Smugglers of Gor (6 page)

Gorean men are patient.

I hear the gate at the head of the stairs being undone. Soon the gruel will be in the troughs, or, for those chained at the sides, to the heavy rings, in the bowls.

We are not permitted, as yet, to use our hands.

There are a thousand roads.

Why does one take one road, and not another? Sometimes curiosity, sometimes adventure, sometimes because it is a new road, on no familiar map. And yet, truly, one does not know, really, where even the most familiar and prosaic road may lead. Are there not a hundred roads leading to Ar, at the end of which Ar is not found? In the distance there is the stirring of fog, into which the road leads. Do not all roads lead into the fog? When the wind rises and the fog dissipates, one is not unoften surprised at the country within which one finds oneself.

My purse was heavy enough, early, at any rate. Why did its weight not content me?

The venture had been productive. Each capsule had been filled. Why did I not book passage for Daphne, where the spring rendezvous was to take place? The gray sky ship does not linger long, even in that remote place. Whence came the craftsmen, I wondered, who might have fashioned such a ship. It was said there were islands in the night, even beyond the moons.

I thought of another world, wondering why fools would hasten its ruin, scorning and defiling it, contaminating its soil and darkening its skies, polluting its seas and poisoning its air, felling its forests and gouging its surface. Do they hate it so? If not, why do they neglect and injure it? Have they another world at hand, a secret one, better and more convenient? Would they not insult and despoil it, as well? What is so terrible about trees and grass, white clouds and blue skies? Perhaps they do not care for such things. Perhaps they want a world such as they have made theirs, one crowded and smoky, odorous, and filthy. Perhaps they desire such a world, and deserve it.

It is good to be again on Gor.

The sky ships pay well.

Too, we are often given our pick of the stock.

It is not unusual for a fellow to reserve to himself a particular item, usually on a temporary basis, usually one he may have found arrogant or annoying, that he may have the pleasure of introducing her to the collar. A few days later, she, now well apprised of her bondage, may be led, back-braceleted, hooded, and leashed, sobbing, begging to be kept, to the market. I was thinking of reserving to myself, temporarily, one who had been meticulously, expensively, overbearingly, and pretentiously dressed, as is sometimes the case with slave stock, who had presented herself as aloof, superior, haughty, and frigid, but I did not do so. They are quick enough, at one’s feet, incidentally, to beg a strip of cloth, a rag. I was actually puzzled about her, for when I had initially noticed her she had been quite different, modestly and tastefully garbed, given the season, in a simple sweater, blouse, and skirt, diffident and needful, muchly aware of her sex and perhaps slightly fearing it, aware of how she might appear to men, as a woman suitable to be appropriated, exquisitely female, clearly waiting and ready. Our eyes had met, and it had not been difficult to see her, standing there, startled and apprehensive, as the slave she was, though not yet in the encircling band, locked on her throat. I had half expected her to kneel, and bow her head.

She was not strikingly, even startlingly, beautiful, like many of the women we bring to Gor, but there was something, at least to me, arresting about her. Certainly my colleagues had agreed. She was, in her way, an excellent choice for a Gorean block.

I recalled her.

She was the sort of woman whom it is difficult to think of, save as barefoot, in a slave tunic.

Clearly, some women belong in such, a particularly revealing tunic, which makes it clear to the occupant and the observer, casual or otherwise, precisely what she is, and only is.

I wanted to get her out of my mind.

Why then did I occasionally visit the capsule chamber, and regard her, in her capsule, naked and sedated, the identificatory steel anklet, inscribed with its legend, locked on her left ankle? It is commonly removed before they are revived. Two hoses enter the capsule, one at the head, one at the feet, the first to supply oxygen, the second to withdraw carbon dioxide.

I often, to my annoyance, thought of her. I tried to dismiss her from my mind, but it was not easy to do.

Surely she was not that beautiful.

Or was she?

I remembered her.

Why her?

There are so many, and one puts the lash to them, as needed. It would be the same with her, if she dared to be displeasing. She had doubtless felt it in her training. Thereafter they are muchly concerned to please.

Paga was of little assistance, or the belled sluts of the taverns. The turning wheels and the cards, the dice tumbling on the felt, were of little assistance, save in lightening my purse.

I did attend her sale. She did not do well on the block, as a whole. It was clearly her first sale. She was, however, obviously eager to please the auctioneer. I suppose that is understandable. He, after all, held the whip. On the other hand, I had gathered, from the reports of instructors and guards, as I had expected, that she was a woman who understood that she was a woman, and accordingly, in the order of nature, wished to defer to men, and be pleasing to them. These inclinations are obvious consequences of the nature of the hereditary coils. Despite the distortions, the curbs, and obstacles, of a pathological acculturation, stunting minds and shortening lives, nature, embedded in each cell in the human body, persists. Nature, like a living plant, may be crippled, stunted, denied, poisoned, and, if necessary, uprooted and destroyed, but it returns again, patient, latent, ready, alive, in each new child, in each new seed.

