Tribesmen of Gor

by Norman, John;

  I took the water and gave the man a copper tarsk.

  I smelled the spices and sweat of Tor. I drank slowly. The sun was high.

  Tor, lying at the northwest corner of the Tahari, is the principal supplying point for the scattered oasis communities of that dry vastness, almost a continent of rock, and heat, and wind and sand. These communities, sometimes quite large, numbering in hundreds, sometimes thousands of citizens, depending on the water available, are often hundreds of pasangs apart. They depend on caravans, usually from Tor, sometimes from Kasra, sometimes even from far Turia, to supply many of their needs. In turn, of course, caravans export the products of the oases. To the oases caravans bring various goods, for example, rep-cloth, embroidered cloths, silks, rugs, silver, gold, jewelries, mirrors, kailiauk tusk, perfumes, hides, skins, feathers, precious woods, tools, needles, worked leather goods, salt, nuts and spices, jungle birds, prized as pets, weapons, rough woods, sheets of tin and copper, the tea of Bazi, wool from the bounding Hurt, decorated, beaded whips, female slaves, and many other forms of merchandise. The principal export of the oases are dates and pressed-date bricks. Some of the date palms grow to more than a hundred feet high. It takes ten years before they begin to bear fruit. They will then yield fruit for more than a century. A given tree, annually, yields between one and five Gorean weights of fruit. A weight is some ten stone, or some forty Earth pounds. A great amount of farming, or perhaps one should speak of gardening, is done at the oasis, but little of this is exported. At the oasis will be grown a hybrid, brownish Sa-Tarna, adapted to the heat of the desert; most Sa-Tarna is yellow; and beans, berries, onions, tuber suls, various sorts of melons, a foliated leaf vegetable, called Katch, and various root vegetables, such as turnips, carrots, radishes, of the sphere and cylinder varieties, and korts, a large, brownish-skinned, thick-skinned, sphere-shaped vegetable, usually some six inches in width, the interior of which is yellowish, fibrous and heavily seeded. At the oasis, because of the warm climate, the farmers can grow two or more crops a year. Larma and tospits are also grown at the oases, in small orchards. Some rep is grown, for cloth, but most cloth comes to the oases from caravans. Kaiila and verr are found at the oases, but not in great numbers. The herds of these animals are found in the desert. They are kept by nomads, who move them from one area of verr grass to another, or from one water hole to another, as the holes, for the season, go dry. Smaller water sources are used in the spring, for these are the first to go dry, larger ones later in the year. No grass grows about these water holes because many animals are brought to them and graze it to the earth. They are usually muddy ponds, with some stunted trees about, centered in the midst of an extensive radius of grassless, cracked, dry earth. Meat, hides, and animal-hair cloth are furnished to the oases by the nomads. In turn, from the oases the nomads receive, most importantly, Sa-Tarna grain and the Bazi tea. They receive, as well, of course, other trade goods. Sa-Tarna is the main staple of the nomads. They, in spite of raising herds, eat very little meat. The animals are too precious for their trade value, and their hair and milk, to be often slaughtered for food. A nomad boy of fifteen will often have eaten meat no more than a dozen times in his life. Raiders, however, feast well on meat. The animals mean little to them and come to them cheaply. Tea is extremely important to the nomads. It is served hot and heavily sugared. It gives them strength then, in virtue of the sugar, and cools them, by making them sweat, as well as stimulating them. It is drunk three small cups at a time, carefully measured.

  I finished the cup of water and handed the cup back to the water carrier. He bowed, grinning, the bag, swollen and bulging, damp on his shoulder, and, hooking the cup on his belt, backed away. “Water!” he called. “Water!”

  I blinked my eyes against the heat and glare of the sun. The buildings of Tor are of mud brick, covered with colored, often flaking, plasters. But now, in the sun, and the dust, raised by the people in the streets, everything seemed drained of color. I would soon have to buy appropriate garments. In such a city I was too conspicuous.

  I made my way toward the bazaar.

