Duncton Wood (88 page)

Arthur reared and shook in fear, his yellow eyes casting about the moor and sky, his flanks trembling at whatever it was this mole, this monster mole, wanted him to do. Go and get Rebecca... the idea stormed about them. Perhaps Bracken did not even speak its words. Perhaps their power simply showed itself.

Arthur’s paws scratched at the ground, his great head swayed back and forth as Bracken began to think again of Rebecca and the Stone and some deep sense of calling came to Arthur. He bent his head down to the mole he feared, and sniffled and snouted at him, taking in his scent, and then raised his head and looked across the moor away from Siabod and down into the valleys from where the pulling was coming, aching to find the thing they wanted.

“Bring Rebecca here. Bring our healer here.”

And Arthur turned at last away from the hold of Cwmoer, down through its falls and rocks by the way these moles had come, away from their cries whose power in breaking him had brought him such strange distress. He bounded down the hills away from them until he found the scent again, and it showed him whatever it was they wanted him to bring back for them.

The Siabod moles heard him before they saw him, a great hound in maddened distress: running over the surface, howling and scratching here and there with his great paws. He surprised some on the surface and they thought themselves dead when his great snout and maw came down on them, sniffing at them. But then he dismissed them, for they were not the scent he was looking for.

The Siabod moles tell of it still, of how Arthur followed the scent of Bracken and Boswell down into the valley the way they had come, and of how they heard his howlings from near the river and then suddenly a thunderous barking, like a hound that has found its prey.

While Celyn himself, who heard the hound and later saw him clear as slate in the sun, made a song of it which told how Arthur came back from the valley carrying a mole that none of them had ever seen or scented before.

Rebecca never spoke of how Arthur found her, or much of her journey to Siabod, though she would have known that in a way Celyn’s song was true. For though Arthur never carried her he did lead her up the valley and round to Cwmoer, watching over every inch of what to him must have seemed slow progress.

Massive and dangerous though he was, she knew he would never harm her for she was not afraid of him, as Mandrake was not afraid. How can a mole be afraid of a hound who carries such loss and craving as he did? And perhaps he sensed that she was
of
Mandrake, the monster mole, and that all of them were monsters who had a power that made him tremble. So he watched over her, running forward impatiently, and back to where she was struggling forward, then on again and urging her to come to where those other moles were waiting.

But if she was slow how could he know that she was with litter? No mole now knows or will ever know which mole was her mate. Though why she took him is obvious enough because it was spring and mating time, and had not Rebecca suffered enough litterless days on her own? Perhaps she feared she would never see another mating time. Perhaps she found a male somewhere below Siabod who sensed her desire and had none of the fears the Duncton males had in the presence of their healer.

Her pregnancy was nearing its term when Arthur found her and perhaps she would have let him carry her, as the ballads would have us believe, if she had not been thinking of her young. There are some things about which the histories of Uffington are silent.

Did she sense that it was to Bracken and Boswell that Arthur was leading her? Did she hear Bracken’s call? Or did her instinct go even deeper and make her sense, as she passed up the shadowy paths of Cwmoer, that above the rock faces an ancient female was watching blindly, sensing that she was there, and then singing a cracked song into the wind in old Siabod, whose words spoke of Mandrake’s return and wove tears into triumph?

Death and life, suffering and triumph are all one, they are all one, and disease or health, they matter not. They are all one was the theme of despair behind the jumble of suffering thoughts that overtook Boswell in the dreadful days following Arthur’s departure.

While Bracken, between searching for food and forcing Boswell to eat what he could, tried to say no no no no in so many different ways and so to halt the slide into despair and death toward which Boswell’s thoughts seemed to be leading him.

There is an intimacy between moles in a death burrow when one mole lies dying and another uselessly watches every shiver of pain, every weak smile of bravery, every shaking of fear, every sliding into puppish cries and sees the blood and the vomit and the messing that accompanies the stiflement of life. An intimacy and secretiveness which afterward make the healthy one forget what he saw and heard and smelled. Just as a mother forgets the messing her pup once caused, so does a mole who watched a loved one near death not feel disgust at the ugliness that goes with a body’s decline.

