The Wintering If I had hoped for an easy answer to the riddles which concerned me, or a swift end to my search for the egg of Priest-Kings, I was disappointed, for I learned nothing of either for months.

I had hoped to go to Turia, there to seek the answer to the mystery of the message collar, but it was not to be, at least until the spring.

"It is the Omen Year," had said Kamchak of the Tuchuks.

The herds would circle Turia, for this was the portion of the Omen Year called the Pa.s.sing of Turia, in which the Wagon Peoples Bather and begin to move toward their winter pastures; the second portion of the Omen Year is the Winter- ing, which takes place far north of Turia, the equator being approached in this hemisphere, of course, from the south; the third and final portion of the Omen Year is the Return to Curia, which takes place in the spring, or as the Wagon Peoples have it, in the Season of Little Gra.s.s. It is in the spring that the omens are taken, regarding the possible elec- tion of the Ubar San, the One Ubar, he who would be Ubar of all the Wagons, of all the Peoples.

I did manage, however, from the back of the kailla, which I learned to ride, to catch a glimpse of distant, high-walled, nine-gated Turia.

It seemed a lofty, fine city, white and shimmering, rising "Be patient, Tart Cabot," said Kamchak, beside me on his

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kaiila. "In the spring there will be the games of Love War and I will go to Turia, and you may then, if you wish, accompany me."

"Good," I said.

I would wait. It seemed, upon reflection, the best thing to do. The mystery of the message collar, intriguing as it might be, was of secondary importance. For the time I put it from my mind. My main interests, my primary objective, surely lay not in distant Turia, but with the wagons.

I wondered on what Kamchak had called the games of Love War, said to take place on the Plains of a Thousand Stakes. I supposed, in time, that I would learn of this.

"After the games of Love War," said Kamchak, "the omens win be taken."

I nodded, and we rode back to the herds.

There had not been, I knew, a Ubar San in more than a hundred years. It did not seem likely, either, that one would be elected in the spring. Even in the time I had been with the wagons I had gathered that it was only the implicit truce of the Omen Year which kept these four fierce, warring peoples from lunging at one another's throats, or more exactly put, at one another's bask. Naturally, as a Koroban, and one with a certain affection for the cities of Gor, particularly those of the north, particularly Ko-ro-ba, Ar, Thentis and Tharna, I was not disappointed at the likelihood that a Ubar San would not be elected. Indeed, I found few who wished a Ubar San to be chosen. The Tuchuks, like the other Wagon Peoples, are intensely independent. Yet, each ten years, the omens are taken. I originally regarded the Omen Year as a rather pointless inst.i.tution, but I came to see later that there is much to be said for it: it brings the Wagon Peoples together from time to time, and in this time, aside from the simple values of being together, there is much bask trading and some exchange of women, free as well as slave; the bask trading genetically freshens the herds and I expect much the same thing, from the point of view of biology, can be said of the exchange of the women; more Importantly, perhaps, for one can always steal women and bask, the Omen Year provides an inst.i.tutionalized possibility for the uniting of the Wagon Peoples in a time of crisis, should they be divided and threatened. I think that those of the Wagons who inst.i.tuted the Omen Year, more than a thousand years ago, were wise men.

How was it, I wondered, that Kamchak was going to Tigris in the spring?

I sensed him to be a man of importance with the wagons.

There were perhaps negotiations to be conducted, perhaps having to do with what were called the games of Love War, or perhaps having to do with trade.

I had learned, to my surprise, that trade did occasionally take place with Turia. Indeed, when I had learned this, it had fired my hopes that I might be able to approach the city in the near future, hopes which, as it turned out, were disap- pointed, though perhaps well so.

