Nor could he shake off the feeling, so uncharacteristic of so optimistic yet cautious a mole, whose life as a journey-mole had taken him through so many scrapes, that this time events were running faster than he could control, and that the final turn in his life had come and that the Stone, much as it sought to protect its devoted followers, must sometimes ask a mole as part of his task to make a supreme sacrifice.
“It’s given me a lot in my time, and its constant protection,” he muttered to himself as he went along, “and now it’s asking for my help as if it knows there’s no other mole hereabout who can serve it as well as I! What it wants me to do I cannot imagine. But I would have liked to see my Fieldfare again, not only because I love her, but because my last words to her when I parted from her near Uffington were that she’d hear from me before long.”
He paused briefly in the tunnel, causing the Newborn guards behind him to talon him in the rump to start him moving again. But in that brief moment of time he had space to stare ahead, and he realized that though he was alone and afraid he was also a lucky mole, for he had been much loved all his rough life by the best mole he had ever known.
“Blow it!” he said resolutely to himself, summoning up all his courage and resolve and trying to rid himself of his imaginings, “I’m not going to let a bunch of Newborns get me down. Fieldfare, my sweet, if you’re putting in a word for me to the Stone, because you sense I’m in trouble, you keep on doing it, because your Chater needs all the help you can get him.”
Muttering such thoughts and prayers to himself Chater continued his grim passage through the tunnels, the sweat of strain and apprehension darkening the fur about his neck as he tried to put boldness into his paws, and to stay alert, for whatever it was that the Stone was going to ask him to do it was going to be soon, very soon.
“But not soon enough!” he whispered to himself a little later, when the guards came to a stop as they crossed another communal tunnel and ran into a hurrying search party of Newborns.
“Stay here awhile so you don’t cause confusion while the search for her continues,” he heard one in the patrol command.
“What’s going on?” asked Chater.
A talon-thrust in the face was the only reply from his guards, but he heard one of the patrol say, as they left, “Bloody Duncton moles. Should have killed the bitch while we could.”
Chater reacted to this with a mixture of excitement and concern. If the mole was of Duncton and she was female, then, by the Stone, whatmole else could it be but Privet herself? Which made Chater almost inclined to try to escape there and then, except that he had too much sense not to bide his time, and wait for a better opportunity.
“Come on,” said the guards at last after a long delay, “we’re not hanging about here any longer. Let’s get you down there now where you can’t cause us any more trouble.”
“Where?” asked Chater.
“Move on and shut up!”
So he did, but alert now, and encouraged by his sense of Fieldfare’s distant prayers, and the welcome news that a Duncton mole had escaped and was causing the Newborns trouble – just as Duncton moles traditionally caused trouble for those who sought to take away others’ liberty.
“I’ll be causing you lot trouble too before long, given half a chance,” said Chater, as he was led on down the tunnel to his fate.
The tale Weeth heard, mainly from Hamble, of the wanderings of Rooster and the others was indeed interesting, as many a mole has discovered who has kenned any of the histories of the times, or any of the several biographies of Rooster that have since been scribed.
After the death of Red Ratcher, Rooster had had little difficulty in so cowing the other Ratcher moles, including several who must have been his brothers or half-brothers, that in a matter of hours the situation of conflict across the Moors between the grike-dominated Ratcher moles and the moles of Crowden had changed. Confrontation had given way to co-operation, and though there were to be several more summer moleyears of difficulty, as different factions of the Ratcher moles tried to regain control over their brethren, Rooster’s power to inspire and lead was so great that they soon weakened and faded away.*
*The most exhaustive account of these times is certainly that by Scammell, entitled The Master Roosters Middle Years: Trial or Triumph? Whillan of Duncton’s fascinating Out of Charnel Clough is perhaps the most insightful account of Rooster’s early life, and is regarded as a classic by moles interested in the story of the recovery for moledom of the lost delving arts.
Before autumn he had been able to return in a kind of triumph to the Reapside of Charnel Clough, going there in the hope that he might find a way to cross into the Charnel itself once more and be reunited with the moles he had been forced to leave behind. But the Span was gone irrecoverably, and though they journeyed up and down the side of the gorge, and even back out of the Clough altogether and over the Tops to try to climb down by way of the Creeds, the Charnel was unreachable. A mole would either drown in the Reap in the attempt, or tumble to his death down the huge cliffs which, from above, seemed impassable to mole. He went back for one last try, thinking that at the upper end of the Reapside, near the Creeds themselves, where the river flowed out from the head of the valley and waterfalls tumbled down from the heights above, a mole might get across – but only with luck, not judgement, and by leaping from slippery boulder to boulder, between which treacherous white water raced, and above which the ravens cawed in the spray, and hopped out for the carrion of drowned moles, dashed by the rushing water against the rocks and washed up dead somewhere down the gorge.
Several of the moles would not venture near the place, and in the end only Hamble would go with Rooster to make the attempt. Yet notwithstanding the dangers and insanity of trying such a thing. Rooster was so desperate to reach the other side and find out if his friends Humlock and Glee were still alive, that he certainly would have tried beyond even his strength, endurance and limits had not Hamble hauled him back.
