Duncton Wood

Chapter One

September. A great grey storm swept its pelting rain up the pastures of Duncton Hill and then on into the depths of the oaks and beeches of Duncton Wood itself. At first the wind lashed the trees, which swayed and whipped each other in the wet. But then the wind died and solid rain poured down, running in rivulets down the tree trunks and turning the leaf mould of the wood into a sodden carpet, cold and wet.

And the noise! The endless random drumming of the rain drowning every other sound—not a scurrying fox or a scampering rabbit or a scuffling mole could be heard above the noise. Until, when all had found their burrows, the wood was as still in the endless eternal rain as a lost and forgotten tunnel.

All the moles but one were deep in the ground, hiding themselves from the wet and noise: safe and sound in the warmth of their dark burrows.

Only solitary Bracken stayed out, crouching up on top of the hill among the great beeches that had swayed in the wind and at the coming of the rain and now stood in sullen surrender to it, dripping and grey.

He had left the fighting and the talons of the tunnels far behind below the hill and found himself now in the shadow of the great Stone, the curious isolated standing stone that stood silent and huge at the highest point of the wood. It was tens of millions of years old and it looked its age—hard, gnarled and grey. There were others like it scattered across the Downs of southern England, remnants of the mass that once covered all the chalk. As heartstones of the old mass they retained its rhythm, and this gave them a life and mystery that every creature sensed. Until some, like the moles, learned to turn to them at times of thanksgiving or wonder, suffering or pain. Or change, as Bracken did now.

He had been there since the early afternoon when the shifting September sky, now blue and clear, now white and cloudy, had given way to the deep mauve-greys of storm-clouds. He had crouched, enthralled, sensing the rain lash the country far away in great sweeps of wet, and in awe of the white lightning whose bright flashes his eyes only dimly saw, and the strong shakings of the thunder that entered his body. He felt the storm coming closer and closer, looming towards and above him, and then finally all around, the wind ruffling his fur before the rain turned it shiny black.

Now he was absolutely lost in it, his paws seeming part of the ancient ground on which they rested, his fur seeming the sky itself, his face the wind and rain. Bracken was lost, no longer conscious of what he thought he was. Not a mole, but a part of everything. As the rain beat down upon him it finally washed away a hopeless desire he had long struggled with—to be a mole like so many of the others, with talons flashing, fighting, rough and tough and eating worms with a hungry crunch.

When he laughed they didn’t laugh, but in the rain it no longer mattered. When he lay still as surface roots they fought and strove, and as the rain ran off his shining black fur into the leaves, he knew it would always be like that. When he made for a shaft of sun among the ferns they pointed, nervous, to the owl heights above, and always would. He had lived three moleyears alone and in silence, struggling with his desire to run down and back to try to start again with them, but now that desire was being washed away forever in a storm. There was nomole, not in the Duncton system at least or that he knew of, to share his love of the sun and his hatred of talons.

Above him the Stone was running with rain, leaning away from the beech tree whose roots entwined its base, towards the furthest hills and vales his weak eyes could never see. Towards the west where Uffington lay. But he could feel the world beyond like sun upon his face and it was greater, far greater, than the system in which he had been born and which, in a storm, he now shed.

He crouched surrendered like this for a long time before he became even dimly aware that another mole was near him, watching him from a clump of green sanicle. He didn’t move; he wasn’t afraid. Indeed, after he realised that somemole was there, he started thinking of something different—how strange it was that as evening fell the sky grew lighter. Perhaps it had something to do with the softening rhythm of the rain…

He was right, for high above the hill the swirling masses of the stormclouds gave way to cliffs of whiter cloud and the rain’s noise became a patter as the irregular drip of individual droplets from the trees that surrounded the clearing around the Stone could be heard once more.

Then, as the mantle of rain dropped from him, he turned to face the watching mole with no fear and little interest. The mole was a little older than he, and female. From the great distance he felt himself to be in, he sensed rather than watched her, feeling her to be perplexed, anxious, lost. To his surprise he sensed no aggression at all towards him, none whatsoever, though she was as big as he was. Almost an adult, but not quite. Finally she came forward into the open by the Stone.

‘I’m lost. How do I get back into the system?’ she asked. He didn’t answer immediately, so she added, ‘I’m a Duncton mole, you know.’

He knew all right; he could tell by the way she was, the woody scent. His silence was not suspicion, as she seemed to think, but pleasant surprise—nomole had ever asked him a favour like this in the days when he had lived in the main system.

‘It’s easy,’ he said, ‘very easy.’ She seemed happy at this, relaxing in his calm as she rubbed her head with one of her paws and waited. Suddenly he scurried past her down the hill, by a track she had crossed a dozen times in her journey up the hill: one of the ancient forgotten tracks up to the Stone.

‘Come on,’ he called. ‘I’ll show you.’ They twisted and turned down the wet track, the great evening clouds swirling between the treetops high above, while the wet fronds of the undergrowth tumbled rainwater on to their fur. He darted this way and that, down and down the hill, until she was quite out of breath following him. Suddenly, by a fallen oak branch, he stopped at an entrance she knew, dark, warm and inviting.

‘There you are!’ he said. ‘I told you it was easy. You know where you are now, don’t you?’ Yes, yes she did, and she nodded, but she was thinking of him, looking right into him it seemed. He remembered no other mole ever looking at him like this: curious, compassionate, friendly. Suddenly she came forward and touched him with her paw, or rather caressed him on his shoulder, for a second that he remembered a lifetime.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘I’m Bracken,’ he said after a moment, and then suddenly turned and scurried off up the track and into the evening light. And light dawned on her. She gasped and reached out after him and started to run back the way he had gone. Bracken! So he was Bracken! So hunched, so small, so defenceless.

‘I’m Rebecca,’ she called. ‘My name is Rebecca.’ But he was gone long before the words were out. Then she stopped and turned back to the tunnel he had led her to and ran with relief back into the depths of the main system.

At the spot by the entrance to the tunnel where she had touched him so briefly the air was very still and quiet, with just the drip, drip, drip of the last of the rain from the trees, while far away the heart of the storm moved on across country, leaving Duncton Wood to the silence of the evening and its higher deserted part to the silence of the Stone.

Chapter Two

The entrance down which Rebecca ran so thankfully was the highest of those leading into the main Duncton system. Above it the wood narrowed to the summit of the hill, flanked on one side, the southeast, by the steep, rough face of the chalk escarpment and to the west by rolling pastures that fell gently away to clay vales in the distance.

Up there the chalk reached nearly to the surface of the ground, yielding only a thin, worm-scarce soil, but supporting tall grey beech trees whose fall of leaves formed a dry, brown rustling carpet in the wood. The roots of the trees twisted like torn flank muscles among the leaves, while here and there a patch of shiny chalk reflected the sky.

There was always a windsound there, if only just a murmur among the leaves. But sometimes the strong grey branches of the trees whipped and cut the wind into whines and whispers; or a tearing screech of winter gales raced headlong up from the slopes below, exploding into the trees on top of the hill before rushing on over the sheer scarp face, carrying a last falling leaf or tumbling a dry and broken twig out and down to the chalkfall below.

This highest and most desolate part of Duncton Wood is also the most venerable, for beneath its rustling surface is the site of the ancient mole system of Duncton, long deserted and lost.

Here too stands the great Stone, at the highest point of the hill where the beeches thin out, bare to all the winds—north, south, east and west. And from here a mole might see, or rather might sense, the stretching triangle of Duncton Wood, spreading out below to the escarpment on the east side and the pastures on the west, with the marsh, where nomole goes, beyond the northern end.

At the time Bracken and Rebecca first met, and for many generations before, the system lay on the lower slopes of the hill where the wood was wide and rich. There the beeches gave way to oaks and ashes and thick fern banks, and pockets of sun in the summer. Down there, birds sang or flittered, while badgers padded and barked at night. Down there, life ran rich and good with a worm-full soil black with mould, moist with change. There the wind was slowed and softened by the trees.

Nomole, not a solitary one, lived now up in the Ancient System. Slowly they had migrated from the desolate heights, rolling down through the generations as a pink mole pup rolls blindly down a slope too steep for its grip. First its stomach rolling over its weak front paws, then its soft talons scrabbling uselessly at the soil, then its rump and back paws arching over, until at last it lies still again. So, bit by bit, the generations had come down to the lower system where the wood lay rich and welcoming. They migrated still, but only from one side of the wood to the other, as each new generation left its home burrows in the middle of summer to make burrows for itself or reoccupy deserted ones.

In Bracken’s time the strongest group in the system were the Westsiders, whose burrows flanked the edge of the wood next to the pastures. The soil there was rich and much desired, so only the toughest moles could win a place and defend it. With the dangerous Pasture moles nearby as well, Westsiders needed an extra measure of aggression to survive. Naturally they tended to be big and physical, inclined to attack a stranger first and ask questions after. They laughed at physical weakness and worried if their youngsters didn’t fight the moment they were weaned. Gentler moles like Bracken, whose father, Burrhead, was one of the strongest of the Westsider males, had a tough time of it. They were ridiculed and bullied for not wanting to fight and only the most wily learned quickly enough that to survive they needed to be masters of compromise, cajolery and the art of disappearance at times of trouble.

Eastsiders were less aggressive. They lived on a drier, harder soil, which made for fewer of them. They were small and stocky and superb burrowers. Independent, not to say eccentric, Eastsiders were rarely seen and hard to find, for their tunnels spread far in their worm-poor soil. Their territory was bounded to the east by the steep drop of the chalk scarp and to the south by the rising slopes of the hill.

Northwards lay the marsh, where the air hung heavy and damp with strange rush grasses clicking scarily above a mole’s head. Although the Duncton moles called it marsh, it was in fact a range of poorly drained fields, permanently wet from the two streams that started near the edge of the wood where clay overlay the tilted chalk. Because the marsh was always waterlogged, it couldn’t be burrowed, which made it dangerous ground for moles. The smell was wrong, the vegetation different, the noises of birds and other creatures strange and terrifying. The marsh assumed vast proportions in their minds, a place of dark, dank danger never to go near.

The northern stretch of the wood next to it was called the Marsh End and the moles who lived there—the Marshenders—were feared and reviled, as if they carried a curse from the dangerous place they lived so near. They were felt to be a treacherous lot, known to attack outsiders in twos or threes, something the Westsiders would never do. They were unhealthy, too, for if disease came to the system, it always seemed to start in the Marsh End. Their females were coarse and mocking, inclined to spur on their mates with encouraging shouts or mock them the moment they suffered defeat, switching their loyalties at the fall of a talon.

No one group lived on the slopes above the main system below the top of the hill. Just a few older, hardy moles, who liked to tell stories of the old days and who ekedout a scraggy living in the poorer chalky soil there. Many went mateless in the spring, and few pup cries were heard there in the April weeks.

Nomole knew the whole system—it was too large—but all knew and loved its centre: Barrow Vale. Here the elder burrows lay, and in early spring white anemones glistened between the trees before the bluebell carpet came, mirroring a clear spring sky.

At Barrow Vale a pocket of gravelly soil caused the oaks to thin out, creating a natural open space warmed by the sun in summer, white and silent in the snow of deep winter, always the last place of light in the wood at nightfall. Being wormscarce because of the poor soil, its tunnels were communal and everymole went there without fear. It was a place of gossip and chatter, where young moles met to play and venture out, often for their first time, on to the surface. It was relatively safe from predators, too, for the tunnels that radiated from it to all parts of the system made for early warning of an approaching danger long before it arrived.

As for owls, the most fearsome enemies of the moles, they rarely came there, preferring the wood’s edge where they could wait in the trees and dive down on their prey clear of the branches. So, for a Duncton mole, Barrow Vale was a place of security to go back to from time to time.

Yet it had also become something of a trap as well. For long, long before, when the system had been smaller, up on top of the hill, with the Stone as the natural centre, the lie of the land had made the moles outward-looking, seeking new places, eager to follow their snouts into the distance. But lower Duncton Wood was worm-rich and safe, so it was foolishness to want to go outside it.

Inevitably there were dark stories of those who had tried and always, so it seemed, met a terrible end. Some had actually been seen being torn in the talons of an owl almost the moment they set paw on to the pastures; some had died of sadness, others had suffocated in the mud of the marsh.

But generally, few moles concerned themselves with these places or such fears: they kept their snouts clean, fought for their own patch, found and ate their worms, slept in their dark burrows, and pulled themselves through the long moleyears of winter until, blinking but aggressive, they came out in spring for the mating time.

Each full moon represented the passing of another moleyear, with the Longest Day at Midsummer the happiest time and the Longest Night—at the end of the third week of December—the darkest and most treacherous: a time to placate the Stone with prayers and to celebrate the safe passage into the start of the new cycle of seasons in the snug safety of a warm home burrow. A time to tell stories of fights gone by, and worms and mates to come. A time to survive.

A place to survive! By the time Rebecca and Bracken were born, that was all the once proud Duncton system had become. Its pride was all in the past when, setting out from the shadow of the great Stone, many a young adult male ventured forth from Duncton Wood carrying its name far off to other systems. Inspired by the talk of scribemoles, many of them headed for the Holy Burrows of Uffington, others simply wanted to show that they could live for a while alone, or in other systems, and then come back with new experience and wisdom to their home system. And how exciting it was when one returned! Word would go round the chalky tunnels of the Ancient System and many would gather about him and give him worms for encouragement as he told his stories. Of fights and strange places and different customs. A very few were able to tell how at Uffington they had had the honour to see, perhaps even to touch, one of the legendary White Moles said to live there.

But that was past. Even the oldest mole in the system, Hulver the elder, could not remember a time when a mole had left the system and returned, or a time when the system had been visited by a friendly mole. Hulver himself rarely talked of the past—he tried but had found that the ears of the new generations seemed increasingly deaf and he had given up. He preferred to mutter and sing to himself, picking out his hard life as one of the isolated moles who lived in the worm-poor slopes below the hilltop.

Once in a while he would talk, though, and the moles around would listen out of respect for his age (or rather for his ability to survive). Indeed, after the last elder meeting before the Longest Night preceding Bracken’s birth, when everymole was in a mellow mood, he had told a group of chattering moles in Barrow Vale: ‘I can remember my father telling me that the system used to be visited each Midsummer year by a scribe from the Holy Burrows.’ (And old Hulver inclined his head to the west where Uffington lay.) ‘He would crouch with the elders by the great Stone, for that was the centre of things then, and question them about the state of the system.

‘But even when I was young, it was a long time since a scribemole had been. They said then, and I believe it now, that something happened to stop the scribes coming and that no scribe could ever come again. If I had known that to be so when I was young—when I was your age,’ he added, looking especially at the younger moles about him, ‘I think I would have gone forth as my father’s father did, even if it meant that, like him, I never came back.’ But Hulver was old and they dismissed this last comment as old age talking, a foolish dream that might have crossed each of their minds at one time or another, but which none with sense should listen to.

Yet Hulver was right: something had happened. The system, the Ancient System of Duncton—a system whose glorious past was written up by the scribes in some of the most venerable histories in Uffington—Duncton had been cut off.

It was isolated, anyway, by the sheer chalk escarpment, and the marsh to the north. And then, in Hulver’s grandfather’s time, the road that had always been a hazard far off to the north and west had been developed so that it was uncrossable for moles, or hedgehogs, or almost any creature.

Scribemoles charged with the fearful task of visiting Duncton had tried and failed. Some were killed on the road by what the moles who lived near it called ‘the roaring owls,’ some never had the courage, or the faith, to venture on to it at all.

So Duncton had been left unvisited, safe enough in its isolation but declining in spirit through the years for want of the kind of stimulus new moles, especially scribes, could give. Many of its traditions died, only the most important, like the trek of the elders to the Stone at Midsummer—and on the Longest Night—surviving. Its legends and stories were passed down but in an increasingly romantic or simple form, for few of the new moles had the love of language or spiritual strength that taletellers of the Ancient System had had.

Yet had they been able to know what was happening in other systems, the Duncton moles might have drawn a small consolation from the fact that their own decline merely echoed a decline in the spirit and energy of moles in general. Even the scribes were not quite what they had been, for in the past a scribe would have made his way to Duncton Wood, revelling in the trial to his soul that the new dangers created; and once there he would have left no doubt about what he thought of the fat, sleek, complacent mole the Duncton mole seemed often to have become.

But would the Duncton moles have cared? Certainly most of the seven elders of Bracken’s youth would have been unimpressed by a scribe’s comments, for they were of the new breed, born with the inward-looking attitude of the lower system. Elders like his own father, Burrhead, for example, simply would not have understood a scribemole’s comments about the lack of spirit at Duncton: ‘Haven’t we got worms, don’t we defend the system, aren’t there plenty of youngsters coming out?’ That’s what he would have said.

Rune was another elder, originally from the Westside as well, though to be near the centre of things he had moved his burrow nearer to Barrow Vale. He was a menacing mole who wove warning into his words, which were usually as dark and dank as the Marsh End soil. What he lacked in terms of Burrhead’s size and muscle he more than made up for in cunning and deviousness. His ear was tuned to disaster, for he knew when the bad weather was coming or when a tree might fall. He knew when the owls were hungry (and was capable then of leading his opponents to a place where they might become owlprey) or where disease might be found.

He was always the clever one, was Rune, always so clever. But you didn’t stay long with him without sadness creeping into you and a desire for clean air in your fur. You didn’t meddle with Rune either, because a terrible thing would happen to moles who did: they seemed to die.

His voice was cold as ice, dry as dead bark and covered with the red velvet of a dangerous sky. Nomole liked to fight him, nomole ever came forward who ever saw him kill. Yet each mating time he would kill for a mate, luring his rival somewhere dark and treacherous. Rune was a shadow on life, and much feared.

‘He’s the clever one, he is,’ moles were inclined to whisper about him. ‘He’ll know when his opportunity comes. He’ll take over the system one day with his cunning ways and warning words.’

Two elders came from the north of the system, Mekkins and Dogwood. Mekkins was the nearest the system ever got to having a Marshender as an elder for his mother was from there, though he was raised in the neutral territory north of Barrow Vale. He spoke in the quick snouty way Marshenders used, and enjoyed combining direct talk with a mocking turn of phrase.

‘Yer not going to tell me yer serious about that daft idea, Burrhead me old lad?’ he’d say to one of the Westsider’s more ponderous ideas. ‘You’ll not get anymole I know ter go along with it. I’ll tell you that right now.’

His contacts with the Marshenders made him a useful elder, while his contacts with the other elders made him useful to the Marshenders. He was tough and quick, and likely to flare up for no reason at all, as it seemed to the victims of his temper. Dogwood, the other elder from the north, was his close friend and, as close friends often are, a complete contrast. He was plump and perennially cheerful. He had the reputation, envied throughout the system, of being the best wormfinder in Duncton Wood. ‘He’d find a worm in a snowflake if he had to’ was how Mekkins once put it.

The oldest of the elders was Hulver, who had seen six Longest Nights through—six!—and it made many a Duncton mole gasp to think of it. But he was old now, very old, and had not mated last spring. But he was still cheerful and sprightly, with a way of laughing at the end of a sentence that made a mole think that nothing he said was more than a joke. But wiser moles knew better, and listened well to what he had to say. In his lifetime he had seen the system decline and had often said so. He was one of the few who remembered the old rituals and sayings and he talked of the Stone as if it were a friend at his flank.

‘The less that he do say, the more then he do mean,’ his confidant, colleague, fellow elder and hearty protagonist, Bindle, was fond of saying. Bindle himself had seen four Longest Nights through and though he fought little and was one of the eccentrics who lived over on the poor Eastside near the chalk escarpment, he was never short of a mate.

He and Hulver would often meet and chatter in the wood, old moletalk about worms and past summers, and mates and litters the like of which you never saw today. ‘No, sir! The females just aren’t what they used to be!’

Between them, Hulver and Bindle had taken over the duties of conducting the rituals, principally the two treks up to the Stone at Midsummer and Longest Night. Only Hulver knew all the rituals, and he worried that no other mole knew them as he did. But somehow, Bindle himself never wanted to learn them, not the important parts, the parts that mattered. And the truth was that Hulver didn’t want to teach them to him. For to speak the rituals you had to know that power of life was in the Stone, and outside it, too. And you had to see that an acorn, a worm, an anemone in Barrow Vale, and even a swooping owl were finally the same, and that a mole’s strivings were nothing but the crack of an acorn husk in a deserted wood.

Hulver tried to explain to Bindle, but the words wouldn’t come right; and Bindle, who loved old Hulver as if he were his own father, could only smile and nod as he tried to explain, and wish he could please his old friend by understanding. But both knew he did not.

So there they were, six out of the seven elders: Burrhead, Rune, Mekkins, Dogwood, Bindle and Hulver. An unimpressive bunch when set against the elders of the past who had fought and bred in pride when the system was on top of the hill in every sense of the word. None of them, with the exception perhaps of gentle Hulver, remains even a whisper in the tunnels of memory.

But there was one more, the seventh. A mole whose shadow had the smell of evil, whose very name still seems a curse on the mole who utters it.

Many a mother has tried to still the tongues of youngster moles who ask in an excited, unknowing whisper, ‘Who was Mandrake? Tell us about him!’ Many a father has cuffed a son as he pretended to be ‘as strong as Mandrake was’. They felt his name was better left unsaid, his memory much better scratched with talons from the recesses of the mind.

But that is not the way to fight evil. Let its name be called. Let the fire of the sun do battle with its form until it lies dried out and colourless in the evening shade: no more than a dead beetle’s wing to be carried off on the midnight wind.

But there are books in Uffington that tell his tale and this must do the same. For he is the shadow against which the light of the love of Bracken and Rebecca should be set. But let compassion and burning love be in the heart of any that thinks, or speaks, or dreams, or reads the name of Mandrake.

Chapter Three

He came to the system over the open fields, unopposed by owl or Pasture mole, a thunderstorm that rained down blood. He cast his shadow on the wood long before he reached it, for the adult males shuddered and shook in advance of his coming, gathering first at Barrow Vale and then going in twos and threes down the tunnels to the Westside, where the pastures are.

They saw him in the setting sun one spring evening, his silhouette growing bigger and more threatening as the sun set. They scuffed and stamped in the tunnels, running this way and that, crying out in fear and upset, half attacking each other before turning to face a mole whose very size made their muscles grow weak.

Saying nothing, he slowly advanced on them all, his great head hunched forward, his snout like a huge talon, his shoulders like yew trunks.

The first that came to him he hardly seemed to touch, yet down he fell, not only dead but torn to death; the second died of a talon thrust so powerful that it seemed to start at his snout and end at his tail; the third turned to run even before he attacked, but too late. A mighty lunge from Mandrake caught him too, and he lay screaming, his black fur savaged open, red blood glistening. And as Mandrake passed by, he coldly crushed his snout and left him there arced out in a bloody, searing, ruthless death. Then they backed before him this way and that, chattering in fear, running away, taking to surface routes in their fright.

So Mandrake entered the Duncton Westside, resistance by the toughest moles in the system crushed, and made straight for Barrow Vale. There, he roared and smote the walls so that all the system would know from the shuddering vibrations that he had come. ‘My name is Mandrake,’ he roared, ‘Mandrake! Let anymole that opposes me come forward now.’ But the three bravest were dead and not one single mole more stirred. Then he cried out in a strange, harsh tongue the language of Siabod, which lay far to the northwest and was a system of which no Duncton mole had ever even heard at that time.

‘Mandrake Siabod wyf i, a wynebodd Gelert Helgi Cwmoerddrws a’i anwybyddu. Wynebais Gerrig Castell y Gwynt a’u gwatwar. Gadewch i unrhyw wadd a feddylio nad yw’n fofni wynebu’m crafangau nawr.’ Whatever it meant, its intent was clear. It was a threat, and one no Duncton mole dared answer.

He had come at mating time, a full cycle of seasons before Rebecca’s maturing and Bracken’s birth, and he travelled to all parts of the system, killing male after male to take their females. Even the males that refused to fight, or tried to run clear, he killed. Fighting is one thing, killing another, and no mating time in Duncton was ever so overcast as that. And when it was over and the warmer days of May came on, he brooded here and there—now over to the Westside, now down to the Marsh End. He said barely a word throughout this terrible time, a brooding, silent curse upon anymole whose territory he moved into. Many were the empty burrows that he found, still warm from the moles who had left in haste to avoid facing him. Only mothers with young remained, watching terrified as he stared at them from a burrow entrance, his head massive and his eyes as black as night, staring at their children. But these, at least, he didn’t harm.

He became an elder without asking or being asked, after killing an elder in a mating fight and taking his place.

He said nothing at the first elder meeting he attended, merely staring at the others, who conducted the business in a hurried hush with furtive glances in his direction. Only two males showed any reaction other than fear at the meeting: Hulver greeted him formally and then ignored him, refusing to be hurried or harried by the others into doing his part of the business any faster, while Rune, ever conscious of where he might find advancement, made ingratiating comments like, ‘We would all agree that it would be a privilege if he that is new, and welcome, among us might give us his view.’ To which Mandrake said absolutely nothing.

In May he attended his second elder meeting, again saying not a word. But at his third, in June, when plans for the Midsummer trek to the Stone were being debated, he made his first move.

There were now grave doubts among some of the younger elders as to whether the Midsummer trek was worthwhile; Burrhead, in particular, argued that the known presence of more owls up on the hill, combined with the scarcity of worms that year and the many changes that had come over the system (they all knew that he was referring to the many deaths that had overtaken them following Mandrake’s arrival), were all factors that made the Midsummer trek of doubtful value. Rune agreed, adding that the trek was merely a sentimental throwback to the past when ‘aims were different from what they are now and there was a greater need to keep the system together by a show of unity such as the trek represented’.

‘We’ve grown beyond that now, and many of us,’ and Rune glanced slowly round at them all in turn, his dark gaze settling finally on Hulver, ‘no longer accept the kind of invocations and nonsense that the Midsummer ritual involved.’

This was too much for old Hulver, who found that a combination of anger and fear ran through him as he listened to Rune’s words: ‘I am the oldest here,’ he started, sensing immediately that it was just the wrong thing to say, ‘and I tell you that our ancestors would shudder if they thought that the Midsummer trek, the happiest celebration in the system, was talked of as a sentimental tradition. It is a part of the system, a celebration of the fact that, individually, we are nothing’—and he looked at all of them in turn as Rune had done, including Mandrake, who sat brooding at the end of the burrow—‘but that we acknowledge in the Stone the presence of something beside which we may feel we are nothing but without which, I tell you all, we truly are nothing, however strong we may think we are.’

His words, especially the last ones, hung ominously over the meeting for a while as everymole there expected Mandrake to react to them. But he stayed still, listening. Then Hulver came forward into the centre of the burrow so that he was in their midst, his ageing, wrinkled snout and greying fur contrasting with the younger, glossy fur all about him. ‘Something has happened in our system,’ he said quietly, ‘something more difficult to fight than owls, or wormless soil, or a gang of Pasture moles. I wish I had the words to explain to those who do not understand how bold and true Duncton moles once were. They were warriors, not fighters; believers, not arguers. And that is how they still could be and how, deep down and with the right leadership from us elders, they still are.’

He paused for a moment, sensing that of them all only Bindle was truly listening and even he, for all his love, could not understand.

His snout wearily touched the burrow floor for a moment, despair seeping through his body, for he had not the strength or the words to say what he meant. He wanted to wrench out the feeling that was so strong in his heart and show it to them and say, ‘Look, now can you see it, now can you see what we must do?’

Chapter Four

The system under Mandrake changed as a wood changes when dirty fog invades it; the trees are still there, the flowers still have colour, but everything looks different and feels sinister.

So it was in Duncton Wood. The Westsiders still fought and struggled in the usual way; the young moles went to Barrow Vale to go on to the surface as they always had; Dogwood carried on finding worms where no other mole could; owl talons still cut through the evening air to kill the careless young and weakening old; and the wood itself still swayed and stilled to the passing of the days.

But under Mandrake’s thrall, the tunnels seemed darker and burrows far less safe. Males felt threatened even in their own home burrows, while the females became dissatisfied and bitchy, wondering what mole it was that could so terrify their mates. Moles had to watch what they said, too, because Mandrake’s henchmoles seemed everywhere. Sadly, the one way of getting any security and the freedom to travel in the system was to do what Rune and Burrhead had been the first to do—declare yourself a supporter of Mandrake and do his bidding.

Not that his bidding was very specific, which was one reason there was so much doubt and suspicion in the system, even among the henchmoles. Nomole ever quite knew what Mandrake wanted. He did, at least, make clear that there were certain things he did not want. He did not like moles who went too far from their home territory, for example, because ‘it makes for confusion and uneasiness’. So a henchmole who found an adult wandering too far from his home burrow felt he had Mandrake’s sanction to ask the reason why, and if he wasn’t satisfied, to fight and, if necessary, kill. In this way, each area in the system became more insular and suspicious of outsiders, ready to drive away a wanderer by force with the righteous confidence that they had official sanction to do so.

What was worse, as his first winter in Duncton approached, Mandrake let it be known that he did not like a mole to go on to the surface unless it was for a good reason. ‘Too many of us are being taken by owls and badgers, so this is in the interest of everymole and the strength of the system,’ was the way he put it to Rune, who was beginning to act as his main agent.

But it happened that a great many moles went on to the surface for no other reason than that they liked the sun on their fur, or the sound of wind in the trees, or to get a breath of fresh air outside the oppressive atmosphere that the tunnels seemed increasingly to possess.

Now moles had to be going somewhere specific or grubhunting for food or seeking a herb for some ailment or other. And if they did just crouch in the wood, their snouts warmed by the sun, or watching the texture of moss by an exposed root, their enjoyment was marred by having to be ever ready with an excuse in case an inquisitive henchmole happened by.

Mandrake also let it be known that he did not want any contact with the Marshenders: ‘They bring disease to the system and have never contributed very much,’ was the way Rune explained it to the others. Adding, with distant menace, ‘The day may well come when they must be driven out of Duncton altogether, for they have no rightful place here.’

This put Mekkins, half Marshender himself and an elder, into something of a difficulty, but he got round it with characteristic cunning by pretending to become Mandrake’s spy in the Marsh End camp and offering to bring back news of their doings—while still convincing them that he was their only hope with Mandrake and the other elders. But the position made him unhappy.

Mandrake’s decision to isolate the Marshenders was carefully thought out. He sensed early on that if there was going to be opposition to him from any quarter, it would be from their grubby, muddy, dank little part of the wood—as he thought of it. As time went on, he could blame things on them—a spread of disease here, a shortage of worms there—and isolate them further.

He was right, for Marshenders, though frightened of Mandrake, were not as generally struck dumb by him as other moles were. It was true that the males had been too frightened to attack him when he visited them, but it was equally true that one of the females at the time had commented, ‘Bloody load of cowards you lot were,’ which spoke of a spirit of resistance that did not live elsewhere.

One thing that made Mandrake even more unpopular was that he liked to keep his mates as his own. Not that he created a harem for himself, a string of females ready to do his bidding. Instead, having found a mate, he would fight and kill any male he found trying to consort with her, watching over each he had taken until their litters were born.

The curious thing about it all was that the females he had mated with did not seem to mind. Long years after, they would remember the time they had lain in the power of Mandrake, the cruel, evil Mandrake, and a light would come to their spirits and a terrible excitement to their souls. For they knew (which others who never came near him never did) that beneath the murderous bloodlust of his mating lay a passion and love that cried out to be cherished.

It seemed to possess him for only a moment when they mated, but it was of such tenderness that they could never forget it. For a moment, in the wild darkness of a burrow filled with Mandrake’s menacing presence and massive body, the same paw that maimed or killed a rival could caress as gently as a June wind and pass on the passion of a heart that ached to be loved. And sometimes in such moments Mandrake spoke out in Siabod, his own language, words of love that seemed addressed less to his mate than to all the creatures he had ever harmed.

Yet he did not like his mates themselves to try and caress him or whisper back comfort. For then his love would be gone in an instant, replaced by contempt or terrible anger.

What he did like, he told a group of henchmoles once when he was tired and nearing sleep and his stomach was full of food, ‘is the kind of female who has a spark of life in her and makes you feel proud to be a male. They make you want to kill and make life at the same time.’

Sarah must have been one of those females with the spark of life in her that made Mandrake feel a male, for he guarded her for himself more than any other mate, and she was loyal to him. Her fur was fairer than most, in some lights almost a gentle grey, and though bigger than most females, she was graceful and slim. She came from an old respected mole family that held territory next to Barrow Vale itself and who, as one of the leading families in the system, had often produced elders in the past. Mandrake knew all this—his henchmole Rune told him everything—but it was not what attracted him to Sarah one summer’s day after his arrival in the system. It was the fact that she was one of the very few females still able to mate at the end of summer. He could tell it, as could other males, and he wanted her.

Some say he killed the males in her home burrow to get her, others that Sarah prevented any slaughter by approaching Mandrake directly herself. But perhaps it was as simple as the fact that she was one of the finest females of her generation and he the strongest male.

However it was, they mated and she stayed with him through the long, evil years of his sway over the Duncton system. It is from her, or rather from what she told close friends whose memories are recorded in the libraries of Uffington, that we know something of the gentler side of Mandrake and the terrible tragedy of his struggle with Rebecca.

For many it is a mystery that Sarah stayed loyal to Mandrake and yet never seemed corrupted by him—always preserving her grace and goodness, as a snowdrop does in the bitterest weather. The answer may lie in one word: compassion. None can ever know if she knew the terrible origin of Mandrake in the grim system of Siabod in North Wales, but if she did not know its details, perhaps she guessed that something like it had happened. No poet could make a verse of Mandrake’s birth, no singer sing it as a song, no taleteller add it to his stories without his listeners covering their ears for horror. Only one account of it remains, written down as it was told directly to Boswell, the blessed scribemole, by an inhabitant of Siabod. Let his words tell the tale:

‘Mandrake was born and survived in conditions beyond even the nightmares of the toughest Siabod moles. At the time of his birth—May—conditions around the mountain of Siabod were severe. A mild February and March had been followed by the coldest April any Siabod mole could remember, and that’s saying something! When you’re as high and exposed as we are, you get used to the cold. A lot of lowland moles would die just being here. Anyway, by mid-May, there were still many patches of ice and snow on Siabod’s sides. In such conditions most moles keep below ground, securing themselves in a snug burrow with a worm supply that would survive the cold, or be driven down into the lower winter tunnels they had dug.

‘No doubt Mandrake’s mother had prepared a nest, yet for some reason that will never be known, she was out on the surface when her litter started—maybe seeking nesting material. It coincided with yet another sudden terrible change in the weather, which switched from pure clear cold to a terrifying blizzard that swept over from the heights of Snowdon, the Glyders and Cnicht to dash against the flanks and falls of Siabod. Perhaps the sudden weather change upset her rhythms and brought on the birth sooner than she expected.

‘Whatever it was, she was on the surface when the blizzard started and naturally she tried to get back to her nest. She must have dragged herself through the storm over the ice-covered Siabod rock plateaux, paws and talons tearing at the snow and scanty vegetation, to try to reach warmth and safety before the first was born.

‘But we think she was on the wrong side of the slope and had to battle a little way uphill before she could reach back down to a tunnel into the system. She could no doubt have found a burrow or made one long before she became too exhausted to continue, but females with young like to return to the nest they have prepared.

‘We can only imagine what happened. Overcome by exhaustion and cold, unable to battle further against the wind and icy snow, she settled down in the blizzard on what was little more than bare rock to give birth to her litter. She must have felt a terrible horror and loneliness out there on the side of Siabod, the sky obscured by snowclouds, the wind ripping at her fur, trying to tear away each tiny mole pup as it was born. We do not know how many there were—four or five, probably. She must have watched their blind struggle desperately as the warmth from her womb was dashed and scurried away from them by the blizzard wind. Perhaps she tried to burrow into the snow to protect her young, but the wind was too strong for any more than an inch or two of snow to settle.

‘Into this icy chaos Mandrake was born, struggling from birth to hang on to life, fighting with his siblings from the very start to find a place of warmth among his mother’s teats. She no doubt set her back to the wind, taking the brunt of it herself, to give her young the warmth of her stomach and flanks. For days she fought the cold and wind, never resting for a moment lest one of her young slip out of the protection of her paws into the teeth of the blizzard. The storm continued for nearly eight days, the most vital time in anymole’s life. Blind, furless, vulnerable, how Mandrake must have struggled to keep his place at her teats, unknowingly pushing his siblings out of the way, dashing their heads and snouts with his feeble paws, fighting to suck.

‘At some point his mother must have realised that without food her milk would dry up, and yet known that if she left her litter for a second, it would mean certain death for all of them.

‘It is hard to imagine that she deliberately decided to sacrifice one of the litter after another in the hope that one at least might survive. But everymole knows that, faced by acute danger, a littering mother will kill and sometimes eat her young. Perhaps what happened was that the weakest of the litter died from lack of milk and exposure and rather than let it lie there to be lost for nothing in the cold, she ate it, hoping that it might give her the nourishment she and the rest of the litter needed. One by one her litter died, exposed in the worst Siabod blizzard in mole memory. One by one she must have eaten them, their blood mingling with the snow and ice. One by one her nipples and teats dried up as the nourishment from the food stored in her body, and from the cannibalism of her own young, gave out.

‘Until at last only Mandrake remained, struggling among her cold teats to find one that would yield milk to his desperate suckling. By now his eyes were open, but all he could have seen was the dark of his mother’s fur, the pink of her teats, and the racing, grey blizzard all around. So, from the start, his world was one of extremes. How he must have struggled to keep his place! Not for him the peace and comfort of safe suckling; never for him the unremembered memory of a relaxed mother holding him warm and close. Fighting for life from the very start.

‘Did his mother wonder if he must be sacrificed for her own survival? Or did she leave it to the elements, herself finally falling asleep, the freezing wind at her back taking a seeping hold on her body, her last memory being Mandrake trying to suckle her cold teats?

‘If that was her last memory, then his first sight might well have been the discovery that his mother was dead. And though he would never know it, she had died to give Mandrake the chance to live, to fight, and to mate. But for him then, there was nothing left but the wind, and the freezing flank of his dead mother. He was too young to think. But think what he must have felt: desolate loneliness, loss, abandonment.

‘It was almost certainly on the eighth day of the storm that this moment came, for shortly after, it began to clear, and it is unthinkable that Mandrake could have survived these conditions for more than a few hours. The freak weather conditions that had nearly killed him now reversed to save him. The sun broke out through the stormcast sky and the freezing wet was replaced by thawing warmth. Steam began to rise from the rocks and peat as it does sometimes after a storm in summer. Creature after creature came out from shelter, stretching into the warm, moist air and feeling themselves back into the light. Here a mole, there a vole, above the larks tilting into the breeze with their song hanging again above the flanks of Siabod. And buzzards and ravens.

‘Mandrake could easily have died then, taken by one of the predators whose eyes now searched the mountain’s sides again. But perhaps his mother’s instinct to return home when the blizzard broke had been right, for where she had finally lain to litter was not so far from one of the outlying entrances to the Siabod system. And the wind was in the right direction to carry his cries to a mole by the entrance, and a female at that. She was very young and yet she climbed across the slope towards the cries and found Mandrake crying and nestling into the cold body of his mother, surrounded by the pathetic remains of the rest of the litter. She comforted him, warmed him and nudged him down the wet slope into the system. Anymole who saw him that day or in the days following will not forget the sight: eyes open, fur barely grown, head big, paws scrabbling and flailing—lost and untrusting and wild. So he always remained, wild and aggressive.

‘As he grew, he took to roaming Siabod’s sides for food. I have seen him myself, the great, fierce Mandrake, silent and evil, leaving the system to search on the surface, fearless of weather or birds. One day he left like that and he has never come back.’

Such is the record in Uffington as told to Boswell himself so long ago. No more is said about how Mandrake came to leave Siabod and make his way to Duncton Wood. Perhaps he thought he might find something he had once lost in a storm. Who can say?

Nor can we say how much of this Sarah knew. But if she had but a tiny fraction of the compassion that her daughter Rebecca was to have—and where else would Rebecca have found it?—then in the mating burrow with Mandrake she must have felt his loss and tried to cherish him as, in other circumstances, he might have been cherished at birth: to help him escape the world of blackness into which he had been born and in which he believed he lived.

