There were sounds, often startling, but they never did set off the coiled-spring trap of the silence. The dogs still whimpered, hens clucked behind the house, a magpie’s call rang like a bell. Somehow the silence took these sounds and out of them built more silence. A hard nasal cry, distant but sharp, made Simon jump.
‘Old ewe,’ said Charlie, handing him a suitcase. ‘Edie’ll have the kettle boiling. I could do with a cup, what about you?’
They had tea in the kitchen where a big stove burnt day and night. Edie had already put away her green coat, brown fur, and winged hat; she now wore a red-and-black frock and a green hand-knitted sweater. The house was old and full of old things. There was a row of bedrooms opening on to a long veranda where Charlie and Edie had their rooms, but Simon’s was a tiny one just off the living-room. White walls stood close to the bed; there was a red felt mat on the polished wood floor, and a great dark old pine outside the cobwebbed window.
He put his things away where Edie showed him and went out slowly feeling lost and sore, as if he had been carried off out of the world; hating it, and the strangers who acted as if it were normal. They must be mad already, he thought, or they’d go mad here.
Charlie was in the living-room, lighting a fire in the brick fireplace. Its yellow light flickered across Simon’s bedroom door. A jarring of crazy laughter came from outside. ‘Kookaburra,’ said Charlie, settling a log in place.
‘I know that,’ said Simon. They were his first words at Wongadilla.
No one told him where to go or what to do, so he wandered out to the kitchen where Edie was cooking. She flicked a look at him. ‘You’ll want an early night,’ she said.
I don’t want anything in this weird place, thought Simon savagely.
He had to do something, so he followed Charlie outside and stood about while Charlie fed fowls, dogs and horses, and milked cows. The western hills were so high and near that the sun had gone behind them already. The air was sharp and cool. From far down on the flat came a wild cry, half animal and half human. Simon shivered.
‘Fox,’ said Charlie instantly from behind a cow. ‘Too many of them about.’
He wandered inside again. Edie was peeling potatoes and spoke into the kitchen sink. ‘You could have a bath before dinner if you liked, and be ready for bed. Your things are warming by the fire – That’s old Pet neighing.’
He needed to know but was not glad to be told, and it made him angry to find his pyjamas, gown and slippers beside the fire like a baby’s. Even the bathroom looked make-believe, with the old bath standing on its four feet on bare boards. He had washed and was getting into his pyjamas when – crash! The breath rushed out of him, the house shook and echoed, and Simon was standing rigid in the kitchen doorway clutching his gown.
Charlie was closing the lid of a large wooden chest in a corner of the kitchen. He and Edie stared at Simon.
‘Filling the woodbox,’ they said together guiltily.
Simon marched back to the bathroom. That was it, then; nothing was going to shock him like that again. From now on he would expect anything and question nothing.
They had chops, potato and pumpkin at a table in the kitchen. Edie said, ‘This is your place … Simey,’ and it took him a moment to realise that she was talking to him. ‘Eat what you can and leave the rest,’ she added. ‘That’s a wallaby thumping.’
‘Or an old ’roo,’ said Charlie, heaving his chair into place.
After dinner they sat round the living-room fire and listened to the news. Edie sat on one side, moving her rocking-chair just a little with a soft, regular creak. She had brought out some bright blue wool to knit a sweater for Simon. Charlie sat in an old leather chair on the other side of the fire, his feet in socks stretched out on the hearth almost into the ashes. Simon was in the middle, in an old cane chair that kept up a conversation of whispered squeaks. A train-rhythm was beating in his head and the red coals made hill-shapes endlessly changing. He leapt awake when something heavy thudded on the roof with a hideous scratching of claws on iron.
‘Possums,’ said Charlie and Edie at once. Edie added, ‘There’s a hot-water bag in your bed when you’re ready.’
Simon went to bed, closing his door. He was almost too tired to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes the hill-shapes advanced, retreated, turned and swung, till he opened them again and looked at darkness. The pine-tree outside his window breathed quietly in the wind, and outside something called with a menacing oom – oom – oom. Then the catch of his door clicked, and it opened a little. Warm yellow firelight flickered in the opening; Simon watched it till he fell asleep.
