And then, surrounded by the silence of the Stone, they began to talk of the things that had been in their hearts so heavily for so long and to heal each other of their memories. Rebecca’s lost litter, Bracken’s isolation in the Ancient System, Comfrey, their son by circumstance, and Cairn, oh Cairn. Sometimes they wept, sometimes their tears were dried by their laughter, sometimes they reached out to be touched, sometimes they lay still, but always the light of the stone glimmered and shone in the burrow about them.
Bracken told her about the death of Cairn, repeating the words he had said to him about Rebecca at the end: ‘She is the wild flower that grows in spring, she is as graceful as the swaying branches of the ash, as light as pussy willow caught by sun, she is…’ and as he talked, using words he half remembered, he began to say them to her direct, his body against hers, her paws on his face, his snout to her neck fur, her body caressingly warm against him. ‘Yours is the love of life itself, yours is the life that flows from wood to pasture, from hill to vale; yours is the love in the tunnels of Uffington; yours is the love in the hearts of the White Moles.’
‘That’s what I told him Rebecca, that’s what I said,’ whispered Bracken to her. ‘I could feel his pain, the terrible pain they made him feel; and I could feel his love for you, I could feel it…’
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I know, my own wildflower, my sweet love, I know… I love you, I love you,’ she said, and he said, endlessly, over and over again.
At their side the light from the centre of the stone flared and flickered all around, and cast their shadows out on to the roots and walls of the chamber beyond the burrow where they crouched, where they mingled into one shadow, one shape, which shimmered and moved with the light. How many minutes or hours they stayed together in this state of loving grace nomole can say, or cares to try. But there came a time when, just as they had moved with one accord on their journey there, so they simultaneously began to be restless and to lose their sense of being at one with each other and the Stone, in whose depth they had found such peace. Perhaps it was their imagination, but the stone in the burrow seemed to flicker and glimmer more intermittently.
Bracken suddenly found he was hungry, Rebecca that she wanted to get back to Comfrey. They began to feel the love they had touched slipping away. Both of them tried to reach out for it with new endearments of love and passion, deeper sighs and heavier caresses, for it was too sweet to lose. But it seemed to them to be fleeing away to some world they could not reach, whereas, in truth, it was they who were fleeing away from it as they returned to the world of time and worry, fears and fretting heaviness.
Bracken turned to look at the stone again, for he knew he must soon leave and he wanted to remember it. After all, this was the heart of the system he had sought so long to explore. He looked at it now (as it seemed to him) more objectively, from the illusory world of time he and Rebecca were so reluctantly reinhabiting, and it no longer seemed quite so smooth or quite so oval as it had before. There was a delicate whorl of interlocking shadows on it… not shadows, but carvings, or rather embossments, like those he had seen before on a cruder and grander scale on the wall of the Chamber of Dark Sound.
‘I know those patterns,’ he said, half to himself. ‘I know their power. If you hum, they will make a music back to you.’ He half reached out towards the stone, as if warming his paws at its light, and began to hum. The burrow was soon filled with sounds in return, some far lighter and more beautiful than the most wonderful he had heard from the wall, others far darker and more unbearable.
Rebecca began to writhe and gasp as the beginnings of a scream formed inside her, while Bracken felt fear and panic overtake him. He stopped humming and reached out involuntarily to the stone, as if trying to stop the sound coming from it, and as he touched it, the light plunged out once more, casting them not only into darkness but into a depth of despair—a sense of loss—that brought horror to them and made them both grasp for each other instinctively.
As Bracken’s paw left to touch Rebecca, the light slowly returned again and their sense of loss began to fade. This time Bracken could feel the impression of the stone on his paw, not smooth like moss, but more like an embossed abrasion, like a pain that had a shape to it. Yet when he looked, there was nothing there.
