Duncton Wood (22 page)

When, finally, she took her paws from Bracken’s head, her aging fur was running with sweat and hung with exhaustion, and she looked as if she had been on a journey to the edge of life itself, and only just been able to return.

All her strength was gone. She was too tired even to find food and to wonder whether, after all, she had done enough. She simply lay down where she was, one of her paws touching his neck and her old body close to him – and fell asleep. She stirred sometimes when he stirred, and whispered gentleness into his ears and battling soul.

For three days, perhaps four, Rose stayed tending Bracken and cherishing the life in him back to hope and light. No mole can be certain of the time it took, and Boswell of Uffington, in the account he later scribed, says that there are events in moles’ lives against which the measure of time becomes measureless, and “this one meeting between the loving Rose and Bracken of Duncton Wood was surely one of them.”

However, the day came when Rose knew that Bracken, though not fully healed, was at least safe – as safe as a mole can ever be against the force of evil. His breathing became deeper and more rhythmic, his weak paws now moved restlessly with life, his groans no longer held the agony she had first heard in them. He stirred at last into consciousness and whispered words of Hulver and Rebecca the Healer... “Rebecca, Rebecca... though he did not seem to know that Rose was there with him.

At last she left him, still only on the verge of conscious health again, finding first for him in the tunnels some food which she placed ready at his side. So many times she had left moles like this, healed as best she knew how but seeming so vulnerable before the rest of the journey into health and wholeness which, finally, they must make for themselves. Never had she been so reluctant to leave a mole, and never had she said the ancient journey blessing of Rebecca the Healer with such appeal to the forces of light and love which abound in even the darkest places:

May the healing of Rebecca

Encompass your going and returning;

The peace of the White Moles be yours in the travel

And may you return home safeguarded.

And she might have said the blessing for herself as well, for she had a long journey to her own burrow before her and was very weary – more tired than she had ever been.

She left the tunnel by the way she had come, covered over the entrance she had made with leaf litter and soil, and tried to shake the fatigue from her old body. It was dusk, a good time to travel at least, but it was an effort even to put one paw in front of the other as she made for the Stone – the first stage of her journey.

“I’m getting old,” she said to herself, “and a little weary. Why, my home burrow has never seemed quite so far away as it does now.” The atmosphere among the great trees of the Ancient System was much calmer than when she had arrived, and less confused.

When she reached the Stone clearing it was night, and she paused there to rest and reflect, feeling the richness of Duncton stretching beyond the slopes beneath her. Something very powerful was going on, bigger than the system she loved, perhaps even more important than all the moles who lived there or had made their lives there in the past, and whom she had so long cared for and tended.

So much was changing. She had known of the change even before Mandrake came – indeed, she saw that he was a part of it and not a cause of it. Hulver and Bindle were both gone, killed near this very spot, and other old moles she knew were all gone as well.

It occurred to her that she was one of the oldest moles in Duncton or on the pastures and she found herself thinking again “I
am
getting old!” She looked down at her paws and rubbed her snout and face against them, smiling gently at the silly thought. For above her, the tilted Stone rose in the night, the great tree roots black around its base, and she chided herself with the thought that no mole was ever old in the Stone. “Why, you mustn’t make me say such foolish things!” she said to the Stone, in the chatty way she always spoke to it. “Or even let me think them.”

With that she began to make her way slowly and carefully down the slopes by the edge of the wood, taking her thoughts and aging body to the warmth of her home burrow. And to sleep.

   11  

R
OSE
had chosen the moment of her departure wisely, for the following dawn Bracken finally awoke with a clear head but a terribly weakened body. He was aching and wretched, and a little ill-tempered, but at least he could see and hear the waking world around him. See, that is, the dawning light coming into the tunnel, and hear the morning breeze by the cliff and a chorus of wrens and greenfinch and the chaffer of a young jackdaw somewhere among the trees.

His shoulder still hurt terribly, but the pain was now confined to the wound itself and did not spread evilly through his body to his very eyes, and snout, and sensibility. He could control it.

He had the feeling that he was not alone, for the burrow smelled fresh and lived in. Curious! He dozed and awoke and dozed again, until he finally awoke hungry as a pup. And there was food ready for him. Strange. “I must have gotten it for myself,” he thought, though he couldn’t remember... anything.

Yes.. yes he could. Illness and dark and a great red cardinal beetle that was coming to him and struggling with him... and a worm and a black beetle much bigger than he that were trying to destroy him, take him away... Bracken shuddered and started to eat the food, asking no more questions of himself.

Though he was hungry, he managed less than half a worm. He was so unused to eating. But he managed to nibble at the stem of a... but he didn’t know the plant’s name. It tasted fresh and good. Strange again. He looked around the tunnel, half expecting to see a friendly mole, but there was none – just high, arching walls and a well-made floor that stretched into the darkness ahead.

