Duncton Wood (46 page)

Bracken looked up to the roof of the chamber, wondering if they could escape that way, by burrowing up somehow onto the surface – but it was too high, and the jags of thrusting flint too difficult to negotiate.

Rebecca ran forward to the heaving roots and Bracken followed to stop her. “It’s impossible!” he shouted over the noise. “We’ll be lost forever in there.”

But Rebecca twisted away from his grasp and ran between the first roots, shouting back to him, “Think of the stone we saw, think of its protection...,” and she was gone among them.

He stretched a paw after her, hesitating for a moment, but then, feeling again the strange itching impression of the stone on his paw, he remembered the light of the stone and ran after her. They twisted their way among the treacherous roots – each movement forward just in time to escape the crushing behind them of roots between which they had passed, a path opening up before them as roots parted just in time for them to escape the opening of fissures in the ground or the crashing down of debris from above. On and on they went. Bracken following his Rebecca, Rebecca feeling that Bracken was pressing her on from behind, two moles as one, one mole escaping the roots. Always thinking of, and clutching onto, the memory of the stone and its glimmering light, always trying to hold that in their hearts to keep at bay the horror around them. Each moment held a terrible death for them, each moment was a miraculous escape, until their breathing came gasping and desperate and they felt they could not run on through the racking darkness of the roots. On and on until they were led forward by instinct and trust as a blind pup might find its mother’s teats.

Then they were clear, back to the entrance into the labyrinth of echoes, the roots reaching out at them from behind, trying to pull them back as Bracken led them out through the labyrinths into the sudden, unbelievable silence of the circular tunnel.

Without a word to each other they wended their way back to Bracken’s burrow, where they found Mekkins still asleep, paws curled to his belly and a contented purr coming from his mouth. They looked at each other in deep silence, there being no words to express the joy and then the dark they had experienced together.

In the peace and homely comfort of his own burrow, Bracken could barely believe that he had seen what he had, and the memory, both good and bad, seemed already to be slipping away. To remember it was too much for him to want to face.

For Rebecca, however, the memory was clear and she guessed that they had seen something more wonderful than some moles ever dream of. She touched Bracken with her paw to tell him that it was real and that he must not let it slip away, but he only looked at her in a kind of dawning fear, compounded partly of a sense of loss of what he could not quite remember, partly from having faced for a moment a truth he could face no longer.

Then they slept the fitful sleep of the deeply tired, waking only to the sound of Mekkins’ singing as’ he groomed and stretched himself in preparation for leaving with Rebecca.

They said few words – indeed, Mekkins said most of the farewells. But they touched again and Bracken knew that Rebecca and he had, for a time at least, been at one with one another and that a part of himself was forever in her heart, as part of her would always be in his.

He saw them as far as the Stone clearing where, for a brief moment, they looked up at the great Stone, leaning into the morning wind, the beech branches waving against a cold white sky above it.

When they were gone, he turned back to his tunnel and down to his burrow where he crouched in silence, a sense of wonder and disbelief mixing with a terrible feeling of loss. His left paw Vaguely itched or burned, but when he looked at it, there was nothing there. But the irritation stayed with him and eventually, with his right paw, he tried to scratch the pattern that he had felt on the stone onto the burrow floor, an interlacing of lines and circles. Again and again he traced in the dust, scratching it out with his paw until slowly it seemed to come right. Again and again, until, like the tunnels in the Chamber of Echoes, he knew it by heart. The itch began to fade and as it did so, he began to sink into a deep sleep, his right paw still extended where it was tracing the pattern of the burrow stone yet again, before he finally slept.

   23  

W
ITH
the passing of Longest Night, which he spent completely alone, Mandrake sank finally into obsessive madness. He ranged about his tunnels, or Barrow Vale, muttering and cursing violently, often in the rough hard tongue of Siabod, the language of his fathers. Occasionally he caught some unfortunate mole unawares and – whether young or old, male or female – would attack it savagely for some imagined wrong it had done, leaving it wounded or, more than once, dead.

Trembling moles would hide in tunnels and burrows as he passed heavily by, wondering at his continual calling out for Sarah and Rebecca, whom he no longer seemed to think were dead but gone to the Stone Mole in the Ancient System, leaving him alone and forsaken. As the days slipped by into cold January, he could be heard sounding curses in his own language: “Arthur, helgi Siabod, a’m dial am eu colled trwy ddodi ei felltith ar Faenwadd Duncton” — “May Arthur, hound of Siabod, avenge for me their loss by bringing his curse on the Stone Mole of Duncton.” Arthur was the legendary hound of Siabod who was believed to protect its holy stones, though none in Duncton knew of his name then.

Any lesser mole than Mandrake would have been killed by other moles, or driven out of the system, but there was none in Duncton prepared to start a fight with him. And only one – Rune – with the courage even to talk to him.

Rune listened with almost a purr of pleasure to his ravings about the Stone Mole and his threats to summon the mythical Arthur. He knew that with each day that passed, the system was slipping out of Mandrake’s talons and into his own. It was just a matter of time and opportunity.

Inevitably, plots were made against Mandrake, especially since the murder of Rebecca’s litter, which had appalled so many moles, as Rune had hoped it would. Rune positively licked his lips with pleasure when dithering henchmole after henchmole came to him with some feeble plot or other. “A group of us feel, and it’s only a feeling, and we wouldn’t do anything without your approval and support. Rune, sir, that the system is overdue for a change...”

