Mercenaries of Gor

by Norman, John;

  He then left.

  “He lives in the building,” said the proprietor. “He, and some of the others, sometimes in gangs, enjoy playing “Capture the Slave Girl.”

  “I see,” I said.

  Feiqa, still kneeling, somewhat shaken, adjusted her tunic.

  I smiled. I now had an excellent idea what had happened to the lovely, light-haired slave we had seen earlier on a lower landing, she whose tunic was opened and whose hair had been in such disorder. She had been “captured” earlier.

  “It is an excellent game,” said the proprietor. “It helps them to become men.”

  Many Gorean games, incidentally, have features which encourage the development of properties regarded as desirable in a Gorean youth, such as courage, discipline, and honor. Similarly, some of the games tend to encourage the development of audacity and leadership. Others, like the one referred to by the proprietor, encourage the young man to see the female in terms of her most basic and radical meaning, in the terms of her deepest and true nature, that nature which is most biologically fundamental to her, that nature which is that of the inestimable prize, that of the most desirable prey, the most luscious quarry, that of she who is to be rightfully caught and, in all propriety, uncompromisingly embonded, she who is to be captured and mastered, absolutely, without which relationship she can never be completely fulfilled, she to whose owning and domination all of nature inclines, and without which the ancient sexual equations of humanity cannot be resolved. Such games, in short, thus, encourage the lad, almost from infancy on, to reality and nature, to manhood and mastery.

  “What a disgusting child,” said Boabissia.

  The lad had now disappeared.

  She looked at Feiqa. “You, too, are disgusting,” she said.

  “Yes, Mistress,” whispered Feiqa.

  “It would be the same with you, Boabissia,” I said, “if you were a slave. You, too, then, as much as Feiqa, would be at the mercy of free persons. You, too, then, would have to obey, and anyone, as much as she. You, too, as then a mere slave, would have to cringe, and perform, and kiss, even if it were only at the command of a child. You, too, then, as much as she, would have to obey, responding swiftly, hoping desperately to please, while being put through your paces.”

  “It is this way,” said the proprietor. “Up this ladder, now.”

  “It is stifling,” said Boabissia.

  “Up the ladder,” I said.

  She went up the ladder, carefully. She held her skirt together, with one hand, as she could, about her legs. That, I thought, was a note of charming reserve, appropriate in a free woman. I followed her, into the dark opening above. Then I turned about and, on my hands and knees, looked down. Feiqa looked frightened. I do not think she wished to ascend into that darkness. To be sure, it did not seem a pleasant prospect. “Hand up the pack,” I said to Hurtha. I was not sure Feiqa could manage it on the ladder. Hurtha removed it from her back, and stood on the lower rungs, lifting it up to me. I glanced at Feiqa. She had backed away. She was near the stairs. She was frightened. She did not wish to ascend the ladder. It frightened her, and that to which it might lead. Certainly it was not much of a ladder. It was narrow, and moved with one’s weight. The rungs, of different sizes and unevenly spaced, were roped in place. Too, it would be dark, and hot, in the loft. What would await her there? She was a slave. Feiqa backed away another step. Her hand was before her mouth. I was afraid she might bolt.

  “Slave,” I said, sternly.

  “Yes, Master,” she said, and hurried to the ladder.

  “Keep both your hands on the uprights,” I told her.

  “Yes, Master,” she said.

  Below, Hurtha grinned.

  “Disgusting,” said Boabissia.

  I reached down and helped Feiqa to the loft.

  “Here is the lamp,” said the proprietor, handing it to Hurtha. He then, the lamp in hand, climbed up to join us.

  “Be careful of the lamp,” said the proprietor.

  I took the lamp from Hurtha and lifted it up. There was a narrow corridor there, with some rooms on the left and right.

  “It is the last room on the right,” called the proprietor.

  “Wait,” I said to him. I then, bending down, carrying the lamp, led the way to the room.

