by John Norman
"I am Zosk," he said.
I wondered if it were a use-name, or his real name. Members of low castes often call themselves by a use-name, reserving the real name for intimates and friends, to protect it against capture by a sorcerer or worker of spells who might use it to do them harm. Somehow I sensed that Zosk was his real name.
"Zosk of what city?" I asked.
The low-slung, broad frame seemed to stiffen. The muscles in his legs seemed suddenly to bulge like cable. The rapport I had felt with him seemed suddenly gone, like a sparrow flown or a leaf suddenly torn from a branch. "Zosk..." he said.
"Of what city?" I asked.
"Of no city," he said.
"Surely," I said, "you are of Ko-ro-ba."
The squat, misformed giant of a man seemed almost to recoil as if struck, and to tremble. I sensed that this simple, unaffected primate of a man was suddenly afraid. Zosk, I felt, would have faced a larl armed only with his ax, but yet, here, he seemed frightened. The great fists holding the cords of the bundle of wood turned white; the sticks rattled in the bundle.
"I am Tarl Cabot," I said. "Tarl of Ko-ro-ba."
Zosk uttered an inarticulate cry, and began to stumble backwards. His hands fumbled on the cords and the great bundle of wood loosened and clattered to the stone flooring of the road. Turning to run his foot slipped on one of the sticks and he fell. He fell almost on top of the ax which lay on the road. Impulsively, as though it were a life-giving plank in the maelstrom of his fear, he seized the ax.
With the ax in his hands, suddenly he seemed to remember his caste, and he crouched in the road, there in the dusk, a few feet from me, like a gorilla clutching the broad-headed ax, breathing deeply, sucking in the air, mastering his fear.
His eyes glared at me through the grizzled, matted locks of his hair. I could not understand his fear, but I was proud to see him master it, for fear is the great common enemy of all living things, and his victory I felt somehow was also mine. I remembered once when I had feared thus in the mountains of New Hampshire, and how shamefully I had yielded to my fear and had run, a slave to the only degrading passion of man.
Zosk straightened as much as his giant bow of a backbone would allow him.
He was no longer afraid.
He spoke slowly. His voice was thick, but it was fully under his control.
"Say you are not Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba," he said.
"But I am," I said.
"I ask your favor," said Zosk, his voice thick with emotion. He was pleading. "Say you are not Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba."
"I am Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba," I repeated firmly.
Zosk lifted his ax.
It seemed light in his massive grip. I felt it could have felled a small tree with a single blow. Step by step, he approached me, the ax held over his shoulder with both hands.
At last he stopped before me. I thought there were tears in his eyes. I made no move to defend myself. Somehow I knew Zosk would not strike. He struggled with himself, his simple wide face twisted in agony, his eyes tortured.
"May the Priest-Kings forgive me!" he cried.
He threw down the ax, which rang on the stones of the road to Ko-ro-ba. Zosk sank down and sat cross-legged in the road, his gigantic frame shaken with sobs, his massive head buried in his hands, his thick, guttural voice moaning with distress.
At such a time a man may not be spoken to, for according to the Gorean way of thinking pity humiliates both he who pities and he who is pitied. According to the Gorean way, one may love but one may not pity. So I moved on.
I had forgotten my hunger. I no longer considered the dangers of the road.
I would make it to Ko-ro-ba by dawn.
4
The Sleen
In the darkness I stumbled on toward the walls of Ko-ro-ba, striking the stones of the road with the butt of my spear, to keep on the road and to drive possible serpents from my path. It was a nightmarish journey, and a foolish one, trying to rush on through the night to find my city, bruising, falling, scraping myself in the darkness, yet driven on by such a torment of doubt and apprehension that I could allow myself no rest until I stood again on the lofty bridges of Ko-ro-ba.
Was I not Tarl of Ko-ro-ba? Was there not such a city? Each pasang stone proclaimed there was—at the end of this road. Yet why was the road untended? Why had it not been traveled? Why had Zosk of the Caste of Carriers of Wood acted as he had? Why did my shield, my helmet, my accouterments not bear the proud sign of Ko-ro-ba?
