Slighe, who was never far away, came hurrying in.
“Master?” he asked.
“I am leaving Cannock for a short time...” Slighe’s face showed the same alarm that Terce’s had and Lucerne laughed aloud. “I shall be safe enough! The Word shall care for me! Now listen... our planning is almost done. When I return it will be to set the next stages of the crusade in motion, and once it begins I fear it will have a life of its own and we who lead it shall not get much rest. So, briefly, while I have time, I shall seek my way with the Word.”
“Surely Master...” said Slighe unhappily.
“But...” tried Terce again.
“Meanwhile I have a task for you and Slighe which will keep you occupied enough not to worry about me, Tutor
Keeper.” He smiled as he used this old way of addressing Terce. “In consultation with the new sideem, but in secrecy of our true intent, you shall together begin to group the sideem and guardmoles into threes. Each group shall be able to act independently and alone, and each must contain the skills of scrivening and of fighting. For this reason one at least shall be sideem, one at least guardmole. The third may be either, or simple helper, according to your judgement. Place all the new sideem in this way. Slighe has already made scrivenings of the different systems according to their loyalty to the Word and the strength of Stone belief within them. The systems must each have a group of three moles nominated to it; begin to match them to each other, though I shall make the final choice on my return. So, that is all. If the Word wills that Clowder, Ginnell and Mallice return while I am gone, then brief them thoroughly. I shall wish not to waste time when I return.”
“It shall be done,” said Terce.
Lucerne raised a taloned paw.
“Do not have me followed, Terce. I would be alone. Not even Drule.” Terce flicked a glance at Slighe and looked apologetic. Sending a trusted guardmole to follow the Master had been exactly his intent.
“I mean it, Terce. Whatever mole you send after me I shall kill and that would be a waste,” said Lucerne at his most charmingly chilling. “Like anymole, the Master has need to be alone at times. Now I shall leave.”
“Master?”
“Yes, Slighe?”
“Just for the scrivens... have these groups a name?”
Lucerne paused and thought.
“Call them trinities. It is a fitting name and the sideem shall like it.”
“Trinities,” whispered Slighe, playing with the word.
“Trinities,” repeated Lucerne, and with that he left.
So began the trinities, the most hated and feared of all Lucerne’s creations.
So began as well that extraordinary and mysterious interlude in which, briefly, Lucerne was lost to the sight of all the moles of the Word in Cannock, not excepting even Terce himself.
“Keeper Terce? A question.”
“Scrivener Slighe?”
“Where has the Master gone?”
“The Master seeks a mole I fear he shall not find: his mother Henbane. It is a need he does not know he has. When Mallice is with him he forgets that need, for she ministers to it. Now she is gone that ache has returned. He will not find Henbane, I think, but no doubt he’ll find a female soon enough. Some little slip of nothing who’ll not know the mole who’s come to her.”
“I do not like not knowing where my Master is,” said Slighe.
“Nor I, Slighe, much more nor I. It was a mistake that I let Mallice go so far from him and for so long. I shall not permit it ever again.”
“But he is Master, he can do as he wills,” said Slighe.
“No, Slighe, he is the Word’s servant, and he cannot. Do not forget that. Never forget it. Upon your understanding of that will lie the final fulfilment of your task for which, I may remind you, I preferred you myself.”
Slighe stared at Terce and blinked. His eyes were empty of emotion.
“We have a task, Senior Keeper,” he said at last.
“Scrivener Slighe, we have.”
It was in the few days that Lucerne was gone that first Clowder and then Ginnell came at last to Cannock. Terce briefed them on all that had been happening and made his own record of their news.
“Tell nomole of this, Clowder,” he said, when that mole had finished his description of the terrible events for which he had been responsible in Ribblesdale, beside which few massacres in mole history compare except, perhaps, that in Weed and Fescue’s day on the Slopeside of Buckland when the clearers were all killed and Tryfan and other followers barely escaped.
Ginnell, a grizzle-furred mole of spare body and few words, and an impressive grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of moles of the Word and Stone alike, gave detailed reports to Terce as well.
Neither mole could credit that Terce did not know where Lucerne was.
Terce merely sighed and shrugged, saying, “He wished to be alone. He is mole as well as Master, Clowder.”
“Humph!” said Clowder.
“Nomole knows where the overall commander is?” said Ginnell incredulously.
“He knows where we are,” said Terce.
“Well!” said Ginnell, who expected moles, even Masters, to be where they said they would be.
“He will soon be back,” said Terce.
“Aye!” chuckled Clowder. “He will! The Master, or rather the Keeper Lucerne as he still is, is probably with Mallice, and if not with her then with a wench, and a young one. He likes them so! Eh, Terce?”
“It is possible,” said Terce carefully.
“Well, when he comes back let me know,” said Ginnell.
“We will,” said Clowder. “Mole, we will.”
Clowder knew his friend and Master well, but Terce, who had made him what he was, knew him better.
Even so, until now, the truth of Lucerne’s brief disappearance from Cannock that October has not been known. We can only make a surmise from a certain record made much later by a certain mole whose name... whose name is best for now left unspoken.