  I knew the light lance, and the swift, silken kaiila. I had learned these with the Wagon Peoples. But I did not know the scimitar. The short sword, now slung over my left shoulder, in the common fashion, would be of little use on kaiila back. The men of the Tahari do not fight on foot. A man on foot in the desert, in warfare, is accounted a dead man.

  I looked up at the buildings. I was now in the shade, descending a narrow, steep street, toward the bazaar. The buildings in Tor are seldom more than four stories high, which is about as high as one may build safely with beams and mud brick. Because of the irregular topography of Tor, however, which is a hilly, rocky area, like most of the Tahari terrain, many of the buildings, built on shelves and rises, seemed considerably higher. These buildings, on the outside smooth and bleak, save for occasional narrow windows, high, not wide enough to admit a body, abut directly on the streets, making the streets like deep, walled alleys. In the center of the street is a gutter. It seldom rains in Tor, but the gutter serves to collect waste, which is often thrown into it, through open doors, by slaves. Within these walls, however, so pressing upon the street, I knew there were often gardens, walled, well-watered, beautiful, and cool, dark rooms, shielded from the heat and sun, many with superb appointments. Tor was, as Gorean cities went, a rich, trading city. It was headquarters for thousands of caravan merchants. In it, too, were housed many craftsmen, practicing their industries, carvers, varnishers, table makers, gem cutters, jewelers, carders, dyers of cloth, weavers of rugs, tanners, makers of slippers, toolers of leather, potters, glaziers, makers of cups and kettles, weapon smiths, and many others. Much of the city, of course, was organized to support the caravan trade. There were many walled, guarded warehouses, requiring their staffs of scribes and guards, and, in hundreds of hovels, lived kaiila tenders, drovers, and such, who would, at the caravan tables, when their moneys had been exhausted, apply, if accepted, making their mark on the roster, once more for a post with some new caravan. Guards for these caravans, incidentally, were usually known by, and retained by, caravan merchants between caravans. They were known men. Tenders and drovers, on the whole, came and went. Elaborate random selection devices, utilizing coins and sticks, and formulas, were sometimes used by merchants to assure that applying tenders and drovers were selected, if they were not known, by chance. Tenders and drovers were assured that this was to insure fairness. Actually, of course, as was well known, this was a precaution against the danger of hiring, en bloc, unwittingly, an organized group of men, who might, prior to their hiring, have formed a plan to slay the guards and merchants and make off with the caravan. Tenders and drovers, however, like men generally, were an honest sort. When they returned to Tor, of course, they had been long in the desert. At the end of the trip they received their wages. Sometimes, not even a hundred yards from the warehouses, these men would be met by enterprising cafe owners, praising the advantages of their respective establishments. The owners of these cafes, usually, would bring with them a chain of their girls, stripped, as free women in the Tahari districts may not be, purportedly a typical selection of the stock available.

  “In my house,” he would call, indicating one or another of the girls, “rent the key to her chains.”

  But generally the men would proceed past these enticements, which were, from what I saw, far from negligible, and hurry toward their favorite cafes and hostels, whose wares, I gathered, did not need such blatant advertisement, whose worth, and capacities for total and complete satisfaction, were apparently well known. Certain of these cafes I might mention. The Silken Oasis is well known, even in Ar, but it is extremely expensive; in the middle range of price are the Golden Collar and the Silver Chain, both under the same management, that of a Turian named Haran; good, relatively inexpensive cafes are the Thong, which I would recommend, the Veminium, the Pomegranate, the Red Cages and the Pleasure Garden. These various establishments, and more than forty others,
from the point of view of tenders and drovers, have one thing in common. They succeed in separating, with celerity and efficiency, a fellow from his money. I do not feel this way myself. I think most of them, with the exception of the Silken Oasis, are reasonable. The drover’s objection, I think, is largely a function of the fact that he does not have a great deal of money to spend. What there is, accordingly, seems rapidly diminished. Tenders and drovers often proceed from one cafe to the other, for several nights. The wages for a caravan trip, which often takes months, commonly will last the fellow about ten days, or, if nursed out, some fifteen days. They are, of course, a rather pleasant ten or fifteen days. At the end of this time, after a day or so of some physiological discomfort, usually violent nausea and blinding headaches, it is common to find the man again back at the tables, once more attempting to vend his services to the master of a caravan.

