Duncton Stone (31 page)

“Ystwelyn, you’ll be in second-in-command for now, and stay with me. I want to tell you my plans. Arvon, you could go with a couple of strong moles and Warren here – we’ll only need one guide to take up to Shoal Hill, and you’ll do that. Pottle...”

“Yes sir!” said Pottle smartly.

“... and pick up what stragglers you can find. But take no risks. Don’t be back later than dusk tonight.”

And so the first plans were laid and orders given before the two groups went their different ways.

The hours that followed were anxious ones, but even before dusk Arvon’s party returned intact, with seven more moles who wanted to join Maple’s force.

“When do we leave, and for where?” asked Arvon stoutly, when he had recovered his breath and eaten.

“We leave now,” said Maple resolutely, “for the Newborns will be after us tomorrow dawn if they’re not already.”

“Now is always the best time!” said Arvon with sudden passion. “And we Siabod moles won’t let you down!”

“I know that, mole, I know it well,” said Maple, “so let us begin our march for liberty. Tonight we’ll disappear into darkness. Tomorrow we’ll begin a trek to a system that needs our support... no need to name it yet, for the less is said, the less the Newborns can find out.”

“Rowton?” suggested Weeth quietly as they set off.

Maple nodded, his eyes gleaming with purpose and excitement in the gathering twilight. He looked at the moles who followed him, quiet and generally disciplined.

“It’s a beginning, Weeth,” he said.

“It’s
the
beginning,” replied Weeth with certainty.

Chapter Sixteen

The Newborn Crusades, which had effectively been initiated by Quail the Longest Night before the Wildenhope Killings, began in earnest immediately after them. Indeed, as we have seen, that same evening the first step in their consolidation was taken with the confinement of Thripp of Blagrove Slide and the formal creation of the infamous Crusade Council.

The emergence of the Council, with Quail as its spiritual head and Skua as its inquisitorial leader and second-in-command, seemed to mark the end of the long struggle between Quail and Thripp for effective leadership of the Newborns. With Quail now openly willing to exclude Thripp and deny him access to other moles, and with an Order already issued for his death later that summer,
*
the second and more brutal generation of Newborns were now in a position to prosecute the Crusades to which the subverted Convocation of Caer Caradoc had been the evil preparation and preface.

*
See the chilling twelfth Secret Order in ‘Secret Orders in Council’ edited by Bunnicle of Witney, based on Snyde’s contemporaneous records.

The Crusades were naturally disguised by the Newborns as spiritual campaigns aimed to lead the feeble, fainthearted and misguided
peaceably
back to the true way of worship of the Stone. Nominally the Brother Advisers attached to each company of guards were in charge of matters locally, the guards themselves being there only to enforce the “Stone’s will” upon those in whose hearts the twin evils of sin and doubt were too deeply entwined. But, of course, it was often the Brother Commanders and their guards who took charge and set the murderous tone of the Crusades.

In fact, as allmole has long known – and as those who did not will already have deduced from what has been scribed in this history – the Crusades were nothing more or less than the systematic corruption or murder of males of middle age or less, and the seduction or rape of females of pup-rearing age.

It is unfortunately true that if an army of moles is appointed divine agents of the Stone, and given permission to murder males on one paw and rape females on the other, it will happily do so. The ground had been well prepared over the winter years by well-placed Inquisitors in all the major systems, who had “cleansed” the libraries and the inhabitants in the way Pumpkin witnessed in Duncton Wood; it was not difficult for the zealots fired and trained at Caradoc to set forth and bring terror and tragedy to any system unfortunate enough to resist them. Immediately after the Wildenhope Killings the Crusade Council began to issue its Orders and commands to all parts of moledom in what seemed for a time like a never-ending succession of instructions to the Brother Advisers and Brother Commanders in the field.

