The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “They’re puny,” said Albert. “The people dot got faces. I’m going to give them eyes and ears!”

  “No. You must not. Truly,” said Comity, as firmly as she knew how.

  The Blighs smelled blood. “They are rude. They need clothes,” said Anne. “Give them some clothes, Albert.”

  “And a carriage to go about in,” said Alexander, grinning.

  “And a house with curtains!”

  “There are handprints, look. We should all leave our handprints!”

  “They are a thousand years old,” Comity insisted. “They were painted by the ancestors. You would not crayon in a church, would you?” But she could hear the panic in her voice and see the dingo glint in their eyes. She should never have brought them here, should never have been tempted to show Fred’s secrets to the noxious Blighs. Alexander and Albert began crayoning the palms of their hands, ready to make handprints. Albert drew out a red crayon and leaned one hand on the cave wall. A dingo-pink tongue poked out of the side of his small mouth as he prepared to improve on the sacred paintings.

  Then a drone, like wind among buildings.

  “What’s that?” said Anne, spinning round.

  The drone throbbed and sobbed, louder and louder, passing in and out of a musical note found nowhere on any piano keyboard. It thrummed as if there might be feathers attached to whatever was making it – wings – a sting, even. Urging and surging and circling and swooping, it seemed to surround them, its echo filling the cave as a howl fills a dog’s gullet.

  Albert dropped his crayons. Alexander and Anne looked at Comity for her to say something reassuring.

  Her face was as coldly blank as any of the painted warriors’ on the wall. “What did you expect?” she said. “Now you have roused up the guardian monsters.”

  The Blighs ran so fast they had no breath left for screaming. The only noise to escape them was a sporadic squeak and squeal, as of piglets rolling down a hillside.

  Fred appeared from nowhere, wrapping the bullroarer round and round with its string. For weeks he had been promising to show one to Comity: ever since the War of Calgo Spur Line. She had doubted his promise, knowing full well that bullroarer magic was not meant for girls – nor for little boys uninitiated into the mysteries of manhood. But here he was, pressing the magic noise-maker into her hand – an oval of wattle wood etched and stained with patterns.

  “You made it?” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Against Regulations. I am not man yet. You better have it.”

  “Me?” said Comity. “What, always?”

  “Byallmean,” said Fred.

  “Verily?”

  “Verily.”

  He took her other hand and pressed it to the wall alongside the palm-prints of his ancestors. Spread against the rock, his own hand was smaller than hers.

  Neither left a print: that was not the intention. It was more as if the two of them were stroking the flank of a great beast – feeling its red heart beat through the smoothness of its ancient hide.

  Glossary of Aboriginal Words

  (Pama-Nyungan Dialect)

  allinger yerra-bamalla

  it is sunset

  Altjeringa

  the land of the Dreamtime; the land of Byamee

  arcoona

  it’s no good

  bulyakarak

  spiritually powerful person

  corroboree

  tribal gathering with dance and storytelling

  cull-la

  all right

  djanak

  spirit being

  goonawodli

  toilet

  gunyah

  camp or shelter

  kardang

  little brother

  kert-kert

  quickly

  koppi unga

  give me some water

  korr

  come back

  kubang

  friend

  kulpernatoma

  I’m talking to you

  kurlang

  son/child

  lilly-pilly

  a myrtle tree or rose apple

  malka karak

  doctor

  mantanekin

  wait for me

  min-min

  floating lights sometimes glimpsed in the Outback – a natural phenomenon

  ngai ouri

  come here

  thrunkkun

  go away

  wayarn

  afraid

  wija narani

  I am leaving

  windana?

  which way?

  yamble

  a lie or tall story

  yarrura?

  what am I going to do?

  yirra

  up

  General Glossary

  Big Red

  a (red) kangaroo

  brolga bird

  the delicate and dancing Australian crane

  burdi

  a burrowing rat-kangaroo

  coolabah

  a kind of eucalyptus tree

  comity

  courtesy, especially between nations who respect each other’s laws and customs

  corella

  a long-billed cockatoo

  dillybag

  small bag woven from plant fibres or grass and worn round the neck to carry gathered food or tools

