He might still have been caught by Mandrake, had Mandrake wished it. But as the great mole squatted back ready to burst out of the entrance, he heard Rebecca whimpering and crying in the burrow where she had, for one brief second, blocked Mandrake’s way and allowed Cairn to escape, and savagely, the blood of her mate on his talons and fur, he turned back towards the burrow.
As his shadow blackened the entrance to the burrow again and he entered it, Rebecca stopped sobbing and looked up at him. She saw again the great scars made by talons that ran and rumpled down his face, and the new talonscores that Cairn had made on his shoulders, which were bloody and red. She felt the power of his presence over her, and looked up at him as her mother, Sarah, must once have done; she looked into his angry eyes that saw so little and yet sought so much.
She thought he was going to kill her and expected the talons he had raised above his head to strike down upon her. They did come down, massively, not to kill her but to possess her as, without a word and with only the sound of anger in the burrow, he took her, he took her, he took her for his own, savaging his way into her as the burrow exploded about them both into a redness and black, and shafts of light and terrible pain. Rebecca! Rebecca!
She did not know if it was Mandrake who cried her name through the exquisite storm of agony in the burrow about her, and inside her, or a memory of her beloved Cairn saying it. Or whether it was another memory, of she herself calling it into the wet wood up through the slopes after Bracken had left her. ‘My name is Rebecca!’ Or perhaps she was calling out her name to herself as she drowned in the flood of bloodlust that came over her.
Until, at last, she knew it was herself, and Mandrake, too. ‘Rebecca! Rebecca!’ He spoke it deeply into her, his body in her and, for that brief moment, hers.
‘Rebecca!’ he repeated as he finally pulled away and back into the world of darkness in which he lived but from which, for a moment, he had escaped with her as he once had with Sarah.
‘Rebecca,’ she said softly, crying and shuddering with pain and loss.
‘Rebecca…’ whispered Cairn as he crawled up the hill along the wood’s edge by the pasture with a throbbing of pain in his back and haunches and head that was almost too much to bear. ‘Rebecca,’ he whispered into the deaf grass that swayed towards him and struck his snout powerfully, ‘find my brother Stonecrop for me. Send him to help me.’
But no answer and no Stonecrop came, and he stumbled desperately on, unwilling to stay still where he might be found, yet afraid to break cover on to the pasture from the longer grass by the wood’s edge because he would be too slow to avoid any owl that saw him. On he struggled up the hill, not knowing that he was getting nearer and nearer to the Stone or that across its soaring face, now grey with dawn, the first dead beech leaves of autumn were beginning to fall.
Chapter Seventeen
It was among a fresh-fallen scatter of beech leaves near the Stone that Bracken first saw him. He was trying to run, but in fact was only just crawling, and Bracken had never seen a mole so terribly wounded yet still alive. His snout and cheek were crushed, his shoulders and flanks ragged red, his left eye torn and blinded, and his back legs seemed only good for dragging along, while his hind quarters had suffered deep wounds which seemed the result of several massive talon thrusts.
Bracken had never sensed such suffering in a mole, and perhaps he himself was only able to do so because of what he had suffered in the tunnel by the cliff before Rose the Healer came.
The injured mole advanced a little way towards the Stone, tried to snout up at it for a short while, but then staggered and swayed round to one side. For a moment Bracken thought he was coming straight at him, where he crouched half visible on the other side of the Stone, and he grew frightened. It was as if death itself was approaching him. But the mole did not see Bracken and anyway swung round again, gasping and panting with pain and effort, as he dragged himself slowly across the clearing away from the Stone and towards the pastures.
As he disappeared into the undergrowth, Bracken felt the pain as if it were his own. There was a sense of loss and failure over the mole that made Bracken want to run after him and say, ‘No. It’s not like that, it’s not.’ Though why he wanted to say such a thing, or about what, he did not know.
The mole’s progress was not hard to follow, for he made a lot of noise and, despite his fear, Bracken followed him. He staggered this way and that, crashing painfully through some brambles and leaving a red-brown smear of blood on a young sapling he brushed against. The more Bracken watched him the less he was afraid and the more he wanted to help in some way. There must be something he could do. Fetch Rose? He would never know where to find her. Rue? Too far, and he doubted if she would want to leave her tunnels having only just refound them.
He remembered that once Hulver had told him that the juice of sanicle was good for rubbing into wounds, but he didn’t even know what it looked like, whether it was in season, or where to find it. And anyway, looking at this hurt creature, whose wounds looked all the worse for his being so big and once-powerful, Bracken thought that there was no herb that would help him now.
What would Hulver have done? He would have comforted the mole by talking gently to him. It was this conviction that made Bracken finally break cover, though he did it with some care—approaching the mole from his right side from where, given his wounds, he could more easily see and scent Bracken. He deliberately made a noise as he came near and the mole came to a clumsy halt.
‘It’s all right,’ said Bracken, ‘I will not harm you.’
The mole turned his snout painfully towards Bracken and even tried to raise himself on his back paws for a few terrible seconds.
‘It’s all right,’ said Bracken again. ‘I may be able to help.’
‘Where are the pastures?’ asked the mole. ‘Where are my tunnels?’
‘The pastures are only fifty yards more,’ said Bracken. ‘Not far.’ Bracken turned towards them and led the way, slowing down when he sensed that even though he was going at a snail’s pace, it was still too fast for the other mole. Finally they reached the wood’s edge where the long grass grew on the wood side of the fence, stirred by the wind that always seemed to come off the pastures.
The mole slumped down, snout low, and Bracken asked,
‘What’s your name?’
‘Cairn. From the pastures.’ For him to say that took a long time, for his voice came slowly and with pain.
‘Did a Duncton mole do this,’ asked Bracken, ‘because you’re from the pastures?’
‘It was a mating fight. I took a woodmole for a mate. A mole called Rune found us. Do you know Rune?’
There was fear in Cairn’s voice, for it occurred to him that Bracken might be one of Rune’s friends. But then the thought weakened into hopelessness; if he was, so what? It didn’t matter anymore. He knew he was going to die.
‘Rune!’ exclaimed Bracken. ‘Yes. I know Rune. Everymole in Duncton does.’
‘He found us several days ago and I fought him and chased him away; I should have killed him. It was my first mating fight. He brought another mole and I could not fight him. Not to win. His name was Mandrake.’
Bracken looked with renewed horror at Cairn. No living mole knew better than he what that meant. Surely there was something he could do.
Cairn seemed lost in a world of his own, for his head hung down on to the ground, tilted to one side so the wound did not touch the grass, and the only movement was his quick, shallow breathing that made one of his limp paws twist fractionally to the left and then back again with each in-and-out of his breath.