As Midsummer dawned across bleak Whern, the black and awesome darkness in the subterranean Chamber of the Rock of the Word began to weaken towards light, and the sinister shapes of moles to show themselves.
The novices awaiting the terrible rite of acceptance to the sideem had long since gathered, and now formed a mass of moles in the lowest part of the chamber, which ran down to the edge of the lake, on the far side of which the Rock itself rose.
Gradually through the night all twelve Keepers had taken up their stances about the edge of the chamber, except for its furthest, darkest, higher part where nomole but the Mistress of the Word might go.
As the distant rising sun began to play its light at the contorted fissure in the roof high above, all was still and waiting. No sound but the drip and play of water and the high-pitched call of bats above, disturbed by the light, shifting their roosts, uneasy.
Then the Twelve Keepers, as one, began chanting the long gradual which is the preliminary to the rite; a chant whose ancient and subtle timings announce and follow the slow progress of the great shaft of light which comes down into the chamber once the sun is high enough.
At first showing, the shaft of light is but short and stays high among obscure crevices, but then as the gradual continues and the sun above rises, it strengthens deeper into the chamber and brightens all in its path.
The awed novices watch on until suddenly, in a moment they never forget, it reaches the spot where, most mysteriously, the Mistress or Master of the day is revealed in meditative stance: still, fur ablaze with light, eyes impenetrable pools of darkness, ready to give the command that even the most confident novice must dread.
The chant of the gradual deepens and grows louder, the novices feel themselves drowning in its sound as the shaft travels on to the very edge of the lake. As its first dappling reflections shoot out and up and on to the face of the Rock far beyond, the Master or the Mistress speaks.
So, that Midsummer morn, Henbane spoke.
‘Begin,’ she said.
None but a sideem who has survived the ritual can know the shudder of awe, fear, dread, excitement and terror that overcomes the novices at that moment: 'Begin!’
Lives hang now in the balance, and as some will surely end before the day is out, so, truly, do many indeed begin again, changed and wrought darkly by the most testing of the rituals of the Word.
As Henbane spoke the command that Midsummer day a mortal silence fell over the gathering, and the gaze of the novices was concentrated with a fearful intensity on the solitary shaft of light that even now moved on, half on the lake’s shore and half into its deepening edge where, pale green, the limestone shore shelved out and then was gone into the shimmering chill of the water.
The shaft’s brightness served only to make all the rest of the chamber seem dark, but for the massive dappling of the light’s reflections on the water that played back and forth across the Rock and would remain much the same for some hours yet until, its journey across the lake complete, it reached the face of the Rock itself and rose back whence it came, towards the darkness of the night. But by then many of the young eyes now hypnotised by the light would be drowned and dead, and see fight no more. It is – or was – one of the great ironies of moledom that moles of the Word celebrate Midsummer during the day, whilst those of the Stone made their ritual when that day ended, and night returned. But for now … suffer the Word’s vile way …
Henbane remained elevated on that rocky outcrop on the far side of the chamber behind which a high cavern runs into which no sideem may go. There are the remains of previous Masters, their body shapes preserved in the slow encrustations which form as ceiling water drips and water trickles out of unseen tunnels and runs on to feed the great lake.
It was up one of those tunnels, tiny, dark, almost unexplored, that Mayweed had led Sleekit moleyears before, each carrying one of the pups Henbane had borne after her mating with Tryfan. Nameless then, Wharfe and Harebell later, they had been carried past the surface cemetery of the Masters and up into the darkness, their escape made the easier by the awe in which the sideem held that place, and the reluctance with which they followed Henbane’s command to pursue and kill.
Indeed, not a single one of the five sideem who had obeyed her command had returned, lost in the swilling darkness of the tunnels and perhaps taken by drowning into the dread Sinks into which failed sideem are sucked. For in Whern such tunnels are inclined to flood, and moles to drown. There, too, it was presumed, Mayweed, Sleekit, and the pups had been lost and now none but Henbane herself, hoping with a mother’s hope that those pups survived, believed them still alive.
More than once Henbane cast her gaze behind her towards that cavern and the distorted shapes of the Masters dead; her gaze settled on the newest corpse there: Rune’s, the father she killed. Already the surface of his body was slaked and hardened with shining crystals of lime, his black talons turned a milky white, his back sheening into the grotesque and arching form of a centuries-old Master behind him, his snout extending beyond its normal length and dribbling with the drips of that wet place. At his rear, past his distorted right paw, the biggest of the feeder tunnels stretched away to blackness, half blocked by his body. Water trickled out from it; water that might become a flood. Henbane shuddered and turned back to watch the rite commence.
Although at first the mass of moles might have seemed in no special order, in fact to one who knew them it was plain that near each Keeper those novices attached to him had gathered. Apart from Henbane herself, four moles stood out from the rest and these partly by virtue of having taken their places immediately under the spot where she had stanced: Terce, Clowder, Mallice and Lucerne.
Such was his chilling authority that Terce would have been noticeable at any time in any company, but there, that day, for this rite, this quality he had was especially marked.
His large thin body was so still that a mole looked twice to see if he was alive, to which the clues were only his open staring eyes and the just perceptible in and out of his breathing. A little below him, to his right, was Clowder, full grown now and dark, his gaze pitiless, his physical power overt and frightening; to Terce’s left flank was the mole many had looked forward to seeing – Mallice, his daughter. The likeness was unmistakable, for her body and head were thin and dark like her father’s, the eyes similar. Though smaller than both Terce and Clowder there was a quality to her eyes and set of her jaw that warned a mole not to cross her path, the more so that Midsummer day because like others there she was afraid, and fear made her beauteous face look vicious.