Once I shouted in pain. Two fangs had struck into my calf. An ost, I thought! But the fangs held fast, and I heard the popping, sucking sounds of the bladderlike seed pods of a leech plant, as they expanded and contracted like small ugly lungs. I reached down and jerked the plant from the soil at the side of the road. It writhed in my hand like a snake, its pods gasping. I jerked the two fanglike thorns from my leg. The leech plant strikes like a cobra, and fastens two hollow thorns into its victim. The chemical responses of the bladderlike pods produce a mechanical pumping action, and the blood is sucked into the plant to nourish it. As I tore the thing from my leg, glad that the sting had not been that of the venomous ost, the three hurtling moons of Gor broke from the dark cover of the clouds. I held the quivering plant up. Then I twisted it apart. Already my blood, black in the silvery night, mixed with the juices of the plant, stained the stem even to the roots. In a matter of perhaps two or three seconds, it had drawn perhaps a gill of liquid. With a shudder I hurled the loathsome plant away from the road. Normally such plants are cleared from the sides of the roads and from inhabited areas. They are primarily dangerous to children and small animals, but a grown man who might lose his footing among them would not be likely to survive.
I prepared to set forth on my journey again, grateful that now the three moons of Gor might guide my path on this perilous road. I asked myself, in a sane moment, if I should not seek shelter, and I knew that I should, but I could not—because questions burned within me that I could not dare to answer. Only the evidence of my eyes and ears could allay my fears, my bewilderment. I sought a truth I did not know, but knew I must discover—and it lay at the end of this road.
I caught a strange, unpleasant scent, much like that of a common weasel or ferret, only stronger. In that instant every sense was alert.
I froze, an almost animal response.
I was silent, not moving, seeking the shelter of stillness and immobility. My head turned imperceptibly as I scanned the rocks and bushes about the road. I thought I heard a slight sniffling, a grunt, a small doglike whine. Then nothing.
It too had frozen, probably sensing my presence. Most likely it was a sleen, hopefully a young one. I guessed it had not been hunting me or I would not have been likely to have smelled it. It would have approached from upwind. Perhaps I stood thus for six or seven minutes. Then I saw it, on its six short legs, undulate across the road, like a furred lizard, its pointed, whiskered snout swaying from side to side testing the wind.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
It was indeed a young sleen, not more than eight feet long, and it lacked the patience of an older animal. Its attack, if it should detect my presence, would be noisy, a whistling rush, a clumsy squealing charge. It glided away into the darkness, perhaps not fully convinced that it was not alone, a young animal ready to neglect and overlook those slight traces that can spell the difference between death and survival in Gor's brutal and predatory world.
I continued my journey.
Black, scudding clouds again obscured the three moons of Gor, and the wind began to rise. I could see the shadows of tall Ka-la-na trees bending against the darkness of the night, their leaves lifting and rustling on the long branches. I smelled rain in the air. In the far distance there was a sudden flash of lightning, and the sound of remote thunder reached me some seconds later.
As I hurried on, I became more apprehensive. By now it seemed to me that I should be able to see the lights of the cylinder city of Ko-ro-ba. The wind gathered forc
e, seeming to tear at the trees.
In a flash of light I spied a pasang stone and eagerly rushed to it. In the mounting wind and darkness I traced the numbering on the stone. It was true. I should now be able to see the lights of Ko-ro-ba. Yet I could see nothing. The city must be in darkness.
Why were the lanterns not hung on the lofty bridges? Why were the lamps of a hundred colors and flames not lit in the compartments of the city, telling in the lamp codes of Gor of talk, of drinking, of love? Why were the huge beacons on the wall not burning, not summoning Ko-ro-ba's far-roving tarnsmen back to the shelter of her walls?
I stood by the pasang stone, trying to understand. I was confused, uncertain. Now that I had not seen the lights of Ko-ro-ba, as I would have expected, it struck me more forcibly that I had not even seen the lights of peasant cooking fires glowing in the hills surrounding the city, or the torches of rash sportsmen who hunt the sleen by night. Yes, and by now I should have been challenged a dozen times by Ko-ro-ba's night patrols!
