Duncton Wood

Chapter Twenty-Five

Uffington! No single word could have heartened Bracken more at that moment. A mole from Uffington! It had always been Hulver’s greatest wish that he should live to see such a thing and now, here in this strange place, Bracken had been led to just such a mole by the Stone’s grace.

His excitement was, however, tinged by a sense of disappointment, for this Boswell did not in any way look as Bracken had imagined one of the legendary moles from Uffington would look. He was small and crippled, his weak paw making him walk in a darting, hobbling way that had his head swinging to the left—the side of his weak paw—then up away from the ground on his right and then down again. His coat was a very dark grey flecked with white and he looked half-starved.

He spoke in a quick staccato way as if he could not get his thoughts out fast enough to keep up with his words, and he had a habit of interrupting Bracken when he spoke with a, ‘Yes, yes,’ as if he knew what he was going to say before he said it. Which, often, he did.

Despite his overt weakness he seemed quite unafraid, although a semblance of fear—very like that he had shown before the other mole—would sometimes cross his face. Bracken soon realised that this was a guise, a kind of mask he wore to appear so pathetic that nomole would wish to persist in attacking. ‘Perhaps that’s why he’s managed to survive,’ thought Bracken, whose only knowledge of crippled moles was that they never survived their first summer because they could not get territory of their own.

Perhaps the most disconcerting quality he had lay in the way his eyes, small and bright as a bark beetle’s wing, fixed Bracken with a gaze so direct and penetrating that at first Bracken felt positively shifty looking at him.

‘So you’re from Duncton, are you?’ said Boswell, before Bracken could get a word in. ‘Just the mole I’ve been looking for.’

‘Well, it would be nice to know a bit more…’

‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Boswell, ‘all in good time. Right now there’s no time. If you want to rest you had better forget it. We’ve got to get out of here as fast as we can.’

‘We’ve got to—’ started Bracken, who had no intention of allying himself to anymole just like that, whether he came from Uffington or not.

‘That’s right. We. You can try it on your own but you won’t succeed.’

It did not take Boswell very long to persuade Bracken that they—and his ‘they’ included the other mole, who now lurked near them looking both angry and fearful at the same time—were in a desperate situation.

The place into which Bracken had fallen was a long, narrow drainage channel made of a smooth unnatural stone, which smelt wrong and had high impassable walls. On one side was the marsh, on the other side an embankment that rose massively upwards and sloped away out of sight. But though Bracken could not see its end, he could smell and hear what was there—creatures whose noise was loud and rumbling, so great, indeed, that the very ground shook with their passing and whose smell was so sick with death that it made a mole’s snout go numb.

‘Roaring owls,’ said Boswell obscurely.

‘Owls?’

‘Seen them myself. I came here down that embankment two nights ago. There’s a flat path at the top, wide as a mole’s system, and the roaring owls fly along just above it. You wait till night comes and you’ll see what I mean.’

By this time the third mole, whom Bracken had driven away, had slunk back within earshot. He seemed to want to join in the discussion and nodded his head when Boswell was describing the owls.

‘Their gaze is so fierce that you can see it at night even down here. It’s like fire,’ he said, creeping over to them.

‘Fire?’ queried Bracken, who had never heard the word.

‘Like hot sun,’ said the other, ‘only it kills everything it touches.’

As if this weren’t enough, they went on to explain that the channel they were in was plagued by carrion crows and the occasional kestrel, which dived and pecked at any creature, alive or dead, caught in it. They had taken a mole only hours before Bracken’s arrival, and constantly squabbled and pecked over a dead hare that lay further away down the channel.

‘There’s no cover here. You can’t burrow. And the stench of the roaring owls is enough to kill a mole,’ exclaimed Boswell.

‘And there’s no food—that’s why…’ The other mole didn’t finish; he didn’t want to remind Bracken of the circumstances of their first meeting.

‘What’s your name?’ asked Bracken, taking the initiative for the first time.

‘Mullion, from the Pasture system. It’s near Duncton Hill.’

‘I have heard of it,’ said Bracken irritably.

‘He hadn’t,’ said Mullion, pointing at Boswell.

They talked for a while—Bracken was too tired to do much else—and kept well in to the side of the channel, using some plant debris as cover. It seemed that Mullion had come over the marshes a week before, when it was frozen, in search of a mole who had left the pastures. A friend of his, he said. As for Boswell, he had made his way along the path used by the roaring owls, nearly been hypnotised by them, and then slipped and tumbled headlong down the embankment, trying to escape crows one night. Bracken wanted to know much more about him and where he had come from and why, but this was not the moment to ask. The lack of food showed on them both, and the fact that Mullion had survived a full week said much for his basic strength.

Bracken was aware that he had brought them both some kind of hope, though why he could not imagine.

‘We’ve both tried everything,’ said Boswell.

‘Why did you say a mole couldn’t do it by himself but might together with others?’ Bracken asked him.

‘No reason, just instinct. A mole like me only survives with others, you see.’ He looked at his crippled paw and shrugged. ‘Moles don’t often realise that two’s better than one.’

‘Or three’s better than two,’ said Mullion.

‘Quite,’ said Boswell.

They looked at Bracken, waiting for him to speak, and for the first time in his life Bracken understood that he had to lead other moles. They were right; there was no time. With each passing hour he would grow weaker, as Mullion had done. Better get on with it.

At that moment, as a reminder of the dangers they faced, the cawing above them of a crow, which hung as a shadow in the sky, shattered through the constant rumbling noise of the roaring owls as it lunged down towards where they crouched, its eyes peering down into the channel. Its claws hung loose, relaxed and deadly under its body as its harsh caw shot about them. Then it wheeled away again.

‘Right,’ said Bracken, ‘we’re getting out of here. There must be a way. I’m going to have a look around for myself. Don’t move—and don’t fight. I’ll be back and we’ll work something out.’

They watched him creep off along the bottom of the wall, a look of hope in Mullion’s eyes and a look of confidence in Boswell’s.

The channel, which was about two hundred moleyards long, had few features. Its walls were smooth and impossible to climb; its floor was wet with drifts of sand where water had flooded in the past. At either end the channel was cut off abruptly by a deeper channel that appeared to flow from the marsh and on through the embankment by huge tunnels visible to Bracken but inaccessible because the water flow was too fast and furious, and now very nearly on a level with the channel he was in. Five pipes, like the one he had tumbled down, drained into it from the marsh, ten or twelve molefeet above the bottom of the channel, which sloped gently down from a central point either way to the bigger, lateral drainageways at the bottom. Water drained steadily down from the five pipes.

On the embankment side there were a couple of evil-smelling pipes set into the wall and sloping up into the darkness of the embankment itself, their outlets low enough for Bracken to be able to snout out the fumes and stench that came from them. From the black stains running from them down the wall he guessed that they were unpleasant inside.

The sense of exposure was quite frightening—nomole likes to be on unburrowable ground. As Bracken was thinking about what to do, he heard a shout behind him, and Mullion came running.

‘The water’s rising,’ he said. ‘It’s creeping up towards where we were from the other channel.’

He was right. The thaw of the snow and ice on the marsh must have brought a rush of water into the bigger channels and now it was creeping quite steadily up towards them from either end of the channel.

‘Well, we can’t fly,’ said Bracken sardonically, ‘so we had better do something.’

A check down the other end, where Bracken had been, confirmed that the level had risen even since he had last been there. The dead hare, which lay grotesquely huddled against the channel wall and smelt of death, began to flop and float about in the rising waters, while their channel began to grow wet and treacherous from the increasing outflow from the marsh drainage pipes leading into it.

‘What about those tunnels up into the embankment?’ Bracken said finally to them both.

‘It’s what I said,’ replied Boswell, ‘but Mullion says it’s not possible.’

‘Too steep and slippery, quite apart from the poisonous smell. You can’t even get started,’ said Mullion.

The water crept nearer and they all moved up towards the centre of the channel. The walls seemed higher and more impassable with each second, almost leaning over and crushing down upon them.

‘What about swimming out?’ said Mullion.

‘Never swum in my life,’ said Bracken.

‘You’d learn quick enough,’ said Boswell. ‘Even I can do it. But the water in those channels is too fierce.’

At the far end of the channel a massive white and grey gull dived squawking on the hare, which was now half submerged in water. There was a plash and splash as the gull’s claws swept the water, trying vainly to lift the hare out, and then it was up and away into the dull sky. A black beetle suddenly came crawling by in the sand, heading up the centre of the channel, as if it knew that the water was rising. Mullion took it for his own and crunched it nervously as they all thought what to do.

Bracken went and took another look up into the round tunnel pipes into the embankment and then impatiently scrambled up into one of them. His back paws had almost disappeared before he came sliding out again and fell into a roll on the channel floor.

‘See what I mean?’ said Mullion. He was beginning to sound desperate.

‘No, I don’t,’ said Bracken. ‘You can get a grip if you stretch far enough ahead because I could feel that the tunnel has an edge across it—it’s not all smooth like the marsh one I came down.’ He climbed up again, Mullion nudging him up a little from behind and this time his whole body disappeared and he was gone.

‘What’s he doing?’ asked Mullion, increasingly worried by the water at his paws.

‘Finding a way out, I expect,’ said Boswell calmly. Then he added for Mullion’s benefit, ‘It’s not as bad as it seems, you know. We can all swim if necessary—though our chances would be low. But we’re not going to drown in the next five minutes.’

There were shouts from the pipe and Bracken came slithering down backwards out of it, covered in mud. He hung for a moment from its edge, his back paws scrabbling for a hold on the smooth wall, and then fell the short distance to the channel floor.

‘Well, it’s possible,’ he said breathlessly. ‘It doesn’t go anywhere much because there’s no wind current and I can sense that it doesn’t. But at the very least we might—if we’re careful and if you do exactly what I say—avoid the water when it rises. There might even be some food up there—though how it would survive in that roaring-owl stench I don’t know.’

The water began to rise towards their bellies and was now threatening to sweep them off their feet as Bracken quickly outlined his plan. The pipe was in sections, each unfortunately longer than the length of a mole. But where they joined there was a gap in the pipe large enough to sneak a talon or two in and hold a mole secure.

‘The trouble is,’ said Bracken, ‘negotiating your way up to the next hold—that’s how I slipped the first time.’

‘Are we taking him?!’ asked Mullion suddenly, looking at Boswell.

‘Yes,’ said Bracken coldly, in a voice that allowed no argument. His plan was that Mullion should go first, being biggest, and stretch forward to the hold Bracken had managed to reach. Then Boswell should follow, clambering up over Mullion to get a grip—a thought that seemed to annoy Mullion and amuse Boswell, who was the only one among them apparently quite unaffected by the position they faced. Then Mullion was to go to the next hold as Bracken joined Boswell, who would then go on up to Mullion again.

‘That’s the theory. Now let’s get on with it,’ said Bracken urgently, the water now almost lifting Boswell off his feet. ‘And remember you two—one slip and we’ll probably all go sliding down into this lot.’

The pipe was far more slippery with mud and slime than Mullion expected and it took him several attempts even to get up into it, and then only with Bracken pushing, while Boswell in turn hung on to Bracken as the water steadily rose about them.

‘Come on!’ urged Bracken, giving Mullion a final heave from behind to help him stretch blindly into the darkness and fight his way up to the first hold. He got to it just as his back paws began to slide away from under him and hung there gasping for a few moments before bringing his other paw forward and getting a secure grip. The gap between the two sections of pipe was quite wide and the hold was good enough to let him rest for a little as his back paws found a better grip and he distributed his weight evenly. There was a thin trickle of muddy water running down the bottom of the pipe, getting into his snout and fur. The smell in the pipe went to his snout so powerfully that it disorientated him and made him feel nauseous. But he hung on—he wasn’t going to let a Duncton mole think Pasture moles were always quite so nervous as he had been before. Behind him he felt Boswell pulling tentatively at his back paw and then somehow levering himself along him with gasps and pants.

‘Just in time,’ said Boswell, joining him at the first hold. ‘The water was getting so dangerous that Bracken virtually threw me up.’

Behind them they heard Bracken working his way up and then calling out: ‘On you go, Mullion, so I can come on up.’

And on Mullion went, inch by slippery inch, paws constantly seeming about to slip out of control. Then up struggled Boswell again, even finding time to comment: ‘Not a nice place to live, this!’ The round tunnel was cold, wet and dark about them. Behind them they could hear Bracken talking himself on: ‘Now, if I put this one there, and this one here, then I’ll get a better grip and…’, a habit he had acquired from so many months alone in the Ancient System and one that, in moments of crisis, he was never to lose.

The higher they went the steeper the pipe seemed to get and the more nervous each became as the consequences of a slip became increasingly serious. A mole slipping from this height would probably be so stunned in the fall that he would drown in the swirling water at the foot of the pipe.

Here and there the gap between the pipes was quite wide and gave them points at which they could rest—for lying outstretched in the steep tunnel, hanging on only by talons, was very tiring.

It was when they reached about the fifteenth stretch of pipe that Mullion suddenly, and without warning, slipped. He fell back on to Boswell without even getting a chance to cry out, and Boswell slipped back on to Bracken under his weight. For a moment Bracken felt his own grip going, the slimy, odorous tunnel suddenly witness to a desperate struggle to maintain a hold on life—but above him, Mullion managed to get a grip again and Boswell, his back paws bouncing all over Bracken’s snout, recovered himself as well.

‘Thank you,’ said Bracken acidly.

‘Sorry,’ shouted Mullion down the pipe. He was feeling very weak, but really his performance so far was extraordinary for a mole who had been so weakened by starvation.

A short while later, the pipe levelled off to a less steep slope and they were all able to have a rest. The water flow down it, however, was cold and dank and Boswell was beginning to shiver.

‘Well! Well!’ said Bracken, trying to keep up morale. ‘I wonder where we go from here!’ From the darkness far below them they could hear a splashing and rushing of water as if the channel where they had been was now as flooded as the ones at its end had been. It sounded a long way away, and nearer at hand they could hear the occasional drip of water, hollow and ringing through the pipe.

‘I don’t think this tunnel goes anywhere, but we can try,’ said Bracken. The next few sections were easy, though Bracken stayed carefully behind, watching over their progress—he knew how weak they both were. But then there was a hopeless shout from Mullion: ‘I can’t go on—it’s almost vertical now.’ And it was. The pipes twisted upwards and offered no further holds.

‘We’ll just have to burrow out from here, then,’ said Boswell, picking with his good paw at the earth and grit that lay between two sections of the pipe near which they were crouched. But it was Bracken who had to do it and it proved a long, slow job, partly because the embankment was made of hard-packed soil with all sorts of obstacles like pieces of square rock which he had to burrow round, but also because he was so very tired. He seemed barely to have stopped moving since his escape from the Ancient System back in Duncton four days before. But he tried to put that out of his mind, for he knew his chances of ever returning to Duncton were now slim, even supposing he wanted to.

It took him over two hours before a pawthrust broke through the surface of the embankment. He emerged tentatively; Boswell had warned him of the steepness of the slope, and there were the roaring owls to beware of.

Night had fallen and the first thing he saw—and it made him retreat into the tunnel—was the glare of a roaring owl’s eyes racing towards him out of the darkness, and the growing crescendo of its rumbling flight. The noise was so loud that it stunned him and the stench was many times more nauseating than that in the tunnel. It made his eyes water and his snout ache. And below there was the roar of running water.

He retreated down into the tunnel.

‘Well, we can get out, but it’s so dangerous there that we had better work out what to do before we start,’ he said.

‘There is little you can do except move as fast as possible,’ said Boswell. ‘From what I’ve seen, we’ll have to cross the owl paths and head off along their edge to the west. We’ll be very exposed—not only to the roaring owls but to crows and other predators that may be about.’

‘At night, up here?’ queried Mullion.

‘Death hangs in the air at any time,’ said Boswell. ‘With luck we’ll be able to get off the path by the way I originally came and there’ll be food to find when we get there. But whatever you do, do not look directly into the eyes of a roaring owl, as it will instantly hypnotise you.’

The climb up the burrowed tunnel was no problem, since it was small enough for them to flex their limbs against the sides, but once out on to the wet slope they were in continual danger. The passing owls were snout-shatteringly loud, and each one left its wave of noisome smells which so disorientated them that they nearly lost their grip more than once. Indeed, Bracken, used as he was to the clear air of Duncton Hill, started to faint and had not Boswell, at risk to himself, put his paw hard against Bracken’s back, he might easily have slipped back down into the wet running darkness from which they were trying to escape.

Thus, slowly and dangerously, they climbed a mountain whose top they were afraid of reaching. When they got there it was far worse than either Bracken or Mullion could ever have imagined. The noise, the stench, the flashing owl gazes! They all kept their snouts down and their eyes averted for fear of being transfixed by the owls’ gaze—but even so, they could see the light of the owl eyes flashing and shooting on the grubby wet grass that grew on top of the embankment, and the ground continually trembled with their passing.

‘Whatever you do, and whatever happens, do not look round at the roaring owls,’ repeated Boswell. ‘Once they have transfixed you with their gaze, they will crush you with their talons. ’

The owls passed intermittently from both directions—the ones on the nearer path going one way and on the further path the other. The three moles waited for a lull before looking up and across—but it was too murky to see much and their snouts were so upset by the fumes and vibrations that they could not snout out much either. Bracken felt a lassitude growing over him. His will to move was fading. He wanted to crouch down and sleep. He wanted… until Boswell nudged him. ‘Come on, we must move. They are so powerful they can confuse you and put you to sleep without even touching you. Come on!’

It was suddenly Boswell who was leading them, for he seemed to have the power to fight the weakness this terrible place put into a mole.

‘Listen!’ he said urgently. ‘We will run across to the area between the two paths…’

‘But if they see us,’ faltered Mullion, looking up just a little at the owl gazes about them.

‘They mustn’t, and you mustn’t let them. Wait until I start and then follow, and do not look towards them, however near they may seem.’

Boswell waited for another lull and then was suddenly off through the grass and on to a hard, wide path that smelt of death. In the distance an owl’s gaze shone up into the sky, round across the marshes behind them and then along the path towards them, casting their three shadows before it. ‘Run!’ gasped Boswell, hobbling across the road as fast as he could, the road so wide, the danger getting so near. ‘Run!’ The path stretched hard and black ahead of them as the roaring owl grew nearer, its noise shaking the air about them and its gaze bright and moving on their fur.

Fast as they ran, the roaring owl seemed to fly faster towards them, getting bigger as the edge of the path they could now just see ahead of them seemed to retreat. Each pawstep forward seemed to take a lifetime, each second made the owl bigger and nearer, its eyes brighter as they tried to reach the centre, as Boswell trailed behind the other two.

‘Run!’ It was Bracken’s voice shouting out over the owl noise, urging Boswell on to the safety of the central edge. And he was almost there, his paws almost amongst the sparse vegetation that scraped a living there, when the roaring owl loomed mightily above him and roared past, the wind from its wings so powerful that he was bowled several moleyards along the road.

In the silence that followed, Bracken and Mullion watching in dread, Boswell turned back on his paws, shook himself, and ran at last to join them. ‘Running’s not my strong point,’ he said, and Bracken shook his head in disbelief that a mole could make a joke of nearly dying. There was more to Boswell than met the eye.

The central strip between the paths offered them some cover, though the creatures still flew close by in each direction, and every time they did so, the world seemed to be replaced for a few moments by hell itself.

It was Boswell, once again, who urged them on, running out into the darkness of a lull once more, the others following.

None of them knew quite what happened next. However it was, Mullion forgot himself when he was halfway across and looked up at another approaching owl, its eyes catching his in a transfixion of horror. He stopped and turned towards it, and it was only when the other two were across and looked back that they realised what had happened. There Mullion crouched, snout towards the approaching owl, quite still and waiting for death. It was Bracken who gasped, but Boswell who acted. He darted out into the path again, hobbled over to Mullion as fast as he could and went between him and the roaring owl. Bracken could not hear what he said but he saw him shouting, saw him cuff Mullion and saw Mullion shake himself as if awakening, and then Mullion turned and ran towards him to safety.

But then something worse followed, the sight of which Bracken would never forget. As Boswell stood poised to follow Mullion, lit up by the owl’s gaze, there was the sudden ghostly shadow of a ragged translucent white in the sky as from it there dropped, at terrible speed, a tawny owl, its feathers caught in the glare and its talons heading straight for Boswell. The roaring-owl noise got louder and louder, the tawny owl fluttered for a moment above Boswell, its wings shining and shadowy with light, and then down the last few moleyards on to Boswell. There was a squeal, a fluttering of wings as the owl started to rise again, with Boswell as its limp prey. But beyond it, on the far path, a roaring owl passed by and the wind from its wings seemed to beat the tawny owl back down towards the ground, straight into the murderous path of the one that had caught Mullion in its gaze. There was a rush and a thump, a squeal, and a flying of feathers and the roaring owl passed by, taking with it the tawny owl and Boswell. Silence. Nothing. Bracken stared at the path in disbelief. He looked at Mullion, who looked despairingly at him and then into the path again.

‘It even eats its own kind,’ whispered Mullion.

‘But…’ began Bracken, utterly shocked by what had happened. Another roaring owl passed. Silence again. Boswell had gone.

They retreated into the cover of the grass on their side of the path.

‘We had better get out of here,’ said Mullion matter-of-factly. ‘Which way did he want us to go?’

‘To the west,’ said a voice from the darkness behind them. It was Boswell! He was covered with blood. ‘Not going without me, are you?’

Bracken ran back to him, reaching forward before Boswell collapsed from his injuries.

‘It’s owl’s blood, not mine,’ said Boswell. ‘He got killed when the roaring owl went over him, but I didn’t. It went over me, too, but by the Stone’s grace his talons missed me. Now. Shall we get going? Again.’ Even his normal calm sounded just a little shaky.

They followed him down the path under cover of the grass that grew there, so shocked by what had nearly happened that the proximity of other roaring owls going by no longer disturbed them. They hid each time a yellow gaze lit up the path and grass near them, then went on again, until the night grew deep and the roaring owls came less often.

Until at last they came to a part where the path gave way to gravel and then a wall, creeping along its edge, round its far corner, and then blissfully away from the path and down an embankment again, this one drier and less steep. As they went down, they moved into a beautiful darkness, the sounds of the owls now high above them, and never had Bracken appreciated more the stillness of his own world.

Boswell insisted on leading them on along the edge of a field—to get them away from the owl paths as quickly as possible—until there was no more than a distant occasional roar, and they were back in the elements of earth and silence and rustling that they knew. A quick, tired digging of temporary burrows, a snouting out of a couple of worms each, and then tumbling head over heels and falling down a dreamland embankment of moss and soft grass into the sleep of the tired and safe.

Chapter Twenty-Six

They stayed for several weeks near the field to which Boswell had led them. Not only were they all tired and in need of rest and food to regain their strength, but February was just starting and with it the worst of the winter. The thaw was soon followed by more snow, which gave way to freezing rain that finally slunk into miserable cold days when the nights dragged on and on and the days were so gloomy they barely got started before they were finished.

Mullion, being a Pasture mole and used to open ground, stayed out in the field, quickly taking the opportunity of the thaw to create a simple but extensive system deep enough underground to avoid the frost, which, when it came again, drove worms and grubs down into his tunnels. His lines of freshly dug molehills began to poke out of the snow for a wide area over the field.

Bracken hunted around along the edge of the field until he found a small copse just beyond the fence furthest from where they had first come, where he created a more complex Duncton Wood-style of system, with subtly connecting tunnels and secret entrances concealed by long grass or leaf mould.

As for Boswell, he refused Bracken’s offer to help him build tunnels and worked slowly on his own to create his own system—starting it from inside an abandoned rabbit tunnel. Bracken was surprised at how big Boswell insisted on burrowing his tunnels and it was several days before he realised that the feeling of familiarity they gave him, as if he had been there before, came from the fact that they were not unlike some of the tunnels in the Ancient System.

But it did not need this to prompt him to satisfy his curiosity about Uffington. Indeed, he could hardly wait for Boswell to recover from their ordeal before asking him a dozen questions. His curiosity was matched by Boswell’s about Duncton. But asking questions is one thing, giving answers quite another. The fact was that Bracken was not very eager to talk about it in detail. So he merely outlined the system’s geography, described its personality, explained where he had come from, but affected vagueness about the Ancient System and never even mentioned Rebecca.

These glimpses scarcely satisfied Boswell, whose eagerness after so many moleyears to talk to the one mole he had met who knew anything about Duncton was only tempered by Bracken’s almost painful inability to talk in detail about it. He guessed its causes and, with a compassion and wisdom that Bracken did not sense, eventually stopped seeking the information he felt he needed to pursue his quest for Duncton.

In fact, his self-denial in not pressing Bracken surprised Boswell, for if there was one vice of which he was aware in himself it was impatience. Again and again he had caused annoyance and trouble with other moles he had met since leaving Uffington with his habit of saying too directly what he thought, and his habit of jumping five paces ahead of anymole talking to him.

His fault lay in his own quick intelligence, which made it almost painful for him to have to sit and listen to somemole prattling on towards a point that was perfectly obvious the moment he had opened his mouth.

With Bracken he found he did not feel this frustration—not that Bracken’s thinking was so swift and clear that he never wandered in talk; he did, but there was a quality in Bracken that aroused in Boswell feelings he had not known before and swamped any impatience he might have felt. It was as if Bracken had unknowingly opened a tunnel for Boswell into a world of suffering and joy he had never entered before.

The books he had read, the writing he had learned to scribe and interpret, the two works he himself had worked on all seemed quite irrelevant beside the unfamiliar breathless feeling of being on the brink of something when talking with Bracken.

He saw, too, that Bracken himself was not aware that he had this effect—perhaps not even aware of the sufferings and joys whose power was revealed so well in the way he sometimes talked and by the way his eyes would seem to seek out, even in the burrow where they crouched, the moles he mentioned or the places he described so reluctantly, all of which he had so recently left behind.

He mentioned a mole called Hulver, for example, with a tremble in his voice, as if he had not got used to the fact that Hulver had died long before, violently it seemed. Yet when Boswell asked a little more about him, Bracken avoided the subject, saying, ‘He was only an old mole I knew who talked too much!’ But the look in his eyes betrayed how much more Hulver meant to him than that.

Then there was a mole called Rebecca, of whom, when he finally mentioned her, Bracken said, ‘She was a mole I met in a rainstorm by the Stone on top of the hill. She was as lost up there as I was, in a different way, and she touched me.’ Bracken’s voice had lowered when he said this, as his snout had, and for a moment Boswell felt as if he was walking with Bracken through the silence of a forgotten wood that even a single breath would blow away. Which, indeed, it did. For Bracken changed when pressed about Rebecca and laughed about her, pretending she was just ‘one of the Duncton females, and a very pretty one, too’.

It was the same with the Ancient System, which was what Boswell wanted most to know about. Bracken said hardly anything about it, but when it did get mentioned, his whole body seemed to alternate between fear and peace and Boswell felt he was watching a changeable spring day pass by.

It was seeing these things in Bracken that made Boswell, who was so quick with words and so used to the learned cut and thrust of Uffington, understand that the message in something a mole says may lie not in the words spoken, or the sense imparted, but the impulse of feeling behind them, which they themselves may change or distort. The more he spoke with Bracken, the more he had the feeling that the Stone itself had brought them together and that this strange mole was one he would follow wherever he went. It seemed to Boswell that Bracken held in his heart a secret of which he was not aware but whose revelation was a joy and pain to which, in some way, both of them must surrender themselves.

So it was that Boswell’s initial impatience with Bracken’s unwillingness to talk about Duncton in detail gave way to an affectionate silence from whose simplicity Boswell really began to hear the words the other spoke and, through him, the words all moles speak.

There was another way in which his dialogue with Bracken was a new experience for him as well. The fact was that since the preceding September, when he had left Uffington to come to Duncton, a period of several moleyears, he had become increasingly unwilling to talk about the sacred Holy Burrows to anymole. Yet when Bracken started asking him questions so enthusiastically, he found only pleasure in giving him the answers. His reluctance simply vanished.

‘What are they like?’ asked Bracken. ‘And do scribemoles still live there?’

‘They are on the top of a chalk hill many thousands of feet high, which is steep to its north side and gentle to the south. The tunnels are very big and spacious, unlike any tunnels I have seen since elsewhere. It is the most peaceful place I know.’

‘But what are the Holy Burrows?’

‘A group of burrows in the centre of the Uffington system where only moles who have taken certain vows of obedience may live. Fighting is not allowed. Many of the moles there decided to stop talking and live in a silence of contemplation. Those that talk try only to say those things that are essential and truthful.’

‘Are they all White Moles?’ asked Bracken, fascinated by everything Boswell was saying.

‘No, none of them is. There are no White Moles—well, there were once, starting with the first of them all, Linden, the last son of Ballagan, and Vervain…’

‘Yes. They tell that story in our system, though I’ve only heard it vaguely because it’s one normally only for Longest Night and I was… well… nowhere where stories like that were told on Longest Night.’

So, piece by piece, Boswell told Bracken about Uffington and its lore, learning something about it himself too as he talked, for he had never really thought about it objectively before. He realised that he missed the Holy Burrows, the libraries and some of the moles there, like Skeat, whom he had grown up to know so well; yet he saw, too, how ignorant he had been of the world outside and how many of the scribemoles he had known, for all their learning and wit, worshipped the Stone through ignorance rather than wisdom. Perhaps Uffington was as much in decline as so many of the systems he had passed through seemed to be.

‘Why did you leave?’ Bracken had asked. And Boswell had told him, describing as best he could the urge he had felt to leave, though not mentioning that it was to Duncton that he had felt directed to come.

He even recited the text he had found hidden in the depths of the libraries, the indirect cause of his breaking his vows and departing for Duncton.

‘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.’

As Boswell was about to recite the second stanza, Bracken interrupted him.

‘What’s all that mean?’ he asked.

‘Well, it’s obvious, it’s saying that—’

‘No. I mean, what’s a Stillstone?’

It had not occurred to Boswell that he didn’t know such a simple thing.

‘There are six of them—well, seven, according to this text—but the ones that are known are somewhere in the Holy Burrows where only the Holy Mole and the masters have seen them. They are stones that legend says contain the essence of the seven Holy Books, one stone for each book. I’ve never seen them myself, of course, but they say in Uffington that each one contains a kind of light, like the sun or moon only coloured, one for each Book. They—’

‘How big are they?’ interrupted Bracken. He almost whispered it, an extraordinary sense of being carried along on a great wind or flood overtaking him and stilling him to the ground.

‘Well, I’ve no idea, since the masters never spoke of them; indeed, it is forbidden to speak to the masters about them. But—well—scribemoles like a chat like anyone else.’

‘What are they for, exactly?’

‘It’s a good question, and one every newcomer to Uffington asks. The best answer is in the Book of Light, though I can’t remember it well enough to quote exactly.

But it explains that each Book has a stone so that by looking at it a reader of the Book may be reminded that truth lies not in scribed words but only in the heart that scribed them and the heart that reads them, just as the light lies inside the stone and not outside it.’

