Duncton Wood (89 page)

“Bracken, Bracken, Bracken,” she whispered, looking at her swollen sides and trying to invoke not a mole so much as a peace and silence she had known when they had touched together by the glimmering Stillstone. She started to cry and then stopped, and then started again. She wanted him to come to her without being called. She wanted her litter to come in the warmth of his trust. She was so restless, so confused, and the burrow wasn’t right any more, not here with those black slates outside in whose shadow Mandrake had been born.

She stirred yet again, rising clumsily to her paws and going first to the tunnel and then to the entrance and then snouting outside against the bitter wind that came down the moor. She looked over through the darkness toward where the entrances to Bracken’s and Boswell’s burrows lay and wished that Bracken was there on the surface to greet her.

She wished he would come over to her and whisper to her and hustle her back into the warmth of her burrow and say it was all right, it didn’t matter where her litter was born. But she was restless and turned away upslope from the stream, thinking that perhaps there might be a better place for her litter nearby where the soil was less cold and a burrow could be free of these slates. She moved restlessly along, almost talking aloud to herself, telling her young that it wouldn’t be long now and she loved them and they shouldn’t be afraid; though she was – yes, she was – so afraid.

Bracken follow me follow me, she thought as she moved higher and higher in the darkness up the slopes to find somewhere better. The wind grew steadily colder, but Rebecca didn’t notice; indeed, she was almost hot with sudden energy as she moved on steadily away from the safety of her burrow out onto the moor that rose round and above the quarried cliffs of Cwmoer.

Then, unnoticed, the first whipping sleets of snow came rushing with the wind. She laughed into the wind. She felt hot and alive in it and as the sleety snow whipped along more strongly through the darkness, she did not care.

I’ll find a place for them soon, she said to herself, the grass changing to grassy rock, the flat turning to a slope that grew steeper and steeper as she contoured it, the cwm off to her right. There is a better place... but I haven’t quite found it, she kept telling herself. The stream suddenly stopped her forward movement and she climbed up along it until the ground grew flatter where it had fanned out into braids of streamlets running among soft, boggy grass and moss, and she crossed it.

So Rebecca wandered, higher and higher up the slopes of Siabod to where the soils were thin as old fur and the return down the rocks that she was able to climb so easily became more and more difficult.

Perhaps she rested. Perhaps she drank at the chill water of the innumerable streamlets that coursed down the slopes and which she crossed without difficulty; always she must have been looking for soil and a place for a burrow that reminded her more of the peace and warmth of Duncton Wood. Until sometime in the night, as dawn approached, the energy that preceded the start of the birth of her litter must have begun to fail and Rebecca must have started to feel tired and desperate.

Sometime in the night, not too long before dawn, the real blizzard came. Sudden, cold and harsh – a driving and swirling of biting snow that stung a mole’s snout and roared so loud that thinking became hard. The snow barely settled, preferred to race like moving ice across the surface; but then it began to form eddies and drifts to the lee side of the bigger rocks and to spread out from these in scatters of white. Nowhere safe for Rebecca to stop, so on she went, still certain that she could find a place where she could burrow down into stiUness for the sake of herself and her litter.

Did she stop now and try to turn back and discover that it was impossible to go back without sliding and falling? Did she think to find a drift of snow and stop for safety there? Did she wander here and there, confused, and know that she was lost? The blizzard grew worse, creating a nightmare dawn in which the only sound is the rushing snow and the wind seems to tear at fur and eyes and talons and tail, flattening a mole that tries to move against it, toppling one over that tries to run with it.

It was sometime then that Bracken awoke and heard the blizzard’s roar. He went immediately to Rebecca’s tunnel, finding even the short run between the two a struggle to cross. But she was not there. He rushed back to Boswell’s burrow, and the two called uselessly, Boswell coming to the entrance and peering out into the racing snow that fell in flurries of cold into his tunnel.

“Rebecca! Rebecca!” they called, but the blizzard was so loud that they could not even hear each other’s call.

Bracken stepped full out into the blizzard and cried “Rebecca!” for he loved her, she was his love, and as panic and anger came over him at the thought of her loss, he pressed forward up the slope in the direction in which his instinct told him she had gone without even looking back to say a word to Boswell.

“Bracken! Bracken!” cried Boswell as the racing blizzard blotted out Bracken’s retreating back and Boswell too tried to go after him, but was too weak and found it hard even to regain access to his tunnels.

While up through the blizzard Bracken went, trusting to his instinct to find Rebecca, who must have gone seeking a birth burrow as females in litter sometimes will. Oh, Rebecca! he cried out in despair as the icy, racing snow tore at him, Rebecca!

She wandered on through the blizzard, no longer in any set direction but disorientated and growing progressively weaker as the effort to find a place, any place she could litter, came over her. But not here, not here where the snow is thin as ice on the bare rock ground and shadows of half-seen boulders and shapes in the racing snow seem to loom; and where a litter would be lost. Not here!

Somewhere, sometime, Rebecca came across the fresh tracks of another mole in the thin snow. She looked at them disbelievingly until she thought, and then she knew, that it was Bracken, her Bracken, come for her, and she turned to follow them, for they were fresh and the racing snow hadn’t even started to obscure them. “Bracken!” she must have called, trying to follow and catch up with him, “Bracken!”

