John Norman - Mercenaries of Gor

"I mean the draft fellows," said the driver.

"I suppose so," I said. It seemed likely to me that I could handle these more docile, sluggish beasts, if I had been able to handle their more agile brothers, the saddle tharlarion.

"They take a great deal of beating about the head and neck," he said.

I nodded. That was not so much different from the high tharlarion, either. They are usually controlled by voice commands and the blows of a spear. The tharlarion, incidentally, at least compared to mammals, seems to have a very sluggish nervous system. It seems almost impervious to pain. Most of the larger varieties have two brains, or, perhaps, better a brain and a smaller brain-like organ. The brain, or one brain, is located in the head, and the other brain, or the brain-like organ, is located near the base of the spine.

I looked down at Feiqa, walking beside the wagon, the rope on her neck.

"Tharlarion," I told her, expanding on the driver's remark, "show little susceptibility to pain."

"Yes, Master," she said.

"In this," I said, "they closely resemble female slaves."

"Oh, no Master!" she cried. "No!"

"No?" I said.

"No," she said, looking up earnestly, frightened, "we are terribly susceptible to pain, truly!"

"Doubtless you were as a free woman," I said. "but now you are a slave." "I am even more susceptible to pain now," she said, "for now I have felt pain, and know what it is like, and now I have a slave girl's total vulnerability and helplessness, and know that anything can be done to me! Too, my entire body has become a thousand times more responsive and sensitive a thousand times more meaningful and alive, since I have been locked in the collar. I assure you Master, I am a thousand times more susceptible to pain now than ever I was before!"

I smiled. Such transformations were common in the female slave. Just as their sensitivities to pleasure and feeling, sexual and otherwise, physical and psychological, conscious and subconscious, were greatly increased and intensified by being imbonded, so too, concomitantly, naturally, were their sensitivities to pain. The same changes that so considerably increased their capacities in certain directions increased them also in others, and put them ever so more helplessly, and hopelessly, at the mercy of their masters.

"Ah," she said, chagrined, putting down her lovely head, "Master teases his girl."

"Perhaps," I said.

She kept her head down. She blushed. She looked lovely, the light, locked, steel collar on her throat.

I reached down and lifted her up, by the arms, swinging her up, and back, into the wagon. She would be weary from her walking. "Thank you, Master," she said, much pleased. She then knelt behind us, rather close to us, on some folded sacks in the wagon bed, the rope attaching her to the wagon still tied on her neck. I began to consider in what ways I should have her this evening.

"Bread! Bread!" cried a woman to one side. There another Sa-Tarna wagon had stopped. The driver, who had apparently been adjusting the harness of his beast, was now again on the wagon box, his reins and whip in hand.

"Away!" cried the driver.

She threw herself before the wagon. "Bread!" she screamed. He cracked the whip and the beast lurched forward, the woman screamed, barely scrambling from its path. I had little doubt that had she not moved as she had she would have been run over.

"They will try almost anything," said my driver, as our wagon rolled past the woman. She was shuddering. She had just escaped death or crippling. "Sometimes they will send their children out beside the road to do the begging. They themselves hide in the brush. Sometimes I throw them some bread. Sometimes I don't. It seems the women themselves should beg, if they want the bread." "Perhaps they do not want to pay for it, in the way of women," I said. "They will pay for it, and in the way of women, when they are hungry enough," said the driver. I nodded. That was true, I supposed. This driver, incidentally, seemed to me a decent, good-hearted fellow. Certainly he had stopped and fed some of the women along the road. That I had seen. Too, he had doubtless done that in spite of the fact that he would now come in with a short load. Many of the drivers, I speculated, would not have behaved so. Also, he had not objected to my riding with him, nor to carrying Feiqa. Yes, he seemed a good fellow.

"How far ahead are the troops?" I asked.

"Their lines of march extend for pasangs, with intervals, too, of pasangs," he said.

I nodded. It would take days for them to pass through the country. They were apparently far from the vicinity of any enemy. Accordingly, they exhibited little concern with possible imperatives of assembly and concentration.

Interestingly, not even raiding parties, as far as I knew, had delayed or harried their advance. They might as well have been marching through their own countries in a time of peace.

"The rearward contingents of the units before us will be some ten pasangs up the road," he said.

"How many troops are there, altogether?" I asked.

"A great many," he said. "Are you a spy?"

"No," I said.

"Look," he said, gesturing.

I glanced to the right, and upward. On the summit of a small hill I saw some seven or eight riders, riders of the high tharlarion, the tharlarion shifting and clawing about under them, with tharlarion lances. They were clad in dusty, soiled leather, riding leather, to protect their legs from the scaly hides of the beasts, and helmeted. Two had shields slung at their back. Shields of the others hung at the left sides of their saddles. They were an unkempt, dirty, grim lot. About the beasts' necks, and behind the saddles, hung panniers of grain and sacks of woven netting containing dried larmas and brown suls. Across the saddle of one were tied the hind feet, crossed, of two verr, their throats cut, the blood now brown on the sides of the tharlarion. Another fellow had a basket of vulos, tied shut. Another had stings of sausage hung about his neck and shoulders. There was no herded tarsk or bosk with the group. Such animals were probably extremely rare now, at least within one or two day's ride of the march. Still the fellows seemed to have done very well. Doubtless they had fared far better than most engaged in their business. Too, I noted that their interests had not been confined merely to foodstuffs. From the saddle of more than one there dangled armlets, two handled bowls and cups. Too, from the saddle of one a long tether looped back to the crossed bound wrists of a female. Doubtless she had been found pleasing. Thus she had been brought along. Doubtless she was destined for the collar. Near the pawing feet of the leader's tharlarion, in their tunics of white wool, there stood two stout peasant lads, bound, heavy sticks thrust before their elbows and behind their backs, their arms bound to these at the back, their wrists, a rope across their bellies, held back, tied at the sides. They would be recruits for some captain, requiring to fill gaps in his ranks. They would probably bring their captors in the neighborhood of a copper tarsk apiece.

The fellows on the tharlarion looked down at the wagons and then moved down the hill and forward. Two or three women, I now saw, coming over the hill, had apparently been following them, probably on foot from some village. One of the fellows, shouting angrily, turned his tharlarion about and, waving his lance, urging it up the slope toward them, charged them. They scattered before him, and he, not pursuing them, turned about and, in a moment, had rejoined his fellows. The women how hung back, daring to follow no further. I looked after the riders, now two or three wagons ahead of us, the two peasant lads, and the female, stumbling behind them on her tether.

"Foragers," said the driver.