Tripods 02 - The City of Gold and Lead

by John Christopher

  It did not actually rain, but the day was cloudy and chilling. The river rolled beside us, broad and turbulent, and we watched a barge go downstream and thought we detected, in its wake, the fragrance of bacon frying on the galley stove. Not far on, we found a cluster of houses, a farming hamlet. Beanpole had the idea of presenting himself as a Vagrant, hoping to be given food. I offered to do it instead, but he said it was his idea, and I must keep out of sight: Vagrants never traveled in company. So I hid in a hedge, and watched.

  In my village at home there had been the Vagrant House, provided for the use of these poor wandering madmen. There they were given food and drink, and there were servants to clean and cook. Beanpole had told me that in his' country nothing of this sort was provided. Vagrants slept rough and where they could -- in barns if they were lucky, or in ruins. They begged their food from door to door, and it was given them with varying generosity.

  We had assumed that something of the sort might apply here. There were half a dozen houses, and I saw Beanpole go up to the first of them and knock at the door. It did not open; later he told me that a voice from inside shouted at him to go away, adding curses. At the second door there was no response at all. At the third, a window opened and a bucket of dirty water was thrown over him, to the accompaniment of laughter. As he went away, wetter than before, the door opened. He half turned, prepared to put up with insults if there was a chance of food, and then fled. They had loosed a savage looking brindle dog on him. It chased him halfway to where I was lying and then stood barking its hostility after him.

  Half a mile farther on we found and raided a potato field. They were small, and would have been more palatable cooked. But we had no prospect of making a fire in this cold, gray sullen land. We slogged on and, as darkness fell, saw ahead of us downriver a barge moored by the bank. I think the same thought struck us both: that it might be the Erlkönig, that for some reason Ulf might have been held up and that we might rejoin them. It was an absurd hope, but it was bitter, all the same, to have it dashed. The barge was bigger than the Erlkönig, and was making upstream, not down. We went away from the river to circle past it.

  Later we came back to the river bank, to sit shivering in a broken-down hut. An unhappy silence had fallen. I wondered if Beanpole was thinking that he might but for me have been safe and warm and well-fed on the barge. I thought about that myself, though it did no good.

  Then he said, "Will."

  "Yes."

  "Where the barge was moored, there was a wharf, and a couple of houses. That would be one of the stages."

  "I suppose so."

  "The first we have passed since the town." I thought about that. "Yes. Yes, it is."

  "Ulf was reckoning to cover two stages a day, taking things easily. So in two days..."

  In two days we had covered a distance the barge would have sailed in a morning, though we had walked from first light till it was too dark to see where we were going. It was reasonable enough, but discouraging. I made no comment.

  Beanpole went on, "It was planned that we should get there three days before the opening of the Games. It was to take five days. At this rate, we shall take twenty. The Games will be over before we arrive."

  "Yes." I tried to rouse myself from torpor. "Do you think we ought to go back instead?"

  "To the tunnel? I don't like to think what we should say to Julius in that case."

  Nor did I, but I did not see what else we could do.

  Beanpole said, "We must get on faster. There is the river."

  "We dare not approach one of the other barges. You know what was said about that. They're suspicious of strangers and never allow them on board."

  "If we had a boat of our own..."

  "It would be a fine thing," I said, with a touch, I fear, of sarcasm. "Or if we found a Shmand-Fair traveling along the river bank and could climb aboard it."

  Beanpole said patiently, "A boat -- or a raft? The side of this hut, maybe? It is falling apart, as it is. If we could detach it, and get it into the water...the current would carry us twice as fast as we could walk at least, and much more directly."

  I took his point, and felt a sudden unexpected lift of hope, which for a moment allowed me to forget my cold shivering limbs and groaning empty stomach. It just might be possible. Long ago as a boy I had helped to make a raft under the supervision of my cousin Jack, and we had floated it on a nearby duck pond. It had collapsed and precipitated us into pea-soup water and stinking mud. But we had been children then. This was a different proposition.

  I said, "Do you think we can...?"

  "In the morning," Beanpole said. "We will try in the morning."

  The day, as though to encourage us, started bright. We tackled the job at first light. It was encouragingly easy, and then discouragingly difficult. The wall Beanpole had spoken of was about six feet square, and already largely split away from the roof. We completed the separation and freed the sides. After that it was simple enough to press it outward and down. It collapsed with a satisfying clatter -- and in several sections, as the individual planks fell apart.

  The thing to do, Beanpole said, was to secure them with cross pieces. Planks taken from the other walls would do. As for the means of securing them, we would have to take nails out and drive them in again where needed. He spoke with a fine practical-sounding confidence.

  The trouble was that most of the existing nails were both twisted and rusted, in some cases to the point where they broke under simple finger pressure. We had to hunt for reasonably sound ones, to lever them out carefully, avoiding any further distortion, and then straighten them and drive them through the crossed planks. We had nothing like a hammer, of course. We had to use chunks of stone with fairly flat surfaces. Beanpole found quite a good one and surrendered it to me because, as he said, I could use it better. This was true. I have always been fairly skilled with my hands -- more so, I am afraid, than with my head.