At any rate, what is known is that Mandrake chose Sarah for a mate; that he watched her grow big with her litter, that he stayed nearby at the birth; and that he waited brooding, turning, twisting, scratching his face with his talons, never comfortable, in the tunnel outside until the litter showed.

He came to the burrow entrance—Sarah allowed him no further—and looked at the litter. Three males and a female. He watched her croon to them and he looked at them, pink, comfortable and safe in her nest, her body warmly encircling their snouts and still-pale whiskers wet with her milk. But he seemed interested only in the female, who struggled, paws bending and flexing weakly, questing for milk as the others did. His eyes were on her alone.

‘Call her Sarah, after yourself,’ he ordered. ‘It’s a fine, strong name.’

But Sarah looked up from her litter and straight at him with the same mixture of compassion and strength that the tiny female pup now suckling her was to have in her face when she looked on Bracken at their first meeting many moleyears later.

‘Her name will be Rebecca,’ she said.

Mandrake looked at the tiny, struggling female and back at Sarah, and then back at his daughter again: he who had killed so many moles had once been as helpless as this, but he didn’t think of that; he who had taken so many females had given them pups like this, but he didn’t think of that either; nor did he think that he, whose talons ached with killing and whose shoulders hung huge and heavy on his body, now craved to lean into the burrow and touch his daughter.

But though he was not able to think these things and say them to himself, they twisted and turned and racked his heart as he crouched in the tunnel unable to say anything. Mandrake, huge and menacing, unable to cut through the whirling darkness of his mind: impotent.

Rebecca, tiny, pink and suckling. Alive!

‘Call her Rebecca, then,’ he said finally, finding himself unaccountably gasping and breathless and wanting to run away from the burrow. ‘Call her Rebecca!’ he said more loudly, turning back into the tunnel clumsily, feeling more than ever the huge, cumbersome weight of himself on himself and wanting to shake and rip it off.

‘Call her Rebecca!’ he shouted, gasping for air, running down the tunnel and out of the nearest entrance on to the surface in Barrow Vale. ‘Rebecca!’ he roared, as if he could not escape the name, slashing the base of an oak tree with his talons as he charged blindly into it.

Sarah heard him, licking her young, curling them into her and sighing in satisfaction. ‘Rebecca,’ she whispered, ‘Rebecca,’ as gently in the darkness of the burrow as, for the briefest of hidden moments, Mandrake had once whispered to her, ‘Sarah.’

From the first, Rebecca held a strange fascination for Mandrake, who would often stare at her from the tunnel by the burrow where Sarah nursed her litter. Sarah would sometimes waken and find him there, or see his black shadow move away down the tunnel as if, seeing her beginning to awaken, he didn’t want to be seen simply watching over his daughter.

Yet as the days and molemonths went by, no one would have guessed, least of all Mandrake himself, that he loved Rebecca with a passion as strong as a gale across a moor. For he treated her harshly, disciplining her unmercifully to try, it seemed, to break her down to a mole of obedience. At first it was easy, for she was but a tiny pup who quailed and backed away from his deep-voiced commands. Her paws would fall over themselves in their anxiety to escape from her great father as she ran desperately back for the protection of her mother’s flanks.

Sarah would hold her and say, ‘She’s only a pup, only a young thing.’ But this made little impact on Mandrake.

‘A pup will do what I say, as I want,’ he would roar, glowering darkly at the cowering Rebecca. But never once did he try to wrest her from Sarah, or hit her when she was young.

Such threats had their effect and for a long time Rebecca did Mandrake’s will, frightened of him not only when he was there, but also when he was out in the system with Rune or other henchmoles doing system business.

She grew quickly, so that by late autumn she was already nearing adult size. Not as big as moles born the preceding spring, but not so small that she could not put up a fair fight if necessary, though the youngsters still fought for fun rather than in earnest. The real fighting came only with the mating season or when one mole was trying to wrest away another mole’s territory. She stayed in her home burrow longer than the young of spring litters, who could take advantage of the good summer weather to leave their mothers and find their own territory. Rebecca stayed at home, close by Sarah and Mandrake, kept innocent, childlike and cowed by Mandrake’s continual aggression towards her.

Through the following January and early February, when the wood was at its bleakest, it seemed to her that almost everything was bleak, for she could never please her father. It was then that there occurred an incident about which she never told another mole until years, lifetimes, later and that deepened forever her relationship with Mandrake.

In mid-February the weather turned suddenly bitterly cold and hoarfrost delicately picked out the stalks and veins of the decaying leaves on the wood’s floor. While other moles slept and kept warm, or grumbled at the cold as they hurried to find food, Rebecca snouted about on the surface, awed by the chill beauty of the frostbound wood. Then the lightest of snowflakes began to fall, feathering down through the leafless black branches from a grey sky, settling for a second on the back of her paw before melting with her warmth. As she tried to catch them falling about her she seemed to dance with delight in the silent wood.

‘Like it, do you, girl? Think it’s fun?’

It was Mandrake on the surface behind her, interrupting her reverie, angry. She had done something wrong again but she had no idea what. He came closer, his heavy paws destroying the delicate patterns of frost on an oak leaf she had looked at moments before.

‘Think it’s pretty, don’t you?’

His voice was getting louder and she wanted to get away. ‘You think this snow’s just here for your special pleasure? Well, come with me…’

She wanted to run from him, to get away from his anger and his voice that was getting louder. She wanted the safety of Sarah. But looking up at his angry gaze she could not move a paw but in the direction in which he pointed—towards the pastures. But she didn’t want to go there.

‘Please can I go back to the home burrow?’

Mandrake cuffed her not once or twice but several times, so that her head stung and she found herself running tearfully before him towards the pastures, through a wood in which the snow that had once fallen delicate and light was beginning to swirl and whose trees were starting to strain before a blizzard.

She was cold and Mandrake was wild; her teeth chattered in fear. If she opened her mouth as she ran, to gain breath as Mandrake rushed her through the wood, the bitter wind seemed to want to blow her apart.

Then she was at the wood’s edge and forced by Mandrake to gaze out on to the pastures, whose grass was grey with a thin layer of snow over which more snow whined with the blizzard.

‘Still think it’s pretty, still think it’s something to dance to?’ roared Mandrake above the wind.

Then he pushed her out from the protection of the wood into the killer wind and her screams and sobs lost themselves in its wild bitterness, and her tears were part of the stinging blizzard snow. Until she was so far out from the wood that it was lost behind her in the storm and the only solid thing she could see was the dark shape of Mandrake himself, crouched like a black rock against the wind, snow swirling around him.

Mandrake seemed no longer interested in her, turning his attention instead to the blizzard and raising a paw against it as if searching for something beyond it that was threatening him and which he hated and would defy.

‘Thought you could kill me, you bastard; thought Mandrake would yield. Siabod, you’re nothing, your Stones are a nothing, Gelert is nothing, you…’ And then he began to roar and rage at the blizzard, his language changing into the harsh tongue of Siabod, whose words were like talon thrusts. He was no longer immobile rock but a moving mass of dark shadow and anger raging at the bitter wind and ignoring the harsh snow that flailed against his snout and mouth. But his roars began to get more high-pitched and wilted before the wind into what seemed the bleatings and mewings of a creature lost, and Rebecca’s fear was gone.

She wanted to reach out and take him to her, tell him he was safe, and so she shouted, ‘Mandrake! Mandrake!’ into the deafening wind. He turned to her and she saw that in his eyes, so menacing before, there was a terrible fear and a loss so great that she could only reach out to it…

He hit her as she came to him, the look of loss replaced again by anger, and then he turned her to the wind and snow and shouted into her above the sound of the blizzard, ‘This is what I faced, this is the force you face, and you, Rebecca, will never yield to it because you are part of me who knew Siabod once and defied its death…’ and she wanted to cry, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t it, it isn’t, it isn’t,’ but she was too young to know the words and the words only cried inside her and so she sobbed and struggled to get free. But she never forgot what she was unable to say, just as she never forgot the power of his grip as he forced her to face the blizzard wind. Nor could she forget the strangest thing—how safe she felt as he held her there.

That was what happened to Rebecca with Mandrake in mid-February, and what mole can doubt that in those wild half-remembered moments her love for him grew deep? Had he not shown her something of himself?

Yet what a shuddering memory it soon became, and how much more afraid of him she grew.

Still, through that bleak winter there were some comforts. Sarah would sit with her and tell stories about her family. She would play with her brothers when Mandrake was not about (he preferred to keep her separate when he was there), usually leading them in the games they played, for she had a good imagination and could always think of something to do.

As yet she had none of the grace of her mother, Sarah, every movement betraying an anxiousness to please Mandrake, even when he was not there. It unsettled her, too, that other moles’ approach to her was unpredictable, because of who she was: some were extra nice to her, thinking it might pay dividends with Mandrake. Others, especially the females, were inclined to be bitchy, making remarks about ‘certain moles who think a lot of themselves and have it easy’. Or, as one of them put it to a friend in Barrow Vale, loudly enough for Rebecca to hear: ‘She’s got all the worst qualities of both of them: stuck up as her mother and as heavy-pawed as Mandrake.’

Faced by such comments, Rebecca at first cried and hid herself away, taking minor tunnels to avoid meeting adult moles if she went out. But as February advanced she grew brasher, though no less sensitive, and would walk boldly past the gossips, affecting total indifference to them.

But towards the third week of February, everything started to change as the earliest spring began and there was much less of the chatter and idleness that had characterised the winter years. Rebecca began to go out on to the surface more, cheered by the growing lightness of the spring days.

From her very first venturing on to the surface, she loved the smell and colour of trees and plants. At first it had been the acorns cracking down to the ground, the rustle of the last falling leaves, autumn fruit and the surprise of bright holly berries thrown in a red huddle by an entrance after a storm.

As February advanced, the slow growth of shoots and new leaves enthralled her, and she would run up into the wood day after day, sniffing the cold spring air, to see what new delights she could find. One day it was the yellow delicacy of winter aconite rising among sodden leaves and stem bottoms as pale as the spring sunlight. Another day she crouched for hours before a cluster of snowdrops, their white petals dancing in the cold wind, the black leafless branches of a great oak hanging starkly above them.

Then she was amazed at the speed with which shoots of dog’s mercury rose up into the spring light, but quickly learned to take paths avoiding them because of their rank smell. If she had to go through a patch of them, she would run and hold her breath as she did so, emerging gasping and laughing, often with a brother or two in tow.

As spring advanced, she found the flowers grew more scented and she would bring them, wild and sweet-smelling, down to a place near the entrance to the home burrow so that their scent met any mole who entered. Her mother would tell her the names, and Rebecca would repeat them over and over, mingling them into verses with names of other flowers Sarah told her about, but which were not yet in bloom.

Adults got quite used to young Rebecca dancing with her brothers, singing flower songs, leading them in a game of her own invention, whose verse might run:

Vervain and yellow flag,

Feverfew and rue;

Some for my mother,

Plenty left for you.

And they would tumble about laughing, mock-fighting and rolling on the wood’s floor.

Now Mandrake found it harder to control her. It was not that she, Rebecca, was disobedient in any way, but her spirit was, and that seemed something neither of them could control. It was almost as if her life, and love of it, thrived on his malevolence. Not that, for a moment, she ever enjoyed annoying him or being the subject of his anger. But each time he knocked her down, sometimes literally, up she would get to run off somewhere and, despite every good intention on her part, do something else that displeased him.

‘You’re not to play so roughly with your brother,’ he would say, but she would.

‘It’s dangerous up on the surface now by the edge of the wood,’ but there she would be found.

‘You’re to stay in the home burrow today because there are things to do,’ but she wouldn’t.

She managed to do terrible things without even trying. Just before the April elder meeting, for example, she couldn’t resist having a peek about the elder burrow, somewhere she had never seen and which, since everymole was always talking about it, she thought she would have a look at. So she did, and very impressive she found it. After she had left it to wander off around Barrow Vale, a terrible cry went up: ‘The worms, the elders’ worms! They’ve been eaten. Somemole has been into the elder burrow and eaten all the worms!’

She heard it, and it was true, dreadfully true! She had eaten them! Well, she had seen them in a pile in the corner of the burrow, squirming about in a delightful way and, yes, she had had one, but she had hardly thought about it because, well, she was looking around the burrow, and yes, then she did have another one; no, it wasn’t intentional; yes, she did eat it, the burrow was so interesting, you see, and she was hardly thinking, and… Oh dear, another one, were there really five missing? She couldn’t possibly have eaten five, perhaps another mole came in… No? Well, she could always…

Only old Hulver laughed when he heard about it. It was a sign of the times, he thought, that everymole took the whole thing so seriously. Mandrake attacked Rebecca viciously and also hurt Sarah, who was trying to protect Rebecca; the elder meeting was held in an atmosphere of acrimony, though it was nomole’s fault among the elders.

If that had been the only incident it might not have mattered, but despite her sincere good intentions, Rebecca did other things as bad. One day, for example, she managed to lose not one of her brothers in the wood, but all three. One of them nearly got killed by an owl and the other two were gone for two days and were only brought back to the home burrow by, of all moles, a Marsh End female. ‘It was Rebecca’s fault,’ they wailed, though they were by now nearly adults.

Rebecca tried to explain to Mandrake: ‘It was only a game of hide-and-seek and I thought it would be fun to go a bit further than usual in the tunnels and perhaps for a moment or two on to the surface I’m terribly sorry I didn’t know where we were but it wasn’t hard to find the way back I don’t understand how they got lost for two days and there weren’t any owls about I’m sure please…’ but Mandrake was furious. Indeed, so furious was he that few moles had ever seen him like that and survived. His anger with her on these occasions was always out of proportion to the crime, if crime it was. Yet still her spirit seemed to thrive on it.

But while she grew big and headstrong like Mandrake himself, she also became smiling and graceful like her mother. She loved to touch things and to dance or find some quiet spot in the spring sun and lie softly, with the ecstasy of it on her snout. She would chase her brothers like a growing male yet comfort them when they were hurt as the kindest female did.

There was a fine lightness of spirit, of life, about her and perhaps it was this that Mandrake, in his black anger, would try vainly to catch and crush. As she grew older, Mandrake’s only recourse was to increasing violence towards her, and as the spring advanced, she found it best to keep her snout down, and well out of the way.

There came a time in April when suddenly there was wild blood in the air, and Rebecca found it exciting. Mating time was starting. She knew she shouldn’t go on to the surface, but Mandrake himself seemed to be gone more these days and her mother was losing interest in the autumn litter because it was almost full-grown now. So though Rebecca felt tied still to her home burrow and was still not really an adult, she was drawn by the life in the air up and out into the busy wood.

Busy and noisy. Birds darted and flitted about the trees, which were now heavy with bud. Anemones, celandine, daffodils were almost everywhere. Some days, it was true, the sky would be grey and dark with the air around the trees and undergrowth heavy and still. But only some days. Increasingly she would poke her snout out of a tunnel entrance early in the morning and see a magical, light, swirling mist running through the wood, white and pink as the sun broke through it. The buds and flowers about her seemed to be opening, reaching up through the light mist to the sun beyond.

‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘How beautiful!’ Near her a cluster of celandine, yellow petals half open, reached up softly to the sky. The mist thinned before her eyes until it was almost gone, and she ran across the surface among the trees feeling she was part of the spring excitement of the wood. From afar off to the Eastside, the soft caw-caws of rooks carried to her, long and slow compared with the trilling of the blackbirds and thrush that darted in and out among the trees as excited as she was. She ran to the centre of Barrow Vale to watch the wood wake up as the last of the thin wisps of mist swirled away into the sunshine. A warm, moist, nutty smell had replaced the rotting smell of winter, which she now saw, for the first time, was unpleasant and hung about the tunnels still.

Duncton Wood spread away all around her—over to the Westside and the East, down to the south where her brothers had got lost, and up towards the slopes leading to the top of Duncton Hill. Oh, she wanted to sing and dance and call everymole together and celebrate! Duncton Wood! The name was magical in the sunlight. The winter’s years had gone! She laughed, or rather smiled aloud, her joy shaking among the yellow petals of the celandine which were now open, and echoed in the constant calls and whistles of the birds. The great oaks, round and solid at their bases, rose high about the edge of Barrow Vale, and somewhere among their branches a woodpecker drummed its territorial rights from a tree and then flew direct to another oak to drum again.

‘It’s my wood,’ she whispered to herself, joyfully. ‘My wood!’

‘And mine too,’ said a voice behind her, the voice of Rune. She turned round, startled, but as usual found it hard to see him immediately, so good was he at hiding in impenetrable shadows, even on a sunny day.

‘You shouldn’t be here, you know,’ he said coldly, but with a smile to his voice that only seemed to underline the threat it carried.

For Rebecca, Rune, who still smelt of winter, spoiled everything she was enjoying about the morning, and so she ran off without a word, across Barrow Vale. Rune followed urgently, easily keeping up with her but hanging behind two or three paws’ distance. Rune wanted Rebecca, he wanted to mate with her. His desire was not lust, for Rune did not give way to simple lust, the lust he felt for any female in mid-March, but a kind of sick sensuality based on the fact that she was Mandrake’s daughter. He felt, in some way, that his position in the system gave him the right to take her and also that it would make him equal with Mandrake.

Sensing at least some of this, Rebecca’s joy in the morning died within her and she ran anxiously down into the tunnels towards her home burrow, trying not to appear too disturbed by Rune’s presence. He followed behind her, the sound of his paws on the tunnel floor liquid and smooth. Her breath became irregular; she could smell Rune behind her and hear his chill voice calling after her, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca, I was only joking about you not being allowed out on Barrow Vale. Stay and talk.’

Rebecca scurried on, ready now to turn with her talons on Rune and draw his blood if she had to. Imperceptibly the scamper along the tunnels turned into a chase, until they were travelling at speed, and Rebecca had to think very fast to twist and turn in the right direction. Sometimes Rune would disappear down a turn in the tunnel, only to reappear ahead or to the side of her, so she had to turn away from the direction of her home burrow to keep clear of him. Sometimes he would laugh or call after her, ‘It’s all right, Rebecca, I won’t hurt you.’ She was out of breath with running and becoming confused as to which way to turn, everything rolling round in her mind as her chest heaved and panted with the effort of the chase. ‘I want you, Rebecca. I want you,’ Rune called, his voice seeming to echo darkly from all directions, as if there was a Rune down every turn in the tunnels.

Finally she could stand it no more and stopped in her tracks, turning round to face him, with talons raised but shaky. He eyed her calmly and, inching forward very slowly, got bigger and bigger. He smelt of the dead of winter and she felt as if she was falling back into a pit, her talons soft and useless, scrabbling ever more weakly above her head as she fell back and back. Somewhere, far, far away, she thought she could hear the urgent drumming of the woodpecker on the oak’s side, but it was only the pounding of her heart, which no longer seemed to be part of her. Rune came nearer, smoothly nearer, looking down at her, petrified before him, lusting in his power before her.

But the moment was suddenly broken by the terrible shout of, ‘Rebecca!’ It was Mandrake, suddenly Mandrake, and now she did hear her heart thump, thump, thumping, and she felt terribly frightened as the two male moles she most feared in the system loomed above her.

‘This is not the time to leave the home burrow,’ said Mandrake, adding with threatening force, ‘How many times must you be told?’

‘Just what I’ve been telling her, Mandrake, my very words,’ purred Rune, turning with a black smile to Mandrake.

‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘He wanted…’

But Mandrake ignored her words, going straight at her and striking her so hard that she fell back and hit her snout against the tunnel wall, bringing tears to her eyes. She ran crying from them both, back to her home burrow.

Mandrake turned to Rune: ‘She will not mate this spring,

Rune, not this spring. She is not ready, and I will kill anymole that tries. Whichever mole he might be.’

Then Rune ran off down the tunnel, as ever awed by Mandrake who, it seemed, was impossible to fool. However, he promised himself, a cold laugh in his voice, ‘I’ll have her yet.’

So April ran on towards May and most Duncton females grew big with young, so that when the burrows started to warm up they were ready for their litters. Rebecca had seen the males grow aggressive and her father angry with bloodlust, and Sarah grow excited and running, sighing, nervous, taken in the burrow by Mandrake, and Rebecca near to hear the deep softness in his voice and wonder about the world in a whirl about her, and thinking of Rune chasing her, not knowing where to turn, watching the males who dared not come near, thinking of Mandrake and Sarah, Mandrake so powerful on Sarah, she wanted to run to them. Oh, oh, oh she would sigh alone, drifting into adulthood.

She heard the cries of littered pups and wanted to go near and croon over them as she did over flowers and the sunlight, but she never dared go near for fear of attack. She steered clear of males after her father found her with Rune, for though he never said anything to her directly, she knew he would kill anymole who came near. So, when males did come near, she would discourage them, though often they were young like her and sweet, so sweet that she wanted to dance with them, and laugh as they did to match her desire, and run, her spirit rising and diving like larks did over the pastures beyond the edge of the wood.

As summer started, she felt miserable and isolated, for even her brothers went off for long periods searching for mates across the wood. Sometimes, though, they would return to the home burrow, for they were still youngsters at heart. If they had been beaten in a fight, as they always were by the older, more experienced males, she would delight in comforting them and making them laugh again. But they had changed, becoming more aggressive towards her, and sometimes she sensed in them the same urgent demand that had been in Rune’s voice in the tunnel when he chased her, and she would turn away from them, unhappy.

Chapter Five

Bracken was raised on the Westside, where fear was a dirty word and blood (provided it was somemole else’s) was a thing to celebrate. Westsiders were tough and Burrhead was the toughest. That meant his mate’s children had a lot to put up with in the way of fighting, bullying, being surprise-attacked, and generally being knocked about, as mole youngsters learned the arts of self-protection and aggression in the toughest school in the Duncton system.

Bracken’s mother, Aspen, came from the Eastside, Burrhead having fought and killed for her after the February elder meeting. Apart from Mandrake, who killed other moles automatically in mating fights, few of the moles actually killed opponents in fights. One or other retreated before they were hurt. So Burrhead’s performance made him feared.

He was, in fact, unusually aggressive, and in a system without Mandrake might well have emerged as the toughest mole of all. He was, however, brutish-tough rather than cunning-tough, and moles like Rune or Mekkins had more native wit about them than he did.

It is unlikely that they, for example, would have put up with a mate as untidy as Aspen. Her burrow was always in a mess, littered with uncleared droppings, grubby dried worm bits festering in the burrow’s recesses, and vegetation brought in by the youngsters.

Aspen chose the names, as traditionally the females did—the strongest, Bracken’s brother, being called Root for obvious reasons; the female was called Wheatear because there was a very slight discoloration over her right ear—as there was over Aspen’s. And she gave Bracken a name traditionally given to the weakest of a litter of three.

Burrhead was never impressed by Bracken—in fact, he wasn’t much impressed by the litter as a whole, since it only produced one useful male. Still, as he watched the three pink pups struggling at each other and their mother’s teats, he got some satisfaction from the fact that the strongest, Root, seemed very strong indeed. A conclusion which was well justified, as Root developed into just the kind of bullying, aggressive mole Burrhead had hoped for in a son.

Bracken had an unpleasant childhood. He was always struggling for food and losing, ending up with scraps. As a result, he was slow to grow, which perpetuated the situation, making him the skinny runt in the family, always ill and whining when very young, frightened and crying when older. However, he was at least intelligent (‘cunning,’ Burrhead called him) and quickly learned to avoid being attacked when danger threatened or his bigger brother was feeling aggressive. He found that there was no point in fighting back, because he always got beaten, so he took to hunching up into a defensive stance so that he was always ready for the blows and scratches that came to him from all sides. He adopted a low snout, keeping eyes averted and playing the fool so that Root and Wheatear were bored with him.

His task of survival was easier because his two siblings, like their father, had a complete lack of imagination, which meant that he could usually work out well ahead of them what they would do and then take appropriate avoiding action.

At the same time, he had enough sense to work out what would please them—worms, new places to play, new tunnels to explore—and put it their way, which meant that they relied on him, grudgingly, for ideas. That didn’t stop them thumping him quite a lot and ignoring him a great deal, but that was better than out-and-out assault. Still, he did often end up in tears, and it was then that Aspen came, for a rare moment, into her own. For along with her untidiness went a certain romantic whimsiness which meant that she loved telling stories. And when Bracken was upset, she would comfort him with mole legends and tales, simple stories of honoured, brave moles, or tales of fine males fighting for their mates.

Many were traditional mole legends, of which every system had its version; others were peculiar to Duncton and were usually set in the long-distant past, when the moles lived in the Ancient System up on top of the hill. Aspen entered into the spirit of these tales to such an extent that she would often moan and weep as she told them, and Bracken, his head against her flank, would feel her breathing getting heavier and faster as she neared a climactic end, and for a while he would forget his tears and the bullying in the drama of the tale.

He would enter into them as she did, his eyes perhaps half closed or affixed to some distant place beyond the walls of the burrow, and soon he would be there, fighting to the death, weaving magic with his talons, facing the most dreadful dangers. Aspen loved to paint in the rich colours of her own whimsy the scene when the hero mole returns from his quest across the wood to fight owls, or outfox foxes, or find worms to save the system. This would move Bracken deeply, for he wished he might return home one day as his heroes did, to a snug burrow, warm with love, friendly and wormful. Wanted, not an outcast.

It was from these beginnings that Bracken’s fascination with the Ancient System grew, and when he ventured on to the surface, he would often stop and stare dimly up in the direction of the top of Duncton Hill, far beyond his sight and hopes, and wonder if he might ever climb there himself. One day Aspen told him about the Stone that was said to stand there, ‘though it’s a long time since anymole but the elders went up there, and then only at Midsummer and Longest Night. It’s probably just legend, but a nice one, don’t you think?’

The idea of the Stone fascinated him so much that he gathered his courage and dared ask Burrhead about it one day when he seemed in a mellow mood. To his surprise, Burrhead was very ready to give an answer: ‘Aye, the Stone’s up there right enough. I’ve seen it myself, though I don’t suppose that’ll happen much more because, if I have my way, we’ll stop the Midsummer trek.’

‘Why?’ asked Bracken tentatively.

‘Owls and worms, two words you should get into your head, my boy. Owls is dangerous up there and worms is scarce. No point risking ourselves for some ancient ritual which nomole but old stick-in-the-muds like Hulver can remember.’

‘What’s the Stone like?’ demanded Bracken, encouraged by his father’s unusual willingness to talk. And noticing that Aspen was listening too.

‘It’s nothing, really,’ said Burrhead, ‘just a stone. Well, a big stone. Tall as a tree, shoots straight up into the sky. It’s grey. It turns dark blue as night falls and then pitch black, blacker than night itself, except where the moon catches it and it’s silvery grey.’

So there were moments of stillness for Bracken in his burrow, when Aspen would talk to him and even Burrhead would tell him things, and he was unmolested.

But as May advanced and Root and Wheatear gained in strength, such moments became rarer, and he had to use all his ingenuity to avoid being hurt in their rough-and-tumble fighting, which always had him as the butt.

There came a time, at the end of May, when Root would seek him out and deliberately intimidate him, trying to make Bracken raise his talons so that he would have an excuse to fight him.

‘He started it,’ Root would tell a despairing Aspen, faced once more by a bewildered, hurt Bracken.

As the days wore on, Bracken began more and more to spend time by himself, exploring away from his home burrow, finding he had further and further to come home again for sleep or worms. In this way he made his way to Barrow Vale one day, but found it too full of other moles, curious about who he was, so he turned away and tried other directions. Another day he went right to the edge of the wood and looked out for the first time on to the pastures, frightened by the open space and massive sky beyond the trees, terrified of the cows who hoofed and pulled at grass beyond the fence.

But Burrhead did not call him cunning for nothing. Bracken quickly realised that his timid appearance and obvious youth allowed him to cross the tunnels of moles who might otherwise be hostile to him. He developed various ways of approaching them, finding that even if they started off hostile, he could usually disarm them by asking a question which established his inferiority and their importance.

‘I’m lost,’ he might say. ‘Can you tell me where the Barrow Vale is from here?’

Or, if he knew their names (which he would try to find out from the preceding mole he had encountered), ‘I was looking for Buckbean because he knows an awful lot about the system,’ and Buckbean suddenly did, indeed, feel he knew an ‘awful lot’ about the system, and would feel flattered and retract his talons—though still standing his ground until quite certain this youngster was safe.

Bracken was to use this approach later and more effectively with the Eastsiders, who were more willing to pass the time of day talking than the Westsiders. But even so, many Westsiders yielded to Bracken’s combination of youthful vulnerability, innocence and flattery to answer his sometimes spurious questions and let him continue his explorations.

The more so because, as Mandrake’s power had increased, he had let it be known that he preferred moles to stay in their territory and not wander around without reason, so a safe stranger like Bracken was welcome for the interest he could bring. It was true, in fact—though the Duncton moles didn’t know it, since they kept to themselves—that there was traditionally more mixing and visiting in Duncton than, for example, out on the pastures.

Mandrake himself came from a desolate system where individuals kept themselves to themselves, but his reasons for encouraging isolation in Duncton were not nostalgic: he knew that the more isolated each Duncton mole was, the better could he control them. And he seemed to have a peculiarly deep-rooted aversion to the Stone.

This all being so, a visiting youngster was more welcome than he once might have been. He could pass on a bit of gossip, he was safe, and Mandrake’s rule didn’t apply to youngsters.

In this way, Bracken was able to learn a great deal about the Westside and something about the system, too. He would hear gossip about the elders, news of the havoc and deaths caused by Mandrake’s henchmoles, among whom his own father was a leading figure, and stories of Mandrake himself.

Of all the things that he heard, it was these that made the biggest impression on him, for there seemed no end to Mandrake’s strength and power:

‘He’s so strong he’s been known to destroy an oak root thick as a mole to make a tunnel.’

‘He’s the best fighter the system’s ever seen and ever likely to see, if you ask me. Do you know, my boy, when he first came to Duncton he killed twelve of the strongest adults before he even set paw in a tunnel? Twelve! Mind you, I wasn’t there myself.’

‘They say the first time he went down the Marsh End he stopped a group of Marshenders from attacking him by just pointing his huge snout at them and staring. Didn’t say a word; just crouched ready and stared. They backed away, tearing at each other to escape. That’s how powerful Mandrake is.’

Mole after mole, females and males, came out with stories like this, so that soon Mandrake assumed terrifying proportions in his mind.

Indeed, Mandrake might well have taken on the mantle of powerful protector of Duncton and its moles in Bracken’s mind had it not been for the fact that his own bullying father was one of Mandrake’s henchmoles and forever going on about the fact. So Mandrake took on a dark and sinister role in Bracken’s imagination rather than a benevolent one.

It was for this reason that Bracken was both surprised and fascinated when, one day towards the end of May, he heard a Westside female say, with the indirectness of a gossip who deliberately invites a follow-up question by the mystery of what she says: ‘Mind you, there’s one mole who can stand up to Mandrake, and there’s nothing, I tell you, absolutely nothing, he can do about it. Not a single solitary thing.’

‘Who’s that?’ asked Bracken, amazed.

But she continued her train of thought, piling on the mystery for her own delight: ‘Yes, he can huff and puff all he likes, but I don’t think he can do a thing.’

‘But who is it?’ asked Bracken, eaten up with curiosity.

‘Why, Miss Stuck-up-Rebecca, that’s who. His darling daughter. Twists him round her talons she does. Mind you, dear,’ his confidante placed her snout close to his ear and affected to look down the communal tunnel in the direction of Barrow Vale, ‘mind you, all that won’t last much longer, if you know what I mean,’ digging him in the ribs.

Bracken didn’t know what she meant and wanted very much to know. ‘Do you mean…?’ He hesitated encouragingly, and she obligingly continued.

‘Yes, you know I do. We all know she was an autumn-litter mole, which means she’ll be nearly ready to leave her home burrow by now. What’s more, it wouldn’t surprise anymole if Sarah, Mandrake’s so-called mate, had another litter this summer. Mandrake’s not one to hang about, is he? And Sarah isn’t going to want Rebecca around with another litter of her own to bring up.’

So, piece by piece, Bracken built up a picture of the system and its leading moles. He learned about Rune—‘cunning as a stoat’; he heard about Bindle—‘sulking over on the Eastside now’; he delighted in the stories about Dogwood and Mekkins; they told him about Hulver, about how the owls were most dangerous on the edge of the wood, and about how dangerous the Pasture moles were.

He often heard about Rebecca as well, especially from the males, who revelled in the scrapes she got herself into, causing Mandrake to tear a strip off her again and again, so they said.

She was, so he was variously told, wild, nearly as big as a male of her age, an autumn mole (which meant that she was tough), obstinate, always laughing, inclined to dance about Barrow Vale on the surface, the bane of her brothers’ lives, and frequently punished by Mandrake.

Bracken, who naturally grew increasingly curious about Rebecca, might have been tempted to go and find her had she been any other mole’s daughter and had he himself been more sociable. But despite his ability to wheedle his way into other moles’ tunnels and occasionally even their burrows, he was rather shy of his own generation. Talking with adults was one thing, consorting with his peers was another, and much more difficult. Still, for a while he looked out for her in the communal tunnels and ventured once or twice on to the surface at Barrow Vale, thinking he might see Rebecca there, but nothing ever came of it.

Soon, other things about the system caught his interest. The stories Aspen had told him about the Ancient System, and the occasional mentions it got as a long-unvisited place, fascinated him. Also, there was something about the way moles talked about the Duncton Stone, and the mystery of why they mentioned, as something separate from it, ‘The Stone,’ which was powerful and held all moles’ lives in its power. Was there, then, a Stone a mole could never see?

‘Where is it?’ he would ask. ‘What is it?’ But nomole gave him an answer. He thought he might find it if he went to the Ancient System, but as yet he didn’t actually want to try to go there—it was far too dangerous—but he did want to meet a mole, apart from Burrhead, who had been there.

It was this interest and the fact that he had exhausted the exploration possibilities of Westside and Barrow Vale that led him to strike out towards the slopes one day.

Chapter Six

There were far fewer moles on the slopes, and after several visits, getting higher each time, Bracken began to see that he would have to explore in a different way. For one thing, the higher he got, the more he found the mixed oaks and elms and safe undergrowth he had been used to giving way to open beech wood with its disconcerting layer of rustling beech leaves, which gave away every movement if a mole wanted to travel fast. The burrows and tunnels in this borderland had a curious, derelict air that, at first, Bracken found depressing. Tunnel after tunnel would be abandoned and dusty, or taken over by weasels or voles, though only for a short way past their entrances. Or he would find a system that had recently been lived in, for scraps of worms remained, or the entrances weren’t grown over, or he could smell the demarcation marks left by their occupants, faint but discernible. But rarely any moles.

Then there were large areas where nomole seemed to have burrowed, though quite why, he couldn’t work out. When he was there, he began to feel he would never see anymole here at all, and even found himself talking to himself on occasion, almost as if he missed company.

All this meant that he found the slopes wearing and at first could only take a short while of them, scampering back to the Westside as quickly as he could—running down communal tunnels where they helped him and over the surface if a tunnel route meant a confrontation he preferred to avoid. It was so tiring placating moles!

May slid into June and he was no longer a pup. Root and Wheatear were nearly adult in size and tried more and more to behave like adults, too, which meant they would ignore him totally, attack him, or push him out of the way. If he found worms when they had none, for example, they would simply take them from him, talons raised above his vulnerable snout as a warning that they meant business.

He sensed that his time in the burrow was running out, so to try to extend it he exaggerated yet further his juvenile pose, going about in the defensive stance of a timid, placatory mole. Burrhead began to call him ‘young Bracken,’ as a way of differentiating him from Root and Wheatear, who seemed in his terms to be growing up normally. Bracken, he was beginning to think, was in some way backward and hardly worth getting into a lather about any more. He obviously wasn’t going to last long once the summer came and the new generation started its search for territory.

‘He won’t stand a chance against this spring’s lot,’ Burrhead told Aspen one day at the end of May. ‘But every litter has its wrong ’uns.’ Aspen nodded, but she was not so sure. Bracken was a disappointment and yet, well, ‘He’s not so stupid as he sometimes seems, you know—he knows much more about the system than either of the other two—in fact he knows more than I do.’ But this was just a disguise for her true feelings about Bracken, which were those of many a female for the weakest of her litter: compassion mixed with hope that they might turn out better in the end. And he did like her stories, which was more than she could say for Root and Wheatear, for all their stolid, moleworthy qualities.

But she didn’t say any of this to Burrhead because it just wasn’t worth it, and she was losing interest in them all. The litter would be gone soon and they had the summer to get through, when she’d be on her own much more, and she was looking forward to it. Sensing these things, Bracken spent more and more time away from the home burrow and began to consider carefully where he might go when he finally left it. He had no desire to compete with the likes of Root for a place in the Westside. He wasn’t crazy!

Nor did he know enough about the north or the Eastside yet to make plans in that direction. So increasingly he began to think the slopes were a possibility—they might be wormscarce but they were also mole-scarce, which was a major attraction. He had seen enough to think he might make a living there, giving himself breathing space to consider what to do next.

With these ideas in his mind, he decided to make a trek to the slopes one day and explore them further, perhaps staying away from his home burrow for a day or two. He slipped away one quiet June morning, when everymole was asleep or preoccupied, and took a mainly surface route up towards the slopes. He didn’t know it, but he was never to live in the Westside again.

It took him until late in the morning to reach his first beech tree, at a point he already knew where he could find some worms. Then he pressed on along what he called the beech-oak borderland until at last he was into new territory. And then on and on eastwards, progressing along a contour line for a while, and then up for a bit.

He saw a lot of life—birds, a couple of voles, several squirrels, a possible fox—but no moles. By the early afternoon he was tired and stopped for food. He had never been so far in one day and knew he would be spending the night in a strange burrow, or perhaps one he must make for himself.

In search of worms, he found an old, disused tunnel and went down it, snout aquiver, but not a whiff or sign of a mole. So he blocked one end of it to make a temporary burrow and, putting his back against it, crouched facing the entrance above and the continuation of the tunnel beyond. Safe, snug and just the place to crunch the worms he had found. He closed his eyes and settled down, heart thumping from the day’s journey. But he was not asleep, and when there was a scratching at the earth block he had made and a warning vibration along the tunnel wall, he was awake and ready, still as a root. Moles feel safe in their own tunnels and make quite a lot of noise, and this one was no exception.

Indeed, he was chatting to himself in a busy kind of way, interspersing it with snatches of a familiar worming song:

‘Now we dig and we scratch and we wedge and we pull,

Now we wedge and we dig and…’

‘Mmm. This shouldn’t have happened, not in my tunnel. Mind you, it’s a long time since I was here. Too long. I’m hungry. Worms, that’s what I want.

‘Worms, worms, worms,

Lots of lovely worms.’

Bracken relaxed when he heard all this, for the mole sounded old and good-humoured and unlikely to cause him harm. Still, feeling it is better to be safe than sorry, he took advantage of the noise the mole was making to sneak out quietly on to the surface again to wait and see who would come.

The muttering and humming continued and an occasionally heavy breathing of exertion, as the mole burrowed his way through Bracken’s block, until finally a snout appeared at the entrance, sniffing about the warm evening air.

‘Somemole’s here,’ he said loudly. ‘I can smell it.’ At which the snout disappeared back into the tunnel and there fell a deep silence. Bracken held his breath, waited for several minutes, and finally could stand it no longer. ‘Hello, I’m here,’ he said in as cheerful a tone as he could muster, ‘a youngster from the Westside.’ Silence.

‘I got lost.’ Silence. ‘I’m very sorry, really I am, but I thought your tunnel was deserted.’ Snuffling. Finally the mole spoke out from the dark tunnel.

‘It was deserted. I’ve not had time to come here for months. It’s merest chance’ (at this point the snout poked out of the tunnel again) ‘that I happened along at this particular moment.’

The mole’s head appeared—the head of the oldest mole Bracken had ever seen. ‘At least I think it was merest chance. I’m not sure that chance exists anymore.’

The mole emerged completely from the entrance and stood on spindly paws peering in Bracken’s direction. ‘By which I mean that I’m not anymore sure… if you see what I mean. Haven’t got a worm or two, have you?’ he asked abruptly, settling down with slow dignity and not saying another word.