A half-moon slipped down behind a spur. Below the shoulder of the mountain a blunt yellow machine stood under the stars. Sly eyes peered at it from out of the tops of trees.
It was late when Simon woke, and Charlie was already away working on the mountain. From time to time the sound of his work came down to the house, thunk! thunk! thunk! Simon would have liked to ask what he was building up there, but he could not yet say ‘Charlie’.
He was eating a special late breakfast when a sound he did know came from the mountain: the hoarse, rumbling shout of a heavy machine. Edie lifted her head. ‘They’ve started, then,’ she said; and Simon remembered what Charlie had said about a bulldozer clearing scrub. His heart lifted a little. There were men with a big machine just up there.
Since no one told him where to go or what to do he spent the morning wandering round the house, gazing at the deep dark gully with its creek far down on one side, the flat far down on the other, and the forested ridge that climbed up from it to the mountain’s shoulder. He spent a lot of time looking up there, though he could not see the bulldozer because of the forest in between. He would have liked to climb up there but thought he would probably need permission; it was really quite a long way and only looked close because the mountain was so high. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Edie and dreaded being scolded for going without asking. So he had to be satisfied with listening to the bulldozer: its shout rising to a roar when it attacked something and dropping to a grumble when it backed away. Sometimes there was an enormous slow breaking sound and then a long crash, and he knew that a tree had fallen. Sometimes the bulldozer stopped, and the silence came springing back with its spare, precise erection of sounds: the thunk! thunk! thunk! of Charlie’s work; bird-calls; wind among leaves. Then would come a flat, solid boom! that Simon guessed was blasting; another tree would begin its long slow crash, and then the bulldozer would start again.
After lunch Simon did slip away without asking. Edie was watering roses, her ankles jutting sharply above cracked old gardening shoes. He told himself angrily that she couldn’t keep him hanging about the place forever, that there had to be somewhere he could go. He could see a patch of trees on the mountain above the gully, and a glimpse of road below it. He slipped quietly away to walk across there.
And so, in a hollow just below that scrub, Simon discovered the swamp.
He could hardly believe it, lying there so secret and so high. He thought there must have been rain lately, and soon the water would drain away. Yet it must have been there a long time for the flat-floating leaves of water-parsley to spread so far. And at one end, nearest the gully, there was a broken bank of earth where someone had once tried to turn the swamp into a dam; dried stems of purple-top stood five feet tall on the bank, and the deeper water there was fringed with reeds browned by winter. The tuneless, changeless song of frogs might have been going on since the world was made.
There was a chuckling noise; something splashing in the water, probably. Simon took off his shoes and walked into the swamp.
The Potkoorok stirred. Its golden eyes gleamed. It slid like a ripple through the water, watching the boy. It waited while he explored the edges, examining brilliant green moss with air-bubbles trapped in it. It waited while he scooped up tiny slate-blue tadpoles and examined them and let them go. It waited till he stepped into deeper water; then it curled a coldness round his ankl
e, slithering like an eel.
Simon gave a yell and leapt on to a tussock. There was a stick caught there; he grabbed it and poked and prodded, peering into the water. There was no sign of anything. It must have been a strand of moss that wound itself round his ankle. He began to feel stupid about having yelled, and stepped off his tuft. There was a watery gurgle as if the swamp chuckled. Simon went striding through the bull-grass, sending water-spiders darting away.
The swamp-creature smiled slyly. It knotted two tufts of grass together and waited. A boy was the accident of a moment, something as light and brief as a sun-glint on water – but a good trick was something to chuckle over for a hundred years. It waited easily.
Simon got over his fright and forgot to feel foolish. The swamp was rich and exciting, a place of his own tucked away privately between mountain and hillock. He had found some small black worms lashing about in wet earth. He pored over them, wondering what kept them in this state of struggle. After that he looked at some frog-spawn; the black specks of embryos looked almost big enough to hatch. He went from one lot to the next looking for hatching tadpoles – until he took one more step and went sprawling forward.
