Duncton Stone by William Horwood

  In appointing Snyde his official record-keeper Quail had unwittingly appointed a monster to a task he would make monstrous – his obsessive energy and secret endeavour turned ordinary scribes into a ruthless team of enquiry, and a hotchpotch of twisted records into the greatest collection of testimony and verbatim evidence of evil and tyranny that is ever likely to exist. Snyde was truly the spider at the centre of a web whose extent only he knew, or could ever hope to use.

  Through the long harsh winter years that followed the Convocation of Caer Caradoc, Snyde and his minions busied themselves; first at Caradoc, then at Bowdler and finally at Wildenhope creating the structure of his system – vast, orderly, chillingly clean chambers into which the records of life outside, of Elder Brothers’ meetings, of confessions, of inquisition, and of secret plots and counterplots would flow, and be stored for posterity. Once the Crusades started in spring he was ready to send out his spies and recorders in the form of the Brother Advisers, attached to every part of the Crusade – a representative specimen we have already met, in the vindictive and self-serving form of Fagg.

  The Inquisitors certainly knew the worth of what he was doing, and he made sure of this, thus ensuring they would sanction him and his workers to record all they did. Equally, Quail saw to it that his own achievements were recorded by Snyde, who as spring approached had so gained Quail’s confidence that he seemed almost like his twisted shadow, following him wherever he went and attending his meetings discreetly, silent but for the sliding and scratching of his scribing talons on bark.

  But if these moles thought they knew the full extent of what Snyde was doing they were mistaken – they did not; nomole at that time did. For in addition to the “official” records of inquisition and Newborn affairs, at some time in that period Snyde began to collect records to gratify his own peculiar interests and private obsessions.

  These began with the obscene and filthy scribings that Squelch, Quail’s obese and deviant son, one day showed him – records of certain activities, of intercourse with young unfortunates placed in Squelch’s power for “correction’, so foul that even now few have ever been allowed to see them. Censorship may be a bad policy, but there are some things so corrupting, so evil, that it is surely better that they are not generally available to mole. Such were the scribings Squelch tentatively proffered Snyde, and it is better not to think too much about the heavy excitement and the eager lustful way the deformed librarian kenned them, his excitement mounting much as the normal passion of a young male in love with a female might mount in spring. We have already witnessed Snyde’s necrophilic lusts at Ludlow, where he found filthy climax and fulfilment with the corpse of the guard who had been strettened. But generally Snyde was more fantasist than doer.

  But what Squelch did, Snyde kenned, and the two began a relationship whose fervour and most passionate expression found its life in the pornography of the text. This was Snyde’s first acquisition for his private collection, and it took him into dark tunnels of deviance and infamy in which sexual torture and cruel fantasy vied with the voyeuristic darkness and acts of obscenity and the necrophilia, real and imagined, already referred to. Snyde had a snout for such things, and the moles who indulged in them, and if the word “great” can be associated with such an enterprise, his collection of such textual obscenities remains the greatest and most complete in moledom.

  But much of the time Snyde was concerned with recording mundane trivia of the kind only an obsessive would bother with, and whose value or interest emerged only at later times. Thus did he depute a mole to set up a system of records of all who had reason to visit Wildenhope, whether as prisoners or guards – or as Newborns on the official business of arraignments and inquisition. So it is we know precisely whichmoles were held in Wildenhope from shortly after the end of the Convocation right through until... but a chronicler must beware of going forward too fast and revealing in the wrong sequence the infamous and historic events of those times.

  It is enough to say that Snyde’s records make it possible to construct a very full account indeed of affairs at Wildenhope as they affected Privet and the others, and to describe in as much detail as is appropriate the true horrors of that chilling place of punishment, death, and manipulation of minds, which is what Quail and his Inquisitors made it. But as we do so it is hard to forget that at our shoulder limps the deformed shadow, and pokes the weaselly snout, of Snyde, a scribemole of flawed genius; while beyond what we ken from his public record is a more private one, material for which his narrow, lustful, deviant eyes continually seek out, but which, thank the Stone, we will but rarely have to sully our minds and memories with.

  Wildenhope has sometimes been compared to the Sumps, those deep and treacherous tunnels in the Cannock system which the moles of the Word used as a place of confinement and punishment when they moved their government of moledom there. Certainly it was used for a similar purpose, and the horrors of torture and inquisition were a feature of both. But Wildenhope was on a bigger scale, and much less obviously a place of evil and oppression. The bluff of land which held it was inconspicuous, and the tunnels themselves clean, spacious and well-ordered – more so than at Caer Caradoc. The surface was rough pastureland, which dropped away east and south to the wet meadowlands that bordered the river on one side and its tributary on the other. It is the kind of ground that youngsters spread across in summer when it dries out, worm-rich and easily delved but offering no permanence because of its vulnerability to flooding. All, that is, but for a raised pathway across it to the spit of ground where river and tributary meet and drop away steeply in cascading rapids.

  When Privet and the others were brought to Wildenhope they were taken across the surface far enough to look across this wet ground, flooded now by the rain that had hindered them so much. They could see the raised causeway emerging from submerged fields on either side, and past it the river-bank beyond whose edge the yellow rush of water could be seen.

