Duncton Wood

Chapter Forty-Four

Few creatures in the world are so well equipped to survive burial in an avalanche as moles, whose very first action at birth is to burrow their way among their siblings and nesting material to find teats for suckling.

So Bracken burrowed through the depths of snow that finally came to rest in silence far, far beneath the towering cliffs of Tryfan. And he burrowed down, not up, for just as the plants in the cwm into which he had fallen knew that the soil was lime-rich so he knew that he would find food there.

He stayed on there long after the snow had cleared, through April and May, living in an isolation that, at last, he had learned to be at peace with.

Sometimes he would peer back at the cliffs and slopes down which he had fallen and wonder if Celyn and Bran were still in the east beyond them and if they thought him dead. Some days he would pick his way among the tussocks of fescue and scurvy grass down to the clear cwm lake and drink at the dappled water, whose surface reflected the distant peaks that lowered over the cwm.

Often he would think of Rebecca, with whom he had never even mated, and of what the power of their love had been—and still was, since it lived on inside him.

But as the summer advanced into June he grew restless, for this was only a haven, not a home, and he wanted to go back finally to where beech trees soared in sunlight and oak trees rustled and the soil was rich. He wanted to see the white of chalk dust on his talons again.

But perhaps what made him finally make the move to leave the cwm was the thought that Boswell at least might still be alive and might have got back safely to Uffington. In any case, he felt an obligation to return to Uffington and tell them that he had reached the Siabod Stones and worshipped the Stone and even seen the Stones of Tryfan, which nomole could ever reach.

When he finally left the cwm and made his way down into the valley beneath it, he could not bear to turn north to trek a way back round to Siabod, because he feared the memories there would be too bleak. He had done what he had promised to do and now turned south, to make his way finally back to Uffington through other valleys and by way of other systems.

And so it is that systems south of Siabod to this day tell of his passing—Rhinog, Cader, Mynydd, Faldwyn and back to Caer Caradoc, through which he and Boswell had originally passed. He saw that system after system was beginning to recover from the plague, while they saw in him a strange, wild mole with a terrible loss in his eyes but whose power of spirit was so great that none dared oppose him. As he passed through their tunnels he asked for little and said less, just telling them his name was Bracken of Duncton and that he had been to Siabod and was going to Uffington. While they wondered if he was a scribemole or special in some other way.

They were right to see loss in his eyes, for once he was back to gentler country, where the plants were familiar and trees grew tall again, and the river water no longer froze in a mole’s mouth, he missed Rebecca more and more. The sun did not shine but that he thought of her; no shadow fell on him but that he ached for the comfort of her touch. But now that she was gone the only thought that sustained him through the moleyears it took him to travel back to Uffington was the hope that he would find his beloved Boswell safe and well in the Holy Burrows.

He reached them finally in December, climbing up past the Blowing Stone as he had once before and entering the tunnels at the top of the escarpment like a forgotten shadow.

But they remembered him and clustered about him, chattering with excitement, eager for his news. ‘Tell us! Tell us!’ they exclaimed, as he was led through the great holy tunnels to where the Holy Mole was. ‘Is Boswell safe?’ was all he wanted to know, but nomole seemed to hear him.

So, in great excitement and with an unaccustomed celebration in the Holy Burrows themselves, he found himself facing the Holy Mole himself, who was a mole he knew and remembered with love. It was Medlar, who had been in the Silent Burrows and who had come out on Skeat’s death and been made Holy Mole.

Medlar looked on him in silence and saw, without a word being spoken, how much the mole he had taught to fight had suffered, and learned as well. Not being a scribemole, Bracken did not know the traditional greetings and another scribemole there said the words for him:

‘Styn rix in thine herte!’

‘Staye thee hoi and soint,’ intoned Medlar.

‘Me desire wot we none,’ said Bracken’s proxy.

‘Blessed be thou and full of blisse,’ smiled Medlar into Bracken’s eyes.

They brought him food and made him rest before he began his tale, but when he did, he told it all quietly and with truth, as a warrior should, and they came to know that he had indeed fulfilled his promise to them. It was Medlar himself who raised the question uppermost in Bracken’s heart: ‘And Boswell, do you know what finally became of him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bracken, ‘more than what I’ve said. I had hoped… I thought he might be here.’

The scribemoles listening fell silent, one or two muttered a prayer of blessing, and the Holy Burrow in which they crouched grew still.

‘He is,’ said Medlar softly. ‘He did come back and he told us of your courage in leading him so far. He told us how you must have faced Gelert the Hound after he had been injured. All of us here have prayed for you many times, Bracken, and hoped the day would come when you might return.’

‘But what happened to Boswell?’ whispered Bracken, for there was nothing else that mattered to him anymore.

‘Come,’ said Medlar, ‘I’ll show you. For though few moles have ever been where you will go, I know that it is right that you should see. If you were a scribemole I would simply tell you, but you are not, and there are things that some moles such as you had better see and accept than wonder about for the rest of their lives.’ Then he added very seriously: ‘But you must promise me, or the Stone itself, that you will say not one single word in the place where I shall take you.’

But before Bracken began to nod his head and say, ‘Of course,’ Medlar went on: ‘This may be your hardest trial, Bracken, harder than anything you have yet faced.’

So, full of awe and fear, Bracken followed Medlar beyond the Holy Burrows into a tunnel that went west for two molemiles until he was inside the holy place where he had once crept unasked and heard the secret song.

The tunnels led down to a place where the soil was almost white with chalk and there was the deepest silence he had ever heard. There were one or two novice scribemoles there, who moved about with great peace and grace and silence and seemed to protect the tunnels into which Medlar led him. Until, at last, there stretched before him a great chamber, on one side of which were a series of simple burrows, some unoccupied with open entrances and many long since sealed. But there was one whose seal was fresh.

Medlar pointed to this one, and Bracken understood that his Boswell was inside it and had come of his own accord to live in the Silent Burrows.

Silently Medlar led him into a smaller tunnel at the end of the chamber that led to other smaller burrows running behind the bigger ones, each of which had a tiny entrance, no bigger than a paw, where food was put so that the moles who had chosen to live in absolute silence might stay alive. Griefstricken, Bracken gazed at the little opening that was the only contact that his Boswell now had with life. Never, ever, had he felt so desolate.

He returned to the main chamber and stared at the bleak, sealed walls, aching to dash his talons against them and cry out to Boswell to tell him that he loved him and had wanted to see him, and hear his voice, and feel his gentle touch once more. To tell him that Rebecca was gone from him and there was nomole left now who loved him as she and Boswell had.

Unable to move, unable to talk, unable to tell Boswell that he was there so close, Bracken found that all he could do was to weep and say a bitter prayer that Boswell, at least, might find peace.

‘How do you know that he’s all right?’ asked Bracken when Medlar had led him back to the Holy Burrows.

‘He takes his food,’ said Medlar simply. ‘He has been there ever since he came back in August. He asked that he might be allowed to go there, for he felt that though he had failed in his quest for the seventh Stillstone and the Book, he might find something there that would bring him closer to the Stone.’

‘But why?’ cried out Bracken bitterly. ‘That isn’t where life is! Not there in that dead, lost place.’

‘No,’ said Medlar, ‘but for some moles it may be the place where life is found. Always remember that the trial Boswell is now facing alone is the equal of any you have faced. You can fight another mole or a blizzard and know that you have won; but you should know, Bracken, how hard it is to face yourself in silence and seek out the truth that is inside your heart and soul. So pray for him, and try to bear your loss with compassion for him.’

Later Medlar said, ‘He told me that he knew where the seventh Stillstone was, and what the subject of the seventh Book is. Do you?’

So Bracken told him what he and Rebecca had seen beneath the Duncton Stone, and how he and Boswell had talked about the seventh Book.

‘It was a long time ago, and though we told him where it is, I don’t think he knew what the Book’s subject was. I don’t think so… but perhaps something has told him since. Will he ever come out of the Silent Burrows, as you did, Medlar?’

‘Only the Stone knows that. Nomole—not even I!—can ask him. Many moles never come out, and their burrows are finally sealed. We believe that such moles have found the silence of the Stone. Others know, as I knew, when to come out, for their task may be different. As for Boswell, nomole can know. But trust the Stone if you can, Bracken, as I have learned to do.’

Bracken was silent for a long time, and the two moles crouched together, the sacred peace of one bringing peace for a while to the restless heart of the other.

‘What shall I do, Medlar? What is there left to do?’ asked Bracken eventually.

Medlar smiled and touched Bracken’s paw. ‘If I thought you might become a scribemole I would say so. But I do not believe that this is your way. Go back to Duncton, Bracken, and make your home there again.’

‘But Rebecca is gone, and so much of the wood burned down… what is Duncton for me now?’

‘I cannot tell you,’ said Medlar, ‘but I know it is a question that does have an answer. Go back to Duncton and give the moles there your love and wisdom, as you say Rebecca once did.’

To Bracken it seemed bleak advice, but what else was there to do? He was grateful to Medlar for having the wisdom to show him the burrows in which Boswell was now sealed, though their silence seemed to him a terrible thing and a cold kind of holiness. ‘Oh, Boswell,’ he murmured as finally, not even waiting to regain his full strength, he left Uffington and turned east into the restless November wind, towards Duncton.

Rebecca’s return to Duncton Wood had been as much a miracle to the Duncton moles as her departure had been a mystery. She had come back off the pastures one autumn day as easy as you please, in the company of a wiry kind of a mole called Bran who spoke with a harsh accent and whose laugh, when it came, was as cunning as a wind in gorse.

He stayed a while, seemed unimpressed by what he saw, wouldn’t say a word about Rebecca’s journey or what she had been up to, and then, when November came, finally left.

Her return established once and for all time Comfrey’s status as a mole whose eccentric isolation and abstracted habits seemed to have given him special gifts of wisdom and foresight. He had always said Rebecca would come back. Now he found the reverence they held him in embarrassing because there wasn’t anything special in what he did or said: he just listened to the Stone. And anyway, Rebecca was never going to leave Duncton for ever, just like that: so there seemed no call for any fuss and bother.

He accepted Rebecca back rather as a pup takes it as a complete matter of course that his mother will return, even if she’s been gone a rather long time. And for most of the moles her return was just a nine days’ wonder. She was their healer, wasn’t she? A mole could always turn to her. In fact, come to think of it, it was just a little bit cheeky of her ever to have pushed off like that for so long…

Longest Night passed, the second since the one with Bracken, and chill January ran into freezing February. The cycle of seasons again.

Bit by bit she told Comfrey what had happened, and on those days when he knew that she was mourning Bracken, who must have been lost up on the slopes of Siabod looking for her, he made sure he was close by and quiet, just so she knew that she was loved.

But always, at the back of his mind, was the fear that the day would come when she would slide down into that black despair he had seen once before, and he wondered if he would have the strength again to see her through.

‘If it’s going to come, then let it come,’ he used to mutter to the Stone as he passed it by on leaving her burrows. And there came a day, at the start of February, when it did.

There is a way to kill a mole that is so unimaginably cruel that even an owl might quail before the thought of it. Moles who live in systems plagued by it call it, quite simply, the Talon. But most, living in woods and distant fields as they do, have no name for it, and when, by terrible chance, they happen on it, or it on them, then their imagination can barely take in its harsh reality.

It is called a harpoon trap. It has long, sharp prongs set on a spring which are poised above a tunnel in which a pawplate is set. The tunnel is blocked. The mole reopens it, touches the plate and down plunges the unseen Talon, which pierces and squashes at one and the same cruel time. A lucky mole dies at once. But through the paw, or shoulder, or flank, many unlucky ones are impaled, often too shocked even to struggle, and death comes on them with agonising slowness.

By February, Bracken had reached a system on the chalk no more than twenty moledays from Duncton. Drawn as ever by the ancient sarsen stones that follow the chalk, he came one day to a field that seemed almost too good to be true. Open and flat, used as pasture for sheep in the summer and rich with worms as a result, and empty of moles. Off to one side of it stood a great circle of stones, which gave him comfort for he liked their presence, and since he liked to travel in stages—resting at a good place when he could find one—he decided to make the field his own.

It already had a few old tunnels in it but no sign of mole at all. Perhaps he should have been suspicious; perhaps he was tired, and as he came nearer and nearer to Duncton, his mind was excited at approaching so near his home system after so long away and wondering what he might find.

The field was good and he enjoyed prospecting it and then finally starting his tunnels over near the Stones, where another mole had left off. One day, two days, four days passed, and a heavy hoarfrost came. The ground grew white and hard, and as the worms tunnelled down deeper he followed suit, throwing up on the surface great heaps of reddish soil conspicuous against the frost.

He ate well and slept long, putting off renewing his journey as long as he could. Then a day came when he found a tunnel burrowed out the evening before, which was blocked and smelt strange. Badgers? Rabbits? Weasels? He shrugged and sighed and started to build it up again, ignoring the strange smell, for he had scented more dangerous things than that.

A forward step, a shiny, sinking flatness where the floor should have been, a click of steel, and from above came a piercing, lunging shock, so painful that he seemed himself to be the scream he screamed as it entered his right shoulder and impaled him to the floor.

To what does a mole turn when a prong of steel thrusts through his body and sticks him to a tunnel floor, cutting through his veins and arteries and breaking through the joints and bones on which so much of his life depends?

As the agony came piercing into him, Bracken began a cry for help no other mole could ever have understood, for it was distorted with such terrible pain; it was a name, the only name that finally, when he had come right to the edge of life itself, he thought of as protection: ‘Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca,’ he screamed. And even though he knew that she was dead, he cried out her name that she might come to him, to help her love; his love, Rebecca.

Like the other moles in Duncton, Comfrey heard Rebecca’s terrible scream of pain echo down the tunnels of the Ancient System that February day. But while the others quailed before it and ran to their burrows in fear, he turned towards it, running, running to help Rebecca, crying out that he was coming, running into her screams.

