Rooster shrugged and grinned. “Best way!” he said.
“And when your brothers come back and attack again, which they’ll do before long, what do we do then?”
“Delve,” said Rooster. “Like we’ve begun. Not fight, I won’t.”
It was true that much good had now emerged from his coming. He had directed the other moles to delve according to marks he made, and in a surprisingly short space of time had created a defence of Dark Sound, just as he had at Chieveley Dale – so successfully, indeed, that the Crowden moles were afraid of crossing through their own defensive lines, such was the agony of dark confusing sound the delvings emitted.
“Trouble is,” grumbled Hamble, “your delvings can’t tell the difference between friend and foe.”
“Delvings can,” said Rooster, “but I don’t make those ones here. Not right. Not holy these delvings’ purpose, not made for good reason. Right delving for right place.”
“What’s better than protecting your own?” asked Hamble.
“Helping your enemy,” said Rooster promptly. “That was what Gaunt taught me, what Hilbert taught him through his ancient delvings. Help, love, pacify, give. Best, but hard.”
“You’ll really never fight?” said Hamble doubtfully, on another occasion when they were alone on one of their tours of the system. Rarely had two moles found it so easy to be friends.
“If I hurt another I lose all for ever. If I kill I am no Master. If I think to kill it’s harder to think like a Master of the Delve.”
“But you have thought like that, eh? You’ve wanted to hurt a mole?” asked Hamble shrewdly. “Like Ratcher, for example?”
Rooster nodded uncomfortably. “Wanted to hurt him.” He was silent for a little and then suddenly blurted out something that seemed to have been worrying him: “Wanted to hurt Privet.”
“Privet?” repeated Hamble, astonished.
Rooster looked both ashamed and strangely pleading. “Have you ever?” he asked quietly.
“Wanted to hurt Privet? No, never. She’s like a sister, she is, I’d defend her to the death. Wouldn’t hurt her ever.”
“Or any female?”
“Hurt them?” said Hamble puzzled, and not understanding Rooster’s meaning, or his sense of shame and confusion about his previously violent feelings of desire for Privet. “I wouldn’t hurt a mole I loved. But you wouldn’t, would you?”
“Not hurt a mole I loved, no, no, no,” said Rooster, shamed even more. Hamble didn’t understand that by “hurt” Rooster meant “make love’, which was something that seemed so violent to him, so uncontrollable that he mistook his natural passion for Privet for something it was against the creed of a Master to do. If only Hamble had understood poor Rooster’s guilt and agony.
“You’re a strange mole,” said Hamble, not knowing how upset Rooster felt to be told that, or how convinced it made him feel he really was strange, and wrong in the feelings he had for Privet. How hard it is to listen to another mole, and understand what his words really mean – how often the right moment slips away.
As the time went by and the work of defensive delving took Rooster from her flank. Privet saw how right she was to worry over Lime, for her sister was without shame or scruple in her desire for Rooster. But Privet had the reassurance of Rooster’s response to Lime’s advances; puzzlement and growing irritation. He did not like Lime, and sensed that she was trouble, and he did not like to see Privet upset. All of which made Privet feel easier, the more so because from the first Rooster shared quarters with her near the Library, and did not dally with the females as other male moles did at that season. Indeed, though she worried still, she felt all was reasonably well, and even put the threat of Lime to one side in favour of worrying, as friends will, at Hamble’s failure to find a mate.
“You’re too nice a mole!” she counselled him privately. “Be a bit tougher on them and they’ll come seeking you out!”
“Well, you’re the wise one. Privet, having found a mate!”
“We haven’t mated,” said Privet, “we’re just good friends.”
“Like you and me?” Hamble laughed.
“More than us,” said Privet shyly. “But we’re not ready for that yet. One day —”
“Hmmph!” said Hamble, unconvinced. “You may think you’re not ready for it, but I’ve never met a male who wasn’t, and nomole would say Rooster isn’t male. And you advise me about getting a mate! You better practise being more alluring. Get some lessons from Lime, she knows how!”
