Duncton Wood (6 page)

Mandrake’s decision to isolate the marshenders was carefully thought out. He sensed early on that if there was going to be any opposition to him from any quarter, it would be from their grubby, muddy, dank little part of the wood – as he thought of it. As time went on, he could blame things on them – a spread of disease here, a shortage of worms there – and isolate them further.

He was right, for marshenders, though frightened of Mandrake, were not as generally struck dumb by him as other moles were. It was true that the males had been too frightened to attack him when he visited them, but it was equally true that one of the females at the time had commented “Bloody load of cowards you lot were,” which spoke of a spirit of resistance that did not live elsewhere.

One thing that made Mandrake even more unpopular was that he liked to keep his mates as his own. Not that he created a harem for himself, a string of females ready to do his bidding. Instead, having found a mate, he would fight and kill any male he found trying to consort with her, watching over each he had taken until their litters were born.

The curious thing about it all was that the females he had mated with did not seem to mind. Long years after, they would remember the time they had lain in the power of Mandrake, the cruel, evil Mandrake, and a light would come to their spirits and a terrible excitement to their souls. For they knew (which others who never came near him never did) that beneath the murderous bloodlust of his mating lay a passion and love that cried out to be cherished.

It seemed to possess him for only a moment when they mated, but it was of such tenderness that they could never forget it. For a moment in the wild darkness of a burrow filled with Mandrake’s menacing presence and ■ massive body, the same paw that maimed or killed a rival could caress as gently as a June wind and pass on the passion of a heart that ached to be loved. And sometimes in such moments Mandrake spoke out in Siabod, his own language, words of love that seemed addressed less to his mate than to all the creatures he had ever harmed.

Yet he did not like his mates themselves to try to caress him or whisper back comfort. For then his love would be gone in an instant, replaced by contempt or terrible anger.

What he
did
like, he told a group of henchmoles once when he was tired and nearing sleep and his stomach was full of food, “is the kind of female who has a spark of life in her and makes you feel proud to be a male. They make you want to kill and make life at the same time.”

Sarah must have been one of those females with the spark of life in her that made Mandrake feel a male, for he guarded her for himself more than any other mate, and she was loyal to him. Her fur was fairer than most, in some lights almost a gentle gray, and though bigger than most females, she was graceful and slim. She came from an old respected mole family that held territory next

to Barrow Vale itself and who, as one of the leading families in the system, had often produced elders in the past. Mandrake knew all this – his henchmole Rune told him everything – but it was not what attracted him to Sarah one summer’s day after his arrival in the system. It was the fact that she was one of the very few females still able to mate at the end of summer. He could tell it, as could other males, and he wanted her.

Some say he killed the males in her home burrow to get her, others that Sarah prevented any slaughter by approaching Mandrake directly herself. But perhaps it was as simple as the fact that she was one of the finest females of her generation and he the strongest male.

However it was, they mated and she stayed with him through the long, evil years of his sway over the Duncton system. It is from her, or rather from what she told close friends whose memories are recorded in the libraries of Uffington, that we know something of the gentler side of Mandrake and the terrible tragedy of his struggle with Rebecca.

For many it is a mystery that Sarah stayed loyal to Mandrake and yet never seemed corrupted by him – always preserving her grace and goodness, as a snowdrop does in the bitterest weather. The answer may lie in one word: compassion. None can ever know if she knew the terrible origin of Mandrake in the grim system of Siabod in North Wales, but if she did not know its details, perhaps she guessed that something like it had happened. No poet could make a verse of Mandrake’s birth, no singer sing it as a song, no taleteller add it to his stories without his listeners covering their ears for horror. Only one account of it remains, written down as it was told directly to Boswell, the blessed scribemole, by an inhabitant of Siabod. Let his words tell the tale:

“Mandrake was born and survived in conditions beyond even the nightmares of the toughest Siabod moles. At the time of his birth – May – conditions around the mountain of Siabod were severe. A mild February and March had been followed by the coldest April any Siabod mole could remember, and that’s saying something! When you’re as high and exposed as we are, you get used to the cold, A lot of lowland moles would die just being here. Anyway, by mid-May, there were still many patches of ice and snow on Siabod’s sides. In such conditions most moles keep below ground, securing themselves in a snug burrow with a worm supply that would survive the cold, or be driven down into the lower winter tunnels they had dug.

