As Mekkins looked at her, free from the threat of Mandrake—with whom she had been the last time he saw her—he felt he had never seen such light radiance in a female before. He tried to say that he didn’t know about Hulver or Bracken, that perhaps they were up on the slopes, that he was old now and… but one by one the lies dried up before her simple gaze. Mekkins was clever, a survivor, one well used to telling half-truths to get his way. But, well, there are times when a mole wearies of the effort of not telling the truth, and he admired the stand Hulver had made too much to want to tell any lies about him. And he remembered the strong adult voice of that strange mole, Bracken, whom none of them had ever quite seen, who had cried out from the clearing those ritual words of the Midsummer blessing, words that had often come back to him: The grace of whole-souled loveliness… and now, before the radiant Rebecca he could tell nothing but the truth. As she gazed happily at him, with joy in her movements and life radiating from her, Mekkins felt a poverty in his own spirit about the murders by the Stone, and his snout lowered as his gaze fell to the wood’s floor.
Slowly, and with a low voice, he told her exactly what had happened on Midsummer Night—as far as he understood it. He ended finally with a description of the shock that had run through the elders when, en route back to Barrow Vale, they were stopped short by the voice of an unknown mole uttering the sevenfold blessing loud and clear through the wood after them. ‘The grace… the grace… ’ He could hear the words now.
‘What mole said them?’ asked Rebecca, who crouched by him, listening, still and sombre.
‘Bracken, Burrhead’s son, we think it must have been him.’ Rebecca’s heart seemed to stop when he said Bracken’s name, and every word Mekkins spoke seemed to be of great importance. Mekkins described the chase Bracken had led them on, speaking of the bravery of one so young as if it were a legend and not something that had happened only a short time before.
‘Who is he?’ whispered Rebecca, almost to herself. ‘Who is he?’
Mekkins repeated that he was Burrhead’s son, one of Aspen’s spring litter; but that was not what Rebecca meant. She explained that Hulver had said of Bracken that Rebecca the Healer had led them to one another. Now here he was again, the only mole in Duncton, so it seemed, who could lead Mandrake on a chase and get away with it.
‘Oh, but ’e didn’t!’ exclaimed Mekkins. ‘’E was killed. He ran clean over the chalk cliff edge trying to escape from Mandrake.’
The hot July sun was suddenly cold. Every insect in the wood froze to its spot. The evening breeze ceased. The air was loud with anger.
Rebecca had listened in silence to Mekkins’ miserable tale. She had heard him out in peace as he described the hunt for the most venerable mole in the system and his subsequent murder with Bindle. But now, with the news of Bracken’s death in her ears, she reared up in terrible anger and for the first time attacked, really attacked, another mole, and her talons descended on Mekkins. She tore at him as if he were evil itself. And as she did so, she began to weep, striking out blindly through her tears.
Mekkins fell back before her assault, unable to strike Rebecca, even though he was bigger and more powerful and could almost have killed her with one blow. Instead, he warded off her blows, or dodged the wilder ones, until her rage was spent and she was stooped and sobbing before him.
‘So much killing in the system,’ she cried. ‘He hates everymole and every living thing. I tried… to show him how much I loved him, but he can’t hear me…’ She sighed deeply and looked out into the evening.
Then, to Mekkins’ amazement, for he was just beginning to think he felt the depths of her sudden grief, she laughed in a tearful way: ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘this mole Bracken’s not dead. He couldn’t be, you see. He couldn’t be.’
She turned to Mekkins inquisitorially and said, ‘Did you see him dead?’ And Mekkins, who could not keep up with Rebecca’s changes of mood or understand them, had to admit that he hadn’t. But then, how could you see if a mole who had gone over a cliff was dead?
‘No, no,’ said Rebecca, ‘he’s not dead. Or if he is, he’s not.’
With this mysterious comment Rebecca fell silent, and Mekkins fell to thinking that the Duncton system was going mad.
‘Bloody ’ell,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’m going mad.’
He told himself this because he felt a peculiar sense of escape coming over him that his commonsense character could do nothing at all to hold back. It was as if after weeks of misery his body could again feel the space and trees about him, and his paws feel the firm soil he loved so much. And just as Rebecca had asked ‘Who is he?’ of Bracken, he now found himself asking ‘Who is she?’ of Rebecca.
