The White Mountains (The Tripods)

by John Christopher

  “Boy,” he said, “what is the name of this place?”

  “It’s called Wherton,” I told him.

  “Wherton,” he repeated. “Ah, loveliest village of the plain; here is no anguish, here no pain. Do you know me, boy?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “I am the king of this land. My wife was the queen of a rainy country, but I left her weeping. My name is Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

  He talked nonsense, but at least he talked, and the words themselves could be understood. They sounded a bit like poetry, and I remembered the name Ozymandias from a poem which I had found in a book, one of the dozen or so on the shelf in the parlor. As he went on toward the village, I followed him. Glancing back, he said, “Dost follow me, boy? Wouldst be my page? Alas, alas. The fox has his hole, and the bird shelters in the great leafy oak, but the son of man has not where to lay his head. Have you no business of your own, then?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Nothing is important, true, but how does a man find Nothing? Where shall he seek for it? I tell you, could I find Nothing, I would be not king but emperor. Who dwells in the House, this day and hour?”

  I assumed he was talking about the Vagrant House.

  “Only one,” I said. “I don’t know his name.”

  “His name shall be Star. And yours?”

  “Will Parker.”

  “Will is a good name. What trade does your father follow, Will, for you wear too fine a cloth to be a laborer’s son?”

  “He keeps the mill.”

  “And this the burden of his song for ever seems to be: I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me. Have you many friends, Will?”

  “No. Not many.”

  “A good answer. For he that proclaims many friends declares that he has none.”

  I said, on an impulse which surprised me when I reflected on it, “In fact, I don’t have any. I had one, but he was Capped a month ago.”

  He stopped in the road, and I did so, too. We were on the outskirts of the village, opposite the Widow Ingold’s cottage. The Vagrant looked at me keenly.

  “No business, of importance anyway, and no friend. One who talks and walks with Vagrants. How old are you, Will?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “You are small for it. So you will take the Cap next summer?”

  “Yes.”

  Widow Ingold, I saw, was watching us through the curtains. The Vagrant also flicked a glance in that direction, and suddenly started dancing a weird little jig in the road. He sang, in a cracked voice:

  Under the greenwood tree,

  Who loves to lie with me,

  And tune his merry note

  Unto the sweet bird’s throat?

  All the rest of the way to the Vagrant House he talked nonsense, and I was glad to part from him there.

  My preoccupation with the Vagrants had been noticed, and that evening my father took me to task for it. He was sometimes stern but more often kindly—just according to his lights, but he saw the world in simple shades of black and white, and found it hard to be patient with things that struck him as foolishness. There was no sense that he could see in a boy hanging about the Vagrant House: one was sorry for them, and it was a human duty to give them food and shelter, but there it should end. I had been seen that day with the most recent arrival, who appeared to be even madder than most. It was silly, and it gave tongues cause to wag. He hoped he would hear no more such reports, and I was not to go into the Vagrant House on any pretext. Did I understand?

  I indicated that I did. There was more to it, I realized, than concern over people talking about me. He might be willing to listen, at a remove, to news from other villages and from the city, but for gossip and ill-natured talk he truly had nothing but contempt.

  I wondered if his fear was of something quite different, and much worse. As a boy, he had had an elder brother who had turned Vagrant. This had never been spoken of in our house, but Jack had told me of it long ago. There were some who said that this kind of weakness ran in families; and he might think that my interest in Vagrants was a bad omen for the Capping next year. This was not logical, but I knew that a man impatient of foolishness in others may yet have fallibilities of his own.

  What with this, and my own embarrassment at the way in which the new Vagrant had behaved in the presence of others, I made a kind of resolve to do as I had been bid, and for a couple of days kept well clear of the Vagrants. Twice I saw the man who had called himself Ozymandias clowning and talking to himself in the street, and shied off. But on the third day I went to school not by the back way, the path along the riverbank, but out of our front door, past the church. And past the Vagrant House. There was no sign of anyone, but when I came back in the middle of the day, I saw Ozymandias coming from the opposite direction. I quickened my step, and we met at the crossroads.

  He said, “Welcome, Will! I have not seen thee, these many days. Has aught ailed thee, boy? A murrain? Or haply the common cold?”

  There had been something about him that had interested, even fascinated me, and it was that which had brought me here in the hope of encountering him again. I admitted that but, in the moment of admission, was once more conscious of the things that had kept me away. There was no one in our immediate vicinity, but other children, coming from school, were not far behind me, and there were people who knew me on the far side of the crossroads.

  I said, “I’ve been busy with things,” and prepared to move on.

  He put a hand on my arm. “Wilt tarry, Will? He that has no friend can travel at his own pace, and pause, when he chooses, for a few minutes’ converse.”

  “I’ve got to get back,” I said. “My dinner will be waiting.”

  I had looked away from him. After only a slight pause, he dropped his hand.

  “Then do not let me keep you, Will, for though man does not live on bread alone, it is bread he must have first.”

