Duncton Wood (7 page)

But though he was not able to think these things and say them to himself, they twisted and turned and racked his heart as he crouched in the tunnel unable to say anything. Mandrake, huge and menacing, unable to cut through the whirling darkness of his mind: impotent.

Rebecca, tiny, pink and suckling. Alive!

“Call her Rebecca, then,” he said finally, finding himself unaccountably gasping and breathless and wanting to run away from the burrow. “Call her Rebecca!” he said more loudly, turning back into the tunnel clumsily, feeling more than ever the huge, cumbersome weight of himself on himself and wanting to shake and rip it off.

“Call her Rebecca!” he shouted, gasping for air, running down the tunnel and out of the nearest entrance onto the surface in Barrow Vale. “Rebecca!” he roared, as if he could not escape the name, slashing the base of an oak tree with his talons as he charged blindly into it.

Sarah heard him, licking her young, curling them into her and sighing in satisfaction. “Rebecca,” she whispered, “Rebecca,” as gently in the darkness of the burrow as, for the briefest of hidden moments. Mandrake had once whispered to her “Sarah.”

From the first, Rebecca held a strange fascination for Mandrake, who would often stare at her from the tunnel by the burrow where Sarah nursed her litter. Sarah would sometimes waken and find him there, or see his black shadow move away down the tunnel as if, seeing her beginning to awaken, he didn’t want to be seen simply watching over his daughter.

Yet as the days and molemonths went by, no one would have guessed, least of all Mandrake himself, that he loved Rebecca with a passion as strong as a gale across a moor. For he treated her harshly, disciplining her unmercifully to try, it seemed, to break her down to a mole of obedience. At first it was easy, for she was but a tiny pup who quailed and backed away from his deep-voiced commands. Her paws would fall over themselves in their anxiety to escape from her great father as she ran desperately back for the protection of her mother’s flanks.

Sarah would hold her and say “She’s only a pup, only a young thing.” But this made little impact on Mandrake.

“A pup will do what I say, as I want,” he would roar, glowering darkly at the cowering Rebecca. But never once did he try to wrest her from Sarah, or hit her when she was young.

Such threats had their effect and for a long time Rebecca did Mandrake’s will, frightened of him not only when he was there, but also when he was out in the system with Rune or other henchmoles doing system business.

She grew quickly, so that by late autumn she was already nearing adult size. Not as big as moles born the preceding spring, but not so small that she could not put up a fair fight if necessary, though the youngsters still fought for fun rather than for real. The real fighting came only with the mating season or when one mole was trying to wrest away another mole’s territory. She stayed in her home burrow longer than spring litters, who could take advantage of the good summer weather to leave their mother and find their own territory. Rebecca stayed at home, close by Sarah and Mandrake, kept innocent, childlike and cowed by Mandrake’s continual aggression toward her.

Through the following January and early February, when the wood was at its bleakest, it seemed to her almost
everything
was bleak, for she could never please her father. It was then there occurred an incident about which she never told another mole until years, lifetimes, later and that deepened forever her relationship with Mandrake.

In mid-February the weather turned suddenly bitterly cold and hoarfrost delicately picked out the stalks and veins of the decaying leaves on the wood’s floor. While other moles slept and kept warm, or grumbled at the cold as they hurried to find food, Rebecca snouted about on the surface, awed by the chill beauty of the frostbound wood. Then the lightest of snowflakes began to fall, feathering down through the leafless black branches from a gray sky, settling for a second on the back of her paw before melting with her warmth. As she tried to catch them falling about her she seemed to dance with delight in the silent wood.

“Like it, do you girl? Think it’s fun?”

It was Mandrake on the surface behind her, interrupting her reverie, angry. She had done something wrong again but she had no idea what. He came closer, his heavy paws destroying the delicate patterns of frost on an oak leaf she had looked at moments before.

“Think it’s pretty, don’t you?”

