The White Mountains (The Tripods)

by John Christopher

  He said, “It was because of the Capping that I really wanted to get away. I didn’t have any place in mind, of course, but I thought I might be able to hide, for a time at any rate.”

  I remembered Ozymandias asking me if there was anyone else who might be willing to go south, and my reply. I put my fingers down inside the lining of my jacket.

  “This is the map,” I said.

  We came into Rumney in the early evening of a day that had been alternately bright and stormy; we were wet and tired, and my ankle was aching. No one paid us any attention. For one thing, of course, it was a town, and people in a town did not expect to be able to identify everyone as local or foreigner, as they would in a village. And this was a port, also—a place of comings and goings, quite unlike the easy familiar round of the country. There was an exciting bustle of activity, the glimpse of sea at the end of a long street, men in blue jerseys sucking on pipes, a few tardy seagulls grabbing out of the air for food. And all the smells: tobacco, tar, spices, the smell of the sea itself.

  Dusk was thickening by the time we reached the harbor. There were dozens of boats of all sizes tied up, and others standing out in the harbor, sails close-reefed on their masts. We wandered along the quay, reading their names. The Maybelle, the Black Swan, Venturer, the Gay Gordon —but no Orion.

  “She might be at sea,” I said.

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “We’ll have to find somewhere to sleep.”

  Henry said, “I wouldn’t mind finding some food, as well.”

  We had finished our provisions that morning. The windows of the taverns along the front were brightly lit in the twilight, and we could hear singing from some of them. From some, also, issued rich cooking smells that made my belly groan in protest against its emptiness. In a nearby window there was a board, and chalked on it: HOT PIES—SIXPENCE. I still had a little money, which I had brought with me, and which I had not dared spend before. I told Henry to wait for me, and slipped in through the door.

  It was a low-ceilinged, wooden-beamed room, with scrubbed deal tables at which people were eating, swilling the food down with mugs of beer. I did not study them closely, but went to the serving counter, where I handed over my shilling and took the two pies from a dark girl who was talking all the time to a sailor at the nearest table. I made for the door with them, but a hand reached out and took a crushing grip on my arm.

  He looked a very big man, too, until he stood up. I saw then that he was thick-set but, because of the shortness of his legs, only a couple of inches taller than I. He had a yellow beard, and yellow hair receding from his forehead, where the wires of his Cap showed up. He said, in a harsh, barking voice, “Well, lad, how would you like to be a sailor?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He stared at me. “Are you from these parts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you say your folks will be seeking you if you don’t come back tonight?”

  I said boldly, “I only live three streets from here. They’ll be looking for me if I’m not back right away.”

  He was silent for a second and then laughed, deeply and unpleasantly.

  “You tell me so, with an accent like that! You’re from the country if ever I heard a country lad.” I gave a quick twist, and tried to break free. “Now then, no trouble. Save your strength for the Black Swan.”

  He dragged me to the door. No one paid any attention, and I realized the scene could not be an uncommon one. Crying out would do no good, either. If they did not ignore me, they could very well ask questions which I did not want to answer. There might be a chance of breaking clear outside. Not much, though, because I had felt his strength. And the Black Swan was moored no more than a hundred yards away.

  I saw him as we reached the door: a tall man, with a long, thin-lipped face, black-bearded and swarthy. I called out:

  “Captain Curtis!”

  He gave me one swift glance, and challenged my captor.

  “Leave him be, Rowley. That’s my boy. I signed him on this afternoon.”

  The man he had called Rowley looked for a moment as though he were going to argue, but Captain Curtis took a step toward him, and he let go of my arm. He said, “You should keep him on board, and not let him go wandering around the town.”

  “I can look after my own crew,” Captain Curtis said. “I want no advice from you.”

