Duncton Wood (71 page)

Perhaps Bracken sensed this, for he talked to her as if she could hear him, treating her as if she were the most precious thing in the world, as, indeed, she was. The ugliness as the plague swellings grew worse, the stench of the sores when they came, the abjection of the affliction... neither he nor Comfrey noticed or afterward remembered. It was Rebecca they loved, and she was not a swelling or a sore but a mole who had tended so many and suffered so much, and who, in their turn and in their different ways, now tended her, both giving her something different from their own spirits. Comfrey’s certain knowledge that she would live was one strength: Bracken’s force of love was another.

Present with them in Curlew’s burrows was a third strength – the power of the prayers that Boswell spoke up at the Stone, so far away, thinking of them both, and of all the other moles of Duncton and the pastures which his great love encompassed through the Stone.

Crouched up in the darkness of that long night, when Rebecca lay so ill, perhaps sensing that she was, he whispered the prayers he had learned as a scribemole but never thought he would himself have the power to say. Though now, as he said them, they came as naturally as breathing, each one calling out through him the blessing of the silence of the Stone:

Power of the Stone come into thee

All of thee in quiet

Power of the sun come into thee

A part of thee in warmth

Power of the moon come into thee

A part of thee feel cool

Power of the rain come into thee

A part of thee refreshed

Power of death depart from thee

Taken by the Stone

Power of life return to thee

Borrowed from the Stone

Power of the Stone is with thee

For you are the Stone,

All of you the Stone.

He said it for the system’s sake, he said it for the pastures, he said it for the moles he had seen suffer and the moles who would never know the Stone; he said it for Bracken, and he whispered it for Rebecca. And if its effect was to bring quiet and silence, this was the third strength that came into Curlew’s burrows and accompanied Bracken and Comfrey and Rebecca on her journey through the plague.

And though its talons may have cast her down they took with them, when they finally left her three days later, the power that Mandrake’s dreadful death had held over her. After two long days and nights she began to breathe easily, and on the fourth, she smiled again at last, and all of them could smile. And she had the strength to tell them both that they were her loves, as they had always been, father and son.

   35  

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the fifth day in Curlew’s burrows, when Rebecca had almost recovered, a mist unlike any mist Bracken had ever seen came over the surface from the marsh. It was thin and swirling at first, noticeable more for its smell than its sight. It was dry and woody and smelled like some musky flower. Sometimes it was stronger, sometimes weaker and sometimes minute black dusty particles, light as the seedsails of rosebay willowherb, floated down in it.

Bracken did not know it, but it was the smoke of a fire that was spreading slowly across the dried-up marsh, crackling inexorably among the husky tall grass and reeds, curling and licking its way from reed stem to stem, its flaming reds and oranges paled by the sunlight. Here and there, where the reeds were thicker and the fire caught hold better, the smoke curled in thick waves of choking blue-gray, then rose and swirled away, revealing the brighter red of flames as they turned the yellow dry vegetation black and traveled on, leaving smoldering charred remnants behind.

Creatures ran in panic and confusion before it, many waiting as long as they could, for they had never seen a fire, then running before its heat and in the waves of panic of other creatures about it; fieldmice, a couple of voles, a hare that had strayed onto the dry marsh in search of food, and hundreds more.

A long olive grass snake delayed too long and its back-and-forth snaking became quicker and more rushed as it tried to escape, until smoke came into its throat and its shaking became a thrashing as the fire ran over and under it and its body curled and blackened into an agonized death, the skin cracking as the life in the flesh hissed out. The fee passed on, leaving the snake’s burnt corpse behind with the other distortions of life among the ashes.

As the afternoon progressed, the mist by Curlew’s burrows grew thicker and more difficult to breathe in, and the sounds in the wood no longer seemed right. The mist was beginning to smell in the burrow and though it smelled cleaner than the plague, a mole would be insane to stay there too long.

Rebecca was strong enough to move – indeed, for a full day she had begged Bracken to let her go out, but he had resisted the idea: best to take it easy. And anyway, where could they go that wasn’t plague-ridden? Best to stay still. But now things were different and he was going to lead them up through the wood, away from the marsh, which he had never liked and from where this mist was drifting in.

“We’re going,” said Bracken. “Now.”

The smoke on the surface was getting steadily thicker, but the evening sun could still penetrate into it, giving the wood a luminescent blue appearance, with the trees looming out of it palely. Black sooty specks of burnt grass drifted along with the smoke toward the interior of the wood, and Bracken led Rebecca and Comfrey along with them, instinctively following a route away from the advancing fire – which had now reached to within a few moleyards of the wood and whose urgently sharp crackling could be heard.

“What is it?” asked Comfrey, curious rather than afraid.

“I don’t know,” said Bracken, “but it’s dangerous. Now come on.”

