Duncton Wood (35 page)

Mandrake reacted by rearing up and plunging his talons at Cairn once more; he, instead of retreating, came viciously forward with his own talons, the two becoming locked in a bloody struggle at the entrance to the burrow.

When one or other of the two great males hit the side of the entrance, the whole burrow shook and earth flew, as Rebecca watched them, at first helpless and confused. As she did so, a powerful and unwanted excitement ran through her, a forbidden and obscene excitement that she tried to blot from her mind: the excitement of seeing the two huge males, both of whom she loved, fighting for her.

There was a momentary lull in the fight as Mandrake stepped back in preparation for a complete push forward into the burrow, and in the lull she could hear her Cairn’s desperate gasping of breath as his snout lowered from the enormous effort he had had to make to survive so far. It was this hopeless sound that made Rebecca act.

As Mandrake plunged forward into the burrow, she powered her way past Cairn, with her talons out for Mandrake and a cry of “Run, Cairn, run!” Mandrake moved to one side to avoid Rebecca, at the same time trying to land his talons on the suddenly rapidly moving Cairn, but he was too late, and Cairn was past him and out into the tunnel and running down toward the entrance to the surface.

Mandrake swung back through the entrance, knocking part of its lintel of solid earth flying, and managed to bring his talons with terrible force onto Cairn’s fleeing back. Cairn grunted with terrible pain but pulled himself away, leaving Mandrake’s talons hanging still for a moment in the middle of the tunnel, covered with his blood. Then he ran on, down the tunnel, the sound of Mandrake snarling and massive behind him. Then up desperately through the entrance, an instinctive memory of the trick Rune had tried to play before making him power his front paws ahead of him with talons splayed out, into the graying night.

But Rune was not to be caught a second time. He crouched to one side of the entrance and, as Cairn came out, plunged his talons with deadly accuracy toward the pasture mole’s snout and face. One tore through the left side of the snout, another cut savagely into his left eye, in one terrible instant turning Cairn’s face into an open wound that, after no more than a second, began to pour blood.

At the same time, behind him in the tunnel. Mandrake brought down his talons a second time on Cairn, this time tearing his haunches and hind quarters and only failing to stop the fleeing pasture mole dead in his tracks because Cairn’s initial thrust out of the tunnel was so powerful.

Cairn staggered heavily forward, swinging instinctively round toward Rune, whom he could now only vaguely see through the haze of pain and blood round his face, catching him savagely in the breast with a cutting sweep of his talons that, had they been lunging instead of swinging, would certainly have killed Rune. As it was, the blow was sufficient to knock him backward past the entrance and to give Cairn time to turn to the fresh air and openness that he could sense off to his right. He began to run and stagger toward it with the desperation of a mole who has faced death, who may soon die, but who seeks one last chance to live.

He might still have been caught by Mandrake, had Mandrake wished it. But as the great mole squatted back ready to burst out of the entrance, he heard Rebecca whimpering and crying in the burrow where she had, for one brief second, blocked Mandrake’s way and allowed Cairn to escape, and savagely, the blood of her, mate on his talons and fur, he turned back toward the burrow.

As his shadow blackened the entrance to the burrow again and he entered it, Rebecca stopped sobbing and looked up at him. She saw again the great scars made by talons that ran and rumpled down his face, and the new talonscores that Cairn had made on his shoulders, which were bloody and red. She felt the power of his presence over her, and looked up at him as her mother, Sarah, must once have done; she looked into his angry eyes that saw so little and yet sought so much.

She thought he was going to kill her and expected the talons he had raised above his head to strike down upon her. They did come down, massively, not to kill her but to possess her as, without a word and with only the sound of anger in the burrow, he took her, he took her, he took her for his own, savaging his way into her as the burrow exploded about them both into a redness and black, and shafts of light and terrible pain. Rebecca! Rebecca!

She did not know if it was Mandrake who cried her name through the exquisite storm of agony in the burrow about her, and inside her, or a memory of her beloved Cairn saying it. Or whether it was another memory, of she herself calling it into the wet wood up through the slopes after Bracken had left her. My name is Rebecca! Or perhaps she was calling out her name to herself as she drowned in the flood of bloodlust that came over her.

Until, at last, she knew it
was
herself, and Mandrake, too. Rebecca! Rebecca! He spoke it deeply into her, his body in her and, for that brief moment, hers.

“Rebecca!” he repeated as he finally pulled away and back into the world of darkness in which he lived but from which, for a moment, he had escaped with her as he once had with Sarah.

“Rebecca,” she said softly, crying and shuddering with pain and loss.

“Rebecca...,” whispered Cairn as he crawled up the hill along the wood’s edge by the pasture with a throbbing of pain in his back and haunches and head that was almost too much to bear. “Rebecca,” he whispered into the deaf grass that swayed toward him and struck his snout powerfully, “find my brother Stonecrop for me. Send him to help me.”

But no answer and no Stonecrop came, and he stumbled desperately on, unwilling to stay still where he might be found, yet afraid to break cover onto the pasture from the longer grass by the wood’s edge because he would be too slow to avoid any owl that saw him. On he struggled up the hill, not knowing that he was getting nearer and nearer to the Stone or that across its soaring face, now gray with dawn, the first dead beech leaves of autumn were beginning to fall.