The last of this quartet was Lucerne, who had taken a place of special privilege behind and above Terce, and nearest of all to his mother Henbane. The most frightening thing about Lucerne was the fearlessness with which he seemed to face the coming rite. From his dark eyes there came a look of utter confidence overlain with tension and concentration. He did not look like a mole who could fail.
Taken together, these four presented a formidable front and from their position might almost have been taken for a protective guard about Henbane; or else a custodial guard, which many there knew was more the case.
Few truly believed that the Mistress was cured of the madness that had overtaken her earlier in June, and Whern was rife with rumours that these four moles, led by either Terce or Lucerne himself, had nurtured her back to sanity for this day’s rite, and that alone. After … nomole could know. She would have fulfilled her task. Lucerne would be legitimised by the rite and ready to take her place, leaving Terce, his tutor, the second most powerful mole in moledom. If Lucerne wished so to do, none there would gainsay him: the sideem would rather have a strong Master than a failing Mistress.
Other lesser rumours abounded too, of Mallice especially, and of how Lucerne and Clowder had used her – with her acquiescence – and even, darker still, how she and her own father, Terce … but few moles there dared stare at her for long. She seemed to sense when others gazed on her and turned her narrow eyes on them, and left a mole feeling marked for future vengeance if he displeased her. She had something of the power and allurement of Henbane, but none of her strange charm. But now … all that was as nothing before the reality of the rite to come.
‘Begin!’ Henbane had said, and as the echo of her solitary command died away in the high darkness of the Rock the First Keeper came forward.
He was an old, thin mole of withered mouth, but dignified, and he advanced into the water and turned to face the way he had come. As he did he signalled a novice forward and a male broke ranks and came to him. The Keeper began the low chant, in little more than a guttural whisper, which is the start of the ancient liturgy of anointing, his voice cold and strangely powerful in its whispering age, and finding awesome echoes in the distant Rock. Light seemed to thunder down about him as he spoke, and the black water of the lake stirred and lapped away with his movements into the darkest corners of the chamber.
‘Forasmuch as all moles are conceived and born in shame and weakness, spawned of lust and born out of the flesh; forasmuch as born moles cannot please the Word until they have Atoned; forasmuch as allmole without instruction of the Word and mandate from it will die cursed in everlasting pain, and unfulfilled, the Word ordains that chosen moles go out into moledom’s bleak places to convert the lost and blind, to destroy the mindless and the wilful, to set example in word and deed and bring Atonement to those cursed.’
The First Keeper paused and stared about, his front paws dropping half submerged into the water. He stared down at the mole before him who crouched at the very edge of the lake, his snout low.
‘By words and deeds!’ the First Keeper cried out suddenly.
‘Is it not so?’ spoke Henbane sharply.
‘It is so!’ the Keeper whispered back.
‘Forasmuch as this mole has been admitted to the knowledge of the Word,’ continued the Keeper, the other novices now utterly transfixed and staring, ‘may he thank the Word for its complaisance and its pleasure and now be grateful to stand trial in the chill waters of the Word’s judgement. To be found worthy is to live; to be found wanting is to die and journey to the Sinks and there repent his failure in just and everlasting torment. Art thou grateful for this chance?’
‘I am,’ whispered the novice humbly.
‘Art ready?’
‘I am,’ he said yet more softly, his flanks visibly trembling.
‘Then prepare now to submit thy will, and the last vestiges of thy shame and vanity, to the Word’s power and might, here, today, now, before us thy witnesses.’
‘I do!’ said the novice.
The First Keeper now laid his paws on his pupil’s head, and Henbane spoke out the following words in a commanding voice:
‘Of those before us now, some, mighty Word, are unsure and weak, their desires false, their intentions misaligned from thy intent. May thy dark waters punish and damn them and we be witnesses to their shame.’
‘May it be so,’ said the eleven other Keepers.
‘And more than so,’ said Henbane.
This was the signal for the First Keeper to raise the mole before him and turn him to face the Mistress.
‘The novice Brenden, born of Howke, I present to thee for ordination of the Word,’ he said.
‘Dost another make avowal for the novice Brenden, born of Howke?’ said Henbane.
‘I, Fourth Keeper, declare the same,’ said that Keeper, coming forward.
‘Novice Brenden, art thou ready to make the declaration of assent before the Rock and these witnesses?’ said Henbane.
‘I am,’ replied the novice.
‘By this rite thou shalt be sideem or die inglorious. The sideem are the only true representatives of the Word, privy to its secrets, privy to its power, privy to its purpose. They profess the faith in the scriptures uniquely revealed to the Master Scirpus even in this holy place and scrivened by him, whose creeds and articles must be proclaimed afresh by each generation.
‘For this great task thou hast applied, for its training thou wast accepted by the First Keeper, and thou now find seconding by the Fourth. Your testing time has come. In the declaration thou art about to make, thou wilt affirm thy loyalty to the great inheritance of faith, of inspiration, and of guidance through the Master or the Mistress of the day.’
Henbane stopped speaking and a dread silence followed before, faltering at first and then gaining in confidence, the novice Brenden replied in the prescribed words.
‘I, novice Brenden, borne of Howke, will so affirm and declare by belief and trust in the Word and the power of Atonement.’
