Duncton Wood

Chapter Thirty-Six

The following March Bracken and Boswell finally came to within a day’s journey of the Blowing Stone, which stood at the foot of Uffington Hill, and more than six long moleyears had passed. They had faced every kind of physical danger moles can face—river, ice, owls and weasels, and marsh—and worse, had seen that system after system had been devastated by the plague. In many only a few solitary moles survived, turned half mad by the mystery of why they had not die or showing such a fear of strangers that Bracken and Boswell might have been the plague incarnate.

More than once their path crossed that of other wanderers, some looking for moles whom they could not believe were dead, while others were thin and unkempt and ate little, telling of the curse that had fallen on the world and the punishment that still awaited each one of them.

These encounters, and the strain of the journey itself, had changed Bracken. His face fur was now lined and he had matured; at the same time he had filled out and become more powerful-looking so that he had something of the solid strength of his father Burrhead, though none of the heaviness. He was not aware of it himself (though Boswell was) but he was now a formidable mole to face, for his four paws were firmly on the ground and his gaze was often clear and direct, as from a settled heart. But recently there had come a weariness of spirit over him, especially with the beginning of spring, which only Rebecca would have lifted from him. Days went by when he would talk little, and Boswell understood from the way he looked around and ahead at each turn in their journey that he was searching for the love he and Rebecca made together.

Boswell had changed, too, though not physically. He was still thin and jerky in movement, his eyes darting this way and that with the great curiosity about life that he had; his coat, shot through with grey as it was, was now fuller and more glossy than when Bracken had first met him in the drainage channel.

But the biggest change was in his spirit, which became ever more simple and laughing, so that a mole who didn’t know him might almost have taken him for a fool. He saw laughter in the simplest things, and often when they were in difficulties it was his good humour that took the frown from Bracken’s face. And often, too, Bracken’s own laughter would never have started had not Boswell been there to show that a heart may be light even when circumstances are grim.

At last, on a grey March morning after days in which the pull of Uffington had become stronger and stronger, they came within sight of the Blowing Stone. Or rather within sound, for the day was windy and the first signal they had that they had reached Uffington was the low moan of the wind in the crevices and holes of the Stone, all of which carried in vibrating waves down into the vale up which they were travelling.

‘Listen! That’s the Blowing Stone,’ said Boswell.

‘So we’re almost there!’ said Bracken, unable to believe that their long journey was nearly over.

Their pace quickened and soon the wind carried to them a scent Bracken had almost forgotten—beech trees. They were nearly on chalk again. Soon they came to a clump of beech and as they passed into it, the familiar roots, powerful in the ground, and the dry smell of chalk and beech leaf litter and brought back to Bracken a memory of Duncton Wood, of the Ancient System and, most of all, of Rebecca. She was suddenly full in his heart again as, passing beyond the last of the beech trees, they came to the great Blowing Stone itself and crouched down thankfully in its presence.

It stood at the edge of a field, overshadowing a hedge that grew near it, and had been weathered by wind and rain and sometimes ice into a thousand scoops and hollows, with holes in its upper parts which the moles could not see but which were the source of its moaning and hooting in the wind. It was split vertically along its natural cleavage as well, so that from some points it looked more like three stones than one.

Looming over it was the steep escarpment of Uffington Hill itself, which rose in sheer shadows of nearly vertical, tussocky grass, many hundreds of molefeet high. A mole’s gaze had to tilt higher and higher, and still higher, before he could see the shadows end at the distant top of the hill and the white-grey March sky beyond.

‘Over to the west, beyond the top of the hillface, that’s where the Holy Burrows lie,’ said Boswell. ‘It takes half a day for most moles to climb it—a bit longer for me.’

The day was drawing in, grey and cold, and they decided to stay where they were until full light before climbing the hill, eager though both of them were to get to the top. But they were tired and thankful for food and a temporary burrow near the Blowing Stone, falling asleep to the soft vibrations and moans of the Stone.

Because the escarpment faced north, dawn was a long time coming, and even when it came it seemed gloomy and wan. The wind had died and the March grass through which they started their climb was lank and dreary. But it soon became shorter and more wiry and their hearts began to fill with excitement as, step by step, they climbed up towards the goal they had aimed at for so long. At first, Bracken took the lead, but in his eagerness to get to the top, he so outpaced the limping Boswell that finally he stopped and let Boswell set the pace, and it seemed right that Boswell should lead the way.

The hillface grew steeper and steeper and their pace slower, and Bracken began to have the feeling that behind him there was nothing but clear air and a tumbling fall to somewhere far below. At the same time they felt the wind behind them, a wind that blew on even the calmest of days up the scarp face, flattening the grass upwards and on towards the top.

Higher and higher they climbed until each step was accompanied by a pant and they could think of nothing but finding a talonhold in the next patch of rough grass ahead and summoning the strength to push themselves and pull themselves yet higher. The grass was tough, more like a set of long pine needles than the soft pasture and meadow grass of the valleys they had grown used to, and was a buff-yellow or brown rather than green, scorched in summer by sun and in winter by wind.

They stopped several times for a rest before Boswell said—or rather breathed: ‘Halfway. A good way to go yet.’

Bracken looked above him and the scarp face still looked as massive as when they had first started. They felt exposed, for the grass was now quite short and the sky loomed hugely all around them, while the soil, which showed through the grass in places, was dry and stony with flakes of chalk and flint—not easy to burrow into quickly if a kestrel happened along.

They pressed on, the wind coming stronger and colder behind them all the time, blowing across their fur and driving it forward like the grass beneath them. On they went, the wind so battering them from behind that in the final stretch it almost blew them up the hill and they had to lean back a little into it to keep their balance.

Then the grass changed to a short, green pasture grass, and the slope suddenly slackened to a final rolling stretch. Fifteen moleyards, ten, five, and then, as simple as you please, they were there together, on top of Uffington Hill, at the end of their journey.

Bracken turned round, snouted into the shrill wind, and looked out on to a sea of sky, massive above and ahead of him, and below, the hazy distance of fields and grasslands, meadows and valley, trees, rivers and farmland. The wind was so strong that it took Bracken’s breath away and made his eyes water, and so noisy that talking was impossible so that Boswell had to cuff him lightly to draw his attention as he indicated that they should retreat a little from the crest of the slope. They did so, and within a matter of ten moleyards the wind dropped to almost nothing and they could see and hear and think again. Boswell turned away from the slope and waved a paw to the west. ‘Uffington!’ he said, excitement and apprehension in his voice. ‘By the Stone’s grace, and with its strength, I am back. May the Stone have preserved the moles I left behind.’

Beyond him the clear grass swept into a tussocky distance. In the foreground it seemed as flat as the slope had been steep, though over a distance it undulated gently, in soft, delicate curves that changed subtly whichever way a mole turned and never seemed to stay the same.

‘Well, come on then,’ said Boswell, winding his way among old molehills flattened by wind and rain in which flakes and chips of flint were mixed with the light soil, until he came to a hill of fresh earth. Burrowing into it, he led Bracken into the Holy Burrows at last.

The tunnels leading to the Holy Burrows were worn smooth with age and venerable use. Generations upon generations of scribemoles had trodden their way through them so that some of the protruding flints were rounded and shiny from the rubbing of flank fur, while the chalky floor was packed hard and shiny in places as well, so that near some of the entrances the light coming in made the tunnel floor look like dimly lit ice.

‘We’re nearly there now,’ said Boswell, ‘though there aren’t many moles about.’

‘I haven’t seen any. Not a single one. But I can scent them all right. Uffington must have been affected by the plague like every other system,’ said Bracken brutally. ‘Better face the fact, Boswell.’

‘Well, well,’ said Boswell, ‘we’ll soon know.’

Boswell led them on down a tunnel whose size was equal to the biggest in the Ancient System but whose sculpting was more aged—very like the simple rounds and squares of the tunnel beyond the Chamber of Roots which led to the buried part of the Stone. It sloped steadily downhill for a while before levelling off, and Bracken sensed that they had entered a deeper and somehow more sacred part of the system. It was a place to move slowly in, and with grace, and one where, if a mole spoke at all, he did so in a low voice that did not disturb the peace.

‘We are very near the libraries,’ said Boswell softly. ‘This is a holy place, Bracken, and it is best that you do not say anything to anymole we may meet. I do not think a mole who is not a scribemole has ever been here before, but nor do I remember anything in the writings or rules that is against it. But stay silent, move gently, and let me talk.’

The tunnel entered a round chamber that was the confluence of three other major tunnels as well as two much smaller ones.

‘That one leads to the Holy Burrows themselves,’ said Boswell, pointing to one that Bracken estimated ran westwards, ‘while this one leads to the libraries.’ He led the way down it slowly. As Bracken followed him out of the chamber and into the tunnel, he could have sworn he saw a mole watching them from where, seconds before, there had been nomole, in the entrance to the tunnel to the Holy Burrows. He thought he saw him clearly, an old mole with a long lean face and thin fur, but when he really looked, he wasn’t there! Strange! Bracken looked around him, feeling that in this place time did not mean quite what it meant in other systems. But he had seen a mole! He hastened after Boswell, anxious to keep him in sight.

The tunnel steepened suddenly, going down deeper and deeper, until it was cast into semisolid chalk in which fissures and stratum lines were visible. The air was heavy with the slow echoes of their movement but there was no windsound now at all. The tunnel levelled off again, ran to an entrance, and then they were through it and into an enormous chamber whose end was too far off to see. It was too complex and confusing a place to take in all at once, and it was some moments before Bracken could even make out its main features.

It was not a simple oval or square but rather appeared to be a series of interconnected chambers with entrances between them big enough to allow a mole to see a lot of the next chamber. There were arches and corners in the chambers, parts darker than others, and set into each of the many walls were surfaces on which were stacked what looked like pieces of bark and sometimes flakes of hard chalk. Above these surfaces were embossments like those in the Chamber of Dark Sound. There were stacks of bark on the floor as well, or piled against walls and, as far as Bracken was able to see into the linked chambers, there were more pieces of bark piled untidily there.

‘Books,’ whispered Boswell. ‘This is the main library.’

He was about to say more, and might have taken one of them down to show Bracken, when he was stopped short by a stirring at the far end of the chamber and a movement as what seemed a shadow changed into what looked like an ancient and grey-furred mole who was in the middle of a long yawn.

‘Well! I don’t know, I’m sure,’ the ancient mole muttered to himself, oblivious of their presence at the other end of the chamber. ‘I don’t know. If I didn’t put it where I should have, which is more than likely, then surely I would have put it here, which it seems I didn’t. How they expect me to do all this by myself I really don’t know. Come on, my beauty, where are you?’ he said, snouting back and forth among some of the books and evidently hoping that one of them, which he had obviously lost, would pop out of its own accord and announce its hiding place.

Boswell signalled to Bracken to move back into the shadows and not say anything as he advanced slowly on the ancient mole. He got nearer and nearer, but the mole did not seem to notice, muttering to himself and peering impatiently here and there among the books, turning over one or two half-heartedly and leaving them where they fell. Eventually Boswell made a discreet scratching noise to announce himself.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the old mole, ‘I’m coming. Can’t do everything, you know. Anyway, is it that important?’

He darted forward to an enormous book and started to pull it down, but its weight was too much for him to take it bodily off the surface. But it slid off on to him all the same and his tottering old paws struggled to keep in under control. Boswell stepped forward and relieved him of the book.

‘There we are!’ said Boswell. The old mole looked at him at last, peering at him with a frown. ‘I know you,’ he said.

‘Boswell,’ said Boswell.

‘Mmm, something like that,’ said the old mole.

Boswell stepped back a little and hesitated for a moment before saying, ‘Is it Quire? Are you Quire?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Quire. ‘Now what’s this?’ he muttered, peering at the book and then running his paw across its surface. He growled and grunted to himself and then stepped back, saying, ‘Here, you tell me. I’m losing my feel. Can’t even read any more. There was a time when I knew every book in the place by position alone, but since they changed it all round and then the plague came, it’s all gone to rack and ruin. I can’t keep it up all by myself.’

Bracken watched as Boswell examined the book. First he snouted rapidly over its surface. Then, for the first time ever in Bracken’s presence, he used his withered left paw positively. He swung it on to the book and, with a gentle caressing motion beautiful to see, ran the paw across the embossments on the book’s surface.

‘It’s the Avebury Hymnal, with an appendix of carols and lays,’ said Boswell.

‘No, that’s not the one. What I want is the Book of the Chosen Moles. You know…’

‘Linden?’

‘Do you know where it is?’ asked the old mole eagerly.

‘I know what it feels like,’ said Boswell, ‘at least I think I can remember.’ He snouted rapidly along the rows of books, muttering and twittering to himself, touching one book after another, half pulling out one or two, shaking his head, umming and ahhing and, it seemed to Bracken who had listened to their conversation without understanding a word of it, having the time of his life.

‘Got it,’ he announced finally, pulling another enormous book off the shelves. He ran his paw over it. ‘Linden’s Book of Chosen Moles, with additions by sundry paws,’ he read out.

‘Not before time,’ said Quire ungratefully.

‘Sorry,’ said Boswell.

‘You youngsters are all the same. Think you know it all. You wait till you’re as old as me and you’ll find nothing at all.’ He peered at Boswell again. ‘Where was it?’ he asked.

‘Where it always used to be.’

‘Damnation!’ said Quire, almost lifting himself off his paws with the violence of the word. ‘I can’t get used to the new system—always put books back in the wrong place now. I know you, don’t I? How did you survive the plague?’

‘I wasn’t here,’ said Boswell. ‘I’ve been away.’

‘Oh, yes!’ said Quire, seeming to remember but making it obvious that he didn’t. ‘Mmm. Which system?’

‘Duncton.’

‘One of the Seven! Did you get there?’

‘Yes,’ said Boswell, ‘I did.’

‘Good. Glad to have you back, especially since most of the scribemoles here went away during the plague or succumbed to it, and there’s hardly any left who know enough about the library to be much use to me. I remember you. Boswell, isn’t it? Should have told me before. Crippled but useful, as I remember. Where have you been?’

‘Duncton,’ repeated Boswell patiently.

‘Good. Glad to have you back,’ repeated Quire. ‘They’re in a bit of a flummox at the moment because there’s hardly enough moles to sing the Song and even though I offered my services to Skeat, he told me I was not chosen. So anyway, you can help me here…’

He seemed about to dragoon Boswell into work when three moles entered the chamber from one of the side chambers.

They snouted about, saw Boswell, and there was a moment of absolute stillness as everymole looked at each other. It was Boswell who broke the silence.

‘May the grace of the Stone be with you,’ he said. They relaxed a little.

‘And with thee,’ said one of the three.

They continued to look at each other.

‘I do not know you,’ said Boswell quietly, his voice echoing among the books, ‘but my name is Boswell. I have returned from a journey to Duncton Wood.’

One of the moles darted forward and snouted at him, turned round, and signalled to one of the others, who ran out of the entrance near where Bracken was crouching in the shadows. Soon several more moles joined them, none seeming to notice Bracken, who kept quite still as Boswell had told him.

As Boswell crouched there, the moles about him began a curious chanting, nearer speech than song, which was deep and rhythmic and to which Boswell occasionally responded. Bracken could not catch most of the words, which were in a language strange to him, but Boswell’s response seemed to be ‘And with thee, and with thee…’ the same as one of the moles had spoken to him. He only recognised the word ‘thee’ because he had heard Boswell speak it occasionally to very old moles they had met.

The moles were all shapes and sizes, and Bracken was disappointed to see that not one of them was white. Many were grey, and some just common or garden black, like him. But he had to admit that they did have an air of authority—a strange, quiet way of carrying themselves—that fitted well with the reverential air in the place and made him reluctant even to think of speaking or making a noise. He felt as if just being there was disturbing something precious and holy.

It was strange and exciting for him to see Boswell in this setting, for he saw how well he fitted here and, as it seemed to him, what enormous peace and authority emanated from Boswell. Bracken might not be able to tell what was being said, but he could sense that nomole there was going to attack Boswell and that was all he was really worried about. When the others had first come, he had been ready to leap forward and defend Boswell to the death.

Without warning, the chanting suddenly stopped and all the moles seemed to relax. Especially Quire, who had been fretting about behind Boswell and now said to one of the moles, ‘I’ve got it, here it is, the book he wants.’

But before there was time to reply, there was a stir and a sound from one of the side chambers. Two older-looking moles came forward, both with calm, severe expressions on their faces, and their look about the library brought an immediate hush to all the moles there. They stepped to either side of the chamber entrance and a mole came forward in whose presence Bracken felt an immediate awe. He wanted to lower his snout in a gesture of submission and, indeed, he did so, but he could not help keeping his eyes open at the extraordinary scene before him.

The mole was old and thin, with a frail, silver-grey coat of fur that was patchy in places and the most kindly eyes that Bracken had ever beheld. Bracken had seen him before, or thought he had: he was the mole who had seemed to be at the entrance to the Holy Burrows watching them as they entered the libraries. As he entered the chamber, the other moles cleared a path between him and Boswell, and Boswell, snout low, stepped forward a few paces towards him. And they then had a chanting exchange in the language Bracken could not understand.

‘Steyn rix in thine herte,’ said Boswell.

‘Staye thee hoi and soint,’ said the Holy Mole.

‘Me desire wot I none,’ replied Boswell.

‘Blessed be thou and ful of blisse,’ finished the Holy Mole. A blessing, thought Bracken. That’s what it was!

Then the Holy Mole smiled and Boswell stepped forward, and for a moment they nuzzled each other.

‘Well, Boswell, so you have returned. By the Stone’s grace you have come back!’

Boswell seemed unable to say anything, but looked at the Holy Mole almost with disbelief in his eyes.

‘Yes,’ said the Holy Mole, ‘it really is Skeat, your old master. Look what they’ve done to me!’ He laughed, a delightful laugh, very like the one that Boswell, in his moments of puppish delight in something, sometimes let forth.

‘Well, well… I said the journey blessing when you left and here you are, so many moleyears later, to prove that a mole may trust its power. Have you nothing to say to your Skeat? Those few of us left who remember you are going to want to hear your story very much; and those others here, whom you will not know, will surely profit by it.’

‘Skeat, I…’ As he said this, there was a slight gasp among the other moles and Skeat raised his paw, smiling.

‘You’re meant to call me “Holiness”, but… these are strange times and anyway, if I’m not mistaken, you were relieved of your vows.’ Then Skeat spoke to all of them rather than to Boswell, and said, ‘Remember he has not been here for many moleyears—perhaps more than twenty—and has forgotten our ways. But then it is not our ways or rituals that express the truth in the Stone but what is in our hearts. The Stone has sent Boswell back to us, for what purpose none can tell, though I have my own ideas. But the Stone will not mind if he calls me Skeat, or any other name for that matter.’

Turning to Boswell he said, ‘However, bringing a mole who is not a scribe into the Holy Burrows is just a trifle daring, even for you, Boswell. Who is he?’ With that, Skeat turned slowly to where Bracken crouched in the shadows, thinking nomole knew he was there.

If a yawning crevice could have opened up and swallowed him there and then, or if the rows of books could all have collapsed on him, hiding him from view, Bracken would not have minded in the least. Fifty marauding moles, twenty weasels, ten owls… anything but the sudden exposure to the gaze of all those scribemoles.

He stepped forward reluctantly, out of the darkness by the tunnel entrance, hardly daring to breath and, not knowing what else to do, he kept his snout low and waited.

‘His name is Bracken,’ said Boswell, ‘and without his help I would not be here now and nor would there be anything to report of my quest for the seventh Book.’ At this there was a sudden excited buzz of whispers among the moles. The seventh Book! So Boswell was one of those who had gone in search of it so long ago, thought the new scribemoles, who were wondering what this was all about. They gazed on Bracken with awe.

‘He has also come to give thanks to the Stone for a mole who survived the plague. I have reason to give thanks to her myself, as many moles have.’

Skeat stepped forward towards Bracken, going up to him and touching him gently on his left shoulder, just where another mole had touched him once, long, long before, after they had met by the Stone. The feeling he had had then was the same as he had now, and he looked up into Skeat’s eyes as if no other mole existed. He was close to tears.

‘What is the mole’s name?’ asked Skeat gently, so quietly that it was almost like a private conversation.

‘Rebecca,’ whispered Bracken.

‘May the Stone protect her and bless her with strength. May you both have strength for the trials to come.’

No other mole heard him say this blessing, not even Boswell, and Skeat himself was surprised to find himself saying it. But there was something about this mole Boswell had brought to Uffington that made him see again something that he had often thought, though most scribemoles and even masters forgot it: the Stone very often works through moles who are far from Uffington’s peace and prayer, who may themselves never understand the Stone or, indeed, may not even trust it. Such moles may show a courage far greater than many a scribemole shows in their pursuit of truth and their fulfilment of the tasks the Stone has set. Their pain and suffering may be as deeply felt and as spiritual as a scribemole’s, or one who worshipped the Stone. Skeat sensed that Bracken was just such a mole.

