“I tried to chase after them but the Brother Assistant came to the portal and blocked my way. My friend had become my foe.
“‘You cannot follow where they are going. Sister Crowden,’ he said, ‘and it is best you do not try.’ I screamed and cried and beat him, and hit him, but he held me back, as gently as he could, saying again and again it was for the best, and that I could never understand.
“‘They even took the male pup!’ I shouted, grasping at some semblance of justice, as if taking the females was all right, but the male...
“‘They took him, especially,’ said the Brother Assistant. When I demanded to know what he meant he did not reply, as if he had said more than he should. I did not understand his meaning then, and I do not now.
“I turned back from the futility of fighting and arguing and retreated into my own loss; my pain as well, for though the pups were weaned my teats were swelling and taut. I cannot describe the numbing grief I felt as the night continued, so quiet, so normal; my world had been taken from me, and I was powerless to help my pups. That night I journeyed into a darkness and beyond, and saw myself as I was, a trapped mole who had failed her pups and herself. Yet I dared to think again. I dared whisper to myself that there was no Stone!
“Dawn came and I turned to the wall of what I now knew to be my cell, and defiantly I began to scribe the names of all the moles I had ever known, one after another, after another. Wort, Rooster, Hamble, Shire, Lime... and when for a moment my memory of moles failed me, I scribed the names of places I had been. I screamed and shouted the words that I scribed down and the Brother Assistant came briefly to watch and then went away again. I did not care.
“By that scribing on the wall of my cell I repossessed my past and brought it to my present. The last words I scribed were the names I had given my four pups, names I held more dear than any I had scribed, names I have never spoken from that day – but for sweet Loosestrife, which I spoke to you just now. Oh, they were the names of life I made and lost.”
Privet stared at her paws, her mouth trembling before she looked up once again.
“By scribing the names of moles I had known and loved I was delving them into existence as Rooster had taught me to, and thereby informing the Stone that they were, because they were something of me, and I was alive. My pups were, and nomole, no faith had the right to take them from me. I felt that by scribing their names I was protecting them, as also I was protecting those other living moles I loved, like Hamble and Rooster, and even Lime, even her. I felt too that in those moments of scribing I was using almost the last of the strength that had kept me alive so long. It was as if the Stone had allowed me to conserve something of my true self for a final moment of trial and effort, and that there and then that moment was about to be.”
“Will you tell us what all their names were?” asked Whillan. “It is as if they are part of my past too, the shadow siblings who were with me when you reared me.”
Privet turned, and speaking as if to him alone she said, “My dear, when you were very young, too young to know what it was I said to you, I used sometimes to speak their names, imagining for a moment you were they. Just for a moment... The smallest of the females, the one the least likely to survive, was Brimmel, which is the Whernish name for brambles such as those that grew down by Crowden Lake. I had shared happy times with Hamble there in the autumn, when their shiny leaves turned red. Her two sisters I named Sampion and Loosestrife, and I confess that Loosestrife was my favourite, don’t ask me why. But she had a way with her, she was the one in whom I put all my dreams and hopes of living life differently and better than I had done, with more courage and more joy.
“Pups are all different, Whillan, even when so young, as one day you will find if the Stone blesses you with them.”
“And the male pup?” asked Whillan.
“I never could find a proper name for him,” she said, “not a name worth having. I think I was intimidated by the knowledge that of them all he was the only one likely to survive, even if it was as a Newborn brother. I used to call him Mumble, and that was the name I scribed on the wall. He used to mutter and mumble to himself in an endearing kind of way as he pushed and shoved his way about, and perhaps his sturdiness, which contrasted with his sisters, reminded me of Hamble, and so “Mumble” came readily to me.”
“‘Mumble,’” repeated Whillan, almost with embarrassment, as if greeting a mole he had heard a great deal of but had never met before. “And Brimmel, and Sampion, and Loosestrife.”