Like all moles who rise to the top through cabals and terror. Quail believed himself capable of running everything and until the various flaws in Newborn organization began to show it must certainly have seemed he was right. The stream of reports that began now to come from the major systems pointed to phenomenal success. On Avebury, for example, the system where Quail had first sharpened his inquisitorial talons, “all surrounding systems as far as Fyfield” were “cleansed” by early May – but then that area had the advantage of milder weather and so an earlier start. But only shortly afterwards Brother Inquisitor Fetter was able to report similar success from Duncton Wood, and nearby Rollright was not far behind.

So, through May, the litany of apparent success continued, with Blagrove cleansing the eastern reaches of moledom by the end of the month, and astonishing progress reported from Ashbourne, the system that was the central focus of the Crusades in the north-east, the more historic Beechenhill being too high and obscure for such a role.

Cannock was rather slower to report, and when it did Quail and his minions were unwilling to ken between the lines of what was said and appreciate the significance of Brother Commander Thorne’s account of resistance shown to Squilver’s guards, prior to his arrival, “led by one Maple of Duncton Wood’. Yet in his report, more honest and to the point than most others, we begin to see signs of the trouble that was building up for the Newborns, and can glimpse the true tragedy of much that was suffered in those early days.

“We must bring to the attention of the Council that although resistance to the Crusade has in all other cases*been ultimately ineffectual, it has nevertheless been spirited, courageous, and persistent. The moles of Stafford fought us to the death of
every mole
in the system; those of Penkridge caused us considerable problems by dispersing in the surrounding countryside and then attacking us intermittently; while those of Rugeley killed their females rather than let us take them for correction and education...”

*The exception implied is Maple’s escape from Cannock and his subsequent flight to Rowton and successful exodus to the Wolds. See below.

It would seem that this report, with its implications of serious resistance, was ignored by Quail, and the lessons it might have taught remained ominously unheeded. Worse, from the Newborn point of view, few other of Quail’s Brother Commanders in the field appear to have been as honest or perspicacious as Thorne, preferring to ignore the evidence of resistance they must have seen.

Thus, there is no record of the moles led by Spurling and Fieldfare up on Seven Barrows near Uffington, nor of those who escaped to join them from the systems around Avebury; then, too, Brother Fetter was economical with the truth when it came to giving a proper account of Pumpkin’s brave retreat with twenty or so moles into the Ancient System of Duncton Wood back in February, and the failure of subsequent attempts to flush them out.

The Ashbourne brothers gave no hint, in the reports they sent the Council, that they had met successful resistance just to the north of their system among the idiosyncratic moles of the Dark Peak; nor, finally, did the Brother Inquisitors of Rollright do anything other than suggest that the cleansing Crusade of their system and those surrounding it was complete and successful, whereas, in fact, the redoubtable Hodder, whom Hamble had met, and his kin and friends had already laid plans for resistance and counter-attack.

But perhaps, after all, these points of opposition seemed as nothing compared to the overwhelming successes the Crusades were showing, and the piecemeal capitulation of system after system to the zealous and reforming brothers. Why muddy the pool with a mere gobbet of soil?

However it really was, through May and into early June all seemed well with the Crusades that Quail inspired and led from Caradoc and Wildenhope. It was simply a matter now of waiting a little longer before all corners and crannies of moledom were finally cleansed.

Meanwhile, as Snyde’s reports show, females all over the crusading areas were beginning to give birth to pups sired by their Newborn masters, and the chilling process of killing female pups and educating the males, which had begun first at Blagrove Slide and been perfected at Bowdler near Caradoc, was already well advanced in many systems.
*

*
Snyde’s records show two Brother Advisers to have been especially ruthless in this regard. One was the unpleasant Brother Sapient of Avebury, who maintained the tradition of rigorous cruelty first established by Quail himself in that system; the other was the self-styled Brother Zeon, judged by most to have been insane, whose brief but foul reign at Cannock after Thorne’s and Fagg’s departure was brought to a precipitate end by his last victim, the Confessed Sister Suede of Cirencester.

