The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods) by John Christopher Page A

quite happy to see us drift on past, and would not have spared more than a moment’s thought for our chances of escaping drowning. But now that we were here . . .
    He said, “You’ll want to dry yourselves out. You’d better come with me.”
    All sorts of questions were in my mind, apart from the really crucial one of why he was not Capped. But it seemed best to do as he said, and let enlightenment wait. I looked at Beanpole and he nodded. The man led the way, up to what I saw was a well-trodden path. It wound between the trees for several minutes before coming out into a clearing. In front of us there was a wooden hut, with an oil lamp burning in the window, smoke blowing from its chimney. He unlatched the door and went inside, we following.
    A log fire was burning in a stone fireplace. There was a large woolen rug in front of it—red with a design of black and yellow animals—and sitting on the rug there were three cats. Two of them were tabbies, marked with white patches, the third an oddly patterned black-and-white with a white face and a funny black moustache under the nose. The man moved them with his foot, not roughly, merely forcing them to yield place. He went to a cupboard, and produced two lengths of coarse toweling.
    “Get your wet things off,” he said. “Warm yourselves in front of the fire. I’ve got a couple of shirts and trousers you can put on while your own are drying.” He stared at us. “Are you hungry?”
    We looked at each other. Beanpole said, “Very hungry, sir. If you . . .”
    “Don’t call me sir. I’m Hans. Bread and cold ham. I don’t usually cook at night.”
    “Just bread will do,” I said.
    “Aye,” he said. “You look starved. Get yourselves dry, then.”
    The trousers and shirt were too big, of course, particularly in my case. I had to roll the bottoms up and he gave me a belt to put around the middle. I was lost inside the shirt. While we were changing, he had been putting things on a scrubbed wooden table under the window: a couple of knives, plates, a dish of yellow butter, a large flat loaf of brown bread and a ham, partly cut, which showed firm pink meat surrounded by clear white fat, baked brown on the outside. I sliced at it, while Beanpole cut bread. I saw Hans watching me, and was a little ashamed of the thickness of the slices I was cutting. But he nodded, approvingly. He brought over a couple of mugs, plonked them by our plates, and returned with a big earthenware jar from which he poured us dark drafts of beer. We set to. I warned myself to eat slowly, but it was no good. The ham was sweet and good, the bread nutty and coarse textured, the butter of a finer quality than I had tasted since leaving home. The beer with which I washed it down was strong and sweet. My jaws ached with chewing, but my belly still clamored for nourishment.
    Hans said, “You were hungry, all right.” I looked guiltily at my plate. “Never mind. Eat on. I like to see someone enjoying his victuals.”
    I came to a halt at last—Beanpole had finished much earlier. I was feeling full, in fact overfull, and happy. The room was snug, with the glow of lamplight and the flicker of firelight and the three cats, back in their original positions, purring away in the hearth. Ipresumed that now we would be asked questions—where we had come from, the reason for our being in the river. But this did not happen. Our host sat in a wooden rocking chair which looked as though he might have made it himself, and smoked a pipe. He did not seem to find the silence awkward or constraining. In the end, it was Beanpole who said:
    “Could you tell us how it is that you are not Capped?”
    Hans took his pipe from his mouth. “I’ve never bothered.”
    “Not bothered!”
    It came out slowly, through prodding from both of us. His father had brought him to this island as a young boy, after his mother died. The pair of them had lived together here, growing their own vegetables, keeping chickens and a