  It was hard work and took time. We were sweating by the time we finished, and the sun stood clear above the hills. That left us with the task of getting our raft into the water, and this was not easy, either. The but was some fifty feet from the river bank, and the ground between was uneven and marshy. The raft was much too heavy to lift so we had to drag and pull and maneuver it, a little at a time and resting between efforts. Once, when it got entangled in some viciously prickly thorn bushes, I almost felt like giving up, and kicked the planks in angry despair. It was Beanpole who tugged it free. Not long after that we got it to the bank, and only had to force it down a short slope to the dark rushing waters of the great river. And it was here that, again through Beanpole, we had a stroke of luck: he found the rough nest of a water bird, with four large speckled eggs in it. We ate them raw, licking the inside of the shell with our tongues, and threw ourselves into the final struggle. Beanpole plunged into the river and dragged; I thrust from the other side. The raft creaked ominously, and I saw a nail spring, but she went in and floated. We clambered aboard and pushed off from the bank.

  It was not exactly a triumphant voyage. A current took us out and propelled us, spinning around in sluggish circles, downstream. She floated, but only just. Under our combined weight all but one corner was under water. Through some freak of balance this rode some inches above the level of the river. We took it in turns for one to crouch there while the other sat or sprawled in the slopping wet. The water was cold, too, as well it might be at this time of the year in a river whose early course was fed by the melting snows of the southern mountains.

  But at least we were getting on faster than we had done by land. The bank flowed past us at a steady rate. And the weather was holding fine. The sun blazed hot in a sky whose blue was reflected, more deeply, in the smooth thoroughfare along which we traveled. Beanpole called to me and pointed. To the west there was a Tripod, giant-striding through the fields. I felt a kind of satisfaction at the sight. Ridiculously puny by comparison though we were, it was something that we were still in the fight.


  The next time I saw a Tripod I was a good deal less happy about it.

  An hour after we set out we passed a barge. It was heading upstream, and the encounter was therefore a brief one. A man on deck stared at us curiously, and threw out some comment or question that we did not grasp. We must have presented an odd sight, floating along on this waterlogged contraption.

  Hunger had been scarcely abated by the four raw eggs and became more and more insistent. We saw fields that looked as though they held crops that might be worth raiding, but here a particular deficiency of our ramshackle craft was brought home to us -- our inability to steer it. We had a couple of plank splinters, but they were only of value in pushing the raft off obstacles, and not much then. I realized that we must go where the river took us, and that, apart from the chance of running aground, we could only make a landfall by abandoning the raft and swimming for it. We were well out now, and the current was strong; it would have taken quite a swim to make shore. Meanwhile, the fields slid by and gave way, after a time, to terraces planted with the regular ranks of vines. There was no provender there. The tiny grapes would be barely set at this early season.

  A large fish, possibly a salmon, leaped tantalizingly near us. We had no means of cooking it, but if we had been able to catch it we would have had a shot at eating it raw. Visions of food passed before me, as I clung to the rough wood. Beef roasting on a spit...tender leg of lamb, with the sauce my mother made from garden mint...or just bread and cheese, bread crusty outside and soft within, cheese yellow and crumbling to the touch. I tasted my own spit, salt and unsatisfying.

  The hours passed. The sun arched high behind us and then curved down to the west. I was both hot and cold. I tried drinking great quantities of water, scooping it up in my hands, to fill the aching void in my belly, but it only made me feel bloated without being any less hungry. In the end I told Beanpole that we must get food somehow. We had passed two villages, one on either bank of the river. There would be food there, something edible at least -- in the gardens if we could not manage anything better. If we worked hard to paddle ourselves in toward shore with the bits of wood we had...and then did our best to beach the raft at the next sign of human habitation...

  He said, "It would be better if we could hold out till evening. There will be more opportunity to forage."

  "We may not see a village then."

  We argued, and at last, reluctantly, he agreed. We had moved, by degrees, nearer the west bank, and we tried paddling toward that. The result was ludicrous. The raft spun round, but our position relative to the shore did not alter. We abandoned the attempt, realizing we were getting nowhere.

  Beanpole said, "It's no good."

  I said, "Then we'll have to swim for it."

  "That means abandoning the raft."

  Of course it did! I was angry. "We can't go on without food! It was a mad idea to do this, anyway, without any means of controlling it."

  Beanpole was silent. Still irritated, I said, "And what about tonight? We can't sleep here. If we tried to, we would roll off and drown. We shall have to abandon it before dark, anyway."

  "Yes," he said, "I agree. But let us wait longer. There are no houses now."

  That was true. The river rolled between green banks equally free of any signs of life. I said sullenly, "I suppose so. Isn't it time we changed over again?"

