Duncton Wood (55 page)

Brome listened to this with great interest, for it seemed to him to have a lot to do with what he wanted to say to this first senior mole of Duncton he had met. But first he had to decide if he could trust Mekkins.

“Tell me, Mekkins,” he said quietly, “what do you know of the Stone?”

Brome noticed that Mekkins’ manner changed. It became more personal, less weighted by the many considerations a leader has, even if only of part of a system like Marsh End.

“Do you mean the Stone generally?” asked Mekkins, looking around in a quiet way, “Or the Duncton Stone in particular?”

“Is there a difference?” asked Brome.

Mekkins hesitated. He had never talked about the Stone to another mole in his life, not even since he had gone to it for Rebecca’s sake and it had answered his prayers. Since then he had been in deep awe of it and hesitated now to talk to another mole who might not understand his words. Finally he said: “The Duncton Stone has great power and may still be the true heart of our system, as it once was the heart in reality – when moles lived only on top of the hill. We’ve been cut off from it, though, by the likes of Mandrake and Rune, who I’ve told you about.” Then he added in a rush: “If you want to know what I think, the Stone is the most important thing Duncton’s got.”

Brome nodded. He looked pleased by this reply but said nothing. For a moment it was his turn to hesitate, but then he settled down farther onto his paws with the air of a mole who, after a very long time keeping something to himself, has decided that the moment has come to tell it all. He trusted Mekkins.

“You’ve got to understand that in my system we are brought up to believe that Duncton moles are spell-weavers and evil, that the wood is dangerous to go near and that the Stone on top of the hill – which we have all heard about – is an evil Stone.”

Mekkins looked visibly surprised at this.

“Well, that’s how it is. Now, plenty of moles here believe in the Stone as an idea – something to worship, if you like. And we’ve got our rituals, like any other system. But we’re a big, diverse system and in recent years have been plagued by fighting and factions, just as other systems such as your own have. When at about the time I took control here, I got talking to Rose about this and that, and she told me, to my surprise, that she had been to your Stone several times. ‘It’s about as evil as a buttercup,’ she said. Well, one night I decided to go and see for myself – a bit risky, but something drove me to it.”

“Yeh! The Stone’s like that,” murmured Mekkins.

“Well, of course it wasn’t evil, it was inspiring. I couldn’t even describe the effect it had.”

“Don’t worry,” said Mekkins with a conspiratorial grin. “I think I know.”

“I might have left it at that but for something that happened last September. One of our moles, Cairn, got killed in your system. A mating fight. His brother is... I

should say was because he has left our system now... a mole called Stonecrop, who was the most important fighter this system has ever seen. He wanted to lead a group of moles over to Duncton and avenge Cairn’s death. One way or another I persuaded them out of it – frankly, I was worried about the consequences. But somehow it made me think about whether it
would
be worth invading Duncton.”

Mekkins began to look worried, but Brome laughed. “Don’t worry. Hear me out. What I concluded was that if there was anything at all in Duncton Wood we wanted it was the Stone. Or rather, access to the Stone. It would give our moles the kind of focusing point that might stop the pointless feuds that keep developing here. And anyway, half of Duncton Hill is made up of the pastures, isn’t it? And taken together – the two systems, that is – the Stone is a natural center.”

Mekkins looked decidedly worried. The implications of what Brome was saying were very obvious to him.

Brome continued. “Now, the reason I mention all this to you is principally because if you want my help down in the Marsh End against your Rune, which I think you may, then I’m going to want yours, up on top of the hill. I don’t want territory. I want access.”

“The thin end of the root,” said Mekkins cynically.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” said Brome. “But it might just stop the killing and feuding that goes on between the systems, and within my own.”

“What’s this to do with me?” asked Mekkins.

“I don’t know – yet,” said Brome. “But I’ve got a feeling that when Rose told me that you were a mole to be trusted, she meant you might have a bigger part to play than perhaps you expect in the changes she is talking about.”

