by John Norman
“You are a forester?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “You are in the precincts of the reserves of Port Kar,” he said.
“I did not know that,” I said.
The great arsenal at Port Kar has its shipyards, as well as its warehouses and wharves. To guarantee a supply of valuable, suitable timber, for example Tur trees for strakes, keels, and planking, needle trees for masts, and tem wood, the rare yellow tem wood, for oars, the arsenal claims and badges selected trees within given ditched areas in the northern forests, which supplies, largely in a raw state, together with others, more processed, such as tars, resins and turpentines, items primarily suitable for naval stores, are transported southward on Thassa to the Tamber gulf. Occasionally, it is rumored, the precincts set aside by Port Kar are raided, or exploited, or poached upon, by other naval powers, particularly those of Tyros and Cos. On the other hand, I frankly doubt that this is true. Both of those formidable maritime ubarates have their own reserves, and extensively so, as does Port Kar. Indeed, predictably, there are similar rumors abroad, I understand, that Port Kar predates on the precincts of Tyros and Cos, and other maritime ubarates. I take these rumors to be false, as well. The last thing Port Kar, or these other powers, needs is a land war, which would have to be primarily conducted by mercenaries. Cos is already overextended in this manner in the south, at Ar. Indeed, there now tends to be little interaction, at least ashore, amongst these powers. Much contest, however, is done for the mastery of certain sea lanes, particularly toward the south, and towards Tabor and Asperiche, and even as far south as Bazi, Anango, and Schendi. If the forests were less abundant, one supposes, of course, that wars would be fought for scarce, possibly dwindling resources. On the other hand the environed trees, and, in particular, those marked or badged, tend on the whole to be left unmolested, in the various precincts.
I was soon to learn, however, that these surmises, however sound in principle, required certain qualifications.
“Your Home Stone,” I said, “is that of Port Kar?”
“Yes,” he said, “but I have not seen her for years.”
“You were not born in the forests?”
“No,” he said. “There are few free women in the forests.”
Slaves are commonly used for work and pleasure. They may be bred, of course, as the livestock they are, at their master’s will. There are slave farms here and there, but they are rare, and often specialize in exotics of various sorts. It is expensive and time consuming to raise female slaves from infancy. It is easier and less expensive to allow others to raise them, so to speak, and then, when convenient, attend to their harvesting and collaring. There are many female slaves on Gor and it is often, to the irritation of venders, and the mortification and chagrin of the slaves, a buyers’ market. Almost all Gorean slaves are captures, having once been free women. The bred slave, other than in the sense that all women are bred slaves, is rare.
One might mention, at this point, a word or two about the stabilization serums, which were developed centuries ago by the green caste, that of the Physicians. By means of these serums a given phase of maturation, say, beauty in a woman, strength in a man, and so on, may be retained indefinitely. The caste of Physicians, long ago, construed ageing as a disease, the “drying and withering disease,” and not as an inevitability or fatality, and so set to work to effect, so to speak, its cure. Scientists of Earth, as I understand it, are only now beginning to sniff about the edges of this problem. A radical shift in perspective, of course, is necessary. And such conceptual reformulations, as is well known, are difficult, rare, and, oddly, often unwelcome. Major truths, no matter what the evidence in their favor, are often, in the beginning, denied, then ridiculed, then battled, and then, if the cultural situation permits, and insufficient numbers of the heretics, or proponents, of the new views are imprisoned or executed, grudgingly accepted, and then, later, hailed as obvious, and those originally most adamant in their opposition, perhaps having run out of penitentiaries and firewood, will claim credit for the discoveries to which they have so reluctantly succumbed. Indeed, can they not find passages in their texts which hint of those very secrets, and other passages which allude to them in now-transparent metaphors?
Claims to the effect, say, that ageing is, or is not, a disease are at least cognitive. One can be right or wrong about them. They should be distinguished from claims, or seeming claims, which are noncognitive, namely, which lack either truth or falsity. For example, it is impossible to confute nonsense for it is neither true nor false, and that which is neither true nor false cannot be shown to be either. The truth or falsity of such things is not hiding. It just does not exist. It must not be lost sight of in these matters, of course, that nonsense is often well armed. Consider poison. It, too, is neither truth nor false, but it is dangerous, and it can kill.
