Duncton Wood

Chapter Fifteen

The silence of the Stone. A mole may listen for a lifetime and not hear it. Or it may touch him at birth and seem to protect him with its power for the tasks that he must face.

Such a mole was Boswell, scribemole of Uffington, where the Holy Burrows lie, who is now known and beloved of all moles as Blessed Boswell.

Yet there was a time when his vow of obedience had shaken his heart as day after day he prayed and meditated in solitude by the Blowing Stone that lies at the foot of Uffington Hill—a stone whose special power for truth everymole knows. He was seeking the guidance he needed before making his now legendary decision to break his vows and make the trek over chalk hills and clay vales, across river and marsh, to the ancient system of Duncton.

The time was September, the same in which Bracken and Rebecca first met, and the weather was changeable. A storm had come in from the east, the direction of Duncton Wood. It obscured the top of Uffington Hill in rain and mist, leaving Boswell below it, isolated and alone with the Blowing Stone, to make up his mind. At the height of the storm, the wind was strong and it wound and raced around the hollow convolutions of the Stone until at last it sounded the deep vibrating note that cast all doubts aside and filled his heart with the terrible certainty that he must make the perilous journey.

He had already asked that he might do so, going with his master, Skeat, to the Holy Mole himself and begging to be allowed dispensation to risk the long trek to Duncton. But, though with kindness and compassion, he was refused, just as Skeat had warned he would be.

‘You’re far too valuable here, Boswell, for nomole knows the secrets of the libraries as well as you do, or the old language, which even the scribes forget. And anyway,’ and here Skeat looked sadly on Boswell, ‘you know you can never make such a journey and survive. Others might, perhaps, but not you, Boswell.’

Boswell would not have stood a chance. He had been cursed at birth with a crippled paw, whose talons were weak and useless and with which he only barely had enough strength to limp about, always struggling to catch up with the other pups. It was perhaps a miracle that he survived long enough for Skeat to come across him—or perhaps a reflection of the fact that he had the intelligence to steer clear of trouble.

Skeat himself had first found Boswell in a system near Uffington and brought him for his own protection to the Holy Burrows. He said that he saw in his quickness and intelligence, and in his awe of the Stone, something that should not be lost when he grew too old to stay in his home burrow and was forced to fight for a place of his own.

He was put to work in the libraries at Uffington where, before he ever became a scribe, he learned to take care of the ancient books with a love and feeling that other scribes said was a joy to behold.

Some said he was natural-born to the libraries, where his fur, flecked with grey as it was, blended with the white of the chalk walls and made him seem, in some lights, as ancient as the books themselves. They soon grew fond of the sight of his frail form, struggling sometimes with the bigger books but refusing all help, and would smile to see him.

He became a scribe very young and quickly distinguished himself for his work on some of the most sacred texts of all. The Book of Earth, as it now exists in its edited form, is substantially Boswell’s work; the Book of Light, so long an obscure text that few moles understood, was translated and explained by Boswell alone. And all this while he was still young and had seen through only one Longest Night.

But one spring, the same spring in which Bracken was born, Boswell seemed to change. Only Skeat, of all the masters, correctly linked the change with a text that Boswell one day found in the course of his delvings in the dark places of the libraries. It was a piece of bark manuscript and appeared to have been hidden deliberately. It had upon it the most holy seal of all—the seal of white birch bark: the seal of a White Mole.

He took this find to Skeat, his master, who took it to the Holy Mole himself, who opened it in the presence only of Skeat. It was written in the old language and began: ‘Sevene Stillstoones, sevene Bookes makede, Alle but oone been come to grounde…’ which in translation reads:

Seven Stillstones, seven Books made,

All, but one, have come to ground.

First, the Stone of Earth for living,

Second, Stone for Suffering mole;

Third of Fighting, born of bloodshed,

Fourth of Darkness, born in death;

Fifth for Healing, born through touching,

Sixth of pure Light, born of love.

Now we wait on

For the last Stone

Without which the circle gapes;

And the Seventh

Lost and last Book,

By whose words we may be blessed.

Find the lost Book, send the last Stone,

Bring them back to Uffington.

Send a mole in courage living

And a mole compassionate,

With a third and last to bind them

By the warmest light of love.

Song of silence,

Dance of mystery,

From their love one more will come…

He the Stone holds,

He the Book brings,

His the Silence of the Stone.

The enormous significance of this text was immediately obvious to both the Holy Mole and to Skeat. For it confirmed a belief, held by generation upon generation of scribemoles, that there were, indeed, seven holy Books and not six—the number Uffington actually had. And if there were seven Books, there must be a seventh Stillstone, for each of the six Books in Uffington had its counterpart in a Stillstone, as the special stones associated with the seven Books were known, whose location in the deepest parts of Uffington was a secret known only to the Holy Mole and the masters. What the two moles immediately debated was whether this text answered the two great mysteries about the lost Book: where it was, and what its subject was. And also whether or not there was a seventh Stillstone. But, as scholars so often do, they failed to come to any clear answer.

When the system heard that this text had been found and what its contents were, there was an enormous excitement, for surely its discovery was some kind of sign. Inevitably a great many scribes, particularly the younger, more aggressive ones who liked a bit of action, asked to be allowed to leave Uffington to search for the lost Stillstone and the lost Book.

But Boswell, who felt the same urge himself, was excluded from this clamouring, for how could a defenceless mole such as he ever leave Uffington? He lost himself in work in the libraries, pursuing the one course of search for the seventh Book open to him. He began a massive, solitary search for other material in the library in the same script as that of the manuscript he had found. He himself has recorded this search elsewhere, but what is important here is that in the Midsummer after the spring in which he made the initial discovery, he found a reference in an entry which was written in the same script, in one of the Rolls of the Systems, the books that record the findings of the wandering scribes, as they were then known, about the systems they had visited. It referred to ‘Duncton, a system separated from the world by the rivers that surround three sides of it, which has tunnels of great subtlety and wisdom’.

In itself this entry was not unusual. What was remarkable was the effect it had on him. It seemed to him as he read it that he heard a calling to him from it, as if from an old mole lost in a place from which he could not escape, asking him to come.

He himself doubted this voice, believing it to be but his vanity and pride making an excuse for him to follow the urgings he felt to leave the system. But, over the weeks that followed, it persisted and eventually he too asked permission of the Holy Mole to see if he could find the system, whose location was known, though no scribe had visited it—or at least returned from it—for many generations.

He asked three times, and each time his request was refused. So finally, that September, the same in which Bracken and Rebecca first met, he trekked down to the Blowing Stone and began his vigil for truth by it. And so it was there, in the light brought to him by the storm and by the grace of the Stone that he made his decision, even though it meant breaking his vows. It is said that he begged the forgiveness of the Holy Mole himself and that it was given to him ‘for all the things you have done for Uffington and for all the things the Stone may allow you to do outside’.

It is also said, though there is no record of this, that Skeat accompanied his protégé and friend to the end of the eastern part of Uffington Hill, where, sadly, he must have watched Boswell slowly make the start of his journey.

There, too, we must leave him to make his perilous journey alone. It will be a long time before we hear of him again, for Duncton was distant and those days were dark and dangerous.

Yet as he starts upon it, let us repeat, as Skeat did then, the ancient journey blessing, which is traditionally said as a plea to the Stone when a beloved one is going at last from our protection:

May the peace of your power

Encompass him, going and returning;

May the peace of the White Mole be his in the travel.

And may he return home safeguarded.

Chapter Sixteen

Cairn’s vengeful chase after Rune eventually gave way to common sense. The deeper he got into the wood the more its great trees oppressed him, for he was only used to open sky, fresh wind, and tunnels that were sparse and smelt dry.

But he was at first reluctant to turn back. For one thing, his brother Stonecrop had told him once, ‘Never leave a fight half fought,’ which Cairn took to mean that an opponent was best killed rather than left free to sneak off and remain a danger.

Also, Cairn sensed that Rune was not truly beaten anyway and probably had some trick prepared. And then again, this Rune might bring other Duncton moles to attack him, and Cairn had no inflated sense of his own prowess. He could have beaten Rune, he knew that, but not two Runes, or three. So, finally, Cairn gave up the chase and turned back to try to find his mate.

Out on the pastures this would have been easy for him, but here in the wood with so many strange smells and sounds, and with the heavy rain half obscuring everything, Cairn found it impossible, and he was lost in the wood for hours trying to find his way back to the pastures. Eventually, when the rain lightened and a breeze returned, fortunately from the west, he got a scent of the pastures and was able to head directly for them and from there to the temporary burrow where he had left Rebecca.

He called out her name as he went down, but he could sense without waiting for the silence that greeted him that she was gone. Probably to look for him.

But how wet and forlorn the place looked bereft of her. How dank and desolate the wet wood about seemed, just as it always had when he had come near it from the pastures. How cold their burrow was with only the fresh wood scent of Rebecca there to give it a feeling of life and love.

He waited in the burrow, tending the scratches and wounds he had received in his fight with Rune and feeling lost. He wanted to see her again, if only to confirm that she had not been a dream—though, he thought ruefully, his wounds from Rune were evidence enough that she was not.

Rebecca, too, was miserable throughout that same night, for though she was tired, she could not sleep with fretting for her Cairn. When dawn came, and it came very slowly, she made her way back to the surface near the pastures, where the air was cool and clear from yesterday’s storm and the sun was beginning to shine. The wood gave her the feeling that it had shaken off the trial of the storm and was there again for moles to enjoy, sliding into autumn it was true, but with enough green leaf about to catch the morning sun and make a mole feel that he, or she, was back in summer again.

As soon as Rebecca came to the little clearing where her temporary burrow was, she knew that he was there waiting for her. Oh, she could smell again the strong young scent of the open pastures, where the wind blew and shadows seemed few and far between. She sighed for happiness and crept as quietly as she could into the tunnel, hoping to surprise Cairn, but he was ready for her. She heard him stir and laugh as he delighted in her scent coming to him, and there he was, waiting in the burrow, her Cairn! Her love! His love, Rebecca!

How quiet they both were, and how content. She tended for a while to his scratches and wounds, especially the one he had received on his face as he had run out of the tunnel after Rune. What special attention she gave to that one! What sighings and caresses, what entwinings and delights, what peaceful rest and waking dreams! How close they were!

‘Rebecca, Rebecca!’

‘Cairn, my love, my wildflower.’

They smiled and laughed and giggled to be so near, fur once more mingling with fur, and haunch soft against haunch. For a while they even mock-fought, until Cairn’s wound got scratched again and he surrendered in defeat to his Rebecca, and she licked and tended him once more. Then they slept again, the sweet sleep of love satisfied.

‘Been in a fight, have you, Rune?’ Mandrake asked the question with good humour, for after the confrontation with the owl face in Hulver’s tunnels he had felt weary, and in no mood to deal with the sycophantic mumblings of the henchmoles, so was glad to see Rune back again from wherever he had been.

When he entered the elder burrow where Mandrake was crouched, Rune had placed himself carefully out of the shadows where his wounds and scratches might be clearly seen. He had done so wearily and in seeming pain, his snout low but making a consciously brave effort to look cheerful.

‘Not exactly a fight, Mandrake, but it is of no matter. I hope.’

‘Mmm?’ Mandrake’s growl indicated that he wanted to know more.

‘It’s nothing,’ said Rune. ‘At least, I hope it’s nothing.’

He paused to give time for the doubt to sink into Mandrake’s mind and then said lightly, ‘Well! Everything’s quiet in Barrow Vale. That’s something!’

‘Where have you been, Rune?’ asked Mandrake, his curiosity now successfully aroused.

Rune sighed, licked his wounds, scratched, twisted and turned, coughed, put a brave smile on to his shadowy face, sighed again, and finally said: ‘Do you know where Rebecca is at the moment?’

‘No. Where?’ asked Mandrake, puzzlement taking over from curiosity.

‘Ah! I thought… nothing. I must be wrong.’

Mandrake got up and came closer to Rune. ‘What did you think?’ he asked more intensely.

Rune demurred. Then he said, ‘At any rate if there is anywhere in the system where danger and treachery can have least effect it is in the Westside. Most of the henchmoles come from there. Very loyal to you and the system.’

‘Danger? Treachery?’ There was a hint of irritation in Mandrake’s voice, a touch of anger.

‘We must always be prepared for them, you have taught me that.’ Rune stopped again and Mandrake waited for him to go on. Eventually he did, but deliberately on to another subject.

‘Autumn is starting, Mandrake. A time of change. But what a summer! You must have been proud of Rebecca, then.’

‘Proud?’

‘Such innocence, in the summer. Such warmth, when the sun was shining. So beautiful, then. She’s not here in Barrow Vale now?’

‘Should she be?’

‘She was. After she left her burrows a few days ago. But perhaps she’s gone back there now, and I’m wrong.’

‘Wrong? What is that you’re saying, Rune? Come on, out with it.’

‘Fears are not always founded in fact. They are best left unspoken until they are known to be true. And then a mole may root out danger and treachery.’

‘Treachery? Rebecca? What do you mean?’ Mandrake was becoming angry, though not exactly with Rune himself, since nomole had been more loyal to him.

‘What mole did you fight?’ persisted Mandrake.

‘A mole I hope that Rebecca has not met,’ replied Rune, adding quickly, ‘but we will soon know… if Rebecca is back in her tunnels, I mean. I did not want to worry you about fears which, though black as shadows, may yet be groundless. You have other things to worry about and I am ever concerned to keep such smaller worries from you.’ Rune scratched himself again and smiled weakly at Mandrake, grimacing as if in pain.

‘What mole?’ asked Mandrake.

‘A Pasture mole,’ said Rune.

‘You killed him?’ asked Mandrake.

‘I wish I had. But there was more than one. Perhaps I killed one of them.’ He paused as if he were thinking and Mandrake waited impatiently for him to go on. Finally, he did.

‘We must be more wary of the Pasture moles, for they are getting subtler in their ways of attack, subtler than they once were. You know what I think, Mandrake?’

Involuntarily Mandrake came closer, thinking that at last Rune would say what was on his mind.

‘I think that a Pasture mole likes nothing more than to take a Duncton female, the younger and more innocent the better, and to have her for his own, hard haunch hard into soft young haunch. To take her in the safety of the wood’s edge and to leave her to litter in shameful secrecy a brood of squawling Pasture pups in the heart of Duncton Wood.’

As this image hung between them, a henchmole poked his snout through the entrance into the elder burrow in which Mandrake and Rune were talking and, seeing that they were silent, whispered: ‘Rune, sir, Rune! She is not there!’

‘Who is not where?’ thundered Mandrake, directing the frustration he felt at Rune’s careful vagueness at the henchmole, who stumbled and stuttered and looked desperately at Rune for help.

Rune merely lowered his snout and shook his head sadly.

‘Well?’ demanded Mandrake of the henchmole.

‘Er—well—it’s Rebecca. She’s not in her tunnels.’

‘Where is she, then?’ roared Mandrake.

‘I… we… don’t know, Mandrake, sir,’ whispered the henchmole.

‘Rune?’ Mandrake turned aggressively back to Rune.

‘This was what I feared. This was what I hoped could not be true. Ah, Rebecca!’

‘Get out,’ shouted Mandrake at the henchmole. Then, turning to Rune, he said, ‘You had better start at the beginning, Rune.’

‘There is not much more to say now, Mandrake. Only things to do… But you know why Rebecca came to Barrow Vale?’

‘Why?’

‘September is a time of change. Leaves may be a delicate green in June, but by September they decay. Some moles mate in September… some moles like it, want it… then. Or now, I should say.’

‘Mating… Rebecca… now…’ The elements were beginning to combine into swirling red and black poison in Mandrake’s mind.

‘On the wood’s edge, near the pastures,’ went on Rune, adding hastily, but deliberately not hastily enough, an explanation of what he meant: ‘That’s where I’ve been. Fighting Pasture moles who had taken a Duncton female into their darkness and done to her what she allowed them to do. Treachery and danger.’

‘You mean Rebecca?’ asked Mandrake, enraged but fascinated at the same time. With each word that Rune now spoke a picture of his Rebecca, his daughter Rebecca, his untouched child, hardened on the edge of his mind where nomole at first likes to look, but to which a jealous mole may easily be drawn. A picture of fur and darkness, of moving haunches and talon scratches on backs, of moist snouts long and pointing and open mouths, and white teeth and sensual smiles in the dark of a forbidden burrow. And his Rebecca among them. His daughter!

‘Rebecca? With Pasture moles? I hope not,’ said Rune. ‘I’m certain she couldn’t,’ he added, but with too little conviction to satisfy Mandrake.

Rune’s plans ran deep, deeper perhaps than even he realised. He recognised Mandrake’s jealousy for Rebecca because he had felt something of it himself, though being cold and cerebral, his was the jealousy of non-possession rather than of blood right and lust, as Mandrake’s was. He thought of Rebecca and Cairn, and his eyes had the black glitter of the owl face in Hulver’s tunnels, for evil takes its greatest pleasure in tearing the innocence and happiness from the face of joy.

‘Did you see her there?’ demanded Mandrake, now shaking with anger and the need for action.

‘I heard a female there, taking her pleasure with a mole or moles. A Duncton female from the scent. Thrusting her open haunches to a male, or males, from the pastures. She was there… but whether or not it was Rebecca I cannot be sure.’

‘Rebecca?’

‘Perhaps it was another female, but I cannot be certain,’ said Rune.

His Rebecca. His child. Her haunches open to another male… Mandrake shook with the thought of it until finally he shouted the words that Rune most wanted to hear. ‘Take me there and let me see!’

Yet even then Rune pretended to hesitate. ‘Perhaps it is but a mistake, a silliness on my part. It was raining, a heavy storm; the senses play tricks in such weather. I may be very wrong and nomole would wish harm on a mole such as Rebecca, sweet Rebecca, less than I.’

‘Take me there,’ ordered Mandrake with a terrible coldness in his voice that warmed Rune’s heart.

Night-time, and Rebecca and her Cairn slept on. Nighttime, and the urgent pounding of Mandrake’s heavy pawsteps grew nearer and nearer to the wood’s edge. Night-time, and up in the black and barkless wastes of a dead elm, the yellow eyes of an owl stared down and down at the wood floor beneath, talons itching round the branch they clasped as it waited for the sight and smell of prey.

Mandrake and Rune finally broke out on to the surface of the wood, near the pasture, just before dawn, when the only sound is the distant squeal of a field mouse or bank vole taken by a tawny owl. At such a moment only troubles wake a mole and make him toss and turn in his half-sleep; only a cold wind disturbs the wood floor and makes a bramble thorn rasp against its own hard stem; only a cold moon casts a light, though even that is fading as the moon sinks down beyond the distant vales.

Cairn stirred. He knew that his time with Rebecca was almost up. Rebecca moved even closer, even more content. She had mated and she would litter. She knew it with sweet certainty. But she knew that Cairn, her love, was restless and that dawn was coming. He wanted to return now to his own system to find the tunnels he felt safe in and talk again to his brother, Stonecrop.

Rebecca and he had come together in joy but both wanted to part now, as mated moles eventually must. Rebecca sighed, nuzzling him close and smiling, for she was thinking of the pups he had given her, while Cairn smiled to think of Rebecca with her pups, tumbling and playing with them, suckling them to her body, against whose soft warmth he now lay.

Close by, and getting closer, massive Mandrake and Rune crept along the edge, Rune pretending to snout his way there with difficulty, though knowing very well exactly where he was leading Mandrake.

‘Here,’ hissed Rune.

‘Where?’ demanded Mandrake.

‘There.’ Rune pointed, his talon indicating the entrance to Rebecca’s temporary burrow, the disturbed earth rough and shadowy around it in the dim, cold light.

Meanwhile, for Rebecca and Cairn the minutes that had once seemed hours now turned to seconds as their time together sped by. Soon it would be dawn and they would part. They began to talk the sweet goodbyes of lovers, but as they did so, there was a snarl and a roar and it seemed as if the tunnel outside their burrow was filled with the movement of a thousand predators. It was Mandrake who, remembering what Rune had told him, or seemed to have told him, had broken the sullen stillness of the last of the night and moved hugely into the tunnel leading to the burrow with his talons ready to kill, and kill powerfully, anymole, male or female, that showed its snout.

Moments after this sudden disturbance, and as Cairn instinctively turned with his talons to the burrow entrance, there came the scent that Rebecca knew too well and which made her cry out in fear. The odour of Mandrake. It was strong and aggressive and angry, and it put fear into the heart of even Cairn, who waited now a second time to defend his right to Rebecca. But this time he did not laugh, and when Rebecca started to tell him who it was, he pushed her back and away, for he knew he would need all his concentration to survive this fight.

Somewhere further down the tunnel there was movement and they heard the deep rasping voice of Mandrake saying ‘Stay out on the surface, Rune, for this is my task. I will kill them myself.’

Rebecca wanted to run out past Cairn, to protect him from the terror that was coming and that such a mole as he could surely never imagine could exist. But if he could not have imagined it before, he knew it now, for even his bold young heart sickened at the smell of Mandrake’s rage and quailed before the sight of Mandrake’s mighty talons lunging suddenly through the murk of the tunnel and straight towards his snout. That would have been as far as most moles ever got with Mandrake. But not Cairn, for he was powerful and very quick and had fought enough times on his own account to know how to avoid the first lunges of a fight without becoming impaled upon the second.

Cairn did not even strike a blow before he retreated into the burrow and crouched, appalled by the sight he had seen approaching him as Mandrake’s smouldering size seemed to fill the tunnel.

Mandrake crouched for a moment in silence beyond the entrance, looking at them both, surprised at Cairn’s size. But though Cairn was bigger even than Burrhead, who was the biggest Duncton mole next to Mandrake, he was not as big as Mandrake himself.

Cairn snarled, his great shoulders flexed and ready, as Rebecca whispered urgently to him from the end of the burrow where his movement had forced her: ‘Run if you can, my love, for nomole has ever defeated him and none ever will. Oh, run, my Cairn!’

If Cairn had not already mated with Rebecca he would have fought to the death there and then, and died. But he had mated and their time was over, and more than anything else, more now even than Rebecca, he wanted to be back in the fresh air of the pastures, where he would not be surrounded by alien scents and evil moles.

‘If I escape,’ he said to Rebecca without looking at her, for his every sense was concentrated on the burrow entrance through which Mandrake was wondering how to pass without exposing his snout too much, ‘I will return and we will mate again.’ He spoke the words quite clearly so that Mandrake would hear them, for he hoped they would enrage Mandrake enough for him to move carelessly and give him the chance he needed to give Mandrake a wounding thrust with his talons.

Mandrake reacted by rearing up and plunging his talons at Cairn once more; he, instead of retreating, came viciously forward with his own talons, the two becoming locked in a bloody struggle at the entrance to the burrow.

When one or other of the two great males hit the side of the entrance, the whole burrow shook and earth flew, as Rebecca watched them, at first helpless and confused. As she did so, a powerful and unwanted excitement ran through her, a forbidden and obscene excitement that she tried to blot from her mind: the excitement of seeing the two huge males, both of whom she loved, fighting for her.

There was a momentary lull in the fight as Mandrake stepped back in preparation for a complete push forward into the burrow, and in the lull she could hear her Cairn’s desperate gasping of breath as his snout lowered from the enormous effort he had had to make to survive so far. It was this hopeless sound that made Rebecca act.

As Mandrake plunged forward into the burrow, she powered her way past Cairn, with her talons out for Mandrake and a cry of, ‘Run, Cairn, run!’ Mandrake moved to one side to avoid Rebecca, at the same time trying to land his talons on the suddenly rapidly moving Cairn, but he was too late, and Cairn was past him and out into the tunnel and running down towards the entrance to the surface.

Mandrake swung back through the entrance, knocking part of its lintel of solid earth flying, and managed to bring his talons with terrible force on to Cairn’s fleeing back. Cairn grunted with terrible pain but pulled himself away, leaving Mandrake’s talons hanging still for a moment in the middle of the tunnel, covered with his blood. Then he ran on, down the tunnel, the sound of Mandrake snarling and massive behind him. Then up desperately through the entrance, an instinctive memory of the trick Rune had tried to play before making him power his front paws ahead of him with talons splayed out, into the greying night.

