John Norman - Gor 10 - Tribesmen of Gor

10 Tribesmen of Gor

Tribesmen of Gor

John Norman

Chronicles of Counter-Earth Volume 10

1 The Hall of Samos

There were bells, three rows of them, small and golden, thonged tightly about the

girl’s left ankle.

The entire floor of the chamber, shining, richly mosaiced, broad, reflecting the

torchlight, was a map.

I watched the girl. Her knees were slightly bent. Her weight was on her heels,

freeing her hips. Her rib cage was lifted, but her shoulders, relaxed, were down.

Her abdominal muscles, too were relaxed. Loose. Her chin was lifted, haughtily.

She did not deign to look at us. Dark hair flowed behind her.

“There are many things I do not understand,” said Samos to me. I reached for a

slice of larma fruit and bit through it. “Yet,” said Samos, “I think it is important

that we come to the truth in this matter.”

I regarded the vast map on the floor of the chamber. I could see, high on the map,

Ax Glacier, Torvaldsland, and Hinjer and Skjern, and Helmutsport, and lower,

Kassau and the great green forests, and the river Laurius, and Laura and Lydius,

and lower, the islands, prominent among them Cos and Tyros; I saw the delta of

Vosk, and Port Kar, and, inland, Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning, and

Thentis, in the mountains of Thentis, famed for her tarn flocks; and, to the south,

among many other cities, Tharna, of the vast silver mines; I saw the Voltai Range,

and Glorious Ar, and the Cartius, and, far to the south, Turia, and near the shore of

Thassa, the islands of Anango and Ianda, and on the coast, the free ports of

Schendi and Bazi. There were, on the map, hundreds of cities, and promontories

and peninsulas, and rivers and inland lakes and seas.

The left ankle of the girl, under the bells, the brown thong, the golden metal, was

tanned.

“Perhaps you are mistaken,” I told him. “Perhaps there is nothing to it.”

“Perhaps,” he smiled.

At the corners of the room, helmeted, with spears, stood men-at-arms.

The girl wore Gorean dancing silk. It hung low upon her bared hips, and fell to her

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ankles. It was scarlet, diaphanous. A front corner of the silk was taken behind her

and thrust loose and draped, into the rolled silk knotted about her hips; loosely,

draped, into the rolled silk at her right hip. Low on her hips she wore a belt of

small denomination, threaded, overlapping golden coins. A veil concealed her

muchly from us, it thrust into the strap of the coined halter at her left shoulder, and

into the coined belt at her right hip. On her arms she wore numerous armlets and

bracelets. On the thumb and first finger of both her left and right hand were golden

finger cymbals. On her throat was a collar.

I took another piece of larma fruit. “I gather,” I said, “you have information?”

“Yes,” said Samos. He clapped his hands. Immediately the girl stood beautifully,

alert, before us, her arms high, wrists outward. The musicians, to one side, stirred,

readying themselves. Their leader was a czehar player.

“What is the nature of your information?” I asked.

“It is nothing definite,” he said.

“Perhaps it is not important,” I suggested.

“Perhaps not,” he admitted.

“Kurii, Others,” I said, “following the failure of the northern invasion of native

Kurii, halted in Torvaldsland, have been quiet, have they not?”

“Beware of a silent enemy,” said Samos. He looked at the girl. He clapped his

hands, sharply.

There was a clear note of the finger cymbals, sharp, deliberate, bright, and the

slave girl danced before us.

I regarded the coins threaded, overlapping, on her belt and halter. They took the

firelight beautifully. They glinted, but were of small worth. One dresses such a

woman in cheap coins; she is slave. Her hand moved to the veil at her right hip.

Her head was turned away, as though unwilling and reluctant, yet knowing she

must obey.

“Come with me,” said Samos.

I swilled down the last swallow of a goblet of paga.

He grinned at me. “You may have her later,” he said. “She will dance from time to

time during the evening.”

Samos stepped from behind the low tables. He nodded his head to cup

companions, trusted men. Two briefly clad, lovely female slaves withdrew before

him, kneeling, heads down, their serving vessels in their hands.