Then Henbane spoke again.
‘A sideem is called to lead and care for allmole towards the service of the Word, and to show the cursed the way of Atonement. It is his duty to watch over the spiritual health of those in his care, to reward virtue, and to punish without mercy and in the manner taught by the articles of the Word all those infected with error, or who lead others to error in their ways. He acknowledges the absolute power of the Master or the Mistress of the day and teaches others to do the same, that the sideem may be as one, and through their sage ruler follow only the true way.
‘In order that we of the High Sideem may know your mind and purpose, and that those amongst your peers chosen to survive the rite may be witness to your declaration, you must now make the declarations I, your Mistress, put to you.
‘Do you believe, so far as you know in your own heart, that the Word has called you to the office and work of the sideem?’
‘I believe the Word has called me.’
‘Do you accept the scrivened Word as revealing all things necessary for salvation of mole?’
‘I do so believe.’
‘Do you accept the doctrine of Atonement, that the original sin of mole may be eschewed and divorced only through austerity in the Word’s name?’
‘Truly, I believe it.’
‘Will you accept at all times the judgement of the Master or the Mistress of the day, and the discipline of the sideem?’
‘Gratefully I so accept.’
‘Will you be diligent in your study of the Word, in prayer, in discipline, in the upholding of truth against all error?’
‘By the help of the Word, I shall.’
‘Will you strive to shape your life even unto death, according to the Word?’
‘Humbly, I shall.’
‘Will you be witness of the Word and its true prosecutor at all times, always?’
‘As I have been taught, so shall I be.’
‘And now, before we ask novice Brenden to make the final declaration, let us speak thus for him: Holy Word, if it is your will he lives, give him the strength to perform all these things that he may complete that task he has begun in your name.’
‘Be it so!’ cried out the assembled Keepers and novices as one.
‘Then let the Rock be witness to thy faith, let the waters of the lake cleanse thy body, and may the Word have mercy on thee if error lurks within thy heart.’
With these words, Henbane ended the Declaration of Assent, which is the first part of the liturgy of anointing, and nodded sternly at the First Keeper to continue.
In a daze, it seemed, terrified certainly, the novice mole backed slowly into the lake until his rear part was submerged and his balance only kept by the firm hold the Keeper had taken of his right shoulder. It seemed quite certain that the quality of the Word’s mercy was about to be tested.
The Fourth Keeper, who was the novice’s seconder, now came into the water too and, crossing his left paw over the First Keeper’s, he grasped hold of the novice’s left shoulder.
‘By this anointing may he be judged,’ said Henbane as the two Keepers placed their talons around the mole’s throat and, with an almost violent movement, arced him back into the water with a splash so that he was suddenly totally immersed.
Sleekit’s account of what that baptismal act is like says that nothing before prepared her for the jolting shock of the freezing water on her face, snout and eyes, which seemed like sharp stars of pain. To add to the dismay of the moment was the complete disorientation and vulnerability a mole feels in such a posture, made all the worse by being held there until the breath began to burst in the lungs, and panic set in.
Then, said Sleekit, as sudden as the submergence, is the re-emergence into the bright and blinding shaft of light from the fissure high above. Talons, sharp and pressing, turn the novitiate about to face the Rock even as the swirl of dark sound made by the echoed chant of moles against the Rock seems to present a new drowning, and one yet more terrible.
Then the Keeper whispers an urgent, ‘Swim! And may the Word be with thee, mole! Swim and remember all you have been taught! Keep to the left, and do not pause or falter for a single moment. Swim!’
Out into the frightening, chilling, numbing cold of the lake and through the blinding light towards the Rock, which seems to recede with each desperate stroke, seems too far, for the cold numbs the mind almost as fast as it numbs the body. A terrible crushing thing about a mole’s flanks which causes pain between the paws, which stirs at her and seems to seek to suck her down.
So Sleekit told Mayweed and so must it have been for the novice Brenden of Howke as, with the eyes of all upon him, he set off to swim out and make his scriven mark upon the Rock, and then swim back. Anything less was failure. To turn back too soon, the task incomplete, meant a taloning to death by his tutor Keeper and the seconder. To linger too long, to slow, to lose orientation, to succumb to the cold and begin to wander, that meant death as well: the sucking death among the currents that run strong and deep near the centre of the Rock.
‘Keep left! Always left!’ was the traditional advice, and generation after generation of novices wondered why the tutor Keepers were so insistent on it, so boringly repetitive.
But now that novice began to know, by the dread Word he knew! The water was a tightening clasp of cold about him as he passed beyond the shaft of light into the dappling darkness there, and heard what he had been warned he would hear then: the sound of his own frightened and desperate gasping echoing back as dark sound from the Rock ahead.
‘Turn it to your purpose,’ he had been told. ‘Feed on its strength to make more strength, or its weakness will weaken you.’
But he did feel weak, and panicky too, for from the uncharted darkness beneath him he felt the first entwinings of a current, cold and powerful, diverting his paws as they sought to swim him forward. His breath came fast and desperate, and the dark sound worsened into weakness.
That novice tried, as so many had before him, to call upon the long moleyears of training he had had, to conserve his strength to swim resolutely forward to the left side of the Rock and through the strait of death he now found himself in.
‘To the left, to the left,’ his chattering mouth sought to whisper as he saw, nearer now, the ghastly dark maw at the centre of the Rock in which water slurped about and towards which the unseen current began to drag him, and into which a failed mole flounders before he is lost to the eternal damnation of the Sinks.
