‘No doubt about it, Boswell. Those Duncton moles are shifty and dangerous, like what we’ve always been told by our elders. They do strange rituals in that wood of theirs, and weave evil spells. They’d turn a mole into a root as soon as look at him. You wouldn’t get me within a long tunnel’s length of that place.’
Suddenly afraid that Boswell might pass all this on to Bracken who, though younger, had beaten him in a fight, he added: ‘Mind you, I’ve got nothing against Bracken—look at the way he got us out of that channel! I admire a mole with what my father used to call “resources”. Know what I mean?’
Boswell did and smiled. Mullion yawned and stretched himself.
‘We’ve got to have a talk about where we’re going. Can’t stay here much longer, that’s obvious. I mean, there’s nothing here, is there? Maybe a few moles about somewhere, but I haven’t seen signs of any yet. And anyway, there’s somewhere I want to go to…’
Boswell listened, as talking with Bracken had taught him to. Now that Mullion had fattened up, he had lost some of the aggression he had shown when they had first found themselves imprisoned together in the channel and Boswell got on well with him. He was a big mole, as Pasture moles generally were, but a little clumsy. Inclined to bump into entrances when he entered burrows and throw out molehill soil a bit too enthusiastically so that it fell in a mess. But he was good-natured with it—which made the objective he had in mind when he had first left the pastures slightly comic.
It seemed there was a story current in the pastures that there was a mole come from the north who now lived in the nearby system of Nuneham, a fighter who taught other moles to fight. Nomole knew his name, but the story was that he was not staying in the Nuneham system for long. Several Pasture moles had left to join him to see what they could learn, and Mullion, who had been undecided about whether to join them, had changed his mind and set off later on his own.
‘Then I came a cropper in the channel and thought that was it. But now, what with spring coming along soon and this being only a temporary place for the winter, I reckon it would be good to see if we could get to the Nuneham system.’
‘What you mean is that you want us to go with you because three is safer than one,’ said Boswell.
‘That’s about it,’ Mullion agreed. ‘Unless you’ve got a better suggestion.’
Boswell knew what he, personally, wanted to do, what he must do, but he also realised that Bracken was not yet ready even to think about returning to Duncton. At the same time, Mullion’s story interested him, for (as he explained to Bracken when Mullion had put his plan to him himself) there were many accounts of such wandering fighters in the records of Uffington. Indeed, the Book of Fighting had been written by one of them after he had taken his vows, among them the vow not to fight again.
‘Seems a funny thing to do then—write a book about it!’ declared Bracken.
‘The book is not about fighting but about how not to have the need to fight,’ said Boswell mysteriously.
‘Where is this place, Mullion?’
Mullion hesitated, then admitted he wasn’t sure. One of the elders in the system had told him to ‘keep his snout to the Stone’ but he was not sure what he meant and the explanation was not very clear.
‘Is there a Stone at the system of Nuneham, then?’ asked Bracken. Mullion did not know.
The Stone, always the Stone. Bracken remembered the pull of the Stone, the power on its line between Duncton and Uffington. He knew what the elder meant.
‘Do you know what direction it’s in?’ persisted Bracken.
‘The story was, and it came from the mole who came to the pastures and had been to this Nuneham place, that it was towards the north.’
‘If there is a Stone there, I may be able to snout it out,’ said Bracken, surprised at his own audacity. He left them in the burrow and went up on to the surface and out into the field, where he crouched in some grass by a stand of last summer’s thistles, wondering quite what he was doing. It was midmorning and cold but the grass in the field, unlike the thistles, was just beginning to have a bit of life in it again, while from up in one of the bushes among the trees where his tunnels were, the shrill song of a blackbird, powerful and urgent, came across the field.
Bracken thought of the Stone, the Duncton Stone, and looked automatically towards where he knew, without knowing, it must be. Its pull had been there all the time, only he had not bothered to think of it before. But he did not face it directly—it made him feel too desolate and lost to do that.