  A fellow walked past me, carrying several vulos, alive, heads down, their feet tied together. He was followed by another fellow, carrying a basket of eggs.

  I followed them as they would be going to the market streets, near which was the bazaar.

  The water in an oasis is, of course, at its lowest point. Residences, at an oasis, are built on the higher ground, where nothing will grow. It is the valley, naturally, which, irrigated, usually by hand, though sometimes with clumsy wooden machinery, supports the agriculture. Land, at an oasis, which will grow food is not wasted on domiciles. Tor, rather similarly, though few crops were grown within its walls, was built high, about its water, several wells in the deepest area in the city. The architecture of Tor, in concentric circles, broken by numerous, narrow, crooked streets, was a function of the radius from its wells. An advantage of this municipal organization, of course, though it is scarcely a matter of intentional design, is that the water is in the most protected portion of the city, its center. Tor’s water, I might mention, was ample to her needs. Though I saw few of them, she boasted many shaded gardens. Water for these gardens, by contract with slave masters, was carried by chains of male slaves and emptied into house cisterns, whence, later, by house slaves, it would be taken in cans and sprinkled carefully, foot by foot, throughout the garden.

  I was now in the lower part of the city.

  “Water!” I heard. “Water!”

  Behind me, turning, I saw the water carrier, he from whom I had purchased a cup of water earlier.

  A woman, veiled, passed me. She held a baby inside her cloak, nursing it.

  I continued down the sloping street, toward the bazaar and market.

  I had arrived in Tor four days ago, after first taking tarn to Kasra. There I had sold the bird, for I did not wish to be conspicuous in Tor, as I would surely be as a tarnsman. From Kasra I had taken a dhow upriver on the Lower Fayeen, until I reached the village of Kurtzal, which lies north, overland, from Tor. Goods which are to be transported from Tor to Kasra sometimes are first taken overland to Kurtzal, and thence west on the river. Kurtzal is little more than a loading and shipping point. In Kasra, descending upon my tarn, I had been a warrior. A mercenary tarnsman. As a portion of my assumed disguise, uncollared, lashed on her back across my saddle, had been the body of a naked girl. She was blond. She was barbarian. She could not even speak Gorean. I was congratulated on my catch. I visited one of the metal workers, to purchase a collar for my prize. None, Samos and I suspected, would regard one with such a wench, so clumsy, so untaught, so obviously new to slavery, as being upon the business of Priest-Kings. She was simply a caught girl, picked up by a tarnsman with ease, simply to be used for a time and then discarded for a few tarn disks. “I took her from a slaver’s camp,” I told the metal worker. “I see her brand is fresh,” said the metal worker. It was true. She had not been branded in Teletus. Sometimes a girl is not branded until she is first sold. There are various brands. Sometimes it pleases the master to decide with which the girl will be marked. Within an hour, however, of her arrival at the house of Samos, the girl had been sent to the branding chamber. The standard Kajira mark, as was the house policy, was put upon her.

