At this, Mekkins, no slouch when it came to combat, narrowed his eyes and protracted his talons—he might have been asked to watch over Bracken, but there was absolutely no way he was going to allow himself to be assaulted just like that.
Then, a voice came hesitantly out of the shadows. ‘Bracken?’—and there stood Rebecca in the moonlight. She immediately moved in front of Mekkins towards him.
‘Bracken?’ she said again, touching him with her paw as she had once touched him before. Only this time it was as if she did not believe that he could be Bracken. She spoke as if she was in a terrible nightmare; the frailty and fear in her voice seemed to hang over them all.
He turned his eyes away from Mekkins to Rebecca and looked at her. He was shaking with anger and tension but it slowly died away as he seemed to wake from some nightmare of his own and saw before him a mole so hurt in spirit that his anger and pain was nothing. He thought slowly, ‘Is this Rebecca?’
He was appalled by how thin she was, how stooped. Was this Cairn’s Rebecca? The same he had met here by the Stone? There was puzzled entreaty in her eyes and he saw with utter clarity that she had been so hurt in some way that she could not stand his anger with Mekkins, or the threat in his voice. Words formed very slowly in his mind and when they were ready he said them.
‘It’s all right.’ Then, more softly, ‘It’s all right.’ He paused and then said, as if he were calling out from some depth in which he was trapped: ‘Rebecca?’ He advanced just a fraction and reached out a paw towards her. ‘Rebecca?’ Mekkins crouched quite still. It seemed to him that he could hear two moles calling out to each other from some lost place of their own and, more important, they seemed to hear each other. The Stone rose high above them all, most of it black with shadow, but with a thin line of moonlight delineating one plunging edge of it. When he looked again at Bracken and Rebecca, they were even closer together, Rebecca speaking to him as if he were Comfrey, which in a way he was; while he spoke to her with a gentleness Mekkins had never heard an adult male speak with before, except to a pup, a tiny lost daughter perhaps. Rebecca seemed to be crying, or sobbing, or was she laughing? She was doing something, at least. Then they were nuzzling each other, snouting softly at each other and whether the sounds they made were of tears or joy, sobs or laughter, Mekkins could not tell. They were the sounds of discovered love.
‘It’s Longest Night!’ thought Mekkins to himself, filled suddenly with a sense of its joyous mystery and witnessing for himself the power of the Stone to make moles see each other. ‘It’s Longest Night!’ Involuntarily he began to sing a little song to himself and wander around the clearing to get a view of the Stone on the side that was lit by the moon.
Beneath it, Rebecca and Bracken seemed almost still, for Rebecca’s nuzzlings were of the gentlest, quietest sort, while Bracken’s paw caresses were of the softest and most tender. ‘It’s Longest Night!’ said Bracken to her. ‘Do you realise?’
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, I do! Mekkins,’ she called across the clearing, ‘do you know what tonight is?’
He answered with a Marsh End ditty, and Rebecca started to laugh with a hint of the old freedom Mekkins had thought he would never hear again, the laughter that put hope into a mole’s heart. But it was deeper and quieter than it had once been. She stopped suddenly and turned again to Bracken and just looked at him. And he looked at her. ‘Why, she understands!’ he was thinking.
‘He knows!’ she said to herself.
‘Where are the worms, then?’ said Mekkins. ‘Where’s the feast? I don’t know about you, Rebecca, but I ain’t come all the way up ’ere just to sing a song and get no food. Where is it, then?’
Bracken almost fell over himself thinking how he could get the best worms and other things together in the shortest possible time, while at the same time thinking that his burrow wasn’t big enough for all of them—or was it?—and what was the best way to take them, and try to sing a song as well; while Rebecca kept laughing and looking serious and then a little sad, and then dancing a bit, and Mekkins was thinking there had never been such a good spot or such nice moles as this spot and these moles, at that particular moment… Oh! surely there weren’t three more excited or happy moles in the whole of Duncton Wood, and any one of them would have been hard put to it to explain quite why! Except… well… it was Longest Night, of course! When a mole realises there are other things, bigger things, than even the biggest fears and most terrible worries. That’s the magic of it, that’s its mystery. And so, with a song and a dance in his steps, Bracken led them out of the Stone clearing and down the tunnels to his biggest burrow.