  “The water doesn’t stay long on the surface,” one of their guards observed to another, who was unused yet to the place. “It drains away, adding to the river’s flood. The river is bloody terrifying close to, I can tell you! A mole looks down on to moving, rushing death!”

  After this brief glimpse of distant terrors the four moles were taken below ground into wide, featureless tunnels. From here each was led a different way and, their separate protests ignored, for naturally they wanted to be together, they were placed in rough sandstone cells, lit from above, and well guarded. The only sounds were the distant roar of the river, the quiet and disciplined chat of the guards, and the occasional moans of other prisoners, heard but rarely seen.

  Had the four moles been able to compare notes, they would have realized that they had been placed in near-identical cells. Each was round with a portal which widened upwards, making it impossible to get in and out without an awkward struggle which automatically drew the attention of nearby guards; and each could only be reached down a long tunnel whose entrance was close-guarded. They were set deep below soil level, in underlying sandstone, so that escape by tunnelling was impossible.

  But to describe these extraordinary cells simply as “lit from above” is to fail to convey any idea of the single feature which their unfortunate occupants soon came to regard with the greatest dislike. For the cells had no roofs, and the walls rose narrowly and inclined inwards, so that the perimeter at the top was only half that of the base. Above this nonexistent ceiling, or hole as it appeared to those below, was the much higher roof covering all the cells, which were in effect small roofless chambers within one greater chamber.

  This was not all. The main roof was fissured and open to the sky, and even on dull days such as that of their arrival the light appeared bright, blindingly so, to those peering up from below. Around the perimeter of the top of these strange exposed cells were routeways patrolled by guards whose heads, in featureless silhouette against the light beyond, would appear suddenly above, as they checked the presence of each p
risoner in the cell below, who thus could not identify who was spying upon them. Since the guards rarely spoke, and never from above, the prisoners had the feeling, which soon became obsessive and deeply unsettling, that they could see nothing of the world, but the world could see them. Not for one moment could they feel private or unobserved, except at night, provided it was moonless and without stars. To add to the sense of isolation and helplessness thus created was the way the prisoners were fed – worms were dropped down from above, usually thin and inadequate, always sporadically and without even the comfort of regularity or routine.

  Nor were the moles allowed out to the surface for grooming and ablution. Instead they were taken separately and in silence out of their cells, along a tunnel downslope into a cold damp chamber at the far end of which an underground river swiftly ran. Here they had to drink and wash, and then go to the furthest and darkest part of the stream, where it disappeared into rock, to pass water and faeces into the flow. It was clean, effective, and chilling, and left a mole feeling as icy and bereft mentally and spiritually as physically. Each prisoner who first came was warned against trying to escape or drown themselves by diving into the stream, though what might happen if they did nomole said. The threat was enough.

  We know now that some hundred and twenty moles could be held in these extraordinary and efficient cells at Wildenhope, though few were ever there very long. Most passed through a system of holding, of sapping strength, or re-education, and of release or summary execution in the manner which Wildenhope was to make its own, and to which, regretfully, this account must shortly come.

  The existence of a few long-term prisoners was rumoured by moles who dared speak of the place in any detail – former guards were expressly forbidden ever to mention it, but inevitably some did – and there were tales of moles forgotten except by guards, and now made pale and weak and withered by time. Perhaps some remembered the horrors of the Sumps of Cannock Chase, where many were so abandoned, and imagined the same of Wildenhope. There were terrors enough to make us hope that so cruel a place of loss and abandonment did not exist in the sterile labyrinths of the Newborns’ Wildenhope. Certainly there was a continual supply of young males and females, ready, available and unwilling to satisfy the varied appetites of senior and privileged Newborns, such as Quail’s son, Squelch.

  This was the place into which Privet and the others entered, and where without word or promise of release they were summarily incarcerated. There, alone and seemingly abandoned, each had to wait, and struggle with the nightmare in which they found themselves as best they might.

  They naturally did not see, and could not possibly have known, that the area of cells was but one part of the excavations, albeit one of the cruellest. Elsewhere, in higher tunnels delved in wormful soil at the western side of the bluff, were the administrative chambers of Wildenhope. Here the guards relaxed, and the mole who was responsible for the day-by-day running of the place gave his orders and meted out his discipline. This mole, the Governor, was always a Senior Brother, who for the period of tenure of his office was referred to by title rather than by name. *

  * Snyde’s records obligingly give the names of all the Newborn governors of Wildenhope, drawn from what sources nomole knows. The Governor during Privet’s incarceration was Brother Tern, elder brother of Inquisitor Skua. The most infamous governor of all was, of course. Quail himself...

  But with Quail’s ascendancy the Governorship lost some of its power for a time, simply because of Quail’s decision, following the Convocation, to move his own administration and that of the Inquisitors to Wildenhope, which was rather better placed than Caer Caradoc for supervising the kind of Crusades that he had in mind for the coming spring and summer.

