Bracken heard snatches of their conversation: ‘You here as well this time?’ ‘Why, bless me, I ain’t seen you since July, and what a good time that was…’ ‘Bit bloody parky up here, isn’t it?’ ‘Goin’ to be a cold winter if you ask me…’ Each phrase that came to him reminded him of how alone he was and without a friend. He thought again of visiting Rue, but somehow she wasn’t what he wanted on Longest Night, though what that was he didn’t know. He scratched himself miserably, looked balefully at the moon through the trees and turned his attention to the moles in the centre of the clearing near the Stone. There was silence and a great sense of awe in their communal presence. Some crouched peacefully, occasionally raising their snouts slowly to look up at the Stone, almost as if they thought that something so awesome might suddenly go away. Others intoned prayers to themselves which Bracken could not hear, while some, mainly Eastsiders he guessed (for theirs were the traditions nearest to the ancient ones), half sung, half intoned their prayers in a dialect Bracken could not understand.
Others spoke prayers of unaffected simplicity loud enough for him to hear. ‘Thank you, Stone, for the joys you have given and for the strength I have been blessed with… Take care of Duncton and let it see your light… My heart is in thy silence, Stone, only let me hear it…’ Again and again he heard moles, both males and females, whispering the same final little prayer, ‘Only take us to the silence’—words he had heard Hulver himself say from time to time.
Occasionally several of the moles there would appear to start saying the same prayer simultaneously; their voices would join in unison, creating a kind of spoken song of great power which would, for a moment, take Bracken’s heart out of himself and transport it into something of the mystery of Longest Night.
As the night wore on and grew colder, the moon rising and the Stone’s shadow turning towards the lower part of the wood while growing smaller at the same time, Bracken was touched by something of these moles’ faith, and the Stone began to seem less distant from him than he had thought. He wanted to run out into the centre and ask one of the older ones to explain about the Stone to him; he thirsted for knowledge of it. But he did not have the courage. Sometimes he wanted to join in their prayers, but he did not know the words.
Slowly, the numbers in the clearing declined until he began to have to search its shadows to locate the few moles left, mainly the very old ones, and he realised that the Stone trek was almost over. From down on the slopes even the sound of the songs and revels of departing moles faded, until, as one by one all the moles in the clearing went, Bracken was left quite alone.
A bleak despair began to creep over him, for he felt he had seen a glimpse of some sweet mystery into whose light he wanted to go, but for which he needed a mole to guide him. He had never missed old Hulver so much as at that moment; ‘Surely,’ thought Bracken, through tears that stopped him even seeing the Stone, ‘he would have shared his Longest Night with me.’ Self-pity mixed with a real sense of loss as he crouched in the shadows beyond the clearing, and the night deepened into a still, cold silence all about him.
The moonlight was now strong enough to catch the condensation of his outward breaths into the cold air, and the wood fell very still. The dead brown beech leaves on the floor of the Stone clearing looked pale white, and the surrounding vegetation was black around them.
On impulse, Bracken advanced towards the Stone, out of the undergrowth in which he had been hiding, not sure what he was doing but very conscious of himself alone in the wood. He wanted to say something to the Stone, not a prayer so much as an affirmation that he was there before it, waiting for something to happen. He felt he had been waiting a long time. He also felt unsettled and angry and very conscious of his own lonely existence.
For lack of anything better to do, he went up to the Stone and touched it with his paws to see if, after all, there was more to it than there seemed to be. But there was nothing but its unyielding rough surface, nothing at all.
He waited like this a long time until, somewhere in the darkness beyond, not far off in the shadows by the clearing’s edge, past the great tree whose roots encircled the Stone, he heard a scurry and a slide.
A whispered ‘Ssh!’ came out of the darkness into the moonlight where he lay. He turned his snout towards it aggressively, wondering what it was. Then he sensed a mole.
A deep silence fell as Bracken waited, every sense stretched, his snout poised still as stone and his face whiskers stiff as pine needles.
But not for long. For very soon the anger that had been building up all night replaced the defensive care with which he had first responded to the noise.
