Outlaw of Gor (7 page)

“Let us talk,” said Thorn of Tharna.

I squatted down on my heels, as he did.

“Let us talk,” I agreed.

We resheathed our weapons.

Thorn was a large man, big boned, powerful, now tending to corpulence. His face was heavy and yellowish, but mottled with patches of purple where small veins had burst under the skin. He was not bearded, save for the trace of a tiny wisp of hair that marked each side of his chin, almost like a streak of dirt. His hair was long, and bound in a knot behind his head in Mongol fashion. His eyes, like those of an urt, one of the small horned rodents of Gor, were set obliquely in his skull. They were not clear, their redness and shadows testifying to long nights of indulgence and dissipation. It was obvious that Thorn, unlike my old enemy Pa-Kur, who presumably had perished at the siege of Ar, was not a man above sensual vices, not a man who could with fanatical purity and single-minded devotion sacrifice himself and entire peoples to the ends of his ambition and power. Thorn would never make a Ubar. He would always be a henchman.

“Give me my man,” said Thorn, gesturing to the figure that lay in the grass, still moving.

I decided that Thorn, whatever he was or wasn't, was a good officer.

“Take him,” I said.

The spearman beside Thorn went to the fallen man and examined his wound. The other warrior was clearly dead.

“He may live,” said the spearman.

Thorn nodded. “Bind his wound.”

Thorn turned to me again.

“I still want the woman,” he said.

“You may not take her,” I said.

“She is only one woman,” said Thorn.

“Then give her up,” I said.

“One of my men is dead,” said Thorn. “You can have his share of her selling price.”

“You are generous,” I said.

“Then it is agreed?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“I think we can kill you,” said Thorn, plucking a stalk of grass and meditatively chewing on it, regarding me all the while.

“Perhaps,” I admitted.

“On the other hand,” said Thorn, “I do not wish to lose another man.”

“Then give up the woman,” I said.

Thorn looked at me intently, puzzled, chewing on the piece of grass.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I was silent.

“You are an outlaw,” he said. “That I can see by the lack of insignia on your shield and tunic.”

I saw no reason to dispute his opinion.

“Outlaw,” said he, “what is your name?”

“Tarl,” I responded.

“Of what city?” he asked.

It was the inevitable question.

“Ko-ro-ba,” I said.

The effect was electric. The girl, who had been standing behind us, stifled a scream. Thorn and his warrior sprang to their feet. My sword was free of its sheath.

“Returned from the Cities of Dust,” gasped the warrior.

“No,” I said, “I am a living man, as you.”

“Better you had gone to the Cities of Dust,” said Thorn. “You are cursed by the Priest-Kings.”

I looked at the girl.

“Your name is the most hated on Gor,” she said, her voice flat, her eyes not meeting mine.

We four stood together, not speaking. It seemed a long time. I felt the grass on my ankles, still wet from the morning dew. I heard a bird cry in the distance.

Thorn shrugged.

“I will need time,” he said, “to bury my man.”

Silently, Thorn and the other warrior scooped out a narrow trench and buried their comrade. Then wrapping a cloak about two spears, and fastening it with binding fibre, they formed an improvised litter. On this, Thorn and his warrior placed the wounded companion.

Thorn looked at the girl and, to my astonishment, she approached him and extended her wrists. He snapped slave bracelets on them.

“You do not need to go with them,” I told her.

“I would bring you no pleasure,” she said bitterly.

“I will free you,” I said.

“I accept nothing from the hands of Tarl of Ko-ro-ba,” she said.

I reached out my hand to touch her, and she shuddered and drew back.

Thorn laughed mirthlessly. “Better to have gone to the Cities of Dust than to be Tarl of Ko-ro-ba,” he said.

I looked at the girl, now after her long days of suffering and flight at last a captive, her slender wrists encircled at last by Thorn's hated bracelets, beautifully wrought bracelets, like many, of exquisite workmanship, bright with colour, set even with jewels, but like all slave bracelets, of unyielding steel.

The bracelets contrasted with the meanness of her coarse brown garment. Thorn fingered the garment. “We will get rid of this,” he told her. “Soon, when you have been properly prepared, you will be dressed in costly pleasure silk, given sandals perhaps, scarves, veils and jewels, garments to gladden the heart of a maiden.”