“Yes, they were my pups,” said Privet steadily, “and then they were taken for ever from me.”
It seemed that by speaking the names aloud that dawn Privet had allowed her pups to be real once more, however brief and anonymous their lives had been.
“They’re good names,” said Maple.
“Are they?” whispered Privet with real delight.
“They are!” said Weeth, his eyes brimming with tears for what might have been.
“Well, well...” said Privet, sighing and struggling to control her emotions. “What happened next? Yes, it was then that he came to the portal of my cell, summoned by the Brother Assistant no doubt, and as I turned and faced him I saw his eyes were on my scribing, with the same appalled horror as before.
“‘Where are our pups?’ I shouted at him, quite hysterical.
“He winced at my use of the word ‘our’ as if he wanted to deny that we had a part in them.
“‘What is this?’ he said, ignoring my question and advancing on my scribing.
“‘They are the names of moles and places that I love,’ I said, adding as a deliberate provocation, ‘and if you can ken, then you will find the names of our four pups at the end.’
“‘I can ken,’ he said sharply, and I understood in that moment that he was a mole to whom pride was important.
“‘Then ken,’ I challenged.
“He hesitated between the ignominy of obeying a suggestion made by a female, even if she was one to whom he had dropped his guard for a time, and appearing a fraud if he did not show he could understand what I had scribed.
“He raised his paws to the wall and following my scribing with his paws. He did it very quickly, like a mole well used to scribing, and he did not go over the same markings twice. He turned to me and to my astonishment repeated what I had scribed name by name, like liturgy he had learned by rote.
“‘Hamble, Rooster, Wort...’ until he reached the last of all that I had scribed, ‘Loosestrife.’ Then he went back to Wort.
“‘Wort?’ he said. ‘The Eldrene Wort?’
“How I was tempted to tell him who I was, the one thing I had not told, and what that made his pups, but even in my anger I knew it would endanger even the male pup’s life. Such progeny as that would not be acceptable to so dogmatic a mole of the Stone. So I remained silent, and a flash of anger crossed his face, and then pity, as brothers often responded when sisters had transgressed. It is a look that turns a sister into something less than mole.
“‘The last four names you spoke are the names of our pups,’ I said at last, ‘and you have taken them.’
“‘I have taken nothing. You have given them up to the Stone.’
“‘You have taken them from me, and their lives are now your responsibility. If you let them die, in body or in spirit, you are nomole of the Stone, for you kill something of yourself.’
“‘You cannot speak to me, to a Brother Confessor, thus.’
“‘I am their mother and as I cannot go to them this is the last I can do for them. Before you harm them, Brother Confessor, turn your snout towards the Silence of the Stone and ask for the Stone’s guidance. The pups are not yours to mould, as you have moulded moles like me.’
“‘They are —’
“‘They are not yours.’
“‘Sister Crowden —’
“‘My name is not Sister Crowden. It is —’ and I stopped. I could see the anger mounting in him, but it was well under control, as you wou
ld expect from a Senior Brother. Such control is a formidable and frightening thing which the male Newborns no doubt learn from a young age and it gives them strength, and a power to command. As I stared into his eyes I felt my own strength weakening, not yet in spirit, but in body, and I knew that my last reserves were almost gone and that if I had anything left to say that might influence him for the good of our pups I had best say it.
“‘Promise me they will all live,’ I said.
“He hesitated, and I knew the mortal danger some of them at least must be in.
“‘The Stone will —’
“‘Put your talons on the names of our pups I have scribed, and promise.’
“He stared at the scribings he had just kenned but did not move. ‘The male will live to glorify the Stone,’ he whispered.
“‘Promise they all shall live,’ I said, with almost my last strength. ‘If you do not, Brother Confessor, you are nothing before the Stone – nothing.’
“The chamber swayed and darkened about me, and as I tried to hold his gaze, I heard him say softly, ‘You know, Sister, I would not harm a single hair on their bodies.’