‘To the … left?’ The memory of his training was leaving him, despair was overtaking his desperate paws, the dark sound echoed back his own slow drift towards surrender and whatever he had been taught seemed beyond his grasp now, lost in the confusion that overtakes a mole succumbing to such death.
His paws reached forward towards the Rock. The left! The left! faint memory said – but the left was drifting away and the dark centre was coming nearer and the lake’s current growing stronger and remorseless.
Fatally he paused to look around for help that was not there, and saw only a shaft of light and the distant shapes of moles, as the current bore him on into the very centre of the dark sound of his own fear. Fear palpable; fear tangible; fear felt as growing pain, and his strokes, such as they were, grew wild and desperate, the Rock huge above him, and on its face the scrivens none had ever seen so close but those about to die.
Then he screamed, the novice Brenden born of Howke, and of his scream the Rock made a dark sound more dread than any yet heard. Like a black talon to pierce and turn in a mole’s gut it came, worse than a snouting it was, and only another scream could he make as the dark water sucked him and turned him as, with one last desperate surge of rational strength, he reached up and touched the Rock even as he was swept into its maw and beyond all hope, ever, of recovery.
A final despairing scream, the scrivening scratches of his paws along the lowering ceiling of the cavern which lies beyond the maw, and then rock abrading his head, water sucking him beneath it, pain all through his body, and the last hopelessness of a mole who knows that all his life’s trials, all his hopes, all his fears, all of everything, even love, even first memory, were leading him to nothing but this dawning hateful unredemptive terror, and the beginning of the bursting of his lungs.
So the novice Brenden was lost to the world. Gone but for his last scream and scratching which redoubled in the Rock’s dark echoes and cast a deep fear and dread over the remaining novices. It was a sound that made the Keepers seem the very agents of judgement and death, and made the Mistress Henbane – dark and still, alluring and merciless – the very embodiment of the Word itself.
‘Next!’ she said, and the First Keeper’s second pupil stumbled forward, and the rite began again.
Three more died before one survived, and that the last of the First Keeper’s group. An ominous beginning, and enough to cast a pall over that Keeper’s future. By the pupils let the tutor himself be judged, so saith the Word.
But when he who survived clambered ashore the palpable fear that had haunted the chamber was overridden by an extraordinary zeal. If one could, others might. The possibility was there. It could be done.
The Second Keeper began his round of anointings, and throughout that Midsummer day, deep in the black heart of Whern, the rite went on. The ominous beginning gave way to a run of survivals as the shaft of light travelled on across the lake towards the Rock.
Then, at the thirteenth anointing, and on to the Fourth Keeper’s group, another death; and another after that; and then a third. Now a grim and dour mood came upon the witnesses to this rite, for moles others knew were dying and more would die among those who waited with nothing to do but stare in growing awe at Henbane or the Keeper performing the ritual, and envy those who had survived.
Over these survivors a striking metamorphosis had taken place. The light of success and confidence seemed to have settled on them, a hard cruel light of moles who have been tried and tested and now feel exclusive, not recognising as worthy of respect any who have yet to prove themselves. Such demeaning of others in the survivors’ eyes is a prime purpose of Whern’s Midsummer rite, and prepares such moles for the tasks of subjugation and tyranny soon to come.
Meanwhile, among those waiting, were brooding Clowder; Mallice; and Lucerne.
It is part of the Twelfth Keeper’s great art to keep the stolidity and confidence of his own group intact as the rite wears on and his novices face a double undermining – from watching moles die, whilst having to face longer than any other group the new power discovered in those who have survived.
Terce seemed to have done his work well, for none of his three pupils flinched or looked unsettled as the day progressed. Their stances were relaxed and sure, and at different times each of them sunk into a whispering meditation. The only perceptible difference was that Terce moved closer to them, and they to him, so that they seemed to form almost a solid mass of mole, formidable and fearsome. Even Mallice, the weakest of the group, seemed to have gained composure.
Above them Henbane stanced her ground unmoving, and yet a watcher might have perceived a change gradually come over her as the rite’s progress led to the Tenth Keeper’s charges (one dead) and then the Eleventh’s (two out of four lost into the Rock’s maw).
Few yet knew for sure, though many guessed, of the struggle that had developed between Henbane and Lucerne in which, so far, Terce had played an ambiguous part. Henbane, who had been hemmed in ever since her return to a semblance of normality by Lucerne and those sideem Terce had set to the task of over-watching her, had agreed to participate in the rite only because she had no other choice.
She did not trust or love her son. Thus far her sole intent was to try and undo what she had done, which was to help others and the Word make of Lucerne’s life a growing evil. Yet she felt powerless and had watched over the course of the rite with growing despair and self-hatred. Those lives that were lost in the maw of the Rock were wasted lives, pointless lives, and she was herself the very instrument of their doom. Yet what confusion swirled inside her as the dark sound swirled without, for each time she raised her paws, each time she spoke that dread word ‘Next!’, she found it harder to keep her composure, harder not to scream out her self-misery.
But she knew well enough that Terce, Lucerne and the others, whatever else they might be, were her guards, and from here there was no easy escape. After the rite was done, and Lucerne legitimised, she knew her life would be forfeit. So what to do but hope, even at this last hour as the rite continued, that some way of stopping Lucerne might still be found.