He saved himself by splashing his hands down into bubbled weed and came up with weed clinging to his wet arms. He cleaned it off and looked to see what had tripped him. He saw the knotted tufts of grass. That couldn’t be an accident, and it wasn’t something an animal could do. He splashed angrily back to firm ground, hearing again that low, watery chuckle.
‘All right, you wait!’ shouted Simon. He picked up a lump of wood and sent it skittering across the swamp.
The Potkoorok narrowed its golden eyes. So the boy wanted to change the rules? He might have been puzzled, or frightened, or too stupid for either – instead, he had challenged the ancient joker. The Potkoorok accepted the challenge and caught the lump of wood before it sank. First the wood began to spin as if a whirlpool had caught it, then it whirled in circles round and round on the water. Faster and faster it went, until it dived under the water and disappeared. The swamp-creature had declared itself.
Simon stood and watched, frowning but refusing to give way, until the stick disappeared … Weird … weird … like this whole weird place. He put his shoes on to go back to the house, but after ten steps he turned round again. The swamp lay flat and innocent, with a secret glint of water between the bull-grass. The hole at the end was dark and still among tall rushes.
‘That’s where it lives,’ he said to himself.
Whatever it was in the swamp, it was something different. Tricky … wild … not solid and dull like a grown-up stranger. More like another boy … He was a bit frightened, but he almost wanted to go back.
He didn’t go back. The western hills were throwing shadows over the swamp; the shouting of the bulldozer had stopped some time ago, and now the thunk! thunk! thunk! of Charlie’s work had stopped too. He walked back to the house, while the hills’ long shadows reached further and further to grasp him. He reached the rough track down the ridge and heard soft creakings and blowings and a thud of hoofs. Charlie was coming down from the mountain behind him on a big bay horse.
Simon stepped quickly off the track, but Charlie slowed the horse till it paced beside him. ‘Surprise won’t stand on you,’ he said. ‘You just want to keep back of his head and go steady. So you found the swamp.’
So much for being tucked away in a place of his own. Simon said, ‘It’s always there. Isn’t it?’
‘Gets a bit smaller in a dry spell, but it’s always there.’
‘What lives in it, anyhow?’
‘All sorts,’ said Charlie. ‘Frogs, of course. A few leeches. Pond snails -’
‘What big thing?’
Charlie looked thoughtful. ‘Eel, maybe?’ Simon said nothing to this; eels don’t make grass-traps. Charlie said, ‘Hear them working on the scrub?’
‘They don’t work long,’ said Simon rather scornfully. ‘They start late and finish early.’
‘They’ve got to come out from town and go back at night,’ Charlie explained. ‘Takes a bit out of their day.’
‘What were you doing up there, anyhow?’ said Simon, able to ask at last.
‘Fencing,’ said Charlie. ‘I could do with a hand tomorrow, that’s if you’ve got nothing better to do.’
Simon considered. By then he would probably want to go back to the swamp – but he mightn’t get another chance to see the bulldozer working. ‘All right,’ he said gruffly.
Charlie dismounted at the shed behind the house and hitched Surprise to a post. ‘Might want him again if the cows don’t come up. I could do with a cup, what about you?’ Simon followed him into the kitchen, refusing to look at Edie, waiting for her to say something about going off without asking. But she only said, ‘So you found the swamp. You could do with a cup, then. I’ve lit the fire.’
‘You’re a bottler,’ said Charlie gratefully. ‘Isn’t she, Simey?’
Simon couldn’t answer. If he opened his mouth, he knew he would yell ‘Don’t call me that’. And what was the use? It would just make another name that nobody could say. They had to call him Simey; they were Edie and Charlie.
