Duncton Rising

  “It was only later that I came to suspect that each one of us sisters was assigned to a Senior Brother according to his particular suitability to weaken us and mould our minds.

  “The clue to my vulnerability lay in my Whernish, and so they found a Senior Brother who could speak it, and so reach into me. It says much for their skill and subtlety that despite what he later did to me I still remember him not as a tormentor, or even corrupter, but as the only mole in that nightmarish place who ever comforted me. Except perhaps for his young assistant brother, who had a kind of gentleness very rare in Blagrove Slide.

  “I wish I knew my Senior Brother’s name, but of course we sisters were never permitted to call them anything more personal than brothers, though in those shared moments when we were together, we would make up names for our Senior Brothers, and speak in a juvenile pubescent way of how “ours” was better than the others, and how we loved them, and they were surely beginning to love us...

  “‘Mine’ – I am sure now he had other sisters than me! – was perhaps two Longest Nights older than me, and intelligent enough to deal with my doubts in the course of the instruction he gave me without imputing to me the sin of transgression simply for having them. It was not long before he persuaded me that the Newborn way to the Stone was the only true way, and led me towards asking if I might become a Confessed Sister.

  “He said he was able to accept me as a Confessed Sister on trial but that if I was to be fully accepted then Eider Brother Thripp, or perhaps Quail – he used their names – must grant permission. I was overjoyed at this, and cried myself to sleep with happiness that the Stone had so honoured me. Confession brought certain privileges: better food, better burrows; but also certain responsibilities – attendance at rituals before the Stone to perform minor tasks of preparation, grooming of the Senior Brothers as they prepared themselves for the ceremonies.

  “Imagine my thrill at being allowed to groom the Senior Brother whom I now regarded as my protector and guide, and the delight I felt if by the slightest of nods or the smallest of smiles he acknowledged the minor service I did for him.

  “But I knew there was a dark side to being a Confessed Sister. For now the slightest transgression – whether a mistake during the rituals, or a complaint, even illness – was enough to earn the Senior Brothers’ punishment, though they referred to it always as punishment in the Stone. Punishment was banishment to a state far worse than that initial one from which we had risen with such difficulty, and being forced to do the vilest and most menial of tasks. Some of these penalties were brief, others permanent, and sometimes moles we had known were suddenly seen no more. We Confessed Sisters therefore lived in constant fear of losing our privileges through transgression.

  “It was at this time that I was permitted to attend one of the Newborn celebrations before the Stone, a rare privilege, and one which we were only allowed to enjoy at a distance. I was overjoyed to discover that Blagrove had a Stone, tall and thin, thrusting up to the sky, and I could not keep my eyes off it, such were my adoration and faith.

  “When I did drag my eyes away from the vibrant surging thing the Blagrove Stone seemed to be it was naturally only to look out for the Senior Brother who had befriended me, who was there taking part in the ritual. I felt very proud to see him stanced prominently among his peers and wished I could have told him so; but of course, I knew that for a female to do such a thing would have meant punishment. In fact a female was chastised at the celebration, and humiliated, but I remember feeling only slightly sorry for her. I wondered what she had done, and felt sure that she deserved what she got, for by now I was convinced that the Senior Brothers were all-wise. Two other sisters were blessed at the ritual because they were with pup and I noticed that one of them had been among those who came with me to Blagrove – she who had reported the mole who had tried to warn us to escape.

  “I noticed that ‘my’ Senior Brother conducted that part of the ritual which blessed the sister, and I wondered if he was her Brother Confessor as well! How jealous I felt! The words of the blessing were interesting, for they referred only to male pups, and indeed asked the Stone to grant that the pups the female bore would all be male. It did not occur to me to question this, perhaps because I was so exhausted by the work and lack of sleep and the feeling of being cut off from the world that I had lost my ability to question anything.

  “Soon after this I was summoned again before my Brother Confessor. He complimented me, and said I had done well at the ritual and that he had good reason to think I was among the chosen. He asked if I desired to serve the Stone and I said I did. He gave me to understand that I could best render service by doing what females are sent by the Stone to do, which is procreation; that was the word he used.

  “He spoke simply and well, and his eyes were strangely bright, and I said, provocatively, that I would like to serve, I would like to have pups, but I had no mate. Those were my very words, ‘I have no mate,’ and I confess here that I looked coyly at the ground, hoping that he would take me. This is all as it was. This was the truth of Blagrove Slide.

  “He said that such a thing was a matter for the Elder Senior Brother but if he gave permission and I was deemed to be clean of spirit and body it might be arranged.

  “‘Elder Senior Brother Thripp or his representative will be generous in his assessment of your desire to serve the Stone,’ he said. ‘Of course, this acceptance into the Stone’s service carries with it certain privileges; extra food and a comfortable place for the period of your gestation.’ The way he looked at me, his eyes warm, betrayed his desire. Innocent as I was, abject as I had become, that much I recognized.