So the two moles teased and confided in each other as the days continued, and the sense grew that renewed attacks by Ratcher’s clan were ever more imminent.
“It’s strange, Privet, but since Rooster’s come there’s been a different feel to Crowden, a new sense of purpose. He says he’s a pacifist but I’ve never met a mole with greater brooding strength, as if he’s waiting for an excuse to get angry. I mean —”
“You mustn’t let him, Hamble, not ever. He is angry, angry for his past and for what happened to Samphire. Don’t let him get angry; I’ve seen him and I know how violent he could be. He fears his anger and the feeling of wanting to hurt a mole.”
“Aye, he said as much to me, and he said it about...”
“About what?”
“No matter,” said Hamble quickly. “I’ll see he doesn’t, if I can.”
“It’s important, Hamble. He carries a responsibility far greater than anymole really understands. Being a Master of the Delve is a burden almost too much for a single mole to bear. In the past Masters worked in groups and shared their tasks. I think Rooster had formed a group with Glee and Humlock, but he’s lost them now, and Hume and the others here aren’t quite the same. I don’t know why or how, but his two Charnel friends were part of his Mastership, like a support he needed, and now he’s lost them he’s angry and vulnerable.*I can’t give him the support myself for I’m just a scribe. So you must try to save him from himself until he’s found some other way of finding support in the delve. The Stone made him, and the Stone will find a way. It will! I pray to it all the time!”
*See Duncton Tales. The albino female Glee, and her blind deaf-mute companion Humlock were left behind to die in the Charnel Clough from which, because of landslips and river torrents, nomole could escape.
Hamble stared at her. “Mole, you love him with a passion.”
“I feel he’s my whole life.”
“Beware then. Privet, for in these troubled times a mole had best not beheve her whole life depends upon another.”
“We’re always giving each other advice, you and I,” she said affectionately.
Hamble held her close. “With you, Privet, I feel closer to myself than with any other mole. I feel it’ll always be like that, always. I never thought for one moment you wouldn’t come back from Chieveley Dale, and now I’m sure that wherever you are I’ll know if you’re well or ill, safe or unsafe. Always.”
Privet felt warm and loved, and wished she could feel as sure of things as Hamble did. She remembered the difference between his parents, whom she had loved so much, and her cold mother. Shire, and knew that if there was one reason why he felt such assurance, and she could not quite trust that life would treat her well, it lay in the difference in confidence their parenting had given them.
“I know one thing, Hamble: if ever I have young it will be to the example of your parents I shall look for raising them, and to you as well.”
“And to the infamous Eldrene Wort, my dear, for I know of her Testimony and what finding it must have meant for you. She’s kin to be proud of.”
“Oh Hamble, why do I feel so uncertain and full of dread? I have felt so from the moment we first came back to Crowden. I do still”
“Rooster’s the mole to take that from you,” said Hamble. “When he gets round to seeing the treasure he’s got he’ll make you feel wanted, and more than wanted! He’s a bit shy with females, that’s all – just like me.”
He laughed, but when he went hi
s way he found himself wondering if dread could be infectious, because he was beginning to feel it rise up in him as well.
Chapter Nine
Two days after this the Ratcher clan’s offensive began in earnest, and such things as Privet and Hamble had talked about seemed but niceties of living when set against the harsh realities of war.
A careless guard, made bored and complacent by the recent lack of activity, had ventured beyond the defences and was caught at dusk by the grikes. His screams as he was tortured, deliberately in earshot of the defences, cast a pall of dread and loathing over Crowden. This tactic had been used before as a way of luring out Crowden’s guards to the rescue, and though from time to time successful attempts had been made, in recent times, with Crowden under the younger leadership of Hamble, the grikes had known how to ambush the rescuers, and take even more prisoners. Therefore it had been generally agreed that rescues would not be attempted, and the agony of the captured mole was perhaps greater because he knew none was likely to come for him. At dawn his screams became quieter, and later he was found deposited near the defences, mercifully close to death, his snout crushed and his eyes blinded.
