The slate was piled against another even bigger one, and it was to the shelter of this that Bracken now crawled, pulling the half-conscious Boswell with him. The hound lunged and thrust and barked about them, growling at his quarry, smelling the blood from Boswell’s wound, hungry for the living flesh.
Then, as suddenly as his attack had begun, he fell silent, crouching down by the pile of slates where the moles were hiding, head on one side, paws stretched forward as he tried his next and often successful ploy—to wait for them to make a dash for it.
As the silence started, Bracken dared to breathe and turned to Boswell, whose wound he saw was deep and serious.
‘Boswell! Can you hear me? Boswell! How much does it hurt?’ Boswell only moaned, his eyes closed, and a curtain of blood from the long wound running down his left flank and turning his fur into a shiny, congealing bog.
The hound above them, whose odour was now all about their retreat, next tried scrabbling at the ground by the slates, great claws pumping up and down as he tried to dig them out. But the ground was hard with sharp fragments of slate and they gave as good as they got from Gelert’s paws.
He sat down on his haunches once more and waited, pale eyes never leaving the slates, only a sullen twitch of his tail betraying the excited impatience he felt. He had sat like this before, for rabbit and weasel and vole, even for shrew. He had the patience to wait for mole.
The afternoon wore down into sullen gloomy skies as the same drift of weather that had brought wet snow the night before now carried thunderous rain towards the hills and mountain of Siabod. It came from the west in a great swath of lightning and noise, with a rolling of thunder and yellow, sudden light, into the darkest cwms or deeps of the dark mountains west of Siabod. Until, at last, it reached Siabod itself, and as rain fell upon its peaks, lightning picked out its jagged summit against the dark evening clouds. Then, with a crack and a roar and flickering flashes of light, the storm began to roar around the great deep of Cwmoer, flattening the wavelets on the lake with pelting rain, breaking up the snow on the sullen slates, turning the streams all around them into torrents.
Like the rocky bluffs that stuck out of the valley’s sides, Gelert’s head stayed motionless in the rain, water running through his rough, tawny fur and dripping off the blue-black skin that hung from his lower jaw. His eyes stayed fixed on the two slates where the moles were still hiding as a thin run of surface water began to slide under them.
Its cold wetness at first seeped under the slate, wetting Bracken’s belly as he tried unsuccessfully to move himself and the now unconscious Boswell out of its way. But soon water dripped and poured all around him, running through the cracks between the slates and along the impervious ground under them until everything was wet and cold.
But Bracken barely noticed it. Nor did he think very much now of the hound whose paws lay on the wet ground within sight from under the slate, waiting for their move. Bracken was thinking of Boswell. He had seen another mole die of an evening, up on Duncton Hill, and that one had not deserved such an end either. He loved Boswell. The Stone knew how much. Now his friend would need food and shelter, warmth and love if he were to survive, but here they lay trapped, denied everything. Bracken had crouched in another storm, too, when he had stared out across the vales that lay beneath Duncton Wood, wondering if one day he might go out among them as the moles of the Ancient System once had done. Now here he was.
As the storm crashed about him and the lightning showed on the wet ground around the slate, casting the shadow of Gelert into their retreat, such memories as these began to replace the fear Bracken had felt. He remembered being in the Chamber of Dark Sound with Mandrake coming towards him and starting the hum that had created the sound that seemed to confuse Mandrake and cause him to stumble and hesitate in the centre of the great chamber. He remembered, too, that great power that had come to him then, making his limbs feel bigger and his talons more and more powerful. And how Mandrake had stared over at him, afraid. Then the power had nearly overwhelmed him, for he was too young to know how to use it. Now he was older, stronger, and had learned something of the spirit of the warrior from Medlar.
Now something of the power Bracken had felt in different ways so many times before began to consolidate in him, tough as the slate that gave them protection. While Gelert, crouching in the storm, the rain pouring off him, let his tail fall still and shifted uncomfortably. Some deep instinct made him switch his gaze for a moment from the slates on the ground to the rain-swirled heights above him, searching for something he could not see.
There had been another mole here, the only other mole that had dared venture in his lifetime into Cwmoer. No good pretending he had forgotten, though many killings had assuaged the memory. A bigger, darker mole than either of these two, with talons as strong as a badger’s.
That mole had faced him as well and not run away. Its odour was the fiercest of any creature he had ever faced. Faced! Does a hound talk of facing a mole! In his nightmares he did, when he remembered the power in the mole who had faced him contemptuously somewhere among these slate tips. He knew where. Slowly he admitted the memory to his mind and saw again the great mole who had snarled back at him near this very spot, talons as ready to kill as his own, and had finally passed him dismissively by, turning its back contemptuously on him and ignoring his howls.
Gelert’s baleful eyes searched the great cliffs about him, feeling that something was there and was staring at him, wishing him ill and robbing him of his pleasure and will. He began to howl, while beneath the slate, Bracken began to move, stirring himself into the action which he knew he must take and which now no longer cast a single shadow of fear into his heart.
High up on the edge of the cwm, her blind eyes the colour of the rain-filled mist that swirled and raced there, Y Wrach crouched at the end of the tunnels with her snout to the depths below. She had been waiting, a lifetime of waiting, waiting for the sound that now came up to her from the black depths beneath: the lost and bewildered howling of Gelert the Hound of Siabod, carried up on the storming winds and signalling in some way she could not yet comprehend the return to her of Mandrake.
‘Gwyw calon rhag hiraetb,
Crai by myrd rhag lledfryd heno…’
she chanted.
‘My heart is withered from longing,
I am wasted from melancholy tonight,
But give me strength through this storm…
Come Mandrake, hear his howling,
Give of your spirit, hard as the slate,
Arc out your talons where buzzard floats.
The rocks are bare below… ’
Her voice was harsh, spittle ran from her cracked mouth, and now the sound of the Siabod she spoke was not musical but fierce, invoking for the mole who struggled in the cwm below the power he needed but which she could only partially give.
She felt the weight and waste of age upon her, but fought it off to pass down to Bracken what power she had, and more than that, to celebrate the trust she had that Mandrake was not dead and would come back.
She did not need eyes to see the struggle. She crouched, withered, fierce as hail, proud as the eye of an eagle. Rebecca, was that the name? ‘It does not matter; it does not matter that he’s dead, he’s coming back.’
She cried it out in Siabod, old Siabod, whose sounds are harsh and pity not the hound his cries. She shivered like a young female, she felt a tremble of life where any other mole would only have sensed a withered womb and seen the obscene-seeming twistings of an ancient female whose cries no longer even sound the words of the old ancestral tongues but slide, or rather scream, into the eternal sound of a frightened female giving birth again. ‘A second chance, and bastard Mandrake, you will come again and see the Stone whose light you saw before and never could forget, whatever darkness shadowed out its grace. You, come!’