Every lesson Stonecrop had learned from Medlar now came into play. Sensing Mandrake’s surprise, Stonecrop acted immediately, lunging forward with a talon cut that scored another wound on Mandrake’s lined and pitted face.
Then Mandrake did a strange thing. Instead of immediately counterattacking, he seemed to try to peer round Stonecrop as if baffled by an obstruction on a path that had once been clear; trying to get a better look at Rebecca and calling, crying, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ And still he did not try to strike Stonecrop back.
Behind Stonecrop, Bracken turned to Rebecca, who was trying to come forward towards Mandrake as she herself called out from some terrible distance, ‘Oh Mandrake, Mandrake!’
Stonecrop hesitated, not knowing whether to yield to his desire to try and kill Cairn’s murderer or to listen to some half-heard instinct that told him… told him something he could not quite catch… something desolate in Rebecca’s voice.
There was movement behind him as Bracken and Mekkins forcibly stopped Rebecca running forward and Bracken shouted grimly, ‘Kill him, Stonecrop. Kill him!’ Then, as Rebecca let forth a terrible cry of, ‘No… no…’ that seemed to fill the clearing, and beyond it the beech trees and beyond them the whole of Duncton Wood with despair, Stonecrop lunged forward against Mandrake again.
‘He will kill you, Rebecca,’ shouted Bracken, as Rebecca’s talons tore at him and Mekkins in her desperation to go to her father. ‘He wants to save me,’ she cried, as once more Mandrake roared out, ‘Rebecca, I’m here, Rebecca,’ and she heard him cry, his voice calling from out of a blizzard of icy winds and sleet that ravaged the high slopes of Siabod, where once, so long ago and so terribly, he had been born. She heard his cries of ‘Rebecca, Rebecca’ as the cries of a pup which feels itself lost for ever in a storm, she heard them as the mewings and bleatings of a litter she could not save. Her talons tore uselessly, desperately, into the face and fur and flanks of Bracken as beyond him she saw Stonecrop bear down at last on Mandrake, beginning, lunge by terrible lunge, to kill him. There were growlings and roars, there was blood on angry talons, but most of all, and worst, there was the huge impersonal back of Stonecrop, his massive shoulders working methodically forward as lunge after cut after talon thrust he destroyed Mandrake before her eyes. Mandrake’s cries of ‘Rebecca!’ continued between grunts of horrid pain and the last tired lunges of a fighter who has no more will to fight; the last calls of a pup in a blizzard whose cold has taken him for its own. And then they grew weaker, despairing, and finally fell silent until, at last, Stonecrop seemed to be hitting not straight ahead of him but down, near the ground, where Mandrake had fallen into his own blood, his paws feeble and his breath weakening, his eyes closing, and finally, his life force gone. Then, Stonecrop was over him, shoulders weak from the kill, Mandrake’s blood on his paws and fur, the living looking at the dead.
He turned back towards the Stone where Rebecca now crouched, Mekkins and Bracken still holding her, and each of them saw that his face was contorted by a horror of something his eyes had seen and his talons felt. Then he said, almost by way of explanation and with unnatural calm: ‘He killed Cairn. He killed your litter. He…’
‘He loved me,’ cried Rebecca. ‘He was calling for me. And I couldn’t… You wouldn’t… let me…’ Then her sobs were wild and desperate, a weeping for something that can never be brought back, while to Bracken it seemed that they were not just for Mandrake, but for all the moles who lay dead and dying about the Stone clearing—Brome, Mullion, Oxlip, Burrhead, his own father now dead before him, Pasture moles, Duncton moles, males and females, and Rebecca’s tears seemed for them all. Worst of all, they were for him as well.
He tried to comfort her but she pulled away, looking at him from a cold and far-off place he kew he could never reach. His hold on her fell limp and she crossed over to where Mandrake lay, paused for a moment as she touched his head gently, looked back at Bracken and Stonecrop with a fierce and cold pity, and then went out of the clearing and into the dark.
No stabbing talon could ever have thrust itself with such pain into Bracken’s heart as that terrible look from Rebecca before she turned her back on him and was gone. He felt himself cut off from life itself. He ran from the Stone towards the clearing edge, calling, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ but the name did not seem to carry, and even the light in the clearing grew weaker as the moon began its fall behind the trees.
Then Boswell’s voice came to him gently from the Stone. ‘Say the blessing, Bracken, say the Midsummer blessing for the young.’
Bracken turned to look back at the Stone, which stood darker now, the bodies of the dead moles about it no more than rounded shadows in the weakening light. He could see the snouts of the youngsters they had saved moving and bobbing by the Stone, with the bigger forms of their mothers about them. A stronger shaft of light seemed to fall on Boswell, who stood to one side of the Stone, his eyes compassionately on Bracken, to whom it seemed that Boswell was part of the Stone, a living part.
He was weak and utterly desolate and his breathing came quicker and more shallow as if he was going to weep. He had lost his Rebecca. He knew it as certainly as he knew it was night.
‘Say the blessing, Bracken,’ whispered Boswell—or did he shout it?—‘Rune has gone, the Stone has given its protection.’
‘The stone has given its protection to everymole but me,’ Bracken thought bitterly. ‘And Rebecca.’
He came forward, moving slightly to the right to stand to the west of the Stone, in the direction in which it tilted. He looked up at its highest point, the only part that still caught the moonlight clearly, and began to speak words he had learned so reluctantly, so long ago. First the prefatory chants that he did not even know he knew, and then finally, the last words of the blessing:
‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,
We free their fur with wind from the west,
We bring them… choice… soil,
Sunlight in… life …’
As his voice faltered and caught sobbing in his throat, Boswell’s voice joined him, its strength giving him strength and its faith giving him a kind of desolate hope. The voice of Boswell spoke from some ancient past that stretched back to a time before even the tunnels around them were made, and which went forward to a future that trembled now in his heart:
‘We ask they be blessed
With a sevenfold blessing:
The grace of form
The grace of goodness
The grace of suffering
The grace of wisdom
The grace of true words
The grace of trust
The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’
If Bracken’s voice faltered as he spoke the words none there noticed it, for Boswell’s voice mingled powerfully with it as, without knowing what he was doing, Bracken moved among the youngsters, touching them as his Rebecca might have done.
‘We bathe their paws in showers of light,
We free their souls with talons of love,
We ask that they hear the silent Stone.’
‘So Boswell knows the words as well,’ thought Bracken, vaguely. ‘Then who is Boswell?’ he asked himself.
‘The wood is safe,’ Bracken found himself saying to the Marsh End mothers, ‘so take your youngsters back to the Marsh End.’ Then, one by one, the moles left the Stone—the Pasture moles cutting off westwards, through the wood, Stonecrop leaving with them, as the Marshenders began their long trek home. There were henchmoles there, but Bracken saw they were no longer threatening, just ordinary moles who had lost their way. They began to cluster silently around Bracken, Mekkins and Boswell, looking to them for guidance, and Bracken noticed that beyond them other Duncton moles came from out of the shadows—Eastsiders, females from the Westside, moles from the slopes, all scraggy with age. Even some of the Marshenders stayed behind with Bracken. Then they began to whisper in a curious, almost primitive, chanting way, ‘Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale…’ and Bracken knew he must lead them there. He turned his back on the Stone to take up the power Mandrake had held, and then Rune, and that had destroyed both of them.