Duncton Wood (99 page)

With a hesitant cough he finally spoke. “I’m lost,” he said. “How do I get back into the system?” And when she didn’t answer immediately, he added: “I’m a Duncton mole, you know.”

She turned to him, eyes alight with her love for him, and came right to him and caressed him on the shoulder, just as she had on the same day she herself had spoken those words near this spot, the first time they ever met. Did he remember them so well?

When her paw left his shoulder, he put his own paw there, breathless – still utterly moved by the way she touched him.

“Do you remember what I replied?” he asked.

“You said ‘It’s easy’ and later you said ‘I’ll show you.’”

“And did I?” he wanted to know.

She nodded. “And I think I can remember the way you went,” she said.

“Show me, Rebecca.”

And she did. She ran past him, just as he had once run past her, though neither as fast as they had been then, and then by the ancient mole track down the slopes this way and that, down the hill, until he was quite out of breath following her.

“You stopped by a fallen oak branch because that was where the entrance into the system was, and I asked your name, because I didn’t want you to go,” remembered Rebecca.

He smiled, caressing her as she had him. The sun caught her fur, which was as thick and silvery-gray as it had ever been, though her face was lined now. But there was not a single line he would want taken away or changed, for she was the most beautiful mole he had ever known, just as she had always been.

“Rebecca?”

“Mmm?”

“I want to look at the wood again, the places where our lives were first made.”

“I’m lost, my love, the wood’s so changed. You’ll have to show me...”

“I will,” he whispered.

Then he ran past her and led her down on into the Old Wood, hesitating at a turn sometimes, stopping still with his head on one side, sometimes whispering to himself “No, it’s not
this
way,” until they were back in the heart of the Duncton Wood and she saw they were near clumps of anemones, not yet in full bloom, though one or two white buds were showing.

“Barrow Vale was somewhere here,” he said.

He snouted over the surface, which was open and grassy with brambles at its far edges, until he found a spot where he started to burrow. Then he stopped when he was halfway into it and tried a bit farther on, suddenly disappearing.

She peered down after him into the tunnels of Barrow Vale, which no mole had visited since the plague and the fire.

“Do you want to look?” he called.

Most of it was still there, the tunnels and the burrowing just as they had been, though dusty and unkempt. Empty of sound and with a few scatterings of bones and many roof-falls. A dead place where Bracken had once been leader, after Rune and Mandrake.

They looked around it together, staying close to each other, and occasionally one or the other would say “Look!” and point to a place they both remembered, where so many things had happened. But the voices of the past did not come back, just a shimmer of memory that was gone forever almost the moment it returned.

“One day other moles will find this place and recolonize it – they might call it something else, or perhaps somemole will remember being told there was a place called Barrow Vale.,. but I doubt it. Why should moles remember?” wondered Bracken aloud.

They peered into the elder burrows, which were thick with soil dust and partially collapsed from a tree that had fallen onto the surface above, perhaps during the fire.

“It’s strange,” said Bracken, “but when I first explored the Ancient System it wasn’t like this at all. It felt alive there, waiting for something. This all feels dead. It
is
dead.”

“It never found the power of the Stone,” whispered Rebecca.

“No,” said Bracken. The tunnels and the burrows of Barrow Vale fell away from him, for nothing was more real, or ever had been, than this love he was in now.

“I love you,” he said softly, and she felt he had never said it before to her: he said it with the wisdom of his whole life.

“If there was a mole you wanted to bring back, just for a moment here in Barrow Vale, who would it be?” he asked.

Image on image came to her as she thought of the question, and remembered the moles she had loved. Rose? Mekkins? Cairn? She hesitated for a moment and then said another name to herself – Mandrake? She shook her head.

“Hulver,” she whispered finally.

“Why?” Bracken asked, surprised, for it wasn’t a name he would have expected her to say.

“Because it was near here just before a June elder meeting that I met and talked to him and he mentioned your name. It was the first time a mole ever mentioned it to me.”

“What did he say?” asked Bracken.

“Nothing much. But.. She stopped to think about it. What
had
he said? It wasn’t that he said anything, it was that he had somehow shown her, without either of them seeing it, that he loved Bracken. Now how did she know that?

