Savages of Gor

6 Kailiauk

I looked down into the broad, rounded, shallow pit, leaning over the waist-highwooden railing. In the pit, about five feet below the surface of the ground,there were nineteen girls. They wore wrist and ankle shackles, their wristshaving some six inches of play and their ankles some twelve inches of play. Theywere also chained together by the neck. None of them stood, for such a girl, insuch a pit, is not permitted to stand, unless given an express order to do so.

The pit was muddy, for it had rained in the morning. They looked up, some ofthem who dared to do so, at the men looking down at them, from about thecircular railing, assessing their qualities as females. Did they look into theeyes of their future masters? They had not yet even been branded.

"Barbarians," said the fellow next to me.

"Clearly," I said.

"There are two other pits," said the fellow. "Did you see them?"

"Yes," I said. "I have already perused their contents." It is pleasant to seenaked, chained women, either slaves or those soon to be slaves.

I had spent a night on the road and had arrived in Kailiauk, hungry and muddy,yesterday, shortly after the tenth Ahn, the Gorean noon. Indeed, I had heard thestriking of the time bar, mounted on the roof of the Administrator's store, as Ihad approached the town's outskirts. In Kailiauk, as is not unusual in the townsof the perimeter, the Administrator is of the Merchants. The major business inKailiauk is the traffic in hides and kaiila. It serves a function as well,however, as do many such towns, as a social and commercial center for manyoutlying farms and ranches. It is a bustling town, but much of its population isitinerant. Among its permanent citizens I doubt that it numbers more than fouror five hundred individuals. As would be expected it has several inns andtaverns aligned along its central street.

Its most notable feature, probably, is its hide sheds. Under the roofs of theseopen sheds, on platforms, tied in bundles, are thousands of hides. Elsewhere,here and there, about town, are great heaps of bone and horn, often thirty ormore feet in height. These deposits represent the results of the thinnings ofkailiauk herds by the red savages. A most common sight in Kailiauk is the comingand going of hide wagons, and wagons for the transport of horn and bones. Thenumber of kailiauk in the Barrens is prodigious, for it affords them a splendidenvironment with almost no natural enemies. Most kailiauk, I am sure, have neverseen a man or a sleen.

The Barrens are traversed by a large number of herds. The four or fivebest-known herds, such as the Boswell herd, he for whom the Boswell Pass isnamed, and the Bento herd and the Hogarthe herd, named after the first white menwho saw them, number, it is estimated, between two and three million beasts. Thetremors in the earth from such a herd can be felt fifty pasangs away. It takessuch a herd two to three days to ford a river. It has occasionally happened thatenemy tribes have preyed on such a herd at different points and only afterwards,to their chagrin and amusement, realized their proximity to one another. Besidesthese major herds there are several smaller, identifiable herds numbering in thehundreds of thousands of animals. Beyond these, as would be expected, are manysmaller herds, the very numbers of which are not even calculated by the redsavages themselves, herds often range from a few hundred to several thousandanimals.

It is speculated that some of these smaller herds may be subherds of largerherds, separating from the major herd at certain points during the season,depending on such conditions as forage and water. If that is the case then thenumber of kailiauk may not be quite as large as it is sometimes estimated. Onthe other hand, that their numbers are incredibly abundant is indubitable. Theseherds, too, interestingly enough, appear to have their annual grazing patterns,usually describing a gigantic oval, seasonally influenced, which covers manythousands of pasangs. These peregrinations, as would be expected, tend to take aherd in and out of the territory of given tribes at given times. The same herd,thus, may be hunted by various tribes without necessitating dangerous departuresfrom their own countries.

The kailiauk is a migratory beast, thusly, but only in a rather special sense.

It does not, for example, like, certain flocks of birds, venture annually inroughly linear paths from the north to the south, and from the south to thenorth, covering thousands of pasangs in a series of orthogonal alternations. Thekailiauk must feed as it moves, and it is simply too slow for this type ofmigration. It could not cover the distances involved in the times that would benecessary. Accordingly the herds tend not so much to migrate with the seasons asto drift with them, the ovoid grazing patterns tending to bend northward in thesummer and southward in the winter. The smell of the hide sheds, incidentally,gives a very special aroma to the atmosphere of Kailiauk. After one has beenthere for a few hours, however, the odor of the hides, now familiar andpervasive, tends to be dismissed from consciousness.

"Some of them are quite pretty," said the fellow next to me, looking down intothe pit, his elbows on the railing.

"Yes," I said. We stood within the compound of Ram Seibar, a dealer in slaves.

It is a reasonably large compound, for he also handles kaiila. It is, I wouldestimate, something over three hundred feet square, or, say, a bit less than atenth of a pasang square. It contains several slave pits but only three were nowoccupied. It also contains several larger and smaller wooden structures,primarily holding areas, barracks for men and various ancillary buildings. Theentire compound is enclosed by a wooden palisade. On the largest building, themain sales barn, about seventy feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet inlength, there flies the pennon of Seibar, a yellow pennon on which, in black,are portrayed shackles and a whip.

"Do you know Grunt, the trader?" I asked the fellow.

"Yes," said he.

"Is he in the vicinity?" I asked.

"I do not know," said the man.

I had sought this fellow in the various inns and taverns of Kailiauk. I couldfind no one who seemed to know of his whereabouts. Indeed, I had begun todespair of finding him.

This morning, at the Five Horns stables, in Kailiauk, I had bought two kaiila.

Bridles, a saddle, various sorts of gear, supplies, and trading goods, too, Ihad purchased in the town, at the store of Publius Crassus, of the Merchants,who is also Kailiauk's Administrator. Too I had purchased a short bow, modeledon the sort used by the savages, fit for clearing the saddle, and a quiver oftwenty sheaf arrows.

