Once glimpsed, that “something” – that light, that Silence, that fierce fire burning towards the truth – becomes a portal that can never close, beyond which a mole sees fearsome things of beauty not seen before.
But Henbane had, though all too briefly, seen the light itself before. At her own birth, shafting down in the chamber of the Rock, a light before which Rune and Charlock had trembled. To that distant, unconscious memory something in Henbane had returned, and that light it was that cast itself now across her life and made her see anew what she had barely seen before.
These recollections of her life became her torment now, for she saw that, despite what she was and all she represented, life had given her much whose beauty she had not recognised or which she had affected to despise.
There must have been many such memories for Henbane then, but we who have followed her story know for certain only a few of them. Some seem surprising now... like the memory she had of Brevis, scribemole of Uffington and the mole who, along with old Willow, was snouted at Harrowdown on her direct command. At the time she had discounted their bravery, only now did she wish she might have talked to them, two different moles, both wise, whom she had killed with barely a moment’s thought. Two of many such....
But if such a memory was representative of many, a few stood out alone and by themselves, and none more so, perhaps, than that evening and night when she and Tryfan of Duncton had known each other in her chambers in the High Sideem. Passion and delight, abandonment, and they had made love. Now, moleyears later, for the first time in her life she knew loss and regret – for she knew their time together could never be again, and she saw too late its full beauty, its goodness. Yet she marvelled that such light should have been known to her, and of all places here, in Whern. And she wept that she had not treasured or honoured it, and ached and sighed with remorse.
Which regretful memory led to the last and greatest realisation of all, which had to do with Lucerne. For the result of that union with Tryfan was, significantly enough, the only pregnancy she had ever had, the only life, as it now seemed to her, she had ever made.
She wept now at the memory of how Tryfan’s pups grew inside her, so slowly, as if knowing that it would take time for her to even sense that here, at last, was something good to come of her, something unsullied by the Word. Despite her weakness in the days before her time came, despite all fears, and most of all despite the loss she knew would result from what she did, she yet had the courage to command Sleekit to take those pups from her. In the event two were saved – or at least got out alive.
“May they be safe, may they be strong... may their parentage be forever unknown that they live in anonymity...” she whispered often to herself those days before Midsummer.
But the third pup, Lucerne, had not been got out of Whern, but had been hers to keep and in that keeping she had for a time found new and terrible strength. For him she had killed her father Rune and later, had not the Rock sounded its dark sound in her soul and kept its corrupting hold upon her, she might still have saved him too.
But that power overtook her, along with dynastic desire, and she committed him to the joyless Word, and did to him what had been done to her. Worse, she did it well. Worse still, she even denied her troubled self to do it, denied the memory of Tryfan, denied that same urge that had but a short time before made her make Sleekit take the others.
Then, when the pup was ripe for joy, for life, for the sun and air and love she herself had been denied, she let him have it not.
“I gave him up to Terce... I gave...” And she remembered, and her talons curled in an agony of hatred at herself to have so abused the single trust her life had left her with. Of all that she had done this was the worst to think upon. Yet, however evil Henbane’s life, it was courageous to look back....
So it is we find her, as Midsummer approaches, acting out the part of Mistress of the Word, listening to sideem confessions, licensing the preparations for the terrible rite to come, while all the time struggling on bravely with thoughts that dwelt on what she might not have done.
To her credit there must have come a day when her thoughts moved on from regret to reality and asked the treacherous question: what might now be done? For reasons that will soon be plain enough she did not think that Lucerne was redeemable. He was what she, and Terce, and ultimately the Scirpuscan Word, had made him. Again and again she returned to those questions: what was Lucerne’s weakness? How might she exploit it?
In the internecine troubled world of Whern she knew that Lucerne guessed at where her thoughts were aiming. So his concern, and Terce’s too, was to contain Henbane’s power to what was essential, to surround her with spies, to so encumber her with work and assistance that she had not time or opportunity to make whatever undermining plans she might wish to make.
“Once Midsummer is over and she has fulfilled her task...” purred Lucerne.
“Yes,” said the Twelfth Keeper, and said no more. The very essence of such moles as those is ambiguity and vagueness so that when the moment conies and they move one way, nomole may accuse them of not having kept the option open to move another.
But where was Lucerne’s weakness, if he had one at all? The weakened Henbane sought to know, surrounded by threat and the knowledge that when her duty was done they would have power to dispose of her. And would do so. So it was that over and again she thought of his education since Longest Night in the light of something two moles alone knew – herself and Terce. She as Mistress, he as Keeper of the Twelfth Cleave. For it is part of the Word’s creed that nomole should be perfect, and part of the Twelfth Keeper’s duty is to ensure that sideem moles each have a weakness which, if need be, a Master or Mistress can exploit. That poisoned secret is the greatest of the Twelfth Keeper’s art, a canker in the summer rose. She knew Terce must have put such weakness into Lucerne but did not know what its nature was.
