Outlaw of Gor (26 page)

About a hundred yards from the rampart I put down the shield and spear, signifying a temporary truce.

A tall figure appeared on the rampart and did as I had done.

Though he wore the blue helmet of Tharna I knew that it was Thorn.

Once again I began to approach the rampart.

It seemed a long walk.

Step by step I climbed the black avenue wondering if the truce would be respected. If Dorna the Proud had ruled upon that rampart rather than Thorn, a Captain, and a member of my own caste, I was certain that a bolt from some crossbow would have pierced my body without warning.

When at last I stood unslain on the black cobblestones at the foot of the double rampart I knew that though Dorna the Proud might rule in Tharna, though it might be she who sat upon the golden throne of the city, that it was the word of a warrior that ruled on those ramparts above me.

“Tal, Warrior,” said Thorn, removing his helmet.

“Tal, Warrior,” I said.

Thorn's eyes were clearer now than I remembered them, and the large body which had been tending to corpulence had, in the stress of fighting, hardened into muscular vigour. The purplish patches that marked his yellowish face seemed less pronounced now than before. Two strands of hair still marked his chin in parallel streaks and on the back of his head his long hair was still bound in a Mongol knot. The now clear, oblique eyes regarded me.

“I should have killed you on the Pillar of Exchanges,” said Thorn.

I spoke loudly so that my voice might carry to all who manned the double rampart.

“I come on behalf of Lara, who is true Tatrix of Tharna. Sheathe your weapons. No more shed the blood of men of your own city. I ask this in the name of Lara, and of the city of Tharna and its people. And I ask it in the name of the codes of your own caste, for your swords are pledged to the true Tatrix–Lara–not Dorna the Proud!”

I could sense the reaction of the men behind the rampart.

Thorn too now spoke loudly for the benefit of the warriors. “Lara is dead. Dorna is Tatrix of Tharna.”

“I live!” cried a voice behind me and I turned and to my dismay I saw that Lara had followed me to the rampart. If she were killed the hopes of the rebels might well be blasted, and the city plunged interminably into civil strife.

Thorn looked at the girl and I admired the coolness with which he regarded her. His mind must have been in tumult for he could not have expected that the girl produced by the rebels as the true Tatrix would actually be Lara.

“She is not Lara,” he said coldly.

“I am,” she cried.

“The Tatrix of Tharna,” sneered Thorn, looking on the unconcealed features of Lara, “wears a golden mask.”

“The Tatrix of Tharna,” said Lara, “no longer chooses to wear a mask of gold.”

“Where did you get this camp wench, this imposter?” asked Thorn.

“I purchased her from a slaver,” I said.

Thorn laughed and his men behind the barricade laughed too. “The slaver to whom you sold her,” I added.

Thorn laughed no longer. I called out to the men behind the barricade. “I returned this girl–your Tatrix–to the Pillar of Exchanges where I gave her into the hands of Thorn, this Captain, and Dorna the Proud. Then treacherously I was set upon and sent to the Mines of Tharna, and Dorna the Proud and Thorn, this captain, seized Lara, your Tatrix, and sold her into slavery–sold her to the slave Targo, whose camp is now at the Fair of En'Kara, sold her for the sum of fifty silver tarn disks!”

“What he says is false,” shouted Thorn.

I heard a voice from behind the barricade, a young voice. “Dorna the Proud wears a necklace of fifty silver tarn disks!”

“Dorna the Proud is bold indeed,” I cried, “to flaunt the very coins whereby her rival–your true Tatrix–was delivered into the chains of a slave girl!”

There was a mutter of indignation, some angry shouts from the barricade.

“He lies,” said Thorn.

“You heard him,” I cried, “say to me that he should have killed me on the Pillar of Exchanges! You know that it was I who stole your Tatrix at the Amusements of Tharna. Why should I have gone to the Pillar of Exchanges if not to surrender her to the envoys of Tharna?”

A voice cried out from behind the barricade. “Why did you not take more men with you to the Pillar of Exchanges, Thorn of Tharna?”

Thorn turned angrily in the direction of the voice.

I responded to the question. “Is it not obvious?” I asked. “He wanted to protect the secret of his plan to abduct the Tatrix and put Dorna the Proud upon her throne.”