  Ozymandias had said that crossing the sea would be the easiest part, and he was right. The Orion was one of the ships out in the harbor—we had nearly missed her, because she was sailing on the midnight tide—and Captain Curtis took us to her in a dinghy. He single-oared us across the harbor, threading his way between lines and buoys, to the ship’s dark hulk. She was a trawler, of no more than a hundred tons, but she looked enormous as I made my way, swaying and barking my knuckles, up the rope ladder to the deck. Only one of the crew of six was on board, a tall, awkward, gently spoken man with gold rings in his ears. The others were Capped, Captain Curtis said, but he was one of us.

  It was essential that we should not be seen by the rest of the crew, because of the difficulty of explaining our one-way voyage. We were put in Captain Curtis’s own cabin, where there were two bunks. It did not occur to us to ask where he was going to sleep. We were both tired. I fell asleep at once, and was only half-wakened, some time later, by the pounding of feet overhead, and the grinding roar of the anchor chain coming up.

  I had heard tales of the motion of the waves making people sick, but though the Orion was rolling a little when I awoke the next morning, it was not enough to trouble me. The Captain brought us breakfast: bacon, fried eggs, a hillock of fried potatoes, and mugs full of a hot brown liquid that gave off a strange but glorious smell. Henry sniffed at his.

  “What is it?”

  “Coffee. It comes from a long way off, and costs a lot to landsmen. Are you all right?” We nodded. “No one will come in here. They know my door is always locked. But keep quiet, all the same. It’s only for today. With this wind we shall be in harbor before sundown.”

  The cabin had a porthole, through which we could stare out at blue waves, topped here and there with white. It was a strange sight for two who had never seen a stretch of water bigger than the lake up at the Manor House, and at first we were fascinated, but soon grew used to it, and at last bored. During the day, only one thing happened to break the monotony, though that was startling enough.

  In the middle of the afternoon, above the creak of ropes and stays and the slap of the waves, we heard a new sound, a high-pitched wailing, far off, that seemed to rise up from the sea itself. Henry was at the porthole. He said, “Come and look, Will.”

  There was urgency in his voice. I put down the piece of wood I had been trying to whittle into the shape of a boat, and went to join him. The sea was blue-green and empty, marked only by the silver bar of sunlight that shimmered out to the horizon. But something moved in the silver, a flicker in the bright haze. Until, crossing from the sun-path into the blue, it took on shape. A Tripod, followed by a second, and a third. Six of them all told.

  I said, in wonder, “Can they walk on water?”

  “They’re coming this way.”

  They were moving fast. I saw that their legs did not move, as they did in crossing land, but remained fixed and triangulated, and that each foot raised a bow-wave which, supposing they were of the usual size, must be twenty feet high. They were traveling much faster than a horse gallops. They kept their course toward us, their speed seeming to increase as the bow-waves rose higher above the line of the horizon. Each foot, I saw, ended in a kind of float. And they were on a collision course with the Orion. If one of them hit her, and capsized her—what chance would we have, below decks, locked in a cabin?

  At about twenty-five yards’ distance, the leading Tripod veered sharply left to cut across our stern. The rest followed. There was a howling like a dozen different winds, running up and down the scale. Then the first of the waves hit the ship, and she to
ssed like a cork. We both fell, as the cabin heaved under us, and I banged myself painfully against the stanchion of the bunk. I started to get up, and was flung toward the open porthole, as the Orion rolled. The sea came up to meet me. A wave splashed in, drenching both of us. And the howling was increasing again as the Tripods came around in another circuit of the ship.

  They made three or four—I was not in a mood for keeping strict count—before continuing on their way. Captain Curtis told us later that this sort of encounter was not uncommon; the Orion had had half a dozen previously. No one knew why they did it—as a joke, perhaps. It was a joke that could have a grim ending: quite a few boats had foundered as a result. We were merely soaked and shaken. I think I was more shaken by their appearance than their actions. They dominated sea, as well as land. If I had thought about it, I suppose, I would have assumed that. But I had not, and the reality depressed me.