Bracken fell silent. He was thinking of the stone he and Rebecca had found in the Ancient System. He felt at once full of wonder and very frightened. Had it been a Stillstone? Was it the seventh Stillstone? He wished he could reach out and touch Rebecca now, just as he had then. He wished her paws were round him. He silently begged the Stone to keep her safe, and his paw, the one that had touched the stone, began to burn and ache. He looked at it, but there was nothing there.

‘Probably doesn’t make much sense,’ said Boswell, thinking his silence meant incomprehension.

‘No,’ said Bracken. ‘I was just thinking… I was wondering… well, what the “seventh stone” is, the last one, the one in that verse.’

‘The seventh stone is a Stillstone; it doesn’t have a name. But the last book, the seventh Book—ah! Well! That’s the question every scribemole in Uffington wants an answer to. Nomole knows—it is not written anywhere.’

Boswell fell silent, thinking. Then he said, ‘Of course, everymole has made guesses—the most popular being that it’s the Book of Love, but I don’t think that’s likely. For one thing, anymole who’s read the Book of Light knows that that’s the one about love, really, which the sacred text confirms; and anyway, love isn’t exactly an easy word to define, is it? It’s not absolute, like fighting or earth, if you see what I mean. No. It’s not love. The other idea in Uffington about the seventh stone is that it is simply the Book of the Stone. Makes sense in lots of ways.’

Bracken rubbed his paw, which was still itching. He had the impulse to scratch out the pattern from the stone on the burrow floor, but some deep instinct told him that much though he wanted to, he must give nomole any clue of what he and Rebecca had seen. It was something they had shared, for some reason he didn’t know, but it would be wrong to the Stone itself to talk about it.

He looked at Boswell and, just as Boswell had felt that his destiny was in some way tied to Bracken, so now in his own turn Bracken sensed that this strange Boswell, so full of information and knowledge, was a precious mole, a mole to protect; and he understood why the Stone had protected him from the certain death that surely went with his being crippled, and as he did so he saw, or felt he saw, that in some way the burden of protecting Boswell had passed to him.

As February passed into March and the heavy, bitter gloom of the past long weeks gave way to changeable cold winds and rain, with an odd hour or two of watery sun, Mullion grew increasingly restless.

He had kept very much to himself since they had arrived in the field, not out of any hostility but because the winter months are a time when Pasture moles lie still, not having the protection of a wood or its undergrowth overhead. But then, as the weather began to improve, he started burrowing at a shallower level, throwing up a new set of molehills in place of the ones he had created when they first came, and which had now been beaten down into muddy remnants of themselves by the weather.

Occasionally he came over for a chat—principally to try to satisfy his curiosity about Duncton Wood, in whose shadow he had lived through two Longest Nights. Bracken’s monosyllabic answers about it confirmed his belief that the Duncton moles were a silent, secretive lot, prone to keeping things to themselves—a theory he expounded to Boswell one day.

‘No doubt about it, Boswell. Those Duncton moles are shifty and dangerous, like what we’ve always been told by our elders. They do strange rituals in that wood of theirs, and weave evil spells. They’d turn a mole into a root as soon as look at him. You wouldn’t get me within a long tunnel’s length of that place.’

Suddenly afraid that Boswell might pass all this on to Bracken who, though younger, had beaten him in a fight, he added: ‘Mind you, I’ve got nothing against Bracken—look at the way he got us out of that channel! I admire a mole with what my father used to call “resources”. Know what I mean?’

Boswell did and smiled. Mullion yawned and stretched himself.

‘We’ve got to have a talk about where we’re going. Can’t stay here much longer, that’s obvious. I mean, there’s nothing here, is there? Maybe a few moles about somewhere, but I haven’t seen signs of any yet. And anyway, there’s somewhere I want to go to…’

Boswell listened, as talking with Bracken had taught him to. Now that Mullion had fattened up, he had lost some of the aggression he had shown when they had first found themselves imprisoned together in the channel and Boswell got on well with him. He was a big mole, as Pasture moles generally were, but a little clumsy. Inclined to bump into entrances when he entered burrows and throw out molehill soil a bit too enthusiastically so that it fell in a mess. But he was good-natured with it—which made the objective he had in mind when he had first left the pastures slightly comic.

It seemed there was a story current in the pastures that there was a mole come from the north who now lived in the nearby system of Nuneham, a fighter who taught other moles to fight. Nomole knew his name, but the story was that he was not staying in the Nuneham system for long. Several Pasture moles had left to join him to see what they could learn, and Mullion, who had been undecided about whether to join them, had changed his mind and set off later on his own.

‘Then I came a cropper in the channel and thought that was it. But now, what with spring coming along soon and this being only a temporary place for the winter, I reckon it would be good to see if we could get to the Nuneham system.’

‘What you mean is that you want us to go with you because three is safer than one,’ said Boswell.

‘That’s about it,’ Mullion agreed. ‘Unless you’ve got a better suggestion.’

Boswell knew what he, personally, wanted to do, what he must do, but he also realised that Bracken was not yet ready even to think about returning to Duncton. At the same time, Mullion’s story interested him, for (as he explained to Bracken when Mullion had put his plan to him himself) there were many accounts of such wandering fighters in the records of Uffington. Indeed, the Book of Fighting had been written by one of them after he had taken his vows, among them the vow not to fight again.

‘Seems a funny thing to do then—write a book about it!’ declared Bracken.

‘The book is not about fighting but about how not to have the need to fight,’ said Boswell mysteriously.

‘Where is this place, Mullion?’

Mullion hesitated, then admitted he wasn’t sure. One of the elders in the system had told him to ‘keep his snout to the Stone’ but he was not sure what he meant and the explanation was not very clear.

‘Is there a Stone at the system of Nuneham, then?’ asked Bracken. Mullion did not know.

The Stone, always the Stone. Bracken remembered the pull of the Stone, the power on its line between Duncton and Uffington. He knew what the elder meant.

‘Do you know what direction it’s in?’ persisted Bracken.

‘The story was, and it came from the mole who came to the pastures and had been to this Nuneham place, that it was towards the north.’

‘If there is a Stone there, I may be able to snout it out,’ said Bracken, surprised at his own audacity. He left them in the burrow and went up on to the surface and out into the field, where he crouched in some grass by a stand of last summer’s thistles, wondering quite what he was doing. It was midmorning and cold but the grass in the field, unlike the thistles, was just beginning to have a bit of life in it again, while from up in one of the bushes among the trees where his tunnels were, the shrill song of a blackbird, powerful and urgent, came across the field.

Bracken thought of the Stone, the Duncton Stone, and looked automatically towards where he knew, without knowing, it must be. Its pull had been there all the time, only he had not bothered to think of it before. But he did not face it directly—it made him feel too desolate and lost to do that.

He turned his back to it and snouted out again, seeing if he could feel any other pulls. Well, of course, there was Uffington; he could feel that. Deep and distant but always strong. He crouched silent and still, letting his mind wander out of his body and around the horizon in the circle. It was hard not to be continually pulled by Duncton and Uffington, the two Stone pulls with which he was familiar, but slowly he forgot them, putting them in the background of his body and mind and seeing what else he could feel.

Nuneham. He tried to reach out to it somehow. If it had a Stone, then surely he would feel it as well! But he suddenly grew tired and ran back for cover again.

For several days Bracken was irritable and wandered about on the surface alone, confirming once more Mullion’s prejudices about Duncton moles generally.

But Boswell understood well what he was trying to do, and realised that few moles had the ability to follow the Stones, and that it was sometimes hard for them. He had already seen how, if they talked about Uffington, Bracken unconsciously aligned himself to its direction and when they referred to Duncton, he would look over his shoulder in what Boswell imagined to be its direction, though Bracken never aligned himself directly to it.

‘Leave him alone to his own thoughts for a few days, Mullion,’ advised Boswell, knowing how impatient and restless the Pasture mole was becoming. ‘He got us out of the channel—he may be able to find the way to Nuneham.’

‘He’s so secretive he won’t even say if he’s willing,’ complained Mullion, ‘and I want to get going.’

Four or five nights later, Boswell was wakened by Bracken well past midnight. ‘Here. Wake up and come outside!’ said Bracken urgently.

Boswell followed him on to the surface.

‘I think Nuneham’s over there,’ said Bracken, pointing a talon to the northwest and aligning his body as well. ‘I woke up a short time ago and could feel it in my body. I know it’s there. There’s a Stone there, though it’s not nearly as strong as Duncton’s. I can feel it.’ He sounded happier than he had for days and Boswell could sense and share his excitement with him.

‘We’ll go there,’ said Bracken. ‘I’ll lead you there.’

He looked out into the night and then swung back towards Uffington. ‘I’ve always felt the pull of Uffington from the moment I first went to the Stone,’ he said. He glanced briefly over his shoulder to the east where Duncton lay, and then back, with relief, to where he said Nuneham was. Boswell could almost feel the pulls of the Stones that Bracken felt. Involuntarily he ran forward and touched Bracken’s shoulder with his good paw.

‘We’ll all go there, together,’ said Boswell.

‘I wouldn’t leave you here,’ said Bracken seriously, misunderstanding him, adding lightly to hide the way he felt: ‘Anyway, you haven’t told me all you know about Uffington yet!’

Boswell understood what Bracken meant and felt suddenly warmed by the power of his protection. It had been a long, cold journey from Uffington but now, watching Bracken returning to his burrow through the night ahead of him, Boswell felt that at last he had arrived.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Rebecca’s escape with Comfrey and Violet from Duncton was made possible only by Mekkins’ intricate knowledge of the Marsh End, which allowed them to elude the henchmoles who sighted them almost immediately after Bracken’s departure into the marsh.

Even then they were not safe, for they were found trying to make their way to Rose’s tunnels by a group of Pasture moles who very nearly killed them. The only thing that saved them was Rebecca’s pleas that they at least be allowed to see Rose—whose name the Pasture moles seemed to respect— and also the audacity of Mekkins’ defence of the three of them.

‘You bloody well take your paws off of me, and let us talk to Rose the Healer! And don’t give me any of your lip, chum, because otherwise I’ll get really narked.’

The Pasture moles did not understand all the words, but they could make sense of the sentiment—and even the biggest of them quailed slightly at the sight of Mekkins in a rage. Duncton moles had a reputation for being brave and cunning fighters.

When Rose finally came, brought by an uneasy Pasture mole, the first thing that Mekkins said was, ‘’Ere, Rose, tell this bleeding lot of Pasture moles that we’ve not come ’ere to take over the Pasture system all by ourselves. We’re not bloody stupid. And anyway,’ he added, looking contemptuously around, ‘and begging our pardon, but this ain’t exactly the place I’d choose to settle down!’

Rose smiled at them all, though she knew that this was an escape and not a visit. She had long suspected that this might happen.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘This is Mekkins of the Duncton system and other moles I know. He is an elder and an honourable mole, even if he does seem a little rude at times.’

‘Yes—well—sorry,’ muttered Mekkins, shaking his shoulders and looking chastened. ‘But they needn’t have been so rough with Rebecca and the youngsters. This is Rose, you two,’ he added, turning to Comfrey and Violet, ‘so you say hello.’

‘Hello!’ said Violet, running up to Rose immediately.

Comfrey just looked at her, moving to hide behind Rebecca.

‘Hello, my dears,’ said Rose. ‘Now Mekkins had better tell me what has happened.’

Rose quickly insisted on installing Rebecca and the youngsters in a burrow near her own, though the Pasture moles muttered that it wasn’t right, and they’d better not get up to any of their Duncton Wood hanky-panky here. And to make sure they didn’t, they said they would post some guards by the burrow, while they went and conferred with one of their elders.

Mekkins found this hard to take, especially as he was now very anxious to get back to the Marsh End, but did not want to risk leaving Rebecca here until he was sure it was safe for her. He suggested that he go with the Pasture moles to see their elders for himself.

‘No way, mate,’ said the toughest of the Pasture moles. ‘No way. We’re not having you spying on us, casting those spells and rituals you get up to in Duncton Wood. No! You stay right here and just shut up until we decide what to do. And think yourself lucky that Rose knows you, otherwise…’ He stabbed a talon into the air to indicate what would otherwise happen.

However, after two days of complaints and anger, Mekkins was finally summoned to meet a Pasture elder somewhere deep in the Pasture system. By then Rose had made it quite clear that she felt that Rebecca must stay with her, and Comfrey and Violet, too, until they were more independent.

‘Which won’t be all that long, my love, by the way they’re already settling down,’ she said. And it was true, for Violet was beginning to get on with even the Pasture moles and Comfrey was finding new questions to ask Rose every hour, now that he had got used to her.

The place that Mekkins was taken to by four of the toughest male moles he had ever seen outside the Westside of Duncton (‘guardmoles’, they called themselves) was way down in the pastures through a series of long, sparse tunnels with far fewer burrows off them than he was used to. The Pasture moles seemed thinner on the ground—but then he could see that worms were not so plentiful out here either.

Finally they reached a structure that Mekkins had heard of but never seen—a fortress, a massive molehill with burrows on several levels, both above and below ground, connected by linked tunnels. There was a big, round central burrow that was wider but not so high as the elder burrow in Barrow Vale. Its walls were dry and well burrowed, and its floor covered in comfortable nesting material, mainly dry thistles and grass. He was ushered none too gently into the burrow where, at one end, a big, dark-grey mole crouched, his talons splayed loosely before him and his snout sleepily lowered over them. His eyes were half closed, but his voice, when he finally used it after a long silence, was wide awake.

‘Name?’

‘My name’s Mekkins, and I…’

‘System?’

‘Don’t be so daft!’ said Mekkins, more than irritated. ‘I’m from Duncton, aren’t I?’

The guardmoles moved heavily forward at this rudeness, but the big mole raised one paw to stop them.

‘Just answer my questions,’ he said. ‘Purpose.’

‘What do you mean, “purpose”?’ said Mekkins.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘The moles I brought—that’s Rebecca and her two youngsters—had a spot of bother. They were being attacked. I knew Rose would help them so I brought them.’

‘Why should we let them stay here?’

Mekkins opened his mouth to answer, but couldn’t think of anything to say that would make any sense to a mole that didn’t know Rebecca.

‘Well?’

‘Because Rose trusts her; that’s the best reason I can give,’ said Mekkins.

Suddenly and unexpectedly the mole smiled. It was a slow, warm smile which took the aggression right out of Mekkins.

‘A very good reason, if I may say so, a very good reason. Very good.’ The mole got up and came over to where Mekkins was crouched between the guardmoles. With a pleasant nod he dismissed them, leaving himself alone with Mekkins.

‘My name’s Brome,’ he said, ‘and despite appearances, I’m glad to see you. Rose warned me that there was trouble coming and she even mentioned your name as a mole to trust. I did not think we would meet so soon. Sorry about my guardmoles, but you can’t change generations of hostility overnight and there’s no reason why we should. Except that if you believe Rose, which I do, the time is coming when hostility isn’t going to matter much one way or another. Now, since you are on Pasture territory, I think it is reasonable that you tell me about your system first. All these warnings by Rose are fair enough, but I have to run a system and I can’t do it on vague guesses and surmises. So what’s happening?’

He spoke pleasantly but with great authority, treating Mekkins as an equal and instilling in him a sense of trust that Mekkins, well used to judging moles quickly, was prepared to accept. These were funny times and the more friends a mole had the better, as far as he was concerned. So he told Brome exactly what the problem was and how the system had changed and been corrupted under Mandrake—a mole, it turned out, who had done a great deal of damage in the pastures en route to Duncton. Mekkins described how Rune was in the process of taking over Duncton and what the implications were for his own Marsh End.

Mekkins told him something too about Rebecca, saying there was no reason the Pasture moles should suddenly take her into their system except that he, Mekkins, believed she held some kind of destiny in herself for more than just a couple of youngsters. And so did Rose.

Brome listened to this with great interest, for it seemed to him to have a lot to do with what he wanted to say to this first senior mole of Duncton he had met. But first he had to decide if he could trust Mekkins.

‘Tell me, Mekkins,’ he said quietly, ‘what do you know of the Stone?’

Brome noticed that Mekkins’ manner changed. It became more personal, less weighted by the many considerations a leader has, even if only of part of a system like Marsh End.

‘Do you mean the Stone generally?’ asked Mekkins, looking around in a quiet way. ‘Or the Duncton Stone in particular?’

‘Is there a difference?’ asked Brome.

Mekkins hesitated. He had never talked about the Stone to another mole in his life, not even since he had gone to it for Rebecca’s sake and it had answered his prayers. Since then he had been in deep awe of it and hesitated now to talk to another mole who might not understand his words. Finally he said: ‘The Duncton Stone has great power and may still be the true heart of our system, as it once was the heart in reality—when moles lived only on top of the hill. We’ve been cut off from it, though, by the likes of Mandrake and Rune, who I’ve told you about.’ Then he added in a rush: ‘If you want to know what I think, the Stone is the most important thing Duncton’s got.’

Brome nodded. He looked pleased by this reply but said nothing. For a moment it was his turn to hesitate, but then he settled down further on to his paws with the air of a mole who, after keeping something to himself for a very long, time has decided that the moment has come to tell it all. He trusted Mekkins.

‘You’ve got to understand that in my system we are brought up to believe that Duncton moles are spell-weavers and evil, that the wood is dangerous to go near and that the Stone on top of the hill—which we have all heard about—is an evil Stone.’

Mekkins looked visibly surprised at this.

‘Well, that’s how it is. Now, plenty of moles here believe in the Stone as an idea—something to worship, if you like. And we’ve got our rituals, like any other system. But we’re a big, diverse system and in recent years have been plagued by fighting and factions, just as other systems such as your own have. When, at about the time I took control here, I got talking to Rose about this and that, she told me, to my surprise, that she had been to your Stone several times. “It’s about as evil as a buttercup”, she said. Well, one night I decided to go and see for myself—a bit risky, but something drove me to it.’

‘Yeh! The Stone’s like that,’ murmured Mekkins.

‘Well, of course it wasn’t evil, it was inspiring. I couldn’t even describe the effect it had.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mekkins with a conspiratorial grin, ‘I think I know.’

‘I might have left it at that but for something that happened last September. One of our moles, Cairn, got killed in your system. A mating fight. His brother is… I should say "was" because he has left our system now… a mole called Stonecrop, who was the most important fighter this system has ever seen. He wanted to lead a group of moles over to Duncton and avenge Cairn’s death. One way or another I persuaded them out of it—frankly, I was worried about the consequences. But somehow it made me think about whether it would be worth invading Duncton.’

Mekkins began to look worried, but Brome laughed. ‘Don’t worry. Hear me out. What I concluded was that if there was anything at all in Duncton Wood we wanted it was the Stone. Or rather, access to the Stone. It would give our moles the kind of focusing point that might stop the pointless feuds that keep developing here. And anyway, half of Duncton Hill is made up of the pastures, isn’t it? And taken together—the two systems, that is—the Stone is a natural centre.’

Mekkins looked decidedly worried. The implications of what Brome was saying were very obvious to him.

Brome continued. ‘Now, the reason I mention all this to you is principally because if you want my help down in the Marsh End against your Rune, which I think you may, then I’m going to want yours, up on top of the hill. I don’t want territory. I want access.’

‘The thin end of the root,’ said Mekkins cynically.

‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ said Brome. ‘But it might just stop the killing and feuding that goes on between the systems, and within my own.’

‘What’s this to do with me?’ asked Mekkins.

‘I don’t know—yet,’ said Brome. ‘But I’ve got a feeling that when Rose told me that you were a mole to be trusted, she meant you might have a bigger part to play than perhaps you expect in the changes she is talking about.’

Mekkins and Brome looked at each other as two equals, poised before great events about to take place which would affect and change everything they knew. Mekkins smiled at last.

‘You’re quite a mole, you are, Brome. We could do with a mole like you in Duncton.’

Brome laughed and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, as if to seal a trust between them.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘if that Rebecca of yours is the one who mated with Cairn, which I noticed you avoided even hinting at, you had better warn her not to mention it. There’s Pasture moles who wouldn’t like to know she’s in the system. You see, Cairn’s brother Stonecrop was a very special mole and he’s missed. If they thought a mole who, even indirectly, caused his departure from the system was here, they might not like it.’

Mekkins smiled noncommittally. He turned to go.

‘Is she that mole?’ asked Brome.

‘Yes,’ said Mekkins. He didn’t like lies.

‘She must be quite somemole,’ said Brome.

‘She is,’ said Mekkins. With that, their discussion was over, and after a short visit back to Rose’s burrow, in which he passed on Brome’s advice to Rebecca, Mekkins went hurriedly back to see what was happening in Duncton Wood.

Rose’s burrow was one of the untidiest, and loveliest, Rebecca had ever seen. It was the kind in which youngsters could wander delightedly from object to object and lose themselves in reveries of wonder and play. Its walls had been burrowed in a rough and homely way, with an occasional roundel of stone left protruding, because Rose liked it that way, which cast friendly shadows and pillows of shade.

Just inside the entrance, and half blocking it, was a pile of dried leaves and flowers of woodruff, whose hay like scent, said Rose, was the quickest way of reminding a returning mole that sanity lies inside her burrow more often than outside it. Next to this was a scatter of beechnut husks and near them, the two mingling together at the edges, a collection of black elderberries, dried and frizzled into hardness.

There were several flints around the floor of the burrow, one of them flat-topped and obviously used by Rose as a surface on which to crash herbs, for it was covered by the crushed and shredded foliage of white horehound, whose thyme scent made that corner of the burrow like an open field of its own to moles who closed their eyes and let the scent take them over.

‘Yes, my love, that’s why I never quite finish crushing them all, because, you see, every time I try, the delicious scent quite takes me over!’ said Rose, explaining the clutter of horehound stems and leaving them exactly where they were.

On the far wall opposite the entrance Rose had made her own special nest, a soft pile of blue runner leaves intermingled with the dried petals of eglantine and wild lavender. Rose had let Violet sleep there one day, though inevitably she complained that it was ‘uncomfortable and bumpy,’ which indeed it was, since some of the rose hips which Rose had gathered and heaped nearby had ‘inexplicably’ rolled into her nest and she had never noticed them.

There was a dusty, dried-out red cardinal beetle shell by one wall, which Rose had never bothered to move since, ‘It crawled down here one summer’s day and peacefully spent the evening watching me do something or other—I can’t quite remember what—and then died!’ Violet didn’t like it much, but Comfrey found its colour—a deep red ochre— beautiful, and he liked the obscure shine of its dead wings.

In the centre of the burrow and draped with other herbs and stems, all dusty, dry and green with age, was a long, gnarled flint of pinks and blues whose shape seemed to change with the hour of the day and the angle at which a mole chose to look at it. ‘Oh, no. It doesn’t change,’ explained Rose to Rebecca when they were talking one day, ‘you do.’

From this fragrant burrow Rose had carried out her life’s work of healing Duncton and Pasture moles alike. By the time Rebecca came so desperately to her in the last week of that cold January, Rose was reaching the end of her long life. Even in the time since just before Longest Night, when Rebecca had last seen her, Rose had slowed and aged. She suffered pains now in her shoulders and back paws, which made movement difficult so that she tended to prefer to settle into one position at a time, moving only her head to keep track of Rebecca and the youngsters when they were in her burrow. She liked to see a mole’s eyes when she spoke to him, or her, and despite her pain, her own eyes were as still and warm as ever.

At the same time she slept more, sometimes drifting in and out of sleeping and waking as a scatter of dandelion silk rises and falls on a warm evening wind in September. As the days went by, she seemed to say less and less and to smile more, and round her came a peace that descended even on Violet, whose normal ebullience grew quieter and gentler when she was near Rose.

Comfrey had quickly overcome his initial wariness of Rose and, together with Violet, he would spend long hours with her as she told them tales and legends of the system. Violet liked the dramatic ones, with heroes and villains dashing about from tunnel to tunnel, while Comfrey preferred to hear Rose tell stories of the flowers and trees, whose lore and mysteries held him spellbound.

Rose began each of her tales the same way—‘From my heart to your heart I tell this tale, that its blessing may touch you as it has touched me’—and Comfrey would snuggle down, while Violet looked all expectant as the magic of the story wove them into its fabric.

Although Rebecca was not aware of it, it was almost unknown for a mole to enter Rose’s burrow, and word quickly got about among the Pasture moles that ‘that Rebecca from Duncton must be very special, because Rose the Healer lets her inside her burrow. Inside!’

They were right to remark on it, for to Rose, Rebecca was very special. She had seen the power for life in Rebecca from the first, and valuing it as she did, understood better than any mole, better even than Mekkins, how near to a death of spirit the murder of her litter by Mandrake had brought her.

Even in Rebecca’s care of Comfrey, which could hardly have been more tender and loving—and now, in her acceptance of Violet—even now Rose could see that Rebecca had lost much trust in life. Sometimes there was a far-off sadness in the way Rebecca caressed Comfrey, or a sudden frailty in the laughter that had once always been so full and free.

So Rose opened her burrow to Rebecca and the youngsters, knowing that with the Stone’s grace, Rebecca might find again some of the life she had lost touch with. Rose did not waste time or breath on regretting what had happened. She had known since their first meeting that Rebecca would be a healer, and she knew that healing can only come from a heart that has seen the dark as well as the light. She feared that for Rebecca there was more to come, far more than she herself had ever known, and she silently prayed that the Stone would help her give to Rebecca the strength and trust to find her way alone when she, Rose, was gone.

It was for this reason that Rose was insistent that the youngsters should, for a period every day, leave her together alone with Rebecca—indeed, she made sure that the more friendly of the Pasture guardmoles, who still hung about, took Violet and Comfrey under their care and kept them occupied.

These were times of talk and silence, times in which Rose imparted to Rebecca her knowledge of herbs and healing lore and a trust in the Stone—a time in which there continued inside Rebecca the healing that had started with her communion with Bracken on Longest Night, in the silence of the Stone.

She taught Rebecca by instinct rather than by design, for her mind was as delightfully illogical as her burrow. Rhymes and sayings, thoughts and words, ideas and laughter, all came at their own pace and in their own way, and Rebecca was barely conscious that she was learning anything. Like the old flower rhyme that Rose taught her one day to illustrate the herbs that give a burrow a nice, long-lasting scent, and which Rebecca only discovered she remembered many moleyears later:

Germander and marjoram,

Basil, meadowsweet,

Daisy-tops and tansies,

Fennel with burnet;

Roses in August,

Lavender in June,

Maudlin and red mint—

None will go too soon.

They talked about a thousand things, but what Rose most put into Rebecca’s mind were seeds of thought to grow, rather than finished plants to fade. And she waited for Rebecca to ask the questions.

‘Rose?’

‘Mmm, my love?’

‘How do you know how to help a mole when you think he needs help?’

‘You don’t know, my dear. You never know. You may have an idea but you don’t know. No… you see, they tell you. What you have to learn is to understand what they are trying to say, because if there’s one thing certain, they won’t know themselves! In fact, Rebecca, one of the burdens healers have to bear is most moles’ inability to say what it is that’s wrong with them. Mind you, if they knew—really knew—then there probably wouldn’t be anything wrong.’ Rose crouched in silence, Rebecca letting the words sink in. Then Rose added: ‘The best way to start is to touch them gently with your paw just as you touch Comfrey when he needs comforting. Touching tells you far more than words ever can.’

Another time, Rose suddenly broke a long silence in which she had seemed to be sleeping and said, ‘You can tell what’s wrong with a mole by the way they stand. Illness and disease, even that which starts in the mind, always shows in the body. The easiest things to heal are injuries after a mating fight—give them a push here, a shove there, and a word of encouragement all over and they’re soon as right as rain. How I used to love to get my paws on those rough Westside males!’ They both laughed at the thought, and Rose explained: ‘You see, they use their bodies for fighting so much that they can feel what’s wrong better than most moles, and they soon go back into place. As a matter of fact, fighting isn’t as bad as some moles make out. It teaches a mole to appreciate what he’s got. Too much fear and too little action spoils a body. That’s what was wrong with that Bracken of yours!’

As the weeks passed and February reached its chilly end, Rose began to encourage Rebecca to make sure each day to find time to crouch by herself and ‘not think’ for a while.

‘What do you mean, Rose?’

‘You just do it, my love, and don’t think about it. You’ll find that every burrow has its best spot for crouching and doing nothing and in my burrow it’s over by that plant where the horehound scent’s so pleasant. You can start right now. You just go over there and close your eyes and don’t think, while I do my best to tidy up a bit. But don’t mind me.’

As Rose slowly moved about, Rebecca tried, but after a few minutes her voice came to Rose across the burrow. ‘It’s impossible not to think! Thoughts keep coming to replace the ones I’ve just got rid of!’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Rose unsympathetically, ‘it is trying. But you won’t find it helps to talk.’

That first time Rebecca managed it for only ten minutes before she gave up in exasperation, claiming that she had better go and see what the youngsters were up to. But Rose kept her at it and gradually, as March progressed, Rebecca found she was positively looking forward to her time of not thinking every day.

When this happened, Rose, who was only repeating what her own teacher had taught her so many years before, started to suggest that instead of thinking of nothing, she try thinking about one thing each time. It was the spear thistle that grew on the pasture above Rose’s tunnel and would soon be showing life again that she had to think about the first time. Then, variously, such things and ideas as oak trees, owls, stones, the Stone, darkness, talons and warmth.

One day Rebecca started to weep when she was doing this, and Rose let her, glad to see that at last some of her grief was leaving her. Later, Rebecca spoke about it, saying, ‘I remembered running up the hill one day, after Cairn had left to fight Rune—I told you—and it was raining and I was running. I was so confused, running this way and that until somehow I found I was up at the Stone…’

‘Somehow?’

When Rose interjected like this, Rebecca knew it was important to find an answer. How had she found her way up the hill? She thought back, and she was among those great grey beech trees again, with the rain falling between them and she was turning, running… why, it had been the beech trees swaying with her, urging her this way and that, swaying her back to the light at the top of the hill where the Stone was, as if they knew where she should go and were telling her…

‘Was that it, then?’ she asked herself and Rose.

‘Only you can really tell, my dear. But I know that the trees and plants tell me things I wouldn’t otherwise know. Sometimes I think they help to guide me to a mole who needs help—otherwise I can’t think how I’ve so often found my way so quickly to a mole. If you doubt me, go on to the surface in Duncton Wood after a really bad storm, when the trees have been whipped and shattered by the wind, and branches have fallen: you can feel that the trees are shaken and desolate by what has happened, for their feeling is in the very air, mixed with relief as well.’

So, bit by bit, Rose passed over some of the heritage of her wisdom to Rebecca, who one day, she knew, would take over her task of healing.

By mid-March, the two youngsters, particularly Violet, were becoming increasingly independent. Violet was already growing fast and had managed to make friends with some Pasture youngsters from an autumn litter, so they saw less and less of her, though she came back to sleep in Rebecca’s burrow most days.

Comfrey still liked to stay near Rebecca, though lately he had taken to sleeping in a burrow of his own making. Inspired by Rose, he had grown increasingly interested in herbs and flowers, and was forever asking when he would be able to go out on the surface and see more for himself.

