Norman, John - Gor 20 - Players of Gor.txt

by Players of Gor [lit]

  other girls looked after her, with horror. None of them, I think, had expected

  that her punishment would be so grievous.

  “The rest of you females,” said Boots, clapping his hands sharply, “get back to

  your work!”

  Swiftly the girls scattered from his sight, seeking various labors. Even the

  Lady Yanina fled from his sight, as promptly as though she, too, might have been

  only a common slave.

  “I will need her, of course, for the performances,” said Boots to the player. “I

  hope that is understood.”

  “Of course,” said the player.

  “Do you think little Bina now knows she is a slave?” asked Boots.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think she now knows it well.”

  Boots then turned away, making his way back to his wagon.

  “Congratulations,” I said to the player.

  He shrugged.

  “You are pleased, surely?” I said.

  “I have never even had a woman,” he said.

  “Try them,” I said. “I am sure you will enjoy them.”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “They make splendid recreations,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “They are absolutely delicious properties,” I said. “They are the loveliest

  thing a man can own.”

  “What has she to do with Kaissa?” he asked.

  “Very little, I would suppose,” I said.

  “In my life, hitherto,” he said, “I have been concerned primarily with Kaissa.”

  “Perhaps you could broaden your interests,” I suggested.

  “What shall I do with such a woman?” he asked.

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  “For most practical purposes,” I said, “she is yours. I would do with her, then,

  if I were you, whatever I pleased.”

  “That seems a splendid suggestion,” he said.

  “You know the sort of woman she is,” I said. “Make her grovel, and crawl, and be

  perfect for you.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “Are you strong enough to punish her?” I asked.

  He looked across the area of the camp to his wagon. He looked at the door of the

  wagon, reached by climbing the flight of steps at the back of the wagon. The

  door was now shut. The girl would be behind it, awaiting him.

  “Yes,” he said.

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  13 Nim Nim

  I clutched the bars of the narrow cell window, looking out onto the courtyard.

  I stood on a table which I had dragged to the side of the wall, in order to be

  able to look out. Behind me, on his straw, crouched the small,

  narrow-shouldered, spindle-legged representative of the urt people.

  “I had warned you,” had moaned Boots, in his camp, “but you would not listen!”

  Five days ago I had been returning to the camp of Boots Tarsk-Bit, coming back

  from a nearby village where I had gone to fetch Sa-Tarna grain, from which the

  girls, back at the camp, using stones and flat rocks, sifters and pans, would

  produce flour. This was somewhat cheaper than buying the flour directly, for

  then one must pay the cost of the peasant women’s work or that of its millage. I

  carried the sack across my shoulders. It was not heavy. It weighed only a little

  more than an average female. I had been surprises to see Lady Telitsia running

  towards me down the road. She flung herself to her knees before me. “Run,

  Master,” she had cried. “Run! There are men at the camp, come looking for you!”

  “Who are they?” I asked. “What do they want?”

  Then, it seemed in a moment, while she cried out in misery, high tharlarion,

  some twenty of them, thundered suddenly about me, the earth shaking, dust rising

  in billows about me. I was encircled. “Hold!” cried a man. “Do not move!”

  Crossbows, in the hands of surrounding, shifting riders, aligned themselves upon

  me. A great billowing cape, like a flag, swirled behind

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  their leader. I had seen the cap before. I had seen the man before.

  “Manacle him,” said Flaminius, he in the service of Belnar, Ubar of Brundisium.

  Men leaped to the ground. The sack of Sa-Tarna grain was dragged from my

  shoulders. My hands were pulled behind me. I felt them clasped in steel

  manacles. One end of a long chain leash was tossed to one of the men near me. I

  felt it locked about my neck. Flaminius looped the other end of the leash twice

  about the horn of his saddle. “We meet again, Brinlar,” he said, “or is it Bosk,

  of Port Kar?”

  “I am Bosk, of Port Kar,” I said.

  I saw several of the men look uneasily at one another.

  “He is manacled and leashed,” said Flaminius to his men. Then, again, he looked

  at me. “We took you as easily as a slave,” he said.

  I pulled at the manacles. I could not elude them. They were made to hold men,

  even warriors.

  “We saw the fat fellow of the acting troupe speak to the slave,” he said. “later

  we saw her slip from the camp. It was easy to suppose that it was her intention

  to warn you. Then we needed only to follow her, and, indeed, the naked, pretty

  little slut led us immediately, unerringly, to you.”

  “Forgive me, Master,” moaned Lady Telitsia.