  His tone was cheerful, but I thought I detected something else. Disappointment? I started to walk on, but after a few steps checked and looked back. His eyes were still on me. I said, in a low voice stumbling over the words:

  “Do you go out into the fields at all?”

  “When the sun shines.”

  “Farther along the road on which I met you—there’s an old ruin, on the right—I have a den there, on the far side where the copse comes close—it has a broken arch for an entrance, and an old red stone outside, like a seat.”

  He said softly, “I hear, Will. Do you spend much time there?”

  “I go there after school, usually.”

  He nodded. “Do so.”

  Abruptly, his gaze went from me to the sky, and he held his arms out above his head, and shouted, “And in that year came Jim, the Prophet of Serendipity, and with him a host of angels, riding their white geldings across the sky, raising a dust of clouds and striking sparks from their hooves that burned the wheat in the fields, and the evil in men’s hearts. So spake Ozymandias. Selah! Selah! Selah!”

  The others were coming up the road from the school. I left him and hurried toward home. I could hear him shouting until I passed the church.

  • • •

  I went to the den after school with mingled feelings of anticipation and unease. My father had said he hoped he would hear no more reports of my mixing with Vagrants, and had placed a direct prohibition on my going to the Vagrant House. I had obeyed the second part, and was taking steps to avoid the first, but I was under no illusion that he would regard this as anything but willful disobedience. And to what end? The opportunity of talking to a man whose conversation was a hodge-podge of sense and nonsense, with the latter very much predominating. It was not worth it.

  And yet, remembering the keen blue eyes under the mass of red hair, I could not help feeling that there was something about this man that made the risk, and the disobedience, worthwhile. I kept a sharp lookout on my way to the ruins, and called out as I approached the d
en. But there was no one there; nor for a good time after that. I began to think he was not coming—that his wits were so addled that he had failed to take my meaning, or forgotten it altogether—when I heard a twig snap and, peering out, saw Ozymandias. He was less than ten yards from the entrance. He was not singing, or talking, but moving quietly, almost stealthily.

  A new fear struck me then. There were tales that a Vagrant once, years ago, had murdered children in a dozen villages, before he was caught and hanged. Could they be true, and could this be such another? I had invited him here, telling no one, and a cry for help would not be heard as far from the village as this. I froze against the wall of the den, tensing myself for a rush that might carry me past him to the comparative safety of the open.

  But a single glance at him as he looked in reassured me. Whether mad or not, I was sure this was a man to be trusted. The lines in his face were the lines of good humor. He said, “So I have found you, Will.” He glanced about him, in approval. “You have a snug place here.”

  “My cousin Jack did most of it. He is better with his hands than I am.”

  “The one that was Capped this summer?”

  “Yes.”

  “You watched the Capping?” I nodded. “How is he, since then?”

  “Well,” I said, “but different.”

  “Having become a man.”

  “Not only that.”

  “Tell me.”

  I hesitated a moment, but in voice and gesture as well as face he inspired confidence. He was also, I realized, talking naturally and sensibly, with none of the strange words and archaic phrases he had used previously. I began to talk, disjointedly at first and then with more ease, of what Jack had said, and of my own later perplexity. He listened, nodding at times but not interrupting. When I had finished, he said, “Tell me, Will—what do you think of the Tripods?”

  I said truthfully, “I don’t know. I used to take them for granted—and I was frightened of them, I suppose—but now … There are questions in my mind.”

  “Have you put them to your elders?”

  “What good would it do? No one talks about the Tripods. One learns that as a child.”

  “Shall I answer them for you?” he asked. “Such as I can answer.”

  There was one thing I was sure of, and I blurted it out: “You are not a Vagrant!”

  He smiled. “It depends what meaning you give that word. I go from place to place, as you see. And I behave strangely.”

  “But to deceive people, not because you cannot help it. Your mind has not been changed.”

  “No. Not as the minds of the Vagrants are. Nor as your cousin Jack’s was, either.”

  “But you have been Capped!”

  He touched the mesh of metal, under his thatch of red hair.

  “Agreed. But not by the Tripods. By men—free men.”

  Bewildered, I said, “I don’t understand.”

  “How could you? But listen, and I will tell you. The Tripods, first. Do you know what they are?” I shook my head, and he went on, “Nor do we, as a certainty. There are two stories about them. One is that they were machines, made by men, which revolted against men and enslaved them.”

  “In the old days? The days of the giant ship, of the great-cities?”

  “Yes. It is a story I find hard to believe, because I do not see how men could give intelligence to machines. The other story is that they do not come originally from this world, but another.”

  “Another world?”

  I was lost again. He said, “They teach you nothing about the stars in school, do they? That is something that perhaps makes the second story more likely to be the true one. You are not told that the stars at night—all the hundreds of thousands of them—are suns like our own sun, and that some may have planets circling them, as our earth circles this sun.”

  I was confused, my head spinning with the idea. I said, “Is this true?”

