“Go round the guards and continue our climb up Caer Caradoc, which begins to feel to me like a climb through the stages of life itself,” said Privet, more for her own benefit than for Madoc’s; still restless and apprehensive, she was already slipping off their path and contouring the slope northwards.
This second escape of the evening, their first upon the slopes, seemed far enough behind them when they finally found a spot to point their snouts upslope once more and begin to climb. In that time they had heard more rushing and shouting across the flatter ground below them, and guessed that some of it at least must be moles out searching for them. It seemed that Rolt had been right about nomole thinking that they would climb Caer Caradoc, though if the guards were used to females coming up to them (and this presumably was something a more innocent mole, like Brother Rolt no doubt, might not have known about) others might have guessed they could come this way. Other business was perhaps apaw, and fully engaging Brother Quail’s Inquisitors and patrols.
No sooner had Privet shared these thoughts with Madoc, and they had succeeded in climbing back to the level they had reached before the guards packed them off downslope, than they heard the sounds of mole coming up the slope some way behind them, though further across the hill.
“Time to pause again?” said Privet ironically. Madoc grinned, nodded and stanced quietly down – the Duncton mole’s calm was affecting her as well. As they waited and listened the ground about them lightened as the clouds across the stars thinned and shifted, and revealed a clear night sky and the moon.
They heard the approaching moles, and peering southward downslope they saw several great moles labouring upslope and doing their best to be silent, but not succeeding very well.
“They’re going straight to where the guards are,” whispered Madoc. “They must be a party out looking for us.”
She lowered her snout fearfully into the short grass, and then, still feeling exposed, slunk back in among some nearby bracken. But Privet stayed where she could watch, until the force of moles dropped out of sight into a slight fold in the ground, up about where the guards had been.
The guards’ confident challenge came soon after, loud and clear, demanding to know whatmole was about, and why, all in the name of the Order of Caradoc!
To Privet’s surprise there was no reply, and after a short pause the challenge came forth again, this time more menacing. Some instinct of natural preservation in Privet, that had nothing to do with the idea of being “invisible” and being especially safe that night, caused her to draw back in amongst the bracken where Madoc already hid. As she did so there was a third challenge, this time sounding rather desperate, and broken off halfway through into an ugly grunt of pain and surprise, followed by a shout, perhaps from the second of the guards, and a savage, attacking roar.
Then there was fighting, fierce and evidently frantic, and a voice, a rough wild voice, cried, “That one!”
There was a scream of pain, and the sounds of struggle grew louder, close at paw, then nearer still.
“They’re coming here,” whispered Madoc urgently. “What shall we do?”
What shall we do? Privet found herself staring up through the bracken and on up the silvery slope of Caer Caradoc towards where she knew the Stones must be. All her life, she and moles about her had constantly been asking what must they do, what must they do, and then, before they really found the answer, striving to do it...
Privet felt her calm, her friend as she now thought of it, return: nearer, more powerful about her, everything to her.
“We let things be,” she whispered quietly. “This night it is all we will do, all we must do, let things be.”
The struggling moles were suddenly almost on them, the scent of their angry fear preceding their rolling bodies and wild thrusting paws. One broke free, and reared up for a moment, and Privet and Madoc could see it was one of the Newborn guards who had earlier turned them back; he fled across their sight and crashed his way down the slope and away, blood shining black on his flank in the moonlight.
The other, the one who had spoken to them in so jovial and friendly a way, almost fell out of the darkness on to them, his breathing fast and desperate as three great moles followed him, fierce and terrible, buffeting, pushing, trying to gain a hold to finish him off. He broke free and turned as his friend had done to try to get away but tripped and fell forward, his paws crashing about the clump of bracken where the two females hid, before his body thumped down painfully upslope on the grass beyond.
With a great roar a mole moved out of the melee and placed a massive paw on the fallen mole’s chest to hold him down before raising his other paw preparatory to striking a killing blow. The light of moon and stars shone on his face with horrid clarity. His brows were furrowed, his eyes angry, his mouth open, his face all shadows and light.
Madoc saw him, and screamed.
The mole beneath him raised a futile paw to protect himself.
And then Privet spoke.
Calm? Aye, she was calm. At peace? She seemed as peaceful as a lake in a still winter’s dawn. But never, ever, had she in all her dream thought to meet her love again in a nightmare such as this.
“Rooster,” she said, her voice quiet, her eyes still, her heart so sad to see the mole she once loved come to such bloody murder, no better than the Newborns. “Rooster, you cannot. This you must not do.”
He turned slightly and stared down at her with eyes that seemed those of a mole who had long since lost himself Yet he knew her. He stanced back as if afraid, his raised paw falling to his flank, and that which held the Newborn to the ground easing, seeming almost gentle now.
“Oh, Rooster,” she said again, and all was still. He was reared up in the light; she stanced amidst the dry bracken. The Newborn, suddenly free, turned, rose, stared, and ran – all no doubt in but a moment of time, but there, then, it seemed like all time had slowed, and faded away as he fled. Then time returned.