“No doubt Mandrake’s mother had prepared a nest, yet for some reason that will never be known, she was out on the surface when her litter started – maybe seeking nesting material. It coincided with yet another sudden terrible change in the weather, which switched from pure clear cold to a terrifying blizzard that swept over from the heights of Snowdon, the Glyders and Cnicht to dash against the flanks and falls of Siabod. Perhaps the sudden weather change upset her rhythms and brought on the birth sooner than she expected.

“Whatever it was, she was on the surface when a blizzard started and naturally she tried to get back to her nest. She must have dragged herself through the storm over the ice-covered Siabod rock plateaus, paws and talons tearing at the snow and scanty vegetation to try to reach warmth and safety before the first was born.

“But we think she was on the wrong side of the slope and had to battle a little way uphill before she could reach back down to a tunnel into the system. She could no doubt have found a burrow or made one long before she became too exhausted to continue, but females with young like to return to the nest they have prepared.

“We can only imagine what happened. Overcome by exhaustion and cold, unable to battle further against the wind and icy snow, she settled down in the blizzard on what was little more than bare rock to give birth to her litter. She must have felt a terrible horror and loneliness out there on the side of Siabod, the sky obscured by snow-clouds, the wind ripping at her fur trying to tear away each tiny mole pup as it was born. We do not know how many there were – four or five, probably.. She must have watched their blind struggle desperately as the warmth from her womb was dashed and scurried away from them by the blizzard wind. Perhaps she tried to burrow into the snow to protect her young, but the wind was too strong for any more than an inch or two of snow to settle.

“Into this icy chaos Mandrake was born, struggling from birth to hang on to life, fighting with his siblings from the very start to find a place of warmth among his mother’s teats. She no doubt set her back to the wind, taking the brunt of it herself, to give her yoimg the warmth of her stomach and flanks. For days she fought the cold and wind, never resting for a moment lest one of her young slip out of the protection of her paws into the teeth of the blizzard. The storm continued for nearly eight days, the most vital time in any mole’s life. Blind, furless, vulnerable, how Mandrake must have struggled to keep his place at her teats, unknowingly pushing his siblings out of the way, dashing their heads and snouts with his feeble paws, fighting to suck.

“At some point his mother must have realized that without food her milk would dry up, and yet known that if she left her litter for a second, it would mean certain death for all of them.

“It is hard to imagine that she deliberately decided to sacrifice one of the litter after another in the hope that one at least might survive. But everymole knows that, faced by acute danger, a littering mother will kill and sometimes eat her young. Perhaps what happened was that the weakest of the litter died from lack of milk and exposure and rather than let it lie there to be lost for nothing in the cold, she ate it, hoping that it might give her the nourishment she and the rest of the litter needed. One by one her Utter died, exposed in the worst Siabod blizzard in mole memory. One by one she must have eaten them, their blood mingling with the snow and ice. One by one her nipples and teats dried up as the nourishment from the food stored in her body, and from the cannibalism of her own young, gave out.

“Until at last only Mandrake remained, struggling among her cold teats to find one that would yield milk to his desperate suckling. By now his eyes were open, but all he could have seen was the dark of his mother’s fur, the pink of her teats, and the racing, gray blizzard all around. So, from the start, his world was one of extremes. How he must have struggled to keep his place! Not for him the peace and comfort of safe suckling; never for him the unremembered memory of a relaxed mother holding him warm and close. Fighting for life from the very start.