  Henry said to the Captain, “They didn’t sound like Tripods.”

  “Sound? I suppose you’ve only heard the Capping Call. North of the Channel they see to the Cappings, and that’s about all. In the south you will see more of them, and hear them. They have all kinds of calls.”

  That was another thing. I had thought of them in connection with the Cappings, and only that. What Ozymandias had said about hunting men as men hunted foxes had not really affected me. My mind had rejected the idea as fantasy. It did so no longer. I was depressed. I was also quite a bit scared.

  Captain Curtis took us off the Orion in much the same manner as he had brought us on board. He gave us food before we left, filling my pack, and providing Henry with another. He also gave us last-minute advice.

  “Keep under cover, avoid all contact with the people. They speak a different language, remember. You won’t understand them, and they won’t understand you. If they pick you up, they will hand you over for Capping.”

  He looked at us, lamplight catching deep rusty gold among the blackness of his whiskers. His was a hard face, until one got to know it.

  “It’s happened before. With lads like yourselves, heading for the mountains, or with lads who have run away from someone like Rowley. They’ve been taken by foreigners, and Capped in a foreign land. They all became Vagrants, and bad ones at that.

  “Perhaps it’s because the machines are set for thoughts in that language, and not being able to understand them cripples you. Or perhaps they just go on until either they get a response or break you—and you don’t know how to respond the way they want. Anyway, keep clear of people. Get out of this town fast, and stay away from towns and villages after that.”

  He brought the dinghy up to a careening hard. Two or three boats lay on their sides, but there was no sign of life. One could hear distant noises—someone hammering, voices faintly singing—but close at hand there were only the hulks of boats, hard-edged in moonlight, the low line of the harbor wall, and the roofs of the town beyond. A strange town, in a strange land, whose people we could not, and must not, speak to. The dinghy’s keel grated on pebbles.

  “Off you go,” Captain Curtis whispered. “Good luck!”

  The pebbles under our feet made a crunching sound that was loud in the quiet night, and we stood for a moment, listening. Nothing moved. I looked back, and saw the dinghy disappear behind a larger boat, moored close in. We were on our own. I gestured to Henry, and set off up the hard. One came out on the front, Captain Curtis had said, turned left, walked a hundred yards, and there was a road to the right. Following it would take us out of town. A quarter of an hour, and we could relax our vigilance, if only slightly.

  What we had, though, was something like a quarter of a minute.

  A road ran alongside the harbor wall and on the far side of it there was a row of houses, taller and seemingly narrower than those in Rumney. As Henry and I moved across the entrance to the hard, a door opened across the way, and a man came out. Apparently seeing us, he yelled. We ran, and he ran after us, and others spilled out from the open door. I made perhaps fifty yards along the front, before I was caught and held. The one who had grabbed me, a big, wild-looking man whose breath smelled unpleasant, shook me and demanded something: at least, I could tell that he was asking a question. I looked for Henry, and saw that they had caught him, too. I wondered if Captain Curtis had heard anything of the disturbance. Probably not, and if he had there was nothing he could do. He had told us that plainly.

  They dragged us across the road. The house was a tavern, but not much like the tavern in Rumney. We were in a small room, full of tobacco smoke and smelling of liquor, but both tobacco and liquor smelled differently. There was a bar counter, and half a dozen marble-topped tables, with high-backed chairs. The men stood around us, talking incomprehensibly and making a lot of gestures with their hands. I had a feeling they were disappointed about something. At the back of the room there was a staircase which turned on itself, leading both upstairs and down. Someone was watching us from the upper stairs, gazing over the heads that surrounded us.

  Although he was tall and had a face that seemed old enough, he had not been Capped. But the striking thing about him was what he wore on his face. Pieces of thin metal ran from behind his ears to hold a frame with a couple of round pieces of glass, one in front of each eye. One of them was somewhat larger than the other, giving him a peculiar cockeyed look. Even in our present predicament, I thought him funny. He looked odd enough, in fact, to be a Vagrant, though that was impossible since he was not yet Capped. It dawned on me that the apparent oldness of his face was the result of this contraption he wore. His features behind it were thin. He was a lot taller than I, but he could be near my age.

