Gor - Nomads For Gor Part 5

Kamchak and I waited until the string had been chewed.

When Kamchak had finished he held out his right hand and a man, not a Tuchuk, who wore the green robes of the Caste of Pysicians, thrust in his hand a goblet of bask horn; it contained some yellow fluid. Angrily, not concealing his distaste, Kutaituchik drained the goblet and then hurled it from him.

He then shook himself and regarded Kamchak.

He grinned a Tuchuk grin. "How are the bosk?" he asked.

"As well as may be expected," said Kamchak.

"Are the quivas sharp?"

"One tries to keep them so," said Kamchak.

''It is important to keep the axles of the wagons greased,"

observed Kutaituchik.

"Yes," said Kamchak, "I believe so."

Kutaituchik suddenly reached out and he and Kamchak, laughing, clasped hands.

Then Kutaituchik sat back and clapped his hands together sharply twice. "Bring the she-slave," he said.

I turned to see a stout man-at-arms step to the dais, carrying in his arms, folded in the furs of the scarlet larl, a girl.

I heard the small sound of a chain.

The man-at-arms placed Elizabeth Cardwell before us, and Kutaituchik, and drew away the pelt of the scarlet larl.

Elizabeth Cardwell had been cleaned and her hair combed.

She was slim, lovely.

The man-at-arms arranged her before us.

The thick leather collar, I noted, was still sewn about her throat.

Elizabeth Cardwell, though she did not know it, knelt before us in the position of the Pleasure Slave.

She looked wildly about her and then dropped her head.

Aside from the collar on her throat she, like the other girls on the platform, wore only the Sirik.

Kamchak gestured to me.

"Speak," I said to her.

She lifted her head and then said, almost inaudibly, trem- bling in the restraint of the Sirik. "La Kajira" Then she dropped her head.

Kutaituchik seemed satisfied.

"It is the only Gorean she knows," Kamchak informed him.

"For the time," said Kutaituchik, "it is enough." He then looked at the man-at-arms. "Have you fed her?" he asked.

The man nodded.

"Good," said Kutaituchik, "the she-slave will need her strength."

The interrogation of Elizabeth Cardwell took hours. Need- less to say, I served as translator.

The interrogation, to my surprise, was conducted largely by Kamchak, rather than Kutaituchik, called Ubar of the Tuchuks. Kamchak's questions were detailed, numerous, complex. He returned to certain questions at various times, in various ways, connecting subtly her responses to one with those of another; he wove a sophisticated net of inquiry about the girl, delicate and fine; I marveled at his skill; had there been the least inconsistency or even hesitation, as though the girl were attempting to recollect or reconcile the details of a fabrication, it would have been instantly de"

tected.

During all this time, and torches had been brought, the hours of the night being burned away, Elizabeth Cardwell was not permitted to move, but must needs retain the posi- tion of the Pleasure Slave, knees properly placed, back straight, head high, the gleaming chain of the Sirik dangling from the Turian collar, falling to the pelt of the red tart on which she knelt.

The translation, as you might expect, was a difficult task, but I attempted to convey as much as I could of what the girl, piteously, the words tumbling out, attempted to tell me.

Although there were risks involved I tried to translate as exactly as I could, letting Miss Cardwell speak as she would, though her words must often have sounded fantastic to the Tuchuks, for it was largely of a world alien to them that she spoke a world not of autonomous cities but of huge na- tions; not of castes and crafts but of global, interlocking I, -.

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46 NOMADS OF GOR .

industrial complexes; not of batter and tarn disks but of fantastic systems of exchange and credit; a world not of tarns I and the tharlarion but of aircraft and motor buses and trucks; a world in which one's words need not be carried by a lone rider on the swift kaiila but could be sped from one corner of the earth to another by leaping through an artifi- cial moon.

Kutaituchik and Kamchak, to my pleasure, tended to re- strain judgment on these matters; to my gratification they did not seem to regard the girl as mad; I had been afraid, from time to time, that they might, losing patience with what must seem to them to be the most utter nonsense, order her beaten or impaled.

I did not know then, but Kutaituchik and Kamchak had some reason for supposing that the girl might be speaking the truth.

What they were most interested in, of course, and what I was most interested in, namely, how and why the girl came to be wandering on the Plains of Turia in the Lands of the Wagon Peoples they, and I, did not learn.

We were all, at last, satisfied that even the girl herself did not know.

At last Kamchak had finished, and Kutaituchik, too, and they leaned back, looking at the girl.

"Move no muscle," I said to her.

She did not. She was very beautiful.

Kamchak gestured with his head.

"You may lower your head," I said to the girl.

Piteously, with a rustle of chain, the girl's head and shoul- ders fell forward, and though she still knelt, her head touched the pelt of the larl, her shoulders and back shaking, trem- bling.

It seemed to me, from what I had learned, that there was no particular reason why Elizabeth Cardwell, and not one of Parth's countless others, had been selected to wear the mes- sage collar. As yet the collar had not been removed and examined. It was perhaps only that she was convenient, and, of course, that she was lovely, thus a fitting bearer of the collar, herself a gift with the message to please the Tuchuks, and perhaps better dispose them toward its contents.

Miss Cardwell was little different from thousands of lovely working girls in the great cities of Barth, perhaps more intelligent than many, perhaps prettier than most, but essen- tially the same, girls living alone or together in apartments, in''.'

working in offices and studios and shops, struggling to earn a hying in a glamorous city, whose goods and pleasures they could ill afford to purchase. What had happened to her might, I gathered, have happened to any of them.