  “It was our original intention to wait for you in the camp, surprising you

  there,” said Flaminius. “Obviously this worked out much better. For example, it

  has saved us the problem of trying to conceal the tharlarion, the presence of

  which might have aroused your suspicions.”

  “Doubtless it would have,” I said.

  “Please, forgive me, Master,” wept Lady Telitsia.

  “It is nothing,” I said. “Dismiss it from your mind, female slave.”

  “Master!” she wept.

  “Were you given permission to speak?” I asked.

  “No, Master,” she wept.

  “Then be silent,” I said.

  “Yes, Master,” she said.

  She put her head down, sobbing. She was still kneeling, of course, being in the

  presence of free men. I saw tears fall from her eyes, moistening the dust

  between her knees. I also saw some of the riders looking at her. If Flaminius

  did not object I was sure, before we returned to the camp, some of them would

  make u se of her. She was, after all, only a slave.

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  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “You are now in the territory of Brundisium,” he said.

  “So?” I said.

  “We make it our business to concern ourselves with strangers within our

  borders,” he said. I recalled that I had heard from Boots that security, for

  some reason, was very tight in Brundisium. Apparently it was tighter than even

  he had understood. It apparently extended well beyond the walls of the city

  itself.

  “I would have thought,” I said, “that a troupe of actors would have aroused

  little suspicion.”

  “It didnâ
€™t,” he smiled, “but one of your performances was witnessed by one of

  our agents.”

  “I was recognized?” I asked.

  “No,” said Flaminius. “The Lady Yanina was recognized.”

  “I see,” I said. I should, of course, have followed Boots’s advice about keeping

  her hooded this near 6to Brundisium, or perhaps I should have sold her off

  altogether. Still, I had thought that we were still far enough from Brundisium

  to be safe on that score. I had not realized, and I suspected that Boots had not

  realized it either, the intensity or extent of the security now being maintained

  by Brundisium. It was probably greater now, for some reason, I suspected, than

  earlier, else Boots would presumably have known more of it. I wondered why its

  extent or degree might have been recently increased.

  “How is it that she was recognized?” I asked, irritably. “Are most free women in

  Brundisium so easily recognized?”

  “Hardly,” said Flaminius, “but our agent in this case, happily, was one of the

  men who had originally served the Lady Yanina, one who had occasionally,

  unbeknownst to her, a lusty fellow, spied upon her in her tent when she had

  unpinned her face veil.”

  I smiled. It amused me that the Lady Yanina had apparently, upon occasion, been

  spied upon in the fashion. How furious and indignant, how outraged and shamed,

  she would have been to have learned that she had been looked upon without her

  knowledge, looked upon surreptitiously when her face was as bared as that of a

  slave. To be sure, after her fall in favor, probably to the amusement of those

  who had been her former men, face veiling had been denied to her, at least, I

  assumed, until her return to Brundisium. In this way, of course, there might

  actually have been several fellows here and there who, theoretically, if they

  had had the chance, might have recognized her. It was for such a reason, if none

  other, that I would have kept her hooded nearer to Brundisium.

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  “And it was from the Lady Yanina, of course,” said Flaminius, “that we learned

  of your presence with the troupe.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Our agent, now my man, reported that she looked well half naked, buckled to a

  target board.”

  “She does,” I agreed.

  “I know,” said Flaminius. “After she eagerly informed us of your presence with

  the troupe, I, curious as to the matter, had her so costumed and displayed.”

  “It must have given you pleasure to see her exhibited, limbs extended and

  helpless, in that fashion,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “almost as much pleasure as it would be to see her in the collar

  of a slave.”

  “I think she would look well in such a collar,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “Waiting in the camp,” he said. “It was a brilliant stroke of yours,

  incidentally, giving the proud Lady Yanina for a gown only a flour sack.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “She is now back in it,” he said. “She also has her wrists bound behind her back

  with slave thongs, and has a rope upon her neck.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I think it will amuse Belnar to see her thusly,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Did she not, eagerly, inform you of my presence with the

  troupe?”

  “Of course,” he aid. “But she is not now in high favor with Belnar.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “For many reasons,” he said. “For example, she had Bosk of Port Kar in her very

  grasp and let him escape. She lost important diplomatic communications,

  permitting herself to be tricked out of them. I even found her chained like a

  slave under a table near the Sardar fairgrounds. Now I find her the helpless

  captive of this same Bosk of Port Kar and clad only in a sack!”

  “I see,” I said.