“Did his mother wonder if he must be sacrificed for her own survival? Or did she leave it to the elements, herself finally falling asleep, the freezing wind at her back taking a seeping hold on her body, her last memory being Mandrake trying to suckle her cold teats?

“If that was her last memory, then his first sight might well have been the discovery that his mother was dead. And though he would never know it, she had died to give Mandrake the chance to live, to fight, and to mate. But for him then, there was nothing left but the wind, and the freezing flank of his dead mother. He was too young to think. But think what he must have felt: desolate loneliness, loss, abandonment.

“It was almost certainly on the eighth day of the storm that this moment came, for shortly after, it began to clear, and it is unthinkable that Mandrake could have survived these conditions for more than a few hours. The freak weather conditions that had nearly killed him now reversed to save him. The sun broke out through the storm-cast sky and the freezing wet was replaced by thawing warmth. Steam began to rise from the rocks and peat as it does sometimes after a storm in summer. Creature after creature came out from shelter, stretching into the warm, moist air and feeling themselves back into the light. Here a mole, there a vole, above the larks tilting into the breeze with their song hanging again above the flanks of Siabod. And buzzards and ravens.

“Mandrake could easily have died then, taken by one of the predators whose eyes now searched the mountain’s sides again. But perhaps his mother’s instinct to return home when the blizzard broke had been right, for where she had finally lain to litter was not so far from one of the outlying entrances to the Siabod system. And the wind was in the right direction to carry his cries to a mole by the entrance, and a female at that. She was very young and yet she climbed across the slope toward the cries and found Mandrake crying and nestling into the cold body of his mother, surrounded by the pathetic remains of the rest of the litter. She comforted him, warmed him and nudged him down the wet slope into the system. Anymole who saw him that day or in the days following will not forget the sight; eyes open, fur barely grown, head big, paws scrabbling and flailing – lost and untrusting and wild. So he always remained, wild and aggressive.

“As he grew, he took to roaming Siabod’s sides for food. I have seen him myself, the great, fierce Mandrake, silent and evil, leaving the system to search on the surface, fearless of weather or birds. One day he left like that and he has never come back.”

Such is the record in Uffington as told to Boswell himself so long ago. No more is said about how Mandrake came to leave Siabod and make his way to Duncton Wood. Perhaps he thought he might find something he had once lost in a storm. Who can say?

Nor can we say how much of this Sarah knew. But if she” had but a tiny fraction of the compassion that her daughter Rebecca was to have – and where else would Rebecca have found it? – then in the mating burrow with Mandrake she must have felt his loss and tried to cherish him as, in other circumstances, he might have been cherished at birth: to help him escape the world of blackness into which he was born and in which he believed he lived.

At any rate, what
is
known is that Mandrake chose Sarah for a mate; that he watched her grow big with her litter; that he stayed nearby at the birth; and that he waited brooding, turning, twisting, scratching his face with his talons, never comfortable, in the tunnel outside until the litter showed.

He came to the burrow entrance – Sarah allowed him no farther – and looked at the litter. Three males and a female. He watched her croon to them and they, pink, comfortable and safe in her nest, her body warndy encircling their snouts and still-pale whiskers wet with her milk. But he. seemed interested only in the female, who struggled, paws bending and flexing weakly, questing for milk as the others did. His eyes were on her alone.

“Call her Sarah, after yourself,” he ordered. “It’s a fine, strong name.”

But Sarah looked up from her litter and straight at him with the same mixture of compassion and strength that the tiny female pup now suckling her was to have in her face when she looked on Bracken at their first meeting many moleyears later.

“Her name will be Rebecca,” she said.

Mandrake looked at the tiny, struggling female and back at Sarah, and then back at his daughter again: he who had killed so many moles had once been as helpless as this, but he didn’t think of that; he, who had taken so many females, had given them pups like this, but he didn’t think of that either; nor did he think that he, whose talons ached with killing and whose shoulders hung huge and heavy on his body, now craved to lean into the burrow and touch his daughter.