She remembered arising and washing and dressing, eating a hurried breakfast, taking the elevator downstairs from her apartment, the subway, arriving at work, the routines of the morning as a junior secretary in one of the larger advertising agencies on Madison Avenue, her excitement at being invited to interview for the position of a.s.sistant secretary to the head of the art department, her last-minute concern with her lipstick, the hem of her yellow shift, then steno pad in hand, entering his office..

With him had been a tall, strange man, broad of shoulder with large hands, a grayish face, eyes almost like gla.s.s. He had frightened her. He wore a dark suit of expensive cloth and tailoring, and yet somehow it seemed not that he wore it as one accustomed to such garments. He spoke to her, rather than the man she knew, the head of the department, whom she had seen often. He did not permit her to take the seat by the desk.

Rather he told her to stand and straighten herself. He seemed to scorn her posture. Angry, she nevertheless did so until, embarra.s.sed, she stood insolently erect before him. His eyes regarded her ankles with care, and then her calves and she was acutely aware, blushing, that standing as she did, so straight before him, the simple yellow, oxford-cloth shift ill concealed her thighs, the flatness of her belly, the loveliness of her figure. "Lift your head," he said, and she did, her chin high, the lovely, angry head set proudly on her aristocratic delicate neck.

He then backed away from her.

She turned to face him, eyes flashing.

"Do not speak," he said.

Her fingers went white with anger, clutching the steno pad and pencil.

He gestured to the far side of the room. "Walk there," he said, "and return."

"I will not," she said.

"Now," said the man.

Elizabeth had looked, tears almost in her eyes, at the department head, but he seemed suddenly to her soft, pudgy, distant, sweating, nothing. He nodded hastily, "Please, Miss Cardwell, do as he says."

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i.,,,~, 48 NOMADS OF GOR.

Elizabeth faced the tall, strange man. She was breathing rapidly now. She felt the pencil clutched in her sweating hand. Then it broke.

"Now," said the man.

Looking at him she suddenly had the feeling, a strange one, that this man, in some circ.u.mstances and for some purpose or another, had a.s.sessed and judged many women.

This infuriated her.

It seemed to her a challenge that she would accept. She would show him a woman indeed allowing herself for the instant to be insolently and fully female showing him in her walk her contempt and scorn for him.

She would then leave and go directly to the personnel office, tendering her resignation.

She threw back her head. "Very well," she said. And Elizabeth Cardwell walked proudly, angrily, to the far side of the room, wheeled there, faced the man, and approached him, eyes taunting, a smile of contempt playing about her lips. She heard the department head quickly suck in his breath She did not take her eyes from the tall, strange man.

"Are you satisfied," she asked, quietly, acidly.

"Yes," he had said.

She remembered then only turning and starting for the door, and a sudden, peculiar odor, penetrating, that seemed to close about her face and head.

She had regained consciousness on the Plains of Gor. She bad been dressed precisely as she had been the morning she had gone to work save that about her throat she had found sewn a 0th, thick leather collar. She had cried out, she had wandered. Then, after some hours "tumbling confused, ter- rified, hungry through the high, brown gra.s.s, she had seen two riders, mounted on swift, strange beasts. They had seen her. She called to them. They approached her cautiously, in a large circle, as though examining the gra.s.s for enemies, or others.

"I'm Elizabeth Cardwell," she had cried. "My home is in New York City. What place is this? Where am 1?" And then she has seen the faces, and had screamed.

"Position," said Kamchak.

I spoke sharply to the girl. "Be as you were before."

Terrified the girl straightened herself and again, knees placed, back straight and head 0th, knelt before us in the position of the Pleasure Slave.

'the collar," said Kamchak, "is Turian."

Kutaituchik nodded.

This was news to me, and I welcomed it, for it meant that probably, somehow, the answer to at least a part of the mystery which confronted me lay in the city of Turia.

But how was it that Elizabeth Cardwell, of Earth, wore a Turian message collar?

Kamchak drew the quiva from his belt and approached the girl. She looked at him wildly, drawing back.

"Do not move," I told her.

Kamchak set the blade of the quiva between the girl's throat and the collar and moved it, the leather collar seeming to fall from the blade.

The girl's neck, where the collar had been sewn, was red and sweaty, broken out.

Kamchak returned to his place where he again sat down cross-legged, putting the cut collar on the rug in front of him.

I and Kutaituchik watched as he carefully spread open the collar, pressing back two edges. Then, from within the collar, he drew forth a thin, folded piece of paper, rence paper made from the fibers of the rence plant, a tall, long-stalked leafy plant which grows predominantly in the delta of the Vosk. I suppose, in itself, this meant nothing, but I naturally thought of Port Kar, malignant, squalid Port Kar, which claims suzerainty over the delta, exacting cruel tributes from the rence growers, great stocks of rence paper for trade, sons for oarsmen in cargo galleys, daughters for Pleasure Slaves in the taverns of the city. I would have expected the message to have been written either on stout, glossy-surfaced linen pa- per, of the sort milled in Ar, or perhaps on vellum and parchment, prepared in many cities and used commonly in scrolls, the process involving among other thing tile washing and liming of skins, their sc.r.a.ping and stretching, dusting them with sifted chalk, rubbing them down with pumice.

Kamchak handed the paper to Kutaituchik and he took it but looked at it, I thought, blankly. Saying nothing he handed it back to Kamchak, who seemed to study it with great care, and then, to my amazement, turned it sideways and then upside down. At last he grunted and handed it to me.- I was suddenly amused, for it occurred to me that neither of the Tuchuks could read.

''Read," said Kutaituchik.