Tarnsman of Gor

Chapter 13 Marlenus, Ubar of Ar

I SET MY COURSE FOR Ko-ro-ba, carrying in my saddle pack the trophy that was now, at least to me, worthless. It had done its work. Its loss to Ar had already riven an empire and, for the time at least, had guaranteed the independence of Ko-ro-ba and her hostile sister cities. Yet my victory, if victory it was, brought me no satisfaction. My mission might have been concluded, but I did not rejoice. I had lost the girl I had loved, cruel and treacherous though she might have been.

I took the tarn high, to bring a circle of some two hundred pasangs or so under my view. In the far distance I could see the silver wire I knew must be the great Vosk, could see the abrupt shift from the grassy plains to the Margin of Desolation. From the height I could look down on a portion of the Voltai Range, with its arrogant reddish heights, as it faded away to the east. To the southwest I could see dimly the evening light reflected from the spires of Ar, and to the north, approaching from the Vosk, I could see the glow from what must be thousands of cooking fires, the night's camp of Pa-Kur.

As I was drawing on the two-strap, to guide the tarn to Ko-ro-ba, I saw something I did not expect to see, something directly below, which startled me. Shielded among the crags of the Voltai, invisible except from directly above, I saw four or five small cooking fires, such as might mark the camp of a mountain patrol or a small company of hunters, perhaps after the agile and bellicose Gorean mountain goat, the long-haired, spiral-horned very, or, more dangerously, the larl, a tawny leopardlike beast indigenous to the Voltai and several of Gor's ranges, standing an incredible seven feet high at the shoulder and feared for its occasional hunger-driven visitations to the civilized plains below. Curious, I dropped the tarn lower, not willing to believe the fires belonged to either a patrol or to hunters. It did not seem likely that one of Ar's r patrols would be presently bivouacked in the Voltai, nor did it seem likely the fires below would be those of hunters.

As I dropped lower, my suspicions were confirmed. Perhaps the men of the mysterious camp heard the beating of the tarn's wings, perhaps I had been outlined for an instant against one of Gor's three circling moons, but suddenly the fires disappeared, kicked apart in a flash, of sparks, and the glowing embers were smothered almost immediately. Outlaws, I supposed, or perhaps deserters from Ar. There would be many who would leave the city to seek the comparative safety of the mountains. Feeling that I had satisfied my curiosity and not wanting to risk a landing in the darkness, where a spear might dart from any shadow, I drew back on the one-strap and prepared to return at last to Ko-ro-ba, whence I had departed several days — an eternity — before.

As the tarn wheeled upward, I heard the wild, uncanny hunting cry of the larl, piercing the dusk from somewhere in the peaks below. Even the tarn seemed to shiver in its flight. The hunting cry was answered from elsewhere in the peaks and then again from a farther distance. When the larl hunts alone, it hunts silently, never uttering a sound until the sudden roar that momentarily precedes its charge, the roar calculated to terrify the quarry into a fatal instant of immobility. But tonight a pride of larls was hunting, and the cries of the three beasts were driving cries, herding the prey, usually several animals, toward the region of silence, herding them in the direction from which no cries would come, the direction in which the remainder of the pride waited.

The light of the three moons was bright that night, and in the resultant exotic patchwork of shadows below, I caught sight of one of the larls, padding softly along, its body almost white in the moonlight. It paused, lifted its wide, fierce head, some two or three feet in diameter, and uttered the hunting scream once more. Momentarily it was answered, once from about two pasangs to the west and once from about the same distance to the southwest. It appeared ready to resume its pace when suddenly it stopped, its head absolutely motionless, its sharp, pointed ears tense and lifted. I thought perhaps he had heard the taro, but he seemed to show no awareness of us.

I brought the bird somewhat lower, in long, slow circles, keeping the larl in view. The tail of the animal began to lash angrily. It crouched, holding its long, terrible body close to the ground. It then began to move forward, swiftly but stealthily, its shoulders hunched forward, its hind quarters almost touching the ground. Its ears were lying back, flat against the sides of its wide head. As it moved, for all its speed, it placed each paw carefully on the ground, first the toes and then the ball of the foot, as silently as the wind might bend grass, in a motion that was as beautiful as it was terrifying.

Something unusual was apparently happening. Some animal must be trying to break the hunting circle. One would suppose that the larl might be unconcerned with a single animal escaping its net of noise and fear and would neglect an isolated kill in order to keep the hunting circle closed, but that is not true. For whatever reason, the larl will always prefer ruining a hunt, even one involving a quarry of several animals, to allowing a given animal to move past it to freedom. Though I suppose this is purely instinctive on the larl's part, it does have the effect, over a series of generations, of weeding out animals which, if they survived, might transmit their intelligence, or perhaps their erratic running patterns, to their offspring. As it is, when the larl loses its hunt, the animals which escape are those which haven't tried to break the circle, those which allow themselves to be herded easily.

Suddenly, to my horror, I saw the quarry of the larl. It was a human being, moving with surprising alacrity over the rough ground. To my astonishment, I saw it wore the yellow cerements of the sufferer of DarKosis, that virulent, incurable, wasting disease of Gor.

Without bothering to think, I seized my spear and, dragging harshly on the four-strap, brought the taro into a sharp, abrupt descent. The bird struck the ground between the diseased victim and the approaching larl.

Rather than risk casting my spear from the safe but unsteady saddle of the tarn, I leaped to the ground, just as the larl, furious that it had been discovered, uttered the paralyzing hunting roar and charged. For an instant I could not move, literally. Somehow the shock of that great, wild cry gripped me in a steel fist of terror. It was uncontrollable, an immobility as much a physiological reflex as the jerking of a knee or the blinking of an eye.