It was an experience that Privet, who witnessed the maimed mole being brought back to communal chambers near the Library, could scarcely believe, nor ever forget. In years past such behaviour had called forth savage reprisals by the Crowden moles, but by Hamble’s time, as he himself said, some sense of resolve or purpose had gone from Crowden, and the grikes’ brutal tactics produced the effect of moles wondering why they should struggle on in such a place in the face of such assaults. Why not leave the
Moors and find a better and less brutal place to live?
There were skirmishes, and others were wounded, and two more caught – and returned, dying. One with his snout amputated and in such agony that he was put out of his misery; the other with a wound in his chest so wide and deep that the broken ribs protruded from his body, and each breath he tried to take before he died was an agony that Privet, who was amongst those who tended him, felt herself. Then a third mole was treated in the same way, his face half ripped off, his looks gone, his flanks, so strong, so sturdy, shivering with fear and shock.
In all cases these moles whispered the same name before they died; “Red Ratcher did it; it was Ratcher himself... and one called Grear...”
Bleakly Rooster heard this, and saw what his father and brother had done, and stared blankly at the wounded, and the dying, and the dead. His breathing quickened, his restless paws grew deadly still, and there he would stay until one of the Charnel moles, usually Hume, took him away and tried to divert his shame, anger and frustration into delving more and better defences.
“Can’t do nothing,” Rooster said, “not nothing at all. But want to want to; WANT TO.”
And when he tried to sleep at night with Privet he was restless and distressed, wanting to go out to the defences, to stare into the dangerous night, to do something: to rise up in fury, to attack his kin that brought this agony and death.
“Want to hurt,” he whispered again and again, “want to. Want to kill him. Grikes only bad because leaders bad. I’m grike and I’m not bad.”
As the days passed, and the siege and attempted incursions all about the system continued. Rooster suffered more and more from doing nothing. While Hamble and other males fought to preserve the system, all he could do was delve – and despite others’ praise for what he did, to him it was not enough. So that nowhere was the agony of war.
its fears and its rising hatreds, greater than in Rooster’s head and heart, and passive paws.
The siege went on, and on, and the Ratcher moles, soon learning that the Dark Sound of the eastern defences was impossible to pass, began to probe Crowden’s periphery in places they had not been to before. They were sighted by day, and Hume and Rooster confirmed that the mole who seemed to be in charge and helped do the torturing was Grear, whom they had seen on their escape from the Charnel. But they saw Red Ratcher too, lurking and laughing among his kin, making his violent gestures and shouting obscenely.
They gained intelligence from the prisoners they took that the grikes had come in greater numbers than before, and that under Grear’s and Ratcher’s more effective leadership some from the southern Moors had been persuaded to join the fray. Crowden was in mortal danger, and grim fear and gloom pervaded its tunnels, despite Hamble’s every effort to rally morale.
The Crowden moles, it must be said, stopped short of torturing the grikes they caught, though only because of Hamble’s direct intercession. However, there were some things he could not stop, and questions were not asked about what happened to the prisoners once they had given what information they could – nor about the bodies of grikes that drifted grimly in the lake adjacent to the outer defences to the north.
Meanwhile, Rooster could not be hemmed in all the time, and sometimes when things were quiet he went out on the surface, despite the pleas of Hume and Privet, and Hamble himself. He was drawn to where the action was, as bees are lured to the sweetest flower, and there was no shortage of young moles willing to go out and guard him, as if they felt he was special, and almost a leader. Indeed, none could fail to see that morale lifted and moles felt reassured when he showed his snout.
“He’s a natural leader, Privet, a warrior greater than any of us,” said Hamble. “You can see it in his face, you can almost smell it on him. It’s no good you, or Hume, or any other moles pretending otherwise. He’s made for it.”