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To one side, stripped, bound tightly in black leather, hand and foot, straps crossing

between her breasts and circling her thighs, to which her wrists were secured, in

buckled cuffs, knelt a whitish-skinned girl, blond, frightened. Her shoulders, like

those of most females of Earth, were tight, tense. The tone of her body, like that of

most Earth women, was rigid, defensive. Like most others she had been

acculterated in a thousand subtle ways to minimize, to conceal and deny the

natural, organic sweetnesses of her musculature and structure, conditioned into a

dignified, formal physical neutership, the stiffness, reserve and tightness so much

approved of in females in a mechanistic, industrial, technological society, in which

machines govern and present the symbols and paradigms of movement,

understood as repetition, measure, regularity, precision and function. Human

beings move differently in a technological society than in a non-technological

society; they hold their bodies differently; a man or woman’s acculturation is

visible in their demeanor. Few people understand this; most view as natural

motions and body positions, which are the consequences of a subconsciously

conditioned, mechanistic ballet, a choreography of puppets, imitating the models,

the stridences, in which they find themselves enmeshed. Yet, somewhere beneath

the conditioned behavior lies the animal, which moved naturally before there was

a civilization to teach it the proprieties of mechanism. It is little wonder that the

Earth human, when unobserved, even the adult, sometimes throws itself on the

ground and rolls and cries out, if only to feel the joy of its own movement, the

unleashing of the tensions inflicted by the rigidities of the civilized restraints.

Invisible chains are those which weigh the most heavily.

I looked down at the girl. She was terrified, miserable. “Tell her,” said Samos, “to

watch a true woman, and learn to be female.” He indicated the Gorean dancer.

The girl had not been long on Gor. Samos had purchased her for four silver tarsks

on Teletus, with many others, for various amounts. This was the first time out of

the pens for her in his house. She wore her brand on the left thigh. A simple band

of iron had been hammered about her neck by one of the metal workers in the

employ of Samos. She was poor stuff, not fit for a lock collar. I probably would

have sold her for a kettle girl. Yet, looking more carefully upon her, examining her

with candor, as she looked away, miserable, I saw that she might not be without

promise. Perhaps she could be taught. The basic characteristic expected of a

Gorean woman is, interestingly, femaleness; this is, I note, certainly not the basic

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characteristic requested of an Earth woman; indeed, femaleness in a woman of

Earth, as I recalled, was societally discouraged, it complicating the politically

expedient neuterlike relationships valuable in a technologically sophisticated

social structure, to which sexual relationships were irrelevant, if not inimical.

Western industrialized societies on Earth optimally would be manned by metal

creatures, sexless, smoothly functioning, programmed to tend preserve and

replicate the metal society. Man, on Earth, had finally succeeded, after long

centuries, in creating a society in which he had no essential place; he had, at last,

built a house in which he could not live, in which he had left not one room suitable

for human habitation; he called it a home; in it he was a stranger; his habitat, by

his own efforts, became inhospitable to himself; his efficiencies, his machines, his

institutions, in his own hands, had at last succeeded in evicting himself from his

own realities; women were shamed to be women; men terrified of listening to their

blood, and being men; in their plastic cubicles, amidst the hum of their

machineries, men at night squirmed and wept, hating themselves, castigating

themselves for not meeting the standards of a world alien to their sensate truths;

let robots weep for not being men, not men weep for not being robots; the strong,

the fine, the mighty, is not wicked; only the vile and small, incapable of power,

speak it so; but there was little hope for the men of Earth; they feared to listen, for

they might hear ancient drums.

The blondish girl put down her head. I gestured to the guard behind her. He thrust

his hand in her hair. She cried out. Her head was rudely jerked up and back. She

looked at me.

I pointed to the dancer.

The girl looked at her horrified, offended, scandalized. She shuddered, and

squirmed in the straps. Her fists were clenched at her thighs, beside which they

were held in the cuff straps of her harness.

“Watch, Slave,” I told her, in English, “a true woman.” The girl’s title and name

had been Miss Priscilla Blake-Allen. Her nationality had been American. Then she

had been branded.

She was now only nameless property in a slaver’s house, no different from

hundreds of other girls in the pens below.

The dancer was now moving slowly to the music.

“She is so sensual,” whispered the blondish girl, in horror.

