‘I hoped she would have got rid of them by now,’ he was saying to one of the henchmoles. ‘A pity. Give her less food and hit her when you feel like it. She’s bred with a Pasture mole and ought to be killed. But Mandrake…’ Rune shrugged and turned away.
Rebecca got up heavily and tried to call to him, moving as quickly as she could to the entrance, and begging him. But he was gone, and one of the henchmoles hit her and she fell down. And one of her young moved inside her as she lay there and she wept until fear overtook her and she lay trembling in the terrible silence.
She began to have fantasies and nightmares. In one of them her burrow was falling on her and she dug desperately at the wall trying to escape… to be awoken by the angry shouts of the henchmoles and the discovery that in her sleep she had started to burrow at the walls. In another, she was lost in a storm on a hill and there was a mole there, crouching, who surely would give her help and show her the way, but when she asked him and he turned to face her, it was Rune. Rune, laughing at her!
Until suddenly, at last, her pups began to be born. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘Oh, no, my loves. Not yet! Not yet! Not here…’ and her eyes searched the burrow fearfully and she saw, her nightmare realised, that watching her was the massive form of Mandrake, his eyes cold and full of hate. Just watching her, as the pains drove into her, and she begged for her young not to be born.
‘She’s giving birth to her Pasture pups,’ she heard a voice hiss in the shadows next to Mandrake. ‘Which nomole here wants to see alive,’ said Rune.
‘Oh, no,’ she gasped. ‘Not here, my flowers, not here. Oh, Cairn, my—’ but they started to come, eyes blind, snouts pink, wet with blood and water, floppy as green wet leaves, tiny mouths mewing and seeking her teats. For a moment she saw them all. Four, or was it five altogether? Perfect and alive, their bleatings pure with life in her cursed burrow, their mewings drowned by a voice that urgently hissed. ‘They must be killed, Mandrake. They must go,’ and she tried to gather them to her, to protect them in the crescent of her soft belly and teats, to thrust away the cold, black talons that came among them, stabbing and stealing them, hurting them and making them bleat in their blindness. She tried to raise herself through her nightmare weakness and strike out into the darkness of bloody talons before her. She tried so hard to protect them as their bleats weakened or turned into pathetic last squeals and their mouths tried to suckle her teats even as they died in the darkness that lay between her and Mandrake. And in that moment, when he was murderous and full of hate before her, when he could not see, he could not see, it was not her love for him that he destroyed but her trust in life itself. And evil smiled to see its work well done.
Until there was nothing but death and darkness before her, for the sounds of her litter were gone, arid only her voice remained whispering endlessly into the silence: ‘Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me…’
And all of them were gone. Mandrake, Rune, the two henchmoles who had guarded the burrow and all the henchmoles around her entrances, leaving Rebecca alone in her burrow, and free now to go where she pleased.
If Bracken’s adulthood may be said to have started with his almost casual mating with Rue, his long march into maturity started somewhere in the depths of the Ancient System to which he returned after leaving her. There he began the first exploration of its centre since its desertion, isolation, and final forgetting so many generations before.
But if he hoped, as he approached the Chamber of Dark Sound once more, that this time he would be quite unafraid, his hopes were shattered into a thousand fears when he got there. He could not see the owl face from the east side to which he came, but the chamber echoed with its dark menace even before he got there. Summoning all his courage, he made his way straight across the floor of the chamber towards where the owl face towered, his snout trembling with apprehension and his fur sensitive to the slightest danger.
Finally he came near enough once more to see the dark glint of the flint parts of the face, and to look into the eye cavities of the mole skeleton that crouched at the entrance of the tunnel beneath.
And what relief! The skull and skeleton seemed suddenly no more than the white bones they were, and Bracken saw that they could do him no harm. He had lived into death with Cairn and now, looking at this long-dead creature, he could only feel sorrow for its passing and wonder what strange story lay behind its presence here. He was afraid, certainly, but no longer of a mere skeleton.
Shiny walls of flint rose on either side of it, grey flint rather than black, and stepping carefully past the skull, he moved through the entrance into the seventh tunnel.