Skeat turned back to Boswell and said ‘And what of your quest for the seventh Book? Did you succeed…?’ His question tailed off into nothing and an excited hush fell over the scribemoles who were listening.

‘I have not found the seventh Book,’ said Boswell, a ripple of disappointment running round the moles in the library, ‘but Bracken of Duncton’—they all looked at Bracken—‘has, I believe, seen the seventh Stillstone. He knows where it is and has shown me.’

There was absolute silence in the library.

‘It is in a sacred place, a protected place, and one into which nomole may simply go. Only a mole or moles graced by the Stone, as Bracken was graced, may go there and perhaps nomole in our lifetime will ever be able to enter there again.’

‘A strange beginning, Boswell, and a story which, when you both have rested and eaten, you had better tell me of in full. There is much, too, for you to hear, and if you are as you once were, you will ask me a dozen questions for every one I answer! But not until you have eaten and rested.’

With that Skeat raised one paw briefly to them all and said, ‘In worde, werke, will and thought, make us meke and lowe in hert. And us to love as we shulde do.’

As Skeat left, Bracken noticed that one of the two moles who had come in with him took the book Quire had been searching for and carried it off after the Holy Mole.

Then, thinking that if he wasn’t ‘lowe in hert’ he was certainly low in strength, Bracken willingly followed one of the scribemoles as he led them away to two simple burrows in the chalk soil where they found food was provided, and they were left to eat and sleep. Bracken found it hard to fall asleep for thinking about the strangeness of the Holy Burrows, and finally got up to go and have a chat with Boswell. But he found him fast asleep, head and snout curled on to his crippled paw as they always did when he was sleeping peacefully. Bracken did not disturb him but returned to his own burrow. It was only the memory of the private blessing Skeat had given to Rebecca and himself, and the consecration he felt that it imposed upon their love, that finally brought him the peace he needed before he, too, fell into a deep sleep.

In the course of their subsequent conversations with Skeat, which were held over a period of many weeks in a simple chamber along the tunnel that led to the Holy Burrows, with just one other mole in attendance, Bracken and Boswell were to learn much more about how the plague had ravaged the systems in general.

It had started in the north and travelled steadily southwards, killing about nine out of ten moles who came into contact with it. It was regarded by the scribemoles as a judgement on moles by the Stone and, to their credit, a judgement on themselves as well when it struck Uffington, killing as many there as elsewhere.

Skeat had been the only master to survive and had accordingly, by the tradition of precedence, been elected Holy Mole—a position he had neither desired nor expected and one he accepted with reluctance. One reason for this was that he sensed, as others in many different systems had, that the time in which they lived was one of great change and destiny. They needed a Holy Mole of greater wisdom and experience than he, and one who had seen into the silence of the Stone far more deeply than he felt he had.

But with such thoughts, genuinely modest as they were, he did himself an injustice: Uffington, and through its example all systems, needed in that troubled time a leader who was strong enough to impose the unity and trust the conditions of devastation demanded, while wise enough to dispense with the rigid and sometimes inflexible rituals of the past.

It seemed that many of the plague survivors had felt, as Bracken had, that they should visit Uffington to express their thanks to the Stone. Most had been unable or unwilling to do this in person, preferring to visit the nearest Stone, from where their prayers of thanksgiving came to Uffington. That many such visits had been made was known, because some scribemoles had, like Boswell, survived and made their way back to Uffington, while a very few nonscribes had come as well. Bracken was one, but there had been others.

‘We have had a visit from a mole who knows you both and has spoken well of you: Medlar, from the north.’

So he had got here, after all! The news excited Bracken, who was now a little less awed than he had been at first in Skeat’s presence and who, since Boswell wasn’t going to ask, boldly asked the question himself.

‘Where is he?’

‘It will not be possible to see him,’ said Skeat with a certain finality to his voice. ‘May the Steyn rix in hys herte,’ he added, words that seemed to have a special significance for Boswell, who started a little at it and muttered a blessing under his breath. It was this that warned Bracken against asking outright where Medlar was, and this too that gave him the uncomfortable feeling that there was a lot about the Holy Burrows that he did not understand, and never would.

‘With your visit we have now heard from all six of the seven major systems—Duncton, Avebury, Uffington, of course, Stonehenge, Castlerigg and Rollright,’ said Skeat.

‘What’s the last one which you haven’t heard from?’ asked Bracken.

‘It’s the great system of Siabod in North Wales. Nomole has come to Uffington who knows what has happened to it in the plague. Perhaps nomole survived, but I think that is unlikely… the Siabod moles are famous, or notorious, for their toughness. Of all the seven systems this is the least accessible and the most difficult to live in.’

Bracken listened fascinated, for Siabod was Mandrake’s old system, the one where they spoke a different language, even today.

‘Is there a Stone there?’ he asked, hoping to find out something more.

‘Now that is something we would very much like to know! The records have no account of a Stone on the Siabod system itself, but there is a constant reference to a Stone or stones at a place nearby mysteriously called Castell y Gwynt, and there is a single reference in the records of Linden, referring to the travels of Ballagan to the “Stones of Tryfan” which we think is a group of the Stones in this other place. Perhaps bigger than the rest.’

‘Why’s it so important?’ asked Bracken, his mind racing with these mysteries and strange names.

‘Because while other systems come and go, the seven great systems have always been occupied and lived in. Some, like Duncton, have been cut off for long periods, but moles there have always finally come forward who have maintained the traditions laid down by Ballagan himself, as you yourselves have now. We do not know—we have never really known—if the moles of Siabod worship at whatever Stone it is that stands at Castell y Gwynt. Their language is different and no scribemole that I know has ever bothered to learn it.’

‘Does it matter?’ asked Bracken, rather regretting the question when he saw the look of patient tolerance that flickered over Skeat’s face for a moment.

‘I think so, Bracken. We live in a time of trial and trouble. Worship of the Stone is really at the centre of all moles’ lives, although it has been forgotten by so many. But we in Uffington are to blame for that. There was a time when scribemoles visited each of the systems at least once in a generation and the seven main systems more regularly than that. And from those seven the strength would go out to the others. It is now no longer possible to visit Siabod. We have too few scribemoles even to service Uffington itself, but if we knew that the Stone was at least honoured in all of the seven systems, that would be a start. And we do—for six of them. For these have been visited and by the Stone’s grace even Duncton, so long cut off, has made itself felt again. But Siabod… we know nothing of it. Siabod has always been an exception. It requires a mole of exceptional fortitude of spirit and body to reach it, let alone return from it.’

Skeat was silent for a while before starting to talk quietly again, almost as if thinking aloud. ‘The systems, the worship of the Stone… it has all slipped into disarray. Now the plague. We have a chance to start again—perhaps we already have, for your visit, like Medlar’s before you, fills me with hope. But what strength it would give us in Uffington to know that all seven of the major systems were centred on the Stone… to know that Siabod, too, worships the Stone! You must both forgive an old mole his dreams. Perhaps this office makes a mole overreach himself. Well, now, to other things.’

He asked them a great many questions about Duncton, a subject Bracken had not particularly enjoyed listening to Boswell talk about in the library. There was something special about his experience by the buried part of the Stone with Rebecca that made him recoil instinctively from having it talked about in public. However, Skeat seemed to sense this and his manner was so gentle and understanding that soon Bracken was describing what had happened two Longest Nights previously in a detail, and with a passion, that even Boswell had not heard.

Skeat wanted to know a great deal about the location of the Stillstone after this—how accessible it was, what the Chamber of Roots consisted of, whether any other moles knew of it, and many things more—and his interest and concern extended to the story of Bracken himself, and Rebecca, Mandrake, Rune, Mekkins… they all played a part in the story Bracken was induced to tell. And Skeat was especially interested that Mandrake was said to be from Siabod, and fell silent for a long time thinking about it.

Then suddenly, it was over. Skeat had finished with his questions and there seemed nothing more to say.

‘Leave us now, Bracken, for I have to talk to Boswell alone for a while…’ and Bracken found himself excluded, cut off from the mole with whom he had shared everything for moleyears on end, and at a loose end in a system where the moles were strange and there were long silences, and great spaces, in which a mole like Bracken felt restless and uneasy. He was taken back to his burrow by a silent mole, who responded to all questions with a bland smile and a maddening shake of the head which might have been ‘Yes’ and might have been ‘No’ but seemed most likely to be ‘Perhaps’. Yet when they arrived and the mole seemed about to leave, he hesitated and asked suddenly: ‘

Did you really see the seventh Stillstone?’ And then, before Bracken could even begin to think what to say, the mole added, ‘I’m sorry. I should not have asked such a thing.’

But Bracken, a little fed up with all the secrecy, said boldly, ‘Yes. I did!’ and added with what he thought was obvious irony, ‘It was ten times as big as a mole and made a noise like a bumblebee.’ Bracken regretted this expression of irritability the moment he had uttered it, for the mole scurried away as if he had been stung by a bee and no amount of calling after him would bring him back. With a sigh, Bracken returned to the burrow, laid himself down, and in no time at all was asleep. He had done more talking than he realised, and there is something about memories recalled in detail that makes a mole tired.

He was woken up by Boswell saying, ‘Bracken! Bracken! I’m sorry about all that. But it’s not important…’

‘What did he want to say to you?’ asked Bracken, but immediately his voice died miserably in his mouth because he could see Boswell stiffen uncharacteristically and lower his snout, indicating that he didn’t want to talk about it.

‘I can’t say, Bracken. You must try to understand that there are things here which are impossible to explain…’

‘All I understand is that they’ve no use for what they call nonscribes around here,’ said Bracken angrily. ‘All this bloody way and there’s secrets all around. What’s this with Medlar, for example? Why can’t he be seen?’

Boswell lowered his gaze to the floor, his normally peaceful face troubled with Bracken’s feelings of being excluded, which, of course, he was. Perhaps, though, what had happened to Medlar was something he could explain. Surely it would do no harm.

‘Medlar has gone to a place which is to the west of Uffington Hill where the Silent Burrows are. It is not far, perhaps two miles at most, and it is connected to Uffington by a tunnel.’

‘What happens there?’ asked Bracken.

‘Well, that’s hard to explain. Nothing really. Nothing at all. There are special burrows there in which certain moles, only a very few, choose to live and rarely leave. In fact, the entrances are sealed up and they stay there in silence.’

‘What for?’ asked Bracken, incredulous.

‘Because they have reached a point where the only way forward is sitting still. Do you remember what Medlar used to say about the importance of doing that?’

‘Is that what he’s doing now, up there?’

Boswell nodded.

‘But how does he stay alive?’

‘Other moles bring him food. It is an honour to serve a silent mole. At some time all novices take their turn in serving them.’

‘What about fouling the burrow?’ asked Bracken.

‘They use two burrows. One of them is cleaned out by the other moles. But, in fact, it is not a problem. After a while, a silent mole eats less and less and the process seems to purify him in a strange way.’

‘When do they come out?’ Bracken wanted to know next—he had never heard anything so extraordinary in his life.

‘Nomole can say. Some can only bear it for a few days, though that is very rare, for the preparation is careful. Medlar, for example, has been preparing for this for many moleyears, probably without realising it, although his case is unusual since he comes from outside and is not a scribemole in the normal way. Others, in fact most, stay in the Silent Burrows for at least two moleyears, often very much longer. Some choose never to emerge again and one day, when no movement has been heard for a full moleyear, and when no food has been taken, the Holy Mole orders that their burrow should be honourably sealed.’

‘But what do they do?’

‘Pray. Meditate. Forget themselves. Learn something of the glory of the Stone.’

‘What about the ones who come out?’

‘What about them?’

‘Well, what happens to them?’

‘They continue to live ordinary lives. You have already met one: Quire was in the Silent Burrows for ten moleyears. But do not think his forgetfulness is as a result of that—he is very old now and, for all his bad temper, much honoured.’

‘Do all scribemoles go there?’

Boswell laughed. He had never heard Bracken ask so many questions all at once.

‘No, very few. It requires great strength and simplicity. Medlar is probably the only one there now, and I think it is significant that he is not a scribemole. As Skeat has said, we live in a strange time when traditions are changing. I do not know if a nonscribemole has ever been in the Silent Burrows before, but I do not see why they shouldn’t. Getting close to the Stone is not a prerogative of the scribemoles only, as my journey to Duncton has shown me.’ He was referring to moles like Mekkins, Rebecca and Bracken himself who, in his opinion, had much to teach scribemoles. Hadn’t he learned much himself from them, and had he not still so much to learn?

Boswell yawned, scratched himself, snouted this way and that and finally wandered off to his burrow to sleep. Bracken scouted around for some food and then returned to his own burrow to sleep, his mind full of images of moles in silent burrows. Uffington was a strange place, and he was not sure he liked it much. Well, he had done his bit and come here and thanked the Stone. The Holy… Skeat had blessed him, and Rebecca as well. His half-sleeping mind transmuted the image of silent burrows into one of the burrows he and Rebecca had found under the buried part of the Duncton Stone and he remembered them lying there together, touching and caressing, the light of the Stillstone all over the place, and he smiled, for nothing seemed more pleasant or comfortable. But then, as half-dreams often will, the image slid into something more fearful as he saw Rebecca in a silent burrow alone, waiting through the long moleyears, waiting and waiting, and he wanted to go to her now and take her protectively to him; as he wanted her now, in this strange place, where he was alone with Boswell. Tears wet his face fur, but the sudden pain of their separation was so strong in his mind that he did not notice them.

‘Protect her,’ he whispered. ‘Protect her until I can return and protect her myself. ’ And with this prayer to the Stone in his heart he fell asleep.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Nomole is so strong or unfeeling that it does not suffer a time during a prolonged period of endurance when courage begins to fail and spirits sag.

Such a time came to Rebecca in March at about the time that, unknown to her, Bracken and Boswell arrived in Uffington. From the moment of their departure, she had inspired the other dispirited Duncton and Pasture moles into occupying the Ancient System with enthusiasm and determination. It was she who suggested that they should occupy the eastern half near the cliff, where the soil was a little more worm-full and the tunnels less immediately forbidding; it was she who stopped the Pasture moles from occupying one section and the Duncton moles another, persuading them instead to mix and form a united group; it was Rebecca to whom the others came with their fears and doubts, hopes and ideas, and she who nudged one mole, twisted the paw of another, spent time with a third to ensure that they lived in health and harmony.

For the other moles Rebecca was always available, always cheerful, always the one they could rely on, the one who made them see sense. And it was a task she took on willingly, for had not Rose taught her that a healer works in many different ways and will not even think about the fact that she puts herself last?

But in March, after the long moleyears of winter, her spirits were low and it became a terrible effort for her to appear, as she successfully did, ever cheerful and happy to deal with the other moles’ problems.

She had occupied the tunnels created by Bracken on the far side of the Stone near the pastures. ‘A healer shouldn’t live under the paws of other moles,’ Rose had once told her, ‘because she needs a space in which to find herself and the strength she needs to serve others.’ Rebecca not only followed this advice in choosing the location of her home burrow, but decided in March, when she felt so low, that it also meant she should spend rather more time alone occasionally. For short periods at least.

This was, however, easier said than done, since as soon as moles suspect that a healer is no longer so available as she once was, they have the habit of finding a thousand excuses to go especially to see her. And how could Rebecca turn away a female who was worried that she wouldn’t litter or an older mole whose aches about the shoulders got unbearable when it tried to burrow? Or a male who had damaged his paw right at the start of the mating season? So, day after day, always for one good reason or another, Rebecca found herself preoccupied with other moles when she should have been sitting quietly doing nothing. And she began to get more tired and more irritable; and as she did so, she felt more and more guilty about it—for wasn’t she a healer and mustn’t she therefore always be cheerful and good-natured?

But there were times when even with the best of wills she lapsed into distant and seeming coolness, and the mole who bore the brunt of this was Comfrey.

Comfrey had chosen to live away from the others down on the slopes, choosing a place on the very edge of where the fire had reached. His reason, he told Rebecca, was because there weren’t enough herbs and flowers up among the ‘boring’ beeches and he wanted to be near what remained of the wood to see if any of the plants had survived the fire.

He ranged far and wide in his pursuit of plants and almost every time he visited Rebecca, which he did when he returned from one of his trips, he would bring her something or other for her burrow. Even through the winter months he managed to find things: the red berries of cuckoo pint; gentle-scented fungi; and bright, shiny leaves of holly plants.

‘Where do you find them?’ she would ask.

He would shrug his shoulders and say he had been over beyond the Eastside where the wood hadn’t been touched by the fire. He often appeared when she was visiting in the Ancient System, with parts of plants he thought she might need, and became regarded by many of the moles there with the same affectionate awe in which they held Rebecca. Like Rebecca, he never seemed to expect thanks for what he did, regarding it more as something that just happened, like the weather.

Rebecca’s occasional coldness to him in March upset him dreadfully. It happened in various ways, and always unexpectedly, as she slid away into a world of her own, no longer willing to make the effort to open herself to his stuttering and stumbling conversation.

‘Hello, R-Rebecca!’ he would say, putting a plant, or part of one, by her burrow entrance.

‘That’s nice,’ she would smile, her eyes drifting away from him and with none of the usual questions and laughter that he loved so much. Then silence, which would make him uneasy, and he would stumble over himself trying to fill it. His thin face would crease with the effort of trying to find something to say which would lift the impersonal smile from her face, which he felt to be in some way his own fault.

‘I’ve b-b-been a long way in the last few d-d-days,’ he might say.

‘Have you?’ Rebecca would respond dispassionately.

‘Y-yes, all the way d-down to the m-marsh.’

Smiles. No questions. No encouragement.

‘It was in-in-interesting,’ he might add weakly.

He would try for a bit longer, but was no good at it, and when Rebecca was like that, his whole world seemed to grow dark and he wanted to escape.

Sometimes Rebecca would say she was sorry and it wasn’t his fault. At other times she would let him go without saying a word, feeling a numbness within herself and unable to do anything but, eventually, weep. Or she would do busy things around her burrow, losing herself in rearranging it or cleaning out already clean tunnels.

Sometimes he would stay quietly with her when she wept and hear the things she said, and could have said in the hearing of no other mole in Duncton, about how she had no strength to serve them all and how they came all the time and they needed her help and how she ought to have the strength to give it if she was to honour Rose’s memory. She would weep and even scream sometimes. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ And he would listen to her, too slow in his speech to say anything, light only dawning in him very slowly that sometimes she needed a mole to run to, as he ran to her and the others did. It was then, too, that he wished there was a mole like Mekkins had been, whom she could rely on and lean against sometimes. He wished he was like that and not, as it seemed to him, so weak. Still, he could go to the Stone, which he did, and pray that perhaps the Stone would let Bracken come back so he could help Rebecca.

It was after one of these dispiriting times in March that Comfrey went to the Stone and crouched there, racking his brains about the way he could help. Several days later, Rebecca noticed that not a single mole had visited her, which was odd. She had never been left so blissfully and peacefully alone before. She began to worry about them, and after fretting for a whole day, went down to see what was apaw.

The first mole she met, a female, looked surprised, even alarmed, saying, ‘Oh! Rebecca!’ and scampering away.

The second, a male well known for his habit of finding things wrong with himself when everything was all right really, because he needed Rebecca to tend to him once in a while, said a strange thing when he saw her. ‘Hullo, Rebecca! I’m just fine. Nothing troubling me at all… no, not a single thing!’ he added with a merry, unnatural laugh.

She finally got the truth out of an old female who was genuinely unwell and whose distress she could sense before she even entered her burrow. It seemed that Comfrey had gone around the tunnels virtually ordering all moles to stay away from Rebecca ‘b-b-because she needs a rest’. If anymole needed her desperately they must go to him on the slopes and he would do what he could for them without disturbing Rebecca. Which was an odd thing, because if there was one thing Comfrey didn’t like, it was being disturbed in his own herb-laden burrow.

She went down to the slopes herself to see him and scolded him for what he had done—but very half-heartedly because, in truth, she could hardly remember anymole doing anything so kindly for her benefit and she loved him for the care he had taken and the love he had shown.

But her low spirits persisted as March progressed, increased, rather than lifted by the exciting arrival of the first litters in the ancient tunnels for many generations. Most of the females had mated and the first litters, although a little late, began to arrive towards the end of the month.

