Chapter Twenty-Three
With the passing of Longest Night, which he spent completely alone, Mandrake sank finally into obsessive madness. He ranged about his tunnels, or Barrow Vale, muttering and cursing violently, often in the rough hard tongue of Siabod, the language of his fathers. Occasionally he caught some unfortunate mole unawares and—whether young or old, male or female—would attack it savagely for some imagined wrong it had done, leaving it wounded or, more than once, dead.
Trembling moles would hide in tunnels and burrows as he passed heavily by, wondering at his continual calling out for Sarah and Rebecca, whom he no longer seemed to think were dead but gone to the Stone Mole in the Ancient System, leaving him alone and forsaken. As the days slipped by into cold January, he could be heard sounding curses in his own language: ‘Gelert, helgi Siabod, a’m dial am eu colled trwy ddodi ei felltith ar Faenwadd Duncton’—‘May Gelert, hound of Siabod, avenge for me their loss by bringing his curse on the Stone Mole of Duncton.’ Gelert was the legendary hound of Siabod who was believed to protect its holy stones, though none in Duncton knew of his name then.
Any lesser mole than Mandrake would have been killed by other moles, or driven out of the system, but there was none in Duncton prepared to start a fight with him. And only one—Rune—with the courage even to talk to him.
Rune listened with almost a purr of pleasure to his ravings about the Stone Mole and his threats to summon the mythical Gelert. He knew that with each day that passed, the system was slipping out of Mandrake’s talons and into his own. It was just a matter of time and opportunity.
Inevitably, plots were made against Mandrake, especially since the murder of Rebecca’s litter, which had appalled so many moles, as Rune had hoped it would. Rune positively licked his lips with pleasure when dithering henchmole after henchmole came to him with some feeble plot or other. ‘A group of us feel, and it’s only a feeling, and we wouldn’t do anything without your approval and support, Rune, sir, that the system is overdue for a change…’
‘Well, I’m sure that as long as Mandrake is here in good health and in charge we none of us need worry…’ Rune would reply hypocritically to would-be revolutionaries in his maddeningly measured and reasonable way. And they would retreat, murmuring to each other ‘Rune’s too loyal for his own good!’ or ‘Far too modest, that Rune—doesn’t realise his own worth.’
But if there was going to be a revolution (and that was precisely what Rune intended there should be), it would be done in his own way and in his own time. And as Mandrake’s ravings about the Stone Mole got worse, he began to see that there was a way, and its path lay towards the Ancient System.
So the shadows on the system continued to fall, and with them the bitterest weather of winter came. The first snow fell after two cold days in the second week of January, and though it did not stick, the skies remained grey and cold, and the wood silent but for the wind. Then, in the third week of January, it turned even more bitter and thick snow finally came, the silent brightness it brought to the wood almost a relief after the previous gloom.
The winds drove the snow into the tree trunks so that on some of them, especially the rougher-barked oak, the snow formed a vertical line on the windward side, making the trees seem even higher and more ethereal than they normally did in snow. The brambles, which retained their leaves through much of the winter, were bowed down with white, while the orange stalks of the dead bracken, lost until now against the leaf-fall of autumn, stood out brightly against the snow.
While, but for the occasional dropping of dead twigs and the odd branch under the weight of snow, the wood fell into a cold, white silence.
The shadows cast by Mandrake’s rule did not fall on all burrows equally. Some, like the tunnels of Rue and of Curlew, were brighter for the presence of growing pups. Rue’s four were lively and, by the third week of January, beginning to have minds of their own, chattering and squabbling among themselves so much that Rue was glad that they were able to look after themselves so much more, only clustering around her when they had had enough of each other’s company and fancied a snuggle.
Curlew’s burrow was quieter, not only because there was just a single pup there, but because he was far less advanced than Rue’s other four.
Comfrey was thin and nervous, sticking close to Rebecca or Curlew, or both if he could, and by the time the snow came had not learned to talk with any fluency. He would try as best he could, but the words came out stutteringly and he often broke off in mid-sentence as if he had lost interest in what he was trying to say.
‘R-R-Rebecca? I want the…’ and he would trail off, looking somewhere else, as Rebecca looked up inquiringly and asked him what it was he wanted. Often he seemed to have forgotten.
Mekkins stayed on for only two days after he had delivered Rebecca back safely—just time enough to confirm that the change for the better that he saw coming over her on Longest Night, whose causes he did not fully understand, was lasting. Then he left them to it—partly because no male likes to be away from his own burrow too long in January, when the females are just beginning to get restless for the mating season and the males are beginning to extend their territory.
So, when the deep snow came, it was just Rebecca, Curlew and a fascinated Comfrey there.
‘Where has the g-g-ground gone?’ asked Comfrey when he first saw the snow. Then ‘Where did it come from? What is it? H-how long has it come for?’
His slowness of speech did not stop him asking a dozen questions, many of which neither Rebecca nor Curlew could answer. But Rebecca did her best—for she remembered her own insatiable curiosity as a pup about the wood—and to Curlew’s delight the two would sit and talk away, the burrow filled with Rebecca’s laughter and Comfrey’s hesitating, serious voice. He never laughed and rarely smiled, yet managed to convey a sense of excitement and fascination with the world about him. But he hated Rebecca to leave the burrow for too long and would stand by the burrow entrance, looking miserably up the tunnel, and nothing Curlew could say would take the worried furrows from the thin fur on his forehead.
When the snows came and the males in the system began to be more aggressive, Rune knew that he must soon take a chance on his own revolution. The time was right, for there was nothing like a bit of premating aggression to put the henchmoles into the right frame of mind to follow his lead and oust Mandrake. But it had to be done subtly.
His opportunity came during a conversation with Mandrake—‘monologue’ is a better word—which convinced Rune that the system’s long-standing leader was, indeed, demented.
‘Have you see the Stone Mole, Rune?’ asked Mandrake, having summoned him into his tunnels with a roaring shout around Barrow Vale. ‘Well?’
‘I? No… I have not,’ said Rune carefully.
Mandrake smiled a terrible smile of triumph.
‘Ah! But I have, you see. I know!’
Rune was a study in unctuous silence.
‘I have spoken to the Stone Mole,’ added Mandrake softly. ‘I know he means harm to the system and I have told him I will kill him.’ Mandrake’s black eyes widened horribly and he nodded his head. ‘I will. Yes, I will. I’ll kill him.’