At any rate, what is known is that Mandrake chose Sarah for a mate; that he watched her grow big with her litter, that he stayed nearby at the birth; and that he waited brooding, turning, twisting, scratching his face with his talons, never comfortable, in the tunnel outside until the litter showed.
He came to the burrow entrance—Sarah allowed him no further—and looked at the litter. Three males and a female. He watched her croon to them and he looked at them, pink, comfortable and safe in her nest, her body warmly encircling their snouts and still-pale whiskers wet with her milk. But he seemed interested only in the female, who struggled, paws bending and flexing weakly, questing for milk as the others did. His eyes were on her alone.
‘Call her Sarah, after yourself,’ he ordered. ‘It’s a fine, strong name.’
But Sarah looked up from her litter and straight at him with the same mixture of compassion and strength that the tiny female pup now suckling her was to have in her face when she looked on Bracken at their first meeting many moleyears later.
‘Her name will be Rebecca,’ she said.
Mandrake looked at the tiny, struggling female and back at Sarah, and then back at his daughter again: he who had killed so many moles had once been as helpless as this, but he didn’t think of that; he who had taken so many females had given them pups like this, but he didn’t think of that either; nor did he think that he, whose talons ached with killing and whose shoulders hung huge and heavy on his body, now craved to lean into the burrow and touch his daughter.
But though he was not able to think these things and say them to himself, they twisted and turned and racked his heart as he crouched in the tunnel unable to say anything. Mandrake, huge and menacing, unable to cut through the whirling darkness of his mind: impotent.
Rebecca, tiny, pink and suckling. Alive!
‘Call her Rebecca, then,’ he said finally, finding himself unaccountably gasping and breathless and wanting to run away from the burrow. ‘Call her Rebecca!’ he said more loudly, turning back into the tunnel clumsily, feeling more than ever the huge, cumbersome weight of himself on himself and wanting to shake and rip it off.
‘Call her Rebecca!’ he shouted, gasping for air, running down the tunnel and out of the nearest entrance on to the surface in Barrow Vale. ‘Rebecca!’ he roared, as if he could not escape the name, slashing the base of an oak tree with his talons as he charged blindly into it.
Sarah heard him, licking her young, curling them into her and sighing in satisfaction. ‘Rebecca,’ she whispered, ‘Rebecca,’ as gently in the darkness of the burrow as, for the briefest of hidden moments, Mandrake had once whispered to her, ‘Sarah.’
From the first, Rebecca held a strange fascination for Mandrake, who would often stare at her from the tunnel by the burrow where Sarah nursed her litter. Sarah would sometimes waken and find him there, or see his black shadow move away down the tunnel as if, seeing her beginning to awaken, he didn’t want to be seen simply watching over his daughter.
Yet as the days and molemonths went by, no one would have guessed, least of all Mandrake himself, that he loved Rebecca with a passion as strong as a gale across a moor. For he treated her harshly, disciplining her unmercifully to try, it seemed, to break her down to a mole of obedience. At first it was easy, for she was but a tiny pup who quailed and backed away from his deep-voiced commands. Her paws would fall over themselves in their anxiety to escape from her great father as she ran desperately back for the protection of her mother’s flanks.
Sarah would hold her and say, ‘She’s only a pup, only a young thing.’ But this made little impact on Mandrake.
‘A pup will do what I say, as I want,’ he would roar, glowering darkly at the cowering Rebecca. But never once did he try to wrest her from Sarah, or hit her when she was young.
Such threats had their effect and for a long time Rebecca did Mandrake’s will, frightened of him not only when he was there, but also when he was out in the system with Rune or other henchmoles doing system business.
She grew quickly, so that by late autumn she was already nearing adult size. Not as big as moles born the preceding spring, but not so small that she could not put up a fair fight if necessary, though the youngsters still fought for fun rather than in earnest. The real fighting came only with the mating season or when one mole was trying to wrest away another mole’s territory. She stayed in her home burrow longer than the young of spring litters, who could take advantage of the good summer weather to leave their mothers and find their own territory. Rebecca stayed at home, close by Sarah and Mandrake, kept innocent, childlike and cowed by Mandrake’s continual aggression towards her.
