The White Mountains (The Tripods)

by John Christopher

  He was closer than I had thought, though, and he pounded after me, yelling threats. I put a spurt on, looked back to see how much of a lead I had, and found myself slipping on a patch of mud. (Cobbles were laid inside the village, but out here the road was in its usual poor condition, aggravated by the rains.) I fought desperately to keep my footing, but would not, until it was too late, bring out my other hand to help balance myself. As a result, I went slithering and sprawling and finally fell. Before I could recover, Henry was kneeling across me, holding the back of my head with his hand and pushing my face down into the mud.

  This activity would normally have kept him happy for some time, but he found something of greater interest. I had instinctively used both hands to protect myself as I fell, and he saw the Watch on my wrist. In a moment he had wrenched it off, and stood up to examine it. I scrambled to my feet, and made a grab, but he held it easily above his head and out of my reach.

  I said, panting, “Give that back!”

  “It’s not yours,” he said. “It’s your father’s.”

  I was in agony in case the Watch had been damaged, broken maybe, in my fall, but even so I attempted to get my leg between his, to drop him. He parried, and, stepping back, said,

  “Keep your distance.” He braced himself, as though preparing to throw a stone. “Or I’ll see how far I can fling it.”

  “If you do,” I said, “you’ll get a whipping for it.”

  There was a grin on his fleshy face. “So will you. And your father lays on heavier than mine does. I’ll tell you what: I’ll borrow it for a while. Maybe I’ll let you have it back this afternoon. Or tomorrow.”

  “Someone will see you with it.”

  He grinned again. “I’ll risk that.”

  I made a grab at him, I had decided that he was bluffing about throwing it away. I almost got him off balance, but not quite. We swayed and struggled, and then crashed together and rolled down into the ditch by the side of the road. There was some water in it, but we went on fighting, even after a voice challenged us from above. Jack—for it was he who had called to us to get up—had to come down and pull us apart by force. This was not difficult for him. He was as big as Henry, and tremendously strong also. He dragged us back up to the road, got to the root of the matter, took the Watch off Henry, and dismissed him with a clip across the back of the neck.

  I said tearfully, “Is it all right?”

  “I think so.” He examined it, and handed it to me. “But you were a fool to bring it out.”

  “I wanted to show it to you.”

  “Not worth it,” he said briefly. “Anyway, we’d better see about getting it back. I’ll lend a hand.”

  Jack had always been around to a lend a hand, as long as I could remember. It was strange, I thought, as we walked toward the village, that in just over a week’s time I would be on my own. The Capping would have taken place, and Jack would be a boy no longer.

  Jack stood guard while I put the Watch back and returned the drawer key to the place where I had found it. I changed my wet and dirty trousers and shirt, and we retraced our steps to the ruins. No one knew what these buildings had once been, and I think one of the things that attracted us was a sign, printed on a chipped and rusted metal plate:

  DANGER

  6,600 VOLTS

  We had no idea what Volts had been, but the notion of danger, however far away and long ago, was exciting. There was more lettering, but for the most part the rust had destroyed it. LECT CITY: we wondered if that were the city it had come from.

  Farther along was the den Jack had made. One approached it through a crumbling arch; inside it was dry, and there was a place to build a fire. Jack had made one before coming out to look for me, and had skinned, cleaned, and skewered a rabbit ready for us to grill. There would be food in plenty at home—the midday meal on a Saturday was always lavish—but this did not prevent my looking forward greedily to roast rabbit with potatoes baked in the embers of the fire. Nor would it stop me doing justice to the steak pie my mother had in the oven. Although on the small side, I had a good appetite.

  We watched and smelled the rabbit cooking in companionable silence. We could get on very well together without much conversation, though normally I had a ready tongue. Too ready, perhaps—I knew that a lot of the trouble with Henry arose because I could not avoid trying to get a rise out of him whenever possible.

  Jack was not much of a talker under any circumstances, but to my surprise, after a time he broke the silence. His talk was inconsequential at first, chatter about events that had taken place in the village, but I had the feeling that he was trying to get around to something else, something more important. Then he stopped, stared in silence for a second or two at the crisping carcass, and said,

  “This place will be yours, after the Capping.”

  It was difficult to know what to say. I suppose if I had thought about it at all, I would have expected that he would pass the den on to me, but I had not thought about it. One did not think much about things connected with the Cappings, and certainly did not talk about them. For Jack, of all people, to do so was surprising, but what he said next was more surprising still.

  “In a way,” he said, “I almost hope it doesn’t work. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather be a Vagrant.”

  I should say something about the Vagrants. Every village generally had a few—at that time there were four in ours, as far as I knew—but the number was constantly changing as some moved off and others took their place. They occasionally did a little work, but whether they did or not the village supported them. They lived in the Vagrant House, which in our case stood on the corner where the two roads crossed and was larger than all but a handful of houses (my father’s being one). It could easily have accommodated a dozen Vagrants, and there had been times when there had been almost that many there. Food was supplied to them—it was not luxurious, but adequate—and a servant looked after the place. Other servants were sent to lend a hand when the House filled up.