‘You’ll have to wait a week or two more yet before the first ones start coming, my sweet thing,’ said Rose, ‘though I expect you’d find a few snowdrops here and there now. And winter aconite. But soon there’ll be celandine and bluebells, and after that, in April, there’s ground ivy, bugle, all sorts of ferns starting up and oh! you’re so lucky!’ Rose suddenly looked sad and nostalgic, as if she knew that she’d never see such delights again.

‘Of course you will, Rose,’ said Rebecca. ‘The warm weather’s nearly here now. Why, there’ll be the sound of pup cries in Duncton soon, and probably in the pastures as well…’ But Rebecca couldn’t go on. Rose was looking at her with eyes that said she knew how old she was and how near the end. And Rebecca could never say anything but the truth to Rose.

Now, subtly, their relationship changed and deepened. It was as if Rose felt there was no more she could tell Rebecca— her beloved Rebecca—and now she must trust to the Stone that Rebecca could find her own way. There were long hours of silence between them; times when the best words were silent. A time when Rose showed Rebecca that she trusted her and in doing so helped Rebecca learn to trust in life again. A time when Rebecca began to see, and fear, that she might soon have to take over Rose’s task of healing. Oh! She knew so little! A time when Rose’s sleep grew longer and more troubled with pain, and her talk began to wander and her sense of peace to deepen, so that the very burrow seemed to hush and grow more still: its shadows darkening, its aromas and scents more delicate and distant, and Rebecca now rarely leaving Rose alone as she slept in her nest.

The Pasture moles seemed to sense that Rose’s work was nearly done, for they shushed the youngsters in the tunnels outside and the Pasture moles spoke in low voices, and brought food to save Rebecca from having to get it.

Some of what Rose whispered to herself aloud in those last days Rebecca understood; other parts she remembered, and somehow made sense of in later years when she had greater wisdom; and some made no sense at all.

She was old Rose now, her breathing shorter and shallower, her snout hardly moving, the bliss of having Rebecca near her in the dark, moving gently in her burrow, soothing her pains, laughing still with that Violet, naughty minx, and Cairn and Bracken of the Ancient System; ‘My love my sweet thing,’ she said to him, ‘do you remember Bracken? Up in the dark tunnel where I lost so much strength giving it to Bracken so he could learn to love?’ So many moles had come her way one by one so much fear so many unnecessary things. Rebecca knew everything already poor child she didn’t know no good telling her sweet child her Bracken she would love…

‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ she whispered in the burrow where the scent was sweet.

‘Yes, my love,’ said Rebecca. Her fur on mine, nuzzling me my love my words her love in me Rebecca Rebecca shivering a shiver where’s your Bracken who I saw, where…

‘What is it, Rose?’

…where’s Bracken do you know… ‘Where’s … Bracken?’

‘I told you, Rose, he’s gone, he’s gone, but I know he’s safe. I can feel it like the beech trees, like I knew before when…’

‘I went to him on the hill and you helped me you did…’

‘Yes, Rose, sleep, Rose, sleep, my dearest Rose.’

I stayed by the Stone afterwards looking darkness in the night great trees beech trees sway and roots and… ‘I knew it was you and Bracken around us you and Bracken Rebecca you and Bracken would be around us all…’

‘Yes, Rose.’

You wept at last and I knew it would come like you did to the hill your wet tears had to come on your face on my fur at last.

‘Now, no need my dear no need.’

And her old voice died away, leaving only the sound of Rebecca’s tears, muffled by sweet Rose’s fur.

‘Where’s Rose gone?’ Violet asked the guardmole, who hesitated because he didn’t know.

‘She’s gone to the St-Stone,’ said Comfrey, angry with himself for always stuttering on the word that mattered most.

‘How do you know?’ asked Violet.

‘I just d-do,’ said Comfrey, who did know, because Rose had told him once that all the plants come from the Stone and plants were no different from moles, and he had asked, ‘Where do they go when they wither and die in the winter?’ and she said, ‘They go to the Stone, which is everywhere,’ so they must do, and that’s where Rose had gone. But it was no good telling Violet that, because the words wouldn’t come out right.

But he could tell Rebecca, because she knew and he could find her up by the entrance on the surface in the sun where she went afterwards and was now. He would run, he was running, running into tears, and he couldn’t help it. Oh, where was Rose, he sobbed.

Rebecca would know.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

It took Bracken, Boswell and Mullion until the middle of April to make their way to the Nuneham system—a time in which Mullion frequently threatened to leave them because, ‘Bracken obviously does not know the way and all this Stone stuff is a load of nonsense,’ as he put it.

Bracken himself did not say much. He could feel the Stone’s pull but was not confident enough about it to be willing to argue with Mullion, if he did not want to follow him. Boswell had more faith than either of them, and it was his moderation, and occasional calling of Mullion’s bluff— for the Pasture mole really did not want to go it alone—that kept them together.

They faced many difficulties and dangers: the country they had to cross was mainly wet and low-lying and often slow to travel, while since it was the mating season they had to avoid penetrating too deeply into any of the systems they came near. But gradually Bracken found that the pull of the Stone got stronger and stronger until there came a day when they asked a mole they met if he knew where Nuneham was and he answered, with a look that showed he thought they were stupid, ‘Aye, this is it. It was Nuneham you said, warn’t it?’ Bracken immediately asked where the Stone was and how hostile Nuneham moles were likely to be.

‘Oh, well, I wouldn’t worry about that too much. Nuneham bain’t what it was, you know. The river’s moved in the last few generations and flooded the place out so much that there isn’t a system worth speaking of any more. Just a few old-timers like me who keep their snouts out of trouble… You’ll find the Stone yonder.’ He waved a talon westwards down the tunnel where they had met and scurried off in the opposite direction.

‘Here!’ shouted Mullion after him. ‘Wait a minute!’ He ran off after the mole and Bracken and Boswell heard him ask, ‘You got any idea if there’s a mole here who’s a fighter, come from the north?’

‘You’re not the first as has asked that, I can tell you! Well, there is and there isn’t. I never met en myself. Plenty comes to find en and most go away disappointed. Some claim they found en, but won’t never say where or when.’

‘Where do you think we could find him?’ asked Mullion.

‘Beyond the Stone, that’s where most things be,’ said the mole. ‘There was several moles like you come on through here not so long back, couple of weeks it war. Big like you they was. They found en and they didn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Mullion.

‘Well, now, there was four of em and I met three of em after, up by Stone as it happens, and they said they looked about and they reckoned en didn’t exist. But one of em oo warn’t with them anymore, he was waiting a bit longer to see and not going back with the others.’

‘Where to?’ asked Mullion excitedly.

‘Ask the worms, don’t ask me. I don’t go gallivantin’ about the countryside like you youngsters do.’ With that he really did leave, and Mullion came back to the others.

‘Hear that? Sounds like the four Pasture moles I mentioned have been here before us. I wonder who stayed behind.’

They found the Nuneham Stone with no difficulty—all the tunnels seemed to lead to it. It was wide and bulbous in shape, much less tall than the Duncton Stone, and stood on a bluff of deep green pasture grass overlooking a low and meandering river that lay below, beyond several fields of lush green pasture. Patches of blue creeping speedwell, a few early dandelions and the darker leaves of young bugle shoots grew among the grass by the Stone, whose general appearance disappointed Bracken. He had expected something much more impressive.

‘Each Stone is different,’ explained Boswell, ‘and they can all teach you something. Try to spend some time in silence by any Stone you come to before examining it too closely—that way you may get to know it faster.’

Bracken complied—he trusted Boswell’s advice on anything to do with the Stone—and since it was late afternoon, and the surface felt safe, he was willing to crouch for a while in the open. From beyond the Stone he could hear the sound of chaffinch, yellowhammer and blackbird busy in some hedge he could not see, and to the mixed sound of their warbles, notes and songs, he let himself listen to the Nuneham Stone. It seemed a friendly, peaceful place.

Mullion, however, could not crouch still and had no desire to. He wanted to go searching for the fighting mole, and also to see if he was right and that the Pasture moles had indeed been there.

It was only when evening started drawing in, bringing with it the risk of predators, that Bracken and Boswell returned to the tunnels and pressed on beyond the Stone, calling out for Mullion, who had disappeared.

The tunnels were like those in the pastures by Duncton Wood, sparse, long and straight, with relatively few burrows or side runs, but the impression they gave was very different. For one thing, the soil was richer and darker, and having an element of sand or gravel in it from some distant past when the river had deposited its alluvium this high up the valley side, it tended to soften and slide in places, giving the tunnels a discarded air. There was an untidy litter on some of the tunnel floors while what burrow entrances there were were untidy and unkempt.

Once or twice they heard and saw moles nearby, but there was no feeling of hostility or even curiosity about them, and they, too, seemed to be coming and going rather than stopping still.

‘There aren’t even any pup cries up here,’ observed Bracken to Boswell. ‘In fact, I haven’t seen or smelt a female yet.’

Boswell was content to follow Bracken, whose instincts in route-finding he trusted absolutely, and so they wandered from tunnel to tunnel, generally slightly uphill, occasionally calling out for Mullion, though they knew that they could always meet him back at the Stone again.

Being April, the nights were still cold and as nightfall began outside, a chill settled down into the tunnel. They had some food and then decided to press on uphill to any outer limit the tunnels might have, and there to sleep.

But then, as they advanced, Bracken began to grow restless, feeling that he was going somewhere definite, though where, he had no idea. He scurried on forward, only occasionally stopping to look around and check that Boswell was behind him and to let him catch up.

‘Have you noticed that the tunnel is suddenly getting tidier and neater?’ asked Boswell, limping forward to where Bracken was waiting for him on one of these slopes. ‘Somemole’s cleared the litter and shored up some of these crumbling walls,’ he added.

And as he spoke, there was a heavy tread in the tunnel ahead of them which stopped some way beyond in the darkness.

‘What mole is there?’ asked a strong, deep voice from the depths behind. It was neither friendly nor hostile.

They pressed forward until they came to a big central chamber in which several routes met, on the far side of which crouched a very powerful-looking mole. He was slim compared with a Duncton mole and his fur was light. He was enormously muscular and strong—the kind of mole whose size only tells when a normal mole goes near him, and whichever way he stands he seems to feel dwarfed.

His face fur was thick and dark-silvery, his eyes full of self-confidence. Bracken noticed that his back paws were unusually large and that he crouched full square on the ground, giving the impression that he was ready to spring into action at any moment.

‘What moles are you?’ he repeated.

But before Bracken could reply, his manner, until now quite neutral, suddenly changed. His big snout came forward towards Bracken and sniffed at him, his front paws pushed powerfully into the chamber floor as his eyes narrowed and his tail started to twitch angrily. There was a deep growling from his throat as, very slowly, he drew himself up to his full height.

Bracken stopped quite still, his mind racing after reasons for this sudden hostility. Not finding any but being unwilling to argue, he backed away towards the entrance through which they had come, pushing Boswell protectively behind him. Better to have it out verbally from a position in which it was possible to retreat.

‘I said what moles are you and where are you from?’ repeated the mole, more angry by the second.

‘I am Bracken of…’

‘Duncton Wood?’ roared the mole inquisitorially. ‘From Duncton Wood are you?’

He came powerfully towards Bracken, his size seeming to double with each forward step he took. And before Bracken could even say a word or raise his talons to defend himself, the mole was on to him and had thrust a paw just behind his shoulder and with one massive heave pulled him round into the centre of the chamber. For a moment the mole looked back at Boswell, snouted at him and then turned away dismissively, back to Bracken again.

‘I would know your smell anywhere,’ he thundered, bringing down a massive talon blow in such a way that it did not seriously injure Bracken but cut across his shoulder and hurled him backwards several steps. His power and speed were extraordinary and Bracken was still desperately trying to think what was happening when the mole brought his left paw swinging round and tore a talon’s cut along his flank. As Bracken staggered back, gasping and frightened, a line of blood appearing on his fur, he watched as behind the great mole Boswell hobbled forward bravely to strike uselessly at the mole with one paw. With a terrible backward kick the other mole sent his back paw shattering into Boswell’s face and he fell back against the wall behind and slumped across the entrance they had come in by.

Despite his shock and cuts, this sight of Boswell, whom he knew had never harmed anymole in his life, being knocked unconscious, brought to Bracken the kind of rage he had felt overtake him when he had first confronted Mullion in the channel beyond the marsh.

He raised his talons, stepped back to give himself more room, and then lunged forward towards the mole’s eyes and snout with all his power. He missed wildly, however. When he got there, the great mole moved easily out of his path, leaving his talons stabbing at the air, while the mole laughed cruelly at him. And then grew serious.

‘What’s it feel like, Duncton mole? What’s it feel like?’ he roared.

Bracken charged again, but this time the great mole simply leaned up and backwards and Bracken could not even reach his face with his talons. He tried bringing them down on the mole’s shoulders but he simply stepped sideways, letting Bracken fall vulnerably forward, carried by the force of his own futile blow.

By now Bracken was gasping for breath, and frightened, as he looked desperately around the burrow for his adversary. The mole was now behind him, talons loose and raised, mocking him in his inability even to hit him.

Then he said, ‘Is this what you’re trying to do?’ and lunged a blow forward that caught Bracken powerfully below his shoulder and made him sound a deep grunt of pain, the sound of a mole who knows that a few more such blows will mean death.

‘Or this?’ said the mole, suddenly swinging round and kicking him so hard that for a moment it seemed that the chamber was collapsing about him as he fell back against the wall where Boswell still lay, now groaning and beginning to stir.

Bracken tried to move but couldn’t. A thousand painful weights seemed to be dragging each limb down. The great mole started towards him, talons out, and a look in his eyes such as Bracken had only once seen in anymole’s, and that was Mandrake’s as he came towards him in the Chamber of Dark Sound.

He tried to pull himself up, but even his head would not move as he wanted it to, seeming to slur to one side with a mouth that hung open and gasping with pain. The mole came nearer, the talons of one paw rising. He was saying something but there was such pain in Bracken’s head that he could not hear—only see the mouthings of accusation, and recognise the word, ‘Duncton, Duncton,’ and then, as talons rose over him, he knew with terrible certainty that he and Boswell were going to die. His head turned uselessly to look at Boswell, by the entrance, still lying where he had been thrown by the mole’s kick. Bracken tried to speak, tried to say ‘Why?’—tried to push his body back into the wall, through the wall, out of the chamber to escape the talons, the fear like a root round his throat.

But then the talons stopped, the mole’s head turned away to look at the entrance near where Boswell lay and then at something beyond it. The mole’s motion slowed to stillness and a look of surprise came on his face and his body started to turn aggressively towards the entrance when, through it, there came a snout, then a face, and then the front half of a mole; an old mole, a frail mole, a mole whose coat was wrinkled with age and whose movement was hardly movement at all.

Sound returned to Bracken’s ears.

‘So there’s another one of you!’ roared the big mole.

The old mole half smiled, he turned towards where Bracken and Boswell lay and was suddenly there between them and the big mole, crouching down and facing him.

‘Then three of you can die,’ shouted the big mole, moving suddenly forward again. How does a mole remember something impossible but which he has seen happen? He remembers it as a dream.

So it was a dream to Bracken as the great mole lunged towards them and the wrinkled old mole moved forward and away, perhaps lunging gently with one paw, and the great mole was suddenly falling backwards, wheeling round and back against the far wall of the chamber. Then the old mole was in the middle of the chamber, crouched quiet again, and the attacker coming forward with a massive lunge of both paws.

In Bracken’s dream the old mole stepped, or rather seemed to float, to one side and with the softest of flicks of one of his back paws sent the great mole shuddering into the side wall of the chamber. A dream, but a dream with sounds. For Bracken could hear the pained gasping of the great mole and the scrabbling of his paws as he tried to right himself and staggered round for a third attempt. But even as he drew himself up, the old mole, whose smile never seemed to leave his face and whose eyes stayed clear and calm, stepped forward slowly as if time had stood still especially for him, and gave the big mole the gentlest of blows with his left paw, which made him fall back into unconsciousness, as if he had been struck by some massive storm-torn oak branch.

The dream seemed to continue. As Bracken watched, still half conscious, he heard a fifth mole slowly enter the chamber on his left. He turned his throbbing head towards it, and there he saw Mullion standing open-mouthed, taking in the scene before him. Bracken could almost hear Mullion’s thoughts think themselves.

Three moles lying around the chamber walls as if swept aside by a raging storm and in the centre an old mole crouched still and peaceful, aged paws stretched harmlessly before him, snout settling down comfortably on to them.

‘Impossible!’ Mullion was thinking.

‘Oh no, it’s not,’ thought Bracken. And then, ‘Oh no, you don’t!’ as Mullion started angrily towards the old mole. But he got up, turned his snout to Mullion, seemed suddenly more powerful than anything Bracken had ever seen in his life, and without so much as flexing a talon, brought Mullion to a respectful halt.

The dream ended. To his right Bracken saw the big mole stirring and heard him groan and gasp. To his left he felt Boswell’s paw, against which he had fallen, moving as the mole from Uffington slowly came to. He felt himself stretching, aching and pained, as he righted himself back to his paws, and turned to look at the old mole again.

‘It would be a courtesy if you told me your names,’ said the old mole in a kindly, wise voice.

‘Mullion, of the Pasture system,’ said Mullion, awed and respectful.

‘Bracken of Duncton,’ said Bracken. The old mole turned to look at him, nodded gently and said nothing. He turned to the big mole at the side of the chamber, who raised his snout, shook it, and said, ‘My name is Stonecrop, also of the Pasture system.’

At this, both Bracken and Mullion started with surprise. ‘Stonecrop!’ thought Bracken. ‘Stonecrop. Brother of Cairn. Known to Rebecca. So that was why…’

‘Stonecrop!’ said Mullion delightedly, but with the old mole so much in command he did not dare move.

The old mole smiled and turned to Boswell who, instead of saying his name, got up slowly and moved out into the chamber before him.

‘My name is Boswell of Uffington,’ he said, lowering his snout respectfully to the old mole.

‘May the blessings of the Stone be with you, as they must have been to have brought you safely so far from the Holy Burrows,’ the old mole said to him. ‘And may they be with the rest of you. My name is Medlar of the North and it would be better if there were no fighting in these tunnels—not at any rate by moles such as yourselves who are prey to ignorance and fear.’ He said this severely, as a father might to a recalcitrant youngster.

Then he turned to Mullion and said gently, ‘I think you have come to learn how to fight, but I tell you, your nature is not that of a fighter but a friend. Anymole that counts you as a friend will be stronger by far than if he stood alone.’

Medlar turned to the other three and looked at each of them in turn and then said: ‘I do not know what forces have brought you here, or indeed have led me here myself. But in all my long life I have never met three moles who have more to learn about the way of fighting, or have given me the sense that they will learn as much. I hesitate to speak of this and after it will say little more on the subject. Each of us has a task and with the Stone’s grace only may he fulfil it. All moles may choose to be a fighter if they wish, though many do so who are not fitted for that way. All moles perhaps may be warriors, too, though few, too few, can find the way to it. My task is to try to show you the difference between a fighter and a warrior and it may not be what you expect.

‘Each of you stands now in a tunnel, the start of which is far behind you, the end of which is far ahead. I am but a mole who meets you on the way. Others ahead of me will talk to you as well, and many try to take you down false paths with them. These are your real opponents. Do not give in. Some will invent ways of distracting you. Learn to recognise them. Only the spirit in your heart will keep you going. Hear it. Follow it. Let courage and patience enter your talons and love of your opponents enter your heart.’

Medlar looked round at each of them in turn again. As he looked at Bracken, his old eyes kind and wrinkled with age, Bracken felt as if his soul was stripped bare and this strange mole knew everything there was to know about him. Bracken felt at once frightened and exultant.

‘Now,’ said Medlar, ‘leave me here and go and sleep, for each of you has made a long journey to get here—and each must soon make a long journey again. So our time is short. Eat and sleep and tomorrow I will begin to show you what you need to do.’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tomorrow came, and with it the start of what, for Bracken, was to be the first long period of settled peace in his life. For the days and nights passed slowly, sliding through the molemonths as April gave way to May, and May grew warm with sunshine and birdsong, until a full moleyear had gone by.

It was a time in which Bracken learned to stop worrying about physical danger as he and the other moles concentrated on the guidance that Medlar gave them. Like Hulver, Medlar gave a mole the feeling that when he crouched in a burrow, time chose to crouch still with him, and from this stillness some of Medlar’s wisdom went out to all of them.

Each took something different from him, though it was to be a very long time before any of them understood that he was teaching them. For as well as the curious exercises he made them do—Boswell, for instance, had to attack a wall ‘in slow motion’ for many days in succession, while Bracken had to crouch opposite Mullion and guess ‘what he was thinking and whether he likes you or not’—he instructed them in the art of sitting still and doing nothing, ‘which is where you will meet your first, and perhaps your only real opponent—yourselves’.

But for his extraordinary display of fighting skill against Stonecrop, and the sense of truth he seemed to carry in everything he did, all three of them, at one time or another, might well have given up what seemed a fruitless effort.

As Stonecrop—who soon learned to respect Bracken—was to say one night, ‘I’ve come here to learn how to fight, not to sit on my belly all day trying to think about nothing.’ Yet there was never a time when all three wanted to leave all at once and, indeed, at any one time there was always at least one of them who positively felt he was learning something, though none of them was ever quite sure what.

The fact was that Medlar had seen from the first that the three moles who appeared in the chamber so unexpectedly each had unusual abilities in some directions and were underdeveloped in others. Stonecrop, for example, was one of the most physically harmonious moles he had ever met but for the key fact that his mind was unpeaceful and often confused and full of anger about his brother’s death, so that he could never be a really good fighter because he was not at one with himself. So Medlar made him sit still and allow time for the anger to evaporate.

Boswell, on the other paw, was one of the most spiritually developed moles Medlar had come across—indeed, Boswell was to teach Medlar a great deal about the philosophy of the Stone in talks they had to which Bracken listened, though Stonecrop and Mullion found them boring.

But Medlar understood clearly Boswell’s difficulty in believing that he could extend the use of his body into something as straightforwardly physical as fighting—a natural doubt, given his deformity. But if there was one thing Medlar had learned in his years of showing others how to fight, it was that most moles underestimated what they were capable of doing, killing off their own instincts with the false opinions others held of them.

As for Bracken, Medlar found him the most interesting of the three. It was obvious to Medlar from the moment he first saw him that he was a mole of enormous physical and mental stamina. But it was only slowly that Medlar understood that the fugitive life he had lived, alone with himself and with real danger, had given him no way of valuing the strengths he truly had. He was like a hungry mole who is too insensitive to see that food lies all around him. Medlar’s task was to make him see the qualities he had developed inside himself without knowing it—an ability to act independently and alone for long periods, and very real physical power.

Medlar’s skill lay in making each of the three moles not only see these different qualities in themselves but actually experience them, the only way to pursue truth that he knew. ‘You may tell a mole ten times he is strong and he may believe you, but he will still remain weak; only let him experience his own strength once, and he will always be strong,’ he was fond of saying. So he made Stonecrop experience stillness, Boswell experience gracefulness and Bracken experience his own independence and staying power.

Bracken’s view of Medlar—and indeed of Boswell, Mullion and Stonecrop—changed several times as the molemonths went by. His early awe gave way to exasperation at having to do such pointless-seeming things, and then blind trust took over when he found he could do things that were difficult; then a kind of cocksure disrespect when he thought it was all very easy; and then, when more molemonths had passed, he discovered a new awe bordering on love as he understood that Medlar was teaching him things, without him knowing it, whose very conception he could not even have had at first. Like the question that Medlar had first raised with them about how a great fighter loves his opponent.

His insight into the truth of this came one day when he was engaged in a mock fight with Stonecrop. By now the two moles had an affectionate relationship and were certainly close enough not to wish to harm each other. Bracken was no longer afraid of Stonecrop because he had discovered that, though smaller, he was able to move faster and could turn Stonecrop’s size and power back against him by, for example, using it to add power to his own talon thrusts. As they were engaged in sparring in this way, Medlar suddenly called out: ‘Right! Now make the fight real. Try to kill each other.’

So great was their trust in Medlar that their hesitation was only temporary as each saw the other’s stance change into a real threat. The fight grew slower and more intense and Bracken found to his surprise that he seemed to be not so much fighting against Stonecrop as engaged in a ritual dance with him—a feeling that soon gave way to the sense that, for the moment at least, he was Stonecrop and that when Stonecrop lunged towards him, he was able to counteract the move instinctively because he was making Stonecrop’s lunge himself. ‘Stop!’ called Medlar, and the two, who had both experienced this sense of oneness in the fight, or ‘love,’ as Medlar called it, found their bodies now experienced a curious sense of loss as the fight ended. Neither was in the slightest bit hurt.

Experience like this also taught Bracken to appreciate that a fight between moles is not, at root, a physical thing at all, but a spiritual confrontation. The very idea of spirit was a new one to him and he only learned of it in himself by being made to observe it in other moles. Mullion for example, had a friendly, weak spirit with no ‘hardness’ or ‘force’ to it, and it was only when Bracken himself sensed this that he understood Medlar’s immediate rejection of Mullion as a fighter.

‘But it is his real spirit,’ said Medlar, ‘and it is therefore a powerful one, but it is not the spirit of a fighter. Win the loyalty of his spirit, however, and you are strong indeed.’

Bracken found that Stonecrop, on the other hand, had a very hard and powerful spirit, though one that was inflexible and therefore, in Medlar’s terms, fairly easy to get round. In his own mind, Bracken came to understand this by thinking of Stonecrop as a series of burrows and tunnels, not unlike the Barrow Vale, where, if a mole kept his head and spirit firm, he would eventually find a way through. It was understanding this that cleared Bracken of his fear of Stonecrop—and simultaneously made Stonecrop more respectful of Bracken.

As these insights about fighting came to Bracken, he began to understand other things that Medlar had taught. One of them was the idea that there is no such thing as a talon lunge by itself: a proper fighter lunges with his whole body, which for Medlar meant with his whole spirit.

‘If you understand this, Bracken, you have the way into your true strength. So many moles think that they will succeed by making their lunges more and more powerful—but a gentle touch from the paw of an old mole like me is a thousand times more powerful because I make it with my whole spirit, whereas they use only their muscles.’ And, as if to prove the point, Medlar seemed to do no more than touch Bracken on his shoulder and he found himself tumbling back across the chamber.

Sometimes Bracken saw things suddenly as if a rush of sunlight had all at once filled a gap between trees—and this often happened when he was watching Medlar instruct one of the others. One day, when Boswell was the willing victim, Medlar suddenly yawned and crouched down. Involuntarily Boswell followed suit, thinking that Medlar was taking a rest. Or was it just that? As Boswell relaxed, Medlar attacked him viciously and, taken by surprise, Boswell almost crumpled up before them.

‘A weak spirit will follow a strong spirit and copy what it does,’ said Medlar. ‘You tense up, he will tense up; but you relax and he will relax, as Boswell just did. In a fight, if you gain dominance of spirit and then relax, your opponent will do the same, and in that moment you can kill him, as I could have killed Boswell. Learn to read your opponent’s spirit.

‘It will help you do this if you make him strike at you first with his talons. Indeed, among great fighters the one who strikes first will always lose the fight. Striking betrays weakness of spirit.’

‘Well, that would mean that really great fighters never need to strike a blow,’ said Bracken dubiously.

‘Exactly,’ said Medlar.

One day, Medlar invited Stonecrop to kill him. Stonecrop thought it was a joke, or some kind of trap—which, in a sense, it was, though not quite as Stonecrop imagined. Medlar became angry with his hesitation (or seemed to be, none of them was ever sure with Medlar) and he started viciously attacking Stonecrop, who became angry in his turn. In the midst of the fight, Medlar dropped his guard and repeated, ‘Kill me, Stonecrop,’ and crouched quite still, waiting. There was a hush lasting a long time as Stonecrop’s talons hung poised above Medlar’s upturned snout. Suddenly he dropped his talons and relaxed, saying, ‘You want to die!’

Medlar laughed and said ‘Perhaps I do, but do not turn your back on what you have learned. You see, I am no longer afraid of death and for another mole to meet that attitude is a very fearful thing. A mole who no longer fears death is very powerful because his opponents are then faced by nothing but their own fears. This is very hard to understand, very hard to feel. When you can see that there is no difference between life and death and that you are already dead, then not only will you be more alive than you have ever been but it may be that at last you can accept the task that the Stone has got for you. When that happens you will be a warrior.’

Bracken found it hard to understand these ideas but the exercises Medlar gave him to do made him feel the truth of them and so come to know them from within rather than from without. Discussing them with Boswell, he discovered that while Boswell often understood them better, he found it harder to feel them—neither was sure which was best, or worst.

So the molemonths passed, and the meadow grass on the surface of the Nuneham system began to grow green and lush with the coming of June. More and more grasses and flowers appeared, as the early spring plants gave way to red and white clover and the waving pink flowers of ragged robin, while white clusters of sneezewort and pink cuckoo flowers grew down nearer the river where, in moments of relaxation, the moles occasionally explored. While the river itself flowed more languidly, tiny whirlpools of water catching and circling into nothing at its edge, where the shadows of tall reed, reedmace and fluttering yellow flag fell; and the occasional chub or roach took food on the surface, the roundling circlets of their rise travelling and fading slowly with the flow.

Then, quite suddenly, Bracken began to miss Duncton Wood. He missed the high cover of green leaves, always rustling above, and the different sounds of birds—blackbird and thrush, treecreeper and chaffinch—scurrying and hopping, some on the surface, others on the branches, their massed song at daybreak sharper and much clearer than the more diffused song of a system out here in the open. He missed the beech trees he had grown to love. He missed the darker rich smell of the tunnels, where the worms moved easily, and the surface litter, so much richer in grubs and insects than green grass.

He missed the sound of a Duncton voice. He missed Rue. But most of all, and most mysteriously to him, he missed Rebecca. The more he sat and didn’t think, as Medlar insisted that he should; the more he learned to feel the spirit of Stonecrop or Boswell, and of himself; the more he turned to face the world about him through learning how to fight… the more he missed Rebecca.

There were days when her memory would nag at him, and he would look about him as if the world was incomplete, and there was something just outside his reach which needed to be put in place for it all to be right again. He remembered running through the Chamber of Roots beneath the Stone, when she was ahead of him. He could feel her touch on his shoulder and her voice, gentler and yet fuller than any birdsong he had ever heard, as it spoke again to him. ‘My love. My sweet love.’ She had said those words to him, she had, she did. ‘My love, my Rebecca.’ And the stone beneath the Stone, the stone that had glimmered and played its light around them! The Stillstone! He had touched it, he could still feel its pattern on his paw, and could scratch it on the ground and wonder at it, thinking of her. She had touched his fur, and he remembered touching her, he did, he had, his love Rebecca.

