Tribesmen of Gor

2 The Streets of Tor

“Water! Water!” called the man.

“Water,” I said.

He came to me, bent over, tattered, swarthy, grinning up at me, the verrskin bag over his shoulder, the brass cups, a dozen of them, attached to shoulder straps and his belt, rattling and clinking. His shoulder on the left was damp from the bag. There were sweat marks on his torn shirt, under the straps. One of the brass cups he unhooked from his belt. Without removing the bag from his shoulder, he filled the cup. He wore a head scarf, the wrapped turban, wound about his head. It was of rep-cloth. It protects the head from the sun; its folds allow beat and perspiration to escape, evaporating, and, of course, air to enter and circulate. Among lower-class males, too, it provides a soft cushion, on which boxes, and other burdens, may be conveniently carried on the head, steadied by the right hand. The water flowed into the cup through a tiny vent-and-spigot device, which wastes little water, by reducing spillage, which was tied in and waxed into a hole left in the front left foreleg of the verr skin. The skins are carefully stripped and any rents in the skin are sewed up, the seams coated with wax. When the whole skin is thoroughly cleaned of filth and hair, straps are fastened to it so that it may be conveniently carried on the shoulder, or over the back, the same straps serving, with adjustment, for either mode of support. The cup was dirty.

I took the water and gave the man a copper tarsk.

I smelled the spices and sweat of Tor. I drank slowly. The sun was high.

Tor, lying at the northwest corner of the Tahari, is the principal supplying point for the scattered oasis communities of that dry vastness, almost a continent of rock, and heat, and wind and sand. These communities, sometimes quite large, numbering in hundreds, sometimes thousands of citizens depending on the water available, are often hundreds of pasangs apart. They depend on caravans, usually from Tor, sometimes from Kasra, sometimes even from far Turia, to supply many of their needs. In turn, of course, caravans export the products of the oases. To the oases caravans bring various goods, for example, rep-cloth, embroidered cloths, silks, rugs, silver, gold, jewelries, mirrors, kailiauk tusk, perfumes, hides, skins, feathers, precious woods, tools, needles, worked leather goods, salt, nuts and spices, jungle birds, prized as pets, weapons, rough woods, sheets of tin and copper, the tea of Bazi, wool from the bounding Hurt, decorated, beaded whips, female slaves, and many other forms of merchandise. The principal export of the oases is dates and pressed-date bricks.

Some of the date palms grow to more than a hundred feet high. It takes ten years before they begin to bear fruit. They will then yield fruit for more than a century. A given tree, annually, yields between one and five Gorean weights of fruit. A weight is some ten stone, or some forty Earth pounds. A great amount of farming, or perhaps one should speak of gardening, is done at the oasis, but little of this is exported. At the oasis will be grown a hybrid, brownish Sa-Tarna, adapted to the heat of the desert; most Sa-Tarna is yellow; and beans, berries, onions tuber suls, various sorts of melons, a foliated leaf vegetable, called Katch, and various root vegetables, such as turnips, carrots, radishes, of the sphere and cylinder varieties, and korts, a large, brownish-skinned, thick-skinned, sphere-shaped vegetable, usually some six inches in width, the interior of which is yellowish, fibrous and heavily seeded. At the oasis, because of the warm climate, the farmers can grow two or more crops a year.

Larma and tospits are also grown at the oases, in small orchards. Some rep is grown, for cloth, but most cloth comes to the oases from caravans. Kaiila and verr are found at the oases, but not in great numbers. The herds of these animals are found in the desert. They are kept by nomads, who move them from one area of verr grass to another or from one water hole to another, as the holes, for the season, go dry. Smaller water sources are used in the spring, for these are the first to go dry, larger ones later in the year. No grass grows about these water holes because many animals are brought to them and graze it to the earth. They are usually muddy ponds, with some stunted trees about, centered in the midst of an extensive radius of grassless, cracked, dry earth. Meat, hides, and animal-hair cloth are furnished to the oases by the nomads. In turn, from the oases the nomads receive, most importantly, Sa-Tarna grain and the Bazi tea.

They receive, as well, of course, other trade goods. Sa-Tarna is the main staple of the nomads. They, in spite of raising herds, eat very little meat. The animals are too precious for their trade value, and their hair and milk, to be often slaughtered for food. A nomad boy of fifteen will often have eaten meat no more than a dozen times in his life. Raiders, however, feast well on meat. The animals mean little to them and come to them cheaply. Tea is extremely important to the nomads. It is served hot and heavily sugared. It gives them strength then, in virtue of the sugar, and cools them, by making them sweat, as well as stimulating them. It is drunk three small cups at a time, carefully measured.

I finished the cup of water and handed the cup back to the water carrier. He bowed, grinning, the bag, swollen and bulging, damp on his shoulder, and. hooking the cup on his belt, backed away. “Water!” he called. “Water!”

I blinked my eyes against the heat and glare of the sun. The buildings of Tor are of mud brick, covered with colored, often flaking, plasters. But now, in the sun, and the dust, raised by the people in the streets, everything seemed drained of color. I would soon have to buy appropriate garments. In such a city I was too conspicuous.

I made my way toward the bazaar.

I knew the light lance, and the swift, silken kaiila. I had learned these with the Wagon Peoples. But I did not know the scimitar. The short sword, now slung over my left shoulder, in the common fashion, would be of little use on kaiila back. The men of the Tahari do not fight on foot. A man on foot in the desert, in warfare, is accounted a dead man.

