It was a journey through death, for the Marshenders seemed even more stricken than the moles around Barrow Vale and he came across body after body, or poor creatures dragging themselves along in their final hours. Or others, who seemed to have gone insane, whispering in a kind of daze, ‘We have been saved from the plague, we had it, we had it, and we have been saved. Praise the Stone for saving us. Praise the Stone…’ And they reached out to touch Bracken as he passed them by, their faces and bodies still bearing the plague sores to show that it had, indeed, been their way, their eyes crazed by their strange deliverance.
Until at last he was into the eastern part of the Marsh End, whose surface was now hard and friable but still had something of the dank shadowiness that it had always held. He had not been here since he had been chased from it by Rune so long before when… he almost said to himself, ‘When the world was right’.
On and on he went, his heart quickening as he reached the end of the journey for what he might find when he got there.
It was night and he had been journeying one way or another since the early evening. ‘Only let her be alive,’ he whispered again as he reached the last few yards, ‘and nothing else will matter. I will go to Uffington and give thanks, whatever the cost.’
He found Curlew’s old tunnels with little difficulty, but stopped short outside the entrance because something lay there which he had not seen for a long time—a fresh flowerhead. Its petals were like a crocus, and a delicate mauve, its stalk white and vulnerable. Lying as it was among the aridness of drought-dusty, faded ivy that covered the tree trunk by the entrance and on top of rustling dry leaf mould, it presented a strange sight. He had never seen such a flower before and it made him pause and wonder at it before entering the tunnel carefully, snouting out ahead of him to see if life were there.
There was life all right, and plague. He could smell the terrible plague odour and hear movement of some kind. At least she was still alive. He approached noisily and called out ahead of himself, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca! It’s Bracken!’ and ran on down.
He was met at the entrance to Curlew’s old burrow not by Rebecca but by the stutter and stumble of Comfrey, whose thin snout peered out at him as he approached. ‘Hello, Br-Br-Bracken,’ he said.
Before Bracken even wondered what Comfrey was doing there he asked, ‘Is she here? Is she all right?’
‘She’s g-g-got the plague,’ stuttered Comfrey. ‘She’s n-n- not very well.’
Rebecca was crouching in the same corner she had occupied when she had been so ill before. Her eyes were swollen but not yet closed, while her mouth hung loose to ease her breathing. Already the swellings were starting on her face and snout. By her head on the floor lay the white shiny bulb part of a plant, the flower of which Bracken had seen on the surface.
Comfrey stepped forward to Rebecca. ‘You’ve got to eat it,
R-Rebecca,’ he said to her softly, touching her face to draw her attention. ‘You’ve g-got to try.’
‘Rebecca,’ whispered Bracken. ‘It’s me, Bracken.’
She sighed and he saw that her eyes were running, though whether with tears or illness it was hard to say.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered almost inaudibly.
‘M-make her eat it,’ said Comfrey desperately to Bracken. ‘It will help her. I kn-kn-know it will.’
‘What is it?’ asked Bracken.
‘I got it from beyond the Eastside where there’s pasture near the marsh. It’s called meadow saffron by the Eastsiders, though it’s so rare that few of them have ever seen it. But I found it, and when I did I kn-knew it was for R-Rebecca. I knew it. I always kn-know when she n-needs help. It’s a special healing plant… I’ve often f-found plants when she needed them. But it’s always been for a m-mole she’s helping. I didn’t know it was for her.’ He sounded desperate and kept pushing the white flesh of the bulb at Rebecca’s mouth for her to take.
‘You mustn’t try to die,’ he said simply, almost scolding her. ‘It’ll take you longer to get better if you d-d-don’t eat it.’ Then he looked straight at Bracken as if reading his thoughts and said: ‘You don’t have to worry about her dying. She won’t.’ There was total faith in Comfrey’s words.
If Bracken had not been in such a place at such a time he would have sworn that he saw a glimmer of the starting of a smile on Rebecca’s plague-ridden face, or perhaps even a laugh.
‘Rebecca,’ he said urgently. ‘Rebecca…’ His voice changed almost to a command and he said, ‘You’re bloody going to eat this thing Comfrey’s got for you!’ With that he took the bulb himself, bit off a piece, chewed it lightly into a mush, and putting it on his paw, started feeding it to Rebecca. She couldn’t chew but she was able to take it piece by slow piece and swallow it, like a pup taking its first solid food.
As she did so, he too knew with absolute certainty that she was not going to die—or rather that Comfrey, for all his hesitation, had spoken with such total faith in a voice that Rebecca had heard, that she could not die.
‘Most of them die because they don’t eat anything and b-because they can’t breathe properly,’ said Comfrey matter-of-factly, now content to watch over Rebecca and Bracken as if they were one mole—and one who had given him a rather unnecessary scare. ‘Rose told me about meadow saffron in a rhyme she said once, b-b-but I didn’t know that “pestilence” meant plague. Then an Eastsider told me, so I knew.’
Bracken did not take much of this in, though much later Rebecca was to remember every word. The horror of the plague was that the mind stayed quite clear while the body would no longer obey it.
Perhaps Bracken sensed this, for he talked to her as if she could hear him, treating her as if she were the most precious thing in the world, as, indeed, she was. The ugliness as the plague swellings grew worse, the stench of the sores when they came, the abjection of the affliction… neither he nor Comfrey noticed or afterwards remembered. It was Rebecca they loved, and she was not a swelling or a sore but a mole who had tended so many and suffered so much, and whom, in their turn and in different ways, they now tended, each giving her something different from their own spirits. Comfrey’s certain knowledge that she would live was one strength; Bracken’s force of love was another.
Present with them in Curlew’s burrows was a third strength—the power of the prayers that Boswell spoke up at the Stone, so far away, thinking of them both, and of all the other moles of Duncton and the pastures whom his great love encompassed through the Stone.
Crouched in the darkness of that long night, when Rebecca lay so ill, perhaps sensing that she was, he whispered the prayers he had learned as a scribemole but never thought he would himself have the power to say. Though now, as he said them, they came as naturally as breathing, each one calling out through him the blessing of the silence of the Stone:
‘Power of the Stone come into thee
All of thee in quiet;
Power of the sun come into thee
A part of thee in warmth;
Power of the moon come into thee
A part of thee feel cool;
Power of the rain come into thee
A part of thee refreshed;
Power of death depart from thee
Taken by the Stone;
Power of life return to thee
Borrowed from the Stone;
Power of the Stone is with thee
For you are the Stone,
All of you the Stone.’
He said it for the system’s sake, he said it for the pastures, he said it for the moles he had seen suffer and the moles who would never know the Stone; he said it for Bracken, and he whispered it for Rebecca. And if its effect was to bring quiet and silence, this was the third strength that came into Curlew’s burrows and accompanied Bracken and Comfrey and Rebecca on her journey through the plague.