Duncton Wood by William Horwood
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!’
She cried out the words into the wind, spitting them down towards Gelert, drowning his howls as they sought a way out
* * *
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.
Massive and dangerous though he was, she knew he would never harm her for she was not afraid of him, as Mandrake was not afraid. How can a mole be afraid of a hound who carries such loss and craving as he did? And perhaps he sensed that she was of Mandrake, the monster mole, and that all of them were monsters who had a power that made him tremble. So he watched over her, running forward impatiently, and back to where she was struggling forward, then on again, urging her to come to where those other moles were waiting.
But if she was slow, how could he know that she was with litter? Nomole now knows or will ever know which mole was her mate. Though why she took him is obvious enough because it was spring and mating time, and had not Rebecca suffered enough litterless days
Her pregnancy was nearing its term when Gelert found her and perhaps she would have let him carry her, as the ballads would have us believe, if she had not been thinking of her young. There are some things about which the histories of Uffington are silent.
Did she sense that it was to Bracken and Boswell that Gelert was leading her? Did she hear Bracken’s call? Or did her instinct go even deeper and make her sense, as she passed up the shadowy paths of Cwmoer, that above the rock faces an ancient female was watching blindly, sensing that she was there, and then singing a cracked song into the wind in old Siabod, whose words spoke of Mandrake’s return and wove tears into triumph?
* * *
Death and life, suffering and triumph are all one, they are all one, and disease or health, they matter not. ‘They are all one’ was the theme of despair behind the jumble of suffering thoughts that overtook Boswell in the dreadful days following Gelert’s departure.
While Bracken, between searching for food and forcing Boswell to eat what he could, tried to say no, no, no, no in so many different ways and so to halt the slide into despair and death towards which Boswell’s thoughts seemed to be leading him.
There is an intimacy between moles in a death burrow when one mole lies dying and another uselessly watches every shiver of pain, every weak smile of bravery, every shaking of fear, every sliding into puppish cries and sees the blood and the vomit and the messing that accompanies the evaporation of life. An intimacy and a secretiveness which afterwards make the healthy one forget what he saw and heard and smelt. Just as a mother forgets the mess her pup once caused, so does a mole who watches a loved one near death not feel disgust at the ugliness that goes with a body’s decline.