A monstrous chain of lightning exploded in the night about me, deafening me with the shock and roar of its thunder, splitting the darkness in violent fragments, breaking it to pieces like a clay bowl struck with a hammer of fire, and with the lightning, the storm descended, fierce cold torrents of icy rain whipped by the wind.
In a moment I was drenched in the icy water. The wind tore at my tunic. I was blinded in the fury of the storm. I shook my head. I pulled off the helmet and wiped the cold water from my eyes. I thrust my fingers in my hair to force it back. I replaced the helmet, it bright, and then dark, running with rain. My eyes were half closed against the storm. The blinding fury of the lightning like a whip of electricity struck again and again into the hills dazzling me for an instant of crashing agony, then vanishing again into the darkness.
A bolt of lightning shattered on the road not fifty yards before me. For an instant it seemed to stand like a gigantic crooked spear poised in my path, luminous, uncanny, forbidding, then vanished. It had fallen in my path. The thought crossed my mind that it was a sign from the Priest-Kings that I should turn back.
I continued forward and stood where it had struck. In spite of the icy wind and rain I could feel the heat of the stones through my sandals. I raised my eyes to the storm, and my spear and shield, and shouted into the storm, my voice drowned in the turbulence of nature, a defiant puff of wind hurled against the forces that seemed arrayed against me.
"I am going to Ko-ro-ba!" I cried.
I had hardly moved another step when, in a flash of lightning, I saw the sleen, this time a fully grown animal, some nineteen or twenty feet long, charging toward me, swiftly, noiselessly, its ears straight against its pointed head, its fur dark, slick with rain, its fangs bared, its wide nocturnal eyes bright with the lust of the kill.
A strange sound escaped me, an incredible laugh. It was a thing I could see, could feel, could fight!
With an eagerness and a lust that matched that of the beast itself, I rushed forward in the darkness and when I judged its leap I lunged forward with the broad-headed spear of Gor. My arm felt wet and trapped, and was raked with fangs and I was spun as the animal squealed with rage and pain and rolled on the road. I withdrew my arm from the weak, aimlessly snapping jaws.
Another flash of lightning and I saw the sleen on its belly chewing on the shaft of the spear, its wide nocturnal eyes unfocused and glazed. My arm was bloody, but the blood was mostly that of the sleen. My arm had almost rammed itself down the throat of the animal following the spear I had flung into its mouth. I moved my arm and fingers. I was unhurt.
In the next flash of lightning I saw the sleen was dead.
A shudder involuntarily shook me, though I do not know if this was due to the cold and the rain or the sight of the long, furred lizardlike body that lay at my feet. I tried to extract the spear but this was no easy task, so deeply it was lodged within the animal.
Coldly I took out my sword and hacked away the head of the beast and jerked the weapon free. Then, as sleen hunters do, for luck, and because I was hungry, I took my sword and cut through the fur of the animal and ate the heart.
It is said that only the heart of the mountain larl brings more luck than that of the vicious and cunning sleen. The raw meat, hot with the blood of the animal, nourished me, and I crouched beside my kill on the road to Ko-ro-ba, another predator among predators.
I laughed. "Did you, Oh Dark Brother of the Night, think to keep me from Ko-ro-ba?"
How absurd it seemed to me that a mere sleen should have stood between me and my city. Irrationally I laughed, thinking how foolish the animal had been. But how could it have known? How could it have known that I was Tarl of Ko-ro-ba, and that I was returning to my city? There is a Gorean proverb that a man who is returning to his city is not to be detained. Was the sleen not familiar with that saying?
I shook my head, to clear it of the wild thoughts. I sensed that I was irrational, perhaps a bit drunk after the kill and the first food I had had in several hours.
Then, soberly, though I acknowledged it as a superstition, I performed the Gorean ritual of looking into the blood. With my cupped hands I drank a mouthful of blood, and then, holding another in my hands, I waited for the next flash of lightning.
One looks into the blood in one's cupped hands. It is said that if one sees one's visage black and wasted one will die of disease, if one sees oneself torn and scarlet one will die in battle, if one sees oneself old and white haired, one will die in peace and leave children.
