Tripods 02 - The City of Gold and Lead

by John Christopher

  "We will get across there in the morning," Beanpole said.

  "Yes," I nodded wearily, "in the morning."

  "The trees are thicker farther back. More shelter, if it rains."

  I nodded again, and moved my leaden legs forward for a few steps only, and then stopped. Someone was standing by the edge of the trees, watching us. When he realized we had seen him, he came toward us. In the dim light I could see that he was a man in his middle years, tall and lean, dressed in rough-looking dark trousers and shirt, his hair long and his face bearded. I saw something else, too. Although his hair hung down behind his neck, it receded at the forehead. It was dark hair, beginning to turn gray. And where the silver band of the Cap should have been there was only flesh, toughened and browned by long years of exposure.

  He spoke in German, in a harsh dialect. He had been looking out and had seen us struggling in the water, and had watched Beanpole haul me in to shore. His manner was odd, I thought -- part grudging and part welcoming. I had the feeling that he would have been quite happy to see us drift on past, and would not have spared more than a moment's thought for our chances of escaping drowning. But now that we were here...

  He said, "You'll want to dry yourselves out. You'd better come with me."

  All sorts of questions were in my mind, apart from the really crucial one of why he was not one of the Capped. But it seemed best to do as he said and let enlightenment wait. I looked at Beanpole and he nodded. The man led the way to what I saw was a well-trodden path. It wound between the trees for several minutes before coming out into a clearing. In front of us there was a wooden hut, with an oil lamp burning in the window and smoke blowing from its chimney. He unlatched the door and went inside, we following.

  A log fire was burning in a stone fireplace. There was a large woolen rug in front of it -- red with weirdly shaped black and yellow animals -- and sitting on the rug were three cats. Two of them were tabbies, marked with white patches, the third an oddly patterned black and white with a white face and a funny black moustache under the nose. The man moved them with his foot, not roughly, but merely forcing them to yield their place. He went to a cupboard and produced two lengths of coarse toweling.

  "Get your wet things off," he said. "Warm yourselves in front of the fire. I've got a couple of shirts and trousers you can put on while your own are drying." He stared at us fiercely. "Are you hungry?"

  We looked at each other. Beanpole said, "Very hungry, sir. If you..."

  "Don't call me sir. I'm Hans. Bread and cold ham. I don't usually cook at night."

  "Just bread will do," I said.

  "Aye," he said. "You look starved. Get yourselves dry, then."

  The trousers and shirt were too big, of course, particularly in my case. I had to roll the bottoms up and he gave me a belt to put round the middle. I was lost inside the shirt. While we were changing, he had been putting things on a scrubbed wooden table under the window: a couple of knives, plates, a dish of yellow butter, a large flat loaf of brown bread, and a ham, partly cut, that showed firm pink meat surrounded by clear white fat, baked brown on the outside. I sliced into it, while Beanpole cut bread. I saw Hans watching me, and was a little ashamed of the thickness of the slices I was cutting. But he nodded, approvingly. He brought over a couple of mugs, plonked them by our plates, and returned with a big earthenware jar from which he poured us dark draughts of beer. We set to. I warned myself to eat slowly, but to no avail. The ham was sweet and good, the bread nutty and coarse-textured, the butter of a finer quality than I had tasted since leaving home. The beer with which I washed it down was strong and sweet. My jaws ached with chewing, but my belly still clamored for nourishment.

  Hans said, "You were hungry, all right." I looked guiltily at my plate. "Never mind. Eat on. I like to see someone enjoying his victuals."

  I ground to a halt at last; Beanpole had finished much earlier. I was feeling full, in fact overfull, and happy. The room was snug, with the glow of lamplight and the flicker of firelight and the three cats, back in their original positions, purring away in the hearth. I presumed that now we would be asked questions: where we had come from, the reason for our being in the river. But this did not happen. Our host sat in a wooden rocking chair that looked as though he might have made it himself, and smoked a pipe. He did not seem to find silence awkward or constraining. In the end, it was Beanpole who said, "Could you tell us how it is that you are not Capped?"

  Hans took his pipe from his mouth. "I've never bothered."

  "Not bothered!"

  It came out slowly, through prodding from both of us. His father had brought him to this island as a young boy after his mother died. The pair of them had lived together here, growing their own vegetables, keeping chickens and a few pigs, making things to sell in the village across the river. Then his father had died, in turn, and he had stayed on. No one from the village troubled about him; he was not counted as part of their life. This happened in the spring of the year in which he would have been Capped, and during that summer he had not moved from the island, concerned only with doing on his own all the things in which previously he had assisted his father. (He had buried his father, he told us, not far from the hut, and over slow months that winter carved a stone with his name to put over his grave.) Since then he had gone across to the village perhaps twice a year. He had a boat in which he rowed there and back.

