Duncton Wood (21 page)

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

   10  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was for her at once the frailest pup she had ever touched and all the hurt moles who had ever asked her for help. He was, too, all the many moles who had
never

asked her, not knowing they were troubled, to whom she had given her healing love.

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

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

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