I turned and looked upon the valley in which Ko-ro-ba had lain. "You are Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," said the man.
I was startled. "Yes," I said, "I am Tarl of Ko-ro-ba." I turned to face him.
"I have been waiting for you," he said.
"Are you," I asked, "a Priest-King?"
"No," he said.
I looked at this man, seeming to be a man among other men, yet more. "Do you speak for the Priest-Kings?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
I believed him.
It was common, of course, for Initiates to claim to speak for the Priest-Kings; indeed, it was presumably the calling of their caste to interpret the will of the Priest-Kings to men.
But this man I believed.
He was not as other Initiates, though he wore their robes.
"Are you truly of the Caste of Initiates?" I asked.
"I am one who conveys the will of the Priest-Kings to mortals," said the man, not choosing to answer my question.
I was silent.
"Henceforth," said the man, "you are Tarl of no city."
"I am Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," I said proudly.
"Ko-ro-ba has been destroyed," said the man. "It is as if it had never been. Its stones and its people have been scattered to the corners of the world, and no two stones and no two men of Ko-ro-ba may stand again side by side."
"Why has Ko-ro-ba been destroyed?" I demanded.
"It was the will of the Priest-Kings," said the man.
"But why was it the will of the Priest-Kings?" I shouted.
"Because it was," said the man, "and there is nothing higher in virtue of which the will of the Priest-Kings may be determined or questioned." "I do not accept their will," I said.
"Submit," said the man.
"I do not," I said.
"Then be it so," he said, "you are henceforth condemned to wander the world alone and friendless, with no city, with no walls to call your own, with no Home Stone to cherish. You are henceforth a man without a city, you are a warning to all not to scorn the will of the Priest-Kings — beyond this you are nothing."
"What of Talena?" I cried. "What of my father, my friends, the people of my city?"
"Scattered to the corners of the world," said the robed figure, "and not a stone may stand upon a stone."
"Did I not serve the Priest-Kings," I asked, "at the siege of Ar?" "The Priest-Kings used you for their ends, as it pleased them to do so." I lifted my spear, and felt that I could have slain the robed figure so calm and terrible before me.
"Kill me if you wish," said the man.
I lowered the spear. My eyes were filled with tears. I was bewildered. Was it on my account that a city had perished? Was it I who had brought disaster to its people, to my father, to my friends and Talena? Had I been too foolish to understand that I was nothing before the power of the Priest- Kings? Was I now to wander the forlorn roads and fields of Gor in quilt and agony, a wretched example of the fate which the Priest-Kings could mete out to the foolish and proud?
Then suddenly I ceased to pity myself, and I was shocked, for looking into the eyes of the robed figure I saw human warmth in them, tears for me. It was pity, the forbidden emotion, and yet he could not restrain himself. Somehow the power I had felt in his presence seemed to have vanished. I was now only in the presence of a man, a fellow human being even though he wore the sublime robes of the proud Caste of Initiates.
He seemed to be struggling with himself, as though he wanted to speak his own words and not those of the Priest-Kings. He seemed to shake with pain, his hands pressed against his head, trying to speak to me, trying to tell me something. One hand stretched out to me, and the words, his own, far from the ringing authority of his former tones, were hoarse and almost inauduble.
"Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," he said, "throw yourself upon your sword." He seemed ready to fall, and I held him.
He looked into my eyes. "Throw yourself upon your sword," he begged. "Would that not frustrate the will of the Priest-Kings?" I asked. "Yes," he said.
"Why do you tell me this?" I demanded.
"I followed you at the siege of Ar," he said. "On the Cylinder of Justice I fought with you against Pa-Kur and his assassins."
"An Initiate?" I asked.
He shook his head. "No," he said, "I was one of the guards of Ar, and I fought to save my city."
"Ar the Glorious," I said, speaking gently.
He was dying.
"Ar the Glorious," he said, weak, but with pride. He looked at me again. "Die now, Tarl of Ko-ro-ba," he said, "Hero of Ar." His eyes seemed to begin to burn in his head. "Do not shame yourself."
Suddenly he howled like a tortured dog, and what happened then I cannot bring myself to describe in detail. It seemed as though the entire inside of his head began to burst and burn, to bubble like some horrid vicious lava inside the crater of his skull.
It was an ugly death — his for having tried to speak to me, for having tried to tell me what was in his heart.
It was becoming light now, and dawn was breaking across the gentle hills that had sheltered Ko-ro-ba. I removed the hated robes of the Initiates from the body of the man and carried the naked body far from the road. As I began to cover it with rocks, I noted the remains of the skull, now little more than a handful of shards. The brain had been literally boiled away. The morning light flashed briefly on something golden among the white shards. I lifted it. It was a webbing of fine golden wire. I could make nothing of it, and threw it aside.
I piled rocks on the body, enough to mark the grave and keep predators away.
I placed a large flat rock near the head of the cairn and, with the tip of my spear, scratched this legend on it. "I am a man of Glorious Ar." It was all I knew about him.
I stood beside the grave, and drew my sword. He had told me to throw myself upon it, to avoid my shame, to frustrate for once the will of the might Priest-Kings of Gor.
"No, Friend," I said to the remains of the former warrior of Ar. "No, I shall not throw myself upon my sword. Nor shall I grovel to the Priest-Kings nor live the life of shame they have allotted me." I lifted the sword toward the valley where Ko-ro-ba had stood. "Long ago," I said, "I pledged this sword to the service of Ko-ro-ba. It remains so pledged."
Like every man of Gor I knew the direction of the Sardar Mountains, home of the Priest-Kings, forbidden vastness into which no man below the mountains, no mortal, may penetrate. It was said that the Supreme Home Stone of all Gor lay within those mountains, that no man had looked upon a Priest-King and lived.
I resheathed my sword, fastened my helmet over my shoulder, lifted my shield and spear and set out in the direction of the Sardar Mountains.
Chapter Six: VERA
The Sardar Mountains, which I had never seen, lay more than athousand pasangs from Ko-ro-ba. Whereas the Men Below the Mountains, as the mortals are called, seldom enter the mountains, and do not return when they do, many often venture to their brink, if only to stand within the shadows of those cliffs that hide the secrets of the Priest-Kings. Indeed, at least once in his life every Gorean is expected to make this journey. Four times a year, correlated with the solstices and equinoxes, there are fairs held in the plains below the mountains, presided over by committees of Initiates, fairs in which men of many cities mingle without bloodshed, times of truce, times of contests and games, of bargaining and marketing. Torm, my friend of the Caste of Scribes, had been to such fairs to trade scrolls with scholars from other cities, men he would never have seen were it not for the fairs, me of hostile cities who yet loved ideas more than they hated their enemies, men like Torm who so loved learning that they would risk the perilous journey to the Sardar Mountains for the chance to dispute a text or haggle over a coveted scroll. Similarly men of such castes as the Physicians and Builders make use of the fairs to disseminate and exchange information pertaining to their respective crafts. The fairs do much to unite intellectually the otherwise so isolated cities of Gor. And I speculate that the fairs likewise do their bit toward stabilising the dialects of Gor, which might otherwise in a few generations have diverged to the point of being mutually unintelligible — for the Goreans do have this in common, their mother tongue in all its hundred permutations, which they simply refer to as the Language, and all who fail to speak it, regardless of their pedigree or background, of their standards or level of civilisation, are regarded as almost beyond the pale of humanity. Unlike the men of Earth, the Gorean had little sensitivity to race, but much to language and city. Like ourselves, he finds his reasons for hating his fellow-men, but his reasons are different.