Mercenaries of Gor

by Norman, John;

  “So, too, is Dietrich of Tarnburg,” he said.

  “Oh?” I said. “For what side?”

  “Who knows?” chuckled the driver.

  Dietrich of Tarnburg, of the high city of Tarnburg, some two hundred pasangs to the north and west of Hochburg, both substantially mountain fortresses, both in the more southern and civilized ranges of the Voltai, was well-known to the warriors of Gor. His name was almost a legend. It was he who had won the day on the fields of both Piedmont and Cardonicus, who had led the Forty Days’ March, relieving the siege of Talmont, who had effected the crossing of the Issus in 10,122 C.A., in the night evacuation of Keibel Hill, when I had been in Torvaldsland, and who had been the victor in the battles of Rovere, Kargash, Edgington, Teveh Pass, Gordon Heights, and the Plains of Sanchez. His campaigns were studied in all the war schools of the high cities. I knew him from scrolls I had studied years ago in Ko-ro-ba, and from volumes in my library in Port Kar, such as the commentaries of Minicius and the anonymous analyses of “The Diaries,” sometimes attributed to the military historian, Carl Commenius, of Argentum, rumored to have once been a mercenary himself.

  It was Dietrich of Tarnburg who had first introduced the “harrow” to positional warfare on Gor, that formation named for the large, rakelike agricultural instrument, used for such tasks as the further leveling of ground after plowing and, sometimes, on the great farms, for the covering of seed. In this formation spikes of archers, protected by iron-shod stakes and sleen pits, project beyond the forward lines of the heavily armed warriors and their reserves. This formation, if approached head-on by tharlarion cavalry, is extremely effective. It constitutes, in effect, a set of corridors of death through which the cavalry must ride, in which it is commonly decimated before it can reach the main lines of the defenders. When the cavalry is disorganized, shattered and torn by missile fire, and turns about to retreat, the defenders, fresh and eager, initiate their own attack.

  He was also the initiator of the oblique advance in Gorean field warfare, whereby large numbers of men may be concentrated at crucial points while the balance of the enemy remains unengaged. This formation makes it possible for a given army, choosing to attack only limited portions of the enemy, portions smaller than itself, to engage an army which, all told, may be three times its size, and, not unoften, to turn the flank of this much larger body, producing its confusion and rout. Too, if the attack fails, the advanced force may fall back, knowing that the balance of their army, indeed, its bulk, rested and fresh, not yet engaged, is fully prepared to cover their retreat.

  Most impressive to me, perhaps, was Dietrich of Tarnburg’s coordination of air and ground forces, and his transposition of certain techniques and weapons of siege warfare to the field. The common military response to aerial attack from tarnsmen is the “shield roof” or “shield shed,” a formation the same as, or quite similar to, a formation once known on Earth as the testudo, or “tortoise.” In this formation shields are held in such a way that they constitute a wall for the outer ranks and a roof for the inner ranks. This is primarily a defensive formation but it may also be used for advancing under fire. The common Gorean defense against tharlarion attack, if it must be met on open ground, is the stationary, defensive square, defended by braced spears. At Rovere and Kargash Dietrich coordinated his air and ground cavalry in such a way as to force his opponents into sturdy but relatively inflexible defensive squares. He then advanced his archers in long, enveloping lines; in this way they could muster a much broader front for low-level, point-blank firepower than could the narrower concentrated squares. He then utilized, for the first time in Gorean field warfare, first at Rovere, and later at Kargash, mobile siege equipment, catapults mounted on wheeled platforms, which could fire over the heads of the draft animals. From these engines, hitherto employed only in siege warfare, now become a startling and devastating new weapon, in effect, a field artillery, tubs of burning pitch and flaming naphtha, and siege javelins, and giant boulders, fell in shattering torrents upon the immobilized squares. The shield shed was broken. The missiles of archers rained upon the confused, hapless defenders. Even mobile siege towers, pushed from within by straining tharlarion, pressing their weight against prepared harnesses, trundled toward them, their bulwarks swarming with archers and javelin men. The squares were broken. Then again the ponderous, earthshaking, bellowing, grunting, trampling tharlarion ground cavalry charged, this time breaking through the walls like dried straw, followed by waves of screaming, heavily armed spearmen. The ranks of the enemy then irremediably broke. The air howled with panic. Rout was upon them. Spears and shields were cast away that men might flee the more rapidly.

