The first guardmole was thrashing about in pain and surprise, his eyes watering and his shouts of anger echoing about the damp cross-under. The sideem seemed dazed and slow to comprehend what had suddenly happened to them.
So only the second guardmole pursued Marram who, urging Sorrel to make good his escape back into the system, stopped limping and loomed his full height intimidatingly back towards the grike who, perhaps sensibly, drew to a halt.
“He’s just an old fool that one,” said Marram, “let him die in peace.”
The guardmole stared up at the now formidable Marram and, thinking better of attacking, took the easiest way out.
“You better bugger off, mate, before my mate and the sideem come to. Get yourself lost, and stay lost.”
“Why?” said Marram, at his most authoritative.
“Because he’s not the only new sideem they’ve sent, and Duncton’ll be in for a visit if you don’t keep your bloody snouts out of sight. Now... this won’t have done any of us any good and the last thing we want is to come searching your Word-forsaken system and catch disease. Wouldn’t be too pleased if we had to do that, wouldn’t be too friendly.”
“You’re new here. Changes in the patrols?” Marram dared ask.
“Changes all over bloody moledom, chum. Now scarper!”
Which, thankfully, Marram did, following on after the redoubtable Sorrel, and ensuring that their escape up into the wood beyond the slopes above was swift, and complete.
News of this incident and its obvious implications for the system spread rapidly through Duncton Wood and it was not long before Tryfan was dragged from the Marsh End by Skint to hear the report at first paw by Marram and the unrepentant Sorrel. They met, along with a growing number of excited moles, that same afternoon at Barrow Vale and there told their tale in full. Marram’s modest and brief account being graphically filled out by the still-outraged Sorrel, who showed off his injuries and, far from exhibiting signs of weakness as a result of what he had suffered, seemed rather to gain strength as the afternoon progressed.
As soon as he had heard the news Skint had quietly and efficiently deployed other watchers down towards the cross-under, in case the grikes sent out a revenge party; at the same time moles like Madder and Dodder on the Eastside were evacuated to Barrow Vale and that side of the system cleared.
But the cross-under stayed quiet, guardmoles were seen there doing no more than their usual duties, and the threat seemed, for the time being at least, to subside.
Meanwhile, at Barrow Vale, Madder made a rousing speech against all sideem and grike guardmoles, and was ably seconded by Dodder, though the latter avoided casting aspersions against the Word itself. Then there was a renewed demand for yet another recounting of Marram’s splendid rescue, followed by an increasingly serious discussion about the dangers implicit in a new regime of sideem at the cross-under, and, worse, the grim news that the grikes might be on the rampage across moledom once more.
All there knew how vulnerable to attack they were, all realised that the days of their contented and happy summer were getting fewer, as old Skint had long since warned. All feared that....
“Aye, but where’s Beechen?” said one of them suddenly, provoking general alarm. Moles ran here and there looking for him but found he was not among them. None had seen him that day! He might very well be in danger! Quick! Find him! Save him!
Tryfan calmed them.
“He’s no fool,” he growled, “and is not one to go on the south-east slopes unaccompanied. Panicking will help nomole. Where’s Mayweed? He’s the one who’ll find him.”
“Humbleness is here, and he is, trenchant Tryfan, the one to find him. Or, looking at it another way, he’s the one to find us! Get it? Yes? No? Not got it? No? Are we dim tonight? We are! Mayweed humbly takes your leave and will seek him here and seek him there and, in the end, find him, as one day moledom will, everywhere.”
With many a mole shaking their heads at this cryptic statement, and some still wanting to rush off and search for Beechen themselves, Mayweed turned around several times, snouting north, east and west, before turning resolutely southward and upslope, towards the Stone and Ancient System, and saying, “Yes, Sirs, Yes, Madams, yes, yes, yes!”