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I turned to watch the dancer. She danced well. At the moment she writhed upon

the “slave pole,” it fixing her in place. There is no actual pole, of course, but

sometimes it is difficult to believe there is not. The girl imagines that a pole,

slender, supple, swaying, transfixes her body, holding her helplessly. About this

imaginary pole, it constituting a hypothetical center of gravity, she moves,

undulating, swaying, sometimes yielding to it in ecstasy, sometimes fighting it, it

always holding her in perfect place, its captive. The control achieved by the use of

the “slave pole” is remarkable. An incredible, voluptuous tension is almost

immediately generated, visible in the dancer’s body, and kinetically felt by those

who watch. I heard men at the table cry out with pleasure. The dancer’s hands

were at her thighs. She regarded them, angrily, and still she moved. Her shoulders

lifted and fell; her hands touched her breasts and shoulders; her head was back,

and then again she glared at the men, angrily. Her arms were high, very high. Her

hips moved, swaying. Then, the music suddenly silent, she was absolutely still.

Her left hand was at her thigh; her right high above her head; her eyes were on her

hip; frozen into a hip sway; then there was again a bright, clear flash of the finger

cymbals, and the music began again, and again she moved, helpless on the pole.

Men threw coins at her feet.

I looked to the blondish girl. “Learn to be a female,” I told her.

“Never!” she hissed, in her harness.

“You are no longer on Earth,” I told her. “You will be taught. The lessons may be

painful or pleasant, but you will learn.”

“I do not wish to do so,” she said.

“Your will, your wishes, mean nothing,” I told her. “You will learn.”

“It is degrading,” she said.

“You will learn,” I told her.

“She is so sensual,” said the girl, angrily. “How can men think of her as anything

but a woman!”

“You will learn,” I told her.

“I do not want to be a woman!” she cried out. “I want to be a man! I always

wanted to be a man!”

She squirmed in the harness, fighting its restraints. The straps, the rings, held her,

of course, perfectly.

“On Gor,” I told her, “it is the men who will be men; and the here, on this world, it

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is the women who will be women.”

“I do not wish to move like that,” she wept.

“You will learn to move as a woman,” I told her. I looked down at her. “You, too,

will learn to be sensual.”

“Never,” she wept, fighting the straps.

“Look at me, Slave,” I said.

She looked up, tears in her eyes. “I will speak to you kindly for a moment,” I said.

“Listen carefully, for they may be the last kind words you will hear for a long

time.”

She regarded me, the guard’s hand in her hair.

“You are a slave,” I said. “You are owned. You are a female. You will be forced

to be a woman. If you were free, and Gorean, you might be permitted by men to

remain as you are, but you are neither Gorean nor free. The Gorean man will

accept no compromise on your femininity, not from a slave. She will be what he

wishes, and that is a woman, fully, and his. If necessary you will be whipped or

starved. You may fight your master. He will, if he wishes, permit this, to prolong

the sport of your conquest, but in the end, it is you who are the slave; it is you who

will lose. On Earth you had the society at your back, the result of centuries of

feminization; be could not so much as speak harshly to you but you could rush

away or summon magistrates; here, however, society is not at your back, but at

his; it will abet him in his wishes, for you are only a slave; you will have no one to

call, nowhere to run; you will be alone with him, and at his mercy. Further, he has

not been conditioned with counterinstinctual value sets, programmed with guilt,

taught self-hatred; he has been taught pride and has, in the very air he breathes,

imbibed the mastery of females. These are different men. They are not Earthlings.

They are Goreans. They, are strong, and they are hard, and they will conquer you.

For a man of Earth, you might never be a woman. For a man of Gor, I assure you,

my dear, sooner or later you will be.”

She looked at me with misery.

The dancer moaned, crying out, as though in agony. Still she remained impaled

upon the slave pole, its prisoner.

“The Gorean master,” I told the blondish girl, “commands sensuality in his female

slaves.”

She stared at the dancer, her eyes wide with misery. The hips of the dancer now

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moved; seemingly in isolation from the rest of her body, though her wrists and

hands, ever so slightly, moved to the music.

“You cannot even move like that now,” I told the blondish girl. “Yet muscles can

be trained. You will be taught to move like a woman, not a puppet of wood.” I

grinned down at her. “You will be taught to be sensual.”