Ahead of her, not knowing she was so close by, he pressed on even faster and called her name despairingly into the wind, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca.

But try as she might, she was too tired and too heavy to move fast enough, and the tracks raced on ahead of her, beginning to fill with snow, growing fainter before her as her Bracken, trying to find her, moved farther and farther away from her. Then, finally, she lost the tracks and despair began to creep over her as she turned to the right, high above Cwmoer, to go with the wind, which was easier for her. And she knew that soon, in this waste, with the blizzard raging around, she would have to litter as Mandrake’s mother had done. Oh my loves, she must have whispered, forgive me, forgive me, as she hopelessly sought a place where she might burrow on the black slate plateaus of Siabod.

Off to her left, far off now and growing farther. Bracken pressed on, fearing more and more that he had lost his Rebecca forever in the snow.

He stopped and snouted about into the blizzard all around trying to make contact with his love. Great falls of black rock now rose above him, covered in ice and with the thin half-snow of the blizzard swirling like white mist aross their sheer faces. He did feel a pull from far, far off to the northwest, a pull that he wrongly thought might be his Rebecca calling. So he turned toward it and away from his Rebecca, not knowing that up there, through the wastes, far off, stood the great Stones of Castell y Gwynt, which had waited for mole for so long. He thought he could feel his Rebecca there, and so he stumbled forward across the rocks and moors where the wind was so strong that only the thinnest layer of snow settled. He prayed to the Stones for his Rebecca as he began the terrible trek that, unbeknown to him, would grant the last wishes of Skeat that the Stone should be honored even in these wastes; and to fulfill his promise to the scribemoles of Uffington and Boswell as well. But he only thought of Rebecca and of how somehow, somewhere, he had lost her.

While Rebecca, lost now above Cwmoer in the white-out of the blizzard, finally gave up her futile search for safety and settled into the thin snow, her back curled against the bitter wind, as one by one her litter began to be born and from their very first moment she battled to protect their lives just as Mandrake’s mother had once battled so bravely to protect his.

It was three full days before Boswell was able and strong enough to move from his burrow out into the blizzard. He had thought a thousand times of what he should do, knowing that he did not have the strength to go upslope into the storm, and only one possibility seemed to slip and slide his way back down through Cwmoer and try to find Arthur of Siabod and perhaps he would know what to do. But he never could find him, wandering lower and lower down Cwmoer in his weakness from the wound until the time came that he had to find food and so give up the search. Soon afterward he knew he would never find the strength to go back up into the blizzard wastes above Cwmoer. He had lost Bracken, lost Rebecca. The Seventh Stillstone, the Seventh Book... they were not after all his to find. He found that he could not even return to Siabod, for the way by which he had come so recently with Celyn and Bracken was blocked by snow and ice. So he turned his back on Siabod and pointed his snout back to the south, toward Uffington. Asking himself as he left those futile questions to the Stone that anymole asks in the face of pointless tragedy, all of which begin with
Why?

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T
HAT
same day, Bracken, nearing starvation, found to his surprise that he was dropping rapidly into a valley where the snow was thicker, and he was able to burrow into its silence out of the blizzard. If the soil beneath had been anything else but wormless peat, he might have stayed still and waited for the blizzard to pass. But it was peat, and so on he had to go – sometimes through the snow itself, sometimes out on the surface where its depth was shallow. Until, at last, he was in a river valley where the soil was rich with food under the layer of snow.

For a whole day he was too tired and shocked to do more than rest and eat and regain his strength. But when he had, the pull from Ae northwest continued. What called him on? He knew it was no longer the hope of finding Rebecca, for Siabod was now far behind him. He crouched clear of the snow’s edge by the river and looked across it through the continuing wind, sensing more great heights beyond him. His snout traveled the length of the great ridge on the far side of the valley and he began to know that there, where such power seemed to come from, must stand the Stones he had been sent to reach. Castell y Gwynt... Tryfan... Rebecca. He whispered the names into the wind, careless of his own life now that Rebecca was gone, and knowing that this was his final trek.

Even so, he shivered as he looked about the worm-full tunnels he had made by the river, and then up to the wastes from which he had no expectation of ever returning. He remembered something Celyn had said about the final climb having to be done fast to the Stones because the ground was wormless and then, impulsively, he was off – up the river to a bridge, across a way which even the roaring owls seemed to have abandoned to the snow, and then climbing once again with growing despair in his heart. So far to go, so little time.

Strange thoughts flew at him out of the wind and snow, most of them of Mandrake. It was as if he knew with certainty that this was the way Mandrake had come – up Cwmoer, over Siabod, and then up here. He remembered Mandrake again, his power and despair, but most of all he remembered Mandrake’s last sad cries to Rebecca by the Duncton Stone, which he had not known how to listen to. Now, as he climbed onward and upward into the cold and rocks on the far side of the valley from Siabod, he spurred himself forward by telling himself that he was at last answering Mandrake’s call. Cruel Mandrake, mad Mandrake, but a mole that Rebecca had loved. And if, as he climbed, he fancied he saw in the flurries of snow and the changing shadows of the contorted rocks the shape of a great and lumbering mole, what then? It no longer mattered. Y Wrach had said that Mandrake would come back. So let him come back, here now, to guide me with his knowledge and power to the great Stones, and to the Tryfan Stones themselves.