The excitement! The rushing! The chatter in the great old tunnels! The hurried, whispered thanks to the Stone! But at the end of the day, Rebecca, the loveliest mole in the system, the most beautiful, the one who so desired to cherish and nurture a litter of her own, remained mateless and litterless. The truth was that she might well have accepted one of the males in the system had they not all been so afraid of her, and in awe of her healing power. But none dared step forward and she thought wistfully of Cairn, of moles like Bracken and Mekkins, and, yes, even of Mandrake. She wished that the shadow of a male such as they had been would cross the entrance to her tunnels. But then she told herself that perhaps it wasn’t just a mate she wanted, and she dared to think it was Bracken alone she needed, whom she loved and who she feared might never return. She let herself weep for him, her face fur contorted with her sense of loss and despair and with the weakness, as she thought of it, of feeling such things. She looked out towards the west and trembled to think that he would never come back.

Comfrey saw this side of her as well and wished there was some comfort he could bring her, however slight.

It was in the second week of April, with the weather still changeable and cold, that he tried once more to help.

He arrived at her tunnels and said, ‘Let’s go for a w-w-walk.’

He ignored her reluctance, her distance, her coldness and her wish to be alone, and almost literally dragged her out.

‘Come on, Rebecca! You used to love going and l-l-looking at things. Well, let’s g-g-go and see if we can find spring.’

The weather could hardly have been less springlike, being cold and damp, with the great leafless beech branches swishing around irritably in a fretful wind. Rebecca was even more reluctant to go when Comfrey began heading off down the slopes towards what the moles in the Ancient System now called, ironically enough, the Old Wood. She had not been back since the fire and found she had a real fear of going there. It was all right for Comfrey; he was hardly old enough to remember it as it had once been—the Westside, the Marsh End, Barrow Vale—and could not feel the loss now that it was all gone.

But he went off so quickly that she had to follow, if only to stop him, and then she found she was twisting and turning down the slopes behind him, her eyes softening as she settled happily into being led, and she remembered how Bracken had led her once down the slopes, almost on this self-same route. Why! How big Comfrey was now compared with the weakling he had once been! He was thin and nervous, but he moved with a certain assurance through the wood. It was good being led by him. At the same time, there was an unusual air of secrecy, or suppressed excitement, about him that intrigued her. Comfrey was a strange mole!

The slopes were covered in sludgy leaf litter—mostly beech but with a few rotted oak leaves from the previous autumn and fresher ones that had blown up here from the few oaks still standing after the fire—all in the narrow zone at the bottom of the slope where both sets of trees grew uncomfortably together.

Rebecca knew when they were approaching the fire-devastated wood by the fact that the trees ahead suddenly lightened out, where once it had grown darker and more dense as they had gone under the thicker mixture of oak and ash branches and holly and hazel shrubs. The wind was freer than before as well, and there was a silence from the place ahead where once there might, even in this weather, have been the startings of a spring bird chorus.

Then they were there, among the stark, burnt stumps that stood stiff and unnatural above the ashy wood floor.

‘Comfrey! Comfrey!’ called Rebecca, wanting to stop him going any further into this desolate place, but he ran on, pretending not to hear, which wasn’t like him either. ‘Oh, Comfrey,’ she sighed, following on.

They skirted round blackened tree roots, over tangles of ashy bramble skeletons, round jumbles of shattered, burnt branches, black and wet and lifeless. She looked in vain for something she recognised, some scent, some tunnel entrance, some shape to the roots that might tell her where she was. But the air was dead of scent and nothing was familiar, and anyway, Comfrey was running on so fast that there was no time to stop and pause.

Here and there the wood floor was thick with a white, sodden ash where the fire had been so hot that it had reduced wood to bleached-out embers. In other places the heavy rains of winter, unimpeded in their drainage by undergrowth and living plant roots, had eroded out little gulleys that zigzagged downwards for a short way, with a few flints and stones left clear of ash and soil in their centres, like miniature dry river beds.

Then she saw something among the ashes that brought her to a startled halt. Fresh spring green it was, peeping from among grey ash.

‘Comfrey! Look! Stop, Comfrey, and look!’ It was the first pushings of a fern shoot, curled up tight and hairy, parts of it green, fresh green, among the dead ashes. Then she saw another, which had forced aside two or three lumps of grey-black wood ash to get at the light and air for its growth.

‘Comfrey! Stop!’ Oh, she was so excited! There was life still in the soil of the burnt-down wood and it would come up in the next few weeks and cover the dead, white, grey, black ashes of the fire with a carpet of green.

But Comfrey didn’t stop. He went on, darting this way and that, looking over his shoulder sometimes to see that she was following and then pressing on again. And he was smiling to himself, excited and pleased to see her excitement. ‘Where are we going, Comfrey?’ she called.

‘Just to see if there are any plants growing here,’ he called back, not stopping.

‘But there are, there are,’ she said, ‘didn’t you see them?’ He rushed on, deeper and deeper into the Old Wood, over the charred surface, ignoring the great hulks of dead trees that stuck up into the grey, billowing sky, snout ever onward. She had never seen him move in such a straight line for so long. Not Comfrey, who tended to snout at everything he saw and ended up going in the opposite direction to the one in which he had set out and finding a different plant from the one he had been looking for.

But finally he stopped, breathless and trying to act naturally. ‘Well, just a few ferns, and some thistles. Not much, I’m afraid. I thought we might see more… Still, we m-might as well press on a bit further.’

‘Where are we?’ asked Rebecca, who was quite lost.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Comfrey unconvincingly. ‘You take the lead, Rebecca, and I’ll follow for a change’ She turned one way, but he said, ‘N-n-no. Go that way.’

She did. The ground rose very slightly. She pressed on and then she ran straight into them. Not one, not two, not ten, but dozens of wood anemones, their green leaves perfect, their white and purple flowers half open and bespattered with shining raindroplets.

‘Oh, Comfrey!’ she said. ‘They’re growing just as they always did. Anemones! Did I ever tell you…?’

He nodded. Yes, she had. In Curlew’s burrow she had told him. And her love for these flowers had inspired him with a love for all flowers and herbs. Yes, he knew she loved them, and how much.

‘You knew they were here, didn’t you, Comfrey?’ she said, smiling gently at him.

‘No, I d-d-didn’t,’ he said, turning away because he hated to tell lies, even white ones. Then he added: ‘But I thought they’d come back. You know, after the f-fire.’

Rebecca looked at them, wandering among them and letting their intricate pointed leaves brush against her, springing back again on long delicate stalks as she went by. The flowers were still young, tight heads hanging down with the weakness of youth and many with their petals still to open. They had come back!

‘Where is this place?’ she asked, looking around at the wide circle of anemones with the stretching of burnt tree trunks and shrubs at its edge.

‘It’s Barrow Vale,’ said Comfrey.

‘Oh!’ she said.

‘Rebecca,’ whispered Comfrey, looking at the anemones with her, ‘you know that B-Bracken will come back, don’t you? He will, you know.’

Rebecca closed her eyes as a great wave of feeling, powerful and tearful, took her over.

‘Oh, Comfrey,’ she said, ‘Comfrey!’ He had bullied and fooled her into coming, to show her these flowers to remind her that just as they had survived the fire, so, somehow, Bracken would survive and come back. But what made her weep was that Comfrey had thought to do it, loving her enough to think of a way to make her see again something of the joy in Duncton Wood that once, so long ago, she had so often celebrated and to make her see that she would not always have to stand alone. But what made her weep even more was the thought that if Bracken did return, then surely he, too, would love her enough to sit down sometimes, as Comfrey must have done, to think of ways to cherish her. ‘Oh, Comfrey!’ she said again, going to him and nuzzling him close. As she did so, a wonderful look of strength came into Comfrey’s normally nervous face, for he had never, ever in his whole life, felt quite so proud.

‘Rebecca, you’re the best mole there is,’ he said, without the trace of a stutter.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Bracken woke late one morning, long after dawn, with a head as heavy as a clod of wet clay. He lay drowsily uncomfortable for a long time, waiting for the aches behind his eyes and snout to clear away and the real world of the chalky burrow to take over from the troubled place of half-remembered dreams into which he thought he had awoken.

So it was some time, and gradually, before the awareness that something was wrong in Uffington fully came to him. The silence in Boswell’s burrow was the first clue, a general feeling of abandonment the second.

He was up and into Boswell’s burrow in a second, but he knew in his heart before he got there that his friend had gone. He hurried into the communal tunnel outside, thinking that there might be a scribemole about, but it was empty of life or even a hint of it. At first Bracken was curious rather than alarmed, but his curiosity soon gave way to something more urgent as he went down the first tunnel to the bigger one it joined, where there had, until now, always been some sound of scribemole about. Not a thing stirred. Only the far-off wind that whistled and moaned in the higher-level tunnels of Uffington and which could sometimes be heard down in the Holy Burrows.

Bracken headed for the chamber that Boswell had originally taken him to, and from which tunnels led to the libraries (into which he had been) and the Holy Burrows (into which he had not). As he passed through the chalky tunnel, he had the absurd feeling that he would never again see another mole alive and all he could have for companionship was the echoing sound of his own pawsteps.

This illusion was quickly shattered, though not in a way that gave him much cheer. Ahead he heard a sound. He stopped, snouted about and ran forward, and two scribemoles, thin and bent, crossed the tunnel ahead of him, emerging from a small tunnel on one side and disappearing into one on the other, no more than a few molefeet from where he watched. They ignored him utterly, going past with snouts bowed and in a hushed and reverential way as if they had an appointment with Skeat himself.

He called after them—‘Have you seen Boswell?’—but his voice sounded loud and almost blasphemous with the disturbance it made, and although one mole paused and looked back at him, neither said anything and both went on.

He wondered whether to follow them but decided to go on to the chamber where, surely, he would find somemole.

When he got there, he found that a scribemole had been posted, rather like a henchmole, between the two major tunnels—the one leading to the libraries and the other to the Holy Burrows.

‘Ah, hello!’ said Bracken. ‘It’s Boswell I’m looking for. Have you seen him?’

The scribemole appeared to be half asleep, his snout low as the others’ had been and his eyes closed. Once again Bracken’s words hung embarrassingly loud in the air until, when they died away, Bracken noticed that the scribemole was muttering or chanting to himself. Slowly he came out of what seemed a trance and looked with some surprise at Bracken.

‘Are you Bracken of Duncton?’ he asked, adding, before Bracken had a chance to reply, ‘Why are you here?’

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘Has nomole told you to go out on to the surface or to stay in the guest burrow?’

‘Nomole has told me anything,’ said Bracken a little ill-temperedly.

‘It is best that you do one or the other. Just for today and tonight. Just until tomorrow. You’ll find plenty of food in the high tunnels since all scribemoles must fast today. Though you know it would be appropriate if you did the same.’

Bracken was annoyed by the mole’s offhand manner and air of slight condescension and might well have been tempted to push past him to the libraries, or explore into the Holy Burrows, had not the possibility that he might embarrass Boswell in some way occurred to him.

‘Look, mate,’ he said, adopting the tough familiarity of a Marshender, ‘stop burrowing about the bush and tell me where Boswell is.’

The mole shook his head and said, ‘That is not possible. If the Holy Mole has not told you what today is, then I certainly may not do so. Trust in the Stone and go back to your burrow and meditate in peace.’

‘Stuff this,’ thought Bracken to himself, now thoroughly annoyed and resisting the impulse to attack the scribemole. He turned back the way he had come, nodding his head as if in agreement with the scribemole and thinking that rather than have a confrontation he would simply find some other way past the chamber. The thought turned into action as soon as he got back to the tunnel down which the two scribemoles who had ignored him had gone. He paused there, crouched down, and for the first time since he had come to Uffington felt his way into the tunnels about him. It was exciting, like being back in the ancient tunnels of Duncton, where everything was unknown and all lay before him for him alone to find out. Bracken liked nothing more than a challenge in which he had to use his wits and talent for exploration.

As far as he could tell, everything happened to the west of the chamber where he had been stopped. There lay the libraries and the burrows, and beyond, according to what Boswell had told him, lay the tunnel leading to those mysterious ‘Silent’ Burrows. He hesitated for only a moment before heading off into the side tunnel, the way the other two moles had gone, believing that if he could find out their destination, he could solve the mystery of where Boswell was, and what was so special about the day.

For the next two hours Bracken enjoyed the thrill of exploration and orientation once again, creeping along the ancient, dusty tunnels that seemed much less used than the others he had been in in Uffington and coming to an exaggerated sharp stop at the slightest real or imagined noise. He heard moles several times, and chanting more than once, but he avoided direct contact, and the one or two moles who went by near him never saw him, for he hid in the many corners and shadows created by the old flints that protruded from the walls or the complex intersections of tunnel crossing points. Soon the original object of his search—to find Boswell—was lost in the sheer enjoyment of outwitting the scribemoles about him.

But his game and his anonymity were brought to a sudden halt when, turning a corner, he found, as he suspected that he eventually would, that he had by this roundabout route made his way into the main library. Quire was there, ferreting around among the books as usual, and on seeing him Bracken was suddenly weary of his game and the isolation it caused him. He greeted Quire with a reverence he genuinely felt and explained that he was in search of Boswell.

‘Why should I know where he is, might I ask?’ said Quire, peering at Bracken. ‘Wait a minute—I know you. You’re the Duncton mole, aren’t you? The one who’s seen the seventh Stillstone. Where is Boswell?’

Patiently, Bracken explained what had happened and how puzzled he was by the secrecy among the moles in the tunnels that day.

Quire smiled and shrugged. ‘Yes, they do make rather a meal of it. There’s no mystery. Today is the day when the secret Song is sung. You know, Merton’s task and all that. Now that may be a mystery, but the fact of its being sung is known to all moles. That’s what all the fuss about chosen moles was about, you see. They like to enter their names in the book before the Song is sung, all twenty-four of them. You’ll probably find, Bracken of Duncton, that Boswell has been chosen. Hence the secret. We’ll soon know, since the Holy Mole will return the book tomorrow with the new names neatly scribed. Of course, you’re not meant to read them but, well, the book’s kept on the shelves and it’s an open secret. As a matter of fact, there is an exceptional number of new chosen moles this time because so many of the last lot died of the plague. That’s why you’ll find there’s not that many about. After the devastation of the plague it’s a miracle that there’s enough moles to sing the song.’

‘Where do they sing the song?’ asked Bracken.

‘Never been there myself, of course, not being chosen, but it’s somewhere up near the Silent Burrows. In a special chamber. Said to be the oldest in Uffington, though, strictly speaking, it’s not in Uffington but up where the Silent Burrows are. About two miles yonder . . .’ He waved a paw towards the west.

‘Could I get there?’ asked Bracken.

‘Whatever for?’ said Quire. ‘I never can understand why you youngsters are always rushing off to see and hear things somewhere else when there’s plenty to see and hear where you happen to be crouching at the moment. You’ll be asking me next what I thought about all those moleyears I was in the Silent Burrows. You wouldn’t be the first.’

Bracken couldn’t help laughing. It was true. Quire wasn’t as daft as he seemed. Then Quire laughed, too, though his laughter rapidly degenerated into a wheezing and coughing through which he finally said, ‘I thought about nothing, don’t you see? Mind you, that’s easier said than done for most.’ There were times when Bracken thought himself completely stupid, when his brain seemed to register things so slowly that he found it embarrassing to contemplate the process as it happened. It happened now, as everything about him, all the secrecy and rushings about, fell into place. They were going to sing the same secret song that Hulver had once told him about when he told the story of Merton, and Merton’s task. Linden had been the scribe who wrote about Merton, the selfsame scribe, presumably, who made the first entries into the Book of Chosen Moles. Why didn’t somemole say, and then he wouldn’t have got worried about Boswell. In fact, come to think of it, he felt proud of Boswell. Him, a chosen mole! A feeling of awe came over him… there was something special about a day when they sang a song that had been passed on in secret through generations and which was sung once in twelve moleyears, and which would only be sung to all moles, and then by them, when the Blowing Stone sounded seven times.

‘Quire, have you ever heard the Blowing Stone sound?’

‘Many times, many times. A mole may often hear it in a storm sounding the odd note. As a matter of fact, I once heard it sound three times in succession and it was that which made me decide to go to the Silent Burrows. It seemed significant at the time. I never regretted it.’

‘What did it sound like?’

‘Oh, dear! More questions? You can ask things until your snout turns blue, but you’ll only ever really find the answers yourself. Now, why don’t you stop asking questions and go up on to the surface and get some fresh air? Make your way up to the surface near the Silent Burrows and crouch among the grass and trees up there. It’s a good place to be.’

‘How will I find it?’

‘More questions? Go and try. And if you see Boswell anywhere tomorrow when it’s over, tell him he hasn’t finished here yet. I thought he said he was going to do some filing for me,’ and Quire turned away from Bracken and started poking about among the books. As Bracken set off out of the library to find a way to the surface, his spirit was very calm and peaceful. He might not be able to sing a song or take part in the special rituals the scribemoles seemed involved in, but in his own Duncton way he could perhaps go and crouch on the surface and offer some invocation to the Stone on this special day, and think of Boswell, who perhaps needed a little extra strength in the next few hours.

Up through the tunnels he went, back the way he had first come with Boswell, with a smile of affection for Quire on his face and moving with an air of reverence and peace which, though he did not know it, was exactly the same as that in which the two scribemoles had originally passed him by in the tunnel. The spirit of Uffington, ancient and reverent, had finally caught up with Bracken.

The weather was cold, wet, and messy, as grey sweeps of rain came across the vales below Uffington and swirled up the hill into the long, coarse grass into which Bracken emerged from the tunnels below. Not normally conditions in which a mole much likes to wander about, but Bracken did not mind, for there was a certain wild freshness about the air that suited his mood.

He headed westwards, as Quire had suggested, and with his usual talent for finding the right route, soon came upon a run of long grass that gave him good protection and headed the right way. He did not know what he was looking for but, as often in the past, he knew he would find it when he got there. It was hard to say at what time of day he set off, because the sky was so overcast that the sun might as well not have existed.

But there was the feeling of late afternoon to the air when he finally began to think he ought to arrive somewhere, and the sky was beginning to gloom over even more. To the right of the line of grass in which he made his way was a ploughed field of thin soil, more grey than brown and with many flakes of mottled blue flint and hard off-white chalk, and not a single sign of plant growth yet. To the left was a rutted, grassy track, potholed and puddly, where the soil and chalk had formed a light-grey clay. If Bracken had been able to fly up into the air, he would have seen what he knew by instinct, that the chalk downlands stretched far away all around him, except to the right, beyond the ploughed field, where the chalk escarpment fell many hundreds of molefeet downwards.

Then he heard a familiar and welcoming sound, the rushing of wind through bare beech-tree branches and twigs somewhere ahead. Its sound was subtle and variable, so that at first he had to pause in his passage through the long, whipping grass to catch it. But it soon got stronger and more persistent and he had the illusion for a moment that he was moving up the slopes of Duncton Hill towards the beeches that surrounded the Stone.

The air was clearing of rain as the wind increased and he found that he was, indeed, moving uphill and that ahead the light was darker and more confused as the great, tall shapes of the beech trees he had heard came into view. They were thinner than the Duncton trees, giving the illusion that they were taller, and stood in such a neat, tight group that from a distance their branches seemed to form one great crown, as if there were only one tree there.

They were to the right of his path, fenced off all by themselves in the middle of the ploughed field he had been skirting, so that he had to pick his way across the wet earth, flints and chalk fragments to reach them. The trees whipped and whistled high above him, and as he entered among them he saw that they formed a single oval stretching away from him, and there was such a pool of quietness in the centre where the wind was still that it was like entering into a peaceful burrow.

Inside the oval, nearest to where he had entered it, stood a sight more magnificent than any he had ever seen on the surface before. Four great sarsen stones stood in a gnarled, dark line with a gap in the middle between them beyond which there were more stones sunk into the ground. Among them were deep shadows and a wet, dark stillness and they formed an entrance to a great mound or barrow that stretched to the far edge of the oval of beeches. There was an air of great solidity and silence about the whole place, as if the very weather itself stopped and knocked before it entered. The sky above formed a great oval of light, though for the time being it was gloomy and lowering grey.

The grass in the oval was short and soft, and it covered the barrow behind the stones, although there and there a smaller sarsen stone poked its grey, wet snout out at the edge of the barrow and formed a pattern that delineated its long shape.

Sensing that he was in a very holy place, Bracken skirted around the edge of the stones and barrow at first, travelling its full length and then back the other side. Only when he had made a full circuit did he plunge into the gap between the stones, sniffing among them for mole-scent. There was nothing much, certainly nothing fresh, until he went right into a cell formed by the stones from beyond which, through gaps between them, he sensed the presence of recent mole activity. The scent was dry and a little mysterious, like sun- bleached wood or the husks of beech nuts. He fancied he sensed movement, secretive and silent, ritualistic and arcane—or was it vibrations from the great, shadowy stones about him, before which many a mole ritual must have been enacted, that he heard? He moved carefully and silently, as if the slightest movement would disturb the peace about him.