  Dreamtime

  a legendary Aboriginal age during which the world was created and shaped, and the ancestors (both human and animal) introduced the skill and customs needed for day-to-day living

  ghan

  a native of Afghanistan or India, encouraged to bring to Australia his camels and his experience of delivering goods by camel trains. Camels were ideally suited to the harsh, dry Australian outback

  ghantown

  settlements built by the ghans

  goanna

  a large lizard

  gullah

  a kind of parrot

  jacky

  used in the past by non-Aboriginals to refer to Aboriginal males regardless of their actual name

  jerky

  beef cut into strips and dried in the sun

  Kadimakara

  an Aboriginal term for monsters who lived during the Dreamtime and, when the trees disappeared, wandered in the desert until they died, leaving only their bones. Hence the name given by archaeologists to a unique breed of dinosaur identified from a single find of skull fragments

  Macassar oil

  a preparation used by men to keep their hair plastered in place

  mob

  Aboriginal term for family or clan or group

  mulga

  an acacia tree, its wood often used in house building

  Mullah

  used in the past by non-Muslims as a name for any ghan settler; in fact a Muslim teacher or authority in Islamic law – a figure of authority within any community

  perentie lizard

  a huge flesh-eating lizard, the biggest in Australia, growing to over two metres in length

  pituri

  a shrubby tree, also the juice made from its leaves, used by huntsmen to drug and slow down fast-moving emu

  spencer

  a short vest

  spinifex

  sharp-pointed Australian grass, sometimes called porcupine grass

  stockmen

  farmhands (usually Aboriginal) who looked after cattle

  tintown

  same as ghantown, so-called because of the use of sheet metal in the buildings

  witchetty grubs

  larvae of a moth or beetle

  woomera

  a stick used to propel a spear

  Thank you, thank you…

  Like Herbert Pinny, I like working alone, filling my days up with words. But of course that’s not a true picture of the writing life. Many, many people are involved in bringing a book to life, and I am hugely grateful to all of them for making this one: Rebecca for liking the idea; Anne, Sarah and Stephanie for rescuing me from my mistakes; de
signers Hannah and Sarah; Amy and Liz for telling people about it; author and friend Kate Forsyth; Nola Turner-Jensen, Cristina Cappelluto, Abigail Wheatley and Margaret Cole for their advice; also the excellent people I met in Australia (especially at Alice Springs) who introduced me to the world of the repeater station, the Ghan railway and the camel trains.

  I must acknowledge my debt to R Lewis and H W Reed whose lexicons of Aboriginal language and collection of myths I was all too dependent on.

  Thank you, too, to the ghosts of all those remarkable and motley inhabitants of the nineteenth-century Red Heart, whose footprints smoothed the harsh path to modern-day Australia.

  About the Author

  Geraldine McCaughrean is one of today’s most successful and highly regarded children’s authors. She has won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award three times, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Bronze Award four times, the prestigious U.S. Printz Award and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award. She was chosen to write the official sequel to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Peter Pan in Scarlet which was published to wide critical acclaim.

  Geraldine lives in Berkshire with her husband, most of her grown-up daughter’s possessions and laconic golden retriever, Daisy.

  www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk

  You might also like to read:

  “I was totally captivated… I felt I was there amongst the people, the bloodshed, the revenge and the secrets.” lovereading4kids.co.uk

  “Beautifully written and utterly gripping.” Philip Reeve

  Here’s the first chapter:

  Monsters

  Rusti feared nothing but God and the lightning.

  Well, he was a Mongol, wasn’t he? Born to a travelling life, a nomad’s life. His first memories were of being cradled in the bow of a saddle, rocked to sleep by the swaying of a horse, woken by the sounds and smells of an army on the move. His life was one long journey – one long military campaign, riding in the wake of the Conqueror. Home was wherever night kissed the ground and marked the spot for pitching camp.