However it was, however it will be, that mole much later, when the events of this history became but shifting shadows and passing light across forgotten fields, had good reason of his own to venture forth into the moors that lie north-east of Cannock Chase. Good reason to talk to moles along the way, good reason to point his snout upmoor and press on and answer when a mole asked, “Greetings, mole, whither are you bound?”
“To see the Five Clouds. Can you direct me to them?”
“Aye, mole, you’re not far off. A day to the north-west of here and you’ll find them. Keep to the streams, there’s food along their way.”
It was not mole country, yet that mole pressed on and saw at last five overhangs of millstone grit darkening the skyline above and beyond. In their lee, far under them, he met a mole he had sought for many a molemile past. She might have been as old as the dark grit that overshadowed the isolated but homely tunnels she and her kin had made. Dark though her fur, overhung the place, yet her eyes were bright as speedwell.
He saw her and he saw her kin in the system thereabouts, generations of her making, and his troubled face looked pleased. She saw him, and her peaceful eyes looked troubled.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked her.
“I can guess who you might be.”
“Can you guess why I might have come?”
“I can. How did you know?”
“He never forgot,” said the traveller. As the old female’s eyes lightened with pleasure, he asked softly, “Will you tell me?”
She stared at him, and when the youngsters who came near stopped to stare as well, she sent them away.
“Shall you ever speak of it?”
“It is part of moledom’s history and my own. I may speak of it, I may scribe of it: there is no promise I shall ever make I cannot keep.”
She was silent a long time, and for some of it she turned and gazed at the Five Clouds above.
At last she said, “I have never spoken of it. Why must I do so to you??
??
“Look at me, mole, look well.”
She did, and she nodded and she sighed. Then she did
speak, and that stranger mole made a record of what she said.
I did not know his name. He was young, he was like nomole I had ever seen or ever saw again. The sky was in his fur so bright it was as if it had never been there before. I was afraid of him and asked him whither he was bound. When he made no reply I said, “Are you going to Beechenhill?” In those days that was a system outcasts and followers of the Stone sought out for refuge, and the Five Clouds and the Roaches beyond was a safer route than most. We often saw such vagrant moles pass through.
“Are you in trouble with the grikes?”
It was then he gave me the only dark look I ever saw upon his face. It made me cry. He asked me if I was of the Stone and I said I did not know what I was. I had gone there to escape such things. But if the Stone was like the Five Clouds then yes, I was of the Stone. And if the Word was of the Five Clouds, then the Word was for me. I was surprised that he asked me what they were and so I took him there. It was October, yet warm and he was male, and I was untouched by mole. Before he came I had felt so young and gay, but the moment he looked at me I felt I had waited for him all my life, and as if my life had been long. I took him upslope a little way to see the Five Clouds better than we could from here and when he saw them he said we must go to them. I said nomole should, and he said he was not ‘nomole’. He took me there, and beyond to the Roaches themselves where the scent of pine makes the rounded rocks and wormless soils seem light and heady. There above the Five Clouds where I thought I could never go, nor have ever been again, we mated. For a time he was everything to me. I never knew there could be such joy with anymole, nor have I ever known it since. His talons were both rough and soft, wild and free, his body strong. Yet sometimes he was like a pup in my paws and even said himself that if I’d been able I should have suckled him. It was but lovers’ talk. Sometimes he seemed but a pup....
I do not know how many days we wandered there. On the last day I pointed east and said, “Beechenhill’s there. Was that where you were going?” He said, “I know ’tis there. I know.” If he had not been so strong, so fierce at times, so assured unto himself, I would have said he was afraid. “Promise me you’ll never go there, never.” I did. I would have promised anything.
We wandered slowly back downslope to here where he left me and where you find me now. I knew he would not come back.
“What was his name?”
“I never asked his name,” she said, “not once. Nor did he ask mine. When we needed a name we took it from the earth or the air or the sky as we made love. He was most beautiful. He made my life.”
“Did he ever say where he had come from, or whither he was bound?”
She shook her head.
“Do you know who he was?”
“He chose not to tell and I not to ask. Why should I change that now?” She looked around and saw the youngsters born of her own youngsters’ young. They were curious and creeping near once more. She looked very old and yet her eyes were so filled with that short memory they seemed as young as those of the pups that ran to her.
“What’s he want?” asked one of them.
“To talk of the Five Clouds,” she said.
“Oh, them! When’s he leaving?”
“Don’t be so forward, don’t be so rude,” she said, laughing.
“He’s going now!” they said. “What did he want?”
She said nothing but watched the mole leave, dark, his fur shining with the sky, and long before he paused to look back and raise a paw and call farewells she had turned from the sight of him and followed the youngsters to play.
Such is the record that mole made, and it remains the only clue to where, that October long ago, when darkness was poised to fall across moledom’s pleasant land, Lucerne, Henbane’s son, might have been.
Lucerne came back to Cannock as secretly as he had left. Now he had been there, then he had been gone, now he was returned as Terce had said he would: full of the fire of crusade, impatient to begin.
