The Nargun and the Stars

by Patricia Wrightson

  Edie gave him one, and then another one for later. Simon succeeded in saying ‘Thanks’ and erupted from the kitchen feeling embarrassed but successful.

  He went running up the ridge to the point where he had to turn off the track, to the left along the mountain. There he slowed down suddenly. It must have been somewhere here … He went slowly, looking for the rock or stump or bush that had seemed so horrifying in the sudden moonlight. He couldn’t find one.

  ‘Things always look wrong and different at night,’ he reminded himself, and went running on again to the swamp.

  At the edge where he had gone splashing in last night he stopped again to look. This was better. This he could remember clearly, just as it had looked in the moonlight. There were the trees out of whose shadows the grader had come into sight, with the spindly creatures clustered over it and dancing round. The magic of it reached out and took him again. There must have been hundreds of them, and more coming down from the trees all the time, and still more travelling to the swamp springing from tree to tree. Creatures of the trees – what had they to do with the swamp-creature and the frog? Why was the yellow machine a trouble to them? You’d think tree-things would have picked on the bulldozer; that was a yellow machine too, and surely more of a trouble to tree-creatures.

  Simon went down to the deep end of the swamp and peered into the water. There wasn’t a sign. The hole couldn’t be deep enough to hide a whole grader! They must have moved it again. He threw one of Edie’s apples into the water for the swamp-creature and went across soft muddy soil to the road.

  The grader’s work had all been washed away, and water had cut fresh grooves in the surface of the road. Simon went along it again until he could see the place where the grader had been parked; Charlie’s station-wagon was parked there now. He and the driver would have climbed down the mountainside to see if the grader had been washed over there. Simon went back towards the swamp.

  There was some commotion in the scrub above it. Out of the trees came a scatter of sheep, small hoofs pelting as if something were after them. They swung east along the mountain and went racing back towards the home ridge. Simon looked after them thoughtfully, hesitated for a minute, then went up the mountain into the scrub.

  The terraces between the roots were soft and squashy to walk on after the storm. He was pelted at once with a heavy shower of twigs, and remembered that the bulldozer had been covered in twigs and sticks on a night of little wind. Small paws went scuttling everywhere among the leaves, and something big that couldn’t be seen came bounding towards him with heavy thumps until at last he had to dodge aside. Since there was really nothing there, this made him feel foolish.

  ‘You want to watch it!’ he called loudly.

  A few more twigs hit him. The running paws scampered by. He caught a glimpse of movement at the edge of his vision, but when he turned his head there was nothing there. Wherever he looked there was movement in some other direction.

  When this had happened three or four times Simon stood quiet and looked steadily ahead. After a while, from the corners of his eyes, he saw three grey shadows with straggling beards scuttling like spiders round the trunks of trees.

  ‘Caught you!’ he crowed, pointing – and was pelted with twigs again. ‘Anyhow,’ he shouted, ‘you got the wrong machine!’

  There was utter stillness in the scrub. Delighted with himself, Simon went running down the root terraces into the sunlight. The song of frogs lay over the swamp. At the far end, sitting on the bank with its legs in the water, sat the greenskinned golden-eyed swamp-creature eating an apple.

  Simon stood still while excitement fluttered in his veins. The swamp-thing stayed peacefully where it was. Simon took the second apple from his pocket and went slowly to the bank and sat down. The swamp-creature gave him a comical look. They sat side by side on the bank, both chewing apples and Simon swelling with delight. After a while he ventured to speak.

  ‘What’s your name?’ It was a stupid thing to say to a swamp-thing, but how else could you start?

  The swamp-creature made a sound like the calling of frogs.

  ‘Eh?’ said Simon.

  The creature made the sound again: ‘Potkoorok.’

  ‘Is that your own name? Or is it what you are?’

  ‘That is my name that I am,’ said the creature a little grandly. ‘You are Boy. I am Potkoorok.’ It put the last bit of apple into its froglike mouth and crunched away. Juice ran out of the corners of its mouth. ‘Good,’ it said, turning its head towards Simon.