   17  

I
T
was among a fresh-fallen scatter of beech leaves near the Stone that Bracken first saw him. He was trying to run, but in fact only just crawling, and Bracken had never seen a mole so terribly wounded yet still alive. His snout and cheek were crushed, his shoulders and flanks ragged red, his left eye torn and blinded, and his back legs seemed only good for dragging along, while his hind quarters had suffered deep wounds which seemed the result of several massive talon thrusts.

Bracken had never sensed such suffering in a mole, and perhaps he himself was only able to do so because of what he had suffered in the tunnel by the cliff before Rose the Healer came.

The injured mole advanced a little way toward the Stone, tried to snout up at it for a short while, but then staggered and slued round to one side. For a moment Bracken thought he was coming straight at him, where he crouched half visible on the other side of the Stone, and he grew frightened. It was as if death itself was approaching him. But the mole did not see Bracken and anyway swung round again, gasping and panting with pain and effort, as he dragged himself slowly across the clearing away from the Stone and toward the pastures.

As he disappeared into the undergrowth. Bracken felt the pain as if it were his own. There was a sense of loss and failure over the mole that made Bracken want to run after him and say “No. It’s not like that, it’s not.” Though why he wanted to say such a thing, or about what, he did not know.

The mole’s progress was not hard to follow, for he made a lot of noise and, despite his fear, Bracken followed him. He staggered this way and that, crashing painfully through some brambles and leaving a red-brown smear of blood on a young sapling he brushed against. The more Bracken watched him the less he was afraid and the more he wanted to help in some way. There
must
be something he could do. Fetch Rose? He would never know where to find her. Rue? Too far, and he doubted if she would want to leave her tunnels having only just re-found them.

He remembered that once Hulver had told him that the juice of cammock was good for rubbing into wounds, but he didn’t even know what it looked like, whether it was in season, or where to find it. And anyway, looking at this hurt creature, whose wounds looked all the worse for him being so big and once-powerful. Bracken thought that there was no herb that would help him now.

What would Hulver have done? He would have comforted the mole by talking gently to him. It was this conviction that made Bracken finally break cover, though he did it with some care – approaching the mole from his right side from where, given his wounds, he could more easily see and scent Bracken. He deliberately made a noise as he came near and the mole came to a clumsy halt.

“It’s all right,” said Bracken, “I will not harm you.”

The mole turned his snout painfully toward Bracken and even tried to raise himself on his back paws for a few terrible seconds.

“It’s all right,” said Bracken again.
“I
may be able to help.”

“Where are the pastures?” asked the mole. “Where are my tunnels?”

“The pastures are only fifty moleyards more,” said Bracken. “Not far.” Bracken turned toward them and led the way, slowing down when he sensed that even though he was going at a snail’s pace, it was still too fast for the other mole. Finally they reached the wood’s edge where the long grass grew on the wood side of the fence, stirred by the wind that always seemed to come off the pastures.

The mole slumped down, snout low, and Bracken asked “What’s your name?”

“Cairn. From the pastures.” For him to say that took a long time, for his voice came slowly and with pain.

“Did a Duncton mole do this,” asked Bracken,
‘’because
you’re from the pastures?”

“It was a mating fight. I took a woodmole for a mate. A mole called Rune found us. Do you know Rune?”

There was fear in Cairn’s voice, for it occurred to him that Bracken might be one of Rune’s friends. But then the thought weakened into hopelessness; if he was, so what? It didn’t matter any more. He knew he was going to die.

“Rune!” exclaimed Bracken. “Yes.
I
know Rune. Everymole in Duncton does.”

“He found us several days ago and I fought him and chased him away; I should have killed him. It was my first mating fight. He brought another mole and I could not fight him. Not to win. His name was Mandrake.”

Bracken looked with renewed horror at Cairn. No living mole knew better than he what that meant. Surely there was something he could do.

Cairn seemed lost in a world of his own, for his head hung down onto the ground, tilted to one side so the woxind did not touch the grass, and the only movement was his quick, shallow breathing that made one of his Ump paws twist fractionally to the left and then back again with each in-and-out of his breath.

It occurred to Bracken finally that if only he could get Cairn to go a little way farther up the hill to where the Stone faced the west toward far-off Uffington, the line on which he himself had automatically crouched when he had first come to the Stone and on which Hulver had died, there might be some power for comfort there.

Somehow he coaxed Cairn along, though each step was painful, until at last Bracken could sense that they were in the right place. Cairn seemed to sense it, too, for he slumped down again with a sigh. His breathing grew easier and he was happy to be able to point his snout out over the pastures he loved. It was afternoon and the sky was light, with a few high clouds and some haze far off below them over the vales.

It was peaceful there and as Bracken faced in the direction of Uffington and felt its power coming to them, with the strength of the Stone from behind, a peace was beginning to fall on the broken and suffering Cairn.

“Tell me about the Stone,” he whispered. “She talked about the Stone. She said, Rebecca told me, that she came up to the Stone after I left her to chase the Rune mole away. She talked a little about it.”

“But no mole has been here,” said Bracken, until he remembered that a mole had. A female. And he felt again her caress on his shoulder and knew that
she
had been Rebecca. If only he had stayed to ask her name. If only. For some reason this discovery made him feel at one with Cairn, and he began to understand something of the sense of loss he carried with him.