transportation to Gor, slavery. She knows nothing. She scarcely understands,
now, the meaning of her collar.
Samos laughed unpleasantly, the laugh of a slaver.
“Yet one thing you had from her seems of interest,” said Samos, preceding me
down a deep corridor. In the corridor we passed female slave. She dropped to her
knees and put her head down, her hair upon the tiles, as we passed.
“It seems a random thing, meaningless” I said.
“In itself, meaningless,” he said. “But, with other things, it induces in me a
certain apprehension.”
“The remark she overheard, in English, concerning the return of the slave
ships?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Samos. When I had probed the girl in the pens, mercilessly, forcing
her to recall all details, even apparently meaningless scraps of detail, or
information, she had recalled one thing, which had seemed puzzling, disturbing.
I had not much understood it, but Samos had evinced concern. He knew more than I
of the affairs of Others, the Kurii, and Priest-Kings. The girl had heard the
remark drowsily, half stupified, shortly after her arrival on Gor. She,
stripped, half drugged, the identification anklet of the Kurii locked on her
left ankle, had lain on her stomach, with other girls, in the fresh grass of
Gor. They had been removed from the slave capsules in which they had been
transported. She had risen, to her elbows, her head down. She had then been
conscious, vaguely, of being turned about and lifted, and carried, to a
different place in the line, one determined by her height. Usually the tallest
girls lead the slave chain, the height decreasing gradually toward the end of
the chain, where the shortest girl is placed. This was a “common chain,”
sometimes called a “march chain” or “trekking chain”; it was not a “display
chain: in the “display chain,” or “selling chain,” the arrangement of the girls
may be determined by a variety of considerations, aesthetic and psychological;
for example, blondes may be alternated with brunets, voluptuous girls with slim,
vital girls, aristocratic girls with sweet, peasant wenches, and so on;
sometimes a girl is placed between two who are less beautiful, to enhance her
beauty; sometimes the most beautiful is saved for the last on the chain;
sometimes the chain is used as a ranking device, the most beautiful being-placed
at its head, the other girls then competing with one another constantly to move
to a new wrist-ring, snap-lock or collar, one higher on the chain. She had been
thrown to her stomach in the grass, and her left wrist drawn to her side and
down. She had heard the rustle of a looped chain, and the periodic click of the
wrist-rings. She felt a length of chain dropped across the back of her thighs.
Then, about her left wrist, too, closed the wrist-ring, and she, too, was a girl
in a coffle. A man had stood by, making entries in a book. When her
identification anklet had been removed, after she was in the wrist-ring, the man
removing it had said something to the man with the book, and an entry had been
made. When the girls were coffled, the man with the book had signed a paper,
giving it to the captain of the slave ship. She knew it must be a receipt for
merchandise received. The cargo manifests, apparently, had been correct. She had
pulled weakly at the wrist-ring ,but it of course, held her. It had been then
that the man with the book had asked the captain if he would return soon. The
man with the book spoke in an accent, Gorean. The captain, she gathered, did not
speak Gorean. The captain had said, as she remembered it, that he did not know
when they would return, that he had received orders that there were to be no
more voyages until further orders were received. She was conscious of the
departure of the ship, and the grass beneath her body, and the chain lying
across her legs, and the steel of the wrist-ring. She felt the chain move as the
girl to her right stirred. Her left wrist was moved slightly behind her. They
lay in the shade of trees, concealed from the air. They were not permitted to
rise. When one girl had cried out, she had been beaten with a switch. Miss
Priscilla Blake-Allen had not dared to cry out. After dark, they were herded to
a wagon.
“Why,” asked Samos, “should the slave ships cease their runs?”
“An invasion?” I asked.
“Unlikely,” said Samos, “If an invasion were to be launched soon, surely the
slave runs would continue. Their cessation would surely alert the defense and
surveillance facilities of Priest-Kings. One would not, surely, produce a state
of apprehension and heightened awareness in the enemy prior to an attack.”
“It does not seem so,” I admitted, “unless the Kurii, perhaps, feel that just
such a move might put the Priest-Kings off guard, that it would be too obvious
to be taken as a prelude to full war.” “But this possibility, doubtless,” smiled
Samos “too, is one which will not fail to be considered by the rulers of the
Sardar.”
I shrugged. It had been long since I had been in the Sardar.
“It may mean an invasion is being readied,” said Samos. “But I think the Kurii,
who are rational creatures, will not risk full war until reasonably assured as
to its outcome. I suspect their reconnaissance is as yet incomplete. The
organization of native Kurii, which would have constituted a splendid
intelligence probe, and was doubtless intended primarily as such, yielded them
little information.”
I smiled. The invasion of native Kurii from the north, survivors and descendants
of ship Kurii, for generations, had been stopped in Torvaldsland.
