Duncton Quest (81 page)

“The Stone be with you, mole!” said Alder.

“And with you!” said Caradoc powerfully. The uncertain and timid mole they had met only days before stood proud now and purposeful. Such was Alder’s effect on moles he met and spoke to; such is a great leader’s way.

Terse and taciturn though Cwm was, they learnt much of Siabod’s recent history from him over the next three days of journeying.

The grikes had first come nearly a full cycle of seasons before, advancing up the valleys steadily. The first mistake the Siabod moles made was to ignore them completely, so they were able to entrench positions in adjacent valley systems where, apart from an occasional skirmish, they quietly got on with subverting the faith of the indigenous moles, and brutalising those few who resisted them.

It was only when a few brave vagrants appealed to Siabod for help that those moles came out of the high fastness of their tunnels and attacked the grikes. But it was piecemeal and without co-ordination and though some individual triumphs occurred, no progress was made in dislodging the aliens. Indeed, when summer came and the Siabod moles moved into their high tunnels and left their lower tunnels and the routes to the wormful valley of the Nantgwryd unattended, the grikes methodically took them over. It was this mistake which had now weakened the Siabod moles, for as winter came they had been unable to move back down to wormful soils and were stuck in the worm-poor high tunnels.

Even then the Siabod moles might have successfully fought back, for the grikes were spread thin and needed reinforcements. But once again, though the attacks were bold, they were sporadic and without co-ordination, so the moment was lost.

Cwm did not dwell on the disaffection and disarray that followed. Apart from the fact that many young, strong Siabod moles had died in the fighting, old moles died too from undernourishment, while others fled south to grimy Ffestiniog, a place of slate and gloom that saps a mole’s vitality and turns him in upon himself to wither and die young.

“So the stories we heard in the south of Siabod’s bold resistance were not quite true,” said Alder. “It was more that the grikes did not then have enough moles to risk striking to the very heart of Siabod and its fabled Stones?”

Cwm agreed that it was so. The summer had given them a brief respite, for they were able to take their young to the higher ground and at least recover some of their strength.

“But now the winter’s come again and the grikes are even stronger in our lower tunnels than before. Reinforcements have come and food is scarce and many moles among us feel the best course is to yield to the grikes and hope that a time may come when we can recover our pride and strength.”

“And you, Cwm, what do you feel?”

“I’ll fight the bastards to the death, see, and beyond that if I have to.”

“Are there many like you?”

“Enough.”

“Who is your leader?”

“I thought Caradoc would have told you that,” said Cwm. “His name is Glyder
*
. Don’t you know who he is, moles?”

*
Pronounced “Glidder”.

Alder and Marram shook their heads, and Cwm seemed surprised.

“But I thought....”

“Yes?” said Alder.

“Let him tell you for himself then!”

On the third day they dropped down into the valley to their left and crossed the Nantgwryd by a twofoot bridge. Every field they saw held evidence of grike occupation, but they were not observed as they ran silently behind Cwm through the lines of the grikes. To their right the ground rose sharply and Cwm explained that the Siabod mass lay that way.

“Even if the clouds lifted you’d not see it from here because the valley side rises so steep it obscures it. The main Siabod tunnels start above here, but as they’re occupied by grikes we’ll travel west along the river and take an unfamiliar route at the north end of the main system.”

The weather was still bad, the clouds persistently low, and the wind sharp and sleet-laced. Yet once they crossed the river and started climbing they were warm enough provided they kept moving, and though the ground was wet, Cwm knew it well and found good temporary burrows for them.

“It’ll get cold the moment we’re clear of the valley,” said Cwm, “so rest well tonight and eat well too, for there’ll be little enough to find from here on.”

They resumed their climb at dawn to a grey landscape and a distinctly colder wind, while the sky had that chilling luminescence that heralds snow. Below them the river they had crossed snaked blackly eastward among trees. Northward the cloud was lifting and they saw, for the first time, the heights that separate Siabod from the sea. Grey with the first snows, huge flanks of rock, wind-swept moorland of a kind neither had seen before. A place that is death to mole.

Here and there a peak rose higher than the rest.

“They are the Carneddau,” said Cwm, “unlived in by mole.”

Alder and Marram stared at those heights as the clouds drifted fast across them, revealing a sheer face here, a scree fall there and impassable ridges beyond.

