The Nargun and the Stars

by Patricia Wrightson

  THE NARgUN AND The STARS

  Patricia Wrightson is one of Australia’s most distinguished writers for children. Since her first novel The Crooked Snake was published, she has won many prestigious international awards including an OBE, the Dromkeen Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, all for her services to children’s literature. Many of her books have been short-listed for the Australian Children’s Book of the Year Awards which she has won four times for The Crooked Snake, The Nargun and the Stars, The Ice Is Coming and A Little Fear.

  Other books in UQP’s Children’s Classic Series

  Hesba Brinsmead

  Pastures of the Blue Crane

  Nan Chauncy

  Tangara

  Ruth Manley

  The Plum-Rain Scroll

  Reginald Ottley

  By the Sandhills of Yamboorah

  Ivan Southall

  Josh

  To Penny and James, who live by Wongadilla. And with thanks to Jill, who sent me to the Nargun’s den.

  Contents

  Cover

  Author Bio

  Other Books by Patricia Wrightson

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Imprint Page

  one

  It was night when the Nargun began to leave. Deep down below the plunging walls of a gorge it stirred uneasily. It dragged its slow weight to the mouth of its den; its long, wandering journey had begun.

  Two hundred feet above, on the broad uplands, moonlight whitened the gum-trees where eagles were building. It spilt into the gorge to touch the tallest heads of coachwood and nettle-tree, but it never reached the black damp rocks of the bottom. Only where water slid over the great slab of cliff at the head of the gorge a glint of silver light was carried down.

  At the bottom the water fell, with a sound-and-echo like guitar strings, into a pool that spanned the gorge. Behind this pool – behind a bead-curtain of falling water – cut broad and low into the base of the cliff was the archway of a cave. This was the ancient den of the Nargun. Here it had lain while eagles learnt to fly and gum-trees to blossom; while stars exploded and planets wheeled and the earth settled; while the cave opened; while dripping water hollowed a pool from rock and filled it, and drop by drop built crystal columns before the cave. And all this while the Nargun slept.

  In time it opened slow eyes and saw light. Little by little it dragged itself from earth and moved. There came a night when it had a voice and cried down the gorge. There came a day when, crouching in shadows, it grasped at something warm and found food to mumble on. After that it ate when it could; sometimes once in ten years, sometimes in fifty.

  It moved down the gorge to blink at the sun, to watch a river flow, to hunt savagely; but always it made the ponderous climb back, crushing ferns and grinding moss on its way, to drag itself behind the crystal columns.

  Sometimes it remembered the world’s making and cried for that long agony. Sometimes it felt anger: for a fallen tree, a dried-up pool, an intruder, or for hunger. Then too it cried. It had a sort of love: a response to the deep, slow rhythms of the earth; and when it felt the earth’s crust swell to the pull of the moon it sometimes called in ecstasy. It had no fear; but a wide sunny place, or any strange thing, made it uneasy. Then it crouched in stony stillness and little lizards ran over it.

  Earth swung like a moth around the sun; time passed, and the shadows of the gorge thinned as the forests thinned above. By day the sun came slanting halfway down, and the Nargun crouched and hid. No food came that way any more. Worse still, there was sometimes a strange tremor in the rocks, a vibration that was not the earth’s. The old thing was restless and brooding. Earth, the soft-winged moth, flew round and round the sun and the Nargun’s uneasiness grew; until this night.

  By now the crystal columns had grown into a fretted screen. The black bulk of the Nargun loomed beside it, peering through strands of water at a narrow path of stars. The sound of falling water was as clear as stars; it faltered as it always did when the old thing lurched through. Around the pool and down its ancient track the Nargun lumbered, rocking stiffly from one squat limb to the other. At the mouth of the gorge it crouched a while and then, for the first time since earth was new, moved very slowly into the moonlit valley. It cried out once in anger or distress and headed north.

  That was about 1880, and in Victoria.

