Norman, John - Gor 23 - Renegades of Gor.txt

by Renegades of Gor [lit]

  to lay aside any arms.

  “Admit me!” I cried.

  Was there no one on the wall?

  I looked back, toward the trench. I saw no unusual activity there.

  “Ho!” I called, waving the cloth. “Ho!”

  There was silence.

  (pg.179) “Is there no one there?” I called.

  For a wild, irrational moment I wondered if the city might have been deserted.

  But that would not be possible, of course. The garrison and population could not

  have withdrawn unnoticed. The land side was invested. The countryside swarmed

  with Cosians, and their mercenaries and allies. The harbor was closed with ships

  and rafts. What was more likely, of course, was that there were few men on the

  walls. What defenders there were would presumably be summoned by alarms to

  threatened points. I feared my position might be noticed at any moment by

  Cosians, and that I might be trapped against the wall.

  “Is there anyone there?” I called. I assumed that at the distance I could not be

  heard in the Cosian lines.

  Suddenly a basket, on a rope, was flung over the wall and lowered.

  I hurried to it. In it lay a golden tarn disk.

  “You are mad to come in daylight,” called a voice from above. “Put your food in

  the basket, quickly, and be gone! Hope that no one has seen you!”

  I stepped back a few yards.

  I thrust the white cloth in my belt.

  There would be no point in climbing the rope as it could be cut or dropped, or,

  if I were not welcomed at the height of the wall, I could be cut from it there.

  “I am Tarl, of Port Kar,” I called, “a city enemy to Cos.”

  “Do you have food?” called a man. I could see his face now, in one of the

  crenels at the height of the wall, some eighty feet above the embankment at the

  foot of the wall. It was gaunt, and hard.

  “I come from Gnieus Lelius, regent in Ar,” I called. “I bear a message for

  Aemilianus! Admit me!:

  I saw part of a crossbow at one of the other crenels. There crenels, like many,

  were wider on the outside then inside, constituting embrasures. This affords a

  wider range of fire by missile weapons.

  “Do you have food?” called a voice.

  “No!” I said.

  “Go away!” it said.

  (pg.180) The basket, on its rope, maddeningly, drew upward some yards.

  “Admit me!” I called. “Look! I have diplomatic pouch, too, taken from a courier

  of Artemidorus. It may contain matters of moment! Admit me!”

  “It seems you offer us many inducements to admit you,” called a fellow.

  “Admit me!” I cried, urgently. “Do not fire!” I called out to the fellow with

  the crossbow.

  “Go away!” said one of the voices.

  “You would be mad to enter this place,” said another voice.

  “He is a spy, who would see behind our walls, who would inquire into our

  defenses,” said another.

  “No!” I said. “Blindfold me, if you will. Take me to Aemilianus!”

  “You have been seen,” said another fellow, the voice drifting down to me. I saw

  his hand, pointing out, toward the Cosian lines.

  I turned about. I could see one or two fellows standing at the height of the

  trench.

  “Your friends call to you,” said a voice. “Make it back to them, if you can.” I

  saw the crossbow move. Then, in another crenel, I saw another.

  “Do not fire!” I called.

  “Spy!” called one of the fellows.

  “No!” I said.

  “If you were not of Cos, you could not have come through their lines,” he

  called.

  “No!” I said.

  “How came you through the lines?” called another.

  “By trickery,” I said.

  I heard laughter, unpleasant laughter.

  “Admit me!”

  “Return to your friends,” laughed another fellow.

  “I am of Port Kar!” I cried. “I am a courier of Gnieus Lelius. Summon

  Aemilianus, if no other can admit me!”

  “Your friends are in the trench,” called a fellow. “They come to support you!

  perhaps you can make it to the trench. Run!”

  I made no move to approach the trench. I looked back. To (pg.181) be sure, there

  seemed to be movement in the trench. I could see it here and there, from the

  embankment, in the openings between the wooden coverings.

  “Admit me!” I cried. Then I raced, suddenly, to the foot of the wall. Two

  quarrels struck into the embankment where I had stood.

  “Admit me!” I cried upward, from the foot of the wall. It would be hard to be

  struck from the wall in such a place.

  “If you are a friend, show yourself,” called a fellow.

  “Come out where we can see you, friend,” called another voice, enticingly.

  A quarrel then, suddenly, from the direction of the sapping trench chipped the

  wall, beside my head.

  “They are firing on him!” said someone, from above.

  Even before he had spoken two answering quarrels from the wall had leaped toward

  the trench, one skittering off one of the boulders there, then bounding oddly

  away, end over end, to the right, another passing half through some of the

  planking spread over the trench.

  I heard the basket, scraping against the wall, dropping down, on the rope.

