Savages of Gor (14 page)

"You will trust your translations to such a fellow?" I asked.

"Our clearest speech," said the officer, "will be with steel."

"You have many men," I said. "Your expedition must be very expensive. Had it been mounted by several cities I think I would have heard of it. Whence comes the gold for these numerous and manifold fees?"

The officer looked at me, angrily.

"We are sustained by the merchant council," said the woman. "Our papers are in order."

"I see," I said.

"Seldom," said the officer, "have I seen steel move as swiftly, as deceptively, as yours. My offer stands. Rations and a silver tarsk, one for each month of service."

"Rations, and a golden tarsk," said the woman, looking down at me. Over her veil of light silk her eyes shone. She had made the offer without consulting the officer. She had obviously much authority and power. I wondered what she would look like, if reduced to helpless bondage,

"My thanks, Lady," I said. "But I am in my own service."

"A position might be found for you, even in my intimate retinue," she said.

"I am in my own service," I said.

"Move on!" she called, lifting her gloved hand, and sitting angrily back in the curule chair.

I stepped to the side of the road.

"Forward!" called the officer, lifting his arm. The lady looked at me, angrily, her gloved hands now clutching the arms of the curule chair. Then she lifted her head and looked directly ahead. "Ho!" called the officer. His arm fell. The lines of mercenaries then moved forward, with the wagon in their midst, northward, toward Kailiauk. I withdrew to the side and sat in some shadows, among rocks, to observe the lines. I estimated the number of men, and, carefully, counted the supply wagons. My conjectures were warranted. Considering the game presumably available in the Barrens there were several more wagons in the lines than would have seemed called for.

When the lines and wagons had passed I emerged from the rocks and, at a distance, followed them toward Kailiauk.

The merchants of Port Olni, of course, would not be sustaining the enormous expense of such an expedition. They were not intimately involved in the hide traffic and, if they had been, as merchants, their procedures, initially, at any rate, would have been mercantile and not military. They would surely have tried, at least in the beginning, to work through local traders or, say, Dust Legs themselves. I had, in my mind, no doubt as to what source on Gor had both the motivation and resources to mount such an expedition. Similarly I had little doubt as to who were the occupants of certain of closed wagons in the lines.

On the road to Kailiauk I threw back my head and laughed heartily. I, Tarl Cabot, had been approached by agents of Kurii, and asked to take fee! I had little doubt that Kog and Sardak, and others like them, scratched impatiently, twisted, uncomfortably, anxious to get on with their work, in wagons ahead of me. Such close confinements, voluntary and self-imposed, would surely be almost intolerable for them. I admired their discipline. I hoped that it would hold out. It was nice to know where they were.

I bent down and picked up a rock, and tossed it ahead of me, down the road. Then I continued on again, toward Kailiauk.

One additional thing I had noted about the forces ahead of me. There had been no slave wagons in the lines, nor, chained in throat coffle, trudging in the dust behind the supply wagons, any slave girls. That I took to be the doing, and a tribute to the power, of the Lady Mira of Venna. As a free woman she doubtless hated slave girls, the lascivious, shameless sluts who drove men wild with such desire for them. Too, doubtless it pleased her vanity to be the only woman among so many men. I had seen her features, concealed by only a wisp silk. I wondered what she might look like in dancing silk and a steel collar, perhaps kneeling before me, the shadow of my whip falling across her body. I thought then she might not seem so proud, not as a humbled, owned slave. The Kurii, I granted them, almost always chose female agents of incredible beauty. This is so, I gather, that when they have served their serious purposes, there is always something else that may be done with them.

I spun another rock down the road, after the lines and wagons.

