‘No. I mean, what’s a Stillstone?’
It had not occurred to Boswell that he didn’t know such a simple thing.
‘There are six of them—well, seven, according to this text—but the ones that are known are somewhere in the Holy Burrows where only the Holy Mole and the masters have seen them. They are stones that legend says contain the essence of the seven Holy Books, one stone for each book. I’ve never seen them myself, of course, but they say in Uffington that each one contains a kind of light, like the sun or moon only coloured, one for each Book. They—’
‘How big are they?’ interrupted Bracken. He almost whispered it, an extraordinary sense of being carried along on a great wind or flood overtaking him and stilling him to the ground.
‘Well, I’ve no idea, since the masters never spoke of them; indeed, it is forbidden to speak to the masters about them. But—well—scribemoles like a chat like anyone else.’
‘What are they for, exactly?’
‘It’s a good question, and one every newcomer to Uffington asks. The best answer is in the Book of Light, though I can’t remember it well enough to quote exactly.
But it explains that each Book has a stone so that by looking at it a reader of the Book may be reminded that truth lies not in scribed words but only in the heart that scribed them and the heart that reads them, just as the light lies inside the stone and not outside it.’
Bracken fell silent. He was thinking of the stone he and Rebecca had found in the Ancient System. He felt at once full of wonder and very frightened. Had it been a Stillstone? Was it the seventh Stillstone? He wished he could reach out and touch Rebecca now, just as he had then. He wished her paws were round him. He silently begged the Stone to keep her safe, and his paw, the one that had touched the stone, began to burn and ache. He looked at it, but there was nothing there.
‘Probably doesn’t make much sense,’ said Boswell, thinking his silence meant incomprehension.
‘No,’ said Bracken. ‘I was just thinking… I was wondering… well, what the “seventh stone” is, the last one, the one in that verse.’
‘The seventh stone is a Stillstone; it doesn’t have a name. But the last book, the seventh Book—ah! Well! That’s the question every scribemole in Uffington wants an answer to. Nomole knows—it is not written anywhere.’
Boswell fell silent, thinking. Then he said, ‘Of course, everymole has made guesses—the most popular being that it’s the Book of Love, but I don’t think that’s likely. For one thing, anymole who’s read the Book of Light knows that that’s the one about love, really, which the sacred text confirms; and anyway, love isn’t exactly an easy word to define, is it? It’s not absolute, like fighting or earth, if you see what I mean. No. It’s not love. The other idea in Uffington about the seventh stone is that it is simply the Book of the Stone. Makes sense in lots of ways.’
Bracken rubbed his paw, which was still itching. He had the impulse to scratch out the pattern from the stone on the burrow floor, but some deep instinct told him that much though he wanted to, he must give nomole any clue of what he and Rebecca had seen. It was something they had shared, for some reason he didn’t know, but it would be wrong to the Stone itself to talk about it.
He looked at Boswell and, just as Boswell had felt that his destiny was in some way tied to Bracken, so now in his own turn Bracken sensed that this strange Boswell, so full of information and knowledge, was a precious mole, a mole to protect; and he understood why the Stone had protected him from the certain death that surely went with his being crippled, and as he did so he saw, or felt he saw, that in some way the burden of protecting Boswell had passed to him.
As February passed into March and the heavy, bitter gloom of the past long weeks gave way to changeable cold winds and rain, with an odd hour or two of watery sun, Mullion grew increasingly restless.
He had kept very much to himself since they had arrived in the field, not out of any hostility but because the winter months are a time when Pasture moles lie still, not having the protection of a wood or its undergrowth overhead. But then, as the weather began to improve, he started burrowing at a shallower level, throwing up a new set of molehills in place of the ones he had created when they first came, and which had now been beaten down into muddy remnants of themselves by the weather.
Occasionally he came over for a chat—principally to try to satisfy his curiosity about Duncton Wood, in whose shadow he had lived through two Longest Nights. Bracken’s monosyllabic answers about it confirmed his belief that the Duncton moles were a silent, secretive lot, prone to keeping things to themselves—a theory he expounded to Boswell one day.
