by John Norman
The thought struck me that I, Tarl of Ko-ro-ba, a mortal, here in the night on this road, might be looking upon the face of a Priest-King.
As we faced one another, the storm ceased, the lightning no longer shattered the night, the thunder no longer roared in my ears. The wind was calm. The clouds had dissipated. In pools of cold water lying among the stones of the road I could see the three moons of Gor.
I turned and looked upon the valley in which Ko-ro-ba had lain.
"You are Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," said the man.
I was startled. "Yes," I said, "I am Tarl of Ko-ro-ba." I turned to face him.
"I have been waiting for you," he said.
"Are you," I asked, "a Priest-King?"
"No," he said.
I looked at this man, seeming to be a man among other men, yet more.
"Do you speak for the Priest-Kings?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
I believed him.
It was common, of course, for Initiates to claim to speak for the Priest-Kings; indeed, it was presumably the calling of their caste to interpret the will of the Priest-Kings to men.
But this man I believed.
He was not as other Initiates, though he wore their robes.
"Are you truly of the Caste of Initiates?" I asked.
"I am one who conveys the will of the Priest-Kings to mortals," said the man, not choosing to answer my question.
I was silent.
"Henceforth," said the man, "you are Tarl of no city."
"I am Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," I said proudly.
"Ko-ro-ba has been destroyed," said the man. "It is as if it had never been. Its stones and its people have been scattered to the corners of the world, and no two stones and no two men of Ko-ro-ba may stand again side by side."
"Why has Ko-ro-ba been destroyed?" I demanded.
"It was the will of the Priest-Kings," said the man.
"But why was it the will of the Priest-Kings?" I shouted.
"Because it was," said the man, "and there is nothing higher in virtue of which the will of the Priest-Kings may be determined or questioned."
"I do not accept their will," I said.
"Submit," said the man.
"I do not," I said.
"Then be it so," he said, "you are henceforth condemned to wander the world alone and friendless, with no city, with no walls to call your own, with no Home Stone to cherish. You are henceforth a man without a city, you are a warning to all not to scorn the will of the Priest-Kings—beyond this you are nothing."
"What of Talena?" I cried. "What of my father, my friends, the people of my city?"
"Scattered to the corners of the world," said the robed figure, "and not a stone may stand upon a stone."
"Did I not serve the Priest-Kings," I asked, "at the siege of Ar?"
"The Priest-Kings used you for their ends, as it pleased them to do."
I lifted my spear, and felt that I could have slain the robed figure so calm and terrible before me.
"Kill me if you wish," said the man.
I lowered the spear. My eyes were filled with tears. I was bewildered. Was it on my account that a city had perished? Was it I who had brought disaster to its people, to my father, to my friends and Talena? Had I been too foolish to understand that I was nothing before the power of the Priest-Kings? Was I now to wander the forlorn roads and fields of Gor in guilt and agony, a wretched example of the fate which the Priest-Kings could mete out to the foolish and proud?
Then suddenly I ceased to pity myself, and I was shocked, for looking into the eyes of the robed figure I saw human warmth in them, tears for me. It was pity, the forbidden emotion, and yet he could not restrain himself. Somehow the power I had felt in his presence seemed to have vanished. I was now only in the presence of a man, a fellow human being even though he wore the sublime robes of the proud Caste of Initiates.
He seemed to be struggling with himself, as though he wanted to speak his own words and not those of the Priest-Kings. He seemed to shake with pain, his hands pressed against his head, trying to speak to me, trying to tell me something. One hand stretched out to me, and the words, his own, far from the ringing authority of his former tones, were hoarse and almost inaudible.
"Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," he said, "throw yourself upon your sword."
He seemed ready to fall, and I held him.
He looked into my eyes. "Throw yourself upon your sword," he begged.
"Would that not frustrate the will of the Priest-Kings?" I asked.
"Yes," said he.
"Why do you tell me to do this?" I demanded.
"I followed you at the siege of Ar," he said. "On the Cylinder of Justice I fought with you against Pa-Kur and his assassins."
"An Initiate?" I asked.
