After the death of Hulver, or, more particularly, ever since Mandrake had been so shocked to hear those words of grace spoken by Bracken—the voice of the Stone, as it seemed to Mandrake—he had slowly lost interest in the power he had won for himself. Nomole doubted he was in charge, not even Rune, but he preferred to let Rune exercise power for him, with occasional excursions into mindless brutality just to show who was in charge.
Most moles in Duncton, including Mandrake, assumed that Rebecca had been taken by an owl along with her litter after their killing. But seemingly worse, for Mandrake, was the fact that his mate, Sarah, who had opposed the killing of the litter from the start, had been taken by owl as well—at the same time as Rebecca. The sudden loss of his mate and daughter seemed to mark the start of Mandrake’s decline into distracted brutality. He would suddenly appear in Barrow Vale and spend hours sitting brooding, while the moles there would quietly disappear. Sometimes he was heard to attack the walls of his tunnels in great lumbering crashes and to mutter to himself in the language of Siabod. Words that sounded like curses, and ravings nomole could understand.
He became obsessed, too, by the Stone Mole, a rumour that had never died out. Indeed, the incident with Rebecca got tangled up with the Stone Mole, who was said (and Mandrake appeared to believe it in some way) to have mated with Rebecca. ‘Oh, yes! Haven’t you heard? The pups Mandrake killed were the Stone Mole’s pups!’
Nomole quite believed this, and yet it was a good story… so rumours feed on themselves.
As for the reports of her death, these were so confused that nomole could really tell what the truth was. Mandrake himself believed her dead but there were others, Rune among them, who were not so sure. Some even said—but this was the wild gossip of those who had exhausted the titillation in every other story—that she had escaped from the system with a single pup who had not died in the assault and was rearing him as a second Stone Mole to come and avenge his siblings’ deaths. ‘Typical Rebecca!’ some said, not knowing that the Rebecca they had known was no more, alive or dead.
Mekkins garnered all these stories in visits to Barrow Vale, for Marsh End was too cut off and unpopular to be a good source for gossip. He trusted the henchmole who had so bravely led Rebecca down to the Marsh End to keep quiet—it was in his interests to do so.
More serious was the possibility that the news of Rebecca’s existence and whereabouts might leak from the Marsh End, where a few moles must have guessed at it. He began to think that if there was any way for Rebecca to leave the system he should find it. For surely if they ever did discover her, especially with Comfrey, then she would be killed. It was to discuss this that he himself decided to risk a journey to the pastures to see if he could locate Rose to ask for her advice and help. He wanted, in any case, to bring her back to Curlew’s burrow to take a look at Rebecca and see if she could inject into her a greater will to live again.
Meanwhile, the Stone Mole rumour was resurrected periodically by glimpses of Bracken, who now had such a command of the Ancient System—except for its most central part, whose exploration still defeated him—that he did not mind taking a few risks. In fact, for him it was quite fun. But he was seen only down on the slopes, for as the atmosphere of fear in the wood increased, nomole ventured too far from his burrow, and none up on to the hill itself.
Bracken’s visits to the slopes were principally to see Rue and her thriving litter—Violet, Coltsfoot, Beech and Pipple.
Bracken had tried several more times to find his way through the Chamber of Roots but finally gave up when, one windy day when the roots were viciously active below ground, he got cut off by a deep and treacherous fissure that appeared in the floor and took a long and dangerous time to find another way out again, while the roots got noisier and noisier and seemed to want to entwine themselves about him and take him for their own. He was determined to return one day and find some way of completing the exploration, but meanwhile decided to create tunnels of his own.
He established his tunnels at the wood’s edge beyond the Stone clearing, quite near the spot where Cairn had died. His choice was decided principally by the existence of the second tunnel leading out of (or into) the circular tunnel around the Chamber of Echoes. The tunnel was a slight affair, meandering here and there and eventually petering out to the west of the Stone. Bracken constructed a clever series of tunnels that connected up with it in a deliberately confusing and roundabout way, designed to put off any inquisitive mole who found his own tunnels. He liked the idea of having access to the Ancient System underground but saw danger in creating a direct route.