Then, as swiftly as it had come, that nightmarish instant of immobility passed and I set my spear to take the jolt of the larl's attack. Perhaps my sudden appearance had disoriented the beast or shaken its marvelous instincts, because it must have uttered its killing cry an instant too soon, or perhaps my muscles and nerves responded to my will more rapidly than it had anticipated. When, twenty feet away, the great, bounding beast, fangs bared, leaped for its prey, it encountered instead only the slender needle of my spear, set like a stake in the ground, braced by the half naked body of a warrior of Ko-ro-ba. The spearhead disappeared from sight in the furry breast of the larl, and the shaft of the spear began to sink into it as the weight of the animal forced it deeper into its body. I leaped from under the tawny, monstrous body, narrowly escaping the slashings of its clawed forefeet. The spear shaft snapped and the beast fell to the earth, rolling on its back, pawing at the air, uttering piercing, enraged shrieks, trying to bite the toothpick-like object from its body. With a convulsive shudder, the great head rolled to one side and the eyes half closed, — leaving a milky slit of death between the lids.

I turned to regard the individual whose life I had saved. He was now bent and crooked, like a broken, blasted shrub in his yellow shroud like robe. The hood concealed his face.

"There are more of these things about," I said. "You'd better come with me. It won't be safe here."

The figure seemed to shrink backward and grow smaller in its yellow rags. Pointing to its shadowed, concealed face, it whispered, "The Holy Disease."

That was the literal translation of Dar-Kosis — the Holy Disease — or, equivalently, the Sacred Affliction. The disease is named that because it is regarded as being holy to the Priest-Kings, and those who suffer from it are regarded as consecrated to the Priest-Kings. Accordingly, it is regarded as heresy to shed their blood. On the other hand, the Afflicted, as they are called, have little to fear from their fellow men. Their disease is so highly contagious, so invariably devastating in its effect, and so feared on the planet that even the boldest of outlaws gives them a wide berth. Accordingly, the Afflicted enjoy a large amount of freedom of movement on Gor. They are, of course, warned to stay away from the habitations of men, and, if they approach too closely, they are sometimes stoned. Oddly enough, casuistically, stoning the Afflicted is not regarded as a violation of the Priest-Kings' supposed injunction against shedding their blood.

As an act of charity, Initiates have arranged at various places Dar-Kosis Pits where the Afflicted may voluntarily imprison themselves, to be fed with food hurled downward from the backs of passing tarns. Once in a Dar-Kosis Pit, the Afflicted are not allowed to depart. Finding this poor fellow in the Voltai, so far from the natural routes and fertile areas of Gor, I suspected he might have escaped, if that was possible, from one of the Pits.

"What is your name?" I asked.

"I am of the Afflicted," said the weird, cringing figure. "The Afflicted are dead. The dead are nameless." The voice was little more than a hoarse whisper.

I was glad that it was night and that the hood of the man was drawn, for I had no desire to look on what pieces of flesh might still cling to his skull.

"Did you escape from one of the Dar-Kosis Pits?" I asked.

The man seemed to cringe even more.

"You are safe with me," I said. I gestured to the tare, which was impatiently opening and closing his wings. "Hurry. There are more larls about."

"The Holy Disease," the man protested, pointing into the hideously dark recesses of his drawn hood.

"I can't leave you here to die," I said. I shivered at the thought of taking this dread creature, this whispering corpse, with me. I feared the disease as I had not feared the larl, but I could not leave him here in the mountains to fall prey to one beast or another.

The man cackled a thin, whining noise. "I am already dead," he laughed insanely. "I am of the Afflicted." Again the weird cackle came from the folds of the yellow shroud. "Would you like the Holy Disease?" he asked, stretching out one hand in the darkness, as if trying to clutch my hand.

I drew back my hand in horror.

The thing stumbled forward, reaching for me, and fell to the ground with a tiny, moaning sound. It sat on the ground, wrapped in its yellow cerements — a mound of decay and desolation under the three Gorean moons. It rocked back and forth, uttering mad little noises, as if grieving or whimpering.

From perhaps a pasang away I heard the frustrated roar of a larl, probably one of the companions of the beast I had killed, puzzled about the failure of the hunt.

"Get up," I said. "There isn't much time."

"Help me," whined the yellow mound.

I stilled a shiver of disgust and extended my hand to the object.

"Take my hand," I said. "I'll help you."

From the bent heap of rags that was a fellow human being, a hand reached up to me, the fingers crooked, as though they might have been the claws of a chicken. Disregarding my misgivings, I took the hand, to draw the unfortunate creature to its feet.

To my amazement, the hand that clasped mine firmly was as solid and hardened as saddle leather. Before I realized what was happening, my arm had been jerked downward and twisted, and I had been thrown on my back at the feet of the man, who leaped up and set his boot on my throat. In his hand was a warrior's sword, and the point was at my breast. He laughed a mighty, roaring laugh and threw his head back, causing the hood to fall to his shoulders. I saw a massive, lion like head, with wild long hair and a beard as unkempt and magnificent as the crags of the Voltai itself. The man, who seemed to leap into gigantic stature as he lifted himself into full height, took from under his yellow robes a tarn whistle and blew a long, shrill note. Almost instantly the whistle had been answered by other whistles, responding from a dozen places in the nearby mountains. Within a minute the air was filled with the beating of wings, as some half a hundred wild tarnsmen brought their birds down about us.

"I am Marlenus, Ubar of Ar," said the man.