“He’s a delver, never forget that, for on it so much depends,” insisted Privet. “I’m beginning to wish I’d never brought him here.”
Early summer came across the Moors as April gave way to May, and still the attacks continued, and the grikes dug into positions all about the system. Slow molemonths of attrition, and occasional mistakes by the Crowden moles. One night, after an ill-conceived attack on the Ratcher clan went wrong, they lost part of their defences when the grikes burrowed in from above and destroyed something of what Rooster’s skill had made, so that ground was lost, and moles as well.
Then more sights of blood and pain, more sounds of agony that moles could not escape; not even Privet down in her Library, working now to seal up as many of the precious texts as she could in secret burrows, against the day when the system might have to be abandoned, or worse, was overrun. In that, at least. Rooster could work with her, and for a time both sought escape from the agonies above in hard work far below, and many texts were hidden.
But now Lime began to be more bold, as if sensing that Crowden was fragmenting in spirit, and opportunities might exist for... play. She became insinuating and clever, whispering things to Rooster when Privet was watching at which he could not but smile, wheedling her feminine attractive way into Rooster’s confidence as he, ever more discontented and restless at being unable to help Hamble more, turned his frustration on those he loved.
Lime was seen with him here, accompanying him there, touching, reaching, mouth open and moist pink tongue that showed when she laughed as she cajoled him to come...
“Where?”
“Oh Rooster! Anywhere.”
All of this poor Privet saw, and suffered at, trying to tell herself that the turmoil and unreasonable jealousy that surged in her, and had her watching out for him and wondering where he was, and what he was doing, and going to places she would not normally go to see if he and Lime were there, and thinking that if they were not, where were they... was uncharitable, before the greater tragedy that was beginning to take Crowden by its throat and destroy it for ever.
Then, suddenly, one afternoon, when Privet was in her Library and blessedly free from jealous fears, all unknown to her Rooster was involved in an affray: nothing much, little more than a brush with grikes down in the defences when he pulled a mole to safety through Dark Sound and faced a talon-thrust towards himself. He did nothing, but the blood of the mole he saved was on him, and he was bruised where he was hit; Lime was quickly in attendance.
/> “Come, Rooster, they don’t like you here,” she purred, and her paw caressed Rooster’s back as they went, and Rooster turned and frowned, not at her, but at the evil that was on them all, which he was, as he had said, prevented from trying to stop. A guard saw them go and grinned and thought of certain things that he would like to do with Lime again – for he had done them once. Lime was a mole who liked males.
“Come delve with me,” she purred to Rooster, and for relief perhaps from the violence of the grikes and the pressure of his peers. Rooster went with her.
A mole need be neither old nor especially wise to imagine what occurred, just as that guard had already imagined what might occur. A pause in a tunnel, the hot breath of a whisper, a quick caress, and Lime, who knew it all, aroused what Rooster thought was his anger, but she knew was his angry lust.
“Leave me. Want Privet now. Not you.”
“Yes, my dear, then go,” she said, her sliding subtle talons hurting him just enough where they explored and caressed to make him feel more angry still, yet stay for more.
“Not here,” she whispered as his great paws turned on her roughly, “not here, my love.”
“Wasn’t going to hurt you,” he said in dismay, as he tried to push her away and she clung on in pretended fear, closer still.
“No,” said Rooster, finding he was holding her.
“Oh yes,” she said, as somewhere out on the edge of the system more screaming was heard as the grikes and Crowden warriors fought again. “Unless you want to be a real mole and go to that.”
“Can’t,” said Rooster.
“Then come with me, my dear, come with me,” and though her paw was ever so gentle in his, its pull was a command, and Rooster was led down one tunnel, and then another, and then a third, to a place all dark and soft and warm which scented good, where a mole did not have to think or. speak, but only touch, and explore, as if it were a delving that he made.
“No,” he said one last time, as her paws rose up his body, firm and sure.