by John Norman
"Is it customary," I asked the Tatrix, "for warriors to carry weapons to the Pillar of Exchanges?"
"There will be no treachery," said the Tatrix.
I considered turning the tarn and abandoning the venture.
"You can trust me," she said.
"How do I know that?" I challenged.
"Because I am Tatrix of Tharna," she said proudly.
"Four-strap!" I cried to the bird, to bring it down on the pillar. The bird seemed not to understand. "Four-strap!" I repeated, more severely. For some reason the bird seemed unwilling to land. "Four-strap!" I shouted, commanding it harshly to obey.
The great giant landed on the marble pillar, its steel-shod talons ringing on the stone.
I did not dismount, but held the Tatrix more firmly.
The tarn seemed nervous. I tried to calm the bird. I spoke to it in low tones, patted it roughly on the neck.
The woman in the silver mask approached. "Hail to our Beloved Tatrix!" she cried. It was Dorna the Proud.
"Do not approach more closely," I ordered.
Dorna stopped, about five yards in advance of Thorn and the two warriors, who had not moved at all.
The Tatrix acknowledged the salutation of Dorna the Proud with merely a regal nod of her head.
"All Tharna is yours, Warrior," cried Dorna the Proud, "if you but relinquish our noble Tatrix! The city weeps for her return! I fear there will be no more joy in Tharna until she sits again upon her golden throne!"
I laughed.
Dorna the Proud stiffened. "What are your terms, Warrior?" she demanded.
"A saddle, weapons, money, supplies, such things," I answered, "and the freedom of Linna of Tharna, Andreas of Tor, and those who fought this afternoon in the Amusements of Tharna."
There was a silence.
"Is that all?" asked Dorna the Proud, puzzled.
"Yes," I said.
Behind her, Thorn laughed.
Dorna glanced at the Tatrix. "I shall add," she said, "the weight of five tarns in gold, a room of silver, helmets filled with jewels!"
"You truly love your Tatrix," I said.
"Indeed, Warrior," said Dorna.
"And you are excessively generous," I added.
The Tatrix squirmed in my arms.
"Less," said Dorna the Proud, "would insult our Beloved Tatrix."
I was pleased, for though I would have little use for such riches in the Sardar Mountains, Linna and Andreas, and the poor wretches of the arena, might well profit from them.
Lara, the Tatrix, straightened in my arms. "I do not find the terms satisfactory," she said. "Give him in addition to what he asks, the weight of ten tarns in gold, two rooms of silver and a hundred helmets filled with jewels."
Dorna the Proud bowed in gracious acquiescence. "Indeed, Warrior," said she, "for our Tatrix we would give you even the stones of our walls."
"Are my terms satisfactory to you?" asked the Tatrix, rather condescendingly, I thought.
"Yes," I said, sensing the affront that had been offered to Dorna the Proud.
"Release me," she commanded.
"Very well," I said.
I slid down from the back of the tarn, the Tatrix in my arms. I set her on her feet, on the top of that windy pillar on the borders of Tharna, and bent to remove the golden scarf which restrained her.
As soon as her wrists were free she was once again every inch the royal Tatrix of Tharna.
I wondered if this could be the girl who had had the harrowing adventure, whose garments were tattered, whose body must still be wretched with pain from its sojourn in the claws of my tarn.
Imperiously, not deigning to speak to me, she gestured to the gloves of gold which I had placed in my belt. I returned them to her. She drew them on, slowly, deliberately, facing me all the while.
Something in her mien made me uneasy.
She turned and walked majestically to Dorna and the warriors.
When she had reached their side, she turned and with a sudden swirl of those golden robes pointed an imperious finger at me. "Seize him," she said.
Thorn and the warriors leaped forward, and I found myself ringed with their weapons.
"Traitress!" I cried.
The voice of the Tatrix was merry. "Fool!" she laughed, "do you not know by now that one does not make pacts with an animal, that one does not bargain with a beast?"
"You gave me your word!" I shouted.
The Tatrix drew her robes about her. "You are only a man," she said.
"Let us kill him," said Thorn.
