Bracken was gone before he could say more, running down through the system towards Mekkins’ tunnels, for that was where she would be. Running and running as if death were chasing at his paws. Running and running through the flea-ridden, death-smelling, stifling tunnels with sweat in his fur and terrible visions of a dying Rebecca mixing with pictures of a dead Mekkins in his mind, and prayers, more wild and desperate than any he had ever felt tempted to utter running through his head. ‘Keep her alive,’ he begged as he ran, ‘keep her alive. Spare Rebecca… take me. Take me,’ as he ran and ran.
She was not in Mekkins’ burrow, where only Mekkins’ body lay, hunched and sore-ridden like the rest. Oh, Mekkins! Mekkins!
Rebecca! He looked around wildly, not knowing where to go, trying to think, trying to recover enough to think. Rebecca! He ran from tunnel to tunnel, seeking a mole to guide him to where she might be, meeting mole after mole who looked at him stupidly when he asked, ‘Where’s Rebecca?’ for they had problems of their own and how would they know where she was?
Why hadn’t she come to him? Where would she have gone?
He began to run towards the pastures, thinking that she must have returned to her burrow, but only when he was nearly to the wood’s edge did he remember that he didn’t know exactly where she lived there—up near the higher pastures? Down where Rose once lived? And anyway… he paused in his running, sweat now shining in his fur and his breathing desperate with effort… it didn’t feel right. He felt as if he was running away from her. He turned south, towards the Stone on top of the hill, the evening air in the tunnels around him heavy with dry heat and asked aloud, ‘Where are you?’ He wanted to call for her and hear her answer. He wanted Rebecca.
Where would she have gone? He crouched down and closed his eyes, thinking himself into her mind as best he could and wondering where she might have gone. The Stone? Barrow Vale? Where else was there?
Only one place, and it came to him quietly as he himself had once gone there. Curlew’s burrow. The place she had gone when she had been so ill before and where, by the grace of the Stone, she had survived to take care of Comfrey. She must have gone there. He was so certain of it that a peace came to him as he got up and set off eastwards across the Marsh End to the most forsaken part of the system. By the grace of the Stone… he prayed to it subconsciously, feeling guilty at asking it to keep her alive when he had doubted it so much. ‘If you keep her alive,’ he bargained, ‘I’ll go to Uffington to give thanks. I’ll do anything… only keep her alive.’
It was a journey through death, for the Marshenders seemed even more stricken than the moles around Barrow Vale and he came across body after body, or poor creatures dragging themselves along in their final hours. Or others, who seemed to have gone insane, whispering in a kind of daze, ‘We have been saved from the plague, we had it, we had it, and we have been saved. Praise the Stone for saving us. Praise the Stone…’ And they reached out to touch Bracken as he passed them by, their faces and bodies still bearing the plague sores to show that it had, indeed, been their way, their eyes crazed by their strange deliverance.
Until at last he was into the eastern part of the Marsh End, whose surface was now hard and friable but still had something of the dank shadowiness that it had always held. He had not been here since he had been chased from it by Rune so long before when… he almost said to himself, ‘When the world was right’.
On and on he went, his heart quickening as he reached the end of the journey for what he might find when he got there.
It was night and he had been journeying one way or another since the early evening. ‘Only let her be alive,’ he whispered again as he reached the last few yards, ‘and nothing else will matter. I will go to Uffington and give thanks, whatever the cost.’
He found Curlew’s old tunnels with little difficulty, but stopped short outside the entrance because something lay there which he had not seen for a long time—a fresh flowerhead. Its petals were like a crocus, and a delicate mauve, its stalk white and vulnerable. Lying as it was among the aridness of drought-dusty, faded ivy that covered the tree trunk by the entrance and on top of rustling dry leaf mould, it presented a strange sight. He had never seen such a flower before and it made him pause and wonder at it before entering the tunnel carefully, snouting out ahead of him to see if life were there.
There was life all right, and plague. He could smell the terrible plague odour and hear movement of some kind. At least she was still alive. He approached noisily and called out ahead of himself, ‘Rebecca! Rebecca! It’s Bracken!’ and ran on down.
He was met at the entrance to Curlew’s old burrow not by Rebecca but by the stutter and stumble of Comfrey, whose thin snout peered out at him as he approached. ‘Hello, Br-Br-Bracken,’ he said.