The Wagon Peoples, though enemies of Turia, needed and wanted her goods, in particular materials of metal and cloth, which are highly prized among the Wagons. Indeed, even the chains and collars of slave girls, worn often by captive Turian girls themselves, are of Turian origin. The Turians, on the other hand, take factor or trade in trade for their goods obtained by manu- with other cities princ.i.p.ally the horn and hide of the bask, which naturally the Wagon Peoples, who live on the bask, have in plenty. The Turians also, I note, receive other goods from the Wagon Peoples, who tend to be fond of the raid, goods looted from caravans perhaps a thousand pasangs from the herds, indeed some of them even on the way to and from Turia itself. From these raids the Wagon Peoples obtain a miscellany of goods which they are willing to barter to the Turians, jewels, precious metals, spices, colored table salts, harnesses and saddles for the ponderous tharlarion, furs of small river animals, tools for the field, scholarly scrolls, inks and papers, root vegetables, dried fish, powdered medicines, ointments, perfume and wom- en, customarily plainer ones they do not wish to keep for themselves; prettier wenches, to their dismay, are usually kept with the wagons; some of the plainer women are sold for as little as a bra.s.s cup; a really beautiful girl, particularly if of free birth and high caste, might bring as much as forty pieces of gold; such are, however, seldom sold; the Wagon Peoples enjoy being served by civilized slaves of great beauty and high station; during the day, in the heat and dust, such girls will care for the wagon bask and gather fuel for the dung fires; at night they will please their masters. The Wagon Peoples sometimes are also willing to barter silks to the Turians, but commonly they keep these for their own slave girls, who wear them in the secrecy of the wagons; free women, incidentally, among the Wagon Peoples are not per misted to wear silk; it is claimed by those of the Wagons, delightfully I think, that any woman who loves the feel of silk on her body is, in the secrecy of her heart and blood, a slave girl, whether or not some master has yet forced her to don the collar. It might be added that there are two items which the Wagon Peoples will not sell or trade to Turia, one is a living bask and the other is a girl from the city itself, though the latter are sometimes, for the sport of the young men, allowed, as it is said, to run for the city. They are then hunted from the back of the kaiila with bole and thongs.

The winter came fiercely down on the herds some days before expected, with its fierce snows and the long winds that sometimes have swept twenty-five hundred pasangs across the prairies; snow covered the gra.s.s, brittle and brown already, and the herds were split into a thousand fragments, each with its own riders, spreading out over the prairie, pawing through the snow, snuffing about? pulling up and chewing at the gra.s.s, mostly worthless and frozen. The animals began to die and the keening of women, crying as though the wagons were burning and the Turians upon them, carried over the prairies. Thousands of the Wagon Peoples, free and slave, dug in the snow to find a handful of gra.s.s to feed their animals.

Wagons had to be abandoned on the prairie, as there was no time to train new bask to the harness, and the herds must needs keep moving.

At last, seventeen days after the first snows, the edges of the herds began to reach their winter pastures far north of Turia, approaching the equator from the south. Here the snow was little more than a frost that melted in the after- noon sun, and the gra.s.s was live and nourishing. Still farther north, another hundred pasangs, there was no snow and the peoples began to sing and once more dance about their fires of bask dung.

"The bask are safe," Kamchak had said. I had seen strong men leap from the back of the kaiila and, on their knees, tears in their eyes, kiss the green, living gra.s.s. "The bosk are safe," they had cried, and the cry had been taken up by the women and carried from wagon to wagon, "IT he bosk are safer"

This year, perhaps because it was the Omen Year, the Wagon Peoples did not advance farther north than was necessary to ensure the welfare of the herds. They did not, in fact, even cross the western Cartius, far from cities, which they often do, swimming the bask and kaiila, floating the wagons, the men often crossing on the backs of the seam,, ming bask. It was the Omen Year, and not a year, apparently, in which to risk war with far peoples, particularly not those?

Of cities like Ar, whose warriors had mastered the tarn and'

might, from the air, have wrought great destruction on the herds and wagons The Wintering was not unpleasant, although, even so far north, the days and nights were often quite chilly; the Wagon Peoples and their slaves as well, wore boskhide and furs during this time; both male and female, slave or free, wore furred boots and trousers, coats and the flopping, ear-flapped caps that tied under the chin; in this time there was often no way to mark the distinction between the free woman and the slave girl, save that the hair of the latter must needs be unbound; in some cases, of course, the Turian collar was visible, if worn on the outside of the coat, usually under the furred collar; the men, too, free and slave, were dressed similarly, save that the Kajiri, or he-slaves, wore shackles, usually with a run of about a foot of chain.

