Beasts Of Gor

9
I See The Wall; I Am To Be Whipped

"Impressive, is it not?" she asked.

We stood on a high platform, overlooking the wall. It extended to the horizons.

"It is more than seventy pasangs in length," she said. "Two to three hundred men have labored on it for two years."

Beyond the wall there milled thousands of tabuk, for it had been built across the path of their northward migration. They stretched for pasangs to the south, grazing.

On our side of the wall was the compound, with the hall of the commander, the long houses of the guards and hunters, and the roofed, wooden pens of the laborers. There was a cook shack, a commissary, smithy and other ancillary structures. Men moved about their work.

"What are in the storage sheds?" I asked.

"Hides," she said, "thousands, not yet shipped south." "The slaughtering," she said, "takes place largely at the ends of the wall, to prevent animals from taking their way northward."

"It seems many would escape," I said.

"No," she said. "The ends of the wall are curved, to turn the beasts back. When they mill the hunters fall upon them. We kill several hundred a day."

"Can you skin so many?" 1 asked.

"No," she said. "We content ourselves with prime hide. Most of the animals we leave for the larts and sleen, and the jards." The jard is a small scavenger. It flies in large flocks. A flock, like flies, can strip the meat from a tabuk in minutes.

"Even the jards die, gorged with meat," said the man near us on the platform.

"May I present my colleague," said my lovely captor, "Sorgus."

"The hide bandit?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

The man did not speak to me, nor look at me.

"Such men," she said, "have been useful. No longer are they confined to robbing the hides of honest hunters. We give them harvests beyond the loots which might be reaped from a hundred seasons of thievery."

"But I note." I said, "that higher men aid you as well."

I looked to the other fellow on the platform.

"We meet again," he said.

"It seems so," I agreed. "Perhaps now," I said, "you might succeed in striking me with your dagger."

"Release him," said he to my captor, "that I may with blades, he, too, armed, dispatch him."

"The silly pride of men offends me," said she.

"Free him," said he.

"No," she said. "He is my prisoner. I do not wish for you to kill him."

"It seems," said he to me, "that you will live, if only for an Ahn longer."

"It is you, perhaps," said I, "whose life she thusly prolongs."

He turned away, to look out over the railing on the platform, and out over the high wall, to the thousands of animals, like cattle, beyond.

"Can you truly do your own killing," I asked, "or do you need, as in my house, to enlist the services of a female slave to aid you?" I recalled Vella. She had given him a jacket of mine, that he might use it to give my scent to the sleen. What a traitress she was! I had known she had once served Kurii. I had not known at that time that the pretty little slave, the former secretary on Earth, still licked their claws. She would no longer receive an opportunity to betray me. Death was too good for her. When I returned to Port Kar I would plunge her into a slavery deeper than she would believe possible.

The man, angry, did not respond to me.

"You are not Bertram of Lydius," I said to him. "Who are you?"

"I do not speak to slaves," he said.

My fists clenched in the manacles.

"Did you truly enlist the services of a female slave in his house?" asked my captor.

"I do not wish to speak before him," said the man.

"Do so," she snapped.

I saw him look at her, angrily. I read the look in his eyes. I smiled to myself. I saw that it had been to him that she, when her work was done, had been promised as a slave.

"I am waiting," she said.

"Very well," said he. "It is true that I enlisted the services of a lowly bond girl in his house, to obtain material from which I might give scent to the sleen."

"She is a spy there?" she asked.

"No," he said, "I tricked her. I used her as a mere dupe in my scheme. It was not difficult. She was only a woman."

My captor's eyes flashed.

"Only a slave girl," he said.

"That's better," she said. Then she said, "Slave girls are so stupid."

"Yes," he said, "that is true."

