Each minute that passed left Rebecca more miserable and lost. The sound of the rain seemed to confuse her and drain her of strength, and she had no idea what had happened, where her mate might be or whether or not he might be injured. Once she advanced out into the rain, towards the way they had gone, and called out, ‘Cairn, Cairn…’ but she could only hear rain and see wet foliage and undergrowth. Then she crept back into the burrow to wait a while longer.
At last she grew fearful for Cairn and this made her fearful for herself. For if he had been defeated, then Rune might come back and find her there. But surely her Cairn could not have been defeated? But perhaps he had been, and she should have tried…
So, for the first time in her life, questions and worries of life and death began to darken Rebecca’s mind. The truth was that so much had happened to her so happily in the previous twenty-four molehours that the sudden appearance out of a dark sky of Rune had shocked her into being confused and upset. To have had taken from her so violently the very thing she had been seeking for so many molemonths left her frightened and insecure and doubting the very impulse for life and joy that had brought her so trustingly over to the pastures in the first place. Now the deafening rain seemed the mirror of her torrent of fears.
Until at last, panicked by the threat of Rune’s possible return, she took to the surface again, though uncertain where to go. She turned at first towards the Westside but stopped for fear that Rune, if he was coming back, would come that way. She hesitated before the pastures, for without Cairn and Stonecrop to accompany her there, they seemed dangerous; the more so because a great herd of cattle, which had silently drifted up the pastures through the day, now stood silent and massive beyond the fence, their hooves dirty from the mud that was forming there.
Miserably she turned yet again, this time towards the slopes to the south—but what could she find there but more desolation and emptiness? Everywhere seemed hopeless now that her mate was gone.
Such a time may come suddenly to anymole, in any place, at any time. When suddenly the sun’s light is gone and all falls gloomy and dark and each drop of rain that thunders to the ground is a reminder that a mole is for ever alone, seeming for ever lost. But though the sun is gone, there is an unseen light that may seem far off and dim, and whose rays may touch the heart and not the mind. Yet such a light, vague and hard to make out though it is, may draw a mole forward far, far more powerfully than any sun.
And such a light drew her now, up along the wood’s edge on the western side of the slopes, higher and higher up the hill, where the oaks thinned away to tall beeches, which even in the rain gave the wood a lighter, loftier look. Each massive beech she passed seemed to will her on as it stood, solid and powerful, the green lichen covering its base almost luminescent in the shady light of a darkening afternoon that had taken over from a gloomy morning. She hardly knew where she was going, or that she was going, and when she wandered in her desolation from the path that led her higher and higher, the massive trees seemed to sway her back towards the light that perhaps they could see far more clearly than she could that day. Higher and higher, until the wood’s floor levelled off and she swung in from the pastures towards a great clearing that drummed with the sound of rain. At its centre stood a Stone, enwrapped by the roots of a tree. The Stone itself. And on the west side of the clearing, crouched so still that he might almost have been a part of the wood, was a mole, shiny with rain, smaller than Cairn, who faced away from her as he looked out through the trees to the west.
Bracken had been there for several molehours, from the time the rain had begun to fall, thick and wet. His few days with Rue in Hulver’s old tunnels, which might have left him feeling less lonely after his initial exploration of the Ancient System, had had the opposite effect. He had left her as the rain started, and trekked miserably up the hill towards the Stone, for no reason that he understood. Back to the Stone.
He had looked at it for a long time, feeling alternately resigned to its impassivity and angry with it just being there and ‘doing’ nothing. Then he was angry with Hulver, who had said that the Stone held everything, a promise which did not seem to be fulfilled now that Bracken was alone and desolate before it.
