Duncton Wood (92 page)

He stayed a while, seemed unimpressed by what he saw, wouldn’t say a word about Rebecca’s journey or what she had been up to, and then, when November came, finally left.

Her return established once and for all time Comfrey’s status as a mole whose eccentric isolation and abstracted habits seemed to have given him special gifts of wisdom and foresight. He had always said Rebecca would come back. Now he found the reverence they held him in embarrassing because there wasn’t anything special in what he did or said: he just listened to the Stone. And anyway, Rebecca was never going to leave Duncton forever, just like that: so there seemed no call for any fuss and bother.

He accepted Rebecca back rather as a pup takes it as a complete matter of course that his mother will return, even if she’s been gone a rather long time. But for most of the moles her return was just a nine-day wonder. She was their healer, wasn’t she? A mole could always turn to her. In fact, come to think of it, it was just a little bit cheeky of her ever to have pushed off like that for so long.

Longest Night passed, the second since the one with Bracken, and chill January ran into freezing February. The cycle of seasons again.

Bit by bit she told Comfrey what had happened, and on those days when he knew that she was mourning Bracken, who must have been lost up on the slopes of Siabod looking for her, he made sure to be close by and quiet, just so she knew that she was loved.

But always, at the back of his mind, was the fear that the day would come when she would slide down into that black despair he had seen once before, and he wondered if he would have the strength again to see her through.

“If it’s going to come, then let it come,” he used to mutter to the Stone as he passed it by on leaving her burrows. And there came a day, at the start of February, when it did.

There is a way to kill a mole that is so unimaginably cruel that even an owl might quail before the thought of it. Moles who live in systems plagued by it call it, quite simply, the Talon. But most, living in woods and distant fields as they do, have no name for it, and when, by terrible chance, they happen on it, or it on them, then their imagination can barely take in its harsh reality.

It is called a harpoon trap. It has long, sharp prongs set on a spring which are poised above a tunnel in which a pawplate is set. The tunnel is blocked. The mole reopens it, touches the plate and down plunges the unseen Talon, which pierces and squashes at one and the same cruel time. A lucky mole dies at once. But through the paw, or shoulder, or flank, many unlucky ones are impaled, often too shocked even to struggle, and death comes on them with agonized slowness.

By February, Bracken had reached a system on the chalk no more than twenty moledays from Duncton. Drawn as ever by the ancient sarsen stones that follow the chalk, he came one day to a field that seemed almost too good to be true. Open and flat, used as pasture for sheep in the summer and rich with worms as a result, and empty of moles. Off to one side of it stood a great circle of stones, which gave him comfort for he liked their presence, and since he liked to travel in stages – resting at a good place when he could find one – he decided to make the field his own.

It already had a few old tunnels in it but no sign of mole at all. Perhaps he should have been suspicious; perhaps he was tired, and as he approached nearer and nearer to Duncton, his mind was excited at approaching so near his home system after so long away and wondering what he might find.

The field was good and he enjoyed prospecting it and then finally starting his tunnels over near the Stones, where another mole had left off. One day, two days, four days passed, and a heavy hoarfrost came. The ground grew white and hard, and as the worms tunneled down deeper he followed suit, throwing up on the surface great heaps of reddish soil conspicuous against the frost.

He ate well and slept long, putting off renewing his journey as long as he could. Then a day came when he found a tunnel burrowed out the evening before, which was blocked and smelled strange. Badgers? Rabbits? Weasels? He shrugged and sighed and started to build it up again, ignoring the strange smell, for he had scented more dangerous things than that.

A forward step, a shiny, sinking flatness where the floor should have been, a click of steel, and from above came a piercing, lunging shock, so painful that he seemed himself to be the scream he screamed as it entered his right shoulder and impaled him to the floor.

To what does a mole turn when a prong of steel thrusts through his body and sticks him to a tunnel floor, cutting through his veins and arteries and breaking through the joints and bones on which so much of his life depends?

As the agony came piercing into him, Bracken began a cry for help no other mole could ever have understood, for it was distorted with such terrible pain: it was a name, the only name that finally, when he had come right to the edge of life itself, he thought of as protection:
Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca,
he screamed. And even though he knew that she was dead, he cried out her name that she might come to him, to help her love; his love,
Rebecca.

Like the other moles in Duncton, Comfrey heard Rebecca’s terrible scream of pain echo down the tunnels of the Ancient System that February day. But while the others quailed before it and ran to their burrows in fear, he turned toward it, running, running to help Rebecca, crying out that he was coming, running into her screams.

He found her out on the surface, running wildly this way and that among the roots of the leafless trees, crying out and sobbing, no no no no, and writhing in a terrible pain and saying help him help him oh help him, and not seeming to see Comfrey or hear him as he asked what it was, what was wrong, what he could do, what was hurting her, and he tried to hold her still to find out what it was – because he could see nothing.

But she was racked with pain, and ran in sobbing agony here and there as if she was trying to find something, or shake something off, and then screaming Bracken’s name over and over and saying help him help him help him, her breath coming out in great gasping sobs of pain, her face contorted with it as if she were possessed by an evil that she could not fight.

