Naturally moles asked him what was apaw, and he told them something of his fears and hopes as well.
“When or how the grikes might come I know not, but we must be vigilant. Equally, the Stone will give us guidance and we must be ready to hear that too, for the Stone works in mysterious ways and what it wants us to do is not always easy to discover.”
“But haven’t you any idea at all what we’re looking for?” asked Harebell.
“He’d tell us if he knew,” said Wharfe.
Harebell grinned.
“He didn’t always tell us we were going the wrong way in the tunnels before we got lost when we were pups! That is before he got too rotund to go the more secret ways!”
All of them but Wharfe managed to laugh, Squeezebelly especially, and he patted his large stomach and said, “Pure muscle, my dears, not a mite of wasted flesh at all! But listen. Over the years I’ve learnt most and been challenged best by the followers the Stone has sent here to visit us, Tryfan himself included. They always come in summer, so be observant when they come and see if there isn’t one who can give us a clue to what we’re looking for.”
Summer is ever a time for visitors, moles in other systems growing restive then, and that summer was no exception and a good few moles passed through in late July, and more in August. In return for the warm welcome such moles got they were as usual asked to pass on their knowledge of moledom beyond Beechenhill, and so Squeezebelly saw that his moles were kept informed and outward-looking. It was in August that they had confirmation for the first time of rumours of changes at Whern, and that Lucerne, son of Henbane, had taken over as Master of the Word.
This was news indeed, and inevitably resurrected once more the old stories told of Henbane and her southern invasion, and the graphic accounts given of her by Mayweed and Sleekit when they had brought Wharfe and Harebell into the system with the help of Skint and Smithills, both old friends of Squeezebelly.
Always at such times Squeezebelly had to ask himself how much longer he must keep the secret of Wharfe and Harebell’s parentage from them, and whether he was right to keep them in ignorance at all. He had noticed that Wharfe in particular seemed to have doubts about the truth of the idea that Mayweed and Sleekit were their parents, and in fact had never directly asked if it were true – as if he was afraid of what the answer might be. Sometimes both moles said that they would like to see Mayweed and Sleekit again, but moles were used to wandering and separation, and in those times to permanent loss as well.
So when the news came that Henbane had been deposed and had gone missing, the time did indeed seem to have come to tell them the truth and one day in September the opportunity arose.
It was shortly after Wharfe had returned from a dangerous reconnaissance down the Dove Valley towards Ashbourne, confirming an escalation in grike guardmole activity, and he was in Squeezebelly’s burrow with Harebell and their friends Bramble and Betony.
It was one of those friendly family occasions, when the chatter may be idle but the feelings are close and deep; such a time indeed when moles who love each other may say things that matter much to them. It seemed an ideal time for Squeezebelly to say what he had so long wanted to, and the presence of his own two seemed to make it more appropriate.
But it was Wharfe who spoke first, and quite unexpectedly.
“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, “about being so morose all summer but ever since June....”
There was silence in the burrow. He had said at last what all of them had thought at different times, and only Betony had dared raise with him.
“I should have spoken before.”
Harebell nodded silently.
“But it’s not been easy.”
“Never is,” said Bramble.
“Let him get on with it,” said Betony.
“Well... I don’t know where to begin. Well I do. It was the day I touched the Stone, in fact the moment I touched the Stone. The day it rained.”
Nomole spoke, all remembered.
“I had this feeling as I touched the Stone that there were others touching with me.”
“But you were alone,” said Betony. “We didn’t reach you till ages later.”
“I know, but I don’t mean moles you could see, or even moles that were there. It was like...” And then he tried to tell them what it was like – as Mistle had tried to tell Cuddesdon, as Caradoc had tried to tell Alder, as Glyder had told nomole but Caradoc, who had known already.
Perhaps they found it hard to understand exactly what Wharfe was trying to describe, but when a mole they all knew so well, and who was of them all the strongest and on whom one day soon the responsibility of leadership would fall, when such a mole expressed grief and loss they believed and understood the strength of his feeling well enough.
“Why didn’t you say before,” said Harebell. “Perhaps we could have helped.”
“The moles who I felt touch the Stone with me seemed so real. As for the one we were all trying to help, I know he’s real, as real as any of you. I know that somehow one day I’ll meet him.”
“It’s a him, is it?” said Betony with relief, as if she half imagined that had it been a female she would have stolen Wharfe’s heart away. They all laughed, as families do at such moments.
“Has the thought crossed your mind that it was the Stone Mole you were ‘trying to help’?” said Squeezebelly.
Wharfe nodded and shifted his stance, his strength and dark fur in contrast to Harebell who was lighter in both colour and weight.
“I’m sure it was,” he said. “Maybe we’re all of us – us in Beechenhill, followers in other systems, moles like Henbane and that Lucerne in Whern – all part of something that has started with the coming of the Stone Mole.”