“Finally, it was all I could do to get him to leave the Charnel,” Hamble quietly told Weeth later on when Rooster was talking to another mole, “for after our failure to cross the Reap he just wanted to stance and stare through the skeins and mists of water at where, moleyears before, he had been forced to leave his dearest friends behind. He felt angry with life and with himself, guilty perhaps, and roared out his grief and pain. To this day, Weeth, he has not recovered from losing those two friends of his, and I believe that their loss lies at the root of his abandonment of the delving arts. Until you contrived to make him ken your scribing as a delver would, I swear I have never seen him apply the arts I know he still commands and probably longs to practise.”
“He never delves at all?” asked Weeth in astonishment.
“He’ll delve a burrow like any other mole when he’s travelling, and a defensive line as well if need be, and they’ll be better than most could delve – swifter, sweeter of sound, better of lie – but they’re only workaday and modest things compared to what we all know he could do if he wished. I would say that we have followed and supported him, in the hope that one day he may fulfil his promise as a Master of the Delve. My heart felt joy when you forced him to ken your scribing. There is hope still.”
“There is always hope, always,” said Weeth.
“You are a positive mole, Weeth, a remarkable mole.”
“Yes, I think so too!” said Weeth, which made good Hamble laugh aloud.
“I noticed in your telling you were reticent about this mole Whillan.”
“Rooster seemed put out that Privet should have reared him,” said Weeth.
“I was glad to hear she had had a mole to love. Her puphood was not good, and she was a timid mole, without the confidence of love. After she came off the Moors with Rooster all had changed, all seemed bright. She was as happy as I ever knew her, despite the pressure we were under in Crowden from the grikes.”
“But her sister, Lime...” began Weeth, who remembered that part of Privet
’s account especially well, for it was the only time that she had ever looked bitter.
“Ah, Lime,” said Hamble sadly, and, as it seemed to Weeth, with rather more sympathy than he would have expected, “you know of her then? She did much wrong, but she suffered much for it too, more perhaps than anymole ever should. In the end Lime gained my respect and proved to me that anymole can grow, can develop, even if, as in her case, it ended in tragedy.”
Weeth might have heard more then, but Rooster came back, and the tale resumed from the Charnel, and Lime’s trial and triumph and final tragedy duly unfolded as but part of his greater story.
After Rooster had lingered several more miserable days in the Charnel, staring bleakly across the impassable Reap and becoming inconsolable, his friends finally succeeded in leading him back out on to the Moors, where for a long time they wandered, bringing peace to the places where Red Ratcher and others like him had brought anarchy for so long. Throughout this time Rooster stayed silent and depressed, a wild, desolate mole, whose mood and character well complemented the Moors, which were now his free domain.
At his flank he had Lime, who had stolen him from Privet, and ousted her. He now took her as his own, jealous in his protection of her, passionate in his attentions, and yet – and this was plain enough to Weeth as he heard the tale – Rooster held on to her from duty as much as passion, and in his love was the bitter fruit of the knowledge that through her intervention he seemed to have lost Privet and his true vocation for ever.
The two tried to have pups, and had they done so, then perhaps the nature of Rooster’s love would have changed, deepened and grown, and in the rearing of his offspring he might have found the outlet that his denial of delving robbed him of. But they did not, or could not, and so their love was but physical passion, and swung from argument to reunion, from recrimination to reconciliation, from passionate but temporary interest, to passionate and recriminatory boredom.
“Only give me pups!” she would scream in her worst moments of anger. “But you cannot, Rooster, and you are not true mole. Give me pups or I will take another mole to me for them!”
Then he would strike her, and she would strike him back, and they would rage and weep, and shout and cry across the Moors their wild and fruitless love, or love-hate, the embodied expression of that great pack of moles that Rooster now led, but whom only quiet Hamble, faithful, trusting deeply in the Stone, and with an abiding belief in Rooster’s ultimate destiny as a Master of the Delve, kept loyal.
They centred their activity for a time on Crowden, but since Red Ratcher’s death Rooster did not like the place and they moved their centre to the Weign Stones up in the Moors. There, in their own wild ways, they were followers of the Stone, and when females joined their little society they formed a community which, even if it was mixed and rough, was better and more benign than any the Moors had known for decades past. Rooster was its strange and troubled spirit, Hamble its firm and generous organizer: two moles who successfully acted as one, and trusted and respected each other as only true friends can.
But in truth it was Hamble who held the group together, not as the stronger of the two but as the more stable and approachable. Whilst Rooster’s moods swung this way and that, not helped (as it seemed to Hamble) by the passions and rages of his relationship with Lime, Hamble was always there – friend to both moles, friend to all. His life was his friend’s, sacrificed to some vision of Rooster that seemed all hopeless and laid waste and which had come originally perhaps from Privet. He took no mate, no private companionship, and existed for nothing but the greater good of the moles that stayed with Rooster, and believed there was something in him still.