Talking about her did not help, or any other of his Duncton memories. One day he suddenly took it into his head to tell Stonecrop about Cairn. He told him just as it was, the terrible love and ache of it all, his spirit turning weak from the telling. He said again what he had said then about Rebecca, and Stonecrop nodded because he remembered her. Stonecrop didn’t say much but just heaved his body sadly, the look in his eyes a mixture of loss and anger, and disgust at the memory of Mandrake’s odour in a temporary burrow by a wood’s edge, a smell he had not forgotten.

No, talking was no use. Bracken tried to tell Boswell about the stone in the heart of the Ancient System but the words died in his mouth and he could not take Boswell past the Chamber of Echoes in his account, lying—‘No, no. I couldn’t get through, it’s impossible’—and the lie was better than betraying the memory of the glimmering stone where he and Rebecca were… what? ‘Where we were was the best way he could tell it to himself. Bracken wanted to leave Nuneham.

So did Stonecrop, and Mullion as well; while Boswell left those things to Bracken, whose words were sometimes jumbled and confused but whose instincts he trusted and would always follow, as the Stone itself seemed to have instructed him to do. Medlar agreed. He had known before any of them that there was no more he could do—a mole must learn the rest himself. And anyway, he had more to learn himself, and a place he must go to.

‘You will find there is much more to learn,’ Medlar said finally at the end of the first week of June, ‘and that none of it is very far from your heart. Indeed, I will let you into a secret!’ Medlar said this jovially, for he was relieved that his task was done. June was a time to travel, and he wanted to leave Nuneham himself and head for Uffington, to where, he knew now, he had always been going.

‘You do not have to learn anything. You know it all already. Each one of you. It’s all here!’ And he thumped his old chest cheerfully, laughing gaily as if everything was really so simple that it was absurd worrying about it, which it was.

‘As for fighting, when you no longer need to fight at all, you will know when you have learned enough. This is not a mystery but a simple fact. A real fighter does not need to raise one single talon to quell an opponent—unless it be to teach him a lesson of the crudest sort!’ Medlar looked at Stonecrop when he said this, remembering their first meeting, and then laughed again.

‘We are living in a strange time, which is why I am going to Uffington. By the Stone’s grace I will get there. As for you, each of you has the strength to be a warrior, as have we all.’

They said their farewells at night by the Nuneham Stone. Medlar spoke to each of them in turn—including Mullion, of whom he had grown especially fond—and then said a prayer to the Stone itself. Boswell said a prayer as well and then uttered the journey blessing on Medlar. And when Medlar had gone, he said it again, so that its protection would go with old Medlar, who had awakened so much in all their hearts.

The June moon was waxing and strong. ‘We’ll travel all together,’ said Bracken with a strong spirit which they all respected, even Stonecrop. ‘We’ll head straight for the Duncton Stone. Just look at the moon! You know what it means for a Duncton mole? Midsummer’s coming! And there’s words I’ve promised to say by the Stone on Midsummer Night.’

‘We’ll have to push it to get there that quick,’ said Stonecrop.

‘We will!’ said Bracken. He stayed on alone by the Nuneham Stone for a moment after the others had set off, his snout pointing towards Duncton, whose pull he could feel and which would get stronger as the moon got fuller and the days advanced towards Midsummer. And looking at it, and then in the direction of Duncton Wood, he remembered another light, white, glimmering, and whispered ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ and laughed aloud into the night.

Chapter Thirty

Few springs had ever been as miserable in spirit as that in which Rune consolidated his power in Duncton Wood. Under his black thrall the system became in fact what the Pasture moles had always feared it was—a place where evil spells are woven by minds that lurk in darkness and by moles whose smiles are as warm as the welcome an owl gives to its prey.

Rune’s power came initially from the vicious loyalty of the henchmoles whose favour he had fostered so successfully under Mandrake, and who now did his bidding whenever it came, and for whatever purpose.

He was well aware that since the henchmoles had given him power, they could, in theory at least, take it away again. For this reason, once he was installed as leader of the Duncton system, he began a policy of winning their gratitude by granting them favours of territory and matings and securing their fear by imposing particularly cruel and rough punishment on those henchmoles who transgressed his deliberately arbitrary rules. He had noticed how Mandrake had made everymole fear him by occasionally picking on one at random and killing or maiming him for all to see.

Rune’s method was more subtle and perhaps even more effective. He would arbitrarily select a henchmole and accuse him of a crime that had not been a crime the day before, and was not one again in the days that followed. Perhaps a henchmole had killed another one unnecessarily in a mating fight—nothing normally wrong with that at all in Rune’s system: the more killing the better! But suddenly, out of the blue, that mole would be accused of harming Duncton by attacking a colleague and a friend, and Rune would throw his fate open to the whim of the group of trusty henchmoles who always stayed close by him, currying his favour. Great was their joy at not being the victim; pleasantly were their sadistic imaginations stretched to think of a way of punishing him. Injure him and leave him for the owls to take alive? Crush his snout and let him die slowly in full view of Barrow Vale? Whatever was decided, Rune liked to watch, and he rarely left a scene of punishment without his own talons being covered in blood and his unpleasant laughter carrying above that of the rest.

At the same time, he encouraged henchmoles to spy on each other and on other moles, and to tell him what they had found out. His punishments for moles successfully accused were always grim and form part of one of the cruellest, and saddest, periods in the history of Duncton. Maimings, blindings, snout-crushings and enforced cannibalism—the list is as long, as dark and as bloody as each individual death the henchmoles devised.

By the beginning of March, Rune had the henchmoles completely under his control, and with them all the system but the Marsh End. That he preferred to leave alone for a while longer, for fear that the disease that had broken out there—a rumour successfully propagated by Mekkins, who intended to resist Rune in every way he could—would spread into the main system. But if a henchmole could get hold of a wandering Marshender, that was fine, and what cruel pleasure was had by all before the poor creature died!

As March had begun and the mating season got under way, there was a certain decrease of the violence, for it had served its purpose and the henchmoles deserved to take their pleasures in mating and fighting among themselves and others. The sight of the big and bullying Westsiders, from whose ranks most of the henchmoles came, as they roamed about seeking mates became familiar in all the system, where females waited in abject fear, and males from such areas as the Eastside and around Barrow Vale preferred to scurry away and hide, lest they be lured into a mating fight they could not win.

The henchmoles did not, however always have things their own way. One female called Oxlip, who lived near the Marsh End, objected to the invasion of her tunnels by a henchmole and, with a combination of cunning and sheer anger, succeeded not only in killing him but also in injuring another henchmole who was lurking nearby.

Rune’s reaction was to kill the injured one who reported the incident ‘for bringing shame to the henchmoles’ and then to send others to find the female. They failed, for Oxlip turned north to the Marsh End, where Mekkins accepted her as a Marshender, glad to have any mole brave enough to fight and flee from the henchmoles.

But just as spiders suddenly appear from nowhere in damp September, so does evil manifest itself when a mole like Rune takes power. Strange, dark creatures of moles, diseased in mind, distorted in body, began to appear from the darkness in which they had so long lurked and to gather in the shadows that surrounded Rune. An old female from the Eastside, for example, appeared one day in Barrow Vale—her thin and haggard appearance and the cast of danger in her body all so threatening that the henchmole who found her and dared not touch her took her to Rune.

Although her origin was vaguely known—she said herself that she came from beyond the Eastside—nomole knew her name. The henchmole called her Nightshade and Rune very quickly seemed to take to her, liking to have her misshapen form lurking in the tunnels and burrows from which he ruled Duncton. He saw the silly, superstitious fear she caused and so exploited it. It was said that she knew dark and secret rituals banished from Duncton by the moles of the Ancient System and handed down in some outback of the Eastside by generation after generation of moles waiting for just such a moment as this. However it was, no henchmole dared to risk angering her or getting in her way before dawn, when she liked to squirm about the surface muttering and cursing to herself and casting spells that left an odour in the air.

Evil showed itself in other ways, too. Duncton’s normally bright and cheerful spring wild flowers seemed to grow prematurely withered out of the ground—wood anemones drooping, the white petals mottled and limp, while even the normally ebullient dog’s mercury grew rank and fetid where its spiky leaves pierced last year’s dead undergrowth. The sun, normally bright and warm for at least a few days at the end of March, stayed distant and watery, and even when its rays broke through the cloud they were chilly, and the light they cast was cold.

The trees were slow to take leaf, and by mid-April only the hawthorn and an occasional horse chestnut were beginning to show green in their buds, miserable against the black trunks and leafless trees that gave the wood a wintry air.

Ordinary moles in the system did their best to keep their snouts out of trouble, staying as quietly as they could in their own tunnels or giving them up without a struggle if some bully of a henchmole fancied taking them. Some sought to find favour and settled old territorial scores by reporting their harmless neighbours to the henchmoles. Others crouched and shivered in their burrows, stirring only to find food, their spirits lowering as the weeks went by.

The fear and stress found their evil way into the very life of the system itself, for far fewer females became pregnant, and of those that did, far more than usual aborted their litters and went pupless into early summer. Such females were vulnerable to attack, being already weak, and Rune made his displeasure with them known. Those who littered were, however, favoured—not because of the joy their pups might bring but because their young might make henchmoles in the future, and it was to the future that Rune’s black mind was looking.

As April advanced, Rune, the only mole in Duncton Wood who seemed positively glowing with health, began to relax about the possible return of Mandrake, which he had seen initially as a serious threat. Mandrake had last been seen bringing down the great flints in the Chamber of Dark Sound to halt the henchmoles’ assault upon him, and since then, nothing had been heard. Rune had left several henchmoles at key points around the Ancient System—at Hulver’s old tunnels, by Bracken’s tunnels in the area between the Stone clearing and the pastures, and a few other points where tunnels started. But Mandrake was never seen or heard, and Rune began to suspect that the inevitable had happened and that Mandrake had died in lonely madness somewhere in the forgotten tunnels, or perhaps had left the system altogether to seek out some other place as he had once sought out Duncton. But wherever he was, the henchmoles would never allow him back now.

In any case, as the warmer weather finally and reluctantly began to arrive in the second week of May, Rune became preoccupied with an idea that had been growing in his mind for many moleyears. He wanted to attack the Pasture system.

He had suspected for a long time that the Pasture moles were not as strong as the Duncton moles feared they were. The number of incidents between the two systems had declined steadily over the moleyears, and it was significant to him that there was no reaction from the pastures after the attack on Cairn. Rune wrongly assumed that the injured Cairn had made his way back to the pastures and from this believed that, had the Pasture moles been really powerful, they would have attacked Duncton, or at least sought reprisals. But even in the mating season, when there were usually a few incursions, nothing happened.

Rune decided that the time had come to launch a limited assault on the pastures. It was with this objective in mind that he started to gather his henchmoles on the Westside at the end of May.

The death of Rose was a deep loss to the Pasture system, where she was much loved, and in particular to Brome, who had always revered the trust and advice she had given and that had helped him to take control of the pastures peacefully and with justice.

When her death was reported to him, he had set off at once for Rose’s burrows, for it is the tradition in the pastures that the burrows of a healer are sealed by a mole or moles to whom they have been close. When he got there, he found the tunnels and burrows deserted except for the body of Rose, and a guardmole led him to her main tunnel’s exit on the surface where Rebecca was crouched, snout pointing across the open grass to the darkness of the wood she loved. She had a youngster at her side.

Because he was uncertain how to address a mole who had, by all accounts, lived closer than any other ever had to Rose, if only for the last few molemonths, he said rather formally, ‘It is the custom to seal the burrow.’

Rebecca turned and looked at him, tiredness and loss in her eyes, but a sense of peace as well. Used as Brome was to deference from other moles, he was surprised but relieved to sense none at all in this Rebecca, only a sorrow for the passing of a mole she had obviously loved as well.

‘In our system, it is the custom to let the owls have their way,’ she said, quietly smiling to him as a token of her sense of his loss.

A little discomfited by the directness of her gaze, Brome asked. ‘What’s his name?’ looking at Comfrey. Rebecca said nothing, making it clear that Comfrey was old enough to reply for himself.

‘My name’s C-C-Comfrey,’ he said, looking at Brome with his curious mixture of timidity and interest, ‘and I’m from D-D-Duncton Wood.’ Brome nodded and smiled, but Comfrey went on. ‘My father was Bracken who went into the marshes. H-he’s coming back.’

Brome had heard about the sad story of Bracken from Mekkins, so he smiled again and nodded his head vaguely, thinking that this was some kind story Rebecca had reassured the youngster with, for nomole returns from the marshes. To his astonishment he saw a look on Rebecca’s face that seemed almost angry with him, as if she suspected this thought and wished to underline that what she had told Comfrey was indeed true.

This mute exchange surprised Brome and he looked at Rebecca more closely, his curiosity sliding very quickly into a kind of uneasy awe. Never before had he been in the presence of a mole who gave him the impression that she knew exactly what he was feeling. He saw as well that she was very beautiful, with a coat of dark, silvery grey, whose sheen held the light of a clear sky after rain.

He had a dozen things in his mind to say, but they all fell away before her still gaze and he said what was in his heart: ‘What are we going to do, Rebecca?’ She came forward and touched him for a second, a touch that reassured him, and then she led the way back to Rose’s tunnels where, without another word, they sealed the tunnels together, soil falling on their fur as with burrowing sweeps of their paws they retreated before it. It was the Pasture way of doing things.

‘Will you stay here?’ he asked. It was really a plea, for such a mole could bring nothing but good to the system and the pastures had lost much in the passing of Rose.

She nodded, suddenly weary, for she knew that Rose had left her the task of filling her place as healer, a prospect that seemed unreal and impossible to achieve. There was so much she didn’t know and so many things she wished she had asked. So she would be a healer and for the time being she would stay here, for there was nowhere else she could go—certainly not to Duncton, not yet. It was Brome’s turn to sense what was in her mind, for he came nearer her and crouched quietly, his big limbs stretched comfortably by the untidy seal of soil they had just made as he said: ‘It will be all right here, you know. There are many moles that will need you.’

For a while he hesitated to say more, but finally said ‘There may be problems if they know that you and Cairn…’

Rebecca looked sharply at him and his words froze in his mouth. Rebecca had a power in her he had never seen before in anymole. ‘The only way possible for a healer is to live in the truth,’ she said. ‘Cairn and I mated, and he was killed by Mandrake and Rune, two Duncton moles.’

‘Well,’ said Brome, ‘I will see that all moles know who you are and why you are here. Only you can allay any doubts or fears or hostility they may have.’

‘If Stonecrop were here and I could talk to him, he would understand,’ she said.

Brome shook his head sadly. ‘Stonecrop left the system—he wanted to avenge Cairn’s death—but I persuaded him that it would not be right, or safe.’ Rebecca smiled, for that was just what Stonecrop would have wanted to do.

‘He heard that a great fighter had come to a system said to be quite near here, beyond the pastures, and in company with other moles he went off to find him. The others have come back, but Stonecrop was not with them.’

Rebecca lowered her head. Stonecrop dead, or lost? Another mole gone? Cairn, Bracken, Hulver, Stonecrop, Mandrake. Why so many? She felt as if they were all leaving her, and immediately sensed that the thought was wrong. ‘I’m so self-centred!’ she scolded herself. Then she said: ‘Bracken was with Cairn when he died,’ as if to reassure Brome about Cairn’s death, and through him other Pasture moles.

‘Who is this Bracken? Everymole I meet from Duncton seems to mention him—you, Mekkins, even Comfrey. Was he one of your mates?’ She shook her head. ‘He was a mole who lived in the Ancient System by the Stone—he knew the tunnels there better than anymole ever has. He is a very special mole.’

‘But he’s lost if he’s gone out on to the marsh—nomole ever comes back from there,’ said Brome.

‘He will,’ said Rebecca, closing the subject.

Rebecca made her own tunnels quite near where Rose’s had been—but how bare her burrow seemed compared with the cluttered, untidy place that Rose’s was! How she missed the scents and smells of a thousand different herbs!

She saw little of Violet, who had a sort of a burrow of her own nearby but was rarely seen near it for she was quickly getting absorbed into the Pasture system and even beginning to speak in the quicker, higher intonation of the Pasture moles. Comfrey stayed near—big enough now to make his own burrow, digging it into a long and winding shape, quite unlike any burrow Rebecca had ever seen before. He preferred her not to enter it, and, like Rose, seemed inherently untidy, though always clean.

The fascination with herbs that Rose had inspired in him persisted, and his first long expedition away from Rebecca and the burrows arose out of it. He heard her say one day that she missed the smells of herbs and looked forward to the day when she could go back to Duncton and get some. The following day he disappeared. He returned two days later with a lot of noise and deposited outside her burrow a pile of fresh light-green leaves.

‘It’s ch-chamomile,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Just the leaves. The flowers aren’t out yet, b-but when they are I’ll get you some. The leaves smell fresh.’

Something else happened that same day that made her feel that at last the clouds that had been above her so long were beginning to lift. There was a timid scratching near her burrow, and when she looked outside, a young and nervous-looking female was standing there in a worried sort of way. She started back when Rebecca appeared and seemed to find difficulty saying anything. She looked very miserable.

‘What is it, my love?’ asked Rebecca gently. The female stayed where she was, dug her talons nervously in and out of the soil of the tunnel floor, and eventually managed to say, ‘Violet said you would help.’

Rebecca went forward to her until they were almost touching and asked ‘Are you a friend of Violet’s?’ The female nodded, but said nothing. ‘What’s worrying you?’ asked Rebecca gently.

For a moment the female swayed back and forth, her eyes fixed in a mute appeal on Rebecca, and then she burst out, ‘I don’t know!’ in a voice of despair and started to cry. Rebecca touched her with her paw, felt that her fur was clammy and cold and her head too hot, and somehow she caressed her, held her, touched her, and the female slowly calmed and settled down. Rebecca found herself whispering healing words softly to her, nothing talk, talk about the herbs she wished she had, talk from one heart to another whose individual words are of no account. Until eventually the female got up, eyes bright, and with barely a word went off down the tunnel, leaving Rebecca quite exhausted.

A few days later a male came, saying, ‘You helped a friend of mine and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, and I don’t know why I’m here, in fact, I think I’ll go away again, it hurts here, well not there exactly, I don’t know why I didn’t see to it before, for years actually…’ And so, by word of mouth, Rebecca’s work as a healer gently began.

Rune finally launched his attack on the Pasture system in mid-June in a spirit of cold curiosity. Like every other aggressive mole in Duncton, he was interested in finding out what the pastures, and the moles who lived in them, were like. This factor, coupled with a few well-chosen words to his henchmoles about how ‘Pasture moles periodically murder our females and youngsters’ and how ‘the pride of Duncton Wood is threatened by these cowardly moles’, and so on and so forth, was sufficient to give the henchmoles the motive they needed to pass over the wood’s edge and on to the pastures, and from there to make the trek to find tunnels down which they could mount their attack.

But Rune was no fool and he was well aware of the dangers inherent in leading a body of moles who had no experience at all in warfare. So he was also curious to see how the henchmoles would perform as an attacking group and to find out what lessons he might learn for future, more serious affrays.

His caution was wise. The assault on the pastures might well have been a complete disaster had not the Pasture moles been as ill-prepared for a sudden night attack as he was in making it, and had he not had a superiority of numbers. His objective was to locate and kill a few Pasture moles and this was only achieved by the henchmoles with a great deal of rushing about, shouting, bumping into each other, wounding one another by mistake, and generally inefficient turmoil. They killed four moles, wounded seven and frightened a dozen more.

However, they were also very nearly cut off from the wood by a rapid and efficient counterattack led by Brome, and they retreated, as they had arrived, in disarray. Near-disasters are, however, usually labelled complete victories by cunning leaders and this one was no exception. It was true that the henchmoles lost three of their number, but once back in the Westside with no sign of pursuit by the Pasture moles, they celebrated the ‘victory’ as if they had conquered the whole of the Pasture system in two hours’ work, recalling the deeds of their lost colleagues with relish.

Rune learned many things from this attack, the most immediately applicable being his need to appoint a tough deputy he could rely on to keep the henchmoles in control when he was not around. He gave the task to the trusty Westsider Burrhead, knowing that his loyalty was sound and that he did not have sufficient wit to attempt to lead a coup against him.

He also decided he must quickly and ruthlessly inculcate group efficiency into the henchmoles—which he set about doing immediately, knowing there would be little time to lose before he heard from the Pasture moles.

The repercussions of this attack in the pastures, in the Marsh End and, finally, in Duncton Wood itself, were many and complex. Perhaps the most significant was Brome’s decision to take reprisals against Duncton—a move more or less forced upon him by the anger of the Pasture moles at the savagery of Rune’s attack. Brome was, in fact, reluctant to counterattack, since what little he had seen of the stocky Duncton moles suggested that they were individually far more powerful as fighters than Pasture moles, even though they were not always as big. There was an evil viciousness about the moles of Duncton, whose fur was generally so dark and whose bodies smelt of the dank wood. And who fought with cold ruthlessness.

For this reason, rather than enter into Duncton Wood, his method was to lure them on to the pastures one evening with a deliberately weak attack and spurious retreat by the wood’s edge, where he felt he could outmanoeuvre them. But he was wrong.

Rune had ruthlessly and efficiently disciplined his henchmoles, and they followed the fleeing Pasture moles so fast that they had killed most of them before they had advanced sufficiently to fall into the trap Brome had prepared. Suspecting it, Rune cunningly stopped his forces from advancing directly, circling instead through the unknown Pasture tunnels in the belief that they might outflank the Pasture moles in their own system. At the same time, Rune left sufficient henchmoles to guard the wood’s edge, with various small but very fast runners to keep the two groups in touch with each other.

Rune finally led his henchmoles into a vicious and bloody attack on Brome’s moles, coming at speed from an unexpected direction and moving forward with a solid resolution that took the Pasture moles by surprise.

Brome’s reaction was wise, and unimpressive, but saved the day. He retreated on all sides, using his popularity with the Pasture moles to persuade them to follow his advice and retire quickly so that the Duncton moles would have nomole to fight. The move was so effective that the impetus of the Duncton henchmoles was lost as they found burrow after burrow empty, and tunnel after tunnel echoing only with the sound of their own slowing paws and the groans of badly injured Pasture moles left behind in the flight.

At the same time, Brome sent two of his most trusted moles northeast towards the distant Marsh End to seek out Rebecca and with her help try to win the support of Mekkins. It was a long shot, but Brome saw clearly that a temporary retreat might indirectly win victory while a permanent retreat meant defeat. He would soon have to attack again, and the more friends he had, the better.

Rune’s cunning as leader improved every moment, and with his now customary speed of action he withdrew all the henchmoles back to the Westside, much against their wishes.

‘Have I not led you to victory so far?’ he asked the doubters coldly. ‘Trust me to do so now. This trick will bring the Pasture moles back.’

For two days there was an uneasy silence as the normally clear, sparse tunnels of the pastures, now deserted, began to reek of the stench of the dead, whose decay was hastened by the onset of summery June weather. During the day, birdsong filled the wood, skylarks hung in the air above the high pastures, and the fresh green of the leaves of Duncton Wood glistened and danced with sunshine before the warm June breeze.

But underground, moles on both sides were tense and anxious as each waited for the other to make a move.

Brome advanced his moles back to their original positions, at first puzzled by the Duncton moles’ disappearance, then seeing its logic. Rune must have guessed that after the successful killing of so many Pasture moles, their remaining forces would not want actually to enter the wood itself.

In the course of this advance, Brome was unexpectedly visited by Rebecca. She had refused to accompany his moles to the Marsh End, or even to show them the way, without first understanding what was going on. She did not like mass fighting and wanted no part in causing it. And anyway, she felt she should be where she could help. She shivered at the smell of carnage in the tunnels and her first words to Brome were the simple advice that he had best arrange for the dead to be dragged to the surface for the owls ‘or there won’t be a system worth living in anyway’.

This simple advice was to be the cause of one of the many remarkable myths that grew up around Rebecca. For soon after the advice was taken, the surface above the pasture was covered not by a plague of owls but by a mass of bristling, cawing, fighting crows, pecking at the dead moles and putting fear into the advance guards of the Duncton moles, watching out for signs of Pasture movement.

The idea that the Pasture moles ‘had the crows on their side’, as one of the scouts put it, was fearful indeed. While among the Pasture moles the arrival of the crows, simultaneous as it was with the coming of the mysterious, though increasingly popular Duncton healer, created the idea that Rebecca had the power to summon crows!

‘If Mekkins were to support us from the north,’ explained Brome, ‘then it would probably be worth our while standing our ground. We cannot retreat again, but I do not think we have the skill or strength to resist these Duncton moles by ourselves.’

Rebecca was doubtful. Fighting was not something she liked, although she conceded it was sometimes necessary.

‘What mole is leading the moles from Duncton?’ she asked curiously.

Brome shrugged. ‘He’s a good fighter, that’s for sure. Several of our moles report seeing a cunning-looking mole apparently in charge, quite big, very dark and with as evil a glitter about him as you would find in any nightmare.’

‘Rune!’ whispered Rebecca. Yes, in that case she would do what Brome wanted and try to summon Mekkins’ help.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I will go to the Marsh End—let’s hope Mekkins is still secure. I want to go. Things are happening down there, I think. Here too. It’s all changing, Brome, and whatever you try to do, there’s nothing you can do—but you must try.’ She laughed at his bewilderment at her words and added: ‘I only half understand what I’m saying myself. It’s all right!’

As Brome watched her leave, he thought to himself that there were times when she spoke with the same mysterious certainty Rose had sometimes had. As if she saw a world he could not see and there were no words to describe the realities within it. Yet as she left alone, how vulnerable she seemed, and for the first time he saw very clearly how much in need of protection she really was.

Two days later, as night fell, the battle started up again, first as a skirmish up near the wood’s edge where some Pasture moles went scouting about, and then as a full-scale battle in the Pasture tunnels themselves.

It was bloody and confused as under Brome’s quiet leadership every Pasture mole stood his ground against the brutal assault of the Duncton henchmoles. Brome had sensibly blocked several side tunnels, making it difficult for the henchmoles to advance en masse, and that much easier for them to be picked off one by one. But soon the henchmoles did manage their circling tactics again and the battle raged back and forth from tunnel to tunnel with little pattern except that slowly the Pasture moles began to retreat, moving back steadily towards bigger tunnels where, once the henchmoles were established, they would have room to manoeuvre and crush the Pasture moles with their greater ruthlessness and nerve. It was not that the Pasture moles lacked courage—just the opposite—but somehow they did not have the will to win that Rune inspired in his own moles.

The fighting eventually began to concentrate in a central chamber formed by the crossing of two communal tunnels. The Pasture moles occupied the part that led directly away from the direction of the wood and towards the centre of their own system. Rune’s henchmoles occupied the wood side of the chamber and the side tunnels that radiated north and south from it. Powerful talon thrusts and lunges jabbed out from the dark, moving mass of the henchmoles towards the group of Pasture moles whose light coats showed up the blood from their cuts and wounds more easily. Brome now stood resolutely at their head.

There was a continuous angry growl in the air as the moles fought back and forth, panting and grunting with the effort of staying alive. Gradually, subtly, as Pasture mole after Pasture mole fell and the henchmoles advanced across the chamber, there came the feeling among all of them that a critical point in the struggle had been reached. Brome moved right to the front of his moles, fighting strongly and encouraging them to stand firm. While behind the mass of henchmoles, wounded but not seriously, Rune slid back and forth, encouraging a mole here, warning one there, shouting out orders to them all.

‘Kill their leader… go for their leader,’ he shouted, gesticulating through the fighting talons and noise towards Brome.

Brome stood solid, now surrounded by his most loyal fighters, eyes narrowed with concentration and aggression, his great, strong body and calm stance the central part of the Pasture defence. He had tried pushing forward but the henchmoles were too strong and stolid in their positions, and inch by inch he was retreating. To his left a Pasture mole had rolled over on to his side, blood running from his mouth, and a henchmole was on top of him pushing forward in his determination to reach Brome. To Brome’s right, the henchmoles pulled back and forth, trying to get round one of their own number who had fallen bloodily from an accurate blow to his snout. The talons cut and thrust so fast that had the sturdiest thistle clump suddenly sprouted up between the two camps, it would have been torn to shreds in seconds.

‘Stand firm!’ roared Brome to his forces, but he feared in his heart that the cry was in vain. ‘Hold fast!’ he shouted, pressing suddenly forward in an effort to show his moles that they could make headway if only they would try.

As he did so, the henchmoles wavered very slightly, so subtly that only Brome himself noticed it—but it was enough for him to shout and lunge forward again, the Pasture moles encouraged by his bravery.

And the henchmoles were wavering and looking uncertainly behind themselves as there came confusion in the tunnel from the north. Screams and shouts, different noises, the roar of new moles arriving and a wavering, even by Rune, who turned to see what the commotion was and then found himself pressed back by a retreat of his own forces from the chamber as, with roars and shouts, a gang of Marshenders burst into the chamber.

At their head was Mekkins, swearing and cursing at his own forces, and everymole else’s, flailing his talons before him like the whipping branches of a blackthorn in a thunderstorm.

‘Kill the buggers,’ he was shouting. ‘Give '

Them every bloody thing they’ve asked for!’ He lunged forward and Brome, hardly daring to believe his eyes, saw that among the forces behind Mekkins—as motley and vicious a band of moles as he’d ever seen—were males and females, big and small, all wiry and quick and fighting in a raggle-taggle way but with a resolution that made the rest of them look half asleep.

Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the henchmoles were in retreat as the harsh cold voice of Rune rose above their heads and he shouted, ‘Fall back in order!’ and, ‘Take it slowly!’ until, fighting every inch of the way, back the henchmoles went to retreat in the direction of the wood, leaving several of their dead and wounded blocking the tunnel up which they ran.

For a moment there was silence in the chamber as the remaining Pasture moles and Marshenders looked at each other in disbelief. Then the noise of relief and cheers as Brome and Mekkins were congratulating each other and there was excited chattering and laughter, drowning the groans of the dying; and the sight of very tired moles, who had stared at death, falling into a fatigue deeper than many of them had ever known as they realised that it was over.

But was it? After the victory cheers had died down and the wounded had been cared for and most moles had fallen asleep, Mekkins remained uneasy, as he had been from the moment Rune had suddenly withdrawn his forces from the chamber. You never could trust that Rune. Nothing he ever did was as simple as it seemed. But in the first flush of victory such doubts were submerged, and only hours later did the doubts come back. He was uneasy. Something was wrong. He didn’t know what.

‘Are you thinking they’ll come back here?’ asked Brome, who had carefully placed some guardmoles higher up the tunnels towards the wood to watch for just such a possibility.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mekkins, thinking and thinking. ‘Unless… unless!’ A shiver of horror ran through him. He looked quickly around to see which of his moles were about and then he was urgently gathering them together, his seriousness putting a pall on the cheer in the tunnels.