  Masters, incidentally, seldom brand their own slaves. To brand a girl well demands a sure hand, and, usually, experience. In training a man to use the iron slavers always give him poorer women at first, sometimes having him mark them more than once, until he becomes proficient. Usually by the fifteenth or the twentieth woman, the man is capable of marking them deeply, precisely and cleanly. It is important for the girl’s thigh to be held immobile; sometimes it is held by more than one man; sometimes it is bound to a wagon wheel; sometimes, in the house of slavers, a heavy, vise-equipped metal branding rack is used. The girls are usually branded impersonally, perfunctorily, as cattle. Though they feel their mark intensely physically, it is felt, interestingly, even more intensely, more profoundly, psychologically; not unoften it, in itself, radically transforms their self-images, their personalities; they are then only slaves, not permitted their own wills, rightless, at the bidding of masters; the mark is an impersonal designation; this is understood by the girls; when she is marked she understands herself not to be marked by a given man for a given man, to be uniquely his, but rather, so to speak, that she is marked for all men; to all men she is a slave girl; usually, of course, only one among them, at a given time, will be her master; the brand is impersonal; the collar is intensely personal; the brand marks her property; the collar proclaims whose property she is, who it is who has either taken, or paid for, her; that the brand is an impersonal designation of an absence of status in the social structure is perhaps another reason why masters do not often brand their own girls; the brand relationship to the free man is institutional; the collar relationship, on the other hand, is an intensely personal one; it is not uncommon for masters to pride themselves on the depth with which they know their slave girls; this depth is far greater in my opinion than that with which the average husband of Earth knows his wife; the slave girl is not simply someone with whom the man lives; she is very special to him; she is a treasured possession; he owns her; he wants to know, profoundly and deeply, the background, the history, the mind, the intelligence, the appetites, the nature and the dispositions of his lovely article of property; this knowledge, of course, puts her more at his mercy; by making it possible for him to manipulate her feelings, exploit weaknesses, drop asides, etc., she in the helpless condition of slavery, it gives him greater power over her. For example, it is common for a master to force his girl to speak at length and in detail to him of the secret sides of her nature, explaining and elaborating on her fantasies; if she is literate, she may be forced, naked, collared, on her knees at a small table, sometimes with her ankles shackled, to write them out; this supplies the master, of course, with abundant materials which may be used by him to make her further and more helplessly his; sometimes the girl attempts to deceive the master; it is not difficult to detect inauthenticity in such matters; she is then beaten; too, she may at times be ordered to invent fantasies, sometimes of a certain type; these, too, for she has invented them, are, to an astute master, instructive; these intellectual, emotional exercises, performed by the girl under a condition of slavery, particularly if coupled with an enforced exercise regime, posings under male surveillance, and such, can do much to sensitize her to her collar; they awaken her body and, of equal importance for the Gorean, though not for the Earthling, who sees sex with the perception of a hippopotamus, as a matter of body rubbings, her fantastic imagination and mind; she becomes curious, soon, about the deeper implications of what she is, a mere article of her master’s property; then, with authority, with assurance and power, to the depth and height of her mind and imagination she is taught; the slave girl experiences a paradox of freedom; the free woman is physically free, but miserable, fighting to be what she is not; the slave girl, physically in bondage, even to the collar, sometimes chains, is given no choice by men but to be totally and precisely what she is, slave; such women, the slave girls, interestingly, are almost always joyful and vital; they are, paradoxically, in t
heir feelings and emotions, liberated; they are not pinched, not psychologically restrained; why this should be I do not know; to see such women, their heads high, their eyes bright, their bodies, their movements, beautiful, as no Earth woman would dare to be, is quite pleasurable; some of them are so insolent, so proud of their collars, that I have cuffed them to my feet, to remind them that they are only slaves.

  It had been fortunate for us that the girl’s brand had been relatively fresh, that she had been marked in the house of Samos and not on Teletus.

  This made it more plausible that she was a recent prize, abducted, as I had averred to the metal worker, from the camp of a slaver. We could, of course, have taken another girl from the pens of Samos. This one, however, seemed ideal. She was obviously untrained, a clumsy wench, as stupid and raw, aside from a few rapings, as an uncooked piece of bosk meat, a naive, ignorant wench, a wench obviously new to slavery. Furthermore, ideally, she could not yet speak Gorean. She could, thus, do nothing to betray or confound, inadvertently or otherwise, by word or glance, our plans. She knew nothing. She was only a part of my disguise. Nonetheless it was with pleasure that I snapped the collar, marked in the name of Hakim of Tor, as she, kneeling, naked, looked up at me in anger, on the small, lovely throat of the former Miss Priscilla Blake-Allen, of Earth.