She refused to leave her tunnels because, as she explained, this was probably the only place in the system where her weak paws could manage to burrow and repair tunnels, and then only untidily. But, yes, she had known sadness, and had always wanted young of her own, though now she knew she could never have them. It was knowing this that made Mekkins bring Rebecca here, for surely Curlew would take care of her as if she were a pup of her own.
But in the next few days, Rebecca’s condition got steadily worse. She grew weaker and more and more unresponsive, hardly bothering to eat the food that Mekkins and Curlew brought her. The light had gone out of her eyes and the gloss from her fur, which now hung about her like dead ivy.
On the fourth night she was there, Curlew went to wake up Mekkins, prodding him urgently and asking him to come.
‘She’s dying, Mekkins, and there’s not much anymole can do. Her teats are hard with unsuckled milk and they’re swollen and are paining her in her troubled sleep. I think we may be too late to save her.’
Mekkins looked at Rebecca, his snout low with grief and desolation, his eyes restless with the need to do something for her. ‘Rebecca,’ he whispered to her. ‘Rebecca. It’s Mekkins! You’re safe now. Listen, Rebecca!’
She stirred and turned a little to him, her forehead furrowed and her eyes hauntingly lost. ‘Listen to what?’ she whispered. ‘They’ve all gone. I heard the last of their cries. He’s taken them.’
‘But there’s so much, Rebecca, so much. The flowers you love, the ones you showed me in the summer, they’ll come again. And spring, that’ll come, you’ll see. You’ll see…’ But Mekkins couldn’t go on. He could find no words to say because he could not think of a reason why she should want to live. If only Rose were here, he thought, she’d know what to say.
Looking at her there, he felt himself almost absurdly strong and healthy, realising what a gift it was, almost for the first time. But he would have given it all to see Rebecca look up at him with the laugh and dance in her eyes that he remembered and loved so well.
He left her and Curlew and went grimly up to the tunnel entrance and stayed there looking into the night. From somewhere off in the marshes came the haunting single call of a solitary snipe. Otherwise the wood seemed to be settling into the darkness of winter.
Yet, as he crouched there, upset and frustrated, from the light-filled recesses of his soul, where the cherished things of the heart lie still and waiting, there came a memory of the Stone. Not as he had last seen it, with the blood of Hulver and Bindle staining its shadow, but as he had first seen it so long ago when he was little more than a pup and had been led up Duncton Hill on the long trek, when there was no shame in celebrating Midsummer.
It had stood massive, awe-inspiring and, somehow, safe, and he had looked up at it, as the elders did their chanting, and all had faded away from his mind but its size and majesty, and his sense that he was part of it. In the many moleyears since, he had only ever thought of the Stone as a distant thing, for the sense of grace that flowed into him then was overshadowed by the fighting and living, and the mating, that was the reality of Duncton in his time.
But now the grace returned, distant and uncertain, but there all the same. He turned back down into the tunnels and went straight to Curlew.
‘How long can she live?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘There are herbs I know, healing charms I heard my mother say. She may cling on for a few days…’
‘She must,’ he said urgently, ‘she must. For a few days you must make her. I have to go, but I will be back.’
‘Where to?’ asked Curlew, suddenly afraid to be left alone, with Rebecca now so certain to die.
‘I’m going to the Stone, Curlew, to ask for its ’elp. I don’t know nothing about praying but I’m bloody well going to try.’
It took him a full night and day of travel to reach the massive, silent Stone. Mekkins had never prayed in his life before and so, lacking any preconceived idea of how a mole should pray, he spoke to it as he would to anymole. ‘She’s a good mole, better than anymole I know, so why’s she dying? What’s the use in it? Look… I’ll do anything I can do to ’elp her out…’
But the Stone was silent.
‘Look ’ere,’ tried Mekkins again, his paws now touching the base of the Stone, ‘there can’t be any sense in lettin’ her die now, can there? I’ve seen her dance in the sun and say her rhymes and all sorts of things and you didn’t make her learn to do those things so she should die like she is. You made her so that other moles could understand ’ow to live properly in this forsaken bloody system of ours.’
But still the Stone stood silent, its cold height rising above and beyond Mekkins’ vision to the nearly leafless branches of beech trees high above, which made an interlocking craze of silhouettes against the bleak white clouds of the October dusk.