His voice was getting louder and she wanted to get away. “You think this snow’s just here for your special pleasure? Well, come with me...”

She wanted to run from him, to get away from his anger and his voice that was getting louder. She wanted the safety of Sarah. But looking up at his angry gaze she could not move a paw but in the direction in which he pointed – toward the pastures. But she didn’t want to go there.

“Please can I go back to the home burrow?”

Mandrake cuffed her not once or twice but several times, so that her head stung and she found herself running tearfully before him toward the pastures, through a wood in which the snow that had once fallen delicate and light was beginning to swirl and whose trees were starting to strain before a blizzard.

She was cold and Mandrake was wild; her teeth chattered in fear. If she opened her mouth as she ran, to gain breath as Mandrake rushed her through the wood, the bitter wind seemed to want to blow her apart.

Then she was at the wood’s edge, and forced by Mandrake to gaze out onto the pastures whose grass was gray with a thin layer of snow over which more snow whined with the blizzard.

“Still think it’s pretty, still think it’s something to dance to?” roared Mandrake above the wind.

Then he pushed her out from the protection of the wood into the killer wind and her screams and sobs lost themselves in its wild bitterness, and her tears were part of the stinging blizzard snow. Until she was so far out from the wood that it was lost behind her in the storm and the only solid thing she could see was the dark shape of Mandrake himself, crouched like a black rock against the wind, snow swirling around him.

Mandrake seemed no longer interested in her, turning his attention instead to the blizzard and raising a paw against it as if searching for something beyond it that was threatening him and which he hated and would defy.

“Thought you could kill me, you bastard; thought Mandrake would yield. Siabod, you’re nothing, your Stones are a nothing, Arthur is nothing, you...” and then he began to roar and rage at the blizzard, his language changing into the harsh tongue of Siabod whose words were like talon thrusts. He was no longer immobile rock but a moving mass of dark shadow and anger raging at the bitter wind and ignoring the harsh snow that flailed against his snout and mouth. But his roars began to get more high-pitched and wilted before the wind into what seemed the bleatings and mewings of a creature lost, and Rebecca’s fear was gone.

She wanted to reach out and take him to her, tell him he was safe and so she shouted
Mandrake! Mandrake!
into the deafening wind. He turned to her and she saw that in his eyes, so menacing before, there was a terrible fear and a loss so great that she could only reach out to it....

He hit her as she came to him, the look of loss replaced again by anger, and then he turned her to the wind and snow and shouted into her above the sound of the blizzard “This is what I faced, this is the force you face, and you Rebecca will never yield to it because you are part of me who knew Siabod once and defied its death...” and she wanted to cry no no no this isn’t it, it isn’t it isn’t, but she was too young to know the words and the words only cried inside her and so she sobbed and struggled to get free. But she never forgot what she was unable to say, just as she never forgot the power of his grip as he forced her to face the blizzard wind. Nor could she forget the strangest thing – how safe she felt as he held her there.

That was what happened to Rebecca with Mandrake in mid-February, and what mole can doubt that in those wild half-remembered moments her love for him grew deep? Had he not shown her something of himself?

Yet what a shuddering memory it soon became, and how much more afraid of him she grew.

Still,
through that bleak winter there were some comforts. Sarah would sit with her and tell stories about her family. She would play with her brothers when Mandrake was not about (he preferred to keep her separate when he was there), usually leading them in the games they played, for she had a good imagination and could always think of something to do.

As yet she had none of the grace of her mother, Sarah, every movement betraying an anxiousness to please Mandrake, even when he was not there. It unsettled her, too, that other moles’ approach to her was unpredictable, because of who she was: some were overly nice to her, thinking it might pay dividends with Mandrake. Others, especially the females, were inclined to be bitchy, making remarks about “certain moles who think a lot of themselves and have it easy.” Or, as one of them put it to a friend in Barrow Vale, loud enough for Rebecca to hear: “She’s got all the worst qualities of both of them: stuck up as her mother and as heavy-pawed as Mandrake.”