But Rune was not to be caught a second time. He crouched to one side of the entrance and, as Cairn came out, plunged his talons with deadly accuracy towards the Pasture mole’s snout and face. One tore through the left side of the snout, another cut savagely into his left eye, in one terrible instant turning Cairn’s face into an open wound that, after no more than a second, began to pour blood.

At the same time, behind him in the tunnel, Mandrake brought down his talons a second time on Cairn, this time tearing his haunches and hind quarters and only failing to stop the fleeing Pasture mole dead in his tracks because Cairn’s initial thrust out of the tunnel had been so powerful.

Cairn staggered heavily forward, swinging instinctively round towards Rune, whom he could now only vaguely see through the haze of pain and blood round his face, catching him savagely in the breast with a cutting sweep of his talons that, had they been lunging instead of swinging, would certainly have killed Rune. As it was, the blow was sufficient to knock him backwards past the entrance and to give Cairn time to turn to the fresh air and openness that he could sense off to his right. He began to run and stagger towards it with the desperation of a mole who has faced death, who may soon die, but who seeks one last chance to live.

He might still have been caught by Mandrake, had Mandrake wished it. But as the great mole squatted back ready to burst out of the entrance, he heard Rebecca whimpering and crying in the burrow where she had, for one brief second, blocked Mandrake’s way and allowed Cairn to escape, and savagely, the blood of her mate on his talons and fur, he turned back towards the burrow.

As his shadow blackened the entrance to the burrow again and he entered it, Rebecca stopped sobbing and looked up at him. She saw again the great scars made by talons that ran and rumpled down his face, and the new talonscores that Cairn had made on his shoulders, which were bloody and red. She felt the power of his presence over her, and looked up at him as her mother, Sarah, must once have done; she looked into his angry eyes that saw so little and yet sought so much.

She thought he was going to kill her and expected the talons he had raised above his head to strike down upon her. They did come down, massively, not to kill her but to possess her as, without a word and with only the sound of anger in the burrow, he took her, he took her, he took her for his own, savaging his way into her as the burrow exploded about them both into a redness and black, and shafts of light and terrible pain. Rebecca! Rebecca!

She did not know if it was Mandrake who cried her name through the exquisite storm of agony in the burrow about her, and inside her, or a memory of her beloved Cairn saying it. Or whether it was another memory, of she herself calling it into the wet wood up through the slopes after Bracken had left her. ‘My name is Rebecca!’ Or perhaps she was calling out her name to herself as she drowned in the flood of bloodlust that came over her.

Until, at last, she knew it was herself, and Mandrake, too. ‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ He spoke it deeply into her, his body in her and, for that brief moment, hers.

‘Rebecca!’ he repeated as he finally pulled away and back into the world of darkness in which he lived but from which, for a moment, he had escaped with her as he once had with Sarah.

‘Rebecca,’ she said softly, crying and shuddering with pain and loss.

‘Rebecca…’ whispered Cairn as he crawled up the hill along the wood’s edge by the pasture with a throbbing of pain in his back and haunches and head that was almost too much to bear. ‘Rebecca,’ he whispered into the deaf grass that swayed towards him and struck his snout powerfully, ‘find my brother Stonecrop for me. Send him to help me.’

But no answer and no Stonecrop came, and he stumbled desperately on, unwilling to stay still where he might be found, yet afraid to break cover on to the pasture from the longer grass by the wood’s edge because he would be too slow to avoid any owl that saw him. On he struggled up the hill, not knowing that he was getting nearer and nearer to the Stone or that across its soaring face, now grey with dawn, the first dead beech leaves of autumn were beginning to fall.

Chapter Seventeen

It was among a fresh-fallen scatter of beech leaves near the Stone that Bracken first saw him. He was trying to run, but in fact was only just crawling, and Bracken had never seen a mole so terribly wounded yet still alive. His snout and cheek were crushed, his shoulders and flanks ragged red, his left eye torn and blinded, and his back legs seemed only good for dragging along, while his hind quarters had suffered deep wounds which seemed the result of several massive talon thrusts.

Bracken had never sensed such suffering in a mole, and perhaps he himself was only able to do so because of what he had suffered in the tunnel by the cliff before Rose the Healer came.

The injured mole advanced a little way towards the Stone, tried to snout up at it for a short while, but then staggered and swayed round to one side. For a moment Bracken thought he was coming straight at him, where he crouched half visible on the other side of the Stone, and he grew frightened. It was as if death itself was approaching him. But the mole did not see Bracken and anyway swung round again, gasping and panting with pain and effort, as he dragged himself slowly across the clearing away from the Stone and towards the pastures.

As he disappeared into the undergrowth, Bracken felt the pain as if it were his own. There was a sense of loss and failure over the mole that made Bracken want to run after him and say, ‘No. It’s not like that, it’s not.’ Though why he wanted to say such a thing, or about what, he did not know.

The mole’s progress was not hard to follow, for he made a lot of noise and, despite his fear, Bracken followed him. He staggered this way and that, crashing painfully through some brambles and leaving a red-brown smear of blood on a young sapling he brushed against. The more Bracken watched him the less he was afraid and the more he wanted to help in some way. There must be something he could do. Fetch Rose? He would never know where to find her. Rue? Too far, and he doubted if she would want to leave her tunnels having only just refound them.

He remembered that once Hulver had told him that the juice of sanicle was good for rubbing into wounds, but he didn’t even know what it looked like, whether it was in season, or where to find it. And anyway, looking at this hurt creature, whose wounds looked all the worse for his being so big and once-powerful, Bracken thought that there was no herb that would help him now.

What would Hulver have done? He would have comforted the mole by talking gently to him. It was this conviction that made Bracken finally break cover, though he did it with some care—approaching the mole from his right side from where, given his wounds, he could more easily see and scent Bracken. He deliberately made a noise as he came near and the mole came to a clumsy halt.

‘It’s all right,’ said Bracken, ‘I will not harm you.’

The mole turned his snout painfully towards Bracken and even tried to raise himself on his back paws for a few terrible seconds.

‘It’s all right,’ said Bracken again. ‘I may be able to help.’

‘Where are the pastures?’ asked the mole. ‘Where are my tunnels?’

‘The pastures are only fifty yards more,’ said Bracken. ‘Not far.’ Bracken turned towards them and led the way, slowing down when he sensed that even though he was going at a snail’s pace, it was still too fast for the other mole. Finally they reached the wood’s edge where the long grass grew on the wood side of the fence, stirred by the wind that always seemed to come off the pastures.

The mole slumped down, snout low, and Bracken asked,

‘What’s your name?’

‘Cairn. From the pastures.’ For him to say that took a long time, for his voice came slowly and with pain.

‘Did a Duncton mole do this,’ asked Bracken, ‘because you’re from the pastures?’

‘It was a mating fight. I took a woodmole for a mate. A mole called Rune found us. Do you know Rune?’

There was fear in Cairn’s voice, for it occurred to him that Bracken might be one of Rune’s friends. But then the thought weakened into hopelessness; if he was, so what? It didn’t matter anymore. He knew he was going to die.

‘Rune!’ exclaimed Bracken. ‘Yes. I know Rune. Everymole in Duncton does.’

‘He found us several days ago and I fought him and chased him away; I should have killed him. It was my first mating fight. He brought another mole and I could not fight him. Not to win. His name was Mandrake.’

Bracken looked with renewed horror at Cairn. No living mole knew better than he what that meant. Surely there was something he could do.

Cairn seemed lost in a world of his own, for his head hung down on to the ground, tilted to one side so the wound did not touch the grass, and the only movement was his quick, shallow breathing that made one of his limp paws twist fractionally to the left and then back again with each in-and-out of his breath.

It occurred to Bracken finally that if only he could get Cairn to go a little way further up the hill to where the Stone faced the west towards far-off Uffington, the line on which he himself had automatically crouched when he had first come to the Stone and on which Hulver had died, there might be some power for comfort there.

Somehow he coaxed Cairn along, though each step was painful, until at last Bracken could sense that they were in the right place. Cairn seemed to sense it, too, for he slumped down again with a sigh. His breathing grew easier and he was happy to be able to point his snout out over the pastures he loved. It was afternoon and the sky was light, with a few high clouds and some haze far off below them over the vales.

It was peaceful there and as Bracken faced in the direction of Uffington and felt its power coming to them, with the strength of the Stone from behind, a peace was beginning to fall on the broken and suffering Cairn.

‘Tell me about the Stone,’ he whispered. ‘She talked about the Stone. She said, Rebecca told me, that she came up to the Stone after I left her to chase the Rune mole away. She talked a little about it.’

‘But nomole has been here,’ said Bracken, until he remembered that a mole had. A female. And he felt again her caress on his shoulder and knew that she had been Rebecca. If only he had stayed to ask her name. If only. For some reason this discovery made him feel at one with Cairn, and he began to understand something of the sense of loss he carried with him.

‘Was your mate Mandrake’s Rebecca?’ asked Bracken needlessly.

Cairn nodded painfully.

Bracken moved closer to Cairn, flank against flank, trying to warm his body with his own as it grew colder and weaker.

‘Talk to me, Bracken. Tell me about the Stone. Tell me about Rebecca.’

What could Bracken say? He knew little about either, far too little when he thought about it. And what comfort can a mole give to one so injured?

‘The Stone is the centre of the Ancient System,’ he began, wondering how to go on. ‘And… and it’s so big that a mole cannot see the top of it. It soars up like a tree without leaf or branch. But you must have seen it when I first saw you, for you were by it.’

Cairn said nothing, so Bracken continued. ‘It’s where the rituals are carried out, on Longest Night and Midsummer Night, and in the old days rituals now long forgotten were carried out there. They say it will always protect you, but—’ But Bracken did not believe that. It had not protected him or Hulver from Mandrake. It had not miraculously healed Cairn when he came near the Stone.

Yet—yet the more Bracken saw of the Stone, and was near it, the more he felt its power and understood that it did hold an awesome mystery that a mole was unwise to turn his back on.

‘Tell me about Rebecca,’ said Cairn quietly.

‘Well, I don’t know much about her, only what other moles have said. She’s big for a female and lives down beyond Barrow Vale; somewhere near Mandrake, I was told once. I’ve heard them say she’s beautiful.’

He thought of the mole he had guided back to the system two days before and wondered if she was beautiful. It hadn’t occurred to him.

‘She was always getting into trouble when she was a youngster—you should have heard the stories they told about her in Barrow Vale! Eating worms she shouldn’t, getting her brothers lost accidentally on purpose—that sort of thing. Hulver said something about her once (he was an old mole I knew), he said that she was so full of life that it frightened other moles. But then, a lot of things he said didn’t make much sense, though I think they meant something.’

Bracken stopped for a moment, but from the way Cairn moved and looked at him, he could tell he was enjoying him talking like this and so Bracken continued.

He told him the full story about Rebecca stealing the worms from the elder burrows. As he told it, however, a sense of panic began to creep over him, for he sensed that Cairn was slipping away from him—or at least his body was. It was getting stiller and colder, and his breathing was becoming almost imperceptible.

When Bracken finally stopped talking and could think of nothing else to say, Cairn did not even try to look around at him, though his uninjured eye was half open and looking over the pastures. For a moment Bracken thought that he was… but then Cairn began to talk.

‘She told me that story in our burrow when we mated, and how frightened she

was when she was questioned by Mandrake about the worms. Having fought with him and lost, I know she was right to be frightened. There is nomole like Mandrake in the Pasture system, and nomole like that Rune either.’ Each word was painful for him and occasionally he shifted his body heavily, as if in an effort to make it easier for him to speak, and Bracken saw that every word he spoke must have meant a great deal for him to have suffered the pain of getting it out.

Cairn went on. ‘She said she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about and didn’t see why they didn’t find more worms, which they must have done anyway.’

Bracken nodded but said nothing, not wanting to interrupt Cairn’s painful flow of words.

‘Rebecca said she couldn’t understand why behaving “naturally”, as she put it, should be such a crime. What was worse for her was that Mandrake made her be polite with the other moles—which, as she didn’t like some of them, was “unnatural”. She was made to speak only when she was spoken to—which must have been hard for her.’ Cairn almost managed a little laugh and Bracken saw his face wrinkling a little, where it could, into lines of love and affection for his Rebecca.

‘Why does all this have to happen?’ asked Cairn, his words now so weak that Bracken could hardly hear them. ‘Why do moles sometimes get so angry that they kill each other? What was wrong with me and Rebecca being together? I was just going when they came. A few more minutes and I would have been gone. A few minutes and it would have been different. You ask your Stone why. I’d like to know what it answers.’

Cairn turned with great difficulty to Bracken and the bewilderment in his voice was replaced by real pride as he said, ‘She was my first mate.’ Bracken hardly dared draw breath for the frailty he now saw in the once-powerful mole beside him. ‘She was my only mate,’ he said softly.

‘Then Mandrake came and just took it away. Him and that Rune mole. I could have killed him before.’ There was a long silence that Bracken did not try to break. Finally Cairn found the strength to go on: ‘He’s killed me. If Stonecrop had been there we would have killed them both. He’s my brother. He can fight like no other mole in the pastures. Why does a mole like Mandrake come? Why me?’

‘Why him,’ Bracken wondered. Why him? At that moment he could have wished almost any other mole to be suffering in Cairn’s place, himself included. Why him?

‘Why not me?’ Bracken muttered to himself, not realising that he too had suffered and might yet suffer much, much more.

‘I don’t know the answer to anything,’ said Bracken, ‘at least to anything like that.’

Cairn suddenly began to tremble violently and when Bracken put a paw on his back to comfort and still him, he found the fur was wet with cold sweat. The blood of the wounds on his face and back had congealed, though a trickle of fresh blood still flowed down from the wounds at his back haunches; fresh blood from the wound on his back had trickled between the two moles and hardened their fur together.

The evening was near enough for the air to have started to cool, but far enough for the sky still to be light.

‘Have you the strength to move?’ Bracken asked. ‘I could help you across the pastures to one of your tunnels and perhaps somemole could try to find Rose the Healer.’ It was a brave suggestion, for if Pasture moles had found Bracken with Cairn in this condition they would have killed him first and asked questions afterwards.

But Cairn shook his head and settled even further into the thick grass, leaning his weight more against Bracken’s body.

‘It’s a good spot, this,’ he whispered. ‘You chose well. One half of me in the wood where I mated, the other half in the pastures where I lived.’

There was a very long silence between them, then Cairn said: ‘There’s so much, Bracken, so much more to it than I thought. Well, I didn’t think before now. But you’ll have time to find it.’

Bracken heard the first stirrings of the evening wind in the beech trees above them. A few autumn leaves drifted leisurely down, bouncing somewhere above and behind them against the branches through which they fell. There was the sudden flap of a wood pigeon somewhere along the wood’s edge below them. High above there was the soaring trilling of a skylark, sometimes strong, sometimes distant, dropping and rising against the wind in the sky. The sun, which had not really shone all afternoon, was dropping below the great mauve bank of cloud that had hidden it and was now pale and a little watery because far off, over where it hung in the sky, there had been rain. For a few minutes its rays below the cloud were light and golden, but as it sank further and further, they began to redden, and the bank of cloud it had left behind changed from mauve to a magnificent purple that faded into deep pink at the edges.

‘Find what?’ wondered Bracken. What was it Cairn had seen that had the power to put peace into his body, despite his wounds and agony? Bracken felt lonely suddenly, even though he had never ever been so close to anymole as he was now to Cairn, flank to flank, haunch to haunch.

He wanted to help Cairn so much, but did not know what more he could do, not knowing that he had already done far more than most moles ever could. Cairn trembled violently again, and Bracken put his paw softly on his great hurt back, holding him still and warming him as best he could with his own body.

‘Tell me about Rebecca again,’ whispered Cairn, so softly that Bracken had to bend his head to hear, so that it almost touched Cairn’s. ‘Tell me everything that you know about her.’

Then, at last, Bracken sensed what he must say to Cairn. He must give to Cairn something that lay in his heart and spirit, rather than his mind. He must weave a tale of truth for Cairn about a mole he didn’t know but whose spirit, for one brief caressing moment, had touched his own. He must honour that memory and through it bring the peace and comfort that Cairn yearned for and which he could until then only have got from Rebecca and Stonecrop, two moles who loved him. At that fearful moment, Bracken must make the effort to love Cairn.

‘Rebecca is a giving mole,’ he began, ‘a wonderful mole—’ and his pawhold on Cairn grew softer yet infinitely stronger as he began to weave a picture of Rebecca, finding his words from the woods that surely she, too, must love; from the wild flowers that she danced by and whose scent she knew; weaving words from the breeze that had so often rustled his fur, as it must have rustled hers.

‘Rebecca is the wild flower that grows in spring, whose leaves are the freshest green; she is as strong and graceful as the tallest grass that grows down the Marsh End. Rebecca’s laughter and dance are like the sun dappling the wood’s floor when the trees sway lightly in the summer wind. Hers is the love of life itself, and love with her is as big and strong as a great oak tree, with a thousand branches for its feelings and a million trembling leaves for its caresses. And because your heart was open to hers, the love you found was far, far greater than the love each of you gave. If Rebecca were here now, she would take away your agony and desolation because she would be all you need, and all you are. As you are, and have been, for her…’

Bracken spoke to Cairn with the same voice of power that had come from him once in the Stone clearing, on Midsummer Night; the voice of an adult who is blessed for a moment to see far beyond himself. A voice that spoke words that drew on his own heart’s deepest yearnings and gave the answers to his heart’s own despairs. Expressing to Cairn the love that lies waiting in everymole.

‘But Rebecca is here, Cairn, for she has touched your heart for ever with her love. There is nothing you can know or feel that she has not already given you and with which you are not already touched. Hers is the love in the very earth and burrows in which we live and sleep: hers is the sun that warms us in the morning: hers is the bliss of sleep that brings us peace and sees our troubles through. She is there in the pastures where you and Stonecrop ran, as she has always been and always will be; she is behind us in the wood among the trees and flowers; she is the love in which you made your life. She is here, Cairn, she is here with you now.’

But Cairn did not hear Bracken’s final words, for in the peace that Bracken brought him, his agonies were gone and his injuries mattered no more.

He died with Bracken’s paw on his back, holding him close, the fur of their flanks mingling as one.

‘She is there in the pastures,’ Bracken had said, and Cairn had run there to join her, to dance with his Rebecca again across the dew-touched grass, their paws warmed at last in a rising sun. They had run and danced with Stonecrop in the warmth of the sun, which grew lighter and brighter about them until all was pure and white; and all that remained was the pattern of their dance on the pastures by Duncton Wood, where their paws and bodies had caught the morning dew.

The sun set slowly behind the distant hills, casting reds and pinks into the darkening sky above, while the vales beneath Duncton Hill grew misty blue before they fell into darkness. As the last light of the sun faded from the trees that rose behind Bracken, he finally took his paw from Cairn’s back and moved away from his body.

He felt a terrible desolation. It was as if Cairn had gone to the world of the living, leaving him in a place of the dead.

He crept away from Cairn’s cold body back into the wood and across to the Stone. For a time, as darkness fell, he stayed there, his tail moving restlessly this way and that as the only sign of how unsettled and without a place he felt.

He wanted another mole to talk to him, as he had talked to Cairn. He wanted to be touched by another mole. He wanted thereby to find that last portion of the courage he would need to return to the Ancient System, as he knew he very soon must.

But not yet—not now; not with the bleak reality of Cairn’s death and the lost warmth of those words of love he himself had spoken and which hung over him like a shroud.

But there was a mole who knew who he was and who might, for a short time, give him the reminder of life that he needed—Rue. When the thought came to him in the darkness, he did not hesitate over its possibility for one moment, but ran busily out of the Stone clearing and diagonally down across the slopes, wondering if she would be surprised to see him again so soon.

Up on the pastures, Stonecrop resolutely continued the search for his brother which he had started in the afternoon, calling Cairn’s name softly into the wood. Cairn had been gone too long and there was a smell of danger in the air that worried Stonecrop. He had delayed, not out of fear of Duncton Wood, for Stonecrop had little fear of anything, but out of affection and reverence for his brother’s privacy.

But finally he had gone into the wood and found the temporary burrow where he could tell his brother had been, and where there were signs of fighting. There was fear and terror in the air of the burrow that put a dreadful urgency into Stonecrop’s search.

Indeed, the stench of fear was so unpleasant in the abandoned burrow that he could not stay in it and ran out on to the surface. He moved carefully about the area of trampled vegetation around the tunnel entrance trying to work out what had happened. He had no fear at all of Duncton moles discovering him there, for he was powerful and strong, bigger and more solid than Cairn. So he searched the little clearing without fear, working out where Cairn had gone.

He must have been injured, or he would have returned to the pastures. He would not have gone deeper into the woods, for fear of other Duncton moles. Stonecrop searched the area between the tunnel entrance and the wood’s edge and finally found a clue of disturbed and bloodied vegetation that suggested that Cairn had been that way, keeping to the cover by the wood’s edge and heading uphill.

Stonecrop’s progress was slow, for he stopped every few yards to call and shout about, knowing that his brother might be so injured that he was unable to respond to his call. So it was that the evening was late, the night had come and Bracken was long gone, before Stonecrop finally found Cairn’s body.

Even in death he recognised his brother’s beloved scent, the scent of openness and freedom and of running through sparse earth and fresh grass. He was shocked by how terribly injured Cairn had been and dazed by the fact that he would never play and mock-fight and laugh with Cairn again. He looked out at the dark pastures, so overcome by a sense of unreality that he almost expected Cairn to come running over to him and say, ‘It’s all a joke. That’s not me.’ But it was, and at last he sank down into a crouch, too full of grief to move, or think, or do anything.

Much later a chill breeze made him shiver and he got up stiffly. He snouted at the long grass and fence that formed an immediate backdrop to where his brother lay, and heard the rustlings and swayings of the great beech trees above, now lost in the darkness, and anger began to overtake him at last. He hated the dark wood where so much evil seemed to happen and he now hated everymole within it. Nothing, not even the beguiling Rebecca mole, was worth his brother’s life. His breath came more quickly, he seemed to grow even bigger in his anger, and had anything moved before him at that moment, he would certainly have attacked it. But nothing moved and only his brother was there, still and cold. And not his brother any more.

‘You should have called for me,’ he whispered. ‘I would have come. I would always have come.’ Then he did what seemed a strange thing—he took one of his brother’s front paws in his mouth and dragged the body out on to the pastures. It was no longer stiff; that stage had passed, and its limbs and head flopped in the grass as he dragged it along, moving with some difficulty as he was going backwards. At last he seemed satisfied with the distance he had gone and let the paw drop, looking up in the direction of the treetops he could not see. ‘Better to be owl fodder on the pastures he loved than prey to some skulking scavenger in the grass,’ he was thinking.

He looked again at the injuries and thought bitterly, ‘He must have been killed in a mating fight, but by two moles from the look of it. We don’t fight like that on the pastures—we don’t need to.’

With that he turned back down the hill, keeping very close to the edge of the wood and moving as fast as he could. He had one last job to do before he returned to the Pasture tunnels.

He made his way back to Rebecca’s temporary burrow and went straight down it again and crouched there very still. He breathed in the sickening odour left there by Cairn’s attackers—it was so unpleasant that it made him a little dizzy—until the fear it had initially put into even him was replaced by the anger he had felt up on top of the hill. He breathed it in so that he would never forget it, for he knew it was the scent of the Duncton mole who had killed his brother.

‘I’ll know you for a Duncton mole if ever I meet you,’ Stonecrop whispered menacingly into the tunnels, ‘and I won’t forget the smell of this wood either. I hope neither was the last odour that my brother smelt but I won’t mind if they are mine, so long as my talons first reach the mole whose stench this is.’

When he was quite sure he would know the smell again, and that it would cause him anger and not fear, he ran as quickly as he could out of the tunnel, across to the wood’s edge, and out into the fresh air of the pastures.

Rue laughed a little laugh of pleasure when she realised it was Bracken from the Ancient System hesitating about outside her tunnels. She recognised that he was not dangerous from his noisiness and diffidence about entering her tunnels, and the fact that he had approached from the direction of the pastures suggested who it might be. She went up to one of the entrances and the sight and scent of him confirmed it. So she laughed, because she was more than glad to see him. But she wouldn’t make it easy, oh no! Not she!

