John Norman Gor 07 Captive of Gor

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he had passed I rolled again to my belly and put my chin on the back of my
hands, their palms resting on the plating. I would be a clever slave, a
beautiful slave, and exciting one. I was a slave. I would be a superb one. I
would use my intelligence and my beauty to make my life on Gor an easy one. I
had learned a great deal in my training. I was eager to learn more. Already my
body moved as that of a slave girl, and unconsciously, naturally! I smiled. I
would bring a high price on the block.
I glanced over at Inge. Poor stick-like Inge! What man would want her? And Ute
was so little and stupid. Even Lana seemed dull to me. But I was superb. I
recalled the man in the hut had said that the indications were that I would
make a fantastic pleasure slave for a master. My brow wrinkled and my lip
curled. I
was irritated. It was I who would conquer. I remembered the panther girls,
dancing under the moons of Gor, and how they had writhed helplessly beneath
those wild moons. I despised them for their weakness. I did not have such
weaknesses. I was a slave, but I did not have such weaknesses. Inside I was
cold and hard, and hated men. I would conquer them.
And so I mused, an illiterate barbarian slave girl in a Ko-ro-ba slave pen.
* * *
Some four days before we were to depart Ko-ro-ba for Ar, the news swept like
tarns through the pens.
"Verna the outlaw girl!" we heard the cry. "She had been taken by Marlenus of
Ar."
I rushed to the bars of the cage, thrilled. I wept with joy. How I hated that
proud woman, and her band! Let them be slaves! Let them be slaves!"
"Poor Verna," said Ute.
Inge was silent.
"Let her be a slave!" I cried. "Like us!" I whirled to face them on the straw,
my back against the bars. "Let her be a slave like us!" I cried.
Ute and Inge watched me.
I turned about again, grasping the bars, filled with a sense of triumph, with
vindictive victory. Let Verna kneel to men, and fear the whip!"
"Poor Verna," said Ute.
"Marlenus will tame her," I said. "In his pleasure gardens he will have her
feeding from his hand."
"I hope she will be impaled," said Lana.
I did not hope that. But I hoped she would be put in slave rouge, and silk,
and bells! Let her know slavery! How I hated the proud Verna! How pleased I
was that she, as I, had fallen prey to men!
I looked about the cage, flushed, furious. I shook the bars. I stamped on the
plating beneath the straw with my heel. I cried out with rage and picked up
straw and flung it about the cage. I had been captured, and must be a slave
girl!
"Please, El-in-or," cried Ute. "Do not behave so."
"Let Verna be a slave!" I screamed down the long hall between the cages.
I wept, holding the bars. "Let her know what it is to be a slave," I
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whispered.
A guard looked at me, curiously.
I shrieked with misery and ran across the cage, flinging myself into its back
wall, pounding on it, and then I sunk to my knees by the wall and, in rage and
frustration, weeping and screaming, pounded on the steel plating of the floor.
"Weep, El-in-or," said Ute. "Weep."
I lay on the floor, naked in the straw, a helpless slave girl, the property of
men, who must do as they commanded her, and wept, and wept.
I mention two other bits of news, which, from the outside world of laughter
and daylight, filtered into the straw-strewn, barred pens.
Haakon of Skjern, from whom Targo had purchased his hundred northern beauties,
now concluding their training, was in Ko-ro-ba.
This news, for no reason I clearly understood, rendered Targo apprehensive.
The other news dealt with the bold raids of Task of Treve.
All Ko-ro-ba seemed aflame with fury.
Four caravans had fallen spoils to the fierce, swiftly striking tarnsmen of
Treve. And his men had fired dozens of fields, destroying Sa-Tarna grains. The
smoke of two of these fields had been visible even from the high bridges of
Ko-
ro-ba herself.
Ko-ro-ban tarnsmen flew at all hours, in the high sun, in the cold morning, at
dusk, even when the beacon fires burned upon the lofty walls, flew patterned
sorties, and irregular sorties, but never did they find the elusive, marauding
band of the terrible Rask of Treve.
I mused to myself.
I had some reason to know that name. Rask of Treve, Targo, and others, had
even more reason. It had been he, Rask of Treve, who had raided Targo's slave
caravan, before, in the fields northwest of Ko-ro-ba, on the route to Laura, a
wandering, strangely clad, barbarian girl had been enslaved, whose name was
El-
in-or. Indeed, it was because of Rask of Treve that Targo, who became that El-
in-or's master, had lost most of his women and wagons, and all of his bosk. It
was because of him that El-in-or, the barbarian girl, with the other girls,
had been harnessed to his one remaining, partially burnt wagon, and had been
forced, and under the switch, to draw it, as draft animals. Targo, as I knew,
had fled into a Ka-la-na thicket with his men, saving his gold and nineteen of
his girls, Inge, Ute and Lana among them.
Rask of Treve, as a raider true to the codes of Treve, that hidden coign of
tarnsmen, that remote, secret, mountainous city of the vast, scarlet Voltai
range, had not, in these circumstances, much pushed pursuit. In the shadows of
the forest the crossbow quarrel can swiftly touch, and slay. The element of
the tarnsman is not the green glades, and the branches; it is the clouds, the
saddle and the sky; his steed is the tarn, his field of battle, strewn with
light and wind, higher than mountains, deeper than the sea, is the very sky
itself.
Such men do not care to venture creeping into the shadows of forests, pursuing
scattered game. Victorious, they roar with laughter and, hauling on the one-
straps of their tarn harness, take flight. There is always other gold, and
other women. And, the Priest-Kings willing, a coin that is lost today, or a
woman, may, at a later time, in a more convenient place, be found, and more! A
woman, who escapes your collar this afternoon may, by nightfall, find herself [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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