‘This ain’t the Pasture system, me old mate,’ said Mekkins. ‘They may do that there, but they ain’t taken over Duncton yet. I don’t want a couple of diseased strangers rotting in my tunnels, thank you very much.’
Just as Bracken was about to step in and settle the argument there was a commotion at the other end of the tunnel and the mole who had been sent to get Rebecca appeared.
‘She ain’t there,’ he said. ‘Gone to deal with something or other over in the far pastures she has, so some berk of a Pasture mole told me. They’re thick as lobworms, them lot. I left a message. Let’s hope he’s not too thick to pass it on.’
‘Right. We’ll wait till Rebecca gets back before deciding what to do with these two,’ said Bracken firmly. ‘Now, can we go somewhere more pleasant, Mekkins, and decide what we are going to do?’
Two hours later one of the moles who had been guarding the two strangers began to sweat. Six hours later he was dead. That same evening a mole came to tell Mekkins that two more who lived near the burrow where the two strangers had died had been taken ill—sweating, irritable, very thirsty and weakening by the hour.
Bracken, now increasingly worried and restless for something to do before Rebecca arrived, went to look at them. Rebecca came straight from the pastures on receiving the message and it was here that she found him. He was looking at their suffering and feeling the agony of helplessness that the healthy feel before extreme illness in another. If they heard him in the tunnel where they were crouched motionless, they did not show it, and they could not have seen or scented him, for the skin around their eyes was painfully swollen and their snouts were running with a foul-smelling mucus.
‘Bracken?’ It was Rebecca’s voice, and then her touch. ‘Bracken?’
He turned to her, his suffering for them so much a part of him that his gaze on her was direct and open. The last thing he was thinking about was Rebecca’s attitude to him. ‘Can you help them?’ he asked, but before the question was fully out he could see her answer. She looked tired and stricken.
‘There are many moles like this on the pastures over on the far side,’ she said. ‘Some moles came in from another system and must have brought the disease with them. One of them has been lucky and is not ill, but he says that most of the moles in his system died from the disease.’
‘The whole system?’ whispered Bracken.
Rebecca nodded. ‘Bracken, there was nothing I could do for them. The ones who died didn’t respond to anything I gave them. The one who lived—or has so far—didn’t survive because of anything I did.’
Mekkins suddenly joined them. ‘A couple of moles have come over from the Eastside and there’s death there now.’ He shrugged hopelessly. ‘You know what it is, don’t you? It’s the plague, and there’s not a blind thing anymole can do about it—not even you, Rebecca.’
‘But Rose might—’ she began.
‘She couldn’t,’ said Mekkins firmly, ‘so put that idea out of your head.’
Boswell joined them quietly as well, and all four looked at each other in a dawning horror. Each one had heard stories of the plague, though none knew the history of its, terror more than Boswell, who had read some of the Rolls of the Systems, whose records had been mysteriously interrupted two or three times in molehistory when most of the chroniclers themselves had suddenly died or disappeared in a waste of history that reflected plague and only a single account had remained to tell the story.
‘The shadow has fallen’ was the phrase with which one of the most famous Rolls of the Plague ended, written as it had been by the last survivor, a scribemole, in a system to the west, whose account was left unfinished before he himself had died. It was the same phrase that Boswell, or the moles that possessed him, had used by the wall in the Chamber of Dark Sound.
But Boswell, who knew so much, had nothing to say. Crouched together in the tunnel, the four began to feel the full weight of the waves of death that were rolling towards them, a flood far more powerful than the one Bracken and Boswell had faced in the drainage channel. Then, hour by hour, the reports began to stream in.
‘Five moles in the Eastside…’
‘A female in Barrow Vale itself…’
‘Three Westsiders, two males and a female…’
Panic and fear began to take over the system as each began to fear for his or her life. Everymole sought some remedy or escape and when moles found that Rebecca was among them, with Mekkins, they besieged and beseeched her for help—for a charm, for a prayer, for a herb that would save them. But the more they asked, the more impotent Rebecca felt, for there was nothing her normally healing words seemed able to do, and no herb that she knew seemed to help.