Mekkins and Brome looked at each other as two equals, poised before great events are about to take place which would affect and change everything they knew. Mekkins smiled at last.

“You’re quite a mole, you are, Brome. We could do with a mole like you in Duncton.”

Brome laughed and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, as if to seal a trust between them.

“By the way,” he said, “if that Rebecca of yours is the one who mated with Cairn, which I noticed you avoided even hinting at, you had better warn her not to mention it. There’s pasture moles who wouldn’t like to know she’s in the system. You see. Cairn’s brother Stonecrop was a very special mole and he’s missed. If they thought a mole who, even indirectly, caused his departure from the system was here, they might not like it.”

Mekkins smiled noncommittally. He turned to go.

“Is
she that mole?” asked Brome.

“Yes,” said Mekkins. He didn’t like lies.

“She must be quite somemole,” said Brome.

“She is,” said Mekkins. With that their discussion was over, and after a short visit back to Rose’s burrow, in which he passed on Brome’s advice to Rebecca, Mekkins went hurriedly back to see what was happening in Duncton Wood.

Rose’s burrow was one of the untidiest, and loveliest, Rebecca had ever seen. It was the kind in which youngsters could wander delightedly from object to object and lose themselves in reveries of wonder and play. Its walls had been burrowed in a rough and homely way, with an occasional roundel of stone left protruding, because Rose liked it that way, which cast friendly shadows and pillows of shade.

Just inside the entrance, and half blocking it, was a pile of dried leaves and flowers of woodruff, whose haylike scent, said Rose, was the quickest way of reminding a returning mole that sanity lies inside her burrow more often than outside it. Next to this was a scatter of beechnut husks and near them, the two mingling together at the edges, a collection of black elderberries, dried and grizzled into hardness.

There were several flints around the floor of the burrow, one of them flat-topped and obviously used by Rose as a surface on which to crush herbs, for it was covered by the crushed and shredded foliage of white horehound, whose thyme-scent made that corner of the burrow like an open field of its own to moles who closed their eyes and let the scent take them over.

“Yes, my love, that’s why I never quite finish crushing them all, because, you see, every time I try, the delicious scent quite takes me over!” said Rose, explaining the clutter of horehound stems and leaving them exactly where they were.

On the far wall opposite the entrance Rose had made her own special nest, a soft pile of blue-runner leaves intermingled with the dried petals of eglantine and wild lavender. Rose had let Violet sleep there one day, though inevitably she complained that it was “uncomfortable and bumpy,” which indeed it was, since some of the rose hips which Rose had gathered and heaped nearby had “inexplicably” rolled into her nest and she had never noticed them.

There was a dusty, dried-out red cardinal beetle shell by one wall, which Rose had never bothered to move since “it crawled down here one summer’s day and peacefully spent the evening watching me do something or other – I can’t quite remember what – and then died!” Violet didn’t like it much, but Comfrey found its color – a deep red ochre – beautiful, and he liked the obscure shine of its dead wings.

In the center of the burrow and draped with other herbs and stems, all dusty, dry and green with age, was a long, gnarled flint of pinks and blues whose shape seemed to change with the hour of the day and the angle at which a mole chose to look at it. “Oh, no.
It
doesn’t change,” explained Rose to Rebecca when they were talking one day,
“you
do.”

From this fragrant burrow Rose had made her life’s work of healing Duncton and pasture moles alike. By the time Rebecca came so desperately to her in the last week of that cold January, Rose was reaching the end of her long life. Even in the time since just before Longest Night, when Rebecca had last seen her. Rose had slowed and aged. She suffered pains now in her shoulders and back paws, which made movement difficult so that she tended to prefer to settle into one position at a time, moving only her head to keep track of Rebecca and the youngsters when they were in her burrow. She liked to see a mole’s eyes when she spoke to him, or her, and despite her pain, her own eyes were as still and warm as ever.