  I saw a fellow rise up, in the trench, his bow leveled. I moved, faster, then

  slower, laterally, watching him, toward the rope. His bolt struck the wall,

  flashing against it, ahead of me. He had overled his shot. I then had my hands

  on the rope, above the basket. I swung wildly, kicking away from the wall, and

  was then, for a moment, half climbing, half being drawn upward. “Fire!” I heard

  from the trench. Two more quarrels struck near me. “Fire!” I heard from above. I

  continued upward, sometimes climbing hand over hand, feverishly, as I could, the

  rope momentarily arrested, at other time then, the rope moving rapidly upward,

  doing little more than clinging to it, sometimes, again, both climbing and being

  drawn upward. I swung as I could, too, and kicked away from the wall, that the

  target of the men in the trench would move in more than one plane. More quarrels

  struck about me, bursting chips from the wall, some striking me like stinging

  pebbles, then, at last, after a seemingly endless ascent, hands burning and raw,

  I was at the height of the wall, some eighty feet above the embankment, and

  hands (pg.182) reached out, seized me, and pulled me inward, through a crenel.

  “My thanks!” I gasped.

  I was flung to my stomach on the walkway behind the parapet. Hands held me down.

  My weapons and pouch were removed.

  “Strip him and chain him,” said a voice.

  In a moment, lying on my stomach, on the walkway behind the parapet, I was

  stripped and chained, my hands manacled behind me, a chain running from the

  manacles down to join another chain, one strung between the shackles on my

  ankles.

 
“I am Tarl, of Port Kar,” I said, “a courier, from Gnieus Lelius, regent of Ar!”

  “Hood him,” said a voice. “Use that white cloth.”

  The white cloth I had brought with me, as a truce flag, apparently doubled, or

  folded, was put over my head and tied under my chin.

  “Kneel him,” said the voice.

  I was dragged up, to my knees.

  “Here are the things he had with him,” said a fellow.

  Inside the improvised hood I could see very little. I could make our shapes

  about me.

  “Put a rope on his neck,” said the voice.

  A shape bent toward me. I was neck-roped.

  “Release me,” I said. “Take me to Aemilianus! The message in my pouch is for

  him. He may be, too, interested in the contents of the diplomatic pouch. I do

  not know. I took it from a courier of Artemidorus, south of here, on the Vosk

  Road, at an inn, the Crooked tarn!”

  “Hooded, and on a rope, I do not think you will learn much of our defenses,”

  said a voice.

  “Take me to Aemilianus,” I said.

  “Silence, spy,” said a voice.

  “I am not a spy!” I said, angrily.

  “Let us hang him,” said a voice. “Let us show the sleen of Cos that we do not

  waste time with spies.”

  “I am not a spy!” I said.

  “Good,” said another voice, approvingly.

  “Fasten the rope here,” said a fellow, to my left, “and (pg.183) show them that

  their spy is thrown over the wall, hanging against the stone, within Ihn of his

  entry into the city.

  “Excellent!” said another.

  I felt the rope jerked on my neck.

  I felt hands on my arms.

  “They fired upon me! You saw it!’ I said.

  “But they did not hit you,” said a fellow.

  “Would you rather that they had?” I asked.

  “It might have been better for you, had they done so,” said another, grimly.

  I was pulled to my feet.

  “The rope is secure,” said a voice.

  “I came under a flag of truce,” I said. “Is this how those of Ar’s Station

  respect the conventions of war?”

  The hands of the men were tight upon my arms. I could feel a breeze through the

  crenel to my left. Through the whiteness of the hood I could make out the

  opening.

  “Hold,” said a voice.

  I heard the rope being unfastened. It was now, again, a tether.

  “We had almost forgotten our honor,” said the voice. “We are grateful to you for

  having recalled it to us. To be sure, it shames us that this should have been

  done by a sleen of Cos. Yet it does not matter. That it should be remembered is

  what is most important.”

  “I had not realized until now,” said a man, “that we had suffered so much. I had

  not realized until now that we had been so deeply hurt, that our wounds were so

  grievous.”

  “Behind the trenches I think the Cosians are forming,” said a fellow.

  “It is the morning assault,” said another fellow, wearily.

  “Stranger,” said the voice which had first spoken of honor to me, “know that you

  have been spared now, in your entry into the city, because of the flag you bore.

  And tragically, I confess, nearly it was not so. But, now, beneath its aegis,

  beneath its shelter, guarded within its folds, you are as safe as through ringed

  by walls of iron. The honor of Ar’s Station has it so. I give you thus the

  option, if you wish it, to return to those of Cos.”

  “Take me to Aemilianus,” I said.

  “I think you are a spy,” he said.

  (pg.184) “I am not a spy,” I said.