  The Nargun blundered up the valley, blindly seeking a gorge, deep and dark and filled with rain-forest, but where there was food and where the earth kept to its old rhythms. It found a gully and lumbered in, seeking and not finding. It met a rocky wall and slowly turned back. The moon set. In darkness the old dark thing moved on. Sometimes it went on all fours, sometimes crookedly erect, a relentless, heavy fumbling along the valley wall. It found another gully and crept in among ridges. Grey daylight came; it pressed itself into the side of the gully, still as stone.

  When daylight turned to moonlight it stirred and moved again. Through a shallow creek, rumbling heavily among stones; partway up a low ridge. So it went on, night after night; up branching gullies yard by yard, and foot by foot up ridges. By day it crouched half-buried in the earth or among rocks. It bore the weight of the sun and the hardness of rain. By night it crept on blindly, and when it met a rock-face or too steep a ridge it blundered blindly back.

  Slowly, relentlessly, it worked its way north, and by the year of Federation it was near Bombala. Here it killed. They found a heap of torn and mangled clothing weeks after the old thing had passed.

  Creeping up gullies and low ridges, by slow degrees the Nargun was led higher. It lumbered in the lower ranges, passing by the eastern end of the Australian Alps. They heard its cry in Cooma.

  Year by slow year, rocking on stumpy limbs, it made its way north between the Shoalhaven and the range. There its claws left marks in rock that have never been explained. Always it travelled by night and lay like a stone by day. East of Lake George it killed again, a horse and a dog. By the 1920s it reached Goulburn and broke through eastward along the Wollondilly.

  The next thirty years were a bad time for the Nargun, a time of blind uneasiness and sudden sullen rage. Step by step it stumbled along the fringes of the Blue Mountains, sensing the nearness of gorges and frustrated by vertical heights. The vibrations here drove it from uneasiness to anger – the throbbing of some shaken, uneven pulse that was strange. The thing killed four times on this stretch: twice for food, leaving torn garments that rotted and were never found; twice in sudden, crushing rage, a man and a boy.

  Aimlessly driven by its blind need it blundered north between spurs of the Hunter Range. It crept through Singleton on a night when the electricity had failed and no one in that town knew what went by, rocking from limb to limb in the starlight. Northward still into tangled ranges, where its need drove it with painful slowness up long slopes that the trees rode like a swing.

  Between the Mitchell and the Hunter, in seventy years of crawling, it had found no gorge chiselled through level uplands; and so the Nargun dragged itself by western slopes up ridges, and yard by yard and year by year up spurs. It saw the heights setting their rocky shorelines to the wind, and though it never reached them it inched its way up. It heard the howl of space in the wind, and felt its tides and currents. It lifted its craggy he
ad and howled back. Once it saw the moon lean down to touch a mountain. Once or twice it killed a beast.

  In the 1960s it turned west along a range. It knew this range from ancient times, knew it had been poured molten from rose-red fires hoarded within the earth. From Ben Hall’s Gap to Crawney Pass slowly it untied the tangled knot of ridge and spur. Across blue distance it saw the slow world turning, and in high shadowed hollows felt the white sting of snow. Once it glimpsed, in a great far cliff, the turquoise granite of a mountain’s bones. Crouching in rain, it heard the shout of a waterfall.

  One night, rocking its slow way round a mountain, it lumbered into a cleft cut downward through the mountain’s crown. It was shaded and cool with a trickle of water, and it opened into a shallow gully blocked with brambles. There were ferns and moss, and a way through the brambles to hunt. The ancient Nargun rested there. It had come to Wongadilla.

  Wongadilla received it with a stillness of water, a silence of trees, and a stirring within rocks. Its own ancient creatures sensed the Nargun that had come so far. They knew its age – ten times their own – and its slow, monstrous coldness. They stirred or were silent, like children.

  Wongadilla is one knot in that tangle of spurs and ridges. You would say it is much like the other small sheep-runs nearby, but Charlie claims it is greener. Its steepest, sharpest height is called ‘the mountain’, but really it is a clump of high and higher tops melted together in one. There are green places high and low, and slopes of tall grass the colour of moonlight; shade trees everywhere, and a patch or two of scrub, and rock breaking through in the steepest places.

