easier then, miss, so there’s no need to fret. Maybe the rain’ll stop and the river’s flow ease off a bit.”

“Maybe...” said his fellow guard dubiously.

There followed a troubled night in which the rain did ease a little, but the roar of the nearby river grew louder. Everywhere and everything around them seemed to drip and run with water, and Privet felt chilled to the bone.

At dawn came the signal to move once more.

“I thought we would wait until full daylight,” said Privet.

“The Commander’s probably thinking that the sooner we get across the better – if the river floods we could be stranded this side, or worse,” observed the friendly guard at some point when dawn light came.

It was cold comfort, for nomole likes a flooding. Water is one thing, a flooding is another, for however well a mole can swim, the power and rush of a flooding can overcome the strongest. A grim look had settled on to the faces of Privet’s normally affable guards, and the only comfort was that they stayed protectively close to her as the party sloshed its way over water-logged meadows towards the river they could hear but no longer see. How they would actually cross it Privet could not imagine, for there was no sign of a roaring owl way and a nice safe stone bridge which might have led them comfortably high over the raging water. Privet had never wished before for signs of two-foots and their structures, but she wished for them now. Looking back the way they had come she saw that the top of the Edge was obscured by grey cloud, and now the rain began once more.

They came down at last to the field before the river itself, at which point they not only lost sight of it beneath its banks, but its roar became muted, replaced by the shriller sound of rushing water in the drainage ditches that crossed the fields all about. They turned south, parallel with the river, to cross the first of several ditches by means of swaying planks on unstable and rickety two-foot structures made wet and slippery by the rain and, worse, the occasional upward splash of water from the torrents they bridged. Privet disliked these crossings, but they were generally short enough to scurry across in one quick movement, being careful to keep eyes firmly fixed on the pawhold ahead and never straying past and downward to the water itself. Only once did Privet do that and she momentarily froze; the rush and dash of water below was so mesmerizing and terrible that the guard behind had to talk her on step by step until she was safely across.

It was midday before they turned once more towards the river, taking a route along the very edge of the dyke they had just crossed. Ahead was a clump of shrubby trees through which the river seemed to take a curving course. They cut in among these trees to slightly higher ground and for a moment Privet had the illusion they had left the river behind, and were safe once more.

The separate parties had slowed and bunched up, so that for the first time since the journey started Privet was near enough the others to see them clearly, if not quite talk. All looked tired, their fur bedraggled and their paws and snouts muddy. Rooster, huge and fearsome, seemed to tower over the guards around him and he looked round for a moment and gestured towards her and frowned, which might have meant anything from complete despair to a determination to escape. The moment passed and they plodded off once more through the trees, past two-foot structures, over a large concrete dyke by way of a sturdy flat bridge of the kind Privet would have welcomed earlier, and then finally out of the trees to the river’s edge.

It was then she saw sweeping up from the bank a structure of a kind she had seen on her journey across Evesham Vale before Caer Caradoc, but never been upon. It was, Weeth had explained, for cows and sheep to cross from one pasture to another and had been all muddy and trodden down at either end where the livestock had grouped and waited. This one however was ruinous and abandoned, its entrance fenced off to cows by barbed wire. The structure was still whole on either bank, but where an elegant span might once have been there was now only a great girder of rusting metal, its centre sagging down towards the torrent that raged just below. To make the prospect of crossing it especially grim the girder had a leftward twist, and swayed to and fro in the wind, and up and down.

“Right!” said Thorne firmly. “There’ll be no dawdling and no rushing. One at a time, go steadily, concentrate on the next step, and count. That’s the way to do it.”

“Counting keeps your mind off it,” whispered Privet’s friendly guard, his paw touching hers reassuringly, “we came this way and there’s nothing to it!”

“Wasn’t roaring then,” said his companion unhelpfully, “wasn’t flooded.”

Privet could have wished that she was among the first to go, but they went in the order in which they had travelled and her fears about the crossing had time to grow and fester and feed upon themselves. When the third mole across hesitated, she hesitated with him; when the fifth slipped and nearly fell, she slipped too, and half screamed in fear – a cry lost in the remorseless roar of the river below.

Whether out of sympathy or a moment’s forgetfulness in the successive dramas of moles crossing, the guardmoles allowed their charges to come close enough to shout words of greeting and encouragement to each other over the noise of the river, and nothing was more comforting to Privet than that. Rooster was already near the girder, ready to cross behind one of his guards so it was Whillan and Madoc Privet saw best, and both seemed well, if tired, with Whillan now a little recovered from his beating.

Rooster set off firmly, making it look easy, and giving Privet a little more confidence. But halfway across, where the girder dipped down lowest to the torrent below, he stopped. Unaware of this the guardmole ahead continued, but the one behind paused, eyeing Rooster uneasily and knowing perhaps that here at least, without the others’ support, he was no match for the great mole.

Rooster seemed oblivious to them all, but only stared for a moment at the dangerous waters below and then very slowly and strangely gazed around him and then upward, eyes wild, snout raised, mouth half open. Then, most terribly, he looked back at them, on his face the expression of one who never expected to see them again.

“Something’s wrong!” cried out Privet, forgetting her own fears. “Whillan, something’s wrong...”

Whillan pushed forward shouting something Privet could not quite catch, but as the guards restrained him Rooster seemed to come out of his strange trance; he shook his head, and proceeded to cross without further hesitation, into the grateful paws of the guards massed ready for him on the other side.

