The Nargun and the Stars

by Patricia Wrightson

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Charlie, almost excited. ‘We’ve made it move – we’ve sent it back to hide.’

  Simon could say nothing. He was too shaken. That granite face turned to the sky seemed to bear all age, all emptiness, all evil and good; without hope or despair; with rock-like patience. He was shaken by a sudden storm of pity and fear.

  ‘We’ll have a bite of breakfast,’ said Charlie, ‘and go and find the old Pot K. After we’ve got the jobs done. It’s putting too much on Edie, all this business.’

  ‘She’d rather,’ Simon reminded him. ‘She likes to be in it as much as she can.’

  ‘M’p,’ said Charlie. ‘She’ll be in it, all right. Who do you think will be driving the tractor while I’m starting the bulldozer?’

  Simon was silent again, this time with astonishment. He thought of Edie driving the tractor, bunched up in the seat with her bony feet reaching for clutch and brake. And the Nargun, they hoped, would be on the move nearby -‘Someone’ll have to be with her!’ cried Simon.

  ‘You,’ said Charlie. ‘And see you don’t let her make friends with the brute and try to bring it home.’

  ‘She couldn’t! Even the Turongs – even the Nyols aren’t friends with it!’

  ‘You never know with Edie,’ said Charlie. ‘With you either maybe.’

  When jobs were done and breakfast over they went to the swamp. The sun lay on it, and the floating weeds were a gay young green flushed with pink, ready for spring. Frogs creaked like a chorus of rusty hinges. Sitting on the bank while Charlie talked to the Potkoorok, Simon was swept away from them on a wave of longing: for a quiet day like this one, but without anything wrong; for a day when he could splash about in the swamp, and perhaps be tripped up by the Potkoorok, and perhaps coax it out with an apple.

  He was thinking this against the background of Charlie’s talk when something cool and heavy rasped softly over his hand as it lay on the bank. He looked, moved, and yelled, all in a moment: a black snake lay across his hand. As he yelled it vanished, and the Potkoorok chuckled. Simon rounded on it angrily.

  ‘You want to watch it! What if I died of fright?’

  The Potkoorok chuckled again and turned its old lizard eyes on Charlie. ‘The Potkoorok tricks men and boys and Nyols,’ it said smugly. ‘Most old things it cannot trick. Not Turongs, for they are tricksters too. Not Narguns, for they see with different eyes: less, and more deeply. Nyols are like boys. The Potkoorok could trick the Nyols, even out of their rocks. But this is a wrong thing. An old one does not trick another old one. We trick men.’

  ‘You want the Nargun to go, don’t you?’ Charlie argued.

  ‘Why should I want that? The Nargun should go, yet this is not a trouble to the Potkoorok. My territory is here.’

  This self-satisfied point of view would have driven Simon to fury; but Charlie held on to his patience with the skill of experience. ‘What about the Turongs, then? Can they trick the Nyols?’

  ‘Maybe. Not so good as the Potkoorok. They cannot help it.’

  ‘It ought to be the Turongs, Charlie,’ Simon broke in. ‘It means going right up to the end of the mountain, and the Turongs go up there all the time. They go everywhere. The Potkoorok couldn’t go as far as that, could it?’ He said this quite innocently because he had been wondering about it, but the Potkoorok bridled at once and looked indignant.

  ‘How wise is the Boy!’ it snapped. ‘Six times he sees the sun rise over Wongadilla, and already he knows what the Potkoorok knows! I have wasted ten thousand suns. I should have asked the Boy.’

  Charlie gave his mouse-coloured hat a tug. His face was wooden. ‘Simey’s got a point,’ he said comfortably.

  A red light flashed in the Potkoorok’s golden eyes. ‘Hear the Man in Charge! No wonder the Boy is wise, for the Man is his teacher. And did you take the Potkoorok’s road into the dark places, Boy? Did you see with your eyes and hear with your ears? There were Turongs in the place of the Nyols?’

  ‘Lay off, can’t you?’ Simon protested. ‘You just said this was your territory.’

  ‘And what is this, and what am I that live here? A Bunyip that lives in a swamp? And what is that, that runs in the far gully below? Another swamp, maybe?’

  ‘It’s a creek. And it doesn’t go anywhere near the Nyols, if you want to be clever.’