“The sideem are all here, all waiting, all eager, Master,” said Terce, with Slighe in attendance. “The trinities are named; Clowder has returned and Ginnell arrived. All is ready.”
“All? Is Mallice here?”
“She is not, Master.”
“I am displeased.”
“But your... journey. You... were... satisfied?”
“Satisfied?”
“With where you have been.”
Lucerne looked at Terce in such a way that Terce never asked that question again. Nor, when she later heard of it, was Mallice ever fool enough to ask. Nor anymole. What was had been. What would be was what mattered now.
“Have Clowder and Ginnell reported?”
“Fully.”
“Good news?”
“Excellent.”
“It is well. You will brief me now before I see them. It will save time. Meanwhile, Slighe, let it be known that tomorrow, early, the whole chapter of sideem shall meet and then I shall make known the nature of the task the trinities will have. After I have spoken with Terce, and talked with Clowder and Ginnell, we three shall meet again and arrange which trinities will go where. It will be a long night, Terce.”
“But the beginning of a longer night for the followers of the Stone,” replied the Twelfth Keeper.
“You are nearer to the truth than you yet know!” said Lucerne, his eyes bright. “Now brief me.”
Of the full horrors and pitiless slaughter that Clowder was responsible for at Mallerstang in Ribblesdale we shall soon know more. It was the first of the new massacres in the name of the Word. Everymole, male or female, old and young, that Clowder and his guardmoles found in that quiet and peaceful place was killed in a rapine orgy of violence. The moles of Horton, judged pure of the Word, were nevertheless forced to see Clowder’s work for themselves, trekking up the bloody slopes of Mallerstang. Lest there be any doubt at all of what a mole’s duty was, the eldrene and the senior guardmoles of Horton were forced as well to snout some moles Clowder ordered to be kept alive for that purpose.
To this day the slopes of Mallerstang seem to hang heavy with that massacre, and in October, when autumn comes, then if the sun shines those desolate slopes seem red. “Aye, red with the blood of innocents,” as the locals say.
“It is well done,” said Lucerne. “We shall have Clowder tell the full story to the chapter of the sideem tomorrow. It will encourage them and make their duty clear. Mallerstang shall be an example for us all of how the Word made angry wreaks vengeance on the wicked and the sly.”
Early the next day Lucerne spoke to the full chapter of the sideem. There was a change among those who expectantly and eagerly waited for him to speak compared to those who had heard him in Whern at Midsummer after the ousting of Henbane. Now there was a harder and more certain air about them all: some had scars from travels they had made, some seemed older by far. But the most part of the difference was in the confidence and spirit they had. The weak ones had gone and those that were left, or the older sideem who had survived the testing times of interrogation, were resolute and self-disciplined.
Before Lucerne spoke, Terce told the moles about the trinities and Slighe assigned them to one and to a system, so that each knew with whom he would serve his task and where he must go, though none knew yet what the task might be.
There was mounting excitement and curiosity about this when Clowder rose and gave a cold, impartial account of the destruction of Mailerstang. He told how those moles had mocked the Word, and why its judgement had been merciless. Awed silence met the end of his account, and then such cries as a rabble makes when it feels victorious and its evils seem justified. Cries which ask for more and call for death on all those not on their side.
In this atmosphere of brimming violence and hatred, Lucerne at last rose up. Instant silence came. The speech he made was a long and passionate address, though i
n Terce’s record of it the full power of it is lost, and the passion diluted. But the record shows that all who heard it rejoiced to be so led, and to be given tasks of the Word that would lead inevitably to the destruction of the Stone.
As he spoke on, there came an adoration to the sideems’ faces, and when he smiled they laughed, and when he laughed some were moved to tears.
“Help him, Word!” they cried out.
“Blessed be our Master!”
“Your Master? Nor yet even Master of the Word. For I am not yet ordained. Nor shall I ever be... no, not ever be.” He paused and the silence was so great that if a mole had dared breathe it would have been heard.
“No, my fellow sideem, I am not ordained. And this pledge I give thee as I give it to the Word we serve and which makes us and gives us our life. When the task we begin this day is complete, on that night will I be ordained. By the whispered Word, by the bloodied Stone, by the drift of cloud, by the rasp of just talon; by the shout of triumph in thy hearts shall I be ordained. When that night comes, that dread night for those that fear the judgement of the Word, when that night is here – that night when rejoicing fills the heart of those who have no fear of what they do – then shall the Word judge me Master. But what night shall that be? What shall it be to us?”
“Tell us when, Master!” shouted a sideem.
“Master, tell us what we must do that you shall be ordained.”
“You must fulfil your tasks,” he said simply, his voice suddenly calm, his eyes watching for their response as he paused and wiped white spittle from the corner of his mouth.
“What is our task?” another said, his voice pleading with Lucerne to say.
“To go forth obediently in those trinities in which you have been placed. To go to those systems to which you are nominated.” He stared at them, playing with their terrible desire.
“But what shall we do?” one asked at last.
“Do that which is most hard. You shall... listen. Listen to the followers of the Stone. Listen for the deceit and fraud they call Silence. Listen and scriven the names, the places, the strengths, the weaknesses, the everything of the followers.”