I looked up at the buildings. I was now in the shade, descending a narrow, steep street, toward the bazaar. The buildings in Tor are seldom more than four stories high, which is about as high as one may build safely with beams and mud brick. Because of the irregular topography of Tor, however, which is a hilly, rocky area, like most of the Tahari terrain, many of the buildings, built on shelves and rises, seemed considerably higher. These buildings, on the outside smooth and bleak, save for occasional narrow windows, high, not wide enough to admit a body, abut directly on the streets, making the streets like deep, walled alleys. In the center of the street is a gutter. It seldom rains in Tor, but the gutter serves to collect waste, which is often thrown into it, through open doors, by slaves. Within these walls, however, so pressing upon the street, I knew there were often gardens, walled, well-watered, beautiful, and cool, dark rooms, shielded from the heat and sun, many with superb appointments. Tor was, as Gorean cities went, rich, trading city. It was headquarters for thousands of caravan merchants. In it, too, were housed many craftsmen, practicing their industries, carvers, varnishers, table makers, gem cutters, jewelers, carders, dyers of cloth, weavers of rugs, tanners, makers of slippers, toolers of leather, potters, glaziers, makers of cups and kettles, weapon smiths, and many others. Much of the city, of course, was organized to support the caravan trade.

There were many walled, guarded warehouses, requiring their staffs of scribes and guards, and, in hundreds of hovels, lived kaiila tenders, drovers, and such, who would, at the caravan tables, when their moneys had been exhausted, apply, if accepted, making their mark on the roster, once more for a post with some new caravan. Guards for these caravans, incidentally, were usually known by, and retained by, caravan merchants between caravans. They were known men. Tenders and drovers, on the whole, came and went. Elaborate random selection devices, utilizing coins and sticks, and formulas, were sometimes used by merchants to assure that applying tenders and drovers were selected, if they were not known, by chance. Tenders and drovers were assured that this was to insure fairness.

Actually, of course, as was well known, this was a precaution against the danger of hiring, en bloc, unwittingly, an organized group of men, who might, prior to their hiring, have formed a plan to slay the guards and merchants and make off with the caravan. Tenders and drovers, however, like men generally, were an honest sort. When they returned to Tor, of course, they had been long in the desert. At the end of the trip they received their wages. Sometimes, not even a hundred yards from the warehouses, these men would be met by enterprising cafe owners, praising the advantages of their respective establishments. The owners of these cafes, usually, would bring with them a chain of their girls, stripped, as free women in the Tahari districts may not be, purportedly a typical selection of the stock available.

“In my house,” he would call, indicating one or another of the girls, “rent the key to her chains.”

But generally the men would proceed past these enticements, which were, from what I saw, far from negligible, and hurry toward their favorite cafes and hostels, whose wares, I gathered, did not need such blatant advertisement, whose worth, and capacities for total and complete satisfaction were apparently well known. Certain of these cafes I might mention. The Silken Oasis is well known, even in Ar, but it is extremely expensive; in the middle range of price are the Golden Collar and the Silver Chain, both under the same management, that of a Turian named Haran; good, relatively inexpensive cafes are the Thong, which I would recommend, the Veminium, the Pomegranate, the Red Cages and the Pleasure Garden. These various establishments, and more than forty others, from the point of view of tenders and drovers, have one thing in common. They succeed in separating, with celerity and efficiency, a fellow from his money. I do not feel this way myself. I think most of them, with the exception of the Silken Oasis, are reasonable. The drover’s objection, I think, is largely a function of the fact that he does not have a great deal of money to spend. What there is, accordingly, seems rapidly diminished. Tenders and drovers often proceed from one cafe to the other, for several nights. The wages for a caravan trip, which often takes months, commonly will last the fellow about ten days, or, if nursed out, some fifteen days. They are, of course, a rather pleasant ten or fifteen days. At the end of this time, after a day or so of some physiological discomfort, usually violent nausea and blinding headaches, it is common to find the man again back at the tables, once more attempting to vend his services to the master of a caravan.

A fellow walked past me, carrying several vulos, alive, heads down, their feet tied together. He was followed by another fellow, carrying a basket of eggs.

I followed them, as they would be going to the market streets, near which was the bazaar.

The water in an oasis is, of course, at its lowest point. Residences, at an oasis, are built on the higher ground, where nothing will grow. It is the valley, naturally, which, irrigated, usually by hand, though sometimes with clumsy wooden machinery, supports the agriculture. Land, at an oasis, which will grow food, is not wasted on domiciles. Tor, rather similarly, though few crops were grown within its walls, was built high, about its water, several wells in the deepest area in the city. The architecture of Tor, in concentric circles, broken by numerous, narrow, crooked streets, was a function of the radius from its wells. An advantage of this municipal organization, of course, though it is scarcely a matter of intentional design, is that the water is in the most protected portion of the city, its center. Tor’s water, I might mention, was ample to her needs. Though I saw few of them, she boasted many shaded gardens.

Water for these gardens, by contract with slave masters, was carried by chains of male slaves and emptied into house cisterns, whence, later, by house slaves, it would be taken in cans and sprinkled carefully, foot by foot, throughout the garden.

I was now in the lower part of the city.

“Water!” I heard. “Water!”

Behind me, turning, I saw the water carrier, he from whom I had purchased a cup of water earlier.

A woman, veiled, passed me. She held a baby inside her cloak, nursing it.