  “She has fallen far from the favor of Belnar,” he said. “In Brundisium I am

  confident she will be permitted only a brevity of skirting, one suitable for

  slaves. Similarly I am confident she will be denied footwear and face veiling.”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  “Many times Belnar has even considered making short work

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  of her, having done with it, simply putting her in a collar and selling her on

  the market.”

  “Excellent,” excellent,” I said. It seemed the climb to favor in Brundisium

  would be, at best, a long and difficult one for the proud Lady Yanina.

  “We shall now return to the camp,” said Flaminius, well pleased. “Thence we

  shall make our way to Brundisium. On the way, in order to make all haste, you

  will be tied, still manacled, on the back of a tharlarion. When we reach the

  gates, of course, both you and the Lady Yanina will be led in afoot, helpless

  and on tethers.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “By the way,” asked Flaminius, “what did you do with the papers you took from

  the Lady Yanina?”

  “They were worthless,” I said. “They contained nothing but some puzzling scraps

  of Kaissa notation. I threw them out, with the packet itself.”

  “I am not surprised,” said Flaminius. “That is what I expected. Indeed, it is as

  I assured Belnar.”

  “I had hoped they would contain negotiable notes,” I said.

  “Had they done so,” laughed Flaminius, “you would doubtless not have had to

  throw your lot in with an itinerant troupe of impoverished players.”

  “True,” I said.

  “You were bringing grain back to your camp,” said Flaminius, looking down at the

  sack of Sa-Tarna grain lying in the dust.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Put it on his back,” he said to one of his men.

  The fellow lifted the sack up and, as I bent down, he put it on my back.

  “Tie it there,” said Flaminius.

  The sack was tied on my back. Flaminius then turned his tharlarion about. The

  chain on my neck swung in front of me, then looped up to his saddle horn.

  “Captain,” said one of Flaminius’s men to him.

  “Yes?” he said.

  The man indicated the kneeling Lady Telitsia with his head. She knelt in the

  dust, small among the great, clawed hind legs of the shifting tharlarion.

  “Very well,” agreed Flaminius.

  Several of the men dismounted. T3wo of them pulled her to her feet by the upper

  arms.

  “After your uses,” Flaminius informed her, “you will follow us back to camp.”

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  “Yes, Master,” she said. She was then dragged to the side of the road.

  Flaminius then urged his tharlarion slowly forward and I, his captive, afoot, on

  his chain, carrying the burden, followed him. Most of his men followed, too,

  strung out behind us. After a tim
e the other fellows, too, caught up with us. At

  the crest of a hill I paused and looked back. Several hundred yards behind us,

  following slowly, moving in pain, awkwardly, her head down, came the slave, Lady

  Telitsia.

  ***

  I clutched the bars of the narrow cell window, looking out onto the courtyard. I

  stood on a table which I had dragged to the side of the wall, in order to be

  able to look out. Behind me, on his straw, crouched the small,

  narrow-shouldered, spindle-legged representative of the urt people.

  I looked from the window down into the courtyard. There, some thirty feet in

  width, was a shallow, iron-railed pit. this pit was encircled with several tiers

  of bleacherlike wooden benches. These benches were filled with colorfully

  garbed, screaming spectators. I squinted against the sun. The noise was loud,

  resounding and reverberating as it did within the walls of the courtyard. I

  myself did not much care for such spectacles. Some men enjoy them. Too, they

  provide an occasion for betting.

  “Look, look?” squeaked the creature on the straw below me. It scratched about on

  the straw, backwards with its feet, while looking up at me.

  I turned about and reached down, extending my hand to it. Agilely it scurried

  across the stone floor of the cell and leapt to the table on which I stood.

  Then, clinging to my arm, and boosted by my hand, it seized the bars beside me,

  thrusting it’s forearms through and about them, clinging to them, using them to

  support its weight.

  I then returned my attention to the courtyard below.

  The three sleen in the pit, snarling, tails lashing, their hunched shoulders

  scarcely a foot from the ground moved in a menacing, savage, twisting, eager

  circle about the center of their interest. This object, alert, every nerve

  seemingly tensely alive, was chained in the center of the pit.

  An attempt on my life had been made in Port Kar. That attempt had seemed tied

  in, somehow, with Brundisium. this speculation had been amply confirmed in my

  dealings with the Lady Yanina and Flaminius. It had seemed likely, further, to

  me, that there must then be some connection between Brundisium and either the

  Priest-Kings, or Kurii. Over the past weeks, for

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  several reasons, it had come to seem more and more likely to me that it was not

  the Priest-Kings who had any special dealings with, or interest in, Brundisium.