Outside on the surface, he headed off towards the slopes as in the distance he heard the sound of carrion crows and pigeons, blackbird and robin, and what might have been a thrush. But it was the crows he heard most of all, for there is something about an early spring day in a leafless wood that makes their call carry. And it was a spring day!
Soon Bracken’s paws felt as light as a pup’s and he wanted to run, so he did. But as he started down the slopes, it occurred to him that it would be more fun running with Rebecca, so he went back to get her.
When he found that she wasn’t in her burrow, he guessed where she would be, and with a laugh, took a route by a tunnel that brought him out on the surface a little below the Stone clearing.
With what sighs and dragging steps did he pretend to pull himself up and into the clearing, with what absurdly mopish snout-lowering and tired weavings here and there did he approach Rebecca, who was crouched in spring sunshine near the Stone! She tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help smiling as she first scented him and then heard him. So sad? Not possible, not him, not today.
With a hesitant cough he finally spoke. ‘I’m lost,’ he said. ‘How do I get back into the system?’ And when she didn’t answer immediately, he added: ‘I’m a Duncton mole, you know.’
She turned to him, eyes alight with her love for him, and came right to him and caressed him on the shoulder, just as she had on the same day she herself had spoken those words near this spot, the first time they ever met. Did he remember them so well?
When her paw left his shoulder, he put his own paw there, breathless—still utterly moved by the way she touched him.
‘Do you remember what I replied?’ he asked.
‘You said “It’s easy” and later you said “I’ll show you.’”
‘And did I?’ he wanted to know.
She nodded. ‘And I think I can remember the way you went,’ she said.
‘Show me, Rebecca.’
And she did. She ran past him, just as he had once run past her, though neither as fast as they had been then, and then by the ancient mole track down the slopes, this way and that, down the hill, until he was quite out of breath following her.
‘You stopped by a fallen oak branch because that was where the entrance into the system was, and I asked your name, because I didn’t want you to go,’ remembered Rebecca.
He smiled, caressing her as she had him. The sun caught her fur, which was as thick and silvery-grey as it had ever been, though her face was lined now. But there was not a single line he would want taken away or changed, for she was the most beautiful mole he had ever known, just as she had always been.
‘Rebecca?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I want to look at the wood again, the places where our lives were first made.’
‘I’m lost, my love, the wood’s so changed. You’ll have to show me the way…’
‘I will,’ he whispered.
Then he ran past her and led her down on into the Old Wood, hesitating at a turn sometimes, stopping still with his head on one side, sometimes whispering to himself, ‘No, it’s not this way,’ until they were back in the heart of
Duncton Wood and she saw they were near clumps of anemones, not yet in full bloom, though one or two white buds were showing.
‘Barrow Vale was somewhere here,’ he said.
He snouted over the surface, which was open and grassy with brambles at its far edges, until he found a spot where he started to burrow. Then he stopped when he was halfway into it and tried a bit further on, suddenly disappearing.
She peered down after him into the tunnels of Barrow Vale which nomole had visited since the plague and the fire.
‘Do you want to look?’ he called.
Most of it was still there, the tunnels and the burrows just as they had been, though dusty and unkempt. Empty of sound and with a few scatterings of bones and many roof-falls. A dead place where Bracken had once been leader, after Rune and Mandrake.
They looked around it together, staying close to each other, and occasionally one or the other would say ‘Look!’ and point to a place they both remembered, where so many things had happened. But the voices of the past did not come back, just a shimmer of memory that was gone for ever almost the moment it returned.
‘One day other moles will find this place and recolonise it—they might call it something else, or perhaps somemole will remember being told there was a place called Barrow Vale… but I doubt it. Why should moles remember?’ wondered Bracken aloud.
They peered into the elder burrows, which were thick with soil dust and partially collapsed from a tree that had fallen on to the surface above, perhaps during the fire.
‘It’s strange,’ said Bracken, ‘but when I first explored the Ancient System it wasn’t like this at all. It felt alive there, waiting for something. This all feels dead. It is dead.’
‘It never found the power of the Stone,’ whispered Rebecca.
‘No,’ said Bracken. The tunnels and the burrows of
Barrow Vale fell away from him, for nothing was more real, or ever had been, than this love he was in now.
‘I love you,’ he said softly, and she felt he had never said it before to her: he said it with the wisdom of his whole life.
‘If there was a mole you wanted to bring back, just for a moment here in Barrow Vale, who would it be?’ he asked.
Image on image came to her as she thought of the question, and remembered the moles she had loved. Rose? Mekkins? Cairn? She hesitated for a moment and then said another name to herself—‘Mandrake?’ She shook her head.
‘Hulver,’ she whispered finally.
‘Why?’ Bracken asked, surprised, for it wasn’t a name he would have expected her to say.
‘Because it was near here just before a June elder meeting that I met and talked to him and he mentioned your name. It was the first time a mole ever mentioned it to me.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Bracken.
‘Nothing much. But…’ She stopped to think about it. What had he said? It wasn’t that he had said anything, it was that he had somehow shown her, without either of them seeing it, that he loved Bracken. Now how did she know that?
Suddenly Barrow Vale was over for them. The tunnels were just tunnels, any tunnels, and they had no more need to see them. Bracken led the way out, back into the spring sunshine, to the surface, where Rebecca started off towards the Marsh End.
‘But it’s miles!’ said Bracken.
‘Oh, listen!’ said Rebecca excitedly, for from far away towards the north they could hear the soft cawings of nesting rooks.
They didn’t go into the tunnels at the Marsh End; there was something too derelict about the place without a mole like Mekkins to greet them. But they wandered as far to the east as Curlew’s tunnels, which they couldn’t find but whose position they could guess at roughly. They remembered the fire, the flames, and then they remembered the plague. They wondered whether to go back west towards the pastures or perhaps… but there was no need. The memories were falling away from them. It was Rebecca Bracken wanted, and she was there in the early spring warmth with him; it was Bracken Rebecca wanted… ‘And he is here, here with me now,’ she thought.
‘There’ll be bluebells soon and daffodils after the wood anemones.’
‘These trees will leaf again,’ said Bracken, ‘starting with the chestnut over by the pastures.’
‘It’s gone,’ said Rebecca. ‘Comfrey took me there last summer.’
‘It’ll come back. They’ll all come back.’