Raiders of Gor (21 page)

smuggling and trading, had become a fairly profitable way of life, apparently

for all. Doubtless, in Cos and Tyros as well there were rumors of fleets being

prepared to be sent against them. The seaman, to his chargrin, was dismissed by

a vote of the council.

We then turned our attention to matters of greater importance, the need for more

covered docks in the arsenal, beneaht which additional galleys could be caulked

for the grain fleet, else how could a hundred vessels be red for the voyage

norht to the grain fields before the sixth passage hand?

It is perhaps worth remarking, briefly, on the power of Port Kar, with it being

understood that the forces of both Cos and Tyros, the other two significant

maritime Ubarates in know Thassa, are quite comparable.

The following figured pertain to medium class or larger vessels:

The five Ubars of Port Kar, Chung, Eteocles, Nigel, Sullius Maximus and Henrius

Sevarius, control among themselves some four hundred ships. The approximately

one hundred and twenty captains of the council of Captains of Port Kar havem

pledged to their personal service, some thousand ships. They further control

another thousand ships, as executor, through the council, which ships comprise

the memebers of the grain fleet, the oil fleet, the slave fleet, and others, as

well as numerous patrol and escort ships. Beyound these ships there re some

twenty-five hundred ships which are owned by some fifteen or sixteen hundred

minor captains of the city, not wealthy enough to sit on the Council of

Captains. The figures I have listed would give us some forty-nine hundred ships.

To get a better figure, particularly since the above figures are themselves

approximations, let us say that Port kar houses in the neighborhood of five

thousand ships. As mentioned above, the naval strengths of Cos and Tyros are,

individually, comparable. It is, of course, true that not all of these some five

thousand ships are war ships. My estimation would be that approximately fifteen

hundred only are the long ships, the ram-ships, those of war. On the other hand,

whereas the round ships do not carry rams and are much slower and less

maneuverable than the long ships, they are not inconsequential in a naval

battle, for their deck areas and deck castles can accommodate springals, small

catapults, and chain-slings onagers, not to mention numerous bowmen, all of

which can provide a most discouraging and vicious barrage, consisting normally

of javelins, burning pitch, fiery rocks and crossbow quarrels. A war ship going

into battle, incidentally, always takes its mast down and stores its sail below

decks. The bulwarks and deck of the ship are often covered with wet hides.

It was voted that another dozen covered docks be raised within the confines of

the arsenal, that the caulking schedule of the gran fleet might be met. The vote

was unanimous.

The next matter for consideration was the negotiation of a dispute between the

sail-makers and the rope-makers in the arsenal with respect to priority in the

annual Procession to the Sea, which takes place on the first of En’Kara, the

Gorean New Year. There had been a riot this year. It was resolved that

henceforth both groups would walk abreast. I smiled to myself. I expected there

would be a riot net year as well.

The rumor of the seaman, that Cos and Tyros were preparing fleets against Port

Kar, again entered my mind, but again I dismissed it.

The next item on the agenda dealt with the demand of the pulley-makers to

receive the same wage per Ahn as the oar-makers. I voted for this measure, but

it did not pass.

A Captain next to me snorted, “Give the pulley-makers the wage of oar-makers,

and sawyers will want the wages of carpenters, and carpenters of shipwrights!”

All who do skilled work in the arsenal, incidentally, are free men. The men of

Port Kar may permit slaves to build their house and their walls, but they do not

permit them to build their ships. The wages of a sail-maker, incidentally, are

four copper tarn disks per day, those of a fine shipwright, hired by the Council

of Captains, as much as a golden tarn disk her day. The average working day is

ten Ahn, or about twelve Earth hours. The amount of time spent in actual work,

however, is far less. The work day of a free man in the arsenal is likely to be,

on the whole, a rather leisurely one. Free Goreans do not like to be pressed in

their tasks. Two Ahn for lunch and stopping an Ahn early for paga and a talk in

the late afternoon are not uncommon. Layoffs occur, but , because of the amount

of work, not frequently. The organizations, such as the sail-makers, almost

guildlike, not castes, have due, and these dues tend to be applied to a number

of purposes, such as support of those injured or their families, loans, payments

when men are out of work, and pensions. The organizations have also, upon

occasion, functioned as collective bargaining agencies. I suspected that the

sail-makers would, threatening desertion of the arsenal, this year or the next

obtain their desired increase in wages. Brutal repressions of organization have

never characterized the arsenal. The Council of Captains respects those who

build and outfit ships. On the other hand, the wages tend to be so slight that

an organization seldom has the means to mount a long strike; the arsenal can

normally be patient, and can usually choose to build a ship a month from now

rather than now, but one cannot well arrange to eat a month from now, and not

today, or tomorrow, or until a month from now. But most importantly the men of

the arsenal regard themselves as just that, the men of the arsenal, and would be

unhappy apart from their work. For all their threats of desertion of the arsenal

there are few of them who would want to leave it. Building fine and beautiful

ships gves them great pleasure.