Outwardly calm, Henbane had inwardly debated long and vigorously what she could yet achieve. Kill him, her son! It might be just possible if he had been nearer. Had she not killed Rune in this same place? Yes, the thought occurred and recurred as the day went by. But if she failed … if others stopped her … then her ignominy would be a glorious beginning to his reign. And, too, killing was not to her talons’ liking any more. Life was what they craved; the life and light they should have known before …
Or hope, perhaps, that he might not survive the rite? That had been her wish when the day began, and before. It would be a fitting end. But watching him, seeing his confidence, seeing that lesser moles than he survived, sensing the confidence that Clowder and Terce seemed to have as well, she doubted that he would fail. Only Mallice seemed weak. That mole might fail, but not Lucerne.
Yet suddenly then she relaxed and seemed to know what to do, and Terce seemed to sense it for he tensed and kept looking at her, his mind puzzling over what she might have thought of. Well … he was prepared for all things. The plans of the great Rune, of which he was the executor, would go on.
The last of the pupils of the Eleventh Keeper stumbled back to land, and already, with but the last three to go, a mood of excitement had come over the assembly. With Lucerne, son of the Mistress, to go, and Mallice, daughter of the Twelfth Keeper, there was a certain gratuitous interest in the success or otherwise of the remaining novices.
Interest, excitement … and tension, too, which came most of all from the Mistress herself. Never had she stanced so still, never with such fearsome authority, and never had her fur seemed so full of light and graceful age, and her eyes so impenetrable.
‘Next!’ she said, and Terce nodded to Lucerne, and slowly Lucerne rose and followed the Keeper to the water’s edge. The rite began as it had so many times already: the tutor Keeper went out into the water, he turned, he raised his paws.
Behind him the great shaft of light began at that moment to shine at last upon the Rock itself, at its dark centre, where the water flowed deep and dangerous and whence the bleakest suckings came. What had been obscure before now became clear, for the watching Keepers, the newly anointed sideem and the three waiting novices could now see all too well the terrible nature of the cavern into which the lake flowed. Above that dark place the light of sun – direct at the base, reflected and dappled above – caught at the great scrivenings of the Rock and made them seem like wild scrivens across a great sky, beautiful and awe-inspiring. The dark sound muttered, water lapped and, once, high and unseen, a bat shrilled.
As Terce opened his mouth to summon Lucerne into the water and begin the Declaration of Assent, Henbane hunched suddenly forward, the first movement she had made for hours. It was enough to shock and still the watching moles.
‘Not him,’ she whispered. ‘Not my son. I judge him yet unready.’
A buzz of excitement and alarm went among the watching moles. The implications were all too plain. Unanointed, Lucerne could not assume any power at all. Unanointed he was less than he had been before, for the others who had come through had something he had not.
For a moment Lucerne himself was still, and then he turned, glowering, while higher on the shore Clowder moved in anger, and Mallice too. Indeed everymole but one seemed disarrayed by Henbane’s quiet and brief announcement, and that one was Terce.
Lucerne seemed about to speak, to shout perhaps, and Clowder ready to rally at his side; a hushed whisper of apprehension went among the moles. Terce alone was calm, the counterpoint to Henbane’s icy stillness.
‘Novice Lucerne,’ he hissed, ‘return to thy place. It is thy Mistress’s will.’
But was there reassurance in his voice? Had he foreseen this move of Henbane’s? Had he already made his plans? Or was he taken by surprise as well and wished his loyalties to remain ambiguous? None knew then, none truly knows now. At all events, he stayed calm and made but one change that others knew of, which was that when the Mistress said ‘Next!’ once more, after Lucerne had grudgingly resumed his place, Terce nodded not at Mallice as he had intended but at Clowder.
The reason was plain enough. If the next that went failed then the Twelfth Keeper’s position would be weak indeed. Of Clowder and Mallice the former was certainly the more likely to succeed, and his success would surely encourage Mallice when she went, and thereafter … not a mole could doubt that Terce was thinking of a way in which Lucerne might gain Henbane’s permission, if not peaceably then by force.
Clowder came forward past a grim-faced Lucerne in a chamber now cast down into a silence of suppressed excitement. The shaft of light was strong on the Rock, from the maw of the cavern now came the loudest suckings yet heard and the lake’s water lapped hungrily at the shore. Not a mole but Terce and Clowder moved.
‘Forasmuch as all moles are conceived and born in shame and weakness …’ Terce began the rite once more, raising his paws over Clowder’s head, his words finding a clear and distant echo all about the chamber.
There was about Clowder’s anointing an assurance that even the strongest moles had not yet shown, and a confidence in the way he rose from submergence and turned, unaided by the Keepers, and began to swim steadily towards the Rock. Not once did he falter, not once deviate, not once slow. But on he went steadily, driving the dark waters before him, the grunt of his breathing powerful, and dark sound subservient to his strength. On, on, watched in awe by the other moles, unperturbed by the occasion, certain of success.
Indeed, his reaching the Rock was almost an anticlimax, for he made his scrivening swiftly and then turned and was coming back, water flowing off his face and back as his body rose with each stroke he made, looming nearer and nearer to the shore once more. He emerged and shook himself dry without the support of anymole, stared balefully around at Henbane, then, instead of joining those other moles who had made the swim successfully, he returned to take stance at Lucerne’s side.
‘Next!’ commanded Henbane icily, and Mallice rose and went past Lucerne and Clowder and advanced towards Terce, her father-tutor, and the rite began once more.
