It occurred to Bracken finally that if only he could get Cairn to go a little way further up the hill to where the Stone faced the west towards far-off Uffington, the line on which he himself had automatically crouched when he had first come to the Stone and on which Hulver had died, there might be some power for comfort there.
Somehow he coaxed Cairn along, though each step was painful, until at last Bracken could sense that they were in the right place. Cairn seemed to sense it, too, for he slumped down again with a sigh. His breathing grew easier and he was happy to be able to point his snout out over the pastures he loved. It was afternoon and the sky was light, with a few high clouds and some haze far off below them over the vales.
It was peaceful there and as Bracken faced in the direction of Uffington and felt its power coming to them, with the strength of the Stone from behind, a peace was beginning to fall on the broken and suffering Cairn.
‘Tell me about the Stone,’ he whispered. ‘She talked about the Stone. She said, Rebecca told me, that she came up to the Stone after I left her to chase the Rune mole away. She talked a little about it.’
‘But nomole has been here,’ said Bracken, until he remembered that a mole had. A female. And he felt again her caress on his shoulder and knew that she had been Rebecca. If only he had stayed to ask her name. If only. For some reason this discovery made him feel at one with Cairn, and he began to understand something of the sense of loss he carried with him.
‘Was your mate Mandrake’s Rebecca?’ asked Bracken needlessly.
Cairn nodded painfully.
Bracken moved closer to Cairn, flank against flank, trying to warm his body with his own as it grew colder and weaker.
‘Talk to me, Bracken. Tell me about the Stone. Tell me about Rebecca.’
What could Bracken say? He knew little about either, far too little when he thought about it. And what comfort can a mole give to one so injured?
‘The Stone is the centre of the Ancient System,’ he began, wondering how to go on. ‘And… and it’s so big that a mole cannot see the top of it. It soars up like a tree without leaf or branch. But you must have seen it when I first saw you, for you were by it.’
Cairn said nothing, so Bracken continued. ‘It’s where the rituals are carried out, on Longest Night and Midsummer Night, and in the old days rituals now long forgotten were carried out there. They say it will always protect you, but—’ But Bracken did not believe that. It had not protected him or Hulver from Mandrake. It had not miraculously healed Cairn when he came near the Stone.
Yet—yet the more Bracken saw of the Stone, and was near it, the more he felt its power and understood that it did hold an awesome mystery that a mole was unwise to turn his back on.
‘Tell me about Rebecca,’ said Cairn quietly.
‘Well, I don’t know much about her, only what other moles have said. She’s big for a female and lives down beyond Barrow Vale; somewhere near Mandrake, I was told once. I’ve heard them say she’s beautiful.’
He thought of the mole he had guided back to the system two days before and wondered if she was beautiful. It hadn’t occurred to him.
‘She was always getting into trouble when she was a youngster—you should have heard the stories they told about her in Barrow Vale! Eating worms she shouldn’t, getting her brothers lost accidentally on purpose—that sort of thing. Hulver said something about her once (he was an old mole I knew), he said that she was so full of life that it frightened other moles. But then, a lot of things he said didn’t make much sense, though I think they meant something.’
Bracken stopped for a moment, but from the way Cairn moved and looked at him, he could tell he was enjoying him talking like this and so Bracken continued.
He told him the full story about Rebecca stealing the worms from the elder burrows. As he told it, however, a sense of panic began to creep over him, for he sensed that Cairn was slipping away from him—or at least his body was. It was getting stiller and colder, and his breathing was becoming almost imperceptible.
When Bracken finally stopped talking and could think of nothing else to say, Cairn did not even try to look around at him, though his uninjured eye was half open and looking over the pastures. For a moment Bracken thought that he was… but then Cairn began to talk.
‘She told me that story in our burrow when we mated, and how frightened she
was when she was questioned by Mandrake about the worms. Having fought with him and lost, I know she was right to be frightened. There is nomole like Mandrake in the Pasture system, and nomole like that Rune either.’ Each word was painful for him and occasionally he shifted his body heavily, as if in an effort to make it easier for him to speak, and Bracken saw that every word he spoke must have meant a great deal for him to have suffered the pain of getting it out.
Cairn went on. ‘She said she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about and didn’t see why they didn’t find more worms, which they must have done anyway.’
Bracken nodded but said nothing, not wanting to interrupt Cairn’s painful flow of words.
‘Rebecca said she couldn’t understand why behaving “naturally”, as she put it, should be such a crime. What was worse for her was that Mandrake made her be polite with the other moles—which, as she didn’t like some of them, was “unnatural”. She was made to speak only when she was spoken to—which must have been hard for her.’ Cairn almost managed a little laugh and Bracken saw his face wrinkling a little, where it could, into lines of love and affection for his Rebecca.
‘Why does all this have to happen?’ asked Cairn, his words now so weak that Bracken could hardly hear them. ‘Why do moles sometimes get so angry that they kill each other? What was wrong with me and Rebecca being together? I was just going when they came. A few more minutes and I would have been gone. A few minutes and it would have been different. You ask your Stone why. I’d like to know what it answers.’
Cairn turned with great difficulty to Bracken and the bewilderment in his voice was replaced by real pride as he said, ‘She was my first mate.’ Bracken hardly dared draw breath for the frailty he now saw in the once-powerful mole beside him. ‘She was my only mate,’ he said softly.
‘Then Mandrake came and just took it away. Him and that Rune mole. I could have killed him before.’ There was a long silence that Bracken did not try to break. Finally Cairn found the strength to go on: ‘He’s killed me. If Stonecrop had been there we would have killed them both. He’s my brother. He can fight like no other mole in the pastures. Why does a mole like Mandrake come? Why me?’
‘Why him,’ Bracken wondered. Why him? At that moment he could have wished almost any other mole to be suffering in Cairn’s place, himself included. Why him?
‘Why not me?’ Bracken muttered to himself, not realising that he too had suffered and might yet suffer much, much more.
‘I don’t know the answer to anything,’ said Bracken, ‘at least to anything like that.’
Cairn suddenly began to tremble violently and when Bracken put a paw on his back to comfort and still him, he found the fur was wet with cold sweat. The blood of the wounds on his face and back had congealed, though a trickle of fresh blood still flowed down from the wounds at his back haunches; fresh blood from the wound on his back had trickled between the two moles and hardened their fur together.
The evening was near enough for the air to have started to cool, but far enough for the sky still to be light.