In the three days since he had left, she had been ever so busy. Scurrying about cleaning the place of dust and old vegetation, and finding the best place for worms—just as she had in the adjacent Hulver’s tunnels. She sang songs to herself that she had not sung since puphood and which she had forgotten that she knew. She shored up one or two tunnels, sealed all the entrances that lay towards Hulver’s tunnels and started to extend the system on the other side. She made her burrow in the tunnel that Bracken had burrowed for her because it had such a lovely quality of sound to it—just as he had said it would have—and then she slept in it long and peacefully, like a log. When she awoke it was a lovely misty September dawn and as she poked her snout out of one of the entrances and looked about, and then came back into her tunnels again, she asked herself, ‘What’s it all for? What do I want such a well-burrowed system for?’

She answered herself as quickly as a September mist clears on a sunny morning: ‘For mating. That’s what!’ She fancied having an autumn litter. She fancied hearing pup cries up here on the slopes where those old stick-in-the-muds down in Barrow Vale said nomole ever had litters. Too ascetic and dangerous, they said.

So when she heard Bracken snouting about outside soon afterwards, she could not help laughing for the pleasure of it and with delight that her life seemed to be taking a turn for the better at last. So she started the pretence that she didn’t want to see him by running up to an entrance where he was wondering whether or not to enter and saying, ‘It’s my system now, Bracken, so even though you did stay here once, you can’t anymore.’ She even pretended to snarl a bit and scratched the wall with her talons.

Bracken crouched out on the surface listening to these goings-on in some puzzlement. He could hear what she said but it didn’t match up with the nice way she smelt. He had been near plenty of hostile systems in his time and none had ever smelt quite so welcoming as these tunnels of Rue’s.

Bracken hesitated at the entrance, not quite sure of himself, but not so dim as to think that he could really be hurt by Rue. ‘Hello!’ he said, in as friendly and open a way as he could muster when Rue reappeared. ‘I was just passing!’

At this Rue laughed out loud, scratched the side of the tunnel a bit more, than backed a bit down the tunnel snarling and growling in a delightfully pathetic way that invited Bracken to follow her down the tunnel, which he did.

‘Um,’ he began, ‘what a lot you’ve done here!’ This turned her snarls into giggles and he laughed, too, and soon they were playing such a delicious game of scratching, snarling and talking nonsense that Bracken began to enjoy and relax into it. He wasn’t quite sure of Rue—he thought correctly that this was her system now and that he must not take liberties with it—but he knew that for the time being at least she wanted him to be there.

Suddenly Rue ran off, and Bracken heard her crunching away at a worm. He stayed where he was and soon she came back, bringing one for him. They ate in silent intimacy. When they looked at each other again, she was a bit meeker and her eyes were shiny and her mouth open. She crouched still and he came up to her, snouting around her, diffidently at first but then more boldly, more deeply. He liked the delicious moistness of her, he liked her snouting at him, under him, over his soft parts that grew harder, he liked her smiles as if she knew a delightful secret that she wasn’t going to tell him, but much, much better, that she was going to show him. He scratched her with his paw, nuzzled hard into her, pressed himself closer and closer to her, as she twittered and champed and swung her back round to him and then back-quartered into him and he into her.

‘He’s like a pup,’ she thought delightedly, because she had never mated before with a mole who was barely an adult. But when he finally understood what it was about, and was on her and taking her, she was surprised at his strength and laughed with pleasure at his delight in her and at the shuddering way he relaxed into her.

Afterwards, he didn’t want to leave her at all and they went into the main burrow and snuggled into a dreamy sleep with hardly a word spoken between them. Sometime, when evening had come, she awoke to find him deliciously snouting at her again and pushing a little clumsily at her so that, half asleep, she swung back into him and he into her, and with his last shudder in her, he was snuggling back to her and asleep again. Oh, he was so simple and young!

Sometime later in the night he again woke up, this time properly, and lay with her fur warm on his, giving him the illusion that his whole body was cocooned into her. He thought of the things that had happened in the last two days and simply could not believe, in the total comfort in which he now lay, that they had happened.

When they finally awoke, it was dawn again and the magic and amusement of the mating with Rue was quite finished.

He sensed that she wanted him gone, so that her tunnels were hers alone once more, and so was any litter that she might have. But he didn’t mind. The pattern of the last few days had fallen into place and as he left her burrow and headed off down the tunnel he himself had burrowed, he found he was at last looking forward to going back to the Ancient System where he would enter the Chamber of Dark Sound again, and explore the seventh tunnel if he could and whatever secrets lay at its end.

Chapter Eighteen

With Cairn’s death, the shadows that had been looming so long over Duncton Wood began, one by one, to fall. Spirits crept lower, danger seemed to lurk in every shadow, the chatter in Barrow Vale fell muted, and even the weather deteriorated into a succession of cold mists and rain that robbed the autumn wood of its colour and turned the falling leaves into a dank mess.

Few moles travelled, fewer smiled. It was as if the wood was waiting for the fulfilment of a curse. While even those visits which might normally have been a source for cheer turned out, for some moles at least, to be the harbingers of doom.

Just such a visit was made to Mekkins in the Marsh End in mid-October by Rose the Healer, whose normally cheerful face had not been seen in Duncton for several months. When Mekkins saw her, he guessed why. She looked as if she had been ill, for her face was drawn and her flanks thin and only her eyes, warm and gentle, though touched now, it seemed to Mekkins, with a hint of sadness, had anything of the old Rose in them.

‘’Ello, ’ello,’ Mekkins greeted her, hiding his alarm and sounding as cheerful as he could. ‘And ’ow ’ave you been keeping?’

‘A little tired, my dear, I’m afraid,’ she said.

They talked a little about the Marsh End, and two or three moles that Rose liked to keep an eye on, and then Rose came straight to the point.

‘It’s you I’ve come to see, Mekkins,’ she began.

‘Why? Nothing wrong with me, is there?’ he laughed.

‘No! No! Not that I can see. You only ever needed me when you were a pup, my love, and that was from sheer overindulgence in worms, as I remember!’ She paused, looked at him with a great deal of affection, and then fell serious again.

‘No, it’s not that. Mekkins, I have come to warn you of a danger in which the system is going to need your help and all your skills. I have seen it coming for many years from before Mandrake came, from even before you were born. I experienced something of the power of the darkness to come in August, when I was summoned to help a certain mole up in the Ancient System…’

‘Bracken?’ asked Mekkins quietly. ‘Is he alive?’

‘You know something of this, then?’ asked Rose.

‘Well, I know something’s going on like, I mean you can feel it in the bloody trees, can’t you?’

Rose smiled bleakly at this. She hesitated about coming to talk to Mekkins, for no healer likes to talk of his or her own fears, or of other moles they have treated. But now she was glad she had, for however cunning he was in his handling of the Marsh End, and however much he had enjoyed the power of being an elder, she sensed that he could be trusted.

‘Bracken carries a secret, but I doubt very much if he knows what it is. Perhaps he will never know and has no need to. Don’t ask me what it is because I don’t know myself. But whatever it is, he carries with it a burden the size and pain of which neither of us will ever comprehend. When I went to help him, I felt the force of its darkness sapping me of strength. I have been ill because of it and I doubt that I will ever recover the strength I once had. There is such fear about, Mekkins, of a kind you perhaps do not know. May the Stone help you never to know it.’

Rose shifted wearily in the burrow where they crouched and then asked: ‘How well do you know Rebecca?’

Mekkins told her, describing how they had got to know each other in the summer and how fond of her he had become. Rose could hear from his voice, and see in his eyes, that his affection for Rebecca ran far deeper than fondness.

She saw with relief that she had done the right thing in talking to him.

‘Much is going to depend on these two moles, Bracken and Rebecca, and neither of them may ever know it. Somehow you will have to help watch over them until they are strong enough to stand alone, though what you must do I cannot say, but I suspect it will need great courage, which I know you have. But, most of all, you must trust them both, hard though it may sometimes be. In a pup trust is the most natural of emotions; in an adult it may often be the hardest. Without it, nothing can be healed.’

They talked on a little, but Rose had said the most important things she wanted to say and she was tired, so Mekkins saw her back towards her tunnels, as far as the pastures. When she had gone, he wasn’t sure if he knew exactly what it was she had said, but he understood enough to know that he must watch over Rebecca and, if the opportunity ever arose, over Bracken as well. He would go to Rebecca now.

But he was too late. Try as he did in the next few days, Mekkins could get no nearer to Rebecca’s tunnels than the henchmoles who guarded each exit. The most he got from one of them was that Rebecca was being kept in her system by order of Mandrake until she littered.

‘So, she is going to ’ave a litter, is she?’ he said, surprised.

‘Oh, yeh,’ said the other. ‘There’s no doubt of that. She’s already big with it. But it’s more than my life’s worth to let you near her. Well, you know how it is with Mandrake’s orders…’

Mekkins did, but he didn’t like it. There was trouble in the air, and foreboding, and it seemed the worse for hanging about the tunnels which had been so full of life and joy in the summer.

‘Fair enough, mate,’ said Mekkins. ‘But if you get to see her, you tell her there’s Mekkins has been by and that ’e’s always down the Marsh End if she needs ’im. Right?’

‘If I can, I will. I don’t like it any more than you do, chum. Now, you get goin’, Mekkins, because our orders are to keep everymole away, even elders.’

Rebecca lay on her side, trembling in her burrow. She could feel her young moving inside her and sometimes now even see their sudden movements as some tiny limb or embryonic head pushed against the tight soft fur below her belly.

‘Oh, my loves,’ she whispered to them. ‘Oh, my darlings, my wildflowers, may I have the strength to protect you.’

Two henchmoles crouched by the entrance to her burrow, silent, morose and pitiless. They had been specially picked for the task by Rune, acting on Mandrake’s orders.

They had come unexpectedly several days before, just when Rebecca was beginning to rejoice in her litter to come and make the delightful preparations of nesting a new burrow that she had so long looked forward to.

She had tried to fight with them, angry on behalf of herself and her young, but one of the henchmoles had cuffed her so hard across the snout that she fell back into her burrow almost unconscious. She had not been allowed out of the tunnel since, and food was brought to her. She was angry, she demanded to see Mandrake, or even Rune; she begged to be allowed to see Sarah. But it was useless and nomole came to see her. Faced by the henchmoles’ silence and ignorance of her, she was overtaken by a creeping loneliness, and with it a terrible fear for her young.

The most they would let her do, and only because the unpleasantness was too much for them, was to switch to another burrow while hers was cleaned out and new nesting material put there. ‘And this is doing you a favour, lass,’ said one of them unpleasantly, ‘because Rune said to keep you where you were. But I’m buggered if I’m going to crouch in the way of your stink.’

For Rebecca, who was the cleanest and brightest of moles, and whose burrows had always celebrated with their scents and cheer the best of the life in the wood, this was a terrible thing.

As her young grew inside her, she grew more fearful and her eyes, once so bright with joy, took on a sad and haunted look. She whispered for her mother, Sarah, begging her to hear her and come and help. And sometimes her mind wandered from its present pain to that day when she had danced with Stonecrop and Cairn on the pastures in the grass. ‘Oh, Cairn, please help me,’ she entreated, fearing he would never come. Not knowing he was dead.

She tried to maintain her strength, knowing that it would be needed when the birth came, but fear and the desperate hopelessness over whatever it was that was coming began to take it from her. Until, at last, all she could do was to pray, beseeching the Stone to hear her and send its help. Prayers that were mingled with the tears and desperate love she felt for her growing young.

She lost track of time and her sense of things seemed to change. Soon, the only thing that mattered, the only hope she felt she had, was that Mandrake might come to see her. Then, surely, she could make him see!

One day she woke out of her nightmare drowsiness to the sound of whispers in the tunnel outside and the sight of two black eyes looking coldly at her from the entrance. It was Rune.

‘I hoped she would have got rid of them by now,’ he was saying to one of the henchmoles. ‘A pity. Give her less food and hit her when you feel like it. She’s bred with a Pasture mole and ought to be killed. But Mandrake…’ Rune shrugged and turned away.

Rebecca got up heavily and tried to call to him, moving as quickly as she could to the entrance, and begging him. But he was gone, and one of the henchmoles hit her and she fell down. And one of her young moved inside her as she lay there and she wept until fear overtook her and she lay trembling in the terrible silence.

She began to have fantasies and nightmares. In one of them her burrow was falling on her and she dug desperately at the wall trying to escape… to be awoken by the angry shouts of the henchmoles and the discovery that in her sleep she had started to burrow at the walls. In another, she was lost in a storm on a hill and there was a mole there, crouching, who surely would give her help and show her the way, but when she asked him and he turned to face her, it was Rune. Rune, laughing at her!

Until suddenly, at last, her pups began to be born. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘Oh, no, my loves. Not yet! Not yet! Not here…’ and her eyes searched the burrow fearfully and she saw, her nightmare realised, that watching her was the massive form of Mandrake, his eyes cold and full of hate. Just watching her, as the pains drove into her, and she begged for her young not to be born.

‘She’s giving birth to her Pasture pups,’ she heard a voice hiss in the shadows next to Mandrake. ‘Which nomole here wants to see alive,’ said Rune.

‘Oh, no,’ she gasped. ‘Not here, my flowers, not here. Oh, Cairn, my—’ but they started to come, eyes blind, snouts pink, wet with blood and water, floppy as green wet leaves, tiny mouths mewing and seeking her teats. For a moment she saw them all. Four, or was it five altogether? Perfect and alive, their bleatings pure with life in her cursed burrow, their mewings drowned by a voice that urgently hissed. ‘They must be killed, Mandrake. They must go,’ and she tried to gather them to her, to protect them in the crescent of her soft belly and teats, to thrust away the cold, black talons that came among them, stabbing and stealing them, hurting them and making them bleat in their blindness. She tried to raise herself through her nightmare weakness and strike out into the darkness of bloody talons before her. She tried so hard to protect them as their bleats weakened or turned into pathetic last squeals and their mouths tried to suckle her teats even as they died in the darkness that lay between her and Mandrake. And in that moment, when he was murderous and full of hate before her, when he could not see, he could not see, it was not her love for him that he destroyed but her trust in life itself. And evil smiled to see its work well done.

Until there was nothing but death and darkness before her, for the sounds of her litter were gone, arid only her voice remained whispering endlessly into the silence: ‘Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me…’

And all of them were gone. Mandrake, Rune, the two henchmoles who had guarded the burrow and all the henchmoles around her entrances, leaving Rebecca alone in her burrow, and free now to go where she pleased.

Chapter Nineteen

If Bracken’s adulthood may be said to have started with his almost casual mating with Rue, his long march into maturity started somewhere in the depths of the Ancient System to which he returned after leaving her. There he began the first exploration of its centre since its desertion, isolation, and final forgetting so many generations before.

But if he hoped, as he approached the Chamber of Dark Sound once more, that this time he would be quite unafraid, his hopes were shattered into a thousand fears when he got there. He could not see the owl face from the east side to which he came, but the chamber echoed with its dark menace even before he got there. Summoning all his courage, he made his way straight across the floor of the chamber towards where the owl face towered, his snout trembling with apprehension and his fur sensitive to the slightest danger.

Finally he came near enough once more to see the dark glint of the flint parts of the face, and to look into the eye cavities of the mole skeleton that crouched at the entrance of the tunnel beneath.

And what relief! The skull and skeleton seemed suddenly no more than the white bones they were, and Bracken saw that they could do him no harm. He had lived into death with Cairn and now, looking at this long-dead creature, he could only feel sorrow for its passing and wonder what strange story lay behind its presence here. He was afraid, certainly, but no longer of a mere skeleton.

Shiny walls of flint rose on either side of it, grey flint rather than black, and stepping carefully past the skull, he moved through the entrance into the seventh tunnel.

It was simple and uncarved and not as big as other ancient tunnels, and it ran only a short way before it cut into a tunnel that curved away to the right and left.

He travelled carefully round this tunnel, which was roughly circular, as rapidly as he could, disturbing the chalk dust that had settled there through the ages and which flurried behind him in his haste. Its walls were of hard chalk subsoil, roughly burrowed, and it was clearly no more than a passageway. It took a long time to complete the full circuit, but when he had, he had a very much clearer idea of what he must do.

In addition to the entrance he had joined it by, the circular tunnel had a total of eight different entrances leading off it. Of these, seven were flint-lined and led on towards the centre of the circle. From each came a curious murmuring, confusing rather than fearful, and not unlike the distant chatter of male moles—sometimes one sound rose a little above the rest, at others there was a momentary lull.

The eighth entrance was simply a tunnel leading away from the circle on the far side where he had first entered. Here and there on the outer edge of the circle there was a root, half buried, sliding down the wall from above, which suggested that his location was in that treeless circle that surrounded the outer edge of the Stone clearing, adjacent to the trees that formed it, which meant that he still had the roots of the massive beeches that formed the clearing itself to pass through.

It took him three hours or so to make the full circuit, and since, at this depth, there was no food supply at all and he was hungry and tired, he returned to the Chamber of Dark Sound and cut across it to the eastern entrance, along which he knew he would have no trouble finding food.

He returned after a good sleep, carefully bringing with him some worms, which he stored in a cache in the circular tunnel; and then he went into the nearest of the flint-lined entrances towards the murmur of sound, anxious to get on with what he hoped was the final exploration into the heart of the Ancient System.

The tunnel was small and crudely burrowed into the subsoil, with a packed floor, rough walls and a simple rounding for the roof. After a short way, it split into two and, taking the right-hand fork, Bracken found that it almost immediately split into two again. Worse, the tunnel began to curve confusingly and then cut across other tunnels, and split yet more times. To add to this spatial confusion, the deeper he got, the louder the stressed murmuring he had first heard so ominously in the Chamber of Dark Sound became, while the echoes of his pawsteps kept coming back to him, running in from all directions, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to confuse him, disappearing off behind him. Until he stopped, lost, and with no idea of whether he was going forward or backward, away from the centre of the system or towards it.

It took him two long hours to find his way back again, and then only with the greatest skill and patience as he marked each turn and thought carefully back to the twists and turns he could remember.

It was while he was in the worrying process of doing this, crouching and thinking what to do next and making no noise himself, that he began to suspect what the vague murmurings he had first heard were, or might be. They were muffled and soft, but there was enough edge and harshness to the louder of them for him to think that they must be the sound of the roots of the beech trees that protected the buried part of the Stone. He was getting closer.

When he finally got back to the safety of the circular tunnel and had eaten, he was sufficiently stirred by the realisation of how near he was to want to go back quickly and try again.

What followed took him not minutes or hours but five days, and is now regarded as one of the greatest feats of tunnel analysis by any single mole. For the tunnel of echoes into which Bracken had entered, and in which he might easily have been lost and never heard of again, had been deliberately designed by the ancient moles to protect the Stone from just such interlopers as Bracken. Once, it had been protected by living moles as well, and he certainly would not have got as far as even the Chamber of Dark Sound. But the original designers of the system had foreseen that some catastrophe might one day overtake it, as it clearly had, and so had provided the Stone with the extra protection of the tunnels whose challenge Bracken now faced.

His approach was careful and methodical, and it took a very long time. He began by marking each split or subsidiary tunnel he came to in such a way that only one route that he took was the ‘main’ one. When it circled back on itself or led to a dead end, he re-marked it, thus trying one permutation after another. He progressed slowly at first, but then found that at some points in the tunnels the sound of the roots was louder, perhaps nearer, and he rerouted his chief route in the direction of the sound. Because of the subtlety of the echoes, this often led him round, back to a way he had come, or again to dead ends. But slowly the route he developed did seem to go deeper into the circle and the roots’ sounds grew louder yet again, but again and again though it seemed to him that he was about to get there—wherever there was— they only led him nowhere.

But then he began to notice a new element in the tunnels that went with the sound—tunnel vibrations. As the sound began to define itself more clearly into stresses and creaks, long moans and pullings, so, too, matching vibrations came down the tunnel and he felt them with his paws; shakings, jolts and shudderings.

His excitement grew. As the sound got louder, the tunnel grew straighter until, pressing rapidly on and with no side turnings to worry about, he was suddenly out of it at last, and had successfully passed through the labyrinth of echoes into a place whose sights and shuddering sounds were of such enormity that he crouched there dumbfounded.

He was among the living roots of one of the gigantic beeches that protected the Stone, and they moved continually in response to the eternal swayings and stressings of the wind-touched tree whose trunk and branches they fed and supported. From a darkness high above him they plunged down through the soil, massive and vibrant, twisting down through the chalky floor on which he crouched. They stretched beyond him in a tangle of verticals and angles, some massive and thick, others fine and thin: some entwined about each other, some vibrating tautly. Each made some kind of noise, each noise was different. The whole made a sound that was distorted and tangled, like a thicket of dry brambles blown by the wind. There was no clear path ahead, for the roots snaked down this way and that, and their continuous movement gave him the impression that if there was a route, it was always changing.

To add to his confusion and sense of there being no direction ahead, there were no walls to the chamber into which he had entered. The roots not only stretched in a terrifying tangle into the distance ahead of him, but to either side as well.

He noticed that imprisoned among some of the tight vertical tangles of the roots were great lumps of hard soil or rock, which seemed either to have fallen from the ceiling or been lifted bodily from the floor, imprisoned in a cage of living, moving bars. Sometimes dust or small fragments fell from them as a result of the stress they were under. He saw plunging from ceiling to floor one root which seemed to pull upwards periodically and then sink back. With each upward pull, a long boulder of chalk rose higher and higher from where the root left the ground until, before Bracken’s startled eyes, the fragment, which was many times bigger than himself, pulled out of the ground and toppled with a crash of dust and fragments on to the floor of the chamber, breaking one of the thinner roots, which twanged loudly into the darkness above as it snapped apart.

In some places the roots seemed to have forced themselves through the floor so powerfully that great fissures and crevices radiated dangerously from them, and when the roots moved dust and sound seemed to fly up from the jagged depths beneath.

Bracken looked on this terrifying scene for a very long time before turning his back on it and returning through the circuitous, echoing tunnels whose labyrinths absorbed the rootsound behind him, back to the outer circular tunnel. He was not yet ready to press on among the roots themselves.

It was at this point that Bracken showed again his special skill and foresight as an explorer. Some instinct, perhaps an awe of the venerable place he was in, told him that he must not leave the route he had found so clearly marked as it now was. And so, after more rest and food, he set himself to memorise it, slowly removing each marking the further his memory took him towards the roots.

Until at last he could run the whole route almost by instinct, navigating the labyrinths all the way to the Chamber of Roots without any need of markers. Only then was he prepared to press on, but still he did not do so. Instead, he began his exploration of another of the entrances, progressing up it the same way, though finding his task much easier now that he had done the same thing already.

In this way Bracken taught himself to find his way among three of the ways into the centre and in doing so discovered, or rather deduced, that the labyrinth of echoes was interconnected right round the perimeter of the Stone, while the Chamber of Roots was really one big chamber, with no walls but those formed by roots. Though what lay beyond them he did not yet know and was a mystery he would need great courage and fortune to solve.

Yet, when the hour came to set off among the roots themselves, his attempt to pass through was a failure, and a curious one. It was not that he was afraid of the roots exactly, though their massive movement and confusing noise was enough to terrify anymole; nor was it that it would not have been possible to find his way into them in much the same way as he had through the labyrinths of echoes. It was subtler than that.

In his first attempt, for example, he got no further than perhaps ten moleyards before his mind began to wander and he began to wonder why he was there and what the point was. He was out of the Chamber of Roots almost before he knew what he was doing, and only two or three hours later wondered why he had not gone on.

Another time he made a more determined effort and indeed got further into a complex of roots from which he could no longer see the entrance to the chamber. But then the roots got denser and more sinewy, even the marks he made just behind him on the ground seemed to start disappearing, and he got the feeling that he was being watched from somewhere to his left. By mole? By beast? He felt panic coming over him and, try as he might to control it, he could not—though it cleared the moment he turned round and started back, stumbling quickly through the noise and heaving roots, afraid for a time that he would not find the way out again.

He tried once more, on a day that must have been calm on the surface, for the roots were whispering quietly, and he did quite well until he suddenly felt a pleasant tiredness coming over him and the roots ahead seemed to open out invitingly for him to lie down… He had to shake himself to keep awake, only realising when he did so that what lay ahead of him was a great crevice, wide and deep, and delving down to a rugged darkness from which slidings and hissings of thin roots seemed to come. Once more he turned back.