The most interesting aspect of her sale occurred late in the sale, when the auctioneer chose to display her slave reflexes.

As I had anticipated, they proved excellent.

How startled and distressed she was!

How foolish, did she still think herself free?

It was interesting to consider what might be her nature later, once her slave fires had been ignited.

I could conceive of her crawling on her belly to a master, tears in her eyes, begging to be touched.

It is pleasant to own such a woman.

What man does not want one?

I wondered if she would be domestically suitable, say, could she sew, or cook, such things. Some attention to such things is commonly involved in their training. To be sure, the principal object of a slave’s training is to teach her to give inordinate sexual pleasure to a master.

It is primarily what she is for.

I did not wonder about her heat. She would be a hot slave. Periodically, recurrently, helplessly, she would find herself in desperate sexual need. She would soften and oil at a casual glance. Her need would run down her thighs. She would proffer a master a juicy pudding, bubbling and delicious. She would be a pleasant confection, a delightful candy, a moaning, gasping tasta squirming on its stick.

And I wondered, again, if she could sew, or cook, such things.

If her efforts were unsatisfactory in such ways, or others, her grooming, her posture and grace, the care of a domicile, her shopping, or such, one might reduce, or deny her, the touch of the master, of which touch, at that time, she would be in desperate need.

The slave must learn, of course, to please the master, unquestioningly, and instantaneously, in all ways.

His satisfaction is paramount, not hers.

Still, a hot slave is a precious possession. It is one of the great pleasures of the mastery to play with his toy, to patiently lick, kiss, and caress his property, it perhaps helplessly bound or chained, to turn it into a writhing, pleading, sobbing, subdued, owned, gasping, bucking, lovely, helpless, ecstatic beast.

She went for forty-eight copper tarsks, which was about what I thought she would bring, something in the nature of a half tarsk, of silver.

Some weeks before, as I had been given to understand, the forces of Cos, Tyros, and their allies, and hirelings, most in mercenary bands, had withdrawn from Ar. The accounts of this were various. It was claimed by some that the work of the occupying forces was done, that Ar had been taught her lesson, her walls razed and her coffers looted, that she was now impoverished, docile, and subdued, and was no longer a threat to the civilized cities. Accordingly, the occupying forces had executed an orderly withdrawal, one supposedly scheduled for months aforehand. Others claimed that the troops of Cos and Tyros, and the others, had marched from the city, over streets carpeted with blossoms, amidst shouts of joy and flung garlands, the tribute of a grateful populace, freed from the gross despotisms and tyrannies of the past. And some said that like a storm at sea, one without warning, the red waves of revolt had surged into the streets, pouring forth from hovels and sewers, from taverns and stables, from cellars and
insulae
, that thousands of citizens, many armed only with clubs and stones, had rushed forth, intent upon the blood of invaders and traitors. Marlenus, Ubar of Ubars, it was said, had returned to Ar.

In any event, several of the coastal cities and towns, and, in particular, Brundisium, were now filled with what might, I suppose, be accounted refugees. It was claimed by some that the retreat from Ar had been a rout, precipitous and disorderly, and, in some cases, even disciplined troops had cast aside their shields and fled for their lives. Were it not for the ruination of her walls, thousands might have been unable to escape the city, to the open fields beyond. Countless dead would have been heaped at the gates. As it was, men of Ar tried to prevent the remnants of the occupying forces fleeing and hundreds of sympathizers and collaborators from leaving the city. Bands of mercenaries not quartered outside the city often had to fight their way to the countryside. Even in the open fields they were pursued and hunted, sometimes from the sky by tarnsmen of Ar, no longer enrolled in the sorry task of protecting uniformed looters and policing a sullen, resentful citizenry with which they shared a Home Stone. For pasangs about the city the fields were littered with feasting for scavenging jards. Within the city long proscription lists were posted, and traitors and traitresses were hunted down, house to house. Hundreds of impaling spears were adorned with writhing victims. Few free traitresses, or traitresses who long remained free, escaped the city. The common price for their license to accompany armed, fleeing men, unwilling to accept the burden of conducting free women, was their stripping and the collar. Many were currently being offered in the markets of Brundisium and other coastal cities. Some of those vended in the recent sale I had attended were former high women of Ar, now naked properties worth only what men were willing to pay for them. Many of the refugees still flooding into Brundisium were ragged, exhausted, and half-starved. Some had sold even their swords. Others had formed larger or smaller outlaw bands and prowled the roads, producing a realm of peril and anarchy for a hundred pasangs about. Passage to Tyros or Cos was costly, and many of Brundisium’s newcomers were destitute. Some, armed with clubs, hunted urts by the wharves. Two men had been killed for stealing a fish. It was said, too, that various towns and cities, even villages, in the island ubarates themselves were not enthusiastic about the turn of events, that they were less than willing to welcome the return of defeated, penurious veterans. Could honor be retained in the face of defeat, even rout? If the stories were true, of triumph, and such, where was their wealth, their spoils? Surely, for whatever reason, or reasons, justified or unjustified, an inhospitable reception not unoften awaited them. Some, even regulars managing to return to the islands, found themselves isolated and despised, denied work and a post. “Where is your shield,” they might be asked, “where is your sword?” In Brundisium, on the other hand, a busy port, with access to the northern and southern coastal trade, and an access to the major island ubarates westward, Cos and Tyros, there was considerable prosperity, for the coin that leaves one purse will soon find a home in another.

