Cairn turned with great difficulty to Bracken and the bewilderment in his voice was replaced by real pride as he said, ‘She was my first mate.’ Bracken hardly dared draw breath for the frailty he now saw in the once-powerful mole beside him. ‘She was my only mate,’ he said softly.
‘Then Mandrake came and just took it away. Him and that Rune mole. I could have killed him before.’ There was a long silence that Bracken did not try to break. Finally Cairn found the strength to go on: ‘He’s killed me. If Stonecrop had been there we would have killed them both. He’s my brother. He can fight like no other mole in the pastures. Why does a mole like Mandrake come? Why me?’
‘Why him,’ Bracken wondered. Why him? At that moment he could have wished almost any other mole to be suffering in Cairn’s place, himself included. Why him?
‘Why not me?’ Bracken muttered to himself, not realising that he too had suffered and might yet suffer much, much more.
‘I don’t know the answer to anything,’ said Bracken, ‘at least to anything like that.’
Cairn suddenly began to tremble violently and when Bracken put a paw on his back to comfort and still him, he found the fur was wet with cold sweat. The blood of the wounds on his face and back had congealed, though a trickle of fresh blood still flowed down from the wounds at his back haunches; fresh blood from the wound on his back had trickled between the two moles and hardened their fur together.
The evening was near enough for the air to have started to cool, but far enough for the sky still to be light.
‘Have you the strength to move?’ Bracken asked. ‘I could help you across the pastures to one of your tunnels and perhaps somemole could try to find Rose the Healer.’ It was a brave suggestion, for if Pasture moles had found Bracken with Cairn in this condition they would have killed him first and asked questions afterwards.
But Cairn shook his head and settled even further into the thick grass, leaning his weight more against Bracken’s body.
‘It’s a good spot, this,’ he whispered. ‘You chose well. One half of me in the wood where I mated, the other half in the pastures where I lived.’
There was a very long silence between them, then Cairn said: ‘There’s so much, Bracken, so much more to it than I thought. Well, I didn’t think before now. But you’ll have time to find it.’
Bracken heard the first stirrings of the evening wind in the beech trees above them. A few autumn leaves drifted leisurely down, bouncing somewhere above and behind them against the branches through which they fell. There was the sudden flap of a wood pigeon somewhere along the wood’s edge below them. High above there was the soaring trilling of a skylark, sometimes strong, sometimes distant, dropping and rising against the wind in the sky. The sun, which had not really shone all afternoon, was dropping below the great mauve bank of cloud that had hidden it and was now pale and a little watery because far off, over where it hung in the sky, there had been rain. For a few minutes its rays below the cloud were light and golden, but as it sank further and further, they began to redden, and the bank of cloud it had left behind changed from mauve to a magnificent purple that faded into deep pink at the edges.
‘Find what?’ wondered Bracken. What was it Cairn had seen that had the power to put peace into his body, despite his wounds and agony? Bracken felt lonely suddenly, even though he had never ever been so close to anymole as he was now to Cairn, flank to flank, haunch to haunch.
He wanted to help Cairn so much, but did not know what more he could do, not knowing that he had already done far more than most moles ever could. Cairn trembled violently again, and Bracken put his paw softly on his great hurt back, holding him still and warming him as best he could with his own body.
‘Tell me about Rebecca again,’ whispered Cairn, so softly that Bracken had to bend his head to hear, so that it almost touched Cairn’s. ‘Tell me everything that you know about her.’
Then, at last, Bracken sensed what he must say to Cairn. He must give to Cairn something that lay in his heart and spirit, rather than his mind. He must weave a tale of truth for Cairn about a mole he didn’t know but whose spirit, for one brief caressing moment, had touched his own. He must honour that memory and through it bring the peace and comfort that Cairn yearned for and which he could until then only have got from Rebecca and Stonecrop, two moles who loved him. At that fearful moment, Bracken must make the effort to love Cairn.
‘Rebecca is a giving mole,’ he began, ‘a wonderful mole—’ and his pawhold on Cairn grew softer yet infinitely stronger as he began to weave a picture of Rebecca, finding his words from the woods that surely she, too, must love; from the wild flowers that she danced by and whose scent she knew; weaving words from the breeze that had so often rustled his fur, as it must have rustled hers.