Bracken, half hidden behind a fallen branch, came out a little and crouched down himself. The old mole evidently gave up hope of a worm from Bracken and asked the question moles traditionally ask of others on their territory: ‘Who are you and where do you come from?’ He asked it in a singsong, almost as if he wasn’t thinking about what it meant or expecting a reply. But he got one, all the same. ‘I’m Bracken from the Westside, exploring.’

‘Mmm, exploring! Very good.’ He dropped his voice a little and, in a stage whisper that Bracken thought might be sarcastic, said, ‘Haven’t explored out any of my worms, have you?’

‘Well, I…’ Bracken stuttered, because he didn’t like to admit he had done just that, yet didn’t want to tell a lie somehow. ‘Well, I could find you some worms in no time, I expect,’ he offered at last.

The old mole said nothing, but chomped his jaws together appreciatively and started to hum again. Bracken ran off busily to look for worms, pleased without knowing it to be doing something for another mole, even if the impulse was born of the fact that he had stolen some of the old mole’s worms. He rummaged happily under fallen branches and down an old tunnel he had seen, half dug and abandoned. He sensed that the other mole was not aggressive; indeed, he seemed positively friendly, and obviously wanted to have a chat. And that would be nice, thought Bracken: he might know something about the slopes that he wants to tell me. And the Stone.

Soon he had got six or seven worms together, enough for them both. He deposited four by the old mole and, as a mark of respect, bit their heads off so they could not escape, and sat down again. The old mole thanked him and crouched in silence, looking at the worms as if he was pondering something. Then he said:

‘Be with us, Stone, at the start of our feast.

Be with us, Stone, at the close of our meal.

Let no mole adown our bodies

That may hurt our sorrowing souls,

Oh no mole adown our bodies

That may hurt our sorrowing souls.’

The simple grace was over almost before it had begun and it so awed Bracken, so filled him with wonder, that he was shaken with silence. He had never heard a prayer before. He had never heard the Stone spoken to as if he were a friend at a mole’s side.

The evening fell about them and they ate their worms in silence, in great peace with each other. When the mole had finished the four worms, which he ate with slow relish, he stopped and cleaned his face and licked his paws.

‘That’s better. I am grateful,’ he said. ‘My name’s Hulver, by the way, and if I’m not much mistaken, your father is Burrhead from the Westside.’

‘Yes, that’s right. How did you know?’ asked Bracken.

‘He’s an elder, like me,’ explained Hulver, ‘and he’s mentioned you once or twice.’ Hulver leaned forward like a fellow conspirator and whispered, ‘He’s not pleased with your progress. You’re not nasty enough!’ Hulver laughed and Bracken decided he rather liked him, but still didn’t know what to say. He was in the presence of an elder he had heard of as the wisest in the system, so what could he say? Hulver fell into silence again, snout quivering in the blue evening light and slowly lowering on to outstretched paws as he contemplated nightfall.

Bracken’s mind was in a whirl—the prayer had left him feeling very strange and, as far as he was concerned, it hung magically in the air about them, making everything beyond it seem dim and unclear. He felt lost in his thoughts, literally lost, for he couldn’t find where among them he actually was. The old mole crouched before him as if he were one of the trees, or a plant growing or the soil, part of the whole thing that seemed around him contained in the prayer. He was finally dragged—that’s what it felt like—out of these thoughts by Hulver, who asked him in a gentle voice, ‘Why have you come over to the slopes, can you tell me that?’ Bracken started to tell him, explaining how he was interested in the system, liked exploring and… and soon he was telling Hulver everything.

Talking on and on into the night, telling Hulver things he hardly knew about himself, complaining bitterly about his life, criticising Burrhead, saying finally that he hated him, expressing his contempt for Root, telling about Aspen’s stories, admitting his fear about leaving the home burrow to find his own territory. Now and again Hulver would nod encouragingly, but he never said more than two or three words or passed a judgement, making Bracken freer to say what he felt.

He was stopped finally by an ominous owl hoot somewhere high above and the sudden realisation, as he looked up and saw the shining crescent of a moon dimmed by clouds, that it was late, and getting later. He was tired, and felt he had never talked so much in his life. Hulver yawned, looked about him, and said, ‘Time for the burrow, my lad, time for sleep.

‘Now you are welcome to use this tunnel, though perhaps I should say continue to use it. But I’m going down to my burrow, which is a little way off, because it’s so much quieter.’ And with that he ran off into the night, Bracken following his course by sound until he went down an entrance and his sound was lost.

For a while Bracken crouched in the night alone, wondering about Hulver and enjoying the unusual calm and peace he felt. A snatch of the grace Hulver had spoken came back to him and he let its words run through his tired mind like the sound of the breeze in the long grass by the edge of the wood:

‘Let no mole adown our bodies

That may hurt our sorrowing souls.’

He changed the ‘our’ to ‘my’ the second time round, not knowing that Hulver, in his graciousness, had himself modified the words to take account of Bracken’s presence, for it was a prayer he often said for himself over his solitary meals. Bracken couldn’t remember all the words and promised himself that he would ask Hulver to repeat them so he could learn it; then he climbed down into the tunnel, carefully reblocked it again, and fell into a deep sleep.

But Hulver, resting his old snout on his greying paws, did not fall asleep immediately, thinking about the strange young mole now sleeping in one of his tunnels. For all the youngster’s confusion and bitterness, and his youthful carping at the Westside ways, there was something about him that pleased Hulver. He had a nice quick way with words; his damning criticism of some of the Westside moles, including Burrhead, was on target, while his obvious courage in exploring the system so far was impressive in one so young.

Hulver was excited, too, that he seemed to have a curiosity about the old system and something of the spirit for exploration that too few moles had. He paused in his thoughts, scratching his forehead with his left paw, trying to catch the words to express the effect Bracken had on him. ‘Never was much good with words,’ he muttered to himself, shifting into something nearer a sleeping position. ‘But I like the youngster, there’s something about him, even if he doesn’t look as if he could fight a flea.’

He thought about the impulse that had taken him to the part of his tunnels where he had found Bracken. The same warm impulse he had felt in recent weeks lifting him out of the long moleyears of pain and desolation that had followed the preceding Midsummer Night when he had been sure Rune had been listening in the shadows. Only with the new spring had the load lightened and something of his old love of life returned. And now, this Bracken had turned up on his territory, bold as a brash young pup.

‘Well,’ he told himself, drifting into a happy sleep, ‘I’ll teach him something about the Ancient System and its ways. What I know of them. I might even mention something of the rituals to him, some of these youngsters ought to know about them.’

So began the first friendship that Bracken ever knew and the last that Hulver ever enjoyed. A strange association of the oldest mole in the system, who had long lost his political power, and one of the weakest, who had no power at all.

In the June days that followed Hulver told him a great deal, and Bracken listened well, taking an active part in his imagination in all the adventures and journeys, fights and rituals that Hulver talked about.

He soon asked Hulver to take him up to the Ancient System, but Hulver always refused, one excuse following the other: ‘I’m too tired today for such a climb… it’s wormscarce up there at the moment, better wait a while… there’s nothing much to see that I can’t describe… too many owls now because moles have been gone too long.’ But all this didn’t put off Bracken, who only became more determined to go.

But there were other things to talk about as well. It was from Hulver that he first learned of Uffington, where the Holy Burrows were, and where mysterious White Moles were said to roam.

‘It’s far off, far to the west. I’ve never met a mole who’s been there, though I talked to some when I was your age who claimed to have met moles who had.’

‘What do they do there?’ Bracken wanted to know. ‘What moles live with the White Moles? Do you know anything about scribe moles, like Aspen mentioned in her stories?’

The questions tumbled from him in a flow that sometimes made Hulver feel old and helpless, for there were so many questions he didn’t know the answers to and, what was worse, had never thought of finding the answers to.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never known,’ he would say. ‘The scribes came from there, I know that!’

‘Yes, but what do scribemoles do?’ Bracken would persist. ‘They write the stories that moles want to remember and the prayers and blessings that true moles love. They go out from Uffington to remind us of the Stone.’

‘Have they ever been here?’ asked Bracken tirelessly, and Hulver told him what he knew of that.

So Bracken learned much from what Hulver talked about, but more without knowing it from the gentle way the old mole lived, looking for worms, openly seeking the Stone’s help, pausing sometimes to tell Bracken to listen to the sound of ‘this beloved wood’. Often just crouching and making Bracken do the same, even though he found it irksome crouching in silence when he could be doing something or talking.

‘Which is why I make you do it,’ Hulver would tell him mysteriously.

One day Hulver shocked Bracken by announcing that it was time for the June elder meeting and he would be gone for five or six days—‘even though they don’t listen to what I say, with Mandrake hard upon them.’

Just before he left, he spoke to Bracken very seriously. ‘Stay here quietly, live in my burrow silently as I have been teaching you to do, for though, being Midsummer, this should be a time of great happiness, I fear there is much danger about. I can smell it, so take care.’

A chill came over Bracken’s heart at this, for the sudden prospect of being alone again made him recognise the joy he had been living with in the last few days with Hulver, who, seeing fear cross his face, softly touched his shoulder with his paw and said, ‘There is danger, but you are strong enough to face it. You will never face an evil you have not the strength to master. When I come back there will be a lot to do and you will have much to learn,’ Hulver told him finally. ‘I am going to take you up to the Ancient System. Meanwhile, do not be lulled by the June sun. There is danger in the system and I fear you may suffer in its coming, so be careful.’

Hulver turned and ran a little way down the slope before disappearing down a tunnel leading to far-off Barrow Vale. He hated to leave Bracken, for he had rejoiced in their friendship too.

Bracken watched him go, and with an enormous sense of loss turned back down into Hulver’s tunnels and along to his burrow, where he crouched, shaken and desolate. A terrible dark fear began to seep into him and he shivered, despite the June warmth. He had never felt so alone. In the darkness he tried to find words to comfort himself, the fear swirling about him, but they had gone. Then the fear took him over until it felt like a black cloud that would burst and explode inside him, and he found himself crying and desolate, repeating between his sobs lines from the first grace he had heard Hulver speak:

‘Let no mole adown my body

That may hurt my sorrowing soul.’

And though he did not know it, it was the first prayer to the Stone that he ever spoke. Slowly it calmed him until he was able to think of Hulver again and not himself. He changed the ‘my’ to ‘his’ and said the grace again, hoping it might go down through the tunnels with Hulver to the elder meeting at Barrow Vale, where it might protect him.

But Hulver met another mole and had a conversation with her, before he joined the other elders. It was a meeting that affected him very much and caused him to think that Bracken was a more special mole than he might otherwise have thought.

The mole he met was Rebecca, and it would be the first time that Rebecca ever heard the name of Bracken spoken, for her now legendary first meeting with him by the Stone was not to take place until the following September. She had known that an elder meeting was taking place in June and, her curiosity as ever getting the better of her fear of Mandrake, she had dared wait in Barrow Vale to see the elders arrive for the meeting.

Other moles did the same. That was the nice thing about the communal tunnels beneath Barrow Vale. The moment she saw the old mole coming down through the tunnels that led from the slopes, his snout wrinkled and low, his fur ragged and greying, she knew who it was. She ran up to him in the old friendly way she hadn’t dared adopt with anymole during April and May, breathless and smiling. ‘Are you Hulver?’ she asked. He stopped and looked up at her, for she stood more upright and young than he did, and he was so nice. Oh! he was wise and radiated love!

‘I’m Hulver, I can’t deny it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, nomole else is as old as I am now, so it wasn’t hard to guess. Who are you, my dear?’

She hesitated to say from habit, for moles tended to back away when they found she was Mandrake’s Rebecca. But with Hulver she sensed it didn’t matter. ‘Rebecca,’ she said.

‘Sarah’s daughter!’ he said. ‘And Mandrake’s. You’re a fine-looking female, I must say, though I suppose you’re an adult now, but you all look so young to me. Be the same for you, one day,’ he laughed.

‘Would you tell me about the old times?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Because they say you’re the only one who remembers now, the only one who’s left.’ She dropped her voice a little as she said these last words, because she felt an unaccountable desire to go close to Hulver, to press herself to him, to hold him.

‘It would take a lifetime to tell you even a small part of it,’ he said, ‘and unfortunately I’m in a hurry for the elder meeting.’

‘Oh,’ sighed Rebecca, disappointed. There was so much she wanted to know about things and she felt Hulver could tell her. Indeed, she felt he could answer questions she didn’t even know how to ask. She crouched down near him sadly.

Hulver, too, was affected by their meeting. She seemed so, so… so alive! Eager, and sighing, standing and crouching, sad, loving. ‘Elder meetings never start on time, anyway,’ he thought to himself, settling down comfortably by her as a sign that he would talk for a little at least. ‘I’ll tell you about Rebecca, your namesake, if you like, Rebecca the Healer of the Ancient System.’

Rebecca changed mood again, now sighing contentedly, smiling, peaceful, and closing her eyes as she asked to do when Sarah began to tell her a story.

‘Mind you, I expect you know all about Rebecca; you can hardly fail to in Duncton, since she’s the only claim to fame we seem to have and at least they haven’t forgotten her, though they’ve forgotten everything else that matters.’ Rebecca nodded happily; she had heard all about Rebecca but she didn’t mind hearing it again, not from Hulver.

But Hulver himself didn’t know what he was going to say, since it all came into his mind and out as words without him seeming to have too much to do with it. He felt very peaceful. ‘Most of the stories you’ve heard are nonsense, I’m sure; harmless nonsense, of course. It’s just that we all like a good tale and if there seems to be a gap in the telling of it, we fill it up with something we like to think might have been—and who knows, it might have been!’ Hulver felt as if his words were exploring a tunnel down which he himself had never been.

‘Do you know what I think?’ He asked the question as much of himself as of Rebecca, but she shook her head and crouched even closer to Hulver, whose presence she found she loved, because there was something about his great age and goodness which seemed to grow out of the ground itself and make her feel safe and loved. ‘I believe she did stay here in Duncton for quite a time. I believe that in those days Duncton was a system where a mole like her would want to stay. I believe she loved Duncton Wood as you or I might love Barrow Vale in the spring.

‘Now, what you are going to ask me, in fact, what I ask myself, is why I believe all that. Well, I’ll tell you, my dear, because even if you don’t understand now, one day you will, I’m sure.

‘Twelve moleyears ago, before you were born, there was an elder meeting. It was the June meeting like the one about to be held. Much was said at it, though you needn’t worry about that. But during it, your father became the leading elder and his real sway over the system began. There were threats, dark talk, much sadness over the system for some of us, as there still is. For a time I felt full of despair and wanted to die. I saw that your father would destroy the system and there was nothing I could do about it. I went back to my burrow and sat in silence. I would have liked to have talked to another mole, but even my dearest friend, Bindle, was too afraid to talk to me. Now he no longer attends the elder meetings. Anyway, I was alone. Everything seemed bleak, although outside the June wind was warm, the worms were plentiful and the youngsters were growing fast down in the main system. But I didn’t eat. I crouched alone and silent.

‘The only thing that kept me alive was the knowledge that I alone knew the full Midsummer ritual and although Mandrake said he would kill me’—here Rebecca gasped lightly, and Hulver put a paw on her shoulder for a moment—‘if I went through with it, yet I knew I had to.

‘Then one of the old legends came to me; you know it, I’m sure—Groundsel the Owlkiller. You remember how he saw that it was better to die than to live in the thrall of fear? I began to feel the same. I went out on to the surface and looked up at the great trees above me, listening to the wood all around and waiting for first light. June! What a time! How happy I suddenly was as the light overtook the dark wood, cutting away its darkest patches, turning black into grey and then grey into the colour of summer! When night came around again, I climbed the hill to celebrate Midsummer. The fear that had been hanging about seemed to have gone and, of course, I wasn’t killed by Mandrake. As I set off I knew I wouldn’t be killed, even though I was followed from the moment I left my burrow. I’m not sure by whom, but seeing how things have gone since in the system, and who is Mandrake’s most active henchmole, I think it must have been Rune. He probably thought I didn’t know he was there, but you don’t live as long as I have without knowing what or who is nearby—especially somemole as unpleasant as Rune!’

Here Rebecca sighed and nodded. She knew what he meant.

‘Anyway, I went through the ritual carefully, not missing out one bit. I also said a special prayer and I said it in the direction of Uffington—I asked that Duncton might be visited once more by a scribemole. There was something funny about that prayer, something powerful that made me know that the Stone does listen. One day you’ll understand what I mean.’

As he said this, Hulver looked full on Rebecca and into her eyes, which were alight with life and love, and for a moment it was as if his old body had stopped and was hung suspended in a place of wonder, for he knew that this mole, this female, was special and that in some mysterious way the Stone was speaking to her through him. And that thought caused him to think of Bracken, who had looked so frightened when he left him up on the slopes, and made him see that there was a connection between the two. He felt as if he were crouched between them and that there was a power, a force, an enormous, troubled strength that was coursing unknown between them and taking its path through him! He shook himself and continued his story.

‘When I had finished making this prayer, I turned back to my burrows on the slopes, feeling, I must admit, somewhat cast down. I felt Rune’s evil presence near me and this time I couldn’t resist it in the way I had when I went up the hill. Perhaps the ritual had drained me: such things are very tiring, you know. I could feel his evil coming into me as fear, as aching, as ageing.

‘Now what has all this got to do with Rebecca the Healer? Listen carefully. As the days went on, I felt sure that Rune had put some kind of curse on me, or left something of himself about my tunnels. Yet, though I felt tired and ill, my old head began to see things more clearly than before. What did I see? I can’t possibly explain it all—I forgot things that ran so clearly before me almost as soon as I saw them. But the most important thing I saw, or rather felt, was that Rebecca the Healer was in the system: she was here. Now that’s different from hearing a tale told, and enjoying it, about a mole who once stayed in the Ancient System. I knew she was here. What’s more, I could feel she was still here—I should say is still here. I lived totally by myself for molemonths on end, or perhaps it was moleyears—I’m not quite sure—but I wasn’t alone. Rebecca was there as she is with you, her namesake, or up there,’ he waved his paw in the direction of the slopes, ‘with… with Bracken!’

Before Rebecca could ask who Bracken was, which she was about to do, Hulver interrupted her and himself by touching the side of her head with his paw and saying, ‘I don’t think I will see you again, my dear, so remember what I say, however strange it seems.’ He was conscious again that the elder meeting was going to start soon, also that time was running out and he was sorry, so sorry, that he had not met Rebecca before.

‘You see, my dear,’ he said urgently, ‘Rebecca the Healer was up on the slopes with me, or rather her love was, which is more or less the same thing. Often in the silence of my burrow, or crouching still on the surface, I would hear her in the wind or see her in a beech leaf or a root, and my old pains and aches would be gone. I’m an old mole and have had many mates, but I’ve never felt such a love as Rebecca seemed to fill me with. She loved Duncton Wood once, or the moles in it, and left her love here always. You only have to reach out a paw to touch it.’

He stopped suddenly. He had to go. He wanted to get the elder meeting over and done with, because there was so little time. ‘Does any of that make sense to you?’ he asked Rebecca gently. He knew it didn’t matter whether she answered or not but, in fact, she was so involved with what he was saying that she said nothing at all. It didn’t make much sense to him, come to think of it, so quite what he could expect Rebecca to say he didn’t know. But after all this time away from friendly moles—his only appearance at Barrow Vale in the last few moleyears had been at elder meetings—it was a pleasure to be talking to a mole who listened to him with affection. So young, so much to live through that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be able to help with. He thought of Bracken again suddenly, up there in his burrow waiting for his return. He remembered the sad fear in the youngster’s face as he left him there.

‘Do you know a mole called Bracken, from the Westside?’ he asked Rebecca. She shook her head. ‘A strange thing,’ he went on, half to himself. ‘I was drawn over to a part of my tunnels which I had more or less abandoned by… well… a feeling. A “Rebecca kind of feeling”, as I call them. And there was a mole, bold as you please. A youngster looking as if he was hardly weaned. Not much to look at, inclined to complain about his home burrow, also inclined to steal other moles’ worms. Be that as it may. Since Rebecca seemed to have led me to him, it seemed the least I could do was talk to him, which I did, though I was tired.’

Hulver did not elaborate. It occurred to him that the fewer who knew Bracken was still in his burrow, the better.

‘Please, Hulver, did you tell him the story about Rebecca, I mean your story?’

‘No, no, he wouldn’t understand. He was more interested in adventure and fighting and exploring the Ancient System. Oh, and in scribemoles, though I couldn’t tell him much about those!’

‘Well, I want to know about the Ancient System, too,’ said Rebecca, pretending for a moment to be just a youngster who has to be humoured. ‘And about scribemoles as well.’

Hulver ignored the sudden childishness in her voice and continued to speak to her as he had already—as if she were an adult.

‘This Bracken,’ he said, ‘there’s something about him… I don’t know what. Perhaps I’m getting old. I wish I was young again so I could help him…’ He stopped, his snout lowered, and Rebecca wanted him to go on. He was trying to say something to her, but he didn’t know the words.

She looked at his old face and watched the struggle for words go across it and understood suddenly, in the way that often comes to youngsters, a truth she was still too young to articulate. She understood that a mole, even a wise one, may often not know what it is he is trying to say and that one who is listening to him must help, by being silent, and by listening to the silence between the sometimes stumbling words.

‘This Bracken, he’s a strange mole. He has given me hope, but I don’t know why. He really isn’t much to look at at all and certainly doesn’t look as if he could defend himself. And yet… well… Rebecca…’ He looked at her again, struggling for the words, caught between these two youngsters, unable to express the power and relief they unwittingly gave him. ‘Rebecca, sometimes you’ll find there are moles you can help who don’t seem worth the trouble. You wonder why you tried. They may be weak, or selfish, or stupid, or lazy. But you’ll find that if you give such a mole your help, or in other words your love, they will often repay you in ways you could never have dreamed of. That’s how the Stone works, do you see? That’s it. These moles will pop up years later and suddenly the mystery of why they crossed your tunnel, and came briefly into your life, is solved. And then you know that there are powers beyond yourself over which you have no control and before which a mole should feel awe. That’s something many moles have forgotten. Don’t you forget it. Never forget it!’

He looked at her intently and she was wide-eyed before him and wanted, oh how she wanted… and she did! She went up to him and nuzzled him and held him for an instant, her young glossy fur mixing with his own. Oh, she felt such love for him, such awe for his wisdom and the simple way he held his old body. ‘Oh, Hulver,’ she whispered, oh oh oh.

A great sweetness came into Hulver, who had not been touched by another mole for moleyears, and never with such love. Never, ever. Why, she was beautiful—had it taken him so long to see that the only beauty is love? And then, once again, an image of Bracken came into his mind and he found himself saying—or rather whispering, because she was so very close—‘You keep an eye out for Bracken. There’s more to him than a mole might think when they meet him. Much more. He may need your help, Rebecca.’

He broke away from her and they smiled into each other. ‘Perhaps you’ll need his help,’ said Hulver, ‘because that’s how the Stone works, you see. All of us need what you can give, especially you yourself.’

And with this last mysterious comment, Hulver left her, and she found herself full of the strangest love and joy. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, oh.

Chapter Seven

Bracken stayed fast in Hulver’s burrow for two days after he had gone. There was a good supply of worms, and Hulver’s warning had frightened him enough to make him stay where he was. Indeed, it had put such a fear in him that for those two days Bracken expected some terrible danger to manifest itself at any moment, even in the burrow itself. So he started at every sound and worried at every silence.

By the third day the worms were running out and, anyway, he was getting restless. Even fear can be overtaken by boredom. He could feel that the weather was warm and June-like on the surface, so he went there, never straying far from the tunnel entrance. The entrance nearest Hulver’s burrow was among the beech trees themselves; only below it did they disappear into the oaks and mixed wood that formed the level part of Duncton Wood.

Among the beeches the wood felt different, and he wasn’t sure if he liked it so much. They were lighter and cleaner than oaks and no vegetation grew under them nor cluttering hazel, hawthorn and holly about them. There was a purity in the air and a lack of distracting vegetation on the ground that made a mole think. ‘If the top of the hill is like this,’ Bracken thought, ‘then no wonder the ancient moles were different from us.’ He explored Hulver’s tunnels in all directions and found, as he had suspected, that the system was too large for the old mole to maintain and in places was falling into disrepair.

He noticed that on the east side of Hulver’s system the tunnels were older-looking, less straight and not in such good condition. He deduced from this that Hulver had tied his own tunnels on to another long-abandoned series of tunnels he had found a little higher up the slopes. Bracken was intrigued by this and sought the central home burrow this older system must have had, but he couldn’t find it. Here and there, where tunnels rose up the slopes, he found they were blocked—and blocked a very long time ago, for the barriers looked like tunnel ends rather than mere walls of soil, but by tapping them with his talons he could tell there were more tunnels beyond. He was tempted to burrow a way through, but this would have been discourteous to Hulver.

As his explorations continued (and they spread over several days because he still spent a lot of time in silence in Hulver’s home burrow) a gradual reorientation about the shape of the whole Duncton system took place in his mind. He had, of course, not yet been to some key areas—the Ancient System, the Eastside and the Marsh End. But he became much more aware of them and their relationship to each other than he had been before. As a mole pup sees his own burrow in a different way once he has been outside it into the tunnels, and those differently when he has been on to the surface, so Bracken now saw that the Westside was only a part of the system, and a peripheral part at that.

These thoughts struck him with particular force one morning, the seventh day of Hulver’s absence, as he crouched up on the surface again enjoying the June sun. He had found a few worms, and having eaten them, was ‘listening to the wood’ as Hulver himself often did. The wood was exciting and very alive. Much more sound came from the lower part, where the oak trees started and there were more birds. Up here on the slopes the air seemed clearer than he had ever known, and everything seemed possible. Everything. Bracken crouched facing south towards Barrow Vale far below, his back to the Ancient System above.

The sun shone through the shimmering young beech leaves from the east to his right, while down to his left lay the Westside and Aspen and Root going about… and Burrhead must be straight ahead down there at the elder meeting, talking talking… and above was the sky bigger than everything, arching away, far beyond even the Marsh End. Bracken saw then, for the first time, how the Duncton system was just a system, not the world. One day he could go beyond it like the sky did, for everything was possible.

He felt a surging pull above and behind him from the Ancient System, whose edge he was on. He felt for a moment like one of the ancients, looking down on the new system. He saw that Hulver’s system was superbly placed in the system as a whole, poised as it was on the edge of the ancient and the modern, the Eastside and the West. Bracken’s heart raced as he felt an urge to run off through the wood, all over the wood, for everything was possible and must be explored.

He might well have done so had not a familiar scurrying sound warned him that a mole was coming up from the oak wood below. Bracken knew it was not Hulver when the sounds veered off to the west and disappeared below ground. Hulver would never enter his own system so stealthily. At this point Bracken was wary rather than frightened, and ran back down into the tunnels, crouching quietly in a side tunnel near the home burrow from where he would hear everything and be able to escape in several different directions. He knew the system well enough to be able to elude any alien mole if necessary.

The mole moved about here and there in the system but finally went up to the surface again, searching back and forth until he found the main entrance. This was only a few moleyards from where Bracken crouched and he waited tensely.

It was a strange position to be in—defending a system not his own. Suddenly the mole came boldly and resolutely into the system and stopped still as death in the main tunnel. Bracken shuffled about a little to establish his presence, for he had no intention of either waiting to be found or running off and leaving Hulver’s burrow to the care of a stranger.

‘Who is there, and what are you doing here?’ the alien mole called in a commanding voice that took Bracken by surprise. He might have expected to ask the same question himself but had neither the presence of mind nor, perhaps, the courage, to do so. The mole was obviously tough and mature, and Bracken quickly persuaded himself that there was no possibility of fighting successfully, even if he had wanted to, which he didn’t.

He had no sooner poked his snout out of the side tunnel, than the stranger was coming towards him—bold, calm, dominant.

‘My name’s Rune,’ said the mole, ‘and you had better tell me what you are doing here.’ He advanced the last few steps menacingly. For the first time in his life Bracken was faced by a mole he knew, with absolute certainty, would kill him if he felt like it. There was such indifferent power in Rune’s gaze that what little courage Bracken felt inside him shrivelled up, to be replaced by a desperate clutching in blackness that simply wanted to escape. Rune seemed huge and all-powerful and, for all Bracken knew, might continue his menacing walk right over him, leaving him like a squashed moth that has happened into a hurrying mole’s path.

Oh, Rune, sir, my name’s Bracken and I came too far from the Westside,’ he whined, his voice high from the tightness and constriction that, in his fear, had invaded his throat. He looked at the terrifying Rune, waiting to do his bidding. If Rune had said ‘Turn on your back and scratch the ceiling’ Bracken would have done it without question. But Rune said nothing, simply gazing searingly at Bracken who, had he had sufficient wits about him to consider the matter, might have concluded that it would be better if he had been asked to scratch the ceiling. Instead, he chose to fill the silence with another catchphrase from his stock of ‘little mole lost’ excuses for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘I also ran out of worms and this burrow was deserted so I stayed here.’

Rune knew perfectly well that Bracken was Burrhead’s son, and though the lad was by all accounts an idiot (a good reason for killing him there and then) he had no wish to aggravate Burrhead and the Westside needlessly. The time was not yet ripe. Though as he watched the stuttering youngster making his excuses, Rune was inclined to think he would be doing Burrhead a favour by getting rid of him.

‘Well, it’s not deserted, because I’m here now and I suggest you return to the Westside fast,’ he said slowly. ‘Moles shouldn’t leave their territories and it’s only because you’re a youngster that I’m making allowances. If you get stopped on your way back to the Westside you can tell them that I sent you back. But don’t try this kind of exploration again; it’s not safe. Now get going.’

‘Yes, Rune, sir, thank you, sir,’ said Bracken, adding with the effusiveness of a mole who has been let off the talon, ‘thank you, sir, I will go straight back now. Thank you, sir.’ And he dashed away, up into the fresh air.

There he found himself shaking and sweating and running all at the same time, desperate to get away from Rune, who put the fear of diseased darkness into his soul. He had never been so frightened in his life, not by Root, not by the wildest noises on the surface out of reach of a tunnel entrance, not even by Burrhead.

Only when he was down below the slopes again and well into the oaks did he pause to think. He couldn’t go back to the Westside, because he would almost certainly be killed by Burrhead or Root; he couldn’t hang about around Hulver’s tunnels. So he didn’t know where to go. Having reached this cul-de-sac he moved on to thinking about Hulver.

If Rune was here and Rune was an elder, the elder meeting must be over. Which meant that Hulver must also be on his way back. Hulver would be able to tell him what to do or where to go, so he turned away from the route back to the Westside, cutting off towards the Eastside, contouring round the slopes. He would try to locate the main tunnel Hulver had headed down when he had gone to Barrow Vale and which, presumably, Rune had come up. With luck he might reach it before Hulver passed by on up to his burrow—and Rune. Rune! It occurred to Bracken only then, after running so far and fearing so much, that Rune was the danger Hulver must have sensed would come. Rune had come to kill Hulver.

An urgency now came to his progress through the wood, for he speeded up, not bothering to run from cover to cover and shadow to shadow as any sensible creature normally does. No time. Not bothering to avoid the dry leaves because of the noise they made. No time. Dashing, running, scampering along the contour. Against time. His fear of Rune was replaced by an urgent desire to reach Hulver and warn him.

Strangely, as he ran through the wood, aware of direction, aware of scent, feeling the dangers, head clear as air after rainfall, an excitement he had never felt before crept over him. He felt more in control of himself than he had ever felt. All the skills he had added to his basic gift for orientation and exploration were now working together, taking him towards the tunnel he knew must be there to find. Probably no other Duncton mole but Rune and one or two of the Marshenders could have found their way across the system to the communal tunnel with the concentration and skill that Bracken, still a youngster, was able to muster. He knew where he was going. And he found the tunnel as surely as a wasp finds its nest or an owl its prey. He knew it by temperature change, by smell, and by location; he knew by instinct. He lay above the tunnel for a moment or two and then ran up it towards the slopes, realising that if he went down towards Barrow Vale it was just possible that Hulver might pass him. So he ran back up towards Hulver’s burrow and the danger of Rune until he found an old, barely discernible entrance, and went down it. He crouched low and silent. There was no vibration in the tunnel at all, not a mole for miles. If Hulver had passed by, he was now far on and there was no chance of catching him. So he waited, snout on his paws, just as Hulver sometimes lay in the wood, eyes closed. Above, on the surface, the midday sun shone down poised for its downward arc to the west.

Not long afterwards Bracken felt vibrations and the briefest rush of air as a mole approached. He waited trembling, for if it wasn’t Hulver he would have to do some fast talking. He decided to claim that Rune had sent him down this way on his way back to the Westside. As the mole approached, Bracken decided to save time by announcing himself.

‘Hello! I’m Bracken!’

The mole stopped, and Bracken heard a gentle laugh.

‘Are you, indeed! Always finding your way into tunnels you shouldn’t be in!’ It was Hulver, and Bracken felt relief rush over him. ‘There’s little time, Bracken, very little,’ said Hulver quickly, ‘and there is a great deal to do. I assume that Rune found you in my burrow and sent you packing?’

Bracken nodded. ‘Whether he has gone there to kill me or simply to warn me for a final (and fruitless) time, I cannot say,’ said Hulver. ‘But I’m not going to risk going back now that you are safe here with me. There are nine days left before Midsummer Night. We cannot return to my tunnels and so must hide somewhere else. I think the best thing is to head up towards the Stone and rely on its shadow to hide us for the days that remain. You have much to learn, more than you can know.’

Bracken felt, or thought he felt, alien vibrations far down in the tunnel. Hard to say, but he wanted to get away as fast as possible.

‘There may be other moles coming,’ he whispered. ‘I can hear something, or rather feel it.’ Hulver looked at the youngster who crouched still before him, his head and snout on one side, body tense and ready; feeling fear for him. For himself he felt nothing; he had little time left now. But this youngster had so much to do, so much, and Hulver trembled for him.

‘We must go,’ said Bracken urgently. ‘Please may we go?’ Hulver nodded and turned up to the entrance and out on to the surface into the afternoon sun.

Hulver led the way, taking the circular route below his own tunnels that Bracken had taken, then up towards the beech trees. At last the beech wood lay directly ahead of them, familiar to Hulver but as terrifying to Bracken in its tall silence as it had been when he had been alone by Hulver’s burrow. Each step they took left the friendly oak wood further behind, with its bird chatter and song, its scurrying blackbirds searching the leaves, its squirrels starting and champing among the oak branches.

‘We had better stop for a while,’ said Bracken, his natural tracking instinct giving him a sense of command he had not felt before. ‘We’ll wait for the evening wind to give us noise cover before we climb on.’

Hulver smiled to himself. Just what he would have done—had he thought of it. Bracken certainly seemed to know his way about the wood. Yet, at the same time, the youngster was very nervous, jumping at every shadow and making Hulver himself start more than once. It was time to stop.

He let Bracken dig a temporary burrow, watching him tunnel away at the mould. The youngster looked vulnerable against the massive oak root that plunged into the ground beyond him.

He had a strong feeling that his long wait since the previous Midsummer, a wait that had often driven him to despair and doubt, had not been in vain.

Often on a dark night he had tossed and turned over in his mind why he, of all his generation, was still alive after six Longest Nights. Six! He shuddered at the number. When the long moleyears of winter had given way finally to the earliest stirrings of spring, the worst time came when the air was chill as ice and he knew he would not mate. Often, then, he would go to sleep in his burrow and wish that he might not wake up. He wanted never again to rise to the aches and pains, fears and doubts that had come upon him in old age. But as spring advanced, the feeling that Rebecca the Healer was there had come over him and gradually a tiny hope had come back that something might happen. Something might happen. He had remembered the stories about her which they had told him as a child when he was sure she was real and walked the tunnels when nomole was there. Now he saw she was real after all, but had gone away for most of his life, only to come back at the end. ‘Old foolish mole,’ he scolded himself. ‘Living in the past.’

‘The burrow’s ready, Hulver,’ Bracken said, breaking into his thoughts. ‘Best go down it until the wind rises.’ Hulver did, meek as an old mole. What could he give the youngster in the time he had left?

Well, he could tell him the old stories and instruct him in the rituals to pass on the heritage that is everymole’s, though so few want to honour it.

Seeing that Bracken was jumpy with waiting for nightfall, Hulver decided to start his education there and then by recounting the tale of Merton, chosen mole of Uffington, just as it had been told to him by his father, and to him by the very last scribemole ever to visit Duncton Wood.

It was a tale that recalled the mole whose task in life had turned out to be to save the secret song of Uffington, which only chosen moles sing and then only once in a cycle of seasons. How Bracken shuddered to hear of the plague that wiped out most of the scribemoles back in the distant past when Merton had lived. How his heart stirred to hear of Merton’s escape from Uffington, and his survival, and his remembrance of the sacred song he had learned in secret and never forgotten. Then of his return, when his days were nearly over, so that he could pass on the song for other younger moles to sing so that it might be known to future generations and perhaps, if the Stone permitted it, finally be sung by all moles and not just a chosen few.

‘Will that ever happen?’ asked Bracken, breaking the silence that followed the end of Hulver’s long tale. ‘And do they still sing the secret song in Uffington?’

Hulver shrugged, for how could he know if the song still lived? Had not most of the rituals in his own system died, and that within living memory?

‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ he said, ‘but I remember one thing my father told me, though blessed if I can make much sense of it. He said there was a special Stone nearing Uffington—the Blowing Stone, I think he called it—which sounds in the wind sometimes. He told me that the scribemole said that when that Stone sounded seven times, then the secret song would be sung by all moles.’

It was just the sort of story to stir a youngster’s heart and Bracken asked the question any youngster would have asked: ‘What’s the song about?’

Hulver stayed silent; he had often pondered the question himself. He had asked it of his father, and got no clear answer. He could only answer in terms of Duncton Wood, where he had spent his entire life, and think that perhaps there were times when belief in the Stone and celebration of its life becomes a hidden secret thing, carried forward to new generations by those few who are foolhardy enough, or brave enough, to trust in a power they cannot see, and believe that it is worth far far more than the comforts of food and shelter that a system like Duncton offers.

He was confused about it, so how could he ever hope to pass on anything useful to this youngster? All he could do was to try, and to believe that tales like this one carry truth forward in their own way.

This was the story a long-forgotten scribemole brought to Duncton Wood. It was handed down through the generations as the song it is about was handed down. Until one fraught day it was Hulver’s task to hand it on to young Bracken to carry it in his heart all his life, as Hulver carried the song.

Although Bracken appeared half asleep as Hulver finished the tale, he had never been so awake. The tale had the effect of carrying him far beyond Duncton Wood and making him see again, as he had seen before, that Duncton was just one system, one place, one corner of the world. He wondered where his task lay, for he supposed he had one.

Above them, on the surface, the wind stirred and a beech leaf tumbled noisily against their temporary burrow entrance. It settled for a moment and then scurried off a moleyard or two before eddying to a stop against a beech-tree trunk, joining the others already there.

The evening wind had come and the light was beginning to lose its shine as the sun settled down towards the distant hills no Duncton mole could ever see.

‘It’s time to go,’ said Bracken. ‘Show me the direction, but let me go first, for I’m used to sensing danger and can find my way very quickly.’

They trekked up to the southwest, away from Hulver’s burrow and the danger of Rune. Bracken had imagined his first climb up into the Ancient System, thinking that the sun would be high in the sky and he would walk boldly upwards. Instead, here he was with very real danger about, skulking his way through the twilight. But there was something sweeter than his most delightful imaginings in having as a guide and friend this old mole for whom he was beginning to feel such deep affection and reverence.

It got darker as they rose higher, yet the further they went, the stronger did Bracken feel the pull from the top. He felt it as a good wormhunter feels his prey. They scurried from tree to tree, from root to root, always seeking the darkest shadow. Here and there they came across a bare patch of chalk, white in the evening gloom, and they avoided it for fear that their movement might be seen against it by any predators that lurked in the trees above. Once they passed by a massive tangle of roots rising starkly into the air, the bowl of a tree that had toppled over in some storm. They steered well clear of its long trunk and shattered branches on the ground—what mole could tell what might be nesting there.

As they rose higher, Hulver suddenly stopped and put his paw on Bracken’s shoulder, bringing him to a halt. ‘We are on the Ancient System,’ he whispered. ‘From here it runs upwards and across the hill.’

