“Thank you, sir.”
“I suppose you are getting impatient to know which of you will be going to the Games?”
I nodded. “A little, sir.”
He studied me. “When the Tripod had you in its grasp—do you remember how you felt? Were you afraid?”
I remembered. I said, “Yes, sir.”
“And the thought of being in their hands, in their City—does that frighten you?” I hesitated, and he went on: “There are two sides to the choice, you know. We old ones may be able to judge your quickness and skill, of mind and body, but we cannot read your hearts.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “it frightens me.”
“You do not have to go. You can be useful here.” His pale blue eyes looked into mine. “No one need know if you prefer to stay.”
I said, “I want to go. I can bear the thought of being in their hands more easily than of being left behind.”
“Good.” He smiled. “And you, after all, have killed a Tripod—something I doubt any other human being can claim. You know that they are not all-powerful. That is an asset, Will.”
“Do you mean, sir . . . ?”
“I mean what I said. There are other considerations. You must go on working hard, and preparing, in case you are chosen.”
Later I saw him talking to Henry. I thought it was probably much the same conversation as mine had been. I did not ask him, though, and he did not volunteer anything about it.
• • •
During the winter our diet, although adequate, had been very dull, the staple item dried and salted meat, which, however hard the cooks tried, remained stodgy and unappetizing. In the middle of April, though, a raiding party brought back half a dozen black-and-white cows, and Julius decreed that one should be killed and roasted. After the feast, he spoke to us. When he had been talking a few minutes I realized, the excitement almost suffocating me, that this, almost certainly, was the moment for announcing the names of those who were to make the attempt at penetrating the City of the Tripods.
He had a quiet voice, and I was with the other boys at the far end of the cave, but his words were clear. Everyone was listening, attentively and in silence. I glanced at Henry, on my right. In the flickering light, I thought he looked very confident. My own confidence was ebbing rapidly. It would be bitter if he went, and I were left.
First, Julius talked about the plan in general. For months those in the training cadre had been preparing for their task. They would have some advantage over competitors from lower lands, because it was known that men in higher altitudes developed stronger lungs and muscles than those who lived in the thicker air. But it had to be remembered that there would be hundreds of competitors, drawn from the best athletes all over the country. It might be that, for all their preparation, not one of our small band would wear a champion’s belt. In that case, they must find their way back to the White Mountains, and try again, next year. Patience was as necessary as determination.
Contestants in the Games must be Capped, of course. That presented no great difficulty. We had Caps, taken from those killed in forays into the valleys, which could be molded to fit the skulls of the ones chosen. They would look like Caps, but they would give no orders. Here, though, a problem did present itself.
We who had never been Capped could not know just how men’s minds were controlled by them. It might be that they simply fixed the wearers in an attitude of uncritical obedience, of devotion, to the Tripods. In that case, our spies only needed to put on the appearance of willing slaves. But there was the possibility that the Tripods could talk to the minds of the Capped through the Caps, without the need for speech. That, it was plain, would mean discovery, and either execution or Capping. The former was the better fate.
Not only for the individuals but for those who stayed behind. It had been objected—I wondered who had dared to object to a plan put forward by Julius—that this involved the risk of betraying our existence to the Tripods, of provoking them to bring their power to bear and crush us. The risk must be taken. We could not skulk forever in the mountains. Even if we hid in holes all the time, eventually they would ferret us out and exterminate us, like vermin. Our hope of survival lay in attack.
Now to the details of the plan:
The City of the Tripods lay hundreds of miles to the north. There was a great river which covered most of that distance. Barges plied up and down it in trade, and one of these was in the hands of our men. It would sail to a spot within easy reach of the place where the Games were held.
Julius paused, before going on.
It had been decided that three should be selected from the training cadre. Many things had to be taken into account: individual skill and strength, the likely level of competition in the event, the temperament of the person and his probable usefulness once he had penetrated the Tripods’ stronghold. It had not been easy, but the choices had been made. Raising his voice slightly, he called.
“Stand up, Will Parker.”
For all my hopes, the shock of hearing my own name unnerved me. My legs trembled as I got to my feet.
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. 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 which 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.
The main Tunnel had been built by the ancients to take horseless carriages up through the mountain to a point near the top, where the great glacier rolled away between snowy peaks to the southeast. We had no idea why they had done that, but there was a big house at the top, and a building with a domed roof of metal that had a vast telescope pointing at the sky, and a cave where strange figures were carved in ice. On the way up, there were galleries, from which one looked out and down, and the lowest of these showed a rich green valley, thousands of
feet below, in which one could see roads like black thread, tiny houses, pinpoint cattle in miniature meadows. There was a telescope here, too, a small one fixed in the rock, but one of the lenses had been broken and it was useless.
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 . . . 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 group, but they don’t think I’d 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.
Two
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, lying up 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, as they generally were there, in the first weeks of summer. 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 determined not to let anything of that kind happen now, and with this in mind made a special effort to be nice to him. But there was a poor response to my overtures; Fritz remained taciturn and withdrawn. I was prepared to resent that, in turn, but 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 by way of warning and instruction.
A week had been allowed, 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. It 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, and 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 wheelhouse aft, giving the steersman some protection against the elements. She had a crew of two, both false-Capped. The senior of these 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 had 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 was 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 have 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 on his legs 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. He looked capable of carrying out the threat.
He went on, “You’ve arrived early, which is better than arriving late. It’ll take a day to load cargo, but we’re not due off for another three. We can leave a day early, but no more. So the first couple below have a two-day stint before they see the sky. 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 the barges had paddle wheels in their sides, and Beanpole was excited by the thought that there might be some machine, surviving from the days of the ancients, which 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 exertions 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 out 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. 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 of 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 which were kept for the donkeys and did our best to stay quiet. Once I could not stop myself 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 was to take 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. The air was wonderfully sweet and fresh after my confinement, and there were many interesting things to be seen, both on the river and around it. Westwards 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.