  Halfway down its looming height the mountain spreads a broad lap, and from there throws out three ridges into the flat between it and the opposite mountain. One of these is near the eastern end of the mountain, like a long arm running out from under its rocky shoulder. This ridge is covered in forest and lies half in Wongadilla and half outside it; Charlie’s boundary fence, running down the mountain, cuts across the ridge and through the forest, and takes in the flat below. The flat spreads wide between this ridge and the other two, like the space between your thumb and your first two fingers.

  The other two ridges lie close together, holding between them a narrow, deep gully where the creek runs down to the river. Where they join the mountain is the round green swelling of a hill, and behind this a hollow that is always green with a glint. This is the swamp. When you come on it, hidden on the side of the mountain and halfway up to the crest of the wind, then you begin to know Wongadilla.

  If you go into the swamp you feel no squish of mud but rough clean water-couch springing under your toes. Rafts of pink-tipped weed drift with the wind, drawing its pattern in lines on the water. Jelly-froth rafts of frog spawn are moored to tufts of bull grass, for the swamp is always loud with the creaking and hiccuping of frogs. There are rootled-out, snuffled-up holes where a wombat was feeding – a tuft of clean mauve fur left by a swamp-wallaby – it is like seeing a door close as someone slips away. And something else lives in the swamp: something sly and secret, half as old as the mountain. On a still day you may hear it chuckle.

  Clinging to the mountainside above the swamp is another patch of forest. Its steep ground, bare except for dead leaves, is terraced by roots into shallow steps going up the mountain. In this forest, and in the one on the end ridge, you may be showered with twigs from swinging treetops. For every rabbit, lizard or bandicoot that rustles through the dead leaves you may hear two – just as in the swamp you may see the swirl of an eel or hear a chuckle. There are ancient tricksters in the trees of Wongadilla as well as in the swamp. They were silent and uneasy when the Nargun came, only rustling restlessly as they listened for its voice. After a year or so of waiting and hearing no call they came scuttling and gliding from the forest tops to nearer trees. They pelted it with sticks, and hissed when the sticks came flying back. After that they kept away from the slow, cold monster in the gully.

  On the second of the mountain’s three ridges stands a white house with a red-brick chimney – below the swamp, far under the wall of the mountain, but high and straight above creek and flat. Charlie Waters and his sister Edie live in the white house. They are old now, but they were children there. From the house a track leads down, back and forth across the steep, blunt end of the ridge and over a bed of stones in the river just below the point where the creek joins it. The river itself is hardly more than a creek, even after rain; but not even Charlie or Edie would try the crossing after one hour’s rain, in case the river rolled their old station-wagon over. It is a small river, but quick, with the weight of the mountain behind it.

  The track joins a gravel road that finds its way in from the valley, running over the toes of opposing hills. Along this road, splashing through the river, and swinging without a thought up the narrow, dangerous track, Charlie drove the station-wagon on the day he and Edie brought Simon Brent, the sullen boy who was a stranger, to Wongadilla. The dogs heard them coming, and barked and leapt about at the ends of their chains.

  two

  No one could have been stranger than Simon. He was a stranger even to himself, and he had never heard of Won-gadilla till a few days before. He was at the Home then, and he still felt raw all over as if he had been skinned – all the known things, all his known life, suddenly torn away. Gone in twenty seconds, or however long it takes for one car to crash into another. One great whoomp! – and Simon Brent, who never heard it, who was in fact playing football at the time, had become a stranger with no world of his own.

  He didn’t even know; he had just gone on playing football, would you believe that? At the Home he sometimes woke up shivering: he had probably been getting that pass off to Flinty, or tackling the ratbag with the ginger hair, when the car crashed with Mum and Dad. And he had gone on doing it, till they came out on the field and told him to stop.

  He had been at the Home for weeks and weeks before he heard of Wongadilla. That was only the other day, when he came in from the new strange school.

