Suddenly Rue ran off, and Bracken heard her crunching away at a worm. He stayed where he was and soon she came back, bringing one for him. They ate in silent intimacy. When they looked at each other again, she was a bit meeker and her eyes were shiny and her mouth open. She crouched still and he came up to her, snouting around her, diffidently at first but then more boldly, more deeply. He liked the delicious moistness of her, he liked her snouting at him, under him, over his soft parts that grew harder, he liked her smiles as if she knew a delightful secret that she wasn’t going to tell him, but much, much better, that she was going to show him. He scratched her with his paw, nuzzled hard into her, pressed himself closer and closer to her, as she twittered and champed and swung her back round to him and then back-quartered into him and he into her.
‘He’s like a pup,’ she thought delightedly, because she had never mated before with a mole who was barely an adult. But when he finally understood what it was about, and was on her and taking her, she was surprised at his strength and laughed with pleasure at his delight in her and at the shuddering way he relaxed into her.
Afterwards, he didn’t want to leave her at all and they went into the main burrow and snuggled into a dreamy sleep with hardly a word spoken between them. Sometime, when evening had come, she awoke to find him deliciously snouting at her again and pushing a little clumsily at her so that, half asleep, she swung back into him and he into her, and with his last shudder in her, he was snuggling back to her and asleep again. Oh, he was so simple and young!
Sometime later in the night he again woke up, this time properly, and lay with her fur warm on his, giving him the illusion that his whole body was cocooned into her. He thought of the things that had happened in the last two days and simply could not believe, in the total comfort in which he now lay, that they had happened.
When they finally awoke, it was dawn again and the magic and amusement of the mating with Rue was quite finished.
He sensed that she wanted him gone, so that her tunnels were hers alone once more, and so was any litter that she might have. But he didn’t mind. The pattern of the last few days had fallen into place and as he left her burrow and headed off down the tunnel he himself had burrowed, he found he was at last looking forward to going back to the Ancient System where he would enter the Chamber of Dark Sound again, and explore the seventh tunnel if he could and whatever secrets lay at its end.
Chapter Eighteen
With Cairn’s death, the shadows that had been looming so long over Duncton Wood began, one by one, to fall. Spirits crept lower, danger seemed to lurk in every shadow, the chatter in Barrow Vale fell muted, and even the weather deteriorated into a succession of cold mists and rain that robbed the autumn wood of its colour and turned the falling leaves into a dank mess.
Few moles travelled, fewer smiled. It was as if the wood was waiting for the fulfilment of a curse. While even those visits which might normally have been a source for cheer turned out, for some moles at least, to be the harbingers of doom.
Just such a visit was made to Mekkins in the Marsh End in mid-October by Rose the Healer, whose normally cheerful face had not been seen in Duncton for several months. When Mekkins saw her, he guessed why. She looked as if she had been ill, for her face was drawn and her flanks thin and only her eyes, warm and gentle, though touched now, it seemed to Mekkins, with a hint of sadness, had anything of the old Rose in them.
‘’Ello, ’ello,’ Mekkins greeted her, hiding his alarm and sounding as cheerful as he could. ‘And ’ow ’ave you been keeping?’
‘A little tired, my dear, I’m afraid,’ she said.
They talked a little about the Marsh End, and two or three moles that Rose liked to keep an eye on, and then Rose came straight to the point.
‘It’s you I’ve come to see, Mekkins,’ she began.
‘Why? Nothing wrong with me, is there?’ he laughed.
‘No! No! Not that I can see. You only ever needed me when you were a pup, my love, and that was from sheer overindulgence in worms, as I remember!’ She paused, looked at him with a great deal of affection, and then fell serious again.
‘No, it’s not that. Mekkins, I have come to warn you of a danger in which the system is going to need your help and all your skills. I have seen it coming for many years from before Mandrake came, from even before you were born. I experienced something of the power of the darkness to come in August, when I was summoned to help a certain mole up in the Ancient System…’
‘Bracken?’ asked Mekkins quietly. ‘Is he alive?’
‘You know something of this, then?’ asked Rose.
‘Well, I know something’s going on like, I mean you can feel it in the bloody trees, can’t you?’
Rose smiled bleakly at this. She hesitated about coming to talk to Mekkins, for no healer likes to talk of his or her own fears, or of other moles they have treated. But now she was glad she had, for however cunning he was in his handling of the Marsh End, and however much he had enjoyed the power of being an elder, she sensed that he could be trusted.
‘Bracken carries a secret, but I doubt very much if he knows what it is. Perhaps he will never know and has no need to. Don’t ask me what it is because I don’t know myself. But whatever it is, he carries with it a burden the size and pain of which neither of us will ever comprehend. When I went to help him, I felt the force of its darkness sapping me of strength. I have been ill because of it and I doubt that I will ever recover the strength I once had. There is such fear about, Mekkins, of a kind you perhaps do not know. May the Stone help you never to know it.’
Rose shifted wearily in the burrow where they crouched and then asked: ‘How well do you know Rebecca?’
Mekkins told her, describing how they had got to know each other in the summer and how fond of her he had become. Rose could hear from his voice, and see in his eyes, that his affection for Rebecca ran far deeper than fondness.
She saw with relief that she had done the right thing in talking to him.
‘Much is going to depend on these two moles, Bracken and Rebecca, and neither of them may ever know it. Somehow you will have to help watch over them until they are strong enough to stand alone, though what you must do I cannot say, but I suspect it will need great courage, which I know you have. But, most of all, you must trust them both, hard though it may sometimes be. In a pup trust is the most natural of emotions; in an adult it may often be the hardest. Without it, nothing can be healed.’
They talked on a little, but Rose had said the most important things she wanted to say and she was tired, so Mekkins saw her back towards her tunnels, as far as the pastures. When she had gone, he wasn’t sure if he knew exactly what it was she had said, but he understood enough to know that he must watch over Rebecca and, if the opportunity ever arose, over Bracken as well. He would go to Rebecca now.
But he was too late. Try as he did in the next few days, Mekkins could get no nearer to Rebecca’s tunnels than the henchmoles who guarded each exit. The most he got from one of them was that Rebecca was being kept in her system by order of Mandrake until she littered.
‘So, she is going to ’ave a litter, is she?’ he said, surprised.
‘Oh, yeh,’ said the other. ‘There’s no doubt of that. She’s already big with it. But it’s more than my life’s worth to let you near her. Well, you know how it is with Mandrake’s orders…’