  “You understand that if you go now to Aemilianus,” he said, “that you forfeit

  the protection of the flag you bore.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Take him to Aemilianus,” he said.

  “Give me something,” I said, as I was turned to the side, “if even a shred of my

  tunic, to cover myself.”

  “There are many Cosians forming,” said a fellow, near the wall.

  “You came as a spy,” said the voice. “It is to Aemilianus as a caught spy that

  you will go.”

  Hands closed tightly on my arms.

  “Take him away,” said the voice.

  11 Aemilianus

  (pg.185) “There,” said a voice.

  I was forced down, on a hard surface, tiles, I thought, on my knees.

  The white cloth I had used as the truce flag was removed from my head. I

  blinked, looking about myself.

  I knelt, on tiles, to be sure, before a curule chair, on a stepped dais.

  To one side of the curule chair, kneeling below it, on one of the broad steps,

  collared and briefly tunicked, was a pale, blond slave.

  “You may leave us, Shirley,” said the man on the chair.

  “Yes, Master,” she said. Her head had been turned to the side, and her eyes had

  been averted. I was a free man and, had she looked upon me, without permission,

  she might have been punished. Slave girls do, upon the streets, occasionally

  look upon stripped free prisoners, sometimes even taunting them, and such, but

  they are not likely to do so, without permission, beneath the very eyes of their

  masters.

  The name ‘Shirley’ is an Earth-girl name but I suspected that she was not an

  Earth girl. Her accent, at any rate, did not suggest it. She might have been of

  Earth, of course. After a few months on Gor it often becomes very difficult to

  distinguish Earth girls from Gorean girls, at least without a careful

  examination of their bodies, for example, for fillings in the teeth, or an

  inquiry, they kneeling before you, into their (pg.186) specific antecedents.

  Goreans sometimes give Earth-girl names to Gorean girls, as they think of them

  as excellent slave names. To a Gorean ear names such as ‘Jean’ or ‘Joan’ have an

  exotic flavor, and are regarded as fit names for slaves brought in from such

  far-off, mysterious places as “Tennessee” or “Oregon.” Such girls, too, coming

  to understand the sensuous connotations of their names on Gor come to regard

  them then no longer as common, or plain, names, but, like the Goreans, as

  thrilling, beautiful names, and come to revel in them, and try to live up to

  them, as superb slaves. To be sure, they know they wear them now only as slave

  names, theirs only by the will of a master.

  It is true that Earth girls are regarded as slave stock by Goreans, but I think,

  at least these days, that there is nothing special about this, really. As the

  girl left I watched her. She was quite thin. Once, I through, she would probably

  have been much more fully bodied in her beauty. Once she might have been

  luscious, perhaps even voluptuous. By such signs I conjectured the paucity of

  rations in Ar’s Station. I suppose, however, that she, and others like her,

  might be quickly enough returned to a former condition of desirability by so />
  simple a means as the restoration of a proper diet, both with respect to

  quantity and quality. By such means do dealers prepare women, grateful for food,

  to bring higher prices upon the slave block. Her blond hair, too, had been

  cropped. In these times, I suspected there would be few unsheared free women. In

  the case of the slave girls, of course, their hair would simply be taken from

  them. The hair of the free women, on the other hand, would presumably have been

  donated, as a contribution to the defense of the city.

  “Yes,” said the fellow sitting on the curule chair, a strongly built man,

  through one now seemingly weary, one with a bloodied bandage about his head,”

  she was once quite beautiful.”

  I turned my attention to the man. He had, with him, on his lap, the diplomatic

  pouch, opened, and the letter cylinder taken from my pouch. It had been sealed

  with wax and ribbon, the wax bearing the seal of Gnieus Lelius, regent of Ar.

  (pg.187) “Are you Aemilianus,” I asked, “commander in Ar’s Station?”

  “I am,” he said, looking at me.

  I glanced toward the retreated slave, who had turned to regard me.

  The fellow on the curule chair smiled. “She has dared to look upon you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “They are so curious,” he said.

  I did not respond.

  “Shirley!” he called, without turning to look at her.

  “Master?” she answered, from near a side door in the back.

  “Remind me, tonight,” he said, “to whip you.”

  “Yes, Master!” she sobbed. She turned, then, and fled from the room.

  “They are women,” I said. “They cannot help themselves.”

  “I do not object that she did what she did,” he said. “It is only that, as she

  has done it, she is to be whipped.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Even in hard times,” he said, “it is good to maintain discipline.”

  “Doubtless,” I said.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You are in the citadel,” he said.

  “I thought I might be,” I said. It seemed a likely place to house the

  headquarters of the city.

  “You are Tarl, a fellow of Port Kar,” he asked, “as you told my men upon the