He shook his head. "No," he said, "I was one of the guards of Ar, and I fought to save my city."
"Ar the Glorious," I said, speaking gently.
He was dying.
"Ar the Glorious," he said, weak, but with pride. He looked at me again. "Die now, Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," he said, "Hero of Ar." His eyes seemed to begin to burn in his head. "Do not shame yourself."
Suddenly he howled like a tortured dog, and what happened then I cannot bring myself to describe in detail. It seemed as though the entire inside of his head began to burst and burn, to bubble like some horrid viscous lava inside the crater of his skull.
It was an ugly death—his for having tried to speak to me, for having tried to tell me what was in his heart.
It was becoming light now, and dawn was breaking across the gentle hills that had sheltered Ko-ro-ba. I removed the hated robes of the Initiates from the body of the man and carried the naked body far from the road.
As I began to cover it with rocks, I noted the remains of the skull, now little more than a handful of shards. The brain had been literally boiled away. The morning light flashed briefly on something golden among the white shards. I lifted it. It was a webbing of fine golden wire. I could make nothing of it, and threw it aside.
I piled rocks on the body, enough to mark the grave and keep predators away.
I placed a large flat rock near the head of the cairn and, with the tip of my spear, scratched this legend on it. "I am a man of Glorious Ar." It was all I knew about him.
I stood beside the grave, and drew my sword. He had told me to throw myself upon it, to avoid my shame, to frustrate for once the will of the mighty Priest-Kings of Gor.
"No, Friend," I said to the remains of the former warrior of Ar. "No, I shall not throw myself upon my sword. Nor shall I grovel to the Priest-Kings nor live the life of shame they have allotted to me."
I lifted the sword toward the valley where Ko-ro-ba had stood.
"Long ago," I said, "I pledged this sword to the service of Ko-ro-ba. It remains so pledged."
Like every man of Gor I knew the direction of the Sardar Mountains, home of the Priest-Kings, a forbidden vastness which no man below the mountains, no mortal, may penetrate. It was said that the Supreme Home Stone of all Gor lay within those mountains and was the source of the Priest-Kings' power. It was said no man had returned alive from those mountains, that no man had looked upon a Priest-King and lived.
I resheathed my sword, fastened my helmet over my shoulder, lifted my shield and spear and set out in the direction of the Sardar Mountains.
6
Vera
The Sardar Mountains, which I had never seen, lay more than a thousand pasangs from Ko-ro-ba. Whereas the Men Below the Mountains, as the mortals are called, seldom enter the mountains, and do not return when they do, many often venture to their brink, if only to stand within the shadows of those cliffs that hide the secrets of the Priest-Kings. Indeed, at least once in his life every Gorean is expected to make this journey.
Four times a year, correlated with the solstices and equinoxes, there are fairs held in the plains below the mountains, presided over by committees of Initiates, fairs in which men of many cities mingle without bloodshed, tim
es of truce, times of contests and games, of bargaining and marketing.
Torm, my friend of the Caste of Scribes, had been to such fairs to trade scrolls with scholars from other cities, men he would never have seen were it not for the fairs, men of hostile cities who yet loved ideas more than they hated their enemies, men like Torm who so loved learning that they would risk the perilous journey to the Sardar Mountains for the chance to dispute a text or haggle over a coveted scroll. Similarly men of such castes as the Physicians and Builders make use of the fairs to disseminate and exchange information pertaining to their respective crafts.
The fairs do much to unite intellectually the otherwise so isolated cities of Gor. And I speculate that the fairs likewise do their bit toward stabilizing the dialects of Gor, which might otherwise in a few generations have diverged to the point of being mutually unintelligible—for the Goreans do have this in common, their mother tongue in all its hundred permutations, which they simply refer to as the Language, and all who fail to speak it, regardless of their pedigree or background, of their standards or level of civilization, are regarded as almost beyond the pale of humanity. Unlike the men of Earth, the Gorean has little sensitivity to race, but much to language and city. Like ourselves, he finds his reasons for hating his fellow-men, but his reasons are different.
