Nomads of Gor (2 page)

 
tudes, frightened men and stampeding animals, had come.

 
There, some pasangs distant, I saw columns of smoke rising

 
in the cold air, where fields were burning. Yet the prairie

 
itself was not afire, only the fields of peasants, the fields of

 
men who had cultivated the soil; the prairie grass, such that

 
it might graze the ponderous bask, had been spared.

 
   
Too in the distance I saw dust, rising like black, raging

 
dawn, raised by the hoofs of innumerable animals, not those

 
that fled, but undoubtedly by the bask herds of the Wagon

 
Peoples.

 
   
The Wagon Peoples grow no food, nor do they have

 
manufacturing as we know it. They are herders and it is said,

 
killers. They eat nothing that has touched the dirt. They live

 
on the meat and milk of the bosk. They are among the

 
proudest of the peoples of Gor, regarding the dwellers of the

 
cities of Gor as vermin in holes, cowards who must fly behind

 
walls, wretches who fear to live beneath the broad sky, who

 
dare not dispute with them the open, windswept plains of

 
their world.

 
The bosk, without which the Wagon Peoples could not

 
live, is an oxlike creature. It is a huge, shambling animal,

 
with a thick, humped neck and long, shaggy hair. It has a

 
wide head and tiny red eyes, a temper to match that of a

 
sleen, and two long, wicked horns that reach out from its

 
head and suddenly curve forward to terminate in fearful

 
points. Some of these horns, on the larger animals, measured

 
from tip to tip, exceed the length of two spears.

 
    
Not only does the flesh of the bask and the milk of its

 
cows furnish the Wagon Peoples with food and drink, but

 
its hides cover the domelike wagons in which they dwell; its

 
tanned and sewn skins cover their bodies; the leather of its

 
hump is used for their shields; its sinews forms their thread;

 
its bones and horns are split and tooled into implements of a

 
hundred sorts, from awls, punches and spoons to drinking

 
flagons and weapon tips; its hoofs are used for glues; its oils

 
are used to grease their bodies against the cold. Even the

 
dung of the bask finds its uses on the treeless prairies, being

 
dried and used for fuel. The bask is said to be the Mother of

 
the Wagon Peoples, and they reverence it as such. The man

 
who kills one foolishly is strangled in thongs or suffocated in

 
the hide of the animal he slew; if, for any reason, the man

 
should kill a bask cow with unborn young he is staked out,

 
alive, in the path of the herd, and the march of the Wagon

 
Peoples takes its way over him.

 
    
Now there seemed to be fewer men and animals rushing

 
past, scattered over the prairie; only the wind remained; and

 
the fires in the distance, and the swelling, nearing roll of dust

 
that drifted into the stained sky. Then I began to feel,

 
through the soles of my sandals, the trembling of the earth.

 
The hair on the back of my neck seemed to leap up and I

 
felt the hair on my forearms stiffen. The earth itself was

 
shaking from the hoofs of the bask herds of the Wagon

 
Peoples.

 
They were approaching.

 
Their outriders would soon be in sight.

 
    
I hung my helmet over my left shoulder with the sheathed

 
short sword; on my left arm I bore my shield; in my right

 
hand I carried the Gorean war spear.

   
I began to walk toward the dust in the distance, across the

 
trembling ground.

 
#2

I Make the Acquaintance of the Wagon People

     
As I walked I asked myself why I did so-why I, Tarl

 
Cabot-once of Earth, later a warrior of the Gorean city of

 
Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning, had come here.

 
In the long years that had passed since first I had come to

 
the Counter-liarth I had seen many things, and had know

 
loves, and had found adventures and perils and wonders, but

 
I asked myself if anything I had done was as unreasoning, as

 
foolish as this, as strange.

 
    
Some years before, perhaps between two and five years

 
before, as the culmination of an intrigue enduring centuries,

 
two men, humans from the walled cities of Gor, had, for the

 
sake of Priest-Kings, undertaken a long, secret journey, car-

 
rying an object to the Wagon Peoples, an object bestowed

 
on them by Priest-Kings, to be given to that people that was,

 
to the Goreans' knowledge, the most free, among the fiercest,

 
among the most isolated on the planet-an object that would

 
be given to them for safekeeping.