I continued down the sloping street, toward the bazaar and market, I had arrived in Tor four days ago, after first taking tarn to Kasra. There I had sold the bird, for I did not wish to be conspicuous in Tor, as would surely as a tarnsman. From Kasra I had taken a dhow upriver on the Lower Fayeen, until I reached the village of Kurtzal, which lies north, overland, from Tor. Goods which are to be transported from Tor to Kasra sometimes are first taken overland to Kurtzal, and thence west on the river. Kurtzal is little more than a loading and shipping point. In Kasra, descending upon my tarn, I had been a warrior. A mercenary tarnsman. As a portion of my assumed disguise, uncollared, lashed on her back across my saddle, had been the body of a naked girl. She was blond. She was barbarian. She could not even speak Gorean. I was congratulated on my catch.

I visited one of the metal workers, to purchase a collar for my prize. None, Samos and I suspected, would regard one with such a wench, so clumsy, so untaught, so obviously new to slavery, as being upon the business of Priest-Kings. She was simply a caught girl, picked up by a tarnsman with ease, simply to be used for a time and then discarded for a few tarn disks. “I took her from a slaver’s camp,” I told the metal worker. “I see her brand is fresh,” said the metal worker. It was true. She had not been branded in Teletus.

Sometimes a girl is not branded until she is first sold. There are various brands. Sometimes it pleases the master to decide with which the girl will be marked. Within an hour, however, of her arrival at the house of Samos, the girl had been sent to the branding chamber. The standard Kajira mark, as was the house policy, was put upon her.

Masters, incidentally, seldom brand their own slaves. To brand a girl well demands a sure hand, and, usually, experience. In training a man to use the iron slavers always give him poorer women at first, sometimes having him mark them more than once, until he becomes proficient. Usually by the fifteenth or the twentieth woman, the man is capable of marking them deeply, precisely and cleanly. It is important for the girl’s thigh to be held immobile: sometimes it is held by more than one man; sometimes it is bound to a wagon wheel; sometimes, in the house of slavers, a heavy, vise equipped, metal branding rack is used.

The girls are usually branded impersonally, perfunctorily, as cattle. Though they feel their mark intensely physically, it is felt, interestingly, even more intensely, more profoundly, psychologically; not unoften it, in itself, radically transforms their self-images, their personalities; they are then only slaves, not permitted their own wills, rightless, at the bidding of masters; the mark is an impersonal designation; this is understood by the girls; when she is marked she understands herself not to be marked by a given man for a given man, to be uniquely his, but rather, so to speak, that she is marked for all men; to all men she is a slave girl; usually, of course, only one among them, at a given time, will be her master; the brand is impersonal; the collar is intensely personal; the brand marks her property; the collar proclaims whose property she is, who it is who has either taken, or paid for, her; that the brand is an impersonal designation of an absence of status in the social structure is perhaps another reason why masters do not often brand their own girls; the brand relationship to the free man is institutional; the collar relationship, on the other hand, is an intensely personal one; it is not uncommon for masters to pride themselves on the depth with which they know their slave girls; this depth is far greater in my opinion than that with which the average husband of Earth knows his wife; the slave girl is not simply someone with whom the man lives; she is very special to him; she is a treasured possession; he owns her; he wants to know, profoundly and deeply, the background, history, the mind, the intelligence, the appetites, the nature and the dispositions of his lovely article of property; this knowledge, of course, puts her more at his mercy; by making it possible for him to manipulate her feelings, exploit weaknesses, drop asides, etc., she in the helpless condition of slavery, it gives him greater power over her. For example, it is common for a master to force his girl to speak at length and in detail to him of the secret sides of her nature, explaining and elaborating on her fantasies: if she is literate, she may be forced, naked, collared, on her knees at a small table, sometimes with her ankles shackled, to write them out; this supplies the master, of course, with abundant materials which may be used by him to make her further and more helplessly his; sometimes the girl attempts to deceive the master; it is not difficult to detect inauthenticity in such matters; she is then beaten; too, she may at times be ordered to invent fantasies, sometimes of a certain type; these, too, for she has invented them, are, to an astute master, instructive; these intellectual, emotional exercises, performed by the girl under a condition of slavery, particularly if coupled with an enforced exercise regime, posings under male surveillance, and such, can do much to sensitize her to her collar; they awaken her body and, of equal importance for the Gorean, though not for the Earthling, who sees sex with the perception of a hippopotamus, as a matter of body rubbings, her fantastic imagination and mind; she becomes curious, soon, about the deeper implications of what she is, a mere article of her master’s property; then, with authority, with assurance and power, to the depth and height of her mind and imagination she is taught; the slave girl experiences a paradox of freedom; the free woman is physically free, but miserable, fighting to be what she is not; the slave girl, physically in bondage, even to the collar, sometimes chains, is given no choice by men but to be totally and precisely what she is, slave; such women, the slave girls, interestingly, are almost always joyful and vital; they are, paradoxically, in their feelings and emotions, liberated; they are not pinched, not psychologically restrained; why this should be I do not know; to see such women, their heads high, their eyes bright, their bodies, their movements, beautiful, as no Earth woman would dare to be, is quite pleasurable; some of them are so insolent, so proud of their collars, that I have cuffed them to my feet to remind them that they are only slaves.

It had been fortunate for us that the girl’s brand had been relatively fresh, that she had been marked in the house of Samos and not on Teletus.

This made it more plausible that she was a recent prize, abducted, as I had averred to the metal worker, from the camp of a slaver. We could, of course, have taken another girl from the pens of Samos. This one, however, seemed ideal.

