Before Bracken even wondered what Comfrey was doing there he asked, ‘Is she here? Is she all right?’
‘She’s g-g-got the plague,’ stuttered Comfrey. ‘She’s n-n- not very well.’
Rebecca was crouching in the same corner she had occupied when she had been so ill before. Her eyes were swollen but not yet closed, while her mouth hung loose to ease her breathing. Already the swellings were starting on her face and snout. By her head on the floor lay the white shiny bulb part of a plant, the flower of which Bracken had seen on the surface.
Comfrey stepped forward to Rebecca. ‘You’ve got to eat it,
R-Rebecca,’ he said to her softly, touching her face to draw her attention. ‘You’ve g-got to try.’
‘Rebecca,’ whispered Bracken. ‘It’s me, Bracken.’
She sighed and he saw that her eyes were running, though whether with tears or illness it was hard to say.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered almost inaudibly.
‘M-make her eat it,’ said Comfrey desperately to Bracken. ‘It will help her. I kn-kn-know it will.’
‘What is it?’ asked Bracken.
‘I got it from beyond the Eastside where there’s pasture near the marsh. It’s called meadow saffron by the Eastsiders, though it’s so rare that few of them have ever seen it. But I found it, and when I did I kn-knew it was for R-Rebecca. I knew it. I always kn-know when she n-needs help. It’s a special healing plant… I’ve often f-found plants when she needed them. But it’s always been for a m-mole she’s helping. I didn’t know it was for her.’ He sounded desperate and kept pushing the white flesh of the bulb at Rebecca’s mouth for her to take.
‘You mustn’t try to die,’ he said simply, almost scolding her. ‘It’ll take you longer to get better if you d-d-don’t eat it.’ Then he looked straight at Bracken as if reading his thoughts and said: ‘You don’t have to worry about her dying. She won’t.’ There was total faith in Comfrey’s words.
If Bracken had not been in such a place at such a time he would have sworn that he saw a glimmer of the starting of a smile on Rebecca’s plague-ridden face, or perhaps even a laugh.
‘Rebecca,’ he said urgently. ‘Rebecca…’ His voice changed almost to a command and he said, ‘You’re bloody going to eat this thing Comfrey’s got for you!’ With that he took the bulb himself, bit off a piece, chewed it lightly into a mush, and putting it on his paw, started feeding it to Rebecca. She couldn’t chew but she was able to take it piece by slow piece and swallow it, like a pup taking its first solid food.
As she did so, he too knew with absolute certainty that she was not going to die—or rather that Comfrey, for all his hesitation, had spoken with such total faith in a voice that Rebecca had heard, that she could not die.
‘Most of them die because they don’t eat anything and b-because they can’t breathe properly,’ said Comfrey matter-of-factly, now content to watch over Rebecca and Bracken as if they were one mole—and one who had given him a rather unnecessary scare. ‘Rose told me about meadow saffron in a rhyme she said once, b-b-but I didn’t know that “pestilence” meant plague. Then an Eastsider told me, so I knew.’
Bracken did not take much of this in, though much later Rebecca was to remember every word. The horror of the plague was that the mind stayed quite clear while the body would no longer obey it.
Perhaps Bracken sensed this, for he talked to her as if she could hear him, treating her as if she were the most precious thing in the world, as, indeed, she was. The ugliness as the plague swellings grew worse, the stench of the sores when they came, the abjection of the affliction… neither he nor Comfrey noticed or afterwards remembered. It was Rebecca they loved, and she was not a swelling or a sore but a mole who had tended so many and suffered so much, and whom, in their turn and in different ways, they now tended, each giving her something different from their own spirits. Comfrey’s certain knowledge that she would live was one strength; Bracken’s force of love was another.
Present with them in Curlew’s burrows was a third strength—the power of the prayers that Boswell spoke up at the Stone, so far away, thinking of them both, and of all the other moles of Duncton and the pastures whom his great love encompassed through the Stone.
Crouched in the darkness of that long night, when Rebecca lay so ill, perhaps sensing that she was, he whispered the prayers he had learned as a scribemole but never thought he would himself have the power to say. Though now, as he said them, they came as naturally as breathing, each one calling out through him the blessing of the silence of the Stone:
‘Power of the Stone come into thee
All of thee in quiet;
Power of the sun come into thee
A part of thee in warmth;
Power of the moon come into thee
A part of thee feel cool;
Power of the rain come into thee
A part of thee refreshed;
Power of death depart from thee
Taken by the Stone;
Power of life return to thee
Borrowed from the Stone;
Power of the Stone is with thee
For you are the Stone,
All of you the Stone.’