For a moment he wanted to raise himself fully to his paws and start exploring the Ancient System which, he realized with a thrill, now lay ahead for him to explore whenever he wanted. But the moment he tried to move, he knew how weak he was and it was several days before he felt able to do more than struggle painfully up and down the tunnel he was already in, picking up what food he could find.

They were strange days of pain and content. His shoulder hurt whenever he moved and yet a restlessness to get started drove him on to use it more and more, despite the pain. In doing so, he learned that pain is a clumsy word, describing as one something that is a thousand feelings, not all of them unpleasant. The ache in his head, the searing pain if he worked his shoulder too much, the dull moaning of his stomach as it became used to food again – they were all different. He learned to welcome the step into pain that he had to take when he awoke and stretch his limbs and work his body back into himself.

Quite where the content of these days came from he did not know, but it was there alongside him as if a companionable mole were in the tunnel with him. He was restless, impatient, ill-tempered with his weakness, but beneath it all he felt a happy certainty that so much lay ahead for which he, himself, had found the strength. In his mole-months of illness, stretching from the last week of June to the start of August, he had matured a great deal. He could dimly remember, as a pleasant dream, the caresses and gentleness of a mole very close to him, but thought it must be some recreation of his own of the Rebecca of old times Hulver had talked about. He might indeed, had he been asked, have talked of Rebecca the legendary Healer as a real force in the system, so persistent was the idea that she had been there with him. But Rose? No, he never knew that she had been there.

Perhaps, deep down, he knew, but preferred to think that he gave himself the strength to survive, and so forgot. Certainly he forgot other important things as well. He forgot that he nearly died. He forgot the swirling forces of evil into whose darkness he had looked. He forgot the power of light by whose strength he had been kept back from the void. He forgot again the memories of puphood that early in his illness had flooded back. In forgetting all these things, he lost as well the lessons they might have taught him, or the releases their memory might have brought.

At the same time, he remembered things as they never were: he, and only he, had found the power to heal himself; that pain and suffering quickly pass; that Mandrake and Rune were, after all was said and done, just moles.

Just
moles? No mole is just a mole. A mole may have to learn a lesson many times before he knows its truth, especially one like Bracken.

He finally woke up one dawn a few moledays into August, knowing that at last he had strength and desire enough to start exploring the Ancient System. Most of all he wanted to get his bearings, for few moles were quite so uncomfortable as Bracken, the greatest explorer of his generation, when they didn’t know
exactly
where they were.

He ran first to the cliff end of the tunnel, to pay his respects to the spot where he had found a second life and to take one final look into the daylight before plunging back into the unknown tunnels and discoveries behind. Grass, cudweed and brambles hung waving across the tunnel from the surface above. He listened to the soft-loud-soft buzz of nectar-seeking flies and wasps taking advantage of the blue harebells and bright yellow furze that grew on this sunlit eastern part of the wood.

The smell of summer was warm and sweet and it was only then, taking it in, that he realized by its heavier dryness compared with June, how many molemonths had passed in nightmare illness. Well, now he was better, and the time had come, at last, to explore.

He turned around and started forward on a journey into tunnels and burrows, dangers and marvels, that no mole had ventured near for generations.

It was only when he was well past the farthest point he had reached previously in his search for food that Bracken noticed the deepening quality of sound in the tunnel he was traveling down. It crept forward toward him, at first no more precise than the backwash of a mixed wind on rough grass. But then, with each step he took, its quality became richer. The sound of sliding soil came whispering from the unknown labyrinths beyond; then the moan of wind at some twist or turn, gathered into the tunnel from some distant exposure; into these came the harsher, mysterious creaking of a subterranean tree root in stress – but whether from round the comer or many tunnels away, he could not tell; then the sudden scuttle of a beetle; and mixing with it all, the echo and re-echo of his own pawsteps running forward ahead of him and returning from some wall beyond in the dark.

The wall turned out to be the far side of a much bigger tunnel into which the one he had started from entered at right angles. As he stepped into it, the sounds he had heard redoubled in richness and complexity, and quite took his breath away. If there was any truth in the old mole saying “You can tell a mole by the sounds of his tunnels,” then surely the moles who built this system were wise and cunning indeed.

For when a mole burrows a tunnel, he takes heed of the acoustics it creates – not for his entertainment, but so that he might gauge from the sounds it carries to him at any one point potential danger or possible food. A tunnel has to be good to carry the vibrations of a worm more than fifty moleyards: it has to be superbly designed to carry the slinking of a rival much more than one hundred moleyards. This being so, the air currents in a system are very important – for while earth vibrations may carry fifty moleyards and sound in a still system perhaps two hundred, air currents help carry sound a great deal farther, and scent as well. But air currents do not happen – they are designed, and it was this aspect of the tunnel into which he entered that impressed Bracken. For the air currents were, subtle and complex, the moles achieving the difficult art (in many systems long forgotten) of creating tunnels in which air flows in different directions at different levels – as water may do in a river, or wind often does in a steep valley.