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 of Cwmoer, past whatever it was there, staring down at him, wishing him ill and sending him weakness and Bracken strength.
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.’
