Although her origin was vaguely known—she said herself that she came from beyond the Eastside—nomole knew her name. The henchmole called her Nightshade and Rune very quickly seemed to take to her, liking to have her misshapen form lurking in the tunnels and burrows from which he ruled Duncton. He saw the silly, superstitious fear she caused and so exploited it. It was said that she knew dark and secret rituals banished from Duncton by the moles of the Ancient System and handed down in some outback of the Eastside by generation after generation of moles waiting for just such a moment as this. However it was, no henchmole dared to risk angering her or getting in her way before dawn, when she liked to squirm about the surface muttering and cursing to herself and casting spells that left an odour in the air.
Evil showed itself in other ways, too. Duncton’s normally bright and cheerful spring wild flowers seemed to grow prematurely withered out of the ground—wood anemones drooping, the white petals mottled and limp, while even the normally ebullient dog’s mercury grew rank and fetid where its spiky leaves pierced last year’s dead undergrowth. The sun, normally bright and warm for at least a few days at the end of March, stayed distant and watery, and even when its rays broke through the cloud they were chilly, and the light they cast was cold.
The trees were slow to take leaf, and by mid-April only the hawthorn and an occasional horse chestnut were beginning to show green in their buds, miserable against the black trunks and leafless trees that gave the wood a wintry air.
Ordinary moles in the system did their best to keep their snouts out of trouble, staying as quietly as they could in their own tunnels or giving them up without a struggle if some bully of a henchmole fancied taking them. Some sought to find favour and settled old territorial scores by reporting their harmless neighbours to the henchmoles. Others crouched and shivered in their burrows, stirring only to find food, their spirits lowering as the weeks went by.
The fear and stress found their evil way into the very life of the system itself, for far fewer females became pregnant, and of those that did, far more than usual aborted their litters and went pupless into early summer. Such females were vulnerable to attack, being already weak, and Rune made his displeasure with them known. Those who littered were, however, favoured—not because of the joy their pups might bring but because their young might make henchmoles in the future, and it was to the future that Rune’s black mind was looking.
As April advanced, Rune, the only mole in Duncton Wood who seemed positively glowing with health, began to relax about the possible return of Mandrake, which he had seen initially as a serious threat. Mandrake had last been seen bringing down the great flints in the Chamber of Dark Sound to halt the henchmoles’ assault upon him, and since then, nothing had been heard. Rune had left several henchmoles at key points around the Ancient System—at Hulver’s old tunnels, by Bracken’s tunnels in the area between the Stone clearing and the pastures, and a few other points where tunnels started. But Mandrake was never seen or heard, and Rune began to suspect that the inevitable had happened and that Mandrake had died in lonely madness somewhere in the forgotten tunnels, or perhaps had left the system altogether to seek out some other place as he had once sought out Duncton. But wherever he was, the henchmoles would never allow him back now.
In any case, as the warmer weather finally and reluctantly began to arrive in the second week of May, Rune became preoccupied with an idea that had been growing in his mind for many moleyears. He wanted to attack the Pasture system.
He had suspected for a long time that the Pasture moles were not as strong as the Duncton moles feared they were. The number of incidents between the two systems had declined steadily over the moleyears, and it was significant to him that there was no reaction from the pastures after the attack on Cairn. Rune wrongly assumed that the injured Cairn had made his way back to the pastures and from this believed that, had the Pasture moles been really powerful, they would have attacked Duncton, or at least sought reprisals. But even in the mating season, when there were usually a few incursions, nothing happened.
Rune decided that the time had come to launch a limited assault on the pastures. It was with this objective in mind that he started to gather his henchmoles on the Westside at the end of May.
The death of Rose was a deep loss to the Pasture system, where she was much loved, and in particular to Brome, who had always revered the trust and advice she had given and that had helped him to take control of the pastures peacefully and with justice.
When her death was reported to him, he had set off at once for Rose’s burrows, for it is the tradition in the pastures that the burrows of a healer are sealed by a mole or moles to whom they have been close. When he got there, he found the tunnels and burrows deserted except for the body of Rose, and a guardmole led him to her main tunnel’s exit on the surface where Rebecca was crouched, snout pointing across the open grass to the darkness of the wood she loved. She had a youngster at her side.
Because he was uncertain how to address a mole who had, by all accounts, lived closer than any other ever had to Rose, if only for the last few molemonths, he said rather formally, ‘It is the custom to seal the burrow.’
Rebecca turned and looked at him, tiredness and loss in her eyes, but a sense of peace as well. Used as Brome was to deference from other moles, he was surprised but relieved to sense none at all in this Rebecca, only a sorrow for the passing of a mole she had obviously loved as well.
‘In our system, it is the custom to let the owls have their way,’ she said, quietly smiling to him as a token of her sense of his loss.
A little discomfited by the directness of her gaze, Brome asked. ‘What’s his name?’ looking at Comfrey. Rebecca said nothing, making it clear that Comfrey was old enough to reply for himself.
‘My name’s C-C-Comfrey,’ he said, looking at Brome with his curious mixture of timidity and interest, ‘and I’m from D-D-Duncton Wood.’ Brome nodded and smiled, but Comfrey went on. ‘My father was Bracken who went into the marshes. H-he’s coming back.’
Brome had heard about the sad story of Bracken from Mekkins, so he smiled again and nodded his head vaguely, thinking that this was some kind story Rebecca had reassured the youngster with, for nomole returns from the marshes. To his astonishment he saw a look on Rebecca’s face that seemed almost angry with him, as if she suspected this thought and wished to underline that what she had told Comfrey was indeed true.
This mute exchange surprised Brome and he looked at Rebecca more closely, his curiosity sliding very quickly into a kind of uneasy awe. Never before had he been in the presence of a mole who gave him the impression that she knew exactly what he was feeling. He saw as well that she was very beautiful, with a coat of dark, silvery grey, whose sheen held the light of a clear sky after rain.
He had a dozen things in his mind to say, but they all fell away before her still gaze and he said what was in his heart: ‘What are we going to do, Rebecca?’ She came forward and touched him for a second, a touch that reassured him, and then she led the way back to Rose’s tunnels where, without another word, they sealed the tunnels together, soil falling on their fur as with burrowing sweeps of their paws they retreated before it. It was the Pasture way of doing things.