  There was then little left to be done. It would be the cavalries which would attend to the fugitives.

  “I had thought rather,” I said, “of perhaps joining the wagons for a time.”

  “They need drivers,” said the fellow. “Can you handle tharlarion?”

  “I can handle high tharlarion,” I said. Long ago I had ridden guard in a caravan of Mintar, a merchant of Ar.

  “I mean the draft fellows,” said the driver.

  “I suppose so,” I said. It seemed likely to me that I could handle these more docile, sluggish beasts, if I had been able to handle their more agile brothers, the saddle tharlarion.

  “They take a great deal of beating about the head and neck,” he said.

  I nodded. That was not so much different from the high tharlarion, either. They are usually controlled by voice commands and the blows of a spear. The tharlarion, incidentally, at least compared to mammals, seems to have a very sluggish nervous system. It seems almost impervious to pain. Most of the larger varieties have two brains, or, perhaps better, a brain and a smaller brainlike organ. The brain, or one brain, is located in the head, and the other brain, or the brainlike organ, is located near the base of the spine.

  I looked down to Feiqa, walking beside the wagon, the rope on her neck. “Tharlarion,” I told her, expanding on the driver’s remark, “show little susceptibility to pain.”

  “Yes, Master,” she said.

  “In this,” I said, “they closely resemble female slaves.”

  “Oh, no, Master!” she cried. “No!”

  “No?” I said.

  “No,” she said, looking up earnestly, frightened, “we are terribly susceptible to pain, truly!”

  “Doubtless you were as a free woman,” I said, “but now you are a slave.”

  “I am even more susceptible to pain now,” she said, “for now I have felt pain, and know what it is like, and now I have a slave girl’s total vulnerability and helplessness, and know that anything can be done to me! Too, my entire body has become a thousand times more responsive and sensitive, a thousand times more meaningful and alive, since I have been locked in the collar. I assure you, Master, I am a thousand times more susceptible to pain now than ever I was before!”

  I smiled. Such transformations were common in the female slave. Just as their sensitivities to pleasure and feeling, sexual and otherwise, physical and psychological, conscious and subconscious, were greatly increased and intensified by being embonded, so too, concomitantly, naturally, were their sensitivities to pain. The same changes that so considerably increased their capacities in certain directions increased them also in others, and put them ever more helplessly, and hopelessly, at the mercy of their masters.

  “Ah,” she said, chagrined, putting down her lovely head, “Master teases his girl.”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  She kept her head down. She blushed. She looked lovely, the light, locked, steel collar on her throat.

  I reached down and lifted her up, by the arms, swinging her up, and back, into the wagon. She would be weary from her walking. “Thank you, Master,” she said, much pleased. She then knelt behind us, rather close to us, on some folded sacks in the wagon bed, the rope attaching her to the wagon still tied on her neck. I began to consider in what ways I should have her this evening.

 
; “Bread! Bread!” cried a woman to one side. There another Sa-Tarna wagon had stopped. The driver, who had apparently been adjusting the harness of his beast, was now again on the wagon box, his reins and whip in hand.

  “Away!” cried the driver.

  She threw herself before the wagon. “Bread!” she screamed. He cracked the whip and the beast lurched forward, the woman screamed, barely scrambling from its path. I had little doubt that had she not moved as she had she would have been run over.

  “They will try almost anything,” said my driver, as our wagon rolled past the woman. She was shuddering. She had just escaped death or crippling. “Sometimes they will send their children out beside the road to do the begging. They themselves hide in the brush. Sometimes I throw them some bread. Sometimes I do not. It seems the women themselves should beg, if they want the bread.”

  “Perhaps they do not want to pay for it, in the way of women,” I said.