I should not have demonstrated the skill with the sword that I had, I supposed. Indeed, I had resolved, as a part of a disguise, to pretend to only modest skill with the weapon, unless it proved necessary to do otherwise. As soon as the two blades had touched, however, I had seen what could be done, and had done it. The matter was reflexive as much, or more, than rational. The steel, as is often the case, had seemed to think for itself. But I did not regret what I had done. I chuckled. Let them see, said I to myself, the skill of one who had once trained in the martial courts of Ko-ro-ba. I laughed. I wondered what these agents of Kurii would if they had known that Tarl Cabot had been in their midst. But they would have no reason to suppose him in the vicinity of the Barrens. They would know only that they had encountered one who, obviously, was not unaccustomed to steel.

Once again I thought of the Lady Mira of Venna. Yes, I thought, she would look well, like any other beautiful woman, stripped and collared, crawling to the feet of a man.

6
     
Kailiauk

I looked down into the broad, rounded, shallow pit, leaning over the waist-high wooden railing. In the pit, about five feet below the surface of the ground, there were nineteen girls. They wore wrist and ankle shackles, their wrists having some six inches of play and their ankles some twelve inches of play. They were also chained together by the neck. None of them stood, for such a girl, in such a pit, is not permitted to stand, unless given an express order to do so. The pit was muddy, for it had rained in the morning. They looked up, some of them who dared to do so, at the men looking down at them, from about the circular railing, assessing their qualities as females. Did they look into the eyes of their future masters? They had not yet even been branded.

"Barbarians," said the fellow next to me.

"Clearly," I said.

"There are two other pits," said the fellow. "Did you see them?"

"Yes," I said. "I have already perused their contents." It is pleasant to see naked, chained women, either slaves or those soon to be slaves.

I had spent a night on the road and had arrived in Kailiauk, hungry and muddy, yesterday, shortly after the tenth Ahn, the Gorean noon. Indeed, I had heard the striking of the time bar, mounted on the roof of the Administrator's store, as I had approached the town's outskirts. In Kailiauk, as is not unusual in the towns of the perimeter, the Administrator is of the Merchants. The major business in Kailiauk is the traffic in hides and kaiila. It serves a function as well, however, as do many such towns, as a social and commercial center for many outlying farms and ranches. It is a bustling town, but much of its population is itinerant. Among its permanent citizens I doubt that it numbers more than four or five hundred individuals. As would be expected it has several inns and taverns aligned along its central street.

Its most notable feature, probably, is its hide sheds. Under the roofs of these open sheds, on platforms, tied in bundles, are thousands of hides. Elsewhere, here and there, about town, are great heaps of bone and horn, often thirty or more feet in height. These deposits represent the results of the thinnings of kailiauk herds by the red savages. A most common sight in Kailiauk is the coming and going of hide wagons, and wagons for the transport of horn and bones. The number of kailiauk in the Barrens is prodigious, for it affords them a splendid environment with almost no natural enemies. Most kailiauk, I am sure, have never seen a man or a sleen.

The Barrens are traversed by a large number of herds. The four or five best-known herds, such as the Boswell herd, he for whom the Boswell Pass is named, and the Bento herd and the Hogarthe herd, named after the first white men who saw them, number, it is estimated, between two and three million beasts. The tremors in the earth from such a herd can be felt fifty pasangs away. It takes such a herd two to three days to ford a river. It has occasionally happened that enemy tribes have preyed on such a herd at different points and only afterwards, to their chagrin and amusement, realized their proximity to one another. Besides these major herds there are several smaller, identifiable herds numbering in the hundreds of thousands of animals. Beyond these, as would be expected, are many smaller herds, the very numbers of which are not even calculated by the red savages themselves, herds often range from a few hundred to several thousand animals.

It is speculated that some of these smaller herds may be subherds of larger herds, separating from the major herd at certain points during the season, depending on such conditions as forage and water. If that is the case then the number of kailiauk may not be quite as large as it is sometimes estimated. On the other hand, that their numbers are incredibly abundant is indubitable. These herds, too, interestingly enough, appear to have their annual grazing patterns, usually describing a gigantic oval, seasonally influenced, which covers many thousands of pasangs. These peregrinations, as would be expected, tend to take a herd in and out of the territory of given tribes at given times. The same herd, thus, may be hunted by various tribes without necessitating dangerous departures from their own countries.