She was obviously untrained, a clumsy wench, as stupid and raw, aside from a few rapings, as an uncooked piece of bosk meat, new to slavery. Furthermore, ideally, she could not yet speak Gorean. She could, thus, do nothing to betray or confound, inadvertently or otherwise, by word or glance, our plans. She knew nothing. She was only a part of my disguise. Nonetheless it was with pleasure that I snapped the collar, marked in the name of Hakim of Tor, as she, kneeling, naked, looked up at me in anger, on the small, lovely throat of the former Miss Priscilla Blake-Allen, of Earth.

But when I descended the narrow gangplank of the dhow, which I took upstream from Kasra to the village port of Kurtzal, it was not as a tarnsman. The tarn I had sold in Kasra, for four golden tarn disks. I wore now the rags of a drover of kaiila. Bent over, carrying a grossly woven bag of kaiila-hair cloth, filled with accouterments, I set foot on the cracked boards of the Kurtzal dock.

Moments later I stood inland, ankle deep in the white dust. Following me down the gangplank, clad in a black haik, could have been only my companion, the pitiful free woman who shared my poverty. The haik, black, covers the woman from head to toe. At the eyes, there is a tiny bit of black lace, through which she may see. On her feet were soft, black, nonheeled slippers, with curled toes, they were, decorated with a line of silver thread.

Beneath the haik none needed know the woman was naked and wore a collar.

We took a salt wagon, empty, to Tor from Kurtzal.

There was another reason I had brought Miss Blake-Allen, as we may perhaps speak of her for purposes of simplicity, to the Tahari districts. Cold, white-skinned women are of interest to the men of the Tahari. They enjoy putting them in servitude. They enjoy, on their submission mats, turning them into helpless, yielding slaves. Too, blue-eyed, blond women are, statistically, rare in the Tahari districts. Those that exist there have been imported as slaves. Given her complexion and coloring, I thought, and Samos concurred, we could get a good price for the wench in Tor, or in the interior, at an oasis market. We had little doubt that the men of the Tahari would pay high for the body and person of Miss Blake-Allen. It had entered my mind, too, that it might prove most profitable, under certain conceivable circumstances, to exchange her for information.

In Kasra I had learned the name, and father, of the boy who had found, in pursuing a kaiila, the rock on which had been inscribed ‘Beware the steel tower’. His name was Achmed, and his father’s name was Farouk, who was a Kasra merchant. I had failed to contact them in Kasra, as I had planned, but I had learned that they were in the region of Tor, purchasing kaiila, for a caravan to the kasbah, or fortress, of Suleiman, of the Aretai tribe, master of a thousand lances, Ubar of the Oasis of Nine Wells.

A merchant passed me, climbing the stones of the street. He wore a striped, hooded, sleeved, loose robe, a djellaba. The striping was that of the Teehra, a district southwest of Tor, bordering on the Tahari. Following him, in a black haik, was a woman. Suddenly I was startled. As she passed me, her stride small and measured, I heard the clink of light chain, the sound of ankle bells. She was slave. She turned her head, briefly, to look at me; I saw her eyes, dark, through the tiny opening in the haik, through the tiny, black-lace screen, about an inch in height and four inches in width. Then, with a rustle of the chain, and the tiny music of her bells, she turned swiftly, following her master.

Beneath the haik, I supposed her collared, naked. The use of a light walking chain, tethering the ankles, meant to be worn abroad, accompanying the master, incidentally, is not uncommon in the regions of the Tahari. A beautifully measured gait is thought, in the Tahari, to be attractive in a woman. There is dispute as to the desirable length of the stride, and the chain may be adjusted accordingly. To me it seems obvious that one must experiment with the given girl. Height and hip structure vary. I resolved to obtain such a set of chains for Miss Blake-Allen. I was curious to see what measure of stride would best suit the slave in her. Free women, in the Tahari, incidentally, usually, when out of their houses, also measure their stride. Some fasten their own ankles together with silken thongs. Some dare even the chain, though they retain its key. Free girls, not yet companions, but of an age appropriate for the companionship, sometimes signal their availability to possible swains by belling their left ankles with a single “virgin bell.” The note of this bell, which is bright and clear, is easily distinguished from those of the degrading, sensual bells of the slave. Sometimes free girls, two or more of them, as a girlish lark, obtain slave bells and, chaining their ankles, dress themselves in their haiks and go about the city. Sometimes their girlish amusement does not turn out as they expect. Sometimes they find themselves being sold in markets at obscure eases.

There was a great shouting, and, passing through the market gate, I had turned into the nest of market streets.

I brushed away two sellers of apricots and spices. “Come with me to the cafe of Red Cages,” said a boy, pulling at my sleeve. They receive a copper tarsk for each patron they bring through the arched portal of the cafe. I gave the boy a copper tarsk, and he sped from me.

I made my way carefully through the crowds.