That night again the fire was too much for Simon. He was sleepy with sun and sharp air and distances. Edie sat in her rocking-chair, creaking it a little back and forth and knitting his thick blue sweater. Charlie stretched his feet into the ashes and read the papers that the mail-car left every second day in the box beside the road. The cane chair carried on its tiny squeaking chatter; the flames danced like sunlight on swamp-water. From outside came that low, menacing oom – oom – oom that he had heard last night.
‘Frogmouth,’ said Charlie absently from behind the paper.
Sometimes Simon thought he could hear another sound: a sad, high howling, far away and lost. Once Edie lifted her head and frowned as if she heard it too. Yet Simon could not be sure; it came and went like the wind, faint and far.
He listened for it while he climbed into bed and felt for the hot-water bag. Just as he fell asleep he thought he heard it plainly.
three
Next day Simon gave Charlie a hand with the fence, riding with him up the mountain on old Pet. No one mentioned Pet until he discovered her saddled at the shed beside Surprise – and stopped in his tracks, questions and alarms rolling about in his mind like marbles.
‘Quiet old thing,’ said Charlie. ‘Like a table. You won’t get any fancy riding, but she’ll take you up there if you give her time. You’ll want a leg up.’
There was a moment of rushing upward, and Simon found himself perched in the saddle gripping the pommel with both hands.
‘You want to hold on to her mane, not the saddle,’ Charlie advised, handing him the reins and shortening the stirrups. ‘Now all you’ve got to do is sit there, and not fall off over the old girl’s tail on the mountain.’
This proved to be true. When Simon was used to Pet’s lurching walk he simply sat on her back while she followed Surprise up the ridge. Once or twice he guided her jerkily round a stone or stump, just to prove that he understood about reins and could do it. When they reached the steep rise Charlie said, 'Now you’ll need those stirrups.’ Simon had thought he was using them already; but he stood up in them as Charlie did and leaned forward.
From round the end of the mountain came a sudden roar: the bulldozer had started. It was very near, but still out of sight round the curve of the mountain. Simon had no time for it yet. He was too busy with the mountain itself.
The trail wriggled up it like a snake, turning back and forth between a fence and a small gully. At every turn the horses heaved themselves heavily up to the next level. Soon the sound of the bulldozer was below. The world fell dizzily away into vistas of far blue ridges; the wind curled round the mountain with a dangerous pull. The end ridge was so far under that you looked down on the tops of the forest; they were rippling in the wind and roaring huskily like the sea. The complicated pattern of ridge and gully was flattened into a
map, easy to see. The house was a white shoe-box, with a small toy Edie walking across the yard. You could see a glint of the swamp, and its scrub, and a loop of road curling in towards them and out again. Simon felt as if he were perched on the brink of the world and might fall off if Pet stumbled. He could see, past the end of the mountain and across the forest, new ridges tying Wongadilla into the tangle of ranges.
They stopped on a grassy ledge, with the mountain’s top still looming above them. Charlie unsaddled the horses and tethered them in the shade among brambles and bracken, tall trees and silver-grey logs. Charlie pulled out from under one log a sack containing tools and a coil of wire. Simon saw that some of the posts of the fence were rotted off at the bottom, so that they hung heavily on the wires they should have supported; and new iron posts were laid beside them. The posts were not very evenly spaced, probably because they had been put in wherever it was possible to sink a hole. It was hard to imagine how the fence had been built at all in such a place. From the fence, at last, you could look down the end of the mountain on to the bulldozer. Simon was startled at what it had done.
Already the bulldozer had wrecked a whole slice of forest. Slaughtered trees lay where they had fallen, or where they had been snigged aside. A few had been trimmed into logs and neatly stacked, and two men with a chainsaw were now trimming another. The yellow bulldozer worried at the edge of the forest like some great blunt beast, roaring above the howl of the chain-saw. Its snub yellow shape stood out clearly under the canopy that protected the driver. Simon watched it at work, while the wind tugged at him.
Near at hand came the thunk! thunk! that had come from a distance yesterday. Charlie had started work; he was settling a post in its hole by banging it with a mallet. Simon remembered that he was supposed to help.
The Nargun and the Stars Page 2