But Bracken knew it already, for he had sensed they were crossing old forgotten tunnels lost deep beneath the mould and debris of ages. His heart was beating with excitement for he felt as if, after a very long time, he was coming home. He knew the Ancient System was around him, he could feel it. It lay beneath them waiting, as it had waited for generations. And he could feel more than ever the great Stone which they were getting nearer and nearer.

‘We’ll go right to the Stone, now,’ he said quietly to Hulver, ‘and from there we’ll know what to do.’

It was at that moment in the evening when an eyeblink separates day from night. In the moment that a mole might wonder if it is still day, the question is answered by a sudden pall of purple in the sky. Bracken’s snout pointed up through the wood directly towards the Stone, although he had never been there. ‘There is nomole here,’ he told Hulver, certain of himself, ‘and there is none on the Ancient System. Can’t you feel it?’

Hulver couldn’t feel it, didn’t like it, and couldn’t understand Bracken’s certainty; but he followed after him, for as he watched Bracken’s flanks disappearing upwards into the dark and looked about him at the black tree-shapes with the wide open spaces in between, nothing else seemed as safe. He could feel that Bracken was gaining strength with each moment that passed. There was a power about him that swept Hulver along and he had the feeling that through this mole the Stone was revealing to him a tiny part of its pattern, the whole of which he could not see or feel, although he knew it to be there.

With this feeling, a slow calm fell over him that was never to leave him again. In some way he was watching a battle start, an enormous battle, a terribly dangerous time. It would happen, whatever happened, and his own part in it, if part he had, was best played by his being at peace with himself and the world about him.

‘Hulver!’ The whispered urgency of Bracken’s voice struck Hulver as comic, but with compassion for the youngster he restrained himself from laughing happily. Instead he watched with love as Bracken ran back towards him, to hurry him up, no doubt.

To Bracken, Hulver looked so gentle in the soft night, he expressed such peace and love, that his nerves were suddenly calmed within themselves and his fear and nervousness became as easy to brush away as dust on his fur. ‘Come on,’ said Bracken softly, ‘come on, Hulver!’ But there was no need, for Hulver was already starting up the hill again, and for some reason was chuckling quietly to himself.

As the hill levelled off and they reached its summit, Bracken slowed, almost afraid to advance, for he knew they were now very near the Stone. The windnoise in the trees was high and strong, swinging back from one side above them to the other as the wind billowed from one group of trees to another. It was a mass of great, invisible waves rolling across the top of the wood and way beyond it. ‘There!’ said Hulver, pointing a talon forwards into a clearing ahead of them. ‘There is the Stone.’

And it was, huge and massive, towering upwards, solid in the windy night. Ten or twelve moleyards from it stood an ancient beech tree, its roots plunging along and into the ground, across the clearing’s floor to the Stone itself. From where Bracken crouched, the roots appeared solid waves that had rolled and heaved against the Stone, so that it tilted a little from the tree away towards Uffington.

There was no other tree near it, for the clearing was quite wide, and as they ran across towards the Stone, the windnoise above them fell quieter, staying with the trees at its edge, and Bracken had the impression that he had come into somewhere very quiet and still. But he felt the thunder of the generations and knew that all around him and beyond the clearing the Ancient System stretched forth, its lost tunnels hidden beneath the ages of leaf mould on the spare surface of the hill. He was at the heart of the Ancient System, but more than that; he was home, at the centre, at the true centre of the system into which he had been born.

Hulver crouched down before the Stone and Bracken followed him. Up here the wood defined itself by windnoise. Off to the west lay the pastures, the wind running up off them and then through the massive branches above them. To the east was the escarpment where upward eddies of air met the wind in the trees and the wind tumbled above on the edge of the void. Below them were softer noises of the main wood itself, quieter than this, deeper. By the Stone there was silence, and a calm Bracken had never known anywhere in the wood.

He got up and ran to the edge of the clearing in the direction towards which the Stone tilted: ‘How far is Uffington, Hulver?’ he asked.

Hulver came to his side, both their snouts pointing out through the trees towards the west. Hulver was still breathing heavily from the long climb up from the slopes. ‘A long way, a very long way, but not so far if you have the Stone behind you.’

‘No, it’s not so far, not too far,’ said Bracken to himself, for he could feel Uffington pulling him. ‘It’s not that far, Hulver,’ he said quietly, ‘I can feel it.’

When Hulver used the words ‘not so far if you have the Stone behind you’, he was giving the standard reply senior moles used to give to youngsters who asked the once inevitable question about Uffington. But as Bracken crouched there, Hulver saw it differently from the way in which he had seen it before: perhaps it meant exactly what it said: perhaps Uffington was in some way nearer if you kept the Stone always directly behind you as you progressed towards it. Well, it made sense, didn’t it? And he had been struck by the way in which Bracken had run exactly to the point on the edge of the clearing that lay nearest Uffington, without having been told.

‘How do you know where Uffington is?’ asked Hulver curiously. Bracken interested him more and more. ‘I can feel it. If you stand with the Stone behind you,’ said Bracken, ‘you can feel it pulling. Well, you know…’

But Hulver didn’t, though he understood what Bracken was saying better than Bracken himself.

Bracken would have stayed there all night if Hulver had not at last said, ‘Come on, Bracken, we must hide ourselves now. We must find worms to eat and we must rest. There is much for you to learn tomorrow.’

They finally hid themselves among the surface roots of the old beech in the clearing by the Stone. The soil was hard there, but there was mould and leaves to burrow under and the nearer the Stone they were, the safer they felt themselves from the danger of Rune.

Bracken was never sure afterwards whether he slept right through until the sun rose or whether he kept waking up and looking at the Stone. But dream or reality, he later remembered a changing vision of the Stone, first deep black in the night, later mellowing to purple, suddenly very dark grey, gradually lightening to a dull grey before lightening to pink and soft grey and yellow as the sun broke through the beeches behind them with the dawn.

When he finally woke up, there was the Stone rising protectively above him, the soft grey and greens of the beech trees in June behind, and the sky beyond that. A shaking of leaves off his fur, two or three steps forward, and he was able, at last, to reach out with his paw and touch the Stone in the morning light.

Chapter Eight

The threat from Mandrake against Hulver and Bracken over the performance of the Midsummer ritual was very real. At the previous Midsummer, Mandrake had not felt secure enough to order Rune to kill Hulver at the Stone. But now he had the system so cowed that he felt strong enough to kill off its old traditions and anymole who stood by them.

At the June elder meeting, which Hulver had left Bracken to attend, Mandrake left no doubt about his intentions. The Midsummer ritual must not be spoken, he told the elders, and nomole must go up to the Stone. This was an absolute ruling for which he now expected each elder publicly to signal his support. If it should be disobeyed, he stressed, then that would result in the death of the disobedient.

Before he asked each elder to show his support, Mandrake made himself very clear a final time: ‘I understand that a certain mole here among us performed the ritual last Midsummer Night, despite our agreement that it should be abandoned. I was prepared then to give him the benefit of my tolerance…’ Mandrake looked about him with avuncular concern. ‘But nomole should depend on it again.’ He paused to let the message sink home, fixing Hulver with his gaze. ‘Now do we agree that the ritual must not be performed?’ One by one the elders signalled agreement. Except for Hulver, who stayed silent and motionless, snout on his paws and his eyes half closed. Very peaceful.

Mandrake affected to ignore him. ‘We have made our decision, then, and will see that it is carried out,’ he said with a heavy menace that amounted to a command to them all: he did not actually say that they must all take part in what looked to most of them like the inevitable slaughter of Hulver up by the Stone, but anymole there who refused to be involved, and take responsibility, had better watch out!

But Hulver was not the only mole there to disagree with Mandrake. Mekkins, the half-Marshender, had no intention of adding his talons to those who might strike Hulver down on Midsummer Night. True, he had signalled agreement, and he would go along with Mandrake’s suggestion that they all take part in any punishment meted out to the ‘disobedient’—but Mekkins was good at appearing to do something and actually doing something else. He might not be a very moral mole—how could he be while he acted for Mandrake and the Marshenders at the same time?—but he had never yet killed a youngster or a mole too old to defend himself and he wasn’t going to start now. He would fight anymole that got in his way, but he didn’t set out to kill them because they did something to which he was utterly indifferent, like performing the Midsummer Night ritual.

Soon after the decision on the ritual, the elder meeting fizzled out. Rune left early, muttering something about an important job as Mandrake gave him a nod of approving dismissal. Hulver was suspicious, and on his way out with the others, he stopped one of the youngsters hanging about Barrow Vale and asked if he had seen Rune pass by. The answer was as he had feared: ‘Yes, sir, he went up by the tunnel to the slopes. Not so long ago, so you might catch him.’

So Hulver set off back to the slopes, regretting now that he had left Bracken so exposed. But he had found him, and now, here they were, up on the Ancient System waiting for the days to pass to Midsummer Night.

The Midsummer ritual Mandrake, Rune and Burrhead made so much trouble about was a thanksgiving for the blessing of the new generation of youngsters born in the spring. Midsummer fell at about the time they left (or were pushed out of) their home burrows to find their own territory. It was the beginning of a more solitary life and a time in which many would be caught by a tawny owl or starve as they searched for new territory. As well as being a thanksgiving, the ritual was also a petition to the Stone that these youngsters might be safe from talon and beak.

As they began the first of many sessions of explanation and story-telling in the nine-day wait before Midsummer Night, Hulver explained to Bracken that in ancient times every youngster in the system made the trek to the Stone and witnessed the ritual. It helped give youngsters the courage they would need in the trials that lay immediately ahead of them. Indeed, after it, many never returned to their home burrows—the ritual was the moment of departure and their home burrows were left for their mothers to occupy by themselves again.

In ancient times, a scribemole would make the long trek from Uffington to attend the Duncton ritual, for the presence of the Stone gave it a special status among mole systems generally. By the time of Hulver’s youth, of course, no scribemole came, or had come for a long time, and the ritual was beginning to decline in importance. Fewer youngsters attended, perhaps initially because, as they migrated down the slopes, the journey became too dangerous.

‘Perhaps Mandrake’s ban on the ritual is the inevitable conclusion to what has been coming for generations,’ explained Hulver, ‘though why an outsider should be the instrument of it, I do not know. It may be ending, but I will not let it end as long as I am able. They think I’m old and traditional down at Barrow Vale, and perhaps I am, but unless you honour something, you honour nothing. There’s more to being a mole than burrows, worms, fighting and mating—much more. I hope you’ll have the sense to see that one day.’

‘Did you go to the ritual when you were young?’ asked Bracken.

‘Yes, I went. I was one of the few—but then my mother came from the slopes and insisted. It was the first time I saw the elders together in the shadow of the Stone and with the chanting and the words it was very awe-inspiring. I remember afterwards I felt I could do anything. Anything! It gave me the courage to face the fact that I could never return to my home burrow, and after it, I never did.’

Bracken nodded with understanding. He remembered his own feelings of fear and desolation when he was alone in Hulver’s burrow.

‘What’s a chanting song?’ Bracken wanted to know next.

‘Oh!’ Hulver was surprised, but then youngsters these days didn’t seem to know anything. ‘Why, they’re ritual songs, songs of courage, hope and prophecy. One mole sings a verse and then the others join in.’

Hulver began to sing one of the songs in his old voice, but Bracken wasn’t impressed and finally Hulver stopped singing. ‘Well, you need a lot of moles singing it together. Hear that once and you never forget it!’

They stayed entirely on the surface for the first two or three days, because although Bracken was at first inclined to search for an entrance into the Ancient System, Hulver refused to let him. ‘No living mole has been down into the Ancient System and I’m certainly not going down now, after all these moleyears. There’s something about it that makes it wrong. It’s not ready yet.’

Bracken, despite his desire to explore everything, understood. He could feel the Ancient System around him, apparently more than Hulver could, but he felt the Duncton moles had lost it and were not yet ready to find it again. He hadn’t even seen an entrance to it since he had been up on the hill, because everything was so blocked up by mould and debris. But the tunnels were there, their secrets intact.

After two or three days of staying near the Stone, the two set off across the hill to the south end of the wood. On one side of it the chalk escarpment fell away sharply, the wind rushing up and blowing your snout into the air if you tried to peer over. On the other side, the pastures began—or ended, depending on your point of view—all rough and scrubby with billowing clumps of gorse whose bright yellow flowers attracted Bracken, though he didn’t dare break cover from the last of the wood to take a closer look.

There was a nomole’s-land of rough grass and stunted hawthorn between the wood and the pasture where they petered out into each other and it was here that they spent the last five days of their wait for Midsummer Night. Each made a burrow for himself, grubbing about in the wood itself for food. Bracken didn’t like them to go back into the wood proper for fear that Rune or some other henchmoles might find them, but none ever did, nor did they see anymole. In fact, the only life they saw was rabbits, which Bracken had often heard about but never seen close. They scampered about, squatted still feeding, and shot their ears up with a start if Bracken so much as poked his snout out of a tunnel near them.

Until now Bracken had tended to sleep long and irregularly. Now he fell in with Hulver’s habits, which consisted of three sleep periods every day. Hulver liked to check the burrows and tunnels in the afternoon, but these were temporary and not extensive, there wasn’t much to check, and Hulver got into the habit of using the afternoon period to tell Bracken scraps of history about Duncton, something about the great elders of the past, and of the famous fights and the notorious worm-poor years. He told of the coming of Mandrake and other tyrant moles of the past—‘though none I’ve heard of was ever as malevolent as him’. Bracken had to ask what ‘malevolent’ meant, and when Hulver told him, he thought to himself that it sounded as if Rune was malevolent as well.

It was from Hulver that he first learned of Rose, the healer mole who occasionally came in from the pastures to work her magic on sick or diseased moles. ‘You’ve probably never seen her, because she tends to go only to the Marsh End, where they believe in her more than most other Duncton moles. Anyway, she comes mainly in the autumn and spring—one of which you haven’t experienced and the other which you won’t remember.’

‘She’s a Pasture mole?’ Bracken was surprised, because all Pasture moles he had ever heard of were treacherous and aggressive and if they ever tried to visit Duncton, they would surely be attacked.

‘Ah, yes. But Rose is a healer and that’s very different. Healers live by their own rhythms and ways. Anyway, Rose wouldn’t hurt a flea and nomole would want to hurt her. Mind you, I’ve only seen her a few times myself and only in passing. She’s never laid a paw on me!’

‘How many Longest Nights has she seen?’ asked Bracken.

‘Mmm, well… she’s certainly not young, and yet she’s like a youngster all the time. She sings, you know, and dances, too, on occasion. She tells stories to the youngsters, if they can persuade her to.’

‘When does she come?’

‘Ah, now, that’s a good question. It’s a bit of a mystery, because nomole ever knows when she’s going to come, even the ones she comes to heal. In fact, some of them don’t even know there’s anything wrong with them. You see, as she lives somewhere out in the pastures, no Duncton mole ever goes and gets her, and yet, when she’s needed, she suddenly appears, as if by magic. Of course, she doesn’t come for every hurt and illness, otherwise she’d be here all the time.’

A day or two after this, Hulver let forth another scrap of information about Rose. They were talking about aches and pains, and Hulver was explaining that he found it helpful to chew various plants like the seeds of dog rose (‘Excellent when you’re run down; you’ll find them over on the Westside edge of the wood if you want to risk it’) and sanicle (‘Good for wounds after a fight—and plenty about in Duncton’), and Hulver got to telling Bracken about how he loved the smell of some of the plants and herbs in the wood, especially the sunnier clearings and then said, ‘And you know that Rose I mentioned, the healer, well she always has the sweetest smell of herbs about her that I’ve ever come across. Makes you feel good just being near her! Mekkins is the one to talk to about Rose. He knows her best of all the elders, coming as he does from the Marsh End.’

Hulver sighed. He often felt when he was talking to Bracken that his words didn’t say what he wanted them to. He wanted to tell the youngster so much. He became irritated with himself because he seemed to know so little and there was so much for a youngster to face.

At such times, Bracken imagined that he was tiring Hulver, or annoying him. So much of what Hulver said he found hard to understand and when he tailed off in the middle of something after trying to explain it two or three different ways, he felt the loss as much as Hulver felt the irritation. But then Bracken was beginning to love the old mole so much that it didn’t much matter what he said. He would have listened with reverence anyway.

Since they had moved to the furthest point of the wood, indeed almost out of it, they felt much safer and the days passed by peacefully.

As Midsummer Night drew near, Hulver became more specific about the ritual. He had explained something about its meaning and purpose in the first few days; now he began to repeat the ritual itself. He would quote sections of the words, explaining what they meant and how they should be said. But he made no attempt to teach them formally to Bracken.

‘Words change in the speaking,’ he explained, ‘so I want you to know what they mean rather than what they are. Listen to the spirit that lies behind them, that’s what you most need to remember. Should the day come when you have to say the ritual yourself, then you’ll remember enough of what I’ve taught you. Most of the words are known by my friend Bindle, so he’ll tell them to you if you need to know.

‘But he doesn’t know the final blessing, the most important part of all. I tried to teach him but he wouldn’t listen; he said he couldn’t learn them because they were just words to him. It’s too late now—he didn’t come to the last Midsummer Night—frightened off by Mandrake, if you ask me. I haven’t seen him for moleyears now, literally moleyears. But he’s my oldest friend, is Bindle.’

Bracken sensed sadness in Hulver as he talked of his friend, the only time in their days together up on the hill that Hulver ever showed sadness.

But there was one part of the ritual Hulver did make Bracken learn—so much so that Bracken almost became sick of its constant repetition. By the end, the words had no meaning whatsoever, blurring themselves into the same meaningless syllables as the two lines from the food blessing had done when he repeated them too much. They were lines of the final blessing—the words that Bindle refused to learn. And he learned them by hearing Hulver gently repeat them again and again:

‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,

We free their fur with wind from the west,

We bring them choice soil,

Sunlight in life.

We ask they be blessed

With a sevenfold blessing:

The grace of form

The grace of goodness

The grace of suffering

The grace of wisdom

The grace of true words

The grace of trust

The grace of whole-souled loveliness.

We bathe their paws in showers of light,

We free their souls with the talons of love,

We ask that they hear the silent Stone.

‘Repeat, repeat,’ Hulver would command Bracken. ‘The rest you can learn when the time is ripe, but these words I want to hear you say until they are part of you. You need not understand them yet—indeed, they will change their meaning with the passage of time—but you must know them.’ So Bracken repeated them, whispering as the sun rose, saying them into the wind from the void, whispering them into sleep.

Though he grew tired of repeating them, he learned to love the words he was taught, and he wondered where the moles who had first made them had gone. Why had they left the system?

They heard molesounds only once, carried on the wind and in vibration in the soil from the direction of the Stone. They waited silently for the sounds to come nearer, but they never did and they were left again in trembling peace.

Only when Midsummer Day itself came did Hulver tell Bracken his plan. ‘There is only one way to complete the ritual, and even that is risky and I have my doubts that it will work. It will demand great courage from you. It depends on my belief that they do not think I will come with another mole. If this is so, then, if you advance from the direction of the slopes, they will mistake you for me. You will come towards the clearing so that you are seen, run off and draw them away, so that I can move into the clearing from another direction. Then, with the Stone’s help, I can repeat the ritual.’

The old mole stopped, for that was his plan, all of it. Bracken didn’t like it—too simple, too much to go wrong. Supposing they didn’t all chase him; supposing they caught him? But though he racked his brain for a better plan, he could not find one: there were too many imponderables whichever course they took. So in the end, Hulver’s simple plan seemed the best.

As the afternoon fell away into evening, Bracken grew restless and hungry. Hulver had calmly fallen asleep, but Bracken was too nervous to do anything but toss and turn. Finally he went in search of worms and found six. He woke Hulver as dusk fell and laid his worms before him.

They wound and wriggled on the ground, extending their heads into a thin questing point to escape. Bracken made to stop them but Hulver said quietly, ‘Let them go. Eat yours, but let mine go.’

Then he blessed them gently and, snout on paws, watched his three worms make their slow escape.

It was too much for Bracken. ‘They took a long time to find,’ he complained. ‘If you don’t want them, I’ll eat them.’

‘Ah, I do want them,’ said Hulver, ‘but it is no longer important. I would rather those worms lived with my blessing than died without it.’

‘But I’ve only got three,’ said Bracken, ‘and there’s a lot to face up to this evening.’ He hated to see the worms he had worked hard to get disappearing before his eyes.

‘If it troubles you, imagine that I have eaten them. If you would be less hungry for my having eaten them than for my not eating them, then your hunger is in your head and not your stomach. So satisfy your head. Meanwhile, let the worms go off and find their own supper; I hope with your blessings as well.’

It seemed to Bracken that there was something illogical in Hulver’s reasoning, but he could not work it out. The whole thing left him irritated, the first time he had felt like that since he had been with Hulver. By the time the three worms had finally disappeared, Hulver had dozed off again, while Bracken had worked himself up to the point where he had to get going.

Eventually the late afternoon light lost the last of its lustre and Hulver stirred. It was time to set off for the Stone. With a final last look back at the great bushes of gorse on the edge of the pasture, whose flowers looked like yellow lights in the evening, they turned down into the darkness of the wood.

The night was clear and warm but Bracken felt shivery. He was afraid, and as he followed behind Hulver he felt as if they were both walking to their death. He had the sinking heart of a mole committed to a course of action that may result in disaster but with no option other than to go through with it. Every leafcrackle made him jump, every dark shadow hid a dozen moles, each rustle of wind behind him heralded a rush of talons through the air.

Yet each step forward found them safe and unharmed until they approached to within a few molefeet of the Stone clearing, where they stopped to listen for moles. They had approached in a wide arc, bringing them on the far side from the slopes, for they both suspected that Mandrake and his henchmoles would wait by the slope side for Hulver to arrive.

Now they were still and silent Bracken felt a little safer, for they could not be surprised where they crouched. At the same time some of Hulver’s calm came through to him and his heartbeat slowed and his breathing grew quieter.

Beyond the trees and lower than the top of the Stone, the moon began to shine. Bland and white at first, it gained in brightness as it rose higher, casting the soft light that Bracken loved. The only part of Hulver it caught was his snout, which moved occasionally by his paws as he eased his position. The wind was very gentle in the beech-tree leaves high above them and there was no birdsound at all. Somewhere far below them they heard an untidy rustle, indifferent to being heard—probably a hedgehog.

Not until the moon was on a level with the top of the Stone did Hulver suddenly touch Bracken’s shoulder and, bringing his head closer, point his talon to the slopes side of the clearing. At first Bracken could sense nothing but then, among the shadows, a darker shadow moved, and he could feel its vibration. Silence. Rune. Or probably Rune. Which mole else could move so silently?

The mole snouted about the clearing, padding about its perimeter and peering beyond, into the wood. At one point it appeared to look in their direction and Bracken froze, even though he knew the mole could not possibly sense them. He sniffed and snouted about the clearing, coming at one point to within fifteen molefeet of where they crouched. The moonlight was full on him, making him lighter than the Stone behind, and Bracken watched as his form moved across the Stone and then back again, towards the slopes side. Then they heard a scuffling and two noisier moles came chattering into the moonlit clearing.

‘Ssh!’ said the mole they had been watching.

‘Sorry, Rune,’ said one of the others.

‘That’s Dogwood,’ whispered Hulver. ‘That must mean that Mandrake is keeping them to their word and so they’ll all be here to… to see what happens.’ He stopped himself from saying ‘kill me’ because he didn’t want to alarm Bracken, who was going to need all his courage.

‘There’s nomole here, that’s for sure,’ said one of the other moles.

‘It’s Burrhead,’ gasped Bracken, suddenly very frightened.

‘Yes, I’m afraid it is,’ said Hulver softly.

‘… And there won’t be anymole here at all if you carry on scuffling,’ said Rune. ‘Have none of you learned how to move silently? Remember, movement carries further than words.’

That did the trick, and they crouched down in the clearing quite still, right by the Stone where they could clearly be seen.

‘I must have been right,’ whispered Hulver. ‘They wouldn’t stay in that position if they weren’t pretty certain that anymole coming from the slopes was going to be intercepted. Mandrake and the rest must be down there.’

This was soon confirmed by Rune, who whispered: ‘Now, remember what Mandrake said—if he slips through here before Mandrake gets him, he must be kept alive. Is that clear?’

Horrified at this exchange, Bracken glanced at Hulver, but only his snout was visible in the moonlight. Even his form merged into the blackness of the beech leaves and stems of the wood ivy in which they were crouched. But to Hulver it was as if they were talking about somemole else, and he was very peaceful—he knew that what he had to do had the blessing of the Stone. There was nothing anymole could do to stop him performing the ritual with all the love and dignity he could muster.

However, he could sense Bracken’s fear. ‘Wait a little longer yet,’ he whispered, ‘for if you start now it will be too early for the ritual to be said. It needs to be said at midnight, or near it.’

To fill in the time and to take Bracken’s mind off his task, Hulver told him to repeat to himself the words he had taught him and to think about their meaning as he did so.

This was so effective that Bracken was surprised when Hulver nudged him gently in the dark and told him it was time. Now Bracken felt cold and frightened. The wood seemed suddenly a very dangerous place. Surely it was somemole else who was slowly rising to his paws so near the three dangerous moles in the clearing. Some other mole who stole away into the night, forgetting to say a word of good luck, or goodbye to Hulver as he left? Not this mole who was utterly alone in the wood, moving through the silent night, afraid of stirring even a beech leaf!

So Bracken began his long, nerve-racking trek round the clearing, down towards the slopes and then turning back again by the route they had originally taken to get to the Stone when they first came up to the Ancient System. He crept from shadow to shadow; he held his breath at each tiny noise he made; and he dearly wished, every inch of the way, that he had been allowed to explore the Ancient System that lay somewhere beneath his paws, so that he might exploit its tunnels now to bring him safely underground to the point on the slopes where he must materialise and start his impersonation of Hulver. Behind him, Hulver watched the three moles by the Stone. The clearest thing about them was the spot of moonlight on their snouts, and from this he saw them occasionally move restlessly in the dark.

Meanwhile, far below, Bracken finally reached a point on the slopes where he could cut across with the contour of the hill and begin his more ostentatious climb up.

He was acutely aware of all the reference points of location about him. As he turned up towards the Stone, the pastures lay some distance away to his right. Far to his left was the void of the chalk escarpment, running right up into the pastures which swung around beyond the clearing. There were a couple of fallen beeches in the wood to his left which he had passed on his way down, and these were useful points to remember. Apart from that, all was the wood, the silence, and his progress up the hill into danger.

Now that he was committed to the task, he found he was icy cool in his thinking. He was nervous, sweating a little, but his mind had never felt more clear.

He proceeded up the hill towards the Stone, as he imagined Mandrake and his henchmoles would have expected Hulver to proceed, with care, slowly, and keeping well hidden. This suited him, because if he was seen even for a moment in the moonlight by one of them, then surely they would realise he was not Hulver. He stopped to listen frequently as Hulver—as anymole—would have done. He kept to the dark patches and slightly off the communal surface pathway—as Hulver would have done. He made just enough noise to be detected, but not too much to be taken for a fool.

At last, off to his right, he sensed what he had taken to be part of a root move. It was only fractional, but roots rarely move even fractionally, not on the surface anyway. After this, he carried on, now totally committed, because a henchmole was now behind him. It made him proceed a little faster because he wanted to get as near to the clearing as possible before he was challenged. That way he would be able to draw off Dogwood, Burrhead and Rune as well as the others. By a movement, the slightest of vibrations, he detected a second mole off to his left, this one lurking in what must be a temporary burrow.

Somewhere, far off below them all, a creature moved heavily in the wood. A badger, a fox, perhaps only a hedgehog. He was getting nearer to the clearing—indeed, he could see the top of the Stone caught beyond two trees ahead of him in the moonlight, just as Burrhead himself had once described it to him. Any moment now, he knew, he would be attacked or stopped. He had to make his move ahead of the challenge. That would give him surprise and a split second’s advantage in time.

Ahead of him lay the two beeches and beyond them, the clearing. There must be one other mole at least by the trees, probably lying among the roots between them, waiting for him to come into sight. He thought he detected a movement behind him, perhaps one of the moles he had passed closing in.

He was beginning to move to the right round the tree ahead, expecting the third mole to come forward and challenge him at any moment, and then—and then he made his move. Realising he was heading into unavoidable moonlight, he swung back sharply to the left, giving him an advantage on anymole who might be waiting for him by the tree and throwing whatever mole was behind him off balance. With a mighty thrust, he pushed narrowly past the beech tree, with the clearing and the Stone to his right, scattering beech leaves behind him.

The uneasy silence of the night suddenly shattered. As he passed the tree, he caught the briefest glimpse of the biggest mole he had ever seen, in the moonlight. His talons were swinging round in the air, his body was arching round as if he had been facing the wrong way, but his snout was already round towards Bracken, huge and horrible. Mandrake!

Bracken deliberately ran close to the clearing before swinging off into the wood, to draw Rune and the others away from Hulver, who was on the far side. It worked. He heard Rune call, some shouts, and then there was a rush of moles from the clearing adding to the noise of Mandrake and the others following behind and on his left. Then he swung away into the wood, taking them all with him and leaving the clearing free for Hulver. He felt alive and full of energy and ran at great speed through the wood, weaving in and out, listening to the confused shouts of the rushing moles behind him. His instinct was to burrow to safety and again he regretted that he had not found a way into the Ancient System. But there were so many moles chasing him that he felt a safety in their confusion. The wood was dark, for the moonlight could not penetrate the thick canopy of beech leaves above them, and there was so much noise that nomole seemed to know where he was going. But Bracken did. He started on a long arc towards the slopes, much the same route he had taken so nervously before.

Behind him, beyond the clearing, old Hulver rose slowly to his paws as the noise of the fleeing Bracken and his pursuers died off into the wood. He approached to the very shadow of the Stone. There he crouched still for a moment or two, for a mole must be calm to say a ritual properly. Then, as if there was all the time in the world, Hulver began the ritual of Midsummer.

Bracken ran on through the night, twisting and weaving among the trees, working his way towards the fallen beech that he had passed on his way up from the slopes with Hulver. He knew the moles about him were confused— indeed, one of them had called forward to him, thinking he was Dogwood, and told him to cut off to the left, which he had obligingly done. He heard Mandrake shouting from time to time, and Rune; and he realised that nomole knew exactly where he was.

It was then that he saw the great dead beech ahead of him and hid in the shadows among its dry branches, his chest heaving with the effort of running. The chase continued around and about him until, one by one, they came to rest in a group on the ground not far from where he lay hidden in the fallen tree.

It was some moments before any of them had caught breath sufficient to speak, and then it was Rune. ‘He has escaped, Mandrake, and gone down to the slopes where he lives. At least he cannot do the ritual now.’

They were gathered in a spot dappled with moonlight filtering through the gap in the canopy by the fallen tree where Bracken lay hidden. Bracken peered down to look at Mandrake. His presence was huge—he was massive, more like two moles than one. He seemed blacker than the night itself and Bracken could see that he held his head forward and low, as if about to attack the whole world.

‘You say he has escaped? But who has escaped?’ demanded Mandrake. ‘I do not believe that the oldest mole in the system, who appeared to be hardly alive at the last elder meeting, could run through the wood like a youngster and elude the’—he looked around him sarcastically, as if he was not one of them—‘the toughest moles in the system. That was not Hulver.’

At this, they followed his gaze down to the slopes. Then, quick as a flash, as they looked back up towards the distant Stone lost somewhere above them in the night, the realisation came to all of them that they might have been fooled. They all started back for the Stone as one, and as fast as they could—Mandrake at their head.

Bracken decided that he must follow them. It would be easy enough to avoid them now, and they were making sufficient noise to cover his sounds.

One makes faster progress than six, and so it was that Bracken arrived on the far side of the clearing when Mandrake came to it from the slope side.

Hulver was there, clear in the moonlight, back to the Stone and paws raised towards Uffington. He was in the final stages of the ritual, his figure commanding in its calm, his voice awe-inspiring in its aged strength. Behind him the Stone towered up into the sky.

He seemed oblivious of the arrival of Mandrake and his henchmoles, who stopped for a moment in awe at the sight of him.

But there was one other mole there whose presence was unknown to any of the others, including Hulver. He was hidden among the roots of the great beech by the Stone where Hulver and Bracken had slept their first night in the clearing.

He had left his burrow on the Eastside and come slowly and reluctantly through the wood to the Stone. He had not wanted to come, for he had heard the talk that Mandrake’s henchmoles would be out, yet he knew he must, and he arrived as Bracken drew the others away, in time to watch Hulver start the ritual. He might have joined in, but he felt unworthy to do so, as if he had no right to be there. But he mouthed the words with Hulver, urging the old mole through each one and intending to see Hulver through to the end of the ritual. Then he would go quietly back, back to the Eastside, so that none might ever know that he had watched over the ritual.

But now he saw that Hulver would be cut down before the end and he knew, as perhaps he had known all the time, what he must do. Perhaps he could stop them—he must at least try. In the moment during which Mandrake hesitated with the others at the clearing’s edge he came from among the roots behind the Stone and stood with his back to Hulver, his talons raised towards Mandrake, ready to do his best to stop him while Hulver finished the ritual. Bracken did not recognise him—he was an older, sturdy mole whom he had never seen in his travels around the Westside and Barrow Vale. But Rune knew him, and so did the others.

‘Bindle!’ hissed Rune. ‘It’s Bindle come to be brave.’

‘Bindle!’ roared Mandrake.

But Bindle stood firm as they advanced slowly towards him and holding his talons ready began to join in with Hulver:

‘By the shadow of the Stone,

In the shade of the night…’

Mandrake began to speed his approach.

‘As they leave their burrows

On your Midsummer Night…’

Mandrake’s breath came out rasping and angry, black and dangerous against the gentle combination of the voices of Hulver and Bindle as they continued towards the final part of the ritual:

‘We the moles of Duncton Stone

See our young with blessing sown…’

While Bracken watched in horror from outside the clearing, Mandrake reared his talons up high above Bindle. And then they came crashing down with a terrible force, plunging through Bindle’s own upraised paws and ripping deep into his body. He fell down and back, torn and crippled, as Mandrake rushed past him towards Hulver, while Rune and Burrhead cut at him as they too ran on towards Hulver.

Bracken crouched in the shadows, frozen with fear, unable to move, watching Hulver in anguish as the three strongest moles in Duncton, one of them his own father, bore down upon him with raised talons and ugly snouts. They were shouting or screaming at him, it was hard to tell which, and yet through it Bracken could hear Hulver begin the very final part of the blessing, the part he himself had learned:

‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,

We free their fur with… ’

But old Hulver got no further. He half-turned at the final moment to face his attackers and Bracken saw that his talons were not raised at all—rather, his paws were outstretched as if he were blessing them. Just as he had blessed the worms at the very first meal they had taken together:

‘Let no mole adown my body

That may hurt my sorrowing soul…’

And then frail Hulver was gone, lost beneath their stabbing, vicious, thrusting, tearing talons, any sound he made drowned by the noise of their screams of anger and the panting of their murderous effort. Torn down where he stood in the shadow of the Stone, at the very heart of the system he loved, uttering the blessing on the youngsters in whose future he believed. Bracken was rooted to the spot, his heart screaming out at the agony of watching the mole he had so quickly grown to love, slaughtered before him. Yet he could not move. He did not have the courage, or the foolishness, to run out into the clearing and face Hulver’s killers.

Then, in a moment, it was over. Mandrake stood back and the others fell away, and without a word to each other, they turned round like a pack of rats in the night and scampered out of the clearing. As they passed Bindle, lying stretched out on the ground, he stirred and moaned, but Mandrake said, ‘Leave him, let him be living owl-fodder.’

They were barely gone before Bracken found his strength again and was able to run out into the clearing to Hulver.

But Hulver was dead, and all he could see was the body of a time-worn old mole, terribly torn, small and crumpled in the moonlight, the left paw catching its light and curled softly like a young pup’s. There was the shiny blackness of blood on him, from his snout to his rump.

With a terrible sob, Bracken ran over to Bindle, who was moaning and whispering, trying to raise himself on a shattered paw, the paw sliding out uselessly from under his weight. Bracken bent low over him and heard him whisper,

‘Bindle, my name is Bindle. I came back to say the ritual with my oldest friend. We almost finished it, didn’t we?’ His breath came rasping and painful, and Bracken’s heart ached to hear it. ‘We almost finished it. And in the end I knew the words. He never thought I knew them all, but I did. When they came at the end I remembered the words.’ Bindle tried to say more but he rasped and coughed, and gasped in his terrible pain. Bracken pressed against him, supporting his torn body, blood on his fur. Bindle started to speak again, each word a massive effort: ‘Listen, youngster, and try to remember them: “We… bathe… their… paws… in…”’

Bracken looked up at the Stone and across to the body of Hulver, whose wisdom he now began to see. And then, at first very softly, but with increasing strength, he joined his voice to the dying Bindle’s:

‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,

We free their fur with wind from the west,

We bring them choice soil,

Sunlight in life.

We ask they be blessed

With a sevenfold blessing…’

Bracken spoke the words now with power, with the voice of an adult. They filled the clearing and carried on beyond it loud and clear, until they stopped Mandrake and his moles in their tracks.

‘The grace of form

The grace of goodness…’

A wild storm of racing blood and blizzard cold swept through Mandrake’s head and body; he seemed possessed by rushing darkness. With a mighty roar he turned back, thrashing up towards the clearing, tormented by the powerful voice that carried words that agonised his soul.

‘The grace of suffering

The grace of wisdom

The grace of true words

The grace of trust

The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’

Bracken had moved to the Stone and now stood in its dark shadow turned towards Uffington, aware of everything about him: the dead Hulver, the dying Bindle and the agonised rushing of Mandrake fast approaching him, but he ignored it all.

It seemed to Mandrake, as he arrived back at the clearing and saw at first only two moles lying on the ground, that the Stone itself was speaking:

‘We bathe their paws in showers of light,

We free their souls with talons of love,

We ask that they hear the silent Stone.’

It was only with these very last words of the ritual that Mandrake saw Bracken in the shadow, and with a roar as agonised as it was angry, charged upon him.

Bracken stepped forward for a moment into the moonlight, where Mandrake saw him clearly for the first time, and then ran behind the Stone, beyond the great beech tree, and into the wood in the direction of the chalky escarpment.

As Mandrake followed after him, Bindle moved for the last time, stretching a paw towards his friend Hulver, his snout turned towards the Stone into whose silence and light he felt himself flowing, away from the rasping breathing that was no longer his and numbing cold that had been spreading from his paws and flanks towards his heart, and thinking that the youngster somehow knew the words as well, and that was how it should be.

On Bracken ran, his strength failing rapidly. He could no longer think clearly and his breath was coming in pants and rasps as Bindle’s had done. Behind him he could hear Mandrake getting nearer, carried forward as he was by an indescribable rage and malevolence, beech leaves and leaf mould scattering in his wake.

To his left, Bracken could hear other moles running towards him through the undergrowth, Rune, Dogwood and the others. To his right, the hill rose towards its final height, where he and Hulver had lain in secret before tonight. But he knew he had no strength left to climb up and away from Mandrake. So he ran straight on, straight towards the void of the chalk escarpment, his heart pounding in pain and each breath harder and harder to grasp hold of. Mandrake could see him now, just ahead, paws scrabbling over themselves, back almost within talon range. With a final push forward Mandrake reared up to try to bring his talons down on the failing Bracken.

Sensing what Mandrake was about to do, Bracken turned in mid-flight to make a valiant effort to ward off Mandrake’s blows. But as he raised his own talons to defend himself, he felt his back paws continue forward into nothing, sliding downwards through loose soil and vegetation, attempting, it seemed, to keep hold of nothing. As Mandrake’s talons crashed down towards his upturned snout he felt the nothingness of the void swallowing him, pulling him down into the blackness as his front paws flailed desperately at the cliff face to retain a hold. He felt a terrible pain in his left shoulder and the cliff face slipping past his snout, felt loose vegetation and flints scratching at his face.

Above him he heard a mighty roar of triumph from Mandrake. But then, hardly realising what was happening, he felt his front paws fall suddenly forwards into an emptiness in the cliff face and caught hold of a surface. And he was flailing again, pulling himself forwards, back paws again in contact with the cliff face, pulling, heaving, shoving himself up until he finally lay on the smooth, flat floor of a tunnel exposed by some winter cliff fall, whose ancient dark depth echoed back his gulps for air and life. From above him came the thumping of paws and more paws, as Rune and Mekkins, Dogwood and Burrhead joined Mandrake at the cliff’s edge, and looked over into the blackness of its void.