Another man appeared at the top of the barricade. He removed his helmet. I saw that it was the young warrior whose wound Lara and I had tended on the wall of Tharna.

“I believe this warrior!” he cried, pointing down at me.

“It is a trick to divide us!” cried Thorn. “Back to your post!”

Other warriors in the blue helmets and grey tunics of Tharna had climbed to the top of the barricade, to see more clearly what befell.

“Back to your posts!” cried Thorn.

“You are warriors!” I cried. “Your swords are pledged to your city, to its walls, to your people and your Tatrix! Serve her!”

“I shall serve the true Tatrix of Tharna!” cried the young warrior.

He leaped down from the barricade and laid his sword on the stones at Lara's feet.

“Take up your sword,” she said, “in the name of Lara, true Tatrix of Tharna.”

“I do so,” he said.

He knelt on one knee before the girl and grasped the hilt of the weapon. “I take up my sword,” he said, “in the name of Lara, who is true Tatrix of Tharna.”

He rose to his feet and saluted the girl with the weapon. “Who is true Tatrix of Tharna!” he cried.

“That is not Lara!” cried Thorn, pointing to the girl.

“How can you be so certain?” asked one of the warriors on the wall.

Thorn was silent, for how could he claim to know that the girl was not Lara, when presumably he had never looked upon the face of the true Tatrix?

“I am she,” cried the girl. “Are there none of you here who have served in the Chamber of the Golden Mask? None of you who recognise my voice?”

“It is she!” cried one of the men. “I am sure!” He removed his helmet.

“You are Stam,” she said, “first guardsman of the north gate and can cast your spear farther than any man of Tharna. You were first in the military games of En'Kara in the second year of my reign.”

Another warrior removed his helmet.

“You are Tai,” said she, “a tarnsman, wounded in the war with Thentis in the year before I ascended the Throne of Tharna.”

Yet another man took from his head the blue helmet.

“I do not know you,” she said.

The men on the wall murmured.

“You could not,” said the man, “for I am a mercenary of Ar who took service in Tharna only within the time of the revolt.”

“She is Lara!” cried another man. He leaped down from the wall and placed his sword also on the stones at her feet.

Once again she graciously requested that the weapon be lifted in her name, and it was.

One of the blocks of the barricade tumbled into the street. The warriors were dismantling it.

Thorn had disappeared from the wall.

Slowly the rebels, waved ahead by me, approached the wall. They had cast down their weapons and, singing, they marched to the palace.

The soldiers streamed over the barricade and met them in the avenue with joy. The men of Tharna seized one another in their arms and claspled their hands in concord. Rebels and defenders mingled gladly in the street and brother sought brother among those who had minutes before been mortal foes.

My arm about Lara, I walked through the barricade, and behind us came the young warrior, others of the defenders of the barricade, and Kron, Andreas, Linna and many of the rebels.

Andreas had brought with him the shield and spear which I had put down in token of truce, and I took these weapons from him. We approached the small iron door that gave access to the palace, I in the lead.

I called for a torch.

The door was loose and I kicked it open, covering myself with the shield.

Within there was only silence and darkness.

The rebel who had been first on the chain in the mines thrust a torch in my hands.

I held this in the opening.

The floor seemed solid, but this time I knew the dangers it concealed.

A long plank from the scaffolding of the barricade was brought and we laid this from the threshold across the floor.

The torch lifted high, I entered, careful to stay on the plank. This time the trap did not open and I found myself in a narrow unlit hallway opposite the door to the palace.

“Wait here,” I commanded the others

I did not listen to their protests but saying no more began my torchlit journey through the now darkened labyrinth of the palace corridors. My memory and sense of direction began to carry me unerringly from hall to hall, guiding me swiftly toward the Chamber of the Golden Mask.

I encountered no one.

The silence seemed uncanny and the darkness startling after the bright sunlight of the street outside. I could hear nothing but the quiet, almost noiseless sound of my own sandals on the stones of the corridor.

The palace was perhaps deserted.

At last I came to the Chamber of the Golden Mask.

I leaned against the heavy doors and swung them open.