Samos, with a snap of his fingers, freed the dancer from the slave pole. She moved

turning, toward us. Before us loosening her veil at the right hip, she danced. Then

she took it from her left shoulder, where it had been tucked beneath the strap of

her halter. With the veil loose, covering her, holding it in her hands, she danced

before us. Then she regarded us, dark-eyed, over the veil; it turned about her body;

then, to the misery of the blondish girl, she wafted the silk about her, immeshing

her in its gossamer softness. I saw the parted lip, the eyes wide with horror, of the

kneeling, harnessed girl through the light, yellow veil; then the dancer had drawn

it away from her, and, turning, was again in the center of the floor.

“You will learn your womanhood,” I told the blondish girl. “And I will tell you

where you will learn it”

She looked up at me.

“At the feet of a master.” I told her.

I turned away from her and, following Samos, left the chamber. “She will have to

learn Gorean, and quickly,” said Samos, referring to the blondish girl.

“Let slaves, with switches, teach her,” I said.

“I will,” said Samos. There was no swifter way for an Earth girl to learn Gorean,

providing that candies and pastries, and little favors, like a blanket in the pen, were

mixed in. Learning was closely associated, even immediately, with reward and,

punishment. Sometimes, months later, even when not under the switch, a girl

would, upon a mistake in grammar or vocabulary, wince, as though expecting a

fresh sting of the switch. Goreans do not coddle their slave girls. This is one of the

first lessons a girl learns.

“You learned little from her?” asked Samos.

I had interrogated the girl when she had first came to the house of Samos.

“Her story,” I said, “is similar to those of many others. Abduction, transportation

to Gor, slavery. She knows nothing. She scarcely understands, now, the meaning

of her collar.

Samos laughed unpleasantly, the laugh of a slaver.

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“Yet one thing you had from her seems of interest,” said Samos, preceding me

down a deep corridor. In the corridor we passed female slave. She dropped to her

knees and put her head down, her hair upon the tiles, as we passed.

“It seems a random thing, meaningless” I said.

“In itself, meaningless,” he said. “But, with other things, it induces in me a certain

apprehension.”

“The remark she overheard, in English, concerning the return of the slave ships?” I

asked.

“Yes,” said Samos. When I had probed the girl in the pens, mercilessly, forcing

her to recall all details, even apparently meaningless scraps of detail, or

information, she had recalled one thing, which had seemed puzzling, disturbing. I

had not much understood it, but Samos had evinced concern. He knew more than I

of the affairs of Others, the Kurii, and Priest-Kings. The girl had heard the remark

drowsily, half stupified, shortly after her arrival on Gor. She, stripped, half

drugged, the identification anklet of the Kurii locked on her left ankle, had lain on

her stomach, with other girls, in the fresh grass of Gor. They had been removed

from the slave capsules in which they had been transported. She had risen, to her

elbows, her head down. She had then been conscious, vaguely, of being turned

about and lifted, and carried, to a different place in the line, one determined by her

height. Usually the tallest girls lead the slave chain, the height decreasing

gradually toward the end of the chain, where the shortest girl is placed. This was a

“common chain,” sometimes called a “march chain” or “trekking chain”; it was

not a “display chain: in the “display chain,” or “selling chain,” the arrangement of

the girls may be determined by a variety of considerations, aesthetic and

psychological; for example, blondes may be alternated with brunets, voluptuous

girls with slim, vital girls, aristocratic girls with sweet, peasant wenches, and so

on; sometimes a girl is placed between two who are less beautiful, to enhance her

beauty; sometimes the most beautiful is saved for the last on the chain; sometimes

the chain is used as a ranking device, the most beautiful being-placed at its head,

the other girls then competing with one another constantly to move to a new wrist-

ring, snap-lock or collar, one higher on the chain. She had been thrown to her

stomach in the grass, and her left wrist drawn to her side and down. She had heard

the rustle of a looped chain, and the periodic click of the wrist-rings. She felt a

length of chain dropped across the back of her thighs. Then, about her left wrist,