“You think they’re frightening? You’ve not seen Siabod yet!” said Cwm with a laugh, and he turned to lead them out of the valley and on to the northern slopes of the system he was willing to die for.

It was the wind that hit them first, sweeping down from the mist-driven slopes above, and then the cold. But then, beyond all that, a sense of awesome imminence, a darkness to the mist as if it was solid and hard and rising to unseen rocky heights that made a mole peer up expectantly, and then up again.

They travelled through pine woodland, the soil dead and acid, and running with freezing stained water between tussocks of grass and roots. Above their heads the trees shifted in the wind uneasily. It was a place to make a mole shiver and move on. Soon they climbed out of that and went on a way that had the woodland to their left-paw side and a rushing stream to their right. Then the trees seemed to wither and fail and they pressed on upslope over desolate moor.

“It’s a wormless place for mole,” said Alder, as Marram looked about uncomfortably.

“There’s food if you know where to go, and tunnels higher up, the like of which you’ll not have seen before.”

“We said we’d not argue with you, and we won’t. But where’s this Glyder, and the other Siabod moles?”

“He’ll find us, will Glyder, never you worry about that!”

Above them the mist thickened and lowered more. To their right, beyond the stream, the ground dropped away and up it came a swirling mist-filled wind. The light was grey and the brightest thing about them was the bracken, golden brown but dead.

On they went, higher and higher, the wind ever more changeable and carrying flurries of hail or hard snow, though the ground was snowless yet.

“I’m not happy with this,” muttered Marram, looking about him in the knowledge that they could be attacked from any quarter and not know it until their attacker was upon them.

“Nor am I,” said Alder, “but we’ve no choice. Stay close and trust that the Stone leads us true.”

“Look!” cried out Marram suddenly, pointing a talon ahead as if he had seen something vast. “I thought... it was dark, Alder, huge...” But it was gone, hidden by mist.

They pressed on, getting colder and more tired by the minute, but neither complained of that.

Then Cwm stopped, though why neither could have said, for there was no sign of way or tunnel or anything at all.

“The mist will clear shortly,” he said.

“Looks as if its thickening to me,” grumbled Marram. Their fur was wet with particles of mist and hail.

“You get to know the run of the mist in these parts or you die young,” said Cwm grimly. “It’ll clear northward first.” They turned to look downslope.

Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, it did. Not near to them – the driven mist from the valley below still swirled up just below their line of sight – but far across the valley they sensed but could not see, over the mist that lay in its depths, there was a sudden lightening and then it cleared to reveal an astonishing sight.

For the sun was shining in the far distance, and lighting on the peaks that rose there, or at least on all but one that lay a little beyond them, its lower half hidden. But two nearer peaks were clear, and a third that lay off to the right, further even than the shrouded one.

“What are their names?” asked Alder.

“The furthest is still in the Carneddau, and that is Carnedd Dafydd, or Dafydd for short. The two nearer ones are Glyder Fawr on the left and Glyder Fach on the right,”

“Glyder!” repeated Alder, for that was the name of the Siabod leader.

“The one in cloud, that’s...” began Cwm.

But he was interrupted by Marram, who had turned to look behind them and had been so awestruck by what he saw that he instinctively touched Alder’s flank, as if to speak would have brought a wrath of rock down upon them.

For the mist had nearly all gone and there rose bleak Siabod, towering above them, awesome and majestic, its faces sheer and dark and quite unreachable. Cloud played at its highest part, drifting across its face and hiding from time to time its uttermost peak.

“Aye, that’s Siabod,” said Cwm with reverence. They stared at it for a long time before Alder turned back to look once again at the mountains Cwm had been naming. Mist still came up from the valley but it was thinning, swirling, now deep, now light, playing on the ground before them. There were shapes in it, dark and fearsome, like sheep, like mole. None of them spoke, the wind seemed wild, beyond it all and across the valley, the four peaks rose, the same one still shrouded in mist.

Cwm was silent, staring ahead, while Marram had come closer to Alder, and both had taken stance, for the shapes in the mist were coming nearer and were moving, steadily moving upslope towards them, huge and menacing, three of them; moles.

Then the mist was swept clear and three huge moles crouched before them, two to the left side, and one off to the right, and they had taken stance as if in echo of the mountains that rose so mightily in the distance behind each of them, with a gap where that shrouded mountain rose.