There they might have remained had not a group of Newborn missionaries, looking for pastures new, made the mistake – the fatal mistake – of venturing up into the Moors to visit the Weign Stones in late February as the snows thawed, seeking to convert anymole who lived there. How could they know they were Roosters moles?
“It was as if they gave a focus to all that anger and guilt and sense of failure that Rooster felt,” Hamble explained to Weeth. “He has, you see, a way of responding to moles that is instinctual, and has little to do with reason. Perhaps it is because he is a delver, and feels things far more strongly than he is able to think them. I do not say he is always right – in the matter of Lime I think he was finally very wrong – but we who are his friends know that usually he is right, and so we follow him.”
When the Newborn missionaries came. Rooster’s response to them was rough and ready. He felt them to be corrupt, and perhaps saw more clearly than others could not simply the facile and arrogant nature of their beliefs, but more than that, the deep corruption of spirit of the system from which they had emerged. He personally drove them off the Moors for a whole night and day, roaring and savage in his threats, yet those like Hamble who followed laughing in his wake, noticed he was careful not to hurt them beyond a mild buffeting.
But at the end, when they threatened him as a blasphemer and a “grike” he should not perhaps have hurled them bodily downslope off the last part of the Moors. They ended up shocked, badly bruised, strained, but worst of all with a pride sufficiently hurt that they took back to the Senior Brothers false stories of violence they had suffered from “moles of the Word”.
Had the Newborns left it at that, moledom might have heard no more about it, and Rooster and Hamble and their friends have stayed on the Moors and not strayed to the lower, greener and more wormful valleys to the west and south. But at the hint, false though it was, that there were still moles of the Word on the Moors, the Newborns sent out a punitive crusade of missionaries from Blagrove Slide and began a campaign of retribution for the imagined hurts the first four had suffered, in which isolated and harmless moles died, pups were taken, females left ravaged and alone. These were moles in small systems far from Rooster’s protection, for at first they attacked only on the northeastern fringes of the Moors. But emboldened by early success the Newborns made an incursion up the valley of the River Crowden and at Crowden itself, inhabited by then by a small number of unassuming moles, they subjected all they found to vile massacres as moles of the Word. Then all across the Moors a new fear went, and its victims turned to Rooster, who had saved them from Red Ratcher, to rid them of the curse of the Newborn moles.
So began the grim struggle through early March between Rooster and the Newborns, the first in which the Newborns found a foe worthy of the name; moles who fought back, and who rejected the Newborn sectarian faith not with words but with talons, asking nothing but that they be left in peace. This brief and bloody war on the Moors only ended when, after seeking to avoid a confrontation by retreat, which was against his nature, and attempts at negotiation led by the more conciliatory Hamble, Rooster was driven at last to stance his ground and lead his friends against the Newborns in the grim Battle of the Weign Stones.
Between them. Rooster and Hamble brilliantly routed the Newborns and killed a good many, the rest fleeing off the Moors back to the lowlands once more. But this time, sensing that it would not end there. Rooster led his band in pursuit and so began the bloody odyssey through eastern moledom to seek to end for ever the war the Newborns had begun. It was a local war that attracted the worst elements of the Newborns, including it is said the Brother Quail, not yet as powerful as he became, who here developed the bloody and cruel punishments and tortures which he later applied more sparingly through his Brother Inquisitors, and so gained power far beyond any authority vested in him by the Newborn creed.
Meanwhile, Rooster and the others were adjusting to the nature of the lowland territory they had invaded. It is hard for ordinary moles, reared to such things, to imagine the impact that the lowland vales of wormful plenty, of blossom, of warmer winds and clear waters of brooks and streams had on moles reared only to the bleak wormless wilderness of the Moors. To the taciturn Rooster, uniquely sensitive to form and shape, texture and sound, this was a kind of paradise. But it was one marred by th
e continued and to him inexplicable assaults of the Newborns, who harried them wherever they went, and never seemed to give up. “Teaching the Newborns a lesson’, which was all the “strategy” that Rooster and Hamble then really had, was proving far more difficult than they had thought.
But what made matters infinitely worse for Rooster was that it was there in the beautiful lowlands that he had his worst, most violent, and final argument with Lime. She had been as taken as he was by the gentleness of the landscapes they found themselves in, and her desire to have pups increased; she wanted to settle down, and be done with all fighting against the Newborns, and against Rooster.
“She simply wanted pups, like any female,” whispered Hamble to Weeth, expanding on a part of the tale that Rooster refused to talk about. “And then, tragically as it turned out, she got with pup.”
“Why tragic?” asked Weeth in surprise.
“Because she fatally chose to tell Rooster, for reasons of argument or vindictiveness, that they were not his pups. I have never in my life seen him so angry – which is, of course, just what Lime wanted. After that she could not get him to believe they were his, and I myself had to pull him off her or else I swear she would have been killed. First his father, then the mole he got with pup!”