 
    
The two men who had carried this object, keeping well its

 
secret as demanded by Priest-Kings, had braved many perils

 
and had been as brothers. But later, shortly after the com-

 
pletion of their journey, in a war between their cities, each

 
had in battle slain the other, and thus among men, save

 
perhaps for some among the Wagon Peoples, the secret had

 
been lost. It was only in the Sardar Mountains that I had

 
learned the nature of their mission, and what it was that they

 
had carried. Now I supposed that I alone, of humans on

 
Gor, with the possible exception of some among the Wagon

 
Peoples, knew the nature of the mysterious object which once

 
these two brave men had brought in secrecy to the plains of

 
Turia and, to be truthful, I did not know that even I

 
should I see it-would know it for what I sought.

 
Could I, Tarl Cabot, a human and mortal, find this object

 
and, as Priest-Kings now wished, return it to the SardarÄ

 
return it to the hidden courts of Priest-Kings that it might

 
there fulfill its unique and irreplaceable role in the destiny of

 
this barbaric world, Gor, our Counter-Earth?

 
I did not know.

 
What is this object?

 
    
One might speak of it as many things, the subject of

 
secret, violent intrigues; the source of vast strifes beneath the

 
Sardar, strifes unknown to the men of Gor; the concealed,

 
precious, hidden hope of an incredible and ancient race; a

 
simple germ; a bit of living tissue; the dormant potentiality of

 
a people's rebirth, the seed of godsÄan eggÄthe last and

 
only egg of Priest-Kings.

 
But why was it I who came?

 
Why not Priest-Kings in their ships and power, with their

 
fierce weapons and fantastic devices?

 
Priest-Kings cannot stand the sun.

 
    
They are not as men and men, seeing them, would fear

 
them.
 
Men would not believe they were Priest-Kings. Men con-

 
ceive Priest-Kings as they conceive themselves.

 
The object the egg might be destroyed before it could

 
be delivered to them.

 
It might already have been destroyed.

 
   
Only that the egg was the egg of Priest-Kings gave me

 
occasion to suspect, to hope, that somehow within that mys-

 
terious, presumably ovoid sphere, if it still entwisted, quiescent

 
but latent, there might be life.

 
   
And if I should find the object, why should I not myself

 
destroy it, and destroy thereby the race of Priest-Kings,

 
giving this world to my own kind, to men, to do with as they

 
pleased, unrestricted by the laws and decrees of Priest-Kings

 
that so limited their development, their technology? Once I

 
had spoken to a Priest-King of these things. He had said to

 
me, "Man is a larl to man; if we permitted him, he would be

 
so to Priest-Kings as well."

 
"But man must be free," I had said.

 
"Freedom without reason is suicide," had said the Priest

 
King, adding, "Man is not yet rational."
 

  
  
But I would not destroy the egg, not only because it

 
contained life, but because it was important to my friend,

 
whose name was Misk and is elsewhere spoken of; much of

 
the life of that brave creature was devoted to the dream of

 
a new life for Priest-Kings, a new stock, a new beginning; a

 
readiness to relinquish his place in an old world to prepare a

 
mansion for the new; to have and love a child, so to speak,

 
for Misk, who is a Priest-King, neither male nor female, yet

 
can love.

  
  
I recalled a windy night in the shadow of the Sardar when

 
we had spoken of strange things, and I had left him and

 
come down the hill, and had asked the leader of those with

 
whom I had traveled the way to the Land of the Wagon

 
Peoples.

 
I had found it.

 
The dust rolled nearer, the ground seemed more to move

 
than ever.

 
I pressed on.

 
   
Perhaps if I were successful I might save my race, by

 
preserving the Priest-Kings that might shelter them from the

 
annihilation that might otherwise be achieved if uncontrolled

 
technological development were too soon permitted them;