‘He has gone, gone to his death,’ screamed Mandrake. ‘I caught him with my talon before he went and ripped his flesh.’ And then Mandrake laughed terribly into the darkness beyond.

‘Which mole was it?’ asked Mekkins, wondering at the courage and strength of the three moles they had killed that night.

‘It was Bracken,’ hissed Rune into the darkness beyond them. ‘The mole I found in Hulver’s tunnels. I should have killed him then but I did not wish to warn Hulver that something was wrong. I should have killed him painfully then.’

‘It was Bracken, was it!’ exclaimed Burrhead, trying to sound angry. But there was a hint of surprise in his voice, mingled with a touch of pride. He could not believe that it was his own strange son, whom he thought had been killed after leaving the home burrow without a word, who had given Mandrake so much trouble before his end. ‘Best say no more,’ Burrhead thought.

Bracken heard them move off across the floor of the wood, back towards the slopes. Painfully he raised himself up, his left shoulder now stiff and almost lame, and pointed his snout forwards into the Ancient System, which, after so many generations, had at last opened its tunnels to a mole again.

Chapter Nine

Rebecca’s bleak mateless spring had become an early summer of delights. When Sarah’s litter by Mandrake arrived in April, Rebecca had the excuse she wanted to leave the home burrow to scrape a living for herself in her own tunnels. She had wondered whether to leave Barrow Vale altogether, to get away from Mandrake, but when it came to that, she had no real desire to do so. Perhaps she sensed that beneath his brutal hostility to her he loved her, the very viciousness of his assaults a sign of how deep his feelings ran.

Certainly she was pleased when he gruffly took her aside at the end of April to say, ‘You’ll be leaving the home burrow now, but you’ll not go far, Rebecca—I want to keep an eye on you. There’s a burrow not far from here which I’ll show you…’

She was surprised that one should be so conveniently free, and only long afterwards found out that Mandrake had driven away the mole who occupied it—an older female called Rue—threatening her with death if she tried to win it back. Not knowing this and flattered by Mandrake’s sudden interest in her wellbeing, she settled down happily to wait for summer. She cleared out the runs and burrows in her new tunnels, replacing the nesting material with sweet-smelling grasses and leaves she found on the wood’s floor. She opened up a new entrance which caught the morning sun, and another which threw light and fresh, cool air into her burrows towards the end of day.

All this occupied her so much that she hardly missed not seeing Sarah during May and early June, by which time Sarah’s second litter was beginning to roam, and the two became friends again. They would talk of flowers and trees, and Sarah would tell her the ways of shrews and voles, laughing at their fights and antics. She warned of weasels and owls.

The flowers that had carpeted the wood’s floor in spring died away as the trees above began to leaf, blocking the sun so that a heavier, duller undergrowth took their place. Rebecca, growing bolder as each summer day advanced, took to seeking out flowers and sunlight on the pasture edge, and in one or two more open places towards the Marsh End. She would have liked to explore deeper into the Marsh End itself, among the danker darkness of its trees, but there was a musty smell about the place, which she did not like on a summer’s day, created by the moss and fungi that grew about the one or two rotting trees and many fallen branches.

But these herbal forays were interspersed by long periods of simply sitting still in her own tunnels or at their entrances, learning about the wood nearest to her. Its summer noises were less frenetic than the spring’s, but fuller and richer. Very near one of her tunnel entrances were a couple of small oaks with patches of bramble and ground ivy nearby, and here, just before she herself arrived, a pair of nightingales settled to breed and raise their young. As the summer moved into July, she grew to love their ferreting busyness as they grubbed among the undergrowth for spiders and worms, an activity often followed by the rich jug-jug-chooc-chooc of song, ascending to a powerful crescendo pioo-pioo which she could hear in her deepest burrow. A night was blessed that began with their song.

Often ‘her’ nightingales joined the chorus that woke with her at dawn as a colourful medley from a blackbird or two joined the sounds of nuthatch, wren and tit, and the soft, distant cooing of wood pigeon over on the wood’s edge. The birds scurried about the dead leaves on the wood’s floor or flittered among living leaves above. And the smells of fresh growth! She loved that best of all as she and the woods grew into the season together.

In this summer period she grew used to sounds that had frightened her at first—the scurrying of a hedgehog, often blindly running right past her snout, or the sudden buzz in her face of a flying beetle or searching wasp.

One reason she tended to keep near her own tunnels was that if she was caught too far away by hunger or tiredness, she had to make a temporary burrow in a place whose noises were strange and threatening. It was a long time before she revisited the Eastside, for example, because when she stayed there overnight, she happened on a mating fight between a couple of badgers who sounded, in their thumping rushes and shrill, eerie screams, as if they were about to fall through the burrow roof on to her. They were, in fact, many moleyards away in the slopes of a bank where they had dug their own massive burrows, but how was she to know, never having heard them before? Worse than their terrible sounds was their rank smell, which wafted sickeningly into the tiny burrow and made her tremble and sweat with fear in the darkness.

But far, far worse were the chilling sounds of tawny owls hooting at night. They cast a terrible fear into her. She knew little of them beyond the fact that they were the mole’s most terrible enemy in Duncton in summer and were the taloned death that came with silent suddenness out of the darkness above. There were one or two moles in Duncton—and Rebecca had heard one of them tell his tale—who had been caught by owl but by some freak chance escaped, talon-torn but alive. Some of the older moles said that to touch such a mole brought you luck, but Rebecca had been too shy to seek that privilege.

Mandrake came to visit her two or three times in June and July. He always claimed to be just passing and pretended to have no interest in her doings. He sat about for a while, asked her a few monosyllabic questions, cast his glowering glance about her system, and was off as suddenly as he had come. She sensed that in his own gruff way he was keeping an eye on her, and that gave her pleasure as well.

One hot July evening, when every insect in the wood seemed busy, Mekkins passed her way and she heard for the first time of the deaths of Hulver and Bindle. On Mandrake’s orders the story had been kept dark for weeks past, but the idle summer months are a time for gossip and chatter and such a tale must eventually come out.

Mekkins, who felt the whole story to be a shadow on Duncton, would have preferred to keep silent about it with Rebecca. She was so young, so innocent, so full of the joy of the season, that telling her seemed as shameful as trampling on a wood anemone. But she was so overjoyed to see him, though he knew her only passingly, and fixed him with such an open gaze that he found it impossible to tell a lie when she suddenly asked, ‘Where can I find Hulver, the elder?’

He hesitated to answer, playing for time with ‘Why?’ She told him how Hulver had talked to her before the June elder meeting and told him the legend of Rebecca the Healer, and about a mole called Bracken who was somewhere up on the slopes. Hulver had told her about Bracken with such a curious passion that she had taken to heart his odd suggestion that she should make sure that Bracken was all right.

As Mekkins looked at her, free from the threat of Mandrake—with whom she had been the last time he saw her—he felt he had never seen such light radiance in a female before. He tried to say that he didn’t know about Hulver or Bracken, that perhaps they were up on the slopes, that he was old now and… but one by one the lies dried up before her simple gaze. Mekkins was clever, a survivor, one well used to telling half-truths to get his way. But, well, there are times when a mole wearies of the effort of not telling the truth, and he admired the stand Hulver had made too much to want to tell any lies about him. And he remembered the strong adult voice of that strange mole, Bracken, whom none of them had ever quite seen, who had cried out from the clearing those ritual words of the Midsummer blessing, words that had often come back to him: The grace of whole-souled loveliness… and now, before the radiant Rebecca he could tell nothing but the truth. As she gazed happily at him, with joy in her movements and life radiating from her, Mekkins felt a poverty in his own spirit about the murders by the Stone, and his snout lowered as his gaze fell to the wood’s floor.

Slowly, and with a low voice, he told her exactly what had happened on Midsummer Night—as far as he understood it. He ended finally with a description of the shock that had run through the elders when, en route back to Barrow Vale, they were stopped short by the voice of an unknown mole uttering the sevenfold blessing loud and clear through the wood after them. ‘The grace… the grace… ’ He could hear the words now.

‘What mole said them?’ asked Rebecca, who crouched by him, listening, still and sombre.

‘Bracken, Burrhead’s son, we think it must have been him.’ Rebecca’s heart seemed to stop when he said Bracken’s name, and every word Mekkins spoke seemed to be of great importance. Mekkins described the chase Bracken had led them on, speaking of the bravery of one so young as if it were a legend and not something that had happened only a short time before.

‘Who is he?’ whispered Rebecca, almost to herself. ‘Who is he?’

Mekkins repeated that he was Burrhead’s son, one of Aspen’s spring litter; but that was not what Rebecca meant. She explained that Hulver had said of Bracken that Rebecca the Healer had led them to one another. Now here he was again, the only mole in Duncton, so it seemed, who could lead Mandrake on a chase and get away with it.

‘Oh, but ’e didn’t!’ exclaimed Mekkins. ‘’E was killed. He ran clean over the chalk cliff edge trying to escape from Mandrake.’

The hot July sun was suddenly cold. Every insect in the wood froze to its spot. The evening breeze ceased. The air was loud with anger.

Rebecca had listened in silence to Mekkins’ miserable tale. She had heard him out in peace as he described the hunt for the most venerable mole in the system and his subsequent murder with Bindle. But now, with the news of Bracken’s death in her ears, she reared up in terrible anger and for the first time attacked, really attacked, another mole, and her talons descended on Mekkins. She tore at him as if he were evil itself. And as she did so, she began to weep, striking out blindly through her tears.

Mekkins fell back before her assault, unable to strike Rebecca, even though he was bigger and more powerful and could almost have killed her with one blow. Instead, he warded off her blows, or dodged the wilder ones, until her rage was spent and she was stooped and sobbing before him.

‘So much killing in the system,’ she cried. ‘He hates everymole and every living thing. I tried… to show him how much I loved him, but he can’t hear me…’ She sighed deeply and looked out into the evening.

Then, to Mekkins’ amazement, for he was just beginning to think he felt the depths of her sudden grief, she laughed in a tearful way: ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘this mole Bracken’s not dead. He couldn’t be, you see. He couldn’t be.’

She turned to Mekkins inquisitorially and said, ‘Did you see him dead?’ And Mekkins, who could not keep up with Rebecca’s changes of mood or understand them, had to admit that he hadn’t. But then, how could you see if a mole who had gone over a cliff was dead?

‘No, no,’ said Rebecca, ‘he’s not dead. Or if he is, he’s not.’

With this mysterious comment Rebecca fell silent, and Mekkins fell to thinking that the Duncton system was going mad.

‘Bloody ’ell,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’m going mad.’

He told himself this because he felt a peculiar sense of escape coming over him that his commonsense character could do nothing at all to hold back. It was as if after weeks of misery his body could again feel the space and trees about him, and his paws feel the firm soil he loved so much. And just as Rebecca had asked ‘Who is he?’ of Bracken, he now found himself asking ‘Who is she?’ of Rebecca.

For, faced by Rebecca’s absolute conviction that Bracken was alive, Mekkins found himself delightfully able to believe that this impossibility was, in fact, true. At the same time, in the space of this short conversation, Mekkins had shed, like last year’s winter, whatever loyalty to Mandrake he might have had left. Duncton Wood could go and jump over the cliff as far as he was concerned. He was a Marshender first, foremost and for ever, and that was all he wanted to be.

‘Maybe you’re right after all,’ he said finally, getting up and playfully pushing her with his shoulder. Rebecca laughed with him and the July evening was warm again, the insects hurrying and busy with their life.

‘Take care, Mekkins,’ she called after him as he left her for the Marsh End, as if she knew he had changed and made a decision about himself that would cause him trouble if he was to honour it. Mekkins found in going that he hated to leave her.

The end of July and the beginning of August turned out to be a time of delicious chatter and idleness. The females who had littered in spring were well clear of their young, who had gone off to find their own burrows and tunnels, while the males had lost their aggressiveness. Moles rarely came right to the centre of Rebecca’s system, as Mekkins had done, but out on its periphery, or on the edge of other moles’ systems, Rebecca spent a lot of time with them, talking and learning new lore of the wood.

Her springtime fascination with plants continued and she was especially interested in what the older females had to say about how herbs could heal all kinds of ills and aches, if only a mole knew how to use them. Again and again the name that cropped up was Rose the Healer’s, who was said, though nomole was certain, to live on the pastures! This was always whispered in a hush and gave Rose a special air of mystery that resulted in Rebecca regarding her with a great deal of awe.

‘What’s she like?’ Rebecca would ask, but nomole seemed to express him- or herself the same way about her.

‘She’m the most understanding creature I do know,’ one would say.

‘Commonsensical—that’s the word I’d use,’ another would pronounce.

‘Rose? Ah, well, Rebecca, if you want to know Rose, you get her to tell you a story. She’s good at that.’

Rose appeared to possess, for each mole that talked to her, the one characteristic they liked in another mole best of all. Rebecca wanted to meet her for lots of reasons, but most of all because of what she might be able to tell her about herbs.

However, Rose’s appearances and disappearances were as mysterious and unpredictable as everything else about her. You didn’t arrange to meet Rose—she just appeared.

It was at the beginning of August that Rebecca heard a snatch of an old rhyme that so intrigued her that she decided to make another herbal journey down towards the Marsh End. The snippet she heard was this:

When white stars have shone,

When their petals have gone,

Then pick thy ramson.

‘Ramson’ was the old word for wild garlic and everymole knew how good that was in times of trouble. Hearing that it grew in the darker and moister parts of the Marsh End, she was at first put off trying to find it, but then one old female claimed to have seen it in a bit of a damp patch over where the Marsh End butted on to the pastures and so, hoping to avoid the dark places she did not like by keeping to the wood’s edge, Rebecca set off one dawn to find it.

But it was more than just the desire to find ramson that drove her out of the safety of her burrow. She had felt ill at ease for several days, unhappy, uncertain—as if there was something that needed seeing to just around the corner, but she didn’t know what. She had kept looking over her shoulder. It nagged at her and made her restless, so the journey to find the ramson was a good means of giving way to her restlessness. There had been a shower sometime in the night, and as the morning warmed, the wood’s floor grew steamy, while droplets of rain fell off the bramble and ivy where Rebecca had to take to the surface.

Quite what ‘white stars’ referred to, she wasn’t sure, but the rest seemed to make sense. ‘You’ll know the place by the perfume, if you can call it that,’ she was told, and she spent a happy morning sniffing her way along the pasture edge, seeking out a ‘perfume’ that wasn’t quite a perfume.

Lower and lower down the hill she went, among the long summer grasses and bracken, and stopping with delight by a stray wild honeysuckle that entwined itself among a stand of brambles. Scent after scent came to her—nettles, oak bark, ants, cow dung, the most delicate aroma of fungi, but nothing that smelt like the way ramson sounded.

Still, it was a nice day and that part of the wood felt safe, provided you didn’t stray too far beyond the cover of the trees. By midmorning she was sleepy and dozed off in a warm, dry old burrow she found.

She awoke in a delicious summertime reverie, when each thought comes crystal clear but leisurely. She was aware of birdsong around her and the gentle buzz of flies and bees along the edge of the wood. The thought she was thinking was how curious it was that some parts of the wood seemed safer than others, carrying in their every plant and creature a greater sense of peace and calm. She had mentioned this feeling to other moles before now, but they looked puzzled and didn’t seem to understand what she was talking about.

Still, on a day like this, what did it matter what other moles thought? Indeed, it didn’t even matter much that she couldn’t find the wild garlic, because there were plenty of other things to experience.

She listened to a blackbird hopping impatiently about the wood’s floor, turning over this and that in search of grubs; she came upon a dusty little ants’ nest and, as once before, tried licking up one or two. They tasted horrible and she spat them out again.

‘Oh, well,’ she sighed happily, ‘if everything tasted nice, then nothing would taste nice, would it?’ And with this thought she wandered straight into the range of a strong, clinging smell that was not horrible and yet not exactly nice… but definitely attractive, and began to make her way hopefully towards it.

She would have pressed straight on, but stopped when she heard the quiet singing of a mole ahead of her amongst the undergrowth. There wasn’t any tune to the song, but it had a tune; there weren’t any words, either, but it had words; you couldn’t say the voice was much… but it was lovely to listen to.

In other places in the wood Rebecca would have backed carefully away, unwilling to risk attack, even if moles who sang songs were rarely aggressive. But here, in this part of the wood, on this particular August day, she had never felt safer. So she made a semi-burrowing noise to announce politely that she was about and then went cheerfully forward through the undergrowth from beyond which the singing was coming.

There, right before her, was the singer—and the ramson. A female was crouched with head on one side among a clump of tall green plants with long, floppy, oval leaves that curled and fell back on themselves. She was quite old, by the look of her fur, and as happy as anymole Rebecca had ever seen. Between snatches of song, she was sniffing the plants up and down, almost as if caressing them.

The mole, who did not seem to notice Rebecca, was smallish, the tall plants all around her perhaps making her seem rather smaller than she was. But her shoulders were sturdy and there was a great solidity about her that reminded Rebecca of an oak root poking out of the ground to which there is a great deal more than the eye can see or the snout scent.

‘Why, hello, dear,’ the mole said, without looking around, ‘I wondered how long it would be before you summoned up enough sense to come and introduce yourself.’

Rebecca started forward but the old female raised a paw to signal that Rebecca should wait where she was while she finished whatever she was doing with the ramsons.

‘It’s best for you to wait there while I do this. I’m just getting these ramsons used to the idea that I’m going to pick one or two of them. It might slow things down if you came here among them.’

She sang a little more, touched one or two of the stems, peered at them through wrinkled eyes, and finally said, ‘There, now! That’s all right! They’re almost ready!’

Finally she turned to Rebecca, who saw what she had already sensed, that her face was one of the kindliest and most sympathetic she had ever looked upon.

‘So they’re ramsons, are they?’ exclaimed Rebecca, finally unable to resist the temptation to run forward and sniff at the leaves and stem of the one nearest to her. The flowers, which were withered and nearly done, were too high for her to reach, though their scent was strong enough to smell without getting near. Even so, Rebecca noticed something curious. ‘It’s strange,’ she said, ‘how they smell more at a distance than close to.’

‘It’s not strange at all, as a matter of fact,’ said the other mole, coming over to where Rebecca was standing. ‘It’s inevitable. If you can understand why and believe it, then you’ll hold a secret in your heart for which many moles you meet will have cause to be grateful.’

Before Rebecca could ask what this mystery meant, the mole asked, ‘What’s your name, dear?’

‘Rebecca. Mandrake’s daughter.’

‘And Sarah’s child, if I’m not mistaken. Well, child, my name’s Rose.’

‘Oh, at last!’ exclaimed Rebecca. ‘Rose the Healer! They said you’d know about ramsons and lots of things like that, and here you are to tell me!’

Rose laughed gaily and Rebecca began asking questions so infectiously that Rose quietly settled herself down in a spot warmed by the sun, for she knew she would be asked a lot more before this young thing had done with her.

But what Rebecca wanted to know about most of all was the little rhyme about ramsons she had heard. ‘I couldn’t see what it could possibly mean,’ she said, ‘unless it was that you can only pick them at dawn when the stars have shone. But then… well… that would mean you could pick them at any season, and I’m sure that wouldn’t be right.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be right, my love?’ Rose asked the question quite seriously, the cheerful content in her face subtly replaced by an excited curiosity about what Rebecca had said.

‘Well, because there’s only certain times you can pick plants and herbs like ramsons—I mean, times of seasons. Looking at growing things, I’ve often thought that they weren’t exactly ready but I’m not sure ready for what.’

‘What mole told you there were only certain times?’ asked Rose, now quite serious.

‘Well, nomole exactly. My mother, Sarah, told me about some of the plants, and other, older moles told me names and rhymes and how you can use them for healing, but nomole said when to pick them. Well… the plants told me!’

Rebecca finally got this out with some difficulty; she had never thought about it before, though it had always seemed obvious enough to her. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she finally asked.

Rose looked at her for quite a long time, her head on one side. Then she said firmly, ‘It’s not obvious at all; in fact…’ But a blackbird hopped and scurried near her, seeming to break her line of thought. So Rebecca asked, ‘Well, what does that rhyme mean?’

Rose laughed. ‘It’s the flowers, Rebecca; they’re like lovely, white stars when they come out. Here, I’ll show you… ’ And she led Rebecca through the clumps of ramson to a plant in a dark part of the wood over which an oak branch had fallen so that its growth had been stunted.

‘Look!’ said Rose, pointing to the moist shadows by the branch. There, among the small ramson leaves, Rebecca saw a stalk with a cluster of white flowers whose pointed petals were sharp and bright against the gentle, pale green of the long leaves. Several of the flowers were withered, but one or two were still fresh and their smell strong.

‘You’ll often find in a clump of plants that one or two flower very late, or their flowers stay longer after the others have developed towards seed. Perhaps the sun doesn’t reach them, perhaps, as with this one, they are stunted by accident; or perhaps, like some moles, they just naturally take a long time to develop. Never ever pick those ones, my love, never ever. They’re very special. Their spirit has a special beauty.’

Again Rebecca wanted to ask why, but Rose turned away and went slowly back to where they had been sitting before, touching the stems of the bigger ramsons with her paws as she passed them. The subject seemed closed.

‘Anyway, you can see now what the rhyme means, can’t you?’ said Rose.

‘Yes,’ said Rebecca, but rather vaguely, because something had occurred to her. ‘Do stars look like that?’ she asked Rose.

It was a good question. Everymole knows that stars shine some nights, usually when the moon is strong. But, of course, moles cannot see them. It had never occurred to Rebecca to wonder what mole it was that had been able to see stars so that other moles knew about them with such certainty that they never questioned their existence.

Rose thought about Rebecca’s question for some time. Indeed, it prompted a whole series of thoughts in her mind far beyond the question itself. The fact was that, in a very short space of time, Rebecca had made a deep impression on Rose. She had liked her from the first moment she scented her hesitating beyond the undergrowth, uncertain whether to show herself or not. But liking is one thing, feeling awe is another. And that’s what Rose felt.

Rose had been a healer in the pastures and Duncton Wood for many moleyears past and had felt many times the great wonder of the life about her which she was sometimes graced to have the special power to cherish and preserve. She was loving and modest in her service to other moles, going to them when they needed her and expecting nothing in return. Some, however, would bring to her useful herbs which grew near their tunnels, while others would tell her the stories and tales that had been told them by their parents, knowing they delighted her. She loved to tell stories herself, especially to the youngsters in spring (when she noticed with a smile that many adults would stop to listen as well). But she never spoke about one mole to another or of Duncton Wood in the pastures—or the pastures in Duncton Wood. Such knowledge was her own and she never passed on the secrets of the moles she helped and healed.

But a healer’s life may sometimes be a lonely one, and in recent moleyears Rose, who had been getting older, had felt the weariness of forever being a prop to other moles and never being able to seek support for herself when she needed it. Naturally she scolded herself for such thoughts, or chewed some dried flowers of yellow meadowsweet which she gathered from where it grew down near the Marsh End and blossomed in summer. ‘Nothing like this to cheer up a mole,’ she would tell herself, but some melancholies will never quite leave, even from the heart of a healer.

On the dawn of this particular day, Rose had been drawn out of her burrow and over to Duncton Wood by an impulse compounded of unease and excitement. She never questioned such impulses—they had a will of their own, and a purpose, too, which it was beyond anymole to fathom. A mole resisted them at her, or his, peril. All she knew was that somewhere in the system there was a mole in deep trouble who in some way needed her help. Where the mole was, what the trouble was, or what mole it might be she had no idea. But the need to pick ramsons was part of the impulse and that in itself was unusual, since she had already gathered her stock of ramsons for drying in June, when they were flowering most widely. Still, with ramsons the fresh plant is always best, and if the impulse said ‘Go and pick some’ Rose would do just that.

She had not been at all surprised when another mole joined her—though she had half expected whatever mole it was to be the one in need of help. That, however, did not seem to be the case.

To add to her puzzlement, and subsequently to create a sense of awe in her, Rebecca said several things that suggested she knew a great deal instinctively about plants and their powers, which she did not yet know she knew. Sensing this, Rose had deliberately not elaborated on several of the more important questions that Rebecca had raised almost unconsciously. The question of why the smell of wild garlic may seem stronger further off than close by, for example, involved explanations of why it is that the smaller the dose of a herb a healer gives, the more potent may be the impact.

Rebecca’s understanding of the fact that plants talked to her was also difficult to explain to her without, in a curious way, jeopardising her ability to listen.

For knowledge, Rose had painfully discovered, was a very different thing from wisdom and common sense and may often come in the way of both. The sight of such innocent wisdom as she saw in Sarah’s and Mandrake’s child made Rose hesitate to try to explain these things. Faced by it, she felt her own ignorance, not as a negative thing but as a simple fact. And she saw again what her weariness, age and occasional loneliness had made her forget: that each mole is graced with different virtues, just as each herb is. She sensed that Rebecca had many graces and the awe she felt was of the power of the Stone that had put them there.

These thoughts ran through Rose’s mind while she considered Rebecca’s question about the stars. She wished she had more power with words to explain the answer, though it was a wish that did her an injustice, since Rose could often explain things that other moles, who seemed more articulate, could somehow never grasp.

She sighed and wondered where to start. She looked around her, at the ramsons, at the cluttered undergrowth of thorns and dark leaves, and at the light sky above and beyond.

It was the gentle sound of a warm breeze in the trees that helped her. ‘Do you know what the top of a tree looks like?’ she asked Rebecca.

‘Well, of course!’ said Rebecca. ‘We’ve all been shown fallen branches with leaves on—they look like that.’

‘Can you remember the first time you saw one?’ asked Rose.

‘Oh, yes, it was disappointing!’ She paused, but Rose stayed silent, so she continued. ‘Well, I mean… before you see them, you imagine them, don’t you? And the roots of trees were so big, and the noise their tops made in the wind so powerful, that I imagined that trees went up and up for ever into the sky, and their tops were each as big as the whole of Duncton Wood put together. So when someone said “That’s a top of a tree” I was disappointed!’

Rose laughed sympathetically—she had once felt just the same. ‘But really, my dear, treetops aren’t just branches and leaves, are they? Did you see the noise of the wind, for example? I’m sure you didn’t. Did you see all the branches together? Well, of course, you couldn’t have. There are a lot of things, the most important things, which you can never see and can only learn about in your own way. Just as the treetop you saw couldn’t tell you everything about treetops, so the starlike flowers of ramsons only hint at what stars are really like.’

‘But how does anymole know what they’re like?’ persisted Rebecca. ‘How can a mole be certain that they’re there?’

A strange thing happened to Rebecca as she asked this question. As it hung in the air between them, she saw very clearly that it was a question impossible for Rose to answer. Perhaps it was because Rose was not trying to answer it that she saw this; perhaps it was also that she understood instinctively that Rose knew there were stars, even though she had never seen one. In that moment, Rebecca understood something quite different from what she had been asking about, that there are a lot of things moles can only come to know for themselves. Why, she had thought she knew all about treetops when she ‘saw’ one, but, of course, she didn’t! ‘Why, they really are majestic and powerful, just as I thought they were when I was a pup!’ she exclaimed to herself. It didn’t matter what stars looked like—Rose knew they were there and perhaps one day she would really know it, too.

‘Oh, I wish I could answer your question,’ exclaimed Rose, ‘but there are so many things that a mole can’t explain. You see, if you tried to explain to most moles about plants talking to you, they…’

‘I have, and they didn’t,’ sighed Rebecca. ‘I’ve given up trying!’

‘Well, it’s like that with most important things. A mole will come to know things if he’s going to, and no amount of talking about it will make him understand if he’s not going to. And even if he or she is going to get to know something, it’s no good trying to hurry the process up—it happens when it’s meant to and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Well, perhaps we can encourage it sometimes.’

Rebecca liked talking to Rose because she talked to her as an equal. She made her feel that she wasn’t just a youngster who hadn’t mated yet. She made her feel that her paws were firmly on the ground.

‘Now,’ said Rose firmly, ‘I really must finish these ramsons off. You sit there quietly and listen if you like. You’ll want to ask questions, I wouldn’t wonder, but you won’t get any answers from me while I’m talking to the plants.’

Rose’s eyes twinkled with affection at both Rebecca and the ramsons and she re-entered the clump of wild garlic and began her strange enchanting song again. Her voice went gently up and down, in and out, as if weaving and winding among the stalks and leaves of the ramsons like thin wisps of mist among the trees on an early summer’s morning.

Gradually Rebecca noticed that she seemed to be talking to two or three plants in particular and though Rebecca couldn’t see that they looked different from the others, they definitely were, in some way. They seemed more… more… there.

Suddenly Rose’s words became more distinct and Rebecca heard her singing:

‘Wild flower, kind flower,

Petals for the sick;

Wild plant, kind plant,

A healing for the ill.

Leaves for the sorrowful

And stem for the sad,

Bless them with your essence

And their bodies will be glad.’

As Rose sang these words, she picked a stalk from each of the plants she had been concentrating on, touching the rest of each plant gently with a paw. Then she brought the stalks over to where Rebecca was and placed them on the ground by her.

‘All over, all done,’ she said, yawning. ‘Oh, I am tired today!’ Then she told Rebecca, ‘Now, don’t you forget about picking plants at the right time, although you already seem to know something about that.’

But before Rebecca could ask herself if she did know something about it, Rose continued: ‘And never pick too many, because you won’t need them. The less you use, the further they go—that’s why you can smell them better from further off than near to.’

‘But I don’t understand what you mean at all,’ said Rebecca, ‘or what you meant before when you said…’

Once more Rose didn’t let her finish. Instead she laughed and said, ‘Now, Rebecca, my love, you take “understand” right out of your vocabulary as quickly as you can and then you’ll understand all the faster. I don’t understand anything myself, my dear, not one single thing. Well, of course, I do, so that’s silly. I understand that when you pick plants you must get on and use them, otherwise you’ll lose so much.’

‘I don’t understand again…’ sighed Rebecca. Rose didn’t seem to answer any of her questions. ‘What do you mean, Rose?’ she asked finally.

‘That’s better! What I mean is that generally when plants are ready to pick, they’re ready to use, which is what I’ve got to do with these now. There’s a mole that needs me in Duncton and I really only came here just to pick these and take them with me.’

By now it was mid-afternoon and the wood had a warm, sleepy air about it. There was little birdsound, for with the passing of spring and early summer, their calls and songs had died away, leaving only the trills and whistles of yellowhammer and greenfinch along the woodland’s edge. Sometimes, as now, the distant harsh call of a crow would come cawing through the wood high above their heads, making it seem vast and roomy in the summer stillness.

It was hard to think that anymole could be ill on such an afternoon but as Rebecca automatically followed Rose as she made her way towards the wood’s edge, she wondered again about the unease she had been feeling for so many days.

‘Rose?’

‘Mmm, my love, what is it?’

‘Can I come with you?’

‘No, my dear, not yet. I’ll let you come one day when you’re ready.’

‘Rose?’

‘My love?’

‘Which mole is it that’s ill?’ There was real concern in her voice, for the unease she had felt seemed now to turn into a sense that a mole was ill and was calling her from somewhere in the wood, for she could feel the suffering almost as if it was her own. She looked about as if expecting to see some suffering mole right there before them both.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Rose quietly. ‘I often feel the call for help long before I know what it is, or which mole is calling.’

By now Rebecca’s afternoon content had been replaced by a restless unease as the strange feelings of distress she had felt, and which she had put aside, returned ten times more strongly. Oh, she could feel another mole’s pain and it was drawing her somewhere… where? She looked again about the still wood where only ants stirred and bees and wasps hummed.

‘Rose?’ She spoke the name almost as a call for help. ‘When a mole is ill, how can you feel it? Is it like… a… well, like a restless breeze that pulls you along, or a tunnel sucking you into its darkness, or a storm rising in the sky, higher and higher until you feel you’ll burst with it? Is it like that, Rose?’

As Rebecca spoke, Rose felt a great releasing flow through her body, as if she was returning to a welcoming burrow whose nest was warm and where she could lay her head and sleep at last. She had only ever once heard another mole describe the force of compassionate love that pulls a healer from her burrow, however weary she may be, so that she may find the strength to tend and cherish the distressed and sick. The last mole that spoke such words to her was the old female who had first taught her about healing. In all those long and often lonely moleyears since, she had forgotten how gentle was the sound of a healer’s voice when it sounded in her own ears.

From the moment she had scented Rebecca coming with the wildflower smell of her kindness and youth, Rose had sensed, but not dared to believe, that another healer was near. Everything Rebecca had said to her had shown that her instinct was right, but again and again, as they had talked, Rose had not dared to accept the idea, for fear that it was her own hopes rather than the Stone’s desire talking. But now, hearing Rebecca describe the restless impulse that leads a healer to the sick, she knew that her instinct about Rebecca had been right from the first.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what it’s like, Rebecca. That’s what it will always be like.’

If only she had the power to save this young creature from the pain and suffering the process of becoming a healer seemed so often to bring. But she had learned long ago that there were things nomole could change—a mole’s freedom lay only in finding the courage to face with truth the darkness and light which the Stone would bring.

‘Well, if it’s like that,’ said Rebecca firmly, surprising herself with what she was saying so boldly, ‘then I think the mole you’re going to is called Bracken. You’ll find him somewhere up on the Ancient System. He was a friend of Hulver’s when Hulver… before my… before Hulver… He told me to take care of Bracken but I didn’t know what he meant, since I didn’t even know him and have never met him.’

Rebecca continued, less excitedly and more slowly as, with a brief glance to the south where the Ancient System lay, she turned to face her own part of the wood. ‘Hulver did say to take care of him but, well, perhaps he just meant for me to mention his name to you so you’d know. Mekkins told me he was dead, but I knew he wasn’t. In fact, I thought he was all right at first, but now I think something’s wrong—I’ve been feeling that restless feeling for days, but I didn’t know what it was. It’s what brought me over here today.’

She finally stopped and Rose could feel how troubled she was. ‘I’ll take care of him, my love, just as you would—try not to fret about him, for he will be safe.’

‘Who is he, Rose? Why is he special?’

Rose could only shake her head, for she did not know the answer. She only understood that Rebecca, too, was special, more special than anymole in Duncton could know, thought Rose, looking at her passionate innocence and watching her light-hearted ways.

‘You leave your Bracken to me for the time being. I will take care of him, really I will.’ Rose moved gently over to Rebecca and nuzzled her in the soft part between shoulder and neck. ‘My dearest creature,’ she whispered. Then, taking up the ramson, she turned back towards the wood’s edge so that she might take a route along it up to the Ancient System, and was gone.

Chapter Ten

The Ancient System took in the injured Bracken as a mother tending a gravely hurt pup. It caressed him with its silence, soothed him with its darkness, and its labyrinths were to give him space in which to find himself again.

He was badly hurt. The wound where Mandrake’s talons had torn into his left shoulder quickly turned septic so that even the strength that had allowed him to pull himself into the precipitous cliff face entrance ebbed away. He could do no more than crawl up and down the tunnel where he first arrived, taking whatever worms and beetles he found there.

For the first two or three days he looked forward to recovering and heading off into the tunnels beyond. The one he found himself in was big and well burrowed, its roof arching above his head and the pale chalk-dusted soil in which it was hewn, catching the light that came in from the cliff opening.

But soon his interest in the Ancient System left him, as the poison in his wound seeped by degrees to the rest of his body and all he could do was to lie in the tunnel groaning and gasping with pain and distress.

The roots of his illness lay deeper than the wound itself. They went back to the trials and humiliations of his puphood, his uneasy passage into June, and the final shock of seeing the death, in the Stone clearing, of the one mole in whose presence he had begun to feel himself.

With the passage of each day, each one that succeeded it became longer and more painful. The agony of his shoulder spread to all parts of his body so that everything about him seemed to ache and throb. At the same time, the spirit that had started to grow in him in Hulver’s presence began to wither as the hopes and interests in his mind became replaced by despair and weariness. As each passing day brought again the painful light from the tunnel end, it showed his fur to be more clogged and fading, while his snout and mouth were soon running with fever and disease.

His hunt for food became slower and more dragging, while even the slowest of dank grubs seemed to find the power to escape his painful attempts to catch them. Once, a red cardinal beetle fell down on its back before his snout and gasping mouth. As if in a nightmare, he watched it struggling to turn itself over and escape, while he, even more slowly, tried to bring his paw to bear on it. But his limb was like a root stuck in deep and paining ground, and by the time he finally dragged it to its target, the beetle had manoeuvred itself upright, waved its antennae around to find an escape route, and was gone—its shiny redness lost in the swirling blackness of the tunnel beyond and Bracken’s own tortured mind.

There were fresh roots enough, and the occasional live catch to keep him from dying quickly. His decline was gradual as, with too little food and moisture, the poison racked his body more and more and his sense of time, of place, of life itself, changed to a sense of eternal suffering. As week after week went by and summer took over the surface above, he slowly began to starve. Time lost its meaning.

Memories came back to him, clear and painful. Root, Wheatear, Burrhead. So much torment. A snatch of one of Aspen’s stories and he would be crying in the vale of its words, the tears running furrows down his fur and hot and salty into his open mouth. Sometimes he seemed to hear rasping shouts directed at himself, or the thunderous sound of pursuit, but it was only the gasping of his own stricken voice and the shiver of his fevered paws on the tunnel floor.

Beyond the tunnel in which he lay so ill, the tunnels of the Ancient System turned this way and that, echoing the rhythms of emptiness that had occupied them for so many generations. From far off, though Bracken was too ill to hear it, there sometimes came the soft hiss of a minor roof-fall; or the plop and sliding back to safety of a worm; or the creaking, primal vibration of a tree root as it moved massively a fraction of a hair’s breadth in its growth among the tunnels.

A day came at the beginning of August after weeks of illness, when he had no more strength even to eat the food that presented itself to him. A great lobworm that arced in and out of the tunnel wall seemed to sense that the mole who lay beneath him was not dangerous, and ran its pink, moist length over Bracken’s flanks, snaking in a curl of life along his back and fur. A black, shining beetle, caught for a moment in the light from the cliff end, stood poised before Bracken’s snout, its antennae questing and curious at the mole that seemed dead and yet still made a faint noise of desperate life. A flea hopped and bristled in the dust in which Bracken lay, our of his fur and into it, and then out once again.

Yet, in these hours of decline, he did not want to die. Deep, deep within his heart the pup who had had the strength to find his lonely way up out of the Westside and on to the slopes now stretched his soft paws out and called for help. Beyond the seeping wound and fading body, the spirit that moves a pup to bleat or a beaten male to raise his talons one last time went out, insubstantial as mist, vulnerable as an autumn leaf before an eastern wind. But who could hear?

What mole could know that on a warm August night, when the rest of Duncton lay at peace, a precious mole lay dying in the dark of a forgotten tunnel?

Only one, and she was at that moment by the Stone and able to hear his unspoken cry. Rose had come the long, weary way up the wood’s edge and then cut into the wood to the Stone, and now crouched praying that it might lead her to the mole whose call both she and Rebecca had heard. It was not that she doubted she would find him—it did not occur to her that she would not—but rather that she needed the Stone to lead her. Now that she was on the Ancient System, she sensed that her meeting with Rebecca and the desperate call from Bracken were all part of a profound change that was coming over the system, and perhaps all systems.

Rose could almost smell the forces for love and evil that intertwined in the air about her and shuddered in the tunnels below. She had never in her life entered the tunnels around the Stone, though she had long ago known that one day she might, when she had the strength.

Now she prayed for the Stone’s help that she might be able to aid whatever mole it was that was embroiled in a battle with darkness and death and held so little light in his talons to combat them with.

She left the clearing and took almost the same route across the Ancient System as the one along which Bracken had fled before Mandrake. She went slowly, too tired to move fast, and snouted this way and that as she went—the drag of disease always strongest straight ahead. The August day was long over, and high summer cloud hid whatever moon there might have been. The beech trees rustled cleanly above her, seeming to echo the dry rustle of the old leaves through which she made her way.

She could sense the deep past of the Ancient System all around her, rich with the love and suffering that are the residue of generation upon generation of lives.