Beyond this, lastly, it might be mentioned that Gorean society, on the whole,

tends to be tradition bound, and that there is little questioning of the wisdom

of one’s fathers; in such a society individuals usually have an identity

satisfactory to themselves, and a place in which they feel comfortable;

accordingly they are less susceptible ot the social confusions attendant upon a

society in which greater mobility is encouraged and traditonal prestige

considerations replaed with materialistic ones. A society in which each is

expected to succeed, and it placed under conditions where most must fail, would

be incomprehensible, irrational, to most Goreans. This will sound strange, I

suppose, but the workers of the arsenal, as long as they make enough to live

reasonably well, are more concerned with their work, as craftsmen, than they are

with considerabley and indefinitely improving their economic status. This is not

to say taht they would have any objection to being rich; it is only to remark,

in effect, that it has never occurred to them, no more than to most Goreans, to

take very seriously the pursuit of wealth as their universal and compelling

motivation; being ignorant, it seems, they, like most other Goreans, are more

concerned with other things, such as, as I have earlier noted, the building of

fine and beautiful ships. I make no pronouncements on these matters, but report

them as I find them. I would note, of course, that these weaknesses, or virtues,

of the men of the arsenal are, of tradition, welcomed by the Council of

Captains; without them the arsenal could not be as efficiently and ceonomically

managed as it is. Again I make no pronouncements on these matters, but report

them as I find them. My thinking on these matters is mixed.

Why, I asked myself, should Cos and Tyros consider bringing their fleets against

Port Kar? What had changed? But then I recalled that nothing had changed. It was

only a rumor, one which, it seemed, recurred at least every year in Port Kar.

Doubtless there were similares rumors raising their small stirs, in the councils

of Cos and Tyros. I recalled that the words of the seaman had been dismissed.

Now, crying to come before the council, was the mad, half-blind shipwright

Tersites, a scroll of drawings in his hand, and calculations.

At a word from the scribe at the long table before the thrones of the Ubars, two

men put Tersites from the chamber, dragging him away.

Once before he had been permitted to present plans to the council, but they had

been too fantastic to be taken seriously. He had dared to suggest a redesign of

the standard tarn ship. He had wanted to deepen teh keel, to add a foremast, to

change the rowing to great oars, each handled by several men, rather than one

man to an oar; he had wanted ven to raises the ram above the waterline.

I would have been curious to hear the arguments of Tersites pertinent to these

recommendations, but before, when it had become clear how radical and, I gather,

absurd were his proposals, he had been hooted from the chamber.

I recall men shouting, “Many men could not all sit through the stroke of an oar!

Would you have them stand?” “So great an oar could not even be held by the hands

of a man!” “Two masts with their sails could not be quickly removed before

battle!” “You will slow the ship if you deepen the keel!” “If many men sit a

single oar, some will slack their work!” “What good is a ram that does not make

its stroke below waterline?”

Tersites had been permitted that once to address the council because he, though

thought mad, had once been a skilled shipwright. Indeed, the galleys of Port

Kar, medium and heavy class, carried shearing blades, which had been an

invention of Tersites. These are huge quarter-moons of steel, fixed forward of

the oars, anchored into the frame of the ship itself. One of the most common of

naval strategies, other than ramming, is oar shearing, in which one vessel, her

oars suddenly shortened inboard, slides along the hull of another, whose oars

are still outboard, splintering and breaking them off. The injured gally then is

like a broken-winged bird, and at the mercy of the other ship’s ram as she comes

about, flutes playing and drums beating, and makes her strike amidships. Recent

galleys of Cos and Tyros, and other maritime powers, it had been noted, were now

also, most ofte, equipped with shearing blades.

Tersites had also, it might be mentioned, though he had not presented these

ideas in his appearance before the council, argued for a rudder hung on the

sternpost of the tarn ship, rather that the two side-hung rudders, and had

championed a square rigging, as opposed to the beautiful lateen rigging common

on the ships of Thassa. Perhaps this last proposal of Tersites’ had been the

most offensive of all to the men of Port kar. The triangular lateen sail on its

single sloping yar is incredibly beautiful.

Tersites had, some five years before, been removed from the arsenal. He had

taken his ideas to Cos and Tyros, but there, too, he had met with only scorn. He

had then returned to Port Kar, his fortunes exhausted, no place left to him in

the arsenal. He now lived, it was said, on the garbage in the canals. A small

pittance granted him by the shipwrights, of whm he had been one, was spent in

the paga taverns of the city. I dismissed Tersites from my mind.

I had made, since coming to Port Kar, five voyages. Four of these had been

commerical in nature. I had no quarrel with the shipping of others. Like the

Bosk itself I would not seek for trouble, but, too, like the Bosk, I would not

refuse to meet it. My four commercial voyages had been among the exchange

islands, or free islands, in Thassa, administered as free prots by members of

teh Merchants. There were several such islands. Three, which I encountereed

frequently in my voyages, were Teletus, and, south of it, Tabor, named for the

drum, which it resembles, and to the north, among the northern islands, Scagnar.

Others were Farnacium, Hulneth and Asperiche. I did not go as far south as Anago

or Ianda, or as far north as Hunjer or Skjern, west of Torvaldsland. There

islands, with occasional free ports on the coast, north and south of the Gorean

equator, such as Lydius and Helmutsport, and Schendi and Bazi, make possible the

commerce between Cos and Tyros, and the mainland, and its cities, such as

Ko-ro-ba, Thentis, Tor, Ar, Turia, and many others.

On these voyages my cargos were varied. I did not, however, in this early

period, because of the cost, purchase cargos of great value. Accordingly I did

not carry, in these first voyages, any abundance of precious metals or jewels;

not did I carry rugs or tapestries, or medicines, or silks or ointments, or

perfumes or prize slaves, or spices or cannisters of colored table salts. In

these first voyages I was content, quite, to carry tools and stone, dried fruit,

dried fish, bolts of rep-cloth, tem-wood, Tur-wood and Ka-la-na stock, and horn

and hides. I did once carry, however, a hold of chained slaves, and, another

time, a hold filled with the furs of the northern sea sleen. The latter cargo

was the most valuable carrried in these first four voyages. Each of these cargos

I managed to sell at considerable profit. Twice we had been scouted by pirates