  ‘Never let the Boy call the Potkoorok clever. Only the Turongs are clever, for they live in trees and are seen in rocks. Tonight the Boy will show this wonder to the simple Potkoorok, for you will travel with me to trick the Nyols.’

  ‘Hang on -’ said Charlie.

  ‘All right, I will,’ shouted Simon, exasperated.

  Suddenly the Potkoorok began to chuckle. Its chuckles lapped and rollicked round the swamp, and the frogs doubled their cries at the sound. The Potkoorok lay on the bank and flapped its large green feet in the air, chuckling till its eyes streamed. ‘A trick –’ it spluttered. ‘A trick. They will tell it across the land for a thousand years! In wells and streams, and in secret waters under the desert, they will tell how the Nyols fled from their rocks! I will be known forever, Boat Boy! They may even hear of you.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Charlie, ‘but you’ll have to manage without Simey. I’m not having him dragged along to prove how clever you are.’

  By now Simon was full of doubts and worries; but if Edie could drive the tractor across the path of the Nargun – He said, a little unwillingly, ‘Well then how will you know when the Nyols have gone, Charlie? They won’t all go down the passage, see; they’re not solid like the Nargun. They go through little places you can’t even see, and a lot of them’ll go out the back of the mountain probably. So how will you know when you can get to the bulldozer if I’m not there to come and tell you?’

  ‘I don’t even know if he can swim!’ roared Charlie to the chuckling water spirit. By now it was enchanted with its plan and full of good humour. It stopped chuckling and answered Charlie gently.

  ‘When he travels with the Potkoorok he can swim. In the water and the deep places he can breathe. When he looks with the Potkoorok he can see and find the road. He will come to no harm, but keep him if you will. At sundown the Potkoorok goes to trick the Nyols out of their rocks. If the Boy is here then, he comes too.’ It slid away into the water, and the swamp chuckled.

  ‘Look here, Simey,’ said Charlie as they rode home, ‘we’ve got enough on our hands without the worry of this. We’ll just let the old thing get on with its own job and we’ll get on with ours. Edie and I’ll be needing a hand.’

  But Simon too had been enchanted – by the Potkoorok’s promise. ‘All right,’ he said gruffly. ‘Only how will you know when it’s all right to go in to the bulldozer?’

  Charlie rode in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘Wouldn’t you be a bit upset going under the water with the old thing? It can be as silly as a wet hen – lord knows what it’ll be up to.’

  ‘Not after it promised!’ Simon cried. But Charlie did have enough on his hands without this extra worry, so Simon made himself speak sensibly again. ‘See, I’d be out to you with the message before you went in, so I’d still go down to Edie and do whatever else you want. Only I’d do this first. But it’s up to you. I’ll do what you say.’

  ‘Well …’ said Charlie, sounding bothered. ‘We’ll see what Edie thinks.’

  When Edie heard of the plan she too seemed uncertain and asked if Simon could swim. He said that he could a bit but it didn’t matter, and explained about the Potkoorok’s promise. Edie was silent for a moment, retreating into a deep calm. At last she said, ‘I’d rather trust him with the Potkoorok than with those Nyols yesterday when we’d never even seen them. He’ll be all right, I suppose.’ So Simon assumed that it was settled, and he would go.

  He had doubts himself as the day went on, growing less and less real by the hour. Soon everything seemed like the sort of dream where things go on happening whether you want them to or not, and you have no choice about what you will do
. Listening to Charlie’s instructions to Edie and himself about the tractor, helping to overhaul it and remove the muffler, taking a can of fuel and some oil up to the cave for the bulldozer – all of it seemed like some game of make believe.

  ‘What if the bulldozer won’t start, Charlie?’

  ‘It’s a washout, and we’ll have to think of something else. We won’t know till we try.’

  ‘What if the Nargun stays right up where it was this morning? Will it hear the tractor?’

  ‘It won’t matter. The tractor only matters if the thing tries to come down. Now mind, you’re not to go up the gully, just across and back below it. Just to keep that thing from coming down this way. Leave the rest to the bulldozer. I’ll get back to you as quick as I can.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to stop with the bulldozer, then?’