* * *
‘Well, that was some feast, that was!’ declared Mekkins sometime deep in the night, paws on his stomach and full contentment on his face. And with that, his eyes closed, his head began to nod and his mouth fell gently open as he gave himself up to a deep and delicious sleep.
He might equally have said, ‘That was some occasion, that was!’ for surely the Ancient System had not been within sound of such tale-telling, singing, joking, guzzling, speechifying (mainly by Mekkins) and laughing, smiling, grinning (mainly by Bracken) and rhyming, molelore, and enchantment (Rebecca’s) in generations. What excitement for Mekkins and Rebecca to enter tunnels burrowed into the chalk soil, with its grey-white shadows, which made a mole feel close to the past and the Stone; what a joy for Bracken to hear the sound of friendly moles in his tunnels, which he had burrowed in isolation and shared only with his own silence until now.
They all asked each other dozens of questions and listened spellbound to each other’s tales, Rebecca hardly daring to breathe when Bracken described to her his first entry into the Chamber of Dark Sound, while Bracken laughed to hear how the story of the Stone Mole had grown to such proportions all over the system. As for Mekkins, his real joy was to see something of the old Rebecca return, though it was a richer, less impetuous sense of life that she now had. And to see that there was something between these two young moles that gave joy to an older mole like him to see, and which anymole with half a heart would want to cherish and protect. But he wondered if it was just something that had happened on Longest Night and which, in the morning, might not seem quite so powerful as it did now. ‘Still, a mole mustn’t go spoiling the present by fearing the future,’ he thought to himself, and so, more than content with the joy of the night, he finally fell asleep.
Bracken, on one side of the main burrow, and Rebecca on the other, both with their snouts between their paws, fell into thinking the warm, random thoughts of the contented tired. Mekkins laughing, spring, dangers past, Rose, Rune, Rue, echoing tunnels. Curlew’s eyes, Comfrey, Cairn, Cairn, oh Cairn, the Stone, what a time it’d been and how much had happened.
‘Bracken?’
‘Mmm?’ Her voice sounded so good in his burrow. He wanted her to repeat his name again.
‘Bracken? Do you believe in the Stone?’
He did not think about the answer but rather wallowed with it in an image of the Stone, wondering what the question meant. He could say he didn’t know, and that was true; but it wasn’t really, because he knew there was something there. Why, there was so much he hadn’t told them. He had got as far as the circular tunnel with the seven entrances into the central part, but after that he had felt it unwise to go on and had steered the conversation away.
‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘Do you?’
She wanted to say ‘No’, to shout ‘No!’ because she didn’t, she couldn’t, it had let her litter die, it had let those talons come down, there was no Stone, there was nothing, nothing; except that an image of Comfrey came to her suddenly and she saw that there was something. There was so much they hadn’t talked about, she and Bracken, she thought to herself.
She raised her head off her paws and looked at him, and found that he was looking at her so deeply that her body seemed to fall away and only her heart or her soul was there; while it seemed to Bracken, when she raised her head to look at him, that t
here was nothing he could not tell her if she wanted to know, and that most of all, he would like to tell her about the Stone, for that was finally where everything, for good or ill, seemed to be.
He started to say her name again and to move a little towards her, but then he looked beyond her to the entrance to the burrow and thought beyond that to the tunnels he had created, and beyond them to the secret way he had made to the circular tunnel, and on beyond, racing along left and right, into the labyrinths with echoes all around and his skin and fur, his whole body, calling to the Stone, and great shadows of roots, great falls and rises of roots, silent and completely motionless, while beyond them, calling him, beyond them…
Bracken got up and, without looking back to Rebecca, went to the entrance, snouting down it towards where the secret tunnels lay. Rebecca followed him silently as if they were one mole, not two, both moving together down the tunnels towards something that pulled them from the direction of the Stone. They moved quite fast but completely without effort and there was no fear at all, just a certainty that somewhere ahead the Stone was expecting them.