He was tempted to go beyond the stones in the cave through the gap between them, but one thing he had learned in exploration of a new place was that it was best to approach by the least obvious way. It was not that he was afraid for himself here so much as that he felt himself on the edge of some religious rite for the Stone and preferred to be as unobserved as possible. For this reason he retreated out of the stone caves and climbed up on top of the long barrow where, rather to his surprise, he found evidence of molehills, though they were old and half washed away by weather.

It was now growing dark and the wind had died a little so that the trees swayed only very slightly, whispering occasionally around the barrow and giving the impression of a growing calm. He snouted from one molehill to the next until he found one where the scent had completely gone and what remained of it was just wet and muddy. Experience now told him that such an entry was likely to be unobserved and forgotten, and he was right. The entrance was virtually blocked up with age and he had to burrow some way down, taking care to let no soil fall downwards, before he found the tunnel he was looking for.

The soil was darker than the chalky soil he had got used to in Uffington, and the tunnel itself was smaller. It led along a short way and then down almost vertically, and then on again and down once more, as if he was dropping into a deeper and deeper silence. There was molescent about, but it was distant and still. It was as if he had descended vertically into a sleeping burrow, except that there was no burrow as such and, as far as he could see, there were no moles near.

The tunnel came to a sudden end, sealed irreversibly by a massive sarsen stone. He put a paw to it and then his snout, sensing that beyond it lay something which would be well worth seeing. Bracken very much wanted to get beyond it and was tempted to burrow round it until, feeling the hard, caked soil in which it was embedded, he realised that the attempt would make far too much noise. Yet, at the same time, he felt an urgent need to press on, a confusing mixture of awe and disregard for the place coming over him, with the same feeling of certainty that he would get through which he had had in the Chamber of Roots with Rebecca when they had passed on to the buried Stone itself. He retreated, looking for the slightest burrowable chink in the wall.

Soon he found one, at the bottom corner of another sarsen stone that lined the wall and in which the soil was not packed so tightly. Careful not to scratch the stone with his talons and so make a noise, he rapidly burrowed the chink bigger so that his snout was into the hole behind his paws, and then his shoulders, and he was pushing the dry soil behind him in great scoops, until the earth ahead collapsed forward and he was in a burrow or small chamber. There was an entrance on its far side and through it he could hear, from somewhere far off, even further off than the scent, the faintest vibrations of voices, as if many moles were gathered together and whispering in a chamber that echoed their sound. He went through this chamber into a tunnel off which there were many turns to left and right. The walls were partly composed of dark earth and partly of dark-olive sarsen stones, which gave any sound in the tunnel a heavy thunking echo in which even the lightest cough might sound serious.

Bracken headed downwards as fast as he could without making a noise, the mutterings and coughing sounds seeming to come from several directions at once and giving him the feeling that he was on the edge of something important which he could not quite reach. He sneaked his way along, keeping to the inside edge of the wall where it curved, just in case there were moles ahead. The sound of voices grew louder and richer and he very nearly stopped, convinced that at the next corner he would come to a great mass of moles. But each turn in the tunnel brought nothing but a louder and louder sound of the moles voices echoing around and past him.

Ahead, the air gained a spacious quality that warned him long before he reached it that he was about to approach a gap in the tunnel or a precipitous void, and he snouted ahead very carefully until, quite suddenly, the floor ahead disappeared and he found himself crouching at the end of a huge drop into the biggest, deepest chamber he had ever seen. It was not so wide as the Chamber of Dark Sound, but it was certainly deeper, and it was some moments before he could make out anything in it, though the echoing and coughing and throat-clearing that came up from below made it obvious that the moles he had heard were gathered somewhere in the gloom below.

The chamber was round and for the most part seemed to have been made of the sarsen stones, piled one on top of the other to form a well-like wall that dropped way down below him and rose far above him into dark and echoing heights he could not even see.

This vertical drop had the effect of making the moles gathered far below him seem tiny, like ants, except that they crouched still and in order, a crescent of moles gathered about what, from above, looked like a jagged shadow but which, after a while, he made out to be a single stone on the floor of the chamber.

To one side of them was an entrance. Leaning against the wall of the chamber, ready to seal it, was a great, round flint, shiny and blue and contrasting with the dull, rough texture of the sarsen.

A hush fell. There was a muttering among several of the moles, and two of them went over to the flint and started rocking it back and forth, for it was too heavy for them to heave in one go. Then Bracken saw that they were going to seal the entrance, and the only way that the flint was to be stopped from rolling past it was by a jag of flint set out from the wall, against which it would rest; and Bracken noticed another for the return journey, when whatever they were going to do was finished and they intended to unseal the entrance. Forward, backward, forward, back… the rocking of the stone was taken up as a chant among the other moles as the great crunch, ker-unch of the stone’s movement began to vibrate about the chamber, spiralling rhythmically up the walls around towards where Bracken crouched, with his snout peeping over the edge from the squat, arched entrance from which he watched, and then booming its way upwards into the echoing darkness above. The chant became slower, not faster, as the flint rocked further back and further forward, almost tipping over at last on to the flint set out of the wall, teetering, then back until, with one mighty effort and with a loud push from the moles, the flint rolled right forwards and struck hard against the flint stop in the wall.

It was a moment which all those moles watching, especially ones who had never seen it before, like Bracken, would never forget. For as the flint struck the stop, a spark of stunning light leapt from between the two stones and filled the whole chamber with a light so bright that it seemed everything in the chamber was turned into iridescent white, except the shadows, which turned pitch-black. The outline of each mole on the chamber floor was delineated in frozen clarity, the edges of the sarsen stones and the flints themselves seemed as hard as ice, the arched entrance in which Bracken hid became an arched, black hole against the white surrounding wall, the very heights of the massive chamber itself might have been seen, had a mole been looking at them.

As the first struck together and the light lit up the chamber for an eternal second, several of the moles, all older ones who had sung the song before, broke into a deep-voiced, rhythmic song that seemed cast as far back in time as the very stones of which the chamber was built. It was a song such as Bracken had never heard before, which took a mole’s heart into itself and carried it, and his spirit, and his whole being in powerful steps towards the heart of the Stone itself. Bracken gasped and moved forward, unafraid of being observed so high up, as from its very first notes the song took his spirit into its ancient being.

But as the last of the light from the clashing flints died away and he watched the singing moles below, he did not see one other sight that the spark had lit up and frozen even higher up in the chamber than he was, on the opposite side and crouched in a similar tunnel end. It was the face of Skeat, the Holy Mole, crouched in an entrance high above the chamber where, by long tradition, the Holy Moles who had sung the song themselves listened in silence to its subsequent singing.

But what Skeat saw, no other Holy Mole had ever suffered seeing, and it brought to his peaceful face a look of unutterable alarm. He had seen Bracken and realised in that instant of white light that the song that had been secret for so many centuries was now being heard by a nonscribe. It was for him a moment of terrible blasphemy. It was as if the sacred song itself was being reviled and sworn on; it was a kind of spiritual death. Shaking with horror, Skeat turned away from the chamber and began to make his way down the tunnel levels to where Bracken was crouched.

Unaware that he had been observed, utterly conquered by the first few notes of the song, Bracken rose into its glory as, line by rhythmic line, its first verse was sung by the older moles. He could not understand its words, which were in the old language, but as it progressed he began to understand its meaning with his deepest being. There was a short pause, a voice of instruction, and then the second verse started, with more moles joining it, doubly as powerful in sound and richness as the first verse. With each line, each word, each syllable, it seemed that the song gained strength, as the moles that sang it gave their whole souls into it, and it marched forward with them as an expression of the power that impels all scribemoles forward, indeed, all moles, towards the Stone from which they come and to which they return.

As the third verse started, and even more of the twenty-four moles joined in, Bracken began to weep in his heart for the joy that the song surged into him. With each glorious word its deep melody seemed to untie the tangles in his heart about the Stone and the things he had done, and the moles he had known, and forge them into a powerful simplicity. He saw that everything he was was of the Stone—everything he had done, and would do, was of the Stone; Mandrake was of the Stone, Rune… Mekkins… Hulver… Duncton… Boswell, beloved Boswell was of the Stone… Rebecca was of the Stone… and their love! Their love only had meaning in the Stone, and he seemed almost to fly with the power of the song for the glory that it brought to his spirit. And then, as the fourth and strongest verse started and all the moles were singing, his own voice seemed to join them and he was singing it, too, and it carried him even further as its sound echoed and re-echoed around the chamber about him and took him finally for a moment into the very silence of the Stone, where a mole is nothing but a part of the glimmers and rays of the silence itself, unseen. As he went there, he understood at last where he had been with Rebecca and why he would always search until he found it with her once more.

Then the song was over as abruptly as it had begun. But for Bracken, as for the scribemoles who had sung it in the chamber below him, its sound continued on as its echoes died away only slowly in the chamber around them, and even more slowly in the higher peaks of the mountains of their spirits. The flint sealstone was rocked back and forth once more, until it rolled back into its resting place and opened up the chamber again, and one by one the chosen moles began to come out of the world into which the song had led them, but back into which there would now always be an entrance in their souls, which was the purpose of the singing of the song.

While high above them, crouched on the edge of the chamber wall, Bracken began to feel the enormous strength of peace and love and purpose which the song had put into him. But as the chamber came into focus before him once more and the slow sounds of the scribemoles below drifted up, he became aware of a commotion behind him, of a running and angry panting and, turning round, he saw Skeat, the Holy Mole, whose eyes were not filled with love and peace but with horror at the presence of Bracken.

From the place the song had taken him to and from which he was only slowly returning, Bracken seemed to see Skeat as if he were shouting against the force of a wind, so that the sound of his voice was lost and mute and his wild gestures bore no meaning.

Then the sound did come through, and the chamber behind him was filled with a terrible sound which caused the scribemoles below to stop and peer up into the dark, from where they heard a voice of terrible power cry:

‘Bracken of Duncton, you are cursed by the Stone, you are cursed of the Stone, you are lost from its wonder, you are cut off from its love, you…’ and they heard the sounds of scuffles and sobbings and terror above.

As Skeat had begun to curse Bracken, he stepped forward, towards him, and Bracken automatically stepped back to the very edge of the massive drop into the chamber, for what mole dares raise a paw to such a holy mole as Skeat? Everything was confused in Bracken’s mind, for he could not understand Skeat’s words, or from where this terror had come to disturb the world of peace to which the song had carried him. He felt like a pup suddenly and violently cuffed by a mother or sibling who, until that moment, had only ever loved him. So he began to sob in unbelieving fear, weak with confusion, and retreating before a nightmare force. For his part, Skeat was quite as confused, for a Holy Mole is, as he himself had always said, only another mole at heart. What Bracken had done, or seemed to have done, had appalled him as nothing had ever in his life appalled him before. He had run through the tunnels, round to this second viewing point, the sound of the song echoing in his ears and the picture of the intruding Bracken in his mind, but with what intent he had no idea.

When he saw Bracken, the curse came from him as if he had no control over it, and his confusion increased, growing even worse as Bracken retreated towards the void of the chamber behind, looking not like a guilty mole or one who thinks he has done something wrong, but like a pup who has lost his mother and needs help.

But Bracken was not a pup, but an adult who had survived to reach Uffington, and as he felt the danger of the precipice behind him, anger replaced confusion, aggression replaced love, and he instinctively lunged back towards old Skeat with his talons. But instead of retreating, Skeat came forward, for perhaps he saw, as a mole as wise as he must have seen, that Bracken’s blasphemy was unconscious, while the power of the Stone’s love in him was very strong. Perhaps Skeat wanted to take away the curse while its very sound still echoed about them; perhaps he wanted to touch Bracken to bring him back to peace. However it was—and no chronicler is certain on the point, not even Boswell himself, who was there—however it was, Bracken mistook Skeat’s advance for attack, swung round and into him again as Medlar had taught him to do so well, and with a gasp and a cry Skeat was plunging over the void of the chamber down, terribly, towards its depths, down to where the chosen moles were encircled, looking up in horror at the sounds above them, until he fell to his death among them, his frail old body still and bloody at their paws.

Far above them, Bracken crouched frozen in horror looking down, Skeat’s blood on his talons and a black and terrible fear in his heart. And then, as gasps and shouts came up from below, he turned and ran, his paws pulling him desperately forward and up, back through the tunnels he had come down, to get away from the crime he had committed and which lay dead on the floor of the chamber in whose echoing depth he had heard the silence of the Stone. But as he flew from the evil that he seemed to have done, he left behind as well hope and light of the Stone, a mole

fleeing from light into darkness. Until, gasping and panting with effort, weeping and sobbing with fear, he emerged on to the surface again and ran without pause from the calm inside the oval of beeches around the long barrow, on to the rough and difficult ploughed field now dark with night and gusty with wind, across which he began to escape towards the escarpment on the northern edge of Uffington Hill.

It was Boswell who found him, three days later, desolate and lost in the drizzle that enveloped the Blowing Stone. Boswell had left the prayers and chanting lamentations that followed Skeat’s death in Uffington and had gone out on to the surface, turning by instinct down to the Stone towards which, in a time of his own despair, he had gone.

There Bracken crouched, muttering and half mad with grief and shame, with no direction in which to turn that did not seem blacker than the last. Had Boswell believed that his friend had deliberately killed Skeat, once his own beloved master, he might not have been there. But he could not and did not believe it, and the fact seemed confirmed by the presence of Bracken by the Stone, before which he shivered and asked for help and guidance.

Boswell’s gentle touch calmed him, and though Bracken could not bring himself to look straight at his friend, he asked the endless question that all moles faced by seeming evil asked: ‘Why?’

There was no answer, and never can be, and the two moles crouched together in a tragic silence, the wet drizzle of a cold spring day heavy and thick on their fur.

Then, with a sigh, Bracken got to his paws and did something more brave than anything Boswell had ever known: he started the long weary climb back up Uffington Hill again to face the scribemoles into whose system he had brought such shame.

‘Let them decide what is to become of me,’ were the only words he spoke to Boswell on the long, weary climb back.

It was the chosen moles who sat in judgement on Bracken, Boswell present but not among them, and they did it in the chamber where the song had been sung and Skeat had died, believing that his spirit would guide them in their decision.

After Bracken had told them what had happened, as far as he could remember it, and one or two points of detail had been cleared up, there seemed nothing more to say at all, and they crouched in a deep silence which Bracken, in his guilt and before their calm, found almost unbearable. He would rather have faced the talons of Mandrake himself and accepted death there and then, than have faced the silent and tragic meditation of the scribemoles around him earnestly searching for a decision about his future.

Eventually, he, too, fell into a kind of trance and began to think of Skeat, of what little Boswell had told him and what little he had seen of him when they had talked. It was as he did so that an idea came to him, a suggestion, a possibility, that grew in his mind only slowly as light grows at dawn on a winter’s morning. He broke the silence around him with it, speaking it out almost before the thought was clearly into his mind:

‘There is one thing I could do, or try to do if the Stone would give me strength,’ he began, speaking in such a weak and broken voice that it was hard to hear him. There was a murmur among the chosen moles, and they looked up from their prayers at him.

‘Skeat said that Uffington has heard from all the seven major systems but one. He said what strength it would give all moles if here, in Uffington, you knew that the Stone was honoured in the last system—the system of Siabod, of which little is now known. Let me go there and seek to fulfil the dream that Skeat had. If I never come back, than at least I will have tried; and if I return with information, or can myself honour the Stone there, then give me no thanks…’ He bowed his snout and waited while his words sank in.

There was a chatter among the moles, and a voice said, ‘A fine idea, except that this mole, should he ever reach Siabod, and even more unlikely reach the Stones of Tryfan which are believed to stand by the legendary Castell y Gwynt, would bring no honour to the Stone. What he has done means that he can pray for nomole but himself.’

At this there was a murmur of agreement, and the light that had dawned in Bracken’s heart began to flicker and die away into despair again. Until, very softly, a voice broke through the murmurings, the voice of Boswell, and the others fell silent.

‘Then let me go with him,’ he said, ‘and if we reach this place called Siabod, I will speak the prayers of healing and forgiveness that Skeat, my former master, would have spoken, and I will call out the invocations of love through the Stone so that all will know that the Stone is honoured in every system, even after the plague has cursed all moles.’

As Boswell spoke, Bracken dared to look fully on him again at last, and felt the great power of his love, whose light and strength seemed capable of healing so much.

‘Let me go with him,’ repeated Boswell, ‘and surely the Stone’s will may be done.’

There was a silence as the chosen moles considered Boswell’s proposal and then the oldest one among them finally said:

‘Steyn rix in thine herte.’

‘Staye thee hoi and soint,’ chanted all the moles.

‘Me desire wot we none,’ said Boswell, stepping forward to join Bracken and to face the rest of the scribemoles.

‘Blessed be thou and ful of blisse,’ said the oldest mole, raising a paw to bless them and to give them the strength and forgiveness of the Stone. At which Boswell led Bracken out of the chamber and up through the tunnels to the main system of Uffington, and from there out on to the surface. Both knew the sacrifice they had made. For Boswell it was surely the end of his quest for the seventh Book and the Stillstone; for Bracken, the fear now grew into certainty that he would never see his Rebecca again, and the promise he had made in his heart so many times to return and protect her could never be fulfilled. They found a temporary burrow away from the main system and food, and when they had slept and were refreshed, they set off together northwards down the escarpment, veering off towards the dark northwest beyond whose dangerous distances the feared and unknown system of Siabod lay. Each leaving behind him the places and hopes they had cherished for so long.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

By the time that Midsummer came round once more to Duncton’s Ancient System, the moles who had survived in it to burrow and mate and litter through the spring had formed a healthy and harmonious system. The tunnels they had recolonised smelt once more of the freshness of youth and echoed to the sound of growing litters and a laughter that would have brought a smile even to the faces of the sternest moles who lived there originally.

Although the system had no leader, it was Rebecca to whom all moles turned for help and guidance and whose love for them all was the wellspring of so much happiness. And by June, with the coming of summer, Rebecca had regained— or seemed to have—much of her normal joy in living.

So it was she who reminded them that Midsummer Night was a time to gather quietly at the Stone and to give thanks for the young; and who can say, as the warm Midsummer evening drew in, that she did not hope that her beloved Bracken might come again from off the pastures, with Boswell at his side, and speak the special blessing only he knew, which he had not had time to teach another mole before he left?

Perhaps Comfrey suspected, or guessed, that Rebecca had such dreams; perhaps he prayed to the Stone for such a miracle to happen, while making sure that he stayed lovingly close to Rebecca all Midsummer Night in case it did not.

All moles gathered by the Stone, the youngsters younger than normal because of a lateness of littering, many of them playing and gambolling among the roots and leaves, hushed by the peace of their parents and Rebecca, who moved among them whispering words of blessing that she drew from memory and love and which surely spoke the spirit, if not the words, the Stone intended on that special night.

But no Bracken came, no Boswell hobbled into view: though there was a time, later in the evening, when the youngsters had been taken back to their home burrows and only a few adults remained in silence by the Stone, the warm night air soft in their fur, when Rebecca knew in her heart that somewhere, far, far away, her Bracken was saying the blessing for them all and sending her his love as the same moon that shone down into the Stone clearing shone on his own dark fur. She hoped that just as Comfrey was by her, and had stayed with her all evening, so Boswell was near him. ‘Dearest Boswell,’ she thought, ‘My own sweet Bracken,’ she smiled, hoping that the Stone would let him know how much she loved him.

Well, perhaps it could, perhaps it would, and ‘perhaps’ became a word Rebecca grew tired of using. A mole must live where a Stone has put her, or him, and with those moles who happen by circumstance or fate to be living in the same system. And nomole was more aware than Rebecca, healer now to the system of Duncton, that hopes and memories are like winter aconite, a source of health and joy if used one way, a debilitating poison if used another. So, as the summer advanced, she put her Bracken from her mind and concentrated all her energies on helping the moles about her.

Their numbers grew rapidly. Under her care, most of the late spring litters survived and there was so much spare territory available in the Ancient System that there was little conflict, or death, when it came to the dispersal of the young in July and August. At the same time, the Stone, and perhaps the reputation of Rebecca, brought a steady flow of moles into Duncton, some from the outlying parts of the Pasture system, others from far to the east, the old Eastside, which had not been much affected by the fire. There was a good mixture of males and younger females in this influx and the system began to have a fuller, united feel about it—the main social centre of the system being over to its east side where Bracken had first started his exploration.

There was a natural reluctance among the moles to go west into the Chamber of Dark Sound or beyond it towards where the Chamber of Echoes lay, and most moles lived on the east side of the ancient tunnels. Only Comfrey lived on the slopes, which gave him a reputation as an amiable eccentric, but he was respected for his enormous knowledge of the lore of plants and the role he was thought to have as adviser and protector of Rebecca. The mystery around him was enhanced by the fact that it was known that he travelled widely in his search for herbs, venturing right across the pastures, so it was said, and even down across the stricken Old Wood to the marshes.

