The ‘old’ wood was now a lost strange place, a secret place, where a mole like Comfrey could almost lose himself in wonder at the power of life over fire and nature’s burgeoning disregard of death. It was a world Rebecca also ventured into more and more as the summer advanced from July into August, and the magnificent waving pink-reds of the rosebay willowherb came out at last like sunrise against a morning sky. She called them fireflowers, though whenever she did Comfrey corrected her, because he liked to get the names precisely right.
Both of them left the old tunnels alone, occasionally burrowing new tunnels for food or shelter but steering well clear of the old ones. In any case, as the summer advanced, bracken and bramble began to grow once more, thick grass grew here and there, and ground ivy filled the spaces between, so that there was plenty of safe ground cover for a mole. On a hot day, when the sun shone bright and strong and a convectional breeze caught the few remaining full trees, a mole might almost think that he or she was back in the Duncton Wood of old, before the troubles.
August passed and September came, with warm, settled weather for its first two weeks, and not a mole in the Ancient System seemed to need Rebecca’s help. She spent long days alone, basking in the vegetation-covered warmth of the wood floor, listening to the last of the buzzing insects, watching the first of the dews and spiders come, relaxing from a summer of work and rebuilding.
At the same time, the system settled at last into its own patterns and rhythms as the excitement of the plague and the fire finally gave way to a new generation who knew them only as memories, and who grew tired of hearing those old tales told. The young who had been pups in spring now became adults, settling into their own territory in the wide and expansive Ancient System and putting their life into finding today’s food rather than talking about yesterday’s battles.
Bracken, too, became a memory, an especially romantic and dramatic one it is true, but a memory all the same. In the minds of the young, his leadership against Rune and Mandrake was more legend than contemporary history, and though many a youngster crouched by the Stone and gazed towards the west just as Bracken was said to have done, few could really believe he still existed, or could now come back.
Then the first rains of September came and only Rebecca remembered Bracken as he had been and believed he was still alive. Time after time she remembered Boswell’s final reassurance to her—‘I’ll look after him’—and she went to the Stone to pray that he might be given the strength to do so. So many long moleyears gone and she could barely remember what Bracken looked like… only his touch and caress and the protection of his words down beneath the Stone where the Stillstone had shone upon them.
Sometimes she fancied she sensed that he was out there far, far to the west where Uffington lay, until in the last wet week of September she lost that sense and found herself drawn uneasily towards the north, towards… oh, where was it? Then she found herself aching to understand what it was calling to her, sensing some terrible need far greater than the demands made on her by the Duncton moles and drawing her to a place she felt she knew and had once been shown, but which she could not remember. ‘Oh, give me the strength,’ she prayed, ‘give me the courage.’
Some say now that it was a sudden vicious autumn hailstorm that reminded her of the blizzard that Mandrake had once dragged her into on the pastures, when she was a pup. Others, that it was simply that special sense she had always had of where her healing was needed. Whatever it was, she knew that one day soon she must leave Duncton and seek out Siabod, where her father had come from. Oh, she remembered the blizzard now, and understood again the terrible cry from Mandrake she had heard, and which all her life with him she had never learned how to answer so that he could trust her love.
But the very absurdity of making such a journey, the inevitability of her dying on the way, was so great that for days she dared not even admit the possibility of doing it to herself.
‘W-w-what’s wrong, Rebecca?’ asked Comfrey one evening by the Stone. ‘W-what is it?’
His voice trembled with loss and fear for he knew, or could sense, that Rebecca was preparing to go away from Duncton Wood, just as Bracken and Boswell had done.
Slowly she told of the calling from Siabod she had had, and as she did so she felt again the grip of Mandrake’s talons on her back as he had turned her to face the blizzard.
‘How will you f-f-find it?’ trembled Comfrey, muttering miserably to himself.
‘The Stones of Siabod will guide and protect me, just as they gave protection to Mandrake for so long. I’ll follow the line between the Duncton Stone and where they stand, just as Bracken once found his way to the Nuneham Stone and back, and must have since found his way to Uffington. And beyond.’