  “They will pay for it, and in the way of women, when they are hungry enough,” said the driver.

  I nodded. That was true, I supposed. This driver, incidentally, seemed to me a decent, good-hearted fellow. Certainly he had stopped and fed some of the women along the road. That I had seen. Too, he had doubtless done that in spite of the fact that he would now come in with a short load. Many of the drivers, I speculated, would not have behaved so. Also, he had not objected to my riding with him, nor to carrying Feiqa. Yes, he seemed a good fellow.

  “How far ahead are the troops?” I asked.

  “Their lines of march extend for pasangs, with intervals, too, of pasangs,” he said.

  I nodded. It would take days for them to pass through the country. They were apparently far from the vicinity of any enemy. Accordingly, they exhibited little concern with possible imperatives of assembly and concentration. Interestingly, not even raiding parties, as far as I knew, had delayed or harried their advance. They might as well have been marching through their own countries in peacetime.

  “The rearward contingents of the units before us will be some ten pasangs up the road,” he said.

  “How many troops are there, altogether?” I asked.

  “A great many,” he said. “Are you a spy?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Look,” he said, gesturing.

  I glanced to the right, and upward. On the summit of a small hill I saw some seven or eight riders, riders of the high tharlarion, the tharlarion shifting and clawing about under them, with tharlarion lances. They were clad in dusty, soiled leather, riding leather, to protect their legs from the scaly hides of the beasts, and helmeted. Two had shields slung at their back. Shields of the others hung at the left sides of their saddles. They seemed an unkempt, dirty, grim lot. About the beasts’ necks, and behind the saddles, hung panniers of grain and sacks of woven netting containing dried larmas and brown suls. Across the saddle of one were tied the hind feet, crossed, of two verr, their throats cut, the blood now brown on the sides of the tharlarion. Another fellow had a basket of vulos, tied shut. Another had strings of sausage hung about his neck and shoulders. There were no herded tarsk or bosk with the group. Such animals were probably extremely rare now, at least within one or two day’s ride of the march. Still the fellows seemed to have done very well. Doubtless they had fared far better than most engaged in their business. Too, I noted that their interests had not been confined merely to foodstuffs. From the saddle of more than one there dangled armlets, two-handled bowls and cups. Too, from the saddle of one a long tether looped back to the crossed bound wrists of a female. Doubtless she had been found pleasing. Thus she had been brought along. Doubtless she was destined for the collar. Near the pawing feet of the leader’s tharlarion, in their tunics of white wool, there stood two stout peasant lads, bound, heavy sticks thrust before their elbows and behind their backs, their arms bound to these at the back, their wrists, a rope across their bellies, held back, tied at their sides. They would be recruits for some captain, requiring to fill gaps in his ranks. They would probably bring their captors in the neighborhood of a copper tarsk apiece. The fellows on the tharlarion looked down at the wagons and then moved down the hill and forward. Two or three women, I now saw, coming over the hill, had apparently been following them, probably on foot from some village. One of the fellows, shouting angrily, turned his tharlarion about and, waving his lance, urging it up the slope toward them, charged them. They scattered before him, and he, not pursuing them, turned about and, in a moment, had rejoined his fellows. The women now hung back, daring to follow no further. I looked after the riders, now two or three wagons ahead of us, the two peasant lads, and the female, stumbling behind them on her tether.

  “Foragers,” said the driver.

  I looked back at Feiqa, and she lowered her eyes, not meeting mine.

  “The units ahead of us,” I said, turning about, “are the rear guard of the army, I take it.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh?” I said.

  “There are units,” he said, “and wagons, and units before us and behind us. I do not know how long the lines are.”

  I was then silent, for a time. There must be an incredible amount of men, I surmised. I knew, of course, that considerable forces had been landed at Brundisium. What I was not sure of, however, was the current distribution, or deployment, of these forces.

  “You are sure you are not a spy,” he said.

