Tripods 02 - The City of Gold and Lead

by John Christopher

  Julius said, "You have shown ability as a boxer, Will, and you have the advantage of being small and light in weight. Your training has been with Tonio, who would be in a heavier class at the Games, and this should help you.

  "The doubt we had was about you yourself, You are impatient, often thoughtless, likely to rush into things without giving careful enough consideration to what may happen next. From that point of view, Tonio would have been better. But he is less likely to succeed at the Games, which is our first concern. A heavy responsibility may rest on you. Can we rely on you to do your utmost to guard against your own recklessness?"

  I promised, "Yes, sir."

  "Sit down, then, Will. Stand up, Jean-Paul Deliet."

  I think I felt gladder about Beanpole than when my own name was called, perhaps because I was less confused and had been less optimistic. I had picked up his own gloom about his chances. So there would be three -- the three of us who had journeyed together before, who had fought the Tripod on the hillside.

  Julius said, "There were difficulties in your case, too, Jean-Paul. You are the best of our jumpers, but it is not sure that you are up to the standard that will be necessary to win at the Games. And there is the question of your eyesight. The contraption of lenses you invented -- or rediscovered, because they were common among the ancients -- is something that passed as an eccentricity in a boy, but the Capped do not have such eccentricities. Not being allowed to wear the lenses, you must blunder through a world in which you will see less clearly than your fellows. If you get inside the City, you will not perceive things with the clarity that Will, for instance, would.

  "But what you see, you may understand better. Your intelligence is an asset that outweighs the weakness of your eyes. You could be the most useful in bringing back to us what we have to know. Do you accept the task?"

  Beanpole said, "Yes, sir."

  "And so we come to the third choice, which was the easiest." I saw Henry looking pleased with himself, and was childish enough to feel a little resentment. "He is the most likely to succeed in his event, and the best equipped for what may follow."

  "Fritz Eger -- do you accept?"

  I tried to speak to Henry, but he made it plain that he wanted to be left alone. I saw him again later on, but he was morose and uncommunicative. Then, the following morning, I happened to go to the lookout gallery, and found him there.

  It was the lowest of the places where openings in the mountain side gave a view of the outside world. One looked out and down to a rich green valley, thousands of feet below, in which there were roads like black thread, tiny houses, pinpoint cattle in miniature meadows. Henry was leaning against the low wall of rock and turned as I approached. I said awkwardly, "If you want me to go..."

  "No." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

  "I'm...very sorry."

  He managed a grin. "Not as sorry as I am."

  "If we went to see Julius...I don't see why there shouldn't be four instead of three."

  "I've already seen him."

  "And there's no hope?"

  "None. I'm the best of my lot, but they don't think I stand much chance in the Games. Perhaps next year, if I keep at it."

  "I don't see why you shouldn't try this year."

  "I said that, too. He says even three is really too large a party to send out. So much more chance of being spotted, and more difficult with the barge."

  One did not argue with Julius. I said, "Well, you will have a chance next year."

  "If there is a next year."

  There would only be a second expedition if this one failed. I thought of what failure could mean, to me personally. The diminutive valley of fields and houses and ribboned rivers, on which I had so often looked with longing, was as sunny as before, but suddenly less attractive. I was staring at it from a dark hole, but one in which I had come to feel safe.

  Yet even in the brush of fear, I felt sorry for Henry. I could have been the one left behind. I did not think I would have borne it as well, if so.

  2 -- Prisoner in the Pit

  We set out in late afternoon, made our way secretly through the nearer valleys during dusk, and traveled on by moonlight. We did not rest until the sun was high, and by then we were halfway along the shore of the westerly of the twin lakes that lay below our stronghold. We hid ourselves on the hillside; behind and far above us was the glistening white peak from which we had started our journey. We were tired. We ate, and then slept, exhausted, through the long hot day.

  It was a hundred miles to the point on the river at which we were to join the Erlkönig. We had a guide -- one of the men who knew the country from raiding parties -- who would go with us as far as the barge. We went mostly by night, resting during the daylight hours.

  This was some weeks after the feast, and Julius's announcement. During that time we had been given further instruction and preparation, starting with having our hair cropped short and the false Cap molded to fit close to our skulls. It had been strange and desperately uncomfortable at first, but gradually I had grown used to this hard helmet of metal. My hair was already growing through and around the mesh, and we were assured that before the Games began we should look no different from other boys who had been Capped, in the first weeks of summer, as they were here. At night we wore bonnets of wool, because otherwise the cold would strike through the metal, painfully waking us.

  Henry had not been among those who watched us leave the tunnel. I understood that. I would not have wanted to be there if our situations had been reversed. My impulse was to resent Fritz, who had taken his place, but I remembered what Julius had said about needing to curb my rashness. I remembered also that I had resented what I thought was the greater friendship between Beanpole and Henry on our journey south, and how I had allowed it to influence me during our stay at the Château de la Tour Rouge.

