by John Norman
His hand was light on the yellow bow, strung taut. But no arrow was set to the string.
“Where are your men?” he asked.
“I am alone,” I said.
The warrior stood in the stirrups, shading his eyes.
“Why have you come to spy?” he asked.
“I am not a spy,” I said.
“You are hired by the Turians,” he said.
“No,” I responded.
“You are a stranger,” he said.
“I come in peace,” I said.
“Have you heard,” he asked, “that the Wagon Peoples slay strangers?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have heard that.”
“It is true,” he said, and turned his mount back to his fellows.
Last to approach me was the warrior of the Paravaci, with his hood and cape of white fur, and the glistening broad necklace of precious stones encircling his throat.
He pointed to the necklace. “It is beautiful, is it not?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“It will buy ten bosks,” said he, “twenty wagons covered with golden cloth, a hundred she-slaves from Turia.”
I looked away.
“Do you not covet the stones,” he prodded, “these riches?”
“No,” I said.
Anger crossed his face. “You may have them,” he said.
“What must I do?” I asked.
“Slay me!” he laughed.
I looked at him steadily. “They are probably false stones,” I said, “amber droplets, the pearls of the Vosk sorp, the polished shell of the Tamber clam, glass coloured and cut in Ar for trade with ignorant southern peoples.”
The face of the Paravaci, rich with its terrible furrowed scars, contorted with rage.
He tore the necklace from his throat and flung it to my feet.
“Regard the worth of those stones!” he cried. I fished the necklace from the dust with the point of my sword, it in the sun. It hung like a belt of light, sparkling with a spectrum of riches hundred merchants.
“Excellent,” I admitted, handing it back to him on the tip of the spear.
Angrily he wound it about the pommel of the saddle.
“But I am of the Caste of Warriors,” I said, “of a high city and we do not stain our spears for the stones of men — not even such stones as these.”
The Paravaci was speechless.
“You dare to tempt me,” I said, feigning anger, “as if I were of the Caste of Assassins or a common thief with his dagger in the night.” I frowned at him. “Beware,” I warned, “lest I take your words as insult.”
The Paravaci, in his cape and hood of white fur, with the priceless necklace wrapped about the pommel of his saddle, sat stiff, not moving, utterly enraged. Then, furiously, the scars wild in his face, he sprang up in the stirrups and lifted both hands to the sky. “Spirit of the Sky,” he cried, “let the lance fall to me — to me!” Then abruptly, furious, he wheeled the kaiila and joined the others, whence he turned to regard me.
As I watched, the Tuchuk took his long, slender lance and thrust it into the ground, point upward. Then, slowly, the four riders began to walk their mounts about the lance, watching it, right hands free to seize it should it begin to fall.
The wind seemed to rise.
In their way I knew they were honouring me, that they had respected my stand in the matter of the charging lances, that now they were gambling to see who would fight me, to whose weapons my blood must flow, beneath the paws of whose kaiila I must fall bloodied to the earth.
I watched the lance tremble in the shaking earth, and saw the intentness of the riders as they watched its Lightest movement. It would soon fall.
I could now see the herds quite clearly, making out individual animals, the shaggy humps moving through the dust, see the sun of the late afternoon glinting off thousands of horns. Here and there I saw riders, darting about, all mounted on the swift, graceful kaiila. The sun reflected from the horns in the veil of dust that hung over the herds was quite beautiful.
The lance had not yet fallen.
