Raiders of Gor (16 page)

excruciatingly desireable.

“Your paga,” said the girl, who served me.

I took it from her, again not seeing her. “Go, Slave,” said I.

“Yes, Master,” she said and, with a rustle of the chain, left my side.

I drank more paga.

So I had come to Port Kar.

Four days ago, in the afternoon, after two days in the marshes, my party had

reached the canals of the city.

We had come to one of the canals bordering on the delta.

We had seen that the canal was guarded by heavy metal gates, of strong bars,

half submerged in the water.

Telima had looked at the gates, frightened. “When I escapted from Port Kar,” she

said, “there were no such gates.”

“Could you have escaped then,” asked I, “as you did, had there been such gates?”

“No,” she whispered, frightened, “I could not have.”

The gates had closed behind us.

Our girls, our slaves, wept at the poles, guiding the raft into the canal.

As we passed beneath windows lining the canals men had, upon occasion, leaned

out, calling us prices for them.

I did not blame them. They were beautiful. And each poled well, as could only

one from the marshes themselves. We might well have congratulated ourselves on

our catch of rence girls.

Midice, Thura, Ula, Telima.

We no longer kept them in a throat coffle. But we had, about the throat of each,

wrapped, five times, a length of binding fiber, and knotted it, that this,

serving as collar, might mark them as slave. Aside from this they were not, at

the time we had entered the city, secured, save that a long length of binding

fiber, knotted about the right ankle of each, tied them together. Telima had

been branded long ago, but the thighs of Midice, Thura and Ula had never yet

felt the iron.

I watched the girl from Port Kar dance.

We could, tomorrow, brand the three girls, and purchase collars.

There was something of an uproar as a large, fierce-looking fellow, narrow-eyed,

ugly, missing an ear, followd by some twenty of thirty sailors, burst into the

tavern.

“Paga! Paga!” they cried, throwing over some tables they wished, driving men

from them, who had sat there, then righting the tables and sitting about them,

pounding on them and shouting.

Girls ran to serve them paga.

“It is Surbus,” said a man near me, to another.

The fierce fellow, bearded, narrow-eyed, missing an ear, who seemed to be the

leader of these men, seized one of the paga girls, twisting her arm, dragging

her toward one of the alcoves. I thought it was the girl who had served me, but

I was not certain.

Another girl ran to him, bearing a cup of paga. He took the cup in one hand,

threw it down his throat, and carried the girl he had seized, screaming, into

one of the alcoves. The girl had stopped dancing the Whip Dance, and cowered on

the sand. Other men, of those with Surbus, seized what paga girls they could,

and what vessels of the beverage, and draged their prizes toward teh alcoves,

sometimes driving out those who occupied them. Most, however, remained at the

tables, pounding on them, demanding drink.

I had heard the name of Surbus. It was well known among the pirate captains of

Port Kar, scourge of gleaming Thassa.

I threw down another burning swallow of the paga.

He was pirate indeed, and slaver, and murderer and thief, a cruel and worthless

man, abominable, truly of Port Kar. I felt little but disgust.

And then I reminded myself of my own ignobility, my own cruelties and my own

cowardice.

I, too, was of Port Kar.

I had learned that beneath the hide of men burned the hearts of sleen and

tharlarion, and that their moralities and ideals were so many cloaks to conceal

the claw and tooth. Greed and selfishness I now, for the first time, understood.

There is more honesty in Port Kar, I thought, than in all the cites of Gor. Here

men scorn to sheath the claws of their heart in the pretenses of their mouth.

Here, it this city, alone of all the cities of Gor, men did not stoop to cant

and prattle. Here they knew, and would acknowledge, the dark truths of human

life, that, in the end, there was only gold, and power, and the bodies of women,

and the steel of weapons. Here they concerned themselves only with themselves.

Here they behaved as what they were, cruelly and with ruthlessness, as men,

despising, and taking what they might, should it please them to do so. And it

was in this city, now mine, that I belonged, I who had lost myself, who had

chosen ignominious slavery to the freedom of honorable death.

I took yet another swallow of paga.

There was a girl’s scream and, from the alcove into which Surbus had dragged

her, the girl, bleeding, fled among the tables, he plunging drunken after her.

“Protect me!” she cried, to anyone who would listen. But there was only

laughter, and men reaching out to seize her.

She ran to my table and fell to her knees before me. I saw not she was the one

who had served me earlier.

“Please,” she wept, her mouth bloody, “protect me.” She extended her chained

wrists to me.

“No,” I said.

Then Surbus was on her, his hand in her hair, and he bent her backwards.

He scowled at me.

I took another sip of paga. It was no business of mine.

I saw the tears in the eyes of the girl, her outstretched hands, and then, with

a cry of pain, she was draged back to the alcove by the hair.

Several men laughed.

I turned again to my paga.

“You did well,” said a man next to me, half-shaven. “That was Surbus.”

“One of the finest swords of Port Kar,” said another.

“Oh,” I said.

Port Kar, squalid, malignant Port Kar, scourge of gleaming Thassa, Tarn of the

Sea, is a vast, disjointed mass of holdings, each almost a fortress, piled

almost upon one another, divided and crossed by hundreds of canals. It is, in

effect, walled, though it has few walls as one normally thinks of them. Those

buildings which face outwards, say, either at the delta or along the shallow

Tamber Gulf, have no windows on the ourward side, and the outward walls of them

are several feet thick, and they are surmounted, on the roofs, with crenelated

parapets. The canals which open into the delta of the Tamber were, in the last

few years, fitted with heavy, half-submerged gates of bars. We had entered the

city through one such pair of gates. In Port Kar, incidentally, tehre are none

of the towers often encountered in the norther cities of Gor. The men of Port

Kar had not chosen to build towers. It is the only city on Gor I know of whihc

was built not by free men, but by slaves, under the lash of masters. Commonly,

on Gor, slaves are not permitted to build, that being regarded as a privilege to

be reserved for free men.