Then, humming cheerfully to himself, and winking at Tryfan while leering confidently at Feverfew, he said, “One half of me is better than the other half, and the better half knows where bold Beechen is. To her me, Mayweed, humbleness, will go. Southward! Farewell and good night!”
He paused for dramatic effect, a sudden stir of wind up on the surface obligingly marking the moment, and with that and as dusk settled over the quiet wood, he was gone....
From the moment Sleekit had led Beechen down into the peripheral tunnels of the Ancient System she felt uneasy and disorientated, as if she was doing something difficult, something she had never done before, and doubted her own ability. However much she reminded herself that her consort Mayweed had brought her here without mishap, her heart still pounded uncomfortably, and nor was her well-being helped by the distant murmurs of dark sound that the tunnels seemed to carry.
Had it not been for the fact that Beechen seemed quite unaffected by the sound and followed quickly behind her without any apparent doubts about her ability at all, she might easily have surfaced and made good her escape from what felt like the tightening talons of danger while she still could. But, in truth, as well as the sense that she must not let Beechen down there was also that sense of mission a mole gains when personally challenged to do something from which to back down is an admission of defeat. So she went on.
Not that initially there was much direction to their exploration other than that provided by curiosity, whim and the necessity of turning one way or another because the tunnel ahead was blocked. The part of the system they first entered, which was made up of tunnels of an ancient arched style which the Duncton moles did not employ in their later colonisation of the lower slopes and Marsh End of the wood, had clearly been damaged in every way they could have been. Apart from the roots of trees and undergrowth, which in Bracken’s day had been benign but since seemed to have grown malignant, dry summers had cracked the soil. Creatures like voles and weasels had broken into burrows, and squirrels and foxes and, in one place, badgers had vandalised stretches of the Ancient System so that only moles with eyes to see could make out the remnant tunnels and chambers that had once known such glory. Now they were open to the summer sun, desecrated by bird muck, lost among the tumbling of fallen trees and branches, all but destroyed.
It said a great deal for the quality of such tunnels as remained that there was windsound at all in these broken subterranean ways, and suggested that despite appearances even these ruins had links with a deeper part of the system which was whole and undamaged. It was towards this that their seemingly random route appeared to go, and as they went Sleekit had the frightening sense that they were being inexorably led towards a place to which she did not wish to go. She knew that place’s name, for Mayweed had told her, but as yet she had no wish to tell Beechen.
How long they wandered thus that summer day, now below ground, now forced above it by some invasive root or broken ceiling, she did not know, but there came a time when the tunnels began to become more whole, the windsound to grow more sonorous, the hint of dark sound more treacherous, and their route to turn back westwards, towards the centre of the High Wood, beyond which was the Stone itself.
It did not surprise them that here the tunnels were less damaged, and, eventually not damaged at all, for the beech trees were larger and more ancient, and their thick canopy of leaves above, and the many-layered covering of dry beech leaves below, smothered and prevented undergrowth and kept other creatures out. At first they chose to make slow progress, snouting about the tunnels a bit, listening to the subtle windsound, and then darting up to the surface to ascertain where they were.
But finally the ruins were all behind them, the tunnels deepened, and they committed themselves to purs
uing their exploration underground.
The nature of the soil had changed, being drier and harder, with a sub-soil underpaw that was nearly chalk. Here they found tunnels of extraordinary high elegance, deserted and dusty, and in which the ancient moles who had made them had used flints to great effect as buttresses at corners, and exploiting their shiny surfaces to cast light from vents into the dry surface leaves above, and to carry the subtlest of sounds forward.
There was now a quite unmistakable whisper of dark sound about the tunnels, and again and again Sleekit paused and asked Beechen if he was sure he wanted to go on.
Eventually he stopped, stanced still and gazed at her in the direct way he had. “I think it is you who does not want to go on,” he said. “It is your fear you question, not my own.”
“I... I hear dark sound,” whispered Sleekit, ashamed that her fear was so obvious to the younger mole.