He found her out on the surface, running wildly this way and that among the roots of the leafless trees, crying out and sobbing, ‘No, no, no, no,’ and writhing in a terrible pain and saying, ‘Help him, help him, oh help him,’ and not seeming to see Comfrey or hear him as he asked what it was, what was wrong, what he could do, what was hurting her, and he tried to hold her still to find out what it was—because he could see nothing.

But she was racked with pain, and ran in sobbing agony here and there as if she was trying to find something, or shake something off, and then screaming Bracken’s name over and over and saying, ‘Help him, help him, help him,’ her breath coming out in great gasping sobs of pain, her face contorted with it as if she were possessed by an evil that she could not fight.

‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ Comfrey shouted at her to try to stop her, but the more he called her name, the worse she seemed to get, until her talons cut and dug into the roots she passed and leaf litter flew from under the crazed scrabbling of her desperate paws.

Then she was into the Stone clearing and running randomly around it, not caring if she hit herself on the great roots by the Stone, dashing her talons on the ground and thrashing them in the air and shouting, ‘Help him, help my Bracken, help my love,’ and then dashing against the very Stone itself, her paws and talons scratching and splintering on it as she shouted or screamed, ‘I can’t help him, I can’t help you, I can’t, so help him, help him’—and there were tears of grief and pain down her twisted face and sweat on her flanks, and her breathing seemed to fill the Stone clearing with its pain. And Comfrey watched in horror as she cried, ‘Oh help him, he’s Bracken, he’s still alive, so help him.’

The turf above Bracken was torn open and white light from the sky added to his agony. A smell of roaring owl thrust down to the steel that impaled him and picked the trap and Bracken up bodily together. It grasped him firmly and then pulled him off the Talon, down a tunnel whose sides were his own exposed nerves, and though he was free of the Talon, the pain became worse as he was held up in the air, limp as death, and bloody. There was the growl of a voice whose language he could not understand, a mocking voice of contempt and dislike.

And then he was thrown swinging through the air, arcing up into the sky and down, down into a floating sea of pain, down and down and thumping, bumping against one of the great Stones by the side of the field, and he had a moment’s sight of his paw flopping against it, covered in his own red blood, before he felt the pain again.

The smell of the creature went away. Wind rustled the grass by the Stones. Agony filled him. And all he could think of was the absurd thought, so silly, that he must be dying; and yet the Stone was warm against his paw, vibrating with a life and power that frightened him, but which he could not turn away from.

Comfrey stayed on with Rebecca in the clearing but no longer said her name. He stayed by her to protect her if other danger came, watching as her terrible agony gave way to something which, in some ways, was even worse—the sight of her draining herself away into the Stone with continual, almost inaudible, healing words, each one drawn out from all the agony she herself had known and passed in some mysterious way into the Stone of Duncton which now seemed to vibrate with her life. Until darkness began to fall, and then night came, and then it was dark, and only her sobs and whispers to the Stone sounded among the winter trees, ‘My love I’m here, my love my love my love my love,’ the sounds growing weaker and weaker as the night drew on.

Some time after darkness had taken the light away, Bracken came to again into a sea of pain and found that he was not dead, not dead at all, and that around him the circle of Stones on whose edge he lay was warm and shaking in the night with a power and light that he knew and had seen before. A light of life that was calling him to its centre, a light of love that had a being and warmth and the feel of soft fur as he whispered again and again the only thing that made him feel his way beyond the pain, ‘Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca’… she was there in the centre of the circle of Stones and she, and their power, were calling him, stopping him falling asleep, stopping him drowning into the pain, making him crawl, inch by bloody inch, each inch a mile of pain, into the centre of Rebecca’s healing love that told him she was there alive, waiting, waiting, her healing power a call to him. And feeling her need for him, feeling her love, he crawled through the pain into the healing circle of the Stones and back from the edge of life.

While by the Stone in Duncton Wood, when everything had fallen still and it was nearly midnight, Rebecca finally sighed and took her paws away from the Stone’s face. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘oh my love.’

When Comfrey went to her, he was astonished to see that she was smiling. ‘Bracken is alive,’ she said. ‘He is, you know, he really is. He may never come back to Duncton but it no longer matters, for he knows the love is there, our love is there…’ But it did matter, and Comfrey saw that it mattered, now more than ever.

‘C-come on, Rebecca, you’d better go back to your burrows and get some sleep. Come on.’ And he led her down to her burrow and settled down near her until she slept, and watched over her until her breathing was regular and slow, and peaceful as the Stone.

Chapter Forty-Five

Rebecca ran laughing down the slopes towards the Old Wood, calling out, ‘Comfrey, Comfrey! See if you can find me!’

Comfrey chased after her, a little clumsily because he was never much good on his paws, but marvelling at how Rebecca had changed for the better since that terrible night in February. Since then she had shed moleyears, and behaved more and more like a happy-go-lucky pup each day than the female who had seen four Longest Nights through and was healer to the system.

Healer? Well, no more. It wasn’t that she no longer cared for the other moles, or tried to ignore them, or wasn’t helpful when they came to her: but everymole seemed to sense that Rebecca had changed and no longer had the desire or will to support them when, it must be said, they could so often find support within themselves. She seemed now to see beyond their troubles and into their very souls, and it troubled them that she did, and so they preferred to leave her alone.

Only a few of the older moles, and one or two of the young ones, came to her—the ones who understood that the greatest healing she could give was the sense of joy and peace she herself now felt in the wood about her.

So Comfrey now became healer, and it was to him that they mostly went with their troubles, which he was able to help them with in his own eccentric way, giving them herbs that might, or might not, be of practical help.

But once in a while he would take time off—or Rebecca would come and make him do so—and today, on a clear, misty spring morning in April, she had him grumblingly playing hide-and-seek.

Down past the slopes she ran, into the Old Wood where a few trees still stood stark and black to remind them of the fire, but where fresh undergrowth and two seasons of leaf mould had made the grey ashes of the wood a memory. But burrow a little way and a mole could still find the ashes—and they were alive with life now as fronds of the roots of a new spring of anemones grew into them, or young sinewy roots of sapling hazel and the suckers of elm pierced up through them.

She ran instinctively towards Barrow Vale, which she had not found the previous summer but which now, somehow, she knew would be there. The sapling wood was busy and noisy. Birds darted and flitted about the trees, most of which were heavy with bud or catkins.

Still calling, ‘Comfrey! Comfrey!’ her laugh following the sound of his name, she ran on faster than he could, stopping only for a moment to sigh with delight at the sight of a cluster of yellow celandine.

As she ran on towards Barrow Vale, it was as if she were herself the plants and trees and every creature, everything, alive with the sunlight that began to clear the mist and the life that the spring always finally brought. ‘Oh!’ she sighed, just as she had when she had been a pup and had first run with such wonder through the wood. Comfrey! Comfrey! And her laughter filled the wood.

She came to a clearing where the vegetation was lighter because the soil was gravelly, and knew it had been Barrow Vale.

‘Shall I burrow?’ she wondered. But though she tried to start, she didn’t finish, because she was distracted by the last of the morning mist swirling away and then by the sound of the first bumblebee she had heard that spring. Then by a distant cawing of rooks in the trees on the east side which had survived the fire. She crouched in the pale sunshine, thinking she should go and find Comfrey or help him to find her, and just a little sad that he couldn’t play with her like a sibling or a lover because, she knew deep down, it wasn’t quite his way.

But then what mole had ever played with her with the fullness of life that she saw and enjoyed! But her sadness was part of her happiness that there was so much to see and do and enjoy in the wood. So much of the sadness had left her when, on that night by the Stone, she knew with certainty that somewhere her Bracken was alive, even if now he might not come back; and that somehow the love they had known had changed but he was alive, and she had helped him be so. She smiled at the memory of it and laughed aloud again at the distant nervous call of Comfrey, wondering where she was.

She crouched in the sun that grew clearer by the minute, and said aloud, ‘It’s my wood! My wood!’

‘That’s what you always used to say, Rebecca, remember?’ The voice came from the shadows of the roots of a dead oak tree and cast an immediate fearful chill into her heart.

She looked behind to the darkness of the place where the voice came from. His coat was glossy and his smile bland. It was Rune!

‘Hullo, Rebecca,’ he said. She saw that though his face had become lined with the moleyears and his eyes bitter with age, his coat was as unnaturally smooth and glossy as it had always been. His talons were black, there was not a scar on him—face, flank or shoulder—which was unusual in a mole as old as he must be. But then, Rune had a way of avoiding hurt by passing it on to others.

‘So you’re all living up in the Ancient System now, are you, what’s left of you?’ he asked. He smiled blandly as he said it, but still his voice seemed to hold a sneer.

She simply stared at him, unable to comprehend that he was there. He had gone off after the fight by the Stone but hadn’t he died after that, in the plague? Or somewhere else?

‘No, no, I didn’t die,’ he said, sensing precisely what she was thinking. ‘If you survived, why shouldn’t I? Perhaps the thought of you kept me alive. You know how much I always admired you, Rebecca.’

She shuddered at the way he said it, an old weariness coming over her as she realised he was Rune, and he was back in the system he had once nearly destroyed. And she wondered if she had the strength for such things any more.

‘Well, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. You always had a will of your own, Rebecca, I remember.’ He laughed again, the sound of it like cold grey clouds blocking out the sunshine.

‘A good time for an old mole like me to come back, isn’t it? Well, you know, the start of the mating season… a few fights… you know? Now I think I’ll go and explore the system you must all have so patiently been creating… ’ And he slipped away with cruel humour in his narrow eyes, his body lithe as a youngster’s and cunning as evil.

Rebecca shook for a while in disbelief, then turned away back towards the slopes, towards the sound of Comfrey coming down through the wood towards her.

‘Rebecca-Reb-b-becca,’ he said, beginning to stutter as he saw the tiredness that had suddenly come over her. ‘There was a m-m-mole I met who said he was l-looking for you. I told him you were down here and that I was tr-trying to find you…’

She nodded.

‘I d-d-didn’t like him, Rebecca.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘His name is Rune. There was a time when he would have killed you if he could.’

‘I d-don’t like him,’ said Comfrey. But his misery was not for himself, because that never worried him now, but for Rebecca, for whose happiness he cared so much and who had lost the joy that shone from her earlier that day.

It seemed to Bracken that the yellow cowslips that shook and waved in the April wind outside the shallow tunnel in which he had first hidden when he had crawled out from the stone circle had sprouted, leaved, and blossomed overnight.

He looked at them puzzled and felt the warm air about them, wondering where he was and how long he had been there. So late into spring already? But surely, there was a hoarfrost only yesterday…

Next time he went to admire them, two of the florets were already withering and brown, and there was an unaccustomed blue in the sky, which echoed to the high rise and fall of a skylark’s song. On and on it went, all day long it seemed, on into another day. So whole days had passed by, whole weeks had stolen away, most of which he forgot because he was not conscious most of the time. He slept; he pulled himself into the adjacent ploughed field whose soil was sparse with flints and chalk subsoil but where he managed to find food. He crawled back to sleep away the pain.

Kestrels and crows had wheeled and dived, suns and moons had come and gone, until, at last, he was all there, and his body ached and throbbed with hurt.

There was not one wound but two—one at the top of his shoulder where the joints had been broken and ripped, one out of his chest, where the fur seemed to have been misplaced and there was a scar. He could move his right paw, thank the Stone, but two of his talons in it were stiff and would no longer respond as well as those in his left did.

Then he noticed that another three florets of the cowslips had died, and he knew that spring was passing. What dreams he had had, what nightmares! All so pointless and comic. He saw himself as he had been, different moles at different times, nervous or brave, serious or sad, indifferent or loving. Sometimes one, sometimes another. The mole that left Duncton wasn’t the one that arrived in Uffington; and the one that had left Uffington again wasn’t the same as the one who went up Cwmoer. Each one searching for something Bracken could only smile about now as he looked at the grey earth of his tunnel, thinking there was nothing more real than that.

One dawn he went back up to the stone circle, just to see if it was as he remembered it. It wasn’t. The stones were smaller and they did not vibrate or become suffused with light. It grew dark in the time he crouched there so he must have been there a long time, since he had come at dawn. Strange… where had time gone?

Then a day came when he woke up and ran his talons through the soil and saw what magnificent things his paws were, and how wonderful they felt. One sweep and the soil crumbled and broke up before his snout; another, and he thrust it behind him. His body ached and yet he had never in his life felt its power so strongly! He played like this for hours before he knew he was playing, and then he stopped and that was the first moment since he had been caught by the Talon that he had thought of Rebecca.

He said her name aloud—‘Rebecca’—and nothing happened. ‘Rebecca!’ No reaction at all. That was strange as well. But then later he thought that if a mole said ‘sunshine’ or ‘earth’ or ‘food’, he didn’t normally react in any special way. Those things just were. So was Rebecca. ‘She was. She is. And I am,’ he thought.

He had never been so peaceful in his life.

A few days later he remembered Medlar’s advice: ‘Return to Duncton,’ he had said, ‘because that’s your home.’ He wondered if he would be able to find it, and so, when it got dark, he took to the surface and climbed uphill to where it was highest and snouted about to the east. Yes, it was there, he could still feel the pull of its great Stone up on top of the hill where the beeches were. Full of sharp buds by now, he told himself.

He could feel something else, too, as he snouted eastwards. Something troublesome and tedious: a job that had to be done. But after that he would play like a pup in love with life because finally what other way was there to be? Rebecca? He felt her to be alive, he felt that the trouble he sensed affected her, but he shook his head and sighed. How could she be alive? But the peace her love had brought him, oh! it was all about him wherever he went. Except for something troublesome and tedious…

Without another thought, he set off for it, not even looking back to the tunnel that had been his home since that terrible day in February or wondering about the cowslip that grew by it and that had given him so much pleasure: another mole would enjoy it one day.

Strange to be going home after so long. He should have felt old with all the scars and aches he had, but he had never felt more like a pup in his life. Nor had he ever felt so excited at being alive.