The vendors come early to the market, leaving their villages outside of Tor in the morning darkness, that they may find a yard of pavement, preferably near the market gate, to display their wares. I was jostled to one side by two men in djellabas. My ankle stung. I had nearly stepped into a basket of plums. Not even looking up, a woman had cried out, and, with a stick lashed out, protecting her merchandise. “Buy melons!” called a fellow next to her, lifting one of the yellowish, red-striped spheres toward me. A boy passed, spitting out the seeds of a tospit. The thought of Kamchak, of the Tuchuks, passed through my mind. I smiled. Only the rare, long- with melted cheese and nutmeg; hot Bazi tea, sugared, and, later, Turian wine. I did not forget the slave, of course. Crusts of bread did I throw to the boards before her. It was slave bread, rough and coarse-grained. The beauty ate it eagerly. She had not known if she was to be fed that day. Sometimes the slave is not fed. This might occur for aesthetic reasons, as, for example, if her measurements, which are generally carefully kept, should minutely depart from her master’s conception of her ideal curvatures; sometimes merely to remind her of on whom she depends, totally, for her very life; sometimes as a training or disciplinary measure; sometimes merely to startle or puzzle her; what has she done; she is not told; has she not been sufficiently pleasing; she is not told; the girl, frightened, anxious, redoubles her efforts to please in all the thousand spheres of her slavery, intellectual, physical and imaginative; no master, it is said, who has not denied his girl food knows her; pleasant indeed are the surprises which such a fellow, who thought thitherto he knew his girl, upon the completion of the simple experiment, receives: the girl’s wits are sharpened; she becomes resourceful, helpless, desperate, attentive, inventive; “Feed me, Master,” she begs. “Feed me!” at the conclusion of such an experiment, when she is fed, it is always, kneeling naked, from his hand. The lesson is not soon forgotten. Few things so impress the dominance of a male on a woman, and her dependence on him, as his control of her food. This dominance, provided it is absolute, thrills a woman to the core.

I had, from time to time, kept Miss Blake-Allen hungry, giving her only sparing rations. I had not, however, by means of food, truly impressed her slavery on her. I did not want to bring her to her belly at my feet. That pleasure I would deny myself, that it might be reserved for her first full, true master. I wanted to keep her, save for some refinements, a free woman of Earth, wearing a collar, until she was sold. The delights of making her a true slave girl, completely, in the full sense of the word, I would accord to the fellow to whom I would give or sell her. I could imagine her, blue-eyed, fairskinned, angry, proud, rebellious determined to be untamed, standing naked on his submission mat in his tent.

After a week I wondered what she would be like.

I turned from the market streets into a street of shops and stalls, the bazaar, which, in Tor, is most commonly reached through the market gate.

“The Aretai will act,” I beard one man telling another.

I paused before a given stall, where light, walking chains were being sold. They were strung over racks rather like parrot perches. Without much haggling, I bought one, which seemed to me pretty. They are adjustable, with rings, from a length as small as two inches, for security, to a stride length of about twenty inches. Two keys are provided, each of which fits both ankle-ring locks. I also purchased a set of slave bells, of the thong as opposed to the lock variety.

They are less expensive than the lock variety; also, they may be tied at various places on the body, about the neck, the wrist, the ankle, about the thigh, about the arm, etc.; it is delightful to bell a girl; she may not remove them, of course, without her master’s permission.

I passed by the door of a slaver’s house. High in the house, through one of the narrow windows, I saw a girl, looking out. She smiled, and put her arm out through the window, waving. Her face pressed against the bars. She was collared.

I blew her a kiss in the Gorean fashion, brushing it upward to her with my fingers.

I looked into a shop where pottery was being turned. To one side of the wheels, along a wall, sitting among many bowls and vessels, a boy, with his finger, was carefully applying bluish pigment to a large, two-handled pitcher. When the pitcher was placed in the kin this pigment would be burned, hardened, into the glaze. The kilns were in the back of the shop.

“The Kavars, even now, are hiring lances,” I heard.

The rugs of Tor are very beautiful. I paused to look upon several of them, hanging in stalls, many others, lying on top of one another, in great, shaded piles. It takes five girls more than a year to make certain of these rugs. The patterns, memorized by the callers, some of them blind, are intricate, and passed down through families. They are made on simple looms and the pile is knotted onto the warp and weft. Some of these rugs have as many as four hundred knots per square hort. The hort is approximately an inch and a quarter in length. Each knot, by a girl, a free woman, is tied individually by hand. There are many varieties of such rugs. Almost all are incredibly beautiful. The dyes used in the malting of these rugs are, on the whole, natural dyes, vegetable dyes, some made from barks and leaves, and roots and flowers, others from animal products, crushed insects, etc. At various places in the bazaar, from a latticework laid between the buildings, numerous skeins of wool hung, dyed in various bright colors, drying. The carders and the dyers, incidentally, are subcastes separate from the weavers. All are subcastes of the rug makers, which, itself, interestingly, perhaps surprisingly, is accounted generally as a subcaste of the cloth workers.

Rug makers themselves, however, usually regard themselves, in their various subcastes, as being independent of the cloth workers. A rug maker would not care to he confused with a maker of kaftans, turbans or djellabas.

I looked up at skeins of wool hanging from the wooden poles between the flat roofs. They were quite colorful. The finest wool, however, is sheared in the spring from the bellies of the verr and hurt, and would, accordingly, not be available until later in the season. The wool market, as was to be expected, was now slow.

I passed the door of another slaver’s house. I swung the light walking chain casually in my hand. It would look well on the slim ankles of the lovely Miss Blake-Allen.

I passed a fellow inlaying wood, and the shop of a silversmith, and stalls filled with baskets, some of which, grain baskets, were large enough to hold a man. In another place tanned, dyed leathers were hanging, purple, red, yellow. I passed a boy in a shop using a bow lathe. He spins the wood with bow and string, held in his right hand. He uses his left hand and his right foot to guide the cutting tool. Djellabas and burnooses, sleeveless, hooded desert cloaks, were being sold in another stall. The burnoose can, as the djellaba cannot, because of the sleeves, be thrown back, freeing the arms. One who rides the swift kaiia, who handles the scimitar and lance, chooses the burnoose.

