So back went Medlar and several of the masters, with the novices as well, gathering in a circle around the burrow in which Boswell was sealed. The light the novices had spoken of was gone, but the weak scratching continued sporadically, and as several of the moles went forward to start breaking the seal from the outside, Medlar raised his paw to stop them.
‘Let Boswell do it for himself,’ he said quietly, ‘for he would wish it to be so.’
They crouched in silence, whispering and chanting prayers of thanksgiving as Boswell continued slowly to burrow his way through the seal, his sounds falling silent for long periods as, no doubt, he rested from the effort of it. He had, after all, been sealed in the Silent Burrows for no less than ten moleyears, nearly eleven. He must have been very weak.
But eventually dust began to fall from the outside of the wall, a tiny crack appeared in the seal, crumbling soil fell on the floor at the paws of the waiting moles; and the seal began to break away.
Then, as they caught sight of his paws at the widening hole, while the others continued to pray, two or three of them did step forward to help him tear down the last of the seal and to bring Boswell out into the main chamber.
He looked as frail as a pup and almost translucently thin, his fur pale and his snout even paler. Yet from him there came a strength that filled all who saw him with exaltation and wonder. There came from his eyes a brightness, a light, a life and a love that made each one of them feel that they had come home.
They stood in awe about him as he looked slowly around him, and at each of them, and then said softly, ‘Blessed be thou, and ful of blisse,’ and they had never heard the blessing said with such power. They were blessed to hear it.
He was silent for a long time, as if thinking, and then he spoke again, with an authority that made each word he spoke seem absolute, so that none doubted that what he said would come to pass: ‘Soon the seventh Stillstone will come to Uffington from Duncton, in whose ancient tunnels it lies waiting. With the Stone’s guidance I shall make a final trek there myself and find it. There, too, I will meet a mole whose life will be a blessing on us all, and those who follow us, and only with his help will the seventh Stillstone come back here. For he has seen its light and been graced with it, and it is of him that the ancient text that I myself found so long ago is finally about:
‘Find the lost Book, send the last Stone,
Bring them back to Uffington.
Send a mole in courage living
And a mole compassionate,
With a third and last to bind them
By the warmest light of love…’
Bracken, Boswell and Rebecca, they were the moles, they were the ones. But as Boswell paused in the middle of the verse and looked at them all with gentle love, he was thinking only of the fourth mole, the mole he would himself guide back to Uffington but whose name he did not yet know. So he continued:
‘Song of silence,
Dance of mystery,
From their love one more will come…
He the Stone holds,
He the Book brings,
His the Silence of the Stone…’
There was silence as he finished, until one of the moles there whispered, ‘Will you bring the seventh Book as well? Will he bring it?’
‘I do not know,’ said Boswell softly. ‘Only the seventh Stillstone will come. I do not know about the Book,’ he whispered.
They went to his side, for he was suddenly very weak, and held him until he was steady again, and then they led him slowly back to the Holy Burrows, their prayers changing to songs of exaltation as they went.
Chapter Forty-Eight
By August Rebecca’s litter had nearly caught up with litters born in April and was almost ready to leave the home burrow. In some ways they had already, for all of them spent longer and longer away, roaming and exploring about as they began to put out feelers for territory of their own.
Of them all, Tryfan was the most independent and yet the most loved. He had grown into as fine a mole as a mole who is not yet adult can be: strong, ready to laugh, well enough able to look after himself not to need to be unnecessarily aggressive; and able to spend long periods alone, as anymole must.
Early on, he had taken to wandering off by himself, spending whole days on the slopes, or exploring bits of the Ancient System that other moles did not bother with—though like everymole in the system, he kept away from its central core, for that was a special place where a mole had best tread carefully.
But for all his disappearances, Tryfan had a way of turning up in the right place at the right time. There had been an occasion, for example, when a pack of youngsters from the far side of the system had taken it into their heads one day to intimidate Rose and Curlew—still smaller than other females born that spring. But intimidation sometimes escalates into roughness, and roughness into hurt—so that Rose began to cry and Curlew to try to hit out at the bigger youngsters, who started scratching and lunging at them in earnest.
Eventually, Rose and Curlew shivered and trembled with fear, not sure what to do except cry, and the other youngsters jeered and hit out at them even harder until Tryfan quietly appeared and crouched, looking at them all.
‘Leave them alone,’ he said.
‘And what are you going to do about it, mate?’ one of the biggest youngsters said, coming aggressively forward. Youngster males liked a good scrap, the rougher the better.
‘Yeh, why don’t you go and scratch yerself?’ said another male, ganging up with the first.
As Tryfan came forward to protect his two sisters, who now stood wide-eyed in alarm and fear, the pack went for him.
‘He was super!’ Curlew told Rebecca later. ‘Gosh, he was amazing. They all went straight for him and he sort of smiled at them, and calm as you please, he raised one paw and hit the first one, then the second, then the third, and the first one fell back and hit the fourth one and then they were all crying and it was fantastic!’
‘Then Rose started crying again,’ added Curlew disdainfully.
‘Why?’ asked Rebecca.
‘She said because she was so proud of Tryfan but I said she was being stupid. Mind you, he was pretty good!’
There was another occasion, too, more dangerous and more mysterious, when Tryfan appeared when he was needed, but the truth of which neither Bracken nor Rebecca ever got at, and even then they only heard about it from Comfrey, to whom Tryfan went afterwards.
It seemed that Beech and Rose had run into a pack of weasels one day on the wood’s edge, when they were exploring a tunnel they shouldn’t have been in. Perhaps they were not used to weasel scent. What happened wasn’t clear, but Beech and Rose came back to Rebecca’s tunnels frightened out of their lives and had nightmares for a long time afterwards. All they could say was that weasels had attacked them.
‘Nearly k-k-killed them, more like,’ Comfrey told Bracken later, when he reported how Tryfan had come to him with vicious cuts and bites on his shoulder and forehead. ‘He wouldn’t say anything to me, but I’m pretty certain he came just in t-t-time to save them both and must have fought off the weasels single-pawed, b-b-because I doubt if the other two were any good.’
But try as they did, they could never get Tryfan to tell them what had happened. He liked to keep his silence.
He grew very close to Comfrey, and the two of them would spend days in silence together, or Tryfan would ask Comfrey to explain things about plants and show him where he got them.