On the back of the kaiila, the black lance in hand, bending down in the saddle, I raced past a wooden wand fixed in the earth, on the top of which was placed a dried tospit, a small, wrinkled, yellowish-white peachlike fruit, about the size of a plum, which grows on the tospit bush, patches of which are indigenous to the drier valleys of the western Cartius. They are bitter but edible.

"Well done!" cried Kamchak as he saw the tospit, unsplit, impaled halfway down the shaft of the lance, stopped only by my fist and the retaining strap.

Such a thrust was worth two points for us.

I heard Elizabeth Cardwell's cry of joy as she leaped into the air, clumsy in the furs, clapping her hands. She carried, on a strap around her neck, a sack of tospits. I looked at her and smiled. Her face was vital and flushed with excitement.

"Tospit!" called Conrad of the Ka.s.sars, the Blood People, and the girl hastened to set another fruit on the wand.

There was a thunder of kaiila paws on the worn turf and Conrad, with his red lance, nipped the tospit neatly from the tip of the wand, the lance point barely pa.s.sing into it, he having drawn back at the last instant.

"Well done!" I called to him. My own thrust had been full thrust, accurate enough but rather heavily done, in war, such a thrust might have lost me the lance, leaving it in the _.

60.

body of an enemy. His thrust was clearly, I acknowledged, worth three points.

Kamchak then rode, and he, like Conrad of the Ka.s.sars, deftly took the fruit from the wand; indeed, his lance enter- ing the fruit perhaps a fraction of an inch less than had Conrad's. It was, however, also a three-point thrust.

The warrior who then rode with Conrad thundered down the lane in the turf.

There was a cry of disappointment, as the lance tip sheared the fruit, not retaining it, knocking it from the wand.

It was only a one-point thrust.

Elizabeth cried out again, with pleasure, for she was of the wagon of Kamchak and Tarl Cabot.

The rider who had made the unsatisfactory thrust suddenly whirled the kaiila toward the girl, and she fell to her knees, realizing she should not have revealed her pleasure at his failure, putting her head to the gra.s.s. I tensed, but Kamchak laughed, and held me back. The rider's kaiila was now rearing over the girl, and he brought the beast to rest. With the tip of his lance, stained with the tospit fruit, he cut the strap that held the cap on her head, and then brushed the cap off; then, delicately, with its tip, he lifted her chin that she might look at him.

"Forgive me, Master," said Elizabeth Cardwell.

Slave girls, on Gor, address all free men as master, though, of course, only one such would be her true master.

I was pleased with how well, in the past months, Elizabeth had done with the language. Of course, Kamchak had rented three Turian girls, slaves, to train her; they had done so, binding her wrists and leading her about the wagons, teaching her the words for things, beating her with switches when she made mistakes; Elizabeth had learned quickly. She was an intelligent girl.

It had been hard for Elizabeth Cardwell, particularly the first weeks. It is not an easy transition to make, that from a bright, lovely young secretary in a pleasant, fluorescently lit, air-conditioned office on Madison Avenue in New to a slave girl in the wagon of Tuchuk warrior.

When her interrogation had been completed, and she had collapsed on the dais of Kutaituchik, crying out in misery "La Kajira. La Kajira!" Kamchak had folded her, still weep- ing, clad in the Sirik, in the richness of the pelt of the red tart in which she had originally been placed before us.

As I had followed him from the dais I had seen Kutaituchik, the interview ended, absently reaching into the small golden box of kanda strings, his eyes slowly beginning to close.

Kamchak, that night, chained Elizabeth Cardwell in his wagon, rather than beneath it to the wheel, running a short length of chain from a slave ring set in the floor of the wagon box to the collar of her Sirik. He had then carefully wrapped her, shivering and weeping, in the pelt of the red larl.