It was obvious. You should never take Rune at face value. Oh yes, Mekkins was right—never trust Rune. He had not been beaten, but had cleverly seized the opportunity presented to him by the appearance of so many Marshenders on the pastures to redeploy his forces, tired though they were, out of the pastures and down to the now defenceless Marsh End. For there, as he must have guessed, only the spring youngsters remained with a few of the older females— offering him the perfect opportunity to wipe out the next generation of Marshenders, and make their annihilation from the system so much easier… As for disease, well! they wouldn’t all be here if that story was true. Never trust that Mekkins!

Then Mekkins was running, with three of his strongest moles at his side, up on the surface and ignoring the owls… running across the pastures, down the slopes towards the Marsh End, with the other moles following behind. Running through the night with a terrible fear at his paws to spur him on, an icy coldness in his heart to keep him company. It was so obvious!

Down, down through the night, the warm air no comfort to their fur, down towards the Marsh End that lay below them still and strangely silent. Running on and down to the edge of the wood itself, and there stopping and listening for sounds, hoping that somewhere they would see a youngster who should be aburrow, a female who couldn’t sleep, some kind of Marsh End life. But there was nothing.

Then, creeping skilfully by secret Marsh End routes towards the tunnels themselves, and his terrible fear confirmed—for the sound of the deep bully voices of henchmoles could be heard in the tunnels where Marsh End youngsters had so recently run and played and females gossiped.

No good four of them attacking—best find out the worst. Creeping again by secret ways, looking for what they feared to find—the massacre of their youngsters. Henchmoles here and there but no bodies yet … and then to the central place, in and out of the shadows, fugitives in their own tunnels, seeking the sight that would make them fugitives for life. Were they all dead, all killed?

It was only after peering down into many tunnels that Mekkins and his three friends began to realise that there were no Marsh End youngsters or females here at all, dead or alive. Not a single one.

‘They’ve all gone!’ said Mekkins. ‘They’ve gone!’ And it was confirmed by a conversation they overheard between two henchmoles: ‘Bloody waste of time, this jaunt were. That Mekkins must have taken the whole pack of them on to the pastures, youngsters and all! Cunning little bugger, isn’t he?’

But ‘that’ Mekkins had done nothing of the kind. Mekkins crouched in the shadows as a sense of wonder and disbelief settled over him. They could not all have gone!

‘But they have!’ said one of the three with him. They checked again on the surface, down to the marsh edge, creeping silently along for fear of disturbing the henchmoles, peering into tunnel after tunnel and burrows when they could. But not a sign of life could they find. Just a few grumbling henchmoles in the deserted tunnels of Marsh End.

They stopped still again up on the surface, which was bright with the cold light of a nearly full moon. Out from the marshes came the call of curlew and snipe, calls which every one of the four had heard a thousand times and which they barely noticed. Leaves of oak and ash rustled gently above them, catching the moonshine. Mekkins looked about him in wonder and then, very slowly, his face and snout rose to point up towards the moon.

‘It’s nearly full strength,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Nearly full. You know what tomorrow will be?’ There was silence so he answered his own question: ‘It’ll be Midsummer’s Night, that’s what!’ He turned away from the marsh to face southwards, up towards the distant hill now sunk in wooded darkness, where the Stone stood waiting.

‘You know where youngsters go for Midsummer Night, don’t you? I think I know where ours have gone. They’ve not gone, they’ve bloody well escaped!’ Then he laughed gently with wonder and relief and added, ‘And I’ve got a damn good idea who’s leading ’em there!’

Chapter Thirty-One

Rebecca had sensed something wrong in Duncton Wood two hours after Mekkins had left in the early evening with a band of Marsh End males and the stronger females to enter the pastures to try to help Brome. They had gone off amid excited chatter and cheering, eager to be a party to a possible defeat of Rune.

But Rebecca had stayed behind and only later did she begin to know why. Something was wrong. She had the same impending fear she had felt on that night when Rune and Mandrake had come and killed her litter. She went up on to the surface, where the light of the rising moon against a still sky was just beginning to filter among the trees and fall weakly on the wood’s floor, and snouted up in the direction of Barrow Vale. Dark shadows, talons, the shifting unease of danger was what she sensed. She went down into the tunnels where burrow after burrow was filled with the gentle sound of youngsters, some still suckling, others rolling and fighting each other with the strength and independence they had found by their third week of June.

Mothers relaxed with their young, a few older, litterless females gossiped among themselves, chattering about the excitement of seeing Mekkins off ‘to give that Rune a taste of his own violence’.

It was quiet and peaceful with just a hint of laughter in the air. Rebecca paced about uneasily, the few Marshenders who met her smiling, for they knew from Mekkins who she was and that she was a healer like Rose had been.

‘Tell us a story, Rebecca!’ a giggling youngster asked her, pushed forward by his less bold siblings. She touched him, shook her head and passed on, her tail twitching with tension. Something was wrong. Then up on to the surface again and the growing feeling that there was a terrible danger coming through the night, down here where only youngsters played and females were unprotected.

Birdcalls drifted in from the marshes, as they had on the night Bracken had gone; a tree occasionally stirred and whispered in a breeze that ran above the wood but not on its still floor.

Fear began to come into her, her eyes widened in the night, her snout pointed and pointed to the dark towards Barrow Vale. She felt that she was the only thing protecting the Marsh End… from what? The moon rose slowly, stronger, full, the sky finally turning black, and somewhere a small branch fell rolling through the fresh-leaved branches of a tree, tumbling round and down leisurely until it hit the wood floor and all was silent again.

There was danger, and it was coming. And she knew suddenly, and with a ruthless certainty, that she must take them away to somewhere safe where no hurt could befall them. These youngsters were in her protection, just as once her own litter had been. This time there would be no mistakes.

So powerful was her sense of danger and so determined her resolution, that there was no argument. The females with litters heard her in silence, her instinct for protection of the young soon becoming theirs.

Urgent whispers, silent runnings through tunnels, low voices, scurrying, sleepy youngsters suddenly awake and standing still waiting for instructions, last-minute checkings of more distant tunnels and then off together through the tunnels to the east, where nomole likes to go. Where that Curlew had lived. Youngsters running and scrabbling to keep up, calm fear of mothers knowing they must not panic, away and away through the night tunnels, to where the soil is damper and the smell is strange.

Rebecca leading them, away from a danger she had not yet seen but which was coming, towards a place to rest on the east side of the Marsh End and then on, the massed sound of escaping paws pattering in the silent night.

On and on she led them, letting none lag behind, the youngsters holding back their tears and tiredness before the urgent seriousness of adult moles.

Even at Curlew’s place there was no safety in the air. The wood was too still in the light of a nearly full moon. Where to take them? Where to lead? Again and again her snout led her round and up towards the distant slopes where once, on Longest Night, she had gone with Mekkins. Beyond, the Stone waited. It always waited. A full moon, and nearly Midsummer, when the Stone blessed the young. One day to get there, sneaking through the wood. She could try along the east side, up on the surface, pray to the Stone and take them there. The Stone would protect them on Midsummer Night. On to the Stone.

Mekkins and the moles who had followed him finally got back to Brome in the Pasture system at dawn, fatigued beyond sleep.

‘They’ve gone,’ Mekkins said blankly to Brome. ‘Rebecca must have taken the Marsh End youngsters over to the east side so that Rune and the henchmoles couldn’t get them. She’ll probably try to reach the Stone. We’ll have to help…’ But his body could hardly hold itself straight he was so tired, and his eyes could not focus.

‘Try to sleep,’ urged Brome, ‘and when we have all rested we will work out what to do. We will help you as you helped us. If need be our moles will die for your youngsters.’

Mekkins awoke restless and worried. It was late morning and the tunnels of the pastures were light with warm air and the soft smell of summer wafting down from the surface. Then a curious, distant rumbling slowly filled the tunnels as he woke up, quite unlike any sound he had ever heard, and it brought him wide awake out into the communal tunnel before he could blink twice more. A passing Pasture mole must have seen his concern, for he said the single word ‘cows’ as he went by. The rumbling stopped and started, passing overhead like a summer day’s cloud that hides the sun for a while in its passing. ‘Cows!’ muttered Mekkins in a grumbling voice, finding a tunnel to the surface, and going to see them close to. He smelt them before he got there, heavy and sweet, and then watched their black and white flanks swaying and stalling above his gaze against a blue sky, the tearing sound of the grass they grazed filling the tunnels and mixing with the slow sound of their chewing and breathing and the chomping and thumping of their hooves. All harmless and sad. ‘Bloody cows!’

The wood was too distant for Mekkins to see, but the sun was high enough to have caught its western edge billowing green above the pasture, dark at its base where the trunks and shadows were and then bright-lit greens of great branches of leaves, thousands on millions; and a shimmer of the lightest blue haze covering them all as soft flaps and sounds of lazing birds, mainly wood pigeon and magpie, broke out through the haze and drifted over the pasture towards him. A couple of young thistle plants, spikes still soft with youth, cast a shadow on the entrance where he crouched.

He would lead them to the Stone, for it was Midsummer, and tonight, surely, that was where they should be. They would wait for the safety of dusk and then start the trek towards the high wood, into the rustling shade of the beeches as the day drew in, and then over to the Stone. He was restless and worried, but never had he had so much faith in the Stone.

Brome joined him, snouted out into the air, and said ‘It’s the kind of day Pasture moles love, when the young can play and us adults can find a bit of food early and then laze around doing nothing!’

‘We ain’t no different,’ said Mekkins. ‘Pasture, wood… moles don’t change. Not really.’ He told Brome his plan and Brome nodded: he knew it would be hard to persuade his own forces to follow Mekkins so soon into Duncton Wood, but if he had to kick them all the way there he would see they went. And anyway, wasn’t this what they needed—access to the Stone? They would see when they got there, just as he had. There was nothing worthwhile in the world—or nothing he knew—that a mole didn’t have to fight for.

As the warm day slid imperceptibly into the evening of Midsummer Night, Rebecca moved silently among the sleeping mothers and youngsters where they lay hiding and resting in an old tunnel she had found for them.

The mothers dozed rather than slept, looking anxiously over the young who snuggled against them to see that they were safe. Some of the youngsters lay separately, paws out and snouts stretched, like the young adults they almost were. As Rebecca passed them by, she was aware that they looked at her with mute concern, just to see if she was really confident that where she was leading them was all right and that she knew they would be safe. She could sense that panic was not far below their seeming calm, and knew that if it broke out they would all be lost. So she went by calmly, deliberately slowly, saying a word here, pushing a youngster out of the main tunnel there, every second seeming an hour to her.

She was almost reluctant to leave, for once they got to the Stone, what then? It was like leading them to the edge of a void with the enemy behind and wondering how, exactly, they were going to fly to safety when they got there. She had no wings for them.

Henchmoles were about. Earlier she had met one, scurrying busily down towards Barrow Vale, and with the rest of them freezing into the wood’s floor, he had questioned her briefly and she had lied that she was from the Eastside. ‘Well, get on back there now, you know the rules. If I weren’t in a hurry, you’d feel the strength of my paw!’ Big and mindless his voice was, and the youngsters from the Marsh End shivered when they heard it, their mothers’ eyes silent on them, imploring them to keep quite still.

As dusk began to fall, Rebecca led them off on the trek again, cutting straight up the slopes to the Ancient System. There, the massive grey trunks of the beech trees soared above as the last light of the sun died in the highest leaves against the sky, turning in seconds from pinks and greens to the rustling warm grey that would soon be a thousand tiny black silhouettes. Nearer the wood’s floor great beech branches looped down from the main trunks and hung still and low, the leaves getting a lighter green as darkness fell, for they were set against darkening shadows rather than a lighter evening sky as the leaves high above were.

Occasionally a youngster would stop, from tiredness or plain awe, and look up and around into the massed depths of the trees, like nothing ever seen in the danker closed-in Marsh End. The bleak hooting of a tawny owl cut suddenly through the night from somewhere on the slopes below them, and as they froze to a halt, a distant echoing answer came back from somewhere higher up the hill towards the Stone.

‘Ssh!’ hushed Rebecca softly; ‘hussh,’ for she was used to the sound and in a way it gave her confidence. It was the sound of her wood and it was a long time since she had heard it. ‘They’re no more dangerous to us here than those eerie birdcalls you get from off the marshes,’ she said reassuringly, though it wasn’t quite true. But if an owl came, well, that was that! But she could feel the Stone getting nearer and trusted in its protection.

She ran ahead in the dark, having made them spread out among the roots of two adjacent beech trees, so that she could see if the Stone was clear of mole. When she got there, the light was just as it had been the night before, with a moon beginning to show and cast a thin, milky glare in the Stone clearing. At first she could not see the Stone, but then it was there, stretched up into the dark of the sky, the leaves of the beech tree that stood so near it rustling in the night above. It was the start of Midsummer Night, and the full cycle of seasons had run since the last Midsummer, when Hulver had died. Mandrake. Rune. Bracken. Curlew. The image of them rushed and mixed in her mind—so many moleyears had passed! Why, she was an adult; many of the mothers with young whom she had led up here were younger than she was.

There was an air of expectation in the clearing before her. It seemed to wait as she remembered Barrow Vale had sometimes waited for some old storyteller to set the place alive with the action of a tale of old.

She ran back and brought the Marshenders forward to the edge of the clearing, hiding them in the shadows by its edge on the safer side, away from the slopes. They were glad to rest but were hungry, and Rebecca let them go into the darkness to seek some food, litter by litter, telling them to be quiet and quick about it. In such a place, and with so much heavy expectation in the air, they did not need much telling. Most of them just stared from the shadows across the clearing at the Stone, and waited.

The night air cooled slowly as the full moon rose behind the trees, its light filtering down into the clearing and making it seem almost bright against the shadows of the wood around, which grew blacker and more impenetrable. None of them knew what they were waiting for and all Rebecca could do was look up at the Stone in the centre of the clearing, now rugged and grey in the moonlight, and pray that in its depths it would find protection for these young. She felt that it was their life that was in her charge, rather than their personalities, and, indeed, she was indifferent to them individually. She comforted them, or touched them, if need be, but it was their force for life that she cherished.

To their left, through the wood and by the pastures at the wood’s edge, the wind stirred high in the branches, running lightly through the trees towards them. Then again, stronger. Then stillness. Then wind rippled away over the slopes, disappeared into the night across the wood to the vales and silent places of the Eastside. A youngster rustled and was hushed. Another snuggled closer to its mother, half its face lost in her fur, eyes opening and closing towards sleep.

It was Midsummer Night, and bit by bit the wood was beginning to be alive with the rustles of movement. Wind? Moles? Predator? It was the night the Stone gave its traditional blessing to the young.

If there was one mole who knew what Midsummer meant better than any other, it was Bracken, who had been the fearful witness to the terrible death of Hulver in this very spot twelve moleyears before on the last Midsummer Night. Then he had spoken the words of the Midsummer blessing, moving himself towards adulthood as he said them. Now, Bracken was nearly back, rustling into the long grass and the old year’s leaves at the wood’s edge as he re-entered Duncton Wood.

‘We’ll soon be there, Boswell,’ he whispered, ‘and you’ll see the Stone at last.’ Behind them Mullion and Stonecrop crept, wishing they could go straight down to their own tunnels on the pastures but agreeable to sticking with Bracken right to the very foot of the Stone. And anyway, they wanted to see it.

‘We’ll approach slowly and silently, because I don’t know who may be up here tonight. If Mandrake has gone and Rune has taken charge, then he may be here. Rune doesn’t like the Stone, especially at this time of old rituals. He’ll want to see that no ritual is said.’

They crept forward so silently that the first Rebecca knew of them was when she saw the shadow of a mole sliding out of the darkness on the far side of the clearing to stand, in bold silhouette, looking at the Stone. Then another mole, smaller, came out, and even in the moonlight Rebecca could tell that he was limping as his snout moved forward and up with each sequence of steps. Then two more moles, one very large, who looked around the clearing a little uneasily before stopping and settling his gaze on the Stone also.

‘Well, I’ve got to say it! You’ve got us here, Bracken!’ said the big mole.

The world seemed suddenly an unreal place to Rebecca as the name Bracken came across the clearing to her. She looked in wonder at the four moles, trying to make out from the confusion of their silhouettes whether one of them was indeed her Bracken.

Then the small mole spoke, his calm, clear voice full of awe and reverence as he broke away from the other four and went right up to the Stone. ‘So I have finally reached the Duncton system,’ he said. ‘So many moleyears in the travel and all of them survived only by the Stone’s grace.’

Rebecca watched him fascinated, while her heart raced for Bracken, if Bracken it was. The small mole put a paw to the Stone, touched it, and then turned and faced the other three and said quietly, ‘You know there is nothing else but the Stone. Finally, there is nothing else.’

His head turned a little towards Rebecca, where she crouched in the shadow of the wood, and for the first time she saw his face. His fur was grey in the moonlight; seeing him for the first time, his eyes clear and soft, his face filled with the peace of the Stone, Rebecca felt she had never before seen anymole who made her sense the wonder of the Stone so much. The three in the clearing seemed to sense it too, for they all stayed quite still, though she could not tell if they were looking at the small mole or at the Stone that soared so high above him.

‘Am I glad to be back!’ said one of them, moving out clearly into the light. ‘I never would have known how much!’ And Rebecca saw that it was Bracken, it was her Bracken, safe and well, and back in the wood they both loved. She had come unknowing to the Stone and he had come as well as, if she had thought about it, she should have known he would on Midsummer Night.

In the shadows, the youngsters’ eyes peered at her, trying to see what she wanted to do, wondering if these moles were enemies from whom they should run. She turned to them and smiled, touching the one nearest her, and as they relaxed in her confidence, she turned back to the clearing and started out into the moonlight towards Bracken, her shadow running before her.

It seemed to Bracken, and to the others as well, that Rebecca appeared out of the night and before the Stone as if she was part of a mystery in which all things—the moonlight, the trees in silhouette against it, the wood, the Stone, her presence and the darkness behind her—were at one with each other. It was as if, for a moment, he was able to see beyond Rebecca to the powers of life, and death, that had brought her there at that moment and which she was not separate from but a part of.

‘Rebecca,’ he said, for there was no other word.

‘My love,’ she said, saying what he felt.

‘Rebecca?’ he said again, advancing towards her, all sounds and sights of the night but her quite gone from him.

‘Yes,’ she said softly. Then they nuzzled each other as softly as the softest fur, because he almost thought she was a dream and she knew he was her love, and their touching again was as precious as life. They nuzzled each other’s neck and face, she smiling and he serious, she purring and he growling, his body strong and big to her at last, no more the fugitive mole she once had seen. ‘My love,’ they said together, ‘where have you been? Where have you been?’

Their greeting took no longer than it takes to see the beauty in the moonlit Stone; then she was laughing in the night and saying, ‘Boswell? From Uffington? From Uffington!’ and, ‘Stonecrop, dearest creature,’ and then speaking to Mullion, shy before her, whom she cuffed gently because there was no need to be shy. And back to Bracken, who was looking at the Stone, touching the Stone as Boswell had done and understanding that there is no love but in the Stone. And thinking that there was nothing that could disturb a love strong and clear as theirs. Nothing!

Nothing? There was a crashing through the wood from the pasture’s edge, a running and drumming of mole paws, and each one of them was suddenly tense and separate, turning to face the noise, with great Stonecrop moving to their front. Moles were coming, but the nearer they got to the clearing, the more Stonecrop relaxed, as Medlar had made him understand he must. Boswell was the same, his eyes clear into the darkness of the rustling sound, while Bracken sighed and stepped forward to be beside Stonecrop. The three had learned their lessons well. Behind them Mullion stood more tensely, uncertain what to do, while Rebecca silently crossed the clearing to where the youngsters lay, staying in the light and unable to see them, but signalling with a smile for them to stay still and feel safe.

The advancing moles came quickly and, without even a pause, broke cover from the wood into the clearing, only then stopping to look at where Bracken and the others stood ranked by the Stone. There was silence on both sides as each took a moment to recognise the other.

It was Brome and Mekkins, come from the pastures with Pasture and Marsh End moles, but it was one of the Marsh End females in the shadows behind Rebecca who broke the silence.

‘And where the ’ell have you been, Mekkins my lad!’ she said ironically, breaking cover herself.

Mekkins smiled but ignored her, turning instead to Brome and saying, ‘There you are, Brome, me old mate. I said they’d be here, and they are. And where’s Rebecca? Come on, she’s not normally bashful!’ Rebecca moved forward and laughed and everymole relaxed. And then Mekkins was surprise itself when he saw Bracken, and Brome was lost in delight when he saw Stonecrop and Mullion before him.

There was relief and reunion, levity and laughter, but not for long. It was Mekkins, speaking in a whisper to Bracken, Stonecrop, Brome and Rebecca, who gave them the warning that, in his heart, Bracken had feared.

‘There’s a bloody army of henchmoles coming up here with you-know-which mole leading them. Brome put a couple of his moles over by the wood’s edge at dusk, just to see if they could learn anything and they did. Them henchmoles are the worst blabbermouths you could wish to meet and they found out that, sure enough, Rune is planning to bring the whole lot of ’em up ’ere to see that there’s no way anymole can celebrate Midsummer Night.’

Mekkins looked round at them all and grinned. ‘Well, of course there ain’t no way I’m going to leave ’ere, and since by some miracle of the Stone’s magic we seem to ’ave none other than Bracken ’imself come along ’specially for the occasion, the only mole in Duncton who knows the blessing, I suggest we sit tight, get rid of Rune when ’e comes, get on wiv the ritual blessing and show these Marsh End youngsters what tonight’s all about.’

They all turned to Bracken who, not for the first time, was surprised to find that they were looking to him for some kind of lead. It was as if, by virtue of his having lived near the Ancient System for so long, they regarded him as in some way the guardian of the Stone and all its secrets. It was a role he felt inadequate to play, since he did not think he knew enough about the Stone, and was very conscious that what little he did know came from Hulver, who had known so much more. Boswell sensed his doubt, and to encourage him said ‘What do you think we should do, Bracken?’

Bracken looked up at the Stone for a moment and then said simply ‘We must say the blessing. Hulver said it twelve moleyears ago, with only Bindle to help him and myself— though I was too young to protect him, just as these youngsters are too young to protect us, though one day theirs will be the strength to decide and to do what must be done. May the Stone give them its help as it has helped each one of us.’

He looked slowly at them all in turn, his eyes falling finally on Rebecca’s and staying there longest. As he spoke, his voice had gradually grown more powerful and now, as he continued, its strength and force brought all the moles gathering around him in silence.

‘In another hour or so, when the moon is at its peak, it will be the moment to say the blessing before our great Stone. Its power travels to all the other stones set up in the chosen systems by Ballagan, the first Holy Mole. This is not a night for fighting, but for peace and blessing. But the time in which we live is strange and troubled.’ He turned and pointed up at the Stone, whose crevices and facets seemed infinitely complex in the moonlight. ‘Look at our great Stone,’ he said, feeling as he did so its power flowing into him, and his ideas, his very voice, taken over by it as they had been once before when he had spoken to Cairn about Rebecca, and found his words flowing from a source beyond himself.

‘Look at the Duncton Stone! It should stand straight and tall like the trees around it. But see how it tilts over towards the west, where Uffington lies! The system of which it is so much a part is decayed, and it tilts for weakness at the knowledge, seeking the help of Uffington. I tell you that the day will come when by our strength this Stone will stand aright again, proud of the system from whose strength it will soar to the sky and whose power we will not question or, like Rune, try to corrupt. It will stand as straight as the mighty Ballagan set it and when it does all moles shall know that our system has been healed.

‘This is not a night for fighting and Midsummer is not the time for blood. But I tell you that until the time comes when the Stone is the true centre of our system once more, then those who know that there is nothing without the Stone must fight for their belief. I, who have run so often in fear from the talons of death, will run no more, but stand and face what comes with talons of my own. Their strength comes from the power and the silence that lies within the Stone and which each of us may hear and feel.

‘It is no sin to run, and if any want to go, then let them go in peace. But the hour has finally come when everymole, whether from Duncton Wood or the pastures, or Uffington itself, must stand and fight if their belief is in the Stone. Let each one of you look at it now and decide.’ Bracken pointed again at the Stone and everymole there, including the youngsters, looked at the Stone in the light of his words. Not a single mole moved until, one by one, they turned back to look again at Bracken. The night was stirring now with wind and around them in the wood were heavy movements in the undergrowth, first on one side and then on another. The sound of henchmoles closing in. It was too late for anymole there to escape.

‘Let the youngsters gather round the flanks of the Stone, which will protect them, and let the rest range themselves closely about the clearing, for soon Rune will be here. Let Pasture mole mingle with Duncton mole and let us all fight as one.’

Then around them, in the darkness beyond the clearing, there were creepings and peerings, whisperings and plottings, slinkings and dark talons massing for attack. Somewhere in the darkness Rune crouched, listening to the sounds about him, waiting for his forces to mass themselves completely around the Stone clearing. He was smiling. There had been a moment when they should have attacked him—when he was coming up the slopes and feared an ambush— but now the advantage was his. Why, the fools were gathered in the moonlight by the Stone where they could be seen clearly and smelt. The snivelling little Marsh End youngsters were gathered round the Stone with them, waiting to be comfortably killed by his henchmoles, who would take pleasure in catching up with moles who had escaped them down at the Marsh End. Henchmoles do not like being made to feel foolish.

Near Rune, Nightshade slipped her body among the contorted and twisted shadows of the smaller roots of a beech tree—shapes it fitted perfectly. Her talons wound and wove with continuous movement as if she were caressing the night air into dangerous shapes as she snouted out the Stone beyond the darkness. She was casting spells for victory.

‘When the moon is at its peak, Rune, I want to be free with the Stone, yes… mm… to wipe the blood of the young into its holes and crevices and make a curse on all the Marshenders unfortunate enough to survive. What a pity if they all died. Yes… mm…’

Her voice was slimy, like a dying worm, but it clung to the mind of any who heard it, suffocating any thought of love or light or colour that might already be there and aborting any about to be born. Rune, however, wallowed in its sound. Nightshade had waited a long time for this night, as had the dark and treacherous generations whose dark endeavours had produced her, and other moles like her who had lived on the edge of the system until the darkness of Rune sucked them inside it, and to the very heart of Barrow Vale. Yes… mm…

The first attack was swift, sudden and very deadly. Five henchmoles broke cover into the clearing, ran straight across to where a group of Marshender males stood ready, and with swift and fatal lunges killed four moles where they crouched. Just like that. The blood had barely started to flow before they were gone again, and as the natural movement of the defenders of the Stone swayed towards the shadows into which they had disappeared, another attack was launched from a different direction, this time to where Stonecrop and Bracken stood, side by side. Perhaps sensing how dangerous these two were, the attackers sidestepped them, and two more moles went down, before Bracken, with a relaxed lunge, felled one where he stood and so injured another that it took only a quick kick from Stonecrop to finish him off.

Rebecca stood to one side of them, facing the darkness, while around the base of the Stone, among the beech roots gathered there, the youngsters huddled, their mothers forming a final protective rank around them.

The battle was sporadic at first as one quick thrust of attack followed another—a technique already rehearsed by Rune. But it was effective, for the moles of the Stone lost more with each attack than they were able to kill and, the light of the full moon being on them and the attackers coming out of darkness, the advantage was with Rune.

It was to Rune’s credit as a leader that this series of attacks lasted as long as it did before finally breaking down into a concerted onslaught against the besieged moles of the Stone at two different points. On one side, Stonecrop and Bracken, Rebecca and Brome headed the defence; on the other Mekkins and Mullion stood the main ground. All fought differently—Stonecrop with a massive slow soberness that was utterly ruthless, taking blows that would be fatal to other moles as if they were nothing and then launching his own devastating lunges; Bracken was quicker and more subtle, parrying here, cutting there, and killing whenever he could; Mekkins, as usual, swore aloud with every blow, roaring ‘Take that, you bastard’ and ‘Oh, no you don’t, brother’ with every lunge, and ‘Sod it’ when he missed. Brome fought more like Stonecrop but a little less effectively, for he lacked the total concentration Stonecrop had learned; Rebecca was fast, vicious and magnificent, shouting and screaming with anger, snarling at the biggest moles, cutting and thrusting where she could, fearing none. While somewhere just behind Brome and Bracken, Boswell stood firm as well, striking when he could but most useful for the cries of warning he calmly gave to each of the stronger fighters in front of him who were so preoccupied with their individual struggles that they often did not see a threat from another angle.

But one by one they suffered cuts and injuries that slowed them, as around them their colleagues began to fall. Some dead, some too injured to fight, a few too tired to raise their paws and defend themselves. Oxlip, the female who had escaped to the Marsh End, fell and died by Mekkins’ side. Mullion, too, was grimly wounded and fell back behind his own lines, life leaving him.

The moon shone on, its light cold on the terrible scene of carnage it lit so clearly. It reached a peak and then began its waning descent, and still the battle went on with no word of Midsummer blessing said.

The moles around the Stone began to retreat back towards it, leaving their dead and wounded before them as the henchmoles, black and tough as ever, climbed over the stricken bodies and pressed forward.

Then Rune appeared out of the night, the twisted shape of Nightshade at his side waiting by the clearing edge with glee in her eyes, while he pressed forward suddenly into the bloodiest area of the melee, leading his henchmoles on for the last part of the fight. There always seemed to be more henchmoles coming, and more, and always fewer and fewer moles able to stand and face their onslaught. They slowly retreated, back towards the Stone, and as the retreat set in, Rebecca instinctively went behind the front line to rally the mothers of the youngsters behind her so that, if necessary, they could put up a last defence.

The youngsters, seeing now the great floodtide of henchmoles bearing down on them, stopped only by Bracken, Stonecrop, Brome, Mekkins and a few others who stood their ground, began to whimper, their sound a pathetic addition to the screams of triumph and death that rose and fell in the clearing.

Then Brome staggered and fell, lost under a torrent of terrible lunges, and with his death the resolution of the other Pasture moles began to weaken and they all retreated even further back. Seeing his advantage, Rune pressed even harder on them, his black talons cutting and stabbing before him, shiny with blood in the moonlight. Behind him, beyond the mass of murderous henchmoles that backed him up, Bracken could see for a moment the sinister shape of Nightshade, whom he did not recognise, slinking gleefully about the clearing’s edge as if waiting to take her pickings of the dead.

Rebecca rose up magnificently behind him, eyes flashing with anger and determination, the youngsters huddled behind her, the Stone soaring up above them, almost hanging over them all as it tilted over towards the west.

‘Trust in the Stone!’ she shouted, her voice carrying to them all. ‘Trust in Bracken and the Stone!’ Her words carried even to Rune, who until then had not seen her clearly, and he faltered, as if uncertain whether she was really living or come back from the dead. Then he heard that it was her and she was shouting the name of Bracken. His eyes narrowed, he wondered whether he was fighting an army of ghost moles, for he remembered Bracken now; then, as ever, coolness returned and he fought on even more strongly, eager to get to the mole who must be Bracken—the tough one who stood fighting between the great mole from the pastures and Mekkins. That was him. He was the one to kill, before the massacre.

His talons razed through the face fur of Bracken, and other henchmoles, sensing his intent, pressed towards Bracken as well, each trying to get their talons in his fur or snout.