‘He’s changed, you know, so much nicer than what I remember… ’ So said one of the few moles who remembered Rune from the old days.

He had settled himself down well out of anymole’s way, careful not to trespass on anymole’s territory, not throwing his weight around at all—‘and he used to be pretty important, really he did, but now there’s no side to him at all. He’s a really good addition to the system…’

So, subtly, did Rune re-establish himself in Duncton. He was never abject in his approach—simply quiet, and always smiling and willing to pass the time of day if a mole wanted to talk to him.

Which they did, since he was full of knowledge and always pleased to give advice—very helpful advice—and was quite unstinting in the trouble he took. ‘Mind you, he’s not one to take liberties with—you’ve got to respect a mole like him, you know. Oh, yes, he’s the sort of mole to have on your side in a fight!’

Which was a relevant thing to say since, all of a sudden, there was a lot more fighting in the system than there had been for a long time, and not just mating fights, either. Mole seemed to be set against mole; troubles appeared where no troubles had been; there was grumbling and chatter behind other moles’ backs.

Mind you, Rune was always there to give advice: in fact, he seemed to be advising all sides at once, trying to be placatory and stop trouble, only somehow, wherever he had been, more trouble seemed to come along.

Rebecca knew what the trouble was. It was the power of evil. Rune was not evil himself but he was the catalyst for it, whose every action seemed to generate trouble and suspicion and led finally to a death of spirit, and sometimes a death of body.

For a long time he left her alone. But then the day came at the end of April when he called by and she knew what he wanted because she had seen him like that before—with a kind of cold lust in his eyes and a terrible desire about his body that made her want to shiver and groan herself clean of it.

He began to cause trouble for her, though it didn’t seem as if it was him. But somehow other moles seemed to start saying that she was no longer pulling her weight and what was the use of a healer who didn’t heal and hadn’t somemole or another told Rune that it just wasn’t fair being fobbed off with that half-mad Comfrey all the time? Though Rune himself stressed how unfair that was. But then, Rune was too fair for his own good sometimes and not all moles were as thoughtful as he was…

Now Rune began to visit Rebecca frequently, with that cold glitter in his eyes and sensual insinuations.

He made her so weary, so tired, that she wondered sometimes if perhaps the best way to combat evil was to face it with love. Was that it? Or was that obscene? She tried asking the Stone, but somehow it didn’t help her, or she couldn’t hear it, and she did feel weary because tomorrow he would come again, and the next day, and the next.

Chapter Forty-Six

Comfrey turned away miserably from Rebecca’s tunnels. Rune was there, talking. Always talking he was, and getting near Rebecca, which Comfrey didn’t like.

But Rebecca seemed tired and when Comfrey asked if she wanted anything, she had looked so sad and lost that he could have killed Rune, if he had known how. But he wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t want Rune to mate with Rebecca, not him. But Rebecca sort of shook her head and looked down at the burrow floor, and Rune looked triumphant and Comfrey knew he would have to fight or go; so he went, because only a potential mate fights.

Why did Rebecca look so sad? And why was there such a feeling of evil in her burrows, which were normally so fresh and alive, or had been until that Rune came back?

From far off down the tunnels came the sound of pups’ cries—probably one of the earlier litters whose pups were already getting out of hand. You expect that by the first week of May.

Comfrey couldn’t face the tunnels, and anyway, he wasn’t popular with the moles there now, so he went slowly on to the surface and looked for a while at the beech branches above him, which were just beginning to leaf at last. Always so late, beech leaves, but what a gentle rustle of a sound when they came!

But it was no use. Comfrey could not shake the misery out of himself, or the thought of Rebecca with Rune in her burrows. He turned without thinking towards the Stone clearing and, as so often before, went to it and crouched by the Stone. Why had he been made so weak and nervous, even when he wasn’t afraid? Why did the Stone let moles like Rune live?

He looked up at it above him, light and still against the tiny, shimmering beech leaves. Always so different and always such a mystery.

Then he heard a rustle from the northwest, which was unusual. He smelt mole, but not mole that he knew. Hesitating over whether or not to find cover, he hesitated too long and the mole came out boldly into the clearing and straight towards him.

‘What m-m-mole are you, and where are you f-from?’ asked Comfrey as firmly as he could.

The mole looked at him calmly for a while and then laughed aloud, not laughing at Comfrey but rather with him, as if the whole world were full of humour and there wasn’t a thing to worry about. And despite himself, despite his thoughts about Rune, Comfrey found himself laughing as well.

‘I used to live here in this system, you know,’ said the mole. ‘My name is Bracken.’

Comfrey’s laugh froze in his mouth; in fact, the whole of him froze. He looked at the mole, who was scarred and looked quite old, his face lined and his fur straggly. He was big and very powerful now Comfrey looked at him closely, and his paws seemed more solidly on the ground than anymole he had ever known, except Rebecca.

‘Bracken?’ whispered Comfrey, without a stutter.

Bracken nodded.

‘Rebecca’s Bracken?’ said Comfrey.

Bracken laughed again. ‘Well, I was when she was alive, by the Stone’s grace I was,’ he said gently.

‘B-but—’ and now Comfrey did stutter and looked confused, because the whole world seemed to whirl about him and he couldn’t catch his breath, and the Stone was towering behind him and he was shaking with a mixture of pride and tears and relief all at once.

‘But she is alive,’ he said, ‘and she’s here, now.’

Behind Comfrey the Stone rose into the sky and Bracken gazed up at it, his head tilting higher and higher as the words sank in. ‘She’s here, now,’ now where the Stone was, now, now where their love was, now. The trees were the same, the sounds were the same, the scent of the leaf litter was just the same as it had always been, so where had he been for so long? The moleyears began to leave him, though if anything he looked older and more solid for the knowledge that she was here, now.

Slowly he began to hear Comfrey’s voice again as he continued to talk, his voice stumbling faster and a mixture of relief and distress running through it.

‘She’s in the old tunnels you burrowed yourself because that’s where she lives, but it’s not right anymore because Rune came back, who was here before, and he’s there now, and I don’t like him because it’s not right, what he wants.’ And Comfrey began to cry, because though he was an adult and a healer, he knew it didn’t matter in front of Bracken because there was nomole in the world stronger than he was, or who could help so much, except Rebecca, and she needed his help now…

Bracken touched him gently. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. Then he turned away from the mole whose sadness he knew so well, and away from the Stone behind him, and without one trace of urgency in his step he made his way towards the nearest entrance to those tunnels he had himself burrowed so long before, thinking it was his home and nomole but Rebecca had the right to be there. Nomole.

Rebecca was suffering Rune’s snoutings with the thought that surely all moles may be loved finally, all arid every one; but that didn’t take away the disgust she felt or the obscenity of it and she wondered whether, if she had not been made so weary by so many moleyears of giving, perhaps she might be bringing down her talons upon him instead of crouching here like this.

He was saying something, meaningless words whose real meaning was his triumph, and he felt like a solid shadow about her, which made her begin to weep silently, the tears becoming a protective veil beyond which Rune could do what he liked, which he was beginning to do, because she could feel his talons on her now, first at her side and then at her flank as she shuddered and wondered if every mole can be loved, or whether there are some who lose the right or for whom she did not have the power, and she felt so weak and in need of forgiveness; just as she had when this same mole had been there with Mandrake, tearing at her litter, and she didn’t have the strength to fight them. Cairn had not come. But she needed help and wanted Bracken, who would have helped her had she called out to him. So she did… ‘Bracken, Bracken, Bracken!’

Then the burrow was filled with blood: Rune’s.

And scrabbling desperate paws: Rune’s.

And screams of anger and fear: Rune’s.

And Bracken was there.

He was in the centre of the burrow with Rebecca behind him and Rune thrown back against one of the walls, his flank bloody where Bracken’s talons had swung gently down and sent him sailing through the air.

There was no anger about Bracken at all, just certainty and great power.

‘I thought you were dead, Rune,’ said Bracken matter-of-factly.

Rune gathered himself up and lunged viciously forward to where Bracken was and yet wasn’t; when Rune got there, his taloned paw stubbed uselessly into thin air, because Bracken was round to his side and another gentle blow seemed to send Rune backwards against another wall, his neck savaged with talon cuts.

Rune turned to face Bracken again but never pushed forward his attack: he found himself looking not just at Bracken but at Rebecca as well, and they crouched side by side, not angry or contemptuous or hostile in any way: their eyes held compassion and pity. It made Rune turn around in terrible fear, as if he were fleeing from the edge of a void, and he ran out of the burrow into the tunnel beyond.

Bracken barely seemed to move and yet, when Rune looked round to see if he was following, there he was, right behind him, not angry but compassionate, and that was something Rune could not face. He turned away again, running and running away, twisting and turning through the tunnels and up on to the surface, anything to get away from Bracken.

But there he was again, or seemed to be. Bracken was there waiting for him and the great soaring beech trees, sinewy and light, seemed to twist around Rune and encircle him so that he could not bear the simple shimmering of their leaves, which were somehow like Bracken.

Rune began to run across the rustling surface of the wood, trying to control the fear he felt, to wonder at it and so control it, but he could hear Bracken pattering along behind him, a mole who seemed now only to have to raise his talon and it sent him, Rune, powerful Rune, who knew how to kill, who could hurt other moles, painfully flying through the air.

His breath wouldn’t come and his body felt twisted and out of control with pains and wounds, and there was red blood on his fur, always glossy before but now matted with blood and sweat. The trees fell away and he was into the Stone clearing, running and turning to see if Bracken was after him, which he was, so that Rune fell behind himself, hurting himself as he twisted and fell among the roots of the tree and was pressing against the Stone which he hated, turning around with Bracken above him.

Bracken looked down at the withered, trembling, shaking form of Rune, who was trying to pull himself up to face him, and then slowly up at the Stone of which he had asked so many times, in so many different ways, why a mole like Rune existed.

Bracken raised his paws and extended his talons and mercilessly brought them down towards Rune against the Stone. Bracken’s breathing was as gentle as soft wind as his death blow fell on Rune, but his breathing stopped short when, somehow, the Stone seemed to stop his paws, for he hit them against it, he who knew how to fight, and they only scratched, squealing down on its face towards Rune, but not into him.

Seeing death stopped above him, Rune twisted and ran from the Stone and behind him heard Bracken, angry at last, and cursing: ‘Bugger the Stone, I’m going to kill that Rune.’

And now Rune was afraid, finally, truly, deeply afraid. He was going to be killed. And he ran on and on into the wood, away from the Stone, faster and faster, as he heard Bracken follow, whose paws sounded so calm in their running, while his paws scrabbled to get away and wouldn’t grip.

On and on Rune ran, his strength failing rapidly, as if he was growing old and ancient all at once. He could no longer think clearly and his breath was coming in pants and gasps. Behind him he could hear Bracken getting nearer, beech leaves and leaf mould scattering in their wake.

The hill rose to the right towards its final height, while Bracken now veered a little to his left, stopping him turning that way but too close for him to turn back. So he had to go forward towards the void of the chalk escarpment, his heart pounding in pain and each breath harder and harder to grasp hold of.

Bracken watched Rune ahead of him and saw age creep over him, his coat now ugly and matted, his body twisted with fear. Had he once looked so pathetic to Mandrake when he had been chased, as Rune was now, over these leaves and roots, with the beech branches above, and the sky lightening ahead because there were no more trees left, just the straggly line of the sheer cliff edge?

No, he couldn’t kill him, it was no longer necessary. So he would catch him now and stop him, because killing isn’t the way; couldn’t Rune see? So he raised his paws to stop Rune, while behind him came a shout from Rebecca.

‘Don’t touch him. Don’t hurt him, he can’t harm us…’

Rune heard it, Rebecca’s voice, and hated the love in it which he could not bear to face, and where Bracken had turned once to face Mandrake, Rune ran on, the void of pity behind him far, far worse than the void ahead, which was full of air with a chalkfall far below, nothing under his scrabbling paws and a last terrible look back at moles who pitied him, whose faces and eyes and snouts rose far, far above him into the sky, as his back arched under him and his talons tried to hold on to the sky beyond them. Then darkness blotted Rune out.

Rebecca shook like a pup, and stood as weakly as one, as relief, such a relief, came slowly into her. Bracken was still peering over the cliff edge and oh! she was frightened of him. She was shy of him. He was nomole she knew, and yet she knew him to his heart’s core.

As for Bracken, he was only pretending to look over the cliff’s edge. She was there, behind him, his Rebecca, her voice still in the wood about them.

As he turned finally with such love to her, she said, ‘Bracken?’ and he could hear, and she knew he could hear, that she was calling him, calling out to him and he was coming to her at last.

He could see her, she knew he could see her, and she whispered to herself, ‘I’m Rebecca, my name is Rebecca and I’m not Mandrake’s daughter or Cairn’s mate or the healer, but I’m Rebecca,’ and oh! she could hear the whole wood behind her, rustling and free, and the birdsounds from where the slopes were and they were all part of her and he could see it and it was such relief to be seen like that because at last that’s what she was.

‘Rebecca, Rebecca…’

‘Yes, my love, that’s right, my love,’ she said, looking at the love and beauty in his eyes that saw the love and beauty in her own as they lost themselves at last within it.

Chapter Forty-Seven

There is a point at which the gentlest touch becomes the softest caress becomes the sweetest nuzzle becomes the lightest push becomes the most loving romp in the world: but Bracken and Rebecca never found out exactly where it was.

He would look at her in burrow or among dry leaves, and she at him, and they would wonder at the wonder of where they were. And what words they said, or never finished saying, they never knew. Except that when he said, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ it was never, never enough for him, because what words can satisfy the ache to be so wholly with another mole which even bodies cannot satisfy?

Sometimes playful, rompish, silly, she would ask him again, just one more time, ‘Do you really love me,’ and he would hesitate and sadly shake his head and she would cry out, ‘Oh oh oh oh Oh!’ as he said, ‘No, I don’t think I do,’ with such love that it was better than him saying that he did.