“If he has come,” said Bramble. “It’s such an old myth the Stone Mole one, going right back – seems strange to think it’s happening for real in our generation. But perhaps when a mole like Rune of Whern takes power, or moles like Boswell of Uffington and Tryfan of Duncton Wood start trekking about, then everything follows inevitably from it.”
Silence fell again until, in that indefinable way moles who know each other well sense that one is thinking of something he is staying quiet about, they knew that Squeezebelly was holding something back. He shifted about restlessly and then sighed and said, “Well, I knew there would never be a good time, a best time. A mole can’t get everything right!”
“What is it?” said Betony immediately, a frown on her face. She had rarely seen her father discomfited.
It was then, quietly, privately, he told them the story of how Wharfe and Harebell had come to the system. From the very beginning he told it, how Tryfan had trekked north preaching non-violence until he eventually reached Whern; how he had met Henbane there; and how he mated with her and then been all but killed by Rune’s sideem. The rest they knew, or had heard from others over the moleyears – of how Mayweed and Sleekit had rescued two of the three pups born, and brought them to Beechenhill, of how... but neither Wharfe nor Harebell heard more, so dumbstruck were they to learn who their parents really were.
“He was our father?” said Wharfe in astonishment.
“Henbane was our mother?” said Harebell.
“She...” began Squeezebelly.
“You should have told us before!” shouted Wharfe.
“Yes, you should, and you must have known as well!” cried Harebell, turning on Bramble and Betony, both as shocked as their siblings by adoption.
There was anger; there were tears; there was sulking. Then each in their own way grew angry again – now with Squeezebelly, now with each other, and finally with Tryfan. Through it all Squeezebelly stayed sadly calm, pointing out again and again that nomole – not him, not Tryfan – does everything right all the time.
“But Henbane!” shouted Harebell in disgust. “Tryfan with Henbane!”
“He was not an easy mole was Tryfan, but none I ever met or ever hope to meet was truer to the Stone than he,” said Squ
eezebelly, feeling the anger needed a response. “What he had learnt of the Stone he had learnt in courage, and Bramble and Betony here remember better than any of us the preaching he made, and what a great mole he was.”
Betony nodded, her paw to Wharfe’s, tears in her eyes while both Harebell and Wharfe, still appalled, glowered at the rest of them.
“You would have been so proud of him,” whispered Betony to Wharfe, and meaning well she added tactlessly, “and now I know the truth I can see that there’s something of him in you. He was so dark and big and forbidding.”
Wharfe looked utterly outraged.
“And me?” said Harebell miserably, waving a paw over her grey fur and flanks. “What is there of him in me? It’s Henbane that’s in me!”
Squeezebelly went to her and held her close in his great paws while she wept, and if there were tears in his own eyes he did not care. When she had quietened he said, “I have never seen Henbane, but I met moles who knew her, none better than Sleekit who loved and cared for you as if you were her own. She told me that when this day came and I told you the truth that I must say this. That until the day Henbane met Tryfan, Sleekit would have pitied any pup of Henbane’s. But after that day something of great love and light was born in her Mistress (as she always called her). Something she had never seen before, though it must always have been there.”
Squeezebelly spoke slowly and with such a sense of concern and tenderness for them all that the atmosphere in the burrow quietened.
“Sleekit said that as Henbane grew with pup her feelings for her pups – for you – changed from indifference to love; when she felt your movements inside her it was as if she understood something about the nature of a light she had glimpsed long before, and known again only when she and Tryfan had made love. The more these feelings grew, the more afraid she was of the threats to you – not only from the dark intent of Rune and the sideem around him, but from herself, for she knew she had been corrupted.
“She asked – she begged – Sleekit to take you from her once you were born, even though she knew she would not want it and might resist. She felt she would not have sufficient love for you to fight the corruption she had suffered; she felt she would be unworthy of you. This was a most courageous thing for her to ask, and one that Sleekit said caused her much suffering as the time for your birth came. Yet she said it again and again. Through her contact with your father, Tryfan, she had for the first time seen something of the light, and she wanted her pups to know it too, even though she felt she could not have it in her own life.
“Be angry with her if you will, but she did more to show her love for you than many parents ever do. And at the end, when you were born and helpless, she fought with her whole strength for you, and made it possible for Sleekit and Mayweed to rescue two of you at least, and bring you out of Whern. Be proud of her as well. As for your grey fur, Harebell, which you think may be as Henbane’s was, well, mole, that tells me only that your mother must have been most beautiful. And if such as Tryfan loved her, and made you in union with her, why then I am sure the Stone in some way blessed their union, and that one day moledom will also see that it was blessed.”
Squeezebelly fell silent then, and not a mole in that deep burrow doubted that each was much loved by the other, and in some strange way much loved by the Stone.
“But... this Lucerne,” whispered Harebell at last, “he is our brother. The Master of the Word is our brother.”