  At first I was incredulous, thinking of the trouble we who had fled to the White Mountains had taken to avoid being Capped, while this man had just stayed where he was, not worrying. Surely there could not be flaws like this in the Tripods' mastery of the earth? But the more I thought about it, the less surprising it seemed. He was one man, living like a hermit. The domination of the Tripods depended on the serfdom of men as such, and to that end it was enough that Capping should be accepted as a natural and inevitable thing where a handful of men, two or three even, were gathered together. One man did not matter, as long as he stayed quiet and caused no trouble. And the moment he did cause trouble, of course, he would be dealt with, either by the Tripods or their human servants. There would be no difficulty in that.

  Beanpole, once he had established all this, quizzed him about the Tripods. Did he see much of them? What did he feel about them? I saw where the line of questioning was heading, and was content to leave it to him. He did not seem surprised at or suspicious of the conversation, and this in itself showed how small his contact with the wider world must have been. Local customs varied in different countries, but in every one the subject of Tripods and Caps was covered by a taboo. No one, Capped as we appeared to be, would have spoken like this.

  But if unsuspicious, he was also indifferent. He saw the Tripods from time to time, yes. He believed they damaged crops on the mainland; it was hard to see how they could avoid it, great massive things that they were. But none of them, he was glad to say, had ever planted its heavy foot on this island. As for Caps, well, people wore them, and they didn't seem to do a lot of harm and didn't seem to do any particular good. He believed it was something to do with the Tripods, since the boys who went for Capping were taken up by the Tripods. Did they prevent people wanting to fight against the Tripods, Beanpole asked daringly.

  Hans looked at him over his pipe. He said shrewdly, "Well, you'd know more about that than I do, would you not? But it wouldn't make a lot of sense wanting to fight against the Tripods, would it? You would have to be pretty strong in the arm to throw a stone high enough to hit that part at the top, and what good would it do you if you did? For that matter, what's the point in it? It's not as though they do any harm. A bit of damage now and then to crops and cattle -- to men, maybe, if they don't get out of the way fast enough. But lightning can kill you with even less chance of dodging, and hailstones can ruin crops."

  Beanpole said, "We were on a raft farther up the river. The raft was smashed by a Tripod. That's how we came to be washed up here."

  Hans nodded. "Bad luck comes to everyone. Some sickness got among my h
ens two years back. Wiped out all but three of them."

  "We're very grateful to you," Beanpole said, "for giving us food and shelter."

  Hans stared from his face to the fire, and back. "As to that, I get along without seeing people well enough, but now you're here...There's some wood that needs cutting, up at the top end. I've had rheumatics in my shoulder, and it's not got done. You can get on with that tomorrow, and it will pay for the food you eat, and your lodging. Later, maybe, I'll row you across to the village."

  Beanpole started to say something then stopped and merely nodded. There was silence again, Hans staring into the fire. I said, part exasperated, part in hope, "But if you found people who were fighting against the Tripods -- wouldn't you help them? After all, you are a free man."

  He looked at me for some moments before replying. "That's strange talk," he said. "I don't have a lot to do with people, but it sounds strange talk to me. You don't come from these parts, lad."

  It was part accusation, part question. I said, "But if there were men who were not slaves of the Tripods, surely you would want to do what you could..."

  I found my voice trailing off under the steady regard of the bearded man.

  "Strange talk," he repeated. "I mind my own business. I always have, and I always will. Are you one of those they call Vagrants, maybe? But they travel around by themselves, not in couples. I don't have trouble with anyone, because I keep out of it. You seem to want to start trouble. If that's the way you think..."

  Beanpole cut in on him. He said, with a quick look of warning at me beforehand, "You mustn't pay any attention to him, Hans. He's feeling queer. When he was in the water he was hit on the head by one of the planks from the raft. You can see the bruise on his forehead."

  Hans got up from his feet, and came toward me. He peered at my head for a long time. Then he said. "Aye. He's maybe addled his wits a bit. It won't hinder him from swinging an ax in the morning. But you'll both benefit from a good night's sleep. I rise early, so I don't stay up late."

  He brought blankets from the hut's other room, in which he slept. Then, with a gruff goodnight, he left us, taking the lamp with him. Beanpole and I settled ourselves down on the floor, on either side of the fire. I was feeling vaguely uncomfortable from the supper, which, following the previous two days privation, was not proving easy to digest. I expected to have a restless night. But tiredness was stronger than queasiness. I looked at the glow of the fire and the three cats still sentinel in front of it. My next sight was of sunlight on cold ashes, the cats gone, and Hans, whose heavy tread had wakened me, calling to us to get up.

  The breakfast he prepared for us was enormous. Great slices of grilled gammon with as many eggs as we wanted (I ate three), and hot, golden-brown potato cakes. With it we drank more of the beer he had given us the previous night.

  "Eat well," Hans said. "The more you eat, the better you'll work."

  He took us with him to the north of the island. There was a field of about an acre, under potatoes, arid he explained that he wanted to extend it by cutting down and rooting out the trees in the adjoining copse. He had started this task, but the rheumatism in his shoulder had first hindered and then entirely prevented him. He provided us with an ax, spade, and mattock, watched us while we set to, and left us.

  It was hard work. The sap was rising in the trees and the roots of those already cut down were tangled and hard to dig out. Beanpole suggested that, if we worked hard, he might regard a morning's work as sufficient return for hospitality and take us across the river in the afternoon. But although we sweated at the job, the going proved slow. When Hans came for us, toward midday, he looked critically at our results.