As they ran into the ins and outs of Bracken’s confusing tunnels to the centre, they could both feel the Ancient System alive before them, stretching far beyond in tunnel after tunnel, alive with the warm spirit of Longest Night. There was no fear at all.
Bracken led on into the circular tunnel and turned right through one of the flint entrances and into the labyrinth of echoes, pausing for a moment for Rebecca to catch up. The pattering of her paws echoed on into the darkness ahead of them and she whispered, ‘Listen. Listen! Oh, it’s so beautiful. Listen!’
Bracken ran now into the sound of the echoes, twisting and turning each way and every way towards the roots, not even checking the way he went with his memory, for he no longer needed to, he could hear the way ahead, he knew the way, he knew the way. His Rebecca was close with him, her paws pattering with his, her warmth behind him, they were twisting and turning, weaving and wending their way together, as one mole, running as one, no effort, their bodies in unison.
‘Oh, listen!’ he could hear her whispering, or hear the echoes of her whisper whispering, ‘Listen, listen, my love, my love… ’ deeper and deeper into the labyrinths until the confusion of whispering echoes was all about them but they were one mole together, so beautiful, so beautifully echoing around them until at last they were there by the roots, shadows and falls of rising roots as silent and utterly motionless as the trees on the surface in the still night to which they belonged.
‘Listen, my love, listen!’ whispered Rebecca, running ahead of him without pause and entering first among the great roots which rose massive about her, with Bracken following her paws, following her warmth, following his Rebecca, my love my love, the echoes following them both from the labyrinths behind them, fading away behind as they entered deeper and deeper among the roots, one mole running, moving as one, each mole knowing the way as one. The roots grew bigger and thicker, twining about this way and that, seeming to open before them, the sound of their silence all about them, the sound of silence running ahead of them, Rebecca running on without fear and Bracken behind and fissures in front and over them, over them, on and round, and through and under and over and beyond and on past the roots for shadow after shadow, each twist falling straight, each turn not a turn, the route so easy, so easy for them both together.
Then, as suddenly as they had entered the Chamber of Roots, they reached its end, which was a massive impregnable wall rising up into darkness and made of hard chalk subsoil with great nodules of flint poking out of it like the snouts of huge moles. Their eyes travelled from one brooding shape to another, and then behind them, back to the mass of roots that now seemed quite impassable but through which, somehow, they had come. It was a fearsome sight but neither Bracken nor Rebecca felt fear, for they now looked at the ancient world about them as if they were pups in a world in which harm did not exist.
Bracken now took the lead, turning left along the wall and following its rough and ancient surface round, and round, until they came, as he knew they would without knowing, to an entrance to a tunnel. It was small, crudely burrowed by somemole for whom shape and form no longer mattered. Its floor sloped roughly downward, twisting among the flints that were held in the chalk and determined the detail, though not the general direction, of the tunnel.
From beyond it an ancient sound came, the sound that had been heard for whole ages and eras before even moles roamed the earth; the sound that accompanies the rise and fall, and rise again, of trees and woods and whole forests of trees. The sound of an ancient tree whose huge trunk carries the vibrations of both life and death. The sound of a tree whose roots are alive on the outside and carry life up into the new wood and branches but whose central core is now dry and sacrificed and whose hollow secret darkness stretching high out above the surface may be the home of bats or insects, butterflies or birds, but which below ground, where Bracken and Rebecca were, only carries the sound of a sleeping life that waits to be reborn in the wood’s decay.
They had arrived at the roots of the tree that encircled the Stone in the centre of the clearing. The tunnel now was burrowed out between living and dead roots—the dead roots’ stillness being the peace against which the life of the living roots was set. The roots plunged down into the ancient tunnel, forcing Bracken and Rebecca to squeeze round or between them, on and on, now more slowly and with a deepening sense of being at one with each other and the system that radiated all about them.