Or she would talk about a mole who wasn’t there, whom she had known, whom she really did love, yes she did!

‘What was he like?’ Bracken would ask, and she would think and nuzzle him and start to say, then stop, then start again, that, well (nuzzling close), describe a mole whose paws and snout and fur and scars and very soul were just like Bracken’s own, and Bracken would say: ‘Strange, I knew a female once, not far from here, who I think I loved…’ ‘Oh, what was she like?’ asked Rebecca breathlessly. ‘And did you love her?’

But Bracken wouldn’t say but would only show, by putting his talons among her soft, grey fur and snouting at her soft as wind and strong as roots so that she closed her eyes and smiled and sighed aloud until he did it harder and she held him to her so that the mole he knew was she, Rebecca, and she was moist where he snouted and she wide and he pushing and she snouting him soft and hard so that he was hard to her with haunches so powerful to her, and claws that hurt before exquisite now, running down her back and up it, up it higher, higher, and higher until they didn’t need the preface words, or feel the ache of being two apart because he was there upon her, mole of moles, and she so proud and he as well, for his the sound of sighs and calls and cries of the only mole that held a beauty for his eyes, beneath, above, upon, below.

Theirs was the laughter and theirs the tears of making love as days passed into night and leaves changed into stars.

Rebecca knew she was with litter at the very moment that it happened, because the light about them both, in the deep darkness of their burrow, was just as it had been by the Stillstone beneath the Duncton Stone: glimmering white, a halo over them, as the burrow filled with the sound of the sighs of wonder.

Bracken knew she was with litter when one dawn he heard her burrowing nearby, at the end of one of the tunnels, and singing the kind of song that she must have sung as a pup, before he had met her. He laughed and smiled and fell asleep again, the scent and warmth of her all about him; while she heard him laugh, and knowing why he did so, laughed as well as she felt his power and strength in the tunnels all around her, giving her a kind of freedom that she’d never had.

It was May, and the nesting leaves she began to take down to the birth-burrow she was making bore a fresh Maytime scent, each one seeming to her more and more special. She took down grass as well, and the fragrant stems and florets of ground ivy which, because they were not so brittle as the dry and delicate beech leaves, gave her litter-nest the strength she felt it needed.

As the days passed and May grew warmer, she kept more and more to herself as she steadily extended her tunnels, which lay adjacent to the ones Bracken had originally burrowed between the Stone and the pastures.

Bracken had reoccupied his old tunnels, the ones she had lived in for so long, and she liked the feeling that he was there in tunnels she had grown to love and where, he said, he basked in what he called her ‘delicious scent’. They spent long periods near each other, wallowing in the pleasure of having to say so little to understand so much.

Their only visitor was Comfrey who, as the days went by, grew less and less nervous and awkward and was able to crouch for long hours near them without even twitching his tail or looking about himself uncomfortably. Their love calmed him.

It was only because of him that they found out about what each of them had done in their long moleyears of separation. By themselves they never talked of it, but Comfrey had always been a mole to ask questions and there was so much he wanted to know. Rebecca would tell him things very simply, almost as if nearly dying in a blizzard or travelling all the way back from Siabod were the sort of things moles did every other day. Although she rarely referred to the Stone or its providence, there was in all she said the sense that behind each incident there was its common power, whose pattern a mole might wonder at but never fully understand.

Bracken’s stories were more dramatic, more male, and Comfrey would often shudder at the close escapes he and Boswell had had and wonder what powers the two moles must have possessed to have faced so much and come out of it all alive.

But it was only to Comfrey that Bracken would talk like this—to the other moles in the system he was a mystery: they knew what he had achieved, but none of them could ever make him talk of it, and sometimes they wondered if a mole like him, who didn’t seem all that special, could really have done so much.

But more often it was the fact of Bracken and Rebecca being together that they talked about, and there was barely a mole in the system who did not sense the peace and love that surrounded the two most respected moles in Duncton. Their presence together near the Stone began to bring a peace and depth of feeling to the system that contrasted almost magically with the dark dissension created by Rune before Bracken came.

As for Rune being killed, it must be said that the consensus of communal opinion in the Ancient System, fickle as ever, was now that ‘he never was a nice one, that Rune, and I always said it was a bit suspicious the way that he came back like that and pretended to be doin’ us all a great big good turn…’

‘That’s wot I thought exactly, only I didn’t like to say because, well, you don’t like to carp when things seem all right about a particular mole even though you yourself have your own doubts…’ And so forth.

Comfrey, of course, was their darling again and now that Rebecca was definitely out of the running, there was no doubt in anymole’s mind who the healer was.

It all made Comfrey smile, but he didn’t mind because, like Rebecca, he healed and listened and cared for them for no other reason than that he wanted to—it was the Stone he tried to listen to, not the changing words of other moles.

Rebecca’s litter came one night two hours before dawn in early June and was the last to be born that summer. Its birth was quick and joyous, all four pups being nudged at and licked to start their tiny scrabble into life almost before a mole could blink.

It was her third litter and the second she had reared, and she did it as simply as eating or breathing.

Bracken heard the births and stayed nearby but did not enter her burrow, much though he wanted to. But a day or two after they came and their bleats and mewing were beginning to carry, she called out for him and he came slowly into her tunnels to look at them.

How big he seemed to her, crouching at the burrow entrance and looking in wonder at the four pups who seemed to be permanently trying to untie the knot into which they had tied themselves as pink, soft paws and questing snouts jostled and pushed at soft, furless bodies and they climbed over each other with innocent indifference.

Rebecca had three of their names already—Rose and Curlew for the two females and Beech for the smaller of the males. This last was a common name and Rebecca knew it had always been Bracken’s favourite tree to shelter by, so he did not bother to tell her that one of Rue’s litter by him had been called the same.

As for the fourth, she hesitated over what name to give it, wondering if she might not choose the name of one of the moles they had both loved—Mekkins or Boswell.

Bracken shook his head. It wouldn’t have been right. This mole did not look (if pups can look like anything) like either of them. He was, in fact, the largest of the litter and though not the quickest to fight his way through a scrabble for a suckle (that was Curlew’s place), he was always close behind.

Bracken watched indifferently—names didn’t mean much to him. In fact, he was thinking of something else, as fathers often do when faced by the wonder of new life they have not borne themselves yet have helped to create and before which they may often feel a curious impotence. ‘Can these pups really live to be adult?’ they think, as they gaze in awe at the weak, blind things that carry life in every single movement they make.

The four rolled and tangled up before him and Bracken’s mind took him back to the blizzard on Moel Siabod and he wondered how such tiny things—for Rebecca’s Siabod litter could have been no bigger—could ever have survived conditions in which he himself had nearly died. The thought was horrifying. For a moment their paws all piled on top of each other and then splayed out in tiny protracted talons, and he thought of the great rock splinters and fragments near Castell y Gwynt; and the mixing of their mewings seemed like the winds he had heard howling there.

Then suddenly, for a moment, the so-far-unnamed mole scrabbled his way to the top, his snout shooting up above them all, his paws clutching out into thin air and failing to catch on to anything to stop him falling back down again, away from Bracken, and behind the pile formed by the other three.

It seemed to Bracken that he was back beside the desolate Stones near Siabod and slipping and falling as his son had just done, down into the nameless cwm with the great peak of Tryfan which was, for that moment, his son’s tiny snout, above him and he falling away from it. He shivered with the memory and yet felt the wonder again of seeing Tryfan.

‘Call him Tryfan,’ said Bracken simply.

‘Yes,’ said Rebecca, not needing to ask the reason. ‘Tryfan, sweet thing; Tryfan, my love…’ It was the first of their pups Bracken heard Rebecca talk to by name.

Close though Rebecca’s tunnels were to the Stone, the litter seemed too young to go up to it out on the surface a few weeks later, when Bracken was to speak the Midsummer ritual once again.

But they sensed the excitement and knew that the adults were doing something special, for all of them were restless and fractious that day, bleating especially loudly and mewing for no reason at all.

In fact, by Midsummer Night they had already started to wander far and wide in Rebecca’s tunnels and she often had to round them up and shoo them back to her main burrow because she still liked them all to sleep together. Because of this, one of the females from the system agreed to come to watch over them while Rebecca went up for the ritual itself at midnight, so that she would know they were safe.

Even so, they must have sensed that she was leaving them for the surface, because they stumbled bleating after her when she left, despite her smiles and love words to them, and the female had to quiet them with her own words. ‘There, there, she’s not going far, you silly things; she’ll come back, so don’t you go fearing over that. Shhh, my darlings, shhh.’

What a night it was! Warm and clear, with a moon that shone as powerfully as a sun, and beech-tree branches that swayed against it high above the gathering moles, the shiny sides of the beech leaves shimmering with pale light in a faint breeze.

What excitement for them all to know they were going to hear the ritual as it should be spoken, by Bracken who had travelled off so far—all the way to Uffington and further, so they said—and who was taught the ritual by as fine an elder as Duncton Wood had ever seen, name of Hulver!

Youngsters from early litters were brought up to the clearing and crouched about in groups or scampered when they shouldn’t, wondering what the fuss was about until they saw the Stone and were awed by its great size and the way it seemed to move against the rising moon.

How many mothers whispered, ‘Now don’t you forget what you’re going to be seeing and hearing tonight, because this is for you, this is, and Duncton’s honoured to have a mole like Bracken here to say those holy words he learned when he was scarcely older than you are now! So don’t you forget!’ And strange to say, although their puppish eyes wandered here and there, and they thought mainly of play and worms and chasing their siblings through the tunnels, there was many a youngster who did always remember that special night.

But there was one who was not there—not on the surface, anyway—who would have an even more special reason to remember the Midsummer Night when Bracken spoke the ritual: Tryfan.

He was not only bigger than his siblings, he was now also by far the most adventurous; and even the most careful of the females can lose track of a single pup when she’s trying to keep track of four of them at once. So, as they scampered round in Rebecca’s burrow, the female looking after them did not see Tryfan scramble out into the tunnel.

Did he go looking for Rebecca, or was it just the excitement of exploring the tunnels once again? He himself was never able to say, for all he could remember were snatches of images, moments of places, wondrous and fearful incidents such as any pup remembers of something that happened when he was very young and which made an impression for a lifetime upon him.

He remembered the sound of his siblings’ play, suddenly distant, and wondering why he was alone; he remembered the tunnels seeming huge and chalky and looking around behind him and hearing his lonely bleat echo about him, confusing him. He remembered running into tunnels that felt old as time, and curving round and seeing chalk dust on his paws.

He heard the murmur of moles on the surface above where the moles were collecting, carried by some tunnel wind or rootway of vibration, down to where he actually was—the round, circular tunnel that surrounded the Chamber of Echoes, the tunnel from which Bracken had first started his exploration of the central core of the Ancient System. Now Bracken’s son, Tryfan, wandered there alone, and tiny, his fur too young to show, snouting this way and that and not knowing where he was.

Moleyears later Tryfan remembered finding himself in the Chamber of Echoes itself, his pawsounds and whimpers echoing around him as if there were a whole lot of youngsters lost like him, but not one of them near enough to give him comfort.

‘But then, all of a sudden, even though I was lost and should really have been very frightened, I knew it was all right,’ he was to recall. ‘I didn’t know what it was then, but I know now, as I know that Midsummer Night is the night for the blessing on the young, when the Stone gives them its protection. That’s what it did for me.’

As Tryfan was later to remember, there shone in the confusing tunnels around him a light—not all around him but from somewhere ahead—and with its white glimmer on his snout and pale fur he turned to face it and ran towards it without question, knowing he would be quite, quite safe—just as he would have done had he heard Rebecca calling for him: ‘Tryfan, my love, I’m here!’

So he scampered towards the light, but whenever he thought he had reached it, he found it was ahead of him again, until he was in a great chamber, bigger than the place of echoes, with swaying, sliding tree roots all around, towering high into the darkness above him and plunging into crevices along whose edge he teetered, led forward among them by the light.

How long this took he never knew, but eventually he was beyond the roots and inside the hollow of a great tree from whose heights echoed down the faintest sound of wind among beech leaves and the murmur of adult voices chanting and saying prayers.

Then he followed the light around the side of the tree’s deep hollow, the sound of the wind above so distant that it might have been another world.

The next thing he remembered, and what he remembered most of all and yet most confusedly, was plunging into the ground even deeper, over and among great roots that towered and rolled above him, the light getting stronger and warmer and all around him the massive, tilted underside of the Stone of Duncton.

Right under the buried part of the Stone he went, towards the source of the light itself, which was a stone, a Stillstone, the seventh Stillstone, whose glimmering lit up his fur and cast his shadow on the roots of stone and chalk walls about him as if he were a huge, strong mole, and adult, with not a single trace of fear in the way he boldly stood, looking into the eternal light of the Stone itself.

He remembered that as he stood there he heard the deep voice of his father, carried down to where he was by the hollows and convolutions of the ancient beech whose roots encircled the Stone, as he said the final words of the Midsummer ritual. But of course he could not yet understand the words:

‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,

We free their fur with wind from the west.’

Then, as the seven blessings began to be spoken, the wonder of the Stillstone became too much for Tryfan, and as any youngster would, he stepped forward and touched it with his left paw. Instead of its light going out, as it had when Bracken had touched it, it seemed to glimmer even more—so brightly, indeed, that had any other mole been watching, he, or she, might have sworn that Tryfan was suddenly completely white with light.

‘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.’

And that, or rather the sounds of the words, was all that Tryfan ever remembered. Except that much later that night, when he was very tired, he heard voices calling ‘Tryfan! Tryfan!’ and scampering, urgent paws running here and there; and it took him a long time to find them, until he turned a corner in tunnels he knew again and an adult voice said, ‘There you are! We’ve been looking for you everywhere!’ Then his mother, Rebecca, was there and for a moment he thought she’d be so angry, but all she did was take him into her paws and he could feel her love and it was safe, so safe, like a light he had seen and was beginning to forget he’d seen because he was so tired now and Rebecca’s fur was all around him and he was safe again, snuggling into the safety of her love.