The noise was terrible. Screams. Roaring. But then another roaring. The sound came through like sudden wind in trees, a roaring louder than any they had yet heard. A monstrous roaring, accompanied by blunderings and crashings in the wood beyond the clearing, a sound made by no henchmole that had ever lived.

Rune and his moles ignored it, fighting on to kill Bracken and the others. But facing the darkness of the wood as they were, Bracken and Stonecrop and Mekkins, blood flowing freely from their tired limbs, could not but see the sudden huge shadow that appeared at the wood’s edge, ten times bigger it seemed than the slinking form of Nightshade over which it loomed.

It surged forward, caught the moonlight and became clear, a sight more fearful than a thousand henchmoles poised to kill.

It was Mandrake—and he had not looked more terrifying since that spring day, so many moleyears before, when he had appeared at the wood’s edge and slaughtered his way into Duncton.

‘It’s Mandrake!’ cried Bracken, his voice suddenly clear and strong in the night.

Rune and his moles stepped back for a moment, turning to see what it was. Mandrake stood facing them all, his eyes black and impenetrable as the most savage night, fur hanging in great folds about his massive body, his snout as ever like a talon before him.

Nightshade turned round to look as well, but with one single blow of his right paw he swept her bloodily away, her body lifeless before it touched the ground. Mandrake was back.

If days of destiny lead to a final hour and that hour reaches a last minute in whose seconds decisions that form life are made, this was it. Rune tried to grab it.

‘Here is the Stone Mole,’ he shouted, pointing his talons at Bracken. ‘He is the Stone Mole. Help us kill him, Mandrake.’ He turned back to complete the onslaught on Bracken. It was a cunning and brave manoeuvre by Rune.

Mandrake said no word and only a vibrating growl came from him as he looked at them all. His gaze settled not on Bracken but on Rebecca behind him, and behind her on the youngsters gathered, terrified, around her.

‘Rebecca!’ he roared suddenly, moving forward like a black storm cloud across a windy, moonlit sky. ‘Rebecca!’ And his huge paws began to flay right and left, taking with each blow one or two or three henchmoles out of his path. Rune’s forces fell around him at Mandrake’s advance, and at last Rune himself, seeing his support going and his ploy failing, slunk to one side as Mandrake continued his advance, not on Bracken, not on Mekkins, not on Stonecrop, but towards Rebecca beyond them. ‘Rebecca!’ he cried. ‘Rebecca!’

There came from him a smell so rank, so disgusting in its anger and wretched rage, that Mekkins and Bracken fell back before it, closing in front of Rebecca and raising their talons to protect her. But its effect on Stonecrop was just the opposite. He had smelt that odour before—in a temporary burrow where Rebecca and his brother, Cairn, had mated. This was the odour on which he had sworn to take revenge. He moved his own great body forward, his fur lighter and his muscles tauter than Mandrake’s, and with one massive lunge stopped Mandrake in his tracks.

It was the first time since Mandrake had left the frozen slopes of Siabod so many long and cruel moleyears before that anymole had stood so solid in his path. He reared up, looking at Stonecrop as if he was in some way surprised to see him, as if he expected nomole at all to be there. As if the very nature of the world itself had suddenly changed.

Every lesson Stonecrop had learned from Medlar now came into play. Sensing Mandrake’s surprise, Stonecrop acted immediately, lunging forward with a talon cut that scored another wound on Mandrake’s lined and pitted face.

Then Mandrake did a strange thing. Instead of immediately counterattacking, he seemed to try to peer round Stonecrop as if baffled by an obstruction on a path that had once been clear; trying to get a better look at Rebecca and calling, crying, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ And still he did not try to strike Stonecrop back.

Behind Stonecrop, Bracken turned to Rebecca, who was trying to come forward towards Mandrake as she herself called out from some terrible distance, ‘Oh Mandrake, Mandrake!’

Stonecrop hesitated, not knowing whether to yield to his desire to try and kill Cairn’s murderer or to listen to some half-heard instinct that told him… told him something he could not quite catch… something desolate in Rebecca’s voice.

There was movement behind him as Bracken and Mekkins forcibly stopped Rebecca running forward and Bracken shouted grimly, ‘Kill him, Stonecrop. Kill him!’ Then, as Rebecca let forth a terrible cry of, ‘No… no…’ that seemed to fill the clearing, and beyond it the beech trees and beyond them the whole of Duncton Wood with despair, Stonecrop lunged forward against Mandrake again.

‘He will kill you, Rebecca,’ shouted Bracken, as Rebecca’s talons tore at him and Mekkins in her desperation to go to her father. ‘He wants to save me,’ she cried, as once more Mandrake roared out, ‘Rebecca, I’m here, Rebecca,’ and she heard him cry, his voice calling from out of a blizzard of icy winds and sleet that ravaged the high slopes of Siabod, where once, so long ago and so terribly, he had been born. She heard his cries of ‘Rebecca, Rebecca’ as the cries of a pup which feels itself lost for ever in a storm, she heard them as the mewings and bleatings of a litter she could not save. Her talons tore uselessly, desperately, into the face and fur and flanks of Bracken as beyond him she saw Stonecrop bear down at last on Mandrake, beginning, lunge by terrible lunge, to kill him. There were growlings and roars, there was blood on angry talons, but most of all, and worst, there was the huge impersonal back of Stonecrop, his massive shoulders working methodically forward as lunge after cut after talon thrust he destroyed Mandrake before her eyes. Mandrake’s cries of ‘Rebecca!’ continued between grunts of horrid pain and the last tired lunges of a fighter who has no more will to fight; the last calls of a pup in a blizzard whose cold has taken him for its own. And then they grew weaker, despairing, and finally fell silent until, at last, Stonecrop seemed to be hitting not straight ahead of him but down, near the ground, where Mandrake had fallen into his own blood, his paws feeble and his breath weakening, his eyes closing, and finally, his life force gone. Then, Stonecrop was over him, shoulders weak from the kill, Mandrake’s blood on his paws and fur, the living looking at the dead.

He turned back towards the Stone where Rebecca now crouched, Mekkins and Bracken still holding her, and each of them saw that his face was contorted by a horror of something his eyes had seen and his talons felt. Then he said, almost by way of explanation and with unnatural calm: ‘He killed Cairn. He killed your litter. He…’

‘He loved me,’ cried Rebecca. ‘He was calling for me. And I couldn’t… You wouldn’t… let me…’ Then her sobs were wild and desperate, a weeping for something that can never be brought back, while to Bracken it seemed that they were not just for Mandrake, but for all the moles who lay dead and dying about the Stone clearing—Brome, Mullion, Oxlip, Burrhead, his own father now dead before him, Pasture moles, Duncton moles, males and females, and Rebecca’s tears seemed for them all. Worst of all, they were for him as well.

He tried to comfort her but she pulled away, looking at him from a cold and far-off place he kew he could never reach. His hold on her fell limp and she crossed over to where Mandrake lay, paused for a moment as she touched his head gently, looked back at Bracken and Stonecrop with a fierce and cold pity, and then went out of the clearing and into the dark.

No stabbing talon could ever have thrust itself with such pain into Bracken’s heart as that terrible look from Rebecca before she turned her back on him and was gone. He felt himself cut off from life itself. He ran from the Stone towards the clearing edge, calling, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ but the name did not seem to carry, and even the light in the clearing grew weaker as the moon began its fall behind the trees.

Then Boswell’s voice came to him gently from the Stone. ‘Say the blessing, Bracken, say the Midsummer blessing for the young.’

Bracken turned to look back at the Stone, which stood darker now, the bodies of the dead moles about it no more than rounded shadows in the weakening light. He could see the snouts of the youngsters they had saved moving and bobbing by the Stone, with the bigger forms of their mothers about them. A stronger shaft of light seemed to fall on Boswell, who stood to one side of the Stone, his eyes compassionately on Bracken, to whom it seemed that Boswell was part of the Stone, a living part.

He was weak and utterly desolate and his breathing came quicker and more shallow as if he was going to weep. He had lost his Rebecca. He knew it as certainly as he knew it was night.

‘Say the blessing, Bracken,’ whispered Boswell—or did he shout it?—‘Rune has gone, the Stone has given its protection.’

‘The stone has given its protection to everymole but me,’ Bracken thought bitterly. ‘And Rebecca.’

He came forward, moving slightly to the right to stand to the west of the Stone, in the direction in which it tilted. He looked up at its highest point, the only part that still caught the moonlight clearly, and began to speak words he had learned so reluctantly, so long ago. First the prefatory chants that he did not even know he knew, and then finally, the last words of the blessing:

‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,

We free their fur with wind from the west,

We bring them… choice… soil,

Sunlight in… life …’

As his voice faltered and caught sobbing in his throat, Boswell’s voice joined him, its strength giving him strength and its faith giving him a kind of desolate hope. The voice of Boswell spoke from some ancient past that stretched back to a time before even the tunnels around them were made, and which went forward to a future that trembled now in his heart:

‘We ask they be blessed

With a sevenfold blessing:

The grace of form

The grace of goodness

The grace of suffering

The grace of wisdom

The grace of true words

The grace of trust

The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’

If Bracken’s voice faltered as he spoke the words none there noticed it, for Boswell’s voice mingled powerfully with it as, without knowing what he was doing, Bracken moved among the youngsters, touching them as his Rebecca might have done.

‘We bathe their paws in showers of light,

We free their souls with talons of love,

We ask that they hear the silent Stone.’

‘So Boswell knows the words as well,’ thought Bracken, vaguely. ‘Then who is Boswell?’ he asked himself.

‘The wood is safe,’ Bracken found himself saying to the Marsh End mothers, ‘so take your youngsters back to the Marsh End.’ Then, one by one, the moles left the Stone—the Pasture moles cutting off westwards, through the wood, Stonecrop leaving with them, as the Marshenders began their long trek home. There were henchmoles there, but Bracken saw they were no longer threatening, just ordinary moles who had lost their way. They began to cluster silently around Bracken, Mekkins and Boswell, looking to them for guidance, and Bracken noticed that beyond them other Duncton moles came from out of the shadows—Eastsiders, females from the Westside, moles from the slopes, all scraggy with age. Even some of the Marshenders stayed behind with Bracken. Then they began to whisper in a curious, almost primitive, chanting way, ‘Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale…’ and Bracken knew he must lead them there. He turned his back on the Stone to take up the power Mandrake had held, and then Rune, and that had destroyed both of them.

Among the moles who followed Bracken down, gleefully chanting ‘Barrow Vale’ and then ‘Bracken, Bracken,’ there was only one who stayed silent and yet who truly loved him. And that was Boswell, who followed limping behind, trying to keep up with them so that he could always keep Bracken in his sight.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Duncton Wood quickly settled down to summer and Bracken’s rule. There was some preliminary skirmishing with the remnants of the henchmoles, some of whom claimed that since Rune had not been killed and was nowhere to be found, there was no reason to think that he wasn’t coming back. But Bracken quickly put a stop to this with a coupled of swift and deadly fights against the toughest of the remaining henchmoles, which killed one and injured the other.

By the first week of July all was quiet and Bracken was in total command and the henchmoles were but a memory fading into the shadows from whence they had come, as Bracken’s days became taken up with the settlement of the usual disputes and wrangles that beset any system in the idle months of summer, when the only real interest lies in what territory the youngsters are winning for themselves.

The summer grew increasingly hot. Not the occasional heat of a couple of days that gives way rapidly to great lumbering cumulus clouds that sail across the face of the sun and remind moles to enjoy the sun while they may, but the heat that starts slowly and then simply stays, beating down day after day and making green leaves begin to look wan and desperate in its hazy stillness. The kind of heat that produces an endless palling stillness through which the sun seems almost to filter itself of good cheer, becoming instead faceless and impersonal. Rain, when it fell, was almost dry before it hit the ground, and by the third week of July it seemed to have been all used up.

Against this background, Bracken’s rule settled into routine. He gave advice and help when it was sought and visited the pastures, where Stonecrop had assumed control, agreeing that the Stone should be made accessible to any Pasture mole who wanted to visit it. Soon there was a feeling of lightness and relief in both systems and Bracken began to feel, with some justice, that in most respects Duncton Wood was a better place than it had been for many many moleyears.

Yet all was not well. As the molemonths passed into August, he began to change in ways that were imperceptible to himself. For one thing, it proved impossible to remain as accessible and friendly as he had initially been to everymole who came to see him.

Most moles seemed to want to set him apart, eager to respect him, and to listen with irritating seriousness to what he said. Others, even the biggest Westsiders, seemed afraid of him, and his initial attempts to put them at their ease gave way eventually to an unconscious contempt for them and a subtly growing idea that, yes, indeed, he must be a special mole and perhaps everything he said was interesting.

When he wanted things done, he began to find it easier to be tough and terse in issuing instructions than careful and polite. It was much less fuss, and anyway, as he grumbled to Boswell in an irritated rationalisation of his growing autocracy, the moles of Duncton liked to be led and have their minds made up for them.

It was easier, too, to have other moles do certain things for him—to listen to complaints, to advise on which issue Bracken would, or would not, prefer to make his own judgement about personally—and so a corpus of moles, many of them from Barrow Vale and a few from the Eastside, began to grow up who acted as a buffer between Bracken and everymole else.

There was nothing unusual or sinister about such a development—most systems have something like it at one time or another—but in Bracken it combined, unfortunately, with his own growing unspoken restlessness, whose causes he did not seek to know, since he was not even aware of the changes overtaking him.

He became irritable and sharp; some of his judgements were hasty and ill-advised. He stepped in on one territorial dispute, for example, up near the slopes between youngsters who should have been left to settle it themselves, and so caused resentment all round. Whole days would pass when he refused to talk to anymole, preferring to stay in his tunnels near Barrow Vale or wander over to the more deserted areas of the slopes.

The only mole who retained constant contact with him was Boswell, though even with Boswell Bracken was increasingly offhand and indifferent.

In Barrow Vale they began to call Bracken standoffish and superior, though his achievements in getting rid of Rune, in being the one to order the killing of Mandrake, and his now legendary crossing of the marsh were sufficient for nomole to doubt that he was their leader.

But soon there were other things to gossip about, like the continuing hot weather which, it was said (though nomole was sure by whom), was beginning to affect the worm supply on the pastures, and some of the Marshenders were saying that the marshes were smelling terrible and hadn’t been so bad in living memory, while everymole agreed that the heat and dryness was enough to make a mole thoroughly irritable, not to say fed up, wasn’t it?

But while other moles thought of other things, Boswell concerned himself about what lay at the root of the change in Bracken. He had been bleak witness to the terrible shock that crossed Bracken’s face when Rebecca left them in the clearing on Midsummer Night, since when, so far as he knew, the two had not met again. Now he could not help but notice that whereas Bracken had once talked often of Rebecca, especially on their journey from Nuneham, he never mentioned her name now, although sometimes, in the presence of one of the brighter younger females or up on the surface when a wind ran among the trees, he would see Bracken look about him sadly, his normal mask of cool command dropping for a while, as if there were something nearby he thought he had lost.

Boswell was too wise to raise this with Bracken directly, but if, as it sometimes did, the subject of healing came up, or some particular work Rebecca had been doing somewhere in the pastures or Duncton was mentioned, he would try to draw Bracken on to the subject, believing that talking might help. But it didn’t. Bracken did not seem to mind mention of her name, but he did not react to it except to utter some general comment such as, ‘The system is lucky to have a mole like Rebecca for its healer—in fact, it’s a miracle we’ve got a mole so good in succession to Rose,’ but there was something too studiously careful about these comments to convince or satisfy Boswell.

At the same time, Rebecca was rarely seen anywhere near Barrow Vale, a fact made far more of by Boswell and Mekkins, who discussed it together, than it was worth, since in her own time Rose had rarely bothered with Barrow Vale. When moles need healing the best place to do it, she used to say, is in the privacy of their burrows, not on public view in Barrow Vale.

Rebecca had stayed on the pastures in the tunnels she created for herself after Rose’s death, and little had changed: Comfrey still lived nearby, still strange and nervous, with a great love of herbs and plants and unwilling to let Rebecca go too far from him for too long: partly, perhaps, from his own insecurity, but also, though Boswell was never to guess it, because in his own way he protected Rebecca from despair. Sometimes he would travel off in search of new herbs, but he had a knack of making his path cross where Rebecca was— and seemed, too, to sense what herbs she needed, for often he would appear suddenly in some remote corner of one of the systems with the very herb she needed for some healing process. There was a great trust and peace between the two, and by virtue of his attachment to her Comfrey went unmolested wherever he wished in the systems, which allowed him to develop in time as wide a knowledge of where the medicinal plants of the two systems were as anymole had ever had.

Violet had now been completely absorbed into the Pasture system and lost all contact with Rebecca and, of course, Bracken.

But as for Rebecca coming to see Bracken, it just never happened, and it wasn’t the kind of thing a mole would want to raise with Rebecca. A healer does not have problems as far as anymole else is concerned. And even if she had, Rebecca gave no sign of it at all except to Comfrey, who saw far more than even she ever suspected.

What was worse for Boswell was that he saw clearly how Bracken’s coldness about Rebecca affected the way he thought about the Stone. Bracken no longer revered the Stone but became inclined to make ironic or cynical remarks about it—‘It’s all an illusion, which may please some moles, but they’ll soon grow out of it,’ or, on an occasion when Boswell dared to suggest that it would be a good idea to go to the Stone to pray for rain, ‘If it sends rain, Boswell, it’ll send a flood; that’s the way your Stone amuses itself when it answers prayers.’

As for visiting the Stone, or the Ancient System, which Boswell still desperately wanted to do in Bracken’s company, there was no quicker way to make Bracken coldly angry than to suggest it. There was only one absolute rule with Bracken, and that was that nomole was to visit the tunnels of the Ancient System, in any circumstances. They could go to the Stone if they wanted, though it was probably a waste of their time.

Boswell was at first very frustrated by all this, not only because he loved Bracken as he had loved nomole, but also because he wanted to pursue the quest he had come to Duncton Wood to fulfil—to find the seventh Stillstone and the seventh Book, which he was convinced were there. He would talk to other moles he met about the system, seeking out the oldest ones with longest memories, trying to find clues in the stories they told that might guide him forward. He would even tell them about Uffington if they asked, or he thought it might encourage them to revive memories of their own system. He might have been tempted to visit there himself but for the sense he had that it was Bracken, and Bracken alone, who would guide him there.

But as time went by a curious thing happened: Boswell began to lose the urgent desire he had first felt to find the seventh Book. He began to sense that there are some things, great things, which a mole should not reach out his talons for. He must learn to sit still and trust that they will come to him. This discovery served only to increase his awe of Bracken—for was it not Bracken’s very recalcitrance that made him see it? He began to wonder whether, in some strange way, the Stone was working through Bracken far more powerfully than anymole could ever have dreamed of, which made him seek ways of quietly making life as caring and loving for Bracken as he could. Nothing gave him more pleasure than the fact that, despite Bracken’s ill temper and contradictions, he never once told Boswell to leave him, but always seemed pleased in his awkward way for him to be there.

So it was quite without seeking it that Boswell discovered his first dramatic clue to the existence of the seventh Book. It happened when he decided for himself to go to Rebecca in the pastures and see if he could not work some kind of reconciliation between her and Bracken. An idea which, had he known Rebecca better, he would never have been innocent enough to try.

He made his way into the pastures with Mekkins’ help, the Marshender leaving him safely at the entrance to Rebecca’s tunnels. Mekkins was no fool and could guess why Boswell had come and though, being more worldly wise, he feared the attempt would fail, he felt it best to stay clear of the whole thing and let the strange scribemole try.

He himself loved Rebecca too much to want her to stay so far apart from Bracken, and anyway, he had grown to respect Boswell, who seemed to know a lot of things, even if he was a bit daft when it came to understanding females, especially ones like Rebecca.

Rebecca greeted Boswell with real warmth. They had not met since Midsummer Night, but her travels about the systems had brought her into contact with many moles who were wide-eyed with fascination about the strange mole from Uffington ‘who do ask the queerest questions that ever I have heard, and do tell the strangest quaintest tales if ’e’s a mind to it’.

Boswell’s response to Rebecca was not at all what he had expected it would be. He had come full of good intent, calmly and gently to talk to her about Bracken. But the moment he saw her again and found himself in the clear warmth of her smile, any words that he had rehearsed quite left him. He gazed on her with genuine delight, his bright intelligent eyes travelling quickly around her burrow, now nearly as full of herbs and flowers as Rose’s had once been. He sensed the great reverence she felt for the life which she had pledged herself to help, and he saw far more about her than Mekkins could ever have given him credit for: he saw a brave mole whose warmth and love were real, but whose spirit bore the marks of loss as Bracken’s did, but who did not pretend to herself that it was not so.

He saw immediately how vulnerable she was. But what he did not see, and perhaps would never understand, was how, in his company, her spirit was able to begin to soar again into a freedom it had once taken for granted. Indeed, the feeling of lightheartedness that arose in her as soon as he crouched down, looked about him curiously and then fixed his gaze directly on her, took her by surprise. She wanted to laugh for the pleasure of it. More than that, she wanted to dance! She wanted to sing and play. What she did do was to smile and feel more delightfully foolish than she had for many a long molemonth.

‘Why have you come to Duncton Wood?’ she asked eagerly, quite unaware that she was the first mole to ask him this simple question or that it raised a subject that made his mission of reconciliation suddenly irrelevant.

‘Well…’ he began, not sure where to begin.

‘You must have come here for some reason, Boswell! It’s a long way to come just to say hello and go away again.’

‘I think the Stone called me here, or told me to come,’ he said simply. He knew instinctively that she would understand what he meant by this, and he was right, for Rebecca nodded and said: ‘Yes, of course. But why?’

‘It has to do with what the scribemoles of Uffington call the seventh Book. You see, Rebecca, there are seven holy Books and…’ and he began to tell her, reciting the mysterious text he had found describing the other six Books, and explaining at some length why it was so important that the seventh Book should be found.

‘The Book will be found when it needs to be found, I expect—and anyway, perhaps what will happen is that the Book will find you.’ He knew what she meant, and of course she was right. Hadn’t he told himself that nomole can try to reach out for such a thing?

As Boswell talked, Rebecca had grown happier and happier, for she saw clearly what it was about Boswell that made her feel so free. Every other mole she saw sought her help in one way or another, whereas Boswell, despite appearances, did not need any healing that she could give. She was free with him because he did not need her. He asked nothing of her and because of it was strong enough to face the full spirit of her love for life, as if it were no more unusual than a tree or sunshine. She sighed to herself in bliss to feel it and closed her eyes with a smile as he talked.

It was only when he began to tell her of the seven Stillstones that went with the Books, and she realised that they were not huge stones like the one on top of Duncton Hill but smaller, that her sense of bliss was transmuted into the shiveringly awesome feeling that she and Boswell were touching something that made time and circumstance fall away into a different place.

Boswell sensed this feeling in her, for he stopped talking at once and asked: ‘Can you tell me something about any of this?’ For the first time since he had come to Duncton he felt that the Stone was giving him its help.

Then, very simply, Rebecca told him about what she and Bracken had seen and felt on Longest Night. She described it matter-of-factly and quite without mystery, though the fears, doubts and joys that had been a part of that night were a part of her description.

He listened to her, trembling with the same sense of awe that she had felt, and when she finished, his first comment was: ‘So he touched that stone, which must have been a Stillstone and its light faded? He touched it!’

‘Does it matter?’ she asked a little nervously, because he sounded shocked.

‘I don’t know, Rebecca. Perhaps not. I don’t know.’

‘Hasn’t Bracken told you anything about this at all?’ she asked.

Boswell shook his head. ‘Nothing. In fact, he doesn’t even like to talk about you. I’ve asked him to take me up to the Ancient System but he has ordered that nomole goes there. I think…’ But he stopped, because what he thought was something that Rebecca perhaps ought not to hear.

‘Yes?’ said Rebecca who, as a healer, was more used than anymole in the two systems to moles who were reluctant to finish sentences. Usually the unspoken part of the sentence was what they had come to talk to her about. She didn’t think this of Boswell, but habits die hard.

‘I was going to say that I think his apparent dislike of the Ancient System, which extends to the Stone, as you well know, has a lot to do with you and him… well… not…’ said Boswell, searching vainly for the right words.

‘Not being in touch?’ said Rebecca.

‘Exactly,’ smiled Boswell. ‘Yes, that’s it!’ He wanted to laugh, but Rebecca was not smiling. She was serious, and for the first time since he had been in her burrow her face expressed the sense of loss that he had sensed in her spirit when he first came.

Once more he saw how vulnerable she was. There were times when he felt acutely his own lack of wisdom and wished he knew how to comfort a mole. He was full to bursting with the desire to say something to Rebecca, but did not know the words. But he found himself saying, ‘He loves you.’ Perhaps it was all he had come to say to Rebecca anyway.

‘Does he know it?’ asked Rebecca.

Boswell shook his head: he didn’t know. He could not help wondering whether or not Rebecca knew that she loved Bracken. But then, what did those words mean unless they were expressed through the Stone, which, in the first place, they had been?

‘When I think of him or hear his name, I think of Mandrake,’ said Rebecca quietly. ‘I think of him trying to reach out to me by the Stone and Bracken stopping me, stopping me.’

‘But it was Stonecrop who killed him,’ said Boswell.

‘It wasn’t that,’ whispered Rebecca, remembering. ‘Perhaps a fight is better than an owl, or disease, especially for Mandrake. Perhaps that was best. No, you see, Bracken heard Mandrake. He heard him calling me and because he was afraid he stopped me going, and Mandrake was left in that… place—’ Rebecca could not go on. She cried freely, freer than she would have been before any other mole but Boswell. Boswell wished he had had the wisdom to understand.

But Bracken and Rebecca did meet, an accidental crossing of paths in the Marsh End where he and Boswell had been talking to Mekkins one day about what everymole now recognised was a drought, and getting more serious every day.

Bracken and Boswell were going down a tunnel. There was laughter ahead, a couple of females chatting, and then there was Rebecca, large as life, Bracken tensed and looked surly, even angry. Rebecca smiled, a shade too calmly Boswell thought, as he backed away to leave the two together.

‘Rebecca!’ exclaimed Bracken with false cheer, having recovered himself. ‘I hear good reports of your work—not only in Duncton but on the pasture as well.’

‘Hello, Bracken,’ said Rebecca quietly.

‘Yes, again and again I come across moles who…’ and within Boswell’s hearing Bracken launched into a shower of talk about everything but what was in his heart—his joy and confusion at seeing Rebecca again.

She said hardly a word during this prattle, except ‘yes’ and ‘mmm’ and ‘really?’ but each word she spoke seemed slower and sadder than the last. But there was a point in their painful conversation when, for a brief moment, the light shone again. Bracken had got on to the subject of the drought and Rebecca suddenly said, ironically, ‘You should put a stop to it, Bracken. You’re the leader of Duncton.’

Bracken laughed a little too loudly and then said, ‘I’m not the Stone, Rebecca,’ and Boswell heard her soft reply: ‘No, my dear, you’re not.’

Bracken was silent, for he heard the love behind her reproof just as much as Boswell did, and he could not hide the sadness in his own eyes. For a moment he relaxed and looked directly into Rebecca’s eyes—and she into his. And there was stillness between them again. Rebecca had seen that look before, one September in the fading of a rainstorm when Bracken had first told her his name. He had run off then, and he did it again now, barely saying goodbye before he was gone. And Rebecca was left with only a look of understanding from Boswell to weigh against the loss she felt, the frustration at Bracken’s fear, and the feeling that in some way, surely, it was her fault. She could have done more: the same feeling she had so often and so sadly faced with Mandrake. And then she thought of Mandrake, whom she had loved so deeply, and wondered why Bracken had not heard his cries.

Chapter Thirty-Three

In the third week of August, Stonecrop came over from the pastures to see Bracken. They talked in the elder burrow with Boswell and a couple of other Duncton moles present.

‘The drought on the pastures is now getting very serious, Bracken,’ started Stonecrop. ‘Perhaps you in the wood are more protected than we are, and so do not realise how critical it is becoming. The grass is turning yellow with dryness; the soil is cracking and so hard for lack of rain that our youngsters who have left their home burrows cannot burrow tunnels and are being forced to live on the surface in the few areas of longer grass that exist. Many have been taken by owl and kestrel. The stronger ones are fighting for older moles’ territory and there is death and violence in the system. Food is scarce and moles that find a source of worms are keeping it secret, or killing other moles who find out their secret, and there is a growing sense of distrust and treachery throughout the system.’

‘What can we do about it?’ asked Bracken coldly. ‘Our own food supply is poor and, I am told, getting worse.’ He looked round at the others for confirmation. They nodded, and

Boswell thought to himself that there is nothing like a shortage of food to turn a system violently against others and itself. He had heard of it, but never seen it at first paw.

Bracken looked at Stonecrop unsympathetically. His job now was to protect his system and if Stonecrop was going to suggest, which it seemed likely that he was, that the Pasture moles should move in on Duncton where the food supply was better, he would have to resist it. With force, if necessary.

‘My predecessor, Brome, who helped you save your system and get rid of Rune—not to mention Mandrake—believed that the Stone should be accessible to the Pasture moles,’ said Stonecrop.

‘Well isn’t it?’ asked Bracken irritably. He didn’t like being reminded about Brome and Rune and Mandrake, not by Stonecrop of all moles. All that, and a lot more, was over. It was gone.

‘Does anymole live in the Ancient System now?’ asked Stonecrop unexpectedly.

The question brought an icy calm into Bracken’s mind as, keeping his face quite impassive, he worked out what his response to the implication behind this question should be. He wanted no Pasture mole living in the Ancient System. There was something almost blasphemous about the idea. Blasphemous? Bracken thought to himself that that was a strange word for him to use. Why, for Stone’s sake, he didn’t want anymole living in the Ancient System.

‘If you are going to suggest that because nomole from Duncton now lives in the Ancient System that Pasture moles might now live there, then…’ He was about to say, and thought better of it, that if that was what Stonecrop meant he had better forget about it. Right now.

However, if his time as leader of Duncton had taught him anything, it was that blunt statements of intent were sometimes less effective as a way of getting things done than ambiguity. So he finished the sentence clumsily and only half-convincingly: ‘then… this is something we will naturally need to talk about carefully among ourselves. Trust me, Stonecrop, to see that we do our best.’ But Stonecrop didn’t like the indirect mole Bracken was becoming and certainly didn’t trust him much at all. Why, it had once been so easy to talk to Bracken, hadn’t it? But he hadn’t smiled once. Where was his spirit gone? In the third week of August, Stonecrop came over from the pastures to see Bracken. They talked in the elder burrow with Boswell and a couple of other Duncton moles present.

‘The drought on the pastures is now getting very serious, Bracken,’ started Stonecrop. ‘Perhaps you in the wood are more protected than we are, and so do not realise how critical it is becoming. The grass is turning yellow with dryness; the soil is cracking and so hard for lack of rain that our youngsters who have left their home burrows cannot burrow tunnels and are being forced to live on the surface in the few areas of longer grass that exist. Many have been taken by owl and kestrel. The stronger ones are fighting for older moles’ territory and there is death and violence in the system. Food is scarce and moles that find a source of worms are keeping it secret, or killing other moles who find out their secret, and there is a growing sense of distrust and treachery throughout the system.’