Still carrying the ramsons she had picked with Rebecca, Rose found her way to the part of the cliff over which Bracken had fallen, but was confused for a while by the lack of any obvious tunnel entrance. But finally her instinct told her where to dig and she burrowed down quickly, having carefully placed the ramsons clear of where the burrowed soil would fall, and after some tiring digging and a couple of rests, she broke into the tunnel between the cliff face and where Bracken lay. Long before she fully entered the tunnel, she knew that he was there. She could smell the heaviness of disease and hear the terrible rasping sound of the very ill.

‘Oh, my dearest,’ she whispered as she entered the tunnel and made her way along it to where she could see Bracken lying. He was huddled to one side of the tunnel, his back paws limp, and his snout and forepaws lost in the darkness ahead. His coat was grimy with dirt and round the terrible wound in his left shoulder were the congealings of blood and the spreading of poison. The tunnel floor about him was grimy with droppings and half-eaten food.

She touched him very, very gently on his good shoulder and whispered softly to him, but he did not respond at all, his breathing short and painful, his eyes closed, his snout bearing the pallor of near-death.

She could see how close to death he was, and how deeply he had suffered. Yet she was puzzled by the fact that the injury itself, though deep and unpleasant, was no worse than many she had seen and from which other moles, surely no fitter than Bracken had been, had recovered without any help at all. Such thoughts were natural to Rose, who treated anymole in trouble by trying to see what were the causes of his distress, knowing that more often than not they were different from what the victims themselves thought they were.

How often had a mole come to her with aches and pains in his shoulders which she had treated by massaging his haunches with comfrey; how often had she treated a loss of smell, the most terrible affliction for anymole, by buffeting the mole’s back? Rose’s treatments often seemed bizarre, but they worked.

She suspected that Bracken’s illness lay not so much in the wound as in Bracken himself, and perhaps in the way the wound had been inflicted. Clearly, it had been done when he was in a state of distress and weakness… well, she couldn’t very well ask him.

She began by gently caressing him and grooming his fur, so that slowly she could feel each part of his body relax under her paws and snout until his breathing grew a bit more peaceful and his paws a little less limp. This took her many hours, for he was so weak that she had to be very slow and gentle.

After this she cleaned the wound itself, using juice from the ramson, whose stinging smell also served to purify the air of the tunnel. He groaned a little when she did this, but not much, though he restlessly moved his head from one side to another in his unconsciousness.

She let him alone for a while so that she herself might sleep, and the day above had started again and the August sun was well into the beech trees, all yellow, grey and green, before she woke. She scurried up and down the tunnel, found a worm or two for herself and a couple of beetles, and even went to the cliff end of the tunnel whose precipitous drop made her gasp with awe as a morning breeze raced up from the cliff face below. Then, awake and recovered, she went back to Bracken.

He was alive and young, that was the best she could say. She sensed again the great struggle of darkness and light about him, as if all these conflicting forces were concentrated in his broken body which lay lost in this great place, teetering on the edge of a black void.

She placed one of her paws on each side of his face, closed her eyes, and began to pass into him her own healing love for life with a force and power she had never used before, or been able to use.

He was for her at once the frailest pup she had ever touched and all the hurt moles who had ever asked her for help. He was, too, all the many moles who had never asked her, not knowing they were troubled, to whom she had given her healing love.

There was no prayer in the meaning of the words she spoke, which were a running brook of love sounds and gentleness, of ‘My love, my dear, my sweet thing, creature of love, my laughter, my whole-souled joy’… The prayer lay in her whole being and it did not ask for help but praised the divine power that could still hold on to such life in so much suffering.

Her prayer, and the love of it, flowed through Bracken and beyond them both to the forgotten burrows and tunnels on whose edge he lay. Perhaps, too, it travelled out into the trees of the Ancient System, which now stood dappled in a morning sun, and it danced with the light and caressed the smooth grey branches of the beech trees and whispered amid the shining green of their leaves.

How long Rose gave herself to the healing of Bracken she never knew, for she was lost to the world as she did it. But long before she had finished, the sun on the surface declined towards the pastures and a wood pigeon had flapped and cooed in the evening light.

When, finally, she took her paws from Bracken’s head, her ageing fur was running with sweat and hung with exhaustion, and she looked as if she had been on a journey to the edge of life itself, and only just been able to return.

All her strength was gone. She was too tired even to find food and to wonder whether, after all, she had done enough. She simply lay down where she was, one of her paws touching his neck and her old body close to him—and fell asleep. She stirred sometimes when he stirred, and whispered gentleness into his ears and battling soul.

For three days, perhaps four, Rose stayed tending Bracken and cherishing the life in him back to hope and light. Nomole can be certain of the time it took, and Boswell of Uffington, in the account he later scribed, says that there are events in moles’ lives against which the measure of time becomes measureless, and ‘this one meeting between the loving Rose and Bracken of Duncton Wood was surely one of them’.

However, the day came when Rose knew that Bracken, though not fully healed, was at least safe—as safe as a mole can ever be against the force of evil. His breathing became deeper and more rhythmic, his weak paws now moved restlessly with life, his groans no longer held the agony she had first heard in them. He stirred at last into consciousness and whispered words of Hulver and Rebecca the Healer… ‘Rebecca, Rebecca…’ though he did not seem to know that Rose was there with him.

At last she left him, still only on the verge of conscious health again, finding first for him in the tunnels some food which she placed ready at his side. So many times she had left a mole like this, healed as best she knew how but seeming so vulnerable before the rest of the journey into health and wholeness which, finally, they must make for themselves. Never had she been so reluctant to leave a mole, and never had she said the ancient journey blessing of Rebecca the Healer with such appeal to the forces of light and love which abound in even the darkest places:

‘May the healing of Rebecca

Encompass your going and returning;

The peace of the White Moles be yours in the travel

And may you return home safeguarded.’

And she might have said the blessing for herself as well, for she had a long journey to her own burrow before her and was very weary—more tired than she had ever been.

She left the tunnel by the way she had come, covered over the entrance she had made with leaf litter and soil, and tried to shake the fatigue from her old body. It was dusk, a good time to travel at least, but it was an effort even to put one paw in front of the other as she made for the Stone—the first stage of her journey.

‘I’m getting old,’ she said to herself, ‘and a little weary. Why, my home burrow has never seemed quite so far away as it does now.’ The atmosphere among the great trees of the Ancient System was much calmer than when she had arrived, and less confused.

When she reached the Stone clearing it was night, and she paused there to rest and reflect, feeling the richness of Duncton stretching beyond the slopes beneath her. Something very powerful was going on, bigger than the system she loved, perhaps even more important than all the moles who lived there or had made their lives there in the past, and whom she had so long cared for and tended.

So much was changing. She had known of the change even before Mandrake came—indeed, she saw that he was a part of it and not a cause of it. Hulver and Bindle were both gone, killed near this very spot, and other old moles she knew were all gone as well.

It occurred to her that she was one of the oldest moles in Duncton or on the pastures and she found herself thinking again, ‘I am getting old!’ She looked down at her paws and rubbed her snout and face against them, smiling gently at the silly thought. For above her, the tilted Stone rose in the night, the great tree roots black around its base, and she chided herself with the thought that nomole was ever old in the Stone. ‘Why, you mustn’t make me say such foolish things!’ she said to the Stone, in the chatty way she always spoke to it. ‘Or even let me think them.’

With that she began to make her way slowly and carefully down the slopes by the edge of the wood, taking her thoughts and ageing body to the warmth of her home burrow. And to sleep.

Chapter Eleven

Rose had chosen the moment of her departure wisely, for the following dawn Bracken finally awoke with a clear head but a terribly weakened body. He was aching and wretched, and a little ill-tempered, but at least he could see and hear the waking world around him. See, that is, the dawning light coming into the tunnel, and hear the morning breeze by the cliff and a chorus of wrens and greenfinch and the chunter of a young jackdaw somewhere among the trees.

His shoulder still hurt terribly, but the pain was now confined to the wound itself and did not spread evilly through his body to his very eyes, and snout, and sensibility. He could control it.

He had the feeling that he was not alone, for the burrow smelt fresh and lived in. Curious! He dozed and awoke and dozed again, until he finally awoke hungry as a pup. And there was food ready for him. Strange. ‘I must have got it for myself,’ he thought, though he couldn’t remember… anything.

Yes… yes he could. Illness and dark and a great red cardinal beetle that was coming to him and struggling with him… and a worm and a black beetle much bigger than he that were trying to destroy him, take him away… Bracken shuddered and started to eat the food, asking no more questions of himself.

Though he was hungry, he managed less than half a worm. He was so unused to eating. But he managed to nibble at the stem of a… but he didn’t know the plant’s name. It tasted fresh and good. Strange again. He looked around the tunnel, half expecting to see a friendly mole, but there was none—just high, arching walls and a well-made floor that stretched into the darkness ahead.

For a moment he wanted to raise himself fully to his paws and start exploring the Ancient System which, he realised with a thrill, now lay ahead for him to explore whenever he wanted. But the moment he tried to move, he knew how weak he was and it was several days before he felt able to do more than struggle painfully up and down the tunnel he was already in, picking up what food he could find.

They were strange days of pain and content. His shoulder hurt whenever he moved and yet a restlessness to get started drove him on to use it more and more, despite the pain. In doing so, he learned that pain is a clumsy word, describing as one something that is a thousand feelings, not all of them unpleasant. The ache in his head, the searing pain if he worked his shoulder too much, the dull moaning of his stomach as it became used to food again—they were all different. He learned to welcome the step into pain that he had to take when he awoke and stretched his limbs and worked himself back into his body.

Quite where the content of these days came from he did not know, but it was there alongside him as if a companionable mole were in the tunnel with him. He was restless, impatient, ill-tempered with his weakness, but beneath it all he felt a happy certainty that so much lay ahead for which he, himself, had found the strength. In his molemonths of illness, stretching from the last week of June to the start of August, he had matured a great deal. He could dimly remember, as a pleasant dream, the caresses and gentleness of a mole very close to him, but thought it must be some recreation of his own of the Rebecca of old times Hulver had talked about. He might indeed, had he been asked, have talked of Rebecca the legendary Healer as a real force in the system, so persistent was the idea that she had been there with him. But Rose? No, he never knew that she had been there.

Perhaps, deep down, he knew, but preferred to think that he gave himself the strength to survive, and so forgot.

Certainly he forgot other important things as well. He forgot that he had nearly died. He forgot the swirling forces of evil into whose darkness he had looked. He forgot the power of light by whose strength he had been kept back from the void. He forgot again the memories of puphood that early in his illness had flooded back. In forgetting all these things, he lost as well the lessons they might have taught him, or the releases their memory might have brought.

At the same time, he remembered things as they never were: that he, and only he, had found the power to heal himself; that pain and suffering quickly pass; that Mandrake and Rune were, after all was said and done, just moles. Just moles? Nomole is just a mole. A mole may have to learn a lesson many times before he knows its truth, especially one like Bracken.

He finally woke up one dawn a few moledays into August, knowing that at last he had strength and desire enough to start exploring the Ancient System. Most of all he wanted to get his bearings, for few moles were quite so uncomfortable as Bracken, the greatest explorer of his generation, when they didn’t know exactly where they were.

He ran first to the cliff end of the tunnel, to pay his respects to the spot where he had found a second life and to take one final look into the daylight before plunging back into the unknown tunnels and discoveries behind. Grass, cudweed and brambles hung waving across the tunnel from the surface above. He listened to the soft-loud-soft buzz of nectar-seeking flies and wasps taking advantage of the blue harebells and bright yellow furze that grew on this sunlit eastern part of the wood.

The smell of summer was warm and sweet and it was only then, taking it in, that he realised, by its heavier dryness compared with June, how many molemonths had passed in nightmare illness. Well, now he was better, and the time had come, at last, to explore.

He turned around and started forward on a journey into tunnels and burrows, dangers and marvels, that nomole had ventured near for generations.

It was only when he was well past the furthest point he had reached previously in his search for food that Bracken noticed the deepening quality of sound in the tunnel he was travelling down. It crept forward towards him, at first no more precise than the backwash of a mixed wind in rough grass. But then, with each step he took, its quality became richer. The sound of sliding soil came whispering from the unknown labyrinths beyond; then the moan of wind at some twist or turn, gathered into the tunnel from some distant exposure; into these came the harsher, mysterious creaking of a subterranean tree root in stress—but whether from round the corner or many tunnels away, he could not tell; then the sudden scuttle of a beetle; and mixing with it all, the echo and re-echo of his own pawsteps running forward ahead of him and returning from some wall beyond in the dark.

The wall turned out to be the far side of a much bigger tunnel into which the one he had started from entered at right angles. As he stepped into it, the sounds he had heard redoubled in richness and complexity, and quite took his breath away. If there was any truth in the old mole saying ‘You can tell a mole by the sounds of his tunnels’ then surely the moles who built this system were wise and cunning indeed.

For when a mole burrows a tunnel, he takes heed of the acoustics it creates—not for his entertainment, but so that he may gauge from the sounds it carries to him at any one point potential danger or possible food. A tunnel has to be good to carry the vibrations of a worm more than fifty moleyards; it has to be superbly designed to carry the slinking of a rival much more than one hundred moleyards. This being so, the air currents in a system are very important—for while earth vibrations may carry fifty moleyards and sound in a still system perhaps two hundred, air currents help carry sound a great deal further, and scent as well. But air currents do not happen—they are designed, and it was this aspect of the tunnel into which he entered that impressed Bracken. For the air currents were subtle and complex, the moles having acquired the difficult art (in many systems long forgotten) of creating tunnels in which air flows in different directions at different levels—as water may do in a river, or wind often does in a steep valley.

The advantage of such air currents to a mole who knows them is that they allow him to ‘read’ his tunnels in two directions at once, and sometimes, if he is at an intersection or crosstunnel, even more.

At first Bracken could not easily interpret the sounds he heard or the scents either. That would take time. Though from the scents he could tell that there were no moles about, nor did he expect any. There were, however, other animal smells—voles, certainly, but they’d grab any temporary burrow they could get, and if that included the entrance to a deserted mole tunnel, well and good; the more sinister, sharp smell of weasel came to him, too, though from a long, long way off; but nothing else that was specific, except for the clean, dry smell of fresh vegetation whose roots and scent he realised must enter the Ancient System in many places.

This play on his ears and snout was intoxicating enough, but the impression of the great tunnel he was in was only completed by its awesome size and evident age. Its wall and roof towered above him, giving the immediate impression that it had been burrowed in some long-distant age, when giant moles roamed the earth. The walls were hard and a little chalky, the floors smooth and well packed, while the curves of its roof and corners, and where subsidiary tunnels joined it, were subtle and sinewy.

Set into the walls at irregular intervals were the grey-white roundels of enormous flints, plump with curves and hollows, which added not only to the curious flowing appearance of the tunnels but created a feeling of great antiquity as well.

It occurred to Bracken how extraordinary it was that moles had been able to move these great stones so that they might fit the tunnel—so deliberate did their setting seem—but then he saw that, by some miracle of orientation, the tunnel had been burrowed to fit the existing position of the stones. It was as if, in some way, the ancient moles had taken their cue not from any desire to impose a pattern on virgin soil but from the pattern set by whatever power it was that had first placed the stones. The feeling of age and venerability the tunnel gave him was such that he almost tiptoed along so he wouldn’t disturb the ancient peace.

What he did disturb, however, was the deposit of fine white chalk dust that had settled through time on the floor and rougher parts of the walls. The first big drift he came to he mistook for a rise in the floor, and went unthinking into it so that particles rose about him in a great choking cloud of dust, and he backed away from it, sneezing and gasping, his fur all white.

After that, he watched carefully for the thicker drifts, gradually getting used to the fact that the chalk tended to be deposited on alternate sides of the great tunnel, creating a winding path of clearer floor down the centre of the tunnel—which added to the impression the tunnel gave to a mole travelling down it of dancing or weaving along past the immovable stones of time.

Bracken did not enter any of the subsidiary tunnels that ran off this bigger tunnel on his first two days of exploration. He was too tired and too cautious. His explorations of the Westside, Barrow Vale and the slopes in May and June had taught him that exploration is best done carefully until a mole has a grasp of the orientation of the tunnels accessible from it.

He quickly established that what he had come to regard as the peripheral communal tunnel of the Ancient System ran, at this point anyway, parallel with the cliff’s edge and roughly one hundred moleyards in from it. It ran on up towards the top of the hill where he and Hulver had lain hidden before Midsummer Night, and back down towards the easternmost side of the slopes. There was only one other tunnel running back to the cliff’s edge as did the first one he had found himself in—and this, too, fell sheer to the void below.

On the third day of his new exploration, Bracken travelled a little way down one of the tunnels that branched off towards the centre of the Ancient System, which was the part he most wanted to reach. The tunnel was smaller than the communal one from which it led out, just as elegantly burrowed, and flints still lined its walls.

He was only a few moleyards into it when he saw ahead of him the well-rounded entrance into a burrow. He approached with heart beating rapidly and breath held, for in any system it is the burrows that bring home the fact that moles actually once lived and ate, slept and fought there. He entered it a little nervously, automatically sniffing at the entrance for the scent of life, though he knew that there could be none there. The burrow was bigger than those in the present system, and oval instead of round. Its soil was the same grey-white of the tunnels, the walls were smooth and held no flints, and on its floor lay the dusty fibres of some long-since-perished nesting material. The whole effect was sparse and cold, and try as he might, he could not imagine moles living there in some past time; he felt the age of the burrow, but no warm sense of its past life.

It was the same further on—the same oval burrow, the same sparseness, the same disappointing inability to reach back to the moles who must once have lived there. Quite what Bracken expected he didn’t know, but ever since he had first heard of the Ancient System the idea of its past life had excited his imagination. Now he was here—well, he wanted more than he could have.

He explored down all the subsidiary tunnels leading towards the centre of the wood, which were within reach of the base he had established for himself in his original tunnel. He gradually got used to the rich sound and by association and deduction was able to start to interpret it. At the same time, and without knowing it, he built up his strength again so that when he was ready for more ambitious exploration, he was fit enough for it as well.

It was the second week of August when he made the decision to press forwards to where he reckoned the centre of the system would be, and not try and return in one day but to make do with whatever burrow he could find. By now, the great communal tunnel that had so impressed him at the start was familiar, its curves and twists still mysterious and beautiful, but the initial awe he had felt was replaced by a certain proprietorial confidence. He felt there was nothing more it could tell him and that having conquered it, so to speak, he might as well move on to better things.

With this dangerously complacent attitude, Bracken left what was in fact no more than the periphery of the Ancient System and struck westwards towards its very centre. He took the biggest of the subsidiary tunnels and, ignoring all side turns and burrow entrances, pressed on down it, anxious to see if he could find something like a centre to the system.

Bracken’s sense of direction was, as ever, very accurate, for the tunnel went directly west towards where he was certain the Stone itself stood.

However, he was over-optimistic about the speed he would make, for after two or three hundred moleyards, the tunnel’s condition deteriorated rapidly as it sloped upwards nearer the surface and entered an area of softer, blacker soil. There were frequent roof-falls to burrow through; they had cascaded down in the long-distant past and opened the way for superficial vegetation to send down its roots, winding and confused, into what had once been a perfect tunnel. At the same time, the roots of trees impinged on the tunnel, sometimes sending a root shaft vertically through it, so that he had to squeeze his way past, while more than once, an old root ran along the tunnel itself, melding into the soil around it and losing the tunnel in a debris of mould that he did not much like burrowing through.

So his progress became slow, and his early hopes of a quick passage to the marvels that he hoped lay ahead were lost in the sweat and toil of pressing forward. The tunnel was not so deep in the ground as the big communal one from which he had started, and had a more temporary air about it, and somehow, somewhere, lost the awesome sense of the past he had felt initially.

This feeling was accentuated by the fact that the marvellous richness of sound in the earlier tunnel was muffled and lost in the confusion of roof-fall and roots he was battling through. He began to feel isolated and cut off in a way he had not felt before, and to have a sense that he was lost for ever in the ruins of a system that was now empty of life and interest.

So strong did this feeling become that more than once he was tempted to burrow up to the surface and press on across it to a point where the Ancient System might have more to offer. Only his desire truly to explore the Ancient System, coupled with a real fear of the dangers from predators on the open surface above him, kept him pressing on through the ruined tunnel. Until finally, and suddenly, he was tired. His left shoulder grew aching and heavy, throbbing where the wound had been, while the sounds in the tunnel seemed to fade and swell, whirling in a dizzy way about him, so that he knew he must rest.

He chose one of the many subsidiary runs off the tunnel he had been going down and found a small burrow a few moleyards into it. It was dusty and infiltrated from above by the white fronds of roots, but at least it gave him a floor on which to sleep and a secure roof over his head. But he was too fatigued to fall into sleep immediately, dozing instead, while listening to the muffled sounds about him.

If he fell asleep, he did not notice it, for he awoke with a start and the crystal-clear conviction that the sound about him was different from any sound he had heard before in the Ancient System. It had a depth and resonance that suggested… that said… he couldn’t say what. He could hear, but he could not put words to it. But he was suddenly afraid in a way he had never known before—a fear not of possible hurt to his body, but of some wonder, some depth, that once felt or seen would strip away something from him and leave a routeway of vulnerability running to his very soul.

But just as a pup may often face some danger so enormous that he cannot even comprehend it and innocently stand before it like an anemone in a gale, so Bracken now only briefly acknowledged this fear. He shook himself awake, got up, and was off down the tunnel with renewed excitement, convinced that the most gruelling part of the journey was over and that the deeper sound ahead heralded a discovery that would take him at last to the heart of the system.

He was right. The tunnel began to enter a harder chalk subsoil and to drop down to still and ancient depths where all windsound began to fade, to be replaced by strange distant creakings and groanings.

The tunnel ran deeper and deeper and then levelled off, the floor covered by dust and grime that had been disturbed by no creature for generations. The sound of his pawsteps was muffled by dust, and when he scratched his claws along the wall, the sound travelled ahead but did not echo back, rather losing itself in some great void at the end of the tunnel. He soon found out why. The tunnel emerged into a chamber, the size of which took Bracken’s breath away. It was so big that had his paws not been on solid ground, he might have thought he was floating in space itself. The chamber was full of the mysterious creakings and strainings he had heard before, coming from its far side. The walls actually stretched ruggedly to his right and left but appeared to stretch in a straight line and not in the curve he was used to from other big chambers he had been in. A curving wall, after all, suggests that a place has confines. A straight wall in a chamber hints at massive size.

Bracken crouched down in the protection of his little tunnel entrance and began to feel his way mentally into the place. Its roof soared so high above him that its height seemed even further off than its unknown, unseen walls. He let out a brief call to test the echo, and it travelled away from him, falling into silence until he had almost given it up before far, far from the distance, the echo returned, small and lorn. As he was thinking about what this meant another echo came back from his call, this time from somewhere high above him. Then finally one more, from way off to the right.

He explored first to the right and then around the perimeter to the left, stopping in each case only when he reached either end of the massive wall that towered darkly on the far side of the chamber.

The wall cast fear into him, for it was curiously carved, with great swirling crevices and jagged embossments that gave it an eerie power to distort and amplify any sound that came up against it. The sound of Bracken’s pawfalls became the tramp, tramp, tramp of an army of great moles, causing him to peer furtively about him in the dark to see if these phantoms were really there. An intake of breath became a dark gasp of horror so convincing that it made him feel the fear it sounded like. As for a hum, which he tried, that turned into the deep chant of dark and malevolent moles.

Such was the power of these echoes or sounds that Bracken was at first reluctant to progress to its very centre. But as it was from that murky and unseen depth that the creakings and stressings that vibrated about the chamber came, he knew that finally he would have to penetrate into it.

He thought about what he had found. Three tunnels on one side of the chamber, three on the other, all radiating to different parts of the system. Six in all, not counting the tiny tunnel that had led him here, and which he suspected had been burrowed in secret as a special way for somemole, or moles, in the past. Six tunnels. Was there, then, a seventh, leading through to the Stone clearing which must surely lie beyond this great embossed wall, and which must lie further along it?

Slowly he set off, stepping out several moleyards from the wall so he could see ahead just a little better, and so his hums would not be quite so powerful.

The sounds, when he briefly created them by a tentative hum—he did not want to provoke the same reaction as before—now evoked a feeling of vulnerable good spirits in him, less jerky than before but quite without the smooth gentleness of the first set of sounds. He felt that at any moment they would take him plummeting down to misery again, and stopped humming, though it was difficult to stop the feeling continuing and changing as he went on. He looked at the wall, whose carvings were clear but getting more complex again, the lines spiralling and looping from ground to shoulder height and sometimes beyond.

He tried humming louder to see what would happen, and what happened was not pleasant. The sound had a dark quality to it. At first it was distant, coming from somewhere high up the wall some way beyond, hanging off the overhang and easily forgotten if he concentrated on the more pleasant sounds that came to him straight off the wall. But this became harder the further he went, and, despite himself and his fear of being caught up again in dark sound, he continued to hum so that the darkness in the sound grew blacker and its lightness fled behind him to where the more melodious patterns and wall carvings were. This black sound began to overwhelm him and he began to push and stagger forward as if losing his sense of direction, trying to catch up with his breath and stop his own throat sending out these unnatural sounds that pulled him onwards and on.

In front of him, a great jag of flint, black and shiny, rose up from the floor, set solid in the wall and tapering down into the floor. Its top was so sharp and fine that it was translucent, and a mole could have cut a single whisker with it. Bracken staggered around it to face another jag of flint, bigger than the first, that appeared to thrust towards him. He ran on, whimpering with fear. The sounds were dark, blacker and more and more owl-like, and he struggled desperately with himself to stop making them, his paw rattling its talons against his throat, scratching himself to stop the noise, conquer the terror… Until there were no more flints and his breath came out shallower and he managed to twist his mouth to his paw and stop the sound, saliva running on to his talons with the effort. There was another set of the jagged flinty rocks beyond him, the same as the ones he had just passed by. They ran into the wall. His eyes followed their line upwards to the great beak of shiny cold flint that curved up to two massive roundels of black-silver eyes, all of which seemed to form the massive face of an owl infinitely evil to look on. Its black, shiny flint seemed to give it a shimmering light.

The sound he had stopped making still echoed about the chamber, swirling blackly somewhere between him and the wall, caught between the flint talons that shot out on either side of him and seemed to draw him to the centre of the wall. His eyes fell slowly and fearfully from those of the great owl to the wall beneath, the part that lay under the beak and between the great black talons. The part that lay straight ahead of him.

What he saw there made him gasp in horror. For there, ahead of him, was the start of the last tunnel, the seventh, the one he had been seeking; and crouched at the entrance, its head resting between its paws, the round, black voids of its eye sockets looking straight at him, was the blanched skeleton of a massive mole.

Beyond it he caught the full blast of the straining, creaking sounds he had first heard when he entered the chamber. Sliding, rasping, slowly crushing and melding, the rasp of wood on living wood, a sound like old branches rubbing against each other on a wild night, only below ground.

Then he knew what it was he was hearing: the sound of the roots of the great beeches that surrounded the Stone clearing and into which he now knew with terror this seventh tunnel must lead. As he listened, the sounds seemed to come to him through the gaunt holes of the skull’s eyes, or to be spat out at him from its vicious teeth, seeking to entangle him in the collapsed rib bones scattered on the ground behind the skull.

To reach the centre of the system he would have to face the living roots he could hear but yet not see; and to reach them he would have to pass by this massive skeleton that seemed to carry the very essence of the root sounds themselves.

But not now, not at this moment. The fears he had so far controlled exploded inside him and turning, breath gasping, he started to run from the mole body in panic, heading across the great chamber and making instinctively for the tunnel to the northeast, which carried the scent of oaks and worms, and of a life that was now and that he needed.

Chapter Twelve

August is an untidy month in Duncton Wood, when the leaves of the trees have lost both the virgin greenness in which they gloried up until June and their rich, rustling maturity, which was one of the pleasures of July. Now they are past their best. Here and there, passing August rain brings one or two leaves down, green but limp, on to the wood’s brown floor to die among the great blowzy fern and insinuating ivy into which they have fallen.

Birdsong wanes down to the fidgeting of yellowhammer and greenfinch at the wood’s edge and along some of its more open paths and vales, while in its heart only the call of rooks, with the flapping of their wings, makes a noise that carries. Still, on the occasional hot day, when the sun forms warm pools of yellow light in the rich green undergrowth, a stag beetle may suddenly rise and buzz through the air, or ants rustle, or gall wasps drone. And then a mole in Barrow Vale may yawn and stretch and another may affect to ask what the fuss is all about.

A mole on the surface might think, as the vagrant sun catches the pink petals of bramble flower, that spring is suddenly back again and it is wild cherry blossom that is on show. But not for long. Let the high banking clouds smother the sun and the brambles look again like what they truly are, a tangled untidiness bearing wavering petals which never seem quite to know how to stay crisp and neat. Still, what’s it matter? What mole cares? There must be something better to talk about…

Chatter. Gossip. Rumour. The three consorts of August. One for the lazy, one for the idle, and the third for the bored. For the older moles of Duncton, the ones who have seen at least one Longest Night through, the main source of chatter and gossip in August lies in the doings of the youngsters. They have by now left the home burrow far behind and, after a molemonth or two of scurrying about in shallow runs and burrows, are just beginning to establish themselves—the ones who have survived, that is. For many have been taken by owls or lost strength in territorial fights and, unable to find sufficient food, died a lingering death in hot July, to be pecked at by crows or colonised by carrion flies and egglaying beetles.

These struggles go on into the middle of August and many a Barrow Vale mole, complacent in the knowledge of having his or her own territory (though not too complacent because some of these Westside youngsters are still very hungry indeed for territory), will pass the time of day with the kind of talk that begins ‘Have you heard what happened to… ?’ or ‘One of them Marshenders had the effrontery to… ’ And so on, and so forth.

In an August when things are well settled by the third week and when there is enough food about and a mole gets bored, rumour may take over from gossip. Who can say where it comes from or why one story seems more fascinating than another? Some rumours fly on a breeze of hope to float about the burrows brightly and give pleasure to those who hear them, and those who pass them on. Others sneak in on the winds of discontent, shadows on whispered conversations whose dark pleasures lie in the fact that if what they say will happen really does, it will be somewhere else, to some other poor mole.

Occasionally, very rarely, a rumour may come which contains both the seeds of hope and the germs of discontent, and seems to herald change of a kind that will affect everymole, not just one.

Such a rumour arose that August in Duncton Wood, and unknowingly Bracken was the cause of it.

His panic flight from the Chamber of Dark Sound (as he now called it) took him towards the slopes, and the pleasant woodland scent of the tunnel lured him finally outside. But his surface senses had been dulled by the long time underground and by his illness, and without realising what he had done, he went straight into the path of a Westside youngster who was establishing his territory. Bracken looked so wild and desolate that the youngster (who was no older than Bracken himself) fled back to his home burrow with a garbled story of a wild monster mole he had seen coming from the Ancient System. The story soon got round the Westside, and what a good August story it was for moles to get their teeth into!

Then Bracken was spotted over on the Eastside, and an exaggerated version got back to Barrow Vale—a wild mole seen on the Ancient System, massive and fearless, who would kill anymole that tried to get near him.

It was enough to get the rumour going even more strongly, and the Eastsiders, a superstitious lot, resurrected an old legend that one day the Stone would send its own mole to bring havoc on the system as a punishment—though for what nomole was certain. And it was from this story that Bracken unwittingly gained himself an awesome name that became the subject of rumour, thrilling fears, and an exodus of youngsters who might otherwise have tried to make territory near the slopes: he became the Stone Mole.

‘Aye, he’s up there all right, you mark my words; and he’ll be down this way, I shouldn’t wonder,’ was how one Barrow Vale gossip put it, his words heavy with complacent warning. ‘Just been biding his time, he has, just waiting for the right moment, and now he’s come. The Eastsiders call him the Stone Mole, and that isn’t such a bad name if you ask me…’

When Mandrake first heard the story, he thought it was amusing, and laughed. Probably some Pasture mole gone astray, he thought. Well, he’d sort it all out when he felt like it. As for Rune, he latched on to anything that had possibilities for his own advancement, and there was a way the Stone Mole rumour could help him. His smile was smug with the potential of it all.

Had Bracken any inkling that such a rumour had gained ground, he would have been amazed. He regretted the contacts with moles he had so unsuccessfully made on two different occasions since he emerged out of the confines of the Ancient System, because he now reckoned that it was best, on the whole, to continue to lie low.

The first, with the mole on the west side of the slopes, was just an accident. Nothing he could do about that. The second was more regrettable, since it was born out of a desire in him to make contact with somemole somewhere after such a long isolation. The two old Eastsiders looked friendly enough—and what a relief it had been to hear mole being talked. It was almost like listening to Hulver himself talking, so learned did they seem. And they used one or two words of the old language that Hulver had sometimes used. Spurred on by the promise of this and their seeming gentleness, he had come out into the open after listening to them for a while, and approached them. When they challenged him with the traditional greeting, he tried to answer as best he could but, well, he wasn’t sure quite where to say he had come from and, anyway, he was so unused to talking to another mole, let alone moles, that somehow he stumbled over his words. Then they looked frightened and ran away from him and he looked back behind him to see if there was some big mole or other creature that was threatening them, not realising that it was he, himself, they were running from.

This incident saddened Bracken, for it made him feel isolated and lost and left him craving contact with another mole, anymole, even more. The idea that they were running from him dawned on him slowly as he scratched his side and felt his fur still hanging loose on his gaunt body, while he thought of the two older moles so plump and sleek who had fled from him.

‘I must look a pretty sight,’ he whispered to himself, snouting first at his flanks, then at his scarred shoulder, and finally rubbing his paws down his thin face.

Bracken did not know it, but he looked a lot better than when he had first emerged from the Ancient System’s tunnel and started to live in the warmer air and wormier soil of the slope surface. But while a mole will normally recover from injury or illness very fast, swinging back from near death to full health in a matter of moledays, one that has been as ill as Bracken had been, both physically and emotionally, may take moleweeks or even moleyears to recover fully. (Just as such illness may be moleyears in the making, so the route back to health may be moleyears in the finding.)

Still, physically at least, he was improving. In the days that followed the distressing incident near the Eastside, he took it easy, eating as much as he could, sleeping a great deal and keeping well hidden. He still wanted to make contact with another mole, more and more so as he began to feel healthier, but he was regaining his normal caution and would try to be more careful next time.

It was perhaps three or four moledays into September before he returned to the Ancient System tunnels by the way he had come out. His intention was to explore the periphery of the tunnels on the slope side so that when, and if, he made contact with a mole again, he would have a good working knowledge of the system’s main routes and be able to escape back into them if he needed to.

It was in this period that Bracken began to perfect his peculiar—some might say unique—talents for exploration and route-finding. He already had an instinctive grasp of the strategy that distinguishes an explorer (able rapidly to establish his sense of place in a widespread system) from an orienteer, able to grasp only the minutiae of tunnel directions in a smaller area. The key to this strategy lies in getting to know the outline of a system before exploring its detail—which was what he was now doing with the Ancient System.

Bracken knew that there were two parts to the Ancient System—superficial summer tunnels which, on the edges, were bigger, forming an all-round peripheral system serving the central core; and a deeper, probably more ancient, set of tunnels, whose area was much more restricted and where food supply was likely to be a major problem except in the winter moleyears, when worms were driven deeper underground. He suspected that the big communal tunnel he had first entered from the cliffside formed a wide encirclement of the whole summer system, and this was soon confirmed by his following it from the slopes right round to the cliffside. It petered out, somewhat, further on, where it turned northwards on the west side and he did not bother to burrow his way through the many roof-falls in there. Instead, he pursued it back past the slopes and north of the Stone clearing where, again, it continued its circle round the whole system and faded again as it turned southwards. From this great circling tunnel there were several routes radiating into the centre.

First, he must find his courage and return to the deeper system where, though he dreaded doing it, he must make his way to the Chamber of Dark Sound and somehow past that long-dead mole.

But before doing that, Bracken decided—perhaps more as a way of delaying the day when he must go back to the deeper tunnels—to find out what tunnels lay between the summer communal route on the east side and the slopes beneath, to where, here and there, the present Duncton system reached. His objective, for he liked to have one, was to make his way to Hulver’s tunnels, for he was convinced that the sealed-off tunnels he had seen in them, and puzzled over, must lead up into the Ancient System. It was there, where Hulver himself had lived and had tried so hard to maintain a living link between the old and the new, that the physical link must lie. Bracken wanted to establish the fact of it before doing anything else.

It was in this period of a moleweek or so that Bracken began to perfect another of his strong talents for exploration and route-finding. His accidental discovery that a mole may use sound to make carved walls ‘speak’ had made him think about the possibility of using sound on ordinary walls in ordinary tunnels.

Of course, he already did this instinctively to some extent, using, for example, the echo-back of his pawsteps from a wall ahead to gauge how far he had to travel before reaching it. But until now Bracken had only done this in the tunnels he knew—and the soil in the Duncton system was too soft and absorbent ever to allow moles there to refine this technique very much. Up here, however, the soil was harder and much more responsive to sound and vibration, and now Bracken began to exploit the fact. He spent long periods trying different sounds on particular stretches of tunnels, learning to read the tunnel ahead from the sound it sent back. A straight tunnel running into a T-junction sent back a much clearer signal than a similar tunnel that had twists and turns; a tunnel with many burrows off it was more muted and richer-sounding than a similar tunnel with simple runs off it; softer soil—of which there were pockets on the Ancient System—was less responsive than harder soil and deeper sounds had to be used on it to get a maximum return of echo. Different sounds had to be used to maximise the information coming back from even clear-sounding tunnels—too sharp a sound, for example, in a responsive tunnel came back so fast and its echo repeated so often that it drowned itself in his own sound, and the information was lost.

So Bracken proceeded on his explorations, testing different sounds, trying out different thumps and scratches with his paws, and generally making enough noise to frighten a whole system of moles, let alone one, had they been there. But to Bracken it seemed that nomole would ever be there and, protected by his sense of isolation (though often regarding the fact of it as a curse), he went on in his humming, sounding, scratching, thumping way, turning the art of exploration into a science.

It did not occur to him, as he made his rambling approach through the peripheral tunnels towards Hulver’s old system, that another mole might have occupied them. But so it was. She was a female, and her name was Rue, and in her time she had littered well. Then, in the early summer, Mandrake himself had loomed, one terrible day, into her burrow and turned her out of the cosy tunnels beyond Barrow Vale, which she had occupied for moleyears, to make way for his darling daughter, Rebecca.

Rue didn’t have a chance, and believed Mandrake’s growling threat that if she so much as showed herself on Rebecca’s territory or anywhere near Barrow Vale, he would maim or kill her.

She had already been distressed by her inability to litter that spring, though she had mated more than once. The sounds of other pup cries upset her and gradually she found she ate less and that her heart was not in keeping the burrows and tunnel tidy, though she was normally a very neat mole.

Already dispirited, she was easy prey to Mandrake’s will and so became yet another victim of his unpredictable moods. Rue suddenly found herself competing with the new crop of youngsters for territory. She was a small mole and, coming as she did originally from the Eastside, was not a great fighter. She certainly wasn’t weak or even gentle, like some of the Eastside moles, but she was no match for the bigger Duncton ones. The system she had won for herself, and that Rebecca had taken over, lay between two richer ones held by stronger moles and to some extent was neutral territory—perhaps that was why she had managed to hold on to it so long.

May, June and July were one long nightmare for Rue as she scratched about for a living wherever she could. Cut off by Mandrake’s threat from her friends and the territory she knew, she became scraggy and dishevelled, and her eyes began to wear the look of a female on the way to defeat—one who faces a mateless future and a territoryless death. She might have made for the Marsh End nearest where she had been brought up, but that was moleyears and moleyears before, in times that she had long stopped thinking of, and in her present state it seemed a hazardous journey to make. And Marshenders do not take kindly to strangers. Driven from one tunnel to the next, barely escaping with her life more than once, so real are the threats to an ageing mole who falls from territory and grace, she slowly found herself in August making towards the one place where old moles may, before the shadow of age creeps right over them, find a temporary security and some vague hope—the slopes.

For younger moles the name is literally dreadful, for it puts into their minds the possibility that they, too, might one day wake up with aches in their backs and shoulders and find that they cannot move, or hear, so well as once they could. But Rue was nowhere near that stage, though to all outward appearances she might have seemed to be.

