Then there was a mole called Rebecca, of whom, when he finally mentioned her, Bracken said, ‘She was a mole I met in a rainstorm by the Stone on top of the hill. She was as lost up there as I was, in a different way, and she touched me.’ Bracken’s voice had lowered when he said this, as his snout had, and for a moment Boswell felt as if he was walking with Bracken through the silence of a forgotten wood that even a single breath would blow away. Which, indeed, it did. For Bracken changed when pressed about Rebecca and laughed about her, pretending she was just ‘one of the Duncton females, and a very pretty one, too’.
It was the same with the Ancient System, which was what Boswell wanted most to know about. Bracken said hardly anything about it, but when it did get mentioned, his whole body seemed to alternate between fear and peace and Boswell felt he was watching a changeable spring day pass by.
It was seeing these things in Bracken that made Boswell, who was so quick with words and so used to the learned cut and thrust of Uffington, understand that the message in something a mole says may lie not in the words spoken, or the sense imparted, but the impulse of feeling behind them, which they themselves may change or distort. The more he spoke with Bracken, the more he had the feeling that the Stone itself had brought them together and that this strange mole was one he would follow wherever he went. It seemed to Boswell that Bracken held in his heart a secret of which he was not aware but whose revelation was a joy and pain to which, in some way, both of them must surrender themselves.
So it was that Boswell’s initial impatience with Bracken’s unwillingness to talk about Duncton in detail gave way to an affectionate silence from whose simplicity Boswell really began to hear the words the other spoke and, through him, the words all moles speak.
There was another way in which his dialogue with Bracken was a new experience for him as well. The fact was that since the preceding September, when he had left Uffington to come to Duncton, a period of several moleyears, he had become increasingly unwilling to talk about the sacred Holy Burrows to anymole. Yet when Bracken started asking him questions so enthusiastically, he found only pleasure in giving him the answers. His reluctance simply vanished.
‘What are they like?’ asked Bracken. ‘And do scribemoles still live there?’
‘They are on the top of a chalk hill many thousands of feet high, which is steep to its north side and gentle to the south. The tunnels are very big and spacious, unlike any tunnels I have seen since elsewhere. It is the most peaceful place I know.’
‘But what are the Holy Burrows?’
‘A group of burrows in the centre of the Uffington system where only moles who have taken certain vows of obedience may live. Fighting is not allowed. Many of the moles there decided to stop talking and live in a silence of contemplation. Those that talk try only to say those things that are essential and truthful.’
‘Are they all White Moles?’ asked Bracken, fascinated by everything Boswell was saying.
‘No, none of them is. There are no White Moles—well, there were once, starting with the first of them all, Linden, the last son of Ballagan, and Vervain…’
‘Yes. They tell that story in our system, though I’ve only heard it vaguely because it’s one normally only for Longest Night and I was… well… nowhere where stories like that were told on Longest Night.’
So, piece by piece, Boswell told Bracken about Uffington and its lore, learning something about it himself too as he talked, for he had never really thought about it objectively before. He realised that he missed the Holy Burrows, the libraries and some of the moles there, like Skeat, whom he had grown up to know so well; yet he saw, too, how ignorant he had been of the world outside and how many of the scribemoles he had known, for all their learning and wit, worshipped the Stone through ignorance rather than wisdom. Perhaps Uffington was as much in decline as so many of the systems he had passed through seemed to be.
‘Why did you leave?’ Bracken had asked. And Boswell had told him, describing as best he could the urge he had felt to leave, though not mentioning that it was to Duncton that he had felt directed to come.
He even recited the text he had found hidden in the depths of the libraries, the indirect cause of his breaking his vows and departing for Duncton.
‘Seven Stillstones, seven Books made,
All, but one, have come to ground.
First, the Stone of Earth for living,
Second, Stone for Suffering mole;
Third of Fighting, born of bloodshed,
Fourth of Darkness, born in death;
Fifth for Healing, born through touching,
Sixth of pure Light, born of love.
Now we wait on
For the last Stone
Without which the circle gapes;
And the Seventh Lost and last Book,
By whose words we may be blessed.’
As Boswell was about to recite the second stanza, Bracken interrupted him.
‘What’s all that mean?’ he asked.
‘Well, it’s obvious, it’s saying that—’
