For Rebecca, however, the memory was clear and she guessed that they had seen something more wonderful than some moles ever dream of. She touched Bracken with her paw to tell him that it was real and that he must not let it slip away, but he only looked at her in a kind of dawning fear, compounded partly of a sense of loss of what he could not quite remember, partly from having faced for a moment a truth he could face no longer.
Then they slept the fitful sleep of the deeply tired, waking only to the sound of Mekkins’ singing as he groomed and stretched himself in preparation for leaving with Rebecca.
They said few words—indeed, Mekkins said most of the farewells. But they touched again and Bracken knew that Rebecca and he had, for a time at least, been at one with one another and that a part of himself was for ever in her heart, as part of her would always be in his.
He saw them as far as the Stone clearing where, for a brief moment, they looked up at the great Stone, leaning into the morning wind, the beech branches waving against a cold white sky above it.
When they were gone, he turned back to his tunnel and down to his burrow where he crouched in silence, a sense of wonder and disbelief mixing with a terrible feeling of loss. His left paw vaguely itched or burned, but when he looked at it, there was nothing there. But the irritation stayed with him and eventually, with his right paw, he tried to scratch the pattern that he had felt on the stone on to the burrow floor, an interlacing of lines and circles. Again and again he traced it in the dust, scratching it out with his paw until slowly it seemed to come right. Again and again, until, like the tunnels in the Chamber of Echoes, he knew it by heart. The itch began to fade and as it did so, he began to sink into a deep sleep, his right paw still extended where it was tracing the pattern of the stone yet again, before he finally slept.
With the passing of Longest Night, which he spent completely alone, Mandrake sank finally into obsessive madness. He ranged about his tunnels, or Barrow Vale, muttering and cursing violently, often in the rough hard tongue of Siabod, the language of his fathers. Occasionally he caught some unfortunate mole unawares and—whether young or old, male or female—would attack it savagely for some imagined wrong it had done, leaving it wounded or, more than once, dead.
Trembling moles would hide in tunnels and burrows as he passed heavily by, wondering at his continual calling out for Sarah and Rebecca, whom he no longer seemed to think were dead but gone to the Stone Mole in the Ancient System, leaving him alone and forsaken. As the days slipped by into cold January, he could be heard sounding curses in his own language: ‘Gelert, helgi Siabod, a’m dial am eu colled trwy ddodi ei felltith ar Faenwadd Duncton’—‘May Gelert, hound of Siabod, avenge for me their loss by bringing his curse on the Stone Mole of Duncton.’ Gelert was the legendary hound of Siabod who was believed to protect its holy stones, though none in Duncton knew of his name then.
Any lesser mole than Mandrake would have been killed by other moles, or driven out of the system, but there was none in Duncton prepared to start a fight with him. And only one—Rune—with the courage even to talk to him.
Rune listened with almost a purr of pleasure to his ravings about the Stone Mole and his threats to summon the mythical Gelert. He knew that with each day that passed, the system was slipping out of Mandrake’s talons and into his own. It was just a matter of time and opportunity.
Inevitably, plots were made against Mandrake, especially since the murder of Rebecca’s litter, which had appalled so many moles, as Rune had hoped it would. Rune positively licked his lips with pleasure when dithering henchmole after henchmole came to him with some feeble plot or other. ‘A group of us feel, and it’s only a feeling, and we wouldn’t do anything without your approval and support, Rune, sir, that the system is overdue for a change…’
‘Well, I’m sure that as long as Mandrake is here in good health and in charge we none of us need worry…’ Rune would reply hypocritically to would-be revolutionaries in his maddeningly measured and reasonable way. And they would retreat, murmuring to each other ‘Rune’s too loyal for his own good!’ or ‘Far too modest, that Rune—doesn’t realise his own worth.’
But if there was going to be a revolution (and that was precisely what Rune intended there should be), it would be done in his own way and in his own time. And as Mandrake’s ravings about the Stone Mole got worse, he began to see that there was a way, and its path lay towards the Ancient System.