I would have given much for a tarn in my journey, though I knew no tarn would fly into the mountains. For some reason neither the fearless hawklike tarns, nor the slow-witted tharlarions, the draft and riding lizards of Gor, would enter the mountains. The tharlarions become unmanageable, and, though the tarn will essay the flight, the bird almost immediately becomes disoriented, uncoordinated, and drops screaming back to the plains below.
Gor, sparsely inhabited by human beings, teems with animal life, and in the next weeks I had no difficulty in living by hunting. I supplemented my diet with fresh fruit picked from bushes and trees, and fish speared in Gor's cold, swift-flowing streams. Once I brought the carcass of a tabuk, one of Gor's single-horned, yellow antelopes, which I had felled in a Ka-la-na thicket, to the hut of a peasant and his wife. Asking no questions, as was suitable given the absence of insignia on my garments, they feasted me on my own kill, and gave me fiber, and flints and a skin of wine.
The peasant on Gor does not fear the outlaw, for he seldom has anything worth stealing, unless it be a daughter. Indeed, the peasant and outlaw on Gor live in an almost unspoken agreement, the peasant tending to protect the outlaw and the outlaw sharing in return some of his plunder and booty with the peasant. The peasant does not regard this as dishonest on his part, or as grasping. It is simply a way of life to which he is accustomed. It is a different matter, of course, if it is explicitly known that the outlaw is from a city other than one's own. In that case he is usually regarded as an enemy, to be reported to the patrols as soon as possible. He is, after all, not of one's city.
As was wise, I avoided cities in my long journey, though I passed several, for to enter a city without permission or without satisfactory reason is tantamount to a capital crime, and the punishment is usually a swift and brutal impalement. Pikes on the walls of Gorean cities are often surmounted with the remains of unwelcome guests. The Gorean is suspicious of the stranger, particularly in the vicinity of his native walls. Indeed, in Gorean the same word is used for both stranger and enemy.
There was reputedly one exception to this generally prevalent attitude of hostility toward the stranger, the city of Tharna, which, according to rumor, was willing to engage in what on Gor might be accounted the adventure of hospitality. There were many things supposedly strange about Tharna, among them that she was reportedly ruled by a queen, or Tatrix, and, reasonably enough in the circumstances, that the position of women in that city, in contrast with common Gorean custom, was one of privilege and opportunity.
I rejoiced that in at least one city on Gor the free women were not expected to wear the Robes of Concealment, confine their activities largely to their own quarters, and speak only to their blood relatives and, eventually, the Free Companion.
I thought that much of the barbarity of Gor might perhaps be traced to this foolish suppression of the fair sex, whose gentleness and intelligence might have made such a contribution in softening her harsh ways. To be sure, in certain cities, as had been the case in Ko-ro-ba, women were permitted status within the caste system and had a relatively unrestricted existence.
Indeed, in Ko-ro-ba, a woman might even leave her quarters without first obtaining the permission of a male relative or the Free Companion, a freedom which was unusual on Gor. The women of Ko-ro-ba might even be found sitting unattended in the theater or at the reading of epics.
In the cities of Gor that I knew, with the possible exception of Tharna, women had been most free in Ko-ro-ba, but now Ko-ro-ba was no more.
I wondered if I might be able to secure a tarn in the intriguing city of Tharna. It would shorten the trip to the Sardar Mountains by weeks. I had no money with which to purchase a tarn but I reasoned my hiring price as a swordsman might be sufficient to purchase a mount. For that matter, though I did not seriously consider the possibility, being without a city, in effect an outlaw, I was entitled in the Gorean way of thinking to take the bird or its purchase price in any way I saw fit.
As I was pondering these matters, I observed, approaching me, but not seeing me, in the distance, moving across a green meadow, a dark figure, that of a woman. Though she was young she walked slowly, mournfully, heedlessly, aimlessly.
It is unusual to find a woman unescorted outside the walls of a city, even near the walls. I was startled to see her alone in this wild, deserted place, far from roads and cities.
I decided to wait for her to approach.
I was puzzled.