The kailiauk is a migratory beast, thusly, but only in a rather special sense. It does not, for example, like, certain flocks of birds, venture annually in roughly linear paths from the north to the south, and from the south to the north, covering thousands of pasangs in a series of orthogonal alternations. The kailiauk must feed as it moves, and it is simply too slow for this type of migration. It could not cover the distances involved in the times that would be necessary. Accordingly the herds tend not so much to migrate with the seasons as to drift with them, the ovoid grazing patterns tending to bend northward in the summer and southward in the winter. The smell of the hide sheds, incidentally, gives a very special aroma to the atmosphere of Kailiauk. After one has been there for a few hours, however, the odor of the hides, now familiar and pervasive, tends to be dismissed from consciousness.

"Some of them are quite pretty," said the fellow next to me, looking down into the pit, his elbows on the railing.

"Yes," I said. We stood within the compound of Ram Seibar, a dealer in slaves. It is a reasonably large compound, for he also handles kaiila. It is, I would estimate, something over three hundred feet square, or, say, a bit less than a tenth of a pasang square. It contains several slave pits but only three were now occupied. It also contains several larger and smaller wooden structures, primarily holding areas, barracks for men and various ancillary buildings. The entire compound is enclosed by a wooden palisade. On the largest building, the main sales barn, about seventy feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet in length, there flies the pennon of Seibar, a yellow pennon on which, in black, are portrayed shackles and a whip.

"Do you know Grunt, the trader?" I asked the fellow.

"Yes," said he.

"Is he in the vicinity?" I asked.

"I do not know," said the man.

I had sought this fellow in the various inns and taverns of Kailiauk. I could find no one who seemed to know of his whereabouts. Indeed, I had begun to despair of finding him.

This morning, at the Five Horns stables, in Kailiauk, I had bought two kaiila. Bridles, a saddle, various sorts of gear, supplies, and trading goods, too, I had purchased in the town, at the store of Publius Crassus, of the Merchants, who is also Kailiauk's Administrator. Too I had purchased a short bow, modeled on the sort used by the savages, fit for clearing the saddle, and a quiver of twenty sheaf arrows.

In my opinion one of the mistakes of the white cavalries of the perimeter areas was their reliance on the crossbow, which is primarily an infantry weapon. It does, of course, have various advantages. It has considerable striking power, it may be kept ready to fire almost indefinitely, and, for most men, it is easier to fire with accuracy from the saddle than the straight bow. It will also, at short ranges, penetrate most of the hide shields used by the red savages.

Its major disadvantage is its slowness in rate of fire. The cavalry crossbow does have an iron stirrup in which the rider, without dismounting, may insert his foot, thus gaining the leverage necessary for drawing the cable back with both hands. If the rider is right handed he usually inserts his right foot in the stirrup and leans to the right in drawing the cable; this procedure is reversed, of course, usually, if the rider is left handed. While this procedure permits the rider to reload without dismounting and tends to improve, at some cost to striking power, the bow's rate of fire, it still provides, in my opinion, no adequate compensation for the loss of rapidity of fire. I think it not unlikely that the red savage could discharge three to five shafts in the time a single quarrel could be set in the clumsier weapon. In my opinion, if the crossbow, of the lighter, more quickly loading type, had proved to be a superior missile weapon in the typical combats practiced in the Barrens the red savages would have had recourse either to it, or to something analogous to it. But they have not.

I opted, accordingly, taking them for my authorities in the matter, for a weapon similar in design to theirs, one which had, apparently, proven its usefulness in the abrupt, sudden and fierce engagements characteristic of war on the vast grasslands of the Barrens. Unable to find Grunt, I feared I must enter the Barrens alone. Already, early this morning, the Lady Mira of Venna, and Alfred of Port Olni, with their mercenaries, had left Kailiauk.