  I pushed open the door. It was small and low, but it was stout. It could doubtless be well secured from the inside. It would doubtless prove to be an effective barrier. The folks in insulae take their doors seriously. Such a door, plus his own dagger, is the poor man’s best insurance against theft.

  “Frightful,” said Boabissia.

  “It is furnished, as you can see,” called the proprietor from below.

  “It is too small, it is too dirty, I can hardly breathe up here,” said Boabissia.

  “It is my last vacancy,” called the proprietor.

  “I cannot stay here,” said Boabissia.

  “Go inside, and wait for me,” I told my party. They bent down and entered the room.

  “Is there no light?” asked Boabissia.

  “There is a small shuttered aperture on the left,” I said, holding up the lamp. “Some light will come through that in daylight hours.”

  “It is dirty here, and hot,” said Boabissia. “I will not stay here.”

  “It is a copper tarsk a night,” called Achiates. “Take it or leave it. It is my last vacancy.”

  “I will not stay here,” said Boabissia, firmly. I saw that Feiqa, too, regarded the room with horror.

  “I feel faint,” said Boabissia. “There is not enough air.”

  “Open the shutters,” I said.

  “It is too hot in here,” said Boabissia.

  “We are just under the roof,” I said. “The hot air rises and gets trapped here.”

  “I think I will be sick,” said Boabissia.

  “Open the shutters,” I said.

  “This is a terrible place,” said Boabissia.

  “It is an insula,” I said. “Thousands live in them.”

  “I will not stay here,” she said.

  “What do you think?” I asked Hurtha.

  “It is splendid,” said Hurtha. “To be sure, it would be even better if the temperature were more equable and if there were air to breathe.”

  “I came to Ar to claim my patrimony,” said Boabissia, “not to suffocate and roast in a loft.”

  “Have no fear,” I said. “When the temperature goes down these places, I am told, can be freezing.”

  “There, you see,” said Hurtha.

  “I will not stay here,” repeated Boabissia.

  I then retraced my steps to the opening to the upper level, where the loft had been converted into even more rooms. The proprietor was waiting below.

  “We will take it,” I told him. I dropped a copper tarsk into his palm. He then turned about and went down the steps, and I, with the lamp, returned to the room.

  They had opened the shutters. There was a tiny falling of light, in a narrow, descendant shaft, into the room. In it there drifted particles of dust. They were rather pretty.

  I blew out the lamp.

  “Surely you did not pay a copper tarsk for this place,” said Boabissia.

  “Ar is packed with refugees,” I said. “Many will not do so well as this.”

  “This is a terrible place,” she said.

  “It is furnished,” I said. I looked about. Against one wall, there was a chest. There was some straw in a corner of the room. One could distribute it and sleep upon it. There were also some folded blankets. Too, there was a bucket with some water in it, with a dipper in it. That had probably not been changed recently. Then there was a slop pot as well, one for the wastes to be emptied into the vat on the ground floor. It was a long trip. It was not hard to understand how such wastes were occasionally cast from roofs and windows, usually with a warning cry to pedestrians below.

  I looked about the room, in the dim light.

  There, in one wall, was a long crack. The floor
creaked, too, in places, as one trod upon it. I trusted this was merely from the disrepair and age of the boards. Insulae are seldom maintained well. They are cheap to build, and easily replaced. Their structure is primarily wood and brick. There are ordinances governing how high they may be built. Although we had come up several flights, we were probably not more than seventy or eighty feet Gorean from the street level. Without girders, frame steel, and timber iron, as the Goreans say, wrought in the iron shops, such as are used in the towers, physics, even indexed to the Gorean gravity, is quick to impose its inexorable limits on heights. Such buildings tend to be vulnerable to structural stresses, and are sometimes weakened by slight movements of the earth. Sometimes walls give way; sometimes entire floors collapse.

  I put the lamp down on the chest. I put my pack against a wall.

  “This is a terrible place,” said Boabissia. She knelt to one side, her knees together, in the position of the free woman.

  I was pleased to see this.

  She had done it naturally.

