Rebecca wanted to run out past Cairn, to protect him from the terror that was coming and that such a mole as he could surely never imagine could exist. But if he could not have imagined it before, he knew it now, for even his bold young heart sickened at the smell of Mandrake’s rage and quailed before the sight of Mandrake’s mighty talons lunging suddenly through the murk of the tunnel and straight towards his snout. That would have been as far as most moles ever got with Mandrake. But not Cairn, for he was powerful and very quick and had fought enough times on his own account to know how to avoid the first lunges of a fight without becoming impaled upon the second.
Cairn did not even strike a blow before he retreated into the burrow and crouched, appalled by the sight he had seen approaching him as Mandrake’s smouldering size seemed to fill the tunnel.
Mandrake crouched for a moment in silence beyond the entrance, looking at them both, surprised at Cairn’s size. But though Cairn was bigger even than Burrhead, who was the biggest Duncton mole next to Mandrake, he was not as big as Mandrake himself.
Cairn snarled, his great shoulders flexed and ready, as Rebecca whispered urgently to him from the end of the burrow where his movement had forced her: ‘Run if you can, my love, for nomole has ever defeated him and none ever will. Oh, run, my Cairn!’
If Cairn had not already mated with Rebecca he would have fought to the death there and then, and died. But he had mated and their time was over, and more than anything else, more now even than Rebecca, he wanted to be back in the fresh air of the pastures, where he would not be surrounded by alien scents and evil moles.
‘If I escape,’ he said to Rebecca without looking at her, for his every sense was concentrated on the burrow entrance through which Mandrake was wondering how to pass without exposing his snout too much, ‘I will return and we will mate again.’ He spoke the words quite clearly so that Mandrake would hear them, for he hoped they would enrage Mandrake enough for him to move carelessly and give him the chance he needed to give Mandrake a wounding thrust with his talons.
Mandrake reacted by rearing up and plunging his talons at Cairn once more; he, instead of retreating, came viciously forward with his own talons, the two becoming locked in a bloody struggle at the entrance to the burrow.
When one or other of the two great males hit the side of the entrance, the whole burrow shook and earth flew, as Rebecca watched them, at first helpless and confused. As she did so, a powerful and unwanted excitement ran through her, a forbidden and obscene excitement that she tried to blot from her mind: the excitement of seeing the two huge males, both of whom she loved, fighting for her.
There was a momentary lull in the fight as Mandrake stepped back in preparation for a complete push forward into the burrow, and in the lull she could hear her Cairn’s desperate gasping of breath as his snout lowered from the enormous effort he had had to make to survive so far. It was this hopeless sound that made Rebecca act.
As Mandrake plunged forward into the burrow, she powered her way past Cairn, with her talons out for Mandrake and a cry of, ‘Run, Cairn, run!’ Mandrake moved to one side to avoid Rebecca, at the same time trying to land his talons on the suddenly rapidly moving Cairn, but he was too late, and Cairn was past him and out into the tunnel and running down towards the entrance to the surface.
Mandrake swung back through the entrance, knocking part of its lintel of solid earth flying, and managed to bring his talons with terrible force on to Cairn’s fleeing back. Cairn grunted with terrible pain but pulled himself away, leaving Mandrake’s talons hanging still for a moment in the middle of the tunnel, covered with his blood. Then he ran on, down the tunnel, the sound of Mandrake snarling and massive behind him. Then up desperately through the entrance, an instinctive memory of the trick Rune had tried to play before making him power his front paws ahead of him with talons splayed out, into the greying night.
But Rune was not to be caught a second time. He crouched to one side of the entrance and, as Cairn came out, plunged his talons with deadly accuracy towards the Pasture mole’s snout and face. One tore through the left side of the snout, another cut savagely into his left eye, in one terrible instant turning Cairn’s face into an open wound that, after no more than a second, began to pour blood.
At the same time, behind him in the tunnel, Mandrake brought down his talons a second time on Cairn, this time tearing his haunches and hind quarters and only failing to stop the fleeing Pasture mole dead in his tracks because Cairn’s initial thrust out of the tunnel had been so powerful.