But those adult paws searching for Tryfan after the Midsummer ritual was over were not the only paws that scampered and urgently raced that Midsummer Night.

There were some that did the same in Uffington as well. From the Silent Burrows they ran, down the long tunnels, through the deep night, on and on they ran to find Medlar, the Holy Mole, in the Holy Burrows.

‘What is it?’ he gently asked the two novice scribemoles who finally gained an entrance to him. ‘What is it that makes you run in the Holy Burrows on this happiest of nights?’

‘It’s Boswell,’ they gasped out. ‘He’s leaving the Silent Burrows. He wants to come out.’

‘Yes?’ smiled Medlar.

‘But that’s not all. He began to scratch at the wall inside the burrow, where the seal is, and then, when we heard that, well… there was suddenly a light—’ began one.

‘All around the outside of his burrow,’ continued the other, ‘shining and bright.’

‘Sort of white and glimmering,’ finished the first.

Medlar could see the awe in their faces. Indeed, he could see something of the reflection of the light they had seen.

He raised a paw and spoke softly to them: ‘This is a blessed night, a holy night, and what you have witnessed may be remembered for generations to come. I have felt the peace in the Holy Burrows, felt the silence.’ He stopped and stared at them, and they saw that awe was on his old face as well. ‘Come,’ said Medlar, ‘come. We will return to the Silent Burrows and see what we may do.’

So back went Medlar and several of the masters, with the novices as well, gathering in a circle around the burrow in which Boswell was sealed. The light the novices had spoken of was gone, but the weak scratching continued sporadically, and as several of the moles went forward to start breaking the seal from the outside, Medlar raised his paw to stop them.

‘Let Boswell do it for himself,’ he said quietly, ‘for he would wish it to be so.’

They crouched in silence, whispering and chanting prayers of thanksgiving as Boswell continued slowly to burrow his way through the seal, his sounds falling silent for long periods as, no doubt, he rested from the effort of it. He had, after all, been sealed in the Silent Burrows for no less than ten moleyears, nearly eleven. He must have been very weak.

But eventually dust began to fall from the outside of the wall, a tiny crack appeared in the seal, crumbling soil fell on the floor at the paws of the waiting moles; and the seal began to break away.

Then, as they caught sight of his paws at the widening hole, while the others continued to pray, two or three of them did step forward to help him tear down the last of the seal and to bring Boswell out into the main chamber.

He looked as frail as a pup and almost translucently thin, his fur pale and his snout even paler. Yet from him there came a strength that filled all who saw him with exaltation and wonder. There came from his eyes a brightness, a light, a life and a love that made each one of them feel that they had come home.

They stood in awe about him as he looked slowly around him, and at each of them, and then said softly, ‘Blessed be thou, and ful of blisse,’ and they had never heard the blessing said with such power. They were blessed to hear it.

He was silent for a long time, as if thinking, and then he spoke again, with an authority that made each word he spoke seem absolute, so that none doubted that what he said would come to pass: ‘Soon the seventh Stillstone will come to Uffington from Duncton, in whose ancient tunnels it lies waiting. With the Stone’s guidance I shall make a final trek there myself and find it. There, too, I will meet a mole whose life will be a blessing on us all, and those who follow us, and only with his help will the seventh Stillstone come back here. For he has seen its light and been graced with it, and it is of him that the ancient text that I myself found so long ago is finally about:

‘Find the lost Book, send the last Stone,

Bring them back to Uffington.

Send a mole in courage living

And a mole compassionate,

With a third and last to bind them

By the warmest light of love…’

Bracken, Boswell and Rebecca, they were the moles, they were the ones. But as Boswell paused in the middle of the verse and looked at them all with gentle love, he was thinking only of the fourth mole, the mole he would himself guide back to Uffington but whose name he did not yet know. So he continued:

‘Song of silence,

Dance of mystery,

From their love one more will come…

He the Stone holds,

He the Book brings,

His the Silence of the Stone…’

There was silence as he finished, until one of the moles there whispered, ‘Will you bring the seventh Book as well? Will he bring it?’

‘I do not know,’ said Boswell softly. ‘Only the seventh Stillstone will come. I do not know about the Book,’ he whispered.

They went to his side, for he was suddenly very weak, and held him until he was steady again, and then they led him slowly back to the Holy Burrows, their prayers changing to songs of exaltation as they went.

Chapter Forty-Eight

By August Rebecca’s litter had nearly caught up with litters born in April and was almost ready to leave the home burrow. In some ways they had already, for all of them spent longer and longer away, roaming and exploring about as they began to put out feelers for territory of their own.

Of them all, Tryfan was the most independent and yet the most loved. He had grown into as fine a mole as a mole who is not yet adult can be: strong, ready to laugh, well enough able to look after himself not to need to be unnecessarily aggressive; and able to spend long periods alone, as anymole must.

Early on, he had taken to wandering off by himself, spending whole days on the slopes, or exploring bits of the Ancient System that other moles did not bother with—though like everymole in the system, he kept away from its central core, for that was a special place where a mole had best tread carefully.

But for all his disappearances, Tryfan had a way of turning up in the right place at the right time. There had been an occasion, for example, when a pack of youngsters from the far side of the system had taken it into their heads one day to intimidate Rose and Curlew—still smaller than other females born that spring. But intimidation sometimes escalates into roughness, and roughness into hurt—so that Rose began to cry and Curlew to try to hit out at the bigger youngsters, who started scratching and lunging at them in earnest.

Eventually, Rose and Curlew shivered and trembled with fear, not sure what to do except cry, and the other youngsters jeered and hit out at them even harder until Tryfan quietly appeared and crouched, looking at them all.

‘Leave them alone,’ he said.

‘And what are you going to do about it, mate?’ one of the biggest youngsters said, coming aggressively forward. Youngster males liked a good scrap, the rougher the better.

‘Yeh, why don’t you go and scratch yerself?’ said another male, ganging up with the first.

As Tryfan came forward to protect his two sisters, who now stood wide-eyed in alarm and fear, the pack went for him.

‘He was super!’ Curlew told Rebecca later. ‘Gosh, he was amazing. They all went straight for him and he sort of smiled at them, and calm as you please, he raised one paw and hit the first one, then the second, then the third, and the first one fell back and hit the fourth one and then they were all crying and it was fantastic!’

‘Then Rose started crying again,’ added Curlew disdainfully.

‘Why?’ asked Rebecca.

‘She said because she was so proud of Tryfan but I said she was being stupid. Mind you, he was pretty good!’

There was another occasion, too, more dangerous and more mysterious, when Tryfan appeared when he was needed, but the truth of which neither Bracken nor Rebecca ever got at, and even then they only heard about it from Comfrey, to whom Tryfan went afterwards.

It seemed that Beech and Rose had run into a pack of weasels one day on the wood’s edge, when they were exploring a tunnel they shouldn’t have been in. Perhaps they were not used to weasel scent. What happened wasn’t clear, but Beech and Rose came back to Rebecca’s tunnels frightened out of their lives and had nightmares for a long time afterwards. All they could say was that weasels had attacked them.

‘Nearly k-k-killed them, more like,’ Comfrey told Bracken later, when he reported how Tryfan had come to him with vicious cuts and bites on his shoulder and forehead. ‘He wouldn’t say anything to me, but I’m pretty certain he came just in t-t-time to save them both and must have fought off the weasels single-pawed, b-b-because I doubt if the other two were any good.’

But try as they did, they could never get Tryfan to tell them what had happened. He liked to keep his silence.

He grew very close to Comfrey, and the two of them would spend days in silence together, or Tryfan would ask Comfrey to explain things about plants and show him where he got them.

Tryfan took to spending long periods by the Stone, both at day and night, and would ask Bracken and Rebecca to explain things about it to him which the others never asked. What was it for? Were there others like it? What was inside it?

He was fascinated by Uffington and by the stories of scribemoles, just as Bracken had been, though Bracken could never tell him enough about Boswell and the things he had said. Yet strangely, from Bracken’s point of view, Tryfan never wanted to go down to the Chamber of Dark Sound, or be shown—or even told—anything about the Chamber of Echoes or the Chamber of Roots. It was the one thing that seemed to upset him.

Then, one day in mid-August, he was gone, just like that, as mole youngsters will. And soon the others left as well, Rose and Curlew to the slopes and Beech over to near the Eastside where he had found friends. But they did not know where Tryfan went and of them all they missed him the most.

Yet it would not be true to say that Bracken and Rebecca were sad to see them go. For Rebecca especially, their departure marked the start of a period of great quiet and contentment. She had nurtured her young, cherished them through illness and growing up, and seen them leave in August as fine a quartet of youngsters as any mother could wish to have borne.

But she wanted, and no longer felt it wrong to want it, the peace of long days of solitude and the love that Bracken, living so nearby, made with her.

As for Bracken, he had watched over the raising of his young from a distance as male moles always must, but had taken care to protect Rebecca if she needed it, showing that he was always there.

It was a time in which he grew closer and closer to the Stone, as things that Boswell and Hulver and so many other moles had said to him began to fall into a kind of pattern, whose shapes were finally as simple as the way in which he now began to live.

He still loved to explore, only now it was to the Old Wood he went, where the system had been in his puphood; retracing old tunnels, seeing how the burnt wood was beginning to grow alive with saplings and birds once more and wondering about things he had done and not done.

Yet, quiet and nearly anonymous though Bracken and Rebecca now became, it would be wrong to think that they had no influence on the system. No conscious influence, it is true; but their love, or the sense of it that pervaded all of the system, now began to work a slow miracle in Duncton Wood. Without knowing it, they created an atmosphere in the Ancient System and in the slopes and beyond, where the wood was beginning to be recolonised, that moles from other nearby systems seemed to sense and came to, as they might to untunnelled, worm-full soil.

In the wake of the plague, whose worst horrors were now beginning to be forgotten (or turned into a tale of the past), litters had been especially large—and a relatively moist summer made it easy for youngsters to burrow and find new territory in the devastated systems, so that survival rates were unusually high. Which made it more curious and more magical that so many youngsters, and some older moles from nearby systems, made the trek over to Duncton, perhaps sensing the great peace that was coming, and about to come, to the Ancient System of Duncton Wood.

The fame of Bracken and Rebecca and their loyalty and love seemed to have spread far and wide, though as August crept into September and then on towards the tail end of autumn, they were seen less and less, as they kept to their tunnels beyond the Stone and to themselves.

It was in December, when a cold and chilly winter had already set in, that Tryfan reappeared. They heard of him first from Comfrey, to whose burrows on the slopes he had gone, and then, one evening a few days later, he came to Bracken’s burrows. He had been down to what had once been the Marsh End, he told them, and then over to the pastures, living alone and ‘thinking,’ as he quietly put it.

He had changed. The last of his puppishness had gone and Bracken saw that he was now large and powerful—larger than Bracken himself—and that his unusually dark coat was full and glossy, while he had about him a calm that Bracken had never had at his age.

Yet he seemed to have suffered. There was a restlessness in his eyes, and a searching, and Bracken knew that he had come back to seek answers to those questions that may be raised in a moment and yet not answered for a lifetime.

‘Why do you believe in the Stone?’ he asked Bracken after they had greeted each other and eaten food together.

‘I can’t give you a reason, Tryfan, or reasons, for that matter, and I know it won't be enough to tell you that I simply do. I remember moles saying that to me once, and not being satisfied. But you know how Rebecca and I love each other…’

Tryfan nodded. He knew.

‘Well, you know how that “feels”—you can’t give it reasons but you know it’s there, as solid as rock. That’s how my belief in the Stone feels as well. I know it’s there. My belief in the Stone started when I began to see that really I’m nothing at all against the flow of life into which I was born and that will continue after I’ve gone. Yet I felt its wonder in me, not any other mole, and without me the flow of life is nothing, as well. This feeling gave me a sense of wonder which we say comes from the Stone and is part of what the Stone is. Each of us is nothing—and everything—and only believing in the Stone makes sense of it.’ Bracken sighed with frustration; he had never been much good at talking about it.

‘Rebecca might be better than me at telling you about it, though I doubt it. You’ve missed your chance! She hardly says a thing these days!’ Bracken laughed and ran down his tunnels towards Rebecca’s, calling out her name.

‘Look who’s here! Come and see!’

Rebecca looked at Tryfan for a long time, almost drinking in the sight of him before she smiled and came forward to touch him. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked, in a way that said, ‘There’s no need to tell me, my love, I think I know.’

The three of them talked for a long time, over several moledays, and they told him things they only half remembered, or had never spoken of before. Both of them felt it was right to tell him of the seventh Stillstone and the wonder of what they had seen together, and he listened to them in awe, for as they spoke he felt he had been there before… and knew that he would go there again.

He asked about Uffington, and Boswell, and scribemoles—just as he had when he was a pup. And one day, finally, he told them he wanted to be a scribemole like Boswell had been and that perhaps he should try to make his way to Uffington.

They nodded, though Bracken warned him that winter was not the time to travel so far and that if he was going to go, then there were things about travel, about fighting, about route-finding that perhaps he ought to teach him.

But Tryfan shook his head, and looking at them both where they crouched close together, said: ‘You’ve both taught me more than all those things, and surely the Stone will teach me the rest. The Stone will show me the way and it will protect me if I need to fight.’

How big he was now, how strong and young, and Rebecca could not help smiling with love at the contrast he made with Bracken, whose face and sides were scarred with the fights he had been in but whose eyes held the clear light of peace Tryfan’s did not yet have. But how hard-won had Bracken’s peace been, and how much courage a mole needed to hold on to it! Rebecca knew that the times Bracken spent with the Stone were not always easy for him. They weren’t for her.

It was at that moment, as Tryfan gazed on their love together, and perhaps with their words during their long conversations about the Stillstone still in his mind, that the first definite memories of the Midsummer Night when he had got lost began to stir in his mind.

