The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods) (8 page)

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 much 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 less chance of dodging, and hailstones can ruin crops.”

Beanpole said, “We were on a raft further 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 hens 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, “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, “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 axe 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 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, the three cats still sentinel in front of it; and 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, and 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 axe, spade, and mattock, watched us while we set to, and left us.

It was hard work. The standing trees were green and supple, 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 beer, he said, was likely, in the middle of the day, 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’re already behind time for competing 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 the idea struck home, 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, was thinking along the same lines.

I said, “If we managed to slip away this evening . . . I suppose it would be a 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 pains 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 secured 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, 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, his thighs, but he waded on, still cursing. When it reached his waist, he even 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.

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

We went downriver swiftly enough after that. We took it in turns at the oars, started early and carried on until late each day. Food was a problem, but we managed, although we were, after the first day, hungry all
the time. We passed barges, traveling upstream and down, and kept clear of them—a course increasingly easy as the great river broadened on its way to the sea. The river itself was a source of much interest, rolling through varied scenery, woods, pastures, vineyards, and wheat fields 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 river, 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.

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

It was a land of
flower-starred meadows, heavy rich-yielding earth, small prosperous villages and everywhere windmills, 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 which, 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 watch 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 must sleep where best we could—in the open, as it proved, under willow trees beside a rushing stream—but tomorrow, provided we passed the early trials and were accepted, we would be competitors, to be housed in the long low wooden huts built near the Field.

To reach that place one passed through the town, with its great twin-towered church and its newly painted houses, and skirted the hill that looked down on it. (Wandering there once, we found a vast semicircular pit, descending in levels faced with stone to a central stone platform—we could not guess its purpose, but the stones were cracked and worn and distorted by what must have been not years but centuries. And all those centuries, I thought, before the coming of the Tripods—generation on generation.) Beyond there was a village, and nearby the Field. It was huge in extent, and the local people told a story of it. In the days of the ancients, they said, there had been many great battles, in which—though it was scarcely to be believed—men had slaughtered each other because of their wickedness. This was the field of the last, most immense and savage battle of all, though where some said it had happened, others believed it was still to take place. Hearing this, I hoped it was an omen for our success. One battle needed to be fought, and we, here, were the outriders of our army.