Each time he got back to the entrance of the chamber, however, these curious feelings immediately cleared and, looking back at the roots, they seemed their normal massive, threatening selves, but no more than that.

Finally, he decided to take a break—perhaps, after all, the time had come to return to the surface, for he had been involved in this exploration for many days. He had lost his sense of timing, thinking that perhaps only fifteen or twenty days had passed since he had left Rue, yet when he finally reached the surface he was surprised to find it was chilly, even though it was afternoon. The wood was filled with the chill light of the end of October, when most of the leaves have gone and the wind stirs the remainder irritably.

Then he knew that he must have been gone for many moleweeks and wondered what it was about the Ancient System that made a mole seem to lose his sense of time.

Bracken shivered at the cold and felt in need of company. Well, he could visit Rue; she was always glad to see him—and always glad to see him go! He laughed a little as he bustled off down the slopes to see her, thinking that he was getting to know her ways, and how pleasant it was to feel the fresh air in his fur and smell the clear scents of the wood again.

He would laugh even more when he got there, and learn something about a kind of mole he had never had anything to do with—young pups. For Rue had littered just a few days before and, for the time being at least, would be delighted to see Bracken again, provided he didn’t come into her birth-burrow uninvited. He could fetch a few worms now and again, and keep away intruders.

Chapter Twenty

A cold wind blew on the wood’s surface above Rebecca’s burrows where the snout of a brave mole quivered in the shadow of a root. He was the henchmole who had finally refused to let Mekkins enter Rebecca’s tunnels but who had promised to deliver his message and, shocked by what had happened though still fearful for his own safety, had crept back in the depth of the night to see if there was anything he could do—ostensibly to help Rebecca but in truth to rid himself of the uneasiness he felt at being a party, however coerced, to what had happened.

He crept down the deserted tunnels to her burrow, ready to retreat at the slightest danger. He was a tough mole, a henchmole of experience, an aggressive Westsider, but what he saw when he got there made him tremble with a fear greater than any he had ever felt before a fight, or after a close-won victory.

Rebecca lay still as death on the far side of the burrow. The bodies of her five young lay about the burrow, tangled up with nesting material, scattered like leaves. He picked his way with a beating heart among them and it was only when he was close up to her and he heard the soft moaning of her breathing, distant as a falling pulse, that he was sure that she was still alive.

What use his message now? For a moment he wanted none of it, telling himself, ‘I don’t know what the hell this has to do with me. Stone knows what I’m doing here—they’ll kill me if they find out. What a bloody mess this is!’

Then he cuffed her lightly with his paw and said gruffly, ‘Here you—you wake up. Got to get you out of here quick. Wake up! Come on, lass…’

Rebecca stirred and was then awake instantly. She started to scream and he cuffed her again, none too softly.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said, ‘but we’ll both cop it if they find me here, so shut up!’ She fell silent, looking at him fearfully.

‘I know a mole who can help you,’ he said more gently. ‘Name of Mekkins. He tried to see you before… before this bloody thing happened.’

Rebecca did not respond.

‘Come on, love,’ he said suddenly, gruffly gentle, ‘you can’t stay here. Got to get you away…’ He quickly pulled her to her paws and, talking desperately fast so that her attention would not wander to the dead litter about her, he hurried her out of the burrow, down the tunnel, and up to the entrance. But when she got into the night air, she seemed to come round to understanding where she was and what had happened. She started to shiver violently and sob out words so shaken by her distress that it was a long time before he could make out what she wanted. ‘I c-c-can’t leave them there,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘I c-c-can’t.’

He was impatient with this, very conscious that the noise she was making might easily attract the attention of a mole like Rune, prone to skulk about at night, or even an owl. But hard though he tried, she would not leave. At last he said brutally, ‘Right! You’re on your own, then! I’m off…’ and off he went.

But not far. His heart wouldn’t let him. Instead, he crouched in the protective shadow of the root he had first hidden by and watched over her, thinking that she would soon come to her senses. But what he then witnessed was the ancient and instinctive ritual of a bereft mother.

She turned back down into the tunnel and after a long wait, in which he almost decided to leave her to her fate, she came back out into the night. She was carrying one of her dead young by the scruff of the neck, just as a mother carries a squalling pup. This one hung down limp and dead, and she laid it on the surface by the tunnel entrance. Then, one by one, she brought out the other four and laid them where the wind might touch them and the owls come and take them.

Then he watched as she crouched in the shadows by them, whispering words of love and sorrow, chanting the ancient songs of the bereft, whose words and sounds of loss have no need of being set down or learned, for they are written in the depths of every soul.

Then she crouched down with them to wait for the owls to come. But he was not going to wait for that and ran back over to her and said, ‘Come on, Rebecca, come on, love. There’s nothing more you can do. There’s nothing left to do.’

He became angry again and said: ‘If you don’t bloody well come now, then I really will push off. I’m only doing this for Mekkins. Come on!’ And, more or less dragged along by him, she went with him, shaking and sobbing to leave all she had left of her litter behind in the night, tiny and pathetic on the cold surface of the wood.

No record has been kept of how this unnamed henchmole succeeded in leading Rebecca down to the Marsh End and how he protected her from the Marshenders until Mekkins was found. But it is in such forgotten moles as he, as well as in those whose names are recorded in the books of Uffington, that the actions of truth and love fulfil themselves. So, nameless though he is, let him be remembered.

Mekkins took one look at Rebecca, out of whom all spirit of life had gone, and knew without being told what had happened, and what to do.

Half pushing, half carrying and constantly urging her, he took her towards the east side of the Marsh End, where the soil is dank and the vegetation heavy; a place in the wood where nomole goes and fallen wood rots unnoticed.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she whispered hopelessly, more than once.

‘Somewhere Mandrake and Rune will never find you, and where you’ll have time to find your strength again.’

‘I don’t want to be alone,’ she sobbed, ‘not here in this terrible place.’

‘It’s all right, Rebecca,’ he soothed her, ‘you won’t be. There’s a mole there will help you. She’s known trouble herself and will know what to do.’

But Rebecca became afraid again and refused for a while to go on.

‘Look, my love,’ said Mekkins, desolate to see Rebecca so changed, ‘there’s nowhere else I can take you. Mandrake and Rune will be after you—they’ll want you killed. I know them. It’s a miracle you’re still alive as it is, though perhaps, at the time, that’s something even Mandrake couldn’t do. Not to you he couldn’t.’

At this second mention of his name Rebecca sobbed again and then fell into a torpor of desolation. But when Mekkins urged her on, she agreed, as if everything was hopeless and even resistance was futile. Mekkins saw then that she wanted to die.

They came at last to a far corner of the wood which edged the marsh and where the wind carried into the wood’s depths the eerie call of marshbirds unknown to mole—snipe, curlew and clamorous redshank—telling of the wet desolation all moles fear. It was a damp and dismal place where Mekkins finally stopped, by a dank and diseased-looking entrance, hung over with rotting wood. He peered into it and was about to call down, when an aged, frightened voice whispered out of its dead depths: ‘Disease! There is disease here! Disease and death!’

Rebecca shrank back, pleading with Mekkins to take her away, but he put a paw on hers and said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not as bad as it sounds. She only says things like that to keep others away.’

He turned back to the entrance. ‘’Ere, Curlew! Don’t be so daft! It’s Mekkins… I’ve got a friend with me for you to meet.’

‘I have no friends here,’ the voice said again, ‘only the darkness of disease, only the dankness of the earth.’

Mekkins shrugged his shoulders and, with an encouraging pat on Rebecca’s shoulder, pushed her down the burrow ahead of him.

The tunnel was both dank and dark and it was a long time before she could make out clearly the appearance of the old female who, muttering and cursing, retreated before them. ‘Trouble is,’ whispered Mekkins, ‘she lives alone so much that she takes a while to get used to strangers. And she likes to put on a bit of an act at first. But she’s got a heart of gold and if she takes to you, she’ll see you right as rain.’

At last Rebecca could see her clearly and had she been anything less than near collapse, she might well have run away there and then.

Curlew was small and wasted, her whole body twisted subtly out of true by some past disease or abnormality; she had no fur on much of her face and what there was on her thin flanks was sparse and grey. Her front paws were almost translucent with weakness.

But her eyes! It was as if they had, temporarily, taken refuge in the wrong body, for they were bright and warm with kindness and compassion, beautiful with life, and Rebecca realised that the frightened voice that had come up to them really had been an act.

The moment Curlew saw Rebecca clearly, she came forward, though a little diffidently, and said, ‘My dear!’ in a voice of such compassion that Rebecca knew that she, too, had suffered in some terrible way and that she understood. Then Rebecca settled down, weary beyond words but feeling safer than she had for a very long time. She crouched down in the corner of Curlew’s little burrow, with its wet walls and miserable air, settled her snout between her paws, and simply closed her eyes.

‘This mole is Rebecca from Barrow Vale,’ said Mekkins. ‘And she needs help and protection. That’s why I’ve brought her here, Curlew, ’cos I reckon you’ll know how to get a bit of life back into her.’

Rebecca felt a gentle paw caressing her face and heard a gentler voice saying, as if from a great distance, ‘It’s all right, my dear, you’re safe now, quite safe.’ And then she fell asleep.

When Mekkins told Curlew the story of what had happened, she sighed to hear it, speaking of ‘the wickedness of it’ and the ‘dark shadows that curse Duncton’, looking at the sleeping Rebecca, the tears in her kind eyes running down her bald face.

She too had wanted a litter, but the disease that struck her down in her first summer so long before had for ever deprived her of the chance. No male would take her and the story in the Marsh End for a long time was that she had become simple as a result and been taken by an owl.

But this was not so—as Mekkins, in one of his explorations of the perimeter of the Marsh End when he was a youngster, found out. He came across her little system, burrowed in a ramshackle way in the soft wet soil, and for a long time got no response but ‘There’s disease here’ from her. Until, bit by bit, he cajoled his way into her tunnels and there found Curlew, who had had no contact with anymole for many years, preferring to hide her disfigurement in the isolated place she chose to live in. Unlike other moles who had seen her in the past, he showed no fear of her and treated her as he would any other mole. Then, over the years, he had seen her change, losing some of her shyness and finding more and more peace in her life and teaching him that a mole may live alone for many years and learn a great deal of wisdom and find much love in the small things about its tunnels.

She refused to leave her tunnels because, as she explained, this was probably the only place in the system where her weak paws could manage to burrow and repair tunnels, and then only untidily. But, yes, she had known sadness, and had always wanted young of her own, though now she knew she could never have them. It was knowing this that made Mekkins bring Rebecca here, for surely Curlew would take care of her as if she were a pup of her own.

But in the next few days, Rebecca’s condition got steadily worse. She grew weaker and more and more unresponsive, hardly bothering to eat the food that Mekkins and Curlew brought her. The light had gone out of her eyes and the gloss from her fur, which now hung about her like dead ivy.

On the fourth night she was there, Curlew went to wake up Mekkins, prodding him urgently and asking him to come.

‘She’s dying, Mekkins, and there’s not much anymole can do. Her teats are hard with unsuckled milk and they’re swollen and are paining her in her troubled sleep. I think we may be too late to save her.’

Mekkins looked at Rebecca, his snout low with grief and desolation, his eyes restless with the need to do something for her. ‘Rebecca,’ he whispered to her. ‘Rebecca. It’s Mekkins! You’re safe now. Listen, Rebecca!’

She stirred and turned a little to him, her forehead furrowed and her eyes hauntingly lost. ‘Listen to what?’ she whispered. ‘They’ve all gone. I heard the last of their cries. He’s taken them.’

‘But there’s so much, Rebecca, so much. The flowers you love, the ones you showed me in the summer, they’ll come again. And spring, that’ll come, you’ll see. You’ll see…’ But Mekkins couldn’t go on. He could find no words to say because he could not think of a reason why she should want to live. If only Rose were here, he thought, she’d know what to say.

Looking at her there, he felt himself almost absurdly strong and healthy, realising what a gift it was, almost for the first time. But he would have given it all to see Rebecca look up at him with the laugh and dance in her eyes that he remembered and loved so well.

He left her and Curlew and went grimly up to the tunnel entrance and stayed there looking into the night. From somewhere off in the marshes came the haunting single call of a solitary snipe. Otherwise the wood seemed to be settling into the darkness of winter.

Yet, as he crouched there, upset and frustrated, from the light-filled recesses of his soul, where the cherished things of the heart lie still and waiting, there came a memory of the Stone. Not as he had last seen it, with the blood of Hulver and Bindle staining its shadow, but as he had first seen it so long ago when he was little more than a pup and had been led up Duncton Hill on the long trek, when there was no shame in celebrating Midsummer.

It had stood massive, awe-inspiring and, somehow, safe, and he had looked up at it, as the elders did their chanting, and all had faded away from his mind but its size and majesty, and his sense that he was part of it. In the many moleyears since, he had only ever thought of the Stone as a distant thing, for the sense of grace that flowed into him then was overshadowed by the fighting and living, and the mating, that was the reality of Duncton in his time.

But now the grace returned, distant and uncertain, but there all the same. He turned back down into the tunnels and went straight to Curlew.

‘How long can she live?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘There are herbs I know, healing charms I heard my mother say. She may cling on for a few days…’

‘She must,’ he said urgently, ‘she must. For a few days you must make her. I have to go, but I will be back.’

‘Where to?’ asked Curlew, suddenly afraid to be left alone, with Rebecca now so certain to die.

‘I’m going to the Stone, Curlew, to ask for its ’elp. I don’t know nothing about praying but I’m bloody well going to try.’

It took him a full night and day of travel to reach the massive, silent Stone. Mekkins had never prayed in his life before and so, lacking any preconceived idea of how a mole should pray, he spoke to it as he would to anymole. ‘She’s a good mole, better than anymole I know, so why’s she dying? What’s the use in it? Look… I’ll do anything I can do to ’elp her out…’

But the Stone was silent.

‘Look ’ere,’ tried Mekkins again, his paws now touching the base of the Stone, ‘there can’t be any sense in lettin’ her die now, can there? I’ve seen her dance in the sun and say her rhymes and all sorts of things and you didn’t make her learn to do those things so she should die like she is. You made her so that other moles could understand ’ow to live properly in this forsaken bloody system of ours.’

But still the Stone stood silent, its cold height rising above and beyond Mekkins’ vision to the nearly leafless branches of beech trees high above, which made an interlocking craze of silhouettes against the bleak white clouds of the October dusk.

He crouched by the Stone for a long time saying nothing. He had nothing to say. He looked around at the trees, then at his own strong paws, and then out across the lower wood in the direction of Marsh End. Then he got angry and started shouting at the Stone, almost attacking it in his anger: ‘What the ’ell are you anyway?’ he shouted. ‘I come all the way ’ere to ask for your help and I ain’t never asked for your ’elp before and all you do is nothing at all. Just stand there silent. Silent as the stone you are. You know what? You’re nothing, that’s what you are, nothing!’

Wild anger flowed through Mekkins, feelings of a power and rage he had never felt before. They were the more powerful for the sense he felt of the Stone’s betrayal of the feeling of grace and hope that had inspired him to come so far in the first place. He turned away from the Stone and half hit, half collapsed on the ground, his movements as restless as the roots that ran this way and that around the Stone and formed the dark shadows at its base.

He half sobbed, half shouted in his rage until, slowly, the hatred for what was happening to Rebecca and his anger at the Stone began to fade into weariness and helplessness, so that even his strong shoulders and sturdy body could not stop wilting and sagging into a posture of defeat. He turned back to the Stone, his snout low and his anger quite gone.

‘’Elp her,’ he whispered finally to the Stone. ‘’Elp her for my sake,’ he said simply.

Mekkins finally left the Stone as dawn was breaking the next morning. His spirits were too low for him to want to face the chatter of Westside or Barrow Vale, so he turned east, taking a route by the central slopes and contouring his way round, and slowly down towards tunnels that would eventually lead to the Marsh End.

His route took him by Hulver’s old system and it was as he passed near it that he felt the faintest of vibrations and smelt the faintest of cheerful scents. He stopped and snouted about, glad to know there was life here again and then, finding an entrance, he went down into it, careful to make plenty of noise so as not to take any mole by surprise.

Any mole? Moles more like! The place was alive with the sound of pups, bleating and mewing and stirring, and the sound of a mother shushing them still.

Pups on the slopes! It was the first time he had ever heard of such a thing and if there was one thing in the world to raise his spirits a little at that moment, it was their sound.

There was a scurrying and muttering somewhere in the tunnels ahead where the litter was. Then a mole came running aggressively down the tunnel at him, stopping ready with her talons raised.

‘It’s all right,’ he said gently, ‘I’m not here for harm, just to pass the time of day like. I’m Mekkins the elder, from the Marsh End.’

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Rue.

‘I’ve been to the Stone.’

‘Oh!’ She sounded surprised and came closer and snouted at him.

‘Sounds like you got yourself a litter,’ said Mekkins cheerfully. ‘Can I look?’

She nodded. She knew of Mekkins. He was all right, played fair, they said.

‘Got a worm or two to spare?’ asked Mekkins, pressing his luck.

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ said Rue. ‘But as it happens I have.’

She turned round and ran on before him, back to her litter, and he followed very slowly, knowing how sensitive mothers can be.

Her burrow was a joy to look into. There she was, curled up with four pups suckling at her teats, bleating occasionally when they lost their grip, wrestling with each other for the best place, and milk spattering their pink snouts and pale young whiskers. Their eyes were blind and their paws as floppy as wet grass. Rue twittered and whiffled at them, guiding their mouths to her nipples and cooing love sounds at their feeble antics. One of the pups did a mewing cartwheel backwards and Rue laughed fondly, saying, ‘Come on, my sweet,’ pulling him back. It was only as she lifted him up to her nipples that Mekkins saw that there was a fifth pup there, smaller than the rest, lost among the melee of the paws and questing snouts. He was feeble and lacked the vigour of the others, seeming unable even to suck.

‘The runt,’ said Rue matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve tried to make him feed but he only manages when the rest take a break and that isn’t often. He’s growing weaker by the hour. There’s always a weak one in a litter of five. Of course, he’s a male—they’re always the ones.’

But Mekkins wasn’t listening. He was thinking, his mind was racing, and an idea was forming swifter than lightning. An idea so ridiculous that he might make it work.

He took a tentative step into the burrow, at which Rue immediately tensed. ‘There’s a female I know,’ he said at last, ‘who lost her litter. She’s ill from want of suck. That’s why I went to the Stone—to ask it to help her.’ He looked meaningfully at the little feeble pup being climbed all over by the other four. Its mews were too weak for him to hear them above their noise, but he could see its mouth desperately forming the sounds.

Rue looked at him. ‘What you’re saying is that he might survive with her, whereas he definitely won’t with me. You may be right and you may be wrong.’ Slowly Rue relaxed.

She went back to tending the more vigorous four and somehow shifted a bit so the fifth fell away and got lost by itself in the nesting material between Rue and Mekkins. Slowly, with great care, he eased himself towards the little thing. Rue studiously ignored them both.

Then Mekkins gently bent down to the tiny pup, took it up in his mouth by the scruff of the neck, and lifted it off the ground. It swung loose from his mouth, eyes blind and paws waving weakly. Mekkins hesitated for only a moment before turning to the entrance and going back into the tunnel and then, as fast as he could go, down to its entrance. Rue did not even look up after he had gone. ‘My sweet things,’ she whispered to the healthy four, ‘my loves.’

As Mekkins was about to exit on the surface, he heard sounds behind him and thinking that Rue had, after all, changed her mind, turned round to face her and found himself looking into the face of a young adult male, with grey fur and wary eyes. The pup hung in the air between them.

‘Take care of him,’ said the young male. His voice was strong but strangely haunting, and it made Mekkins stop quite still, for surely he had heard it before. Before high summer he had heard it… coming out of the dark on Midsummer Night, coming from the Stone clearing. The voice of Bracken. Feeling suddenly that he and the system were in the grip of forces whose power and destiny were beyond imagining, Mekkins sensed the pup in his mouth stir feebly and then he was gone, up into the light of early morning, racing down the slopes, running with the little pup swinging helplessly in front of him, as he made desperately, without pause, for the distant isolated place where Rebecca lay dying.

Never had the smell of decaying wood and rotting leaf mould—the smell of the most forsaken part of Duncton Wood—felt so good to Mekkins. It meant that he was back.

Down then into Curlew’s dark tunnels, along to her burrow, desperate eyes at its entrance looking to see if Rebecca… if Rebecca was… and a gasp from Curlew that had a thousand different feelings in it.

Mekkins placed the pup at Rebecca’s belly, nudging it to her hard and swollen nipples, pushing it forward almost clumsily in his desperation to see it take suck. And when it did not, whispering to Rebecca, whose eyes were closed and whose breathing was shallow, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca! I’ve brought you a pup!’

‘They’ve all gone,’ she moaned in a dead voice. ‘All gone.’

‘He’s here. Look at him. Look at him,’ whispered Mekkins gently, his eyes looking hopelessly to Curlew as the pup, too feeble to suck on its own, fell back to the shadows of her belly, its own tiny belly hurrying in and out, in and out, as if its life were being gasped away.

‘Just look at him, my dear,’ said Curlew, her snout caressing Rebecca’s face. ‘Just try.’

But Rebecca was not even interested, and try as they did, the pup could not seem to suck at her nipples, though it mewed softly and its mouth opened to try.

‘Rebecca,’ said Mekkins, again desperately, ‘please listen, my love. Try to help him. Try to give him your love. He needs you.’

But still she only stirred slightly and though she looked round at the pup for a moment, she seemed to have no interest.

Mekkins sought for something to say, just as he had searched for something to say at the Stone. His eyes were wild, his mind distraught, and he searched desperately about until, suddenly, the words of Bracken came to him again. ‘Take care of him,’ he had said and he saw an image of Bracken’s face, looking at him so deeply.

Mekkins turned back to Rebecca once more, put his snout to her ear, and said urgently: ‘You must try. You must try. The pup is Bracken’s young. He’s Bracken’s pup!’

What mole can say how soon a pup knows that its mother is gone? However it is, and will always be, the pup suddenly bleated out its sense of eternal loss. Not the quiet mewing that had been too soft to hear in Rue’s burrow, nor the feeble bleats he had made while trying to reach Rebecca’s teats. But the loud cry into the wilderness of loss, so that as Mekkins said ‘He’s Bracken’s pup’ Rebecca seemed to hear the pup’s cry as if it was her own.

Her snout slowly turned round and down to the bleating thing, ran gently over its body, sniffled at its tiny paws; her tongue ran softly over its dry snout and she curled the protection of her body around it and guided it to one of her teats. The pup fell away, but she tried again. And again. Beginning to whisper words of encouragement as soft as its gentle mews, nudging it to her, pushing her teat to its mouth, moistening her own teat with her tongue to help, giving it her love. Until at last, before the breathless gaze of Curlew and Mekkins, the pup began to suckle, the noise of it filling the burrow like the sound of soft spring rain falling among dry grass.

While behind them, unnoticed in the shadows of the tunnel outside the burrow, Bracken crept silently away. He had used all his skills to follow Mekkins’ desperate race to Curlew’s burrow so that he might watch over the safety of his son. Had

danger loomed, had a badger come by, had Mandrake himself come like a black cloud out of the night, Bracken would surely have given fight, so that his son, carried on by Mekkins, might be safe.

So, unnoticed, he had watched over the safety of his son. He had crept into the tunnel after Mekkins and watched unobserved, only realising, because she was so changed, that it was Rebecca who was lying there when Mekkins said her name. He watched as the pup faltered and weakened, willing him to try again! Until the pup had bleated his heart out in one last cry and Rebecca had at last turned her face gently to him and, unknowingly, taken his son for her own.

Only then did Bracken creep softly away. Out again on to the surface of this dark and wet part of the wood, back up south to the Hill and towards the Ancient System, to which he seemed for ever enchained.

Chapter Twenty-One1

They called the pup Comfrey, after the healing herb that grew by the wood’s edge near Curlew’s tunnels and which, she said, had kept Rebecca alive in the two days Mekkins was away at the Stone.

For many long days they worried over him, all three nurturing and cherishing life into him until he was able to suckle of his own accord, and his sounds were those of the eagerness of a growing mole rather than the desperation of a dying one.