Squeezebelly stared at them, and at his Bramble and Betony, and he said, “We live in times I do not always understand. Since Tryfan came here I have felt that the Stone has chosen Beechenhill for something no other system will know. All these years, all these decades, since long before I was born, since the coming of the first mole himself, perhaps, the Stone has blessed this system and kept its moles in health and faith, as if it knew that one day it would need a place most fitting to the light it casts, and the Silence that is all its own. More and more I believe this great event is near. I believe it has been nearer ever since the Stone Mole’s star first showed. I believe your strange birth of parents supremely of the Stone and of the Word is part of this event.
“And if I had to look into the future and say what might be, I would say to both of you that if the day should ever come when you meet your brother Lucerne then more than your own lives will depend on how you conduct yourselves with him. I believe all of moledom will tremble in that hour, and in time all moledom will know of it, for better or for worse.
“Your father preached before our Stone, and spoke of the non-violent way. I do not know what that way may be, yet always I strive to find it. Where he is now or what happened to him I cannot tell. Your mother was the very head of the violence that the Word wreaked across moledom, yet she gave you the chance of life before the Stone, and now she has power no more, but more than that I do not know.
“What I do know is that I, and through me Beechenhill, was entrusted with your lives. We have reared you here as best we could, in a community which knows the Stone’s light. Why, if either of your parents could see you now, as I can, then I think they would be as proud of you as you should feel of them.”
So Squeezebelly spoke, and nomole could doubt that he had fulfilled his task in those two moles. They looked at him with love, as Bramble and Betony did, and though they did not think it then, they one day would: that they may have lost first their parents, and then the two moles who saved and reared them, but in Squeezebelly they had found a mole who had ever showed them as much of love and faith and honour as the truest parents ever could.
“And now,” he said, “I think you must decide if you are to keep this secret or tell other moles. We shall all do as you wish.”
“Secret,” said Wharfe, “though I hate to take that way.”
“Secret for now,” said Harebell, “though I hate it too. But moles might not understand....”
“For now only,” said Wharfe. “But one day we must tell.”
“So be it,” said Squeezebelly. “Bramble? Betony?”
“We shall not tell,” said Bramble.
“I shall never say,” said Betony with a smile towards Wharfe.
The number of visitors to Beechenhill had been declining since news of the changes at Whern had come into the system and by mid-September no visitors at all were seen, and few even heard of.
The weather had worsened, and as autumn came across the southern Peak, grike patrols increased in the peripheral areas, not only in the east and south, but more ominously in the less populated west and north as well.
Then, like shadows gathering, the news filtering into Beechenhill became more grim. A watcher went missing on the eastern side; two vagrants who, it seemed, had been trying to reach Beechenhill from the normally safe west were found slain by grikes.
Then in the last third of September news came from followers in Ashbourne that a great massing of moles was taking place, and soon after that an account of the snouting of the eldrene of Ashbourne, and three of her guardmoles, one of whom Squeezebelly knew to be a brave and secret supporter of the Stone. It was a great blow, for Ashbourne was a system that was traditionally friendly towards moles of Beechenhill and it seemed that the new regime of the Word was being thorough in its job if it was killing its own when they were deemed to go astray.
It was against this darkening background that Squeezebelly ordered a retreat into the more central and safer part of the system of moles who lived around its edges, while moles like Wharfe were sent out on missions to watch for grike movement and change. There was a sense of fear about the tunnels now, and all knew that the dangers Squeezebelly had warned about for so long might be soon upon them.
But for several days, and then a week, and then two weeks nothing happened. Several of those out on missions returned and reported no grike moves against Stone followers. The tension eased and there came that dangerous sense that the danger was past, and soon surely the Stone would send them better news. And so at first it seemed.
/> Wharfe had been sent to the north-west with three other moles including Bramble, and they had ventured a good many miles beyond Beechenhill itself and seen some evidence of grikes and even patrols up the Manifold Valley, which is the complex western boundary of Beechenhill. But beyond it, on Grindon Moor and north to Revidge Heath, there were no grikes.
It was as they turned back to make the long trek home, and were seeking a safe passage across the Manifold at Ecton, always a grike outpost, when Wharfe had turned a corner among the rough grasses above Ecton that he found himself face to face with a greying tough-looking mole. He seemed alone and regarded them gravely and kept utterly still, appraising them without fear or aggression. Wharfe had rarely seen a mole in such circumstances so self-assured, and asked with typical Beechenhill calm, “What is your name, mole, and whither are you bound?”
The manner of the mole’s reply, as much as its content, took them by surprise, for though he was one to their four he spoke quite without fear and indeed with considerable authority. He had a strong northern accent, and had he not spoken slowly they might have had trouble understanding him.
“Neither my name nor my destination need concern you yet. Where are you from?”
“Ours is the power to ask,” said Wharfe with a smile.
“’Tis of no consequence,” he said coolly, settling down and smiling back in a way that they found disconcerting. Wharfe had a most uncomfortable feeling that he was out of his depth, and certainly he did not know quite how to proceed. The mole, who though a good deal older than him was evidently fit and powerful, eventually said after the silence had grown uncomfortable, “We could stance here facing each other all day and learn nothing.”
“Or you could respond to our greeting and give us your name and destination,” said Wharfe.