“What is his weakness?” Henbane asked herself a hundred times. “May I be granted that discovery...!” It was the desire to know the answer that drove her tormented mind to look back again and again at all she could recall of Lucerne’s dire education at Terce’s talons....
We said it would be an unpleasant duty to make a record of this education and so it is, but a necessary one. For let all those who make or bring forth pups reflect upon the duties they may have, and how the nature of the contribution to Silence they make, or mar, may be dependent on the love, or lack of it, they show their pups.
For know this well: the seasons turn swift, the pup a parent soon becomes, and the measure of a mole is the quality with which he or she learns to live with the past to make something of the present which enhances the future. Nothing is more real in the present, nor more challenging, than the pups that depend on a mole. Nothing. No success is more satisfying than this; no failure more undermining....
Lucerne began as any pup begins, with bleating, with suckling, with messing, and with life. Bonny he was, though dark and intense, but in fertile times many such are born. They do not all become the monster he became.
Seeing him, feeding him, encircling him, Henbane felt great joy; but hearing his bleats and not knowing their meaning, seeing his distress and not knowing distress is normal, suffering his demands and having no joy or patience of herself to set such suffering by and see its triviality, Henbane was confused and angry in herself.
In that dark place where Lucerne was born, surrounded by moles distorted by training, mainly male, mainly with a learnt distaste and fear of females, Henbane found no others to turn to. Few mothers can have been so ill-prepared within themselves, or so ill-placed within moledom’s great expanse for such a great yet simple task: the rearing of a pup to maturation, with love.
Had she but known it she had already done more than many such mothers could have done: she had fought for her young, she had helped them all survive, and from some instinct deeper than time itself she had seen that two of them were taken from her to safety.
That much was tru
e, but the reassurance of it was not hers to have, and nor in that hateful place was there a single mole to give such reassurance, or to help her with the simplest things to do with a mother’s love. Yet even so, despite everything, she had the courage to have doubts. For when Lucerne the pup was gay, and she saw his simple happiness, and she took him by his neck and carried him to the surface and the sun, she knew, deep down, that all was not right.
“My love, my sweetling, my own delight,” she purred, words which vile Charlock never said to her with love. She cried to see him happy and feel in herself an inability to respond, and worse, the tightening of incoherent anger as he demanded love. Strange anger that feeds upon itself and turns impotence into a sense of uselessness, and forces a mother to put upon a harmless pup the anger and frustration she felt for what had once been done to her. Pity her, that she knew not how to stop the hatred of the mewling thing that grew side by side with love, as black ivy entwines the sapling sycamore.
She was a mole perverted by her parents from the course of normal love and was no better prepared for the defence of her pup than a crippled mole on the surface is against the marauding owl. And yet within her there was decency and the propensity to love, and crippled though she truly was she faced not one owl but ten or a hundred with a courage few mothers ever show.
Again and again she recalled Terce’s persistence in asking that the pup be delivered to him on Longest Night that his training might then begin.
“It is the due time then, Word Mistress, the due time for such a one as he.”
She said yes and yes again, yet still he persisted, as if the very process of making her angry and guilty about parting with her pup to him was part of his Twelfth Keeper’s art.
Henbane, no fool, challenged him.
“Oh yes Mistress, I am aware that my diligence annoys you. It must be so if the pup is to be prepared fully for what is to come. I say again, he must hate thee if he is to fulfil his task.”
“What task had you in mind, Twelfth Keeper?”
Did Terce then hesitate? She watched his reaction minutely, as skilled at observation as he at impassivity. She saw no hestitation, and yet knew his answer was not the truth.
“Why Mistress,” said Terce, “to be Master after thy Mistress-ship. To be thy worthy successor.”
No, no, no, no, no. There was more. Something Rune had planned. Something....
“You were made by Rune, Keeper.”
It was as near to an accusation of falseness as she ever got.
“I can be unmade by thee!” said Terce smoothly. His eyes were as cold and fearless as her own could be.
“Well, he shall come to thee. He shall. But....”
“Word Mistress?”
“Shall he be tutored with other novice sideem, as I ordered?”
“I have chosen but two to serve their novitiates with him, Mistress.”
“Tell me of them.” Henbane had been surprised to find she felt jealous of these youngsters and was also surprised to see Terce falter a shade as if, realising this, he knew that one or other of those he had chosen would give her cause for jealousy. And then she remembered that Terce desired hatred between son and mother, and she smiled. One of the novices would be hers to destroy if she so willed – the payment to her for suffering her son’s hatred.
“I have chosen the first after much thought, and the second by instinct though in response to a vow before the Word.”
Again, Henbane was surprised, for such vows were rare, and rarely extracted from a Keeper, least of all from a Keeper of the Twelfth Cleave.
“The first is Clowder, of Hawkswick born. I nearly took his father a cycle ago but he was flawed. We have overwatched his young, and Clowder has all the qualities of his father – intelligence, pugnacity, astuteness, plus something more. He is that rare mole, a leader who yet will serve another in whom he has faith. If I may put it this way, Mistress: as you served Rune in your campaign in the south so shall Clowder serve Lucerne. I shall make him worthy of his great task.”