"No," said the Tatrix, imperiously, "that would not be enough." The mask glittered on me, reflecting the light of the descending sun. It seemed, more than ever before, to possess a ferocity, to be hideous, molten. "Shackle him," she said, "and send him to the mines of Tharna."
Behind me the tarn suddenly screamed with rage and its wings smote the air.
Thorn and the warriors were startled, and in this instant I leapt between their weapons, seized Thorn and a warrior, dashed them together, and threw them both, weapons clattering, to the marble flooring of the pillar. The Tatrix and Dorna the Proud screamed.
The other warrior lunged at me with his sword and I side-stepped the stroke and seized the wrist of his sword arm. I twisted it and thrust it up and high over my left arm, and with a sudden downward wrench snapped it at the elbow. He collapsed whimpering.
Thorn had regained his feet and leaped on me from behind, and the other warrior a moment later. I grappled with them, fiercely. Then, slowly, as they cursed helplessly, I drew them inch by inch over my shoulders, and threw them suddenly to the marble at my feet. In that moment both the Tatrix and Dorna the Proud plunged sharp instruments, pins of some sort, into my back and arm.
I laughed at the absurdity of this, and then, my vision blackening, the pillar whirling, I fell at their feet. My muscles no longer obeyed my will.
"Shackle him," said the Tatrix.
As the world slowly turned under me I felt my legs and arms, limp, as weak as fog, thrown roughly together. I heard the rattle of a chain and felt my limbs clasped in shackles.
The merry victorious laugh of the Tatrix rang in my ears.
I heard Dorna the Proud say, "Kill the tarn."
"It's gone," said the uninjured warrior.
Slowly, though no strength returned to my body, my vision cleared, first in the center, and then gradually toward the edges, until I could once again see the pillar, the sky beyond and my foes.
In the distance I saw a flying speck, which would be the tarn. When it had seen me fall it had apparently taken flight. Now, I thought, it would be free, escaping at last to some rude habitat where it might, without saddle and harness, without a silver hobble, reign as the Ubar of the Skies that it was. Its departure saddened me, but I was glad that it had escaped. Better that than to die under the spear of one of the warriors.
Thorn seized me by the wrist shackles and dragged me across the top of the pillar to one of the three tarns that waited. I was helpless. My legs and arms could not have been more useless if every nerve in them had been cut by a knife.
I was chained to the ankle ring of one of the tarns.
The Tatrix had apparently lost interest in me, for she turned to Dorna the Proud and Thorn, Captain of Tharna.
The warrior whose arm had been broken knelt on the marble flooring of the pillar, bent over, rocking back and forth, the injured arm held against his body. His fellow stood near me, among the tarns, perhaps to watch me, perhaps to steady and soothe the excitable giants.
Haughtily the Tatrix addressed Dorna and Thorn. "Why," she asked them, "are there so few of my soldiers here?"
"We are enough," said Thorn.
The Tatrix looked out over the plains, in the direction of the city. "By now," she said, "lines of rejoicing citizens will be setting out from the city."
Neither Dorna the Proud, nor Thorn, Captain of Tharna, answered her.
The Tatrix walked across the pillar, regal in those tat
tered robes, and stood over me. She pointed across the plains, toward Tharna. "Warrior," said she, "if you were to remain long enough on this pillar you would see processions come to welcome me back to Tharna."
The voice of Dorna the Proud drifted across the pillar. "I think not, Beloved Tatrix," she said.
The Tatrix turned, puzzled. "Why not?" she asked.
"Because," said Dorna the Proud, and I could tell that behind that silver mask, she smiled, "you are not going back to Tharna."
The Tatrix stood as if stunned, not understanding.
The uninjured warrior had now climbed to the saddle of the tarn, to whose ankle ring I lay helplessly chained. He hauled on the one-strap and the monster took flight. Painfully I was wrenched into the air and, cruelly hanging by my shackled wrists, I saw the white column dropping away beneath me, and the figures upon it, two warriors, a woman in a silver mask, and the golden Tatrix of Tharna.