Suddenly Barrow Vale was over for them. The tunnels were just tunnels, any tunnels, and they had no more need to see them. Bracken led the way out, back into the spring sunshine to the surface, where Rebecca started off toward the Marsh End.

“But it’s miles!” said Bracken.

“Oh, listen!” said Rebecca excitedly, for from far away toward the north they could hear the soft cawings of nesting rooks.

They didn’t go into the tunnels at the Marsh End; there was something too derelict about the place without a mole like Mekkins to greet them. But they wandered as far to the east as Curlew’s tunnels, which they couldn’t find but whose position they could guess at roughly. They remembered the fire, the flames, and then they remembered the plague. They wondered whether to go back west toward the pastures or perhaps... but there was no need. The memories were falling away from them. It was Rebecca Bracken wanted, and she was there in the early spring warmth with him; it was Bracken Rebecca wanted, and he is here, here with me now, she thought.

“There’ll be bluebells soon and daffodils after the wood anemones.”

“These trees will leaf again,” said Bracken, “starting with the chestnut over by the pastures.”

“It’s gone,” said Rebecca. “Comfrey took me there last summer.”

“It’ll come back. They’ll all come back.”

They crouched down near some tiny shoots of dog’s mercury; they found some food; they dozed in the sun; morning slid into afternoon, as time started to matter no more.

They were dancing together in the wood they loved, but that, they knew, was no longer theirs. Its trees were blurring, its plants waiting to delight the hearts of other moles, its scents and sounds, lights and shades, darkness and night and returning dawns were all one thing, Rebecca; Bracken my love. Were they tired? They didn’t feel it, not when they were so close and the woods and the lovely spring day were fading.

Were they old? Yes, yes, yes, my sweet love, by the Stone’s grace; or young as two pups, if you like. Young enough to make love with a touch and caress and nuzzle of familiar paws and claws and fur that feel as exciting as the first spring day, whose light catches a mole’s fur if she’s in love, or he’s in love to see it, Rebecca; Bracken, you came back; we’re here now, my love.

There was a tremble of wind among the buds of a sapling sycamore; the sun was lost behind returning cloud. Evening was starting early and the light had the cast of a storm about it.

“Will you show me the way back?” whispered Rebecca.

“Will you help me?” he asked.

Bracken turned to the south toward the top of the hill where the Stone stood. He went slowly and calmly without one moment of hesitation or doubt, climbing steadily upward toward the slopes, and then up them over toward the top of the hill. Sometimes he turned around for a moment to check that his Rebecca was close behind, but really he would have known if she weren’t there, for they moved steadily together, like a single mole. Sometimes they rested, and there was no need to hurry.

Up on the slopes they met Comfrey, who began to say a greeting but stopped when he saw them. There was something about them that didn’t need words. Below them, in the Old Wood where they must have been, he heard the wind begin to sway what trees there were and scurry at the undergrowth.

“Rebecca?” began Comfrey finally.

But she. only looked at him and touched him for a moment as if to say it was all right, he didn’t need her now, it was all right, and as they passed him by, he thought how old they looked and how full of joy.

“Rebecca” he whispered, after them. And he trembled, because he knew he would never see her again.

I’ll go to the Stone, he told himself, that’s the best thing. I’ll go there now. But he hesitated, going back down to his tunnels first and tidying up a bit, and sniffing a herb or two. Then, when he felt he was ready, he went.

Bracken and Rebecca climbed on steadily up to where the hill leveled off among the beech trees, the leaf litter between the trees rustling with the strengthening storm wind all about them. As the sky began to darken, brambles that had glowed with the early morning sun now rasped against each other restlessly. They turned toward the Stone clearing without pause, then across it to the great beech whose roots encircled the Stone, among which Bracken had spent his first night near the Stone with Hulver.

Branches had fallen from the tree since then, and some had rotted. Among the gnarled convolutions of the roots he found a pool of rainwater and drank from it. Rebecca, looked into it, but didn’t drink.

The wild sky seemed suddenly to be below them, in the reflection of the water’s surface, with a rising of interlacing dark branches and the twists and turns of the ancient tree trunk.