  “Quite true. And it may be that the Tripods came, in the first place, from one of those worlds. It may be that the Tripods themselves are only vehicles, for creatures who travel inside them. We have never seen the inside of a Tripod, so we do not know.”

  “And the Caps?”

  “Are the means by which they keep men docile and obedient to them.”

  At first thought, it was incredible. Later, it seemed incredible that I had not seen this before. But all my life Capping had been something I had taken for granted. All my elders were Capped, and contented to be so. It was the mark of the adult, the ceremony itself solemn and linked in one’s mind with the holiday and the feast. Despite the few who suffered pain and became Vagrants, it was a duty to which every child looked forward. Only lately, as one could begin to count the months remaining, had there been any doubts in my mind; and the doubts had been ill-formed and difficult to sustain against the weight of adult assurance. Jack had had doubts, too, and then, with the Capping, they had gone. I said, “They make men think the things the Tripods want them to think?”

  “They control the brain. How, or to what extent, we are not sure. As you know, the metal is joined to the flesh, so that it cannot be removed. It seems that certain general orders are given when the Cap is put on. Later, specific orders can be given to specific people, but as far as the majority are concerned, they do not seem to bother.”

  “How do the Vagrants happen?”

  “That again is something at which we can only guess. It may be that some minds are weak to start with, and crumble under the strain. Or perhaps the reverse: too strong, so that they fight against domination until they break.”

  I thought of that, and shuddered. A voice inside one’s head, inescapable and irresistible. Anger burned in me, not only for the Vagrants but for all the others—my parents and elders, Jack …

  “You spoke of free men,” I said. “Then the Tripods do not rule all the earth?”

  “Near enough all. There are no lands without them, if that’s what you mean. Listen, when the Tripods first came—or when they revolted—there were terrible happenings. Cities were destroyed like anthills, and millions on millions were killed or starved to death.”

  Millions … I tried to envision it, but could not. Our village, which was reckoned no small place, numbered about four hundred souls. There were some thirty thousand living in and around the city of Winchester. I shook my head.

  He went on, “Those that were left the Tripods Capped, and once Capped they served the Tripods and helped to kill or capture other men. So, within a generation, things were much as they are now. But in one place, at least, a few men escaped. Far to the south, across the sea, there are high mountains, so high that snow lies on them all the year round. The Tripods keep to low ground—perhaps because they travel over it more easily, or because they do not like the thin air higher up—and these are places which men who are alert and free can defend against the Capped who live in the surrounding valleys. In fact, we raid their farms for our food.”

  “We? So you come from there?” He nodded. “And the Cap you wear?”

  “Taken from a dead man. I shaved my head, and it was molded to fit my skull. Once my hair had grown again, it was hard to tell it from a true Cap. But it gives no commands.”

  “So you can travel as a Vagrant,” I said, “and no one suspects you. But why? With what purpose?”

  “Partly to see things, and report what I see. But there is something more important. I came for you.”

  I was startled. “For me?”

  “You, and others like you. Those who are not yet Capped, but who are old enough to ask questions and understand answers. And to make a long, difficult, perhaps dangerous journey.”

  “To the south?”

  “To the south. To the White Mountains. With a hard life at the journey’s end. But a free one. Well?”

  “You will take me there?”

  “No. I am not ready to go back yet. And it would be more dangerous. A boy traveling on his own could be an ordinary runaway, but one traveling with a Vagrant
… you must go on your own. If you decide to go.”

  “The sea,” I said, “how do I cross that?”

  He stared at me, and smiled. “The easiest part. And I can give you some help for the rest, too.” He brought something from his pocket and showed it to me. “Do you know what this is?”

  I nodded. “I have seen one. A compass. The needle points always to the north.”

  “And this.”

  He put his hand inside his tunic. There was a hole in the stitching, and he put his fingers down, grasped something, and drew it out. It was a long cylinder of parchment, which he unrolled and spread out on the floor, putting a stone on one end and holding the other. I saw a drawing on it, but it made no sense.

  “This is called a map,” he said. “The Capped do not need them, so you have not seen one before. It tells you how to reach the White Mountains. Look, there. That signifies the sea. And here, at the bottom, the mountains.”

  He explained all the things on the map, describing the landmarks I should look for and telling me how to use the compass to find my way. And for the last part of the journey, beyond the Great Lake, he gave me instructions, which I had to memorize. This in case the map were discovered. He said, “But guard it well, in any case. Can you make a hole in the lining of your tunic, as I have done?”

  “Yes. I’ll keep it safe.”

  “That leaves only the sea crossing. Go to this town.” He pointed to it. “You will find fishing boats in the harbor. The Orion is owned by one of us. A tall man, very swarthy, with a long nose and thin lips. His name is Curtis, Captain Curtis. Go to him. He will get you across the sea. That is where the hard part begins. They speak a different language there. You must keep from being seen, or spoken to, and learn to steal your food as you go.”

  “I can do that. Do you speak their language?”

  “It, and others. Such as your own. It was for that reason I was given this mission.” He smiled. “I can be a madman in four tongues.”