Soon the animals would be turned in on themselves, to mill together in knots, until they were stopped by the shaggy walls of their own kind, to stand and graze until the morning. The wagons would, of course, follow the herds. The herd forms both vanguard and rampart for the advance of the wagons. The wagons are said to be countless, the animals without number. Both of these claims are, of course, mistaken, and the Ubars of the Wagon Peoples know well each wagon and the number of branded beasts in the various herds; each herd is, incidentally, composed of several smaller herds, each watched over by its own riders. The bellowing seemed now to come from the sky itself, like thunder, or from the horizon, like the breaking of an ocean into surf on the rocks of the shore. It was like a sea or a vast natural phenomenon slowly approaching. Such indeed, I suppose, it was. Now, also, for the first time, I could clearly smell the herd, a rich, vast, fresh, musky, pervasive odour, compounded of trampled grass and torn earth, of the dung, urine and sweat of perhaps more than a million beasts. The magnificent vitality of that smell, so offensive to some, astonished and thrilled me; it spoke to me of the insurgence and the swell of life itself, ebullient, raw, overflowing, unconquerable, primitive, shuffling, smelling, basic, animal, stamping, snorting, moving, an avalanche of tissue and blood and splendour, a glorious, insistent, invincible cataract of breathing and walking and seeing and feeling on the sweet, flowing, windswept mothering earth. And it was in that instant that I sensed what the bosk might mean to the Wagon Peoples.
“Ho!” I heard, and spun to see the black lance fall and scarcely had it moved but it was seized in the fist of the scarred Tuchuk warrior.
Chapter 4
THE OUTCOME OF SPEAR GAMBLING
The Tuchuk warrior lifted the lance in triumph, in the same instant slipping his fist into the retention knot and kicking the rowelled heels of his boots into the silken flanks of his mount, the animal springing towards me and the rider in the same movement, as if one with the beast, leaning down from the saddle, lance slightly lowered, charging.
The slender, flexible wand of the lance tore at the seven-layered Gorean shield, striking a spark from the brass rim binding it, as the man had lunged at my head.
I had not cast the spear.
I had no wish to kill the Tuchuk.
The charge of the Tuchuk, in spite of its rapidity and momentum, carried him no more than four paces beyond me. It seemed scarcely had he passed than the kaiila had wheeled and charged again, this time given free rein, that it might tear at me with its fangs.
I thrust with the spear, trying to force back the snapping jaws of the screaming animal. The kaiila struck, and then withdrew, and then struck again. All the time the Tuchuk thrust at me with his lance. Four times the point struck me drawing blood, but he did not have the weight of the leaping animal behind his thrust; he thrust at arm’s length, the point scarcely reaching me. Then the animal seized my shield in its teeth and reared lifting it and myself, by the shield straps, from the ground. I fell from some dozen feet to the grass and saw the animal snarling and biting on the shield, then it shook it and hurled it far and away behind it.
I shook myself.
The helmet which I had slung over my shoulder was gone.
I retained my sword. I grasped the Gorean spear.
I stood at bay on the grass, breathing hard, bloody.
The Tuchuk laughed, throwing his head back.
I readied the spear for its cast.
Warily now the animal began to circle, in an almost human fashion, watching the spear. It shifted delicately, feinting, and then withdrawing, trying to draw the cast.
I was later to learn that kaiila are trained to avoid the thrown spear. It is a training which begins with blunt staves and progresses through headed weapons. Until the kaiila is suitably proficient in this art it is not allowed to breed. Those who cannot learn it die under the spear. Yet, at a close range, I had no doubt that I co
uld slay the beast. As swift as may be the kaiila I had no doubt that I was swifter. Gorean warriors hunt men and larls with this weapon. But I did not wish to slay the animal, nor its rider.
To the astonishment of the Tuchuk and the others who observed, I threw away the weapon.
The Tuchuk sat still on his mount, as did the others. Then he took his lance and smote it on the small, glossy shield, acknowledging my act. Then so too did the others, even the white-caped man of the Paravaci.
Then the Tuchuk drove his own lance into the dirt and hung on the lance his glossy shield.
I saw him draw one of the quivas from a saddle sheath, loosen the long, triple-weighted bola from his side.
Slowly, singing in a guttural chant, a Tuchuk warrior song, he began to swing the bola. It consists of three long straps of leather, each about five feet long, each terminating in a leather sack which contains, sewn inside, a heavy, round, metal weight. It was probably developed for hunting the tumit, a huge, flightless carnivorous bird of the plains, but the Wagon Peoples use it also, and well, as a weapon of war. Thrown low the long straps, with their approximate ten-foot sweep, almost impossible to evade, strike the victim and the weighted balls, as soon as resistance is met, whip about the victim, tangling and tightening the straps. Sometimes legs are broken. It is often difficult to release the straps, so snarled do they become. Thrown high the Gorean bola can lock a man’s arms to his sides; thrown to the throat it can strangle him; thrown to the head, a difficult cast, the whipping weights can crush a skull. One entangles the victim with the bola, leaps from one’s mount and with the quiva cuts his throat.
