‘He’s the clever one, he is,’ moles were inclined to whisper about him. ‘He’ll know when his opportunity comes. He’ll take over the system one day with his cunning ways and warning words.’
Two elders came from the north of the system, Mekkins and Dogwood. Mekkins was the nearest the system ever got to having a Marshender as an elder for his mother was from there, though he was raised in the neutral territory north of Barrow Vale. He spoke in the quick snouty way Marshenders used, and enjoyed combining direct talk with a mocking turn of phrase.
‘Yer not going to tell me yer serious about that daft idea, Burrhead me old lad?’ he’d say to one of the Westsider’s more ponderous ideas. ‘You’ll not get anymole I know ter go along with it. I’ll tell you that right now.’
His contacts with the Marshenders made him a useful elder, while his contacts with the other elders made him useful to the Marshenders. He was tough and quick, and likely to flare up for no reason at all, as it seemed to the victims of his temper. Dogwood, the other elder from the north, was his close friend and, as close friends often are, a complete contrast. He was plump and perennially cheerful. He had the reputation, envied throughout the system, of being the best wormfinder in Duncton Wood. ‘He’d find a worm in a snowflake if he had to’ was how Mekkins once put it.
The oldest of the elders was Hulver, who had seen six Longest Nights through—six!—and it made many a Duncton mole gasp to think of it. But he was old now, very old, and had not mated last spring. But he was still cheerful and sprightly, with a way of laughing at the end of a sentence that made a mole think that nothing he said was more than a joke. But wiser moles knew better, and listened well to what he had to say. In his lifetime he had seen the system decline and had often said so. He was one of the few who remembered the old rituals and sayings and he talked of the Stone as if it were a friend at his flank.
‘The less that he do say, the more then he do mean,’ his confidant, colleague, fellow elder and hearty protagonist, Bindle, was fond of saying. Bindle himself had seen four Longest Nights through and though he fought little and was one of the eccentrics who lived over on the poor Eastside near the chalk escarpment, he was never short of a mate.
He and Hulver would often meet and chatter in the wood, old moletalk about worms and past summers, and mates and litters the like of which you never saw today. ‘No, sir! The females just aren’t what they used to be!’
Between them, Hulver and Bindle had taken over the duties of conducting the rituals, principally the two treks up to the Stone at Midsummer and Longest Night. Only Hulver knew all the rituals, and he worried that no other mole knew them as he did. But somehow, Bindle himself never wanted to learn them, not the important parts, the parts that mattered. And the truth was that Hulver didn’t want to teach them to him. For to speak the rituals you had to know that power of life was in the Stone, and outside it, too. And you had to see that an acorn, a worm, an anemone in Barrow Vale, and even a swooping owl were finally the same, and that a mole’s strivings were nothing but the crack of an acorn husk in a deserted wood.
Hulver tried to explain to Bindle, but the words wouldn’t come right; and Bindle, who loved old Hulver as if he were his own father, could only smile and nod as he tried to explain, and wish he could please his old friend by understanding. But both knew he did not.
So there they were, six out of the seven elders: Burrhead, Rune, Mekkins, Dogwood, Bindle and Hulver. An unimpressive bunch when set against the elders of the past who had fought and bred in pride when the system was on top of the hill in every sense of the word. None of them, with the exception perhaps of gentle Hulver, remains even a whisper in the tunnels of memory.
But there was one more, the seventh. A mole whose shadow had the smell of evil, whose very name still seems a curse on the mole who utters it.
Many a mother has tried to still the tongues of youngster moles who ask in an excited, unknowing whisper, ‘Who was Mandrake? Tell us about him!’ Many a father has cuffed a son as he pretended to be ‘as strong as Mandrake was’. They felt his name was better left unsaid, his memory much better scratched with talons from the recesses of the mind.
But that is not the way to fight evil. Let its name be called. Let the fire of the sun do battle with its form until it lies dried out and colourless in the evening shade: no more than a dead beetle’s wing to be carried off on the midnight wind.
But there are books in Uffington that tell his tale and this must do the same. For he is the shadow against which the light of the love of Bracken and Rebecca should be set. But let compassion and burning love be in the heart of any that thinks, or speaks, or dreams, or reads the name of Mandrake.
