On the back of the kaiila, the black lance in hand, bending down in the saddle, I raced past a wooden wand fixed in the earth, on the top of which was placed a dried tospit, a small, wrinkled, yellowish-white peachlike fruit, about the size of a plum, which grows on the tospit bush, patches of which are indigenous to the drier valleys of the western Cartius. They are bitter but edible.
"Well done!" cried Kamchak as he saw the tospit, unsplit, impaled halfway down the shaft of the lance, stopped only by my fist and the retaining strap.
Such a thrust was worth two points for us.
I heard Elizabeth Cardwell's cry of joy as she leaped into the air, clumsy in the furs, clapping her hands. She carried, on a strap around her neck, a sack of tospits. I looked at her and smiled. Her face was vital and flushed with excitement. "Tospit!" called Conrad of the Kassars, the Blood People, and the girl hastened to set another fruit on the wand. There was a thunder of kaiila paws on the worn turf and Conrad, with his red lance, nipped the tospit neatly from the tip of the wand, the lance point barely passing into it, he having drawn back at the last instant.
"Well done!" I called to him. My own thrust had been full thrust, accurate enough but rather heavily done, in war, such a thrust might have lost me the lance, leaving it in the _ 60 body of an enemy. His thrust was clearly, I acknowledged, worth three points.
Kamchak then rode, and he, like Conrad of the Kassars, deftly took the fruit from the wand; indeed, his lance enter- ing the fruit perhaps a fraction of an inch less than had Conrad's. It was, however, also a three-point thrust. The warrior who then rode with Conrad thundered down the lane in the turf.
There was a cry of disappointment, as the lance tip sheared the fruit, not retaining it, knocking it from the wand. It was only a one-point thrust.
Elizabeth cried out again, with pleasure, for she was of the wagon of Kamchak and Tarl Cabot.
The rider who had made the unsatisfactory thrust suddenly whirled the kaiila toward the girl, and she fell to her knees, realizing she should not have revealed her pleasure at his failure, putting her head to the grass. I tensed, but Kamchak laughed, and held me back. The rider's kaiila was now rearing over the girl, and he brought the beast to rest. With the tip of his lance, stained with the tospit fruit, he cut the strap that held the cap on her head, and then brushed the cap off; then, delicately, with its tip, he lifted her chin that she might look at him.
"Forgive me, Master," said Elizabeth Cardwell.
Slave girls, on Gor, address all free men as master, though, of course, only one such would be her true master. I was pleased with how well, in the past months, Elizabeth had done with the language. Of course, Kamchak had rented three Turian girls, slaves, to train her; they had done so, binding her wrists and leading her about the wagons, teaching her the words for things, beating her with switches when she made mistakes; Elizabeth had learned quickly. She was an intelligent girl.
It had been hard for Elizabeth Cardwell, particularly the first weeks. It is not an easy transition to make, that from a bright, lovely young secretary in a pleasant, fluorescently lit, air-conditioned office on Madison Avenue in New to a slave girl in the wagon of Tuchuk warrior.
When her interrogation had been completed, and she had collapsed on the dais of Kutaituchik, crying out in misery "La Kajira. La Kajira!" Kamchak had folded her, still weep- ing, clad in the Sirik, in the richness of the pelt of the red tart in which she had originally been placed before us. As I had followed him from the dais I had seen Kutaituchik, the interview ended, absently reaching into the small golden box of kanda strings, his eyes slowly beginning to close.
Kamchak, that night, chained Elizabeth Cardwell in his wagon, rather than beneath it to the wheel, running a short length of chain from a slave ring set in the floor of the wagon box to the collar of her Sirik. He had then carefully wrapped her, shivering and weeping, in the pelt of the red larl.
She lay there, trembling and moaning, surely on the verge of hysteria. I was afraid the next phase of her condition would be one of numbness, shock, perhaps of refusal to believe what had befallen her, madness.
Kamchak had looked at me. He was genuinely puzzled by what he regarded as her unusual emotional reactions. He was, of course, aware that no girl, Gorean or otherwise, could be expected to take lightly a sudden reduction to an abject and complete slavery, particularly considering what that would mean among the wagons.
He did, however, regard Miss Cardwell's responses as rather peculiar, and somewhat reprehensible. Once he got up and kicked her with his furred boot, telling her to be quiet. She did not, of course, understand Gorean, but his intention and his impatience were sufficiently clear to preclude the necessity of a translation. She stopped moaning, but she continued to shiver, and sometimes she sobbed. I saw him take a slave whip from the wall and approach her, and then turn back and replace it on the wall. I was surprised that he had not used it, and wondered why. I was pleased that he had not beaten her, for I might have interfered. I tried to talk to Kamchak and help him to understand the shock that the girl had undergone, the total alteration of her life and circumstances, unexplained finding herself alone on the prairie, the Tuchuks, the capture, the return to the Wagons, her examination in the grassy avenue, the Sirik, the interro- gation, the threat of execution, then the fact, difficult for her to grasp, of being literally an owned slave girl. I tried to explain to Kamchak that her old world had not prepared her for these things, for the slaveries of her old world are of a different kind, more subtle and invisible, thought by some not even to exist.
Kamchak said nothing, but then he got up and from a chest in the wagon he took forth a goblet and filled it with an amber fluid, into which he shook a dark, bluish powder. He then took Elizabeth Cardwell in his left arm and with his right hand gave her the drink. Her eyes were frightened, but she drank. In a few moments she was asleep.
Once or twice that night, to Kamchak's annoyance and my own loss of sleep, she screamed, jerking at the chain, but we discovered that she had not awakened.
I supposed that on the morrow Kamchak would call for the Tuchuk Iron Master, to brand what he called his little barbarian; the brand of the Tuchuk slave, incidentally, is not the same as that generally used in the cities. which for girls, is the first letter of the expression Kajira in cursive script. but the sign of the four bask horns that of the Tuchuk standard; the brand of the four bask horns, set in such a manner as to somewhat resemble the letter "H." is only about an inch high; the common Gorean brand, on the other hand, is usually an inch and a half to two inches high; the brand of the four bask horns, of course, is also used to mark the bask of the Tuchuks, but there, of course, it is much larger, forming roughly a six-inch square; following the branding, I supposed that Kamchak would have one of the tiny nose rings affixed; all Tuchuk females, slave or free, wear such rings; after these things there would only remain, of course, an engraved Turian collar and the clothing of Elizabeth Cardwell Kajir. In the morning I awakened to find Elizabeth sitting, red- eyed, at the side of the wagon, leaning back against one of the poles that supported the wagon hides, wrapped in the pelt of the red larl.