Soon after, he went up to the Stone and crouched by it in silence as the cold evening darkened about him and wind stirred at the leaf litter, wet from afternoon drizzle, as those memories became clearer and he saw again, in his mind, the glimmer of the Stillstone. Then he began to talk to the Stone, seeking its guidance and help, as so many moles of so many generations had done before him. He trembled to think of Uffington and the difficulties of becoming a scribemole, feeling how unworthy and ignorant he was to crouch here before it and to seek for so much. He thought of Bracken and Rebecca, and of what Comfrey had told him about the wonderful things they had done, and then of the increasing simplicity of their lives so near each other back in the system from which both, at different times, had roamed so far.

‘Why does a mole have to travel so far just to find himself back in the same place?’ he asked the Stone. ‘Where should I turn?’

Light spots of rain began to mix in with the chill, blustery wind, pattering weakly here and there. How miserable the wood seemed. How desolate he felt. How much in need of help.

* * *

From the shadows around the Stone clearing, the eyes of an old mole watched him gently and smiled. Here he was in Duncton Wood after all this time and what did he find but a mole before the Stone, worrying himself as he had done so many times and by so many different Stones!

Boswell raised a paw and said a blessing on the mole, but he did not step forward. There are times, many, many times, when it is better not to speak or interrupt another mole but to leave him to work out for himself what questions to ask. It was one of the things these great Stones were for. But the answers! Ah—so simple, all so simple in the end!

So Boswell watched Tryfan and blessed him, moving out into the clearing only when Tryfan left it to make his way down towards the slopes to find Comfrey.

Boswell crouched beside the Stone for a while. He had no expectation at all in Duncton Wood—he had, indeed, been personally reluctant to make the trek, for it was a long, long way, and he was getting old. And everywhere he went, moles sensed his holiness and flocked to him to touch him and to ask his blessing and see him on his way. It had been all he could do to stop a whole host of them following him on his way here, but somehow he had managed to make them understand that this was a solitary journey. Yet now he was here, how different it seemed and how weak he felt—and how surprised young Tryfan would have been had he known that moments after he left the Stone, a mole from Uffington had crouched where he had and asked himself just the same question he had asked: ‘Why does a mole have to travel?…’ But Boswell’s answer to himself was a smile and a sort of nod to the Stone. Then he asked, ‘Why have you sent me back here, what do you want me to find?’ And he smiled at that, too: for the Stone gave its answers in its own way and the best thing a mole can do is to trust that it will do so.

‘Now by the Stone’s grace, I’ll find Bracken and Rebecca and I hope that they’ve found themselves some sense at last!’ He laughed with pleasure to think of seeing them again, and knew—or suspected—where they would be.

* * *

‘Why did Tryfan come back?’ Bracken wondered aloud.

‘Perhaps he needs to see and feel, once again, the love that made him,’ said Rebecca.

‘What love?’ asked Bracken. And Rebecca nudged him and he mock-fought her, and they giggled like their pups had, rolling about the floor, each feeling that they were playing with the most beautiful pup in the world.

It was Bracken who heard it. Laughter like their own, from down the tunnels towards where the entrance up to the Stone was. Laughter he knew and had heard so many, many times and thought he would never hear again; laughter he loved and that had him still as roots, eyes wide, and reaching a paw out to touch Rebecca to share with her his wonder. Laughter and polite burrowing noises, the kind of noise a courteous mole makes to announce his arrival.

‘What mole is it?’ asked Rebecca.

Bracken answered, not with a word but with a laugh and a shout, a cry of joy and a bounding forward from his burrow and out into the tunnel and the speaking of a name that made Rebecca gasp and smile at the pleasure she knew it would bring them all.

‘Boswell! Boswell!’ And so it was. His eyes bright as they had always been, his limping walk just as she remembered, but his laughter more gentle, even more full of joy.

‘Oh, Boswell,’ said Rebecca. And what brought tears to Boswell’s eyes was not her nuzzling and love so much as the fact that it was him she loved, and always had, and not the fact that he was a scribemole.

‘Rebecca!’ he said, ‘Rebecca!’ She was as beautiful as love. And then, turning to his old companion, he started, ‘Bracken, Bracken…’ And it was a long, long time before they stopped talking and touching.

What a time then came to Duncton Wood! What excitement! For when the news was out that a scribemole had come, and none other than Boswell himself, how they all came flocking to the tunnels of Bracken and Rebecca to see and to touch him!

What excitement there was in the preparations before Longest Night that December! How especially thorough were so many of the moles in cleaning out and tidying their burrows! How full of hope that Boswell would go their way in the ancient tunnels and crouch near their burrows and talk softly to them as he answered their questions!

Never was there so much song and chatter, laughter and games, both on the surface and below it, as there was that Longest Night. Never did moles revel so much in the old tales, telling and retelling again the stories of Ballagan and Vervain, the first moles, and Linden, the first scribemole, and the stories of the Holy Books.

And, of course, it soon got out that there was a possibility, just a possibility, mind, that the seventh Book, the lost book, was, of all places, here, in Duncton!

‘No!’

‘Aye, that’s what they do say… you don’t think somemole as important as Boswell himself, who’s one of the most important moles in the land now, would come all this way just to say hello to his old friends and touch the Stone. No! If you ask me, what they say about this Book is right, and it is here.’

Once this was established, it was a short step for the Duncton moles to start debating where the Holy Book was—and that wasn’t hard to guess. ‘Under the Stone, that’s where. Beyond the Chamber of Dark Sound where nomole goes if he’s sensible, because there are charms and spells to protect it, and strange sounds that frighten the fur off a mole! Oh, yes! You’d be daft to try it!’

But being crazy never stops some moles from trying, and more than one sneaked his way past the Chamber of Dark Sound and into the Chamber of Echoes in search of the Book. Most got no further than a snout’s length before turning back from fear. But one did go further and got lost, and he was saved only because he had a friend with him who had the sense to summon Bracken for help—for everymole knew he knew the system like no other mole. He had to go in and rescue the explorer, who got a good many cuffs and curses on his way out—and a pat or two of encouragement as well, for Bracken knew better than most what courage he must have needed, even if he had got lost.

Tryfan himself did not meet Boswell until several moledays after Longest Night, when Bracken introduced them with joy—his most loved of friends and his son by Rebecca. What more could he have asked?

Boswell gazed gently at Tryfan, recognising him as the mole he had seen on the night of his arrival by the Stone, and knowing much about him—and guessing more—from what Rebecca had told him. He saw that Tryfan had about him qualities of both Rebecca and Bracken, and bore within himself a great deal of their love. And perhaps he knew that this was the mole he had come to find.

But if he did, he did not show it. Indeed, Bracken was rather surprised at Boswell’s apparent lack of interest and his unusually brief replies to the questions Tryfan asked him.

‘There’s not something wrong with the lad, is there, Boswell?’

‘No,’ said Boswell, shaking his head. ‘It’s just that I’m afraid for him. You said he wants to be a scribemole. Well, you, of all moles, ought to know how hard that can be. So leave me to find out if he has the character he’ll need.’

Again and again Boswell avoided, or put off, or refused to answer the questions Tryfan repeatedly asked. ‘How can I become a scribemole?’

‘Pray,’ was Boswell’s succinct answer.

Replies like this made Tryfan upset and uncharacteristically uncertain of himself and led him to go to the Stone even more, or talk for hours to Comfrey, as he wondered what he had done to offend Boswell, who was so pleasant to everymole else.

Yet, for all Boswell’s seeming refusal to talk, Tryfan began to see how much light there was in him and to follow him round at a distance, sometimes helping him with finding food if he needed it or showing him somewhere in the system that he wanted for some reason to see.

One day, and a very long day it was, Tryfan came to Boswell very nervously—his paws almost trembling with tension. Boswell pretended not to notice, but went about the tunnels as he often did, talking here, telling a tale there, saying blessings or sitting still.

‘Boswell—’ began Tryfan several times, but Boswell didn’t seem to encourage him, and Tryfan did not quite have the courage to finish his question. It was all so unlike him to be nervous, but there was something so simple about Boswell that he felt unworthy to ask him anything.

But then finally, towards the end of the day, when Boswell was growing tired and Tryfan was afraid he would disappear into his burrow and the opportunity would be gone, he summoned up his courage and started: ‘Boswell?’

Boswell crouched down and gazed at him. But said nothing.

‘Boswell… Bracken told me once that you had a master called Skeat. He said he took you to Uffington. He said you admired him more than anymole and that he taught you.’

Boswell nodded: ‘And very hard he made it for me sometimes!’ he said, remembering Skeat with an affectionate smile.

‘Boswell?’ began Tryfan again. ‘Could I… I mean would you… teach me? As a master?’

Boswell looked at Tryfan for a very long time, just as once, long ago, Rose had looked at Rebecca when she knew that Rebecca would become a healer and had wished she could take from her shoulders some of the suffering that that would bring.

‘Yes,’ said Boswell simply. ‘Though always remember that it is not I who will teach you anything at all, but the Stone.’

The relief on Tryfan’s face was better than seeing the sun rise in the morning or the look on the face of a pup who rediscovers his mother after he thought she had been lost for ever.

‘Well… I mean… what must I do?’ stumbled Tryfan.

‘Learn to hear the silence of the Stone,’ said Boswell.

They sat in silence for a long time before Tryfan, emboldened by Boswell’s agreement, asked another question. ‘Why have you come to Duncton?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Boswell. ‘I thought I knew. I thought it was to find the seventh Book, and to take it and the seventh Stillstone back to Uffington. But now I find I’m waiting for something, but I don’t know what. The Stone will show us finally, as it always does.’

This sense of waiting now began to grow stronger and stronger in Duncton. It was like the buildup to Longest Night, or Midsummer, only much slower and subtler, yet infinitely more powerful.

Winter set in and January grew colder, and then the snows and freezings of February came. The Duncton moles grew used to the presence of Boswell, who would often go among them, Tryfan in close attendance, and tell them tales of the Stone and of many legends which only scribemoles know.

There were only two things he would not do. One was show them how he scribed—‘for that is something a mole must prepare himself for and these tunnels are no longer the place: you have far finer things here!’ The second was that he refused to tell them about his travels with Bracken, or to talk about Rebecca—about whom he was often asked.

But apart from those things, there was nothing that Boswell would not do for other moles, or tell them—although the winter affected him badly and Tryfan had often to make sure that he rested and did not overexert himself.

Still the system waited, and as February advanced and the very first stirrings of still-distant spring were felt in the restlessness in the tunnels, there was the feeling that something, something, would happen soon in the system. Something.

Only two moles in Duncton seemed utterly unaffected by this strange tension—Bracken and Rebecca. They lived more and more quietly and joyously near each other and there were long periods during the winter when neither was seen. All moles respected their privacy, and even Comfrey, always one to pop in and see Rebecca, stopped visiting them. Sometimes, though, Boswell would talk to them, indicating to Tryfan that it was best if he did so alone, and Boswell would be especially still and quiet for days afterwards.

All around them the system they had loved, and to which both had contributed so much, seemed to be waiting; but they, who had once been so sensitive to its moods and changes, never seemed to notice.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The bitter weather of February ran on into March until, after several days of more changeable weather, there came one of those dawns that take a mole by surprise and revive the hope that there can be such a thing as spring. Life need not, after all, be permanently damp and cold.

Rebecca knew it even before dawn came and, leaving her burrow only moments after she awoke, went up on to the surface and over towards the Stone clearing. The wood was still dark when she arrived, but it began to lighten as she found a place to settle down as the mauves of the last of night gave way to the first greens and dark pinks of the dawn. On the wood floor, beneath the leafless beeches, the shadows were still black in the deepest root crevices of the trees, but already some of the leaf litter and fallen twigs and branches were catching the new day’s light that came from the east.

Behind Rebecca, to the west, the last of the dark in the sky was going, revealing high scatters of cloud, now grey, then cream, finally white. As the sun started to rise and its first rays pierced through the wood, brightly catching the green, damp lichen on the beech trunks, or the warm brown of the few leaves that had never left the branch, or the dark green of a bramble leaf which somehow took no notice of last year’s autumn, Rebecca stretched and sighed. The air was clear and fresh.

An early spring day! The kind that lulls some moles into thinking that there will not be any more winter! Rebecca knew days like that and that the best thing to do with them was to enjoy their every single moment and forget tomorrow. That could turn into winter again.

But for now there was some blue at last in the sky, and lovely white clouds to set it off, and sunrays that grew warmer by the second and made a mole feel it was time to clear out a tunnel or two, or cast about for a mate.

Bracken stirred and stretched in his burrow. He wondered whether to go and find Rebecca, thinking pleasurably about it for a while before deciding not to, not yet. See what kind of day it is, find some food, groom a bit, listen to the wood. Anyway, these days it took him longer to wake up and he liked to stretch and get the aches out of his body.

Outside on the surface, he headed off towards the slopes as in the distance he heard the sound of carrion crows and pigeons, blackbird and robin, and what might have been a thrush. But it was the crows he heard most of all, for there is something about an early spring day in a leafless wood that makes their call carry. And it was a spring day!

Soon Bracken’s paws felt as light as a pup’s and he wanted to run, so he did. But as he started down the slopes, it occurred to him that it would be more fun running with Rebecca, so he went back to get her.

When he found that she wasn’t in her burrow, he guessed where she would be, and with a laugh, took a route by a tunnel that brought him out on the surface a little below the Stone clearing.

With what sighs and dragging steps did he pretend to pull himself up and into the clearing, with what absurdly mopish snout-lowering and tired weavings here and there did he approach Rebecca, who was crouched in spring sunshine near the Stone! She tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help smiling as she first scented him and then heard him. So sad? Not possible, not him, not today.

With a hesitant cough he finally spoke. ‘I’m lost,’ he said. ‘How do I get back into the system?’ And when she didn’t answer immediately, he added: ‘I’m a Duncton mole, you know.’

She turned to him, eyes alight with her love for him, and came right to him and caressed him on the shoulder, just as she had on the same day she herself had spoken those words near this spot, the first time they ever met. Did he remember them so well?