The further they advanced along the tunnel, the more its walls seemed to be made up of roots as well as chalk, so that they had the feeling that the tree was all around them, the final guardian of the Stone.
The tunnel grew smaller about them, the dryness of its walls now catching their fur as they advanced and its sound deepened and hollowed ahead of them so that Bracken slowed still more, recognising from its pattern that ahead of them lay a chamber greater than any he had discovered in the Ancient System so far.
There was a mass of debris and dust ahead that blocked the lower half of the tunnel and over whose top Bracken could not see. Cautiously he pushed it forward with his right paw, trying to flatten it down a bit, but it just fell forward and away, the debris sliding away from him in an avalanche, dust rising, and then a long, long silence before, far below them, it cascaded and echoed down on to some unknown, unvisited floor. As the dust cleared, they saw ahead of them the vast round of the old tree’s central hollow, which rose above them to unknown heights of ancient wood, and below to where the debris had fallen. The tunnel gave way to a precipitous path torn out of the side of the hollow and round which they started now to go, the wall of soft wood on their right flank, a void of darkness on their left. It spiralled round and down, and they followed it slowly, feeling as if they were travelling into a past that held in its waiting silence the future as well.
Then Bracken stopped and, half turning back to Rebecca—the narrow path would allow him no more movement than that—he pointed a talon at a sight ahead of them that made her gasp with wonder.
It was a massive jutting, jagged corner of stone, the Stone, around which the tree had girt itself and whose roots had pushed and pulled at it so that in their embrace the great Stone had tilted up and forward towards the west, towards Uffington, until here, deep below ground, the corner of the base on which it had originally stood had risen off the ground and ridden into the hollow depth of the tree itself.
The path traversed right down to the Stone, and then under it, leaving the wall of the hollow as it followed the massive, and now dead, root that had first, as a tendril thinner than a single hair of fur, crept under the Stone so long ago.
Into this holy secret place Bracken and Rebecca now moved, the base of the Stone now actually above them and plunging down ahead of them to the very centre of the Stone and the Ancient System itself.
Then the path widened on to a floor, if floor it was that was half chalk, half soil, half debris, all cr
ossed and intertwined with the arms and bent haunches of long-dead roots. The Stone’s base was above them still, but as they advanced further, clambering over the ancient obstructions in their way, they saw that it plunged suddenly down some distance ahead to form a kind of hollow or cave beyond which, no doubt, the furthest part of the Stone had buried itself finally into the chalk, mirroring in its depth the heights of the other part of the base which tilted above them.
They could only see the top half of this hollow because the roots were bigger than they were and they had to climb over each one. The nearer they got, the more they could see that one last great root had grown across most of the hollow, sealing it off at the bottom and leaving only a thin gap at the top. As they got nearer they both stopped at once.
‘Listen!’ whispered Bracken.
‘Look!’ whispered Rebecca.
As they crouched there, they heard from behind them the soft sound of the ancient tree, stirring and stressing in slow, long sounds, sounds more beautiful than either of them had ever heard, for in its movement it carried both the sound and the silence of life itself: the sound of old winds, the sound of new life, the sound of moisture, the sound of warm wood, of cold wind, of the sun.
While they could see above them, on the roof of the hollow cave blocked by the root, a glimmering light like the sun shimmering from a moving stream up on to the gnarled bark of a willow that stretches out over it.
Bracken moved forward and began to burrow under the root—which was easy, because the ground was loose and dry while the root itself was soft with age. Rebecca joined him, burrowing silently by his side, each pushing out the soil and debris behind them, advancing towards the sealed cave of the Stone. It was easy, so easy. Until at last one of Bracken’s burrowing thrusts pushed forward into nothing and he stopped and held his paw there and turned to Rebecca, who stretched her own paw forward and through, and together they pulled the last of the soil and root seal down.