The watching moles regarded Mallice’s progress through the rite, from Declaration of Assent to the moment of immersion, with less interest than they might before Clowder had swum. His triumph had made the whole rite seem easy and had released among the survivors a mood of cheer and renewed excitement. Lucerne seemed diminished and the once-feared Mallice irrelevant; whatever plottings lay between Terce and Lucerne, whatever failings the Mistress might have, she was in the ascendant once more and the survivors could relax and look forward to the pleasures of being acknowledged to be sideem.
It would be hard, impossible perhaps, to say quite why or when they began to pay attention to what, only gradually, mole after mole realised was becoming a scene of profound tension, climax and change in Whern.
Mallice spoke her responses quietly, and though clearly nervous there was something impressive about the almost pup-like sincerity and fragility she seemed to emanate as Terce loomed over her and Henbane and he progressed through the now familiar Declaration of Assent.
Moles seemed to sense that something powerful, something sacrificial, was taking place and that now, in Mallice, a mole most feared for her dark self-centred beauty and closeness to three such moles as Terce, Clowder and Lucerne, there rested something greater than all of them.
Perhaps it was the tension in Henbane’s voice that gave away the fact that if this mole failed then the Mistress would in some way regain power. Perhaps it was the subtle frailty in Terce’s voice, as if at this last moment of the rite he was revealing the attachment he had to this mole, whom all knew to be of his own blood; an attachment that betrayed him and marked him out for dismissal and death. They felt his fear for her.
But more than that there was something in the way the demeaned Lucerne watched her through her rite, something of an attachment which until then none had guessed. Not love, for that short word was never one for Lucerne’s use; nor lust. Nor even liking.
Need … that was it. Need. There was a kindredness between these two, one prevented from taking part in the rite, the other – moles now began to guess – who would almost certainly not have strength for it. Was this then Henbane’s intent in barring Lucerne from the rite, to rob Mallice of the support his success would have brought? To isolate her? And so destroy them both?
If this were so it found confirmation in the strange protective stance that Clowder had taken, and the way he looked malevolently at the Mistress, and then at Terce, as if waiting for a word of command to raise his paws and talon Henbane to death.
Indeed, so overt did his restless anger seem that several Keepers now began to move nearer to Henbane as if, recognising her right to power still and her success in wielding it, they would not allow Clowder or those of his ilk to attack the Mistress of the Word.
But understand this well: this was all unspoken. This was but in the minds of those who watched. And the mole who kept all in control, who kept the anger and the evil there unspoken and contained, was Terce. Still, calm, in control; and all about them the dire whisper of dark sound as the Rock, seeming to respond to what they did and thought, echoed back their silent struggle all about.
Then Mallice was submerged and, rising, she was turned to face the Rock and with the familiar last whispered advice that goes to such novices, ‘Keep left! Keep left!’ was gone out into the unforgiving lake.
She swam more slowly than great Clowder, but steadily enough at first, and in good line. The shining maw was to her right, her strokes were steady, the lake lapped darkly, the dark sound did not grow unkind.
But just when she seemed in reach of the Rock and as the moles began to relax she gasped, suddenly and audibly, and the dark sound cruelly gathered in the Rock above her, and she gasped again, and her distress began to deepen.
Now Mallice declined towards the fateful and terrible ending that the watching moles had already witnessed so many times before that long Midsummer day. Her strokes grew weaker and when she finally reached the Rock it was to falter and slide to her right along its lowering edge, such scrivening as she made weak and pathetic as she tried to push herself away and turn to swim the long impossible route back to the shore across water that swirled and raced with the dragging currents of the lake.
Her gasps were almost screams, her strokes became more frantic, her progress back slowed, she half turned, she saw above her the rising Rock and the maw of its sucking cavern and she cried out these memorable words, cried out as no other novice ever had before: ‘I shall not die! Your power, Word, is in me! I shall not die!’
On the shore the moles most affected by her fate were dumb and still. Terce loomed in the water, staring; Clowder hunched forward, one paw advanced as if wanting to reach out and bring her back. On Lucerne’s face was … what? What word exists for a feeling others do not feel? No word at all. Loss, anger, despair, kindredness … strange pride.
‘I shall not die!’ she had said, and Lucerne looked … proud? Even as the waters sucked her towards eternal pain? He did! Hunched forward like Clowder, eyes narrowed, snout thrusting, his elegant flanks and fur that caught the dark light of the chamber expressive of a mole about to thrust his talons into the very heart of time and turn it to his use. His breathing quickened, he sensed his potent time was almost come.
But now something more came to that hateful chamber as the others there, seeing Mallice so near death, wishing to align themselves to the one who would win the unspoken contest that was taking place before their eyes, instinctively began a dark chant to urge the female of Terce’s seed on to her death.
Slowly Lucerne looked around at them. The guttural chant whose principal refrain might have been Die, die die! was amply matched by the snarled and torsioned curls of their mouths and teeth, and the swelling of their reddening eyes. Die, and the rite is done and we can begin our celebration. Die, and our lives as sideem begin. Die, for thy lingering keeps us from what we would the sooner have.
It was a chant whose driving rhythm found like echo in the Rock that now soared above Mallice’s pathetic struggling form as, drawn down by that sucking current beneath the lake’s surface, she desperately tried to reach up the Rock’s slippery face and the cavern’s roof to hold herself from the grasp of death.
Her talons scraped and scrivened at the Rock and she began to add her own scrivenings to the ancient and evil ones already there.
But … ‘Die!’ the chant cried out to her.
