Duncton Wood (83 page)

Boswell tried to defuse the situation by crouching down and beginning to explain why they were there by saying “We’ve come from Capel Garmon and are seeking to find Siabod and...” But it was no use. Bran foolishly darted forward, outraged at Bracken’s apparent ignoring of him, and dared to cuff Bracken lightly on the snout.

Bracken did not hesitate. With a backsweep of his right paw he knocked Bran off his paws, while with a forward thrust with his left he lunged his talons into the other mole’s shoulder and then swept him to the left with a powerful smack of his right paw. Then, facing the two big moles and rearing up before them, he said between angry gulps of breath: “Don’t any of you try
anything
like that again. Now, where’s Siabod?”

As he spoke, the answer soared high above him, behind the silent Siabod moles. Beyond the rim of the valley side the mist slowly cleared and rolled back out of the valley, revealing in the distance the cruel mass of a mountain whose shape was streaked with more and more snow the higher the eye traveled, between which rose steep masses of bare, black rock whose details were obscured by distance. Its size and impregnability seemed absolute. Angry gray clouds kissed at its highest peak, a sharp point that made a mole feel very small and distant.

“That’s Siabod,” spat Bran in a high, shaken voice.

“Good,” said Boswell quietly, “and now that we’ve found it and got to know each other’s strength, why don’t we find a nice safe burrow somewhere and we’ll try and explain why we’re here.”

“What’s your names, then?” asked one of the bigger moles.

“Bracken of Duncton,” said Bracken.

“Boswell of Uffington,” said Boswell, a little wearily because the mention of Uffington rarely failed to have an effect on other moles. It was one of the few systems every-mole seemed to have heard of. This time there was no exception.

“Why didn’t you say so before, mole?” said one of them after a long, respectful pause.

“Now
there’s
a fine thing!” said Bran, his crafty face cracking suddenly into what was for him a smile. “A mole from Uffington! An honor. A great honor.”

And the four of them clustered around Boswell and led him up the valley side, leaving Bracken to trail along behind, feeling quite forgotten and a little foolish for having been so aggressive.

   41  

“Y
OU
’
RE
never going to try to get to Castell y Gwynt!” exclaimed Bran after he and several other Siabod moles they met had heard their tale. There was a great shaking of heads and mutterings in Siabod, whose meaning was plain enough to Bracken: “insane,” “mad,” “crazy,” “foolish,” “idiots.” But behind it all there was awe as well.

“You’ll never do it, mole, you never will.”

“Have none of you ever tried?” asked Bracken.

Bran repeated the question in Siabod, because they found that most moles there spoke no mole at all. There was another shaking of heads and a sullen silence.

“One mole tried a long time ago, but he never came back,” said Bran. “You can’t, see? There is evil up there, there is dangers like no danger anymole has ever faced and lived through. There’s no food, for they say no worms live that high and there is Arthur the Hound of Siabod.” Arthur! Was that what Mandrake had muttered to himself and shouted in his threats at Bracken in the Ancient System? wondered Bracken.

Neither Bracken nor Boswell mentioned Mandrake in their account, principally because they feared that if they told the full story, it might invoke hostility on them. Bracken had, after all, been responsible for his death. But now....

“Do you know a Siabod mole called Mandrake?” asked Bracken slowly.

Bran looked startled, his mouth fell open, he looked nervously at the other moles, and one of them asked him to translate. When he did so there was rapid talk and looks of surprise.

“Well?” said Bracken.

“That’s a strange question, isn’t it?” said Bran carefully. “What makes you ask a question like that?”

Briefly Bracken told him. As he spoke Bran translated, but the moles never took their eyes off Bracken. The only bit that Bracken glossed over was how Mandrake had died.

“Tell them the truth,” urged Boswell.

But Bracken shook his head. “Too risky,” he said. “Later, perhaps.”

“Well, do you know him?” asked Bracken again. But before Bran could answer, or would, one of the older moles there came forward with such authority that they realised that while Bran was their spokesman, this mole was their leader. He had seen perhaps four Longest Nights and he was a little on the tubby side, though his face was lined and scraggy as the others’ were. He had intelligent eyes and a firm way with him that brought respect. He spoke rapidly to Bran in Siabod, while gesticulating at them both. Bran nodded rapidly and turned to them. “You’re to go with Celyn, see? There’s a mole he says you must meet.”

With Bran taking the rear, they were led from the surface tunnels in which they had been talking higher and higher up the valley and out onto the surface. They did not resist this move because they had so often had the experience of being met by guardmoles or scouts at the periphery of a system and then being interrogated before being led into its heart and they had taken it for granted that this was what was happening to them when they were initially led into the tunnels lower down the valley. They rarely found out much about whatever moles they had met during such preliminary talks, and no longer expected to. The excitement started once they were led, as they were being led now, into the real heart of the system.

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 smelled of marsh to deep tunnels in a soft and sticky dark soil filled with gray, flat flakes of rusty-looking slate. The system seemed to have no clear pattern to it, and frequently they broke out onto the surface into nearly open tunnels through rough grass or among 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 likable.

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 they found unexpectedly at its top beyond a stand of coniferous trees, the ground leveled 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-colored 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 it from below, its 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 tunnel’s 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, thin-faced 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 chumping 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 overly appreciative remarks about them to cover the slight sense of embarrassment he felt. Food up here, he was beginning to realize, 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-now on 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 afterward, 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 nightmare 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 no mole, to despise all moles and to fight like no Siabod mole has ever fought. And he grew to be enormous and powerful, like no mole 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 – which means 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 it’s 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. No mole 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 when he finally left her.”