“So go carefully, know that my prayers and thoughts will be daily with you until I hear you are returned home safeguarded. I would send a Brother or two with you, but the Stone is your protector and is more powerful than any mole!”
They embraced one last time, and by the soft June dawn light Privet slipped away southward, her period of respite over, and the way ahead again unclear, uncertain, and without companionship.
“Stone, guide me,” she whispered to herself and was gone.
Chapter Nineteen
“Rooster’s no ordinary mole, and this is no ordinary tale,” was how Weeth began his account of Rooster’s survival of the Wildenhope Killings, “so don’t expect the beginning, middle and end of your average story! In fact, come to think of it, the end is really the beginning, the middle is all the way through and the end is where you start from!”
“Get on with it, Weeth!” said Maple with a frown, and then a half-smile at Rooster, and the young mole he had brought with him who Weeth had seemed in no hurry to introduce. Young, thin, with inquisitive eyes, and a way of constantly checking where Rooster was and if he wanted anything.
“‘Get on with it!’ he says,” continued Weeth unabashed, “as if so extraordinary and dramatic a tale as the one I am about to relate can simply be “got on with” like eating a worm or, or...”
“Having a crap?” called out one anonymous mole from the Wolds, evoking general laughter. But they all appreciated Weeth’s eccentric ways, and those who had already enjoyed the privilege of hearing him tell a tale knew that his preambles and brief diversions were just his way of getting attention, and leading them to settle down to the kind of appreciative silence he liked.
Then, with a friendly grin, and a wink in the direction of Rooster’s anonymous young friend, Weeth quickly did get on with it...
As Rooster broke free from his guards on Wildenhope Bluff that April morning when so many moles were killed, it seemed to him that all the dark and terrible forces that had beset his life had in those moments of Whillan’s punishment gathered as one and burst out in his mind.
Perhaps nothing could have prepared anymole for the dreadful sight of his son – his newly-discovered son – being so cruelly taloned and then dragged to so sudden, so horrible, and so public a death; nothing could have forewarned him of the overpowering rage and grief he felt as Whillan was thrown over the edge of the river-bank, to disappear from sight for long and sickening seconds before reappearing as a body already caught and dragged along like inconsequential flotsam in a torrent of water.
All the grief that Rooster had ever felt, all the rage, all the bleak confusions and loneliness of the years, and the belief that he had failed to honour his task as Master of the Delve – all this was in that explosion of darkness and red light that his mind became.
So he had hurled his guards aside, and with only the mad and surely impossible hope to sustain him that he might somehow save Whillan, he bore down upon Chervil, Feldspar and his two sons. And yet...
Aye, and yet...
Even as he did, even at such a moment, even when he was over and into and lost in the dark void to which his life had brought him, the Stone, which seemed to have been so silent for so long, spoke to him. Not with words, but with a feeling, one whose origin he knew without knowing; it came from a moment long, long before when his mother Samphire held him again after his father Red Ratcher, having so nearly thrown him down into the torrential Reap in the Charnel Clough, brought him back alive to her; and she told him with whispers and caresses that she loved him more than anything and would never let him die.
When a mole is touched by such parental love it is as if he or she has been given a power that lies dormant within heart and body, ready one day, when most it is needed, to emerge once more. It is the power to love another, if only briefly, as we were once loved. This is the gift a good parent gives, and the salvation he or she can deny. This was the gift Samphire had given Rooster, and which had lain dormant in his heart, since before ever he became so troubled and confused.
So then, as Rooster approached Chervil with rage and hatred in his heart, wanting and willing to kill him, if not with a talon-blow then by tumbling him into the river, he felt that power of love. Not as some vague and vapid sentiment, but as a force more powerful by far than the very torrent towards which he rushed.
Chervil finally turned, Rooster bore down on him, and the great mole knew that he could no more harm Chervil, or the guardmoles with him, than harm Privet or Hamble or... or any of the moles who had loved him so well and so long. With a sob of relief to know that he could feel so potent and so total a love for the life of another – and ones who in the circumstances seemed the very last moles in moledom to deserve to be the beneficiaries of such a feeling – Rooster veered one way to avoid Chervil, and another to avoid his henchmoles, and plunged over the bank, out into the void, down towards the grey and angry rush of the water.
What he felt in that poised moment of fall was as unexpected and ultimately important as the surge of love for molekind he had just experienced. Indeed it was part of the same continuum or gyring of emotion which stirs a mole with the courage to feel and move on from security to risk.
So now for Rooster love was followed by bleak, black, all-consuming fear. This was not the false fear of what might be if such and such occurred. This was the real fear, which is darkness in all directions, in which breathing constricts and paws are clenched tight and motionless, and the stomach contracts into a knot of terminal pain, as hope, all hope, is gone. This was the fear of death itself, of being made nothing – the fear all warriors, whether of the mind or body or spirit, must in some way conquer.
For Rooster, the river he now fell towards was not that into which Whillan had been thrown just before and from which he had vainly hoped to save him. This river was now the Reap in the Charnel Clough from which his father saved him, and he was falling back through time to the moments before his father thought again.