But though Rebecca tended to him, whispering her love to him, it still seemed to Mekkins that some light in her had gone out and that there was a weariness with, or lack of belief in, the very life of which she had once been the greatest celebrant.

When November came, Mekkins could stay no longer and left to attend to Marsh End affairs and, though he did not say so, to see what he could find out about any search that might be being made for Rebecca.

‘I’ll take good care of her, Mekkins, so don’t you go fretting,’ said Curlew as he left. ‘Comfrey will be all right now, a little weak perhaps but even the slightest plants bear flowers. And as for Rebecca, she’ll take time to recover, but recover she will, you’ll see.’

Mekkins was touched by the change that had come over Curlew herself since Rebecca, and then Comfrey, had come. They seemed to have put new life into her and the mole he remembered as being so frightened and withdrawn was now bustling with activity and full of purpose. ‘Things certainly work out in a strange way,’ he thought to himself as he departed, and that was something to take comfort from.

When he got back to the Marsh End and heard what had been happening in the system, he realised how right Rose had been to warn that dark days were coming. They were already there. For fear and terror were taking Duncton over, as the henchmoles, mainly Westsiders, were beginning to get so powerful that they were out of control.

There were random attacks on Eastsiders and Marshenders; there were takeovers of tunnels by henchmole gangs; there was even a killing in Barrow Vale itself, the one place in the system where a mole traditionally felt completely safe on neutral ground.

At the root of the problem was the change that had come over Mandrake, which had started, the gossips were quick to point out, from the night he and Rune had killed Rebecca’s young. In the early days of Mandrake’s thrall, if there had been killing to be done it was done by Mandrake himself. He kept tight control of the henchmoles, whom he selected himself and who obeyed nomole but he. Slowly, subtly, darkly, Rune began to gain power. By acting as a buffer between the henchmoles on one hand and Mandrake on the other, he gained the confidence of both. A mole like Burrhead, who was the leading Westside henchmole, preferred to work through Rune rather than directly with Mandrake, who was too unpredictable. He made a mole like Burrhead stumble over his words and feel stupid; Rune was so much more understanding…

By the Midsummer after Bracken’s birth, Rune had the direct loyalty of all the henchmoles, many of whom had gained their positions by his preferment, and one way or another (mainly by his guile) those henchmoles originally selected by Mandrake were frozen out. Rumours were set against them, for example, so that Mandrake no longer trusted them. At one elder burrow meeting, two of them, whose reputation with Mandrake had been poisoned by Rune’s slanders, were killed by Mandrake himself in front of all. So savagely was it done that only Rune smiled; there was something sensual in death for him.

After the death of Hulver, or, more particularly, ever since Mandrake had been so shocked to hear those words of grace spoken by Bracken—the voice of the Stone, as it seemed to Mandrake—he had slowly lost interest in the power he had won for himself. Nomole doubted he was in charge, not even Rune, but he preferred to let Rune exercise power for him, with occasional excursions into mindless brutality just to show who was in charge.

Most moles in Duncton, including Mandrake, assumed that Rebecca had been taken by an owl along with her litter after their killing. But seemingly worse, for Mandrake, was the fact that his mate, Sarah, who had opposed the killing of the litter from the start, had been taken by owl as well—at the same time as Rebecca. The sudden loss of his mate and daughter seemed to mark the start of Mandrake’s decline into distracted brutality. He would suddenly appear in Barrow Vale and spend hours sitting brooding, while the moles there would quietly disappear. Sometimes he was heard to attack the walls of his tunnels in great lumbering crashes and to mutter to himself in the language of Siabod. Words that sounded like curses, and ravings nomole could understand.

He became obsessed, too, by the Stone Mole, a rumour that had never died out. Indeed, the incident with Rebecca got tangled up with the Stone Mole, who was said (and Mandrake appeared to believe it in some way) to have mated with Rebecca. ‘Oh, yes! Haven’t you heard? The pups Mandrake killed were the Stone Mole’s pups!’

Nomole quite believed this, and yet it was a good story… so rumours feed on themselves.

As for the reports of her death, these were so confused that nomole could really tell what the truth was. Mandrake himself believed her dead but there were others, Rune among them, who were not so sure. Some even said—but this was the wild gossip of those who had exhausted the titillation in every other story—that she had escaped from the system with a single pup who had not died in the assault and was rearing him as a second Stone Mole to come and avenge his siblings’ deaths. ‘Typical Rebecca!’ some said, not knowing that the Rebecca they had known was no more, alive or dead.

Mekkins garnered all these stories in visits to Barrow Vale, for Marsh End was too cut off and unpopular to be a good source for gossip. He trusted the henchmole who had so bravely led Rebecca down to the Marsh End to keep quiet—it was in his interests to do so.

More serious was the possibility that the news of Rebecca’s existence and whereabouts might leak from the Marsh End, where a few moles must have guessed at it. He began to think that if there was any way for Rebecca to leave the system he should find it. For surely if they ever did discover her, especially with Comfrey, then she would be killed. It was to discuss this that he himself decided to risk a journey to the pastures to see if he could locate Rose to ask for her advice and help. He wanted, in any case, to bring her back to Curlew’s burrow to take a look at Rebecca and see if she could inject into her a greater will to live again.

Meanwhile, the Stone Mole rumour was resurrected periodically by glimpses of Bracken, who now had such a command of the Ancient System—except for its most central part, whose exploration still defeated him—that he did not mind taking a few risks. In fact, for him it was quite fun. But he was seen only down on the slopes, for as the atmosphere of fear in the wood increased, nomole ventured too far from his burrow, and none up on to the hill itself.

Bracken’s visits to the slopes were principally to see Rue and her thriving litter—Violet, Coltsfoot, Beech and Pipple.

Bracken had tried several more times to find his way through the Chamber of Roots but finally gave up when, one windy day when the roots were viciously active below ground, he got cut off by a deep and treacherous fissure that appeared in the floor and took a long and dangerous time to find another way out again, while the roots got noisier and noisier and seemed to want to entwine themselves about him and take him for their own. He was determined to return one day and find some way of completing the exploration, but meanwhile decided to create tunnels of his own.

He established his tunnels at the wood’s edge beyond the Stone clearing, quite near the spot where Cairn had died. His choice was decided principally by the existence of the second tunnel leading out of (or into) the circular tunnel around the Chamber of Echoes. The tunnel was a slight affair, meandering here and there and eventually petering out to the west of the Stone. Bracken constructed a clever series of tunnels that connected up with it in a deliberately confusing and roundabout way, designed to put off any inquisitive mole who found his own tunnels. He liked the idea of having access to the Ancient System underground but saw danger in creating a direct route.

Meanwhile, Duncton Wood declined towards winter. The winds off the pastures grew greyer and colder, and the last of the leaves blew in desolate flurries off the trees, leaving just a few dead ones hanging on the beech and oak trees as a reminder of the summer now long gone. The only green that remained was the ivy that hung off some of the older trees, some mistletoe that had colonised the occasional oak on the lower Westside, and near Barrow Vale a holly tree or two, whose shining, prickly leaves and clusters of red berries seemed the only splash of colour in the whole wood.

Creature after creature disappeared from sight. Most of the birds had gone, while the grey squirrels, who had scampered their way over the trunks and branches of the oaks or across the wood floor between the beeches all spring and summer, began, one by one, to disappear into the nooks and holes in which they hibernated and would see the long winter through.

A colony of pipistrelle bats found out the hollow dead elm in the lower wood and, after wheeling and circling round it dusk after dusk, settled down to sleep the winter through in the safety of its dark inaccessibility. Insects like wasps and ladybirds crawled away under the looser patches of tree bark while hedgehogs, after growing slow and dozy, finally chose their spots for sleep as well, curling up under a cover of leaves and mould with only the very slightest trembling of their snouts to tell that they were still alive.

Then, as November gave way to December, the Duncton moles responded to winter by clearing out their deeper runs, shoring them up where necessary, blocking off colder entrances, and crouching still in the cold darkness of a system, and a season, bowed down by gloom. For hours a mole’s only movement might be the shivering of flanks or a sullen search for food, while the only sounds carried in on the wet, cold wind were the crackings and fallings of twigs and branches, or the flap of a magpie’s wings, whose black sheen reflected a grey sky.

Yet, however bowed down a system may be, nothing can quite destroy the spark of excitement that comes to everymole’s breast with the start of the third week of December and the approach of Longest Night. For even in the darkest hour there is a distant star, a tiny light of hope whose glimmer, though far off, is enough to thrill the most despairing heart.

Longest Night! The time when youngsters grow silly with expectation and adults grow young with memory. The time when a mole may forget the icy months still to come in the knowledge that the imminent passage of Longest Night means that the nights are beginning—however unlikely it seems—to shorten once more. Longest Night! The time when darkness and light hang in a balance and the mystery of life is remembered again.

Then are the old tales told and the ancient songs sung. Of the coming of Ballagan; of the finding of the first Stone, of its splitting into the seven hundred Stones; of Ballagan’s mate, Vervain of the West Stone; of their struggle with darkness on the first Longest Night; of their sons and daughters and the founding of the first system; of Ballagan’s discovery of the first Book, and Vervain’s discovery of the second. But most beloved tale of all, and the one all moles like to hear again on Longest Night, of how Linden, last son of Ballagan and Vervain, made the trek with the Books to Uffington and then learned to read them, and in the course of one Longest Night, became a White Mole, thereby allowing the Stone’s healing power of love and silence to pass through him to all moles.

In honour of Linden at least some moles in every system traditionally trek to the Stone (or whatever feature in their system represents it) on Longest Night. And what an exciting memory that is for those who take part, as jokes, smiles, giggles, whimsies, buffoonery, tomfoolery and games mix with prayers, silence and mystery in an evening of pilgrimage. Then back to the burrows for a feast and a chatter and a tale well told; and then sleep, if there’s time, before waking at last in the knowledge that Longest Night has been survived and the long journey towards spring has begun.

As this particular Longest Night approached, many Duncton moles thought to themselves that one way or another they ought to make the trek to the Stone this time, having been deterred from doing so by Mandrake’s outright threats on the previous Longest Night. This time their fear was greater and morale lower—yet it is just at such times that thoughts turn naturally to the Stone, and the need to ask for its help. So many moles secretly intended to make the trek, though few admitted they were making plans to do so. As December entered its third week, the system began to buzz with excitement and chatter as moles cleaned out their burrows and made their plans, and laughed with pleasure at the prospect of Longest Night.

But there are always moles—and always will be—who, through character or circumstances, decide they cannot join in the gregarious fun at the approach of Longest Night. Bracken was one of them. He could, it is true, have spent a little time with Rue, assuming she would have allowed it, but the spirit was not in him. At the very moment when most moles in the system were finding a little relief from the shadows of winter in the celebration to come, he found himself falling into an uneasy sadness.

Some days he would go to the edge of the wood and look across the pastures and wonder if, after all, his first impulse on coming to the Stone might have been the best—to leave the system altogether and make his way to whatever lay beyond it in the direction of Uffington. Other days he found himself crouched in anguished silence in its shadows, wondering whether, after all, its power was imaginary— demanding then to see the power, to feel it. Or again, he would think about the Chamber of Roots and wonder why he could not cross it—and then ask himself how he could consider leaving the system if he had failed even to explore the system’s most secret part. ‘What will I find out there,’ he would whisper to himself as he looked across the pastures, ‘if I can’t even follow my snout in here?’

He was lonely. He wanted to talk to a mole again as he had talked so long before to Hulver; he wanted to learn something from a mole who could tell him what to learn. He wanted knowledge, but did not know where to find it. And Longest Night, which he knew was near, and when all moles shared a joy together, simply underlined the fact of his isolation from the Stone, from the heart of the Ancient System, and from all other moles.

‘Rebecca! ’Ere, Rebecca! I’ve got a surprise for you, my girl!’ It was Mekkins, full of the joy of the season and suddenly back in Curlew’s burrow with many a whisper and a laugh on the way down the tunnel to it. He had brought Rose.

She took one look at Rebecca and said, ‘My love, how frail and thin you have become. This certainly will not do.’ She said it kindly but firmly, crouching down snout to snout with Rebecca and examining her with motherly care.

‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’ And faced by Rose’s love, she started to cry as she had never cried, ever before. She tried for a moment to stop, for little Comfrey, who was snuggled up against her, started up frightened, but Curlew took him to her and played a game with him, which had him and Mekkins running out into the tunnel, leaving Rose and Rebecca alone together. So that Rebecca could cry.

Rose was too wise to think that jollying Rebecca along to get her out of her depression would be useful. She saw that much of Rebecca’s spirit had been killed and its rebirth was not something a healer could bring about quickly by herself. As she talked to Rebecca and heard the indifference to life in her voice, Rose saw that the best she could do was to push her in the right direction and trust to the Stone that she would finally be able to find the right way herself.

When Rose watched Rebecca play with Comfrey, she was pleased to see that there, at least, was something she wanted to do, though she saw that even Rebecca’s interest in Comfrey was sometimes little more than dutiful. The sounds of love were there, for sure, but spontaneous love, or trust, or faith, or hope, or life? These were the drives that Rebecca had had so much of before, but which somehow she seemed not to be able to pass on to Comfrey, for they were no longer in her.

The pup was growing well, Rose observed, but he would need to be given much more than food and grooming if he was to reflect in his life some of the quality that Rebecca had once had in hers, and surely still could have.

‘But how?’ asked Mekkins, who understood well what was wrong with Rebecca. ‘What can we do to make her see that, terrible though the death of her litter has been, life, for her, has barely begun?’

‘Mekkins, my dear, you have a good heart, I sometimes think better than anymole I know! But Rebecca’s problem lies deeper than in simply having things to live for. You see, my love, she has experienced evil—she has seen it with her eyes, smelt it with her snout, and felt its dark talons tearing inside her body. It tears at her still. She has felt enough of its power to destroy an ordinary mole but, as the coming of Comfrey shows, she is in some ways graced and surely a special mole. The only power that can heal her lies in the Stone—though you must understand she may never be the same kind of mole that you once knew. If a mole feels evil as she has done, only the light in the Stone can erase its shadow. Then may she continue to grow again.’

‘But how can she be made to see it?’ asked Mekkins. ‘There is no way a mole such as I, or you, can predict how the power of the Stone will be felt, or when. Often we may not even know if it has been. But Longest Night is coming and I think Rebecca should make the trek to the Stone. Perhaps, if she goes near it, something of her spirit will be reborn…’

‘But what about Comfrey, and how will she get there?’

‘You will guide her there, Mekkins, and Curlew will take care of Comfrey—something I suspect she has prayed she might be able to do—by herself for a while. He is no longer suckling and she can look after him very well by herself. ’ But what seemed a good idea to Rose, and eventually to Mekkins, did not appeal to Rebecca. She simply was not interested. She shook her head. She said she would not leave Comfrey. She said it was too far and Mekkins had done too much. She said there was no point. She grew angry with them all and attacked the idea that the Stone was anything more than mystic nonsense beloved of silly old moles. She had a temper tantrum.

Until, the problem still unresolved, Rose herself had to leave to get back to the pastures in time for Longest Night. Mekkins accompanied her, for she was now growing old and frail. Her last words to him when they came to the wood’s edge on the west side of Marsh End were ‘You must try once more to get her to go, Mekkins. The fact that she is so opposed to going convinces me that she should go—even if you have to drag her there!’ They both laughed a little at the idea, but their laughter was sad.

‘I’ll do the best I can,’ said Mekkins.

‘I know you will, my love,’ said Rose. ‘I always knew you would. The day will come when all moles will remember you and will take heart from the story of your loyalty and of what you did for Rebecca.’

‘Me, Rose? Don’t be silly!’ said Mekkins, adding, ‘Now you take care of yourself on those pastures, and have a good Longest Night.’

‘And you,’ said Rose, running back and nuzzling him. ‘And you, too, my love.’ Then with a smile of affection they parted. And hour by hour Longest Night crept nearer.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Bracken knew when the trek to the Stone on Longest Night had begun by the sound of chitter and chatter and laughter coming from the clearing—he could even hear it in his deepest burrow, to which he moved in a sullen irritation. Some moles, who evidently did not know the best way to the Stone, wandered over the surface above his tunnels telling their stories, singing ridiculous songs, racing and dancing about, and generally annoying him. He wanted none of it.

But as the evening drew on, the sounds changed from revelry to reverence—for the first moles there were always the ones who came simply for the fun of the trip and wanted to get it over as quickly as possible so that they could get back to their burrows for the real festivities.

Only later did those who were moved by the mystery of Longest Night and remembered Linden, the first White Mole, with real thanksgiving in their hearts, come in ones and twos and crouch in reverence by the Stone.

By this time Bracken was too restless with annoyance at the disturbance of his peace—or what he considered his peace—to be able to stay still, and so crept as near as he could to the Stone to watch the proceedings. He felt alienated from each mole there, and from the Stone itself, and watched it all almost as if he was not breathing the same air or sharing the same cold frosty December night as anymole else. There was a moon low to the east which, since the night was clear, cast its light into the Stone clearing, the Stone a black silhouette in the centre, the moles forming gently moving shadows around it. The shadow of the Stone ran directly towards Bracken when he arrived, shortening and swinging to the south as the evening passed on when the moon rose and swung to the north in the sky.

Moles continually came and went from the clearing, with a little banter and gentle laughter on the edge, but none at the centre itself.

Bracken heard snatches of their conversation: ‘You here as well this time?’ ‘Why, bless me, I ain’t seen you since July, and what a good time that was…’ ‘Bit bloody parky up here, isn’t it?’ ‘Goin’ to be a cold winter if you ask me…’ Each phrase that came to him reminded him of how alone he was and without a friend. He thought again of visiting Rue, but somehow she wasn’t what he wanted on Longest Night, though what that was he didn’t know. He scratched himself miserably, looked balefully at the moon through the trees and turned his attention to the moles in the centre of the clearing near the Stone. There was silence and a great sense of awe in their communal presence. Some crouched peacefully, occasionally raising their snouts slowly to look up at the Stone, almost as if they thought that something so awesome might suddenly go away. Others intoned prayers to themselves which Bracken could not hear, while some, mainly Eastsiders he guessed (for theirs were the traditions nearest to the ancient ones), half sung, half intoned their prayers in a dialect Bracken could not understand.

Others spoke prayers of unaffected simplicity loud enough for him to hear. ‘Thank you, Stone, for the joys you have given and for the strength I have been blessed with… Take care of Duncton and let it see your light… My heart is in thy silence, Stone, only let me hear it…’ Again and again he heard moles, both males and females, whispering the same final little prayer, ‘Only take us to the silence’—words he had heard Hulver himself say from time to time.

Occasionally several of the moles there would appear to start saying the same prayer simultaneously; their voices would join in unison, creating a kind of spoken song of great power which would, for a moment, take Bracken’s heart out of himself and transport it into something of the mystery of Longest Night.

As the night wore on and grew colder, the moon rising and the Stone’s shadow turning towards the lower part of the wood while growing smaller at the same time, Bracken was touched by something of these moles’ faith, and the Stone began to seem less distant from him than he had thought. He wanted to run out into the centre and ask one of the older ones to explain about the Stone to him; he thirsted for knowledge of it. But he did not have the courage. Sometimes he wanted to join in their prayers, but he did not know the words.

Slowly, the numbers in the clearing declined until he began to have to search its shadows to locate the few moles left, mainly the very old ones, and he realised that the Stone trek was almost over. From down on the slopes even the sound of the songs and revels of departing moles faded, until, as one by one all the moles in the clearing went, Bracken was left quite alone.

A bleak despair began to creep over him, for he felt he had seen a glimpse of some sweet mystery into whose light he wanted to go, but for which he needed a mole to guide him. He had never missed old Hulver so much as at that moment; ‘Surely,’ thought Bracken, through tears that stopped him even seeing the Stone, ‘he would have shared his Longest Night with me.’ Self-pity mixed with a real sense of loss as he crouched in the shadows beyond the clearing, and the night deepened into a still, cold silence all about him.

The moonlight was now strong enough to catch the condensation of his outward breaths into the cold air, and the wood fell very still. The dead brown beech leaves on the floor of the Stone clearing looked pale white, and the surrounding vegetation was black around them.

On impulse, Bracken advanced towards the Stone, out of the undergrowth in which he had been hiding, not sure what he was doing but very conscious of himself alone in the wood. He wanted to say something to the Stone, not a prayer so much as an affirmation that he was there before it, waiting for something to happen. He felt he had been waiting a long time. He also felt unsettled and angry and very conscious of his own lonely existence.

For lack of anything better to do, he went up to the Stone and touched it with his paws to see if, after all, there was more to it than there seemed to be. But there was nothing but its unyielding rough surface, nothing at all.

He waited like this a long time until, somewhere in the darkness beyond, not far off in the shadows by the clearing’s edge, past the great tree whose roots encircled the Stone, he heard a scurry and a slide.

A whispered ‘Ssh!’ came out of the darkness into the moonlight where he lay. He turned his snout towards it aggressively, wondering what it was. Then he sensed a mole.

A deep silence fell as Bracken waited, every sense stretched, his snout poised still as stone and his face whiskers stiff as pine needles.

But not for long. For very soon the anger that had been building up all night replaced the defensive care with which he had first responded to the noise.

‘What mole is there, and why?’ he demanded, getting up from where he was and approaching through the moonlight towards the impenetrable shadows around and beyond the tree roots.

A rustle. The sneak of a talon. A whisper again.

‘I said what mole is there!’ Bracken said again, his talons tensing and his body angry beyond his mind.

A movement, a scurry, an intake of breath and as a snout pushed out from the blackness half into the shadow, a voice accompanied it saying, ‘’Ello, Bracken. It’s me, Mekkins. You know! We met…’

‘What do you want?’ demanded Bracken, tensing even more. Mekkins’ friendliness upset him more than if he had been hostile. He wanted no part in friendliness.

‘I’m Mekkins. I met you in Rue’s burrows…’

Bracken was getting more angry by the second, an irrational anger born out of despair. At that moment he would probably have been angry at anything that moved. Bracken could feel anger overtaking him and was almost enjoying the feeling, even though the anger was absolutely real.

‘Look, Bracken,’ said Mekkins, advancing towards him in a conciliatory way, ‘it’s Longest Night and a time for celebration, not…’

‘I don’t care if it’s Longest Minute,’ shouted Bracken. ‘I don’t want you here. There’s been enough moles up here disturbing me…’ He was shaking with anger and began the ritual advance on Mekkins that prefaced a fight—paws stiff, tail high, snout pointed stiffly forward.

At this, Mekkins, no slouch when it came to combat, narrowed his eyes and protracted his talons—he might have been asked to watch over Bracken, but there was absolutely no way he was going to allow himself to be assaulted just like that.

Then, a voice came hesitantly out of the shadows. ‘Bracken?’—and there stood Rebecca in the moonlight. She immediately moved in front of Mekkins towards him.

‘Bracken?’ she said again, touching him with her paw as she had once touched him before. Only this time it was as if she did not believe that he could be Bracken. She spoke as if she was in a terrible nightmare; the frailty and fear in her voice seemed to hang over them all.

He turned his eyes away from Mekkins to Rebecca and looked at her. He was shaking with anger and tension but it slowly died away as he seemed to wake from some nightmare of his own and saw before him a mole so hurt in spirit that his anger and pain was nothing. He thought slowly, ‘Is this Rebecca?’

He was appalled by how thin she was, how stooped. Was this Cairn’s Rebecca? The same he had met here by the Stone? There was puzzled entreaty in her eyes and he saw with utter clarity that she had been so hurt in some way that she could not stand his anger with Mekkins, or the threat in his voice. Words formed very slowly in his mind and when they were ready he said them.

‘It’s all right.’ Then, more softly, ‘It’s all right.’ He paused and then said, as if he were calling out from some depth in which he was trapped: ‘Rebecca?’ He advanced just a fraction and reached out a paw towards her. ‘Rebecca?’ Mekkins crouched quite still. It seemed to him that he could hear two moles calling out to each other from some lost place of their own and, more important, they seemed to hear each other. The Stone rose high above them all, most of it black with shadow, but with a thin line of moonlight delineating one plunging edge of it. When he looked again at Bracken and Rebecca, they were even closer together, Rebecca speaking to him as if he were Comfrey, which in a way he was; while he spoke to her with a gentleness Mekkins had never heard an adult male speak with before, except to a pup, a tiny lost daughter perhaps. Rebecca seemed to be crying, or sobbing, or was she laughing? She was doing something, at least. Then they were nuzzling each other, snouting softly at each other and whether the sounds they made were of tears or joy, sobs or laughter, Mekkins could not tell. They were the sounds of discovered love.