She grubbed about the quiet surface of the slopes, fearful of the owls said to haunt the heights above, running from temporary hide to temporary burrow, meeting aggression from one or two Slopesiders whose tunnels she crossed until, one day, she came to a tunnel that smelt empty and deserted.

It was an outlier from Hulver’s old system and had not been reoccupied by any other mole since he had gone from it for ever in June.

She waited by it for three moledays, keeping her snout low and listening with care to see if there was a mole somewhere about. Badgers she heard, from the humpy ground somewhere towards the Eastside; crows she heard and saw; a fox prowled past quite close, but she smelt him long before he came and did not even bother to hide as youngsters often did before they learned better, because she knew that a fox will not touch a mole. ‘A fox may be a mole’s best friend, when his path with ours doth wend’ said the old Eastside proverb she had learned when she was a pup. The fox sniffed about and tiptoed away.

Apart from that, nothing. So, after three moledays, Rue made her way timidly towards Hulver’s old tunnels and could smell the emptiness all around. ‘Oh!’ she sighed, though she hardly dared let the relief sound in her voice.

Suddenly bold, she darted this way and that in the tunnels, snouting out one tunnel after another, running from burrow to burrow. There was a whiff of weasel at the end of one, only faint, but she sealed it off all the same.

She didn’t yet dare to eat down there, so she found some worms and took them out into a temporary burrow on the surface nearby. Then she returned and completed her exploration, eventually finding the central burrow, the one where Bracken had crouched miserably after Hulver’s departure for the June elder meeting and which, to her delight, was as deserted as everywhere else. In fact, although the place needed a little dust cleared away at one or two tunnel junctions and the nesting material was old, the whole place seemed to her tired eyes as bright as a primrose, and she sensed a peaceful air about it, which she could not know was one of the legacies left behind by old Hulver.

Rue was overjoyed. Her whole appearance changed from that of the hunched-up, aged mole she was becoming to one full of the joy of a place of her own and something to care for. Indeed, she began to sing a song the like of which these tunnels, and most others on the slopes, had not heard in generations—the song a youngster mole traditionally sings when, after the summer is over and the autumn is setting in, she has found a place of her own and can relax into it for the winter:

‘Rue’s found a cleansome home,

Rue’s got a place.

Let sun and moon and stars go roam,

Rue’s got a place.’

Then, with her tail held higher than it had been for molemonths, she busied herself with replacing the nesting material, shoring up one or two entrances, and, most important of all, finding where the best spots for food were.

Three moleweeks later, when September was well started and the leaves on the beech trees on the surface were beginning to dry and mellow with the onset of autumn, Bracken solved the problem of which tunnel led down to Hulver’s system. He had had difficulties, because the tunnels seemed to have been made deliberately complex here, but slowly, and by occasional recourse to the surface, he made his way in the right direction until the whole pattern fell into place and he found the tunnel that led resolutely down the slopes to the point where Hulver’s system started—or stopped, depending on a mole’s point of view.

He had now developed, almost to a science, his system of sound exploration to establish what lay ahead, and seeing that the tunnel was in softer soil more typical of the lower slopes, he called ahead with a deep roaring sound that travelled well and got a good response in this kind of soil.

The response it gave was the one he hoped for—a clean echo back, though far in the distance. It meant that the tunnel ran down to a dead end, the end being the seal he had seen from the other side in Hulver’s tunnel. He ran on down, occasionally making an uncharacteristic whooping sound from the sheer pleasure of having finally found his way right round the Ancient System and established, he was almost certain, the site of its link with the present Duncton system. This was an important moment for Bracken, not so much because he wanted to go into the present system, but rather because it satisfied the desire he had had since puphood to get a grasp of how the Ancient System related geographically to everything else. ‘Where is the Ancient System—where does it start and where does it go?’ he had once asked Burrhead. Now he would know.

He ran on down the tunnel almost as excited as when he had reached the Stone for the first time. Soon he heard the echo of his pawsteps coming back, pitter pat pat patter, pitter pat pat patter, drumming back to him in an escalating pattern of soft sound as the end of the tunnel got nearer and nearer and then finally came in sight straight ahead of him. As he reached it, he let out a shout of pleasure, for surely the tunnel was the right size, in the right direction… it was just a matter of finding a way through to the other side without leaving any clues for any Duncton mole who might, at some future time, come along.

The sound of his shout echoed back past him and on up the tunnel down which he had just run, where it was lost in the darkness of ever-shifting air currents. The tunnel here was dusty and he saw at once that the seal was as it had appeared on the other side—hard-packed soil. He was at the end! Again he let out a laugh or shout of pleasure, crouching down on the dusty floor of the tunnel with contented relief.

And Rue heard it. She thought she had heard sounds before, distant sounds like a mole running and shouting, sounds from outside her tunnels. She had run about seeking their source, determined to fight to the end for the tunnels she had found with such difficulty and which nothing would make her give up. Perhaps, three moleweeks before, when she had first come here, she would not have been so determined. But now she was strong again and though the tunnels were not a patch on the system Mandrake had turned her out of—at least from a food point of view—they were hers. She had busied herself to make them comfortable for the approach of autumn and they smelt sweet from the nesting material she had brought in and rustled with the sound of beech leaves. Her cache of worms was well stocked and she had cleaned everywhere. It was hers, and nothing would force her out.

The sounds did not come from up on the surface into whose night air she snouted and listened fruitlessly. Down below again she listened and distinctly heard the sound of Bracken’s approaching pawsteps, soft but persistent in her tunnels. She darted about, eliminating one tunnel after another as their source, until she took the old half-finished tunnel that lay past her burrow and led up towards the higher slopes, and the sound seemed to come from there. She went up it very, very hesitantly, because being dead-end, any creature there would have to fight, and a fight is best avoided if it can be.

The sound came stronger… pitter pat pat patter, pitter pat pat patter… a running mole. Surely a running mole! Rue, trembling with apprehension, approached the tunnel end and looked up at the blank wall which, on this side, had been covered over with a thin layer of dried mud.

The sounds were coming from beyond her tunnels. Higher up the slope. From the direction of the Ancient System. Rue’s eyes widened, and she waited, not knowing what to do or how to move. How can a mole fight an enemy who isn’t there?

Beyond the wall she heard the pawsteps stop. She heard a triumphant shout or laugh—she couldn’t tell which—and the settling of a body on the ground. She not only heard that, she felt its vibration as well. Her heart in her mouth, her mouth slightly open, she waited. Behind her her bright tunnels, her sweet place, seemed to darken and blur as she wondered if perhaps she should run after all.

Rue waited in the silence that now settled on the tunnels as, beyond the seal, Bracken got his breath back. She knew that the slightest clumsy movement on her part would send a vibration, and possibly even a sound, through to whatever creature it was beyond.

Bracken looked about him with pleasure, and then up at the blunt end to the tunnel formed by the seal. It looked like a mass of consolidated and close-packed soil and was not likely to give him much difficulty now that he had regained so much of his physical health and strength. He did not intend to break the seal right down, because he wanted nomole to know what lay on this side of it. But he wanted to make a hole big enough to peer through and establish without any doubt that this was the link. So he would make one, burrow his way up on to the surface, re-enter Hulver’s tunnels and make his way up to the seal to confirm its position in the tunnels.

He got up, turned to the blank face of the seal, and in an exultant gesture, spread his talons wide, reached as high as he could, and brought them crashing down on the seal, ripping them vertically down its length. The noise that followed was indescribably terrible. For, unknown to Bracken, or to Rue who crouched so near on the other side, the seal was, in fact, massive flint covered over only thinly with soil and debris. Bracken’s talons cut through the veneer of long-dried soil with ease, and scraped down the flint beneath with such a screeching scratch that the sound was like a million blackthorns flying in the air.

The soil fell away before him to reveal the great flint underneath and Bracken had to cover his ears with his paws to block out the terrible sound he had made.

While, on the other side, unknown to Bracken, Rue heard the terrible sound, and it was like an owl killing its prey. In that moment she forgot all her resolutions to stay and defend her territory. All she knew was that there was a mole beyond the Stone who could make owls appear and screech at their victims. She turned away in fear and ran away out of her new home, desperately making for the communal tunnel down to Barrow Vale, where, if she survived that far, she could tell her tale of a dreadful mole from the Ancient System and the owl that seemed to screech at his command.

She could not know what effect the sound of her fleeing would have on Bracken. His talons smarting from their confrontation with the impregnable flint, its sound dying away, he heard a mole beyond fleeing into the distance.

Nothing could have told him more clearly than this flint that it was here that the Ancient System ended, or started, depending on which side you came from. Nothing could have driven home to him more forcibly than the sound of yet another mole running from him, to whom he meant no harm, that he was for ever dispossessed of the Duncton system in which he had grown up. It was no longer his system. He was not of it. He was of the Ancient System now, and alone in it. Its tunnels, its wormless depths, its mysterious secrets, its aching isolation and loneliness, were his, and his territory.

His mood changed from exultation to a grim despair.

He looked at the great flint and knew it would be useless to try to dig a way round it. Still, at least he could confirm that the seal was where he thought it was in Hulver’s old tunnels, and perhaps stay in them for a few moledays, or until whatever mole it was that had run off came back. When he did, Bracken would retire gracefully. For the time being, however, he simply could not face going back to the confines of the Ancient System—which, though it was now his place, was too lonely for him to bear quite yet.

Chapter Thirteen

With Rue’s sudden appearance in Barrow Vale one morning, frightened, dishevelled and with a genuine tale of horror to tell, the rumour of a giant mole in the Ancient System turned into solid fact. She happened to arrive at a time when both Mandrake and Rune were away in the system, so that before news reached them, she had told her story to everymole who wanted to listen to it—which was every mole.

But the story did not only bring Mandrake and Rune hotpawing it back to Barrow Vale; it also brought Rebecca, who, since her meeting with Rose, had grown much more independent. Perhaps having her own tunnels had something to do with it as well, for she seemed to throw off any sense of the constraints that Mandrake’s bullying and rules of conduct had put on her and started living with a joy and spirit that Duncton females rarely showed. If there was laughter in the system, hers were the tunnels it seemed to come from; if there were tears, hers was the place where a mole might find comfort; if there were moles having a good feast, hers was the place where they had it.

In no sense was Rebecca wilfully disobedient to Mandrake, about whom, and to the amazement of all moles who knew her, she never had a hard or harsh thing to say. ‘I love him,’ she would declare, as if such a love could forgive the many cruelties and unkindnesses all the system knew he had imposed on her. Which, indeed, it could. The fact was that Rebecca did not seem the least affected by Mandrake’s attitude to her. But however great her love for him, her love for life and for living was greater. It was as if she was driven by a force for joy and love quite out of her control, and anymole who came into contact with her fell under its spell and got carried along by it. She seemed not only to affect other moles, but other creatures and plants as well, as moles like Mekkins, who took to visiting her, soon noticed. The trees, the plants, the creatures of the wood—all seemed brighter and happier around Rebecca’s burrows. Hers was the place where the nightingale sang; hers was the place where the sun seemed to shine; nowhere else did wood violets look quite so lovely in the sun.

And Rebecca herself was the picture of health and happiness. Her coat was full and glossy, catching even the most delicate of summer dawn lights in its sheen, and beautifully warm and dark when the sun shone full upon it. She had grown since the spring and was big for a female, equal in size to some of the smaller males, and though not so graceful as her mother, Sarah, she was a thousand times more feminine.

She would touch and rough-play, and cry ‘Look!’ pointing to some rambling eglantine or scurrying beetle whose beauty and life caught her eye, which she always seemed to want to share with another mole. But for many, her enthusiasms were sometimes almost embarrassing in their exuberance, for it doesn’t do for an adult to dance and play too much, does it?

So that sometimes, when Rebecca was quite alone and lying still in the evening or watching the light change in the early morning, there was a subtle sadness about her of which she herself was barely aware, and if she had been, she could not have known its cause. Sometimes in her dreams she wished that she might meet a mole who would play and dance with her and make her laugh and sing with the same abandon to life that she gave to others.

There were only two moles who understood this unseen sadness in her life. One was Sarah, who was now more a friend than a mother and who, though more sedate than Rebecca, would sometimes giggle like a pup while they lost themselves in each other’s fun. The other was Mekkins, who, since that day in July when he had conceived such a powerful affection for her, had often stopped by near her burrow and spent some summer time there. Of all the males she knew, he was the one with the greatest force for life, the only one whose wit was sharp enough and whose humour was wide enough, and whose experience was sufficiently great, for Rebecca to feel in his presence an expansion of herself that she did not feel with the others. She loved his Marshend language and irreverence.

Curiously, it was these two, who loved and cared for Rebecca most of all, who were the least concerned by the change that started to come over her at the end of August. She began to become restless and stayed for moledays down in her burrow, seeing no joy in the fading summer sun, no fun in the flocking of starlings and pigeons that were the early heralds of autumn. For the first time since she had left her home burrow she became angry with other moles, snarling at them if they came too near or presumed (as they had often done before) on her good humour and generosity. Sometimes, when she heard another mole coming, she would hide herself and not answer its calls.

But Sarah and Mekkins understood in their different ways. The fact was that Rebecca was beginning to need a mate. Or rather a mating and a litter, since Duncton moles rarely pair for more than a few moledays.

When Mandrake had forbidden her to go near a male in the spring, she had had a craving for a mate and a need to celebrate the busy life she saw about her with the feel of a litter inside and the joy of pups in her tunnels. There had been times in early June when the sound of other females’ growing pups had left her feeling bereft and lost. But these feelings had faded as the summer advanced until, at the start of September, this much stronger and more specific desire for a mate came to her.

Then sometimes she would remember, with a dark excitement, the time Rune had followed her down into the tunnels, chasing after her, and she had been scared, knowing what he wanted. She hated him and yet (and this she could not understand) again and again the secret memory of the mating ritual he had started and Mandrake had stopped short, coupled with the dark, assured malevolence of Rune, came back to her.

It was Mekkins who, in the middle of September, brought her the sensational news that the Stone Mole, as the Eastsiders had first called him, had been sighted by a female called Rue who, at this very moment, was telling everymole in Barrow about it.

‘Course it’s a load of rubbish. I mean, it’s got to be, hasn’t it? You’ve only got to look at this mole, and I’ve seen her, to see she’s as nervous as a pup and would think a dormouse was a monster. They say that she’s been through a hard time… ’ Mekkins knew perfectly well that it was Rue whom Mandrake had turned out of these very tunnels to make way for Rebecca, but knowing Rebecca as he did, he realised that if she knew, she would be the first to go impetuously rushing off to offer Rue back her tunnels. Rebecca would learn in time that there were some things a mole couldn’t do much about.

Mekkins went on: ‘Anyway, it’s had the inevitable effect of making the Stone Mole rumour the number-one talking point all over the bloody system.’ He laughed, and Rebecca shared his laugh.

Rebecca believed that the Stone Mole was Bracken, with a conviction born of the faith first put into her by Hulver just before the June elder meeting; as for Mekkins, he almost believed it too, and the very least that Rebecca’s certainty did for him was to remove him from taking part in the gossip about the Stone Mole and make him see most of it for the nonsense it truly was. This objectivity about something everymole else got worked up about was perhaps characteristic of Mekkins anyway, for he had maintained his unique position as a buffer between the Marshenders and the main system only by the extreme independence of his spirit and actions. He was perhaps the only mole in the system uncorrupted by any fear of Mandrake.

It had been the Eastsiders who had first labelled whatever it was up in the Ancient System the Stone Mole. Mekkins told Rebecca that story and thrilled to see the pleasure it gave her to have her belief that Bracken was still alive confirmed. He was puzzled that she should be so concerned about a mole she had never met, but with Rebecca, well, she was concerned about so many things so enthusiastically that one more shouldn’t be a surprise. And she had explained the impact Hulver’s conversation had had on her.

After that, he brought her the ‘news’ of the Stone Mole as it came along, and there was plenty of it. Nothing highlighted the system’s decline in morale under Mandrake’s thrall so well as everymole’s willingness to believe that anything out of the ordinary that happened in the system was the Stone Mole’s doing. It was as if the whole system were looking for a saviour, if only a fictional one, to rid them of Mandrake and his henchmoles. If a wind-broken branch was found at the foot of a tree, it had been felled by the Stone Mole; if a badger left his trail in moist soil down near the Marsh, the Stone Mole had passed that way; if weasels had a fight and left a mess on the ground, why, of course, the Stone Mole had done it!

Mekkins and Rebecca laughed together at these stories, for even Rebecca, eager as she was to have her hopes confirmed, could not believe them all when a mole as sceptical as Mekkins was her mentor.

But even Mekkins was surprised at something that happened just a few moledays before the arrival of Rue and provided almost the perfect preface of violence to it. One night, over on the part of the Westside which was adjacent to the pastures, there were screechings and unearthly growlings as two creatures locked together in combat late at night. The woodland silence was shattered by it, and many moles trembled to hear the fatal sounds carrying down into their burrows.

Everything finally fell silent as dawn broke, and some brave Westsider, whose burrows lay nearby, crept out to find, hanging limp from the pasture fence in the cold, dull light of very early morning, a massive owl, savaged to death. One wing was entangled in the barbed wire of the fence, the body tilting from it down on to the ground, its talons hooked and dead. One eye was staring open, its yellow glare overtaken by a lifeless, opaque haze; the stomach and neck were bloody with gore, while the only movement was in the soft downy feathers of its inner legs when the morning breeze stirred them where they were not stiff with dried blood.

Burrhead was summoned, and he immediately sent henchmoles to get Mandrake and Rune, for a dead owl is a rare sight for a mole and something the elders should see. And the word quickly got about that the Stone Mole had killed an owl!

The only mole not visibly shaken by the sight was Mandrake himself—even Rune seemed put out by it, looking at the body sideways and unwilling to get too close to it. Mandrake doubted whether the owl had been killed by a mole at all—the descriptions of the unearthly growling that had been heard, presumably sounds made by the owl’s successful adversary, sounded very like a wild farm cat to him. But then, he thought, looking contemptuously around at the miserable Duncton moles gathered there, he was forgetting that this lot had never seen a farm, let alone a farm cat. They had never even been out of their own system.

But he didn’t say anything—he had his own strategy for dealing with the Stone Mole rumour and it hinged on fostering the system’s fear and awe of the Stone Mole until he felt the time was right to make an excursion to the Ancient System and kill it. Or rather, find some scapegoat mole and kill him in privacy in such a way as to impress on these miserable moles that only one mole was in charge in Duncton Wood and that was himself. Mandrake was beginning to get heartily sick of the Stone Mole rumour and was looking forward to putting into effect his simple plan to scotch it at one fell blow.

Meanwhile, his sense of bloody drama had not left him. As the rest of the moles hummed and hawed at the sight of the owl, and Rune looked at it in his sneaking way, Mandrake went up to it and plunged his right paw, talons outstretched, into the owl’s torn breast and smeared the blood over his face fur. Then, turning on the moles, he looked at each of them in turn and laughed. They looked shocked and frightened at his actions, as if believing that in some way he would now be able to inflict the owl curse on them. Then he licked his talons with relish and, with a mighty blow, knocked the owl’s wing in such a way that the body fell on to the ground with a thump.

‘Anymole here like a taste of owl as well?’ he taunted them. ‘Good for the health, it is,’ he mocked.

The moles slunk away, excitement over, aware once again of Mandrake’s brutish power. And even Rune, who had strategies within strategies of his own for dealing with the Stone Mole and Mandrake together, could not help wondering, as he looked at Mandrake exulting in the owl’s gore, whether this bestial mole might not kill them all before he had a chance to take power for himself.

News of this incident was soon all over the system, and Mekkins regretted that he had not been near enough to witness it. So the Stone Mole was an owl-killer as well now! By the time he got near where the owl had died, it had long since been taken by some predator and only feathers and dried blood on the grass remained. The story impressed him, and it impressed Rebecca, too, elevating the already overimaginative idea of Bracken she had into almost heroic status.

Against this background, the sudden arrival of Rue on the scene caused a sensation, and when Mekkins told Rebecca of it, she determined to get to Barrow Vale before Mandrake and Rune did and talk for herself to the mole who claimed to have got to within a few molefeet of the Stone Mole. The idea of the journey appealed to her newfound restlessness for mating and gave her something concrete to do. She would be careful, she promised Mekkins, who was against her going, but she would go.

Rebecca reached Barrow Vale in safety, but she never got to Rue in time. For just as she entered among the wider Barrow Vale tunnels, a chilling voice called out to her from the shadows of a side tunnel. ‘Rebecca!’ it said. ‘Now this is a surprise, it really is. You in Barrow Vale of all moles, come to gossip away with the best of them? Well, well.’

Rune came out of the dark and stood boldly in front of her, moving slowly towards her as he spoke each word and forcing her back towards the side tunnel. Rune always seemed to be where he could inflict most evil, and he began to weave his black spell on Rebecca now. The moment he saw her so fortuitously he could scent she was ready for mating. Now, ever bold, ever opportunistic, he began resolutely to impose his sensual maleness on her. Rebecca hated him, but her body did not. She could have run, she could have raised her talons, she could have done a thousand things to get away. But instead, her snout fell low and her body tensed as her eyes were held by his bold gaze and she retreated before him.

‘Well, now, it must be a long time since we met, yes… back in the spring, wasn’t it, when you were hardly more than a pup… but one who’s grown into an adult, a female, ripe with life, from what I’ve heard…’

She hated his words, she hated his stare that outstared hers, she hated the secret knowledge he seemed to have that he was going to take her then and there whatever she wanted, his slinky body bold and sure within hers, she hated him… and yet her breathing grew shallow with the excitement of it, and her eyes grew dim with the darkness of his bigger body coming closer and closer to her. Perhaps after all this was all mating was: just sensual darkness. She could wonder only vaguely where the light in the mating excitement was, where the joy she had sensed would be found.

Rune stopped talking and moved up to her, sniffing at her from snout to tail and then back to snout again. The sound of other moles in the main Barrow Vale tunnels nearby seemed to recede and grow distant, and though she wanted to move and run, her body also wanted to drown in his darkness as Rebecca relaxed before his power to do what no other moles she had met dared do, which was to master her. She did not want to feel the moment of his touch but craved his talons in her fur and shuddered and gasped when the first touch came, confident and assured, upon her. She stood tense and bound by instinctive desire, her haunches shivering very slightly and her mating scent growing moister and stronger as he circled about closer and closer with his sensual strength binding her.

She was ready for him, almost thrusting her haunches at him, and he could take her just when he wanted, just as he wanted…

‘Rune! Rune, sir!’ The henchmole’s voice carried down the tunnel towards him and then the sound of the henchmole running down to them. ‘Rune, sir! Mandrake wants you.’

The henchmole stopped some way from Rune for he could see that he was with a female, and a salty, mating scent hung in the air and carried with it the threat that Rune might attack to kill for being disturbed. In the spring a mole was more careful, but September matings were a rarer thing. The henchmole backed slowly away, repeating, ‘It’s Mandrake, sir, he’s got a mole he wants you to see and listen to. He’s got Rue from the slopes.’

Rune turned to look at him, the voice growing louder in his ears as he pulled himself back from the encirclement of Rebecca to the demands of Mandrake. He heard Rebecca’s breathing change and saw her tense and move away very slightly, and he saw that his moment had gone, for the time being. ‘I’ll have you yet,’ he promised himself, looking at her beautiful coat and now only half-open haunches. ‘I’ll take you any way I want.’ With that, and without a word to her, he left, following the henchmole to go to Mandrake and this tiresome mole from the slopes.

For a long time after he had gone, Rebecca stayed where he had left her, feeling enshadowed and grimy. The talon touch that had excited her so much moments before now hung heavy on her. She could smell his scent in the air where he had left it, and it seemed dry and cold, making her shiver with disgust.

She had no more desire to stay in Barrow Vale, even though she had only just arrived. If Mandrake and Rune had got hold of Rue, she would have little chance of talking to her without Mandrake finding out she was there and causing trouble. And she was so tired of that from him. She wondered why something so simple as mating seemed to be so complicated.

Eventually, it was the possibility that Rune might come back and find her there, or that he would tell Mandrake that she was in Barrow Vale, that made Rebecca leave. But she had no desire to return to her tunnels. Instead, she circled her way through Barrow Vale in the direction opposite to that in which Rune had gone with the henchmole, keeping to the shadows and avoiding conversation with other moles until she found herself leaving by an entrance that led towards the Westside.

Well! She had heard so much about it and never dared to go there. Now was her chance! She stayed on the surface for only a short time, found what smelt like a communal tunnel, and shook the shadows of Rune and Barrow Vale from her fur as she headed off on the longest journey she had begun since going down to the Marsh End and meeting Rose the Healer.

If the thought had crossed Rue’s mind, as she rushed in a panic down to Barrow Vale, that she would eventually be summoned into the elder burrow to tell her story to

Mandrake, she might have thought twice about heading down there in the first place. She was terrified of him and had never forgotten his threat to kill her if she ever tried to return to her tunnels again.

But on her third day in Barrow Vale, a henchmole ambled up to her, pushed away the moles who were gathered around her, and said, ‘Yer ter jump to it and come wiv me dahn ter the Elder Burrer: Mandrake wants to talk to yer.’ She stared at him in terror and could not move a muscle. ‘Come on then, look sharp. And for Stone’s sake clean yerself up a bit, because although Mandrake won’t notice, Rune’s goin’ ter be there and ’e will.’

The henchmole, a roly-poly bully of a southern Westsider, almost had to drag her along to get her there, and when finally he shoved her into the presence of Mandrake and Rune, cuffing and cursing as he did so, she felt certain she was going to be killed on the spot. Her paws trembled and she did not at first dare look up at the looming presence above her. When she finally did, it seemed that Mandrake’s eyes were black holes deep in his face.

‘So this is the female who claims to have heard mole noises coming from the Ancient System,’ said Rune to Mandrake in a voice so accusatory that it made it sound as if Rue had set out to tell lies and deliberately deceive Mandrake himself.

Mandrake looked full on her and she quailed before his gaze, everything suddenly cast for her into slow motion as he shifted his massive weight from one side to the other and scratched the side of his face with the biggest talon she had ever seen.

‘Mmm…’ he growled. ‘What’s your name, girl?’

‘R-Rue,’ she faltered.

‘Rue.’ He said the name as if it were the name of a mole long lost in the pit of despair. ‘Rue. Mmm… you used to live over by…’ He didn’t finish the sentence, and to fill the gap she nodded her head eagerly, feeling an inclination to say anything to save herself from the death that she felt certain was about to come her way. Something like ‘It really doesn’t matter that you forced me out of my tunnels, I don’t mind, I’m only an insignificant little mole and you can do what you like to me, only please don’t…’ As it was, she didn’t need to say anything, since she looked as abject and pathetic as she felt.

‘I have heard of your story and I’m not wasting time hearing it again here,’ said Mandrake. ‘You will take us to your tunnels and show us where you heard what you claim to have heard.’

‘Yes, sir,’ whispered Rue.

Rune suddenly poked his snout forward until it was only inches from hers, and she felt the power of his contempt on her.

‘Did you hear noises, or did you make it up to draw attention to your miserable little self?’ he asked.

Rue started to whimper at this. She was so frightened and cowered back, stuttering out that ‘n-n-nomole could tell a lie in the Elder Burrow’. The thought had not occurred to Rune, who would tell a lie in front of the Stone itself if need be, but what did occur to them was that Rue was too grubby and unintelligent to make up such a bold lie.

So it was that Barrow Vale was treated to the rare sight of a quaking Rue leading the mighty Mandrake and Rune, along with the attendant henchmole, through their tunnels and on to the communal one leading towards the slopes.

Rue, however, was a poor leader. She felt nervous and sick at the strain of it all and at one point actually collapsed, unable to on. ‘Get her food,’ snapped Rune impatiently to the henchmole, who did so with ill grace.

‘Last bloody time I find worms for a female, I can tell yer that,’ he muttered angrily as he hurled three worms down before her in the tunnel where she lay. Rune noted this remark down in his memory. He didn’t trust moles who lost their tempers over something as trivial as that, or even lost their tempers at all.

‘Well now, is ’er ladyship ready to move ’erself forward then?’ asked the henchmole sarcastically when she had eaten the food. She nodded and got up, feeling very shaky and nervous, for to add to her fear of Mandrake and Rune, there was her apprehension about what might be waiting for them in her tunnel.

Eventually she reached the end of the communal tunnel, led them out on to the surface, and from there pressed on the last few hundred moleyards to her tunnels.

‘Well!’ said Rune when they got there, with sarcasm lurking behind the good-humoured tone in his voice. ‘This is where it all happened, is it?’

Rue nodded her head miserably. She felt she was going to be attacked at any moment by one of them, or perhaps all of them.

‘Why didn’t you say that this was Hulver’s old system right from the start?’ Rune spoke the words silkily, but to Rue they sounded as threatening as a thousand moles. And she didn’t understand what he meant at all.

Her terror, her general miserableness, now gave way to tears and she gulped her next words out: ‘I don’t know what you mean. I only did what you said. This is where I heard it and there is a mole up there on the higher slopes and I don’t know if his name is Hulver or anything. I didn’t even know moles lived in the Ancient System and I don’t know what you want me to say or do.’

‘Be quiet!’ Mandrake brought her flood of tearful words to a short, sharp stop as he raised his talons by a tunnel entrance and snouted inside. ‘There is a mole here, or has been recently,’ he said tersely. ‘You two wait here and let nomole out, nomole. I will see what we may find, for there is a scent here like none I have found before in the Ancient System— dry and dusty, old in its impression but fresh in its strength.’ With that, Mandrake boldly went into the tunnels, while Rune covered those entrances that lay nearby and the henchmole went off to cover more.

Mandrake was right—Bracken had been in the tunnels, having gone there for comfort after Rue had fled four moledays before. But he was getting wiser and, having worked out that if anymole returned it would almost certainly do so from the direction of the communal tunnels, he had kept himself as far over the other side of the tunnels as possible, with a line of retreat ready. On hearing the arrival of several moles, and in particular the whimpering of a female, he quietly crept out of the tunnels by a little entrance higher up the slopes, which he blocked behind him, and made his way down into the tunnel on the far side of the stone seal. He was very cautious indeed, and blocked up each tunnel as he went.

Mandrake explored the tunnels in a no-nonsense fashion, quite ready to do battle with whatever creature he might find there. The scent puzzled him, for it was strange and strong, but he could not trace its source. He called the others down, and Rue, still trembling, led them past the main burrow up to the stone seal. She told them what she had heard, pointing a talon at the black wall of the seal on the far side of which, unknown to any of them, Bracken crouched listening.

Mandrake sent Rue and the henchmole back to her burrow while he and Rune discussed the situation.

‘Mmm… It’s a seal, that’s for sure,’ mumbled Mandrake, ‘which means there must be a tunnel beyond it.’

‘A tunnel leading into the Ancient System?’ Rune asked it as a question, for he liked Mandrake to feel he had the initiative all the time, but it was more an obvious statement of fact. Mandrake nodded.

‘No wonder Hulver chose to live here, where he could be so close to his beloved dead tunnels of the past,’ said Rune.

Mandrake looked up at the seal and finally decided what he must do. A bold gesture was needed. He still doubted very much that there was anymole in the Ancient System— indeed, if there had been, whatever it was would surely have destroyed the seal and entered these tunnels. The fact was that something suggested to Mandrake that it was, as he had always suspected, just an ordinary mole—whom, when the time came, he would kill. If he was in the forgotten tunnels beyond, then well and good, let him know that Mandrake was here. He raised his massive talons to the seal, not knowing that beneath its cover of packed soil it was massive flint, and brought them down upon it, just as Bracken had done.

But this time the result was startlingly different. Again there was the terrifying screeching sound that Rue had told them about, but from behind the mass of dust and debris something far more frightening appeared. As the covering peeled away under Mandrake’s blow and the dust settled, there, staring at them all, and bigger even than Mandrake, was an image of an owl just like the one Bracken had already found in the Chamber of Dark Sound. Its eyes, its beak, its talons—each were picked out through the calcite covering of the flint so that they shone black with the hard, glossy shine of the raw stone underneath, while the screech of talon on flint sounded harshly about them, as it had sounded about Rue before, seeming to come from the owl face itself.

Their reactions to this sudden apparition were all different. Rue simply covered her ears with her paws, looked at the image forming in front of her and fled to her burrow. The henchmole staggered back from the sound and sight, his mouth open, trying to say something in his fear and surprise, but failing.

At first sight of the owl face, Mandrake reared up snarling before it, his talons poised on a level with the owl’s eyes, and his mouth open and ready for any kind of fighting. He was feeling that at last, in this system to which life had so miserably driven him, he had an adversary worth facing. And in that moment of poised action, he crossed over a boundary beyond which a mole never again knows physical fear.

Crouched behind him, Rune’s response was altogether different. It was an inward reaction, for outwardly he showed little or no response—a momentary look of surprise, an instinctive clawing of talons, but no more than that. But as Rune looked into the sudden black eyes of the owl face that materialised before him, he saw the power for evil which he had pursued for so long. His pulse quickened, he gazed with excited awe on the owl face, and he shivered with a frisson of sensuality far deeper, and for him far more exciting, than any he had felt with Rebecca. With her he was in charge and playing a game; here, he was surrendering his will to what, for him, was the only reality of life, its dark and arcane side where a mole might learn to agonise the souls of others by wielding the same black power that seemed to lie behind the shining flint eyes of the owl.

For each mole these moments lasted a very long time; for all of them together they lasted for no longer than it takes to draw breath. Then Mandrake’s paws dropped as he saw that the owl was no more than an image; the henchmole tried to recover his nonchalant stance, and Rune almost purred with pleasure at the sight before them. Rue’s screams could be heard coming up the tunnel from her burrow.

‘Shut her up,’ ordered Mandrake without taking his eyes off the image before him. The henchmole left the burrow.

‘Well, well!’ said Mandrake robustly. ‘So at long last the decaying Duncton system has actually sprung a surprise. You know what it is, don’t you Rune?’

‘I have an idea,’ lied Rune. It was the pleasant face of power, as far as he was concerned.

‘I have seen owl faces like this before,’ said Mandrake, ‘in burrows far from here, on my way from Siabod. They were used by ancient moles to create fear in the minds of moles who might feel tempted to see what secrets lie in the tunnels beyond. Very effective on some moles, not much use on a mole like me. See, they don’t really protect anything worth protecting. It’s all nonsense, isn’t it? Just a joke that ought to make a mole laugh.’

Meanwhile, Bracken, who was listening to this from his vantage point beyond the flint but could not fully understand what was happening, had heard Mandrake’s blow on the flint and seen its effect—for it was so powerful it sent some remnants of the soil cover on his side down on to the tunnel floor and on to his coat as well. He didn’t dare shake it off for fear that he might be heard. Then a silence followed the terrible screech of talon on stone: he heard one of the moles scream and pawsteps fading away, he heard what sounded like Mandrake himself snarl with rage, but then nothing more for some moments. Until Mandrake’s deep voice gave an inaudible command, and then, a little muffled by the flint between, said, ‘You know what it is, don’t you, Rune?’

So Rune was there! But what was ‘it’? He listened on.

The conversation that followed was largely meaningless to Bracken until, at last, Mandrake said that he had seen ‘owl faces like this’ in a system he had lived in for a short time ‘on my way from Siabod’.

So there was an owl face on the far side of the flint! And it was a scaring-off device.

Beyond the flint, Mandrake and Rune finished their discussion. ‘So, for the time being, we’ll leave it as it is,’ Mandrake was saying. ‘We will create the impression that we have faced great dangers—an idea which will no doubt be reinforced by that shambling henchmole, who seemed very frightened indeed.’

Then he added: ‘I’m glad you weren’t affected by it, Rune—I wouldn’t want to think that you are afraid of things like this.’ He tapped the owl beak with his talons, the sound echoing into the ancient tunnels beyond, way past Bracken.

Rune smiled, pitying Mandrake for taking the owl so lightly. ‘We know better,’ he was effectively saying to himself, ‘we of the dark powers, we of the black beak and talon, we of the impenetrable eye.’

Mandrake took his talons from the flint before him with an unaccustomed shiver. It was very cold and there was something in the way that Rune was looking at him which had the same blank quality of the owl’s eyes. He didn’t like Rune. You couldn’t trust a mole like him. Mandrake turned his back on the owl and left down the tunnel towards Rue’s burrow. His gait was suddenly heavy and ponderous and he felt tired. Tired and old. It was true that in his confrontation with the owl image he had, finally, lost all sense of physical fear, though Mandrake lived in too great a haze of anger and confusion to know the fact. But when a mole loses such fear, the freedom he finds may serve only to make him prey to the darker, more perilous fears that lurk beyond all moles’ bodies and inhabit their minds.

Rune watched him go down the tunnel, perceiving the new fatigue in his movements as only a mole of his diabolic insight possibly could. Rune looked back to the black eyes of the owl, then forward again at Mandrake, and knew that the hour when he would take power in Duncton was getting nearer.

Lacking any instruction, Rue followed the three big moles up out of the tunnels and on to the surface, where she crouched, blinking in the light, wondering what was going to happen to her.

‘Shall I have her killed?’ asked Rune, looking at Mandrake and aware that the henchmole was itching to do it. Rue cowered pathetically before them, staring at the big henchmole whom she knew hated her. Too cowed even to raise her talons in self-defence. She knew she was going to die.

Mandrake looked round at her. It would be wrong, quite wrong, to say that the light of pity shone in his heart. ‘Pity’ was a word that Mandrake never knew. It was sheer tiredness with the effort of violence. Time was when he would have nodded his head, and Rune would have raised his talon as a signal, and the henchmole would have plunged his talons as a pleasant job. Not now.

‘What’s the point?’ said Mandrake, looking blankly at Rue. Rune and the henchmole looked at Rue with complete contempt and then all three of them turned away from her as if she did not exist anymore. And the sense that she was so worthless that she wasn’t worth killing was so great in Rue that she just crouched there stunned, unable even to relax in the knowledge that at last they had gone and she was safe. Then she started to cry, for she could not follow them back to Barrow Vale and she could not return into the tunnels that had started to be her home. She seemed to have nowhere to go. In her misery she wanted to do nothing but die, to forget the system into which she regretted ever having been born.

And there, a few molehours later, exposed in the open and vulnerable to owl attack, Bracken found her. He had heard her first, for after the moles had gone from the tunnels, he crept over there himself and, having established there was nomole there, went up on to the surface where he heard the shaky breathing and occasional sobs and he quietly went out to see who it might be.

He watched her for a long time, puzzled that she should stay crouched out in the open as dangerous dusk fell and trying to decide for one last time whether he should risk making contact with another mole.

Finally he came forward to her with enough noise for her to know that he was there. She looked at him but did not run away as he expected. Instead, her snout lowered in a gesture of total defeat and she asked him quietly, ‘Have you come to kill me?’

Such a thought was so far from his mind—indeed, it was so far from his experience—that it quite took his breath away. He saw that she was small and bedraggled and seemed very frightened, while he (and he looked at the now much glossier fur above his paws and felt the much more powerful muscles that had developed since he had started to regain his strength) was fit and well and must seem confident. Why, he was an adult, and a male, and strong!

Bracken laughed and said that the only killing he knew of was when moles tried to do it to him. She sniffled and wiped her face with her paw, comforted by his laugh but troubled by the curious wildness about his appearance and the strength that seemed to come from him, even though he wasn’t as big as that Rune and the henchmole. As for that Mandrake, well… nomole was as big as him!

‘What mole are you, and where are you from?’ Bracken asked.

‘My name is Rue from beyond Barrow Vale,’ she said, ‘but my tunnels were taken away by… they were taken from me. I lived here until the Stone Mole came. What mole are you?’

‘Bracken, from the Westside.’ The answer was, in his own mind at least, untrue, for he was really of the Ancient System now. But ever cautious, Bracken had worked out that if he should meet another mole, he would first find out where they were from and then say he was from anywhere else but the Ancient System.

‘I knew Hulver,’ he added, by way of explaining why he was there. There was a pause while they considered what to say next. Then each asked a question simultaneously.

‘Who’s Hulver?’ asked Rue. ‘Who’s the Stone Mole?’ wondered Bracken. They laughed, their mutual interruption breaking the awkwardness between them. They each sensed that the other meant no harm.