“Well, I’m sure that as long as Mandrake is here in good health and in charge we none of us need worry...,” Rune would reply hypocritically to would-be revolutionaries in his maddeningly measured and reasonable way. And they would retreat, murmuring to each other “Rune’s too loyal for his own good!” or “Far too modest, that Rune – doesn’t realize his own worth.”

But if there was going to be a revolution (and that was precisely what Rune intended there should be), it would be done in his own way and in his own time. And as Mandrake’s ravings about the Stone Mole got worse, he began to see that there
was
a way, and its path lay toward the Ancient System.

So the shadows on the system continued to fall, and with them the bitterest weather of winter came. The first snow fell after two cold days in the second week of January and though it did not stick, the skies remained gray and cold, and the wood silent but for the wind. Then, in the third week of January, it turned even more bitter and thick snow finally came, the silent brightness it brought to the wood almost a relief after the previous gloom.

The winds drove the snow into the tree trunks so that on some of them, especially the rougher-barked oak, the snow formed a vertical line on the windward side, making the trees seem even higher and more ethereal than they normally did in snow. The brambles, which retained their leaves through much of the winter, were bowed down with white, while the orange stalks of the dead bracken, lost until now against the leaf-fall of autumn, stood out brightly against the snow. While, but for the occasional dropping of dead twigs and the odd branch under the weight of snow, the wood fell into a cold, white silence.

The shadows cast by Mandrake’s rule did not fall on all burrows equally. Some, like the tunnels of Rue and of Curlew, were brighter for the presence of growing pups. Rue’s four were lively and, by the third week of January, beginning to have minds of their own, chattering and squabbling among themselves so much that Rue was glad that they were able to look after themselves so much more, only clustering around her and half-heartedly suckling when they had had enough of each other’s company and fancied a snuggle.

Curlew’s burrow was quieter, not only because there was just a single pup there, but because he was far less advanced than Rue’s other four.

Comfrey was thin and nervous, sticking close to Rebecca or Curlew, or both if he could, and by the time the snow came had not learned to talk with any fluency. He would try as best he could, but the words came out stutteringly and he often broke off in midsentence as if he had lost interest in what he was trying to say.

“R-R-Rebecca? I want the...,” and he would trail off, looking somewhere else, as Rebecca looked up inquiringly and asked him what it was he wanted. Often he seemed to have forgotten.

Mekkins stayed on for only two days after he had delivered Rebecca back safely – just time enough to confirm that the change for the better that he saw coming over her on Longest Night, whose causes he did not fully understand, was lasting. Then he left them to it – partly because no male likes to be away from his own burrow too long in January, when the females are just beginning to get restless for the mating season and the males are beginning to extend their territory.

So, when the deep snow came, it was just Rebecca, Curlew and a fascinated Comfrey there.

“Where has the g-g-ground gone?” asked Comfrey when he first saw the snow. Then “Where did it come from? What is it? H-How long has it come for?”

His slowness of speech did not stop him asking a dozen questions, many of which neither Rebecca nor Curlew could answer. But Rebecca did her best – for she remembered her own insatiable curiosity as a pup about the wood – and to Curlew’s delight the two would sit and talk away, the burrow filled with Rebecca’s laughter and Comfrey’s hesitating, serious voice. He never laughed and rarely smiled, yet managed to convey a sense of excitement and fascination with the world about him. But he hated Rebecca to leave the burrow for too long and would stand by the burrow entrance, looking miserably up the tunnel, and nothing Curlew could say would take the worried furrows from the thin fur on his forehead.

When the snows came and the males in the system-began to be more aggressive. Rune knew that he must r soon take a chance on his own revolution. The time was right, for there was nothing like a bit of premating aggression to-put the henchmoles into the right frame of mind to follow his lead and oust Mandrake. But it had to be done subtly.

His opportunity came during a conversation with Mandrake – monologue is a better word – which convinced Rune that the system’s long-standing leader was, indeed, demented.

“Have you seen the Stone Mole, Rune?” asked Mandrake, having summoned him into his tunnels with a roaring shout around Barrow Vale. “Well?”

“I? No... I have not,” said Rune carefully.

Mandrake smiled a terrible smile of triumph.

“Ah! But I have, you see. I know!”

Rune was a study in unctuous silence.

“I have spoken to the Stone Mole,” added Mandrake softly. “I know he means harm to the system and I have told him I will kill him.” Mandrake’s black eyes widened horribly and he nodded his head. “I will. Yes I will. I’ll kill him.”

There was a long silence.

“Only you could do such a thing,” began Rune soothingly, wondering if his opportunity to get Mandrake up to the Ancient System and isolate him there, which was his intention, was now coming.

Mandrake grew irrationally angry at this: he did not need Rune to tell him what he could do or could not do. Whatmole was Rune to say such a thing? Always poking his snout into things. Perhaps he was the one who told the Stone Mole to take Sarah away, and Rebecca? Wouldn’t put it past him. Slimy little bastard is Rune. Interfering little hypocrite. Mandrake turned to Rune to strike him with his talons so that he would learn what not to say... But Rune was gone. Rune was not crouching where he had been. There, there were only black shadows where Rune had been, shades of darkness where Rune-mole Rune had gone. And there
would
be, for Mandrake was not even facing where Rune had been and still was; Mandrake did not want to put his talons into any-mole again; Mandrake was mumbling into a dark corner of his own imagining, mumbling to himself in his loneliness.