In my opinion one of the mistakes of the white cavalries of the perimeter areaswas their reliance on the crossbow, which is primarily an infantry weapon. Itdoes, of course, have various advantages. It has considerable striking power, itmay be kept ready to fire almost indefinitely, and, for most men, it is easierto fire with accuracy from the saddle than the straight bow. It will also, atshort ranges, penetrate most of the hide shields used by the red savages.

Its major disadvantage is its slowness in rate of fire. The cavalry crossbowdoes have an iron stirrup in which the rider, without dismounting, may inserthis foot, thus gaining the leverage necessary for drawing the cable back withboth hands. If the rider is right handed he usually inserts his right foot inthe stirrup and leans to the right in drawing the cable; this procedure isreversed, of course, usually, if the rider is left handed. While this procedurepermits the rider to reload without dismounting and tends to improve, at somecost to striking power, the bow's rate of fire, it still provides, in myopinion, no adequate compensation for the loss of rapidity of fire. I think itnot unlikely that the red savage could discharge three to five shafts in thetime a single quarrel could be set in the clumsier weapon. In my opinion, if thecrossbow, of the lighter, more quickly loading type, had proved to be a superiormissile weapon in the typical combats practiced in the Barrens the red savageswould have had recourse either to it, or to something analogous to it. But theyhave not.

I opted, accordingly, taking them for my authorities in the matter, for a weaponsimilar in design to theirs, one which had, apparently, proven its usefulness inthe abrupt, sudden and fierce engagements characteristic of war on the vastgrasslands of the Barrens. Unable to find Grunt, I feared I must enter theBarrens alone. Already, early this morning, the Lady Mira of Venna, and Alfredof Port Olni, with their mercenaries, had left Kailiauk.

The fellow leaning on the rail turned to look at me. "Why do you wish to findGrunt?" he asked.

"I wish to enter the Barrens," I said.

"It is madness to do so," said he.

I shrugged.

"It is unfortunate you did not come to Kailiauk a month ago," he said.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Settlers, armed, with two hundred wagons, crossed the Ihanke," he said. "Men,women, children. There must have been seven or eight hundred of them. You couldhave accompanied them. There is perhaps safety in such numbers."

"Perhaps," I said. Such a. party, however, I knew must travel slowly. Also, itwould be impossible to conceal its trails and movements.

"You are a big fellow," he said, "and seem quick, and strong. Why did you notsign articles with the troops who left this morning?"

I did not respond to him.

"It was the largest mercenary band ever to leave Kailiauk," he said. "You shouldhave gone with them."

"Perhaps," I said.

"I'm chained! I'm chained!" wept one of the girls in the pit below. She knelt,nude, in the mud. With her small hands, her tiny wrists in their close-fittingmanacles, she seized the chain attached to the collar on her neck. She jerked ittwice against the back of her neck. It cut at the back of her neck. "I'mchained," she wept, disbelievingly. "Where am I? What has become of me? Whereare my clothes? Who are these men? How is it that they dare to look at me? Inwhat place do I find myself?"

"They cannot even speak Gorean," said the man beside me.

"Barbarians," I said.

"Yes," he said. The girl had spoken in English. This had confirmed my surmise asto their origin. I had come to Seibar's market out of curiosity. I had heard hewas the major dealer in Kailiauk for barbarian slaves. I did not know, but Isuspected that he himself was not in league with Kurii, but merely purchasedwholesale lots of such girls from one or more of their agents. Such girls, Igathered, from my conversations with the teamster with whom I had ridden to FortHaskins, were sold at various points along the perimeter. I had, earlier in theafternoon, on one of my purchased kaiila, scouted the terrain north and south ofKailiauk. In my ride I had come to one place, sheltered among small hills, inwhich I had found scorched grass and several, rounded six-inch-deep impressionsin the earth. It had been there, I speculated, that one of the steel ships ofthe Kurii had landed. Also there were wagon tracks leading away from the area,toward Kailiauk. I was less fortunate, at various small camps and outlyingfarms, in obtaining information as to the possible whereabouts of a white tradernamed Grunt. I did not approach the Ihanke, nor did I wish to do so, ifpossible, until I knew exactly what I was doing. I did not know, for example,even if it were guarded or not.

"Even if such girls understood Gorean," said the fellow next to me, amused,"they could probably not even understand what was required of them. Theyprobably do not even know the hundred kisses."

"They could be taught," I said.

"That is so," he laughed.

"Stand aside, Gentlemen, if you would," said a voice near us, that of a slaver'sman.

We stepped back and he, from a basket, hurled an assortment of scraps, such ascrusts of bread and rinds of fruit, into the muddy pit. It was the refuse, thegarbage, I gathered, from a meal of the slaver's men.

In the pit the girls regarded the refuse with horror. Then I saw the small,chained hand of one reach forth toward a piece of roll. She picked it up andthrust it in her mouth. Another girl then reached to a bit of fruit. Anotherthen snatched at a gravy-sopped wedge of yellow Sa-Tarna bread. Then, in aninstant, in their chains, they scrambled in the mud after the garbage, twistingand shrieking, caught and restricted in their chains, scratching, and rollingand fighting, for the least of the tidbits cast to them by a free man.

"They are slaves," said the man near me, as we returned to the railing.

"Yes," I said. Too, I saw that their education had begun.

"There is better stock inside, I hear," said the man, "hidden away until thetime of the sale, some even in the barbarian garments in which they werecaptured."

"That is interesting," I said.

"But they, too," said the man, "will learn to take food on their belly."

"Of course," I said. Then I turned away from the railing. I was angry that I hadnot been able to locate Grunt, the trader. In the morning, with or without him,I would enter the Barrens.