‘What can we do about it?’ asked Bracken coldly. ‘Our own food supply is poor and, I am told, getting worse.’ He looked round at the others for confirmation. They nodded, and

Boswell thought to himself that there is nothing like a shortage of food to turn a system violently against others and itself. He had heard of it, but never seen it at first paw.

Bracken looked at Stonecrop unsympathetically. His job now was to protect his system and if Stonecrop was going to suggest, which it seemed likely that he was, that the Pasture moles should move in on Duncton where the food supply was better, he would have to resist it. With force, if necessary.

‘My predecessor, Brome, who helped you save your system and get rid of Rune—not to mention Mandrake—believed that the Stone should be accessible to the Pasture moles,’ said Stonecrop.

‘Well isn’t it?’ asked Bracken irritably. He didn’t like being reminded about Brome and Rune and Mandrake, not by Stonecrop of all moles. All that, and a lot more, was over. It was gone.

‘Does anymole live in the Ancient System now?’ asked Stonecrop unexpectedly.

The question brought an icy calm into Bracken’s mind as, keeping his face quite impassive, he worked out what his response to the implication behind this question should be. He wanted no Pasture mole living in the Ancient System. There was something almost blasphemous about the idea. Blasphemous? Bracken thought to himself that that was a strange word for him to use. Why, for Stone’s sake, he didn’t want anymole living in the Ancient System.

‘If you are going to suggest that because nomole from Duncton now lives in the Ancient System that Pasture moles might now live there, then…’ He was about to say, and thought better of it, that if that was what Stonecrop meant he had better forget about it. Right now.

However, if his time as leader of Duncton had taught him anything, it was that blunt statements of intent were sometimes less effective as a way of getting things done than ambiguity. So he finished the sentence clumsily and only half-convincingly: ‘then… this is something we will naturally need to talk about carefully among ourselves. Trust me, Stonecrop, to see that we do our best.’ But Stonecrop didn’t like the indirect mole Bracken was becoming and certainly didn’t trust him much at all. Why, it had once been so easy to talk to Bracken, hadn’t it? But he hadn’t smiled once. Where was his spirit gone?

After a few minutes of half-hearted talk, Stonecrop left with only the promise that Bracken would let him have an answer in the next few days. Well, a week at most. But Stonecrop let it be known that he wasn’t sure that he would be able to hold his moles in control that long unless something changed very dramatically. If it didn’t, and Bracken remained uncooperative, then he would have to consider whether the help his moles had given Bracken did not give them the right to take the Ancient System by force…

The effect of Stonecrop’s visit on Bracken was immediate. As soon as he had gone, he ordered the other Duncton moles out of the elder burrow and turned to Boswell. ‘Right. We’re going to the Ancient System to see what the food situation is there. It was never up to much when I lived there, but you never know, it might have changed. But first we’re going to find out what the position is in Duncton. I’ve been thinking this drought would soon go away, but we’d better face the fact that it might stay for many weeks yet, perhaps even months. We owe something to the Pasture system. We had better make some plans, but you can’t do that without facts.’

Boswell could hardly believe his ears. For the first time since Bracken had taken over the system he seemed to have real fire in his spirit. His eyes were brighter, there was a combativeness in the way he spoke. More than that, Stonecrop’s suggestion seemed to have opened the way to Boswell finally getting to see the Ancient System with Bracken.

They went first to the Westside, then down to see Mekkins in the Marsh End. They talked to mole after mole, getting a detailed picture of what effect the drought was having on the system. Then back to the tunnels of Barrow Vale, where the moles were at first surprised to see Bracken so personally interested in what they had to say, then falling over themselves to tell him their woes. Finally they went to the Eastside before starting on the trek up the slopes towards the Ancient System.

By then the picture they had formed—not only from what they had been told but also from what they had seen—was a grim one. The system was on the verge of disarray and fights over food were already becoming more frequent.

Along the wood’s edge, the normally green grass and burgeoning brambles had turned yellow in the dryness. Everything creaked and crackled for want of moisture. The very air itself seemed to be made of oppressive dust, the light was harsh and bare—though because of the pall of white haze that seemed to have fallen on the earth, the sun rarely shone directly. On some of the more exposed trees, particularly on their south-facing side, the leaves had dried and crinkled and turned prematurely autumnal. The moisture that normally stayed throughout the summer just beneath the first layer of leaf litter seemed all to have gone, and what grubs there were had buried themselves deeper than usual, along with all the worms, making the normal summer surface runs useless for getting food. The worms also seemed to have bred much less prolifically, so that there was a general shortage. It was not acute, but to survive a mole had to spend much longer each day, and range much further, to find enough food. As a result there were more fights, for territory was more valuable, and anyway, any shortage of food makes moles aggressive and irritable. At the same time, the number of owls in the wood seemed to have increased—summer was always a bad time as the tawny owls’ own young were learning to fly and feed, and took any young moles in the wood or on the pastures they laid their yellow eyes upon. By the end of August, however, this bloody threat was normally over, for the youngsters that were going to be taken had gone, and most moles were sensibly underground. This time, however, the weather seemed to have prolonged the owl threat, whose hanging presence added to the grim atmosphere in the wood.

Mole after mole complained to Boswell and Bracken that something was wrong, very wrong, and they were afraid, very afraid. The Stone was angry and something was going to happen to them. And everymole they met complained of something they themselves had noticed in Barrow Vale: there was an unpleasant infestation of fleas in the tunnels all over the system.

So it was in a mood of foreboding that Bracken and Boswell turned at last up to the slopes and towards the Ancient System. The slopes were more populated with youngsters than Bracken could ever remember having heard of. Unable to find territory in the main system because its residents were keeping a larger portion of it for themselves, many youngsters had come to the traditionally impoverished slopes and established a meagre existence for themselves in the dilapidated tunnels that were distant remnants of the original migration from the Ancient System. They were a skinny, frightened, sorry lot, somehow symptomatic of the arid days through which the system was going. Most ran away and hid when Bracken and Boswell approached.

‘The whole system’s falling apart,’ growled Bracken once when this happened, unaware that just as once he had been afraid of fully mature adult males, so these timid youngsters were afraid of him. Had Boswell been by himself, the story might have been different, for Boswell was the most approachable of moles.

Hulver’s old tunnels were unoccupied and they entered the ancient tunnels by the route carved out by the side of the owl face by Mandrake. As they did so, Boswell felt obliged to reveal to Bracken what Rebecca had told him about their experience together in the central part of the system and what they had found together under the Stone. But whereas before Stonecrop’s visit Bracken would surely have been angry, now he seemed, if anything, relieved.

‘Did she tell you all that? Well, it’s true enough, though it seems so removed from me now that I sometimes think all that happened to two other moles. You can’t go backwards, Boswell.’

Ostensibly they went to find out what the food supply would be like in the Ancient System, but having quickly established that it was no better there than anywhere else, the journey became a tour of the system conducted by Bracken for Boswell’s benefit.

They stayed there for three days, and in that time Boswell learned more about Bracken than he had ever known before. They went over to the cliff edge where Bracken had first entered the system; they travelled down the communal tunnel towards the centre of the system; and they entered tunnel after tunnel and poked their snouts into many burrows even Bracken had not seen before.

Bracken spoke simply about the past, making it sound almost as if it were a different mole he was talking about, but describing all the fears and excitements of the original exploration.

‘Really, when it comes down to it, there isn’t much to see. It’s a deserted system, that’s all, with just the central part having any great interest… perhaps I’ll show it to you before we go back to the main system,’ Bracken said mischievously, for he could see Boswell’s excitement at everything they saw—and, indeed, it rubbed off on to him.

So, when they finally reached the Chamber of Dark Sound, they were both equally excited, and ran down the final length of tunnel towards the echoes like a couple of youngsters. Boswell noticed that Bracken’s old good humour had come back—away from the main system he seemed more relaxed. Perhaps at heart he was a solitary mole, perhaps that was what was wrong—he could never be solitary in Barrow Vale.

The chamber was the same, except that the entrance to the tunnel to the most central part of the system had fallen in where Mandrake had destroyed it, and the half-buried bones of the henchmoles killed in the fight remained among the soil and rubbish. There was a way through, however, dug out no doubt by Mandrake during the time he lived in the tunnels alone.

The atmosphere, which had been dark and dangerous when Bracken first came there, was somehow lighter and more neutral. Bracken did not feel nervous about it, and dispassionately showed Boswell the embossed walls, whose patterns still gyrated and wound across the surface, changing into heavier, deeper patterns nearer and nearer the centre where the owl face, still threatening, hung. How had he ever been afraid of it all!

‘You know what I found out?’ said Bracken, finding it strange to talk normally in this once-terrifying place. ‘If you hum in a certain way, you get sounds back.’ He was about to show how when Boswell suddenly looked warningly at him, raised a paw and said quietly: ‘Be careful, Bracken. You don’t know what you’re doing.’

Bracken began to protest but, as sometimes happened, there was a quality of fierceness to Boswell’s expression that made him hold back his words. His mouth opened and then shut, and it was Boswell who spoke.

‘This wall is the work of long generations of graced moles. It is a wall of hope and warning and it is true that by humming in a certain way, something you have stumbled upon, you may get some of the power from its ancient script. There is a wall like this in Uffington, as there is one in each of the seven chosen systems. They are not to be played with and are traditionally guarded by a mole not only great in body, but wise in spirit as well. It was said that such a guard never left his place, which is at the centre of the wall, whatever calamity befell.’

Bracken remembered then the mole skeleton that had so frightened him at the entrance in the centre of the wall, the seventh entrance. So that had been the guard, and some calamity had befallen the Ancient System. Yet he had stayed. Something of the awe that Bracken had once felt was returning in the face of Boswell’s transformation beneath the wall from follower to aide to teacher.

‘What is the wall for, then?’ asked Bracken rather humbly.

‘It protects the most holy part of the system, the system beyond that entrance. Its shapes carry the voices of the moles of the past and the proper way to approach it is with a chant in the old language, which all scribemoles should know, though these days, alas, many do not know it well enough. If I were still a scribemole and bound by my vows, I would not be able to tell of this, or let you hear the language. But now, Bracken, I am beginning to see that the Stone works its wisdom in ways we cannot understand, and I think it has made me free so that you, who carry so much… may hear the wall’s proper sound.’

‘What do you mean “carry so much”?’ asked Bracken.

Boswell was getting sterner and stranger by the second, and Bracken felt almost intimidated. ‘We didn’t meet by accident, Bracken—surely you know that. You have a destiny I do not understand. But I know it is so. And the Stone has blessed me to help you fulfil it. Rebecca… the seventh Stillstone which… you were so unwilling to talk about… the shadows that have fallen and continue to fall on the Duncton system… they are all a part of it. Every system seems to be in disarray—Nuneham, the Pastures, Duncton, and many that I passed through when I came here. Nomole trusts the Stone; nomole trusts himself. Fear is written on every face.’ It was written on Bracken’s as he listened to Boswell. Who was he? What did the Stone want of him?

Bracken began to shake with fear, for as Boswell spoke, his voice seemed to grow louder and more sonorous and his very language changed as word by word it slid into the old language, which Bracken could not understand. Sounds hard; sounds mellifluous; sounds mysterious. Yet he did understand that there was worse than warning in Boswell’s words and that Boswell was more than mole… Boswell turned to the wall and his voice became a chant, in the language of the old moles, and it began to echo and reverberate a thousand times more powerfully than when Bracken had first discovered the effect a hum could have.

‘The stait of mole dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

Now dansand mety, now like to dee,

Our plesance heir is all vaneglory;

This fals warld is hot transitory,

The flesh is brukle, the dark is sle,

We that in heill wes, and gladnes,

Are trublit now with gret seiknes

And feblit with infermite…’.

As he chanted these ancient words, few of which Bracken could understand, it was as if the wall echoed back the actual chant of ancient moles, powerful moles, and dark sound began to come at Bracken, louder and louder, so that he wanted to run from it. But whichever way he turned, however he tried to escape, it came louder at him, surrounding him in its catastrophe, running at him from every tunnel in the Ancient System, a storm of sound.

As he began to cry out for the terror of it, he thought only of himself and could not know that its echoes and reverberations travelled far beyond the chamber they were in, down the tunnels, booming and vibrating up to the surface, encircling and then issuing from the Stone itself, and then out over the slopes, down towards Barrow Vale, a sound of disaster.

Mekkins heard it, stopping in mid-sentence down in the Marsh End, shaking his head in puzzlement, then running to the surface and snouting up towards the distant Stone from where the deep chant of ancient moles seemed to be coming.

Comfrey heard it, in the shade of the wood’s edge where he vainly sought herbs long since killed by the drought, and he turned towards the hill, the name ‘Rebecca’ forming helplessly in his mouth as fear filled him and he sought the comfort her name always gave him.

Rebecca heard it, down in her burrows, and she knew that what it was they had been waiting for for so long, for generations, perhaps before any of them had been born, had come.

Stonecrop heard it, and mole after mole, like him, stopped what they were doing and paused fearfully, as the sound from the Stone came down to them like thunder through the trees.

‘Stop!’ cried Bracken to Boswell. ‘Stop the sound!’ he shouted, turning this way and that in his desperation. And Boswell’s voice began to soften and change back, his words still thundering but no longer echoing with dark sound, as Bracken heard him say, ‘You argue with Stonecrop, you argue with Rebecca, you argue with yourself. All of you argue, but now the time is coming when you must listen to the Stone. Now the last shadow is falling.’

Bracken stared at Boswell and saw that he too was shaking, sweating and afraid himself. He was possessed by some power that only reluctantly let him go and Bracken called again to him, no longer in fear, but in pity and compassion for them all.

The last shadow had fallen. The last shadow? It was with this mysterious knowledge hanging over them, and not knowing what it meant, that Bracken finally led Boswell—both of them very subdued—through the seventh entrance and on to the central core.

In this moment of long-awaited arrival at the heart of Duncton Boswell said nothing, for he felt the dread of a threat outside the ancient tunnels far more than the promise and excitement of finding the seventh Book, or clues to it, within them. But they pressed on, Bracken leading them quickly to one of the entrances into the Chamber of Echoes, and from there, without faltering once, through the complex labyrinths where the echoes played among the chalky walls and on to the edge of the Chamber of Roots.

There they stopped and looked at the sinews and shadows of the roots massing before them, seeming utterly still for once, but even then sounding the whine and shrill of the subtlest of shiftings from some deep crevice or high cleft as the roots responded to the stresses of the trees. The drought extended even down there, for the air was dry and the root sounds were tauter and higher pitched.

‘The buried part of the Stone is beyond the roots,’ said Bracken, pointing half-heartedly at them, ‘and since we’re here, we might as well try to get through. But… well, you’ll see.’

Bracken led slowly off among the roots, taking care to mark the ground from the beginning so that they could find their way out. But, as he expected, they did not get more than a few moleyards beyond the first of the roots before the lethargy and loss of purpose that had affected him before struck them both. A voice kept saying to each of them, ‘What’s the point?’ and, ‘You know you can’t get through, it’s too far,’ until they seemed to veer off the course Bracken was trying to lead them on, round and round, and out again, back to the edge.

‘You see what I mean?’ said Bracken. ‘I was only able to get through there with Rebecca. We just went straight through without any confusion at all. But if you want to get to the Stillstone, that’s where you’ll have to find a way through, Boswell.’

Boswell was not really listening. He was uncomfortable and restless, feeling that something was nagging at him from behind, a looming shadow he could not quite make out.

Bracken said, ‘Come on, I’ll get you out. Another time… I’ll bring you here again. Anyway, there are things to do. I’ll tell Stonecrop he can bring what moles he liked into the ancient tunnels. I’ll go and see Rebecca. It will be all right, Boswell.’

He saw that the things he must do were really quite simple, and as he did so, felt relieved and clear-headed. He might even have felt light-hearted but for the oppression of the drought and the feeling that Boswell, who was now so silent, was full of fear or dread.

He took them out by his own series of tunnels that led over towards the wood’s edge, describing to Boswell how he had escaped through them with Violet. They found a little food there, but ate it quickly because they wanted to get back on to the surface and down the slopes to the main system. When they did, they found the air was still as dry as bone.

‘It’s just the same as it was!’ said Bracken with relief, as if he had expected the whole wood to have disappeared. ‘That place can leave a mole full of fears! Nice to be out again!’ He tried to be as positive and as cheerful as possible, but Boswell did not react.

‘I can’t see what you’re so miserable about,’ said Bracken, exasperated. ‘There’s nothing wrong—except the heat.’

Chapter Thirty-Four

But the system was not quite the same. While they had been in the ancient tunnels, the sky had taken on an eerie, threatening colour, as if a thunderstorm of heat was about to break but could never quite manage it. At the same time, the flea infestation, which Bracken and Boswell had noticed on their tour of the system, had got suddenly worse. A mole could not enter the tunnels and burrows to the north of Barrow Vale without brown-orange fleas hopping on and off his face and paws, bristling among his fur and itching and biting. They seemed attracted to the fine layer of dust and grit that had formed on the floors of the tunnel with the drought, and although not at first easily seen, the floor was sometimes literally alive with them.

It was so bad in some places that moles began to avoid certain of the communal tunnels and even to abandon affected sections of their own tunnels. Many of the Marshenders took the more drastic but effective step of gathering leaves and the yellow flowerheads of the fleabane that few down near the marshes to spread about their tunnels, which had the unfortunate effect on the system of forcing the infestations further towards the centre, where the fleabane did not grow.

Such infestations had happened in summer before, though never so badly, but even this was regarded by the gossips of Barrow Vale as just another annoyance of an aggravating season. Certainly it was not of enough significance to stop Bracken deciding that, once he had had a rest from his tour of the tunnels, he would set off for the pastures to tell Stonecrop and the Pasture moles that they could occupy the ancient tunnels if they really wanted to. Then he would go and see Rebecca, hoping that she would come close to him again.

But he was never to make either journey. As he was about to leave, Mekkins arrived from the Marsh End with some news so strange that he immediately accompanied him back, though taking a roundabout route to avoid the fleas.

It seemed that the day before, three moles had been gathering fleabane by the marsh’s edge, when from out among its dry rustling grasses two strange moles had appeared. Never in living memory or legend had anymole ever come from across the marshes. The Marshenders were hostile—two standing their ground very firmly while the other got reinforcements and sent to Mekkins. Mekkins came quickly and interrogated them. The two strangers were friendly to the point of abjection. They had come a long way, they said; the marsh was caked over with dryness and there was no problem in crossing it. No, they had not crossed over by any route which the roaring owls took—a suggestion Mekkins made to them on the basis of what Boswell had told him about what lay beyond the marshes. No, they had come by some other way, though they seemed confused, or deliberately vague, about where. They kept asking questions themselves—what system was this, they wanted to know, and was everything all right?

Mekkins answered no questions, but let them come into one of the burrows nearest the marsh where he there put some guards on them while he went to get Bracken. His instinct was to kill them there and then, but he felt that their visit was so unusual, and times were so strange, that it was a good idea to give Bracken and Boswell the chance to talk to them.

So all three of them went back quickly to the Marsh End without pause, going right through towards the marsh itself. But before they got to the burrow where the strangers were being kept, they met the three Marsh End moles who had been guarding them coming towards them.

‘Why the ’ell aren’t you doin’ what you should be?’ demanded Mekkins. ‘Don’t you tell me that them two buggers have scarpered.’ He looked very threatening.

One of the three spoke up: ‘It ain’t that they’ve scarpered, Mekkins. Worse than that. They’re dead!’

‘Yes, suddenly took ill last night with Stone knows what, and as soon as you know it, they were gone,’ said another. ‘Both of them?’ asked Mekkins.

‘Horrible it was,’ said the third. ‘In agony they were.’

‘Horrible it is,’ said the first mole. ‘Never smelt anything like it. You go an’ see for yerself, Mekkins.’

The two dead moles presented a pathetic sight. One was still crouched upright on his paws, all hunched up with his snout tight between his forepaws, as if he had tried to protect himself from a headlong wind. His eyes were terribly swollen, while his snout, what they could see of it, was red and sore, and his fur mottled and caked with sweat. The other was on his side, paws out stiff, his mouth agape. His soft, pale belly fur was lank and diseased-looking, and in the soft part where one of the back paws joined his body there was a gaping sore, yellow with pus. It was from this that a terrible stench of death that filled the burrow seemed to emanate. There was one other thing. The floor of the burrow was bristling with fleas whose one objective seemed the same: to get to the open sores on the mole’s body. Some fleas were already there, sucking at the red and yellow patch. Others, satiated, occasionally lost their grip and fell off, their place taken immediately by new ones.

‘But they looked all right when I left ’em to go and get Bracken,’ said Mekkins to one of the guardmoles.

‘Well, we watched over them from the moment you went. Even offered ’em a worm or two, which is saying something these days, but they weren’t interested. Said they weren’t hungry. One of ’em got restless first and started sweating, a smelly kind of sweat. Then the other got all hot and bothered and says something like “We’re cursed, it will kill everymole”. So I asked him what he was on about and he said “You’ll soon find out” and started groaning and cursing while the other one—he’s the one who’s still on his paws— just sort of curled up and then shivered and started scratching his snout as if there was something on it, which there wasn’t. Then they got steadily worse and worse and I sent somemole over to the pastures to get Rebecca because I thought she would help out, but that was early this morning and you’ve got here first. Then the one that was groaning stopped groaning and sort of his breath came faster’n faster and he shivered. Then before we knew where we were they were both dead, one just where he was and the other keeling over and ending up where ’e is now, on ’is side. Well, then we noticed the smell getting bad, and then the fleas seemed to get worse, though Stone knows where they come from because this burrow was pretty clear of ’em.’

‘What did they mean?’ Bracken pondered aloud to himself. ‘“It will kill everymole”… What do you make of it, Boswell?’

They turned to Boswell, who was looking closely at the dead moles. If ever a mole looked as if he knew more than he was saying, it was Boswell at that moment. ‘The best thing you can do for the time being is to seal that burrow,’ he said, not answering Bracken’s question.

‘This ain’t the Pasture system, me old mate,’ said Mekkins. ‘They may do that there, but they ain’t taken over Duncton yet. I don’t want a couple of diseased strangers rotting in my tunnels, thank you very much.’

Just as Bracken was about to step in and settle the argument there was a commotion at the other end of the tunnel and the mole who had been sent to get Rebecca appeared.

‘She ain’t there,’ he said. ‘Gone to deal with something or other over in the far pastures she has, so some berk of a Pasture mole told me. They’re thick as lobworms, them lot. I left a message. Let’s hope he’s not too thick to pass it on.’

‘Right. We’ll wait till Rebecca gets back before deciding what to do with these two,’ said Bracken firmly. ‘Now, can we go somewhere more pleasant, Mekkins, and decide what we are going to do?’

Two hours later one of the moles who had been guarding the two strangers began to sweat. Six hours later he was dead. That same evening a mole came to tell Mekkins that two more who lived near the burrow where the two strangers had died had been taken ill—sweating, irritable, very thirsty and weakening by the hour.

Bracken, now increasingly worried and restless for something to do before Rebecca arrived, went to look at them. Rebecca came straight from the pastures on receiving the message and it was here that she found him. He was looking at their suffering and feeling the agony of helplessness that the healthy feel before extreme illness in another. If they heard him in the tunnel where they were crouched motionless, they did not show it, and they could not have seen or scented him, for the skin around their eyes was painfully swollen and their snouts were running with a foul-smelling mucus.

‘Bracken?’ It was Rebecca’s voice, and then her touch. ‘Bracken?’

He turned to her, his suffering for them so much a part of him that his gaze on her was direct and open. The last thing he was thinking about was Rebecca’s attitude to him. ‘Can you help them?’ he asked, but before the question was fully out he could see her answer. She looked tired and stricken.

‘There are many moles like this on the pastures over on the far side,’ she said. ‘Some moles came in from another system and must have brought the disease with them. One of them has been lucky and is not ill, but he says that most of the moles in his system died from the disease.’

‘The whole system?’ whispered Bracken.

Rebecca nodded. ‘Bracken, there was nothing I could do for them. The ones who died didn’t respond to anything I gave them. The one who lived—or has so far—didn’t survive because of anything I did.’

Mekkins suddenly joined them. ‘A couple of moles have come over from the Eastside and there’s death there now.’ He shrugged hopelessly. ‘You know what it is, don’t you? It’s the plague, and there’s not a blind thing anymole can do about it—not even you, Rebecca.’

‘But Rose might—’ she began.

‘She couldn’t,’ said Mekkins firmly, ‘so put that idea out of your head.’

Boswell joined them quietly as well, and all four looked at each other in a dawning horror. Each one had heard stories of the plague, though none knew the history of its, terror more than Boswell, who had read some of the Rolls of the Systems, whose records had been mysteriously interrupted two or three times in molehistory when most of the chroniclers themselves had suddenly died or disappeared in a waste of history that reflected plague and only a single account had remained to tell the story.

‘The shadow has fallen’ was the phrase with which one of the most famous Rolls of the Plague ended, written as it had been by the last survivor, a scribemole, in a system to the west, whose account was left unfinished before he himself had died. It was the same phrase that Boswell, or the moles that possessed him, had used by the wall in the Chamber of Dark Sound.

But Boswell, who knew so much, had nothing to say. Crouched together in the tunnel, the four began to feel the full weight of the waves of death that were rolling towards them, a flood far more powerful than the one Bracken and Boswell had faced in the drainage channel. Then, hour by hour, the reports began to stream in.

‘Five moles in the Eastside…’

‘A female in Barrow Vale itself…’

‘Three Westsiders, two males and a female…’

Panic and fear began to take over the system as each began to fear for his or her life. Everymole sought some remedy or escape and when moles found that Rebecca was among them, with Mekkins, they besieged and beseeched her for help—for a charm, for a prayer, for a herb that would save them. But the more they asked, the more impotent Rebecca felt, for there was nothing her normally healing words seemed able to do, and no herb that she knew seemed to help.

By the third day, when Bracken and Boswell had moved back to Barrow Vale to see if they could at least control the panic, leaving Mekkins and Rebecca in the Marsh End—the one because he wanted to be in his own tunnels, the other because she felt instinctively that that was where she could give most comfort—there were so many dead in the system that the living could no longer move them from where they had died. Dead, odorous moles lay in tunnels, in burrows, halfway out of entrances, some even lay in the very place they had been burrowing for worms before the plague crept up on them and took them away.

Each corpse was flea-covered, each carried the stench that the first two had had, and each showed the same grim progress of symptoms. And the stifling heat that continued seemed only to speed up the process of decay and spread the smell of death.

By the third day there was not a mole in the system who did not have a friend or close relative who had died. Some had lost each one of their siblings; some had lost each of their neighbours; many marvelled to find themselves alive. In one or two places—on the slopes and in parts of the Westside— hardly a single mole died and the moles marvelled at their fortune, seeking vainly for an explanation of it.

Then there was a lull for two days which brought sudden false hope, and the gossips in Barrow Vale, who chattered now more wildly and more desperately, started to say that the plague was over and Stone knows why they had been spared but… but on the next day the plague returned, in a new form. It was as if, unable to kill all the moles quickly, it had adopted a new guise to take them in a different way, one that was slower.

Moles broke out in sores under their bellies and on their flanks, painless but odorous sores, which came with the sweating. Then swellings and nodules of hardness under the skin appeared on their faces and snouts, blocking them and making their breathing laboured and terrible to hear. At the same time, the disease seemed to go to the lungs of the moles, causing them to cough and retch. And a mole that began to cough blood was a mole soon dead.

The system began to be filled with a strange moaning sound, the cries of moles in distress to whom there was none to minister, few to give comfort. Those that survived, untouched by the plague, seemed to wander about in a daze, unable to stay still in the face of such total tragedy but unable to help those suffering around them.

The system soon started to collapse around Bracken. Many of the moles who had been his executives and aides simply disappeared; others joined in the incessant talk that now took over the panic-stricken Barrow Vale, where moles seemed to find refuge in congregating together and discussing the latest plague news and noting with alarm and self-satisfaction why more moles seemed to die in the morning before sunrise than at any other time, while more moles seemed to develop swellings around the belly and groin which became sores after two or three days. Death from the new form of plague took up to four days and the only consolation that the moles could find was that not all the sufferers seemed to die, though most still did.

Not everymole panicked. At least one, Comfrey, stayed calm and left the pasture, crossed through the wood and began searching for something that he remembered Rose talking about a long time before. ‘If only I c-c-could remember properly,’ he scolded himself.

The talk in Barrow Vale soon concentrated on the idea that the plague came from the Stone and was its judgement on them, a punishment for a system that had let the old ways slip under the rule of Mandrake and Rune.

From this idea came the belief that the only way of combating the plague was to visit the Stone and touch it—eagerly accepted confirmation of which was that one of the moles who had recovered from the plague had previously been up to the Stone and touched it, living proof that the Stone worked.

‘Is it true, Boswell, or is it just another superstition?’ asked Bracken, making it more a statement than a question. He had noticed that several moles who had been to the Stone had subsequently died and was cynical about the ‘explanations’ offered by the Stone’s proponents that these moles had transgressed in other ways and so the Stone did not favour them.

‘In the sense you mean, it is untrue,’ said Boswell, breaking the silence in which he had been lost for most of the time since the plague came upon them. ‘These moles do not understand that the Stone is not a power by itself. Its power is invested in each one of us, whether it is a power for good or for evil. If you touch the Stone with faith, perhaps that does release a power, but only one that exists already inside you. For all your cynicism, Bracken, you have that power as well.’

‘Can I stop myself getting the plague?’ asked Bracken bitterly, thinking of the many who had died. ‘Could they have?’

Boswell was silent, which turned Bracken’s bitterness into anger. He felt, as so many other moles did themselves, that the plague was in some way a judgement on him. But his feeling was the stronger for his being leader of the Duncton system and, though no other moles said it, he felt responsible for what was happening. Like Rebecca, he felt the terrible frustration of not being able to relieve the suffering, almost as if it was a guilt. He turned these feelings back on Boswell, and through him on to the Stone.

Boswell was silent.

‘Where is this power of the Stone when it is most needed?’ demanded Bracken angrily. ‘You’re clever at making the Stone seem important, but when it’s needed, really needed, what good is it? Why does it let this happen?’ Bracken waved his paws around the tunnels of Barrow Vale, now full of frightened survivors of the plague, in a way that took in their fears and took in as well the dead, the stench of the dead and the distant moans of the dying.

‘Well, Boswell?’

But Boswell was silent. He knew the Stone was inside Bracken and one day he would know it. The plague was no more a judgement on the system or the moles in it than the idea that the sun was a bonus for living a good life was true. The plague was a part of life, as death was, but Boswell did not know what words could express such thoughts in such a place as this.

