Duncton Stone (52 page)

He revelled in his power as head of the Crusade Council, convening it at strange and arbitrary times, listening to the reports it received and waiting for the councillors’ responses in an intimidating and malevolent way, as if to say, “You tell us what
you
think, but get it wrong and I’ll have you killed, or kill you myself.” And how he grew to enjoy summoning moles that reports had maligned or praised, to accord them punishment or promotion.

It is natural to wonder how a mole so grotesque and increasingly unbalanced could hold sway over so many moles more healthy, more competent, and no doubt more intelligent than he. But this is to forget the fear that any brutal tyrant can inspire in all around him; jostling and struggling for survival and promotion, they become so corrupted by fear, so self-serving in all they do, that maintaining their position becomes all-important to them. When this finally depends on the tyrant who gave it to them, then, sadly, it is with his continuing survival that their own is linked and so they must support him.

By that July and August all competent Newborns had learned to keep their mouths shut, and all intelligent ones had found sinecures as far as possible from Wildenhope itself. The most talented of all – like Thorne and Chervil – were already alienated and now waited to find some way to wrest power from Quail. The least talented but most ambitious were, in the main, the ones who remained at Wildenhope, unwilling and afraid to express the truth that was surely all too plain to see; that bit by bit their bald, odoriferous, insatiable, decaying leader was losing touch with the Newborn Crusade he himself had planned. Whether he was yet aware that the Crusade was losing pace, and that the dominance of the Newborns had begun to wane, is impossible to say. But probably not, for Snyde, so accurate on all else, says nothing of it.

But what Quail did finally come to understand was that moles trained as Inquisitors did not make the best commanders in the field. No wonder then that realizing that many of his Brother Commanders were ill-suited to the power and responsibilities given them, he had them killed or demoted. In this he was helped by Snyde, often more perspicacious than Quail in assessing the qualities of others.

At times, however, Quail was capable of recognizing competence where it existed. The diatribes against Thorne decreased as that mole’s regular reports through the earlier part of the summer came to make more and more sense of what was really going on, especially after Maple’s emergence in the Wolds as leader of the followers. Thorne’s reports analysing the threat of growing resistance, and the order and expansion he established at Cannock, had increasingly exemplified to the Wildenhope leadership how affairs should be. conducted more widely.

So it was that Quail promoted two junior brothers, Sapient and Turling, to commands in Avebury and nearby Buckland respectively. Although we know them to have been murderous tyrants in their locales, they were at least efficient in what they did. But it was, rather, in the peripheral ground, Blagrove Slide and Ashbourne, where the Brother Commanders were fatally weak, and frequently replaced; and in northern and western territories, where too little attention was given.

In the key system of Duncton Wood no Brother Commander had been appointed – partly because Brother Inquisitor Fetter appeared to have everything under control (the insurgents in the Ancient System, led by Pumpkin, had gone unreported) – but also because Duncton occupied a special place in Quail’s imagination. Like most other moles, he held it in awe for its history and the existence of its famous Stone, and wished to preserve for himself the right to be its Brother Commander.

“Whichever mole controls Duncton, controls the hearts of allmole,” Quail was inclined to say, making clear that the day would come when he would move his entourage and court from Wildenhope to Duncton Wood.

This opinion was not original, for moleyears before, when Thripp had been dominant and Quail a striving assistant Inquisitor, the Elder Senior Brother had confided that his greatest wish was to enter Duncton Wood as a spiritual conqueror, and by some new ritual or other be acknowledged master of moledom. Thripp had long since forgotten such youthful ambitions, and in any case if he had used the words “master of moledom” he had quite specifically meant a conqueror of the spirit rather than the body. But how that phrase had stayed with Quail, its spiritual resonances long since replaced by a simple lust for power. That, to him, was what “master of moledom” would mean, and it was what he intended to achieve.

This being so, it becomes easier to understand why Quail had so long permitted Thripp to live, albeit in complete isolation, down one of the deeper tunnels, and in one of the darker cells, of Wildenhope.

“Kill him?
Kill
him, mole?” Quail had rasped one night when Snyde had whispered the proposition in his ear. “You’re a fool, Snyde, and not always a clever one. Kill Thripp and I might as well kill myself Indeed, I make sure he does not die, though by all these talons of mine I wish that he would... Aye, I wish it. But he does not, he will not, he must not. For... he... is...
loved
.”

Quail spat out the last word like some rotting piece of wormflesh that had caught between his broken, crumbling teeth and come suddenly free and loose in his stenchy mouth.

“Loved?” whispered Snyde, who was not a fool. He chose his moments well for such questions, using them to gain information, or provoke action, as the occasion demanded.

Quail turned, impatiently pushing aside the torn and broken body of the youngster upon whom he had just satiated his lusts.

“Yours,” he mumbled, suddenly tired.

Snyde eyed the dying body in the gloom, listening to its shocked and painful breathing appraisingly. Death was near, but not so near that he had not this exquisite time of lingering before taking his own pleasures in Stone knows what dark places his master had been before him.

“I am a fool, no doubt,” he purred, his right paw reaching out to caress the near-corpse, “and so I do not understand your hesit —, your
decision,
to keep Thripp alive.”

“I shall be master of moledom and I wish him to live to see it. No!”

This last word was a sudden shout, like one of pain, and since his mouth was opened wide in making it and close to Snyde’s twisted snout, the librarian took the full blast of Quail’s foul and heavy breath. For a moment he almost vomited, but then, submitting to the odour as an unwilling female might to a dominant male, with a shudder of horrid release, he inhaled Quail’s breath, and sighed it out again.