  I was determined not to let anything of that kind happen now, and with this in mind made a special effort to overcome my animosity and be nice to Fritz. But there was a poor response to my overtures; he remained taciturn and withdrawn. I was prepared to resent that, in turn and with more justification, as I saw it. But I succeeded in bottling up my annoyance. It was a great help that Beanpole was with us. He and I did most of the talking, when we were in circumstances where talking did not involve risk. Our guide, Primo, a dark, burly man, looking clumsy but in fact wonderfully sure-footed, said little beyond what was necessary in warning and instruction.

  A week had been allowed for us to reach the barge, but we covered the distance in four days. We followed a high ridge, skirting the ruins of one of the great-cities. These encompassed a bend in the river, which was to be our thoroughfare. The river came from the east, with the early morning sun glinting along its length, but here turned and flowed northward. The higher stretch was empty, as was the part that ran between the sullen humps that had once been towering buildings, but above that there was traffic -- two barges nosing downriver, perhaps a dozen tied up by the bank at the wharves of a small town.

  Primo pointed down. "One of those will be the Erlkönig. You can find your way down there on your own?"

  We assured him that we could.

  "Then I'll be getting back." He nodded briefly. "Good luck to you."

  The Erlkönig was one of the smaller barges, some fifty feet in length. There was nothing special about her; she was just a long, low structure rising a few feet above the surface of the water, with a partly covered wheel-house aft, giving the steersman some protection against the elements. She had a crew of two, both false Capped. The senior of them was called Ulf, a squat, barrel-chested man in his forties, with a brusque manner and a habit of punctuating his speech by spitting. I did not like him, the more so after he made a disparaging remark about my slightness of build. His companion, Moritz, was about ten years younger and, I thought, ten times pleasanter. He had fair hair, a thin face, and a warm and ready smile. But there could be no doubt as to which of them was master: Moritz deferred to Ulf automatically. And it w
as Ulf, spitting and grunting at regular intervals, who gave us our instructions for the voyage.

  "We're a two-man barge," he told us. "An extra boy is fair enough -- you start 'prentices that way. But any more would draw notice, and I'm not having it. So you'll take it in turns to work on deck -- and when I say work, boy, I mean it -- and the other two will lie below decks and won't come up even if she's foundering. You've been told the need for discipline, I take it, so I don't need to go into that. All I want to say is this: I shall give short shrift to anyone who causes trouble, for whatever reason.

  "I know the job you've got to do, and I hope you're up to it. But if you can't behave sensibly and obey orders on this trip, you're not likely to be any good later on. So I won't think twice about dropping somebody off who's out of line. And since I wouldn't want him to float into the wrong harbor and start people asking questions, I've got a weight of iron to tie his legs to before I do drop him off."

  He cleared his throat, spat, and growled. The last remark, I thought, was possibly meant to be a joke. But I was not sure of that. He looked quite capable of carrying out the threat.

  He continued. "You've arrived early, which is better than arriving late. We have a cargo to load yet, and in any case it's known that we're not due off for another three days. We can leave a day early, but no more. So the first couple below have got a two-day stint before they see the sky again. Do you want to draw lots for it?"

  I glanced at Beanpole. Two days on deck were vastly preferable to spending the time below. But there was the possibility of two days confined with the silent Fritz. Beanpole, his mind presumably working along the same lines, said, "Will and I will volunteer to stay below."

  Ulf looked at me, and I nodded. He said, "Just as you like. Show them where they can bunk, Moritz."

  A problem that had engaged Beanpole as we came down from the hill to the river bank had been the way in which the barges were propelled. They had no sails, and these, in any case, would have been of limited value in the confines of a river. They could go down, of course, easily enough with the current, but how had they come up to this point against it? As we got nearer, we saw that they had paddle wheels in their sides. Beanpole was excited by the thought that there might be some machine, surviving from the days of the ancients, that moved them.

  The truth was disappointing. Each wheel had a treadmill inside, and the treadmill, on journeys upriver, was worked by donkeys. Trained for the task when young, they strained steadily forward and their efforts pulled the barge through the water. It seemed a hard and dreary life, and I was sorry for them, but they were well looked after by Moritz, who was plainly fond of the beasts. They were worked very little on the downriver trips, and were pastured whenever there was an opportunity. They were in a field not far from the river bank now, and would stay there till it was time for the Erlkönig to move on. Until they came aboard, Beanpole and I stayed in their small stables, with the smell of donkey and fodder mixing with the smells of old cargoes.

  The cargo this time was wooden clocks and carvings. The people who lived in the great forest east of the river made these, and they were shipped downriver to be sold. They had to be loaded with care because of their fragility, and men came aboard the barge to see to this. Beanpole and I hid behind the bales of hay that were kept for the donkeys, and did our best to stay quiet. Once, I could not stop myself from sneezing, but luckily they were talking and laughing loudly enough not to hear it.