Now he hung above the torrent, now he knew the ultimate rejection – to be destroyed by the parent who made him – but now, now as he fell, he knew his father had never changed his mind; no, no, his father let him go after all, and fear of death and rejection was as real as the waters of the Reap which roared up towards him, to engulf him and take him for its own.
The fear from which Rooster had been trying to escape all his life was made real, and waited for him now in the Reap. And, he thought, with the wondrous clarity of such infinitesimal moments, he deserved this. Had not his father spared his life? He had. And had Rooster not later taken Red Ratcher’s life? Aye, he had. So, of course, he deserved to die, and for his guilt to be assuaged in being made nothing. But the fear was more terrible than he could ever have imagined, as the torrent reached up its grey, remorseless, uncontrollable mass and embraced him to its raging heart. He did not want to die.
Rooster plunged into the water and felt each of his limbs taken by it, and heard a roaring in his ears; there were violent pressures at his eyes and mouth and snout, and all about him, like a tunnel caving in and crushing him, a cold, chill, freezing force such as he had never known. Does a mole scream and roar with shock and fear beneath the water? Rooster did.
And he struggled, desperate to rise towards air again, desperate to reach out a paw to Whillan. But for what? So that his own son could save him. In Rooster’s wild and terrible fear, lost as he now was in the waters he had sought to avoid all his life, saviour had become victim, and victim sought saviour. It was only that hope that he might be found that kept him struggling for life.
He surfaced, looked desperately about, and was dimly aware of moles on the receding river-bank chasing and shouting after him. He turned, saw a glimpse of a paw, Whillan’s paw, before it disappeared under water ahead of him, and he cried out for help. He lunged forward in the water to try to reach it, and as he saw that ahead of where it had gone the water turned white-yellow, racing and impossible for mole to control, he felt a surging current at
his rear, and then at his front, sucking him forward and down, down beneath the water, down and turning him so that direction had no meaning, and a strength ten thousand times greater than his own gripped his body.
For a moment Rooster wanted to submit to his fear and the power of the river, but mortal terror generates its own strength and fighting against these feelings he struggled and forced his way towards the surging light he could dimly see through the water, now above, now to the side, now below.
Below! Light, life and air was... below. Utterly disorientated, he swam what felt downwards to save his life and was thrust suddenly out – and up! – bursting into the air and light. Whillan... and Rooster felt his left paw touch something soft and moving – soft, but horrible. His saviour felt foul. Fear ate him and he it, and he was fear palpable.
And for a second time he felt himself pushed down, and that urge to give up returning, because he was tired now and his paws were beginning to ache and nomole could fight such forces as these; and anyway, to give up was to be free of all the darkness he had ever known, free of...
He felt his body turned and pushed against another in the drowning darkness of the water. Whillan again. The Stone had delivered him up. A chance to save or be saved.
Rooster grasped his son, his personal fear subsumed by parental love, and struggled up and up and desperately up now to the light and air and life once more. Up through the downward force of that water trying to obliterate them, but against which Rooster knew he must fight for both.
Up and out once more, one paw holding on to Whillan and the other flailing, pushing, powering against the water to keep them both afloat. Whillan...
Rooster, in control again, carried along but still at the surface, looked for the first time at Whillan, pulled his head out of the water, struggled to keep them both upright, looked for signs of life, and saw...
“Not!” roared out Rooster. “Not him!”
Nor was it Whillan, but some other mole; fatter, thinner; darker, lighter; older, younger, he did not know. But bloated and decayed, the eyes staring, the mouth flopping open and foul, the paws heavy and clinging, wrapping around him, climbing on top of him, trying to drown him... the odorous mouth trying to embrace him; but not Whillan, not his son. Relief mixed with strange self-mockery to think that all his huge effort and struggle, a journey of a lifetime’s striving it seemed, had as its result the embrace of a rotting unknown corpse that was, now (as it seemed) doing its dead best to drown him.
He let the sodden, stinking body slide off into the torrent and cried out, “Where?” For where was Whillan if that thing that flopped and twisted away was not him?
He trod against the water, turned to look back, and saw something that explained everything, and it was then he understood all of the events of the morning. Then it was he laughed the roaring laugh which even those up on Wildenhope Bluff heard above the river’s clamour. They heard, and saw the great mole turned and turning in the water, before, seeming to give up the unequal struggle, he was taken down by the river again and disappeared for ever from their sight beyond the river-banks.
But Rooster himself was now anything but afraid. Twice he had fought the torrent and reached the surface to breathe again, but this third time he did not. He gave himself up to its power – no, to its care – and happily abandoned that long lifetime’s struggle against all he feared. The Stone had shown him he could love, and now what he had seen briefly on the bank meant that the Stone had shown him he could give up and just let go.
“Might drown, but won’t!” was his light and easy thought as he felt himself turned head over heels in the water, like a leaf in autumn wind.
“Can’t die!” he thought as, needing breath, the Stone surged the river beneath him and brought him to the surface so he might take it.