She lay there, trembling and moaning, surely on the verge of hysteria. I was afraid the next phase of her condition would be one of numbness, shock, perhaps of refusal to believe what had befallen her, madness.

Kamchak had looked at me. He was genuinely puzzled by what he regarded as her unusual emotional reactions. He was, of course, aware that no girl, Gorean or otherwise, could be expected to take lightly a sudden reduction to an abject and complete slavery, particularly considering what that would mean among the wagons.

He did, however, regard Miss Cardwell's responses as rather peculiar, and somewhat reprehensible. Once he got up and kicked her with his furred boot, telling her to be quiet.

She did not, of course, understand Gorean, but his intention and his impatience were sufficiently clear to preclude the necessity of a translation. She stopped moaning, but she continued to shiver, and sometimes she sobbed. I saw him take a slave whip from the wall and approach her, and then turn back and replace it on the wall. I was surprised that he had not used it, and wondered why. I was pleased that he had not beaten her, for I might have interfered. I tried to talk to Kamchak and help him to understand the shock that the girl had undergone, the total alteration of her life and circ.u.mstances, unexplained finding herself alone on the prairie, the Tuchuks, the capture, the return to the Wagons, her examination in the gra.s.sy avenue, the Sirik, the interro- gation, the threat of execution, then the fact, difficult for her to grasp, of being literally an owned slave girl. I tried to explain to Kamchak that her old world had not prepared her for these things, for the slaveries of her old world are of a different kind, more subtle and invisible, thought by some not even to exist.

Kamchak said nothing, but then he got up and from a chest in the wagon he took forth a goblet and filled it with an amber fluid, into which he shook a dark, bluish powder. He .~.i _.

62.

NOMADS OF GOR.

then took Elizabeth Cardwell in his left arm and with his right hand gave her the drink. Her eyes were frightened, but she drank. In a few moments she was asleep.

Once or twice that night, to Kamchak's annoyance and my own loss of sleep, she screamed, jerking at the chain, but we discovered that she had not awakened.

I supposed that on the morrow Kamchak would call for the Tuchuk Iron Master, to brand what he called his little barbarian; the brand of the Tuchuk slave, incidentally, is not the same as that generally used in the cities. which for girls, is the first letter of the expression Kajira in cursive script. but the sign of the four bask horns that of the Tuchuk standard; the brand of the four bask horns, set in such a manner as to somewhat resemble the letter "H." is only about an inch high; the common Gorean brand, on the other hand, is usually an inch and a half to two inches high; the brand of the four bask horns, of course, is also used to mark the bask of the Tuchuks, but there, of course, it is much larger, forming roughly a six-inch square; following the branding, I supposed that Kamchak would have one of the tiny nose rings affixed; all Tuchuk females, slave or free, wear such rings; after these things there would only remain, of course, an engraved Turian collar and the clothing of Elizabeth Cardwell Kajir.

In the morning I awakened to find Elizabeth sitting, red- eyed, at the side of the wagon, leaning back against one of the poles that supported the wagon hides, wrapped in the pelt of the red larl.

She looked at me. "I'm hungry," she said.

My heart leaped. The girl was stronger than I had thought. I was very pleased. On the dais of Kutaituchik I had feared that she might not be able to survive, that she was too weak for the world of Gor. I had been troubled that the shock of her radical transposition between worlds, coupled with her reduction to servitude, might disarrange her mind, might shatter her and make her worthless to the Tuchuks, who might then have simply cast her to the kaiila and herd sleen. I saw now, however, that Elizabeth Cardwell was strong, that she would not go mad, that she was determined to live.

"Kamchak of the Tuchuks is your master," I said. "He will eat first. Afterward, if he chooses, you will be fed."

She leaned back against the wagon pole. " right," she said.

When Kamchak rolled out of his furs Elizabeth, involun tartly, shrank back, until the pole would permit her to with- draw no further.

Kamchak looked at me. "How is the little barbarian this morning?" he asked.

"Hungry," I said.