At the same time she slept more, sometimes drifting in and out of sleeping and waking as a scatter of dandelion silk rises and falls on a warm evening wind in September. As the days went by, she seemed to say less and less and to smile more, and round her came a peace that descended even on Violet, whose normal ebullience grew quieter and gentler when she was near Rose.

Comfrey had quickly overcome his initial wariness of Rose and, together with Violet, he would spend long hours with her as she told them tales and legends of the system. Violet liked the dramatic ones, with heroes and villains dashing about from tunnel to tunnel while Comfrey preferred to hear Rose tell stories of the flowers and trees, whose lore and mysteries held him spellbound.

Rose began each of her tales the same way —” From my heart to your heart I tell this tale that its blessing may touch you as it has touched me” – and Comfrey would snuggle down, while Violet looked all expectant as the magic of the story wove them into its fabric.

Although Rebecca was not aware of it, it was almost unknown for a mole to enter Rose’s burrow, and word quickly got about among the pasture moles that “that Rebecca from Duncton must be very special, because Rose the Healer lets her
inside
her burrow.
Inside!”

They were right to remark on it, for to Rose, Rebecca
was
very special. She had seen the power for life in Rebecca from the first, and valuing it as she did, understood better than anymole, better even than Mekkins, how near to a death of spirit the murder of her litter by Mandrake had brought her.

Even in Rebecca’s care of Comfrey, which could hardly have been more tender and loving – and now, in her acceptance of Violet – even now Rose could see that Rebecca had lost much trust in life. Sometimes there was a far-off sadness in the way Rebecca caressed Comfrey, or a sudden frailty in the laughter that had once always been so full and free.

So Rose opened her burrow to Rebecca and the youngsters, knowing that with the Stone’s grace, Rebecca might find again some of the life she had lost touch with. Rose did not waste time or breath on regretting what had happened. She had known since their first meeting that Rebecca would be a healer, and she knew that healing can only come from a heart that has seen the dark as well as the light. She feared that for-Rebecca there was more to come, far more than she herself had ever known and she silently prayed that the Stone would help her give to Rebecca the strength and trust to find her way alone when she. Rose, was gone.

It was for this reason that Rose was insistent that the youngsters should, for a period every day, leave her together alone with Rebecca – indeed, she made sure that the more friendly of the pasture guardmoles, who still hung about, took Violet and Comfrey under their care and kept them occupied.

These were times of talk and silence, times in which Rose imparted to Rebecca her knowledge of herbs and healing lore and a trust in the Stone – a time in. which there continued inside Rebecca the healing that had started with her communion with Bracken on Longest Night, in the silence of the Stone.

She taught Rebecca by instinct rather than design, for her mind was as delightfully illogical as her burrow. Rhymes and sayings, thoughts and words, ideas and laughter all came to their own pace and in their own way, and Rebecca was barely conscious that she was learning anything. Like the old flower-rhyme that Rose taught her one day to illustrate the herbs that give a burrow a nice, long-lasting scent, and which Rebecca only discovered she remembered many moleyears later.

Germander and marjoram

Basil, meadowsweet,

Daisy-tops and tansies

Fennel with burnef,

Roses in August

Lavender in June

Maudlin and red mint
 
—

None will go too soon.

They talked about a thousand things, but what Rose most put into Rebecca’s mind were seeds of thought to grow, rather than finished plants to fade. And she waited for Rebecca to ask the questions.

“Rose?”

“Mmm, my love?”

“How do you know how to help a mole when you think he needs help?”

“You don’t know, my dear. You never know. You may have an idea but you don’t
know.
No... you see, they
tell
you. What you have to learn is to understand what they are trying to say, because if there’s one thing certain, they won’t know themselves! In fact, Rebecca, one of the burdens healers have to bear is most moles’ inability to say what it is that’s wrong with them. Mind you, if they knew – really knew – then there probably wouldn’t be anything wrong.” Rose crouched in silence, Rebecca letting the words sink in. Then Rose added “The best way to start is to touch them gently with your paw just as you touch Comfrey when he needs comforting. Touching tells you far more than words ever can.”