  "I thought you would have done better than that. Still, you've made a start. You'd better come now for your dinner."

  He had roasted a couple of chickens, and he served these with a heap of buttered potatoes and a sour-tasting cabbage. He gave us wine with it because drinking beer in the middle of the day, he said, was likely to make us sluggish. Afterward there were sweet blueberries doused with cream. Then he said, "You can rest now for half an hour, and digest your food, while I get things cleared up. Then you get back to the field. Leave that big oak till tomorrow. I want to make sure she falls the right way."

  He left us lying in the sun. I said to Beanpole, "Tomorrow? So much for him offering to take us across the river this afternoon."

  Beanpole said slowly, "Tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. He is determined to keep us here until the wood is cleared."

  "But that would take a week, at least, probably two!"

  Beanpole said, "Yes. And we have little time if we are to compete in the Games."

  "We shall not manage that, anyway, on foot. We should have to find the material for another raft, and build it. And even then I doubt if we could do it. We need a boat."

  I stopped as an idea struck me, surprised that it had not occurred to me before. We had seen Hans's boat on our way up to the field. It was tied in a small inlet on the east of the island, a sturdy-looking six-footer, with a pair of oars. Beanpole, from the look he gave me, thinking along the same lines.

  I said, "If we managed to slip away this evening...I suppose it would be a pretty rotten trick, but..."

  "The boat must mean a great deal to him," Beanpole said. "He depends on it to get to and from the village. I think probably he built it himself, or his father did, and it would take him a long time to build another, particularly with the pain in his shoulder. But we know from what he said last night that he would never help us, although he is not Capped. He would keep us here, working for him, even if he knew what our mission was. I think getting into the City is more important, Will, than this lonely old man and his boat."

  "So, this evening..."

  "This evening loses us half a day, and there may not be another time when we know ourselves to be unwatched." He rose to his feet. "I think now is better."

  We walked in as innocent a manner as possible toward the shelter of the trees. As we approached them, I glanced back and saw the open door of the hut, but no sign of Hans. We went more quickly after that, running in the direction of the inlet and the boat. It rocked as Beanpole climbed aboard and unshipped the oars, while I saw to the rope that tied it to the branch of a tree. It was tied in a complicated knot, over which I struggled with, at first, little effect.

  Beanpole said, "Hurry, Will."

  "If I had a knife..."

  "I think I hear someone."

  I heard it, too -- running feet and now a voice, calling harshly. I wrenched desperately at the knot, and it came free. Then I scrambled into the boat, which tilted dangerously under us. As Beanpole pushed off from the bank, the figure of Hans burst through from the trees, shouting curses. We were ten feet clear by the time he reached the water's edge. He did not stop but plunged in after us. The fast-flowing water came up to his knees, then his thighs, but he waded on, still cursing. Where it reached his waist, he succeeded in grasping at the blade of one of the oars, but Beanpole pulled it from him. The current took us, and we moved out toward midstream.

  Hans fell silent then, and his expression changed. I had borne his earlier raving and anger easily enough, but this was different. I still feel sick when I remember the terrible despair in his face.

  We went downriver swiftly enough after that. We took turns at the oars, started early, and rowed until late each day. Food was a problem, but we managed, although after the first day we were hungry all the time. We passed barges, traveling upstream and down, and kept clear of them, which was increasingly easy as the great river broadened on its course to the sea. The river itself was a source of great interest, rolling through varied scenery, woods, pasture, vineyards, and wheatfields, and the silent, somber heaps, mounded up on either side, of the ruined cities of the ancients. We saw Tripods many times, and once heard the wild warbling of their hunting call, but that was far in the distance. None approached us closely. There were rivers that ran in to join the mother riv
er, castles of great antiquity lifted high on spurs of cliff, and in one place a huge tawny mass of tree-decked rock, taller than a Tripod, set in midstream.

  Finally we came to where the Games were held. There were many barges tied up there, the Erlkönig among them.

  5 -- The Games

  It was a land of flower-starred meadows, heavy, rich-yielding earth, small prosperous villages, and windmills everywhere, their sails turning slowly in warm gusts of wind. The season was perhaps not so far advanced as in the south, but the weather seemed to have set in fair. This was true Games weather, people said, though I thought the fact that so many of them remarked on it might indicate that true Games weather was more a rarity than a reasonable expectation.

  The town lay west of the river, behind meadows that, as we made our way through them, were hot and slumbrous in the afternoon sun. Many people were traveling that way, not only competitors but spectators to see the Games. The town and nearby villages seemed to bulge with them, and thousands more set up tents in the fields. There was an air of festival -- much eating and drinking of beer and last year's wine, everyone, it seemed, happy, and dressed in their best. We had got there the day before the opening. That night we had to sleep where best we could -- in the open, as it proved, under willow trees beside a rushing stream -- but tomorrow, providing we passed the early trials and were accepted, we would be competitors and be housed in the long, low wooden huts built near the Field.