  I gathered that, whatever might be her interior state, or states, that she was no longer concerned to pretend to be a man. She was a long way now from the Alar camp in which, as a pseudomale, she must have been in effect, as such women are, little more than a laughing stock, little better than a joke. In any event, it seemed she had now abandoned her foolish charade of masculinity. It seems to me that being a woman is a beautiful and wonderful thing to be, but, to be sure, it is not being a man. It is different. And this is not to say that it is better or worse, but it is to say that it is different. One supposes, even, that it may well be something more deliciously precious than being a man. That seems possible. If it were not it seems puzzling that men would be so concerned to acquire and own them, put them in collars, master them, and such. In any event, whatever might be the truth in these matters, it seems clear that each should be true to themselves, and their own nature. How else is happiness, or fulfillment, to be obtained? Boabissia, I was sure, was confused and unsettled within herself. She seemed now surely not male, which was an occasion, at least in my view, for rejoicing, but, too, unfortunately, less than a full woman. She was trying to find herself, I think, trying to ascertain her own identity. Who was she? What was she? Perhaps she feared to find her true self. That seemed to be the case with many free women. They avoid looking in the most likely places, in biology, in nature. In any event, she now wore a dress, and, if I were not mistaken, had dared to cord it in such a way as to acknowledge, and perhaps to some extent flaunt, the loveliness within it. Certainly I had seen more than one free male looking upon her with interest and approval. To be sure, she was not veiled. Perhaps I should speak to her about that. She was no longer in the Alar camp. On the other hand, one must be careful about such things. Judicious veiling, far from discouraging masculine interest, may stimulate it.

  One of the major differences, incidentally, between the free woman and the slave girl is that the slave girl is not permitted veiling. Sometimes a new slave must be whipped into the streets, for she is ashamed to be seen in public with a naked face. This makes a great deal of cultural sense as the face seems far more expressive, revealing, personal, and sensitive than the body. That it should be seen in public, stripped, disrobed of the privacy of its concealments, is often traumatic for a new slave. To be sure, she is likely later, as she learns more of her collar, and her own desirability, to do gladly without the inconveniences and encumbrances of the veil. She thinks of herself, and conceives of herself, in a new way. Perhaps, too, there is something of a masculine conspiracy involved here. Men certainly enjoy looking upon the features of one another’s slaves. And, of course, who would veil an animal? Does that very thought not seem ridiculous? Would you veil a tarsk, a kaiila, a sleen? So why another sort of animal, a female slave? And free women, though presumably with different motivations, also insist on denying the veil to slave girls. In doing so they emphasize the enormous and extreme difference between themselves and chattel girls. The chattel girl is nothing. She is worthless. She is no more than a domestic animal. See? Her face is bare! That the women of Earth, by and large, are unveiled is taken as not being unmeaningful by many Goreans. They see this as indicative of the fittingness of such women for the chain and collar. And certainly this feature makes the work of Gorean slavers on Earth less burdensome than it might otherwise prove to be. It is almost as though the women of Earth were presenting themselves for their own appraisal, for their own assessment as potential slaves.

  Too, of course, the lack of veiling permitted the slave makes her the more likely target of roving tarnsmen, brigands, slavers, and such. It is understandable that many men may not care to risk their lives to obtain a woman who, when unveiled, may turn out to be a disappointment, one who is insufficiently beautiful to be a slave, one whose looks do not merit the iron and the collar.

  In any event, no longer did Boabissia affect the demeanor, attitudes, and postures of an Alar warrior. To have continued to do so would now be even more of a lie, more of a pompous, pretentious fraud, more of a mockery and travesty, than it had ever been in the past. That was behind her. But what was before her?

  She had learned, I think, to some extent, in some sense or other, in a sense that she herself perhaps did not yet fully understand, in a sense that she had not yet herself fully plumbed, not only that she was a female, but, more troublingly, more intriguingly, more luringly, had begun to suspect what it might be to be a female.

