Duncton Wood (81 page)

The greens in the wood were lusher, too, because of persistent rains; so rich, indeed, that they seemed almost to bleed out into the sky, shining with life among the occasional horse chestnuts and furtive hawthorn on the wood’s edge.

The “old” wood was a now-lost strange place, a secret place, where a mole like Comfrey could almost lose himself in wonder at the power of life over fire and nature’s burgeoning disregard of death. It was a world Rebecca also ventured into more and more as the summer advanced from July into August, and the magnificent waving pinkreds of the rosebay willowherb came out at last like sunrise against a morning sky. She called them fireflowers, though whenever she did Comfrey corrected her, because he liked to get the names precisely right.

Both of them left the old tunnels alone, occasionally, burrowing new tunnels for food and shelter but steering well clear of the old ones. In any case, as the summer advanced, bracken and bramble began to grow once more, thick grass grew here and there, and ground ivy filled the spaces between, so that there was plenty of safe ground cover for a mole. On a hot day, when the sun shone bright and strong and a convectional breeze caught the few remaining full trees, a mole might almost think that he or she was back in the Duncton Wood of old, before the troubles.

August passed and September came, with warm, settled weather for its first two weeks, and not a mole in the Ancient System seemed to need Rebecca’s help. She spent long days alone, basking in the vegetation-covered warmth of the wood floor, listening to the last of the buzzing insects, watching the first of the dews and spiders come, relaxing from a summer of work and rebuilding.

At the same time, the system settled at last into its own patterns and rhythms as the excitement of the plague and the fire finally gave way to a new generation who knew them only as memories, and who grew tired of hearing those old tales told. The young who had been pups in spring now became adults, settling into their own territory in the wide and expansive Ancient System and putting their life into finding today’s food rather than talking about yesterday’s battles.

Bracken, too, became a memory, an especially romantic and dramatic one it is true, but a memory all the same. In the minds of the young, his leadership against Rune and Mandrake was more legend than contemporary history and though many a youngster crouched by the Stone and gazed toward the west just as Bracken was said to have done, few could really believe he still existed, or could now come back.

Then the first rains of September came and only Rebecca remembered Bracken as he had been and believed he was still alive. Time after time she remembered Boswell’s final reassurance to her – “I’ll look after him” – and she went to the Stone to pray that he might be given the strength to do so. So many long moleyears gone and she could barely remember what Bracken looked like... only his touch and caress and the protection of his words down beneath the Stone where the Stillstone had shone upon them.

Sometimes she fancied she sensed that he was out there far, far to the west where Uffington lay, until in the last wet week of September she lost that sense and found herself drawn uneasily toward the north, toward... oh, where was it? Then she found herself aching to understand what it was calling her, sensing some terrible need far greater than the demands made on her by the Duncton moles and drawing her to a place she felt she knew and had once been shown, but which she could not remember. Oh, give me the strength, she prayed, give me the courage.

Some say now that it was a sudden vicious autumn hailstorm that reminded her of the blizzard that Mandrake had once dragged her into on the pastures, when she was a pup. Others, that it was simply that special sense she had always had of where her healing was needed. Whatever it was, she knew that one day soon she must leave Duncton and seek out Siabod, where her father had come from. Oh she remembered the blizzard now, and understood again the terrible cry from Mandrake she had heard, and which all her life with him she had never learned how to answer so that he could trust her love.

But the very absurdity of making such a journey, the inevitability of her dying on the way, was so great that for days she dared not even admit the possibility of doing it to herself.

“W-w-what’s wrong, Rebecca?” asked Comfrey one evening by the Stone. “W-What is it?”

His voice trembled with loss and fear for he knew, or could sense, that Rebecca was preparing to go away from Duncton Wood, just as Bracken and Boswell had done.

Slowly she told of the calling from Siabod she had had, and as she did so she felt again the grip of Mandrake’s talons on her back as he had turned her to face the blizzard.

“How will you f-f-find it?” trembled Comfrey, muttering miserably to himself.

“The Stones of Siabod will guide and protect me, just as they gave protection to Mandrake for so long. I’ll follow the line between the Duncton Stone and where they stand, just as Bracken once found his way to the Nuneham Stone and back, and must have since found his way to Uffington. And beyond.”

She tried to sound bold about it, to convince herself, but she didn’t fool Comfrey. Yet he said something then that in a strange way gave her the strength she needed to finally leave Duncton:

“What will we do w-w-while you’re gone?”

Oh, she smiled; oh she loved Comfrey! While she was gone!
While!
No mole, not even Mekkins, had ever had such faith in her as Comfrey. To tell Comfrey you would do something was as good as making a promise to the Stone, and so as a final affirmation of her faith in the decision to leave she said “While I’m gone” – and how she relished the phrase! – “
while
I’m away, you will be healer in the system for me.”

Comfrey’s eyes opened wide in astonishment and he looked in puzzlement at his gentle, hesitant paws.

“You know more about the healing herbs of the wood and how to use them than anymole Duncton has ever known,” she said firmly, “and you knew Rose as I did, even though you were only a pup then. More important than this is that you have a faith in the Stone that runs very deep, and its power will always be with you, as it is already.”