17
The Mines of Tharna
The room was long, low, narrow, perhaps four feet by four feet, and a hundred feet long. A small, foul tharlarion-oil lamp burned at each end. How many such rooms lay beneath the earth of Tharna, in her many mines, I did not know. The long line of slaves, shackled together, stooped and crawled the length of the room. When it was filled with its wretched occupants, an iron door, containing a sliding iron observation panel, closed. I heard four bolts being shoved into place.
It was a dank room. There were pools of water here and there on the floor; the walls were damp; water in certain places dripped from the ceiling. It was ventilated inadequately by a set of tiny circular apertures, about an inch in diameter, placed every twenty feet. One larger aperture, a circular hole perhaps two feet in diameter, was visible in the center of the long room.
Andreas of Tor, who was shackled at my side, pointed to it. "That hole," he said, "floods the room."
I nodded, and leaned back against the damp, solid stone that formed the sides of the chamber. I wondered how many times, under the soil of Tharna, such a chamber had been flooded, how many chained wretches had been drowned in such dismal, sewerlike traps. I was no longer puzzled that the discipline in the mines of Tharna was as good as it was. I had learned that only a month before, in a mine not five hundred yards from this one, there had been a disturbance created by a single prisoner. "Drown them all," had been the decision of the Administrator of the Mines. I was not surprised then that the prisoners themselves looked with horror upon the very thought of resistance. They would strangle one of their fellows who thought of rebellion, rather than risk the flooding of the chamber. Indeed, the entire mine itself could, in an emergency, be flooded. Once, I was told, it had happened, to quell an uprising. To pump out the water and clear the shafts of bodies had taken weeks.
Andreas said to me, "For those who are not fond of life, this place has many conveniences."
"To be sure," I agreed.
He thrust an onion and a crust of bread into my hands. "Take this," he said.
"Thanks," I said. I took them and began to chew on them.
"You will learn," he said, "to scramble with the rest of us."
Before we had been ushered into the cell, outside, in a broad, rectangular chamber, two of the mine attendants had poured a tub of bread and vegetables into the feed trough fixed in the wall, and the slaves had rushed upon it, like animals, screaming, cursing, pushing, jostling, trying to thrust their hands into the trough and carry away as much as they could before it was gone. Revolted, I had not joined in this wretched contest, though by my chains I had been dragged to the very edge of the trough. Yet I knew, as Andreas had said, I would learn to go to the trough, for I had no wish to die, and I would not continue to live on his charity.
I smiled, wondering why it was that I, and my fellow prisoners, seemed so determined to live. Why was it that we chose to live? Perhaps the question is foolish, but it did not seem so in the mines of Tharna.
"We must think of escape," I said to Andreas.
"Be quiet, you fool!" hissed a thin, terrified voice from perhaps a dozen feet away.
It was Ost of Tharna, who, like Andreas and myself, had been condemned to the mines.
He hated me, blaming me somehow for the fact that he found himself in this dire predicament. Today, more than once, he had scattered the ore which, on my hands and knees, I had chipped from the narrow shafts of the mine. And twice he had stolen the pile of ore I had accumulated, poking it into the canvas sack we slaves wore about our necks in the mines. I had been beaten by the Whip Slave for not contributing my share to the day's quota of ore required of the chain of which I was a member.
If the quota was not met, the slaves were not fed that night. If the quota was not met three days in a row, the slaves would be whipped into the long cell, the door bolted, and the cell flooded. Many of the slaves looked upon me with disfavor. Perhaps it was because the quota had been increased the day that I was added to their chain. I myself guessed this was more than a coincidence.
"I shall inform against you," hissed Ost, "for plotting an escape."
In the half light, from the small tharlarion-oil lamps set in each end of the room, I saw the heavy, squat figure beside Ost loop his wrist chain silently about the creature's thin throat. The circle of chain tightened, and Ost scratched helplessly at it with his fingers, his eyes bulging. "You will inform against no one," said a voice, which I recognized as that of the bull-like Kron of Tharna, of the Caste of Metal Workers, he whose life I had spared in the arena during the Battles of Oxen. The chain tightened. Ost shuddered like a convulsive monkey.