‘I will go the Stone myself,’ he said finally.

‘To pray?’ mocked Bracken. ‘Or to touch the Stone so you don’t get it…’ His voice trailed off as he heard his own tired bitterness. He was so weary, and suddenly afraid now that Boswell was going to leave. Impulsively he went up to Boswell and stopped him leaving.

‘What will happen to us all, to the system?’ Boswell looked at him with those bright dark eyes that held such understanding and warmth to anymole willing to raise his own eyes and look into them. He understood Bracken’s anger and torment, for he loved him with a love that grew stronger and fiercer in him day by day. He knew that a mole like Bracken might be angry with the Stone as well as in love with it. Indifference was the greatest threat.

‘I will pray for you, Bracken, for Rebecca and for all moles…’ But Bracken turned away again, thinking that prayers would be of no help to the moles in his system who had died already and to whom he had been unable to offer any protection. Yet his heart sank to see Boswell go. He wondered if he would ever see him again.

Four days and many more plague deaths later, Bracken had a visit in Barrow Vale from a Marshender. His message was stark and simple: Mekkins was dead. Just like that. Mekkins was gone.

‘Rebecca was with him but she couldn’t do nothing,’ said the Marshender, who had seen so much death that even Mekkins’ death had not affected him. ‘What mole can? It’s the Stone’s curse, and we’re powerless against it.’ Mekkins!

There was no need to be told how, or when, or where. The fact of it was enough to take the last strength from his body and for despair to take him over. It was as if some thief had sneaked into his burrow in the night and taken something from him without him seeing it and which he could never recover. Nothing could have underlined the tragedy that had overtaken the system more than this. Mekkins! Who had talked to him only days before, who was always aggressive and full of life; who had done so much for him and Rebecca and so many other moles.

He rose up from where he was crouched and began to roar in his shock and rage, raising his talons and bringing them down on the walls of the elder burrow, gasping out in his anger, grunting in his effort to attack and attack the earth around him, spittle forming on his mouth fur. He wanted to do something, anything, but there was nothing. He wanted to run roaring through the tunnels to the Marsh End, but what was the point?

The Marshender watched him. He had seen it all before. Anger, rage, prayers, the whole bleedin’ lot. A bit of roaring and raving wasn’t goin’ to do no good. Still, didn’t hurt, either. Better tell him the rest.

‘Rebecca’s got it as well. She’s got the plague,’ said the Marshender.

Horror and fear rushed over Bracken’s fur, then icy calm. ‘Where is she?’ he asked urgently.

‘Stone knows,’ said the Marshender. ‘She was only just took with it when I left—sweatin’ she was just like the others. I reckoned it was the plague. I scarpered. I mean, if the healer gets it, then Stone help us all.’

Bracken was gone before he could say more, running down through the system towards Mekkins’ tunnels, for that was where she would be. Running and running as if death were chasing at his paws. Running and running through the flea-ridden, death-smelling, stifling tunnels with sweat in his fur and terrible visions of a dying Rebecca mixing with pictures of a dead Mekkins in his mind, and prayers, more wild and desperate than any he had ever felt tempted to utter running through his head. ‘Keep her alive,’ he begged as he ran, ‘keep her alive. Spare Rebecca… take me. Take me,’ as he ran and ran.

She was not in Mekkins’ burrow, where only Mekkins’ body lay, hunched and sore-ridden like the rest. Oh, Mekkins! Mekkins!

Rebecca! He looked around wildly, not knowing where to go, trying to think, trying to recover enough to think. Rebecca! He ran from tunnel to tunnel, seeking a mole to guide him to where she might be, meeting mole after mole who looked at him stupidly when he asked, ‘Where’s Rebecca?’ for they had problems of their own and how would they know where she was?

Why hadn’t she come to him? Where would she have gone?

He began to run towards the pastures, thinking that she must have returned to her burrow, but only when he was nearly to the wood’s edge did he remember that he didn’t know exactly where she lived there—up near the higher pastures? Down where Rose once lived? And anyway… he paused in his running, sweat now shining in his fur and his breathing desperate with effort… it didn’t feel right. He felt as if he was running away from her. He turned south, towards the Stone on top of the hill, the evening air in the tunnels around him heavy with dry heat and asked aloud, ‘Where are you?’ He wanted to call for her and hear her answer. He wanted Rebecca.

Where would she have gone? He crouched down and closed his eyes, thinking himself into her mind as best he could and wondering where she might have gone. The Stone? Barrow Vale? Where else was there?

Only one place, and it came to him quietly as he himself had once gone there. Curlew’s burrow. The place she had gone when she had been so ill before and where, by the grace of the Stone, she had survived to take care of Comfrey. She must have gone there. He was so certain of it that a peace came to him as he got up and set off eastwards across the Marsh End to the most forsaken part of the system. By the grace of the Stone… he prayed to it subconsciously, feeling guilty at asking it to keep her alive when he had doubted it so much. ‘If you keep her alive,’ he bargained, ‘I’ll go to Uffington to give thanks. I’ll do anything… only keep her alive.’

It was a journey through death, for the Marshenders seemed even more stricken than the moles around Barrow Vale and he came across body after body, or poor creatures dragging themselves along in their final hours. Or others, who seemed to have gone insane, whispering in a kind of daze, ‘We have been saved from the plague, we had it, we had it, and we have been saved. Praise the Stone for saving us. Praise the Stone…’ And they reached out to touch Bracken as he passed them by, their faces and bodies still bearing the plague sores to show that it had, indeed, been their way, their eyes crazed by their strange deliverance.

Until at last he was into the eastern part of the Marsh End, whose surface was now hard and friable but still had something of the dank shadowiness that it had always held. He had not been here since he had been chased from it by Rune so long before when… he almost said to himself, ‘When the world was right’.

On and on he went, his heart quickening as he reached the end of the journey for what he might find when he got there.

It was night and he had been journeying one way or another since the early evening. ‘Only let her be alive,’ he whispered again as he reached the last few yards, ‘and nothing else will matter. I will go to Uffington and give thanks, whatever the cost.’

He found Curlew’s old tunnels with little difficulty, but stopped short outside the entrance because something lay there which he had not seen for a long time—a fresh flowerhead. Its petals were like a crocus, and a delicate mauve, its stalk white and vulnerable. Lying as it was among the aridness of drought-dusty, faded ivy that covered the tree trunk by the entrance and on top of rustling dry leaf mould, it presented a strange sight. He had never seen such a flower before and it made him pause and wonder at it before entering the tunnel carefully, snouting out ahead of him to see if life were there.

There was life all right, and plague. He could smell the terrible plague odour and hear movement of some kind. At least she was still alive. He approached noisily and called out ahead of himself, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca! It’s Bracken!’ and ran on down.

He was met at the entrance to Curlew’s old burrow not by Rebecca but by the stutter and stumble of Comfrey, whose thin snout peered out at him as he approached. ‘Hello, Br-Br-Bracken,’ he said.

Before Bracken even wondered what Comfrey was doing there he asked, ‘Is she here? Is she all right?’

‘She’s g-g-got the plague,’ stuttered Comfrey. ‘She’s n-n- not very well.’

Rebecca was crouching in the same corner she had occupied when she had been so ill before. Her eyes were swollen but not yet closed, while her mouth hung loose to ease her breathing. Already the swellings were starting on her face and snout. By her head on the floor lay the white shiny bulb part of a plant, the flower of which Bracken had seen on the surface.

Comfrey stepped forward to Rebecca. ‘You’ve got to eat it,

R-Rebecca,’ he said to her softly, touching her face to draw her attention. ‘You’ve g-got to try.’

‘Rebecca,’ whispered Bracken. ‘It’s me, Bracken.’

She sighed and he saw that her eyes were running, though whether with tears or illness it was hard to say.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered almost inaudibly.

‘M-make her eat it,’ said Comfrey desperately to Bracken. ‘It will help her. I kn-kn-know it will.’

‘What is it?’ asked Bracken.

‘I got it from beyond the Eastside where there’s pasture near the marsh. It’s called meadow saffron by the Eastsiders, though it’s so rare that few of them have ever seen it. But I found it, and when I did I kn-knew it was for R-Rebecca. I knew it. I always kn-know when she n-needs help. It’s a special healing plant… I’ve often f-found plants when she needed them. But it’s always been for a m-mole she’s helping. I didn’t know it was for her.’ He sounded desperate and kept pushing the white flesh of the bulb at Rebecca’s mouth for her to take.

‘You mustn’t try to die,’ he said simply, almost scolding her. ‘It’ll take you longer to get better if you d-d-don’t eat it.’ Then he looked straight at Bracken as if reading his thoughts and said: ‘You don’t have to worry about her dying. She won’t.’ There was total faith in Comfrey’s words.

If Bracken had not been in such a place at such a time he would have sworn that he saw a glimmer of the starting of a smile on Rebecca’s plague-ridden face, or perhaps even a laugh.

‘Rebecca,’ he said urgently. ‘Rebecca…’ His voice changed almost to a command and he said, ‘You’re bloody going to eat this thing Comfrey’s got for you!’ With that he took the bulb himself, bit off a piece, chewed it lightly into a mush, and putting it on his paw, started feeding it to Rebecca. She couldn’t chew but she was able to take it piece by slow piece and swallow it, like a pup taking its first solid food.

As she did so, he too knew with absolute certainty that she was not going to die—or rather that Comfrey, for all his hesitation, had spoken with such total faith in a voice that Rebecca had heard, that she could not die.

‘Most of them die because they don’t eat anything and b-because they can’t breathe properly,’ said Comfrey matter-of-factly, now content to watch over Rebecca and Bracken as if they were one mole—and one who had given him a rather unnecessary scare. ‘Rose told me about meadow saffron in a rhyme she said once, b-b-but I didn’t know that “pestilence” meant plague. Then an Eastsider told me, so I knew.’

Bracken did not take much of this in, though much later Rebecca was to remember every word. The horror of the plague was that the mind stayed quite clear while the body would no longer obey it.

Perhaps Bracken sensed this, for he talked to her as if she could hear him, treating her as if she were the most precious thing in the world, as, indeed, she was. The ugliness as the plague swellings grew worse, the stench of the sores when they came, the abjection of the affliction… neither he nor Comfrey noticed or afterwards remembered. It was Rebecca they loved, and she was not a swelling or a sore but a mole who had tended so many and suffered so much, and whom, in their turn and in different ways, they now tended, each giving her something different from their own spirits. Comfrey’s certain knowledge that she would live was one strength; Bracken’s force of love was another.

Present with them in Curlew’s burrows was a third strength—the power of the prayers that Boswell spoke up at the Stone, so far away, thinking of them both, and of all the other moles of Duncton and the pastures whom his great love encompassed through the Stone.

Crouched in the darkness of that long night, when Rebecca lay so ill, perhaps sensing that she was, he whispered the prayers he had learned as a scribemole but never thought he would himself have the power to say. Though now, as he said them, they came as naturally as breathing, each one calling out through him the blessing of the silence of the Stone:

‘Power of the Stone come into thee

All of thee in quiet;

Power of the sun come into thee

A part of thee in warmth;

Power of the moon come into thee

A part of thee feel cool;

Power of the rain come into thee

A part of thee refreshed;

Power of death depart from thee

Taken by the Stone;

Power of life return to thee

Borrowed from the Stone;

Power of the Stone is with thee

For you are the Stone,

All of you the Stone.’

He said it for the system’s sake, he said it for the pastures, he said it for the moles he had seen suffer and the moles who would never know the Stone; he said it for Bracken, and he whispered it for Rebecca. And if its effect was to bring quiet and silence, this was the third strength that came into Curlew’s burrows and accompanied Bracken and Comfrey and Rebecca on her journey through the plague.

And though its talons may have cast her down, they took with them, when they finally left her three days later, the power that Mandrake’s dreadful death had held over her. After two long days and nights she began to breathe easily, and on the fourth, she smiled again at last, and all of them could smile. And she had the strength to tell them both that they were her loves, as they had always been, father and son.

Chapter Thirty-Five

On the fifth day in Curlew’s burrows, when Rebecca had almost recovered, a mist unlike any mist Bracken had even seen came over the surface from the marsh. It was thin and swirling at first, noticeable more for its smell than its sight. It was dry and woody and smelt like some musky flower. Sometimes it was stronger, sometimes weaker and sometimes minute black dusty particles, light as the seedsails of rosebay willowherb, floated down in it.

Bracken did not know it, but it was the smoke of a fire that was spreading slowly across the dried-up marsh, crackling inexorably among the husky tall grass and reeds, curling and licking its way from reed stem to stem, its flaming reds and oranges paled by the sunlight. Here and there, where the reeds were thicker and the fire caught hold better, the smoke curled in thick waves of choking blue-grey, then rose and swirled away, revealing the brighter red of flames as they turned the yellow dry vegetation black and travelled on, leaving smouldering charred remnants behind.

Creatures ran in panic and confusion before it, many waiting as long as they could, for they had never seen a fire, then running before its heat and in the waves of panic of other fleeing creatures; fieldmice, a couple of voles, a hare that had strayed on to the dry marsh in search of food, and hundreds more.

A long olive grass snake delayed too long and its back-and-forth snaking became quicker and more rushed as it tried to escape, until smoke came into its throat and its shaking became a thrashing as the fire ran over and under it and its body curled and blackened into an agonised death, the skin cracking as the life in the flesh hissed out. The fire passed on, leaving the snake’s burnt corpse behind with the other distortions of life among the ashes.

As the afternoon progressed, the mist by Curlew’s burrows grew thicker and more difficult to breathe in, and the sounds in the wood no longer seemed right. The mist was beginning to smell in the burrow and though it smelt cleaner than the plague, a mole would be foolish to stay there too long.

Rebecca was strong enough to move—indeed, for a full day she had begged Bracken to let her go out, but he had resisted the idea: best to take it easy. And anyway, where could they go that wasn’t plague-ridden? Best to stay still. But now things were different and he was going to lead them up through the wood, away from the marsh, which he had never liked and from where this mist was drifting in.

‘We’re going,’ said Bracken. ‘Now.’

The smoke on the surface was getting steadily thicker, but the evening sun could still penetrate into it, giving the wood a luminescent blue appearance, with the trees looming out of it paly. Black sooty specks of burnt grass drifted along with the smoke towards the interior of the wood, and Bracken led Rebecca and Comfrey along with them, instinctively following a route away from the advancing fire—which had now reached to within a few moleyards of the wood and whose urgently sharp crackling could be heard.

‘What is it?’ asked Comfrey, curious rather than afraid.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bracken, ‘but it’s dangerous. Now come on.’

But though Rebecca could move, she could not move fast, and with Comfrey unable to keep in a straight line for continually snouting after things and trying to satisfy his curiosity about them, their progress was slow.

Behind them the fire had reached the reed wall at the marsh edge and burst through it with low rustlings and crackles as orange flame licked at the dry grass of the bank that led up to the shrubs and smaller bushes that grew at the wood’s edge. At one point it took hold and crossed to the bank, encouraged by the lightest of breezes that came off the marsh. Then, at another point. Then a third. Until the whole bank had taken, and the fire was sweeping up it through the shrubs to the first trees of the wood. As it reached them and started at the heavy dry leaf litter, the quality of the fire and smoke changed. It grew thicker and heavier as curls of grey-yellow smoke came from the leaf litter and the breeze carried it through the wood, where it overtook the lighter blue smoke with its white-yellow, and this drifted on more urgently into the wood, obscuring the sun, enshrouding the trees and soon catching up with the fleeing moles.

Bracken was more worried about Rebecca than Comfrey, for her strength was not as great as either of them had thought. He had taken a place behind them both and urged them on, especially Rebecca. ‘My love, you’ve got to keep going. It’s getting thicker and the noises are louder. It is coming nearer.’ Behind them the crackle of the fire increased, changing here and there into a roar as it passed over what had been Curlew’s burrows and trees and branches fell under its heat and destroyed her tunnels for ever.

Sometimes, the breeze of smoke through the wood, which was getting stronger, carried a roaring of fire sound rather than just a crackle.

They ran on, smoke at their throats and eyes, now frightened by the thing that sounded so massive and threatening behind them, their own rustles and scamperings drowned by the fallings, crashings and roarings from the fire.

Once clear of the isolated area of woodland in which Curlew’s tunnels were they came across entrances to tunnels into the system, and to get them away from the smoke Bracken led them down. The air was blissfully easier to breathe, but once down they noticed immediately the nauseating odour of plague and ahead of them saw the rotting body of a mole.

‘Come,’ said Bracken wearily, ‘we had best stick to the surface.’

Even in the short time they had been underground, the fire had advanced so much that they could feel that the temperature of the air had gone up and waves of heat were blowing up from behind them, with smoke and black soot. At one point Comfrey went off too far to the left and they lost him and had to stop and call until, scared and apologetic, he came spluttering back. ‘It’s even worse over there,’ he said.

Bracken had memories of being chased through this same part of the wood by henchmoles, in the opposite direction, and remembered how they had advanced to his right and his left until they seemed to be all around him. He felt that the ‘thing’ behind them was doing the same—and although he sensed that it was impersonal, like rain, it was still frightening. Gradually the fire overtook them on the left and they veered away from it to the right, only to find its sound and roaring even louder there.

‘Faster! Faster!’ he urged them. ‘It mustn’t catch us!’ And they ran on.

The fire had taken hold of the whole of the Marsh End, surging through the dried bracken and leaf litter and crackling at the base of trees before turning their bark black, while higher tongues of flame leaped up from dry fern and bracken and caught at the leaves of the lower branches which took the flames, curling them into death as they raced over the tree’s surface and then started at the twigs and branches as the fire took hold. Smoke billowed up from the wood, heavy with the feathery remnants of burning leaves and black ash, twisting and swirling into a great pall of smoke that drifted ahead of the fire through the drought-dry branches of the trees and undergrowth, towards the slopes.

Sometimes, among the soaring fragments of ash, a delicate white admiral butterfly or garish purple emperor tried to fly clear of the heat and smoke, beating frail wings unnaturally high into the air against the sucking and hurling currents, fluttering the last of its life away before smoke choked it and heat turned the beautiful wings into crumpled ash, and it fell back into the flames, unrecognisable and lost.

Death licked and darted its flaming way among the heavy tree trunks and branches, where, beneath the once protective bark, the larvae of stag beetles and longhorns or scuttling weevils found themselves trapped in the steam of boiling sap, their scrabbling bodies falling still as the fire burned away the life of tree after tree. While on the leaves, and especially the beloved oaks of Duncton Wood, the knobbles and carbuncles of the gall wasps and midges, where tiny young maggots lived in a cocoon of life, were suddenly gone, caught by a devastation more terrible than the plague that had swept through the moles below and one from which none escaped.

Along the wood’s edge, in advance of the flames, the grass was alive with fleeing creatures: dormice, unused to the light of day; squirrels, tails dancing in tune as they ran and then stopped, still on two legs, to see if they could tell where the danger lay before running on again; stoats and bank voles, and, of course, those few moles who had survived the plague had been driven from their tunnels by the smell of danger. Creatures that were normally foes now lost their internecine fears and ran, or hopped, or hesitated, or fled as their nature and instincts told them. Few dared to venture out of cover on to the pastures, most preferring to run on through grass or undergrowth in advance of the fire, and hope that they might escape it.

On the hilltop by the Stone, among the great beeches, Boswell could sense the terrible devastation that was spreading through the wood below. He could smell the smoke, though the terrible pall that now covered the wood as far as the slopes was beyond his range of vision. And he could not know that below him the ancient and noble oaks of Barrow Vale were being taken for ever by the fire. He had heard the urgent wings of carrion crow high in the branches, flapping blackly up through the smoke-filled beech branches and out of the wood. Then the sudden flight of a spotted woodpecker, flying straight out of its territory and ignoring any danger but the fire behind. And an urgent scurrying of such normally unseen birds as nuthatches and tree-creepers, driven out of their cover by panic.

There were other moles with Boswell, huddling by the Stone, most of whom had come to touch the Stone to avoid the plague and stayed there to avoid the danger in the system below. One or two had come up from the slopes, worried by the smoke and unnatural sounds.

Their only comfort was Boswell’s calm and peaceful presence, and to him they looked again and again for reassurance, shivering with fear despite the heat of the day and the smoke, unwilling to flee beyond the Stone. Occasionally creatures ran across the clearing—a squirrel, a stoat from somewhere down on the slopes—but the pawful of moles stayed fast, waiting and waiting in the smell of the fire and the sound of Boswell’s prayers.

The fire finally caught up with Bracken, Rebecca and Comfrey when they were halfway to the slopes. The flames crackled and roared to their left and right, burning branches fell crashing into the flames of the undergrowth, the smoke began to choke them with its heat and they began to turn this way and that in an attempt to progress further. Until at last there was nowhere to go, and the fire was approaching from all around them, Bracken’s fur singed by its sparks and flames.

It was then that they were forced underground again, into the plague-smelling, smoke-filled tunnels. Bracken led them down, past the dead and gaping bodies of moles, seeking out a tunnel or burrow that was smoke-free. To the left, to the right, through narrow tunnels they went, until they found a subsidiary tunnel that was clear—obviously because it led nowhere. Bracken saw Rebecca and Comfrey safely into it before following them and sealing it up, so that no smoke could enter, and then making a second seal for safety. The tunnel ran among the roots of an oak tree, thick and gnarled, and there they stopped, hoping that the danger would pass. They could hear the sound of the crashing fire above them, and worse, far worse, they could hear in the desperate sounds of the roots the useless fight of the tree against the fire that now overwhelmed it. Hissings and sobbings, groanings and cryings as the tree died above them, the roots sweating with its death. Branches crashing and cracking all about. Time stretched from desperate minutes into aching hours, and then on into an unseen dawn and another day.

Occasionally they heard thumps and crashings above them, or felt the tunnels vibrate from some branchfall. But gradually thick silence fell, the only sense of the fire left to them being its smell, which filtered into even their sealed tunnel. The air in the tunnel grew heavy and warm with their confined presence, and fetid, too, though they could not tell it. They sweated and sighed, crouching in silence together, Bracken’s flank to Rebecca’s, and Rebecca’s paw touching Comfrey.

But at least they found a little food—some worms and grubs that had made their way to the tree’s roots. At last the air became so unpleasant that they all wanted to move, and they were encouraged by the arrival of silence.

‘Right,’ said Bracken, breaking the silence, ‘we’re going to try to get out.’

They broke through one seal and then, very slowly, poked a way through the other. The air beyond smelt of smoke but it was clear, and they passed without hesitation into it to find their way back to the surface.

‘Rebecca!’ called Comfrey as they ran down the tunnel.

‘What is it, my sweet?’ said Rebecca, her voice warm and healthy again.

‘There’s no smell of plague in the tunnel!’ And it was true—the dead moles were still there but somehow they were dry and did not seem ever to have been moles.

‘There’s no fleas, either,’ said Bracken in wonder.

It was true—the smoke and heat from the fire had cleared the tunnels of plague.

The entrance they had come in by had gone beyond recognition, for a great branch had shattered through the dry soil and the tunnel was open to the air, its roof torn and black, warm ash and occasional swirlings of smoke playing where the roof had been.

Then they were out, on to what had once been the surface, but now lay black and waste, with not a hint of green in sight; just blackened roots of trees that had become no more than huge black thorns pointing ruggedly to the bare sky.

The surface felt exposed, as it did over on the pastures, and its air was heavy with the passage of the fire. They passed over the ashes of their wood, their black coats making them seem no more than shadows against its dark grey wastes. Where fire still smouldered at a root or branch, the smoke was swirled this way and that by a wind that seemed unable to make up its mind which way to blow. And the air hung heavier and heavier while the sky grew darker and more overcast. Ahead of them there was still an occasional crackle of fire, but it was sporadic and non-threatening and anyway, they could go no way other than up the slopes, for behind them their devastated wood stretched black and defeated, dead of all life.

The fire had stopped by the top of the slopes, turned back by the wider spacing of the trees and the lack of undergrowth. It had smouldered its way up among the first one or two beeches but could not get hold of the carpet of beech leaves or make headway against the massive bare trunks of the trees. One or two were charred, a few more blackened by soot, but none took the fire and it had stopped. It guttered and crackled still, but they were able to pick a way through it without trouble.

Rebecca let out a cry of sheer delight when they were able to get their paws on unburnt leaf litter once more, and Bracken’s pace quickened. His mind was a whirl of thoughts and feelings as tiredness mixed with relief, sadness with delight, excitement with apprehension. They headed straight for the Stone, the air about them faintly hazy from the smoke that drifted up from the wood.

Then they were there, the clearing ahead, the Stone looming up into the haze and then the Stone clear before them—and at its foot, in a motley cluster of all shapes and sizes, the moles who had survived the fire and, before it, the plague.

And Boswell was there. Their Boswell, greeting them with a touch and smile as a gasp of wonder saluted their arrival and they were surrounded by the moles, some of whom knew Rebecca, while others recognised Bracken and welcomed their leader back.

What mole can remember the laughter and blessings that were spoken then among the moles who had survived so much? What mole ever remembers such moments, when the past and the future are gone in the delight of life rediscovered and reclaimed? Each had a story to tell, each had struggled through surroundings of death. Not one mole there, save Boswell, failed to tell a story of how he or she had nearly died a dozen times. Only Boswell stayed silent, for he had come to the Stone before the fire even started, and prayed in its shadow, asking that the plague might go and knowing that however his prayer was answered, it would not be in a way he could predict or understand. Fire was not part of his prayer, but a prayer answered is a grace, for it takes a mole beyond himself and his present life and starts him on his way again.

Boswell’s prayer had been answered for good or bad—and who was he to question the Stone? The results now clustered about him. And he was their silent centre. As he watched them, he began to understand better than any scribemole before him what the seventh Book must be about, and why the colour of its light was no colour at all, but white. The colour of silence. In the exultant activity of survival around the Stone, Boswell understood at last the name of the book he had sought so long. It was the Book of Silence, but where he would find it he could not guess.

Bracken, Rebecca and Comfrey were not the last moles to arrive. Some fifteen more came finally from off the pastures where they had crept as high as they could to escape the plague and then waited while the smoke and fire came up through Duncton Wood.

Their own system had been decimated by plague, and they brought the news that Stonecrop had died of it, and all the Pasture elders. And somemole said that little Violet had died of it as well. So many gone! They were all gone but these few. Leaderless and lost. So they turned to the Stone.

As evening fell, the moles about the Stone began to whisper, ‘What shall we do now? Where can we go?’

Bracken heard them, and though he was still their leader, he asked himself what good he had done any of them.

‘What shall we do?’ They began to ask it of him directly, waiting for him to tell them, to show them a way of living beyond the devastation that had overtaken them all. He heard them, but had no wish to lead any mole anywhere ever again. A mole had best lead himself. He turned to Rebecca and called her name.

She came to him silently, as if she knew what he was thinking, and together they moved away from the other moles to the west side of the clearing. Above them the trees stirred softly with a cool breeze and the air felt fresher than it had for months. The sky was still dark and the fraught colour in it had gone, so that it looked grey with moisture.

‘This is where you were crouching when I first met you here,’ she said softly to him. ‘So long ago now.’

He stared again out through the wood towards the west, as he had then. He could feel Uffington’s pull as he always had and he turned to her and said. ‘That’s where Uffington lies.

Rebecca…’ but he couldn’t finish his sentence or even whatever thought lay behind it, for as he looked at her, and she at him, they knew that they were at one again and that she was part of him now and always would be. But… but… and he stared out through the trees towards Uffington, through trees that shimmered and shook in his tears. He had fought through so much, as she had, but whenever they reached a point together again there was always something pulling. Uffington! Still looking out towards it, he reached out a paw and found hers, not daring to say what he would have liked to say. And anyway, there was no need, for she knew—she could tell.

‘Rebecca?’

He had promised the Stone that he would go to Uffington if she survived, and she had. He had made a bargain with himself. They were at one with each other and yet a promise to the Stone that had brought them together now stood between them. He wished he understood better, and it wasn’t so confused and that he could be at peace with the Stone. Perhaps the answer lay in Uffington, but he wished he could be certain.

‘Rebecca,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going to Uffington.’

‘I know, my dear,’ she whispered, her eyes fixed on the west whose sky was lighter for the dark angry clouds that now loomed around and above it.

He turned abruptly towards the Stone, and Boswell came towards him. ‘They want you to tell them what to do,’ he said.

‘That’s something nomole can do,’ he said softly, ‘and certainly not me. And anyway, I must leave Duncton.’ ‘Where will you go?’ asked Boswell, though he knew the answer and was smiling before Bracken gave it.

‘Uffington,’ said Bracken. ‘And you’re coming, Boswell.’

‘Yes,’ said Boswell. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

Bracken went to the moles by the Stone and looked gently at them. ‘There is only one place for you to go now that the wood is destroyed, and the pastures are plague-ridden.’ He waved his paw towards the beech trees behind the Stone. ‘A long time ago, for reasons we can never know, the moles who lived in the Ancient System left it. Many must have gone down the slopes and created a new system there, whose tunnels have been the inheritance of many of you. Some, perhaps only a few, must have left altogether, perhaps travelling on the long journey to Uffington, to give thanks for deliverance and to pay homage to the Stone. But they left an inheritance, and it is one that each of you may now accept if you wish it: the ancient tunnels which they left behind. They are yours to make of what you can. They lack only life, and the laughter and dance and cries of the young. I will show you them and leave you there, for I must go to distant Uffington.’ There was a groan among the moles, and a shaking of heads.

‘I will give thanks that each of us has lived. But I will leave behind much of my spirit, which has dwelt already in the ancient tunnels where you will make a place of love; and I will leave behind Rebecca, who was taught by Rose the Healer. Guard her well, for she is your healer. Cherish her, as she will cherish you. And trust the Stone as, slowly, I have come to do.’

When Bracken had shown the moles the way into the Ancient System and left them to discover the tunnels for themselves and create a system born of the union of Duncton and Pasture moles, he returned with Boswell and Rebecca to the Stone clearing.

Night was coming on fast, and the air was pleasantly cool. Approaching them from the west was a front of rain—rain that would end the drought, the first rain of September.

It was a good time to go and they said very little. What need three moles who love each other say when they part?

‘Take care, my love,’ whispered Rebecca. ‘Come back to me.’ They touched and caressed and nuzzled, and Boswell, too, felt the warmth of Rebecca’s great love.

‘I’ll look after him,’ Boswell whispered to her, limping slowly out of the clearing after Bracken as they started on their journey.

‘I know you will,’ said Rebecca, thinking that she could wish for no other mole than Boswell, however great or strong, to protect her Bracken from the dangers and trials that faced him.

Then they were gone into the night, towards Uffington, their paws scuffling through dry leaves, leaving Rebecca to crouch by the Stone as the first drops of rain began to fall through the swaying beech leaves above and down into the dry and blackened soil of the system below the slopes, which had once been theirs. And then rain at last fell, September rain, the sound of which drowned out the final rustles of Bracken and Boswell as they left Duncton Wood for the dangerous world beyond.