“It was the Charnel Clough!” shouted Whillan to Privet. “I think for a moment he thought he was crossing out of it again. Did you see the way he looked back here as if we were his friends Glee and Humlock he left behind? Did you?”

As Whillan was pushed up to the girder to take his turn at crossing it Privet thought, “Even after so long he has not forgotten them. Friends lost. His whole life has been loss.”

Certainly Whillan’s imagining, if that was what it had been, had the ring of truth about it, as if he understood something of Rooster’s mind as only family or a friend might.

As Whillan crossed, and more guards, and then Madoc, the number watching from the far side grew, whilst those around Privet decreased, until only her two guards and Brother Adviser Fagg remained.

She might have been all right had not Fagg come close and whispered maliciously, “Not nervous, are we, not worried about falling in?”

Privet stared at him, while her guardmole friend could only look on in despair.

“We are?” sneered Fagg. “Well, nomole cares if dried-up bitches like
you
die, nomole at all. But don’t worry, I’ll be right behind...” His eyes glittered, and in them a mole might have seen the reflection of the river raging past.

“Brother Adviser,” said the guardmole, trying to intervene.

“You lead, guardmole, you lead... and I’ll follow,” said Fagg, and there was nothing a guardmole could do to countermand a Brother Adviser’s order. His friend went first, Privet next, and Fagg too close behind, his every word of hypocritical encouragement – “Careful! Watch that bit! Oh, dear, you nearly slipped!” – unheard by anymole but Privet, adding to her fears and turning her paws all awkward and stumbly; the rain got in her eyes, the wind tried to pull and push her from the swaying, slippery girder, and the river surface seemed to boil and break beneath and send waves of water up towards her.

The moles on the other side sensed something was wrong, though from where they watched they could not have guessed that Fagg was maliciously turning a difficult situation into a dangerous one. Behind him the last guardmole, the friendliest, leaned out from one side to another to see what help he could offer, but Fagg blocked his view, and all possibility that he might do anything.

The fear that Privet now began to feel was unlike anything she had ever known – indeed, she might have wondered if she had ever known fear at all until now. From the first moment she put her paws on the girder and felt it twisting and shifting beneath her, its hard, weathered surface offering so little grip to prevent her from slipping towards the maelstrom below, she felt panic coming upon her, and knew she would have trouble controlling it. But as she edged along the persistent voice of Fagg behind caused her to lose concentration, and think thoughts and do things she was trying to avoid. When he said, “Don’t look down or you’ll panic,” she could not prevent herself from looking down, nor from feeling the panic tighten her paws, restrict her breathing, and... “Watch that bit there!”

“Which bit? Where? Oh dear, oh...” The fear was becoming palpable, a black and numbing cloud closing in upon her and blocking out all sight and sound but the swaying stretch of girder ahead, and the blurring rush of water beneath which gave the illusion that her next pawhold was moving away to her right, and she could not breathe, could not place her paw, and she was being drawn over and over and must slip, was slipping now, would fall, on and on the screaming voice of fear was hers and nomole was there, none to help and... and Privet began to freeze where she was, her eyes wide with fear, and her breath coming out now in short audible gasps of pain as voices shouted at her, behind and in front, but she felt out of reach of any aid they might bring.

She did not – could not – see how Fagg was now being perilously restrained from further interfering with her by the guardmole behind him, while the one in front had turned, which was no easy thing on the narrow wind-buffeted girder, to try to reassure her.

But now on the far bank Rooster reared up, and Whillan too, and both were struggling with the guards in their efforts to clamber back on to the girder and give Privet what help they could. In Whillan’s case the struggle was unequal, for the guards were as big as him, and he was outnumbered. But Rooster was throwing guards off himself like a giant mole breaking through dry undergrowth, whilst all the time he was roaring and shouting in Privet’s direction.

But it was Thorne who assessed the situation, and perhaps saved it. He barked out several quiet commands – first to Whillan and those around him, which stilled them, and then to Rooster’s guards, who fell away from a struggle they were beginning to lose.

Then as Rooster shook himself finally free Thorne said, “You go to her, mole, and calm her... now!” And turning towards the river-bank he gave such a sudden and authoritative order to the guard in front to “clear the way” that the mole turned forward again and scurried to the safety of the bank in moments.

Rooster needed no further encouragement and set off rapidly along the girder, but if Thorne thought he was going to simply talk Privet over to safety, he was mistaken. It was not in Rooster’s nature to do the simple thing, nor, as in this case, the safest one either. Muttering to himself and glaring at both the girder and the river below as if they were living enemies, he charged down towards Privet with no concern for himself, and not much for Privet either – his objective was Fagg.

The Brother Adviser, restrained behind by the guard-mole and now borne down upon by Rooster, notwithstanding that the terrified Privet was in the way, now seemed very alarmed indeed.

When Rooster roared, “You! Off! Out! Leave! Away!” he looked quite terrified. The guardmole understood at once and leaving matters to Rooster he retreated to where he had started from and watched from the safety of the bank, with amused astonishment tinged with awe.

Quite what Rooster meant by his monosyllabic and threatening cries of “Off” and the like was unclear, unless he was advising Fagg to jump into the river below. Certainly Fagg contemplated this as the lesser evil, but one look at the broken, crashing water told him that way was death.