I passed another stall, in which mats were being sold. These are used for various purposes, sometimes vertically for screens, more normally, horizontally, for sitting and sleeping. They can be tightly rolled and occupy little space.

Among them I saw rough-fibered slave mats, and among those, the coarsest of all, submission mats, on which the female slave may be forced to perform for her master.

There were sellers of scarves and sashes, veils and haiks, chalwars and tobes, and slippers and kaftans, and cording for agals. Too, there were cloth merchants, with their silks and rolls of rep cloth. Cloth is measured in the ah-il, which is the length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and the ah-ral, which is ten ah-ils. I saw sleeve daggers. I brushed a mat salesman away.

In another stall a slave girl was being vended. I watched her for a time dance before me, then I turned away.

I smelled veminium oil.

The petals of veminium, the “Desert Veminium,” purplish, as opposed to the “Thentis Veminium,” bluish, which flower grows at the edge of the Tahari, gathered in shallow baskets and carried to a still, are boiled in water. The vapor, which boils off, is condensed into oil. This oil is used to perfume water. This water is not drunk but is used in middle and upper-class homes to rinse the eating hand, before and after the evening meal.

At one place, on a stone shelf, under awnings, several girls, chained naked, were for sale, interestingly, at set prices. It was a municipal sale, under the jurisdiction of the courts of Tor. One brown-skinned girl, black-eyed, no more than fifteen, kneeling, her wrists and ankles tightly chained, looked up at me.

She was being sold to pay her father’s gambling debts. I purchased her, and freed her.

“Where is your father?” I asked.

“At the gaming tables of the Golden Kaiila,” she wept.

I looked at her. She was comely. I looked to the discarded chains on the stone shelf. Other girls there held out their hands to me. I looked again at the girl.

“In another year,” I told her, “you will kneel again on the stone shelf, beneath the awnings.” I regarded her. “Then,” I said, regarding her, “you will be too beautiful to free.”

“I must hurry home,” she said, “to prepare supper for my father.”

I watched her run, shamed, through the streets. She was lovely. I had little doubt that, in time, she would wear slave bells. Even if she were not to be sold by the magistracy of Tor I thought it not unlikely that she would fall to the noose of a slaver.

“Buy us! Buy us, Master!” cried the other girls on the shelf.

“Be slaves,” I laughed to them, turning away.

They wept. I heard the lash fall among them.

Here and there in the bazaar I made purchases.

Twice I was passed by pairs of guardsmen, in white robes with red sashes and scimitars, the police of Tor.

Not five paces behind them I saw a ragged cutpurse cut the wallet of a merchant, dropping its contents into his hand and, bowing and whining, twist away in the crowd. The merchant huffed away. The fellow had done it neatly. I recalled a girl named Tina, once of Lydius, now of Port Kar. She, too, had been an excellent thief. My own coins I kept in belt pockets, within my robes, save for a small wallet at my side. I went about Tor now as a traveler from Turia, a small merchant. I checked the wallet at my side. It was intact.

Some other thieves had not done so well in the bazaar. Several right hands, severed, were nailed to a board on which salt prices were affixed.

There were no feminine hands on the board. A female thief in Tor, even on the first offense, is immediately reduced to slavery.

I glanced behind me. For the second time I saw four men, the same four. But they were only four.

I stood aside as a chain of male slaves was herded by, with spear butts. They were bound for the brine pits of the Tahari, whence comes most of the caravan salt. I expected that less than half of them would reach the pits. Heavy collars, with rings, they wore about their necks. A heavy chain, running through the rings, linked them together by the throat. Their wrists, manacled, were behind their backs. They were naked. Men spit at them as they were herded past.

Miss Blake-Allen was no longer in my compartment. She was now in the public pens of Tor. On the morning of the second day, in the process of my work for Priest-Kings, I had entered the shaded offices of the municipal slave master of Tor.

“Stand here,” I told Miss Blake-Allen, indicating a place in the center of the floor, before the desk of the slave master. She stood where I had indicated.

“Remove your slippers,” I told her. She slipped from the slippers, black with silver thread. She was now barefoot. The slave master came around to the front of his desk. He leaned back against it, sitting on its edge. “Remove the haik,”

I told the girl. She removed the garment. She stood between us, nude.

The slave master regarded her. Then he walked about her, slowly. She stood straight, a female examined by a man. She did not look at him. The slave master looked at me. I nodded. Her body stiffened, and she shut her eyes, as his hands, those of a Gorean flesh appraiser, informed, sensitive, professional, proficient, made swift assessment of the textures of her skin, varying at different points on the body, the tensilities of her musculature, the varying softness and firmness of her, the sweet, complex delights of her lines, the obvious exciting contours of her, the more subtle contours, too, the curve at her hip, at her shoulder, her instep, the back of her neck; he, too, made test, to her helpless, recoiling horror, of the latent pleasures of her, swiftly revealing, then passing over, it noted, the promise of an incredible responsiveness; there were tears in her eyes; how precious and beautiful, I thought, is a woman, how unsurprising that a vital man, without compromise; simply wishes to own such a fantastic, delicious creature, how unsurprising that he wishes in the full and glorious heat of his blood to overwhelm, devour, dominate and master her. On Gor, of course, men have their will, at least with lowly slaves, such as was, against her will, the lovely, unfortunate Miss Blake-Allen.

The slave master stepped back from the slave.

“Kneel,” I told her. She knelt.

“Blond,” said he, “apparently determined to try to remain frigid, blue-eyed, not yet tamed, an incredible potential for helpless sexual heat, an incredible potential for helpless slave submission, excellent. Do you wish to sell her?”