“Rooster,” she had said, but in a voice that was more than mole. It was as if the earth itself had finally spoken to him, or the night sky. Behind him, his companions, grike and mole alike, large and wild, desperate and ready to fight anything, swayed, pushed, shushed and were still as well.
“He let him go,” whispered one. “He let the Newborn bastard get away!”
Rooster turned to him slowly, his stare silencing him, and then the great mole looked at Privet again, his head bent and fretting in the night, seeing her, and the moonstruck slopes of Caer Caradoc, and the starlit sky rising behind; his mouth opened to speak, but at first he could not find the words.
“Didn’t,” he said at last. “Didn’t kill him.”
It was cold comfort, and how long they looked into each other’s eyes nomole can be quite sure. Even Madoc, the only witness who left a record of that moment, did not know herself. Longer, she thought, than moles might think.
Nor can we know what Privet or Rooster thought at this ominous and potent first meeting after so many years; except that Madoc believed that each felt that here and now was not the time to say more than had been said: “Rooster,” and “Didn’t”. Nor had he killed the mole, who was free to tell the tale in better days, in better places, to moles who could never quite believe a word he said.
At last the moment passed and Rooster turned from Privet as if he wished her away from there, stared malevolently at those who followed him and roared, “Only two females. Mean no harm. Won’t tell. We go.”
“Hamble’s not with us,” said one of the moles. “We’ve lost him.”
“He left,” said Rooster, “going now!” And off across the slope they went, contouring on as Privet and Madoc had intended to, all suddenly gone. Madoc’s record shows that Privet said one more thing before she too moved, not after him, but straight up the slope towards the Stones.
She said quietly, “If Rooster had killed that mole, he would have killed me, he would have killed us all. Madoc, my dear, stay close, be strong; the way to the Stone will b
e so hard. It will be so many years before we reach it.” Then, Madoc says, she wept the tears of a mole who has come to the edge of the void, stared over, and seen the darkness as it might have been.
Madoc stayed close, and supportive, understanding in those moments of insight that the journey she was making up the slope was very different from that of her companion. For Privet this was no journey of escape, but a casting-off, a preparation, a night of dying, and Madoc sensed that she was needed.
“It was then my own fear left me,” she scribed later, “for I felt as a mother feels when she accompanies a pup into a dark place of which it is afraid. The mother too might feel fear, but she cannot let it frighten her away, and does not, but finds courage for the pup’s sake. So I found courage for Privet’s sake, because I realized that the journey she had begun long, long before I knew her, was fearful indeed, and made my concerns of Newborns, or steep slopes, or great blundering grikes, seem nothing much at all... Her needs that night gave me courage to continue at her flank.”
For a time at least they made progress, though it was slow. Rooster was long gone, the crashing and then rustling of him and his small group fading off around the slope as they continued up it. Then the night deepened and became heavy with the sense of movement above and below, to right and to left, and of fearful moles. There were cries of command, cries of pain, cries of heartbreak, and the callings of moles one to another as one lost another, or a group became separated from one of its members and there was no time to go in search, no time at all.
The sky stayed generally clear and bright; the moon rose higher, the stars glittered and sparkled, and all moledom stretched out below them into a distant darkness, across which here and there the gazes of a few roaring owls went, yellow in the silver night. The air grew cold and still.
Twice so far the two moles had crossed the paths of others who had for one reason or another gone on by. The feeling that this gave them, to which Privet had given the Word “invisible’, increased now as they came across other parties. At one place further up the slope, a troop of silent dejected moles, some wounded about the head and shoulders, came stumbling past them, led by a Newborn, flanked by two more, and followed up by a fourth. They seemed to be going down into captivity and though Privet and Madoc made scant effort to hide themselves, they saw them not, but simply went by like ghosts in the night, unseeing, silent, all appearing doomed to play a part from which they could not escape.
This was the first of several such groups coming down from Caer Caradoc above, and the third and largest group came so close that the two females might have been trodden on and crushed into the rough rocky slope had they not backed off and lain low. Even then they seemed not to be seen.
It was at this enforced halt that Madoc remembered Privet turning to her and saying, “It is all true, Madoc, what happens when moles turn from the Stone. Now talk to me.”
For a time then Privet lowered her snout, her eyes open; with Madoc whispering at her side, she stared unseeing into the night, listening to Madoc telling of Bowdler and the Newborn way with females that Madoc had told her about earlier.
“They did these things, all these things? They do them still?”
“It is common knowledge.”
“Brother Squelch, Brother Quail the Inquisitor. All of them... Tell me all you know,” said Privet quietly; and Madoc did.
“But not Brother Rolt?” whispered Privet towards the end, near despair.
“He’s a kind mole, he’s not one of them. We see little of him, and the old Master Brothers as they were called. No, they’re not part of it.”
Privet stared at nothing as Madoc spoke, and fretted impatiently when Madoc stopped talking and tried to move them on, not wishing to stir until she heard it all. Historians may well speculate why it was that Privet seemed increasingly to wish – to need – to pause and think, even to live through, matters which even now are too obscene, too disturbing, for ordinary moles to contemplate.
