I then became apprehensive, and, half running, turned back the other direction. I had run no more than two or three Ihn when it became clear to me that the din was now, too, coming from in front of me.
I turned again, this time frantically.
The din, beating on pans and kettles, and the shouting, was now sweeping towards me, in a vast semicircle.
I suddenly realized I was being hunted!
Only from before me was there no sound. I was terrified. I began to run in that direction, toward the edge of the thicket, but then I was afraid. I would lose the cover of the thicket. Moreover, they might be driving me towards hunters, or nets! The silence terrified me as much as the din.
I must slip between their lines.
Some animals fled past me, away from the din, tabuk and brush urts. Carefully, concealing myself as much as possible, I started back toward the din. The din became loud, terrible, and the shouting. The noise, the knowledge that I was being hunted, made me suddenly feel irrational, driven. I wanted only to flee from the sound.
The din became insufferably loud.
I pressed toward it.
Then my heart sank!
There must have been two hundred or more peasants, men, children and women, all shouting, and beating on their kettles and pans. The women and children carried sticks and switches, the men spears, flails, forks and clubs.
They were too close together, there were too many of them!
A child saw me and he cried out and began to beat more loudly on his pan. I turned and fled.
The din now became maddeningly pressing, intolerable, ringing in my brain, closing in on me.
I could do nothing but fly toward the silence.
Then, in the sunlight of the bright morning, late, almost at noon, I fled from the thicket, across the grass of the open field.
I ran irrationally, driven, terrified.
I kept running.
Then, exhausted, I looked back. The peasants had stopped at the edge of the Ka-la-na thicket, in their great numbers. They no longer shouted, they no longer beat on their pans.
I looked ahead of me. There was nothing. No strong peasant lads waited there, to run me down, to strip and bind me, and lead me, my neck roped, back to the village. There were no nets. There was nothing. I cried out with joy and fled across the grasses.
They had wanted only to drive me from the thicket!
I was still free.
I stopped.
I stood in the bright, knee-high grasses of that windblown, flowing field. I felt the sun on my body, the grass touching my calves. My feet felt beneath them the black, warm, root-filled, living earth of Gor. The Ka-la-na thicket was yellow in the distance, the peasants standing at its edge, not moving. The sky was deep, and blue, and bright with sunlight. I inhaled the fresh, glorious air of the planet Gor. How beautiful it was!
The peasants did not pursue me.
I was free!
I put my head back and standing feet spread, leaned backwards, with my hands spreading my hair in the wind. I felt the wind lift it. I was pleased. I was free!
Suddenly my hand flew before my mouth. High, lofty, small in the vertical depths of that glorious sky, there was a speck. I shook my head, no! No!
I looked back toward the peasants. They had not moved.
I knelt down on one knee in the grasses, my eyes fixed on the speck. It was circling.
I saw it far overhead, first to my right, and then behind me, and then to my left, and then before me.
I cried out with misery.
I knew myself, small on the grasses, far below, to be the center of that circle. I began to run, madly, frantically across the grasses.
I stopped, and turned, and looked back and upward. I cried out with misery. I saw the bird turn, swirling in the sky. I saw the sun, for a brief instant, flash from the helmet of its rider. The bird had wheeled in my direction. It was now screaming, descending, wings beating, streaking towards me.
I screamed and began to run, madly, irrationally, across the grasses. I heard the scream of the bird behind me, and the beating of its great wings, closer and closer!
I stumbled, screaming, then running again. I might have been a golden-pelted tabuk, but I was a girl!
The scream of the bird deafened me and its wings broke like thunder about my ears.
The shadow streaked past me.
The leather loop dropped about my body. In an instant it had jerked tight, pinning my arms helplessly to my sides, and I felt my body, my back almost broken, jerked from the grass. The grass rushed swiftly past below me, and I could not touch it with my feet, and then it fled from me, dropping way, and then suddenly, in the rushing air, as I twisted and turned, buffeted in the blasts of wind, a prisoner of the forces, the physics, of the braided leather rope and the accelerations and attitudes, it seemed the sky was below me and the grass overhead, and then I lost my breath, as the tarn began to climb, and I gasped, the grass and the sky, and the horizon, now spinning, and I screamed, crying out, my arms pinned, my hands helpless, unable to hold the rope, and I felt it slip an inch on my body, and I saw the earth now below, so far below, and the Ka-la-na thicket in the distance, like a patch of foliage on a lawn, and I swung, wildly, helplessly, the captive of that taut, slender leather strand by which I was bound, forty feet below the tarn, now hundreds of feet above the earth below me.
The rope slipped another quarter of an inch on my body, and I screamed! Then, the rope, pressing itself cruelly into my arms and body, lodged itself firmly.
It slipped no more.
I was effectively imprisoned by the weight of my own body. I feared only that the rope might break.
The tarn then began to wheel, and soar, and I swung below it, dangling and bound, hundreds of feet above the grasses below. It was turning back toward the Ka-la-na thicket, now remote in the distance, far below.
I felt myself being pulled, foot by foot, upward. I felt the rope press even more cruelly into my body, and I felt myself, foot by foot, lifted. My hands felt so helpless. I wanted to clutch the rope, to hold it! But I could not. Then, looking up, I saw the great talons of the tarn, held in against its body, above me. They were huge, curved and sharp.
I felt my body dragged against the side of the bird, and then I felt my shoulder rub against the metal and leather of the saddle, and a man's leg.
Then he held me in his arms. I could not move, so terrified was I.
I saw his eyes, through the apertures in his helmet. They seemed amused. I looked away.
He laughed.
It was a great, raw laugh, that of a tarnsman. I shuddered.
He removed the tarn rope from my body. On the saddle before him, facing him, I clung about his neck, terrified that I might fall. He coiled the tarn rope, and fastened it at the side of the saddle.
He then removed his tarn knife from his belt.
I felt the knife between the camisk and the binding fiber that belted it on my body. There was a movement of the knife and the binding fiber whipped from my body and, in the rushing wind, the camisk began to tug, snapping away from me, and then it was high, about my throat, pulling at my neck, flapping and snapping. He lifted it over my head and it flew behind the tarn. I felt against my body his leather, the buckle of his tarn belt. My cheek lay against the metal of his helmet. My hair streaked with the wind.
With his two hands he disengaged my arms from his neck.
"Lie before me, on your back," he said, "and cross your wrists and ankles." Terribly afraid of falling, I did so. He bent across my body and I felt my crossed wrists lashed to a saddle ring. He then bent to the other side and, in moments, I felt my crossed ankles lashed to another ring.
I lay there on my back before him, my body a bow, bound helplessly across his saddle.
He slapped my belly twice.
He then laughed another great laugh, that great raw laugh, that of a tarnsman, who has his prize bound helpless before him.
I cursed my misfortune, that I had been driven from the thicket when a tarnsman had been in the sky!
I pulled at my bound wrists, and ankles, fastened to the rings.
I turned my head to one side and wept.
I had again fallen captive.
What an incredible misfortune that I had been driven from the thicket just at the moment when a tarnsman had been in the sky!