Behind her, the wood murmured with birdsound. The morning was warm and they had talked enough. Two magpies played at the wood’s edge, chuckling to each other. One took off from the shadows into the sun out across the pastures below them, and then its mate followed, their flight swift and direct, as if each second of life was precious and not one should be wasted.
With a laugh and a tumble, Stonecrop was suddenly gone, back to the tunnel, ‘because it’s time I found more to eat and you two found yourselves a burrow. I’ll remember not to tell anymole, Cairn; you don’t want gossip!’
Rebecca ran after him, rough-tumbling her farewell to him and feeling suddenly his solid strength. Cairn had a lightness of spirit and a grace that Stonecrop lacked, and yet she felt, as she pushed at Stonecrop and she seemed to make no impression on him, that there was only one other mole who had felt so solid and strong, and that was Mandrake, but his strength was corrupted while Stonecrop’s was pure.
Stonecrop turned and looked down at her. His gaze was very direct. ‘Take care of him, Rebecca, because I love him,’ he said simply, his voice strong as roots.
Cairn watched them both, wanting and yet not wanting his brother to go. Rebecca turned back to him away from Stonecrop, whose sudden sombre solidity had frightened her just a little, and made her want to run even more with the lightness of Cairn, which seemed to match the day so well.
They mock-fought and play-scratched their way to the wood, twisting and turning their snouts into each other, fur mingling with fur; now Rebecca leading, and now Cairn. She loved the way his shoulder bore down on hers because he was so powerful and big, and she loved the lightness of his spirit mingling with the powerful desire that lay behind the stronger and stronger way he touched her and pushed against her.
They ran from the warmth of the middle of the day to the warmth of her tunnel, down and then along into the buried darkness of its burrow.
He snouted her deliciously so that she sighed and gasped and cried out with pleasure, while his breathing became heavier and he moaned into her and his talons rough-scratched her back as she surrendered to his pulling of her this way and that and he gave himself to her rounder, deeper warmth and softer caresses.
Where she had been tensely expectant with Rune, she was gently relaxed with Cairn. First one flank was hard against hers, then another, then his paws and talons up her back and his belly sliding over her fur, higher and bigger and his scent all around her and his talons softly into her shoulders and neck and his snout down towards hers from above, but most of all his flanks behind, over and between; as his paws possessed her in front his flanks possessed her from behind, and they were both together, his talons her exquisite pain, his breathing her sighs, his fur her fur, her warmth his heat, her softness his joy, her depths his light, his power her power, and their power her light.
‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ whispered Cairn, her body as big and warm to him as a home burrow, his body as strong and safe to her as a whole system. Their words of love like no other words either had spoken before, each one a sigh of happiness. Two innocent moles in the darkness of a burrow, whose mating is the joy in the colour of a wild flower, or the changing light of sun on dappled water.
‘Rebecca, Rebecca,’ sighed Cairn.
‘Cairn, oh, Cairn,’ she echoed in reply as they shifted caressingly into each other’s paws and fur and their bodies were full of the content of satisfied surrender.
Evil. It snouts out good as a stinking hellebore finds out the sun in the very darkest part of the wood where it grows.
Evil. It hides in the shadows near which innocents play in the light, taking a thousand forms, some as hideous as disease and most as subtle as snakes.
Evil. No better name for Rune, who could sniff out the scent of goodness and convert it to the stench of corrupted innocence.
Rune. He snouted out with dark knowledge that somewhere, away in the Westside, there was something pure and good to get his bleak talons into, something to do with Rebecca, who had left Barrow Vale before he came back from Hulver’s tunnels and who had not returned to her own tunnels, according to the henchmole he had sent there to see. So Rune set off for the Westside.
How did he know? Who can say why shadows pass their way? Except that a mole like Rune can always stick out a talon and find trouble—for a mole like him is trouble.
So secretly and like a shadow Rune left Barrow Vale and set off for the Westside, snout poking into tunnel after tunnel and burrow after burrow, not knowing exactly what he sought but knowing he would find it.
