‘What do you mean “carry so much”?’ asked Bracken.
Boswell was getting sterner and stranger by the second, and Bracken felt almost intimidated. ‘We didn’t meet by accident, Bracken—surely you know that. You have a destiny I do not understand. But I know it is so. And the Stone has blessed me to help you fulfil it. Rebecca… the seventh Stillstone which… you were so unwilling to talk about… the shadows that have fallen and continue to fall on the Duncton system… they are all a part of it. Every system seems to be in disarray—Nuneham, the Pastures, Duncton, and many that I passed through when I came here. Nomole trusts the Stone; nomole trusts himself. Fear is written on every face.’ It was written on Bracken’s as he listened to Boswell. Who was he? What did the Stone want of him?
Bracken began to shake with fear, for as Boswell spoke, his voice seemed to grow louder and more sonorous and his very language changed as word by word it slid into the old language, which Bracken could not understand. Sounds hard; sounds mellifluous; sounds mysterious. Yet he did understand that there was worse than warning in Boswell’s words and that Boswell was more than mole… Boswell turned to the wall and his voice became a chant, in the language of the old moles, and it began to echo and reverberate a thousand times more powerfully than when Bracken had first discovered the effect a hum could have.
‘The stait of mole dois change and vary,
Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,
Now dansand mety, now like to dee,
Our plesance heir is all vaneglory;
This fals warld is hot transitory,
The flesh is brukle, the dark is sle,
We that in heill wes, and gladnes,
Are trublit now with gret seiknes
And feblit with infermite…’.
As he chanted these ancient words, few of which Bracken could understand, it was as if the wall echoed back the actual chant of ancient moles, powerful moles, and dark sound began to come at Bracken, louder and louder, so that he wanted to run from it. But whichever way he turned, however he tried to escape, it came louder at him, surrounding him in its catastrophe, running at him from every tunnel in the Ancient System, a storm of sound.
As he began to cry out for the terror of it, he thought only of himself and could not know that its echoes and reverberations travelled far beyond the chamber they were in, down the tunnels, booming and vibrating up to the surface, encircling and then issuing from the Stone itself, and then out over the slopes, down towards Barrow Vale, a sound of disaster.
Mekkins heard it, stopping in mid-sentence down in the Marsh End, shaking his head in puzzlement, then running to the surface and snouting up towards the distant Stone from where the deep chant of ancient moles seemed to be coming.
Comfrey heard it, in the shade of the wood’s edge where he vainly sought herbs long since killed by the drought, and he turned towards the hill, the name ‘Rebecca’ forming helplessly in his mouth as fear filled him and he sought the comfort her name always gave him.
Rebecca heard it, down in her burrows, and she knew that what it was they had been waiting for for so long, for generations, perhaps before any of them had been born, had come.
Stonecrop heard it, and mole after mole, like him, stopped what they were doing and paused fearfully, as the sound from the Stone came down to them like thunder through the trees.
‘Stop!’ cried Bracken to Boswell. ‘Stop the sound!’ he shouted, turning this way and that in his desperation. And Boswell’s voice began to soften and change back, his words still thundering but no longer echoing with dark sound, as Bracken heard him say, ‘You argue with Stonecrop, you argue with Rebecca, you argue with yourself. All of you argue, but now the time is coming when you must listen to the Stone. Now the last shadow is falling.’
Bracken stared at Boswell and saw that he too was shaking, sweating and afraid himself. He was possessed by some power that only reluctantly let him go and Bracken called again to him, no longer in fear, but in pity and compassion for them all.
The last shadow had fallen. The last shadow? It was with this mysterious knowledge hanging over them, and not knowing what it meant, that Bracken finally led Boswell—both of them very subdued—through the seventh entrance and on to the central core.
In this moment of long-awaited arrival at the heart of Duncton Boswell said nothing, for he felt the dread of a threat outside the ancient tunnels far more than the promise and excitement of finding the seventh Book, or clues to it, within them. But they pressed on, Bracken leading them quickly to one of the entrances into the Chamber of Echoes, and from there, without faltering once, through the complex labyrinths where the echoes played among the chalky walls and on to the edge of the Chamber of Roots.
There they stopped and looked at the sinews and shadows of the roots massing before them, seeming utterly still for once, but even then sounding the whine and shrill of the subtlest of shiftings from some deep crevice or high cleft as the roots responded to the stresses of the trees. The drought extended even down there, for the air was dry and the root sounds were tauter and higher pitched.
‘The buried part of the Stone is beyond the roots,’ said Bracken, pointing half-heartedly at them, ‘and since we’re here, we might as well try to get through. But… well, you’ll see.’
Bracken led slowly off among the roots, taking care to mark the ground from the beginning so that they could find their way out. But, as he expected, they did not get more than a few moleyards beyond the first of the roots before the lethargy and loss of purpose that had affected him before struck them both. A voice kept saying to each of them, ‘What’s the point?’ and, ‘You know you can’t get through, it’s too far,’ until they seemed to veer off the course Bracken was trying to lead them on, round and round, and out again, back to the edge.
‘You see what I mean?’ said Bracken. ‘I was only able to get through there with Rebecca. We just went straight through without any confusion at all. But if you want to get to the Stillstone, that’s where you’ll have to find a way through, Boswell.’
Boswell was not really listening. He was uncomfortable and restless, feeling that something was nagging at him from behind, a looming shadow he could not quite make out.
Bracken said, ‘Come on, I’ll get you out. Another time… I’ll bring you here again. Anyway, there are things to do. I’ll tell Stonecrop he can bring what moles he liked into the ancient tunnels. I’ll go and see Rebecca. It will be all right, Boswell.’
He saw that the things he must do were really quite simple, and as he did so, felt relieved and clear-headed. He might even have felt light-hearted but for the oppression of the drought and the feeling that Boswell, who was now so silent, was full of fear or dread.
He took them out by his own series of tunnels that led over towards the wood’s edge, describing to Boswell how he had escaped through them with Violet. They found a little food there, but ate it quickly because they wanted to get back on to the surface and down the slopes to the main system. When they did, they found the air was still as dry as bone.
‘It’s just the same as it was!’ said Bracken with relief, as if he had expected the whole wood to have disappeared. ‘That place can leave a mole full of fears! Nice to be out again!’ He tried to be as positive and as cheerful as possible, but Boswell did not react.
‘I can’t see what you’re so miserable about,’ said Bracken, exasperated. ‘There’s nothing wrong—except the heat.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
But the system was not quite the same. While they had been in the ancient tunnels, the sky had taken on an eerie, threatening colour, as if a thunderstorm of heat was about to break but could never quite manage it. At the same time, the flea infestation, which Bracken and Boswell had noticed on their tour of the system, had got suddenly worse. A mole could not enter the tunnels and burrows to the north of Barrow Vale without brown-orange fleas hopping on and off his face and paws, bristling among his fur and itching and biting. They seemed attracted to the fine layer of dust and grit that had formed on the floors of the tunnel with the drought, and although not at first easily seen, the floor was sometimes literally alive with them.