Please forgive the above digression.
I thought it germane to the narrative, however, to refer to the stabilization serums, because of the reference to the rare “bred slave.” Two characteristics of the economic condition, as is well known, are the scarcity of resources and the disutility of labor. Both of these conditions militate against the breeding of slaves, except in special cases, usually exotics, where the rarity is thought to justify the attendant expenditures. It is expensive and troublesome to raise a slave from infancy at one’s own expense and that is why slaves are seldom bred, at least on a wide scale. It is much more convenient to acquire them when they are ready for plucking, so to speak. Why raise the grapes when they are about, and one may pick them, as one sees fit, when they are nicely ready and ripe? To be sure, there are some slave farms which, after a few years, produce their annual crop, so to speak. On the other hand, these enterprises usually require a large initial investment, say, large physical facilities, and hundreds of breeding slaves, male and female, to be carefully matched and crossed, and it normally takes years for the first crop to be readied for market. And such farms, too, commonly deal in exotics. The most common exotic is the virgin slave who has been raised without the knowledge that men exist. Slaves, too, of course, may be bred for a diversity of colors, peltings, facial features, and such.
There is a technique, incidentally, based on a variation of the stabilization serums, for hastening physical maturation, but this is little used because one has then to show for one’s pains only an unusual child. Much can be done with the body, it seems, but little with the mind, saving, perhaps, by Priest-Kings in the recesses of the Sardar. Gorean men are not interested in children, even if they have the bodies of women. They find them uninteresting. Nor will they be of interest until several years have passed. Then they may be interesting, perhaps quite interesting. Humanity, one notes, exceeds physiology. Unfortunately, too, several of these children will suffer confusing stress, as they lack the emotional maturation to relate comprehensibly to the needs and demands of their grown bodies, bodies hastened beyond the horizons of a child’s understanding. Accordingly, this application of the stabilization serums is frowned upon in Gorean society, and in many cities is illegal. A much more benign, or, at least, more acceptable, application of the stabilization serums is founded on a related, and accepted, but opposing principle, the reversibility of all physical processes. In this application, within limits, adjustments to the serums may effect the restoration of youth. The usual application of this technique, as would be expected, is to return a middle-aged, or older, female, to her youth, health, energy, and beauty. As I understand it, this is normally done only with particularly selected women, ones whose once remarkable beauty, this usually determined from old drawings, paintings, and photographs, has faded. Brought to Gor, restored to their earlier vitality and beauty, and collared, they will find themselves, not surprisingly, of great interest on the block. All beauty, of course, is not confined to a particular generation. Would it not be nice to see Thais, Phyrne, Cleopatra, and such on the block?
The usual thing, of course, at least where girls from Earth are concerned, as fr
ee Goreans have access to these serums as a matter of course, is to pick out young, superb, slave fruit, and then bring it to the chains of Gor, and here, in the pens, or, at any rate, early in its bondage, subject it to the stabilization serums, that it may be protected from the ravages of alteration and deterioration. Gorean masters, predictably, tend to favor young, luscious, female slaves. Slavers, too, who wish to buy and sell them, wish them to stay this way, as their value is maintained and, in many cases, improved. Cecily, whom we have met in the preceding pages, was subjected to the serums not on Gor but in the Pleasure Cylinder associated with the Steel World ruled at that time by Agamemnon, Eleventh Face of the Nameless One. Though she was far from immortal, and might even be fed to sleen, she would retain her youth and beauty. To be sure, it would wear a collar.
Doubtless a value judgment is involved in such things.
One might balance, say, freedom, misery, and death, against bondage, happiness, and life.
