‘Yeh! The Stone’s like that,’ murmured Mekkins.
‘Well, of course it wasn’t evil, it was inspiring. I couldn’t even describe the effect it had.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mekkins with a conspiratorial grin, ‘I think I know.’
‘I might have left it at that but for something that happened last September. One of our moles, Cairn, got killed in your system. A mating fight. His brother is… I should say "was" because he has left our system now… a mole called Stonecrop, who was the most important fighter this system has ever seen. He wanted to lead a group of moles over to Duncton and avenge Cairn’s death. One way or another I persuaded them out of it—frankly, I was worried about the consequences. But somehow it made me think about whether it would be worth invading Duncton.’
Mekkins began to look worried, but Brome laughed. ‘Don’t worry. Hear me out. What I concluded was that if there was anything at all in Duncton Wood we wanted it was the Stone. Or rather, access to the Stone. It would give our moles the kind of focusing point that might stop the pointless feuds that keep developing here. And anyway, half of Duncton Hill is made up of the pastures, isn’t it? And taken together—the two systems, that is—the Stone is a natural centre.’
Mekkins looked decidedly worried. The implications of what Brome was saying were very obvious to him.
Brome continued. ‘Now, the reason I mention all this to you is principally because if you want my help down in the Marsh End against your Rune, which I think you may, then I’m going to want yours, up on top of the hill. I don’t want territory. I want access.’
‘The thin end of the root,’ said Mekkins cynically.
‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ said Brome. ‘But it might just stop the killing and feuding that goes on between the systems, and within my own.’
‘What’s this to do with me?’ asked Mekkins.
‘I don’t know—yet,’ said Brome. ‘But I’ve got a feeling that when Rose told me that you were a mole to be trusted, she meant you might have a bigger part to play than perhaps you expect in the changes she is talking about.’
Mekkins and Brome looked at each other as two equals, poised before great events about to take place which would affect and change everything they knew. Mekkins smiled at last.
‘You’re quite a mole, you are, Brome. We could do with a mole like you in Duncton.’
Brome laughed and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, as if to seal a trust between them.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘if that Rebecca of yours is the one who mated with Cairn, which I noticed you avoided even hinting at, you had better warn her not to mention it. There’s Pasture moles who wouldn’t like to know she’s in the system. You see, Cairn’s brother Stonecrop was a very special mole and he’s missed. If they thought a mole who, even indirectly, caused his departure from the system was here, they might not like it.’
Mekkins smiled noncommittally. He turned to go.
‘Is she that mole?’ asked Brome.
‘Yes,’ said Mekkins. He didn’t like lies.
‘She must be quite somemole,’ said Brome.
‘She is,’ said Mekkins. With that, their discussion was over, and after a short visit back to Rose’s burrow, in which he passed on Brome’s advice to Rebecca, Mekkins went hurriedly back to see what was happening in Duncton Wood.
Rose’s burrow was one of the untidiest, and loveliest, Rebecca had ever seen. It was the kind in which youngsters could wander delightedly from object to object and lose themselves in reveries of wonder and play. Its walls had been burrowed in a rough and homely way, with an occasional roundel of stone left protruding, because Rose liked it that way, which cast friendly shadows and pillows of shade.
Just inside the entrance, and half blocking it, was a pile of dried leaves and flowers of woodruff, whose hay like scent, said Rose, was the quickest way of reminding a returning mole that sanity lies inside her burrow more often than outside it. Next to this was a scatter of beechnut husks and near them, the two mingling together at the edges, a collection of black elderberries, dried and frizzled into hardness.
There were several flints around the floor of the burrow, one of them flat-topped and obviously used by Rose as a surface on which to crash herbs, for it was covered by the crushed and shredded foliage of white horehound, whose thyme scent made that corner of the burrow like an open field of its own to moles who closed their eyes and let the scent take them over.
‘Yes, my love, that’s why I never quite finish crushing them all, because, you see, every time I try, the delicious scent quite takes me over!’ said Rose, explaining the clutter of horehound stems and leaving them exactly where they were.
On the far wall opposite the entrance Rose had made her own special nest, a soft pile of blue runner leaves intermingled with the dried petals of eglantine and wild lavender. Rose had let Violet sleep there one day, though inevitably she complained that it was ‘uncomfortable and bumpy,’ which indeed it was, since some of the rose hips which Rose had gathered and heaped nearby had ‘inexplicably’ rolled into her nest and she had never noticed them.
There was a dusty, dried-out red cardinal beetle shell by one wall, which Rose had never bothered to move since, ‘It crawled down here one summer’s day and peacefully spent the evening watching me do something or other—I can’t quite remember what—and then died!’ Violet didn’t like it much, but Comfrey found its colour—a deep red ochre— beautiful, and he liked the obscure shine of its dead wings.
In the centre of the burrow and draped with other herbs and stems, all dusty, dry and green with age, was a long, gnarled flint of pinks and blues whose shape seemed to change with the hour of the day and the angle at which a mole chose to look at it. ‘Oh, no. It doesn’t change,’ explained Rose to Rebecca when they were talking one day, ‘you do.’
From this fragrant burrow Rose had carried out her life’s work of healing Duncton and Pasture moles alike. By the time Rebecca came so desperately to her in the last week of that cold January, Rose was reaching the end of her long life. Even in the time since just before Longest Night, when Rebecca had last seen her, Rose had slowed and aged. She suffered pains now in her shoulders and back paws, which made movement difficult so that she tended to prefer to settle into one position at a time, moving only her head to keep track of Rebecca and the youngsters when they were in her burrow. She liked to see a mole’s eyes when she spoke to him, or her, and despite her pain, her own eyes were as still and warm as ever.
At the same time she slept more, sometimes drifting in and out of sleeping and waking as a scatter of dandelion silk rises and falls on a warm evening wind in September. As the days went by, she seemed to say less and less and to smile more, and round her came a peace that descended even on Violet, whose normal ebullience grew quieter and gentler when she was near Rose.
Comfrey had quickly overcome his initial wariness of Rose and, together with Violet, he would spend long hours with her as she told them tales and legends of the system. Violet liked the dramatic ones, with heroes and villains dashing about from tunnel to tunnel, while Comfrey preferred to hear Rose tell stories of the flowers and trees, whose lore and mysteries held him spellbound.