“‘Promise,’ I whispered with my last breath, ‘for our pups are more than us, and one day... one day we must go to the Silence. Go not with the shadow of their robbed lives upon your face.’
“I remember seeing his paw reach out towards the wall, and his eyes staring at me, and his mouth opening, but nothing more, nothing more. However hard I try I can remember nothing more of him, or of that cell.”
“But later, Privet, later?” said Whillan urgently.
Privet shook her head. “There was no ‘later’ for me in Blagrove Slide. The next I knew I was on a long, dragging journey through tunnels I had not seen before, being half carried, half pulled by the Brother Assistant. I remember that I cried out to him to stop and let me rest, but he only whispered ‘Sssh!’ and I thought I was being taken to my pups, but I was not. On and on I was led. We rested only once that I recall, if it is a true recollection. We seemed to be in the shadow of a portal, and what I saw there a mole such as I would not be likely to forget, and nor would you, Whillan! I saw a library the like of which I had never seen before, nor have since. There were rows and rows of identically made texts, their covers birch-bark, all thin, all neat. The place was well-lit and clean as well. No nooks and crannies, no scholars hunched over ancient texts, nor scribes busy editing new ones: just texts, and not a mole in sight.
“Was it a real library I saw in Blagrove, or a dream of endless obedient brothers and Confessed Sisters, turned into endless texts all made to be the same for ever more, and safe, a place cleaned of transgressions by doctrinal moles? That’s what I think I dreamt or saw... until it ended, and the darkness came back and the running went on down a tunnel into nightmare, and I awoke on the surface beyond the confines of Blagrove Slide. The Brother Assistant was stanced over me.
“‘Sister,’ he commanded me, ‘go far from here and never return or try to, or think of doing so. Go south or east. You must go now.’
“‘My pups —’ I began.
“‘Sister, speak not of this and all your pups shall find favour with the Stone. Your Brother Confessor wishes it. But speak not of this; go now, and never...’
“‘All’ he had said, and it was enough to send a surge of joy and gratitude through me – the unreasonable gratitude a victim feels who has been given a mite of comfort by her oppressor. But it made me believe that I could turn and go, knowing I had done all I could for my young; they were left with a chance, even if they were in the grip of the Newborn moles.
“I had but one more thing to say to the Brother Assistant, and in saying it I finally found myself again: ‘Tell the pups their mother’s true name!’
“‘I know not your name, and I should not know it!’
“‘It is Privet, tell them that, Privet of Crowden. Tell them, mole.’ And with that I left him, and did not look back.
“Instead I trekked off into the last of the summer years, as low as a mole could ever be, to a state of shocked wandering, a kind of living oblivion. Did I meet other moles? Perhaps. Did I enter other systems? Perhaps. Did I pause awhile in lonely places along the way, and watch the seasons advance, and see the autumn come? I think I did. Once or twice I think I came across the Newborns, and when I did I turned from them as I turned from the Brother Assistant that last day at Blagrove Slide, without looking back. I preferred not to even think of them, for to do so was to remind myself that they had taken part of me.
“Sometimes in those long moleyears I wept for moles I had known, and the pups I had lost. Sometimes too I asked myself that question he had asked of himself. Why me? What was there between us that was meant to be, and which the Stone made happen? And why, when those questions came, did my mind turn again and again to the nature of Silence, and the search for the Book of Silence? Perhaps the power of the task I had set myself in Beechenhill sustained me, for lost though I was within myself, and numb though my feelings were, beneath it all remained the drive to carry me to Duncton Wood, as if it had always been my destination.
“By November I had reached Rollright, but when I discovered there were Newborns there I turned away again, and wandered on. I was rarely troubled. Whatmole noticed a thin, strange, vague female, who looked middle-aged, and worth nothing at all? Nomole heeded me, and I felt invisible as I journeyed on. Sometimes I whispered as I went, asking myself what Silence was, and where I might find it, and why my snout always brought me back towards Duncton Wood.”
