Duncton Wood (45 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Listen!” whispered Bracken.

“Look!” whispered Rebecca.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” she replied. “I know, my own wildflower, my sweet love, I know... I love you, I love you,” she said, and he said, endlessly, over and over again.

At their side the light from the center of the stone flared and flickered all around, and cast their shadows out onto the roots and walls of the chamber beyond the burrow where they crouched, where they mingled into one shadow, one shape, which shimmered and moved with the light. How many minutes or hours they stayed together in this state of loving grace no mole can say, or cares to try. But there came a time when, just as they had moved with one accord on their journey there, so they simultaneously began to be restless and to lose their sense of being at one with each other and the stone, in whose depth they had found such peace. Perhaps it was their imagination, but the stone in the burrow seemed to flicker and glimmer more intermittently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will we ever come here again?” asked Rebecca.

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

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

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