"Excellent," he said.

He looked at her, her back tight against the wagon pole, clutching the pelt of the larl about her with her braceleted hands.

She was, of course, different from anything he had ever owned. She was his first barbarian. He did not know exactly what to make of her. He was used to girls whose culture had prepared them for the very real possibility of slavery, though perhaps not a slavery as abject as that of being a wench of Tuchuks. The Gorean girl is, even if free, accustomed to slavery; she will perhaps own one or more slaves herself; she knows that she is weaker than men and what this can mean; she knows that cities fall and caravans are plundered; she knows she might even, by a sufficiently bold warrior, be captured in her own quarters and, bound and hooded, be carried on tarnback over the walls of her own city. More- over, even if she is never enslaved, she is familiar with the duties of slaves and what is expected of them; if she should be enslaved she will know, on the whole, what is expected of her, what is permitted her and what is not; moreover, the Gorean girl is literally educated, fortunately or not, to the notion that it is of great importance to know how to please men; accordingly, even girls who will be free companions, and never slaves, learn the preparation and serving of exotic dishes, the arts of walking, and standing and being beautiful the care of a man's equipment, the love dances of their city, and so on. Elizabeth Cardwell, of course, knew nothing of these things. I was forced to admit that she was, on almost all counts, pretty much what Kamchak thought a little barbarian. But, to be sure, a very pretty little barbarian.

Kamchak snapped his fingers and pointed to the rug, Elizabeth then knelt to him, clutching the pelt about her, and put her head to his feet.

She was slave.

To my surprise Kamchak, for no reason that he explained to me, did not clothe Elizabeth Cardwell Kajir, much to the irritation of other slave girls about the camp. Moreover, he did not brand her, nor fix in her nose the tiny golden ring of the Tuchuk women, nor did he even, incomprehensibly, put her in the Turian collar. He did not permit her, of course, to bind or dress her hair; it must be worn loose; that alone, naturally, was sufficient to mark her slave among the wag- ons.

For clothing he permitted her to cut and sew, as well as she could, a sleeveless garment from the pelt of the red larl.

She did not sew well and it amused me to hear her cursing at the side of the wagon, bound now only by a collar and chain to the slave ring. time after time sticking the bone needle into her fingers as it emerged through the hide, or fouling the leather-threaded st.i.tches, which would either be too tight, wrinkling and bunching the fur, or too loose, exposing what might eventually lie beneath it. I gathered that girls such as Elizabeth Cardwell, used to buying machine-made, presewn garments on Earth, were not as skilled as they might be in certain of the homely crafts which used to be a.s.sociated with homemaking, crafts which might, upon occasion, it seemed, come In handy.

At last she had finished the garment, and Kamchak unchained her that she might rise and put it on.

Not surprisingly, but to my amus.e.m.e.nt, I noted that it hung serveral inches below her knees, indeed, only about four inches or so above her ankles. Kamchak took one look and, with a quiva, shortened it considerably,-indeed, until it hung even more briefly than had the quite short, delightful yellow shift in which she had been captured.

"But it was the length of the leather dresses of the Tuchuk women," Elizabeth had dared to protest.

I translated.

"But you are slave," had said Kamchak.

I translated his remark.

She dropped her head, defeated.

Miss Cardwell had slim, lovely legs. Kamchak, a man, had desired to see them. Besides being a man, of course, Kamchak was her master; he owned the wench; thus he would have his desire. I will admit if need he that I was not displeased with his action. I did not particularly mind the sight of the lovely Miss Cardwell moving about the wagon.

Kamchak made her walk back and forth once or twice, and spoke to her rather sharply about her posture, then, to the surprise of both Miss Cardwell and myself, he did not chain her, but told her she might walk about the camp unattended, warning her only to return before dusk and the release of the herd sleen. She dropped her head shyly, and smiled, and sped from the wagon. I was pleased to see her that much free.

"You like her?" I asked.

Kamchak grinned. "She is only a little barbarian," he said.

Then he looked at me. "It is Aphris of Turia I want," he said.