I had never encountered such a weapon and I had little notion as to how it might be met.
The Tuchuk handled it well. The three weights at the end of the straps were now almost blurring in the air and he, his song ended, the reins in his left hand, quiva blade now clenched between his teeth, bola in his swinging, uplifted right arm, suddenly cried out and kicked the kaiila into its charge.
He wants a kill, I told myself. He is under the eyes of warriors of the other peoples. It would be safest to throw low. It would be a finer cast, however, to try for the throat or head. How vain is he? How skilful is he?
He would be both skilful and vain; he was Tuchuk.
To the head came the flashing bola moving in its hideous, swift revolution almost invisible in the air and I, instead of lowering my head or throwing myself to the ground, met instead the flying weighted leather with the blade of a Koroban short sword, with the edge that would divide silk dropped upon it and the taut straps, two of them, flew from the blade and the other strap and the three weights looped off into the grass, and the Tuchuk at the same time, scarcely realizing what had occurred, leaped from the kaiila, quiva in hand, to find himself unexpectedly facing a braced warrior of Ko-ro-ba, sword drawn.
The quiva reversed itself in his hand, an action so swift I was only aware of it as his arm flew back, his hand on the blade, to hurl the weapon.
It sped toward me with incredible velocity over the handful of feet that separated us. It could not be evaded, but only countered, and countered it was by the Koroban steel in my hand, a sudden ringing, sliding flash of steel and the knife was deflected from my breast.
The Tuchuk stood struck with awe, in the grass, on the trembling plains in the dusty air.
I could hear the other three men of the Wagon Peoples, the Kataii, the Kassar, the Paravaci, striking their shields with their lances. “Well done,” said the Kassar.
The Tuchuk removed his helmet and threw it to the grass. He jerked open the jacket he wore and the leather jerkin beneath, revealing his chest.
He looked about him, at the distant bosk herds, lifted his head to see the sky once more.
His kailla stood some yards away, shifting a bit, puzzled, reins loose on its neck.
The Tuchuk now looked at me swiftly. He grinned. He did not expect nor would he receive aid from his fellows. I studied his heavy face, the fierce scarring that somehow ennobled it, the black eyes with the epicanthic fold. He grinned at me. “Yes,” he said, “well done.”
I went to him and set the point of the Gorean short sword at his heart.
He did not flinch.
“I am Tarl Cabot,” I said. “I come in peace.”
I thrust the blade back in the scabbard.
For a moment the Tuchuk seemed stunned. He stared at me, disbelievingly, and then, suddenly, he threw back his head and laughed until tears streamed down his face. He doubled over and pounded on his knees with his fist. Then he straightened up and wiped his face with the back of his hand.
I shrugged.
Suddenly the Tuchuk bent to the soil and picked up a handful of dirt and grass, the land on which the bosk graze, the land which is the land of the Tuchuks, and this dirt and this grass he thrust in my hands and I held it.
The warrior grinned and put his hands over mine so that our hands together held the dirt and the grass, and were together clasped on it.
“Yes,” said the warrior, “come in peace to the Land of the Wagon Peoples.”
Chapter 5
THE PRISONER
I followed the warrior Kamchak into the encampment of Tuchuks.
Nearly were we run down by six riders on thundering kaiila who, riding for sport, raced past us wildly among the crowded, clustered wagons. I heard the lowing of milk bosk from among the wagons. Here and there children ran between the wheels, playing with a cork ball and quiva, the object of the game being to strike the thrown ball. Tuchuk women, unveiled, in their long leather dresses, long hair bound in braids, tended cooking pots hung on tem-wood tripods over dung fires. These women were unscarred, but like the bosk themselves, each wore a nose ring. That of the animals is heavy and of gold, that of the women also of gold but tiny and fine, not unlike the wedding rings of my old world. I heard a haruspex singing between the wagons; for a piece of meat he would read the wind and the grass; for a cup of wine the stars and the flight of birds; for a fat-bellied dinner the liver of a sleen or slave.