“Rebecca, Rebecca,” Comfrey shouted at her to try to stop her, but the more he called her name, the worse she seemed to get, until her talons cut and dug into the roots she passed and leaf litter flew from under the crazed scrabbling of her desperate paws.

Then she was into the Stone clearing and running randomly around it, not caring if she hit herself on the great roots by the Stone, dashing her talons on the ground and thrashing them in the air and shouting help him, help my Bracken, help my love, and then dashing against the very Stone itself, her paws and talons scratching and splintering on it as she shouted or screamed I can’t help him I can’t help you I can’t so help him help him – and there were tears of grief and pain down her twisted face and sweat on her flanks, and her breathing seemed to fill the Stone clearing with its pain. And Comfrey watched in horror as she cried oh help him, he’s Bracken, he’s still alive, so help him.

The turf above Bracken was torn open and white light from the sky added to his agony. A smell of roaring owl thrust down to the steel that impaled him and picked the trap and Bracken up bodily together. It grasped him firmly and then pulled him off the Talon, down a tunnel whose sides were his own exposed nerves, and though he was free of the Talon, the pain became worse as he was held up in the air, limp as death, and bloody. There was the growl of a voice whose language he could not understand.

“Little bastard,” he said.

And then he was thrown swinging through the air, arcing up into the sky and down, down into a floating sea of pain, down and down and thumping, bumping against one of the great Stones by the side of the field, and he had a moment’s sight of his paw flopping against it, covered in his own red blood, before he felt the pain again.

The smell of the creature went away. Wind rustled the grass by the Stones. Agony filled him. And all he could think of was the absurd thought, so silly, that he must be dying; and yet the Stone was warm against his paw, vibrating with a life and power that frightened him, but which he could not turn away from.

Comfrey stayed on with Rebecca in the clearing but no longer said her name. He stayed by her to protect her if other danger came, watching as her terrible agony gave way to something which, in some ways, was even worse – the sight of her draining herself away into the Stone with continual, almost inaudible, healing words, each one drawn out from all the agony she herself had known and passed in some mysterious way into the Stone of Duncton which now seemed to vibrate with her life. Until darkness began to fall, and then night came, and then it was dark, and only her sobs and whispers to the Stone sounded among the winter trees, my love for here my love my love my love my love, the sounds growing weaker and weaker as the night drew on.

Some time after darkness took the light away, Bracken came to again into a sea of pain and found that he was not dead, not dead at all, and that around him the circle of Stones on whose edge he lay was warm and shaking in the night with a power and light that he knew and had seen before. A light of life that was calling him to its center, a light of love that had a being and warmth and the feel of soft fur as he whispered again and again the only thing that made him feel his way beyond the pain, Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca... she was there in the center of the circle of Stones and she, and their power, were calling him, stopping him failing asleep, stopping him drowning into the pain, making him crawl, inch by bloody inch, each inch a mile of pain, into the center of Rebecca’s healing love that told him she was there alive, waiting waiting, her healing power a call to him. And feeling her need for him, feeling her love, he crawled through the pain into the healing circle of the Stones and back from the edge of life.

While by the Stone in Duncton Wood, when everything had fallen still and it was nearly midnight, Rebecca finally sighed and took her paws away from the Stone’s face. Oh, she sighed, oh my love.

When Comfrey went to her, he was astonished to see that she was smiling. “Bracken is alive,” she said. “He is, you know, he really is. He may never come back to Duncton but it no longer matters, for he knows the love is there, our love is there...” But it did matter, and Comfrey saw that it mattered, now more than ever.

“C-come on, Rebecca, you’d better go back to your burrows and get some sleep. Come on.” And he led her down to her burrow and settled down near her until she slept, and watched over her until her breathing was regular and slow, and peaceful as the Stone.

   45  

R
EBECCA
ran laughing down the slopes toward the Old Wood, calling out, “Comfrey, Comfrey! See if you can find me!”

Comfrey chased after her, a little clumsily because he was never much good on his paws, but marveling at how Rebecca had changed for the better since that terrible night in February. Since then she had shed moleyears, and behaved more and more like a happy-go-lucky pup each day than the female who had seen four Longest Nights through and was healer to the system.

Healer? Well, no more. It wasn’t that she no longer cared for the other moles, or tried to ignore them, or wasn’t helpful when they came to her: but everymole seemed to sense that Rebecca had changed and no longer had the desire or will to support them when, it must be said, they could so often find support within themselves. She seemed now to see beyond their troubles and into their very souls, and it troubled them that she did, and so they preferred to leave her alone.

Only a few of the older moles, and one or two of the young ones, came to her – the ones who understood that the greatest healing she could give was the sense of joy and peace she herself now felt in the wood about her.

So Comfrey now became healer, and it was to him that they mostly went with their troubles, which he was able to help them with in his-own eccentric way, giving them herbs that might, or might not, be of practical help.