One might consider two lives. In one, we might suppose a given woman who, with some good fortune, might live a life of, say, some eighty to ninety years, and live to watch her interest and beauty fade, and observe her once lovely body submit to the slow degradations of age, watch it dry, wither, suffer, decay, and weaken until it subsides into an infantile helplessness, characterized by misery and pain, or perhaps a semi-comatose, bedridden state in which, indifferent and drugged, she waits for an encroaching end which she no longer even understands. Conceivably that could be the choice of a given woman. Does it fulfill her? Does it make her happy? Has her life been a good life? Let us hope so. Then let us consider another life. Let us suppose a young woman is brought to Gor, to be collared and sold like meat off a block. She will learn she is property, and a slave. She will find herself at the feet of men, subject to discipline, chains, and the whip. She will find herself the most degraded and despised, and the most valued and sought-after, of women. She will be expected to kneel and obey. She will be dressed in revealing fashions. She will learn to labor. She will learn what it is to be roped, to wear a chain, perhaps to crouch in a tiny, locked cage. She will learn a life of radical and profound sexuality, in which she will be expected to perform for, and well please, a master, in ways which might have been beyond her hopes, dreams, and ken as a mere female of Earth. She will learn what it is, for the first time in her life, to breathe good air, to look into a blue sky, to see an unpolluted sunset or sunrise, to eat fresh and natural foods, to relish the taste of fresh bread, to be grateful for a piece of meat fed to her by a master’s hand, to put her tongue, if permitted, to a wine beyond what she thought might exist. The purpose of her life will be to please her master. She may fall in love with him, but she should be wary of letting him suspect this, and surely should not speak of it, lest she be peremptorily sold. And in this degradation she may live indefinitely. She learns to understand men and herself. She is likely, in most cases, to be rapturously content, and is likely to live in joy, but she is, of course, when all is said and done, only a slave. She is in a collar. It gives her security, and meaning, and happiness, and identity. Perhaps it is right for her. Could that be? But whether it is right for her or not, she cannot remove it. She is slave.
“How is it that a forester,” I said, “claims as his the Home Stone of Port Kar?”
“I once lived there,” he said, “before I took caste. At that time, long ago, there were few, if any, castes in Port Kar. She had no Home Stone. She was a den of thieves, as it was said, a lair of cutthroats, and such, a stinking maze of canals at the marshes, squalid and foul, and malignant.”
“And without honor,” I said.
“Yes,” said he, “and without honor.”
“I think once she had no Home Stone,” I said.
“That is true,” he said. “Can you conceive of a city, a town, a village, a hamlet, without a Home Stone?”
“There are probably such places,” I said.
“Then,” said he, “that changed. In a moment of crisis, in a time of confusion and terror, when a vulnerable Port Cos awaited the onslaught of the combined fleets of Tyros and Cos, the word spread, the startling mysterious word, a word like the flash of lightning, a word striking through the darkness, a word as mighty as the rallying of a thousand battle horns, as swift as the flight of a tarn, that there was now a Home Stone in Port Kar.”
“Jewel of Gleaming Thassa,” I said.
“Tatrix of the Sea,” said he.
“So you chose caste, that of the foresters, and came here, to serve the Home Stone hundreds of pasangs away?”
“The Home Stone of Port Kar may be served here as well as at the gulf, as well as in the shops of the arsenal, as well as on the wharves, as well as on the decks and benches of her ships.”
“True,” I said.
“I am fond of the forests,” he said. “Most are born to their caste. I chose mine.”
“Some do,” I said. To be sure, it is not easy to change caste, nor is it frequently done. Indeed, few would wish to do it. Goreans tend to be extremely devoted to their castes. In a sense they belong to their caste. It is surely part of their self-identity, and not only in their own eyes, but in the eyes of others, as well. And, indeed, there are few caste members who are not convinced that their caste, somehow, is especially important, even that it may be, in some way, the most essential or the most estimable of all. Surely the peasants, supposedly the lowest of all the castes, have this view. They regard themselves as the “ox on which the Home Stone rests,” and, in a sense, they may be right. On the other hand, where would any of the other castes be, or civilization itself, were it not for my own caste, that of the Warriors?