‘It’s Longest Night!’ thought Mekkins to himself, filled suddenly with a sense of its joyous mystery and witnessing for himself the power of the Stone to make moles see each other. ‘It’s Longest Night!’ Involuntarily he began to sing a little song to himself and wander around the clearing to get a view of the Stone on the side that was lit by the moon.

Beneath it, Rebecca and Bracken seemed almost still, for Rebecca’s nuzzlings were of the gentlest, quietest sort, while Bracken’s paw caresses were of the softest and most tender. ‘It’s Longest Night!’ said Bracken to her. ‘Do you realise?’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, I do! Mekkins,’ she called across the clearing, ‘do you know what tonight is?’

He answered with a Marsh End ditty, and Rebecca started to laugh with a hint of the old freedom Mekkins had thought he would never hear again, the laughter that put hope into a mole’s heart. But it was deeper and quieter than it had once been. She stopped suddenly and turned again to Bracken and just looked at him. And he looked at her. ‘Why, she understands!’ he was thinking.

‘He knows!’ she said to herself.

‘Where are the worms, then?’ said Mekkins. ‘Where’s the feast? I don’t know about you, Rebecca, but I ain’t come all the way up ’ere just to sing a song and get no food. Where is it, then?’

Bracken almost fell over himself thinking how he could get the best worms and other things together in the shortest possible time, while at the same time thinking that his burrow wasn’t big enough for all of them—or was it?—and what was the best way to take them, and try to sing a song as well; while Rebecca kept laughing and looking serious and then a little sad, and then dancing a bit, and Mekkins was thinking there had never been such a good spot or such nice moles as this spot and these moles, at that particular moment… Oh! surely there weren’t three more excited or happy moles in the whole of Duncton Wood, and any one of them would have been hard put to it to explain quite why! Except… well… it was Longest Night, of course! When a mole realises there are other things, bigger things, than even the biggest fears and most terrible worries. That’s the magic of it, that’s its mystery. And so, with a song and a dance in his steps, Bracken led them out of the Stone clearing and down the tunnels to his biggest burrow.

‘Well, that was some feast, that was!’ declared Mekkins sometime deep in the night, paws on his stomach and full contentment on his face. And with that, his eyes closed, his head began to nod and his mouth fell gently open as he gave himself up to a deep and delicious sleep.

He might equally have said, ‘That was some occasion, that was!’ for surely the Ancient System had not been within sound of such tale-telling, singing, joking, guzzling, speechifying (mainly by Mekkins) and laughing, smiling, grinning (mainly by Bracken) and rhyming, molelore, and enchantment (Rebecca’s) in generations. What excitement for Mekkins and Rebecca to enter tunnels burrowed into the chalk soil, with its grey-white shadows, which made a mole feel close to the past and the Stone; what a joy for Bracken to hear the sound of friendly moles in his tunnels, which he had burrowed in isolation and shared only with his own silence until now.

They all asked each other dozens of questions and listened spellbound to each other’s tales, Rebecca hardly daring to breathe when Bracken described to her his first entry into the Chamber of Dark Sound, while Bracken laughed to hear how the story of the Stone Mole had grown to such proportions all over the system. As for Mekkins, his real joy was to see something of the old Rebecca return, though it was a richer, less impetuous sense of life that she now had. And to see that there was something between these two young moles that gave joy to an older mole like him to see, and which anymole with half a heart would want to cherish and protect. But he wondered if it was just something that had happened on Longest Night and which, in the morning, might not seem quite so powerful as it did now. ‘Still, a mole mustn’t go spoiling the present by fearing the future,’ he thought to himself, and so, more than content with the joy of the night, he finally fell asleep.

Bracken, on one side of the main burrow, and Rebecca on the other, both with their snouts between their paws, fell into thinking the warm, random thoughts of the contented tired. Mekkins laughing, spring, dangers past, Rose, Rune, Rue, echoing tunnels. Curlew’s eyes, Comfrey, Cairn, Cairn, oh Cairn, the Stone, what a time it’d been and how much had happened.

‘Bracken?’

‘Mmm?’ Her voice sounded so good in his burrow. He wanted her to repeat his name again.

‘Bracken? Do you believe in the Stone?’

He did not think about the answer but rather wallowed with it in an image of the Stone, wondering what the question meant. He could say he didn’t know, and that was true; but it wasn’t really, because he knew there was something there. Why, there was so much he hadn’t told them. He had got as far as the circular tunnel with the seven entrances into the central part, but after that he had felt it unwise to go on and had steered the conversation away.

‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘Do you?’

She wanted to say ‘No’, to shout ‘No!’ because she didn’t, she couldn’t, it had let her litter die, it had let those talons come down, there was no Stone, there was nothing, nothing; except that an image of Comfrey came to her suddenly and she saw that there was something. There was so much they hadn’t talked about, she and Bracken, she thought to herself.

She raised her head off her paws and looked at him, and found that he was looking at her so deeply that her body seemed to fall away and only her heart or her soul was there; while it seemed to Bracken, when she raised her head to look at him, that there was nothing he could not tell her if she wanted to know, and that most of all, he would like to tell her about the Stone, for that was finally where everything, for good or ill, seemed to be.

He started to say her name again and to move a little towards her, but then he looked beyond her to the entrance to the burrow and thought beyond that to the tunnels he had created, and beyond them to the secret way he had made to the circular tunnel, and on beyond, racing along left and right, into the labyrinths with echoes all around and his skin and fur, his whole body, calling to the Stone, and great shadows of roots, great falls and rises of roots, silent and completely motionless, while beyond them, calling him, beyond them…

Bracken got up and, without looking back to Rebecca, went to the entrance, snouting down it towards where the secret tunnels lay. Rebecca followed him silently as if they were one mole, not two, both moving together down the tunnels towards something that pulled them from the direction of the Stone. They moved quite fast but completely without effort and there was no fear at all, just a certainty that somewhere ahead the Stone was expecting them.

As they ran into the ins and outs of Bracken’s confusing tunnels to the centre, they could both feel the Ancient System alive before them, stretching far beyond in tunnel after tunnel, alive with the warm spirit of Longest Night. There was no fear at all.

Bracken led on into the circular tunnel and turned right through one of the flint entrances and into the labyrinth of echoes, pausing for a moment for Rebecca to catch up. The pattering of her paws echoed on into the darkness ahead of them and she whispered, ‘Listen. Listen! Oh, it’s so beautiful. Listen!’

Bracken ran now into the sound of the echoes, twisting and turning each way and every way towards the roots, not even checking the way he went with his memory, for he no longer needed to, he could hear the way ahead, he knew the way, he knew the way. His Rebecca was close with him, her paws pattering with his, her warmth behind him, they were twisting and turning, weaving and wending their way together, as one mole, running as one, no effort, their bodies in unison.

‘Oh, listen!’ he could hear her whispering, or hear the echoes of her whisper whispering, ‘Listen, listen, my love, my love… ’ deeper and deeper into the labyrinths until the confusion of whispering echoes was all about them but they were one mole together, so beautiful, so beautifully echoing around them until at last they were there by the roots, shadows and falls of rising roots as silent and utterly motionless as the trees on the surface in the still night to which they belonged.

‘Listen, my love, listen!’ whispered Rebecca, running ahead of him without pause and entering first among the great roots which rose massive about her, with Bracken following her paws, following her warmth, following his Rebecca, my love my love, the echoes following them both from the labyrinths behind them, fading away behind as they entered deeper and deeper among the roots, one mole running, moving as one, each mole knowing the way as one. The roots grew bigger and thicker, twining about this way and that, seeming to open before them, the sound of their silence all about them, the sound of silence running ahead of them, Rebecca running on without fear and Bracken behind and fissures in front and over them, over them, on and round, and through and under and over and beyond and on past the roots for shadow after shadow, each twist falling straight, each turn not a turn, the route so easy, so easy for them both together.

Then, as suddenly as they had entered the Chamber of Roots, they reached its end, which was a massive impregnable wall rising up into darkness and made of hard chalk subsoil with great nodules of flint poking out of it like the snouts of huge moles. Their eyes travelled from one brooding shape to another, and then behind them, back to the mass of roots that now seemed quite impassable but through which, somehow, they had come. It was a fearsome sight but neither Bracken nor Rebecca felt fear, for they now looked at the ancient world about them as if they were pups in a world in which harm did not exist.

Bracken now took the lead, turning left along the wall and following its rough and ancient surface round, and round, until they came, as he knew they would without knowing, to an entrance to a tunnel. It was small, crudely burrowed by somemole for whom shape and form no longer mattered. Its floor sloped roughly downward, twisting among the flints that were held in the chalk and determined the detail, though not the general direction, of the tunnel.

From beyond it an ancient sound came, the sound that had been heard for whole ages and eras before even moles roamed the earth; the sound that accompanies the rise and fall, and rise again, of trees and woods and whole forests of trees. The sound of an ancient tree whose huge trunk carries the vibrations of both life and death. The sound of a tree whose roots are alive on the outside and carry life up into the new wood and branches but whose central core is now dry and sacrificed and whose hollow secret darkness stretching high out above the surface may be the home of bats or insects, butterflies or birds, but which below ground, where Bracken and Rebecca were, only carries the sound of a sleeping life that waits to be reborn in the wood’s decay.

They had arrived at the roots of the tree that encircled the Stone in the centre of the clearing. The tunnel now was burrowed out between living and dead roots—the dead roots’ stillness being the peace against which the life of the living roots was set. The roots plunged down into the ancient tunnel, forcing Bracken and Rebecca to squeeze round or between them, on and on, now more slowly and with a deepening sense of being at one with each other and the system that radiated all about them.

The further they advanced along the tunnel, the more its walls seemed to be made up of roots as well as chalk, so that they had the feeling that the tree was all around them, the final guardian of the Stone.

The tunnel grew smaller about them, the dryness of its walls now catching their fur as they advanced and its sound deepened and hollowed ahead of them so that Bracken slowed still more, recognising from its pattern that ahead of them lay a chamber greater than any he had discovered in the Ancient System so far.

There was a mass of debris and dust ahead that blocked the lower half of the tunnel and over whose top Bracken could not see. Cautiously he pushed it forward with his right paw, trying to flatten it down a bit, but it just fell forward and away, the debris sliding away from him in an avalanche, dust rising, and then a long, long silence before, far below them, it cascaded and echoed down on to some unknown, unvisited floor. As the dust cleared, they saw ahead of them the vast round of the old tree’s central hollow, which rose above them to unknown heights of ancient wood, and below to where the debris had fallen. The tunnel gave way to a precipitous path torn out of the side of the hollow and round which they started now to go, the wall of soft wood on their right flank, a void of darkness on their left. It spiralled round and down, and they followed it slowly, feeling as if they were travelling into a past that held in its waiting silence the future as well.

Then Bracken stopped and, half turning back to Rebecca—the narrow path would allow him no more movement than that—he pointed a talon at a sight ahead of them that made her gasp with wonder.

It was a massive jutting, jagged corner of stone, the Stone, around which the tree had girt itself and whose roots had pushed and pulled at it so that in their embrace the great Stone had tilted up and forward towards the west, towards Uffington, until here, deep below ground, the corner of the base on which it had originally stood had risen off the ground and ridden into the hollow depth of the tree itself.

The path traversed right down to the Stone, and then under it, leaving the wall of the hollow as it followed the massive, and now dead, root that had first, as a tendril thinner than a single hair of fur, crept under the Stone so long ago.

Into this holy secret place Bracken and Rebecca now moved, the base of the Stone now actually above them and plunging down ahead of them to the very centre of the Stone and the Ancient System itself.

Then the path widened on to a floor, if floor it was that was half chalk, half soil, half debris, all crossed and intertwined with the arms and bent haunches of long-dead roots. The Stone’s base was above them still, but as they advanced further, clambering over the ancient obstructions in their way, they saw that it plunged suddenly down some distance ahead to form a kind of hollow or cave beyond which, no doubt, the furthest part of the Stone had buried itself finally into the chalk, mirroring in its depth the heights of the other part of the base which tilted above them.

They could only see the top half of this hollow because the roots were bigger than they were and they had to climb over each one. The nearer they got, the more they could see that one last great root had grown across most of the hollow, sealing it off at the bottom and leaving only a thin gap at the top. As they got nearer they both stopped at once.

‘Listen!’ whispered Bracken.

‘Look!’ whispered Rebecca.

As they crouched there, they heard from behind them the soft sound of the ancient tree, stirring and stressing in slow, long sounds, sounds more beautiful than either of them had ever heard, for in its movement it carried both the sound and the silence of life itself: the sound of old winds, the sound of new life, the sound of moisture, the sound of warm wood, of cold wind, of the sun.

While they could see above them, on the roof of the hollow cave blocked by the root, a glimmering light like the sun shimmering from a moving stream up on to the gnarled bark of a willow that stretches out over it.

Bracken moved forward and began to burrow under the root—which was easy, because the ground was loose and dry while the root itself was soft with age. Rebecca joined him, burrowing silently by his side, each pushing out the soil and debris behind them, advancing towards the sealed cave of the Stone. It was easy, so easy. Until at last one of Bracken’s burrowing thrusts pushed forward into nothing and he stopped and held his paw there and turned to Rebecca, who stretched her own paw forward and through, and together they pulled the last of the soil and root seal down.

As they did so their fur, their outstretched talons, their eyes, the tunnel about them… all was covered in a glimmering white light, whose source lay on the floor of the hollow cave into which they had found a way.

It was a stone, no bigger than a mole’s paw, oval, smooth and translucent, and from its centre came a light that was not bright like the sun, nor cold like the moon, nor fierce like an owl’s eye. Rather, it was a light like that which fills a raindrop caught by a soft, warm morning sun. As they advanced towards it, it seemed to change a thousand times each second, as the quality of light on a spring day changes with each station of the sun and shift in humidity in the air. Its glimmering had the endless fascination of the shifting windsound in an ash tree, whose leaves seem to dissect the wind into a thousand different whispers.

It’s rays shone and shot about the burrow in which it lay, lighting up first this side and then that, casting shadow here and chasing shadow there, always changing, never ending.

Bracken slowly, fearfully, stretched out a talon to touch it, but Rebecca ran to him and pulled him back, whispering, ‘Don’t. There’s no need to touch it.’

But Bracken only smiled, for never in his life had he seen or dreamed of anything so beautiful or felt at such peace, and he reached out again. Rebecca’s paw rested on his shoulder, her breath held still, for she, too, wanted to touch the stone. Then, as his paw touched it, its light was suddenly gone, and the burrow was plunged into a darkness so thick that a mole could not breathe.

Rebecca gasped, Bracken pulled back, and as his paw left the smooth stone, the feel of it like the softest moss on his skin, the light in the centre of the stone glimmered dimly again and then, like some creature that has curled up in defence and uncurls when the danger is gone, it slowly came to life and light once more, the light advancing about them like a new dawn.

They looked at each other in wonder, and then round at the burrow, noticing for the first time that its floor was strewn with vegetation and material so dry it fell to dust almost as they moved. Yet from it came the subtlest and the sweetest fragrances that either had ever smelt.

Verbena, feverfew, woodruff and thyme, camomile and bergamot, germander, mint, and rose… blending into the fragrance of a warm spring and a celebration of summer, with a hint of the fruits of autumn and a touch of winter snow. It was so subtle, yet so essential to the burrow, that Rebecca stretched out her paws as if to touch it, and failing, turned back to Bracken and touched him.

She caressed him with a wonder that made her gasp and sigh, for by the glimmering light of the stone he seemed more beautiful than anymole she had ever seen. His fur grey and his eyes soft. Bracken turned to her and touched the soft fur of her face, his eyes alight with a sense of the life that he saw within her which was a force and power he had never before felt within himself. They moved closer to each other, the stone to their side and the wonder of the world within each other’s gaze.

Then they crouched nuzzling each other and sighing, saying words of trust and love, joy and intent, the jumbled words of love whose nonsense makes a greater sense than any reasoned sentence ever can.

They drifted in and out of their newfound world, talking and laughing softly together, Bracken sometimes raising himself and looking down at Rebecca, running his talons through her fur, almost shoving and pushing at her as if he disbelieved that anything so beautiful could be at once outside his body and within his heart. They were pup and mother to each other, father and mate, friend and lover all at once, coming closer and closer to each other in their discovery of trust and love.

And then, surrounded by the silence of the Stone, they began to talk of the things that had been in their hearts so heavily for so long and to heal each other of their memories. Rebecca’s lost litter, Bracken’s isolation in the Ancient System, Comfrey, their son by circumstance, and Cairn, oh Cairn. Sometimes they wept, sometimes their tears were dried by their laughter, sometimes they reached out to be touched, sometimes they lay still, but always the light of the stone glimmered and shone in the burrow about them.

Bracken told her about the death of Cairn, repeating the words he had said to him about Rebecca at the end: ‘She is the wild flower that grows in spring, she is as graceful as the swaying branches of the ash, as light as pussy willow caught by sun, she is…’ and as he talked, using words he half remembered, he began to say them to her direct, his body against hers, her paws on his face, his snout to her neck fur, her body caressingly warm against him. ‘Yours is the love of life itself, yours is the life that flows from wood to pasture, from hill to vale; yours is the love in the tunnels of Uffington; yours is the love in the hearts of the White Moles.’

‘That’s what I told him Rebecca, that’s what I said,’ whispered Bracken to her. ‘I could feel his pain, the terrible pain they made him feel; and I could feel his love for you, I could feel it…’

‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I know, my own wildflower, my sweet love, I know… I love you, I love you,’ she said, and he said, endlessly, over and over again.

At their side the light from the centre of the stone flared and flickered all around, and cast their shadows out on to the roots and walls of the chamber beyond the burrow where they crouched, where they mingled into one shadow, one shape, which shimmered and moved with the light. How many minutes or hours they stayed together in this state of loving grace nomole can say, or cares to try. But there came a time when, just as they had moved with one accord on their journey there, so they simultaneously began to be restless and to lose their sense of being at one with each other and the Stone, in whose depth they had found such peace. Perhaps it was their imagination, but the stone in the burrow seemed to flicker and glimmer more intermittently.

Bracken suddenly found he was hungry, Rebecca that she wanted to get back to Comfrey. They began to feel the love they had touched slipping away. Both of them tried to reach out for it with new endearments of love and passion, deeper sighs and heavier caresses, for it was too sweet to lose. But it seemed to them to be fleeing away to some world they could not reach, whereas, in truth, it was they who were fleeing away from it as they returned to the world of time and worry, fears and fretting heaviness.

Bracken turned to look at the stone again, for he knew he must soon leave and he wanted to remember it. After all, this was the heart of the system he had sought so long to explore. He looked at it now (as it seemed to him) more objectively, from the illusory world of time he and Rebecca were so reluctantly reinhabiting, and it no longer seemed quite so smooth or quite so oval as it had before. There was a delicate whorl of interlocking shadows on it… not shadows, but carvings, or rather embossments, like those he had seen before on a cruder and grander scale on the wall of the Chamber of Dark Sound.

‘I know those patterns,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I know their power. If you hum, they will make a music back to you.’ He half reached out towards the stone, as if warming his paws at its light, and began to hum. The burrow was soon filled with sounds in return, some far lighter and more beautiful than the most wonderful he had heard from the wall, others far darker and more unbearable.

Rebecca began to writhe and gasp as the beginnings of a scream formed inside her, while Bracken felt fear and panic overtake him. He stopped humming and reached out involuntarily to the stone, as if trying to stop the sound coming from it, and as he touched it, the light plunged out once more, casting them not only into darkness but into a depth of despair—a sense of loss—that brought horror to them and made them both grasp for each other instinctively.

As Bracken’s paw left to touch Rebecca, the light slowly returned again and their sense of loss began to fade. This time Bracken could feel the impression of the stone on his paw, not smooth like moss, but more like an embossed abrasion, like a pain that had a shape to it. Yet when he looked, there was nothing there.

‘Come on, Rebecca, we must go,’ he said, and without looking back he turned out of the burrow, down the big tunnel they had dug, and away under the rising ceiling of the Stone. Rebecca followed, more distressed than he, and kept close behind, fearful that he would go too fast. But this feeling lasted only for a short time and when they had climbed the root path back to the hollow of the tree and the Stone was behind them, they stopped and looked around, surprised again at its size and beginning to wonder what it was they had seen, and felt.

‘Will we ever come here again?’ asked Rebecca.

Bracken whispered that he didn’t know, that he didn’t understand quite where they had been, and started again on the trek up the path. The sound in the tree hollow was now more stressed and great shatterings of straining noise cascaded about them, like the sound of lightning they could not see, great rumblings of a power so great that they felt they were nothing in the middle of a storm. There was windnoise, too, and the path ahead of them seemed to tremble or sway, not much but enough to suggest that out on the surface a morning wind was already awakening and stirring the tree that guarded the Stone.

As they reached the entrance to the hollow, they heard even more fearful sounds coming from the tunnel beyond, and as they ran down it, faster and faster, they saw that the roots of the tree were beginning to stress and strain. They ran and pushed, and Bracken herded Rebecca through the roots threatening to crush them, on and on now, anxious to get out. They felt they had stolen the sight of something sacred and the noise was pursuing them to take it back.

When they got past the outer roots of the great tree, they made their way down the rough tunnel back to the roots, but it was like running from the talons of an owl into the fatal rushing of a flood. For the Chamber of Roots was now filled with sinister slidings and pullings, terrible rackings and stretchings, crushings and stranglings, as the mass of roots, which had been so still when they first passed through them, started to respond to the wind on the surface.

Bracken looked up to the roof of the chamber, wondering if they could escape that way, by burrowing up somehow on to the surface—but it was too high, and the jags of thrusting flint too difficult to negotiate.

Rebecca ran forward to the heaving roots and Bracken followed to stop her. ‘It’s impossible!’ he shouted over the noise. ‘We’ll be lost forever in there.’

But Rebecca twisted away from his grasp and ran between the first roots, shouting back to him, ‘Think of the stone we saw, think of its protection…’ and she was gone among them.

He stretched a paw after her, hesitating for a moment, but then, feeling again the strange itching impression of the stone on his paw, he remembered the light of the stone and ran after her. They twisted their way among the treacherous roots—each movement forward just in time to escape the crushing behind them of roots between which they had passed, a path opening up before them as roots parted just in time for them to escape the opening of fissures in the ground or the crashing down of debris from above. On and on they went, Bracken following his Rebecca, Rebecca feeling that Bracken was pressing her on from behind, two moles as one, one mole escaping the roots. Always thinking of, and clutching on to, the memory of the stone and its glimmering light, always trying to hold that in their hearts to keep at bay the horror around them. Each moment held a terrible death for them, each moment was a miraculous escape, until their breathing came gasping and desperate and they felt they could not run on through the racking darkness of the roots. On and on until they were led forward by instinct and trust as a blind pup might find its mother’s teats.

Then they were clear, back to the entrance into the labyrinth of echoes, the roots reaching out at them from behind, trying to pull them back as Bracken led them out through the labyrinths into the sudden, unbelievable silence of the circular tunnel.

Without a word to each other they wended their way back to Bracken’s burrow, where they found Mekkins still asleep, paws curled to his belly and a contented purr coming from his mouth. They looked at each other in deep silence, there being no words to express the joy and then the dark they had experienced together.

In the peace and homely comfort of his own burrow, Bracken could barely believe that he had seen what he had, and the memory, both good and bad, seemed already to be slipping away. Remembering it was too much for him to want to face.

For Rebecca, however, the memory was clear and she guessed that they had seen something more wonderful than some moles ever dream of. She touched Bracken with her paw to tell him that it was real and that he must not let it slip away, but he only looked at her in a kind of dawning fear, compounded partly of a sense of loss of what he could not quite remember, partly from having faced for a moment a truth he could face no longer.

Then they slept the fitful sleep of the deeply tired, waking only to the sound of Mekkins’ singing as he groomed and stretched himself in preparation for leaving with Rebecca.

They said few words—indeed, Mekkins said most of the farewells. But they touched again and Bracken knew that Rebecca and he had, for a time at least, been at one with one another and that a part of himself was for ever in her heart, as part of her would always be in his.

