Nomads of Gor (16 page)

      
with its own riders, spreading out over the prairie, pawing

      
through the snow, snuffing about? pulling up and chewing at

      
the grass, mostly worthless and frozen. The animals began to

      
die and the keening of women, crying as though the wagons

      
were burning and the Turians upon them, carried over the

      
prairies. Thousands of the Wagon Peoples, free and slave, dug

      
in the snow to find a handful of grass to feed their animals.

      
Wagons had to be abandoned on the prairie, as there was no

      
time to train new bask to the harness, and the herds must

      
needs keep moving.

      
At last, seventeen days after the first snows, the edges of

      
the herds began to reach their winter pastures far north of

      
Turia, approaching the equator from the south. Here the

      
snow was little more than a frost that melted in the after-

      
noon sun, and the grass was live and nourishing. Still farther

      
north, another hundred pasangs, there was no snow and the

      
peoples began to sing and once more dance about their fires

      
of bask dung.

      
"The bask are safe," Kamchak had said. I had seen strong

      
men leap from the back of the kaiila and, on their knees,

      
tears in their eyes, kiss the green, living grass. "The bosk are

      
safe," they had cried, and the cry had been taken up by the

      
women and carried from wagon to wagon, "IT he bosk are

      
safer"

      
This year, perhaps because it was the Omen Year, the

      
Wagon Peoples did not advance farther north than was

      
necessary to ensure the welfare of the herds. They did not, in

      
fact, even cross the western Cartius, far from cities, which

      
they often do, swimming the bask and kaiila, floating the

wagons, the men often crossing on the backs of the seam,,

ming bask. It was the Omen Year, and not a year, apparently,

in which to risk war with far peoples, particularly not those?

Of cities like Ar, whose warriors had mastered the tarn and'

might, from the air, have wrought great destruction on the

herds and wagons

The Wintering was not unpleasant, although, even so far

north, the days and nights were often quite chilly; the Wagon

Peoples and their slaves as well, wore boskhide and furs

during this time; both male and female, slave or free, wore

furred boots and trousers, coats and the flopping, ear-flapped

caps that tied under the chin; in this time there was often no

way to mark the distinction between the free woman and the

slave girl, save that the hair of the latter must needs be

unbound; in some cases, of course, the Turian collar was

visible, if worn on the outside of the coat, usually under the

furred collar; the men, too, free and slave, were dressed

similarly, save that the Kajiri, or he-slaves, wore shackles,

usually with a run of about a foot of chain.

 
On the back of the kaiila, the black lance in hand, bending

down in the saddle, I raced past a wooden wand fixed in the

earth, on the top of which was placed a dried tospit, a small,

wrinkled, yellowish-white peachlike fruit, about the size of a

plum, which grows on the tospit bush, patches of which are

indigenous to the drier valleys of the western Cartius. They

are bitter but edible.

 
"Well done!" cried Kamchak as he saw the tospit, unsplit,

impaled halfway down the shaft of the lance, stopped only by

my fist and the retaining strap.

Such a thrust was worth two points for us.

 
I heard Elizabeth Cardwell's cry of joy as she leaped into

the air, clumsy in the furs, clapping her hands. She carried,

on a strap around her neck, a sack of tospits. I looked at her

and smiled. Her face was vital and flushed with excitement.

 
"Tospit!" called Conrad of the Kassars, the Blood People,

and the girl hastened to set another fruit on the wand.

There was a thunder of kaiila paws on the worn turf and

Conrad, with his red lance, nipped the tospit neatly from the

tip of the wand, the lance point barely passing into it, he

having drawn back at the last instant.

 
"Well done!" I called to him. My own thrust had been full

thrust, accurate enough but rather heavily done, in war, such

a thrust might have lost me the lance, leaving it in the

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body of an enemy. His thrust was clearly, I acknowledged,

 
worth three points.

 
Kamchak then rode, and he, like Conrad of the Kassars,

 
deftly took the fruit from the wand; indeed, his lance enter-

 
ing the fruit perhaps a fraction of an inch less than had

 
Conrad's. It was, however, also a three-point thrust.

 
The warrior who then rode with Conrad thundered down

 
the lane in the turf.

