‘You’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 muttering in Siabod, the meaning of which 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 nomole 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 danger 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 Gelert the Hound of Siabod.’ Gelert! Was that what Mandrake had muttered to himself and shouted in his threats to Bracken in the Ancient System? wondered Bracken.
Neither Bracken nor Boswell had 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 on to 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 smelt of marsh to deep tunnels in a soft and sticky dark soil filled with grey, flat flakes of rusty-looking slate. The system seemed to have no clear pattern to it, and frequently they broke out on to the surface into nearly open tunnels through rough grass or amongst 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 likeable.
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 which they unexpectedly found at its top beyond a stand of coniferous trees, the ground levelled 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.