On Gor a woman normally travels only with a suitable retinue of armed guards. Women, on this barbaric world, are often regarded, unfortunately, as little more than love prizes, the fruits of conquest and seizure. Too often they are seen less as persons, human beings with rights, individuals worthy of concern and regard than as potential pleasure slaves, silken, bangled prisoners, possible adornments to the pleasure gardens of their captors. There is a saying on Gor that the laws of a city extend no further than its walls.
She had not yet seen me. I leaned on my spear and waited.
The harsh, exogamous institution of capture is woven into the very fabric of Gorean life. It is regarded as meritorious to abduct one's women from a foreign, preferably hostile city. Perhaps this institution, which on the surface seems so deplorable, is profitable from the standpoint of the race, preventing the gradual inbreeding of otherwise largely isolated, self-sufficient cities. Few seem to object to the institution of capture, not even the women who might seem to be its victims. On the contrary, incredibly enough, their vanity is terribly outraged if they are not regarded as worth the risks, usually mutilation and impalement. One cruel courtesan in the great city of Ar, now little more than a toothless, wrinkled hag, boasted that more than four hundred men had died because of her beauty.
Why was the girl alone?
Had her protectors been killed? Was she perhaps an escaped slave, fleeing from a hated master? Could she be, like myself, an exile from Ko-ro-ba? Its peoples have been scattered, I said to myself, and no two stones and no two men of Ko-ro-ba may stand again side by side. I gritted my teeth. The thought ran through my head, no stone may stand upon another stone.
If she were of Ko-ro-ba, I knew that I could not, for her own welfare, stay with her or help her. It would be to invite the Flame Death of the Priest-Kings for one or the other, perhaps both of us. I had seen a man die the Flame Death, the High Initiate of Ar on the summit of Ar's Cylinder of Justice, consumed in the sudden burst of blue fire that bespoke the displeasure of the Priest-Kings. Slim though her chances might be to escape wild beasts or slavers, they would be greater than the chance of escaping the wrath of the Priest-Kings.
If she were a free woman and not unfortunate, to be alone in this place
was unwise and foolish.
She must know this, yet she did not seem to care.
Something of the nature of the institution of capture, and the Gorean's attitude toward it, becomes clear when it is understood that one of a young tarnsman's first missions is often the capture of a slave for his personal quarters. When he brings home his captive, bound naked across the saddle of his tarn, he gives her over, rejoicing, to his sisters, to be bathed, perfumed and clothed in the brief slave livery of Gor.
That night, at a great feast, he displays the captive, now suitably attired by his sisters in the diaphanous, scarlet dancing silks of Gor. Bells have been strapped to her ankles, and she is bound in slave bracelets. Proudly, he presents her to his parents, his friends and warrior comrades.
Then, to the festive music of flutes and drums, the girl kneels. The young man approaches her, bearing a slave collar, its engraving proclaiming his name and city. The music grows more intense, mounting to an overpowering, barbaric crescendo, which stops suddenly, abruptly. The room is silent, absolutely silent, except for the decisive click of the collar lock.
It is a sound the girl will never forget.
As soon as the lock closes, there is a great shout, congratulating, saluting the young man. He returns to his place among the tables that line the low-ceilinged chamber, hung with glowing brass lamps. He sits in the midst of his family, his closest well-wishers, his sword comrades, cross-legged on the floor in the Gorean fashion behind the long, low wooden table, laden with food, which stands at the head of the room.
Now all eyes are on the girl.
The restraining slave bracelets are removed. She rises. Her feet are bare on the thick, ornately wrought rug that carpets the chamber. There is a slight sound from the bells strapped to her ankles. She is angry, defiant. Though she is clad only in the almost transparent scarlet dancing silks of Gor, her back is straight, her head high. She is determined not to be tamed, not to submit, and her proud carriage bespeaks this fact. The spectators seem amused. She glares at them. Angrily she looks from face to face. There is no one she knows, or could know, because she has been taken from a hostile city, she is a woman of the enemy. Fists clenched, she stands in the center of the room, alone, all eyes upon her, beautiful in the light of the hanging lamps.