  “Yes,” I smiled, “I am sure.” I supposed, of course, that Ar must be attempting to keep itself apprised of the movements of the enemy. Presumably there would be spies, or informers of some sort, with the troops or the wagons. It is not difficult to infiltrate spies into mercenary troops, incidentally, where the men come from different backgrounds, castes and cities, and little is asked of them other than their ability to handle weapons and obey orders. Yet, if men of Ar, or men in the pay of Ar, were attending to these matters, and submitting current and accurate reports, Ar herself, for whatever reason, unpreparedness or whatever, had not acted.

  I looked at the string of wagons ahead.

  How different things seemed from the marches of the forces of Ar, and others of the high cities. When the men of Ar moved, for example, and whenever possible they would do so on the great military roads, such as the Viktel Aria, they used a measured pace, often kept by a drum, and, including rests, would each day cover a calculable distance, usually forty pasangs. At forty-pasang intervals there would generally, on the military roads, be a fortified camp, supplied in advance with ample provisions. Some of these camps became towns. Later some became cities. These roads and camps, and measures, made it possible to move troops not only efficiently and rapidly, but assisted in military planning. One could tell, for example, how long it would take to bring a certain number of men to bear on a certain point. The permanent garrisons of the fortified camps, too, of course, exercise a significant peace-keeping and holding role in the outer districts of a city’s power. Too, training and recruiting often take place in such camps. To be sure, these forces of Cos could not be expected to have come over and taken a few months to attend to the leisurely construction of permanent camps along the route of their projected march. Still, judging from the nature of the supply column, or columns, their progress seemed very slow, almost leisurely. It was as though they feared nothing. Their numbers, I speculated, might have emboldened them. Why had Ar not acted, I wondered.

  “Have you seen tarnsmen in the sky?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. Cos, of course, would have tarnsmen at her disposal. But even those, it seemed, were not patrolling the line of march.

  “Why are there no guards with the supply train?” I asked. “Surely that is unusual.”

  “I do not know,” he said. “I have wondered about it. Perhaps it is not thought that they are necessary.”

  “Have there been no attacks?” I asked. Surely it seemed that Ar might be expected to apply her tarnsmen to the effort to disrupt the enemy’s lines of supply and communication. Perhaps her tarnsmen
had not been able to reach the wagons. If command in Ar had been in the hands of Marlenus, her Ubar, I had little doubt that Ar would have acted by now. Marlenus, however, as the report went, was not in Ar. He was supposedly on an expedition into the Voltai, conducting a punitive expedition against raiders of Treve. Why he had not been recalled, if it were possible, I did not understand.

  “What would you do if tarnsmen of Ar arrived?” I asked.

  “I would leap under the wagon,” he chuckled. “If they saw fit to land, I would take to my heels with all haste.”

  “You would not defend your lading, your freight?” I asked.

  “That is not my job,” he said. “That is the job of soldiers. I am paid to drive. That is what I do.”

  “What of the other drivers?” I asked.

  “They would do the same, I would suppose,” he said. “We are wagoners, not soldiers.”

  “The entire train then,” I said, “or at least these wagons, is open to attack. Yet Ar has not attacked. That is interesting.”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps they cannot get here.”

  “Even with small strike forces, disguised as peasants?”

  “Perhaps not,” he said. “I do not know.”

  It was now growing dark along the road. Here and there, back from the road, on one side or the other, there were small camps of free women. In some of them there were tiny fires lit. Some small shelters had been pitched, too, in some of these camps, little more than tarpaulins or blankets stretched over sticks. Sometimes some of the women about these tiny fires stood up and watched us, as we rolled past. I recalled the free woman I had met last night in her hut. She had not come down to the wagons as far as I knew. We had left her before she had awakened. I had left some more food with her, and had tied a golden tarn disk of Port Kar, from my wallet, in the corner of the child’s blanket. With that she might buy much. Too, with it, or its residue, she might be able to make her way to a distant village, far from the trekking of armies, where she could use it as a bride price, using it, in effect, to purchase herself a companion, a good fellow who could care for herself and her child. Peasants, unlike women of the cities, tend to be very practical about such matters. She had shown me hospitality.