He saw them as far as the Stone clearing where, for a brief moment, they looked up at the great Stone, leaning into the morning wind, the beech branches waving against a cold white sky above it.

When they were gone, he turned back to his tunnel and down to his burrow where he crouched in silence, a sense of wonder and disbelief mixing with a terrible feeling of loss. His left paw vaguely itched or burned, but when he looked at it, there was nothing there. But the irritation stayed with him and eventually, with his right paw, he tried to scratch the pattern that he had felt on the stone on to the burrow floor, an interlacing of lines and circles. Again and again he traced it in the dust, scratching it out with his paw until slowly it seemed to come right. Again and again, until, like the tunnels in the Chamber of Echoes, he knew it by heart. The itch began to fade and as it did so, he began to sink into a deep sleep, his right paw still extended where it was tracing the pattern of the stone yet again, before he finally slept.

Chapter Twenty-Three

With the passing of Longest Night, which he spent completely alone, Mandrake sank finally into obsessive madness. He ranged about his tunnels, or Barrow Vale, muttering and cursing violently, often in the rough hard tongue of Siabod, the language of his fathers. Occasionally he caught some unfortunate mole unawares and—whether young or old, male or female—would attack it savagely for some imagined wrong it had done, leaving it wounded or, more than once, dead.

Trembling moles would hide in tunnels and burrows as he passed heavily by, wondering at his continual calling out for Sarah and Rebecca, whom he no longer seemed to think were dead but gone to the Stone Mole in the Ancient System, leaving him alone and forsaken. As the days slipped by into cold January, he could be heard sounding curses in his own language: ‘Gelert, helgi Siabod, a’m dial am eu colled trwy ddodi ei felltith ar Faenwadd Duncton’—‘May Gelert, hound of Siabod, avenge for me their loss by bringing his curse on the Stone Mole of Duncton.’ Gelert was the legendary hound of Siabod who was believed to protect its holy stones, though none in Duncton knew of his name then.

Any lesser mole than Mandrake would have been killed by other moles, or driven out of the system, but there was none in Duncton prepared to start a fight with him. And only one—Rune—with the courage even to talk to him.

Rune listened with almost a purr of pleasure to his ravings about the Stone Mole and his threats to summon the mythical Gelert. He knew that with each day that passed, the system was slipping out of Mandrake’s talons and into his own. It was just a matter of time and opportunity.

Inevitably, plots were made against Mandrake, especially since the murder of Rebecca’s litter, which had appalled so many moles, as Rune had hoped it would. Rune positively licked his lips with pleasure when dithering henchmole after henchmole came to him with some feeble plot or other. ‘A group of us feel, and it’s only a feeling, and we wouldn’t do anything without your approval and support, Rune, sir, that the system is overdue for a change…’

‘Well, I’m sure that as long as Mandrake is here in good health and in charge we none of us need worry…’ Rune would reply hypocritically to would-be revolutionaries in his maddeningly measured and reasonable way. And they would retreat, murmuring to each other ‘Rune’s too loyal for his own good!’ or ‘Far too modest, that Rune—doesn’t realise his own worth.’

But if there was going to be a revolution (and that was precisely what Rune intended there should be), it would be done in his own way and in his own time. And as Mandrake’s ravings about the Stone Mole got worse, he began to see that there was a way, and its path lay towards the Ancient System.

So the shadows on the system continued to fall, and with them the bitterest weather of winter came. The first snow fell after two cold days in the second week of January, and though it did not stick, the skies remained grey and cold, and the wood silent but for the wind. Then, in the third week of January, it turned even more bitter and thick snow finally came, the silent brightness it brought to the wood almost a relief after the previous gloom.

The winds drove the snow into the tree trunks so that on some of them, especially the rougher-barked oak, the snow formed a vertical line on the windward side, making the trees seem even higher and more ethereal than they normally did in snow. The brambles, which retained their leaves through much of the winter, were bowed down with white, while the orange stalks of the dead bracken, lost until now against the leaf-fall of autumn, stood out brightly against the snow.

While, but for the occasional dropping of dead twigs and the odd branch under the weight of snow, the wood fell into a cold, white silence.

The shadows cast by Mandrake’s rule did not fall on all burrows equally. Some, like the tunnels of Rue and of Curlew, were brighter for the presence of growing pups. Rue’s four were lively and, by the third week of January, beginning to have minds of their own, chattering and squabbling among themselves so much that Rue was glad that they were able to look after themselves so much more, only clustering around her when they had had enough of each other’s company and fancied a snuggle.

Curlew’s burrow was quieter, not only because there was just a single pup there, but because he was far less advanced than Rue’s other four.

Comfrey was thin and nervous, sticking close to Rebecca or Curlew, or both if he could, and by the time the snow came had not learned to talk with any fluency. He would try as best he could, but the words came out stutteringly and he often broke off in mid-sentence as if he had lost interest in what he was trying to say.

‘R-R-Rebecca? I want the…’ and he would trail off, looking somewhere else, as Rebecca looked up inquiringly and asked him what it was he wanted. Often he seemed to have forgotten.

Mekkins stayed on for only two days after he had delivered Rebecca back safely—just time enough to confirm that the change for the better that he saw coming over her on Longest Night, whose causes he did not fully understand, was lasting. Then he left them to it—partly because no male likes to be away from his own burrow too long in January, when the females are just beginning to get restless for the mating season and the males are beginning to extend their territory.

So, when the deep snow came, it was just Rebecca, Curlew and a fascinated Comfrey there.

‘Where has the g-g-ground gone?’ asked Comfrey when he first saw the snow. Then ‘Where did it come from? What is it? H-how long has it come for?’

His slowness of speech did not stop him asking a dozen questions, many of which neither Rebecca nor Curlew could answer. But Rebecca did her best—for she remembered her own insatiable curiosity as a pup about the wood—and to Curlew’s delight the two would sit and talk away, the burrow filled with Rebecca’s laughter and Comfrey’s hesitating, serious voice. He never laughed and rarely smiled, yet managed to convey a sense of excitement and fascination with the world about him. But he hated Rebecca to leave the burrow for too long and would stand by the burrow entrance, looking miserably up the tunnel, and nothing Curlew could say would take the worried furrows from the thin fur on his forehead.

When the snows came and the males in the system began to be more aggressive, Rune knew that he must soon take a chance on his own revolution. The time was right, for there was nothing like a bit of premating aggression to put the henchmoles into the right frame of mind to follow his lead and oust Mandrake. But it had to be done subtly.

His opportunity came during a conversation with Mandrake—‘monologue’ is a better word—which convinced Rune that the system’s long-standing leader was, indeed, demented.

‘Have you see the Stone Mole, Rune?’ asked Mandrake, having summoned him into his tunnels with a roaring shout around Barrow Vale. ‘Well?’

‘I? No… I have not,’ said Rune carefully.

Mandrake smiled a terrible smile of triumph.

‘Ah! But I have, you see. I know!’

Rune was a study in unctuous silence.

‘I have spoken to the Stone Mole,’ added Mandrake softly. ‘I know he means harm to the system and I have told him I will kill him.’ Mandrake’s black eyes widened horribly and he nodded his head. ‘I will. Yes, I will. I’ll kill him.’

There was a long silence.

‘Only you could do such a thing,’ began Rune soothingly, wondering if his opportunity to get Mandrake up to the Ancient System and isolate him there, which was his intention, was now coming.

Mandrake grew irrationally angry at this: he did not need Rune to tell him what he could do or could not do. What mole was Rune to say such a thing? Always poking his snout into things. Perhaps he was the one who had told the Stone Mole to take Sarah away, and Rebecca? Wouldn’t have put it past him. Slimy little bastard was Rune. Interfering little hypocrite. Mandrake turned to Rune to strike him with his talons so that he would learn what not to say… But Rune was gone. Rune was not crouching where he had been. There, there were only black shadows where Rune had been, shades of darkness where Runemole Rune had gone. And there would be, for Mandrake was not even facing where Rune had been and still was; Mandrake did not want to put his talons into anymole again; Mandrake was mumbling into a dark corner of his own imagining, mumbling to himself in his loneliness.

He knew the Stone Mole was waiting for him and he was afraid, and he had never felt fear, no not that, not fear. He didn’t like fear, so he would go to that ancient place where the voice in the Midsummer Night was and where the old mole died, never even struggling, no fear in his eyes. Old whatwashisname? Before Sarah, before Rebecca, remember? He had been a pup but he couldn’t remember or could he member, member his talons soft like Rebecca’s had been when she was born, he membered that, no blizzard though. But snow, now. ‘They don’t know the cold. Only Siabod moles know cold. Take them up Cwmoer and the whole bloody lot would freeze. Gelert would have a feast, see? What did Y Wrach used to say? “Crai by mryd rhag lledfryd heno.” Melancholy as hell she was, the old bitch. Call this Duncton snow cold? They should try the ice on Castell y Gwynt.’

Mandrake’s massive body moved uncomfortably in the dark, his own dark, aching with the lifelong effort of seeing beyond the whirling blizzard in his mind and failing, always not quite seeing, but remembering that he might have, with Sarah, who surely could hear him calling when he took her and he tried to say something but his body and the darkness wouldn’t let him. Yes, she heard him calling out of the blizzard, oh Sarah, she heard him out of the Siabod ice. He membered that. Or was it Rebecca? With Rebecca. On and in Rebecca when she heard him… yes, she did! She heard him. ‘Where is she now? Where is she?’

Rune watched the slow tears on Mandrake’s face pitilessly and called them madness. Mandrake had raised his talons to strike the wall and then muttered, and now turned mumbling and with tears wetting his rough old face fur. ‘He’s past it,’ gloated Rune.

‘You must go to the Ancient System and find the Stone Mole,’ said Rune finally and bravely, ‘and you must kill him for us.’

Mandrake looked at his talons, twisted with fighting and killing, and his snout lowered. He was thinking of when they were in Rebecca’s fur, his Rebecca.

‘Yes,’ he said wearily. ‘Will you come with me, Rune?’

‘Yes,’ said Rune, thinking that a lot of henchmoles would not be far behind either.

‘Yes, you come along, Rune, you might help me find Sarah.’ He wasn’t going to mention Rebecca because he didn’t want Rune helping him to find her. No.

How was Rue to know that her youngsters had mischievously burrowed a way into Hulver’s old tunnels? What wisdom could ever have told her that Mandrake and Rune would happen that way? When trouble comes calling, a mole had better not waste time asking such questions else the impossibility of answering them and so finding some reason for tragedy will drive him, or her, mad.

But one day, when the world was quiet because the snow was thick and all the pups had gone off somewhere, Rue was suddenly alert with a mother’s foreknowledge that something is dreadfully wrong. It was Violet who came running, frightened as a pup should never be frightened.

‘What’s happened?’ Rue asked urgently.

‘There’s two big moles and they’ve got Beech and they’re hitting him.’ Rue started to run the way Violet had come, calling out, ‘Show me.’

What Violet had reported was not strictly true. Mandrake and Rune had entered Hulver’s burrows and gone straight to the sealed tunnel that led into the Ancient System. They had not even considered that the tunnels would be occupied, and the lack of sound and smell seemed to prove them right.

Mandrake started without ado to burrow around the flint seal and, quite quickly, made sufficient of a passage to get through to the other side if he wanted. He had sniffed the cold air of the Ancient System, looked into its depths and was working himself up into a rage preparatory to setting off by himself into its silent depths, to root out and kill the Stone Mole.

Then Rune heard a rustle behind them and caught sight of the youngsters, watching. Mandrake, unpredictably, laughed. Rune, predictably, saw as quick as a talon thrust that there might be some use for these youngsters. They were all of them about to run off, but there was such ice in Rune’s gaze that they froze trembling to the wall—all except Violet, who was behind and slipped back into the shadows.

Mandrake came out of the tunnel he had made, peered heavily at them, shook his head, and was gone into the blackness of the Ancient System with a chuckle and a roar, leaving Rune with the youngsters.

Beech was nearest, so Rune picked on him. ‘Well, well,’ he said sneeringly at him, ‘and who are we, then?’

‘Beech, sir,’ whispered Beech. Rune stretched out a talon and cuffed him hard enough to hurt.

‘Really?’ smiled Rune, hitting him again. The other youngsters’ eyes widened in fear and they started to tremble.

‘Who’s your mother then, Beech, sir?’ said Rune, approaching near him so that Beech felt he was being engulfed by darkness. Beech couldn’t take his eyes off Rune’s; Coltsfoot and Pipple simply stared at him in horror as if they were transfixed by a talon to the tunnel wall.

‘She’s Rue, sir,’ said Beech. He looked round at his brothers and sister for help, his mouth trembling in his struggle not to cry, for he thought that if he did, he might be punished still more. It was at this point that Violet slipped away to run and find Rue.

Until Rue’s name was mentioned, Rune was merely enjoying himself putting terror into the hearts of these youngsters; once it came out, his mind began to race with possibilities. The opportunity he was seeking, and which he knew would come eventually if he was patient enough, had arrived.

Rue was the mole who had first reported hearing the Stone Mole in the Ancient System—a report that in Rune’s view was hysterical and unfounded. But that was no matter—her name was remembered sympathetically in Barrow Vale. What a terrible thing it would be—would it not?—if Mandrake was proved to have killed some of Rue’s litter—a litter she had bravely reared up on the slopes all by herself, et cetera and so forth. And after he had done away with Rebecca’s brood! Rune looked down at the pathetic Beech, thinking that there was nothing like fear to confuse a mind.

Then he heard a calling and a running, the cry of a mother to her litter, and a look of hope came into the stricken eyes of little Beech. So Rue was coming, was she? Perfect timing?

With a talon thrust quicker than a pup can bleat, Rune killed Beech, his body and a few drops of blood falling in a slump against the tunnel wall.

He watched coldly when Rue arrived and a look of horror came over her face and a choking to her throat as she looked disbelievingly at Beech and then up at Rune.

‘Very sad,’ said Rune. ‘Very unpleasant. The work of Mandrake, I’m afraid, wasn’t it?’ He looked menacingly at Coltsfoot and Pipple; he could not see Violet, who was some way behind Rue and sensibly staying there. The two youngsters nodded silently. Rue could see they were terrified, too afraid even to run to her. She went to them.

Rune looked at her and said, ‘You will go to Barrow Vale and report that Mandrake has tried to kill your litter and that Rune has managed to save all but one of them. Tell them that he wants the henchmoles to muster. Tell them that Rune is coming.’

Rue started to back away, eyes wide, protectively pulling two youngsters with her.

Rune loomed towards her. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he smiled. ‘They’ll slow your progress, and anyway, I will protect them from Mandrake should he return.’ He reached out his paws for them, talons loose, and she looked into his evil eyes, every instinct telling her to push them behind her and fight… and yet, if she did, they would surely die, whereas this way, Rune’s way, there could be a chance.

‘Will they be all right?’

‘Of course,’ nodded Rune, ‘they’ll be safer here than tagging along with you. I will block up the entrance into the Ancient System, making it more difficult for Mandrake to return and then hide elsewhere in these tunnels. If Mandrake returns, which he may very soon do, I will fight him for you, for I hate him as you do, as we all do. Now the time has come to resist him, so run to Barrow Vale now, not only for your system’s sake but for your litter’s, too.’

Rue’s grasp of Coltsfoot and Pipple loosened. Perhaps he was telling the truth. She looked round for Violet, and not seeing her, decided not to mention her.

‘Take care of them,’ she whispered desperately, then she turned and ran for their lives towards Barrow Vale.

The two youngsters looked up at Rune, feeling utterly betrayed and now quite terrified. Rune looked down at them, and as his smile faded, he pulled back his paw swiftly and, with a lunge powerful enough to make him grunt a little with its effort, he stabbed Coltsfoot to death.

Pipple simply turned and ran, his tiny paws desperately trying to carry him away from Rune, who watched him go and then nonchalantly trotted after him, letting him run for a twist and turn or two of the tunnel. Unwittingly, Pipple ran straight into the place where Violet was hiding and the two simply crouched transfixed as Rune came upon them in a side tunnel.

‘Well!’ said Rune, ‘how many more of you are there?’

‘There’s four of us altogether,’ said Violet.

‘Just two left, then,’ said Rune to himself. He decided to leave one alive, just so it could tell the story to the henchmoles. Whichever one it was would be too confused to know the truth, and too terrified to tell it if he did. He wondered coldly which one to kill.

‘What are your names?’ asked Rune.

‘I’m Violet,’ said Violet, ‘and he’s Pipple.’ Pipple looked up at Rune and put his paw for safety on his sister’s flank.

‘Pipple?’ ruminated Rune. He didn’t like the name.

So he killed Pipple.

‘My name’s Mandrake,’ lied Rune to Violet, just to confuse the youngster further. And with that he went back to the main tunnel and headed off for Barrow Vale, slowly enough to let Rue get there ahead of him and create some panic before he arrived.

Violet crouched in the tunnel looking at the crumpled Pipple. His eyes were closed and his mouth hung open. ‘Pipple?’ she faltered. ‘Pipple?’ She touched him, but he didn’t move.

She ran down the tunnel, back to where they had been, and found Coltsfoot. ‘Coltsfoot?’ she said, her voice faltering in fear about the tunnel. But she didn’t move either.

Then on towards where Beech had been… surely he would be there. Yes, he was, but there was blood on him. He wasn’t like Beech any more.

Violet looked in panic around the tunnel, not even seeing the owl face that lowered down at her from the flint seal. All she knew was that she could not return down the tunnel where that big mole who had hurt Beech, Pipple and Coltsfoot had gone. She was too afraid to do that.

So she turned instead to the tunnel by the side of the flint that went into the hill where that other big mole had gone, the one who had laughed. Perhaps he would help them. He would know what to do to help Beech and Pipple and Coltsfoot. So, panicking and half sobbing, Violet clambered over the fresh earth burrowed out by Mandrake and went into the echoing depths of the Ancient System, fear behind her and Mandrake somewhere in the darkness ahead.

Rune’s plan worked. It could hardly have done otherwise. Rue had given such a garbled version of what had happened, and was in such a state of shock, that everymole became convinced that it was Mandrake who had killed one of her young, and Mandrake who was now lurking in the Ancient System, possibly with the Stone Mole himself, ready to wreak vengeance on Duncton.

Moles gathered in panic in Barrow Vale, and when Rune arrived he was greeted like the saviour he wanted to appear to be. The time, he told them, had come for the system to act. The Stone had sent Mandrake to test the system’s courage and strength and it must now act by killing him and prove to the Stone that they would not accept such an evil leader.

In the next few hours, henchmoles flocked into Barrow Vale, and even some Eastsiders, hearing the news, came and offered their help.

Rune fuelled their anger by cynically sending Rue back to her tunnels.

'With a henchmole to ‘watch over her’—to collect her young, whom he said he had had to leave there so that he could get himself to Barrow Vale quickly. The terrible story she brought back, that her young were dead or gone, which the henchmole confirmed, gave Rune the final impetus he needed to create a sense of communal outrage against Mandrake and set the moles gathered in Barrow Vale on the path to destroy Mandrake and ‘anymole still in his thrall’.

Rune made various speeches, the most predictable of which ended with the words, ‘These are troubled times and at a time when we lack a leader we must stand firm together…’

At the words ‘lack a leader’ there were cries of dissent and dismay from the attendant henchmoles, who clamoured to let him know that he was far too modest, he was their leader, would he lead them? It was finally Burrhead himself who proposed it, a suggestion Rune accepted ‘reluctantly’ and ‘for the time being’ and with the thought to himself that life can sometimes be very simple.

It was now only a matter of time before Rune would lead the henchmoles back up to the tunnel into the Ancient System and then march through its aged depths to find and kill Mandrake.

There was only one small cloud on Rune’s horizon, and that was the uncooperative attitude of the Marsh End to his new rule.

‘I see no Marshenders lending their support here in Barrow Vale,’ he said smoothly to Mekkins, who had put in an appearance to see what was going on.

‘Disease,’ lied Mekkins, taking a tip from Curlew’s methods of isolating herself. ‘Been dropping like flies in the Marsh End, they have. Often do this time of year, just before the mating season is about to start. There’s not a mole down there doesn’t want to give his support, Rune—in fact, I had to physically restrain a whole pack of them from coming up here. There’s no love lost for Mandrake down our way, you know. But I felt it was too big a risk, mate, too much trouble.’

Rune didn’t like Mekkins—far too disrespectful. Nor did he entirely believe his story. But there were other things to think about and the Marshenders’ failure to help oust Mandrake would be just the excuse he was going to need when it came to doing what he had long wanted to do—wipe out the Marshenders, Mekkins included.

As for Mekkins, he slipped quietly back to the Marsh End, where he had plans of his own to see to. He was well aware of the threat to it and had worked various ideas out, which he now intended to put into practice. At the same time, he had to think how he was going to protect Rebecca and Comfrey now that they could expect trouble down that way, and the first thing he was going to do was to work out where to move them to, for surely where they were was now too isolated and exposed should Rune and the henchmoles choose to take over the system from Mandrake.

It took two days for Mandrake to make his way to the Chamber of Dark Sound, where he stood in the centre and roared out his challenge to the Stone Mole. His noise came back a hundredfold in echoes from the carved wall with the flint owl face at its centre, but had no effect on him. His obsessions seemed to have given him a sublime courage, or ignorance, of where he was and what he was doing. He believed the Stone Mole was there and so he called out to him. He was afraid, but not of a sound that had no effect on him, and the feeling of fear was so alien to him, being Mandrake, that he could only turn and face it with his talons—a courage that few moles would have easily understood.

Violet, wandering disconsolately among the tunnels, heard the roaring and was afraid, but not thinking it came from ‘the big mole,’ redoubled her efforts to find him, hoping he would protect her from everything, and perhaps still help her siblings. She did not really understand that they were dead.

She found him eventually, sleeping in one of the entrances to the great chamber, and without ado, woke him up. Her presence confused him. She wasn’t the Stone Mole. She wasn’t Sarah. She wasn’t Rebecca. He had been a youngster himself. Yes.

She prattled on about Coltsfoot and Pipple and Beech and a big mole. She obviously knew where the Stone Mole was. Perhaps she was a spy. Cunning. But not as cunning as he. He would keep an eye on her, keep her within a talon’s reach. Yes, he would! Better still, he’d get her to show him where the Stone Mole was. Yes. Cunning and clever.

Violet could not understand him. He was alternately kind and angry. He wanted her to lead him somewhere after a stonmole, and she didn’t know what that was. So to avoid him getting angry she led him here and there among the tunnels, her tiny form ahead of his brooding mass as he muttered, ‘Cunning,’ and, ‘You’re a clever one, but not as clever as Mandrake,’ and told her stories about a mole he knew called Rebecca, his Rebecca, who did disobedient things and was with the stonemole, whatever it was.

But they were not alone in the tunnels, for another mole, who knew the ins and outs of the system better than anymole ever had, flitted from shadow to shadow, ahead and behind, looking after them round corners, watching in agonies as Mandrake threatened Violet, watching with relief when he talked more softly to her, and wondering, wondering, how to get her away from Mandrake’s talons.

It was Bracken, who had heard the roarings and had come to investigate. He had recognised Violet as his and Rue’s daughter, and was able, in horror, to piece together something of what had happened from Violet’s pathetic conversation with the demented Mandrake. And he knew that he must act very soon if she, too, was not to be killed.

Outside, the weather was as troubled and changeable as the life of the moles underground. After two days of still coldness the snow had begun to melt, falling with phuts and plops and dollops from the trees, spraying down through the branches, and pitting the snow on the floor of the wood into thousands of minicraters. Here and there a fox’s tracks wove among the trees, and where the badgers lived down on the east side, the snow was roughened and dirtied by soil and debris from their sets.

Then a moist, wet wind came, and the snow began to thaw slowly, making the ground sodden and slushy and the pastures a mixture of green and yellow grass and remnant snow in the hollows where the wind had gathered it. While out on the marshes beyond Marsh End, the snow melted into the water and mud, and at night froze and was deadly still. Then wind again, and change. Uncomfortable weather that did not know which way it was going to go.

Chapter Twenty-Four

As far as he could, Bracken always kept himself between Mandrake and the Chamber of Dark Sound, because then, if he was spotted, he could retreat to the relative safety of the central tunnels beyond the chamber, in which, should he be chased there, Mandrake would certainly lose himself.