The lightning flashed again, and I stared into the blood. In that brief moment, in the tiny pool of blood I held, I saw not myself but a strange face, like a globe of gold with disklike eyes, a face like none I had ever seen, a face that struck an eerie terror into my heart.
The darkness returned, and in the next flash of lightning I examined the blood again, but it was only blood, the blood of a sleen I had killed on the road to Ko-ro-ba. I could not even see myself reflected in the surface. I drank the blood, completing the ritual.
I stood up, and wiped the spear as well as I could on the fur of the sleen. Its heart had given me strength.
"Thank you, Dark Brother of the Night," I said to the animal.
I saw that water had gathered in the concave side of the shield. Gratefully, I lifted it and drank from it.
5
The Valley of Ko-Ro-Ba
I began to climb now.
The road was familiar, the long, relatively steep ascent to the crest of that series of ridges beyond which lay Ko-ro-ba, an ascent that was the bane of strap-masters of caravans, of bearers of burdens like poor Zosk, the woodsman, of all travelers afoot.
Ko-ro-ba lay in the midst of green and rolling hills, some hundreds of feet above the level of the distant Tamber Gulf and that mysterious body of water beyond it, spoken of in Gorean simply as Thassa, the Sea. Ko-ro-ba was not set as high and remote as, for example, was Thentis in the mountains of Thentis, famed for its tarn flocks, but it was not a city of the vast plains either, like the luxurious metropolis of Ar, or of the shore, like the cluttered, crowded, sensuous Port Kar on the Tamber Gulf. Whereas Ar was glorious, a city of imposing grandeur, that acknowledged even by its blood foes; whereas Thentis had the proud violence of the rude mountains of Thentis for its setting; whereas Port Kar could boast the broad Tamber for its sister, and the gleaming, mysterious Thassa beyond, I thought my city to be truly the most beautiful, its variegated lofty cylinders rising so gently, so joyfully, among the calm, green hills.
An ancient poet, who incredibly enough to the Gorean mind had sung the glories of many of the cities of Gor, had spoken of Ko-ro-ba as the Towers of the Morning, and it is sometimes spoken of by that name. The actual word Ko-ro-ba itself, more prosaically, is simply an expression in archaic Gorean referring to a village market.
The storm had not abated, but I had ceased to mind it. Drenched, cold, I climbed on, holding my shield obliquely before me to deflect the wind and make the climb easier. At last on
the crest I waited and wiped the cold water from my eyes, waited for the flash of lightning that after these long years would reveal my city.
I longed for my city, and for my father, the magnificent Matthew Cabot, once Ubar, now Administrator of Ko-ro-ba, and for my friends, the proud Older Tarl, my master-at-arms, and Torm, the cheerful, grumbling little scribe who regarded even sleep and food as part of a conspiracy to separate him from the study of his beloved scrolls; and, mostly, I longed for Talena, she whom I had chosen for my companion, she for whom I had fought on Ar's Cylinder of Justice, she who loved me, and whom I loved, dark-haired, beautiful Talena, daughter of Marlenus, once Ubar of Ar.
"I love you, Talena!" I cried.
And as my cry parted from my lips there was a great flash of lightning and the valley between the hills stood stark and white and I saw the valley was empty.
Ko-ro-ba was gone!
The city had vanished!
The darkness followed the flash of lightning and the shock of the thunder shook me with horror.
Again and again the lightning flashed, the thunder pounded in on me, and the darkness engulfed me once more. And each time I saw what I had seen before. The valley empty. Ko-ro-ba was gone.
"You have been touched by the Priest-Kings," said a voice behind me.
I spun about, shield before me, spear ready.
In the next flash of lightning I saw the white robes of an Initiate, the shaven head and the sad eyes of one of the Blessed Caste, servants it is said of the Priest-Kings themselves. He stood with his arms in his robe, tall on the road, watching me.
Somehow this man seemed different to me from the other Initiates I had met on Gor. I could not place the difference, yet it seemed there was something in him or about him that set him apart from the other members of his caste. He might have been any other Initiate, yet he was not. There was nothing extraordinary about him, unless perhaps it was a brow somewhat more lofty than is common, eyes that might have looked on sights few men had seen.