  ‘Not if it’s running all right. I’ll leave it set on half throttle and come back in case you and Edie strike any trouble. The fact is,’ said Charlie, ‘if you and Edie could cope with the ’dozer I’d sooner have you in there than out here. Safer.’

  ‘You wait till you see the ’dozer,’ said Simon. ‘Perched right on the edge of that shelf. It could easy run over, and then it’s some drop.’

  ‘M’p,’ said Charlie. ‘Put a couple of chocks of wood for the tracks with that can.’

  Meals were all wrong, too. Lunch was a hot dinner so that Edie needn’t cook later in the day, and afternoon tea included fried eggs in case it was really late before they could eat again. After that Simon changed into swimming trunks and an old sweater, feeling as though a curtain were going up on some fantastic stage. Charlie and Edie were getting the evening jobs done when he called goodbye and started up the ridge. They both stopped what they were doing and watched him go.

  ‘I’ll take something warm up for you!’ called Edie, and he waved. They had been through all that; it was only a way of saying goodbye. At least nobody had said ‘Now mind you do just what the Potkoorok tells you’. He turned off the track and ran, in his old spoilt tennis shoes, to the swamp.

  The sun was dipping behind the tallest hills when he sat on the bank above the deep hole to wait. The water there looked dark and cold, and Simon shivered. He had to wait ten minutes before the water swirled and the Potkoorok’s head appeared. It chuckled when it saw him, and called, ‘Come, Boy!’

  Breathing quickly, Simon went down the bank and into the pool. The cold water gripped his ankles and feet. He had to keep his eyes and his faith fixed on the Potkoorok in order to walk forward. When the cold had gripped his knees the spirit said, ‘Look down now.’ Simon looked down into the pool. Through clear brown water he saw again the dim yellow shape of the grader.

  ‘Take care,’ said the Potkoorok. ‘Follow after me.’ It sank slowly down past the centre of the frame, and Simon took one step forward and began to sink after it. They went slowly down, between the sideways-tipped cabin and blade – past the wheels – past the sign that said grader - down far underneath it to soft mud that swirled like smoke about their feet.

  The shock of cold disappeared; the water was warmer than the air above. The hole was very deep. It could easily have drowned the grader too deep ever to be seen if the frame had not been so long that it spanned the deepest part. As it was, Simon looked up and saw the grader like a strange yellow scaffolding above him.

  The water swirled in silk ribbons round his legs and face. He could feel it in his nostrils and ears just as you always can when your head is under water. The only difference was that he felt no need either to hold his breath or to breathe, and that he could see a little as if he were wearing dark goggles of wavy glass.

  The Potkoorok was waiting for him at one side of the pool, patting at the wall with a webbed hand. He went to it across the heavily swirling mud and put his hand on the wall too, and felt hardness under spongy moss. The hole went down into rocks. The Potkoorok spoke near his ear and he heard it quite plainly.

  ‘Down between rocks the water goes to feed the creek. We do not go that way.’

  Simon nodded, not wanting to talk in case that spoilt his feeling of not needing to breathe. He followed the Potkoorok along the rocky wall until it slipped into a cranny in the rock and disappeared. He went in after it, and found that he had to crawl into a small tunnel of rock, full of water and sloping upward. He could just see a swirl in the tunnel where the Potkoorok waited.

  It was like crawling into a large pipe full of water, except that the rock was rougher to crawl through. After a few yards the tunnel grew a little higher; Simon could lift his head above water and see the Potkoorok’s head bobbing in front. In spite of its promise he could see no more than he had inside the mountain with the Nyols, but he saw its frog-face turn and grin at him.

  ‘Now we breathe,’ it said, its voice hollow in the rock pipe. Wherever the air was coming from, it was true that Simon could breathe quite normally.

  The tunnel grew higher and broader, the water shallower. Yellow-grey hairweed flowed delicately at its edge, and once he saw a pale spider flicker over the rocks. He saw the water licking at the edge of a crack, and remembered at last the cold, clear note of drips in the Nyols’ caverns. So of course the Potkoorok could travel into the mountain, and the Turongs could not. He was just thinking this when the Potkoorok spoke to him over its shoulder.