“And did you come to a conclusion about Silence?” asked Weeth.
Privet paused and thought about the question, and when she replied she did so slowly, as if drawing on deep and well-considered thoughts on which she had long pondered. Indeed, to add to the variety of “Privets” they had witnessed that night, from scholar to mother, from prudish librarian to Newborn lover, there now came forth another – a Privet who had begun to discover the peace of mind that enabled her to speak with authority and grace on matters of the heart and the Stone.
“The question moles should really ask when evil befalls them is not, ‘Why me?’, nor even, ‘What is the purpose of the Stone in this?’ But rather, ‘What talons of truth and faith has the Stone given me by which, now that I am in darkness, I may proceed back to the light?’”
Weeth allowed a slight smile of acknowledgement to play across his face, a sign that he felt that this was indeed an important question, and more relevant at the present hour than any but he and Privet yet knew.
“Make no mistake. My experience of the Newborns was an experience of evil, yet evil in disguise enough to confuse me, and to leave me wondering if I was in darkness at all. At the time I was not so philosophical or capable of detachment as to ask the crucial question I have raised now. Indeed, until this very moment I never asked the question so clearly of myself before, but I think it is one we must all ask ourselves in the coming times of darkness: ‘What strengths have we that will aid us in reaching the light again?’
“Remember: the task I had accepted was the pursuit to the very end of the search for the Book of Silence. Perhaps where the wisdom of the Stone most deeply lies is in directing moles into circumstances which force them to ask, and to answer, questions they would otherwise be reluctant to raise. So I was directed to Blagrove Slide.
“We all want an easy life, or hope for one. What I had in Blagrove Slide was an experience so shocking, and so searing, that I would never again believe that life can be easy. Pleasant perhaps, joyous, fulfilling; but never easy. And for many moleyears, until now indeed, I lost all confidence in myself as mole.
“But as I have talked tonight of my long journey, and come at last to the trauma of my time at Blagrove Slide before I ended my travels in Duncton Wood, I have begun a second journey, which is that which has taken me out of the darkness of my life until now into the light of acceptance and love: the love of moles like Fieldfare, and Master Librarian Stour, and Whillan here, an
d my other friends. I see now, for the first time, that there can be, or can have been, no great Books without such journeys as these, nor any scribing of them unless it be by moles who have made such journeys. I know now that I may still have some way to go along the path which I started on so long ago, and from which I found respite for a time in Duncton Wood.
“And what of my journey to Duncton? It ended a few days before Longest Night when I reached the cross-under on the south-east side, and passed through it on to the Pastures whose slopes lead up to the Wood.
“I looked up and saw the great beech trees, all leafless and tossing in a storm of winter wind, and I came slowly up. There, at the edge of the Wood, I turned and stared back as if to look across the moledom I had journeyed through, and say goodbye to all my former life: to the Moors, to Rooster, to Hamble, to Cobbett, to my pups in Blagrove Slide. If they lived they would be so changed and grown I would no longer recognize them, with only their names scribed on a wall, and for ever in my heart, to record what they once had been before they became Newborn.
“Then I turned into the Wood, and Fieldfare was there to welcome me. And welcome me she did, and led me to a new life, and gave me time to find myself. I joined a system to which I feel I have given but little, so lost have I been in the darkness of forgetting what I was.”
A sudden gust of wind caught the surface where they talked and when it had passed by they knew Privet’s tale was done – at least, so much of it that related to the past. The rest had yet to come, and each knew he was now a part of it.
PART III
Into Darkness
Chapter Fourteen
The following day they found themselves approaching a second and larger patrol of Newborn moles and realized that they were now very near to Evesham, and to discovery by the Newborns after so long journeying unobserved.
“This may well be it,” said Weeth. “One and all, now may be our last chance to retreat.”
“We’re going on,” said Maple.