Duncton Wood (70 page)

Not every mole panicked. At least one, Comfrey, stayed calm and left the pasture, crossed through the wood and began searching for something that a long time before he remembered Rose talking about. “If only I c-c-could remember
properly
,” he scolded himself.

The talk in Barrow Vale soon concentrated on the idea that the plague came from the Stone and was its judgment on them, a punishment for a system that had let the old ways slip under the rule of Mandrake and Rune.

From this idea came the belief that the only way of combating the plague was to visit the Stone and touch it – eagerly accepted confirmation of which was that one of the moles who had recovered from the plague had previously been up to the Stone and touched it, living proof that the Stone worked.

“Is it true, Boswell, or is it just another superstition?” asked Bracken, making it more a statement than a question. He had noticed that several moles who had been to the Stone had subsequently died and was cynical about the “explanations” offered by the Stone’s proponents that these moles had transgressed in other ways and so the Stone did not favor them.

“In the sense you mean it is untrue,” said Boswell, breaking the silence in which he had been lost for most of the time since the plague came upon them. “These moles do not understand that the Stone is not a power by itself. Its power is invested in each one of us, whether it is a power for good or for evil. If you touch the Stone with faith, perhaps that does release a power, but only one that exists already inside you. For all your cynicism, Bracken, you have that power as well.”

“Can I stop myself getting the plague?” asked Bracken bitterly, thinking of the many who had died. “Could
they
have?”

Boswell was silent, which turned Bracken’s bitterness into anger. He felt, as so many other moles did themselves, that the plague was in some way a judgment on him. But his feeling was the stronger for his being leader of the Duncton system and, though no other mole said it, he felt responsible for what was happening. Like Rebecca, he felt the terrible frustration of not being able to relieve the suffering, almost as if it was a guilt. He turned these feelings back on Boswell, and through him onto the Stone.

Boswell was silent.

“Where is this power of the Stone when it is most needed?” demanded Bracken angrily. “You’re clever at making the Stone seem important, but when it’s needed, really needed, what good is it? Why does it let this happen?” Bracken waved his paws around the tunnels of Barrow Vale, now full of frightened survivors of the plague, in a way that took in their fears and took in as well the dead, the stench of the dead and the distant moans of the dying.

“Well, Boswell?”

But Boswell was silent. He knew the Stone was inside Bracken and one day he would know it. The plague was no more a judgment on the system or the moles in it than the idea that the sun was a bonus for living a good life was true. The plague was a part of life, as death was, but Boswell did not know what words could express such thoughts in such a place as this.

“I will go to the Stone myself,” he said finally.

“To pray?” mocked Bracken. “Or to touch the Stone so you don’t get it...” His voice trailed off as he heard his own tired bitterness. He was so weary, and suddenly afraid now that Boswell was going to leave. Impulsively he went up to Boswell and stopped him leaving.

“What will happen to us all, to the system?” Boswell looked at him with those bright dark eyes that held such understanding and warmth to anymole willing to raise his own eyes and look into them. He understood Bracken’s anger and torment, for he loved him with a love that grew stronger and fiercer in him day by day. He knew that a mole like Bracken’ might be angry with the Stone as well as in love with it. Indifference was the greatest threat.

“I will pray for you. Bracken, for Rebecca and for all moles...” but Bracken turned away again, thinking that prayers would be of no help to the moles in his system who had died already and to whom he had been unable to offer any protection. Yet his heart sank to see Boswell go. He wondered if he would ever see him again.

Four days and many more plague deaths later. Bracken had a visit in Barrow Vale from a marshender. His message was stark and simple: Mekkins was dead. Just like that Mekkins was gone.

“Rebecca was with him but she couldn’t do nothing,” said the marshender, who had seen so much death that even Mekkins’ death did not affect him. “Whatmole can? It’s the Stone’s curse, and we’re powerless against it” Mekkins!

There was no need to be told how, or when, or where. The fact of it was enough to take the last strength from his body and for despair to take him over. It was as if some thief had sneaked into his burrow in the night and taken something from him without him seeing it and which he could never recover. Nothing could have underlined the tragedy that had overtaken the system more than this. Mekkins! Who had talked to him only days before, who was always aggressive and full of life; who had done so much for him and Rebecca and so many other moles.