  ‘This is the Potkoorok’s road that runs many ways. How far will you travel with me, Frog Boy? Will you go where the rivers vanish into secret places of earth and rock? Would you swim in a dark, deep lake and rise through a pipe into the desert? Or should we go under all the wide land to the far west sea?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Simon. ‘I’d rather see you trick the Nyols.’ He felt again as though a mountain held him in its fist, and something with a lot of legs had just run over his hand.

  The Potkoorok chuckled happily. ‘That will be a trick! You will not break it with a word or a cry or a question. You will watch and follow and be silent; and when the time comes you will run quickly to tell the man.’

  ‘All right, I know that,’ said Simon.

  ‘Follow me now,’ said the creature, and slithered into a crack so narrow that Simon almost lost faith in it and turned back.

  It was the worst thing he had ever had to do, to force himself into that narrow crack in the dark, deep rock. He did it quickly because he had to – because he must not lose the Potkoorok for as much as a minute – because alone he could not see or breathe or move about here; and once he tried, a slime of weed helped him to slide through. The crack opened wider so that he could move his arms about and see ahead. The Potkoorok was waiting, sitting in the centre of a leaf-shaped tunnel.

  A trickle of water ran down the centre of this tunnel, over a bed of black slime. The Potkoorok, sitting on the slime, called, ‘Now the road is fast!’ It pushed with its hands on the rock and went sliding away down the tunnel. Simon tried too, and found himself sliding after it. He shouted a question.

  ‘If the water keeps running away like this through the rocks and creeks, why doesn’t the swamp run dry?’

  The Potkoorok fell out of the tunnel with a splash, into a pool in a small cave. It waited for Simon to splash down beside it. Then it said severely, ‘Is the Boy blind? Why does the swamp lie high on the mountain? What makes the swamp?’

  Simon wished that it wouldn’t talk in questions whenever it felt important or superior. He answered with some irritation. ‘Well, the mountain catches a lot of water, and I suppose it runs off and lies there. It’s so high – I suppose even the dew -’

  ‘That is a place for a Bunyip, not for a Potkoorok. A place for rotting and mud, not for clean water flowing -’

  ‘Springs!’ cried Simon. ‘There are springs running into it!’

  The Potkoorok rose solemnly from the pool. ‘The birthplace of many streams,’ it said. ‘Not a swamp but a dreaming of rivers.’ It led the way out of the cave into a corridor.

  Simon followed, turning over another thing that he somehow knew was right. He re
membered the day he first saw the swamp, lying so high on the mountain, and how he could hardly believe it was true. He had known it could not be an ordinary swamp; of course it was the birthplace of rivers.

  Close at hand he heard the cold bell-note of water falling drop by drop into a pool. The Potkoorok waited for him to come close and bubbled quietly into his ear.

  ‘Soft as a ripple, Boy. No talk. The Nyols have good ears.’

  fourteen

  The Potkoorok went striding lightly ahead and Simon crept after it. He was so close that he thought he could feel the creature shaking, and began to feel afraid himself – until the Potkoorok stopped to lean against the rock, and he saw that it was chuckling. It leaned back, pressing its flat fingers over its large mouth for silence, and shook with inward chuckles. Simon waited crossly, unable to share the joke. When it could control itself it leaned close to Simon and bubbled into his ear.

  ‘Now you will see a trick! No words to break the thought. Watch and follow.’

  ‘Get on with it, then,’ Simon hissed back. He was sure they had been a long time already, and Charlie and Edie were waiting out there with the Nargun. It was no time for the Potkoorok to stand about gloating.

  It went forward with bobbing strides into a cave where water lay. Cold drips fell on Simon as he followed it into a shallow pool where it squatted like a frog, closed its eyes, and seemed to dream.

  Simon squatted beside it, waiting anxiously for it to move again. They were still a long way from the Nyols, he thought. The rocks about the pool were damp, and water dripped from overhanging ledges, sounding its bell-notes in the pool. How many drips, he wondered, made a pool? And did they fall faster in wet weather, ringing a chime in the dark? While he was looking, the rock walls seemed to waver; all about the cave, water was sliding stealthily down them from ledges and cracks. The pool was deepening – he could feel the water creeping coldly up and up his chest. He looked anxiously at the water-spirit; it still squatted with its eyes closed and a frog-smile on its face. He opened his mouth to call out, and shut it again. He was not supposed to speak, so he wouldn’t – yet.