  ‘Pot-koo-rok,’ said Simon. The creature chuckled. ‘And what are they? The ones in the trees?’

  ‘Turongs. Tu-rongs. Their name that they are is Turongs.’ It was watching Simon with sly attention.

  ‘Turongs,’ repeated Simon thoughtfully. ‘- Hey!

  He had lost his apple. A green hand with flattened webbed fingers had plucked it lightly from his own hand while he spoke. The Potkoorok chuckled with glee and munched the remains of the apple. Simon supposed that if you wanted to be friends with it you would have to put up with that sort of thing.

  ‘There’s a lot more Turongs up there now, aren’t there?’ he said. ‘Did they come from the other scrub when the trees were cut down?’ The Potkoorok’s wide mouth turned down and it looked at him sadly. ‘Why do they throw sticks and chase the sheep? We didn’t cut down their trees.’

  ‘They play jokes,’ said the Potkoorok reproachfully. ‘On hunters – not so good as fishermen. They can’t help it; they are Turongs, not Potkooroks. They play jokes good enough for hunters. If there are no hunters, what can they do? They play tricks on sheep.’

  ‘You played a trick on them last night,’ said Simon. ‘You made them pinch the wrong machine.’

  ‘No trick. The Turongs want to sink the wrong machine. It is wrong for them too. The yellow machine is a wrong trouble, killing frogs and trees.’

  ‘But that was two different machines! This one killed the frog, the other one killed the trees. The Turongs wanted to get rid of the other one.’

  The Potkoorok gave him an offended look. ‘The Turongs brought the yellow machine,’ it said huffily.

  ‘Both of them were yellow! You just wait – the other one will go on killing trees on the mountain.’

  The Potkoorok turned its golden eyes along the mountain and looked far off. ‘The Boy tricks the Potkoorok,’ it said dryly. ‘I see no yellow machine on the mountain.’

  As it happened, the bulldozer was not working that morning, so Simon was not able to prove his point. In any case, the Potkoorok seemed upset and that was a bad way to begin a friendship. He set out to soothe its ruffled feelings.

  ‘What happened to the machine, anyhow? I looked in the water and it’s gone. You can’t see anything at all.’

  This was evidently the right thing to say, for the creature chuckled like the lapping of water. ‘You can’t see anything at all? You look now,’ it said.

  Simon stood up and looked into the pool. Clearly through the brown water he could see a yellow shape: a wheel, and part of a frame. While he was looking the water grew dark again. Nothing showed.

  ‘Hey!’ said Simon. ‘Would you believe that?’

  The Potkoorok was chuckling away when the sound of a motor came from the road. Still chuckling and without a splash the creature slid into the water and was gone. Simon was almost relieved. It had been a tremendous excitement, but a strain too. He wanted time to think about it and grow used to it.

  He guessed that the motor would be Charlie’s, driving home after the search had been given up, so he went to the bend of the road to wait for it. But it was not the station-wagon that came round the curve of the mountain. It was a blue car, much newer and smarter, driven by a stocky young man wearing a navy singlet. He stopped the car when he saw Simon, and leaned through the window to speak.

  ‘Nice day after the storm … Haven’t seen a bulldozer about, have you?’

  It was the driver of the bulldozer, and he too was looking for
his machine.

  six

  The disappearance of the bulldozer as well as the grader caused a fuss that took up the rest of that day. It began at the telephone in Charlie’s small study where drivers rang up their bosses and the police, and the police rang up other police, and neighbours and townspeople, to help in the search. Edie was kept busy making tea for them and listening to their telephone conversations.

  From there the fuss spread all round Wongadilla. Cars nosed along roads and tracks, four-wheel-drive vehicles charged into gullies; the whining and grinding of their motors hung round the hills all day. There were constant meetings between men who exchanged theories, agreed with each other, massaged their heads, and lapsed into puzzled silence. Only the grader man was sure of anything, and he grew more certain every moment that the brake of the grader had been fully on.