“And I hear confusion,” he replied. Then, coming close and touching her, he said gently, “You know, I must go on towards such confusion until I find it. That is my task, Sleekit. I will go on alone if you... if you feel fear. But I think Boswell’s teaching to Tryfan was that nomole helps another by shielding him from his own fear, or merely by showing such fear can be conquered. My going on alone would not help you, and nor, since my task seems to lie with allmole, would it much help me!”
Beechen even smiled as he said this, and Sleekit felt much moved at his concern for her, and his courage.
She said, “My dear, I am afraid. I have known dark sound before, but I was younger then and perhaps I had more strength than I have now.”
“Was it when you were a sideem in Whern?” he asked. “You’ve never told me about any of that, and nor anymole else as far as I know, because I’ve asked.”
“This is hardly the place,” said Sleekit, looking around the shadowed arches of the tunnels and listening to the distant and ominous sounds that came to them.
“Don’t see why not,” said Beechen lightly. “If a mole waits for the right time and place he might wait for ever. Tryfan always said Boswell said that now was the best time of all.”
“Tryfan has a lot to answer for!” said Sleekit. But then she smiled and said, “But you’re quite right, I haven’t spoken of it. I’m no different than most of the moles in Duncton who want to forget. I sometimes feel lucky just to be here and alive, and have no wish to remember my past.”
Beechen stared at her silently, and she at him.
“Well, are you going to tell me?” he asked at last.
Sleekit sighed and said, “I suppose I must!”
It was then, and in the now ominously whispering tunnels of the Ancient System, that Beechen first heard a full account of those events that had led to the invasion of Duncton by Henbane moleyears before. Then Sleekit found it necessary to tell Beechen of Whern, of the sideem and of the Word. Of the Midsummer rite at Whern she told, of the Rock of the Word and of the Master Rune.
Then too he heard the real truth of Henbane, of her violation and corruption by Rune, of the strange mating with Tryfan and of their even stranger love which was light discovered in darkness, and how Tryfan had been all but killed by Rune’s sideem.
Then of how Mayweed discovered her Sleekit told, and that Henbane had borne Tryfan’s young, and two of them had been rescued by herself and Mayweed and taken out of Whern to Beechenhill.
“Wharfe and Harebell,” Beechen said. “Tryfan told me of them.”
“Yes,” said Sleekit. “And through their rearing I learnt to love Mayweed, and he to love me. We have not young of our own, and nor can we have for disease makes a mole sterile. But we saw those two grow towards maturity and left them in the care of the leader of Beechenhill, Squeezebelly. There is no better nor more stoutly faithful mole than he.”
“What of the third pup?”
Sleekit shook her head.
“I know not. We left him in that dreadful place with Rune and Henbane to fight over him. I know not....”
“But you have an idea?”
“I know only that if he survived he would be raised a sideem, and because of his birth he would be favoured. If he was favoured and well trained, then Tryfan’s son would be thy enemy, and the Stone’s.”
Around them, suddenly, the windsound strengthened, and there was the rumble and roar of dark sound as if other moles were in that place, threatening moles.
“Sleekit,” whispered Beechen, “I think that mole is alive. I feel he is alive. And I think... I think I know where I must go after Duncton.”
“Not Whern, Beechen!” said Sleekit urgently. “Never there. For they shall kill you and moledom shall die with you.”
“Not Whern...” repeated Beechen faintly, but whether he was simply echoing what she said, or whether he had another place in mind, she could not tell.
The light in the tunnels had faded, and there was the sense of dusk about the place.
“We must go back to the surface,” said Sleekit with a shiver. “We must continue here another time.”
“No, no,” said Beechen, “we must continue now. And you shall come with me despite your fears. I shall show you the way beyond them now. I know the way. I have been learning it from the first hour of my birth. Come now....”
Yet even then he lingered, as if reluctant to take up the challenge that he felt lay before him.
“Tryfan told me that he loved Henbane.”