When her paw left his shoulder, he put his own paw there, breathless—still utterly moved by the way she touched him.

‘Do you remember what I replied?’ he asked.

‘You said “It’s easy” and later you said “I’ll show you.’”

‘And did I?’ he wanted to know.

She nodded. ‘And I think I can remember the way you went,’ she said.

‘Show me, Rebecca.’

And she did. She ran past him, just as he had once run past her, though neither as fast as they had been then, and then by the ancient mole track down the slopes, this way and that, down the hill, until he was quite out of breath following her.

‘You stopped by a fallen oak branch because that was where the entrance into the system was, and I asked your name, because I didn’t want you to go,’ remembered Rebecca.

He smiled, caressing her as she had him. The sun caught her fur, which was as thick and silvery-grey as it had ever been, though her face was lined now. But there was not a single line he would want taken away or changed, for she was the most beautiful mole he had ever known, just as she had always been.

‘Rebecca?’

‘Mmm?’

‘I want to look at the wood again, the places where our lives were first made.’

‘I’m lost, my love, the wood’s so changed. You’ll have to show me the way…’

‘I will,’ he whispered.

Then he ran past her and led her down on into the Old Wood, hesitating at a turn sometimes, stopping still with his head on one side, sometimes whispering to himself, ‘No, it’s not this way,’ until they were back in the heart of

Duncton Wood and she saw they were near clumps of anemones, not yet in full bloom, though one or two white buds were showing.

‘Barrow Vale was somewhere here,’ he said.

He snouted over the surface, which was open and grassy with brambles at its far edges, until he found a spot where he started to burrow. Then he stopped when he was halfway into it and tried a bit further on, suddenly disappearing.

She peered down after him into the tunnels of Barrow Vale which nomole had visited since the plague and the fire.

‘Do you want to look?’ he called.

Most of it was still there, the tunnels and the burrows just as they had been, though dusty and unkempt. Empty of sound and with a few scatterings of bones and many roof-falls. A dead place where Bracken had once been leader, after Rune and Mandrake.

They looked around it together, staying close to each other, and occasionally one or the other would say ‘Look!’ and point to a place they both remembered, where so many things had happened. But the voices of the past did not come back, just a shimmer of memory that was gone for ever almost the moment it returned.

‘One day other moles will find this place and recolonise it—they might call it something else, or perhaps somemole will remember being told there was a place called Barrow Vale… but I doubt it. Why should moles remember?’ wondered Bracken aloud.

They peered into the elder burrows, which were thick with soil dust and partially collapsed from a tree that had fallen on to the surface above, perhaps during the fire.

‘It’s strange,’ said Bracken, ‘but when I first explored the Ancient System it wasn’t like this at all. It felt alive there, waiting for something. This all feels dead. It is dead.’

‘It never found the power of the Stone,’ whispered Rebecca.

‘No,’ said Bracken. The tunnels and the burrows of

Barrow Vale fell away from him, for nothing was more real, or ever had been, than this love he was in now.

‘I love you,’ he said softly, and she felt he had never said it before to her: he said it with the wisdom of his whole life.

‘If there was a mole you wanted to bring back, just for a moment here in Barrow Vale, who would it be?’ he asked.

Image on image came to her as she thought of the question, and remembered the moles she had loved. Rose? Mekkins? Cairn? She hesitated for a moment and then said another name to herself—‘Mandrake?’ She shook her head.

‘Hulver,’ she whispered finally.

‘Why?’ Bracken asked, surprised, for it wasn’t a name he would have expected her to say.

‘Because it was near here just before a June elder meeting that I met and talked to him and he mentioned your name. It was the first time a mole ever mentioned it to me.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Bracken.

‘Nothing much. But…’ She stopped to think about it. What had he said? It wasn’t that he had said anything, it was that he had somehow shown her, without either of them seeing it, that he loved Bracken. Now how did she know that?

Suddenly Barrow Vale was over for them. The tunnels were just tunnels, any tunnels, and they had no more need to see them. Bracken led the way out, back into the spring sunshine, to the surface, where Rebecca started off towards the Marsh End.

‘But it’s miles!’ said Bracken.

‘Oh, listen!’ said Rebecca excitedly, for from far away towards the north they could hear the soft cawings of nesting rooks.

They didn’t go into the tunnels at the Marsh End; there was something too derelict about the place without a mole like Mekkins to greet them. But they wandered as far to the east as Curlew’s tunnels, which they couldn’t find but whose position they could guess at roughly. They remembered the fire, the flames, and then they remembered the plague. They wondered whether to go back west towards the pastures or perhaps… but there was no need. The memories were falling away from them. It was Rebecca Bracken wanted, and she was there in the early spring warmth with him; it was Bracken Rebecca wanted… ‘And he is here, here with me now,’ she thought.

‘There’ll be bluebells soon and daffodils after the wood anemones.’

‘These trees will leaf again,’ said Bracken, ‘starting with the chestnut over by the pastures.’

‘It’s gone,’ said Rebecca. ‘Comfrey took me there last summer.’

‘It’ll come back. They’ll all come back.’

They crouched down near some tiny shoots of dog’s mercury; they found some food; they dozed in the sun; morning slid into afternoon, as time started to matter no more.

They were dancing together in the wood they loved, but which, they knew, was no longer theirs. Its trees were blurring, its plants waiting to delight the hearts of other moles, its scents and sounds, lights and shades, darkness and night and returning dawns were all one thing, Rebecca; Bracken, my love. Were they tired? They didn’t feel it, not when they were so close and the woods and the lovely spring day were fading.

Were they old? Yes, yes, yes, my sweet love, by the Stone’s grace; or young as two pups, if you like. Young enough to make love with a touch and caress and nuzzle of familiar paws and claws and fur that feel as exciting as the first spring day, whose light catches a mole’s fur if she’s in love, or he’s in love to see it, Rebecca; Bracken, you came back; we’re here now, my love.

There was a tremble of wind among the buds of a sapling sycamore; the sun was lost behind returning cloud. Evening was starting early and the light had the cast of a storm about it.

‘Will you show me the way back?’ whispered Rebecca.

‘Will you help me?’ he asked.

Bracken turned to the south towards the top of the hill where the Stone stood. He went slowly and calmly without one moment of hesitation or doubt, climbing steadily upward towards the slopes, and then up them over towards the top of the hill. Sometimes he turned around for a moment to check that his Rebecca was close behind, but really he would have known if she wasn’t there, for they moved steadily together, like a single mole. Sometimes they rested, and there was no need to hurry.

Up on the slopes they met Comfrey, who began to say a greeting but stopped when he saw them. There was something about them that didn’t need words. Below them, in the Old Wood where they must have been, he heard the wind begin to sway what trees there were and scurry at the undergrowth.

‘Rebecca?’ began Comfrey finally.

But she only looked at him and touched him for a moment as if to say it was all right, he didn’t need her now, it was all right, and as they passed him by, he thought how old they looked and how full of joy.

‘Rebecca,’ he whispered after them. And he trembled, because he knew he would never see her again.

‘I’ll go to the Stone,’ he told himself, ‘that’s the best thing. I’ll go there now.’ But he did not set off at once; instead he hesitated, going back down into his tunnels first and tidying up a bit, and sniffing a herb or two. Then, when at last he felt he was ready, he went.

Bracken and Rebecca climbed on steadily up to where the hill levelled off among the beech trees, the leaf litter between the trees rustling with the strengthening storm wind all about them. As the sky began to darken, brambles that had glowed with the early morning sun now rasped against each other restlessly. They turned towards the Stone clearing without pause, then across it to the great beech whose roots encircled the Stone, among which Bracken had spent his first night near the Stone with Hulver.

Branches had fallen from the tree since then, and some had rotted. Among the gnarled convolutions of the roots he found a pool of rainwater and drank from it. Rebecca looked into it, but didn’t drink.

The wild sky seemed suddenly to be below them, in the reflection on the water’s surface, with a rising of interlacing dark branches and the twists and turns of the ancient tree trunk.

Bracken looked about them, thinking that apart from Rebecca’s words of love there was never, ever any sound he loved more than the sound of the wind in beech leaves. Well, it was too early in the spring for beech leaves, but Rebecca was there near him.

She watched him turn away from the tree roots, his old fur now the colour of the lighter parts of their bark, and she followed him back out of the clearing without looking at the Stone. A single rush of wind caught the trees over near the wood’s edge and then ran high through the trees and into the branches of the tree by the Stone as they found an entrance to their tunnels and went down it.

But neither paused or hesitated. They turned back towards the ancient tunnels as one, taking the route Bracken himself had burrowed long before and that led, finally, to the circular chamber around the Chamber of Echoes. They were old now, but moved with the grace of tall grass before a full wind and with the simple purpose of two mallards rising over a desolate marsh.

From beyond the Chamber of Echoes they could hear the massive sounds of the beech roots, sliding and trembling with the tensions of the mounting wind over the wood, but they turned without thought towards it, in among the confusing tunnels that were no longer confusing but simple as trust itself. No need to remember a way from the past or a way for the future; they could see a glimmer of light ahead of them, growing brighter as they went towards it, showing them the way forward.

Then, when they were beyond the Echoes and into the Chamber of Roots themselves, it seemed to them both that the terrible sound of the roots began to die away before them and another sound grew in power and strength—the sound of the Stone’s silence to where the light was leading them.

They ran on towards it, not even noticing the huge roots above them that pulled and plunged and yet seemed to make way for them.

On through them they travelled, the light ever brighter, their fur growing whiter with it, until they were past the roots and into the tunnels that led through the roots of the beech near the Stone, around whose hollow centre they pattered, their paws almost dancing, as they got nearer and nearer the glimmering of white light that came from the seventh Stillstone.

Then it was there and they were back, under the buried part of the Stone which rose above them and tilted down ahead of them as they ran on towards its centre to the glimmering whiteness of the Stillstone itself.

Sighing and roaring amongst the dry grass of Uffington, pulling at tunnel entrances, winding down in scurries into the burrows themselves, a wind prefaced a storm. Such a long winter, such a long time, such a long wait since Boswell had left them; so many prayers said, so many whispered hopes.

Below the hill the wind twisted and blew around the Blowing Stone, which began to moan softly with it as the grass at its base swayed back and forth in the lengthening darkness. A light kind of darkness, the kind a mole finds on some stormy nights in March when the days are beginning to lengthen. The wind grew grimmer and stronger, battering now against the Stone, pushing at it, taking it and shaking at it until the moans ceased, the humming stopped and the Blowing Stone at last let out a great long vibrant note as the wind finally conquered it.

Every scribemole heard it and all stopped to listen. Waiting.

Then a second note came, more powerful than the first, and then a third, clear and strong, vibrating down into the Holy Burrows themselves and shaking chalk dust off some of the walls.

As the third note came, Medlar began moving up through the tunnels towards the surface, while from all over Uffington moles were moving, trying not to run but starting to all the same, moving up to the surface as the fourth note of the Stone sounded. While the chosen moles who were still alive, those who had sung the secret song before, wondered if theirs was to be the honour, theirs now the moment, as the fifth great note came from the Stone, and moles snouted out in awe on to the grassy surface of Uffington Hill, facing the northeast where the Stone stood, listening through the wind that tore at their fur and the grass around them.

A sixth note came, stronger than any had ever heard, and in Medlar’s eyes a look of certainty began to form, a look of joy. He began to say a blessing on his moles, on all moles, his words rising into the wind. As he did so, there came at last a seventh great note from the Stone. As its sound carried about them the winds suddenly died and the grass fell still. Then quietly, here and there, each one of the chosen moles there began to sing the sacred song, its sound faint and disjointed at first, a scatter of song across an ancient hill. Until its rhythm and melody began to become established as other moles began to whisper the words and then to start singing them—young and old, novices and scribes—until they were all singing the ancient song of celebration and exaltation which told that the seventh Book was coming to Uffington and that the seventh Stillstone had been found.

Boswell finally and slowly turned in his burrow and looked across it to Tryfan. The angry wind of a storm on the surface sounded about them.

‘Go to the Stone now,’ he said.

Tryfan did not want to leave Boswell, who had been weak and restless all day, refusing to eat his food and saying hardly a word. Tryfan had watched over him troubled, knowing that something was changing and that what they had waited for for so long was here; troubled by not knowing what it was.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked Boswell. ‘What are you going to do?’

Boswell went over to him. ‘Have trust in the Stone, which will tell you what to do,’ he said. ‘I must go to the centre of the Ancient System where the Stillstone lies and to where Bracken and Rebecca have at last found the silence to return. Pray that the Stone will give me strength, pray that it will send the help I need. Trust the Stone.’

Tryfan watched Boswell turning down towards the Ancient System to where the Chamber of Echoes was, and then turned himself up on to the surface, unhappy to let Boswell out of his sight. He looked so frail as he entered those great tunnels by himself, as if the wind that was growing in strength by the minute would blow him away.

Above Tryfan the beeches were now swaying massively in the wind, and the surface of the Ancient System reverberated to the creakings and knocking of their branches against each other.

The noise was even louder by the Stone, and the wind so wild that it was some time before he saw that Comfrey was crouched before it. He was weeping.

‘What is it?’ asked Tryfan. ‘What has happened?’

‘I d-don’t know,’ said Comfrey. ‘I’m sure I saw Bracken and Rebecca going to the Stone just like Rose the Healer went to the Stone when I was a pup.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Tryfan.

‘I d-don’t know,’ said Comfrey. ‘I’m not sure.’

Tryfan stared up at the Stone, the only still thing on a wild and stormy night. He was in awe of it, and afraid now for Bracken, for Rebecca and for Boswell.

He repeated Boswell’s words to him over and over again—‘Trust the Stone, trust it’—and then he began to pray, his words lost in the wind as Comfrey sat waiting beside him and the trees began to sway back and forth and against each other and there were sounds of falling branches and a whining and howling as the wind was whipped and cut by the leafless branches in the terrible darkness about them.

