So there was an owl face on the far side of the flint! And it was a scaring-off device.
Beyond the flint, Mandrake and Rune finished their discussion. ‘So, for the time being, we’ll leave it as it is,’ Mandrake was saying. ‘We will create the impression that we have faced great dangers—an idea which will no doubt be reinforced by that shambling henchmole, who seemed very frightened indeed.’
Then he added: ‘I’m glad you weren’t affected by it, Rune—I wouldn’t want to think that you are afraid of things like this.’ He tapped the owl beak with his talons, the sound echoing into the ancient tunnels beyond, way past Bracken.
Rune smiled, pitying Mandrake for taking the owl so lightly. ‘We know better,’ he was effectively saying to himself, ‘we of the dark powers, we of the black beak and talon, we of the impenetrable eye.’
Mandrake took his talons from the flint before him with an unaccustomed shiver. It was very cold and there was something in the way that Rune was looking at him which had the same blank quality of the owl’s eyes. He didn’t like Rune. You couldn’t trust a mole like him. Mandrake turned his back on the owl and left down the tunnel towards Rue’s burrow. His gait was suddenly heavy and ponderous and he felt tired. Tired and old. It was true that in his confrontation with the owl image he had, finally, lost all sense of physical fear, though Mandrake lived in too great a haze of anger and confusion to know the fact. But when a mole loses such fear, the freedom he finds may serve only to make him prey to the darker, more perilous fears that lurk beyond all moles’ bodies and inhabit their minds.
Rune watched him go down the tunnel, perceiving the new fatigue in his movements as only a mole of his diabolic insight possibly could. Rune looked back to the black eyes of the owl, then forward again at Mandrake, and knew that the hour when he would take power in Duncton was getting nearer.
Lacking any instruction, Rue followed the three big moles up out of the tunnels and on to the surface, where she crouched, blinking in the light, wondering what was going to happen to her.
‘Shall I have her killed?’ asked Rune, looking at Mandrake and aware that the henchmole was itching to do it. Rue cowered pathetically before them, staring at the big henchmole whom she knew hated her. Too cowed even to raise her talons in self-defence. She knew she was going to die.
Mandrake looked round at her. It would be wrong, quite wrong, to say that the light of pity shone in his heart. ‘Pity’ was a word that Mandrake never knew. It was sheer tiredness with the effort of violence. Time was when he would have nodded his head, and Rune would have raised his talon as a signal, and the henchmole would have plunged his talons as a pleasant job. Not now.
‘What’s the point?’ said Mandrake, looking blankly at Rue. Rune and the henchmole looked at Rue with complete contempt and then all three of them turned away from her as if she did not exist anymore. And the sense that she was so worthless that she wasn’t worth killing was so great in Rue that she just crouched there stunned, unable even to relax in the knowledge that at last they had gone and she was safe. Then she started to cry, for she could not follow them back to Barrow Vale and she could not return into the tunnels that had started to be her home. She seemed to have nowhere to go. In her misery she wanted to do nothing but die, to forget the system into which she regretted ever having been born.
And there, a few molehours later, exposed in the open and vulnerable to owl attack, Bracken found her. He had heard her first, for after the moles had gone from the tunnels, he crept over there himself and, having established there was nomole there, went up on to the surface where he heard the shaky breathing and occasional sobs and he quietly went out to see who it might be.
He watched her for a long time, puzzled that she should stay crouched out in the open as dangerous dusk fell and trying to decide for one last time whether he should risk making contact with another mole.
Finally he came forward to her with enough noise for her to know that he was there. She looked at him but did not run away as he expected. Instead, her snout lowered in a gesture of total defeat and she asked him quietly, ‘Have you come to kill me?’
Such a thought was so far from his mind—indeed, it was so far from his experience—that it quite took his breath away. He saw that she was small and bedraggled and seemed very frightened, while he (and he looked at the now much glossier fur above his paws and felt the much more powerful muscles that had developed since he had started to regain his strength) was fit and well and must seem confident. Why, he was an adult, and a male, and strong!
Bracken laughed and said that the only killing he knew of was when moles tried to do it to him. She sniffled and wiped her face with her paw, comforted by his laugh but troubled by the curious wildness about his appearance and the strength that seemed to come from him, even though he wasn’t as big as that Rune and the henchmole. As for that Mandrake, well… nomole was as big as him!
‘What mole are you, and where are you from?’ Bracken asked.
‘My name is Rue from beyond Barrow Vale,’ she said, ‘but my tunnels were taken away by… they were taken from me. I lived here until the Stone Mole came. What mole are you?’
‘Bracken, from the Westside.’ The answer was, in his own mind at least, untrue, for he was really of the Ancient System now. But ever cautious, Bracken had worked out that if he should meet another mole, he would first find out where they were from and then say he was from anywhere else but the Ancient System.
‘I knew Hulver,’ he added, by way of explaining why he was there. There was a pause while they considered what to say next. Then each asked a question simultaneously.
‘Who’s Hulver?’ asked Rue. ‘Who’s the Stone Mole?’ wondered Bracken. They laughed, their mutual interruption breaking the awkwardness between them. They each sensed that the other meant no harm.
‘It’s a bit unsafe staying here,’ said Bracken. ‘It would be safer in the tunnel.’
‘Oh, I can’t go in there,’ said Rue, horrified. ‘The owl’s there.’
‘I know,’ said Bracken to her surprise. ‘That’s what I want to see.’
After a lot of persuasion, he managed to get Rue back into the safety of the tunnels, telling her that the owl would not attack her and, should Mandrake and Rune return, he knew a quick way out to safety. But it was more the simple fact that he so obviously intended not to harm her, and even seemed to have her safety at heart, that finally got her back to the burrow at the heart of Hulver’s system. He even went so far as to get her some worms, and without any difficulty either, since he seemed to know the tunnels quite well. Once fed, they snuggled down on either side of the burrow, where they answered each other’s questions about Hulver and the Stone Mole. Bracken told Rue all about Hulver and Rue explained what she knew, and had heard, about the Stone Mole. He realised long before she got to her own experience in these very same tunnels that he, himself, was the Stone Mole.
‘Show me where it happened,’ he asked her.
‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ whispered Rune, who had worked herself up to a terror just telling the story.
‘It won’t hurt you,’ said Bracken. ‘It’s only an image.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Rue.
A mole like Rune would not have answered this question, for he would have known that a mole’s power often lies in keeping others ignorant, and that it was in Bracken’s interest that nomole knew who he truly was. But Bracken was not aware that he had an interest, being more concerned to reassure Rue, who was the first mole who had been friendly towards him since Hulver himself.