Although the summer was generally sunless and chilly, in contrast to the preceding one, it was still a time for idleness: the rain had brought plenty of worms and grubs to the beechwoods and the litters were quickly off parents’ paws. So, once more, the Duncton moles slipped into their old habits of gossip and chatter and the telling of tales; and, memories being short and imaginations strong, many stories were told (and more created) of the deeds and adventures of Bracken, the mole who had rid the system of Mandrake and Rune and who had gone to Uffington with that Boswell, the mole from Uffington, to give thanks for deliverance from the plague.

Many a youngster heard the tale, and asked to be told again, of how Bracken crossed the marshes to ‘rescue Boswell,’ of how Bracken ‘ordered’ Stonecrop to kill Mandrake before the Stone, of the plague and of Bracken’s subsequent departure for the Holy Burrows.

‘Will he come back one day?’ was the question always asked, and most often greeted with a shake of the head and a statement like ‘These things happened many moleyears ago now, before last Longest Night, and what happened to Bracken and Boswell lies with the Stone.’

Many stories linked Rebecca’s name to Bracken and some even said that stuttering Comfrey was the result of their great love and supposed mating and was the cause of Mandrake’s anger with Rebecca. As the molemonths of summer passed by into moleyears, the name of Mandrake became darker and blacker than it had ever been during his lifetime, and many moles refused even to talk of him. As for Rune, whose evil ran deeper than Mandrake’s ever had, the moles were strangely silent about him, as if disease attached itself to anymole who even mentioned his name. When it was spoken (and what mole doesn’t like from time to time to flirt with evil?), it was in hushes and in secret, and told in garbled form amongst siblings who thought themselves daring and who gasped at the wickedness of it all. Rune and his henchmoles had been routed by Bracken and Stonecrop, and Rune had been forced to flee far away, where he died of the plague. Rune, it was said, did ‘things’ to other moles, and made other moles do them as well, though what ‘things’ were was never specified.

Rebecca heard these stories but never involved herself with them, refusing to be drawn on to the subject of Bracken or Mandrake or any other mole, except that sometimes she would tell tales of Rose the Healer, whom some still remembered, and would often make youngsters and adults alike laugh with her fond memories of Mekkins, the Marshender who had more courage than anymole she knew.

The Old Wood was never visited now by the Duncton moles; its tunnels were believed to be dangerous because of the many moles who had died there of the plague and whose bodies were incarcerated there for ever in the debris of the fire. But in fact, as Comfrey alone knew well, the wood was not as devastated as it had first seemed to be. True, all the shrubs had been killed by the fire, and many of the smaller trees like holly and hazel as well, while some of the oaks, particularly in the centre of the wood where the fire was the strongest, had suffered total destruction of their crown canopies and so would die slowly for want of the means to take life from the sun and air.

But by the end of June, some tree life had returned to the stricken wood as well as a great deal of plant life. Some of the smaller trees had sent up suckers from their roots, like the aspen and, curiously, a couple of old and previously neardead elm trees, while many of the oaks that had looked dead from ground level because their roots and lower trunk and branches had seemed so charred had withstood the fire well, and their higher branches were putting on leaf and beginning to cast a little shade when the sun showed up over the derelict wood floor.

At the same time plant life, which Duncton had never seen before in such profusion because the wood was normally too dark to sustain it by Midsummer, began to blossom and grow among the ashes of the fire. Even in some of the most fire-wasted areas, creeping thistles, their tubers untouched by the fire, sent prickly green shoots up through the black, dead litter; in many areas, great banks of rosebay willowherb shoots were forming, their pink flowers not yet out but their thick stems and long, narrow leaves already giving a magnificent swaying life to the very areas where the fire had been thickest.

Other plants began to rejoice in the new freedom for growth they found, like the evergreen alkanet, whose luminescent tight blue flowers nestled among thick, hairy leaves that towered above a mole like Comfrey, casting shade for the occasional rabbit that came in off the pastures. Down by the marshes there were unaccustomed paths of swaying green watercress, and in the stretches of the wood where the spring rains had turned the wood ash into mud, yellow and pink comfrey had taken root, bigger than that which grew on drier, higher ground and a place for bees to buzz and saunter. Birdsong returned to the wood, though mainly from nesting birds in the less burnt east side, though the beating of wood-pigeon wings and the scurry of magpies was heard more clearly among the sparser trees.

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 now a 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 pink-reds 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 or 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 towards 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 towards the north, towards… oh, where was it? Then she found herself aching to understand what it was calling to 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 finally to leave Duncton:

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

Oh, she smiled; oh, she loved Comfrey! While she was gone! While! Nomole, 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 like to have left 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 towards 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.

Chapter Forty

Nothing 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 grey 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 northwards 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 colour was so dead that when light from the sky touched them they seemed to turn 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!’

Although in the final stages of their journey to Capel Garmon they had managed to avoid all contact with roaring owls, the route on which Bracken now led them took them steeply down into a river valley in which, as they knew from experience, they would sooner or later have to cross a roaring-owl route. In fact, it came so oner, right at the bottom of a steep valley side. They were glad to reach the bottom, for the valley side was wooded with coniferous trees, never a good place to find food. They pressed on over the roaring-owl way without difficulty, using the technique they had developed over the moleyears—a long touch of the snout on the hard, unnatural ground they found in such places and then, when both agreed that there was no vibration, a fast dash across.

Once on the other side, they found that the air was heavy with the scent of a deep, cold river and though tempted to press on and find it, for rivers were a good place for food, Bracken insisted that they stay higher up the valley by the roaring-owl way and follow along by the side of it. It was a wise decision, for this route took them to a bridge over the river from whose height they could hear that it would have been too fast and wide for them to have swum across safely. They waited until dusk before risking the bridge, but once across, dropped right to the river’s edge, where they found food on the thin strip of rough pasture fields that ran by its side.

On the side of the river from which they had come the ground rose steeply with massive coniferous trees covering it in darkness and stiff silence, while higher up on their own side a smattering of deciduous trees, mainly oaks and ash, gave way to rougher, starker ground that grew thicker with coniferous forest the higher it went. They pressed on downstream until, after only four or five molemiles, a tributary flowed down into the main river, a tumbling, rocky stream too rough for a mole ever to cross.

‘But then, we don’t need to,’ said Bracken. ‘That’s where Siabod lies, off up this valley somewhere.’ He pointed his snout upstream and they both headed westwards again, wondering what lay up the valley above them.

Their progress was mainly slow, for the valley was steep and rocky, but here and there it flattened out into sheep-pasture fields where the food was good and the going easy. But however flat the ground immediately ahead of them sometimes was, they were aware, constantly and claustrophobically, of the steep valley sides rising to their left and beyond the river to their right, and of the dark green forest that clothed it, out of which ugly snouts and flanks of grey-black rock protruded more and more frequently. Bracken felt he was taking them straight into a rocky trap from which, should they run into trouble, there would be no easy escape. The river raced and roared down past them and occasionally its sound was joined by the rumble and rattle of a roaring owl as it went by on the way that ran a little higher up the valley side.

Because the valley was so closed in they could get no sense of what lay beyond it, either to the side or straight ahead, while from down the valley and into their faces ran a continual run of bad weather, rain and wind, sometimes hail, and air that got colder and colder. It gave them the feeling that their situation was only going to get worse.

It was on the fourth day after crossing the bridge that they ran into their first snow—not falling from the sky, but lying in wet, streaky patches in hollows in the ground and several days old, judging from the way it had been trodden over and messed on by the sheep. It was grubby, half-thawed snow and it matched the place they were in. High above them, where rock was exposed, an occasional snow patch glared against the dark rise of trees, though these had now shed whatever snow had settled on them from their steep branches. As night fell, the temperature dropped and the snow patches began to freeze and crackle at a talon touch, their icy surfaces catching the last purple glimmer of daylight in the chill sky above.

It was on the following day, the fifth in their journey up the valley, that they met their first Siabod mole. It happened suddenly among some tussocky brown grass near the river’s edge where they had gone to take a drink in a tiny backpool made accessible by treading sheep.

They heard his voice from the tussocks above before they saw him: ‘Beth yw eich enwau, a’ch cyfundrefn?’ They did not understand the language at all, though from its tone and his stance it was obvious what it meant.

‘We’ve come from Capel Garmon,’ said Bracken, to make things simple.

‘In peace,’ added Boswell.

‘Dieithriaid i Siabod, paham yr ydych yma?’ His words were a question, but that was all they could tell. They waited in silence. If he was a Siabod mole, he was not what either of them had expected, which was a mole as big as Mandrake, and as fierce.

He was thin and wiry and had a wizened, suspicious expression on his face that spelt distrust. His snout was mean and pinched, and his fur looked more like a bedraggled teasel than anything else. His small black eyes travelled rapidly over them, taking in their strength, their relative size, Boswell’s crippled paw, their position (which was lower than he, down by the water), and generally giving them the feeling that they were being picked over by the snoutiest little mole they had ever come across.

Then Boswell spoke again. ‘Siabod?’ he asked.

The mole stared at them, his eyes flickering from one to the other, the faintest wrinkles of contempt forming in minute folds down the furless part of his snout.

‘Southerners, are you?’ he asked, speaking in ordinary mole so they could understand, but in such a way that the question was also an accusation and with a harsh, mocking accent to the words.

But before they had time to reply, he darted back into the grass from which he had emerged, and by the time Bracken had climbed up to it, was gone. Bracken called after him, shouted out that they intended no harm and asked him to come back, but the only reply lay in whatever words a mole cared to divine in the rushing and rippling of the cold, indifferent river.

‘He’s gone,’ said Bracken.

‘Let’s press on,’ said Boswell, ‘as you have said more than once. Anyway, he’ll be back.’

‘Yes, and with other moles. He was a Siabod, all right. He spoke with the same accent Mandrake had,’ said Bracken.

‘Well, I can’t see where else he can be from up here,’ said Boswell, running along a little behind, ‘and that must have been Siabod he was speaking and—’

‘He was so pathetic,’ said Bracken contemptuously. ‘He reminded me of nothing more than a wireworm in a tunnel when you expected to see a lobworm. Nasty little character he was. I mean, he might have helped us…’ The anger in Bracken’s words reflected his apprehension about what they might soon face.

They pressed on, a new life flowing through them now that they had made contact, if contact it was, with somemole, however contemptible he seemed to Bracken.

Indeed, they were so full of the encounter and the discussion of the possibilities of the first mole bringing others, and their decision just to push forward and see what happened, that they hardly noticed that the wood on their side of the river suddenly gave way to clear, rough pasture, while the valley widened out to their left into a gentler slope. As they moved forward, their snouts to the ground ahead and not looking up at the prospect that very slowly began to loom before them, they did not notice that beyond the now gentler valley side, off to their left, what looked like a mist was beginning to swirl in, swath after swath, among the upper branches of the highest trees. Not mist but low cloud, whose lower edge smoked like moist grass caught by fire, while beyond the gaps in these low clouds there was not more sky but a grim, great blackness, spattered here and there with specks of pure white, that rose soaring high and massive like a wall above the valley: a mountain.

Because the mist was so pervasive and changeable, it would have been impossible, even had Bracken and Boswell been aware of the scene looming so high beyond them, to make out the complete shape of the gloomy heights above the valley side.

But no sooner were they conscious that the valley had widened and that the quality of windsound had grown deeper and heavier than the mist began to fall in waves towards them into the valley. At first it was only a thin veil that softened and deadened the russet and grey slopes behind it, but as it crept, swirled and surged lower, its higher parts grew thicker and the valley sides above them were lost in an impenetrable murk like the opaque off-white that slinks across the eyes of the creature going blind with age.

Then, faster than a forest fire, more silent than snow in the night, more unexpected than an owl’s attack, the mist was down across the ground where they crouched, racing and running between them in cold and clammy fronds, robbing everything of colour before masking everything in grey.

It was like no mist either of them had ever seen on the chalk downland they knew, where a mist generally came with cold, still air and a mole waited patiently for it to go. This one was moving and racing and challenging, a living mist that disorientated a mole by putting its chill around his snout and forming mysterious shapes in its layered depths that seemed to move around him, or make him feel he was moving when he was, in fact, crouching still.

‘Boswell?’ called Bracken to his friend, who, though only a few moleyards away, was becoming obscured by the thickening white between them that not only cut off sight and smell but muffled and distorted sound as well.

‘Boswell, stay close to me or we’ll get separated.’

When the two moles came together, each noticed that the other’s fur was coated with the finest of condensation and that their talons were shiny and wet with it.

With no reference points of sight or smell around them but the now-muffled river, they instinctively tried burrowing, but the ground was so wet and full of flat, granular stones that jarred the shallowest talon thrust that they gave it up.

‘I don’t like this one bit,’ said Bracken, looking around at the mist in which the light intensity continually changed as the layers between them and the sky thickened or thinned with the run of the breeze. ‘I’ve never felt so exposed in my life. Let’s make for the river and we can find a temporary burrow in its bank.’

Bracken started off one way, then paused and, shaking his head, went another before stopping and moving in yet a third.

‘I think the river’s that way,’ said Boswell, pointing in a fourth direction.

‘No, I can distinctly hear it that way,’ said Bracken, pointing somewhere else and resolutely leading them towards where the sound of the river seemed, possibly, to come from. The mist moved about them, drifting one way, racing another, fading before them so that they caught a glimpse of a scatter of grey rock for a moment before it disappeared again, or a stand of grass appeared to their left or right.

Then they heard voices, harsh and quick, somewhere ahead; or was it behind? Siabod voices.

They stopped, snouting about themselves in confusion, and for the first time in their long journey together found they were totally lost. They could hear the river but not find it, and the only reference point they really had was each other.

‘Best thing to do,’ said Bracken in a voice that made it quite clear that it was what he was going to do whatever else happened, ‘is to crouch still and wait until it clears. And if those were moles we heard, I hope they find us, because they can lead us to somewhere safe.’

He looked in the direction of the sky above them, seeking out a lighter part of the mist and hoping it might clear. Then the voices came back, from somewhere else, and there was a sudden rush and squeal of a massive herring gull in and out of the mist above them.

Time was as obscured as place, and neither mole could have said whether it was ten minutes or two hours before the mist began to clear as suddenly as it had come. First they were able to see a greater distance along the ground as one patch moved off and was not so quickly replaced by another. Then the swirls above them parted for a moment to reveal, quite unexpectedly, a hint of a blue sky. The light brightened around them, and soon they were able to make out the direction of the sun itself, though it was too diffused to show its shape. The mist suddenly cleared to their right, bringing the sound of the river clearly to them once more, and there it lay, quite a way below them; without realising it, they had moved across the valley and a little way up its side in their wandering. They were about to start off towards the river when a voice sang out of the light mist that still lay ahead of them: ‘It’s lost you are, is it?’

Bracken tensed and stepped a pace or two in front of Boswell, squinting to see if he could make out from the dark rocky shapes and shadows ahead where the mole was hidden. He felt angry and frustrated enough for a fight.

The mist rolled away and there were four moles ranged on the slope a little above them, the one they had seen and three others, all equally stunted and mean-looking.

‘Siabod moles,’ murmured Boswell.

‘Yes, we are lost, as a matter of fact,’ said Bracken boldly, ‘and we’d be obliged if you’d tell us where Siabod is.’

There was a rapid crossfire of talk among the four moles which they could not understand before the smaller one, who had met them already, approached and said, ‘And what would you be wanting with Siabod? It’s not a place you just go to, you know.’

‘If you hadn’t scarpered when you saw us before, we wouldn’t have been mucking about in that bloody mess,’ said Bracken, waving a paw at the retreating mist and deciding that a bit of aggression wouldn’t go amiss.

It went very amiss indeed. One of the other moles stepped forward and said in a high, angry voice, ‘Now don’t you go talking to Bran like that, or you’ll have something else to talk about, see?’

Bran smirked and stepped cockily forward in a way he had not dared to do when he was alone.

‘Well?’ he asked.

Bracken did not reply because he was engaged in a snout confrontation with the other mole, who did not impress him one bit. He had learned a great deal about aggression over the moleyears and could tell a phoney when he saw one. Also, he was hungry and he was itching for a fight.

Boswell tried to defuse the situation by crouching down and beginning to explain why they were there by saying, ‘We’ve come from Capel Garmon and are seeking to find Siabod and…’ But it was no use. Bran foolishly darted forward, outraged at Bracken’s apparent ignoring of him, and dared to cuff Bracken lightly on the snout.

Bracken did not hesitate. With a backsweep of his right paw he knocked Bran off his paws, while with a forward thrust of his left he lunged his talons into the other mole’s shoulder and then swept him to the left with a powerful smack of his right paw. Then, facing the two big moles and rearing up before them, he said between angry gulps of breath: ‘Don’t any of you try anything like that again. Now, where’s Siabod?’

As he spoke, the answer soared high above him, behind the silent Siabod moles. Beyond the rim of the valley side the mist slowly cleared and rolled back out of the valley, revealing in the distance the cruel mass of a mountain whose shape was streaked with more and more snow the higher the eye travelled, between which rose steep masses of bare, black rock whose details were obscured by distance. Its size and impregnability seemed absolute. Angry grey clouds kissed at its highest peak, a sharp point that made a mole feel very small and distant.

‘That’s Siabod,’ spat Bran in a high, shaken voice.

‘Good,’ said Boswell quietly, ‘and now that we’ve found it and got to know each other’s strength, why don’t we find a nice safe burrow somewhere and we’ll try and explain why we’re here.’

‘What’s your names, then?’ asked one of the bigger moles.

‘Bracken of Duncton,’ said Bracken.

‘Boswell of Uffington,’ said Boswell, a little wearily because the mention of Uffington rarely failed to have an effect on other moles. It was one of the few systems everymole seemed to have heard of. This time was no exception.

‘Why didn’t you say so before, mole?’ said one of them after a long, respectful pause.

‘Now there’s a fine thing!’ said Bran, his crafty face cracking suddenly into what was for him a smile. ‘A mole from Uffington! An honour. A great honour.’

And the four of them clustered around Boswell and led him up the valley side, leaving Bracken to trail along behind, feeling quite forgotten and a little foolish for having been so aggressive.

Chapter Forty-One

‘You’re never going to try to get to Castell y Gwynt!’ exclaimed Bran after he and several other Siabod moles they met had heard their tale. There was a great shaking of heads and muttering in Siabod, the meaning of which was plain enough to Bracken: ‘insane,’ ‘mad,’ ‘crazy,’ ‘foolish,’ ‘idiots’. But behind it all there was awe as well.

‘You’ll never do it, mole, you never will.’

‘Have none of you ever tried?’ asked Bracken.

Bran repeated the question in Siabod, because they found that most moles there spoke nomole at all. There was another shaking of heads and a sullen silence.

‘One mole tried a long time ago, but he never came back,’ said Bran. ‘You can’t, see? There is evil up there, there is danger like no danger anymole has ever faced and lived through. There’s no food, for they say no worms live that high and there is Gelert the Hound of Siabod.’ Gelert! Was that what Mandrake had muttered to himself and shouted in his threats to Bracken in the Ancient System? wondered Bracken.

Neither Bracken nor Boswell had mentioned Mandrake in their account, principally because they feared that if they told the full story, it might invoke hostility on them. Bracken had, after all, been responsible for his death. But now…

‘Do you know a Siabod mole called Mandrake?’ asked Bracken slowly.

Bran looked startled, his mouth fell open, he looked nervously at the other moles, and one of them asked him to translate. When he did so, there was rapid talk and looks of surprise.

‘Well?’ said Bracken.

‘That’s a strange question, isn’t it?’ said Bran carefully. ‘What makes you ask a question like that?’

Briefly Bracken told him. As he spoke, Bran translated, but the moles never took their eyes off Bracken. The only bit that Bracken glossed over was how Mandrake had died.

‘Tell them the truth,’ urged Boswell.

But Bracken shook his head. ‘Too risky,’ he said. ‘Later, perhaps.’

‘Well, do you know him?’ asked Bracken again. But before Bran could answer, or would, one of the older moles there came forward with such authority that they realised that while Bran was their spokesman, this mole was their leader. He had seen perhaps four Longest Nights and he was a little on the tubby side, though his face was lined and scraggy as the others’ were. He had intelligent eyes and a firm way with him that brought respect. He spoke rapidly to Bran in Siabod, while gesticulating at them both. Bran nodded rapidly and turned to them. ‘You’re to go with Celyn, see? There’s a mole he says you must meet.’

With Bran taking the rear, they were led from the surface tunnels in which they had been talking higher and higher up the valley and out on to the surface. They did not resist this move because they had so often had the experience of being met by guardmoles or scouts at the periphery of a system and then being interrogated before being led into its heart and they had taken it for granted that this was what was happening to them when they were initially led into the tunnels lower down the valley. They rarely found out much about whatever moles they had met during such preliminary talks, and no longer expected to. The excitement started once they were led, as they were being led now, into the real heart of the system.