“Of a slave,” she said.

Thorn lifted her chin with his finger. “You have a beautiful throat,” he said.

She looked at him angrily, sensing his meaning.

“It will soon wear a collar,” he said.

“Whose?” she demanded haughtily.

Thorn looked at her carefully. The chase had apparently in his eyes been well worth it. “Mine,” he said.

The girl almost swooned.

My fists were clenched.

“Well, Tarl of Ko-ro-ba,” said Thorn, “it ends thus. I take this girl and leave you to the Priest-Kings.”

“If you take her to Tharna,” I said, “the Tatrix will free her.”

“I will not take her to Tharna, but to my villa,” said Thorn, “which lies outside the city.” He laughed unpleasantly. “And there,” he said, “as a good man of Tharna should, I will revere her to my heart's content.”

I felt my hand clench on the hilt of my sword.

“Stay your hand, Warrior,” said Thorn. He turned to the girl. “To whom do you belong?” he asked.

“I belong to Thorn, Captain of Tharna,” she said.

I replaced the sword in my sheath, shattered, helpless. I could kill Thorn and his warrior perhaps, free her. But what then? Free her to the beasts of Gor, to another slaver? She would never accept my protection, and by her own actions she preferred Thorn and slavery to a favour from the man called Tarl of Ko-ro-ba.

I looked at her. “Are you of Ko-ro-ba?” I asked.

She stiffened, and looked at me with hatred. “I was,” she said.

“I am sorry,” I said.

She looked at me, tears of hatred burning in her eyes. “Why have you dared to survive your city?” she asked.

“To avenge it,” I replied.

She looked into my eyes for a long time. And then, as Thorn and the warrior picked up the litter with their wounded companion and began to depart, she said to me, “Goodbye, Tarl of Ko-ro-ba.”

“I wish you well, Vera of the Towers of the Morning,” I said.

She turned quickly, following her master, and I remained standing alone in the field.

The streets of Tharna were crowded, yet strangely silent. The gate had been open and though I had been carefullly scrutinised by its guards, tall spearmen in blue helmets, no one had objected to my entry. It must be as I had heard, that the streets of Tharna were open to all men who came in peace, whatever their city.

Curiously, I examined the crowds, all seemingly bent on their business, yet strangely tight lipped, subdued, much different from the normal, bustling throngs of a Gorean city. Most of the male citizens wore grey tunics, perhaps indicative of their superiority to pleasure, their determination to be serious and responsible, to be worthy scions of that industrious and sobre city.

On the whole they seemed to me a pale and depressed lot, but I was confident they could accomplish what they set their minds to, that they might succeed in tasks which the average Gorean male, with his impatience and lightness of heart, would simply abandon as distasteful or not worth the effort, for the average Gorean male, it must be admitted, tends to regard the joys of life somewhat more highly than its duties.

On the shoulders of their grey tunics only a small band of colour indicated caste. Normally the caste colours of Gor would be in abundant evidence, enlivening the streets and bridges of the city, a glorious spectacle in Gor's bright, clear air.

I wondered if men in this city were not proud of their castes as were, on the whole, other Goreans, even those of the so-called lower castes. Even men of a caste as low as that of the Tarn-Keepers were intolerably proud of their calling, for who else could raise and train those monstrous birds of prey? I supposed Zosk the Woodsman was proud in the knowledge that he with his great broad-headed ax could fell a tree in one blow, and that perhaps not even a Ubar could do as much. Even the Caste of Peasants regarded itself as the “Ox on which the Home Stone Rests” and could seldom be encouraged to leave their narrow strips of land, which they and their fathers before them had owned and made fruitful.

I missed in the crowd the presence of slave girls, common in other cities, usually lovely girls clad only in the brief, diagonally striped slave livery of Gor, a sleeveless, briefly skirted garment terminating some inches above the knee, a garment that contrasts violently with the heavy, cumbersome Robes of Concealment worn by free women. Indeed, it was known that some free women actually envied their lightly clad sisters in bondage, free, though wearing a collar, to come and go much as they pleased, to feel the wind on the high bridges, the arms of a master who celebrated their beauty and claimed them as his own. I remembered that in Tharna, ruled by its Tatrix, there would be few, if any, female slaves. Whether or not there were male slaves I could not well judge, for the collars would have been hidden by the grey robes. There is no distinctive garment for a male slave on Gor, since, as it is said, it is not well for them to discover how numerous they are.