  By chance this move had taken place but a short time before the capture of Privet, Rooster, Whillan and Madoc, so that there was no delay between their arrival and Quail’s knowledge of it, since he was already at Wildenhope. Present too, and by now almost a prisoner himself, was Thripp, along with Brother Rolt, the one remaining aide allowed him, who had been at his flank in Caer Caradoc and had given Privet and the others such assistance, along with Boden and old Arum.

  Many historians believe that it had been Quail’s wish, with the help and collusion of Skua, to eliminate Thripp at Caradoc, or perhaps to “disappear” him at Wildenhope – where the coincidence of the Governor being Tern, an ally of Quail, seems a peculiarly happy one for the Quail contingent. But Quail appears to have abandoned his murderous intent, at least for the time being, probably because the continuing popularity of Thripp amongst the brothers would have made it dangerous, perhaps fatal, for Quail to move against him too soon.

  Then, too, though Thripp’s present frailty made him a virtual prisoner of Quail, yet we know it to be true – as we have already indirectly seen – that he was by no means a spent political force. Plots and counterplots were the order of those days and Thripp, though physically weak, appears to have been much engaged in them. The one mole now had real power, the other a true following, and the two represented a schism that put the Newborn heart asunder for those few, those very few, who knew of it.

  At the time of Privet’s coming to Wildenhope the struggle had come to turn on the loyalty, or otherwise, of Chervil, Thripp’s son. The question was, of course, loyalty to whom: to his father and an old idealistic dream, or to Quail, and a new, tempting reality? At the Convocation, as we have seen, Quail was already in the business of testing Chervil, for whom he had a natural dislike and distrust, given his paternity. Yet in the highest councils of the Newborns, now almost wholly supporters of Quail, two things about Chervil could not be denied: one was that he had shown no liking or inclination to sympathize with Thripp and his softer ways (as they were perceived); and secondly, that among the younger generation he was unquestionably the ablest and most charismatic mole, commanding the respect and affection of his peer group in a way that went beyond the fact that he was Thripp’s son – though that helped.

  Quail, who in Chervil’s younger days had been appointed his mentor, had long recognized this. In truth, he had held Chervil in high affection and esteem, seeing in him all the potential for strong leadership and powerful command that was lacking in his son Squelch. When Thripp had commanded that Chervil be sent to the obscurity of Duncton Wood, beyond Quail’s influence, the bald-headed Inquisitor had been hurt and furious, and had conceived a hatred for the Elder Senior Brother out of proportion to the act.

  Chervil’s return to Caradoc had therefore been monitored carefully by all the Senior Brothers, partly for the malicious pleasure that came from knowing that if Chervil favoured one of the rivals he would cause dismay to the other, and also because in terms of the resolution of the power struggle, if he lived up to his potential as a youngster, much might depend on him.

  But Quail need not have feared – Chervil’s reputation for toughness preceded him. Quail’s spies sent back reports of the mole throughout the moleyears he was away and his moral rectitude and ruthlessness in pursuit of the Caradocian way could not be doubted. Quail had been especially pleased that on his coming to Caradoc it was to him and not Thripp that Chervil first paid his respects. True enough, he went to Thripp soon after, as any dutiful son might to a father who was ailing, but Quail’s spies left him in no doubt that the meeting went badly. Old Thripp had tried to win his son’s support and foment disunity, but Chervil had stayed firm. By this Quail was well pleased.

  He was less happy however that Chervil kept his own counsel and was disinclined to come out against his father – which would have greatly eased Quail’s elimination of him. Instead he stayed, as Quail saw it, insolently independent, as if he had his own eye on ultimate leadership.

  “Which I have no doubt he has,” said Skua matter-of-factly, “but what’s the harm in that? Eh, Brother Quail?”

  “It’s insubordinate, Brother Skua,” replied Quail, eyes narrowing evilly.

  “It’s natural,” observed Skua. “He will be a useful ally, and fin
ally a useful subordinate.”

  “He would do better to show respect,” growled Quail, not altogether unpleasantly.

  “He might – but then perhaps he is only waiting for his father’s demise. Many of the younger brothers would look askance if he publicly supported you against his father so soon. Watch and wait and be patient, and the young pretender will be yours to command.”

  “And what do you say. Squelch?”

  It was a peculiarity of Quail’s conduct of affairs that he liked to have his loathsome son Squelch nearby, though moles no longer thought it peculiar, they were so familiar with it. Perhaps since Quail indulged nomole-else it did not matter that he indulged such a one as his rotund and pathetic son who emitted the sense of evil inadequacy as stinkhorn fungi drip foul-smelling poison that only the lowest and filthiest of creatures are attracted to. It was Quail’s habit to turn to Squelch with a question or two at moments of doubt, usually rhetorically, though Squelch was capable of, and often gave, a perspicacious reply.

  “Me? I say nothing today,” said Squelch on this occasion, “because I choose to sing.”

  His father laughed and said, “You sing then, and sing well, for I must decide about Chervil.”

  “Chervil’s my friend,” said Squelch, “and he you never ever harm, not ever. Never, never, never...”