The precaution was wise, for the moment inevitably came when Mandrake sensed his presence.

‘Shush, girl,’ he said to Violet. ‘I think I hear the Stone Mole ahead.’

Bracken froze and tried to steal away, but Mandrake had heard and was after him, all his old savage speed still there.

Bracken raced ahead, his knowledge of the tunnels making up for Mandrake’s extraordinary speed. He reached the Chamber of Dark Sound, raced across it to the seventh entrance, where the mole skeleton still lay undisturbed, but instead of running on he halted between the two great flintstones that stood either side of it and turned to face the chamber. He waited until Mandrake was about to enter and then began to hum softly up into the convolutions of the terrible owl face above. The effect was extraordinary. The noises that had so terrified him when he was in front of it now sounded out beyond him and gave him the impression of having great strength and power. His talons and shoulders seemed bigger, his sight more deadly clear. He seemed to be able to see across the chamber, which normally was not quite possible, and there to catch sight of Mandrake, halted and baffled, moving as if in slow motion, struggling forward into a sound that clearly caused him great fear and distress. Bracken watched him almost dispassionately, seeing his massive size, each limb seeming as big as a mole, the eyes red with aggression, but fearing none of it. He knew with certainty that so long as he sounded the noise, Mandrake would never be able to reach him.

But the effect of the sound was soon subtler and more evil than that. It began to make Bracken want to torment Mandrake, to hurt him, it made him feel that he really was as powerful as the owl looked; it made him want to kill Mandrake. Worse, it made him start to forget that his real aim was to get Violet away from Mandrake and the Ancient System. For his now dispassionate gaze fell not only on Mandrake but also on Violet, who had followed into the chamber after him and now stood, apparently unaffected by the sound, in its centre.

Bracken’s talons were protracted forward, his back reared up and his snout arched cruelly down, his mouth and teeth setting into a rigour of humming as he felt himself losing control of his body and the hum began to take him over, its evil sound beginning to creep into his spirit.

It was Violet who stopped him. She watched puzzled as Mandrake writhed and thrashed about at the noise, which was only a nasty noise as far as she was concerned, and then she wandered over towards its source. She saw a white skeleton, but that didn’t worry her because she had no idea what it was, and anyway, what was crouched by it was far more interesting. It was a mole that stood like stone, its eyes wide and its teeth clenched. It had terribly big talons, all stretched out. It was humming. It was the stonemole! The thing Mandrake was looking for! She ran forward to it and touched it and oh… it was real, it had fur just like her…

The touch of her paw broke the spell of the hum and slowly Bracken relaxed, and then fell silent, the sound fading out in the chamber as both he and Mandrake seemed to come out of a nightmare.

Poor Violet, upset by shock after shock, started to cry; Mandrake, hearing her, started running towards them both. Bracken stepped forward, put a paw round her shoulders, and pulled her back through the flint entrance.

‘Violet,’ he said urgently. ‘Listen! Run down this tunnel and go into the first entrance you see in the tunnel it comes into. Hide in the shadows there. I’ll come. Run!’

She only half recognised him, but she knew his voice, he was a mole who knew Rue. Oh, that was a relief! And she was running, she was running, and perhaps he’d help. ‘Run!’ he shouted after her, ‘run!’

It was as Bracken turned back into the chamber to face Mandrake, who was now halfway across it, and coming inexorably towards him, that the whole chamber was filled with another sound, one that took them both totally by surprise—the pattering of a hundred running paws, and of grim mutterings of moles, angry and full of bloodlust.

Mandrake stopped and turned round, his back to Bracken, and both saw first one mole, then two, then five more pouring through the eastern tunnel entrance that marked the tunnel running up from the slopes. It was Rune and the henchmoles and more besides, and they were chanting ‘Kill him, kill him!’ and massing ready to charge Mandrake down.

‘There he is!’ cried Rune, pointing a taloned paw at Mandrake.

Mandrake looked at them uncomprehendingly. He wasn’t interested in them. He had the Stone Mole almost at the end of his talons and he wasn’t going to waste time on Rune and a bunch of henchmoles. Were they threatening him? He laughed, shook his head, turned his back contemptuously on them and started forward again to pursue Bracken.

‘He’s running!’ cried Rune triumphantly, and that was enough to give the moles the courage they needed to begin their assault on Mandrake. Several of them reached him before he reached the flint entrance and thrust their claws at him with screams and shouts. One got in the way of his back paws and made him half trip, forcing him to stop. He turned to face them again, and as he did so Bracken, unseen by anymole, took the opportunity of running off down the tunnel to find Violet and slip away. The Duncton system was clearly going mad.

In amongst the moles, Mandrake rose up magnificently, and with a mighty sweep of his right taloned paw, killed three moles with one terrible blow. He had not forgotten how to fight. He stepped back, throwing, as he did so, another two off his huge back. His left paw thrust viciously forward and two moles crumpled up screaming below his snout. His movements were not hasty or rapid, but had the leisurely grace of a confident fighter who had never in his life been beaten. With dead or dying moles around him, he stepped back once more, swinging his right paw back so that two more moles went flying forward into the mass who had been clamouring to get at him. He laughed and then roared, and the moles hesitated, the ones in front no longer willing to go forward to what seemed a certain, and cruel, death. Only Rune was still there and shouted out again for the moles to kill. Mandrake might, indeed, have killed Rune there and then, but he remembered that his main purpose was to kill the Stone Mole, not this snivelling rabble or Rune.

He backed into the flint entrance, watching as the moles still advanced slowly towards him. He saw the great flints on either side of the entrance, raised a paw to each of them, dug his talons deeply into the soil behind them, and with one massive roaring and grunting effort, pulled down the two flints in a mass of dust and debris before them all, blocking the entrance completely and leaving himself free to pursue the Stone Mole.

As he ran off, the remaining flint capstone over the entrance broke free from the soil above it and crashed on to the flints below, and from out of their dust and debris, all that Rune and the other moles could now see were the gaunt, hollow eyes of the skull of a long dead mole, the rest of its skeleton lost under a mass of impassable debris.

Bracken almost carried Violet round the circular tunnel and out into his own burrows, he was so anxious to get her out of the Ancient System and away from Mandrake. And himself, too, for that matter.

He went as fast as he could straight up the entrance nearest the pastures and then out on to the surface, where a grey morning was well advanced and the ground was wet from the thaw of snow. And there they were almost immediately seen by a henchmole—one of the many Rune had prudently posted all around the surface of the Ancient System for just such a possibility as this. Only it was Mandrake Rune had expected to try to escape, not some other mole. Bracken dived back down into his tunnels, pushing Violet roughly ahead of him and, knowing that the henchmole would delay some while before he risked chasing down after him, made for a different exit.

The fact that they had so nearly been caught was a blessing in disguise, for it warned Bracken of the dangers they now faced. It seemed to him that the only possibility open to him was to get as far away from the top of the hill as possible, to somewhere where they could find friends. And that meant Rebecca’s hideaway down in the eastern Marsh End.

Of their trek down there, which took almost three days, almost every terrifying detail is known, for it was a memory that Violet was to carry with her for the rest of her life and accounts of it now lie recorded in the Rolls of the Systems in the libraries of Uffington.

What Violet never revealed, however, was that the real reason for their delay was her incredible slowness and her inability to understand the danger they were in. At moments when they were close to being sighted by pursuing henchmoles, or when Bracken was despairing of ever keeping her alive, or when the cold of January seemed certain to freeze them both to death, she would ask some irrelevant question like ‘Who is that stonemole, then?’ or ‘Do you really know where we’re going because I’m getting bored’ or ‘If he was Mandrake, who was that big mole?’ Or she would declare in a loud voice that would shatter the silence they were trying to sneak through: ‘I’m hungry!’

But while she may have driven Bracken mad, perhaps her continual puppish ebullience kept his spirits up as well.

They were under pressure from henchmoles from the moment they started down the slopes towards the Eastside. On their flanks, behind, sometimes in front, henchmoles chased them, cutting back and forth in numbers across the wood’s floor to find their scent and track them down. Bracken avoided them, partly by sticking to the surface the whole time—except for once, when he had to use a tunnel to escape several henchmoles coming at them from different directions—but mainly by his extraordinary ability, developed in his long period of solo exploration in the Ancient System, to foresee route alternatives and take the one that would confound his enemies. He himself later pinned his success on the fact that thawing snow created temporary rivulets, particularly just below the slopes, which masked their scent tracks.

However, they avoided rather than lost their pursuers and by the third day, when they were nearing Curlew’s burrows, they were being very hard-pressed. The more so because, unknown to Bracken, the pressure to find them had been increased by Rune’s decision to join the search and abandon Mandrake to the central part of the Ancient System, where he seemed content to stay. Henchmoles only remained up there to monitor his movements while Rune rapidly went down the slopes to find out who these two moles were who had escaped so mysteriously from the Ancient System.

By the time Bracken realised in horror that his own arrival might lead to the discovery of Rebecca and Comfrey and Curlew by directing the henchmoles to their tunnels, it was too late—henchmoles seemed to have cut off any other route. All he could do was to make a final dash ahead and hope he would be in time to warn Rebecca.

On the afternoon of the third day, when the weather was turning bitterly cold again and the light in the wood was gloomy and dark, Bracken finally reached the entrance to Curlew’s tunnel. Henchmoles were not far behind and so he pushed Violet down it, with an instruction (which he had scant hope would be carried out) that she should warn them that he was there, and turned round to ward off any henchmole who might come and surprise them.

Violet tottered complainingly down into the tunnels, saying she was hungry and she hoped there was some nice mole around who would do the proper thing and produce a worm or two, or three, and that Bracken never answered any of her questions, and ‘Aren’t there any moles here at all? She found herself face to face with Mekkins, who had advanced warily up the tunnel to see what the fuss was about.

‘Hullo,’ said Mekkins, ‘and who are you, then?’

‘Violet. I’m hungry.’

‘Yes, so I heard. I expect Rebecca’ll find you something.’

‘He’s up there,’ said Violet, looking back up the tunnel. ‘He said to warn you.’

When Mekkins saw Bracken, he was relieved to find him safe but shocked at how terribly weary he was. But a moment’s account of what had happened soon explained why.

‘I’ve come ’ere myself to take them away,’ said Mekkins, ‘’cos I could see the way things are goin’. There’s only one place where they’ll be safe, and that’s out of the system.’

‘But where?’ asked Bracken.

‘With Rose, on the pastures. It’ll be risky getting them there and might even be risky once they’re there, because Rose’s protection may not be enough. But anywhere else… well…’

Bracken was almost falling off his paws with tiredness. But still he snouted into the gloom for signs of henchmoles.

‘They’ll not come this far yet, surely?’ said Mekkins.

‘Yes, they will,’ sighed Bracken. ‘There seem to be so many of them and they’re so determined to find us that they keep on and on. They nearly caught us several times. You’ve got to get out of here, Mekkins. I’m sorry…’

‘Listen, chum. You’ve worked a bloody marvel. The more I know about you and Rebecca, the less I understand. But don’t you say you’re sorry. Now look, there’s no sign of them at the moment, and it would take them a while to find these tunnels anyway, so you go down and rest for a bit and I’ll keep a watch out and come down later to work out what to do. You send Curlew up as well, ’cos there’s something she can do…’

Mekkins had nothing for Curlew to do at all, but he knew that Rebecca had been worried about Bracken. ‘Let ’em have a few minutes together for Stone’s sake,’ he said to himself. ‘Don’t ask me what it’s about,’ he added, shaking his head and turning his attention to the gathering dark.

But Mekkins’ sentimentality was misplaced. Bracken was too tired, Rebecca already too aware of the dangers in the system, and Comfrey too afraid of Bracken’s size and different smell for there to be much between any of them. Only Violet seemed unaffected by it all. Bracken laid his head on his paws and looked curiously at the thin and nervous Comfrey. Why, he liked Violet better! As for Rebecca and himself, neither could believe that they had really made a journey to the centre of the system together. Surely that had been two different moles? The burrow was small and cramped, the atmosphere fearful, and everything in flux. There was the feeling that nothing could be permanent and that the system of Mandrake was giving way to something worse. As for Bracken, he was beginning to feel tired of running, always running, and felt half inclined to go out on to the surface and do some final battle with the henchmoles. But then he fell asleep.

Rebecca watched over him, wondering as she looked, almost for the first time, at a mole she hardly knew, and who seemed a stranger, why she was so moved by every start and turn in his fitful and uneasy sleep. ‘Who is he?’ she wondered. She wanted to draw Comfrey to her and say to him ‘Look, that’s your father. His name’s Bracken, he’s a brave mole.’ But wisely she let him be.

Comfrey was having problems of his own, anyway, with Violet—who might just as well have woken from a long refreshing sleep for all the sign she showed of tiredness after a three-day escape from Rune’s henchmoles.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked him.

‘C-C-Comfrey,’ he finally got out.

‘Why can’t you speak properly?’

Silence.

‘Well, at least you could ask my name, which is Violet.’

‘Where do you come from?’ tried Comfrey.

‘Rue’s tunnels, near where the Stone Mole lives.’

‘Who’s the St-Stone Mole?’

‘He is, silly,’ said Violet, pointing at the sleeping Bracken. Violet turned away, looking a little miserable. Now that Bracken was asleep, she felt alone. He was all she had.

Rebecca stretched a motherly paw to her and pulled her to her flank. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened, my love,’ said Rebecca, and bit by bit Violet did, her little defences dropping as she relaxed at last into a mole who seemed almost as cuddly as Rue. ‘What’s going to happen?’ Violet asked much later. Rebecca could see how alone she was, and how near to tears. Bracken’s daughter, Bracken’s son. He couldn’t have done more for them. Now perhaps she could care for them while they grew up.

‘Rebecca! Bracken!’ It was Curlew, running back into the burrow. ‘Wake up, Bracken! The henchmoles are coming!’ How Curlew had changed since Rebecca had first come! True, her fur was still rough and patchy—but her spirits were so full and high, and her body straighter and prouder than it had been. ‘You’ve got to leave, Rebecca, almost immediately,’ she said.

Mekkins came running down. ‘They’re almost here,’ he said, ‘and they’ll find these tunnels very soon. There’s an exit nearer the marshes and I’ll take you all out by that.’

Bracken did not move. He did not even get up. He was tired of running. ‘You go. I’ll stay. I can hold them back for a while.’

As Mekkins and Rebecca started to argue, Bracken got up and slowly faced them. His gaze was clear and there was an enormous authority about what he said that left nomole there in any doubt that he would do what he intended.

‘I led them here and I’ll lead them away again, in a different direction to where you’re going. Don’t worry, Mekkins, I won’t try to fight them all by myself. But with luck I can lead them off your scent, and you, Rebecca and these two,’ he pointed to Comfrey and Violet, ‘can get away to Rose the Healer.’

Violet started to protest, but Bracken gazed at her with such strength and love that she simply retreated back to Rebecca’s flank and waited for once for the adults to do whatever they had to do. ‘Rebecca will take care of you and I’ll be back,’ Bracken said gently to her. ‘And don’t you chatter so much this time!’

For a moment Rebecca and Bracken stared across the burrow at each other and the light that seemed to have gone from them shone again, and time was not important. ‘Why, it’s there and always will be,’ thought Rebecca, knowing it was true.

‘I’m not going either,’ said Curlew suddenly. ‘These are my tunnels and they’ve served me well, and I’ll defend them. I couldn’t live anywhere else, anyway.’ Her mind was quite made up so that, with a shake of his head in puzzlement, Mekkins led Rebecca and the youngsters away, and the burrow was suddenly silent of them.

‘There’s a tunnel I’ll show you, off to the east,’ said Curlew. ‘It goes for quite a way. If they come, I’ve got a way of holding them up for a bit, so you go down there and lead them off away from the west, where Mekkins will be. Every little bit gives them time.’

With a thumping overhead and shouts, the henchmoles did come, not long after, and Curlew tried her old trick on them. ‘There’s disease here, contagious disease,’ she hissed up the tunnel at them.

It worked for a while, until a cold authoritative voice came out of the bitter night to the henchmole who was hesitating.

‘Get down there now or I’ll kill you with my own talons,’ it said. Down in the central burrow, Bracken recognised with a shudder the voice of Rune. So he was here! And then there was a thump and a gasp, and old Curlew was outnumbered and outfought as the henchmoles rushed past her and down to where Bracken crouched.

He raced away along the tunnel she had shown him and out into the night, and chased desperately this way and that across the frozen ground, making as much noise as possible and heading for the north and east towards the marsh. Henchmoles were thick on the ground, and more than once he came face to face with one before twisting away into the dark, saved only by their own confusion at each other’s noise. Sometimes he hid in silence and let them chase around him; then, when they seemed to be drifting back to the west, towards where Rebecca, Violet and Comfrey might be with Mekkins, he would make a noise again and they would swing back towards him.

If the night was cold, the dawn was colder. It rose bleakly on a wood full of hate and fear. There was a hoarfrost on the trees and ground which gave the wood a deceptive white calm but meant that the slightest movement brought a crackling of frozen leaves and vegetation.

Bracken was now very tired and responded with a start of alarm at every movement around him. He wanted to run back, or forwards, or wherever they were and say ‘Here I am. Here! It’s over. You’ve got what you want!’

Then a henchmole moved somewhere and he was off again, paw in front of paw, twisting and turning and trying to think ahead of himself, trying not to drown in his own breathlessness and succumb at last to the tiredness he felt. Noises all around, and white-coated twigs and leaves that would have seemed delicate and beautiful had a mole had time to look.

On through the lightening mauve of dawn, nearer and nearer to the wood’s edge, nearer and nearer now to the marsh. He could sense the dreadful space stretching out somewhere beyond the trees and tried to cut away from it back into the bigger trees. But henchmoles were there, more of them running, distant shouts, nearby sneakings of talons on the frosty ground. He was forced nearer and nearer to the marsh.

Sound to the right and left, the fearful light and space ahead, no other way to go for a desperate mole, paw after paw unsteadily in front of another, shoulders aching with effort.

Then he was out of the wood and tumbling down a short bank under an old wire fence to a wall of alien marsh grass and the smell of the unknown. Off to the right two henchmoles came out of the wood as well, down the bank, looked right and then left and saw him; and they were coming, coming, their paws and

talons pounding, bigger and nearer with each moment. He looked back along the marsh grass to his left towards the west and there were other henchmoles, several, sneaking steadily along towards him. Desperate, he turned around to look back up the bank he had fallen down. It was so steep, and he was so tired, each gasp a pain for life. Perhaps he could make it back into the wood, perhaps his near-dead, aching paws would take him back. Perhaps.

Then Rune was there. Rune out on the bank looking down at him. A nightmare come true. Rune triumphant. Rune about to say something. Rune’s mouth open and his talons ready, as left and right the henchmoles came.

Bracken turned away from them all and faced the still, frosted wall of tall, haggard grass, diving into it and through, a final chase to his own destruction. Through the grass, leaving the shouts, into an alien world where the birds have eerie calls and slow flapping wings and long, sharp beaks enough to kill a mole. Running once more, but with the voices fading at last behind him.

‘He’s gone into the marsh, the silly bugger!’

‘Who was ’e then? Never seen him before.’

‘’E’ll be drownded or eaten ’fore the hour’s done.’

‘Who was he, Rune?’

‘Somemole we’ll wait for, that’s who. So patrol this edge until I’m satisfied he’s gone for good,’ said Rune.

Silence came and the wood was gone for ever behind Bracken as he wearily wended his way over the tussocks and ice of the frozen marsh. No food, no shelter, little hope. Lost in a frozen waste. No good going back.

On he went into a fearful day, with whispers of wind in the reeds above his head, the frozen debris of an alien world at his paws. And hunger bearing down on him. A long day of fear, a night of rustling ahead. Another dawn came, a day of gnawing at dry grass stems and snouting out the dangers that seemed to wait at every turn. Another afternoon. A sudden spell of bright, cold sun that made him feel as vulnerable as a flea on an open paw. Night and cold. Day and fear. A starting up of blustering winds as hunger weakened him step by step. The carcass of a dead and frozen bird, torn by other scavengers more used to the marsh than he. A tearing of teeth at it, something to eat, a frozen survival, and then black crows wheeling from the sky and down at him, and he was off again, shaken by the cawings and wheelings of blacksheen wings.

Then the worst horror, the ultimate fear of everymole in nightmare straits: oozing mud. The wind brought a thaw and that brought a softening to the grasses, and a heaving to the ground. Where it had been solid to his tired paws, it now squelched wet. Where it had supported his weight, it now let him sink. His belly was covered in the slime of mud as finally, and desperately, he dragged himself on. Everything gone, why cling to life? But what makes a mole fight death? What force drags one tired paw before the other?

His progress—to where? he wondered—grew slower. If he stopped, he sank. If he went on, he grew more and more in need of sleep. A great crow dived from the white sky again, wheeling and calling about him. On and on, with talons ready, Bracken tried his best.

His best was just good enough, for as the marsh thawed out behind him, the frost quite gone, and pockets of water appeared again where ice had been, Bracken neared a wall that skirted its northern edge. The grass adjacent to it was a little drier and he was on it, and up to the wall, and suddenly alive for a moment more as the crows wheeled about and he looked for cover. The smell of a hole, damp and cool, and he was chasing to it… along the wall to a great round drainage pipe set into it, and into its dank shelter. Behind, against the white sky, there was the flutter of a black wing, the hang of a dark grey claw, the tap of a death beak. He turned away in fear into the strange round tunnel and started down it, only trying to stop himself when it was too late. For it sloped down steeply, its bottom was slimy with mud and as the sides were too wide for him to reach to grip, he could not stop himself sliding faster and faster down it, a tired anger mounting in him at falling to his death like this.

Then, slipping helplessly towards a bright light where the tunnel ended in a void, he fell tumbling in a shower of mud and water into a stone drainage way, beyond the marsh and the wall.

He opened his eyes into a waking nightmare. For fighting and clawing at each other in the mud and slime that had fallen with him on to the hard ground of the drainage channel were two moles, both intent, it seemed, on finding any worms or other food that had come from the pipe in his fall. There was something wild and desperate about each of them—their fur was unkempt and their flanks thin from starvation—and one of them was rapidly losing the fight. Indeed, so unequal was the struggle that the smaller of the two was simply retreating from the other by the time Bracken first fully realised what was happening.

With one final clout, the bigger one turned back to where Bracken lay, to search for food in peace, the other watching from a distance, hoping, perhaps, to pick up a scrap or two.

All this Bracken took in very quickly, and as he did so he felt himself suddenly lifted on to his paws by a sense of anger and outrage. Had he run and run and run from fighting in Duncton only to find himself landing straight into more fighting even in this evil-smelling place?

It was as if his frustration with Rune and Mandrake, at Cairn’s death and the henchmoles, even back to Root and Wheatear—all moles who had faced him in one way or another with fighting from which he had run—had finally boiled over into rage. He snarled, his talons extended, and without any more ado he attacked the bigger mole viciously. There was no fear in what he was doing, and little thought. He simply crashed down his paws and talons, grunting and snarling with each lunge, encouraged to even greater violence by each successful contact with his surprised, and then frightened, adversary. For a moment, the mole fought back, but then, lowering his snout in a gesture of defeat, he turned tail and ran off down the channel, out of the range of Bracken’s sight.

Bracken watched him go, shaking with anger, and then turned to the smaller mole who crouched quite still looking at him. Quite what Bracken expected he did not know—but certainly not the response he got. For, instead of showing any thanks for his deliverance from the bigger mole or any acknowledgement of Bracken’s superiority, or even any fear, he had the nerve to ask ‘What mole are you, and where are you from?’—the traditional greeting of the superior mole to the inferior.

Bracken was so taken aback by this insolence that he very nearly started laying into this mole as well, but then the sight of one so weak and pathetic-looking being so bold struck him as frankly comic.

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ he said. ‘My name’s Bracken, from Duncton Wood.’

This appeared to have as startling an effect on the small mole as his own question had had on Bracken.

He darted forward, limping in a curious way as if he was injured, and exclaimed, ‘You mean the Duncton system?’ Bracken began to nod and then asked: ‘And what mole are you, for Stone’s sake?’

‘Boswell of Uffington,’ the mole replied.