But this time the journey was unusually long and little was said. The system’s peripheral tunnels were very variable, ranging from the crudest surface runs through an unpleasant, wormless peat soil that smelt of marsh to deep tunnels in a soft and sticky dark soil filled with grey, flat flakes of rusty-looking slate. The system seemed to have no clear pattern to it, and frequently they broke out on to the surface into nearly open tunnels through rough grass or amongst heather.

It was in one of these surface runs that they saw, off to their left, their first full view of Siabod, or Moel Siabod as Bran called it, speaking the words with a shiver in his voice that made him seem almost likeable.

Now that they could make out its mass unobstructed by the valley side, they saw that it was even more imposing than they had at first thought, with great falls of black rock, misty with distance, rising in ugly snow-covered steps to the summit itself.

Once above the valley and past the gnarled oaks which they unexpectedly found at its top beyond a stand of coniferous trees, the ground levelled out into an area of flat sheep pasture, green and relatively dry in some places, boggy and soppy with wet peat in others, all interspersed with rocky outcrops. They crossed this on the surface, keeping to a ground cover of heather and young bilberry which the surface runs had been cleverly designed to exploit to the full, until at last they plunged underground once more into tunnels that gave them their first sense of being in a real, complete system.

In all their explorations and journeys, they had never seen tunnels quite so bare and bleak as these were. The soil was good, considering the miserable, wet peats they had crossed over and the bleached-out, ash-coloured soils that had been encountered nearer the valley, for it was dark and well-structured and had the smell of food about it.

What was unusual was the way the tunnels exploited the great masses of smooth and jagged slate that thrust through the soil from below, their strata all at a steep angle to the level of the surface itself. Clearly, generations of moles had turned these rocks into natural routeways, burrowing tunnels which used the tilted slate as one massive wall on one side, with bare soil on the other. The effect was grim but powerful, for the tunnels’ roofs—though most were more pointed or lanceolate than flat—were unusually high, and this no doubt created the moist, dour echo that was deeper and more primitive than the echoes drier chalk created.

Celyn, the older mole who had been leading them, stopped suddenly and crouched down, saying nothing.

‘After we’ve eaten, we’ll rest here and sleep in burrows nearby,’ said Bran. ‘There’s still some way to go.’

Food was brought to them by yet another scraggy, thinfaced mole like Bran, who appeared with a bundle of worms that were mean and grubby little specimens by any normal standards.

Boswell ate them slowly, one by one, but Bracken, who was hungry, wolfed several down very fast before becoming aware that the champing and crunching of his eating was the only sound in the tunnels about them apart from the distant drip, drip, drip of water off the slate. He slowed down and made a few over-appreciative remarks about the worms to cover the slight sense of embarrassment he felt. Food up here, he was beginning to realise, was a lot harder to come by than in the lowlands. It was not to be eaten too fast.

Only after they had eaten did they feel free to ask some questions about the Siabod system and where they were being taken. Most of the talking was done in Siabod by the bigger, older mole, and then translated by Bran.

What they heard about Siabod was familiar enough. The system had been decimated by the plague, which came to it later than to other systems but took a massive toll. The few moles left tended to live in a narrow belt between where they had been interrogated and where they were now, where there was reasonably worm-full soil if a mole knew where to look.

There was no leader in the system because Siabod moles tended to follow the lead of a group of elders like Celyn. But he was at pains to explain that the system had been kept together during and since the plague by a mole he called Y Wrach—a guttural-sounding name that made the mole, whoever he was, sound like a curse.

‘Oh, it’s not a male, it’s a female. Her name is Gwynbach, but most of the moles here have a nickname and hers has always been Y Wrach.’

‘And what does that mean in mole?’ asked Bracken.

‘Depends how you pronounce it, see? One way it means “healer” or “spell-weaver”, another way it means “witch”. You’ll see why when you meet her.’

‘So we’re going to meet her, are we?’ said Bracken.

‘You’ll have to, now. Wouldn’t be right not to, you know. Not after what you said about Mandrake. You see, she’s the one who saved him… ’ And it was then that Bran began to tell them the tale that, long afterwards, Boswell was to scribe so carefully in the Rolls of the Systems and which begins with the now famous words, ‘Mandrake was born and survived in conditions beyond even the nightmares of the toughest Siabod moles…’

When he got to the end of the chilling story, which carried into the heart of Bracken as he remembered Mandrake’s despairing cry to Rebecca before he was killed by Stonecrop, Bran explained, ‘You see, Y Wrach was the female who found him. She liked wild places, she still does, and she heard him bleating up on the slopes where he had been born and carried him down by the scruff of his neck. They say there were those who wanted to kill him, being the last of a cursed litter, but she protected him and fought them off, dragging him about with her until he grew strong and then, when he did, teaching him to trust nomole, to despise all moles and to fight like no Siabod mole has ever fought. And he grew to be enormous and powerful, like nomole the system’s ever seen before or since. You know what they called them then, being such a funny-looking pair? The “fach” and the “fawr”—the “little” and the “big”.’

‘But how can she still be alive?’ asked Boswell. ‘She must be very old.’

‘She’s seen six Longest Nights through at least,’ said Bran, ‘and though her senses are failing now, her mind’s as sharp as a talon. Now the moles here bring her food, robbing themselves of it when its scarce, just as she did for that Mandrake.’

‘But what happened to him? How did he come to leave the system?’

‘He defied her. He was always like that, from the moment she found him, it’s said. Nomole ever understood why she looked after him, for there was never a word of love spoken by Y Wrach. Not to him or anymole. Nor between them. They fought from the start and it’s said that the scars on her snout came from him, made then he finally left her.’

‘What did he do?’ asked Bracken.

Bran turned to Celyn and consulted with him. The two talked rapidly in Siabod for a while until finally Bran came closer to Bracken and Boswell, speaking in a low voice as if he was going to be overheard by the passionless slate walls of the tunnel or the empty depths about them.

‘He set off for Castell y Gwynt.’ Bran paused to let the words sink in before adding slowly, ‘That’s what he did, see. That’s what he did.’

‘But why?’ asked Bracken. ‘Why?’

Bran ignored his question, his gaze fixed on some image in his imagination as he continued. ‘He must have gone up through Cwmoer because that’s the only route to the upper slopes, up into the desolate place where Gelert the Hound lives. It was thought, until you told your story, that he must have been torn to death. But he must somehow have got through and then gone on up to the wormless heights of Siabod and on to the holy Stones of Castell y Gwynt.’ Bran paused and there was silence among them.

‘But why?’ persisted Bracken.

‘Why? What mole can say the true reason why a mole risks death where every other mole fears to go? The reason he gave, it is said, was that the Stone does not exist. There is no Stone. Therefore the Stones themselves mean nothing. He wanted to show that the Stone all moles worship and Siabod moles have always revered is nothing. He wanted at once to show how he despised our fears and mocked our belief. Remember, in those days before the plague, all moles were made to worship the Stone, but Y Wrach taught him not to, at least she told him to take no part in our rituals. But then Mandrake said, What Stone can exist when such suffering as was wrought by his own birth can exist? And after the plague came a lot of us came to see he was right, see?’

The thought hung about them, each considering it in a different way. For Boswell the answer was as simple and as peaceful as sitting still; for Bracken, who had seen plenty of suffering in his own time, it was a question he had never been able to answer. For Bran, it was not much worth thinking about. They could not tell what Celyn thought at all.

‘And she’s still alive, after so long?’ asked Boswell. ‘What is it that she’s waiting for?’ He asked it with compassion, looking not at Bran but at Celyn. Bran repeated the question in Siabod and Celyn answered it very softly.

‘Well?’ asked Bracken.

Bran laughed and shrugged. ‘He says that she thinks that Mandrake will come back,’ he said.

Bracken had never actually said Mandrake was dead and now was even less sure what to say. But Boswell got him out of the difficulty.

‘Take us to her,’ he said gently.

‘But we need to rest, to sleep…’ complained Bran.

‘Take us,’ Boswell repeated, saying the words to Celyn, who seemed to understand and got up to lead the way forward again.

The second journey consumed several molehours more and took them into tunnels whose size and appearance was more fearful than anything a Duncton mole could ever have imagined. The slate walls began to tower higher and higher above them, the floor to widen so broadly that it was sometimes hard to make out the far side. To keep a straight track they had to stay close to one wall, though that was difficult sometimes because the continual running of water down the walls had created great pools on the floor, which was made of slate flakes rather than soil. In several places great tunnels entered the one they were travelling down and there was the continual sound of the running of underground streams and even in one place of some subterranean waterfall. The quality of the echo became deep and sonorous so that even the smallest paw sound seemed made by a giant mole.

‘What moles burrowed these?’ asked Bracken in awe at one point, his voice echoing harshly into the distance.

‘Not moles,’ said Bran. ‘This is not the work of moles.’

In some places there were great chambers of slate, higher than a hill, taller than the biggest beech tree, and littered about the flat, lifeless floors were twisted, jagged shapes of rusting metal such as they had seen sometimes near where roaring owls ran. The air was chill with a death that had been dead many generations before.

‘She lives here?’ asked Bracken.

‘No, this is just a quick way to reach her when there’s too much wet on the surface above. But we’re nearly there, see,’ said Bran.

Celyn led them round another great chamber that echoed to the clatter of their paws on the slaty floor, then through a blissful mole-sized crack in the rock that sloped steeply upwards but down which fresh cold air streamed. They scrambled up through the muck of slate fragments and muddy, fallen vegetation, scrabbling through sodden peat particles and back to near the surface into a proper tunnel, obviously mole-burrowed. Then out on to the surface, where the evening was beginning to form in the angry grey sky. They could see Siabod more clearly now, nearer and more massive; more jagged, too, with black buttresses of rock jutting out and disrupting the smoother profile they had first seen and obscuring all but the highest part of the summit itself, over which grey mist lingered.

Then down into another tunnel, along for a quarter of a molemile, and into the tunnels of a damp and dismal little system that reminded Bracken of Curlew’s burrows in what had once been the Marsh End.

‘It’s Celyn and Bran, Gwynbach,’ called Bran. ‘And some friends for you to meet.’

They rounded a corner, went to a burrow entrance, and Celyn, signalling them to stop, entered. They heard him talking in Siabod and the murmur of a reply from a cracked and aged voice through which ran an edge as sharp as the thinnest of slate flakes. Celyn came out and beckoned Boswell and Bracken inside the burrow.

Y Wrach was crouched in a nest of dried matgrass and heather, and what pale fur she still had on her ancient body was grey and worn with age. Her face was contorted into a thousand wrinkles and her talons were short and worn—one had gone altogether—and their colour was translucent grey rather than black. Her eyes were closed, blind and running, and Bracken noticed that her back paws were swollen out of shape by some disease or complains that came with age. But her head movements were quick and acute, and she beckoned first Boswell and then Bracken over to her, seeming to know exactly where they crouched. She snouted at each one of them, running a paw over Boswell, lingering for a moment at his crippled paw and then pushing him away, turning to Bracken, whom she examined in the same way. He shuddered at her touch, which was like the caress of disease, but he noticed that Boswell was looking intently at her, compassion and warmth in his eyes—and more than that, respect.

‘Pa waddod ydych, sy’n ddieithriaid yma? Dywedwch yn eich geiriau eich hunain a siaredwch o’r galon.’

‘She wants to know who you are and for you to tell her yourselves,’ said Bran.

‘Well, I’m not sure that we ought to tell her everything…’ As Bracken hesitated and stumbled over his words, Boswell quietly interrupted him, speaking to Celyn and ignoring Bran.

‘Where shall we begin?’ he asked.

Celyn hesitated and then, to Bracken’s surprise, broke into mole, which he spoke very well though with a harsher accent than Bran.

‘Tell her what’s in your heart. She will know it, anyway. I will translate.’

There was something almost ritualistic about the way Boswell set about telling their story—quite unlike the matter-of-fact approach Bracken used. First he settled himself down comfortably, close to Y Wrach, closing his eyes for a short while almost as if he were praying or invoking some power he felt the occasion warranted. To his surprise, Bracken saw that the ancient mole started to do the same, the two of them engaged in a kind of crouching mutual trance.

Finally Boswell said, softly, ‘What I shall say is from my heart to your heart, told with the truth the Stone itself put there, and which I shall try to honour.’ He paused briefly, and Y Wrach nodded slightly, her snout bowed and her head a little on one side.

‘My name is Boswell, scribemole of Uffington, who has journeyed here for many long moleyears, through winter and snow, with news you have waited for for far longer than that. May the Stone give you strength to receive it.’

He paused between each sentence so Celyn could translate, and imperceptibly Bran and Bracken retreated into the further shadows of the burrow as Boswell and Y Wrach began their talk, almost as if it were private. Even Celyn soon seemed to fade away, his voice speaking the words of one to the other as if he himself were not there, so that soon it was just Boswell and the old female talking alone together.

‘The mole I have come with, who brought me safely here, is Bracken from Duncton which, like Siabod, is one of the Great Systems. Nomole may be trusted more.’ Y Wrach nodded gently, snouting over towards the shadows where Bracken crouched in silence.

‘I will tell you of Mandrake, the mole of Siabod; I will tell you of changes that nomole may judge. I will ask you a favour of the great Stones of Siabod… ’ So Boswell began to tell their story, speaking in the traditional rhythmic way of scribemoles for whom truth is more important than time or effect, and who speak as moles can only ever truly speak, from one heart to another.

When Celyn reached the name of Mandrake in his translation, Y Wrach sighed very slightly and seemed to mutter to herself, peering blindly at Boswell and then round at the rest of them in the burrow, seeming suddenly to find more strength in her body and to hold herself more and more erect. Her face bore the pride of a difficult promise fulfilled. She spoke a few words in Siabod which Celyn translated almost as she spoke them.

‘Alas, Boswell, that you are not a female, for then, perhaps, there would be less need of words. Tell me of Mandrake whom I saved on the mountain, tell me it all and I will tell you its truth.’

So Boswell began the tale, telling of Duncton and of all Mandrake did there. Telling of Rebecca and speaking of Rune, sometimes softly referring to Bracken for details that he did not know or could not remember having been told.

Until at last, in a voice as hushed as night-time snow, he told of the fight by the Stone and of the death of Mandrake.

There was a sigh from Y Wrach as he told of this and a shaking of her old lined head. Then Boswell continued, telling of the seventh Stillstone, of the death of Skeat, of the plague, and of all the things that had happened to bring them to Siabod. As he spoke, Bracken saw for the first time that, looked at in the way Boswell had told them, all these things were linked to Mandrake. But then he thought that in another way they were linked to Rebecca, or to Boswell, or to Uffington. And the Stone. Their story was all one.

There was a long silence before Y Wrach began in her own turn to speak. As she did so, she seemed to rear up and grow in size, the great slab of slate that formed one side of the burrow seeming to shrink behind her, a black backdrop to her grey and wrinkled form. She spoke in a singsong voice, different from the one she had first spoken in, and the words seemed to come not from her but through her, from a different generation of moles and from a mole who was young and speaking reluctantly through a body that had nearly done with life:

‘Hen wyf i, ni’th oddiweddaf…

Crai fy mryd rhag gofd haint…

Gorddyar adar; gwlyb naint.

Llewychyd lloer; oer dewaint.’

‘Ancient am I, and do not comprehend you…

I am wasted from painful disease…

Loud are birds; streams wet,

The moon shines; midnight is cold.’

The Siabod she spoke was more rhythmic and musical than that Bracken had first heard from Bran and the other moles down in the valley. And as Celyn’s translation began, her own words seemed to form a wonderful, melodic accompaniment to his own rendering of it, so that the sense came from him, but the power and poetry of sound came from her.

At first Bracken found it hard to follow what she meant, until he realised that he was not listening to a series of logical ideas or explanations of anything so much as to the outpouring of images and memories from the heart of a mole who had struggled with age for many long moleyears and whose life is better explained by the running of a stream than by the exposition of a scribemole. At the heart of all she said was her faith in Mandrake, or in the life force within him, whose power she believed would not have withered in the dull safety of burrows and tunnels, having survived the blizzard from which she saved him.

‘Mandrake, I knew your nature,

Like the rush of an eagle in estuaries were you.

Had I been fortunate you could have escaped,

But my misfortune was your life.

My heart was withered from longing.

The buzzard has plunged on the heath,

Your black fur lost in the slate

Of Siabod, or the hound’s howls,

Of Gelert, black as Llyn dur Arddu.

I am wasted, disease has seized me.

Mandrake, what part of you hears me?

For you are coming again

From the slate where you went,

Black among shadows. I hear you.

Wind tosses starry flowers,

Snow drips among green fern.

No more will the buzzard see me,

But I will come in a circle,

A gyre of triumph; bare like the hill,

No fur, no grass; weak talons, soft rock.

This leaf, the wind whips it away.

Alas for its fate,

Old, born this year.

Young, reborn next.

So will you come back,

So will I come back,

So will you know me,

So will I laugh at the black slate of Siabod,

Though my heart withered from longing

In this life that you left me,

And wind swept the last trees from the mountain.

So did I laugh in the blizzard that found you.

Lakes cold, their looks want warmth,

Ravens scatter in Castell y Gwynt,

Beak on the ice where your talon went,

Where the Stone’s silence warned you

And Tryfan stands still.

I am wasted with melancholy tonight

That I was not there with you,

Nor can ever be. Another will go

And you will come back.

Let the Stones see another

In Castell y Gwynt

Where the winds howl through cracks

But Tryfan stands still.’

As the chanting music of her voice fell away, Celyn spoke the final words and then there was a long silence, Bracken never taking his eyes from her as the images she had invoked of age, and of quest, and of Mandrake, to whom she spoke as if he were still alive, melded in his mind and soared to the Stones of Siabod where he knew he must go.

But most of all he felt her love for Mandrake and her sense that in some way she, who had saved him, had yet failed him. And in hearing her speak, and understanding this truth behind her words, he understood at last Rebecca’s love for Mandrake, which was the same. He remembered again, as he had so many times, that terrible cry by Mandrake when he was by the Stone, a cry he had heard but not known how to listen to. How can a mole answer such anguish? Where does he find the strength? So he looked on Y Wrach anew and wondered if there was anything that he might say to her, anything that would bring her some comfort.

‘Tell her about Rebecca,’ he said suddenly, his voice breaking the silence. And then, turning to Celyn, he said, ‘Did you tell her?’

‘She knows,’ said Boswell softly, and Celyn nodded.

‘No,’ said Bracken, ‘I mean you must tell her I love her,’ for he knew it was the only way of letting this mole, who had waited so long, know that there was something of Mandrake that another mole loved.

‘Tell her,’ said Bracken to Celyn.

Celyn spoke softly to Y Wrach, who put out to him an aged paw which he held in his own before she turned and faced Bracken directly. Then she came over to him slowly, her back paws moving with difficulty, and touched his paw with her own.

‘Dywedwch wrthyf sut un ydi Rebecca!’ she said softly.

Bracken looked over to Celyn for a translation.

‘She says “Tell me what Rebecca is like”,’ he said.

Bracken looked at Y Wrach and wondered what he should say, what he could say. She was like… she was like…

‘She is full of love and her fur is thick and glossy grey. She is big for a female but graceful as a rush in the wind. Her laughter is like sunshine. Life flows through her and she is powerful with it, and moles are afraid of the life she has but they come to her because they need it… ’ He trailed off into silence and Celyn’s soft translation came to an end soon after and there was silence among them.

Bracken wondered at what he had said, because he had never thought those thoughts before about Rebecca. Was he afraid of her himself? Was it simply the life she had that he wanted?

He wanted to carry on speaking to Y Wrach but felt embarrassed with Celyn and Bran and Boswell there, and uncertain of his feelings. He tried to think himself back to the Stillstone with Rebecca, but it seemed too far away, so long ago, that it had happened to another mole. He wanted to cry. He wanted to sigh. He wanted Y Wrach to hold him. He wanted Rebecca.

‘I love her,’ he mumbled, and Celyn repeated the words in Siabod. Y Wrach smiled and then looked a little fierce and then said something to him.

‘She says she knows you love Mandrake’s child Rebecca,’ said Celyn, ‘and that one day you may know it too.’

Then Y Wrach began speaking again, though not in the chant she had used before.

‘I did not want him to go, and warned him against it,’ repeated Celyn, once more translating her words, ‘but you who never saw him then, nor ever watched him grow, can perhaps not understand the power that he had. The sky and the wind were in his fur, and though black clouds raced there, the sun lit its way as well. He had a power of life before which I saw that sad and empty Siabod, the system that you call one of the seven great systems, was but the carcass of a crow dashed against slate cliffs by a cold wind.