The Wagon Peoples are fascinated with the future and its signs and though, to hear them speak, they put no store in such matters, yet they do in practice give them great consideration. I was told by Kamchak that once an army of a thousand wagons turned aside because a swarm of rennels, poisonous, crablike desert insects, did not defend its broken nest, crushed by the wheel of the lead wagon. Another time, over a hundred years ago, a wagon Ubar lost the spur from his right boot and turned for this reason back from the gates of mighty Ar itself.
By one fire I could see a squat Tuchuk, hands on hips, dancing and stamping about by himself, drunk on fermented milk curds, dancing, according to Kamchak, to please the Sky.
The Tuchuks and the other Wagon Peoples reverence Priest-Kings, but unlike the Goreans of the cities, with their castes of Initiates, they do not extend to them the dignities of worship. I suppose the Tuchuks worship nothing, in the common sense of that word, but it is true they hold many things holy, among them the bosk and the skills of arms, but chief of the things before which the proud Tuchuk stands ready to remove his helmet is the sky, the simple, vast beautiful sky, from which falls the rain that, in his myths, formed the earth, and the bosks, and the Tuchuks. It is to the sky that the Tuchuks pray when they pray, demanding victory and luck for themselves, defeat and misery for their enemies. The Tuchuk, incidentally, like others of the Wagon Peoples, prays only when mounted, only when in the saddle and with weapons at hand; he prays to the sky not as a slave to a master, nor a servant to a god, but as warrior to a Ubar; the women of the Wagon Peoples, it might be mentioned, are not permitted to pray; many of them, however, do patronize the haruspexes, who, besides foretelling the future with a greater or lesser degree of accuracy for generally reasonable fees, provide an incredible assemblage of amulets, talismans, trinkets, philters, potions, spell papers, wonder-working sleen teeth, marvellous powdered kailiauk horns, and coloured, magic strings that, depending on the purpose, may be knotted i
n various ways and worn about the neck.
As we passed among the wagons I leaped back as a tawny prairie sleen hurled itself against the bars of a sleen cage, reaching out for me with its six-clawed paw. There were four other prairie sleen in the cage, a small cage, and they were curling and moving about one another, restlessly, like angry snakes. They would be released with the fall of darkness to run the periphery of the herds, acting, as I have mentioned, as shepherds and sentinels. They are also used if a slave escapes, for the sleen is an efficient, tireless, savage, almost infallible hunter, capable of pursuing a scent, days old, for hundreds of pasangs until, perhaps a month later, it finds its victim and tears it to pieces.
I was startled by the sound of slave bells and saw a girl, stripped save for bells and collar, carrying a burden among the wagons.
Kamchak saw that I had noticed the girl and chuckled, sensing that I might find it strange, seeing a slave so among the wagons.
She wore bells locked on both wrists, and on both ankles, thick cuffs and anklets, each with a double line of bells, fastened by steel and key. She wore the Turian collar, rather than the common slave collar. The Turian collar lies loosely on the girl, a round ring; it fits so loosely that, when grasped in a man’s fist, the girl can turn within it; the common Gorean collar, on the other hand, is a flat, snugly fitting steel band. Both collars lock in the back, behind the girl’s neck. The Turian collar is more difficult to engrave, but it, like the flat collar, will bear some legend assuring that the girl, if found, will be promptly returned to her master. Bells had also been afflicted to her collar.
“She is Turian?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Kamchak.
“In the cities,” I said, “only Pleasure Slaves are so belled, and then customarily for the dance.”
“Her master,” said Kamchak, “does not trust her.”
In his simple statement I then understood the meaning of her condition. She would be allowed no garments, that she might not be able to conceal a weapon; the bells would mark each of her movements.