  Rusti despised town dwellers. However magnificent the town – and in his short life he had seen many, many towns and cities – the men who lived there filled him with disgust. They were “tajiks” – stayers-in-one-place – and to a nomad all tajiks are despicable. What did they know of a warrior life? What did they know of sleeping under the stars, of riding into the teeth of a freezing wind or into the flames of battle? They were soft. They were weak. They almost asked to be conquered, as a flea asked to be squashed.

  The tajiks of India did not stand a chance against Timur the Lame, Conqueror of the World. As the Chronicler Shidurghu wrote down, bending the Emir’s name into a grander shape with the nib of his pen: “Tamburlaine’s millions of men advanced so fast that they overtook the birds in their flight”. Nothing slowed them – not their pack mules, camels, siege engines, flocks, tents, cauldrons, carts, iron baths, noise-throwing guns, travelling mosques nor their portable kitchens. Certainly not the cities that stood in their way. The Horde travelled by moonlight, storming towns and citadels by day, slaughtering thousands and taking prisoners by the tens of thousands.

  Now the Conqueror’s sights were set on Delhi. Listening at night to his neighbours crouched around the campfires, red-cheeked in the heat, Rusti heard them say how Delhi was a treasure house crammed with gems and perfumes, twinkling with silver, fragrant with spices. Rusti’s older brother, Cokas, already had a big leather pannier full of beautiful things he had pillaged in Tiflis and Smyrna. Beneath her robes, his wife Borte rattled with silver ornaments looted on the journey south. But rumour had it that when they reached Delhi there would be the best loot of all. That’s what people said.

  They said Delhi had an army, too, but Tamburlaine the Great and his Mongol warriors would wash that away as a river washes away the leaves that fall into its stream. No, Rusti found nothing to fear in his young life, except for God and the lightning…

  Until he reached Delhi.

  Rusti pictured what he might plunder for himself when the city fell: some silver stirrups, perhaps; a rug, some jewellery for a dowry. Well? He was twelve already, wasn’t he? Soon he would be old enough to marry. (Cokas had married at fourteen – though secretly Rusti was hoping for a wife less sharp-tongued than Borte, and one who made less noise when she moved.) Today nothing seemed impossible. For as of today, Rusti was old enough to ride out with the army. Rusti was old enough to be accounted a warrior!

  From the ridge-top palace of Jahan-numah, the Grand Emir Tamburlaine, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction, surveyed the Jumna river plain, seeking the ideal place to do battle with the warriors of Delhi. If they decided to fight. Some cities just surrendered without a struggle. The people looked over the walls, saw the Mongol Horde on its way, like a tidal wave, and immediately sent ambassadors to present the symbolic shroud and sword and to beg for their lives. They wept, they implored, they grovelled and pleaded to be spared their miserable tajik lives. They emptied out their treasures at the Emir’s feet, offered their sons as hostages, promised to add their soldiers to the might of Tamburlaine’s army. (Occasionally, the Emir was merciful: he took their presents and allowed them to live.) In short, they were contemptible. Beetles. Ants. Fleas on the skin of the world. Rusti found it easy to despise them. After all, a man with fear in him is worth no more than a dog with worms.

  The squirming heat in Rusti’s own stomach was not fear – of course not! – it was the stirring of excitement. Rusti-the-Man was about to burst out from inside Rusti-the-Boy. It was no wonder he felt a little sick.

  The sun was hot. Light bounced back off the baked ground like brass arrowheads: Rusti had his eyes half shut. The heat was tying side-strands of his brain into a headache. Nearby he could hear his fearsome sister-in-law rattling in her chain-mail underwear of looted spoons, brooches, ink-holders, buckles and horse bits. Maybe it was all that lumpy weight that made her scowl. Maybe she scowled at everyone like that, and not just at him. Suddenly he heard warning shouts, turned…and saw them for the first time.

