Bracken heard snatches of their conversation: ‘You here as well this time?’ ‘Why, bless me, I ain’t seen you since July, and what a good time that was…’ ‘Bit bloody parky up here, isn’t it?’ ‘Goin’ to be a cold winter if you ask me…’ Each phrase that came to him reminded him of how alone he was and without a friend. He thought again of visiting Rue, but somehow she wasn’t what he wanted on Longest Night, though what that was he didn’t know. He scratched himself miserably, looked balefully at the moon through the trees and turned his attention to the moles in the centre of the clearing near the Stone. There was silence and a great sense of awe in their communal presence. Some crouched peacefully, occasionally raising their snouts slowly to look up at the Stone, almost as if they thought that something so awesome might suddenly go away. Others intoned prayers to themselves which Bracken could not hear, while some, mainly Eastsiders he guessed (for theirs were the traditions nearest to the ancient ones), half sung, half intoned their prayers in a dialect Bracken could not understand.
Others spoke prayers of unaffected simplicity loud enough for him to hear. ‘Thank you, Stone, for the joys you have given and for the strength I have been blessed with… Take care of Duncton and let it see your light… My heart is in thy silence, Stone, only let me hear it…’ Again and again he heard moles, both males and females, whispering the same final little prayer, ‘Only take us to the silence’—words he had heard Hulver himself say from time to time.
Occasionally several of the moles there would appear to start saying the same prayer simultaneously; their voices would join in unison, creating a kind of spoken song of great power which would, for a moment, take Bracken’s heart out of himself and transport it into something of the mystery of Longest Night.
As the night wore on and grew colder, the moon rising and the Stone’s shadow turning towards the lower part of the wood while growing smaller at the same time, Bracken was touched by something of these moles’ faith, and the Stone began to seem less distant from him than he had thought. He wanted to run out into the centre and ask one of the older ones to explain about the Stone to him; he thirsted for knowledge of it. But he did not have the courage. Sometimes he wanted to join in their prayers, but he did not know the words.
Slowly, the numbers in the clearing declined until he began to have to search its shadows to locate the few moles left, mainly the very old ones, and he realised that the Stone trek was almost over. From down on the slopes even the sound of the songs and revels of departing moles faded, until, as one by one all the moles in the clearing went, Bracken was left quite alone.
A bleak despair began to creep over him, for he felt he had seen a glimpse of some sweet mystery into whose light he wanted to go, but for which he needed a mole to guide him. He had never missed old Hulver so much as at that moment; ‘Surely,’ thought Bracken, through tears that stopped him even seeing the Stone, ‘he would have shared his Longest Night with me.’ Self-pity mixed with a real sense of loss as he crouched in the shadows beyond the clearing, and the night deepened into a still, cold silence all about him.
The moonlight was now strong enough to catch the condensation of his outward breaths into the cold air, and the wood fell very still. The dead brown beech leaves on the floor of the Stone clearing looked pale white, and the surrounding vegetation was black around them.
On impulse, Bracken advanced towards the Stone, out of the undergrowth in which he had been hiding, not sure what he was doing but very conscious of himself alone in the wood. He wanted to say something to the Stone, not a prayer so much as an affirmation that he was there before it, waiting for something to happen. He felt he had been waiting a long time. He also felt unsettled and angry and very conscious of his own lonely existence.
For lack of anything better to do, he went up to the Stone and touched it with his paws to see if, after all, there was more to it than there seemed to be. But there was nothing but its unyielding rough surface, nothing at all.
He waited like this a long time until, somewhere in the darkness beyond, not far off in the shadows by the clearing’s edge, past the great tree whose roots encircled the Stone, he heard a scurry and a slide.
A whispered ‘Ssh!’ came out of the darkness into the moonlight where he lay. He turned his snout towards it aggressively, wondering what it was. Then he sensed a mole.
A deep silence fell as Bracken waited, every sense stretched, his snout poised still as stone and his face whiskers stiff as pine needles.
But not for long. For very soon the anger that had been building up all night replaced the defensive care with which he had first responded to the noise.
‘What mole is there, and why?’ he demanded, getting up from where he was and approaching through the moonlight towards the impenetrable shadows around and beyond the tree roots.
A rustle. The sneak of a talon. A whisper again.
‘I said what mole is there!’ Bracken said again, his talons tensing and his body angry beyond his mind.
A movement, a scurry, an intake of breath and as a snout pushed out from the blackness half into the shadow, a voice accompanied it saying, ‘’Ello, Bracken. It’s me, Mekkins. You know! We met…’
‘What do you want?’ demanded Bracken, tensing even more. Mekkins’ friendliness upset him more than if he had been hostile. He wanted no part in friendliness.
‘I’m Mekkins. I met you in Rue’s burrows…’
Bracken was getting more angry by the second, an irrational anger born out of despair. At that moment he would probably have been angry at anything that moved. Bracken could feel anger overtaking him and was almost enjoying the feeling, even though the anger was absolutely real.
‘Look, Bracken,’ said Mekkins, advancing towards him in a conciliatory way, ‘it’s Longest Night and a time for celebration, not…’
‘I don’t care if it’s Longest Minute,’ shouted Bracken. ‘I don’t want you here. There’s been enough moles up here disturbing me…’ He was shaking with anger and began the ritual advance on Mekkins that prefaced a fight—paws stiff, tail high, snout pointed stiffly forward.
At this, Mekkins, no slouch when it came to combat, narrowed his eyes and protracted his talons—he might have been asked to watch over Bracken, but there was absolutely no way he was going to allow himself to be assaulted just like that.
Then, a voice came hesitantly out of the shadows. ‘Bracken?’—and there stood Rebecca in the moonlight. She immediately moved in front of Mekkins towards him.
‘Bracken?’ she said again, touching him with her paw as she had once touched him before. Only this time it was as if she did not believe that he could be Bracken. She spoke as if she was in a terrible nightmare; the frailty and fear in her voice seemed to hang over them all.
He turned his eyes away from Mekkins to Rebecca and looked at her. He was shaking with anger and tension but it slowly died away as he seemed to wake from some nightmare of his own and saw before him a mole so hurt in spirit that his anger and pain was nothing. He thought slowly, ‘Is this Rebecca?’
He was appalled by how thin she was, how stooped. Was this Cairn’s Rebecca? The same he had met here by the Stone? There was puzzled entreaty in her eyes and he saw with utter clarity that she had been so hurt in some way that she could not stand his anger with Mekkins, or the threat in his voice. Words formed very slowly in his mind and when they were ready he said them.
‘It’s all right.’ Then, more softly, ‘It’s all right.’ He paused and then said, as if he were calling out from some depth in which he was trapped: ‘Rebecca?’ He advanced just a fraction and reached out a paw towards her. ‘Rebecca?’ Mekkins crouched quite still. It seemed to him that he could hear two moles calling out to each other from some lost place of their own and, more important, they seemed to hear each other. The Stone rose high above them all, most of it black with shadow, but with a thin line of moonlight delineating one plunging edge of it. When he looked again at Bracken and Rebecca, they were even closer together, Rebecca speaking to him as if he were Comfrey, which in a way he was; while he spoke to her with a gentleness Mekkins had never heard an adult male speak with before, except to a pup, a tiny lost daughter perhaps. Rebecca seemed to be crying, or sobbing, or was she laughing? She was doing something, at least. Then they were nuzzling each other, snouting softly at each other and whether the sounds they made were of tears or joy, sobs or laughter, Mekkins could not tell. They were the sounds of discovered love.