Poor Violet, upset by shock after shock, started to cry; Mandrake, hearing her, started running towards them both. Bracken stepped forward, put a paw round her shoulders, and pulled her back through the flint entrance.
‘Violet,’ he said urgently. ‘Listen! Run down this tunnel and go into the first entrance you see in the tunnel it comes into. Hide in the shadows there. I’ll come. Run!’
She only half recognised him, but she knew his voice, he was a mole who knew Rue. Oh, that was a relief! And she was running, she was running, and perhaps he’d help. ‘Run!’ he shouted after her, ‘run!’
It was as Bracken turned back into the chamber to face Mandrake, who was now halfway across it, and coming inexorably towards him, that the whole chamber was filled with another sound, one that took them both totally by surprise—the pattering of a hundred running paws, and of grim mutterings of moles, angry and full of bloodlust.
Mandrake stopped and turned round, his back to Bracken, and both saw first one mole, then two, then five more pouring through the eastern tunnel entrance that marked the tunnel running up from the slopes. It was Rune and the henchmoles and more besides, and they were chanting ‘Kill him, kill him!’ and massing ready to charge Mandrake down.
‘There he is!’ cried Rune, pointing a taloned paw at Mandrake.
Mandrake looked at them uncomprehendingly. He wasn’t interested in them. He had the Stone Mole almost at the end of his talons and he wasn’t going to waste time on Rune and a bunch of henchmoles. Were they threatening him? He laughed, shook his head, turned his back contemptuously on them and started forward again to pursue Bracken.
‘He’s running!’ cried Rune triumphantly, and that was enough to give the moles the courage they needed to begin their assault on Mandrake. Several of them reached him before he reached the flint entrance and thrust their claws at him with screams and shouts. One got in the way of his back paws and made him half trip, forcing him to stop. He turned to face them again, and as he did so Bracken, unseen by anymole, took the opportunity of running off down the tunnel to find Violet and slip away. The Duncton system was clearly going mad.
In amongst the moles, Mandrake rose up magnificently, and with a mighty sweep of his right taloned paw, killed three moles with one terrible blow. He had not forgotten how to fight. He stepped back, throwing, as he did so, another two off his huge back. His left paw thrust viciously forward and two moles crumpled up screaming below his snout. His movements were not hasty or rapid, but had the leisurely grace of a confident fighter who had never in his life been beaten. With dead or dying moles around him, he stepped back once more, swinging his right paw back so that two more moles went flying forward into the mass who had been clamouring to get at him. He laughed and then roared, and the moles hesitated, the ones in front no longer willing to go forward to what seemed a certain, and cruel, death. Only Rune was still there and shouted out again for the moles to kill. Mandrake might, indeed, have killed Rune there and then, but he remembered that his main purpose was to kill the Stone Mole, not this snivelling rabble or Rune.
He backed into the flint entrance, watching as the moles still advanced slowly towards him. He saw the great flints on either side of the entrance, raised a paw to each of them, dug his talons deeply into the soil behind them, and with one massive roaring and grunting effort, pulled down the two flints in a mass of dust and debris before them all, blocking the entrance completely and leaving himself free to pursue the Stone Mole.
As he ran off, the remaining flint capstone over the entrance broke free from the soil above it and crashed on to the flints below, and from out of their dust and debris, all that Rune and the other moles could now see were the gaunt, hollow eyes of the skull of a long dead mole, the rest of its skeleton lost under a mass of impassable debris.
Bracken almost carried Violet round the circular tunnel and out into his own burrows, he was so anxious to get her out of the Ancient System and away from Mandrake. And himself, too, for that matter.
He went as fast as he could straight up the entrance nearest the pastures and then out on to the surface, where a grey morning was well advanced and the ground was wet from the thaw of snow. And there they were almost immediately seen by a henchmole—one of the many Rune had prudently posted all around the surface of the Ancient System for just such a possibility as this. Only it was Mandrake Rune had expected to try to escape, not some other mole. Bracken dived back down into his tunnels, pushing Violet roughly ahead of him and, knowing that the henchmole would delay some while before he risked chasing down after him, made for a different exit.
The fact that they had so nearly been caught was a blessing in disguise, for it warned Bracken of the dangers they now faced. It seemed to him that the only possibility open to him was to get as far away from the top of the hill as possible, to somewhere where they could find friends. And that meant Rebecca’s hideaway down in the eastern Marsh End.
Of their trek down there, which took almost three days, almost every terrifying detail is known, for it was a memory that Violet was to carry with her for the rest of her life and accounts of it now lie recorded in the Rolls of the Systems in the libraries of Uffington.
What Violet never revealed, however, was that the real reason for their delay was her incredible slowness and her inability to understand the danger they were in. At moments when they were close to being sighted by pursuing henchmoles, or when Bracken was despairing of ever keeping her alive, or when the cold of January seemed certain to freeze them both to death, she would ask some irrelevant question like ‘Who is that stonemole, then?’ or ‘Do you really know where we’re going because I’m getting bored’ or ‘If he was Mandrake, who was that big mole?’ Or she would declare in a loud voice that would shatter the silence they were trying to sneak through: ‘I’m hungry!’
But while she may have driven Bracken mad, perhaps her continual puppish ebullience kept his spirits up as well.
They were under pressure from henchmoles from the moment they started down the slopes towards the Eastside. On their flanks, behind, sometimes in front, henchmoles chased them, cutting back and forth in numbers across the wood’s floor to find their scent and track them down. Bracken avoided them, partly by sticking to the surface the whole time—except for once, when he had to use a tunnel to escape several henchmoles coming at them from different directions—but mainly by his extraordinary ability, developed in his long period of solo exploration in the Ancient System, to foresee route alternatives and take the one that would confound his enemies. He himself later pinned his success on the fact that thawing snow created temporary rivulets, particularly just below the slopes, which masked their scent tracks.
However, they avoided rather than lost their pursuers and by the third day, when they were nearing Curlew’s burrows, they were being very hard-pressed. The more so because, unknown to Bracken, the pressure to find them had been increased by Rune’s decision to join the search and abandon Mandrake to the central part of the Ancient System, where he seemed content to stay. Henchmoles only remained up there to monitor his movements while Rune rapidly went down the slopes to find out who these two moles were who had escaped so mysteriously from the Ancient System.
By the time Bracken realised in horror that his own arrival might lead to the discovery of Rebecca and Comfrey and Curlew by directing the henchmoles to their tunnels, it was too late—henchmoles seemed to have cut off any other route. All he could do was to make a final dash ahead and hope he would be in time to warn Rebecca.