‘Say the blessing, Bracken,’ whispered Boswell—or did he shout it?—‘Rune has gone, the Stone has given its protection.’
‘The stone has given its protection to everymole but me,’ Bracken thought bitterly. ‘And Rebecca.’
He came forward, moving slightly to the right to stand to the west of the Stone, in the direction in which it tilted. He looked up at its highest point, the only part that still caught the moonlight clearly, and began to speak words he had learned so reluctantly, so long ago. First the prefatory chants that he did not even know he knew, and then finally, the last words of the blessing:
‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,
We free their fur with wind from the west,
We bring them… choice… soil,
Sunlight in… life …’
As his voice faltered and caught sobbing in his throat, Boswell’s voice joined him, its strength giving him strength and its faith giving him a kind of desolate hope. The voice of Boswell spoke from some ancient past that stretched back to a time before even the tunnels around them were made, and which went forward to a future that trembled now in his heart:
‘We ask they be blessed
With a sevenfold blessing:
The grace of form
The grace of goodness
The grace of suffering
The grace of wisdom
The grace of true words
The grace of trust
The grace of whole-souled loveliness.’
If Bracken’s voice faltered as he spoke the words none there noticed it, for Boswell’s voice mingled powerfully with it as, without knowing what he was doing, Bracken moved among the youngsters, touching them as his Rebecca might have done.
‘We bathe their paws in showers of light,
We free their souls with talons of love,
We ask that they hear the silent Stone.’
‘So Boswell knows the words as well,’ thought Bracken, vaguely. ‘Then who is Boswell?’ he asked himself.
‘The wood is safe,’ Bracken found himself saying to the Marsh End mothers, ‘so take your youngsters back to the Marsh End.’ Then, one by one, the moles left the Stone—the Pasture moles cutting off westwards, through the wood, Stonecrop leaving with them, as the Marshenders began their long trek home. There were henchmoles there, but Bracken saw they were no longer threatening, just ordinary moles who had lost their way. They began to cluster silently around Bracken, Mekkins and Boswell, looking to them for guidance, and Bracken noticed that beyond them other Duncton moles came from out of the shadows—Eastsiders, females from the Westside, moles from the slopes, all scraggy with age. Even some of the Marshenders stayed behind with Bracken. Then they began to whisper in a curious, almost primitive, chanting way, ‘Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale, Barrow Vale…’ and Bracken knew he must lead them there. He turned his back on the Stone to take up the power Mandrake had held, and then Rune, and that had destroyed both of them.
Among the moles who followed Bracken down, gleefully chanting ‘Barrow Vale’ and then ‘Bracken, Bracken,’ there was only one who stayed silent and yet who truly loved him. And that was Boswell, who followed limping behind, trying to keep up with them so that he could always keep Bracken in his sight.
Duncton Wood quickly settled down to summer and Bracken’s rule. There was some preliminary skirmishing with the remnants of the henchmoles, some of whom claimed that since Rune had not been killed and was nowhere to be found, there was no reason to think that he wasn’t coming back. But Bracken quickly put a stop to this with a coupled of swift and deadly fights against the toughest of the remaining henchmoles, which killed one and injured the other.
By the first week of July all was quiet and Bracken was in total command and the henchmoles were but a memory fading into the shadows from whence they had come, as Bracken’s days became taken up with the settlement of the usual disputes and wrangles that beset any system in the idle months of summer, when the only real interest lies in what territory the youngsters are winning for themselves.
The summer grew increasingly hot. Not the occasional heat of a couple of days that gives way rapidly to great lumbering cumulus clouds that sail across the face of the sun and remind moles to enjoy the sun while they may, but the heat that starts slowly and then simply stays, beating down day after day and making green leaves begin to look wan and desperate in its hazy stillness. The kind of heat that produces an endless palling stillness through which the sun seems almost to filter itself of good cheer, becoming instead faceless and impersonal. Rain, when it fell, was almost dry before it hit the ground, and by the third week of July it seemed to have been all used up.