“Straighten your body Slave,” I told her.

Frightened, Miss Blake-Alien straightened her back, and lifted her head. She knelt back on her heels, knees wide, hands on her thighs. It was the position of the Pleasure Slave. I had taught her the position. It is one of the first things a good-looking woman, fallen slave, is taught on Gor.

“Do you wish to sell her?” again inquired the slave master of Tor.

I knew I would not obtain the best price from this office, for the municipal pens usually buy cheaply and sell cheaply. They exist primarily as a service for caravan masters, buying unsold girls, later retailing them to other merchants, who may be short of flesh for the oasis traffic. The municipal pens exist primarily to perform a service, not to make profit.

“What would you offer?” I asked.

“Eleven silver tarsks,” he said.

I knew I could get twice that much from a private house.

“Fifteen?” he inquired.

“No,” I smiled, “but your bids are reassuring.”

He smiled. “I did not think you wished to sell her,” he said. “That is why I was as honest with you as I was. Now that I know you do not wish to sell her, I will tell you that, in my opinion,” he looked down at the kneeling girl, “her potentiality is fantastic.”

“I am glad to hear it,” I said. Miss Blake-Allen, in the position of the Pleasure Slave, was looking about the room. She could not understand us, for we spoke in Gorean. It is perhaps just as well.

The usual buying price of the municipal office was two or three silver tarsks per wench. I had learned that Miss Blake-Allen was valuable in the Tahari. This pleased me.

I looked at her. She was beautiful. I agreed with the slave master. Doubtless, someday, for someone, she would make an excellent slave.

“I wish,” I said, “to board her, and purchase her some training.”

“We cage a wench for a copper tarsk per day,” he said. “Training is extra, but, I think, reasonable.”

“She does not speak Gorean,” I told him.

He smiled. “She will learn swiftly,” he said.

Then the officer and I discussed details of training. He would include in her training the regime of the stimulation cage. For the first five nights, following my recommendation, she would wear the rope harness. After that it would be used, if necessary, for discipline.

“Let her, however,” I said, “meet the eyes of her trainer, and of other males. I do not wish her to become the love slave of the first man into whose eyes she is permitted to gaze.”

“I understand,” said the man.

“Is there anything else?” I asked.

“Do we have complete food and whip rights over her?” he asked.

“Certainly, “I said.

I then turned to the girl. “What is your name?” I asked her in English.

“Priscilla Blake-Allen,” she said.

I looked at her. Her face went white. “I have no name, Master,” she whispered.

“I am only a nameless slave,” she whispered.

I thought to myself. Priscilla Blake-Allen. Blake-Allen. Allen. Allen. Allena.

Ah-leh-na. Then I had it. An excellent name, not unknown in the Gorean Tahari.

“I will give you a name,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Alyena,” I told her. The ‘l’ sound in this name is rolled, one of two common “l” sounds in Gorean. An English transliteration, though not a perfect one, would be rather along the lines of ‘Ahl-yieh-ain-nah,’ where the ‘ain’ is pronounced such that it would rhyme with the English expression ‘rain.’ The accent falls on the first and third syllable. It is a melodic name. I thought it would improve her price. Names are often used by auctioneers. “Here, Noble Gentlemen, for your consideration, is the slave girl called Alyena. Regard her!

Does she please you? Move for the noble gentlemen, Alyena. Display your beauty.

Do not such masters excite you? Do you not long to serve them? Behold, Gentlemen, Alyena dances her beauty for you! How much am I bid for the fair Alyena?”

“Alyena.” whispered the girl.

“Alyena,” I said to her. “Yes, Master.” she said.

“I am not selling you,” I said. “These are the public pens of Tor. You are here for boarding and training. You will begin to learn Gorean. You will learn as a child learns, without the benefit of translation. You will learn swiftly. You will also he exercised and receive slave instruction.”

“Slave instruction?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Is this clear, Alyena?”

“Yes, Master,” she whispered.

“If you are uncooperative, or slow in your lessons, you may be starved or beaten-lashed-you understand?”

“Yes, Master,” said the girl, her eyes wide.

I threw a silver tarsk to the official. He clapped his hands. Through a silver curtain, of silver strings, came a large, powerful slave girl. She wore a plain iron collar, with ring. She wore a halter of leather: she wore a belt of leather; two strips of leather girded her, falling to her knees: about her calves, crossing, leather straps bound heavy sandals on her feet. In her hand she carried a long supple kaiila quirt of leather, about a half inch in width and a yard long.

The large female slave feasted her eyes on the slender, lovely Alyena. Then she gestured with her quirt toward the threshold of silver strings. “Hurry, Pretty One,” she said to Alyena, in Gorean, harshly.

Miserably, Alyena, understanding what was required of her, fled to the threshold.

There she turned to regard me. The quirt fell, viciously, across her shoulder.

Crying out with pain, the lovely Alyena turned, and, weeping, stumbling, fled through the curtain of silver strings, to the pens of Tor.

“By the way,” I asked the officer, casually, though it was my main reason for visiting his office, “there was a girl of interest to me who, I understand it, was named Veema, and was at one time one of your guests. I should like to discover what became of her. Would you have records on her?”

“Do you know her number in the pens?” asked the officer.

“87432,”1 said.

“Information such as this is usually confidential to the municipality,” said the officer.

I placed a silver tarsk on the table.

Without taking it he went to a set of heavy, leaved books, bound in heavy, black leather, on a nearby shelf.

