As Midsummer Night drew near, Hulver became more specific about the ritual. He had explained something about its meaning and purpose in the first few days; now he began to repeat the ritual itself. He would quote sections of the words, explaining what they meant and how they should be said. But he made no attempt to teach them formally to Bracken.
‘Words change in the speaking,’ he explained, ‘so I want you to know what they mean rather than what they are. Listen to the spirit that lies behind them, that’s what you most need to remember. Should the day come when you have to say the ritual yourself, then you’ll remember enough of what I’ve taught you. Most of the words are known by my friend Bindle, so he’ll tell them to you if you need to know.
‘But he doesn’t know the final blessing, the most important part of all. I tried to teach him but he wouldn’t listen; he said he couldn’t learn them because they were just words to him. It’s too late now—he didn’t come to the last Midsummer Night—frightened off by Mandrake, if you ask me. I haven’t seen him for moleyears now, literally moleyears. But he’s my oldest friend, is Bindle.’
Bracken sensed sadness in Hulver as he talked of his friend, the only time in their days together up on the hill that Hulver ever showed sadness.
But there was one part of the ritual Hulver did make Bracken learn—so much so that Bracken almost became sick of its constant repetition. By the end, the words had no meaning whatsoever, blurring themselves into the same meaningless syllables as the two lines from the food blessing had done when he repeated them too much. They were lines of the final blessing—the words that Bindle refused to learn. And he learned them by hearing Hulver gently repeat them again and again:
‘We bathe their paws in showers of dew,
We free their fur with wind from the west,
We bring them choice soil,
Sunlight in life.
We ask they be blessed
With a sevenfold blessing:
The grace of form
The grace of goodness
The grace of suffering
The grace of wisdom
The grace of true words
The grace of trust
The grace of whole-souled loveliness.
We bathe their paws in showers of light,
We free their souls with the talons of love,
We ask that they hear the silent Stone.
‘Repeat, repeat,’ Hulver would command Bracken. ‘The rest you can learn when the time is ripe, but these words I want to hear you say until they are part of you. You need not understand them yet—indeed, they will change their meaning with the passage of time—but you must know them.’ So Bracken repeated them, whispering as the sun rose, saying them into the wind from the void, whispering them into sleep.
Though he grew tired of repeating them, he learned to love the words he was taught, and he wondered where the moles who had first made them had gone. Why had they left the system?
They heard molesounds only once, carried on the wind and in vibration in the soil from the direction of the Stone. They waited silently for the sounds to come nearer, but they never did and they were left again in trembling peace.
Only when Midsummer Day itself came did Hulver tell Bracken his plan. ‘There is only one way to complete the ritual, and even that is risky and I have my doubts that it will work. It will demand great courage from you. It depends on my belief that they do not think I will come with another mole. If this is so, then, if you advance from the direction of the slopes, they will mistake you for me. You will come towards the clearing so that you are seen, run off and draw them away, so that I can move into the clearing from another direction. Then, with the Stone’s help, I can repeat the ritual.’
The old mole stopped, for that was his plan, all of it. Bracken didn’t like it—too simple, too much to go wrong. Supposing they didn’t all chase him; supposing they caught him? But though he racked his brain for a better plan, he could not find one: there were too many imponderables whichever course they took. So in the end, Hulver’s simple plan seemed the best.
As the afternoon fell away into evening, Bracken grew restless and hungry. Hulver had calmly fallen asleep, but Bracken was too nervous to do anything but toss and turn. Finally he went in search of worms and found six. He woke Hulver as dusk fell and laid his worms before him.
They wound and wriggled on the ground, extending their heads into a thin questing point to escape. Bracken made to stop them but Hulver said quietly, ‘Let them go. Eat yours, but let mine go.’
Then he blessed them gently and, snout on paws, watched his three worms make their slow escape.
It was too much for Bracken. ‘They took a long time to find,’ he complained. ‘If you don’t want them, I’ll eat them.’
‘Ah, I do want them,’ said Hulver, ‘but it is no longer important. I would rather those worms lived with my blessing than died without it.’
‘But I’ve only got three,’ said Bracken, ‘and there’s a lot to face up to this evening.’ He hated to see the worms he had worked hard to get disappearing before his eyes.
