Duncton Wood (38 page)

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

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

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

Mekkins told her, describing how they had got to know each other in the summer and how fond of her he had become. Rose could hear from his voice, and see in his eyes, that his affection for Rebecca ran far deeper than fondness. She saw with relief that she had done the right thing to talk to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had tried to fight with them, angry on behalf of herself and her young, but one of the henchmoles had cuffed her so hard across the snout that she fell back into her burrow almost unconscious. She had not been allowed out of the tunnel since, and food was brought to her. She was angry, she demanded to see Mandrake, or even Rune; she begged to be allowed to see Sarah. But it was useless and no mole came to see her. Faced by the henchmoles’ silence and ignorance of her, she was overtaken by a creeping loneliness, and with it a terrible fear for her young.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She’s giving birth to her pasture pups,” she heard a voice hiss in the shadows next to Mandrake. “Which no mole here wants to see alive,” said Rune.

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

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

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

   19  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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