Duncton Wood Read Online Free PDF Page B

come when they must be driven out of Duncton altogether, for they have no rightful place here.”
    This put Mekkins, half marshender himself and an elder, into something of a difficulty, but he got round it with characteristic cunning by pretending to become Mandrake’s spy in the Marsh End camp and offering to bring back news of their doings – while still convincing them that he was their only hope with Mandrake and the other elders. But the position made him unhappy.
    Mandrake’s decision to isolate the marshenders was carefully thought out. He sensed early on that if there was going to be any opposition to him from any quarter, it would be from their grubby, muddy, dank little part of the wood – as he thought of it. As time went on, he could blame things on them – a spread of disease here, a shortage of worms there – and isolate them further.
    He was right, for marshenders, though frightened of Mandrake, were not as generally struck dumb by him as other moles were. It was true that the males had been too frightened to attack him when he visited them, but it was equally true that one of the females at the time had commented “Bloody load of cowards you lot were,” which spoke of a spirit of resistance that did not live elsewhere.
    One thing that made Mandrake even more unpopular was that he liked to keep his mates as his own. Not that he created a harem for himself, a string of females ready to do his bidding. Instead, having found a mate, he would fight and kill any male he found trying to consort with her, watching over each he had taken until their litters were born.
    The curious thing about it all was that the females he had mated with did not seem to mind. Long years after, they would remember the time they had lain in the power of Mandrake, the cruel, evil Mandrake, and a light would come to their spirits and a terrible excitement to their souls. For they knew (which others who never came near him never did) that beneath the murderous bloodlust of his mating lay a passion and love that cried out to be cherished.
    It seemed to possess him for only a moment when they mated, but it was of such tenderness that they could never forget it. For a moment in the wild darkness of a burrow filled with Mandrake’s menacing presence and ■ massive body, the same paw that maimed or killed a rival could caress as gently as a June wind and pass on the passion of a heart that ached to be loved. And sometimes in such moments Mandrake spoke out in Siabod, his own language, words of love that seemed addressed less to his mate than to all the creatures he had ever harmed.
    Yet he did not like his mates themselves to try to caress him or whisper back comfort. For then his love would be gone in an instant, replaced by contempt or terrible anger.
    What he did like, he told a group of henchmoles once when he was tired and nearing sleep and his stomach was full of food, “is the kind of female who has a spark of life in her and makes you feel proud to be a male. They make you want to kill and make life at the same time.”
    Sarah must have been one of those females with the spark of life in her that made Mandrake feel a male, for he guarded her for himself more than any other mate, and she was loyal to him. Her fur was fairer than most, in some lights almost a gentle gray, and though bigger than most females, she was graceful and slim. She came from an old respected mole family that held territory next
    to Barrow Vale itself and who, as one of the leading families in the system, had often produced elders in the past. Mandrake knew all this – his henchmole Rune told him everything – but it was not what attracted him to Sarah one summer’s day after his arrival in the system. It was the fact that she was one of the very few females still able to mate at the end of summer. He could tell it, as could other males, and he wanted her.
    Some say he killed the males in her home burrow to get her, others that Sarah prevented any