‘They grew angry that I would not let him see the Stone crushed between the dead talons of their rituals or join their hopeless song. I told him that the Stone soars on Castell y Gwynt, not in these slated, wormless tunnels now fittingly punished by plague.

‘But he grew to hate me as he hated them, and sought to mock us all by going there. Yet I knew that even Gelert, Hound of Siabod, could not rob him of his life; none could or ever will.’

‘But he’s dead now,’ said Boswell softly, Celyn saying the words back to her.

She shook her head and laughed, her first laugh among them, a laugh as stunted but strong as hillside gorse.

‘You have things to learn, Boswell. And you,’ she turned unerringly towards Bracken and raised an ancient paw at him. ‘You have things to learn, and things you must do, you who say you love Mandrake’s child.’ She came forward slowly to Bracken and touched him, and this time her touch was like a warm, rippling breeze on his fur and he knew that she knew all that was inside him.

‘You may have to lose her, Bracken of Duncton, before you find her. Just like I lost my Mandrake. And found him.’

With this final mystery, which threw only fear into Bracken’s heart, she fell silent and Celyn signalled that they should leave her.

They saw her only once more, two days later, when she led them to the end of her tunnels, to the edge of a massive drop down into the quarried cliffs that, in the distance, edged the precipitous slopes up towards Siabod.

She snouted blindly over this precipice for some time before saying, ‘The way on to Moel Siabod lies through there by the cliffs of Cwm-oer. Beyond it, though nomole now knows them, stand the Stones you seek, and Tryfan, which you will never reach.’ She waved a paw over the slopes to her right. ‘Over there, as I remember too well, is a way back from these depths, but nomole may climb it—only tumble down.’

The ground she pointed over was rough rock, with a few fragments of starved vegetation—frail parsley fern and battered bilberry—that rose steeply along the edge of the quarry and in the distance met its far heights.

‘Up there, in a blizzard, was Mandrake born and there did I find him: a place for herring gull or crow or the dance of a fritillary in summer, but not for mole.’

She turned back to the grim depths of slate below them, which rose far into the distance in a jumble of massed rock fragments and forgotten ruins.

‘That is where Gelert lives and where your path lies.’ She turned away, muttering finally to herself the words she had said before: ‘Hen wyf i, ni’th oddiweddaf.’

Bracken looked up at Siabod and then back down into the place he would soon have to go to reach it, feeling that if she did not understand, what hope had he?

Chapter Forty-Two

Bracken and Boswell crouched on the threshold of Cwmoer with the warnings of the Siabod moles in their ears and shadows in their hearts. A sleepy snow had fallen in the night, layering the fragmented black rocks that lined its gaping valley walls with a thin wet whiteness that only added to the bleakness of the place.

Only Celyn had come with them, for though Bran had guided them back down the valley, he had refused to come anywhere near Cwmoer, hurrying away from them long before they reached it with barely a word of farewell, as if staying too long would bring upon him the same doom that would surely soon fall upon them.

But Celyn took them on along a route he had travelled for a dare as a pup, though he did not know its final stages, for the wind from the cwm had been so chillingly vicious then that he had not got that far. Now, however, he took them on as far as the rocky turning that revealed the start of Cwmoer.

There he stopped, and before leaving them wished them well and gave them one last piece of advice, born of his own long experience on the gentler slopes of Siabod on its eastern side.

‘You will probably find this place even more worm-scarce than those parts of Moel Siabod you have already seen. Many a mole has starved to death out on the soggy peat seeking food—or has been caught out in the open by buzzards or ravens, kestrel or merlin. Up here the streams often shelter food, so follow them if you’re in doubt, however unpromising they may seem. There’s plants, too, that like the soil that worms go for, but you’ll not know most of them. Do you get orchids on the soil you come from—on what you call chalk?’ Boswell nodded, the memory of the delicate, curling orchids of the chalk seeming a distant, unattainable dream up here.

‘Then watch out for one that’s purple and in flower now. And starry saxifrage which Y Wrach mentioned, and which you saw coming here—you’ll find that near worms and grubs. And sorrel—do you know that?’

This time it was Bracken who nodded, for they had fed near sorrel many, many times in the last few moleyears, always a few worms near sorrel!

‘There’s one that grows up here in the worm-full soils, only a bit different from the one you see in the valley—it’s got heart-shaped leaves, but its scent is much the same. It won’t be blooming yet, but watch out for its leaves; they’ll guide you to food.’

He left them with a blessing in Siabod, disappearing back down the rough grass over which they had finally had to come, for the tunnels petered out some way before Cwmoer. They did not move for a while, preferring to stay in the safety of the clump of matgrass in which they were crouching while they worked out what to do.

To their left they could hear and smell the rush of a mountain stream whose noise and heavy splashing suggested that it was the one that took in all the many streamlets that raced and wound their secret ways down the sides of the cwm valley, even fuller now from the fall of snow overnight. A little way up the slope above them, to their right, the grass came to an abrupt stop where the final spewing of a steep and massive slate tip covered it. Not a plant grew on its uninviting face, which rose starkly towards the sky, hiding the base of the great buttress of rock that rose behind and far above it.

What lay straight ahead higher up the valley they could not sense, though its total distance, judging from the quality of windsound, and the occasional bird cry in it, and what they had seen already from Y Wrach’s tunnels, was perhaps six or seven molemiles—a five hour trek.

‘Let’s press on as fast as we can to the head of the valley so that when we get there we’ll have enough time and strength left to find a place for rest and food,’ said Bracken. ‘If this famous hound of theirs is here, so be it! There’s nothing we can do about that. At least there’s plenty of slate to hide away under out of reach of his legendary paws!’ Bracken’s lightheartedness was a poor cover for the unease he felt at the start of this grim journey.

They set off quickly, finding their way to a wide, slaty track that had the smell of roaring owls about it, with the stream on one side and the slate tip on the other. There were patches of sheep’s fescue and matgrass here and there, a welcome break from the snow and slate, but otherwise their way was bleak and steep. The higher they got, the more oppressive they found the towering tip on their right—and even more so because flurries of snow occasionally slid off the great flakes of grey and rusty-brown slate of which it was formed, while in several places along the track there had been rock slips from the tip and great pieces of slate, many twice as thick as a mole and many times longer, had spilled across the track, giving the whole area an atmosphere of oppressive instability.

After an hour’s steady climb in which they used outgrowths of grass for cover as much as possible, the slope levelled off and the track slued round to the left on to a bridge over the stream and then round the left side of a long lake that filled the valley floor ahead of them. Although its water was clear, it appeared cold and black because of the reflection in it of the towering slate cliffs that rose bleakly on its far edge. Impatient little wavelets lapped at the edge of the lake near the track on which they travelled: the whole effect was black and chill.

Here and there on the lake, though a mole could not see it, there were runs of icy white, where the reflections of the precipitous backdrop took in a steep side of snow-covered grass between the cliffs.

To their left the peat gave way to shallow, rocky slopes covered in drier grass and studded here and there by the only cheerful colour in the whole miserable scene, the bright yellow petals of squat tormentil. But behind this grass, too, the slope gradually steepened, rising eventually to more overhangs of rock, or sheer black-grey faces where only an occasional raven or crow moved, visible only when it rose high enough to break out across the dull white sky.

Bracken and Boswell now moved faster, for the track was exposed ground, only pausing to rest at a spot where a rivulet ran under the track in the peat to join the lake. They expected to find food there but were unlucky, and all they could do was to rest and snout out at the sky for predators.

Then on they went, right along the edge of the lake, until that too lay behind them and they were rising again, back among great steep jumbles of snow-covered slate tips that edged the now increasingly rough and rocky track.

They might by now have been lulled by the sheer uneventfulness of the journey into thinking that its dangers had been exaggerated had they not quite suddenly moved into a bank of the heavy odour of some creature they had never faced before, whose path must have crossed the slaty track a short time previously. Its scent had something of the wild deadness of the thick brown peat and something more of the savagery of a carnivore; worse, it held the vaguest hint of that stupefying smell that goes with roaring owl and which, if a mole is not careful, will dull his snout into senselessness.

They retreated off the track for a while, taking refuge by some loose slates amongst which matgrass was growing, and snouted out for a stronger indication of the scent, listening for movement or vibration.

‘What creature was it?’ asked Bracken.

Boswell shrugged and shook his head. He was frankly frightened. But as he watched Bracken stir and eventually snout out of the protection of the grass, he admired again, as he had admired so many times before, his friend’s obstinate courage. So often it had been the only thing that had led him, Boswell of Uffington, a scribemole who was meant to know so much, forward into new awareness and wisdom.

There was a kind of courage Boswell had seen in moles many times that was born of ignorance and stupidity. Give such a mole a task, tell him to get on with it, and off he goes. But Bracken? He was not stupid, he had so many things he understood and sought to live for, and yet on he went in the wake of this fearful odour.

‘Truly the Stone was wise to have bound me to Bracken,’ thought Boswell, following with something near a rueful grin.

They very soon found they had good cause to fear, for as the path took them nearer to the stark rock face at the end of Cwmoer, leaving the lake now some way behind and below them, they moved straight into the terrible smell again, this time finding as well the awesome tracks of the creature that had made it. Each impression was at least half the size of a mole and comprised the five padmarks like a dog’s, which at their forward edge had an additional deep gashline in the snow where a claw had left its mark. The space between each print was three or four times wider than they had seen in any other creature’s tracks and bigger by far than the tracks of even the biggest fox or badger, while the weight of the creature was such that, whereas their own tracks in the snow just broke the surface, these pressed right through to the black slate beneath. They looked like dog, but a monstrous dog, and one whose size would block out the very sky.

They now took a path that prudently meandered from side to side of the track to seek out a route ahead that went as near as possible to growths of matgrass or slate crevices in case quick refuge was needed.

The pawmarks they had seen crossed their track and rose impossibly in great, leaping bounds up the steep side of the slate tip and over its distant top. Here and there, though the two moles could not see it, the heaviness of the creature had been too much for the sometimes delicately balanced slates, and the tracks were marked by slidings of snow and slate that had avalanched down the face of the tip with its passing.

A hovering kestrel might have seen, in the wastes of Cwmoer below, how the tracks dropped down on the far side of the tip, bounded up another, wandered here and there after the smell of sheep, and then dropped back lower down the valley, padding across the snow-layered grass and rocks until they cut back on to the very same track up which Bracken and Boswell had laboured an hour or so before.

A kestrel might have left it at that, but a carrion crow, who knows how to seek out death and feed off it, might have seen that the tracks then ran clumsily back and forth across the fresh moletracks, the snow beside them stirred and messed by the sniffing and slobbering of some great maw, until finally and inexorably they began to follow back up the track after the scent the moles had left behind.

Meanwhile, Bracken and Boswell were beginning to get tired. They seemed to have climbed and climbed all day, with never a sniff of food before them. The walls of the valley had closed in and now forced the track, and them, round to the left, past a bluff that cut off any view of the lake below and then up a much steeper incline on the right-hand side of the now narrowing valley. Below them the head stream of the cwm rushed icily down in the direction they had come. They began to regret not following it up because, as Celyn had suggested, they might have found food somewhere along it. Now it was too late, for the route down the valley side to it would be too steep and slippery, and so they pushed on up the track, hoping that finally it would reach the head of the valley and rejoin the river again.

As they went on, the sound of the river below became slowly muffled by the infilling of yet another ugly tip of slate, far bigger than any they had passed so far, that looked as if the very head of the valley itself had slumped forward in one massive, loose mound that rose higher and higher up the valley side, the river issuing forth at its foot, until the tip was level with the track on their left and soon rising above it. With this on their left and the final stages of the valley wall proper on their right, they were hemmed in on both sides so that if danger should come, they had little hope of moving to right or left unless to hide among the looser slates at the side of the tip.

But for the half-hearted snow about them, all was black and oppressive, and even the afternoon sky seemed to have turned the colour of slate. There was no colour left in the world at all, and the only sound was that of the stream, rushing below them somewhere through the depths of the tip, and other streamlets coursing their eternal way down the steep, echoing walls of the cwm that now, finally, had the two moles in the depth of its savage grip.

They grew fearful, with danger all around them—from shifting slate, from diving predator, from polecat and from monstrous hound—and never in all their travels had they felt a greater sense of foreboding.

The track rose sharply over a thin line of harder rock protruding from the valley side on their right and then dropped before them into a tip-surrounded hollow, its far side towering above them, to the far right of which, over a rocky ledge, the stream that had been on their left tumbled in a waterfall through ruined slate and then under the track of loose slate before them. They looked back at the last of the cwm, and forward into a hollow that looked like a dark well, for barely any light seemed to be reflected out of it. It was a moment at which Bracken would have given his very soul to catch one glimpse of sunshine on a bare face of white chalk, to hear the run of a summer Duncton breeze through dry grasses, and to see the orchids and blue harebells that lift the heart of the saddest mole. But beyond the hollow surely there would be safety and food!

So down into it they went, slipping here and there on snowy slates, lifeless wetness all around them and the rush of the waterfall growing louder all the time. There was not the scent of a single living plant to cheer them, and they knew without searching that they would have to climb back up out of this hollow even higher before having any hope of finding food.

It was only when they reached the bottom, with difficult steepness all about them and the feeling that the slates might suddenly slide inwards and bury them in their jagged darkness for ever, that they caught smell of the creature again. The same savage smell they had had before, only fiercer and nearer.

As the stream rushed and bubbled and raced, they heard over its noise what sounded like the rumble of slate on slate but was, in fact, the first grim growlings of a massive hound whose great paws and claws now covered the tracks Bracken and Boswell had left minutes before at the top of the hollow.

As Bracken stopped, turned and looked back the way they had come, the scent and the sound melded into the terrifying knowledge that a hound was on them. Gelert of Siabod was at them and it seemed that the sky itself had a snarling muzzle of teeth, that it had fiery yellow eyes, that the slate tips were great living paws. Then the sky, the tips around them and the very ground on which they stood so defencelessly seemed to emit a scent of death. His fur was yellow flecked with white, thick as wire grass, his paws heavy, and his great head massive as a bulwark of rock.

Gelert the Hound of Siabod tore down towards them mockingly, his snarls the sound of pleasure as he raced upon them, his great maw of flapping, loose flesh hanging momentarily over them to take in their scent before racing away up the other side of the hollow where he turned on loose slates, which flew away beneath his weight, and began the pleasurable descent upon them once more.

Moles! It was usually better fun to dig them out from where they shivered in fear among the slates to which he had tracked them; even better to dig them out of the valley meadows below Cwmoer, where they left a trail any hound could follow. Only once before that he could remember had mole come to Cwmoer itself, and that was many killings ago. But if he could not sniff them out of the slates or dig them out of the ground, he could play with their fear of him right here, before shattering their silky bodies against the slate and seeing their blood-stains in the snow.

So, enjoying himself, Gelert tore down upon them again, adding growls to his snarls, just for fun, because living meat was so much more exciting than dead.

It was as the hound passed by a third time without touching them that Bracken realised that they were being played with and might yet have time to escape into one of the many hollows off the track under the slates at the foot of the tip. He grabbed at Boswell and pushed him towards them, automatically shielding him as the hound began its fourth run upon them down the steep track.

Seeing them move, Gelert’s great muscles rippled and flexed in his shoulders. He shifted his weight with the subtlety of a bird in flight, his back legs following his body in a swerve to the left as, to his delight, the moles pathetically scrabbled for shelter. With the slightest of halts in motion and speed he effortlessly brought his great paws hard on the ground just in front of their snouts, making them stop in panic and giving him the pleasurable whiff of their scent of fear.

They turned away, as he knew they would, and he swung his great rough-furred head to look at them, enjoying the flow of his great body as it turned sharply back on itself and he went in for a proper snout at them.

Bracken had stopped still when the hound came at them again, but as he went past, he pushed Boswell ahead again, turning back towards the hound. There are some threats so vast to a mole, so utterly beyond his sight, that resistance seems as absurd as a six-day mole pup fighting with its mother. And yet a pup does fight.

So, as Boswell ran on, Bracken turned back towards the great shining muzzle of Gelert and with all his body and spirit thrust out his talons at it as Medlar had so long before taught him. His talons were sharp and the lunge was very powerful. It caught the hound and caused him such surprise and sudden pain that he pulled massively back and growled for the first time with genuine anger.

With one great sweep of his paw he sought to catch both moles at once, the one who had struck out at him and the other who was fleeing. As Boswell dived beneath the massive slate towards which Bracken had pushed him, Gelert’s claws, or one of them, ran searingly down Boswell’s back, bringing an immediate rush of blood to it. This was sufficient to halt the swing of Gelert’s paw enough for Bracken instinctively to sidestep its nearly fatal sweep, to snarl in his turn and to run under Gelert’s gaping jaws after Boswell into the safety of the slate. A smaller adversary has some advantages. There was a great growling and snarling from above them as Gelert, angry but delightfully excited now, smelt the blood on his paw and hungrily thrust it under the slate, the claws scratching noisily at its edge. Getting a purchase on it, he strained to pull it aside, but though it rocked and Bracken felt its weight lift and slide above him, it did not shift sufficiently to give Gelert access to the moles.

The slate was piled against another even bigger one, and it was to the shelter of this that Bracken now crawled, pulling the half-conscious Boswell with him. The hound lunged and thrust and barked about them, growling at his quarry, smelling the blood from Boswell’s wound, hungry for the living flesh.

Then, as suddenly as his attack had begun, he fell silent, crouching down by the pile of slates where the moles were hiding, head on one side, paws stretched forward as he tried his next and often successful ploy—to wait for them to make a dash for it.

As the silence started, Bracken dared to breathe and turned to Boswell, whose wound he saw was deep and serious.

‘Boswell! Can you hear me? Boswell! How much does it hurt?’ Boswell only moaned, his eyes closed, and a curtain of blood from the long wound running down his left flank and turning his fur into a shiny, congealing bog.

The hound above them, whose odour was now all about their retreat, next tried scrabbling at the ground by the slates, great claws pumping up and down as he tried to dig them out. But the ground was hard with sharp fragments of slate and they gave as good as they got from Gelert’s paws.

He sat down on his haunches once more and waited, pale eyes never leaving the slates, only a sullen twitch of his tail betraying the excited impatience he felt. He had sat like this before, for rabbit and weasel and vole, even for shrew. He had the patience to wait for mole.

The afternoon wore down into sullen gloomy skies as the same drift of weather that had brought wet snow the night before now carried thunderous rain towards the hills and mountain of Siabod. It came from the west in a great swath of lightning and noise, with a rolling of thunder and yellow, sudden light, into the darkest cwms or deeps of the dark mountains west of Siabod. Until, at last, it reached Siabod itself, and as rain fell upon its peaks, lightning picked out its jagged summit against the dark evening clouds. Then, with a crack and a roar and flickering flashes of light, the storm began to roar around the great deep of Cwmoer, flattening the wavelets on the lake with pelting rain, breaking up the snow on the sullen slates, turning the streams all around them into torrents.

Like the rocky bluffs that stuck out of the valley’s sides, Gelert’s head stayed motionless in the rain, water running through his rough, tawny fur and dripping off the blue-black skin that hung from his lower jaw. His eyes stayed fixed on the two slates where the moles were still hiding as a thin run of surface water began to slide under them.

Its cold wetness at first seeped under the slate, wetting Bracken’s belly as he tried unsuccessfully to move himself and the now unconscious Boswell out of its way. But soon water dripped and poured all around him, running through the cracks between the slates and along the impervious ground under them until everything was wet and cold.

But Bracken barely noticed it. Nor did he think very much now of the hound whose paws lay on the wet ground within sight from under the slate, waiting for their move. Bracken was thinking of Boswell. He had seen another mole die of an evening, up on Duncton Hill, and that one had not deserved such an end either. He loved Boswell. The Stone knew how much. Now his friend would need food and shelter, warmth and love if he were to survive, but here they lay trapped, denied everything. Bracken had crouched in another storm, too, when he had stared out across the vales that lay beneath Duncton Wood, wondering if one day he might go out among them as the moles of the Ancient System once had done. Now here he was.

As the storm crashed about him and the lightning showed on the wet ground around the slate, casting the shadow of Gelert into their retreat, such memories as these began to replace the fear Bracken had felt. He remembered being in the Chamber of Dark Sound with Mandrake coming towards him and starting the hum that had created the sound that seemed to confuse Mandrake and cause him to stumble and hesitate in the centre of the great chamber. He remembered, too, that great power that had come to him then, making his limbs feel bigger and his talons more and more powerful. And how Mandrake had stared over at him, afraid. Then the power had nearly overwhelmed him, for he was too young to know how to use it. Now he was older, stronger, and had learned something of the spirit of the warrior from Medlar.