So Boswell, so Bracken. But a decline from wounds is a different thing than from disease or age; its danger, and what may weigh the balance down, lies in the loss of spirit that dies with wounds – for without the will that made the first pup cry, no mole would ever have raised its head and laughed at the world about it.

So Boswell now. The days dragged by and Bracken barely slept. He talked to his beloved Boswell in images of warmth, answering each of Boswell’s weakening despairs with whispered memories of life that he had seen or they had seen together.

Boswell’s wound coursed deeply down his back, and though it did not fester or poison it seemed to have ripped out his will to live. He lay belly down, for any other position caused him worse pain, with his snout on one side to ease his breathing. His paws became as floppy as a pup’s and of the food, mushed up, that Bracken tried to feed him, only a small part went down – the rest dribbling back out of his weak mouth.

But at least Boswell sometimes asked if Rebecca was coming, and that, surely, said that he was still looking to a life beyond his pain.

Bracken dug out a temporary burrow for them both, but it was so shallow and the tunnel so short that light of day came in. And the cold of night as well. Days ran into nights which lost themselves in days, but there were so many times when Boswell seemed so weak that it was minutes that Bracken prayed for, not whole days.

“Let him hold on for one more hour... let him live until the rain has stopped... let him stay until the first light of dawn.. So Bracken pleaded with the Stone, begging that his friend might hold on to life until Rebecca came.

Until, at last, after eight days of waiting, Arthur returned. His paws were cut and bloody, his coat was covered in mud and grit and there were great cuts and gashes across his face where he had plunged through blackthorn and brambles, and a terrible cut under his left flank where, in leaping over some obstruction, the cut of steel had caught him.

But he had led Rebecca in safety over the molemiles, a journey that moles still celebrate with gratitude and pride, and he took her to the ground by the temporary burrow as gently as he had led her. Who she was, or what she was for, he did not know; but his journey was done and the cliffs of Cwmoer no longer seemed to want to press down upon him; and the great moles that had threatened him from the shadows were gone. He scratched at the ground, waited until Bracken came, and then turned wearily back down the track, his tail low and his body dragging with fatigue to hide in his own lair where he could forget these moles, or try to, and dream of summer days when no trouble like they brought bothered him.

The first thing Bracken noticed about Rebecca was that she was with litter, and not his litter. The second was that she was not the mole, the fictitious female, he had created in his imagination in the long moleyears of their separation. This was not the mole he had prayed for, whose memory had comforted him, whose caress had become in his mind like the music of water or wind. She was tired, she was older, she was worried.

“Rebecca!” he said, a little hostile.

“Bracken!” She smiled, seeing at once his confusion and disappointment. And seeing, too, how much thinner he had become – just as he had been when they met for the very first time. Did he know how wild his fur looked, or how lost his eyes? Did he know how nervous and ill at ease he was?

“It’s Boswell, isn’t it?” she asked. He nodded and took her down into the burrow where he crouched uneasily as she examined Boswell’s wound. She asked Bracken questions about it, but less for the information they gave her (she got that from touching poor Boswell) than in the hope that they might put Bracken at his ease. But it was no good, and the hostility she sensed to her touching “his” Boswell finally made her ask him gently to leave her alone with Boswell “so that I can talk to him as a healer must and for no other reason than that.”

Oh, she sighed as Bracken left, miserably; oh, my love! She was so tired and there was nothing, nothing in the world, that she desired more at that moment than Bracken’s trusting touch and caress in her fur so that she could know that he was there with her, in love and silence. As she turned to Boswell she scolded herself for thinking, as Rose had done before her so many times, that she wished there were a mole who would one day reach out and touch her and let her rest.