“No,” snarled Quail, “I keep him alive not only that he may live to see my triumph at Duncton Stone, but so that he shall die to see it too.”

“Die, Master?” simpered Snyde, joyous in the contemplation of such evil at the Stone he knew so well; he much looked forward to returning there in triumph as Quail’s Recorder and the new Master Librarian of Duncton Wood.

“The last thing Thripp shall see is my confirmation as mole Paramount and Prime, and the true way established corporeally through me across all moledom. We shall establish this ancient position once more and it is most fitting that it should end in the contemplation of the spiritual triumph of whose beginning he was the inspiration.”

“Most fitting,” murmured Snyde, repeating Quail’s words over to himself that he might the more accurately scribe them down later, for the notion of serving he who was Paramount and Prime appealed to him and he revelled in his use of the word “corporeally’.

Of the body; of the body as symbol of all else; of the body we do come, into which we went to procreate, and out of which we flee when its work is done and the Silence calls us.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Snyde, ecstatic now, for Quail had turned from him towards the slumber that followed the nightly gratification of his lusts; all the hours that lay ahead could be measured and enjoyed in the satisfaction of his own.

“Guardmole!” called out Snyde.

They came running, and supporting the dying youngster on either side they dragged and pushed him out into the tunnels, and thence to Snyde’s own cell, a trail of blood behind.

“Corporeally,” repeated Snyde slowly, sniffing Quail’s smells before he left, that they might linger like ethereal scent in his snout, and carry him forth to the dark necrophilism of the night.

“Leave us,” smiled Snyde, in his cell at last, the body almost dead.

“Yes, sir,” winked the guardmole, “and have a good night.”

“I will,” said Snyde, eyes alight across the haunches of the cadaver-to-be.

“I don’t doubt you will,” said the guard, whose companionable impudence Snyde rather liked, even encouraged, the more because it
was
impudence, and one day, or night, rather, that plump guard would be well checked. It was one of Snyde’s perverted and disgusting pleasures to be especially nice to those he fancied... dead. One day this cheeky guardmole, and the next? Whatmole knows? Quail himself, perhaps.

Snyde’s haunches trembled at admitting so forbidden a thought to the consciousness of his imagination. Quail, dead. Quail, his own at last. Quail become his plaything. Oh, oh, oh, sighed Snyde,
that
was worth waiting for.

Meanwhile...

“Corporeally,” murmured Snyde again, enjoying the sensuousness of the word. His paw shivered with anticipation as it reached towards the body, the reward his master gave for his loyalty.

Peepholes in the night.

Snyde shifted, and darted a dark glance towards a shadowed place high in the wall of the cell. He smiled conspiratorially, and then stalked around the corpse as if it were living prey.

“Are you there?” he whispered towards that little hole through which Squelch was allowed to watch. He knew not, but it was not the knowledge of being watched so much as the possibility that he might be that gave Snyde his extra pleasure.

Beyond the cell’s wall Squelch giggled and sighed, and heaved his obese body about excitedly, as below him, Snyde snouted at the body he had power over, which could hot mock his deformities or threaten him, then savagely began his pleasures.

Such dark goings-on as these were the nightly norm at Wildenhope that corrupted summer. And corruption was the word, for even the most innocent and naive of visiting brothers – come to Wildenhope to give the latest news of his part in the Crusade – might find himself rewarded with some offer or other he found hard to refuse.

A scurry at the portal of his cell, the laugh of a guardmole melding with the whimper of some forsaken youngster who had offended the Newborns in some way, and was now offered up as temporary amusement to the visitor.

“What am I to do with her?” the brother might call out to the retreating guard.

“As you will, sir, as you will,” came the reply, “but you’d be advised to do something, know what I mean?”

A brother who had reached as far as to be entertained at Wildenhope knew at least what
that
meant: he must do something, or be considered to have insulted his host, Quail himself. Such a brother might also be aware that he was being watched, as happened elsewhere in Newborn visitor and pleasure cells, usually through peepholes reached by secret galleries.

The sin was not in failing, so much as not trying at all.

And so the brother, tired from his journey perhaps, beset by the deep fears that the tunnels of Wildenhope instilled in a mole, terrified and awed by the Elder Senior Brother Quail and the impassive cold eyes of the Crusade Council, would stare at the waiting victim, and then perform. Often these inhibited brothers, reared in a culture of hatred and contempt for followers, deprived of love from the very beginning of their lives, presented with such sudden and unexpected opportunity, discovered in themselves strange and terrible depravities.

Quail watched. Squelch watched and giggled. Snyde watched and recorded. The guardmoles watched. Every-mole in the place seemed to do, or to watch, or a bit of both.

When so many knew so much, and all were implicated, no wonder nomole dared speak, or tried to explain the cries and sobs in the night; and it is not surprising that, from time to time, some brother or other, visibly distressed by what he had found himself capable of when given permission or threatened, would wander over the bluff of Wildenhope and hurl himself into that great river of blood whose deeps were a punishment for others, but now an escape for him.

Another daybreak, and the business of directing the Crusade could continue once more.

“Or can it?” rasped Quail, tired from his night’s activities.

“Elder Senior Brother?” one of the Councillors dared ask.

“The Crusade, mole. Directing it from here? Eh?”

Quail expectorated, turned the yellow-green phlegm about his stinking mouth, and spat it out against the nearby wall, down which it slowly slid as if alive.

“It is becoming... difficult,” opined another Councillor, and one but recently elevated to his office. “The intelligence comes later by the day as the crusades reach further north, and east and south. We need...”

He paused and faltered. Something in Quail’s look warned him. Some fractional change in the Elder Senior Brother’s stance, some brief flare of his powerful snout; something...