How many mothers whispered, ‘Now don’t you forget what you’re going to be seeing and hearing tonight, because this is for you, this is, and Duncton’s honoured to have a mole like Bracken here to say those holy words he learned when he was scarcely older than you are now! So don’t you forget!’ And strange to say, although their puppish eyes wandered here and there, and they thought mainly of play and worms and chasing their siblings through the tunnels, there was many a youngster who did always remember that special night.
But there was one who was not there—not on the surface, anyway—who would have an even more special reason to remember the Midsummer Night when Bracken spoke the rituaclass="underline" Tryfan.
He was not only bigger than his siblings, he was now also by far the most adventurous; and even the most careful of the females can lose track of a single pup when she’s trying to keep track of four of them at once. So, as they scampered round in Rebecca’s burrow, the female looking after them did not see Tryfan scramble out into the tunnel.
Did he go looking for Rebecca, or was it just the excitement of exploring the tunnels once again? He himself was never able to say, for all he could remember were snatches of images, moments of places, wondrous and fearful incidents such as any pup remembers of something that happened when he was very young and which made an impression for a lifetime upon him.
He remembered the sound of his siblings’ play, suddenly distant, and wondering why he was alone; he remembered the tunnels seeming huge and chalky and looking around behind him and hearing his lonely bleat echo about him, confusing him. He remembered running into tunnels that felt old as time, and curving round and seeing chalk dust on his paws.
He heard the murmur of moles on the surface above where the moles were collecting, carried by some tunnel wind or rootway of vibration, down to where he actually was—the round, circular tunnel that surrounded the Chamber of Echoes, the tunnel from which Bracken had first started his exploration of the central core of the Ancient System. Now Bracken’s son, Tryfan, wandered there alone, and tiny, his fur too young to show, snouting this way and that and not knowing where he was.
Moleyears later Tryfan remembered finding himself in the Chamber of Echoes itself, his pawsounds and whimpers echoing around him as if there were a whole lot of youngsters lost like him, but not one of them near enough to give him comfort.
‘But then, all of a sudden, even though I was lost and should really have been very frightened, I knew it was all right,’ he was to recall. ‘I didn’t know what it was then, but I know now, as I know that Midsummer Night is the night for the blessing on the young, when the Stone gives them its protection. That’s what it did for me.’
As Tryfan was later to remember, there shone in the confusing tunnels around him a light—not all around him but from somewhere ahead—and with its white glimmer on his snout and pale fur he turned to face it and ran towards it without question, knowing he would be quite, quite safe—just as he would have done had he heard Rebecca calling for him: ‘Tryfan, my love, I’m here!’
So he scampered towards the light, but whenever he thought he had reached it, he found it was ahead of him again, until he was in a great chamber, bigger than the place of echoes, with swaying, sliding tree roots all around, towering high into the darkness above him and plunging into crevices along whose edge he teetered, led forward among them by the light.
How long this took he never knew, but eventually he was beyond the roots and inside the hollow of a great tree from whose heights echoed down the faintest sound of wind among beech leaves and the murmur of adult voices chanting and saying prayers.
Then he followed the light around the side of the tree’s deep hollow, the sound of the wind above so distant that it might have been another world.
The next thing he remembered, and what he remembered most of all and yet most confusedly, was plunging into the ground even deeper, over and among great roots that towered and rolled above him, the light getting stronger and warmer and all around him the massive, tilted underside of the Stone of Duncton.
Right under the buried part of the Stone he went, towards the source of the light itself, which was a stone, a Stillstone, the seventh Stillstone, whose glimmering lit up his fur and cast his shadow on the roots of stone and chalk walls about him as if he were a huge, strong mole, and adult, with not a single trace of fear in the way he boldly stood, looking into the eternal light of the Stone itself.
He remembered that as he stood there he heard the deep voice of his father, carried down to where he was by the hollows and convolutions of the ancient beech whose roots encircled the Stone, as he said the final words of the Midsummer ritual. But of course he could not yet understand the words:
‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,
We free their fur with wind from the west.’
Then, as the seven blessings began to be spoken, the wonder of the Stillstone became too much for Tryfan, and as any youngster would, he stepped forward and touched it with his left paw. Instead of its light going out, as it had when Bracken had touched it, it seemed to glimmer even more—so brightly, indeed, that had any other mole been watching, he, or she, might have sworn that Tryfan was suddenly completely white with light.
‘The grace of form
The grace of goodness
The grace of suffering
The grace of wisdom
The grace of true words
The grace of trust
The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’
And that, or rather the sounds of the words, was all that Tryfan ever remembered. Except that much later that night, when he was very tired, he heard voices calling ‘Tryfan! Tryfan!’ and scampering, urgent paws running here and there; and it took him a long time to find them, until he turned a corner in tunnels he knew again and an adult voice said, ‘There you are! We’ve been looking for you everywhere!’ Then his mother, Rebecca, was there and for a moment he thought she’d be so angry, but all she did was take him into her paws and he could feel her love and it was safe, so safe, like a light he had seen and was beginning to forget he’d seen because he was so tired now and Rebecca’s fur was all around him and he was safe again, snuggling into the safety of her love.
But those adult paws searching for Tryfan after the Midsummer ritual was over were not the only paws that scampered and urgently raced that Midsummer Night.
There were some that did the same in Uffington as well. From the Silent Burrows they ran, down the long tunnels, through the deep night, on and on they ran to find Medlar, the Holy Mole, in the Holy Burrows.
‘What is it?’ he gently asked the two novice scribemoles who finally gained an entrance to him. ‘What is it that makes you run in the Holy Burrows on this happiest of nights?’
‘It’s Boswell,’ they gasped out. ‘He’s leaving the Silent Burrows. He wants to come out.’
‘Yes?’ smiled Medlar.
‘But that’s not all. He began to scratch at the wall inside the burrow, where the seal is, and then, when we heard that, well… there was suddenly a light—’ began one.
‘All around the outside of his burrow,’ continued the other, ‘shining and bright.’
‘Sort of white and glimmering,’ finished the first.
Medlar could see the awe in their faces. Indeed, he could see something of the reflection of the light they had seen.
He raised a paw and spoke softly to them: ‘This is a blessed night, a holy night, and what you have witnessed may be remembered for generations to come. I have felt the peace in the Holy Burrows, felt the silence.’ He stopped and stared at them, and they saw that awe was on his old face as well. ‘Come,’ said Medlar, ‘come. We will return to the Silent Burrows and see what we may do.’