"Do not kill him," I said to Kron.
"As you wish, Warrior," said Kron, and dropped the frightened Ost, roughly disengaging his chain from the creature's throat. Ost lay on the damp floor, his hands on his throat, gasping for breath.
"It seems you have a friend," said Andreas of Tor.
With a rattle of chain and a roll of his great shoulders, Kron stretched himself out as well as he could in the cramped quarters. Within a minute his heavy breathing told me he was asleep.
"Where is Linna?" I asked Andreas.
For once his voice was sad. "On one of the Great Farms," he said. "I failed her."
"We have all failed," I said.
There was not much conversation in the cell, for the men perhaps had little to say, and their bodies were worn with the cruel labors of the day. I sat with my back against the damp wall, listening to the sounds of their sleep.
I was far from the Sardar Mountains, far from the Priest-Kings of Gor. I had failed my city, my beloved Talena, my father, my friends. There would not be a stone set upon another stone. The riddle of the Priest-Kings, of their cruel, incomprehensible will, would not be solved. Their secret would be kept, and I would die, sooner or later, whipped and starved, in the kennels that were the mines of Tharna.
Tharna has perhaps a hundred or more mines, each maintained by its own chain of slaves. These mines are tortuous networks of tunnels worming themselves inch by inch irregularly through the rich ores that are the foundation of the wealth of the city. Most of the shaft tunnels do not allow a man to stand upright in them. Many are inadequately braced. As the slave works the tunnel, he crawls on his hands and knees, which bleed at first but gradually develop calluses of thick, scabrous tissue. About his neck hangs a canvas bag in which pieces of ore are carried back to the scales. The ore itself is freed from the sides of the mine by a small pick. Light is supplied by tiny lamps, no more than small cups of tharlarion oil with fiber wicks.
The working day is fifteen Gorean hours, or Ahn, which, allowing for the slight difference in the period of the planet's rotation, would be approximately eighteen Earth hours. The slaves are never brought to the surface, and once plunged into the cold darkness of the mines never again see the sun. The only relief in their existence comes once a year, on the birthday of the Tatrix, when they are served a small cake, made with honey and sesame seeds, and a small pot of poor Kal-da. One fellow on my chain, little more tha
n a toothless skeleton, boasted that he had drunk Kal-da three times in the mines. Most are not so fortunate. The life expectancy of the mine slave, given the labor and food, if he does not die under the whips of the overseers, is usually from six months to one year.
I found myself gazing at the large circular hole in the ceiling of the narrow cell.
* * * *
In the morning, though I knew it was morning only by the curses of the Whip Slaves, the cracking of the whips, the cries of the slaves and the rattle of chains, I and my fellow prisoners crawled from our cell, emerging again into the broad, rectangular room which lay directly beyond.
Already the feed trough had been filled.
The slaves edged toward the trough, but were whipped back. The word had not yet been given which would allow them to fall upon it.
The Whip Slave, another of the slaves of Tharna, but one in charge of the chain, was pleased with his task. Though he might never see the light of the sun, yet it was he who held the whip, he who was Ubar in this macabre dungeon.
The slaves tensed, their eyes fixed on the trough. The whip lifted. When it fell, that would be the signal that they might rush to the trough.
There was pleasure in the eyes of the Whip Slave as he enjoyed the tormenting moment of suspense which his uplifted whip inflicted on the ragged, hungry slaves.
The whip cracked. "Feed!" he shouted.
The slaves lunged forward.
"No!" I cried, my voice checking them.
Some of them stumbled and fell, sprawling with a rattle of chains on the floor, dragging others down. But most managed to stand upright, catching their balance, and, almost as one man, that wretched degraded huddle of slaves turned its frightened, empty eyes upon me.
'Feed!" cried the Whip Slave, cracking the whip again.
"No," I said.
The huddle of men wavered.
Ost tried to pull toward the trough, but he was chained to Kron, who refused to move. Ost might as well have been chained to a tree.
The Whip Slave approached me. Seven times the whip struck me, and I did not flinch.
Then I said, "Do not strike me again."