  ‘… Miss Edith Waters, Simon, your mother’s second cousin …’

  And there was Edie, stout on top with skinny legs, wearing a bunchy green coat with a brown fur-thing over it, and a pair of brown felt wings perched on her grey-and-black hair. She looked something like a green leghorn and nothing at all like his smooth young mother.

  ‘… a sheep-run in the mountains. She and her brother want you to go and stay with them, and make it your home if you’re happy there …’

  ‘Do I call you Auntie Edith?’ he asked gruffly because they were waiting for him to speak. She didn’t answer at once, so he looked at her. She had a creamy face like wilting petals and sudden grey eyes. He looked away quickly from that sudden glimpse of a person watching him from the grey eyes.

  She said, ‘Edie’ll do me and Charlie’ll do Charlie, but I suppose you might want to put an auntie and uncle between us. Suit yourself.’

  So he didn’t call either of them anything.

  He asked about the place. ‘Wongadilla,’ she told him. ‘Five thousand acres, right up the Hunter.’ She didn’t tell him any more about it, or what fun they would have, or how well she remembered his mother. She was still, like a swamp. He hardly knew why he agreed to go – except that one Home was as good as another and he couldn’t stay at this one if they wanted him to go. Mrs Brown of the Home was the enthusiastic one.

  ‘It sounds wonderful, Simon! A boy in the country – a family of your own – you’d like to try it, wouldn’t you?’

  He said yes, still gruffly. He was mostly gruff these days. They came by train, Simon wedged in a corner by the window watching the world grow wide and empty, the colour of hay under a widening sky. Endless wire fences, and blue hills lifting. Sometimes for relief he changed the focus of his eyes and looked instead at reflections in the window: his own thin face with heavy brown hair and sullen brown eyes – and the green-and-brown ghost of Edie hanging in the glass behind him.

  They got out at a station in a l
ittle flat town, and Charlie was there to meet them. He was taller and thinner than anyone Simon had ever seen. He had grey-and-black hair and sudden grey eyes like Edie’s, and in other ways was the exact picture of what an Australian country man is supposed to be. His face was brown and lined; he wore his mouse-coloured old felt hat like a lid, and a faded blue shirt, a hand-knitted sweater, and drill trousers washed to a creamy shade.

  Charlie said, ‘There you are.’

  Edie said, ‘Here we are.’

  They exchanged a light, ceremonial kiss and Charlie clapped Simon on the shoulder. Then he picked up two suitcases in each hand and led the way out to his old cream station-wagon.

  It was a long drive from the station, on a road that sometimes broke into astonishing colours: patches of turquoise or fuchsia gravel, banks that glowed coral-red in the sun. Flocks of grey cockatoos swept up from the road, turning to clouds of pink as they rose. Charlie told Edie scraps of news about sheep, dogs, a horse, and a neighbour. Tall hills and ridges advanced and retreated, turned about and changed places, in a great, slow Morris dance. High rocks and shadowy hollows hung with blue; green humps and ridges; slopes the colour of hay or of moonlight; the frown of forests.

  ‘They’ll be clearing scrub on the end ridge,’ said Charlie. ‘Taking out the bit of timber that’s worth it. Brought a bulldozer up yesterday.’

  Edie made a disgruntled sound. ‘We’ll be having some noise, then,’ she said.

  And what’s wrong with a bit of noise? thought Simon sullenly. He had never been so far into the country before, and the close, insistent noise of just one engine was making his ears feel funny. Sometimes they passed a house, and Charlie and Edie always looked at it with attention. Simon thought that a single house amid crowding hills was about the loneliest thing in the world.

  After more than an hour of driving they splashed through a stream, stopped at a gate, and went on up and up a ridge. Above the sound of the climbing motor came the clamour of dogs. They had reached Wongadilla, a single house among crowding hills. Charlie put his head out of the window. ‘All right, put a sock in it, lie down!’ he roared. The dogs dropped their voices to an eager whimper, the engine stopped – and there was the silence waiting, coiled like a spring between earth and sky.