Now something of the power Bracken had felt in different ways so many times before began to consolidate in him, tough as the slate that gave them protection. While Gelert, crouching in the storm, the rain pouring off him, let his tail fall still and shifted uncomfortably. Some deep instinct made him switch his gaze for a moment from the slates on the ground to the rain-swirled heights above him, searching for something he could not see.

There had been another mole here, the only other mole that had dared venture in his lifetime into Cwmoer. No good pretending he had forgotten, though many killings had assuaged the memory. A bigger, darker mole than either of these two, with talons as strong as a badger’s.

That mole had faced him as well and not run away. Its odour was the fiercest of any creature he had ever faced. Faced! Does a hound talk of facing a mole! In his nightmares he did, when he remembered the power in the mole who had faced him contemptuously somewhere among these slate tips. He knew where. Slowly he admitted the memory to his mind and saw again the great mole who had snarled back at him near this very spot, talons as ready to kill as his own, and had finally passed him dismissively by, turning its back contemptuously on him and ignoring his howls.

Gelert’s baleful eyes searched the great cliffs about him, feeling that something was there and was staring at him, wishing him ill and robbing him of his pleasure and will. He began to howl, while beneath the slate, Bracken began to move, stirring himself into the action which he knew he must take and which now no longer cast a single shadow of fear into his heart.

High up on the edge of the cwm, her blind eyes the colour of the rain-filled mist that swirled and raced there, Y Wrach crouched at the end of the tunnels with her snout to the depths below. She had been waiting, a lifetime of waiting, waiting for the sound that now came up to her from the black depths beneath: the lost and bewildered howling of Gelert the Hound of Siabod, carried up on the storming winds and signalling in some way she could not yet comprehend the return to her of Mandrake.

‘Gwyw calon rhag hiraetb,

Crai by myrd rhag lledfryd heno…’

she chanted.

‘My heart is withered from longing,

I am wasted from melancholy tonight,

But give me strength through this storm…

Come Mandrake, hear his howling,

Give of your spirit, hard as the slate,

Arc out your talons where buzzard floats.

The rocks are bare below… ’

Her voice was harsh, spittle ran from her cracked mouth, and now the sound of the Siabod she spoke was not musical but fierce, invoking for the mole who struggled in the cwm below the power he needed but which she could only partially give.

She felt the weight and waste of age upon her, but fought it off to pass down to Bracken what power she had, and more than that, to celebrate the trust she had that Mandrake was not dead and would come back.

She did not need eyes to see the struggle. She crouched, withered, fierce as hail, proud as the eye of an eagle. Rebecca, was that the name? ‘It does not matter; it does not matter that he’s dead, he’s coming back.’

She cried it out in Siabod, old Siabod, whose sounds are harsh and pity not the hound his cries. She shivered like a young female, she felt a tremble of life where any other mole would only have sensed a withered womb and seen the obscene-seeming twistings of an ancient female whose cries no longer even sound the words of the old ancestral tongues but slide, or rather scream, into the eternal sound of a frightened female giving birth again. ‘A second chance, and bastard Mandrake, you will come again and see the Stone whose light you saw before and never could forget, whatever darkness shadowed out its grace. You, come!’

She cried out the words into the wind, spitting them down towards Gelert, drowning his howls as they sought a way out of Cwmoer, past whatever it was there, staring down at him, wishing him ill and sending him weakness and Bracken strength.

The rain lightened but the storm grew wilder as Bracken slowly and heavily backed his way out from beneath the great slate into the evening light under Gelert’s great stare. The hound watched helplessly, his flanks trembling from cold, though not a cold that any other creature felt, as the mole came out, rump first, dragging the other mole with him.

It was contemptuous, just like the other one whose presence now seemed to swirl about again, around this mole. It turned and faced him. Faced him! From its mouth, caught by the loose skin of its neck, heavy in the wind, hung the other mole.

Bracken stood solid in the storm, his Boswell hanging from him like a pup, and gazed in pity and anger on great Gelert, such a power in him now that it needed no raised talons to tell out its force.

He had picked up Boswell because he loved him and was going to see him live just as he had wanted Cairn to live. Ten hounds of Siabod would not stop him seeing Boswell live. So he picked him up with gentle love, dragged him from the retreat where he was dying from cold and wet and lack of food and boldly placed him down between the massive paws of Gelert.

Then he began to speak out the words that came to him from the silent Stone and made him, Bracken, seem ever greater and more powerful to Gelert, bigger and bigger, as behind him another mole seemed to rear, its great head scarred with fights; and Gelert’s eyes widened in fear and he started to howl because his limbs refused to take him away from the horror as the mole began to speak words whose meaning he could not understand and which yet were clear as claws.

‘Gelert, Hound of Siabod, see the blood of Boswell you have spilled and freeze in fear before its flow. This is a holy mole and you are cursed for what you dared to do. You will help him live…’

It was the Stone that gave the words to Bracken, the Stone that made Gelert see the one thing that puts a fear into all creatures, however mighty the body that shields them—a mole that no longer fears death—and made him understand the intent of the words whose language he could not understand.

The mole needed help. Gelert turned suddenly and in three or four great bounds was up on the far edge of the hollow they were in and looking back down on Bracken, whining slightly to make him understand, as his mouth hung open and his breaths came out in miserable bursts while he waited for Bracken to follow.

Bracken looked up at him, then down at Boswell, then back up the steep slope to where Gelert stood. Wearily he bent down again and took up Boswell by the neck to carry him to wherever it was that the hound seemed to want to lead them.

Up towards Gelert he struggled, step by slow step, the roar of the stream to his right and the grey winds battering the rock faces behind and above him. Up and up he struggled, as once he had climbed the chalk escarpment of Uffington, each painful breath rasping out of his mouth between the folds of Boswell’s neck skin which his teeth hung on to. Sometimes Boswell’s crippled paw rocked limply against his struggling ones and sometimes, where Boswell’s back dragged on the slates, it left behind a smear of blood, red on the dead grey slates.

Then he was up to where Gelert stood towering above him, the hound’s great flanks breathing in and out as his head and face pointed this way and that across the flatter moor that ran beyond the quarry of Cwmoer. Until his gaze settled on a point where the stream flowed more gently, and he led Bracken across to it with infinite and troubled patience.

Bracken found himself at last by a gentler curve of the stream where saxifrage and heart-leaved sorrel grew, and he knew that they would find food and shelter there. He laid Boswell gently down and crouched, faltering now, by him, while the hound, his yellow eyes gazing down on them, wondered what they would want of him.

‘Rebecca.’ Boswell whispered the name so softly that Bracken had to lean close to him and hear it again. Then Bracken said to himself wearily, ‘Oh yes, Rebecca. She would help if she were here. She would know how to save Boswell.’

‘Tell him,’ whispered Boswell, gulping with the strain of speaking, ‘tell him to find her. Tell him to seek her out.’

‘Oh Boswell,’ said Bracken to himself, desolation coming over him. He got up from the hollow by the stream and stepped out into the wind. He ignored Gelert, who crouched waiting. He snouted into the wind and then southeastwards towards where Duncton Wood lay so many hundreds of molemiles away. The words formed long before the idea did, for the idea was absurd and words are easy: ‘Boswell needs you, Boswell needs you. Can you hear him calling? Give me the strength to heal him,’ and as he spoke the words to himself the spirit of them became stronger in him and he began to feel again the power of the Stone, and then the more specific force of the Duncton Stone, and then a wild Siabod calling off along the top of Cwmoer, wild and harsh in the wind, a call of triumph, and he knew that the impossible was possible. So he turned to great Gelert once more and said ‘Go and find our healer. Go and get Rebecca. Go away from Cwmoer and lead our healer here.’

Gelert 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 ever speak its words. Perhaps their power simply showed itself.

Gelert’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 Gelert. He bent his head down to the mole he feared, and sniffed 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 Gelert 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 Gelert 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 Gelert came back from the valley carrying a mole that none of them had ever seen or scented before.

Rebecca never spoke of how Gelert 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 Gelert 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, 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? Nomole 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 Gelert 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 Gelert 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 Gelert’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 towards 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 evaporation of life. An intimacy and a secretiveness which afterwards make the healthy one forget what he saw and heard and smelt. Just as a mother forgets the mess her pup once caused, so does a mole who watches 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 different from a decline 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, nomole 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 the 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, Gelert 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 such as they brought would bother 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 Gelert 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 given. 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 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 for ever, 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 cruellest 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 the 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, everymole 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 flickering 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 nuzzling 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-coloured 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.

‘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 towards 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 that she loved them and they shouldn’t be afraid; though she was—yes, she was—so afraid.

‘Bracken, follow me, follow me,’ she entreated 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 on to 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, preferring 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 stillness 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, raging 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, overcame 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 Bracken, trying to find her, moved further and further 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 plateaux of Siabod.

Off to her left, far off now and growing further away, Bracken pressed on, fearing more and more that he had lost his Rebecca for ever 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 across 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 towards 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 honoured even in these wastes; and that would fulfil 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 whiteout 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 the only possibility seemed to slip and slide his way back down through Cwmoer and try to find Gelert of Siabod who perhaps 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 afterwards 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, towards 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?’

Chapter Forty-Three

That 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 the 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 travelled 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 to the Stones having to be done fast 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,’ he prayed.

Celyn had been right: these heights were wormless. What worms ever live among acid peats on a surface where only rocks seem in place?

Steep, steeper, steeply dangerous drops fell beneath his slipping talons, which could hardly hold on to the icy rocks. Falls into black rocks far below, wind racing up sheer faces along whose very edge he had to climb. No place for moles.

Steeper and steeper, into the sky itself. Then suddenly, quite suddenly, the terrain was rounded and flat and on top of the world. Between blasts of wind he could make out square and random shapes of rocks stretching eerily away on flat ground, and piled like jumbled slates one on top of another, or toppled over on their sides, or rising in a fan like the spines of a dead hedgehog. Blacks and whites, snow and ice, eerie silences around corners of spined, black rock.

Sudden rushing of winds and ebbs. All in a high land of shattered rock whose edges were sometimes square, sometimes sharp, always changing as a mole approached them, or passed them by, or flying snow hid them. And strange silences.

Great strength began to surge into Bracken, for he knew that at last he was within reach of Castell y Gwynt. Somewhere in this flat land of waste that was sterile of all life but himself and a few gale-bent tufts of heather, the stones they wrongly called the Stones of Siabod stood. They were beyond Siabod.

And then, off to his right, as he turned away from a great tower of rocks, he heard through the wind the whistling and howling of more wind which came louder and softer, as varied in its range as only one other thing he had ever known: the sounds in the Chamber of Roots beneath the Duncton Stone. The sound of Castell y Gwynt.

The ground was now pure loose rock, if rocks a hundred thousand times the size of a mole can ever be called loose. His vision was still obscured by racing, powdered snow, so he clambered blindly on towards the sound, awe and fear growing in his heart as it grew louder and more varied, menacing and sweet. The sound grew louder and was somewhere in the sky above him, the sound of wind among rock, twisting and swirling in and out of the hollows and flutes and rises and falls of rock. Sharp rocks, talons of rocks, a rock mass that rose from out of the snow and now was steep and massive before him, and he stopped in wonder before its great power and raised a paw as if to touch its great talons with his own, his mouth open in wonder. Castell y Gwynt. Castle of the Winds.

So much suffering to get here. So much struggle. And Rebecca… ‘What of my Rebecca? Are these the Stones I’ve lost you for? And which of you are the Tryfan Stones?’

As his eyes searched among the rising stones, each of which was four or five times the height of the Duncton Stone and whose tops were obscured again and again: ‘Is the Stone here? What must a mole do to reach up to it? Why so much suffering for this? Why so much suffering at all?’

But as he stood doubtful before the Stones, what great shape rose behind him among the other stones of the plateau of Gwynt and urged him to trust the Stone? He thought he heard a mole, a massive mole, the sound of life, and turned round to see… but there was nothing but the howling of the wind through the rocks behind him, and those of the Castell y Gwynt above.

‘Well,’ he whispered softly to himself, at last, ‘well, what am I anyway, unless I’m part of it, whatever it may be?’ Then Bracken began to pray to the Stone, before the Stones, and say those words that so long before Mandrake, standing in this very spot, might himself have said if only he had had the love of Rebecca then, or had known Boswell, or had been graced to hear the silence of the Duncton Stone. Bracken prayed for the moles of Siabod, he gave thanks for the life within himself, he prayed that the Stone would protect Rebecca wherever it had taken her. He prayed to the memory of Skeat and in honour of the scribemoles of Uffington. He prayed that Boswell would know these prayers had been made. As he prayed, and the cold wind began to die, and he noticed nothing of himself but his silence in the Stone, he brought the worship of the Stone back to Siabod and the black heights beyond it.

When he thought he had finished, he found he had not. He prayed again for his Rebecca and thanked the Stone for the love that they had seen. And he wondered, curiously, which of the Stones were the Stones of Tryfan.

Then he was finished and became suddenly cold, so he turned at last from the Stones to find the winds growing lighter and the snow almost finished. Beneath him, only a few moleyards off, he saw a cliff edge at the top of a steep, snow-filled drop into a cwm that went down and down as far as anymole could sense, and further. Beyond it, the swirling snow danced in the wind, growing lighter and weaker as it faded away, and there came slowly through it not light but black darkness that rose before him as the snow cleared in a steepness of more rock. It rose higher and higher as his eyes widened in wonder and awe and the snow finally swirled away, revealing a massive, isolated peak on top of which there stood other Stones he could sense, but not see. The Stones of Tryfan, he knew.

‘But it’s impossible, ’ he whispered, ‘impossible for mole—’ for though Tryfan seemed so close across the void between, almost within a talon’s touch, it was impossible to reach. He now gazed at it in wonder as, so long before, Mandrake had gazed at it in fear. And as Mandrake had stepped forward to touch it in contempt, so now Bracken stepped forward, his paw outstretched in wonder, for he saw that a mole can touch the Stone, he can, he can; but as he tried, he was falling forward and rolling into steep snow, tumbling over, the peak of Tryfan rising higher and higher above him, rising away from his grasp as he fell down into the nameless cwm that had gaped beneath him and now took him. Snow flurried down as he fell, rolling on into an avalanche, carrying him down and down and further down, and faster, snow all around him worse than a blizzard, and a sliding avalanche of silence building up about him as the cwm echoed outside the snow that enveloped him and of which he was a tumbling part. Far, far above him the two Stones of Tryfan stood out in a clearing sky.

As Bracken fell into white silence, the wind across on Siabod began to die away and the blizzard to stop. But Rebecca knew it had come too late for her; she might still have struggled alone down the slopes, and she might even have managed to carry a single pup. But she looked at the four that lay against her teats but were now no longer able to get milk from them, felt them grow colder and colder against her encompassing belly and knew she could not leave three to die alone.

Whatever strength it was that had kept her alive for nearly six days through the howling winds was finally failing her now. Her mind had begun to wander, and she found it harder and harder to gather the strength to keep the pups from crawling blindly from her protection into the chill that would kill them.

She whispered and mumbled to herself, talking to imaginary moles. She had even laughed in the night and with the dawn: she remembered them all, the moles she had loved. Why, Mekkins was there, out in the snow, calling her to him gruffly; and Rose was there, sweet Rose. And Sarah, and Bracken there, near her, and dear Boswell, sweet mole. And Mandrake up near the rocks that she now saw were nearby, he was there in the shadows, his talons trying to protect her from the wind because he loved her, yes he did.

Only the cold stopped her dreaming, though sometimes it lured her towards sleep—which she fought, and had fought for days, because there is no waking up on a mountain like Moel Siabod, above which the black ravens fly.

Food. She thought of it as a dream, an impossible thing, and it smelt so good. Remember the worms she had stolen from the elder burrows and how Mandrake was angry, yes he was. Silly thing, he was, never seeing what was at the end of his snout.

The smell of food in these cold wastes where nothing lived! And Mandrake, the thought of him had given her such strength. ‘Mandrake. Mandrake.’ She whispered his name and mixed it with the hopeless dreams of food and her Bracken as tiredness came towards her like darkness at night and even the strength to tend to the pups she had kept alive, and whose bleatings seemed so far away now, was leaving her.

‘Difryd difro Mandrake, difryd difro Mandrake.’ She heard the words from beyond the darkness of sleep into which she was finally sinking, but it was his name that brought her back again, and a strong nuzzling, stronger than the pups could manage, much stronger. As she opened her eyes, she smelt food and saw at her side an ancient mole, female and grey, snouting blindly at her and muttering words she could not understand, except that they meant she was no longer alone up here where poor Mandrake had been born.

Y Wrach had found her. The worms she carried were the ones that Celyn had brought up through the tunnels the day before, the fifth day of the blizzard. He had found her writhing and cursing and shouting out at the storm and saying that Mandrake was near, he was, and didn’t Celyn know that ‘addewid ni wrieler ni ddiw’? ‘A promise not accomplished is no promise at all!’

‘He promised,’ she shouted, ‘he said he would come back. He’s here now, up there, up there.’ So she took the worms and crawled painfully out into the blizzard to find him, refusing to let Celyn go with her. Hadn’t she found Mandrake before with nomole’s help?

‘But you were young,’ he said, ‘you were young,’ and she laughed bitterly at her twisted hind paws and said, ‘Just you see!’

When he asked if he should pray for her, she told him to wait for her in her tunnels, and pray whatever he liked.

Then she snouted her way blindly out into the storm, almost blown off her paws in the wind, and he waited until the wind began to die and there was no more blizzard. Then he did pray in the old Siabod way, prayers that sounded more like curses than worship. In a hard language. She must be dead.

But he stayed on to honour his promise, and before his stay could turn into a wake, she had come back off the Siabod slopes, carrying a pup as pink with health as the stem of starry saxifrage.

‘Shut up and keep him warm,’ she cursed before she was gone again, and he did, in wonder he did. And then another, and a third. And she was gone again up to where Rebecca lay eating the food this ancient female had brought who now urged her to her paws with no words she understood but, ‘Mandrake! Mandrake!’

It was darkening towards late afternoon by now, and the wind was freshening again, with touches of sleet in it. Rebecca herself picked up the last pup at the gestured bidding of the old mole and slowly went down the slope, following her clear tracks as the wind grew stronger and stronger at her rear and the blizzard began again. Behind her she heard the mole call out the name ‘Mandrake’ once more, the sound flying in the wind, and she turned with difficulty and saw, or thought she saw, great shadows of moles among the rocks higher up the slopes, that moved and melded into scurrying snow, all white and dark in the evening. And then the old female was gone for ever, lost in the blizzard that had first brought her life. Rebecca turned away back down the old mole’s tracks and entered into huge, slate-lined tunnels where she heard her young mewing for her, and found a scraggy-faced male, who reminded her of nomole so much as Hulver, doing his best to keep them in order as they wandered here and there vainly seeking out their mother’s teats.

Today, in Siabod, Rebecca is legend. They talk still of how Y Wrach grew old and invoked the ancient powers of the Siabod Stones and went out into the blizzard to return with a litter of her own; of how she changed herself into the form of a female whose fur was soft and glossy grey, like no Siabod female’s had ever been, and who claimed her name was Rebecca and said she could not speak Siabod.

They tell of how Rebecca’s four male pups grew into four moles whose size made them unassailable in fights and whose courage brought back the pride of Siabod. They warn of the eastern slopes of Siabod where Y Wrach’s spirit roams and where, when dusk falls and snow flies thick, her Mandrake may sometimes be seen, his talons raised protectively behind Y Wrach, a smile at last on his great, scarred face.

They tell how Rebecca brought love and joy back to the system after the plague, and how, when the summer came and her pups were beginning to leave the nest, she would tell tales of Rose, a healer she knew, and a mole called Bracken, who must have been as big as Mandrake because he faced Gelert the Hound and defeated him.

They love to weave tales on Siabod, and confusing legends that shorten long nights and make the bitter days bearable. They love to sing an old song. But always they tell sadly of how, at last, when her pups were mature and her work was done, she said she must leave before the winter returned.

Then they love to tell the story of Bran, who accompanied her on her journey away from Siabod when she said she was going back to her own system, though all Siabod knew she was really Y Wrach in disguise.

‘What happened to Bran?’ ask the pups when they hear this last tale.

‘Now there’s a strange thing,’ they’re told, ‘because he came back, you see. After moleyears and moleyears it was that he came back, but wouldn’t ever speak a word about it. And that was strange, too, because there was never a mole liked to talk so much as Bran—before he left, mind. Journeys change a mole, see, so don’t you go journeying off too far, little one…’

There’s many an older Siabod mole, too, will claim that more than once, when they’ve been caught in a blizzard, Rebecca’s come for them out of the storm, sometimes like the beautiful mole she was, sometimes looking like Y Wrach had been, but always with the shadow of a great mole that was Mandrake among the rocks nearby to protect her, and she’s shown them the way home to safety.

That’s what they say, in Siabod.