He reached them finally in December, climbing up past the Blowing Stone as he had once before and entering the tunnels at the top of the escarpment like a forgotten shadow.
But they remembered him and clustered about him, chattering with excitement, eager for his news. ‘Tell us! Tell us!’ they exclaimed, as he was led through the great holy tunnels to where the Holy Mole was. ‘Is Boswell safe?’ was all he wanted to know, but nomole seemed to hear him.
So, in great excitement and with an unaccustomed celebration in the Holy Burrows themselves, he found himself facing the Holy Mole himself, who was a mole he knew and remembered with love. It was Medlar, who had been in the Silent Burrows and who had come out on Skeat’s death and been made Holy Mole.
Medlar looked on him in silence and saw, without a word being spoken, how much the mole he had taught to fight had suffered, and learned as well. Not being a scribemole, Bracken did not know the traditional greetings and another scribemole there said the words for him:
‘Styn rix in thine herte!’
‘Staye thee hoi and soint,’ intoned Medlar.
‘Me desire wot we none,’ said Bracken’s proxy.
‘Blessed be thou and full of blisse,’ smiled Medlar into Bracken’s eyes.
They brought him food and made him rest before he began his tale, but when he did, he told it all quietly and with truth, as a warrior should, and they came to know that he had indeed fulfilled his promise to them. It was Medlar himself who raised the question uppermost in Bracken’s heart: ‘And Boswell, do you know what finally became of him?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bracken, ‘more than what I’ve said. I had hoped… I thought he might be here.’
The scribemoles listening fell silent, one or two muttered a prayer of blessing, and the Holy Burrow in which they crouched grew still.
‘He is,’ said Medlar softly. ‘He did come back and he told us of your courage in leading him so far. He told us how you must have faced Gelert the Hound after he had been injured. All of us here have prayed for you many times, Bracken, and hoped the day would come when you might return.’
‘But what happened to Boswell?’ whispered Bracken, for there was nothing else that mattered to him anymore.
‘Come,’ said Medlar, ‘I’ll show you. For though few moles have ever been where you will go, I know that it is right that you should see. If you were a scribemole I would simply tell you, but you are not, and there are things that some moles such as you had better see and accept than wonder about for the rest of their lives.’ Then he added very seriously: ‘But you must promise me, or the Stone itself, that you will say not one single word in the place where I shall take you.’
But before Bracken began to nod his head and say, ‘Of course,’ Medlar went on: ‘This may be your hardest trial, Bracken, harder than anything you have yet faced.’
So, full of awe and fear, Bracken followed Medlar beyond the Holy Burrows into a tunnel that went west for two molemiles until he was inside the holy place where he had once crept unasked and heard the secret song.
The tunnels led down to a place where the soil was almost white with chalk and there was the deepest silence he had ever heard. There were one or two novice scribemoles there, who moved about with great peace and grace and silence and seemed to protect the tunnels into which Medlar led him. Until, at last, there stretched before him a great chamber, on one side of which were a series of simple burrows, some unoccupied with open entrances and many long since sealed. But there was one whose seal was fresh.
Medlar pointed to this one, and Bracken understood that his Boswell was inside it and had come of his own accord to live in the Silent Burrows.
Silently Medlar led him into a smaller tunnel at the end of the chamber that led to other smaller burrows running behind the bigger ones, each of which had a tiny entrance, no bigger than a paw, where food was put so that the moles who had chosen to live in absolute silence might stay alive. Griefstricken, Bracken gazed at the little opening that was the only contact that his Boswell now had with life. Never, ever, had he felt so desolate.
He returned to the main chamber and stared at the bleak, sealed walls, aching to dash his talons against them and cry out to Boswell to tell him that he loved him and had wanted to see him, and hear his voice, and feel his gentle touch once more. To tell him that Rebecca was gone from him and there was nomole left now who loved him as she and Boswell had.
Unable to move, unable to talk, unable to tell Boswell that he was there so close, Bracken found that all he could do was to weep and say a bitter prayer that Boswell, at least, might find peace.
‘How do you know that he’s all right?’ asked Bracken when Medlar had led him back to the Holy Burrows.