‘Die!’ the Rock above echoed back, sending out a sound so vile that horror came to all who heard it, and their eyes widened and their senses seemed to attune ever more to where there was weakness in that great chamber – which was where Mallice struggled and where, the only one there absolutely still, her father Terce, Twelfth Keeper, his reputation dying in some strange evil way out on the water before him, stared too.
Weakness there seemed now in that mole of towering strength, Clowder, for he too was still and staring and helpless as the companion of his training moleyears continued to die before his eyes.
Little wonder that such mite of pity as there was that day in that place was all unseen. Yet may the Stone be praised for what it gives, pity was there. Coursing as a single tear down one mole’s face: Henbane’s. She who had most to gain from the death of Mallice was the only mole there with heart enough to pity her. So far along the hard way towards the light had Henbane travelled, so far but no further.
For no others tears flowed, but rather her eyes hardened as she remembered that in the death of this mole Mallice some measure of hope that Lucerne’s growing power might be stalled remained alive. So Henbane pitied, but did nothing more.
Then a strange forbidding silence began to fall, as if the dark sound had reached its peak of frightfulness and found no more moles on which to dwell and swell its evil. So, an echo turning back on itself, it began to die and the moles there began to know a fear worse than any they had so far felt, now or ever before: a fear of a silence they had never even suspected existed before in which a mole, truly, as the Word taught, was nothing.
In that silence the moles witnessed an astonishing thing: Mallice still alive. Mallice clinging to the Rock, cursing, blaspheming, fighting for life and not sucked in, her talons tight to some cornice or cleft at the maw of the cavern and the dark, angry flow of the lake water at her body. Her screams had gone, her gasps had gone, and now in the silence the moles heard the answer to their guttural chant for death: the short, sharp breathing of a mole who has a will to live.
‘I shall not!’ whispered Mallice, and each mole heard those words as a charge against themselves. Each mole trembled, each felt anger, each felt frustration. She who should be dead was not. The Rock seemed defied. The Rock was demeaned. And yet there was glory in that moment, and revelation, and, surviving but yet unsaved, Mallice dared to laugh.
Then Lucerne moved. Forward. Slowly. As if dark shadows had taken life and moved out into the light. As if the chamber’s very shape was being realigned.
‘Tutor Keeper,’ he said, ignoring his mother Henbane utterly, ‘I shall make the Declaration of Assent. Now!’
‘He shall not!’ cried Henbane.
Clowder turned towards her, and seemed half inclined to attack her then and there, but Terce whispered, ‘Novice Clowder, thou art not a sideem yet. The rite is not concluded. But it is the Mistress herself who blasphemes. This mole seeks to make the Declaration and he cannot be denied.’
Henbane stared powerless as Clowder turned back towards Lucerne, hunched over him protectively, and nomole there to stop him or defy him as Lucerne entered the water, turned and began in a rapid powerful voice to speak out the Assent.
‘I believe … I so believe … I believe it … so I shall be!’ he cried, uttering the responses boldly as Terce spoke his own part of the litany and that of the Mistress as well. Shock at such seeming blasphemy was palpable about them and some of the other Keepers stirred uncertainly, wishing to protest, but the light and the power of the moment seemed gathered about Lucerne and so confident, so overpowering was the speed and utterance of his litany, so at one with the darkness and the light in the chamber about him, so matching it was the defiance that came from the struggling Mallice out at the very portal into suffering, that nomole there dared gainsay it, or him. And nor, for good measure, would any have tried but with the certain knowledge that even as they spoke their protest Clowder would have raised his talons and dashed the life from them.
Then Terce signalled to Clowder to come to his side, and the two moles – one most senior Keeper of all and the other the most recently anointed sideem – sought to reach forward and immerse Lucerne in the holy sanctifying waters of the lake.
But even this he would not have.
He waved them back imperiously and then, alone and untouched, he turned to face across the lake towards the Rock. He dipped his paws in the water, he raised them and tumbled the water’s shining darkness in cascades upon himself.
‘Word, to thy service I commend myself,’ he said. ‘Anointed by thee alone. To thy care I commit my body, to thy will I commit my soul, to thy purpose I commit my life.’
With this he thrust off into the water and swam out towards the Rock, but not to the left, nor to the right, but straight to its darkest heart and very centre where Mallice awaited him.
Nomole who witnessed that fabled moment in Whern’s dread history, save Henbane alone, ever gainsaid the dark glory and evil wonder of that moment. But for her it seemed a moment of turning evil.
Out swam Lucerne, swift and sure, and if Clowder’s swim had seemed powerful his appeared as if preordained to triumph by the lake and Rock itself.
The waters drew him on, the shaft of light cast down upon the Rock and dappled now in reflections as he went lighting his way.
This was the Master in the making. This was Scirpuscan power reborn. This was of such power that anymole who saw it would follow him for evermore. Anymole but Henbane.
To the right flank of Mallice he went, defying the current that ought to have swept him on, turning without seeming to need to touch the Rock for support at all.
‘Return to thy life renewed! I, thy Master now, so order it!’ he cried out to Mallice. Dark sound whispered, strength came to her, and she who had so nearly died now swam out against the current and defied it. Back towards the awestruck moles she came, across the dappled water, as Lucerne watched, his power beyond questioning.
Then he turned, stared up at the Rock and then, as the waters seemed to surge and raise him up, he reached forward his talons and scrivened bold and mightily across the Rock’s great face.