Inside there was light. The torches on the walls still burned. Behind the golden throne of the Tatrix loomed the dull gold mask, fashioned in the image of a cold and beautiful woman, the reflection of the torches set in the walls flickering hideously on its polished surface.

On the throne there sat a woman clad in the golden robes and mask of the Tatrix of Tharna. About her neck was a necklace of silver tarn disks. On the steps before the throne there stood a warrior, fully armed, who held in his hands the blue helmet of his city.

Thorn lowered his helmet slowly over his features. He loosened the sword in its scabbard. He unslung his shield and the long, broad-headed spear from his left shoulder.

“I have been waiting for you,” he said.

The war cries of Tharna and Ko-ro-ba mingled as Thorn hurled himself down the stairs toward me and I raced toward him. Both of us cast our spears at the same instant and the two weapons passed one another like tawny blurs of lightning. Both of us had in casting our weapon inclined our shields in such a way as to lessen the impact of a direct hit. Both of us cast well and the jolt of the massive missile thundering on my shield spun me half about.

The bronze head of the spear had cut through the brass loops on the shield and pierced the seven hardened concentric layers of bosk hide which formed it. The shield, so encumbered, was useless. Hardly had my shield been penetrated when my sword leaped from its sheath and slashed through the shoulder straps of the shield, cutting it from my arm.

Only an instant after myself Thorn's shield too was flung to the stones of the chamber floor. My spear had been driven a yard through it and the head had passed over his left shoulder as he crouched behind it.

His sword too was free of its sheath and we rushed on one another like larls in the Voltai, our weapons meeting with a sharp, free clash of sound, the trembling brilliant ring of well-tempered blades, each tone ringing in the clear, glittering music of swordplay.

Seemingly almost impassive, the golden-robed figure on the throne watched the two warriors moving backward and forward before her, one clad in the blue helmet and grey tunic of Tharna, the other in the universal scarlet of the Gorean Caste of Warriors.

Our reflections fought one another in the shimmering surface of the great golden mask behind the throne.

Our wild shadows like misformed giants locked in combat against the lofty walls of the torchlit chamber.

Then there was but one reflection and but one gigantic, grotesque shadow cast upon the walls of the Chamber of the Golden Mask.

Thorn lay at my feet.

I kicked the sword from the hand and turned over the body with my foot. Its chest shook under the stained tunic; its mouth bit at the air as if trying to catch it as it escaped its throat. The head rolled sideways on the stones.

“You fought well,” I said.

“I have won,” he said, the words spit out in a sort of whisper, a contorted grin on his face.

I wondered what he might mean.

I stepped back from the body and looked to the woman upon the throne.

Slowly, numbly, she descended the throne, step by step, and then to my amazement she fell to her knees beside Thorn and lowered her head to his bloody chest weeping.

I wiped the blade on my tunic and replaced it in the sheath.

“I am sorry,” I said.

The figure seemed not to hear me.

I stepped back, to leave her with her grief. I could hear the sounds of approaching men in the corridors. It was the soldiers and rebels, and the halls of the palace echoed the anthem of the ploughing song.

The girl lifted her head and the golden mask faced me.

I had not known that a woman such as Dorna the Proud could have cared for a man.

The voice, for the first time, spoke through the mask.

“Thorn,” she said, “has defeated you.”

“I think not,” I said, wondering, “and you Dorna the Proud are now my prisoner.”

A mirthless laugh sounded through the mask and the hands in their gloves of gold took the mask and, to my astonishment, removed it.

At the side of Thorn knelt not Dorna the Proud, but the girl Vera of Ko-ro-ba, who had been his slave.

“You see,” she said, “my master has defeated you, as he knew he could, not by the sword but by the purchase of time. Dorna the Proud has made good her escape.”

“Why have you done this!” I challenged. She smiled. “Thorn was kind to me,” she said.

“You are now free,” I said.

Once again her head fell to the stained chest of the Captain of Tharna and her body shook with sobs.

At that moment into the room burst the soldiers and rebels, Kron and Lara in the lead.

I pointed to the girl on the floor. “Do not harm her!” I commanded. “This is not Dorna the Proud but Vera of Ko-ro-ba, who was the slave of Thorn.”