I was amused. I wondered if she would change her opinion as to the intelligence of slave girls when she herself wore the collar. As a matter of fact intelligence is one of the major criteria used by Gorean slavers when scouting an Earth girl for capture and abduction to the chains of Gor. The other two major criteria appear to be beauty and femininity. Intelligent, beautiful, feminine women make the best slaves. Who would want a stupid slave? Too, intelligent women can feel their slavery much more keenly than their simpler sisters. This makes it much more amusing to keep them in bondage. Too, because of their intelligence they more swiftly realize the biological rightness of their predicament, though they may fight it longer. The intelligent woman is more apt to trust her own intelligence, and intuitions and feelings than the duller woman, who is more apt to be a naive functjon of the stereotypes and images with which she has been conditioned. The more intelligent woman is quicker to realize, though more tardy to admit, that it is right for her beauty to be enslaved. Her yielding, too, to her secret realities, when she yields honestly and fully to them, is a glorious thing. At last she whispers, on her knees, to him, "I am a slave, Master." "Go to the furs," he says, gently. "Yes, Master," she says, and obeys.

But many highly intelligent women have fought these battles out in their heart long before they see a chain or the steel of a collar.

They live waiting for a master. They wait for the man who will look into their eyes and see what they truly are, and into whose eyes they will look, and see that he knows their secret. When they are alone, he will say to her, softly, "Kneel, Slave." They kneel. They are then truly a slave, his.

"Tell him your name," she ordered the fellow on the platform.

"I do not speak to slaves," he said.

"Obey me!" she said.

He turned and went down the stairs of the platform.

"He is called Drusus," she said. "He is of the metal workers."

"He is not a metal worker," I said. "He is of the Assassins.

"No," she said.

"I have seen him use a knife," I said. "He did not obey you," I observed.

She looked at me, angrily.

"Your days in authority here," I said, "are numbered."

"I am in command here!" she said.

"For the time," I said. I looked out over the milling tabuk.

They were northern tabuk, massive, tawny and swift, many of them ten hands at the shoulder, a quite different animal from the small, yellow-pelted, antelopelike quadruped of the south. On the other hand, they, too, were distinguished by the single horn of the tabuk. On these animals, however, that object, in swirling ivory, was often, at its base, some two and one-hall inches in diameter, and better than a yard in length. A charging tabuk, because of the swiftness of its reflexes, is a quite dangerous animal. Usually they are killed from a distance, often from behind shields, with arrows.

My thoughts strayed to Vella, once Elizabeth Cardwell. Apparently she had not knowingly collaborated with Drusus, he who had called himself Bertram of Lydius. He had tricked her in the matter of the sleen. She had been his dupe. It would not then be necessary to be too hard on her. It would be sufficient, when I returned to Port Kar, merely to have her whipped for her stupidity.

I put her from my mind, for she was only slave.

"It must be difficult to place the logs of the wall," I said, "because of the permafrost."

"How difficult you will learn," she said. She was still angry that her authority had been flouted in my presence.

At this latitude, even in the summer, the earth only thaws to a depth of some two feet. Beneath this depth one strikes still frozen ground. it is almost like stone. Picks and drive bars ring upon it.

The construction of the wall was, in its way, a considerable engineering feat. That it had been accomplished by men, with simple tools, said much for the determination of the Kurii, and the rigors imposed upon its laborers by their guardsmen.

"You will see who is in authority here," she said, angrily. I felt the line on my neck jerk tight. I accompanied her down the stairs of the platform.

"Guards!" she called. Some four guardsmen came to her, running.

"Bring Drums to me," she said, "if necessary in chains."

They hurried from her. In a few moments they returned, he who called himself Drusus with them.

She pointed arrogantly to the ground at her feet. "Kneel," she said to him.

Angrily he knelt.

"Tell him your name," she said to him.

The man looked up at me, in fury. "I am Drusus," he said.

"Attend now to your duties, Drusus," she said.

He got to his feet and left. I saw that she was truly in authority. If her tenure of authority were to be soon terminated there was as yet no sign of it. She looked at me, and tossed her head arrogantly. She was supreme among these men.

"It was Drusus who identified you for me," she said.

"I see," I said.

"Three prisoners have been captured," said a man, coming up to her.

"Bring them before me," she said.