 
There was a cry of disappointment, as the lance tip

 
sheared the fruit, not retaining it, knocking it from the wand.

 
It was only a one-point thrust.

 
Elizabeth cried out again, with pleasure, for she was of the

 
wagon of Kamchak and Tarl Cabot.

 
The rider who had made the unsatisfactory thrust suddenly

 
whirled the kaiila toward the girl, and she fell to her knees,

 
realizing she should not have revealed her pleasure at his

 
failure, putting her head to the grass. I tensed, but Kamchak

 
laughed, and held me back. The rider's kaiila was now

 
rearing over the girl, and he brought the beast to rest. With

 
the tip of his lance, stained with the tospit fruit, he cut the

 
strap that held the cap on her head, and then brushed the cap

 
off; then, delicately, with its tip, he lifted her chin that she

 
might look at him.

 
"Forgive me, Master," said Elizabeth Cardwell.

 
Slave girls, on Gor, address all free men as master,

 
though, of course, only one such would be her true master.

 
I was pleased with how well, in the past months, Elizabeth

 
had done with the language. Of course, Kamchak had rented

 
three Turian girls, slaves, to train her; they had done so,

 
binding her wrists and leading her about the wagons, teaching

 
her the words for things, beating her with switches when she

 
made mistakes; Elizabeth had learned quickly. She was an

 
intelligent girl.

 
It had been hard for Elizabeth Cardwell, particularly the

 
first weeks. It is not an easy transition to make, that from a

 
bright, lovely young secretary in a pleasant, fluorescently lit,

 
air-conditioned office on Madison Avenue in New

 
to a slave girl in the wagon of Tuchuk warrior.

 
When her interrogation had been completed, and she had

 
collapsed on the dais of Kutaituchik, crying out in misery

 
"La Kajira. La Kajira!" Kamchak had folded her, still weep-

 
ing, clad in the Sirik, in the richness of the pelt of the red

 
tart in which she had originally been placed before us.

 
As I had followed him from the dais I had seen Kutaituchik,

 
the interview ended, absently reaching into the small

 
golden box of kanda strings, his eyes slowly beginning to

 
close.

 
Kamchak, that night, chained Elizabeth Cardwell in his

 
wagon, rather than beneath it to the wheel, running a short

 
length of chain from a slave ring set in the floor of the

 
wagon box to the collar of her Sirik. He had then carefully

 
wrapped her, shivering and weeping, in the pelt of the red

 
larl.

 
She lay there, trembling and moaning, surely on the verge

 
of hysteria. I was afraid the next phase of her condition

 
would be one of numbness, shock, perhaps of refusal to

 
believe what had befallen her, madness.

 
Kamchak had looked at me. He was genuinely puzzled by

 
what he regarded as her unusual emotional reactions. He

 
was, of course, aware that no girl, Gorean or otherwise,

 
could be expected to take lightly a sudden reduction to an

 
abject and complete slavery, particularly considering what

 
that would mean among the wagons.

 
He did, however, regard Miss Cardwell's responses as

 
rather peculiar, and somewhat reprehensible. Once he got up

 
and kicked her with his furred boot, telling her to be quiet.

 
She did not, of course, understand Gorean, but his intention

 
and his impatience were sufficiently clear to preclude the

 
necessity of a translation. She stopped moaning, but she

 
continued to shiver, and sometimes she sobbed. I saw him

 
take a slave whip from the wall and approach her, and then

 
turn back and replace it on the wall. I was surprised that he

 
had not used it, and wondered why. I was pleased that he

 
had not beaten her, for I might have interfered. I tried to

 
talk to Kamchak and help him to understand the shock that

 
the girl had undergone, the total alteration of her life and

 
circumstances, unexplained finding herself alone on the

 
prairie, the Tuchuks, the capture, the return to the Wagons,

 
her examination in the grassy avenue, the Sirik, the interro-

 
gation, the threat of execution, then the fact, difficult for her

 
to grasp, of being literally an owned slave girl. I tried to

 
explain to Kamchak that her old world had not prepared her

 
for these things, for the slaveries of her old world are of a

 
different kind, more subtle and invisible, thought by some

 
not even to exist.

 
Kamchak said nothing, but then he got up and from a

 
chest in the wagon he took forth a goblet and filled it with an