On and on Rune ran, his strength failing rapidly, as if he was growing old and ancient all at once. He could no longer think clearly and his breath was coming in pants and gasps. Behind him he could hear Bracken getting nearer, beech leaves and leaf mould scattering in their wake.
The hill rose to the right towards its final height, while Bracken now veered a little to his left, stopping him turning that way but too close for him to turn back. So he had to go forward towards the void of the chalk escarpment, his heart pounding in pain and each breath harder and harder to grasp hold of.
Bracken watched Rune ahead of him and saw age creep over him, his coat now ugly and matted, his body twisted with fear. Had he once looked so pathetic to Mandrake when he had been chased, as Rune was now, over these leaves and roots, with the beech branches above, and the sky lightening ahead because there were no more trees left, just the straggly line of the sheer cliff edge?
No, he couldn’t kill him, it was no longer necessary. So he would catch him now and stop him, because killing isn’t the way; couldn’t Rune see? So he raised his paws to stop Rune, while behind him came a shout from Rebecca.
‘Don’t touch him. Don’t hurt him, he can’t harm us…’
Rune heard it, Rebecca’s voice, and hated the love in it which he could not bear to face, and where Bracken had turned once to face Mandrake, Rune ran on, the void of pity behind him far, far worse than the void ahead, which was full of air with a chalkfall far below, nothing under his scrabbling paws and a last terrible look back at moles who pitied him, whose faces and eyes and snouts rose far, far above him into the sky, as his back arched under him and his talons tried to hold on to the sky beyond them. Then darkness blotted Rune out.
Rebecca shook like a pup, and stood as weakly as one, as relief, such a relief, came slowly into her. Bracken was still peering over the cliff edge and oh! she was frightened of him. She was shy of him. He was nomole she knew, and yet she knew him to his heart’s core.
As for Bracken, he was only pretending to look over the cliff’s edge. She was there, behind him, his Rebecca, her voice still in the wood about them.
As he turned finally with such love to her, she said, ‘Bracken?’ and he could hear, and she knew he could hear, that she was calling him, calling out to him and he was coming to her at last.
He could see her, she knew he could see her, and she whispered to herself, ‘I’m Rebecca, my name is Rebecca and I’m not Mandrake’s daughter or Cairn’s mate or the healer, but I’m Rebecca,’ and oh! she could hear the whole wood behind her, rustling and free, and the birdsounds from where the slopes were and they were all part of her and he could see it and it was such relief to be seen like that because at last that’s what she was.
‘Rebecca, Rebecca…’
‘Yes, my love, that’s right, my love,’ she said, looking at the love and beauty in his eyes that saw the love and beauty in her own as they lost themselves at last within it.
Chapter Forty-Seven
There is a point at which the gentlest touch becomes the softest caress becomes the sweetest nuzzle becomes the lightest push becomes the most loving romp in the world: but Bracken and Rebecca never found out exactly where it was.
He would look at her in burrow or among dry leaves, and she at him, and they would wonder at the wonder of where they were. And what words they said, or never finished saying, they never knew. Except that when he said, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ it was never, never enough for him, because what words can satisfy the ache to be so wholly with another mole which even bodies cannot satisfy?
Sometimes playful, rompish, silly, she would ask him again, just one more time, ‘Do you really love me,’ and he would hesitate and sadly shake his head and she would cry out, ‘Oh oh oh oh Oh!’ as he said, ‘No, I don’t think I do,’ with such love that it was better than him saying that he did.
Or she would talk about a mole who wasn’t there, whom she had known, whom she really did love, yes she did!
‘What was he like?’ Bracken would ask, and she would think and nuzzle him and start to say, then stop, then start again, that, well (nuzzling close), describe a mole whose paws and snout and fur and scars and very soul were just like Bracken’s own, and Bracken would say: ‘Strange, I knew a female once, not far from here, who I think I loved…’ ‘Oh, what was she like?’ asked Rebecca breathlessly. ‘And did you love her?’
But Bracken wouldn’t say but would only show, by putting his talons among her soft, grey fur and snouting at her soft as wind and strong as roots so that she closed her eyes and smiled and sighed aloud until he did it harder and she held him to her so that the mole he knew was she, Rebecca, and she was moist where he snouted and she wide and he pushing and she snouting him soft and hard so that he was hard to her with haunches so powerful to her, and claws that hurt before exquisite now, running down her back and up it, up it higher, higher, and higher until they didn’t need the preface words, or feel the ache of being two apart because he was there upon her, mole of moles, and she so proud and he as well, for his the sound of sighs and calls and cries of the only mole that held a beauty for his eyes, beneath, above, upon, below.
Theirs was the laughter and theirs the tears of making love as days passed into night and leaves changed into stars.
Rebecca knew she was with litter at the very moment that it happened, because the light about them both, in the deep darkness of their burrow, was just as it had been by the Stillstone beneath the Duncton Stone: glimmering white, a halo over them, as the burrow filled with the sound of the sighs of wonder.
Bracken knew she was with litter when one dawn he heard her burrowing nearby, at the end of one of the tunnels, and singing the kind of song that she must have sung as a pup, before he had met her. He laughed and smiled and fell asleep again, the scent and warmth of her all about him; while she heard him laugh, and knowing why he did so, laughed as well as she felt his power and strength in the tunnels all around her, giving her a kind of freedom that she’d never had.
It was May, and the nesting leaves she began to take down to the birth-burrow she was making bore a fresh Maytime scent, each one seeming to her more and more special. She took down grass as well, and the fragrant stems and florets of ground ivy which, because they were not so brittle as the dry and delicate beech leaves, gave her litter-nest the strength she felt it needed.
As the days passed and May grew warmer, she kept more and more to herself as she steadily extended her tunnels, which lay adjacent to the ones Bracken had originally burrowed between the Stone and the pastures.
Bracken had reoccupied his old tunnels, the ones she had lived in for so long, and she liked the feeling that he was there in tunnels she had grown to love and where, he said, he basked in what he called her ‘delicious scent’. They spent long periods near each other, wallowing in the pleasure of having to say so little to understand so much.
Their only visitor was Comfrey who, as the days went by, grew less and less nervous and awkward and was able to crouch for long hours near them without even twitching his tail or looking about himself uncomfortably. Their love calmed him.
It was only because of him that they found out about what each of them had done in their long moleyears of separation. By themselves they never talked of it, but Comfrey had always been a mole to ask questions and there was so much he wanted to know. Rebecca would tell him things very simply, almost as if nearly dying in a blizzard or travelling all the way back from Siabod were the sort of things moles did every other day. Although she rarely referred to the Stone or its providence, there was in all she said the sense that behind each incident there was its common power, whose pattern a mole might wonder at but never fully understand.