Such dark sound sounded then that moles covered their ears in fear, moles closed their eyes in terror, and moles sought vainly to bury their snouts in the unyielding ground.
Then, when that sound began to die, they looked back across the lake, and saw Mallice coming and Lucerne protectively behind. While on the shore Clowder waited for the mole who, the moment he touched the shore once more, must surely be acknowledged Master; and for she who, saved by him, would be his consort and mistress.
So they stared, and might have stared on had not a sudden movement to their right reminded and alerted them that the Mistress was witness to her own supersession. They turned as one and saw Henbane turn before them, back and gone into the cavern wherein the Master, dead, lay encrusted by the flow of time.
‘Take her!’ cried out Terce. ‘By my power as Twelfth Keeper I order thee to follow her to where the Masters of the past lie still, and take her!’
So it was that Lucerne’s triumphant return to shore with Mallice was overtaken by a rush of moles up to that raised place where Henbane had been, and then on to where she had retreated among the encrustations of the past.
The first there saw her at that tunnel’s mouth from which one of the feeder streams came down, with the contorted body of Rune, limed over, at her side.
‘Take her!’ roared her son Lucerne, Master designate, as he reached the shore and sought to scramble up to where she had been. ‘All favour to him who gets his talons on her first!’
Ominous and strange what happened next. Unreported until now. Distasteful. A precursor of worse to come.
Henbane seemed unsure, as if to flee was to turn towards an unknown that even now she feared more than the evil from which she fled. But moles advanced upon her, greedy to touch their talons to her hallowed flanks. Greedy for the favour her capture might bring.
Quickly she turned, suddenly she stumbled, and her left paw fell upon the flank of her dead father Rune. So vile, so unexpected what happened then.
Rune’s flank cracked. Rune’s dead body burst. The encrustation broke beneath her paw and revealed a body rotted into slime and dark tuberous remnants, sliming odorous protrusions that burst and spattered, slid and flowed down towards the moles that advanced on Henbane. The smell was viler than moles had ever smelt before, as if all evil was concentrated in the squirting cracking thing that Rune’s body had become.
For a long moment Henbane floundered in her father’s body’s rotten flesh, then she screamed; and as the odour of what she had disturbed rose up she screamed once more and found the strength to push on past it, leaving its sliming flow in her wake, a wave of vileness that stopped the pursuing moles in their tracks.
Some pulled back; others, too late, found their snouts and mouths caught by the filthy stuff and retched and vomited where they were. While others, behind these ones, were overtaken by the horror of the smell and turned away, deaf to the cries and orders of Lucerne, their paws to their retching mouths, their eyes watering into blindness.
Most strange of all was Lucerne. Such was the confusion of the moles ahead of him that he could not break through; and yet he retched not and seemed unaffected. The rottenness of death had no hold on him.
‘Catch her!’ he cried, but nomole could obey.
‘Then to the surface!’ was all he could command. ‘Find her and the Word will judge her through me!’
So, out through known tunnels Lucerne led them; the rite was done and power transferred in confusion, and a new Master made and eager to mete punishment on the Mistress whose power he had stolen.
While deep in the heart of Whern, unseen, alone, Henbane fled her father’s broken cadaver. Retching, near to being sick, she ran on gasping and desperate, not knowing that those who had sought to follow her were not behind. To flee the rottenness, she headed for light and air. She ran from power to powerlessness, from being the pre-eminent mole of her time to being nothing.
The more she went on and that stench was lost behind her, the more she sensed the freshness of life that lay ahead. On and on, towards the glimmering of new light.
And she laughed, and she cried, and she whispered as she went, ‘Lead me, help me on, take me to where those I lost so long ago still live. Lead me …’
She went where good Mayweed had once gone, she ran in the steps of brave Sleekit, she seemed to know that this was how her pups whose names she did not yet know had escaped.
‘Help me!’ she whispered as she went. And the tunnel helped her on until the air was clear, the light was good and she surfaced high on Whern, into the last of the Midsummer sun and saw its glory across the sky, and its new hope.
‘Give me strength!’ she said, and as the sun shone upon her aged fur she turned and went across the fells of Whern to seek out what light her life would still give her time to find.
‘I shall find you,’ she whispered to the pups she had lost so long ago, ‘and you shall teach me what I was denied.’
Peace began to come to her and sometime then, among the humble peat hags there, she saw a pool of water. But it was not black or stained as such pools are, but rather seemed as clear as a summer’s day, shining with the blue and white of a great sky, and into it she went and cleansed herself.
‘By the light that makes this water bright I am reborn,’ she said. Then she came out and took a stance on the open surface of the moor, and let the wind dry her fur, and felt the evil that had been her inheritance leave her.
‘My name is Henbane no more,’ she said. ‘Whatever task I still can do, grant that I do it well.’
The Midsummer sun began to fade and gave the mole that had been Henbane, and now seemed nomole at all, the security of darkness to make her escape; the special darkness of Midsummer Night.
The special Night when others, far away from that place called Whern – moles whose hearts are turned not to the Word’s dark sound but towards the Stone’s great Silence – touch each other’s paws, raise up their eyes and pray for those less fortunate than themselves, who wander lost but seek to find the hardest thing of all: the better way.
So, that night, did an old female go out alone at last, free to find the self that once, by a lake dark and forbidding, before a Rock, her parents took away from her.
‘Which way?’ she whispered to herself. Then with a sigh, and trusting to herself at last, she journeyed on. Which way?
Moles, let it be towards our prayers she comes.