  Later there was a deserted jumble of ruins, and north of that we met another barge. There was a temptation to shout to them to pick us up. I resisted it, but with difficulty. We had passed a staging post soon after noon. It had been empty, the small wharf white and silent in the harsh sunlight. The second post had two barges tied up, and a mile farther on a third barge was nosing its way up. I had not said anything else about leaving the raft and swimming for shore. Beanpole knew as well as I that this was what we would have to do. I took a small perverse satisfaction in leaving it to him now to initiate things.

  As the day waned we saw ruins again, but still nothing of habitation. The river was wider, and we had eddied out into the center of it. The swim would not be easy under any circumstances, still less to two people who were hungry and exhausted, cold and wet. The resentment I felt against Beanpole faded in the prospect of what lay ahead.

  Quite suddenly, though, everything changed. It came from the north, striding along the west bank. It was going to pass no more than a hundred yards from us, closer to us than any Tripod had been on this trip. There was no satisfaction this time, but a great relief when it had gone past. Until I saw it swing around and turn toward us, and heard the ululation that I had twice heard before and had cause to dread. Water fountained up as the great metal feet splashed into the river. There could no longer be any doubt that we were a target. Had they captured the Erlkönig, I wondered? Were they somehow, fantastically, informed of our objective, and looking for us? I stared at Beanpole, and he stared back. I said, "Better dive for it."

  It was already too late. At that instant the metal tentacle snaked down from the hemisphere. It crashed between us, splintering the frail planks. The next moment we were struggling in the water.

  4 -- The Hermit of the Island

  I had been expecting to be snatched up by the tentacle. The Tripod's action of smashing the raft, instead, astonished as well as alarmed me. I went deep under and took a mouthful of river water before I fully realized what was happening. When I surfaced I first looked up and saw that the Tripod, silent again, was rocking away on its previous course to the south. It seemed that what it had done had been aimless, on a par with the waltzing around the Orion when we were crossing the Channel from England. Like a vicious boy it had noticed something, swotted it out of pointless malice, and gone its way.

  But survival was a more pressing concern than speculation on the motives of the Tripods. The raft had disintegrated into its component planks, one of which bobbed in the water near me. A couple of strokes took me to it, and I hung on and looked for Beanpole. I could see nothing but the river, graying with the approach of evening, and wondered if the tip of the tentacle might have struck him as it came down. Then I heard his voice and, turning my head to look back, saw him swimming in my direction. He took the other end of the plank and we trod water, gasping.

  I said, "Shall we strike out for the shore?"

  He had a fit of coughing, then said, "Not yet, I think. Look ahead. The river bends. If we hang on we may be taken nearer in."

  The plank was a support that, in any case, I was not eager to relinquish. The current seemed faster, and certainly more turbulent. There were hills on either side, the river forcing itself between them. We were coming to the angle where it turned, fairly sharply, to the west. As we did so I saw the green bank on our right divide, showing more water.

  "The river..." I said. "It must fork there."

  "Yes," Beanpole said. "Will, I think we must swim for it now."

  I had learned to swim in the rivers around my village of Wherton, and once or twice, illicitly, in the lake up at the estate. It was better than nothing, but Beanpole had grown up in a seaside town. He pulled away from me with powerful strokes, realized I was falling behind, and called out, "Are you all right?"

  I called back doggedly, "All right," and concentrated on swimming. The current was very strong. The shore at which I was aiming slid past and behind. Only gradually did I make an impression on the distance. Then I saw something that dismayed me. Ahead the shore became a spit, with a wider reach of water beyond it. This was not a place where the river forked, but an island. If I missed it, there was the wider passage ahead. Already tired, I would find myself in midstream with a much longer haul to come. I altered course and swam almost directly against the current. I heard Beanpole call again, but could not spare the energy to look for him or to reply. I struggled on, my arms becoming more and more leaden, the water colder and fiercer and more implacable. I no longer looked where I was heading, concerned only with forcing my arms into and out of the water. Then something hit my head and I went under, dazed. I remem
bered nothing after that until I was aware of someone dragging me, and of firm ground under my feet.

  It was Beanpole who pulled me up onto a grassy bank. When I had recovered enough to take in my surroundings, I saw by how small a margin we had made it. We were within a few yards of the northernmost limit of the island. It lay in the center of the river's bend, and just ahead the river broadened considerably. My head was hurting, and I put my hand up to my forehead.

  "A plank hit you," Beanpole said. "From the raft, I think. How do you feel, Will?"

  "A bit dizzy," I said. Something else returned. "And hungry. Across there -- isn't it...?"

  "Yes," he said, "a village."

  Despite the deepening dusk, it was possible to see houses on the east bank. Some had lights in their windows. By this time I would have been prepared to take a chance on having dirty water thrown over me or being chased by large dogs -- even on being questioned as to what I was doing here -- but not on trusting myself to the river again. I could think more clearly, but physically I was as weak as though I had spent a month in bed.