Great task? Terce knew something Henbane did not. Terce planned something more than he now said. Again, Henbane detected the vile talon of Rune in this.
“The other novice, what of him?”
Terce faltered. Genuine? An act? Henbane could not tell. She disliked the mole, but acknowledged to herself that he was a master at what he did, and as such was fitting tutor to her son.
Terce replied, “I know not, but the promise of a sideem before the Word is a sacred thing. I know not....”
“You know not, Keeper?” It was an astonishing admission, and Terce came as near as he ever did to looking sheepish. The moment quickly passed as he repeated once more that the choice was instinctive and such choices had not failed him before.
“Tell me,” said Henbane coldly.
It seemed that he had got a female with pup, which is a Keeper’s privilege if it is done discreetly and outside the confines of the High Sideem.
Henbane, all powerful, could afford to laugh.
“And you promised what to her?” she said, eyes light as she added a purred afterthought: “You make me think that
Keepers aren’t as dry and dead as they usually seem, Terce. Tell me, whatmole was your mistress?”
“’Twas a female came a spring before but could not find sponsorship. Her name was Linton, but she was not strong enough to be sideem.” He paused fractionally and Henbane saw it.
“You’re doubtful, mole. You still think sweet of her who was strong enough to make the Keeper all novices fear make a promise by the Word.”
Terce did not smile.
“She had the touch about her, certainly. I promised if she was with pup then I would take the best born of her litter to be novice, whether he seemed fit enough or not. By the Word I promised it.”
“And who to choose this “best born” who shall serve his time with my best born?” There was sarcasm in her voice, and a measure of dislike. If one was to be sacrificed to Henbane’s jealousy this would be he.
“Last month Linton sent word that the youngster was ready and even now I await the return of my colleague, Lathe, with him. On such matters Lathe is discreet. I shall honour her wish and her choice, for in my judgement a mother who has born and reared her young, if she is intelligent and respects the Word, as Linton is and does, is the best judge.”
Henbane smiled sweetly.
“You seem to have much experience in these matters for one who is a sworn celibate. But no matter... you shall let me know when this “best” mole comes: what his name, and what his character.”
“Mistress, I shall.”
And days before that fateful Longest Night he had.
The loathsome Lathe had brought the youngster privily up through Whern and into the High Sideem to Terce’s chamber. At first, seeing the youngster, Terce was inclined to smile, even laugh, which was very rare, if not unknown, for him. The youngster Linton chose was female.
Terce laughed because he appreciated Linton’s humour.
“I refused her,” he whispered to himself, looking at the comely elegance of the female, “but this one I must train.” But incest was not in his mind, or even crossed it. His perversions lay at first remove in others’ lusts.
“Your name?” he asked the youngster, who was, after all, of his own seed.
“Mallice, father,” she said. Her eyes were not afraid. They were his own. Her spirit was Linton’s, her body young. Laughter first, now pride he felt. And then fear, terrible. For she was not strong and even if she survived the Midsummer rite, which surely she could not, Henbane’s jealousy would take her. Perhaps he had underestimated Linton to so devise a punishment of him.
“You are accepted,” he said, “but if you ever call me father again in that same moment I shall kill you.”
“I understand,” she said, and what he understood was that Linton had reared her to hate him. It was a pretty challenge.
He took her to the Mistress of the Word and the Mistress laughed even mo
re.
“Well,” she said, staring at Mallice, “you have a motley crew of novices for the Midsummer rite, Terce. An ungainly clever mole called Clowder, a daughter whose mother seems to have named her well, and my son Lucerne.” She turned to Mallice again and fondled her, to Terce’s intense displeasure. “Why, truly this mole was sent by the Word. She pleases me, though I wonder if she shall survive the rite. She seems too weak...” Henbane’s eyes looked as cruel and malicious as they ever had.
“I warn you, Terce, and make an ordination of the Word. Train your trio of novices well and see that all survive, for if one does not then you shall die as well. I shall see to it myself. May the Word help you the day the rite comes by. Meanwhile I shall give a mother’s love to my Lucerne and entrust him to thee in the dark hours of Longest Night.”
“Mistress, forgive me but... remember to suckle him. It is meet that you do.”
“I know it,” hissed Henbane.
All this she remembered, all of it. And even more of that Longest Night....
It had been in a small antechamber, adjacent to the Rock, that the life of the then-innocent Lucerne was committed to Terce and seemed to kill forever a sense of joy within herself. Henbane remembered all the details of her last small journey with her growing son, his trust – how hard and falsely won! – his eagerness, his eyes that were wide with interest and intelligence; eyes that were beautiful. Yet behind it all was fear of the unknown, a fear that might have turned to terror had he or Henbane suspected what was soon to come.
But such suspicions were not held, and so it was that an innocent pup, a little afraid of the adult world, but one that might have served his fellows well, trotted obediently at Henbane’s side that Longest Night, going inexorably towards a doom about which despite his fears Henbane would only say that it was for his betterment.
Even then he felt an inner doubt.