“I think,” said Samos “it is something other than an invasion.” He looked at me
grimly. “It is, I suspect, something which would render an invasion
unnecessary.”
“I do not understand,” I said.
“I have much fear,” said Samos. I regarded him. I had seldom seen him so. I
looked at the heavy squarish face, burned by the wind and salt of Thassa, the
clear eyes, the white, short-cropped hair, the small golden rings in his ears.
His face seemed drained of color. I knew he could stand against a hundred
swords, unflinching.
“What is it” I asked, “which would render an invasion unnecessary?”
“I have much fear,” said Samos.
“You said you had other information,” I said.
“Two things,” said Samos. “Follow me.” I continued to follow him through various
corridors, and down stairways in his home. Soon the walls became damp, and I
gathered we were beneath the levels of the canals. We passed barred doors,
heavily guarded. Passwords, appropriate to different levels and portions of the
house, were given and acknowledged. These are changed daily. For a portion of
our way, we passed through certain sections of the pens. Some of the ornately
barred, crimson-draped cells, with brass bowls, and rugs, and cushions and
lamps, were quite comfortable; some of the cells held more than one occupant;
some Of the girls were permitted cosmetics and slave silk; generally, however,
girls in the pen are raw, totally, save for their collars and b
rands, as are
male slaves; the costumer, the perfumer, the hairdresser then does with them
what he is instructed; most retention facilities in the pens, however, are not
so comfortable; most are simply heavy cages; some are small cement kennels,
tiered, with iron gates that slide upward; once we walked over iron gratings,
beneath which were cages; we passed through two processing rooms; off one
corridor was a medical facility, with mats and chains; we passed exercise rooms,
training rooms; we passed the branding chamber; I saw heated irons within; we
passed, too, the dreaded room of slave discipline; there were, in this room,
suspended rings, whips, a large, heavy stone table.
As we passed the cages, male slaves glared at us sullenly; slave girls usually
shrank back. One girl thrust her hands through the bars. “I am really to be sold
to a man!” she wept. “Sell me! Sell me!” A guard struck his leather switch
against the bars before her face, and she fled back within the enclosure.
“She is not yet hot enough for the block” I said.
“No,” said Samos.
Had she knelt at the bars, knees thrust through, her body, her face,
tear-stained, pressed against them, arms extended, letting her arms be switched
for the mere chance of possibly touching the guard’s body, then, perhaps, she
would have been hot enough. Girls are often sent trembling, burning with
passion, to the block. Many times I have seen them, on their feet, shudder and
tremble at the auctioneer’s slightest touch. Sometimes, unseen by the buyers,
they are aroused at the foot of the block, but not satisfied. They are then sent
naked to the block to be sold, in this state of cruel frustration. Their
attempts to interest the buyers in their flesh are sometimes fantastic. Some of
them almost scream in misery, aching for the physical and psychological
completion of what has been done to their bodies. I have seen girls whom the
auctioneer had to beat from him with his whip, merely in order to display them
adequately. These girls, of course, are slaves who have been previously owned.
Women who have not been previously owned, like free women, for the most part,
even if naked and collared, do not yet understand their sexuality. That can only
be taught to them by a man, they helpless in his power. An unowned girl, a free
woman, thus, can never experience her full sexuality. A corollary to this, of
course, is that a man who has never had an owned woman in his arms does not
understand the full power of his manhood. Sexual heat, it might be mentioned, is
looked upon in free women with mixed feelings; it is commanded, however, in a
slave girl. Passion, it is thought, deprives the free woman to some extent of
her freedom and important self-control; it is frowned upon because it makes her
behave, to some extent, like a degraded female slave; free women, thus, to
protect their honor and dignity, their freedom and personhood, their
individuality, must fight passion; the slave girl, of course, is not entitled to
this privilege; it is denied to her, both by her society and her master; while
the free woman must remain cool and in control of herself, even in the arms of
her companion, to avoid being truly “had,” the slave girl is permitted do such
luxury; her control is in the hands of her master, and she must, upon the mere
word of her master, surrender herself, writhing, to the humiliating heats of a
degraded slave girl’s ecstasy. Only when a woman is owned can she be fully
enjoyed.
A silken urt, with wet fur, brushed against my leg.
“Here,” said Samos, at the end of the corridor, one of the lowest in the pens.
He uttered the password through the beamed, metal sheathed door. It swung open.
Beyond it was another corridor, but one much shorter. It was damp. Samos took a
torch from the guard, and went to one of the doors. He looked through the tiny
slit in the door, holding the torch up. Then he slid back the bolt and, bending
over, entered the room. There was a foul stench of excrement from within.
“What do you think?” asked Samos.