  Hindu cavalrymen had forayed out of the city. And with them they had brought…monsters. Great shapeless leather bags they were, with hideous long noses, gross, misshapen fangs, ears like flapping washing, legs like tree trunks. Their brows and chests were hung with chain mail, and castle turrets grew from their backs, big enough to hold three men. Out of these turrets flew javelins, arrows and firebombs. The fearless Mongols were thrown into panic.

  The pony under Rusti went rigid. There was thunder in those trampling, monstrous feet. Blades lashed to the monsters’ fangs made lightning out of the sunlight. And when they coiled back those hideous noses and bellowed, the noise was like all the demons of hell triumphing.

  But it takes more than shock and horror, more than a surprise attack to unman Mongol troops. Their little cavalry ponies wheeled away down the side of the ridge, rode round the attackers and regrouped behind them. The warriors uttered shrieks quite as beasty as the monsters, and being one with their ponies, wove and darted in among the Delhi cavalry like fish among bulrushes. Short sharp scimitars delivered short sharp strokes that opened a vein, severed a rein, nicked a windpipe, or the fingers from a hand, so fast that the loser barely knew what he had lost.

  Not that Rusti was among them. He was trying to regain control of his pony, which was young and had not seen battle before. It turned around and around on the spot and, when he finally persuaded it to stop, began to trot backwards sooner than move closer to the monstrous grey leather bags. Otherwise, thought Rusti, otherwise… He gnashed his teeth, rolled back his lips, and uttered a subhuman shout which, when it reached the outside of him, sounded more like a groaning bleat. Then there was a double-barrelled explosion very close to and so loud that it hurt deep inside his ears. And Rusti’s pony slumped down on the spot, paralysed with fright.

  The noise-throwing machines of the Horde (which had created the bang) even made Delhi’s monstrous beasts halt, lean
back on their haunches, flap their great ears and shriek. But that only gave the archers aboard them a steadier platform from which to fire down on the enemy. Rusti saw one arrow penetrate the helmet of a neighbour of his, and caught his breath, choking on his own spit: surely the arrow had sunk to its fletch in the man’s brain? But no: it had glanced off the metal and simply slid under the fur band circling his helmet. The owner took off his helmet, grinned at his lucky escape, and jeered abuse at the archers…until another arrow hit him in the side of the throat and left him riding aimlessly about the battlefield, stone dead. To give them their due, the Hindu archers were skilled.

  The tajik horsemen were good soldiers, too: emboldened by their vanguard of giant beasts, they showed courage enough and some talent for killing. But too many of the foot soldiers were ordinary citizens, undrilled, untrained, unorganized. They got under the feet of their own cavalry – even their own saggy monsters. Seeing the battle going against him, the leader of the Hindus lost his nerve and bolted for the city, his tame monsters lumbering after him. Rusti and the seven hundred would have gone after them – given chase…but for those great grey monsters bringing up the rear, shielding the retreating soldiers from attack.

  As they retreated, one of the beasts tripped on the shaft of a cart and lost its footing. For agonizing moments, it teetered on two legs, then toppled sideways and rolled downhill, crushing its turret and riders. As the fleeing Hindus disappeared under a cloud of red dust, this one great land-whale lay stricken on the hillside, flailing its stumpy legs, flapping its ears, squealing like a demented pig.

  No one rode in for a closer look – not until the troops parted and The Great Tamburlaine himself came cantering onto the scene. He rode round the Thing on the ground, his crippled arm folded across his stomach, his pony’s hoofs dislodging pebbles. And then – wonder of wonders! – he rode back and reined in directly in front of Rusti. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Rusti, Gungal Emir!”

  “Then take it prisoner, Rusti. What are you waiting for? Take the beast prisoner.”

  “I— Yes, Gungal Emir! Right away, Gungal Emir!”

  Rusti dug in his heels but his pony refused to go any closer: he had to dismount. He looked around for help, but everyone was hurrying back to camp. The men galloping past gave the monster a very wide berth indeed. Rusti was left alone with the task of getting it on its feet.