  What was known, though not discussed, was that the Vagrants were people for whom the Capping had proved a failure. They had Caps, as normal people did, but they were not working properly. If this were going to happen, it usually showed itself in the first day or two following a Capping: the person who had been Capped showed distress, which increased as the days went by, turning at last into a fever of the brain. In this state, they were clearly in much pain. Fortunately the crisis did not last long; fortunately also, it happened only rarely. The great majority of Cappings were entirely successful. I suppose only about one in twenty produced a Vagrant.

  When he was well again, the Vagrant would start his wanderings. He, or she; because it happened occasionally with girls, although much more rarely. Whether it was because they saw themselves as being outside the community of normal people, or because the fever had left a permanent restlessness in them, I did not know. But off they would go and wander through the land, stopping a day here, as long as a month there, but always moving on. Their minds, certainly, had been affected. None of them could settle to a train of thought for long, and many had visions, and did strange things.

  They were taken for granted, and looked after, but, like the Cappings, not much talked about. Children, generally, viewed them with suspicion and avoided them. They, for their part, mostly seemed melancholy, and did not talk much, even to each other. It was a great shock to hear Jack say he half wished to be a Vagrant, and I did not know how to answer him. But he did not seem to need a response. He said, “The Watch—do you ever think what it must have been like in the days when things like that were made?”

  I had, from time to time, but it was another subject on which speculation was not encouraged, and Jack had never talked in this way before. I said, “Before the Tripods?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we know it was the Black Age. There were too many people, and not enough food, so that people starved, and fought each other, and there were all kinds of sicknesses, and …”
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  “And things like the Watch were made—by men, not the Tripods.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Do you remember,” he asked, “four years ago, when I went to stay with my Aunt Matilda?”

  I remembered. She was his aunt, not mine, even though we were cousins: she had married a foreigner. Jack said, “She lives at Bishopstoke, on the other side of Winchester. I went out one day, walking, and I came to the sea. There were the ruins of a city that must have been twenty times as big as Winchester.”

  I knew of the ruined great-cities of the ancients, of course. But these, too, were little talked of, and then with disapproval and a shade of dread. No one would dream of going near them. It was disquieting even to think of looking at one, as Jack had done. I said, “Those were the cities where all the murdering and sickness were.”

  “So we are told. But I saw something there. It was the hulk of a ship, rusting away so that in places you could see right through it. And it was bigger than the village. Much bigger.”

  I fell silent. I was trying to imagine it, to see it in my mind as he had seen it in reality. But my mind could not accept it.

  Jack said, “And that was built by men. Before the Tripods came.”

  Again I was at a loss for words. In the end, I said lamely, “People are happy now.”

  Jack turned the rabbit on the spit. After a while, he said, “Yes. I suppose you’re right.”

  The weather stayed fine until Capping Day. From morning till night people worked in the fields, cutting the grass for hay. There had been so much rain earlier that it stood high and luxuriant, a promise of good winter fodder. The Day itself, of course, was a holiday. After breakfast, we went to church, and the parson preached on the rights and duties of manhood, into which Jack was to enter. Not of womanhood, because there was no girl to be Capped. Jack, in fact, stood alone, dressed in the white tunic which was prescribed. I looked at him, wondering how he was feeling, but whatever his emotions were, he did not show them.

  Not even when, the service over, we stood out in the street in front of the church, waiting for the Tripod. The bells were ringing the Capping Peal, but apart from that all was quiet. No one talked or whispered or smiled. It was, we knew, a great experience for everyone who had been Capped. Even the Vagrants came and stood in the same rapt silence. But for us children, the time lagged desperately. And for Jack, apart from everyone, in the middle of the street? I felt for the first time a shiver of fear, in the realization that at the next Capping I would be standing there. I would not be alone, of course, because Henry was to be presented with me. There was not much consolation in that thought.

  At last we heard, above the clang of bells, the deep staccato booming in the distance, and there was a kind of sigh from everyone. The booming came nearer and then, suddenly, we could see it over the roofs of the houses to the south: the great hemisphere of gleaming metal rocking through the air above the three articulated legs, several times as high as the church. Its shadow came before it, and fell on us when it halted, two of its legs astride the river and the mill. We waited, and I was shivering in earnest now, unable to halt the tremors that ran through my body.

  Sir Geoffrey, the Lord of our Manor, stepped forward and made a small stiff bow in the direction of the Tripod; he was an old man, and could not bend much nor easily. And so one of the enormous burnished tentacles came down, gently and precisely, and its tip curled about Jack’s waist, and it lifted him up, up, to where a hole opened like a mouth in the hemisphere, and swallowed him.

  In the afternoon there were games, and people moved about the village, visiting, laughing, and talking, and the young men and women who were unmarried strolled together in the fields. Then, in the evening, there was the Feast, with tables set up in the street since the weather held fair, and the smell of roast beef mixing with the smells of beer and cider and lemonade, and all kinds of cakes and puddings. Lamps were hung outside the houses; in the dusk they would be lit, and glow like yellow blossoms along the street. But before the Feast started, Jack was brought back to us.