“Can’t if I wanted to!” Rooster almost sang as he was pulled down again, and this time felt not panic and fear but the chill cleansing of the water at every part of his body – at crease and orifice, at face and haunch, at eyes and belly, at curve and cranny. Rooster outstretched his paws into the waters of the river, extended his head and snout back into its great currents, and when he felt his haunches pushed and turned by the crush of the water he relaxed the rest of his body, and let it be pushed and turned also.
He was at one with the torrent, unafraid, its waters his purification as he was rushed along, overturned, thrust up to breathe and pulled down to drown. Now he could only let go the dark confusions that he had grasped at so long, beginning with that first elemental fear of what the Reap in Charnel Clough would do to him if he fell into it. He was in it now, and he was alive, never more so, and all the dirt and filth of life, inside him and outside him, was being pulled from him and washed away.
No wonder that he laughed and felt such joy, for no experience he had ever had came near to what he felt now, unless it be that night in Crowden on the Moors so long ago when Privet’s sister Lime first embraced him, and taking him, led him to a new world of freedom and release. But that was more physical than spiritual and could not last for long beyond the chamber where he and Lime had snatched love.
But here, now, in the baptismal flow of the river to which he gave himself up, he was enabled to let go all his past – the killing of his father Red Ratcher, the failure to honour his love for Privet, his loss of Hamble, and much else beside; but more than all that was his letting go of a sense of having failed as Master of the Delve. The task as it was set for him had been too great, too onerous, and now, with the freedom that purification brought he saw something which was both simple and startling: it did not matter that he had so far failed – if he wanted he could start again, if he did not want then he did not need to. The Stone is love, it never demands of moles what they cannot give; the Stone is love, it forgives moles their failings if they truly desire forgiveness; the Stone is love, it will show moles the way to what they seek if they only look. The Stone is love...
So was Rooster tossed and turned by the river, and cleansed of his confusions, and made new-born.
“New-born!” he growled, aware of the irony, the torrent slowing and easing as the river widened far, far downstream where it had taken him. “New-born, and will begin again!”
He stared at the passing trees upon the far bank, and felt his strength now was less than a new-born pup’s; he hoped that if the Stone willed it he might be allowed somehow or other to reach the far shore, to begin to live again.
His paws touched bottom, he drifted on, they touched again, and stumblingly, like a pilgrim mole who has reached the end of his path but has barely strength left to take the last few steps, he staggered up through one of the eddies of the river, and clambered on to land once more.
Trees rising above him. Mud. Drifting stormclouds. His paws and flanks shivering with cold, he tried to keep awake and reach somewhere less exposed, but sleep overcame him. The river’s diminishing roar. A voice. A mole coming out of dusk. The drift back into sleep and the murmuring of the water. A paw touching his head, the gentlest touch he had ever felt. And the voice again.
“Mole! Mole...”
Rooster opened his eyes from a great sea of tiredness and found himself staring into the eyes of an elderly mole.
“Whatmole are you? Whither...?” The eyes were kind and clear.
And Rooster dared say at last what mole he was, and what he always had been, and must always be.
“Am Rooster.”
“Rooster?”
“Am Master of the Delve.”
The mole who found him was Dint, beloved elder of the system of Great Stoke, upon whose western periphery the river had delivered him up.
“Though, I must explain,” said Dint a little later, as Rooster consumed the third succulent worm he had been offered, and stretched his aching limbs, “that we are here in Nether Stoke, which as its name implies is lower than the main system, which is on the river terrace some way above us, east of here.”
It seemed that the Stoke moles re-occupied Nether S
toke at the end of each spring when the floods subsided and the tunnels in the water-meadows could be repaired after the depredations of the winter years, when flood and frost routinely ruined many of them, and silted them up.
“I was on the investigative visit one of us elders makes each May,” said Dint, “and the Stone guided me to the edge of the river-bank from where I saw your not inconsiderable bulk stretched out in the mud.”
“May?” said Rooster, for when he hurled himself into the river at Wildenhope it had been April.
“No good doing it earlier,” said Dint, “too dangerous. We lost an elder that way years ago when I was young.”
“Not April now?”
“You seem confused, if I may say so,” said Dint sympathetically.
“Am,” said Rooster with a comfortable sigh. “Confused but content. Will talk.”
“Nothing like it,” said Dint, “to ease the troubled mind. I presume you somehow fell into the river, but that the Stone, wanting you to live, sent you here.”
“Not Newborn here?”
“Trying hard not to be, but with Evesham so close by it isn’t easy. We have what they call a Brother Assistant Inquisitor up in Great Stoke, but he has been made comfortable and ineffective – food and a female is all he seems to want. He’s a mole of the spirit all right, but it’s a greedy and lustful one!”
Rooster appeared to contemplate the twin evils of gluttony and lust and finally said, “Lies are worse. Denying Stone bad. Lust? I had it for a mole called Lime. Gone now. Greed? Eat when I can, don’t I? This Newborn Inquisitor, he needs love.”
Dint grinned and Rooster laughed.
“Not from us!” he said.
“So...” said Dint judiciously, after studying Rooster in silence for a little and then staring at the slow muddy eddies of the Severn as if for inspiration, “you’re the Master of the Delve. The one we’ve heard talk of for many a moleyear past.”