  There were times when Simon, following them about, wondered whether he ought to tell about the grader. But he was sure they would not believe him if he did, and somehow just as sure that people should not interfere with the creatures of the country. Besides, he had no idea what could have happened to the bulldozer. Perhaps, after he had run home last night, the wild crowd of Turongs had gone on across the mountain and carried off the bulldozer too. Yet he didn’t believe this. The Potkoorok would have known and boasted about it, instead of being huffy when he mentioned two machines.

  Late in the afternoon Charlie extricated himself and Simon from the search, telling the searchers to help themselves to the telephone if they needed it and that he had to check up on some sheep. By that time the searchers were ready to give up in any case, and began to drive away. The final theory was that thieves or practical jokers had driven the two machines off last night, unheard in the storm, and that the police must look for them miles away from Wongadilla.

  Simon and Charlie came into the kitchen where Edie was already pouring their tea. She looked at Charlie with a questioning face. ‘Not a sign,’ he told her. ‘They’d have to be somewhere, they couldn’t vanish.’

  ‘It won’t do any good,’ said Edie in a vexed way, pushing the sugar basin towards him. ‘There’ll be another bulldozer up there inside a week.’

  ‘Anyhow, this one’s nowhere on Wongadilla. They reckon it’s been stolen, and I’d say they’re right. A wasted day, and too late to get around the sheep tonight – best I can do is have a look at their camp. I wish these machine men could look after their own stock. Eh, Simey?’

  Simon didn’t really hear. He was listening, at last, to the silence with its clear, frail sounds. He was tired of interruptions and strangers and excitement. Now he wanted to be alone with the silence and the windy heights of Wongadilla, letting them restore to him the small old creatures of the land. Later, though he sat between Charlie and Edie, he was alone with the fire; and he thought of the Potkoorok stealing his apple, and smiled and hugged himself. Then he was alone between the white walls of his room, hearing the pine whisper and a fox call; and he thought of spidery grey shadows climbing round trunks. He went to sleep thinking of the Turongs’ dance, and woke deciding to spend the day alone on the mountain.

  Charlie was going to muster the sheep and look them over, as he had meant to do yesterday. ‘I could do with a hand,’ he told Simon, ‘that’s if you’ve got nothing better to do.’ When Simon stammered that he thought he might go and look at the place where the bulldozer had been, Charlie said quickly, ‘That’s right, you look around while you’ve got the chance. You wouldn’t want to go through the fence, of course – one of those trees could make a mess of you if it happened to fall on you.’ He helped Simon to catch Pet while Edie cut lunch for them both, and watched Simon ride off alone without seeming to mind at all. He only shouted after him: ‘If you see any sheep send ’em down!’ And Simon waved in reply and then forgot. Perhaps a cicada feels as Simon did when it crawls out of the earth in its tight shell.

  He rode first to the foot of the steepest slope and reined in near the fence; the screen of forest had been cleared from there, and he could see what the bulldozer had done. Before it disappeared it had flattened about half the forest on that side of the fence. No one was working there today.

  Someone would come and finish the job, he supposed. Someone would load and cart away the trimmed logs, and perhaps burn the others. Grass would grow in time, and bracken, and a few new trees. Then it would look like any other ridge. Now it looked barer and uglier than the rocks that rose above it at the end of the mountain.

  Standing in the stirrups and switching at Pet’s rump with his stick, he forced her up the trail that had frightened him that first time. Whenever the trail turned and she was faced with the need to clamber higher, Pet stopped dead until Simon shouted and switched. They came at last to the ledge, and he got off and tethered her where Charlie had. He walked to the fence and looked down, as he had that other day. There was no place down there to hide a bulldozer except in the forest itself; even the Turongs couldn’t have done it. The bulldozer must have gone out by the way it came in, as the searchers had said. He went back to the ledge and looked down at Wongadilla.

  There it was, plunging down, with blue heights swinging up beyond. There was the glinting green of the swamp, and the white shoe-box house. Some tiny sheep were collected on the flat; he could hear Charlie’s shouts, and the answering yelps of the dogs. Next time, he thought, he would have to give Charlie a hand – when he had sorted out the things he wanted to think about.