  But it was a relief when the two days were up and, in the early morning, the barge cast off and moved out into the river. The donkeys worked their treadmill -- two at a time, with one resting -- and Beanpole and I drew straws for who took Fritz's place on deck. I won, and went up to a dark, blowy day, with a wind from the north that carried occasional gusts of rain. Yet the air was light and fresh, after my confinement below, and there were many things to be seen on the river and around it. Westward there was a great fertile plain with people working in the fields. To the east the hills stood up, with the black clouds pressing down over their wooded crests. I did not have much time, though, to admire the scenery. Ulf called me and made me get a bucket of water, a brush, and a handful of yellow, soft soap. The decks, he observed truthfully enough, had not been scrubbed for some weeks. I could make myself useful by remedying that.

  The progress of the Erlkönig was steady, but not fast. In the evening, before it was dark, we tied up on a long island where another barge was already moored. This was one of a number of staging posts that apparently ran the five-hundred-mile length of the river. Moritz explained to me that they were set a distance apart, which was calculated as a minimum day's haul upriver. Going down with the current, one usually covered two stages easily in a day, but to achieve a third meant risking darkness falling before one got there. The barges did not sail by night.

  We had seen no sign of Tripods during our journey from the White Mountains through the valleys to the river. During this day on deck, I saw two. Both were distant, striding along the western skyline, three or four miles away at least. But the sight of them gave me a shiver of fear, which took some subduing. For quite long periods it was possible to forget the exact nature of the mission on which we had embarked. Being reminded of it was a nasty jolt.

  I tried to console myself with the thought that there had been no hitches so far, that everything was going well. It did not help much, but by the following evening even that small consolation had gone.

  The Erlkönig stopped at the halfway stage, in a small town, a trading post. Moritz explained that Ulf had some business to conduct there. It would only take him an hour or so, but he had decided, since we were in advance of schedule, to stay over until the following morning. The afternoon lengthened, though, and there was no sign of Ulf returning. Moritz became more and more visibly nervous.

  In the end he voiced his apprehensions. Ulf, it seemed, was a man who drank heavily on occasion. Moritz had thought he would not do so on this trip, in view of everything that hung on it, but if the business on which he was engaged had gone wrong and he had become irritated by that, he might have stopped at a tavern, intending to have a drink to soothe his temper, and one thing might have led to another...In a bad bout he might be away from the barge several days.

  This was a discouraging thought. The sun dropped down in the west, and there was no Ulf. Moritz began to talk of leaving us on the barge and going in search of him.

  The difficulty was that the Erlkönig, and Ulf and Moritz, were well known in this town. Already a couple of men had stopped by to offer greetings and chat for a while. If Moritz left, Beanpole would have to handle them (it was his day on deck), and Moritz was unhappy about that. Suspicions might be aroused. They were likely to quiz him in his role as a new apprentice -- people on the river were curious about strangers, knowing each other so well -- and he might be led into saying something that they would recognize as false.

  It was Beanpole who suggested another way. We boys could go and look for Ulf. Choosing moments when no eye was watching, we could slip away in turn, and hunt round the taverns till we found him; then either persuade him to return or, at least, tell Moritz where he was. If we were questioned, we could pass as travelers from far parts: after all, the town was a trading post. It was not the same as having to answer questions about what we were doing on board the Erlkönig.

  Moritz was dubious, but admitted there was some point in this. Gradually he allowed himself to be persuaded. It was out of the question for all three of us to go searching for Ulf, but one might -- Beanpole, since it had been his idea. So Beanpole went, and I at once started working on Moritz to let me go also.

  I was helped by the fact that my importunity was matched, on Fritz's part, by indifference. He made no comment and clearly was prepared to wait until things sorted themselves out without assistance from him. So, having allowed one to go, there was only one other for Moritz to consider. I wore him down, as I had known I would; he was more amiable than Ulf, much more amiable, but also less s
ure of himself. He insisted that I should be back within the hour, whether or not I found Ulf, and I agreed to that. I was tingling with the excitement of exploring a strange town in a strange country. I checked that no one was watching the barge, then jumped quickly onto the quay, and made my way along the waterfront.

  It was a bigger place than I had thought, looking at it from the deck of the barge. Fronting the river was a row of warehouses and granaries, many of them with three floors above ground. The buildings were partly of stone but more of wood, and the wood was carved and painted with figures of men and animals. There were a couple of taverns in this stretch, and I looked in briefly, though Beanpole, I guessed, would have covered these before me. One of them was empty, except for two old men, sitting with large mugs of beer (they were called steins, I knew) and smoking pipes. The other had perhaps a dozen men in it, but I could tell in a quick survey that none of them was Ulf.

  I came to a road, which ran at right angles to the river, and followed it. There were shops here, and a fair amount of horse traffic, with pony traps and larger carriages and men on horseback. There were, I thought, a lot of people about. I understood why on coming to the first intersection. The crossing road, in either direction, was blocked by stalls that sold food and cloth and all kinds of goods. This was the town's market day.