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too, closed the wrist-ring, and she, too, was a girl in a coffle. A man had stood by,

making entries in a book. When her identification anklet had been removed, after

she was in the wrist-ring, the man removing it had said something to the man with

the book, and an entry had been made. When the girls were coffled, the man with

the book had signed a paper, giving it to the captain of the slave ship. She knew it

must be a receipt for merchandise received. The cargo manifests, apparently, had

been correct. She had pulled weakly at the wrist-ring ,but it of course, held her. It

had been then that the man with the book had asked the captain if he would return

soon. The man with the book spoke in an accent, Gorean. The captain, she

gathered, did not speak Gorean. The captain had said, as she remembered it, that

he did not know when they would return, that he had received orders that there

were to be no more voyages until further orders were received. She was conscious

of the departure of the ship, and the grass beneath her body, and the chain lying

across her legs, and the steel of the wrist-ring. She felt the chain move as the girl

to her right stirred. Her left wrist was moved slightly behind her. They lay in the

shade of trees, concealed from the air. They were not permitted to rise. When one

girl had cried out, she had been beaten with a switch. Miss Priscilla Blake-Allen

had not dared to cry out. After dark, they were herded to a wagon.

“Why,” asked Samos, “should the slave ships cease their runs?”

“An invasion?” I asked.

“Unlikely,” said Samos, “If an invasion were to be launched soon, surely the slave

runs would continue. Their cessation would surely alert the defense and

surveillance facilities of Priest-Kings. One would not, surely, produce a state of

apprehension and heightened awareness in the enemy prior to an attack.”

“It does not seem so,” I admitted, “unless the Kurii, perhaps, feel that just such a

move might put the Priest-Kings off guard, that it would be too obvious to be

taken as a prelude to full war.” “But this possibility, doubtless,” smiled Samos

“too, is one which will not fail to be considered by the rulers of the Sardar.”

I shrugged. It had been long since I had been in the Sardar.

“It may mean an invasion is being readied,” said Samos. “But I think the Kurii,

who are rational creatures, will not risk full war until reasonably assured as to its

outcome. I suspect their reconnaissance is as yet incomplete. The organization of

native Kurii, which would have constituted a splendid intelligence probe, and was

doubtless intended primarily as such, yielded them little information.”

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I smiled. The invasion of native Kurii from the north, survivors and descendants of

ship Kurii, for generations, had been stopped in Torvaldsland.

“I think,” said Samos “it is something other than an invasion.” He looked at me

grimly. “It is, I suspect, something which would render an invasion unnecessary.”

“I do not understand,” I said.

“I have much fear,” said Samos. I regarded him. I had seldom seen him so. I

looked at the heavy squarish face, burned by the wind and salt of Thassa, the clear

eyes, the white, short-cropped hair, the small golden rings in his ears. His face

seemed drained of color. I knew he could stand against a hundred swords,

unflinching.

“What is it” I asked, “which would render an invasion unnecessary?”

“I have much fear,” said Samos.

“You said you had other information,” I said.

“Two things,” said Samos. “Follow me.” I continued to follow him through

various corridors, and down stairways in his home. Soon the walls became damp,

and I gathered we were beneath the levels of the canals. We passed barred doors,

heavily guarded. Passwords, appropriate to different levels and portions of the

house, were given and acknowledged. These are changed daily. For a portion of

our way, we passed through certain sections of the pens. Some of the ornately

barred, crimson-draped cells, with brass bowls, and rugs, and cushions and lamps,

were quite comfortable; some of the cells held more than one occupant; some Of

the girls were permitted cosmetics and slave silk; generally, however, girls in the

pen are raw, totally, save for their collars and brands, as are male slaves; the

costumer, the perfumer, the hairdresser then does with them what he is instructed;

most retention facilities in the pens, however, are not so comfortable; most are

simply heavy cages; some are small cement kennels, tiered, with iron gates that

slide upward; once we walked over iron gratings, beneath which were cages; we

passed through two processing rooms; off one corridor was a medical facility, with

mats and chains; we passed exercise rooms, training rooms; we passed the

branding chamber; I saw heated irons within; we passed, too, the dreaded room of

slave discipline; there were, in this room, suspended rings, whips, a large, heavy

stone table.

As we passed the cages, male slaves glared at us sullenly; slave girls usually

shrank back. One girl thrust her hands through the bars. “I am really to be sold to a

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John Norman - Gor 10 - Tribesmen of Gor

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