She cried out the words into the wind, spitting them down towards Gelert, drowning his howls as they sought a way out of Cwmoer, past whatever it was there, staring down at him, wishing him ill and sending him weakness and Bracken strength.
The rain lightened but the storm grew wilder as Bracken slowly and heavily backed his way out from beneath the great slate into the evening light under Gelert’s great stare. The hound watched helplessly, his flanks trembling from cold, though not a cold that any other creature felt, as the mole came out, rump first, dragging the other mole with him.
It was contemptuous, just like the other one whose presence now seemed to swirl about again, around this mole. It turned and faced him. Faced him! From its mouth, caught by the loose skin of its neck, heavy in the wind, hung the other mole.
Bracken stood solid in the storm, his Boswell hanging from him like a pup, and gazed in pity and anger on great Gelert, such a power in him now that it needed no raised talons to tell out its force.
He had picked up Boswell because he loved him and was going to see him live just as he had wanted Cairn to live. Ten hounds of Siabod would not stop him seeing Boswell live. So he picked him up with gentle love, dragged him from the retreat where he was dying from cold and wet and lack of food and boldly placed him down between the massive paws of Gelert.
Then he began to speak out the words that came to him from the silent Stone and made him, Bracken, seem ever greater and more powerful to Gelert, bigger and bigger, as behind him another mole seemed to rear, its great head scarred with fights; and Gelert’s eyes widened in fear and he started to howl because his limbs refused to take him away from the horror as the mole began to speak words whose meaning he could not understand and which yet were clear as claws.
‘Gelert, Hound of Siabod, see the blood of Boswell you have spilled and freeze in fear before its flow. This is a holy mole and you are cursed for what you dared to do. You will help him live…’
It was the Stone that gave the words to Bracken, the Stone that made Gelert see the one thing that puts a fear into all creatures, however mighty the body that shields them—a mole that no longer fears death—and made him understand the intent of the words whose language he could not understand.
The mole needed help. Gelert turned suddenly and in three or four great bounds was up on the far edge of the hollow they were in and looking back down on Bracken, whining slightly to make him understand, as his mouth hung open and his breaths came out in miserable bursts while he waited for Bracken to follow.
Bracken looked up at him, then down at Boswell, then back up the steep slope to where Gelert stood. Wearily he bent down again and took up Boswell by the neck to carry him to wherever it was that the hound seemed to want to lead them.
Up towards Gelert he struggled, step by slow step, the roar of the stream to his right and the grey winds battering the rock faces behind and above him. Up and up he struggled, as once he had climbed the chalk escarpment of Uffington, each painful breath rasping out of his mouth between the folds of Boswell’s neck skin which his teeth hung on to. Sometimes Boswell’s crippled paw rocked limply against his struggling ones and sometimes, where Boswell’s back dragged on the slates, it left behind a smear of blood, red on the dead grey slates.
Then he was up to where Gelert stood towering above him, the hound’s great flanks breathing in and out as his head and face pointed this way and that across the flatter moor that ran beyond the quarry of Cwmoer. Until his gaze settled on a point where the stream flowed more gently, and he led Bracken across to it with infinite and troubled patience.
Bracken found himself at last by a gentler curve of the stream where saxifrage and heart-leaved sorrel grew, and he knew that they would find food and shelter there. He laid Boswell gently down and crouched, faltering now, by him, while the hound, his yellow eyes gazing down on them, wondered what they would want of him.
‘Rebecca.’ Boswell whispered the name so softly that Bracken had to lean close to him and hear it again. Then Bracken said to himself wearily, ‘Oh yes, Rebecca. She would help if she were here. She would know how to save Boswell.’
‘Tell him,’ whispered Boswell, gulping with the strain of speaking, ‘tell him to find her. Tell him to seek her out.’
‘Oh Boswell,’ said Bracken to himself, desolation coming over him. He got up from the hollow by the stream and stepped out into the wind. He ignored Gelert, who crouched waiting. He snouted into the wind and then southeastwards towards where Duncton Wood lay so many hundreds of molemiles away. The words formed long before the idea did, for the idea was absurd and words are easy: ‘Boswell needs you, Boswell needs you. Can you hear him calling? Give me the strength to heal him,’ and as he spoke the words to himself the spirit of them became stronger in him and he began to feel again the power of the Stone, and then the more specific force of the Duncton Stone, and then a wild Siabod calling off along the top of Cwmoer, wild and harsh in the wind, a call of triumph, and he knew that the impossible was possible. So he turned to great Gelert once more and said ‘Go and find our healer. Go and get Rebecca. Go away from Cwmoer and lead our healer here.’
Gelert reared and shook in fear, his yellow eyes casting about the moor and sky, his flanks trembling at whatever it was this mole, this monster mole, wanted him to do. ‘Go and get Rebecca’… the idea stormed about them. Perhaps Bracken did not ever speak its words. Perhaps their power simply showed itself.
Gelert’s paws scratched at the ground, his great head swayed back and forth as Bracken began to think again of Rebecca and the Stone and some deep sense of calling came to Gelert. He bent his head down to the mole he feared, and sniffed and snouted at him, taking in his scent, and then raised his head and looked across the moor away from Siabod and down into the valleys from where the pulling was coming, aching to find the thing they wanted.
‘Bring Rebecca here. Bring our healer here.’
And Gelert turned at last away from the hold of Cwmoer, down through its falls and rocks by the way these moles had come, away from their cries whose power in breaking him had brought him such strange distress. He bounded down the hills away from them until he found the scent again, and it showed him whatever it was they wanted him to bring back for them.
The Siabod moles heard him before they saw him, a great hound in maddened distress: running over the surface, howling and scratching here and there with his great paws. He surprised some on the surface and they thought themselves dead when his great snout and maw came down on them, sniffing at them. But then he dismissed them, for they were not the scent he was looking for.
The Siabod moles tell of it still, of how Gelert followed the scent of Bracken and Boswell down into the valley the way they had come, and of how they heard his howlings from near the river and then suddenly a thunderous barking, like a hound that has found its prey.
While Celyn himself, who heard the hound and later saw him clear as slate in the sun, made a song of it which told how Gelert came back from the valley carrying a mole that none of them had ever seen or scented before.
Rebecca never spoke of how Gelert found her, or much of her journey to Siabod, though she would have known that in a way Celyn’s song was true. For though Gelert never carried her, he did lead her up the valley and round to Cwmoer, watching over every inch of what to him must have seemed slow progress.