  But I did not have much opportunity for speculation. After some minutes of badgering us in their strange language, the men plainly reached a conclusion. There was shrugging and waggling of hands, and we were shoved toward the stairs. They took us down, and pushed us through a door at the bottom. I fell sprawling from a blow, and heard a key turn in the lock behind us.

  For half an hour or so we heard sounds of people moving about over our heads, and a low grumble of voices. Then there were noises of departure, and through the small, vertically barred window, high on one wall, we saw legs outlined against the moonlight as those who had been drinking went home. No one came down to us. We heard bolts slammed, the stamping of a last pair of feet—that would be the landlord—and after that nothing but a distant scratching that was probably a rat.

  The most likely thing was that we were being held for a Capping. I was scared again, realizing how close this might be—it could be tomorrow, even—and, for the first time it seemed, envisioning the lonely mad life ahead. There would not even be Henry, because Vagrants wandered apart, each cloaked in his own wild dreams and fancies.

  Henry said, “I wonder …”

  Hearing his voice was a small relief. I said, “What?”

  “The window. If I gave you a leg up …”

  I did not believe they would have imprisoned us in a place we could break out of so easily, but it was something to do. Henry knelt by the wall, and I stood on his shoulders in my stockinged feet. There was a twinge of pain in my ankle, but I disregarded it. He raised up slowly, while I kept my hands against the wall and reached for the window bars. I got hold at last, first of one and then another. I heaved and pushed, but they were firmly bedded in stone, top and bottom. Henry shifted under me, and I called down:

  “It’s no good.”

  “Try again. If you …”

  He broke off, and I heard what he had heard: the scrape of a key against the sides of the lock. I jumped down, and stood watching the darker rectangle of the door. Slowly it creaked open. There was light beyond, a lamp held up, and the light gleamed on small circles of glass. It was the boy who had watched us from the stairs.

  Then he spoke and, to my greater astonishment, in English.

  “Do not make a noise,” he said. “I will help you.”

  Silently we followed him up the stairs, the old timbers creaking under
us, and across the bar room. He drew the bolts very carefully, but they sounded hideously loud. At last the door was open. I whispered, “Thank you. We …”

  He thrust his head forward, the contraption on his nose looking even more ludicrous, and said, “You wish to go to the boat? I can still help.”

  “Not to a boat. South.”

  “South? From the town, into land? Not to the sea?”

  “Yes,” I said, “inland.”

  “I can help there also.” He blew out the lamp, and set it down inside the door. “I will show you.”

  The moonlight was still bright on the waterfront and the gently bobbing masts of the boats in the harbor, but in places the stars were hidden by cloud, and a breeze was getting up from the sea. He started along the way Captain Curtis had said, but before long led us into an alley. We went up steps, and the alley twisted and turned. It was so narrow that moonlight did not penetrate; there was barely enough light to see our way.

  Later there was a road, then another alley, and a road again. The road widened, houses thinned on either side, and at last we reached a place where there was a bright meadow, dotted with the dark shapes of cows. He stopped beside a grassy bank.

  “This goes south,” he said.

  I said, “Will you get into trouble? Will they know it was you that let us out?”

  He shrugged, his head bobbing. “It does not matter.” He said it like “mat-air.” “Will you tell me why you wish to go into land?” He corrected himself: “In-land?”

  I hesitated only for a moment. “We have heard of a place, in the south, where there are no Cappings, and no Tripods.”

  “Cappings?” he repeated. “Tripods?” He touched his head, and said a word in his own language. “The great ones, with three legs—they are Tripods? A place without them? Is it possible? Everyone puts on—the Cap?—and the Tripods go everywhere.”