  “‘Would it be with you. Senior Brother, I mean...?’ I faltered. I felt shy and brave at the same time, and filled with desire such as I had never felt before. So dependent had I become, and so obedient! I wish I could say I have forgotten all that occurred from that time on, but I have not, not all of it. Some days later I learnt he had been given permission to ‘know’ me, as he put it, and I was overjoyed; but first I had to pass through a period of meditation by the Stone.

  “‘But I cannot go to the Stone alone!’ I said.

  “‘No, you cannot. Sister Crowden. I will go with you, and instruct you in the act of abasement before the Stone, and the need to open yourself up to it, to give yourself to it entirely, to... to touch and caress it with your faith, with your heart, with your body.’

  “Oh yes, my Brother Confessor instructed me before the Stone all right! Whispering instructions before it through the night, putting his paw to my shoulder and flank and haunch, that I might be, as he softly put it, in the right position to receive the Stone’s Light and power... until I found myself urged on and on, and I felt excitement and utter abandon before the Stone’s great spirit and his desire that I make the admission of the need to procreate.

  “‘Yes, yes, yes...’ I sighed, hoping that what I thought might happen would happen, then, and there, in the night before the Stone of Blagrove Slide.

  “‘I must know you. Sister, know the truth of you, know the deep of you, know the quick of you!’ he cried, and I remember thinking that for the first time he sounded as if he was not quite in control. Oh, the power of that moment, and the passion of what I thought was faith, and the ecstasy as he came closer still and I felt his desire for me, and the sharp unique pain of the moment of knowledge, when he took me that first time and knew me, only me, all of me, before the straight and risen Stone!

  “The excitement, as he mounted me and together we ascended heights of ecstatic faith – for the first time I felt him not as a Senior Brother but as a mole, as vulnerable as myself. I heard him gasp, I heard him cry, and I heard him give thanks to the Stone that at last, at last...

  “And I knew with an absolute certainty that I was the first female he had known. I knew, or felt I knew, that for him, as for me, this was a moment that transcended who and what and where we were. We were any two moles that had ever made love with abandon, each d
iscovering for the first time the excitement of union.

  “After that my Senior Brother knew me many times before the Stone and I am not ashamed to say that I more than enjoyed it, it was a kind of ecstasy. But if a confession of anything is needed it is this: I felt a secret triumph that I was doing with him what Rooster had done with Lime. Yes, before the Blagrove Stone I recovered a kind of pride. Yet there was a new understanding too – of what my prudishness and Rooster’s innocence and fear of “hurting” had denied us, and why it might be that he had wanted to take Lime, and had enjoyed doing so. My Brother Confessor showed me the way to an understanding of why Rooster had done what he had.

  “There was one more thing. When a mole makes love to you, and gives himself to you, he cannot but reveal things he might normally hide – and certainly things a Brother Confessor would wish to hide from a Confessed Sister. I felt in those moments that he was alone as I was, and sensitive, which though it was never in his words, for they were as dogmatic and cast in the Newborn mould as all the rest, was there in his touch, and most of all in those brief moments of ecstasy. I felt I had made him discover something in himself he did not know was there, and in that I felt the Stone, the loving true Stone of Light and Silence devout followers seek to worship, was trying to show him what he otherwise could not see. You might think that what he did was wrong and hypocritical – reducing a female to obedience and then saying it was the Stone’s will that he mate with her. It would have been wrong, had not something in our love transcended what we were and did. I felt something in him that was wonderful, even great, and that our meeting, and all we did, was meant to be. Each of us had been hurt, and each helped the other to be whole again, or at least to go forward better than we might otherwise have done. Was this my delusion? I thought not then, I think not now.

  “I said before that we sisters had talked of love, and I described it as juvenile. Yet after he made love to me – for call it what you will, or what the Newborns wish, that’s what it was – I felt love for him: for what he had given me, for that unspoken secret he had revealed. So that when, soon after, I found I was with pup, I felt utter joy. I do not think I have known such intense happiness as that; except perhaps sometimes, Whillan, when you were a pup; and with Rooster, so long ago on Hilbert’s Top, when we lay and held each other close, and all the world was as nothing to us – that was deep abiding delight.

  “But there in Blagrove Slide... the fact that I was making life gave my existence a meaning it had never had before. I could not but feel good about the mole who made that life in me, despite the circumstances in which he did it. But that time of joy was the best of Blagrove Slide for me, for what went before was grim, and what came after was hell. For one thing, I was put in quarters with other pregnant sisters, and far from helping each other through, jealousy was rife between us, added to which was the feeling of being sick and tired which came on us at the beginning. I learnt too that female pups were “disappeared” soon after birth, and some said only the males were given favour and allowed to survive. Even though I had by then become convinced that males were better than females, I felt a profound need to seek ways to protect my unborn young – and a deep despair, for there was no way that I could see.

  “I have mentioned the young brother before, and he now came to visit me regularly – provoking jealousy in the other sisters, for their Brother Confessors sent nomole at all – to see what my progress was. I asked him hopefully if it was possible for my Brother Confessor to visit me, because it would be a comfort.

