But this time the journey was unusually long and little was said. The system’s peripheral tunnels were very variable, ranging from the crudest surface runs through an unpleasant, wormless peat soil that smelt of marsh to deep tunnels in a soft and sticky dark soil filled with grey, flat flakes of rusty-looking slate. The system seemed to have no clear pattern to it, and frequently they broke out on to the surface into nearly open tunnels through rough grass or amongst heather.
It was in one of these surface runs that they saw, off to their left, their first full view of Siabod, or Moel Siabod as Bran called it, speaking the words with a shiver in his voice that made him seem almost likeable.
Now that they could make out its mass unobstructed by the valley side, they saw that it was even more imposing than they had at first thought, with great falls of black rock, misty with distance, rising in ugly snow-covered steps to the summit itself.
Once above the valley and past the gnarled oaks which they unexpectedly found at its top beyond a stand of coniferous trees, the ground levelled out into an area of flat sheep pasture, green and relatively dry in some places, boggy and soppy with wet peat in others, all interspersed with rocky outcrops. They crossed this on the surface, keeping to a ground cover of heather and young bilberry which the surface runs had been cleverly designed to exploit to the full, until at last they plunged underground once more into tunnels that gave them their first sense of being in a real, complete system.
In all their explorations and journeys, they had never seen tunnels quite so bare and bleak as these were. The soil was good, considering the miserable, wet peats they had crossed over and the bleached-out, ash-coloured soils that had been encountered nearer the valley, for it was dark and well-structured and had the smell of food about it.
What was unusual was the way the tunnels exploited the great masses of smooth and jagged slate that thrust through the soil from below, their strata all at a steep angle to the level of the surface itself. Clearly, generations of moles had turned these rocks into natural routeways, burrowing tunnels which used the tilted slate as one massive wall on one side, with bare soil on the other. The effect was grim but powerful, for the tunnels’ roofs—though most were more pointed or lanceolate than flat—were unusually high, and this no doubt created the moist, dour echo that was deeper and more primitive than the echoes drier chalk created.
Celyn, the older mole who had been leading them, stopped suddenly and crouched down, saying nothing.
‘After we’ve eaten, we’ll rest here and sleep in burrows nearby,’ said Bran. ‘There’s still some way to go.’
Food was brought to them by yet another scraggy, thinfaced mole like Bran, who appeared with a bundle of worms that were mean and grubby little specimens by any normal standards.
Boswell ate them slowly, one by one, but Bracken, who was hungry, wolfed several down very fast before becoming aware that the champing and crunching of his eating was the only sound in the tunnels about them apart from the distant drip, drip, drip of water off the slate. He slowed down and made a few over-appreciative remarks about the worms to cover the slight sense of embarrassment he felt. Food up here, he was beginning to realise, was a lot harder to come by than in the lowlands. It was not to be eaten too fast.
Only after they had eaten did they feel free to ask some questions about the Siabod system and where they were being taken. Most of the talking was done in Siabod by the bigger, older mole, and then translated by Bran.
What they heard about Siabod was familiar enough. The system had been decimated by the plague, which came to it later than to other systems but took a massive toll. The few moles left tended to live in a narrow belt between where they had been interrogated and where they were now, where there was reasonably worm-full soil if a mole knew where to look.
There was no leader in the system because Siabod moles tended to follow the lead of a group of elders like Celyn. But he was at pains to explain that the system had been kept together during and since the plague by a mole he called Y Wrach—a guttural-sounding name that made the mole, whoever he was, sound like a curse.
‘Oh, it’s not a male, it’s a female. Her name is Gwynbach, but most of the moles here have a nickname and hers has always been Y Wrach.’
‘And what does that mean in mole?’ asked Bracken.
‘Depends how you pronounce it, see? One way it means “healer” or “spell-weaver”, another way it means “witch”. You’ll see why when you meet her.’
‘So we’re going to meet her, are we?’ said Bracken.
‘You’ll have to, now. Wouldn’t be right not to, you know. Not after what you said about Mandrake. You see, she’s the one who saved him… ’ And it was then that Bran began to tell them the tale that, long afterwards, Boswell was to scribe so carefully in the Rolls of the Systems and which begins with the now famous words, ‘Mandrake was born and survived in conditions beyond even the nightmares of the toughest Siabod moles…’
When he got to the end of the chilling story, which carried into the heart of Bracken as he remembered Mandrake’s despairing cry to Rebecca before he was killed by Stonecrop, Bran explained, ‘You see, Y Wrach was the female who found him. She liked wild places, she still does, and she heard him bleating up on the slopes where he had been born and carried him down by the scruff of his neck. They say there were those who wanted to kill him, being the last of a cursed litter, but she protected him and fought them off, dragging him about with her until he grew strong and then, when he did, teaching him to trust nomole, to despise all moles and to fight like no Siabod mole has ever fought. And he grew to be enormous and powerful, like nomole the system’s ever seen before or since. You know what they called them then, being such a funny-looking pair? The “fach” and the “fawr”—the “little” and the “big”.’
‘But how can she still be alive?’ asked Boswell. ‘She must be very old.’
‘She’s seen six Longest Nights through at least,’ said Bran, ‘and though her senses are failing now, her mind’s as sharp as a talon. Now the moles here bring her food, robbing themselves of it when its scarce, just as she did for that Mandrake.’
‘But what happened to him? How did he come to leave the system?’
‘He defied her. He was always like that, from the moment she found him, it’s said. Nomole ever understood why she looked after him, for there was never a word of love spoken by Y Wrach. Not to him or anymole. Nor between them. They fought from the start and it’s said that the scars on her snout came from him, made then he finally left her.’
‘What did he do?’ asked Bracken.
Bran turned to Celyn and consulted with him. The two talked rapidly in Siabod for a while until finally Bran came closer to Bracken and Boswell, speaking in a low voice as if he was going to be overheard by the passionless slate walls of the tunnel or the empty depths about them.
‘He set off for Castell y Gwynt.’ Bran paused to let the words sink in before adding slowly, ‘That’s what he did, see. That’s what he did.’
‘But why?’ asked Bracken. ‘Why?’
Bran ignored his question, his gaze fixed on some image in his imagination as he continued. ‘He must have gone up through Cwmoer because that’s the only route to the upper slopes, up into the desolate place where Gelert the Hound lives. It was thought, until you told your story, that he must have been torn to death. But he must somehow have got through and then gone on up to the wormless heights of Siabod and on to the holy Stones of Castell y Gwynt.’ Bran paused and there was silence among them.