‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ whispered Cairn, her body as big and warm to him as a home burrow, his body as strong and safe to her as a whole system. Their words of love like no other words either had spoken before, each one a sigh of happiness. Two innocent moles in the darkness of a burrow, whose mating is the joy in the colour of a wild flower, or the changing light of sun on dappled water.
‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ sighed Cairn.
‘Cairn, oh, Cairn,’ she echoed in reply as they shifted caressingly into each other’s paws and fur and their bodies were full of the content of satisfied surrender.
Evil. It snouts out good as a stinking hellebore finds out the sun in the very darkest part of the wood where it grows.
Evil. It hides in the shadows near which innocents play in the light, taking a thousand forms, some as hideous as disease and most as subtle as snakes.
Evil. No better name for Rune, who could sniff out the scent of goodness and convert it to the stench of corrupted innocence.
Rune. He snouted out with dark knowledge that somewhere, away in the Westside, there was something pure and good to get his bleak talons into, something to do with Rebecca, who had left Barrow Vale before he came back from Hulver’s tunnels and who had not returned to her own tunnels, according to the henchmole he had sent there to see. So Rune set off for the Westside.
How did he know? Who can say why shadows pass their way? Except that a mole like Rune can always stick out a talon and find trouble—for a mole like him is trouble.
So secretly and like a shadow Rune left Barrow Vale and set off for the Westside, snout poking into tunnel after tunnel and burrow after burrow, not knowing exactly what he sought but knowing he would find it.
And find them he did, scenting her deliciousness in the shadows of the wood’s edge and then cutting back and forth along towards it like a fox quartering a wood. Until he found what he was snouting for—the entrance to a burrow from whose depths came the smell of Rebecca and the smell of a male. Rune smiled, stretched his talons, and started down boldly into the tunnel without any other thought than the pleasure of killing. There was only one mole in Duncton he was afraid of, and that was Mandrake.
Rebecca tensed the moment she smelt his odour, turning to face the burrow entrance, even before Cairn knew there was trouble.
‘Is it another male?’ asked Cairn quietly and calmly, coming to Rebecca’s side and then easing himself ahead of her nearer the entrance, where he could defend his right.
‘No, it’s Rune. A Duncton elder. He’s dangerous, Cairn, and he’ll fight to kill.’
Cairn laughed out loud, just as Stonecrop, his brother, had laughed the several lifetimes before when they had all met out on the pastures. A deep laugh that mocked the sly odour of Rune’s coming.
Rune said nothing, but came to the burrow entrance slowly, his eyes taking in the size of the tunnel, the possibilities of blocking and turning, and the size of the entrance where Rebecca and her consort lay hiding from him. He liked a fight, especially one which he knew before he started that he was going to win.
It wasn’t hard to win a fight when a male was trapped in a temporary burrow with no room to move and all he, Rune, had to do was to power-thrust his talons into the darkness and feel the soft fur, or even better, the vulnerable snout of his opponent yield before him.
Yet Cairn laughed. He had been in just this position so many times with Stonecrop, who was a master of fighting, that he knew exactly what to do about it. Instead of pushing forward boldly into his opponent’s thrust as most males would have done, he fell back, pushing Rebecca behind him and keeping as far away from the entrance as possible. Rune’s shadow fell across it and, as fast as it did so, Rune plunged forward and round into the entrance, his talons shooting to where Cairn was reared up ready and waiting. They brushed his fur but went no further. There was a momentary pause as Rune puzzled over the contact he had failed to make, and taking advantage of it, Cairn lunged forward into the fleshy part of Rune’s paw, a searing plunge of sharp talons that forced Rune to withdraw with a twist and a cry of pain.
As he did so, Cairn lunged forward, plunged out of the entrance with his left talon, straight into Rune’s left shoulder and narrowly missing his snout. The whole thing was done with such speed that Cairn was back in the burrow and crouched still and waiting before Rebecca knew what had happened. They could hear the sharp, hurt breathing of Rune in the tunnel beyond, as he fell silent and thought what to do.
Then all was movement, as Rebecca heard a growling and a snarl, saw a rush forward by Cairn, heard a hissing from Rune and the two moles were attacking each other at the entrance, the dark body of Rune now in full sight, the lighter fur of Cairn contrasting with his blackness. For a moment both fell back; but then Cairn lunged forward again and was out into the tunnel driving Rune back down it towards the entrance. ‘Be careful, Cairn,’ called Rebecca desperately after him. ‘He’s not just a mole, he’s Rune. Be careful.’
But Cairn was not a defensive fighter and Rune’s retreat gave him the false impression that this was a fight to be easily won. When he heard Rebecca’s voice, Cairn laughed and drove forcibly forward. But Rune, too, was strengthened by its sound.
Rune saw that the mole he was fighting was young but strong, and no fool, and that it would be cunning, not strength, that defeated him. And for Rune, what was worse and increased his hatred of this mole still more than the fact that he seemed to be Rebecca’s mate was the fact that he was a Pasture mole. The fresh cropped-grass scent on Cairn sickened Rune, used as he was to the rotting of leaf mould in the shadow of the wood in which he habitually slunk.
So Rune backed slowly away, avoiding the worst of the blows that the young Pasture mole powerfully directed at him, as he worked towards the manoeuvre that would allow him to inflict the fatal talon thrust that he had made his speciality.
Cairn pressed on, impressed by Rune’s ability to avoid his fastest and most dangerous blows and to use the tunnel to prevent him from getting round and under him; warned, too, by the way Rune seemed to keep even his snarls under control.
For a moment, almost experimentally, Cairn relaxed in the face of his opponent’s retreat and immediately, without a moment’s hesitation and with no sign of the fear that a mole might mistakenly have thought would go with his retreat, Rune came in with a talon thrust which twisted and tore into Cairn’s cheek, drawing blood on to his face fur, on which a thin trickle wound down to his snout.
The thrust brought a sudden stillness to both moles as each looked to find a move that would bring the opportunity for real damage to the other.
It was Rune who broke the deadlock. He suddenly turned and thrust back out of the tunnel to the surface, the start of the manoeuvre he had used many times before as a preface to defeating a mole who seemed stronger than he. With a snarling roar, Cairn lunged after his retreating form as Rebecca, who saw the back of him disappearing out to the surface, called urgently, ‘Be careful, he’s Rune.’ She could have made no other word sound so black.
Her warning was right, for Rune knew that in the moment that a mole runs up towards the surface he instinctively hesitates to enter out on to it because he is about to lose the protection of the tunnel’s darkness. In that moment of hesitation, another mole, one waiting as Rune did now, with his talons poised for the kill by the entrance, can thrust back down into the tunnel on the mole who is coming out, and with luck administer a fatal snout-blow.