  There was the distant booming first, and the quietness and waiting, and the tread of the gigantic feet, shaking the earth. The Tripod halted as before, and the mouth opened in the side of the hemisphere, and then the tentacle swept down and carefully set Jack by the place which had been left for him at Sir Geoffrey’s right hand. I was a long way away, with the children at the far end, but I could see him clearly. He looked pale, but otherwise his face did not seem any different. The difference was in his white shaved head, on which the darker metal tracery of the Cap stood out like a spider’s web. His hair would soon grow again, over and around the metal, and, with thick black hair such as he had, in a few months the Cap would be almost unnoticeable. But it would be there all the same, a part of him now till the day he died.

  This, though, was the moment of rejoicing and making merry. He was a man, and tomorrow would do a man’s work and get a man’s pay. They cut the choicest fillet of beef and brought it to him, with a frothing tankard of ale, and Sir Geoffrey toasted his health and fortune. I forgot my earlier fears, and envied him, and thought how next year I would be there, a man myself.

  I did not see Jack the next day, but the day after that we met when, having finished my homework, I was on my way to the den. He was with four or five other men, coming back from the fields. I called him, and he smiled and, after a moment’s hesitation, let the others go on. We stood facing each other, only a few yards from the place where, little more than a week earlier, he had separated Henry and me. But things were very different.

  I said, “How are you?”

  It was not just a polite question. By now, if the Capping were going to fail, he would be feeling the pains and discomfort that would lead, in due course, to his becoming a Vagrant. He said, “I’m fine, Will.”

  I hesitated, and blurted out, “What was it like?”

  He shook his head. “You know it’s not permitted to talk about that. But I can promise you that you won’t be hurt.”

  I said, “But why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why should the Tripods take people away, and Cap them? What right have they?”

  “They do it for our good.”

  “But I don’t see why it has to happen. I’d sooner stay as I am.”

  He smiled. “You can’t understand now, but you will understand when it happens. It’s …” He shook his head. “I can’t describe it.”

  “Jack,” I said, “I’ve been thinking.” He waited, without much interest. “Of what you said—about the wonderful things that men made, before the Tripods.”

  “That was nonsense,” he said, and turned and walked on to the village. I watched him for a time and then, feeling very much alone, made my way to the den.

  It was not until after his Capping that I understood how much I had depended on Jack for companionship in the past. Our alliance had isolated me from other boys of roughly my age in and around the village. I suppose it would have been possible to overcome this—Joe Beith, the carpenter’s son, made overtures of friendship, for one—but in the mood I was in I preferred to be alone. I used to go down to the den and sit there for hours, thinking about it all. Henry came once, and made some jeering remarks, and we fought. My anger was so great that I beat him decisively, and he kept out of my way after that.

  From time to time I met Jack, and we exchanged words that meant nothing. His manner to me was amiable and distant: it carried the hint of a friendship suspended, a suggestion that he was waiting on the far side of a gulf which in due course I would cross, and that then everything would be as it had been before. This did not comfort me, though, for the person I missed was the old Jack, and he was gone forever. As I would be? The thought frightened me, and I tried to dismiss it, but it continually returned.

  Somehow, in this doubt and fear and brooding, I found myself becoming interested in the Vagrants. I remembered Jack’s remark and wondered what he would have been like if the Cappi
ng had not worked. By now he would probably have left the village. I looked at the Vagrants who were staying with us, and thought of them as once being like Jack and myself, in their own villages, sane and happy and with plans for the future. I was my father’s only son, and would be expected to take over the mill from him one day. But if the Capping were not a success …

  There were three of them, two recently arrived and a third who had been with us several weeks. He was a man of my father’s age, but his beard was unkempt, his hair gray and sparse, with the lines of the Cap showing through it. He spent his time collecting stones from the fields near the village, and with them he was building a cairn outside the Vagrant House. He collected perhaps twenty stones a day, each about the size of a half brick. It was impossible to understand why he chose one stone rather than another, or what the purpose of the cairn was. He spoke very little, using words as a child learning to talk does.

  The other two were much younger, one of them probably no more than a year from his Capping. He talked a lot, and what he said seemed almost to make sense, but never quite did. The third, a few years older, could talk in a way that one understood, but did not often do so. He seemed sunk in a great sadness, and would lie in the road beside the House all day, staring up at the sky.

  He remained when the others moved on, the young one in the morning and the cairn-builder in the afternoon of the same day. The pile of stones stayed there, unfinished and without meaning. I looked at them that evening, and wondered what I would be doing twenty-five years from now. Grinding corn at the mill? Perhaps. Or perhaps wandering the countryside, living on charity and doing useless things. Somehow, the alternatives were not so black and white as I would have expected. I did not know why, but I thought I had a glimmer of understanding what Jack had meant, that morning in the den.

  The new Vagrant arrived the next day and, being on my way to the den, I saw him come, along the road from the west. He was in his thirties, I judged, a powerfully built man, with red hair and a beard. He carried an ash stick and the usual small pack on his back, and he was singing a song, quite tunefully, as he strode along. He saw me, and stopped singing.