‘It’s a bit unsafe staying here,’ said Bracken. ‘It would be safer in the tunnel.’

‘Oh, I can’t go in there,’ said Rue, horrified. ‘The owl’s there.’

‘I know,’ said Bracken to her surprise. ‘That’s what I want to see.’

After a lot of persuasion, he managed to get Rue back into the safety of the tunnels, telling her that the owl would not attack her and, should Mandrake and Rune return, he knew a quick way out to safety. But it was more the simple fact that he so obviously intended not to harm her, and even seemed to have her safety at heart, that finally got her back to the burrow at the heart of Hulver’s system. He even went so far as to get her some worms, and without any difficulty either, since he seemed to know the tunnels quite well. Once fed, they snuggled down on either side of the burrow, where they answered each other’s questions about Hulver and the Stone Mole. Bracken told Rue all about Hulver and Rue explained what she knew, and had heard, about the Stone Mole. He realised long before she got to her own experience in these very same tunnels that he, himself, was the Stone Mole.

‘Show me where it happened,’ he asked her.

‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ whispered Rune, who had worked herself up to a terror just telling the story.

‘It won’t hurt you,’ said Bracken. ‘It’s only an image.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Rue.

A mole like Rune would not have answered this question, for he would have known that a mole’s power often lies in keeping others ignorant, and that it was in Bracken’s interest that nomole knew who he truly was. But Bracken was not aware that he had an interest, being more concerned to reassure Rue, who was the first mole who had been friendly towards him since Hulver himself.

However, there is a difference between naivety and ingenuousness, and Bracken’s fault, if fault it was, was that he was naive. He told her no more than that he had been into the tunnel behind the great flint and possibly what she had heard had been his noise and actions on the other side—as he had heard Mandrake’s earlier that day. As for the sights he had seen in the Ancient System, and the sounds he had heard, there was something about them that warned him to keep them secret. Some things, especially when a mole does not understand them, are best honoured by being kept secret in the heart rather than scattered to the winds as words.

Rue would only go so far as the last curve in the tunnel leading to the great flint seal, peering on from there nervously as Bracken went on to the end, raising his voice over his shoulder to keep her reassured.

He told her ‘It is just an image, just a carving—something the ancient moles used to do to frighten other moles away.’ He raised his talons to the flint on a level with the curve of the beak and scratched it very slightly to show how the sound was made, and its screech whispered round the tunnel like a distant echo of the terrifying sounds he had heard before. She started to cover her ears again, and Bracken stopped. He looked at the owl face, surprised to find that it held no fear for him as the other one had. Looking at it, he felt a different mole from the one who had looked at the other, and he hoped that at last he had found the strength to delve back into the tunnels and make his way to the Chamber of Dark Sound, and beyond.

‘Is there a giant mole in there?’ asked Rue.

‘There aren’t any moles in there at all, not a single one.’

‘But the Stone Mole lives there!’ Rumours die hard, even when the subject of them is there to put the record straight.

It was late and both of them needed sleep. Bracken thought it wiser to abandon the main burrow, since Mandrake and Rune might come back at any time, and so they occupied instead tunnels to the west of Hulver’s system, where a few abandoned ones remained from some system of the past.

Even then, Rue might have been reluctant to stay there had not Bracken said that he would stay on a few moledays to help her seal up the connection between these tunnels and the others, so that Rue would have the makings of a system of her own. It was no hardship to him and, indeed, sometime before dawn, he awoke briefly to hear Rue’s deep, peaceful breathing in a burrow near the tunnel where he slept, and was grateful to have company again, even if only temporarily.

Rue was a survivor, and recovered fast from her ordeal. With Bracken there to help her seal off her new system and to burrow out one or two new tunnels and entrances, it very soon took shape. Better than that, it gave Bracken an opportunity to put into practice one or two of the subtleties of shape and sound he had observed in the Ancient System as he created a couple of bigger-than-normal tunnels which Rue looked at in surprise and soon adopted with pleasure. Somehow they managed to pick up the sound of the September rustles of beech leaves from the surface, where hints of the autumn were just beginning to show, and carry them on into the more traditional tunnels that were the basis of her new system.

There was change in the air. The distant smell of autumn. And not so distant either when the wind blew, carrying a few beech leaves down to the wood’s floor or scurrying the more crinkled leaves of the few oaks that grew on the slopes along between the trees.

After three moledays, the tunnels began to look spick and span and Rue said, ‘Are these your tunnels?’

It was a strange question, for Bracken had never thought for one moment that they were. His future lay with the Ancient System and his time here was a welcome respite from pursuing his explorations of it to the end. The question was Rue’s way of asking him when he was leaving. She was restless and increasingly proprietorial about the place and wanted him gone. She wanted to dwell in her own place, or so it seemed to Bracken.

He looked wearily in the direction of the higher slopes and knew that he must be off. He was beginning to like Rue now that he had seen the nervousness fall off her to be replaced by the good sense that was her nature. She made a mole feel comfortable, even if not always welcome. But that was the way with some females, Burrhead had once told him. Sometimes he was surprised to find that he even felt aggressive, like an adult male, towards her.

‘Are these your tunnels?’ The question still waited between them. Well, of course they weren’t. He felt he wanted to mock-fight with her and pretend they were and to let their laughter fill the place with sound, as once or twice his laughter had mingled with Wheatear’s when they were very young pups and when Root wasn’t around to break up their games.

‘No, they’re yours. You know that, Rue.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And she got up, restless and a little irritable, and though he didn’t want to go, he felt he should.

Outside, above the biggest beech on the higher slopes, the September sky was changing. Now blue and clear, now white and cloudy, as the morning hesitated over whether it was the remnant of a defeated summer or the vanguard of a new autumn.

‘Well, I’ll go then,’ said Bracken, a little miserably, as he led the way to one of the entrances higher up the slopes. Rue stayed in the burrow as she watched his departure. She was glad to see him go, because there was an uneasy power about him like that of some of the youngsters she had had who had not yet learned their strength and were clumsy in their ignorance. Only this mole’s strength wasn’t physical but something else. He was such a strange mole to be with.

September. Such a funny month for a female who hasn’t mated in the spring. September. And the morning in the sky above seemed to decide to be a part of autumn.

Somewhere near the entrance where Bracken paused, his sense of isolation very rapidly returning, a great plop of rain fell; and then another, almost into the entrance itself, spattering on to Bracken’s face and hiding drops of silver in his fur. With a sigh he left the shelter of the tunnel.

The air Bracken stepped out into was getting heavier by the minute with the pressure of an impending storm, and the blue, clear patches in the sky, now pushed to the end of the wood, were disappearing fast, squeezed out by the heavy grey clouds that darkened the sky and told of the coming of the first autumn storm.

Several more drops of rain, and Bracken turned to look at Rue again, but he couldn’t make her out any more in the shadows of the entrance, so he turned away and set off, swinging spontaneously to the southwest towards the Stone rather than towards the place where he could get back into the Ancient System.

‘If the Stone calls you,’ Hulver had told him, ‘you go to it, because it knows best.’ In his misery and renewed loneliness, as he left Rue and her tunnels behind, the Stone was calling Bracken, and he obeyed its command.

Down among the shadows of her tunnel entrance, Rue watched him go, cursing herself as a fool for letting him go just yet, but remembering with a little giggle, which made her sound almost a youngster again, that males, even strange ones like Bracken, have a habit of coming back again when they are needed. Especially by females.

Chapter Fourteen

From the moment Rebecca left Barrow Vale for the Westside, after Rune had been called away to hear Rue’s story, she saw what she was doing as a journey of discovery. Perhaps she wanted to find the pastures and to test their scent; perhaps to press on up the legendary slopes to see the Stone; perhaps even to make contact with Bracken at last, though she was now a little nervous of doing so, because part of the price she had paid for holding on with such conviction to the idea that he was alive was that she believed him to be, at the very least, a mole almost as big and powerful as Mandrake himself.

But these were the vaguest of hopes, for Rebecca lived more in the delightful present than most moles, having little time for reveries concerning herself when there was so much to see, to do, and feel now. And as her journey coincided with the start of autumn in Duncton Wood, there was the excitement of the wood’s sudden surrender to the season of change for her to enjoy.

On the second day, when far off to the east and up on the slopes Rune and Mandrake were leaving Hulver’s burrows after investigating Rue’s story, Rebecca awoke to a morning when the wood’s floor was draped and decorated with a thousand dew-hung cobwebs. They ran in ladders and cascades of wet brightness up and down the untidy brambles, in and out of the ground ivy, over and around the dead twigs of fallen branches. About them the ground was moist and almost steamy, for it was still warm from the summer, and the sun that replaced the drizzle of the previous few days still had the strength to start drying the moisture on to which its light fell.

Sometimes, as Rebecca travelled on the surface, a spider would retreat into its silk-lined nest, its front legs poised tense against possible assault as she passed. Sometimes one of her front paws would catch a long anchor thread from a cobweb, which would stretch as she pulled past and then break, the web to which it was attached trembling as one of its supports was pulled away and the dew caught in its symmetry, suddenly dropping and falling to the bramble thorns or fallen leaves beneath, leaving the cobweb bereft of light.

Later the same morning, in a more open vale of the wood, she found herself face to face with the tiny red fruit of wild strawberries which brightened the shadows of their crumpled and serrated leaves and among which stood a few pink flowers of rosebay willowherb, tall as a small shrub and far beyond Rebecca’s sight. But at least she could sniff at some of the blackberries, still hard and green, whose hairs tickled her snout and stopped her trying to nibble at them.

Rebecca at once grew happier and more restless with each passing sight, each exciting sound; the autumn made her want to run through the wood as fast as a fox, or be blown about it with the random abandon of the seeds of dandelion, which flurried and floated over the more open space.

As for the pastures, well! When she reached them, she found that they were fresher up here than she remembered from lower down by the Marsh End where she had said goodbye to Rose. She did not venture out of the long grass and rough hawthorn bushes that lay just inside under the barbed-wire fence that kept the cows out of the wood, because she was a little nervous of doing so—but the more she snouted out through the grass to the vast sky-strewn openness beyond, the more her excitement began to overcome her fear of the pastures or its moles.

On the third day Rebecca lost all track of time as the autumn continued its slow change about her and, as on different days in the spring and summer, she wandered from one delight to another. Squirrels nervously hopping between trees; starlings flocking and feeding in flurries of squealing sound; leaf-fails from a tall and gentle ash, whose leaves always fall earlier than those of other trees in the wood. While there were some things she had at last got used to and found she could take pleasure in rather than run from—like the crashing about of an old hedgehog at dusk who grubbed about an area of leaf mould she had been interested in and who seemed to make so much noise that she wondered if he would scare away even the trees themselves.

With her fourth dawn away from Barrow Vale, the dew was thick on the pastures and Rebecca woke in the temporary burrow she had made near them, feeling at one with the change that now moved so excitedly about her, rather than just a delighted observer of it. From its first moment, the day seemed to carry her along so that she surrendered to its will and did whatever it seemed to want. She was as hungry as ever on waking, but this put no urgency at all into her stretching and grooming, which became a timeless exercise in self-content. Time did not matter. Eventually, her coat glossy and her eyes happy, she burrowed about for food before taking to the surface to see the day. And the day seemed so free with itself that it almost asked that she should break free from the grass of the wood’s edge and go out on to the fresh pastures, the cool dew catching her paws and belly.

Because this part of the wood faced the west, the sun had not yet reached it, casting instead the shadow of the trees way out across the pasture. Beyond, the sun hit the grass and dried the dew, the area of tree shadow receding as the sun rose higher in the sky and swung south. The edge of the shadow and the area still bedewed shrank steadily from west and south as the morning advanced, and in it, near her burrow but now clear out on the pasture, Rebecca stayed, listening, watching and scenting the day. Behind her, the barbed wire marked the edge of the wood, and here and there along it, tufts of cow’s hair vibrated a little, the only evidence of a morning breeze. Even if Mandrake himself had asked Rebecca to move she might well not have done so, for she could smell a scent of such excitement that she knew without thinking about it that it was the one she had been seeking for weeks past. For as the shadow of the trees shrank towards her, two big male Pasture moles followed it up the pastures, down among their tunnels, then up and rolling across the surface, playing hide-and-seek and catch-as-catch-can with each other. It was a morning in which a mole should dance and smile and forget that summer was yesterday and tomorrow may bring an autumn storm. A morning to live in.

The two moles were slimmer and more lithe than Duncton moles, but just as powerful as the strongest Westsider, their coats just a shade lighter. They seemed to know each other so well that they did not really talk as they played, preferring to laugh and roll and touch and mock-fight with each other as they made their way towards the dark wall of the west side of the wood, its shadow receding before them.

The light morning breeze coming up the pastures carried their scent to where Rebecca crouched. The scent was male and new: strong and exciting. It was distant enough for her to want to run out towards it, to increase the chance that the males—though she did not know there were two of them—might scent her out. And run she did, or rather she danced across the dew-covered grass towards where the shadow stopped and the sun started, the male scent fresh like new-cropped grass, different from Duncton scents. As she danced, she did not even think of the risk she was taking, or how dangerous it would have seemed to most Duncton moles. She was Rebecca, there was the massive exhilaration of autumn soaring in the air around her, she wanted a mate, and a male was so near, somewhere near.

And one of them was. He had run on ahead, in and out of tunnels, towards where the pastures were still in shadow and where the dew had not yet dried out. On and on he ran, laughing and snouting back over his shoulder to see if the other was following near. On and on…

‘Cairn! Cairn!’ the one who was lagging behind called ahead, his voice deep and authoritative. ‘Don’t go too near the wood without me, you never know if there are Duncton moles about near the edge. Cairn!’ The name was called with love and good humour and without real fear that any harm was about. This was a morning in which to live to the full, rather than to sneak about.

Cairn ran on, laughing, snouting over his shoulder to see how far ahead he was and drawn on by such a sweet wildflower smell ahead. When, Oh! And a tumble. And a snarl. And Rebecca. Rebecca and Cairn. Tense and staring at each other, Rebecca’s talons hard in the ground and Cairn looking to see and snouting to scent if there were other males about.

‘Cairn… Cair…’ and the other arrived, and all three crouched suddenly tense in the still wet grass as the sun rose on into the sky and the shadow of the trees swept on towards the wood, passing over all three so that they were all in the sun, and Rebecca’s coat was glossy with excitement and bedabbled with dew. And all their breaths were tense with excitement.

Rebecca moved first. She turned with what was meant to be a mock-snarl, but came out more as a gay laugh, and started for the wood, but seeing the dewy shadows there, twisted and turned in a circle back into the sun; Cairn followed, with deep growls that delighted Rebecca and finally made her turn to face him, talons out, watching him come towards her with exaggerated care, first one paw, then another, snout quivering. He was magnificent; each move he made had a muscular grace that made her want to run forward and push and tumble him, to see him spring up and mock-fight with her.

‘My name’s Cairn,’ he said, and snout to snout they looked at each other, Rebecca’s head very slightly to one side, her back warmed by the morning sun and her talons shiny with dew.

The other mole came towards her from her right and looked at them both crouched opposite each other, and then, settling down, said, ‘And I’m Stonecrop, just in case you’re interested.’

Rebecca laughed, and sighed, and looked at him. He was heavier than Cairn and if anything more powerful and his coat was a little darker. Then she looked back at Cairn.

‘What mole are you, and where are you from?’ Cairn asked. It was the ritual question but one that Rebecca had not been asked before, except in fun or mockery.

‘I’m Rebecca, of Duncton Wood.’ As she said her name it seemed that nothing had ever been so real to her before and that, suddenly, she was out of the shadows in which she had lived and fully herself. And playing in the light, without waiting for more questions, she ran between them and away, and she heard Cairn say ‘Rebecca!’ and heard him chase after her. Then Stonecrop laughed, deep and strong as she liked to hear a male laugh, and suddenly they were all chasing and running and mock-fighting in the sun, paw on face, face on flank, flank on paw, paw entwined with paw again. And the laughter of one seemed to go into and come out of another, Rebecca’s higher, female laughter mixing a gay silver lightness into their deeper laughs and growls of content.

Until, when the morning was fat with the September sun and the shadows of the trees by the wood had narrowed down to a sliver of dark, they were all still again, crouching under the protection of some faded common thistle, well out on the pastures and quite near one of the entrances to a tunnel the two males had used on their way up towards the wood.

‘So you’re Pasture moles! They said you were all vicious and dangerous!’ exclaimed Rebecca, content and safe in their company.

‘And they said you were all dark and broody and lived in shadows weaving spells,’ said Cairn.

Then they talked and asked so many questions of her that she couldn’t find time to answer them all. They were fascinated by the fact that Duncton Wood had a central place for moles in Barrow Vale because, according to Stonecrop, ‘We don’t have such a place at all, except where a couple of communal tunnels meet and you can have a chat down there, if you feel like it.’

But they knew more about Duncton than she had expected, given that there was so little contact between the two systems, and that she, herself, had learned nothing about the pastures. They knew of the Stone, ‘though it’s very dangerous and is protected by dangerous Duncton Wood spirit moles who could turn a Pasture mole into the root of a tree by a glance and imprison him there for ever until the tree dies and his spirit is released,’ explained Cairn.

‘What happens then?’ asked Rebecca, thinking that roots had never seemed sinister before to her but wondering if now she could ever look at one again without wondering if a mole was imprisoned inside.

‘Nomole is sure,’ continued Stonecrop. ‘And I personally don’t believe it. Have you been to the Stone?’ he asked Rebecca.

‘No, it’s a long way from where I live. I was going to it, well, sort of heading in that direction, when I stopped by the pastures. But it’s not an evil place. Well, it can’t be, because the Stone’s there and the Stone protects us.’

‘Is it true you’ve got scribemoles living in Duncton Wood?’ asked Cairn.

‘Scribemoles?’ Rebecca wasn’t sure what he meant. She had heard of them in stories Sarah had told her, but they didn’t exist anymore. ‘No, we haven’t any of them. That was long ago and they only ever came here for a short time.

‘What lies beyond the pastures?’ asked Rebecca. Even asking the question made her nervous.

‘Never been down there, have we, Stonecrop?’

‘Nope. Too dangerous. But I’ve always said I would go—it’s no good living in fear of things, is it?’

‘Does Rose live in the Pasture system?’ asked Rebecca. ‘Rose the Healer?’

‘Down near the marshes, isn’t she, Cairn?’

‘That’s right,’ said Cairn, ‘though you never know where she’s going to pop up next.’

Rebecca laughed—at least there was one thing in common between the two systems.

Behind her, the wood murmured with birdsound. The morning was warm and they had talked enough. Two magpies played at the wood’s edge, chuckling to each other. One took off from the shadows into the sun out across the pastures below them, and then its mate followed, their flight swift and direct, as if each second of life was precious and not one should be wasted.

With a laugh and a tumble, Stonecrop was suddenly gone, back to the tunnel, ‘because it’s time I found more to eat and you two found yourselves a burrow. I’ll remember not to tell anymole, Cairn; you don’t want gossip!’

Rebecca ran after him, rough-tumbling her farewell to him and feeling suddenly his solid strength. Cairn had a lightness of spirit and a grace that Stonecrop lacked, and yet she felt, as she pushed at Stonecrop and she seemed to make no impression on him, that there was only one other mole who had felt so solid and strong, and that was Mandrake, but his strength was corrupted while Stonecrop’s was pure.

Stonecrop turned and looked down at her. His gaze was very direct. ‘Take care of him, Rebecca, because I love him,’ he said simply, his voice strong as roots.

Cairn watched them both, wanting and yet not wanting his brother to go. Rebecca turned back to him away from Stonecrop, whose sudden sombre solidity had frightened her just a little, and made her want to run even more with the lightness of Cairn, which seemed to match the day so well.

They mock-fought and play-scratched their way to the wood, twisting and turning their snouts into each other, fur mingling with fur; now Rebecca leading, and now Cairn. She loved the way his shoulder bore down on hers because he was so powerful and big, and she loved the lightness of his spirit mingling with the powerful desire that lay behind the stronger and stronger way he touched her and pushed against her.

They ran from the warmth of the middle of the day to the warmth of her tunnel, down and then along into the buried darkness of its burrow.

He snouted her deliciously so that she sighed and gasped and cried out with pleasure, while his breathing became heavier and he moaned into her and his talons rough-scratched her back as she surrendered to his pulling of her this way and that and he gave himself to her rounder, deeper warmth and softer caresses.

Where she had been tensely expectant with Rune, she was gently relaxed with Cairn. First one flank was hard against hers, then another, then his paws and talons up her back and his belly sliding over her fur, higher and bigger and his scent all around her and his talons softly into her shoulders and neck and his snout down towards hers from above, but most of all his flanks behind, over and between; as his paws possessed her in front his flanks possessed her from behind, and they were both together, his talons her exquisite pain, his breathing her sighs, his fur her fur, her warmth his heat, her softness his joy, her depths his light, his power her power, and their power her light.

‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ whispered Cairn, her body as big and warm to him as a home burrow, his body as strong and safe to her as a whole system. Their words of love like no other words either had spoken before, each one a sigh of happiness. Two innocent moles in the darkness of a burrow, whose mating is the joy in the colour of a wild flower, or the changing light of sun on dappled water.

‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ sighed Cairn.

‘Cairn, oh, Cairn,’ she echoed in reply as they shifted caressingly into each other’s paws and fur and their bodies were full of the content of satisfied surrender.

Evil. It snouts out good as a stinking hellebore finds out the sun in the very darkest part of the wood where it grows.

Evil. It hides in the shadows near which innocents play in the light, taking a thousand forms, some as hideous as disease and most as subtle as snakes.

Evil. No better name for Rune, who could sniff out the scent of goodness and convert it to the stench of corrupted innocence.

Rune. He snouted out with dark knowledge that somewhere, away in the Westside, there was something pure and good to get his bleak talons into, something to do with Rebecca, who had left Barrow Vale before he came back from Hulver’s tunnels and who had not returned to her own tunnels, according to the henchmole he had sent there to see. So Rune set off for the Westside.

How did he know? Who can say why shadows pass their way? Except that a mole like Rune can always stick out a talon and find trouble—for a mole like him is trouble.

So secretly and like a shadow Rune left Barrow Vale and set off for the Westside, snout poking into tunnel after tunnel and burrow after burrow, not knowing exactly what he sought but knowing he would find it.

And find them he did, scenting her deliciousness in the shadows of the wood’s edge and then cutting back and forth along towards it like a fox quartering a wood. Until he found what he was snouting for—the entrance to a burrow from whose depths came the smell of Rebecca and the smell of a male. Rune smiled, stretched his talons, and started down boldly into the tunnel without any other thought than the pleasure of killing. There was only one mole in Duncton he was afraid of, and that was Mandrake.

Rebecca tensed the moment she smelt his odour, turning to face the burrow entrance, even before Cairn knew there was trouble.

‘Is it another male?’ asked Cairn quietly and calmly, coming to Rebecca’s side and then easing himself ahead of her nearer the entrance, where he could defend his right.

‘No, it’s Rune. A Duncton elder. He’s dangerous, Cairn, and he’ll fight to kill.’

Cairn laughed out loud, just as Stonecrop, his brother, had laughed the several lifetimes before when they had all met out on the pastures. A deep laugh that mocked the sly odour of Rune’s coming.

Rune said nothing, but came to the burrow entrance slowly, his eyes taking in the size of the tunnel, the possibilities of blocking and turning, and the size of the entrance where Rebecca and her consort lay hiding from him. He liked a fight, especially one which he knew before he started that he was going to win.

It wasn’t hard to win a fight when a male was trapped in a temporary burrow with no room to move and all he, Rune, had to do was to power-thrust his talons into the darkness and feel the soft fur, or even better, the vulnerable snout of his opponent yield before him.

Yet Cairn laughed. He had been in just this position so many times with Stonecrop, who was a master of fighting, that he knew exactly what to do about it. Instead of pushing forward boldly into his opponent’s thrust as most males would have done, he fell back, pushing Rebecca behind him and keeping as far away from the entrance as possible. Rune’s shadow fell across it and, as fast as it did so, Rune plunged forward and round into the entrance, his talons shooting to where Cairn was reared up ready and waiting. They brushed his fur but went no further. There was a momentary pause as Rune puzzled over the contact he had failed to make, and taking advantage of it, Cairn lunged forward into the fleshy part of Rune’s paw, a searing plunge of sharp talons that forced Rune to withdraw with a twist and a cry of pain.

As he did so, Cairn lunged forward, plunged out of the entrance with his left talon, straight into Rune’s left shoulder and narrowly missing his snout. The whole thing was done with such speed that Cairn was back in the burrow and crouched still and waiting before Rebecca knew what had happened. They could hear the sharp, hurt breathing of Rune in the tunnel beyond, as he fell silent and thought what to do.

Then all was movement, as Rebecca heard a growling and a snarl, saw a rush forward by Cairn, heard a hissing from Rune and the two moles were attacking each other at the entrance, the dark body of Rune now in full sight, the lighter fur of Cairn contrasting with his blackness. For a moment both fell back; but then Cairn lunged forward again and was out into the tunnel driving Rune back down it towards the entrance. ‘Be careful, Cairn,’ called Rebecca desperately after him. ‘He’s not just a mole, he’s Rune. Be careful.’

But Cairn was not a defensive fighter and Rune’s retreat gave him the false impression that this was a fight to be easily won. When he heard Rebecca’s voice, Cairn laughed and drove forcibly forward. But Rune, too, was strengthened by its sound.

Rune saw that the mole he was fighting was young but strong, and no fool, and that it would be cunning, not strength, that defeated him. And for Rune, what was worse and increased his hatred of this mole still more than the fact that he seemed to be Rebecca’s mate was the fact that he was a Pasture mole. The fresh cropped-grass scent on Cairn sickened Rune, used as he was to the rotting of leaf mould in the shadow of the wood in which he habitually slunk.

So Rune backed slowly away, avoiding the worst of the blows that the young Pasture mole powerfully directed at him, as he worked towards the manoeuvre that would allow him to inflict the fatal talon thrust that he had made his speciality.

Cairn pressed on, impressed by Rune’s ability to avoid his fastest and most dangerous blows and to use the tunnel to prevent him from getting round and under him; warned, too, by the way Rune seemed to keep even his snarls under control.

For a moment, almost experimentally, Cairn relaxed in the face of his opponent’s retreat and immediately, without a moment’s hesitation and with no sign of the fear that a mole might mistakenly have thought would go with his retreat, Rune came in with a talon thrust which twisted and tore into Cairn’s cheek, drawing blood on to his face fur, on which a thin trickle wound down to his snout.

The thrust brought a sudden stillness to both moles as each looked to find a move that would bring the opportunity for real damage to the other.

It was Rune who broke the deadlock. He suddenly turned and thrust back out of the tunnel to the surface, the start of the manoeuvre he had used many times before as a preface to defeating a mole who seemed stronger than he. With a snarling roar, Cairn lunged after his retreating form as Rebecca, who saw the back of him disappearing out to the surface, called urgently, ‘Be careful, he’s Rune.’ She could have made no other word sound so black.

Her warning was right, for Rune knew that in the moment that a mole runs up towards the surface he instinctively hesitates to enter out on to it because he is about to lose the protection of the tunnel’s darkness. In that moment of hesitation, another mole, one waiting as Rune did now, with his talons poised for the kill by the entrance, can thrust back down into the tunnel on the mole who is coming out, and with luck administer a fatal snout-blow.

Rune’s ploy might well have worked but for the chance that the mole he happened to be fighting had fought so many times with Stonecrop, whose prowess as a fighter was almost a legend in the pastures. The trick Rune was trying was an old one and Cairn’s rapid pursuit, powered forward by his back paws so that his front paws could be protectively outstretched, was the answer Stonecrop had devised to it.

Neither mole won this round of fight. Cairn was caught by Rune’s downward thrust as he came charging out, though only on the arm and shoulder, while Rune suffered a wound to his face. Then, on the surface, unrestricted by tunnel or burrow, the two moles rolled into thrusting clinch after cutting lunge, back paws scratching and kicking, front talons trying to plunge a fatal wound.

About them the sky became overshadowed by the threat of a storm, and instead of the light being bright it was, for a morning, almost gloomily dark. While far beyond the trees in whose stormy shade they now fought, the first great drops of rain of a storm started to fall, sporadic at first, but then growing more heavy and persistent.

It was the same rain into which, far off to the east on the slopes, Bracken was at that very moment setting off from Rue’s new burrows for the Stone, which loomed, like the storm itself, over all the moles in Duncton Wood.

As the rain started to fall heavily on them both, Rune sensed that Cairn was the stronger and not much less the cunning, either. Rune might be lucky to find a fatal thrust. His speed might win the day. But he would have to be lucky, and the luck might not run his way, and anyway—why take a risk in killing a mole when there was a much surer way of doing it? There was another mole in Duncton much stronger than either of them who would relish the chance to kill Rebecca’s mate—the more so if he came from the pastures.

So Rune’s dark mind raced as he parried and thrust Cairn’s blows, while the rain fell ever more thickly through the open trees of the wood’s edge on to their fur, mingling with their wounds and blood and obscuring their sight and sense of each other.

Then Cairn charged on Rune once more, stronger and more confident now that he was out in the open, and caught him terribly on the haunch. In that moment, Rune decided that, for the time being, he had had enough. He would retreat into the wood, gradually enough to lure Cairn on with him, and take him slowly and surely towards the haunts of the Westside where this Pasture mole might be killed; and if not there, then lure him even to Mandrake, whose talons would take pleasure in doing the deed and who would surely give Rune credit for bringing this mole to him.

Rune ran back, turned and snarled, and then ran back further into the wood, making Cairn follow as he pursued the bloodlust that told him to kill this dark and vicious Duncton mole, and made him forget Rebecca in the tunnel behind him.

As they retreated into the rain and dark of the wood, she emerged from the tunnel entrance and listened to their noise slowly die away. She wanted to chase after them and join Cairn in his assault on Rune. But in a mating fight, which surely this was, it wasn’t for a female to do more than wait. But everything in Rebecca told her to chase after them, to help her Cairn; yet she stayed, hesitating by the entrance in the rain, confused by the sudden attack but hoping that at any moment Cairn would come back with the blood of Rune on his talons.

But as the stormclouds burgeoned and grew heavier over the pastures and wood, darkening everything with their steady rain, Cairn followed the retreating Rune deeper and deeper into the wood, leaving Rebecca crouched and desolate and quite alone.

Each minute that passed left Rebecca more miserable and lost. The sound of the rain seemed to confuse her and drain her of strength, and she had no idea what had happened, where her mate might be or whether or not he might be injured. Once she advanced out into the rain, towards the way they had gone, and called out, ‘Cairn, Cairn…’ but she could only hear rain and see wet foliage and undergrowth. Then she crept back into the burrow to wait a while longer.

At last she grew fearful for Cairn and this made her fearful for herself. For if he had been defeated, then Rune might come back and find her there. But surely her Cairn could not have been defeated? But perhaps he had been, and she should have tried…

So, for the first time in her life, questions and worries of life and death began to darken Rebecca’s mind. The truth was that so much had happened to her so happily in the previous twenty-four molehours that the sudden appearance out of a dark sky of Rune had shocked her into being confused and upset. To have had taken from her so violently the very thing she had been seeking for so many molemonths left her frightened and insecure and doubting the very impulse for life and joy that had brought her so trustingly over to the pastures in the first place. Now the deafening rain seemed the mirror of her torrent of fears.

Until at last, panicked by the threat of Rune’s possible return, she took to the surface again, though uncertain where to go. She turned at first towards the Westside but stopped for fear that Rune, if he was coming back, would come that way. She hesitated before the pastures, for without Cairn and Stonecrop to accompany her there, they seemed dangerous; the more so because a great herd of cattle, which had silently drifted up the pastures through the day, now stood silent and massive beyond the fence, their hooves dirty from the mud that was forming there.

Miserably she turned yet again, this time towards the slopes to the south—but what could she find there but more desolation and emptiness? Everywhere seemed hopeless now that her mate was gone.

Such a time may come suddenly to anymole, in any place, at any time. When suddenly the sun’s light is gone and all falls gloomy and dark and each drop of rain that thunders to the ground is a reminder that a mole is for ever alone, seeming for ever lost. But though the sun is gone, there is an unseen light that may seem far off and dim, and whose rays may touch the heart and not the mind. Yet such a light, vague and hard to make out though it is, may draw a mole forward far, far more powerfully than any sun.

And such a light drew her now, up along the wood’s edge on the western side of the slopes, higher and higher up the hill, where the oaks thinned away to tall beeches, which even in the rain gave the wood a lighter, loftier look. Each massive beech she passed seemed to will her on as it stood, solid and powerful, the green lichen covering its base almost luminescent in the shady light of a darkening afternoon that had taken over from a gloomy morning. She hardly knew where she was going, or that she was going, and when she wandered in her desolation from the path that led her higher and higher, the massive trees seemed to sway her back towards the light that perhaps they could see far more clearly than she could that day. Higher and higher, until the wood’s floor levelled off and she swung in from the pastures towards a great clearing that drummed with the sound of rain. At its centre stood a Stone, enwrapped by the roots of a tree. The Stone itself. And on the west side of the clearing, crouched so still that he might almost have been a part of the wood, was a mole, shiny with rain, smaller than Cairn, who faced away from her as he looked out through the trees to the west.

Bracken had been there for several molehours, from the time the rain had begun to fall, thick and wet. His few days with Rue in Hulver’s old tunnels, which might have left him feeling less lonely after his initial exploration of the Ancient System, had had the opposite effect. He had left her as the rain started, and trekked miserably up the hill towards the Stone, for no reason that he understood. Back to the Stone.

He had looked at it for a long time, feeling alternately resigned to its impassivity and angry with it just being there and ‘doing’ nothing. Then he was angry with Hulver, who had said that the Stone held everything, a promise which did not seem to be fulfilled now that Bracken was alone and desolate before it.

Finally Bracken had started to weep tears from a well of lonely desolation so deep that they shook his whole body in their sadness. Tears which mingled with the rain that tumbled on his face and fell with it to the ground which, slowly, took them in and carried his grief for its own. Then he had turned away from the Stone and gone to crouch, still miserable, in the spot to the west side of the clearing which lay towards Uffington where the Holy Moles were said to be.

Some time later he started to speak to the Stone behind him and to Uffington far off before him, not knowing that what he was doing was praying. He asked for the Stone’s help in his search for strength. He asked for the strength to continue his exploration of the Ancient System. He asked for help.

At first, the wind lashed the trees, which swayed and whipped each other in the wet, far above where Bracken crouched. But then the wind died and solid rain poured down, the same that seemed to deafen desolate Rebecca as she heard Cairn and Rune disappear deeper into the wood, and it ran in rivulets down the treetrunks round the Stone clearing, turning the leaf mould into a sodden carpet, cold and wet.

And the noise! The endless random drumming of the rain drowning every other sound—not a scurrying fox, or a scampering rabbit, or a scuffling mole could be heard above the noise. Until, when it seemed to Bracken that all creatures save only himself had found temporary refuge in their burrows, the wood was as still in the rain as a lost and forgotten tunnel.

Then a peace crept slowly over Bracken. A peace that was mingled with the sighs of the understanding that came with the knowledge that he was alone and that moles like Mandrake and Rune, who could chase after a Stone Mole that did not exist, were surely no less alone than he. A peace that came with the certainty that it didn’t matter where he lived, and if the Stone had brought him to the Ancient System, he might just as well explore it to the end.

So, as Rebecca began her own weary ascent of the hill in the rain, Bracken fell into the peace that follows the tears of a prayer spoken truly from a heart surrounded by suffering and darkness. The words that Hulver had taught him now came back and each one seemed to carry a meaning for him which he had not seen when he first recited them:

‘The grace of form

The grace of goodness

The grace of suffering

The grace of wisdom

The grace of true words

The grace of trust

The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’

Then his mind fell silent for a time and he saw for a moment past the impenetrable, impassive face of the Stone into the world of trust and love beyond it.

Weary, her wet paws sore, her mind dazed and upset, Rebecca crouched down in the Stone clearing looking up at the Stone, unafraid of the strange mole who crouched off to her right in the pouring rain. She stared at the Stone for a long time, wondering at its size and majesty, losing herself in its strength.

Finally she grew cold and shivery, but found that her panic and confusion had gone, and she just wanted to get back to the tunnels of Duncton where she could shelter for a while and then try to find Cairn again.

She approached the mole on the edge of the clearing carefully, for fear of disturbing him, for he seemed not to have noticed her. There was a patch of sanicle into which she went and made her way round to him. At first she might almost have thought he was dead, so still did he crouch, looking away through the trees somewhere out to the west. But rain seems to sink into a dead creature, leaving no light, whereas with this mole there was about him the light of the few brighter parts of the sky which lay over to the west and were reflected in the sheen of his wet fur.

She watched him longer than she intended, for a great sense of peace seemed to come from him, even though he was small and hunched and seemed, in a way, almost afraid. She wondered for a moment who he might be and decided he must be one of the Pasture moles. The thought that he might be Bracken never occurred to her, for her idea of Bracken was that he would be at least as big as Stonecrop or Mandrake, and quite unafraid. She wanted to get dry and warm again and back to the Duncton tunnels. But she needed help to get there, for the strength that had carried her up the hill had deserted her now, and she was weary.

Little by little the heavy rain began to fade and the drumming noise it had been making for so long became a patter again as individual droplets, falling through the trees that surrounded them, could be heard once more. Slowly the sky began to lighten from the west.

As this happened, the mole Rebecca was watching turned to face her, looking at her in an abstracted kind of way. Neither could have known how unutterably weary the other was. But just as Bracken sensed that the mole before him was anxious and lost, so Rebecca sensed that he, too, had been lost and lonely. It gave her the strength to speak to him, and in other circumstances would have been enough for Rebecca to run forward and make his eyes light up with her own vital joy, just as she had done sometimes with her brothers, and Mekkins, and Rose. And even, had she known it, with Mandrake.

But she was too tired to follow this impulse and instead came forward just a little and said ‘I’m lost. How do I get back into the system?’

The mention of the word ‘system’ made Bracken look past her in its general direction down the slopes, as he remembered that it really was no longer his system. He was not of it. He had little desire or need to return to it, but then, what did it matter? And anyway, it was a pleasant feeling to have a mole ask him to do something to help. He looked at Rebecca and thought to himself that he wanted to help her because she… well, there was something warm about her that… but he didn’t have words for it, or even clear thoughts.

‘I’m a Duncton mole, you know,’ she added. He knew that—he could tell by her fresh wood scent that reminded him of the sunny surface of Barrow Vale when he had seen it at its best in early summer.

Bracken was especially pleased to be asked by a mole from the system to find a route. It was the first time (apart from the odd occasion with Root and Wheatear in their puphood) when somemole had asked him the way and there was almost nothing Bracken liked better than to exercise his unusual ability to navigate.

‘Come on,’ he found himself saying happily. ‘I’ll show you.’ And he was off past her, leading her down by a way he remembered to an entrance which must lie just beyond the slopes and from where she could find her own way on. He liked the feel of running down the slopes, this way and that, through the wet foliage, with another mole following who depended on his skill. He enjoyed it so much that he was sorry when they got there and he had to turn to her and say, ‘There you are! I told you it was easy!’

He looked at her looking at him and wanted to stay and ask all sorts of things. But somehow the way she was looking at him stopped him asking the questions he was framing and left him mute, as she came forward and touched him on his shoulder where the scar was fading under cover of new fur. She did it with such gentleness that the words he wanted to say were quite gone and he felt suddenly achingly vulnerable as he let a route into his heart open up that pride, or fear, or vanity, would never again quite be able to close. He wanted to go up close to her and touch her in his own turn, nuzzling his snout into the soft fur of her neck. The feeling frightened him and he wanted to run away from it, and from her, and the system.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked gently.

‘I’m Bracken,’ he blurted out. Then he did run, turning away from the entrance where they had been crouching and making for the slopes. As he ran, he felt a relief that he was gone from her, but he could still feel the touch of her caress on his shoulder where once his terrible wound had ached so much; and though he was glad she was gone, he wished he had asked her name.

He did not hear her call out to him, ‘My name is Rebecca,’ or see her run a little way towards the way he had gone, nor did he see her stop and look up towards the slopes to which he had returned before turning away herself into the tunnels of the system.