‘Where are the worms, then?’ said Mekkins. ‘Where’s the feast? I don’t know about you, Rebecca, but I ain’t come all the way up ’ere just to sing a song and get no food. Where is it, then?’
Bracken almost fell over himself thinking how he could get the best worms and other things together in the shortest possible time, while at the same time thinking that his burrow wasn’t big enough for all of them—or was it?—and what was the best way to take them, and try to sing a song as well; while Rebecca kept laughing and looking serious and then a little sad, and then dancing a bit, and Mekkins was thinking there had never been such a good spot or such nice moles as this spot and these moles, at that particular moment… Oh! surely there weren’t three more excited or happy moles in the whole of Duncton Wood, and any one of them would have been hard put to it to explain quite why! Except… well… it was Longest Night, of course! When a mole realises there are other things, bigger things, than even the biggest fears and most terrible worries. That’s the magic of it, that’s its mystery. And so, with a song and a dance in his steps, Bracken led them out of the Stone clearing and down the tunnels to his biggest burrow.
‘Well, that was some feast, that was!’ declared Mekkins sometime deep in the night, paws on his stomach and full contentment on his face. And with that, his eyes closed, his head began to nod and his mouth fell gently open as he gave himself up to a deep and delicious sleep.
He might equally have said, ‘That was some occasion, that was!’ for surely the Ancient System had not been within sound of such tale-telling, singing, joking, guzzling, speechifying (mainly by Mekkins) and laughing, smiling, grinning (mainly by Bracken) and rhyming, molelore, and enchantment (Rebecca’s) in generations. What excitement for Mekkins and Rebecca to enter tunnels burrowed into the chalk soil, with its grey-white shadows, which made a mole feel close to the past and the Stone; what a joy for Bracken to hear the sound of friendly moles in his tunnels, which he had burrowed in isolation and shared only with his own silence until now.
They all asked each other dozens of questions and listened spellbound to each other’s tales, Rebecca hardly daring to breathe when Bracken described to her his first entry into the Chamber of Dark Sound, while Bracken laughed to hear how the story of the Stone Mole had grown to such proportions all over the system. As for Mekkins, his real joy was to see something of the old Rebecca return, though it was a richer, less impetuous sense of life that she now had. And to see that there was something between these two young moles that gave joy to an older mole like him to see, and which anymole with half a heart would want to cherish and protect. But he wondered if it was just something that had happened on Longest Night and which, in the morning, might not seem quite so powerful as it did now. ‘Still, a mole mustn’t go spoiling the present by fearing the future,’ he thought to himself, and so, more than content with the joy of the night, he finally fell asleep.
Bracken, on one side of the main burrow, and Rebecca on the other, both with their snouts between their paws, fell into thinking the warm, random thoughts of the contented tired. Mekkins laughing, spring, dangers past, Rose, Rune, Rue, echoing tunnels. Curlew’s eyes, Comfrey, Cairn, Cairn, oh Cairn, the Stone, what a time it’d been and how much had happened.
‘Bracken?’
‘Mmm?’ Her voice sounded so good in his burrow. He wanted her to repeat his name again.
‘Bracken? Do you believe in the Stone?’
He did not think about the answer but rather wallowed with it in an image of the Stone, wondering what the question meant. He could say he didn’t know, and that was true; but it wasn’t really, because he knew there was something there. Why, there was so much he hadn’t told them. He had got as far as the circular tunnel with the seven entrances into the central part, but after that he had felt it unwise to go on and had steered the conversation away.
‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘Do you?’
She wanted to say ‘No’, to shout ‘No!’ because she didn’t, she couldn’t, it had let her litter die, it had let those talons come down, there was no Stone, there was nothing, nothing; except that an image of Comfrey came to her suddenly and she saw that there was something. There was so much they hadn’t talked about, she and Bracken, she thought to herself.
She raised her head off her paws and looked at him, and found that he was looking at her so deeply that her body seemed to fall away and only her heart or her soul was there; while it seemed to Bracken, when she raised her head to look at him, that there was nothing he could not tell her if she wanted to know, and that most of all, he would like to tell her about the Stone, for that was finally where everything, for good or ill, seemed to be.