He rose up from where he was crouched and began to roar in his shock and rage, raising his living talons and bringing them down oh the walls of the elder burrow, gasping out in his anger, grunting in his effort to attack and attack the earth around him, spittle forming on his mouth fur. He wanted to do something, anything, but there was nothing. He wanted to run roaring through the tunnels to the Marsh End, but what was the point?

The marshender watched him. He had seen it all before. Anger, rage, prayers, the whole bleedin’ lot. A bit of roaring and raving wasn’t goin’ to do no good. Still, didn’t hurt, either. Better tell him the rest.

“Rebecca’s got it as well. She’s got the plague,” said the marshender.

Horror and fear rushed over Bracken’s fur, then icy calm. “Where is she?” he asked urgently.

“Stone knows,” said the marshender. “She was only just took with it when I left – sweatin’ she was just like the others. I reckoned it was the plague. I scarpered. I mean, if the healer gets it, then Stone help us all.”

Bracken was gone before he could say more, running down through the system toward Mekkins’ tunnels, for that was where she would be. Running and running as if death were chasing at his paws. Running and running through the flea-ridden, death-smelling, stifling tunnels with sweat in his fur and terrible visions of a dying Rebecca mixing with pictures of a dead Mekkins in his mind, and prayers, more wild and desperate than any he had ever felt tempted to utter running through his head. “Keep her alive,” he begged as he ran, “keep her alive. Spare Rebecca... take me. Take me” as he ran and ran.

She was not in Mekkins’ burrow, where only Mekkins’ body lay, hunched and sore-ridden like the rest. Oh, Mekkins! Mekkins!

Rebecca! He looked around wildly, not knowing where to go, trying to think, trying to recover enough to think. Rebecca! He ran from tunnel to tunnel, seeking a mole to guide him to where she might be, meeting mole after mole who looked at him stupidly when he asked “Where’s Rebecca?” for they had problems of their own and how would they know where she was?

Why hadn’t she come to him? Where would she have gone?

He began to run toward the pastures, thinking that she must have returned to her burrow, but only when he was nearly to the wood’s edge did he remember that he didn’t know exactly where she lived there – up near the higher pastures? Down where Rose once lived? And anyway... he paused in his running, sweat now shining in his fur and his breathing desperate with effort... it didn’t feel right. He felt as if he was running away from her. He turned south, toward the Stone on top of the hill, the evening air in the tunnels around him heavy with dry heat and asked aloud “Where are you?” He wanted to call for her and hear her answer. He wanted Rebecca.

Where would she have gone? He crouched down and closed his eyes, thinking himself into her mind as best he could and wondering where she might have gone. The Stone? Barrow Vale? Where else was there?

Only one place, and it came to him quietly as he himself had once gone there. Curlew’s burrow. The place she had gone when she had been so ill before and where, by the grace of the Stone, she had survived to take care of Comfrey. She must have gone there. He was so certain of it that a peace came to him as he got up and set off eastward across the Marsh End to the most forsaken part of the system. By the grace of the Stone... he prayed to it, subconsciously feeling guilty at asking it to keep her alive when he had doubted it so much. “If you keep her alive,” he bargained, “I’ll go to Uffington to give thanks. I’ll do anything... only keep her alive.”

It was a journey through death, for the marshenders seemed even more stricken than the moles around Barrow Vale and he came across body after body, or poor creatures dragging themselves along in their final hours. Or others, who seemed to have gone insane, whispering in a kind of daze “We have been saved from the plague, we had it we had it, and we have been saved. Praise the Stone for saving us. Praise the Stone...” And they reached out, to touch Bracken as he passed them by, their faces and bodies still bearing the plague sores to show that it had, indeed, been their way, their eyes crazed by their deliverance.

Until at last he was into the eastern part of the Marsh End, whose surface was now hard and friable but still had something of the dank shadowiness that it had always held. He had not been here since he had been chased from it by Rune so long before when... he almost said to himself “when the world was right.”

On and on he went, his heart quickening as he reached the end of the journey for what he might find when he got there.