Bracken looked about them, thinking that apart from Rebecca’s words of love there was never, ever any sound he loved more than the sound of the wind in beech leaves. Well, it was too early in the spring for beech leaves, but Rebecca was there near him.

She watched him turn away from the tree roots, his old fur now the color of the lighter parts of their bark, and she followed him back out of the clearing without looking at the Stone. A single rush of wind caught the trees over near the wood’s edge and then ran high through the trees and into the branches of the tree by the Stone as they found an entrance to their tunnels and went down it.

But neither paused or hesitated. They turned back toward the ancient tunnels as one, taking the route Bracken himself had burrowed long before and that led, finally, to the circular chamber around the Chamber of Echoes. They were old now, but moved with the grace of tall grass before a full wind and with the simple purpose of two mallards rising over a desolate marsh.

From beyond the Chamber of Echoes they could hear the massive sounds of the beech roots, sliding and trembling with the tensions of the mounting wind over the wood, but they turned without thought toward it, in among the confusing tunnels that were no longer confusing – but simple as trust itself. No need to remember a way from the past or a way for the future; they could see a glimmer of light ahead of them, growing brighter as they went toward it, showing them the way forward.

Then, when they were beyond the Echoes and into the Chamber of Roots themselves, it seemed to them both that the terrible sound of the roots began to die away before them and another sound grew in power and strength – the sound of the Stone’s silence to where the light was leading them.

They ran on toward it, not even noticing the huge roots above them that pulled and plunged and yet seemed to make way for them.

On through they traveled, the light ever brighter, their fur growing whiter with it, until they were past the roots and into the tunnels that led through the old roots of beech near the Stone, around whose hollow center they pattered, their paws almost dancing, as they got nearer and nearer the glimmering of white light that came from the Seventh Stillstone.

Then it was there and they were back, under the buried part of the Stone which rose above them and tilted down ahead of them as they ran on toward its center to the glimmering whiteness of the Stillstone itself.

Sighing and roaring among the dry grass of Uffington, pulling at tunnel entrances, winding down in scurries into the burrows itself, a wind prefaced a storm. Such a long winter, such a long time, such a long wait since Boswell had left them; so many prayers said, so many whispered hopes.

Below the hill the wind twisted and blew around the Blowing Stone, which began to moan softly with it as the grass at its base swayed back and forth in the lengthening darkness. A light kind of darkness, the kind a mole finds on some stormy nights in March when the days are beginning to lengthen. The wind grew grimmer and stronger, battering now against the Stone, pushing at it, taking it and shaking at it; until the moans ceased, the humming stopped and the Blowing Stone at last let out a great long vibrant note as the wind finally conquered it.

Every scribemole heard it and all stopped to listen. Waiting.

Then a second note came, more powerful than the first, and then a third, clear and strong, vibrating down into the Holy Burrows themselves and shaking chalk dust off some of the walls.

As the third note came, Medlar began moving up through the tunnels toward the surface, while from all over Uffington moles were moving, trying not to run but starting to all the same, moving up to the surface as the fourth note of the Stone sounded. While the chosen moles who were still alive, those who had sung the secret song before, wondered if theirs was to be the honor, theirs now the moment, as the fifth great note came from the Stone, and moles snouted out in awe onto the grassy surface of Uffington Hill, facing the northeast where the Stone stood, listening through the wind that tore at their fur and the grass around them.

A sixth note came, stronger than any had ever heard, and in Medlar’s eyes a look of certainty began to form, a look of joy. He began to say a blessing on his moles, on all moles, his words rising into the wind. As he did so, there came at last a seventh great note from the Stone. As its sound carried about them the winds suddenly died and the grass fell still. Then quietly, here and there, each one of the chosen moles there began to sing the sacred song, its sound faint and disjointed at first, a scatter of song across an ancient hill. Until its rhythm and melody began to become established as other moles began to whisper the words and then to start singing them – young and old, novices and scribes – until they were all singing the ancient song of celebration and exaltation which told that the Seventh Book was coming to Uffington and that the Seventh Stillstone had been found.