The tree by the Stone pulled and stressed above them, even its massive trunk beginning to move before the power of the wind, so that the ground beneath them began to shake and shudder with the stress of the roots pulling through it.

In among the roots of the beech by the Stone, the surface of the pool of trapped rainwater where Bracken had taken a drink earlier that day began to shake with the straining of the tree in the mounting storm.

Boswell approached the Chamber of Echoes slowly, feeling the power of the storm above shaking the tunnel walls all around him. The sounds from the Chamber of Roots were so massive that they drowned out the patter of his paws on the tunnel’s floor but he went calmly, now at peace with himself.

When he stood on the threshold of the Chamber of Roots, which was in violent and dangerous motion everywhere, with crashing of chalk subsoil from the roof above and tearing and crunching across the floor as root fissures heaved and widened before him in clouds of dust and soil, he felt nothing but peace.

The light of the Stillstone led him through the roots safely and beyond to the buried part of the Stone itself.

Down into the depths beneath the Stone he went, the roots of the tree now pulling and straining about him, some twisting under windstress off the tunnel floor and then whipping or crashing down again, while others, enwrapped about the Stone, were pulling at it, pushing it under and around so that the very Stone itself was beginning to shake and move, the tilted end now rising higher above Boswell and then sinking ominously down towards him.

Deep under its lowest part crouched Bracken and Rebecca, the light of the Stillstone filling their fur with brightness and turning everything it touched into white.

As he went forward to this most sacred of places, Boswell sought to see what he had looked for for so long: the seventh Book. The Stillstone was there, but where was the Book, where was it hidden? His eyes cast about into the shadows caused by the Stillstone among the shifting roots and into the recesses of the burrow in which Bracken and Rebecca crouched together.

Rebecca turned to him and looked as if she expected to see him there with them both, as if she could read his thoughts. There was no need for words, even if words could have been heard in the increasing sounds of rootstress and strain as the very world they were in seemed to be swaying and pulling and collapsing, and they were the only still things in it.

She looked at him as he at her and knew he was wondering where the Book was. ‘Don’t you know?’ she seemed to be saying without saying a word. ‘Oh, Boswell, don’t you know?’

Bracken turned to him, a look of unutterable joy about him as the Stillstone glimmered and shone brighter about them and cast its light on to Boswell’s fur. ‘The Book’s here, you have it, you have it,’ Bracken was thinking, and Boswell had no need to hear the words; he knew them. You have it, it is yours already.

The light from the Stillstone shone fully now on Boswell, whose fur seemed as white before it as that of Bracken and Rebecca.

The Stone above them began to move more and more, pulled and pushed by the roots of the tree that, high above where Comfrey and Tryfan waited and prayed in the storm, was caught more and more strongly by the wind, and its aged roots began a battle through the night against the storm’s might.

Now the Stone moved on the surface. A gap between its base and the surrounding soil appeared that widened and narrowed to the swaying of the tree above it. The ground began to tremble and Comfrey began to pray aloud.

Among the roots beneath the great Stone in the silence created by love, Bracken turned to the Stillstone and took it up. Its brightness did not fade nor did its glimmering cease as it had when he had touched it once before. Now its light travelled into his paw and from there to his body and over his fur and into his eyes, and where his other paw touched Rebecca’s its light travelled on until both seemed aflame with the Stillstone’s light and there were no words, they were beyond words as Bracken joyfully passed the Stillstone to Boswell of Uffington.

As Boswell took the Stillstone he saw that its light stayed on with Bracken and Rebecca, for it was in them now and shining from them as their love had done, growing stronger and stronger every moment. Above them, the Duncton Stone’s tilted base began to rise and fall, and fall further, and rise and fall further again, and Boswell could only see them vaguely now, in the light of their love where they seemed to be dancing before him, laughing and dancing and singing ‘You have the Book, you have the Book’ as the Stone was pulled at by the tree roots out on the surface, tilting first towards Uffington and then away from it up towards the storm-filled sky, back and forth as the beech tree began to lose its battle with the wind, its roots growing weaker and weaker as the Stone swayed and pulled itself more and more upright, more towards the sky.

But underground Boswell could only see the white light of the Stillstone and feel the joy of holding it as he watched, or felt, the dance in its light of Bracken and Rebecca. Oh, he wanted to join them, to dance with them, to cast off the weight of his old body as they were doing and dance where his crippled paw would not slow him, nor his age, nor the cold, nor the wind that was straightening the Stone and making its base fall blissfully upon them.

Did he want any more to find the seventh Book? Did it matter, when the dance in the light was such joy? As he started forward towards them he saw, from the brightness of where Bracken and Rebecca had been crouched together so peacefully, Rebecca’s smile coming towards him and love and trust for him in her eyes. He heard her voice with Bracken’s as they said, or called, or sang, ‘Not yet, not yet, go back, beloved, for yours is the task of the seventh Stillstone. We give you the Book, Boswell beloved, beloved mole who has loved us, we give you the Book that you may inscribe it, the great Book of Silence, the lost and the last Book, for you who have lived it are its author-protector scribe and creator and the Stillstone will give you the strength for the scribing, beloved Boswell, White Mole of Uffington.’

Boswell reached a paw forward to touch his Rebecca, to feel the fur of Bracken, for he wanted to join them and not take this burden, for who was he before their light or before the Stone? ‘Help me,’ he called out. ‘Help me!’

And the light from the Stillstone travelled into his paw and from there to his body and over his fur until it shone from his eyes so that he had the courage to turn away from their light into the sound of the wind and the cold, and feel again the weight of his frail body. But he knew that their love was within him and that he would scribe the great Book of Silence. The lost and the last Book.

Above him the great mass of the Stone’s base began finally to sink down upon him and behind him upon Bracken and Rebecca, roots breaking about him as it crashed down through them, but holding the Stillstone he ran from under the Stone’s base as his old limbs raced to escape the cracking roots and shattering soil; he heard the thump of the Stone behind him and he began to turn back up the tunnel to the hollow of the tree, which swayed and shook before him as he picked his way around its edge, limping and hobbling with great difficulty because of the Stillstone, trying to get away as the tree began to pull out its roots from beneath the Stone and started to sway and to crash and to fall.

As the tree began its final descent he called out, ‘Tryfan, Tryfan, help me. Now you can help me. Tryfan, yours is the power.’

Mole upon mole had come to the circular chamber around the Chamber of Echoes, from which the fiercest sounds came, drawn by a sense that a great moment of change was taking place in the system, fearful of the sounds and awed by the majesty.

They chattered and stamped their paws with fear, for somemole had said he had seen Bracken and Rebecca go into the Chamber and that Boswell was there as well and all moles could sense that danger and great joy were there together.

‘Should we go in, should we help, can we do anything?’ they whispered and muttered to each other, looking fearfully at the entrances to the Chamber, not one there with the courage to enter in. Some braver moles wandered from entrance to entrance, passing by all seven of them, still unable to find the strength they needed to risk going in. Most just stared.

But all of them agreed afterwards on one strange and mysterious fact. As they watched and trembled they seemed to hear the singing of a sacred song whose words they knew but which they had, until then, forgotten. And all began to sing it, a song of hope and exaltation that spoke of the coming of a White Mole.

Then suddenly, as their song gained strength, Tryfan entered the circular tunnel, the only completely calm and silent one among them. He stared for a moment at one of the entrances into the Chamber of Echoes by which so many of the moles had been crouched hesitating. He was strong and purposeful and, moving without pause or apparent hesitation, he boldly entered into the echoing tunnel from whose darkness the sounds of stressing destruction were coming. He did it so naturally that, seeing him, a mole might have thought he had been that way before…

The strange thing is that afterwards each mole in the circular tunnel swore, and would have sworn by the Stone, that it was the entrance that they were standing nearby which Tryfan entered—which is impossible, for how could Tryfan or anymole enter all seven entrances at once?

As he disappeared from sight the song fell away from them and they waited in terrible fear as the root-pulling and stressing reached a climax of destructive sound. Yet although many of them wanted to run away to a place of safety not one moved, for they sensed they were witnessing a moment of profound change, a moment of wonder.

And then back out of the tunnel Tryfan came, half carrying and half pulling old Boswell of Uffington, who was covered in dust and grime and barely conscious from the power of the forces that had so nearly overwhelmed him. And who carried, clasped against his old chest, a small pebble or stone that looked as if it had nothing special about it to make a mole want to carry it out from such destruction.

Up on the surface by the Stone, where he had watched the storm continue into the first light of a wild, grey dawn, Comfrey saw the beech by the Stone finally sway back and back, and back and down, as its crown and branches and trunk crashed through the surrounding trees, and one by one its roots tore themselves from the soil around the Stone, which swayed and rocked on the edge of the crater they had left.

Then, as he watched, the Stone slipped back and down into where the roots had been until it stood firm and upright, no longer tilted by the roots towards Uffington, but upright as it must originally have been, with its great sides and top thrusting straight up into the sky.

But even though the crashing tree thundered and shook through all the tunnels of the Ancient System and the walls of the circular tunnel where the moles had gathered cracked and fissured from the shock, that was not what the moles noticed. What made them gasp in awe, and sing the sacred song that all moles thought they had forgotten, was that they saw that Boswell was changed. In the time he had been caught in the violence of the Chamber of Roots and seen the Stillstone’s light pass into Bracken and Rebecca, he had become a Holy Mole surrounded by silent love; and they saw that his fur had turned completely white. The White Mole had come. So they sang in exaltation and reached out to touch him.

Chapter Fifty

Duncton Wood stood quiet, bedraggled by the storm as last drops of rain dripped on to the damp leaf mould and the sky cleared to the west. Every tree, every bush, every plant seemed battered and shaken and there was a silent, almost wounded, air about the wood, as if a great mole were resting after a very long fight. Boswell crouched with Tryfan and Comfrey by the Stone. The other moles had finally gone back to their burrows, reluctant to leave the wonder and love they found in the presence of Boswell, beloved Boswell, Blessed Boswell, the White Mole of Uffington. Now only Tryfan and Comfrey remained, one who was in deep awe of Boswell and the other, Comfrey, who accepted him matter-of-factly, just as he had accepted Rebecca’s return to the system and her final departure with Bracken into the Stone where all moles must go.

‘So you found the seventh Stillstone but not the Book?’ said Comfrey, looking at the smooth, flinty stone that Boswell had placed on the ground before them; it did not look special at all.

Boswell smiled wryly. ‘No, I know where the Book is, Comfrey,’ he said simply. ‘I have to scribe it myself.’

‘Oh,’ said Comfrey, ‘yes, of course.’ He should have thought of that. Bracken and Rebecca and Boswell had made the Book together, so it couldn’t have been scribed before. A mole couldn’t scribe a book until it was ready—it was probably just like picking herbs.

Boswell had told them both something of what had happened, and Comfrey had understood that finally Rebecca was safe and so he could stop worrying about her. She was all right now.

He looked at Boswell and thought what a contrast he made to Tryfan—one frail and white, the other strong and black-furred. He smiled, too, because he saw that Tryfan watched with love and care over Boswell’s every move, as if he were afraid that a puff of wind would blow Boswell away. Well, one day he would know Boswell better than that.

‘I will pray for your safe journey,’ said Comfrey finally. ‘But then there’s not much harm can come to you, Boswell, with Tryfan by your side.’

Tryfan snouted about to size up the hour and the weather and decided that the time had come when they ought to leave. But he did not need to say a word of what he felt to Boswell, because Boswell knew.

‘It would be an honour to have your prayers, Comfrey,’ said Boswell, looking up for one last time at the Stone that now stood upright and towering over the base of the fallen tree. ‘If a mole could scribe on stone, I would scribe their names on it,’ he said.

Then, with a last touch and final farewell, they left Comfrey by the Stone and set off across the clearing, out through the wood to the pastures and then off across them to the west, towards Uffington. Comfrey whispered a prayer after them and a journey blessing and crouched, wondering why he felt such a sense of relief. The air in the wood was so clear after the rain, it smelt so good, and he was at the start of a new spring in a system that had pride and memories and so much hope.

He could teach some of the youngsters the rituals and show them how they should be done. And if he didn’t remember all the words, it didn’t matter, because true words come from a mole’s heart, not his memory.

He looked back in the direction of Uffington and whispered again ‘May they return home safeguarded.’ Then he laughed, a rare thing for Comfrey. He liked its sound so much that he laughed aloud again, with relief and happiness.

Off to the west, on the pastures, Tryfan and Boswell wound their way downhill. The trees of Duncton rose behind them at the top of the hill, the pasture dropped away below, and Tryfan asked, ‘How long will it take?’

‘Not too long,’ said Boswell.

‘Will you tell me about the things that happened to you and Bracken, and to Rebecca? All the things they would never talk about? All the stories?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Boswell, smiling.

‘Will I become a scribemole?’ asked Tryfan.

Boswell stopped and touched him gently. ‘You’ve begun already,’ he said, ‘just as I did, without ever knowing it.’ But Tryfan found this hard to believe, even though Boswell himself said it.

‘Tell me about them,’ he asked, and Boswell sensed that it was right to start doing so, for surely nomole held more of their joint spirit than Tryfan. And so Boswell began to tell the story, from the beginning, drawing on the memories of what Bracken and Rebecca had told him. Stories that gave him joy as well.

While Tryfan, after taking a final look back to Duncton Wood, which was now almost too far away even to scent, moved protectively nearer to Boswell, whom he would see safely home to Uffington whatever dangers or trials they had to face. He felt strong and powerful, with the Stone of Duncton behind him and at his side the White Mole, who carried the seventh Stillstone and who would scribe the seventh Book, the Book of Silence, telling him stories that he had so long wanted to hear.

As evening fell and they settled down into the first stage of their long journey, Tryfan thought to himself that if he ever did become a scribemole, then perhaps, with the Stone’s grace, he might one day record all that Boswell was beginning now to tell him of the story of Bracken and his beloved Rebecca.