  Now it must be nearly ‘time for a cup’. He took an apple from his lunch bag: Edie had given him two. Simon suddenly knew that Edie would always give him two apples, since yesterday when he had asked for one. He took the apple across the steep slope to that little gully where he had been before; last time he had climbed into it from high up the mountain, and he had climbed out again at about this level.

  It was very quiet and alone in there, just as he remembered. He could look down the gully over Wongadilla, but no one there would see him, leaning back against the side like this. He sat there eating his apple and feeling the strength of the mountain surging behind him. He felt the earth rolling on its way through the sky, and rocks and trees clinging to it, and seas and the strands of rivers pressed to it, and flying birds caught in its net of air. And though he didn’t know what the Potkoorok and the Turongs were, still he knew they were part of the earth and this mountain. People might come and go, he thought, but those others belonged here; and he thought they had belonged here always. There was something old and innocent in the way the Turongs danced, and in the sly teasing of the Pot-koorok. There was something that didn’t care – something free and old like the mountain, and elusive like the blue shadows of distance. Simon could not have explained it, but he knew it.

  His breath came quicker when he faced the question of what these old creatures were. For the only words that came to him were ‘elf’ and ‘magic’ – and surely those meant something different? He put the question away again and thought of the Turongs: ‘If there are no hunters, what can they do? They play tricks on sheep.’ Once they had played their tricks on dark-skinned hunters, he thought; and they had lived hidden in a wide world of forests instead of fleeing from one small scrap to the next …

  BRENT, said the gully silently.

  Simon frowned. No one could have spoken his name up here. Nothing interrupted the silence. He went back to his thoughts.

  BRENT, said the gully.

  Simon shifted in an irritated way. He looked, and saw his name scratched on a small rock – he must have been seeing it for some time without really seeing. It made him jump at first, until he remembered scratching it there himself the other time he was here. He must be sitting in almost the same spot as he was that day.

  BRENT, said the gully, speaking urgently. He shrugged, trying to forget it. He frowned and looked about, then sat up straight, frowning again.

  Where was simon?

  He had scratched both names, on two rocks, side by side so that they made his whole name, simon brent. Here
was brent; where was simon?

  He began to look around, puzzled: it had been a big rock, very big, leaning against the wall of the gully with the smaller rock on its other side. He remembered quite well. The blue-green lichen in which he scratched his name had been bigger, too; it had caught his eye first, and started him off with his name-scratching. He had made the first name so big that there was no room left for the second. Idly, not really thinking much about it, he had looked for a place to scratch the second name and noticed the small rock with a smaller lichen. They had stood close, side by side, and made his whole name between them, even though the second name was smaller.

  So where was simon?

  ‘That’s mad!’ he said angrily, and got up to search. No one could have moved a big rock like that! Even in the storm, even a torrent of water rushing down couldn’t have moved it … but perhaps it might have moved the smaller rock? Perhaps he wasn’t in the same place at all but a little further down the gully? He went to examine the smaller rock.

  He grasped it and wrenched at it, but it stayed firm. It was set in the earth; ferns and grass stood around its base and nothing had disturbed them … But there were crushed ferns and grass, and smeared moss, in a patch between the small rock and the gully wall. It didn’t look as though a great rock had been torn from the ground where it belonged – but something very heavy had been moved.

  He looked for more crushed ferns and moss, and saw a patch on rocks six feet higher up the gully. From there he saw, higher still, a deep groove ploughed into soft soil; and beyond that a scraped muddy mark on a flat rock. From sign to sign, he traced a trail up the gully between walls that grew steeper and closer as he went.

  Up the gully!

  ‘It’s mad!’ cried Simon angrily again.

  Then he hit on a solution to the mystery, and wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. The Turongs, of course. He couldn’t guess why or how they had moved a great boulder up this little gully, but they must have done it; and who knew how or why the Turongs did anything? Greatly relieved he came to a sharp elbow in the gully and stopped.