When Celyn reached the name of Mandrake in his translation, Y Wrach sighed very slightly and seemed to mutter to herself, peering blindly at Boswell and then round at the rest of them in the burrow, seeming suddenly to find more strength in her body and to hold herself more and more erect. Her face bore the pride of a difficult promise fulfilled. She spoke a few words in Siabod which Celyn translated almost as she spoke them.
‘Alas, Boswell, that you are not a female, for then, perhaps, there would be less need of words. Tell me of Mandrake whom I saved on the mountain, tell me it all and I will tell you its truth.’
So Boswell began the tale, telling of Duncton and of all Mandrake did there. Telling of Rebecca and speaking of Rune, sometimes softly referring to Bracken for details that he did not know or could not remember having been told.
Until at last, in a voice as hushed as night-time snow, he told of the fight by the Stone and of the death of Mandrake.
There was a sigh from Y Wrach as he told of this and a shaking of her old lined head. Then Boswell continued, telling of the seventh Stillstone, of the death of Skeat, of the plague, and of all the things that had happened to bring them to Siabod. As he spoke, Bracken saw for the first time that, looked at in the way Boswell had told them, all these things were linked to Mandrake. But then he thought that in another way they were linked to Rebecca, or to Boswell, or to Uffington. And the Stone. Their story was all one.
There was a long silence before Y Wrach began in her own turn to speak. As she did so, she seemed to rear up and grow in size, the great slab of slate that formed one side of the burrow seeming to shrink behind her, a black backdrop to her grey and wrinkled form. She spoke in a singsong voice, different from the one she had first spoken in, and the words seemed to come not from her but through her, from a different generation of moles and from a mole who was young and speaking reluctantly through a body that had nearly done with life:
‘Hen wyf i, ni’th oddiweddaf…
Crai fy mryd rhag gofd haint…
Gorddyar adar; gwlyb naint.
Llewychyd lloer; oer dewaint.’
‘Ancient am I, and do not comprehend you…
I am wasted from painful disease…
Loud are birds; streams wet,
The moon shines; midnight is cold.’
The Siabod she spoke was more rhythmic and musical than that Bracken had first heard from Bran and the other moles down in the valley. And as Celyn’s translation began, her own words seemed to form a wonderful, melodic accompaniment to his own rendering of it, so that the sense came from him, but the power and poetry of sound came from her.
At first Bracken found it hard to follow what she meant, until he realised that he was not listening to a series of logical ideas or explanations of anything so much as to the outpouring of images and memories from the heart of a mole who had struggled with age for many long moleyears and whose life is better explained by the running of a stream than by the exposition of a scribemole. At the heart of all she said was her faith in Mandrake, or in the life force within him, whose power she believed would not have withered in the dull safety of burrows and tunnels, having survived the blizzard from which she saved him.
‘Mandrake, I knew your nature,
Like the rush of an eagle in estuaries were you.
Had I been fortunate you could have escaped,
But my misfortune was your life.
My heart was withered from longing.
The buzzard has plunged on the heath,
Your black fur lost in the slate
Of Siabod, or the hound’s howls,
Of Gelert, black as Llyn dur Arddu.
I am wasted, disease has seized me.
Mandrake, what part of you hears me?
For you are coming again
From the slate where you went,
Black among shadows. I hear you.
Wind tosses starry flowers,
Snow drips among green fern.
No more will the buzzard see me,
But I will come in a circle,
A gyre of triumph; bare like the hill,
No fur, no grass; weak talons, soft rock.
This leaf, the wind whips it away.
Alas for its fate,
Old, born this year.
Young, reborn next.
So will you come back,
So will I come back,
So will you know me,
So will I laugh at the black slate of Siabod,
Though my heart withered from longing
In this life that you left me,
And wind swept the last trees from the mountain.
So did I laugh in the blizzard that found you.
Lakes cold, their looks want warmth,
Ravens scatter in Castell y Gwynt,
Beak on the ice where your talon went,
Where the Stone’s silence warned you
And Tryfan stands still.
I am wasted with melancholy tonight
That I was not there with you,
Nor can ever be. Another will go
And you will come back.
Let the Stones see another
In Castell y Gwynt
Where the winds howl through cracks
But Tryfan stands still.’