Faced by such comments, Rebecca at first cried and hid herself away, taking minor tunnels to avoid meeting adult moles if she went out. But as February advanced she grew brasher, though no less sensitive, and would walk boldly past the gossips, affecting total indifference to them.

But toward the third week of February, everything began to change as the earliest spring began and there was much less of the chatter and idleness that characterized the winter years. Rebecca began to go out onto the surface more, cheered by the growing lightness of the spring days.

From her very first venturing onto the surface, she loved the smell and color of trees and plants. At first it had been the acorns cracking down to the ground, the rustle of the last falling leaves, autumn fruit and the surprise of bright holly berries thrown in a red huddle by an entrance after a storm.

As February advanced, the slow growth of shoots and new leaves enthralled her, and she would run up into the wood day after day sniffing the cold air, to see what new delights she could find. One day it was the yellow delicacy of winter aconite rising among sodden leaves and stem bottoms as pale as the spring sunlight. Another day she crouched for hours before a cluster of snowdrops, their white petals dancing in the cold wind, the black leafless branches of a great oak hanging starkly above them.

Then she was amazed at the speed with which shoots of dog’s mercury rose up into the spring Ught, but quickly learned to take paths avoiding them because of their rank smell. If she had to go through a patch of them, she would run and hold her breath as she did so, emerging gasping and laughing, often with a brother or two in tow.

As spring advanced, she found the flowers grew more scented and would bring them, wild and sweet-smelling, down to a place near the entrance to the home burrow so that their scent met anymole who entered. Her mother would tell her the names, and Rebecca would repeat them over and over, mingling them into verses with names of other flowers Sarah told her about, but which were not yet in bloom.

Adults got quite used to young Rebecca dancing with her brothers, singing flower songs, leading them in a game of her own invention, whose verse might run:

Vervain and yellowflag

Feverfew and Rue;

Some for my mother

Plenty left for you.

And they would tumble about laughing, mock-fighting and rolling on the wood’s floor.

Now Mandrake found it harder to control her. It was not that
she,
Rebecca, was disobedient in any way, but her spirit was and that seemed something neither of them could control. It was almost as if her life, and love of it, thrived on his malevolence. Not that, for a moment, she ever enjoyed annoying him or being the subject of his anger. But each time he knocked her down, sometimes literally, up she would get to run off somewhere and, despite every good intention on her part, do something else that displeased him.

“You’re not to play so roughly with your brother,” he would say, but she would.

“It’s dangerous up on the surface now by the edge of the wood,” but there she would be found.

“You’re to stay in the home burrow today because there are things to do,” but she wouldn’t.

She managed to do terrible things without even trying. Just before the April elder meeting, for example, she couldn’t resist having a peek about the elder burrow, somewhere she had never seen and which, since every-mole was always talking about it, she thought she would have a look at. So she did, and very impressive she found it. After she left it to wander off around Barrow Vale, a terrible cry went up: “The worms, the elders’ worms! They’ve been eaten. Somemole has been into the elder burrow and eaten all the worms!”

She heard it, and it was true, dreadfully true! She had eaten them! Well, she had seen them in a pile in the corner of the burrow, squirming about in a delightful way and, yes, she had had
one,
but she had hardly thought about it because, well, she was looking around the burrow and yes, then she
did
have another one; no, it wasn’t intentional; yes, she did eat it, the burrow was so interesting you see and, she was hardly thinking, and... Oh dear,
another
one, were there really five missing? She couldn’t possibly have eaten five perhaps another mole came in... No? Well, she could always...

Only old Hulvar laughed when he heard about it. It was a sign of the times, he thought, that everymole took the whole thing so seriously. Mandrake attacked Rebecca viciously and also hurt Sarah, who was trying to protect Rebecca; the elder meeting was held in an atmosphere of acrimony, though it was no mole’s fault among the elders.