Conspirators of Gor (9 page)

“I am frightened,” said Tela. “Something is wrong.”

We dared not change position, as we had not received permission to do so.

“Be as you would,” said Tela.

We looked up.

Usually Tela’s switch dangled from her wrist.

It was not there now.

She was clearly frightened, and her alarm spread to the rest of us, not now serving. I was the only barbarian in the room. We feared Tela, for she was first girl, our switch mistress. I had never seen Tela frightened before, except before the masters. There were two of us in the outer room, who would be, as far as I knew, serving.

“What is wrong, Mistress?” asked Midice.

“The guests have fled,” she said.

I did not understand this, for the tables, the games, did not close until the early morning.

“I fear the masters are undone,” she said. “They have departed.”

“What is going on, Mistress?” asked Midice.

“Listen!” said Tela.

“Oh!” whispered Lucia.

“The drums of guardsmen,” said Daphne.

“They are coming closer,” said Cara.

“Closer!” wept Portia. I gathered she had had dealings with guardsmen before. She seemed very much afraid.

“What of the masters?” said Dina. She wore the tiny Dina brand, “the slave flower.” The Dina is a familiar slave brand, but not nearly as common as the cursive Kef. The girls who wear that brand are often called “Dina,” doubtless from the mark.

“I do not think they will escape the city,” said Tela.

Our house was one of several on the Street of Chance in Ar.

Outside the drums had stopped, and we heard shouting, and pounding, from the sound of it, the pounding of spear butts, on the door.

“You know nothing!” said Tela.

I sensed that Faia and Tirza, in the outer room, must have hastened to the door, and, struggling, removed the long, heavy beam which secured it. I would later learn that the masters, as they departed, had instructed them to set the beam in place. In this, they may have been hoping to gain time.

The doors burst open and there were heavy footsteps, as of high, military sandals. I heard Faia and Tirza scream. There were shouts, and a crashing, and piling, of furniture.

In a moment I sensed fire, and, through the door, saw wild shadows cast on the walls, of armed men, breaking tables, hurling them to the center of the room. I smelled smoke.

“Run, run!” said Tela, hastening back, into the larger room.

We, in our serving tunics, crying out with fear, hurried out, into the larger room. Smoke was now billowing from the flaming heap in the center of the room, the tables, the wheels, the boards, the boxes of gaming pieces. We fled toward the welcome of the opened door, but our passage was blocked by a lowered spear.

“Where is your master?” said a voice.

“Masters!” said Tela. “But we do not know!”

Addressed by a man, we all knelt.

My eyes stung.

I began to cough.

“Who is first girl?” asked the man.

“I am,” said Tela, “if it pleases Master.” She was trembling.

“How many are there?” asked the man.

“Eleven, including myself,” wept Tela.

The soldiers, or guardsmen, despite the fire, were pulling down hangings, and prying loose panels from the wall. Two inspected our holding room, and two others rushed to the kitchen, and storage rooms. Then they, and the others, their work done, the premises rummaged through, the decor torn, scratched, and ravaged, exited behind he before whom we knelt, who barred our way.

“We are slaves,” wept Tela. “Have mercy on us! Let us out!”

An officer appeared behind the fellow who barred the door. “Close them inside, and block the door,” said the officer. “They are not stupid. They know what was transpiring here.”

“No, Masters!” cried Tela, from her knees. “We know nothing!”

“We are ignorant!” cried Faia.

“Who knows what transpires with masters?” cried Midice.

“We are only slaves!” cried Tirza.

“Slaves!” wept Lucia.

“We dared not inquire, Master,” said Daphne. “Curiosity is not becoming in a slave!”

The heavy door was swung shut before us. We rose to our feet, coughing, and weeping, and screaming, struck at it, pulled at it, tried to open it.

“The back is chained shut,” cried Cara.

We sank down, behind the door, scratching at it.

I was blinded with smoke, half strangled, with a lack of air. We could not help who had bought us.

I slipped to my belly before the door.

I put out my fingers, and touched the wood.

Then suddenly the doors swung back, and I saw light, and smoke billowed into the street.

My lungs drew in the bright, clean air of Gor.

A hand seized me by the hair and drew me forth on all fours, and then thrust me down to the street, on my belly.

“Fasten your hands in your hair,” said a man.

We lay prone, in a line, side by side. Midice was to my left, and Luta, who had spoken to me so contemptuously in the holding room, was to my right. I thought to myself, “See, Luta, we are not so different.”

I was aware of sandaled feet stepping about, amongst us.

We did not look up.

After a time, a voice said, “A silver tarsk, for the lot.”

“Very well,” said the officer, “but see that they are sold in the Tarsk Market.”

“A stipulation?” said a voice.

“Yes,” said the officer.

“Done,” said the voice.

I heard a clink of coins, and, shortly thereafter, I felt a rope looped about my left ankle, snugly, and knotted, tightly, and then passed to Midice, on my left, and thence to those beyond her.

“A silver tarsk!” I thought. “We have been given away!”

“Keep your hands fastened in your hair,” said a fellow.

Then another said, “Kajirae, up!”

We rose to our feet.

I stole a glance at he who seemed to have completed the purchase, in which I was an item. He was a small man, in a dirty white tunic, with a yellow sash.

I kept my hands in my hair, while the tunic was cut from me. We were then, in ankle coffle, herded through the lower streets of Ar, to the Tarsk Market.

The first step is made with the left foot.

Chapter Seven

The cages, of heavy, cable-like woven wire, are made for tarsks, not kajirae. One cannot stand in them. They are long, narrow, and low. Thus, more than one can be placed on a sideless, flat-bedded wagon, roped in place. Too, like the common slave cages designed for kajirae, they may be stacked.