Yet so she appears to have done. It is enough only to hint at these things that a mole may know that Privet did not shrink from unpalatable truths, and may understand that through the long time of her ascent of Caer Caradoc she was perhaps making a passage through many things that she might come nearer to a vision of the Stone’s Light and Silence.
Let us be plain, but mercifully brief. What Madoc had told her was simply this: the relationship between Confessed Sisters and Senior Brothers that Privet herself had witnessed and experienced at Blagrove Slide had become corrupted at Caer Caradoc, and the evil mole who sanctioned the corruption, who created it, was Brother, Quail.
The mating of Senior Brothers with sisters as Privet had known it was not all bad – she herself had experienced ecstasies and pleasures she had not known before, or since, flawed and ruined though they were by the stealing of her young, and the possibility that her female pups had been killed. That possibility, however, seemed less, from what
Rolt had said. At least, there was hope for some. But with Quail’s ascendancy the corruption of the selected males became possible and perhaps inevitable, corruption and control of mind through body, and certain of the Senior Brother Inquisitors had preferences and skills that way. Even this might be tolerated, almost. But what was certainly obscene and evil was the fate of those poor male pups who through weakness of intellect or natural timidity failed to pass the tests of education and achievement which the Senior Brothers and Inquisitors set for them.
For Brother Quail desired that only the best male pups be recruited to his hierarchy of Inquisitors, which meant that as he gained power all others were, by definition, second-best, and therefore, in the twisted minds and logic of those Quail gathered about himself, no longer mole, and therefore to be used and abused as seemed best.
Many became the Newborn guards already spread so widely across moledom – cold, efficient in their way, willingly subordinate to the Inquisitors and Senior Brothers, punitive in their attitude to any of their own kind who, showing a spark of individuality perhaps, transgressed their own harsh vows and rules. From such moles came the strettenings.
This much Privet may well already have guessed, though Madoc confirmed it. What she had not known, and her new friend made incontrovertible, was what happened to those pathetic male pups, often weak, very vulnerable, who failed even to have potential as Newborn guards.
Of these Squelch was not only the disgusting prototype but the arch-abuser, and it was common knowledge who he was: Quail’s own son. But worse: he was neither male nor female, but both, as indicated by his high voice, his untoward obesity, his corrupted caresses of anymole unfortunate enough to come into his power.
Hushed, whispered, shaming even to utter, was the account Madoc gave Privet of how Squelch came to be made what he was when Quail vented his rage filthily on him when he realized he would never be a “proper” brother. Or so moles said. Aye, moles had best avert their gaze, or move on past this moment in our tale if they are squeamish, or too innocent, too trusting, to accept that what mole will do to mole at times beggars belief. In his anger, in his rage, in the humiliation he felt the pup Squelch’s slowness imposed on him, Quail ravaged his own son, and in whatever moments of evil ecstasy he thereby found, he bit him deep enough to leave the scars that his subsequent obesity made seem mere folds in flesh and fur. By the time the youngster’s screams were done he could be, he would be, normal no more.
It was then, said Madoc, that for the first time Squelch did what he did supremely well – he sang. He sang his grief and shame, and to that sad theme his singing often returned, especially after he had vented his urges on some poor young mole, as Quail had on him. Then he sang so well, so beautifully, that moles wept to hear him.
So Squelch survived, and incredibly he was if anything yet closer to his father, yet more eager to please him. He grew, he fattened; his falsetto singing was perfect, but his drives were strange, cruel, terrible. Whether from remorse, or a need to find an outlet for his own wilder fantasies. Brother Q
uail began to yield to his son’s importunate demands for, yes, young, vulnerable pups, male or female, who like him were not going to be Inquisitors, nor grow to be Newborn guards.
Nor did many of them ever have the chance once Squelch had had his way with them, and played with them, and corrupted them until, growing bored, eager for a new plaything – which his father would most willingly provide – he ended their puphood, and in some cases their maleness, for ever. The screams that marked that vile rite of passage into neuterdom Madoc herself heard more than once.
So there was a third kind of mole, called the “suborns” in the slang of Bowdler. They spoke strangely, were slow and fat, and generally cruel; but where the sisters were concerned they were very safe indeed, and an errant Newborn guard might well watch out, for the fate worse than death that he might suffer, worse than any strettening, was that Brother Quail might yield to Squelch’s persistent but mercifully rarely satisfied plea, that a guard’s punishment might be that he be “given” to the suborns...
There! That was the heart and root of Quail’s corruption of Caradoc, the known secret, the matter which, Madoc informed Privet, the Elder Senior Brother, by then already strangely ailing, did not at first know about; and when he did it was too late to act.
It was Privet’s wish to contemplate these unpleasant realities during the pause in their journey of ascent, and no doubt they shocked her. But, if Thripp had discovered these things, no wonder he sent his son Chervil to the safe haven of Duncton Wood; no wonder too, as Madoc believed, he had been seeking out some way of ridding the Caradocian Order of the monster that had taken effective power over it.
These things Privet pondered, along with others which had to do, as Madoc rightly guessed, with her long journey to Caradoc, which began, she now saw, before even her own birth, in moledom’s modern history.