Bracken, now increasingly worried and restless for something to do before Rebecca arrived, went to look at them. Rebecca came straight from the pastures on receiving the message and it was here that she found him. He was looking at their suffering and feeling the agony of helplessness that the healthy feel before extreme illness in another. If they heard him in the tunnel where they were crouched motionless, they did not show it, and they could not have seen or scented him, for the skin around their eyes was painfully swollen and their snouts were running with a foul-smelling mucus.
‘Bracken?’ It was Rebecca’s voice, and then her touch. ‘Bracken?’
He turned to her, his suffering for them so much a part of him that his gaze on her was direct and open. The last thing he was thinking about was Rebecca’s attitude to him. ‘Can you help them?’ he asked, but before the question was fully out he could see her answer. She looked tired and stricken.
‘There are many moles like this on the pastures over on the far side,’ she said. ‘Some moles came in from another system and must have brought the disease with them. One of them has been lucky and is not ill, but he says that most of the moles in his system died from the disease.’
‘The whole system?’ whispered Bracken.
Rebecca nodded. ‘Bracken, there was nothing I could do for them. The ones who died didn’t respond to anything I gave them. The one who lived—or has so far—didn’t survive because of anything I did.’
Mekkins suddenly joined them. ‘A couple of moles have come over from the Eastside and there’s death there now.’ He shrugged hopelessly. ‘You know what it is, don’t you? It’s the plague, and there’s not a blind thing anymole can do about it—not even you, Rebecca.’
‘But Rose might—’ she began.
‘She couldn’t,’ said Mekkins firmly, ‘so put that idea out of your head.’
Boswell joined them quietly as well, and all four looked at each other in a dawning horror. Each one had heard stories of the plague, though none knew the history of its, terror more than Boswell, who had read some of the Rolls of the Systems, whose records had been mysteriously interrupted two or three times in molehistory when most of the chroniclers themselves had suddenly died or disappeared in a waste of history that reflected plague and only a single account had remained to tell the story.
‘The shadow has fallen’ was the phrase with which one of the most famous Rolls of the Plague ended, written as it had been by the last survivor, a scribemole, in a system to the west, whose account was left unfinished before he himself had died. It was the same phrase that Boswell, or the moles that possessed him, had used by the wall in the Chamber of Dark Sound.
But Boswell, who knew so much, had nothing to say. Crouched together in the tunnel, the four began to feel the full weight of the waves of death that were rolling towards them, a flood far more powerful than the one Bracken and Boswell had faced in the drainage channel. Then, hour by hour, the reports began to stream in.
‘Five moles in the Eastside…’
‘A female in Barrow Vale itself…’
‘Three Westsiders, two males and a female…’
Panic and fear began to take over the system as each began to fear for his or her life. Everymole sought some remedy or escape and when moles found that Rebecca was among them, with Mekkins, they besieged and beseeched her for help—for a charm, for a prayer, for a herb that would save them. But the more they asked, the more impotent Rebecca felt, for there was nothing her normally healing words seemed able to do, and no herb that she knew seemed to help.
By the third day, when Bracken and Boswell had moved back to Barrow Vale to see if they could at least control the panic, leaving Mekkins and Rebecca in the Marsh End—the one because he wanted to be in his own tunnels, the other because she felt instinctively that that was where she could give most comfort—there were so many dead in the system that the living could no longer move them from where they had died. Dead, odorous moles lay in tunnels, in burrows, halfway out of entrances, some even lay in the very place they had been burrowing for worms before the plague crept up on them and took them away.
Each corpse was flea-covered, each carried the stench that the first two had had, and each showed the same grim progress of symptoms. And the stifling heat that continued seemed only to speed up the process of decay and spread the smell of death.
By the third day there was not a mole in the system who did not have a friend or close relative who had died. Some had lost each one of their siblings; some had lost each of their neighbours; many marvelled to find themselves alive. In one or two places—on the slopes and in parts of the Westside— hardly a single mole died and the moles marvelled at their fortune, seeking vainly for an explanation of it.
Then there was a lull for two days which brought sudden false hope, and the gossips in Barrow Vale, who chattered now more wildly and more desperately, started to say that the plague was over and Stone knows why they had been spared but… but on the next day the plague returned, in a new form. It was as if, unable to kill all the moles quickly, it had adopted a new guise to take them in a different way, one that was slower.
Moles broke out in sores under their bellies and on their flanks, painless but odorous sores, which came with the sweating. Then swellings and nodules of hardness under the skin appeared on their faces and snouts, blocking them and making their breathing laboured and terrible to hear. At the same time, the disease seemed to go to the lungs of the moles, causing them to cough and retch. And a mole that began to cough blood was a mole soon dead.
The system began to be filled with a strange moaning sound, the cries of moles in distress to whom there was none to minister, few to give comfort. Those that survived, untouched by the plague, seemed to wander about in a daze, unable to stay still in the face of such total tragedy but unable to help those suffering around them.
The system soon started to collapse around Bracken. Many of the moles who had been his executives and aides simply disappeared; others joined in the incessant talk that now took over the panic-stricken Barrow Vale, where moles seemed to find refuge in congregating together and discussing the latest plague news and noting with alarm and self-satisfaction why more moles seemed to die in the morning before sunrise than at any other time, while more moles seemed to develop swellings around the belly and groin which became sores after two or three days. Death from the new form of plague took up to four days and the only consolation that the moles could find was that not all the sufferers seemed to die, though most still did.
Not everymole panicked. At least one, Comfrey, stayed calm and left the pasture, crossed through the wood and began searching for something that he remembered Rose talking about a long time before. ‘If only I c-c-could remember properly,’ he scolded himself.
The talk in Barrow Vale soon concentrated on the idea that the plague came from the Stone and was its judgement on them, a punishment for a system that had let the old ways slip under the rule of Mandrake and Rune.
From this idea came the belief that the only way of combating the plague was to visit the Stone and touch it—eagerly accepted confirmation of which was that one of the moles who had recovered from the plague had previously been up to the Stone and touched it, living proof that the Stone worked.
‘Is it true, Boswell, or is it just another superstition?’ asked Bracken, making it more a statement than a question. He had noticed that several moles who had been to the Stone had subsequently died and was cynical about the ‘explanations’ offered by the Stone’s proponents that these moles had transgressed in other ways and so the Stone did not favour them.