But though Rebecca could move, she could not move fast, and with Comfrey unable to keep in a straight line for continually snouting after things and trying to satisfy his curiosity about them, their progress was slow.

Behind them the fire had reached the reed wall at the marsh edge and burst through it with low rustlings and crackles as orange flame licked at the dry grass of the bank that led up to the shrubs and smaller bushes that grew at the wood’s edge. At one point it took hold and crossed to the bank, encouraged by the lightest of breezes that came off the marsh. Then, at another point. Then a third. Until the whole bank had taken, and the fire was sweeping up it through the shrubs to the first trees of the wood. As it reached them and started at the heavy dry leaf litter, the quality of the fire and smoke changed. It grew thicker and heavier as curls of gray-yellow smoke came from the leaf litter and the breeze carried it through the wood, where it overtook the lighter blue smoke with its white-yellow, and this drifted on more urgently into the wood, obscuring the sun, enshrouding the trees and soon catching up with the fleeing moles.

Bracken was more worried about Rebecca than Comfrey, for her strength was not as great as either of them had thought. He had taken a place behind them both and urged them on, especially Rebecca. “My love, you’ve got to keep going. It’s getting thicker and the noises are louder. It is coming nearer.” Behind them the crackle of the fire increased, changing here and there into a roar as it passed over what had been Curlew’s burrows and trees and branches fell under its heat and destroyed her tunnels forever.

Sometimes, the breeze of smoke through the wood, which was getting stronger, carried a roaring of fire sound rather than just a crackle.

They ran on, smoke at their throats and eyes, now frightened by the thing that sounded so massive and threatening behind them, their own rustles and scamperings drowned by the fallings, crashings and roarings from the fire.

Once clear of the isolated area of woodland in which Curlew’s tunnels were they came across entrances to tunnels into the system, and to get them away from the smoke Bracken led them down. The air was blissfully easier to breathe, but once down they noticed immediately the nauseating odor of plague and ahead of them saw the rotting body of a mole.

“Come,” said Bracken wearily, “we had best stick to the surface.”

Even in the short time they had been underground, the fire had advanced so much that they could feel that the temperature of the air had gone up and waves of heat were blowing up from behind them, with smoke and black soot. At one point Comfrey went off too far to the left and they lost him and had to stop and call until, scared and apologetic, he came spluttering back. “It’s even worse over there,” he said.

Bracken had memories of being chased through this same part of the wood by henchmoles, in the opposite direction, and remembered how they had advanced to his right and his left until they seemed to be all around him. He felt that the “thing” behind them was doing the same – and although he sensed it was impersonal, like rain, it was still frightening. Gradually the fire overtook them on the left and they veered away from it to the right, only to find its sound and roaring even louder there.

“Faster! Faster!” he urged them. “It mustn’t catch us!” And they ran on.

The fire had taken hold of the whole of the Marsh End, surging through the dried bracken and leaf litter and crackling at the base of trees before turning their bark black, while higher tongues of flame leaped up from dry fern and bracken and caught at the leaves of the lower branches which took the flames, curling them into death as they raced over the tree’s surface and then started at the twigs and branches as it took hold. Smoke billowed up from the wood, heavy with the feathery remnants of burning leaves and black ash, twisting and swirling into a great pall of smoke that drifted ahead of the fire through the drought-dry branches of the trees and undergrowth, toward the slopes.

Sometimes, among the soaring fragments of ash, a delicate white admiral butterfly or garish purple emperor tried to fly clear of the heat and smoke, beating frail wings unnaturally high into the air against the sucking and hurling currents, fluttering the last of its life away before smoke choked it and heat turned the beautiful wings into crumpled ash, and it fell back into the flames unrecognizable and lost.

Death licked and darted its flaming way among the heavy tree trunks and branches, where, beneath the once-protective bark, the larvae of stag beetles and longhorns. or scuttling weevils found themselves trapped in the steam of boiling sap, their scrabbling bodies falling still as the fire burned away the life of tree after tree. While on the leaves, and especially the beloved oaks of Duncton Wood, the nobbles and carbuncles of the gall wasps and midges, where tiny young maggots lived in a cocoon of life, were suddenly gone, caught by a devastation more terrible than the plague that had swept the moles before and one from which none escaped.

Along the wood’s edge, in advance of the flames, the grass was alive with fleeing creatures: dormice, unused to the light of day; squirrels, tails dancing in tune with their run and then stopping, still on two legs, to see if they could tell where the danger lay before running on again; stoats and bank voles, and, of course, those few moles who had survived the plague and been driven from their tunnels by the smell of danger. Creatures that were normally foes now lost their internecine fears and ran, or hopped, or hesitated, or fled as their nature and instincts told them. Few dared to venture out of cover onto the pastures, most preferring to run on through grass or undergrowth in advance of the fire, and hope that-they might escape it.