But beyond the influx of refugees, more streaming in each day, the crowding, the begging, the closing of hiring tables, the raiding of garbage troughs, the sleeping in cold, damp, dangerous streets, the discordant accounts of doings to the south and east, the racing about of rumors, it was clear that something different and unusual was occurring in Brundisium, something apart from refugees, apart from remote dislocations, apart from proscriptions and impaling spears, apart from tumult and flight, apart from red grass and bloodied stones, apart from hazard and vengeance, apart from political rearrangements, apart from exchanges of power wherein, as it is said, the “streets run with blood.”

This had to do with those spoken of as the Pani.

There must be two or three hundred of them in Brundisium, and perhaps many more in the north, in their unusual garb, with their dark, keen eyes, their black hair drawn back and knotted behind their head, men lithe and graceful, like panthers, taciturn, not mingling, avoiding the taverns, equipped with their unfamiliar weaponry.

It was not clear from whence these strange warriors, and their cohorts and partisans, were derived. Some, from the eyes, said they were Tuchuks, but others who had had the fortune, or misfortune, of encountering Tuchuks, as some looted, ransomed merchants, survivors of raided caravans, and such, denied this. Surely none wore the colorful, ritual, exploit scarring of the Tuchuks. Some said they came from the World’s End, but, as is known, the world ends at the farther islands, and beyond them is nothing. It was alleged they came from the Plains of Turia, far south of Bazi and Schendi, or from the Barrens to the east, but, if such things are so, why was there no heralding of their approach, no records of their passage?

In any event many are in Brundisium.

They speak a comprehensible dialect of Gorean, one with which I am not familiar. They work largely through agents. They have gold, apparently much gold. Some serious project is afoot. Their agents are hiring ships, and recruiting men, many ships, many men. Some ships, with crews, and complements of armed men, have already left port, bound north. They are laying in extensive supplies. Guarded compounds near the wharves are stacked with boxes, barrels, bales, clay vessels, like blunt-bottomed
amphorae
, tied together by the handles, bulging sacks, and weighty crates. It is as though some great voyage was contemplated, but the ships are small coasters, many of which one might not even risk to Temos or Jad, and they seem to move north. What might be in the northern forests, or Torvaldsland, to warrant this mighty movement of men and supplies? Do they think to found a city at the mouth of some far river, say, the Laurius or the remote Alexandra? Such locations would seem remote and inauspicious. Too, interestingly, many of the supplies seem to be war supplies, and naval stores. Why would one require naval stores to found a city, or even a village? Other goods, one supposes, would suggest trading, or the raid. There are bundles of silk, coils of wire, brass lamps, jars of ointment and salve, flat boxes of cosmetics; and poles on which are strung shackles and slave chain. Do they truly think there is that much slave fruit in the north? And, besides, they are already buying slaves. They are buying them from the shelves, from the wharf cages, the dock markets, and the house markets. Agents of Pani, for example, had purchased several of the girls in the recent sale I had witnessed, including the one whom I had found of some negligible interest, whom I had originally seen in a large emporium on another world. She would not remember me, though it was I who brought her to the collar and whip, where she, and such as she, belong. Some were even purchased at the gates, off their rope coffles, as bandits, or refugees, had brought them in. It was not fully clear why these purchases, or so many of them, had been made. If they were to be resold there seemed little point in taking them north. Better markets were elsewhere. Perhaps they were for gifts or trade goods. But to whom, and where? Certainly a lovely female makes a splendid gift, and, in many situations, can be bartered to one’s advantage. But who is, say, to buy them in the north, and so many? To be sure, many men were taking ship north, and they might be intended for them, if not for outright purchasing, for brothels, slave houses, or taverns. Men will want their slaves. Many of the purchased slaves were being held in the vicinity of the docks, in holding areas, the basements of warehouses, and such. In some places, through the high, narrow, barred windows in the walls, through which light may filter, they would hear the calls of longshoremen, their loading chants, the rumble of wheels on the planks, the creak of timbers, the stirring of slack canvas on a round ship, the water washing against the pilings.