The purpose, incidentally, of the brief garment of the female slave is not simply to mark out the girl in bondage but, in exposing her charms, to make her, rather than her free sister, the favoured object of raids on the part of roving tarnsmen. Whereas there is status in the capture of a free woman, there is less risk in the capture of a slave; the pursuit is never pressed as determinedly in their cases, and one does not have to imperil one's life for a girl who might, once the Robes of Concealment have been cast off, turn out to have the face of an urt and the temper of a sleen.

Perhaps I was most startled on the silent streets of Tharna by the free women. They walked in this city unattended, with an imperious step, the men of Tharna moving to let them pass–in such a way that they never touched. Each of these women wore resplendent Robes of Concealment, rich in colour and workmanship, standing out among the drab garments of the men, but instead of the veil common with such robes the features of each were hidden behind a mask of silver. The masks were of identical design, each formed in the semblance of a beautiful, but cold face. Some of these masks had turned to gaze upon me as I passed, my scarlet warrior's tunic having caught their eye. It made me uneasy to be the object of their gaze, to be confronted by those passionless, glittering silver masks.

Wandering in the city I found myself in Tharna's marketplace. Though it was apparently a market day, judging from the numerous stalls of vegetables, the racks of meat under awnings, the tubs of salted fish, the cloths and trinkets spread out on the carpets before the seated, cross-legged merchants, there was none of the noisy clamour that customarily attends the Gorean market. I missed the shrill, interminable calls of the vendors, each different; the good-natured banter of friends in the marketplace exchanging gossip and dinner invitations; the shouts of burly porters threading their way through the tumult; the cries of children escaped from their tutors and playing tag among the stalls; the laughter of veiled girls teasing and being teased by young men, girls purportedly on errands for their families, yet somehow finding the time to taunt the young swains of the city, if only by a flash of their dark eyes and a perhaps too casual adjustment of their veil.

Though on Gor the free maiden is by custom expected to see her future companion only after her parents have selected him, it is common knowledge that he is often a youth she has met in the marketplace. He who speaks for he hand, especially if she is of low caste, is seldom unknown to her, although the parents and the young people as well solemnly act as though this were the case. The same maiden whom her father must harshly order into the presence of her suitor, the same shy girl who, her parents approvingly note, finds herself delicately unable to raise her eyes in his presence, is probably the same girl who slapped him with a fish yesterday and hurled such a stream of invective at him that his ears still smart, and all because he accidentally happened to be looking in her direction when an unpredictable wind had, in spite of her best efforts, temporarily disarranged the folds of her veil.

But this market was not like other markets I had known on Gor. This was simply a drab place in which to buy food and exchange goods. Even the bargaining that went on, for there are no fixed prices in a Gorean market, seemed dreary, grim, lacking the zest and rivalry of other markets I had seen, the glorious expletives and superlative insults traded between buyer and seller with such incomparable style and gusto. Indeed, upon occasion, in other markets, a buyer who had succeeded in winning the haggling would bestow five times as many coins on the seller as he had agreed to pay, humiliating him with a smug, “Because I wish to pay you what it is worth.” Then, if the seller is sufficiently outraged, he might give back the buyer the coins, including most of those he had agreed to pay, saying, with mock contrition, “I do not wish to cheat you.” Then another round of insults occurs, and, eventually, both parties satisfied, some compromise having been reached, the transaction is concluded. Buyer and seller part, each convinced that he has had by far the best part of the bargain.

I this market, on the other hand, a steward would simply approach a vendor and point to some article, and hold up a certain number of fingers. The vendor would then hold up a higher number, sometimes bending his fingers at the knuckle to indicate a fraction of the value unit, which would be, presumably, the copper tarn disk. The steward might then improve his offer, or prepare to depart. The vendor would then either let him go or lower his price, by expressionlessly lifting fewer fingers than before. When either party called off the bargaining, his fists were closed. If a sale had been made, the steward would take a number of pierced coins, threaded on a string hung about his left shoulder, hand them to the vendor, pick up his article and depart. When words were exchanged, they were whispered and curt.