He started to say her name again and to move a little towards her, but then he looked beyond her to the entrance to the burrow and thought beyond that to the tunnels he had created, and beyond them to the secret way he had made to the circular tunnel, and on beyond, racing along left and right, into the labyrinths with echoes all around and his skin and fur, his whole body, calling to the Stone, and great shadows of roots, great falls and rises of roots, silent and completely motionless, while beyond them, calling him, beyond them…
Bracken got up and, without looking back to Rebecca, went to the entrance, snouting down it towards where the secret tunnels lay. Rebecca followed him silently as if they were one mole, not two, both moving together down the tunnels towards something that pulled them from the direction of the Stone. They moved quite fast but completely without effort and there was no fear at all, just a certainty that somewhere ahead the Stone was expecting them.
As they ran into the ins and outs of Bracken’s confusing tunnels to the centre, they could both feel the Ancient System alive before them, stretching far beyond in tunnel after tunnel, alive with the warm spirit of Longest Night. There was no fear at all.
Bracken led on into the circular tunnel and turned right through one of the flint entrances and into the labyrinth of echoes, pausing for a moment for Rebecca to catch up. The pattering of her paws echoed on into the darkness ahead of them and she whispered, ‘Listen. Listen! Oh, it’s so beautiful. Listen!’
Bracken ran now into the sound of the echoes, twisting and turning each way and every way towards the roots, not even checking the way he went with his memory, for he no longer needed to, he could hear the way ahead, he knew the way, he knew the way. His Rebecca was close with him, her paws pattering with his, her warmth behind him, they were twisting and turning, weaving and wending their way together, as one mole, running as one, no effort, their bodies in unison.
‘Oh, listen!’ he could hear her whispering, or hear the echoes of her whisper whispering, ‘Listen, listen, my love, my love… ’ deeper and deeper into the labyrinths until the confusion of whispering echoes was all about them but they were one mole together, so beautiful, so beautifully echoing around them until at last they were there by the roots, shadows and falls of rising roots as silent and utterly motionless as the trees on the surface in the still night to which they belonged.
‘Listen, my love, listen!’ whispered Rebecca, running ahead of him without pause and entering first among the great roots which rose massive about her, with Bracken following her paws, following her warmth, following his Rebecca, my love my love, the echoes following them both from the labyrinths behind them, fading away behind as they entered deeper and deeper among the roots, one mole running, moving as one, each mole knowing the way as one. The roots grew bigger and thicker, twining about this way and that, seeming to open before them, the sound of their silence all about them, the sound of silence running ahead of them, Rebecca running on without fear and Bracken behind and fissures in front and over them, over them, on and round, and through and under and over and beyond and on past the roots for shadow after shadow, each twist falling straight, each turn not a turn, the route so easy, so easy for them both together.
Then, as suddenly as they had entered the Chamber of Roots, they reached its end, which was a massive impregnable wall rising up into darkness and made of hard chalk subsoil with great nodules of flint poking out of it like the snouts of huge moles. Their eyes travelled from one brooding shape to another, and then behind them, back to the mass of roots that now seemed quite impassable but through which, somehow, they had come. It was a fearsome sight but neither Bracken nor Rebecca felt fear, for they now looked at the ancient world about them as if they were pups in a world in which harm did not exist.
Bracken now took the lead, turning left along the wall and following its rough and ancient surface round, and round, until they came, as he knew they would without knowing, to an entrance to a tunnel. It was small, crudely burrowed by somemole for whom shape and form no longer mattered. Its floor sloped roughly downward, twisting among the flints that were held in the chalk and determined the detail, though not the general direction, of the tunnel.
