‘Dywedwch wrthyf sut un ydi Rebecca!’ she said softly.
Bracken looked over to Celyn for a translation.
‘She says “Tell me what Rebecca is like”,’ he said.
Bracken looked at Y Wrach and wondered what he should say, what he could say. She was like… she was like…
‘She is full of love and her fur is thick and glossy grey. She is big for a female but graceful as a rush in the wind. Her laughter is like sunshine. Life flows through her and she is powerful with it, and moles are afraid of the life she has but they come to her because they need it… ’ He trailed off into silence and Celyn’s soft translation came to an end soon after and there was silence among them.
Bracken wondered at what he had said, because he had never thought those thoughts before about Rebecca. Was he afraid of her himself? Was it simply the life she had that he wanted?
He wanted to carry on speaking to Y Wrach but felt embarrassed with Celyn and Bran and Boswell there, and uncertain of his feelings. He tried to think himself back to the Stillstone with Rebecca, but it seemed too far away, so long ago, that it had happened to another mole. He wanted to cry. He wanted to sigh. He wanted Y Wrach to hold him. He wanted Rebecca.
‘I love her,’ he mumbled, and Celyn repeated the words in Siabod. Y Wrach smiled and then looked a little fierce and then said something to him.
‘She says she knows you love Mandrake’s child Rebecca,’ said Celyn, ‘and that one day you may know it too.’
Then Y Wrach began speaking again, though not in the chant she had used before.
‘I did not want him to go, and warned him against it,’ repeated Celyn, once more translating her words, ‘but you who never saw him then, nor ever watched him grow, can perhaps not understand the power that he had. The sky and the wind were in his fur, and though black clouds raced there, the sun lit its way as well. He had a power of life before which I saw that sad and empty Siabod, the system that you call one of the seven great systems, was but the carcass of a crow dashed against slate cliffs by a cold wind.
‘They grew angry that I would not let him see the Stone crushed between the dead talons of their rituals or join their hopeless song. I told him that the Stone soars on Castell y Gwynt, not in these slated, wormless tunnels now fittingly punished by plague.
‘But he grew to hate me as he hated them, and sought to mock us all by going there. Yet I knew that even Gelert, Hound of Siabod, could not rob him of his life; none could or ever will.’
‘But he’s dead now,’ said Boswell softly, Celyn saying the words back to her.
She shook her head and laughed, her first laugh among them, a laugh as stunted but strong as hillside gorse.
‘You have things to learn, Boswell. And you,’ she turned unerringly towards Bracken and raised an ancient paw at him. ‘You have things to learn, and things you must do, you who say you love Mandrake’s child.’ She came forward slowly to Bracken and touched him, and this time her touch was like a warm, rippling breeze on his fur and he knew that she knew all that was inside him.
‘You may have to lose her, Bracken of Duncton, before you find her. Just like I lost my Mandrake. And found him.’
With this final mystery, which threw only fear into Bracken’s heart, she fell silent and Celyn signalled that they should leave her.
They saw her only once more, two days later, when she led them to the end of her tunnels, to the edge of a massive drop down into the quarried cliffs that, in the distance, edged the precipitous slopes up towards Siabod.
She snouted blindly over this precipice for some time before saying, ‘The way on to Moel Siabod lies through there by the cliffs of Cwm-oer. Beyond it, though nomole now knows them, stand the Stones you seek, and Tryfan, which you will never reach.’ She waved a paw over the slopes to her right. ‘Over there, as I remember too well, is a way back from these depths, but nomole may climb it—only tumble down.’
The ground she pointed over was rough rock, with a few fragments of starved vegetation—frail parsley fern and battered bilberry—that rose steeply along the edge of the quarry and in the distance met its far heights.
‘Up there, in a blizzard, was Mandrake born and there did I find him: a place for herring gull or crow or the dance of a fritillary in summer, but not for mole.’
She turned back to the grim depths of slate below them, which rose far into the distance in a jumble of massed rock fragments and forgotten ruins.
‘That is where Gelert lives and where your path lies.’ She turned away, muttering finally to herself the words she had said before: ‘Hen wyf i, ni’th oddiweddaf.’
Bracken looked up at Siabod and then back down into the place he would soon have to go to reach it, feeling that if she did not understand, what hope had he?
Chapter Forty-Two
Bracken and Boswell crouched on the threshold of Cwmoer with the warnings of the Siabod moles in their ears and shadows in their hearts. A sleepy snow had fallen in the night, layering the fragmented black rocks that lined its gaping valley walls with a thin wet whiteness that only added to the bleakness of the place.
Only Celyn had come with them, for though Bran had guided them back down the valley, he had refused to come anywhere near Cwmoer, hurrying away from them long before they reached it with barely a word of farewell, as if staying too long would bring upon him the same doom that would surely soon fall upon them.
But Celyn took them on along a route he had travelled for a dare as a pup, though he did not know its final stages, for the wind from the cwm had been so chillingly vicious then that he had not got that far. Now, however, he took them on as far as the rocky turning that revealed the start of Cwmoer.
There he stopped, and before leaving them wished them well and gave them one last piece of advice, born of his own long experience on the gentler slopes of Siabod on its eastern side.
‘You will probably find this place even more worm-scarce than those parts of Moel Siabod you have already seen. Many a mole has starved to death out on the soggy peat seeking food—or has been caught out in the open by buzzards or ravens, kestrel or merlin. Up here the streams often shelter food, so follow them if you’re in doubt, however unpromising they may seem. There’s plants, too, that like the soil that worms go for, but you’ll not know most of them. Do you get orchids on the soil you come from—on what you call chalk?’ Boswell nodded, the memory of the delicate, curling orchids of the chalk seeming a distant, unattainable dream up here.
‘Then watch out for one that’s purple and in flower now. And starry saxifrage which Y Wrach mentioned, and which you saw coming here—you’ll find that near worms and grubs. And sorrel—do you know that?’
This time it was Bracken who nodded, for they had fed near sorrel many, many times in the last few moleyears, always a few worms near sorrel!
‘There’s one that grows up here in the worm-full soils, only a bit different from the one you see in the valley—it’s got heart-shaped leaves, but its scent is much the same. It won’t be blooming yet, but watch out for its leaves; they’ll guide you to food.’
He left them with a blessing in Siabod, disappearing back down the rough grass over which they had finally had to come, for the tunnels petered out some way before Cwmoer. They did not move for a while, preferring to stay in the safety of the clump of matgrass in which they were crouching while they worked out what to do.
To their left they could hear and smell the rush of a mountain stream whose noise and heavy splashing suggested that it was the one that took in all the many streamlets that raced and wound their secret ways down the sides of the cwm valley, even fuller now from the fall of snow overnight. A little way up the slope above them, to their right, the grass came to an abrupt stop where the final spewing of a steep and massive slate tip covered it. Not a plant grew on its uninviting face, which rose starkly towards the sky, hiding the base of the great buttress of rock that rose behind and far above it.