He held the torch up.
The chained shape did not move. Samos took a stick from beside the door, with
which the jailer thrust the pan of water or food toward the shape.
The shape was apparently either asleep, or dead. I did not bear breathing.
An urt scurried suddenly, unexpectedly, toward a crack in the wall. It
disappeared within.
Samos touched the shape with the stick. Suddenly it turned and bit the stick
through, eyes blazing. It hurled itself, some eight hundred pounds of weight, to
the length of the six chains that fastened it, each chain to a separate ring, to
the wall. The chains jerked at the rings, again and again. It bit at us. Claws
emerged and retracted, and emerged again, from the tentaclelike six-digited
appendages of the thing. I looked into the flat, leathery snout, the
black-pupiled, yellowish-corneaed eyes, the ears flat back against its head, the
wide, fang-rimmed orifice of a mouth, large enough to bite the head from a man.
I heard the rings groan in the stone. But they held. I removed my hand from the
sword hilt.
The beast sat back against the wall, watching us. It now blinked, against the
light of the torch.
“This is the first one, living, that I have seen,” said Samos.
Once before, in the ruins of a hall in Torvaldsland, surmounting a stake, he had
seen the head of such a beast.
“It is a Kur, surely,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “it is an adult Kur.”
“It is a large one, is it not?” asked Samos.
“Yes,” I said, “but I have seen many larger.”
“As nearly as we can determine,” said Samos, “it is only a beast, and not
rational.”
I smiled.
It was chained in six places, at the wrists and ankles, and about the waist, and
again about the throat. Any of the chains might have held a bosk or a larl. It
snarled, opening its fanged mouth.
“Where did you take it?” I asked.
“I bought it from hunters,” said Samos. “It was taken southeast of Ar,
proceeding in a southeasternly direction.”
“That seems unlikely,” I said. Few Goreans would venture in that direction.
“It is true,” said Samos. “I know the chief of the hunting pride. His
declaration was dear. Six men died in its capture.” The beast sat, somnolent,
regarding us.
“But why would it, a Kur, venture to such a place?” I asked.
“Perhaps it is insane?” suggested Samos.
“What purpose would such a journey serve for a Kur?” I asked.
Samos shrugged. “We have been unable to communicate with it” he said to me.
“Perhaps not all Kurii are rational,” He said. “Perhaps this one, as perhaps
some of the others, is simply a dangerous beast, nothing more.”
I looked into the beast’s eyes. Its lips, slightly, drew back. I smiled.
“We have beaten it” said Samos. “We have whipped it, and prodded it. We have
denied it food.”
“Torture?” I asked.
“It did not respond to torture,” said Samos, “I think it is irrational.”
“What was your purpose?” I as
ked it. “What was your mission?”
The beast said nothing.
I rose to my feet. “Let us return to the hall,” I said.
“Very well,” said Samos. We left the chamber.
The belled left ankle of the dancer moved in a small circle on the mosaiced
floor, to the ringing of the bells, and the counterpoint of the finger cymbals.
Men lifted their cups to Samos as we reentered the hall. We acknowledged their
greetings.
Two warriors, guards, held, between them, a dark-skinned slave girl. She had
long, black hair. Her arms were bound tightly to her sides, her wrists crossed
and bound behind her. They thrust her forward. “A message girl,” said one of
them.
Samos looked at me, quickly. Then to one of those at the table, one who wore the
garments of the physicians, he said, “Obtain the message.”
“Kneel,” said Samos. The girl, between the guards, knelt.
Samos loomed over her. “Whose are you?” he asked.
“Yours, Master,” she said. It is common for the girl to be given to the
recipient of the message.
“Whose were you?” asked Samos.
“I was purchased anonymously from the public pens of Tor,” she said. Certain
cities, like Tor, dealt in slaves, commonly buying unsold girls from caravans,
and selling them at a profit to other caravan masters. The city’s warriors, too,
paid a bounty on women captured from enemy cities, customarily a silver tarsk
for a comely female in good health. “You do not know who purchased you, or why?”
asked Samos. “No, Master,” she said.
She would not know the message she bore.
“What is pour name?” asked Samos.
“Veema,” she said, “if it pleases Master.”
“What was your number in the pens of Tor?” asked Samos.
“87432,” she said, “Master.
The member of the caste of physicians, a laver held for him in the hands of
another man, put his hands on the girl’s head. She closed her eyes.
“Then,” said I to Samos, “You do not know from whom this message comes.”
“No,” said he.
The physician lifted the girl’s long dark hair, touching the shaving knife to
the back of her neck. Her head was inclined forward.
Samos turned away from the girl. He indicated to me a man who sat at a far end
Norman, John - Gor 10 - Tribesmen of Gor.txt Page 2