By the beginning of June, indeed, Quail and Skua were so confident of the success of the Crusades that they were already planning a triumphal tour of four of the major systems, which was to start with Cannock and end, in the autumn, in Duncton Wood itself, where many of the leading Avebury brothers and others from outlying systems would join them. The purpose was partly punitive – we know the Cannock visit was to be made with the intention of arraigning and punishing Thorne – but mainly to consolidate successes ahead of the winter years; Quail had a taste for sudden promotion of some and demotion of others, which he used to create a permanent sense of unease and competition (not to say a culture of deceit and disloyalty towards all but himself) among his subordinates.

Yet by early June, in the time of greatest success and self-congratulation, the first signs of the difficulties about to beset the Newborns began to show themselves. Try as they might, the unctuous and self-serving Brother Advisers in system after system could no longer disguise the fact that there
was
continuing resistance, though its source and strength remained mysterious.

Then, unexpectedly and quite shockingly for Quail and the Crusade Council, came news of something more than resistance. First came reports from the Wolds, until then disregarded, that a force of Brother Crusaders, based at Broadway, had been attacked and virtually massacred by a band of miscellaneous moles from the Cotswold heights. Worse followed two days later when a travel-weary and still-shocked guardmole from the major system of Evesham arrived in Wildenhope reporting that his Brother Commander, Finial of Bromsgrove, had been taken prisoner, and several guardmoles killed in a well-organized attack, the culprits being unknown though believed to be led by the same mole responsible for the Broadway “outrage” – as the Crusade Council naturally perceived it.

“Name a name, I want a name!” roared Quail, when he heard of this.

The name was forthcoming soon enough, for but a few days later, Wildenhope having been abuzz with rumour, confusion and dismay, who should appear but the “lost” Brother Commander Finial himself, and with a story to tell of stark and shocking humiliation.

Yes, he had been taken. No, he had not been ill-treated. Yes, he had been released by his captors, he had not escaped from them.

“But you tried, Brother Commander?” demanded Quail.

Finial, who was tired from his journey and recent experience, and humiliated by all that had happened, was perhaps less patient with the Council than he might have been.

“There was no point in “trying” to escape since my captors told me from the first that they intended to let me go.”

“Why then did they take you in the first place?” demanded Skua.

“They told me they wished to educate me,” said Finial, with little sign that he appreciated the irony of being so publicly educated by moles it was
his
job to educate. “They told me they wished to remind me of what worshipping the Stone was all about. They were wrong and misguided and I am glad to be clear of them.”

“And their leader? Did they have one?” asked Quail, his eyes glinting dangerously.

“Oh yes, I met
him
,” said Finial. “His name is Maple. A large mole, impressive in his way.”

“Have I heard of him?” asked Quail, the skin of his bald head wrinkling, his eyes flicking about the members of the Council, seeking information, and perhaps explanation. There was a murderous mood about: at the very least Finial might not survive the day. Quail did not like failure or defeat, nor moles who brought news of it.

“I know of this mole,” said an unctuous voice at Quail’s right ear.

“Well, Brother Snyde?
Well
?”

Snyde nodded to one of his minions to continue recordkeeping and eased his crooked body near Quail, the better to address him discreetly.

“Maple is of Duncton, I regret to say. He has military pretensions. He was the sinning mole who was observed helping the reprobate Rooster escape.”

“Duncton! Rooster!” repeated Quail, spitting out the words as if they were worms gone bad. “Again! Come closer still, Snyde, and tell me more... Mmm... I see... Quite so... The one who made a fool of Brother Commander Thorne in Cannock, eh?”

Snyde whispered his lies and calumnies, only speaking louder when he wanted Finial to hear, for he knew well how the right words to one mole could gain the favour of another. “The mole Maple is well-kenned in war, and more than likely he had spies to help him at Evesham. Against such evil advantage it might have been hard for any Brother Commander to do better than Brother Finial did.”