But there are always moles—and always will be—who, through character or circumstances, decide they cannot join in the gregarious fun at the approach of Longest Night. Bracken was one of them. He could, it is true, have spent a little time with Rue, assuming she would have allowed it, but the spirit was not in him. At the very moment when most moles in the system were finding a little relief from the shadows of winter in the celebration to come, he found himself falling into an uneasy sadness.
Some days he would go to the edge of the wood and look across the pastures and wonder if, after all, his first impulse on coming to the Stone might have been the best—to leave the system altogether and make his way to whatever lay beyond it in the direction of Uffington. Other days he found himself crouched in anguished silence in its shadows, wondering whether, after all, its power was imaginary— demanding then to see the power, to feel it. Or again, he would think about the Chamber of Roots and wonder why he could not cross it—and then ask himself how he could consider leaving the system if he had failed even to explore the system’s most secret part. ‘What will I find out there,’ he would whisper to himself as he looked across the pastures, ‘if I can’t even follow my snout in here?’
He was lonely. He wanted to talk to a mole again as he had talked so long before to Hulver; he wanted to learn something from a mole who could tell him what to learn. He wanted knowledge, but did not know where to find it. And Longest Night, which he knew was near, and when all moles shared a joy together, simply underlined the fact of his isolation from the Stone, from the heart of the Ancient System, and from all other moles.
‘Rebecca! ’Ere, Rebecca! I’ve got a surprise for you, my girl!’ It was Mekkins, full of the joy of the season and suddenly back in Curlew’s burrow with many a whisper and a laugh on the way down the tunnel to it. He had brought Rose.
She took one look at Rebecca and said, ‘My love, how frail and thin you have become. This certainly will not do.’ She said it kindly but firmly, crouching down snout to snout with Rebecca and examining her with motherly care.
‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’ And faced by Rose’s love, she started to cry as she had never cried, ever before. She tried for a moment to stop, for little Comfrey, who was snuggled up against her, started up frightened, but Curlew took him to her and played a game with him, which had him and Mekkins running out into the tunnel, leaving Rose and Rebecca alone together. So that Rebecca could cry.
Rose was too wise to think that jollying Rebecca along to get her out of her depression would be useful. She saw that much of Rebecca’s spirit had been killed and its rebirth was not something a healer could bring about quickly by herself. As she talked to Rebecca and heard the indifference to life in her voice, Rose saw that the best she could do was to push her in the right direction and trust to the Stone that she would finally be able to find the right way herself.
When Rose watched Rebecca play with Comfrey, she was pleased to see that there, at least, was something she wanted to do, though she saw that even Rebecca’s interest in Comfrey was sometimes little more than dutiful. The sounds of love were there, for sure, but spontaneous love, or trust, or faith, or hope, or life? These were the drives that Rebecca had had so much of before, but which somehow she seemed not to be able to pass on to Comfrey, for they were no longer in her.
The pup was growing well, Rose observed, but he would need to be given much more than food and grooming if he was to reflect in his life some of the quality that Rebecca had once had in hers, and surely still could have.
‘But how?’ asked Mekkins, who understood well what was wrong with Rebecca. ‘What can we do to make her see that, terrible though the death of her litter has been, life, for her, has barely begun?’
‘Mekkins, my dear, you have a good heart, I sometimes think better than anymole I know! But Rebecca’s problem lies deeper than in simply having things to live for. You see, my love, she has experienced evil—she has seen it with her eyes, smelt it with her snout, and felt its dark talons tearing inside her body. It tears at her still. She has felt enough of its power to destroy an ordinary mole but, as the coming of Comfrey shows, she is in some ways graced and surely a special mole. The only power that can heal her lies in the Stone—though you must understand she may never be the same kind of mole that you once knew. If a mole feels evil as she has done, only the light in the Stone can erase its shadow. Then may she continue to grow again.’
