Nomads of Gor (12 page)
Authors: John Norman
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Adventure, #Gor (Imaginary Place), #Cabot; Tarl (Fictitious Character), #Outer Space, #Nomads, #Outlaws
war. Now, from the right side of his mouth, thin, black and
wet, there emerged the chewed string of kanda, a quarter of
an inch at a time, slowly. The drooping eyes, glazed, regard-
ed us. For him there could no longer be the swift races
across the frozen prairie; the meetings in arms; even the
dancing to the sky about a fire of bask dung.
Kamchak and I waited until the string had been chewed.
When Kamchak had finished he held out his right hand
and a man, not a Tuchuk, who wore the green robes of the
Caste of Pysicians, thrust in his hand a goblet of bask horn;
it contained some yellow fluid. Angrily, not concealing his
distaste, Kutaituchik drained the goblet and then hurled it
from him.
He then shook himself and regarded Kamchak.
He grinned a Tuchuk grin. "How are the bosk?" he asked.
"As well as may be expected," said Kamchak.
"Are the quivas sharp?"
"One tries to keep them so," said Kamchak.
`'It is important to keep the axles of the wagons greased,"
observed Kutaituchik.
"Yes," said Kamchak, "I believe so."
Kutaituchik suddenly reached out and he and Kamchak,
laughing, clasped hands.
Then Kutaituchik sat back and clapped his hands together
sharply twice. "Bring the she-slave," he said.
I turned to see a stout man-at-arms step to the dais,
carrying in his arms, folded in the furs of the scarlet larl, a
girl.
I heard the small sound of a chain.
The man-at-arms placed Elizabeth Cardwell before us, and
Kutaituchik, and drew away the pelt of the scarlet larl.
Elizabeth Cardwell had been cleaned and her hair combed.
She was slim, lovely.
The man-at-arms arranged her before us.
The thick leather collar, I noted, was still sewn about her
throat.
Elizabeth Cardwell, though she did not know it, knelt
before us in the position of the Pleasure Slave.
She looked wildly about her and then dropped her head.
Aside from the collar on her throat she, like the other girls
on the platform, wore only the Sirik.
Kamchak gestured to me.
"Speak," I said to her.
She lifted her head and then said, almost inaudibly, trem-
bling in the restraint of the Sirik. "La Kajira" Then she
dropped her head.
Kutaituchik seemed satisfied.
"It is the only Gorean she knows," Kamchak informed
him.
"For the time," said Kutaituchik, "it is enough." He then
looked at the man-at-arms. "Have you fed her?" he asked.
The man nodded.
"Good," said Kutaituchik, "the she-slave will need her
strength."
The interrogation of Elizabeth Cardwell took hours. Need-
less to say, I served as translator.
The interrogation, to my surprise, was conducted largely
by Kamchak, rather than Kutaituchik, called Ubar of the
Tuchuks. Kamchak's questions were detailed, numerous,
complex. He returned to certain questions at various times, in
various ways, connecting subtly her responses to one with
those of another; he wove a sophisticated net of inquiry
about the girl, delicate and fine; I marveled at his skill; had
there been the least inconsistency or even hesitation, as
though the girl were attempting to recollect or reconcile the
details of a fabrication, it would have been instantly de"
tected.
During all this time, and torches had been brought, the
hours of the night being burned away, Elizabeth Cardwell
was not permitted to move, but must needs retain the posi-
tion of the Pleasure Slave, knees properly placed, back
straight, head high, the gleaming chain of the Sirik dangling
from the Turian collar, falling to the pelt of the red tart on
which she knelt.
The translation, as you might expect, was a difficult task,
but I attempted to convey as much as I could of what the
girl, piteously, the words tumbling out, attempted to tell me.
Although there were risks involved I tried to translate as
exactly as I could, letting Miss Cardwell speak as she would,
though her words must often have sounded fantastic to the
Tuchuks, for it was largely of a world alien to them that she
spoke a world not of autonomous cities but of huge na-
tions; not of castes and crafts but of global, interlocking
I, -
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46 NOMADS OF GOR
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industrial complexes; not of batter and tarn disks but of |
fantastic systems of exchange and credit; a world not of tarns I
and the tharlarion but of aircraft and motor buses and
trucks; a world in which one's words need not be carried by
a lone rider on the swift kaiila but could be sped from one
corner of the earth to another by leaping through an artifi-
cial moon.
Kutaituchik and Kamchak, to my pleasure, tended to re-
strain judgment on these matters; to my gratification they did
not seem to regard the girl as mad; I had been afraid, from
time to time, that they might, losing patience with what must
seem to them to be the most utter nonsense, order her beaten
or impaled.
I did not know then, but Kutaituchik and Kamchak had
some reason for supposing that the girl might be speaking the
truth.
What they were most interested in, of course, and what I
was most interested in, namely, how and why the girl came
to be wandering on the Plains of Turia in the Lands of the
Wagon Peoples they, and I, did not learn.
We were all, at last, satisfied that even the girl herself did
not know.
At last Kamchak had finished, and Kutaituchik, too, and
they leaned back, looking at the girl.
"Move no muscle," I said to her.
She did not. She was very beautiful.
Kamchak gestured with his head.
"You may lower your head," I said to the girl.
Piteously, with a rustle of chain, the girl's head and shoul-
ders fell forward, and though she still knelt, her head touched
the pelt of the larl, her shoulders and back shaking, trem-
bling.
It seemed to me, from what I had learned, that there was
no particular reason why Elizabeth Cardwell, and not one of
Parth's countless others, had been selected to wear the mes-
sage collar. As yet the collar had not been removed and
examined. It was perhaps only that she was convenient, and,
of course, that she was lovely, thus a fitting bearer of the
collar, herself a gift with the message to please the Tuchuks,
and perhaps better dispose them toward its contents.
Miss Cardwell was little different from thousands of lovely
working girls in the great cities of Barth, perhaps more
intelligent than many, perhaps prettier than most, but essen-
tially the same, girls living alone or together in apartments,
in''.'
working in offices and studios and shops, struggling to earn a
hying in a glamorous city, whose goods and pleasures they
could ill afford to purchase. What had happened to her
might, I gathered, have happened to any of them.
She remembered arising and washing and dressing, eating a
hurried breakfast, taking the elevator downstairs from her
apartment, the subway, arriving at work, the routines of the
morning as a junior secretary in one of the larger advertising
agencies on Madison Avenue, her excitement at being invited
to interview for the position of assistant secretary to the head
of the art department, her last-minute concern with her
lipstick, the hem of her yellow shift, then steno pad in hand,
entering his office..
With him had been a tall, strange man, broad of shoulder
with large hands, a grayish face, eyes almost like glass. He
had frightened her. He wore a dark suit of expensive cloth
and tailoring, and yet somehow it seemed not that he wore
it as one accustomed to such garments. He spoke to her,
rather than the man she knew, the head of the department,
whom she had seen often. He did not permit her to take the
seat by the desk.
Rather he told her to stand and straighten herself. He
seemed to scorn her posture. Angry, she nevertheless did so
until, embarrassed, she stood insolently erect before him. His
eyes regarded her ankles with care, and then her calves and
she was acutely aware, blushing, that standing as she did, so
straight before him, the simple yellow, oxford-cloth shift ill
concealed her thighs, the flatness of her belly, the loveliness
of her figure. "Lift your head," he said, and she did, her chin
high, the lovely, angry head set proudly on her aristocratic