The three prisoners, their hands bound behind their backs, were brought forward. One was a man, the other two were girls, slave girls. The man was on an individual neck tether, in the hand of a guard. The girls were on a common tether, the throat of each tied at a different end of a long strap; it served as their common leash, a guard grasping it in the center. The man was the red hunter I had seen at the fair. He no longer possessed his bow or other accouterments. The two girls were the slaves he had purchased at the fair, the Earth girls, one blond, the other dark-haired, who had worn the torn red pullover. He was dressed as he had been at the flit, in trousers and boots of fur, but bare-chested. The two girls now, however, wore fur wrapped on their feet, tied with hide string, and brief fur tunics. The hair of each was tied behind her head with a red string. Under the tether on the throat of each there was tied an intricately knotted set of four leather strings. In such a way the red hunters identify their animals. The owner of the beast may be determined from the knetting of the strings.

"Kneel," said a guard.

The two slave girls immediately knelt, obedient to a master's command.

My lovely captor regarded them with contempt.

The red hunter, he of the polar basin, had not knelt. Perhaps he did not speak Gorean well enough to understand the command. There are several barbarian languages spoken on Gor, usually in more remote areas. Also, some of the dialects of Gorean itself are aimost unintelligible. On the other hand, Gorean, in its varieties, serves as the lingua franca of civilized Gor. There are few Goreans who cannot speak it, though with some it is almost a second language. Gorean tends to be rendered more uniform through the minglings and transactions of the great fairs. Too, at certain of these fairs, the caste of scribes, accepted as the arbiters of such matters, stipulate that certain pronounciations and grammatical, formations, and such are to be preferred over others. The Fairs, in their diverse ways, tend to standardize the language, which might otherwise disintegrate into regional variations which, over centuries, might become mutually unintelligible linguistic modalities, in effect and practice, unfortunately, separate languages. The Fairs, and, I think, the will of Priest-Kings, prevents this.

"No," said the red hunter. He had spoken in Gorean.

He was struck to his knees by the blows of spears. He looked up, angrily. "Free our tabuk!" he said.

"Take him away and put him to work on the wall," said my lovely captor.

The man was dragged away.

"What have we here?" Sidney Anderson asked, regarding the two girls.

"Polar slaves, beasts of the red hunters," said a man.

"Look up at me," she said.

The girls looked into her eyes.

"You have the look of Earth girls," said my captor, in English.

I thought her perceptive. They could still be distinguished from Gorean collar girls. There was still something about them which, to a discerning eye, betrayed their intricate, constricted Earth origin. Later, if they had the proper master or series of masters, it would no longer be possible to do this by sight. They would be betrayed then, if their teeth were not carefully inspected, only by their accent. A filling found in a tooth is usually a sign of an Earth girl. It is not an infallible sign, however, for not all Earth girls have fillings and some dental work is done upon occasion by the caste of physicians on Gorean girls. Cavities are rare in Goreans because of their simple diet and the general absence of cruel emotional stress, with its physiological and chemical consequences, during puberty. Gorean culture tends to view the body, its development, its appetites and needs, with congeniality. We do not grow excited about the growth of trees, and Goreans do not grow excited about the growth of people. In some respects the Goreans are, perhaps, cruel. Yet they have never seen fit, through lies, to inflict suffering on children. They seem generally to me to be fond of children. Perhaps that is why they seldom hurt them. Even slave children, incidentally, are seldom abused or treated poorly, and are given much freedom, until they reach their young adulthood. It is then, of course, that they are taught that they are slaves. Men come, and the young male is tied and taken to the market. If the young slave is a female she may or may not be sent to a market. Many young slave maidens are raised almost as daughters in a home. It is often a startling and frightening day for such a girl when, one morning, she finds herself suddenly, unexpectedly, put in a collar and whipped, and made to begin to pay the price of her now-blossomed slave beauty.

"Are you not Earth girls?" asked blue-eyed, auburn-haired Sidney Anderson of the two kneeling girls, in their short fur tunics, the strings on their throats, and tethers, their hands tied behind their backs.

"Yes! Yes!" said the blond girl suddenly, "Yes!"

Sidney Anderson, I conjectured, was the first. person on Gor whom they had met who spoke English.

"What are you?" asked Sidney Anderson.

"We are slaves, Mistress," said the blond girl.

"What are your names?" asked my lovely captor.

"Barbara Benson," said the blond girl. "Audrey Brewster," said the dark-haired girl.