Later, moleyears later, Boswell would say that his days of illness on Siabod were the days when he learned most about physical suffering. For a mole born with such a disadvantage as a withered paw, it was a remarkable thing that by the Stone’s grace he so rarely suffered assault or direct physical hardship.

He knew, as Bracken did not, how important his contact with Rebecca was in those long days and nights. She stayed by him constantly (as close to him as Rose had once been to Bracken in the Ancient System), whispering her healing words and letting him find again, in the security of her warmth, the spirit and strength he had lost when Arthur wounded him so deeply.

Yet Boswell was a healer, too, and as he gained in strength, his own acceptance of her great love of life, which most moles found so hard to face, helped her through her final days before her litter came. Not many males, certainly very, very few scribemoles, have ever been so close to a female with litter as Boswell was in those strange healing days.

For Rebecca herself, the only hardship was Bracken’s uneasy companionship to them both: he made another burrow for himself nearby and unstintingly found them food and whatever herbs he could that might be of help. When the weather grew colder, as it did two days after her arrival, he reburrowed the tunnels to insulate Boswell’s burrow better.

But there was an air of distrust about Bracken’s contact with Rebecca which put an impassable barrier between them so that, although both ached for an expression of love, neither knew how it could be done. The fact that she was with litter made him angry and turned and twisted in his mind and put a barrier of suspicion and jealousy before his eyes.

The time came when Rebecca made a burrow of her own and began gathering what nesting material she could from the sparse vegetation that grew by the stream where they lived. She did not want to litter there, for there was something grim and desolate about Siabod, but she did not trust herself to move back down through the Cwmoer, even with Bracken’s help, and anyway, Boswell was still weak.

The weather turned colder and a bitter wind blew and began to put a layer of verglas on the rocks near their tunnels so that they became slippery and unsafe for even the steadiest talon. The matgrass snapped and crackled in the cold, darkness fell swiftly, the sun seemed lost forever, and the snow that had fallen the night before they had first come up Cwmoer, having half melted with the rain, had now permanently frozen on the rocks where it had stayed or lay dry and shiny among the tussocks of grass. Late spring in Siabod seemed to bring harsher weather than the cruelest winter in Duncton.

Now that Rebecca was living and spending more time in her own burrow. Bracken talked to Boswell more and found he was beginning to recover fast. As ever, Boswell was aware of, and upset by, his friend’s distrust of Rebecca. Could they never see that the love they had was as strong as the sunshine? Why was Bracken such a fool, and Rebecca, who knew so much, unable to make Bracken see their love?

“Look after her. Bracken, because she needs your help, you know. I sometimes think you don’t know how much she loves you...”

Bracken shrugged. “She’s more concerned with that litter of hers than anything else/‘he said, betraying his real feelings, “But, of course, I’ll do what I can. But a nesting female doesn’t want males hanging about, every-mole knows that. They like to get on with it themselves.”

It was night, and the wind stirred, fretting at the tunnel entrances, seeming to find a way into even the warmest spots. Outside the stream rushed and dashed against the rocks, grass chattered against the entrances, a night when only the most peaceful moles can fall easily to sleep.

Boswell was worried and concerned, but he didn’t know what about. Bracken crouched talking to him in stops and starts, eyes flicking about the burrow, sentences cut off by the howl of the wind outside.

Rebecca, separated from them by two tunnels and the short surface run between, stirred restlessly. Her tail switched back and forth, she couldn’t get her body comfortable now that it was so full and her litter was nosing and muzzling and turning inside her, limbs pushing under her smooth belly fur. She didn’t like this Siabod. She didn’t want her young born here among dark, peaty soil and slate fragments that cut a careless mole. She shuddered to think now of the dark falls of rock in Cwmoer beneath them and the Siabod heights somewhere over the moor beyond from where the peat-colored river rushed down.

She wanted Bracken there, nearer than he was. She wanted to hear him stir outside, and not the wind. She wanted to call his name and know that he was there to say the silly things that mean so much; the silly things no male but Cairn had ever said to her when she was very young.