“Oh!” said Comfrey, for if Rebecca said it then it must be true.

Rebecca would have liked to leave there and then but she rightly sensed that she was such an integral part of the system’s life that to leave without saying goodbye and trying to make others understand would be a betrayal of those who had given her love. So she said goodbye to each of them, saying again and again that she had faith in the Stone that she would be back, as they shook their heads and scuffed the ground with their paws.

Some were angry and bold enough to say “But what about Bracken and that Boswell? They never came back, did they? Got taken by owls if you ask me. Just as...” but not many dared finish the thought to her face.

“And who’ll take your place?” asked others tearfully.

“Comfrey,” she smiled.

“Comfrey?
She must be bloody daft,” they swore among themselves when she had gone to talk with other moles.

Yet when, finally, she left, taking a route down near the marsh by way of the pastures, it was to Comfrey that they turned and asked “Will she come back?
Will
she?”

“Yes she will,” said Comfrey firmly, “because she’s R-R-Rebecca and she will.”

“And what about Bracken and Boswell?” reminded the doubters, the angry ones who felt most betrayed.
“They
never came back.”

“I d-d-don’t know about them. But she will.”

But when they had all gone back to their burrows and

Comfrey was sure there wasn’t a single mole to see, he felt all the loss and loneliness he had been trying to control begin to overwhelm him and he ran back and forth in the Stone clearing, peering first at the Stone and then out from the edge of the clearing toward where she had gone. All he could do was say Rebecca Rebecca to stop himself crying, until he couldn’t even think her name without crying and wishing she was there for him to run to.

The Stone watched over him, its power in him and its silence finally there as well. Until when his grief had played itself out, and he had slept, and he was ready to face the system as its healer, he found that he had the strength never to doubt, not for one single solitary lonely moment throughout the long moleyears that followed, that Rebecca would come back. He was just looking after things while she was gone.

   40  

N
OTHING
  more is known of Bracken’s and Boswell’s long journey between Uffington and Capel Garmon, which lies on the very threshold of the Siabod system itself, than has been recorded by Boswell himself. His account has left much technical information about the postplague state of the many systems the two moles passed through, but of the many long moleyears’ travel, and what happened during it, he scribed little and said less.

It is known that the two moles spent Longest Night at Caer Caradoc, a system near the Welsh Marches, after which, says Boswell’s account, “We were soon able to gain access to Offa’s Dyke by which route Bracken of Duncton was able to find a rapid and safe approach for us to the forsaken system of Capel Garmon.”

This brief sentence, which covers a period of many moleyears, gives no hint of the hard winter conditions through which they had to travel, or of the intriguing question of why they made for Capel Garmon. Certainly Boswell regarded Capel Garmon, a miserable and insignificant place now but for its association with these two courageous moles, as a turning point on their journey. Perhaps the stones that now squat lifeless and gray in that dank place still retained some of the power they have now entirely lost.

But the true answer can only be found by a mole who has crouched among the squalid, bare moorlands of Capel Garmon and turned his snout to the west and contemplated the fact that his long journey northward from the warmer south is over and he must now turn irrevocably west to the heights of worm-poor soils that are the grim prelude to the mass of Siabod itself.

But let the name of Capel Garmon send a shiver down the spine of
anymole
who knows what it feels like to crouch on the edge of a dark country into which he must, for whatever reason, reluctantly travel and from which death is a more certain gift than a safe return.

The two moles paused there for only two or three days before the hour came when Bracken crouched on the surface, his snout due west, and said: “We are near to Siabod now, Boswell; I can feel it and we must go while we still have strength.” He was shivering and his voice was strained because he was afraid of the power of Siabod. “We must go
now.”

Boswell smiled and nodded, for he had often heard Bracken say the same thing when they faced a danger ahead and he wanted to face it and get it over. Bracken always found it hard to wait. But even Boswell felt a sense of dread, for there was something worse than forsaken about a place where a system had once thrived (according to the record of the Rolls of the Systems) but of which there was now barely a sign. The soil was soggy with rain and thawed snow, and there had already been long stretches, many molemiles wide, in which they had had to scratch around for hours to find a decent worm. Now there was just the sodden rustling of last year’s bracken and heather and the plaintive bleating of grubby, dung-caked sheep among the scattered bleakness of rocks whose color was so dead that when light from the sky touched them they seemed to turn it into shadow. Yet, with the prospect of Siabod before them, even Capel Garmon seemed a haven. But finally, wet, cold and hungry, the two moles made the turn west for the last part of their journey. Yet, even at the grimmest moments, a mole may see some reminder of hope, and Bracken saw it. Among the lifeless stones through which they passed he came upon a wet and stunted bush of gorse on which, joyous in the April murk, was a cluster of orange-yellow flowers, fresh as a happy spring. “They grow like that, only bigger, up on the chalk downland above Duncton Wood,” he told Boswell, “and one day, if we ever get out of this alive, I’ll show you. I’d give anything to be able to be there now!”