“You are pleased with the forests?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “When you see them,” he said, “you will understand.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
I was not clear why the Priest-Kings had arranged my being in this place at this time. I did suspect, however, that they had their reasons. Little took place in the Sardar which was not planned without an end in view, their own end.
“What is your Home Stone?” he asked.
“It is not that of Cos, or Tyros,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Your accent is different.”
As he was of Port Kar, or claimedly so, I thought it well to establish this matter. A state of war exists between Port Kar and the maritime ubarates of Cos and Tyros. To be sure, sometimes enemies meet affably enough.
“My sword, once, long ago,” I said, “was pledged to the Home Stone of Ko-ro-ba.”
“Long ago,” he said.
“I have served Port Kar,” I said.
“Were you there on the 25th of Se’Kara?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Were you?”
“Yes,” he said.
On the 25th of Se’Kara, in Year One of the Sovereignty of the Council of Captains, a great naval a battle was fought between Port Kar and the fleets of Cos and Tyros. Port Kar, on that occasion, was victorious. In the chronology of Ar, this battle took place in 10,120 C. A., that is “Contasta Ar,” or “From the Founding of Ar.” To be sure, I doubt that anyone really knows when Ar was founded.
“We are then in our way, are we not, ‘trust brothers,’” he said.
“It would seem so,” I said.
Certainly a bond would forever unite those who had been at sea on the 25th of Se’Kara, who had met Tyros and Cos that day.
From that day on they would be different.
“Were you there?” one seaman might ask another in the taverns of Port Kar, over kaissa or paga, the girl of his choice lying bound hand and foot by his table, waiting to be carried over his shoulder to an alcove, at his convenience, or wherever two fellows of that unusual polity might meet, perhaps even on a remote beach, by forests, and one need never ask “Where?”
But he had asked, in a way, had he not, for he had specified the date.
“Have you ever seen the Home Stone of Port Kar?” he asked.
“How is it that I
, one not of Port Kar, should have seen her Home Stone?” I asked. “Have you?”
“Of course,” he said.
“I have heard,” I said, “that it is large and well-carved, and inlaid with silver.”
“With gold,” he said.
“I am not surprised,” I said. “In the cupboards of Port Kar, it is said, one is as likely to find gold as bread.” It was a saying. The corsairs of Port Kar venturing at sea, prowling the merchant routes, unannouncedly visiting coastal towns, and such, often returned to port well freighted with various assortments of goods, fruits and grains, weapons, vessels, tools, leathers, viands and wines, precious metals and stones, diverse jewelries, unguents, perfumes, silks, women, and such. These women are often wholesaled, given their numbers. Not infrequently they are wholesaled south to Schendi, for those of Schendi are fond of white-skinned female slaves. Slavers, of course, come from various cities to bid. Port Kar is well known for the high quality of her “fresh collar meat.” Many of these women, of course, on the other hand, are distributed as gifts by the captains or, more likely, retailed locally, for example sold to various local taverns. The women are usually of high quality or they would not be taken. When they are stripped, if ashore, before embarking, before returning to port, it is determined whether or not they are, as the saying is, “slave beautiful.” If they are not, they are freed and dismissed. If they are, they are taken aboard and chained, sometimes on deck, sometimes in the hold. If at sea, those who are less than “slave beautiful” are separated from the others, as though they might contaminate them, and kept for pot girls, laundresses, kettle-and-mat girls, and such. Interestingly, a kettle-and-mat girl, or such, in the collar, often becomes beautiful. In my view this far exceeds the matter of diet and exercise. In bondage a woman, even a beautiful woman, becomes more beautiful. The collar, it seems, has a remarkable and lovely effect on a woman. It softens her and, in it, in her place in nature, she becomes, as she must, doubtless for the first time in her life, a total woman. Mastered, at a man’s feet, she discovers fulfillments which were beyond her ken as a free woman. She finds an inward meaning and happiness and this is inevitably expressed in her features, bodily attitudes, and behaviors.