  The room was dusty, and dingy.

  Hurtha was sitting to one side, cross-legged. He was examining his ax.

  The room was hot. It was small. It was, at least, furnished. To one side, on the floor, fastened to a heavy, bolted-in metal plate, there was a slave ring. Near it were some chains. Too, among them, opened, I saw an iron collar, woman-size, with its lock ring. This permits it to be fastened on various chains, to be incorporated in a sirik, to be locked about the linkage of slave bracelets, and such. Too, there were some manacles there, of a size appropriate to confine perfectly and helplessly the small, lovely wrists of a female. Various keys hung on a hook near the door, well out of reach from the slave ring. On the wall, too, near the keys, an implement common in Gorean dwellings, hung a slave whip.

  I removed the whip from the wall, and shook out the strands. There were five of them, pliant and broad.

  I looked at Feiqa.

  She knelt before me.

  “This morning,” I said, “you erred. It was a rather serious mistake. You were intending to drink from the upper bowl of the fountain, that reserved for free persons.”

  “Please do not punish me, Master,” she begged. “I do not want to be whipped! Let me go this time! Just this time!”

  I looked at her.

  “I will not do it again!” she wept.

  “I am sure you will not,” I said. “Take off your clothes.”

  23

  The Day of Generosity and Petitions

  “Hurtha!” I protested. “No!” But it was too late. The fellow had already been struck with a thrust of the ax handle, to the back of the neck. He was having difficulty falling, however, unconscious though he might be, for the press of folks about the far end of the velvet rope, leading to the Central Cylinder, fighting for places on it.

  “Here is his ribbon,” said Hurtha cheerily, holding it above grasping hands. “Tie it about yourself and the rope.”

  “That fellow may have been waiting in line since yesterday,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” admitted Hurtha, thrusting the ribbon to me. I seized it, and looped it about my shoulder and body, and about the velvet rope, and tied it. This would keep me on the rope. Hurtha’s elbow, with a lateral stroke of great force, discouraged a fellow from snatching at the ribbon. I do not think he knew what hit him. Two other fellows backed away. I waved to them. “Move forward,” said a Taurentian. We shuffled forward.

  “The ribbons are all gone,” moaned a man.

  “Gone!” wept a woman.

  “Are y
ou a citizen of Ar?” inquired a fellow.

  “Why?” I asked, warily.

  “Only citizens of Ar, on the Day of Generosity and Petitions, are permitted to approach the regent,” he said. “The holiday is for citizens, and citizens alone. Do you think we want folks streaming in from thousands of pasangs about to rob us of our places?”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  “I do not think you are of Ar!” he said. “Give me your ribbon!”

  “I would rather keep it,” I said.

  “Guardsman!” he cried. “Guardsman!” Then he quieted quickly, lifted up by the back of the neck.

  “Do you know how Alars cut out a tongue?” he was asked.

  “No,” he squeaked.

  “It is done with an ax,” said Hurtha, “from the bottom, up through the neck.”

  “I did not know that,” said the fellow, dangling.

  “An ax much like this,” said Hurtha, holding the great, broad blade before the fellow’s face, from behind. “Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly,” said the fellow.

  “Did you wish to speak to a guardsman?” asked Hurtha. “There is one just over there.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” asked the fellow.

  “I have no idea,” said Hurtha.

  “I don’t either,” said the man.

  Hurtha then dropped him to the stones and he scurried away.

  “There may be a problem,” I admitted to Hurtha. “I am not a citizen of Ar.”

  “How would they know?” he asked. “Are you supposed to be carrying the Home Stone in your pouch?”

  “There could be trouble,” I said.

  “You could always ask for a clarification of the rules after you have seen the regent,” he said.

  “That is true,” I granted him.

  “What could they do to you?” asked Hurtha.

  “Quite a number of things, I suppose,” I said.

  “Even if they boiled you in oil,” said Hurtha, “as that is normally done, it could be done only once, or, at any rate, only once that would be likely to be of any interest to you.”