"I scarcely think," said my captor, "that those names would have been given to you by an Indian."

I had not really thought of the red hunter as an Indian, but I supposed this was true. The men of the polar basin are usually referred to as the red hunters in Gorean. Certainly they were culturally distinct from the red savages, tarn riders, of the countries north and east of the Thentis mountains, who maintained a feudal nobility over scattered agricultural communities of white slaves. Those individuals, more than the red hunters, I thought of as Indians. Yet, doubtless the red hunters, too, if one were to be strict about such matters, were Indian. On the other hand the children of the red hunters are born with a blue spot at the base of the spine and those of the red savages, or red tarn riders, are not. There is, thus, some sort of racial disaffinity between them. There are also serological differenees. Race, incidentally, is not. a serious matter generally for Goreans, perhaps because of the inter-mixtures of people. Language and city, and caste, however, are matters of great moment to them, and provide a sufficient basis for the discriminations in which human beings take such great delight.

The blond-haired girl looked up at Sidney Anderson. "I am Thimble," she said.

"I am Thistle," mid the dark-haired girl.

How beautiful they looked, kneeling, with their hands bound behind them.

"Are you not shamed to be slaves?" asked Sidney Anderson.

"Yes, yes!" wept the blond-haired girl. I remembered she had once worn the brief, denim shorts, raveled, and the man's shirt, tied under her breasts.

"Good," said Sidney Anderson.

They looked at her.

"Look at yourselves," she said. "Consider your attire. You should be ashamed."

"Are you going to free us?" breathed the blond-haired girl. Then she added, "-Mistress?"

Sidney Anderson regarded them with contempt.

"Some women," she said, "should be slaves."

"Mistress," protested the blond-haired girl.

"I look upon you," said Sidney Anderson, "and I see women who deserve to be only meaningless slaves."

"Mistress!" protested the blond-haired girl.

"Take them away," said Sidney Anderson.

"Do you want them killed?" asked a guard.

"Wash and comb them," she said, "and then chain them in the long house for the guards."

"It will be done," said the man.

The girls were dragged away.

"Doubtless you have other girls, too," I said, "kept for the men."

"Those are the only two," she said. "I have given orders that our sutlers not peddle slave sluts in the camp."

"When I was captured," I said, "a blond slave named Constance was taken, too. I would have thought she would have been brought here."

"No," said my lovely captor.

"Where was she taken?" I asked.

"I do not know," she said…

She tugged on the rawhide leash I wore. Then she reached up and removed it from my neck, and coiled it, and replaced it on the ring on her belt.

"The sun is beautiful in your auburn hair," I said.

"Oh?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "Did you know that girls with auburn hair often bring higher prices on the slave block?" I asked.

"No," she said, "I did not." Then she said to guardsmen who stood about. "Take him to the whipping frame. Secure him there and beat him well. Use the snake. Then pen him and chain him. Tomorrow put him to work on the wall."

"The red hunters depend on the tabuk," I told her. "Without it they will starve."

"That is not my concern," she said.

The men put their hands on my arms.

"Oh," she said, "incidentally you may know of a ship of supplies which had been bound for the high north."

"I know of such a ship," I said.

"It has been sunk," she said. "Its crew doubtless will greet you tomorrow. They, too, labor on the wall."

"How could you take the ship?" I asked.

"There are five tarnsmen here," she said, "though now they are on patrol. They fired the ship from the air. Its crew, abandoning the ship, were apprehended later. The ship, burned to the waterline, was steered onto the rocks and fell awash. In the rising of the tide it was freed and sank. Sharks now frequent its hold."

I looked at her.

"We are thorough," she said.

"The red hunters will starve," I told her.

"That is not my concern," she said.

"Why are you holding the tabuk?" I asked. "What have you to gain?"

"I do not know," she said. "I am merely discharging my orders."

"The red hunters," I said.

"They are not my concern," she said. Then she said, "Take him away."

Two men seized me and conducted me from her presence. I was confident that I saw the point of stopping the tabuk. Its role in the plans of Kurii seemed clear to me. I was puzzled that the girl did not see its import.

She knew no more, it seemed, than she needed to know.