“It is true. I know my Mistress much loved him. In their union I saw the first good, the first light, I ever saw in Whern. Tryfan opened a portal in Henbane’s heart which I believed could not, would not, be closed again. She... she...” Sleekit lowered her snout.
“Yes?” said Beechen.
“She was not as evil as she seemed. She did evil, but she was not all evil. And always, always, there was in her what other moles – moles that might be good, followers as well – often did not quite have. She had life, Beechen, and seeing that and witnessing what I did when Tryfan loved her, and how she bore their young with courage I have never seen before nor known myself, I knew that moles who live, which is to say moles who have courage to experience what comes their way, may finally, whatever else they may have done, find their snout turning towards the Stone’s light.”
“Others think her evil.”
Sleekit made a strange reply to this. She said, “Others once thought my Mayweed to be a mole of no account. I have loved him as I loved her, despite what all others say.”
“Perhaps you have an eye for the light of truth,” whispered Beechen.
Sleekit said nothing to this but instead declared with uncharacteristic passion, “I am fearful for them both. What will become of my Mayweed? What has become of Henbane?”
There was no reply but in the windsound, dark and light, of the tunnels about them.
“I often think you know more than you let others know,” said Sleekit.
It did not seem to be Beechen, a young adult, who replied.
“I may know more fear than they, it is my heritage and my task,” said the Stone Mole, his eyes bright in the darkness about them, his form almost lost in the chalky shadows where he stanced.
“Now, you have told me of the dark sound of Whern. What of this place, and the sounds we have heard all day? Tell me!”
But all Sleekit could do was to repeat the little she had been told by Mayweed and Tryfan, about a place Bracken had called the Chamber of Dark Sound, wherein moles had once died in their pursuit of Mandrake. Stories of times past before the plagues, fearful stories.
“Then let us face these fears and find that chamber!” said Beechen boldly.
So, with dark shadows all about, they turned into those side tunnels from which the dark sound came loudest. By slow degrees the tunnels deepened and the surface noise of the rousing wind seemed further off. Yet in places light from a rising moon began to reach down to them through the cracks and crevices of the surface above, and the windsound and dark sound in the tunnels increased and grew more troubled until
at last Sleekit was forced to pause and let Beechen take the lead, for her courage was deserting her again.
Whatever lay in the tunnels or chamber ahead was echoing their pawsteps back to them, but all turned and distorted and painful to the ear.
“It is like the sound I heard the Rock of the Word send out,” said Sleekit.
“Then follow close and let us face it,” said Beechen.
A short time after, the tunnel widened and Beechen led Sleekit into that fabled chamber into which nomole had gone since those distant days when Mandrake had wandered madly there.
Great beyond sensing. High beyond seeing. Long beyond telling. But far ahead of them across its width was the rising, shining, flinty and scrivened face of the chamber’s west wall. At its base, centrally, but dwarfed by its size, was the portal that led on to the whispering sinewy sounds of the Chamber of Roots.
But this was no ordinary portal. It had been delved such that rising from it, all around, across the whole face of the wall, was the image of the cruel open beak of the owl whose image was formed by the carvings or scrivenings which made the dark sound.
The flinty wall shone and reflected dark light, and the slightest pawstep or breath seemed instantly to be echoed back from its scrivenings, all distorted and fearful.
Beechen stared across the chamber in awe and wonder but then, seeing the portal, he said without a moment’s hesitation, “That is our way. That is where we must go.”
“But the dark sound...” whispered Sleekit. “It will grow worse as we go nearer to it. It is like the Rock of the Word, made to disorientate a mole, and then destroy him.”
There was no doubt that she was right. For as their eyes grew used to the strange light of the place they saw that scattered across the floor were the gaunt remains of moles who had been in the place before them, which they guessed must be the bodies of henchmoles who, in times past, had pursued Bracken and Mandrake. They saw then, too, that the portal was partially blocked with fallen flints and more bodies of moles, but all broken and crushed.