  “‘The Brother Confessor does not see females he has made with pup,’ were his devastating words. Females! Oh, jealousy! I felt it then! ‘My’ Brother Confessor was not mine at all! Yet even as I thought that, I answered it by chastising myself for thinking I might be his only Confessed Sister, and comforting myself that even if I was not, I was surely special, because he had seemed to reveal something of himself on those treasured occasions when we had been at the Stone. How easily weak excuses satisfy the meek!

  “One of the things I had wished to talk to my Brother Confessor about was the important question of naming my pups, thinking that it might involve him in some way and give me a legitimate reason to share something with him about them. This I was now denied, and lacking his company or any other that was friendly and which I could trust, I did what many a mother does; I whispered to myself the names I thought to use, trying out the sound of them, seeing if they felt right for the pups that were beginning to move with tiny life inside me.

  “Being a scribe, it was but a short pawstep from speaking them to scribing them, though I knew well enough that this might be construed as a serious transgression. Sisters did not scribe, and certainly I had never once revealed that I could, not even to him... So as I grew heavier, and rested more, I would turn to the wall of the little burrow I was by then able to call my own and scribe some of the possible names, and reach out a paw to ken them and repeat them, which gave me pleasure and comfort. I always scored out the scribing when I had done, and even when moles approached down the communal tunnel, so I had no fear of discovery.

  “As my time approached I was taken by the young brother to the place of my confinement, which was isolated from all other moles but him, and a wan, mute female who used to come that way to clear out the tunnels and bring fresh litter.

  “I was not allowed on to the surface, though I asked to go many times. The new burrow was more comfortable, and brought me relief from the other females, and the food was better too. Perhaps that made me careless, or perhaps being with pups changes a mole and stops her being as careful as she might be. However it was, I knew by feeling that I carried four pups and that all were active and well, and one day I scribed down the names I wanted to give them in a neat line on the wall. I hoped that all would be male, yet secretly I longed for a female pup, and superstitiously I felt it best to “pretend” I had two of each and so I scribed down names for two of each as well. There they were, living inside me, and scribed down too, and I stared and mused and dreamed of what might be; too long, it seemed, because I fell asleep.

  “When I woke I knew even before I opened my eyes that my Brother Confessor was in the chamber, and that I had not scored out the scribing. Even as I reached out to do so I heard him say, ‘Sister! Leave that!’

  “I turned to him with pleading eyes, to beg forgiveness, to ask...

  “‘Whatmole scribed it? Eh? My Brother Assistant, presumably. Brother! Come!’

  “Before I could stop him he had gone and summoned his assistant, who appeared meekly at the portal.

  “‘What is the meaning of that, Brother?’ he said, not unkindly.

  “I stared in mute fear at my friend, who looked at the names on the wall at which the Brother Confessor pointed, and gaped with blank surprise. He looked at me with his kind eyes and I knew that he understood immediately that it was I who had scribed the names – and I saw astonishment and respect in his face. More than that, I felt a surge of joy that he should so quickly believe that I could scribe. It meant that I must have some qualities left that others could respect.

  “He turned to the Brother Confessor and smiled and said, ‘Forgive me, but she would insist on speaking out the names she wants to give her pups and I felt it might be a comfort...’

  “‘It is well enough, if a little indulgent,’ said my Brother Confessor, turning to ken the names. But even as he did so I sensed that no matter what the reason why the Brother Assistant wished to protect me, and whatever he was protecting me from, if I allowed a lie to live about my pups, even before they were born, I was no true mother in the Stone. That was the moment in Blagrove when I began to find strength to become a mole again.

  “To make it worse, my Brother Confessor was repeating the names to himself, playing with the sound and thought of them as I had so often done, and a slight smile was on his face as he whispered them to himself, half turned from me, of course, because it would never do for anymole to see him expressing feelings in that way.
Yet I knew what I must do.

  “‘Thank you. Brother, for seeking to protect me and my pups from the transgression I may have committed,’ I said quietly to the assistant, ‘but I would not be a true mother to them if I allowed their father to be so misled. It was I, Brother Confessor, who scribed their names.’

  “‘You!’ he said, astonished.

  “I nodded, and so complete was his disbelief and horror – horror that I could claim such a thing, for still I do not think he believed it – that I reached up my paw and scribed before his very eyes my favourite name of all the four, which was ‘Loosestrife’. How I had dreamed of her, a female pup such as I had never been, beautiful, a pup to be proud of, a pup to make a mother feel her life was given meaning by making her.

  “He stared in silence, seemingly appalled at what I had done, and affronted too, as if thereby I was no female mole at all, but an alien mutant thing with which he wanted no intercourse lest she infect him with something unspeakable. In that look I saw the face of dogma and rule challenged by a fact which opened wide the hypocrisy and myopia of its thought, and showed it to be the nonsense that it was. In his narrow world females could not scribe; they were not intelligent enough, they were not able to.

  “‘You scribe?’ he said. Nothing can convey the profound horror and shock in his voice.