Politically, Port Kar is a chaos, ruled by several conflicting Ubars, each with

his own following, each attempting to terrorize, to govern and tax to the extent

of his power. Nominally beneath these Ubars, but in fact much independent of

them, is an oligarchy of merchant princes, Captains, as they call themselves,

who, in council, maintain and manage the great arsenal, building and renting

shitps and fittings, themselves controlling the grain fleet, the oil fleet, the

slave fleet, and others.

Samos, First Slaver of Port Kar, said to be an agent of Priest-Kings, was, I

knew, a member of this council. I had been suppose to contact him. Now, of

course, I would not do so.

There is even, in Port Kar, a recognized caste of Thieves, the only such I know

of on Gor, which, in the lower canals and perimeters of the city, has much

power, that of the threat and the knife. They are recognized by the Thiefs Scar,

which they wear as a caste mark, a tiny, three-pronged brand burned into the

face in back of and below the eye, over the right cheekbone.

One might think that Port Kar, divided as she is, a city in which are raised the

thrones of anarchy, would fall easy prey to either the imperialisms or the

calculated retaliations of the other cities, but it is not true. When threatened

from the outside the men of Port Kar have, desperately and with the viciousness

of cornered urts, well defended themselves. Further, of course, it is next to

impossible to bring large bodies of armed men through the delta of the Vosk, or,

under the conditions of the marsh, to supply them or maintain them in a

protracted siege.

The delta itself is Port Kar’s strongest wall.

The nearest solid land, other than occasional bars in the marshes, to Port Kar

lies to her north, some one hundred passangs distant. This area, I supposed,

might theoretically be used as a staging area, for the storing of supplies and

the embarkation of an attacking force on barges, but the military prospects of

such a venture were decidedly not promising. It lay hundreds of pasangs from the

nearest Gorean city other, of course, than Port Kar. It was open territory. It

was subject to attack by forces beached to the west from the tarn fleets of Port

Kar, through the marsh itself by the barges of Port Kar, or from the east or

north, depending on hte marches following the disembarkation of Port Kar forces.

Further, it was open to attach from the air by means of the cavalries of

merceneary tarnsmen of Port Kar, of which she has several. I knew one of these

mercenary captains, Ha-Kee, murderer, once of Ar, whom I had met in Turia, in

the house of Saphrar, a merchant. Ha-Keel alone commanded a thousand men,

tarnsmen all. And even if an attacking force could be brought into the marsh, it

was not clear that it would, days later, make its way to the walls of Port Kar.

It might be destroyed in the marshes. And if it should come to the walls, there

was little likelihood of its being effective. The supply lines of such a force,

given the barges of Port Kar and her tarn cavalries, might be easily cut.

I took another drink of paga.

The men who had come to the tavern were roistering but order, to some extent,

had been restored. Two of the ship’s lanterns had been broken. There was glass,

and spilled paga about, and two broken tables. But teh musicians were again

playing and again, in the square of sand, the girl performed, through not now

the Whip Dance. Nude slave girls, wrists chained, hurried about. The Proprietor,

sweating, aproned, was tipping yet another great bottle of paga in its sling,

filling cups, that they might be borne to the drinkers. There was an occasional

scream from the alcoves, bringing laughter from the tables. I heard the flash of

a whip somewhere, and the cries of a girl.

I wondered if, now that the canals were barred, slaves escaped from Port Kar.

The nearest solid land was about one hundred pasangs to the north, but it was

open land, and, there, on the edges of the delta, there were log outposts of

Port Kar, where slave hunters and trained sleen, together, patrolled the

marshes’ edges.

The vicious, siz-legged sleen, large-eyed, sinuous, mammalian but resermbling a

furred, serpentine lizard, was a reliable, indefatigable hunter. He could follow

a scent days old with ease, and then, perhaps hundreds of pasangs, and days,

later, be unleashed for the sport of the hunters, to tear his victim to pieces.

I expected there was not likely to be escape for slaves to the north.

That left the delta, with its interminable marshes, and the thirst, and the

tharlarion.

Hunting sleen are trained to scent out and destroy escaped slaves.

Their senses are unusually keen.

Tuchuks, in the sounth, as I recalled, had also used sleen to hunt slaves, and,

of course, to protect their herds.

I was becoming drunk, my thoughts less connected.

The sea, I thought, the sea.

Could not Port Kar be attacked from the sea?

The music of the musicians began to beat in my blood, reeling there.

I looked at the girls serving paga.

“More paga!” I cried, and anoher wench ran lightly to serve me.

But only Cos and Tyros had fleets to match those of Port Kar.

There were the northern islands, of course, and they were numerous, but small,

extending in an archipelago like a scimitar northeastward from Cos, which lay

some four hundred pasangs west of Port Kar. But these islands were not united,

and, indeed, the government of them was usualy no more than a village council.

They usually possessed no vessels more noteworthy than clinker-built skiffs and

coasters.

The girl in teh sand, the dancing girl, was now performing the Belt Dance. I had

seen it done once before, in Ar, in the house of Cernus, a slaver.

Only Cos and Tyros had fleets to match those of Port Kar. And they, almost of

tradition, did not care to engage their fleets with hers. Doubtless all sides,

including Port Kar, regarded the risks as too great; doubtless all sides,

including Port Kar, were content with the stable, often profitable, situation of

constant but small-scale warfare, interspersed with some trading and smuggling,

which had for so long characterized their relations. Raids of one upon the

other, involving a few dozen ships, were not infrequent, whether on the shipping

of Port Kar, or beaching on Cos or Tyros, but major actions, those which might