John Norman - Nomads of Gor

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, trembling 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. Needless 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 marvelled 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 detected.

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 position 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 larl 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 nations; not of castes and crafts but of global, interlocking industrial complexes; not of barter and tarn disks but of fantastic systems of exchange and credit; a world not of tarns 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 artificial moon.

Kutaituchik and Kamchak, to my pleasure, tended to restrain 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 shoulders fell forward, and though she still knelt, her head touched the pelt of the larl, her shoulders and back shaking, trembling.

It seemed to me, from what I had learned, that there was no particular reason why Elizabeth Cardwell, and not one of Earth’s countless others, had been selected to wear the message 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 Earth, perhaps more intelligent than many, perhaps prettier than most, but essentially the same, girls living alone or together in apartments, working in offices and studios and shops, struggling to earn a living 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 assistant 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 greyish face, eyes almost like glass. 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, embarrassed, 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.”

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 circumstances and for some purpose or another, had assessed 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.