Through the following January and early February, when the wood was at its bleakest, it seemed to her that almost everything was bleak, for she could never please her father. It was then that there occurred an incident about which she never told another mole until years, lifetimes, later and that deepened forever her relationship with Mandrake.
In mid-February the weather turned suddenly bitterly cold and hoarfrost delicately picked out the stalks and veins of the decaying leaves on the wood’s floor. While other moles slept and kept warm, or grumbled at the cold as they hurried to find food, Rebecca snouted about on the surface, awed by the chill beauty of the frostbound wood. Then the lightest of snowflakes began to fall, feathering down through the leafless black branches from a grey sky, settling for a second on the back of her paw before melting with her warmth. As she tried to catch them falling about her she seemed to dance with delight in the silent wood.
‘Like it, do you, girl? Think it’s fun?’
It was Mandrake on the surface behind her, interrupting her reverie, angry. She had done something wrong again but she had no idea what. He came closer, his heavy paws destroying the delicate patterns of frost on an oak leaf she had looked at moments before.
‘Think it’s pretty, don’t you?’
His voice was getting louder and she wanted to get away. ‘You think this snow’s just here for your special pleasure? Well, come with me…’
She wanted to run from him, to get away from his anger and his voice that was getting louder. She wanted the safety of Sarah. But looking up at his angry gaze she could not move a paw but in the direction in which he pointed—towards the pastures. But she didn’t want to go there.
‘Please can I go back to the home burrow?’
Mandrake cuffed her not once or twice but several times, so that her head stung and she found herself running tearfully before him towards the pastures, through a wood in which the snow that had once fallen delicate and light was beginning to swirl and whose trees were starting to strain before a blizzard.
She was cold and Mandrake was wild; her teeth chattered in fear. If she opened her mouth as she ran, to gain breath as Mandrake rushed her through the wood, the bitter wind seemed to want to blow her apart.
Then she was at the wood’s edge and forced by Mandrake to gaze out on to the pastures, whose grass was grey with a thin layer of snow over which more snow whined with the blizzard.
‘Still think it’s pretty, still think it’s something to dance to?’ roared Mandrake above the wind.
Then he pushed her out from the protection of the wood into the killer wind and her screams and sobs lost themselves in its wild bitterness, and her tears were part of the stinging blizzard snow. Until she was so far out from the wood that it was lost behind her in the storm and the only solid thing she could see was the dark shape of Mandrake himself, crouched like a black rock against the wind, snow swirling around him.
Mandrake seemed no longer interested in her, turning his attention instead to the blizzard and raising a paw against it as if searching for something beyond it that was threatening him and which he hated and would defy.
‘Thought you could kill me, you bastard; thought Mandrake would yield. Siabod, you’re nothing, your Stones are a nothing, Gelert is nothing, you…’ And then he began to roar and rage at the blizzard, his language changing into the harsh tongue of Siabod, whose words were like talon thrusts. He was no longer immobile rock but a moving mass of dark shadow and anger raging at the bitter wind and ignoring the harsh snow that flailed against his snout and mouth. But his roars began to get more high-pitched and wilted before the wind into what seemed the bleatings and mewings of a creature lost, and Rebecca’s fear was gone.
She wanted to reach out and take him to her, tell him he was safe, and so she shouted, ‘Mandrake! Mandrake!’ into the deafening wind. He turned to her and she saw that in his eyes, so menacing before, there was a terrible fear and a loss so great that she could only reach out to it…
He hit her as she came to him, the look of loss replaced again by anger, and then he turned her to the wind and snow and shouted into her above the sound of the blizzard, ‘This is what I faced, this is the force you face, and you, Rebecca, will never yield to it because you are part of me who knew Siabod once and defied its death…’ and she wanted to cry, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t it, it isn’t, it isn’t,’ but she was too young to know the words and the words only cried inside her and so she sobbed and struggled to get free. But she never forgot what she was unable to say, just as she never forgot the power of his grip as he forced her to face the blizzard wind. Nor could she forget the strangest thing—how safe she felt as he held her there.