“She was bought for two tarsks, from a caravan master named Zad of the Oasis of Farad,” he said.

“I am more interested,” I said, “in who purchased her.”

“She was sold for four tarsks,” said the officer.

“To whom?” I asked.

“Keep your tarsk,” said the man, wryly. “There is no name given.”

“Do you remember the girl?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Why have you not recorded a name?” I asked.

“No name was given, apparently,” he said.

“Do you often sell women thusly?” I asked. ·

“Yes,” he said. “It is the money in which we are interested. What is it to us what might be the name of the buyer?”

I checked the book myself. Its entries were not coded.

“Keep the tarsk,” I said to the man. Then I left the office of the slave master of Tor. I had failed to learn who it was who had purchased the girl Veema, who perhaps had sent her as a message girl to Samos of Port Kar. To me the slave master of Tor, within the normal discrepancies of the office, seemed an honest enough fellow.

I was satisfied that he did not know to whom had been sold the girl Veema, 87432, Turian Pen Number. I recalled the message which she had borne. “Beware Abdul.”

I bade the slave master farewell.

In the bazaar I stopped, seeming to contemplate mirrors. The four men I had seen earlier, two large ones, two small ones, in white burnooses, still followed.

I had assumed the name Hakim, a Tahari name, one suitable for a merchant.

I would choose the place with some care.

I passed a stall of perfumers, and thought of Saphrar of Turia. Then I passed a shop where the high, light kaiila saddles were being made. One could also buy there, saddle blankets, quirts, bells and kaiila reins. The kaiila rein is a single rein, very light, plaited of various leathers. There are often ten to a dozen strips of tanned, dyed leather in a single rein. Each individual strip, interestingly, given the strength of the rein, is little thicker than a stout thread. The strips are cut with knives, and it requires great skill to cut them.

The rein, carefully plaited, is tied through a hole drilled in the right nostril of the kaiila. It passes under the animal’s jaw to the left. When one wishes to guide the animal to the left one draws the rein left; when one wishes to guide it right one pulls right, drawing the rein over the animal’s neck, with pressure against the left cheek. To stop the animal one draws back. To start or hasten the animal, one kicks it in the flanks, or uses the long kaiila quirt.

I passed one of the wells of Tor. There were steps, broad, flat, worn, in concentric circles, leading down to the water. At this time of year eight of the steps were uncovered by the water. Many came there for water. I saw children on their hands and knees lapping water, women filling jugs, men submerging bags, the air bubbling up as the bags filled. Like most water in the Tahari the water of Tor was slightly salty and unclear.

Casually glancing about I saw the four men. I assessed them, determining in my mind who would be the swiftest, the most dangerous, the leader; who would be the next most dangerous; and then the others.

I saw the water carrier, too, with the brass cups. It struck me suddenly strange that he should be in the area of the bazaar, which, in the lower area in the city, is in the vicinity of the wells. Surely few would call to purchase water where it lay free at hand. He descended the steps and submerged his bag, grinning at me, remembering me from earlier in the day. I smiled at him, turning away. He was a simple, poor fellow, harmless, servile, slight. I felt myself a fool. Of course he would have to come to the bazaar area. What would I have him do, fill his bag with the white dust of Tor’s higher terraces?

I chose a side street, and another street from that, which terminated in a blind wall. There were few about.

I heard the men hurrying toward me. I swung the walking chains I had purchased lightly in my hand, not looking back, noting the shadows.

They would think I was trapped in the alley, with its blind wall. I had chosen this alley, that they might make their move swiftly, at my choosing, not truly theirs. Also, the alley was open behind them. I gave them access to flight. I had no wish to kill them. It seemed to me most probable they were simple brigands.

I saw the shadows, darting, heard the rush of robes.

Laughing, with the elation of the warrior, I turned, swiftly hurling the walking chains, spinning once, through the air. They lashed about the face of the leader. It had taken only an instant, the chain leaving my hand, to determine that he was exactly where I had expected him to be, as he would have been at any time in following me, had I earlier turned, slightly to my right. He cried out, the chains whipping about his face. I used his body to block the two men on my left. I leaped, knees bent, body turned, legs like compressed springs, toward the man on the leader’s left. One foot struck him in the chest; the other snapped his head back. I slipped behind the leader, seized the small fellow to his right by the arm and hurled him headfirst into the wall. The last fellow I lifted from his feet and, turning, hurled him against the same wall as the other. He struck it, upside down, full along his back and head, and tumbling, fell beside the other fellow, who lay inert. The leader, face bleeding, wiped the blood from his forehead from his eyes, stepping back.

“You are of the warriors,” he whispered. Then he turned about, and fled.

I did not pursue him.

I returned to the bazaar, and inquired where steel might be purchased, and kaiila. I was informed by a ragged youngster, whom I rewarded with a copper tarsk. The weapon makers’ street was close on the bazaar. The kaiila pens in Tor are outside her south gate.

On the way to the street of weapon makers I again passed the water carrier. His bag on his shoulder was now, again, damp, dark, bulging.

“Tal, Master,” said he to me.

“Tal,” said I to him.

I walked to the street of the weapon makers. I was anxious to make the acquaintance of the Tahari scimitar.

“There will be war between the Kavars and the Aretai,” I heard a man say.

I walked to the street of the weapon makers. Lightly, in my right hand, I swung walking chains. They would look well on the slim ankles of the lovely Alyena, a slave girl I was having bearded and trained in the pens of Tor.

This night I thought I would have my supper at the Pomegranate. I had heard their dancers were superb.