Duncton Wood (77 page)

The slopes were covered in sludgy leaf litter – mostly beech but with a few rotted oak leaves from the previous moleyear 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 from going any farther 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 started round blackened tree roots, over tangles of ashy bramble skeletons, round jumbles of shattered, burned branches, black and wet and lifeless. She looked in vain for something she recognized, 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 undergrowths and living plant roots, had eroded out little gulleys that zigzagged downward for a short way, with a few flints and stones left clear of ash and soil in their centers, 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 gray 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 gray-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, gray, 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 gray, 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 opposite the direction from that in which he bad set out and finding a different plant than the one he had been looking for.

But finally he stopped, breathless and trying to act natural. “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 on their long delicate stalks as she went by. The flowers were still young, their 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. She felt weak and almost swayed and fell, and she started to weep, her tears as soft on her fur as the raindroplets on the green leaves of the wood anemones about her.

“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 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.

   38  

B
RACKEN
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 tunnels 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, ran forward and two scribe-moles, 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 some-mole.

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 no mole told you to go out onto the surface or to stay in the guest burrow?”

“No mole 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 scribe-mole. 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 stop, 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 tunnels’ crossing points. Soon the original object of his search – to find Boswell – was lost in the sheer enjoyment of outwitting the scribemoles about him.