It was night and he had been journeying one way or another since the early evening. “Only let her be alive,” he whispered again as he reached the last few yards, “and nothing else will matter. I will go to Uffington and give thanks whatever the cost.”

He found Curlew’s old tunnels with little difficulty, but stopped short outside the entrance because something lay there he had not seen for a long time – a fresh flowerhead. Its petals were like a crocus, and a delicate mauve, its stalk white and vulnerable. Lying as it was among the aridness of drought-dusty, faded ivy that covered the tree trunk by the entrance and on top of rustling dry leaf mold, it presented a strange sight. He had never seen such a flower before and it made him pause and wonder at it before entering the tunnel carefully, snouting out ahead of him to see if life were there.

There was life all right, and plague. He could smell the terrible plague odor and hear movement of some kind. At least she was still alive. He approached noisily and called out ahead of himself “Rebecca! Rebecca! It’s Bracken!” and ran on down.

He was met at the entrance to Curlew’s old burrow not by Rebecca but by the stutter and stumble of Comfrey, whose thin snout peered out at him as he approached. “Hello, Br-Br-Bracken,” he said.

Before Bracken even wondered what Comfrey was doing there he asked: “Is she
here?
Is she all right?”

“She’s g-g-got the plague,” stuttered Comfrey. “She’s n-n-not very well.”

Rebecca was crouched in the same comer she had occupied when she had been so ill before. Her eyes were swollen but not yet closed, while her mouth hung loose to ease her breathing. Already the swellings were starting on her face and snout. By her head on the floor lay the white shiny bulb part of a plant, the flower of which Bracken had seen on the surface.

Comfrey stepped forward to Rebecca. “You’ve got to eat it, R-Rebecca,” he said to her softly, touching her face to draw her attention. “You’ve g-got to
try
.”

“Rebecca,” whispered Bracken. “It’s me. Bracken.”

She sighed and he saw that her eyes were running, though whether with tears or illness it was hard to say.

“Thank you,” she whispered almost inaudibly.

“M-make her eat it,” said Comfrey desperately to Bracken. “It will help her. I kn-kn-know it will.”

“What is it?” asked Bracken.

“I got it from beyond the eastside where there’s pasture near the marsh. It’s called meadow saffron by the east-siders, though it’s so rare that few of them have ever seen it. But I found it, and when I did I kn-kn-knew it was for R-Rebecca. I
knew
it. I always kn-know when she n-needs help. It’s a special healing plant... I’ve often f-found plants when she needed them. But it’s always been for a m-mole she’s helping. I didn’t know it was for her.” He sounded desperate and kept pushing the white flesh of the bulb at Rebecca’s mouth for her to take.

“You mustn’t try to die,” he said simply, almost scolding her. “It’ll take you longer to get better if you d-d-don’t eat it.” Then he looked straight at Bracken as if reading his thoughts and said: “You don’t have to worry about her dying. She won’t.” There was total faith in Comfrey’s words.

If Bracken had not been in such a place at such a time he would have sworn that he saw a glimmer of the starting of a smile on Rebecca’s plague-ridden face, or perhaps even a laugh.

“Rebecca,” he said urgently. “Rebecca...” His voice changed almost to a command and he said, “You’re bloody going to eat this thing Comfrey’s got for you!” With that he took the bulb himself, bit off a piece, chewed it lightly into a mush, and putting it on his paw, started feeding it to Rebecca. She couldn’t chew but she was able to take it piece by slow piece and swallow it, like a pup taking its first solid food.

As she did so, he too knew with absolute certainty that she was not going to die – or rather that Comfrey, for all his hesitation, had spoken with such total faith in a voice that Rebecca had heard, that she
could
not die.

“Most of them die because they don’t eat anything and b-because they can’t breathe properly,” said Comfrey matter-of-factly, now content to watch over Rebecca and Bracken as if they were one mole – and one who had given him a rather unnecessary scare. “Rose told me about meadow saffron in a rhyme she said once, b-b-but I didn’t know that ‘pestilence’ meant plague. Then an eastsider told me, so I know.”

Bracken did not take much of this in, though much later Rebecca was to remember every word. The horror of the plague for a mole was that the mind stayed quite clear while the body would no longer obey it.