August passed and September came, with warm, settled weather for its first two weeks, and not a mole in the Ancient System seemed to need Rebecca’s help. She spent long days alone, basking in the vegetation-covered warmth of the wood floor, listening to the last of the buzzing insects, watching the first of the dews and spiders come, relaxing from a summer of work and rebuilding.
At the same time, the system settled at last into its own patterns and rhythms as the excitement of the plague and the fire finally gave way to a new generation who knew them only as memories, and who grew tired of hearing those old tales told. The young who had been pups in spring now became adults, settling into their own territory in the wide and expansive Ancient System and putting their life into finding today’s food rather than talking about yesterday’s battles.
Bracken, too, became a memory, an especially romantic and dramatic one it is true, but a memory all the same. In the minds of the young, his leadership against Rune and Mandrake was more legend than contemporary history, and though many a youngster crouched by the Stone and gazed towards the west just as Bracken was said to have done, few could really believe he still existed, or could now come back.
Then the first rains of September came and only Rebecca remembered Bracken as he had been and believed he was still alive. Time after time she remembered Boswell’s final reassurance to her—‘I’ll look after him’—and she went to the Stone to pray that he might be given the strength to do so. So many long moleyears gone and she could barely remember what Bracken looked like… only his touch and caress and the protection of his words down beneath the Stone where the Stillstone had shone upon them.
Sometimes she fancied she sensed that he was out there far, far to the west where Uffington lay, until in the last wet week of September she lost that sense and found herself drawn uneasily towards the north, towards… oh, where was it? Then she found herself aching to understand what it was calling to her, sensing some terrible need far greater than the demands made on her by the Duncton moles and drawing her to a place she felt she knew and had once been shown, but which she could not remember. ‘Oh, give me the strength,’ she prayed, ‘give me the courage.’
Some say now that it was a sudden vicious autumn hailstorm that reminded her of the blizzard that Mandrake had once dragged her into on the pastures, when she was a pup. Others, that it was simply that special sense she had always had of where her healing was needed. Whatever it was, she knew that one day soon she must leave Duncton and seek out Siabod, where her father had come from. Oh, she remembered the blizzard now, and understood again the terrible cry from Mandrake she had heard, and which all her life with him she had never learned how to answer so that he could trust her love.
But the very absurdity of making such a journey, the inevitability of her dying on the way, was so great that for days she dared not even admit the possibility of doing it to herself.
‘W-w-what’s wrong, Rebecca?’ asked Comfrey one evening by the Stone. ‘W-what is it?’
His voice trembled with loss and fear for he knew, or could sense, that Rebecca was preparing to go away from Duncton Wood, just as Bracken and Boswell had done.
Slowly she told of the calling from Siabod she had had, and as she did so she felt again the grip of Mandrake’s talons on her back as he had turned her to face the blizzard.
‘How will you f-f-find it?’ trembled Comfrey, muttering miserably to himself.
‘The Stones of Siabod will guide and protect me, just as they gave protection to Mandrake for so long. I’ll follow the line between the Duncton Stone and where they stand, just as Bracken once found his way to the Nuneham Stone and back, and must have since found his way to Uffington. And beyond.’
She tried to sound bold about it, to convince herself, but she didn’t fool Comfrey. Yet he said something then that in a strange way gave her the strength she needed finally to leave Duncton:
‘What will we do w-w-while you’re gone?’
Oh, she smiled; oh, she loved Comfrey! While she was gone! While! Nomole, not even Mekkins, had ever had such faith in her as Comfrey. To tell Comfrey you would do something was as good as making a promise to the Stone, and so as a final affirmation of her faith in the decision to leave she said, ‘While I’m gone’—and how she relished the phrase!— ‘while I’m away, you will be healer in the system for me.’
Comfrey’s eyes opened wide in astonishment and he looked in puzzlement at his gentle, hesitant paws.
‘You know more about the healing herbs of the wood and how to use them than anymole Duncton has ever known,’ she said firmly, ‘and you knew Rose as I did, even though you were only a pup then. More important than this is that you have a faith in the Stone that runs very deep, and its power will always be with you, as it is already.’
‘Oh!’ said Comfrey, for if Rebecca said it then it must be true.
Rebecca would like to have left there and then but she rightly sensed that she was such an integral part of the system’s life that to leave without saying goodbye and trying to make others understand would be a betrayal of those who had given her love. So she said goodbye to each of them, saying again and again that she had faith in the Stone that she would be back, as they shook their heads and scuffed the ground with their paws.
Some were angry and bold enough to say, ‘But what about Bracken and that Boswell? They never came back, did they? Got taken by owls if you ask me. Just as…’ but not many dared finish the thought to her face.
‘And who’ll take your place?’ asked others tearfully.
‘Comfrey,’ she smiled.
‘Comfrey? She must be bloody daft,’ they swore among themselves when she had gone to talk with other moles.
Yet when, finally, she left, taking a route down near the marsh by way of the pastures, it was to Comfrey that they turned and asked ‘Will she come back?’ Will she?’
‘Yes, she will,’ said Comfrey firmly, ‘because she’s R-R-Rebecca and she will.’
‘And what about Bracken and Boswell?’ reminded the doubters, the angry ones who felt most betrayed. ‘They never came back.’
‘I d-d-don’t know about them. But she will.’
But when they had all gone back to their burrows and Comfrey was sure there wasn’t a single mole to see, he felt all the loss and loneliness he had been trying to control begin to overwhelm him and he ran back and forth in the Stone clearing, peering first at the Stone and then out from the edge of the clearing towards where she had gone. All he could do was say, ‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ to stop himself crying, until he couldn’t even think her name without crying and wishing she was there for him to run to.
The Stone watched over him, its power in him and its silence finally there as well. Until when his grief had played itself out, and he had slept, and he was ready to face the system as its healer, he found that he had the strength never to doubt, not for one single solitary lonely moment throughout the long moleyears that followed, that Rebecca would come back. He was just looking after things while she was gone.