I hooked my fingers in the wire, and looked out, frightened, from my knees. The Tarsk Market has its name, obviously enough, I suppose, because it is a general market for tarsks. Certainly the smell of tarsk was all about. And there was little doubt, from the condition of the cage, that the previous occupants of the cage had been tarsks.

Needless to say, it is only low slaves who are vended from such a market.

I lay down in the cage, on my right side, in the straw, facing the back wall of the warehouse.

How vulnerable we were, as slaves!

But, had we been free women I did not doubt but what we would have been abandoned, left in the house, to perish in the flames.

The marks on our thighs, our collars, had saved us. We had been saved, but only as animals.

It is often safer to be a slave than a free person. Who, for example, would bother slaying a tarsk, or a kaiila?

Instead, one would herd them, or rope them. One would appropriate them.

It is for such a reason that free women, trapped in a burning city, a fallen city, being sacked, will not unoften steal collars from their girls, and fasten them on their own necks, hoping to be taken for slaves, to be spared as slaves.

I had recognized two of the soldiers, and the officer. They had been patrons of the house.

They had lost heavily.

Of course we were guilty! Did we not know of the manipulation of the tables’ spins, of the dishonest stones, the fraudulent dice, the ostraka which, to the informed eye, could be read?

Did we not invite in the patrons, at the door, with our smiles, the glances over our shoulders, our fingers lightly touching our brands beneath the cloth, not silk, but rep cloth, for ours was a shabby den for its purposes. We served as the slaves we were in the wide, low-ceilinged, ill-lit interior of the outer room. We would bring the gamesters paga and ka-la-na, and platters of meat and bread, and cakes and sweets, to keep them at the tables. We pretended zestful enthusiasm for their playing, as if it might be our own. How we rubbed against them, so inadvertently, laughed, joked, touched their arms, and hands, applauded their boldness, pretended dismay at a loss, pretended chagrin and sorrow when they made to leave the tables. Rather they should choose and again match ostraka, hazard another turn of the wheel, another placement of the stones, another roll of the dice! We must serve our paga and ka-la-na modestly, of course, for the men must be kept at the games. Indeed, we served it in the manner that Eve, Jane, and I had been instructed by Mrs. Rawlinson to serve beverages at the party, kneeling, our head down, extending the goblet, held in both hands, between our extended arms. I suspected that Mrs. Rawlinson, at the party, had been amused, seeing us so. This posture and attitude, I suspected, was not unknown to her. Perhaps she, watching, envisioned us so serving at another time, in another locale. But even so, would not anyone seeing us so have found the behavior interesting and not without meaning? Did it not seem clear, the sort of female who must serve so? But even so, our service must be modest. We must not so excite the men, that they might be distracted. We were not paga slaves who, if too frequently spurned, may expect their master’s whip after closing. But more than once I had felt Tela’s switch, and had been driven from the outer room, to the holding area, weeping and shamed, while the men laughed, to be chained, supperless, to the ring by my mat. I could not help myself. I was now other than I had been on Earth. Men had seen to that.

How the fellow who had accompanied me in the van would have been amused, to see his prisoner, the vain, aristocratic young lady, indeed, the debutant, afflicted by need, slave need!

As the reader, if reader there may be, may have gathered, I had been much troubled on Earth, not knowing who I might be, or what might be my nature. I had been alarmed by casual thoughts, sometimes stealing upon me when I was unprepared to resist them, certain frequently recurring daydreams, and surely the strange, wild, unaccountable realities revealed to me in the astonishments of my troubled slumber. It was at such times, that I found it difficult, despite my upbringing, my education, and background, to see myself, and feel myself, as I had learned I should see myself, and feel myself. Who were others, to tell me who I was? How was this a freedom, to be told how to be? How strangely false and unsatisfying seemed the culture to which I was expected to conform, and that which I was expected to perpetuate! Was I truly an artifact, a meaningless, unhappy puppet of a dismal world, responsive to strings I had neither designed nor requested? Perhaps humanity, in its flight from nature, into its thousands of ideologies, superstitions, and pretenses, had unknowingly betrayed itself, building up about itself, brick by subtle brick, its invisible prison, satisfying only those who might profit by its exploitation. But perhaps, too, there are no prisons, other than those we ourselves make, or will accept. It would be interesting if the walls we most fear, within which we feel ourselves the most constrained, within which we most lament, do not exist. In any event, I knew that I carried in my body, as other human beings, a history and a heritage extending back to the first blind, reproducing forms of life, ages prior to the complex marvels of the unicellular organism. To such an organism could biology be irrelevant? Surely templates must exist in the human organism, as in other forms of life, perhaps subtler and vaster, but just as real. Could my behavior, my promptings, what would satisfy me, what I would need, be wholly independent of my form of life, be unique amongst all living forms, merely accidents and oddities imposed upon me from the outside, beginning with the first flash of light, the first breath, the sobbing birth cry of a small, bloody animal? That did not seem likely. The cultures which denied men and women to themselves, for their own purposes, in their own interests, inertial, self-perpetuating structures, productive of misery and alienation, were inventions of recent date, the mere tick of a clock, marking a moment in millenniums. If there was a human nature, had it been fabricated, truly, so recently? Might it not have been formed in other times and other places, a consequence of other conditions, as an entailment of alternative realities? Might we have been formed for one world and precipitated into another, a quite different world, an alien world, one in which our form of life finds itself homeless, finds itself in exile?

I saw no need for civilization and nature to be incompatible, to be enemies.